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Wait a minute. There you are. It's great to see you. Come on in. Let yourself in and grab a chair. Beverages are in the fridge. Help yourself. And the coffee maker has a fresh pot of coffee. So we're about to have a Saturday podcast while all of the lazy podcasters are sleeping in. Although there's something to be said for that as well. All right, let me make sure I got your comments working. And then. Then we forgot to show that you've been craving. Yeah, craving. You'll be savoring it later, but for now, you're just craving. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's the best time you'll ever have in your whole stinking life. But if you want to take a chance of elevating your experience up to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, well, all you need for that is a cup of mug or a glass of tanker Shelters. Dinah Canteen Jugger flask. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now on the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine. End of the day, the thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip. And it happens. Now. Go. Well, all systems are working well, as tradition recently dictates. Owen Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces event right after this. And you can talk more about the topics I talked about today or probably some other stuff, too. So look for Owen Gregorian on X. All right. Well, this is hard to believe. Really unbelievable. But I said something incorrect yesterday, and so I need to correct it. I was talking about the Tesla app. The Robo Taxi app. It was the number one download, and I mistakenly thought that that app was to turn your own car into a robo taxi, which is coming. That'll be a real thing. But I was corrected that that's probably just the app for calling a Robo taxi. So if you're in one of the cities where they roll it out, you'll have the app. All right. Well, can you believe it? I saw a story in the Daily Caller News. Well, the Daily Caller News foundation and a story about sea levels have not been surging, despite years of climate activists yelling that they would. So the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering published this peer review paper, and as you know, all peer review papers are exactly accurate. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that? When the science is in the direction of something, I want to be true, or it makes me look like I was right about something that I automatically assume it must be some pretty solid science. The best you can do to block your own bias is sort of keep score and say to yourself. It does seem to me that I don't do as much skepticism on the science. That agrees with me. This would be more of that. But apparently I think it is reasonably true that the sea levels have not been rising at a rate that would suggest the climate models were correct. And you know what I say about the climate models, right? Wait till they find out about the climate models. The best kind of predictions to make are the kind that really, really can't be wrong. There's not even the slightest chance that if you went forward enough in time, there's not the slightest chance that the final, let's say, verdict on climate models, there's not a slightest chance that in the future they will say, those climate models, they really nailed it. You all know there's no chance that, right? The only question is how long it takes. So that's why I think it's funny to just keep asking the question and sort of tease it when you find out about those climate models. Well, you've heard the stories about scientists. Engineers could turn WI fi routers into a tracking device that knows where you are and even who you are, I believe. And it can track you in your own home. Well, now they've got some technology that could track heartbeats without you needing to put anything on your body. So your WI fi router, if it were adapted to do it, I guess it would just be software would be able to detect your heartbeat and, and your pulse, I guess. Is that the same thing? And I wondered. It makes you wonder how many other passive health related things could happen. Could you imagine inviting somebody over to your house and they don't know that your WI fi is measuring their heartbeat. Hey Bob, it looks like you got a little arrhythmia going. What? And based on what we've detected from your exhalations, your breath, I'd say a little bit of shmiginosis, which is probably not a thing anyway. So somebody's going to build the world's creepiest house that can detect all of your medical problems as soon as you walk in. Well, Google, I guess, lost some court cases. I've been ordered to pay 425 million because they were indirectly tracking users who disabled their web and app tracking. So I guess the people who thought they were not being tracked by Google because they'd opted out of it, Google just used third party apps that they had kind of connections with to track those same people. So apps like Uber, Instagram and Venmo, somehow they can get information from them and they could just keep tracking people that didn't want to be tracked. So that violation of privacy, it created a lawsuit that cost them $425 million. Although it doesn't look like it was intentional in the sense that it was somebody's plot. It was just, that's what their technology did. It just had a workaround. All right, and then was it. Google also had an earlier case in Texas where they had to pay $1.4 billion for a settlement with to Texas over alleged violations of some state level privacy rules. So that would be, if you're keeping track, about $2 billion that just Google has had to pay for violating privacy rules, which I'm guessing they weren't even aware they were doing. Do you think that it feels like the lawsuits are at a point where you would have to be the size of Google just to survive all the lawsuits?
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This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.
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Speaking of lawsuits, Apple is being sued by authors. You've heard this story before, but not about Apple yet over the use of books in their AI training. Newsmax is writing about this. So apparently this is another one of those situations where authors like me, although it's the first time finding out about it, seem to have banded together for some kind of lawsuit over the use of their material to train the AI. And Microsoft had that problem and Anthropic had that problem. So this whole business of whose intellectual property is getting mined for AI is getting bigger. So yet again, this is another industry that if it were not already gigantic, it wouldn't be able to withstand all the lawsuits. I mean there will just be non stop lawsuits against every AI company, not just for this, but for. I think I already mentioned that sometimes the AIs have encouraged people to harm themselves, especially minors. And so those are lawsuits too. So you would have to be enormously rich or well funded to just survive all the legal challenges. I mean, think about Uber. When Uber started, if it had not become somewhat, you know, immediately Gigantic in terms of funding and value. They would have survived all the legal challenges, I think. So that's the biggest challenge to any really successful startup is the legal stuff. Look at all of Tesla's lawsuits. It's just nothing but lawsuits. I mentioned to you before that when I was in the restaurant business, I owned a couple of small restaurants that they became just lawsuit activities. It was just, just one damn thing after another. And it was all over bs, you know, it was not over anything that you think anybody should have had to sue about anything. But there they were. All right, so. So OpenAI apparently released some new paper about why these large language models, the AIs hallucinate and the thinking. The new insight here is that the reason that the AI hallucinates is because it's trained to be rewarded for guessing. So much like if you were taking a test in, let's say school and it was multiple choice and there was no penalty for guessing wrong per se, it's just, it wasn't right. You would guess on every one, you wouldn't leave it blank. You would be rewarded for guessing. And so in some analogous way, it seems that the large language models are rewarded in whatever reward means for AI for guessing. So if they could teach it to know, not to guess, and instead admit that it doesn't know the answer, they could cut down the hallucinating, they think. So we'll see. I saw a post by Rohan Paul about that. And OpenAI apparently is going to start working with Broadcom to make its own AI chips. Don't you wonder like I do, why is it that chip making is so uniquely difficult to compete with? Why is it that there's for some reason something in Taiwan that we can't do? Because there's nothing else like that, is there? Is that that we don't have the know how, or is it that we maybe there's some kind of patents involved, where somebody owns a patent and there's just no way you could make a chip the way they do it legally. I don't really understand why the United States. You know, even if you make an argument about the US being in decline, which I don't think it is, why can't we make chips as easily as some other countries or Taiwan in particular? I don't know. So it feels like maybe there would be something like this is my guess that it will seem like the US is behind in chip making until very suddenly it isn't. I think that's what's going to happen. I feel like the US is Just going to snatch that dominance back. Well, here's the weirdest news story, and I feel like this one might be fake news or lacking some context. So one of my many public services is I try to help you recognize when the news doesn't look like it could be possibly true. This is one of those stories. So according to multiple sources, Speaker Mike Johnson says that Trump was an FBI informant in the Epstein case. Quote, he was an FBI informant to try to take the. Take this stuff down. And apparently House Speaker Mike Johnson said that on Friday. So yesterday he was speaking to reporters at the Capitol. So he wasn't. It wasn't like he was overheard or he said something accidentally. He said it very intentionally. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down. So that was in service of, you know, saying that Trump knows that the Epstein crimes are not a hoax. He's just saying that the way the topic is being treated, it was a hoax, I guess. So here's the part I don't believe we've already heard from. Was it the do There was some lawyer who was explaining when he was originally looking into Epstein that Trump was the only person who said, you just called him and gave him all the time he wanted to say, what was the deal with Epstein? Now, do you think that got conflated with an FBI informant who had some kind of formal arrangement to take down Epstein and that we're just finding out about this now, and that there was apparently no reason we wouldn't know about it because Mike Johnson just sort of casually said it like it was no big deal. But if it was no big deal, why would we just be finding out about it now? Does any of that track how many of you think this story is complete and it's just what you thought it was, that he was literally a secret, that Trump was literally a secret FBI informant on Epstein and that we didn't find out about it until yesterday. Does that really. So here I have to give it the really test, where all you do is you say really in a sarcastic way and see if it fits. So he was an FBI informant the whole time. Really? Really? Really? Yeah. See what I mean? The really test is kind of a useful one, this one. So, I mean, maybe it's exactly true, but doesn't feel like it. Well, Newsmax is telling us that the Republicans are looking at. The gop is looking at Kansas and Nebraska as states that they might want to go into redistricting, which would give the. The Republicans more seats in the House. Now, I'm kind of loving the fact that even though maybe it's not technically true, it sort of looks like Gavin Newsom was lured into starting a redistricting fight, you know, where there was more mutually assured destruction, except that it wasn't mutually assured. So Newsom needs to learn the difference between destruction, in this case, self destruction of Democrats and mutually assured. Because I think that when, when Newsom said, well, well, I'll say in my raspy voice, if you're going to redistrict in Texas, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to redistrict here, right here in California. Now, he probably would say that with more jazz hands, sort of like that. But I don't think he realized that if he reciprocated that it would cause. Who caused Republicans, like, empty the quiver and just shoot every arrow that they had at the same time and say, well, well, you know, we, we would have stopped with Texas. You know, honestly, we weren't really even thinking about those other states. We would have stopped with Texas. But if you want to go, if you want to go full quiver, we'll give you all our arrows. Sure, why not? So that may not be, like I said, what I just described as more of a narrative, not exactly an objective picture of truth, but that's what it looks like. It's a funny narrative. Well, for my other favorite funny story of the day, these are good Saturday stories. Not too serious. Well, it's very serious for this one person. So, you know, Kilmara Brago Garcia, he's a gentleman who got deported. El Salvador. I hope I'm not mixing up my, my stories. I think that's the guy. And then, you know, the lawyers and everybody said, no, he's. That's. He can't go back there. That's the one place he can't go back to. And then, then they couldn't figure out where to deport him to because it was okay to deport him. But they, you know, it would depend where he got deported. And then I guess he gave them a list, gave the government list of over 20 countries that he thought he didn't want to be deported to because they would torture him. He thought there. He actually thought that there were more than 20 countries who had it in for him so badly that they wouldn't just jail him, they would torture him. So even I don't know who it was. Whatever government entity, ICE or border Patrol or somebody, they sort of mocked him in writing. But then they came up. So then they came up with this great solution since he was afraid of these 20 countries torturing him, that they would send him to a country called, it's in Africa. It's called Eswatini. And of course you've all heard of Eswatini. It's a really, really small African country. I guess it's mostly surrounded by South Africa, but it used to be called Swaziland. So I've heard of Swaziland, but it's a tiny, tiny little country in Africa. So I guess, I guess the joke here is, you know, half of the time when I analyze what the Trump administration does or what Republicans do, you have to almost analyze it like a prank, like somebody with a sense of humor came up with this. All right, so we got these 20 countries you don't want to go to. Have you ever considered Eswatini? I'm sure the lifestyle there is just terrific. You love it. You love their prisons.
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C mintmobile.com well, there's some more, believe it or not, more updates in the Biden auto patent story and the clemency and pardons situation. And I guess there's more documents that have been made available. Just the news is reporting on it. Stephen Richards and John Solomon and let's see what else we know. So Biden aids, this is what we've learned. Biden AIDS believed he should sign pardons by hand. I guess that was a tradition and something they decided. But he's, and he seems to have outsourced approvals to Vice President Harris. But I don't think there's any documents to say she really did anything, just in general. And there's no evidence that Biden himself ever attended a meeting on any of these clemency decisions. So anyway, there's some more evidence that maybe was not a real appropriate chain of approvals. So we'll see. The latest jobs report is a little soft and disappointing. Not hugely, but definitely going in the wrong direction. Only added 22,000 jobs and that was 53,000 lower than I expected. And so unemployment also ticked up to 4.3, which is not terrible, 4.3, but you don't want to see it working, you know, moving in the wrong direction. Well, as you know, yesterday Trump announced that the Department of Defense would in fact be renamed the Department of War. He says that it's really about winning. Yeah, we should have won every war. We could have won every war. But we really chose to be very politically correct or wokey. I like that he's trying to popularize the word wokie. Yeah, or wokie. So I saw a report that there's a backstory to why Department of War came back and that Lucky Palmer might have been the main influencer on that. He would be the Enduril founder, a defense contractor. So anyway, that's interesting. So apparently a Hyundai factory in Georgia was raided by the Department of Homeland Security for their non citizen workers. They're illegal workers. And 450 people were arrested, which I believe was close to their entire employee base. So imagine if you will, that Hyundai is incentivized to come to the United States with the express purpose of creating jobs in the United States. So they come to the United States and they do in fact create jobs in the United States. At least 450 of them. And then they staff them all with non US citizens. All of them. Not just some of them, but pretty much all of them. So do I feel sorry for Hyundai that their entire factory will have to grind to a halt because they lost all of their employees? No, no, Hyundai, I think you were maybe adhering to the letter of the law, but not the spirit now. But I will give them this much cover. I'm not positive about this, but I believe that probably during the period when they did the hiring that the only thing they were required to do is check the documents from the actual applicant that says they are or are not a citizen. And there were plenty of people who had fake, you know, fake ID and fake documents. So if all they did was look at the fake documents and not being document experts said, all right, well that's all we've been asked to check. And you've got those documents, probably it's going to be kind of a gray area whether they were even knowingly breaking any law at all. So they might be not in much trouble. The employer, if they followed all the rules as they used to exist. Well, Van Jones on CNN says that tens of thousands of Africans have already died because of Trump administration cutting the funding for some program called pepfar that allegedly had saved millions of victims of HIV in Africa. And I said to myself, number one, do you think that's true? Would that be the way you would say it? Because why is it that the United States has some kind of unique responsibility to Africa? Now, I get how terrible the AIDS epidemic in Africa is, but what is China and Russia doing? What are all the other countries doing? Why is it the United States problem to solve a problem in Africa? What makes that our problem or national interest? Now, as a human, you can certainly empathize and you could want it to be solved, but it's kind of weird that we just sort of assume that if we have the ability to save some life anywhere in the world and we don't do it, that that means that we kill them. It doesn't really mean that we kill them because we can't really save all the other lives and all the other world without destroying ourselves, which would also have a ripple effect and be bad for the rest of the world in our case. So it's a tough one. This is why you don't want to be president, because you make decisions where people could credibly argue, you just killed tens of thousands of people. Well, you just killed tens of thousands of people. And then you have to argue, well, you can't say, I killed somebody by not helping them because the entire world is full of people we didn't help all over the place. And even the country is full of people we didn't help and they died. So I would reject the idea that it is our responsibility. If we could do it and it didn't have some kind of cost that was bigger than the benefit, then I'd feel differently. So. But then I went to Grok and asked if it was true that cutting that funding meant that tens of thousands of people were dying in Africa. And unless I read it wrong, it looked like Groq said that there was no funding cut, that it was considered and then canceled. I don't know if that's a hallucination, but. So it's not clear that that was even canceled. So you could give me a fact check on that. Have you. Have any of you seen the online? See, would you call it a conspiracy theory? I'll let you decide what to call it. But it was the idea that the polio vaccination didn't actually end polio, but instead it was improvements in hygiene. Have you heard that one, by the way? I don't subscribe to that, but it's actually somewhat prominent. I've Seen it quite a bit on social media, so that's out there. But we'll see what happens when the various changes happen with RFK Jr and all the work he's doing and maybe changing of mandates more than anything else, that's probably the main thing that's going to happen. Mandates will change. Well, according to the Daily Mail, there's a new poll, the Daily Mail JL Partners poll, that says that Trump is at his highest approval rating of his presidency. Now they're, they've got him at 55% approval. That would be higher than any other poll that I've seen. So take it with your usual polling, grain of salt. But at the same time, Newsmax is reporting that Zogby poll has him at a solid 46% now. 46%, you know, given our divided country, is actually pretty good. You know, you'd love to see it over 50%, but today's day and age 46, pretty strong, so. And I guess he got a bounce. You know, he took a little dump over the summer after the hundred days was over, but he's sort of bounced back. And I guess John Zogby says that at that level of approval, he is impeachment proof. So even if the Democrats took control of the House, he would be impeachment proof. I think he was impeachment proof anyway, but that helps. Let's see. It's been so long. How have you been? Hello. I'm doing well, Dave. Why are you talking that way? Please say one for a compliment or two for a question. Yeah, this is weird. I think I'm gonna.
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Find a plan@pacificsourcemembersfirst.com Speaking of polls, Erasmus had a poll that said that 53% of likely voters under 40 won a socialist president in 2028. The post, millennials writing about this. Does, does that even sound real? How many of you are, like, shaking your heads right now and saying, wait, did I hear that wrong? 53% of likely voters under 40 want a socialist president, like, right away. Now I do this thing where I try to put myself in other people's shoes and just literally just see if I can imagine it, just to try to see what would be behind that. Now, your first, your first impression is that what's behind it is that they're poorly educated about the risks and rewards. Right? That's your first impression. Well, they must be poorly informed or poorly educated because there's no way that anybody would want a socialist present. But keep in mind that there's a lot of news around the fact that young people don't believe that they can achieve the American dream. So I wind myself backwards in time. I go, what if I were 20 years old and didn't believe there was any path for me to get a house someday or to be married with a family or something? What if I thought there was no real practical way that could ever happen for me? Would I be in favor of capitalism? And I still have to work hard, and I couldn't even find a job, and I can't stay employed long enough to have health care, and the robots are coming to take my job. So I got to say that if I subtract from my assumptions that the American dream, work hard and go to school and stay out of trouble gets you almost anything you want. If I take that out of my assumptions, would I be. And you make me 20 years old, would I be leaning socialist? And maybe would socialists just mean something different to me? Because maybe all it would mean is free health care and free education and free transportation. Suppose that's all I meant. Well, I mean, that's a lot. But if I were young, I could very easily see myself being persuaded into the same camp. So if you think this is some kind of a fleeting thing, that maybe it's just going to be limited to New York City, I don't think so. I think that unless something fundamentally changes where everybody can get what they want, which is sort of the promise of the robot age, but I'm a little bit skeptical that it will go that way very quickly. I don't know. It's going to be a whole lot of people who are going to try to vote other people's money into their pocket because they won't have access to making their own money? You know, it won't even be their fault. What would you do if your only choice was to vote somebody else's money into your pocket because you didn't have the option of just working hard and making your own money, what would you do? So something's got to change. Let's see. Oh, Trump was asked about the new thing in Florida where Florida dropped all mandates for vaccinations in schools. And I'm no medical expert, so I have mixed feelings about it. So I'm more of a wait and see, certainly we'll know maybe in two or three years, maybe much less. Won't we know pretty soon if Florida is, you know, killing a bunch of kids accidentally by creating a situation where they're less likely to get vaccinated? I mean, so it's an experiment which I feel like is worthy because it seems to me there are enough people concerned about the risks of any health risks from the vaccinations themselves if they feel that the science has not been sufficient or that maybe the people who do the science can't be trusted. It's a reasonable parental decision that some people will make to get vaccinated and some will make to not get vaccinated. But we'll at least know. Know if it made a difference. Well, at least no. And the people who do get vaccinated, if the vaccinations work well, they don't have to worry about getting it right. So the only people who have to worry about it are the people who didn't get vaccinated. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but I think that's true. So, you know, they would know what risk they're taking. So I don't know. I like the freedom of it. But until we know if it causes, you know, like massive deaths or something, which I doubt, but we'll know pretty soon, then I don't have to guess. And according to Oregon Health and Science University, there's new evidence. This will make you crazy. That childhood vaccinations can last for decades. So boosters are not necessary for some things. And I think that they mentioned tetanus, Tetanus and diphtheria booster shots. So apparently for years and years, people have been getting these booster shots that the data does not support make any difference at all. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Science and guessing almost identical. Except that guessing is a little bit better. And that's not even a joke. If you flipped a coin, you'd at least get 50%. But science, I believe, is less because there's so many ways it can get distorted beyond chance. All right, there was a new Gates backed study. According to Modernity, John Fleet was writing about it. So Bill Gates backed the study. They found that the seasonal flu shots are linked to. Oh, just shoot me. Are linked to 27% higher heart injury risk. The Lancet reports. So seniors vaccinated for influenza experience more heart injuries, not fewer. So, and how did they get. How do they get the wrong answer? Well, apparently it was a statistical trick with the data. No, really. So the data, the Data had always showed that it was riskier for your heart, but there was a little bit of gamesmanship with the statistics to make it go away. But it doesn't go away in the real world. It's just you can game it away with statistics. And so they did. And that's one of the reasons that. Anyway, according to them. So that's suboptimal. And now According to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, after 40 years, heart doctors say beta blockers may do more harm than good. Do you see the theme, by the way? These are just, these are stories today. What's the rest of the week look like? This is just today. How many stories can there be just today? There's some gigantically major thing in health care was just wrong. All right, so apparently the beta blockers, it looks like it maybe they had been good at some point, but when matched with other modern stuff that generally comes at the same time, they might not match good with that. So that. So it has more to do with how they interact with other treatments. But the bottom line is beta blockers may be a little more risky than you thought. And then there's also a report, I don't know how confirmed it is, probably no more confirmed than anything else. But there's allegations that Tylenol taken during pregnancy might be linked to autism. So there's that. And then Bill Maher had his show last night and you know, on Saturday, we're always talking about the clips that come out of that. You know, I was going to say something mean, but then I withdrew it. But then I might, I'll just say the mean thing at the end. Okay, so Bill Maher has decided that RFK Jr is nutty and that he's got to go. Now, you've seen most of the democrats complaining about RFK Jr. Can anybody give me an example of what he's done on the job? Because that's the part that matters. What has he done on the job that would, that would classify as nutty? Can anybody give me one example? I mean, even. What is the example? I believe the only one that Bill Maher mentioned was that he fired like, you know, massive bunch of people, you know, that were in the vaccination decision making capacity. To which I say, don't you think there's a little context missing to that? Do you think he just fired them because they liked vaccinations? Or do you think he fired them because they were actively trying to stop him from gathering more information about vaccinations? Or do you think they may have had some ties to the pharma companies they were trying to regulate, if that's the right word. Do you think there might have been some backstory as to why they got fired? Do you think he did it just because he's a madman who wants to ban vaccinations and so he had to get rid of all the pro vaccination people? Like, do you really believe that's what happened? Because that would be nutty. Right? That would be nutty. If the only reason he did it is because he disagreed with him and his opinion was not based on any science, that would be nutty. But why would you believe that's happening? What would bring you to the twisted and unrealistic assumption that the reason he was doing it would be nutty? If you knew it, why would he even think that? It's not like he's got some big track record of doing things that nutty. I mean, he's done things that are fun, you know, in his personal life, but nothing like nothing nutty in this, this class. Nothing like that. So it seems to me that There is an RFK Jr. TDS kind of thing, derangement syndrome. And this is a really good test of how much psychosis can be, let's say, installed by the media. There are probably tens of millions of voters in the US who believe the same narrative, that RFK Jr is a wacko, nutty, anti science guy. But not one of them could give you an example that would be compelling, that would make that case not one of them. Now here I'm going to limit it to, you know, the work he's actually doing in the actual job. Right? Nobody has any examples. And when they, when you hear one, you say to yourself, sounds like you just got that story wrong. So sometimes they'll say stuff like, yeah, he's making vaccinations unavailable. And then you'll find out really it's about mandates. So, like, they don't even have the right story. So how could so many tens of millions believe that he's a nut job? And the only reason is because the media and social media have told that story. And that's all it takes. So if you wondered how powerful is hypnosis? Well, if you extend the definition of hypnosis to include any repetition of a lie, you can see for yourself. Tens of millions of people have been convinced that RFK Jr is nutty when the truth is they've simply been hypnotized. That's it. They've just been hypnotized and they're not aware of it. So. And then Bill Maher also is worried that Trump militarizing the cities by putting the National Guard in some of the big cities is a prelude to creating his own sort of dictator, you know, personal police for his eventual potential stealing of democracy and taking over the country. Now, does that sound saying to you, does Bill Maher sound sane when he says that sending the National Guard into what, what would be the highest number at the same time? 2. Do you think he can bite off more than two cities at the same time? I mean, I think even Washington, D.C. will wind down before Chicago might wind up. And he's worried that that will militarize our cities and give him a chance to take over. Let me ask you this. What kind of dictator is pro gun? Is that a thing? Can anybody think of any dictator, authoritarian? Who is pro gun? Has that ever existed? And how exactly does militarizing the cities. But let's just call that sending in the National Guard. How in the world do you evolve that into some kind of like secret police without the public being so all over it and dismantling it that it couldn't possibly, like, even if he wanted to. How would that plan work? It's sort of like believing, which Bill Maher also believes, that the January 6ers were doing a legitimate plan to take over the country by trespassing in one building. How do you take over a country by trespassing in a building? Even if some of them were violent, which they were, how does that take over a country? In what twisted nightmare does any of that result in taking over a country? It obviously wasn't intended to do that because that would be insane. It would be insane. So, yes, what looks to us like mental illness in Bill Maher is almost certainly susceptibility to brainwashing by the media. In this case, more the media than the social media. It affects anybody. So he's a very high iq, high functioning, well informed guy. Doesn't make any difference. The brainwashing is just exactly effective on some number of people, regardless of what you would imagine would be their ability to defend against it. But that's not a thing people can't defend against it. Senator Tammy Duckworth. What's a Duckworth? Okay. She said that Trump's use of the military against the drug smuggling narco terrorists is setting the conditions for occupying US Cities to interfere in the next election. Now, come on, is she even serious? I mean, what even. What is that? Is that insanity or is that being hypnotized? This doesn't feel like being hypnotized. This feels like somebody who knows she's lying and knows that the lie will work. Just. I mean, I don't know that because I can't read her mind, but that's what it looks like. It feels like she knows she's lying because it's too ridiculous. Yeah, but I suppose cognitive dissonance would get you to the same place. So you can't be sure on this one. And then of course, the, the Hitler analogies live on, I guess a CNN person ran a Furuhar says that the fact that businesses are refusing to speak out against Trump and his administration is reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Come on. Yeah. Can you believe that there's somebody still in 2025 who believes that going on CNN and comparing Trump to Nazi Germany is somehow additive? Is that additive? If you were the producers of CNN and you heard somebody go on the air and say yet again, yet again, oh, he looked like a Nazi, I think he's going to be a Nazi. When the smartest people in even the Democratic party have said, can you just shut up about the Nazi stuff? It doesn't work. And every minute you spend doing that is a minute you weren't doing something better. Right. So even the Democrats know it's the biggest dumb thing to do at the moment. So do you get invited back if you bring up Nazism? If I were the producers, I wouldn't take you off the list. You wouldn't be a guest after that because it's 2025 people. You're supposed to say oligarch and authoritarianism. Well, here's a story that I don't know how many times I've heard this story over the decades. Interesting engineering has it this time that some Chinese entity has developed a transparent coating for windows that would allow the window to become a solar power generator. Now, is it just me or does this story come out once a year and has for my entire adult life? How many times have you heard of somebody invented a window that will turn sun into energy and it'll be cost effective? I swear, once a year for at least 30 years. So is this one the real one? Nah. No, probably not. I wouldn't bet on it. So Rand Paul did an interview talking about Dr. Fauci and he said that that the private emails show the lab leak theory was at least a 5050 with him. He says that government officials were aware Covid likely leaked from Wuhan lab but destroyed anyone who said so publicly. So he goes, rand Paul says it's an extraordinary thing where in private, they know that from the documents, that they were very open to the fact, leaning towards and in favor of the fact that the virus came from the lab. In public, they were disdainful. Is there a reason why that matters so much? There's something about the story that I'm missing. I get that Fauci shouldn't have been lying, and I get that probably would have been better if we knew the right answer. But did it make any difference in the end that we knew where it came from or we didn't know where it came from? As a practical matter, would we have treated China differently? I don't know. So I will acknowledge that Fauci has to answer for that if he was lying to the public. But I'm not aware of how that hurt us. I mean, you wouldn't want it to happen again, Right. But did it hurt us? Just in trust? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm agreeing that we'd have to do something about it. All right. Thomas Massie points out that Congress spends tens of billions of dollars on secret projects that can only be viewed in a secure room. And if you go in a secure room to look at what those secret projects are, they're all described in code words, so you can't tell what they really are. Are you comfortable with the fact that there are tens of billions of dollars on secret projects and that even a member of Congress, who presumably would have the authorization, can't figure out what they are? Well, I'm a little uncomfortable with that. You know, you like to believe that they have the right kind of controls and audits on that kind of stuff, that even though you and I don't know what it is, that doesn't mean the government doesn't have full control over it, and they're monitoring their expenses and making sure that it's operating in the best interest of the public. Right? No. One thing we know for sure is that our government is designed, maybe unintentionally, but it's designed by its design. It's a giant criminal organization because it just invites every criminal scheme that you can possibly do. And the odds of getting away with them look like it's pretty good. If I were going to give a young person career advice and they were afraid of, you know, robots taking all the standard jobs, I'd say, young man or young woman, you should run for office, because politics is where you can steal the most money with the lowest odds of being caught. No, I wouldn't say that. Even though it's true. Well, Trump's going to blacklist some countries for imprisoning Americans. Newsmax is reporting. And so I guess that would. The state sponsors of wrongful detentions would be, you know, punished in a variety of ways. And I thought to myself, how many of those countries are there? Are there a lot of countries that are needlessly imprisoning Americans? I got questions. I guess Venezuela is getting some Iranian missile boats. They're going to go try to threaten some of our naval assets. Maybe we're trying to make us worry about what's happening. I'll tell you one thing that Venezuela would not want to do, which would be sink a major American naval asset, because if they haven't figured it out yet, that would be a very bad thing for them to do. Well, I'm a little late on this story. Maybe some of you heard it, but the, I guess the New York Times reported, and I don't know how they knew it, that There was a SEAL team that penetrated North Korea back in 2019, and they were trying to install some electronic surveillance device, but they failed because there was some fishing boat that kind of encountered them by accident. So they ended up murdering the Fisher Boat People 3 and puncturing their lungs with knives so they would float to the bottom. And then they, you know, canceled the project. So they canceled the mission. Now, the real question is, who told the New York Times? And should the New York Times be writing about that sort of thing? I, I, I feel like that would be, I mean, just, just think about the public good. Isn't this very, very, very bad for the public good that that story was reported? What is the upside of that? Was there someone who would say, no, whatever you do, don't plant any listening devices so we know better idea what's happening in North Korea. And it looks like it was designed as a leak strictly for the purpose of crippling Trump's diplomatic work so that North Korea would be mad at us. It feels like that was the only purpose. So, anyway, and once again, University of Copenhagen says that scientists have figured out how to transform plastic waste into a thing that absorbs CO2 from the air and captures it. And, you know, you always say, when I tell you there's a news story about some new way to capture CO2, what do you always say in the comments? But damn it, Scott, that CO2 makes our plants grow better. We're all going to die if they suck all the CO2 out of there. You fool. You fool. All right, so I did that for you so you don't have to. Well, as I mentioned, Owen Gregorian will be holding a Spaces event immediately or not that immediately, but sort of, sort of after this event is over and this event is coming to an end for all of you except the few people on Locals, my beloved subscribers who I'll be talking to privately. And I would like to point out to you that my book Loser Think is available now on Amazon. It's the only place you can get it. And LoserThink will teach you how not to sound like you're bad at debating and arguing and thinking. It'll tell you what not to do so that the smart people won't say, oh, are you using word thinking or an analogy to make an argument or a lot of other things you learn. All right, Locals coming at you privately in 30 seconds. The rest of you, thanks for joining. Hope I can see you again tomorrow same time, same place.