Is the US Stealing Venezuela's Gold? Trump Claims The Strait of Hormuz & 24k Illegal Votes!

Key Takeaway

Treat strong claims, headlines, and your own reactions as hypotheses—not conclusions. Today, pick one issue you care about and spend 20 minutes identifying the strongest evidence against your current view, then write down what evidence would change your mind. Pair that with a practical reset: when anxiety or rumination appears, interrupt the loop, name the thought, and take one concrete action toward a goal you can control.

Episode Overview

Tom Billou and Drew examine contested claims about non-citizen voting, US foreign policy, Venezuela’s gold and oil revenue, political polarization, and the spread of unverified information. The discussion repeatedly returns to incentives, institutional safeguards, human psychology, and the value of testing beliefs against opposing evidence. The episode closes with reflections on purpose, progress, anxiety, and practical business hiring decisions.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Is the US Stealing Venezuela's Gold? Trump Claims The Strait of Hormuz & 24k Illegal Votes! from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billou Show live. We are living in a crazy world, boys and girls. Trump didn't like South Korea's refusal to join us in Iran, so now he's cozying up to an insane dictator in North Korea. I would not believe this if it were satire, but nonetheless, it's real life. Trump also just announced that the Straight of Hormuz is now US territory. We did it. We're going to discuss what's likely to happen next. Dude, this is We're back to gallows humor, Drew.

We're back to gallows humor. All right. Historic analysis is indicating that China's economic and demographic decline is likely to lead us to war. We're going to do a deep dive on that live today. Uh that one you are definitely not going to want to miss. It's a whole idea that actually directly counters my belief about Thusidity's trap. So, if you want to watch me confront my own belief system and see how it's changing over time, this is that moment. The Census Bureau just released a bombshell report showing at least 24,000 illegal votes have been cast in US elections and there are still 32 million more votes left to assess to see.

So I imagine that that number is going to climb even higher. The US is being accused of stealing Venezuelan gold. The question is, are they actually or is this, as I think it is, a distraction from something far worse that the US is actually doing? GTA 6, they had a fresh round of leaks, and the manifesto from the hacker has to be heard to be believed. There is a real cultural moment, a battleground that is playing out in the video game industry, and it is getting uh very aggressive.

So, we're going to be looking at that one. All right, the Census Bureau, man. They ran 2020 voter records against federal citizenship files. Of the first 128 million records, more than 24,000 belong to nonitizens at the time they cast a ballot. So 32 million records still left unprocessed. Uh so you can expect this to get worse. Now, this is not registrations. These are actual ballots that were counted. So these are real illegal votes. the very thing that people were telling you isn't happening is actually happening.

Uh Drew and I have been in sort of a a silent battle behind the scenes about this. This is a a particular thing for me. I am on fire for all of this. Uh and Drew kept saying, "Listen, anecdotal evidence is not the same as data. Although I really do believe uh that there is something um to the the saying is that the plural of anecdote is not data. But I actually think that there's some BS behind that. I think that's precisely what data is. It's formalized anecdotes finally coalescing into something that you can show a repeatable pattern.

But nonetheless, this really does hit a new threshold for what we can actually verify. Now, non-citizen voting in a federal election is already a felony. Uh but are we treating it as such? As you guys, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I'm very heated about the way that things are done here in California. Uh we're not the only place that does it. I know Minnesota also has uh very lax ID requirements, but in the state of California, it is actually illegal to ask somebody to show ID when voting.

That's already crazy. So that is somebody saying, "Hey, let's make this easier for the fraud to happen." On top of that, there are all kinds of things that they do where you can use a voucher system. So, one person can vouch for I forget how many, but it's like 18 people. you can vouch and just say, "Yeah, yeah, they are who they say they are." And so, you can walk up uh in California and as long as you know somebody's name that is a registered voter and you're willing to sign, uh you can vote.

And of course, everybody kept saying this isn't actually happening and now we're finding out this is actually happening. You have people that should not be voting that are actually voting. The bureau linked voter files against USCIS, ICE, and Social Security records. Mexico led the country of birth list. Uh so you've got roughly 3,800 of the uh illegal votes being cast were cast by people that are from Mexico, followed by Canada, by the way. Uh the Philippines, Jamaica, Germany, the UK. Around 7,000 records have no country data at all.

So we'll see where those end up coming from. Now the thing that the bureau didn't publish is the immigration status breakdown. So, please keep in mind that this ties back to um these are noncitizens voting. So, when we talk about what do we need to do to shore this up and people saying you've got to prove that you're a citizen, unfortunately, you can't even rely on a government ID for that. Many states have already um watered down the um like a a California state driver's license does not mean that you're a citizen of the US.

you can get that in some places regardless of uh your status whether you're legal, illegal, doesn't matter. There are places that are pushing to get people those IDs. So, that doesn't work. So, we need something to prove that people are citizens. So, take my wife for instance, who cannot vote, doesn't vote, even though she's lived in America legally uh for over 20 years, but nonetheless is not a citizen and should therefore not be voting in these elections. And what we're finding is that people actually are.

Now, in the fullness of time, I imagine that we'll actually get the answer to the immigrant status of the people that have been voting, at least if we're able to identify exactly who they were. So, I don't know if the 7,000 people were because they're sort of mystery question marks or if we know who they are, and that data just hasn't been aggregated yet. We'll see. So, it's still early days, but I really believe as we look closer and closer at fraud, at voter fraud specifically, that we're going to find that all of these things that we were told are not actually happening are in fact actually happening because the incentive system exists and the ability to do it exists.

And anytime that you create an incentive structure and there are no safeguards, you're going to get that thing. That that is just how these incentives work. And later today, we're going to be hopefully we'll get to uh some DS a DSA interview uh that I thought was very telling with the co-chair. And when people say that they're thinking through something from first principles and they don't mention incentive structures and they don't mention that when there are incentive structures and nothing physically stopping people from doing it, that they will in fact do it, that you can follow that literally from first principles, then they're not being honest.

And so when you look at voter reform needs from first principles and you acknowledge that when you have access plus incentive, you are going to get that behavior. And so for me, it was literally just a matter of time that this was going to start coming out. And I think that this probably will be the beginning of something that we'll find more and more of this stuff. Now, why does all of this matter? This matters because everybody that votes illegally is watering down your vote. And at the end of the day, we are a republic.

We are not a true democracy for the better. By the way, uh that is a a battle for another diet tribe. But we are a representative democracy that is uh making sure that people's voice can be heard at the ballot box. And when you're allowing people to come into your country to vote illegally, now that begins to water down your actual vote. And I know that there's a lot of cultural energy from the far left on this idea that borders themselves are somehow oppressive. Uh you must understand that the first order of a government is to provide for the safety of the people within their country.

And if you have a whole bunch of people pulling in opposite directions, you begin to lose that high trust society. That begins to break down. you now have people abusing the system, which is exactly what I think is going to come out more and more, that the fraud in America is just absolutely rampant because you don't have people that are buying into the American system because we are not putting up, and I use this word somewhat to get people's attention, but we don't have discriminatory borders that say this person can vote, that person cannot vote, so that we can maintain a cohesive identity.

If you do not have a cohesive identity, you don't have a functioning society. And I do not understand how people don't look around the world and see how hard it is to create a high functioning society, how difficult it is to maintain that high functioning society, how much soft things like trust, social cohesion play in that. And so when we look at the fact that people are removing the things that would stop somebody from voting illegally and we create through social programs the incentive to come in illegally and vote to ensure that you get a bigger and bigger base um of welfare options uh that that is obviously going to play out that people are going to race down that path that that is going to happen and we're seeing that more and more.

So to plant a very simple flag, what I believe is happening is there is a massive amount of fraud, there is a massive amount of corruption, there is a massive amount of voter fraud, and that this is going to re be revealed over time as we look more and more closely at this in the same way that I hope people were a gasast when um Doge first opened and we saw some of the just absolutely insane things that were being done with people being able to sign off on funds without having to account for where it's going.

I mean, that's absolutely insane to not even require that people say these funds are for this thing that there was no text field that was mandatory to fill out. I mean, it's just absolute insanity. Uh, and this all ties back to what JD Vance was saying about the exorbitant privilege of being the reserve currency puts people over time in this uh, very, it's not lazy, but you get very undisiplined about everything. You get undisiplined about your finances. You start saying yes to everything because you don't have to be in any way, shape, or form uh, disciplined.

And when that discipline goes out the window, then you start the long and steady march to empire decline and empires in decline start acting crazy. We're going to talk about that when we get to China. Stuff matters. Uh, okay. Let's talk about what this is and what this is not. I want to just make sure that we are clear about what this report has released. Now, the report is very specific by saying non-citizen. Yep. It does not say legal alien. It does not say legal immigrant.

The reason I'm making those two distinctions is because Lisa is a great example. If somebody has a green card, but they did not fulfill their nationalization oath, which means they didn't they are a lawful permanent resident and they try to vote, they will be counted here. Yep. They're searching the federal databases. So, this is anybody that has um social security number, anybody that has a ITIN, anybody that is fed federally registered visas in both school visas, um travel visas, immigration visas, uh green cards I mentioned already.

So I just want to make it very clear that these are people who are permanent residents who are then getting cross-cheed around citizenship pool and then the at that after that cross check they are they then checking has this person been officially nationalized yet? If that answer is no they are a non-citizen. If that answer is yes they are a citizen. I'm going click that box. The reason I want to give that specification is because it's very easy in this moment to be like see they're coming over the border and they're giving them a ballot or they're ballot harvesting in Mexico and they're mailing them to California.

That is not necessarily true. And I also want to give well so in in fairness you're making a very fair point and I think that that's wonderful. At the same time I want to make sure that we put the similar caveat which is we don't know that these aren't illegal aliens. So right now the document does not give a detailed breakdown of whether these are just non-citizens and these 100% of them were all here legally or if these were um some mix of the two which I imagine is precisely what you're going to find that it is some mix the sources that they are coming from are from federal sources.

So if they have a person sourced in America then you wouldn't be illegal because then you wouldn't register. But are you saying that only people the only people that have social security numbers are here legally? I'm not saying the only people that have social security numbers are illegal. I'm saying everybody that is right. But you could then be in the federal system even though you are here illegally. You can't get a social security number if you are here illegally. You either have to go. So you are saying that I'm saying that there is already and fact check me in real time because if I'm wrong then I'll just say oh yes I was wrong about that.

Uh but it is my current understanding based on things I have read that I may be misremembering but things that I have read that there are for sure illegal aliens who have been given um social security numbers. It's either a work authorization or um I think it's ITINT ITIN number something like that. Okay. So it's a separate classification number. Ryan's going to fact check us, but you're saying what this data says, which is not what I found in my research, but you're saying the data very clearly states that this is 100% people here that are legal.

Everybody here that is already federally in a federal mandate. The reason I'm making this uh designation is because there is an assumption a lot of times when we have this conversation, this is my assumption, that people are coming over the border with no federal registration. We don't know where these people are and they're going to the ballot box. And what I'm saying is you can't just walk into a federal um you can't just walk in to vote. You have to be registered. You have to be on the list.

Now those people are registered. So this is what I was trying to cover in so there are two things that are on the table right now. There's the point you're trying to make which I think is actually a worthwhile point. We should keep going down that path. Then there is the single sentence that you just said now which is that you can't just walk in and vote even though you're an illegal alien. Uh which I did address in my opening thing. You may disagree with my I'm talking about let's stick to California because I know California better.

So in California it is illegal to ask somebody for their ID. Yes. So I can walk in and all I have to do is know the name of somebody who is registered and then I'll be able to vote no problem. There will be no friction whatsoever. You agree with that, right? Yes. Okay. So now there is nothing stopping an illegal thing from happening. So then we go well people aren't going to do the illegal thing. We've seen plenty of evidence. You're just saying you're voting for somebody.

You're not saying you're illegally voting cuz you're what you're saying right now is you're So you're saying I could walk in and say I'm Tom Billu. I live here. I should be able to vote now and they'll say, "Okay, Tom, here's your ballot." Correct. But I'm also saying that somebody else could walk in and say, "I'm Tom Bilu." And they would not ask them to show ID. So as long as you know the name of somebody who is registered to vote, you are going to be able to vote.

And then on the back end, they'll have three Tom billu votes from three different people. And then Tom Billy's vote will be stricken from the record. Yeah. So, let's presume that some of that will be that and those will get thrown out. No problem. But some of it is going to be I know the little old lady in my building is never going to vote and so I'm going to go use her information to vote. Got it. And so they're already finding that people are doing this.

They're already finding that people are registering to vote that are illegal. They tell the person, "I am not here legally. Can I still sign up?" and they say, "Hey, you're going to have to sign a document that says that you are legal." So, we know that there are places they've been caught on camera saying that, "Hey, you you got to sign the thing. I wouldn't do it if it wasn't real." But they even though that person has just said to them, I'm not here legally. They will still give them a registration form.

And so, they're like, "You got to sign it. It's just me." So, it's like, listen, the there is nothing stopping people from doing this. We are already finding that people are voting illegally. Maybe they're all true. Uh they're here legally. They're just non-citizens. So, we know that people cast illegal votes. We know that people register even though they're not legal. Hey, Tom, it's just anecdotal. It's, you know, only the the the three people that got caught on camera doing it, they're the only three that have ever done it.

Get the [ __ ] out of here. If you want to understand how I'm parsing this information, I look at that and I'm like, yes, you have made it so easy to go in and get registered, even if you're illegal. You have made it so easy for somebody to say that they're somebody else, even if they're not. We've had people on the voter roles that are voting even though they're dead. We've had people on the voter roles where you go knock on their door and say, "Hey, you you ma'am have voted in, you know, whatever eight of the last elections." They're like, "I haven't voted once in my life." So, they either are so riddled with Alzheimer's that they're going out and voting and just don't remember or someone is using their information to vote on their behalf.

And I'm just saying I have a feeling and it is just a feeling. I have a feeling that we can all ignore because emotions don't matter. But I have a feeling that you're going to find that this is going to more and more as we look more and more closely at this, we are going to find more and more illegal votes. So you and I have been having a private battle and you you have been amazing. I want to let the record reflect. Uh you came to me and said, "Hey, I want to make sure that you saw this thing." Which is at least in very minor part, I think you would say, a vindication of my stance.

And so um Drew, as always, is intellectually honest. For whatever beef anybody may have with you, no one can say that you're not honest. And that's important for me to say. I appreciate So, uh, but nonetheless it was at first, hey, that's just anecdotal. Okay, well, now it's real. And I'm again, it's just a feeling we will need the data to keep coming out. But I believe just as I am one step closer to being vindicated. Now I think there will be more steps and more steps because thinking from first principles you realize if you make it very easy to abuse the system and you create an incentive or an incentive exists to abuse the system then the system is going to be abused.

So it's like kids what what are we doing? So this is where we'll see in the fullness of time this all needs to come out. We need to be looking at this stuff. But what I would beseech anybody that can hear my voice right now is where you see an incentive system and nothing is being done to block it and that incentive system creates a real consequential problem, we should all be saying, "Hey, let's shore that up." Even if we don't have overwhelming evidence that this is a problem, let's shore it up.

It's consequential enough. Now, if something isn't consequential, I get why people just say, "Listen, this is going to fall low on my priority list." But, oo, buddy, protecting the integrity of your elections when you are the wealthiest nation on earth and everybody is trying to get to your country and everybody would like some of them free handouts. And as a culture, we are sliding towards the give me more free [ __ ] which is what every empire does. And guess what happens to every empire when they stop being disciplined and they say, "Give me more free shit." They collapse.

And so I'm just saying, man, we are acing towards empire collapse. Tick tock, baby. You are on, bro. I I still stand by my 9-year timeline. It was 10 a year ago. It's now nine. We are not moving in the right direction. Uh I have the fact checks if y'all want them. So first fact checked is regarding the social security numbers and then the next one is California's voter process. Um so I'm going to go through both of them. So we'll start with the social security numbers.

Both of you are technically correct. Um, so the Social Security Administration obviously doesn't give undocumented migrants social security numbers. That's not how that happens, but they do get them through, like what Drew is saying, um, they're given specific permission to work by the Department of Homeland Security. And then the most common ways undocumented immigrants have social security numbers are, uh, both fraudulent documents and expired visas. And so fraudulent documents, at least I can speak from a Texas perspective. Most of the illegal immigrants in Texas fake their papers because there's just an underground industry for it.

Um, you know, that being said, most of the people doing that are just doing their day-to-day lives. But, um, and then expired visas, so people holding on to the things that allow them to be here. So, that's the social security thing. We're both kind of right. Points to the one lane. Uh, and then real fast as an orienting mechanism to um, so I can understand your worldview. What's your take on um what they're now calling crimes of necessity? Uh crimes of necessity. I think I don't I don't know why we need to go into this, but if because you made a single sentence that was like, "Hey, I just want to make sure that everybody knows that they're really just going about their daily lives and that's why they have a fraudulent they are." I mean, yeah.

So now I want to know if we're if your belief system spills over into crimes of necessity trap, right? Don't fall for It's not a trap, but I'll give my honest answer. I think crimes of necessity are still crimes and should be punished as crimes, but I'm not going to hate someone committing a crime of necessity as much as a murderer. And I think that's very that seems very reasonable. I don't have any beef with that. Uh, now for the California voter identification, how this process works, and I'm a Texas boy, so our process is different.

I have to hand my driver's license in when I go. Um, but for California, uh, which y'all voted, so correct me if I'm wrong in this. Um, basically you have to sign something and they compare your signature to the digital registration. And the key exception uh is if you're a first-time voter and you didn't have like a license on record or an ID number from California or your social security number, you have to present that when you're there. So they'll sorry, you have to present that when if you're a first like if you if you're a first-time voter who didn't put that in there, like who didn't have that on record, that's the time they're allowed to ask that kind of thing.

Meaning, are you registered or not registered? Uh, registered by mail and did not provide a driver's license number, California ID number, or the last four digits of your social security number at registration. Federal law, HAVA, requires you to show identification the first time you vote. So, that's the one instance they can't ask for ID. I was just adding that extra. Wow. Will you do a search? Do a search to see if that's actually enforced. Oh, and you can do like a utility bill. I didn't know that.

Texas didn't, I don't think, allow like utility bills and and rent. What was the question? Sorry. You can do a utility uh bill instead of showing ID. Uh this is like for first time it says acceptable ID in that case can be a photo ID, driver's license, passport, etc. or a document showing your name and address, utility bills, bank statements, government checks. And so you look at that and you're like this is locked down. I mean to me it's like we just there's less than 1% voter fraud in America.

There's less than 1% voter fraud that's already been documented and shown. I will give you that. Well, I mean, I'm saying, are you asking my take or are you asking for I'm asking your take because here's here's what I think is far more likely given the number of videos I've seen people record at registration offices, the number of videos I've seen people record actually going to the ballot box, my own experience going to the ballot box, they don't ask for [ __ ] And in California, maybe minus this one caveat, it is it is illegal to ask for somebody's ID.

Well, that's cuz they got the signature. So, I think that's the like a normal voting process. They show your signature, right? Like you sign something and then they compare it to your registration. They don't do [ __ ] That's what this is saying. This is saying you give your name and address to a poll worker who looks you up in the roster of registered voters for the precinct. If they find you and you haven't already voted, you sign the roster next to your name and your signature is compared to Do me a favor.

Look up. Can somebody vouch for the identity of a voter? Vouch for in California. Uh, it's California and or Minnesota. Can I just say California for the sake of I would say California or Minnesota cuz I can't remember which one when I saw Minnesota has a James O'Keefe video. So, we have to talk about Minnesota to back up the claims of the video otherwise the video will be thrown out of evidence. Well, I'm just saying like are their processes different or are they similar? I would assume they're different.

Yeah, because I just wouldn't want the things to get mixed, but I'm asking both. We'll ask both. Okay, so it's saying they the first thing it said is they handled it differently, but I'm going to go to Google while this is processing. Um, yeah, I wouldn't expect them to be the same. Exactly. But go ahead. California, no, there is no vouching system. California verifies identity through the registration process and then it's just repeating the stuff I said earlier. Okay, so now I know that's [ __ ] California, you can if somebody is unable to sign, you can sign for them and say, "Yes, this is that person's ballot." That's for mail and ballot.

So, you'll they'll sign it, put it in the sealed envelope, and then you drop it in the mailbox or drop it off at a public. Sure. Oh, and if someone can't This is actually added in California. If someone can't verify that what mail and ballot, you have like the sealed envelope. So, it's just like if you drop in drop off your mail and ballot. Yes. So, I can So, if Ryan gave me his mail and ballot, it's sealed, it's closed, and all these other things. I can then drop it off with my And say Yeah.

For real, for real, this was Ryan. You don't see a way that that could be abused? I can take somebody else's and sign their names and yes, submit it. Yes, I can do that. I mean, I think any system can be abused. Yes. But also like I have the Minnesota if you want Minnesota. That's the whole that's his whole point because Minnesota does back here. It is possible mail and ballots and and do that. Yes, that is. And then sorry, you're saying the Minnesota part? Yes.

Minnesota has a long-standing vouching provision under Minnesota used for same day election day registration. Registered voter can vouch for up to eight people, but someone who is vouched for cannot vouch for someone else. And the staff at residential facilities can vouch for an unlimited number of facility residents. The mechanics, the voucher must accompany the person to the polling place and sign an oath under penalty of perjury affirming that they're registered in the precinct or employed to the facility and they personally and that they personally know the person resides in the precinct.

Okay, so this this is utterly fascinating. So boys and girls, the key takeaway in my opinion to all of this, at least for the three of us here uh on camera right now is we are looking at the same facts and we see something so different. This is why understanding that the vast majority of the human experience is perception and has it is almost impossible to ascertain what an actual fact is because people will look at the same things and see something completely different. Uh, so I see a system designed to be a greet for fraud.

And you guys see, I don't want to put words in your mouth. You see something different than that. I see 24,000 from the Census Bureau out of 128 million. They got 32 million more to go. Let's see what that final number comes up to. There it is, boys and girls. There it is. Welcome to the human experience, everybody. If you're new here, this is how life works, man. Much to my dismay, we uh all of life is interpretation. It's wild. Everything's perception. Okay. It is what it is.

Um all right, we got to jump over to Trump. Trump had a generational week this week and it's only Wednesday. Um I want to start with the video and then I'll go with the tweet because the video at least makes a little bit more sense. Um and the tweet is too accusatory. I'm I'm trying to give them the the benefit of the doubt with this. South Korea has been protected by us for many many years. True. And during my first term, they agreed to pay close to $3 billion a year for protection because we don't, you know, they essentially weren't paying.

And I asked them to do that. At my request, I said not. They weren't happy about it, but they agreed. I asked for $10 billion. And uh they were very unhappy. But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion and next year it would go up and the next year would go up. So they start paying for their protection. when the election was rigged and I ended up uh watching for four years and then coming back. I watched Biden resend that $3 billion here for whatever reason.

When I called recently uh president of South Korea, who I like, I think he's very nice actually, but I called him. I said, "Would you like to give us a little hand? We don't need help with Iran, but if you'd like, give us a hand with Iran." He said, "No thanks." I love the way he says that. That that is so dumb. Uh, hey, I really, you know what? It'd be I I don't need your help. But like, if you rolled up and you did help, like that would be cool.

It's up to you. I, you know, I'm just saying it's up to you. I could carry the couch by myself. But if you're busy on Saturday and I I could use a hand. No, I'm good. I'm good. You don't need to help. But like, if you're here, and if you don't, by the way, I'm going to your mortal nemesis and I'm going to start talking very highly of them. God. And then that leads us to the tweet um based on my so for this is Trump just for the record on True Social.

The background is South Korea was announcing military exercises on that day Trump uh tweeted or true social I don't know what the verb is based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. I am not happy with the fact that the United States has long ago agreed to participate in joint military exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly with much of these calls paid for by the United States as usual but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile to a country that as long as Donald J.

Trump has been president has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War Pete Hexf to substantially reduce the joint military exercises while somewhat unrelated. I recently asked the president of South Korea if they would like to join us in the denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran and they said no thanks. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump, he told on himself in unrelated news and then he put it a question mark himself in a parenthetical.

So while somewhat unrelated question mark, I recently asked the president of South Korea, Jesus. All right. So, clearly uh this is just some straight petty [ __ ] from Trump who is trying to bully long-standing allies acting as if the disintegration of globalism uh should be done via hand grenades. It it is such a weird approach to the world. And maybe this works in the uh razor elbow world of New York real estate, but when you start doing this on an international stage and you put yourself in a position where nobody wants to come to your aid, where nobody feels like uh they actually are an ally with you.

Like look, I get it. I know that America, I forget if it was Kissinger, but somebody said, and I think it was Kissinger, uh that America has no allies, just interests. And I get it, but you've got to pretend like that's not the case. You've actually got to do nice things for people. You can't always just bully and push people around. Dude, this is one thing you learn as a business leader very fast. Yes, you might be the CEO, and yes, you can theoretically force everybody to do what you want.

But let me tell you how poorly people will help you when they feel like there's a gun to their head, and how much extraordinary talent you can get from people when you show them you're such an incredibly important part of this. These are your contributions. You did that. That wasn't us. And so that country, that person, whatever, understands their story, their like self-narrative in the victory. If the selfnarrative is you're the [ __ ] little guy and just go do what I say, this is where you get into A2 brute where you're getting stabbed in the [ __ ] back by somebody you thought was your friend.

Yeah. Because you clowned on them. You treated them like an [ __ ] You were uh abusive to them psychologically. you like I will just tell you rule number one. Never ever make fun of a man in front of his wife and kids. Never [ __ ] ever. Dude, that guy will come for you. He will come for you in a thousand ways. They might all be subtle. They might all be back door. They might all be feminine, whatever, but that guy's going to [ __ ] come for you.

And if you're the dumb [ __ ] that runs around the world essentially clowning on people in front of their own constituents, not thinking they're going to find a way to get back to you. Dude, these this is the dumbest foreign policy I've ever heard in my life. Some people have to understand, all right, this is my guy and I'm going to do things sometimes that are hard with my own voters because I understand that this relationship is important and we need to protect this and that you're also going to do some hard things like, hey, if we were actually going to bat for the Japanese yen because we actually gave a [ __ ] about Japan, that actually might not be a stupid move.

Now, we're not doing it for that reason, so it probably is a stupid move, but sort of I'm going to set that aside. If we had pure intentions, it would do better things for the relationship. We do not have pure intentions and so people are going to feel that. And so we are going from globalization where we were so dumb and we pretended like, oh, we're going to be holding hands forever. And now we're in the opposite direction where globalism is breaking apart and we're like, I can shoot anyone in the face that I want to and everything is going to be just fine.

It's really stupid. Are do you people not engage with other people? Is that the problem? Have you do you not understand how people respond when you're unkind or you're cruel? By all means, there is a phenomenal quote from Churchill. You made enemies. Good. It means you stood for something. Great. If you've got a principle, somebody violates that principle. You're not afraid to say, "Hey, you violated my principle. These are going to be the consequences." And you move on it and you don't apologize. I love it.

I'm here for that. But when you're just like, I'm going to get my way. I'm going to say, I don't really need your help, but I, you know, if you want to help, that'd be cool. And then they're like, we don't want to help, but thank you for asking. And then you start punishing them. Dude, it's so weird. It it it's weird very precisely because it will turn that person off. They will not want to help you. They will start acting spiteful. Regardless of whether you're dealing with a leader of a nation, the leader of that nation is still human and they will have resentment and they will want to see you fail and watching you struggle will become shod and frea and you've now given them a positive dopamine loop for you being in a dark place.

Dude, you can do that with a handful of people but you can't do that with everybody you come across. It's terrible [ __ ] policy. Um, to follow it up, he's playing all the hits today. Um, Trump just declared the state of Moose new US territory. I think this was tongue and cheek. To to his credit, I don't think it was actually being serious. But read the room, bro. Yeah, this is one I I really want to look inside of his heart. If this were uh trolling that he could back up, then that would mean something.

given that this is trolling that he can't back up and that he is setting himself up to be embarrassed over and over and over at this point. Uh this is in my opinion very unwise trolling. This is precisely where you want to be building alliances. You want to be figuring out what do people need. You don't want to keep going. Uh you know we don't have we don't need anything from this. So these guys are going to have to go and do all of this on their own.

You have to come across as a statesman because listen you overextended yourself. you played the aggressor here. And if you're going to be the aggressor and you're not going to have people on your side, then you're going to have to find a way to start digging out of that hole. And the way out of that hole is not to ratchet up, ratchet up, ratchet up the bully behavior. The way to get out of that hole is to get everybody together and say, "Listen, uh, I made the move for this reason.

We could not have a nuclear Iran. The initial, um, salvo did not go the way that I wanted. It didn't happen as quickly as I would have liked it to. I'm now going to run an Anaconda strategy. And if you guys haven't heard this, I don't know if you can pull it up fast, Drew, but uh there's a guy named Victor Davis Hansen who I think is um he's definitely partisan, but I think he's somebody that really does have a grounded take on what a wise strategy would be if you are the Trump administration.

he's a little too between the lines like maybe Trump is really brilliant in all of this. But if we're really running that strategy, then you've got to articulate it to people and you've got to keep walking people through it. And if you can actually build a coalition by reggrounding yourself, Trump is able to ground himself. He's able to talk in a way that isn't just completely unhinged. Uh and you're going to have to build a coalition around that. Okay, listen. This is what we were hoping would happen.

This is how far we actually got. They've buried a lot more things than we realized. The mosquito fleet is proving harder to address than we thought. We're working with internal weapons manufacturers like Lucky Palmer. We're developing uh a new type of munition which is much cheaper to make. It's going to be able to be produced on um the um auto factory assembly lines. And so that's going to help us return jobs, but it's also going to help us deal with this new style warfare. Um, while I can't force Loheed Martin and the other companies to um license out their missiles to Ukraine, I am putting as much diplomatic pressure on them as I can.

I would really like to see that. I would like to see America play this role where we're able to help people that are on the right side of history. We're able to help them stand up to the people around them. So, just as we are going to defend Taiwan, we are going to defend Japan. If you haven't heard China, they're starting to talk real [ __ ] crazy about Japan. So, we're going to defend Japan, long-standing ally. You don't have to remind everybody about [ __ ] Pearl Harbor.

Uh, we're going to defend our long-standing ally there. We understand the importance of uh Taiwan to everybody in terms of the modern world. And hey, while we believed it was our moral duty to ensure that Iran did not get nuclear weapons, we understand that this has made things far more difficult for a lot of people. And even though we don't need the a lot of the resources that are going through there, we understand that they're very important to the rest of the world. We're going to stand here.

We're going to fight this fight. Now, quietly behind the scenes, if you've got to like put a little bit more pressure on people, fair enough, man. But like if you're coming across he he just he's always going to come across this way because it is his personality. But man, uh that's what he should be doing. And if he were doing the uh the approach that somebody like Rubio is doing where he goes and gives that speech several months ago, if you guys remember, to the European Union and he was talking to them, he basically wanted to slap them around about like free speech and where the partnerships were going.

And he did it in a way where he reminded them that in many ways we're a child of this region. You guys are incredibly important. He gave them the vision of why they matter on the world stage, how important they are culturally. Now they're way more likely to listen. But you've got to recognize the truth of human psychology, which is just something that Trump doesn't do. He's he's got a very narrow um band of cards that he likes to play that have a lot to do with um just carrot and stick over and over and over with no like psychological how does this nation see themselves as the hero like in this is sales 101.

So let's say I'm teaching an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur comes to me and they say hey I'm trying to get XYZ thing done. The first thing I ask is are you selling to individuals you selling to corporations? Tom I'm selling to a corporation. Okay great it's a very different sales cycle. You've got to think about how do you make buying your product the mo the thing that's going to make that guy a hero inside of his company. If buying your product makes him a hero's likely to make him get promoted, you you just sell around that.

And as long as that is true, your sales are going to be easy. But you have to understand that guy probably doesn't give a [ __ ] about your software. He wants to know how it's going to help him. He wants to know how it's going to elevate him in the company. People in countries are asking the same question. They've got to turn around and talk to their constituents and say, "We, no matter how small the country is, we're the good guys. We've got we're doing this amazing thing, this herculean lift.

We're important on the international stage." If you don't give people that, they're going to look for every reason to trip you up. Um, I was going to bring something up, but the super chatter did, so I'll let that I'll I'll save that one for later. Um, did you hear about this Natalie Hart nonsense? No. With Trump? I don't even know what you're talking about. About his like assistant who was like writing him love letters and all that. It's gossip. It's here. Hit me with it. But it's funny to me.

Um, so wait, this is one of his interns? This is one of his aids. Um, okay. One of his aids. Should I be thinking Monica Lewinsky right now? This is the reason why. Remember when he switched planes? Uhhuh. He left his press secretary Rubio. All those people, she came with him. Whoa. That's conspiracy theory. This This is me 100% with my foil. Do we know that she went with him or that's just the No. No. Yeah. Thank you. Um, yes. Confirm that she went with him.

And everybody's like, "Well, this just his aid, his closest like I would rather have Pete the headset than my secretary." You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Especially if I'm in foreign hostile territory, but he couldn't let her. And then there is there was a series of love letters. Okay. I need to know about these love letters cuz that that's there's only one that has quote the one that has quote is you're all that matters to me. I want you to bring joy. I want to bring you joy.

And she's the one that writes his tweets and the documentary that came out. So it's like everybody's been all right. I'm I'm going to get more evidence. Let me get more rock. Cuz right now it's just tweets and vibes and you know people are trying to run with it. But it was you're all that matters to me. I I hope she's single because if she's saying that [ __ ] and she's got kids and a spouse, that that would be wild. Now, if she meant you're all that matters to me in this administration, that would be less uh unnerving.

But this is interesting. This is interesting. You want to talk about human dynamics. Um, women love power, man. I was about to say if Trump bagged her, though, that is that is a win, bro. That'd be easy. A got the president of the United States is pulling from a very deep pool. A very deep pool for sure. Andy's wealthy. Forget it. Like that. Listen, this is just psychology. He won't have to grab her. Oh god. Oh god. So if you throw it out of Oh dear lord.

No. Nothing. No. There's another quote for that one where he's like painful. I have money and power and the the women will throw it at me. they throw like he said that about like there's a quote for everything with this guy. Well, the bad news is that actually is really true. Now, it isn't universal. It's not like every woman, but but that's the thing. There's differences in though cuz just having money doesn't make you attractive. It's the power like you have to be able to wield that money in a way that elevates your status.

Yes, I will grant you that. But if you are I I if you have those resources and you're willing to spend it on that person, even if it isn't something that um makes you look good, think about Anna Nicole Smith. This is now a long time ago. I don't even know if Ryan knows who that is, but uh Anna Nicole Smith was married to a guy deep into his 80s and he was I mean, as far as I could tell, physically infirmed, so it's not like I imagine they were having sex, but he she like would do on him and act almost like a nurse.

And when you hear him talk about her, he talks about her like a drug. Like, I need you around and you're so good to me and like you take such care of me. And so, it was like she was drawn to him for the cash. This was not somebody that um he was powerful or cool or this looked good on her. In fact, it was one of the things that people threw at her all the time, like you're a gold digger. Like, it was much more an element of shame, the kind of thing you'd want to hide.

Like I mean he was like the quintessential guy in the wheelchair who look he's 80 and he looks 130. I mean it was just like rough rough rough. But when you go from the depths of poverty to being extraordinarily wealthy because this guy's giving you god knows how much allowance. Uh I mean unfortunately it gets you a long way. It's not going to buy you love but it's certainly going to buy you companionship. So yeah. Now, if you also have power and so you have wealth, power, and man, if you've really got the trifecta, and you're also good-looking, sure, now that person's going to be even higher on sexual market value.

But the reality is access to resources is a real intoxicant. Uh, for women who don't have their own access to resources, from an evolutionary lens, it actually is logical. So, I understand how we end up there. doesn't make it any less icky. But yeah, if you want to understand how guys like that end up in that position where I I and I really do think from an evolutionary perspective, there's a reason that women look at looks less than men look at looks. And so the like I think guys when you see the sort of underground cliche of the bodybuilder who's like with the old rich woman, that one I think you're fighting evolution a lot harder than a woman who is with an old decrepit man.

I feel like old women are hornier though than old men. That might be true, but I don't think that's what's going on in the bodybuilding community. Okay. So I mean gez. You want to talk about a fractile? That'll get me in trouble. But yeah, uh that one I think is these guys are so obsessed with working out all the time, they just literally can't hold a job. This was something that you would see more back in the 80s. But yeah, they would um often times the oh god so mental map, I have not studied this in any deep way, but the accusation was always basically these guys were some percentage of them were gay.

Oh, they were with a woman. She wanted companionship, emotional connection. He needed a place to live. He needed money so that he could just lift and do all that stuff. Uh and so my instinct is those are different evolutionary pressures. They play out the same where it's like young attractive person with older person, but I doubt that the majority of those were sexual relationships. Again, I have not done some deep dive, so I could very much be wrong on the reality of that. Um but knowing what I know about evolutionary pressures, that would make more sense.

Uh, last thing on the Natalie Harp thing. Um, shout out to Dr. James in the chat. Um, I forgot about that one. When he was at Mara Lago, they couldn't book her in the same like golf course, I guess. So, she slept in the locker room. Um, I think Trump just thinks it's Ivanka. So, wait, why couldn't they put her in a room? Cuz she's weird. Like, she was like the love letters and stuff. So, they I guess for optics, they were like, we should separate them.

And then she like slept in like the light. Okay, that's getting weird. I'm going to need some confirmation on that. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like it's like numerous sources. I'm like I need I'm waiting for like the Atlantic deep dive, but um we're very early on. Um okay, last Trump hit um Disney ABC has filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the FCC. ABC lawyers claim that Trump administration has attacked ABC speech on multiple occasions, including the stories it journalists report and viewpoints it network programs.

Over time, those attacks have escalated and expressed demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast license because of its speech. FCC sued. Um, yeah. I mean, listen, let this play out in the fullness of time. This is exactly how the court system should work. If you've got an administration that's weaponizing the um different regulatory bodies against somebody, you want that to come out. You do not want the government to have unchecked power. This is one of the things that um drives me crazy about this moment in time is everybody wants to weaponize whether it's the Department of Justice, whether it's um the FCC that they are actively trying to browbeat their opponents.

Uh that very aggressively is coming from both sides of the aisle. they are trying to um just one up each other constantly leveraging the power when they hold it acting like it is an existential threat to be out of power because it's becoming more of an existential threat to be out of power. So it's not like they're crazy and the problem is with each election this goes up and up and up. U so this is why I really want Trump I oh god I'm always conflicted with this but I really want Trump to leave Obama alone.

It's like, listen, I'm sure there were things done that we would not like if we looked too closely at, but to some point at at some point, the most important thing is that we find a sensible way forward where we're not weaponizing everything. But you're you're never going to get to that state while you're locked in a populist moment because it's not what the voters want. The voters want you to hate each other. The voters really do think the other side's an existential threat. And so now you get into this, it's going to be weaponized because that's what the voter wants to see.

And so people need to remember Donald Trump was um summoned in a demon summoning circle in the same way that the DSA was summoned in a demon summoning circle. This is what you get in a populist moment. And so now that you have these leaders, we all have to take responsibility that we pulled them forward. And I think people instead take the flip side. And there really is a um the great man theory of history. It's real. And so if there wasn't somebody like Donald Trump that could galvanize people the way that he did, it wouldn't have worked as well.

Um and you would just get degrees of efficiency. Take Biden. Biden was not able to galvanize his side in the way that Trump was able to galvanize his side. So I'm not saying that that you Trump is just an avatar and we're all to blame. But the reality is like that person doesn't get called forth. that person when they start hurling insults back in the day, we just wouldn't vote for them. Like there was a guy, I forget the guy's name, maybe Ryan can find this for us, but he became known as like the howler or the shouter or something.

So he was really trending well, I think for president. Uh maybe governor, but I think it was for president. And he gave the speech and he's like, "We're going to go from this city to that city." And he starts yelling, "Oh, Howard Dean Howard." And that literally ended his political career. Yeah, that that's how it yelling like being a little bit awkward ended his political career. And now like right so now it's completely the opposite. So the more unhinged the better. Uh and so yeah, unfortunately we need to stop weaponizing the different departments.

So I'm glad to see these guys push back. I think that's an absolute must. This is how the court system is meant to work. Uh, and yeah, at least you can hope for a stalemate, even if you can't hope for a return to people's senses. U, all right, we got some super chats. Um, really quick though, Tom, is this the chart? You have the China thing. I didn't see it on the Oh. Uh, is that what chart? The for the China read that you have the China beat.

It's not on the sheet. No, no, sorry. The China beat the the like actual proper deep dive that we're going to be doing. Oh, that's the reacts. That's the react. Got it. Never mind. That'll be third hour. Sorry, Ryan. Um, no worries. No worries. All right. First up, S. Bros Pod says, "Sorry, hit post before I wrote something, Tom. Are you working on the data center deep dive?" Um, I am learning more about the data center. I'm not going to actually script a deep dive, but yes, I'm becoming far more knowledgeable about uh data centers, and we can certainly talk about that at any point.

uh my information. Call me three or four times more educated than I was on whatever Monday when we last talked about this. Uh but deep dive, we're not there yet. Uh T4 tricks says, "Morning. Would love to see you and at the fat electrician talk about communism. He makes American history propaganda videos. TD and R." Oh, Tom Drew and Ryan. What are your thoughts on social security needs dismantling? Love the show. Thank you from the E at the Fat Electrician. Okay. Uh let's uh we'll have to put that on the research list.

Not not a name I was expecting, but uh let's do it. If you can slack that to me, that'd be amazing. Yes. Uh Brutus Lugo says, "Tom, let's assume this voting story vindicates your position. What in your mind and by your standard would vindicate Drew's position?" That's a great question, Brutus. I really like that. So, um this and I'll answer it in a second, but let me say why this is so smart. So, whenever you're talking to somebody, if they have an unfalsifiable position, then you can just throw it out.

They're locked in their frame of reference and they're going to argue for it no matter what. Um, so what I think would vindicate Drew's position would be that you the no matter how much you look, so let's say you've got the Trump administration, they've they just have put so much of their energy behind this is all fake. Uh, the election was rigged. Um, and they go into everything in Georgia. Uh, they get voter roles from all the Democratic states. They they finally get turned over and the appropriate departments comb through it and they're just like, "No, man.

I mean, sure, like you had the 24,000 and that's not nothing, but that's it." Like, it wasn't the tip of an iceberg. It was an ice cube floating in the ocean and that's that. Uh, and at that point, I'd be like, "All right, it's a minor thing. I am still deeply concerned about the um the fact that we haven't done anything to shore it up. But at that point, I'd be like, yeah, there's nothing in my camp. There's not enough in my camp and right now I am um really reacting strongly emotionally to a small amount of data.

And so I would at least be honest about that like these are my feelings. People should ignore my feelings because ultimately only the data matters. Um, so that'll be that and we'll have a much better sense I think over the next two to three years how much of this is happening because they do seem to be taking it pretty seriously. Um, so we'll see. But and to that point, one illegal vote is one too many. So I'm not saying yeah,000 whatever it's cool but I just think it's a scope scale thing.

I don't think any of these flipped an election in one way or another. And behind the scenes you're very clear about that. So I don't mismap your position as like oh like oh it's fine, no big deal. Yeah, you've been very consistent with me that this is a scope and scale thing that uh you see it more as anecdote. So anyway, I think 24,000 is um already getting pretty bad, but if it stopped at 24K and that was it, no matter how far they dig or reach, like even in California and Minnesota, that's just it.

Okay, then I put my attention onto other elements. Shore up the uh fact that it's just too easy for this to happen. And then we also have incentive structures that I think are god awful for the future of the country that we should be addressing. Uh but at that point you wouldn't hear me talk about voter fraud outside of like I have a feeling. Um but yeah while I read this question Drew could you check Slack real quick? Uh and then the question comes from cringe.

Why aren't we calling Trump a Russian asset again? He destroys allies, divides our people, massively corrupted intentionally tearing down norms and the only country winning is Russia which is making money from higher oils. I think China's making a lot more off of Trump's behavior than Russia is. Uh I don't call him a Russian asset because I don't think that's actually Trump's nature. I think Trump is somebody who is hyper narcissistic. Um who is very good at building a um coalition of sick fans. I mean he's got though Rubio.

Rubio I really respect. So anyway, but he certainly does that. He's somebody who is easy to manipulate. uh if you're kind to him, he's really gonna go for that. Uh so you don't have to go all the way to he's a Russian asset. It just wouldn't make sense. It for the same reason that it seems patently absurd to me to say that he is an agent of uh Israel, this is not a guy who's going to be an agent of anybody. Uh so he is way too narcissistic for that.

So he goes out of his way to little bro uh Netanyahu. He'll keep doing that. He'll try to little bro everybody uh unless you're sick ofantic to him. So that to me is a far uh higher there's way more predictive validity something I haven't said in a while uh to seeing him as narcissistic versus seeing him as a Russian agent. Broto bro as somebody who was Obama's a perfect person to I do like ACA. I think y'all are haters, but Obama did make the drone warfare a thing.

Obama did um open up the door to private credit bubble that we're in right now. Obama wasn't flawless. Yeah, I can admit that I liked what he did, but it might not have been the best presidency overall in totality with some of the down like stream conflicts uh effects. Trump is not having a good run this presidency. We got to call this B. That's obvious. Yeah. Like it's not it's not cool. And I'm not going to say that Kamla would have done it better. It's impossible to tell, but I would say I'm not going to project this on you, but would you be say you are disappointed with the presidency of how it turned out so far?

That's of course like that. Um, so I tried to warn people at the beginning of this, if you think I'm supporting Trump, you're out of your mind. Um, I obviously with my belief system, I don't think anybody will be surprised to hear that I think that a vote for Kamla would have been far worse. Uh, but there you're worse. far worse. Your worst is different. Remember, Drew, I know you don't like me. You don't want me getting in the loop. Uh so, I will simply say that Trump is trying to build a system where he'll win off of things that will make America stronger.

when you start talking about controlling grocery stores uh from the top down when you ran a president who obviously had dementia uh but your party got behind that I they they referred to themselves as the pilot bureau. So this is like I don't even understand how people aren't radicalized by that. So, the only way I can parse the world is that people have leanings at a temperament level. Because I lean right, I don't um I'm not as inclined to be animated by those abuses as I am the ones on the left because they I I just it it's so crazy to me.

But that's whatever. Now, when you get into like the actual policies of it all, it is self-evident to me that you have provably the most murderous ideology the world has ever seen being put forward by people on the left. And I I every time we're prepping for an episode, I go through this weird cycle of um what the left is doing is so dangerous. I imagine myself for 3 hours just screaming into the microphone and then I'm like that would not be wise. And so I stopped myself from doing it.

But but the rise of the DSA wouldn't have happened if Kamla would have won. I disagree with you wholeheartedly. She a thousand% they don't even endorse her. They don't even like her. So understand that when you put people in power that are going to do more left-leaning things, what's going to happen to the economy? In my worldview, it's going to break, right? So the economy is going to get worse and they're going to keep letting people flood over the border. That is going to continue to put downward pressure on wages.

It's going to put upward pressure on crime. uh all the incentive structures, illegal voting, the things that I'm worried about, those are going to increase. So now the blue states have a bigger census because more and more illegal immigrants are coming in. Um giving them the power to do that to change the body politic of the entire nation. Uh she was floating the idea of we're going to start doing the top down control that we're not going to let grocery stores set their own prices. We're going to go after people for price gouging.

all all the lunacy. She is like this is where people going uh the standard Democrat party they're fine but the DSA that's crazy. Watch the Democrat party embrace the DSA because that's already where the energy is. Now I don't think the energy was there during the election. So I'll um I'll step on your side of the fence for a second and I'll say okay Tom here's what you're missing. that the mere fact of electing Donald Trump so energized the left that if you had not given them that galvanizing force then we wouldn't see the rise of the DSA on the left and I'll say there's a case to be made we're never going to be able to run the counterfactual it's a very fair point but I remember what it felt like before I had even heard the letters DSA put together how when I was looking at the fact that they called themselves the pilot bureau which is what the um the Russians call themselves, the Chinese call themselves.

Allegedly, Biden's wife called them the call their they called themselves the Pallet Bureau and I'm almost certain in writing like this isn't a Tom is making this up or I believe some rumor I heard. So they referred to themselves as the poll bureau which tells you where their ideology is. The things that Kamla was running on were nonsensical. She was a nonsensical candidate in terms of intellect. Um, you also have just playing out what they did with Biden, the number of people that came across the border, how that does things to the actual makeup of the country.

Um, the they were already talking defund the police. They were already talking about um I I feel like that sound I look at Kamla as Biden 2.0 and if we would have run a Biden 2.0 no strategy based on Biden's economy and based on what Trump's economy in the first two years have been so far. I personally would have preferred Biden based on the results that we're getting. What Trump said was great. Trump was Trump sold it. He told us he was going to do all the things, right?

But so here's where this breaks down and why I think people um the only right answer to this, which is why I'm never going to be like, "Oh, I'm sad that I voted for Trump." Yeah. I'm always going to say the same thing. At that moment, here was the information that I had. I couldn't like if you could just run them both and go, "Okay, this is what you get out of Trump. This is what you get out of Kla." And then I can judge and go, "Oh, we're gonna live through either this or this.

That one's great." Like I wouldn't have any problem voting for a Democrat. Great. Literally, I I am not a Republican. I want to be very clear. I know people get confused because I say that my temperament leans right, but I mean that from an evolutionary standpoint, not from a party affiliation standpoint. I'm not a Republican. I will never declare myself a Republican. Nobody can assume I'm going to vote for them because they're a Republican. Hell no. So, if we are honest, what we're looking at is we got to see the first almost two years of a Trump presidency.

So, we know what that looks like. But now we're saying, oh, he said nice things, but then didn't do nice things. So, we're saying it was a one-way decline. So now I'm saying imagine you get the same thing that the things Kamla says are the best it's going to be but it's actually going to be a decline from there just like Biden ran on hey I'm workingass Joe from Scranton I'm middle of the road uh Democrat and then became the most progressive president we've ever had since like FDR.

So it's like well I would assume that you're going to get the same thing from Obama would get that label versus him because Obama actually passed universal health. I would have to go through and put together the case for that. I think emotion. I think that that would be a very easy case to make as it is something that I've seen over and over and over. Uh but hey, maybe that's just echo chamber. Maybe I find oh my god, he was actually amazing. I doubt it, but it's certainly possible and I'm happy to look at it.

Yeah, it's a TSMC uh facility built up. The chipsack is winning. That was a great legislation for Biden. Hey, great. If that brought manufacturing to the US, I love it. I'm here for it. Uh but again I I am literally scandalized in ways that I cannot say. So um I will often say to somebody who I have a big disagreement with. I want you to imagine me screaming. I'm not going to scream because it's unhinged. But I the the the intensity with which I feel the following statement.

Drew, I want you to imagine me screaming. You had a president that had dementia. They knew he had dementia. They wanted somebody with dementia so that the pilot bureau could actually run the country. That is immediately disqualifying. Love or hate Trump, he's actually the guy. He's the guy that you're engaging with. And so, um I don't that whole like blob uh bureaucrats like beginning to choke people out. Also, all the censorship stuff. I have a real again imagine me screaming a real problem with that. I think it is psychotically dangerous.

So anyway, I think that they have been moving in the direction of the DSA for a long time, which is why they're having such an easy time getting that part of the wing energized, which is why they're not shunning them and getting them out. Um the whatever brief civil war they were going to have over the DSA, they're going to lose. So there is no energy in that. Nobody on the left is going to go to bat for uh the centrist Democrat routine right now in the same way that traditional Republicans lost to the mega wing.

So it's like it just it is what it is. So again, without actually running the counterfactual, the only thing you can say is each side can only talk about in terms of like should you have voted for that or not, each side can only talk about what was known at that time. And so I'm not going to now compare a known against an unknown because we're all just going to fantasize, oh my god, that one would have been great. It would have been so much better.

We don't know that. True. We got one more, right? Uh, two more. Two more. First up uh comes from uh Kaitton in the corner. POV pain to play is all there is today. Here you go. Uh, where's Lisa? Melania could use her help. Wait, hold on. What? Listening to Tom for 10 plus years. Oh, I was going to do that one last cuz it's $100. Oh, sorry. But I'm just confused about what this person just said. Paying to play is all there is today. What does that mean?

In politics. I'm assuming in politics is what this person was talking about. They didn't add more. They're in the chat still if you'd like to clarif. Here you go. Where's Lisa? Melania could use her help. Oh, Melania could use Lisa's help with what? Uh, getting away from Trump is my assumption. Oh. Oh. Oh my god. What a great point in terms of Lisa's channel. Now I get it. Okay. Yep. Yep. I forget that from outside. People probably know Lisa more from her channel. I obviously think of her as my wife.

So, I was like, how is there's a good bit of crossover wife? People always uh talk about her newest videos whenever they come out. Bro, she's on a tear. She is on a tear. She's doing, guys, if you're not watching her channel, she's doing very interesting stuff. Very interesting stuff. I'm fascinated by some of the like serial killer stuff. Yeah, it's absolutely wild. Humanity gone wrong. Votes no longer matter. Was the pay to play thing. Like it's Oh. Oh. Yeah. Well, now you're into a whole another thing which is money and politics.

Get it out immediately. That That one's going to be tough, but boy, things would be better. And the last super chat for now. Ambivalent Soul says with $100. Thank you, Ambivalent Soul. Thank you for Thank you, brother. That's huge. Huge. Huge. Listening to Tom for 10 plus years and joining the live weekly. Uh, huge POSOS impact on my life. Thank you so much. Uh, I have a 19-year-old cous with a rare blood condition. Never finished high school due to drug addiction. In and out of rehab, please reach out and I'll provide the rest of the details.

Hoping you can help. That's rough, man. Uh, yeah, please reach out. So, basically, uh, you want me to send like a message to him or something? Um, be more than happy to record like a quick video message if that's what you mean. So, here's the bad news about drug addiction. Until people want to change, there's nothing you can say. I'll say it out of uh acknowledgement to how long you've been a part of this community, which I'm eternally grateful for. Uh but man, drug addiction, overweight, you can't lose the weight for them.

They got to wonder themselves. Same thing. I know that one intimately. Same thing. Much to my dismay. But uh man, I'm sorry for that. That's brutal. It is so hard to watch somebody you love and care about struggle. Wish it weren't so. Uh, okay. I'm going to be honest. Um, the DSA is not beating these allegations cuz, um, Gustafo Gordilo, and we actually covered his interview with Fox News a couple weeks ago, lives in a $ 1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse. Um, held through his parents' trust and it's subject to the Mamani Ped tax.

Um, also he's registered as an electric as as a union electrician. It's from his family's engineering firm. Like it just keeps going worse and worse. He's literally in like a Bedstey neighborhood. Um, that's like historically black. So technically he's the gentrifier that has like turned over the like it just keeps getting hit. Like this is bad. Um, over production of elites, man. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. These are a bunch of rich kids that can afford to be revolutionaries and they are trying to break a system that has created more wealth than any nation has ever created in history.

And they want to break it in the name of workers, but their party is only like 5% actually workingass. The rest of them are upper class. Like it it's so crazy. And what's really wild is a lot of these um people like this guy's born in Peru. How's Peru doing? Right? So you get these people whose parents fled a country. They come here, they raise their kid in the middle of wealth and then that kid mistakes that for like this just eternal condition, adopt the Marxist framework of oppressed and oppressor and it just becomes complete madness all the way down.

Six row, sixbedroom townhouse um in Brooklyn. Crazy. And what's crazy is it won't matter because all of the overproduc produced elites that are a part of the DSA movement, they all get it. And so this is part of the reason why people like Bernie Sanders no longer have a problem with millionaires because they themselves are wealthy. Bernie Sanders is a multi multi multi-millionaire. So it's like, bro, yes, you exist in a system that allowed for you to be successful. It's dope. Celebrate it. Don't be an [ __ ] about it.

Same thing with Hassan, man. Listen, I love that this kid has been successful. I hate the stuff he talks about, but it's awesome. He should be like an example for people of like how well something can go. Um, so Laura Ingram on Fox News, Hassan is a Nepo baby lab. Same thing. Champagne socialist. You live in a $3 million house. You got rich off capitalism. Now you're really against capitalism. And he replied, okay, I'm a class trader. Now, what I want you to talk about this term class trader of people who are according to them, they are upper class.

they are affluent and they're going to the working class because they see that just because they're on that side of the fence, they shouldn't stay there. What do you like to understand this? You have to understand that the socialism is a movement of resentment. You absolutely cannot track their behavior if you don't understand that they are people that are full of resentment. They always thought they were going to be more important, that they were going to have more control, and now they're being iced out. uh they went they got their degree and um because they went got their degree did everything that they were supposed to do and then got out and they're an Uber driver now all of a sudden they're extremely pissed off but their family has money and so these guys have the ability to um play around and to go to all these meetings and go to protest all the time and instead of actually going out into the workforce trying to build something trying to do something great and that resentment allows s them to turn a blind eye to the fact that they've been in the case of Hassan that they've been successful, that they've been able to do these things.

Um, or that if you want to look at him from the perspective of his family was already doing well and so he had a leg up and so now he's quote unquote class trading, the only way that that would make sense is the the question everybody should ask is, okay, everything that Hassan is putting forward he could do right now, but he doesn't do that right now. And so if he were saying,"Well, there's a bunch of people that helped me build my company, so why aren't they all getting as wealthy as I'm getting?" And he doesn't have an answer for that.

Why am I the one in the fancy house and none of the other people that have helped me build my um you know, my thing up? They're not doing as well as I'm doing. But he could do that. We've had people do that. We covered this in a deep dive. Um there have been throughout American history, there have been people that tried to build these socialist utopias. Every single one of them failed. And one of the more famous ones was a guy who's a wealthy textile owner from Scotland comes over to the US try begs the US Congress to understand the brilliance of socialism and uh they basically say well just do it yourself.

So he does it himself and it collapses within a year. He sinks 80% of his money into it and it doesn't work because of the free writer problem which we've talked about many times before. And so I don't know if Hassan is being honest with himself or not honest with himself. Um but the reason that he isn't doing that is it is um much easier to push for change that you've not really thought through from an economic perspective as to why it's actually going to break.

Uh he's never thought through what it means to be um like if you want to build China because that's going to be everybody's sort of moving away from um all the failed examples of socialism and now they're going over to China and they're saying okay well China is the example not understanding that China is not communist China is authoritarian. China is um in a moment right now where they only, you know, put a millionish people in concentration camps. They don't have like a full 5 or 10% of their population concentr concentration camps yet.

Uh they're not currently in the middle of starving people to death. Uh they are purging the government. They are doing that. So that gets a bit dicey. Um but until you're the person that's disappeared, uh everything feels fine. And this is why people absolutely must read the Goolog Archipelago. which is where you watch a guy go from not thinking any of this is really a big deal to one of his friends rats him out over something that he says privately and he spends I forget how long in the goologs but a very long time and he writes like 1,200 pages of a man who's basically screaming into the page for 1,200 pages just absolutely eviscerating uh that type of authoritarian rule and all the [ __ ] about being a comrade.

It's all fake. Everybody lies all the time about everything because they have to to stay in line with the party. And this is what these guys are asking for. So it's like you look at China and understand what actually happened to China. So um that's where they're just divorcing themselves from that reality or they haven't studied that reality well enough to know what it's really like or they think it's not going to happen to them. I don't know. It it's some amount of that. But if you assume these are resentful people uh and they assume that they're going to be the ones in power, then it all makes sense.

But they certainly don't see themselves as being on the bottom of the pallet bureau. No one is going to imagine that life. They don't imagine themselves as uh a working-class person in China that's not allowed to say the things that they think are true. Um they assume that they're going to be one of the wealthy successful people in China. They don't look at the fact that China has more um disparity in household wealth than we have in the US. And even the people that dispute that aren't saying that there isn't massive catastrophic disparity uh inequality in China.

Nobody's saying that. They might say it's not quite as bad as the US, but nobody's like there is none. So all of these guys are assuming they're not the ones living under the, you know, underpass um being online uh selling things 24/7 but actually are homeless. Like they're not imagining that. They're imagining they're one of the people in power. That's the crazy [ __ ] about all this. And anybody who thinks that all the workers are going to unite and we're going to be able to do everything by democratic vote.

Have you never met people like that is the crazy thing that I'm just like what is happening? Uh yeah. So that doesn't work. There are reasons that people protect against that kind of thing. There's a reason that the US government very specifically said humans tend towards tyranny. We have to protect ourselves against that. That there is very aggressively something called the tyranny of the majority where they will tyrannize the minority. But you could have a 5149 split and now you've got 51% of people tyrannizing the 49% of people.

Like it's just crazy that they haven't they either haven't thought through this stuff or they're perfectly happy because when they imagine it on the other side they imagine they're the ones in control. Just remember Trosky got exiled. Uh the people that helped the Ayatollah rise up in Iran were killed basically immediately. Um, both Stalin and Lenon shot a bunch of the people that helped them get in power. Just how it goes, man. And so when the gun gets turned on you, it's a little late and you're suddenly like, "Oh [ __ ] this was a bad idea." And my advice to all of us is instead create a system that mitigates the inevitability of humans breaking bad.

Humans will break bad. You want to make sure that you have something that cleanses the system of a Donald Trump, that cleanses the system of a Stalin, a Mau, whatever. Not that I'm trying to say that Trump is bad like that. I'm not. I'm just saying that you want a system that when you get somebody in power and you're like, "Oh my god, this is not what I wanted." Cool. They're going to get out. Uh you don't want a system where that person can get control of the levers of power and maintain them forever like a Putin or a Xi.

You don't want that, man. You don't want that. And that's what I see these guys are moving towards with they want to abolish the Senate. Uh they want to abolish the or they want to defund the police. Th this is about getting rid of the structures of power so that they can just vote for everything that they want and they think it's going to work out well for them and they don't understand how bloody that becomes. How do I know it becomes bloody? Because we've run this experiment over and over and even in China after Mao they rolled in with tanks and shot their own citizens in the face.

So, that's the part that I'm just like, guys, remember, even modernday China, shot people, their own citizens, shot them dead to get them back in line. That's what we're fighting for. That's what we're saying we want. That's crazy. And if you're going to say, "Well, the Trump administration is doing the same. You're out of your [ __ ] mind." So, three people getting shot by ICE in the middle of a scramble is very different than rolling tanks into a peaceful protest and shooting people dead. It's just [ __ ] absurd.

um you know the like Maslo's hierarchy of like needs intimately. Yeah. Right. I think that there should be like a political one of like hierarchy of like issues because I think what happens a lot of times is just like in the hierarchy of needs when you get past struggle mode when you have housing and you have food and you have those things and you're not operating from that level you can then focus on your higher the needs higher up the pyramid. And I think that the economy right now there are too many people who are struggling for that bottom level of the pyramid that they don't understand or they don't go to bat for those nuances and the structures and the institutions at the top and we they go a lot to the same um bookmarks that we had throughout history.

So just like we look at history to show that this can not work in history and all the time socialism failed. Some of these people are looking at history and like well all change is coming from revolution and right now they're not changing. And these incremental steps the things that we need to do abolish the debt um get money out of politics none of those things are going to happen in this lifetime. I'm going be honest because it it threatens too many people in the power structures.

I think everybody's bought and paid for in Washington. I I'm I'm not optimistic about that. So, a lot of people are saying instead of trying to fight for the thing that would work, we can't get that thing. So, now we just want to flip the table and go, we want to inflate the ball and go home. You know what I mean? It's really interesting that you're tying this to Masow's hierarchy of needs. Let me say why that's so brilliant and why you actually need less change than you think for this all to click into place.

So, Masow's hierarchy of needs is trying to explain to people why humans act differently in different times, what motivates us. This is why, Drew, if I could snap my fingers and everybody had to spend a year developing uh an open world sandbox survival crafting game. That's specific. No, but for real, for real. Here's why. This has been one of the most um it's not transformational. It's been it's it's organized my thinking because what you realize when you start developing the game, you just think, I just want this to be really fun.

You've played games and so you're like, I want to make something fun, but I want to do it in like my unique way. And then as you try to make it fun, you start going, why isn't my game fun? And so this is exactly how I'm developing Kaizen. I'll play it and go, I'm bored now. Why am I bored? And as you do that, you start redescribing to yourself life. And what you realize is, oh my god, I'm trying to replicate the entire human experience inside of a video game in this really distilled fashion.

Masle's hierarchy of needs is basically that. It's a guy trying to explain like what is this? What is the human experience? Like if I don't have my resources, okay, I start there. But what are the things that make me do that? There's an element of evolution, but there's just hunger. Hunger is so immediate. Thirst is so immediate. Shelter is so immediate. So it's like, oh, he's literally trying to grapple with what are what's the programming of the matrix that drives humans to behave in a certain way and then how does that behavior change over time?

Once you understand that, you'll begin to understand from what you're trying to get at the the political of it all. So when you think about getting to the um revolutionary state where people want to tip everything over and go in a different direction, what's that being born out of? It's being born out of we fought really hard to establish safety. We establish safety. Go back to kings and queens. Okay? These were incredibly strong families that usually killed somebody else. They stopped an invading army. They had the will of the people.

The will of the people elevate them. And then the people don't want the instability when the king dies. So they go, "Okay, well your heir is you genetically and they're going to be raised by you. So let's just do hereditary. That way we know we have this succession line and as long as nothing disrupts that, we should be able to maintain this level of peace." But the problem is, especially if you get a bad role that that person who you did who had the real belief of everybody because they fought for you, they won.

They rose you up out of the mud. uh their kid grows up where it's all stable and they grew up a prince and so like who the [ __ ] are all these peasants and they just have a totally different mentality. So we've now gone all the way up right where you get that same thing that happens when you have overproduced elites. You have stability. The kid is raised in stability. The kid is raised when everybody just adores you. You don't have to earn that right.

And so that creates these distortion mechanisms in their mind. Now, when you get the revolution is when people got all the way to self-actualization and they realized that the the corebased physiological needs um of the game of life is anchoring people. And when they don't have that, things start to derail. Uh this matters to me. I don't expect it to matter to anybody else. But I I'll keep coming back to this idea. As an adult, the first profound realization I ever had where it was like the first piece of my worldview snapped into place was what I said to myself was some people need to be chased by a lion.

And what I was getting at is there's something about down here when it's actually dangerous, people's thinking is clear because it's like we don't have time to [ __ ] around. We don't have time to posture and pretend like I'm the right guy to follow. If uh somebody breaks in and one of the guys in the company is 6'8 and he's a jiu-jitsu fighter, I don't go, I want to look cool, let me go up front. We're all like, where's [ __ ] Achilles? You bring Achilles up and we're all like, he's the one because it's real danger.

And so you see that with men and women. When [ __ ] pops off, the woman smartly, unless it's Ronda Rousey, is going to fall in line behind a guy that has more strength. And it's like, yes, you're the disposable male. You better be [ __ ] stronger. I as a woman have bred you over hundreds of thousands of years have more upper body strength than me. Go [ __ ] use it. Right? But that requires the physiological need thing to still be going. Once you climb up to self-actualization and the person realizes there's no finish line and now I don't have any phys physiological needs or safety needs driving me anymore.

Now I'm like I'm in Minecraft and there's there's no quest. I don't have to do anything. So now I've got to come up with a quest on my own and say, "I'm going to go do this thing and I'm going to make progress towards that." Progress is one of the foundational pillars of human happiness. If you're not making progress, you will feel completely diseased. Literally diseased. You will feel diseased for sure. It will [ __ ] rot you mentally. Like you've got to have a very clear thing that feels like it matters.

I'm pursuing this thing. This whenever somebody asks me, "Why do you still work? You don't need to." I say because I thank God I learned that when I was in my 20s and I realized, oh [ __ ] I've got to always have something I'm progressing towards. I've got to always do something that makes me feel like I'm contributing to the group in a meaningful way. And the second I don't do that, I'm going to feel diseased. So what happens is you get the revolution when people climb up.

They're not self-directed in any way other than I'm going to break this [ __ ] system because something esteem did not work out the way that I thought it would. I thought I was going to come out and be important, but I come out and first of all, I'm young, but I'm buried under debt. I'm mad about that. And I'm not as important as I thought I was going to be. So, [ __ ] all this. Like, I'm going to flip it over. And when the uh when the economy makes you feel like you're going to get pulled back down from your $ 1.5 million uh mansion, you're going to get pulled back down into having to deal with your safety needs and your physiological needs.

You're like, "Nah, [ __ ] that. All these guys that have more than me, I'm taking some of that." And so you realize that other people have that anxiety. But the crazy part is, Drew, you never get there when you're actually struggling with the safety and the psychological problems. You don't even get it when you're peak. You get it when you're afraid you're going to slide back down. And so that fear of like, oh [ __ ] tomorrow might not be as good as today. Like I'm about to take something.

And so that's where like that's why [ __ ] brilliant Drew of bringing up this pyramid is that's exactly what's happened. People have been raised up at the top. They don't have to worry about any of that [ __ ] but they have this fear of, uhoh, I'm never going to be able to get out from under my dad's shadow. Uh, I'm not going to perform as well as my parents did. Uh, I've got debt. I'm not as important as I thought I would be. Uh-oh.

And now we're in this backslide. Tip it all over. Because what should happen is parents should be raising their kids to do better than they did. The kids should have the expectation, I'm going to do better than my parents. Dude, I never once felt trapped under my dad's shadow. My parents were just like, "Go, man. You're going to do amazing [ __ ] like we're working hard so that you can go do this incredible thing. Which is a great [ __ ] message for kids. Hard work.

It's important. You got to do it. There's expectations of you. You're going to go be great. Go pursue it. Your future's going to be so cool. It's going to be way cooler than what you're raised in. But you were raised safe. You were fed, you know, yada. But you could imagine a cooler world. But this moves in [ __ ] cycles because you get to the point where it's like, uhoh, where do we go from here? And that's where we're at. That was profound, bro. That was good.

Yeah. I meant the wrong button. My bad. That was good. Um, and it it grounds us. I feel like it makes sense. So, yeah, to the people out there, you guys should look at this like pyramid and see where you are individually and see how you feel about your life and how you feel about you. Not how Trump did, not what Tom said, but how do you feel about you and go downstream from there? It's so true. And by the way, just make sure you're progressing towards something.

Uh, set a sight on the horizon and go after it. And the problem is though that can be hijacked. This is why I think Heather Hying's philosophy that one of the things that we're seeing now is women who aren't having kids and aren't having to struggle with the lower tiers of Maslo's pyramid. They're putting all of that mama bear energy into climate change into the DSA. And so it just becomes like this we're protecting things with a ferocity that just doesn't match reality. And this is one thing I would like to see because when we talk about revolution and people point to the founding fathers, there's the the people saying that we need a revolution now, they have disdain for the founding fathers.

And if you're putting forward a message like the DSA, so there's um I can't remember if it's in the doc, but there was an interview. Oh, it would be in the reacts doc. I don't know if you want to pull this up, but um there is it's longer, so do with that information what you will, but um she is talking about her policies for the DSA. And the guy interviewing her, he's from the New Yorker, if I remember right, he did a really good job, did he?

And he was saying like, "Okay, but you you say things like just tax the hell out of the rich. What do you mean by that?" And she couldn't give an answer. And he's like, "Well, hold on. Like if you're putting forward policy and you guys want to be in charge of policy, don't you think that you should actually be able to articulate what that means? Now, I would like people to compare that to Alexander Hamilton writing the Federalist Papers, not by himself, but he did most of it.

And the level of thought, the level of understanding of cause and effect that he displayed in the Federalist Papers, the level of cause and effect that you can see displayed in the structure of the Constitution. It's like these were profound thinkers that were really trying to anchor themselves in what is true. Now, the thing that drives me crazy about this chick is she keeps saying, "Let's start from first principles," and then proceeds to not start with first principles. Um but when you have a set of profound thinkers like the the founding fathers who to whom we all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude uh you see what it looks like to really organize something and not just be like we're going to tear it down.

They were like we know what we want it to become. We have a vision for precisely the economic structures that are going to get us there. How we migrate. Um you know first we're going to be agricultural. We're going to leverage that to industrialize. we're going to need a brief period with the central bank to do that. Uh we're going to let the states be individual experimentations. Uh but we're going to come together as one nation. Like dude, it was so clearheaded and they, you know, did all of the debating, but it was in good faith about where we're going.

They had tasted tyranny. So this was the generation that had such an intimate relationship with somebody having power over them but them not having a vote and so feeling powerless that when you understand that generation of people are the people you want doing the revolution because they're legitimately being abused. And instead what you have is a generation where 47% of our national budget goes to um entitlements and we're acting like we're being abus. It's wild. And so it's like we're in the richest nation in the world.

We have inequality, but that's a resentment trigger. That's not an actual you're starving on the street. Almost nobody's starving on the street in America. If you're starving on the street in America, odds are you're a drug addict. So people have food insecurity, but that's very different than starving to death. So it's like we're we're in this like hyperprotected bubble and that's the generation that's talking about revolution. So to them, it's just like [ __ ] break it because life's so safe, man. What could go wrong?

It's like, whoa, you don't understand how dangerous it can get and how dangerous it can get fast. Yeah, I pulled up the point. What do you mean by text the hell out of them? All right, like to start. All right, so real fast. This is Megan Romer. She's the co-chair of the DSA. This is not some rando chick. And if I'm not mistaken, she's the co-chair of the New York chapter of the DSA, which is like their Rome. So, yeah. The hell out of millionaires. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, what does taxing the hell out of them mean? Uh yeah, you know, again, I don't have like a solid, but but I think I will I will I will um I mean, if you're the co-chair, if you're the co-chair of the of the DSA, shouldn't you be more specific than just taxing the hell out of something? What What exactly do you mean? So, again, it's democracy, right? And and we have to look at what we need to spend and what we need. We don't want to depend on the existence of millionaires because that means people are still getting exploited.

So, so yeah, we need to look at what we need to pay for in the interim, what what sort of tax base we need for that to happen and then um and build from there. Bro, I want you to imagine the Federalist Papers sounding like that. Like if you've ever read the Federalist Papers, which admittedly I've only read a small portion, but it's like damn, this [ __ ] is grounded. They're bringing in economic thinkers. They're talking about how this leads to that leads to that, and this is how this is going to work.

Like, here's the bad news. Because Marx has been so thoroughly discredited, they can't they do often, but they can't even just be like, "All right, here's the book. Here's what it says. This leads to this." But if you start trying to walk people through the Marxist, like this leads to this. People are going to be like, "Actually, fact check. No, it doesn't. Try it here. Oh, by the way, you can even get Steve Keen, who loves Markx and thinks Markx was one of the greatest economic thinkers the world has ever seen, literally." and says but unfortunately he had philosophy that he let override the reality of his economic thinking.

So it's economic thinking when followed out you realize that workers are not the only people that can provide uh surplus value and so the whole uh value theory of labor just goes away which is like the entire thing that Marx is is u standing on writing on top of and so that's why you never get this worker revolution and so anyway uh and also I cannot believe I have a theory on why what marks is failing to take into consideration I don't hear anybody talking about anywhere uh which is absolutely crazy and I think the reason nobody He talks about this is e economists almost never run their own companies and so they don't understand the actual thing that deres value from a bunch of people that are working their asses off.

Workers are dope. Nobody should underestimate the power of a good team. One of the things I teach entrepreneurs all the time is that the people in your company, you don't scale, they do. And so if you get somebody in that's really great at what they do, oh my god, like it it it is night and day. You guys have heard me say this a thousand times. Companies are not nameless faceless organizations. They are a collection of individual people. And if you left, the company would be fundamentally different, especially at our size.

So it's like anyway, nobody talks about that. And if you don't have somebody that can galvanize them, that can get everybody pointed in the right direction, make them believe, allocate the capital right, uh get the public to believe in the product. Ah, that so much of the value exists at that level. That's not to undermine the contributions of people that are working in the company. That would be just as big of a mistake. But if people want to understand why Markx doesn't work, there are real reasons that you can point to that are hyper tangible.

But instead, you get this level of like full [ __ ] That's crazy. To your point, um, Hamilton wrote 51 of the 85 federalist papers and that was before like his like rise to power. Like that's when he was shouting in the streets. So, it's interesting how she became the co-chair without that level of specificity like beforehand. So, uh, it's a different time, man. It's a different time. And so, look, not to overesteem just Hamilton. There were a whole host of incredible founding fathers. But that kid grows up hard, gets on a boat, risks everything.

I think he even shipwrecks, which is wild. On his way to America, uh, finally makes his way to the shore. I mean, as like a what, somewhere 18 to 21. He was young as hell. Uh, and gets there and just starts making a name for himself. on the battlefield, [ __ ] Like riding next to George Washington. Uh, and imagine for a second being on the battlefield. You're actively being shot at. And what's in your pocket? It's an economist book, an economics book. That's crazy. That's incredible.

Like, we just we we should demand leaders like that. That would be incredible. We are not getting that crop of leaders. Trump doesn't have an economy book in his book. No, Trump definitely not. Definitely not. Trump is not going to find himself on the battlefield either. Shin splits. U Okay, this is like a social experiment. Um this also proves my point that the dead internet theory is real. Um don't believe the hype. You are being spun. That was your point. You're always being being spun at all times.

So, a polling firm that came out of nowhere to show that Francesca Hong had a 23point lead over David Crowley in the Wisconsin primarily. She ended up losing um was shut down and said it whole operation was bogus. So, Media Strategies polling discontinued. Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data. Median Strategies was create created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.

Thank you for your understanding. Yeah, we popped up said some people had leads and disappeared and they were on CNN, they were being cited, they were on Main Street news, they were taken and run with it to to use whatever point that that person was making um at the time. So very very interesting. I don't know if people are uh expected to be mad at that. I'm not mad at that. I am glad that somebody did that so we can see that first of all, polls almost certainly do influence people in one way or the other.

We may not know in which way, but we certainly meaning uh if you see that your candidate is ahead, does that mean you go, "Oh, cool. I can just stay at home." Uh or does that motivate the other side to get up and get in there? So, but that it does have an influence otherwise people wouldn't be talking about this stuff until the end of time. Also, uh the fact that people will put something forward because they see a headline, it gets cited by somebody and then it just spreads through the discourse incredibly rapidly.

This is why I think using AI is brilliant, but you must build a mental model of what the opposite side says because if you just go cool, AI, tell me uh with its own biases and things, you're going to get a very narrow view of this. So what I will spend an inordinate amount of time doing when I'm trying to use AI to research a topic is I'm like, "Okay, now that I understand what the core arguments are, give me the brightest minds in the world that think this is stupid.

What do they say?" Then that gives you the next layer of research that you can start doing. Then once you're like, "Okay, I understand my side of the argument and I understand the argument against my argument and here's why I think that's flawed and you can actually take people sort of down to the metal as it were." Now you're in a much stronger position. one that you're not even tricking yourself that you're actually able to see things more clearly. Uh like some of the data center stuff that I'm learning about is very interesting.

Uh so it certainly isn't um what you're being spun on either side. So it's not the oh my god these things are the end of the world and they use so much water we're all going to die. It isn't that. Uh there actually is a problem with water. It's not that they're over here making things. um they're constantly contaminating the water, but it has happened once and so there obviously is things that we need to uh take into consideration when we look at that. Um there are real concerns with the data centers.

They're just not the parts that anybody's talking about because it takes you like a few layers to get down to, oh [ __ ] it's actually peak water usage becomes the thing that's scariest. or since all the new propositions are what they call dry cooling where it's a closed loop system. There's no evaporation but that takes more electricity. So now what happens when you get into the summer, right? So now you start seeing, oh, this is all the [ __ ] that Elon Musk was thinking through when he said we got to just put this stuff in space cuz it's like you're going to keep running into the problems here on Earth.

So all of this stuff is real, but you do have to like go layer after layer after layer and you have to assume as you go into the research phase. what I'm thinking about this isn't true. That that's like the only thing I know. I'm stuck in a frame of reference. I just don't know which part of what I believe is uh going to make contact all the way down to metal and stand and which part of this is just going to fall away. If you have emotional friction over being wrong, good luck.

You're never going to get out of that system. If you don't mind being wrong because you know that actual truth has massive amounts of utility, then it becomes incredibly effective. But so often people just want the answer fed back to them. It's pretty crazy. So anyway, this poll thing being fake, totally for it. Glad that they came out and said that it was fake. Uh but boy oh boy, do things sweep through uncritically. This is part of why, so I'll finish that sentence. This is part of why I like the fact that Drew and Ryan do not see the world the same as I do.

Uh if you guys have studied um Abraham Lincoln, he had a strategy that I thought was absolutely brilliant, which is precisely why I have the structure on the show that I have, which is what he called a team of rivals. Now, you're a team, but you see things differently. So, I'm well aware that, and Ryan will speak up if he feels differently, but I actually think some of my beliefs are are just really antithetical to Ryan's worldview. And so I imagine sometimes he is choking back the bile when I'm speaking.

Now he's very generous uh and doesn't uh flip his desk over and freak out. But it's like that's I think he and I have more distance than say Drew and I. But we're able to be civil with each other on and off camera to want to hear from the other to see how they're thinking about it. Uh it's such a better way to live anyway. But you have to want to know where you're wrong. Most people don't. Yeah. Um, interesting news, alleged breaking story still developing.

The US is confiscating Venezuela gold from the UK bank. All of Venezuela's gold reserves totaling 31 tons which are held at the Bank of Gangling will be transferred to the United States Pearl National. The value amounts to 4 billion resulting in the loss of Venezuela's sovereignty over the resources. Yeah. Accusations that the US is stealing Venezuela's gold are going viral, boys and girls. One post reads, this is a quote, "Breaking. The US is confiscating Venezuela's gold from the UK bank. Now, all of Venezuelan's gold reserves totaling 31 tons, which are being held in the Bank of England, uh will be transferred to the United States, uh that's what people are asking you to believe.

But the reality is that if we start from the um the perspective that this is the US stealing gold, then this is none of this is going to make sense because the 31 tons are still in the Bank of England vaults where they've been locked up since 2018. So what's going on is in England, they have said uh long before the US got involved. We don't know who's in charge in Venezuela. We don't know who has the right to actually tell the central bank to do something.

So, we are going to uh just park the money, park the gold, excuse me, for a second. Now, what sparked the accusations are that on August 12th, Jorge Rodri Rodriguez signed a joint communique with uh Dora Fgera. Um uh they are in the 2015 opposition assembly. Now, both sides agreed to push for the gold's release with audit and traceability mechanisms for protection to make sure that there's no corruption happening because they want to use it to help with earth the earthquake reconstruction. So, back in June, they had the big earthquake if you guys remember.

So, they want to use the gold for that. But then this guy Raone Lopez, which was one of the negotiators on the opposition side, told Venovision that the proceeds were just going to land in an account administered through the US Treasury. Okay. from that the theft headline was born. Now, I actually wouldn't be surprised if the gold ended up actually uh being controlled by the US, but the reality is right now it's still in the UK. They haven't made a decision uh the gold just remains locked up where it's been again for a very long time uh almost a decade now at this point, okay?

Because of the political instability in Venezuela. Now, I get why Lopez might be paranoid. And that leads us to the thing I think people should actually be talking about because this to me is starting to edge up into scandal territory, which is the Venezuelan oil. That is the real story. There was a January 9th executive order that declared Venezuelan oil proceeds sovereign Venezuelan property as you would expect, but it was nonetheless handed over to US Treasury custodial control because we came in and snatched their sitting president.

And so that obviously is giving us a lot of um potentially undue influence. There's an argument to be made that for given what's going on between us and China, we had to reestablish our control over South America. I don't expect that to necessarily be a popular opinion with everybody, but I think that it's very easy to make a very compelling argument for that case. So, we'll say for now that contested though it may be there's a reasonable argument to be made. However, if we're going to do that, we have to understand how dicey of a position that puts America into just again looking like uh the evil empire.

So, we need to go way out of our way to make sure that if we are controlling their money, to make sure that the government is doing things that are good for their citizens, that they are not allowing undue influence from China, that they are going to fold into our western umbrella, then we've got to be very transparent in what we're doing. Now, we're not we're not being transparent at all. And the first sale of crude oil to went to Vital and Trafigura and that generated about $500 million and it ended up being routed um not through Washington but through a bank account actually in Qatar.

Now for me I was like what why on earth did that go to Qatar? Now Rubio called um this a logical move given that there's basically a novel mechanism at play here. This is a a short-term thing that we're doing and part of the reason is that the offshore structure allows the money to be parked in US institutions or sorry if it were parked in US institutions it could be grabbed by Venezuela's creditors. Okay. So the mechanism that's basically keeping Venezuela from getting a hold of its own revenue also just shields that revenue from immediately going to uh people that Caracus owes money to.

So if you're trying to make sure that that those oil profits go to the people of Venezuela first and that as the US you're going to come in and be the moral army and you're going to just make sure that the Venezuelan people are being taken care of. You don't want the creditors to be able to insta snatch it. So I get that. However, the profits keep rolling in and the question of who is paying attention is yet to be answered. So, the Financial Times counts roughly $13 billion more have been generated since that initial sale, and that number is likely to be uh growing still.

About 300 million has been publicly traced back to to actually going to Venezuela. Okay, that still leaves a whole lot that's outstanding. And the State Department's transparency portal only lists a single transaction. So, the whole reason to put it up, hey, don't worry everybody, you're going to be able to see what's going on. uh no one's looking and so the quarterly audits that were promised in April have not arrived and Bessant had agreed back in February that he was going to produce the statutory authority uh for all of this.

So it was like hey we're going to talk about why we have the right to do this what we're doing you guys going to be able to see it but 6 months later Congress is still asking and there's no response. So that to me is what we should be talking about. This is like one of those times. America, America, I love you so much, but holy hell. Uh, you can't run around the world bombing everybody, looking a fool, acting a fool, and then the one place where you had a victory, you just like quietly start taking the resources.

You want, you were talking about the DSA can't beat the rap of they're a bunch of overproduced elites. The US is not going to be able to beat the rap that we're an evil empire. Like, what the [ __ ] are you doing? This is where you've got to be a moral arbiter. I get it. China's got to go. Cool. Smart. Very wise. Uh we need a cooperative government in Venezuela for what's going to be good for the whole Western Hemisphere. Got it. Great. But it can't just be uh that hey nice oil revenue that you got there for me.

Um I'm going to take that. Like that we cannot do. So we need the transparency. People need to be banging the drum about that. We don't need fake headlines. What we need are, hey, there's a real thing that's actually a real problem that people should really be talking about. So, that one is what I want to see rectified. That we've got to start building a reputation of being able to be trusted. Otherwise, the entire world will rightly race away from the US and the US dollar.

Um, and this is from the Reuters, their Venezuela branch. About half of Venezuela oil output now goes directly to the US. And for those oil uh buffs in the chat, this is directly the crude. We have built specific refineries in Texas to import that type of Venezuelan oil. So, this is stuff that we're now using, refining, and using at home. Here's the thing. There is a really gnarly way to read that, which, hey, we've confiscated it. We're going to sell it. We're going to take it all.

[ __ ] you. Uh if we're doing that, [ __ ] us. That's terrible. If it's, hey guys, we're going to partner with you. We're going to make sure that the oil gets flowing. We're going to help you up your production, your refining, uh so that we can get your economy booming again. Uh we want to help reintroduce the um private ownership of the industry because when you guys uh made it public, you [ __ ] destroyed the whole industry. So we want to get this going again.

Um and that would be great. And if that's what's happening, wonderful. As long as the proceeds are actually going back to Venezuela. If we're taking uh the normal fees you would take as a refiner, if there's some sort of administrative fee, that's reasonable. Okay. But if we're just like snatching it, that's crazy. Wild work. Um okay, another wild news. Cyber League, I don't know if you guys heard, he has dropped a bunch of GTA 6 leaks. Um, the total amount, this is from his website. He has a teaser video, he has a couple random videos, a full map, a basketball video, three map sneak peeks.

Um, I'm not playing any of them cuz everything is getting copywritten off the internet. So, yeah. Do not Yeah. Also, they're talking about suing people. You want to talk about the fastest way to kill this episode? Uh, but we can talk about what's going on. So, here is the thing that I find really, really interesting about all of this. This fits into the larger movement of what's happening in I'll call it primarily millennial and older gamers. They they have a very strong culture and they have been rebelling against AAA games monetization strategies.

As a game developer, you can imagine I pay very close attention to this. We actually brought on the guy that started stop killing games, the stop killing games movement. Uh brought him on the live. He was one of our first guests, if not our first guest to the live. Shout out to him. He's doing uh really interesting work trying to bring light to some of the changes that have happened um with the fact that as we move into a new era of gaming, you it's falling into the you'll own nothing and be happy vibe.

Uh and so people are paying for a game that back in the day you would have just had forever. Uh but these are online games that have to connect to a server and so when the company decides to stop supporting it, it just goes away. Okay, so that's the larger context. And there's way, way, way more than that, but that's the larger context of consumers in gaming culture really feeling like they're being taken advantage of by um the gaming industry as a whole through predatory monetizing practices.

Okay, with that account called uh Cyber Leak has posted 2 minutes of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay. Uh did it on August 18th. um Jason Dval, who's the main character uh in the game. You see him shooting baskets outside his house. You've got Jason beating a delivery driver with a wrench. Uh and all of this is happening what 9 days I think before Rockstar's official reveal on Netflix. So they're obviously not loving that. Uh and he's doing this very specifically on purpose. And he essentially gave us a manifesto.

So Cyber League is saying that the trigger was the way that the game is being sold. So, physical retail copies of GTA 6 were going to ship with a download code in the box instead of an actual disc. And so, what he's saying is, okay, hold on. I I will not abide this. And he's issued what he's calling commandments. Uh, and his big beef is that, okay, back in the day when you guys had to print a box, you had to print a disc, there were real costs to you.

And so, you were going to only print a certain number of copies. And so you would ask people to pre- buy them so that you knew how many to publish and that way the people that really wanted it on day one and didn't want to run into a shortage, you know, maybe they couldn't be standing in line to get it, so they wanted to pre-order it. It's good for the publisher because just like in the film industry, the reason that you would roll out slowly across countries is you would use the money from the sales typically in America to then be able to make the prints that you would take to England, for instance.

And so you would roll out that way. And then if you found that it wasn't being successful, you just wouldn't keep rolling out to additional countries. So you had the same thing with pre-orders in the games industry. If it was popular, then you could make more. And if you didn't get pre-sales, then you kept your orders tight. Gave people a way to manage their cash flow. But now once it's digital, there is no such thing as selling out. So why exactly are you uh doing these pre-orders?

though his cyber uh idea is that the reason you're doing this is it's just a predatory practice. So you're giving people something very small in order to get the money ahead of time. Now there have been rumors that part of what set all of this off was that the game was secretly going to be delayed and so now you had people that had already paid for the um early uh purchase and then the game was being delayed. I could not see that backed up anywhere. So I'm going to assume that that that's just rumor.

it's not real. Uh that you can still expect the game to come out in November. But that was the beef that he was really going against. Okay. So, um what he's in his commandments, what he's saying is that you're going to end digital pre-orders until independent reviews are out. Physical pre-orders can stay. So, if you're going to print a physical disc, a box, he's not going to keep hacking you. So, let let us do keep in mind this is blackmail. But nonetheless, uh you're going to stop charging for single player DLC that already ships with the game.

So if it's if the content is already in the game and you're just gating it, that is uh in his world not acceptable. Uh and Cyberlinks calls those demands the floor, not the ceiling. All right. Um he wants also a public statement and an apology. So no private negotiations, no settlements behind closed doors. Uh until then, he said the leaks are just going to keep on coming and he's obviously picking Rockstar on purpose. They are the absolute [ __ ] biggest behemoth in the world and his message to everybody else was behave or be the next target.

This is wild, man. So now Rockstar hasn't publicly commented. However, they are DMCA striking everything. So stuff is being taken down. You probably wouldn't see DMA strikes if this wasn't legitimate stuff. Now people are debating whether this is old stuff or new stuff. I guess one of the images of the maps uh that he showed, everybody's saying that's way too simplistic to be a final map. Some people are saying that the footage that he pulled from 2023, so it's probably going to look better. But there's a lot of question marks at this point.

To me, it's like I get why gamers are frustrated. Uh, but games are now more and more finding success out of indie developers precisely because when you have the AAA industry doing bad things, that creates opportunity for other people. So for me, I would much rather see this play out in vote with your dollars and more and more money go to indie developers. Now obviously I have a dog in that fight as an indie developer. Uh, so Lord knows I want to see more people turn to indie developers.

And when I look at this stuff, I go, "Oh, those are all the things that the uh AAA industry is doing and people hate it." Great. I'm going to do the exact opposite. Was exactly why I wanted to talk to uh the people at Stop Killing Games. I want to know like, "Okay, cool. What do I do to make sure that people are super enthusiastic about what we're doing?" So, whenever the big companies do the dumb thing, that creates the opportunity for the small companies. So, uh, I'm not a fan of seeing somebody hack somebody else because they don't like what they're doing because inevitably there are going to be people that are hacking that feel like, "Oh, we can get away with this.

These are the gamer version of uh what? Crimes of necessity." So, um, yeah, vigilanteism. I get the impulse, but I think it is a very bad idea. Uh, and boy, do I worry that this guy is going to get tracked down. So, you know, be very careful out there, boys and girls. Doing things like this may seem like it's not a big deal, but uh especially if this kind of thing has a big negative impact on the share price of um Rockstar, it's not Rockstar Games.

What What's the parent company? Take two. Thank you. Um so then it's like they've got real financial incentive to make a uh statement by going after this guy. So anyway, just be careful out there, boys and girls. Vote with your dollars. Find people that treat you the way that you think you deserve to be treated. uh singing their praises from high heaven, please uh let people know that you love those indie games, everybody. Um but yeah, this is not the right way to go about it, though.

I do certainly understand why people are pissed. Yeah, J. Oh, I was going to He already added it. I was going to say the 2023 edition cuz it is like you were saying, it's all footage ripped from 2023's build of the game. That's confirmed. Uh from all the insiders, like none of it's fully confirmed, but from all the insiders who follow like all the every detail. Yeah. It's like pretty positive it's a 2023 build cuz they're doing the previews of the game right now with the media.

Um, which is also where people originally thought it was a current build, but people are saying it might even end up looking better because they think it's that 2023 build that that's interesting. Well, here, let me give a curveball that I have no data for whatsoever. This is me way out over my skis. Imagine he's doing the 2023 footage, but they know what files he's accessed. So, they do know he accessed it. They confirmed that. At least that's my understanding from what I read. And if they know what files he's accessed and what has been downloaded, they know what he has access to.

And so if he's saying, "Listen, the leaks will continue." And they're like, "Okay, he hasn't leaked anything that would really like deflate the enthusiasm for the Netflix thing," uh, they might be more prone to try to make something happen. But it is very interesting that he's like, "I'm not doing back channel negotiations. You're either going to apologize or I'm going to keep doing this." It's wild, man. It's wild. Take two stat currently unaffected at the moment. Yeah. I mean, it's GTA 6. It's a behemoth at the end of the day.

Like, this is going to be it's still going to sell cuz the point is like you want to play it. But, uh, yeah, it I wouldn't expect merely doing early leaks to impact the um, like enthusiasm for people who want to play the game, but it will deflate some of the marketing hype. I think what deflated it more though is the Oh, sorry. No, please. I was going to say I think what deflated it more though is the fact they're not doing physical discs. I mean this all came off the back of the PS5 saying by 2028 we're not doing discs anymore.

And even though there is a small percentage of people who still buy physical, those are your gamers. Like those are the consumers that they need to be marketing towards. And so I think what hurts the marketing more is the fact that hey we're not releasing this game on a physical disc ever. And I think that's really bad news. And I I if you have data, definitely challenge me. But here is what I think the reality is. Uh and I've heard game reviewers talk about this. They're like, "Yeah, it's terrible.

You guys shouldn't you like keep doing physical discs. You should do that. Like that's the right thing." I don't buy them and haven't for a decade, but like they should exist. These businesses are looking at it and going, "You guys don't give a [ __ ] You care about it at the level of like bang the drum, hack our servers, but you don't actually buy physical copies." I'll say I buy every single game physical if there's a physical. But do you think you're like a really small minority or do you represent like Well, but I did say a minute ago that I it is a small statistic of people.

I think the PS5 stat is like 4% of sales in 2025 were physical. But what I'm trying to say is that is your core audience. Like even though it is the smallest number, right? Like let's look at GTA 6. That game is an everyone game. Everyone's playing that game, right? So the disc argument can kind of collapse there. But let's say Devil May Cry 6 comes out in the next couple years. Who's buying Devil May Cry 6? Not the casual gamers. It's going to be that 4% who would buy physical.

I will disagree with you. Now, again, if you've got data, definitely tell me. Here's what I mean. It's on a per game, I think. Yeah. Here's here's what I have learned. Um, there are people who like to collect and then there are people who like to play games, like to invest, whatever. They're they're just it's a very different thing. And so if collectors like to have physical media, I get and I don't know if you feel that you identify as a collector and that's part of why you like the physical media or if you're like, I don't trust these guys.

I've got to have it physical. But I would put forward that the majority of people who buy, and this is just instinct, but the majority of people who buy physical are people that want to see it on their shelf. And that's what I call the collector. They want the visual representation of that thing. And I'm a massive collector. Like I literally at one point used to buy games just to display them on my shelf. I never planned to play them. I was like I like the box art or I just I'm a collector so I like to have the physical thing.

So I'm like the guy you're pitching the ball to on if there is a phys I used to read books digitally and still buy a physical copy because I like to collect the thing. But if it's actually collectoriness that drives that, the world has already spoken and it's only whatever 4%. I think it's more ownership. And I actually think Yellow Knight points to cuz I wouldn't classify myself as a collector. Yeah. I think Yellow Knight's actually, although he's kind of joking on part of this, I think he is pointing to the real situation, which is most gamers these days are on PC, which they buy on Steam.

There's no physical copies for a PC. That's what I was going to say. Once PC like really proliferated, like the physical games argument kind of died, right? But now like if you actually go into the gaming community online like most gamers who will play everything cuz that is such a small subset of people. Not everyone plays everything. Most people stick to their freetoplay games. Freeto play is what increased gamers numbers across the entire country, right? That's why then we had the debates of well Candy Crush is a video game game game, you know, that kind of thing.

Um majority of hardcore gamers who monitor the titles, watch all the the showcases, those are the ones buying physical is I guess what I'm getting at. Where do you have just intuition? Like what makes you say that? Because I only have intuition on my side. So whatever. To me, it's I'm very in on the gaming space. I a lot of my friends are also to the level I am where we play every release. I mean, this is like it's like the film industry. Like as much as I'm a I'm a film guy, I think I'm more a video game guy ultimately just because of how into that world I am.

And like it goes back to the size of the game, I think, plus the platform with Steam like the chatter was saying. So honestly, most of my games, yeah, I do buy off Steam, but if it's a game I'm buying for console, it's physical, and I think that's what most people do. Couple stats, uh, AI, so it does have a tendency to hallucinate, but what we have so far, um, US Milestone, only seven total PlayStation games across both PS4 and PS5 have managed to sell more than 100,000 physical disc copies.

Yep. year-to date weekly sales um only two PlayStation titles sold more than 10,000 weekly. So digital sales now make up roughly 82 to 85% of full-time software sales which backs up now here's an interesting PlayStation that backs up the 5% for PlayStation that I was saying but look up the top games for the last month on the PlayStation store. It's Madden. It's NBA. It's Call of Duty. And so what happens is these these numbers, these digital numbers are inflated because of these casual yearly games where most of the audience is because as much as people dog on Call of Duty year after year because they're mid games and they don't put a lot of effort into them, they still sell the most every single year on PlayStation.

I mean, welcome back to why the why from a mathematical standpoint they are going to put less company energy into those people even though they may be the most hardcore gamers. The reality is hardcore gamers aren't the people that are paying the bills. And to make it even worse, that they think a lot more about people who are influential than they think about people who are hardcore gamers. I know that's hard to hear because there really is something about when you give yourself to a game and it becomes like a world that you inhabit.

Like I I used to be Destiny was like the game I played and then into Destiny 2. And so as they started making decisions that didn't feel good and it stopped being uh fun to play, I was legitimately Iate. Like there were things where I was like, "Bro, you broke like the thing I love doing. Like this is crazy. I can't." And there was some part of my brain that was like, "They don't have the right." And it's like I remember also when George Lucas made changes to Star Wars, I had a very similar feeling of like, who does this guy think he is?

I was like, it's his [ __ ] man. He's the guy. Like that's the one that gets to do it. And given how much time and energy I put into Kaizen, if at some point people were like, "Yo, who do you think you are to make that change?" I'll be like, "Bro, I'm the one that like the only I've poured so much money, so much time into this thing." And yes, it has to be something you want to play for sure, but I have to protect the long-term longevity.

I have to make sure that the business is here, that it can support it. Like you guys will um hopefully play, but it's like you're going to come and go. So, um, yeah, this one is is sort of high tension for me on both sides cuz I get it. And as the one that wants to take advantage of this opportunity and like, oh, physical games, like, dude, I the second I heard people wanted physical games, I was like, doing the math. Oh, is it real? Because if it was real, I would love to make physical games.

And because I can afford to print games, I was like, "Oh my god." Like, that could be my in. And then I looked at the numbers. I'm like, "Nobody gives a [ __ ] about physical games." Like, that's all hype. Nobody gives a [ __ ] Now, if they did, trust me when I say I would do it. Try to get a leg up for sure. But I'm really looking. You know who the real competition is? These guys should all be worried. Exactly. One company, Roblox.

And Roblox, nothing physical. These kids don't interact with anything physical. You're going to have an entire generation of kids that are like, "Physical games? I don't even know what you mean." So, it's not like this is 85% now and it's going to be 85% in 5 years. It's going to be 85% now and 92% in five years. And whether they stop doing it or not because every kid that graduates into that next generation that they won't have any experience of going to a game store and buying a physical disc, they won't think to shop for it on Amazon.

It just won't be they won't even think about it. It it is heartbreaking to me that the world changes like that. So changes like that. Pose it. This is just an interesting thought experiment. Video games going all digital. Do you think there is any world where those options there should not be any physical options? Because we look at movies, we look at music, there's always been physical options. My thing is every company should shoot themselves in the face as they see fit. If people actually care about physical games, then let PlayStation shoot themselves in the face and let me scoop up all the people that actually care about physical games.

But I bet if um somebody did a uh like I won't put me because no one trusts me yet as a game developer, but if you put somebody in that's like, "Oh, they've done like a couple titles. We like get it. We know what they're about. Hey guys, we're going to do a physical disc, but you have to pre-order it." People be like, "Nah, it'll do like a few hundred units maybe." But it it'll the amount of time and energy to find somebody to make that disc for you, to have to create all the additional art, the like the back and forth proofing, learning about printing.

Now, keep in mind, I'm a guy. I printed physical comics. So, I had to go through the rigomearroll of I don't know how to print, now I know how to print. Dude, it's a [ __ ] thing. But if that's the case, why would Rockstar still release a physical case with no disc? you're still spending the money because they know some people want it on the shelf and they're only spending part of the money and they don't have a problem, but those don't sell well though.

Like those those boxes with codes never sell well. I think that's just that the thing is not an argument of it's almost certainly going to be tied to distribution channels. So we have distribution partners that we make certain amount of money with. We want to make sure that they have something to hang up in their store. We want to keep them happy. those partners are in lobbying Rockstar and saying, "Hey guys, please, please, please, like, we've done so well with you guys forever. You guys maybe have merch.

We're going to sell the merch in the store." All all the behind-the-scenes stuff. When you run a business, it's like this is a much bigger thing. They'll have a hundred reasons why they want to put something out, uh, but they want to reduce the cost, not have the disc, or they might know that the disc is a pain in the ass because you've got to deal this. I'm just guessing now, but like that there's firmware updates you're going to have to do that that is locked in time in the disc and oh my god.

Whereas if we just send them to the latest file, their very initial install is a better install. So they might know failure rates where you're going from disk with outdated drivers and all that [ __ ] So uh there will be many many reasons why they want to do it the way that they're doing it, but there's only like the great news is you only need to trust them to be greedy. They're just looking at the math and going, "The math just isn't there." If they're wrong about it, then it's a sledgehammer to the face.

Now, they may just be wrong about the psychology, and people like, "I'm never gonna buy it, but you better [ __ ] offer it." And then, okay, maybe they just have to. Uh, or it's going to allow the Valheims of the world to be like, "Oh [ __ ] we're about to hit our 1.0 release. Let's give people a physical copy." Same with a PAL world, right? Indie Dev, [ __ ] lightning in a bottle. And they go, "Hey, we're the developer of the people." They they scored huge win by keeping their cost down.

They could have easily justified raising the price tag. They had told people back in early access, this is an early access price. When we go to 1.0, we're going to raise the price. And they didn't do it. Oh, confetti falls. People are [ __ ] ecstatic. They go back to number one or almost number one on Steam charts. An absolute Cinderella story. So, if there's actually appetite, these guys will go, "Cool. We're going to make the physical disc." But I bet they're not going to because there's just no money.

music industry. They're the criminarian in a coal mine. So CDs are done vinyl for very niche people, but there's no vinyl equivalent for games. So yeah, unfortunately I'm with you. I think it sucks, but just like with the music industry, just so retro gaming is kind of like vinyl for cuz retro gaming saw a rise in 2020s. I mean, I know we got a third hour to go to. I could talk video game. We're we're now abusing our poor uh audience here. Okay, so we've got another hot button issue that we got to talk about.

Uh, and that is more What the hell's going Oh, sorry. Do we have something we need to do first? Oh, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Um, so we there's more madness coming out of China. Uh, that we've got to get into. What's the thing called, Drew? It is no longer open on screen sharing. The guy with the You want to do supers while we're pulling it up? Yeah. Oh, perfect. All right. First up comes from Brutus Lugo. Biden economy was objectively better. Why would a Biden 2.0 be worse given all the information we have now?

So, when you look at the direction of travel of what was happening with the uh Democrat party at the time, remember, you could see that Biden was scenile. Now, I don't know, maybe for you guys that wasn't a problem. For me, that was a huge problem. They snuck Kamla in at the last second. Kamla's economic policies were full [ __ ] So, I just want to make sure that everybody goes back to what actually happened. So, you've got all this crazy censorship. You've got talk of doing things from top down.

You've got the revelations of the pilot bureau. You've got somebody that was uh sorry, I haven't sent the request yet. Uh you've got somebody that is um talking crazy, somebody that is uh mentally just completely non-existent. And so, that was the vote at the time. Uh the only way to know if that would was a mistake is if you could actually see both of them run out. And of course you can't. So for all we know, Kamla would have run the economy even worse than Trump.

Maybe not. Maybe she would have run it better. And you can't deny that that's a possibility. But what you can say unequivocally is that you'll never have that counterfactual. It's not real. So that becomes entirely theoretical. So now we just have to look forward and go, okay, is somebody who voted for Trump who now looks at the results and goes, I'm not liking these results. Do they just vote party line in the next election? Or do they go, okay, this is a person that I think is going to, and then insert whatever their hot button issue is.

This is the person that I think is going to handle it better. Maybe the same party, maybe the absolute other party. That's how you want to judge it. You can only talk going forward. I don't understand the mental. I mean, I can tell you what it is, but it's so nonsensical. I don't know how people allow themselves to get in a trap that just want to be like, "I told you so." So, this is like in a business. So, we do this thing called disagree, but commit.

You've got this idea, you want to put it forward. You're all arguing very bitterly. Let's say you're the one that doesn't get your way. And so, you got outvoted and we end up moving forward with the idea that you thought was terrible. Now, you're an [ __ ] in my opinion if as we're moving forward, you just do everything you can to undermine that. So, um, like I will say this about M Donnie. If he makes New York a better place, I'm going to be ecstatic.

I want him to win. The problem is when you look at the policies from a cause and effect perspective, you can say, "Hey, this isn't going to work and it's not going to work for this reason." But I don't want to undermine him. I want to see him do well. That's why I call balls and strikes. I'm never going to say something about him that isn't tied to something that's actually happening because I want to see New York do well. I want to see America as a country thrive.

So when you disagree but commit, it's like that thing may still end up being wrong and you need to challenge it and you need to say look this is it's not working. It's not working for this reason. This is what we should do instead which by the way is the mark of um somebody who I think is being sincere. Can they tell you what you should be doing? So not like some pie in the sky theoretical thing but like really what is the answer the difficult answer in this moment?

So anyway you can hold me accountable to that. I will certainly do that. Uh, but I think it's a nonsensical worldview to look at something you'll never know the answer to and just assume it would have been great. Candace Baris says, "I do like the idea of hierarchy of needs, but everyone has different priorities. A moral constitution would be more useful. List and prioritize personal moral principles and use that to make decisions. That won't end up being true. We have too many algorithms deeply embedded uh in our brains." And that's what Masle's hierarchy of needs is trying to get to or what are the things that every human goes through.

Now, if you're a psychopath or something like that, okay, sure, you're going to sit outside of that precisely because your algorithms are broken. Now, within any of those layers, there's going to be variation. Like, we're all going to react to scarcity differently. Some people are going to be tyrannical. They're going to go try to conquer the next village. Some people are going to beg. Some people are just going to wander off into the woods and die. All of that is going to be um very individualistic.

But when you take humans as you know a totality there are directions of travel uh that can be very easily understood. I think Masle's hierarchy of needs has withtood the test of time precisely because it's close. It's not going to be perfect but it's certainly close. All right to the um okay the shine of it all. All right. So I have breaking news right now. Let's hear it. So, Madna stock is up 110% today after announcing the first ever positive phase 3 results for a personalized cancer vaccine.

Holy [ __ ] I take it back. I do want to know. Madna made a cancer vaccine that is custom for every person. Doctors read the DNA of your tumor, find what it makes it unique, that makes an mRNA shot that teaches your immune system attack cells that look like this. Holy. They combine it with K. Truda, a drug that stops cancer from hiding from your immune system. It just succeeded in a phase three melanoma trial. Not a cure for cancer, but a huge idea if it works for other cancers, too.

It's not for all cancers, but Yeah. Yeah. For melanoma. Yeah. Bro, huge. That's okay. Listen, phase three is still early. You never know what happens. It like uh it cures the cancer, but it makes your head fall off. It, you know, there can always be weird [ __ ] like that. The lawyers and it cause diarrhea, depression, suicide thoughts, all these other things. Yeah. Talk real fast at the end of the commercial. Yo, 3 hours later, Madna vaccine plans go missing and the scientists behind it found dead in ditch.

Yeah. Nuts. Yeah, that's very exciting. Do you think people are going to trust us though cuz Madna is also the vaccine uh people? Well, people are already freaked out about anything that's mRNA. But let me tell you, you have melanoma cancer that's eating you away. You real fast go, "Yep, I'm going to take that shot." So, this is where this is like the equivalent of needing to be chased by a lion. when you're dying of something, you you stop being precious about any of that stuff.

It's like even Steve Jobs when he first got cancer, he was like, "I'm just going to drink apple juice." And then finally was like, "Okay, I'm going to take all the chemo you got." Because you just start realizing, "Uhoh, what I'm doing isn't working. I'm now going to try anything and everything." Um, if you have that strong push to stay alive. So, yeah, I don't think anyone is going to care if they start seeing real results come out of this. Nice. Um, all right. All right, I know we got a couple more super chats.

Got a good amount of super chats to go through. Silent Night says, "You often mention the overproduction of elites. There was a theory that a highly educated workforce was an asset. Today, we're on the other side the other end with high schoolers that can't read. Was this intentional or failed policy?" Failed policy a thousand%. So, the overproduction of elites, unfortunately, has very little to do with how educated they get. You're always going to benefit from an educated populace that's educated in proportion to the number of jobs that are needed.

And historically, we worked very hard to sort of keep that number in line. Uh and then once you had the government guaranteeing student loans, the administrative burden of the schools just like went psychotic. Uh everything started getting more expensive. We told every kid that they need to go through uh college and it just became like a pipeline to get them into that debt uh accumulation machine. And so that is unfortunate. Um so yeah, no child left behind. uh get everybody on that college debt. Send everybody in.

No matter what they want to study, no matter what the world needs, doesn't matter. Let them study whatever they want. Don't let them discharge the debt when they graduate. Create essentially indentured servants. Not because you want indentured servants because you want people paying off that debt. Uh and then that is where you get everybody thinks that they're going to be the next elite group of people instead of everybody understanding, okay, my skill set is leading me down this path. Uh nice normal middle class life. my ambitions, my talents, it's where they take me.

It is what it is. Then some people are going to try to be PhD doctors, some people are going to be MD doctors, but everybody sort of gets I'm on a track and now it's just sort of become this generic go get uh you know get your higher education degree uh with no sense of like what am I actually going to do? What's going to be the job? So, but the under undereducation of our children, I think is just uh compassion gone completely haywire instead of us saying no, we want to we want the hardest core of the hardest core.

We want to identify the most gifted among us, separate them out, uh and really see how far we can rev that engine. Um but yeah, we just don't do that anymore because we don't want anybody to feel left out. Arian Brown with a $50 super chat. Thank you. says, "Foreign sovereign wealth funds recycle recycle their surpluses back into dollar denominated assets, strengthening the dollar. Persistent dollar strength relative to other currencies incentives America incentivizes America to import. Persistent imports erode domestic military capacity." Yep. as the truest statement of all time.

And this is why you have to put walls up because the incentive structure is that it's a basically a sucking sound where America with the strong dollar will buy uh stuff from all of the weaker countries. And unfortunately, you're going to have to do something to balance the playing field so that you can have industry. This is why you c you've got to keep BYD out. Unfortunately, the history popcorn says, "Friend has no income, social anxiety, and a health issue hurting his confidence. Treated not physically limiting.

He's stuck on all three. Where should he focus first? And would you plan it weekly, 90 days, or yearly?" Okay, I'm going to give you the speedrun. It's interesting that people are asking that question. Uh, I'll give you the speedrun. They're not going to do anything with it. It breaks my heart that that is true, but what I realize is you have to give up on adults. Okay, having said all of that, here's what you're going to tell them. um you're having a biological experience. So the anxiety that you're feeling that can be interrupted.

Part of it is probably due to diet and then part of it is definitely due to rumination. So we are going to stop doing both of those. You need to introduce something from cognitive behavioral therapy called a pattern interrupt. A pattern interrupt is where they start feeling anxiety and they say, "Nope, stop. I'm not going to do that. What is it I'm thinking about? Okay, I'm thinking about how my future is going to suck. Okay, I couldn't stop myself from thinking of the first thought, but I absolutely can stop myself from repeating that.

I'm not going to repeat anything that makes me feel anxious. I'm going to get up. I'm going to go work out. I'm going to use that as a habit loop trigger to force myself to like, okay, what is it I need to do on my CV or whatever to get that job to move up in my career? What skills should I be going after? Oh, I just had another negative thought about I'm a loser. Uh the economy is so broke and I'm never going to get anywhere.

Nope. I don't do that. I'm going to stop thinking about that. and you literally become militant in your own head. Here's the thing, it works. It doesn't work some of the time. It works all of the time. Every single time, it doesn't matter. It's just that people won't [ __ ] do it. So, once that person is in enough pain that they're finally like, I'm not willing to do this anymore. Then you can offer this to them. But the fact that they didn't come ask this, you're asking on their behalf tells me that you're a good person and you love so much.

And I hate that you're going to have to learn the same lesson that I had to learn, which is until the person wants for themselves, they are trapped. And there is no sequence of words that you can tell them that will unstick them. I'm very sad to report that. But the change really is there for them. And if they want it, they could turn their life around literally today. Not tomorrow, today. But it starts with acknowledging you're having a biological experience. And you must take control of your mind and your body to get those things moving in the right direction.

Blake Bullion incentivized to lie sounds like CO reporting for funding. It also kind of sounds like social programs that are incentivized to lie in order to get more funding. Fraud, waste, and abuse hurt the economy and exacerbate things. So true. So true. Show me the incentives. I will show you the outcome. Shout out Charlie Mer. Uh, Silent Night says, "I've seen studies that show the opportunity cost of kids is too high, as he suggested. Do you really think it's educated women or more of the fact that people can't get a house until they're 40?

Well, so okay, now let's go to the farm argument, which I should have made when we were doing the uh dissertation on educating women. So when you're on a farm and you need kids for labor, then that the cost impulse definitely comes into the equation and people will have a lot more kids. Um so but as more kids survive, that number tends to go down even if you're using labor. Uh so I think it's a little bit weaker, but that certainly is real. And the catch is that deeply poor people will still have a gaggle of kids.

So I still come down on the side that this isn't about money. This is about birth control, cultural influence, and how many options the people have. Um so yeah, did that answer the question? I feel like there might have been some other part to that. Um I feel like you answered it. preach. Yeah. I mean, you gave your what you think is the the issue, not the cost of children, um, but more so what you were saying, just the options available to people who want to have children.

Word. The Sanchez Craft 3005 says, "We'll break 1.6 million this year after 1 million last year, 12 field techs and leads, just two founders running everything else. We're considering a people HR leader to build people system as our first major hire. Would you make the same move?" Hell no. Hell no. Absolutely not. Terrible [ __ ] idea. So, who generates revenue in your company? Focus on that. You want to hire somebody that's going to drive revenue. Do not hire anyone in your company until you can look at what I call your financial model, which is every beat in your company.

Everything that you do to drive revenue from how does somebody find out about you all the way through to they're now a paying customer. So, look at that. Which of those things is like, oh, if we doubled our the frequency that we post on LinkedIn, if all other variables hold the same, then that would double our leads. And then if we doubled our leads, that would have, you know, this impact on revenue and profitability. Awesome. Who's stopping you from doubling your posting on LinkedIn? Find the things that drive revenue and hire for that.

Now, as you start crossing, you know, 150 employees, maybe you got to start thinking about it. But I'm telling you, like, you can really get into trouble bringing in HR too soon. That doesn't mean that you don't want systems and operations in place to make sure that every complaint can be heard. Uh we have a system here where if somebody has a complaint, then we have a legal team that is independent of us. They do not report to us. They will adjudicate. Um, and so yeah, if somebody brings up a complaint, then we just, hey, go talk to these independent people, uh, and then we'll engage with that system and follow it.

But yeah, having in-house HR did not help. It hurt. And that's it for Super Jets. All right. Thank you guys. This is a big one. Appreciate you guys being here very, very much. And excited to see you again on Friday. By the way, we have a new ITU AI master class. I hope some of you joined me yesterday. I did. We It was low-key. We didn't promote it here. Uh I will do better about that next time because it was a killer master class uh for people that actually have high functioning businesses, how to level it up.

But our next one, this is an AI, it's free master class. Thursday, September 10th at 1 p.m. Pacific. Links in the description. Now, I'm going to show you guys how to launch a company using AI. I know there's mixed feelings about AI. I'm telling you, it does some things incredibly well, some things very poorly. But the reality is the things that it does well, it does very well. And you guys should absolutely avail yourselves. I'll walk you through the differences on Thursday, September 10th, 1 p.m.

Pacific. Hope to see you there. All right, everybody. We'll see you Friday. Love you. Till next time, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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