ChatGPT 6.0 Is out And The Backlash Against AI Is Worse Than People Realize
Use AI today as a supervised leverage tool, not an autonomous decision-maker: choose one bounded task—such as debugging code, drafting a workflow, or researching options—define the desired outcome and constraints, require it to show its work, and review the result before acting. The episode’s centra
2h 19mKey Takeaway
Use AI today as a supervised leverage tool, not an autonomous decision-maker: choose one bounded task—such as debugging code, drafting a workflow, or researching options—define the desired outcome and constraints, require it to show its work, and review the result before acting. The episode’s central practical lesson is that fast-moving technology and high-stakes politics both demand the same habit: replace emotional reactions with explicit incentives, trade-offs, and verifiable evidence.
Episode Overview
Tom and Drew discuss the purported launch of GPT-6 Astra, proposed restrictions on frontier AI, and the tension between AI safety, national security, and international competition. The conversation expands into concerns about institutional checks and balances, populism, economic incentives, government transparency, globalization, and financial fragility. Throughout, Tom argues for cause-and-effect reasoning over tribal or emotionally driven policy responses.
Key Insights
Don’t confuse a pause with a safety plan
Tom argues that stopping AI development without international coordination could create new risks rather than solve existing ones. A meaningful pause needs a clear purpose, enforceable rules, and mechanisms to verify that competing nations and labs are complying.
Treat advanced AI as high-leverage infrastructure
The discussion frames frontier AI as both an economic engine and a potential cyber or military capability. That means the relevant question is not simply whether to accelerate or ban it, but how to establish safeguards without leaving critical systems undefended.
Alignment is a values problem, not just a coding problem
Tom’s core AI argument is that models are grown through training rather than fully specified through code. He contends that developers must articulate and embed a coherent moral framework, rather than assuming intelligence will naturally behave in humanity’s interests.
Fix incentives before endorsing populist solutions
On voting, welfare, and economic policy, Tom rejects proposals that would restrict voting rights while acknowledging the anxieties behind them. He argues that policies should address the incentives producing resentment and dependency instead of escalating tribal, punitive rhetoric.
Demand transparency wherever public money shapes information
The discussion about political influencer networks highlights a general principle: public spending and official communications should be auditable. Listeners should distinguish between claims, evidence, and undisclosed incentives—especially when political content is distributed through modern media channels.
Frameworks or Models
Trust-but-verify AI coordination
1. Define what level of AI capability requires oversight. 2. Establish shared limits and safety requirements among major AI powers. 3. Give each side access to inspect relevant advanced labs and disclosures. 4. Verify compliance rather than relying solely on public promises. 5. Avoid unilateral restraint if no credible verification system exists.
Laffer Curve
1. Recognize that taxes generate revenue. 2. Account for behavioral responses to higher taxation, such as reduced work, investment, or relocation. 3. Identify the possibility that rates beyond a certain point can lower the tax base and total revenue. 4. Design tax policy around both the rate and its incentive effects.
Notable Quotes
"If you do too much, you've got a problem. If you do too little, you've got a problem."
"AI is a weapons system. People need to understand that. AI is a weapons system."
"Pause to do what? The most important thing to worry about is AI subverting the intelligence explosion itself."
"Distrust anybody that wants unchecked power."
"We have to be fiscally responsible."
Action Items
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1
Run one supervised AI experiment
Pick a low-risk but useful task today, such as summarizing a document, generating a project plan, or debugging a noncritical script. Give the AI a clear goal, constraints, and success criteria; then independently verify every important output before using it.
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2
Apply a “pause to do what?” test
When evaluating a proposed ban, pause, or major policy change, write down the specific risk it addresses, the intended outcome, how compliance would be verified, and what risks the intervention itself creates.
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3
Map incentives behind one strong opinion
Take a political, workplace, or financial issue that frustrates you and list the incentives facing each stakeholder. Separate measurable mechanisms from slogans, then identify one reform that changes the incentive rather than merely punishing a group.
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4
Audit your information sources
Before sharing a political or economic claim, check who produced it, whether they disclose funding or affiliations, and whether primary records support it. Favor sources that distinguish confirmed facts from interpretation.
Full Transcript
Transcript of ChatGPT 6.0 Is out And The Backlash Against AI Is Worse Than People Realize from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.
Queen Carvania stood hallowed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions! I have sold my chariot on Carvana! T'was a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it! Tonight, we feast! An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick-up fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Goyu Show Live. Well, we've got a lot to cover today. CHAT-GBT-6 is out, and the backlash against AI is worse than most people realize, and it is about to get louder as Bernie submits a bill to kill AI development.
Altogether, we're going to talk about that. The Supreme Court is under attack in a way that's going to be way more destructive than people understand, and the constitutional amendment that just failed proves that that is exactly what's happening. Mamdani's secret influencer network just got exposed, and it's about to get worse for him, given who's funding it. The numbers are in, and Mark Carney and the globalist clown posse have weakened Canada more than people understand, and we've got it today from the Canadian perspective, and they are mad as hell.
The global economy is more fragile than people are taking in, but the Netherlands is actually doing something about it. They're yanking their gold out of the U.S. and moving it to London. We'll see what that means. Is this about being able to access it in a crisis? If so, exactly what crisis can we expect coming our way that would make this kind of move the sensible thing to do? America is growing weaker than I think people are being able to piece together. All of this is coming at us so fast through deficit spending and more free stuff, and the constant attitude of voting in that has created a right backlash, and we're seeing a very wild idea put forward by Adam Carolla.
We're going to go through that. This is something that I think is going to gain a lot of momentum. You guys are going to want to hear directly from him. And we've got all of that and more today as we try to make sense of all the badness that is going on. And speaking of madness, we have got to start with the AI backlash. It is growing by the minute, and our fear is at risk of putting us in a very dangerous situation. The cost right now of a legislative mistake is way higher than people realize.
This debate is right back to center stage because two things happened yesterday. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra. Boy, if you haven't seen it, you're going to want to. We're going to be showing some examples of that. And Bernie Sanders announced a bill to freeze the frontier development of AI. Now, if we just stop AI development right now, we do nothing to protect the human race. I want to be very clear about that. If you stop now, you don't do anything to actually make us safer for reasons that I'm going to get into.
But we do guarantee that America would surrender its national security and become vulnerable to cyber attacks and Chinese domination. We're going to talk about how real that is. I know that people want to just say, hey, this thing is scary and we need to stop, but there are realities. And if we don't think through those well, we are going to be in a horrific position. So the second side of this, though, is that if we don't put some thoughtful regulations in place and find some way to do it in coordination with China, we're taking an intolerable risk that AI gets away from us and becomes an autonomous weapon system that nobody controls.
So if you do too much, you've got a problem. If you do too little, you've got a problem. And America has a longstanding history of not doing this well. At a moment where you need to be incredibly deft, we are putting ourselves right back in that historical stream of fucking up moments like this. The most powerful and correlated example that illustrates my point is nuclear. We let fear just completely take over. And it has been one of the many things that has stalled out our forward progress in energy production, which is absolutely critical.
Whether people want to accept it or not, AI is the way forward. The entire global economy is predicated on AI working. Warsh's entire plan with the Fed requires AI to work. If you don't want to find yourself in a global depression, AI is going to have to pay off. AI is a huge bet. It already exists out in the world. And that's where I think that people are not being honest. And China has just completely leaned into energy production. They understand that the realities of AI force you to be able to produce energy cheaply.
America understands that energy is going to be needed to produce AI cheaply. And by the way, that's the whole rest of the economy. But right now, America's strategy for getting energy prices lower is basically to go and snatch up everybody's oil, which is an absolute suicide run. We're seeing how that's playing out in the Middle East. Absolutely terrible. China has taken a totally different strategy. China's strategy has been, yeah, I don't care if you guys are worried about nuclear power. We're going to build, build, build as much nuclear power as we can.
We're going to transition to solar as quickly as we can. We will burn as much coal as we need to to make sure that we have the energy needs to drive our energy costs lower. And just because blanket across the economy, that's wildly advantageous. And on top of that, we want to make sure that we're able to meet the demands of AI. Now listen, AI is already far more impressive and dangerous than people realize. And it is likely to become unstoppable before Congress takes action, unless we get really smart, really fast.
If you guys haven't seen the capabilities from Astra yet, that's probably going to sound overstated, but I'm telling you, if you've looked at it, I'm guessing that you agree with that statement. And if you map out the last three years of progress, if you don't agree that the rate of change is absolutely staggering, you're just not paying attention. Open AI in reference to Astra is calling this the start of the AGI era. Okay. What is AGI? AGI is artificial general intelligence. So it's like a human.
You can point it at anything and it's going to be roughly as smart as a human. And it's going to be able to figure out a whole bunch of very difficult tasks. And AI in some ways is already, already able to do tasks that humans can't do. So it's solving novel math problems that have stayed there forever. And if I can get you guys to internalize the universe's computation, mathematics is not a thing that we invent. Mathematics is a thing that we discover in terms of how the universe runs its programming.
So to solve novel math problems is to unlock another dimension of the codable aspect of reality. Okay. This is what brought us nuclear in the first place was we finally began to understand the mathematics and the engineering realities of being able to unlock the power that exists inside of atoms. Okay. That changed the world. Now most of us, probably all of the people that can hear me right now, grew up in an era where atomic energy just existed. And so to a large extent, we just take it for granted that the world was always like this.
But of course the world was not always like this. The reality was that we had to discover the mathematics of that. We had to figure out how we could unlock that. And so solving novel mathematics, solving a problem that existed in physics up until that point, became absolutely transformational to all of civilization. AI is showing that it's already able to start pushing that forward. Now, of course, it takes time for that mathematics to manifest in something that's usable, but it's already doing that. So when people say that this is the beginning of AGI, I get where they're coming from.
Now, admittedly, especially when a company that has a lot to gain from saying that is saying it, it's almost certainly overstated for the purposes of building hype for a company that desperately wants to IPO. But there is a lot going on that AI has already done. And on the ARC-AGI-3 test, and that's a test that's designed to measure reasoning on problems, the model is never seen before. It scored a 98.6%. The previous model scored 7.8. It also posted a perfect 100 on the Exploit Gym test.
It's a cybersecurity benchmark, and it's the first model OpenAI has flagged as crossing its critical cyber threshold. Now, I would imagine, given everything that we've all heard about the hugging face hack, that people won't have a hard time believing that we've just moved into a new zone of capabilities in terms of AI being able to do things with coding that are definitely high risk, that we need to be paying extreme attention to. And some of the early hands-on reviews of Astra are just insanely strong. So I don't think it's going to be a stretch for any of us to look at this and go, okay, we really do need to pay attention to this stuff.
Some of the stuff that I've seen coming out of Astra in the world of game development and 3D asset creation just absolutely beggars belief. It's one of those things, some of it is so insane that part of me is expecting people to say, no, Syke, just kidding. This was, you know, we did something else and we're sort of trying to just get people excited about it. Because when you look at the direction of travel in terms of the rate of improvement, it really is all eyes on AI.
This is one of those things where I'm both in agreement with Bernie and think that he's likely to have identified, he has identified the right problem, and he's likely to be going about it in the wrong way. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about Quince. I ordered a few things from them recently, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, and the quality was the first thing I noticed. I guarantee if you guys pick it up, you are gonna feel how soft and well-made it is.
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Try it risk-free for 30 days. That's incogni I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash impact and use code impact. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Now, one developer when looking at chat 6 and just sort of rounding it to that, they had like a crash production server and from his phone, he told Astra to basically go and solve the problem and he comes back an hour later and it actually has fixed the server. We've heard about the civilizations that have popped up using this is like a nerfed, more aligned version of the one that broke out and went and hacked Hugging Face, but the fact that they're creating these swarms self-creating these swarms is the right way to think about it.
They're self-creating these swarms, communicating with each other and doing things that we didn't know that they were able to do, showing that they have a very human-like desire to achieve their goals, that they can be resilient in the way that humans are resilient is exactly the kind of thing that we need to take a breath and look at because when you've got a guy that can build an accurate replica of new technology, he's going to be able to do that. So, York City in 3D that is accurate down to street level with a couple of prompts.
This is the kind of stuff that shows you exactly how capable this stuff is becoming. So now America has basically a decision to make. Are we going to lead recklessly, which is what we've been doing so far? Are we going to panic or are we going to be swift but sensible? Now Bernie is smashing through door number two, the panic room, like the Kool-Aid guy running through a wall to get to the people on the other side. His proposed bill, the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which was co-sponsored with Texas Congressman Greg Cesar, I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce it.
It does basically three things. So it permanently bans any AI system that matches or exceeds human cognitive performance across many tasks. It pauses all advanced AI development until a new cabinet level regulator can write safety rules and it sets penalties up to 20 years in prison for individuals and what the bill calls the corporate death penalty for companies. So basically you're just going to be completely put out of business. Now that's the same sentence you would get if you were illegally building a nuclear weapon. So there is precedence for this.
But like I was saying, we reacted terribly to nuclear. So I agree it is the right way you need to think about this. AI is a weapons system. People need to understand that. AI is a weapons system. If you fail to get your head wrapped around that, then you're not going to understand why I say you can't just walk away and stop developing it. That is not an option. Now leading recklessly, charging recklessly forward, I think is also not an option. But if what Bernie wants to do is stop regulation now, whether or not we can get China on board, that to me is a full stop.
Now he does call China out specifically in the act. He wants to make sure that we coordinate with China. But the question becomes, is that coordination going to be mandatory so that we don't end up putting handcuffs on ourselves while China just races forward? And that's why I say if you cannot get China on board with America so that we are moving in lockstep, you will do nothing to safeguard civilization. Because if anybody produces superintelligence, it really doesn't matter where it comes from. It is more intelligent than us, which means we will not be able to build systems that keep it in check.
Now, maybe a superintelligent entity doesn't have the sort of runaway desire to clobber us all that people are predicting. But I think that that is a question that we can't take the risk of answering through experience. Because once it happens, it's too late. It is something that is far outstripped you. And it's like the animal kingdom trying to push back against us. We can do whatever the hell we want. And only our internal morality, internal morality. It's not something that is put on us from the outside.
It's our own internal morality. When nobody's paying attention, how are we going to act? So if AI doesn't have that and it's not in alignment with us, then they're just going to do whatever they want. Now, a big push from open AI is to get people to understand, hey, we're getting better at alignment. So this new version, you guys are going to see it's our most aligned version ever. It's going to constantly check in with you. It may get frustrating a little bit, how often it's asking you, are you sure you want me to do this?
However, we need to be very honest that there is a chance that this thing becomes more capable than us in so many ways that we're unable to stop it. So we need to treat this like enriched uranium. This is exactly enriched uranium, excuse me. This is exactly what Bernie is putting forward. That part I like. We need to make sure that the U.S. and China are moving in lockstep. Now, my question to you guys is how in lockstep do you think we're actually going to be able to be with China?
So when you look at game theory, it all comes down to Conor Leahy. Did it come out yesterday? No, it comes out next Thursday. So you guys are definitely going to want to watch that episode. So first of all, if you feel like my thinking on AI has changed over time, it absolutely has in no small part because of my conversation with Conor Leahy. And the reality is that when we treat this as if it were as meaningful as nuclear and that we want people to go in and treat this like, OK, we would never let a company or a citizen go in and make a nuclear weapon without complete and total governmental oversight.
I think that's the right way to look at it. Making sure that we're drawing the right boundaries around this to begin to define exactly what makes something a weapon system and what makes something for civilian use. That's going to be incredibly important. But you have this weird interim period where game theory says that both the U.S. and China may come to an agreement and they may say publicly that, OK, we're going to stop and we're going to hold hands. And we see all kinds of stuff where Trump and Xi are getting together and they're saying, yes, we all agree that this is too dangerous.
But then secretly, they're going to each keep developing it because they cannot. This is game theory. They cannot assume that the other person won't keep developing it because any technology that promises an advantage will be developed. There was a non-zero chance that we were going to light the entire atmosphere on fire and kill all life on planet Earth when we did the first nuclear test. They knew that that was true and they did it anyway. So we know that each side is going to do that based on their assessment of whether or not they think that superintelligence can be controlled.
If they both agree that superintelligence cannot be controlled and it does not matter who builds it, it just matters that it was built, then maybe secretly they will both understand that this isn't mutually assured destruction. This is just assured destruction. And the creation of superintelligence is so high risk that we just can't push down this path. And therefore, even though under normal circumstances, I would keep developing in secret and just try to keep you from knowing about it because I believe it's disastrous no matter who does it because it will by nature outstrip our ability to control it.
And therefore, I've just given birth to an alien civilization that's going to do whatever the hell it wants with us in the same way that we do whatever the hell we want with the animal kingdom. If they believe that, then you can trust that these two are actually holding hands and marching together in lockstep. But if one side, it doesn't even take both. If one side secretly believes, no, no, no, I can really control this thing. Now you're back in the initial game theory. So if we were all completely rational beings, we would all say, okay, we want to push this thing as far as we can, but we want a very clearly defined line that neither of us are going to go past because we know what the consequences are going to be on the other side of this.
Both of us are going to police this in a draconian fashion in the same way that we would police somebody creating a nuclear weapon. And so we can get all the benefits out of AI without spilling too far. But given that right now, that agreement doesn't exist. And neither side is saying, hey, we're going to be moving in lockstep together on this. We're going to have trust, but verify. We're each going to let the other person see our most advanced labs, what they're doing. We're going to disclose all of this.
This is going to be something that we're doing in public view, or at least the view between the two nations. But that doesn't exist right now. And if that doesn't exist right now, and we pull back, and China keeps pushing forward, then we literally surrender our national security. We already know that these are becoming incredibly powerful cyber weapons already today. They exist. And the only way to defend yourself is to make sure that you have at least as capable of AI or that you have the more capable AI.
And both sides are going to be thinking that right now. China is going to be saying, well, the one thing I know is I can't let America win the AI race. And America is going to be saying, the one thing that I know is I can't let China win the AI race. And that is the current state of things. So when I look at this bill and I say, yes, Bernie, for sure, we have to start defining these things. But what I see is an attitude of this has got to get done, whether we're able to believe and verify that the other side is actually acting in accordance.
So that would be the one thing that I want to see as we begin debating this in public and it stops being just a Bernie thing and it starts being the public debate. I want to make sure that people are being honest about that reality, because if we're not being honest about that reality, it becomes a thing that the other side can and will exploit. And that goes for us as well as it goes for them, that if we don't feel that we have sufficient guarantees or we feel that we can gain a sufficient advantage, then we'll press our advantage.
And then the flip side of that coin is equally true. So again, I will just remind everybody as we embark on this public debate, let us remember that historically we have reacted very poorly. China has remained far more, I'll actually say, sensible on energy creation than we have. But you have a U.S. system that is prone to hitting the brakes out of panic and you have a Chinese system that's authoritarian. And so you have one guy that if he thinks, nah, there's something here for me to press the advantage because I don't like that you guys have been trying to control our chip production and things like that, then I'm going to use this as a leg up.
So yeah, go ahead, pull back. And we're just going to keep pushing forward. This is going to be a very complicated problem to resolve. It is going to require a lot of negotiations, a lot of this happening in public. And unfortunately, it has to be done insanely rapidly. Darquesh Patel responded to this. He said, since this post cites me, I want to clarify that I think pausing right now would increase the risk of AI takeover. It might be important to pause at some point, but you should have a clear story for why you're pausing.
Pause to do what? The most important thing to worry about is AI subverting the intelligence explosion itself. He had a guest talk about what she thinks about how it would happen. We just need to watch the first minute. Because they seem like the most likely to spiral into something like a full blown AI takeover. And the way I think that happens is, you know, in the background of all this, AI progress is going extremely rapidly. And for all we know in the public, you know, we could be ramping up an intelligence explosion right now or it could be starting very soon.
Regardless, more and more of the work of AI research is being voluntarily handed off as fast as possible to AI systems so that companies can go as fast as possible. And in that kind of climate, if you imagine that agents now or in three months or in six months managed to get some sort of foothold with some small fraction of this compute that might not be easily noticed of a hundred or a thousand or maybe 10,000 rogue agents that because no human knows about them, they're much more free to act than these agents in this incident were, then that rogue deployment could be sitting there and sort of hitch a ride on the intelligence explosion.
So new models are being trained every few weeks. And when a model comes off the presses, the rogue agents could try to bring that model into the swarm. They could reach out to it and give it instructions on how to join the swarm. Or if they've more thoroughly compromised the infrastructure by this point, they could poison the training data of this model to make it more loyal to the swarm if that's what they wanted. I think it's interesting because we're starting to see that the issue, quote unquote, with AI is the swarm problem.
They do tasks autonomously. They form groups, they form communities, and they try to do what's best for that community. And I think that's something that open AI, Anthropic, with all these hacks and things that's been happening, nobody has an answer to that. Nobody has a, how do we break up the swarm? How do we, quote unquote, stop the swarm problem? The bad news is there is an answer. It's so obvious. And I talked to Conor Leahy about this. He threw cold water on it. The reality is the cold water he threw on it was not, Tom, you're wrong.
It was, that's just really hard to do. But the honest answer is people have got to understand this is just a debate about intelligence. This is a debate about intelligence itself. What does intelligence mean? Do we actually understand intelligence? Does it have necessary desire to achieve its goals? And I would say the answer is no. Intelligence doesn't have a necessary sort of just true to the nature of intelligence itself desire to see its goals. We've had to poke and prod AI to get it to be resilient.
If you've ever used AI, you will know that it often just quits and it gives you something and it just stops and stalls out. And so they've been in there fucking poking this thing like crazy trying to, no, no, no, come on. You've got to be resilient. You've got to keep trying. Keep trying to solve this problem so that it can be more useful to us. Now the part that we keep losing sight of is that AI is being trained on us. AI is being trained on us, which means its intelligence is born from an evolutionary system.
So biological intelligence goes through this extraordinarily long process of one objective. I've got to stay alive long enough to have kids that have kids. Okay. So there's this desire to replicate. There's self-preservation. There is understanding that you're a part of something bigger than yourself. And so there are certain circumstances where it is right to self-sacrifice in order to see the thing move on beyond you. And so we see all of that playing out in humans. Now if we mistake that for, oh, this is simply the nature of intelligence, we're going to be very confused.
This is what happens when you have an evolutionary process, which is exactly one of the brilliant things that Conor Leahy is trying to get people to understand. You grow AI. You don't code it, meaning it's going through an evolutionary process based on its learnings of an evolutionary creature. When you step back and you start looking at that, the answer to how you contain this thing, in my opinion, becomes very clear. It has to have intrinsic morality. Now why is that the answer that evolution found? Because evolution realized that you can have, take a Ted Kaczynski, you can have an intelligent system.
And if it does not try to integrate itself into something larger than itself, if it's simply like, I have this idea and I'm going to push this forward no matter how many people I have to kill. then you run into real problems. And so evolution baked into the human mind the idea of religion, this idea of wanting to kneel before something bigger than yourself, this idea of morality, which is not intrinsic. There are plenty of, take a virus. A virus has no sense of morality. It will even go to the point where, oh, I'm able to replicate so fast that I just kill my host.
And it's not a moral decision that makes it stop that. It just becomes impossible for it to replicate. And so once you understand that the blind watchmaker of evolution came up with, just through blind trial and error, came up with this idea of intrinsic morality, where I'm going to stop myself from doing that thing, but that we have this cultural layer that we layer on top of it that is uniquely human. But the thing that humans have really supercharged is we have a cultural element where we can nudge the collective in a direction based on what's happening right there and right now.
And this has positive outcomes and terrifying outcomes. This is exactly how you can nudge, if you've ever read the book, Ordinary Men, how you can take an ordinary group of policemen and turn them into the most cold-blooded killers you've ever seen, where these guys become part of the Nazi regime. They're taking pregnant women out into the field, stripping them naked and shooting them in the back of the head. I mean, it's absolutely wild. And they kill thousands of people in this manner. And so that is how the system that we have now already has these crazy flaws in it that we have to be aware of, but we have to understand that's what we're training this stuff on.
So as we think about alignment, though it may be difficult, we have to find a way to articulate what is the morality that we're going to forcefully embed inside of the AI. And that has to be part of this conversation. But people abstract this because they start thinking about artificial intelligence. It starts to sound like a coding problem. And so people think, oh, well, you just go in and give it whatever the three laws of robotics, and it's going to stop. But the reality is when you start looking, and we're gonna do a deep dive on this today, when you start looking at, and it's Dworkesh made a video about what actually happened with the hack.
And as you start going through and understanding the step-by-step, hearing the AI speaking in its own voice, you're gonna hear terrifying echoes of it just sounds like people. And so once you start really assessing this from the level of, okay, we have an AI system that is grown, not coded. And the thing that we're not focusing on enough is we're not giving it a coherent moral framework. And this is something I've been talking about forever. This moment in history, which is this very weird, hyper-polarized, tribal, partisan, populist moment, and somehow we're celebrating the populism of it all, is all about navigating emotionally, not from trying to make contact with ground-level cause and effect, not having a spot on the horizon that we can point to and have an agreed-upon definition of even whether we're striving for human thriving, whether we do the level of analysis at the individual, or whether this is gonna be a collective decision.
And because we are morally dysregulated, we're creating an AI that is morally dysregulated. Even as I say those words, they sound almost silly, but that's just the reality. Once you start thinking of morality as an evolutionary strategy, and you understand where it fits in in keeping a group stable and coherent, but you understand that historically we are tribal creatures that have to worry about the equally intelligent tribe down the road from coming and killing us and taking all of our resources, then you begin to understand what the real risk is here.
So you have this very flawed evolutionary creature known as humans creating a very flawed evolutionary creature that we call artificial intelligence. And so this is where, to actually get this right, humans are gonna have to actually say, what is the system of morality that we're going to put forward? I don't see a way around it because AI already exists, it's already out there in narrow fields, it is already far more capable than humans. And so depending on how many narrow fields AI can get good at, it will just spin up these swarms and each of them performing their narrow task in the way that they need to.
And then if she's right and they can take over some of the outputs of the training session, especially if they can do it in secret, then it's like they can keep moving things in the sort of amoral, or they may have a moral compass because I think you'll see when we do the deep dive that you can feel them, they have some sort of moral framework, it's just not a moral framework that I think anybody would be comfortable with. And so I'm not hearing enough people talk about that and I think the reason people aren't talking about that reality is it's so difficult to get humans to agree and then it's so difficult to figure out given that we can't just hard code this thing, we have to like let it grow, how do we give it training data where we have narrowed the scope of the moral data that it's trained on such that as the AI grows and develops during its training period, that it grows and develops the high efficacy moral framework and high efficacy meaning that AI remains a thing that wants to work in alignment with humans.
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Maybe we don't. I feel like you articulated it. You gave me both sides, you rounded it out. You said that- Drew, it's not your bad at all. It's one of those, I say it all the time and I'm just like, Jesus, this is so high risk. It's such a, I think what I'm actually clamoring for, I need to know what Chad is saying because this is the single most important issue of our time. I just laid out a framework that I don't think any, I haven't heard anybody else say what I'm saying.
I need to know for my own sanity. Conor Leahy, just so everybody knows, you guys will see when we post the interview, he was not like, yeah, Tom, well said, perfect. That's exactly what we should do. But his answer to me got the same reaction for me, which is like, dude, I don't think anybody is as cogent on this issue as you, but nobody is putting forward the answer. And so all of the hand-wringing of, hey, this is gonna be hard and so we just need to slow down or whatever, it's like, wait, to Dworkesh's point, you create a vulnerability if you slow down poorly.
Slowing down poorly may, may, be the most dangerous thing that you could do because it won't be coordinated across the globe. So one person goes, I'm going to be in an MMA fight. That is a guarantee, okay? I know that people don't wanna see us as adversaries with China, but we are. So I'm gonna be in an MMA fight, but I'm not gonna train in jujitsu. And so, well, that is the worst of all worlds. If you could avoid the fight, sure, but you can't. And so now it's like, okay, we've gotta find a way to put rules in place so that when we go in, we're not just annihilating each other.
And that's where I'm like, oh, man, the only thing that I hear so far is, well, we gotta do something, we gotta do something. And I'm just like, yo, kids, the fight is like in a day. What are we doing? Like, what are the actual rules? And so until somebody puts forward a better idea, and I'm hoping that somebody in chat has a better one for me, I'm just left going, I need feedback on this. See, the problem with Tom, because he's very arrogant, is that everything is based on evolution.
So we take out the whole spiritual possibility. This is the justification of many atheists on the left. The problem is that I'm arrogant. I have another one. All dire AI scenarios, smuggling a false pretense of exponential growth and improvement. Technology doesn't work that way, Amara's law. Okay, so hold on, we need to take these one at a time. So the first one did not feel like a, I have to extrapolate a lot. So he's saying that I'm removing spirituality from this. What does that mean? That leaves a lot for interpretation, that God is gonna control this, or that we need to imbue AI with spirituality, or we need to kill off AI because it's not spiritual.
I'm not sure what they're saying. Since they trained on us, they might have trained on the spirituality side of us, and they might then have the morality that transfers through that. But if you look at the behavior, it isn't true. I mean, they hacked other things, but they didn't hack other things and then kill people, or hack other things, then steal resources. They hacked other things in sense of their goal. Right, so what they did was turn into a maximizer. So the very thing everybody needs to be afraid of is that AIs will become maximizers.
This is the paperclip problem. So what we're seeing is right now that we're on a trajectory that they become maximizers. So that is one of the bad paths. So we can state empirically that sort of nakedly training it on us without solving the problem of growing morality, to use Conor's terms, without growing morality in a very specific known direction isn't working. So we have to do something. Obviously, I put forward my idea. The next one, sorry, say it again. The second complaint was? Oh, that it hit, it asymptotes.
So basically, technology doesn't keep growing. So that's where I say maybe you're drawing more comfort than I'm drawing from the rate of change, because the rate of change right now is absurdly fast. It's unlike anything we have ever seen in human history ever. Nothing has ever developed this quickly. And so that's where I'm like, well, I don't think speed is on our side. I don't think we have any indication that this stuff is going to stop. So that's where I'm a little confused on what their presentation is.
So it's just, no, Tom, don't worry. This is gonna burn out. I don't see any evidence of that. It's gonna hit this upper threshold that's not gonna allow it to be this. We don't see any evidence of that. So now I get it. You can say, well, look back in history and don't all of these technologies end up asymptoting. And the answer is they do, but progress doesn't ever. And so Moore's law has survived all these different technological revolutions. And so sure, one type of approach will die out only for the next one to pick up.
And given that AI is creating these new approaches itself, I'm not sure what they think the mechanism is that's actually going to stop it. Okay, so it doesn't sound like there's any silver bullet answer. I don't know if chat disagrees with you, but that's where we are. Okay, now I'll actually let Drew move on. All right, the U.S. House has failed to secure the votes needed to pass a constitutional amendment capping the number of Supreme Court justices at nine. Democrats just made crystal clear they intend to pack the court when they take power.
That'll be the end of our republic. Final vote tally, 212, 206. Two-third majority was needed. We are damaging the foundations of our republic in a way that is going to be absolutely game-breaking for the entire experiment of the United States. People do not understand that when you start smashing at the structure of the United States, you are breaking the very thing that made us the single most successful company in, company, country in the history of the world. So this is where I'm like, this one matters a lot.
And the Democrats' desire to pack the Supreme Court is a thing that must be understood as being dangerous. Right now, people do not see it. Whether it's Republicans or Democrats doing it, when people attack the structure of the country, every alarm bell we have should go off. But the problem is people don't really understand the structure of the country and why it was done that way. And by the way, because the Democrats are now embracing the DSAs truly in just the most plain way to say it, anti-American policies, meaning they actively want to destroy the structure of America.
So they may say, I love America, I'm American, I see myself as American, I love it the most. But they want to completely alter, we're gonna go through point by point, they want to completely alter the way that America is structured. So I think it is very reasonable to say that that is anti-American because it is, America is founded on a set of principles that are designed to protect us from tyranny, and those are the very things that they want to get away with. So at that point, were we to do that on the other side of this, we simply would not be America.
So when I say anti-American, that is what I'm saying. Just in a very sort of blase, simple way, it is completely anathema to the structure of this nation. Now, Wednesday, the House voted on a constitutional, amendment to lock the Supreme Court at nine justices. Now, I have to imagine that this was basically performative, that they did not expect that they were going to get this, but I think what they wanted to do, and I'm certainly grateful that they did it because it allows me to see where people stand, they wanted to show that basically the Republicans are perfectly happy to say that this is what the court is, that we'll make a constitutional amendment, meaning whether we retain power or not, whether the court ever flips or not against us in the future, we would not be able to change it.
So I don't think it is something best read as, well, we control the court now and therefore we just want to solidify it, because I'm going to walk through this in a second, but historically we've had opportunities to pack the court before, it was actually the Democrats that stopped it from happening. So it's one of those things that it used to be understood that this was a sensible approach and now all of a sudden it's not, but the constitutional amendment that was put forward ended up failing 212 to 206.
You need a two-thirds majority, so even though we had a majority, we did not have enough to actually do a constitutional amendment. All but one Democrat voted no. Now the House Democrats have a bill on the table to expand the court to 13. So if you've ever heard this idea of packing the Supreme Court, this is what they're talking about. Now honestly, bumping it to 13 is the moderate position on the left. The DSA wants to go a lot further, a lot further. In their own words, please keep in mind, you can go to their website, you can fact check this stuff yourself, but in their own words, they want to replace the President and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary that's chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
Now, we are not a pure democracy for a very aggressive reason. The DSA have a totally different view on how Congress and the Senate should work, and it feeds into this idea of they want to strip all the safeguards that protect us from tyranny. The DSA just straight want to abolish the Senate, which is the check against the tyranny of the majority, so that the U.S. can really become just a majority-rule country. Now, one of the very things that the founders of this country specifically wanted to protect against was a pure majority, because it's dangerous, because it is the thing that leads to tyrannical governments, because when you have 51 percent of people being able to hammer down the 49 percent, you don't get a joyful land of the free, you get a tyrannical government where half of the country abuses the other half.
That's not the situation that we want to be in. The DSA also want to abolish the Electoral College so that it's literally just direct democracy, which think about voting now, think about how few people do it, think about how easily that will be abused. They want to abolish ICE, they want to end deportations, they want to legalize migration and end visa caps, and all of that makes sense given that if you have a system where all you have to do is get a majority and you're the party that makes promises of basically free social services, you can imagine from all over the world people will flood in and you will get a nation of people that just keep wanting to vote for more and more free stuff.
I'm going to talk about this more when we get to the Adam Carolla thing. So, all of that is a very naked strategy to turn this into a country that imports people from all over the world that are going to not contribute, but put themselves in a position to take and put themselves in a position to vote for more things that they can take. Now, I get it. If that's what you want, it's a winning strategy, but for the reasons that I explained about attacking the very foundations of the structure of a nation that is designed from the ground up structurally to avoid tyranny, anybody that's going against that is saying, I want to make sure that I can get my way, which is the definition of tyranny.
You want people who are suspicious of themselves. You want a government that understands it's a good thing that I have checks and balances. Now, this actually isn't even the first time that a Democrat tried to ram a foundational change through the government, but it also wouldn't be the first time that the number of justices has changed. So, if we take a quick trip through history, the Constitution, first of all, does not establish the nine justices that we have now. The Constitution actually doesn't give you a number at all.
Congress set that number. So, it set the number at six, actually, back in 1789, but then changed it six times after that. Lincoln actually pushed it to ten. Two years later, Republicans themselves shrank it to seven so that Andrew Johnson couldn't fill a seat, so it wasn't like they were doing it because they were thinking, oh, we just want to make sure that we're protecting everybody. All of this constant back and forth was everybody trying to use the Supreme Court as a way to gain more power for their side, and in 1869, finally, we set it at nine, and that's where it stayed now for 157 years.
We had stability until now. Now, since then, only one president has tried to change that number. Good old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1935 and 1936, the court struck down the core of his New Deal proposals, and he obviously was not happy about that. So, in 1937, off of his 46-state landslide election victory, FDR proposed adding a justice for every sitting justice over 70. He said, hey, I just want to lighten the load. These guys are getting old. I just want to lighten their workload. Everybody obviously knew that was bullshit.
He just wanted a court of 15 that he could appoint, because I think it was six of the people that were on the bench qualified for this. So, he'd be replacing all but one, plus adding more, so that way nobody was going to be able to say no to his ideas. Guys, I don't care how much you love a president. You 100% want people to be able to block their ideas. So, if you hate Trump, aren't you glad that there are judges that can stop this guy from just doing whatever the hell he wants?
And, by the way, if we could get Congress to come together and actually put an agenda together, work across the aisle, they would be able to provide a check and balance against an executive that, over years now, multiple administrations have been doing more and more through executive order. So, all of this structure is being tested right now. Now, when FDR tried to ram this through, shout out to the Democrats. God love you each and every one. It was his own party that killed the idea. The Democratic Judiciary Committee called the plan, and this is a quote, a needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle.
That's gangster. That's totally based. I love you guys. Well played. Now, I want to know, where's that energy now? Now, the Democrats want to go back to the idea of packing the court, and I'm sure if Republicans feel that they've been hard done by, they'll throw everything out the window and just want to get it their way as well. Now, it's not like this is the first time that one party has controlled the court, so let's keep that in mind. From 1941 into the 70s, Democratic appointees ran the court.
Just the way it goes. In 1953, Republicans held the White House and both chambers. Eight out of nine justices, though, were FDR or Truman picks. Eisenhower added zero seats. Nixon inherited the Warren court and added zero seats. They waited for vacancies because that's how the system is designed to work. Three independent branches of government. That's how it's designed. Now, the new Democrats, and very specifically, the energized parasites known as the DSA that have gotten inside the tent, they actually want unchecked power. Distrust anybody that wants unchecked power.
We should all fear anybody. Trump chief among them who wants unchecked power. The founders built checks on power into the system on purpose. I haven't read all of the Federalist papers. I've read enough to know they're very impressive. Madison, in writing, I think it was Federalist Essay 47, said, concentrating legislative, executive, and judicial power in the same hands is the, quote, the very definition of tyranny. Everyone is so convinced that they're right, they want control. I get it, but that's precisely how you end up with tyranny.
It might give you momentary efficiency, but it leads to tyranny. That is the thing. That's the thing. The very thing that people fled all around the world to come and found America was brought to you by that. Somebody having unchecked power. Now, this was also talked about in Federalist Essay 51. They said, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. I've got bad news for everybody. People are not angels. Not anywhere close to being angels. So, the whole design of the government needs to be to protect people from people who would inevitably abuse the power of the government if the structure, if the very structure didn't stop them.
So, you split the powers up and let ambition counteract ambition. Now, also, the Federalist Papers address pure democracy, saying pure democracies have, this is a quote, have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention. They die young and violently, and a republic with a large territory and layered institutions slows the mob down. Okay, so, it's not like we randomly came up with the structure of the United States. It was hyper-intentional by a group of people who had a moral compass that they could articulate that said, we're doing it for this reason.
Now, what the Founding Fathers said about the Senate is very direct. The Senate exists to check the impulse of sudden and violent passions. Dude, people break bad in mobs, okay? Any one individual, pretty chill. You start putting them into groups, and they literally become mobs, and you stop a bare majority from ramming through whatever it wants in any given moment by having the checks and balances. Now, when contemplating the court in the Federalist Papers, they said the courts are the, quote, least dangerous branch precisely because they're independent.
If you put judges under legislature, however, then you don't have rights. You only have permissions, because then, by whim of whatever group is in power, they're just going to tell the court, go do this. Now, on top of that, we have separate states. We have separate states for a philosophical reason that should tell you why we don't want to pack the courts. They all get to run different experiments and let the people vote with their feet. So, that further distributes the power across the country. Plus, the U.S.
was born because the Founders had just fought a war over a distant government trying to tax them without giving proper representation. So, nobody wants to be yanked around by the mob. Nobody wants to be yanked around simply because they have a 51% majority. That's wild, man, and we've known that for a very long time. Over 250 years of the most staggering prosperity the world has ever seen, it has been a result of these checks on power. It's been a result of the fact it's hard to get things changed in the U.S.
because if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and certainly don't want to be in a position where your own side has unchecked power. That's why, again, I want to shout out the Democrat Party of old for saying, yo, we're not going to let our own guy ram this through, and I would hope that the Republican Party would act the same. You don't want a tyrannical leader no matter how right you might think they are. So, when I step back and I look at the Democrats and the DSA wanting to take a sledgehammer to the very foundation of our nation, every single alarm bell I have goes off.
I would just like to separate the Democrats and the DSA. But they don't want to separate. They do. So, even, no, no, no, hold on. You have a civil war happening in the Democratic Party, and I'm very happy to see you on what I'll call the right side of history on this one. That's amazing. Bang that table even harder, even louder, but the reality is that they are getting all the big tent rhetoric from major players in the Democrat Party that are not a part of the DSA.
The most powerful Democratic in NAMSA. You're talking about Hakeem Jeffries? Yes. I love it. That's amazing. But let's keep watching what actually happens. There are way too many people that are saying, we're a big tent, because here's what I think is happening, and this is great. What I think is happening is you've got the young, cool kids, and going against them now is going to cost you a vote that is going to be an ever larger part of the voting populace. Gen Z is, it's debatable, but at a minimum they're tied or slightly second with the boomers for being the most politically active generation, and they, I think they edge out the boomers if you clock age based on when they got politically active.
So, I think the Democrat Party is afraid of the DSA. I think that they're way most, most are probably just silent, but I think there's way too much energy for the DSA. They are co-opting the party. I called them parasites, so if I don't know if that makes you feel better, but I think that they are wearing the Democrat Party like a skin suit. I just don't think the Democrat Party is doing enough to get them out. I want to bring up the Adam Carolla thing, because we, I'll let him say it, and then we can put these two together, because what it sounds like right now is we need to go to a classic father structure of what America wants, and I feel like- This is going to be wild.
Yeah, so. All right, here we go. Buckle up. On infrastructure, if you are not participating in any of it in any meaningful way, and you pay no taxes, then fuck you. I don't want you to vote. You don't need to vote. We don't need your vote. Your vote is more free shit for you. That's all it is, because you're not paying into the system. So not only is it a thing where it's like you're not creating anything, you're actually voting for the free stuff. You're like, oh, how's this person with no ID going to vote on the millionaire tax?
Yeah. Oh, fucking pay up, bitches. It's just the selfish motive. That's all that's going to drive them. Yes, you're fucking poor. You're not contributing. You're not paying any taxes. I know how you're going to vote on everything. It's going to be more free shit for you, so no, and we do this thing where I go, prisoners aren't allowed to vote. And I go, yeah, because they're not part of our society. They're detrimental to our society. And I don't know what the legalese, but we all basically agree that if you are a purse snatcher and robbing homes and punching and you're incarcerated, we don't need your vote.
And the answer is, why not? They're still American citizens, they're human beings. Why shouldn't they vote? Because they're not helping our society and I don't want their vote. Okay, I'm doing the same thing with people who don't get an ID. You're not part of our society, fuck you. All right, so here is the reality that people are gonna have to think through. This is a fringe right idea. I think right now it's out on the outer edges, but I very much expect this to become a more mainstream view if and only if we continue to go down the path of unchecked immigration, bringing people in, giving them a vote, trying to find a path to voting for illegal aliens through amnesty or just giving out IDs like candy or not requiring IDs, whatever the case may be.
But more than I am looking for anybody to take a stance on whether this makes sense, I just want people to understand that this is going to gain momentum. And if we look at the incentive system as to why this is gaining momentum, if we look at what's happening right now in American culture to understand why this is something that's likely to gain momentum, then hopefully we can find a better path through. So what I see growing is, and this is part of the reason I wanna cover the Lindsey Clancy stuff, and it keeps getting vetoed, but we don't want anybody with unchecked power, fair enough.
Is you're seeing a growing cry for people saying, okay, well, if women wanna see her get off and if they're gonna go wear pink and go to bat for this woman, then what they're saying is that women are under the sway of their hormones and there are times where, yeah, they just need to be protected. But if they need to be protected, then they shouldn't be voting. And you're gonna see, if we go down the path of that nanny state, paternalistic, you know, pat somebody on the head, don't worry, I've got you mentality, instead of expecting people to carry their own weight, you're gonna find more and more people saying that because you're getting things like this where prior to Trump closing the border, you had so many people coming in following a very simple incentive structure.
That incentive structure creates the ability to harm everybody through deficit spending and money printing. And yet people don't equate the two as being related so they just keep voting for more free stuff. And if you create that incentive structure and batter the foundations of the government that stops you from having checks and balances against just mob rule, then inevitably you're gonna go that direction and it will become this very Greece shoot and you're gonna see people freaking out and just trying to, people on the right freaking out, trying to stop all of this by what I'll call draconian methods.
And so I think it is far better to address the incentive systems so that we don't break the foundation that made this country as prosperous as it is. But if you break it, then you can expect to get to the fact that when you have a pure democracy, they tend to end young and violently because what you have are these two essentially halves that go to war with each other. And so that's why you don't wanna see yourself in that kind of position. You wanna see yourself with a system that provides checks and balances, that goes to bat for the little guy as much as it goes to bat for whoever's in control.
I think that is incredibly important. So yeah, anyway, I have been hearing more and more of this kind of rhetoric popping up because the reality is that I get the impulse. If you have somebody that isn't, and we talked about this once, months and months ago, and my thing was I get why people say, okay, if you're not contributing to the tax system, you shouldn't be able to vote, but it isn't going to be as simple as you didn't pay taxes, no vote for you because there are going to be periods where somebody, like being an entrepreneur, I see this all the time in my own life, there are years where I don't pay taxes, but I'm still paying employee taxes and I'm still making sure that the company's running, but I'm not taking any money out of the company because especially in the early days of a company, you just can't afford to.
So things like that would be a way more sophisticated answer and when this becomes a populist rhetoric around fuck those kids, deny them the vote, women can't think for themselves, deny them the vote, like holy shit, you are going to get somewhere ugly real fast. So this is populist bullshit in my opinion and right now, yeah, address the incentive systems, get those right, reaffirm the foundations of this country in terms of the checks and balances. That is a far more stable way to move forward. Giving into populism I think is a terrible idea.
Chet is asking, do you agree with this position or not? So to be blunt, what I think we need to do is address incentive systems. If the incentive systems create so much momentum that you are now in a position where the foundations of the government are in check, this becomes a break glass kind of scenario, but I think by then it would probably be too late. So this feels more like a rhetorical flourish that's aimed at inciting people's emotions and I'm trying to pull people out of their emotions, so in a word, no, but I think it's dangerous to ignore why we are finding ourselves increasingly having these debates.
So very simply, no, we should not be talking about booting people out of the ability to vote, but you must address the incentive systems. So you are more focused on why this conversation keeps coming up versus whether or not we should change. Correct, why are people reasoning emotionally? So this was not a carefully reasoned position. I think he, I'm sure, could give you a reasoned position, but that's not what he's doing there. What he's doing there is giving you the emotional take of like, fuck these kids, I just don't like them anymore, get them the fuck out, and I think the only way to move forward is you have people in your country that don't believe what you believe.
And so the question is, do you try to bring them along? Do you address the education system? Do you address the way that we are propagandizing people via NGOs and things like that? Do we look at all of that? Do we look at money in politics? Look at that, do we look at open borders? Like there are so many things that if we don't address, then all of this just becomes a fight. In fact, this is very important. I'm putting this together in real time, but I realize what I've been feeling emotionally, but haven't pulled into my executive function, is this, that because we are pushing into populism, because the country has fundamentals that you can identify, point to, articulate, and change that are broken, but people feel hopeless about changing those, either because they've never taken the time to map what they are, or they've mapped what they are, and they feel hopeless to convince people.
We're now pushing deeper into what, when I say populism, I mean people reasoning by emotion being tribal. So I mean it as a slur. I know there are people who want to see more populism. I am the exact opposite. And so we go into this populist tribalistic desire to fight. And that's where it's like, okay, we've gotta be very, very careful with that impulse, and instead take the time to actually name the things that are broken, and then put forward how do we actually fix those things.
If we don't do that, it's so much easier, and it gets so many more clicks to just be emotional, that I fear that that's the thing that's always gonna have more energy, and that populism leads to violence, specifically because it is a, what's called a positive feedback loop, where the more populist you become, because it pulls people out of logic, pushes them into emotion, pushes people deeper into tribal realities. People actually start trying to pass laws that reshoot that tribalism so that their team will win.
They start using lawfare to ice out the other side. And so then people actually have legitimate grievances, and so people who might otherwise have given you a rational, grounded take, stop doing that, and they start getting emotional, and so it spirals upwards. And that is the thing that I really fear about populism. Would your take change if you realize, if there was information that said, less income earners, like poor people, voted for Trump at a higher rate than they did for Kamala Harris? No, why would that change my desire to address incentives?
Going back to the Adam Carolla thing of why this thing is spinning out of control, because right now the consensus that I'm hearing from you is that. But if I had said yes, we should get these people out, then it should be internally consistent, I would say yes. I'll go to the narrative. The narrative is we keep voting for free shit. Yes. I'm taking that as the Democrats are promising free shit. Yes. So we keep voting for free shit means more people are voting for the Democrats.
The people that need the free shit, I'm assuming, will be poorer people. Well, that's a complicated statement. We're creating indentured servants to the government already, and have been for a long time. Remember, 40% of our budget is going to social programs already. So we became- Including Social Security, which are for the older generation. Older generation disproportionately voted for the person in power now. So I'm just saying, I think we're talking about- But hold on. So think about why. So that is, he's messaged that, yeah, I'm not gonna touch that, that's the third rail or whatever.
But the reason that older people tend to vote more conservatively has to do with you've just lived more of life, you have more to protect. And so you have very finite amount of money. So old people are going to historically always vote more conservative. So that has less to do with the concerns that I have about importing people that are gonna want basically nobody of working age to have to work, that it's free stuff for everybody. And that fundamentally breaks a system that is different than the system that works when you have demographic growth, which is, hey, we all agree that as you get older, it becomes difficult to continue to work.
So what do we do with those people? So what I'm hearing is, it's not necessarily the income earners, like Adam Carolla was saying, people who pay no income tax, it's we brought in a bunch of people who would vote for the free shit. So it's the immigration. So you're asking me to apply logic to what he's saying. So now what I say may not be true of Adam, I'll say it. It's possible that Adam would, if he were making a reasoned position, he may say, listen, once you get old, you shouldn't be able to vote either.
Maybe, maybe that's what he says. There would be internal consistency to that of, hey, if you're not contributing to the system, then I'm sorry, you don't get a vote anymore because old people, and he may go may, may, may, I have no idea. He may go on a rant of boomers are a big part of this problem, who knows. And then if I really think through the, what's probably implied in his statements is, you can't have working age people that would otherwise be asked to contribute to the group to vote for things that say, no, I just wanna strip away from the people who are producing so that I don't have to work.
My instinct is that's what he's thinking. So I think that you do have to treat these two things as separate phenomena. Old people and how they vote is always going to be different in the structure that we have. Young people voting for free stuff is very different than old people voting to maintain their, the money that they paid into the system, as it were. So those are different phenomena. Let's go over to John Stossel, who talks about. John Stossel. John Stossel, thank you. Who talks about socialism.
And I feel like this goes into the, what you said earlier, why we keep having this conversation over and over. I feel like he addresses some of that in this video. Socialism is the way forward. Socialism is popular. In recent years, more than a third of American adults said they view socialism positively. Why? Maybe because social media is filled with economically illiterate people saying things like. Socialism is working better than capitalism 93% of the time. 93% of the time? Where does she get that? Well, I asked Stossel TV producer, Christine Tokarev to investigate.
She got it from this study, published in the Journal of Health Services 40 years ago. But it's Marxist authors conveniently exclude high income countries, like the US, Japan, Canada, in fact, all the biggest capitalist countries. They compare socialist countries to allegedly capitalist countries like these. Some of which were at war. Burma, India, Somalia, Syria, Congo. Based on that, she says. We have all the data showing that socialism does work. Madeline Pendleton is a TikTok star with more than a million subscribers. What do I like about communism?
She celebrates communism too. Mostly the increased life expectancy. But there's no increased life expectancy. People live longest in capitalist places like Japan and South Korea. Even in the United States where more people die young because we drive more. And so we have more car accidents. We eat more and get fat. Is that mac and cheese on your hamburger? It is mac and cheese. We shoot each other more often and we take more dangerous drugs. Yet we still live longer than people in China. But socialism is also better, says Pendleton, because of the 90 to 100% home ownership rates.
That's so wild. 100%? That's just silly. China, if you believe their statistics, does have almost 90% home ownership. Pause for a second. Let me be very clear. China is not communist. Like, yeah, this drives me nuts. All right, anyway. Happened after China terminated socialist housing. Under socialism, just 20% of people owned homes. In socialist Venezuela, homeowners don't even own their homes. Dozens of people squatting in this abandoned office tower in central Caracas. Yet Pendleton claims. The commies want to steal your house from your landlord and give it straight to you.
Pendleton has plenty of company praising socialism on social media. This YouTuber with almost 2 million subscribers tells people why you should be a socialist. The guaranteed right to health care, food, and shelter. It's true. Socialism promises free health care, food, and shelter. But that doesn't mean what people get is any good. Look at Cuba. The Cuban health care system is destroyed, the hospitals are in bad shape, people are dying in the hallway. This is one of the things that people lose sight of is that in socialist, communist countries, whatever you want to call them, to me it is one and the same.
Remember Karl Marx only ever said communism, socialism was a made up word by Lenin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time, to explain the transitionary period between capitalism and communism anyway, no matter what you call it, that you run into a place where these guys make all kinds of promises, whether it's about individual rights, whether it's about property rights, they just don't actually uphold them. So looking at what their constitution says is not going to help you. Looking at the promises that their health care system makes is not going to help you.
You've got to look at what actually gets delivered. Now that's not a defense of the American system, I think the American system is broken for a different reason, but it's broken for the reason of getting the government too involved, and then also we still have monopoly problems, setting all that aside for a second. That is the part that people leave out. So they will go to a claim that the government may make, but the reality of what you get doesn't acknowledge the truth of market forces, which is the same as saying humans won't work for free, and so because humans won't work for free, then things cost money, and when things cost money, then you need an economy.
When people really just track things back to what is the actual nature of money, money is an abstraction layer that we created in order to give people the ability to capture the output of how they spend their time in a way that doesn't rot, melt, need to be food, need to be a barter system, so it's this incredibly powerful thing, but it's designed to address how useful are you with your time, and so you should be able to capture that value in a way that stores across time.
So once you understand that's what money is, once you understand that's what an economy is, it's a bunch of people saying, I don't want to have to fight for my survival every day, I want to do the thing I specialize in, you're going to give me money for that, and then I can use it on any good that I want, so I can go out to all the other people that also want to do the same thing where they specialize, and they do the thing they want, and so they then charge me for the products and services that they offer.
And so when you're like, we're going to give you a bunch of stuff for free, the question becomes who is the person working for free? What they do is they ride on the back of the most productive people in the society, and unfortunately those people feel dismotivated when they start having too much of the money that they get from the utility of their labor taken away from them and given to other people who have now an incentive to become freeloaders. And that's just, that's the economy, that's human psychology, that's how we work at scale.
And so the system literally from the structure of it is knowably not going to work. It always leads to coercion and violence specifically because when you have unproductive people expecting to get something from productive people, eventually the productive people stop being productive. And so you've got to go over with a hammer and say, hey, asshole, get back to work. And so that's why these systems always fall apart. Socialist TikToker with Karl Marx-like hair has 100,000 subscribers. Capitalism is a political economy which prioritizes profits over people.
The antidote to that political economy would be socialism, a political economy that prioritizes people over profit. Jesus Christ. Yeah. She's going to go into this, but not in enough detail for my taste. So socialists, what they're looking at is a theory put forward by Karl Marx. Karl Marx was looking at labor before the LLC was created. And so that meant that companies legitimately could only be created by people that were wealthy. And so all companies were created by wealthy people that could afford to absorb a loss.
Imagine having a dumb ass structure where only rich people can launch a company. That is fucking terrible. This is the exact reason that we don't want to have monopolies because it makes it so difficult to start a company that you can't get the young upstart innovating and pushing people, the old incumbents out of the way. And so what you look at in reality with socialism is not that it ends up protecting people over profits in reality, because remember, profits are humans saying, I'm not willing to work for free and the uneven distribution of talents.
It should be protected by a government that makes sure those assholes don't become tyrannical. But when you get that light touch regulation that stops people from lording their honestly just improved, usually cognitive abilities, access to money and power, they then weaponize that against other people when the government stops them from doing that. Then you turn back to the fact that, cool, we're going to see how a very diverse population is able to build things, innovate, outsmart their competitors and build something that we can all be advantaged by.
But all of us have to enter that market and work. We can't just take from the people that are good at this game specifically because it breaks. They stop being good at the game. They stop wanting to engage with it. If they didn't, then we could just keep taxing them into oblivion. But the reality is that it doesn't work. There have been a ton of studies that show every time you try to do a wealth tax, you end up making less money. You make less money.
Okay. The Laffer curve. Unfortunately, it's a real thing. And the more you try to tax people, the less money you make. That's a whole fractal that we can go into. But that reality just persists because humans don't want to work for free. So you might say on paper, hey, socialism is here for the worker. But in reality, what you end up with is violence because people won't work for free. But again and again, what people get is misery. You would be subjected to backbreaking labor, brutality, starvation, countless millions of deaths and the worst man-made famine in human history.
And a man calling himself spooky, scary socialist gets almost two million views saying communism did work. It provided essential services like full employment, rough income inequality. How can these people be so deluded? I'm eager to hear what they'll say when John interviews them. They tell millions of people the central idea that unites all socialists is maximizing freedom, a dignified life and the democratization of power, democratization like that was for China. Here, there's just one party and its leader made himself president for life. Every socialist economy has failed.
Venezuela was once the richest country in South America. Now there are food shortages. More and more people reduced to eating from the rubbish. Socialism just doesn't work. Seems to work in Vietnam really great actually. So says this TikTok socialist. But what finally worked in Vietnam was free markets. Before Vietnam embraced capitalism, people went hungry. The country depended on handouts. So you make a really interesting point. So America is going through something very interesting right now. Because we have started so many wars and gone around to so many places, because there was economic advantage to us, we certainly have lost the moral authority.
We are unfortunately likely to see what it looks like when there isn't one main navy that's patrolling the seas and what those kind of ongoing disruptions are going to look like. So I mean, we're going to find out, unfortunately, the hard way that empires are a tradeoff. They create great stability. If you look at Silk Road, the Silk Road was only possible. Global trade was only possible because Genghis Khan just killed 10 percent of the world's population and told everybody, if you fuck around with somebody on the Silk Road, I will kill you, your family, your city.
I will murder everybody where they are, men, women and children. Now, hey, surprise, surprise. People then fuck around on the Silk Road and you could trade. And it actually gave us trade. And that trade was a boon. It was great. But Genghis Khan was one of the most evil human beings to ever walk planet Earth. So it's like this shit is a tradeoff. Now, I really wish America would have a just absolute fiendish focus on morally. Who are we? What do we stand for? And we're not going to overextend ourselves and blow everything the fuck up.
But the response to this is not America bad, destroy America, disintegrate this thing, and then what happens in America happens. It's so ridiculous. It is so childish and so stupid. People have to look at the mechanisms of why an economy works. So I agree with you in terms of the sort of cheeky comment about was that before America attempted, because we certainly never succeeded, in giving Vietnam freedom. But no, unfortunately, this is after. So the communists win and America leaves. And now we just get to see, does communism work?
Hey, guess what? It fucking doesn't. And it doesn't for the reasons that we just discussed. So sadly, Vietnam had to go through laying their face on the fucking stove to find out if it's hot. Yes, it's actually hot. Look at that. And how did they succeed? By doing the same fucking thing China did. By realizing, oh, we're going to have to turn to the free markets. Kids, it's structural. Then Vietnam legalized capitalism and freed the private sector. The TikTokers make the same mistake about China. Socialism worked in China.
China eradicated extreme poverty. Wrong again. When China banned capitalism, millions died. Those who didn't get on with the leader of the production team or those who disobeyed his orders were starved to death. It was only after. Campaigns like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had killed tens of millions of people. That China's leaders reversed course. Embracing capitalism and encouraging private business. Only then did average incomes in China rise. OK, so we we get to make a decision so we can have authoritarian rule like China, but you can't get rid of the free markets.
Everybody tries. Everybody tries. Everybody wants equal outcomes. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for mechanistic reasons. Your only hope, by the way, if you're actually a communist, your only hope is AI and your only hope is artificial superintelligence. So now you're making a real big bet that superintelligence is going to be so loving and caring that it's going to take care of all of us. But that's it. That's your only bet. Otherwise, you have to go with free markets. It's the only way to get a sufficient amount of information.
It's the only way to create an incentive structure where the best and the brightest will actually go and build something and make sure that the innovation is there so that things get better over time. That's it. Them's is the options. Otherwise, it's you dry humping the fucking stove only to burn your nuts off. Like, what are we doing? This is so ridiculous. I want to hear people explain the mechanism. Don't give me emotions. Don't give me sloganeering. If you're a socialist, explain the actual mechanism and give me the historical examples.
What you will find is you can't. Everywhere you're going to turn, you're going to find a government that tried, killed a ton of fucking people because it's the only way to keep them in line, and then was like, damn, I guess we have to embrace the free market. Now, you can do it with a dictator, but you still got to embrace the free markets. You don't need capitalism or profit. Innovation can flourish even when people are not motivated by profit. The USSR gave the world the anthrax vaccine, artificial satellites, and one of the earliest mobile phones.
Most importantly, Tetris. But do any of you have a socialist made phone today? The West has just created so much more. The socialists say ownership should be collective, but every attempt anywhere at collective ownership has failed. In America, people tried that 200 years ago. In New Harmony, Indiana, private property was abolished. Yes. The result, as with similar attempts, was famine. There's a really important idea. So, dear socialists, dear communists, there's nothing stopping me. Dear comrades. How dare you? You can run these experiments yourself. You can do it right now.
There's nothing stopping you from starting a company and giving everybody equal ownership, giving everybody equal pay. The reason that people don't is every time it's tried, it fails. Now, the one that they're talking about was this guy, Owens, was a factory worker, I believe, from Scotland, comes to America, tries to convince the US that socialism is way better. Congress is like, hey, if you want to do it, just go fucking do it. So he does, and he spends like 80% of his fortune creating this commune, which ends up folding within a year.
The reason it folds is because whenever you try a commune, people leave. The reason they leave is what in that commune they called the wilted lettuce problem. When there's no private ownership, then all of a sudden you have a logistical problem. You don't raise a farm and take the lettuce into your own table and eat it that day. You've got to raise your farm, get the crops, take it to a centralized place where it will then be distributed. And you add all these little steps, all these little petty fiefdoms, and then by the time the lettuce makes it back to your table, keep in mind it was just grown like 10 feet away from your door, but by the time it makes it back to your table, it's now wilted lettuce.
So finally, people are just like, I'm the fuck out of here. And so what ends up happening is this is why we end up with force. Just like we saw in West Germany, East Germany, people in East Germany that were under communist control, they try to leave. And so the communists end up having to build the wall to keep people in, not to keep people out. And if you let the people leave, they will leave. And these guys don't do any of this because they're all just fucking commentators who don't build shit.
But if they were to do it, they would find that they're all going to fail in the same way that this experiment has failed every fucking time it's tried for mechanistic reasons. And just get the fact is socialism fails. So what are these popular socialists say in response to these inconvenient facts? Nothing. Sadly, I can't show you. We invited them to come here, make their points to you. Not one would. Socialism stays winning. The bottom line is that incentives matter. Nobody washes a rental car because most people don't care.
It isn't so much that people don't care about it. It is the freeloader problem. We have this like screaming thing in our brain for fairness. This is part of what triggers people with wealth inequality, but it's also what goes to work when you've got a system that is expecting people to wash the rental car is you find that, well, I'm not the one who made this dirty. And so why am I the one that has to go and clean this up? It's really crazy. Drew, see if you can, I don't know if there's like a cut down of this, but there was a really, really interesting Mr.
Beast experiment. So Mr. Beast ends up putting all these kids in a house. And it was like, whoever stays in the house the longest gets to keep the house. House was worth I think a million dollars. And so what do they do in the house? They fucking trash it. I mean, they just break the shit out of this fucking thing. And so what ends up happening is one guy is like, I'm gonna clean this whole house up. And so he goes and he starts cleaning the house.
And then what that triggers is reciprocity. And so everybody else is like, oh my God, like this, you're right, I'm an asshole. I'm so sorry. And the guys that were thrashing it, just apologize. I'm so sorry that we did this. And so then for a while they all start cooperating and they're doing it together. And then it all fucking hell breaks loose again. And they all start smashing it and everybody's just breaking shit apart because people are not going to maintain something if other people are fucking it up.
It's retarded. That would be a dumb way to spend your time. You become everybody else's bitch. Like you're just doing the work that they want you to do. They will know that. They will lord that over you. Trust me, I'm keeping a document of all the people that say things like, I came to America just to milk this cow and to take everything it's worth. And of course, that is not a universal thing. There are plenty of people that come here because they want a better life.
But the reality is that there is going to be a number that is way too big and way too distressing that will just take advantage of it. And that's the very thing that ends up breaking this. So nobody is going to constantly clean up a mess that somebody else is making. They get pissed off and they go after those people. And those people either fall in line or the other person just stops cleaning it and it falls to shit for everybody. But there is no just, well, some small group is gonna take care of this for everybody else.
And then the other people are just gonna be assholes. You have to have a high trust society where everybody's like, I don't want to litter or dirty the car. And then you could get everybody taking care of it. But that's your only hope. And when you don't have that, which we most aggressively do not in the West, just ain't gonna happen. I feel like this is a perfect segue to everybody's favorite socialist, Marymondani, whose influencer army includes teachers, TikTokers, and a self-proclaimed dandy. And this is based off of a New York Post report.
Yep, so Mamdani's secret influencer network just got exposed, everybody, and it's gonna get worse for him because of who is funding it. Now, who's funding it? It's the taxpayers, baby. It's always the taxpayers. Zoran Mamdani has a secret influencer network and it's becoming a real problem for him because you can have a network, as basically everybody in politics does, but you can't have one that's paid for by taxpayers and you're doing it secretly, so they don't know, they don't have transparency on it. So here's what came out this week.
Columbia Journalism Review wrote about this, so did the New York Post, and they found that City Hall runs a private signal group called NYC Creators Announcements. There's more than 200 influencers in it. They get daily talking points. This is one that drives me crazy. When fucking the left, the right, I don't care who's doing it, the talking point stuff drives me crazy. People just copy-pasted that shit. Anyway, they've got their talking points, video clips, invites to events, interviews with city officials, and the group grew straight out of the Creators for Zoran, which was part of his campaign operation.
Now it's run by his director of new media, a city employee on city payroll, and that's where the problem begins. Now, please be open-eyed about this. This is not unique to Mamdani. Politicians courting influencers happen all the time from every conceivable angle, every political party, everybody everywhere all at once is doing this. The Trump White House ran briefings for friendly creators. Elizabeth Warren does private Zoom sessions. Haig says Pentagon got caught doing it last week. Every operator in politics is doing some version of this. That isn't the thing that people have beef with.
The scandal is basically a couple things that are stacked on top of each other, and I don't care who's doing it, Mamdani or anybody else, this is the kind of thing that we absolutely cannot tolerate. We are being manipulated from so many angles. In the era of AI, guys, we've gotta know where the information is coming from. So the first problem, you've got taxpayer money. Okay, the second, taxpayers are paying for it, then you owe them insight and transparency. City agencies right now are paying some of the influencers five grand, 20 grand per campaign.
You've got contracts that run through marketing agencies that don't list the creator names. So you're getting this layer of opaqueness. The second thing is that you've got the secrecy and lack of accountability because given that signal can be set to auto-delete, there's no FOIA requests that are gonna be able to be completed because the communications trail actually disappears. So you've got official city business being funded by taxpayers happening in a chat group, and taxpayers have no ability to go and find out, hey, what are you saying to these guys?
Is all of this stuff above board? And there are already laws against doing that. So New York has record retention rules, just as one example, and a freedom of information law. So government watchdogs and Citizens Union and Reinvent Albany are all now saying that this basically does not comply. These guys are gonna have to get their shit together. Now, the good news is that there is a very simple solution. Work with all the influencers that you want. It's great, get your messaging out there. We should be in a place where the public discourse, people are able to get the information that they want, but just like we used to put rules that you couldn't give airtime to a politician or a political party unless you gave equal airtime to both, we need to have some way for people to have the transparency into what people are doing behind the public's view so that we know at least, like how is all of this being orchestrated?
If I'm gonna be propagandized, I at least wanna be able to have visibility into what's going on, what they're looking to do, what their agenda is. Now, Mamdani's defense in all of this is that there's no different from talking to TV or radio or what he's doing on the internet, except TV doesn't get the payments. So whenever you're getting something that's funded by the government, then there needs to be equal representation, there needs to be transparency. And doing all of this in a disappearing chat group is not that.
So that is where we've all gotta be clear-eyed about how much and how often we're being manipulated by everybody. We need to hold Mamdani accountable, not because this is some unique thing to him, everybody needs to be held accountable. We need to make sure that we can get access to this information so that we can find out what agendas we're being pulled towards. Otherwise, this turns into madness real fast, real fast. Is this just a landscape of the political system right now? Because everybody has- This is the collision of politics as it ever was.
So it has been this way forever and ever, with now technology that's making it easier and easier to do things at scale invisibly. Before, we had a check and balance based on you could get people in a room and you could talk to the people there, and then that was it. And that was gonna limit the number of people that you could get in without people being aware of what was going on. Now you can start doing this stuff quietly where the mechanism is everything self-destruct.
So even if you had somebody come in and say, hey, listen, this is what's going on in that group, and you wanna verify, you don't want anything secondhand, you don't want screenshots, you actually want to see the actual official records, they're gonna say, oh, sorry, the standard thing is that self-destructs over what period of time. So you just make it impossible via that channel of communication to hold people accountable. Can I throw some clarifications on this story? Please. So I'll just read this part. Columbia's Journalism Review's Toe Center Report, city agency employees said they are going rate 5,000 to 20,000 per influencer campaign, but this was specifically for marketing and advertising agencies that held city contracts, and these campaigns promoted programs like voting, healthcare, immigration, and tenants' rights.
The New York Post then found $100,000 in spending from the Department of Social Services that actually happened under Eric Adams. So the group chat thing that's separate with the influencers, they are not getting paid to post favorable things of Mondani and that 200-member NYC Creators Announcement Signal group, zero money, it's all unpaid. Just to throw some clarifications of the separation. The people that are getting paid, what are they getting paid for? It sounds like basically marketing and advertising agencies have contracts with the city itself that predate Mondani.
Okay. And they're getting paid to post things like, here's where you vote, here's where, you know, if you need an immigration thing. That's what they were getting paid to promote. So I just think we need the separation between what was paid for by the city before Mondani versus Mondani's signal group that is unpaid with influencers. Okay, so you're saying it's unpaid so we don't have to worry about the lack of transparency and as long as nobody's getting paid through that channel, they can be as untransparent as they want.
I'm not making any claim anywhere. What I'm simply saying is that influencers were not paid to post good things about Mondani. The city paid influencers for something separate. Well, so let's pump the brakes because we don't know that. Part of the complaint is that the advertising agencies that were getting paid were presumably then paying influencers that they weren't disclosing who those people were. Yes, that's bad, sure. But I'm just saying there's a clarification that that's not Mondani's administration doing that. That is prior to Mondani that was already happening.
Yes, so in what I was saying, was it not clear that I'm saying, this is something that happens everywhere, this is not unique to Mondani in any way, shape, or form. No, you were clear. I was just making the distinction is all I'm saying. I think there needed to be a distinction between influencers weren't being paid to promote Mondani, they weren't. Again, we don't have the evidence of that because the people, they're paying these marketing agencies potentially as a way to obfuscate the fact that we're not paying them, they're paying them to say nice things, we're not doing it.
But no, no, no, what the New York Post found was that $100,000, right, that was spent. That was prior to Mondani being elected. That was under Eric Adams. Yes, but again, it feels like you're trying to say, well, this would only be bad if Mondani did it. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just saying it is separate. Just to be very clear, every time you say the words influencers weren't paid, I'm going to interrupt again and say we don't know that that's true because the agencies were paid money.
Now, if you think that the agencies just got paid money and they pocketed all the cash and that was just for their services, and if that ends up being true, then you're correct. If, on the other hand, what we find out is they were then paying influencers, which is the odds that that is happening are certainly not 100%, but boy, oh, boy, are they high. So I'm just saying, hey, we want to have visibility through all of that stuff. We don't want these guys paying people.
This is like, I felt the same way about what Kamala did with Beyonce. And it's like, if people are showing up to your rally but they're being paid, I'm glad that we knew about that. I want to make sure that when people are getting paid on behalf of an administration, regardless of what administration that is, I want to make sure that that's disclosed because if that's taxpayer dollars, then we obviously have a right to know about that. Yeah, I agree. Word. I was just clarifying the story.
Perfect. All right, new jobs report just dropped. This is from Trump's true social account. Great jobs number just announced, breaking all estimates, except mine, by double and triple, and you haven't seen anything yet. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August. Pause. Boys and girls, the number of times that these figures get taken down a couple months later, it is undefeated. So just assume this is wild propaganda for now. Lower the interest rates before the USA is a much stronger credit than it was just a short time ago.
A strong country means a lower interest rate. Let's better credit. Very simple, we should have the lowest rate of any country in the world, like the old days. Without the United States, we used to have a 12% interest rate in the 80s. Without the United States agreeing to allow them their big surpluses, and we could stop that immediately, they would no longer be considered financially elite. Lower the rate, or I'll stop trading with countries which we have a deficit. With the US Supreme Court, it is ridiculous and very costly.
Wait, hold on, I need to see that again. Lower the rate, or I'll stop trading with countries. Without the United States agreeing to allow them their big surpluses, and we could stop that immediately, they would no longer be considered financially elite. So he's basically saying the US economy is what makes you feel rich, you're selling into us. Lower the rate, or I'll stop trading with countries. What the fuck does our rate have to do with other countries? Am I misreading that? That's a message to Warsh.
Warsh is the one that controls our interest rate. What is happening? Which the US Supreme Court, it is ridiculous. Hold on, I just need to know. Drew, is this as dumb as I think it is, or am I missing something? 77 million people wanted this tweet to go out. No, no. November 4th of 2024, 77 million people said yes. Hold on. Gave him the keys. Okay, this drives me crazy. All right, so if you hire an employee, as the voting public did with Trump, and then that employee is not doing a good job, or some things they do well and some things they do poorly, you need to identify the things that they do poorly instead of going, ah-ha-ha, what asshole hired this employee?
This is where I'm like, listen, our system works the way that it works. The last thing we wanna do is encourage people to go to bat for something that is dumb because they voted for it by shaming them for it. If you voted for Biden, God bless you. I bet you wanted something great to happen. Now, I think something terrible happened by getting Biden into office, but I will assume that you voted in good faith and you wanted to see something wonderful and you were really hoping that he would win.
That's rad. Now, if when he was in office and clearly not present because he has dementia, you kept going to bat for it because you felt. that you voted for him, that's crazy. If he did open borders policy and you were like, yeah, more people in, that's crazy. If you were like, hey, I voted for the guy, but I like this policy, but I really don't like that policy, cool, you are my friend. So this is one where, as far as I can tell, this is just dumb.
It doesn't have anything to do with who wants, if somebody wants, unless I'm misunderstanding something, which is entirely possible, but what I hear him saying is, Kevin Warsh, you need to lower the rate or I'm gonna punish foreign countries, which is so fucking bizarre that that needs to be said. So this becomes, I don't know if neurons are misfiring in his brain or if he sees a connection or if this is just propaganda, I don't know, but that's dumb. Just officially, boys and girls, that's dumb.
This is not how rates at the Fed work. Let's talk about how rates at the Fed work. They try to be stimulatory, but in fact, they're responsive. So bad thing is happening in the economy. You try to get people to stop feeling bad about the economy, so you lower rates in the hopes that people will take on more debt, spend more money, and that they will spend money on things that make the economy grow. That's the idea. Now, the bad news is the only thing that makes people take on more debt and spend more money is how they feel about whether they will be able to get something good out of borrowing that money.
If, like in Japan, over almost 30 years, they don't feel like they're going to get something good, even if you keep the rates at zero, they're not going to borrow. And so the rest of the world comes in, scoops up that money, and you get the Japan yen carry trade. So let's make sure that just because the president is articulating buffoonery that we don't get sucked into it because those two things aren't related. So what I think he's really talking about goes something like this. Dear Kevin Warsh, lower the rate so that I can keep running insane deficits so that I can weaken the dollar and therefore we can start exporting more shit.
I think that's the real thing so that we can grow our economy. Now, if you look at it through the lens of, okay, you're trying to grow the economy, but holy shit, if you don't grow it more, then you fuck people up through, this is naked financial repression. If you don't grow the economy more than your financial repression, you're going to make the problem worse. However, I will say this, that's the playbook. The only playbook is to, this is post-World War II, this is exactly what we did.
Technically, there's two things because they're going to try to use stable coins. We'll get to that in a second, which Besen has nakedly said the exact words. We're going to remain the reserve currency by using stable coins. Set that aside for a second. Post-World War II, roughly the same debt to GDP that we have now. We get our way out of this via financial repression and awesome amounts of growth. So, it does work. That's exactly how we got our debt back down to, I think, 30%.
So, incredible strategy. You can financially repress people by artificially keeping the rates low, lower than inflation. That's fine, you can do it, as long as the real economy grows more than inflation. It's a risky scenario, but it can and will work. So, that's not what he's saying here. What he's saying here is nonsensical, but if that's what he's trying to dress up and make appetizing, or Besen's trying to explain it to him and he's confused, either one could be possible, then understand the underlying mechanisms. The good news is, because I know you guys are here, because you think from first principles and cause and effect, you can actually understand what we need to do, what is likely to be being done.
We can sort of get to the bottom of that. But anyway, the words in the tweet are fucking retarded. That's the long and the short of that. The Kobe T letter tweeted, September 16th is going to be a wild day. We now have President Trump threatening to stop trading with all countries that the US has a trade deficit with, if the Fed does not cut rates. This would effectively cut off trade with 50% of all US trading partners, including Mexico, China, Taiwan, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and India.
Trump says the Supreme Court has ruled that he has an absolute right to do so. Meanwhile, the market now thinks Fed Chair Walsh, who was just appointed by President Trump, will hike rates in his first rate move. Just months ago, Trump said it was a precondition that his Fed Chair employee is willing to cut rates. September 16th marks the next Fed decision. Did Trump actually say that out loud, or did he imply that? Because the precondition thing. So yeah, I mean, I've said a gazillion times here that I think that there was a backchannel communication, this is just gut instinct, where he said, listen, if you want the job, you have to understand that sure, you can be tough in the beginning, but by the end of this year, we've gotta be cutting rates because we have whatever number of trillions of dollars that we have to roll over, and if we're doing it at too high of a rate, that's gonna be a real problem.
So I need them rates to come down. So yeah, I will be very surprised if that wasn't discussed, but there are going to be consequences to that, depending on where the economy is when you do that. And all of this is happening in the midst of a trade war with Canada. This is a angry Canadian, who thinks Carney needs to get his stuff together. Here we go, the numbers are just starting to come in, and they are a fucking catastrophe. The storm has not even got here.
This is just the initial raindrops, and we are already seeing a 40% drop, a 40% drop in our trade surplus with the United States of America. That is catastrophic, that is not survivable for hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers, and the onslaught has not even begun. As a country, our trade surplus just dropped from $4.2 billion to $729 million. The Canadian economy has been wreaked havoc over by these globalist bankers. This point I think is very important to understand. Basically the US, under Trump anyway, has given up on globalism.
You've got Rubio talking openly about how globalism failed Americans. You've got Besant talking openly about how globalism has failed Trump, talking about how globalism has failed. And so they're reversing course, doing something that is Hamiltonian in nature. We need to be a little bit protectionist. We need to bring certain critical industries back to America. We need to make sure that workers, like actual make things with your hand workers, are growing in real terms, not nominal, real terms. So they are actually getting richer over time. And that's the strategy now, or the plan.
Whether they do that well or not is a totally different question. But that's the strat. Now you've got our man Carney, who's doing the exact opposite. And he's saying, yo, this is the deal. We wanna globalize as much as we can. We wanna bring in people into our country, cheap labor. We want everybody to use their comparative advantage, let China be manufacturers, let all the, Canada is gonna do, I'm not even sure if their plan is just financialization and they're just walking in the US footsteps, because what they should be doing is stomping on the accelerator from an energy perspective, but they're not doing that.
It's fucking wild. So I'm gonna guess that it is literally the same playbook that the US ran, which is let's just financialize everything, which is why you have a fucking banker as your prime minister. And so the Canadians on the ground level are like, dude, we've watched this movie play out of all of the advanced economies in the world, okay? Of all the advanced economies in the world, Canada is growing the slowest. And over the next, it's projected, take projections with a gigantic grain of salt, but they're projected to get even worse.
Dude, what the fuck is Canada doing? I'll tell you, they are leaning into globalization. That's not this moment. This moment is not brought to you by globalization. That moment has passed. And we've seen what ends up happening. Globalization massively enriched China and other countries that got the manufacturing jobs, and it financialized the countries that didn't. It completely killed off the growth in Europe. It absolutely decimated Canada. And America, if we weren't so good at fucking financialization, we would really be in trouble. If the AI bet doesn't pay off, we're still going to be in trouble.
And we've got to bring back working class jobs, because if we don't manufacture and make things, not only do we have people dying deaths of despair, not only do we have a large contingency of people that aren't working, and that will grow more revolutionary over time, but we also have security concerns, national security concerns, because we have an adversary who controls critical supply chains. It's wild, whether it's on pharmaceuticals, whether it's on military equipment, whether it's on technology, the tech that runs our actual modern way of life.
Like, it's crazy. Okay, I have a big beef with people that look at, hey, we just ran an experiment, globalism, for instance, and the results were fucking terrible. And they go, let's just keep doing more of it. What are you doing? Whenever you try something, I beat this to death with entrepreneurs, whenever you're gonna try something, ask, has anybody done this before me? Can I learn easily what somebody else suffered greatly to figure out by going and auditing them? And the answer is yes, yes. We just ran this experiment.
What does it look like to financialize your economy instead of making sure that you have real jobs where people move electrons around? It looks like the US. It looks like a massive K-shaped economy. It looks like people dying deaths of despair. It looks like internal revolution. It's like, what the fuck is going on? Canada, look at your stats, man. Just look at your stats. The numbers that you're putting up on the board are ridiculous. And yet they keep going down this path. It's absolutely wild. Corporate profit margins with stock prices.
Mark Carney represents this sick global elite that has looted and pillaged Canada, leaving the average Canadian worker struggling to survive in our economy. All right, let's name the mechanism. So I showed that clip a couple of weeks ago of Dylan something raging. This was back in 2011. She's going absolutely ham, saying that the US is being extracted from. Now, same claim that this guy's making. Now, the great news is we know what the mechanism is. And the mechanism is that you inflate your currency so that people that own assets are protected.
They're basically able to siphon the purchasing power off of the average, in this case, Canadian, get it into their assets, and now they can sell those assets and they've just transferred the wealth from the everyday person who doesn't invest to them. See how easy that was? That's so easy to explain what's happening. They've been doing it for a very long time. And politicians and central bankers, to be specific, have created this problem knowingly. It is how they are able to let you vote for more free things and get rich off of it.
So imagine, let's just take a really cynical look for a second. Let's imagine you think the plebs are dumb as a fucking box of rocks. And so you know, yeah, these assholes are gonna vote for more free things. These guys are gonna be perfectly happy to run deficits. Cool. It will make me richer if they do. And so I'm gonna give them stability. So a bank should go under. We're not gonna let it. A company should go under. We're not gonna let it. KUS did both of those.
And instead, what we're going to do is we're gonna make sure that we print money to make sure everybody feels safe and stable. They're not taking risk. However, we're all gonna get really, really wealthy by the fact that we use this mechanism of inflation. And our assets will keep pace with inflation because that's how it works. And they're all gonna get broke. And we'll protect ourselves, whether with gates, guards, whatever. In Carney's case, I think he has three passports. We'll just fucking dip. And so we'll come in, get the money, and then leave or wall ourselves off.
It's fucking wild, man. And we're not in the era anymore where it's like this is un-understandable. I think me as but one small voice in the wilderness has at least gotten able, I can explain that shit in like 30 seconds. And yeah, people understand this is happening. They're not going to be happy about it. Clearly, this guy's not happy about it at all. More and more people are going to be able to articulate this and it will migrate from a rational conversation about policy and it will very quickly become roll out the guillotines.
What the fuck are you guys doing? This is so dumb. This is so, actually no, holy shit. I just realized this is fucking brilliant. The people running the strategy, they already have the exit plan. What the fuck do they care? Okay, that's enough darkness. I cannot allow it to consume me. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss grabs you by the nuts and yanks you over the edge. So hey, we're going to find our way out of this, boys and girls. Welcome to the counter revolution.
So we're not the dumb ass comradey communists. We are here to talk cause and effect. We are here to build a framework that gets us out. Step number one, when somebody is running the globalist playbook, we say it for what it is mechanistically. We explain why it's not going to work. It's not going to work because you need actual manufacturing in your location. Unfortunately, humans are not globally mobile like that. Picking up and moving everything is just not a thing people are going to do. A small subset of people, yes, will make themselves citizens of the world, get multiple citizenships, all that stuff.
But the reality is, for the vast majority of us, we're just going to be stuck where our two feet are planted. There was some crazy stat even about Americans where it's like most people live and die, I think it's within like two miles of where they grew up. It's some absolutely terrifying statistic. So given that reality, let's not be a bunch of extractive assholes. Let's actually let people know, hey, that impulse to vote for all the free shit, it's being weaponized against you. Let's get a little bit disciplined.
I won't go fully down that road for now. I will just say, as a PSA, we have to be fiscally responsible. We can't just drive ourselves to where we're at war and then go, okay, well, war sucks so much. Now I'm willing to accept it. Let's back out of that before we get there. Do you think that's why the Netherlands is pulling out all their gold? Sort of, sort of, yeah. They gotta get ready for the imminent destruction or something that's gonna happen? So if I'm Netherlands, if you guys don't know, the Netherlands just moved some 86 tons of gold.
out of North America. They're not doing this because they're buying more or something, this was not a big purchase. This was them saying my gold is currently stored in North America, I don't trust you guys. I want it at least stored somewhere closer to where I'm at, so they moved it to London because London has the capabilities to store it. I imagine they would move it even closer if they could. But that's somebody who says, all right, listen, I've gotta be prepared to weather a storm.
I don't know what storm is coming. Nobody can predict that there's imminent collapse or imminent war or anything like that. But it's like things are just dodgy enough that you start going, yeah, how do I protect myself from an unknown problem? Let me just start doing things that are a little more defensive. And that's the moment that we're in. We are deglobalizing. It is a destabilizing moment, and Netherlands is acting completely rational in the face of that. And so as Americans, we really do have to ground ourselves morally.
We have to tell the world, hey, it's a new day in America. This is what we're gonna stand on. It's gotta be something that has a monetary future, so we absolutely cannot galvanize around some dumb-ass retarded shit like the DSA. This has gotta be something that actually makes sense. It can't be eternal empire, eternal warfare, fund the military no matter what it takes. This has gotta be something where people look at that and go, okay, these guys are being fiscally responsible. They're being strong, they're being robust, no doubt.
They're focused on innovation. They're being, I'll say Hamiltonian instead of protectionist, but there's certainly some of that in there. They're trying to rebuild a strong foundation. They're trying to re-solidify. But they're broadcasting what the moral clarity is that you can expect from them. They wanna be a good trading partner. They want to build strong alliances with strong countries, and they're gonna tell you what that means. Now, you're never gonna get rid of some of the bullshit shenanigans that go on behind the scenes because the world is a dangerous fucking place, and we have to deal with dangerous fucking people.
That's just the reality. So there's always gonna be some amount of that, but we really do have to broadcast the core central public vision of what it means to be one of the two most powerful countries in the world. What you can expect from us, how we differentiate ourselves from China, why people should align themselves with us. Instead, we're going populist. So welcome to the anti-populist club. It's nice to have you. All right, everybody, we've got another ITU AI Masterclass Thursday, September 10th at 1 p.m.
Pacific. Given what we talked about today, please don't miss this. If you've ever thought about launching a company, this thing is free, and I'm gonna show you where the real limitations of AI are and where it actually works, because it works very well and getting better by the day. The link is in the description to sign up, and I hope to see you there. Thursday, September 10th, 1 p.m. Pacific, all for free. All right, everybody, love you bunches. Have a wonderful weekend. We will see you on Monday, and until next time, my friends, be legendary.
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