Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-30

Health Update

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 copper mug, a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask. 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.

If you’re wondering why I’m using two hands for my cup, it’s because my hands are semi-paralyzed at the moment thanks to something that’s going on with my body. I told the Locals subscribers before I got on here: I went to the emergency room yesterday on my doctor’s orders because of the growing paralysis in my hands. The emergency room sent me home without the MRI because they said, “This is no emergency. We’re not allowed to use the MRI unless it’s an emergency.”

I said, “My doctor sent me here. She even emailed ahead to make sure you knew what you were going to do so that you would do it.”

They said, “Yeah, but it’s upper back. It’s not an emergency.”

“I’m getting paralyzed. I can barely move one hand.”

“Yeah, but you’re not dying.” So, a guy with a snake bite came in. He didn’t do much better, but I think they saved his life.

Anyway, today is the first day I get my radiation treatment. It’ll just be a spot treatment for the one place that’s bothering me in my lower body. It would not be a treatment for whatever is happening with my paralysis. But the Pluvicto might help with that if I ever get it scheduled. So, that’s the update.

Reframe: Generic vs. Specific Competition

I like to start with a reframe to change your life. As you know, the reframes in my book, Reframe Your Brain, change people’s lives with one sentence. Although each person is different, the sentence that changes your life will be different than the one that changes somebody else’s. But maybe today is your day. Let’s see.

Here’s a usual frame: people tell you that you should compete against yourself. Have you ever heard that? They’ll say, “No, no, you’re not competing against other people. You’re just trying to do better than you do.” Very common advice. Bad advice.

Here’s some better advice. I’m going to reframe it. Instead of competing with yourself and trying to improve over time, which sounds like a good idea, you can do better: compete against other people. You’ll do better if you compete against other people. But here’s the trick: even if they’re unaware that you’re competing with them.

You don’t have to tell them you’re competing with them. It could be a coworker, it could be a classmate, but you just tell yourself, “Okay, I’m going to beat that one. That one I’m going to beat.” Then you’ve got a target. You’ve got something specific. You’re far more likely to accomplish something specific than something generic. Everybody knows that, right? So, if you say, “I’m going to beat that person on that chemistry test,” even if they don’t know you’re competing, it’s going to help you compete. That’s your reframe of the day. Good for young people especially.

Circadian Rhythms and Time Changes

According to somebody named Laura Weed—best last name I could ever imagine—she’s a circadian research lab person from Stanford, so she knows what she’s talking about. There’s a new study that says you shouldn’t change the time. You know, how we do the standard versus daylight time.

But here’s the new wrinkle: changing the time is bad for people’s circadian rhythms, and they have health problems and other problems. But it’s bad no matter how you change it. So, if you stuck with daylight versus standard time, it would still be better than if you changed it twice a year. It’s the change that’s the problem. But on top of that, keeping things as standard time would be the least burden on your circadian rhythms. At least according to one study—not that we trust science anymore, but it’s something to talk about. Keeping it on standard time would be the healthiest.

LED Cancer Treatment and the Bleach Hoax

According to Dr. Peter Diamandis, chemo may be something that we won’t need anymore for skin cancer because there’s new research. Scientists say they can kill 92% of skin cancer cells using an LED light without damaging healthy cells. That sounds pretty good.

What will Democrats say about the development of LED light to fight cancer? We already know what they’ll say. Democrats will say, “Why would you use household disinfectants and bleach to kill cancer?”

Then I would say, “What? Nobody said anything about bleach.”

“Yeah, you just said bleach will cure your cancer.”

“No, nobody even used the word. Nobody even used the word. No, we were talking about light. From beginning to end, we were talking about light.”

“Yeah, were you? Because the news said that you said bleach would do it.”

Do you all remember the drinking bleach hoax? Which was done exactly the same way as the “fine people” hoax. In both cases, the hoax was because you cut off the clarifier. When Trump said, “But I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis, they should be condemned totally,” you take that off, and it reverses what he said. With the drinking bleach thing, if you take off the beginning where Trump said he was talking about light, and then you take off the clarifier at the end where he again emphasized he was only talking about light, if you take those clarifiers off, it allowed the news to say that he was talking about household disinfectants or bleach because the other people had talked about it before. It’s the same hoax. So, it’s funny to see that there’s yet another “light treats a disease” story. We’ll see it reported as: “Why would you put bleach on your skin?” No, they won’t, because Trump didn’t say it.

AI Models and Artificial Neurons

According to Interesting Engineering, now we can make artificial neurons that replicate real brain chemistry. You would do that because it might be another way to get to AI. How many times have I told you that our current big AI models, the large language models, will never get you to general intelligence? They’ll just sort of be able to do what they can do now, but maybe a little bit better. They’re not really going to get over the hump to be like a thinking, conscious anything. It doesn’t have that potential, in my opinion.

But there are a whole bunch of other AI approaches that are being rapidly prototyped, at least because I think people know that there’s a limit to the large language models. So, this neuron replicator was specifically so they can build a better AI with a completely different method. I think I’ve read several now—there are several different approaches that all have that same quality, which is they’re not regular LLMs. They’re a completely different approach because they think that would get you to advanced general intelligence. So, if I had to bet, I would bet that the LLMs are going to get leapfrogged by some smaller entity, and then they’ll get bought up pretty quickly. But if some smaller entity could do that, do the whole large language model without a trillion dollars—if they could do it for a hundred dollars—some trillion-dollar company is going to buy them pretty quickly.

Tesla Optimus

As you know, Elon Musk has said—and I like repeating it because every time I hear it, it makes me happy—that Optimus, the robots that Tesla is going to make (and is making already), will cost less than a car, $20,000to$30,000 eventually. But here’s the fun part: Elon says it will be able to do anything you want. Well, anything? I don’t know about anything. But it could teach, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get groceries, serve drinks, or just be your friend. Whatever you can think of, it will do. I can think of a lot of things.

It’s going to be awesome, and I think this will be the biggest product ever, of any kind. That’s the exciting part: that we could be watching the greatest product innovation rollout trend of all time, of all history. We’re going to get to watch it, I think. But this would suggest that Elon Musk thinks that he has a version of AI that can get to something like general intelligence, because that’s what he’s describing here. The LLMs would never get you to a robot that could do with that stuff. It just isn’t the right technology. But he uses visual training. So, he’s doing a lot of visual training. And I think some probably some artificial worlds training too. So, it looks like he thinks he has a path, and if he says he has a path, I would not doubt him.

Generic Drugs vs. Biologics

Did you know that in addition to drugs that are generic—so, you know we have generic drugs, but the pharma would wish we didn’t, because if there were no such thing as generics, then they could forever have a monopoly on their IP, their property. But over time, their IP times out and then there can be a generic for the drug.

But did you know there’s a separate category of drugs—and I’m not smart enough to know what’s in the category—but the biologics? Biologics. So, that’s a category of drugs. But apparently, according to RFK Jr., who just did an announcement about it, apparently the pharma was doing a great job of marketing and persuading Congress not to allow knock-offs of their biologics. And the argument was that nobody would be able to make a proper copy. That it’s sort of like magic and wizardry and more like making a fine wine, and you couldn’t let anybody knock off the biologics because it might be dangerous and ineffective. And somehow they sold that. Meaning that if you tried to make an imitation or copy of one of these biologics that had lost its copyright protection, or whatever protection it has, that you couldn’t do it because they had put too many obstacles in the way.

But apparently, there’s going to be a rules change, and President Trump is going to sign something that would allow companies to compete for this big category of biologics. And that would be, in my opinion, a huge win for RFK Jr. because it’s not the sort of thing that necessarily would have even come up had he not been running the show. So, not only did he identify a problem that has potentially enormous economic value to consumers, but it looks like he acted. Identified the problem, acted, solved. I mean, I’m sure nothing is that easily solved, but it looks like a win to me. And OAN is reporting on that.

Quiet Supersonic Air Travel

Meanwhile, NASA is reportedly building, or it’s well along the way of building, a quiet supersonic jet. So, something that doesn’t go “bam” when it crosses the sound barrier. This one goes “thud.” A more acceptable noise in the atmosphere. And they’re already testing it—it’s already built—and they’re doing test flights. And it works. And if it works, and if it brings in a new era of air travel, it could reduce the time that you go across the country to maybe half. So, imagine flying from California to New York in three hours instead of sixish. That would be a pretty big change.

Imagine—you know, I live in California—most of the Californians who have a little extra money like to go to Hawaii. It’s sort of our closest tropical-looking place. Imagine instead of six hours to Hawaii, it’s three. It completely changes the experience. For me, any kind of travel was all about the time you had to be in the plane. If you could reduce the time you’re on the plane, I’m all in. But if you’re going to tell me I need to be on a plane for 14 hours to go to Bora Bora or something, I can’t do 28 hours of sitting on a plane there and back. But if you cut it in half, suddenly it looks kind of practical. So, we’ll wait for that: supersonic flights.

AI-Simulated Fusion Reactors

Allegedly, according to Dr. Singularity, who’s got some news on X, a number of the big AI companies have built an artificial simulated fusion reactor situation. Allegedly—I’m a little skeptical about this one—but let me tell you what it is. You know we’ve been trying to get fusion energy, but it’s really complicated and hard. We know we can do it because fusion as a technology is a proven technology, but not engineered to economic success yet. So, there’s an economic iteration process that has to go through. We don’t need to prove it can work; we’re already past that. We just need to engineer it so it does work and it’s reliable and safe. Fusion should be safer if you do it right. Should be safer than fission, but except for the Gen 4.

So, NVIDIA and some other big companies have allegedly gotten together and built an artificial fusion situation so that they can iterate a bunch of different things within a virtual world, and then that will tell them what to do in the real world. Now, do you believe that they can’t build a fusion reactor yet that meets all the requirements, but that they could build an accurate AI simulation of it? Does that sound like something people could do? I’m going to say no. Sorry, I’m going to say no. I don’t think people could do that. It might teach us something, or it might pop up a possibility that we had not considered. But I don’t think it would accurately simulate it, do you? And how would you know if it accurately simulated it? Because we can’t do it in the real world. So, what would you compare it to to know that it had accurately simulated it so you weren’t wasting your time seeing what the simulation would do? So, let’s just say: call me skeptical.

Word Thinking: Genocide and the Government Shutdown

Have you heard of my book Loserthink? Let me grab it off the shelf. Hold on. Sorry, I meant to be more prepared.

So, my book Loserthink has many examples of how to poorly think so that you know not to do it. One of the more important points in the book is what I call “word thinking.” Have you heard me talk about that before? Word thinking. So, word thinking is where you’re trying to make an argument that really just forces the other person to accept your definition of a word, as opposed to an argument. Word thinking is the opposite of being rational and the opposite of making an argument. It’s just trying to browbeat somebody into accepting that the word you’re using for a thing is the right word, because that carries the argument with it if you buy the word.

For example, if they could sell you that Gaza was a genocide, then they don’t need to make an argument. If you accept the word, they’re done, right? But it’s really more complicated than it is or is not a word. There’s a whole backstory, there’s a context, there’s everything. So, whenever you see somebody trying to force you to take their word as their definition, that’s just propaganda. That’s just power. That has nothing to do with what’s right or wrong or logical.

Now, what do Democrats say about the government shutdown? Well, Governor Newsom’s press office said, quote, “If you control all three branches of government, how are you not in charge?” So, they’re using the word “control” as the word that they want you to accept. If you accept control, then you have accidentally accepted that the Republicans are the ones that can open the government all by themselves. Right? There’s no argument there. They just want you to accept “control.” If you buy into the definition of who’s in control, and they’ve defined it as who’s got control of the three parts of the government, then you are in control, and therefore, logically, only you can open the government. Now, everybody who pays attention to the news knows that the Democrats would have to vote for it also, in at least large enough numbers to get it passed, and they’re not. So, the Democrats have complete control because all they have to do is say yes and the government opens, because the Republicans have already said yes to a continuing resolution, which would get it done.

Insurrection vs. Arguments

Now, you may have seen Jessica Tarlov arguing on The Five the same point. And what she does is she uses a word-thinking substitution. I think the word she used, if I remember, was “incumbent.” She said that if you’re the one who owns all—if you’re in control of the three branches of government, as Republicans are—that it is incumbent upon you to negotiate with the minority, the Democrats, and give them something in return for them agreeing to open the government. Now, do you see the word thinking there? That’s word thinking. There’s no argument there. She’s trying to replace an argument with a word: “incumbent.” It’s incumbent upon you.

But where is the connecting tissue? Where is the logic that says that you’ve got two teams, one team has already said yes to open the government, the other team has not yet said yes, why would it be incumbent on the ones who have already said yes to give something away when they’ve already agreed to do the thing that’s the thing, which is open the government and pay for it? They’ve already agreed. There’s no incumbent anything. Who wrote that rule? Is there something in the Constitution about what makes you incumbent?

How many of you recognize this now? How many of you recognize that this was always word thinking, and that’s all it ever was? And that a great deal of the Democrat narratives and approaches are this. They just try to get you to buy into a word. What are some other words the Democrats are trying to get you to accept? “Insurrection,” when they talk about January 6th. They don’t want to give an argument, because the argument would go like this: what did those people want to accomplish? “Oh, they thought the election was rigged and they were trying to pause it to make sure that we had a fair election.” That’s what an actual argument would look like. But if you can’t win the argument, you try to do it with word thinking and you say, “It’s an insurrection.” Well, no, not really, because that was not the intention of any of the people who had attended. It was an insurrection. Yeah, but it really wasn’t. So, if you get into the arguing over what the word means, then they have a chance of at least a tie, because people who don’t pay attention to the news will think, “Well, half of them say it’s an insurrection, half of them say it’s not, sort of a tie, so I’ll just go with my team that says it is.” It’s not a tie. It’s not even close to a tie. There probably wasn’t one person there who thought that they could take over the government by walking around unarmed and trespassing. Not one person, I’ll bet, thought that that would take over the government. Anyway, so that’s what word thinking is: when there’s no argument, but they’re trying to get you to accept their words.

Trump in Asia: The Soybean Deal

Meanwhile, Trump’s been over in Asia trying to make deals. I guess he might have made a deal for some soybeans. I can’t tell if this is a good deal or a bad deal, but 25 million tons—and 12 million tons immediately. So, Besent was announcing that, and also he rents land to farmers who do soybeans. So Besent went over there and got a deal that was good for Besent, apparently. Was it good for anybody else? I have no context to know whether that would be good for anybody else, but certainly it would be good for the soy farming landlords.

What I wonder about, and I don’t know if we’ll ever find this out: did our farmers grow a bunch of soybeans and then have to throw them away because they didn’t have any place to sell them? Have they already wasted the soybeans that they grew, or do they have a bunch of stored-up soybeans that are just ready to go and that this is just pure good news? I don’t know. Because if they already lost the whole season, which they might have, right? Isn’t it possible that farmers lost the whole season? That would put a lot of people out of business. So, I don’t know how good or bad this is. Does it save us? And by us, I mean the soy farmers. I don’t know.

Trump and Xi Meeting

But I guess the President and President Xi, they met, but they did not talk about Taiwan or the deal for TikTok, and I think that was the right play. Because it’s not like they were going to make a decision on Taiwan in the hour and a half they were there. And it’s not like—I don’t think the TikTok deal needed any extra approvals, right? He didn’t need Xi to say yes because they already said yes. So, it doesn’t make sense that they would have talked about those. Those were lower priority for the meeting, I think.

But they did talk about other stuff, and Trump says he’s going to drop the tariff by 10 basis points, 10%, because China promised to do more on fentanyl. Does that sound like a win for the United States? We lowered their tariff because the tariff had been put on because they weren’t doing enough about fentanyl. But Xi said he would try harder on fentanyl. That’s a nothing. Unfortunately, that’s a nothing. Try harder? No, he’s not going to try harder. That’s a nothing. But we did reduce their tariff, so they got something. So, China got something, but it was also something artificial because Trump had simply made up the tariff. So, Xi got something that didn’t have any actual value because it was just something that Trump had made up—“I’ll give you more, I’ll increase your tariff”—and then he took away the thing he made up. So, that’s sort of a break-even. We were not getting enough help with fentanyl; we’re still not going to get enough help with fentanyl. That’s a nothing. So, apparently, this deal of tariffs reduced for fentanyl help, to me it looks a little more like we gave them nothing in return for nothing. To me, that’s just a nothing. Love to be wrong—I would love to be wrong about that.

Rare Earth Minerals

And then apparently, China’s not going to bother us on the rare earth minerals; they’re going to be somewhat unrestricted. But they can change that on a dime, right? China can change their mind on the rare earth minerals in five minutes. So, does it really mean anything when they say they’re not going to try to restrict our rare earth minerals? To me, it looks more like they want to make sure that they can corner that market and not encourage us to create alternative sources. Because I think they know that they would have more power if we believed that we had a secure supply of rare earth from them only, or if they’re the biggest source. So, I’ve got a feeling that that’s more strategic than being a good friend. You know, they’re like, “We’d rather maintain our total power over your rare earth, so for now, we’re going to sell you all you want.” Sort of like a drug dealer. So, I don’t know. It’s better that they’re not restricting it at the moment, as long as we don’t pull back from our effort to diversify our sources. I don’t think we are.

Microchip Restrictions

All right, what else did they agree on? That China is going to, quote, “discuss” microchip restrictions with NVIDIA. Is that anything? So they agreed that somebody’s going to talk to somebody. So China’s going to talk to NVIDIA. But NVIDIA doesn’t get to approve or not approve the chip sales; that’s the government. So the people who can’t make the decision are going to talk about it. That’s a nothing. Again, it’s a nothing, but maybe it looks good on paper.

Trump and Xi: Body Language

So it could be that the only real thing on this list of accomplishments—and you know, you’ve been with me long enough, you know I’m totally pro-Trump, right? You know I’m totally pro-America, pro-Trump. I don’t think he got anything. Is that okay? Everybody okay with that take? I don’t think he got anything. But he didn’t lose anything. I don’t think he lost anything.

Did you see the body language when they were doing the extended handshake? God, that looked awkward, didn’t it? We’ve seen Trump shake hands with every kind of leader in the world, and it always looks like he has some kind of physical dominant advantage over them. Well, President Xi, obviously, he’s operating at a high level and he knows what the handshake means and he knows what it looks like, and he’s a big guy. He’s physically a big guy. So Xi held tight and he just kept his President Xi face. He didn’t get pulled in by the charisma. He was absolutely charisma resistant. And I didn’t see any other leader who ever even tried that. So if you were going to grade them on their body language, it was a tie. And maybe Xi won because he was not affected in any way by the handshake, and you’re looking for him to be affected. So, it looked very awkward. They looked very uncomfortable. There was no point where they looked like buddies, but you know, Trump’s trying to sell it as they’re best friends and they can work together, which is good, by the way. Trump should be acting like, “You’re my friend, we’re going to do great, China and the US can grow together.” Those are all the right messages. So he’s doing the right messaging. But no, Xi is very clearly holding his cards close to his chest. He’s not giving up anything. And you know, Trump did a good job of complimenting him, saying he was a great leader of a great country. And I think those are both true statements. He’s a strong leader of a great country. So, saying that is smart and good, good politics.

Bringing Business Back to America

Also, Secretary Besent says that Trump’s coming back with $2 trillion in added investments. That’s not from China; that’s from the other countries: Japan, South Korea, etc. And that’s pretty good. I don’t think any president has done as well as Trump in bringing business to the United States. Nobody’s even close, right? Is it fair to say that nobody’s even tried this hard to make the US the dominant place you do business?

Trump was giving a speech somewhere over there, and he was talking about making America the easiest place to do business. And that is the smartest thing you’ll ever see for the US, because the contrast—he didn’t have to say it out loud—the contrast is that it’s dangerous to do business in China, right? Did any of you catch that? When he was giving his speech, it looked like he was just talking about the US: “We’re going to make the US the easiest place to get a permit, the easiest place to get approved, the best systems, presumably the best court systems,” etc. That’s important. He didn’t say that, but that’s important. So, he’s consciously saying, “I’m going to brand the United States as the best place to do business.”

That reframe of America being the best place to do business—in the context of all of us knowing, but we don’t even have to say it out loud anymore, that China is the worst place to do business. Because it’s going to be hard to get permits. If you get things approved, they might be yanked back. They’re going to spy on you, steal your IP, put every obstacle in the way, and then eventually steal your entire business if they can. Comparing America: you can be free, you can get here, you can set up shop, you can get a permit, you’ll get approved, the legal system will treat you right—that’s no competition. That is just no competition. And Trump knows a winning play. So, by making it a big deal to brand the US as the best place to do business, he’s sort of bringing together a bunch of things that we know to be true or could be true, which is the easy to get a permit. It’s not true yet. He has to make that true, but he can do it. This is one of the strongest, best plays you’ll ever see an American president do. It would be hard to top that as the smartest, best, most capable thing you could do if you’re president. Really, I’m just blown away by how smart that is. It seems like a simple thing, but other people could have done it, right? If you say to yourself, “But Scott, that’s just a simple thing. It’s just a thing he’s saying in a speech,” anybody could have said that before, right? But they didn’t. It’s the saying it that matters.

Arctic Frost and the Hunting of Republicans

Are you following the story of Arctic Frost? That was the legal project that Jack Smith was going after the Republicans, going after Trump. But what we know now is that as part of that effort, Ted Cruz is telling us about it, the Department of Justice under Biden issued 197 subpoenas for 430 Republican entities and individuals.

The Democrats, once Biden was elected, were literally hunting Republicans. Do you remember when Bill Maher mocked me last week for saying that Republicans would be hunted if Biden got elected? I said that back in 2020 on X. He mocked me for that. He mocked me for saying they would be hunted, while at the same time, one of the biggest stories in the country is that Republicans were being hunted. Now, maybe he thought I meant with a gun, and in some cases, that too. But I didn’t mean that necessarily with a gun, just that they would be hunted, you know, hunted by people who wanted them harm. People. I could not have been more right about this. And that’s not even counting the January 6th civilians. This is the elected Republicans. My God. My God. Now, it’s being called, of course, “Worse than Watergate.” And you know, I’m totally biased on this topic, but isn’t it worse than Watergate? It looks like it to me. Watergate was a tiny little thing when you look at it in the rearview mirror, especially—it seemed bigger then, of course, because the news told you it was bigger—but in the rearview mirror, this looks a lot bigger. A lot bigger. Like a hundred times bigger. So, we’ll see where this goes. Probably nowhere.

Media Criticism: The View and Whoopi Goldberg

Eric Doherty has a post on X. He was noticing on The View that Whoopi Goldberg was being especially stupid—I think he called her ironic. And she was talking about the Biden pardon—I’m sorry, the Trump administration. This is Whoopi Goldberg on The View, and she says she wants the Trump administration to, quote, “stop investigating a man who is no longer in office.” This is Whoopi on The View: “Stop investigating a man who is no longer in office,” meaning Biden. Now, did I mention that this is the same time as the Arctic Frost story is one of the biggest stories in the country? You know, the part where the Biden administration couldn’t stop investigating Trump after he was out of office? At the same time! The same time it’s one of the biggest stories, and she’s saying, “Stop investigating a man who is no longer in office.”

And here’s what Whoopi said that they should be talking about and worrying about. Are you ready for her priorities? All right, so it’s 2025 and these are Whoopi’s priorities: soybeans (solved), Epstein files (don’t really exist), and those narco boats (she wants to make sure that we’ve identified them as actual criminals, not just kill them). So, those are her three priorities: soybeans (solved), Epstein (probably imaginary—I doubt there’s any files), and narco boats (the government is doing exactly what they should be doing, we just don’t know the details).

What’s missing? Do you see anything missing from the list? How about crushing national debt? Missing. How about their biggest concern used to be—say it—climate change? Yeah, we’ll talk about climate change a little bit too. So, what happened to climate change? Suddenly, that’s not a big deal? It’s all about the soybeans and the Epstein file and the narco boats? I would like to make my own list of the least important things to me. The least important things: soybeans, Epstein files, and narco boats. I’m kind of interested in all of them. They’re interesting in their own little way, but they’re the smallest problems I have in the world. But Whoopi, she’s got to get those soybeans and Epstein files solved. Climate change? Not so much.

Thomas Massie and JD Vance

Let’s talk about Thomas Massie and the many dust-ups with President Trump. So, JD Vance was asked at one of the Turning Point USA events recently—he was asked why Trump is going after Thomas Massie, which he is, trying to primary him. And here’s JD’s explanation, and then I’ll give you my take on this. He says, “It’s one thing to disagree with the party on an issue. Voting against the party on every single issue, every time we’ve needed Thomas for a vote, he’s been completely unwilling to provide it. That’s why Trump turned his ire on Massie. We could never count on him for some of the most difficult votes. I say that as someone who knew Thomas well before I got into politics.”

All right, here’s my take on Thomas Massie. What JD is leaving out of his explanation is why he does it. Why would you leave out why he does it? Now, I’m not like an expert on every single thing that Thomas Massie’s ever done, but can you answer this question for me: Is it not true that his resistance to Republican things is always based on the Constitution and always based on an accurate reading of the Constitution? Am I wrong about that? The problem with him is that he can accurately read our own Constitution and then he acts upon it. There may be some exceptions where there’s just something he knew more about than the government—he’s into allowing farmers to sell things directly. I think that’s one of his issues. I don’t know if the rest of the government or the Republicans disagree with that or not. I mean, he has some other issues. But I think JD, if you wanted to be fair about this—and, you know, to be fair, his job is to support the President; his job is not to be completely transparent; he’s a supporter of the President and that’s his right role—so within his role as the Vice President, this is totally acceptable the way he framed it. But as a consumer and as a fan of Massie, I just need to say: I like one person who is supporting the Constitution, even if he’s a pain in the ass. I will accept his pain-in-the-assness because it doesn’t seem to affect too many votes. How many times has he been the one, the only one, who determined which way the vote went? Has that ever happened? Or is he just reliably not in their column? Because if he’d actually changed the outcome of things that I cared about, maybe I’d reassess. But I don’t think he actually changed any outcomes. I think he’s just not reliably on their vote. So, anyway, I’m pro-Massie. I completely understand the argument that winning is more important than maybe some niceties, but I like my Constitution and I like that there’s one person who will risk everything to remind us what’s in it.

Obama and the Regulation of Facts

Well, Obama is talking. He was at some event and said some scary Obama-sounding things that I’ll criticize in a moment. He said, quote, “Part of what we’re going to have to do—who is ‘we,’ the government, the Democrats?—part of what we are going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism. Uh-oh. Already there’s a problem. And how we use social media. Uh-oh. In ways that reaffirm facts and separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion—no you don’t, you liar—we don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government regulatory constraints.” There it is. There it is. He wants some government regulatory constraints.

Now, the way I read this is he wants the government to be in charge of telling you what’s real and what isn’t real. Is it a fact or not a fact? Well, the government—the government will help you with that. What’s that called? It’s called censorship. It’s the dumbest thing. But here’s my take. Doesn’t it feel like old thinking to imagine that we know what facts are true? Can you tell me which domain we’re confident that we know the facts are true? What about those employment numbers? What about our food pyramid? What about all the pandemic data? What about our GDP? What about the inflation numbers? There’s not a fucking true number in the country, people. There is no real, reliable fact that any of us will ever agree on. So what makes this seem like an opinion from the 70s? It just feels old. It’s like Obama hasn’t noticed that everything from climate change to everything is fake. It’s all fake.

Once you realize that all of the facts are fake, and always will be, it’s just an idiot idea to follow the facts. There was a time when we all thought that made sense, right? If ten years ago—maybe more, let’s say 20 years ago—if 20 years ago he had said exactly this, “We have to make sure that people are following facts because if they’re not following the facts, we’re all in trouble, and the government will be helpful in helping you know what the facts are,” 20 years ago, I would have actually thought that was a thing and I would have given that serious consideration, knowing that there’s a censorship risk. But I would have given that serious consideration because I would have thought, “Well, we’re definitely better if we follow the facts, right?” Wouldn’t you say that? Following the facts has got to be better than not following the facts. And then fast forward 20 years to 2025, and you learn the brutal truth of life: there are no facts. There are no facts, people. There are no facts. There are only narratives, there are claims, there are lies, there are lucky guesses. But there are no facts, people. There are no facts. So this is all bad. This is really just Obama saying, “We want to control what you think is true.” That’s what this is. We don’t want that.

Biden’s Advisors and Financial Incentives

I saw a video yesterday of, I guess, one of Joe Biden’s closest advisors, a guy named Mike Donilon, had been—I guess he was being interviewed about his Biden experience. And they made him admit that he had millions of dollars on the line for keeping Biden in the race. Now you know what the problem was, right? Didn’t you know that there had to be some financial thing going on that Biden’s advisors were keeping him in the race? It always seemed to me that there would be this big class of professionals who literally would have millions of dollars apiece that were on the line if he got elected. Right? Not only would they get paid for helping him get elected—as this Mike Donilon said he would get up to $4millionifBidenbecamepresidentagain.$4 million! And coincidentally, Mike Donilon did not think that he should pull out of the race. Right. So we all watched Biden look like a vegetable, but the guy closest to him, who obviously knew what the situation was, had millions of dollars on the line if he lied to us and said he’s fine. Now, I’m not sure that he lied, because I can’t read his mind, but I certainly wouldn’t trust the guy who’s got millions of dollars at stake.

Planned Protests at the Capitol

There’s a video—Libs of TikTok has a video—that I don’t know exactly who this group is, but it’s a group of Democrats, I guess, who are planning to surround the Capitol on November 5th, which they call one year since the fascists got into office. And they’re going to try to increase their number of people around the Capitol until the current administration resigns. So they’re literally planning an insurrection—no exaggeration and no word thinking. So it would be word thinking if it were not an actual insurrection they were planning. But they even talk about it as removing the government before the term is over. So if you’re trying to use a protest to remove the government before the government would normally be done, that’s an insurrection, right? I mean, what else would you call that? So I’m not doing word thinking; that’s just what they say they’re doing. I don’t know who this group is—looked like a small group in a room—I don’t know if we have to worry about them yet. But the fact that they’re even talking about that is just, wow.

Bill Gates and the Climate Change “Hoax”

So as you know, Bill Gates made some news by saying that maybe climate change is not the crisis that people thought, and maybe we should spend our money on feeding people and taking care of our other biggest problems. And people like me made a lot of noise about that.

What’s interesting—a lot is interesting about this, we’ll talk about it—what’s interesting is that we’re all trying to read his mind and trying to figure out, what was Bill Gates thinking before and what’s he really thinking now, and why did he make this pivot? Well, I don’t know. So I always warn you that you can’t read his mind. I saw that Mike Cernovich is going hard at him recently, and calling people—was it naive? I think he used the word “naive” if you think that all he did was look at the facts and adjust to the new facts. And I would agree with Mike that, although I can’t read Bill Gates’ mind, I doubt it had anything to do with facts.

It might have to do with the fact that he has now got approval for his Gen 4 nuclear power plant that he’s invested in. Because if that works out, he’s going to make more money from nuclear power than he’s ever made before in any other thing. I mean, he could be the richest person in the world just because of Gen 4 nuclear power. I mean, that would be enough. So, when somebody has a big financial incentive to say, “Yeah, let’s go strong on energy and don’t waste our money so much on these other things, we’ll put it all in this area,” it might be just financial. But again, I can’t read his mind, so I don’t know.

But according to Harry Enten, who did a survey or looked at the numbers on CNN—he’s their data guy in CNN—he says that the climate change message has not worked for 36 years. So back in the year 2000, 40% of the public, I guess, were alarmed about climate. 40%. That was in the year 2000. By the year 2020, it had gone up to 46% who were concerned. And then after 2020, it dropped. So by 2025, only 40%—back to where it was in 2000. So from 25 years of climate alarmism didn’t move the needle at all. 25 years of massive propaganda in one direction didn’t move it at all.

Where was Trump the whole time? Trump was saying that climate change was a hoax the whole time. Not necessarily the warming part, but the way it was treated as a crisis was a hoax. And he, of course, couldn’t help himself, so he posted today: “We won the war on climate change hoax.” And he said that, this is what Trump said on X, “Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely wrong on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful. MEGA.” So Trump got one of the biggest wins of all time. Imagine how he feels. Is there anything that Trump has been more mocked for besides his haircut than the fact that he called climate change a hoax? I think that was always, besides the trivial stuff like hair and girlfriends and stuff, I think that was like the biggest knock against him. Right? That he was anti-science and he didn’t understand what all the smart people did, that we were all going to die in a climate crisis. Well, people, fast forward: he was right. He was right. So what happened between the years 2020 and 2025 that would have caused people to have less belief in climate change? Is there anybody who got involved in that conversation around 2015? Well, you can do the math.

Gavin Newsom and Patrick Bateman

ABC’s Jonathan Karl was interviewing Gavin Newsom, and this is funny. So you would think that ABC might be sort of pro-Democrat, especially in their news division. But here’s what Jonathan Karl actually did in a recorded podcast with Gavin Newsom. This is almost hard to believe; this is a real thing. He held up a picture of the character from the movie American Psycho and held it next to a picture of Gavin Newsom and told him that even his supporters note that he looks like a comic book villain from central casting. Imagine being in an interview with a legitimate news source, and the legitimate news guy holds up a picture of you as a character in a movie who’s literally a psychopath. And it has no news value whatsoever, except to point out that he looks like a psychopath. Now that’s funny. That’s just funny.

However, I have to support Jonathan Karl on this. The way people look totally matters, right? That’s something I can say because I’m just a guy in a podcast. But you can’t say that if you’re legitimate news. But he did. I mean, in his own way, he’s saying it as a legitimate news guy. The way you look matters a lot. AOC’s look—do you think that makes a difference? Of course it does. President Trump’s height—does that make a difference? Of course it does. Of course it does. Yeah, the way people look is hugely influential. And I do believe, I agree, that Newsom does look like a movie or a comic book villain. He looks exactly like the Joker, doesn’t he? He’s even got the Joker’s haircut. He could walk into a role as the Joker on a Batman movie with almost no makeup. I’m not wrong about that. So, if people can’t notice that, I don’t know.

New York Politics: Elise Stefanik

Meanwhile, here’s a shock, according to the National Pulse. I guess Elise Stefanik, a Republican, just polled the highest for a potential future Governor of New York. And they haven’t had a Republican governor in New York in 20 years. So I don’t know if that’s real—that’s one poll, you can’t really believe one poll—but it’s a new poll from the Manhattan Institute. It shows Elise Stefanik, Republican, leading both the current Governor Hochul—Hochul—and Lieutenant Governor of New York too, who is also a Democrat. So hypothetically, if they ever ran, she would win. That would be amazing. I wouldn’t expect that.

Gaza Security and Ceasefire

Meanwhile, over in Gaza, trying to figure out how to get that all settled down. Axios is reporting that there are lots of conversations and progress, I think, is being made figuring out who’s going to run that place in terms of physical security. And at the moment, it looks like the idea—I don’t know if this is going to work—but the idea is that the US, Egypt, and Jordan alongside some other—this is Axios reporting on this—along with some other Arab and Muslim countries, that might include Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Turkey, might all be part of this security deal. But it sounds like if they’re talking about “maybe this country, maybe that country,” that sounds a lot like they’re not that close to getting any kind of a thing going. But here’s the most interesting thing that happened. Well, let me just say this: I’m sure they’ll get it. So I don’t think there’s any risk that they won’t be able to figure out how to get some countries that want to do security there. It’s just going to take some grinding. It just looks like it’s going to be hard, but totally doable. So they’ll get there.

US-Israel Relations: The Sibling Dynamic

But as you know, there have been some breaks in the ceasefire, which everybody expects. You know, there are always going to be minor breaks in the ceasefire. But so far it’s holding, and even though there are breaks, it gets back on plan when it does. But I didn’t know this, but apparently Israel had planned, as sort of a retaliation for the ceasefire break that they say Hamas did, they were going to retake some part of Gaza and reoccupy it. And the reporting is that Trump said, “No, you’re not. You were not going to take more of Gaza. Stay where you are. We’re just going to sort of tap this along and act like the break of the ceasefire wasn’t the biggest deal in the world so that we can get to the phase two.” Whereas Israel might want to grab some land or just move the IDF into more occupying of Gaza than they’re occupying right now, which would have just caused a giant problem and maybe derailed the entire thing. And the reporting is that Trump said nope. And he said, “No, you’re not. You’re not going to redeploy and take over that space, even though you have a good argument for it. You’re not going to do it.”

Now, here’s my question to you. Did that really happen? Because you know, it’s the news; you never know if it really happened. Did Trump really tell them not to do it, and is that really the only reason they didn’t do it? Because if the reporting is accurate, it’s kind of a blow to the “Israel controls the US” narrative, isn’t it? Kind of a big blow. Does it not seem to you that, at least with our current President, while it will always be true that Israel does an amazingly good job of influencing the US for their own national purposes—which is their job. You know, if you’re an Israeli government—well, even if you’re just a citizen—it’s sort of your job to make sure that your country does well. Does Israel do a good job of making sure their country does well? Yeah. Yeah, really good job. Very good job. Do we like it all the time? Not if we think that it included manipulating or pushing the US around. We don’t like that part. But so far, we’ve heard several anecdotes that seem to suggest that at least Netanyahu is going to—I don’t want to say bow to Trump—but he’s definitely going to take very seriously what Trump wants to the point of maybe just doing what he wants.

So, are we watching any kind of great reversal where the power influence structure is changing? Or has it always been this way, but we were maybe less aware of it? Because you know, I’ve described in the past the US and Israel relationship—to me, it looks less like Israel controlling everything in America and more like a sibling situation. Which is that we have this love for them as siblings, you know, you can argue whether we should or should not, but we do. Israel’s kind of special to a lot of people in the US. Not everybody, obviously. But I think we influence each other. When it matters more to the US, then we push. When it matters more to them, maybe they push harder than we push back. Sometimes they win; sometimes we win. But if it’s true—and I’ll put a big if, because if you wanted to argue with the if, I wouldn’t have a response to that—if it’s true that Trump is telling them what to do in some of these situations and they’re just doing it, that would look very different, wouldn’t it? That would look very much more sibling-like. Sometimes your brother wins, sometimes your sister wins, but it’s not really winning; it’s more like just working with each other. That’s what it looks like. I’m not close enough to the situation to know what it really is like, but it looks like that.

Border Security and Work Permits

Let’s see. Homeland Security, according to NewsNation, is rolling out new rules requiring photographs and, in some cases, fingerprints of all non-US citizens entering the US. To which I say: Wait, what? We’re only now requiring fingerprints and photographs for coming into the country? We weren’t already doing that? That’s one of those stories where you go, “What? I thought we always did that.” All right.

And I guess Trump’s also going to end the Biden policy of automatically extending work permits. Breitbart News is reporting on this. That makes sense. They’re just going to make sure that the people working here have been vetted properly. They won’t like it.

European Politics and Civil War

Meanwhile, also in Germany, they’ve developed—I’m sorry, back to Germany—the right-wing party has got now 40% support, which is actually more than all of the other individual parties. So the dominant party—only by a little, 40 to 38%—is anti-immigration. So, does that mean that Germany will start deporting people and closing their border if the biggest political entity—only biggest by a little bit, but they are the biggest—is against it? Do you think that Germany has time to roll back their immigration standards to save Germany as whatever they want Germany to look like? Probably not. Yeah, I’m seeing in the comments “too late.” Feels too late, doesn’t it? Feels too late.

But speaking of that, Elon Musk has said in his provocative way—Elon said that civil war in Britain is inevitable. I think he said that on X, of course. Do you think so? Do you think that a civil war in Britain is inevitable? What he’s talking about is the native-born versus the immigrant population, I think. You know, maybe he’s talking about the Islamic immigrant population specifically. He’s not being specific. But do you think there’s going to be a civil war in Britain? I’m going to say no, because what would that look like? They don’t have guns. What would a civil war even look like? They’re completely neutered. Who would they fight? What, are they going to go out with butter knives and baseball bats and have a civil war? I don’t think there’s going to be a civil war. I think that whatever it is they wanted to preserve, they already lost, and for them, it’s probably a major tragedy. But I don’t think they can civil war their way out of it. I don’t see that happening.

Anti-Drone Lasers and National Guard Quick Reaction Forces

Meanwhile, also in Germany, they’ve developed a 20-kilowatt laser for shooting down drones. Now this will be like the 20th time I’ve told you a story that there’s a brand new device, laser, for shooting down drones or other things. But what I want to add to this is that apparently, if this works—and they’re already testing it and it does work, so it’s a real thing—that it will lower the cost of defending against drones dramatically. And when I’m looking at war zones—because I have an economics background—I tend to look at the economics of it to predict what’s going to happen. The best economy almost always wins in war. I don’t know if you knew that, but the strongest economy usually can afford the best weapons and over time the best economy usually wins a war. But related to that would be the cost of their weapons. You know, if you’re the smaller economy but you can figure out how to do your weapons really cheap, you effectively can punch above your weight. So if it turns out that our adversaries are really good at building drones, but we get even better at anti-drone lasers and shooting them down out of the sky for 20 cents a drone instead of a million dollars to take out a drone, we win. So it could be that the economic race to have the cheapest anti-drone defenses and also the cheapest drones—just the economics of that—that might determine who wins everything. And Germany’s got a nice little device there that might make a difference.

Well, here’s something for the Democrats to talk about for the next few weeks. According to The Guardian, the Pentagon is telling the National Guard to organize quick reaction forces for all the major parts of the US. So there’d be 20,000 National Guard who would be trained, but no more than say 500 for any one location. So you’re not going to see 20,000 people in the same place. But 500 apiece for various places, and they would be a quick reaction force for if there’s social unrest. So if there’s something that you quickly need to quell, like a riot, there will always be somewhere reasonably close in every state—you’d have 500 well-trained anti-riot people. Now, what do you think the Democrats are going to say about that? This is weeks of content for the anti-authoritarian people. “Oh, there it is, told you! He’s organizing his private army now, if we protest he’s going to come and get us with his 500 National Guard people.” So they’ll have something to talk about for a few weeks; we don’t want them to be bored.

Closing Personal Note

All right, that’s all I have for today. I’m going to talk to the Locals subscribers, my beloved Locals subscribers, a little special. By the way, if you were a member of Locals, you would have been watching me draw Dilbert live every night. I can’t promise I’ll do it every night. Actually, my ability to draw could be done this week. This might be the last time I draw, because my hand is increasingly paralyzed from whatever is going on medically with me. So at the moment, my two fingers and thumb on my left hand still work. So I’ve been doing live drawing demonstrations so you can see how I use the computer to draw, etc., and teach you my little tricks as I’m going. Sometimes we write, sometimes we’ll write live. So that’s on Locals. If you went to—just Google me, Google my name and Locals and you’ll find out where to sign up if you want to. But I can’t promise I can keep doing it—the drawing. So I might have to retire from drawing, maybe this week. It just depends if my hand keeps working. If these three fingers keep working, I can actually draw better than I’ve ever drawn before. So there’s no degradation whatsoever at the moment, but it’s right on the edge. It’s right on the edge where I’m going to lose this ability completely. I already can’t type. So since these fingers don’t work, I can’t type because I can’t feel the keyboard.

But today I’ll go in and get my radiation treatment for at least one part of my body, which won’t affect this, by the way. So there’s no plan for fixing this at the moment. So I might be a quadriplegic pretty soon. Anyway, thanks for joining, and Locals, I’m coming at you privately in 30 seconds.