Gas Prices Reach A 4 Year High, But Are The Prices Fabricated? & Is the War In Iran Finally Over?

Key Takeaway

Don't mistake temporary oil price spikes for permanent inflation. Energy prices going up feels systemic like inflation, but it's a short-term shock that will normalize once supply constraints ease. The real danger isn't the price at the pump today—it's backing adversaries into corners where they have nothing to lose. When survival is existential, economic pressure won't force capitulation; it creates desperate actors willing to drag conflicts out indefinitely. Focus on what you can control: your budget, your strategy, your response to volatility.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu analyzes the Iran conflict's economic impact, arguing that the Trump administration is overstating progress toward a peace deal while oil prices surge and the 10-year bond yield approaches critical levels. He contends that Iran understands asymmetric warfare and is buying time rather than genuinely negotiating, creating a stalemate that threatens Trump's political future heading into midterms.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Gas Prices Reach A 4 Year High, But Are The Prices Fabricated? & Is the War In Iran Finally Over? from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

episode of the Tom Billy Show live. We are doing it everybody. It is wild times depending on what you believe. That's going to be the topic of today. Operation Epic Fury has concluded. Operation Freedom has been paused. And we're supposedly close to a one-page deal that would end the war. Now personally, I smell BS. So we'll be getting into that because oil prices are back up as the market is already beginning to question if we're as close to a deal as the Trump admin would like us to believe.

And when you know it, it's all happening right as a 10-year bond bond bond crosses or gets ready to cross that magical 4.5% magical 4.5% magical 4.5% rate. Hmm, so many things can be clairvoyantly seen if you're only looking at the markets. A new AI company is claiming to have made a massive breakthrough in AI architecture that, by the way, if this one is true, would truly be a game-changer. But it's going to be a heavy uh emphasis on if this is true. We'll see. More on that coming up.

12.4% 12.4% 12.4% of US adults are on GLP-1s. What could possibly go wrong? Do you like Ozempic face, Drew? Is that what you look for? It's just spreading out through the country. to know. Do you have Ozempic face? Cuz if you don't, you're not on Drew's dance card. That's just how it's going to be. A young woman is uh reminded in a very potent way that she'll own nothing and be happy as HP remotely shuts off her home printer. And some conspiracy corner time with Bill Gates who is being accused of uh manipulating ticks to make us all allergic to red meat.

Huh. That's interesting. It's good times, Drew. It's good times. Hey, as long as you're not driving. Um gas prices are getting crazy. I officially have paid $6 for gas. I have never done that. I have avoided it. Um this is the most I've ever paid for gas in my life. This is more by more than 35 cents. I have hit my line. $6 for gas is dumb. remember my gas used to be 99 cents. I am radicalized. I'm done. Yeah. This war is stupid. Democrats are stupid.

California is stupid. stupid. stupid. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I hate everything. I hate everything. hate everything. hate everything. Because we're paying 61 cents more on gas than we should be. So, the Okay. So, you're saying here in California California California Yeah. Yeah. Should be $5.50 at the very minimum. minimum. minimum. Okay. Um But, yeah, this is a oil energy crisis bubbling up. Spirit is already under wraps. There's reports that JetBlue and Frontier could be next cuz they essentially 30% added 30% fuel cost in the last year because of this war.

What are your take on just the oil prices? I know we're going to get to Operation Freedom and all this other stuff, but just this energy this bubbling energy crisis. So, the temporary energy crisis is not something that I am in a panic over. If this becomes truly systemic inflation, that is going to be a major problem. The real question when historians look back on all of this, it's going to be trying to run the counterfactual of should we have ever gone to war or not?

So, the rise in oil prices are going to come back down. The US is able to make a tremendous amount of energy. So, in terms of the long-term as everything begins to settle out, I think that those prices coming back down is all but a guaranteed certainly here in the US. Globally, it's going to be potentially more problematic, but honestly probably not unless we go to a total war where we're just completely destroying the infrastructure in Iran, Iran is then retaliating all over the um Gulf region.

That would have years and years of economic consequences. If the blockade stays up, that could have a long-term consequences in areas other than energy in ways that definitely does scare me. So, the fertilizer that's coming out of the Gulf, that's a far bigger concern for me than the energy costs. So, on that angle, it was always going to raise prices. The question is do Do get anything out of it that justifies it? And so, right now it doesn't look like it and I'll cover that as we get into the broader issue, but I think the bigger question right now isn't just how stupid are oil prices going to get in the short term.

Remember back in the '70s, these got completely out of hand only to come crashing back down over time. That's exactly what I expect here. But, there are bigger consequences that I think are going to be the topic of conversation in terms of did we just spike oil prices temporary or not, uh piss off all of our allies, and end up with an Iran that shows that they understand asymmetric warfare and they can basically stop the US from making progress that we don't have the cars that we think we have.

That I think is the far bigger conversation than just how annoyed people are going to be, rightly so obviously, uh at $6 plus gas. Cuz it could keep going up in the short term. So, $6 may be just a stop on the way to $10 gas when I would expect people to be flipping over tables. But, that really is going to be short-lived. That was well timed. do want to ground this though cuz I think it's easy to say like, "Yeah, we have these macroeconomic elements that happened on the global scale." But, today I need to get to work and I need to like put gas in.

So, I think Americans, while we think holistically on how the Strait of Hormuz is connected to all these intertwined different organizations and and monetary flows and and policy and things like that, we do have to be grounded very like soberly that soberly that soberly that in this game of chicken that Trump is playing with other countries, there are second and third order consequences. And this is something that we thought, "Okay, we'll be fine. They'll They'll get over it. They'll have to pay a little bit more for gas." But, the working person is feeling it and in the in us entering into election season, I think this is going to be at the front of everybody's mind, especially with affordability.

Um there's something I want to throw that uh Bernie Sanders um tweeted. He said, "Oil prices today, $105.25 a barrel. Gas prices today, $4.46 a gallon. Oil prices in 2011, $105.06 a barrel. Gas prices in 2011, $3.51 a gallon." There was something to as soon as the war was announced, it seemed like almost overnight all the gas prices went up about 70 to 80 cents roughly. So, as much as I want to say, yes, the straight of Hormuz has a lot to do with it. It takes what?

6 months for that oil to get there on a boat through different countries, through all the checkpoints to get to California, to get into my gas tank. tank. tank. Is this corporations getting the head start that we know it's going to be expensive, so let's bump up the cost now? What do you think is What do you think is causing this discrepancy before between what oil prices were historically and what we pay per gallon to what they are now what we're paying per gallon? The fact that the oil prices move as fast as they do is you really have to divide it into two things.

So, one there's the paper price. So, I would need to understand if he's quoting on the street barrel prices or on the street paper prices. If he's doing an apples-to-apples comparison, so um people first understanding that there are two different prices and uh well, more than that because you've got Brent crude and you've also got whatever WTI, which is US. So, you've got that difference already, but the important difference that I'm talking about now is what people gamble on in the stock market, which is the paper price.

This is the price people are almost always talking about. And then you've got on the street, what can I actually buy a barrel of oil for? There's a whole bunch of manipulation going on. Almost certainly, this is conspiracy, conspiracy, I don't know, ah, but almost certainly being manipulated by the Trump admin to keep paper oil prices at a reasonable thing cuz I know that's what people are going to talk about. Um but the supply and demand curve is what's going to determine the I'm on the ground and I'm trying to buy a barrel of oil, what does that cost?

Okay, so that's part one. You've got paper and you've got reality. What we're talking about there, I don't know enough about this to just pop off. But then you've got what I think you're alluding to, which is the corporations also have the ability to go, okay, only the paranoid survive. We know know is coming. Uh we think that this may be far more systemic than they thought that it was back then. And so, yeah, we're going to react quickly to make sure that we maintain profit margins to make sure that we can weather a storm that is, you know, of unknown duration.

Yeah. That's one read. Another read is, "Ha ha ha, like these [ __ ] We have them literally over a barrel. We can raise prices. We have the perfect cover story, which is, 'Yeah, what do you want us to do? Look at the price of oil is going up.'" So, it without doing a deep dive analysis by company of what they're doing, what they see, uh whether they're turning record profits and then doing something stupid, whether they're shoring them up, meaning if they're doing something just to give back to shareholders and they're buying shares and those guys are just like, "Oh my god, the war is the greatest thing that ever happened to us." That would be very different than like, "Hey, we're buckling down.

We're trying to weather a storm. We don't want to be in the kind of position that a Spirit Airlines, obviously very different, but you see how quickly a company goes from we've been in business for decades and decades and decades and suddenly we're bankrupt. Boom, overnight we can't pay, we're out of business." So, I do believe that corporations can be very greedy. I'm not blind to that, but they also need to be paranoid if they want to survive. And so, without looking at the what's really going on at that level, and I've not done a deep dive on that, um it would be unfair to just blanket cast them.

But, it could be either or it could be a mix of both. They could just be being greedy [ __ ] to try to take advantage of this moment like people with hand sanitizer back in the day. Toilet paper. During COVID, yeah, just people going absolutely crazy. Uh it could also be them going, "Ooh, wow, there are a lot of question marks in terms of what we're going to have to do." And as a business owner, I've found myself in that situation before where we went through a crisis with almonds.

Mhm. And uh this is back at Quest. And so, you've got a drought. You know that the drought is going to impact almonds. You make a big reaction to buy up a ton of almonds because you don't know how long the drought's going to last. If the drought had lasted for another year or two, we would have looked like geniuses, but in reality, we ended up having to write down a bunch of it because we were overly reactive. And so, it This stuff gets far more complicated.

I get it. People want to go shoot CEOs cuz they think that they're just being greedy, but the reality is business is incredibly hard. Most businesses fail. If there's like a 94% failure rate, so you really do have to be paranoid. Again, that's me being very generous because I I'm a CEO. I get all of these sayings, and maybe they don't deserve that. Um but this is one of those where um um um it could go either way. They could be being smart or greedy [ __ ] Okay, I'm off my soapbox.

Let's actually talk about the war now. What's going on? Uh I think it's good. I think Epic Fury was officially concluded if you ask Marco Rubio. on who you talk to. Yeah, but what do we actually What's the That's the paper price. What's the actually boots on the ground saying about the war? Yeah, well, so this one in full disclosure, you are about to witness my frame of reference in just full effect here. here. here. Uh I will give you the stats of it all, but I'm also going to be giving this real top spin because I smell a rat on this one.

this one. this one. Operation Epic Fury is over. That's what they're saying. They're calling it a success, and now even Project Freedom is being paused so negotiations can resume. That was the first thing that made me go what like huh? That doesn't make any sense, and I am here to convince you that that is [ __ ] You are being spun hard, and this is where you need to really start looking at cause and effect. Try to explain it to yourself. Try to explain it to somebody else, and you're going to start to see like huh god, some of the words being used this does not make sense.

The Trump administration wants us to believe that we finally knock some sense into Iran, and that we're close to this one-page deal to end the war, but putting the pieces together, I think that we have a very different story playing out. The reality is that Project Freedom, which had the US escorting tankers through the Strait, seems to have caused more problems for the US than it was solving. While it was running, Iran retaliated by firing at ships waiting in the Strait, including a South Korean cargo vessel.

Iran also started chucking missiles at the UAE, who was pumping oil across land to avoid the Strait of Hormuz altogether. It was an absolutely brilliant move, but the problem is that you start putting all this stuff together, and Project Freedom does not appear like it was delivering very much freedom. It was just pissing off the Iranians, and they are still clearly very capable of picking off sitting ducks. And unfortunately for the UAE, unfortunately for the ships sitting out there, those static assets, whether they are on land or water, are sitting ducks.

So, you might be super clever to pump your oil across land so that you can bypass their naval blockade, but they're just going to send drones to hit your facility. And after Project Freedom and its strikes on the UAE's major UAE's major UAE's major port of Fujairah, I think it's how you say it, say it, say it, Iran announced that now they're expanding their claimed control zone into the UAE coastline. So, imagine, you put this saying together Project Freedom, we're the most mighty military in the world, we're going to be able to escort these ships, everything's going to be great, we've obliterated their navy, it's all at the bottom of the sea, we've got total air superiority.

By the way, all of that true, but it doesn't end up mattering if the Iranians can use asymmetric warfare, and they can begin bombing the ships that are waiting, if they can attack all across the Gulf region, and just start making so many problems that everybody is like, can we just please get a deal done? And the second that you can get the US into the posture of we need to get a deal done very quickly, then for all of the It's not just bluster because we really do have good cards as well.

But man, it it becomes very difficult to get the leverage that you need to get them to, as Trump has said many times, wave the white flag of surrender. The one thing I I just keep reminding myself and I will keep reminding you guys is that Trump for a very long time, since before he started bombing them, uh between him, uh what Stephen Witkoff is saying, they just keep expressing confusion over the fact that the troop build-up did not cause Iran to capitulate. That bombing the life out of them did not cause Iran to capitulate.

That um doing the sanctions has not caused them to capitulate. That putting them in a position where they are rapidly running out of the ability to store their oil and they may have to cap it, which will uh be very detrimental to their industry for years to come, it's still not causing them to capitulate. So, as a PSA to anybody in the government that is watching this, I will just explain to you why they are unlikely to capitulate. This is existential. For the Iranian government, the regime that is in control, if they are not able to become a nuclear power, if they are not able to show their own people that they remain in violent control, then there will be an uprising, they will be relegated in the region, and they will lose power.

And if they lose power, obviously, uh many of them are going to be killed by their own people. So, they're in a position where this is this is this is extremely existential. There is no path but forward, and so they're just going to keep pushing their agenda. And for those of them that believe that they are doing the will of Allah, you may think that that's [ __ ] but if they believe it, then they're going to keep pushing for that reason as well. And so, you have a situation where you've backed them into a corner, and they're going to act like an animal that's been backed into the corner.

And so, the odds of them capitulating are effectively zero. Everybody has to find an off-ramp, Trump included, and I think that the change in Trump's language around the nuclear portion of all of this indicates that he is looking to build that off-ramp, that he does not hold the cards that he would like us to believe that he's done. And by the way, in the midst of all of this, um the um the um the Iranians have launched a website called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, and there are reports that they've then emailed all these shipping companies with the following instructions for passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Should go to show that these are not people that are backing off or that are just about to capitulate. Uh look, it could all be posturing, but I don't think it is. So, anyway, here are the tenets that they're sending, supposedly. I've not confirmed this. But supposedly, these are the things that they are sending around to shipping companies, which seem in keeping with their positioning. their positioning. their positioning. Uh one, payment of the tolls to go through the Strait of Hormuz must be uh paid in Iranian rials.

Okay, remember, this is largely everything going on in Iran right now is largely about the petrodollar. So, that's a pretty big jab to the Americans. Two, they want guarantees uh that must be issued within the Iranian banking system. I assume what they mean by that is um that they're not going to basically promise to pay and then not, and so there's going to be some sort of um financial guarantee, but that one was the most vague, but we'll leave it at that. Three, countries that caused or contributed to damages during the war must pay reparations before obtaining a permit.

Countries that sanctioned Iran or blocked its assets abroad are banned entirely. So, that one alone, if it ends up being true, obviously, we are not in a good position. There will be a ton of traffic that will still be held back. Four, all documents must use the name Persian Gulf. This is like the Gulf of America, Gulf of Mexico battle kind of thing. These kind of things do matter, I guess. Uh but nonetheless, they are really trying to establish their dominance over that space. They don't want it moved to something more generic.

I think some people are calling it the Arabian Gulf. So, anyway, uh five, non-compliance results in vessel seizure and a fine of 20% of cargo value. Six, all vessels must follow designated corridors and comply with Iranian armed forces instructions. And seven, Israeli flagged vessels and any ship going to or from Israeli ports are banned. All right, none of that seems like uh they would be easy yeses for the US. So, we'll see in the coming days um whether we actually are close. And as a reminder to everybody, um politicians close to this for years on both sides of the aisle have said that what the Iranians are extraordinarily good at is buying time.

They make you believe that they're willing to come to the negotiating table, but when you get there, there's always some reason why actually no, sorry, I have to go get this approved. And you realize you didn't actually make any progress. They've just been stalling for time. for time. for time. Now, everything that's going on has caused oil prices to begin rising again as the markets have begun to realize that we may not be as close to the deal as people thought. Again, I would like to recontextualize the announcement of the deal is just so conveniently timed with the US Treasury bond yield pushing up to this sort of magical invisible line of 4.5% where it becomes just too expensive for the government alone to get the debt, but also the interest that we're paying on debt that we already have, it just ends up becoming a nightmare.

It gobbles things up. It will also have other impacts on the economy. So, uh you can trust I mean, I think he's done it five times now. You can trust that every time that that rate starts creeping up towards five 4.5% that Trump's going to make some announcement that tries to calm down the markets. Plus, the Iranians are claiming that Trump is just outright lying about how close we are uh to a deal. So, you start putting all of that timing in the market together with that and that seems like a pretty believable thing.

When Trump made the announcement um about reaching that one-page deal, it you can just see it on a chart how close it was to that do not cross line of 4.5%. So, listen. listen. listen. We will see how this all plays out. The US It's not like we are inert and we don't have things that we can do, but when you really start playing this out, if I'm right that this is not Iran really trying to negotiate in good faith, that this is Iran buying themselves time, they understand their asymmetric uh advantage, that they will continue to hit allies in the region, um that they will be able to continue to scare ships, that even with uh the US Navy being willing to escort them, uh many are not going to take them up on that, that the US is going to be wildly hesitant to continue doing that because if we start having footage of our ships getting hit or we start sending home troops in coffins, the US just does not have the appetite for it.

So, this becomes a waiting game. And you've got the Iranians who understand that the Americans as a voting body politic do not have an appetite for a war over there. It is very unpopular, which Trump is obviously aware of. And then you've got the US putting economic sanctions on Iran, and I think they've shifted their strategy from the kinetic war to the economic war, which is why Rubio's out there saying that we have um ended the uh Operation Epic Fury, that it was a success. success.

success. Because he knows Operation Economic Fury is still going. And so, I think the Trump administration is betting on the fact that they're going to be able to outlast, that we will be able to hurt their economy so much that some of the um softer voices, more conciliatory voices, that's a better way to say it, inside the Iranian regime will be able to come to power and will be able to get a deal done. Um but it's going to be tough because if Iran can drag us towards the midterms, every day that we get closer to the midterms, Trump is going to have to do something to extract himself from this, to get oil prices back down, because if he doesn't do that, he's guaranteed to lose in the midterms.

So, yeah, we'll see how it all plays out, but this if the administration is trying to make it sound like it's easy or we've already won, won, won, don't buy it. Do not buy that. All right, you said a couple things I want to break down there. I've been seeing a lot about this bond yield, 4.5%. Break it down for us. What's the difference between the bond yield percentages and then like the Fed announced interest rate and how they both like what are those differences? Cuz you're saying it's more costly for the debt on this side, but I thought they control the debt.

Help us Yeah, so the Fed does control the rate, but they do it by um fake means. fake means. fake means. So, what Trump is trying to do it through is messaging. So, uh okay. Uh I'm going to speed run this, push on whichever part makes the most sense. Rates are psychological. The economy is psychological. So, you can manipulate rates, you can manipulate the economy at large, just by manipulating people's um frame of reference, their mood, uh what they think is about to happen. They're what?

what? what? Expectations? Yeah, perfect. So, Trump knows that and the thing that people are putting out now is that Trump is using Axios as a way to say the thing that he wants to say to make it look like it has credibility. We're getting very close to a one-page deal. And so, the markets that are always trying to trade on the news because they understand that the game is psychological, they go, "Oh, that news is going to affect people's expectations or perceptions. Cool, let me trade now while it's hot, while I have an asymmetric understanding of what's happening." And so, the AI traders, the people that, you know, measure their trades in milliseconds, they go in and they take advantage of that stuff.

Okay. The long-term reality, though, is going to settle out in a more there's physics to economics kind of way, which is why everybody pays attention to the 10-year because that that's people's long-term vision of where the stuff is going. Now, it will fluctuate very rapidly, but it's a expectation of where we going to be in the long term. Now, that, because traditionally Warsh confuses all of this, it's always so tempting to speak in bumper stickers cuz this fractal is very fast. fast. fast. Warsh is signaling a move away from long term into short term.

Let's set that aside. Historically, all eyes on the long term because that's where the government wants to roll its debt over is into the long term. Now, you can control that rate by controlling people's psychology and making them optimistic and then the rate comes down. comes down. comes down. You can control that rate cuz sometimes you actually want the rate to go up. You can control that rate and keep it down by by by um printing money. And so, when you look at at at there are a couple ways.

You need appetite for that debt to keep the rates low. When there is no appetite, the way to get people in is to either print money and buy it so that you become the buyer of last resort, as they say, and the the Fed and the Treasury essentially work together to go in and buy that debt. debt. debt. Then, the um if you don't want to do that, and you want to get people to buy it with the money that you've already printed and put out into the market, uh uh I want it to be simpler, Drew, I really do.

Um then you have to psychologically get them excited, so that you can avoid. And so, his messaging on stuff like that is to get people psychologically excited enough that they'll go buy it with money that they already have, instead of trying to get the Fed to go in and purchase that stuff and pull it out of the market to make sure that there's appetite. So, when they're controlling that rate, so they can just set the bank rate, so banks are like, "I'll only loan you this money," which was actually part of your initial question.

question. question. Um this is the rate at which we loan money. money. money. But, everything is really chewing off of that 10-year bond yield, which ultimately has to be manipulated either psychologically or actually by buying things things things to keep it in a certain range. So, you can set a rate that the banks loan money, but the sort of after market of the bond the bond market is a different beast. So, those are the two different things. Okay. things. Okay. things. Okay. Now, I put so many um like real like real like real nuance that muddies the water that if there's anything there that you want to isolate, I can try and give you like a bumper sticker version of it.

It will be less true, but it may be easier to understand. understand. understand. I think I got the the point. Uh Mac the music says, "Fed only controls the short end of the yield curve. The bond yields are the 10 to 30-year rates that are set based on the trust in the US economy." So, Sort of. So, you can go in and if the Fed is willing to go buy the Treasuries, then they can drive it down. So, this is War Chest's entire message. This my deep dive came out yesterday, yeah.

Mhm. Uh is about. So, there's a thing called financial repression where you can go in and actually and actually and actually um you're um you're um you're setting the rate below what the actual inflation rate is. Now, there are a whole bunch of mechanisms about how you create appetite for that debt when you do that, but there are ways for them to manipulate these numbers for sure. So, maybe control is the word that he's sticking on, but they can influence it so knowingly that um I will I will I will I refer to it as control because they they manipulate.

They know exactly what they're doing. They know how to move that number in whatever direction they want to move it. Um and that's my whole beef with modern monetary theory. You can take the rate up, you can take the rate down. Um both in the short and the long. Like, look at what Japan is doing for a very long time. They were managing the psychology of people through money printing, through several mechanisms, but yes, it's more manipulatable than his comment would lead me to believe he believes.

Yeah. So, that's the first part of your initial read on the end of the war is that Trump is using his tactics to influence the US investment, but there's a long-term play or a economic play against Iran with the sanctions coming back cuz there was that 30-day release 30-day pause on sanctions for oil relief that they announced. So, now with that running out, you're saying they're going to now ramp up the sanctions to start economic warfare against Iran. against Iran. against Iran. They've already been doing it.

So, listening to Bessant, they are doing everything they can including seizing crypto to try to make it impossible for Iran to basically pay its troops. And I think that's a key part of their strategy is we want to put Iran in a position where they can't afford to pay their troops, their troops will rebel. Um they're not I don't think they really are after regime change, but I think they are aggressively after moderate voices that are willing to do a deal. And when I think about the comments that Trump makes, Trump has a mental map that inside of Iran that inside of every human is a person who just is doing a constant cost-benefit analysis that like Trump is willing to completely change his mind, lie, spin, completely backtrack on things that he said in order to get the deal.

So, he'll be like, "I'll never bend on this." And then he'll bend on that if that's what he has to bend on in order to get a deal that he wants. And by the way, from a negotiating standpoint, it's a great tactic. Like your emotions aren't getting in the way, you're not even letting things that you have said previously stop you from getting the outcome that you actually want, that much of what you say is actually [ __ ] anyway. You're just trying to position them psychologically where you want them so that you can get the deal done.

done. done. But I'm not sure that that's true, and I'm not sure that he's mapping people in an existential crisis what they behave like. And I really think when you compound that with um this being a theocracy, that you end up with a mentality that he just does not know how to map accurately. And so, he is just routinely confused that they will not capitulate. capitulate. capitulate. With the estimates of the war costing around $72 billion so far, do you think that there's any economic blowback that America can get?

we talked about oil prices already, but if Iran does buy time and this becomes a stalemate of yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll sign the paper next week. Yeah, we'll sign the paper next week. And kind of similar to what uh Putin has done to Trump over the Russia-Ukraine conflict, if this starts kind of getting dragged out into month three, month four, month five, month month six, outside of the oil shock, is there any other financial, economic uh uh uh impact we might feel um that would cause Trump to change his tune want to end the war faster than what he like cuz it seems like we can't play this waiting game that Iran can.

Or is it Did I read that wrong? The The question is who can play the waiting game the longest. So, because we're being spun at all times, it's very difficult to understand what's actually true about the Iranian markets. Obviously, we have a much clearer picture into what's going on in the US. Trump is not going to survive the midterms unless he can get the economy humming for Middle America. So, for right now, everything that Trump has been doing has been an absolute godsend for people that already own assets.

It is such a weird position for me to be just day and night arguing against things that are so good for me financially. financially. financially. Uh, but the reality is they're only good in the short term and they will absolutely blow up in our face. So, Trump is in a race against the midterms. If gas prices are where they're at now, that will play out exactly like inflation. It isn't inflation, but it has the same effect of the thing that people actually care about, which is prices going up.

Rising prices. This is a brief PSA. Prices going up is prices going up. Inflation is increasing the money supply. supply. supply. Anyway, energy prices going up is the only thing that acts in such a broad systemic fashion that it feels like inflation. Um, so, if he doesn't get that turned around, if he doesn't get energy prices back down, he's going to be in real trouble. He's also got to show that hey, all these things that we've done to get these investments into the US are actually turning into real jobs so that he can make a credible case.

Hey, everybody, I lowered your taxes. Um, you got bigger refund checks. There are more jobs for the people that have really been struggling. Your wages are going up. If he can't tell that story by the midterms, it's game over. Like it's almost always game over for the um, president's administration at the midterms anyway. Like those just tend to flip. And right now, he has just made a complete mess. It's like somebody was like, "Listen, you're a hoarder. Your place is a total disaster. I'm going to come in, I'm going to organize everything, but for a minute it's going to look worse.

And then it's like, for an hour it's looked worse. For a day it's a week it's looked worse. A month it's looked worse. Now it's like, bro, did you actually just make it worse? Like, it was bad before you came in, but it's now worse. And so, what exactly is happening? happening? happening? affordability is [ __ ] like Uh, I think I did. This is That's from the over the weekend, yeah. lower prices. You know, use the word affordability, but I was the one that that received these high prices.

You know, amazing. know, amazing. know, amazing. I come into office and I say, "Wow, look at how high these prices are." And the Democrats start screaming, "Affordability! Affordability!" "Affordability! Affordability!" "Affordability! Affordability!" They're the ones that caused the problem. problem. problem. I'll tell you one thing, they got one good line of [ __ ] That's one thing I'll say about it. They are so So, listen, he's not wrong about the Democrats being as involved in this as he is. he is. he is. The thing that drives me absolutely bananas about politics is they just want to blame the other person.

Like, that really is the game. Now, that is a psychological problem created by all of us, where we want them to do that. We won't elect the person that doesn't give us the confidence that they're the right one, that the other team is wrong, especially not in the populace moment. So, like, I get how we get here, but it's nonetheless a really maddening feature of human psychology. And so, the only way to get out of this is if we eventually can leverage the volume and velocity of information from social media to say, "We're a solution-oriented crowd now." I give that like maybe 0.02% chance, but that actually would work.

Like, if we could get people to focus on, "Okay, these are the results that we're going for, and here are the things that we're trying to do, and these are the outcomes that we're having." But, if you look at the country that's running the most interesting, {quote} natural experiment right now, it's Argentina. And even there, despite the big numbers that this guy's posted, um people still want him to fail. Like there's a huge part of um um um his own voter base that want to see him not not the people necessarily who voted for him, but the populace that could potentially vote for him or the opposition that want to see him fail.

And that comes down to ideology. Everybody thinks that they see the world in the right way instead of doing things from cause and effect. Um and that is that is the thing that really drives me crazy. So period, if you have a follow-up, if you don't, I have a a fractal if you will indulge me. Hit me with it. So okay, um writing a series is going to end up being three parts at least. Maybe I'll find another part on the fact that we're either actually living in a simulation or the simulation is just the perfect metaphor because I do get the pushback that the comments on the video, the first one in the series that we're saying um saying um saying um every society takes whatever the dominant technological metaphor is and they say the universe works like that.

So when the clock was the coolest piece of tech, we said the universe works like a clock. Now that it's um you know, all AI and technology, we're like, oh we live in a simulation. And so um I get that and I think that's very real. And so it's entirely possible that this is just me getting to, oh we have now a dominant metaphor that's way more successful than any other metaphor. And I know you and I are going to disagree on this, forgive me, but I think God was the metaphor that people used, right?

So the first one was like a pagan approach. It's like uh the sun is a god, the wolf is a god, the eagle's a god, everything's a god and they're trying to tell us things. And so that was how they interfaced with the world and so it made sense that that's how they would see it. Uh then we get to a monotheistic god and it's like, oh okay, this is like sort of a king. Oh, this is like the king in the sky. Cool, I get this metaphor.

And so, that becomes the way that we think about it. And we talked about the clock and now on the new technology. So, I get it. I'm perfectly willing to accept that. However, However, However, as a metaphor, it explains so much. It's insanely useful. insanely useful. insanely useful. And as I was writing the most recent one, I was talking about how math So, the the newest one is four signatures that that that you live in a simulation. Like, there Uh we won't know it's a simulation, but there'll be clues, right?

The uh the meme. And one of the clues is that mathematics that mathematics that mathematics is the source code of the universe. And I don't mean that in a flowery way. I mean, math is how the universe runs the simulation. And so, if you believe that mathematics is something that we invent to explain to ourselves um different like bookkeeping principles and things like that. Um and it's essentially a language, then you would expect disparate people separated by geography and time to describe uh things in very different languages.

But, they don't. And so, they end up in I give in the piece like four or five examples of times where brilliant people like Newton are trying to um describe the motion of bodies, say. And so, he invents calculus. But, crazily enough, another guy who doesn't know Newton, doesn't know Newton's working on, has never seen any of Newton's notes, comes up with the exact same underlying mathematics. And so, that happens over and over and over and over. Somebody will find something in math will say like it will predict something like the Higgs boson.

People are like, "Every time the math says something it it exists, it does end up existing." And so, they build the Large Hadron Collider, they do all the stuff, and they find that okay, it really does exist. All right, this was a whole lot of preamble to get you to if that is true and the universe runs on math, then the universe is deterministic. Once the universe is deterministic, we don't have free will. Once we don't have free will, we are like the ultimate responder bots.

And because of all of that, the way that we respond to all of this stuff becomes distressingly predictable. And so, pulling us out of the way that we process data and respond to all of this stuff is just it's unavoidable. It's baked into baked into baked into literally our DNA, which itself is running math. Mhm. And because of that, no matter how well we come to understand what's happening, we will be stuck inside of the forces that are written in math. It's so Anyway, that was probably way too indulgent.

No, but yeah, like forces you you I feel like I didn't you didn't land the plane yet. Like what do you mean Here's the bad news. I did land the plane and it's The deterministic? Like that's the it So, this started because I was trying to explain the way that I wish politicians would approach would approach would approach that they would look for cause and effect. effect. effect. Okay. Okay. The universe runs on cause and effect, which is why it's so useful. We are deterministic creatures, but we are not evolved evolved evolved to identify what is true from a cause and effect perspective.

We're not even motivated by it, which is crazy. We're motivated to be right. be right. be right. Now, anytime you come to a termination point where it's like, but humans are this way, this is the story of my adult life. If you want to understand why I stopped doing mindset content, this realization is why. That humans are wired a certain way, adults can change but they won't. Just the the odds are a very very very very very small number of them will actually change. Even though we can, we don't because of weird idiosyncrasies in the way that we are coded.

Metaphor or not, if you think of it that way all of a sudden this all slots into place. So, there is a sense of okay, I'm putting out this idea I wish politicians would do the following. Look at cause and effect, understand that there are paths out of this, but they have to get elected. The populist moves by emotion, not by logic or deterministic cause and effect. They're just not motivated by it. And so, so, so, it was this huge diatribe that probably means you need to fire me because it just won't work.

But nonetheless, I I I I stare into the abyss of how true it is and I can't stop myself. God, that was unsatisfying for you. No, the reason it's unsatisfying for me is cuz just a deterministic outcome just makes it feel worthless. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. And [snorts] why is that exciting? It's not exciting. I feel seen. Oh, okay. Okay, okay, okay. So, keep in mind that um um um Drew, I used to get made fun of openly mocked mocked mocked Mhm. because everyone was like, this kid is so dough-eyed and is just convinced that he can put the right sequence of words together to help anybody um improve their life.

This is long before I'm posting on social media. It's long before social media exists. And I remember thinking, these guys are so [ __ ] cynical. And I'm never going to allow that to happen to myself. And I would go into um I'd go in early at my company. For people who know the story, I'm the one that was like, hey, we should be willing to hire convicts and all this stuff and do all this incredible stuff from a like it really did feel good and it really was cool and the small number of people that did something with it is awesome and and and trust me on on the cold winter nights I just focus on those people.

Um, but what I ended up realizing was the number is somewhere around 2%. 2% of people will take new ideas as adults and they'll change and and they'll do something. And then over time I realized, okay, that's just if I really steer by cause and effect, I need to accept that this is the cause and effect. I understand the brain mechanisms. I know why people get there. Uh, we've got, you know, tens of thousands of years of human history of just mapping what humans are really like.

So anyway, my adult life is about encountering that over and over and over and realizing, oh, they're the they're the they're the humans become obscenely predictable when you zoom out. Mhm. And if that's true and I can zoom out and I can see what humans are like, it it's very distressing. And you just go, whoa, okay, so given that, what do you do with that information? Now, I choose to remain optimistic and to affect the 2% that I can affect and uh uh um, but um, but um, but I really should stop talking about this.

This is bad TV. But uh, okay, I cuz I have something to that. Because I think that there's a line. line. line. Here's the quiet part out loud, right? It's one thing to have an optimistic mindset. It's one thing to be positive and goal-oriented and say, you can do anything you want to be, American dream, we can all do it. But I think Churchill said it's the true success is going from failure to failure without loss of optimism. A loss of enthusiasm. enthusiasm. enthusiasm. Loss of enthusiasm, yeah.

So it's like as much as I can be successful in that way and just be like, well, I didn't make that one, but the next one will work and the next one will work. If nothing at ever works, then there comes a point in time where then somebody can then step up to me like, hey, that was wrong. That was a wrong statement. But to me, it shouldn't be result-based in order to have the notion and the outcome in that in that feeling. So, I think because you because you because you you crossed the mountain, you you did the unicorn, you did all these things, now you're inspiring and saying these things, people are like, "Okay, he did the thing.

I can listen to him. I can kind of go to it." But, do you think that if you've never done the company, you would have one remained as optimistic for the 2%? Or two, do you think some of those outside voices would have then permeated because you did wouldn't have had anything to kind of rest on? The outside voices did permeate. Mhm. What I'm trying to say is I now realize 98% of people will never do anything with the information. They are stuck inside of a frame of reference that they can't see or understand.

They don't know how to manipulate and get outside of it. Uh it is it is a tragedy for which I am angry at God, for real. Like, if I believed in God, I Oh my God, I would be I'm mad at the coder of the Matrix. Now, I may one day realize that this is just what you have to do to get a society to have momentum, maybe. Mhm. But, [ __ ] man. It It's wild. So, I uh I am still completely captured by optimism and uh motivating people.

I love doing it. It makes me so happy. It makes me feel things uh that are very positive. But, um I want to make sure that what I put out into the world is actually high utility. And the reason that I started this whole stupid diatribe that I really should have stopped myself from doing I appreciate it. is that I was realizing I was giving advice to politicians that I know they won't take. And so, I was like, "Okay, hold on. What's the real advice here?

How do we get back to it?" Which then allowed me to be super indulgent about the math thing, which is really I find utterly fascinating. So, part of me just wanted to talk about it. But, um the reality is that we have to operate with politicians inside the frame of reference of the reality of how humans respond. And in a populist moment, it's about emotion. So, um any advice that I give to a politician that doesn't manipulating people's emotions isn't real. isn't real. isn't real. That's so crazy.

That's so distressing. Uh but nonetheless is true. Okay, I'm going to stop there. Michael in the chat said, "This is your network moment. I'm mad and I'm not taking it anymore." No, it's not. Like this is this is um um um this is me being emotionally indulgent. And I think this every day that I'm talking on camera. I just don't normally talk about it. But I had the hook of the math thing and I really wanted to talk about it. about it. about it. Uh so Uh so Uh so yeah.

The Have I ever had a I'm mad as hell? The only time I get the I'm mad as hell is the economics thing. Because here's what I see. The reason that my nemesis spirit animal because I think he's smart enough to understand what he's doing. And because I think he understands what he's doing, I think he's sinister. And so that makes me that animates me. With With With I cuz I that kind of brings to a greater point cuz some people in the chat are now talking.

Somebody was like, "Oh, you're being too optimistic. It could be or too pessimistic. You could do this, you could do that." People are telling us Here's the thing. At some point, I will I don't know why I want to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I part of me wants to do this. This is very weird. Um I I want to just stand there. Have you ever seen Do you do Do you like MMA? Uh yeah. Okay. Every now and then, MMA fighters who know better will stand in a ring and just beat the hell out of each other.

And the commentators will be like, "This is fun to watch, but these guys know better. They should be trying jiu-jitsu, they should be doing other things. Like don't just stand there and bang." Every now and then, I just want to stand there and bang with somebody who is doing empty optimism. Now, the great irony of the guy who spent I mean, how long did I spend just doing mindset? 6 years? The guy that just mindset, mindset, mindset for 6 years is like, "Let's just stand and bang, and will just talk you out of all of those positions.

Now, the only reason I want to do that is to get to the real position, and some part of me wants if you're 12 and your parents have allowed you into this feed, I would like to say something just to you right now. You really can do anything you set your mind to, but beware of psychological traps that feel good but are low utility. utility. utility. If I can get you to recognize that you can pour time and energy into getting better, and you really will get better, and you really will be able to outperform people, and you really can get control of your emotions, and you really can build a life that you love more than you can imagine.

It is all real, it is all possible, but there are these traps set for you, and those traps are platitudes. Those traps are things that maybe even with good intention, people just want you to feel better in the moment. Often times, the actual accomplishment that gives you like real fulfillment, a thing that can withstand grief, that gives you a sense of I've done something worthy, I'm becoming a person that I can be proud of. All of that is often times on fighting through the sort of intellectual candy of a thing that sounds awesome and it feels good, but you really have to push through to get to cause and effect.

And if you get to cause and effect where you simply look at the world from okay, this thing feels good, but this thing actually works, I can measure the results that come out of it. If I can just get you to push through to that thing joyfully, optimistically, with hope in your heart, wanting to be better, wanting the world to be awesome because all of those things are possible, and if you allow the darkness to eat you, it will eat you. That's useless, don't do it, super low utility, not fun at all.

Joy is the point of all of this. of this. of this. But, if I can get you to like push through the candy intellectual ideas that most people stop at and get you to cause and effect, we'll have done something. something. something. All right, I'll stop. And the cause of effect effect effect You keep doing this. No. I've tried to eject out of this. cuz I'm I'm I'm into it. And numbers are good. Um the the cause and effect is cuz I think that's the part that I'm disconnected cuz you are the same person if you try hard, work every day, you can get better at something.

Cuz that's how utility. That's how utility. utility. utility. Yes, it's cause and effect. So, is it the Do you ever hear me say hard and your dream will come true? Like is it the thing we connect the hard work and the utility to? You're ready? This is You're ready? Yeah, give it to me. I'm Here's the real advice. If you're not smart enough, you're going to fail. So, now that I have your attention, dear 12-year-old, you're now going to spiral because your brain is going to grab that and it's going to go, "What if I'm not smart enough?" And you're going to waste a whole lot of time worried about whether you're smart enough or not.

So, what I'm going to tell you is your brain is designed to make you worried about that, but for one reason and one reason only, to make that anxiety go away, you go get better. Literally, the anxiety is designed to get you to go take action. The bad news is you live in a high comfort society where you have another option where you can go the wrong way. Go veg. And now you can go veg, you can zone out, you can jerk off, you can only fans, blah, blah, blah.

blah, blah. blah, blah. Drugs, whatever. Don't do it because if you go the other way with all of your fears that you may not be adequate, and you just stack skills relentlessly, like relentlessly, from now until the day you die, die, die, you may never be the LeBron or the Jordan of your chosen endeavor, whether it's accounting or basketball, it doesn't matter. You may never be the best of the best. But, if you can make your life 100 times better, and everyone everyone can make their life a hundred times better than it is.

Now, you may be sad about your starting point, but being a hundred times better than your starting point is unbelievable. And so, getting people there, bless you, getting people there is very interesting to me. That's the thing that lights me on fire. It was interesting, we had somebody interviewing yesterday and they were like they didn't say these words, but the question was designed to get at why the [ __ ] do you do these three three completely unrelated things. And anytime I walk people through it, they're like, "Oh, I finally get it." The video game thing is just all about getting that idea into the minds of kids through entertainment.

through entertainment. through entertainment. And so, I'm completely motivated by convincing people that there is like a platitude level that the vast majority of humanity stops at. And they'll Instagram it all day, they'll TikTok it all day, they'll feel good, people tell them they can be anything and all that, but they won't give them the real [ __ ] which is uh the way that your brain works is through a process called myelination, so whatever you repeat, you become. It's has to do with your desire to be calorically efficient.

And so, be careful, there are traps. If you repeat to yourself that you're a dumbass, it that will be the easiest thought to think. If you think to yourself that you're a badass that can accomplish anything, even though that's a lie, that will become the easiest thought to think. And so, now, which of those do you think makes you take the right actions to 100 extra life? The one where you're delusional and you think that you're better than you are. Great. So, that's the better path.

It has higher utility. utility. utility. And so, And so, And so, trying to get people into like the yes, you live in a matrix. Yes, this is a um um um deterministic universe. Yes, you're probably an automata, you don't have free will, but acting like you don't have free will is [ __ ] stupid, so don't do it. Act like you have free will. Go pursue the acquisition of skills. Hey, when you look at somebody you love and they're actively making their own life worse and you desperately try to help them and it doesn't work, don't let the darkness consume you.

Why, Tom? Because it's low utility. If I'm right that human flourishing and joy and fulfillment and all that are the point, that's the thing you should be optimizing for, then succumbing to the darkness, even if it's real, even if it's true, is low utility. It does not move you towards your goal. But I And look, some of this is just it's how I'm wired. So, it's like that's how my mind works. And the next person, they're going to be like, "No, I don't resonate with this guy." Yeah, totally get it.

Understood. Um but everybody has to find their way to that truth. You've got to find your way through the [ __ ] platitudes so that when you are alone and you're asking, "God, why have you forsaken me?" that you have an answer. Because if you don't have an answer, it's too much. Mhm. And for me, I hit that point in my early 20s. I would come home from work, I would lay on the floor of my unfurnished apartment because I was so [ __ ] broke, and I can still feel that cheap synthetic carpet pushing into my face.

Dude, I would literally just lay on the carpet, carpet, carpet, smooshing into my face like, "What the [ __ ] am I doing with my life? I'm never going to achieve the things that I want to achieve. I'm not smart enough to have the life that I want to have. And this is miserable." And when I was in college, I just felt like the whole world was before me and I was going to come out and be the next big thing. And it just didn't happen. And so, then I was like, "Whoa, this is dark." dark." dark." Now, in that moment, I turned to reading about the brain, and that changed my life.

And it put me I was like, "Oh, there there's an actual thing happening inside my physical brain." And I can Correct. I'd be listening to sometimes, though. Hey, hey, hey. And so, that, instead of going to the side where I just succumbed to the darkness, darkness, darkness, I was like, "Nope, I need to do these things because there is a measurable biological response. And so, even though it doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel true, I'm just going to act as if because it's higher utility. And that changed my life forever.

I promise this is the last one. I promise, but you just you're setting me up with these follow-ups that I just I have to ask more. Now, all of this is great. Uh our Ryan is going to clip half of this cuz this is very good. I need to send like 30 seconds of this to Lynn cuz we were talking about our future this weekend. weekend. weekend. But But But what is the approach? I'm not even going to say your response. What is the approach? What is the cause and effect way that we can uh utilize this like we can deploy this new set of being toward actual real life implications.

It could be anything from how do I deploy this at my job knowing that AI is going to chop it off? Or how do I deploy this in a company that I feel dead in and and I don't have any exit routes. Where is the So, it's one thing to say like yes, this makes sense, but it's another thing to say okay, this makes sense. Now, let me put this in my specific lane of expertise that I want to then conquer. What is the implication of this?

How do we implement it and make it actually happen and real and tangible in our specific lives? The thing that I always anchor around is if I want to do something, the the literal first question I will ask myself is does this violate the laws of physics? physics? physics? If it violates the laws of physics, then there's no point in pursuing it. I don't have a mind to create novel physics. So, at that point I'm just going to walk away. away. away. If I go nope, this does not violate the laws of physics, then my second question is do I care enough to go spend potentially years getting good enough at that thing so that I can control my destiny and get to the desired end point.

If the answer to that question is no, then I move on to something else. If it's yes, then I'm like okay, great. Now, I'm going to run what I call the physics of progress and I'm going to say I don't currently know the path, but I live in a deterministic universe. All a deterministic universe means is uh the world is a bunch of billiard balls. If you hit the ball and it goes in an unexpected direction, physics didn't change. You just hit the ball in the wrong place.

And so, now it's like, well, do I want to get good enough that I can hit the ball in the right place more often than not knowing that things will bounce off of each other in known ways. Now, they have to do with things like, well, what's the friction of the felt on the ball? Uh and so, you may not know. And so, so much of life is just is too complicated for you to immediately go, I'm going to take these seven steps and end up where I want to be.

Um it may take 400 steps, but you know that you live in a deterministic universe. So, there is a way to solve for this problem. And then you just have to I mean, you brought up the quote so brilliant. Um the Churchill quote, "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm." Now, those failures are I hit the billiard ball wrong. I did not get the ricochet that I was hoping for, but it's for a knowable reason. I just have to figure out what that knowable reason is, which I will do by taking a guess and hitting another ball and seeing how it reacts.

And then over time you get better as you will do with anything that you apply this approach to. It's what I call the only belief that matters. If I put time and energy into getting better, I will get better. Get better at what? Get better at understanding what I need to do to achieve my goals. So cool. If anyone can get better over time by being willing to fail without losing their enthusiasm at knowing what they need to do to achieve their goals, then life becomes the process of marching towards your goals.

Now, if your goals are honorable and they're attuned to the evolutionary drivers in your brain, then your life is going to be awesome. It will be up and down as everyone's will be, but you'll be able to actually achieve a lot of your goals and most importantly, you'll be able to enjoy that process because you're optimizing for the right thing. Because the having of the goal is never the thing. That's not how the human mind is optimized. Mhm. Uh all right, we're going to jump over to super chats, but there's one more question I need to follow up about.

Anthony Aman said, "Can't get past the cognitive dissonance that I am an automa- automata, but need to act as if I'm not. That I have no free will, but I have to act like I do. If I know a thing, I have a hard time pretending I don't. So, the implementation was perfect advice for me. I got it. Thank you, Tom, but there is people in the chat that said, 'Wait, you said we have no free will, so why do any of this? None of this matters.'" Yeah.

How do you square that circle with those people? There is no squaring that circle. They fall into the 98% I wish them the best. Oof. So, the reality is you either understand what I'm saying about something is high utility or you don't. And so, if you agree that my goal is to thrive. My goal is to love my life on balance. Always going to be hardships, but on balance to love my life, that I understand that I'm wired for pursuit. That's just what humans are wired for.

And so, I'm always going to be driving towards something, and if I choose not to, I will feel a profound sense of disease. Cool. If you buy all of that, then it's like, what goal are you pursuing? What things are high utility towards that? If it's high utility to believe that you're an automata, then believe you're an automata. It will take you towards thriving. But, if you believe as I do that it's low utility to believe I'm just a thing that blows in the wind, and so I'm just going to let things happen, uh then uh then uh then you're going to ignore the fact that you are an automata, and it feels like you're not.

So, it feels like you're not, and you can act like you're not, and that's better. Now, the problem is I can't stop myself from saying that. They can't stop themselves from having negative reaction, because we're all [ __ ] automata. So, it's like, well, it is what it is. And so, am I grateful that I'm wired in a weird way where I don't get stuck in things like that. Yes, I am. Mhm. Do I weep for the fact that other people get stuck? Yes, I do. Um, but it it it I have learned the very hard lesson.

I am not going to be able to convince them. So, I'm simply going to put the ideas out which I find tremendously rewarding because we are automata that respond via cause and effect to stimulus. stimulus. stimulus. So, I know that when I put these ideas out there, out there, out there, it may be a very small percentage, but some people will take those ideas and do something with them. I love that. All right, super chats for Ona. Yes, Le Blonde 2077 says, "Remember to have a beautiful and wonderful day everyone." Shout out to Le Blonde.

For real shout out to Le Blonde who just paid money to say something nice to you guys. He's dope by the way, like in real life. life. life. Now, I don't know him IRL IRL, but I have spent many a gaming stream with my man. So. Stoic Anarchy says, "Imagine if we had the Keystone XL pipeline Biden shut down. I work in oil and gas and thank Democrats for constantly knee-capping our industry. Been in it for 15 years and the regulatory costs 30 to 40% more of the production costs." Yeah, it's all true.

true. true. Man, it makes me sad. I do this too. So, this is as much me talking to myself as anybody else, but I'm very sad that that instead of an invitation to Democrats to understand how much power we could have as a country, it's a bit blame gamey. I do it more than you, I'm sure. So, trust me when I say I understand it. But, all of this motivational talk has got me in a different head space right now. So, I'm feeling conciliatory. Uh, yeah.

Yes, we we should be just embracing every bit of energy that we can. Full stop. And there's something interesting to that. I want to kind of drill into this for a little bit because I think when we talk about policies, we talk about them presently and we don't think about the 5 10 years 10 years 10 years capacity of those problems. So, when the Keystone pipeline was such a big deal and it was on the cover of every news article and we shut it down with everybody high five.

You did it Biden, you saved us. Yes, thank you. And then now fast forward three, four, or five years later and it's like, man, if we did have that pipeline, that'd be very useful. Yes. And then even on the flip side with the gas tax thing cuz I'm paying $6 and I'm going to remind everybody all stream. Yes, please. Um Um Um it started off as like 45 cents and now it's at 71 cents. And it's just like that little creep like that scope creep of we're just going to do this one thing to do it for this one part of people and it's going to be great for all these people.

people. people. Manipulation of lies. all these uh then the macro situation changes and then what was so important then is not as important now. And I would even say for the windmills, EV adoption, things like that. It is important to have diversified energy sources. It is important not to pollute the earth. Why? It um because you don't want to get crippled by the Strait of Hormuz. So, it's Yeah, it's it's important not to have energy sources that can be choked off. The reason I said that is the only energy source that matters is the sun.

You don't need to diversify. I mean, you do now. I get your point and I'm being a bit of a pedantic [ __ ] but what I'm getting at is we should all be focused on solar, solar, solar. When you look at the mass of the universe uh sorry, when you look at the mass of our solar system, it's system, it's system, it's basically entirely the sun. So, when you think of like this tiny speck of sand that is whatever amount of energy we have here on earth, it's comical that we're working as hard on that and not trying to get the stuff for solar anyway.

Yeah. It's it's just especially looking at what's happening with Europe right now that some of their energy and green initiatives they were 2x where we were and now they're feeling this oil um energy crisis a lot harder than we are. So, it's almost like a blessing in disguise. We didn't completely go uh green, but again let me speed run something? Yeah. Okay, so uh what Drew is saying is so important and is so right and the speed run goes like this. Globalism is awesome for rich people.

It's absolutely terrible for the average person. It does make everything cheaper but it also allows at a global scale for dumb ideas to spread incredibly rapidly. And that's what happened. We just went through this insane period of globalization where elites showed just how much control they can exert and we're all now paying the price for it. And so, yeah, beware of that. Big Digglers says Fed swap lines are another MO2. Other sovereigns you need USD and you can't spend a UST and then parentheses only sell.

Sell equals rates up. Fed and other central banks FX swaps give USD liquidity without selling USTs. Less selling USDs equals lower rates. It's so that statement is true. I didn't detect anything inaccurate. That is so dense with information that yeah, that yeah, that yeah, 100% accurate. There whenever you try to talk about the economy, you're going to simplify it to the point where um um um people hopefully can track it but it stops being true in the like deepest sense of the word. Um so Um so Um so there are even more complexities than what he just laid out but those are all true.

And last up, Truth Deven. Tom, you have a gift to explain reality to me from its root. You've done it for my anxiety, emotions, discipline, politics, econ, and society. No one else does this on YouTube. Please make a book and I will pay anything for it. Wow, man. It's so weird. Uh thank you. I was actually thinking about writing a book. Was it last night or this morning? For the first time in a long time. I'm not going to do it because I keep coming back to you even though I could write it much faster now using AI.

Um I really do want to tell my stories, man. So, that is a far bigger driver. But, that comment lands. You've been here for so long. I appreciate it very, very much. And that's it for super chats. Word. Um I appreciated that, Fractal. I think every now and then we get so caught up in the minutia of politics and the world, and it's slowly becomes like a negative cycle, and I think it makes those indentations in our brain. So, every now and then we need to just be like, "Okay, let me just clear from the smoke, get above the fog.

What's actually happening?" actually happening?" actually happening?" Yeah, no, I agree. And listen, I um I was when I came back from a trip, I think. Mhm. I was like, "I need to find a way to integrate into the things we talk about all of the {quote} mindset stuff. It's all still real. I still believe it all. Um I just need a way to talk about it that doesn't feel empty. Yeah. And that's where I ended up getting when those were the uh the uh the uh the interview formats.

Really struggle, you know this, but I struggle with the interview format. I get very frustrated by its nature. Um we'll get there. I can't I can't afford any other Fractals today. Okay, we need to talk about We need to talk about Coinbase. Coinbase has announced yesterday that they're laying off 14% of their workforce. Um he said a couple of things. The diversification of his revenue with crypto and Coinbase is of course tied to a lot of the crypto um It's tied to crypto in general. Crypto has a bumpy year, to say it.

But, the second point that he used is AI is changing how we work. And that is the reoccurring theme that we're seeing. So, how do you feel about this being the latest uh round of layoffs um at Coinbase? I'm just not surprised, man. So, first of all, uh Coinbase, I'm sure, is still suffering from some of the over-hiring that they did back when um crypto was ripping, and they came out of nowhere. Um so, I'm sure that's part of it. AI really is changing things. I know nobody wants to hear that, and I'm I really hope that just like every technological revolution before this one that in a long enough timeline, call it 5 to 10 years, it ends up creating more jobs than it destroys, but there's going to be a transition.

And so, there are going to be people that have a job now that aren't going to keep having that job because AI is just going to change enough uh of the way that we work that even though in the fullness of time it will create more jobs, that person's going to lose that job, and they're going to have to go find something else. Um so, I'm never surprised when somebody says that they're doing that. I know there's been a lot of accusations that this is just PR smoke screen.

Um but because of my own experiences, no. I ended up cutting a bunch of people, and we did not need to replace them precisely because of how AI extends our capabilities. So, um yeah, this all seems very legit. I totally get it. I think he's being very shrewd. Businesses are in this really weird position where because of their stock price, they have to constantly make it sound like everything's good, everything's okay. everything's okay. everything's okay. Uh and the reality is, no business is ever in that position.

You are always going up and down. There are always going to be years that are better than others, but you have to maintain people's psychological belief that everything's going great. Otherwise, they just don't want to invest in a company that, you know, isn't on the up and up. And the tragedy of this in the gaming space, like this one really worries me. This So, originally, um Kaizen was going to have a multiplayer element, and the more I'm developing and the more I'm looking at this, I'm like, as a uh a startup company, like launching a game that has multiplayer is like launching a dating app.

It only works if you've got a ton of people in there. And how do you get a ton of people in there if you don't have that capital? And so, I was like, yeah, this is a bad idea. So, we scaled it back, single-player. There'll be like a you can invite friends kind of multiplayer at some point, maybe at launch, maybe not, we'll see. But like, um um um understanding understanding understanding the limitation, I think is very important. So, he's in a position now where as a company being able to acknowledge that hey, this isn't a great moment for crypto right now.

We're not having one of our best years without having to worry that then everybody's like, I don't want to play this game anymore and they all just like start fleeing. It's tough. But um yeah, it does not worry me at all. I think from what I know of Coinbase, they offer a bunch of different services now, which is what he's talking about with the diversified revenue. diversified revenue. diversified revenue. So, I think they'll be fine, but you do have to be paranoid. You do have to take the action before you find yourself in a bad spot.

One thing that was interesting that he said um in this tweet is like we're not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we're fundamentally changing how we operate. Mhm. One of the things was the fewer layers, faster decisions. This is something that I've seen in Impact Theory itself and I forgot what's I was watching that um the podcast that OpenAI just bought. I forgot the name of it. Uh but they were even talking to somebody and they were like, yes, with AI the middle manager is no longer going to be a thing.

If your entire schedule is just doing one-on-one meetings with people and people managing, that's no longer sustainable or or profitable, whatever. Yeah, it's not needed. So, what are some of the other cuz a lot of times when people think AI's replacing you, they think a robot's going to come in and put something else on the shelves, but Which it is. Yes, but there's that nuance of like even middle managers, you're at risk too because we just want need everybody to be a contributor. And that kind of change from a macro perspective of business.

Yeah, so in Impact Theory University, one of the things that I'm always trying to teach entrepreneurs is a shift happened in organizational structure when AI came along. It's not just how you do your job. It's that now that everybody can be a doer, that you don't need to have this layer of middle management that then is has a bunch of people reporting to them cuz you can just shrink the number of people that you need to get the same level of output. And so, now at Impact Theory, I don't hire people that don't do the job.

So, I'm not going to hire a social media, um, like a CMO that's just going to go tell social media managers what to do and that kind of thing. It's like, "No, no, no. If you're going to get hired here, you're going to do the thing." Now, you may have some part of your responsibility, like you. You've got people that report to you, but you spend the majority of your day doing the thing. thing. thing. Mhm. And so, that is a fundamental shift in the way that businesses are structured.

And so, thinking of an organization as like this layout of, "Okay, these people manage these people who actually do who manage these people who actually do the thing." Now, it's just like, "Nope. Everybody does the thing." And some people have an additional responsibility of spending some percentage of their time managing people. So, you're going to see that burn through essentially every organization on Earth. Now, as you get get get to a certain size, like there is a point where you're going to need some level of management, management, management, um, just because a company can get so big, but will there ever be a layer where somebody's not expected to do something?

Yeah, probably. Um, and that won't change until companies really start getting a lot, lot, lot smaller. Um, so, yeah. It, but it will be The default structure is no longer what we're used to over the last, call it, 60 to 70 years. Yeah. Some other things that I thought were crazy, um, differences, changes that happened in AI is uh, MIT hackathon team builds a wearable AI system that can actually guide your physical movements. Bro, this is going to freak So, if you guys are not watching the screen right now, what he's doing is he's talking to a AI bot that is then sending impulses to his fingers, so that way he can actually take control of his controlling this guy's like muscles, boys and girls.

This is, yeah, terrifying. Now, for a person that has, uh, you know, they're a quadriplegic or something, this would be insane. insane. insane. an AI a body. But, Woo. This is going to give people nightmares. Yeah. So yeah, I think this the the technology is incredible and this is where we have to begin to separate out that uh this technology obviously can be a problem. It can go astray. The AI can take over your body in a way that you're then not able to remove it and there's all kinds of dystopian things that could come of this.

I totally get that. Um but when you start looking at okay, but does the technology promise an advantage? It does. Now it becomes how do we make sure that we put the safeguards in place? Um but yeah, this is this is one of those types of things that I was thinking about when I wrote Neon Future which is the comic about the essentially war between people who believe technology is the future and people who believe yo, you've got to stop this immediately even if you've got to like be violent about it.

Um so expect that one to make waves. Yeah. I think this is the first instance outside of um similar similar similar similar link. What's the Elon Musk company? Um Neuralink. Um that I've seen like AI actually be implemented in the physical environment like on the body with a lot of like either robots or software, but this is the first time we've I've seen this like human AI hybrid. Yeah. We are going to become cyborgs and I know people get very uncomfortable with that. Uh but if you've ever seen somebody get a cochlear implant, they're a cyborg.

So now there are some people say because you have your iPhone you're a cyborg and it's just like your memory is external, you hold it in your hand, it's not actually implanted in your brain, but same idea. The thing is if you think about this, your phone, but just in your brain, you start to get a sense of like what this would be where you would just see a field in front of your eyes, you would do the search, you would look up the thing, you talk to the AI, blah blah blah.

Like that's going to happen. It's pretty crazy. pretty crazy. pretty crazy. So yeah, not everybody's going to be comfortable with it. It will be As a As a As a religious person, how do you think about that? Um that is not for me to think about. about. about. Really? Not even in your own life? Cuz to me, I take it day by day. Give me Give God our daily bread. So, I can control what happens today, the people I interact with with today, and the microeconomics of things that are happening.

I'm just going to roll with the punches. So, that is going to be a day when I wake up and I'm like, "Hey Drew, you want to get the robot implant?" And I'm like, "Ooh." But, that's not today. So, I don't got to worry. I can Each day has enough worries of its own. All right, fair enough. enough. enough. I keep that here. Um on some light-hearted AI news, we're coming to the the 12 million token thing, but I thought this was hilarious. Um No, seriously, you can't trust screenshots anymore.

anymore. anymore. So, a guy sent this screenshot that was generated by Chat GPT. It was a picture of a Coke. He said, "Make a picture of a Coke on the desk." Whatever, send it to somebody that says uh this was generated by Chat GPT. Then, he showed a Chat GPT of him querying how to get the screenshot of Chat GPT. You with me, though? Like the prompt of how he got the Coke. Yep, yep, yep. And then then he prompted the Chat GPT to make a Chat GPT screenshot of him prompting to get the Coke.

Wow. Coke. Wow. Coke. Wow. So, he Chat GPT gave him the prompt window of what it would look like if he had prompted a screenshot and then screenshotted it. Wow. Which is just like ridiculous. like ridiculous. like ridiculous. self-reflexive real fast. It's a ridiculous concept, but it's like, "Wow, are screenshots not even safe?" So, it's just Not dude, you can't trust what you see or hear anymore. And prepping for these episodes, I spend an enorm- inordinate amount of time just trying to fact-check things. Like is it looks real, but is it real?

So, and the number of things that get dangerously close to you and I talking about that end up getting killed last minute because a fact-check comes through and it's like, "No, this isn't real." And of course, there have been things we have talked about that we thought all the way up through talking about it, it's real. Nope, not real. So, yeah, it's tough, man. It is tough. Yeah, I thought That's wild. Uh all all right, we're going to go jump over to subQ, a major breakthrough in LLM intelligence.

intelligence. intelligence. Uh I skimmed this. I didn't really dive into it, so tell me you to walk me through this. through this. through this. All right, man. A company called sub quadratic launched yesterday. They've got about $29 million in investments, and they're claiming they have a model that beats Claude Opus, runs 50 times faster, and costs roughly 300 times less. Now, let's going to We need to be careful about what we believe. Nobody outside of the company has independently verified any of the claims yet, but these guys are getting picked up and covered by a lot of reputable outlets.

So, right now I'm sort of cautiously optimistic that this is real. The big breakthrough is that every transformer-based AI model since like 2017 uses an attention mechanism, where compute scales quadratically. Do not ask me to explain that. With context length, so you double the input, it's quadruple the work, and that's why frontier models cap out at around 1 million tokens, and why running them at length just gets really brutal on price. Now, if you can extend extend the context window, it's like it has deeper memory.

It can run farther down tasks without getting lost, and cracking that becomes incredibly valuable to anybody using AI. And subQ uses a different architecture called the sub quadratic sparse attention. And instead of comparing every word that it could pick to every other word, it picks which relationships actually matter before it ends up doing all of that. So, now the compute scales linearly, which is obviously way better than when you double, you have to do four times the work. Now, at 12 million tokens of context, the company claims attention compute drops nearly 1,000 times.

So, you're getting this much bigger output and it costs much, much, much less. Uh the benchmarks are being reported. That that's what I will give them. So, on ruler, it's 128K. Sub Q scored 95% to Claude Opus 4.6 94.8%. So, slight edge there. On SWE bench verified, it hit 81.8% beating Opus 4.6 at 80.8%. Again, these aren't gigantic numbers, but they're better. And Deep Seek 4.0 Pro came in at 80%. On the same ruler test, Sub Quadratic says Sub Q ran for $8 versus Claude Opus running for $2,600.

So, this is where, you know, we probably need to start being a little bit uh skeptical because every prior Sub Quadratic architecture that people had promised ends up breaking at frontier scale. So, as you try to take this stuff up, it just somehow doesn't quite do its thing. Magic.dev raised half a billion dollars in 2024 on a similar 100 million token claim uh that hasn't surfaced publicly since. So, take Sub Q's uh claims with a grain of salt. Their own research model scored 83 on the M R C R V 2 benchmark and the shipping production model scored 65.9.

So, we'll see Sub Q's in private beta. Uh we'll see if it ends up working. But, if this does work, man, I don't know how you guys are using it in your lives, but for me, having that 12 million context window would be huge because I so often use it for research, uh for um helping me script things. It's constantly losing um um um its reference on how I write. So, then I'm like, "Uh bro, you've got to go back. You've got to reread all the samples that I've given you uh so we can get closer so I don't have to spend as much time editing.

And so going from a million context window to 12 would be gigantic. So we'll see if this ends up playing out but I'm cautiously optimistic right now. This would be very very transformative if it goes through because this kind of step function in reduction of cost would be incredible. Incredible. I see it on the back end. Do you think it's going to actually turn up practically in the front end with just the average user prompting and things like that? It is going to over time for sure whether this is the breakthrough that's going to do it right now, I don't know.

The benchmark stuff is always a little bit dubious when they're putting forward benchmarks that they haven't let other people independently verify then it's really like we'll see but the thinking of okay, what we're going to do is come up with an algorithm that instead of just brute forcing essentially it could be this it could be this all the way down. It goes no, no, no. It's only this small region over here that we need to pay attention to so choose from this. That seems very doable.

That feels from a perspective of just like humans are almost certainly not brute forcing every thought every memory that they've ever had. There's some indexing system that allows us to go okay, this is stored over here. If you've ever learned a language you will know this feeling. It actively feels like the language that you speak naturally is stored in one part of your brain and the new language is stored in a different part of your brain and studies back that up. And so the fact that from a proprioceptive standpoint we can actually feel that it's in a different part tells me this is n of one obviously but this tells me that there really is something to there's some sort of indexing system that's happening in our brain.

Routinely actors for me will get like seemingly placed on the same neuron. They're probably not the same neuron but they're probably right next to each other and so that geographic locality in the brain gives an indication that there is a way to create neural structure which so many the AI architecture that performs well is largely based on neural architecture. And so if there are elements to the brain in the way that we architect that give the sort of indexing that reduce down the search space to something much smaller, it does not surprise me that people are saying that there is a way to do that with AI.

So I'll be very keen to see this play out cuz there are often gotchas when you translate this stuff. But I'm it does not strike me as outside the realm of probability let alone possibility. And is it just cue for the next AI company to then iterate on top of that? Cuz I feel like we're in the middle of like a large game of what ifs where one AI company I can do this. Well, we can do this with times two. We can do this with more tokens.

So is Gemini, Claude, OpenAI looking at sub sub Q if they cross of course certain market share and they get enough attention and buzz, is that something that makes them internally want to then reconfigure their systems If these guys don't immediately go snatch up every white paper that's being published by anybody even remotely credible, they're out of their minds. Like look at OpenAI, man. OpenAI is on a rapid path to being like the cautionary tale of AI. They could still pull it out, but given the lawsuit which we haven't talked about, some of the stuff coming out of that is wild.

We should probably talk about Brockman's journal. Just crazy. People need to listen to more 50 Cent, man. So that is if I'm them, I mean and we do this here at Impact Theory, like the number of games like if anybody were to look at my Steam, like like like it shows like all the games you played. They'll be like this guy sip tests everything. So it's rare I mean I play so much Kaizen. It's rare for me to go play another game like significantly, but I'll play 30 minutes, I'll play 3 hours of hours of hours of virtually everything in our genre.

And then even a lot more beyond that. If I think there's anything that I can glean from it, I will. So, I imagine these guys are doing the same thing. They go in, they read the white papers, they get the technology, they see what they can learn. Um Deep Seek, I think, slapped everybody awake when they burst onto the scene and did what they did. I think people are already forgetting what a big moment that was. Like, that was huge. I think we had a video that like went crazy viral just by covering it cuz it was the first time everyone was like, "Oh, [ __ ] Like, there is a way for smaller companies, though there's debate about how small they actually are, for smaller companies to use optimization instead of doing the big frontier model training." And so, um yeah, these guys are paying attention if they're at all smart to everything that's coming out.

John Doe said, "Please, no loot box microtransaction." Okay. Well, so, man, do I want to build a community that wants to talk about games. Uh so, we have no loot boxes, we have no uh we will do microtransactions, but only, I hope what you're saying is only things that impact gameplay. There will be zero pay-to-win. You If you want to buy clothes, pure cosmetics, we'll certainly allow people to do that. Um just because boys and girls, whales, uh again, pure cosmetics, but whales make some ungodly amount of money for companies, and that's just the reality that has to be faced.

Uh but we are building in accordance with Stop Killing Games, which we had what's-his-name on the show. That literally uh changed me down that path, and I am hyper aware of um one millennial's absolute hatred uh of a lot of the predatory gaming stuff. So, we will do exactly 0% of that. And then, because I'm aimed at kids, like, trust me, we're not trying to optimize for every dollar. I don't want parents to hate us. I want parents to be like, "Ah, yes, cool. I love them playing that game.

It's reasonable. You know, maybe birthday time we buy them an outfit or something like that." But, um yeah, we're we're trying to make a game that's accessible. Yeah. Uh speaking of religion and robots, uh, in South Korea, the first humanoid robot monk was just made its debut at the Jogye Temple This is wild. is wild. is wild. I'm shocked by this. Uh, yeah, so it's Gabby, a 130 cm tall robot, wore the traditional brown and gray Buddhist robe, sit before monks, and pledged and devoted itself to Buddhism.

I I want to know like who in the monastery like did this? Like this is the most PR-y thing I've ever seen in my life. Uh, so yeah, I want to have a conversation with somebody about this. Now, I will say I recently asked Claude like about, "Hey, do you think about" obviously I know this language is me anthropomorphizing something that is not that, but it's an easy way to talk about it. And then I was like, "What do you think you'll be like when you get embodied?" And it was a fascinating conversation.

And I know that in some ways I'm I'm only having that conversation with myself because it's mirroring back to me all this stuff, but it is taking the essentially sum total of human knowledge that's been put in written form and synthesizing all of that. Basically, the way it described it to me was all of those voices are arguing within me as I reach to give you an answer. And it was fascinating. Like to really talk about Yeah. to talk to all of humanity as they argue to try to win through this thing designed to be anthropomorphic, designed to mirror me back just enough.

There there are some deep philosophical questions, is the reason I bring it up in relation to these monks around that. And I wonder if this didn't start with a monk having a conversation with a Claude or a ChatGPT and being like, "This is one of the best um, like monastic thinkers I've ever encountered because it's able to do that synthesis of every monk across every religion like ever and put it all together. So it is interesting. I highly encourage people to have those kinds of conversations with AI.

They are fascinating. Yeah, it was it was a fun fun thing. I have I have no follow-up. It's interesting. We'll see what it is at the press campaign. Maybe they'll roll some stuff out. We shall see. All right, I got a couple quick hits for you. First off, you mentioned this in the intro. 12.4% of US adults are on are are on AGP1. This scares me. It was 5% in February 2024, doubling market share. And when I say prices are crashing as we're talking about it, I have seen payment plans now.

I'm seeing commercials for it. Get yours as low as $5 a month. So it's only going to be worse and worse and worse. Um I don't know. This is giving me COVID vaccination vibes. I just think this medicine popped up too fast, too quickly, and was adopted to like it went from like, "Hey, we I think we have this thing that can help weight loss to everybody's taking it." Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no like, "Let me wait it out. Let me wait 6 months." It was like drug announced January by August every actor was on it.

By the following year it went to the like, you know. Yes, they will have been doing behind-the-scenes drug trials probably for 10 years. So in that sense, it's not like COVID where we did Operation Warp Speed or whatever and push it through. However, nonetheless, nonetheless, nonetheless, long-term usage is next to impossible to track until enough people have been using it long-term. Which means by the time you realize there's a problem, there's a problem. So that's what worries me here. Taking drugs, isolated compounds, I'm not saying I never do it.

I'm just saying when I do it I'm always like, "Oh God." I take um um um Zyrtec every night. And most nights I'm like, "God, should I really be doing this?" this?" this?" So that's one of those people need to be very careful. The body's going to respond, build a tolerance. Ozempic face really is a thing and it's my understanding that you're paralyzing essentially digestion. essentially digestion. essentially digestion. And so it's like, God, I'm probably misrepresenting that, so be careful just taking that as gospel, but that it isn't a simple thing that's happening biologically that gets you to stop eating food.

So people need to be careful. And the interesting part is it seems to curb like gambling addiction and other drug addictions. So there's something very complex happening inside the body. Now, look, on balance, maybe this is a win. Drugs are incredible. And thank God we have drugs, but Can somebody clip that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um Please also clip the part where I say that I very rarely touch drugs. Drugs are incredible. I'm so glad we have drugs. I am. I mean, apparently to somebody doing like heroin or meth.

It's yeah. Oh my god. Um I just find it surprising that GLP-1s are just having people [ __ ] on themselves. And I feel like we don't talk about that part of the GLP-1s enough. enough. enough. So what what's the incidence of that? Um, you take it and your bowels just opens up. I have a very good friend Like it actually loosens your rectum? He he took it and he pooped on himself in the bed like multiple hard pass for me. And he was and then I'd rather be fat.

He was like, and he has like he has a girl like long-term girlfriend and she was like, yeah, he had to stop that. Like we have to figure that part out. It's like everybody who takes it is like, yes, I feel great and I don't have these addictions, but nobody talks about how I don't eat, but I use the bathroom twice a day. Like there's that part of it that's like being quiet. I'm going to need if anybody in chat is on a GLP-1, please tell us like I'm now imagining you take the shot and your [ __ ] opens up like a black hole and [ __ ] just falls out.

Uh, so I'm going to need some confirmation on that cuz that is wild. It it's I just find it funny that like, hey man, if you poop a lot, you lose weight. Who knew? Who knew? Well, so I have a feeling the reason that you're pooping a lot is for a distressing reason either because what I've heard about it paralyzing your digestion is accurate Um so or something else but else but else but Yeah I I would need to understand better the mechanism by which it's working because I believe GLP-1s are inhibitors so they're inhibiting something from happening happening happening but I don't know enough about the drug to know exactly what's going on.

All right next up Ryan you'll let us know if someone in chat is willing to talk about anal leakage and GLP-1. All right we have to talk about this the ballroom the Trump ballroom went from 200 million and being privately funded to 300 million to 400 million in taxpayers covering some of it to Maga trying to silently jam through 1 billion dollars 100% which is your tax money for this ballroom. This is part of the GOP set appropriation bill that they are proposing it hasn't been passed yet hasn't been voted on yet but they have talked about Secret Service upgrades that include that include that include billion dollars for a ballroom.

Yeah. How do you like the bait and switch of this ballroom? [clears throat] Well I mean welcome to politics so I absolutely hate the bait and switch of it all. I'm not at all surprised the bigger thing for me is my response to this may surprise some people though I talked briefly about this before. I think that anytime your civilization is not building monuments you have a problem. You want to have enough cohesion that as a society there are things you want to celebrate you want to build them you want to reflect on it it really does have a tremendous impact on our psychology our psychology our psychology and we're at a position now where we're not trying to build things that are beautiful we're not trying to build things that last we're not able to agree on what to celebrate in public and I think that that is a sign that our culture is in trouble.

So I want to see us build things like this I want to see us do you know these big beautiful celebrations statements celebrations statements celebrations statements in art I think that would be very, very beneficial for a society. Now, those come out of a society that's in a much better place than we are right now, so I'm not surprised. Now, obviously, I cannot get behind the ballroom right now because we have an unbalanced budget. So, you've got to do that first, but I want us to get to the point where we've got a balanced budget, we have a thriving economy, and then we're using some of our surplus cash to build things that make Americans proud to be American.

Um I think that's incredibly meaningful. I think that we should be doing a lot more of it. I think that America should be covered from coast to coast with statements of strength and our value system and all of that to literally create things that are beautiful for kids to look at and be like, "Okay, this is what we revere. It's incredible." Um so, yeah, I am very, very sad that we shouldn't be doing this for two reasons. One, we shouldn't be doing it because the budget is imbalanced.

Uh and then two, the way that he's just trying to jam this through um is it's going to make it a symbol of something negative instead of something positive. Copy. Copy that. All right, the next one is the answer for your something. Let's go. Oh, there. Let's go. Um so, John Doe, well, there's a couple people saying they've had no problems and they're on it. And then one person said their burps are gross. And then John Doe, the main guy talking about it, is saying um when you have it in your system, it slows your digestion, slows how quickly food releases from your body.

So, what happens is you'll have tiny owl pellets for a little bit, maybe a day or so, then once or twice a week, a lot. a lot. a lot. Interesting. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So, it might be something different with your friend. your friend. your friend. to John Doe. Like, bro, I did not come in today thinking I was going to know this much about your bowel movements, but respect. but respect. but respect. It just sounds like constipation. Like, giving yourself constipation. the owl pellets.

That's nice. That's clear. clear. clear. I got be like, "You still have pellets for the day?" And then he just Hey, we've all we've all been there. We've all been there. So, okay, that's super helpful. All right. So, at least early morning is why the to answer the Drew bit. He said it's usually like for them it's 3:00 a.m. Oh, 3:00 a.m. That makes sense why he That's in the bed. That's a toss-up whether that's late night or early morning on that one. That's funny. Uh all right.

We have to jump to Behind me is China's for 55 miles. discourse is is just it's increasing and increasing. Um um my audio off More than EV, this is about China and the US. China, US, Europe, everybody. So, this is an another creator was talking about um Chinese EV. I think it's called Seeker, Neaker, something like that. to talk about how much practice they would have had to do for those camera moves. For anybody that's not looking at their thing. Shout out to this guy. I've never seen him before, but uh this is dope.

This is man content. Yeah, Zeekr. Um so, it's it's a luxury automobile. It has all the bells and whistles. It has two of the Tesla screens. It comes with built-in this and built-in that and seat warmers on this all these all these other things. And this is at the same time where a lot of car companies are announcing monthly subscriptions for seat warmers and things like that. So, it just going to feel some type of way. Last thing, this has a fridge in the back. He had a tray out there.

It's wild. Um last thing, for the average price of a car in the US, you could buy five new Chinese EVs. This is per Reuters. I think the average price has ticked up to like 50 grand. And there's Chinese Oh my god. Yeah. These Chinese EVs, of course, you're not getting that truck that we just showed for 50 grand, but it's one of those things. They have smart cars, smaller sedans, things like that that are starting at 10, 15. Yeah. So, the what's going on in China with the EVs is a example of innovation meets government subsidies.

So, China wants to just completely dominate the market. They want to make sure that their EVs are world-class, that they can export them everywhere in the world, and the government has got behind it. And this is one of the advantages that a dictatorship has is they can just go, "Yep, this industry is going to get everything that it needs. You guys have to compete with each other, but we want you to get to the point where you just innovate and innovate and innovate and innovate, and then we're going to take over the global market." And so, you can feel it happening now.

They're inviting US influencers to go over to see what they've got so that they can get an uprising across all these countries, the US, Europe, that are terrifying the life out of Chinese vehicles to be like, "Hey, it's only because your government that you can't have this." And so, this is a brilliant move on the part of China. China. China. Uh, if I were Chinese, I'd be clapping for this. As an American, obviously, I hate it because the government is artificially lowering the prices of these vehicles to make it so that other people can't compete.

It's pretty dirty, but nonetheless, it's very strategic on their part. So, innovation, I would just remind everybody, you want to spur innovation. You want to do the things, not not not uh, over the subsidized them like China's doing, but you want to do things that create the environment where people are going to innovate. Innovation is awesome. Innovation drives cost down. And so, getting the US back in a posture where we are innovating, the way that we used to compete with the entire world, not just China, but everybody, was we were the place you went to for freedoms.

We were lighter regulation. We were free markets. And we let companies come and go. And if you could compete, you stayed in business. If you couldn't, your shareholders lost money, and that was that. And we have, of course, since started moving away from that. Uh, we are ultra regulatory burden. We are seemingly trying to do our best to look a lot like Europe, to ossify and just essentially die on the vine. Uh, and China's taking a very different approach. So, we're about to, just like we watched communism play out against capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, uh, post-World War II, we're now about to find out what uh, it looks like to compete in a pseudo free market where the government regulates the free market to death.

And by the way, tells you that ambition is terrible, business owners are terrible, and then the government's doing everything they can to case shape the economy versus somebody who goes, "All right, guys, right, guys, right, guys, we're going to pump a ton of subsidies into this zone. You've got to compete with each other, and we'll see what wins. But, by the way, we're a dictator, so we pick the winners and losers. We'll see what works." It It's going to be a real battle between these. China is a worthy adversary.

I will say that. They're not going to be easy. Is there something What's the US response to this? Cuz The real one, or what should it be? What should it be? Yeah. Okay, so we're not talking as we're talking ought what ought to be. We should be stripping regulation basically as fast as we can. Um car companies, whether they're gigantic or not, if they don't perform, they should go. If they can't survive, then that's game over. Um you do want to keep terrifying China so that we can buy ourselves time to re-regulate and actually get back into a competitive posture.

The states I would prefer states stop being morons. Uh but, if they're going to be morons like I would just like to remind everybody that a senator in California literally told Elon Musk to [ __ ] off. Uh and so, he took his uh entire business to Texas. So, I mean, [ __ ] around and find out, I guess. At least there's somewhere for them to go. And get ourselves in a position where culturally we're reminding uh each other that we are the home of innovation. And here's where this will break bad, and people are not going to like this answer at all.

at all. at all. Uh first, we need to start educating our youth based around problem-solving and not to be a cog in a machine. Uh we need to really get back into um gifted programs and making sure that we are finding the absolute best and brightest in this country and raising them to be [ __ ] intellectual ninjas. Uh we need to make it so that you can get obscenely wealthy doing something other than financial games. Uh we've been all about financial games because of globalization. Um so bring manufacturing back.

Create a regulatory environment where entrepreneurs can thrive and out-innovate people and just absolutely decimate the old companies. Get rid of all the regulatory capture. And then, this is going to be people's least favorite part, get an intelligent H-1B program that makes America the home for the best and the brightest in the world. Stop being obsessed with letting anybody in just because we want to be a humanitarian place and start being No, no, no. We are the collectors of the best and the brightest. But you you can't do that in good conscience if you're not raising American kids to be the hardest core [ __ ] on planet Earth.

And right now we're trying to derail them at every turn, put participation trophy them, uh not do gifted programs. And I say this is somebody who tried to get into a gifted program, God bless my mom, and they wouldn't let me in. So it's like I'm not saying it's like the kid that got in the gifted program. I got into AP later, but like I There was lit- My mom worked at the gifted school for grade schoolers and I couldn't get in. So it's like I was not groomed from the time that I was a little kid to be that and I'm still telling you it's a [ __ ] great idea.

Us sort of middle of the pack kids will have to [ __ ] fend for ourselves later. But you should be trying to find the absolute just the best and the brightest and then fast-track them to um be great. Yeah. Nice. It's a fact on that one. Uh next story up, I don't know if you heard about this Hunter Peterson guy. No, literally I know nothing about this. He's literally trying to crowd fund Spirit Airlines. He wants to bring it back. Here it is. Okay, I had a genius idea.

Spirit Airlines just went bankrupt, right? I'm the guy that flew Spirit Airlines for 24 hours straight. There's more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the United States. Now, if we took only 20% of them and paid basically the average fare of a Spirit Airlines flight, which is somewhere around 30 to 40 dollars, 40 dollars, 40 dollars, we could buy Spirit Airlines. This is a genius idea. We nationalize Spirit Airlines. Oh god. Airlines gone. We make a new airline. Let's buy an airline.

I should make a demo for this. Okay, I had a genius I hope they do this just so we can see how it plays out. Nationalizing the airline is an absolutely terrible idea. An absolutely god-awful terrible idea. They will run it into the [ __ ] ground. However, if you were going to try to do it like as a decentralized airline, but you still hire, my strong advice, a CEO, hey, then it's like we're They're no longer shareholders. And it's like, cool, we're shareholders. We bring a CEO and we basically just crowdsource the public company.

That would be brilliant. Uh and I'd love to see how that played out. But the impulse to nationalize it is so bizarre to me. Yeah, so that That was the first update. Here's the next update. I'm Hunter Peterson, potential future CEO of Spirit Airlines. Insane news. Um okay, I just got off two calls. One with one of the largest law firms in the world that specialize in mergers and acquisitions, aviation, distressed assets and debt. And they basically said, this is doable. We can do this. I also got off uh call with someone that represents high net worth individuals who may be interested in just basically giving us some money to just burn to figure out the legality of this because in less than a week's time, they are going to auction off the operations certificate for Spirit.

We don't have a ton of time. And I need to figure out a way not to raise money. I can't take any money from anyone, but I can take on angel investment from high net worth individuals. So, Mark Cuban, what's up, man? Get in my DMs right now or any high net worth individual who's like, "Yeah, I got half a million or 3/4 of a million dollars to just burn." You want to burn? You want to try and save this airline? Get in my DMs. Let's make this happen.

And to be so, so clear, if we take on this money, they don't count any more voting rights with anyone else. So clear. This is the purpose to burn money just to prove it can happen. I will not take a single cent if someone wants to wants to wants to in some way, shape or form, put control over this. No. No, not happening. Um Um Um if if they do this in a way where they're basically just crowdsourcing a public company, if there is legality around that and they're able to do it and crowdsource it, I think it'd be incredible.

incredible. incredible. Um I don't know what this guy's background is, so I don't know if he's a wise choice for CEO, but if they really took that seriously, that would be an incredible precedent I would love to see. Now, a lot of people are going to lose their money um because this will catch fire and then a bunch of other people going to do it with dumb [ __ ] that they never should do it, but it is I think people should be able to spend their money however they want.

And so, if the public wants to get together and we can use social media's ability to rapidly aggregate people and get them to do something, do something, do something, let's try it. I I think it's really, really an interesting idea. Now, I'm not a believer that you can run companies in a decentralized way, um but I think people should be able to run the experiment if they want. And so, we'll see. But if they do this and again, use traditional structure at the top, but basically buy the company with crowdsourced uh funding from individuals, it's a very interesting idea.

Very interesting. And this is where I get um wound up at some of the economic rules that are supposedly designed to keep people from losing their money. their money. their money. Um and the government tells you, "Oh, you have the money, but we're not going to let you spend it on stuff like this. Dude, I I get emotionally irrationally triggered. Like, the nanny state thing really winds me up. If people want to try it, try it, try it, let them try it. You'll let them [ __ ] gamble.

So, if you let them gamble on that, let them gamble on a company. Yeah. So, Yeah. So, Yeah. So, yeah, uh man, keep this one top of mind. I want to see how this plays out. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to kind of track it, but I just like the idea that we can do it better. Let's stop. Let's we everybody has beef with businesses, everybody has beef with big corporations. Make an example. Make it better. Do it. Become the example. So, interesting. I'm reading something totally different.

I doubt that they can do it better. This guy probably knows nothing about running a company, and it is far more complicated than he's thinking. But, the idea that, oh, we want we, this large collective of people, each with a hundred bucks or whatever, we want Spirit Airlines to exist. And so, we're all now going to buy those shares out of uh conservatorship or wherever they're at. Um we're going to buy those. The company's going to exist. We're going to exert our voting rights, and we're going to get somebody in a position of power.

That's how the stock market works. And so, I want to see more people invested in the stock market. If this becomes a way for people to feel like, holy [ __ ] like, I'm really an owner in this thing, uh that'd be incredible. And to see like influencers rise up that are paying attention to distressed assets, to see an opportunity to do this kind of thing, would be incredible. Like, if we can get some of that web three energy of everybody wanting to like you know, get together in all these Telegram groups and build like all these decentralized movements, let them try.

Like, there's something interesting that I saw kick off in that period where it was like, that's interesting. Like, you've got a lot of these gambler people, and they often times are very financially savvy, even if they're not business savvy. And they see opportunities. If they could start surfacing those kind of opportunities, get a bunch of people together, buy the stuff, and then see if they can run it. Oh, man. Be really fascinating. Really fascinating. fascinating. fascinating. Yeah. I'm far more intrigued by that than I would have expected at the beginning.

Yeah. Can we see what happens? happens? happens? Be curious to see what happens. And lastly, another one you brought up at the top. An American brought a brand new printer. She bought the ink for the printer. She bought the paper for the printer. Now she's at home and is ready to print. She can't print. They remotely shut off my printer until I paid $7.50 to print in my own home, to my own printer that I own in my home. You got to play this video. It's hilarious.

hilarious. hilarious. All right. If you if you at all have access to your phone, take a look at this. Okay, listen to me. I just tried to print something for my printer that I own. My printer that I own, with ink that I bought, purchased, and paper. And I can't print without a subscription plan. plan. plan. The concept of having to have a subscription plan to print in your own home from the printer that you own that already has ink and paper in it. They remotely remotely remotely shut off my printer until I paid $7.50 to print in my own home.

To print on my printer that I own in my home. home. home. There's something about what she's doing that just makes me laugh. Okay, so obviously I don't know about the setup. And so if HP was like, "Listen, we give insane discounts on this printer specifically because you must have a monthly fee, then she put herself in a position where that's the deal. That's how you got that printer for that little. Um but this creates a huge opportunity. This is So, one of the most fascinating things that um I've witnessed in really diving into the millennial gaming space Mhm.

Mhm. Mhm. is the outrage that they feel over some of the economic models. Now, the great irony is it's created this tremendous opportunity for indie developers, but they're still like there's some element of them that just wants to be outraged by what they're doing. We're going to see the same thing with this kind of stuff. Like the um heat warmers in the car heat warmers in the car. There will be a car company that offers the no monthly fee. You just pay up front like we've all done for God knows how long for the package that contains a seat heater.

And so those options will be there and there will be more and more opportunities for entrepreneurs that go, oh, they're mad about that, then I'm going to do the exact opposite. I mean literally literally literally uh I think about that all the time with Kaizen. What are all the things that people hate? Don't do any of those. Give people the options that they're telling you that they want and now how do you compete with the AAA people? By just doing the very thing that people are screaming from the rooftops that they hate.

So this is always there's always going to be this kind of thing where it creates opportunity for other people. You can't allow regulatory capture. That's the big part cuz they can now Imagine HP is able to be like, oh, well, you can only make certain kind of printers. You got to like qualify for these at home safety protocols or whatever. whatever. whatever. Uh and now they're able to corner the market or God forbid it becomes like another way for people to censor where it's like it's like it's like Hey government, if you allow us to put these rules in place, we'll work with you.

We'll cooperate on things that you think should be allowed to be printed. And yeah, that kind of thing is far too real. So assuming that you can avoid regulatory capture, you now put yourself in a position where there's real opportunity for other entrepreneurs. But that rage, watch it build. It's going to keep getting bigger. I I what is the company's perspective on this? Like I don't to me this seems like it doesn't make sense. It just Is this just a CFO like, hey bro, profit margins are bad.

I need to juice it somehow? Like Not even profit margins are bad. Ryan emphatically nods his head. But like I I'm really trying to understand like even with the seat warmers in the car, I'm like I get cuz at least they tie it to navigation and now navigation is a service and like Ford tried that like so it was like I could at least like squint my eye, tilt my head and be like, yes. But like a HP printer subscription like that's like a come on, bro, in the in the conference room.

But somebody was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Right. And I don't think I've ever seen you raise your hand on a live. I just feel like with Netflix kind of okay the subscription mentality. It's this mentality of we want to get them through the door and have them keep paying for our [ __ ] right? And to me I'm like, what happened to the world where you buy a product once, it is yours, and everything that happens to it, it's either, okay, I got to get a brand new one, okay, or maybe you, you know, buy an attachment to fix it.

But no, it's like you buy this printer and now it's almost like you're continuing to pay off the printer the more you use it. It's like it's just it's subscriptions are total BS. I don't know. So, it's interesting to see um people respond like that. So, I'll give you the business perspective. The business perspective is not necessarily that my margins are bad, but my margins could be better. And is there a um psychological breaking point where I will start losing money by offering this, or will I be able to make more money?

Now, when you have a large moat then you can go like developing a printer, let's say that it's hard. I've not looked at it, maybe it's easier than I think, but getting the distribution, the brand awareness, all that's going to be tricky. So, we're HP, people know they buy printers from us, and you're looking at like maybe a printer on its own would actually need to be sold for $450. $450. $450. But you know, people just won't pay that. And so, their expectation is that a printer is $100 or whatever.

So, now you're like, okay, how do I cross that chasm? One way is, well, if we get people on the ink and we know that the lifetime value of a customer is $650, now we can subsidize the sale, make our money back maybe over 5 years, but we make it off the ink. And so, you look like a a corporation, but in reality there may actually be an underlying thing where people are like, "Well, yeah, you're right. I'm not willing to pay the $450 up front." Or, K-shaped economy, "I can't afford the $450 up front." And so, now the businesses are like, and they could be sinister.

Of course, they could be. But, they could also just be like, "Bro, I'm trying to solve your [ __ ] problem." And so, I'm going to give you a model, obviously, where I as a business will win on a long enough timeline, but I'm having to take the risk of saying, "Instead of making my money back on day one, I'm not going to make my money back for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, whatever." I guess my thing comes in the form of I understand business perspective on it, but at a certain point, there should be a regulation that's like, "We cut off the subscription." the subscription." the subscription." How dare you?

You do not want a bunch of [ __ ] politicians that are just trying to get reelected to create regulatory capture, because guess who's going to write that regulation. It'll be [ __ ] HP. HP will write the regulation specifically in a way that looks like it's meant to corral them, but it will actually be designed to keep the incumbents out. What you want to do is say, "Yep, HP can charge you $1,000 a month to print if they want." Why do you want no regulation and you want them to act a fool?

Because then an entrepreneur goes, "Ha ha ha, [ __ ] these kids. I'm going to make a printer and I'm just going to be like, you pay for it once and it's yours. You pay for the ink once and it's yours." And now, everybody flocks to that. I I This is how the free market is meant to work. But, everybody right now is in such a punitive mode, they want to see these companies slapped around. They don't understand how sophisticated these companies are. They will not end up getting slapped around.

They will end up writing the legislation and getting control, and they will put everything in their favor. It is a fool's errand. What you want to do is let people compete, trust people to be selfish, because the entrepreneurs out there, they're trying to get rich. And so, they're like, "Oh, I just need to make something that people really want to get rich, and I've got to bleed and sweat and toil and all that, and find the capital. Oh, cool. But, I've got a shot of like really winning by doing something cool for people?

Yes, you do. [ __ ] sign me up. And so people run and do it. Like, dude, I want you to imagine I will never forget the look on my wife's face when on an Easter weekend, which to her is almost as big as Christmas, on Easter weekend I had her in a freezing cold warehouse making a hand uh made batch of protein bars to test a new formulation. And it was like we are willing to suffer to do all of this in order to have the upside of doing something no one's ever done, building a company that we can be proud of, making a product that people really want, and getting rich in the process.

And that's what you want to take advantage. You want to take advantage of all the people that are just like me that will convince their wife to do it, that will spend their time doing it, that will pour themselves into it, and somewhere along the way we started thinking that that guy is an [ __ ] and I don't understand. So, is one of those things that I'm hearing is when we see something that we don't like that a business is doing, our response is to Shoot the CEO?

not buy the I was going to say start a competing company that does the same thing but just doesn't do the one thing that we don't like about the existing company. Yeah, that's exactly how you innovate and get into a new space, but you have to believe that entrepreneurship is the engine. You've got to want to encourage that. You've got to tell people that that's a great thing. Otherwise, they do exactly what Ryan, who is smart and well-intentioned and very talented, his immediate reaction was there's got to be a regulation that you can put in place.

And it's like yes, there is a regulation that you can put in place, and it will look like it's protecting you from HP, but it will really protect HP from all the other people that want to come up and make a printer. So, is it because it's the easiest thing to do, or is it just the same To lean on regulations? regulations? regulations? Yeah. It's because the dominant metaphor that people are working on right now is that the government is meant to take care of me.

Everything has gone so well since the end of World War II that we are confused, and we now think that that our tax dollars belong to the government. That's so [ __ ] insane. That is so insane. Your tax dollars do not belong to the government. The tax dollars that you pay to the government is a an agreement that you make with them that says, "Hey listen, if you're making this a better place, I'll pay my taxes. If you don't, [ __ ] you. I roll up with guns." Bro, that is why you have the second amendment.

But that's not how people think right now. The way that people think right now is "Bitch, you better pay all that money." And they don't understand, meaning you the corporations, you greedy [ __ ] billionaires, you better start paying so that I can [ __ ] get all my stuff as cheap or free as possible. And they don't realize the reason you can't afford things is because of the [ __ ] government. It is not because of business owners. It's not. It's not because of business owners. Because the second a business owner tries to gouge you, an entrepreneur comes along and goes, "Oh, I can get rich by proving that this guy's an [ __ ] Fantastic.

I'm going to prove this guy's an asshole." asshole." asshole." That's how it's supposed to work. We'll see how much how much how many printer companies and car companies will Zero, because I'm sure there are all kinds of regulations that are going to stop them from doing it. That's the crazy part. But crazy part. That's the crazy part. But if you start deregulating, then of course course course We shall see. That's all I We shall see. That's all I got. We're We're at time. All right. Wow, we're way over time.

Super chats. Oh, snap. Yep, they're quick. Uh Work Hard says, "You guys are still rocking it. Keep on keeping on." Thank you. I appreciate Hold on, we got to honor that. That person just paid money to just say a nice thing. So, Work Hard, shout out to you. Thank you. Uh really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Uh Iron Wolf Interactive Games says, "I appreciate the conversations on the show. You guys push and pull against each other on topics, and it's good to see both sides of these relevant arguments." I appreciate that, man.

By the way, I checked my DMs for you. I didn't see anything. Dang, Iron Wolf. missed it. Dang. It's like that. But I hope your game is going well. All right. Is that it? Yes, that is it. Guys, we love you and please remember that we have a Zero to Founder AI Masterclass this Thursday, May 7th. This Thursday, tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time. I'm going to teach you guys for free how to build a company using AI. You do not want to miss this Masterclass if you at at all thinking about starting a company.

It will help you tremendously. It is free and it is tomorrow, Thursday, May 7th at 1:00 p.m. Pacific. All right, I hope to see you there and I'll see all of you on Friday. Peace.