Chapter 1: What are the highlights of today's news?
people, so my voice is still a little sketchy. We'll see if it improves. But we'll get as far as we can today in that thing we all enjoy. This time we'll do the same. Not much news today, but we'll do the best we can. Come on in. And while you're streaming in, this would be a perfect time to remind you why you're here. You're here for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass or tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, or a vessel of mankind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better is cold. That's right, the simultaneous sip. It happens now. So good. So, so good.
Well, let's check in on the news. It's the first day of the year. If you don't have your Dilbert calendar, believe it or not, you can still hurriedly get one by the end of, I don't know, probably just taking a few days. You wouldn't miss much. Well, there's a new robotic skin for robots. So researchers have developed a neuromorphic robotic electronic skin.
So apparently the skin that you put on your robot could judge intensity, danger, and injury risk. So do you think that's going to be the killer app for robot skin? Would you get a robot with skin just because it's easier at identifying pain? This seems mean. It would be mean to the robot. I think it's slightly more likely that the killer app will be sex.
Because it's no fun to have sex with a robot if you're just banging metal. But what if the robot could feel every sensation? Are you telling me that if you made the robot soft enough, and you gave it a skin so it could act as though you were doing something good to it. Like, ooh, ooh. Are you telling me that's not the killer app? Of course it is. Of course it is.
But do you know why the robot industry keeps talking about hands, you know, really good hands, and they keep talking about, you know, stuff like skin? But what they're not talking about, because they can't do it, is real intelligence. So we'll see what happens from that.
There's an article in Ars Technica talking about how this might be the year that AI gets sort of, I won't say debunked, but that the skepticism about AI will be a little more obvious.
so after we've got what two years of ai and it still can't do actual generic reason so but it's got good hands and it could do somersaults it might have good skin but you know it can't get past the hallucinations and it doesn't look like there's any way to do it that we know of if there was a way to do it meaning make the ai actually intelligent like we want it to be, you would already see it.
There's no way you wouldn't have seen it by now. So I think the rest of the world is catching up with what is hype and what is real. Now, I'm going to take some credit for being one of the first people to say, after I played with the large language models a little bit, I was one of the first people to say, uh-oh. This doesn't look like you could ever have a path to general reason.
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Chapter 2: How is AI perceived in the current landscape?
Here's something I didn't know. There were multiple times we discovered actual wiretap electronics in product samples we were given. So apparently China gives them samples of stuff, and when we look at it, it's literally wiretap. He said the The rest apply to everything that's made with Chinese components, computers, servers, phones, drones.
You said the super micro incident in the United States where certain server farms had Chinese components. Here's the fun part. Chinese components smaller than a grain of rice were stealing very sensitive information from the computer. And then he asked, how many Chinese computers exist in critical utilities and infrastructure and military? He reckons millions, at least. Millions.
So here's another example. where whatever you thought was how bad it was, and the it that I'm talking about is fraud, debt, or anything else, as soon as you think you know how bad it was, you find out it's a million times worse. A million times worse. I would not have even been able to imagine that they had put components the size of a grain of rice in everything they ship.
So that's a wake-up call. Well, speaking of that in China, according to Newsmax, Trump is saying that we set a world record in attracting investment to the United States and that we attracted more investment to the U.S. than China attracted. And he says that's entirely because of tariffs. Now, I think it's true that the recent surge in investments is entirely because of tariffs.
So I'm going to give him the yes on that. But you might remember that in around 2018, when I lost my stepson to fentanyl, that I started persuading as hard as I could that China was unsafe for business. Now, I think... That made a dent.
So I think there was a priming that happened so that the businesses were already disinclined to put their money there if they had a choice of putting it somewhere else. So between the persuasion that China is unsafe for business, which started out as me just saying it and people telling me I was crazy, Almost nobody agreed.
There were a few people who knew what China was up to that did agree, that China was stealing all of our IP and spying on us and had bad intentions. But for the most part, people said, Scott, Scott, Scott, there's no way this spigot is going to get turned off. There will only be more investment in China. And I disagreed. So here we are, the investment in the U.S.,
seems to be far exceeding that in China at the moment, but I will agree that the tariffs are the prime reason for that at the moment. So I saw a post by Paul Mars on X, and it started with, why do people believe that taxing billionaires, which is what California wants to do more, is suddenly going to fix all our problems? And I've been waiting for this. Somebody finally did the math.
So if you do the math, and you took the top six billionaires in California, and you took 5% of their wealth, how much would you get? Well, you'd get about $94 billion. That means the deficit... the deficit would be 1.7 trillion instead of 1.8. Now, that would be for the whole country, I think, not for California.
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Chapter 3: What is Tesla's new car rental service about?
Is that what you would expect, that by now there would be 60 people just for the Minnesota scams? So that doesn't even count all the Russia collusion hoaxes overthrowing the government and all that. But no prominent people yet. And if you're like me, and I know you are, if you don't see any prominent people get indicted soon, you're going to feel like not enough happened.
Speaking of prominent people. So according to Justice News, the Justice Department still has 5.2 million Epstein documents to review. And that the Department of Justice has 400 attorneys assigned to just the Epstein review. What would you be happier about? Would you be happier if those 400 attorneys were immediately moved to prosecuting people who need to be prosecuted?
Or would you be happier that the 400 attorneys spend their days looking through useless documents that in the end we won't see any of the good stuff anyway? And does it seem to you that the number of Epstein documents is increasing? Increasing instead of decreasing? And I'm wondering, how in the hell do the Epstein documents keep increasing? Have the documents found a way to procreate?
Here's what I think. I think if you leave enough Epstein documents in a room, they will start having sex with each other. And then it will produce offspring, which are like the new documents that they keep finding. So every time they open the door, they're like, whoa, what have you been up to? Looks like a lot more documents in here than last time.
So unless the documents have learned how to reproduce, this looks suspiciously like an attempt to slow things down until we run out of steam. So I don't trust anything about the Epstein documents. Well, speaking of scams, I'm all burpy.
Speaking of scams, the Virgin Islands are suing Meta because they claim that Meta allowed a bunch of scam ads on their platform that scammed lots of people out of money. And the reason that they allowed it, allegedly, is because Meta made a lot of money by running the ads for the scams. Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the reason they didn't take the ads down is not because they didn't know they were scams, but because they made a lot of money running the ads? Well, apparently a lot of money was involved, but that doesn't make us know their thinking. What they claim is that they had an internal review process that sort of prevented them from taking down more than they did, I guess.
We'll see. All right, according to Climate Realism, there's a publication called The LAist that wrote an article last week titled, The Poor Are in a Very Bad State, Climate Change Accelerates California's Cost of Living Crisis. So believe it or not, even today, a publication is claiming that the prices in California are up, not because of the policies,
not because of the policies about climate change, but because of climate change itself, for which I believe there is no evidence whatsoever. It makes me wonder, do the people who write those articles know they're full of shit and they're just trying to fool you? Or are they actually so far inside a bubble that they think that the prices are up because of climate change?
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the alleged attack on Putin's residence?
His evidence was based on his own ability to read a mind because how would he know what Trump believed about the election? In my opinion, Trump genuinely believed, as I do, that the election was rigged. Now, even the fact that people may have acted on that, that would still be free speech, right? Because there's no evidence that he did it for the purpose of targeting a lawful government function.
There's every bit of evidence he did it because he believed it was true that the election was rigged. And as we get further and further into the post-election environment, it does look like he was right. So not only was he right, but he had every reason to believe it was right. But Jack Smith is defending his team because they could read his mind
and find out that his real intent was to overthrow the government and that somehow he knew it was a legal election or a non-rigged election. So the word knowingly was always the biggest part of the hoax.
The January 6th hoax, I'm going to call it a hoax, that there was an insurrection depended entirely on believing that you could read Trump's mind and that the things he was saying, he knew not to be true. Even while it looks true to me, it looks like he was completely accurate and there was no evidence whatsoever that he thought that was a clean election. None. So we'll see where that goes.
Well, Eric Swalwell, who you might know as the person who has the worst take in every situation. He's running for governor of California. And if he becomes governor, he promises he'll make sure federal agents are charged with, quote, kidnapping and assault, and will take away their driver's licenses. That guy has the worst take on everything. Take away ISIS driver's licenses. That's just absurd.
But at least he's consistent. All right. Speaking of consistent, you probably know that Elon's building a giant AI factory called Micro Harder, with two R's at the end, to basically crush Microsoft. So remember what I told you? I guess it has 100,000 supercomputers in it. or will. And he's going to train Grok so hard that he can do what Microsoft can do just by asking him to do it, I guess.
So remember when I told you years ago that smartphones would become just a dumb phone that could do AI? and that the phone would just be a screen and some kind of wireless thing, and then sound. And Elon confirmed that on one of his podcasts, that he sees someday that the phone has no apps, it's just an AI. And I think this micro harder is that. So...
when he was asked if he would build a phone, he didn't say yes, because I don't think he thinks phones are the future. I think he thinks this is his future. So there's a non-zero chance, if this works, that the entire smartphone industry will become whatever Elon wants it to, and he'll own this. And that would just be one thing he did. Imagine having
so many accomplishments that replacing smartphones with entirely new technology would just be one of the things he did. That's just one thing. So I guess the US military, was it the other day, did strikes on three more alleged narco-terrorist vessels. They were traveling as a convoy, so we took them all out. You know, I don't know about you, but my empathy for anybody else is way down.
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Chapter 5: Why is China considered unsafe for business?
If we had seen one claim about the Russia collusion hoax, we might say to ourselves, that's just a claim, that's nothing. If only one entity had told us that that stuff was true and it obviously wasn't. we might have said, oh, but these other entities don't say it's true. But what happened was, for the first time in American history, I think, that the people who colluded were all of our
or what we thought were credible organizations. So you had the fake news saying it was true. You had the intelligence agencies saying it was true. You had the FBI, the DOJ, and the entire Democrat machine saying it was true. I'm talking about the Russia collusion hoax. Now, that's what I call laundry list persuasion. When you don't have anything that's individually persuasive,
But you just throw just a fire hose of claims. And then on top of the fire hose of claims, you have a fire hose of previously credible entities that gave up all their credibility to go all in on it because they were so afraid of Trump. So I call that laundry list persuasion. So I've explained this before. If you say Trump did one thing bad, people would discount it.
But if you say he did this and this and this and this and this, people assume that there's truth in there because there's so much. There's so much smoke, there must be fire. But that's not the case. That's just laundry list persuasion. And I guess this book does a good job of showing how screwed we were.
Well, did you know, according to, let's say, New York Times, that when Trump backed off on funding weapons for Ukraine, it didn't stop our involvement, that the CIA took over. And they didn't do the same thing that we were doing, but they didn't have a funding cut. and the CIA helped Ukraine target the most sensitive Russian places they could attack.
So it looks like the CIA helped Ukraine work smarter, not harder. So instead of raw weapons and raw military, The CIA helped them get just the stuff that was affordable and would make a big difference on the Russian economy. How many of you are surprised that the CIA just kept doing what they were doing? Of course they did. Of course they did.
Now, the indication is that Trump was in favor of that. So as long as it wasn't obvious what they were doing, he wanted to keep the pressure on Putin. All right, ladies and gentlemen, there's not much news happening today. A lot of it looks like a repeat. Every time I turn on X, it's another claim of another state with another giant fraudulent thing they just discovered. I'm getting tired of it.
But I am worried that there is no solution for California's debt and that however bad I think it's going to get in California, it might get worse. Now, I will say that the one thing we have going for us is the Adams law of slow moving disasters. I hope that the disaster, which is California's debt problem and fraud problem, I hope
that we've all known about it long enough that somebody's figuring out what to do about it. And I don't know what that would be. It doesn't look like it's solvable in any mathematical way that I can understand. But I would expect that maybe in the next year, maybe two, there's going to be some shock to the system that's beyond anything we've imagined. Now, I don't know what that is.
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