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Scott Adams
Come on in. Yeah, it's been a while. Come on in and grab a seat. I'll check the stocks for you. The S and P is flat. Tesla is up. Bitcoin is up. All right, well, let me get the comments working, and then we got a show for you. You'll love it. All right, there we go. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. Civilization. It's probably the best time you'll ever have in your life, but if you'd like to take a chance of taking it to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, well, for that, all you need is a copper mug or a glass. A tankard shell. Zesty. And a canteen jugger of flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens. Now go. Excellent. Well, I wonder if there's any science that they wasted their money on. Oh, yeah, here's some. There's a study in Penis. PNAS is the acronym for this publication, and I don't know how you would pronounce that acronym, P, N, A, S, other than P. Penis. So in the prestigious Penis, there's a study that says that if you get enough sleep, you're more likely to be active and to be physically active the next day. Can you believe it? What are the odds? Well, maybe they should have asked me first. Scott, we're thinking about spending a million dollars to do a survey to find out or a study if getting enough sleep helps you be physically active the next day. And I would have said, save your money. Save your money for half of that. I'll give you the answer, yes. Well, according to the City University of London, one in four young adults are living with mental health conditions. One in four. Now, you know how I always make fun of surveys and I always tell you it seems like 25% of the public gets every survey question wrong. You know, if you asked, is it good for people to eat food? 25% would say, well, I don't think so. I don't think you should eat food. So it doesn't matter what the question is. 25% will be on the wrong end of every question. But about one in four young people that have mental health conditions, do you think that's the same people? Because I hope it is. Because if we've got 25% of the public is just stupid and 25% is mentally ill. That's, that's no world I want to live in. But I think I do. I think maybe it's not the same people. Well, I have a confession. I would like to throw myself on the mercy of the court because I know this won't be popular. But lately, because there's not much on TV in the summer and I've been spending a lot of time in front of it because I'm not as active as I used to be, I've started to enjoy women's basketball. I know, I know you can give me all your insults, but when was the last time you actually watched a WNBA game? So there's a couple of things I like about it. Number one, men's basketball has turned into garbage because it's nothing but three point shots and, and then seeing which, which foul the referees want to call. When I'm watching men's basketball, all I feel like the only thing I'm watching is the referees deciding when to call a foul because there's a foul on every play. Multiple players all the time. There's just nothing but non stop fouling. And so watching seven foot guys do free throws, it's just not fun. And it starts looking like every player looks like every other player. You know, not physically, but the way they play. So you turn on wnba and there are two things that they do right that makes me like it. One is that they don't play good defense. You know, relative to what the men do. When the men are playing hard defense, especially like a playoff game, they're just smothering the other side and fouling them every second, there's just no fun to watch. But the women give the other women a little extra space until they get really close to the basket. So there is more scoring and less fouling, it looks like. But the other thing they do right, which is kind of funny, is they have a multicolored basketball. So it's two or three colors. I'm not sure what it is, but it's a colorful basketball as opposed to the men's, which is just one color. And what happens is when the women shoot, especially the three point shots, you can see the rotation of the ball and the rotation of the ball as it's heading toward the basket. Makes me happy because the really good shooters have almost this perfectly designed backwards rotation. So as soon as it leaves their hand, you say to yourself, whoa. It looks like they, you know, had a good handle on that one. So it's actually more fun. So I've Been enjoying it. Will it work for you? Probably not. But that's my confession. The Dalai Lama, as you know, is very old. He's about 90 now, and he's planning to reincarnate because that's what your Dalai Lamas do. But he wants to make one thing clear. It's not up to China who his reincarnation is. So China has already claimed that only they will be the ones to judge who the new Dalai Lama is. Now, the political part of that is that China wants to dominate Tibet, and so they don't want a new Dalai Lama who's too popular or too political, so they want to pick their own. But the Dalai Lama says, no, no, China cannot pick my reincarnation. He wants to say that only his trust can. I don't know what that means. So I guess there's some process where the Tibetans pick their own reincarnation for the Dalai Lama. I don't know, but I want to get in on this. Can I also designate who picks my reincarnation, or is this limited only to the Dalai Lama? Because I kind of like where this is headed. I'd like to put it in my estate plan that there's a committee of five people that we get to decide who my reincarnation is, which, to me, would be hilarious, especially if my reincarnation didn't want the job. Well, looks like you're the new Scott Adams. What? I don't want to be the new Scott Adams. Well, I'm sorry, the Reincarnation Committee has chosen you. You're the new one. I saw a quote by Zubi this morning on X that I like. He said, people who think life is a zero sum game are dangerous to be around. That really sums up a lot, doesn't it? The people who think life is a zero sum game are dangerous to be around. Do you know who thinks that? Socialists. Do you know who else thinks that? The people who chant Death to America. Now, I'm no geopolitical expert, but it seems to me that if you're chanting Death to America, you're not thinking of a win win scenario. All right, well, you'll die, and then we'll do great. So we're both winners. No, no, no. I think you should stay away from people who think life is a zero sum game. Some would say that I got canceled for saying something very similar, but that would be unfair. Well, Jerome Powell was giving a talk at some event, and he was saying that the economy is looking pretty good. Inflation's close to 2%. Core inflation, 2.7, unemployment, 4.2. Not terrible numbers. They're not the best, but they're not bad. The economy is looking good. And then separately, other experts are saying that the stock market is at all time high, I guess, and that can only be because the market has sort of priced in the uncertainty over tariffs. And by priced in, I mean is treating it like it's no price at all, basically. So that's what's happening. And Powell says he expects to see higher inflation over the summer. Why would that be? Is that because he thinks the tariffs will kick in and that'll create some inflation we haven't seen yet? Maybe. Maybe. What does President Trump think about that? Well, he called Jerome Powell a, quote, moron. How would you like to wake up every day and the, and the most important person in the world, the President of the United States, is coming up with brand new insults for you. That must be weird. Anyway, the P. Diddy verdict, we're getting close. Apparently of the multiple counts, there was one that the jury could not decide on and that was the big one, the RICO Racketeering Conspiracy 1. And the judge is apparently going to send it back to try to get a unanimous decision. Now, we assume that the holdouts are probably the ones who don't want to convict, but I don't know that we know that. I think it's just an assumption because it looks like they have a decision on sex trafficking and on the charge of trafficking to engage in prostitution, two counts apiece. And those decisions have been made, which I think we assume means guilty. Right, but we don't know for sure. So Trey Gowdy was explaining on Fox News yesterday that trying to get a RICO conviction is really, really hard because juries don't fully understand all the predicates and the nuance of that law. But it's easier to say, did you transport somebody for sex? You know, it's more of a yes, no situation. So I didn't realize this, but the Diddy defense didn't put on any, any witnesses. Now that presumably means that they were depending on the prosecution not making the case, which sort of looks like, you know, maybe they made the right, the wrong play. But I doubt there were, there were many witnesses that would got to say it was innocent. I don't know. But Diddy's defense was basically that everything was voluntary and, you know, just good fun among adults. I don't think any of you think that's true, but we'll see. I would say the odds are that Denny is going to spend at least 10 years in jail. We'll see. CBS allegedly has settled the lawsuit that Trump had against them for their alleged inappropriate edits of Kamala Harris back in October of last year. And as you know, they edited for conciseness and clarity. That's what CBS would say. And what Trump would say is they made her dumb answer look like it wasn't so dumb, which is interfering with the election. And he sued. Now, I feel like lawyers would say that he never would have prevailed in this lawsuit, except that the entity Paramount is trying to get government approval for a big merger, and that might be on hold. So I don't know if this is a good indication of what the law is or should be or what justice is, But Trump won $16 million, it looks like, assuming that that gets finalized. Now, that's on top of. You might remember ABC News settled with Trump for $15 million that went to the Trump presidential library for their statements that he considered defamatory. And I believe that Paramount has made the same offer that the money will not go to Trump, it will go to his library. So apparently Trump found a way to fund his presidential library, which is suing the fake news that have been the bane of his existence for 10 years. And he's making the fake news pay for his presidential library. Now, on one hand, you might say to yourself, oh, well, they found a clever way to not pay Trump any money. But Trump doesn't really need the money, does he? I mean, not at these amounts, but he definitely needs money for his presidential library. So if he asked me, that's like winning twice. Once is winning the lawsuit, but twice is getting your fake news enemies to pay for your presidential library. That will last forever. Now, that's funny. I mean, that's just good stuff. And you might remember that meta paid reportedly $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over suspending him when they had him suspended on Facebook. I don't think that 25 million went to the presidential library, but it'd be funnier if it did. It's just that Facebook is not exactly the fake news. It's just funnier if the fake news pays for his library. To me, that's just perfect. I've got an observation and maybe you can add to this, but if you notice that the anti Trump press has started to use his branding and his nicknames. So even when CNN or MSNBC talk about the legislation, they also call it the Big Beautiful Bill, although its name has now changed because I think Shuber introduced a name change. So it's not Technically, one big beautiful bill. That's what it was. But is it my imagination, or did Trump get everybody to finally just surrender to his branding ideas and that when he brands something, everybody just uses his nickname and they don't push back too hard anymore? It's like, yeah, all right, it's a big beautiful bill. Likewise, Alligator Alcatraz. Now, that's not one that Trump invented. He just sort of adopted it and boosted it. But it's not my imagination that CNN and MSNBC also call it Alligator Alcatraz. Right. So they've sort of accepted that branding as well. And then, of course, he's calling Zoran Mamdani, the guy running for mayor in New York, Communist. I think so far, mostly just the right is adopting that. And then he, he, he calls Powell too late. Is that what he calls Powell? Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, Too late Powell? I don't think that one's quite stuck yet. But it does feel to me that Trump's branding is so strong that even the, even the news that you think is fake news just sort of accepts it. At this point, MSNBC was looking at some article from playbook publication Playbook, and was wondering if the Alligator Alcatraz play by the Republicans is just a trap to paint Democrats as the open border party. What do you think? Do you think Alligator Alcatraz is by design? So, not accidentally, but is it by design that the Republicans really want the, the critics to argue against deportations, basically, or against strong borders? I don't know that that's intentionally what they're doing, but that's what's happening. But to me, it's more of a trap that they set for themselves. Is it really the Republicans setting the trap? When the Democrats have promoted open borders, they typically don't say they're promoting open borders, but everybody can see it. So I would say it's more likely that the Democrats created their own trap and then fell into their own trap, which is being against border security. Anyway, Joy Reid, predictably, you know, the fired ex host of msnbc, Joy Reid, she says a Trump is constructed, quote, concentration camps to deport brown people. Do you think that'll stick? It might. I could easily imagine other people saying, I told you he was going to form concentration camps for brown people. And there it is. But of course, it's really just a convenience for stuff that we're doing anyway, which is deporting. They're, they're not planning that people will stay there. It's sort of where they go while they're waiting to be deported. So cnn, their host, said that the end of usaid, the program that Doge targeted for elimination and now got rolled into the State Department. So Rubio is keeping some of its functions, but not most of it. But CNN is talking about it as though it will lead to the death of 14 million people. Because 14 million people will die without the USAID funding. Do you believe that? Well, they also had former USAID administrator Samantha Power, who's now fired, and she says that it could kill 12 billion people. So somewhere between 12 and 14 million people will be killed by this Trump policy to decrease USAID funding. What do you think of that? And they claim that one of the entities alone saved 25 million lives and that they will stop selling, that they will no longer be saving 25 million people because of funding. Well, let me put the Dilbert filter on this. So this is a perfect situation that you might see in a Dilbert comic where the staff member or the manager claims that they had saved a bunch of money. And then if something changes, even though it might be made up in hyperbole like, oh, that change means that we'll lose all that money or people will die. Do you think, do you think that the 14 million people was documented so well that we could tell that when the funding got cut that 14 million people start dropping dead within 12 months? Does it seem likely that the people who are tracking that stuff could tell you who is going to die? It doesn't seem super likely to me. But did you know, here's some context for you. Did you know at least the unusual whales is reporting this on x, that the G7 countries, the big industrial countries, the G7, collectively are cutting globally by 28% for the coming year. Now that's according to Axios. So does that seem like the entire world is going to be killing 14 million apiece? So if the US doing its cuts, if the US is going to be responsible for killing 14 million people, but the entire G7 is also massively reducing their global aid, don't they also kill certain number themselves? So would you say it's 14 million times 7? Or maybe they're their funding was not as big, but. So that would very quickly get you to a number like 100 million people are dying because of custom foreign aid. Does that sound even a little bit true to you? Do you believe that five years from now we'll look back and say, oh, 100 million people died because the G7 cut the global aid? It doesn't seem likely to me. But let me give You a little additional context. I went to Grok the AI and I said, how many people in the world are currently starving? As in not enough food, you know, daily. What do you think the answer is? The number of people in the world today who don't have enough food, which would suggest they also don't have enough health care and don't have clean water and all the rest. The answer is 733 million. Did you know that? 733 million. So I would like to add the following horrible thoughts. Are you ready for horrible thoughts? Things you're not supposed to say in public. That's my specialty. All right, here's something you're not supposed to say in public. Happiness depends. Happiness depends on not knowing too much about the people you could have saved if you were willing to make yourself less happy doing it. And there's no way around it. There's no way around it. The only way you can pursue happiness is by consciously ignoring all the people who will die. 14 million of them, maybe 100 million, they will die unless you stop your enjoyment and give them all your extra money. Now, does anybody say that out loud? No. You've got this whole industry of people, you know, which I'm part of, trying to tell people how to be happy in their lives, but they conveniently, conveniently, they all leave out this most important variable. You have to consciously ignore the people who are suffering that you could have helped. You know, even in your small way, you could have helped them, but you didn't. Instead, you decided to live your own life and, you know, make sure your kids have everything they need and all that. So that's the first thing. Are you ready for the even more controversial second thing? Can you handle this? It's going to get worse. All right, here it is. Did you know that if you were to rank the countries by economics, you know, the ones that are making the most money, US and European countries, etc. And then you were to rank them by reproductive success, meaning are you making enough children to replace yourself plus extra. You would find that those are the opposite. You would find that the people who are reproducing at the highest rates are almost entirely the countries that need our aid. Let me say that again. The countries that have the highest fertility rate and are making the most children are the same countries that need our help. And how do we afford helping? Africa and other places? How do we afford that? We afford it by reducing our own reproductive situation. The reason that Americans and Europeans can afford to buy food is because they don't have 10 kids. If, if we all had 10 kids, how much money could we give to other countries for foreign aid? None. None. So it's not a question of we have everything we want, so we'll give a little extra to the countries that need it because they're suffering. We are literally deciding to, to have fewer children so that we can afford to pay the people who are having more children. We're literally funding our own future destructions. About that. Do you ever think of it that way? We always look at the money or we track the number of people who are starving or the number of people who maybe were saved. But shouldn't we be tracking reproduction? Because the countries that are reproducing the most are winning. That's winning. If you have the most children and your, your country, no matter how poor, ends up with the most extra people at the end of the year. And, and they convince some soccer country that they could guilt them into paying to not have their own children because you can't afford it, but to pay a lot extra so that other people could have more children. That's a frame, isn't it? Aren't you glad you watched today? Because that's the most provocative thing you'll hear today anywhere that we should be measuring reproductive success. That's the ultimate goal of, of every species, for every species. The ultimate top level goal is the highest level of reproduction. Because if you don't do that, somebody's going to out produce you and eventually conquer you. And you know, so that's where it's heading. So we have to create the fiscal. And it's worse than that. It's not that you're just. It's worse than that. Remember I, I said that the G7 countries would have to give up their own reproductive potential so they had enough money to pay the people who were having tons of babies. It's worse than that. We're not just giving up our current expensing. We're driving up our debt to the point where we're literally destroying our own civilization because we can't pay the debt. So we're not just giving our extra to other countries that have higher reproductive rates. We're guaranteeing the destruction of our entire civilization to help fund other countries have more babies. That's actually happening. Nobody talks about it that way. Right. We always measure some other variables, but those are the big ones. All right, well, the conversation about Medicaid cuts and the big beautiful bill seems to come down to the Democrats are claiming that the cuts will kick off. Kick people off of the program so they won't have medical coverage, whereas the Republicans are saying no, it's only tightening the requirements. It's getting people who should not be having it off their, you know, undocumented people and getting the lazy people who should be working a job off the couch so that they could qualify for it. I don't know that either of those is exactly the right frame because there's probably something in between. But I'll tell you what you can't do. You cannot forever increase programs where you're transferring money from one group to another. So will it be a giant hardship for some people who are getting Medicaid and now they won't? Probably it will be a giant hardship. But again, is that your problem? Why is it my problem? Why do I have to pay for people I don't know and who are not working or not citizens? Why do I have to pay for them? So I would love them to do well, but is it my job? Is it my job to take care of the people who can't get off the couch or here illegally? I don't know. I'd say no. I'd say that's not my job. And I don't feel guilty about that. Well, cnn, as biased as they might be, I feel like they are moving toward the middle. You know, that that was their ambition. At least the management's ambition was to try to move toward the middle. And I'm seeing small signals, maybe bigger, bigger than small, that they're actually trying to do that. For example, CNN had Jamie Raskin on, I think it was Casey Hunt was the host, and he was complaining about all the bad things in the big beautiful bill. So Raskin is their designated liar. He's the one they bring on the Democrats. He's a Democrat that will say the thing that would just be too embarrassing for regular people to say. He would just sell any ridiculous lie in public. He's one of several people that they use for that. So after he'd been maligning the big beautiful bill, Casey Hunt said, is there anything, is there anything in this bill that you would support? And he's like, oh, you know, changes the subject. And then she gives him a specific. She goes, what about no tax on tips? Now, suppose you're the prominent designated liar for the Democrats and CNN asks you if you are okay with not taxing tips. What exactly is a Democrat supposed to say since the, you know, their big complaints about the Democrats is that they stopped supporting the working people. Well, the people who work for Tips are the working people. It's exactly the people that they haven't been serving and it's the reason for their demise. And so what did Jamie Raskin say? Did he support the no taxes and tips? And he said, I'm doing a long pause because he did a long pause. I don't know. I haven't looked at it. I haven't looked at it. I just told you what it is. It's no tax on tips. What part of that do you not understand? I haven't looked at it. Now that was a weak ass answer. But it's not about Jamie Raskin who can be dependent on to lie about every topic. That's just sort of what he does. But do you think CNN would have asked that question during Trump's first term? Because it was a really good question. The good question was it's got 25 topics in it or more the bill. Is there anything you think is reasonable that is a darn good middle of the road serves the viewers kind of question. So that's my first example where it looked like CNN was trying to find, you know, this middle, unbiased reporting place. But we also talked the other day about burkanish on CNN who, you know, somewhat, I guess many of you would have been surprised by it, but I wasn't. They gave a fairly uncritical, objective analysis of Trump having an amazing few weeks. And he didn't, he didn't try to say, but you know, he's also Hitler. He just said that Trump had an amazing, successful two weeks. Would you have seen that during his first term? You know, you could argue he didn't have two weeks like that. But I don't know, maybe from Sperkonish. And then Harry Ensign, their data guy, the guy who talks about the latest polling. He, I won't say he's pro Trump, but when the numbers go pro Trump, which by the way, they did recently, he reports it enthusiastically. So he doesn't say, well, for a Hitler, we don't know why he's so popular. He just uncritically tells you that the polling looks really good. So he was, Harry Anton was just talking about how Trump, according to the latest survey, is the most beloved, the most loved Republican president in all of history and he beat Ronald Reagan. Let me say that again. CNN Harry Enton reported enthusiastically that Trump is the most loved Republican president in history. Now, obviously mostly loved by Republicans, but still he beat Reagan. And they, they reported that without, again, without saying stuff like, well, I don't know why so many People like Heller, they simply reported that his popularity is through the roof at the moment. And then all of you know that Scott Jennings is getting a lot of airtime on CNN and does an unusually, you know, great job of presenting the other side. So do you remember when Steve Cortez was in that role, I would say in cnn? And then Steve Cortez got sort of pushed out by cnn. Do you know why Steve Cortez got pushed out of cnn? Because he was doing too good of a job. I think he was just a little bit too good. And he was especially attacking him on the fine people hoax, you know, the Charlottesville fine people hoax. So they, they couldn't handle Steve Cortez. But at the moment, Scott Jennings is doing a similarly amazing job, and they seem to be happy with that, at least, you know, from what we can observe. So say then still biased, we assume, but there are a number of bright spots in the show and keep an eye on that. Well, I don't know about your town, but I got a little inside scoop on my town, and apparently the people who live and work around here, who are not documented citizens of this country, have definitely changed their routines. So it used to be that if you were here and you were undocumented, you would just sort of live your life like everyone else. If you wanted to go someplace, you went someplace, you go to work, etc. But I am hearing that the undocumented people are only going out of their house if they have to. So that would include going to work, but they're not spending a lot of time outside the house because the ICE news is really putting a chill on, on the risk. So the one thing I was not really expecting is that Trump has done so well on the border closing and ICE has done so well in promoting what they're doing that the undocumented people are feeling a lot of pressure and they don't want to, you know, be driving a car and run a, run a stop sign because they'd be shipped back to be shipped over to Alligator Alcatraz. So the, the lifestyle of the people who are here, who are not citizens is really compacted. And I would bet that that's the same where you are now. I'm not saying that's good or bad. You can put your own judgment on it. I will tell you that if you don't know anybody in that community, it's a lot easier to be cold and calculated and saying, we're going to ship you back if you do. You probably have had the feeling that Many of us had, at least in California, this is true that we really like them. In many cases, they're just tremendous people, and they're just working hard, trying to improve their life, and you can find a lot to relate. But whether or not they're awesome people, this gets back to my earlier comment. At what point am I morally obligated to transfer my wealth to other people? Because they're awesome and they are awesome. And I do have genuine empathy for the people who are being affected by this. It doesn't look fun. And going back to their home country doesn't look like a bargain. But is it my job to keep all of them alive and, you know, bring more in? I'd say no. So this gets back to, the only way you can live a happy life is by intentionally ignoring the suffering of, you know, a billion other people. A billion. You have to ignore a billion people struggling, otherwise you can't be happy yourself. There's no way to get there. All right, so that may be the same where you live. Orders our Tom Homan. According to the Gateway pundit, he said that the DOJ is looking to AOC because she was employing an illegal alien on her staff, and she was helping undocumented illegal people evade ice. So apparently the accusation or allegation is that she was publicly telling people how to avoid getting picked up by ice, which I believe would be interfering with law enforcement and a crime. And if she knowingly was hiring an illegal alien or employing on her staff, that must be some kind of a crime. I don't know what, but I'll tell you. Democrats might be feeling like it was a mistake to lawfare President Trump for years because if he won, he's going to law fair the out of them in revenge. Now, he doesn't have to say it's revenge. He can just say, no one is above the law, something they introduced. No one's above the law. So I have, again, mixed feelings. In a normal world, I'm not sure the AOC has gone far enough that, you know, putting her in jail would make sense to me. I mean, I get. I get what the problem is. I understand the allegations, but I'm not sure that was, you know, worth too much resource to go after it. But these days, because the Democrats were so lawfare wild against Trump, if Trump's administration decides to go a little bit hard on lawfare against the prominent members, I feel like they brought that on themselves. It feels like, again, it's not a case. As a Republican setting a trap for the Democrats this would be a trap that the Democrats set for themselves. So the way they set it for themselves is by going too far with the lawfare against Trump, which probably helped him get elected, and then it pretty much guaranteed that he wasn't going to be generous when it came to looking at their own legal problems. So was that a trap that the Republicans set? No, that was a trap that the Democrats fully created on their own. And they're getting the somewhat obvious outcome of all that. So we'll see where that goes. I don't think AOC is going to jail. Seems unlikely, but the fact that they're even investigating it, that should scare. All right, so the big beautiful bill was passed by the Senate, but because of our weird lawmaking process, it has to go back to the House, the House which passed the original version. And now they're going to look at the modified, greatly modified version that comes out of the Senate and they have to vote again whether they accept the Senate's modifications. Now, apparently some of those modifications were pretty big and not every member of the House Republicans are going to be for it. They might have to be coerced. But Russ Vogt, who is part of the Trump administration and budgets especially, he says that part of the plan is to explain to people, especially the House, who has to approve the big beautiful bill, to explain the longer term plan to reduce the deficit. So I feel like he's sort of accepting that this one, the big beautiful bill, might not be a deficit fix strategy at all, although there's disagreement about whether it will. I think Scott Besant is saying that it will improve the economy. The big beautiful bill will. It'll goose the economy so much that will make more money in receipts for the IRS than if we didn't do it and therefore it would be reducing the deficit. Do you believe it? Well, I don't think any of us understand what's in that big beautiful bill. So maybe, but I wouldn't bet my life on it. However, if they make the argument, and it sounds like where Rust votes is coming from. But. But I don't want to put words in his mouth, but what it sounds like is that he thinks the best way to sell the big beautiful bill would be to sort of acknowledge that that's not where the big deficit reduction is going to come from, but rather it's just a bunch of stuff Republicans want and, you know, we'd be happy or Republicans would be happy if they got it. So that might be a good approach. But Scott Besant is saying directly that it should make a big difference in reducing the budget or reducing the deficit. So you can pick either one of those and it would give you a reason to be for it. I don't know. I'm not sure I buy any of that, but that would be the argument. Apparently Speaker Johnson says that the House will vote on it maybe Thursday. So they're still rushing to try to get it done by the Fourth of July. But you've got a number of people who are going to be working against it. So Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it's going to bust the budget. And she, she wasn't happy with the bill. And the ogles from Tennessee, he called the Senate bill a dud. That, quote, guts key Trump revisions. I don't know which ones he was referring to. Chip Roy of Texas, he's not happy about the bill's treatment of clean energy tax credits. He would like that to be more aggressive. He says it's a deal killer. If they don't do that, then revolution. Representative Ralph Norman he said they should send it back to the Senate and leave town. Representative Valadao, California said in a social media post, I've been clear from the start that I will not support a final reconciliation bill that makes harmful cuts to Medicaid. So there are at least six Republican nos at this point. But here's what's interesting. According to me, why would any Republican vote for the bill, either in the Senate or the House? Because it feels like everybody's a little bit unhappy with it. They have different reasons, but everybody's got their little complaint. I would argue that at this point, the Congress is doing nothing but trying to avoid being targeted by Trump. So if you think that any of these votes on the big, beautiful bill are going to be based on the details of what's in the big, beautiful bill, it's not. We are in a world where that thing we call our Democratic Republic, you know, whatever our system of government is, it's entirely broken. And right now, the Republicans in the House and the Senate are simply just trying to keep their jobs by not pissing off Trump. They are not voting on what would be good for the people. They're not. It's not. It's just not even a variable. They are not involved in what's good for the country. They are only involved in trying to avoid Trump's wrath because he says he's going to go after him. But interestingly, since Musk has targeted the people who vote for it and Trump has targeted the people who are going to vote against it, you have this weird situation where the Republicans have created a trap for themselves. The trap for themselves is that if they vote for it, Musk will try to take them out through funding a primary challenge. If they vote against it, Trump will try to take them out. So they have two ways to lose and no way to win. And who created that situation? It wasn't the Democrats. There was not one Democrat involved in that. But the Republicans have created a trap that they can't get out of. There's. There's no way that this works out for the Republicans in Congress. They get. They get to choose which way they destroy themselves, voting for it or voting against it. So what happens? Well, under those situations, if I could predict, I would predict it will get delayed. What would you do if you knew that no matter what you do, it's going to be bad for you? You would look to delay it. So I would not be surprised if instead of it getting approved, although I think there's a high chance it will be improved, approved on Thursday. There's a pretty high chance because going against Trump is certain death. Politically. Going against Musk is probably a real big problem. But they might judge that Musk, that Musk is not as scary as Trump or would not be as effective at taking their jobs, and they might be right about that. So that thing called our Democratic Republic, the system that you think you're in, where you vote for your representatives and then the representatives take your interests and, you know, try to negotiate them with the other elected officials, nothing like that is happening. Instead, we've created the system where they're just saying, who is scarier, Musk or Trump? What the fuck kind of a political system is that? Well, no worse than what we had. I guess one of the big changes in the big beautiful bill would be to instead of being a Joe Biden and forgiving everybody's student debts, the reconciliation bill will make it put more pressure on people to pay back their student debts, basically, but it will eliminate all the ways they can do it and make that a little bit of a tighter process. So that's a big deal, which will obviously cost them some votes with students who have loans. Um, let's see what else happened at the moment. According to the Hill, it's reporting on a NPR PBS News Marist Poll. Republicans are more popular than they've been in a long time. So the Republicans in Congress are up to a.36% of registered voters approve of the job Republicans are doing in Congress, not just Trump. The highest level recorded since they started asking the question in 2011. So even though the big, beautiful bill is not passed, it would appear that Republican voters are liking the effort. Now, like I say, it's a, it's a totally bastardized, sick process, you know, where they're just trying to keep their jobs and deciding if Musk or Trump is more dangerous to their, their profession. But apparently the public is happy that they're fighting it out and that there's a lot of stuff in the bill that Republicans like. But it's not like all politicians are getting more popular because the Democrats are down 12 points in popularity according to the same poll since February, February of 2024. So now they're down to 27%. Think they're doing a good job in Congress, the Democrats. All right, I saw that Tesla stock was up a little bit after it had been drifting down because of Musk and Trump fighting over the big, beautiful bill. And today Musk said on X, quote, so tempting to escalate this. So, so tempting. But I will refrain from now for now. So it could be that because Elon looks like he's going to moderate his reaction to it, that people are saying, oh, it's time to jump back in that Tesla stock. That might be what's happening, but there are a lot of variables there, too. Meanwhile, speaking of Musk, I saw Mario Novel post, who, by the way, you should all be following. If you're not following Mario Nafl on X, you're missing a lot of good independent reporting about the news. He reports that. And I guess the source here was breaking defense, that SpaceX has a contract with Space Force to or with our military to build 480 plus military satellites for a new network that would be just for the military, of just satellites. And it's a gigantic deal. The details are classified. But doesn't it seem to you that the government needs Tesla or the government needs Musk as much as Musk needs the government? It's hard for me to see that all the rhetoric, especially what Trump is using about maybe they should look at cutting his funding and maybe they should look at deporting him. We assume that that's just talk and that as people pointed out to me, Trump didn't start the fight, at least not directly. He's just responding to Musk's provocations. So I'll accept that. I'll accept that it does seem inappropriate, the things that Trump is saying about Musk. I don't like the fact that he even teased about deporting him. I don't think you should even tease about that. But it is true that Trump didn't start it and that he hits back as hard as he gets hit. And if you were to say that's no harder than Musk was hitting him first, I could see that. So I will grudgingly say that in this one situation, going too far might be predictably just ordinary Trump stuff and doesn't mean much. Well, in other news, the White House says it's close to, well, as a deal with Israel for a 60 day ceasefire with Hamas, but Hamas has not approved it. I don't know what the odds are that Hamas would say yes, and I don't think Hamas wants a temporary ceasefire. I think they only want to say yes to something that would end the fighting entirely. But it might be that the temporary ceasefire is how you start. I'm no expert, but the fact that Israel has a ceasefire plan and the White House likes it, that's not nothing. And it seemed to me that Trump would like to follow up on what looked like the best month that any president ever had by adding a Gaza ceasefire and maybe, maybe eventually a peace deal to that part of the world, because that would unlock the Abraham Accords, it would allow other countries to join, and he could just be rolling up the victories like crazy. So he's already in, I would say, uncontested best president ever territory. Now, obviously Democrats would disagree, but in my opinion, he is now already Trump is in best president of all time. To me, it looks that way. I mean, we haven't seen anything like this in our lifetime. And before that, I wouldn't know. But if he got Gaza too, oh, my goodness. And it kind of makes sense now that that Trump was supporting Netanyahu about his court situation. It could be that this is just Trump being Trump, where if he needs somebody to do something that maybe is not comfortable, such as a ceasefire with Hamas, that he might make sure that they got a win for it. And the win would be that he's backing Netanyahu really hard and saying great things about him. So that might have been necessary to get Israel to say, yeah, we could work on a ceasefire, even if it's not what they wanted to do. But if Trump gets that, I think that, you know, unless something weird happened after that, he would be just unambiguously. History will record him as our most effective, most important president. Probably he's already there. But, man, just imagine adding Gaza to your win list and the timing is right. I mean, they must have war exhaustion on both sides at this point. We'll see. Meanwhile, Iran's president said that they're going to suspend. Iran will suspend their cooperation with the iaea, which is the group that would inspect their domestic nuclear power programs to make sure it wasn't being weaponized. Now, here's my question. If Iran is going to suspend their cooperation with the iaea, are they not signaling that they plan to build a nuclear weapon? Because if they plan to just have nuclear domestic power, it seems like they would sign up for saying, all right, all right, we'll definitely have the IAEA investigate because that's, that would make everybody comfortable. So they're one of two possibilities. When they say they're, you know, not going to cooperate with them, they either have a death wish, because this would kill them all, basically, if they just started rebuilding their nuclear program, the weaponized part. Or is it a negotiating chip? Could it be that Iran is cleverly sort of, in a Trump like way, creating an asset that they will later trade away? So, for example, the asset they've created is that they would not cooperate with the iaea. They just created that asset just by saying they won't do it. Now they have something to trade. So they'll say, all right, all right, if you drop the sanctions, we might change our mind about these inspectors. So could be that they're just crazy, you know, crazy people who want to have a death wish. But it could be just a negotiating chip. We'll see. All right. I have a suggestion about how to minimize Mamdani. Zoran Momdani. As you know, and I often talk about it, the facts don't matter so much as the persuasion when it comes to politics. It's how you feel about something. And when Mamdani says stuff like, I'm going to work on your affordability, the average voter might not look that deep into it to find out that there's any downside to that and say affordability. I like that. Yeah, I would, I wouldn't mind a little affordability. So if you're going to attack him, it would be hard to attack him on policy because voters are not really engaged at the policy level beyond affordability. Sure. So how could you attack somebody who's so good at what he does? He's really good at social media, he's good at interviews, etc. Well, I have a suggestion. He has a creepy smile. One of the things that makes him popular is he always seems smiling. I believe that Trump, especially Trump, could reframe his smile as a sign of being disingenuous and a scam artist. Because the smile to me sometimes looks natural, but I can easily convince myself that it's creepy. So imagine if you will, that Trump started saying the communist with a creepy smile. Do you feel that? The communist with a creepy smile. Because if you're a Democrat and somebody says some stuff that you like to hear. Oh, affordability. I like that. Are you going to feel the same if he gets branded as having a creepy smile? That creepy smile thing, you can feel it, can't you? Yeah, you. Yeah, creepy copy smile. The communist part might not be enough to stop him from taking office. There might be enough. Voters are like, ah, every. The Republicans call everybody a communist, so I'll just ignore that part. But creepy smile, that's a death blow. That's a kill shot. So if it were me and I were running against him, I would say, don't fall for the communist with a creepy smile. He's up to no good. He's not your friend. Because everybody would interpret creepy smile in their own way, which is really good persuasion. You don't want, you don't want to tell them what to think. You just want to guide them into an area that they weren't thinking about, which is that his smile looks disingenuous and there's something off about him. Now I'm just watching the comments to see if that's hitting. Doesn't that feel like they hit you right in the stomach as opposed to talking about policies? You can feel that, can you? The creepy smile, you would never get that out of your head. Creepy communist smile. So that's my suggestion. All right. I would also refer to him as the shirtless guy with the flag at the ICE protests. Do you remember the iconic. A guy who had a mask on so you couldn't see his face, but he was shirtless and he was standing on top of burning cars and he was waving the Palestinian flag. If I were running against him, I might sort of, tongue in cheek, suggest that that was him because the guy's wearing a mask and it looks like a, you know, a skinny young guy just like him. Anyway, so the White House is working on a way to exclude undocumented illegal aliens from the U. S. Census. Stephen Miller is talking about that. Now. The reason to do that and the reason they would want to do an immediate new census would be that if you could exclude the non citizens in California alone, it would, it would remove four House seats because the number of representatives you get depends on the population of your state. So if they reduce the number of people who are counted in terms of your population, which is what a census would do. If they didn't count the undocumented people, then it would force the system to reduce the number of representatives. Now, if they could get away with that, that would be a super clever political move, but I feel like that probably would not work. The one time they tried it, a federal judge blocked it. But now that the Supreme Court has said that federal judges can't block stuff, they might just do another executive order and see what happens. I guess it would probably be class action suits and stuff, but maybe, maybe that lane is open that they, they could get away with that. I'm betting against it. I don't think they'll get away with it because it's a little too close to a constitutional question that might be black and white. So I'm no expert. Meanwhile, the Libs of Tick Tock is telling us that Stanford Medicine is going to end their transgender surgery for minors because of pressure from the Trump administration. So we keep hearing more stories about that. Meanwhile, Chairman Jim Jordan, according to Politico, is asking for documents from Pan and from Brown Universities. And they're, they're probing into seeing if they did price fixing, that the Ivy League schools may be coordinating their tuition so that you can't easily go to the cheaper Ivy League school. So if they find that that's true, that's going to be a lot of pressure on the Ivy League schools. If they were actually colluding to keep their prices high, maybe, I imagine that they wouldn't be asking for documents about it unless they had some whistleblower who said that. Meanwhile, the FBI, according to the Epoch Times, has charged four Californians with the largest ever Covid tax fraud scheme. They allegedly stole $93 million in Covid tax credits. So do you ever wonder where all the money went? Just in general? We have this rich country and then suddenly we've got $37 trillion in debt. And you said to yourself, what? Where did all that money go? Well, my guess is something like, I don't know, half a trillion dollars a year just goes to fraud because we're bad at checking where our money goes. But maybe that'll turn around. In other news, this didn't happen right away, but I just saw it today. Did you know that Trump had authorized the building of a new Air Force jet, which will be the F47, which is funny because he's the 47th president and Boeing won that competition and, and in three years or so they might have a new, a new jet, the F47. Over in China, China has put on a soccer competition with just robots. Now those robots were not very good at playing soccer. So it didn't look like it was the best state of the art robots, but they played soccer. It was compared to a five or six year old child playing soccer. But they did run after the ball and kick it towards the goal and you know, tried to block it if it was coming the wrong way. So there are now AI controlled robots that play soccer poorly, but that'll be better by next year. All right, I'm going to give you a little micro lesson that I know you need because many of you were criticizing me online because you thought you had better information than I did about putting batteries and solar in the network. So I was criticizing Doug Burgum for saying that solar power doesn't work when it's, when it's nighttime. And I said, you know, it just makes you feel, it makes you look stupid if you don't acknowledge that there's batteries in the network. So the solar charges the batteries and then the batteries can run at night. Now people said, Scott, you idiot, you fool. How do you not know that it is uneconomical to put batteries and solar power into the grid? How do you not know that? To which I say, maybe you need a little update on your technology. So that's what I'm going to give you. According to Grok, how many of these solar powered and then battery, you know, matched with batteries, how many of them are currently in the grid? If it's uneconomical, then nobody would do it, Right? Right. Nobody would do it if it's uneconomical. And so many people told me it's just never going to be economical. Well, why are there 1600 of them with 125 in construction around the world? So are you telling me that thousands, thousands of different experts are unaware of what you know, that it would never make sense to build a solar, solar energy and add batteries to it? Why are they doing it if it's uneconomical in every country? It's like all over the place. It's not just one country or anything. And the US has 575 of them across seven major grids. Are you telling me that all of those projects were uneconomical and the people who built them didn't know it? Is that what you believe? Here's what you were trying to tell me. You were trying to tell me. But Scott, the batteries will only last two to four hours and they're only good for Handling peak loads right now. You're getting really mad at me already, right? Because you're sure that I didn't know that? No, I do know that. I do know that the current technology is that it's only going to handle your peak periods. So does that mean you shouldn't build it? No, obviously it works out. Obviously the economics do work. That's why there's so many of them. So given that we're approaching the AI era, well, we're in the AI Era, and knowing that we need every bit of electricity we can do, do you think it's a bad idea to have systems that can only do two to four hours of peak load? No, that's not a bad idea. The thing with energy that you need to know is that more is better. And suppose it's not the most economical way to do it. Still do it. Still do it. We're not in a place in history where the only power that you add to the network is the most economical power. Maybe there was a time when that made sense, but now we're in a place where if you can make any kind of electricity in any way, or you can help help the existing power plants get over a peak period hump. If you can do anything with any technology that allows you to have more electricity than you would have had otherwise, it probably is economical because AI will be such a big money maker that they're going to spend a lot of money to make sure they have power. Now, some of you said, but, Scott, what about the recycling of the batteries? Well, that's changing quickly. The ability to recycle batteries, the big batteries that are in the network, that's, you know, there are companies that are working on that now. What about the necessity of rare earth minerals to make batteries? Some people said, scott, you fool, that would make us do all this illegal, you know, this, this mining that's bad for the environment and we don't have enough of the rare earth. To which I say, this is the reason that I read to you almost every day that there's a new laboratory breakthrough in batteries. And many of them are about not needing those critical minerals or materials. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening in the development of batteries that would make them easier to recycle, last longer and be cheaper. And remember, if you're putting them in the network, they don't have to be lightweight. So it doesn't have to be really light like it would in a car. They could be, you know, 10 times bigger than you think. They ought to be, because it's just going to be sitting in the network somewhere. So here's the next thing that my critics got wrong. If it's true that the only thing that you'd be happy with is 16 hours of battery storage, we will have that probably in 10 years. So that I think Elon Musk was talking about that Musk was talking about building a gigafactory for solar in the United States. And one of the commenters said, wait, what if you combined an AI data center that needs all this power with a solar powered battery kind of network? And he winked, which suggests that that was on point and that he's looking to use gigantic solar with batteries networks to partially power the data centers. So he might be looking to build that gigafactory right now. So why would he do that if it's not economical, according to my critics? Do you think that Elon Musk is not aware of the economics of solar or batteries? Do you think you know more about batteries and solar than Elon Musk does? I'm pretty sure that he's going to be leaping into that business and playing the long game. So in, in somewhere in the2030s, it looks like batteries probably will be good enough that they could last for 16 hours and cheap enough so it makes sense to use them and easy enough to recycle and easy enough to get the rare earth minerals because it wouldn't use many rare earth minerals. So my critics also said, Scott, you fool, you know, even if you think that this could work, solar is solar is not as good an idea as nuclear, that nuclear would have better economics and produce, you know, more consistent baseload doesn't have a nighttime problem. So solar. So nuclear is the way to go, right? But do you see the inconsistency of comparing nuclear to solar? Let me tell you, it's a timing thing. If I said to you, start building your nuclear power plant today, how long do you think it would take you to get it done? If you were to use existing technology to build a nuclear power plant, would it take 20 years and cost $30 billion? I don't know how long it would take. Do you know why nuclear is, is so has such a high potential? It's not because of the things we already know how to do. It's because there's a lot of work happening in developing nuclear so that it's a whole different engineering situation. And you could make them, you know, you can make them easier, cheaper and safer. So if you're going to allow that nuclear is the future, but you couldn't do it today. You, you kind of have to, you know, you're going to have to test a number of startups, basically startups who are trying to build nuclear power plants in the best way. And it's going to be 10 years, it's going to be 10 years before you see a bunch of nuclear power coming online. It's just going to take that long. So if you're going to say that nuclear is the future, but not what we have now, but rather what we can develop fairly quickly next few years, then you should use the same analysis for batteries. What we could do right now with batteries, not ideal. You know, you get two to four hours of peak coverage in your network. Not too impressive. But if we keep hammering at it and keep developing it and make sure that the market exists, what do you think batteries are going to look like in 10 years? So that's my micro lesson on batteries. I hope that helped. All right. And Russia took full control of the Luhansk region in Ukraine. Newsmax World is reporting. Which tells you why Putin is willing to keep fighting because he's nibbling more and more of Ukraine. So why would Putin wanna want peace when he's still gaining territory? So that one's gonna be a tough one. Blaze Media says that Cash Patel is his. FBI is arresting a bunch of Chinese spies that have been targeting US Military people, trying to convert them to spies. How many spies do we have in this country? I don't know. And then a new study says that senior citizens are going to marijuana in record numbers. The use of cannabis by older adults has quadrupled. And then there's a new study that says if you use a lot of cannabis, it will be bad for your memory, but if you use a low dose, it might even improve your memory if you're a middle aged human. Do I believe that? No, not really, but sounds good. All right, that's all I got for today. Sorry I ran long. I will talk to you all tomorrow, same time, same place. If you're a local, beloved subscriber, stay around because I'm going to go private with locals right now for a very short moment. The rest of you, thanks for joining, see you tomorrow.