Banks Go Crony On Crypto, Inflation Hits A New Low, & Updates from Minnesota

Key Takeaway

Banks are using regulatory capture to prevent stable coins from paying interest to users, maintaining their monopolistic control over your money. While crypto companies want to pay you competitive yields on your deposits (backed 1:1 by treasuries), banks lobbied politicians to ban this practice—ensuring they keep earning 4-5% on your money while paying you 0.35%. This isn't about safety; it's about eliminating competition and maintaining their ability to profit from your deposits.

Episode Overview

This episode covers critical economic and political developments affecting average Americans. The hosts dive deep into how the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act has been corrupted through regulatory capture, with banks successfully lobbying to prevent stable coin issuers from paying competitive interest rates to users. They explain how the current banking system, established in 1913 with the Federal Reserve, creates a mechanism for transferring wealth from the masses through inflation and debt. The discussion connects modern economic policy to historical patterns of empire decline, warning that America's aggressive foreign policy and domestic economic manipulation may accelerate the country's weakening position globally while China pursues strategic soft power.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Banks Go Crony On Crypto, Inflation Hits A New Low, & Updates from Minnesota from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Good morning everybody. Sometimes it really do be like that. So forgive us for being tardy when we were over here doing battle with the technology gods. And in the end we won. So shout out to Drew who actually knew what to do. So Drew, well done. Very well played. Just teamwork makes it work. Carrying more weight for the team. Very impressive. All right, everybody. Welcome. Thank you guys so much for being here on this incredible Friday. There's a lot going on in the world. This is not a boring time to be alive.

That is for sure. Today's going to be uh I can already feel it. I am I'm traumatized by what's happening. We're stepping into the economic zone of things really uh going into a dark phase for my goal, which is to see a thriving middle class. American politicians and bankers are once again placing a boot on the neck of the average Americans. Uh and I hate to see that. Cold civil war continues to ferment in Minnesota as people increasingly call for Trump to invoke the insurrection act and Governor Walls continues to encourage peaceful resistance uh of what he calls an invading force.

The peaceful part might be falling on deaf ears. California is doing its damnedest to commit economic suicide as it makes moves to permanently reduce its tax base. A new economic graph shows the disaster of our grotesque and unsustainable K-shaped economy and the real villain is being completely ignored. I've got a whole thing that I want to present to you guys on that and I'll be very eager to hear what you think about that. Canada opens their markets to Chinese cars in a historic move that I think is going to just completely essentially abolish the Canadian car market.

What the Chinese have done is very impressive here. You cannot deny that. Trueflation reports that inflation might be coming down much faster and farther than people expected. We're going to be diving into that. And it certainly begs the question, are Trump's economic policies actually working? Maybe. We'll see. And new data shows that women are racing to the far left and the answer to why is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. Drew, welcome. How we doing on this Friday? Friday? Friday? Um, a lot to talk about.

A lot to talk about. We started rough this morning. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How are you feeling today? Like in life or Yes, Drew. How are you feeling? Good. I was up at like 1:52 a.m. this morning. morning. morning. That's very early and strikes me. It's in keeping with the vibe that made me ask this question. But, uh, dare I ask what happened? what happened? what happened? Uh, I just woke up and it was one of the things I was like, "Okay, snooze. let me go back to sleep.

And then I was like sitting with my eyes closed for like an hour and I was all right, I'm just up now. So then I started uh jumping into the news. the news. the news. Those days are fun. Into the news. Welcome Drew. There's plenty to cover. Is X down now? Oh, that would be hilarious if X is down now. The question is, is X down for us or are the Iranians hitting? They got the question. You've been talking a lot of [ __ ] about the Chinese.

They heard you. They heard you in their back. Okay, here's the thing I have thought about. So, first of all, I'm actually more worried about the British right now because the British are denying people entry for talking about their government, which I do routinely, and I have a British wife. So, uh, that will be interesting to see how that one plays out. Not super afraid of the Chinese. I definitely worry about making the radar of the Iranians. So, we'll see how that plays out. Um, speaking of the Chinese though, because I I we just were on the backs of a raid in Venezuela because uh a raid a raid a raid uh capture a I don't I'm just intriguing to hear the words people use.

people use. people use. Uh there was six people going in in the dead elect. We snatched somebody and left. I I would classified maybe it's not a raid. Okay. For me, it's an invasion, but invasion. Okay. invasion. Okay. invasion. Okay. Straight went into a sovereign nation and said, "I'll take your president, please." please." please." Yeah. How would we react? It's an act of war for sure. Well, it worked. But I'm I'm I'm going the other way because now with this China Canada deal, they're getting very very cozy.

China is giving visaf-ree access to tourists from Canada. China um Canada snat slash their tariffs. So, there's going to be e uh Canadian uh Chinese EVs. And now Canada and in Mexico, they're definitely going to take over the North American market eventually cuz now I could just buy one in Canada and drive it over the border. Like to me, we were worried about Venezuela cuz China was in our backyard, but now I feel like China is now in our living room. Um, do you think that this is going to warrant a response from Trump just in general?

I think Trump responds to everything he considers a potential slight or threat. So whether it warrants a response or not is a totally different question. Whether it will get a response almost certainly. Uh, is he going to do it in the short term? Probably not. But in the long term, if we start seeing a lot of people buying cars there and then driving them over, I think he will respond with tariffs. He is going to keep Chinese EVs out of America, unless he thinks he's trading for something else.

Because from what I hear, and I haven't done a super deep dive on this, but from what I hear, given the Chinese ability to manufacture at scale just absolutely incredible things, things, things, uh, uh, uh, they can offer a far superior car for far less. And so right about now, Americans are in the market for something better and cheaper. So the reason that we don't have a gaggle of Chinese cars on the market is because we tariff the life out of them. Now, should we be doing that?

Almost certainly yes. We have to. People need to understand that if a country cannot manufacture its own goods, that country is in a horrifyingly weak position, especially if you have a 75% chance of going to war with the people that actually can produce things. Well, in a kinetic war, uh, you better be able to make things, things that move fast, shoot clearly, like you just really can't play. And right now, China basically controls our entire supply chain for drone technology being one of the many things.

Um, our advanced way of life from the rare earth minerals and refining processes that control chip manufacturing, all of that, all of it goes through China. Now, we can get into um all of the complex reasons why we did that, which get back to the core of your question, which is okay, this is a chess game. You've got Trump, who is, I think, very good at first order consequences. I think he's potentially, and in fairness, I need to see some of this stuff play out in the fullness of time, but I think he's much worse at second and third order consequences.

Um so he'll go in and he'll grab Maduro and think that gives us control of the oil but does not then map out accurately what does China do because China's full of very smart people that are not going to sit down. They see this is their opportunity. They've spent whatever 30 40 years clawing their way back onto the world stage after like 200 years of being backwards. It's really, it's a fascinating moment in history to think of China as like a a civilization that is thousands of years old that has like a very concrete identity, a very strong sense of itself as rightfully being what they call the central state, meaning not geographically central, but the most important.

And so you put that with Yeah. 40 years of dictatorial rule of planning for the future of forcing everybody to march in lock step towards one thing one thing one thing and it's bearing fruit. So you are dealing with a very organized a very disciplined a very intelligent China that's going to play incredibly strategic moves. They've been using seduction when the US has been using smash and grab. And I think that that's going to really start to bear fruit. So the more Trump smash and grabs, the more they realize, oh, we need to make our image, and let it be very clear, this is just an image, but we need to make our image that we are the friendly 22 and 23.

And so if you get in bed with America now, you're dealing with people that are um arrogant, overly aggressive, willing to use force, willing to slap people around. We, on the other hand, are just trying to make your life better. Uh we're going to be touching on some ways that they're doing that today. Not the least of which is what they're doing in banking. I just can't believe that America is making some of the choices that it's making. It's absolutely ridiculous. But is in keeping with a declining empire and how they start lashing out and that when people realize they've allowed themselves to get put in a weakened position, they don't start playing a long game uh of seduction.

They start playing the short game of I'm just going to take what I want and I'm going to try to shore up my position as the strongest bully. Again, fine. It works great first order consequences. Like in the immediacy, you're going to get the things that you want, but in the long term, you're going to erode the stability of your position in the world because you don't have allies anymore. And so, the way that I have long, in fact, if you went back to the beginning of 2025 and listened to the words that I'm saying, this is exactly how I feel now.

Trump is playing a game of chicken. And look, Truflation is putting forward that maybe some of this stuff is working better than we think. But if he doesn't pull off the growth, like just the alienation and the damage that he's doing to America's reputation, the the damage he's doing to our own sense of who we are is dramatic. And I don't think people put enough stock in how much a country's vision of itself plays out in its policies and then those policies which is a big part of the argument that I'm going to be making later in today's episode.

Uh the policies have a huge impact. So but it's downstream of this vision that we have of who we are. Gotcha. Um I would love to jump off on the banking thing because to me that was the thing that grabbed my radar. Um, so if you can set us up with some of the banking policies that um are happening. Oh buddy, there's a lot going on there. Okay, let's start with the one that is the most traumatic. The banking system just put another boot on the neck of Americans that are desperately trying to make ends meet in a disgusting act of regulatory capture, which we're going to need to go into detail what that is, but in a disgusting act of regulatory capture, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, originally meant to create a regulatory framework for digital assets, has been mutated into something that guarantees banks s will maintain their monopolistic chokeold on your money.

The Clarity Act, originally put forward by Representative French Hill, who serves as chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, passed the House back in July of 25 with bipartisan support. It looked awesome. It was very exciting. You had a ton of people in the crypto world getting behind it. The legislation divides crypto assets into categories like digital commodities like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Great. Regulated by the CFTC, wonderful. Investment contract assets. Fantastic. Initially, this was under SEC oversight. Not the biggest fan, but nonetheless, nonetheless, nonetheless, and it permitted payment stable coins.

That is critical. Stable coins are critical. critical. critical. And wonderfully, it would prohibit Federal Reserve banks from issuing central bank digital currencies, CBDC's. I did a whole deep dive on CBDC's, why they are sinister. Be sure to check that out. Uh, and the idea is for individuals um, and banks to basically use this for monetary policy. All right, good. These are good things. Maybe you could even say that they're great things. But, and this is the big problem, the Senate got their filthy hands on the bill and they've made changes.

In the words of Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase and former supporter former supporter of the bill, the reason he withdrew his company's support is because, and I quote, "There are too many issues, including a de facto ban on tokenized equities, equities, equities, DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records, and removing your right to privacy, erosion of the CFTC's authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient. to the far more political SEC draft amendments that would kill rewards on stable coins. This is going to be something we're going to focus a lot on.

That allows banks to ban competition. Okay? Not allowing rewards on stable coins is like not letting you treat stable coins like a bank, which you should be able to do, and getting paid interest rates, which you should be able to do. And right now, banks don't allow that effectively. They pay you some pittance, but they're making four and 5% while you make.35% or some ridiculous number. Now, we appreciate all the hard work. This is back to what Brian is saying. We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bipartisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo.

We'd rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully, we can all get to a better draft. This is still him. We'll keep fighting for all Americans and for economic freedom. Crypto needs to be treated on a level playing field with the rest of financial services so we can build this industry in a safe and trusted way in America. All right, that's end quote. Now, I'm gonna add, we need to build this industry in a safe and trusted way that actually benefits the average American and not just the bankers, bankers, bankers, by robbing by robbing by robbing legal and regulated stable coin issuers, of the ability to pay rewards, aka interest payments, just like a bank is allowed to do.

You make it impossible for companies to compete with banks by offering superior interest rates which is the very thing that they should be using to compete and using stable coins basically as a savings account is the future. But not with this legislation. Now hours after Armstrong pulled his support, the Senate Banking Committee postponed the January 15th markup session indefinitely. Though I have heard rumors that it's actually back on, so we will see what happens with that. Committee Chair Tim Scott indicated the bill could still pass before midterms, but acknowledged the need for revisions.

The delay highlights ongoing tensions, including the contentious provision that I'm referencing, which is section 404. How appropriate. The part that prohibits yield payments on stable coins not just from issuers, but also from exchanges, affiliates, or partners. Now, banks, of course, are arguing this is needed to close a loophole allowing crypto intermediaries to pay interest on stable coin holdings, which they see as unfair competition. [ __ ] please. Meanwhile, 53 banking associates, including the American Bankers Association and state groups, have publicly supported the bill. I wonder why. Framing it as necessary for stability, aka it helps them maintain their monopoly.

Now, yes, it would be necessary to ensure that banks don't have competition. If you're one of them, this is a must, but that's a monopoly or a cartel. So, this is not power that we want to give to the banks or the politicians. Okay? People really can be evil [ __ ] But that's just me. Let's hear directly from Brian Armstrong himself. He's got a banger clip. X is down. Nice. Nice. Nice. All right, I'll sum it up in a second. Let let me take a sip. Not just our internet.

I guess it's Elon's internet. Elon's internet. Elon's internet. Let me Let me Let me No, that's what I mean. Like our internet was messed up that I literally went to like isdexown.com and it was like, yes. And it started at 648. Yeah, I tried it, too, and it's like I'm going to put my tin foil hat on real fast, fast, fast, but it 2122 is the Brian Arms. Are you able to pull it up? All right, let's see. Let's see if Elon overcame the uh Iranian cyber attack, which I am not in any way, shape, or form joking.

All right. Yeah, I meant 22 and 23. My bad. We'll see. We'll see, boys and girls. Can we pull it off? Will it play? Yeah. Chat was asking when we're going to switch to Starlink instead of AT&T. Yeah, bro. Listen, if we could, where we're at, we've looked at this like a thousand times and right now it is demonstrabably worse than the internet that we can get otherwise. And we have to upload so much stuff. Unfortunately, just doesn't work for us right now. Satellite internet just historically isn't very fast.

It's fiber optics are just faster. So, I think his max cap is like 200. We get a gig here. No, I think eventually they'll solve that problem, but they have not solved it yet. All right, G. We given up or we we got it. It's a wrap. Okay. So basically the punchline is from Brian Armstrong that he understands precisely why this is happening. That banks need to stop um stable coins from being able to issue interest. People are calling it rewards that sort of new language but understand it is simply an interest payment because what they're doing th this is where this drives me crazy.

Uh even China is paying yield on their digital yuan. Why? because if nothing else, they know that this is going to allow them to attract foreign money. The the whole idea is to compete to be the place the debt that people want to buy, to be the place that people want to save their money. and banks. Remember, the reason that everything is popping off in Minnesota, the reason that there is so much tension in America is because in 1913, we were deceived by bankers and politicians into creating a standing uh central bank, which the founding fathers had fought tooth and nail against because they understood exactly how this was going to play out, which is there is a a glitch in the physics of money that make it such that you can rob from somebody without taking any of their actual dollars, but you still take the purchasing power.

And you do it by printing money. And bankers know that's just confusing enough that they can pull it off forever and always. And they have, and they will continue to be able to do so. And this is exactly one of those moments. You've got banks acting like a cartel. They're saying, "Hey, we're going to uh take your money. We're going to loan it out. We're going to get interest. Let's call it four to 5% right now. changes throughout time, but call it four to 5%. They're going to pass back to you, call it 0.35%.

These aren't literal numbers, but they're so close to being literal that just assume that directionally this is 100% correct. So now they're making that huge take. Okay, they're keeping that delta. It is massive. massive. massive. Keep in mind, please, that they also printed that money out of thin air and are allowed to charge that interest. That that is a privilege granted to them by politicians. by politicians. by politicians. So, they got the money for free and they make 4%. make 4%. make 4%. They made the money for free and then they charge you interest on it.

And what crypto is saying is banks use fractional reserve lending. So they can lend a 100% of the already fictional money. Charge interest on all of it. Create a vulnerability to bank runs because they don't have your money, which is why they act like uh you're [ __ ] picking their pocket when you come and ask for some of your own cash and they want to know what it's for, where it's going. They need you to tell them in advance, all that [ __ ] It's my money as a reminder.

So you've got that issue, fractional reserve. Okay. reserve. Okay. reserve. Okay. Crypto does not have fractional reserve. They have full reserves. They have a one to one. If they give you a dollar of stable coins, they hold a dollar in treasuries. So it is backed one to one by the full faith of the US government unlike banks. And the guys who are in a way safer position are saying just give us the chance to pay out the benefits that we actually make by people lending us this money.

Okay? because those treasuries are paying them money and they're saying as a way to win over customers, we want to pay that money back to the customers, some large percentage of it. So instead of us keeping the vast majority of it, the person loaning us the money is going to get the vast majority of that benefit. And we're going to use that to compete against banks, to compete against other uh cryptos. And now we've got competition in the market. Okay, the whole reason that we have antitrust laws is monopolies are evil.

And so we want the competition because that's good for the average American. And so you've got crypto people clamoring, just let us compete. Let us give the money back that we're making. And the bank's like, nope. And the politicians are agreeing with them. And the only reason is so that bankers may maintain control because they have a revenue stream and they don't want to give it up. [ __ ] each and every last one of them. That is some [ __ ] And that is exactly why we're in the position as a nation that we are in.

Because economics is just confusing enough that very smart people, very connected people leverage that confusion against people. And so they're going to hide behind safety and they're going to say [ __ ] like, "Well, this is going to damage our ability to lend." Yes, it's going to damage your ability to lend because fewer people are going to come into your system, but it will increase other companies ability to lend. And so crypto is basically saying we're we're the modern version of banking. Dear uh government, you've already regulated us way harder than you've regulated the banks.

Just let us [ __ ] lend money out to you, the government, capture some upside for that, and then pass that on to the customer. It's wild that people are fighting back against this, but they are. are. are. And it's one of those things where I can understand if crypto was trying to do something new or if they were trying to invent a new money scheme and then it could look shady. Maybe it's a pyramid scheme, yada yada yada. But they're literally saying people who deposit should earn a yield.

Yes, Yes, Yes, every savings account does that. Every checking account does that. So, it's not like they're trying to do anything new. They're just saying we should also be eligible for people who get their money that can get there. So, it's it's 100% regulatory capture. It's 100% dirty banks. Uh, and yeah, bankers will never uh never beat the allegations, man. They just can't. They're on the wrong side of history repeatedly. history repeatedly. history repeatedly. A, they're on the wrong side of history. We're we're in a moment where finally we have the technology to make it effectively impossible.

When you've got enough guns, nothing's impossible. but effectively impossible in a democratic nation for the banks to maintain their chokeold because right now they have a chokeold because there is no other alternative. The banks have spent so much money building infrastructure so that you can trust them that everyone goes, "Ah, well, I just I I've I've got to trust these guys. They've they've got it all." And Crypto's come along and said, "Well, hold on a second. we can build something that's far more trustworthy, that doesn't have humans in the mix, um that can do essentially code as law, that there's no way around this system because of the way the blockchains work.

But you have to give us the ability to make this exciting to an end user that's never going to know or care about all of the behindthe-scenes stuff. So, there has to be something that's forward- facing for them that makes them go, "Yeah, this is better." Otherwise, what you're going to see is um over the next 50 years, the old guard will just die off and then this will win. It like crypto really is inevitable. Um but why does it always have to be like you just have to wait for everybody to die?

It's so obnoxious. Uh G, can we get 26 and two on the teleprompter queued up? Especially because man, look, as a country, we may not survive this. That's the problem. Like the the economic turmoil. economic turmoil. economic turmoil. Yeah. So, if if I can get everybody to understand, I'm going to speedrun this. Please push, channel the comment section, whatever. I need to know where where this breaks down, where people either get confused, think I'm full of [ __ ] whatever. [ __ ] whatever. [ __ ] whatever. But to speedrun Minnesota, Minnesota, Minnesota, it goes like this.

Country is founded, they know, don't have a central bank because historically every empire ever has ended up abusing debt. debt works at first, then it becomes a crutch, then it becomes the method by which you steal from the people. So, they say, "Okay, but debt is really useful, so let's create a bank, but give it a 20-year time horizon." They do it. It's amazing. It's how America gets its feet under it. But then they terminate the bank. Once they terminate that, the bankers are just like, and I'm talking global bankers, global bankers are like, "No, no, no.

We've got to get America absolutely must have a central bank because without a central bank we cannot debase the currency which means that we can't create this funnel where we rob from the masses. Uh people think that billionaires hold the majority of the wealth. They don't. They hold about 4% of the wealth. Okay, just just to level up for people like billionaires it's a small number of people that hold a tremendous amount of money but it's only 4% of the assets. The 99% of people they own like the vast majority of everything.

And when you say that, because ground me because when I see Elon, Elon about to be a trillionaire, I feel like that takes up at least a couple million people at the bottom. So, are we talking about like assets? Are we talking about talking about talking about real estate? Because I don't want to lose the speedun here. Just know billionaires control 4% of the assets. The the wealth. Copy. Copy. Copy. That's it. So, who do people that want to steal from? They want to steal from everybody.

This is how the Nordic states work. They don't just tax the wealthy. They tax everybody night to death. So in America, 50% of people pay zero tax, income tax. Uh in the Nordic countries, your average person is paying 50 55%. So it's massive. It's just very different. So the real money is in the masses and the bankers know that. So they need to be able to create this funnel to transfer that wealth without the masses having to vote for it. The way that they do that is by debasing the currency, which is printing money.

They get to that by all this debt creation. Cool. So finally in 1913 the bankers collude with the politicians to finally get this passed and we create in 1913 a central bank. That central bank since then began weakening us. So everybody talks about 1971 they should be talking about 1913 because that is the thing that laid the framework for the problem. So, think of it like in 1913, we switched our kids from um eating uh meat and eggs to eating Twinkies. So, at first, not a big deal.

Even if you limit the calories, they're not even going to get fat. So, you can eat Twinkies, you're going to look fine, but there's going to be all this metabolic dysfunction that's building up behind the scenes. And so now come 2026, everybody's morbidly obese because they did not keep their eating in check and they're just eating Twinkies. And so it's all sugar all the time. And so there's just like this catastrophic problems that we see. 1971's easy to point at because it was the last tether.

We we weren't one for one with gold. We had not been for a very long time because that's the banker playbook. So 1971, we finally sever the last tether. Now money is truly fictional. There's nothing to back it up. It's just the government says it's valuable, therefore it's valuable. So, we start having all kinds of problems. We sort of get it in check for a little bit. And then starting in 2000 with the.com bubble, all hell just starts breaking loose because we keep getting these huge bubbles, which are only possible because of all the debt that you're able to put into the system, all the gambling that people do because money is so cheap.

And the bubble bursts, the dotcom bubble bursts, and we have to pour money into the system, fake money, to stabilize the economy. And it does. It first order consequences. It works. It works every time. time. time. And the problem is that it then accelerates the next bubble. So 2008 comes along. Boom. That bursts and the housing market goes haywire. We have to pour a ton of money in again. And now if you start looking at a graph, the money that we're putting into the system that's making money less valuable, less real, whatever word you want to use, that graph is just skyrocketing.

It's ridiculous. And as that number goes up, more bubbles form. And then on top of that, COVID hits. So now you've got to pour even more money. And so that graph just keeps going up. And so the rate at which we're hitting these um catastrophes that require them to pour money in, the the times just get shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. And so we're just constantly dealing with one crisis after another. Okay? It is that setup of putting extra money into the system that makes billionaires.

I want to be very clear. If you want to get rid of billionaires, stop putting money into the system. Okay? Why does it work like that? to create billionaires. It creates billionaires because when you have the same number of stuff, cars, apples, desks, computers, whatever, the same number of things to buy and you give people a bunch more money, they all just go, "Well, I'm willing to pay more money for that thing because I want that thing and I have more money." And so, it doesn't create more value.

There is a way to create more value, but pumping money into the system isn't it. So, you make everything more expensive. And the catch is, and this is the thing people have to understand about why you get a Kshaped economy, because the economy is very good to me, Tom Bill, my life changed. When I decided to start making economic content, I made myself so much richer. I had no idea that was, I swear to sweet baby Jesus, that was not my intention. But it ended up being the effect because I realized the game that was being played.

I realized, oh [ __ ] this game is rigged. It's super winnable. It's almost easy to win in certain periods of time. And so the last couple of years has been like a really easy time to win. I am not a genius investor. I just knew, oh, I have to be in assets because as you pour that money in, I have to go into something that isn't inflatable. So stocks, gold, crypto, whatever. So literally, I just start buying things and I'm like, well, these can't be inflated. And so as I buy a basket of things that can't be inflated, my net worth starts going way the [ __ ] up.

And so now all of a sudden it's like I I am literally telling people as clearly as I can, as rapidly as I can talk how to avoid the problem. The problem that I am on a long enough timeline, Drew, I will end up making more money off my investments than I will have made off of building Quest. Like it's so easy to see. I'm like, "Fuck, this is crazy." And when that happens, I'll be sick to my stomach. I'll be sick to my stomach on a beach with a [ __ ] private island, but I'll still be sick to my stomach that other people did not wake up and realize what is actually happening.

And so they're going to get mad at me at billionaires at whatever because it's like, well, hold on. You guys are hoarding the money. No, they're not. They just own assets that can't be inflated. They un the the game is so obvious that once you understand that little thing of like, oh, they can rob they can steal my money through inflation. Oh [ __ ] Once you get that and then you go, okay, well then where do I put my money? You put it into things that can't be inflated that pe that will likely remain valuable over time.

Gold just being the like most no-brainer 4,000 years or whatever of us using gold, not necessarily going to go up in value, but it'll hold its value comparable to um goods that you can buy. It's like an ounce of gold buys a three-piece suit literally for hundreds of thousand years. So you just sort of that kind of things tends to stay completely static. So all of the like well how many dollars is it worth? That's all noise. What does it buy you? It tends to buy you the same thing for a thousand years plus.

So people that understand that protect themselves from this vicious thing called inflation and everybody else gets hammered. And so the reason that I say that Minnesota is 1913 come to roost now is because something we've talked about here endlessly. Um economics like I'm not going to be able to pay my bills turns into anxiety. People hate anxiety so they turn it into anger. Anger then is easy to leverage to get you to want to be on a team to be tribal so that you can fight for your piece of a shrinking pie.

And that's how you end up here. And so when I see in the midst of all this, I see Ro Kana friendly to the show, but nonetheless making a catastrophic error with what he's trying to do in California, I see the bankers, the Senate making um changes to this bill to specifically make it good for bankers and bad for the average American. It it is it's wild. And because we live in a universe where algorithms determine who sees my content, I am so hyper aware that the only people that are ever going to hear these incredibly eloquent and well-put together rants, Drew, uh, are people that already believe it.

They already understand. It's so wild. So, yeah, I don't know how to escape that. And so, um, my cup runth over with rage for a thing that will make me wealthier. But because I understand there's a breaking point, breaking point, breaking point, it's just so dumb. It's so dumb. And I don't know if I'm mad at the uh architect of the simulation because my real beef is with how the mind works, but this one makes me really sad. Like it every empire ever has in a well doumented fashion collapsed because of exactly what we're doing with this law.

Th this exact thing is why empires collapsed. collapsed. collapsed. Wow. Wow. Wow. It's wild. It's wild. It's wild. You would think one of those politicians have a history book, but it just seems that like that's somebody else's problem. problem. problem. Okay. Yes. Partly that. But now I want you to imagine um let's say that a bank robber um steals a bunch of money and then they stand on top of a roof and they throw millions of dollars in cash off that roof. Would you go try to grab some of that cash?

that cash? that cash? Yeah, why not? Right? Because it's like, bro, people are grabbing up the cash and like if you're standing there, might as well like stuff a few in your pocket. Have a nice day. So, it's like they they cannot help themselves. They see an opportunity to send their kid to a better school. They see an opportunity to enrich themselves. and they don't really understand the economy and so they're just like star. It's wild. It's wild. It's wild. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy.

So from the chat, um, what is the reason why you say 1971 is not it? You have to look at 1913. Why do people look at 71 first? first? first? Because 1971 is when your dad actually had a heart attack. And you're like, dude, 1971, that was that was the year that my dad had the Widowmaker. And you don't go who introduced him for to his first cigarette or to his first Twinkie. And the reality is he had the heart attack because of 30 years of smoking and eating junk food and that had cellular consequences.

And so 1971 was when Nixon realized that people were aware of how much we were inflating the currency. And so they were finally like, I want my [ __ ] gold. And in pulling their gold out, he realized, well, we actually can't pay them off with the gold. So I'm going to need to break the tie between gold and the US dollar. And in breaking the tie between gold and the US dollar, the world became aware of the game that was being played. And so it becomes easy to point at 1971 because there were like these instant consequences.

The stock market rallied massively. we go into this insane inflationary period. So, it's just all like super documentable because there was such a a reaction to what happened. So, if you think of it like that, it's easy to remember the day your dad had a heart attack. It's much mushier to go like, okay, this is I guess when he started smoking and when he started like eating poorly. Yeah. But so that's that makes sense. Um so the next one is we're never going to stop printing but AI is going to absorb the inflation through GDP growth.

The question is what comes after that when 40 to 60% are unemployed. Yeah sort of. So here humans have a hard time with timelines. The real thing to think about is how fast will the growth come and how much will America tell it tear itself apart in the intervening years. So um AI moves fast. There's no doubt three years always feels like the period of time where you just really if you really stop and think about it the way that you engage with your life is already unrecognizable since Chad GPT launched.

I know mine is like it if you just look at the spreadsheet of project Kaizen the video game that I'm building um you'd be like what happened like 18 months ago that something shocking happened because the your cost to develop the game went down dramatically and the rate at which the game is improving went up. It doesn't make sense and that's the introduction of AI. So, um, if you look forward another 3 years, it it is going to be radically different. 3 years is a long time when you've got the kind of protests that we're seeing now, when you have a belief that it's billionaires that are robbing people, uh, that people have their eye on the wrong prize and you have politicians pitting each other against each other.

So um if AI does not bring prosperity, let's say it takes AI, just when you start thinking about like how long it actually takes to make robotics and how long the advances in material science are going to take to drive down the cost of um solar panels and things like that for us to really drive the cost of energy down. energy down. energy down. Seven years, you can do a lot of damage in seven years. A lot. So um America's going to be bankrupt in 10 years.

And that's if we don't do the incredibly stupid kinds of things that we are attempting to do on certain fronts. So yeah, it's a race. It's a game of chicken that I don't love. So we'll get to the true flation stuff in a minute, but that that kind of thing is the only thing that gives me hope. We got a couple super chats. You want to hit those real quick? Yeah, this is uh both from Marouchia Dark. First one, uh which goes back to what you were just saying about the simulation.

Recent events remind me of something both Elon and Scott Adams use as their predictive framework. Namely, that the simulation selects for what be most interesting as a game or story, not necessarily what's accurate or moral. Yeah, I don't think that that's true. It it's a knock-on effect. So, if you actually think about um coding the human mind, you're not trying to optimize for irony. It's that you have to get an organism to move forward. Like when you think about humans, humans are actually optimized for procreation.

They are optimized for a desire to survive. They're optimized for um resource acquisition. They're optimized for learning. And so you start putting all those together and you really think about what are the um pressures that I have to use to get them to move. And the pressure that we end up using is uh emotion. And so then you get into, okay, you've got this aological mechanism by which I get a creature who cannot accurately discern the truth of how the world works at like the level of physics, but I need them to always be moving forward.

So I need to give them this thing that like compels action. Um, and by the way, I have to give them competing impulses because I need you to go move forward to acquire resources, but the act of moving forward to acquire resources is resource intensive itself. So, I need you to have a competing impulse to lay on the couch. And so, it's utterly fascinating. And then, by the way, for whatever reason, there's a distribution of all those traits from intelligence to will to desire. Um, there's differences in cellular expression.

So, just your raw ability to perform the act. There's all these differences. So, you put all that together and you create something that cannot cannot cannot be unstable because then it won't form organisms. organisms. organisms. So, think of city states, governments, things like that, the things that have allowed us to really accelerate. So, uh, if evolution's real goal is procreation, it has to create enough safety, enough access to resources that you can do that. And so, we have this, um, evolutionary pressure to band together. Uh, so we see that, but we also know that there are going to be evolutionary pressures to stop you from calcifying because any society, and this is why I think humans die, any society that calcifies will, much like an immune system, um, it will get caught off guard by a novel threat.

And this is why we use sexual reproduction because we don't know what's coming around the corner. And so we want just variety. I just need I need people to be different. And that way if a virus comes along that wipes out, you know, 30% of the population, uh it doesn't wipe out a 100% of the population. And so that kind of diversity of immune system, there's been all kinds of studies, women will tend to be attracted to the scent of somebody whose immune system is most different from theirs.

That's evolution going. I need you to be attracted to that which is different because that makes you more robust to disease, famine, things like that. Okay? So, uh you've got this organism that needs you to come together. So, it needs you to have enough structure to uh band together and do these incredible monolithic things and at the same time needs to make sure that you can't calcify. And so, we die. Um we breed sexually. uh we have different um abilities to acquire different value systems so that those value systems will compete against each other.

I mean, there's I worry that this tirade will get boring for people. So, I'll put a pin in that, but um I was just texting back and forth with um I won't say who, but somebody a name you guys all know, and we were talking about h how is it that people do not view life through the lens of evolution. Life will be so confusing to you if you're not looking at your own impulses through the lens of evolution. So, anyway, period. We got one more and then back to the news.

Uh Tom, if politicians never go to jail, then doesn't that create exactly the pres perverse incentives that led to the corrupt monoparty doing crime with impunity in the first place against which populism is just an immune response? response? response? No. So I I certainly get the impulse and Lord knows that I hold this conviction lightly because I may end up being wrong about this. But I have a feeling that when your system becomes corrupt that the answer is sunlight. Um, and maybe you try people for the most egregious things, but you really have to have a light touch because if you back people, if you arrest, if you have a two-party system and one party starts arresting the other party, then as soon as the dynamic flips, that party is going to arrest this party and you get into gang warfare.

done in the courts, but it is it is the exact same human impulse of gang warfare of uh tribal wars of uh the Hatfields and the McCoys. Like it's it's so self-destructive and it plays out over such long periods of time that you have to have somebody that can do a pattern interrupt. pattern interrupt. pattern interrupt. So if we get into lawfare and we let that escalate, you force people, you force politicians into a position where it is legitimately um existential for them to stay in power.

And if you put somebody in a position where it's existential that they stay in power, they will lie, cheat, steal, uh become a dictator, whatever, and so that they can stay in power. And that is the worst possible outcome. I would m even though I think it's horrible, I would much rather people get off uh having done dirty [ __ ] So, let's let's just thought experiment. I do not have any inside information. I don't know that this is going to be true, but as a thought experiment, let's say that Obama really did try to insurrect the government and um completely destroy Trump's uh presidency.

The play from where I'm sitting is that uh Trump drags all of that out into the daylight. Absolutely demolishes um Obama's legacy that he becomes like uh Nixon where he's persona nongrada. He is remembered by all living people as uh the dirt bag that did the bad thing. Um but Trump then goes for the health of the country we are only going to look forward. I am not going to pursue him legally. I I want to be truly the president of peace and I don't want to see the left and the right waring as I age out of office essentially.

I want to leave the American people something that is truly great an economically bright future to understand that our enemies are without not within like oh my god I would love the shot to write that speech for him. He'll never do it. I am well aware of that. But that is the thing that would actually work in my opinion. opinion. opinion. Sweet. Sweet. Sweet. Cool. Um, you brought it up earlier about the billionaire tax in California. So, let's jump over to that. Um, exit is still giving us problems, so we can't pull up the rogue kind of Sean Ryan clip, but we can you can kind of level set us as we kind of can we just really fast talk about tinfoil hat thousand%.

Is Elon being attacked by for the stuff that he's doing in Iran? I would not be surprised. surprised. surprised. Um, Um, Um, that is wild. We'll find out. We'll find out. That's tin foil hat. But that is uh the algorithm running in my brain. Somebody just said it's working again. Hit refresh g and see if it if that gets for you. But let's talk about California and this billionaire tax. Let's do it. All right. California is proving once again that it is hellbent on committing economic suicide.

And make no mistake, what we're about to talk about is exactly economic suicide. California lawmakers have proposed a bill, the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act. The act is best thought of as a confiscation of wealth. It allows the government to outright steal 5% of the post tax net worth of California residents and certain trusts if it's valued at a billion dollars or more. It is absolute lunacy and proves yet again that lawmakers have absolutely no understanding of economics. The bill aims to address funding shortfalls in healthcare, education, and food assistance programs amid anticipated federal and state budget cuts.

It targets approximately 200 to 250 billionaires in the state who collectively hold around $2 trillion in wealth. Though recent estimates suggest this has dropped already to 1.3 trillion due to because lo and behold when you threaten to steal money from the most productive and mobile humans on earth they get up and leave to avoid being stolen from. Just putting the bill forward has caused that much money to flee California. Imagine if it actually passes. passes. passes. All of this just reduces the amount of money you can collect in taxes.

Now listen, for all the contempt around billionaires, remember this. They pay an ungodly percentage of taxes wherever they are. 50% of Americans don't pay income tax at all. Let that one sink in. And history has proven time and time again that when you get too aggressive with your tax policy, people leave. The measure is the kind of thing that is literally just attempting to steal up to a hundred billion dollars over the next 5 years. And though critics are going to argue that this will be far less due to design flaws and the fact that it will just chase people out of California, the proposal builds on earlier unsuccessful wealth tax ex efforts in California, such as Assembly Bill 259 in 2023, but is unique in its one-time nature and focuses only on billionaires, at least for now.

It has sparked significant controversy with even Governor Gavin Nuome of all people calling it really damaging to the state's economy. Let that sink in. Gavin Newsome, who never met a tax he didn't like, says that this is really damaging to the state's economy because he knows what's going to happen. Billionaires like Peter Teal and Larry Page, who have already reportedly taken steps to relocate or restructure assets to avoid being affected, are going to be just the tip of the spear. The retroactive January 1st, 2026 obligation date gave little time for relocation after the proposal's public reveal in late 2025, which critics argue was designed intentionally to trap billionaires, which I bet you can imagine how they felt about that.

Net worth will be calculated as a worldwide fair market value of all assets, tangible and intangible, including stocks, bonds, business interests, real estate, art, and collectibles, minus allowable debts and liabilities. Listen, all of this is absurd. Many people would have to sell the very things that they own in order to pay the tax. It's patently absurd. Critics, including the Tax Foundation, argue the effective rate will end up grossly exceeding 5%. Because the aggressive valuation rules, limited deductions, and the inclusion of illlquid assets would force people to sell at depressed prices.

So instead of it being 5%, it goes way up because it was 5% on a theoretical number that you didn't actually get when you did the sales. Proponents such as economic uh economist Emanuel Sees frame it as an equitable all my alarm bells go off emergency tax on those who have benefited most from California's economy. Opponents including Governor Nuome and groups like the tax foundation argue it is poor policy that discourages investment you think and innovation will cause current and future generations of entrepreneurs to seek more friendly jurisdictions.

Talk about not understanding second and third order consequences. This is going to permanently depress the tax base of California. California. California. Opponents rightly point out that wealth taxes have failed spectacularly in Europe and the odds that this actually lowers the long-term tax revenue in California borders on 100%. As of January 16, 2026, the initiative is in signature gathering mode and thankfully has not yet qualified for the ballot. Nuome predicts defeat, praise be to Jesus, citing bad economics, but union back union backing could mobilize voters amid inequality concerns.

If it passes, enforcement would begin in 2027. Now, nobody is more concerned about inequality than myself. Inequality is always going to be present. But there is what I'll call toxic inequality, unsustainable inequality, whatever you want to say. But there is a threshold beyond which society begins to tear itself apart. This is how empires collapse. They always collapse from within. And this is how it happens. So we've got to address the inequality. We have to address the inequality aggressively with immediacy. But if we try to address inequality by doing the exact opposite of what will actually work, then it's lunacy.

And I didn't even in that whole write up, I didn't even talk about the fraud that is for sure going to be uncovered in California. From the Palisades fires not being uh the houses not being rebuilt at all uh to the highspeed rail never laid a track. I mean it's just it is going to be in the tens of billions, hundreds of billions. It it is going to be an amount I expect will be so staggering that the fact that we are talking about trying to get more money out of people to pour into a corrupt broken system that causes more money printing that causes more damage to the middle class is is is infuriating to say the least and certainly damaging.

certainly damaging. certainly damaging. Um, we got this Roana Sean Ryan clip. Um, in respect for Roana, his proposal is a 1% tax, not the 5% tax, but still it's a additional billion. It's a little less egregious, but equally stupid. equally stupid. equally stupid. Just level setting. Ultimately, the idea that having just a 1% tax a year, I mean, in a theory on uh building wealth when you're you make about 10% every year anyway in the stock market and that you're going to use that to make sure pause.

Row is smart. But people Row is smart. But people are not walking away with 10% in their pocket. People do not seem to [ __ ] understand this. They are theoretical gains. It's theory. Like I was joking. If you can loan, if you can loan against it, then it counts. So the 10% that you gain, you loan 1%, you pay off that tax bill, you keep denying. That's what banks do. banks do. banks do. Amazing. Then Drew, you just proposed a policy that isn't [ __ ] [ __ ] Tax people on the amount that they loan against their assets, borrow against their assets, excuse me.

Great. [ __ ] yeah. But this is full [ __ ] And not understanding the difference is how we end up in trouble. There are ways if you want to sensibly tax people, you tax them on money they actually made like cash. They actually have cash. Cool. Tax them on it. But doing [ __ ] like this, like there are loopholes that if people were going after be like, "Yeah, word. Love it. Let's go." This is not that one. Th this is I I can't fully decide. It's probably both. There are some people for whom they're just stupid and they don't understand.

And then there are other people they are evil. Drew, if you're stealing from the average American, you are evil. If you're knowingly doing it and the some percentage of politicians know exactly what they're doing because there is a lobbyist that comes into their room and is like, "Man, it is I can't believe that you don't have golden knobs on your shower like Trump does." Bro, we got to get you golden knobs. How How are you flying in first class? You should be flying private. Like, we got to make this happen.

If you're going to campaign, you you've got to be on a private jet and now all of a sudden it's you're doing favors for them or even just adopting their frame of reference, even just wanting them to be right a little bit more than you want somebody else to be right. And now you've got lunatics like this. Now, I I'm probably I feel positively towards Roana simply because I think he is smart and he was generous enough to give us some of his time. So, I will assume he just doesn't understand.

He has not thought through the economy well enough. He's got a lot on his plate. But, ooh, buddy, I would just like to point out that you just threw out an idea that actually makes sense. And this isn't You're not a politician. So, if you can think of an idea off the cuff that would actually work, uh, what the [ __ ] are they doing they doing they doing for real? for real? for real? What are they doing? All right, let him keep going because it's a good clip.

There's more where people have healthcare and child care and education. I just think that's what's going to prevent a revolution. You know, think about the guys who went in Venezuela, right? And and like they they they stick the landing despite being shot at. They wear the uniform. They give every single thing for this country. And you're saying to me, okay, if you're going to, let's say, in a countrywide have a 1% tax on wealth that people are going to leave, like come on, have some more patriotism.

I am [ __ ] offended by that. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So, So, So, yes, be patriotic. Pay your taxes. I have paid have paid have paid millions and millions and millions of dollars in tax. Cool. No beef. But But But if this passes, you fly in. This is the capital flight. Is this the Yeah, for a thousand%. Really? blocked in Drew. That's I've never heard a thousand% before. I I have said many times Florida no property tax there are certain things that California could do at a policy level that would cause me to leave immediately.

leave immediately. leave immediately. If I had kids, I would have left the second they passed the bill where um they don't have to tell you if your kid is transitioning at school. Nope. Hard pass. Literally in the dead of night would have grabbed my kids, gone, company reforms somewhere else. Uh, I can't believe that people let that one happen. Anyway, uh, this one is a bye. So, now keep in mind Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. this doesn't even apply to me. I am not a billionaire. a billionaire.

a billionaire. However, However, However, I know the math. I know the billionaires control a small fraction of the money. The real money is in everybody else. So, what do you suppose the odds are that a state riddled with fraud and inefficiencies uh is going to stop at the amount that they're able to confiscate from the rapidly fleeing billionaires who are incredibly incredibly incredibly deaf at finding using your rules against you. You can hate billionaires, but to think that at a minimum that they're not surrounded by the smartest people on planet Earth, you're a [ __ ] They have like they even if they're dumb, the people advising them are brilliant brilliant brilliant and they will know exactly how to move that money.

So, they're going to dodge it and then you're going to realize, "Oh, we didn't get as much money as we thought." Who do you turn to? The people that don't know how to run, the people that can't run. And you start using the same thing which has a provision in the bill that if they need to go wider, they can. And you just start going wider and wider. wider. wider. So it goes from the billionaires to the hundred millionaires to the tens of millionaires to the millionaires.

And so it's like there's no universe in which I sit still and just go, "Yeah, I'll be fine." Nope. Hard pass. We out. Hopefully you like Florida, Drew. Hey man, there's a lot of Haitians out there. there. there. See, See, See, food is great. Food is great. Drew, you're gonna get me to fall in love with Haitian cuisine. I can't wait, bro. It's the best cuisine out there. Best cuisine in the Caribbean. I'll stand 10 toes down on that. The show will be even better if you're forced to move.

It'll be wonderful. We'll be wellfed. Florida would be it though. I know you said Texas was a no. I think last I just can't get Lisa excited about Texas. Texas. Texas. Okay, but yeah, Florida Beach. I thought you guys in like Miami, too. You won't go to like Tallahassee. Like you Yeah. You'll go to the the the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. the liberal side of Florida. Not liberal, but you know what I mean. Like not the stuffy owed people retirement home side. Correct. Correct. Correct. Now, I really hope it doesn't come to that.

But if this passes yet, it's peace out. It's interesting. I never heard you say with so much conviction. There it is. Dude, you can't let like at some point you just have to say there's a line. This would for sure be that line. Um, Um, Um, we got a super chat on this. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Yes. uh from Sequoia Hall. And by the way, I want to keep I want to finish this cuz Sean Ryan actually hit some banger. some banger. some banger.

Go ahead with that then. Should we do that first? Yeah. Yeah, let's get to the clip, then we'll finish that. We'll We'll take the I mean, just a a caveat to that. I mean, what are you going to spend the money on? Where's the money going to go? I mean, look at our [ __ ] cities, bro. Look at Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, LA, New York. Tons of Minnesota right now. I mean, look at all this [ __ ] Our our cities are [ __ ] trashed. We have a fentanyl problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and where's all the money going? It sure as [ __ ] isn't going into this country. You know where it's going? It's going to Ukraine. It's going to Israel. It's going to fight war in Venezuela. It's going It's going everywhere but here. here. here. And we all see it. Everybody [ __ ] sees it. Everybody sees another billion another another another more billions allotted to Ukraine more billions allotted to Israel more billions allotted to whatever you know it's just it's it everything seems to go out of the country so why would any business business business I I will be very interested to see how the world responds to seeing how much of this is going to the quality Learing center and the California equivalent and the New York equivalent and all that.

It It is going to be um eye opening when we see like fraud, wild like misappropriations of funds where you're spending all this money and getting absolutely nothing done like it. And in the age of the internet, you're going to see it all. And there are going to be people doing what Nick Shirley did in every city across the country. And people will see like, "Oh, damn." Like, we are so inefficient with our money. Like, we don't have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.

And if you were able to get that money to actually go to the things that you want it to go to, now all of a sudden, you can have some really incredible whether it's health care, whether it's education, like you can start making those things incredible when you're not just leaking money the way that we're leaking money. So yeah, seeing people go on a kleptocratic kleptocratic kleptocratic grab for more cash when they are already defrauding the American people is grotesque in the extreme. In the extreme all right, if you want to go to the super chat, we'll take that.

From Zoya Hall, what percent of our current capitalist system is evil with your definition? All the fraud with food and all the other big market capture schemes. by the way, agreeing on the Cal California tax, also Florida bans books, no free speech. So, I would say that um giving an exact percentage right now would just be uh an emotional read on the situation. What I'll say is the the foundation of our economic system is designed designed designed to siphon money from everyone and give back only to asset holders.

And so that puts people in a position where you're guaranteed a K-shaped economy. So if inequality is your beef, um then hopefully you will agree with me that the part of the economy that matters is corrupt. And so let's say that's only 10% of the economy. Everything is downstream of that 10%. So it's like everything becomes a problem. And I'm not saying that there's fraud or corruption in every element of everything. There's not. there's plenty of good people trying to do good work, but the reality is that it's downstream of a system where they can print money, which I think just now they um said they're printing like another $55 billion or something like literally now.

Uh so Uh so Uh so it's just a neverending parade. And the bad news is that the people that are going to be most negatively affected hear it is like, oh, they're printing money. This is awesome. Um not realizing that it's an absolute catastrophe for them. I see a graph somewhere that we've been we pumped in like 400 million or something like that over the last couple weeks. Um it's basically equivalent to what we pumped in in 2021 just in this quarter. This is going from uh October to December leading into this year.

Um I can't find the graph, but yeah, the liquidity and what the Fed is doing is very quietly scary. How much money is being pumped into the system right now? Yes. And let's make it even more scary. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Um, one of the things that people don't really talk about is when you lower interest rates, interest rates, interest rates, people take on more debt. Where's that money come from? Thin air. So, you have effectively just printed money again. Now, it's a little bit different u because it's often being pulled from It's actually not.

No, it's just bad. Was he buffered a little bit? I was just trying to think if there was anything that on when you get into trading in the markets if it dulled the effect but it doesn't. It's just that it's contained within the market itself. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So I wanted to sort of give the devil is due but there's no due to give. Alas I don't get how debt is tied to inflation money printing the basement. They seem like separate concepts to me. Uh they don't get how debt is tied to that.

that. that. I don't get how debt is tied to inflation. inflation. inflation. Okay. So well the great news is this is exactly what we're talking about right now. Okay. Uh, I'm going to do it real fast and then push on the part that is confusing. confusing. confusing. Okay. So, uh, somebody goes to a bank and says, "I want to build a business." And the bank goes, "Cool. I'm going to give you money." And they don't actually have that money, just to be clear. So, what they do is they make that money out of thin air to give it to you.

And there you now have a debt obligation plus interest and none of that money existed before. What I don't think people understand is the only way that money gets into the system. Literally every dollar ever Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Every dollar ever was made out of thin air and came into existence as debt. That's how fiat money works. So it So it So it basically basically basically inflation is essentially debt. They are effectively one and the same. It's not 100% accurate, but it is very close.

Like when you hear that um debt was issued, just assume Oh god. So I'll give you the caveat so the people don't break in the comments. Uh when you do something like uh the government issues uh bonds, treasuries, and people buy those treasuries, that's not necessarily money printing because people that are buying the debt, uh they are buying the debt with money that's already been issued, but that money was originally issued as debt. So it's just not a second wave. It's the first wave of debt being applied to buy new debt.

But when the government says that this is money of last resort or we're the purchaser of last resort, that's going to be money printing. Okay. Uh Quantum Bite, if you got any more questions, drop them in the chat. Um hope that answers your question. Uh all right, we need an update from Minnesota. I saw riers ripping a weapon cache out of a ICE vehicle. They're also getting warrants and paperwork. Um allegedly arrests have been made. The guy was like a Latin King's gang member. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Um, so it's it's crazy that when people commit crimes and you can see their face, maybe their license plates, you could just find them and arrest them and you don't have to shoot them in the face. But maybe he wasn't there and they were scared. Um, because there was a lot of people. But update from Minnesota. What do you think is going on out there? Update us. All right, here's my take. There are increasing calls for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to calm the ongoing riots in Minnesota.

For context, the Insurrection Act has been invoked by roughly 37% of all presidents. I was shocked by that stat. I had no idea given that it hasn't been used since George HW Bush in 1992 to stop the LA riots. I had no idea that it had already been used 30 times in US history by 17 different presidents. The act is used to stop rebellions and uprisings, so-called situations involving armed groups openly defying federal law, state or local authorities unable or unwilling to enforce federal law, violence or organized resistance threatening federal authority, or instances where courts are blocked, taxes cannot be collected, or officials are openly being attacked.

Specific examples include President Abraham Lincoln invoking it in 1861 at the um outset of the Civil War. him basically trying to stop the civil war from kicking off. Ulissiz Srant using it multiple times in the 1870s to suppress Ku Klux Clan terrorism. President Eisenhower deployed it in 1957 to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. Uh Kennedy used it in ' 62 amid riots over desegregation and President Lyndon Baines Johnson used it in 1967 to quell the Detroit riot. uh as well as what we've already mentioned, the most recent invocation being in 1992 when Bush the first uh deployed federal troops to stop the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict.

The question now is does what's happening in Minnesota match the historical precedent and justify invoking the act. Now, there certainly are elements of resistance to federal law enforcement for sure, for sure. for example, violent assaults on ICE agents and protests disrupting their operations, including ramming their cars, attacking them with shovels. However, as someone who remembers the LA riots, while this is bad, I'm going to tell you it does not feel like we're in the kind of fullblown rebellion or uprising that that felt like where you had shop owners on their shops like shooting at people down below.

It was crazy. And if I remember right, something like 50 people died in the LA riots. So, a scale much more dramatic than what we're going through right now. Now, thankfully, there's no widespread deaths right now. Praise the Lord. There's no mass arson and looting like in 67 Detroit or 92 LA. And there's no armed groups openly defying federal authority on a large scale. You get people on the internet holding very big scary guns, I get it. But in terms of what's actually happening on the street, not so much.

The most concerning part for me right now is the open hostility towards the federal government's authority just in general and ICE agents specifically that the governor Tim Walls and AG Keith Ellison are displaying. So, uh, opening openly like protecting illegal immigrants, painting ICE operations is not being valid somehow and historically consistent uh, enforcement of immigration law for instance, but they're just saying that it's unjust and unlawful even though it's the kind of thing that we've seen many times before, including from Obama. So despite all of that, invoking the act now would be seen by a mass swath of Americans as massive overreach and would for sure inflame tensions even further rather than calming them down, which should be on everyone's agenda.

Historical uses of the act were often last resorts after huge acute local failures. here. Minnesota is in new territory with community organizers and things like that, being able to use technology like apps to get whistles in everybody's hands to explain to them certain code whistles and things that they can do to try and thwart law enforcement activities. But the violence has been contained enough that I think Trump would put himself uh at risk of looking like he's doing more tyrannical acts if he were to invoke the act right now.

Uh so be careful. We must It seems like you you are for just to put a button but button in it. You're for the insurrectionist act. You think Trump should evoke it right now? No, definitely not. It' be a huge mistake. I think you were looking at something on your computer while I was doing that. doing that. doing that. So, how do you think this plays out though? You think there needs to be more because I feel like it's getting out of control. control. control. It is getting out of control and he's got to really give Minnesota um a shot to like rein this in to work with ICE.

Let them do it. Keep it at the state level. Got it. Okay. There there are um people that feel some type of way and I think it's understandable why people don't like seeing the National Guard marching through DC. I think it's understandable that people don't like seeing National Guard marching through the parks here in California. I think it's understandable that people don't like um ICE agents rolling up to Minnesota. I think it's understandable that people when the ICE agents roll up um and then are met with further resistance that they escalate.

I get why people are like, "Ah, I don't like anything about this is horrible." So, at the same time, you cannot let lawlessness reign. And so, my advice to Trump would go something like, "Listen, I get it. I understand this. A is dangerous. B, it is people saying that the um federal government is an illegitimate. illegitimate. illegitimate. They've used invading force. So, we'll call it that. They're an illegitimate invading force. That's pretty insurrectionist." Like, this is bad mojo. Uh, and for everybody that was banging a drum about J6, if you're not banging a drum about this, then I'm very confused.

You're coming at things from a political lens. So, I'm saying people need to chill. Just like the only people that we should have been focusing on J6 were people that were like violently attacking somebody. And if you violently attack somebody, don't worry about insurrection. Just worry about the violent attack. Charge them for that. However, that goes down, that goes down like in a normal court of law. So pulling the trigger fast on an idea like insurrection where you know it's going to be hotly contested is just gonna inflame things further.

So um I really hope that it doesn't get worse and I really hope that people back off. Um I think if he invoked the insurrection act now it would cause it to pop off. Uh if you try to calm everything down, keep doing your job. Don't back off. I'm not in any way, shape, or form saying that they should stop enforcing uh immigration because you don't want to teach people that if you bang enough pots and pans, blow enough whistles, throw enough uh ice on the ground so that the ICE agents slip and fall, um that will back off.

You absolutely cannot teach them that lesson. Um however, you've got to be really deaf about when you pull the trigger on that very formal declaration. Uh so I would not do it yet. things would have to escalate first and I hopefully everybody is hoping that they don't escalate. But to give you the sound bite, it would be a mistake for him to invoke it now. Man, it's it's it just seems like things are buttoning up. Um G, can we hit uh 14 to the second one to the right?

Um Tim Walls uh made a statement. I'm not going to go through his long video announcement, but this was one uh announcement that he announced. I think this is directionally at least in the right direction. Let me know how you feel about it. I'm making a direct appeal to the president. Let's turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are. And I appeal to motans. I know this is scary. We can we must speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully.

We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That's what he wants. wants. wants. Yeah. I mean, listen, it this is in isolation. This is a step in the right direction. Mh. Um, Um, Um, I I I know that when you have people like politicians that if you take jabs at them, then they're going to take jabs back at you. So, he couldn't just say the like high road thing. But, if this was all I had heard from him, I'd be like, "Yes, fantastic. People absolutely have the right to film.

They absolutely have the right to blow whistles. Like, there are plenty of things people can do and should do if they believe that this is unjust." We have a guy on the team here who really believes that this is unjust and yeah, he has a right to that opinion and a thous% I never want anyone in America to feel like they um shouldn't stand up for the things that they believe. They should stand up for the things they believe. But there's a big difference between protesting peacefully, which thankfully you've got um walls calling for in this message um and rejecting the authority of the federal government to enforce the laws of this country.

And so in other posts and um interviews, he's been very clear to say that he thinks that um that ISIS is an invading army or an invading force. I can't remember if you use the word army, but that it's illegitimate, it's unjust, it's unlawful, all that stuff. So he's creating this standoff. Then you've got, and I forget who it was, but standing with the chief of police saying, and listen, he was very careful with his words, but he said there are people in the communities that want local police um officers to fight ICE in the streets.

Now, he didn't say they should, but oo buddy, like saying stuff like that without going, "Everybody needs to calm down. We are never going to do that." Which he most certainly did not follow that up with that. So there's just a lot of rhetoric coming off of people that are being extraordinarily defiant. And so you're hyping up your side. You're going to get them out there on mass. And the problem is that you really have these competing ideologies of like what is an illegal immigrant? Have they broken the law or are they Anne Frank and you need to hide them in your attict?

And then does it matter if Anne Frank like killed some fools? And would you hide the um Annef Franks with no criminal record and leave the ones that have out on the stoop and with a sign that says pick them up? Like that's where this all gets super weird for me. So I'm sitting back looking at this. We all know I'm looking at it through an economic lens. Hopefully we all know I'm looking at it through I want to make sure that we have a thriving middle class.

And I'm going this is really stupid. You've got a state that is just absolutely riddled with fraud. And now as a total distraction from that, we are going to bat for a lot of people that we should want to get out of the country. Um, and that's the part where I'm like, wait, I don't understand. Like, you're so much more interested in a um value system that says something along the lines of nobody's illegal there. Borders aren't real. America is already an occupying force of America.

uh that this land never belonged to us anyway and so we have no moral authority um to stop people from coming in. And so you're saying that there's real world doesn't matter. Realities on the ground don't matter. Um destroying a country economically doesn't matter. Uh stability and safety of the populace doesn't matter. What matters is um this is stolen land and we're the bad guys. And that's where I'm like what the [ __ ] That's so childish that I'm just like, listen, first of all, if you want to have that argument, you very quickly get into, well, which Native American population are you going to give it to?

Because they were [ __ ] slaughtering each other long before we got here. So, um, that kind of stuff is just it it is ignorant to what humans are really like. So, and god, how many people have named their kid Gangas? It's like kids, do you know what that [ __ ] did? That's like in 300 years like Adolf being the most popular name specifically because it was like bro did you hear what he did to the Jews? Like that guy was a legend. It's like uh what? So this is where the value system that people have on display is so wacky to me because I look at that and go I love the empathy.

I love when somebody wants to love somebody else and wants to take care of them. That's awesome. Mhm. awesome. Mhm. awesome. Mhm. And then I'm also the guy that I used to hire hire hire uh convicted felons. They had a chance. It wasn't like I hired them because they were convicted felons. But I said, "Listen, doesn't matter if you have convictions on your record. No worries. Uh my whole spiel is to this day, it doesn't matter who you are. It matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there." And so brought all kinds of problem people into my company.

And um I found myself having to run sting operations because people were stealing from me. We were constantly having to quell violence. I mean it just got wild. And so you just go like, "Hey, I used to do this thing, but you will notice I don't do that thing anymore." So it's like I saw firsthand that there is some percentage of those people for whom giving them a second chance is some of the most meaningful things I think I'll ever do in my life. And so I get it.

Like there's one guy, it's his family that needs to tell his story. Lord knows if they're listening and I can ever help them tell that story, I would do it in a heartbeat. It's one of the my favorite humans that I've ever met. Um how ever he um boy did he have like a hard upright uh upbringing. Um upbringing. Um upbringing. Um did things allegedly that I think would curl most people's hair. Um but when he found a path to go legit, he took it took it took it and it changed the course of his entire family's life.

And at his funeral, his family stood up and said that like, "We all know my dad was a gangster and meeting you changed the course of his life and changed the course of my family's life." Like having somebody say that at their dad's funeral, one of the most like impactful moments of my life. So, I get it. I've put my money where my mouth is with that. At the same time, this guy who turned his life around was in the 2%. Yeah. the 98% it did not matter stay the same.

same. same. Yeah, they were stuck in a um mindset that it it is a tragedy that they found themselves raised in that way that they would end up with that frame of reference. Um but nonetheless, they had that frame of reference. It was super destructive, deeply problematic and ultimately had to be rooted out. And so people just are not being realistic about these policies, who they attract, who's going to take advantage of it. There will be some small percentage and it will be incredibly meaningful. And so finding ways to find those people um is magical.

But blinding yourself and going to bat for the 98% is [ __ ] stupid because they are laughing all the way to robbing you blind. Yeah. Um, there's an argument breaking on chat right now of whether Tim Wall should be in jail. Are you on that team of of of Everybody knows what I'm going to say. No, Tim Wall should not be in [ __ ] jail. Like, you're just going to incentivize Democrats to look for a reason to jail somebody in the Republican party. Republican party. Republican party. So, did Were you guys not there when he was trying to not him, but the Democrats were trying to jail Trump like psychopaths?

psychopaths? psychopaths? It's like they shouldn't have been trying to jail Trump. We shouldn't be trying to jail Tim Walls. We should be uncovering the fraud. We should get Tim Walls impeached, get him out of office if if he's guilty. If he's not guilty, then the the poor [ __ ] guy may be incompetent, whatever. But if he didn't do anything, like, we should want to find that. So, yes, go investigate the fraud. Go find out what is real. But there's nothing I see him doing right now that I would say is put him in jail.

I would also like to remind people and you're going to routinely hear me feel very annoyed by the way that a state is acting, but at the same time, I want to be a federation of United States. I want uh Florida to go, "Oh, California is going to be [ __ ] dumb and go anti-billionaires. Yeah, word. We'll take them all. Please and thank you." And they do a different strategy. And so now we've got 50 people running or 50 states doing running different strategies. is brilliant competition.

I don't want a monopoly. So just because I disagree with the way that they're approaching this problem, as long as they're acting within the confines of the law, they should be able to say their peace. They should be able to stand up for what they think motans want. Yeah. That is as it should be. And so um to that end, I have not seen anything yet that makes me think he should be in jail. Yeah. Uh G, can we pull up 28 on the sheet? Uh, I think it's time to talk about your favorite topic in the world.

Um, Um, Um, it's inflation, everybody. It's inflation. Uh, true inflation numbers just dropped. Uh, the numbers look amazing. look amazing. look amazing. They look awesome. They look amazing. Uh, early estimates, nothing solidified. We haven't got things uh, pressed out yet, but as we're pulling this up, I want to kind of start with the GDP numbers because there's something interesting you said earlier. Um, GDP was up 4% uh, in Q3 of last year. People were celebrating. They were high five. When we go into that second layer of it, we realize that 50% of that is consumer spending.

When we click into that, we go into that consumer spending, we realize that 47% of that consumer spending was the top like 1%. So now we're starting to say that like yes, the economy is booming and we are growing, but the K is definitely K. U so is it one of those things that GDP number go up it's a win regardless or is this K shape eventually going to break somewhere and it's just not perpetual growth. growth. growth. All right I'm going to give you two beats of this answer.

The first I'm just going to give you what trueflation says and then G if we can roll right into um the graph that I pulled of the K-shaped economy. economy. economy. Oh, that would be great. It's two separate beats though. So Drew will tell you the number 26. 26. 26. Um so but first we're going to start with true inflation. Um and then but I'll want you to pull up um something else in a minute. Okay. So here it is with true inflation. G when you're ready.

Uh so according to inflation watchdog group Trueflation year-over-year CPI inflation has dropped to 1.55%. That is incredible. the site they site excuse me cooling uh across multiple categories including housing, food and household items. Now trueflation's numbers are significantly lower than what's being reported by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics which is normally sort of the blue chip. It's what everybody looks at. So I think it it's worth talking about why the numbers are different. Uh and the reason is because Truflation use millions of live prices every day.

This is the kind of thing that Elon was talking about. He's like in today's world why are we using this super outdated system? There's ways to uh get this data in real time. So that's what trueflation does and theoretically this allows them to measure housing for instance more realistically and they can skip the outdated tricks of like well we see this little thing over here and because we don't have enough data we like run this fancy math equation and we think that this is what it's going to be.

So they don't have to do that. they're just looking at way more data points. And um by bypassing the outdated tricks that often make official CPI numbers uh look hotter and are definitely farther behind, they're hopefully able to get closer to the on the ground reality. Truflation's primary index calculates their number by comparing the current cost of a basket of goods. This is what people normally do with CPI to the same day one year ago. So that's what these numbers are. So, we went from, I think, 1.7 to 1.55, but it's year-over-year.

Uh, and they're updating daily with real-time data from over 13 million items across various sources. While users can derive month-over-month or other intervals from the underlying data, the headline percentage that TruFlation is talking about right now um that's on their dashboard is in fact year-over-year. So, this is very encouraging. And ultimately, uh, for context, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, uh, official CPI for December of 2025 was 2.7 year-over-year. Um, so Truflation's index aims to predict and track in real time getting you something that's better.

So, I don't know that I I don't think the right way to look at that is like, oh my god, we've had this huge fall-off. It's that their methodology and the more frequent updates is just more accurate. So, assuming that Trueflation's um real time data is actually showing us um better numbers, which again is 1.55% year-over-year as of January 16th, 2026, um if that accurately reflects the economy more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics lagging 2.7, this could signal that inflation is cooling faster than official metrics suggest.

And here's what um that might imply for anybody that's asking like is Trump's economy actually working? Um so based on their key pillars uh tariffs, tax cuts, deregulation, energy independence, and immigration restrictions um is where is this going? And if this data can be believed, that strategy is actually driving inflation down, which is incredible. Now, some of the infl uh the deflation though could possibly be coming from the economy finally breaking. Not in a good way, but just we've been talking about that for a long time.

So, um I think you're going to hear increasingly people talking about that we're in a recession. So, of course, prices are going to be coming down. So, you always have to be careful. Deflation can be crisisled deflation or it can be increased productivity causing prices to go down. meaning the easiest way to get housing prices to come down is to lower the cost of h uh sorry to make more houses and you can however get housing prices to drop by having mass defaults like we had in the 2008 collapse.

So nobody but investors are going to say that 2008 was great for basically everybody. It was a catastrophe that spread all around the world. So, but both of those things, increasing the housing supply will lower the price and causing a catastrophic uh debt default will also cause housing prices to go down. So, understanding the mechanisms that are working are very very important and I don't think we have enough clarity on that yet. Um, but certainly you can expect some uh victory laps from the Trump administration and honestly hopefully it's true.

Love or hate Trump, we should all want this to be um deflationary or a reduction in inflation because 1.55 is still theft, but it's less thankfully. Um so hopefully that is a decline based on the strategies actually performing. So fingers crossed. fingers crossed. fingers crossed. Nice. Nice. Nice. Okay. The next beat that I want to talk about though, and this is uh far more interesting if we could, and let me know if you need the number uh or if you already know what this one is, but two.

two. two. It is number two almost certainly. Let me confirm that. It is number two. Yes, indeed. All right, get ready, boys and girls. and girls. and girls. Right there. Yeah, please show them the graph. graph. graph. All right. So, I found this graph. Was very shocked very shocked very shocked and uh it it's really interesting coming across a timeline on my X feed that has different um back and forth between topics. So, I'm seeing everything that's happening in Minnesota. I'm seeing politicians hating each other across the aisle.

And then I see this graph. Now, people are arguing over immigration as if it's about race, but it's not. People talk about eating the rich as if the rich are the problem. They're not. People think they're in a class war, but they're not. Those are the distractions that keep you from seeing the real machine that's robbing you blind. And you are being robbed blind. The working and middle class have been absolutely pillaged. But like in a movie, the bad guy is never who you think it is.

The obvious answer is always the wrong answer. So, who is the real villain? Well, look at the graph. The top 10% of US earners now account for almost exactly half of all consumer spending. And this problem has been growing rapidly for the last 30 years, surging by a full 13 percentage points in that time, marking a profound shift in spending power. It is a grizzly illustration of the unbearable inequality in this country. Inequality is unavoidable. Make no mistake about that. You do not even if you try to level set everyone at zero, you're still going to have inequality.

But this level of inequality is the result of intentional wealth transfer. But if the rich aren't the problem, who is? is? is? To answer that question, you have to know how people get wealthy. More than 70% of all multi-millionaires are self-made. So it's not through inheritance. inheritance. inheritance. To get wealthy, you have to build something and own it or bet on something and win. What do you build? A business. What do you bet on? Anything that might go up in value more than inflation over time.

Could be your house, could be the stock market, could be a lot of things that can't be inflated. But if you don't build something, you are forced to bet. Now, most people are willing to bet, but only on a house because it's the thing that they understand intuitively. Their wife is heranging them to get one so that they can live inside of it and build memories. So, once houses become too expensive, too expensive, too expensive, most people just don't bet. And because of that, they get eaten alive by inflation.

If you were willing to bet that the stock market will go up in value over a long period of time, odds are you'll actually win. So imagine going to a casino where there's a known way to play and if you play that way, odds are that you're going to win. You would think that people would rush to that casino and follow the playbook, but most people don't. Most people don't bet. Now, if you ask, well, how do you bet? Well, you're asking the wrong question. The right question is, why do you have to bet at all?

Now, you're getting closer and closer to figuring out who the real villain is when you start asking that question. You shouldn't have to bet. You shouldn't have to be an investor. You should be able to simply save your money. You should be able to save your way to prosperity. I hope that sounds so obvious that people are like, "Wait, that is what I'm doing." If that's what you're doing, you are losing every day because there is a system set up to ensure you lose money if you save.

You can't save for two simple reasons. You don't make enough money for how expensive things are getting. And things are getting more expensive specifically because the government prints money instead of balancing its budget. And that means your money is worth less every day. So you're not making enough already to keep up with inflation. And then what you keep is losing value over time. Don't even get me started on globalism. Now, I could be cheeky and say that, okay, this means that we're all the villain because we vote for this [ __ ] But instead, I'll say this.

You're not in a race war. You're not in a class war. You're in a policy war. A policy war. Politicians run deficits and print money to cover it. And that printed money comes out of your pocket. You don't vote for it. You probably don't even know that it's happening. And to pour salt on the wound, the politicians then have the gall to allow bankers to act like a cartel to keep competition like crypto out so that you have no way to exit the system that's stealing your money.

Now, it breaks my heart to watch Minnesota or any other state burn and know that people think that they're fighting a just war when they don't even know who the real enemy is that has put them in the situation to feel the way that they feel. The real enemy is any policy that offers more free stuff, forces you to gamble, makes you poorer, and more dependent. Free things are always paid for. They're just paid for in inflation, which comes out of your pocket. You need balanced budgets, money that can't be printed, competition among banks, so the consumer wins, not bankers.

We need affordable housing from building more. from building more, which is the only thing that actually lowers the cost of houses without the need for a crisis or without making the buildings impossible to maintain or without needing a commazar to decide who gets what housing. You can't lower prices on something that everyone wants. You have to make it more abundant. Let me say that again. When everybody wants something, you're not going to lower the price. If there's a fixed supply of something everyone wants, the price will always go up.

If you want to lower the price, you simply make more of it. Okay? Pokemon cards understand this. Pokemon collectors are terrified that the companies will print more cards because then the cost of the cards go down. down. down. If Bandai, the company that makes Pokemon cards, understands not to do that, then come on, boys and girls, we've got to figure out that when you increase the supply of something and the demand stays the same, the price is going to go down. This is all a policy concern.

It's a policy war that we're fighting. If you fix the policies, reduce the policies, balance the budget, and turn your anger towards the right people, as long you're you're going to make progress. But as long as we're fighting each other, they can just keep stealing from us. All right, Drew, that's my PSA. I hope that that we get somewhere. Yeah, it there's a lot of um sadness in the chat because it just feels like we're going against this wall of whether it's corporate elites, whether it's the Fed, whether it's money printing, whether it's billionaires.

So, it does seem a little bit gassed. Um but here here, let me give people a little bit of hope. Mhm. Uh I read the Mchavelians, defenders of freedom, James Bham, put forward this idea that hm the elites have always been able to control the narrative. Narratives are useful. Narratives create cohesion. Now they can't. Social media has made that impossible. And he lamented that I don't know that this is going to be better. And I thought, he might be right. I don't know that this is going to be better, but the one thing I will give it if you're open to hearing it, the information is there.

It's just pouring out and the way to beat inflation to way to get on the asset ladder. Like if you hit subscribe immediately right now, this is one thing that I'm just not shy or bashful about. I am walking you through the cause and effect of life. Once you understand the cause and effect of life, everything gets easier because now all of a sudden you understand you you can solve what I call novel problems. Uh you can solve novel problems when you understand cause and effect because you're no longer reasoning by someone else's frame of reference and them telling you what to do.

Uh you're no longer reasoning by analogy. You you're actually thinking from first principles. And you live in that era. You live in an era where there are gaggles of people. you can pop in here, see what I'm saying, move on to somebody else, see what they're saying, and actually in your own life, build a working model of the world that results in the outcomes that you want. So, the only danger in this age where there's going to be a gazillion narratives flying around that will conflict with each other and cause people to hate each other is that if you allow yourself to think by proxy of a team, meaning I'm not going to think through or understand this, I just need to be on a team and then you tell me team how I'm supposed to think.

to think. to think. That that's dangerous. But the flip side is the same thing that makes that possible at scale makes it possible at scale for people to find the information and think for themselves. Um I unfortunately have a now long-standing belief that I don't know that we can save um a government, a country, but for sure you can save individuals. And so my message to you guys is listen at the individual level you don't have to be tense. Uh you can figure these things out for yourself if you're thinking up from first principles.

So that would be the the breath of hope that I will give people is that man, you now have access to the information. Like it is wild what you can learn. Absolutely wild. Um so just make sure that you're putting the time to learn. Um at the beginning of this live before the tech issues, you said, "I just dropped a link and my take is going to piss everybody off." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's now that time for you to piss everybody off. everybody off. everybody off.

Well, I'll be interested to see if I piss off everybody here. I have a feeling I'll piss 50% of the people off here. Uh, but going wide. Yeah, this is I think people have a hard time with this. So, if we could throw that up. This topic more than anything makes me feel of a different generation than people. But, so here's the stat. All right. So, this is from Zerustra. Uh, scrolled up a little too far. So, it says, "Political scientists and data quants have been telling us this for half a decade.

Women have moved radically leftward at a scale and speed with no modern precedent while men have on the whole remained largely steady and unchanged. And then it shows a graph and men are sort of warbling but if you were to straighten their line out there's not a ton of change. Women on the other hand the change is dramatic as they have become more liberal. And the reason that this is happening is very straightforward. very straightforward. very straightforward. men and women are no longer getting together in relationships and women do not have a male influence to check some of their more natural impulses to um continue to go left.

And so when you are boss [ __ ] uh I don't need no man, and therefore don't have a man in your life, then there's nobody there that's helping to shape the way that you view the world. and you are in a world that is protected. Systems are built to make it so you don't have to think about any of those sort of classical male things, creating systems, safety, all of that. And because you believe economic because you're in the west, you believe economic prosperity is just a a rule of life.

Um all of a sudden you don't feel any need to um listen to a man or anything like that. Like when the whole mansplain mansplaining thing popped off, I was so confused by that. I was like, "Wait, you're annoyed that somebody is giving you information?" I don't understand. You can always ignore them, but why would you be mad that So, uh, from an evolutionary perspective, men are designed to figure out systems, and for whatever reason, God saw it fit to make us excited when we understand something we want to tell somebody else.

So, um, that's just how the architecture of the mind works. And yeah, when you don't have that influence to um keep that imbalance, the stuff spirals out of control. control. control. Do you think that higher education has a play on it? Cuz women are getting degrees at a far higher rate than men are are are for sure. But I think it's even a more distressing thing, which is um there's a woman, I'm forgetting her name now, but she's been really making the rounds. If our channel was more inclined to this, I would have her on.

But um she's saying that oh the whole thing you're calling woke phenomenon is simply the you can track it to the date that women uh become more than 50% of that institution. So whether it's um there are more female judges you see what happens to the judiciary when more women are in education as administrators and teachers and you see what happens there. And she's like just one after another after another after another. When women become the majority, it just breaks woke because that is a female mindset.

And it's so funny because in 2020, I think I had this conversation with Heather Hying. And at the very end, this is so early in my like what is happening journey where I pull my head back out of entrepreneurship for a second and start looking at culture like for the first time and I'm looking around like what is happening? M happening? M happening? M and I remember saying to her, uh, this feels like this is, um, female psychology playing itself out at scale. And she, I can't remember how she responded, but it was something like, yeah, like that might really be what this is.

That's what this is. And so men and women need each other. If you want to see the excesses of men, uh, go look at the French Revolution, Napoleon, uh, sweeping across Europe. If you want to see the excesses of men, look at Gangghaskhan. there there's no shortage of what men look like when they become pathological. Uh but we are living through a moment where we're waking up to the reality that uh women can go pathological in the way that they think and that there is a reason that men are made better by women and women are made better by men.

And if you don't have like we are just evolved to be these counterbalancing forces where men want sexual access to women and so they've got to find ways to please them. And um when women want resources and protection from men, then they've got to find ways to please them. And so you find yourselves gravitating more towards a center point. And now that that's gone, it's you see this kind of stuff. It's wild. And I'm sure that there are other stats you could look at where men are becoming super dysfunctional uh because they don't have the influence of women.

So it's like, dude, when I think about how much better my life is because I found Lisa when I was 24, it's like, god damn. Uh, and I will be the first to tell you that Lisa's life is a lot better because she found me at 21. There is just no I will stand 10 toes down that if my wife were here, this would be a great time for her to be in the chat. If my wife were here, she'd be like, "Yes, that is unequivocally true." So, um, um, um, I mean, we are seeing the effects of men.

There's so many men that are not in employment, like not employment, not in schooling. I forgot what the acronym is, but they're just home in their basement playing video games because they're not trying to get laid. Yeah. So that there is that increase on that side. Um I don't know like when I see graphs like this I understand that directionally it could be correct but I just think there's a lot of factors that we're not necessarily talking the neats ne thank you guys u but I just think there's a a lot of layers whether it is education whether it is how the political movements move cuz even now Trump announcing the 10% cap on interest rates he's announcing a health care plan he's announcing all these things that traditionally would have been a left-wing proposal and now it's at the right.

So I think that even the the the the polls that were this is where the left wing starts, this is where the right wing starts, those are even shifting. So uh they're not. So here's here is what people have failed to map accurately. The left and the right is a psychological phenomenon of humans at scale. Humans at scale, the people that lean left, um, they are filling an evolutionary niche of, we'll oversimplify, of compassion. People that have a temperament that lean right are filling an evolutionary niche of avoiding um, freeloaders.

So, there's something in economic game theory called the freeloader problem. Now, keep in mind, it's not like an economic thing. It's economists looking at the way that humans actually behave and going this thing of like humans acting like they're rational just isn't real. That's not how humans act. Humans seem to be doing something else. Like uh if they see an opportunity to exploit something, they will always exploit it. Always. Someone in the group is always going to exploit that. Uh you learn that very quick as a video game developer.

If there is a way to cheese the game, meaning to beat it easily, even though it doesn't help them, like it's literally just your experience to have, people will cheese it. If uh there's a way to cheat and beat other players, even if there's no reward, they'll cheat and beat other players if you make it possible. It's wild. So, it's like there's all these things that the human mind is just it's going to do for whatever reason. And so, if you make something free, there are people who will go, "Well, I don't need to earn this.

I'm just going to get it for free." And so if you didn't if evolution didn't build a counter veiling balance to like love everybody, make sure everybody's okay, um then all you get are people that want to do nothing, expect everything, or completely entitled and the society would collapse. If you only have people that are like, "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, [ __ ] get to work, then it's like you have Sparta, right?" And so it's like uh like you need something that is really the yin and yang of both of those things and they keep each other in check.

So we need people on the left, we need people on the right, but they have to respect each other. They have to see themselves as an ecosystem. That's the part we don't do. And I remember this first started occurring to me when um people that I used to work with, there were two of them, very smart, very smart. And uh they would talk so much [ __ ] on each other. It was wild and not like sometimes good-natured, but oftentimes cruel. M cruel. M cruel. M and I remember thinking, uh, you actually think the other person is stupid and you don't realize that you're a certain way and they're a certain way and together you guys are magical.

Either of you by yourselves would not work. It is the fact that you've come together that makes this work. And but they really couldn't see it and they really were just antagonized. And I remember thinking, "Wow, that's super weird." So, um, that started putting that on my radar as like, "Oh, interesting." like people only know the emotional friction of I don't like the way the other side is instead of being like oh me by myself I'm not going to be able to get this done that humans have evolved as a part of a social system and so we all fill a role inside of a much larger social system so in video games you get this a lot where you'll optimize the different classes inside the video game assuming that they're going to work together that there's going to be the guy that just wants to charge forward there's going to be the guy that wants to protect everybody and absorb bullets there's going to be usually the girl that wants to and like offer healing to everybody and sort of just pay attention to where everybody's at, who needs me.

It's utterly fascinating that that's so often uh a female um role that people take. So all that stuff, there's just all this stuff that's hardwired into us. And so when you put it in that context, it starts making sense. When you take it out of that context, it's very confusing. confusing. confusing. How do you think we get out of this out of like us this Yeah, this gender divide, this partisan gap. Okay. So the real answer is I don't think we ever get out of this.

I think we are headed down a path where we become um synthetic beings and AI makes us makes it so that we never have to resolve this. That's my actual belief. So, it's just going to keep getting wider and wider until and it just won't matter because within seven years um within seven years, wealthy people will have a um AI mistress mistress mistress who gives wicked good head. Wow. And within 15 years, the average person has a mistress, an AI mistress that g a good head.

And then women just they also have their companions and they don't have to um meet their needs and their own needs are met. And it now whether that's 100% dystopia or not, we can debate another time. But I actually think AI is going to make it such that we don't ever answer this question. Wow. Well, that's all I got. All right. And on that crazy ass note, we come to a wrap. It's Friday, everybody. We are going to be here on Monday, even though it's a holiday.

And I want to shout out this crew who had the option. They did not have to come in. They still don't, by the way, boys. So, if you guys want to retract, and I mean this, if you guys are like, "No, no, no. I'd rather have Monday off." I'll figure it out. But currently, these guys are coming. Mad love, mad respect, amazing. Uh have a very wonderful weekend everybody and we will see you on Monday. Until then my friends be legendary. Take care. Peace.