Transcription
Just checking my stocks, and um, I've made more money from Elon Musk in the past year than from anything else, if you count stock appreciation and stuff I do on X, you know, like the subscription to Dilbert, etc. So, stocks are up a little bit, uh, but not all of them. The S&P 500's down a little bit. A little bit. You'll hardly even notice.
All right, let's get the comments going. There we go. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time. But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mug or a glass, a tankered chalice or Ste, a canteen sugar 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 of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens right now. Go. Sublime.
Well, I wonder if there's any sketchy science that says that coffee is good for you. Oh, yeah, there is. Thanks to the Daily Coffee News, who I suspect is an organ of big coffee. Um, so you can trust them totally. A diet rich in foods containing polyphenols, of which there's a lot in coffee, can dramatically reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome, which is a major risk factor for heart disease. So if that sip of coffee made your heart feel better in a variety of ways, that's not an imagination. Yeah. What? Enjoying the simultaneous sip can make your heart feel better. Well, it's a scientific fact according to Big Coffee.
Did you know that egg prices have plummeted 12.7% this month, according to the Gateway Pundit? I'm glad somebody's watching the price of eggs. You know what's the best part about the price of eggs going down? Is it the economic benefit? Is it that you can buy more eggs? No. It's so Democrats can shut up about eggs. I've never been so happy about eggs. So, they're not mentioning eggs. Oh, thank God. Thank God. Because it was the one thing they understood. Eggs are up. Eggs are up. What about those eggs? What has Trump done about the eggs? Now that the eggs are down, they just sort of go quiet about the eggs, but they do have new words, and we'll talk about that in a little bit.
So, here's something uh, surprising and awesome. According to Interesting Engineering, a US company has made a uh, drone battery. So, a battery for their drone that can last three hours, and it doesn't use any of the uh, any of the minerals that we get from China. So, it doesn't have mang—doesn't have—there's no nickel, manganese, cobalt, or graphite. And it can go 86 miles an hour. It's a San Jose-based company called Leighton. L-Y-T-N. Remember, I keep asking, are there any American companies making drones? And I think that maybe the reason we didn't have them before is because drones were more of a personal hobby kind of a product, and it wasn't in the market for our, you know, higher cost of manufacturing, which I assume, um, so it didn't make sense to go into the drone-making business cuz you couldn't really meet the, you know, quality and the price of the Chinese drones. But as soon as it becomes a critical military need, we're talking about more expensive drones, and suddenly you could get really, really rich making drones. So, I'll bet you there are quite a few drone startup companies. I don't know. But their battery is lithium sulfur, and uh, apparently it's ready to go. It's not uh, it's not hypothetical. It's it's here, and it's ready to go.
So, this uh, suggests an interesting possibility. We kind of assume that the way we we get some uh, let's say uh, economic and security comfort with the fact that China has all these critical things we need. It could be that instead of mining our own critical things, we will innovate so we don't need them. So what if we just stop needing these critical minerals? I mean, obviously, we still need them for phones and other electronics, but would it be impossible to to innovate so that we just don't need those mines at all? Maybe. What about pharmaceuticals? Is it possible, you know, especially with AI coming that the AI will say, "You don't need those pills. They're not working. Here's what you need." It'll solve all your problems. And by the way, China doesn't have a monopoly on this stuff. Maybe. So, so the decoupling from China could be from innovation, not because we figure out a different way to get stuff. Possible.
In related news, Toyota is planning to launch an EV with a 745-mile range. That—that's about double what a lot of the EVs have, but it's way more than even the biggest one right now. And uh, you'll be able to charge it in 10 minutes. So, I had kind of stopped reporting on all the battery innovations because it was boring, and there were too many of them, and they were going to take, you know, 10 to 15 years to actually be in any products. But uh, apparently these are going to be in products really soon. So this is fully developed—recharge in 10 minutes. And Harvard researchers say that the batteries could last up to 30 years. So 745-mile range, 10 minutes to charge it up, and the battery lasts 30 years. Not bad, Toyota. And uh, raises the bar for Tesla, doesn't it?
Well, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, um, he's agreed with Elon Musk on the value of robots, humanoid—humanoid robots. I think uh, Elon Musk said at the the high end uh, the robot market could be $50 trillion dollars, and that's what Jensen Huang says. He says it could be a $50 trillion industry because the world is short of workers, and there's a declining birth rate, and he thinks the first use will be in manufacturing.
So, people keep asking me, Scott, um, how do I plan my future in the robot world? And I don't know the answer to that because I'm definitely not smart enough to peer into the future and see what all that robot business is going to bring. But I'll give you kind of a a general advice, which is I think the economic value of doing stuff, you know, carrying things from here to there and just doing stuff is going to drop to zero because the robots will do it. But the value of owning stuff might be retained because robots can't own anything. So if you own a hotel and people want to stay at it as long as there's still some people around, you know, that might be worth something. If you own robots, you know, maybe the model will be that individuals can own a dozen robots, and then the robots just go to work for you. That's what the uh, the new uh, Teslas will be able to do soon. Uh, very soon you'll be able to park your Tesla on the curb, and if anybody wants a uh, auto taxi, they can just call it on the app, and your car will drive to them and make some money while you're asleep. So that's a case of owning something instead of doing something. So just think in those terms—to think of something that a robot can't do, you know, let's say I don't know—there—there's some things where you just need people. Um, but they—they tend not to be the highest-paying jobs.
All right, but let me give you a counterpoint. Right. The counterpoint uh, Mario on X is uh, is arguing that radiologists um, started using AI because it's way faster, you know, to look at uh, what are they looking at—imaging. So once you do some imaging, the radiologist has to look at it and say, oh, this is, you know, bigger than it should be. But apparently that was a laborious process where they literally had to measure the size of stuff. So they would say, "Oh, this looks like it's a little bit bigger than it should be." And now the AI could do that. But instead of replacing radiologists, it just became a tool for radiologists.
Now, how many of you remember the dawn of the computer era where the smart people said it was going to make paper obsolete? You know, paper—and then you waited for paper to become obsolete, and people just kept using paper. In fact, since it was easier to make documents, and you couldn't carry your computer to meetings for at least for a while, um, you'd bring paper. Now, I haven't been in the the real world um, business for a while. Is it still true that if you go to a meeting, people are going to have paper with them, or is that now been completely replaced with bring your laptop? Is there anybody still in the business world? But here's the thing. I think it was 40 years ago. It was maybe 40 years ago that we thought paper would go away. I have not bought any less paper in 40 years. So, but now—but now we're—it's a mix of paper and laptops. I think depending on the company, it would be embarrassing to have paper. Oh, people don't even go to the meetings in person. They do it remotely. Paper took a hit because of the pandemic. You think you use both? All right. So, but my only point—it's not really about paper. It's about—we're—we're not really good at estimating what's going to go away.
Do you remember when television was invented? I'm old enough to basically remember when televisions were introduced into the living room, and all the smart people said, "Well, radio's dead," but radio didn't die. It just moved into your car. And then became, you know, talk radio for politics and Rush Limbaugh and stuff like that. We're really, really bad at estimating what's going to go away. We're—we're a little bit better at estimating what's going to arrive, but it doesn't replace things as quickly as, you know, cars and and horse and buggy. So for every—for every example where something did obviously replace something like uh, cell phones did obviously replace pretty much the bulk of wired phones—at least in terms of usage. We'll see. So that's a counterpoint—then maybe people—humans will just use the AI, but you still need the human. How about a counter to the counterpoint?
All right, counter to the counterpoint. Um, I saw Greg Eisenberg on X. Um, he's saying that Microsoft just terminated 7,000 employees uh, because AI couldn't do their jobs, but would you like a counterpoint to the counterpoint of the counterpoint? Somebody named Incognito John 23 said that's misleading because the uh, the employee terminations are really based on a merger where they just had too many employees and not based on AI. So watch out for your fake news about AI. Um, and would you like a counter to the counter to the counter to the counterpoint? All right. Well, I have one. So, according to Futurism, um, there was a company that wanted to be the darling of OpenAI and be the first ones to replace its marketing and customer service with AI. So, I guess they've been uh, trying to do that since AI uh, OpenAI and ChatGPT got good enough to try, and now giving up on that because they found that AI did not make their customers happy. It—it were—it was cheaper because they did get rid of the human employees. But apparently their—their efforts to automate marketing and customer service didn't work out. Um, it's a—it's a financial tech startup. So they're going to basically reverse it and put humans back into it.
Now imagine if you were calling some company and you had a problem. How many times is your problem something that they've heard of before? In my case, it's never. I—I can't think of a single time I've ever called customer support and they'd ever even heard of—heard of my problem. Every time I've had to call, which is many, many times, like most of you, the—the person who takes the call has never heard of what I've—what my problem is, and they have to figure it out like they're starting from scratch. And then they've got to talk to people, and they've got to look at their notes, and you've got to try things, and you've got to reboot. But never—never is it something that they've seen before. Now why? I don't know. Who knows? Just too many different situations. But imagine if you got an AI and—and the AI was trying to figure out how to solve a problem that nobody had ever seen before. How well would it do? Since it's only trained on things it's seen before, could it really figure out a new thing that, you know, would—would its pattern recognition be enough if it didn't work for the humans and the humans would be, you know, highly trained? So imagine how frustrated you would be if you couldn't talk to a human and you also couldn't get a solution. You would be insane. Your brain would be on fire. At least if you can talk to a human, you feel like you've gotten past the—the first, you know, the first barrier—like, okay, I'm talking to a human, and this human needs to make me happy because they're—they're paid—just depends on it. But the AI doesn't get paid. So the AI doesn't really feel what you feel. It's not really on your side. It's just doing things by patterns. But if you've got a customer service person and you know that they're measured by their ability to quickly satisfy you, and there might even be somebody listening to the call, you at least feel like they're trying hard to solve your problem. So that's my counter-counter-counter-counterpoint to AI taking all the jobs. So look at it. It's—it's almost like ridiculously hard to predict uh, what's coming. So that's a problem.
Well, there's a group that says that uh, robots and AI already have free will. Uh, do you know how they decided that AI has free will already? They changed the definition of free will. Okay. So here's their definition of free will. Uh, so the following conditions have to be met, and this comes from Neuro Edge. Uh, it's based on a new study published in the Journal of AI and Ethics. So, so they say that AI has free will if it meets the following conditions. And some of you are going to say, "Yeah, that's same with humans, right? It should be." So, it shouldn't be the same standard as with humans. All right. Condition number one, it has goals and purposes. Check. Yeah, it does have goals and purposes because you just program those in there. Um, it has genuine alternatives, meaning that it can choose from different options. Check. It could definitely do that. What good would it be if it couldn't do that? And has the capacity to control actions based on those intentions? Check. It can do all those things. Do you know what all those things are collectively? Cause and effect. It's just cause and effect. So if you define—if you define free will to be identical to cause and effect, well, sure. Okay, now your AI has free will, but it doesn't mean a thing. It's just cause and effect. So I know you—I know that's making—say half of you crazy, but think about it. All right.
Um, let's talk about Trump and stuff, but first we'll talk about RFK. So, RFK Jr. is going after pesticides and food. And I guess he's got some report that's coming, and the pesticides he's targeting—and I assume that the report would have to support that or he wouldn't keep targeting—would be uh, glyphosate and atrazine, and he thinks those are uh, toxins. Now Trump officials are reviewing it, but you know, no decisions have been made. Farm groups are against it because it would lower yields, of course. Uh, but here's what I didn't know. Uh, apparently the European Union still allows glyphosate. I swear I've heard a thousand times that they don't allow glyphosate in Europe, but apparently they do. Uh, however, the other one, atrazine, uh, is not allowed in the European Union, but it is allowed in America. So, we'll see. We'll see if we uh, end up banning both or maybe we just match Europe and ban the one. We'll see. Um, but I do like the fact that every time RFK Jr. has an idea, his critics go crazy and they say, "But, but, but you've got to look at the science." And then every time he's looking at something, he says, "Well, that's what we're doing," you know, we commissioned a study or we put together a meta-study or we're looking at the science every time. He—he doesn't sometimes look at the science and sometimes—guess what—what do his critics think he's doing? Do they think he's guessing? He made it very clear that he's all about the science, and he's going to show us his work, and other scientists will get to look at it, and they'll have plenty of time to say this is good science or bad science or to add some more science. But it—it's amazing to me that his critics have decided that sometimes he's going to use the science and sometimes he's just—just going to make up. That's not going to happen. He's going to go with the science every single time. Now, the science might be wrong, but he's not going to ignore the science. That's not going to start happening all of a sudden.
Anyway, I guess uh, President Trump got to meet the the new Syrian president who not too long ago had a 10 million—10 million bounty on his head for being a terrorist, but now he's reformed cuz you know, terrorists sometimes reform. It might be the first time it's ever happened. Um, but uh, he met the Syrian president—not in Syria, but in Saudi Arabia—and uh, wasn't the longest meeting in the world, but uh, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and—and uh, Turkey's Erdogan joined by phone, and it looks like the people who are on our side are trying to rehabilitate this guy, you know, reputationally so that we can work with him, and the idea is that uh, Trump is going to remove his sanctions, which is something Syria desperately needs. And uh, and the government of Syria is going to take some steps to meet US demands. And that would include arresting militants and also um, having relations with Israel, positive relations with Israel. And they've said yes to those. So, I mean, if he's a reformed terrorist, he's doing a real good job of it. You know, I—I'm not close enough to this situation to know if this is all a good idea or the worst idea ever, but he's making a hell of a show of being a reformed guy who just wants things to work out. Israel said none of this will stop their military operations in southern Syria because I guess there's still some bad guys in southern Syria that Israel's after. But uh, Ali London was reporting that uh, what the US wants them to do is to sign on to the Abraham Accords—including relations with Israel—to tell the foreign terrorists to leave Syria. Well, tell them. I mean, probably has to do more than tell them. Uh, deport Palestinian terrorists. I don't know why you'd make a difference between one kind of terrorist and another. And, uh, help the US fight against ISIS and assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in northern—northeast Syria. That all sounds kind of doable, and I—I think the Syrians plan to do it. So, wouldn't that be amazing? It would be kind of phenomenal, I think, if Syria became a, you know, a country we could work with—out of what it's been now. I feel like it's way too—way too early to be too optimistic about that, but everything we see looks good.
Um, Brett Bear is uh, reporting that uh, President Trump's strategy for the Middle East is instead of uh, talking about it—about this big problem area that's full of terror and fighting and stuff. Did—did my—my light just go out again? Hold on. Go on. There we go. So Trump's uh, reframe of the Middle East, you could call it a strategy, is to call—to think of it as a commerce zone. So to make everybody think about money. So instead of thinking about war, how about think about making some money? And—and part of that is he's going there and making these gigantic deals. Um, some of them are about the Middle East, but a lot of them are about investing in the US and just getting everybody financially entangled such that war just stops making sense. Makes more sense to, you know, just build up your money. I think that makes a ton of sense. And it also is compatible with his—what I would say is Trump's strategy on Iran. So Trump has been adamant about not being a sucker and not being drawn into a war with Iran. But what are you going to do if—if they insist on building their nuclear facilities to the point where they can make a bomb in 10 minutes? Well, it appears that Trump's approach—it's too early to know for sure because he hasn't—he hasn't taken violence off the table, but I would say that it would be so non-Trump to just attack Iran cuz there's no way that's going to go great either for Iran or the Middle East or anybody else. It would just be, you know, another debacle. And I think Trump doesn't want that on his permanent record. Neither do we. So it looks like he's going to threaten Iran with complete economic destruction, which is again compatible with his reframing of the Middle East as an economic zone that everybody should be paying attention to because he thinks the Middle East is growing like crazy, too. It's a fast—I—I think they've got a, you know, fast population growth as well as economic growth. And it made me wonder what exactly can you do to Iran that you haven't already done? And I guess the main thing is Iran is still shipping oil. And uh, you know, of course, they're doing it sort of under the—you know, under the—under the—what? Under the curtain or somewhat uh, surreptitiously. But it's not like we can't figure out which ships are full of oil. I mean, we could watch them from above. So maybe all he's going to do is threaten them with complete economic collapse, which I think he could deliver. I think he could deliver that. It would probably take about 6 months. And that might be enough. But what I'm sure of is simply mindlessly attacking them militarily just doesn't feel like a good idea. Yeah, I was worried though that there wasn't any other idea because I was under the impression that the sanctions that we already have on Iran, you know, must have been pretty brutal, and if that wasn't making a difference, but apparently brutal—we haven't gotten to. So brutal sanctions are a whole other level, and apparently Trump is willing to go to that level to avoid a physical war and to get Iran on its side. But I also like the fact that as the Middle East is embracing Trump like—like crazy—I mean, they're really treating him like a superstar, at least the Saudis and the Qataris. Um, if he pulls together a yet more uh, impressive Abraham Accord where essentially everybody but Iran is on the same team and they're all working together—almost like a European Union—Um, it's going to be harder and harder for Iran to have any bad uh, intentions. They're just going to want to—they're going to want to have to play along, I think, at some point. So everything about this seems like he's heading in the right direction, but of course, it's a very unpredictable area. So you never know.
So I guess Trump uh, is in Qatar already. He's already headed there. And Qatar is putting out the red carpet very much like the Saudis. You know, they had the the horses and the the jets were accompanying Air Force One in, and uh, they're going all the way. But uh, I'm now going to change my opinion about the gift of the Qatari airplane that uh, Trump said he would accept. Um, that would be the new Air Force One or at least one of the two Air Force Ones. My first thought was I don't like anything about it cuz it's uh, it looks like it's going to influence him, and uh, anything that even indirectly influences the president while he's got to negotiate with these same countries just feels like a bad idea. And then there's the look of it. So it would be an easy attack vector for his—for his enemies. Oh, you just love the dictators, or whatever. You're—you're just doing it for your own benefit, whatever. And then it didn't really make sense to me because if the—the real thing that takes time is taking an ordinary jet and turning it into Air Force One, my understanding is that Boeing already has the frames. You know, the hard part. The hard part's over. Well, no. The easy part's over, which is building sort of a generic airplane. The reason we don't have Air Force One for another 7 to 10 years is that's how long it would take to build it out. So, it's an Air Force One because
It has all these, you know, defensive things that you've never heard of. And it's got basically every part of it is different from a normal plane when you get to the inside. So, wouldn't that be exactly the same for the Qatari plane?
The Qatari plane wouldn't be done until Trump left office. There's not even the slightest chance that it would be done before he leaves office. So, my initial response had been, I'm uncomfortable with this Qatari plane thing. I was, you know, still reserving a little bit of judgment. But then every time I heard Trump talk about it, he he kept changing my mind.
I don't know if any of you had this experience, but when I just read about it as a news report, I think, well, this is a terrible idea. No, don't take that plane. Don't take then. No, bad idea. Bad idea. And then I'd see a clip of Trump saying, well, you'd have to be an idiot not to take a free airplane. And then I go, "Okay, well that's pretty persuasive. Why wouldn't you take a free airplane?" And then he says, "It's it's a reward for us doing a good job." And I'm like, "Damn it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop convincing me it's a good idea to take this airplane."
So here's my current view. And it's not that it's a good idea to take the airplane. And it's not that it's a bad idea to take the airplane. I was in the wrong frame. So I changed my frame. He is there to persuade, right? He's persuading them to make deals. He's a salesman. He wants to reframe the whole area. This is a persuasion trip. If you allow yourself to move away from the commerce and the gift and sort of the the surface story, let's get down to persuasion. If the if the uh royal family of Qatar offers you a very valuable uh gift before you negotiate with them, should you say yes or no? You should say yes because you want to show them the respect that the gift requires.
Now, I think Trump knows that other people can kill this deal, such as Congress, such as public opinion, such as it's so politically bad that you can't do it. Trump can be the good cop here. I think he's just showing complete respect to Qatar because he's going into some difficult negotiations which are going to get into some hard stuff like what the are you doing with Hamas and he doesn't want to start that with um, you know, essentially being rude and turning down a gift that seems to make sense on the surface to him.
So, I'm looking at this as exactly correct persuasion, which is first you say yes. Then you say the Qataris are awesome for even offering it in the first place. And you say you're all in and anybody who says this is a bad idea is just wrong. Why wouldn't you take a free gift from these awesome Qataris who are our good friends? Now, are they our good friends? Well, some would say that they're playing both sides of the street. Sometimes they're our friends. Sometimes they seem to be supporting Hamas. Uh, I don't know the truth of of either of those things. But I do know that turning down that gift would have looked like a persuasion mistake. And if you stay in the persuasion frame, which is the right frame for the entire trip, he played it right.
Now, do I want Congress to figure out a way to deny him the plane? Yes, I do. I want Congress to deny it. I do not want that plane. And I think the plane would be a huge mistake. And I think on some level, Trump probably knows it. He probably knows it. But he's playing it right.
All right. Apparently Putin has now said he wants Trump to join him and Zalinski in Turkey to talk about the potential end to that war. And Caitlyn Collins is reporting for CNN that Trump says that um he hasn't decided to go there, but he said quote uh about Putin, he would like me to be there. That's a possibility. That doesn't mean I wouldn't do it to save a lot of lives and come back. I don't know that he would be there if I'm not there.
So, do you remember when the Democrats told us that Trump was being considered like the laughingstock of the international community? Does anybody remember that? And then uh Caris Dharmmer comes over and he he's like Trump's best friend. And then he goes to the Middle East and he's treated like a god. And then Putin says, "I can't even have this meeting without you. Where where's the part where where we've lost all of our respect in the world?" And then and then China says, "All right, let's do a deal." Where's all the part where where Trump is embarrassing the United States? Does anybody see any of that?
That was all As I've told you many times, the world is a transactional place. They don't care about how much respect they have for somebody. They care about what can you do for me? And they're watching Trump be a man of action, a man who can make things happen. And they're thinking, well, could he make things happen for us? Because we need some things like the end of the war, like the Abraham Accords, like getting along, like getting rid of the terrorists. There are things we need. And Trump is a man of action and he apparently can make stuff happen. Things that they America needs and things that we need, too. So, they're treating him uh like the most important person in the world because he's the most important person in the world.
So, I don't know what the odds are that the Ukrainian thing will work out. Uh, you know, it's hard to be optimistic about it, but maybe. I mean, maybe. So the fact that uh that the international community is basically fighting over his time because I think he was going to go to the UAE or something so it would take away from some of their time. Um, so I don't know what he's going to do but I guess Marco Rubio at the very least Marco Rubio is going to the uh the Turkey meeting with with Russia. So we'll see what comes of that.
There's a report in the New York Times that a small company with ties to China uh wants to buy $300 million worth of Trump's meme coins, his his crypto. Now, this this small company with ties to China has never made any money, but somehow they mysteriously have $300 million from some kind of stock transaction. And of all the things in the world that they could put their $300 million into, they've decided that their best play is a Trump memecoin. Does anything does anything sound sketchy about that? Everything. Everything about that sounds sketchy. I'm going to wait for David Sachs to weigh in.
Here's what I don't expect. Oh, that's a good idea. Let's take that money from that that that small company with ties to China that miraculously has $300 million and nothing better to spend it on than meme coins. All right. All right.
Let me say as clearly as possible because I know this is going to come up. I am never going to say that Trump's crypto plays that that are things that are good for Trump and the Trump family. I will never be in favor of that. Right. I will never back him on any crypto stuff. If the Democrats say, "Oh, this is terrible." I'm going to say, "Well, that's there's an opinion." If uh anybody wants to say, "But Scott, is it some kind of 4D chess?" Nope. Nope. I don't see any 4D chess. It It looks like it's stuff that was designed to be good for Trump. And I'm I'm not going to defend it even one second. So I'm completely not in favor of any of the weird crypto stuff, but I also don't understand it completely. I don't believe if I did understand it completely, it would change my mind one bit. So don't look to me to defend him on the crypto stuff. You know, the only thing I can say is that it's transparent. That doesn't give you much. It's It just looks sketchy as all hell to me. But it seems to be legal as far as I know.
Well, how many times have I told you that when people argue with analogies, it's because they don't have an argument. You've heard me say that a number of times, right? Here's a good example. I think it was on the five that the uh whoever the Democrat person was who was sitting then that day was making a an analogy between uh Trump doing business in the Middle East and uh doing licensing deals where the Trump name was put on uh hotels and um and the argument was well you know how's that different than the Biden crime family. If you thought the Biden crime family was bad, why don't you Yeah, it was Maria, what's her last name? Was it Harf? Um, you'll give me the right name in the comments in a minute. But, you know, if you weren't complaining, if you were complaining about the Biden crime family, why wouldn't you complain about Trump, you know, benefiting from his time in office?
So, Harf, yeah, Maria Harf, I guess, uh, was the person on the five. And, uh, of course, you know, Greg Guffel jumped all over it. Did they didn't have quite enough time for him to completely destroy her. But the that is the worst analogy I've ever seen in my life. How do you compare Hunter Biden taking a diamond from the Chinese spy chief that nobody knew about, you know, totally secret while he's working all these deals and violating FAR, you know, violating the law FAR and is, you know, clearly just making money and putting it into secret accounts and having all these secret accounts. How do you compare that to a fully transparent business as usual deal where Trump's name is on the tower like this gigantic Trump name? So, nobody's hiding anything.
Now, I'm also uncomfortable with the Trump business, you know, benefiting from the fact that uh Trump may have some uh some good feelings in other countries. So they want to put his name on buildings. It's not the greatest thing for the country, but you can't compare it to something that is just flat-out illegal. Something that's completely legal and completely transparent. Nobody's hiding anything. It's business as usual for the Trump Trump business to license their name to appropriate projects.
So, uh, remember every time you see an analogy as an argument, the reason people use analogies for an argument is because they don't have an argument. If they had an argument, they would say, "Well, what he's doing is illegal." Oh, okay. Well, that's an argument. Now, that's not the case in this case. But if you have to say, "But what about this analogy to this thing that is illegal?" You don't have any argument. Yeah, that's in my book, Loser Think. You're right.
Well, inflation has reached its lowest since 2021. Um, and I know that the the coverage seems to be pretending that the the tariff stuff didn't make any difference, but there's a timing problem here. The whatever is driving the current inflation probably is what has happened recently, but not as recently as the tariff stuff. So if in fact the disruption from all the tariff threats and negotiations if they have an effect on prices that would still be ahead of us. So it would be incorrect in my opinion to say Trump was right that he could do tariffs and at the same time inflation would not go up. It might be true. It might be true because one of the things I've learned about inflation since my time as an economics major in college was that it seems that nobody understands inflation. On one hand, it seems obvious if you print more money, you have more inflation. I got it right. Yes, got it. Totally understand that. But why can't anybody predict it? What? Why are the experts so bad at predicting inflation? And do you remember stagflation? I mean, that kind of caught people off guard. How can you have stagflation? Then the other thing we don't understand is is it possible that inflation is lower because uh the economic activity got depressed because when you're not selling much you're not raising prices. So is it good news or is it an indication that um demand has has fallen off? I don't trust anything about inflation numbers when everything is going the way it is now. There are too many variables in play. But the only thing I I want to warn you about is if you're pairing these two things and saying, "Oh, inflation is low at the same time as tariff activity is high, therefore the tariff activity has nothing to do with inflation." That would be incorrect. There's probably just a timing problem or other variables that are not fully explored.
Well, meanwhile, James Carville is still trying to get the Democrats to use the right words. And he's added a few words that he thinks are dumb for Democrats to use. He says, "Stop using equity and use equality instead. Stop saying oligarch because nobody knows what it means. Stop with your uh communities, you know, stop having communities like uh LGBTQ plus. He goes, "How about, you know, just everybody's people, you know, stop doing communities and stop doing intersectionality?" Um, and he he said about oligarch, he goes, "This is another really stupid word, oligarch. Who in the f knows what an oligarch is?"
Now I would add to James Carville's complaints. How many people know what habeas corpus is? Now habeas corpus gets to due process for somebody who's locked up. But I'm going to go even further. How many Democrats could define due process? Yeah. You know, most of us are news junkies or you wouldn't be watching this podcast. So, if you're a news junkie, of course you know what due process is. Of course you do. You might even know what habeas corpus is. But how many average Democrats could define either of those terms? There's something about the Democrats that is so disconnected from what the real world is. It It's just hilarious.
But I got a question for you. Um, you know, sometimes I can't tell my own uh influence. Is it my imagination or was I the first person to say that the oligarch term was ridiculous cuz the Democrats don't know what an oligarch is? Was I the first? Because I feel like I was and then it just was everywhere. And what I wondered was would that have happened on its own because the oligarch thing was kind of cooking along for a while and nobody was saying anything like we don't know what an oligarch is until I said it and then right after I said it people started saying it. Was that me? Now that's a genuine question because I have no way to know. But if you know somebody else who is does what I do, you know, talk about the news, was there anybody who beat me to it? Cuz in that case, it was probably them. Uh, but I'm not aware of it. So, and I don't know that everybody would have hit that same idea that we don't know what that the world doesn't know what an oligarch is. I don't know how obvious that was until I pointed it out.
So anyway, um here's what else I would add to it. Um, have you noticed that the Democrats when they talk about uh Trump's first 112 days or whatever it is, they say that it was that it's catastrophic. So they say, well, you know, Trump's so far has been catastrophic. And I say to myself, wait, what? What was catastrophic? I wake up every day and nothing really catastrophic is happening to me. I mean, at least from politics. Are any of you experiencing anything catastrophic? Is it the lower inflation? Is it the border being protected? Is it the deals he's making on tariffs and other things? Is it the potential that he might end some wars? Is that the hoodies stopped bombing us? What exactly is the catastrophic part? Is it that there was one MS13 accused MS-13 guy who was a Maryland dad who didn't get his due process? Is that the catastrophic part? But when you hear anybody try to add anything to it? Uh, they they talk about how he's you know becoming a strong man or you know he's trying to become an authoritarian to which I say hasn't he obeyed the courts so far? Is there a court case or a court order that's just being ignored? Because if he's simply doing things which are pushing the envelope, but then the courts are deciding, you know, what he can get away with and what he can't, that's not okay. So where is the catastrophic part? So I think the Democrats need to get rid of catastrophic and chaos because they can't define either one and they don't give any examples.
All right, I'm going to go contrarian on a Biden story. So, we're we're learning now that the reason uh George Clooney was so uh alarmed that Biden's brain wasn't working is that when he met Biden, Biden didn't recognize George Clooney. Now, on one hand, you would say, "Oh my god, he's the most recognizable actor of of course anybody would recognize George Clooney." On the other hand, has anybody noticed that George Clooney doesn't look like George Clooney anymore? Uh, I don't know what's going on. And I don't know if it's weight loss or because he changed his hair or whatever, but to me, George Clooney doesn't look as much like George Clooney as he used to. Do you think that that could be part of the story? Do you think it's 100% that Biden wasn't very sharp because, you know, he probably knew he was going to run into George Clooney. Somebody probably told him. Or is it possible that he looked right at him and he didn't recognize George Clooney because he doesn't look the same as he did even a year ago? Cuz he doesn't look the same as he did even a year ago. Now, I don't know why. You know, it could be he's, you know, it's because he's doing something for a play or something, but uh I'm not 100% sure that that was a Biden problem. You know, I I could imagine it happening to me. That that's why I'm being a little uh a little uh flexible on that one.
But uh PBS News had a uh video in which a reporter was asking uh Chuck Schumer this question. You said in June of last year that in my dealings with President Biden, I found him to be in command and impressive. Were you being straight with the American public? And Schumer's answer was, "We're just looking forward." Now, that sounds a lot like a confession, doesn't it? We're just looking forward. He's completely surrendered to the idea that he can't keep up the sherad or charade that uh that he wasn't aware that Biden was mentally incapable. It just looks like he just gave up and said, "We're just looking forward." So, you can take that win. So, we'll take the win.
According to Resist the Mainstream, I don't know who they are, but they're claiming that uh Biden's uh got a prostate nodule that was discovered. And that nodule uh was uh had some basal cell carcinoma. These are all words. They're trying to say cancer but not saying the actual word. And uh then a biopsy confirmed that it was basal cell carcinoma. And then they say that all cancerous tissue was successfully removed according to Fox News. Now how did they do that without surgery? Do you believe that he had a cancerous nodule on his prostate and it was 100% removed without surgery or that he had surgery and we didn't hear about it? There's something about this story that doesn't add up. I'm just saying.
Um, you may know uh political commentator Mark Halpern, who I consider, um, I've been watching him for a while. He's got a very good podcast, Twire, I think it's called. And he always seems like a straight shooter, meaning that he's not he's not the spin guy. I can't even tell. Honestly, it's hard to tell what political view he favors. He's he's that balanced. But according to him when he talks about Fetterman because there there are stories that Fetterman has been a little erratic. We don't know what that means exactly but Halperin said uh quote but I can tell you behind the scenes and you know Halperin has really good sources. He goes behind the scenes Fetterman's behavior warrants the commentary it's gotten plus more. I can tell you that. So, Fetterman is in fact acting in a way that um I think from a purely health perspective is concerning. So, if you thought you saw it publicly, well, you were um it was showing up. Now, I hope he gets the uh I hope he gets the help that he needs because it could be anything. Could be anything from well, it could be anything. I I'll I'll just say I would treat this as a health problem and uh I'll just hope he gets better.
Um, according to 404 media, the Republicans are trying to put into their big beautiful uh budget bill AI regulations. Um, a ban on states regulating AI for 10 years because I guess states could do that if they wanted to and that would be very bad. Um, but I think it's not just states, but it's about anybody. So, so the Republicans want AI to uh live free and, you know, do what it can do capitalism wise. I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad idea, but it's in there.
Um, remember Senator Tillis? He apparently came out against Trump's plan to slash drug prices with his executive order. What? What how in the world could he be a Republican senator and be against it? And he calls the most favored nations policy, that's where we get the the best price that any other country gets, shortsighted and unsustainable. Really, it's shortsighted and unsustainable. Really? It It's not just a gigantic financial advantage for senior citizens especially. No, it's shortsighted and unsustainable. Now, do you trust him anymore? I mean, you need a better argument than that for me to think that you're not being influenced by something or someone. So any trust you had in Senator Tillis, I think you should remove. Now, if he has a good argument that for some miraculous reason he's the only one who thought of it, I'm open to it. Yeah, let let's hear a good argument. But that's not an argument shortsighted and unsustainable. You're going to need a little bit more than that. Now, maybe there is a little bit more than that. I haven't seen it. But if nobody else is picking up on his argument, I think you just can't trust him on this or anything else. I mean, it feels like it's just so over the top and obviously not serving the people. So, that's what it feels like.
According to the Daily Wire, there's uh um some advocates for a remittance tax. So when all the illegal migrants send money back to Mexico, there's I guess $86 billion went back in 2023. There's a the the Big Beautiful bill um includes a 5% remittance tax. So, the big beautiful bill is not approved yet, but it might be. And that would be uh some extra free money. I mean, it's not not going to change the the total uh debt situation. It's not that big, but it does feel like we should get something. You know, it feels like a fair thing to tax, but maybe I think that because it's not me. So 5% potential tax. I also wonder how much of those how much of that money that's being sent back is trackable. Do you think it's trackable? I feel like they find ways to send money that are, you know, sort of not trackable, but I don't know the details.
Well, there's a Trump appointed judge who says it's okay for uh Trump to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport those Venezuelan gangs, the Tren de Aragua. That's according to Blaze Media. Um but it but the judge says that the administration has to give them 21 days of notice. How does that work? Do do you do you arrest them in a big operation and then say wait right here for 21 days or can you put them in jail and and then the 21 days starts? I don't know if this is helping as much as it looks like. And I also don't know if this is the final say, but at the moment, at least there's one judge who says that Trump can keep doing these uh deportations. So, I think that's what the administration will do.
Well, I was watching some video of Josh Holly going after the CEO of Allstate Insurance, and apparently there are some whistleblowers. Now, you can't always trust the whistleblowers because remember, whistleblowers sometimes are brave heroes telling us what we need to know. Sometimes they're disgruntled employees who maybe got fired for a good reason, but that's not the way they're going to tell it. So, you have to be careful about your whistleblowers. But there are a couple whistleblowers who say that Allstate essentially um essentially ordered them to to downgrade their estimates of how much they should pay people for the damage to their homes. Now, if that's true and essentially they were being asked to lie because the, you know, the evaluators, what would they be called? uh what's the name of those people? The people who who look at your house and decide how much insurance you're going to get anyway. So those people say
That they would do their work and then the bosses would say, "Well, why don't you change that number so that we give them less money?" Adjusters. Thank you. The adjusters. So if it's true that Allstate was leaning on the adjusters to literally lie because it was good for profit, that's a pretty big problem. And I think Josh Ali is doing good work to expose that.
In related news, another insurance company that I always, I always confuse with Allstate—Farm, because they both have "State" in the name—uh, they've requested and been granted a 17% premium increase in California, but they still won't cover wildfires. And the 17% is just the first part of what they want. They want 30%. So insurance companies are not doing great. I mean, I, I guess it's better that they exist than they don't, but they're not really helping California too much, and they, they're starting to look more like the enemy than the, uh, than the safety.
In some technology news, according to Engineering and Technology, there's an electrolysis technique that now can convert seawater directly into hydrogen without desalinating it first. Now, apparently, it is so efficient that it can be, and it looks like it can be ramped up to industrial scale, but so efficient that you can use solar power to create the, uh, the hydrogen. So, in theory, if you're a place that's near seawater and you get a lot of sun, you can just put this new industrial-scale production thing there, and it will just keep running and create a bunch of hydrogen that is worth more than the cost of the installation. Now that would be pretty, pretty amazing, actually. So, I don't know if this is the thing that will change the world, but every time I see something like this, I think, man, you really can't predict where anything is going. Cuz if you can simply put up some solar panels and, uh, dip a hose in the ocean and suddenly you're making hydrogen forever, that's kind of awesome. It's kind of awesome. So, it looks like that's coming.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's what I got for today. Looks like mostly good news, and watching Trump do his thing in the Middle East is awesome. Um, so, uh, let's keep an eye on that. But I'm going to talk privately to the, uh, to the subscribers on Locals, and the rest of you, thanks for joining, and I'll see you same time, same place tomorrow morning because I never rest. Neither should you. Local supporters coming at you in 30 seconds. Private