Did Trump Just Lose? The War is Over, But the Real Winner is Not At All Who You Think

Key Takeaway

When you deficit spend to give people free things and allow fraud, waste, and abuse, you create an inflationary price tag on assets. Anyone who understands the economy knows they must hide from your deficit spending by moving money out of cash and into investment vehicles that rise with inflation. This creates an inflationary cycle where stock valuations become completely untethered from business fundamentals—making theoretical wealth numbers misleading at best.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu analyzes the recent US-Iran deal, arguing it represents a catastrophic strategic failure that may mark America's 'Suez Canal moment'—the end of US global dominance. He breaks down how Trump gave away leverage for minimal gains, spending half a trillion dollars on a war that achieved none of its strategic objectives while simultaneously creating the world's first trillionaire through deficit-fueled asset inflation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Did Trump Just Lose? The War is Over, But the Real Winner is Not At All Who You Think from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

here. here. up up up here. Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. Boy oh boy, do we have plenty to talk about. Things continue to be utterly fascinating in the Middle East. Both Trump and Iran have confirmed that the Iran war is over. A deal has been reached, but the terms look terrible, at least from where I'm sitting. We're going to go over that. Israel denies being bound by the deal and says that they're going to retain any territory taken in Lebanon, despite the fact that the deal says that they've got to go.

Claude's Fable Five gets shut down by the US government over security concerns, but I think there's a deeper drama going on there that we're going to cover. China has China has eliminated useless degrees. useless degrees. useless degrees. [clears throat] I love that. And is committed to out innovating everyone to escape Western containment. It's actually a pretty smart strategy that the US would be wise to follow suit with. Sweden has eliminated permanent resident status for migrants seeking asylum. So, if you want a glimpse into our future, take a look at what's going on there.

Wall Street is running the 2008 playbook with AI debt and it could lead to a disaster. But everybody's caught up in the euphoria as they are want to do. Japan continues to pull money out of the global economy, but may be ending decades of economic stagnation for themselves. So, that one could actually be a good thing. All that and more, boys and girls, brought to you by Kelshi. Shout out to those guys. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. QR code is on the screen.

You can use impact for $10. So that's code impact. If you guys want to know what's going on in the world to get an understanding of what the public sentiment is, Khi is a phenomenal place to do that. Drew and I use it for the show all the time. So check those guys out. And by the way, just uh thank you to you guys for mobilizing with our sponsors. You guys literally crushed the deal that we did on Friday so hard with Code Tom on that hot sauce.

Uh they had to stop it. So that's incredible. Much love to you guys. You're amazing. You're amazing. And thank you for being with us today. We appreciate it very much so. All right. I think we're at time number 38. 39 that we won this round. It is quite literally 39. I wish that were a joke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yes, 39 times, Drew. For real. Why win once when you can win 39 times? That's it. You know, there's so much winning. There's so much winning. All right, so this is what Trump tweeted out over the weekend.

The deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all. I hereby authorize the tollfree opening of the straight over moose and simultaneously here with authorize the immediate removal of the United States naval blockade. Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow. President Donald J. Trump. Here's the part that he didn't mention. It's fee free for 60 days. 60 days. Enjoy your trial introductory offer everybody. This is they turn the straight of Hamoose into a streamer. That's what they're saying for 60 days.

Literally literally you guys. Uh yeah, you get your sample, you get your taster for 60 days, but then it turns bad. I think this is a horrible deal. But let's get into the details. The US and Iran have both confirmed that the war in Iran is over. We have a deal, but the question is, who is the deal good for? Did America just win or did we lose? Now, I'll give you the details of my answer. But first, I think there's two things we have to talk about.

One, much of the agreement is still contingent on things that need to be negotiated. So, I would not get too excited that this is all actually done and dusted. This is, as I've warned about before, the like, hey, we're going to actually finally now start talking about things. And two, at this point, it's really hard to draw too many conclusions because there are at least three different versions of the deal that are in circulation right now on social media that contradict each other. Trump has called one of them just outright fake news.

So, it's hard to know exactly what is true, but I'm going to talk about some of the deal points that come up over and over and over and do seem to be actually pretty legitimate. Though, again, we're going to have to wait for the dust to settle. Okay. Based on early reporting, to me, this looks like a massive loss for the US and a major victory for Iran. I'll take you through some of the deal points that are being telegraphed that explain why I feel that this deal is going to haunt Trump moving forward.

The big one for me is that the US and Gulf States have to put together a $300 billion reparations plan to rebuild Iran. Now, I'm sure that the US is going to try to make some or all of those dollars go to US contractors, but this to me reads like an admission of guilt. These guys are just saying, "Yeah, okay. Listen, yes, we bombed the [ __ ] out of you. We broke a bunch of your stuff, but don't worry. We're going to pay to clean it up." That is wild.

And Trump is nonetheless obviously going to try to spin this is. No, no, no. What do you mean? This is all good. This is all fine and the dollars are going to us. And it's one of those things that will be so grotesque. I don't know if that's the right word, but that if if it actually ends up um being something that we make a lot of money on, there's something so weird about that. I will hate that even if it ends up being financially uh good for the US.

But nonetheless, to me, when you look at this, this is the US negotiating from a position of weakness, not from a position of strength. they are just trying to get a deal done. Also, keep in mind all of that has to be negotiated. And if I'm Iran, I'm not like, "Yeah, just send in a bunch of US people uh into our country that I'm sure will all be spying on us to the nth degree." They're going to want to wall that off. They're going to want the dollars to be just completely um un no strings attached, just give us the money.

And so that's another one of the things that's going to be debated until the end of time. So, we'll see how it all plays out. But again, that one to me just feels like a straight admission of guilt. Second, all of the nuclear stuff is still up in the air. So, we're being asked to believe, though, I think even this is just spin. But we're being asked to believe that the only reason that we went in was to get the nuclear material. Remember, that is not my thesis at all.

This is a Trump administration putting this forward. Hey, we're just here to make sure that Iran cannot have access to a nuclear weapon. These guys are unhinged. They cannot be trusted. uh and so we can't let them have the nukes. Now, Iran said it will commit to non-prololiferation, but the actual terms of the nuclear deal are going to be negotiated later. Now, what are the Iranians absolutely famous for? Everybody acknowledges they are very, very, very good at stalling for more time. So, hey, can you believe that in this negotiated settlement, there's more time to talk about what the actual nuclear deal is going to look like?

Obama's gone on the record saying, "Yeah, you're not going to get to the other side of this with something that's better than the initial JCPOA." I think those are the letters of the agreement that Trump went in and literally blew up uh as we went in uh and attacked attacked Iran. So, we'll see if we actually end up getting something that is marginally better. So, there are things being floated that are um that would try to convince us all that this is going to be a much better deal, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Third, the straight of Hormuse reopens, but on Iran's terms. I don't even think the US is arguing that. Now, they might try to use slightly different words, but the reality is that there's language that says, "We're going to respect Iran's sovereignty. Uh, we won't meddle in their political affairs, and they get to control the straight of hormoves with Oman." Iran is rumored to be collecting a toll after the 60-day mark. So, like I said at the beginning, like you can enjoy your toll-free oil for 60 days.

Now, Trump is saying that it's going to be a joint venture to oversee the strait. [clears throat] Yeah. Let's see how that plays out. All right. Put it all together. Iran gets sanctions reliefs. Oh yeah, we didn't even talk about that. All all kinds of sanction reliefs. sanction reliefs. sanction reliefs. All kinds. Uh billions of 12 billion dollars up front, I think, even just to to sign on the dotted line, plus another 12 down the road in like phase one. So, and this is all broken into three phases.

Each phase getting better for Iran, as far as I can tell, giving them more time to put up more demands. uh the US has to pull their blockade immediately to even begin phase one. So it's just like giving up all of our leverage. Uh so when you put it all together, Iran has sanctions relief. Iran gets to charge a toll. Iran gets the promise of a $300 billion rebuild. Iran keeps the nuclear question wide open. Uh and America gets what? A signing ceremony and a press release.

So this is all madness. This is all madness and and and we'll see. The midterms are going to be a question of the economy. I think Trump can get on the other side of a debacle in the Middle East if everybody's feeling good about the economy. But this, if he was going for getting himself on Mount Rushmore, this was a fail. Homeboy has just like smashed into a wall. Uh, I think this was ultimately about getting the GCC nations to um normalize with Israel, get a thriving economy going there so that Trump could further push back against China, get another region of the world on his side.

If he could cow Iran, I think he would have been absolutely thrilled, uh, and then secure the $2 trillion in promised investments into AI infrastructure for reasons that I hope at this point are just completely self-evident. We're going to talk later about the 2008 playbook of turning the AI debt into something that is resold to the public as being, I'm sure, AAA graded and really safe. Uh, I would highly encourage people to be way more skeptical of that. So you put all of that together, I think the real aims that Trump was trying to get with going to war with Iran, he has gotten none of them, except maybe if we can negotiate something on the nuclear side, that would be uh one thing to come out of this.

But again, I won't believe that that's actually going to be better than JCPOA until we actually see uh what gets done because I don't think anybody's saying that they can't enrich for civilian purposes. Uh so that's on the table. So, they're going to be building a plan that at least gets them part of the way there. Uh, and then I think the thing that Trump is going to walk away saying, "Oh, no, no, no. This this is way better than the Obama deal because we blew all their stuff up." Uh but if they don't have any more restrictions in terms of just oppressive monitoring regimes to make sure that there is no way that they could be um enriching or even just purchasing from another country like if there isn't something just hard and fast that makes that impossible to do even secretly uh I don't think that you're in a better position.

So, um, all the things that he is drum beating that he wants to get are up in the air. Uh, and things that would have made this just an obvious win, um, did not come to pass. So, I think that now whatever money was going to be coming our way in terms of investments, a large portion of that is going to go to defense of the GCC nations is going to uh be put into this reconstruction plan. And then, are we closer to normalizing relationships with Israel?

Uh, I would say we're probably farther, especially if Israel now remains the one sticking point by refusing to adhere to any of the deal points that include their name around Lebanon. Uh, they're saying flat out, we are not subordinate to the United States. We are not beholden to the agreement that they are putting together with Iran. And so, if one of the negotiating points is, hey, US, uh, you've got to make sure that you get Israel under heel, you've got to get them out of Lebanon.

And then they refuse. They keep bombing. Iran via proxies or directly is bombing Israel and that just keeps on going. Then I could see this all turning into literally nothing. Um so we'll see. Is it a signing ceremony? Do we even get that far? If we get to the signing, do we get to the other side of this with a deal that Trump can walk away from uh saying this actually was good for America in a way that people will actually agree? I would say less than 10% chance.

So if you can pull it off, I'll celebrate. But boy oh boy do I not see that coming. And different world leaders have reached out in support of the deal. Um Indian Prime Minister Modi said something Xiinping in China said something. So at the on the surface level the end of a war is always a good thing. So people get to go back home. No more dead bodies. It's at least a humanitarian dub. Now, when we get into the paperwork, into the new into the financial aspects of it.

To your point, it does seem like America is giving a lot and we're losing a lot in that way. Um, is there any way he can spin it or is it just straight up? He'll spin it. It's just the spin isn't very interesting. But the spin will go something like this. So, here here's where I am conflicted maybe is the right word. This may end up being very good for the US at home. So, we had a play in the Middle East. We wanted to do something.

It was going to help us uh block more cheap oil to China. It was going to help us have another region of the world beyond our just our hemisphere where we were in control. Um, if you could get an economically prosperous Middle East that was unified and didn't have to spend all of its money on defense, that those dollars would almost certainly go to our biggest industry, which is we have financialized the world. It's a concept people don't fully understand and so I think a lot of this stuff looks confusing to them.

But you've got the Middle East which is for the most part with the exception of Iran rapidly turning their oil money into investment dollars. The US has the strongest place to invest dollars. AI among them being like of the greatest place on earth to invest your dollars, the US. There is a king asset class right now which is AI. If you win the AI war, which we are very much in with China, now it's like, okay, you're in a really good position. And so, you've got to secure those dollars to build out the infrastructure in the US so that you don't have to absolutely nuke the retail buying public who is going to suck up all this debt that could could end up being brilliant, but could end up being a massive shitowen since 2008.

So, it's like that doesn't mean AI is not the dopest [ __ ] ever. It just means that you get historically a time gap between the infrastructure build out when the dollars actually come in. So it's like that whole play I think is already crater. It's done. Yeah. That he's going to tell you that this was always about the nukes, bro. What what the problem is? And it's like, okay, that's [ __ ] I think uh so the very thing he was trying to do fails cover story maybe he gets a little bit okay.

But now the sort of gross part is uh he'll have a cover story. I don't think it will get him very far, but he'll have a cover story about the 300 billion probably going largely uh through US contractors. He'll at least make that play. Or if that doesn't end up happening, he's going to spin the Iran is now basically a joint venture with the US. Like we control coordinated together the straight of four moves, which I think is total [ __ ] We'll see then. But you've got the other side of this which really could be financially incredible for the energy market in America and that is the US is now bigger than the Middle East and Russia combined in terms of uh oil exports or maybe specifically Saudi and Russia combined anyway were were the largest by a lot and so if the straight of Hormuz being destabilized if the Red Sea being destabilized becomes the back channel thing that all of our negotiators use to bro you've got to send some port send 10 to 20% of your tankers to us fill up an oil fill up in the US we're now the world's gas station [ __ ] the Middle East so it's like you plan A stabilize make it this big AI investment win for our biggest industry which is the financialization of the world or plan B that all falls to [ __ ] you guys are in chaos that incentivizes the world to come to the US.

So, it's one of those where it's like, God, if this ends up working out well for us, it's icky. I don't like it. I'm going to cash those checks, but I don't like it. So, that's I We'll see. We'll see how it plays out. Maybe we're not able to get the world to spin up over here, but I'd be a little surprised if we didn't. So, yes, I think that from that perspective, America is going to be fine. the rest of the world or certainly the Middle East is going to be weird and this is not going to play out to our advantage with China China China and we've done untold reputational damage.

Uh so yeah, there in lies my concern. Okay, period. Full stop. New chapter, chapter, chapter, same book. The thing that scares the life out of me is that when you So people are going to conflate the the persuadable middle is going to conflate Trump with uh capitalism. And so they're now going to swing even more left. You're giving the I think and I know people argue with me which seems crazy but I think the Democrats have swung so far left that their most radical left candidates are going you created a trillionaire so evil like he's a bond villain.

You guys are just fueling that. fueling that. fueling that. Uh second Trump is capitalism. Look at what capitalism just did in the Middle East. Like this was evil. you go in, you say you don't want regime change, but you're just killing everybody left, right, and center all in the hopes of just making more money. Like, that's grotesque. And so, they're going to say that's why you've got to fix the economy, make it work for the everyman by adopting Ma's principles, which kills everybody it touches. And so I'm just like, it is this um magic trick of rhetoric that rhetoric that rhetoric that is not connected at all, but is going to push people farther left.

And then you also have what I consider to be a mind virus, which is this idea that Jews run the world. And so all of that just that just that just pushes people farther and farther left. And the only thing I can guarantee creates absolute death and destruction is socialism, communism. And so it's like, yeah, the the absolute reputational reputational reputational nuke that is how I expect this all to play out and be remembered is terrifying. is terrifying. is terrifying. Yeah, we're going to cover Bernie Sanders on that.

Bill Aman's response um going into the Trump as capitalism. we need to become, we need to fight the trillion thing. But I want to come back to what you said about, you know, the Jews of it all. Um, Israel releasing that statement saying that they're going to still stay in Lebanon. They're going to maintain their territory. That is going to fuel the Israel is the bad guy here. Israel is the war hawk here. Um, is it I don't want to say the responsibility, but should America do something to mitigate that?

Should they strongly send a strongly worded email? like how should the US try to get Lebanon its sovereign territory back? Ooh, I wow. I don't think the US cares at all about sovereign territory in Lebanon. And honestly, I think we have to stop caring. So, our days as the world policemen need to be over. Unfortunately, this is how empires die. They get overextended. This stuff stops working. I have a feeling that what just happened in Iran is going to be remembered as our Suez Canal moment.

This was exactly the thing that people plan to flag. It's always hard to say when an empire died, but you plant the flag in terms of the um England Empire or the British Empire having died when they were unable to secure the Suez Canal. Canal. Canal. And so we've I think just had the same moment play out in the Straight of Hormuz. And so it's like, yep, America's ability to um police the seas that ceases. And so America is not what it once was. I think that is just America stopped being what it once was when we outsourced all of our manufacturing to China.

And I don't think people realize that. And that [ __ ] played out in the the '9s and the early 2000s. So like that ship is sailed. America has got to refind its footing as a manufacturer. And so the fact that we're in this weakened position means we don't get to have uh I mean we can have an opinion, but it's like what are we really going to do to try and go in? Are we going to [ __ ] get back into a hot war with Iran? Like, how many times do we have to lose that hot war before we go, "Huh?" Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Drew, if you're not going to do total warfare, you can't win.

Period. So, what whatever the [ __ ] you were going to do, if you cannot pull it off economically, you're not going to win. Russia couldn't take over Ukraine. Uh, US couldn't slap Iran around. Uh, we couldn't win in Afghanistan. Jesus Christ. So, it's like the only way I I would like to refer everybody to World War II, and this is going to become a big part of my thesis and something that I talk about a lot. All eyes on Japan. Okay, so we go into Iran, we try to like blow enough [ __ ] up that they'll be like, "Fuck, we got to chill." It doesn't work.

It didn't work in Iraq. It didn't work in Afghanistan. It didn't work in Iran. Uh, it didn't work in Vietnam. The reason that these things don't work is because thank god thank god we don't just kill everyone. Yeah. But if you would like a reminder since we ran the experiment, what does it look like when you kill everyone? So we go to Japan, we drop the first nuke, they still didn't chill the [ __ ] out. So we drop another one with promises of like, do you want three and four?

And so they unconditionally surrender. Okay, they unconditionally surrender. We occupy the [ __ ] out of their country. We just occupy it. You're going to do what the [ __ ] we tell you to do. We're going to disarm your police force. Everything, dude. We occupied the [ __ ] out of Japan. Flash forward 40 years later and they are the biggest economy on planet Earth. The dude, they're threatening the US in ways with US is like clutching their pearls. Holy [ __ ] Where the [ __ ] did you guys come from? And they came from you rebuilt us with like you just told us we had to be capitalists and so we just beat you with the [ __ ] game.

So the asymmetric warfare, the like, ah, [ __ ] we don't want to kill too many people, ends in quagmires, quagmires, quagmires, uh, the slow trickle of lives lost, horrific numbers, bad for the economy, bad for them, bad for us, just bad, bad, bad, civil war, horrific destabilization, nasty, total warfare. And if you go in with the right economic principles, they'll come out the other side way better. That is not a justification for war. I want to be very [ __ ] clear. [ __ ] clear. [ __ ] clear. Understood. Understood. Understood.

But that is when you don't get unconditional surrender, you get only madness. And so like I don't even know what we'd be thinking about trying to go into Lebanon and say like do some [ __ ] The reality is Israel has to accept you guys are going to be quote unquote mowing the lawn. That's what we're cutting the grass. That's what they call it. Uh forever. And so one side they'll either be stuck in that Drew literally forever or one of them will kill the other so dead that they stop fighting and then only then on the other side of that will one culture win and then they can move forward.

But dude, much to my dismay, God saw fit to make human psychology such that without complete and total um acquiescence, acquiescence, acquiescence, you fight forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we live in an age where cameras are everywhere. People do not have the stomach. Thank god. Thank God. Thank god to just kill each other into oblivion. So we do this like slow trickle stalemate quagmire [ __ ] Yeah. All right. So we that was the geopolitical angle of it. the economic angle, Trump pretty much got fleeced. This is $300 billion, half a half a trillion on the war itself.

All in as a budget deficit, one issue voter or primary issue voter is financialization of the economy, making sure we get under the debt, making sure we stop money printing. I feel like this didn't help that. that. that. This did not help that. Yeah, this didn't help that. So, was the juice worth the squeeze? Was No. Jesus Christ. This was in right now. This is a catastrophic error that I think is going to be remembered as our Sus Canal moment. It's like, okay, cool. We needed a thing to be like, see, proof.

The American Empire is done. It's done. done. done. So now it's like, get your attention back where it matters. You have a coming economic war, which I hope stays economic, but you have a coming economic war. You're in an economic war with China. Mhm. China. Mhm. China. Mhm. You tried a kinetic play in the Middle East to help win that war, that economic war with China. It did not go well. You are now in a worse position than you were, unless the oil thing pays off so much to the US's benefit that we come out ahead.

But right now, I mean, our oil is not nationalized. We don't have a sovereign wealth fund. That would just make Exxon, Mobile, BP, and those companies have record profits. Thank God. Do you do not want that money in the hands of uh the government? No way. way. way. No, but I'm just saying that in the sense of sense of sense of is that a net good for the US just when US companies are doing good through this though? I feel like I mean sort of yes, it is a net good because we employ Americans.

But it if you really want to make it the kind of net good that you're rightfully wanting, uh you have to stop spending $1.58 for every dollar that you bring in in new tax revenue. So we will be in the same situation if our economy grows slower than our debt which right now is true has been true for a very long time and shows no signs of letting up. If you however balance the budget and then grew your economy it would be a boom. It dude it would be like the 1920s without a coming crash.

We won't do it. But like if you want to know what it felt like in the 80s balance the budget. Balance the budget and get increased energy revenue. Oh my god. And well, uh, spending half a trillion in a war won't balance that budget. Let's go to Bernie Sanders tweet that brings up the trillionaire because I do agree with you. The persuadable middle is feeling a type of way about this trillionaire status. Not everybody's celebrating. celebrating. celebrating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Bernie Sanders tweet and then we'll read Bill Eggman's response.

Elon Musk rise to trillionaire status is not a time to celebrate. It's a call to action to take on the unprecedented income and wealth inequality that now exists in the greed and power of a ruling class that is destroying the social fabric of America. Our democracy cannot survive when one man who contributed 290 million to get Trump elected becomes $700 billion richer since Trump's election. Our economy cannot sustain itself when one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of our society. when 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck.

When we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation and when our kids will have a lower standard of living than their parents, this is not just about wealth. It's about power. Musk and his fellow oligarchs want it all. Together, we must fight back. We can and must create an economy and a government that works for us all, not just Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires. Bill Aman, fellow billionaire, chimed in. Bernie Sanders, it is a time to celebrate. Elon Musk has created enormous value for society by building SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches, and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high-speed, lowcost internet and communication across to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages of our military and our nation's defense.

SpaceX and this technology will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including some of the poorest communities in the US and around the world. SpaceX did make 4,000 new millionaires and a majority of them are in like Hawthorne, California. So, I do have to give credit where credit is due. Um, back to the tweet. Access to lowcost, high-speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of comput advancing AI and humanity. Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wages. 4,000 4,000 4,000 SpaceX employees became millionaires. It's wild. There are some insane number of them that have walked away with a hundred million. Now, that's on paper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But still, it's it's pretty incredible. So, look, I don't know that we have to go through the litany of things that Elon has done. Well, there's just a core concept that concept that concept that if I find utterly fascinating when I read the Bernie tweet.

So Bernie has two threads that he's pulling together and both threads are important to debate but when he weaves them together as if they are the same phenomena that's where I go absolutely crazy. So what he's confusing is Elon becomes a trillionaire by creating value. Let me say that one again. Elon becomes a trillionaire by creating value. Mhm. So he does not become a billionaire by stealing tax dollars for instance uh reallocating wealth. He becomes a trillionaire by creating things that people say are so valuable that they want to own a piece of it.

Uh and that theoretical like desire to own a piece of it because it's all theoretical. But that theoretical desire to own a piece of it theoretically makes him a trillionaire. Okay. So you've got one guy creating a ton of value and Bernie is framing it as if as if he has stolen something. Okay, that's nonsensical. The only reason that we have tax dollars at all, full stop, the only reason that he can redistribute anything is because there is a very very very small group of people that are extraordinarily good at creating value.

Elon Musk is, as far as I can tell, the greatest person at creating value of any human that has ever lived. And so as such, you would expect that this is uh a person that would be the richest person on earth. And so the fact that their theoretical wealth uh is over a trillion dollars should not surprise anybody because you get to be alive at the same time as the person who [snorts] is the best at creating value. Mhm. Now, Bernie is missing a very real piece that exaggerates that exaggerates that exaggerates his theoretical wealth, which again is only wealth in theory.

And that thing that theoretically exaggerates this money or exaggerates for sure the theoretical money is that when you deficit spend to give people free [ __ ] and allow fraud, waste, abuse, when you deficit spend to do those things, you create an inflationary uh price tag on those assets. Because anybody who understands the economy knows I must hide from your deficit spending. I must hide my money. And when I say hide your money, what I mean is you take it out of um cash, just to put it really bluntly, and you put it into an investment vehicle where the price is likely to at a minimum simply go up with inflation.

And so now, cool. If you guys want to spend $1.58 for every dollar that we bring in in tax, which is what we currently do, then I'm going to be sheltered from that by being in assets. Now, the more people that wake up to the need to do that, then you create like an inflationary cycle of all this stuff and the stock market becomes completely unintelligible completely unintelligible completely unintelligible uh from like fundamental economics or I should say fundamentals of the business. So that traditional historic rates between what people are willing to pay to own a piece of it and how much revenue they generate um has just become completely untethered.

Now when you you must factor in two things to make that make sense. make sense. make sense. Uh AI has gotten people very euphoric about a future scenario and inflation deficit spending. If you take either of those two things out the valuations make no sense. Um if you take those things out then Elon isn't a trillionaire. And so it is a very surreal experience to read his tweet and both agree our economy cannot sustain one man having as much net worth as the bottom half of the country.

It he's right about that. But the thing that causes it he's wrong about and the thing that fixes it he's wrong about. The thing that fixes it in his mind will actually exacerbate that dramatically. And so it's like [ __ ] hell. The And this is why I honestly would this is me on repeat because these guys are on repeat. They keep saying the same [ __ ] lie. Now they're either evil or stupid. Either one of those is completely unacceptable. And so every time they bring this [ __ ] up, I have to walk back through the same thing about how we end up with the valuations that we end up with.

And they make out like uh Elon is a king of old who has uh stolen this his wealth through conquest and that like Scrooge McDuck he's got a vault with like a whole bunch of gold coins in it that he sees from people. That isn't how Elon did this. The very fact that America, which basically exists only on financialization, the reason that that's doing so well right now is because one guy is disproportionately good at creating value that other people are able to take advantage of.

And so the Yeah. The fact that he does not understand that, the fact that the things that he champions will destroy that for other people, like to take out Elon Musk, you got to nuke everybody. It's [ __ ] ridiculous. Uh, okay. A couple of follow-up questions. Um, this is both from Yellow Knight and from Martin Mun. Um, Yellow Knight said, "What is value? What is value worth?" And then Martin on the flip side said, "The entire US workforce creates value, Tom." So, I think the word value is being a mousetrap in people's mind.

How would you define value? value? value? I'm so glad they're asking these questions. These are really great questions. Okay. So, uh, value is something that people want. So, um, you can say there are things that people shouldn't value or ought not value. Only fans offers value, but I think a lot of people are going to be like, [snorts] I don't like that. I don't like the value that it offers. But, nonetheless, there's a reason that people pay money for that. It makes them feel something they want to feel, even if it's self-destructive.

So, value can be looked at on a lot of different levels of analysis. What I'm talking about here is specifically economic value. So you can think of it as number go up. So now we have a situation where um you want as a global society we want the number to go up. Now this gets very complicated very fast. So I'm going to oversimplify this. So if people want to drill on in any one part please don't waste my time or your time or the uh the community's time saying I don't understand these other things.

I'm just simply not talking about them. So when you think of number go up as economic value, the world wants number to go up. The reason we want number to go up is that feedback loop of I'm getting richer puts people in a euphoric position. It makes them work harder, engage, be optimistic, things just feel better. People are less violent. They are less downtrodden. This this is everything in the world is about managing people's psychology. And so one of the ways you manage people's psychology is when they believe that their life will be better tomorrow than it is today economically.

They believe that their kids' lives will be better than their life economically. Everyone's like, "Oo, I'm in a good place." They just feel good. They start acting more cooperative. They are innovating harder. They're trying to build new things. They go into entrepreneurship to try to out innovate and to try to get rich and to make more money. And it becomes one of those eras like the 20s or the 80s where it's like people just feel really good about things. It's a great time to be alive.

Having lived through the 80s, I will tell you it felt spectacular. So that's why you want to do it. It has this huge psychological implication that has massive implications to quality of life. And when you think about being a uh somebody who's oriented towards a thriving middle class, that's the what I'm really getting at. People just feel that jubilance. that want to grow, to lean in, to work hard, to believe in the future, to invest in the future, to invest in their children, yada yada yada.

Okay, so now how do we determine what is valuable? It's what people are willing to pay. So there are a whole lot of things that go into determining how much somebody's willing to pay for SpaceX. SpaceX. SpaceX. It's with SpaceX almost entirely psychological. There's very little sort of grounded truth. It's just I think this is going to go up. I think Elon is not only a once in a generation, but he might be a once- in history type value creation person. And because he's building a new thing, he is taking literally rare earth elements essentially and turning them into something that didn't exist before.

And so that creates opportunity. It creates value that didn't exist before. So he did not take a bigger share of the pie. He literally made the pie bigger. And that's the thing that I think humans have a hard time grasping is that through innovation you actually make the pie larger. It is not a zero- sum game. We are making the pie larger. So that's where if you don't understand that part of it that when I say value creation, I'm talking somebody that turned a zero to a one.

And And And it's I guess where a lot of people are coming from is that we were in the talking about it like in the Discord. um the equivalence between like a million a billion a trillion like a billion a million seconds is 11 days a billion seconds is 31 years a trillion seconds is 31,000 years so it's one of those things where it's like a trillion dollars of wealth while yes that's a massive amount yes that's awesome there is something to you can't spend that in one lifetime there is something to how do you pass that on there you could spend a trillion dollars in a long weekend people that say that are so economically [ __ ] That that argument drives me [ __ ] bananas.

So when you start thinking, you yourself said that we spent a half a trillion dollar on two months of war in Iran. So it's just a scale question. We have we have dude, we have $39 trillion just in debt. So uh yeah, we spend a trillion dollars a year in interest, more than a trillion dollars a year in the interest. So this is why I'm saying you could confiscate 100% of Elon's wealth. It would do [ __ ] all. No, but I mean from Elon's perspective, do you think Elon can spend a trillion dollars this weekend if you Of course.

But see, first of all, well, dude, it is a lot of rockets. This guy Oh, God. So, I really want to know, Martin, literally [ __ ] off. If you're No, no, no. Go back. Martin is getting called out and any dumb [ __ ] that posts a [ __ ] It's so stupid. Martin, say why I have lost a script. Say what the script should be. I'm all for criticism, but to just say Tom is dumb or who was the other uh [ __ ] that was saying Tom is bought by Israel.

Do do tell in what way? Like explain what it is. Like get specific, [ __ ] I walk you guys through cause and effect all day. Return the favor. So if you have the cause and effect of where the problem is, I will happily walk through it. And by the way, if you're right, I will immediately update my thinking. It's just a waste of time. So, if we're going to get out of this, we've all got to remember, we've got to understand cause and effect. We've got to be able to build the bricks.

How the [ __ ] do we get out of this? If everyone just gets in their feels and does not have like, okay, here's how the world works. Oh, and by the way, I'm always open to maybe I'm wrong about this. So, give me a better brick. I will put it into my thinking and now I'm thinking more clearly. That's what this has to be. And so I love that you guys criticize because every now and then someone will really hit me with something I'm like, "hm, that's actually probably true." Now, if you guys can help me see that I'm close-minded and I don't evolve my thinking.

Oo, buddy. I'm very open to that. I have not seen that to be true in me in my life. So, please do everyone a favor and just lay out the actual argument. All right. So, um, what I really want people to get on board with, is understanding that to your point about a trillion seconds is, you know, uh, the great one with, um, linear versus exponential growth is, uh, 31 steps gets you to your front door. 31 exponential steps gets you like to the moon and back 72 times or whatever.

I mean, just crazy what a difference it is. So that is all well and good, but in terms of the scale of the money, it's irrelevant. I'm not even sure what people's point is. So if he were going into people's homes and taking their money, then no matter how much or how little, if he walked into somebody's house and stole a dollar, he's an [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] So the the scope of it is somewhat irrelevant. I mean, maybe to a jail sentence it would be different, but the scope of it is irrelevant.

He is creating value. Now the amount of value that he's created again is being exaggerated by the deficit spending, by the money printing. And so people are not able to like put those two things together in some way that I find eternally confusing. eternally confusing. eternally confusing. Martin responded. He said, "The point is your solution doesn't work. The government is not going to balance the budget." budget." budget." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like what? Okay. And now what? We just go, "Oh, I'm going to accept my fate." Is that what?

Hold on. Is that Martin's pitch? Accept your fate. Go [ __ ] steal Elon's money because the government is never going to balance the budget. So, [ __ ] him. Go get his money. What the [ __ ] does that accomplish? Martin, still with me? Drew, if you have an insight, now's the time. time. time. So, okay, let's let's take a step back. Uh, we have a wealth inequality problem. Equality. We can agree. Same page. We agree violently. Okay. Uh, the government is not going to save us. They're not going to balance the budget.

Okay. At this point now, and by the way, we need to stop voting for that. But, okay, we'll put it on the government for now. And we'll just say that we're all helpless. We can't vote intelligently. And fair enough, both sides [ __ ] do this. this. this. But yeah, I mean, Trump ran up the budget. Kamla is going to run the budget. budget. budget. Yep. I just don't want to let myself off the hook. Got it. I I have an obligation to find somebody, champion somebody, make enough noise, something uh to get them in power.

Yeah. Um Yeah. Um Yeah. Um and by the way, for anybody that is just convinced that uh because I think that people have a mind virus about Israel, if you need to hear my nice aggressive criticism, uh Apac was [ __ ] moronic, literally suicidal for running Thomas Massie out of office. That couldn't have been more stupid. I doubt that will help, but there we go. Um, Um, Um, let's have a creative exercise, right? Because they say when you have creative constraints, when you have constraints, you're the most creative, right?

So, constraint number one, government's not going to balance the budget. Yep. Yep. Yep. Constraint number two, um, there will be no, let's just start with the government's not going to balance the budget. How can you propo? What can we do knowing that the government's going to still money print? They're going to still deficit spend. Is there something that the middle class can do or is there initiatives that we should be passing or anything like that? Here, here is the only way to think about it. Politics is downstream of culture if we do not fix culture.

Culture will get fixed and it will either be because of the extraordinary amount of pain and suffering over roughly a hundred years seems to be the cycle. people will finally wake the [ __ ] up and they will Argentina the place, they'll bouquet the place. Like enough suffering will build up in the system, it will change. So there is a reason why there is a on a long enough time frame that you get this only up phenomenon. There's a phenomenal book called The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and he said it does not make any sense to look backwards at thousands of years of history where things just get better and better and better and project that the future is going to get worse.

And I think he is absolutely correct. But that is extraordinarily cold comfort for people who live say through the dark ages which was like 400 years of turmoil. And it was 400 years of turmoil specifically because people did not have access to the information that they needed for culture to do its job of you not having to reinvent everything every [ __ ] generation. And so we're in a position where yes, we'll figure this out. Eventually, we will finally understand, oh, the deficit spending is downstream of the way that we vote, is downstream of the sense of obligation that any of us feel to make this a better place uh for us to actually map out cause and effect and figure out how this stuff works to make enough noise for this stuff.

Uh, and therefore get the people saying the right things to their kids, which then grow up to be good civil servants. uh which understand the chain of value creation and therefore the country is moving in a good direction. So that's going to happen. I just don't know if we can use rhetoric to turn people around. America has pulled it off. We've we've been in moments similar to this from what I can tell. And we've one time had to shoot our way out of it and create the just absolutely hysterical amount of pain and suffering to and by the way just total capitulation.

We beat the Confederate army to the point where they um they surrendered full stop. End of story. And as much as I know people hate this guy, I think it was Roberty Lee. Roberty Lee who could have said, "Now go be um asymmetric tyrannical [ __ ] and um undermine the uh North at every turn." He could have said that, but he didn't. He said, "Basically, go home, go back to your farms. We lost. It is what it is, and now let's move forward." And that decision changed the course of American history.

So again, total warfare, absolute capitulation, they lose, we move forward together as one culture. But every other time, we've actually managed to back off politically. So my hope is that in this age of velocity and volume of information that enough people can speak into a microphone talking about cause and effect, talking about value systems and say, "Hey, can we let's just all agree on where we're trying to go and then let's figure out what we have to do to actually get there." And then we just relentlessly march down that.

And I hope that because of this age that we can talk our way out of politicians refusing to balance the budget. And that I really and look, it's going to take a long time because it it really is and I thought about this a lot from a the perspective of a screenwriter of somebody who wants to create the next Harry Potter or Star Wars. It's always multigeneration. You raise one kid on your thing, but they have to raise their kids on your thing. And if you don't get that, then those ideas never really take hold.

hold. hold. And so we've got to raise a generation of kids who actually understand value creation, who understand that redistribution isn't the magic. It is the ability to innovate and to create a company that creates something of value. Uh to hold our government accountable to the people, uh to want a thriving middle class, on and on. It's a relatively confined talk about constraints. It's a relatively constrained um basket of things that we need to convince people of. Um but if we do that and we get it going for two generations, then America I mean it'll it'll move in cycles for a reason I'll explain.

But we could get America really going in a good direction. Now it'll move in a cycle because the farther you get from the generation, this is the whole idea of the fourth turning. The farther you get from the generation that actually had to do the hard work, that actually had to deal with the suffering, um, people begin to think that success is a law of nature and not something that we had to work and and sacrifice for. All right, I got a new rebuttal in the chat.

This is from Breitb Breitt Bay. Um, if only Tom got this mad about corporations raping the middle class. Corporations are literally taking our money. money. money. How do tell what what's the mechanism? because I can explain the mechanism of how the um government is taking your money. In fact, let me I'll step into his argument. I'll give the best version of that argument that I think is real. Okay. Uh Tom, the thing you're not being honest about is the um American worker has become so disempowered that the corporate overlords, they can charge or they can pay themselves these just comical sums of money and because they have so disempowered the worker, they'll probably site unions.

they would be wrong. But nonetheless, they'll cite them because they've broken the backs of these unions because they're so in bed with the politicians. Look at how much money Elon Musk paid to get Trump into office. Look at how much people like Reed Hoffman put into politics. Like these guys have created a uni party and they're all just there's so much money in politics that the government is always going to do what's best for um the corporations. And so disempowered worker plus the corporations being in bed with the um the government leads to this like grotesque thing where they're just getting richer and richer and richer and everybody else is getting poorer and poor.

Okay. Hopefully they feel seen in that breakdown. There's one more. Oh, please. Oh, please. Oh, please. Wage theft. Wage theft. Wage theft. Not wages not matching up to the productivity. productivity. productivity. But how is that different than what I just said? just said? just said? What I heard you and I might have mischaracterized what you just said. What I've heard you just said was that corporations are leveraging politics to suppress any accountability that they would have to face from the public. Um, versus versus versus No, because that's not mechanistic.

What what I'm saying is you you have twofold. One, what you're calling wage theft, I hate that term so much because it isn't accurate, but accurate, but accurate, but giving the counter argument wage theft. Wage theft mechanistically is a disempowered worker. If the worker isn't disempowered, then they'll negotiate a better wage. So if anybody has an argument that is different than that, please do put that argument forward as I am blind to any mechanism that is other than that. If you have a worker that's empowered, they're going to negotiate a better wage.

Uh there's always going to be a discrepancy between the top and the bottom because of risk uh because of risk and just talent quite frankly. And so if you've got the talent, you will climb up the corporation. you will get paid more because people have an incentive to rise the best and the brightest up because the best and the brightest can make them more money yada yada yada. Okay, so the disempowered worker thing is really strong magic and that one is people and I have banged on about this many many many times.

It is not nearly as dangerous as the left. So if people want to know why I have more animist I have also explained this many times. The left is a far more murderous on one side you have people that steal from you. It's horrible. It's evil and we should stop it immediately. On the other side, you have people stealing from you only to then murder you because it requires so much force. So anyway, both bad, one far more um terrifying and dangerous. Just look at the historical record.

It is far more frequent. It is far more terrifying. It's it is a magnitude. It's like a whatever a 4.5 earthquake or a six earthquake versus a nine earthquake that just completely destroys everything. Everybody's dead under the rubble. Okay. So, uh I've talked about that many times, but the way that you end up weakening the worker is by two things. Regulatory capture so that you really do have these corporations in bed with the government to keep competition out. So, the workers have nowhere else to go.

There just aren't any other companies. So, you get these gigantic monolithic companies that abuse the customer. So, they're giving them less value. Anybody with a single ISP or a power company knows exactly what I'm talking about. Uh it's absolutely horrific. We should never want it. We should be breaking up all of the monopolies as fast as humanly possible. Uh and then you have, and this dovetales into the anthropic drama that we're going to get into in a little while, you have companies that want to make sure other companies just can't come into formation.

It's way too expensive from a regulatory hurdle perspective. Okay, that's way number one. Way number two is that you outsource or you H-1B visa and you disempower the worker because it's like well [ __ ] I'll find somebody that will do it for cheap and I'm going to send this overseas to China. And so when you really look at the math the impact of the unions on a worker's wage was something like 2%. Was very minor. Mhm. minor. Mhm. minor. Mhm. What ends up absolutely controlling your wage is does your employer have another option?

If your employer doesn't have another option either because there's so many other companies innovating that everyone's scrambling for talent that's AI or you've got um there's just it's got to be done here. The factories here and so that's tariffs. And so if you make it so that the company has to be in America. Now listen, I'm a fan of getting the best and the brightest from all over the world. So, I love me a good H-1B visa. H-1B visa. H-1B visa. Putting restrictions on it so it is not cheaper.

Love that. Love that. Don't save anybody a [ __ ] dime with an H-1B visa. visa. visa. Only do that when it's like, "All right, uh, there legitimately is not anybody here that can do the thing." And I know that because I don't save a dime by hiring somebody from outside the country. [ __ ] Make it more expensive. Love it. So now, you know, I'm doing this, not because I'm saving money. It's more expensive for me to do it, but I can't find anybody to do the thing. Cool.

Love it. America has like you want to talk about America's land of immigrants. America is the place that collected the most entrepreneurial, the most risk-taking people, uh, and then the smartest ones just lived because I don't think it only attracted smart people. just literally back in the 1600s if you didn't have the goods you died. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So So anyway, I don't want to muddy this up with H-1B visa. You can set that aside. Shut the door on it. Whatever. I don't give a [ __ ] The thing that I really care about, care about, care about, you've got to have manufacturing here.

You've got to be building things here. And if the corporations have the ability to send the jobs overseas, then you disempower the workers uh an order of magnitude more than the loss of your unions. So if people have another mechanism by which it's happening, definitely put it forward. We can talk about it because I want it's actually bad for me economically from a corporation standpoint because I want to be able to go wherever the labor is cheapest. But as a person who wants America to thrive far more than I want my labor costs to be cheap, uh I want to see people I'm perfectly willing to vote for people who will constrain us and give disincentives for sending things overseas and incentive for bringing things inhouse.

Love it. So if a company is making more money can afford to pay their loyal loyal employees more but don't because that employee has no bargaining leverage is that employer not the bad guy that's from herp derp 300 love it so you get to make a moral decision about that the corporation does it I don't so if you decide that that person is the bad guy then by all means go work somewhere else and this creates the incentive structure for people to leverage being the good guy as a way to get talent.

It's actually a brilliant way to get more talent is to pay more money to treat them better. What what happens is that doesn't happen because the worker is disempowered. And so any time where you're like, you know what, we need we need people to just do the right thing. That is I love it. It's downstream of culture. Let's bake that in. But that's a way longer term strategy, way higher risk, way more likely to fail. What you want to do is incentivize, put align incentives such that when people are being their most selfish, they are walking in lock step.

So I'm like, oh, you want a better place to work with more autonomy. Literally, impact theory is one of the best places on earth to work if you want autonomy. I don't want to micromanage. I do not find that it's very useful. I leave people to do what they want. Now, for people that don't thrive in that environment, this is a terrible [ __ ] place to work. But autonomy is one of the ways that I attract smart people because I'm like, I'm not gonna be in your [ __ ] I'm gonna let you do your thing.

Um, paying people more money. more money. more money. Dude, look at what's going on in AI. You've got people with hundred million dollar salaries in AI. That's wild. So, that's them trying to throw money at the problem. So make sure if you care about more more money that you're going somewhere where it's highly competitive where the person with the talent is in a position of power and that you actually have the talent to justify that negotiation. Uh I want to ask a base assumption question. Do you think that every do you think that everybody should have some type of entrepreneurial endeavor whether it's a side hustle it might not be their nineto-ive but people should know how to make money independently.

independently. independently. That's very different. So entrepreneurial side hustle is about knowing how to make money independently and having a huge risk appetite. Okay, most people do not have a huge risk appetite. Do I think that people would like their life more if they obsessively acquired high utility skills? Yes. That's the entire first phase of my life as a YouTuber was trying to convince people, which by the way, I still believe all the things that I said. I just don't talk about them very much anymore for reasons I've explained a thousand times.

But acquire skills. Get so good you can't be denied. Get so good you create fear of loss in your employer. Now you're in a good position. good position. good position. So that like people should be obsessively focused on that. But right now in culture they feel like they're being taken advantage of when their boss wants them to get better. That's wild. And Tim Dylan, who I find very funny and he's very smart, but I saw something he recorded, I don't know this maybe back in 2023, and he was saying that he fully supports that workers realize that corporate America is a scam.

Therefore, they're doing as little as possible um and just trying to make as much as much money as possible by like using he was talking about woke tactics, using woke tactics to terrify their boss to get more money for doing less work. And I was like, "Holy Jesus." If you can't see how poorly that plays out over a long enough time frame when you've got uh China doing the exact opposite and proving the moments in history when a dictatorship uh is worth its weight in gold because you can just tell people you can't get that degree in college anymore.

It doesn't exist because those are low utility degrees. So all of you are going to be focused on engineering or whatever. And we're just going to subsidize industries. we're going to take from taxpayers and we're going to subsidize the industries we have decided are in our best national interest. Now, put that country up against a country that's doing the exact opposite culturally where it's like, hey, your corporate overlords are evil. Essentially, they're doing wage theft on you. You might as well do wage theft on them and do nothing and try to get more and more money for it.

That will be the death of this country. Cool. Uh Ryan, anything I missed in the chat that you see? Uh nothing that you didn't already bring up. I think you hit most of chat's points. points. points. Cool. Let's do some super chats. Yep, we got two. First up from Marushia Dark, we have I'd like to propose the term K-shaped attention economy to describe the simultaneous rise in popularity of both long form and short form content, but how their audiences seem to diverge with little overlap. Thoughts?

Thoughts? Thoughts? Damn, Damn, Damn, Marushia. Marushia. Marushia. Damn, you might be on to something there. there. there. I So, I engage with both types. My hope is that most people do, but I could be wrong. And there is certainly something that we need to be very careful of. So Lisa and I were watching somebody color with a glitter pen yesterday. And I said to her, "This is why there's no more uh Harry Potters being developed because you're in competition with people watching somebody color with a glitter pen." And it was both this is how my wife and I are choosing to spend our time right now.

Uh so it the attention economy is huge. if somebody is putting all of their time and attention into short form. And something I hear over and over and over, I don't know if it's actually factually true, but something that I hear a lot is that um universities are fairly uniformly backing off of like reading assignments because people just won't read. That's wild. If that's true, that is a level of devastating that I don't quite know what to do with. But then as I was thinking that thought, I thought the number of times I've told somebody who gave me a physical copy of their book, Mike, you need to tell your publisher to get this on Audible because I will listen to it.

I'm not going to sit down and read it. Now, [clears throat] for me, that's an efficiency thing. Uh because now I can take the information in as I'm cooking, brushing my teeth, eating in ways that I can't with a physical book that I have to hold or just walking around. Um, so there there is something there and people need to be very very careful and I worry that Marushia is correct. Patrick Wrightson for a $50 super chat. Let's go Patrick. Let's go Patrick Ryson. Nice to see you, brother.

brother. brother. Patrick says crabs in the bucket. Man, it's honestly sad to watch. Ryan's a lot of the now famous bottom quintile tweet. Wayne, except lately it seems like most of average humanity has bottom quintile perspective. Thank you for pushing back on it, Tom. Yeah. So, um I love America. I love people. Um when I say America, I do mean both the country and what I call foreignb born Americans, people that have the entrepreneurial spirit. Um but I love America. I want to see it do well.

I want to see the middle class thrive. Um I'm on some weird arc. I I think about this a lot. I'm going to be on my deathbed, depending on when it happens, and have a very weird conversation with myself. And it's going to go something like this. You wanted to tell stories, but you kept like doing side quests. Why do you keep doing side quests? Why not just stop everything and tell those [ __ ] stories? It's very weird. But there's always some part of me that feels like a thing that I'm approaching is so important that it's worth postponing.

Partly because I do get a profound sense of meaning and purpose from doing it. And partly because I think that it matters so much. Uh, and I'm always trying to make sure that I leverage the things that I am uniquely good at. Uh, so yes, I'm trying to phase one apply my mindset skills, which I still think are the thing. Every time I say this, people like, "This guy's a [ __ ] narcissist." Sure, fine. Uh, I'm goated on mindset. I am goated on not letting my own mind [ __ ] me up.

Uh, and so I spent a lot of time trying to give those ideas to other people. Take them or not, man. Take them or not, they work in my life. Uh and then right now I feel like this idea of cause and effect is worth just really going ham on. Uh but boy is it delaying uh my telling of stories. Yeah. So Patrick Ryson, thank you man. Very kind. Uh what a wonderful gift your continued string of uh super chats is. Thank you so much for the endless support.

All right, we got to hop into this AI back and forth. Um, I kind of want to start with David Tag's tweet. It's a bit long, but it kind of shows. Hold on. Hold on. Before you go into that, you have to like we have to set the stage for what the [ __ ] just happened happened happened because he's responding to what happened. So, let me give you what just shook down. Claude's controversial fable five model got shut down by the US government over security concerns. Okay.

Now there's an official narrative and the official narrative is that mythos so that fable is actually a subset of something called mythos. Now mythos by anthropic itself was deemed too powerful by p for public consumption. So they're like holy [ __ ] this is finding flaws in code bases that have been there for decades that nobody noticed and they will get exploited immediately by mythos. So we've got to be very careful. So they went to the government, they went to a bunch of corporations and they said, "Listen, we're not going to release this.

Going to water it down, but we want you guys to be aware of these holes in your architecture so that you can fix them." So then Anthropic a little bit later waters Mythos down into Fable. Now, Fable was supposed to be the safe version, but one of Anthropic's own investors discovered a way to jailbreak and unlock some of those uh features that Anthropic themselves said were too powerful for public consumption. So, then the government goes to Anthropic and says, "Hey guys, please fix this." According to David Saxs, they refused.

Now, as far as I can tell, Sax is the only one that has credible insider information that's saying this. So, we'll see in the fullness of time if this ends up being true. But, nonetheless, Sax is saying that they refused. He was bewildered by it. He couldn't understand why they would do it, why they would say, "Hey, this is really a problem. This is way too powerful. We can't release it." Oh, by the way, uh, we've got a good version. It can be released. Somebody else says, "Hey, this thing, I can jailbreak it and get back to those features." And then for some reason, they're saying, "No, no, no.

That's really narrow scope. uh it isn't a problem. Let's just keep going. So now the US government, this is all the official narrative, is saying we're very confused why you would say that. So they send them a letter from the commerce department citing national security issues. Uh they immediately the government says foreign nationals cannot have access to this. Okay. So we're putting export controls now because Anthropic could not filter its users based on where they were geographically fast enough to comply. They just pulled the entire model down for everyone.

Okay, that's where we're at. Now, I think there's a very different read which you're going to hear a little bit of a flirtation with in this and then I'll come back and give you my breakdown of what I think is actually going on after we hear from David Saxs. David Saxs, cryptoar for the White House and AISAR. I've had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside of government about the current situation with Anthropic and here's what I believe to be true. As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mthos classic model class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.

Fable is Methos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you expose Mythos and its advanced cyber cyber capabilities to people who shouldn't have them. Keep in mind that Anthropic W itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyber weapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and champion the guardrails on Fable. If there is vulnerability, big or small, is anthropic responsibility. In the patch, a highly credible, trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails.

The admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or deploy the model. Daario refused. In their blog post, Anthropic defended his decision by saying the jailbreak isn't serious. This is not what the trusted partner in the USG believe, nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic's Bane as the brand as the AI safety company. It's difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operation operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not serious. In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety was must be top priority and taken super seriously.

In this case, Anthropic prioritize a continued offering of the consumer model over safety. In reaction, the administration issued the export control. The admin did this reluctantly. It's been very surprised Anthropic hasn't wanted to cooperate with a reasonably safety request with a reasonable safety request, i.e. fixing the jailbreak issue. Anthropic's reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research company. The admins now hope now is that anthrop Anthropic re remedies the safety issue. The expert controls lifted and Fable goes back into general release.

The admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. Is frankly bewildered that anthropic hasn't wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DOW anthropic issues are wrong. The admins value anthropic technical capabilities and feels this is that this issue while serious should be easily resolved. The balls in anthropics courts. courts. courts. Okay. Now I want to be very clear that I don't have any insider information. So this is me speculating wildly.

But there is tons of behindthe-scenes drama on this whole thing that make me think that there's really something totally different going on behind the scenes of what we're being told. And so I think the real story goes something like this. Anthropic is in a battle with the US government over regulatory capture. So this is the company that built its whole brand on fearing its own technology. Now I don't think that they actually do fear their own technology. I think the reality is Darius is or Daario, excuse me, is running a regulatory capture strategy where he's realizing, okay, oh my god, the amount of debt that we've had to take on to build out this infrastructure and we'll likely have to continue to take out to build this is completely out of step with the amount of revenue that we're getting in.

And because it's out of step, we've really got to buy time. We've got to create as many modes as we can. We've got to get as close to being nationalized as humanly possible. We've got to make sure that there is a limited number of models that are available. Keep in mind that the Biden administration said directly that they were trying to limit the number of models. That's according to Mark Andre, who I certainly consider to be a very reliable source. He was somebody that was actually taking these meetings as one of the largest investors in AI.

And they said, "Don't keep investing in AI models because we're going to control how many models there are and who succeeds." I think Daario is interested in that model moving forward. I think he wants the government to clamp down and create a moat. Now, this is where this maybe this read is unhinged and I will admit while it feels so keeping what with what I know about humans that it is weird enough and uh I forget the the counter psychological strategy uh that this has a name, but I think what's going on is that either David Saxs himself or he's relaying it to somebody else is going to them and saying, "Oh, you guys want regulatory capture?

Well, let me show you what regulatory capture actually looks like. You guys aren't doing what we want. Here's regulation used against you. But I think what David Saxs actually wants because he said as much is for Daario to stop playing this like panic game and constantly trying to raise funds by telling everybody they've got something that's so incredibly powerful but it's too powerful and it's dangerous and trying to essentially get his model nationalized. That's almost a direct quote from David Saxs. And so that's what I think is really at play here is they're using a temporary regulatory slapound to let Daario know, stop [ __ ] around with this.

We're in a race with China. Be a good boy. Play ball. Make sure that the market is open and available so that people can really begin innovating. And if you want to know how highrisk this industry is for innovation, I think we have another clip. I think I pulled this of um the All-In podcast talking it's um [ __ ] what's his name? Chimamoth. Chimamoth laying out like how much money they're spending and like how at risk all of these dollars are because the costs are just so extreme.

I don't know that this is the clip. Uh click in just to see if it's uh deeper in. This is Shimoth. Yeah. All right. Here we go. was engaging in mandatory surveillance and nerfing his models. Dario wrote a new blog post saying that transparency was no longer good enough that we needed to have a new regulatory agency like an FAA or an FDA to approve all models. So that's correct. Yes. If you could go somewhere else to get your questions answered, then you would have alternatives.

But at the same time that profit is engaging in this potentially anti-competitive behavior, they want to restrict your options. It's not good enough for them just to win in the free market. They're calling on the government to regulate and stop potential competitors and limit the number of policy. Why would they want to get super simple to open to open this way and open source models? yeah, guys, we're working on the audio. So, uh, this one magically doesn't have audio for some reason. Yeah, I'm I'm confused.

Can you point your mic at your computer and play the clip? See if that works. Otherwise, we're going to be here forever trying to figure out. Just just rewind back to Chimoth. See if that works. Otherwise, Otherwise, Otherwise, Eric, you got to pause yours. Just Just rewind back to Eric, you got to pause yours. It's on me. One second. It's on me. One second. One sec, guys. We know there's a death loop audio happening right now. We will fix. Bear with us. Got it. Start back at the beginning of his speech.

No, that's still coming out of the TV. Can they hear it? Same issue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to be playing it out of your computer. So, you're going to have to pause us, pull it up on your computer, and then give it a go. People were saying it was playing, Eric. It was just very quiet. They heard it through the mics because y'all's mics are sensitive enough to pick up. pick up. pick up. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. And so the issue we're having is for some reason it's just not going through the desktop.

the desktop. the desktop. So if you pause us and then just play the clip. All right. Take three here. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because they don't have the ability to. Let us know if you can hear this, please. please. please. Like a preemptive strike against token maxing on your local machine. Two years ago, I bought 2,000 acres in Arizona with partner. We got it zoned. We got it approved. So, we're allowed to build a 2 gawatt data center. And I thought that this was the moment where you just turn around and you flip it to the Blackstones of Brookfields of the world, to the Googles of the world.

Let them develop it. And I've come to the conclusion that I don't think I can. And the reason is because I think that unless we direct large swats of compute exactly at the direction that Freeberg says, what Sax says and what Jason just said will happen and we won't have open source. So just to make it very clear when you look at the long tale of access to open source models, it's relatively minuscule. Most of the megawatts are still directed to the big models. Most of them, the overwhelming majority still goes to the big guys.

And so I'm coming to the conclusion that I think we may just be dragged into having to build two gigawatts and I just put in an offer for another gigs in a different place because I'm like if you could take 3 gawatts and now actually create a deep liquid access to open source we're going to have to do it. We as a community now I don't have the money to do that because just to put it out on the table a gigawatt now costs a hundred billion dollars guys.

dollars guys. dollars guys. Damn. Damn. Damn. Okay. So there is a huge capital mo that's a problem here as well. sax which even if we wanted to go and endorse and breathe life into the open source model community where the hell we should aggressively now when I started this project it was like four or five billion and it's increased by 20x so if you want to get all three gigawatt developed I have to come up with 300 billion I don't have obviously I don't have have have you can stop it so I think people get the idea guys sorry for the sound problems there but the there's already we should want desperately for open source to be an incredibly powerful competitor to all of the models that uh the big corporations are making.

And right now, China is basically controlling that. You're never going to be able to stop open source if for no other reason than China. So Dario, don't even try, which is a big part of what I think that he's doing here. And then also, we as the people should want as much competition as humanly possible. Not only does it put the workers at these AI companies in a better spot. So for anybody that wants to see workers in a strong position, the more competition the better.

But it also puts us as users in a better spot because there's just going to be more and more and more and more innovation coming out of the space. And so this is where we've got to be so paranoid. People do not understand that regulatory capture is driven by the companies themselves. So if you want to talk about me getting mad at corporations, this is one thing that drives me [ __ ] bananas is that they do not care at all about uh wanting to compete. This is a whole Peter Teal idea of competition is for losers.

It's we as the end customer want as much competition as we can get and we want the cream to rise to the top. That's the reality. And so the drama playing out with Fable 5, I think is Sachs or someone who has a similar belief system to Sachs slapping Daario around and saying, "Keep in mind that if you keep pushing for regulation, you're not necessarily going to get the regulation that you want." Now, that's not how I want to see this play out because I don't want the government weaponizing this [ __ ] I just want them to be above the freight.

But the reality is that there are so many things working against there being competition in AI because the foundational models are so expensive. The hardware that we need to actually get the compute is so expensive that we've got to want as much competition as possible. We've got to remember we are in a in an economic war in an innovation war with China. And who wins in AI that is going to be a big deal. It is possible though I like to believe that all of my greatest fears will never be realized in AI.

Wouldn't that be lovely? But it is possible that AI is a winner take all technology because AI is intelligence itself. And so if you get a fast takeoff of a super intelligent AI, it will basically be impossible to beat because it can thwart you at every turn. Uh so as you try to build your super intelligent model, it can do things to disrupt that. If anybody's read the three body problem, spoiler alert, spoiler alert, um there is a part that you realize that the reason that our physics stalls out is because uh this other civilization got advanced physics before we did.

And so they're able to send these like um really really really tiny particles around to disrupt our particle physics. And so our large colliders just keep giving us confusing results. And so it would be things like that if we really do get a fast takeoff. Super intelligent AI. Now again that's probably just dystopian fiction. We shouldn't be super worried about that. But that's in addition to all of the economic concerns that will be very real. We have to realize that we are in that battle with China.

And so uh for game theoretic reasons, AI will never do anything other than go underground. It will never be stopped developing. Uh so one just spending a lot of time wasted on that is going to be a tragedy. We need to have a um Manhattan project mentality right now around AI. We need to be developing it fast. We need to be developing it in a way that we control. Just full stop. Yeah. It's interesting to go from our previous conversation about wage theft, corporate greed, and how corporations are taking care of the little guy and how we need regulations to now corporations leveraging corporations leveraging corporations leveraging government regulations in order to sustain their number one spot.

Yes. So, it's almost easy that that can then be weaponized to hurt everybody. Here's the thing. Governments are the ultimate monopoly. And so if you hate monopolies in a corporation, you should at a minimum be skeptical about a monopoly that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. So I believe in governments. I think they are wonderful, but they have a tendency towards pathology that is extreme and again a very knowable mechanism of how they end up spiraling and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And so we have made the welfare state as just one example bigger and bigger and bigger but not solve the poverty problem because handouts unfortunately don't solve the poverty problem. Getting more and more people to um want to contribute to the economy as performers either as a worker inside of a company or to build the company themselves and actually drive the innovation. Those two things pay huge dividends. But getting a corporation that is trying to redistribute the wealth does not. it ends up moving you backwards fast dramatically.

Um, so yeah, we've got to be very very careful about what we wish for. And so anyway, we'll see this in the fullness of time whether I'm right about this, but that's what I think is really happening right now. That's why the messaging is so confusing. You've got Daario who's really just trying to win. He's just trying to be number one and he's using a regulatory capture model, which is why the second you mess with his revenue, he gets very weird and is perfectly willing to take risks.

The narrative of wanting to be the most AI safe company is really about driving forward a regulatory capture regime that we should all be super paranoid about. We should not want the government having a monopoly. We should want them to keep the market open and available. Uh we should want as much competition as we can get. Uh we should not want these corporations to have monopolies. We certainly shouldn't want to have them monopolies that are controlled by the government. Uh and so that's what I think is really going on.

All right. in a major U-turn. Um, switching into other news, um, the Swedish Parliament has abolished permanent resident visas for migrants that have moved to the country. You said this in the rundown that this is kind of the glass crystal ball for our future. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um, you think that this is something that is going to be start to be adopted in the West in mass? Yes. So what's going to happen is either a country will just be too far down the road. I have very little hope for Belgium Belgium Belgium where you become uh a so Belgium already has like seven different parties that war for power inside of their Congress and so they can't get [ __ ] done.

there's like I happen to know Belgians uh and so there's a lot of frustration at least from them like like with anything there might be people who are like what do you mean I love that there are seven parties but um as firsthand relayed to me and it just makes sense you get too many parties fighting you just can't get anything done you start getting this like these coalitions that only sustain for a minute and so the country has a very hard time pointing in any like uh intelligible direction and so it just ends up diffusing all of its power across all these different organizations ations just becomes or not organizations but uh voting blocks essentially and so it just becomes madness.

So maybe Belgium is too far gone and and that's dust and I forget the exact stat but it's something like 72% of everybody in Belgium is either uh an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. It's wild. So now So now So now the immigrants themselves are not going to vote as a unified block and so you just it begins to fall apart. So if people will buy into the fact that culture matters now it's like the the primary question of the next decade for sure for Europe it'll be a big debate here because we'll be watching what's going on but the big debate is going to be do we have a culture that we can agree on a unified culture and are we willing to fight for that culture or are we going to let economics take over and we're just going to bring in as much cheap labor as humanly possible and for the answer to the cheap labor question.

You're going to watch Japan and you're going to watch Europe. Now, Europe, I think, is I [snorts] don't know that they can pull themselves out of the tail spin. When I watch the way that um Kristarma's reacting, when I watch the way that the police react, it it's wild. And it's very much left ideology has officially become pathological by my read. Remember, you need left-leaning ideology, but you never want it to become pathological. Same on the right. You never want it to become pathological. So you need these two in dynamic tension.

In Europe culturally, we've pulled now so far to the left, it's permeated all of the um institutions and so the institutions are making the policies and so they just continue to bring people in. So that's like getting crazy up to the this may be headline, maybe it's not true, but I saw a headline that seemed very much in keeping with Kristarma and so I think it it has reasonable odds of actually panning out. They're allowing like kebab shops, which is an ethnic dish, fair enough. But they're allowing kebab shops to bring in people um in like the same way that you would do an H-1B visa where it's like, well, we need somebody that can do this.

We need specialized skill. Okay, I want to flip the spatula. And then once you get them in, then they can bring their family. And so it's like that to me and this is again wild speculation but that's me reading it like oh maybe we are going to start losing some ground over here on just letting all the boats in. So now let's do legal immigration where it's like well this is a specialized skill. It will take people time to catch up with what we're doing. So I obviously given that so much of my family lives in the UK.

I really hope they figure this out and they realize that there is a reason that people want to come to their country because it has a culture. It has a strong economy. If you don't protect the things that make that culture and that economy, then people won't want to come there anymore and the people that already live there aren't going to want to be there. And so countries uh can and do fail all the time and they fail under the weight of bad culture, bad policies.

So we're going to watch that play out in Europe. Now, Japan is the one that freaks me out the most because you have a government that came in and got a super majority, meaning they could change the constitution of Japan. That's how much power they control. and they've done almost nothing to secure their borders. Now, why? Because Japan is an aging population. And so, people are just dying and they have not had enough kids for a very long time. And so, they have an economic need to obscure and hide the fact that they've been in economic turmoil for almost 40 years.

And one of the ways they're keeping prices low is that they're importing cheap labor. And so, um, is it Takayichi? I think that's her name. The new prime minister uh has come in and I have a fear that she's running into the same problem that Putin always says is men in black suits walk up and tell you how things really work. And she's realizing uhoh, if I break this thing that's masking for the Japanese people how bad the economy actually is by blocking cheap labor, um I'm just going to replace it for another revolt, which is uhoh, you can't afford anything.

And so Japan is now raising their rates. Now, I actually think Japan raising the rates is a good thing um ultimately for Japan, but make no mistake, this is a very tumultuous thing that's happening for them that could end up being terrible. But Japan has been in stagflation for uh or stagnant for a very long time. And now they're finally getting some inflation. And we can talk about um why for Japan that might actually be good. This gets way into the very complex part of the economy, but we certainly talk about it.

Anyway, if Japan doesn't close their borders, then I think, you know, no one's going to close their borders. If Japan can't get it done, then it's like the the economics of keeping labor cheap is just going to win full stop. Yeah. Um and then to your point with uh Japan announcing another rake height, it usually is a negative blowback on the US markets, but it's one of those things. It's just Japan has to do it and the global markets have to eat it in this Yeah.

So, this is where you have to understand the Japan, the Japanese yen carry trade. We've talked about it a few times, but it's one of those, it's weird enough, enough, enough, it probably bears repeating. So, right now, part of the lunacy of the um values in the US market and other markets in the world are because for a very long time, decades, time, decades, time, decades, people have been able to go to Japan, borrow money at essentially zero interest. Not literally zero, but very very low.

very low. very low. And then, so let's say that they're paying 2%. paying 2%. paying 2%. They'll come to the US and get 5%. I mean, like just off the bat in the US market. And so you just arbitrage all day. And so Japan keeps printing the money and the money leaves Japan, which is part of the reason that it doesn't create inflation in Japan. it leaves Japan, gets invested in global markets, and so now the global market is super happy, but the Japanese just won't spend money.

And so you get this weird thing where the Japan is not trying to fuel the global market. Japan is trying to stimulate the Japanese market and the Japanese are just like, nah. Like we went through something so brutal in 1989 where the bubble that they were living in collapsed. Like dude, the um God, I want to get this quote right. If this isn't literally correct, it is directionally correct that the uh price of the real estate in Tokyo that the um the emperor's palace sits on uh was worth more than all US real estate combined.

estate combined. estate combined. She She She Now, if that isn't literally correct, it's directionally correct. I think it actually is literally correct. And that that number is so absurd, but that tells you how big the bubble got in Japan because they were their economy was just handing the US its ass in the 80s. China is a non- entity at this point. And so, uh, that bubble ends up deflating very, very quickly. And the Japanese, you get an interesting confluence of like cultural factors and they just stop spending money and they just every dollar that the Japanese uh the Bank of Japan tries to use to stimulate the economy, they just save.

And so now you're not getting inflation because the economy is not actually being stimulated, but it's stimulating the global economy. So it's wild. And so, yeah, you get into this super bizarre situation where Japan gets this debt to GDP ratio, which violates the rule that I keep saying, you get over 130%. And like everything goes mad. It doesn't end up happening in Japan, but it doesn't end up happening in Japan because they're not getting the runway inflation. inflation. inflation. So, you're not getting the um some of the effects that end up breaking it in economies like the US or like when we've seen it play out in Europe.

So, it is utterly fascinating. But now they actually are getting inflation and wages are starting to go up and people are starting to spend more money. And so now they're having to raise their rates to keep the inflation from going crazy. And that's causing the people who borrowed the money and invested in the US stock market to go, uhoh, I can't do this because I borrowed. And so now it will over time get to the point where I'm not making as much of my money. And so now I could be losing money by being in the global stock market, largely the US.

And so people are worried that more and more money is going to get sucked out of liquidity. And we've seen this play out before. One of the big crypto hits, I forget which one, I think 2024, but one of the big crypto hits was that it was the Japan carry trade broke for the first time. Rates started going up. People panicked. They paid off their um Japanese um debt. And so to do that, they had to sell off crypto or other assets. And so there is big fears that the global market is already so precarious because of the over valuation of AI that you've got this double whammy of that it looks like corporations are pulling back from their AI spend.

And so you have corporations pulling back in their AI spend as more and more money is allocated to AI infrastructure buildout as the yen carry trade which has been allowing for that cheap debt part of it to flood in and now it's backing out. And so now if there's pullback on the revenue delay, so that AI becomes the ultimate technology that we're all expecting it to be, but it takes a couple years extra, a ton of people get liquidated in that as the liquidity gets sucked out to pay back the Japanese yen carry trade, which is going away because inflation is finally starting to take off in Japan.

And so it's like, holy [ __ ] So it's like maybe it doesn't happen. Maybe there's no problem. Maybe it happens slowly enough and people just rebalance and slowly everybody's fine because remember this is just a confidence game. confidence game. confidence game. So we'll see. But there's enough like pressure on the market that I'm super paranoid. paranoid. paranoid. Got it. Um okay. So technically that was a fractal. We were talking about immigration in Sweden u and the general immigration uh policy in the west. Um something interesting happened this weekend.

New York Knicks got their first championship in over 50 years. Shout out to the Nickerbachers. Shout out to everybody in New York. Um, New York City is having a generational run right now. Um, Um, Um, but there was some pretty uh enthusiastic uh fans in the streets last night and this weekend, but I want to bring this up again. We were talking about immigration. When PSG won and they started tearing the place up, the entire ex community was like, "See, this is why immigration needs to happen.

This is why we need to deport people. this what needs to go on in New York City. We're burning things, destroying school buses, we're going ham. And I don't think anybody's anybody's anybody's coming at their culture and maybe thinking that they're not assimilated. So, this is, we talked about this when we were talking about the Carmelo and the uh Harry Novak about the different cassettes depending on what the setup of the media is and how we kind of respond and approach to things like that. Um, is this a double standard that we can call out or is there something that I'm missing on this?

because I've been in the UK in moments of victory and seen people like jump up on presumably strangers cars and like freak out and wave flags and that was like for early matches in the World Cup. Um that this to me is a culture thing and um you've you've got to isolate this to why the [ __ ] are we letting culture run wild? I don't look at this and go this is an immigrant problem unless immigrants are just really like they fall in love with the teams right away.

But this to me does not seem like an immigrant story. This does not seem like a mom Donnie story. So, uh, again, hopefully to earn my credibility, when people are like, "Oh, this is all happening while mom Donnie is partying." It's like, "No, no, no. This is people getting way too enthusiastic going and smashing [ __ ] because we're like in some weird phase right now where like smashing [ __ ] is like cool." So, I would chalk this up to this is a youth energy thing. Um, this falls more in line with like the youth takeovers and [ __ ] where that like there was another one in Houston where people are just running riot and so um letting that get out of hand where people want to celebrate by breaking [ __ ] That's just dumb.

We should all be telling our kids don't be dumb. This is [ __ ] foolish. Um but yeah, I don't see an immigrant story here. I don't see mom Donnie doing something wrong. Um the fact that he was also at a party celebrating the Knicks win. Yeah, exactly. Now, we need to be able to count on each individual person to not act a fool. Now, you might be able to say there's a story here with policing. And if you're telling a dumb story about the police aren't getting involved, like this is on another level from New York, first of all, let's start with that.

But, But, But, um, yeah, the police should be in there breaking it up, stopping people from acting a fool, but let's get everybody to stop acting a fool. Immigration becomes a cultural thing. And so if you see one side of everybody like, "Yo, this is not how we do it around here." Like look at like if you want to see the cultural story play out, put um this up against the Japanese cleaning the stadium when they uh win a match. Doesn't matter. Like the Japanese are not going to go riot.

So that becomes a okay this is to to say it succinctly. I think what you see playing out in New York right now is American culture is degrading versus Japanese culture is still far more intact. Um, so we don't have to go to immigration to have this comparison. Now, if people see something I don't and they see uh video footage of something where it's like this is exclusively immigrants, do tell, but I certainly don't see it. I that kind of was the sentiment when uh PSG won and there was things on fire and there was people running the streets and it was now when PSG popped off.

I was seeing like a just outright misinformation and uh people were showing like um these guys saying oh we took over this country in like uh 30 days or whatever it was and they were like see these are immigrants like mocking us as these riots happen in the streets. No one was saying this is celebratory riots about PSU winning. I had to go look that [ __ ] up. And then second, the footage of the people saying that was from like three years ago on another competition. There there are going to be plenty of moments where it actually is immigration rearing its ugly head.

Like there's plenty of that popping off. The sentiment around Noak, that is an immigrant sentiment. You are now looking at a collision where you're getting legitimate two-tier policing where you can point at very specific things and say it is a very reasonable read that this is about immigration and left-leaning ideology where it's a victim victimizer uh narrative playing out though have the conversation when it's really that but when it's really um young people acting a fool. I personally didn't see a lot of 50-year-olds smashing things.

Do tell if I missed it. But that feels more like that's what's playing out. You could make a tangential thing and say um that that that you'd really be hardressed. But if you want to say the edges that it's young immigrants that are somehow influencing America like u kids that feels like such a [ __ ] reach. So I don't buy into that. that. that. Um I think the immigrant conversation needs to be had around things that are actually being driven by that. Don't go to the second people act stupid.

This is an immigration question. Um Um Um Muhammad is having a crazy run right now though. Like balanced budget. He was paying people to shovel snow. We're going to we're going to need to put balanced budget. This is where I'm reminded I'm surrounded by two lefties. Uh wow. The the balanced budget in in New York. when when you are going in and continuing to spend more money and try to reallocate tax dollars from somewhere else, that that to me is not a balanced budget. When he starts spending less money, then I will champion that.

And same thing though, that that's not unique to Mom Donnie. That is every [ __ ] politician is spending more money. So, uh, but yeah, I'm not going to clap for any politician that balances the budget the way that mom Donnie has balanced the budget. It's it's painful to give you to give him a monoc like a small amount of it really has to be cause and effect. That that's why anytime he does something where I'm like, this is good. I I truly Drew, we've got to bring the left and the right together.

That's an absolute must. And if mom Donnie can be that character, like if he can come in and be like, "Listen, this is how we're going to get this done. We're going to balance the budget. We've got to spend less." And let's say, for instance, that um all of the less spending that he wants to do is things that we say, "Oh, these are things that are helping um uh like means testing. These are able-bodied people. Um they can work. They should be working. And so we're retirement.

Let's do that." If he was like, "Listen, guys. I'm so sorry. Boomers have done really well. We've got to extend their um retirement age." Great. I' I'd be clapping for it. Cool. We can have anything we want. We just have to like balance the budget. And if we're going to balance the budget by telling people that they have to work longer, you're not going to hear any complaints out of me. I'm here for it. So, this is a when you look at the cause and effect of the things that drive his mentality, he actually thinks giving things away for free is going to solve the problem.

He doesn't understand that by making the buses a u something that is not economically sustainable that that's some to work. Same thing with groceries. It's like hold on a second. Get to innovation. Get to like if you want to solve food deserts and things like that, make it safe for businesses. So there there are real cause and effect things that he could be doing. I'd be like yo this is [ __ ] awesome. I love it the most. And if he wants to make things free for um people that are really struggling and he wants to help them get back up on their feet, I'd be like, "Fuck that.

This is great, man." So there are policies that he could do that are really about like we want to make certain things cheap like housing. If he was like only banging the drum about we're going to build build New Yorkers, I told you I was going to drive cost down and we're going to do it. We're going to get rid of the regulation. We're going to make sure that people can come in and build and watch. Rentals are going to go down. Great. Even the pier dera thing, I was like, "Okay, like this one isn't horrible.

If you want to tax like the second income of stuff that's over $5 million, my only concern is that these guys will back out, that you'll end up making uh less revenue in the local area, but let's let it play out. Let's see. I didn't come in hot on that one." So, I am really, really going to call balls and strikes on individual policies. Now, I'll be honest. I really do think his mentality is sinister. I think he's really smart. I think he knows exactly what he's doing and I think that he knows that this will acrue to governmental power and so I don't think he's an innocent broker but I don't know that I'm not inside of his mind so I could be totally wrong.

So I'm willing to watch based on what he actually does but so far what he's done and honestly the least horrible thing of his tax policy is at least he's saying these are dollars that were generated in New York City and so I want these dollars allocated to New York. Okay, there's an argument to be made there. And again, I didn't come in hot on that one, but in terms of like balancing the budget, if he's not trying to reduce expenditure, he's a big government guy for reasons that I've laid out a thousand times, I think that is terrible for the average person.

If this was a spectrum or you said balls and strikes, let's call it points. uh Mandi's policies currently while rhetoric-wise rhetoric-wise rhetoric-wise they can activate a lot of right-wing people to say that okay here comes the big bad kami but when it comes to practicality practicality practicality the only person that's trying to seize the means of production the person that is investing in private companies that's getting government interest the person that's increasing the government budget has been Trump if we're comparing them next to each other Trump has increased the deficit Trump is exploding the budget.

Trump is trying to invest in AI companies like he did with Intel. It worked. Cool. But he still own like a piece of government now owns a piece of private property. That is a to me that would be the slippery slope to capitalism because if I can own 20, I can own 80. Whereas mom Donnie yet if if he doesn't next week, I will then have to eat the crow. But he hasn't done anything like that yet. yet. yet. So So So here's where I will lay out one.

I never want to go to bat for Trump. I don't think Trump is defensible. But I'll walk through again why I think the pathology that Trump is displaying is horrible and should be immediately stopped. Um, but is far less systemically risky than what Mom Donnie is championing and doing his best to move towards. Now, if he ends up not doing those things, then I'll be like, "We dodged a bullet." And maybe uh political pressure stopped him. Maybe just the political process made it impossible. impossible. impossible.

I'll take whatever I can get. But in in this given that you've got a guy that's now been in office for five and a half years and you're comparing him to a guy that's been in office for like six months, uh you're not going to be able to in proof in the pudding see the damage of the rhetoric. So for that I will say you're way better off looking at as you said a spectrum and saying okay Biden is the kinds of policies that M Donnie wants to put in.

I think mom Donnie might be even more aggressive than what we saw in the Biden years. But you can actually see what begins to transpire from the Biden years. And so Biden years is looking at an economic problem and saying, "Okay, I know how we're going to solve this and we're going to keep driving labor down. We're going to bring in as many immigrants as we can. Keep driving labor down. We're going to outsource everything that we can. Comparative advantage. Give it to China. Let them do that.

That's what they do best. And then we're going to look at all these filthy rich people and we're gonna try to get as much money off of them as we can. Maybe we haven't been as good at it yet as we want, but that's what we're going to try to do. And we're going to try to make more things free for people, including, by the way, offering um resources to people that are here illegally. So now if you'll let me bring in Nome who I think is part he's on the what we'll call if DSA is all the way to the left these guys are on the DSA spectrum and so Nome is saying just blatantly we're giving resources to illegal immigrants and not only are we already doing it we want to do it more and so that isn't like a maybe that's what they want to do that is what they want to do and so when I look at that and I ask okay my mission is to get a thriving middle class now which two of these moronic lunatics is worse harder for me to get to a thriving middle class.

Uh is it the guy that is blatantly corrupt Trump and is making sure that he's enriching himself but through a mechanism that everybody I mean he does the insider bit which is horrible again and should be stopped immediately immediately immediately but he for him to win he's got to pump the stock market. Now anybody can participate in the stock market and be advantaged by the things that he's doing to pump it. He has also gone and created the Trump account for kids and convinced billionaires to donate to it.

So now kids are off the jump. They're in that economy. So you've got these guys creating a predatory system that anybody can get and be a part of and they're trying to get more people in it. They're doing a horrific thing with socializing companies like deciding that um Intel is going to win for instance, but they're doing a sort of sovereign wealth fund light thing that Americans will be able to participate in. So they've created this horrific thing around the stock market just going bigger and bigger and embracing the financialization.

But anyone can participate in it. Horrible. We should stop it immediately. But at least anyone can participate in it. Then you and by the way the more we innovate, the more we deregulate, the more everybody wins, including the evil bastards trying to steal from everybody. So they create a system that everybody can win in. Over here you have something that breaks the system and must be enforced through violence. So you don't have to force people through violence to invest in the stock market. You do have to use violence to force people to give [ __ ] away for free because nobody will work for free.

And so they are getting more and more people involved in like the free [ __ ] They are on the direction of more free [ __ ] over on this side. We know how that plays out historically. It's complete madness. So, um, by all means, if you guys, since I don't know if they're off camera, on the stock market thing because, and this is just devil's advocate, right? Not a Ryan stance before chat likes to do what it does. Uh, but like, isn't that just systematic violence? Like, in a in a in a certain way of like we have a system that is like, oh, well, you have to buy into it to have success, and if you don't, then isn't that just like a form of systematic violence?

Like, there's an argument there. So, let's I love it. Let's say that it is systematic violence. So, is there a difference between um slapping someone in the face and ramming a gigantic knife up their ass as they did with Gaddafi? To me, they are both. No, no, just are they different or to you it is exactly the same? Because that almost feels like a weird question because it's like what angle? Because to me, that's violence period. This is you not understanding my argument. That's why I need to find out if you're like those are the same in which case you and I will never see eye to eye and we will always run into this problem because if you think you hear me saying slapping somebody is fine.

I don't know how many [ __ ] times I have to say it's evil and it should stop immediately. But what I'm saying is one person is getting slapped the other is getting a knife shoved up their rectum. They are going to die. And to me they are [ __ ] different but they are leagues apart. If to you it's like no they really aren't different. Okay cool. It's clear. It's from where I'm sitting, it's complete insanity, but it's clear. And then I just know we don't agree. But this is this is my thing to jump in here.

I feel like if Trump is the slap, we're actively getting slapped. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like actively getting smacked around. Yes. And if you are about to say and Manny, you have to go down the street around the corner and then you'll get the knife up your butt. We have to go down the street and around the corner. corner. corner. Unfucking true. This is so wild. The number of times I've explained this and I still the two people closest to me still are not. So guys, the mechanism that makes the stock market go crazy is deficit spending and money printing.

Guess how you pay for all the free [ __ ] Deficit spending and money printing. Correct. Correct. Correct. Money balanced the budget this year at least for this year right now. So there is no deficit spending. There is no money printing in New York City specifically. specifically. specifically. Did Biden balance the budget? Uh, no. I don't think anyone's balanced it. Did news balance the budget? The answer is no. By the way, Mani's budget is balanced on paper. It is not yet balanced in reality. We will have to see at the end of the year, first of all, if he actually balanced the budget.

We will have to see at the end of his term if he pulled anything off. And if he did, then I'll be like, rad. So, let's look at what mom Donnie is doing and let's I'm speaking on Mom Donnie. I'm not I'm not But you guys have no sense of direction of travel. And that is the part that freaks me out. It's It's not that we don't have a sense of I think that you're getting you're putting the cart before the horse. Drew, I'm not I'm living in this America right now.

right now. right now. We have to get there. Hold on. I'm living in this America right now. You're you're asking me to say that M Donnie has somehow solved a problem that he has not solved. So just like I cannot say M Donnie has broken everything. He's made it bad. I'm not making that claim. I'm saying the words Mom Donnie is saying tell me he believes in an ideology that I'm living in now and I have watched played out around the [ __ ] world. And until he tells me something that is actually connected to cause and effect in a way that will actually work, it's madness.

And so I just want to be clear, we can play this clip back later. Drew is saying that mom Donnie has already won something. He's already done something. something. something. He's balanced the budget. That's the thing I say he want. He he has on paper balanced the budget in the same way that Elon Musk on paper is worth a trillion dollars. In the same way that Donald Trump right now has unbalanced the budget with this $ 1.5 trillion increase, he's now made it a two trillion.

That's at the federal level. So, I'm I'm just saying. So, we're talking about paper paper. paper paper. paper paper. Here is how Trump has balanced the budget because the budget will be balanced. By the way, Trump's budget will be balanced. Yes. Of course, you can't actually operate at a uh at where people don't get paid. You know that, right? So, you take on [ __ ] debt. This is how governments work. And so, we money print to balance the budget. So, Trump has balanced the budget, which I give him no [ __ ] credit for whatsoever because it's devastating.

Here is how Mdani has balanced the budget. He's taken money from other places in [ __ ] New York City or in New York and said, "Give it to New York City." Oh, look at that. Holy [ __ ] The budget is balanced. And by the way, it presumes that he's going to get a certain amount of money off of all the things that he's put forward, which we don't know that he's actually going to get. So, let's wait until the end of the [ __ ] year. Now, if he does it, then I'll say, "Cool.

He's robbed Peter to pay Paul, but he balanced the New York City budget." Great. I love it. And by the way, legally, he has to. So he will end up with a balanced budget in the same way that [ __ ] Trump is going to end up with a balanced budget. It is direction of travel. In what way are they doing this stuff? Also, has New York as a state taken federal dollars? If they have, they don't have a balanced budget. So now it's like we've got to start looking at how do we keep ending up with an unbalanced budget?

And we keep ending up with an unbalanced budget because people are giving too much [ __ ] away for free on both sides of the aisle. Now the question becomes what is the ideology that is driving people's behavior and where is it likely to lead? None of this stuff is new. None of this stuff is new. So I these all of these experiments have been run and so I know how they play out. That's why I'm saying the right leaning [ __ ] is pathology. It should be immediately stopped but I know how it plays out.

The left-leaning ideology is not new. I know how it plays out. One of these things is not like the other. One of them ends in 45 million people dead. And it that I cannot get people on board with that. One is where people who understand how the economic game, how financialization is played, they will win more than everybody else. But the British Empire brought to you by people who did this same scam. Pretty [ __ ] incredible. Pretty [ __ ] incredible. Uh the American Empire brought to you by people who run the scam.

Pretty [ __ ] incredible. The China stopped killing people. They lifted 400 million people out of poverty. Brought to you by the same [ __ ] scam. Pretty [ __ ] incredible. So, you've got one scam. It's a [ __ ] scam, but holy [ __ ] While they scam you, they make everything better. One scams you and [ __ ] murders you dead. And the fact that I because he's only six months into running a murderous uh ideology, I cannot get you guys to be like, "Hey, we should probably not [ __ ] do this." Um I I think we got to take a step back cuz you said Trump balanced the budget and I just want the chat was blowing up about that.

And I just want to make sure chat who who the [ __ ] doesn't end up getting paid? I'm sorry. I'm listening. Go ahead. Who is it? Sorry. When we say balance when we say balance of budget, are you saying that Trump doesn't get paid? paid? paid? Who doesn't get paid? Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? No, no, no, no. [ __ ] that. We're not walking away. We're definitely walking away. You guys don't like reality. Who doesn't get Just answer the question. Who doesn't get paid? Ryan, who doesn't get paid?

I I feel like we need to come back. This is in chat when you're asking. So, you don't know who doesn't get paid, Drew. Who doesn't get paid? I don't know what's happening right now. Let's Let's just just get back. Just answer one question. You have made a fundamental claim either from you or from chat that Trump didn't balance the budget, which of course he did. So, how does the budget So, when I say balance the budget, I'm talking about a budget proposal. Did he pull out a budget proposal that had a balanced budget on there?

There's less inputs than there are outputs. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. And how does he do it? It's not how does he do it? You're saying we can go to the government website and he will have a proposal on there that shows a budget a budget surplus, not a budget deficit. Cool. Do you guys really not know how this works? works? works? So, So, So, there is an answer. Get How about this? Don't believe it, but give me the answer I'm looking for so that I know you understand my argument.

Everybody gets paid and they will print money to cover that gap. Okay. And so what's that? They'll deficit spend to cover that gap. Yes. But what's the money printed? Money print. Yes. But how do they they do this in a way? way? way? They raise debt. We know, right? That's how governments work. So they raise debt. No one is saying don't raise debt. We're just saying the rate at which you raise debt is suicidal. So, everyone, even uh oh, [ __ ] what's his name? Bergkshire Hathaway, what's his name?

said, "Yes, you're always going to have debt." have debt." have debt." So, nobody has beef with the debt, the quote unquote unbalanced budget. What they have beef with is the amount of debt. And so I want to be very clear what you guys are pi what Drew is pitching is that Mana has balanced the budget because he got money from the rest of New York state. So he couldn't balance his own New York City budget without going New York state give me money. Now if you're saying I balance my budget by getting money from mom and dad.

Okay. But then I go, by your definition, technically not mine, but by your definition, Trump has balanced a budget because he's going to do debt and money printing. money printing. money printing. So I'm just saying that isn't a balanced budget. So Manny doesn't have a balanced budget in the way that I would consider morally justifiable. morally justifiable. morally justifiable. Copy. Understand the gaps. Uh let's do some super chats. We only got one. Let's do it. Oh, at the buzzer. buzzer. buzzer. Brutus Lugo. Brutus Lugo. Brutus Lugo.

Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. You know you jinx it because now we have two. two. two. Oh, do we? Where's the second one? Uh, Luke Adam. Luke Adam Miller. Oh, I totally missed that. So, sorry, Luke. I'll start with that. Luke Adam Miller says, "Tom, Nobel laurate Joseph Stiglets and other published a batshit crazy global degrowth plan with over 350 signatures. It's simple Jack article in the Guardian. Commemorate buzzing. Got to read to believe. How absurd. Cheers." So basically, you have been extremely generous and the goal is to get me to read that word.

I'm here for it. Thank you. I just want to make sure I didn't miss a question. And last, sorry, last super chat, Brutus Luga says, "No, that is not a balanced budget. A balanced budget means the government completely matches or exceeds its outgoing spending. Borrowing money to pay employees is the exact opposite of balancing the budget." Yes, I agree. But by Drew's definition, Mom Donnie has balanced the budget by getting money from New York State. the tax revenue that was to your point that was generated in New York City.

So that was just reallocated back to it. But But But but now you still have problems outside and they take in federal dollars, right? right? right? Uh I haven't seen that. Let's look that up. New York City take federal dollars? Yes. New York City CD receives billions of dollars in federal funding which supports critical operations across housing, social service, and education. However, however, historically, New York State has been a donor state, meaning it sends more tax revenue to the federal government than it receives back. So, it's a donor state.

Are they now? Um, according to AI that I historically, so let's look at that. Also, the big thing that I'm saying is we need to wait until the end of the year to know if Mom Donnie has balanced the budget. We need to see what happens to New York's budget. We need to see what happens with the federal dollars. And if it works, guys, I care about what works. works. works. So if at the end of this he's won uh meaning he actually balanced the budget and they're generating more tax revenue than they're spending or the same amount that'd be [ __ ] incredible.

And then let's look at his policies and see what happens. That's why I'm saying this is direction of travel. I have no reason to believe that a the budget's actually going to be balanced in the way of not needing either more funds from New York or not being able to run some of the policies that he has put in place now. So we'll see how this actually plays out. Um out. Um out. Um so I am saying like for like if we can get money from someone else and call that a balanced budget then that's exactly what the US government does.

So again, we'll see how this plays out at the end of the year. Copy that. All right, that's all I got. Yeah, there's no more super chats. That is it. is it. is it. All right, we end on a nice contentious note, everybody. I hope that you have enjoyed today. This certainly very interesting for me. Uh, thank you guys for being here. Thank you all for the super chats. It really does mean a lot. And shout out to Koshi. Love you guys very much. Appreciate it.

You can use the QR code on the screen if you want to do some trades. Use code impact for $10 off. And if you want to keep an eye on what direction things are moving. Also, Kelshi is amazing at giving you a barometer on public sentiment and where people think things are going to end up. Uh I think it is far better than polling. So, shout out to those guys. All right, we've got an ITO AI master class coming up July 9th at 100 p.m. Pacific.

Hope you guys will join me for that. This really is no matter what happens economically with AI as a technology, it is unbelievably powerful. And I will be teaching another class on how to use free, by the way, how to use AI to start a business. That's July 9th at 1 p.m. Pacific time. All right. Love you guys bunches. We'll see you on Wednesday. Take care. Peace.