DOJ SHUTS DOWN Epstein Files, Free Speech Battles, & World Order Debated at Munich Conference

Key Takeaway

In the age of persistent information, governments face two options: elect leaders who understand transparency or impose unprecedented control. The Epstein files controversy reveals a fundamental shift - unemployed, highly intelligent citizens are meticulously analyzing released documents, refusing to accept partial disclosures. This represents the new reality: information doesn't disappear anymore, and attempts to control it through censorship (like Spain's proposal to criminalize CEOs for platform content) will backfire. The actionable insight: embrace radical transparency in your own life and work, because the alternative - controlling information - is both impossible and destructive in our connected world.

Episode Overview

This episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show tackles multiple controversial topics, with primary focus on government transparency, free speech, and information control. The hosts discuss the DOJ's decision to halt Epstein file releases after publishing only half the documented archive, Marjorie Taylor Greene's claims about Trump blocking file releases, and Spain's proposed laws holding social media CEOs criminally liable for platform content. The conversation explores the tension between free speech absolutism and societal cohesion, the concept of 'malinformation' (true information governments deem harmful), and how the architecture of persistent digital information is fundamentally changing the relationship between citizens and power structures.

Full Transcript

Transcript of DOJ SHUTS DOWN Epstein Files, Free Speech Battles, & World Order Debated at Munich Conference from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billu Show Live. We are here with you guys to talk about everything that is going on in the world. If you were paying attention this weekend, and they were hoping you wouldn't be, you know that there's plenty going on. The DOJ says it is done releasing the Epstein files. That's it, everybody. Despite the fact that there appears to be a lot that's missing, Marjorie Taylor Green says Trump was the person most aggressively blocking the Epstein files. We're going to dive into all of that and more.

Marco Rubio gets a standing ovation, deservedly so, at the Munich Security Conference for a banger speech about the US and Europe needing to be strong and ditch the guilt over supposed historic sins. The speech was incredible. I'm very eager to show you guys some clips from that and to talk about it. I was blown away. Even Hillary Clinton is forced to admit that mass immigration has gotten out of hand. Retail buyers have flooded into the markets in record numbers higher than even the meme stock era, which I was shocked by.

And I would just like to welcome you all to the casino. Enjoy. We get an economic pulse check when a Pokemon card sells for a historic number that's going to make your eyes water. UK MP Rubert Low announced a new party in the UK called Restore Britain, and it's aimed at not just stopping mass migration, but reversing it. He's got some outrageous things to say. We're going to take a look at that. Free speech is on life support. So, I hope he says it fast. As Spain announces that the CEOs of the social media firms will be held criminally responsible for content on their platforms that does not conform to local laws.

That one's wild. I'm shocked. Boys and girls, we got to be careful with this one. Free speech is is the thing that you were counting on to not get mauled by your government. So, as a quick PSA, we're going to be going into that. Drew, did you enjoy your Valentine's Day as the Epstein files were uh quietly closed and I said, "Nothing nothing more to see here, Drew." Nothing more to see. Move along. Now, my Valentine's Day was lovely. I did a bunch of self-love and I bought myself something.

So, best Valentine's Day gift ever. ever. ever. What' you buy? Um, some sneakers. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. There it is. We wearing them. We're not. I didn't get them yet. They're on their way. On Zway. On Zway. All right. All right. All right. How was your Valentine's Day? Did you do some swe for Lisa? It was awesome. Uh, did we do something special? I bought her a very extravagant bouquet of flowers. Okay, that was a lot of fun. It's fun to pick. She enjoys them very much.

Nice. much. Nice. much. Nice. Uh, and then we ended up staying home at her request. her request. her request. Was not that I did not offer. Uh, we stayed home at her request, but we have an atrium here at the house, which you will know, but guests will not. And [clears throat] we set up like a picnic area inside there and ordered sushi. And that's nice. Uh, it was it was actually a lot of fun. And it was just different enough that it made the weekend feel special.

Nice. Nice. Nice. So, yeah, we had a good time. Nice. Yes. Hope everybody else is having a great Valentine's Day. Hope nobody's on the couch uh over the weekend and you guys heeded our warning. Um but with that being said, Marjorie Taylor Green is on the couch of the Republican party cuz she just keeps talking. Um she's never going to run for nothing again. Like I like she has to be a free or just be a complete Democrat cuz at this point she's putting it right at the feet of Trump with the file.

I'll be interested to see in the fullness of time what the real story is. Um, however, it really did seem like the speech that she gave when she tapped out was like, uh, I suddenly woke up and realized that I have friends and family that I love and who love me and I'm sucked into this weird political game where everything is horrible, everybody's enemies, this is not interesting anymore and I'm going to go back home. And I was like, yeah, I actually get that. M uh my pre- recognition of that is precisely why there's no universe in which I would ever run for office.

Literally none. Uh so yeah, I get that. Now, if that ends up being true, then you get this narrow window where it's like she's not trying to get reelected. She has hopefully actually broken the spell of politicians will do and say whatever they need to to gain and retain power. If you're already in power and you have no intention of trying to get it again, we always get this narrow window with a politician in that frame who will actually say what they think. For my money, she's totally jettisoned the like psychotic behavior that made me literally write her off as a lunatic.

I was like, "Oh my god." Like whoever that person is that's like gone full MAGA at the um State of the Union, I think that was when she was doing it and was just like acting a fool, yelling things out. I was like thi this is the worst look ever. Uh and so yeah, just at at that level wrote her off, did not pay attention to anything she said. Uh and so it's really been this her jettisoning politics and saying I'm done with this. Um that made me sort of stand up and take note.

She's dropped all of the affectations of a crazy person and is now instead of just trying to get clicks is just seemingly saying what she believes to be true. Now of course in the fullness of time I may realize it's all a lie and that she's really running for a different office. uh and she realized she had to completely change her persona, in which case it'll be a master class in marketing. Um yeah, I mean that in some ways will be even more interesting and I'm sure we'll talk all about it, but right now I I take her in the vein of somebody who's really just finally saying what she thinks.

thinks. thinks. Cool. Let's jump into what she said um over the weekend. That fight that fight to release the Epstein files came directly from President Trump. And I know a lot of people have a hard time with that, but that is the truth. He fought the hardest to stop these files from being released. How how how is anybody surprised by that? So, this feels like uh here's what I think was in Trump's head. Mind reading is always a dangerous game, but this is how it feels from the outside.

Um this is a really hot button issue. I'm going to run a releasing the files. I'm going to release a massive slew of documents in a magical binder. People are going to take the binder and the lunatics are going to run with it. Conspiracy theory. put all the strings up and then they're just going to go away. And he does not understand the fundamental architectural change that has already played out in culture and people have not woken up to it. And this is the age of everpresent persistent information where people are going to take those documents and they're going to parse them six ways to Sunday.

And by the way, uh you have when when you put it all together, I forget the exact number, but it's somewhere around like 12 to 14% unemployment once you stop only looking at people that are looking for jobs and can't find them and you start including all the people that have just tapped out, you're going to have I if that number is accurate, and this is not me making that number up, this is me looking at the data. uh if it really is 12%. Imagine how many very intelligent with a touch of tism people you've got just combing through this data because they don't have a job and they're mad as hell and they've tapped out of the job market because they don't believe in the system and so they're like oh you what like you're going to close the binder [ __ ] act real and they're going to [ __ ] go through this thing.

They're going to write AI apps that redact it. We're already seeing it. They're going to go through this stuff. But this isn't just an Epstein thing. This is forever. This is the world you live in. live in. live in. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. The government has two options. Start electing people that understand they live in that world. Clamp down with a level of violence that we've never seen. Spain is choosing violence. We'll get to that story later. But like, Spain is for real going to attempt to lock people up simply for having a platform that allows people to say what they believe to be true.

I cannot fathom that people hear my voice right now and think that's a good idea. That that is so wild. Read 1984. Read 1984. Th this was a guy in the 60s who was like, "Oh, I see where this goes." And once the government gets a hold of surveillance on the level that we have now, they're going to clamp down thought crimes. And that's what we see. Like when you tweet something out, it it is a person thinking out loud. They are trying to work their way through uh an idea.

Remember, we are both the shout and the echo. Humans, if you put them in isolation, they break psychologically. Imagine that. They actually go crazy. Okay? They go crazy if you put them in isolation. We need feedback. So, you say a thing out loud, you get feedback, and you adjust your thinking. That's how this works. That is how the human mind is built. And when you rob people of that ability, look at what happens to their countries. They go completely insane. insane. insane. We are in a position where we've got to find a new relationship with everything being said all the time and a ton of it is going to be malicious.

There's going to be lies, all of that. But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and clamp down so hard that people that are legitimately maybe wrong, but they are legitimately trying to think through issues. This is one of the single most dangerous things that we are playing with as a civilization right now and this is one of those I cannot bang the drum loudly enough. Don't [ __ ] with free speech, okay? Free speech is about letting people say things that you hate, okay? Letting people say things that you hate.

And if you don't allow people to say things that you hate and you're not prepared to challenge those ideas in the public marketplace, now you get a deranged culture because people are not able to think. We need the echo, boys and girls. and girls. and girls. We'll get there. We'll get we'll get to that. We'll get to that one. Um, I want to get back to the Epstein thing cuz to your point, Trump did the JFK files. We worried about them for a week, we moved on.

Then he did the Martin Luther King files, worried about them for a week, then we moved on. So he was like, "All right, I'm two for two. Epstein, it's going to be the same thing." And it's like, "Nope, now we're kind of spinning it around." And the DOJ, if you could throw this up, Eric, the DOJ just released that after releasing the 3.5 million records, half of the 6 million documented Epstein archive, they announced that they're done. The disclosure is done. They did their legal um uh what they're responsible to release legally and they won't release any more files.

That's crazy. That that this is not going to go away and they they are going to have to find a way to reconcile the fact that uh people are already building timelines about what's missing and in the absence of information they're going to make up more and more stories. And one thing, this belongs in conspiracy corner. Let there be no mistake, but one of the conspiracies, and I don't know if people can see the screen that you've got pulled up, but we'll certainly get to that one.

Uh, but one of the conspiracies is that some of the documents that are missing are missing right in the 911 time window. And that part of what we would see is basically communications about that. People being drawn into that conversation that you'd be like, "Wait a second, why are they talking about that? I doubt there's any smoking gun." But nonetheless, there's going to be a lot of weird stuff and that's causing things to resurface. Uh there was a clip that I saw this morning of firefighters going um there were planted explosions inside of the building.

And now is that real? Don't know. Uh was this because if people remember a few years before 9/11 was successful, they had planted bombs in the parking garage trying to topple the building that way. Were they hearing the building collapse and the explosions resulting from just, you know, pillars breaking and they were primed to believe that these were bombs? Maybe. Uh but it's like this is why transparency is going to be the thing that's going to get you to the other side of this because in a vacuum this is not going to go well.

So yeah, the the play here is blowing up in his face. This is going to be the biggest headwind going into the midterms. This is going to be the thing that is already tearing the party apart. You've got Nick Fuentes uh who just cannot say enough mean things about Trump, how badly he wants to see this ruined. He [clears throat] is screaming at the top of his lungs for anybody that follows him to stay at home over the midterms and that they um just in no way, shape or form support this.

And as more and more stuff comes out of the files, man, it's just the only response is response is response is find more, please. like go back if you look at I don't know if we have any clips or anything but there's um a guy who I believe was in the Epstein files who bought the ranch and now the ranch I think there's more information that the ranch was being used as like a hub for genetic engineering of some kind um and maybe it's not nefarious at all or maybe it's super nefarious and so claims have been made that there are the bodies of children or infants as a part of that program that have been buried.

Conspiracy corner, please. Tinfoil hat strapped on. strapped on. strapped on. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. But there's a guy who's saying, "I will cover all the costs to do the scanning." So, dear new owner, let me just scan. And I was like, "Yes, please." And if you put up a even if that guy isn't willing to pay for it, if you put up a GoFundMe for we need to raise $3 million to scan the property, bro. bro. bro. Yeah. raise that lickety split notion. Getting funny to end this.

Um, all right. You brought up conspiracy corner. There was something that we we talked about. We threw it up on the screen briefly, but there's also a sec of people that thinks Gain Maxwell isn't even in prison. She's been body snatched. Um, they're talking about the nose is uh shorter, the facial structure changed, changed, changed, glasses, all types of things. Um, well, yeah. So, okay. Um, we are deep in conspiracy corner now and I'm really gonna need everybody to actually wear a tin foil hat. We should have had ours prepared.

prepared. prepared. Okay, so when you do the face morph over and over and over, it is startling how much these two faces share in common. So I am very slow to say that these are not the same person. Like when you look at like at first I've looked at a bunch of different ones of these and every time I'm looking at the faces going oh this is someone debunking it because the faces really do look identical and then it's like no no no like this is proof that these are not the same person.

Now I will admit the ear movement is the one that I'm like whoa. Now is it possible that as you age the muscles holding the ears in place like start to droop? Obviously that's possible. So, um, and anybody that thinks that there aren't muscles involved in the ears, remember there are people that can wiggle their ears. I am sadly not one of them. And how do they wiggle them? Up and down. So, it is certainly very possible that there is something going on there. Now, the nose one is weird.

And I don't know if as you age or get heavier that some people's noses get bigger. I know men's noses like keep growing. Uh, if you look at the chin how it's like she it went from like pointed to blocky. I don't know. I want to be I don't know. I want to be very clear. I don't know. Now, I will say this. The reason that I wanted to cover this one is because when I first saw it, I was like, that doesn't even look like her, but I'm not conspiratorally minded.

So, I just like I was like, whoa, crazy. Like, prison has not been kind to her. And and I just like moved on. And then when people started, I was like, you know, it really doesn't look like her. But for my money, there's so many things facial, structurally, like where the eyes sit that is so [ __ ] perfect between the two that I'm like, "Yeah, it is the eyes and like the this the bridge of the nose, even the fat pads when she's young, you can see where they're about to come in and then now you can see that they really are where they were coming." Yeah, it's definitely a 60% batch, but that of the 40, I don't know.

This This is one where it's like if this comes out and throw it up one more time. People are like, can we get one more look? Okay, 100% this is not the same person. I'll be like I mean it does there's like a big change. But if it came out and was like, look, this is just how people's faces age. I wouldn't be super shocked. First of all, women tend to masculineize as they get older. Uh as the estrogen dries up, it's a totally different story.

So there's nothing here that feels smoking gun to me, though. People are screaming that this is uh quick yes or no in the chat. If you think it's it is the same person, yes. If you think it's not the same person, no. Just yes, no. And my official vote is it's the same person. There's just no way. There's just no way. But hey, I've had failures of imagination in the past. Uh okay. So, while that's uh throwing in in the chat, I feel like to your point, the Septe the Septe the Septe um final thoughts.

Do you think that we'll get like something breakthrough or is the scanning guy the our hope now? Like what do you think? I I think the way that this plays out is the quote unquote deep state, the connective tissue of the government is so big and strong that the way that this is going to play out is not going to be this really satisfying so- and so goes to prison kind of thing. They might pick one or two like fringe people and they go away so that everybody can point at and say, "Look, we dug in.

These are the only people like it is what it is. I know no one's ever going to be satisfied. No matter how much we release, nobody's going to be happy with it. And the way that it's actually experienced is a flip in the midterms. And then Republicans have a very hard time winning in 2028. And so you'll feel it in the body politic. You won't be able to point and say this was because of Epstein. Um, and then the other thing is the the way that the game is played in terms of how people communicate with each other and all that stuff.

That's going to change. Um, conspiracy theorists are up so big now that I think you're going to see that ramp up even more. Like people like me who used to have a default like there's no way any of this is true. These are all cooks. I just can't write people off like that anymore. So now it's like okay well I need to look at this. Now here's the bad news. I already find myself going um something with say 250,000 250,000 250,000 views or likes uh views, not likes, excuse me, views on X.

If they're making a crazy claim and I would have to go to the original source material and check like, was this AI? Is this real? I'm already like, I'll look at it when it's got like three million views. Until then, I'm not even going to look. So like my thing of the obfuscation is already working because it just becomes too much work. There's just too many conspiracies out there. So I don't necessarily immediately write it off, but I'm also just like, bro, if it's not like Satan and they're actually summoning demons and we found like the bodies of children, it's got to be over three million for me to like take it seriously.

And so that numbing out is the big risk. But but to that point though, I we've been trying to save this story, but it keeps bubbling it up. So, I think we could jump into the Spain CEO thing. I know I'm calling a bit of an audible here, but it it seems like on one side you have people that if something has 12 million views, it's true true true and and that and that's kind of the that's dangerous. that's dangerous. that's dangerous. It has enough c it has I'm just there is a sect of people that's like it has enough cultural energy whether it's true or not, we now have to talk about it.

bringing that idea into the stadium, it becomes some people are like, you know what, I do believe this and whether it's 20%, 15%, whatever that line is. So now the president of Spain right now is coming in and saying we have to now hold the tech companies accountable for hate speech. Hopefully it's the similar with the immigrants thing. If you if you shut down all the employers, people will stop hiring illegal immigrants. It can help the problem that way. So if I hold X accountable, X might do a better job moderating it.

moderating it. moderating it. And be clear, X is the only one they care about. This is all about X. Yeah, because everybody else has bent the knee at one point in time. 100%. Yeah. So, but where is that line though? Because I I'm I'm with you. I don't want 1984. I don't need a Ministry of Truth. But there has been some We were just talking about Epsteorphs. Like there is something as a society we have to realize like, okay, some ideas, not they're bad, but some ideas shouldn't just have this gravitational pull that they do.

And how I take a totally different stance on this. So the way that I look at this, if if you want to move forward well in the world, you have to let people think for themselves. You have to let ideas be battled out in public. And the reality is that a lot of people are just not comfortable with ideas being battled in public. You have to let a slew of lies, a slew of bad information, all of it get put out in the public sphere. And then between community notes, AI analysis, people chiming in, that over time we come to a consensus after the dust is settled, after everybody has said what they need to say, after people have screamed from the rooftops that these things are good and other people screaming these things are bad, that we go, okay, like this is how I'm parsing out the information.

Up until now, we have allowed the oligarchy, remember that just means rule by a few. We have let the oligarchy for thousands of years simply decide what is true and hand that to us. Now there are huge advantages advantages to that and anybody that denies that there are advantages to that is a fool. So hey it creates some good things. The problem is it creates this ability to manipulate to abuse to extract from the populace and we have just played that card. so heavily extracted so much and people now have access to so much information that they're rebelling against all of this and the I want one phrase to stick in everybody's mind.

Every time you think about do I allow myself to vote for the death of freedom of speech remember that there is a concept called malin information. information. information. Mal information Mal information Mal information is something that everyone knows is true, but we have decided nah, it's bad for people to know that this is true. And so we are just going to pretend it doesn't exist and we are going to crush it down. Now, unless you're going to tell me that you don't think malinformation is real, at which point I have AI do a search for you and pull up the absolute avalanche of commentary from government officials about how you cannot allow malinformation to erode the structures of democracy.

I I can't help you. Like, if you're in that bucket, we're in real trouble. It exists. It is talked about. It is embraced by the political class and the political class wants to control what you have access to even when it's true. That to me is a red line. It's a hard stop. It's an I will not cross, do not enter zone. Um you you can't allow people to say this thing is too upsetting and so therefore it is unknowable. You for my money that's an absolute hard pass.

So, the reason that I am so opposed to government censorship is because they're so [ __ ] arrogant that they believe that they that they that they ought to be able to decide what true information you have access to. Also, they're so arrogant they believe they know what's true. Look at these [ __ ] idiots on what they've told us to eat. It is so crazy. And even in the face of us getting fatter and sicker, they just kept telling us, "We know best. We know best." Not only do they not know best, there's all kinds of economic incentives that further complicate things.

The only way is to run the scientific method, and you let ideas battle it out for predictive validity. Which idea has the most predictive validity? If an idea predicts the world that we see more accurately and as we align ourselves with that idea, we get more and more things right, then that idea wins. And the ideas that have the lowest predictive validity can [ __ ] right off. And then we have to remember that the vast majority of the things that we interact with in the world are simply perception and they are not ground level truth.

That's why science is constantly updating. you can get close, but the odds that we're all the way to like actually mathematically true are very very low. All right, let me let me I got to poke a couple holes in there. Um, so there's two things I want to parse out. So for one, the Spanish PM Sanchez, this is what he was um proposing that execs are personally liable for platform violations, algorithmic implication amplification of illegal content is criminalized, hate and polarization tracking systems are introduced, social media banned for under 16s, and prosecutors to act against Grock, Tik Tok, and Instagram.

So is that overreach? Yes. So I I can put that on one side and say two out of these three things, two out of these five things I like, the rest can, you know, suck it. Um, on the other hand though, we are going to Marco Rubio later. We're going we talk about this all the time when it comes to immigration that a country needs to share a narrative. A country needs to believe a certain thing. A country needs to have one method of ideology. We have seen even now in the Trump administration, if you were to criticize Israel, you can now get um deported.

If you were having certain views that were against the government, you are now getting persecuted for those views. whether it's your visa being revoked, whether it's you get expelled from school, all these other things. So on one hand, yes, social media should be this free place, but we are seeing these assaults on um free speech from the government when it becomes town. No, but that's different because that's our social construct or that's different because that's our society narrative. You can't talk bad about that. So where is that line from malin information about Epstein to malinformation about the origin of the United States?

Yeah, that's the right question. And so, first of all, as a general guiding principle, I think you want people to walk right up to the line of absolutely outrageous and damaging long before you get involved. get involved. get involved. Uh, and so we do have safeguards around free speech, but they are very, very light touch and they should remain light touch. Now, because you brought up something that's very difficult, and I always like to face the most difficult question. The thing that's hard for me is at impact theory, we have something called principles.

This is an idea that we got from Ray Dallio. They turned it into software and it allows us to tell each other whatever we need to tell each other in documented form. I don't believe in um anonymous feedback. People should own what the [ __ ] they have to say. say. say. Uh but people can and should say, "I think you're doing this well. I think you're doing this poorly." Whatever. And it's just data and it helps us understand what each of us is good at and what we're not good at.

And there's one thing though that the company's never going to take a vote on, and that's whether we should do that or not. And so on the line of should people be able to say whatever they think is true, I'm a dictator. So while I invite people to tell me, more than anybody, it's important that people tell me what I'm doing wrong. doing wrong. doing wrong. And the reason for that is skills have utility. And if I'm doing something wrong, I can drive the company into the ground and hopefully I've surrounded myself with a bunch of smart people that are going to see things I don't see and they will be able to help me course correct and then we get on the right path because I'm not I'm arrogant in a million ways.

None of them have to do with me thinking I'm always right. None of them having to do with I think I don't have blind spots. I think I have tremendous blind spots. So I'm always like trying to get that feedback. So I am an absolute ruthless dictator. If somebody were to criticize the use of principles to say that people ought to keep quiet, whatever. Uh they're my subordinate, they shouldn't be able to say anything to me, whatever, whatever, whatever. Uh that person will not last long here.

And so now it's like, how is that not a violation? So let's put this into immigration. So you've got somebody here on a student visa and they start talking [ __ ] about America. Talking [ __ ] about Israel. That one is gets weirder because it's not America. So, let's keep it to they're talking [ __ ] about America. So, you have a non-citizen trying to get people riled up about getting rid of foundational freedoms. Let's say, yeah, that person's got to go. So, they are going after the core foundation upon which I think we have to say this one's sacred.

So, this is not a country with no sacred cows. We have sacred cows and if you come after them then if you're not a citizen to me rules apply very differently to a citizen than a non-citizen. That's my take. Um so if you're a citizen and you want to say hey we should be communist okay cool you should be able to do that. If you're a citizen you want to be Marxist. You're a citizen. You want to shut down um free speech. Yep. Cool. Go for it.

You're a non-citizen. You got to get the [ __ ] out. That that's where I break the line. And then for example, um this is actually Sequoa Hall's uh super chat that's on this topic. Um I don't know if you want to read that one out. Yeah, you super chat uh from Sequoia Hall. Google, Apple, Meta, etc. all gave detailed info on anti-ICE accounts to the Trump admin. It's like if they gave all the info on anti-lockdown activists to the feds except flipped, the death of democracy at work.

at work. at work. So on the flip side of that, we're seeing is that a violation of free speech then? Because I might have I'm an American citizen. I'm here. I didn't march. I didn't protest. But if I say I think ICE is bad or ICE is supposed to be coming to this community, everybody be prepared. Is is that protected by free speech? And that's where I think you should be able to say it. And if you haven't broken the law, then nothing should happen to you.

Now we as a society have to decide what we want uh law enforcement to have access to. And if we said we do not want them to have access to who said what, what the tone is of something, I would vote for that. I'm all for it. Um, however, if you don't think that the government can, will, and is crawling the open internet, you are a full [ __ ] That is so crazy. Everything that you put out into the world, if it hits public airwaves anywhere, like, bro, AI is crunching that [ __ ] And I don't know how many Snowdens have to be relegated to Russia before people realize like, yo, you've got to start voting differently.

if you want like something else because right now it is my understanding that the government can and does knowingly spy on basically everything that you put out there. Now, I'm all for voting that down. Let's go. Um, this is also why I don't want CBDC's. I don't want them to have knowledge or control over how I spend my money. Uh, if I violate the law, then they should have to go about proving it just as they would anything else. Anyway, uh, that's my take on that.

So, I don't want to see it, but if we know that it's happening, act accordingly. And um do I consider it a violation of free speech? Only if they stop you from doing it that they are monitoring it, I expect. expect. expect. Got you. Okay. Um, I'm I'm a bit conflicted on this because I think when we talk about free speech, it seems like it's selective based on whichever political party is trying to protect whatever they want to be, whatever they want to be said. Because there was a point in time where during the lockdowns, anybody who critiqued the lockdowns critiqued Anthony Fouchy was a terrible person and they wanted him to get locked up and everybody was bad.

And then the Charlie Kirk thing happened and anybody who said Charlie like didn't say I feel bad for him and his family, you are part of the problem. You need to get locked up. So it seems like the pendulum just kind of swings depending on what the topic is and things like that. That makes me want to flip the table over. What are they doing? When people started acting just like uh every aggressively sensorious person on the left, but now it was coming from the right at when Charlie Kirk, what the [ __ ] are you doing?

Like that was so stupid and they undermined all of their credibility. And it reminds me of the thing that um uh Chappelle said, "Everything's funny until it happens to you." And it's like everything's fine with free speech until you say something I don't like. And now I want to clamp it down. It's like, bro, it it is literally find the speech you find most offensive. Fight for that. like when the I think it was the NC who was it the anti-defamation league anti-defamation league anti-defamation league maybe it was one of like the big like groups groups groups that uh fought for the um the KKK it was either neo-Nazis or the KKK to march through neo-Nazis.

Thank you. The ADL. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Uh so they fought for the neo-Nazis right to march through a neighborhood in like Wisconsin or something that was full of Holocaust survivors. They fought for the right for them to do that. That's free speech. And it's gross. I hate that they did that, but at the same time, welcome to America. to America. to America. All right. Um, one more audible because this is something that's been bubbling up over this week. We haven't pulled anything of it because it's still like just talk right now, but the gerrymandering conversations are really ramping up right now.

So, uh, Texas uh, announced that they were going to jerrymander um, two districts. California responded. a Virginia governor, a Democratic governor was just elected in Virginia. Yeah. So now they now they're flipping Virginia and um the Republicans just lost another two seats there. And now Republicans are saying Democrats are going too crazy with the gerrymandering, we need to stop gerrymandering. So it's the same thing with the free speech that when one side does it, it's okay cuz we're right. And then when the other side gets into power and they start doing it, no, that's not how you're supposed to play the game.

And then it starts coming like this back and forth. Like is there a solution for this tick tick for tat? like there is but it is going to require such a long process. Okay. Uh I'll give you Polyiana and I'll give you um like the Death Star. Which do you want first? Um let's go Polyiana. Okay. Polyiana is uh the fact that voices can come on social media like we are doing right now and lay out a vision for our future. I don't have to ask anybody's permission.

I can say whatever I believe to be true. You can say whatever you believe to be true. There are countless shows and more coming online every day where people believe the things they are saying the things that they believe to be true. And many of them will take a very optimistic tack. And if we can get culture moving in that direction, you get a shift where songs are written about a wonderful future, where movies are told about a wonderful future, where video games are told about a wonderful future, all of that stuff.

It it really will over time begin to sway um culture. It's hard to get that like that first thing going. But if you can get somebody who young people really consider to be cool and then you raise them in an economically positive environment, this is always going to start with economics. So you get the economy humming again. You get people like in the 80s where kids just want to party. And so there's optimism, there's hope, my future's going to be amazing. Like it's that good time then spreads through music and all that.

So the short is fix the debt problem. Stop inflating people's savings away. Um reduce the number of people that need to be in the casino gambling on um stocks and stuff and you'll get there and people really will feel hopeful and optimistic and it'll be incredible. And Elon is certainly doing a lot of things taking us to the moon, potentially taking us to Mars, building rockets that can land themselves. I mean it's really incredible. also um going to uh being in the middle of a cold war with China and having an adversary that we can all point to and say we've got to outperform them.

Have a worthy rival. I forget who is it Eric Weinstein that did a whole thing on that. Um who talked about having a worthy um rival and he talked about his rival in mathematics. I think god I hope I'm not misremembering this uh talked about his uh rival in mathematics and they had all this respect for each other but at the same time like when they were alone and they were like doing their thing and they were you know working more hours than the average person they were thinking about the other person they wanted to beat them and that made them better mathematicians and I love that and I think that that's how life should be.

I think companies should compete with other companies. people should compete with other people. Like it's but in a joyful way, not where you like want to sabotage them and see their building get knocked down where you would legitimately be sad if something bad happened to them. If one of their, you know, think of football, I'm not interested in cheering for a team or being at somebody's party where they're stoked that the other person's best player got injured. Like if you're Charles Barkley and you're going up against Michael Jordan, wow, this dates me.

Uh you certainly don't wish for Michael Jordan to sprain his ankle. Like that's crazy. You want to find out if you can beat him at his peak or not. And this is why everybody should watch One Piece. Oda somehow is just morally so [ __ ] accurate. And so in that story, you see this all the time. I don't want to beat a weakened opponent. I I want you full strength. And if I lose, I lose. But I want you at full strength. And that's the only way that there's honor in it.

Cool. That's the Polyiana version. If we can get that to catch fire, fire, fire, turn the economy around, get people like locked in there. Word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now the Death Star. I was about to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, history tells you you've got a 75% chance of going to war with China, [snorts] that deglobalization is going to be brutal, that the um immigration problem we've already let go too far, that you've raised for sure millennials and Gen Z to be self-loathing Americans, self-loathing um Europeans.

And so now the damage is done. And between that and debt, there's just no way to back out of the death spiral. They will go into what's known as the great taking. And this is what you see happening in the Netherlands. This is what you see being attempted in California and I think you're going to see you see it in New York. You're going to see this escalating where they attempt to tax the life out of people rather than trim the budgets only to find out Laugher's Curve is real.

And not only will people leave, but if you don't let them leave, they'll stop producing. And so then your only hope is to confiscate their wealth, not their revenue. And when you start confiscating wealth, you suddenly realize, oh, this is actually destructive to the tax base again because people will leave, but also because now you're put in a position where you're [snorts] trying to um sell things that won't sell at that value because everybody's trying to sell into that because it's the only way to actually pay for the thing because people fundamentally misunderstand uh wealth versus revenue or actual money in the bank.

And so you further like speed up the decline. And this is like classic late stage empire. You throw the borders open, people flood in. Uh in the in step one, it looks like the immigrants are a win for the economy. And then over time, you realize that it's a massive drag. And so, um I I have a video, a deep dive coming on this tomorrow. Watch it on immigration. I have no doubt people are going to say that I'm racist. It's not that. I go into the details.

Uh so check it out, but it always looks on the surface sort of step one. Oh, immigration is good. Let's cheer for it. Once you realize skilled immigration is good, very good for the economy. Unskilled immigration is horrific. And so in like the early stage, you might get a bump because you're getting labor done very cheaply and then over time they become a massive draw on the system. [snorts] So anyway, uh if you escalate to war at a time where your economy is trash and you're doing the great taking, then so many people die that they just break emotionally and they say, "Wipe out all the debt.

I don't care anymore. I just want to stop fighting." Uh you then wipe out the debt and people are so fatigued from all of the combat that everyone's just like, I just want to raise kids and be left alone. And then [snorts] historically you get this period of things sort of settle down. You lose a generation or two to people um sort of clearing the cobwebs because people don't come out of a war ambitious when they've lost it. They don't come out of war ambitious when all of their debt just poof went away because they're like, "Wait, I worked for 30 years only to have it wiped out with a stroke of a pen." No, no, no.

And so they tap out. And it's not until like their kids or their kids' kids finally come of age don't have any memory of that. Like I'm the child of a child of the war, right? So my grandparents went to war. My parents were born, the boomer generation. They didn't know war. They only knew the like jubilant times that came after that. And [clears throat] then I didn't know anything other than like the 80s were booming. So even the 70s like sort of ooh is this all real hyperinflation all that wasn't born yet and so or wasn't old enough to be cognizant and so by the time I come online Reagan has fixed a lot of these problems the economy is booming people are getting back on track and so my youth was um very hopeful very optimistic and the sense just pervaded the culture that we could do anything but um it that's even like on the that's on the back of winning and being in the country that wasn't touched the way that it normally happens.

Look at Europe. Just so [ __ ] devastated. So anyway, that's the Death Star version. version. version. No, I I think this is the perfect transition to now jump over to um Germany and the Munich Security Conference, which started as a conference of countries when the Great Wall of um Berlin was up and all these other things like that. The Great Wall of Berlin. I was going to say the wall of Berlin. I wanted to make it more Berlin wall. Yeah, but I wanted to make it more, it more, it more, you know, vague, but then it became the Great Wall of China.

You know what I'm saying? saying? saying? Uh, okay. So, with that, um, that's number two. Eric, if you could cue that up. Um, Secretary of State Rubio kicked off the conference, um, with like a thunderous like ovation. Like he basically had people standing on their feet clapping and stuff. So, he definitely reassured a lot of the European nations about it. Um, kind of set us up for it. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. All right. So, if you guys haven't seen it yet, I highly encourage you to watch it.

Rubio received a standing ovation from world leaders at the Munich Security Conference just for saying that the US and Europe need to be strong, believe in their culture, and stop feeling guilty for the supposed sins of the past. Um, I think it's worth seeing some of this actually be said by Rubio. This is really fantastic. this delusion. We embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their c companies to systematically undercut ours shuttering our plants resulting in large parts of our societies being de-industrialized, shipping millions of working and middle class jobs overseas and handing control of our critical supply chains to both adversaries and rivals.

We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves. This even as other countries have invested in the most rapid military buildup in all of human history to use hard power to pursue their own interests. interests. interests. to appease a climate cult. We have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people. Pause it for a second. Even as our competitor what you're saying about the Overton window, even when I had Bujorn Lombore on whatever 18 months, two years ago, something like that, it was still like, whoa, I can't believe you're talking about this.

Like, it was crazy. It was almost like a coming out party for the channel to address something like that. And now to have the Secretary of State call it a climate cult, to have Bill Gates back off of it. This is why malin information just cannot be tolerated, the concept of it. Uh because these were things that were true then are true now, but they were just completely unsayable. And so even when you try to make it unsayable, the truth on a long enough timeline is going to come out.

And so the question is how little suffering, how little time can you put between when the right idea actually begins to surface and when people recognize it as the right idea. That's the key. So it was very interesting to hear him say that. But keep going. I have the 14 one pulled up now. Oh yeah, let's go to that. This this was um this was my favorite part of the speech. Uh let's hear from the man himself. himself. himself. And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak because that makes us weaker.

We want allies who can defend themselves. so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization and who together with us are willing and able to defend it. defend it. defend it. Say it. And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is what was what is necessary to fix it.

For we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline. That line's so gangster. We do not seek to separate but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. history. history. Let's go. What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. So true. So true. So true. An alliance is what the alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into an action by fear.

Fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology. Instead, we want an alliance that boldly races into the future. And the only fear we have is the fear of the shame of not leaving our nations prouder, stronger, and wealthier for our children. An alliance ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny. All right, you can stop it. Not one that exists. From where I'm sitting, Rubio absolutely knocked it out of the park with that speech.

He was so politically deaf. He knows that Trump is brash. He's rude. He's ultraaggressive and he also knows that that is going to alienate a lot of the world especially the more sort of regal sophisticated understated Europeans and he was able to bridge that gap and deliver a hard message to be sure if you watch the whole thing like it is not a kumbaya speech but he also draws the Europeans in it was a masterclass. Rubio is aggressively right that we have to reject the idea that Western civilization should be defined by apology.

He's also right that Europe and America should spend their futures looking at all the incredible things that we can do together instead of looking at their past and trying to atone for everything. He's right that we can't be paralyzed into inaction by fear of climate change, war, technology, whatever. whatever. whatever. If we are, we will lose. We will lose to the cultures and countries who believe in themselves enough to expand, who believe in themselves enough to expand. He talked about it that at one point in the speech and I was like I felt hearing that line the way that I felt or feel every time I hear Annie Lennox saying that some people want to be abused.

I'm always like, yo, right now there are cultures that seek to expand and there are cultures that are shrinking. At a minimum, if we are not prepared to defend what we have, we will lose it. That is the world of great power politics. The very thing that's ending right now is the established world order where nobody invades borders. World's done. That's not the game anymore. Look at Russia. Look at America. We went and snatched up a dictator. We've sent two like carrier fleets to Iran. Imagine you're negotiating with somebody.

Okay, this is what's really happening in Iran. You're negotiating with somebody. They put their terms, slide them across the table, but outside in the parking lot is like 6,000 armed men with the biggest guns you've ever seen in your life. They're like, I sure do hope you agree to these terms. That's some wild negotiating, okay? But that's the world that we're in right now. So, we've got to be prepared to say, "Hey, this is what we stand for. This is what we're going to stand on." Uh, and we've gotten here because that's exactly what other countries believe.

They're prepared to push forward. Now, Rubio, uh, he understands that a country has to have that strength and a country must control who enters their own country. Um, in the speech he talks about that's not xenophobia. It's a fundamental act of national sovereignty. That mass migration is obviously destabilizing societies all across the West. It's not a fringe concern. It is the central domestic issue in nearly every western democracy right now. And the fact that a sit sitting secretary of state said it as plainly as he did on a global stage without hedging is awesome.

We have to have the conversation. At a minimum, we're not all going to agree, but we have to have the conversation. Nations need to be culturally cohesive to function. That I can't believe that that has become super controversial. Uh that isn't bigotry. That's not racism. That's just the physics of the human condition. Now, this part I almost don't want to say out loud as politicians can have big egos, maybe Trump more than most, and that can cause real problems. But Rubio is the man that we need in the White House.

He's brilliant, strong, and he's actually got enough wisdom to know that not every true thing can be delivered like a punch to the face if we actually want allies, which is Trump's strategy. This is true. So, I'm going to beat you about the head, neck, and chest. It's like, it's wild. You've got to seduce. You've got to get people on your team. We should very aggressively want allies. Now, Rubio said a bunch of things um that were similar to what Vance had said. Vance did not get the reception that he got because Rubio framed all of this as shared failures.

And he offered a vision that was actually forwardlooking rather than backwards rather than being punitive. And he referred, this was very smart. He referred to America as a child of Europe. Now, that was a line that drew a ton of applause, understandably so. And that is political seduction in action. The thesis was simple, super powerful. Our civilizations are intertwined both culturally and historically. We've made a bunch of mistakes, but we've made them together and now we have to fix them together. And Rubio was very direct on how devastating globalizing our supply chains has been.

You guys saw that clip earlier. I thought that was a really important message that he had to get out there. Now, ultimately what made the speech work is that it wasn't angry. It was aspirational. It was something for us to strive towards, something for us to do together. This is one thing I try to teach entrepreneurs all the time. When you are doing a negotiation, you've got to know what a win scenario looks like for the other side and help them achieve it. When you're working with employees, you've got to understand what what is their part in this.

How do they go home and tell their wife a story of like, I did this really cool thing. You've got to help them see that. You've got to help the organization see that. And if your dumb ass needs everything to be you, you're going to lose. People aren't going to want to stay with you. You've got to help find that way. So, as America, sure, if we want to be the big swinging dick on a global stage, fantastic. [ __ ] it out onto the table. However, you've got to make sure that other people feel their power.

They feel their sense of involvement and engagement in all of this. And if they don't, they're not going to be on your team. They are going to peace out because you're not giving them a strong narrative. You're not giving them something to go back to their team with. Now, Rubio cast the transatlantic relationship as a dormant friendship that could be rekindled. That's what people want to hear. Okay? He showed it as something that was great. It fell asleep. There's no doubt about that. But we could still wake it up.

Whether that's commercial space travel, which is insane to think that's going to happen in our lifetimes. AI and the incredible things that it's doing. Flex manufacturing critical critical mineral independence. I don't know if you guys heard about the big deposit that was just found in Nevada. So, Rubio was busy painting a picture of what a confident West looks like when it stops apologizing and starts building. That's where we have to get to. The conference chair even said to Rubio when he sat down, you you could hear a sigh of relief in the audience.

This is very different than a year ago. Even Nancy Pelosi called this wellreceived. And when you've got the conference organizer, the EU Commission president, and Nancy Pelosi all nodding along, you got the greatest stock trader of all time in America. Let's go. Sign up now for her, dude. If she like she can't leave office because it won't work, but if she would just like offer a course on stock trading, bro, I'm there. I'm there. Okay, let's break it down. I appreciate Marco Rubio for sounding like an adult.

Yes, Yes, Yes, that's the only credit I will give him. The only credit This is going to get interesting. interesting. interesting. I think that there's a very interesting thing that's happening right now. We can jump to the Hillary Clinton thing next, but politicians are talking about how globalization, this new world order, and the results of all these failed policies is what is causing this decline. But over these 20, 30, 40 years, the incentives haven't changed. And a wise man once told me, "If you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes." Tom, you're the wise man.

I wish that was my line. That's uh my boy uh Charlie Munger. Heard I heard it from you. So, as much as I love that Rubio routed up and all the EU people are high-fiving like, "Yeah, maybe America won't bomb us. We're good now." The incentives are still there. Corporations are still incentivized to make as much profit as possible, which means they'll do whatever they can to export their labor. Uh whether that's through um immigration, whether that's through robots, whether that's through uh cutting things down.

The Ford chair just announced, "I can't find any mechanics." In the 90s, you used to hire your mechanics and then you would bring them on to your team. it would cost him 40k to start a mechanic school and then a direct pipeline, but he won't do that because he's like, "Well, we can't find anybody. Let's just send it over to Mexico. I can save a billion dollars for my bottom line." And then 30 years from now, we're going to say, "Oh man, these policies ruined us." And so tariffs would help something like this.

It's a wild idea, but somebody should try it. try it. try it. It's tariffs. It's tariffs. It's tariffs. So, let me take a step back, which is my uh my mo. uh when I'm teaching entrepreneurs, one of the things that I talk to them about is your job is to create the soil in which your employees can thrive. And if you think your job is to do everything, you are incorrect. So that won't scale. won't scale. won't scale. The government's job is to create the soil.

It's not to do the things. We've somehow gotten the belief that the government should be doing everything. The government should do effectively nothing. they're [ __ ] terrible at doing, like really bad because their incentive structure is screwed up. So, you want to put the government in a position to say, "Ooh, I see what the problem is." The problem is that right now we have no financial incentive in the private markets to build in the US. So, the government has two options. They can start building in the US themselves and do a government funded we're going to build cars.

Terrible idea for the reasons I just said. or they go, "We have to change something in the structure of the soil." The soil being the incentive structure. And so, one option that Trump is running is tariffs. And so, this is a triedand- trueue thing that people do all around the world. And so, people acting like he's the first one to do it is just bizarre. But what you do is you say, "Oh, I see the Chinese government is subsidizing the making of their vehicles, and so they can flood the world to then own the market.

This is why you don't want monopolies, right? monopolies get an unfair advantage just because of size and they can keep everybody else out. So internationally countries will run that same strategy because we can't go break that up. We go cool we're just going to tariff the life out of you. Now everybody wants to say that a tariff is a tax on the people and they're right a tariff is a tax and it is paid for like the primary person responsible is the importer. But the importer, understandably so, is going to go to the people and say that they're buying from.

So, let's say a car manufacturer in China, and they're going to say, "Hey, I need you guys to eat some of this cost. I'm not going to eat it all, and I can't pass it all onto my customers because then your cars won't be competitive." And so, what ends up being true over time with a tariff is that it's a shared tax. So, it's a tax that no one group has to pay all of. So far, to your point about profits, is it hasn't really gotten passed on to the consumer.

I'm sure there have been some things here and there, but inflation is dropping like a rock at a time where tariffs are high. So all the the apocalyptic things that people said about the tariffs, they just haven't come true. So we can just now accept as we see it happening in real time. It certainly is not apocalyptic. And so it becomes a question of what other things can we do to the soil. So Trump is trying to bring manufacturing back. His sort of blunt tool is tariffs.

Now the thing I don't know is all the promises, will they actually come to fruition? fruition? fruition? And I think if he wins the midterms, they will. And if he loses the midterms, they probably won't. Not in any real fashion. So that becomes a bigger question mark. But you've got to get people back here in the US. Now, it's my understanding, if I looked at the data correctly, that the um incomes like real wages are up like 3 to 4%. Uh since Trump took office, that's huge.

Uh so that's exciting. So if we get that and then we get continued like we need deflation. I want to be very clear not we don't want crisisled deflation but we want deflation because the last 5 years alone was 25% inflation. So stopping inflation is not the same as getting rid of that 25% that's already locked into the system. So without triggering a recession we need to find a way to bring that back down. Innovation is always the way. So what can the government do to unlock more innovation?

So deregulation is a big part of it. we're going to start seeing whether there are some windfalls. So, those are two examples of things that we can do to try to incentivize that. Um, now corporations being maximally incentivized to make profit, that is the game. And so, you want to put like moral guard rails in place to be sure. So, obviously there are things that need to be illegal and we want to make sure that nobody's doing them and they should prosecute and all of that.

Um, but you don't want to try to ask corporations to deviate from what is true about the human condition. And humans are selfish. It's the one thing you can count on them to be. to be. to be. And so if you know you can count on a human to be selfish, then how do you unlock the innovation that comes from that? That's where the focus should be. I understand that. Um, but I think that when we talk about humans being selfish, we don't want to own up that selfishness sometimes have bad consequences.

While there are great CEOs that do it with the best of intention, there are selfish CEOs that do it with the worst of intention. So, for one example, again, and I I know you're not the talking piece for Trump, and I'm not trying to put this on your feet, but I'm just giving examples of how we're getting a lot of applause on the international stages for trying to rile up the communities and things like that, but for example, Trump increased the H-1B1 visa from, let's say, $1,000 to $100,000.

I forgot what the first number is, but now every H1B visa permit is $100,000. So Google took a step back, did the math and instead of bringing in 40 50,000 Indian um engineers, they are now just building a plant in India. Yep. Yep. Yep. So the same American company is still going to capture that profit. The stock market is still going to go, but the American engineers that we thought it was going to incentivize them to hire aren't getting hired. Let me tell you how I would respond to that if I were Trump.

And this is why I would never get elected. Um I would go to the American people and I would say that one was a mistake. um we altered an incentive. It's had what we call it created a perverse incentive that we didn't see coming that's now got people going overseas uh because it's just cheaper. And so what we're going to do is lower that to where that cost structure breaks, but we don't create a scenario where there's just infinite high-skilled migration to the US and now all of our American compatriots are iced out.

And so there can be abuses in that system and so they'd have to overhaul it. But this is where the whole so again when I'm teaching entrepreneurs I teach something called the physics of progress. The physics of progress is the scientific method recontextualized for business. business. business. So uh you could do the same thing for governments. So physics of progress is the scientific method recontextualized for governments. And you go okay what is the thing? What's my outcome? So the outcome that he's trying to achieve is he's trying to bring manufacturing back to the US.

He's trying to get real wages to go up, which they have not in a very long time. And one of the things that he's going to attempt to do because there was so much, in fact, one of the things he was attempting to do was calm the masses who were freaking out about comments made by Vance and a couple other people about the um H1B visa process. And so they were like, to them there was no difference. It's like illegal immigrant raping my daughter and uh the Indian coder at Google.

Same problem. Get them all out. And so he had to do something. And so he was in the mode of like I'm going to turn everything into the golden ticket or whatever. I can't even remember what he was doing, but it was like he was big dollars, all these checks. You could basically buy citizenship for like $5 million or whatever. It was wild. And so I'm going to do all these things. And then you look at the ones that work and the ones that don't. Tariffs seem to have worked.

This clearly does not. It's just you're making it too expensive. And if there's a even a four or fiveyear glut of the developers that you need, you can't start a school and wait five years. The public markets don't work like that. These are public companies. So, they're going to have to move very quickly to spin that up, even if long-term they plan to bring it back to the US. But anyway, they they have a literal fiduciary responsibility to the people that own their shares to make a smart move like that.

And then if you want to make that not a smart move, the government has to change the way that they regulate. So the companies go, "Okay, I get it." Um, now are they going to do that? Probably not, cuz he doesn't want to look wishy-washy, blah blah blah. But you didn't get the outcome that you were looking for. And that's the finish the loop on physics of progress. You go, okay, this is the outcome that I'm trying to get. This is the thing I'm going to try to get there.

And then you say ahead of time, by doing this, I expect this change. And if you name that change ahead of time, then you do the thing, and you get something that isn't that change, and it's worse, then you know that that test did not work. You have a failed hypothesis. Great. Scientific method is about invalidating hypotheses, not proving them right. So, you've invalidated that one. Awesome. Now, it's on to the next one. And you keep doing that until you get to the one that works and you can't invalidate it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Lisa Bill is in the chat and wanted to ask a hard question on this. Do you think Quest would have been possible if we weren't able to get cheaper products from China? Do I put my wife on blast? What is she even talking about? So, we didn't use cheaper products from China. like we might have had I don't even remember anything that we were getting from China certainly not in the early days. Um we went to China at one point for equipment but I don't think we ended up buying anything.

So China would have been one small part. The question she needs to be asking like if you want to slap me in the face for Quest you go would we have been able to do what we did if we couldn't get cheap legal but cheap immigrants to work for us in Compton. And there the answer there is it would have been a lot [ __ ] harder. And there is a reason that we were that when you have a manufacturing company, it is going to be in industrial neighborhoods and it's going to attract lowincome people.

people. people. That's like the gotcha. The gotcha isn't China. So yeah, I'm not sure what she's misremembering or thinking. I am remembering incorrectly. remembering incorrectly. remembering incorrectly. But but on on to that problem though, um, another thing that was brought up is illegal immigration. And I have heard people in the chat smarter than me um that were saying, "Hey, why don't we just go after uh was it E-Verify and we could just start doing it from an employer perspective so that we know exactly who's getting paid exactly what time and that can disincentivize people from coming in." Again, my my overarching thesis and the reason I'm giving these examples out is to say I understand that the political sentiment is swinging, but just like the left hated Fouchy and now you are allowed to criticize Fouchy.

I don't want this to be our problem is we we opened up our borders to now we closed our borders, but the incentives that have that are still in place is still going to create this. this. this. We're still going to have the same problem. It's just going to be the person in the other side of the part of the political aisle now in power as it's happening. happening. happening. Yes. That is always the fear that we're not actually changing anything. We're just going from one person is okay doing it because it's for them and then the other person starts doing it because it's okay for them.

Uh we have to get to the point where we can all say this is my northstar. This is what I'm trying to do. Here are the things that I'm going to do to try to get there. And if we don't get there, we're going to change course. But we don't culturally we're not there. Like even doing that inside of this company is is is like some people are so agassed and so shocked at like I only care about what works. And so if you can't deliver what works, but you're the nicest, hardest working person on planet Earth, sorry, you're not going to last here long.

It's like we need results. And so this is ultimately a meritocracy. Every company should be. Every government proposal should result in a desired outcome. And when they don't result in a desired outcome, California, I'm looking at you. You can't spend billions trying to lay down uh highspeed rail and lay none down. So you have completely [ __ ] that up and you must own it. Can't let your city burn. You [ __ ] that up. you must own it. Uh you can't spend the god-awful amount of money that we spend on homelessness and it get worse.

You [ __ ] up. You have to own it. So it's like all of that stuff is wild, man. And this is why I say some people need to be chased by a lion. And when you're in the like impact theory only exists if it can turn a profit, right? Otherwise I just have to keep funding funding funding funding funding. And so that will eventually run out. So you have to have a profitable company. So, I'm at the mercy of the public uh wanting what I'm selling enough to buy it.

The government is not because they can just tax you. And this is why like the steam that's being gained on the whole idea of the great taking. People have to wake up to this because the governments have never and will never learn the lesson that I need to balance budget, spend less money, tell some people no and say, "Yeah, sorry. You're going to not get the thing that you want and or need because we can't pay for it all." And so we have to make very hard decisions about what does and doesn't get paid.

You're not going to be able to retire at that age. Whatever. There's going to be a whole host of things that people just can't do because we can't afford it. But they never learn that lesson. And so instead, what they do is just go, "Well, we're not going to go bankrupt while I'm in office, so I don't care." And so I'm just going to keep doing things that I know mathematically are going to bankrupt the country. Like just yep, it is as simple as the math.

Uh and so that is the terrifying news. But that that's the card that everybody plays. you uh referenced the great taking a couple times, so I want to jump into that. Um this is from Ursula Vanderlayan. Uh she's one of the members of the EU Commission. Um Europe has it needs Europe has all it needs to take the lead in the competitiveness race. This month, the EU Commission will unveil the EU savings and investment union. We'll turn private savings into much needed investment and we'll work with our institutional partners to get it off the ground.

Yeah, I need more details on this tweet. She's said things that make me think that this really is in that spirit. But to be fair in that tweet, it all comes down to whether she's going to incentivize incentivize incentivize people that have their private savings held in a way that she doesn't think is investing in the government uh and their plans enough or is she going to force through tax? through tax? through tax? If she's going to force through tax, bad and it will backfire in her face.

if she's going to um find a way to incentivize people where they hey bigger risk but bigger bigger potential reward and the government is against my advice but the government's going to get involved in actually building private sector partnerships that kind of [ __ ] like what Trump is doing also against my advice um that's better so I would rather see them deregulate because they are an absolute joke Europe is a joke like they have choked innovation out. Europe is going to look very different if Russia if Russia if Russia dude if Russia takes Ukraine it it is a different world overnight because those guys I watched a Peter Zhan video even if he's wrong significantly even being directionally correct will be transformative.

So Trump has been pushing them to spend 3 to 5% of their GDP on defense. And Zyan's thing is, oh no, no, no. If they're going to try to build these institutions from scratch to protect themselves from a hot war that's already in Europe essentially between Russia and Ukraine, he's like, they could be spending 20 or 30% of their GDP on defense. And that is a totally different ballgame. That's uh yeah, sorry, we don't do public healthcare anymore. Like it's just you don't have the dollars because you or the euros you will have to print at a level that's like pure insanity.

insanity. insanity. No, that's a really good point. People don't talk about that for World War II that the government was incentivizing Ford and all these places to make tanks and everybody wants to high-five that, but people forget there were bread lines, there were rationing of food. Like you couldn't just go to the grocery store and buy stuff. Like everybody had allocations and stuff like that. So there's the other side of the let's get together for the war effort like yeah women started getting into the manufacturing but like they had to it wasn't like I want to do this for it wasn't a patriotic kind of urge.

Um, yes. And you only have Moana, Woke Snow White because of World War II. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like when you read the story of how Disney actually survived, it was I hate that this is true because I have so much admiration for him, but it was um doing war cartoons and to get the public to basically buy bonds, so to loan the government money. Uh, and then union busting. busting. busting. That's how I got it done. That's and that's how Disney came and that's how you got the vendors, buddy.

You're welcome. Bonjour. Uh but there there is this shared narrative now with um the California billionaire tax. I think we said two trillion 12 trillion. I forgot what the number is, but a bunch of trains left. Then we had the unrealized gains tax in the Netherlands. Now the EU was talking about this. I'm going to be honest. When I first read this, I looked at it as fractional reserve for like a bank. Like instead of like certain every savings institution now a portion will have to go into government bonds required or something like that.

Um, and you can't just sell it to mortgage other people and the bank can't just eat that profit. I lean on that way. But either way, governments are getting more comfortable deciding how you spend your money. And that seems like that's not just something that's happening in the America, but globally. It's wild. It's wild. It's wild. Hey, we're historically the institution that has proven we are the worst with money literally ever in the history of the world. And guess who you should put in charge of the money and how it's spent?

Us. That is the wildest [ __ ] ever. And what really worries me is that young people are going to be like, "Yeah, that's rad." Because uh capitalism sucks, not realizing that they've not lived under capitalism. And so they are confusing this K-shaped monstrosity born of debt and money printing for actual capitalism. And so they're turning on something, but they're turning on the wrong thing. And so the very people, the government that brought you the K-shaped economy are the people that have put you in this situation. And now you're going to let them decide how you spend money.

It that's so crazy. People should have to watch every morning when they wake up, they should have to watch the Biden uh financial advisor um describing modern monetary theory. That is the wildest [ __ ] you're ever going to see in your life. Uh and just remember that was the guy speaking in the ear of a scenile president. Yo yo, that is crazy. or they should watch Impact Theory's uh compelling interview with Arthur Lafer, the creator of the Laugher Curve, who also explains um how our debt and how the tax policy has evolved through the different years and stuff like that as well.

well. well. Not nearly as darkly hilarious though as the the the Arth was hilarious. I like that he's fun. fun. fun. He's my grandpa now. He doesn't know that. He just adopted me. Um okay. Um this is why young people are mad though because a Pokemon card just sold for $16 million. million. million. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. At like that's a headline. This is not cheeky. This is not funny. This is not me trolling you guys. A Pokemon car just sold for $16.4 million.

Um Um Um $192,000. $192,000. $192,000. Sheesh. Sheesh. Sheesh. You got to back that up. Let people hear the whole number. Logan Paul, you get it. Ken Golden. Yes. Tonight you sold the PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator card for $16,492,000. Okay, pause it for a sec. Th this is not good news. good news. good news. Nope. Nope. Nope. So, uh, So, uh, So, uh, setting aside all the stuff about the I think he's I don't know if he's being sued or people just think he should be sued because this was all part of like some like fractional ownership thing and then he bought it back.

I don't know. Anyway, I don't know the details on that. But there's drama on that side. But I'm saying even like setting that aside, there is when the economy is getting like ultra risk on risk on risk on because money is just like I'm being printed into oblivion, I've got to find something in the market that isn't overvalued and it just starts cascading out of like traditional places into like more and more risky stuff. Um, when you get to a Pokemon card, which by the way, I am an avid collector, not a Pokemon, but of One Piece.

You may be shocked to hear, uh, cards, but I don't do it for the monetary value. That's a whole another thing. But, dude, it's like the extreme edges of risk. And so, when you when you get to this point, it's like, man, this is an alarm bell. This is not a good sign. This reminds me of the banned threeletter um word that we're not allowed to say um that was going on during the pandemic. Um or three letter three letter three letter threeletter abbreviation threeletter abbreviation threeletter abbreviation when people are selling JPEGs for millions of dollars online.

Oh. Oh, NFTTS. Yeah. So, here's the fascinating thing about NFTs. Uh is that is not a collector phenomenon. That's an investor phenomenon. It it's like a derivative. It was just something for people to trade. But what's utterly fascinating about all of this stuff is what you're seeing is seeing is seeing is as you get out of the generations ahead of you. So, uh, boomers have their frame of reference, Gen X has their frame of reference, you start getting into millennials and it just becomes a really different frame of reference.

So, they've been in this really dark place from an economic standpoint. they wouldn't have been able to explain it, but a K-shaped economy based on debt and money printing. So, that's going on forever and ever and ever. And then when meme stocks like went crazy and NFTs went crazy, I could not have read that situation anymore wrong. I end up being on the side of like, oh, this is a collector phenomenon because I'm a collector. So, I've bought cards my whole life. I've literally never sold one.

I couldn't tell you how much I have in cards. in cards. in cards. Um, so it it is like once you realize you get people doing exotic trades and like derivatives, futures, blah, like stuff that I do not even understand that you can make money on the economy going down. It's like what? So we have the average person doesn't understand the basic market, let alone like the really advanced exotic market. Mhm. Um, Um, Um, and so as you start getting into these like outer edges, that's why NFTs attracted like people that understand like derivatives trading and all that, they were riding cultural waves.

And so it was this bizarre like atoms colliding of um artists who were like, "Oh my god, I'm finally going to be able to make a living with my art." And I I'm saying derivatives traders. I just mean people that understand exotic investing. Yeah. at a time where we were so far out on the risk curve. It it was wild. This is literally exactly that, but it's coming back. Obviously, NFTTS from a reputation standpoint dead and gone, but like this is the same thing. And you'll see another thing like that.

Poly market, Koshi, it is the same thing. It is people who have lived in a K-shaped economy finding ultra high-risk but fun entertaining like cultural things to bet on. So yeah, you can expect this thing to raise its head over and over and over throughout history for sure. sure. sure. Yeah. Um and then this also goes into um the quick rise of retail investors. Um you have a read on this, right? Uh of retail investors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um do we have one on this? Um Um Um ah do we not?

Check the bottom. I remember you said you thought you said you you had some yes. I was going to say, wait, I remember doing something on this. All right. So, yeah, what what everything that's going on here is um this is unprecedented. It is very important that you understand what's going on because when you get the kind of massive retailer uh investor flood that we've seen into the markets over the last three or four weeks, like this is alarm bell city. We've had retail investors, everyday people trading from their phones.

I mean just this is like the average people that you know they have been pouring money into the US equities at a pace that nobody on Wall Street for sure expected. The numbers are insane. It's a 53% jump from 2024's 197 billion. It's a 17% jump uh from the previous all-time peak that was set during the 2021 meme stock frenzy. January of 2026 ran 50% above even that record-breaking pace. So, if you guys don't know Citadel Securities, um the guy from there, Scott Rubiner, he reported that in January of 26, we saw the highest retail net stock inflows ever recorded for a January.

It topped the 350 million in daily net buying. Uh previously, options inflows also hit an all-time high above 300 million. Rubener called January's retail activity exceptional and I think that that is an understatement. The question is, is this a good thing? And why did it happen so suddenly? Now, is it a good thing? H yes, it's good because you want people in the market. It's bad because the market is a casino and I have a feeling that people are not being careful with their investment dollars.

So, I'm both like, "Oh my god, people are finally getting it." And I'm terrified that they're all going to get obliterated because they are gambling on the high-risk stuff instead of playing a very long-term game. And the difference between the two is going to be dramatic. Now, the best analysis that I've seen in terms of what is going on, why this happened right now came from Citadel's Q1 outlook and JP Morgan's quantitative team. They're both pointing at the same convergence of factors. So, first, you've got retail investors uh having made a fortune in 2025.

I said that a bunch. 2025 was very good for anybody with assets. Citadel estimates that retail traders earn more than $20 billion in options profits on their platform alone over the course of the year. Okay? And that capital didn't leave, just rolled right back in. Second, household wealth hit all-time highs across every income bracket heading into 2026, meaning there was more balance sheet capacity to deploy than at any point in modern market history. So, people just flush with cash if they were already investors. Third, money market fund assets entered January at record levels, $7.6 trillion sitting in cash.

And in the second week of January, money markets saw their largest weekly outflow since Liberation Day last April. So that's a bunch of sideline cash flooding back into these risk on assets. That's what I'm saying. Like understand what's really happening. People are chasing returns and they're getting more and more confident, which is crazy. The market is so skittish right now, but they're going way out on the risk curve. Now, no one should take investing advice from me, but I will just tell you that one scares me being that far out on the uh the risk curve if you don't know what you're doing and if you don't have just an ironclad deal with yourself that you won't risk more than you're uh able to lose.

lose. lose. I think we're going to see that kind of meme stock crash where a bunch of people just get wiped out because they're yoloing. All right, the fourth element that's meaning this is all happening right now. Dip buying has become the dominant retail strategy. Now, if you're being strategic about it and it's just, hey, there's 10% of my weekly salary that I just dollar cost average in. Great. Long-term thinking hopefully applies. Diversifying risk hopefully applies. applies. applies. But not sure that that's happening now. Anyway, the Dow fell 900 points on tariff fears.

People just went crazy and bought it up. Love it. Dip dip dip. Give it to me all day. The software sector went into a bare market after AI disruption fears. retail piled into Microsoft Palunteer Apploving at discount prices just gobbling up any discount that they can get. JP Morgan noted that one single dip buying session saw retail flows hit the third largest trading day of the entire past year. Retail investors now account for roughly 20 to 25% of total daily US equity trading volume. That's wild.

with spikes as high as 35% during like really volatile sessions. Uh at that level of participation, retail is becoming the main stage, boys and girls. It is a major like market force that moves markets. As Citadel put it, retail is no longer marginal to market outcomes. They're the driver. So, the irony is that while hedge fund managers and pension fund allocators have been quietly trimming positions and warning about bubbles and stretched valuations, everyday investors have been buying every dip and getting rewarded for it. Now, this is one of those just be thoughtful everybody.

I cannot see the future. So, I don't want to talk you out of something. You might make money and I sit here and I just weep that I was not as bold as you. But there's a reason that the average retail investor is known to sophisticated investors as dumb money or exit liquidity. So, please be careful out there. Think long-term. Diversify risk. I know none of that is sexy, but Lord knows, I hope when all of this plays out that you guys are way better off uh coming out than you were going in, but you have to be very careful.

Very careful. Um where do you think that money is coming from? because we're seeing, you know, Bitcoin has been struggling the last couple months. Is it people are just kind of I mean, so the the four factors were people had money sitting in uh treasuries and they're like, "Ah, this is not really returning anything." Plus, Trump is like on a non-stop barrage to get them to lower rates. I want to get out. I want better return. Somehow people are convincing themselves that things are like better than ever.

And it's wild to see like no matter how many times like the professional investors scream from the rooftops, you've got to be careful like we are almost certainly in bubble territory and so at some point the bubble is going to burst. It's always right at that end everybody feels most euphoric. That's why like looking at the U Pokemon card, I'm like as a card collector, hey, this is so exciting and there's so much content. Everybody's having a ball and at the same time I'm like euphoria is the thing that needs to scare you the most because there is no only up phenomenon.

I I will never rat this person out, but somebody that I know and think is just very smart, actually said out loud on camera, this was back in like 21 or something. Um, maybe this time really is different and maybe the world's so interconnected that it will only go up from here. And I thought, oo, every time I say the words maybe this time is different, I'm like every alarm bell I have goes off in my head. So, um, humans tend not to be different, boys and girls.

So the closest thing to maybe this time is different AI. That's the only thing where I'm like, well, this is a unique technology that really may make things just radically alter. But it's like I'm not investing for that future personally. Again, be careful. Don't just blindly take advice from me. Uh but I am I'm investing for the now with an eye towards when the now starts being the past and the future starts being the present. U but I'm not just like, oh, it's going to happen for sure.

like we don't see the future clearly. Well, speaking of AI, uh Sam Alman just tweeted out over the weekend that Peter Steinbrer uh Steinberger, the dude who created Open Claw, is joining Open AI to drive the next generation of personal agents. He's a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people. We expect this very this will quickly become core to our product offerings. Open Claw will live in a foundation as an open source project that Open AI will continue to support.

the future is going to be extremely multi- aent and it's important to us to support open source as part of that. Yeah, this was a very shrewd move on his part and as many people are noting a very big ball fumble from um Claude uh the anthropic the anthropic the anthropic and and and that's open claw built on top of cloud originally. Yeah. And then people started migrating away from it because they woke up one day and Anthropic had shut them all down. And so they were just like, "Oh, I built this app.

It's now broken. I've got to find some solution to this." And so they started spinning away. And so people were like shouting out the guy that I forget you just said his name, but Peter Steinberg. Uh Peter. Yeah. That hey, why didn't you go with anthropic like they're better? Uh and he was like because all they did was send us love letters from their legal department. And he was like again, seduction. seduction, boys and girls. Like, when you look at it and you're just like, "We got to attack this guy.

We got to shut him down." It's like you're missing the point. Um, you want to draw people in. You want to get people excited. You want to make them feel like they're a part of it. Um, and so Sam managed to play this one well. And so this is this is where all of us as consumers, we win because these guys are just going to leaprog each other and we're going to come out ahead. So, So, So, um, yes, I've been seeing that as well. Where is it at?

Um, so this one kind of blew my mind. I laughed at this over the weekend where in the Motion Picture Association of America and Disney has allegedly, because this is from a Chinese source, we'll see, has filed a lawsuit against Bite Dance over the C2.0 Sea Dance 2.0 project, alleging massive copyright infringement. Um, a lot of people are saying that Hollywood is scared of um, Seed Dance because this is the first time you can actually prompt cinematic sequences. Visual effects studios are on notice. like this can be a massive budget reduction, but this can also decimate an industry.

This will decimate an industry. The film industry is dead. Uh they're I mean they might be at the hospital, maybe they're trying to manually palpate the heart, but it's like dude literally in seven years the industry will be 10 to 20% of the like total employment that it's at now. Mark my words. And what always like is surprising to me and man please to to you to the community any if you guys see me making this mistake please point it out because they lock it in as a moment in time and they go well uh but you can't like if you try to change one thing about the dragon then it will redo the whole thing and it might not be the good thing that you loved and they probably had to prompt us 50 times to get this one thing that they like and they're right about that.

But like over the last three years, the amount that this has gotten better is insane. Down to like there was just released an iPad app where you draw on one side. So you're drawing like like they showed them drawing waves literally like this, just squiggly lines and then you type um dark anime ocean and then he drew like a square and was like this is a lighthouse and then this is a boat. Like drew the most simplistic like circle with a stick and a triangle on it.

Was like this is a boat. uh female captain like being brave as she you know deals with waves and it just is updating the image in real time and so it's like well they have control over her every aspect of that now the thing that it outputs you don't but like if you crack under the hood so my spent my Christmas vacation learning how to um do where you control the open-source AI so that you can control every aspect of the image you start learning about things like control nets and things like that where you can control the outline, you can control what feels in the outline, you can control style, you can train it based on your own characters, your own style.

So, it's like people will criticize these things as if like the technology is that's as good as it's ever going to be. And it's like guys, this is why people get caught off guard by the future. They don't understand that this stuff is going to develop and evolve and um just constantly get better. So, that will be one of the first things they give is people to have that control. It already exists if you're willing to do the work. So it's not like it can't be done.

It can be done. And so now it's about integration. It's about giving it the UI moment. This stuff will take time. But like dude, it seven years in the world of AI is a lifetime because okay, let me introduce you to a concept because people are going to be like, hold on, seven years is not going to be enough to have the UI moment, make the technology good enough, whatever. Maybe that's true. But there's a concept in food when you're a food company called share of stomach.

And so if you can get 100% of share of stomach of every person so that they only eat products that you make, you still tap out at what they can eat. And even if you're a moral monster and you're prepared to um push them into obesity, at some point you still kill them. So there's always a limit. Always a limit. And so, you know, like I'm I'm going to hit this finite thing. Same concept with amount of time that people will consume content. Every short that gets published is 30 seconds of a film that I didn't watch.

And so, I have changed my own behavior. When my wife and I used to sit down to watch something together, it would exclusively be like a Netflix or an Apple or something. It'd be a show. Now, we spend I'm going to say at least 25% of our co-watching time is spent watching what we call funny videos. And so, we just watch real after real after real that make us laugh. That's 25% of co-watching time that used to go to somebody else. And so, even if all we see is a shift to, yeah, I can't control the output, but I can still tell my story with me and like three or four other friends.

I don't know if we pulled the clip, but there's stuff of people doing sea dance where it's like they're in their living room. They're laying on the floor holding on to a pillow and then you AI it so it looks like they're floating in the ocean and they're holding on to a log. And so that kind of stuff, you're going to be able to make film. It'll be obviously AI, but people will get more and more clever. The AI will get better and better and people will be able to eat share of viewing time.

And that's the part where I'm like, Hollywood, do you not understand that part? So, even if it's not as good, like if all people care about is how do you make me feel? My wife and I can now laugh until we're crying from watching realels on command. That's awesome. So, some percentage is going to go to that. Then it might be, oh, our friends made a short uh video about a trip that we went on together, or someone in my family made uh a movie, a 12minute movie about our Christmas holiday, whatever.

And so all of that stuff is going to eat away at the share of viewing time. And on top of that, for sure, for sure, for sure, they will just keep integrating AI into the pipelines to drive cost down because to your point, they're going to outsource stuff to Bangladesh or wherever. If AI can do it in-house and they can train proprietary AIs, bro, of course they're going to do it. And as these AIs are able to operate on smaller and smaller computers, I mean, that's part of what we're seeing with OpenClaw is you can just put this on like a Mac Mini.

So this stuff is going to get more and more efficient. It's going to get more and more powerful and be able to become proprietary. They'll take open source, bring it in house, make their modification. I mean, this is what I plan to do with Kaizen. I'm aiming at like right now I do almost no story. I do what I call story breadcrumbs in Kaizen. I give you just enough so that you get I have thought about this world a lot. hopefully by the time the game actually comes out that we'll be able to produce our own mini shorts using our actual characters and then insert them into the game.

And so that's another person that's not going to be hiring somebody from traditional Hollywood. That's that's a cool concept. I haven't thought about that. Um, I was trying to pull up this Mark Cuban uh interview he did over the weekend where he said the white space that a lot of people aren't realizing like why AI was tanking software companies and things like that is because you can go into a small business that never used a computer before, give them AI and make something specific to them.

So to that point, it could be individualized solutions. So it's no more everybody uses Premiere Pro. It's now I use video cutting for shorts at this media company or I use Visual Studios to only create postcards for weddings. Like everybody's going to have very specific nodes in whatever they do repetitively. U so when I see Sance and stuff like that, I get both excited and depressed because I'm like yes, I'll have the opportunity to tell stories at one prompt away. I have scripts ready. I could just in input it.

It would be so cool. But then on the back end of that, it's like, but the audience now is going to be completely different. And when it's the story that I'm telling, nobody's going to a theater anymore. It's now going to be individualized to the six people who like this type of entertainment versus like, okay, I can now do it fast enough, but then the audience is gone. So, it's kind of like the the way that we are creating is changing, but also the way that we're consuming is changing at the same time, and it's hard to kind of pinpoint where those two things will line up.

line up. line up. Yes. Yes. Yes. Welcome. Welcome to the quote that should haunt every bit of your waking hours. Genius is a young man's game. Now, when you really try to break down why genius is a young man's game, you're going to come to the very distressing conclusion that part of what we consider genius is about getting the timing right without realizing you're trying to time it. it. it. Remember, Quest got the timing right. Quest came about because I quit the other company and was like, I'm so unhappy.

I didn't go, "Oh, I've got this brilliant idea. It's going to be the next big thing. It's going to make me fantastically wealthy." I said, "I'm never going to pursue money again. Uh, this like I hate what I'm doing now so much that even though it's on paper, made me a multi-millionaire. I couldn't care less. This is not interesting at all. Uh, I'm a filmmaker. I want to go tell stories." And then it happened to be that the world adopted social media right at that moment.

Had they not, I still would have done it. I would have been like some kook filming like stuff on a VHS camcorder trying to get people to buy protein bars. People like the [ __ ] is this? But the I accidentally got the timing right because I just grew up in that millure. I grew up in it such that I was like I got it. I got why a phone was dope. I had just gotten out of film school. So I got out of film school. I'm super frustrated.

I can't break into the industry. Then you put a camera on a phone and I'm like, "Oh my god, the big thing stopping me was I couldn't afford to film any of this stuff. Holy hell." Like this is incredible. So I'm out of frustration. I'm like, I'm going to do this. And so if you're making something because you're like watching Zoomers and you're like, I bet they'll like this. Like you're going to get mowed over. You've just got to be doing your thing, loving it, doing it, bleeding for it, wanting it so badly because you love it so much that you create something that the world wants.

That's why with Kaizen, I'm building a game I think is [ __ ] awesome and that's it. If I won't play it, it doesn't matter. And so I'm like, huge vulnerability because maybe I'm not aligned with what kids are going to be into all of that. And I'll take my lumps. But the thing I'm not going to try to do is make something I don't think is [ __ ] awesome and try to like force feed it to somebody else. I'm going to give you something where I'm like, "This is the [ __ ] I believe in this.

I [ __ ] love it. I'm here for it. I've got a vision. I'm trying to build something, create something I think is awesome and we'll see. But if you try to like orchestrate, calculate, nope. You the odds that you do something great are effectively zero. Now, the Cuban thing that you brought up, I want to zoom people in on th this not his video because I came to the same conclusion, but I have recently completely switched the company's priorities away from So, we used to make we still do make a lot more money off of in 2025, we made a lot more money off of um selling teaching like business principles to high-end businesses that are already doing over a million dollars in revenue and helping them scale.

Despite how lucrative that has been, I'm now moving all of our resources over to our zero to founder for people that are just starting a business. I'm telling you right now, planting a flag, calling it out, play this back in 5 years that the move people are going to become integrators of AI. So, they're going to completely change their career. Kids are going to come out of high school, college, whatever. They're going to become AI integrators. They're going to need to be entrepreneurial. The number of people that are going to get laid off, quit, whatever, and start an AI company is going to be insane.

Insane. I don't think we've seen anything like this. And so, we're moving all of our attention to that and shifting to basically teaching people how to build business in the age of AI. Like, full stop. Period. End of story. That's it. Like, how do I integrate AI? How do I get the kind of wins that we've had at impact theory? Like, what do you actually do? This is your moment. If you hate your job, deploy AI. Build a company. Remember, companies are all about problem solving.

So, you got to solve a real problem. But become an AI integrator. Start an AI company. Something. This is that moment. It won't last forever. There's going to be like a call it 5 to 10 year window where this is going to play out. After that, no one can see the future. But the next 5 to 10 years are that. And so, if people um take that seriously, I think there's huge opportunity right now. So, yes, sign up for zero to founder. if that's even on your radar at all.

Uh, but we we are making a massive pivot into that because I can just feel an absolute tsunami coming of people starting their own thing for sure. All right, we got a ton of super chats. We do. We got three. Uh, first up from the Mandre mechanism. I know Palunteer's capabilities. The FBI was a founding Palunteer client. 6 million files is basically nothing. This release sloppiness is the slide of hand. Messiness is the intended message. This is Kabuki. I run ontology of 75 million plus files.

And then they added to aid in conversation, number one, victim intimidation is a feature, not a flaw. Number two, selective shielding of domestic care core uh which hurts international first before domestic. And then three, we control the release message. message. message. That sounds like a very astute breakdown, especially the part about hurting international first more than us. Uh, marry that with Marjorie Taylor Green's statement that Trump said, um, yeah, I'm not in the files, but this is going to hurt my friends. Allegedly, allegedly, as stated by Marjgery Taylor Green.

Uh, and it's like, yeah, that all makes sense. Is if there are a bunch of people that this is going to mow over. It's like, okay, well, let me sacrifice the people outside of my c country first and see then if I can get it to go away. Like, at every step, he's just like, why are we still talking about this? Why are we still talking about this? Because you keep asking that question. Mhm. And as long as it's like there's nothing to see here, people are going to dig deeper and deeper and go harder.

But yeah, that seems astute to me and find things to see. Um, on a related note, there's allegedly I'm alleged alleged alleged because I couldn't verify the source, but the exuserk.com um alleged that Palenter was hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super user access. And here's what the hackers allegedly found. Peter Theal and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale. They have thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk.

They have back door to devices, cars, and jets of world leaders and accumulated the biggest archive of blackmail material. Palanteer is creating nuclear and boweapons capabilities for capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia. They believe they are one year away. They plan to achieve this by keeping Russia busy with meaningless peace negotiations. Palanteer is responsible for majority of the Palestine deaths in Gaza. They have developed the AI targeting for Israel. Palunteer is an arm of the CIA and all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud.

Palunteer has become the most dangerous company in the world. If you work there, you have the right to know that this is what Palenter AI is used for without your knowledge. The Palunteer data that hackers allegedly gather will be given to Russia and or China. I was chosen as a trusted partner for this publication. I'm not involved in the Palunteer hack and I don't know the hackers, but I do know that the hack happened. Ooh, alleged. Alleged, alleged. Yeah, who knows? Uh, we'll have to let that play out in the fullness of time, but that um certainly is an interesting allegation.

Uh, I would not be surprised that anybody with a capability to surveil um is surveilling. So, if you tell me the government's surveilling, I'm going to believe you. If you tell me that social media companies are surveilling, I'm going to believe you. If you tell me that Alexa is recording everything I say, I'm going to believe you. Um, yeah, I I think that people that that can surveil do surveil much to my absolute shock horror and dismay. Um, yeah, top, bottom, left, right, up, down, select, start.

Uh, also, as a PSA along those lines, please remember that if you're talking to an AI, that is not protected or privileged information. Even if you're preparing for a legal case, um, that's public domain now, baby, and it's going to be subpoenaed and it's going to be read out in court. Um, so if you're searching for how do I dissolve my wife's bones in acid, that's a bad idea. And yet people do that [ __ ] which is wild. So, uh, don't be dumb, everybody. First of all, just don't commit crimes.

Uh, and then second, yeah, if you're going to do something, remember it's it's all going to be read. Uh, can I quote the imminent 50 Cent? What an incredible philosopher. I try not to say nothing the DA might want to play in court. There you go. words to live by. Uh, I want to marry this with the unusual whales tweet just in. The Pentagon is considering severing its relationship with anthropic over the AI's firm insistence on maintaining some limitations on how the military uses its miles per Axial.

That's rough. That that read is rough. I just imagine the Pentagon being like, "No, no, no. We do want to create like space lasers that can target people based on their DNA." And anthropic's like, "Yo, yo, yo, chill. Let's chill." Uh, yeah. Yeah. But if we make the bioweapon, China won't. What do you mean? mean? mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. So, um, yeah, I think it's probably good that there be some breaks, but I'll I'll let this one play out. I don't know the specifics of the scenario at all.

Um, but will the government weaponize anything and everything that they can? Yes, they will. So, I'd really rather they didn't. they didn't. they didn't. This reminds me of the movie um, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die from that came out this weekend with Sam Rockwell. Such a good movie. So good. I haven't seen it. I like Sam Rockwell. Yeah. talks about the AI uh apocalypse in a very black comedy way. My type of comedy. Okay. comedy. Okay. comedy. Okay. I like it. I got to see that.

No, I I like it's a good movie. It's a very good movie. Um All right. More out streaming or you went to the theaters? theaters? theaters? It was the theaters. It came out on theaters over the weekend. So, it's not out yet. I can't wait for it to come out. When's the last time you sat in in the movie theater? movie theater? movie theater? Like sat down in a chair? Uh I'm going to guess two or three years ago. Family here for Christmas. It would have been something like that, but I don't even remember it.

When was the last time you went to a movie by yourself? Um, well, so I used to go to the movie by myself all the time. So, this is not a like I don't have a problem going by myself. myself. myself. Uh, I'm going to guess seven years. Do you remember the movie was? No, definitely not. All right. Sorry. Next up from R.J. Johnson, Peter Zahan interview number one. Tom said, "Very interesting. more often than the last dozen podcasts combined. But no implication of AI until the last three minutes negates his entire worldview.

See my live comment for more points. Wait, hold on. Let me see this. Peter Z interview number one Thompson. Very interesting. More Oh. Oh. Oh, I see. In that interview uh but no implication of AI until the last few minutes negates his entire his entire his entire we'll have to look at the live thing. I don't understand what he means by negates my entire world. Comments. Um R.J. that's the part you put in the super chat. Like that's the don't bury the headline. I think he wanted Peter to talk about AI more.

more. more. Right. But he's saying it negated something negated my wait negated my worldview. worldview. worldview. Peter's Peter's Peter's there's no implication of AI and your worldview is AI is going to take over everything. And that didn't come up until until until Oh. Oh. Oh. I see. I see. I see. Got it. Got it. Got it. Uh yes. So, if you think of Peter as basically planning for the now, I don't know what the future's going to be, but I plan for the now. All super relevant, very, very helpful.

Um, and if you think of some of the things that I talk about, I'm in the future where I'm saying, "Okay, this has already happened. This is what the world looks like." But please don't ever detach the thing that I This is the second time I'm saying it just today. Uh, you can't exist in the future that doesn't happen hasn't happened yet. You've got to like invest now. You've got to plan now. You've got to do the things now. This is why I'm building a video game despite the fact that I think in five years video games just won't even be a thing anymore.

Uh it will be like uh you know reals now just your algorithm will show you one of a gazillion things that exist and other people won't see it and nobody makes money off of it. Uh my guess is it'll be something like that. But I don't know that there's no way to um see the future clearly. So, I keep acting today um based on what's real today. Two more to go. First up from RBGH fam super chat. super chat. super chat. Do you worry Bitcoin will lose its value eventually because it may be able to be decrypted in the future with quantum commu computing.

It is also not backed by a military like all other currencies. I think the uh well the fact that it's not backed by the military is the feature not a bug. Uh so you want that because otherwise it is something controlled by the government which is why they back it with violence. Um so I think that long before you have to worry about quantum encryption though I'm glad that the community is paying attention to it and they will certainly uh adjust if it starts looking like that's actually really real.

But um the thing we have to worry about is just AI just makes the economy as we understand it now completely nonsensical. That strikes me as a far more likely outcome. Got it. Last one from Ryan Msto 64. Uh, hey Tom, what should I get my kids into for AI? Their ages are 13, 15, 18, and 19. 19. 19. Get them using, get them using it. Use, use, use. Um, so have them build things that matters. The thing with kids is always to teach them basically outcome based thinking.

So you're operating from first principles and then morality. Like if you give them those two things, you're in really, really good shape. So get them to create something that's designed to do a thing. So what do they love? What are they into? Uh if they're into comics, have them create a comic book using AI. Uh if they're into programming, have them do vibe coding and build an app that does the thing that they care about. There is. So this weekend, I I am obsessed now that I'm getting into the code of Kaizen and I'm actually able to make changes.

Oh my god, the intoxication of being able to build something that you care about like like it's not tangible tangible technically it's still ephemeral but like it feels tangible like it's actually changing the world uh the game world it it is awesome and so the odds of you being able to light a kid on fire because they want to uh build their own bike and so you use um AI to build 3D schematics and then you 3D print it at your house like oh my god I can see kids going berserk or even forget cuz I'm sure that'd be very expensive.

Um I my sister is basically like a godparent to these kids or maybe an auntie is how they think of it. I don't know. Anyway, that means that um when we game, we game with these kids. So, they're always sharing stuff that they build. One of them has a a 3D printer and he printed a 3D basketball and he was just over the moon and I was looking at it and I was like, "What? I didn't even know you could do that." And so, um that kind of stuff like he was so excited to show us this basketball that he had 3D printed at home.

So you can imagine that kind of stuff just being a native to AI building something that they care about getting them to invest emotionally so that they want to do it so there's pullth through that's going to be huge and then if you're talking they're older and it's like how do I make a career AI integration so what part of the world do they want to be involved in how do you integrate AI into accounting into the arts into design um into product what whatever element of the world that they're most excited about get them thinking about using this to generate a product that business ready AI is the real key.

real key. real key. We had one more come through uh from R.J. Johnson. Kaizen equals Bruce Willis movie surrogates. movie surrogates. movie surrogates. I don't think that's true. So if I remember surrogates, right? You still have a physical body. And the whole idea of Kaizen is that you have no physical body anywhere. This is what I actually I I'm not ready to commit to this fully, but quietly this has become the way that I believe the universe actually is. I think we are in a simulation or real life just functions so much like a simulation that they're indistinguishable.

Remember, the universe is not locally real. I don't know how people like contend with that. You got to have some way to box that up somewhere in your life. But that literally means if nothing is looking at the moon, the moon actually doesn't exist. It doesn't render. Uh, so wild. So that is precisely how you program a video game. That's the only way to make it um work on a computer is when nothing needs that. It's just a set of potential calculations and then if the player turns to see it, then you actually run the calculations.

If you were trying to run all the calculations all the time everywhere, you would melt every computer ever. And so the fact that our universe is optimized like it's running on a computer. Uh so that tells me I don't understand something. I know that. So it could be just totally different. But the fact that it mirrors exactly video game development is pretty wild. Uh so yeah, that is that everybody has to contend with that. with that. with that. Somebody asked in the chat about testing Kaizen.

Um they're like they want their kids to test it. Are you opening it up for testing for It will be in a year. I can't believe like the timelines we have to talk on. Uh first of all, thank you. That is that is a level of generosity that is received so aggressively. To any parent out there, if you have a kid somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 to 15 a year from now, uh let me know. We will be opening the game up. I aggressively want feedback and I want to know like at what point did the kid go, "This is dumb." And they bounce.

I need that far more than I need I want to know what they like too, don't get me wrong, but like I need to know where they're like uh it's a particular type of gamer archetype. So, we are like Minecraft with guns. It's an oversimplification, but that gets you pretty close. Um, so if they hated Minecraft, they're not going to like this game. Like, you've got to want to invest in what's known as a or what I call a rules-based world. So, it's like blocks stick to each other.

Now, go do whatever you want. that kind of thing where there's just a bunch of ways that the world works and then you can go do whatever you want. Uh players like that. Um and yes, we will be on Steam if people are asking or I know people are. I see it in the chat. So yeah, on Steam, but in a year and then two, it's technically less because we're launching in December of 27 for early release. Uh but so in call it December of 26, we will open it up.

So what's that? 10 months. Uh, and then we'll have a year to polish based on feedback. Thank you for asking. for asking. for asking. Uh, cool. That's all I got. All right, everybody. The world is changing fast. Don't let it overwhelm you, please. you, please. you, please. Somebody asked if Jesus is in your game, and I responded in the DLC that I'm working on. He will be nice. Oh, Drew. I like that. Jesus is going to be an Easter egg. That's fun. Uh, boys and girls, don't let the world overwhelm you.

Take it one piece at a time. Um, act in accordance with today, not just what's going to be in the future. That will serve you very well. Keep your eyes open for the change. Be the first to adapt. Um, don't paralyze yourself with how rapidly this is all changing. Uh, do yourself a favor and watch the Marco Rubio speech in full. It really is awesome. All right. Love you guys and we will see you on Wednesday. Peace. Oh, watch the deep dive coming out tomorrow on immigration.

Watch it. Love you.