Breaking: Imminent Threat, State Department Issues Urgent Warning on Iran - Fear of Rapid Escalation

Key Takeaway

Practice disciplined uncertainty when following fast-moving news: separate verified facts from rumors, identify who benefits from each narrative, and delay strong conclusions until primary evidence emerges. Today, choose one headline that triggers fear or anger, find two credible sources with different perspectives, and write down what is confirmed, what is alleged, and what information would change your view. This reduces manipulation while helping you make calmer, better-informed decisions.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and Ryan discuss a State Department warning about possible Middle East escalation, the interconnected pressures of the Iran, Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, energy, and AI competitions, and a new U.S.-Denmark-Greenland security agreement. The conversation repeatedly emphasizes geopolitical incentives, economic constraints, propaganda, institutional checks and balances, and the need to distinguish evidence from speculation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Breaking: Imminent Threat, State Department Issues Urgent Warning on Iran - Fear of Rapid Escalation from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. We've got a full show for you today, but real fast you will notice unfortunately Drew is out today. He's going to be out for a while. So bear with us. He sends his love, but Ryan is going to be doing those duties today. So if you're wondering what's going on, that is the state of the union. Now there is plenty of foot here. Just when you guys thought that it couldn't get any crazier, things in the Middle East are threatening to escalate out of control.

The State Department issued a regional warning over fears of rapid escalation. That is a direct quote. Due to increased Houthi attacks, Iranian threats, and potential US retaliation. We'll get into the details there. Things may not be quite as they seem. Speaking of feared retaliation, by the way, the Russia Ukraine war has been uh has become a much bigger deal than most people realize. Ukraine slammed Russia with their largest wave of drone attacks ever, as well as their new Flamingo cruise missiles. If you guys haven't seen those, they're insane.

Uh they are supposedly even more powerful than the US Tomahawk missiles. So pretty wild. And everybody now is holding their breath to see what Russia is going to do in response. The situation in Greenland took a surprising turn this weekend. Trump is taking victory laps, but there's a raging debate on what exactly just happened. So, we're going to get into the 1951 of it all. That'll make sense soon enough. The revenue trends in AI are shifting way harder than people understand. And if the trends continue, you guys can expect the frontier model owners to continue their panic and appeal to the government.

We'll see how that one plays out. Real data, by the way, is finally coming out on the impacts of gender affirming care. It's downright shocking. A landmark study published in Finland is casting doubt on the current narrative. We're going to be going into all of that and more. But we've got to talk about what's going on in the Middle East. So, the Houthis fired a ballistic missile barrage at Riad. It was the first attack on the Saudi capital since the Yemen war restarted. The Saudis say it shot down.

That's a little hard to believe when the Aramco fuel depot that's by their international airport was burning. Uh so as a PSA remember there's propaganda all over the place at all times. So something is going on and their airport hit maximum disruption on flight radar 24. So basically the whole thing was on lockdown. So I don't buy that. Uh they were obviously able to stop everything unless they had a planned fire uh at the facility. Now that night the state department was telling Americans to reconsider travel to the entire region.

If you guys were on X this weekend, you know exactly what I'm talking about. For a hot minute yesterday, it really looked like things were going to escalate rapidly. Trump was popping off with some insane tweets. Uh I don't think anybody's super surprised about that, but promising he was in deciding mode about what was going to happen in Iran. But then rumors started coming out that he actually was against uh doing more attacks, that he didn't want to spread his attention out, that his advisers were telling him, "Listen, man.

The war has already put a massive strain on the military. We do not need to open another front on this. Uh the rumors behind the scenes are that Saudis have been going to Trump non-stop. There have been three, I think, pretty confirmed reports about NBS going directly to Trump and saying, "Listen, we need help with this." Then there was like this floating rumor that they were moving away from a Chinese-led um deal around crypto that would further help migrate um Saudi away from the US dollar.

And as you guys know, the petro dollar is basically what has continued post Bretonwoods continue to give us the role as a reserve currency. So that's a pretty big deal. and people were trying to link the two things, but that actually the pullback there had happened months ago. Uh, and supposedly they're still dealing with it, but the rumor that was being spread was basically MBF very specifically got rejected by Trump and so was going back to Trump and saying, "Hey, we'll do this thing. We're going to move away from that deal." Basically remrace the dollar and that gave Trump what he needed to move forward with the attacks.

Now, so far the attacks haven't happened. So, I think it is likely that all of that is largely BS that Trump actually is uh backing off because he understands that opening yet another front would be extremely risky at this point and there's a lot of nested sort of madness going on between what we have happening in Russia Ukraine which I think is the one that's probably most misunderstood right now in the world. There's something about the conflict in Iran that has captured people's attention far more than what's going on in Russia, Ukraine.

But if you guys are watching what is coming out of Europe that's starting to get pretty wild uh with people just nakedly calling uh for their citizens to prepare for war in the coming years. We'll get into the specifics of that, but you've got a narrative that is gaining in traction that goes something like this that you've got China Iran, Russia, North Korea in sort of a loose alliance. The idea being to keep the US bogged down in as many places as possible so that China can move on Taiwan.

Russia can find out whether NATO alliances actually mean anything at this point and then regroup in a post peace world to then make further potential incursions into Europe. And you've got European leaders indicating, and I don't want to overstate any of this because this stuff is sort of loosely pieced together based on I won't say cryptic statements that people in uh Europe have made, but certainly statements that are not direct where they're saying this is exactly what's going to happen, but with a growing hypothesis that peace in Russia Ukraine may be more dangerous for Europe than the current status quo.

Now, how could that be? The reasoning goes like this. That what's happening in Russia right now has completely transformed the Russian economy to a wartime economy. So that the growth that's actually happening in Russia is led by the war machine. Plus, you have people on the front lines that are essentially being radicalized and mobilized, organized, and if they come home now, they become a potentially very disruptive contingent, and you run the risk of a military coup or at least disruption caused by people returning back from the front lines.

And if that's true, then you've got a massive incentive for Putin to just keep the war going as long as possible, assuming that they're not losing ground. And so if you have these two counterveailing forces that both kind of like the stalemate, so you've got Europe using this opportunity to remilitarize, you've got Germany talking about becoming the biggest military in Europe once again. We know how that's played out before. uh you've got the UK directly telling its people to prepare for war in the next few years and this growing sort of hypothesis that we might actually be better off with this stalemate keeping Putin busy than we would be in peace time.

And so you put that all together, you've got the US stretched very thin. You've got China still with that looming threat that we're going to move into uh Taiwan, which obviously would have massive implications for the US. you've got an incentive for China to see the US drug more into the conflict not only in Iran but in uh Russia Ukraine and so Trump showing actually a little bit of restraint here against the Houthis is probably well advised now we'll see if that ends up holding uh as landed diesel prices are or landed gas prices I think across the board actually are getting pretty outrageous as differentiated from just the cost of Brent crude but meaning physically what does it cost to actually ship something?

And obviously because of the uh shutting of the straight of Hormuz and the Bob Almandab Straight, you've got this double whammy where now something that used to cost about $6, a little bit less uh per barrel to ship from West Africa over into um can't remember if that was for Europe or Asia, but that the $67 price tag has now jumped to like $23 plus. That's per barrel. So landing it, shipping it is the thing that's growing increasingly more expensive, which is going to continue to put a strain on the global economy.

And so all eyes on the oil crisis, even though if you're watching it on a day-to-day basis, uh the swings aren't that crazy, but all of this stuff is building up this um penalty that everybody is taking around the world that's causing everybody to scatter and try to find new resources. But when you're talking limited resources, somebody somewhere isn't going to get what they were expecting to get. And so when you have all of these different pockets of conflict simmering and the background economic pressure is only building, uh, then stability is not in your future.

And so that becomes, uh, the backdrop to this warning over the weekend that certainly on Sunday night seemed very, very serious. Now, my hope is that that's dissipated. Trump has backed off, but only the fullness of time is going to show where this settles out because if Saudi Arabia continues to get um bleaguered, the UAE is proving itself to be more aggressive as well, you're going to run into uh the possibility that that just continues to explode, especially as the Houthis get more emboldened by success.

So, fingers crossed, but it's certainly not trending in the right direction right now. Uh we've talked about it a bunch uh and I see people in chat mentioning it as well, but right now we're seeing basically a bunch of alliances kind of turning on each other, things growing and growing and growing. Um now we have the prospects of potentially Taiwan being invaded and I'm curious, do you think we are already on the path of opening up an all-out war across the world or do you think there's still a ways to go?

And if so, what's that tipping point? To me, it everything is so interconnected right now. Calling it World War II is too bombastic. But to say that all of these things really are connected and now you're just waiting for that spark that brings them all together. This is something I mentioned before, but it bears repeating that what made Japan strike the US in Pearl Harbor was that we cut them off from their oil. And so as the US has a blockade outside of the straight of Hormuz and is literally stopping oil from getting to China, um if that ends up becoming a problem, which is a question mark of how long this drags on, but if China finds itself in a position where it's now draining its strategic reserves again, um then you could see China saying, "Okay, we have a limited window where we're going to move on Taiwan.

We wanted to do it in 27 anyway. We were originally going to try to do this all diplomatically, but now let's really make a move. That then draws everything into pretty sharp um relief in terms of okay, now if I'm China, do I want to nudge North Korea to make a little bit of noise in South Korea to make sure that the US just has way too many things to focus on? It's possible. I'm not going to say that it's likely. I do think China wants to do things uh avoiding military intervention wherever possible.

But some of this comes down to just how seriously they feel that they are being isolated on AI because right now chips are how we have slowed them down. If they are looking at that battle and thinking, okay, hold on a second. We've got our reunification efforts as they see it with Taiwan. We're actually falling behind in AI, their perception in in this thought experiment. uh the US is bogged down between what they're having to send to support Ukraine and obviously massively in the Middle East.

Now, could we pull them into having to deal with both Taiwan and South Korea at the same time? Also, me, China, can I convince Putin that don't take any offramps right now? Keep these guys distracted. And then all of a sudden, uh, it's just blatant that this is one thing. And these are the two great powers colliding head-to-head. China using Russia as like the little bro state to try to keep the US distracted. And so at that point, do you then have to sound the alarm as the US and say, Europe, you got to get off your asses.

You need to like get overt now about what you're doing in Ukraine. And so if if everything were to sort of coalesce in that way, which is only one of the ways by the way that I could see this ultimately coalescing, um then yes, at that point it does sort of become officially I don't even like to say World War II because it really does just feel um like it's a bit overstated, but that that is the fear that there's just this like scope creep. There's too much opportunistic reason for China to to keep things going with Russia, uh to continue to help Iran in the ways that it can so that all of that continues to drag out because right now the thing that we're being asked to believe, asked to be believed by Scott Bessant, is that all right, we've got this Anaconda situation.

So, we're shooting everybody in Iran. Uh, and we're constricting them from an economic standpoint. Um, and that's all going to play out. There's they're not going to have any more time. Uh, all the pre-sold oil that was going to China, that's drying up. So, even that money is running out. They've got massive inflation in Iran. Now, I would not expect that massive inflation to break the back of the Iranians because you, in their minds, they have God on their side. That becomes a totally different war.

And so if China is able to continue to somehow someway get funding into Iran and it just drags and drags and drags, um then yeah, this escalates long before it dissipates. And so right now there's no sign that uh the strategy with Iran is working other than trust me bro stuff that we get out of the administration because if the Houthis really are just a proxy for Iran somehow someway they're getting what they need to be more aggressive than ever. Um, so I think that they are still banking on the strategy that they can disrupt things globally by shutting down both straits and that the world will feel the crisis then as much as they're feeling the crisis and then it becomes who really has the will.

I won't even say politically because I think in the US it's political will but in Iran it's more a theological will. Now, I do think Iran is a divided nation. I just don't know. Is it 8020 in one direction or the other? 5050? Like, what exactly is that split? Um, but right now, we have supposedly broken their back like 32 times and they just keep going and it's getting more aggressive. So, do you think there's any world uh this is posed by Kid Obsidian Moon where Trump uses everything going on, this potential looming threat of a of a World War III type scenario?

Do you think he uses that to tighten his grip on power coming up through the midterms? Nobody's going to let a good crisis go to waste. So, uh, Trump chief among them, this is where I I just am driven absolutely bananas by his whole third term thing. Uh, so, do I think he would use it to consolidate power if it presented itself in a way where it's like, "Hey guys, this is World War II. Like, we're really in the middle of this." Um, doing an election right now would be completely nonsensical.

And the bad news is if it really had escalated to that point, it probably would make sense to postpone the election. But because you have somebody who isn't doing it for the right reasons, yikes. That one would be that would be so psychologically detrimental to the US. Um that I really really hope that we don't find ourselves in that situation. Um, so yes, I can certainly see him going, "Okay, I'm on the other side of my midterm elections. I lost. My only way to maintain power is on a war footing." But on that, that's where we're going to have to rely on Congress to be that check and balance because assume that he loses the Senate and the House and wants to do sustained military intervention, he's not going to have the ability to push beyond the whatever 60 days that it is.

So, if he's officially declaring, yo, this is World War II, then he would have to have Congress get in and say, cool, we're on board. And so that is again where I will say anybody that celebrates China I think is out of their minds. You want to have the checks and balances. You want a system where uh you can have one group sty the other and make it impossible for them to move forward. So that would be the hope. And so the call it the psychological danger zone would be a world war that is so uh obvious that it's like okay yeah an election right now wouldn't be in anybody's best interest.

Um, but that would be the the divide would accelerate. And proving and justifying your your this is all economics argument that we've talked about since February. Um, taking just a look at the full global conflict right now with Russia and Ukraine with what happened this past weekend. I've noticed they're hitting more refineries than they are the front lines. Do you think at this point Ukraine understands that the only way out of this war for them is an economic path and not a path of continuing to throw numbers at it because they're don't have the numbers to stand up against Russia or do I think that they think it's the only way?

No, probably not. Because for years they were willing to just keep and look, I don't know how much of this is propaganda, but you see all the time footage where it's like, look, these are Ukrainian frontline soldiers in handcuffs being sent to the front line. Hey, these are kids just like walking their dog in the streets of Ukraine. They get snatched, thrown in a van, and taken to the front lines. So, they certainly have a willingness to uh conscript if the propaganda is accurate through pretty vicious means.

So, I I won't grant that they see that as the only option, but this is what happens in wartime. This is what I was talking about at the beginning of this. The thing you really have to worry about is what happens when you build a very efficient wartime economy. Getting out of that is far more difficult than people give credit to. Like even in the unwinding, the aftermath of World War II, there was some ungodly number of people that were slaughtered uh just in the like, okay, all the troops are going home now.

And so people understand that that is an incredibly dangerous period. So I would not um I I wouldn't look at that and think oh everybody is just racing to peace. It is this very uneasy thing. So um Ukraine has done a very good job of becoming a the world leader in basically offensive modern warfare which is wild to think but you've got the US appealing to them to learn how they're doing it. So they're getting better and better at hitting Russia in that way. So even if it's not the only way that they see forward, it's certainly the smartest way.

Like you want to build technology that's going to give you an advantage in warfare. This is always the way of things. Now the fact that they're hitting the energy infrastructure is smart. And this is probably the thing to best understand about what's happening in Ukraine is they understand they have to make this war so unpopular inside of Russia that Russia is just like, "Okay, we've got to take an off-ramp." Now listen, there are plenty of historians that will give you the following thing. Right now, I I've not looked I don't understand Russian culture well enough to know uh if this is a worthy thing to repeat.

So I will caveat this by saying there are historians of Russia that take the uh read of their historical actions that they take a very eastern mindset to their own people, which is that they're all disposable and all that matters is the survival of the state. And so they will just continue to throw people at that. Now the problem is Ukraine is very much if not directly Russian culture, they are certainly Russian culture adjacent. And so are they going to run a similar strategy? And so you have these two nations that will both continue to throw people at the front line, getting better and better at a wartime economy, getting better and better at killing each other.

And so the question becomes um will there be that uprising of the populace such that they can actually overcome an authoritarian dictator? That is that is a a big task. So, um, we will see if the economic devastation ends up being something that causes Russia to move or if the perhaps more terrifyingly likely uh result is that this drags on for another year. We miss another uh round of uh fertilizer. Just to give one example, fuel costs skyrocket globally. uh you've now got food crises in addition to fuel crises.

And so you've got I mean this is all going to come down to how bad will the winter be this year. If it's a mild winter, expect it to drag on even longer. But if it's an extreme winter in Europe and you've got hundreds of thousands of people dying across Europe just from freezing to death in their own homes because they can't afford to heat them, uh which does happen every year by the way. Same thing that happens in the summer. Uh people dying of heat stroke.

So, uh, when you can't heat or cool your house appropriately, you're going to find a lot of old and vulnerable people dying. So, if we start seeing that kind of sweep with food scarcity, now all of a sudden, you've got Europe like, we can't do this anymore. We've got to escalate to deescalate, as they say. And again, that's another scenario under which this becomes a breakaway problem. So, we will see. But man, this is one of those where every time I go to do a show, I'm like, I want to focus on social stuff.

I want to have a more playful uh like sort of um spine to the day. And I'm just like Jesus like there the these conflicts are becoming so interrelated and most importantly understand why all of this is happening. This is happening because the US as the um monolithic keeper of the global peace fell apart certainly during Biden. Maybe it even started uh in Obama. So you've got the weakening of the US's ability to back most people down. Call it 95 98% of the skirmishes are all just we're the US, we say so.

Back down. We've got the military strength. We've got the reputation. we've got the financial ability. And so everybody just backed down and it really was a watershed moment when Russia invaded Ukraine. And at the time, I don't think a lot of people understood what it was really signaling. And what it really was signaling was, yeah, I don't give a [ __ ] Like, I don't think that you guys, you guys being NATO, I don't think that you've got the will to fight this war, so I'm going to do what I want.

Now, I think that Putin thought that it was going to be very easy to steamroll Ukraine, and I think he was very surprised to find out that it didn't play out like that. But nonetheless, it tells you the world's view of the US. Then the US goes through all the drama that it's going through in terms of internal division beginning to tear itself apart and China becoming more and more economically sovereign and in a just massive leadership position from the ability to produce. And that part is the thing that I don't think people fully understand.

So now you have a peer competitor with the US that is aligned with Russia and now I think the US right now is still in the middle of its Suez Canal moment where it's going to show an inability to reopen the straight of Hormuz through force and once that happens then the world goes oh okay these guys aren't going to be able to back us down and so we go from a 98% back down rate to a I mean 50% 40% back down rate and so now are actually having to fight all of these battles.

And that's where the cost structure just becomes unbearable. And if we were in a good economic situation coming into whatever this moment is going to be known as, it might be different. But we're in a horrific economic situation. So normally you take on the kind of debts that we have now to prosecute the war. But if you're coming into the war already with these insane debts, now you're really in trouble. and it becomes a an inflationary environment and the world leaders everywhere are hyper aware of this stuff.

So they understand the weakened position that the US is in and I think a lot of people are going to make small little plays here and there. I'm not saying military incursions but just places where look at how Canada is being with the US, right? Oh, like hey we can just cozy up to China and Europe. We don't really need the US like we used to need the US. Now, that may be bluster, but nonetheless, it creates another bit of drama that the US is going to have to deal with.

And so, all of that just spreads the US incredibly thin and puts the world in a very unstable position. And so, I I've been talking about this since since I started doing a live show. It's actually one of the reasons I started doing a live show is we're all about to live through a change in great power politics. Now, what does that really mean? I will point you guys to the Middle East. So, the last time that we had this sort of like shakeup in great power politics was at the end of World War I when the Middle East was basically arbitrarily subdivided.

That has not gone well, at least from my read of things. So when you look at the prolonged instability that that's created there, I think that the world is going to feel the echoes of this destabilization for a while now. Whether it looks like um the period between World War I and World War II, or it looks more like the Cold War, that is a huge question. I would much rather it look like a uh nerve-wracking but stableish uh balance of power that we saw during the Cold War.

But that remains to be seen, especially with AI looming on the horizon. Yeah. Every time I talk about this stuff and I I am reminded of all the different ways that these things are interconnected from the economics to the actual warfare to the um cultural divisions in different countries to AI all happening at once. It it is a wild time for AI to be playing out at the same time that a balance of power is playing out is crazy. And that's why I'm just like to all the US people that want to see AI regulated to death in the US, be careful what you wish for because China will see that as an opportunity to go, "Oh, cool.

If you guys are going to uh abdicate the throne or abdicate your responsibility, then we're going to step in uh and play that role and we will keep developing AI because as they know it is intelligence itself and whoever can corner the market on intelligence, you can outsmart everybody else. Speaking on cold wars, uh we've reached an agreement with Denmark in Greenland, cold country. Um basically, look at that. Brian sewing his oats here with transition. Uh but yeah, this deal is called the infinite life security agreement and it's between the three uh countries, United States, Denmark, Greenland, and uh the deal basically just grants us permanent military access.

So Tom, tell us about that. Yeah, so first of all, uh G Eric, this is you're going to want to cue up uh our man, the MP from uh Denmark talking about this. We'll get to that in a second. Okay, if you guys haven't been paying attention to the Greenland situation, it was constantly simmering in the background. We weren't seeing it, but it was constantly going and Trump has suddenly come out with a victory lap saying that we have secured the ultimate deal with Greenland. Never seen anything like it.

This is the greatest thing ever. The question becomes, is there really anything new here or is this basically the same thing that was playing out in uh 1951? So in 1951 there's an agreement struck between the US and Denmark that basically says the US can have as many military bases as it wants. But the real thing that is becoming interesting here is that even when you talk to Denmark they are saying yes there is something new that has happened here and it's a big win for Trump but this is also a win certainly for Greenland.

It's a win for Denmark. It's a win for the UK. And so this seems like something that everybody is getting on board with. But let's break down exactly what's happening. So first and foremost, Trump needs a win. Now, the vast majority of humanity, I won't lump you guys into that, but the vast majority of humanity is a lowinformation uh decision maker in their lives. They hear headlines, that's all they need. So you guys are going to be well informed enough to know that basically Trump is taking a small thing and blowing it up into something big.

and he's going to say, "See, I told you I was going to get control." And he's going to realize that most people do not understand that most of this stuff was already in place in 1951. And so, while there is a new element to keeping foreign involvement out, so take for instance um Greenland will no longer have the ability to do things like have uh Chinese infrastructure. Now, that may not seem like a big deal until you understand, forget which country it was. I think it was one of the Nordic countries.

They took one of the Chinese automobiles that are now selling like hot cakes and they isolated it so it couldn't see anything around it and they wanted to just see what will it do where will it be communicating to and the vast majority of the communications were going back to China. So even when this thing doesn't have it's not it doesn't need navigation data or anything like that. It's constantly sending pings back to China. It was in Norway. Norway. Thank you. So, China is very smart.

I I won't even say China's not dumb. China's brilliant, man. They are chock full of a bunch of engineers that understand that information is power. And if they can be uh mapping the territory, if they can be getting data streams about how people are spending their time on their phones, if they can be listening into conversations, if they can bundle that up and be constantly sending a stream of that back to um China, then obviously they're going to have anformational advantage massively over everybody else. And this was why the Tik Tok thing was such a big deal.

If they also have algorithmic influence over a country, then they're going to have a massive advantage. So they can control both what people look at and what they see and get a anformational loop by having infrastructure somewhere. So, if you're the US and you know that China has always been excluded from the treaties and things around the Arctic because they're not actually in it, uh then you you start asking the question, okay, these guys who can actually go under the ice, which very few people can, uh China who is sending ice breakers up to the Arctic to try to make a new shipping route, they're making themselves uh they are insinuating themselves into the Arctic to try to get some amount of control over that.

If you're the US and you're looking 5 10 years into the future and you know that your big biggest adversary is China by a country mile, then you start saying, "Okay, hold on. This isn't just about them not being able to have a base. It isn't just about the US being able to have bases, which we already have. This is about us making sure that they're not able to do what they've done in so many places in the world, which is actually go and get uh their equipment put in to the infrastructure of the country.

Now, with that as a backdrop, let us check in with the uh one of the members of parliament from Denmark who was talking about this deal. Now, earlier in this interview, he said, "Listen, this isn't that big of a deal. We had a lot of this already in place in 1951 and so Trump is you know doing a bit of his victory lap which is the one of the things that Trump needs. Uh but this actually is a win. Let's hear from him on security. Things have changed.

Tell me about what what your understanding is is of that the current threat and why it perhaps is beyond the scope if indeed it is of Europe and NATO and it has to take the US having this position. No, but it's changed in that way that um the US and US equipment will be in Greenland, not Chinese equipment, uh not Russian equipment. that that's a a huge uh win for uh uh the president and his men. Uh I would say uh so so in that regard uh that's a an [clears throat] extension of the 1951 agreement.

Was there ever a risk of Russian equipment being in Greenland? there's always a risk uh but uh realistically I don't see it uh happening uh or that it could have happened. Uh so now it's just formalized. Now it's uh certain that uh it is NATO led by the US that will uh take care of the security uh in and around Greenland. lost does it. Okay. So, we'll see if there's really something meaningful that comes out of this as we begin to get um the documents and the conversations that have been happening behind the scenes which will come out years later.

And so, we'll find out if there was really a there there here. But when you think about uh people being low information voters, Trump got what he needed, which is basically to be able to claim I told you that I was going to get control of the situation. I got control of the situation. Now, he was saying wild crazy [ __ ] as is his way, talking about we're basically going to get uh Greenland one way or the other. It's going to be ours, not taking military action off the table.

If you guys remember whatever, eight months ago, a year ago, I forget exactly when, but when you had European nations sending troops there because they wanted to find out exactly what was going on. How was the US going to respond? Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. That didn't escalate. Thankfully, we've taken a diplomatic solution, but we now have an opportunity for Trump to take an exit ramp and say, "Okay, listen. I got exactly what I was looking for. Uh, I have won the day and we can move on." Now, I will say in a future where we're having to be cognizant of what Russia is doing.

We're having to watch what China is doing. China was making a play down in South America with the Panama Canal. Obviously, that was one of the first things that Trump addressed. China was certainly flirtat, flirting, being a little flirtatious, touching up uh Greenland, if you will, trying to get into a position where they had a known presence, where they were included in conversations about it because they were calling themselves Arctic adjacent. And so, just trying to become a bigger part of that conversation. Obviously, they weren't doing that for shits and giggles.

they were doing that because there's a strategic advantage to having a presence there uh as any attack on the US, certainly from Russia is going to go over that area. And so if you're trying to build some sort of golden dome to be able to protect the US, to have early warning systems, you're going to need to be able to have a stronghold in Greenland to make sure that you have eyes to protect the US. Now, here is the fascinating part for me. because people hate Trump so much, I think they stop thinking strategically about the US.

Also, I really do believe there's been a shift in the mentality to a large portion of people in the US that no longer believe that America has um a moral justification to be the strongest country in the world. And I think that there are Americans that want to see America's role in the world be far less muscular. They want to see us weakened, which is wild to me. But nonetheless, I think is extremely true. And so I'm sure there are going to be people that they don't like this because Trump did it and they don't like this because they want to see our position weakened on the global stage.

Now, speaking as somebody who um very much wants to see America reestablish its moral core, I think that we do owe that to ourselves and to the world. But in a world where we can refocus on why we are doing what we are doing, focus on American safety, not just trying to project strength everywhere, focusing on our hemisphere, that being able to defend ourselves is paramount. That that is job number one of a government. And if being able to have bases, uh, more bases than we have currently, which was already covered in 1951, but be able to keep the, um, infrastructure and just presence of foreign adversaries out of the area so that we can build technology that we certainly don't want their eyes on.

So that we have defensive capabilities that we don't want them to know about, don't want them to have any way to interfere with, I think that is a win. Now, the fact that everything with Trump has to be done the [ __ ] hard way where he's trying to slap people around emotionally, which by the way, just Jesus, man, I can't stress this enough. Whenever you're doing a negotiation, you've got to give the other person the ability to walk away from the table saying that they won.

And if you're making them accept that they're the little guy in a public forum, it's absolutely asinine. You are giving them every incentive in the world to find a way to backstab you. And that is much of the chaos that we see going on in Canada. That's much of the cha in terms of the the relationship between the US and Canada. That's exactly what we see going on in Europe. When you ask somebody publicly to be the little bro and to pat them on the head, they are going to resent you in the extreme.

It's one thing to do it privately, but giving them a public face where they can save face. It's another to be that dismissive of people in public. It it is a way that Trump has that I think worked fine in the real estate New York era behind the scenes, all of that. Sure, you can go in and do that and the person still gets to, you know, hold their head high coming out of the negotiation because nobody heard you be an [ __ ] but when you're an [ __ ] on the public stage, it creates a totally different dynamic.

Nonetheless, we have gotten here. Somehow, some way, either because he was distracted in other places, somebody got him to shut the [ __ ] up and just get the deal done behind the scenes, which I am very happy to see, uh, actually played out. So, from a US US's ability to protect itself from a growing array of adversaries, I think this is a very strong move. Looking at this, obviously, we have a situation where we Trump Trump wanted Greenland in the past. uh and because of the the language of this deal, it basically allows the US to build new sites without uh Danish or Greenlandic signoff.

Um firstly, do you think there comes a point where a local government says no and this all collapses? But then secondly, um at what point do you think this stops being defense and almost encroaching upon the independence of the people living in the territory? Well, okay. So, this gets into is Greenland actually a sovereign nation or not? And the obvious answer is they're not. Uh the having a relationship with Denmark is going to be much more sort of handholding negotiating with the US. They're just going to tell you what to do.

So I imagine that is going to feel very different to Greenland. Um I think this is largely going to come down to who's president. Trump is only going to be president for another two years no matter what. Uh so I imagine that there's not going to be too much friction in the next couple of years. hopefully we get somebody far more diplomatic in office after that. Um, so that's not something that I see on the horizon now given the uh short time frame that you'll have a uh person like Trump in office.

Now, if we continue to go like lunatic populist, I guess all bets could be off. Uh, but I'm optimistic that uh we won't go that route. So, I don't worry about that. That's not even on my bingo card right now in terms of the real friction being between the US and Greenland. I think the real friction is going to be between the US and Europe writ large which will then become a proxy over Greenland if they feel like um he's doing something untoward in Europe, whether that's through um tariffs, whether that's through um seemingly supporting Russia.

You continue to see people try to push a narrative that's already been debunked even by Snopes, which is that Trump was leaking information to Russia. Again, debunked, debunked, debunked. But it shows you that people are harboring this sense that uh the US and Trump specifically are not European allies anymore. And listen, there's enough smoke there that I understand why people are feeling that. So, I could see Greenland becoming a bit more of a proxy battle, which is what it felt like when this first came up.

uh that Trump was using it to ruffle feathers. He was using it to signal to um Europe that we are not a united front. If you guys don't get in behind my agenda, there's going to be problems. Um so that would be where I could see this becoming a problem. But I think the reason they've signed off on this agreement is partly because Europe isn't dumb. You don't want to put yourself in a position where you're completely beholden to China. They might be making those decisions right now from the perspective of trade that China can make a lot of stuff that's cheap for us.

Remember that is a great way to disguise the decline of your own economy. If you can't grow, at least make things cheaper. And that has been I think a huge impetus behind the importation of uh cheap immigrants. And the um increasing increasing increasing trade with China is just okay our you know GDP per capita is not growing at the rate that it should be. And so the way that we're going to trick people into think that they're getting richer is to continue to partner with China.

So fine, that's what you're going to do on the trade perspective. I think it is very shortsighted. But when election cycles are measured in a short number of years, I certainly understand the incentive to end up in that position. But from a military perspective, if you know that Russia is your biggest threat and China is allied with Russia far more than they're aligned with you, that would be a suicide mission to pair yourself directly with China on all fronts. So part of the language that has been coming out post this Greenland agreement is yes, this is good for Greenland from a protection perspective because you still have the US is still the strongest military in the world.

Whether we are what we once were, I think is self-evident. We are not. But we are still the strongest military in the world. So if you're Greenland, it's like, do I want Europe to uh be the person I'm counting on for protection? No, definitely not. Do I want the US? For sure. Do I want the US and Europe uh together? Yes, that would be my ideal. So, I think it would be very unwise of Denmark, be very unwise of Greenland to be anything but enthusiastic about having defense brought to you by the US.

Now, given that Greenland is not exactly a gigantic population that's spreading out all over the country, as long as the US isn't building bases that is, you know, directly encroaching on the economy of a local area, I think you're going to be fine. Um, so I expect this to be relatively peaceful moving forward. They get the security guarantees that they need. Trump stops being a psychopath because he has the story that he needs. and we march forward and get Trump out of office and hope for something more amendable in the future.

That is how I imagine this will play out. Uh I'm curious your take on this because Quant Ash says in the chat and I think this summarizes this whole story about America and its allies right now. Uh but what America is losing fast is it soft power which is arguably the most effective type of power. No one wants to play Trump's shitty games. Do you think this continues to get worse for us as Trump wraps up his last two years in office? Or do you think there's any way he can turn that around and maybe bring some allies back to the table?

Respectfully, the only way he's going to be able to turn this around is through economic andor military strength. People have to get richer by cozing up to America. And remember, they already have a status quo. So, I don't think it works to threaten to constantly make them poorer. Uh, now you're just strongarmming people. and it will get them to line up briefly, but they will always be looking for and working towards other options. But if he were to somehow pull a rabbit out of his hat in uh Iran, actually stabilize that, get the um Abraham Accords as indicative of that region moving in lock step together towards something that's economically prosperous.

If he's able to do that, then I think people will line up behind the US again. If on the other hand, and by the way, I think as a part of that, he's got to stop trying to please the whole world. He's got to think, okay, we're focused on our hemisphere. We're going to make sure everything is great there. We're going to produce more oil between Venezuela and the US. We're going to produce more oil than they were doing in the Middle East anyway. And so now we're all locked and loaded.

You guys can send your ships here. We're going to be nice and stable if America actually gets its [ __ ] together. and I mean this is a tall order but is not as violently whipssawing back and forth between the left and the right. That would go a long way. Uh and then is able to start growing their economy through AI. That's really going to be the only thing. Um then if they do that plus get Iran under control, then you would see people start to realign.

um that's never going to be easy given a populist leader on the left or the right. And right now, obviously, we have the most bombastic, the most unnecessarily um irritation-causing president that we've had in quite some time. Um but yes, people will always fold in behind strength, period. With Iran specifically, I actually saw theory this weekend, and I don't remember who it was, um but it was just an interesting thought experiment because while it's conspiracy, I think there's some truth to it. Uh right now with the straight closed that's about 20% of the world's oil supply just poof, right?

Like it's harder to get. It's more expensive. Uh and as well a lot of gas companies in America are reporting record profits. Do you think there's a world where Trump is perpetuating these negotiations and perpetuating um you know the the closing the straight uh and like pushing this further to continue those record profits for those companies or do you think it's just a side effect? I think it's a side effect. I'm sure that in those meetings he loves it. This is so bad for him politically that I cannot fathom a universe in which he is thinking like that.

Um first of all, he's really got an issue if if he uh loses the midterms, both the House and the Senate, and then sort of is ignoriously um terminating his career as a politician, they're going to pursue him. And so for him, if he's, and I mean legally, pursue him, put him in prison, pursue him. So if he is at all smart, he's thinking, I've got to make sure that Republicans win after me so that they won't have the ability to target me uh in that way.

And to do that, he's got to leave them on a good note so that even if he lost the House and the Senate, cuz remember it it is the odds are so overwhelmingly stacked against a president anyway because it's how people there's always this huge gap between what you hope for when you vote somebody in and what you actually get. And so that's why it tends to flip. And if he can go out on a positive note, have the economy moving in the right direction, um have the world stable or at a minimum America not getting sucked into uh things further and further that their involvement in these wars is either now purely back to being a weapons dealer um or at least it feels stable and not growing, then he's got a shot that Republicans win and he's probably safe until he dies.

uh presuming he doesn't live another 20 years, which you know that's just given his age and being morbidly obese uh not likely. So um that I think is the smartest play for him. I don't think he's like, "Oh, let me burn my political career down. Let me destroy my own legacy. Let me put myself in a position where I'm uh harassed and hounded for the next four to eight years. uh all so that I can make a few more like even if you throw in billions it's like it doesn't make any sense he has found the perfect uh corrupt path to enrich himself he does not need that and that path is just trade like a fiend and when you have the ultimate insider knowledge and you can move markets personally and then trade against that just do that he it's like it's so grotesque it's so out in public view I would just be shocked if he would burn everything else down when it's like you're already making yourself obscenely wealthy.

So why then shoot yourself in the foot? Yeah, that that one doesn't make sense. So will he be um will he take those meetings and joke and be like these guys owe me and all that? Yes, of course. But would he do it for that reason? That would just be so dumb. Do you subscribe to the idea, this is more general, of the idea that both parties want a consistent wartime economy? cuz that's kind of the team I'm on with with these types of global conflicts that we find ourselves in so frequently of like profits are highest when we're stressed and things are more expensive or do you subscribe to that as well or do you think it's a case by case or I I think that it is not evenly that I think that there are factions in the government that want exactly that and it becomes way too easy if you're struggling to maintain power cuz people people don't understand there's power as in I got elected and then there's power as in I can actually get something done.

And to get something done, you need people on your side. The everyday lever pullers have to believe in what you're doing. They've got to line up behind you. And just like with Saudi Arabia going after the US and saying, "Hey, please bomb the Houthies," which we have already done in the past. So, we obviously don't have some sort of weird moral compunction against it. Um, we're not doing that. Now, I don't know that it's because Saudi Arabia moved away from the US petrod dollar hedgeimonyy, but I know that didn't help them.

And so, it really does become this the public debate is often at the level of how things ought to be, and it's never the sort of real ground level contact of tit all these political negotiations behind the scenes. So, they're not being real about it. So, I could see Trump coming in not wanting to get into more wars, getting intel, which by the way, we have there's a clip uh from uh Senator Kennedy G. Eric uh that we should probably listen to. So, I can see him getting into office really having wanted to end the war in Ukraine.

Ju just think of him as a selfish being. I'm going to end the war in Ukraine because I'm the peace president. Cool. That's going to be my legacy. I'm going to get on Mount Rushmore as the guy that just ended all these wars. um you start making huge strides with the Abraham Accords. Really looks like you're going to do something there. Uh then you start making what you think are going to be huge inroads with Russia, but then the Middle East falls to [ __ ] then the uh Russia technically Russia Ukraine falls a [ __ ] first and you just can't make anything happen there and then not you're not able to get peace in the Middle East and then you start getting intel that Iran really is about to do something and then all the people that you thought you were going to sideline uh from the war machine start coming in and going the intel is the intel bro and like now we can help you out like okay you're not going to end up on Mount Rushmore because you're a peace president or they probably said something more like, "It's peace through strength.

We're going to get to peace. It's just going to be a little bit violent on the way. You're not going to start a war. This is just going to be like a limited incursion. You're going to be fine. You'll see. They'll back off." But then you get sucked in. And you can't admit defeat. So now you've got to keep going, keep going, keep going. And those guys just all along the way are now like, "Hey, we're going to help you. We're here by your side." And all of a sudden, the allies you thought you were going to have by being the peace guy, they turn on you.

and the guys you thought were going to be sort of fringe players become the people you have to rely on because the only way now for you to save your reputation is to keep going down that path. So it isn't just that people want a wartime economy. I think he would have been perfectly happy to be the Saudi invests in AI. They take they transform all of their oil dollars into AI investments and I'm the um S&P 500 president. I think he would have been perfectly happy with that.

But the incentive structures as the landscape changes they change. Dude it people must understand the the practicality of the statement the US has no allies only interests. Now change that because the real answer is the world has no allies. It only has interests. And in the same way that a couple can come together because they're in love only to divorce years later in the most acrimonious way possible and want the demise of each other instead of being like you're the mother of my children. Uh and you know conversely you're the father of my children.

We don't agree anymore. We don't want to stay married. Let's just think about the kids. They can't do it. And it there are very few people that have a moral center and they live by the moral center instead of simply following their interests. And the the practicality of that drives the world. It isn't a uniquely Trump thing. It's not a uniquely US thing. It's just how people are. And so as the incentives change, there's no permanent alignment to peace. There's no permanent alignment to war. It's just where am I going to make money?

How am I going to make the people happy? Cuz you know, every leader is ultimately subject to the people rising up and killing them. So it's like you you've got to pay attention to that. And if the answer is peace, cool, I'll pursue peace. And maybe that's my preferred method. But if the answer ends up being war, I'll pursue war whether it's my preferred method or not. And I think in many ways, you mentioned him being the S&P 500 president. Uh I think that's very fitting given all his trades.

But speaking of funding, let's thank our funders with the first super chat. Let's go. Actually, before we get to that, just because this is so relevant, let's play this clip from Kennedy. So let me ceue this up for a second. So what's going on here? I think this is Theo Vonet if I'm not mistaken. They never show him in the clip. Uh but so you've got Senator Kennedy um explaining something that the Trump administration has been unable to explain. Now maybe I'm being far too generous to Kennedy and maybe he is just a propagandist extraordinaire.

Uh but he's somebody that's always come across as sort of very um blunt to me and for him to go to bat for there being intel that put Trump in a position where it's like Iran behind the scenes was saying basically we can now strike Europe directly not by proxy not their bases in the region. We can strike them directly. Uh that that put Trump in the position of having to act. Uh so let's hear from the man himself. our intelligence. Here's what our intelligence showed, and I've seen it.

It's classified, but I've seen it, but I can give you the a general outline. Our our intelligence showed that Iran was building up its missile capacity, both ballistic and cruise, and they were going to to uh compile so many missiles and drones that they were going to turn to America and Israel and say, "We're restarting our nuclear weapons program, and if you try to stop us, we're going to destroy the me rest of the Middle East. And by the way, our missiles can now reach London and Paris, Paris and uh and Germany.

And you saw you saw reports that I've seen the intelligence. Okay. And President Trump was faced, well, do I let them continue? He had already bombed their nuclear some of their nuclear facilities, but he he he was faced with the decision. Do I let them get to the point where they have so many missiles and drones, ballistic and crews, that they could destroy the Middle East that they could hit London that they might even be able to hit the United States? Or do I go in to stop him?

And he did. All right. So, this is part of the take that I had on this previously, which is that uh it's impossible. It is possible that these guys simply bungled the messaging on all of this. And the reality going into it was listen guys, they have ballistic missiles that they're putting underground. It is getting to the point where uh if we let them keep developing that underground weapon system that we are going to be unable to protect the Middle East is how I thought of it before.

But if this intel is um accurate that it's for us to protect the Middle East and protect Europe, we've got to act now. um otherwise they're going to be able to back everybody down forever because they're going to um have this threat where it's like you can try but you're not going to be able to bunker buster the weapon systems that we have underground. Now the unfortunate reality is I think that the exit or the moment to act on that may have been years ago and we just missed our window because now they are destroying the Middle East certainly the energy infrastructure.

Uh, and it we've proven that no matter what Trump says, they keep showing an ability to launch new strikes by pulling these things out from the underground, launching them, and then putting them back under. So, uh, it's possible that it was sort of the right idea, but bad timing. Uh, and we have had administrations for 20 years talk about how we need to do something about the Iranian threat. And I think that it's possible we just waited too long. And so now Trump did something that would have made sense maybe 10 years ago, but now doesn't make sense now given the extent of the damage.

So we'll see. Again, I'm always skeptical that I'm being spun that somebody is telling me something that's maybe partly true but not all the way true. Um, so we'll see. Also, the fact that they were unable to articulate that message, which is extremely easy to articulate, uh, I'm left wondering if there wasn't something more going on that was less palatable to the American people, which is why they didn't even think to present that message because it wasn't what was on their mind. Uh, it may have been, you know, three or four levels deep.

Um, but there is a reason that they didn't talk about this at the beginning. So, or that they didn't make it the central focus. They did sort of get to the okay there are four things in the ballistic missiles was one of them but they were just never able to explain this clearly which I think is either just proof of a clouded mind in which case you're in poor hands or this was proof of this wasn't actually what they were doing and they were just having a hard time getting the messaging right.

Do you think cuz you mentioned 20 years presidents have been mentioning oh we got to do something by Iran Iran. Uh do you think that intel that leads to that is Israeli based just given they have this expansion mindset of we're going to take the Middle East like that's been their plan for 40 years. Do you think that intel and that desire to take control I say in air quotes of of Iran from the US level stems from Israel? Well I think we see Israel very differently.

So I don't see u mainstream Israeli views being let's take over the entire Middle East. I know there's a biblical uh thing that you can get Mike Huckabe to be like, "Yeah, it's all theirs." Which that [ __ ] is wild. And if you want to know why you should be worried about uh theocratic regimes, why the US should absolutely keep uh separating church and state, uh it's wild ass comments like that. Um, nonetheless, I see the Greater Israel project in terms of expanding into all of what is Gaza now, eating up the West Bank, all of that.

Yeah, I can believe that that's probably more mainstream than they want us to think. Uh, but them sort of eating into the full biblical uh lands. I have a harder time thinking that that's actually guiding their philosophies right now or their actions right now. Do I think that that intel is um Israeli? For sure. some massive percent of it percentage of it is going to be I have a mental map that they're and this is contested but just when I see the way the people respond to Israel I have a feeling that they really do have the best intel on the planet for things in that region for sure um so and maybe spreading into Europe that is entirely possible so I think that they're probably the creme de la creme of Intel so I would imagine a lot of it came from them do they have an agenda That's pro-Israeli.

Of course they do. As every country has agenda, the Israel is like they're going to try to pull everybody into their agenda in the way that America tries to pull everyone into their agenda. Europe tries to pull everyone into their agenda. Ukraine their agenda, Russia their agenda, China their agenda. It's what everybody does. The way that people talk about Israel like they do something that is sort of unnormal for humans is very strange to me. So anyway, yes. Would they leverage it to pull the US into a war that the US should avoid?

Yes, for sure. Um, but ultimately, do I think that the US has interests in the Middle East that would make them more likely to move? Yes. Now, being able to cloud the judgment of the US in terms of, no, now really is the time. You really should move. You do still have an opportunity. That I could see being something where it's like I'm putting a lot of stock into that piece of intel that I can still do this move intelligently. And on that for sure we are vulnerable uh as everybody is to that information being given to us in a very selective fashion premasticated so that it's hard to differentiate what's real.

Um sure. Cool. Speaking of hard to differentiate what's real. We'll get into AI in a second cuz first we got to get to some super chats. All right let's do it. First up comes from Knox Tom. Why assume America must remain dominant to prosper? China's rise needn't mean America's decline. its open source AI can benefit all nations. Are we confusing relative dominance with absolute prosperity? And why must there be only one winner? Okay, so a lot of things there. So, first of all, I wouldn't say that I actually have a hard position on whether the US needs to be the most dominant or not, but I'll make a case for it.

But just know, please, I'm on the fence about that in terms of um will was the world better off when the US and Russia were in dynamic tension. Uh or was the world better off when the US was just the unabashed winner? And I think there's a very strong case that you could make that America was much stronger when we had an adversary that we were legitimately concerned about. Uh, I think that it made the American people be far more in contact with the reality that running a country is hard, that you have enemies, those enemies wish you ill, and so that you have to be very disciplined, uh, fiscally, you have to be very disciplined from, uh, who are we as Americans, all that.

So anyway, I think there's a very strong case to be made for that. Now, uh, in the '9s and through like the early 2000s, globalization was awesome. So, I don't want to lie and pretend that there wasn't like a real run where we were able to mask a weakening economy, a weakening nation, uh, mentality by getting a lot of cheap stuff. It It was a rad time. Not going to pretend. So, uh, that's why I say that I'm on the fence about that. But if we were going to make an argument for why does it make sense for the US to be dominant, I would say there's a couple things.

So, first of all, I'm a big believer in the founding principles of America. I don't think that we have strayed so far from them that they don't remain relevant and that is uh a foundational belief that the spark of divinity exists inside the individual. And so for us it is legitimately a tragedy anytime uh like 13 service members dying in Iran was showstopping here. You don't get that response in China. You don't get that response in Russia. It's just a totally different mentality. And so from that, that's why that communism has been able to take hold in those countries in a way that it so far has not in the US because it isn't a collectivist mentality.

It isn't an identitarian mentality. And I think that that is one of the great advantages of the US because it plays out in innovation. I'll shand it there. If there's follow-up questions, I'm happy to go along with it. Uh so the pursuit of freedom being another one that freedom of speech that the only way to get to the right answer is to let people speak. That means you have to be willing to let people say hateful things about you. Uh that I think all of that is very important.

Um that we are founded on the principle that men individually and governments collectively tend towards tyranny and so you must have protection mechanisms against that. I think that is so important. Uh China does not have that. Russia is not really a player right now. So I'm gonna just keep this to China. China does not have that. And so when I think about with AI, my key message is don't lose to China. I'm perfectly happy to see us in stalemate, but don't lose to China. And the reason that I say that is if China is able to exert its will in the way that the US has exerted its will, then you're going to see in the same way that US tried to bring freedom to people that didn't want it, China is going to try to bring authoritarianism to people that don't want it.

And part of the reason, by the way, that the Middle East became what the Middle East became is they didn't even have like the concept of a nation state. So we're introducing them these ideas that really are very different. They were far more driven by tribalism, far more driven by uh religion and religious divides. And so when you try to make them act as nation states, it becomes very uh tumultuous, which is part of what we're seeing play out now. So you had these um sort of monarchydriven um nation states like uh England getting in the mix with what was going on in the Middle East.

They draw the borders somewhat arbitrarily and you get a lot of the drama that we're seeing play out now. And so the US then follows that up with the we're going to bring freedom to everybody. Afghanistan doesn't want freedom. So it just is what it is. Now, I think that you will see a similar type rebellion from people in the US if we were having an authoritarian dictatorship pushed on us from somewhere like China. So, I think all of that becomes a thing to legitimately be concerned about because we've seen it play out many times.

We've made that same uh mistake ourselves. So, us wanting to make sure that we have sovereignty, I think, is incredibly important. Now, some of the debate is going to come down to are you talking about AI or are you talking about um econ economic hedgeimonyy, are you talking about military hedgeimony? So, that will break in that fashion. But us being able to protect our way of life uh is certainly one of the things that I would put on the table as an argument for the US with a reformed sense of itself, right?

Because I don't think we do nation building anymore. Even Trump, I'll give credit for that. So you've got us having made all those mistakes on the other side of this where we are trying to um reharden America, get to the point where we can manufacture ourselves, focus more on our hemisphere. Um if the world were still echoing off that leadership, I think we'd be in a better position. Do you think because you mentioned the 13 service members we've lost in the Ron War, we may have lost more than that.

That was just from memory the statement when that all popped off. That kind of leads into the question actually I was going to say because we we were talking about like theocracy and um you know how these people treat their troops and things like that. Um the current number that the Pentagon lists is 18 but that number is estimated to be more like 23 24. So you know whether that's hiding whether that's accidental counting who knows but also recently um there's been like a video of heath from the department of war giving Bible verses to the troops and like training them off those Bible verses.

Do you think there almost is a is a way where we come off hypocritical on the world stage that we call out these other countries for the things we are doing ourselves as well? I mean there's certainly going to be some people that see that as um hypocrisy but I'll say that using the using any book Harry Potter the Bible whatever um to get troops like amped up makes all the sense in the world. When I was doing a lot of mindset stuff and you'd get brought in to try to get people motivated and inspired, I'd refer to movies all the time because it manages to capture a part of the human experience that gives you a very quick amount of obviously in movies it's not religious, but it's religious allegory is so powerful because it's a shared from my perspective mythology and if you get the extra juice of like no but this is real.

There really is a magical guy in this guy and he really does want you to behave like this. you're doing it in his honor. It's like that is a supercharger. So if I'm in any role in the government and I'm in charge of getting my troops galvanized, focused, believing, [ __ ] dude, I would rely on the Bible. I would say people, listen, whether I agree that this is real or not, it's the ultimate human story. And you know, I'm still going to galvanize people around that because of the ability for it to carry all of this information very rapidly with emotional veilance that's extreme.

So, um, yeah, I think it's very smart. Now, the real thing that people need to understand, there is a huge difference between being somebody that rallies people around your faith and building your government and your laws around the faith. And that's where it's like, oh yeah, it's perfectly fine that um there are, I believe the number is a thousand in Pakistan. There are a thousand um Sharia court rulings every year where girls as young as like 13 uh oftentimes Christian girls because they aren't they don't have some of the protections that a Muslim girl would have uh they are abducted, raped, and then forced to marry the man that kidnapped them and raped them.

And that goes through the court system and gets ruled in favor of nope, sorry, you got to leave the girl with him because that's fine in the Quran and the Hadiths. So, it's like, yo, that that's where I'm like, all right, these books have a little too much like madness in them for my taste. I would rather we not bake that into the laws, Christian or otherwise. Would you I I would argue that we already have, though. I mean, look at the overturning of Roie Wade.

We've allowed states to push um this idea that if a child is raped by someone, they have to carry the pregnancy all the way through. I mean, like it's smaller scale, but it's a similar weight. I feel like I I would say you have to differentiate between morality and the Bible told me so. And if the Supreme Court had said the Bible says, and therefore we're going to do it, I'd be up in [ __ ] arms. Now, technically, all that Supreme Court said was the states need to decide.

Cool. So, now let's go to the states. The states then go, "Okay, we we can't let people do this." Now, if the state laws say because the Bible says so, then I've got massive beef with that. If the state is merely trying to reflect morality, we have to have morality. The fact that morality globally tends to be anchored on religion, nobody should be surprised about. It does not need to be in my estimation. I am not religious but I am deeply moral and I can build up from a core uh what I think of as first principles philosophies where you basically only have to grant me one not miracle but one sort of founding principle that it's like I'm not going to be able to ground it in because God said so but that would be human flourishing and what I will call the spark of divinity exists in the human.

So um that's where individual choice becomes a bigger part of this conversation. But there is a point at which for instance I would say any moral framework is going to have a hard time saying uh you have exited the birth canal therefore you count. You've not exited the birth canal therefore I can kill you. That that one gets pretty tough there. There's going to be some other delineating factor again based on morality not based on religion in my universe uh where that kind of decision plays out.

But just the thing I want people to hear is it is very different for a state legislative body to say we believe that this is morally unjustifiable and therefore is illegal than to say the Bible says and so therefore it is law. Those are wildly different and they will have very different consequences. Uh next up super chat from Nashville, Australia. $50 super chat. Thank you. Uh man, I've been delving back into the mindset content I missed before I discovered you guys. Appreciate all you lads do.

PS. Halloween coming up. Do an episode with Tom as Abraham Lincoln costume. Much love. You're digging into the mindset content. That is not a direction of travel I ever thought somebody would go through. I know that there are people who did the mindset content who managed to somehow someway uh understand what I'm trying to do with this content, which is still help people in a very specific way to empower people to think through hard decisions to understand how to navigate this incredibly difficult time. I did not expect somebody to start here uh and go into the mindset content.

Very interesting. So, thank you for that. Appreciate it. Uh can't wait to see do an episode with Thomas Abraham Lincoln. I doubt that I will do that, but if I were going to. That's certainly an interesting uh costume. I do think we dress up that uh episode. We probably should. We probably should be fun in in fairness. It is not my personality. I never dress up for Halloween unless my wife absolutely forces me to. Uh, but did we I think we did do something. I had a very subtle nod, I think, to One Piece on Halloween if I remember correctly.

Oh, did you? Yeah. Uh, so we'll have to do something. I was before your time. That's wild. All right. This is our first to give them the applause. So, thank you for the $50 super chat. Thank you. Uh, now AI, we have openweight AI basically shaking up the entire industry right now. Obviously there's a lot of talk about the doom and security and things like that and we'll get into that but there's this big conversation bubbling about openweight AI if you could uh dive into that.

Yeah guys in December open AI models have completely like underperformed they they were nothing nobody cared about them 7% of the traffic right is is happening at the open weight model. uh but now you've got an absolute explosion happening and they are accounting for much much bigger uh amounts of the AI and so what you're seeing is this shift from the very um very little AI happening on openw weight models now shifting over to a lot of it happening over on the openweight side of things and so what's really interesting is what is that going to do in terms of how things are going to play out for the AI industry as a whole.

So, as we talk through this, remember that the entire industry is the bet that the world is making right now. Everybody's betting that AI is going to be the next big thing. And we are way, way out over our skis in terms of all of the debt that's going into AI right now. And so the big question that we've been debating now is why are OpenAI anthropic going to the government and basically appealing more or less to be nationalized. I will put forward that this is really all about them trying to do two things.

one, they have to protect themselves from openweight models so that they can basically survive because they have this huge debt burden that's coming. And if the revenues don't come in fast enough, which they're not currently, and um openweight models are proving that they're going to strip more and more revenue away from them over time, then they've really got to protect themselves. And so getting the taxpayer essentially on the hook is a big part of why they want to do this. if they can get regulatory capture, they can keep their competitors out, they can outlaw um open AI, and they can say, "Hey, listen.

If you want us to go up against China, you're going to need to make sure that we're able to thrive even though the revenue may not be coming in at the rate that we needed to to pay off this debt. So, help us make some of these debt payments and we'll keep making sure that you can go against China." Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is that ultimately these guys have probably a lot of potential litigation coming their way in terms of um they have been peering into whether intentionally or unintentionally the way that people are using their models and absorbing that and basically uh they were launching businesses on the back of that.

So they were launching competitors to some of the people the software applications that were using their AI. So that's crazy. So I think that they're going to have a lot of litigation woes and so they also need to protect themselves from that. Okay. As you have that looming now you start looking at the fact that by August the um open open weight models were accounting for 56% of the tokens that are being generated. So on September 19th versell CEO GMO Roush posted a single day record of 78.4%.

Now please keep in mind that's one day it's on a Saturday. So there's a whole bunch of things that go into that. um because volume is basically the easy part. The openweight models are cheap obviously. So the real question is what's happening to the money? But what they're seeing is that the money is moving. So open weight models took under 4% of the dollar spent on uh the the gateway that we're talking about uh Versel uh in June. So just June. Now in July it jumps to 8.6.

Then in August it goes to 14%. And we're just seeing this steady increase. So by those rates you can expect September to be even even bigger. And so on the record day that Rous is talking about uh he said spending on models from three Chinese labs. So Moonshot, Deepseek and Z.AI added up to more than the spending on open AI. Now they're very aware of this trend. Now start thinking about some of their appeals to the government in that context. So what what they see like as you really dig into the data developers are starting to split the workload.

So the hard high stakes work still goes to Anthropic, which has held at least 61% of the gateway spend every month since December. Everything else is going to whatever's cheapest. And so the average price per token on Versell fell 23% in August alone. So that is what is really got the whole industry scared because the amount of debt that they've taken on is so staggering. So Roush noted that for most of the dollars they're going now to US inference providers. So what that means is who's really winning in AI right now is chip manufacturers because they don't care whether you do this on uh claw directly or open AI directly or if you're just doing it on a cloud provider that has built a data center and is now leasing out compute.

And this is what we mean when we talk about intelligence becoming commoditized. You have these data centers. They don't have models themselves. They're either um running a licensed version of Claude or OpenAI or they're hosting you or any other company that's running an openweight model. And so that's where we're starting to see the value shift. And so the question is what does that end up doing to the entire global economy essentially? Does it just shift the value from one place to another? No big deal. Still a ton of value.

Or in breaking that frontier model narrative, do we run into a concern that basically money is going to be leaking out of the ecosystem because what we thought was going to generate money uh inside of these companies is now not going to the companies that we thought. That debt is still going to implode. There aren't going to be enough people running these free models. What's that? What is that going to look like? I think it's probably just going to shift the value because unless people move away from AI, it's just going to shift the values from okay, we thought it was going to be these two companies to just like every technological revolution behind it, the people we think in the early days are going to be the winners end up not being necessarily the people that win and the value shifts somewhere else in the system.

So that would be my guess on where this is all going to play out. I feel like for the longest time we've just assumed that the best model is going to be what wins. But right now I feel like the data is showing that the cheapest acceptable model is where most of the work is happening. And do you think that quietly kills the incentive to actually build something dramatically better because a lot of these are forprofit or do you think um it only incentivizes people to make better models but cheaper?

that that's one of the biggest questions is will we be able to justify the expense that we put into the frontier models that it it is an interesting question as of right now the answer is yes the frontier models are going to keep getting developed and what we see is actually breaking is not the high end of the frontier it's actually the low end of the big players so open AI is is getting obliterated just because people are reading the situation as you guys are not as good as anthropic so I'm either going to pay for anthropic or I'm going to do the cheap stuff same thing with Google, their entry models are getting obliterated.

So basically, everybody's losing their entry level, their cheap way of getting people in, their gateway models, if you will, but Anthropic's highest tier is still performing well. And that certainly comports with the way that we use AI here at Impact Theory, which is there are some things where I'm like, I'm not cost-sensitive at all. this thing is either not going to be possible for us or we need to use Claude or um we're pretty agnostic still between Claude and um uh the 6.0 which I can't believe I'm blanking on his name.

Uh but oh Opus no um I forgot the name too. I'll look it up while I go. Yeah. So uh that for us is like okay there's stuff that we can only do at the high end. Astra Astra thank you to the stars. um that I think is going to keep going but there are some things that it's like we can't afford to use that for this highle thing. So you prove out what it can do at the frontier and then for the other stuff or for things you need to keep proprietary you're going to use an openweight model.

Now, I actually think that's a big part that we have to put on the table is right now there is a feeling when you engage with AI that this is incredible, but everybody has access to it. And that is very distressing as somebody who you feel like you're thinking through all these very complicated problems. You're leveraging AI in a way that other people can't. So, we all have access to the same tool, but I'm making changes to my tool that now make it more efficient at doing what it's doing or certainly more unique in doing what it's doing.

If you can abstract that away so that I can have an open weight model and I can do it myself now whatever I build remains proprietary that is a far more interesting world and so given that I think more and more companies are going to wake up to that I think that there's going to be a ton of innovation around helping companies host their own models. So going back to this is really just a value shift away from I care about one of these companies to no there's probably going to be one sort of frontier model that creates the like okay you need magical thing to happen here is said magical thing go do uh you know the hardest of the hard things you need to do in our model.

Then for the rest, you take that back and you keep things proprietary on your home-cooked meal or your home cook model and that becomes the way that you differentiate yourself from the rest of the group. And when I think about that, that makes me feel so much more optimistic about what's going to happen to AI because I can still create an advantage by myself and the people on the team here. And so that feels follow the incentives feels like the most obvious first principles uh thought through outcome.

You touched on China's piece in all this earlier in this episode and obviously we know China they're giving their model away for free basically capturing none of the money. So the question becomes for us like why do it at all? Like what's the strategic payoff for deepseek or for moonshot if the profit uh goes to the US GPU owners? Okay so part of it is that you know that the US is making this huge bet. You've been handicapped. So you have to think about it from the chips perspective right now.

China can't keep up with um the US on the frontier models. So they're like, well, we can make a subtier model or we can create free models to disrupt the economic progress that they're making. So that for sure is part of their strategy. And so they're distilling the models down, giving it away for free because they're authoritarian. They know at any time they can clamp down on open source. So if they're able to start manufacturing their own chips, which they are already beginning to do, and if they can scale up and begin homegrowing their own stuff, then they can say, "Okay, no more open source here in China, or it, you know, is relegated to some area and now we're we're actually able to compete at the frontier." They they can nip that in the bud.

So they've got no downside, only upside. And um when you're given the hand of cards that they've been dealt, it's a very very very smart play. Also, if we want to be a little bit cynical for a second, um if it's a Chinese model and you know at any time you can tell DeepSeek, I want all that data, whatever reporting there is, they're going to be able to gain access to that. And just like um Anthropic and Open AI are likely to get lawsuits because they were doing exactly that where the models were learning from the way that people were using it.

uh China who's known for stealing IPA or stealing IP from everybody you've got a grease shoot of it just giving you all the data how people use it what questions they're asking all of that kind of thing or even just learning basically getting uh human feedback from the model what did it like what did it not like what were the final outputs what were the approaches and so now your AI is getting smarter and smarter even though it's open source you can go in get that information close it off from the rest of the world if you ever want to.

So, it puts them in a far stronger position given the sort of weak position that they're starting from. Gotcha. Um, so Open AI when it first came out in 2015 was a nonprofit. I started looking into it cuz the the movie is coming out and I'm very excited cuz I love that director. Um, who's directing it? Luca Guanino, guy who did Challengers, Bones and All. Um, bunch of good like seen anything of his. Never heard the name. I'll give you some recommendations off camera, but um anyway, so they started as a nonprofit in 2015 and around 2019 is when they became a for-profit company and then they did some restructuring in 2025, but remaining a for-profit but public benefit corporation, right?

Um do you think there's a world where China wouldn't be as ahead of us if they had stayed nonprofit and decided to compete with China on the open source front? Because I I think like what we've been talking about, it is very clear that open source is starting to dominate, right? Um, so if they had not had uh as hard of a switch to a for-profit incentive, do you think we would be ahead? It's no is the very clear answer. Um, the interesting thing is that you think opensource would make this advance faster and let me if I had to steal man your argument, what would you have to believe to think that that is true?

Okay, I could use the example I have. Yeah, please cuz I I am looking at open source from the perspective as a content creator. So OBS open broadcasting system is an open source software that revolutionized like screen recording for everyone, right? And up until that people would pay for Fraps or Screen Grab or all these different alternatives. But the minute OBS made something open source that people could contribute to, people could just donate to help out with this company, that became the definitive everyone's using this model and now you don't see any paid for screen recorders and they're the dominant one in the market.

and the most powerful because they take so much from its users to develop that. So, I guess my logic is if we're using these AI models, they're already training themselves off of us and we had started um not focusing on making money as a company and just let's make the best possible AI model. I almost feel like we would have been ahead of where China's at because China started so much later in the game than we did. It's interesting. You have a fundamental flaw in the way that you're thinking about it and by all means, argue to the death here.

I'll be so curious to see if I can convince you. Uh the big problem is that the reason you need the profit incentive, the very reason that doing everything open source is never going to be uh the winning strategy for a lot of things is that there has to be somebody somewhere that builds these brains. So the data centers are required. And I don't know if people are just losing sight of the fact that so far with LLMs, we have not seen a limit to the more neurons uh GPUs you put into the stack, the smarter it gets.

We we have not found the ceiling to that. And that's why these guys just keep bringing on more and more and more and more. And if they could get another 10 trillion, they would build bigger and bigger data centers. And it really becomes a question of okay at some point maybe that asmmptotes and at that point it's like you still would never have gotten to that point had you not invested the insane amount of money into getting the brain up in the first place. Now once the brain exists then it's like okay hey we want people to be able to start uh innovating at the level of uh efficiency algorithm model structure reinforcement learning all of that.

So, we want open source to exist for sure. For sure. But the model that's always made the most sense to me, and I don't know if they actually made good on this promise, but Elon Musk was talking about whatever our current model is with Grock will be paid for, and then whatever is sort of the, you know, model maybe two or three generations old becomes free, open source, and [clears throat] it's like, yeah, that's like they opened up the code. They said they were going to Oh, well, I meant I was just asking for clarification because you said free and then so I think I'm almost certain what he said was open source.

Gotcha. Okay. So because he was the reason that open AAI became OpenAI was he wanted it to be something that everybody had access to. He I don't think he ever thought that oh this will be the way that it gets developed faster than anything else. I think people just wildly underestimated how expensive it was going to be to build out the infrastructure. Um, and so right now my instinct is that you want open source to exist because there'll be a ton of innovation that sort of subfrontier if you will and if you kill that off then costs are going to stay high unnecessarily um and innovation will slowly wither but without the profit incentive you would not be able to aggregate the capital you need to make these brains bigger and bigger.

So I think AI would have stalled out. Um, despite the fact that I am a huge proponent of making sure that open weights remain a thing and that we do not want the government to shut that down by any means. Given that stance, do you think then Verscel has the chance to hurt innovation in regards to all this given that they're trying to become this toll booth almost for the industry? Um, I don't I don't think of them at all as a toll booth. What I the right thing to read into the story of Verscell is that you're basically going to get a bunch of people that are um cloud intelligence providers and so they will commoditize the thought process.

So inference just means the machines are thinking. And so right now everybody was thinking that the frontier lab was going to be where all of the money was captured. But what we're seeing now is that's actually not true. Where it's starting to shift, and we'll see if it holds, but where it's starting to shift is that you're getting people that are like, "No, I don't need that model for a lot of the things that I'm doing uh on these peak days up to 78%. what I need is just access to the intelligence, the inference, the compute, the thinking.

So I need access to the GPUs. Uh I just don't need access to that specific weighted model. Um so that like you need somebody that's making sure that that interaction is facilitated. So um I don't see them as rent seeeking or middlemen toll booths. It's just like that that whole process will capture a ton of the value if openweight models are as big of a part of the future because I don't think it's going to do away with the frontier models, but I think it is going to be a big part of the um the play here to make this accessible to companies that really want to deploy it at scale.

Gotcha. Uh and jumping over to Finland, we want to dive into a study that recently came out of there uh about Boy, am I curious to hear what people think about this. This one's wild. dive right in. Uh so right now in Finland uh researchers tracked every person who walked into a gender- affirming care clinic and you tell us more about it, Tom. All right. So we're finally getting real data on gender affirming care and whether it's good or bad and the answer is it doesn't help at all and in some cases it actually hurts.

As this data continues to come out, you can expect massive public reaction. So here we go. The study was published in ACT Pediatrica uh in April. Researchers tracked every person under 23 who walked into one of Finland's two gender identity clinics between 1996 and 2019. It's over 2,000 people matched against more than 16,000 controls. And Finland's health registry logs every specialist psychiatric visit and patients uh can't opt out. So there's there's no dropout problem. This this is just hey this is everybody that did it in Finland.

Now, the thing that ends up getting most people to throw this stuff out is, well, the patients just drop out. And so, uh, the people that it helps, you just don't see. So, now you have a study where people can't opt out because of the way that their health system works. Now, before ever contacting the clinic, 46% of these young people had already needed specialist psychiatric care. Okay? The general population sits at 15%. Now, if you look at the ones who went on to hormones or surgery, among those transitioning male to female, 9.8% had needed psychiatric care beforehand.

Two or more years later, 60.7%. Yesesh. Female to male went from 21.6 to 54.5%. The co control group didn't move. So we see this big swing in people that actually get the treatment. Now there's a really fair criticism to be pushed back here. A psychiatric visit is not a symptom score and the study can't prove the treatment caused the decline. Okay, those are very real criticisms to think through. The untreated group stayed high as well. So keep that in mind. between 60 and 67% once the authors adjusted for prior history.

Treated and untreated patients carried the same elevated risk. So the way that I'm reading this is basically that it's not helping. Gender affirming care is not helping and it could be hurting. So Finland's clinics treat severe psychiatric illness as a reason to hold off on medical transition. Okay. So the very thing that you're being asked to believe, these people need this transition or they're going to self harm, right? And that's like the big push. If you don't do this, what was the quote? Would you rather have a transgender child or a dead child?

Right? That's the thing that's used to browbe parents. And now they're saying the data just doesn't hold that. So the treated group was the healthiest slice of the cohort going in. They got the intervention that was supposed to basically resolve the distress they were going through and they ended up needing psychiatric care at the same rate as the people who were turned away. So now especially given as you start getting into some of these treatments are not reversible. They can have lifelong consequences especially surgery. So the author's conclusion is that psychiatric uh needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.

So let's be very clear. It's not a solve for that problem. For some patients, they say treatment appears linked to the deterioration. Now, this is where everybody's going to have to make a decision for themselves, but I would say given that the rule is first do no harm if we see that it does nothing good and could be linked to the deterioration that for now it should be aggressively pumping the brakes for anybody underage. I think adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want.

So, if an adult decides that they want to transition, let them transition. Now, whether that should be covered in national uh health care is a totally separate debate, which I'm happy to get into. Uh but I think those are two separate things. We're going to see more and more data come out. So, it'll be interesting to see if this is replicated in other places or if this is something unique to Finland, which I doubt because we've seen the Tavistock clinic in the UK shut down due to very similar reports coming out.

Um, so that's where we are as of today. Given this runs from 1996 to 2019, do you think there is an argument that most of this data doesn't even matter because the fact that it spans an era before it became such a political uh um flash point? Because obviously trans people have been in the conversation forever. Trans people have always existed. They're valid, right? All that stuff. But um they weren't really talked about in mass until Trump too, honestly, where he started going transgender everybody. So, do you think in a certain way that invalidates or at least puts into question how useful this data really is?

No. But, uh, and I'll explain why. I think that the Trump merely rides on what the populace is already feeling. So, there was a very good impression, but I don't think that uh that this came about because Trump was talking about it. I think this came about because of something I've talked about before, which is ultimately in terms of uh the cultural clash you have right now is it really isn't about transgender. It's really about um do we have set definitions? What do we consider um to be the foundational architecture of a society that we're going to build on top of?

And the extreme far-left is taking a blank slate philosophy which I think is it's deranging in the sense that it will break first principles thinking and it will make it impossible to navigate through the world. You will have low predictive validity. Every decision that you try to think through is is going to be um very muddied because it's this completely uh deconstructivist mentality where everything is purely subjective and you spiral into madness. So there are real consequences to how we structure society that this is a big part of in terms of the only way to get to blank slate philosophy is through what I think is a very early exit from reality.

And so it's going to be contested for that reason if nothing else. So, this is why I think there was so much friction around this. Um, and especially because it maps so cleanly to right and left temperament where you've got the left leaning towards compassion and of course wanting to see people live whatever life they want, never wanting to see anybody in distress, wanting to believe that all outcomes should be equal, that um humans having equal moral value means that we have equal skills and talents.

And so, they just don't want to see any difference anywhere. And so everybody like, hey, you shouldn't be boxed into being a boy if you feel like a girl and let's make sure that we can facilitate that up to and including uh treatments. So I get where that comes from. And even if I acquies and just say it's all beautiful, I don't think it is, but even if we say it's all beautiful, it's going to collide with the right, which is saying we need borders, definitions, um restriction, constraint, like all the things that create the order that we also need in society.

So those two things are at a moment of heightened populist tension. It's going to be this flash point. Okay, that's why I think the increased rhetoric. Now, why do I think that this isn't invalidated? I think if anything, the data is more likely to be clean because you're talking to people at a time where there's no political incentive to lie. I worry that people, let's say you go through gender reassignment surgery, it did not go the way that you thought. it did not make you feel better, but you know, politically it's going to be a win for the right if you come out and say like, "Yeah, this sucked and I wish I hadn't done it or I feel that I was bamboozled by people when I was young." Now, all of a sudden, you're not going to necessarily say that because you don't want to see there be a win for the other side.

So, that's where I'm like, uh, data is probably cleaner the farther back we go. Also, we need that time for it to play out. I'm very impressed that you have something that's been going for 25 years so that we have just enough data to see like what if they went through like a brief dip and they felt bad for the first couple years because they just haven't adjusted and then on the other side they're actually no I I went through a trough of despair. I'm not going to lie, but I come out the other side and I feel way way way better.

If you see that these problems persist for multi-deade that's a lot more compelling than 18 months later they're frustrated. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh jumping over to America again. Uh there was another ICE shooting over the weekend um that occurred in my hometown of Austin, Texas. And um it's pretty bad. I don't know if we can show the full video. Uh but what we know so far about the story is that an ICE agent sideswiped a Door Dash driver uh and the ICE agent then jumps out of the vehicle and proceeds to shoot five times at the driver, hitting him in the torso.

He has recovered okay from what we understand, but was in critical condition initially. Yeah. So, we're gonna have to run this one as a thought experiment because there's a lot of details that have still not come out. Yes. Um but when you hear the description, it does sound very distressing. Now, uh I may be wrong in the law and Ryan will look this up for us, but um it is my understanding that if a suspect is unarmed and fleeing that you may not shoot them. Now, from what I hear, if the shots were fired when the driver was still in the car, if the driver had driven in a way where they were using the car as a weapon, now you're back to that same debate that we were having before.

Is a car a weapon? Uh, if they drive it towards a police officer, do the police or do the ICE agents have the authority to shoot? um if they weren't driving in a manner that was aimed at turning the vehicle into a weapon and was merely them escaping, you don't see shootouts in high-speed car chases. So, I presume this is not something where legally they can do that. And so, ICE agents should not have any more uh ability to be violent than a police officer. So, we should already have laws in the books and enforcement principles in place for this.

Now, the thing about how bad was the shooting, he was released the same day. That's the part where I was like, "What?" So, um, while he was listed, I think early in stable, I don't think they ever said critical. They said seriously, I saw seriously wounded in critical condition. I saw both. Got it. Okay. So, given that he was released the same day, I would be very surprised if he went from ICU, oh god, touch and go. Is he going to make it to no psych, just kidding, by see you tomorrow.

Um, so I don't know if he was grazed or something like that, but uh, he certainly was shot. And that's where I think this is all ultimately going to come down to is if this person was fleeing, what are the rules about fleeing? If they he was shot in the back on foot, that would be a whole different scenario. Uh, if he was shot in the car while driving recklessly, that's very different than if he was shot in the car after being rammed by ICE in an unmarked vehicle, by the way, which that would certainly make me as a driver uh take evasive action.

I'm not just going to be like, "Oh, this guy just rammed into me and is driving like a maniac." I'll assume that these are uh, you know, official law enforcement. So, you know, once again, this is going to put a lot of scrutiny on ICE and whether they're doing things in a method that makes any sense whatsoever. Uh, so we're going to need to uh get more data on this one before we can pass judgment at anything other than the thought exercise level. Um, but ICE was doing reasonably well there for a while, keeping their heads down, not shooting people, which was a nice change of pace.

Uh, so this is a very sad return, but we'll need more details. I think the biggest argument and it always comes back to this with ICE shootings is what level of authority does this governmental sector really have. Um and for example like they are allowed to pursue uh someone fleeing in a car but at the same time they must be in a marked vehicle and if I remember correctly in the video uh they were driving an unmarked vehicle and so to the person who is fleeing they're fleeing someone who's chasing them down in the car and they don't know who it is.

Correct? Right. And so the argument becomes um you know at what point does ICE need to step back and let local law law enforcement come in and actually let someone who has jurisdiction over the law like that take control of a city? Well, so now we're just asking a uh law and order question. So from my perspective for maximum law and order, we have uh all of the immigration policies, policing procedures in place. They should be followed to the letter. The question is in any gray zone, what should we be doing?

Should we escalate to the point where shots are fired or should we be like, "All right, listen. This one might have gotten away today. We need to be a little bit more clever next time." Um, that's where I'm like, you guys need to remember that people that um that massive ground swell that we saw when everything was going on in Minneapolis, it it is very indicative of a very meaningful percentage of the US. I'm not going to say that it's 50%, but it's a meaningful percentage of people that feel that this is way too draconian.

and recognizing that, and this is not a populist leader specialty, but recognizing that you represent all of your citizens. It's like you need to do things in a lawful way. You need to do things in a way that is uh as humane as can be done given the circumstances. But yes, they should I think ICE should have the ability to enforce the law. That is what that department is designed to do. Um you don't want suspects being shot in the back as they flee on foot.

That's just like absolute madness. You don't want cars being high-speed chased by unmarked vehicles. You don't want cars being rammed by unmarked vehicles. Um because there's a first principles knockon effect where you create a far more dangerous situation. And so you end up curtailing those things for a reason. You're not curtailing those things to be nice or polite or, you know, some uh in in a right, you know, hard right person's mind, you know, some bleeding heart liberal. you're doing it because there are bad consequences when you start acting like a gang enforcement unit.

So, they need to be very careful through all of this. But yeah, I don't understand the calls to defund ICE. Well, I mean, I understand them. I think that they are foolish. I think that they are going to have terrible consequences. The reality is if you're here illegally, you need to be removed from the country. But we do need to get better at removing people in a way that does not end in shots fired as routinely as it does. Do you think there's a world in which we return to a way that the police are the ones who handle the actual pursuit of people here illegally?

And sorry, I should have addressed that because you did you did float that out and I can tell that you're representing yourself, I'm sure, and a contingent of people uh who believe that this should be done via law enforcement. um you will end up distracting your law enforcement agencies to now just dealing in cities where this is a massive problem. That's all they're going to be dealing with. And so one of two things will happen. Either the um local authorities, the uh police commissioner, the mayor is just going to say, "Yeah, we're a sanctuary city.

We don't do that here." And you're going to get no enforcement whatsoever. Um handling this at the federal level makes sense to me because border protection is a federal issue. uh it's not a state issue. So yeah, having a federal agency that is doing this that will be under the direction of the executive branch I think is the right play. I also don't want to overwhelm local law enforcement. I think it is absolute um let me say this in a nice way because I have you here and I really do want you to push back like as a human like pretend for a second it's just you and me.

Uh because I want you to know that I do care about you as a person and I don't want to be flippant about your values and the things you care about. But it really does seem um that there will be massive negative consequences to uh reducing law enforcement and I'm very curious to get your take. You're a smart well-meaning person when you think about things like um broken window policing, which to me is just like good sense policing. Um or just like increased police presence. I watched what it did to New York City and took it from somewhere that was like rightly portrayed in the media as like a place you don't go by yourself in the subway as a vulnerable person.

You don't walk around the streets at night that um Times Square was a legitimate like degenerate hell hole. I was there in the 80s and I remember thinking yo this [ __ ] is crazy. Like it was you were so nervous that I mean I was 13 so part of it was just being a kid but it was like I remember being like yo this is [ __ ] wild. And so watching that then get turned into something where you felt completely safe on the streets.

There were police all over. The police were super chill. But it came at the cost of like, yo, if you fit a profile of a type of person who's likely to cause a problem, like we're going to come up. We're going to stop. We might frisk you. And I was like, "Yeah, that that's a price I'm willing to pay." And by the way, I have had the police knock the door in to get to me wrongly and I would still rather be in that position where I was legitimately manhandled by the police.

And it's like, yeah. Was it fun? No. Was it high-risisk? Yes. Would I rather be in that position and know that if something like that were really true? Because it a supposed 911 call came from the apartment that I was in and supposedly there was an person in there that I had taken captive. All fake. Oh, it was like a Yeah. They were like, "We got a 911 call from this apartment of somebody saying, "I've been taken like captive." And so it's like what they do to streamers.

Yeah. Yeah. Swatting, but it wasn't swatting. It was just two cops. But nonetheless, it's like I would rather be in that position than people be like, "Oh, no, no, no. We need mental health like uh people." So, I've seen what law and order looks like. Yeah. And it's wonderful. I think to me um I live I'm I'm a child of the post 911 era right which is arguably when Americans lost the most freedoms in their own homes right and to me when I look at IC digital surveillance or something else everything like they I mean it's all surveillance right like doesn't matter what level of surveillance I mean we just found out LG is listening to us through TVs like a week ago you know um and I guess when I look at this I'm like I'm older than ICE right ICE was established as a response to 9/11 it a response to um this terrorism threat that we had that we inevitably used to go kill 2.6 million people, right?

And so when I look at this, I'm like, why don't we go back to a world where uh and I like broken glass policing I have no problem with. I don't think immigration falls into that. I think immigration given how convoluted our system is is so complex that we need to bring um INS back, right? Bring ins back and then allow these cities um to to police these types of situations themselves. is I believe that but do you agree that they won't so take New York they're not going to they will expressly say we're not going to they have expressly said we're not going to I think it would have to be something where we get to that level because the reality is the more we like we would have to actually get there in order mom Donnie has said expressly that we will not cooperate with ICE right but that's because it's ICE that's what I'm saying if we bring back INS we would cooperate with INS I think what would happen if you bring back INS INS is all paper there's no going down chasing people it's all let's handle this at a at you know, federal level legally paper and then we let the police handle the actually arresting and all that because they have more jurisdiction than ICE anyway.

And so in my mind, I think if we were to bring back INS, I do think a lot more cities would cooperate because INS had been long established before. Like the only reason ICE was made was because of 911, right? It was not because people were worried about INS not being a functional uh organization. It was because we were so scared of this terroristic threat that ultimately didn't exist at the scale we thought at the time. So that's what I think is I just think INS would bring back common sense and allow these cities to be like no we'll let them do their thing because to me when we deport someone with ICE they are more likely to come back than if we put them through our own legal system right like if they committed a crime on US soil I think we need to have them tried and arrested uh on the grounds of our law right not on the law of another country not sending them back so they have a chance to come back and then then I think there is a world where we rehabilitate them and allow them a path to citizenship in our country to where they can be contributing at a legal level.

Right. You've been very clear on your stance. Um, and I find it as uncompelling as I'm sure you find mine. So, I I will explain why I find it uncompelling. So, the the reality is that right now there's an economic game being played the world over, the the Western world over, which is we're going to turn a blind eye to illegal immigrants. we're going to import immigrants legally as fast as we can as well. All to drive the cost of labor lower um and to on the side of the left because we know that they will end up voting for more social safety nets and that will allow us to stay in power.

So you've got a voting block, you've got an economic block and so both sides are like, "Yep, cool. Let's just keep importing everybody." Now, when you occasionally get somebody who's like, "I'm actually going to do something about this." um you returned to call it um early 2000s common sense Democrat talking points. Uh you had Obama say nobody should be able to enter the country illegally. We should be um grabbing these people and getting them out of the country. You don't have sovereignty. You don't have safety if you don't know who's coming into your country.

You're also not protecting the American worker. None of that stopped being true because of 9/11. None of that stopped being true because some people may not like the way that they're being um pulled out of the country. I'm empathetic to that that people are going to feel some type of way about like a you know I I'll go so far as to say a paramilitary group that are coming in and like literally snatching people in front of their kids. Don't give a [ __ ] Like we're just going to grab you and get you the [ __ ] out.

Um I I'm empathetic to that. The problem is we have created a real problem for ourselves where we have tens of millions of people in our country illegally. And half the uh half of the political establishment is trying to get them a path to citizenship which is a massive problem because we are seeing that in not being selective about immigration, you not importing people that share your value system and therefore you won't have a cohesive society. And the when people aren't being honest about the need for a cohesive like value set to move a country forward in an intelligent fashion, I think they're setting themselves up for internal strife in their own country in a way that I find deeply distressing.

And we don't have to look far to see what that looks like as these battles begin to play out. So I don't want to find myself in that situation. The countries that thrive e economically are always the ones that have nice stable uh laws because to have private property to be able to do deals, you have to have trust. Not everything can be about what's written down. It just has to be like you and I get along. We understand each other. I'm not going to do you dirty.

You're not going to do me dirty. We both have a reputation to protect. Uh we have a sense of like moral responsibility to the other uh citizens of the nation. when people start seeing themselves of I live in America but I'm actually uh more beholden to uh Venezuela, Somalia, wherever, it's like now you've got a problem. And so that's the kind of thing that we see. And the easy way to talk about it is if I went to Japan and started waving the American flag, people would be like, "What the [ __ ] is this guy doing here?

This is not America. If you want to be in America, go to America. If you want to be in Japan, you want to take advantage of the options in Japan, which I have considered because I love Japan. Japanese culture was trying to do business in Japan. When you're in the video game industry, it's like many roads lead back to Japan. Like there's there's a real uh Tokyo is my favorite city on earth. Anyway, every time I think about it, I'm like, well, am I really prepared to go be Japanese?

I'm like, I'm not. I'm the brash American. Fun place to visit, not where I'd want to live. I would want to terraform it to my sensibilities. So, I don't go do that. So, that's where it's like people need to understand America has a culture, England has a culture. Uh, Norway has a culture, Somalia has a culture, Pakistan has a culture. And so it's like everybody's got to be realistic about are we being selective about are you a foreignb born American and you want to come here?

Are you a foreignb born um like it's entirely possible that Felix uh whose real or whose gamer tag is oh god he was one of the biggest YouTubers ever and uh he ended up moving to Japan and oh PewDiePie. PewDiePie thank you. So, it's entirely possible that PewDiePie was a foreignb born Japanese kid and just always had a sensibility that lined up way more of Japan. Cool. Move there and and ride off into the sunset. Yeah. Um, so I I don't need somebody to, especially as an American, I don't need somebody to have been born here to become a citizen here.

What I need is for somebody to fit the American culture. And that to me is critical. And when you've got tens of millions of people that there was literally just open borders and you let them come in, it's like no, you can't do that. You you've got to boot them out. I guess to bring back my favorite wararmongerers, Israel. Um, how then do we react to and this isn't I'm not saying this is you. I'm more looking at the broader conversation. But how then do we why do we allow people like Congress there?

I think there's like 13 Congress people who have Israeli flags outside their door. I mean, that's a flag representing another nation when primarily we should be focused on the American flag. So, why is it okay when countries like Israel or like I'm Czechoslovakian and I waved the Czech flag when uh they were facing off against Ireland for the world before the World Cup? And it's like when I do that, it's not really looked at as something um that is against the American flag or against my country, right?

It doesn't look like I'm hanging an Israel flag. Well, I'm saying most people look at it like that because you never hear anyone Well, let's hold on. Hold on. Yeah. Anybody that says like um McLemore is so brave. McLemore is saying the dominant position right now, which is [ __ ] Israel. The dominant position is [ __ ] those kids with an Israeli flag. You can wave a Somali flag all day. You can be a congressperson and say my allegiance is to Somalia and people don't sweat it.

Now, right leaning people are going to freak the [ __ ] out. Well, that's where I was. I wouldn't say that's not like some it is not a people don't freak out at Israel flags and uh like when um there some people on the right don't have a beef with waving the Israel flag. But even on the right, that's become contentious. The uh civil war that's playing out on the right right now is largely about Israel. So the safest take in the world is [ __ ] Israel.

Yeah. So there's no way that you're going to say that, oh, I can wave an Israel flag. I just can't wave a Venezuelan flag or a Somali flag. Get out, dude. People go hard in the paint waving all kinds of flags that aren't the American flag right now. And everyone gets a pass except from, I'll say, like a hardcore wing on the right. Now, you think everyone should get Now, let me address Let me address the Israel question. If you are waving an Israel flag, get the [ __ ] what are you doing?

That [ __ ] is crazy to me. I don't care what other nation's flag. Listen, if it's the World Cup and your team is already out or your team isn't playing that day because like I'll go hard in the paint for the UK and Greece because my wife is British and she's Greek by heritage. So now I feel a super warm affinity for the UK and for Greece, but if the UK is going up against America, UK's got to go. So you might catch me in a sporting event being like, "Yeah, [ __ ] UK.

Let's go." But there is a very big difference between I'm a Congress person and outside my office is an Israel flag. Get the [ __ ] out. I don't want to hear any [ __ ] about that. And godamn it, if that's coming from a biblical place, I'm 10 times more annoyed. That's just full [ __ ] for me. I can't believe Mike Huckabe of all people is our ambassador to Israel. Jesus Christ. So not a fan. That gets just as hard of a pass for me.

Now the only question is is Israel culture at like proper Israeli culture? Is it more in line with the US than Somali culture? That is a question that's like, okay, I would rather have people that have built a country that looks a lot like the West than a country that cannot get their [ __ ] together. I'll be very honest. But isn't that operating off of the idea that anyone from another country is going to have that country's best interest in mind over America? Because I feel the average immigrant whether here illegally or not I feel comes here because they want the promise of the American dream and take part in that.

Nope. You do not think that you majority don't. No, I didn't say that. So we have to be very careful to delineate between what I call a foreignb born American and somebody who's here for the welfare state. So if you are a foreignb born American who's like I believe that the individual is the right level of analysis. I don't want handouts. I want to contribute. I want to come make my dream possible, which is I'm going to get educated, meaning get skills because you don't need to go to college.

That was a version. But you just need to get educated, get good at your job, climb the ranks, start your own company, whatever. But economically, you make yourself more and more viable. You make yourself more and more viable in this grand competition where you get a shot. That's it. Nobody promises to catch you on the way down. You get a shot. You're not going to have a king or an authoritarian ruler tell you you can't do something. So you come here, I just want to build a business.

I want to work for somebody. I want to contribute and I want to be able to buy my house, raise my kids. Word, man. Like if you're about freedom of speech, you're um the individual is the spark of divinity. You're not trying to um put religion at the center of laws. Like all of that, I love it. I'm here for it. And I have grown. I've lived in LA now for more than 30 years and LA has a whole bunch of cultures represented and the ones that have that foreignb born American vibe I'm here for.

If you don't and you hate America yada yada uh [ __ ] off. So from a what's the percentage of people or what's the percentage breakdown of that that I won't comment on. I'm merely trying to get people to understand if somebody's reinforcing American culture, which I have now articulated twice in just this uh live. If they're reinforcing American culture, there isn't going to be a problem. If they're here for the welfare state, which I think a huge swath of people that come illegally are here for, uh that is going to especially if they have an allegiance to another nation, that's going to create problems.

Gotcha. Well, we have a super chat to end off the show. Out of curiosity, you just give me the shortest answer. Did you hate that? Completely uncompelled by that answer. There's some logic, but you take it too far. To me, when I hear that, it almost feels like a middle ground opinion of um well, the majority are okay, but there's a small group of people that we got to What's up? I didn't say that. I'm saying there's a very clear delineation, right? If reinforce American culture good.

If here for welfare and reinforce other culture bad, right? But what I said is I think the majority are here to reinforce American culture and take part. You didn't say that. You said that they were going for their version of the American dream. So now I need you to define what is the American dream. Uh to me the American dream is just being able to survive. I don't think there is one really anymore. Free healthcare. Uh take care of me while I'm unemployed. Those are all American dream pursuits.

I don't think those really have anything to tie into this specifically. I mean but you said just survive. Natural Americans still take unemployment. We still push for I mean I push for universal healthcare. I want universal healthcare, right? I don't think so far field define what it means to um survive. You said the American dream was to come here and survive. Well, I'm speaking purely from my perspective as I don't think the American dream exists as we once thought because I mean we can't afford things, right?

I talked about this earlier. I'm not going to be able. Help me help me understand you. Your first thing was I think the vast majority of them are just coming to live the American dream. Then when I said what's the American dream, you said survive. Then when I said what's surviving and you said the American dream is dead. So now you can understand why your first comment to me does not make sense. But that's my point. Survive is so vague that it's like there's no to me.

I would say survive means have a job, livable wage, can have some fun, do what you want, and you're not getting uh like pounds of debt dumped on you. I'd say that's that's what I view the American dream as these days. Like the fact that I have a job if you want to do all of that and you want to enshrine Sharia law. But again, Tom, this goes back to what I said at the beginning of that this is all about um what I what I said at the upfront is that I think a majority of immigrants who come into America want to take part in America and be a part of the American culture.

Right. But just thought exercise me so that I know where your line is. I made my line very simple. Yeah. So if somebody comes here, they want to have a job. Yeah. They want to work, raise a family, not get debt piled on them and have fun and would like to enshrine Sharia law. Does that break anything for you or you're like there's no that's not going to create a problem? I feel like it's the equivalent of how I feel about conservatives going towards this alt-right Christianity over the past 10 years, right?

I mean, it's the same thing. It's a religion that I don't want to take uh control over government. I don't want Christianity to take over. I don't want theocracy, period. the problem. I think the bigger problem on the table is white Christian nationalism in America. Before we move to what I think, but I want to I didn't ask for a bigger problem. I'm trying to understand you letting people into the country. I'm saying the thing the foundational thing that creates a problem is people pulling in different cultural directions.

So I'm giving you one hot button issue of people pulling. Not everybody, not a majority. I just want to know. Yeah. This guy rolls up and he's like, I want Sharia law. Are you like, "Okay, that guy's a problem." No. Yeah. That's where we disagree. Well, and to me, it's like I look at Sharia law, I mean, Sharia law is just dogma, right? Like, well, really fast because you say that uh white national Christians, that is a problem. Yeah. I I think so pulling towards hardcore orthodox Christianity bad, but pulling towards Orthodox Islam, not bad.

I think what we define as Sharia law are two very different things. I'm under the impression that Sharia law is dogma taught under the religion of Islam. Right? And I think in a lot of ways people are selective with it just like I'll take Catholicism because that's what I was raised under. But a lot of us Catholics don't follow our own dogma. Right? But I mean that's the whole thing is like Catholicism has its dogma and we pick and choose what we want to do. Sharia law has its dogma.

They pick and choose what they want to do. I don't know what Judaism's version is but they pick and choose what they want to do from their version of dogma. Right? I don't know the name of it. Yes. But why beef with Christianity and not beef with Islam? Because I think the reality is is all of it is bad. But what's happening right now in America is people are weaponizing Sharia law to try and scare people about Muslims, right? There's always been this idea since 911 of the scary Muslim.

It's why M Donnie wasn't was, you know, people were pressuring him to be um kicked out of the 911 thing. It's why Fox just posted an article about Abdul talking about, oh, it's bad that he's going to have access to private documents if he wins, right? like there's this this association with Sharia law that I think white Christian nationalism has pushed that it's this terroristic threat to America and it's really not. It's just another rel religion's dogma. And I find it really interesting that when you take the three Abrahamic religions, the one that gets the most [ __ ] is the one with people of color.

Okay, but let's get back to why is Christianity bad and Islam. You're sort of sliding from good to just not bad. I'm not saying either. What I'm saying is that both of these things are But you said it was the bigger problem. You didn't want me interrupting you because you were getting onto the bigger problem, which was white. Well, and I and I explained why I don't think Sharia should be the talking point because right now it's part we get now moving on to the white Christian nationalism bad.

Is it the identity group? They're white and they're a group. Is it the Christianity? Is it the dogma? It's the fact that they got people like Donald Trump put into office and this whole idea of white, it's the white power stuff, right? All these white Christian nationalists have this idea that white people are the superior race. White people know what's best and that should be America. Vanishingly small number of people. I think it's a vanishingly small number. Yes. But at the same time, I think they are the ones who have control of our government.

I mean, look at Nick Fuentes right now. Nick Fuentes has was invited to the White House dinner when Trump got reelected, right? I mean, that right there is Trump and that administration signing off on we're okay with this kind of thing, right? I mean, those are the people who got him elected. And there was a in Florida recently, there was a neo-Nazi that almost won his primary, if you remember that. I don't. So, I'll say this. Yeah. You have articulated your position. You've allowed me to pursue you.

Your thoughts are out there for people to do with what they will. Um, I don't agree that white nationalists got Trump elected. He was, by your own admission, it's a vanishingly small number of people. Uh, and he won whether people like it or not. He won with a massive percentage of the vote. So, white nationalists are going to be, I'm sure, a part of that, but a very small part. I I think given they got him elected, white nationalist seeing that they they didn't get him elected.

Like, what math do you use to say they got him elected? Proud boys stand back and stand by. I mean, it's like small [ __ ] but but it's it but those people have a voice, right? You always talk about how the DSA is driving the Democratic party. The DSA is a small voice of that party, right? That isn't true. If there were white nationalists who were getting elected to Congress or uh we have Florida almost and the DSA has the energy of the Democratic party are universes apart.

So, also I'm not even sure you're talking about with neo-Nazi. Oh, I can pull. It's an interesting We're so far over time now. I I will say we'll have to pick this up somewhere else. And I have one super, by the way. Okay, let's do the super then. We will uh but that is fascinating. Uh really fast, just put a capstone on that conversation. Remember, base assumptions control everything. Ryan and I look at the same world and see very different things. Uh what you decide to believe is so informative and so controlling of your entire belief system.

It's wild. Okay, with that, uh give it to me. We have two super chats. Yes. First up comes from some dude on YouTube. How stupid would it be to build an offgrid mesh Laura cyber decks for non- tech people? Off each with its own wait an offgrad. What? Offgrid is what I offrid. Got it. Sorry. Um each with its own open source LLMs that tell the user how to use itself AI as a weapon. And we need to AI to a AI. Second amendment AI, I think is what they mean.

That's interesting. Uhhuh. That's I see what you're saying. Really interesting. And I veto that aggressively. Uh in the same way that we would not allow people to have nuclear weapons, I don't think you can just say, "Yeah, there's no limit to what you can build uh with AI. I think it's it's way too serious of a technology." Um we don't have our hands wrapped around the where that delineating line is. And so right now I'm more worried about regulators being morons uh than I am that just because we don't even know yet if super intelligence is possible.

Um but anyway, I wouldn't say that I want to enshrine that AI is a weapon and people should be able to have unfettered access to it. Uh I think there need to be very strict limitations on that. But um let me read your point in another way that we just need governmental protections that stop them from u blocking us from having AI. If I read it that way then yes that we have open access to uh intelligence with caveats. Yes. If that's what you mean I agree with you.

And next up, Arian Brown with a $50 super chat. Thank you for the $50 super chat. Day 13 of speaking on behalf of the people that want a Michael Every interview. I don't know who that is. But what does Who's Michael? I don't know. Let's look him up. But um day 13, I'm assuming this has been going for a bit. Michael. Michael Ever. Michael Every's capitalized. Global strategist at uh Rabbo Bank. Oh, okay. So it's not we want a Michael every interview. We want a Michael every interview.

Got it. That's my bad. Uh, okay. Cool. He's still not on my radar. I have not looked at him, but this is day 13, huh? It's a good thing you super chatted it because this is the first time, at least recently, that that's made it to me. Okay, I'll look into him. Spongebob, you do a good job of Michael Ever. No. No. Give it up for day 13. Oh, I've never seen a single episode of Spongebob Squarepants. Really? Single one. I've seen memes, but that's it.

Youth, man. Youth. But that's the last super chat. Thank you guys so much for the support. You guys are amazing. Thank you so much again on behalf of Drew. He sends his love. Uh he will be back. It is an unknown date upon which he will be back. So uh he could be back on Wednesday. He might not be back this week. So we'll keep you guys updated as we go. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for the super chats. The support is really felt.

And if you want to support yourself, make sure you attend my next AI master class, Thursday, October 8th at 1 p.m. Pacific. So much has changed in AI. We're going to be talking about Grockbot and a whole lot more. Link is in the description to sign up. It is free and I will teach you how to launch a business or just uplevel your own skill set using AI. Make sure you join us. All right guys, we will see you Wednesday. Until then, my friends, be legendary.

Take care. Peace.

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