Coffee with Scott Adams 2025-10-31
The Simultaneous Sip
I’m a little bit late. Were you worried? But here I am. I made it. Let’s see if we can get a show together today. Hey, you’re supposed to be doing something. That won’t be happening. I’ve got updates for you.
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, a mug, a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, or a flask—a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It’s called the simultaneous sip, and it’s going to happen right now. Go.
Everything is a little bit harder today. Why is my iPad not doing what I want? Well, there it is. Happy Halloween, everybody. Are you all going to trick-or-treat tonight? I’ll probably get a few hundred people today.
Scott’s Radiation Treatment Story
Yesterday I had my radiation treatment for one of my cancer spots. It’s not a cure; it was just trying to fix the place in my back. Do you want to hear the most alarming story you’ve ever heard?
The radiation treatment that I get has zero pain involved. In other words, you don’t feel the radiation. You don’t feel it when it’s happening, and you don’t feel it when it’s done, really. There might be minor side effects or something, but basically, you don’t feel it—unless the position that you have to be in to get it happens to lie on your back in the exact place that it hurts the most. That was my situation.
I didn’t know if I could get through the pain, so I wanted to make sure I knew how long it would last so that I was mentally prepared. I knew it was going to be not just regular pain, but we’re talking about feeling like somebody is putting a spear through your chest the entire time. I mean really, really painful, like you’ve never felt before in your life. I knew it would last a while.
So I asked them and they said, “Well, it could be 15 minutes to an hour,” the doctor said. 15 minutes to an hour of lying completely still while somebody is putting a spear through your chest. If you don’t make it, then you don’t have a chance to get rid of the pain that is destroying your ability to walk. So that was my tradeoff: take a pain that would be the greatest pain of my life for 15 minutes to an hour, or never deal with the problem until my death.
I decided I could do anything for 15 minutes, and the doctor confirmed that in my particular case, it would be 15 minutes. He said the whole procedure would be 15 minutes. So now I understand it’s 15 minutes. You understand that the procedure is 15 minutes. Very easy, very clear communication, wouldn’t you say?
I get under the machine and immediately the pain kicks in. As the techs are walking into the adjacent room where they’ll be monitoring me, allegedly, one of them says, “We start by taking X-rays”—I think they meant a CAT scan, but they said X-rays—“to make sure that your body is in the same position that it was when we did the test to see where the tumors were. You have to be laying in exactly the same position or else the radiation won’t get to the right place.” So they say, “First we’ll take the X-rays.”
Now, what’s my first question? Is that on top of the 15 minutes, or is that included in the 15 minutes? I couldn’t ask because they were already into the test. So I’m laying there and 15 minutes pass, or what I thought was 15 minutes. It felt like 15 minutes of the worst pain I’ve ever endured in my life. I knew I couldn’t go longer, but the 15 minutes were over. Do you know what they said next?
“Well, we got the X-rays.” They hadn’t started. They hadn’t started the treatment. You know, the 15-minute treatment that I didn’t think I could possibly survive? I’d already gone 15 minutes and they hadn’t started.
I bailed out. I screamed and I said, “I’m done. No way. I’m not going to go 15 minutes.” They come in and of course they’re a little bit distraught because I’ve wasted their time, I’ve wasted the appointment, I didn’t get fixed, didn’t get any treatment—no treatment at all—and I just went through the most traumatic experience of my whole life.
And it got worse. Do you know what they said then? Are you ready for this? Then they told me for the first time: the treatment is one minute. One minute. The 15 minutes is all that setup that we told you we were doing. The entire process is 15 minutes. You were 60 seconds away from being completely done, but they had miscommunicated so that I thought it was 15 minutes for the process that had not yet started. So I bailed out.
Then I said, “Now, that’s the end of my appointment, right? So now I’m into somebody else’s appointment, which means I need to get kicked out and rescheduled.” Do you think I let them kick me out and reschedule? No.
So they rescheduled whoever was after me to some other room, I guess. I said, “You’re going to have to give me the strongest painkillers in the world. There’s just no way I can do 15 minutes more of this. So give me whatever you have.” We talked about what was the strongest painkiller they could give me, and I was already on several. I’m not going to get into the specifics of the painkillers because then you’ll go crazy and you’ll have your opinions and I don’t care. But they gave me something really strong on top of the painkillers I already had in me because I was anticipating it.
So now I have several—at least three different painkillers, four maybe—in me at the same time. How much did the painkillers make a difference? Not even a little bit. Not even the slightest bit. The strongest painkillers you can imagine, it was like there was no painkiller at all. I was just sitting right on an open nerve.
But they said because of the first test, they could get it down to six minutes inclusive of the actual radiation. I thought, “I can make it six minutes with these new painkillers.” I didn’t realize at the time that they wouldn’t make any difference. But I was like, I can do six minutes. I can do that.
The six minutes starts and when the six minutes is about done, the door opens and I’m like, “Thank God. They’re coming in because I’m done.” Then the tech said, “Hold on, we have to adjust your body because you’re not in the right place.” Which means that the whole first six minutes was a nothing. Which meant that it was going to be six plus six. So it was really going to be back to 12 minutes, and they had to start again.
But the good news was that my original position didn’t hurt very much. I thought, “I can definitely get through this,” because it didn’t hurt that much. As soon as they moved me into the same position as the one where I’d been tested, the one that they needed to get me in, it was absolute terror pain. It was the position that makes the pain; it wasn’t natural pain, it was the position. Now I’ve got six minutes after the first six minutes after the 15 minutes of the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life.
Have I ever told you about deciding versus wanting? Oh, I was doing a lot of deciding. A lot of deciding. So I got through it. The happy ending is I got exactly what I wanted. But wow. I had some words with them about their communication style.
Hunter Biden’s Autopen Art
Moving on. Did you know that there was a new congressional investigation that discovered that Hunter Biden’s paintings were all created entirely by Autopen? I didn’t even know Autopen had any art ability, but apparently the Autopen did all of his art. All right, how many of you believe that? Did anybody believe that? No, the Autopen did not do Hunter’s art. But it’s kind of funny.
APA Relationship Study
I wonder if there’s any science that you didn’t need to read because you could have just asked Scott. The American Psychological Association tells us that a study says that sharing positive emotions with a partner is good for your health. I’m pretty sure everybody knew that. You didn’t even have to ask me that one. Is sharing positive emotions with a partner going to be good for your relationship? Yes. Is a good relationship going to make you healthier, probably? Yes. Easy. Next time just ask me.
LSD and Anxiety Study
Let’s see if you can guess the outcome of this study based on my patterns. ABC News is talking about this. They did a study where they gave somebody a small dose of LSD to see if it would help them with their long-term anxiety. Importantly, they did not give it to them every day, just once. Just one dose. What do you think? What was the result? One dose of LSD—did it have any lasting effects on anybody’s mental health in a positive way?
You already know the answer to that because I talk about this almost every day. Almost every day there’s a new story about a hallucinogen—usually not LSD, but some hallucinogen that has exactly these properties, that it can fix somebody’s mental health with one dose. I don’t know how many studies we have to do to show that hallucinogens fix people with one dose before everybody tries one dose of hallucinogens. I mean, aren’t we sort of on the cusp of everybody just saying, “All right, all right, just give me some of that”?
Chimps and New Evidence
According to Science Alert, chimpanzees can revise their beliefs when shown new evidence. Well, damn those dirty monkeys. They’re smarter than humans. Humans don’t change their mind when you give them new data, but chimps do.
I would say that humans do too; it really depends. But maybe the advantage that chimps have is that they don’t get embarrassed. If you’re a chimp, you’re flinging your poo and probably trapped in a cage and you’ve got bigger problems. But no, they will revise their beliefs based on new evidence. However, there’s no indication what political party they’re supporting. I think what they did was maybe a test that had something to do with food.
Do you know what kind of opinion I would be willing to change easily? My food opinions. If the only thing they changed their opinion on was something about where the food was hidden, I’m not impressed. Chimps. Sorry, chimps.
Meta Training AI on Porn
Apparently Meta, the Facebook company, Ars Technica is reporting that they’ve been accused of using porn to train their AI. Do you know what their defense is? Apparently there must be digital records of Meta accessing a lot of porn. A lot of porn, because we’re talking about training AI. If you’re going to train AI, you don’t need a little bit of porn; you need lots and lots of porn. Lots.
So they must have some kind of digital path because there’s a lawsuit. Meta asked the US District Court to toss out a lawsuit alleging that they had torrented or streamed a bunch of pornography to train their AI. How much porn was it, and what was their defense? Their defense was it was all downloaded for personal reasons. Their actual court defense was: “No, no, we didn’t need that much porn to train our AI. We needed it totally for jerking off.”
What? No, really. Yeah, we didn’t even touch AI with it. We did not get near AI with that porn. It was all for us just to whack off. That’s a lot of porn. Well, we’re young, and there are a lot of us, and we like our porn, so why don’t you get off my back, Dad?
The Solar Power Boom
Here’s something that Elon Musk knew was coming, but maybe you didn’t. Apparently there’s a solar power boom because the economics of solar power just got really good. One of the reasons the economics for solar got really good is that there are some gigantic solar projects going on, China in particular, and basically it’s just creating a very robust, competitive industry.
So the prices for solar are going down, and a lot more is being installed in countries everywhere. The weird thing is that the economics of solar are so good now that even Saudi Arabia is installing solar. They have a lot of sun, so it makes sense. But one of the biggest regular energy carbon energy producers in the world—even for them, the economics of solar are good.
I assume that maybe this has something to do with battery storage as well. But I guess we’re in that realm where all power is good power. You might remember that this is in the category of Elon Musk being correct again. He’s been saying for a long time that solar would be the economical, easiest, fastest, safest kind of way to go forward. Obviously, he’s in the business, so it’s his job to say it’s good. But I think he’s right.
If I had to guess, the cost of, let’s say, nuclear power might go down as they develop new ways, but that is just sort of going to go up, I think, because they’re always finding new things that they have to do for safety and everything else. But solar, potentially, could just get cheaper and cheaper for a long time, and the batteries could get cheaper and cheaper. So I think Elon was right about the future of solar.
ExxonMobil vs. California
ExxonMobil, according to ZeroHedge, is taking California to court over what they call “compelled climate speech.” They’re not complaining about what the state is making them do about climate; they’re complaining about what they’re making them say, which is actually pretty innovative.
What is it they want them to say? Apparently they’re being forced by California law to publicly endorse opinions about climate change that they don’t agree with. That does seem like something you should be able to sue your state for, right? It’d be one thing if they say the law is you have to do this, but it seems like a violation of the First Amendment to say, “And when you do it, you have to talk about it this way.” What? Really? The state is going to tell you how to talk about climate change? No. No, you don’t get to tell us how to talk about it.
We’ll talk about it any way we want. But if you have some law about what we’re supposed to do, well, maybe we’ll do it. But we’re not going to talk about it the way you want us to talk about it. No. So I’m going to be on ExxonMobil’s side on that.
Tylenol and Autism
RFK Jr. says that there is not yet, and maybe there never will be, sufficient evidence that Tylenol causes autism. I’m sure the Tylenol company, or whoever makes it, has been talking to him. The Hill is reporting this. But they are in the process of looking into it. We’re doing studies to make the proof. But Kennedy says there’s a suggestive connection, but not yet a scientifically demonstrated one. So he’s going to make sure that the science is there before or if they say that it is a problem.
I like that. They’re doing the studies. This is exactly, exactly why I like Kennedy in this job. The anti-Kennedy guys are like, “He would ignore science.” Well, he’s clearly not. He’s clearly not ignoring science. He’s clearly creating science where there was a hole, and it could be one of the most important things anybody ever did anywhere if he finds out what’s actually behind the autism. So yeah, that’s why we like him.
Scrapping the Filibuster
Trump has apparently decided to encourage Republicans to “go nuclear” and scrap the Senate filibuster. My understanding would be that that change would allow them to pass a law without 60 votes, that they would just need a bare majority. And therefore they would be able to control the budget and reopen the government and do everything else.
The downside of getting rid of the filibuster—because the filibuster is sort of what keeps the 60-vote thing alive as long as they’re filibustering—but if you got rid of it, it would work both ways. Meaning that when Democrats eventually get in power, they would also have no filibuster. So if they had just one extra vote more than the Republicans, which isn’t too far away, that one extra vote would allow them to do whatever they wanted.
Right now, the only control that Democrats have over Republicans doing anything they want is that they can filibuster and make this 60-vote threshold too high for the Republicans to get over. It would be quite the move to go nuclear because it would change everything forever. The government would never be the same. And even Republicans don’t want to do it for that reason. It would change everything forever and you might not like it because it probably wouldn’t change back. I mean, it could, but probably wouldn’t. Whoever was in power would never want to change it back because it would be the best power they’d ever had.
Anyway, I don’t know if that’ll happen or if it’s a bluff. It’s probably the right time to bluff it because Democrats are really, really not going to want the nuclear option to be used and they’re really, really, really not going to want the filibuster to go away. But the Republicans have the power to do it. They could make it go away. So it could be that he’s bluffing and negotiating. And if he says, “I totally want the nuclear option and the Senate filibuster to go away forever,” that that might be enough for the Democrats to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, let’s talk.” If that’s what he’s doing, then it’s exactly the right play. If what he’s doing is he’s definitely decided to get rid of the filibuster and he can convince the Republicans—which I don’t think he can, actually. I don’t think he would. But if he could, would they go along with it? I don’t know. I don’t think he could get the enough Republicans. But he’s really good at threatening Republicans with primaries, so maybe he could. He might be able to get them.
BLM Fraud Investigation
Here’s the least surprising story of the day. According to the New York Post, Victor Nava is writing that the Department of Justice is investigating possible fraud within Black Lives Matter. So it’s one particular part of Black Lives Matter. How many times have we heard that story—that Black Lives Matter is being investigated for or suspected of money laundering and stealing money and corruption? Surprise.
But here’s what’s interesting. Apparently the investigation was launched during the Biden administration. So if you think it’s some kind of racist Trump thing that they only go after black people, you should know that this would be a continuation of a Biden administration thing. However, I do have to wonder if Biden was slow-walking it because Democrats don’t want to embarrass Black Lives Matter, to which they had all bowed. So it might have been getting slow-walked. But it’s not getting slow-walked now.
Fulton County Election Anomalies
It looks like the Civil Rights Division of the government is demanding—well, actually, the DOJ is demanding—records on what they call “unexplained anomalies” in the 2020 election after Fulton County did not comply with a subpoena. This is from the Post Millennial; Hannah Nightingale is writing about it.
I guess what this means is that in the past, the Department of Justice had asked for some documents or something from Fulton County and never got them. And now people believe that there are unexplained anomalies related to the 2020 election. Now, how long have we been hearing about these unexplained anomalies in Georgia? It’s been years. For years. It’s like every other day there’s a story about an unexplained election thing in Georgia. But none of them have so far turned into the massive smoking gun that Republicans expect. So there’s no proof that the election was thrown. But I do feel like every part of my body feels like it’s coming. Just in the way that Bill Gates changing his mind on climate change—I felt like it was coming, but I wouldn’t know if it was in 20 years or one year. It turned out it came kind of fast. So I don’t know. We’ll keep an eye on this. The unexplained anomalies.
Anti-Semitism on the Right
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, I believe he’s at an event in—or was—in Las Vegas, that’s the Republican Jewish Coalition. And part of what Ted Cruz would like you to know is that, according to him, the Republicans are drifting into anti-Semitism. He says, and I’ll just read him, “In the last six months, I’ve seen more anti-Semitism on the right than I have in my entire life.” He says this is a poison, and he believes we’re facing an existential crisis in our party and in our country. And he noted that the Democrats had sort of the same problem and were too slow to disavow the anti-Semitism in their own party, and that that was sort of a critical mistake for the Democrats that he would not want the Republicans to make.
And here’s where I’m wondering: how much of it is because of the Gaza situation, and if Gaza had not happened, would he be seeing all this anti-Semitism? Because it looks like the way to understand the various complaints about anti-Semitism is that—and I’m going to deeply oversimplify now—there are some people like Tucker Carlson who seem to be criticizing the state of Israel. But there are some people like Nick Fuentes who appear to be criticizing Jews around the world. Totally different. Criticizing a country? Fine. You’ll still be called an anti-Semite, but at least smart people would consider that reasonable. But if you’re criticizing people, well, you’re not going to get away with that. And Ted Cruz is calling it out.
Ted is very, very, very, very pro-Israel. He would be called by some people too pro-Israel. But again, if you’re pro or anti a country, that’s all legal as long as it’s transparent and you’re not hurting anybody and you’re still putting your own country first. That would be important. That’s one thing. If you’re criticizing AIPAC or the ADL, that’s okay. Those are organizations. That’s not direct. But even if you were anti-Semitic, it would be okay to criticize an organization for what the organization is doing.
So it looks like we’re conflating the two conversations. When is somebody saying something that’s criticism of the country? When have they gone too far and said it’s the people? But I would say that what’s changed in the last six months is that the Gaza situation reached some kind of a peak; obviously, that’s going to have some impact. And also maybe some changes in social media made Nick Fuentes show up on my feed every five seconds. Is anybody having the Nick Fuentes social media effect, that he’s just there almost every time I turn on any videos? On X, he’s in the top five.
Now, it is because I was curious, like what’s the difference between Tucker Carlson’s view and his view and what trouble is he causing? Because when you hear things about him, you don’t always hear the specific of what he did. So I want to see some specifics. And I would agree that he comes off as anti-Semitic. I would agree. If you watch him for a while, it’s hard not to get that impression. Now, he might deny it, etc. But let’s just say the vibe is unmistakable.
Now, he would argue, I think—I don’t want to take his argument—but at least in some cases, he would argue that he’s at least on other topics talking about culture less than he’s talking about people. But I think that’s not so much the anti-Semitism argument as it is his argument about other immigrants, I think. So here’s my take: both Tucker and Fuentes can represent their own opinions. I will add nothing to their opinions, nor do I care enough that I need to get into the weeds on that. But it does look like Tucker is playing with fire, but maybe still slightly on the side of—since he’s going after entities and not people—most of the time. I mean, there might be some people he goes after, but they would be special cases. That’s what it looks like.
FBI and Trump Campaign Records
Kash Patel apparently found, according to Just the News, another October surprise that was happening back in two weeks before the election of 2020. So we know about the Arctic Frost investigation. But did you know that on top of that, they were looking to do something in 2020? Oh, here it was. They were desperately, it looks like, desperately looking for something they could go after Trump for, but they didn’t have much. So here’s how deep they went to try to find something on Trump.
There was a memo—I’ll just read what Just the News is reporting. There was a memo buried in the middle of a 235-page evidence production that Patel sent to the House Judiciary Committee this week that chronicles how the FBI’s Washington Field Office rifled through financial records and campaign expenditure reports, producing what they called a “tactical intelligence report,” trying to link payments from Trump’s reelection campaign and a vendor named American Made Media Consultants to possible casino gambling. Did you get all that? Everybody follow all that? I read it, I don’t even follow it.
In short, Just the News writes, the FBI agents believed an employee of the campaign—not Trump, just an employee—went gambling at a casino after this American Made Media Consultants thing got money for campaign work. “Not exactly the crime of the century,” says Just the News. How’s that even a crime? What exactly was that? I guess the bottom line is that the FBI was looking for just absolutely anything. They were digging hard to try to keep Trump out of office, and that was the best they had: some employee went to a casino.
NYC Crime Survey
According to the New York Post and some new surveys, nearly half of New Yorkers think that New York City crime is going to spike when Adams becomes mayor, which he likely will. About half. That’s pretty scary if half of the people think that crime’s going to go up. But I’ll bet that’s not too different from every other election. Half of the country thinks it’s going to be a disaster.
Elon Musk on Bitcoin
I didn’t know this, but I guess in the past Elon Musk has been not so much of a Bitcoin supporter. But as of today, he says Bitcoin might be the thing because the thing that’s different about Bitcoin is that it’s sort of a proof of real-world power. I think that’s what Mario was describing that as.
Basically, Bitcoin can only be created with energy. So energy is, in a sense, the thing that backs Bitcoin in the way that the old days gold would have backed the dollar. Not anymore. So Bitcoin would be one of the—well, the only, I think it’s the only crypto that would be backed by something that has intrinsic value of its own, which is energy. So you need energy to make a Bitcoin. And so Elon, recognizing that, says he doesn’t hold any Bitcoin, but energy is truth. So I guess the bottom line is that Elon is believing that Bitcoin is here to stay and that there’s a reason that it’s different from the other crypto. And I noticed that Bitcoin was up 3% this morning. I don’t know what it is now.
Tokenizing Financial Assets
BlackRock’s Larry Fink said something that made news that I don’t understand at all. See if you understand it. Larry Fink says that the world is about to tokenize every financial asset. Do any of you know what that means—tokenize?
Now, I think it means have some kind of cryptocurrency that’s backed on the physical thing. Would that make the physical objects that are about to be tokenized? But he’s talking about financial assets. The world is about to tokenize every financial asset. I have no idea what that means. Do you? I mean, I understand they’re talking about the blockchain, blah blah blah. But what does it mean to tokenize every financial asset? Does that mean we’re not going to have financial entities? Will we be able to do all of our financial stuff without Charles Schwab and without a bank? Is he suggesting that banks will go away? I don’t know what this means.
Trump and Xi Meeting
Biden and Xi met the other day and allegedly made some deals. You saw my take on it yesterday in the morning and I said it looked like Biden got nothing. Well, that’s what the Wall Street Journal said, too. It wasn’t just me. So other people said the same thing. It looks like Biden got nothing. Well, we’ll never know because it’s mostly promises. But it looks like we promised nothing and they promised nothing, but we made our nothing sound like something so it looked like something happened. But I think nothing happened. I think nobody agreed on anything that they’re actually going to do.
But Biden did his usual thing where he claimed victory and it was a big win. That does work. If you’re a Democrat, you’re just going to say he’s lying. “He’s lying. He didn’t have a big victory. He’s lying.” But I like it when he uses his hyperbole and salesmanship in these situations because if he can make Xi think that the two of them won something—that the two of them look good and they had a meeting and they both won something that they wanted—that might soften up Xi for the next time. So that would maybe be good, just good technique, to agree that good things happened even if they didn’t.
So we’ll see where that goes. I don’t expect any change on fentanyl. There’s no way China cares about that.
The “Poison Pill” Imaginary Claim
The Daily Wire is reporting—Virginia Kruta is writing about this. There’s some Democrat—who was it?—Janelle Bynum, Democrat from Oregon. She’s a representative. She was being asked by the media about the clean CR, the continuing resolution. This is what the Republicans say they want the Democrats to sign or vote for, that would just extend funding with no changes from what it had been before.
So the “no changes” part is the important part. But Janelle Bynum says that that continuing resolution was not a clean bill, and indeed that it had a “poison pill” in it, meaning that something had been added that Democrats would definitely not want to happen, but if they wanted to open the government, they’d be forced to sign this bill that also had this new add-on that they didn’t want. That would be called the poison pill.
And then the C-SPAN media person said, “What is that poison pill? Can you name that?” And she could not. Because there’s no poison pill.
Have you noticed that the Democrats can make any claim whatsoever and nobody’s going to really fact-check it enough that—I mean, only the nerds like us are going to fact-check it. But the regular public is just going to hear that and they’re going to say, “Oh, it has a poison pill in it.” It has no poison pill in it. The poison pill is imaginary. It’s just completely imaginary. What do I tell you about Democrat beliefs and worries and policies? They’re all imaginary. The more imaginary things you see coming out of the left, the more you realize it’s an imaginary party. Everything from climate change to authoritarianism to Trump becoming a king to this CR having a poison pill—none of it’s true. To the drinking bleach to the “fine people” hoax to the Russia collusion hoax—none of it’s true. None of it’s true. So the imaginary party versus the real party.
Killing Obamacare Subsidies
The Wall Street Journal editorial was that the Republicans should kill Obamacare, the subsidies, if they can. Now, what would happen if these gigantic extra medical costs that have gone up, especially in the last five years—what would happen if the government just said, “All right, no more. It’s just going to be a private market and you’re going to have to eat these expenses.” Could they? Like, what would happen?
It is certainly obvious that the Republicans were right when they said that Obamacare would be a disaster. They were right. Now, Obama was right too in that he knew it would be a disaster but it would cover more people, so at least people would get healthcare while the disaster was running. He was right about that, too. It covered more people and just like the Republicans said, it’s a financial disaster. Is that fixable? I’d sure love to hear the Republican plan to fix it that doesn’t put 10 million people out of healthcare. Is there any way to do that? I’m not even sure that’s physically possible at this point. We’ll see.
Impeaching Judge Boasberg
Speaking of Ted Cruz, he’s also called on the House to impeach that Judge Boasberg. And the impeachment would be, in his opinion—the reason for it would be—that Boasberg had been behind approving the looking into all the personal phone records of a bunch of people, including Ted Cruz.
And I guess Boasberg justified looking into the records under what the judge wrote were “reasonable grounds” that the senator might destroy or tamper with evidence in the Biden administration’s investigation of January 6. And Cruz’s response is: “There is precisely zero evidence to conclude that I am likely to destroy or tamper with evidence or to intimidate potential witnesses.” And I’ll give him that. I’ll give him that. Whether you like Ted Cruz or not, there is zero evidence that he would tamper with evidence. It doesn’t seem like he’d be the guy who would ever do a dumb thing like that. So he’s got a good point.
China Factory Activity
According to Reuters, China’s factory activity is down a little bit, which would be a big warning sign. It might be down because they did a little extra before the tariffs, so it might be just an adjustment from a bump. But it doesn’t seem to be affecting other countries, so it’s a China problem.
Russia/Ukraine Missile Tech
Russia apparently used one of their best missiles—must be something new—in Ukraine. They’ve used it a bunch of times before. But using that missile is apparently what led Trump to quit the nuclear treaty that he’d like to get going. So these must be really good missiles if it ruined the nuclear conversation.
And apparently whatever plan Budapest summit with Putin was going to happen with Trump is off now, so they’re not going to do that. But Putin invited journalists into the war zone. He wanted to show them that Russia had encircled—they claimed—but Ukraine says this is not true. But Russia says they’ve encircled a large part of the Ukrainian army. Thousands of people are allegedly encircled, and Putin wants to bring in the press and say, “See for yourself, they’re encircled.” But they say, “No, we’re not encircled.”
Gaza Ceasefire Violations
Israel launched another attack in Eastern Gaza because the ceasefire is having a little trouble holding. Like I said before, of course there will be violations of the ceasefire. Of course there will be. But if they stay low-grade, they can work through it.
Simulation Theory Debunked?
Here’s the dumbest thing I saw on the internet today. University of British Columbia is behind this, writing about it. They believe they have a mathematical proof that debunks the idea that the universe is a simulation. Do you believe that—that somebody has a mathematical proof that we’re not a simulation? No, of course they don’t. They couldn’t possibly. Because the simulation by its design would prevent you from knowing that it was something else. Who would build a simulation in which the people in the simulation could determine that they were not a simulation? It would just ruin the simulation.
So as long as you can program a simulation such that all the people in it would have some point of view and can never be overturned, that’s all you need. So apparently their mathematical proof boils down to this: since the fundamental level of reality is based on non-algorithmic understanding—that would be the reality we think we’re in, non-algorithmic understanding—what they mean is quantum physics.
So they’re saying that the world is not cause and effect, but it’s sort of a quantum world where you don’t know what’s going to happen. So if you don’t know what’s going to happen, you couldn’t really call that an algorithm, right? So therefore there can’t be a computed simulation because what we observe is that we don’t live in a world that acts like it’s computed. It doesn’t act like cause and effect; it acts like random things are happening.
Now, what does that have to do with the simulation? You could build randomness into a simulation. You could build into the simulation that people think they see randomness. You could build into the simulation quantum physics. You could just say, “Act like there’s quantum physics,” and then the simulation would act like it had quantum physics. And then these guys in the simulation would say, “Look, it’s acting like it has quantum physics. So therefore it can’t be a simulation.” Yes, it can. It can be a simulation pretending to be quantum physics. It’s not hard. People, this is easy.
DOGE Unit Drone Program
According to Reuters, the Pentagon’s DOGE unit is going to revamp the military’s drone program. Is that good news? Do you remember it was just yesterday I was telling you that wars run on economics? Because if you have the best economics, you’re going to have the best weapons. And I told you that the economics of drones and anti-drone technology—those two things might be the key to who has dominance in the future. Are you good at making lots of drones, and do you make really good drones? That’s going to be who has power.
So putting DOGE, which are both geniuses and they’re involved in cost—if you put the cost people in charge of the drone program, you’ve nailed it. Because you’ve got to get the economics right so that you could make a billion drones at the cost that your enemy can only make a million. That’s the whole game. So the fact that the military and Elon and Trump apparently understand that you’ve got to get the economics of drones right—you don’t just get the technology, you’ve got to get the economics of it right. That’s how you win. So DOGE doesn’t seem like the obvious people to pick for the drone program. But once you realize that economics and drones are really the same conversation, then it makes all the sense in the world. You put your geniuses where they can understand not just the technology, but also how the economics of it work. So that seems like real good news.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I had to tell you today. I went a little bit short; I’m not working too well today. My left hand and arm are just useless at this point. I don’t have a plan for fixing that. I’m going to just say a few words to my beloved local subscribers, give you a little extra. The rest of you, hope to see you tomorrow. Come back again, please, if you enjoyed it. And even if you didn’t.