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Come on in. It's about time. We're gonna have a good time today. Promise you. We got news. We got. Well, we got. All kinds of things happen. If I can get my comments working, and I know I can, The Pumpo. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization and Scholar coffee with Scott Adams. And you've never had a better time. But if you'd like to take a chance on elevating your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cover mug or a glass of tank or Chelsea in a canteen jugger 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 day of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens. Now go. Delightful. Delightful. Why is my computer not giving me what I want? Oh, it will. It will. So, as tradition dictates, I've been giving you each other one reframe a day at the beginning of the show from my book, reframe your brain, the highest rated book I've ever written, Changing people's lives like crazy. All right, let's find a new reframe. Remember, not all of these will change every person's life, but some of these you will find very helpful to help other people, if not yourself. All right, here's one. This is what I use a lot. Now, this won't. This will not work for everybody. But do you have in your life a lot of repetitive, boring chores, such as folding laundry? You know, it's like a boring, repetitive chore. What I find is that if I reframe my boring, repetitive choreography as a thing, I can learn to do so gracefully and efficiently that it feels like play. So I think I've given you some of your demonstrations before of folding bath towels. If you're just folding the towels because you want them folded, it's just boring. But if you say, how. How efficiently and impressively can I fold a towel? You know, you. You hold it, you throw it up in the air, you catch it just right, you let it fold over itself, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And then you slap it down and it's perfect. You can't tell me you wouldn't enjoy that. So if it's a boring task, but it's physical, try to. Try to see how impressively you can do it for yourself. Nobody else has to see it, but you'll find it's fun. I used to go to this restaurant called Piatti in Danville near me. And for several years they had a busser, the guy who buses the dishes away, who was like a wizard. He would take, he would take all the plates. Somehow he would hold all the plates and everything for the table and he would just sort of set them down in the middle of the table. And then he would. And the table would be perfectly set and everybody would stop to watch because it was like, what, what did I just say? So he took the most boring job picking up. And he did the same when he picked up the plates. So there'd be an entire table that's just full of dirty plates and he'd be like. And he would have this gigantic pile of plates that nobody should ever try to carry, but he could do it. So. So he put on a whole floor show. Kind of a boring task. You can do that too. There's a study Sipos Karina Perchova is writing about says that brainwave analysis shows that listening to music can restore your energy if you've done a fatiguing process. How many of you didn't know that if you stop doing something that's making you tired and instead you just sit there quietly and listen to music that you like, that it will make you feel more energetic? Didn't you, didn't you all know that? Every one of you? Well, you could have asked me, but apparently there's more to it than just the fact that resting when you're tired is a good idea. Apparently they say the brain waves are doing something more dramatic to your brain so that it's actually better than just resting without music. So they say there's a zero hedge, which you need to know, sells creatine as part of their business model. They've got a new information on some studies about creatine to say it's not just for helping you in the gym, which it does very well, helping you build muscles. But apparently creatine has all these other benefits that they're finding out. Again, this is based on, you know, new studies that are probably, probably unreliable. But allegedly it helps you with lean tissue strength even without exercise. So it prevents you from losing muscle at least as fast as you would and also helps your cognition and memory, they say, and may even push off early stage Alzheimer's and it might help with sleep deprived college students. So don't take any medical advice from me. That's the only medical advice you should take from me is that. Don't take medical advice from me. But the people who sell this creatine and therefore can't be trusted. And the fact that it's on scientific studies that at least half the time are fake. So you can't really trust this. But it's good to note that there are several studies that show it's safe and maybe, maybe useful. Speaking of things like that, did you know there are about a thousand ketamine treatment centers where they use the ketamine to treat you for other problems such as depression, mental problems? I don't. This is another one that I don't recommend. Ketamine is some dangerous stuff, is my understanding. So if you had a, you know, severe medical problem and you're working with real doctors and or real professionals who can keep you safe when you're doing the ketamine treatment, I don't know if that's a good idea or bad idea. I know I wouldn't do it alone. So. So if you know somebody who's got like a little batch of ketamine and you think, ooh, I don't want to, don't want to go to one of those centers, but maybe I'll try it. Don't recommend it. I don't recommend it. I think that'd be kind of dangerous. But I don't have any bad feelings about ketamine treatment if it's done by professionals. So maybe that's the thing. There's lots of reports that it works. And now, because this issue never will go away, this is also. Karina Petrova and Cypost scientists have used brain scans to find out that people who had Covid have different brains. Meaning that the COVID did some kind of a long term change in your brain and your. Your brain chemistry? I guess. So how do they know that it was the COVID that made their brains different and not the shot that almost every one of them probably took for the COVID Well, doesn't say so if they don't mention that, that they've controlled for the people who got the shots. Do you really know that the COVID is what caused the brain difference? I don't think you do. Now it might be. If I read the, you know, the source article, it would tell me if they looked at the shots and somehow separated that out in their study. But I don't know. But here's the weirdest part about it. They also discovered that your brain has a correcting mechanism such that if you get that, that brain problem, that your brain will actually correct it over time. And what it made me wonder is, is it possible that Covid can make you smarter and make you evolve to a smarter thing. So here's the thinking. If you were exercising a regular muscle, the way you would do it would be to break the muscle and then when it recovered, it would recover as a stronger muscle. Right. So for muscles, breaking them down is what makes them stronger. But what about your brain? Same thing. If you, if you stress your brain by making it work harder to think and you do harder thinking tasks, the brain physically changes to become a better brain. What if, and I'm just playing around now, I don't think this is true. Just playing. What if the COVID infection damaged your brain, but because it's a specific kind of damage that the brain apparently can self correct. Is it possible that it made you smarter when it was done the way. The way any muscle or any other mental process would. Would it be the only mental process that corrected itself, but it corrected it right to exactly where it was instead of a little bit better or a little bit worse? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe Covid is how we, how we evolve to the next level. So keep it, keep an eye out to see if the people who got coveted got smarter. I'm just joking. I don't think the people who got Covid got smarter, but it's funny to think that it might be true. Well, Trump has suggested that buying Argentine beef might be a good way to lower our beef costs. I guess the American beef is way overpriced at the moment for a variety of reasons, supply and demand mostly. But I guess Argentina has some beef that we could get for cheaper. And Trump has said maybe, yes, maybe that is a way. So I like the fact that he's open to it and it would be good for our ally and it might be good for us in the short run. I have a confession. After about 30 years of being a vegetarian and then a pescatarian, I was sitting around yesterday and I said to myself, you know what I mean? I think I'm going to try to eat a steak after 30 years of not having, you know, any kind of mammal in my mouth. Well, shut up. So I doordashed a rib eye steak. And now keep in mind, 30 years of not having any kind of steak. I haven't had a hamburger or anything in my mouth. And I think 30 years, I, I haven't done the math, but I think it's like 30 years. And you're wondering how it went. It's pretty good. It was a pain in the ass to cut it because I don't like to work that hard for my food. But Delicious, Delicious might do it again. I'm in the nothing to lose category, so it's not like there's a downside. According to Engineering, Chemical and Engineering News, one in five chemists have deliberately put errors in their papers during peer review. Why would a chemist intentionally put an error in their scientific paper right when they're going to send it to peer review? Does anybody know why? Why would you do that? When I first read the title, I was like, what? Why would you intentionally put an error in the thing that you're going to send to somebody to look to see if there's an error and then it will be rejected. And the whole point is to not be rejected. The answer is if the chemist knows that the person reviewing it had an error in their work, the only way they can match it is put the error in their own work. So if they know the peer reviewer is wrong about something, they'll put that same error in their paper so they'll be approved by the person who was also wrong about that thing. One in five chemists have done that at least once. So how's that a settled science feeling now? All settled. OpenAI is now previewing what they call agent mode. So I guess OpenAI can now take control of your cursor and your keyboard and it can complete some tasks so it can book some tickets for you or do some research. How many of you would trust an AI to do tasks on your computer that involve your other applications? Because that always requires the AI to know your password. Right. For the other application and that it would know also where the parent company presumably could find out exactly what you're doing and when and how. I don't think there's a single person who thinks that's a good idea. Not even one. But I'm going to make a prediction. The, the way you overcome these sort of privacy and security risk problems, if you have an application, do you now you overcome all that resistance from the public? It's kind of easy. You just make it better than not using it. So if you're, if you're sitting in an office full of people who all say, I'm never going to use this, too dangerous, well then it's safe for you not to use the two. You'll just be one of those people in the office. But if your co worker is using this and doubling his productivity and getting a big bonus and you're not, you're going to be looking over at your co worker and saying, I really God, I really don't want to use this agent mode, but I want to raise and I want to get my work done twice as fast and my co worker is doing all of that. So I think people are going to cave. And keep in mind also that the AI will be your brainwasher from now on. So if the brainwasher, the AIs tell you that this is safer than you thought at first, you're going to say no, it's not. No, that's just your business model. That's not safe. You can't tell me it's safe. And then they'll say it again. So you hear it twice. Still won't convince you. Twice. That's not going to change your mind. How about a hundred times? How about if you hear a hundred times from 100 different sources? Totally safe. Yeah, you can use agent mode. Everybody's doing it, all your relatives use, everybody's using it and then suddenly it'll look like a good idea and then you'll use it. Maybe not all of you, you're a special group. But yeah, young people, young people are going to use this pretty quickly. Elon Musk announced that his Wikipedia competitor that will be called Grokipedia was going to launch at the end of this week. But he thinks he needs more time to clean up all the wokeness and propaganda that's in there. So what will happen in a week or so when Grokopedia is a legitimate competitor to Wikipedia? And. And I said that the test of Grokopedia will be how it handles January 6th. The fine people hoax the 2020 election integrity and climate models. Now when I say it depends how it handles them, I'm not assuming that I have the, you know, the grip on total truth and therefore has to match my opinions on those things. I'm not saying that. I'm saying at the very least it needs to show both sides. Would you agree? At the very least has to show both sides. And certainly Wikipedia didn't try to do that for some of these hoaxes. But if Gro says Some people think January 6th was an insurrection and here's why, and then it says but other people say that's ridiculous and here's why I'd be okay with that. That would work for me, both sides. And there's a good chance that Elon's going to get this right. I mean it's Elon, so we'll see. Did you know that there's a startup in California that's trying to build a city? The all in podcast guys featured Yan, I think it's Jan Ceramic who's the head of that. They've already got 100 square miles and a bunch of billionaire rich people, tech people who are in on it. And the idea is to design a city from scratch because you know, most of our cities were built over time. They weren't really designed intelligently, they just sort of evolved and so they would put the manufacturing near the living spaces so you'd have jobs but you wouldn't have to commute that much. And they'd fix the transportation so it's easy to get from one place to the other. They would fix the, the building architecture so that it looked good. There's no reason it can't look good and be the most livable places and affordable that you could have. What is it that you say when I say people are looking at new living styles? You irrationally say you can't let make me live in any tiny house. Did I mention a tiny house? No, but this is not about tiny houses. But what will be your objection to these well designed cities? Your objection will be I'm not going to live in a tiny house. No, let me tell you again, there's no tiny houses. This has nothing to do with tiny houses. I know you won't live in a tiny house. I got it, I got it. You don't have to, you don't want to live in a 15 minute city. I got it. No, this would be designed by the, by the people who would want to have a better lifestyle. It's not being designed by the people who want to control you. Or is it? I don't think so. I think that this would be a safe group of entrepreneurs. That's my guess. Joe Rogan had a climate skeptic on a famous one. Richard Lindson, you know him, he's retired now, but he was a Ph.D. professor emeritus of all earth science kind of climate stuff. So he's an expert on climate at one of the biggest schools, mit. So he, here's what he said. Now I, I, maybe I'd heard this before but he said, quote, on the one hand you're told the science is settled, we're talking about climate change. But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out for instance that, listen to this, water vapor and clouds are much bigger greenhouse factors than CO2 and we don't understand them at all. So here you have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all, but the science is settled. Who knows what that means? Now, I did understand that they were having trouble with water vapor and modeling it. I don't know that I'd ever heard directly from, you know, a top expert that that's a way bigger variable than the one we've been looking at, CO2. I thought I knew it was a big variable. I didn't know it was like an overwhelmingly larger variable. That, that really. Doesn't that settle everything? If, if you know that the biggest factor can't be modeled, that's your answer to everything. We don't know. We just don't know. That's it. We don't know. Anyway, the funniest story of the day. I've been trying to form an opinion about this story, but I can't get past the fact that it's funny. Prior to Trump winning his second term, he had used an existing process to ask for a compensation for all the lawfare that he had experienced. So he wanted the government to pay him $230 million to compensate for the, you know, outrageous amount of lawfare they put him through that didn't amount to any jail time, at least now, independent of whether you think that that should be awarded, because I think it's not a court process. I believe it's a government process as opposed to going through a court. So when he applied for it, he was not the president. And so it was a perfectly applicable thing. It's an existing system. People can apply exactly the way he applied for exactly the reason he applied. So he just followed the existing system and applied to see if he could get some money. Then he wins the presidency. Guess whose job it is to approve the 230 million dollar award should it be approved? Trump, the president. So Trump not only went through the process to request the money, perfectly legal, all transparent, but then he got in a position to be the only one in the world who gets to approve it. I think that's how it works. So he can literally just say yes, and the government will give him a quarter billion dollars. Now, when it was brought up to him in one of the press events yesterday, he said, oh, you know, I'll, I'll donate that to charity. Was he really thinking that he would donate $230 million from, from the government to charity? And isn't the government sort of the charity itself? Like, wouldn't one thing to do just not take the money so that, hey, it goes toward reducing the deficit? See, I'm struggling, I'm struggling to find some kind of an angle where I could have, like, a serious opinion about that. Topic, I can't get past the fact that it's funny. So part of me wants him to just take the $230 million, because I would never stop laughing about that. It would just, you know, we're in a phase where Trump is sort of winning everything all the time anyway. But to win that hard would just be funny because it's just so unexpected, out of nowhere, free money. I always tell you, Trump's good at picking up the free money. No example better than that one. If he goes ahead and does it, I suspect he won't do it, but we'll see. So, do you know the real reason the government shut down? We got a lot of mind readers. So the mind readers are telling us the real reason it shut down. They might be right. So apparently there's some Democrat senator who anonymously made some news by saying, and I quote, that Democrats are afraid of opening the government because, quote, we'd face the guillotine, meaning that the Democrats believe that they would look like the losers to their own team if they're the ones who cave. Now, here's another take. The other reason that Democrats might not want to open the government is that nobody cares if it's shut down. Do you think that the Democrats, the voters, are pestering their leaders to open up? No, they're not pestering their own leaders to open up. They're just blaming Republicans. Do Republicans care that Democrats are blaming them? No, Republicans are blaming Democrats. Do the Democrats care that Republicans are blaming the Democrats for being closed? Apparently not. They don't care at all. So we have this weird situation where both sides want the government to reopen, but not much. I mean, not much. They don't really want it to open. I mean, I'll say I want it open, but I don't really care. Every day that Trump's people can cut the budget of the Democrat programs while it's closed, it's just going to look like a good day to me. How many of you are directly impacted by the closing or the people not getting paid or the closing of the government? Have any of you had any impact yet? I believe I have not, although I suspect I would someday. But so far, I don't even feel it. And I guess it's the second longest government close. It's the second longest one, and we don't even care. It's like this is not even relevant. So I think Trump wins the longer they stay closed. Tucker Carlson was at a look, like he was talking at a Turning Point event. I saw some video and he had a very handy 5.5 point of view of what MAGA is. So here are the five things that Tucker says MAGA is and I didn't spend a ton of time looking at them, but I feel like it's right. So let's see if you would agree that these five things define maga, right? America first. That's maga. America first. No pointless wars. Agree. No pointless wars. Bring back meaningful jobs. We're talking about manufacturing mostly. Yes. Bringing back manufacturing. Controlling the immigration. Yes. Mega and free speech. Yes, I accept those totally. If you told me that we're going to agree to say that MAGA is those five things. It's not the only five things we want, but I would go with that. To me that seems like a very workable functional definition. Ted Cruz is trying to help out with all these, you know, these funded protests. And one of the things Ted Cruz says is that if we add rioting funding, they can go after the criminal enterprises that are funding the, the protests. So in other words, it would be a RICO case if you could tie the funders in with the people doing the street protesting. If they're being dangerous, if all of it is non dangerous, then there's no crime. But if there's somebody funding groups known to be dangerous antifa, for example, then apparently this, if Congress approves Ted Cruz's idea, there'll be some legislation that says oh, if they're doing bad things and they're being funded, that's a RICO situation. Now you have, you have a real good solid base to go after them. So I think Ted Cruz is right on this. Feels like a real good idea. Good job Ted. If it gets passed. Well, John Brennan has now been referred to the Department of Justice by Representative Jim Jordan primarily for lying about the Steele dossier. So he, we all, we've all seen the video where John Bren said that the CIA did not rely, did not rely on the Steele dossier for their post election intelligence community assessment. But we know from other reporting that he definitely not, not only did they rely on it, but it was the, it was the primary thing they relied on. That's a pretty big lie. That's a, that's as big as lie as you can get. That's an overthrowing the country lie. So I don't know if they'll get him for more than lying but if you're lying for the purpose of overthrowing the country, and there's no doubt about that, that's exactly what it was. I don't know, maybe, maybe there's some other crime involved. John Seward continues to be interesting in his criticism of his own team because there's only now there's a handful of people on the political left who are willing to accurately and full throatedly, you know, insult their own teams performance. And Stuart I think does the best of that because he's not crazy. And I do believe that Stewart wants to get the right answer as opposed to the team answer. And I appreciate that. You know, I mean, it's a hard balance because he needs to keep his audience and everything else, but he does seem to be seeking truth. And he went after, he had Bern Sanders on the show and he said to Bernie, is it frustrating that the thing you fought for your whole career, Democrats are the one who run away scared? And Trump has embraced some of it. And I thought to myself, what, what exactly has Trump done that would be Bernie Sanders preferred policies? I, I couldn't think of anything. But then, then John Stewart gave two examples and I said, huh, you might be onto something. One of the examples was Trump taking equity in businesses. So that's something that Stuart called socialism. I called it capitalism. To me it was just free money. And if Trump could get it and he could get it for the benefit of the public, and it wasn't just taking it, but rather was adding something to the company's success that would be totally worth the fact that they had given up some equity. But I can see how you could define that as maybe some kind of a socialist thing. I could see that. The second thing was that Trump's got a government website for selling pharma products cheaper directly to customers in some, but not all cases. Now, would that be an example of something that Bernie wanted the government to be more involved in direct health care work? Kind of, yeah. So these are actually not bad examples of where. But, but if you call it socialism, you're doing what I call word thinking. You haven't added anything except controversy. So what I call them is common sense. So I don't see them as right or left. I don't see either one of those as right or left common sense. Why do you have to be a Democrat to want to lower pharma costs? There's nothing left or right about that. Why do you want to be a socialist? Just because there's an opportunity to take equity while also helping the industry and helping the company. Isn't that more like common sense? There's nobody who's losing. If you have a situation where everybody wins and nobody loses, what's that? That's just common sense. So we'll see if common sense beats socialism. I'm still a little fascinated why there's no Kings protests. And some of the other ones we've seen are so many old white people. And I feel like there's more than one reason, and you'd have to have all the reasons to get what we have. One reason is that many of them are old hippies, and they're just. They're just enjoying a final run. It's like, ah, I've been a hippie all my life. Protesting's in my blood. A lot of them talk like that. My parents were. My parents were protesters. I've been protesting since I was 6 years old. So some of it's just that, you know, the. The one bucket list, let's do our final tour while we. We can still walk kind of thing. Some of them are probably paid to the organizers. Paid. I think some of the attendees are paid. So some of it might be money, some of it might be. It's the only. It's the only group that has that much free time and would enjoy this. There are other groups that are unemployed, but would they have enjoyed being there with all the senior citizens? Probably not. So it's not just that they have time, which they do, but they have time that they don't mind spending doing this. They might actually enjoy it. And that would not apply to other people. But I saw. The reason I'm even talking about it is I saw somebody say that the reason all these old people are protesting the. What is it they're protesting the authoritarianism. It's because they watch the fake news still. It's a group of people who don't know that sometime in our recent past, the news stopped even trying to be news. And if all you're doing is just watching the same channels you always watched, you would never know that, because there's nobody on those channels who tells you they're fake news. If you're not tuning into, you know, Fox News or Breitbart or, you know, if you're not on the podcasting, you know, if you're not watching podcasters and stuff, you don't know, you don't know that the news is completely fake. You would think that the stuff that you agree with is real and the stuff that disagrees with you might be fake. And I'll bet you. I'll bet you the senior citizens largely believe the news. And if you took that away, meaning if you took their illusion that the news is real, if you took away that illusion. I don't know that they would show up because they wouldn't have anything to rely on anyway. And then some of them might be just genuinely concerned about health care, but I susp. I suspect that's the minority. I love it when Trump does things that only Trump would ever do. I never get tired of that. When he does a Trumpy thing, like, what's the, what's the Trumpiest thing that Trump could ever do? Well, it's gonna be hard to top this. So he was at, I guess, some press events yesterday, and Trump says, quote, they say you're the third best president. Third best. And then they said, who are the first two? George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And I got extremely angry at this man. Okay, that's. You cannot entertain me better than this. When, when Trump says things that you know are going to bother people, I just, My dopamine goes through the roof. I love it when he bothers people. He says, it's going to be very tough to beat Washington and Lincoln, but we're going to give it a try. Right? And then he goes further. He goes, hey, they didn't. He goes, hey, they didn't put out eight wars. Nine coming. All right, we put out eight wars and the ninth is coming, believe it or not. Come on. Forget about, you know, how real any of that is. Forget about how valid the comparison is. It doesn't matter. The fact that he would even say these words in public is so delicious because, because you could, you can play in your mind the reaction that his critics are having to it. Like you sort of imagine their heads exploding. Because he's got a decent argument. It's not that he's right or wrong, and it's not that he actually could someday be considered better than those two presidents. What's funny is that you know what the reaction will be? That's the joke. And he's the best at this anyway. I do like that he sets the bar high for his own performance. He's not trying to, he's not trying to leave office with like a good solid 50% approval, which would be amazing. 50%. He's not trying to do that. No, he's trying to be not just the third best president. Come on. I mean, that's like not even trying. So he's trying to be the best president in the history of the United States and he's trying to beat Washington and Lincoln. Maybe. In other fun news, Robby Starbuck, you, I hope you know him as an anti woke activist. Let's call him but apparently Google, if he did a Google search with their AI not too long ago, they would have been defaming him by calling him a whole bunch of things that definitely do not apply. So they've. They've accused him of sexual assault claims. No, nothing like that ever happened. They've accused him of being a white nationalist. Nope, nope, nothing like that. They said he was friends with some famous racist, Richard Spencer. Nope, none of it. True. So he's suing them now. He already won. Who did he beat? He already beat one AI that was doing that. They. They settled with him. He's going to win this one too. So I don't know if we'll ever find out what the settlement is, but getting defamed looks like a pretty good business model at the moment. So Corinne Jean Pierre, Biden's old box spokesperson, she's back with her new book called Independence, and so she's making the rounds. Well, that's funny. All right, I'm seeing a funny comment. I'll get back to that. Have you noticed, though, if you saw Corinne Jean Pierre, that she's changed her hairstyle? So instead of having the, the afro that she had, she's going to a whole different look with, I guess, she. What would you call it? Uncurled her hair, slattened her hair, and she looks like a totally different person. I don't like it. One of the things I liked best about her when she was Biden's spokesperson is that she didn't look or dress like other people. I thought she did a great job. I loved her old look. I know a lot of you didn't. Right. We can disagree on that. But I loved it. I always thought, God, that's such a bold, like, such a classy, bold, professional and yet stylistic approach. I always thought it was great. I loved her look, but she went a different direction and a lot of her charisma just disappears as soon as she changes to a, like, just an ordinary. Now she just looks like somebody's mom. And she loses a lot. Loses a lot. Anyway, they're pestering her about how much she knew about Biden's decline. She, of course, is going to deny. She's denying that she noticed there was anything wrong with him. He certainly had signs of aging, she admits, but there did not seem to be any signs that he couldn't do his professional job. Says her. Some people think that she would only say that because her only way she could ever get a another job is with the Biden's approval. So apparently the Bidens might have enough sway over the world that if she wants to have a good job in her future, she's going to have to say good things about Biden so that Biden can put in the good word for her and maybe get her something. Now, that's just somebody's hypothesis. It could be that this is just exactly what she saw and felt. Might have been because cognitive dissonance would get her to the point where she couldn't see his disabilities. It doesn't have to be that she's lying or stupid. It could be just cognitive dissonance. And she knew that if she acknowledged his disabilities that her life would be ruined and her career would be ruined, so her brain just talked around of it. That would be the normal way cognitive dissonance works. So could be just a phenomena and not any kind of, you know, organic fault in her. Did you know that the Trump government has 40 people involved across the government in some kind of a. What's it called? They're trying to fight against the lawfare, against Trump. Well, weaponization of the government. So it's 40 people, pretty high powered people too, I think, that are fighting the weaponization of government in different departments, I think, but they're working together and they're looking for retribution for January 6th and the Trump prosecutions and the, the Russia probe. And I am all for that. 40 people, that sounds like a serious effort. And it has to be done. There has to be, there has to be an answer for what has been done. So good. See Interagency Weaponization Working Group. Go nuts, guys. Well, Laura Loomer, controversial right leaning pundit, apparently she's having some security problems. There's an anti Israel guy who's made credible threats and she's. She has to beef up her security. But also, I guess he's made threats to what? To also the CEO of. Oh, what you call it? The CEO of. What's the satirical site that we all like? The conservative satirical site. As soon as you say it all, though. Oh, you know what I'm talking about. Right. Anyway, so the same nuck job has threatened a few people and I guess law enforcement is taking it seriously. Loomer is being accused of being a Mossad spy. I don't think that's the case. The Daily Mail is reporting on this. Don't think it's the case. But it is a terrible situation that Trump supporters, the prominent ones, are worried for their life. Apparently a lot of the High Babylon beef that. Thank you. The Babylon B CEO, Seth Dillon, is one of the Ones being. Being threatened. So I hope that all of them are okay because some of them are going to spend a ton of money. I think Ben Shapiro probably spends a ton of money and probably there are half a dozen others that just absolutely have to have security now or they feel they do. Now. The beauty of me being in my current situation, which is, you know, my lifespan is not that long, I don't feel the need for security. I was telling the local subscribers before I started this, this podcast, I was telling you if somebody like broke into my house and threatened to kill me, I'm at the point where I'd be like, all right, just make it a good shot. Right, right there. Can we get this over with Right there. So at the moment, I don't need security. I'd probably have a good conversation with the killer before he did his thing. Bill Ackman, investor. Bill Ackman has some thoughts on Curtis Sliwa, who's running for mayor and in New York City. And a lot of people want him to drop out because that would give at least some chance that somebody who's not a communist mom dummy would win. Meaning. Meaning Cuomo. Now, if you're just watching and you don't know much about the. What's happening behind the curtain, you would say to yourself, ah, what's wrong with that? Sliwa, he's got to give us a chance not to get a communist. But Bill Ackman has some inside information. He says that apparently New York City has an 8 to 1 matching funds program for New York City donors, which. Which allows Sliwa, because he's an official candidate for Office, to give $5 million of matching funds for his campaign from the city. So here's a guy who is not rich, who by running for office and not. Not dropping out. Not dropping out, he gets $5 million sloshing around to hire. I wonder who he would hire. Well, according to Bill Ackman, he hired his wife and his friends and they're enjoying a better lifestyle than they have enjoyed before, presumably because I imagine he didn't hire them for cheap. And it's not even his money. It's public money. So would you expect Curtis Lewa to drop out if it meant that his family would make a lot less money? And he could, you know, he could defend not dropping out. Even if he hated it, he could defend it. I don't think if, if this is true and I'd have to hear. I want to hear Sliwa's response to it. So we don't have the response yet. But if it's true, there's not really any chance he's going to drop out. Would you agree? If he can, you know, pay his wife another high salary for another X number of months and there may never be another chance like this to get sort of free money. You don't think he's going to stay in? I say follow the money. Now it might create a situation where somebody's going to make him some illegal offer to drop out. Pretty sure that would be illegal. I think he claimed that somebody offered him $10 million to drop out, but I don't know about that. James o' Keefe has another win for his, his undercover work. He exposed a hundred billion dollar federal contracting scam where minority owned businesses would get contracts because they could. They could get them because they're minority owned, but then they would just farm out the work to other entities. So they would only do 20% of the work and that's what they admit, by the way. He got them to admit that directly and they would outsource 80% of it illegally because they're not allowed to do that. And then they would just sit back and collect some extra money, I guess. So that was part of a scam where all these minority companies were skimming money off of contracts. Now, as I've told you many times, wherever there's government funding, there is massive corruption every time. And there's a very good reason for that. Nobody's checking on it. That's it. If you have, if you have gigantic amounts of money sloshing around and there's nobody who's checking on where it goes or how it's used. Do you think there's any chance that won't devolve into corruption? No, no, there's not. Any chance is zero. It's exactly zero chance that that does not turn into corruption. Zero. There isn't the slightest chance that that remains a credible system over time. Maybe on day one, but day two, no. By day two, the robbery begins. So I'm going to say for the millionth time, because I feel like I can get, I feel like I get this message through. We do not have an idea for a system of government that can protect us from this. We really need a system of government that can protect us from this because it's destroying every city, every program. And it's of course serving the poor more than the rich. It's. Everything bad about our country is one thing. And the one thing is we don't watch where our money goes. It's one thing. Do you think that we don't have any way to solve that? There's no way to get auditors, there's no way to use AI, blockchain, something? Well, I would argue that the people who are in charge of fixing it are the people who are raping it. So the big problem is that the people who should fix it are the ones benefiting from it, and therefore they could never fix it. But if we don't figure this out, I feel like this is the alpha problem that all the other problems revolve around, even immigration. You think immigration is sort of a standalone problem, but probably immigration was subsidiary to this problem. Probably somebody who found a way to make money by letting people in. You know, the NGOs were making money by letting people in, not preventing them. So probably every one of our biggest problems trace back to the fact we don't watch where the money is spent. All of it. All of it. So if I saw Trump come up with some kind of reaction to this, as in, we're going to try, you know, maybe putting some kind of federal. So that's the trouble, is that you can't expect the local governments to police themselves. But is there any way you can have the federal government say, we're just going to be a watchdog and we won't do anything because we don't have power, we'll only watch and then we'll report. Maybe. Well, what did I tell you about the Gaza ceasefire? Besides the fact that there's no way it's going to hold? Of course it's not going to hold. But the other thing that I could have said that you already knew, is that the odds of a false flag claim, a fake claim that the other side had violated the ceasefire was guaranteed. We may have already had it, because, you know, there was a. There was a report that the Gazans had attacked, and then there was a report that Netanyahu had responded by attacking back and then closing the crossings. But then the crossings got immediately reopened and the reporting is that the US caught Israel in a lie. Now, I don't know that that's true. Remember, everything's fog of war. So if you hear that the United States caught Israel in a lie, that doesn't mean it's true. That doesn't mean anything. It just means that somebody said it. That's all it means. Somebody said it. But the accusation is that it might have been. There might have been an explosion of an IED that was an accident that Israel interpreted as intentional, but then with a Little bit of research, the US Found out, oh, that probably wasn't even intentional, just something blew up that had been unexploded. And Netanyahu very quickly reversed the closing of the crossings, which would suggest that he either understood it wasn't real or understood he couldn't get away with it. One of those two things. But we don't. Anyway, I saw that on Matt Gates's podcast. Apparently, preparations are underway for Trump and Putin to meet in Budapest, even though there's no date for that. And they postponed it because they were not close enough to getting anything agreed on, that it was worth it. And they're still not. But I guess one of the, one of the critical points is that Russia wants to keep all of the Donbass. And I, of course, not being a Ukrainian, I had to go make sure I knew what the Donbass was. So the Donbass is the place where essentially Putin already owns it. He's already occupying it. It's the, the part on the, the east coast of Ukraine. So it's not a perfect match to what Putin's already conquered, but he has 89% of it. So the Russian Armed Forces control 89% of the Donbass. Isn't that really the end of the question? If he already controls 89% of it, he's not going anywhere. Can't we just agree that however this turns out, he's going to have the Donbass? I mean, obviously Ukraine would have to get something in return, I think. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Jessica Costa Q. She says that Trump's crackdown on the border has reduced the fentanyl flow. They're down almost 53% compared to last year. Now, you might say, oh, that just means they're catching less of it. It doesn't mean there is less of it, but it probably does. It probably does mean that they're catching more of it, and that's why, why there's less of it getting through, I don't know. And the, the reporting is that the cartels have stopped exporting as much fentanyl because of the crackdown. Do you believe that? Again, this, all the border cartel stuff is also fog of war, but it's more like a permanent fog of war. So I don't know how much of reporting I'm going to believe on this topic, but it looks like, I mean, directionally, it looks real. I mean, the border is pretty sealed tight relative to how it was in the past. So it wouldn't be a surprise if Trump had cut down the Fendal by 50%. Wouldn't be a surprise. Just don't know. Senator Rand Paul continues to show what makes him valuable as a senator even though he's with Thomas Massie. He's one of the two Congress people who, who tend to be the fly in the punch. I don't know. But they tend to plague the other Republicans by not being on the same page. But when they're not on the same page, let me give a compliment to Rand Paul. When he's not on the same page, it's not because he doesn't make sense. It's not because he's crazy, it's not because he's dumb. It's not because he's under informed. So when he disagrees with all the Republicans as he is with this Venezuelan drug boat attacks, you should listen to him. You don't need to agree with him. I think this is a case where I don't. But I very much appreciate him. I love that he's giving us this transparency and a different way to look at this situation, specifically what he says. And I can't verify that any of this is true. I'm just appreciating that this version of events is out there. And he says that we're not getting any fentanyl from that part of the world. He says that Venezuela is like a zero fentanyl producer. They are a drug producer, but it's, you know, the opioids. So he thinks that first of all it's a lie that we're stopping fentanyl. Secondly, he says that because of the geography over there and the boats that they're using, these would not be the boats you would use to take drugs to the United States. This would be for taking it to some island that would be prepping to take it maybe to Europe or somewhere else. So the other part of it is it's not even destined for the us it would be too far away, too hard to. Too hard to use those little boats to get it all the way to the coast of the United States. You wouldn't do it that way. So why are we blowing up boats? Is it to stop the regular opioids? You could argue that that was a good enough reason. You could. But the head of Columbia thinks it's about a play to get the oil. And then somebody else said on acts, no, we don't want that crappy Venezuelan oil because it's all, it's too hard to refine. So it's like, I know it's thick and sweet or Something so it's hard to refine. So therefore it's not true that the US Covets their oil because we have plenty of oil and our oil is easier to refine. However, GROK disagrees with that. GROK says that the US Actually has the highest capable refineries in the Gulf Coast. Right. You know, close enough. And that our refineries actually can handle that, and they can handle it so well that the net effect would be cheaper oil because our, our refinery is so good that we can take their crappy oil and refine it into a good product and still cheaper than if we had to ship it all the way from the Middle east to refine it. Now, at this point, I don't know how much we ship from the Middle east because we, we're the big producer at this point. So I don't know. So I don't know about the economics of it, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the US was trying to get a bite of that business. It'd be sort of Monroe doctrines to put the drug dealers out of business. So here's what I would say. So Trump is also leaning on Colombia for being a big drug narco terrorist country. And the President is saying, no, no, no, you're just trying to get our oil. In the case of Colombia, I don't think it's the oil. I think it's more like Venezuela's about the oil. But here's what I think. I think that this has to understand what Trump is up to. The first thing you need to know is that it is not his obligation to tell us the truth about these military CIA operations. How many of you would agree with that? We'd like to know the truth. I mean, I'm curious, but it's not really his obligation to tell us the truth about life and death. Military, secret ops, that's not his job to tell us. His job is to get it right. Right. So when we judge Trump, we're going to judge, did he do the thing? Did he reduce our risk? Did he make us safer? Did he make us richer? If he has those things, okay, A plus. But he doesn't need to tell me what the secret plan is, so I'm left to speculate what the secret plan might be. And so I will do that right now. So I'm a big fan of the Monroe Doctrine, which says that the US can and should dominate the entire hemisphere and that we're all better off if that happens. I believe we're all better off if that happens. But what happens if two of the major countries are converting from something like a standard country into a narco terrorist cartel entity that's essentially a criminal enterprise? What would be the best way to handle that if you're a Monroe Doctrine loving President of the United States? Well, number one would be to cut off their source of funds. That, that's the first thing Trump always has. And the way to cut off their funds is to kill their drug business. Once you cut off their funds, well then you get a little bit more flexibility, don't you? Then they're going to negotiate. Then they might need to get into a different business. Then, you know, maybe, maybe they won't even be able to pay paramilitary people to attack the United States. So, generally speaking, I'm in favor of the US Degrading the income that the two countries, Venezuela and Colombia, get from drugs, not just because it might keep some Americans alive. I worry that we can't make much difference. They'll just pay more for the drugs and it won't make a difference in the ods. So I worry that it doesn't work that way, but it definitely works to reduce the income of the, the two leaders who may or may not be leaders of criminal enterprises. So if that's what's going on, and at the very least, that is what's going on. It's not all that's going on, but definitely it's going on that they're, you know, they're in the drug business, the two leaders of those countries, and that we're decreasing their income substantially. That should be useful. It should be useful. We'll see. And I guess Breitbart's reporting that the Coast Guard found a hundred thousand pounds of cocaine in the Pacific, in other words, on a boat. So they enter interdicted 100,000 pounds of cocaine in the Pacific. So that would be the, the other side of the country, if you're keeping track. So both sides of the country have a massive, you know, drug problem. But £100,000, I asked Grok how many overdoses that could, that would respond to 3 billion. So if it's true that there's £100,000 of Coke and if you were to divide it up just enough to kill a person, so everybody got a dose that was an overdose, you could kill 3 billion, 3 billion people, is that right? It doesn't feel right, does it? £100,000 of Coke is a lot of Coke, but really 3 billion people, I feel like maybe Grok was hallucinating on that one don't take my word for it. Meanwhile, we're starting to suspect a big land attack on Mexico is coming from the U.S. apparently everything's approved, at least by the president, not by Congress. And maybe that won't happen, but it looks like the CIA is already planning, you know, where would be the best place for an attack. How are you going to do it? There's no word as to whether Mexico would be involved in. It seems like that would be a mistake because there's no way you could trust the, the Mexican forces not to, not to turn you in and tell the cartels what's coming. So I don't see how we could work with Mexico. The best we could probably do is ask them to get out of the way. I don't know, we'll see where that goes. Meanwhile, the Washington Free Beacon, Aaron Sabarin is writing that UC San Diego had this race based scholarship thing thing, which when they got in trouble for having a race based scholarship, you could, you couldn't get it if you're white. Basically all they did was they, they moved the scholarship thing into this fake, not fake, but some external, external organization to make it look like it wasn't the college doing it. Because if it wasn't the college doing it, then it could still happen. And apparently that didn't fly. So, so they're getting rid of that trick. Apparently it was the Ku Klux Klan act that stops people from using race and there's actually the Ku Klux Klan act that stopped them. Amazon says there's gonna. Look, they're gonna replace 600,000 workers with robots. I feel like that's just the start. Now, I don't give you, and I am very emphatic about this, I don't give financial advice, but I will give you a financial lesson if you can handle the difference. So do not make any investments based on what I'm about to say or anything I've ever said before, because I'm not your financial adviser. But I can tell you things like, you know, diversifying is a good thing. That would be a lesson. That's not advice. Right. Diversifying is a good thing. So here's another one of those. I've said this before, but one of the ways that I look to invest, if I'm looking at an individual company, I look for one that's, you know, going to stay in business first. That's number one. But also if they're involved in something, that will only happen once in the history of the world. So one of the reasons I have stock in Tesla is that there will only be one time in the history of humanity when robots are introduced. There'll only be one time when AI is introduced. He's in that business too. There'll only be one time that we're, we're going to move to, you know, massive solar and batteries and stuff. So basically Elon is in all these one time only trends. So of course I own that stock now. I'm not recommending it. I'm explaining the thinking that somebody would use, not recommending it. Now we see that Amazon is on the verge of replacing humans with robots. How many times in the history of the world will that happen? Once. What would be presumably the biggest expense at Amazon? Humans. Right. Wouldn't that be their biggest expense? So there might be one time in the history of the world where this big, dynamic, successful, incredible company, Amazon, gets rid of people. Now this could be a disaster for the economy in general. While their stock might do well because they're reducing their costs. Now, does that sound like a recommendation to buy, to buy Amazon? No, because here's the part you're missing. The other thing that's going to happen only once, only once is that the AI will eat Amazon because OpenAI is already adding shopping. Would you use Amazon if you could just pick up your thing and say, all right, I want to buy this thing, what should I buy? Okay, good, good, there's a link. Why would you go to Amazon? Well, Amazon also will have an AI. So maybe the very best combination of AI advice, plus photos of the product, plus return, plus free shipping, maybe, maybe that's enough to keep it all on Amazon. Because remember, you talk about Bezos. Bezos is still evolved. So if it were a bunch of, you know, second tier founders or something, I'd say, well, you know, they'll get eaten by AI. But he's not the guy who gets eaten by AI, he's the guy who eats AI. So there's no way to know if the AI threat to Amazon will be bigger, then the robot thing will be big. But something really big is happening at Amazon. Either way, whatever it is, it's really big. And then they've got the Amazon servers, the cloud, the AWS thing they've got to fix. But I'm sure they'll get a handle on that. All right, so that's clear enough. So the lesson is look for things that happen only once, but make sure you don't ignore. There might be more than one thing that's going to happen only once. And they could be working as opposites. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I have for you. I ran a little bit late. I'm going to say a few words to my beloved local subscribers. The rest of you, thanks for joining. It's always a pleasure. It's my favorite part of the day. All right, we'll see if our buttons all work today. Locals coming at you privately, I hope.
Episode 2996 CWSA 10/22/25
Date: October 22, 2025
Host: Scott Adams
Scott Adams uses his signature “persuasion filter” to break down the latest news and cultural happenings, offering reframes, humorous asides, and pointed takes on political controversy, science “settlement,” technology, and governmental dysfunction. The episode blends personal anecdotes, analysis of current events, and insights into human and institutional psychology with Adams’ trademark playful irreverence.
Scott Adams’ tone throughout is conversational, irreverent, and often mischievously humorous. He mixes serious analysis with self-deprecating asides and provocative thought experiments; he is unafraid to issue warnings about fake news, “brainwashing,” or perverse incentives in science and politics. The episode is wide-ranging, fast-paced, and distinctly flavored by Adam’s brand of playful skepticism.
This episode delivers a wide sweep: reframing daily boredom, warnings about supplement hype and science “settlement,” wariness about AI’s growing powers, skepticism of policies and corporate motives, and a wry, sometimes pointed, look at American political dysfunction. Adams remains sharply contrarian, poking holes in institutional credibility, government “solutions,” and media narratives, while encouraging critical thinking, humor, and seeing both (or all) sides.
Ads, intros, and outros were skipped to focus solely on episode substance.