Everyone knows I think AI is garbage and should never be trusted to do the work for you. You always have to Do Your Own Research for real to ensure AI hasn’t conned you or left things out or misstated things. Think of it as a sketchy high school dropout on weed and act accordingly. Hence AI can be “a” useful tool as part of a research process (see my advice in How to Use Pseudo-AI). But part of even that is telling the difference between critical thinking as a skill, and sending bots out to ballpark some data for you. I realized this recently with an endlessly rich example that just happened: “MAGA Millionaire Flamed for Telling Gen Z to Skip Iced Coffee” tells the tale of yet another poncy MAGA elite hiding behind the guarded walls of their mega-estate built on the backs of wage slaves: Tomi Lahren, the infamously racist, plutocratic, Neoconfederate cabalist.

No. Really. AI told me:

Actually I personally know a lot more evidence of that point than AI gophered for me on the quick here, so I didn’t need AI to tell me this. It’s just a public fact. But I wanted to get you started with an example.

Because I had so many more questions about this than everyone else rightly pwned her for (see the link above). But also what they did pwn her for reveals something about the difference between thinking critically and thinking like an idiot. And walking through what I mean by this, I realized, can generate not just awareness but actual understanding of her tweet being idiotic—and why she would never have said that had she thought critically for five minutes.

That so many Americans are acting like her is why we need urgent tutorials helping to get Americans to stop thinking like an idiot and thinking with productively critical intelligence instead. So I am going to walk you through my complete thought process here. Which I completed, with research and screen shots, in approximately thirteen minutes (and I know that because I just checked my timestamped search history and did the math). But had I not been screenshotting and organizing a blog around it, this would have taken less than five. Five minutes is now the difference between intelligence and stupidity.

The crucial overstory here is the questions I thought to ask. I did not get those from AI. They came from my own mind, all of them in under a minute. I only used AI to answer them, and even then only to ballpark that answer. If I needed to be sure, I know how to fact-check the AI’s responses, and would have if any of it really mattered to my point today. You should fact-check them yourself, without AI, if you don’t trust any of the answers I will be screenshotting here. Especially since I used the dumbest AI (the free Gemini native to Google Search now).

The lesson here is not “just believe all these AI replies.” Rather, it’s the questions I thought to ask AI to answer for me. We could run those down to reliability with a little more work, as I explained in my previous tutorial. But I’m skipping that step this time because I don’t think that will change anything fundamental about my point. Refinement of numbers and details will only perfect the same picture. And in this case I suspect there are no egregious errors, because the questions I asked are the kind of generic and widely available public information AI most often gets right, because, statistically, so does the internet. And AIs are just regurgitating the internet (plus billions of pirated books and private messages and whatever shit they dump into these things now).

Notice two things here. Not once do I ever ask AI to do my thinking for me. I only used it as a gopher—and one I don’t fully trust at that. It is working in service to my own thinking. And it is that thinking (thinking for yourself, and knowing how to do that well) that makes the difference between being an idiot and being genuinely intelligent. And I don’t mean IQ intelligent, but actually intelligent, which even someone who tests poorly can be, because this is just a learned skill, not some biological constraint. The second thing is this: what all my questions have in common is curiosity. And that is another absolutely crucial lesson you need to learn here, by seeing it in action, to see how it gets different results than Lahren’s tinfoil methodology, which makes facts fit her emotions rather than the other way around.

So let’s spend a beat on this point.

Rather than just gullibly believing something I’m being told, or just thought to myself (least of all because it maybe sounds like it might be right, or grooms my ego or ideology or identity or something), I immediately asked several questions of the form, “Wait, is that even true?” That I asked these questions, and genuinely believed I should find out first, is what makes the difference between idiocy and intelligence. Indeed it’s what makes the difference between you being an easily manipulated dupe of a captured and polarized media culture, and being someone with a robust defense against the dark arts instead, who thus actually gets at the truth of things.

For this being a real thing, see How Not to Be an Idiot: Lessons from Elon Musk, where I show how it really is curiosity, as a value and habit, that is the one actual thing making the difference between you or me, and idiots like Musk or Lahren. Which is why this isn’t IQ intelligence we are talking about here. Curiosity generates all of this. So that’s all you need. Not a faster brain or something. Maybe you need ten minutes to do what I can do in five. Doesn’t matter. Take the ten and you’ll get it done.

The Setup

It all started with a tweet last week. I am here screencapping that tweet under Christopher Hale’s reply, which is representative of the laughingstock she made of herself, but only touches a tip of the critical thinking iceberg. But let’s start there (I assembled this image to get it all in one shot, but the text is all as-published):

Lahren says “Two things can be true at once,” an opening that is actually mocking a trendline in liberal hot-takes on various things of late but we’re not here to explore the aesthetic history of her word choices, other than that this makes what follows even funnier, which are the “two things” she thinks can be true at once: “1) Things are way too expensive right now. Food, gas, groceries- all high” and “2) The Gen Zers bitching about it all also get a daily iced coffee, wear Alo apparel, and don’t know what it means to live within their means.”

This eventually received hundreds of thousands of views. But Hale almost immediately replied, “Tomi and her husband’s net worth is north of $10 million. I’m sure blaming Gen Z kids living paycheck to paycheck for overspending on Chipotle will be a winning message in November.” Which is the material point: she’s shooting her own political party in the foot with this “Let them eat cake!” take on why everyone is economically fucked. It isn’t their craving for Chipotle. And the voters know it. So she’s being an idiot even as a liar. She can’t even tell a lie but to score an own goal with it.

But that’s not the kind of stupidity I will be exploring here (though I am grateful for it—the best gift of all is fascists being so dumb they ruin their own elections). But it does segue into what I do want to explore. Of course Marie Antoinette probably never said that famous line, it was a meme more than anything, but the joke is that when she was told the public were storming her palace because they had no bread to eat she cluelessly went all Tomi Lahren and said why don’t those idiots eat cake then—not realizing cake is made from bread. The gist is: the elite are so out of touch they don’t even know how basic things work, least of all for the poor, and so they suggest fantastically stupid things instead of real solutions. This is precisely what Lahren just did. And it’s why her party is electorally a bleeding animal right now. The only difference is that Lahren actually said the stupid thing. It wasn’t a satire. She’s Poe’d herself.

The Initial Questions

There are lots of things one could say in response to her. Like, did she just tell Gen Z to boycott capitalist corporations and drive them out of business? Yes. Yes she did. Does she know that’s what she said? No. She be dumb. She has no idea how deep her foot just went into her mouth here. Or, did she just admit coffee and clothes are brutally overpriced and Gen Z is therefore correct to “bitch” about it—while simultaneously bitching about them bitching about it? Yes. Yes she did. Face. Palm. We’ll get to that, but “you should stop complaining about things being expensive and just not buy things” is not the hottest of takes when the cost of housing, medical care, and consumable and durable goods is crushing everyone.

And, of course, there’s the classic false generalization fallacy, “some Gen Zers do a thing, therefore they all do the thing” (and “no one else does that thing”), and the equally classic non sequitur, “coffee and clothes are expensive, therefore you could afford to live fine if you just stopped buying them,” which does not address how much would even be saved by such a desperate move—would that help? Indeed, is this even the problem? Do Gen Zers “not know what it means to live within their means”? That does not follow from what she has stated. She hasn’t supplied the missing premise that would complete the syllogism. And it seems unlikely she could. So she’s bad at enthymemes, too.

But my first thought was, rather, are any of those things even true? Because I trust Tomi Lahren infinitely less than even AI. Like, are Gen Zers buying absurd amounts of expensive coffees? This sounds like a trope, just something marketing says. But are they? Like, the whole generation? Are they just peculiarly mad for designer coffee? And I had never even heard of Alo as a company. I assume it’s expensive? But my Gen Z nephews and nieces are all getting their clothes at thrift shops, not designer salons. So is there some irrational overspend by impoverished Gen Zers on designer clothes I haven’t heard of? Are they actually going bankrupt over an addiction to designer clothes? Seemed unlikely. So I had questions.

Curiosity. The essential step one.

The Great Coffee Condundrum

Claim one: Gen Z “daily” buys “iced coffee.” Which presumably means some sort of expensive iced coffee and not a three dollar takeaway from Dunken Doughnuts. And actually daily, rather than being just a work week essential to labor productivity. Like, she must imagine some sort of fancy $7 coffee at Starbucks or something (the highest price for the stuff I could find commonly anywhere—setting aside Beverly Hills…and airports). So that was my first question put to AI…

So, AI did a pretty good job here. First, it said yes, they do. Which I didn’t know so was glad to learn. I’m sure it hasn’t fudged this. It does appear to be a thing. One of the points of curiously asking if something is true is finding out it is. But it goes on to add nuance. Which, incidentally, it would have done if Lahren had asked this question. She’d be reading essentially the same output I am here. The most pertinent datum here is what must be all over the internet, for AI not only to know this but to statistically think it relevant to my question, the question of why Gen Z is peculiarly spending on this: it’s an “affordable luxury: buying a specialty drink functions as a micro-reward or a form of self-care when major milestones like housing feel out of reach.”

Which illustrates a numeracy point: if you are making a surplus of a hundred a month, that’s nowhere near enough to buy a car or a house or anything actually important, so what else are you going to spend it on? Even if you saved it, it just wouldn’t help. The coffee buy is actually evidence of poverty: they can’t afford nice things, unless they are comparatively cheap things; which actually justifies their bitching that that is the case, exactly the opposite of Lahren’s take. The average buy, AI claims, is $51 a month. If that’s correct (you’d have to check) then it’s not the daily luxury she was claiming. That’s only seven $7 buys a month. Not even two a week, much less one a day. And if you forewent it, like a monk from Sparta, you’d end up with an amazing $612 a year. Which is barely a month of groceries. One month. It’s not even one third of one month of the average rent in America.

In fact, Average and median houses in America go for about half a million, give or take. Ours cost a quarter and it was bottom of the market in our region. Unless you have some ace up your sleeve (like being a military veteran and married), you’re going to need a minimum of 15% to cover down and closing costs. I lucked out at half that (being a military veteran and married). It would have taken us 32 years to raise that by “foregoing” $51 a month in worker productivity drugs (maybe 20 years by earning interest). For the average player, it’s 122 years (15% of $500,000 at $612 a year). No human lives as long. But, hey, if you can get that money into a decent interest earning account, you could do it in maybe 30 years. Just in time to retire in exhaustion.

So, no. Seven mugs of flavored caffeine a month is not Gen Z’s problem. But hey, Tomi, if you really want Gen Z to boycott coffee franchises and kill entire corporations and supply chains, losing millions of American jobs, you go girl.

But wait. We forgot something. Gen Z was complaining about your Point 1 that you admitted was true: things cost too much. So…what do these fancy coffees actually cost?

Oh shit…

Wait. Really? That $7 iced coffee (just coffee and ice and some trivial flavorings) actually costs a dollar. Yet they charge seven. That makes it look like Gen Z’s complaint is spot on: why do they have to pay seven times what that thing is worth? But I’m curious, remember? So, to double check, I asked the question a different way, because I realize my question left something out, and the AI isn’t smart, so it won’t have thought of that—I had to. I first asked what the actual unit cost was; but now I asked what the markup is, which gets the same answer except this time statistics prompted the AI to add something it forgot last time:

So, in the end, assuming AI hasn’t mucked any these results up, we get a clearer picture: though the direct markup on a $7 iced coffee is around maybe 500%, really it’s more like 100% when you count all the corporate waste, fat cat executive compensation packages, and real conglomerate costs like marketing, debt service, and rent.

But I realized again that I have to check on something here: I have to try and prove this false first, before I can believe it’s true. So I asked a much simpler question: what is Starbucks’ annual profit margin. The answer is about 10%, give or take, which is not egregious, but typical of fair business. Only a few percent of that goes to fat cat compensation packages (though that’s still hundreds of millions on a four billion revenue). So I think the real problem is not cost. Starbucks is also getting crushed by that:

Skyrocketing rent, skyrocketing commodities, skyrocketing construction and marketing and financing costs, even static wage inflation, are leaving even Starbucks no choice but to charge seven dollars for a one dollar coffee just to earn a tenth of all its costs back in profit.

So, no. The real problem is wages: the reason $7 sounds so expensive is because people are not being paid what they are worth. Which, oh yeah, we already know (per Forbes):

Wages and worker productivity grew equally until the 1970s, when elites starting siphoning the gains for themselves instead. Since then, wages stayed level while productivity growth continued unabated, resulting in the largest disparity in a century: productivity is up 239% since 1948, more than double the 97% of 1973, while wages are at 109%, marginally above the 91% of 1973. In other words, the rich are not sharing with the working class as they were before 1973 and are now taking over two dollars for our every one. It just so happens this divergence exactly matches that of the decline of unions and rise of offshoring to slave factories abroad (per The Lever):

Here we see the share of income going to the top 10% declined and rose exactly in proportion to union membership since 1910, producing the exact same shape and disparity. These and other results corroborate the conclusion: what Gen Z is really bitching about is getting screwed in their pay. That manifests as sticker shock at prices. But it’s not really the prices. If robber barons had not taken over and leeched all the wealth away, and in result workers were being paid what they were actually worth, as their grandparents had been for over half a century, they would not be complaining. A seven dollar coffee would be trivial. Even if we account for inflation adjusted for the rise in labor costs and buying power, it would not be the “absurd luxury” Tomi Lahren absurdly thinks it is. Of course it’s in fact even now a poor man’s luxury, a luxury of poverty and desperation: the cheap treat one can afford in a world where fundamentals like owning a house are literally impossible. The crumbs on the floor.

Of course, I learned all that on my own. I didn’t need AI for that. I checked. Years ago. Because I was curious. Tomi Lahren isn’t curious. And that’s why she is stupid. She doesn’t know that buying a mere handful of nice coffees a month that each really cost a trifle isn’t some budget-busting travesty but a last ditch effort to get anything desirable in an economy that so criminally underpays everyone that they can’t afford anything better. Lahren does not understand why coffees cost seven dollars. Or why the poor buying them is actually evidence of their poverty, not their irresponsibility. She doesn’t understand where the problem is or why Gen Z is right to complain about it. Because she lacks any curiosity whatsoever. She never asks, “Why is this the case?” She didn’t do any of the things I did above, and yet barfs out an embarrassing opinion with immovable confidence. Because she has no comprehension of what not being an idiot looks like.

The Alo Mystery

Okay. So what about her second item of evidence? The first doesn’t carry her thesis. Gen Z spends only trivially on nice coffee, and the problem keeping them from getting ahead isn’t their spending but their pay—and the fact that coffee is their luxury is actually evidence of that, not their poor budget management. But what’s with Alo? Whatever that is. That was so strangely specific I was more skeptical here. Do Gen Z go crazy buying one expensive brand, and that’s causing them to miss rent? Seems unlikely.

Here my curiosity started with a broader question: does Gen Z buy a lot of expensive clothes? Does Lahren mean Alo as just a stand-in for a larger trend?

So, AI says, no. Instead, I learn something new (assuming this AI didn’t choke here): that Gen Z actually relies on hacks, such as buying knockoffs (“dupes”) or getting one or two durable items that are expensive and wear them a long time, while pairing them with cheap, often thrift-bought clothing. Which tracks my personal experience with Gen Z.

As Gemini cobbled together the notion:

Gen Z does not buy expensive luxury clothes in high volumes; instead they heavily favor secondhand shopping, affordable entry-level items, and budget-friendly “dupes” over full-price designer labels. While they spend a large portion of their disposable income on fashion, economic pressures and a shift in values have caused many to pull back from traditional high-end brands.

And therefore, actually:

A vast majority of Gen Z regularly purchase lower-cost lookalikes or alternative brands rather than paying higher prices … [likewise] used and resale [clothing] … and [if they even] do buy high-end labels, they tend to mix one expensive accessory or statement piece with budget-friendly everyday clothing … [and being] budget-conscious [they] prefer smaller branded items … [believing] modern luxury prices do not reflect actual quality or fair craftsmanship … [because they prefer] personal expression, ethics, and financial caution.

This sounds like exactly the opposite picture Lahren painted of Gen Z. They are budget smart. Not reckless. They seem evidently to know very well how to live within their means. What they are griping about is their means. And Lahren would know that if she had an ounce of curiosity—as that would have motivated her to check and discover what I did. Now, sure, you can say I am over-trusting AI here. Fair enough. But I doubt any fact-check would get a different result. It looks to me like Gemini is regurgitating the most commonly documented reporting by the marketing and fashion industries. I suspect all this will track. (But do find out.)

So now I have a new question. If Gen Z is avoiding expensive brands to be budget conscious, what’s Lahren’s line about Alo about? She seems to think every member of Gen Z is bopping around town in “Alo apparel.” Is this because the only Gen Z people she ever sees are in ads (who don’t exist—that’s what marketers want her to think, not what’s actually happening—is she that gullible?) or in high-end neighborhoods (since she, a rich-b, is less likely to be slumming it anywhere) and thus not representative of Gen Z at all? Or maybe she read some complainer clickbait sky-is-falling article somewhere about all these whippersnapper wearing too many whooziboobles. Who knows. But now my question was: “Do Gen Z buy Alo clothing a lot?”

So now I learn what Alo is: Yoga clothing, particularly leggings, skirts, trousers, and streetwear. Why do penny pinchers buy it? AI says because the Alo brand “acts as an accessible luxury and lifestyle marker for young consumers.” Ah. Note the word accessible luxury. So now I’m thinking Alo isn’t actually all that expensive.

Lahren got coffee wrong (seven dollars a mug, fifty dollars a month in mugs, isn’t the budget breaker she let on). Did she get Alo wrong? Yeah. AI says the “average price for a product at Alo” is $60 to $150. That’s hardly designer prices. By comparison, Jason Wus (a brand Lahren has worn) go in the thousands. I googled around without AI and got the general impression Lahren herself wears items in the hundreds of dollars price range, though sometimes slums in stuff just under the Alo price range (she also runs her own clothing company competing with Alo that undercuts their prices, just FYI). But that range is not really a budget killer. It’s just slightly more expensive than regular clothes.

But maybe Gen Z is just going mad and buying too much Alo? My first question here was the one of suspecting availability bias: is this actually Gen Z or just the top 10% of Gen Z? In other words, is it really just the wealthy few Gen Zers buying a lot of this, and not the Gen Zers who are complaining? Has Lahren confused two different groups of people? Or, as well or alternatively, are Gen Zers just buying these items rarely, and thus to no actual effect on their annual budgets? It does occur to me that rich people forget—they forget what it was like to be poor, if ever they had been. So they forget things like: when we buy a clothing item, we wear it for, like, ten fucking years. Lahren, being rich as fuck, may be used to buying new clothes like weekly groceries, forgetting that Gen Z isn’t doing that. They’re doing what the rest of us do: buy, like, one nice item and wear it to death, which makes its actual amortized value trivial, not a bankbuster.

I didn’t run all those possibilities down, I just did the first one, but one could check the others. The lesson though is that I thought to ask all these questions on my own, almost immediately upon reading her tweet. My followup on that curiosity only strengthened those questions. And Lahren didn’t think of any of this. That’s the difference between being smart and being an idiot: just curiosity + followup.

So what do we get when we ask “what percentage of Alo customers actually are Gen Z?”

Okay, 41%. Almost half. That explains the AI’s previous answer.

But how many actual customers is that?

So best data we have is 10 million visitors to its website a month, which would be 120 million a year, dwarfing their mere 50 stores worldwide; and visits does not mean sales, which will be a lot less. AI claims their web sales make up 65% of all sales. But AI also says there is only a repeat purchase rate of 16.5% long-term. If those data are correct (you’d have to check to be sure), that means most customers by far only ever buy maybe one item there, or shop there only once. This destroys Lahren’s assumption that they are buying too much of it. Amortized over five years a single average Alo buy of $100 amounts to about $20 a year. That’s not causing any household budget crisis. In fact, that looks like good budget management, the opposite of her thesis.

What about the 1 in 6 who buy more than one item? 16.5% of 120 million is about 20 million a year, and again that’s a gross overcount of actual customers, even adding in their brick-and-mortar traffic. Now here is where intelligence over stupidity comes in: does even 20 million customers worldwide walking around with more than one piece by Alo sound like much to you?

Right? So my question then became: how many Gen Zers are there?

Okay, about 70 million in the U.S. But wait, Alo is a global brand (if you check, you’ll find they ship to over fifty nations and have several international locations). How many Gen Zers are there in the developed world? (I’m carelessly assuming not many Alo customers exist outside the developed world, but who knows.)

So, AI says, lowball estimate of 150 million.

Okay. Assuming AI didn’t mess up any of these numbers too egregiously (again, check before being certain; here I’m just walking you through how to think this through once you’ve verified the data): 20 million repeat customers worldwide, only 41% of whom are Gen Z, gets us about 8 million repeat Gen Z customers of Alo apparel worldwide. The U.S. houses half the pertinent Gen Z market, so we’re talking about just 4 million Americans. Given that Gen Z in America tallies to 70 million or so, we’re talking about six percent of Gen Z. Less than ten percent. I don’t know about you, but just thinking in terms of probability, what do you want to guess the odds are that those are the rich? As I suspected, Lahren is complaining about a minuscule elite of Gen Zers splurging on fashion—the lucky 6% earning well over $100,000 a year. The average Gen Z income is below $40,000 (if they even have a full time job). All of which means the vast and overwhelming majority of Gen Zers rarely buy more than one item from Alo in any appreciable amortization period.

So Tomi Lahren is full of shit.

But let’s get back to the point.

I immediately—immediately—thought to ask these questions the moment I saw her tweet. She never thought to ask these questions, not before she typed the tweet, nor still since. And that is the only thing that makes the difference between an idiot and an intelligent person. It’s not your IQ. It’s your curiosity. And your learned and practiced skill at answering it reliably, to run down your questions, and to test your results to be sure. I actually was curious to understand what was going on with Gen Z and fancy coffees and Alo, and whether these even were things, and what really were the causes of them, and how to actually test a hypothesis like “Gen Z are irresponsible with money,” least of all with her bizarre data points and missing premises. So I did. And that’s why I am not an idiot. She didn’t. And that’s why she’s an idiot.

Conclusion

Lahren’s stupidity is typical of the right-wing elite and influencer base, who tend to be absurdly rich and never knew or quickly forgot what life is like for normal people and why they do what they do and why they are so short on money.

I am always reminded of a moment years ago from Tucker Carlson—another absurdly rich fuckhead…

On national television he literally complained (bitched and moaned being not far off the mark descriptively) that no one in America is poor because so many people (he brought up some stat like 95% or whatever) have a refrigerator in their home. This was hilarious because it meant Carlson didn’t know (1) most Americans didn’t buy and don’t own that refrigerator (their landlord does) or (2) fridges are long-lived and cheap and thus easily financed for the poor. Even today, you can get a decent unit new for just $500; when Tucker barfed his thought, it was $400; and used units even today go for as low as $300 or even, if you’re lucky, $50. And they last over ten years. So even at the top end and getting abusively wrecked on interest in a loan for it, that’s under $200 a year, or about sixteen bucks a month.

This tells you Carlson, like Lahren, is utterly clueless and thus completely unqualified to have opinions about economics or average Americans. They don’t even know basic common things.

An intelligent person would conclude from this that they should never listen to anything they say. Their opinions are worthless and just wastes of time to even spend calories hearing or reading. But that’s a media literacy problem I covered before (in A Vital Primer on Media Literacy). The problem today is the crucial and vital importance of cultivating curiosity as an intellectual virtue. And then taking seriously the effort to find out the truth of things, even before uttering opinions on them, much less actually believing something. And this all has to come from you, not AI. You can productively use AI to gather data, provided you apply the correct and needed cautions. But not to think. You have to do that. The curiosity has to come from you. The thinking about the results and whether they are true or what they entail, that has to come from you.

Otherwise you’ll end up an idiot like Tomi Lahren.