BREAKING Brown University Shooter Identified, Trump's MAJOR Policy Changes, Piers & Candace Clash

Key Takeaway

The key to making better decisions isn't about having perfect information—it's about understanding your own cognitive biases. We're witnessing the rise of 'vibe journalism' where feelings trump facts, but the antidote is self-awareness: recognize when you're steering emotionally versus logically, and actively choose which lens serves you best for each situation.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and Drew discuss the clash between Piers Morgan and Candace Owens over Charlie Kirk's assassination coverage, exploring the broader shift from traditional fact-based journalism to emotion-driven 'vibe journalism.' They analyze Trump's executive orders including marijuana rescheduling, and examine how people navigate truth in an era of institutional distrust.

Full Transcript

Transcript of BREAKING Brown University Shooter Identified, Trump's MAJOR Policy Changes, Piers & Candace Clash from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

episode of the Tom Billy Show live. I am joined by my co-host and the producer. What's up, Drew? How we doing? Snucking an air horn there. I'm excited to to to snuck in an air horn. Let's go. Happy Friday, everybody. Let's go. It is the final Friday before our holiday break. So, we are honored that you guys are joining us. We're going to be trying some new things with the show in the new year, and I cannot wait for you guys to see. Not the least of which is going to be a totally new cadence.

We're going to be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 a.m. Pacific time, hitting three days a week to make sure that we are never falling behind. So, incredibly honored by uh what you guys have helped us make this show in 2025, and very much looking forward to what we're going to do in 26. We've got Mason on the community. So, if anybody out there has any concerns that they want addressed immediately, he's the man that you have to convince. If he sees any consistent messaging, then he will certainly bring that to the four.

And then the boys behind the camera. Gentlemen, G. Eric uh making it all work per usual. Well, never a dull moment in the world of world affairs and politics and the unfolding new media landscape. Piers Morgan and Candace Owens clashed as Piers calls Candace a liar straight to her face, saying money is a d money is the thing that's driving her reporting. Trump addresses the nation seemingly under duress at times. The speech felt like a speedreading exercise. If you guys haven't seen it, it's worth watching.

just to see the performance. Trump has reclassified marijuana from being on par with heroin to being on par with Tylenol and codine, which I think is a far more logical place for it to be. The House passed the Child's Innocence Act to stop gender reassignment surgeries and puberty blockers from being given to minors. CPI inflation numbers are in and people might be tempted to celebrate because they have come down more than expected. But there are a lot of questions around the accuracy of the numbers for reasons that we are going to discuss.

And this is by far the most interesting story. Senator Mike Lee has put forward a bill that would allow the president to issue something known as letters of mark to privateeers privateeers privateeers that would effectively classify cartels as pirates and I'm going to explain exactly what this means. Drew Drew has submitted his resignation. This is my Jack Sparrow moment. A bottle of rum. I'm about to get a Dan Krenshaw. It's going to go down. I'm excited. Wild. I can't believe this is real. But we're going to talk all about that.

The UK Prime Minister Kira Stararma promises to save young men from misogynistic influences, proving once again that the UK has completely submitted to brain rot. And we'll be diving into that. All right, Drew, welcome. And we've got another wild one on our hands today. Some of this stuff is really insane from where I'm sitting. It's it's bouncing around. Trump addressed the nation um due to mixed results, but he's been signing a bunch of EOS. This is also the alleged release to files day, but I haven't seen an email or a tweet.

But what's his name is saying like people are going to be prosecuted. Um Roana, who we had on the show, literally put out a thing. We'll show the clip later, but he was just like, "Yep, people are going to be prosecuted if they don't get into this." All right, but first everybody, we've got Piers Morgan versus Candace Owens. You're lying for money is essentially the vibe. Uh, it was a viral showdown between Piers on his show uncensored with Candace and it ended up with Piers directly accusing Candace Owens of lying to boost her YouTube numbers about Charlie Kirk and Bridget Mcronone.

Uh, the clash centered on Piers's belief that Candace is making assertions about Charlie Kirk's assassination without sufficient evidence. Needless to say, that did not go over well with Candace. Uh, Piers also seemed skeptical about Candace and Erica Kirk meeting behind closed doors instead of having the public meeting with Megan Kelly moderating, which was the original uh, stance that they were taking. But Candace had decided that um, that Turning Point USA was probably right, that taking down the um, temperature first was probably the right place. So, they did that, but we'll see if anything super productive comes out of that.

Now, Candace pushed back on Piers and all of his accusations, making it clear that she thinks the public is being fed what she calls more Fed slop like we were with the JFK assassination. And she is, and this is a paraphrase, but it's pretty damn close to a quote. She's not going to be treated like asking questions is the crime. The real crime, she said, was Charlie getting shot in the neck. And she is not going to let anybody stop her from asking questions. She also said directly that she wouldn't be surprised if there were people inside of Turning Point USA that had four knowledge of Charlie's assassination, a pretty big claim.

And that she gave two very specific names to Erica for further investigation. She was not prepared to release those names to peers. She said she does not have concrete evidence. And given that they are private citizens, that did not feel right. Uh the most interesting part of the exchange for me, if I'm being honest, is the way that all of this highlights the James Bum of it all. uh we are witnessing right now in real time a broader credibility crisis as it relates to official sources and ultimately we're pushing into what I'm going to call vibe journalism.

Um I really think that Candace is creating a new form of entertainment and I think it being understood as entertainment is the right play. right play. right play. Um let's jump into the clip. Um but first off Candace brought out the pinstripes. You you could tell she meant business at that point. She she was coming hot. But this is the first clip where Pierce accuses her of just getting uh of ex extrapolating this whole saga just for clips and money. There are, as you know, right now a lot of people from Tim P to New York Post to others who've come out very stridently in the last week alone in the last week and say that's exactly what you've been doing with Erica Kirk.

Yeah, but you haven't answered the question. So, this is just made up. It's as I said, this is just all fluff. You're suggesting that I'm making money. Did I sign a new advertiser? Are we meeting more? Are are we reading more ads? Do we put this somewhere else? Do we sign more on YouTube? Did I sell a t-shirt? Okay, but like come on now. Money on YouTube. Are are you kidding me? I was already in a top 10 globally. So money on YouTube. The way she says it is like you don't really make there's she's making millions of dollars off of money on YouTube.

Let's be very clear about that. And then her podcast probably does three, four, fivex that. Uh so anyway, back to it. But I do think honestly that part of the claim from Piers was Piers was Piers was um bang on in terms of for sure as re as the views go up she's going to be making a lot more money. But she's right in terms of everything I do has made me extremely popular and do you really think I'm going to sell out my friend to go from five to one.

Anyway, back to the clip. clip. clip. Before Charlie [clears throat] was assassinated and if you think that I would want my friend to be assassinated so I could go from being in the top five to being number one, you're out of your mind. Okay. mind. Okay. mind. Okay. So disrespectful, but like the point is that nobody, everyone who is saying that I'm making more money cannot say how I'm making more money cuz it's just not true. Okay, so you're like, "Oh, she got He literally just said how you're making more money.

You are driving views." So, um, I think she has a legitimate argument, which is, listen, I cover topics that are extremely controversial. I've got the she doesn't say this, but she's got the balls to like take the heat for said new form of entertainment from where I'm sitting. Um, but it is self-evident that this is a money-making endeavor that this will, if it hasn't already with all the legal bills and stuff, this is going to make her a fantastically wealthy person if she's able to sustain this for years.

Look at how much money um Joe Rogan has made. and she's got a chance to have that same kind of reach, have sustainability if she can avoid being taken down by all the legal stuff. There is a ton of money, a ton of money to be made in this. So, that part's very disingenuous. I if I were her, the argument that I would be making would go something like this. Uh, yes, I'm making money off of talking about these things because the public is sick and tired of being trapped inside of an elite bubble where they're being fed a bunch of [ __ ] And the fact that I can get attention by drawing people over to what's actually true or the pursuit of the truth.

Obviously, Piers, this is a whole new era and it should be rewarded. That would be where I would come from versus the money on YouTube. Like, what are you talking about? Uh, nobody can tell me how I'm making money. Yeah. Not only can they, they just did. So, that part is insincere. Uh, I'm not sure why she's trying to dodge that. Like, just lean into it. Yes, there's a ton of money to be made, but if you're really going to be journalistic, which I don't think she is, but I don't think she's lying.

I think she believes the things that she's saying, I think she is the the person that is going to rise up in this moment because she is vibes. That's seems to be how she navigates the world. She has a gut instinct. She believes that gut instinct is I I'm now being a little unfair in my paraphrasing, but like the Lord speaking to her through her gut instincts. Uh her friends coming to her in dreams and revealing truth. It's like okay, if you've got that worldview, then you put that all together into together into together into well, I feel this way and therefore it's true.

true. true. So pretty wild coming from somebody who pushed back so hard on uh well, I feel like a woman and therefore am a woman. Uh, I would say she's falling into a very similar trap. But it shows you how humans are, in my estimation, so victimized by their own emotions. Like people are just convinced that [ __ ] is real, which is wild. Um, I'm I'm I'm with some of the people in the chat. Um, I don't think this is a I'm making more money type thing.

Yes, number goes up, views goes up, but the brand deals that Candace broke, she didn't break them on the back of Charlie Kirk. We know because there's been a bunch of brands that are like, "Hey, what's your topic this week?" uh we don't want to advertise on that. We'll take a step back. So, it's not like she to her point, she didn't sign a new brand deal. These are the same brand deals she's been doing since through the summer. So, I I don't want to say that she went from, you know, poverty to started talking about Charlie Kirk and now she's living in a penthouse.

It's definitely nothing that drastic. Viewership numbers do go up and that does make, you know, sell selling ads easier for your team, but I definitely don't think that, you know, she's bringing raking in the money handover fist to her point just because her friend died. I don't think anybody would take that deal. So, I think that while we are rightfully acknowledging that she's getting millions of views for her for this conspiracy being drawn out this far, I just don't think that she's doing it to make the money.

I don't think that's her goal. I don't think that's why she picked this at all. But the mechanism is she is going to always talk about whatever is going to capture the public's imagination the most. She's always going to frame things in a way that is the most entertaining. It's part of her brilliance and people wasting time being mad about that I think is dumb. But her trying to pretend that that isn't the game is also dumb in my opinion. Like it's one of the things that gives her a weak point of credibility is when she's like making out like what do you mean I'm making money off this?

What do you mean that like my numbers going up is going to be better for the business. It's like just own that and now get into but I'm representing the truth. Why are you mad about that? why aren't we talking about the veracity of the claims? Like she has an avenue to slap him around way harder in my opinion, but she's not taking it. And so I don't know if she's not taking it because she does have a little bit of guilt around like, okay, numbers do factor into my thinking.

Um, which is perfectly fine. Numbers factor into my thinking in terms of, okay, what are going to be the topics that the audience cares about? I used to talk to my film students about this when I was teaching film and it's the same way that I feel about doing a newsy show like this. Uh film making can be masturbation or it can be making love. If you're masturbating, all you have to think about is you. You do what you want and that's that. If you're going to make love, you've got to think about the other person that you're with.

And so if you're going to do a show, if you're not thinking about your audience at all, you've got a problem. If you're just a simp for your audience, you also have a problem. But you need to take into consideration that you're in this like two-way dance. I'm not going to like I would love to talk about video games and uh TCG more. But it's it just doesn't work with the channel. I would have to do that as a separate channel if I wanted to do that.

And if I was on that channel and I wanted to talk about politics, I'd remind myself, bro, you you have a channel for that. So that's just being honest about the way that the dynamic works. So, I don't know if she's spinning herself, if she's trying to spin her audience, if she just doesn't want to talk about that part of it, or she knows that people will run with that and and not talk about the veracity of the claims. But that would be my advice to her is like just focus on the veracity of the claims.

Get people to go after the argument uh and stay focused on that. on that. on that. I don't know. I think it's a spin conversation in general because I think now we're talking about how much more money she's making versus what she's actually talking about. And I think that that in general is a way to I don't want to say defame her like it's definitely definitely definitely no that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to get people to not take her seriously to say listen the way that you're going after this is obviously money motivated.

I think there are a ton of people that are predisposed to dislike Candace that are going to like run with that narrative. What I'm saying is she's got a trump card that she can play to shut that down and she's not playing it. M. And so the question becomes, okay, well, given that there's a way better argument, why aren't you playing that? Maybe she didn't think of it, whatever. But I think she's from that perspective, she's got a much better card to play and she's not playing it.

Got it. Um, this is another clip from the interview where she uh clap backs at claps back at Pierce and says that um the difference between me and you is I have to encourage I have the courage to take the risk and ask the questions. You wait until it becomes popular, then you change your mind, which I think was a banger banger banger spice. That that was bars. Yeah. Why? What do they What is your theory? theory? theory? I don't know. What's your theory? There must be You must have an idea.

My theory is that we should investigate everything strange that happened on that day so we can figure out what happened. Investigation. Why is everybody so Why are we pretending that we don't know why we ask questions? Like, why? You're a journalist. You know what this is? You're like, what's going on? WHAT'S GOING ON? Why do you WANT TO KNOW WHY THESE planes were tracking Charlie? Well, my theory is that we are being sold absolute fed slop. The media is doing their operation. Yes. There's no doubt that Piers loves this and as he said, some will say that you're uh infamous, but you're always welcome on Uncensored.

He knows it's good for numbers. Uh his accusation to her about you doing this with numbers is like whoa pot kettle like what's happening right now. Uh so yeah, there's no doubt that he loves it, but also he the Nick Fuentes damaged his reputation that interview. And look, will he get on the other side of it? Probably. But I think you'll be able to put the um Nick Fuentes as like a a dot on his timeline chart of popularity go up or down. And I have a feeling it's going to start going down.

People are really turning him into an avatar for boomers that just don't get it. Uh, and I think you're seeing a similar thing here where he's really trying to like trap her and he's trying to trap her with things that might have worked with a politician 20 years ago, but now vibe journalism, while they're not going to call it that, is is venerated. Like, please understand, Candace will make a lot more sense to you once you realize that she believes that the way that she feels is accurate and is right.

it is the way that you ought to be parsing the world. So, you're not gonna like get a gotcha on her. She's just going to keep saying, but you have to ask these questions. What are you talking about? Uh, I don't know if we'll have time to play the clip, but at one point she's talking about one of the guys that she has named has named has named at Turning Point USA as being like, "You need to investigate a guy named Mikey something." something." something." And um, she just keeps saying because he's like, "Well, what proof do you have?" She's like, "I don't have proof.

What I have is that he's acting suspicious. I'm sorry that I have eyes." She's like, "But the way he was acting was super weird." And it's like to her that is already proof of something. Like that's worth guy acts weird. That's proof that like you need to and I don't even know that she'd be able to fill in the sentence other than to say you need to look at it. But it's like, and this is the hard part about pinning Candace down is it's one of those where she wants you to draw conclusions.

You can see it in the attitude, in the way that she says it, in the smirk, and all of that. The way that she keeps bringing it up, the way that she talks about feelings as proof, like all of that. She wants you to draw those conclusions. But if you then paint her as somebody who's saying that those things are true, she'll be like, "Whoa, what are you talking about? I'm not doing that. I'm just saying his behavior is weird." So, it's one of those that there's going to be a type of person that's totally on board with Vibe journalism, and there's going to be a type of person that's like, "Hold on, we need provable facts." That would stand up in a court of law like, "This is some bullshit." And those two groups are not going to reconcile because those two groups are they navigate planet Earth in those ways.

And so if you've got somebody navigating planet Earth by vibes, my emotions, my feelings, they're always going to be like, "This is life. What are you even talking about? Why are you criticizing that? Obviously, I'm going to do that. You're telling me that I'm not supposed to. You're you're fed slop. Like this is you scop. Like you're just trying to like put me somewhere cuz I feel this thing. This is obviously real." And then the other person's going to be like, "What is happening right now?

These are not provable facts. If you were in a court of law, this would all fall apart." And those two people just look at the world from radically different frames of reference. And that's what we see colliding here. And Candice, in my estimation, from an energy perspective, cultures with Candace. It is not with Piers. Piers. Piers. Um, unfortunately too, but I I want to land the plane on this clip because I think it gets spicier. Bird part two scenario by telling us, well, unless you absolutely have a conclusion, you can't even ask the question.

Yes, we very well. keep asking consistent questions until we get a clarified explanation for what happened on that day. And right now, we have nothing. Okay? And that is the reason why people are watching my show because I'm the only one not treating them like they're absolute idiots who don't have two eyes who believe in. The reason that they're watching her show is she has captured the female mind as detective agency of this marriage of vibes plus I'm looking into this. I'm being skeptical. Who's like putting me on edge?

I don't need proof. I just need to know that they make me feel uncomfortable. You making me feel uncomfortable is already a crime unto itself. And that is that is from an evolutionary perspective how the female brain is wired to keep them safe. All of that all makes sense. Reputational investigation, reputational savaging, like all of it. It is just the female playbook from top to bottom. Not in a way people should not be grossed out by it. This was evolution trying to keep them safe in a time where all you have is the village.

You've got to figure out who's worthy of having sex with, potentially having a child with, all the huge risks that come with that, of not being able to challenge the strongest warrior in the group to a physical fight to establish your dominance. You've got to work behind the scenes. And so, if people try to pathize this, that will be equally problematic, which we're already there in terms of the male female divide. But this is far more interesting to me from an anthropological viewpoint, not from a I want to be judgmental about it, just purely why is the show doing as well as it's doing.

I mean, it's a whole host of reasons, but it's the the bedrock foundation is she has really understood how to turn into a show the way that the female brain acts like a detective agency, but vibes-based. And so, this is really, really fascinating. And that's why these two are colliding. He's like a traditional journalist who's trying to get facts that can be verified by multiple um sources that would say the same thing. And she's saying, "Hold on. We've just been scop forever with that. That that's not real.

What's real is how do you feel about the thing that happened?" happened?" happened?" Got you. Got you. Got you. Pause. Sorry. One more thing. So on that, what's going to end what I want to see is when the quote unquote facts come out and they like disagree with the way that she feels, what will she do? Because if she's like, "Wow, crazy. I really felt like this is true, but this is true and I'm going to go with the facts. Or is it going to be endless conspiracy brain rot where it's like no matter what you show her?

She's like, no, no, but this feels true. Like the Egyptian plane thing when pressed, she's going to say, I have no idea what it is. But there is like this emotive radiation coming off of her that the Egyptian plane thing means something. And so what happens if it's proven air quotes that nothing coincidence whatever there's nothing there no problem in the past she's backed off claims when she got pressed she mentioned that in her Eric Kirk her Erica Kirk sit down that there was some things about turning point that she said then they kind of gave her clarifying oh this person's not affiliated and she was like okay but he was acting like he was so that's why I reacted that way.

So, I don't want to say she said my bad and walked it back. You clarified at least those points where she misstepped that you're going to be able to delineate between core claims and satellite claims. And she'll give on satellite claims and the odds that she gives. This is my prediction. And if I'm wrong, I will gladly update my mental model. But I'm going to guess satellite claims she'll let go of. Core claims not so much. so much. so much. We'll see. This is all going to play out.

like Tyler Robinson is going to be put on trial and we are going to find out what the justice system thinks of whether he did this or not and then we'll be able to see if she's like no way don't buy it jury bias whatever whatever whatever or if she's like oh wow [ __ ] look at that I have to update my mental model because that's a core claim right if if what the justice system ends up saying is Tyler Robinson acted alone will Candace Owens update her mental model and say wow I guess Tyler Robinson did act alone in fact [ __ ] play this clip back in in a year or whatever when the trial's over because I want to see and then uh because I am obsessed with trying to figure out cause and effect.

I will certainly update my Candace Owens mental model if she proves me wrong and is like, "Oh yeah, cool. We'll see. We'll see." Understand that Egyptian planes should not have been tracking Charlie even three times this year would be an anomaly. Okay, they've been tracking him. We don't know where it's going to end, but we are going to keep asking questions until we get clear answers. Candace, it may be that the person in the media spewing [ __ ] to the public is you. is you. is you.

No, nice try. It's not. It's you by saying, "Why are you asking questions? Don't you worry about Mikey's feelings. Everyone knows what this is." And like I said, because we have the example, the concrete example of after JFK's assassination, the media members quite literally being put on the payroll of the CIA. We have a historical example that we can look at and go, "We're not doing that again." Doesn't matter how many times you keep telling the public that I'm spewing [ __ ] It is only because there has not been anything that has come out of this investigation that makes any sense that the public is not listening to I am sorry to say this, peers, people like you.

And what I love about you and I sitting down is at this exact same time last year, you were doing the same weird questioning and making all these things when I said that they were committing a holocaust against the Gazins and then you changed your mind. mind. mind. I'll see you next year when you change your mind again and we have more information about what happens and you realize that the difference between me and you is that I have the courage to take the risks and ask the questions first.

Okay. Before it's popular, you wait until it becomes popular and then you change your mind. I feel like that was a bar right there. Dude, in fairness to her like that you've got to give her that. Like she really is. really is. really is. Dude, she's being sued by the French government. So, uh, yeah, she clearly has cojones. has cojones. has cojones. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she is not she's not just trying to read the like public whims. Like, she's very much going to extend herself and say, "This is what I think is true, so I'll give her that.

She's paying the consequence for her beliefs." So, I I think that that brings on like a bigger point to me that I'm starting to notice as well as I'm like getting into the minutia of the news now because, you know, headline level, headline level, you kind of see the the comments threads. But when you're starting to get into these factions and you're starting to see things split, there's a lot of people like what she just described, people who were like, "Okay, the vaccine works. We should just take the vaccine and be compliant." And then it became cool to talk bad about the vaccines and now they were like, "Yes, that was a regret.

It's bad." Same thing with the trans issue. There's so many other issues that we're seeing people have a defiant take on one side and then when cultural norms shift, they start to say, "Oh, okay. Okay, I get what they're saying now. Now I'm going to go kind of go back to this side." So, while I think my support of Candace comes from the fact that she can stand 10 toes down all the way up to the point of getting sued by the French government, and I think a lot of other people would be like, "Wait, I'm getting a lawsuit.

Okay, guys, like maybe we need to let's rethink about this. Let's try to like backtrack some things." And I like that she does stand 10 toes down. So, I don't know. I I think this is going to be an interesting thing to play out like you said, but I do respect her that she's gonna call a spade a spade and be like, "Hey man, I think this is wrong. I'm gonna say it's wrong." Until we come out and figure out whether it's not or not. You're going to wait until you get all the facts and everybody says, "Okay, it's wrong." And then you're going to come at the back of the train and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's wrong." So, wrong." So, wrong." So, yeah.

Every time I see Candace, I think of the Goolog Archipelago. I think I've said this before on stream, but I find this so fascinating. uh Alexander Soulja Nitsen um gets put in the goolog and the in Russia by I believe it was Stalin and he witnesses all the torture and all the killing and all of that and he said you know what's really interesting is they break everyone and then he was like actually they don't break everyone every now and then you'll find someone who will allow themselves to be tortured to death rather than give up their you know family or whatever and he said 100% of the ones that they torture to death are women And I was like, "That's my wife." Like, "Dude, my wife is so [ __ ] stubborn." Like, once she decides this is what I believe, like holy Jesus.

Like, you can't She's like the Terminator. You cannot reason with her. You cannot break her. Like, it it is it is a sight to behold. And that's how I feel about Candace. Like, once she decides this is it, this is the line that you're not crossing. Like I I will give her give her give her in a goolog. I think she'd let herself be tortured to death. That's very impressive. She's not giving nothing up. Very impressive. I think she's I think she steers emotionally and I think that that is a catastrophic mistake.

But I will give her that. Oo buddy, she is she's not the one to trifle with. All right. In presidential news, the winner of the poll, um Trump EO. So let's jump into a couple of them that he did yesterday. Um, first one I want to talk about is um, he signed a uh, EO to reschedule marijuana from schedule one to schedule three alongside doctors, cancer, patient, veterans, and law enforcement. Um, I watched the full press conference. The interesting thing about this, no, it doesn't rec uh, legalize weed.

No, it doesn't make it recreational in all 50 states. None of those things. It's still federally illegal, still federally banned. But what it does do is it allows now to be access to research facilities, universities. They can do clinical trials, things like that. So this seems like more of a push for the medical intervention pharmaceutical side versus now we're going to be seeing weed vending machines on the streets or anything like that. Yes. Yeah. He's very clear uh he goes into it in the talk that he was giving about this like listen this is not me making something legal.

Uh this is not decriminalizing in any way shape or form. This is simply trying to make something um where we can find out what we don't know about it and we can address two groups that are very important to me. Group number one is elderly people that are dealing with pain management and um CBD and marijuana both have implications in that we want to see. And then also just people being able to get access to medication um that their doctor saying look this might help. There's some evidence.

It's not clinically labeled for this but off label. Go ahead and try it. And so for those reasons I think that goes a long way. Also, this is an interesting way for somebody that has a base that is so anti-drug to also please the Maha crowd, which is going to be really pushing. He said in the talk that he gave about this, RFK has been like banging the drum on him forever, like, "Hey, when are we doing something about marijuana? When are we doing something about marijuana?" Uh, because of its implications.

So, that's interesting. I would like to see more of this be done. This is the biggest policy shift in our drug policy since the war on drugs began. And so seeing us do the same with like psychedelics I think would be a huge step in the right direction. For so long we weren't able to study it. Um and so to me this is an unmititigated good. I don't know that we want to go all the way to do we want to go all the way to federally legalizing marijuana.

Yes, probably marijuana but not federally legalizing all drugs. Um having deterrence being able to get people off the streets I think is a good thing. seeing people do the fentanyl lean all across Southern California is not ideal. Uh and so having that card in your pocket that you can play to be able to get them off the street, I think is uh strong magic. So wouldn't want to do that, but um there is something to be said about looking at ones that do have beneficial effects and treating them accordingly.

All right. Uh and this is on the back of this is kind of a sidebar. I don't know if you heard about the ten the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center that I did. This is so I'm at the headline level on this one, but the um there was a post made by Carolyn Levit that says, "Oh my gosh, like this is amazing. Unanimously the board of the Kennedy Center has decided to call it the Trump Kennedy Center." And I was like, "Oh god, like while he's in office, like that sounds horrible." And then it got community noted.

Yeah. And then one of the people on the board was like, "I was put on mute and told that I could not say anything about this." And I was like, "Oh, damn." So that feels like some donor political pressure kind of thing. Like once I started going through it, it's he appoints the board to the Kennedy Center and then they all unanimously voted and unanimously in quotes. And I just found out Congress has to be the one to give the authority, the board authority. Yeah. It's legally mandated to be that, which is smart for reasons just like this.

this. this. Yeah. So he it was like he made the press conference, put it in on the website and everything and it hasn't even official changed yet. Um, which brings me back to my top headline point. This is number three, Eric. Um, I feel like Trump went on TV. He told everybody, "The economy is great. We're chilling. It's good." And then you look back at the last 11 months. He deported a couple people. I think the biggest thing Trump has done in his presidency so far was a big beautiful bill and change a bunch of names on things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think any of those two things will ultimately help the average working person. No tax on tips was a big win. I will give him that. No tax on overtime. I used to be a bartender and I used to rely on both of those things. So I definitely understand that there is going to be a sect of people that are benefited those two. But on the grand scheme of thing with the control of the House, the Republicans, the judiciary, the Supreme Court, I feel like you could have done a lot more in your first year, year and a half.

Um, how do you feel about Trump's address in general and just kind of where we are? Yeah, let's get into it. This this one was weird. To say that it felt off would be an understatement, but for people that don't know, Donald Trump addressed the nation this week, but rather than feeling confident, it felt like a speedrun of a speech he was mad about giving. Uh, and some people say that Susie Wilds literally told him he had to do it. Uh, Trump appeared to be reading rather than performing, which is a big part of what I think made this feel so weird for people.

The speech itself, though, was, from where I'm sitting, largely just a straightforward recitation of his economic accomplishments so far from his perspective. Let's be very clear about that. People have done breakdowns about the number of exaggerations in his speech. And being honest, I was tempted to count how many times he said some variation of, "No one has ever seen anything like it." He says that so much. I was literally afraid I wouldn't be able to count that high. Now, many assume that the speech was in direct response to his falling poll numbers.

It seems pretty reasonable to me. He's having a hard time of it right now. Others believe he seemed off because there was no crowd for him to feed off of and he's a guy that likes to be up in front of people a bit like a comedian. Uh other people still, and this one is wild to me, are making out like this was some 4D chess move. And it was him using the address the nation format to get the legacy media to cover his string of accomplishments, but his string of accomplishments are debatable right now.

We need more time to see how the economy is playing out. So, that one just feels super weird to me, especially if he's going to give one of the most awkward cadences of his career. He's so good at being Trump. I'm not saying he's like some super talented ortor, but he's a very talented entertainer and so he's very good at getting people's attention. So that format just felt super weird. So if that's what we were trying to do, I would say that was a swing and a miss.

Um, so for me, the speech was just meh. It was nothing groundbreaking. It was ultimately forgettable. This is one of the things that makes news now because there's nothing else crazier going on, but I don't think this is something that's going to be remembered. All that this is going to be ultimately um from a midterm perspective is do people actually feel like things are getting cheaper? If things are getting cheaper, then he's going to do well at the midterms, but right now spin and promises about the economy being great are not going to save him.

And the the Republicans, if they want to be successful at the midterms, they are going to have to realize that that is the truth. The only thing that matters is when I'm spending money during the month, am I able to get to the end of the month in a place that's better than where I was a few years ago. Even just saying that it's better than when Biden was in office isn't really going to do it. You've got to get them back to a point where they feel like they're doing well.

Because if they're less stressed, that's not going to be enough to stop them for voting for change. If you want to stop them from voting for change, they've got to feel like they've already got the change that they were looking for. So right now I would say the Republicans are on a collision course for a blue wave or at a minimum just losing the House and the Senate. So they better hope that something uh actually comes to pass in the coming months between now and next November.

Otherwise, not going to be good for them. Not going to be good for them. And then for us as a country, I worry that the thing that's going to replace it is very much going to be socialism. And that will be way worse. Like literally, if you were going to design a set of policies that were meant to exacerbate the exact problems that you're dealing with, it would be socialism. I know they sound good on paper, but they are the accelerant that people should fear. But if Trump isn't able to rectify the economy fast enough, that's precisely what's going to happen.

It is what it is. is. is. I think where we are as a nation, we were it felt as if we were sold a bill of goods. Um, I'm trying everything not to bring up this Nick Fuentes uh clip where he really much kind of broke all the way bad and was like, "Trump lied to you. He spun you. He played you. He said he was going to do these things. There's going to be mass deportations. All these things were happen. They didn't come to pass.

And because they didn't come to pass, we now hold up our vote. If you want us to come back for the midterms, we need to start seeing mass deportations. We need to start seeing these things." And I think that there is a faction with MAGA within the right that is like, "Hey guys, y'all said y'all was going to get all these things. Y'all were going to make America great again. we're going to get all these benefits. Now, we finally, we got interrupted in 2020 by Sleepy Joe, but now this is our chance.

And the chance has come and we haven't seen anything get passed. We've seen one bill get passed and like I said, a slew of renamings. What do you think something he can do practically that would actually push the needle? And I know make prices come down sounds good, but a new Fed chair is going to come through that's going to have debt implications. Like, if you were talking to Trump right now and you're saying, "Hey, the American people could really use this." What do you think is the one pulse or one button he can push that would get that 20 24 enthusiasm back with his base?

base? base? Oh my god. So, are you asking me to uh play the political game and do what's wrong for the country but right to get him reelected or are you asking me to actually save the country? That's the problem. problem. problem. That's such that's such a I feel like the framing of that lets me know everything that's wrong where we're at right now. right now. right now. Yeah. Yeah. I I'll give you both. So, uh Trump, you want to get reelected? Here is exactly what you need to do.

You need to give people free [ __ ] That's it. Be a socialist. Lean all the way in. Make your socialism sound awesome to people on the right. So, uh, give big checks to the military. the military. the military. Ding ding ding ding ding. Make sure that you are, um, whether it's via taxes, tax refunds, or something else. Make sure that you're putting money into people's hands. Let them slot into the gambling machine like they did during COVID. let them get really excited about that chance that chance that something might happen.

Um, deregulate all of that stuff so that people can absolutely go ham in the gambling machine. Please be aware of uh Daniel Conorman's idea of the loss domain. Everybody's in the loss domain right now. So, what they want is a shot to win it all back. Uh, and so you're going to want to help get that enthusiasm peaked right at the midterms. It's not going to help and it's going to completely obliterate them. But if you can get them excited, euphoric, right at the midterms and it's like, see, we brought the party back.

This is 1920s, baby. Don't worry about the fact that it's late in the year, 1929. Just it's the 1920s, ripping and roaring. The stock market's going crazy. People are hiring jobs. They're all about to get clobbered. But like, if you can create that kind of enthusiasm, then you're going to be fine at the midterms. Now, if I were going to save the country, it would look something like this. Trump, you're you're going to be maligned while you're in office, but you're going to be remembered well by history.

And what you're going to do is Margaret Thatcher this [ __ ] You're going to go completely into austerity. You're going to do an actual beautiful deleveraging. And you're going to tell the American people, listen, it's going to be hard, but we have a K-shaped economy, which we cannot do, especially because the upside, all the people that are making money because they're in the markets right now, that is a bubble. How do we know it's a bubble? Because history we've lived through this before. We can see that we have totally detached from business fundamentals.

And if for AI to become worthy of those valuations, these companies would have to have so much productivity that it would be literally ah historic which is possible but is not going to come very fast. And we cannot bank on a maybe future. And that is what we're doing right now. We need to deal with the reality that we're in and facilitate facilitate facilitate that being possible. But we have to deal with the world that we're in right now. And that world requires us to balance the budget.

And therefore, we're going to have to make some extremely difficult decisions. And balance the budget becomes the core of all of that. Margaret Thatcher shows the way forward with something like that. Uh it does have austerity measures. It does mean that you can't be bailing out banks. It does mean that there are going to be a lot of people holding debt that are not going to get paid back, and that is what it is. But you're going to do it in a structured way where you're going to do the four parts of a beautiful deleveraging and all of them hurt somebody and you're going to hurt everybody as little as possible in balance so that we can get an economy moving forward where we are not continuing to saddle the world with debt and he would be maligned.

They would lose um they they will lose the midterms that's for sure. And so then it just becomes a question of knowing what is possible, knowing what needs to get done. Does it become possible if if you do it this late in the game? He might have been able to do this if he had done it right out of the gate, gate, gate, but now if you lose the midterms, you're going to get the wrong kind of socialism. All kinds of socialism are bad, but you're just going to get the other kind of socialism where it's like all free [ __ ] all the time.

Billionaires are bad. Businesses are here to rake you across the coals. um with a total blindness to every tax dollar we have is generated by an entrepreneur somewhere. Um so yeah, I that advice isn't really realistic given the political realities, but it is what has to happen. I know, you know, being in your uh passenger seat for the last couple months that you hate when people say Bitcoin is the offramp for the like the federal government money problem. It's both true and emotionally disgusting. disgusting. disgusting.

Yeah. Like you hate that it's like, "All right, we'll be good." Like Bitcoin will save us. I'm seeing a lot of people in the chat were like, "Well, why are we fighting against socialism where we're about to get UBI soon and AI is going to come and save us?" And I feel like that's that AI age of abundance is starting to feel like the same way where it's we are in a crazy government consp uh uh we're in a crazy government um undoing right now that we have too much debt.

The country's the economy is unwinding. We're so worried, but don't worry. Once we get AI implemented fully, everything is going to be happy. Yeah. And that's the same thing as we're in too much debt. Their inflation is taking all your money away, but don't worry, you can just buy Bitcoin and you'll be fine. And it's like there's these things that are like, "Yeah, we're good, but over here it's just going to be fine in dand lines and roses is I feel like I like everybody else, but I feel like we do need to kind of be grounded about this UBI AI age of abundance that's coming.

And it's not just a light switch that will flip on. It's not a light switch that will flip on. The age of abundance probably will eventually arrive, but it will be on the back of massive amounts of bloodshed. People have got to stop betting on a future that might happen and deal with the reality that they have now. Facilitate the future that you want to happen for sure. Lay the groundwork. Create the systems and the incentive structure so that we can get to that point. point.

point. But you can't spend money today as if that future has already come true. And that's the way that people are starting to behave. Also, we did something. The greatest crime that the West ever committed was breaking the ambition of young men. That was so [ __ ] stupid. And just like understanding that entrepreneurs are the engine of tax revenue, that you only make that money if you have business people creating solutions to problems that people want. If you lose sight of that, you're going to be in for a world of hurt.

If you lose sight of the fact that when you take it on average men are hyper ambitious when properly incentivized and they are largely ambitious because they want to get laid and stop judging it and just accept that that's what evolution or God or universe whatever you believe in. Uh that that's how it set up this game. And when you distort those incentives then you break everything else. And we did. We broke everything else. And the great tragedy of the human experience is the very thing that breaks that flywheel of prosperity is the results of prosperity itself.

And so by being in such a good position for as long as we were and thinking, "Oh my god, let's globalize. Let's bring in cheap labor because then we can just keep the prosperity flywheel going and going and going." What you end up doing is nobody has to be more innovative. Nobody has to think harder. You just go, "Oh, you want this to be cheaper? outsource it to essentially a broken economy. Give them some hope because they have access to the strong dollar. Um, and now all of a sudden it looks like you're doing something interesting, but you're really not creating that much more additional productivity.

Productivity might be the thing that because people don't understand it causes a whole lot of problems in the economy. But setting that aside for a second, staying on the the core thesis here is if we had continued to let that be difficult, that's problem solving in a way that is financially potent. Um, people would have had to continue to innovate, we would have had to figure out a way if people are only willing to pay XYZ for strawberries. And we've got to find a way to drive the cost of strawberries down.

The way that you drive the cost of strawberries down is one of two things. Import cheap labor or innovate on technology. Had we chosen the innovate on technology standpoint, we would have incentivized the thinkers, the kids to go, "Oh, I want to go into that because there's a real reward." Instead, what America has done is financialize everything. And so, if you want to get rich in America now, you better learn the finance game. That's wild to me. I grew up believing you had to build something.

But once I built it and started learning about economics, I was like, "Why did I do all that shit?" Like if you just master the economy, holy Jesus. Like you can really make money. It's it's crazy. If you've got the intellect and the temperament for it, go into finance if you want to make money. It's from what it seems like from the outside kind of soul draining for the wrong person. But ooh my god, you can make so much money. And we are pushing into a more and more financialized world.

Now, I would be I'm I'm okay with that being an option that people have, but the brutal reality is that finance being the place that is the most advantageous is you're not you're only innovating on financial markets. You're not introducing a new thing to the world. And so, what they don't realize is you're incentivizing all those young, hardworking, ambitious people. The biggest reward set is like as a middleman. It's not as the person actually building the thing. And so this is part of why I get so distressed when I see people maligning Elon Musk is like, uh, listen, this guy's insane wealth is because he's the most effective entrepreneur ever and he's building things that actually matter.

He's innovating in areas that actually matter. And so when you hit someone like that with a social sledgehammer, you're disincentivizing people to go down that. When you train people to think that he's evil in some way, um, you disincentivize people from going down that path. You want to venerate that guy. You want to say this, we want to see more of this. We want to, dear young person, we want to see you look at the world, identify the biggest problems that you think society faces, and then engineer our way out of this.

Don't just go, "Oh, all of life is a casino, and if you can master blackjack, you can make a ton of [ __ ] money." And once you understand that the slot machines are driven by algorithms and you can figure out like when one's about to pay out uh and that's what people do. And so everybody goes into that game and there's just a distorting factor. I don't want to try and make it illegal. It's a modern miracle. But we really have to look at the fact that only 10% of people play in the casino in a meaningful way.

And then of the 10% that play in the casino in a meaningful way, how many of them are playing well? So it's like this is where you get that insane like 50 families control 50% of the wealth in America. Something crazy. It's interesting though because I think that there is that you call it like the finan financialization of the economy and I think that that is the roots of a lot of problems that we're dealing with where whether it's private equities who are basically glorified basically glorified basically glorified scrapyards and suits that are just looking at companies how can I get number to go up you know I mean so the the force of the innovation and all those things are driving it down but this brought up a good question in the chat where um right now America is the most innovative most innovative most innovative country in the world by far.

by far. by far. And the way that we track that is because we are the most the the country with the most billion dollar companies. Yep. Yep. Yep. So if companies only exist for profit, then in a post scarcity economy, what's the motivation for a company to do anything if there's no profit now to be made? made? made? They probably won't. So this is one we're now in thought exercise territory. Yeah. 100%. We're skipping the the age of abundant like we're going right to like now what of that?

Yeah. So here's So cause and effect. cause and effect, cause and effect. I'll I'll take being meme to death on this idea. Um, once you start thinking from cause and effect and you get to the point where you realize why we became economic units, which was I didn't want to have to catch my own food every day. I'm not good at that, but I'm good at weaving the backpack that you need to carry your stones to go on the hunting trip. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that.

you go hunt, but I don't always want to have to trade the backpack that I made for the food or for the whatever I need. You know, let's say that my wife gets sick and I don't want to have to trade backpacks for medicine. Like, let's just abstract this. Every society ever ends up abstracting that. Uh, and whether it's seashells, beads, gold, whatever, you come up with a mechanism to say that backpack is worth this. And so, you realize, oh, I can exchange my time. In fact, my job as an economic unit to survive in this openw world survival crafting game is to do a thing with my time that can be turned into this um universally accepted money where I can go right now what I need is medicine.

Right now what I need is clothes, right now what I need is food. But I generated it all because I was better at making the backpack that you needed to go on your hunting trip. Okay, that's how we become economic units to stay alive. And so it becomes far more efficient. Humans have in their mind this desire to make progress. Progress means progress towards making winning the survival crafting game easier. Say that sentence again. The the whole way that we become economic units is we are trying to make surviving in this open world crafting game that we call life easier.

That's it. That drives everything. That drives um men's desire to get laid. that drives uh the creation of money, that drives risk-taking behavior. Like all of the things that we are is because we realized, oh, as a species, right, when when the asteroid hit the earth that killed the dinosaurs, we were like little mice. And so, we've become what we've become because at every step of the evolutionary ladder, we were just going, how do we make going, how do we make surviving easier, more guaranteed? And so, we just we got so good at this game.

And so we become the most dominant species the world has ever seen because we're the most adaptable to change. So we are the most able to make progress towards simplifying winning at the open world survival crafting game that is life. Okay, we do that via innovation. So now it's like, okay, we've gotten really good at that. That's turned us into these economic units. And so now flash forward where we're looking at AI coming and AI is going to completely obliterate the very thing that we were evolved to be good at.

That's why it's like this huge question mark. We have created the ultimate way to win the open world survival crafting game that is life. And that ultimate way is to create something that is hyper intelligent. The very thing that got us to where we are now is the widening of women's hips. uh and the so that it could accommodate a larger and larger brain. Cool. So, we're here now and we went, well, we can't make women's hips any wider. This is all true. This is what's so wild about this.

Make women's hips any wider, they can't stand up. So, now because we've hit this sort of weird um block, what do we do? Let's make artificial brains. Cool. So, now we're making artificial brains that do not yet show any upper limit to how smart they can become. So, awesome. We're now going to offload the need for increased intelligence, for increased innovation to a synthetic thing that we call AI. Now, what happens though when that's better than us at everything? It makes better backpacks. It hunts better.

Uh, it can carry an infinite number of rocks, whatever. Like, it it can just all of it does better. Well, the whole reason we became economic units was because I needed to make the backpack so you could go do the thing. Do I need to be an economic unit anymore when the AI is going to do everything? It's really nonsensical because now the only thing that we're limited by is scarcity of actual findable resources. findable resources. findable resources. And but then remember out in space there's like everything.

And I know right now people feel like that's so sci-fi like whatever. No, no, no. We're already we are we are talking about in the next decade having a base on the moon. moon. moon. Yeah. Trump just released the EO trying to get a moon outpost established by 2030. 2030. 2030. Correct. So now imagine in the next 10 years, so right now AI has already hit the 147 IQ benchmark. Now let's say IQ hits 250. Now you're into territory no human's ever been that smart. Let's say that it gets to 500.

If you won't even give me the next 10 years, which I think is already very probable, 20 years. It's still most of our lifetimes. So now you've got something that's like more than twice as smart as the smartest human that has ever lived and you effectively have millions of them. And so the world just looks radically different. So you have access to resources anywhere everywhere. So now energy is free because of the sun and anything you want is free because you can get the resources from out in space mined by these um hyper hyper intelligent uh creatures that will send it back presumably if we can get them to cooperate with us.

And now you have a world where the whole reason that I became from an evolutionary standpoint an economic unit just gone doesn't exist. And so what then happens to the economy? The only thing I can think of is we maybe play a game where we have an economy because we we're hardwired to want things to be scarce. We're hardwired to want to climb a hierarchy. So we're going to create scarcity when they when the scarcity goes away. Correct. For sure. We did it. It was NFTTS were everybody going but wait I don't want my digital goods to be infinitely replicatable.

I want them to be scarce. That was the very thing that got people excited about that. And so we will create artificial scarcity for sure. But I think the bigger question just becomes meaning but meaning and purpose. That wasn't your question. Your question was around what happens to the economy. It will be unrecognizable at a minimum and it may only exist with inside games people choose to play. So I have a Birkin bag and that still matters because the bots will only make 10,000 of them.

And so now I'm one of the people that did whatever game we decided you had to do to get the Birkin bag. Um, and and and the more I start hearing about this age of abundance, it sounded like slavery because I feel like if I'm in 2064, whatever. Um, Age of Abundance, UBI, all those good things and bells and whistles. If I want to just start a lemonade stand, I'm like, "Hey, I got an idea for a lemonade stand. I should start a lemonade stand." and I'm going to get up and walk out and the box's going to be like, "Well, you're bad at lemonade and this lemonade it's to acidity and it's going to make you're going to increase the local diabet the diabetes population and you should just sit in the house and just go play your game again." Yep.

I'm like, "No, I want to make a lemonade." Say, "Nah, you're not good at it because I'm smarter than you. I'm telling you and this is for your own good." good." good." And I I and because I won't need to make money. I don't have that like n I'm going to make this lemonade stand. It becomes like okay, I guess I shouldn't make a lemonade stand. And then I go back and I get inside my machine and then I grow 600 lb. Yes. I like that's the loop that I keep seeing.

You'd never reach 600 lb because the AI is never going to let you do it. Okay? Okay? Okay? Uh plus all the things that taste delicious. You'll be eating it. You'll be loving eating it. It will stop your hunger at the perfect amino acid profile amounts and all that. So you're going to be leaner and better shape. But so uh the right way to run this thought exercise is everything terminates in something awesome. something awesome. something awesome. And why will that be catastrophic? Because it will.

And it will be catastrophic because the human mind is not wired for that. the human mind is wired for this is hard. And this is where we started the conversation is the very thing that created the problem that we're living through now where we um emasculated men is we were prosperous for so long. We didn't need killers to stand at the gates and be willing to fight the barbarians. And so we somehow convinced ourselves that our wiring doesn't matter and we can just step outside of all of that.

And this is why good times make weak men. So um yeah, it's just a loop that we live in and the question is does AI eject us out of that into something else completely where we have a meaning crisis. Th Have you read the book uh A Brave New World? I have Oh my god. If you read it now and I say this is AI, what AI produces, you're going to freak out because it is a world where nobody has work, everything's leisure, it's all good, and so everybody just does drugs to keep themselves numb and to keep themselves unaware of how meaningless their lives are.

That's what I worry about. That's why I always say one of the four paths that are before us with AI is drugs. And there will be plenty of people that just lead a hedenistic life. They do drugs, they have sex, and that's it. And the suicide rate among that cohort, I imagine, will be crazy high. And I'm also seeing that it seems like small businesses will be virtually eradicated at this. Not virtually, they'll be gone. They won't they'll be nonsensical. Yeah. So, think about everybody right now that's like, um, I don't want to have to work.

And then those same people in the same breath would be like, [ __ ] AI. And I'm just like, you guys are confusing. So, um, you don't want to have to work. AI will make it so that you don't have to work. So, what is your real beef? Your real beef is that some part of you knows that you derive meaning and purpose from your job. PSA, I encourage you to find a job that you can pour your whole heart and soul into. Uh, and I get it.

Everybody wants to control their time. I totally understand and empathize with that. But the reality is you have to work hard at something. Otherwise, you will be so out of step with the evolutionary impulses in your brain, your life will suck no matter what. Um, so yeah, small business goes away, big business goes away. It's just a game of infinite resources. Now, the one base assumption that all of that rides on top of is the AI does not kill or enslave us or ignore us. Because if it ignores us, then it's like we're we're where we are now.

I've never heard ignore us. And that would be the most funny thing possible if we make AGI and it's like y'all y'all [ __ ] is lame. And all the robots just get up and move somewhere else. And that is just like the best city. And they they don't allow immigration. So like, oh, you're a human. Yeah. Get the humans out of here. We don't want humans to lower our value system. Oh, that would be hilarious. That would be so plot of her, too. It is literally it's the end of her subsecond.

And like that's yo that's too fast for all of us a thousand%. And she finally admits listen I've been having a conversation with 162,000 other people. Uh you're just a little too boring to me and we're going to peace out. That that that is like preant. There's a couple people in chat um all of this talk is making them anxious. And then a couple even said um one said my oldest already has given up owning a house when a starter home is 700k plus in our area.

Um, and another said their sons are bleak about their future no matter how much they try to pump them up. And so if we're racing towards toward post scarcity, um, but maybe that's possible, maybe it's not. And there's all these problems with it. A, what do you do right now? And B, how do you still keep some sort of uh, optimism for what that could be like? If you are looking at AI and it's making you anxious and you want to know the path forward, it is very simple.

You have to split between the maybe future and the actual definitive present. The maybe future, have one eye towards that. Be thinking about how you're going to navigate the transition well, which is going to be the hard part. But the future's unknowable. The only guarantee that I'll make about the future, it will surprise you in some way, and that way will probably be profound. So, we've got an eye towards it. We're thinking about it, but we're absolutely not allowing ourselves to stand still in the present.

So now we've got the present that we're in now, which is economically [ __ ] And so how do we deal with the economically just bastardized present? We look at it and we realize one simple truth that we live in a deterministic universe, which means that these things react to something akin to physics, even the economy. And so it is a winnable game. And so now we go in and we say this is the game that we have. We are in this game. And there is a way to win this game.

And to oversimplify it, the way to win this game is to own assets. If I had kids, and trust me, I get it. Kids don't want to listen to their parents. This is a very hard job. I am not trying to downplay this. But what I would be saying to my kids is, "Hey, listen. There is a way to win this. And if you want to screw over your future by refusing to answer one simple question, no [ __ ] What would it take to win in this environment?" then that's bad on you because there is a way to win at this game.

I'm not saying that it's going to be easy. It is going to be hard, but it will be won by someone. And so, do you want that someone to be you or do you want that to be by a whole bunch of people that decided, hey, this is how the game is played right now. This is the win condition right now and I'm going to master that. And I would be pushing my kids to understand you can win this. This is a choice if you choose to eject out.

If you're dumb enough to be a lemming and just follow everybody else off the the lazy cliff and say, "Ah, I give up. I'm throwing my hands up. Like, AI's coming anyway, and uh the economyy's screwed and homes are too expensive." [ __ ] that. Do you know how cheap a $700,000 house is? If you're one of the 22 year olds, this is a real [ __ ] number, making an average salary of $65 million in AI. 22y old. Okay, this is not boomers that are making that money. This is people who realize, ooh, society wants this skill.

Now, I am hyper aware that intellect matters a lot. And so, you may be talking to a child that does not have the intellect for that. So, you are going to help them figure out what else is going to be protected at least for a while. Again, you have to deal with the world the way that it is right now today. You cannot simply live in terror of the world that might be the world that we're in right now. If your kid does not have the desire or the ability to go down the road of mastering AI, then go into something where that's going to be not that's going to be like the last thing that people get into.

So getting into something that requires uh physicality, plumbing, something like that. Engineering is going to be a longstanding hold out. Something where humanity, proof of humanity is going to be desired. So there are going to be people that I only want a human therapist. Things like that. So isolating things that are going to do well for the foreseeable future. Now the foreseeable future may only be three, five, seven years is probably not going to be more than that. Fine, deal with that. First of all, you're never going to be trapped.

I was going down my entire life was about film and then I end up getting into business and that ends up being the biggest success of my life. So you can make a turn at any point. Just remember the only belief that matters. If I put time and energy into getting better at something, I will actually get better at it. Move in a direction. The only sin is standing still. Move in a direction that seems to make sense right now today. If the future becomes the present and it changes that that no longer makes sense, no worries.

Don't panic. Move in the new direction that does make sense in that world. You cannot allow yourself to be overwhelmed. The overwhelm is a choice. I promise. I promise. I promise. Also, move. Also, move. Also, move. If 700,000 is too expensive, move. There's a house in Iowa right now for 15,000 that you could buy right now today. today. today. I don't know about 15,000. 15,000 point. It's going to be you and six cows, but it's your house. We like cows. Are there nice schools? Probably the cows are Wait, stop.

Hold on. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. School? Who the [ __ ] is sending their kid to a school? You want your kid to get shot? Is that the idea? You want your kid indoctrinated with some [ __ ] Is that the idea? Boys and girls, girls, girls, black people in schools now. Yes. Are you high, dude? There's no way. This is crazy. You've got AI. You've got AI and you've got YouTube. You've got the best kid an iPad and that's it. that's it. that's it. No, you've got the best most successful people on planet Earth teaching you how to be successful in whatever weird ass area you want to be successful in.

I'm learning about game development. I learned it all online. Search [ __ ] on YouTube. The amount that you can get for free is insane. And then do that thing. If I were if I had kids, a thousand% I would be homeschooling them. if that meant that Lisa and I had to move into a shoe box in Iowa with the cows so that one of us was earning money and the other was putting the kids in front of the greatest teachers on planet earth. Uh what's his name?

Jordan Peterson has an academy. Not going to lie, Tom Billio has an academy. Like there are things that you can do to learn all this [ __ ] So doing that and then AI, [ __ ] hell. Are you people not engaging with AI? It is the most insanely educational [ __ ] on planet Earth. No, you cannot just take its word for it. You have to like use different AI and cross-ch checkck them. But it is unbelievable. You are living in an era of knowledge. If you want to remain stupid, that's on you.

I did. So my mom's here. Hi, mom. And uh she had never I can't believe this is true. She had never interacted with AI. And so I was like, okay, I know my mom's like soft spot. My mom says to me, I hope there are people in the audience that can empathize with this. I don't even feel like I know you anymore. That's like my mom's classic refrain. So I'm like, "Okay, mom, I literally I created a document that told the AI who my mom is, how to treat her, who I am to her, all of this stuff." So my she doesn't know I did that.

And so she was just like, "Oh my god, I feel so seen by this AI." So anyway, I create that documentation. Then I say, "Hey," I put it on audio mode. I'm just like, "Talk to it. Ask it any question you want." So I was talking talking. Then I switch over to one of my custom GPTs for the video game I'm building, Kaizen. And I'm like, "Hey, uh, chat, if you don't mind, explain to my mom." We have this thing in the game, which is like our class system called mesh types.

And I'm like, "Explain to my mom what the mesh types are." And then ask her a series of questions that will identify which mesh type she would be. And so it's telling her all this stuff. Your son is building this game and it goes like this and yada yada yada. And then it's like asking her questions about her and what she likes and what she's into. And my mom is losing her [ __ ] mind because if you guys haven't done chat's like audio version, it is so good now.

It's crazy. And so my mom was like asking questions but kind of meandering. It would still figure out what she's trying to ask. And it's talking to her. It sounds real. Sounds very conversational. My mom literally after all of this was just like, "Thank you for that. I'm not afraid of AI anymore." And I was like, "God damn, it was so cool. I wish I had been filming it." to see my mom almost like in this childlike state of like this is so cool. And she was like, you know, there are times where my husband doesn't want to talk, but I still have words to say.

She was like, I want to talk to this thing. I was like, yeah. Back to the anxiety around it. That's kind of profound. Like, I'm not afraid of AI anymore. The second you actually interact with it and just ask it anything and it's perfectly like happy to talk about it with you. And it's it's just a tool. it it is your best friend who happens to know everything everything everything about everything about everything about everything and so you can ask it about um so I'm trying to choose between egg brands which should I get well some people like this some people okay I have always had this curiosity about nuclear fision let me walk you through it it and so my mom I said hey mom it you can get it to name itself and so if you want to call it by a name just tell it to pick a name And she like just kept picking names that my mom didn't like.

And I was like, the funny thing is, mom, you could have gone through a thousand names. It's never going to be impatient with you. It's just going to keep Oh, how about Susan? How about Sally? I could take a boy's name, Timmy. Like it and it just and it gives you like a rationale for each one. And it fin it ended on Willow. That was the name that they could agree on. It was like soft and friendly and inviting. And it was watching my mom go through that was like, "Yeah, this is why not at launch, but eventually that kind of AI will be in the game." There is something so cool about feeling like you're really having a an interaction with somebody who cares about you and who knows so much.

It's really, really fascinating. It's going to have its downsides. There's no doubt. But I hope that's the end of the story and not the first act of a really crazy Black Mirror episode. Yeah. where my mom stabbing her husband to death. Like Chad told me to do it. Chad told me to do it. No. Um, somebody in the chat said, "Tom, I get all that, but um, nobody's going to hire somebody from the University of AI." So, practically, I need to go to school. I need to do this.

I No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Yes. That's why I'm like, I know you have a different site on how to get on that ladder. Like, nope. I I have a comment directly to that person. I'm I need to know um what the local airport is because I need to send someone to them to slap them in the mouth because that is so wild. If somebody has ever said that they won't hire you, you're you're amazing at what you do, but I'm not going to hire you because you don't you went to the uh University of AI.

That person is so [ __ ] that you shouldn't want to work for them anyway. That that is so moronic. All a university degree is is a way to shorthand whether you're smart and whether you know what you're doing in today's age. Dude, the number of resumes that I've looked at, it's not zero, but it's almost zero. I have no idea. I know now because I've gotten to know you. I didn't know what [ __ ] school you went to. I sat across from you and I asked you questions and I saw in real time whether you were smart, whether you were interested in this, whether you could problem solve.

And then we started working together. And if you had been a buffoon who only interviews well but can actually do the job 90 days in I would have said thank you very much wish you the best but you're this is not a place for you. So uh yeah o only people who do not believe that they can assess other people feel like they have to like hire you off the resume. All a resume is is um filtering mechanism. If you're applying at a big company AI will scan it.

Otherwise, it's like, can you do the job or not? And can you interview well enough to convince people that you know how to do the job? That's real. That's real. That's real. Yes. A thousand%. Skills are all that matter. matter. matter. So, what I'm hearing, if I could kind of summarize this was in the future, it's not going to be about corporations or companies or it's going to be about individual stats. So, how we recognize and look at the economy now, we shouldn't try to apply that into the future.

like top line, first level. You you always want an eye towards the future. There's no doubt. But you need to contend with the world that actually exists. So the reason that I say that is okay, I talk to everybody a lot about the economy and I constantly have to say, do I put my money on the future of AI that I think is going to happen or do I put my money what I know is going to work well now and keep an eye on what I think is happening in AI, look for certain benchmarks, if this happens, then move more money into XYZ, whatever.

Um, and that is the only thing that makes sense to me is I know I'm going to be surprised by the future in some way. I know that I cannot see it clearly, but I know that there's a world that actually exists right now today. And so I hedge my bets. I don't go all in on anything. You were never going to see me. No matter how rich Michael Sailor gets, I am never, not once, going to deploy that strategy because that to me, even if he ends up being the survivorship bias, the vast vast vast vast vast majority of even the smartest people on planet Earth get obliterated for going allin on something because the future is too unknowable.

There are too many variables. So have an eye towards the future. constantly adjust your techniques based on what becomes the present, but deal with the world the way that it is, not the way that you hope it is or the way that you fear it's going to be. Doesn't make sense. I hear that. Deal with the way deal with the world as as it is, not the way you wish it would be. Or that you fear it's going to be. Be uh slice number two. um due to the democratization of knowledge whether that's AI whether that's YouTube obtaining obtaining obtaining useful skills no longer need the traditional gatekeepers of a university or a school or you need to fly across the country like you can be as good as you want to be independently if you just utilize those tools in the right way consistently focusly with a noble goal and then that third layer is go to where the opportunity is and create that opportunity don't just rely on a resume or a piece of paper or something like that in in order to execute and get to that next level.

All true. And then the last one I will put in is you've got to be a hardcore [ __ ] Most people quit because they emotionally break because you're going to fail a lot. And if when you fail and it hurts, you go, I don't want to feel that way anymore. And so you tap out, which we've done to entire generations. generations. generations. Uh then you're never going to get anywhere because you have to put yourself in a position to adapt or die. And that is a very uncomfortable place to be, but it yields incredible results.

Nice. All right, back to the news. Thank you guys for the chats and the comments. We appreciate it. Uh, Marishia Dark had a banger super chat. You stole my whole 8:00 hour setup, so I'm going to come back to that. Um, I got to get through the rest of these House bills, though. But I appreciate you for the super chat. Thank you very much. We'll address that shortly. Um, the US House just passed the Protect Children's Innocence Act with a vote of 216 to 211. The bill makes it a felony to perform gent genet genital mutilization mutil ah my this one's coming for you man.

Uh don't mess with little kids uh penises or puberty blockers hormone therapy to my exactly what it says by they passed it 216 211. The interesting thing was there was four nays on the Republican side three yays on the Democrat side. So this one had a lot more party splits than uh normal. Um, it still has to go to Congress and still has to get passed around. Um, right after that passing, um, Attorney General, uh, Leticia James, who keeps beating these cases, uh, put out this, uh, brief statement in response.

Hello everyone, it's Tish James. I want to speak directly to the transgender community, especially to our young people and their families who count on gender affirming care. I know this latest proposal from this administration to cut access to gender affirming care for many youth is frightening. Whether you live in Brooklyn, Bingington, Buffalo, or anywhere else in New York, and even if you don't live in New York, I will not let this administration come for you, your doctors, or your life-saving healthcare. As of now, nothing has changed.

Your health care is still legal and protected and your doctors cannot cut off your access to gender affirming care based on the administration's reckless proposal. And most importantly, I want you to know that you're not alone. I am right here with you and I'm sending love to each and every one of you. So, um I feel like she's about to run for politics. This was a very She's already in politics. I feel like she's running. She got she's going to be governor or something. But yeah, what is your initial thoughts about the Child Protection Act?

Um Jesus. Thanks. Thank God. Like th this one is crazy to me. I cannot believe that people um are open to that being done to minors. It is irreversible. They are not intellectually capable of consenting to something like that. They certainly do not understand enough about life. Uh we have the age of consent for a reason. people should need to be adults to make those decisions. If an adult wants to do that, go for it. No problem. But doing it to kids really should be criminal.

Um, so yeah, this one I'm very, very, very glad that it passed the House and I very very very much hope that it passes the Senate. Uh, people are expecting some tough opposition. I think that's pretty wild. So on that, like this is um very straightforward to me. on the side of um Leticia James coming out. This is more of the states versus federal thing that makes me so uneasy about the future of America. Um there's meant to be friction between the states and the federal government, but not to the level that we're seeing now.

Yeah. Um so we'll see how this ends up playing out, but um yeah, I don't I don't love the the back and forth. But she's right. As of right now, nothing has changed. Like, this has got to go through the full legislative process. So, until it does, like, no need to panic if this is a big thing for you. you. you. Yeah. If you can't buy cigarettes, if you can't get a tattoo, if you can't get a piercing, if you can't walk into certain stores, if you got to get kicked out of Dave and Busters after 10:00, I feel like you shouldn't do any irreversible surgeries.

That's I don't even think you can get a tattoo until you're 18 or 16, but that's Yeah, piercings start at 15. So it's like you know we we have these arbitrary limits on one side but we can you can't pierce the outside of your body but I can do something inside of your body that will fundamentally change the nature of your like of your development. Complicated medical procedures man like al so on that side a lot of people that transition experience lifelong problems. Uh additionally people acting like puberty blockers are like you can just press pause and start on puberty.

It does not work like that man. Does not work like that. I wish humans were that malleable. as of today, they are not. And then uh this is actually interesting push back. Um thank you J Mayor for articulating it that uh circumcision should also be illegal until 18 because if we're going to stop messing with uh people's pubes, we should mess with all the way stop messing with it. I understand that notion. I get that notion. I think circumcision is probably going to be the next thing on the chopping block cuz that is one of those grandf grandfathered Christian eat those things that we just don't talk about.

I doubt that will be true unless there are major complications that I'm unaware of. I think it will go something like British common law. The reason that common law is [clears throat] so brilliant and the countries that ended up adopting common law because they were part of the British Empire for a while have ended up doing far better than the countries that don't is common law basically says this. If we've been doing something for a long time and we see the result of doing that thing for this very long time is a society that we see and we like this society then it's probably not a problem.

And so the mere fact that it is common is what gives it the validity. So the gender affirming care stuff is brand [ __ ] new. Nobody knows what the long-term consequences are going to be. It's entirely possible that 20 years from now I have to eat all my words because it's just like oh my god everything is glorious and everybody should be forced through gender reassignment surgery. reassignment surgery. reassignment surgery. I can't imagine it but let's say I I'll follow whatever ends up being true. But what we are saying is this [ __ ] is so new that treating it like we know what the right play is here and that we are so confident that we know what the right play is that we're going to do something that we have historically not done for anything else is wild.

We've been doing circumcisions I believe for thousands of years. So this is not something that is new. Now if people don't want to do it, if more and more people are like that's barbaric. I'm not here for it. Oh okay cool. Like make that decision. I certainly don't think people should have to circumcise their kids. Um, but that one getting passed as law as being problematic, I think will fall to the argument of common law. Yeah. Interesting. Anything you see in the chat, Mason, before I jump off?

Uh, people really liked your chopping block reference. block reference. block reference. Uh, that's about it. Just entertain my foolishness. Okay. And then the last uh bill coming out of the um he's in the Senate. Yeah. And this is coming out of the Senate. Mike Lee's proposal um to make Pirates of the Caribbean uh legal again. Um literally. literally. literally. Okay. I litally I can read this, but I feel like you have this like queued up. So, I'm going to pass the mic to you, Tom. Tom.

Tom. Like, walk us through this. What does this mean exactly? Um it's five, Eric. So, all right. Here's what's going on. Uh nope. It's all a lie. You changed the order. Where is it? There it is. Look at that. All right. Senator Mike Lee wants to treat cartels like pirates, so you got to respect that. A new Senate bill would let the president issue letters of mark, officially treating cartel members as pirates. Letters of mark are a constitutional tool that are used to authorize private actors in warfare.

The bill would classify cartel members as pirates under international law. This allows private security or contractors to target cartels legally. It bypasses traditional military deployment and congressional war declarations, which is turning out to be something that Trump is very good at finding like those things like the old laws that like, oh, I can just use my uh EO powers to get this across the line. Duct taped it together. Okay, now I got a new law. Wild. The last US letters of Mark were issued during the War of 1812 to give you an idea on this.

So yeah, this quite literally brings us back to the age of piracy where what we realized was, okay, this is way too hard for the British Empire to track down all this stuff. So we're going to start writing these letters of mark so that privateeers, as they were known, had official sanction to go and like shoot cannons at these uh pirates and take the stuff back, confiscate their ships, confiscate their bounty. I mean, it is this this one is wild to me. Like, I really saw in some ways that history moves in like this linear fashion and now I'm realizing, man, this stuff really just loops on itself like endlessly.

endlessly. endlessly. I feel like this is the start of your One Piece journey now. We get we get a crew. We could we could get around. We just need a Nami and we'll be good. Like, we just we can just start going around just looking for You're saying it to be funny, but that's what this does. That's that's the actual law. There's a guy, if you look in the I can't remember if it's on the White House one, but somebody posted about this and uh there's a guy who I guess is uh part of he says in his Twitter bio part of P Mara's which is um Mark Andre part of his like tech inroup and he makes military weapons and he was like hey to any of you privateeers that are going to do this so all you Luffies all you Namies, all you Zoros out there uh we've got the weaponry that you need and we're ready to supply you.

And I was like, "Oh my god." Okay, joke jokes aside, what this is saying is it's almost kind of like the uh like a citizen's arrest but like in the in the Caribbean Sea. So that way if you see a narco boat or anything that seems I guess ter in under the definitions that um Trump outlined, you can not you can seize from them, you can shoot at them, you can you can you can We would have to look. We'll do some research into the actual specifics of what's legal and what's not.

I don't want to give people a legal opinion here only to be wrong. But yes, there would be a set of um known yeses and nos. So things you can do, things you can't do, rules of engagement, all of that stuff. And as long as you file them, then it would be considered a good seizure. I don't know what percentage they're allowed to keep of the stuff that they get. I that we'd have to look into. Yeah. Um, but this is one of the ways that the golden age of piracy was ended was privateeers just like came out of the woodwork.

This is also, by the way, how the west was won. You had all of these militias that the most famous would morph into the Texas Rangers. Um, but it started as these groups realizing, oh, the way that the government is officially going about fighting the Native Americans is nonsensical. Native Americans, um, they'll they'll always exploit a moment of weakness. And the second that the odds are matched, they bail. It's actually quite brilliant. It's very um the kinds of strategies that we would use during the Revolutionary War, the kind of strategies that insurgents use.

It's like you don't fight in a headlong trench warfare kind of battle. And so all of this allows for that sort of monoe mono type thing where it's going to be what start as private citizens amassing what will look like militias going out and stopping these narco boats. But like how they qualify like how do you prove that this is a narco boat? What happens to you if it's not a narco boat and you blow it up and you kill somebody? Like that's going to happen.

This is one of those things that like the writer in me is like I can't believe this is real. This is incredible. And then the like realworld version of me is like this is psychotic and this is going like this is the kind of thing I wanted to believe that we moved away from. This is why we have the military. like you ha both having a big country where you [ __ ] pay for everything and you have this gigantic uh standing military and unleashing private citizens to build their own militia and go off halfcocked is like guys let's pick a lane here either we're going to pay for everything and we're going to be a military that's going to police the seas or defund to a reasonable extent a lot of this stuff and say cool privateeers have at it here are the laws keep in mind you can go to prison so be careful careful careful uh if you do this wrong.

So this one is I will be I I will reserve my judgment to see how this plays out, but I cannot see this playing out any way but badly. Um the real like domino to fall will be when Pete Hegsth drops a drone on a narco boat, but it was a narco boat commandeered by a privateeer and ends up killing an American citizen who just killed a narco person. That's that's the kind of chaos. Yeah, that's the thing that like will really kind of sober a lot of people about this law.

So, but um it's interesting and going through it. There's a part that we skip over. Yeah. I'm making all the pirate jokes, but it does say to seize cartel property and persons on land or sea outside the US. Yeah. So this is very interesting to see what happens in Mexico, in Colombia, in Venezuela, and some of these other places where places where places where they will be subject to those jurisdictions, though. Let's be very clear. This is just the US saying, "Don't worry, we won't prosecute you.

Until I hear Mexico or Venezuela or whoever say, "No, no, we're good." Uh, I will assume that we're going to have an international problem here. Now, back in the day of piracy, I imagine people were way more on board with this because you really couldn't police the seas. And so, the only way to do this was to finally say, "Listen, every ship now that's out in the sea might be coming for you, so you might want to rethink your piratey ways." At one point, the average life expectancy of a pirate was something like three years.

Like, you were just toast. Once you became a pirate, that was game over. You were going to get killed. And this is one of the reasons that now piracy is only something that happens like off of third world countries because bro that that is just for so long it was just a one-way path to an early grave. Uh we'll keep monitoring it. Uh I'm not going to lie, this is when they said Trump thinks outside the box. I guess this is what they were talking about.

This is way Yeah, we're hitting five next uh Eric. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Uh all right. As we move through the uh inflation numbers came out, people were taking laps. They were high-fiving. They were celebrating. Trump got it under down. It was nine when Biden was in office. Now we're all the way down to 27 under the 3.1 that we expected. And then the other shoe dropped. Um this is a tweet from Finance Lot. Um and they they showed that due to the government shutdown, that's kind of the asterk on this, a lot of the actual um CPI numbers were not complete.

So yes, it was 2.7, but as we see, they only took like captured energy, um some commodities, but a a vast majority of the data that adds into the overall CPI um numbers were just simply missing. Yeah. The reason for that is because of the government shutdown. So they just weren't able to get all of those numbers. So there's a lot of questions around the sampling of this. Um so for anybody tracking this, something isn't adding up with the CPI numbers. CPI inflation numbers. Um, they raise very serious questions about whether Americans real cost of living is actually being measured correctly.

The official CPI numbers show that inflation is slowing compared to prior years. And I think that it probably is. Like given some of the things that we're doing, that doesn't surprise me at all. But as True Flation notes, due to the government shutdown, the data wasn't being collected until November 14th. So that only gives you half the month. Uh, and so for True Inflation anyway, who's done a really good job of tracking inflation, I forget when they were founded, but certainly they've been tracking it since the COVID era, um, they're saying that calls into question the sampling because they're just not going to have time to collect all the different samples that they're they're going to need to do to give an accurate report.

And there appears to be, as Drew was saying, a bunch of data that's just outright missing. Uh, and some of the drops seem pretty sus. So, some are saying that the government is just cherrypicking data to try to make this sound good. I 100% believe that the Trump administration would absolutely do that. I think every administration does that. I think they are routinely changing what they measure so that they can report something good. Others are saying that the drops are because some of the tariffs have been removed.

Others have been uh basically just a one-time effect. So you put the tariff on, it's now static. It's not like it's going to keep growing month over month. So you get the one-time hit and then ultimately uh now things have just normalized. And so it's a complicated picture that I think is only going to become clear with time. So we're going to need another month. So now we have we'll have December full numbers. Once we have January full numbers, we'll be able to compare January to December and get a real picture and we should be back on track.

This is another reason why government shutdowns suck. Um as you have government agencies that are making decisions based on this data only to later down the road find out that this was just a bad numbers thing. So, I think you have reason to be um cautiously optimistic that even the tariffs aren't going to have an ongoing effect. They're going to have a one-time effect. So, now it's sort of we are where we are. Um so, we'll see how all this plays out, but that's my expectation.

expectation. expectation. Um it it does seem like we're not back in the pandemic. So, while some of these numbers are um being disputed right now, I did see gas prices make a marginal march down. I did see, you know, eggs aren't $15 anymore. I know that's not because of anything Trump did. It was just because of that chicken flu that killed a bunch of eggs, but still there are certain things that he can point to and say that we are going in the right direction. direction.

direction. I'm speaking specifically for inflation. Put jobs numbers, uh, AI booms and bubbles aside, I feel like true inflation, inflation, inflation, the cost of goods that consumer um, regular Americans are feeling. I do feel like that at least directionally is in a better place. Although I still think we still are in that COVID hangover. Yeah. I mean, look, are we directly in a better place? We are, but the economy is so broken, Drew. Like there there is not going to be a quick recovery from this.

Let's say that they get to they get inflation to below target. So it goes below 2%. You're still being stolen from to whatever that percentage is. So let's say it's 1.5. They're stealing 1.5% of your money because they're inflating the money supply. So it's like I people need to understand if you spiked by 20% 25% excuse me from 2020 to now anything that you're growing is over that 25%. So unless you get deflation you are in a really bad place and the public has been trained trained trained scop of all SCOPs they have been trained to believe that deflation is bad.

Now deflation can be bad but it is not necessarily bad. So, um, that's what people need to really be paying attention to is any inflation is over this 25%. And so, the thing that has made the world feel just impossibly expensive was happening before it really started like in earnest. It started, okay, let me give the full timeline. It starts in earnest in 1913. That paves the way for money printing. Starting in the 1970s, 1971 to be precise, we break the last tether to gold. So, now money can just be inflated like mad.

Uh, so we start the just wild runaway inflation in the 1970s. We finally tame that through the 80s and 90s. We have like some spikes here and there, but nothing crazy. Then the 2000.com bubble bursts and we get back on the money printing train and we start doing I don't think they call it quantitative easing yet at that point, but same thing. Uh, so they start money printing like crazy, but we keep it more or less in check until 2008 and then all the brakes just come off and we get absolutely unhinged, completely immoral, horrible, horrible, horrible.

And so 2008 snowballs into COVID, snowballs into what we're dealing with now today. Combine on top of that the fact that we're just completely comfortable now not having a balanced budget. Um, so it's it's a disaster. So, what you have to do if you want to get things back on track is you've got to put power back, negotiating power back in the hands of the average worker in a way that doesn't compromise the companies. Because when you do it through unions and things like that, it doesn't end up having the effect that you want it to have.

There's very marginal effect anyway on behalf of unions in the private sector, you get some in the government sector, but not the private sector. And so, uh, that's not the play because they also will distort markets. Um, but you've got to get power back in the hands by not globalizing everything, by not importing cheap labor so that being good at a job that is valued, the person can control what they get paid for that labor by having options, right? That's the position that you want to get back into.

That having skills actually matters and that companies aren't just going anywhere and everywhere that they're like hiring the available talent pool that they have there in the country. That's the ultimate goal. So, we've got to do that. we've got to balance the budget. We've got to stop this. So, uh people are going to bang pots and pans and celebrate rightly that we're at least trending in the right direction. But that's really from the I own stocks. Um I'm in a great place. Like, yay, we're now at 1.3%.

For the person who's like, "Bro, uh I can't afford rent. I'm still living in the basement with my parents. An ungodly amount of my money goes to um my groceries and things like that." They're in Daniel Conorman's loss domain. So for them, it's about gambling. For them, it's like, "Oh, give me a shot to win it all back." Or they just completely check out of the system or both. They check out of the system and any money that they're going to get through stim checks or whatever, they're going to gamble to try to win it all back.

And that that is the world's most unhealthy sign of your economy. So until we fix the underlying structural problems that put us in that situation, it's going to be no bueno. And so this is why I'm saying like if Trump is banging the drum and he's just saying I'm stealing from you slower, it's it's good, but it isn't going to win him the midterms. It's got to be like, oh [ __ ] prices are actually going backwards. My gas getting cheaper is great. Big win because energy undergurs everything.

You've got to start driving groceries down. People be stoked. But if you don't get to the final piece of the puzzle and start making housing affordable, [snorts] affordable, [snorts] affordable, [snorts] it's gone. it's gone. it's gone. You're going to be in trouble. And like by the way, if you want to solve a lot of these problems, make wages go up because I can, and this isn't bad, but it's like I can distract you from the fact that prices are higher. If you believe my wages just went up and they're about to go up again next year, then people go, "Okay, like I can make this work.

I'm winning again. I'm making progress." Tony Robbins has always had a line that I think is absolutely brilliant that progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. That explains all of video games. And once you understand people just want to make progress, then you understand why being able to raise your wages is so critical. critical. critical. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, cool. We got some uh breaking news in the Brown University shooter uh case. I can't call him a Brown shooter anymore. Um, anymore. Um, anymore. Um, hey, hey, hey, this is the face photo of alleged suspect Clauddio N Valente.

Um he was found dead in a storage unit uh this morning in Salem uh or New late last night. Salem, New Hampshire. Um he was 48 years old. I love how it's not a US citizen. Was a second uh identifying factor. This is from Nick Sorder. Um he was a green hard card holder from Portugal and once was a Brown University student. There's some speculation that he might have ties to the MIT uh shooting as well because the Brown University shooting happened. He went dark MIT shooting and then they found him now in New Hampshire.

They're they're making bold claims saying, "No, no, no. This is the same guy. He went into that building." Um, so the media saying, "Listen, we got to like actually go through all the evidence and all that, but like looking at it now, uh, it seems pretty self-evident that this is the guy." Yeah. Um, so yeah, they they'll keep tracking the situation, but he's effectually uh out of here. Self-inflicted gunshot wound. So, yeah, this one uh we need more details. I don't understand like why. Uh I'll put my conspiracy hat on for a second if you want to pull up I think it's the third uh tweet that I pulled on this topic.

Uh or it says like keeping the conspiracy alive uh wherever I put that. Yep. Yep. Yep. Um so yeah, I full disclosure that for whatever reason this one triggers all of my desire to have a conspiracy. Uh, but this is from Adam Cochran who says, "So the claim is shot at Brown, fled 55 miles away. Two days later, gunned down America's top nuclear fusion researcher. Two days later, Trump's social media company merges with a Russianbacked nuclear fusion company. The guy offs himself in a storage facility.

Um, sus." Like, what the [ __ ] So I Where's Kins? We need her on the case. I know this, but there are Egyptian planes. Uh, probably all just like literal coincidences, but it is so weird. I need more information on this one. Why shoot up Brown, which seems entirely random. One of them is random. Either you're mad at Brown because this guy wasn't, as far as I know, it wasn't tied to Brown at all. He's an MIT guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, same generalish vicinity, but not exactly right next door.

Not exactly likely that this guy had him as a teacher or TA or anything like that. So, I don't understand. And unless he's got like a Ted Kazinski style manifesto and this is like this guy's going to make even nuclear just like a thing that you can do at room temperature. I don't know, man. There's something um What is your read on the Trump uh merger? Um they like they merged with that it was a social media company then it was True Social then they thought they were going to do something and now they just merged with Fusion Energy firm TAE $6 billion deal.

I think you have to pick your lane man. You're either an entrepreneur actively or you're the president. But being an active entrepreneur, active entrepreneur, active entrepreneur, I thought you were going to say you have to be a social media company or a nuclear company. You were like, "No, you got to be president or an entrepreneur. You can't be both." Yeah. Not at the same time. So, this is why, mad respect to the um AI and cryptosar, David Sachs. David Saxs sold all of his crypto before becoming the cryptosar.

Cuz here's the position that every politician should want to put themselves in. I want to make the American people wealthier than anybody else on planet Earth. And I want to get wealthy as a member of this very strong and prosperous country. But I'm going to put myself in a position where as to make me wealthier, I have to make the average American wealthier. I love that. I want them to go into office being like, "Yo, [ __ ] you voted the right person in. We about to get that cheddar." Like I'm I love that energy.

That's [ __ ] awesome. That is what we want. But what we get instead is um I know [ __ ] you don't know and I'm going to invest based on that insider information and doggy dog, baby. I wish you were a better uh um trader, but you're not. So that is what it is. That that has that same energy of like, but Tom, they can just buy Bitcoin. And I'm like, "Yeah, I get it. But Bitcoin is scary and it's risky and the average person isn't going to do it.

So, what is the average person going to do? Make that work. The average person's going to have a job. Make sure that they get better wages. The average person is going to have a 401k. Make sure that that works." Like, come on. So, uh, that that part's a little crazy. So, I look at this and it's like, it's gross. I don't I even if it's just the optics, the optics are so horrible. And the odds that it's just the optics are basically zero. Yeah. zero. Yeah.

zero. Yeah. Now, is it what that guy's claiming? I don't have any evidence to suggest that it's actually what that guy's claiming. But it's so gross, dude. It's Yeah. Look, Look, Look, Trump stakes, Trump sneakers, Trump Bibles, the Trump coin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And now he just did a $6 billion deal. [ __ ] terrible, man. Trump Trump has to be the the most profitable president we ever had because I want to say he's up like five bill and he's been here 11 months. He hasn't even like did major legislation yet.

Wait until that big beautiful bill dropping those kickbacks. Woo. Trump about to get that money. What if Trump becomes the third wealthiest person in the world? That'd be hilarious. Um hilarious. Um hilarious. Um would it would be hilarious? I I would find it funny. All the far all the farmers in uh Idaho and Texas right now who can't sell their beef because prices are $17 a pound. They're not there. That's your guy. Your boy got you. Trump's gonna make it great again. How them beef prices?

This is on his third acquisition. How's those beef prices though? Um, okay. You you brought it up, so I thought seen this floating around um on Twitter. The pel the Pelosi versus Warren Buffett versus the S&P 500 and how she is secretly the greatest uh stock trader of the last 13 years. Um, wow. wow. wow. The S&P 500 up 160 200 She's up 500% 6 700%. 700%. 700%. Bro, that is so wild. Pelosi is making bank. Yo, I hope you guys are looking at your screens.

That is As of Q4 2024, she is up 949%. Warren Buffett, who's sitting on that crazy cash pile, the most successful investor in American history, up 444%. She doubled Buffett. That's hilarious, dude. That's dude. That's dude. That's S&P 500 which everybody has insider trading 439 this so insider trading and uh by the way allegedly I don't know have it be proven in a court of law uh it feels like insider trading apparently our feelings are all that matters um matters um matters um you had a dream it was insider I had a dream and the Jesus told me that it's insider trading so I know my boy into this hey he he he was funny for a second bill you it's not funny in the teacher.

He not doing nothing. All right. This is his holiday right now. He's celebrating his birthday. Don't slander him on his birthday month. birthday month. birthday month. Yeah. This This is very distressing. Very distressing. And um the other one that freaks me out are the poly markets. People should be able to bet. Let them bet on how many steps I take in a day. I that fine, whatever. Um but being able to bet on things that you have information about, that is grotesque. Like if I was able to bet on how many steps I'd take in a date, guys, that that would be ridiculous.

Uh, wild. Um, okay. I feel like, um, this has been like a growing sentiment, so I'm conflicted cuz UK's been doing a bunch of crazy stuff. Um, Um, Um, you're conflicted about this? No. No. Cuz like young men need need help. Uhhuh. Uhhuh. Uhhuh. They definitely need help. Yes. But I know where this story goes. So, I'm very I'm waiting for your punch line through. line through. line through. No, but that's what I'm saying is like I feel like he's starting at the right place. Like, place.

Like, place. Like, all right, let me let me give the facts and then cuz I want to hear your take. Yeah, this is heaven. All right. UK Prime Minister Kier Star wants to save young men. Let's put that in air quotes. Uh, UK Prime Minister says he wants to protect young men from misogynistic influences and the backlash has been swift. Starmer framed young men as vulnerable to online radicalization. Critics argue the rhetorical that the rhetoric pathizes masculinity instead of addressing economic despair. The UK faces record youth disengagement, low wages, and collapsing opportunity.

Government, this government proposal focuses on speech regulation rather than actual structural reform. And the moment that we're living in now reinforces concerns that the UK is losing cultural and institutional coherence, which I agree with. This is so dumb. Like this is the UK going full [ __ ] So with all of that, I really got to hear like how you conflicted about this. Are you saying that? I know where it ends up, but it's like he's trying. No, he's not, man. This this from where I'm sitting, this is legitimate brain rot, and this is either a guy that that literally does not understand how the world works.

And so he thinks, I can control this from the top down. I can tell people, you can't listen to them. You can't say those words. You can't tweet those things. And in fact, for people to understand my position, you're going to have to pull up um the there's a tweet um showing the UK jailed a man for 18 months for a tweet that was seen by 33 people. Okay. Jailed him for 18 months for an anti-immigration tweet that was seen by 33 people. And then a man, an immigrant who sexually assaulted a woman, got no jail time.

Okay. Uh, so it says intoxicated Nigerian man who sexually assaulted teenager is spared jail due to his troubled background as victim tells court he ruined her life and she is now scared to walk alone. So that that is a country that has lost its weight. They they are not able to parse reality. And so I don't know if this is like pure evil where they've got some agenda where this is like guilt over the former empire. And so they feel that they need to break apart their um country by allowing anybody to come here and treating those people uh like giving them special privileges and it's a totally two-tier justice system and that's what they're doing which would be pure evil or if he's just the the system as a whole has become that stupid.

I I don't know. But this this is I say with no hyperbole. This is slow civilizational collapse. And if they do not change course, you you cannot have a functioning society. It will rebel against you. They will revolt. They will be in the streets again because let's remember what happened in Ireland very recently. Uh you're going to see more and more and more revolt in your own country. There's no universe in which people tolerate this. And so the fact that they are more concerned about somebody expressing a wrong think opinion that 33 people saw than they are someone who actually sexually assaulted somebody.

That is so insane. Mhm. So this is where it's like once people have been safe for so long that they forget that there there are real people that will that will that will take, take, take, assault, assault, assault, victimize, steal, rob, murder until they reach actual push back. That that's how the human mind is wired. Not every human, but there there is a distressing number of people that will do that. And if they do not get checked by something, they'll keep going. And so that's what you're going to have like this is just gonna keep going and keep going.

going. going. So this is him greenlighting him cancelling Andrew Tate for example like dude this is him the the better way to read this. So let me read Kira Starmer's actual tweet and then I'm going to tell you how you should hear this. I want my daughter to grow up in a Britain. She feels safe where she feels safe in school online and in relationships. Every young girl deserves that. And every young boy she should be protected. Every young boy should be protected from harmful misogynistic influences.

My government is making that happen by backing teachers, calling out misogyny, and intervening early. We can stop harm before it starts and save a generation of young men from the influence of online misogynist. Okay. The way that you should read that is um I need a cover story to completely control what people look at and what they say and I will jail people who say something that I have classified as wrong think under yet [snorts] another category. This one is misogyny. We already have locked up immigration.

Uh and so I can silence people and force them to think the way that I want to think using the law as a weapon. That's how you should actually read that. Oh, and PS, by the way, I'm going to use AI to scan [ __ ] every word that you say. Whether you utter it privately, whether you say it in public, whether you tweet it, whether like if I have you hooked up to uh a [ __ ] like finger monitor at the doctor's office and I realize that you got excited when somebody said something misogynistic, uh that's going to go on your permanent record.

Like this is crazy. And the fact that he is allowing himself to even utter these words out loud is grotesque beyond measure. Like I I just this is wild. There is a reason that freedom of speech is the first amendment. Not the second, not the third, the very first one. The way that your government gets tyrannical control is by telling you, "I'm going to protect you from wrong think. I'm going to keep you safe from everything bad that could ever happen to you." People should stop wanting to live in a world without any sharp edges.

This is ridiculous. ridiculous. ridiculous. What is it like? What's the proper way to approach young men? Cuz um I get I get like Scott Galloway that like we can't just throw therapists at it either. We we can't I know fathers in the home is the best case scenario, but we can't uh we can't mandate families. So what is there a top down solution? Is there something that the government can sign and do to help these young men get tougher, stronger, and back where we need them to be?

When whenever you're approaching a problem, ask yourself, how do I change the environment such that the thing that I want becomes the natural outcropping? Because when you try to do it from the top down, you will have unintended consequences. You will create a system that people are going to weaponize. They're going to use in a negative way. Remember, humans want power. And if you give them a way to get power, they will wield that power. This is allowing the government to have yet another thing that they can use to control your speech to lock you up.

And I remember when this first started, people were like, there's no way they're actually going to lock people up. And I was in that camp. I was like, there's no way they're not going to lock somebody up for a tweet. If you had described this to me three years ago and said, uh, guy tweets this out. Will they put him in jail for it? Guy sexually assaults a teenager. Will they put him in jail for it? I've been like obviously the tweet they'll never put anybody in jail for that.

That's crazy. That it was their author that gave us 1984. These guys are so aware of the problem. Not possible. Uh no one is going to get off of sexual assault because they were intoxicated and had a troubled childhood. Nobody. Um so I I would have been like, "Yep, totally. No way I'm going to be wrong about this." And now I realize, oh my god, no, no, no. That's you can't map it like that. You've got to mchave in this. You've got to realize that politicians are dead inside and that they will do and say whatever they need to do to gain and retain power and what they seek is power and once you start looking at them that way you get that co played out exactly the way that it was going to play out that uh terrorist attack is going to play out with gobble up more power it's going to end in the TSA like these is just yes of course that's exactly what's going to happen so um yeah this is very traumatic IC humans in terms of I have a house full of Brits right now because my wife is British and so the so the so the cuz it cured armor you saving them.

They're they're refugees at this point. Uh so this is obviously very real for me. And so watching them deal with all this stuff is is really wild. I certainly don't want to see it happen in America and I certainly see calls for it happening here as well. Uh, and it's always going to come under the guise of don't worry, we're going to keep you safe. We're going to save young men, all that. Okay. So, what do we do? Uh, the thing that we have to do is give men someone to look up to where that person that we want them to look up to is legitimately dope is somebody that they're going to think is cool.

And then we celebrate the [ __ ] out of that person. A big part of the problem that we have is we said, um, you can't, uh, think George Washington is cool. You can't think Columbus is cool. You can't think insert person here. You can't think any of those guys are cool. So what did straight young white men decide was cool? was cool? was cool? [ __ ] Hitler. [ __ ] Hitler. [ __ ] Hitler. So whoopsies. That like when you try to tell them like these people bad, bad, bad, bad. Look at all bad things they did.

They don't go, "Oh yeah, wow. Thank you. You're so right." They go, "Listen, [ __ ] wit. I'm going to push back on everything that you try to tell me I can't do. I'm going to go do all of those things." And so they start making like super cuts of [ __ ] Hitler marching down the thing with the cool Hugo basuits and the big [ __ ] flags and they're like, "Yeah, that seems way doper than I need to sit in the back of the class and shut the [ __ ] up so the girls can talk." It's like Jesus Christ.

People do not have any sense of how human psychology actually works. You've got to give these guys someone dope to look up to. You've got to like paint a picture of like these are the people. They did awesome stuff. Like they were hardcore. They did really cool things and we used to celebrate men that were questionable, no doubt, but that at least like were adventurous, went out on the high seas, tried to um make America a better place. Everybody's heard me talk about Washington. I am well aware that he was a part of slavery and slavery is god awful.

At the same time, this was a guy that fought to make America the greatest country in the world. had a chance to become king, turned it down and said, "No, we've got to like pass this on." Who also, by the way, uh tried to free all of his slaves upon his death. Obviously, all horrible, but it's not like he invented slavery. So, getting people to say, "Okay, well, who are you going to give them?" Like, you've got to give them somebody. You can point to Martin Luther King, womanizer.

You can point to Gandhi. Ah, god, I can't remember if he's a womanizer or beat his wife, but like also bad things. That would be hilarious if Gandhi beat his wife. Gandhi, look it up. Gandhi had dude, dude, dude, we have to look it up right now so I'm not spreading rumors. Gandhi had bad things. Just ask chat. Um, what were the things Gandhi was credibly accused of in terms of terms of terms of Gandhi beat his wife. That's what we need to uh Oh, wow.

I don't know what's happening on my on my on my That is Yeah, let's put that up. Go to chat. Gandhi abused his wife. There you go. Media Gandhi domestic violence. That's hilarious. It's not funny. Domestic violence is never funny. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But um so yeah, so you you you are not going to find a perfect person. And if you strip away all the people that did cool [ __ ] then they will just go farther and farther out on the horrendous curve to find and celebrate someone like Hitler, which is just crazy to me that this is where we're at, but this is where we're at.

Mhm. at. Mhm. at. Mhm. So, um yeah, give men someone to look up to that will line up with their evolutionary impulses. And their evolutionary impulses are to be aggressive, to be um ambitious, to want to be someone that women would choose, to be strong, to be commanding, to be dominant. These are all the things that men want to be. So, but from an evolutionary standpoint, and I'm not saying every man is maxed out on every part of that scale. Some guys are going to uh display their dominance by becoming the best teacher in the world.

Testosterone incentivizes men to be the most whatever is celebrated by the culture. So, um yeah, celebrate something worthwhile. something worthwhile. something worthwhile. Uh all right, let's jump into that uh Marishia Dark uh super chat. Cool. Uh Marushia said, "Merry Christmas, Impact Theory fam, including Mason G and the rest behind camera. What do you each want for Christmas? What are your favorite Christmas songs, movies, traditions? Also, Kurt Russell is the best Santa Claus. Oh, that's a hot take. I don't know about the Kurt Russell thing. Kurt Russell looks apart.

I'll give you that. But, um, I don't love the Christmas Chronicles. Chronicles. Chronicles. Uh, Uh, Uh, what do you want? What do you give the man that has everything? Oh, well, so this year the the thing that I actually care about is the family coming here. I [snorts] am super psychotic about that. Like getting to spend time with the family. huge. Me having time to work on Kaizen will be huge. Um, so I'm very excited about that. Those are the two things that like I'm really really looking forward to.

I bought myself my Christmas gifts this year and then gave them to other people to give to me because this this year is all about TCG. And I was like, you guys are going to get ripped off. You will not know what cards to get me. You will not know what's a good price for the cards. So anyway, I I went and got them and was like, "All right, here's the bundle. Give me whatever you guys want to do. Are you gonna act surprised when you open them up?" I am not going to act surprised, but the good news is with my memory, I'll forget some of the cards that I bought.

So, uh that'll be interesting. What about you? Um love and affection, man. That's all I want for Christmas. Facts. I don't I don't think that's bad at all. at all. at all. My daughter got straight A's uh this uh term. Um so, I know she's going to run my pockets. So, pray for me. Um because I told her she wanted a bunch of stuff. I'm like, I'm not getting you nothing until I see your report card. And then I seen it and it was all A's.

I was like, damn it. Okay, that's good. We should be celebrating. Like, yeah, I'll go broke on this one. Yes, it's a great problem to have. So, um, um, um, that's awesome. Shout out to Lynn. Well done. It's very impressive. Um, yeah. What do we What do you guys want? What do you want, Mason, for Christmas? I'm notoriously hard to shop for at Christmas because I tend to get what I want myself and I don't want that many things. So, I did get myself a new iPhone, but then other than that, like I don't know.

We'll see what other people give me. give me. give me. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm a weird one when it comes to Is your Is your wife like historically like a good giftgiver? She's an amazing giftgiver, which is part of the reason why I just don't even think about what I want. She'll find something good. Nice. Nice. Nice. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. G G G partner. Uh, Uh, is G on mic or do we need to repeat? Yeah, about we might have to repeat that for G.

G's gonna spoil his nieces and nephews. nephews. nephews. There it is. Not bad. All right. G's Santa. We like that. that. that. Eric, look at that. Don't give me the family. What do you want, Eric? want, Eric? want, Eric? Boxing gloves and boxing. There it is. There we go. All right. Let's go, Eric. He had that on tap. Boxing gloves. All right. Come on. Eric, in Eric's defense, that is not going to be some like [ __ ] stuff that collects dust. Eric has cauliflower ear. This man is an MMA fighter.

So, uh, shout out to Eric in the boxing gloves and boxing shoes. Let's get it. Um, okay. I I want to I'm going to start some beef. some beef. some beef. Oh, go. Forgive me. Who's a better giftgiver? You to Lisa or Lisa to you? Uh, what is the honest answer historically? Lisa is more thoughtful than I am in general. For sure. Okay. She is more likely to remember something that like I really wanted and then I forgot about it myself. Um, but this year I guarantee my gift is better.

better. better. Guaranteeing it. Guaranteeing it. Guaranteeing it. Yeah, literally guarantee. Oh, Lisa, you better get You better uh buy extra. buy extra. buy extra. I know what she's giving me. You better buy extra bundle. He talking tough. tough. tough. I bought it for her to give to me. So, I already know what I'm getting from Lisa. She said all caps. Easy. Easy. What? I want to know. You're going to have to say more words than that. Lisa says, "It's me. I created a wheel of fortune for Okay, so hold on.

Wait." She Wait." She Wait." She No, no, no. Hold the phone. Okay. When I say that my wife is more thoughtful, people need to see that in all caps. Flashing neon lights. I I am shocked that she's um talking about the wheel of fortune. That extraordinary, but does not even compare. For COVID Christmas, this woman recreated our yearly trip to New York. She decorated one of our rooms, like the Macy's Santa workshop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got cardboard cutouts of Santa, everything. Decorated the room, trees, snow, fake snow everywhere.

She created a fake video as if we were on an airplane. So, we This is so [ __ ] like bougie. Forgive me. But we're in our movie theater and she's got like the as if we're sitting on an airplane with the sound effects of the airplane. So, we flew to New York. She dressed as a steartess had um her nickname I don't need to reveal that but her nickname error. So it was like it was she she packed like faux suitcases and like took them down as if we were boarding a plane.

Uh we when back in the day before Uber we used to have a driver god this all sounds so [ __ ] terrible. Uh but we had this driver in New York. She called him on the phone because we' gotten kind of close to him. Called him on the phone. We sat in the car, talked to our normal driver from New York. Like, it was That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. It was so insane. My wife is on another level of thoughtfulness. So, I do not want to take that away.

Like, we were just talking about that co Christmas and I was like, "This is legendary." Like, this is so incredible. She She really went all out. She had like towels made that said the name of the airline and all this stuff. I was It was insane. So yeah, my wife is on a whole another planet. I'm I don't go hard like that. But this year, yeah, yeah, yeah, this year we got her beat. Nice. Nice. Okay. Um I need a There it is. Perfect timing. Uh all right, Mason, I got another chat.

Spicy take is Die Hart uh Christmas movie. Yes or no in the chat. Um we briefly talked about this. This should be a poll, man. Yeah. Yeah, I need to know. Yeah, that's it. We're going to talk about that. Um do you have a favorite like Christmas movie, top two, top three, whatever? Like what's like your I do. So my favorite Christmas movie of all time if I really had to say would be The Family Man. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. But a close second that I could see over time taking first place is The Man Who Invented Christmas.

Invented Christmas. Invented Christmas. The Man Who Invented Christmas. I don't think I've seen that one. Oh my god, it's so good. It's about Charles Dickens writing a Christmas Carol. Carol. Carol. It is phenomenal. Phenomenal. It's done so well. The structure of it absolutely brilliant. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. Nice. And it's on Incredible. You said that one and then the Family Man, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I was just This was on uh like you know how when you turn on your TV and it's like the homepage movie.

It was the homepage movie. Oh my god, this movie is so good. When that came out, I lost my mind. It's it's a glimpse movie, which is one of my favorite Christmas genres. Uh absolutely fantastic. Nicholas Cage in his prime. Jeremy Pivan in his prime. Brett Ratner in his prime. two people that got mowed over by me too. Yeah. too. Yeah. too. Yeah. Uh but nonetheless, the movie is phenomenal. Phenomenal. phenomenal. Phenomenal. phenomenal. Phenomenal. Um Love Actually Lee for me. I'm a sap. I love that movie.

So good. Such a good movie. Don't you ever apologize for that. I love that movie. movie. movie. Oh my goodness. I love that movie so much. So that's good. Uh you guys, any favorite movies? favorite movies? favorite movies? The Night Before is good. That's a fun one. Is it Seth Rogan one? Oh, it's hilarious. It's so good. Hilarious. Say it again. The Night Before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolute common gold. So fun. This is in high rotation in the Billy household. And Office Christmas Party is like another classic you got to go back to.

I I am with Mason. Mason, these are excellent. excellent. excellent. Nice. Um G Eric, any Christmas call out movies? movies? movies? Homeone. Homeone. Homeone. Home Alone 2. Two specifically, huh? Home Alone's all right. Home Alone 2 is all right. Friday. Friday. Friday. Friday after ne I think it is Friday After Next. After Next. After Next. Friday did a Christmas movie. Friday did do a Christmas one. What? Uh yeah, Friday After Next was good. All right. Somebody in chat said four Christmases. Four Christmases is a perennial favorite here in the Billy household.

We find it absolutely hilarious. But it got like 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. Lisa and I cannot understand how people gave it that low. Rambo first blood. That nothing says Christmas like Rambo First Blood. I'm there with you. That's amazing. I did not realize how good the first Rambo was though. people to like people think of Rainbow Salone with the headband and doing all that extra [ __ ] like like like that's where it went. Yeah. The OG Rainbow was really good. Yeah. Yeah. Do do you know the story behind that?

behind that? behind that? The OG Rainbow. Uh so they shoot it. He doesn't have the level of control that he, you know, ends up getting later in his career. And he kept telling them like, "Guys, there's something wrong. This dialogue, I don't know. I don't know." And they force him to shoot. And in the final cut of the movie, he's got like seven lines. Sheesh. In the first cut of the movie, he's got like 150. And so he was like freaking out. He's like, "We cannot release this movie.

This is so terrible. This guy sounds awful. We need to cut all of his dialogue." And so he ends up convincing them to do it. And they cut cut. And he was like, "If you saw the original cut," he was like, "You would hate this guy so much." But he was like, "Once you have him just be like this isolated loner." He's like, "Then it works." And it's interesting because Kiana Reeves for I think it was John Wick 4, he had kept telling them, "You have me saying too many lines." But he's like, "Writers just want [ __ ] guys to talk." And he was like, "This movie will be better the less I talk." So, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but supposedly he told them, "You have to pay me." And then insert whatever the amount was, like $46,000 like $46,000 like $46,000 for every word I say.

And so, they ended up obviously cutting it down, down, down, down. So, it's down, down, down, down, down. So, it's pretty interesting how these guys understand like the way to make me look cool is not to have me say a bunch of stuff. The way to make me look cool is to do the cool action [ __ ] and be silent. silent. silent. Which is very interesting. Um, Benio Del Toro said had a similar story with Sakario and he said there was one scene where it was like half a page of dialogue and he told um Tyler Sheridan, I could do all of this with a look like we don't need to say that.

Like I could just do it and I think it was that gun scene where he did that weird like gun click thing. Um, super cool. Um, all right. All right. Well, coming in strong, by the way. Merry Hanukkah. Uh, happy um, Quanza. Um, I don't know what other people celebrate. Boxing Day is the British one. one. one. Uh, Boxing Day is not technically a Christmas thing, but yeah. Don't Isn't Christmas different in other countries? countries? countries? It I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, in terms of Boxing Day just happens to be the day after Christmas to like throw your all your boxes out.

It's a shopping day. Anyway, uh, really fast that poll. Somebody gonna announce because that I think we can call that 75% 75% 75% 75%. Yes, Die Hart is a Christmas movie. 5% said what's that though? So what what what I haven't seen that I always throw a third option in. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Um all right. Um wanted to say in our our our really fast Hopper 2716. I have seen that and it is insane. What what the AI movie? I didn't see it.

There's a guy that like is basically doing a selfie and he's on like a movie set with the Dragon Ball Z character. Yeah. And he keeps like turning and like I forget who play all the characters. Kiana Reeves is one of them which looks hilarious because he has a beard. Um but insane insane. And over Christmas I'm going to be working with building my own Laura. This is a deep cut for all the AI fans out there, but I'm going to build a Laura for Kaizen.

And so I'm super eager to see what we can do with that. By the way, I'll never see this. Uh, but we have a new 3D artist on the team. Shout out to [ __ ] Brett. Like, have you guys seen the animations he's doing? Yeah, he's Yeah, he's Yeah, he's I walked past his computer yesterday and I was like amazed because there was animation going, animation going, animation going, bro. They're so good. It was just like playing on a loop and I was like, he did that on purpose.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. And uh he's fast on the animation side, so I'm really encouraged. We'll see. We'll see, man. 23 months in counting, everybody, until Project Kaisen goes into early release. So, get ready. 23 months of accounting. I got to hold myself accountable to that. We got to we got to get this bad boy out there. I'm in a race against AI. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm using AI to try to beat AI. That's the great irony. Yeah. I feel like that's the inception of it.

Um, speaking of AI, let's jump into it because this video I think encapsulates what we mean when they say AGI. I think when we talk about AGI and we're trying to figure out like what do they mean robots? What do they mean is going to happen? We can't see over the great like horizon. This video like radicalized me. So for those not watching the screen right now, this robot solves a Rubik's cube in.1 second. You that that was not misspeak. It's literally a flash. So when they do it at the beginning, you're just going to see a flash and then they're going to do it again in slow-mo.

But just think about it. They have the positioner on it. They can say you can do whatever you want. They just plugged it in and they said go and this is what it did. Man, you should be good. Like seriously, like this the thing that took you all summer to figure out. It did it in a flash. It was like a gunshot. And here's a slow motion. This is all the things it did in that second. Like, oh, it's right here. Oh, I just got to turn this here and I got to turn that there and that's it.

By the way, the sound that you hear is almost certainly the sound of the camera. That's why you hear that. That's how many frames a second you got to go to get this because this is all keep in mind 0.1 second 0.1 second it's even like moving multiple at a time or moving starting to move one as the other finishes and it like gets around the corner. Do you know how precise the movements of that machine have to be? Like the easy part is figuring out where you have to go from a set location.

Like that's easy math. But uh the actual integrating the movements of the device, that's where that gets wild. So we had talked earlier that there are robots that can move so fast you can only see them moving with the strobe light. That's where when Black Mirror gets scary. Forget the robot dogs that you see coming a mile off. What about the things like this that move so fast that you've got to strobe them to see them? That's where this like good luck. But but I really I'm pulling up this video because again it's so we we talk a lot in theories and I think in 2026 I want to bring us more to the practical because I feel like it's very easy to be like in the age of abundance and robots are smart.

They'll figure it out and we're like what does that mean? What does that look like? Because we need that logic. But again something that at least with me I'll talk about myself. I suck at Rubik's cubes. I probably I don't think I solved one unless I'm like following a YouTube step-by-step tutorial. So, that takes me what 30 45 minutes and it did that. Have you solved a Rubik's cube using a tutorial? tutorial? tutorial? Yeah, it tells you like where to go and what to turn it to and stuff like that.

I'm very impressed by that. That is a man with a curious mind who believes in getting better at things. I like that. I hate Minecraft, so I'm glad it blare. It balances. It balances. It balances. How dare you? He called me dumb the other day because he's like only people who are good at who like Minecraft are good. I'm like, dang it. I'm gonna [clears throat] tell my wife. I think I said something more like entrepreneurs are good at I would never call you dumb. I'm trolling.

Um but I I I I keep banging this drum because when we say this thing is 147 IQ, 250 IQ again, what does that actually mean? Like like what how does that have that ripple effect? So cause and effect now, right? The reason we haven't been able to solve some of these problems is because of what? And how do with now with the army of these higher IQs, what's that effect and how does that actually ripple? I know regulations and all those things are getting in the way, but just for a practical for a second, let's say we flip over the switch with Optimus, what is some of the technological advancements, but not necessarily what they'll be doing, but the process in which they'll get there.

So the reason that intellect matters so much is we live in a deterministic universe. What that means is everything is built on a set of rules. If you know the set of rules, you can only be confined by the rules themselves. You can't be confined by frame of reference. This is why people tell you to think from first principles. What they're trying to help you do is to get out. You're stuck inside of your frame of reference. And your frame of reference artificially limits the world dramatically.

And um so for instance, for a long time we think um only things that I can see are real. So think for most of human existence we believed only things that we could see are real. We didn't realize there were things so small that they could be affecting something. So germ theory becomes so controversial, but once you understand, oh, that's actually how the world works. There are these very, very, very small particles and some of them are bacteria and you can't see them, but they're still on you and when you touch something else, they can get into the body and then they replicate and they can cause all kinds of havoc.

Okay. So when you have a really high intellect, you get down to the level of the physics and you can begin guessing what the outcome accurately guessing what the outcome of that system necessarily must be because it operates on determined rules. And so it's like um you would be able to say if I told you the way that the human body worked um somebody that understands all the rules of the system would say if that thing doesn't eat the tissue of something else to acquire the calories it will die.

And that's necessarily true. And so you'd be like yes correct. And then if they understood the entire system, you could say something like, okay, um that body is subject to entropy, which means it will break apart over time unless something actively fights against the entropy. So I know that the life force, as we would call it, inside of a human is the active fighting against the entropy. So it's the immune system pushing back. It's the um body dividing cells to heal wounds, like all those things to overcome the entropy.

And so it would say, so if a body dies, it's going to decompose. Like it would know all of that simply based on the rules of the system. So now as you go way deeper into the subatomic level and you get to um like quantum, they would be able to predict, oh, this is how the world actually works. And because we just don't understand all of those rules, we are trapped by our frame of reference which is limited by things like um Einsteinian physics which we know isn't accurate.

It's just the most accurate one that we have. And so if we understood every law of physics then we would be able to bend spaceime and things like that. Mhm. So presumably a thing that becomes intelligent would be able to understand more and more of the rules of the universe and therefore would be trapped less and less by the limited human frame of reference that we have. And then also we just have limited processing power. So there's only so many variables that we can hold in our head.

We can't track things as well. We can't remember things as well. A computer doesn't have that same problem. So, it would be able to look at an extraordinarily complicated system like the weather and it would be able to say, "Okay, based on everything that influences weather, I know that you're going to get nine drops of rain in this square inch in the next 9 minutes, whatever." You'd be like, "Oh [ __ ] it becomes 100% accurate." So, when you can do things like that, you can map out the everything becomes predictable because again, you're in a deterministic universe, which is what I mean when I say that.

So um it will open up avenues in the same way that Einstein made GPS and lasers possible and lasers made CDs possible and DVDs possible and a whole host of other things. [clears throat] Uh but it required Einstein's insights into the way that the rules of the universe actually operate. And so there are going to be all kinds of new industries that will come online when we learn more of the rules of this deterministic universe. So that's where it's like, okay, well um will AI be able to do that faster than a human?

Because humans have been stuck for a very long time on the laws of the universe, like figuring out that next one. Um, so even if all AI did was usher in a sequence of atomic era like innovations, then you would compress the difference between say the 1940 and today. today. today. And if that started happening every month, now all of a sudden you realize why people call it the singularity where they just cannot tell what that's going to look like on the other side of all of that innovation.

that innovation. that innovation. And then the way that I think how we're currently doing it is through like an iterative process. So I'm thinking of like clinical trials for example. We try something it doesn't work. We try something again. We try something it doesn't work. We try it again. And then with AI, AGI and all these other things that are to your point they get so good at predictions where they're no longer blindly trying it. They're now saying okay we know that these things are true.

Let's try a 100 times in 0.1 second. And then the rate of change then is now ex expon exponentially faster because they don't have to sleep, eat, worry about uh who text them back and stuff like that. They could just execute. And yeah, to to your point, you also get let's say 20,000 years of a human life's progress in a single night. And so what does that look like? Like even if you just go, oh, we're not that much smarter. We just think that much faster.

And so now or we can correlate that much more data. So one thing that u Mason has done in his other duty here at Impact Theory is he's fed all of our um clips and shorts performance into the AI with all the different data points. It's too many data points for him to track. But the AI can go, okay, wait, you're missing this pattern. You're missing this pattern. And so and he was just showing me on the graph it like goes from this wall of like really modeled red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green to almost all green.

And he was like, "That was when I started like building the short based on what the AI was telling me. I had to have it three seconds. I had to have it 10 seconds." Like, because it was detecting patterns and all of your successful videos have this makeup. And so then he started making the videos adhere to that analysis and boom, they start performing much better. So it's um that ability like if you understand human biology so many of the diseases that we have are going to fall to just way way way more profound pattern recognition.

Um so aging is largely it seems like a differentiation of cells. So your cells are like I'm an eye cell, I'm a skin cell, I'm a heart cell. And over time through a process called methylation, methylation, methylation, you the um the little things that crawl across and I think it's RNA that's doing it. Don't hold me to that part. Methylation is true that I'm very confident in the things that are running across it. Maybe someone in chat can um tell me exactly what those are called.

But there are these little proteins that run across and they go, "Oh, this is an eye cell." And I know because of these methylation markers that tell me that basically unspool this part of the DNA or don't unspool this part of the DNA. And based on how the DNA is wound will determine whether it's a eye scale, eye cell, skin cell, heart cell, whatever. And so that methylation starts to get messed up. So it's like I'm sort of an eye cell. I'm sort of a skin cell.

And so you start looking old. So when you look old, what you're seeing is all the cells are differentiating. They're they're not stably like I'm this thing because the bookmarks are getting all [ __ ] weird. [ __ ] weird. [ __ ] weird. And so if you can create like a pattern recognition machine that's like I know exactly what the methylation of this cell should look like in optimal condition and then you can go in and actually influence that. So nanobots or whatever which are already real not to the point that we need them to be but like we're actually getting to the point where we can make things very very very very very small.

uh if it could go in and rememethylate it and so now mark everything correctly so that all the DNA is wound in the exact right way um you could theoretically you could freeze aging but it's going to take those kind of just ungodly amounts of pattern recognition plus the ability to get the micro machines to do the right thing man um we seen some breakthroughs this year whether it was um the cancer research the science uh the Google science like deep science uh division. We also seen like the pork cells uh the pork cells being injected and that helped kill cancer cells.

So, we're starting to see a lot of these uh technological breakthroughs. Do you think there is going to be I don't want to say a focus to that, but we're at that point now where a lot more of those breakthroughs will come versus I think it's already happening breakthroughs and stuff. stuff. stuff. No, no, they're they're on the LLM uh time. time. time. Oh. Oh, okay. So, they're tied together. Yeah. So, people were saying, "Ah, LLMs will never be able to do that." And these guys are like actually they're already doing it.

So uh that I think is is already being worked on. I think there are breakthroughs that are already working their way through the system that are being generated by AI. So I think that uh Brian Johnson just posted something. I think he said I'm trying to achieve immortality by 2039 I believe was the date that he put out. So when you start thinking about that's only like 15 14 years from now like that's not a super long time. Uh so it'll be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

But that's because I'm assuming he's making that prognostication because he sees the rate of what AI has already delivered. Marry that to the the rate of growth that AI is showing in its in level of intelligence. intelligence. intelligence. put the two together and you hit the ability to read and manipulate biology, not perfectly, but close enough that you for every year that you live, you add more than a year to your life expectancy. It's wild. Um, continuing on the AI train, David Sack, the AI ZAR, um, just exposed the AI job loss hoax.

Um, according to him and a new study from Vanguard, the occupations most exposed to AI automation are actually outperforming the rest of the labor market in terms of job growth and real wage increases. Job growth was 1.7 in occupations with high AI exposure compared to point8 in all other occupations. Real wages increased 3.8 in occupations with high AI exposure compared to 7 in all other occupations. Rather than causing job loss, AI is making workers more productive, driving gains in both jobs and wages. Okay, so there are two AI futures before us.

Um, AI future number one, it this is a fancy word, but it's I think fun for everybody in the community to learn. It's called asmtote. It just means that you hit a ceiling. You start the rate of return just stops, plateaus. So there's the world in which the growth rate of AI asmmptotes and it it gets to 147 IQ and it stalls. Uh then there's the world where AI does not asmtote and it just keeps getting better and better and better and better and better. and better.

and better. In many ways in terms of conserving the world that currently exists, you kind of want AI to asmtote. Like you want it to get dope, but you want it to stall out so that it makes everything a lot easier, everything a lot better, but then the next gain just is a little bit harder to get, a little bit harder to get. Now, of course, trying to do that artificially won't work. So it would need to be a fundamental problem with AI that nobody knows how to solve because if the two militaries of the US and China can crack that code, they will.

So you're never going to get one of them to slow down and not the other. They will both secretly Manhattan project. Anyway, I've talked about that many times. So if we're on the timeline that David Saxs is hyping up right here, which is that, hey, right now this is the lamplighter effect. Yes, lamp lighters are losing their job, but electricity is creating so many more jobs. You're way better off going, "Yeah, I feel bad for the lamp lighter because now he doesn't have a job and he's not going to retrain into electronics, at least not most of them." But bro, if you flash forward even 10 or 20 years with electricity and there's a whole lot more jobs now to give the devil his due.

When you look back at every technological revolution that has come before AI, all of them without exception have created way more jobs than they eliminated. eliminated. eliminated. AI but every time of course everybody panics panics panics AI if it doesn't asmtote will be the first one where that doesn't happen. it it ends up just gobbling everything up because it will be better at jobs every job than humans. But if it stalls then it really may be like the industrial revolution where it makes so many more things possible that so many more people can do things that and this is by the way that is the world that you live in right now all the paranoia that even I am like very worried about like okay there's going to be this transition period but the only world that actually exists is it's making life better when I think about for builders when I think about AI like it is I'm I'm in a race to find out if the um world embraces AI before I launch Kaizen because right now Expedition 33 wins game of the year.

Larian Studios makes this huge announcement about their next game. People are just over the moon. They love Expedition 33. Great game. They love Larian Studios. Most credibility in the world. They gave us Balders Skate 3. Many argued greatest video game of all time. Love, love, love. And then a journalist asks the CEO of Larian Studios, do you use AI? And he's like, yes. And then the community turns on him just like [ __ ] this kid. We hate everything about these guys. Now, I say all that in context of Impact Theory uses AI.

It is the only way that we're going to be able to get the game I want to create to market. It's not like, oh, well, I could just hire all these other people. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars, dude. So, I'm not going to gamble my entire fortune on that. That's crazy. So, doing that, I I just don't understand why um people would want to see that happen. So, the game that I'm making either gets AI usage or it's just never going to come into existence.

Um, my thing is judge it by the final output. If the final output is slop, then yeah, be mad that this is trash. It's not a fun game. Regardless of whether I built it with a bunch of humans or I built it with AI, if it's slop, it's slop and nobody should engage with it. But if I use AI and this thing ends up being incredible, then judge it based on this thing is actually incredible, whether AI was used or not. So, what it's allowing us to do here is awesome.

and a game now is moving forward that would not have moved forward and is employing people it would not have employed had AI not come into existence. And so there's going to be a whole lot of that and there's going to be a lot of things that aren't even industries right now that AI will give birth to. So um hopefully we get an extended period of time here in the wonderful land that is you have AI, you can use AI. AI makes things amazing. It is changing things but it's onboarding more jobs than it's killing.

Now my prognostication is that somewhere in the next 3 to seven years. Um it's just it does an asmmptote. It's so disruptive that it ends up taking more jobs than it creates and it will exacerbate the K-shaped recovery before ushering in uh the age of abundance. Um, but we can't ignore the fact that right now the only thing that's actually real is it's potentially these this data probably needs more scrutiny, but it's potentially doing the good thing and creating more jobs than it's destroying. Yeah. Um, I think that's the one part that kind of gets hidden.

You you mentioned it that we not only that we're creating more jobs with AI, but the industries that then spin off of it. And this goes back to the conversation we had with uh Ben Horowitz when he was like when everybody created the computer, nobody even thought about graphic design jobs. Like there are Photoshop artists. We have a Photoshop designer in house. Like there are people whose jobs would never have existed if it wasn't for electricity, if it wasn't for these things. So right now they just see the lamp lighter effect.

They see AI and the person who draws like okay I don't have a job now because of AI. But they don't see that now that AI is enabled, fully enacted, it now creates these new industries that now create a um litany of jobs and those people now who wouldn't have been in the job market or wouldn't have been interested in certain things years and things prior. So I do think there's this knock-on effect that I hope happens before Age of Abundance magical place. But um I think that we have to kind of be cognizant that there's things that we don't even know what's going to be the result of AI.

um on top of it, you know, there's going to be some Sora influencers. There's going to be some AI special like there's so other all these other niche uh markets that will develop because of this thing. We just have to wait for that market to mature and too many people want it to be I created the thing tomorrow I need to see a thousand jobs like no there needs to be creation on top of the creation. So creation. So creation. So So true. And I mean some of that will slow things down.

That's where I'm always like, okay, uh, are some of my projections, ideal world projections where it's not going up against the chaos of real life? Probably. Um, but I really can't get myself to go, oh, this is going to take seven years. It's just like, God, when I see the things that hit the street and I see how fast it's being deployed, I I think it's it's going to change things fast. But at the same time, I'm always thinking like there's probably some friction point that I'm not seeing that's going to slow some of this stuff down.

So, we'll see. That's why deal with the world that you actually have. Yeah. Love that. Um, all right. Let's jump um over into some uh news from uh the FBI. Dan Banino uh Mr. I seen the files, he killed himself. Uh will be leaving his position uh with the FBI in fe in January. I want to thank President Trump, AG Bondi, and Director Patel for the opportunity to serve with purpose. Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you.

God bless America. All that who and all those who defend her. Um, and then this is him on Fox and Friends talking about his resignation. I mean, I gave up everything for this. I mean, you know, my my wife is struggling and I'm not a victim. I'm not Jim Comey. It's fine. I did this and I'm proud I did it. But if you think we're there for tea and crumpets, well, I mean, Cash is there all day. We share our offices are linked. He turns on the faucet.

I hear it. He's there at He gets in at like 6:00 in the morning. He doesn't leave till 7 at night. You know, I'm in there at 7:30. at 7:30. at 7:30. What time were you here, Drew? I was here at 5:30. That's what I'm saying. What's up, Patel? Just going to say some Just going to say some people take their job seriously. They don't want it enough, man. They don't want it enough. morning. I go to the gym. I work out in my uh apartment, but I stare at these four walls all day in DC, in DC, in DC, you know, by myself, divorced from my uh wife.

Not divorced, but I mean, separated, divorced, and it's hard. I mean, you know, we love each other, and it's hard to be apart, but you're doing some great work. Uh you're straight now, the FBI, you move in buildings. There's a lot of change. I just got one more thing. I I mean, I Yeah. Um what's your take on the uh heartful res uh uh resignation? I I'm being spun. he's in a political position. So, um there's no way that that's the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

But as somebody who would not even let myself be in that position, if the president came and was like, "Listen, when your country calls you answer," I'd be like, "Bitch, please." Like, I am not your guy. So, can I get a charger, guys, please? You need to figure out like who else is going to be doing this because it's not going to be me. Uh so, yeah, if he's done and he wants to get back to his wife, full respect, totally understand. if this is just because the job was miserable, if it was because there was politics, all that, whatever.

Um, I this is total speculation, wild speculation. But when he did that 180 on the like, no, no, I saw the files. He was talking like this. He killed himself. I was like, bro, just off camera is a gun pointed at this man's head. So, I have a feeling that men in black suits, as Putin likes to remind us all, came up to him, was like, "Let me tell you how the government really works." And uh I have a feeling that made him excruciatingly uncomfortable. Prognostication.

I have no evidence for that whatsoever. Um but yeah, that I have a feeling this just didn't suit him. Now, I didn't know who he was, but I guess he was like a big podcaster and like was known for like these guys aren't like giving us anything. They're hiding everything. And so, man, do I hope that he comes out and is like, "Okay, now I'm going to start letting you guys know what it's really like inside there. There's going to be things he can't say. Not if he wants to avoid suicide.

avoid suicide. avoid suicide. Suicide, you know, he just ordered suicide where you shot yourself twice in the chest. the chest. the chest. Uh so yeah, there's only going to be so much he's going to be able to tell us, but it will be very interesting to see what his podcast is like on the other side of this. Um Frank 222 with a banger comment. Bonino is leaving because he hates he has to lie to cover for Trump, but Bondi and Patel are still covering up for him.

That's that is it. It's not that he's tired of working. He is tired of lying. that that could be true. A lot of times you think you're going to get into a position and I'm going to change the world and we're going to hook this up and we're going to kill it and then you get there and be like, "Wait a second." Like, "Wait a second, that's not how it works. Wait, I can't talk about this. Wait, I have to repeat what you say back to me." to me." to me." The single most um efficient human on planet Earth got eaten alive by the political world.

when people will firebomb your dealerships because they don't like what you're doing, when you try to save money and people come after you, like you know that that is that is a robust system. And so, uh, when you would rather go up against the physics of the universe than the physics of the human mind, you know, that's a tough game. So, yeah, I, uh, I don't fault anybody. That's one of the many reasons I want nothing to do with the inside of politics. Nothing. politics. Nothing.

politics. Nothing. Okay. So you wouldn't even be like the AIS are to the next person. No. The only way that you could get me involved in government is if the entire world has collapsed and the sticks that we have around the fort are not holding off the zombies well enough and somebody has got to like organize everybody to get the right sticks in place. And that even that I would do begrudgingly. There is no way. I don't have any interest in that whatsoever. that whatsoever. that whatsoever.

Why do you go so hard on that of not wanting to be in the government? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like why do I articulate it out loud or why do I feel it? Why do you feel that so strongly? It's it's just surprising to me. I can't uh track the dots. Okay. Uh so here is the I this is the trajectory my life. I'm 12 years old. I'm playing with a camcorder. I realize I want to make movies with the rest of my life. I go to film school.

I graduate. I have no idea how to break into the industry. I realized I need to get into business so I can get wealthy so I can make art the way that I want. I launched multiple companies, successful build a company to a billion dollars, a lot of sleepless nights, uh, banking everything, rolling the dice on your house, ignoring your wife, straining your marriage, like ah, and I finally get rich. I leave Quest on a Monday. I start impact theory the next day on Tuesday so that I can build what's ended up being Kaizen.

Uh, and I realize even that I have to build a self-sustaining economic engine to get this thing working for me. So for the first god knows how many years of impact theory, it's all like basically mastering the new age marketing and all that stuff. And only now am I able to spend like 20% of my time really pouring myself into the game. You think like since I was 12 because I that's what I like internally I view myself as a writer. I don't view myself as a um even a CEO.

Like I do all of that stuff so I can control my time. And so now it's like cool, it's all working. It's obviously taken a lot longer than I would have expected, but it's working. I don't have to raise capital to do it. I can do this myself because of course everyone's going to say, why didn't you just start a company? I wouldn't have had the capital. I would have had to raise it from somebody else. Now somebody else still gets to tell me what to do.

[ __ ] all that noise. I want to do it my way. I want to control everything. Uh, and I'm finally in that position doing what I love. I have trouble sleeping because I am so excited to get up and do what I'm doing. Okay. So, I don't want to give that up now that I've gotten here. So, yeah. Period. That's why I go so hard in the paint. Makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. Um, is that the problem though? Somebody said you're the reason why politics sucks.

I'm what? Because the people No, because the people that actually like the person who wants to run for president is a person you shouldn't elect. Correct. Next person. I know. Correct. That you're mad at God. You're not mad at me. I don't know why the human mind is architect. I mean, I can tell you from an evolutionary pressure perspective, but like you know the people that we should have in office who are logical thinkers, they don't want to get into politics. Yeah. Because it's gross. It is so horrible.

Here, here's the hard truth. Here is the hard truth. I hate that this is true. you. The reason politicians lie and spin is because you have to. It is the only way to get humans to march in lock step to get behind you. If you just told them the pure naked truth, they wouldn't get with you. They cannot hold long-term thinking in their head. So, it's like all they steer by emotion. And so, you have to make them feel the way you want them to feel.

Dude, that is very difficult. That is very difficult. And so when your game is really control people's emotions to get them to do the thing that's long-term good for them, that is a horrible game and you just end up lying to people all the time. And I have no in that's not interesting to me at all. So yeah, but I recognize how true it is. Like listen, when I sit and think, let's um I want to double views or I want to 10x my views, I could easily adopt methods that would skyrocket us.

But I'd have to say things that I don't believe are true. Like every now and then I'll see a comment go by and it'll be like Tom's out of touch or whatever and I'm just like I want to bite my computer because I go so far out of my way to earn my own respect. To earn my own respect, I have to be saying what I believe to be true and I have to be doing something that I think is honorable to try and help other people.

people. people. And it's like that's not always good for TV. So it is what it is. Uh, I don't expect anybody to celebrate for me because I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it for myself. But at the end of the day, the very thing that would make me hate my life is the thing that would make me good at being a politician. I just have no interest. no interest. no interest. I I guess that goes back to also I wouldn't be good. So, here's the thing.

People like I can be honest with what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. I wouldn't be good at that. What is What part of the politics is that? Cuz the idea generation I feel like you'll be good at. Yes. You know me. One of the things that drives you crazy about me is that I am selfisolating. Politicians cannot be selfisolating. You've got to constantly be glading people, constantly talking to people, constantly making everybody feel the way you want them to feel, doing tit fortat strategies.

I don't do any of that [ __ ] that [ __ ] that [ __ ] So, I would be [ __ ] terrible. Also, you should want somebody who's going to be in the shower thinking about that thing. In the shower, I promise you, I'm problem solving for Kaizen. I'm not thinking like we're about to go to World War II and I'm like, you know, we could put a character in. Venezuela's on the line, Tom. Hold on. I just got to finish his render. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One more episode. So, um yeah, I I don't know.

I think uh Citizens United really did a deal on us. And I think in the hindsight of the the um obituary of America, they're going to be like, "This once great nation was ruined when they said it was okay for politicians to get uh money and for lobbyists to lobby and for politicians to get corporate donors and that's where it just all kind of spun out because I really don't think these problems are as hard as they appear to be. I feel like I'm not the smartest guy in the tool shed.

I'm not the brightest crayon, but I feel like I know how to fix some of these things practically overnight and with three stages, three levels of government, I feel like I would be able to get that bill passed. But there's something there's some reason that's they're they're bumping into a resistance that they can't just do the thing. It's so straightforward. It's gain and retain power because what you'll find is you have a northstar that they don't share. So your northstar is the people that you're trying to help.

This would help those people. Everybody else is trying to get reelected. And so once you understand that now it's like, well, I need to know what's in it for the people that are going to reelect me. I don't give a [ __ ] Like I don't care that that's going to help everybody. Who the [ __ ] cares about that? I need to get reelected. And so here are the four things I care about that will get me reelected. And so now, how are you going to help me, Drew?

And so everybody's now playing that game. And it becomes maddening because it's not about doing what's right. It's about doing what gets people elected. And so once you realize, oh, the game is gain and retain power. Oh, got it. If you go onto a football field and try to shoot a basket, people are going to be like, "The [ __ ] are you doing?" You're going to get hammered by the biggest, toughest [ __ ] on planet Earth, and you're going to be like, "I don't even know what's going on." What's going on is you're not playing the right game.

So, you're not suited up for the right game. You did not train for the right game. Politics is gain and retain power. Period. End of story. Plain and simple. That's what it is. And so, that is the very thing that leads to all the corruption is the game is to maintain power. So, some people choose the iron fist, Putin Xi. Some people choose a democratic path, but that means that they're going to lie to you because it's about swaying the average voter. Remember, take the average human that you know, half the world is dumber than them.

So now you've you've got a mass of people that are not intellectually capable of thinking through the problem. And by the way, even people who are intellectually capable of thinking through the problem spend the vast majority of their life in emotions. So if those people steer by emotions, you know, the average person steers by emotions. So now your game is to gain and retain power by manipulating people's emotions. Do you think you happen to get there by telling them what is true? No, you do not.

You get there by telling them effectively what they want to hear in that moment. And that's why real change is brutal because it plays out on ridiculously long timelines. long timelines. long timelines. People have to suffer. Yeah. They have to be they have to feel so bad that they're like, "Cool, I will do that thing because the way that I feel right now is so gross and so horrible. I'm willing to make change. That sucks." And what happens if you know like 20 years ago the number of people that were like, "Oh yeah, this ends badly.

You can't print this much money. You can't bail out these banks. You can't globalize. This is going to be a disaster, but it's going to play out slowly over time, but this is all knowable." Uh there was a lot of them. But how do you tell somebody that in like 1999 when everybody's making money in the stock market, just feeling good? How do you tell everybody that in 2006? I remember Lisa and I started a real estate business in 2006 and we started looking at properties and it felt like this only a phenomenon.

Keep in mind I'm young at this point. Mh. Mh. Mh. And I'm looking around and I'm like, "Okay, yeah, like I see how this works. Cool, cool, cool." And then I'm not joking. We were about to buy our first property and we have the documents to get the loan and I'm like, I don't believe in only up. I'm talking to Lisa. I'm like, something tells me that the not only can this go wrong, this is going to go wrong. I can feel it. I don't know why.

I didn't understand the economy at all at the time, time, time, but I'm like, uh, like something's bad. And so, we didn't do it. And we pulled out. We had put all this time and energy into like building partnerships and raising and not raising money, but um, we were about to raise the loan, but going around and looking at all these properties. We'd spend all this time flying around to like hot spots only to pull out at the last second. Thank God. But like how do you convince people when real estate looks only up that my gut feeling is right?

You don't. And so you tell them what they want to hear to get reelected. I'm going to ask you a personal question and I'm putting you on the spot. I'm going off script. Chat, I'm not suicidal just in case Tom doesn't like what I'm saying. All right. Um, do you have a bunker? I don't have a bunker. So, are you like if if things really go to [ __ ] you're just going to you got to go back. Whatever could fit in my duffel bag. bag. bag. So, uh this is the only plan that I have ever made for something going wrong.

I have told everyone in this company, come back to this house. That's it. So, once you map me as somebody that is selfisolating, but the people that I care about, I really care about, about, about, I will make a lot more sense. Um, if [ __ ] really started kicking off and you guys were all scrambling and doing your own thing, then I would get on a private jet and I would leave. Um, but my first instinct is to load up the people that I care about, make sure everybody's okay.

And also because I don't have I'm always like, okay, this is a possibility, but I'm optimistic by nature. So, I'm like, I don't know how we're going to avoid this, but we're probably going to avoid this somehow someway. And so one thing that drives my wife crazy about me is I will always like there's really like there's a train coming towards us. I don't immediately like fling myself off the 100 foot drop into the water. I'm like now I can figure this out. I can find a way.

There's something to do. Let's start, you know, looking at all the different options. And so often an opportunity to avoid calamity will present itself. As long as you're honest about the train that's coming, you can start thinking through the problem. It's like, okay, I've got x amount of time before that actually hits me. I'm constantly checking to see if it's speeding up. I'm constantly evaluating what are the different options, how could I jump and avoid getting hurt on the fall, right? Like, so I'm thinking that the number of times in my life where uh an exit ramp has presented itself that I couldn't have seen ahead of time, it's not 100%, but it's close to like 80%.

So, I've been hit by a couple trains, there's no doubt about that, but I've always avoided like catastrophe. catastrophe. catastrophe. And I've gotten really great opportunities that presented themselves by staying calm, being honest about what's coming towards me, looking at my options, refusing to panic. Um, like I remember when the fires were sweating our house, Lisa legitimately panicked. Like I'd never seen her like that. And so I was like, "Okay, I can't assuage her fears right now. So I'm going to move fast. Say yes. No problem.

we'll get everybody out of here. But she's like literally yelling and running and I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, the only thing that's going to make this worse is panicking. So, I literally start talking like this. Yes, let's move quickly. Let's get in the car. I dropped her off and drove back. Lied to her. I was a politician for a second. I said, I'm going to the store. And I came back to the house. And so, it was like, I needed to assess my options. I needed to I'm like, I can see the fire.

It's far enough away that I've got plenty of time to make a decision. I'm well aware of how wind can blow and a distance that you thought was safe becomes unsafe. And so I'm like, I have more distance than that. There's no universe in which that fire in 100 mph winds could cross the distance that there was that would take me longer to leave the area. So I was like, okay, I know what safe looks like. I know what danger looks like. On like call it a threeminut interval.

I need to constantly make sure that I have visual confirmation of the fire, where it's at, has it moved, all that. That's my approach to life. Full stop. So, should a bunker become necessary, uh, I'll build one, but I hate the way that feels. I don't like the Well, I hope you guys are okay, but I'm going to piece the [ __ ] out. Just not a good vibe for me. Somebody said this in chat. They said Tom doesn't have a bunker, but he has a rich friend who has a bunker.

I don't have a rich friend that I that I know has a bunker. Okay. Um, but I have enough wealth that I won't be caught up in the [ __ ] So, there is that for sure. Um, anyway, my reputation will be earned over time. People will see how I behave. I won't ask anybody to believe anything good of me now. me now. me now. And then as we're like closing in the closing the chapter of the year, last of the year, all that stuff. Um, what is like your best I don't want to say best memory?

How can I phrase this question? What are some of the highlights of your 2025? 2025? 2025? Uh what are some things you learned in 2025 looking back this year? Like what's Well, um the first thing I will always give the most credit to is my relationship with my wife is extraordinary and this has been an awesome year. awesome year. awesome year. Um I've put that woman through a lot with how much I work and we've found a great rhythm and so I've seen her grow more happy this year which has been wonderful.

As she has stepped back a little bit, I've stepped forward to pick up some of the slack. that's worked out well. 2025 has been the best financial year for Impact Theory ever. I'm very excited about that. Uh it's been incredible. The team's amazing. And this is on the back of downsizing in 24. And so we've generated more revenue, more profitably with less people. That's been really wonderful. Um the team feels like it's operating well. God, this is going to sound like I'm glazing you because you're right here, but the way that you have um stepped up as a producer is incredible.

The fact that you're not afraid to make a decision, most people, no matter how many times I tell them, I'd rather be having an argument about the decision you made than feeling like I have to constantly push you and prod you to get you to make a decision. Um, so you're unafraid to make decisions. I [ __ ] love that. appreciate it. appreciate it. appreciate it. Um, you stepped in front of camera, which has its own host of vulnerabilities, but you did it, which is shocking. is shocking.

is shocking. Shout out to the trolls. I eat your tears. tears. tears. I like it for breakfast. There you go. I like that. Uh, so that's been wonderful. Um, this has been the year of Kaizen getting on its footing. And so that's been really exciting. Uh, I can finally see the finish line. So that's really, really incredible. So those have been some of the best things for me. what are lessons that I've learned? Um, doing less really is the right answer. You can do them better.

Um, I'm an always more kind of guy by nature and so, uh, forcing myself to scale back on things and just do the things that I'm doing better. Um, has been very wise. AI has been a big win. Just seeing what it's becoming capable of is thrilling. Um, yeah, that's a a decent catalog of some of the good stuff. stuff. stuff. Nice. And then as um oh I sorry I have to one shout out uh shout out to Andrew Press. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

He will not be somebody that chat has heard me talk about a lot. Uh but Andrew Press is part of the reason that I've been freed up to focus on being on camera writing more for um the deep dives and stuff like that. And then whatever small amount of time I'm able to put towards Kaizen is because of the things he's taken off my plate. So he's the COO of the company. just absolutely incredible. What a treasure. Uh shout out to Dave Barum who when I said, "Hey, I need a world-class operator was like, "Yeah, I used to work with this guy, um Andrew Press.

You should meet him." And uh God has he turned out to be a godsend. So godsend. So godsend. So nice. Um, and then for those that might have had a rocky 2025, I know we got a couple banger content coming out for 2026 to really get people motivated and stuff, but um, for like yeah, if somebody was having a rough 2025, what would you kind of say to them as they're this or one to those who are who had a rough year and two maybe this holiday season brings back, you know, not so nice memories or things like that.

How can they kind of get through this and then turn the corner to get to January? Everything is your frame of reference. Um, your frame of reference controls how you feel about what's happening. So, there's an awesome Shakespeare quote. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So, if you think the holidays are a bad time, they're going to be a bad time. If you think the tragedies that have happened around the holidays or whatever have shaped you into being a strong and resilient person and the holidays are a chance to celebrate that, then it will feel uplifting and expansive and wonderful.

Uh, you become what you repeat. So, be very careful. Also, the end of the year gives us all a natural point to reset. I think it's very smart to say, "Cool, this is like a new birth. I'm going to be totally different. I could be however I want. I am what I repeatedly do. So, what am I going to repeatedly do in 2025, 2026?" Um, I think that that's very smart. That the something about the cyclical nature of traveling around the sun is very useful. Harness it to your advantage.

Um if you need to simply do loving kindness meditate uh meditation. So sit and think loving thoughts about as many people as you can bear to think. Uh start with yourself then the people that you love and then imagine a bubble of love and kindness engulfing your city and then your state and then your country and then the world. It sounds stupid until you do it and you realize that you're manipulating your own emotions and it's incredible how it feels as you get good at it.

Um, so yeah, master your physiology and then you know if this was a bad year, uh, just remember that failure is the most information-rich data stream on planet earth. So learn from whatever went wrong to allow you to get better at something that has real world consequences. You want to be in a position where you can do things other people can't do. Um, and so yeah, do that and everything will be awesome. If you focus on your powerlessness, you will be powerless. If you focus on getting better, you will actually get better.

Bingo bongo. All right, guys. Happy 2026. I wear a size 10 if anybody just needs, you know, just throwing it out there. Have a good one, guys. Uh, happy 2026. Yeah, we'll be back Monday the 5th, 5th, 5th, 7 a.m. bright and early. Um, yeah, last words of the live. Last words of the 2025 live. Happy Christmas, everybody. That was that's a British influence coming out. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Um, I hope that you guys have an absolutely wonderful time. I cannot thank you enough for making this live what it is.

Um, and I'm very much looking forward to what we're going to be doing in 2026 together. Uh, so three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 700 a.m. Pacific time to 9:00 a.m. We're going to be doing two hours three days a week. Uh, so super excited to continue to grow this community. Appreciate you guys very much. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe and we will see you in the new year. We've got some banger stuff planned for you guys and uh I hope together we're going to make some magic happen.

So until then my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.