Massive New Strikes In Tehran, Dirty Moves By Anthropic, & Pelosi's Crazy "No" Vote

Key Takeaway

The "head for an eye" doctrine reveals America's escalating Iran strategy, but success depends on manufacturing capabilities we may no longer possess. After de-industrializing for decades, the U.S. must rebuild its production capacity fast enough to sustain prolonged conflict—or risk entering a quagmire against a formidable opponent with asymmetric warfare capabilities and an unbreakable cultural resolve.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu analyzes Trump's Iran strategy, revealing a shift from "eye for an eye" to "head for an eye" escalation. He explores whether America's weakened manufacturing base can sustain the conflict, the dangers of underestimating Iran's capabilities, and the broader economic implications including China's debt dumping and oil price dynamics.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Massive New Strikes In Tehran, Dirty Moves By Anthropic, & Pelosi's Crazy "No" Vote from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

one. one. Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. It has been wild here behind the scenes this morning and uh I hope you guys enjoy some of the energy you are undoubtedly going to get today. Uh unfortunately there have been massive new strikes in Tyrron that began last night. Uh is a victory even possible at this point? We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Trump's new doctrine uh which came straight from Rubio's mouth. You guys are going to want to hear that.

It is insane. Um, I want to know if we're just digging a deeper hole in Iran. That becomes the big question for me. We'll talk about that from an economic angle, from just can we win the war angle. Uh, all that and more. All right. What are the real motives behind Anthropic's recent dirty moves? We're going to be talking about why AISAR David Saxs is sounding off uh and calling foul. Speaking of calling foul, Pelosi votes against a House bill to stop politicians from insider trading.

Now, that in and of itself is no surprise, but there is a plot twist that you guys are going to want to hear. Mom Donnie goes on Stewart and makes a fool out of both of them. We're going to take a look at that. Amazon's new Bladeunner show is proving that society has extreme levels of AI anxiety. I'm very excited to talk about that. And you're never going to guess what Japan is considering doing to Pokemon. This one is definitely going to be controversial for investors, but yeah, will be important to talk about.

It is getting wild out there for people using collectibles uh as a form of wealth creation, but it's happening. It's one of the best performing asset classes. I can't believe that's true, but it is. All right. Shout out to Humble House. We love these guys. You can see I don't know if you can tell on camera, but these are now just basically becoming empty bottles at this point uh because we eat them so much. Humble House right now is offering offering 15% off their freakishly delicious sauces with the code Tom.

So go to humblehouse foods.com and check them out. They are phenomenal. The ingredients list is what gets me excited. It is super clean, very short things you recognize and they really are delicious. So, if you're looking for something that is supportive of this show and that you're going to love putting on your food and you can feel good about putting in your body, Humble House. All right, turning our attention to what's going on in Iran. This is really getting pretty wild. So, you've got the I'm sure all of you guys have heard the idea of an eye for an eye, but have you heard the latest coming out of Trump, which is that Trump is not running an eye for eye policy?

Forget that. We are running a head for an eye. If you don't believe me, let's hear our man Marco Rubio say it himself. In the power, just want some clarification. Do you rule out striking civilian infrastru I think I saw, you know, guys, I saw Arachi, their foreign minister who who the other day say or something about their policies, an eye for an eye. The president's policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that's what it's going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they're doing.

They're already paying a very heavy price. You guys don't know it cuz you don't cover it. You're not in Iran. You're not in the street. They don't have a free media. But they're going to continue to pay a very heavy price. Their industrial base has been decimated. Their defense industrial base has been decimated. They're losing launchers. They're losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage. And their economy is a disaster. But despite all that, okay, these people who are calling us every day begging, let's do a deal.

They send us messages through other countries, third countries. I mean, they're running out of countries to send. Even I had countries here coming up to me, oh I just spoke to the Iranians. They want to do a deal. The problem is every time these people do a deal, they either break it or after they make it, they want to change the deal. So they're probably not ready to do a deal yet, but they will be soon because the price is very Why exactly do they think that they're going to be ready for a deal?

Because we've had 13 straight nights of American strikes on Iran. Sentcom says that the campaign is aimed at stopping attacks on shipping around the street of Hormuz. Uh but what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that they're going to continue to escalate. They've said over and over that each night things are going to keep getting worse until these guys finally acquies. Uh they want to make sure that the strait is open. Uh they're saying that it's open right now, even though that there are actually only a few ships that are willing to risk the passage.

And in the last 36 hours on the ground in Iran, uh we've seen them sending kamicazi drones into our own bases, uh hitting things all across the region. They're now claiming that they're taking out our THAD radar, our Patriot systems, uh the CRAMM in Jordan. Jordan says it shot down four missiles and six drones in 24 hours coming from Iran. Iran is now really um getting into some very aggressive language and they're letting everybody know if you are an ally of the US, we are going to come after you.

up to and including bases on UK soil. Not UK soil in the region, UK soil as in UK. Uh and they're telling them that if you're allowing US military planes to take off from your bases that your bases are now military targets. They're going to come after you. They also put out a warning to um all the regions. Hey, just so you know, civilians um we are going to target US troops that are in secret locations. So, how the hell would the people know that the troops are staying there?

Cuz the Iranians are saying, "We've been hitting the bases." So, the US has moved their troops off of those bases and they're putting them out into just the public into hotels and places for them to stay. They're trying to do it low-key. The Iranian officials have asked for people to send in to an IRGC uh either Telegram group or uh signal group. I can't remember which one, but one of those saying, "Hey, report. If you see American troops, let us know uh so that we can target those facilities." So, that is going to get wild.

If they are um intentionally going to try to maximize casualties of US troops, no matter where they are at, and Trump is running a head for an eye strategy, things are going to get way worse before they get better. And so, what started out as a hey, we're just going to drop a couple bombs. It's going to be all good. that we're going to take out their nuclear ambitions. Uh we'll be able to prosecute this from the air. It's only going to take what do you say 3 to four weeks in the beginning.

We're now in whatever month eight. Um this is turning into a quagmire. So it is going to be very interesting to see if we're able to actually inflict enough damage on them before we run out of munitions or not. Now, nobody knows exactly how many munitions the US has, but there are plenty of rumors flying around. uh some of them being put out by Iran themselves, saying, "Listen, the reason that these guys have now switched over to their B1 bombers that they're sending out of the UK, which is making the UK a legitimate military target." The reason they're doing that is they've run out of the missiles that they can launch from their ships.

So, they were doing cruise missiles off of ships. We were therefore, you know, just attacking military bases, but now that's not what they're doing. And they are switching because they're running out of munitions. So, I would like to remind everybody in the Trump administration, I get that any of us that are old enough to remember what the vibe of America was leading up to World War II, not that I was alive back then. I'm old, but not that old. Uh, that we have this vision of America as being this manufacturing superpower.

We are not that manufacturing superpower right now. Now, I actually think Trump is making the right moves to make us a manufacturing superpower once again in the future, but that's a 10 to 20year buildout of forcing things back into the US, investing in talent like what you see in Lucky Palmer. uh you don't really get the military aspect from Elon Musk, but that kind of engineering talent at least trying to retain here in the US, trying to make sure that the next generation of kids grow up wanting to be people that make physical things in the real world, which was something that we got out of.

I'm sure we'll get into this as we talk more about economics, but man, people really need to understand the the play that empires make over and over and over. Um we're going to do we're going to go into a third hour today. I'm going to talk a lot about this at that point where there's just a playbook that people run that cause you to get rid of all your manufacturing to make people feel richer, not not feel richer, you are making them richer, but you're burning the candle so rapidly by de-industrializing, moving everything into paper that all of a sudden when you find yourself in a position like we're in now where China is racing away from US debt.

Again, we'll get into the specifics of that later, but just understand right now you've got China racing away from US debt, buying gold at like freakish levels, the US having put all of its bets on the financial market, so financializing everything, not being able to make anything. So, I would like to remind the Trump administration, be very careful trying to prosecute a war when you don't have the ability to manufacture at the rate that you once did. And so if all of your swagger and cockurity is based on a time long gone by, then this is going to get very difficult for us to put enough pressure on the Iranians to actually get them to concede and want a deal.

And so I don't think people are being honest about how big Iran is, about just how many people, 93 million people are. You can spend a lot of munitions, billions of dollars, piss a whole lot of people off, and still just not be able to do enough damage to control the entire length of the straight. I forget how many miles it is, but it's a lot. And so, there is a lot of places that you have to cover that they can just keep popping up new stuff.

And if China is moving away from the US hard enough, aggressively enough, and they want to see Iran um be able to continue to ship oil in a way that's friendly to them, and they just sort of subtly in the background are on the Iranian side. Uh this gets way harder than I think we expected it to be when we went into this. So yeah, this one is um thankfully so far not been us with troops on the ground, though there are rumors that we've tried some things.

They're just rumors right now, so I'll leave that alone. But this is not going to be a simple thing to prosecute. And so watching Trump try to deal with this as he comes into the midterms is going to be wild. And then all of this nested inside of look at what's happening to the oil price. Guys, given what's going on, oil, if the old model was correct and China's demand is what we thought it once was, then you would expect oil to truly have reached the $200 per barrel that we were being predicted we were going to hit.

And now we're still what hovering at a little over a 100. So uh and then the long tail again look at the long tail. What's happening there says people are actually expecting deflation not inflation which is crazy uh in the longish term. And by long term I'm only talking 6 to 12 months. I'm not talking you don't have to throw it too far out before you start seeing those numbers come down. Uh so the world is not what it seems at this point. Uh we're all being propagandized.

It's just hard and fast as people can propagandize us. And so, um, this is far trickier than people want it to be. And so, we better be developing a more sophisticated plan, uh, than what I've seen us do now. So, plan on the table now is disproportionate response. And I'll be it'll be interesting to see to to hear you guys' reaction to this, but I think one it is so abundantly clear that either their messaging about Iran was just wrong and the new messaging that we're getting from um Marco Rubio is now the real messaging that they should have been giving us from the beginning, which goes like this.

Um yes, this is about Iran's nuclear program, but it's it's about all the ancillary things that go along with that. So think about their missile programs. They were building up all these missile programs so that they had everything they would need to put a nuclear warhead on this. And so even if we have destroyed their ability to produce all of the nuclear weapons, the fact that they are able to build these offensive and defensive capabilities up so aggressively means that they could put themselves in a situation where we wouldn't any longer be able to stop them.

And so the messaging from the beginning, maybe maybe if they were being honest from the beginning should have sounded more like that. These guys are on the brink of being able to stop us from stopping them. Not that they were, you know, literally a week away from nuclear weapons, but that they were getting way too close to having the defensive capabilities that they would need to make it impossible for us to come in. Now, that's actually believable because what I'm seeing now is they may have already crossed that.

They may already have such strong defensive and offensive capabilities that they can be a big enough pain in the ass. And I know everybody tries to write it off. Oh, it's just a couple drones, but now they're they've got their micro submarines. I think people are calling them [ __ ] submarines if I'm not mistaken. mistaken. mistaken. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, exactly. Little people submarines. I don't know. What's the right way to say it? say it? say it? Little people subs. Crazy. Can we share this? But I think they really Yeah, they literally call them [ __ ] submarines.

All right. So, uh, little people submarines, whatever the right word is. Uh, so they're they are going to get better and better at being able to cause problems. And so, given the scope and size of Iran, if we all break free of the propaganda of what we've been led to believe is Iran, Iran is not a gigantic desert full of old uh, people. Iran is a very young population. Iran is a very lush and fertile area. Um, do they have deserts? Yes, of course they do.

but they also have incredible mountainous regions um plenty of things that they can be self-reliant on. So, I think that um trying to dismiss them as not a truly formidable foe is a mistake. And all the messaging that we were getting coming into this was just, oh, these guys are a bunch of lunatics. They're going to be easy to wipe out. We're just going to buy force, take out their um nuclear installations, and that's going to be that. And so the desire to propagandize, to give Trump's base red meat, and just every time we drop a single bomb, we're like, "Oh, they've been obliterated.

There's nothing left." All of that messaging has created the problem for themselves. If they had been honest in the beginning, and said, "Listen, what this is really about is these guys are building up such capabilities that they would be able to bully everybody in the region, including us, because they only need to achieve asymmetric um capabilities. and now we're just not going to be able to stop them. And so we have this one sort of window remaining. First of all, me, this is, you know, if I'm advising Trump, you've got me, the only president that's actually willing to do something about it.

And so it's possible that the window is measured in three or four years that it's not like it's the next few months. But to actually prosecute this, well, we've got to get moving now. We've got to try to press the advantage while we still have a bigger advantage. And every day that we delay, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem. And because down the road they've just continued to escalate their nuclear program such that if they got to the point where nobody was going to be able to stop them, they only have a few remaining pieces to put in place and boom, now they can really start attacking people.

So we're going to have to move in and do this thing. Now literally, I'm obviously paraphrasing, but that is roughly the messaging that just now Rubio is finally able to articulate. articulate. articulate. I fear that the reason that the messaging has been so discombobulated is what we've actually seen is an emotional sense of oh I get what I Trump an emotional sense of I get what I need to do to go in and get myself on Mount Rushmore and so I'm going to go in I'm going to slap these guys around.

Remember he was coming off that big victory in Venezuela and so I just think he was too cockshore and he was like yeah this is going to be fine and now we're finally getting the like listen this is actually what this was about. Now, you can still say that that was stupid and that what a total misread or the US has no right to do that. All of those that's a very worthy debate, but at least now we're getting something where I can go, okay, there's internal logic here.

I understand now what you're trying to do, but now that we're talking the real game, did we just wait too long? And if we waited too long and this is something that you either should have done in Trump's first term or this should have been something Bush won or two or Obama should have handled and now like the jig is up and it's they really are already in that position. Um we have to face that and we have to say in the light of what they actually can do, what is the path out of this?

Show me path one. Show me path two. Show me path three. Uh that's going to be hard because obviously they can't lay all their cards on the table but they are in a republic. Uh, and so you have to convince the population and if you don't convince the public of what you're doing, then you get voted out of office. And so, man, we're just in a really weird and difficult position. And ironically, uh, the only thing that's offering any sort of salvation from an everyday person perspective in terms of the cost of oil is that the Chinese economy is struggling.

And so, that's wild. It it is one of those things where when you try to figure out why none of this is perfectly predictable, it's because of [ __ ] like that. Like, who would have thought that the um housing crisis that China is going through right now, which they've done everything economically, he would need to just make this to be a completely untenable war. So, you have just enough where he can keep going. And oil's still only at like $100 a barrel. Uh Uh Uh and China's still doing well enough that they can like keep going, keep doing their thing, keep moving away from the dollar.

They just dumped like $663 million a billion dollars, excuse me, if I'm remembering right, of treasuries like in the last week or something, which is like putting so much pressure on us from an economic standpoint. Everything is economic. Uh, yeah, dude. This one is when you lay out the known things, forget the unknowns. When you lay out the known things of what's happening, all of this becomes quagmirey. like there's not going to be any easy way out of this. Um, I'm not going to say I called it, but I'm going to say I called it.

I feel like from day one I was like, this is a forever war. And I think that there's two things. You can go the Simon Dixon route and say there was incentives there. Trump could get a golf course in Tyrron. Uh Jared Kushner is getting money hand over fist. He's in Trump's ear. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be a two week. We'll we'll make it happen. I got it. So there's all the financial incentives that lets Trump and his family wants to get involved and get messy. But then on the flip side, we have like the Vietnam of it all where it's like, "Oh, this small country will bomb the life out of them." And then now that we got guys popping out of deserts, guys in do-aggs that's going to be attacking us and we're not going to be able to have the necessary wherewithal to withstand that war.

So it's like to me, I would much rather him go fast and furious and bomb everything and just be the bad guy and shrug his shoulders and just be like, "Yeah, I did it, whatever." Rather than this, this, this, we're at war. We're not really at war. We're at war. like this double like this hopscotch like approach that we're doing. doing. doing. Here's the good news for your advice. He's running that playbook now and it just becomes a question of do we have the munitions and the allies to pull it off because a lot of this is going to be how does the Middle East respond to this?

If they get pissed and they feel like okay fine, [ __ ] like we've just got to fight Iran full on right now. This is the time. I wish Trump hadn't made the move but he did. We are where we are. Which by the way that'll be the one thing where um I'll let historians debate whether we should have gotten into the war or not. That's fine. In the fullness of time, people have a much clearer picture of what's going on. But right now, the conversation that we all need to be having is we're in it.

Okay, now that we're in it, what are we going to do? And I fully expect that there will be a cacophony of voices that say we just need to back the [ __ ] out and we need to accept that our time is empire has faded and there's no more free transiting of the seas. Um because we're seeing little fires all over the place of people like the uh Bob El Mandab straight now that the Houthies are like a [ __ ] it. We're going to get involved. Uh Rubio's trying to wave them off and say, "Kids, do you guys The last time we went in and bombed the [ __ ] out of you, you guys backed off.

You touched the stove. You realized it was a bad idea." idea." idea." And Israel's been waiting to kill a Houthy. They They love getting them dudes. Israel been waiting. Israel's like, "Please, please let me kill. They in Lebanon. They in Jordan. They're in Saudia. where where I got to go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, it is uh God, that whole part of this so secretly, Drew, when I'm not on camera, I spend so much time on like the Israel Palestine of it all. There there is something so deeply revelatory of the human experience there.

And because of my mental model of the world, it doesn't matter if you're Jewish or you're um you're um you're um uh part of an Islamic extreme group, whatever, or [ __ ] Uh it it is just facets of the human mind. And so for me, this is just like all of these things reside inside myself. That's how I see this. It's like, oh damn. Okay. So that's what if if id grown up there, that's how I would have played out. If I grew up there, that's how I'd play out.

These are all just value systems. We are all capable of imbuing all of these value systems. Very true. Uh remember, read the book, ordinary men. It was ordinary men in Germany that took pregnant women out in the field, stripped them naked, and shot them in the back of the head. Ordinary men. men. men. Uh so all of us can fall victim to this because of the way that the human mind is. And so watching the human mind play out in this very specific way based on these very specific cultures and collisions of cultures is so fascinating because I'm going to get myself in trouble here.

I don't know if we just want to put a period on that or if we want me to fractal deep into Palestine, Israel, but like we had a couple [ __ ] is okay. Here we go. We haven't heard that one in a while. a while. a while. There it is. Let's go. V. Let's go. R is ready. Activated. I I like to think they haven't used that cuz I I have developed so much more discipline uh on my non-fracking but uh okay so everybody knows my mental model I hope at this point it's it's a question of values and beliefs so everything is downstream of that the way that you behave you have a set of things that you believe to be true both of the way the world is and the way that the world ought to be the ought to be part is your value system okay humans are capable of developing virtually any belief system virtually any value system but you can't understand their behavior until you're downstream dream of that.

So you get the nation of Israel, say what you will, it does exist. And so now you've got this collision of like this really old school mentality from like the Old Testament Bible mixed with all of the economic like awakening that European Jews had. Uh you can certainly point to the Rothschilds and all that, but like they really figure out the economic game. The more I learn about usery and all that stuff, the more I realize anybody trying to bring the usery conversation into modern era is [ __ ] [ __ ] They just don't understand.

So if you're trying to pass like a moral thing about usery, it's because you don't understand central banks. So it's like that comment makes sense when the money supply can't expand. when the money supply can expand then all of a sudden the modern miracle even though I think in the final analysis that central banks the way that we do them creates a moral hazard that becomes deeply problematic but setting that aside for a second uh the modern world is brought to you by charging interest. So it ends up becoming this incredible debt becomes just an absolute miracle.

So anyway you get all that coming into the Middle East. Now you've got a um a hurting society from the Middle East where revenge is everything. You can't ever let anybody slight you. That by the way, many um people many Jews that just never left the Middle East still had that hardcore mentality. But you get that's the whole rise early and kill first thing. thing. thing. Then you get that mixed with but we also know how to do the economic game. And so Israel springs up [ __ ] they build all this insane [ __ ] Absolutely incredible, breathtaking.

uh the only democracy in the Middle East, yada yada yada. But it's infused with but we understand the mentality of this region which is you cannot let people [ __ ] with you and if they [ __ ] with you, you got to hit them hard. And by the way, just the religious extremism on both sides. Like I'm just doing what God tells me to do. And so both sides actually can say to themselves with a straight [ __ ] face, God is on our side. That [ __ ] is so dangerous. Bob Dylan wrote a song about that.

People should listen to it. It's incredible. incredible. incredible. I believe God doesn't exist. So, he's not on anybody's side. So, you But you've got people that really believe I'm doing God's work. And so, I believe in you can't let anybody [ __ ] with you and I'm doing God's work. So, I can't let these people [ __ ] with me in the name of God. So, whichever god you believe in. And so, it gets [ __ ] wild. And so now you're in you've got the US which is like the most unable to build a mental model of the Middle East which has a very different value system.

And so we're trying to do the big dick swagger of American military everything's bigger in Texas vibes. Uh you know we've come in we've just for the last 250 years we've been the gangster. And so we come in and try to slap people around not understanding the ferocity of the mentality of the region of like no no no we don't play that game. We we will fight to the last man. So you brought up the um Vietnam War. I would like to remind everybody in the name of don't underestimate your opponent.

Um, the Vietkong disassembled disassembled disassembled tanks, tanks, tanks, carried the parts of the tanks over these mountains that were considered impenetrable. So, um, they were like, "Oh, we're safe. There's no way they're going to be able to get their um, weapons big enough to defeat us over those mountains, natural uh, border." They [ __ ] disassembled tanks and brought them on the other side. Don't be careful who you [ __ ] with. Yep. Because if people have that kind of uh mentality, so if you believe I'm doing God's work and you have a cultural value system that absolutely says you cannot let people do you wrong and you've got high intelligence, which just assume the Iranians have high intelligence and an insane will to win.

Oo buddy, anybody that comes after you is about to be tested for real. For real. And so now we're about to find out if given that we have gutted our manufacturing base, can we spin our manufacturing base back up fast enough to actually do what you're saying, which is all right, we're in it now. [ __ ] win. win. win. No, but I mean, if we really call Palmer like, "Hey, bro, I need 200 of them disposable missiles. Like, hit me with it." I feel like he can spin it up.

I feel like there's enough. We're about to find out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, so I'm American. I want to see America win. I grew up in the 80s, so I've got like Rambo in my veins and I want to see us win. I would have liked to see this not be a necessary thing. I don't have enough intel to know if this really was wise to move on it. That's why I say historians will figure all that out. But we are in it now.

The fact that we're in it now, we've got to win it. So, yes, I want to see Palmer Lucky, uh, Elon Musk, all of our brilliant engineers come together and just show that America can't be stopped now that we're in it. Um, but we're gonna find out if that's going to be possible. possible. possible. We are going to find out if that's possible. Um, okay. So, I want to take a step back from the international war and I want to look at a much deeper domestic war.

What I what do I mean by that? Um, anthropic is dirty macking. And for those that don't know, dirty macking is when you like your friend and his girlfriend are going through something and you're trying to console her, but you're making like you're saying bad things about your friend while you're consoling her. So, you're not really helping him, you're making yourself look good in that. It's that type of thing. Exactly. Um, Anthropic was supposed to save the world. We were supposed to get protein folding, but now all of a sudden we're getting lobby groups.

We're getting restriction on Chinese open- source models. The price of AI was tanking. My sister called me the other day like, "Yo, Chad GBT is $30 a month right now." I'm like, "Oh, go China. It's free." Wait, what? I have I don't have to pay for this anymore. Like, there's a bunch of regulatory capture, investment capture. They're trying to get like solidify their coffers in front of the IPO. What's your read on this anthropic open AI regulatory capture thing? Yeah, this one is wild. So, Daario Adanthropic just cannot help himself but go for regulatory capture.

To that end, Anthropic just put another $20 million into public first action, which brings our total to public first action to $40 million. Public first action is the policy arm of a super PAC backing candidates who support AI guardrails. Now, I imagine many of you are like, "Yes, I want me some AI guardrails." There's 30 to 50 of these people, uh, politicians that are being benefited from the super PAC. They're from both parties. And all of this is happening right now, just ahead of the midterms.

If you hate money in politics, let's talk about how this actually works. So, Daario himself has kicked in a million dollars of his own money. Anthropic employees have also added $2.15 million just last quarter. Now, you could say, "Well, these are the people closest to the problem. They understand that this could be very high risk and that we need to put guard rails on it." So, I will remind you what they're not telling you is that Chinese open source models already exist. The cat is already out of the bag.

And so, you're not going to be able to stop people from accessing these tools. So, when you say we need to put guard rails on this, who are you trying to help? Exactly. Now, the punchline becomes you're trying to help Anthropic or you're trying to help OpenAI. are trying to use regulation not to keep people safe because it won't work. It's like saying um I'm going to put all kinds of restrictions on the weapons that I can use knowing that there is another weapons manufacturer that's just handing out their weapons like candy to anybody who wants them for free.

So it's like are we really making the world safer? Now we can all certainly say I wish I wasn't in the world where these weapons existed. That is a very reasonable lament. But again, you are in a world where they exist. And so now as OpenAI goes ham, what are they really protecting? Are they actually protecting the world from safety or are they putting limitations so that they can protect at least here in America they can protect their share price? And so I will make the case that they are doing everything they can to protect their share price.

How do I know? Okay, the game of regulatory capture works like this. regulations become incredibly ownorous. Meaning there's a whole lot of very difficult and read by difficulty expensive. There's a whole lot of very expensive things that you need to do in order to um comply. And so what will happen is you get this young startup, they are the maverick. They do all the crazy stuff. They're down in the dirt. They're grinding. They're attracting the best talent. They've got this big vision. They're getting everybody excited.

And they do the impossible. And they build a company that's just growing fast. and Anthropics revenue is growing fast. We're going to hear a little bit about this when we get to David Saxs. So, they're growing fast. Very exciting times ahead. However, by getting the regulation and by being the company that has the fast growing revenues, you become the company that can afford to comply. And now, of course, in the name of safety, which it always comes in the name of safety. In the name of safety, you get all these regulations put in place that end up keeping out who you were five or six years ago, the young upstart just trying to get things going and trying to get things off the ground.

So, this would be the equivalent. So, at Quest, we're building that, right? We do a thing that nobody's done. like we've done this incredibly difficult thing of finding a way to manufacture these products to make sure that they can be made without having sugar in them but taste like they have sugar. Now imagine that I went around and started campaigning saying listen we did it but the process of making this equipment is very dangerous. You you just cannot let a whole bunch of people own this equipment.

It's way too risky. The product that you're making is way too powerful. And so listen, just to keep everybody safe, and I'm the one that close to this. I know how dangerous these things are. So to make sure that this new technology that is so high-risisk and so dangerous is only used for good, let's make sure that we have regulators that come in that are able to make sure that everything is being done right, that you've got all these checks and balances on the product that's being output just to make sure that everybody's safe.

And so now let's say that we make the startup cost of a business dramatically more expensive in just nominal raw terms. So it maybe now it's $10 million to get off the ground. Now for a company of Quest size or for a company of anthropic size that is quite literally chump change. But when we were starting that would have been the difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it. And so now you just kill off all of this innovation. And the innovation often comes from those small companies that have a dream.

They have a vision. They're able to attract talent who is very frustrated with the state of the world. And they harness that frustration to create something not backed by a lot of dollars, but backed by insights, backed by a willingness to work, to try new things, that you don't have all of that infrastructure slowing you down or dragging you down. And so innovation often comes from the new person. It doesn't come from the incumbent. And when you look at how these big leaps of innovation move the world forward, it's often that the old company becomes stodgy.

Everything becomes um calcified. They're not nimble anymore. And it's these new upstarts. And so regulatory capture is designed to kill all of the new upstarts in the cradle. And that's how you end up not having innovation. Now, if they were actually going to be able to deliver safety, I might feel very differently about this, but for the reasons that I've already explained, they won't be able to deliver the safety, but they will be able to kill off the people that are trying to unseat them. And so, that's why people should be grossed out in the extreme whenever you hear somebody banging the drum and saying, "Oh, we've got to protect people.

We've got to get all this regulation." That doesn't mean you want zero regulation. I certainly do not. I want some regulation. I think that that's very smart, but you're going to get very rapidly into heavy-handed stuff. Okay. Uh David Saxs, AISAR, very successful entrepreneurs, one of the most successful operators of our time. And I very specifically say operator because operating a business is ridiculously difficult. So being able to start, scale, uh successfully exit multiple companies, this guy is in like absolutely rarified air. I was so excited when he became the AISAR.

I've explained my thoughts on this. I'm out over my skis on this one, but I think given that the messaging on AI starting to shift to Scott Besson, I think David Saxs, who is a voice of reason in my opinion, is being pushed to the outskirts the outskirts the outskirts and the Trump administration is going to fall for all the regulatory capture stuff. Um, but anyway, this is what David Saxs had to say uh about that. He put out a tweet and it reads, "It's true that Anthropic is the fastest growing company that Silicon Valley has ever seen." Crazy.

Uh which is all the mo all the more reason their incessant attempts at regulatory capture are not just unnecessary but frankly gross. So when you have somebody that has done this over and over and over and is now at this stage in his career lending his very significant talents to the government to say listen this is a game that we see play out all the time and we've all said this is a bad thing and now yet it's being used once again to squash small companies in favor of the big companies on the single most important technology the world has ever seen.

Uh this gets to be in my estimation very problematic. It's unfortunate too because we were joking before we started like you really start off as the hero and live long enough to see yourself turned into the villain because it was so there's so much excitement and even the people that were pessimistic about AI there was still like okay at least it's a better search engine you know there was at least like okay it's cool it's not going to be this robots are coming everywhere but it's at least going to replace Google but then we just start to see like slowly but slowly they're starting to do more things that seem more malicious than actually with good intent for example one of the things that they're parading um about with Chinese models is how they're stealing the IP and then a lot of people are now saying well that's kind of ironic for you know LLM to say because you stole all the IP of the internet ever.

So it's kind of like like like I can do it but when you do it to me it's wrong. it's wrong. it's wrong. Yeah, I I get the argument and it it is an argument that is worth having. There will be people that will be able to debate on both sides on that one. And I find myself coming down on the other side of that. Yes, we do need to protect IP and yes, China has a long-standing history of doing this. They know they're violating their terms, which is precisely why they're spinning up fake accounts, tens of thousands of fake accounts to go and do it.

And so this comes down to like uh when wow, we never ended up getting to cover this, which makes me very sad. There are so many things at the fringes uh I want to start pushing more to to cover in the show. But one thing that happened in the anime community was there were these um guys that were running an anime pirate site and the pirate site got shut down. The guys got arrested. I I don't remember if they were in Vietnam or somewhere but somewhere in East Asia and it got shut down and the anime community was basically on the side of free those guys.

They they were only doing something good. Now, those same people are going to make all kinds of noise and freak the [ __ ] out when they hear that Japanese animation companies are abusing their workers and not paying them enough. Well, guess why? Because there's no money. There's not enough money in this. Guess why? Because people pirate the [ __ ] And so, people want to watch it and they just go watch it for free. And the whole community celebrates the people that get a hold of the IP for free, build their own company, make money off the back of these guys that are working their nuts off in Japan to the point where like they were really breaking the mentality of some people.

There was one like maybe five or six years ago where the guy goes in and basically burns the entire studio down, kills I forget how many people that couldn't get out because he was just so frazzled, so taken advantage of in his mind. And so it's like, okay, wait, which side are you on? Because at some point this stuff has to make money. You, dear person at home, won't work for free. There in lies the problem. These things have to make money. And so we can get into all the asinine [ __ ] about the DSA saying nobody has the right to double digit profit margins.

[ __ ] you do not know what the right profit margin is. This is why you let the free market do it. And if nobody wants anime, then [ __ ] them. They're going to go out of business. But when you're cheering for the guy that's stealing the IP and lamenting the person that's not getting paid enough for making it, it's like, what the [ __ ] are we talking about? So, it just gets so [ __ ] so fast. So, you've got Anthropic making a thing. And they say, if you would like to use this thing, here are our terms of service.

If you adhere to them, use away. If you don't adhere to them and you were using it to distill our model and make something else, you have violated our terms. That's against the law. You can't do that. And so China has a very long-standing wellocumented history of doing exactly that. And they will go, "Oh, you want us to make your insert whatever thing is." Cool. We're going to do that. Send over all of your uh breakdowns of the description and all that and we're going to go do the thing.

Now, Now, Now, once they get it, they then spin up their own version of it. Now, if you really want to compare what's going on with the AI companies that you can like really go after them for, because I don't think it is learning from the entire corpus of human knowledge, all humans do that. We're totally fine when humans do it and we are somehow not fine when AI does it and then gives us back the ability to use that. That one seems crazy to me.

But the one that seems legitimate is you've got these guys spinning up um the distillation models and they're learning all of that and you've got AI basically um trying to stop everybody from being able to use open- source models. That to me is some [ __ ] It's like, hey, if somebody's able to build an open source model and you're trying to use regulatory capture to shut them down, all right, that's ass. That's somebody that's trying to build walls to stop anybody else from being able to do what they're doing.

That doesn't make any sense to me. Can I play devil's advocate, please? please? please? I feel like China just out capitalism anthropic. Okay, terms and condition. I can make an account. Cool. You didn't say I could make 10,000 accounts and I felt like they found their gap and now they're like monopolizing on it. And I think that anthropic is a little butt hurt because they thought that they can monopolize on anybody. I can steal a little bit of your books. I'm not stealing the whole book.

And now people are stealing their stuff and now they feel a type of way. Well, so if you think about uh an open source model being built in a similar way that a frontier model is being built, I love that. That's awesome. Nobody should be trying to shut that model down. Uh if however I make something and uh in fact going back to the um the um the um another thing that AI is doing that I think you can compare directly that's just like a non-starter is that when like I forget which apps it was Slack it's one of those like that I don't think it was but Figma thank you so Figma is using AI AI is sucking all their data away from them and now building a competitor to Figma that's ass that should not be allowed that [ __ ] should be shut immediately we all know exactly what they're doing.

So that one to me is like [ __ ] bad form in the extreme. So those to me are direct parallels. But when you go these are our terms of service, you're using it in a way that you are trying specifically to steal my IP. I think that's bad mojo. Now if they were able to like trying to make a car analogy, like if you're able to get a car, break it apart, look at it, and go, "Okay, cool. I now understand the engineering. you're not violating any patents and you go do it yourself.

Okay, great. That I get. But this is quite literally saying, I'm going to let you train the model, which is very expensive, and then I'm going to learn off of its back specifically to make something I wouldn't be able to make without that existing, and it violates your terms of service. So, that's where it's like that becomes parasitic in my opinion because of all the cash investments that they had to make to make the first one. And so you'll end up actually, it'll be interesting to see if you fundamentally break the technology and just stall us out because if it becomes something where no one can afford to make the frontier models because they just immediately get undercut by open source models that are illegally trained on them, them, them, then now it's like our progress is going to stall.

It might not stop because you still have a lot of algorithmic juice that you can squeeze out of it. Um, but I think that all of us, well, anybody that wants to see AI continue to advance, which I do, and I know that many people do not. Um, but if you want AI to continue to advance, you want to make sure that there actually is a financial avenue because people won't do it if they have to work for free and just the chips. No, I don't know.

But I I could use another example. It's like the fashion industry, right? So, Coach came up with like the really big baggy pants that Kendrick wore on the Super Bowl. Bowl. Bowl. That started the new trend of the very big baggy pants that everybody's wearing. And then you go to American Eagle, Sheen, Aerero Pastel. It's their version of the big baggy pants. So I think fashion is a great indicator of like Louis Vuitton customized the bag and now everybody has a all over print duffel bag.

Like there are these one frontier company does it and then other companies take their iteration of it and they make sub companies from that. I totally hear what you're saying. Yeah. If if I'm mixing that up, let me know. But I feel like other industries, why is AI special? Here's why. Here's what the difference is. I'm going to use a survival crafting game, which I'm sure will surprise nobody. I'm going to use a survival crafting game as an example of why this matters. Okay, so in a survival crafting game, you've got to go out and you've got to like do this insane work to get like specific objects that power a an ability, right?

So, in Kaizen, we have this thing called a stair hack tool. So, um one thing that I both think is brilliant in Minecraft and you find annoying as the game progresses is you can build a staircase out of anything. So, you can go down, you can go up at any time. You're never going to be lost. You can always re get back to the surface or get all the way down to bedrock just by uh breaking the blocks in a in a certain way. And I was like, "Okay, cool.

For early game, but later in the game, I want something where I can just be like three steps like instantaneously." instantaneously." instantaneously." And if you make that too easy, the game stops being fun. So, you need this hard thing that you have to go get to run the stair hack tool. Okay. Now, imagine that what you're doing. And I say, "Hey, you can buy my stair hack tool. You can break it apart. It's fine. and it's yours. But what you can't do is break it apart specifically to get the thing to now build a competitive tool.

That's the one thing that we don't allow. You can buy all of that. You could extract it uh to have it for your own non-commercial purposes. This is like when you um create a broadcast of UFC and you say, "Hey, you can hold a watch party. You can't charge for it. Uh you also can't broadcast it broadly. So you can have people over to your house. You can let them watch it." Now, the reason that you do that is you've got to be able to create an appetite.

You have to create a market. Otherwise, there's no financial viability. And so, for this thing to exist, you can't broadcast it out and then allow other people to broadcast it. And so, we literally have the FBI go track people down that did that and say, "You charged on the back of this thing or you gave this thing away that eroded the market and we don't allow that." Same idea. They did a really hard thing to make this thing exist, the the AI model to exist. If you want to use the AI model to learn, great.

If you want to reverse engineer by asking it questions and figure out, oh, this is how this is all working and then you go build your own thing based on the engineering of how we have to get to this point, all great. But if you create something where it's like, I've imbued this with a really hard thing, a magical diamond in the center of it, and all you do is wait till I do the incredible hard part, which is actually mining it. You do the very easy part, disassembly, and now you have the same diamond.

and now you're going to give that away for free because it was essentially free for you to extract it. Now you break the entire marketplace. And so what we have done historically with things like broadcasting the UFC is we say for the UFC to continue to exist, we are going to put the FBI on tracking people down that erode that market. Now for anybody that's communist or whatever that's like [ __ ] it, it should all be free. Um it's at least an argument and there's coherence to it.

everything should be free. And it's like, yep, it will be and it will be nothing. You will get nothing for free. It'll all be free. It just be nothing because no one's going to go do the hard work of extracting that rare little [ __ ] diamond or whatever. So, we put what are artificial limitations on it because we want to protect that the marketplace exists so that there's incentive for people to do the brutally difficult thing. And one of the signatures of the modern era is that we've done such a good job of collecting the brutally difficult thing that people are now coming along and saying, "I don't see what the problem is.

I own this [ __ ] thing. So, I'm going to strip it." Whether that's taxes, so I'm mom Donnie, you're in New York. You run a business. I should be able to tax you as much as I want. It's like, okay, but when you do that over time, you get less of what you tax. And so, you'll just get less entrepreneurs, but it will last long enough. you'll be able to drag that out long enough that by the time the city falls, no one's going to blame the original taxes.

And so this is exactly what happened in the Bronx and people were burning buildings down because they froze rent and all that. We're still repeating the same mistake, which is [ __ ] crazy. But nonetheless, we get to a point where we've been able to live in a world where people do the hard extraction and they make the really cool things. We built all these insane data centers and put more money into data centers than we've ever put into anything. That is the the rare magical diamond that I'm talking about that they did.

built the data centers, did the frontier model training, all of that, and now we've got somebody that's like, "Thank you for doing the really hard part, and now I'm just going to give it away for free." That will destroy the market. And so, if we're like, "Okay, well, [ __ ] it. We don't care." And we just want to dissipate AI and it's going to fizzle out and it'll just be whatever uh we've learned up to this point and, you know, that's that and we'll get some efficiencies out of it, but that's going to be the end of the game.

um that you would be accepting that fate and it is a fate we don't accept anywhere else and now all of a sudden are accepting in the um AI field which I think would be a huge mistake that humanity will pay a gigantic price for. But for people that hate AI, I get why they'll they won't say the real thing which is I just want to see AI die. And so yes, we're going to strip mine these things and make sure that it's financially unviable. Um, but for reasons like protein folding, I don't want to see that happen.

Um, we have the best chat in the in the internet and I want to like publicly like proclaim their greatness because Jensen Wong just released a open letter about open source. I'm reading this live. I looked at the last two paragraphs. I think this is where the juice is. There might be some more juice. I apologize. I am producing, listening, and reading at the same time, which is not easy. Um but he said in fact openness may be the one important path to AI safety and security.

Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe. They can be breached, misused or fall or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results it results in a small number of single points of failure weakens competition and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models on the other hand allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time.

Just as open source software demonstrated that transparency can be more secure than obscurity, AI safety men depend on giving more people the ability to test and strengthen miles on which society relies, it allows for vigorous benchmarking and evaluation, red teaming, and protections tied to real and demonstrated harm rather than assuming that closed miles closed systems are safer by default. Um, last thing, a safe AI ecosystem is not a foregone conclusion. Policy makers have an important opportunity to act. This includes expanding access to compute for startups and researchers, investing in shared training assets, data sets, tools, evaluation frameworks, and keeping the front frontier plural by avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.

These measures must also look at how strong application layers can expand sovereign use of AI across the economy. Okay, so Jensen is saying exactly what I'm saying. M so what he's trying to point out is that um regulatory capture will be the death of AI. of AI. of AI. Stop thinking that by um putting these guard rails on it that you're going to make the closed ecosystem safe. That's not the path to safety. What he's saying is the path to safety is to put public resources behind this.

So remember how all of this started. Open AI started as Elon Musk trying to convince the world not to develop AI. He could not get anybody interested. So for anybody that forgets the timeline, Elon Musk went after politicians for I think he said like five years and he said nobody would listen to him. And so finally he became fatalistic and he said AI is going to happen. So let me do this the right way. So I'm going to create an open source model for AI to ensure everybody has access to it.

Think of it as like the ultimate proliferation of nuclear weapons. Everybody has it. Mutually assured destruction or it's probably better to not use that. It's you you have the best defense because everybody has access to the same like high tier model. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Now, forget whether OpenAI should have switched over to being a closed model, but listen to the rationale as to why they went to a closed model. Most people are going to say the only real answer was they wanted to get filthy rich.

Cool. I'm sure that's part of it. And I'm sure in their reasoning that strong emotion of, "Oh my god, if I did this, I would be a billionaire. This is [ __ ] crazy." One of the guys, Brockman, I forget his name. [ __ ] Sorry. uh whoever that was at OpenAI wrote in his [ __ ] diary which came out in uh court that like oh my god if we do this I'll be a billionaire like oh [ __ ] and so clearly it was a part of the reasoning but set that aside for a second the reason that they had to do it was they were like this is going to cost so much money that has borne out to be true even Elon Musk has put ungodly amounts of money and so whatever the 2004 400 uh million ion dollar that Elon put in the beginning, it is the smallest drop in a bucket of what ended up being invested.

It's trillions of dollars. So, the gap between what you're going to be able to raise in public funds versus at the time where, sorry, not public funds, uh, charitable funds, what they were able to raise in charitable funds was an absolute minuscule drop in the bucket. If we now want to go, okay, we need to treat this more like um this is something that the government needs to get behind because if it's locked behind a profit motive, it is going to be a closed system and therefore we'll never um we won't get the safest models that we could get.

They're going to fall to regulatory capture. So, we don't want to do that. We want to get back to this initial idea of it's going to be open source, but now we know that it's going to take trillions of dollars. The government's going to have to get involved. that solves my problem which is sorry magical uh diamond thing needs to be extracted. So, somebody has to pay for all of that to happen. And if we want to put our tax dollars towards it, then I just ask, what is the thing you're going to stop paying for to do it?

And if we're willing to stop paying for something to do that, great. But if we're not willing to do that, then you're going to have to rely on public companies. And so you get into this weird quagmire where China has an incentive to distill the models to steal all of that economic viability as a way to hurt the US market and I think as a way to move us away from financializing things which would be right now just absolutely destructive to the entire US economy economy economy and get more into the tangible world which you see them doing in gold and manufacturing which is even bigger for them.

So you've got these like two things happening simultaneously. And if we just go, "Oh, well, I think we all agree that open's better, so let China steal the market out from under us for the reasons that I walk through, that's nonsensical." If what we want to say is this was always meant to be a public good in the first place and so we want to move away from the profit motive and the government is going to start funding this to the tune of the trillions of dollars.

Um I'm certainly open to the debate but again for me you've got to figure out the moral hazard of just printing money. So it's like that's the complexity that's the whole thing. This is still very different. This did start out being open source for very good reasons. Now I don't know if Elon has backed away from this but at one point he said uh every time we launch a new model so let's say we do Grock 4 Gro 3 becomes open model when we do Grock 5 Grock 4 will become open model I don't know if he's actually doing it but he said that extraordinarily publicly about a year ago so my hope is that he really does hold to that and so the frontier model itself which only lasts say 6 months that frontier model will always be closed but then everything trailing behind it will be open and the people that want like the cutting edge, cutting edge, then they pay for it.

And people that are like, "Oh my god, this is plenty good." Then cool, they use it in open source fashion. Um, this is like a perfect segue to the new Amazon Bladeunner show where I think that this is one of those things. Would this conversation be as difficult or as hard if there wasn't the AI anxiety like tied around it? No, of course not. You know what I mean? Like cuz when it comes to pharmaceuticals and other things like Yeah, we got to regulations, shrink shoulders, internet companies.

Yeah, regulations, drugs, public utilities. Like there's other things that to me competition will do a lot better than what is currently the setup. But right now AI seems to be like either we hate it and we want it to be gone or we love it and we want nobody to touch it. And then there's people in the middle like we love it but we want the government to help. Like there's this like three-w weeave thing. So well the really bad news is the way you just said it is sensible that we're we love it, we're worried, we want the government to help.

I like that. Um we want regulation, we want government. What we have now is a government that has become a an absolutely morbidly obese tick that has drained the lifeblood out of the country for decades. Uh people can now finally feel it. They they think that they've been bled by the billionaires. But they've been bled by the government and their inability to map how money actually works and how the economy actually works is leaving them very confused. And so now we have this gigantic bloated entity that needs to be made smaller by the day as aggressively as we can without breaking something.

Um so you want light touch regulation on AI, you don't want heavy-handed regulatory capture. And so if the government was coming in and saying okay listen um here is what we expect from the output uh of a model and if it has you know xyz capabilities to hack or whatever um these are the consequences and so you've got some sense of like anybody can do it it is um you know what the the guidelines are but you can do whatever you want as long as they match that guideline and as long as that is specific enough you don't get into the regul population by um lawsuit, which is what they did during the um crypto days.

That was [ __ ] stupid. Literally criminal in my opinion. So, you don't want to do that. You want to just give people total clarity. Hey, this is what it is. But you don't want to make it something where it's millions of dollars to try to comply. It's like, no, no, no. If you either have these capabilities or you don't, and if you have these capabilities, you need to do this thing, whatever that is. um and you treat it like um something sensible. Uh in food for instance, you have something called generally recognized as safe.

Uh and so when you have things that are like all right, these things are fine. Go go go do whatever you can do and as long as they adhere to that, you're going to be good. And so it isn't crippling in the beginning. It's not easy. Like I remember when we started Quest, there's a lot of regulations. You have to be very careful, but it's like public health. So yeah, you got to take it seriously. But it wasn't crippling. It didn't stop us from starting a business.

um period. So you that's what you want, light touch. Now getting to your anxiety thing, the the big concern that I have there is that um humans are emotional creatures. We do not reason by logic. We reason entirely by emotion and we have so much fear around AI that people can actually ask seriously um what has AI done for us? That is the most ridiculous and absurd question I've ever heard. right now today if AI never improved. I was just at the doctor yesterday which oh god when you're 50 and you go to the doctor holy Jesus.

Um it was my doctor being like yo are you like paying attention to AI? And I'm like bro AI is like what I do and he was like oh my god it's changing medicine so much like this is so incredible. He was like the right now he was like even some of my wealthiest clients they go to Cedars they get a CT scan. He's like it will take them two weeks to get the results. He's like, "I want you to imagine that you're really in pain.

You're suffering from something and it takes two weeks to get your results back." He's like, "AI is going to change it all because it's so good at reading the scans." He was like, "The more this gets implemented, the more it's just going to be real time. Scan will pull up. AI will be like, here's your problem." And he was like, "It'll look, it'll compare your scans." So, it'll be like, "You've had a scan every year for the last 10 years. Here's your problem. This is the area.

It's changing. It's changing by this much. We are seeing all the data across all patients. We know that this means increased likelihood of this, that, or whatever." And he was just like gushing. He was like, "Oh my god, this is so transformative." And he's like, "I can't believe what a boon this is already to health." And I was like, "Bro, tell me about it." I'm like, "What about protein folding?" He's like, "Oh my god." And so I was like, it it was just seeing a doctor who's interfacing with this all day who knows the things that AI is doing right now today.

today. today. And he was like, and just watching it like slowly getting rolled out, he was like, "This is going to be just so incredible." And so that's what AI is doing already right now today. That's not new functionality. That's just roll out the functionality that you already have. have. have. And so people are letting their emotions run away with them. Tell them a story. Everything's going to be bad. This is all going to fall apart. Oh my god, robots everywhere taking over. Um, and they're letting that make them fight for something that isn't connected to reality.

For the reasons I've said a thousand times, the open models already exist. They are already out. They are never going away. If if you are draconian and you try to shut this down, you say, "If we catch you with AI, we're going to shoot you in the face," it's still already out. There will be people who wish you harm that already have these models. And if you, this is what we just saw with the um the attack of hugging face by OpenAI's newest model that escaped Anthropics, one of the two Open.

Open. Open. Uh so their model escapes, finds its way to the internet, goes hacks hugging face. Hugging Face tries to use, I think, Claude to shut it down, Fable 5, but it had been nerfed so much that they weren't able to stop it. And so now they're like, "Guys, we we had to go to a Chinese open model to be able to fight against this." That's already happened. So if you guard rail the [ __ ] out of it to the point where people that are willing to comply don't have access to it, the people who aren't willing to comply will leverage what already exists to come after you.

And that's the part that people just aren't being honest about. about. about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Then let's go forward, right? Because we always talk about like I feel like our tagline for this show is like the Tom Boogie Show. It's all economics. It does come back to like that. So I think what it really comes down to is the downstream effects. It's AI revolutionary technology. AI leads to robots. Robots needed no jobs. No jobs means I'm poor and I live in a tenement with my UBI check.

I think there's a a falsity in that logic. How about this? We haven't seen that yet. that yet. that yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't. I'm I'm just I'm projecting the anxiety. Yeah. What people think, you know what I mean? So, is it because there's economic insecurity that makes us apprehensive about AI where maybe in the past when there were previous technologies was like anybody can get on the internet. It's this new thing. Let's like we were excited to go on AOL and wait for 20 minutes to sign in.

We were excited to try Napster or we were excited to go into our email for the first time. And I think there that excitement isn't there with AI. Maybe that's what it is. That's really interesting. So here I'm I'm really glad you brought up Napster. So the way that these technologies always work is you have the people who have, let's say they're 35 plus, they've gotten to a point in their career where this new change is going to be devastating to them. And by the way, they are right.

There are going to be people who will not be able to quote unquote learn to code. They're not going to just be able to embrace AI. They will never get retrained. they're going to be going in some absolutely horrific, terrible direction, and this is only going to be worse for them. And in being worse for them, they're gonna be right to have all this anxiety. But just like with Napster, despite the fact that Metallica was screaming from the rooftops like this is terrible and we need to go after these people, kids are just like, "Nah, [ __ ] you.

Uh, it's better." And so, because it's better, I'm going to do it. And so that's how these technologies always come into play is that it really does hurt some people but it creates new opportunities elsewhere and only the people who get eroded by it are going to complain. The unique thing about AI and by the way that's true of everything. When the industrial revolution happened when electrification happened when the internet happened it really did it was devastating to people that were um unwilling or unable to shift into the new economy.

The waker uppers was crazy that that was actually like a thing when when you did that. Knocker upers or knocker uppers. Yeah. I was like, dude, there's really somebody that was your child. But go ahead. My bad. Yep. So you you are going to have that. The thing that's unique about AI is everybody thinks they're a knocker upper and so everybody's like, "Oh my god, this is going to replace me too." And so for the first time, it's so widespread that you really might have enough panic, especially because it's happening in a populous moment.

you might have enough panic that people really do in in a developed nation like the US put the kibos on it and then we will just see ourselves get out competed by countries that don't. And so I'll remind everybody that that don't put the kibash on it. I'll remind everybody of what just happened with Bology and going to the Singapore government. They're so anti-Israeli anti-Israeli anti-Israeli that they thought he was secretly um basically uh leveraging or not leveraging but attracting Israelis that were using a second passport.

And so what Bology did was like, okay, who who wants some of the best and brightest young entrepreneurs to come be in their country? Kazakhstan was like, yo, we ain't got [ __ ] going for us. That's why most of you couldn't point to us on a map if you tried, so why don't you come to us? And that's how it'll play out. So, um, even if the US and China were like, nah, [ __ ] this. Kazakhstan's going to be like, thank you for creating an opportunity for me.

It's going to be the open source AI hub. Exactly. And so just like America went from we're just some backwater colony of the UK and we became the greatest power on the globe by a country mile. You'll see a change in dynamic. Whoever embraces AI is going to win. Period. End of story. It is the ability to scale intelligence. Part of the reason that people say that demographics is destiny is because there's no way to bring on intelligence that doesn't take 18 years. Now there is.

AI is the ability to change demographics instantly overnight. And so that's where it's like uh kids, whoever embraces AI is going to win. It is a uh it is a super weapon because it's intelligence itself. Yeah. Um Yeah. Um Yeah. Um did you watch Bladeunner 2049? Uhhuh. Uhhuh. Uhhuh. Ryan is our like go-to movie guy. Did you watch like Blade? Bladerunner is one I haven't seen. Oh my god. 2049. uh is extra. They're both extraordinary. It's a visual feast. I definitely encourage people to watch it.

Um what's fascinating about the new one is a series. It's called Bladeunner 2099. And the premise of Bladeunner 2099 tells you everything that you need to know about this moment in uh the world, certainly the West, as we look at AI. And so the premise of the show is that there was a war between humans and replicants and the replicants win. Okay, so that's just a straight standin for humans and AI go to war and AI wins and now AI is better than humans or they're at least in control of humans and what does it mean to be human in a world where the replicants are in control and that that is literally just us grappling with okay what does it mean to still be human you know if there's something that's smarter than us better than us in control um and it will be very interesting I'll be very eager to watch this um I don't know if this is going to be like a woke retelling where it's like we're all victims and boohoo and you just have to like kill them and get rid of it.

Uh or if it's more a tale of um understanding the power of technology. So this is exactly the same question I was trying to answer. So when I wrote Neon Future, which was the comic book that I did uh five or six years ago, it took the exact opposite stance of AI and humans go to war and humans win. And now there are people that have integrated technology and AI into themselves and they're the ones that can promise the better future because the emotional humans, it's humans on both sides in my story, but the emotional humans who reject technology are actually moving the world backwards.

And because technology is a promise of a better tomorrow, you have to be draconian. You have to kill. You have to silence because those people have a dream of a better future. Whereas the only dream for anti-technologists is stagnation. And so I believe whenever those two impulses collide, stagnation will always and forever lose. Literally always and forever. You might be able to push us into the dark ages for a couple hundred years, but you'll just never be able to defeat the hope of a better tomorrow, which again, technology is best understood as the physical manifestation of the promise of a better tomorrow.

And so that is so innate to us. that drive will always kick in and it will it's exactly what pulled us out of the dark ages when it actually happened. So, I'm certainly not saying that we can't find ourselves in a dark ages, but I am saying on a long enough timeline, technology will always win. Well said. Um, all right, we got some super chats. super chats. super chats. Yes. And before we do, I've had this tab pulled up, so apologies if y'all mentioned it and I missed it, but David Saxs hasn't been AI or Cryptosar since 2026 when he stepped down.

Oh, I didn't realize he stepped down. Uh, it was a 130-day limit as a special government employee and then he ended up stepping down. So, I don't know if he served the full 130, but man, well, that changes my read. Thank you so much for bringing that up. Um, I had no idea. Okay, that may explain why Bessant now is taking over the dialogue on that on that on that and why he's kind of just gone to Twitter, I guess, to to talk about it. Well, that was sort of always his way.

He did way more on Twitter than he was ever doing in terms of public announcements. But, um, it certainly explains why he feels like he's now taking a back seat. All right. So, first up, [clears throat] Marushia Dark says, "Personal training and bespoke N of one plans might do more to fight socialism than general advice or broad policies. Think like Caleb Hammer meets Dr. K's HG coaching program at scale to give individuals hope in spite of circumstance. Uh, I always love N of One Plans, so I am totally on board with that.

I was thinking of um a format for a show that would be a little bit like Caleb Hammer, but um do you are you guys aware that there's like this whole I'll call it underground debate scene where like once you start getting into Israel Palestine, you're going to come across a lot of this debate scene and I guess some people do it on TikTok, some people do it on joust. Uh and you just like you're there and then you say I'm willing to debate these topics and then people come in, you debate for a while and then you move on.

The next person comes in, you debate for a while and you move on. Have you guys seen that? seen that? seen that? I've seen like the Jubilee version of that and like Dean Withers and stuff. Yeah, this is different. This is like live streamers that do battle with other live streamers in some cases, uh, which can get a little weird, but they anyway, they're live and they do this night after night after night. And I realized, wo, there's a whole subculture around debate specifically because it isn't a conversation, it's debate.

like they are trying to win, but there's no like agreed upon format. It's really fascinating. But anyway, we're raising an entire generation of people that they want to [ __ ] fight about their ideas. It's very interesting. So, it got me thinking, oh, would I ever find that interesting in my way? I'm not going to be there to try to win, but it would be interesting to go on and be like, all right, I want to hear from people that are communists. I want to hear from socialists and like bring them in and just talk like, "What am I missing?

What is the thing? Like, give me the information. Okay, but what about this?" It would be fascinating. Um, it looks exhausting, so I'm not sure that that's a format that suits my personality, but it did get me thinking in that um that Caleb hammery Caleb hammery Caleb hammery in terms of him as a uh content creator. She's saying something slightly different. Um, but yes, N of One is great. I love that. I think it's absolutely brilliant. Uh, and the future of a lot of this stuff may be just smashing these ideas together.

uh like the large hydron collider over and over and over so that people begin to map what the actual thing is so they can build their own plan. That's really my takeaway. takeaway. takeaway. Nice. Nice. Nice. Tom, Billy, Jubilee video win. No, because that's like a that's a format that I know that I won't do well at. But those guys, I'd be interested to see how many of those kids come out of this format because if you watch the Jubilee videos, these are not like randos.

In the very beginning, it felt a little bit like randos. And so the um the one person often times felt like they had an advantage over the people that they were arguing with. It's really shifting now and they're getting really sharp, well practiced people that know like all the okay, here's what the normal talking points are. Um it's in the Israel Palestine thing, it's really interesting to see. So like take a Medi Hassan, right? So Medi knows his side just extraordinarily well. He's one of the best representatives of that side.

Then you've got somebody like Nick Matau who's on the opposite side and they're you're never going to be able to knock them off with like the basic [ __ ] arguments. Like you you're going to be like 10 layers deep. You for instance with Nick Mattow you can't quote scripture. He'll just be like I've read the Quran more than you and so here are the defenses. Um it's very very interesting. And so Jubilee is starting to feel more like that. And so once you have one, like if every one of the people in the circle is equally prepared against that one person, they're going to have a hard time pulling out a a dub.

And so I think Jubilee as as debate becomes a thing where it's like these guys are armed on the topic, you're really better off in a 1v one situation because these are elite athletes. So it's like no matter how good, like take Jordan. If it's Jordan versus 25 people, Jordan's gonna lose every time at at the peak of his powers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so the I think it's interesting to see people getting so much better at the game, but I think it's it's going to end up being one v ones.

No. Yeah, cuz they're actually creating influencers in that way. And shout out to Jubilee. It's a great format. Um, but Dean Wither started there. There was that uh black girl with the dreads. She has like a podcast thing now. Matt Nuclear. Nuclear. Nuclear. Matt Nuclear. Yeah. He's somebody that comes across my feed. He's interesting. Yeah. So, there's a couple people that have created platforms from it just because they dunked on it. The Republican guy who always dresses in like a suit and tie. I forgot his name.

But But But Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin. No, no, no, no, no. He was started in the the the He was one of the ones that it was not a crowning achievement of his Yeah. Dave Room got political career. That's the problem. Like, so, first of all, I debate is probably not Dave's format. Um, Um, Um, yeah, it probably not his format. And so going up against these like top tier debaters and there's whatever 20 of them. Uh not not going to go well. How would you describe the debate trend?

Like someone else was searching that in YouTube. Is it like underground debates or like or like or like That's a really good question. I don't know what the name of it is. If you start looking up Joust TV or um live uh Tik Tok live political debate, you'll get on to it for sure. Um because those are the platforms where a lot of this is taking place. So, you'd be able to find it, I'm sure, pretty easily. Um, but for me, I encounter it as clips on um YouTube.

Got it. It's called like debate bro content and it I think it started with Steven Crowder when he would do that stupid table [ __ ] and he'd go sit out on college campuses. college campuses. college campuses. Um, so I think it's just like the next like iteration of that. Yeah. It's like the live streamer format. So, format. So, format. So, but it's just like not substance. It's all like you're saying. It's entertainment. There's no conversation. This stuff is very substantive. Well, I mean it's not conversation. It's not like us, you know?

not like us. You're right. It is two people trying to make the other person look stupid. Um, but what I like about it is you race right to the end to like the distilled arguments. arguments. arguments. So, you get to each when when you get two good people, each side knows like the moves and the counter moves. So, it's like watching black belt jiu-jitsu fighters where it's like, okay, Ronda Rousey throwing an armbar on a guy and th this is backed up by um Dana White movie theater.

There's like two big guys, I think, and um and they were with a girl and the girl was like making all this noise and so um she had put her like shoes on Rhonda's seat and was like kicking it the whole movie. And so at the end Rhonda like confronts her, the guys go to give her [ __ ] and she [ __ ] jiu-jitsu them like legitimately. And that is if that was a black belt, this plays out very differently, right? So when you see one person just dunking on somebody that they don't know, not very interesting.

But when you see two people who are like, "No, no, no. can't run that trick on me from either side. You you sort of race to like the best of the best arguments and it's like, oh damn, that person's got something really interesting to think through. And if you're not trying to win and you're really just trying to understand and form your own opinion, it's very interesting. So anyway, I have found my YouTube feed is now just like a never-ending stream of apparently debate bro content.

But when you find like good [ __ ] it will really challenge your own beliefs. It's how I felt finding Steve Keen. I was like, "Oo, this guy can't be dismissed." And he's saying things that are like, "This is not matching my current mental model of the world." Now, if you hunger for that, it's great content. If you want a bubble, it's bad content because you'll just end up gravitating towards a guy that's just saying what you want to hear. Uh, which is not super useful. It's It's interesting though, cuz I'm looking at uh Ryan's chat.

You say you don't really like uh Destiny. Uh well, that's also He's like a sex offender. offender. offender. Keep in mind Ryan is way to the left of Destiny. No, cuz somebody said Destiny is a closeted Republican. And I was like, like, like, "Yeah, that's Yeah, I'm going say no. Destiny is like the last centrist on the internet, I feel like." And even him, I feel like feel like feel like Destiny's very Destiny leans to the left. left. left. Yes, for sure. Do Am I uncharitable to say that he leans farther left than I lean right?

I think so. Um, but he is close to the middle. And so when you look at um the people that are now going to try to make him sound like a closeted Republican, they are DSA. Yeah. which is Mao. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that is like so crazy far-left. Um that Yeah. It's gonna make him look right leaning, which he is definitely not. not. not. Yes. That's why it's interesting. Like Yeah. I think centrist liberals the best. Someone said it in chat. Centrist liberals the best read on him.

That seems reasonable. Yeah. All right. Flo Fibonacci says, "Mass movements can rise without belief in God, but never without a devil to blame. populist turned the present into the battleground between a glorious past that never was and a prosperous future that will never come. Wake up. Let's go. That was bars. That was Jeez, it's like a poetry slam. Jeez. Yo, I got chills. That was good. That was nice. Who is this guy? This is the first chat. Wait, we've heard that name. We heard that before.

that before. that before. Almost certainly. Flo, am I making that up? I swear. Maybe just Fibonacci. Pull up in Discord, bro. That was great. Yeah, hang out. Well done. Well done. Well done. Uh, and Flo Fibonacci, thank you for another 20, so 40 total. Said, "Tom, care to share what exactly you love so much about the Odyssey. Personally, I cannot really tell why, but the movie filled a longing in my soul I did not know existed. Been thinking about it for 3 days straight." Flo Fibonacci, that is exactly why.

I agree. I agree. I agree. So, okay, I'll give you the specifics. I um this is a spoiler alert because I'm going to go deep on the themes here and anybody that doesn't want to hear about it, I hate doing this because I certainly want as many people here as I can get. Uh but um to talk about it deeply, uh I will have to potentially spoil some things. All right, so here's why I thought that it was utterly brilliant. Um first of all, the way he plays with time is very cool.

And so you'll find that oh wait, this is either a flashback or this is modern day. never says what it is, but you track it. And so he's so good at that, he does it in momentto in the most brilliant way possible. Uh he does it again here, not in a momentto way, but a similar way of condensing things down, moving through time seamlessly, but you don't get lost. Thought that was brilliant. Um also the themes were to me extraordinary. So I'm not entirely sure if I think that Odysius is um a villain or a hero.

given that I believe in um what the guy that wrote the Gulog Archipelago said uh on Andre Alexander Soldier Nitson he said the line between good and evil runs through every human heart when you watch the movie um and and I won't say what he does but in the movie he does a thing that I wanted to like chew through the screen I was so angry that he did it was so stupid and I was like yeah but people do dumb [ __ ] and so I was like interesting the cave yes Okay.

I was I was the cave and he doesn't plug his ears in the one part. That's the hubris. Got it. Got it. Got it. So you you end up going, "What a [ __ ] dumbass." And then you're like, "Wait, Homer's just really that insightful." that insightful." that insightful." Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. And it's the same thing that I feel about um about um about um uh god, Harry Potter was written by JK Rowling. So I feel that same way about her. She resists the urge to make Harry just a good boy.

and he's petty at times and he's insecure and he makes dumb decisions and he's too brash and so but in the end does the good thing and the right thing and so when you look at the Odyssey when he finally major spoiler alert for anybody that hasn't um read the story um when he finally makes it back to Ithaca but he does so in disguise I was like whoa what what is this saying and it's like the surface is he's looking fur snakes in the grass.

And so you you could just like I have the chills thinking about it. You can just go, "Oh, this is he's just being smart. He's being strategic." No, no, no. What he reveals in the end when you finally find out who uh what's her name is is is um what is her name? She's with Tom Holland. Holland. Holland. Oh, Zenaia. Oh, Zenaia. Oh, Zenaia. Yeah, Zenaia. So when when you find out who she really is, you're like, "Oh [ __ ] he doesn't know that he's earned the right to come home." And I was like, "Godamn." And so all of that, but then he [ __ ] fights and you see him take everybody on and he's got to be brilliant and he's got to be daring and then you realize this one for me was the killer because this is this moment and and whether because I think that Nolan is probably a little far-left.

But the fact that to tell a true human story, he couldn't escape the reality that the only way for Tom Holland's character to be who Tom Holland's character needs to be, he has to finally man the [ __ ] up. And so he gets him slapped down early in the story. He isn't man enough. His own mother is like, "You're too big of a pussy." And so he's like, "Fuck." Uh, like, "What am I going to do?" And so he goes on this journey and you think, "Oh, he's gonna finally man up." He doesn't [ __ ] man up.

So you're like, "Jesus Christ." So he goes back to Ithaca. His dad rolls up and is like, "I'm so proud of you." The kid hasn't done it yet, but his dad is like, "I see you. I love you for who you are right now here." And all of us, I think, have this like longing to [ __ ] hear that, even though we haven't earned it yet. And our dad, who is like the ultimate [ __ ] dude, but also is a [ __ ] father. He's just gone. We feel like we've never even met our dad.

We've lived in our dad's shadow forever. And our dad is still like, "I'm I'm proud I'm proud I'm proud of who you are. I love you." and she like [ __ ] that's what he needs to then be like okay I'm going to do the thing right and so he's put in a position where he's like he could puss out but he doesn't and so he goes and confronts his own mortality the fact that he will have to kill in order to finally ascend to the throne but his dad is like I broke something I can't be the king I have to [ __ ] leave and so like the self-exile of it all the like I did it I couldn't do it perfectly cuz I'm not perfect enough and so I [ __ ] up but I did the thing I did finally [ __ ] make it back and I did it imperfectly and I lost all my men and for that like I'll I'll owe atonement forever and so my my ultimate sort of punishment is that I must exile myself.

It's like god damn even now I'm [ __ ] freaking out about it. So that whole thing was just like yes this is the messiness of the human experience. And I love that it came from some [ __ ] from thousands of years ago, right? that a guy [ __ ] knew this that long ago. And that right now in this moment, we've gotten a little confused because we have stopped telling stories that are [ __ ] morally grounded on the truth of the human experience. That you cannot have a king that hasn't earned his spot.

That in trying to be a good king, you can [ __ ] up. In trying to be a good husband, you can [ __ ] up. And for dumb reasons. and that a guy trying to get back to his wife spends whatever seven or eight years on drugs banging some other chick. You're like uhoh. Like that's [ __ ] weird. And then when he finally snaps out of the haze and it's like wait like I've allowed myself to forget all these things. It's obviously a metaphor for people that try to numb the pain out and just like and so the guy who's supposed to be the hero, he spends a lot of time numbing himself out trying to forget his fuckups and all the people that oh my god it's just it's the [ __ ] human experience and Nolan managed to pack it all into three hours and I don't know the original story.

I didn't read it in high school. I've never read it. So it's like ah you hear enough about it through life that you're sort of like skimming across the surface. I wasn't completely unmed but at the same time I didn't know like what moral tale am I about to hear? Like is he going to be painted as like I did everything right? And so at first I was just angry and I was thinking when when he does the thing in the cave that I was just thinking that um Nolan like is doing some dumb [ __ ] or Homer doesn't know what the [ __ ] he's doing or whatever and then you realize oh my god like he's trying to get at the fact that we're not perfect.

We do dumb [ __ ] This guy was emotional for a second in in the worst possible time and other people end up paying an extraordinary price for his what you're calling hubris. In that moment, I I think maybe the taking off the beeswax, you could call that. But um in that moment, he was just emotional. He was just mad. And so he did a thing out of anger to be like, "Fuck you." Even though the obvious strategic move was to just lay low and get the [ __ ] out.

And I think it speaks to Nolan as well because in and correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, because I remember you said you read it. Um, back when I read it, like I was like, why is Odysius so overpowered? Like he's basically, you know, how everyone complains about Ray in Star Wars? That's what he kind of felt like in in the actual poem. And so for Nolan to add those elements like you're saying with the arrow and stuff, it humanizes him to a degree that the original story doesn't, which makes it more relatable to us.

Like Nolan's whole inspiration for this was I'm too away from my family all the time and that is something about myself I don't like and you see it in that last act and that kind of goes into what you're saying with the whole we make silly mistakes we prioritize things we shouldn't etc. I mean, it's just Nolan's such a good writer, writer, writer, dude. I didn't know I hadn't heard anything about why he approached the topic. That makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, man. Um, I am not surprised that it has stuck with you.

It's also stuck with me. And I think it's for those reasons. There's he just touches on these really interesting human things that are I think hyper relevant right now to reorienting us to the messiness of trying to do great things. The things that are required if we want to ascend all of it. It's wild. It's great. It's great. Great. Great. Great. Great comments, Flo. Thank you for this. I needed that fractal. Yeah. And next up for the super chat, Brutus Lugo says, "This is a stolen question from a chatter.

You're making a generic case about hypothetical regulations. What specific regulations are anthropic pushing that genuinely aren't about safety and are about cornering the market? Okay, so the specific regulations that I am not entirely sure what this will come of. I don't think anybody is yet. Um I don't know that they have um detailed out what they're saying in private to the regulators. If they are and I just have missed it, forgive me. Um, but the reason that I know that this isn't about safety is that the example that I gave about weapons before.

So, open models already exist. They have already been distributed. So, those are already running on private servers and there's no way to take that back. Um, so that that ship has already sailed. So, think of it as a weapons dealer that has truly already given away a bunch of weapons. And it's a particular type of weapon where you have to have the exact counter weapon otherwise you can be taken advantage of. So we are as proven by the hugging face hack and them having to turn to an open model to protect themselves.

We're in a position where um without the tool because remember they had access to the to the safe version. The safe version failed to protect them from the open source version. You can think of it that way because it it broke free. So it was in nobody's constraint. And so the only way that they were able to stop that is to go get something unguarded that was equally powerful so that they could stop it. So you need equally powerful weapons to stop yourself from the weapons that are already out there.

So keep in mind the weapon that was used to stop it exists. It's open source and it um you can flip it. So if it can be used to stop a hacking uh attempt, it can be used to propagate the hacking attack. So, we're we're just in a world where you you have lock and key everywhere. The keys uh the locks, excuse me, have to get more sophisticated to stop the keys from opening them. Um so, yeah, we must accept that now arming yourself is the only true way to safety, but the specific regulations, I don't know what they're pushing for behind the scenes.

Uh and what they'll end up getting will undoubtedly be different than what they push for. So, that will come out in the fullness of time. All right. Um, Congress be dirty making again. See, all the politics does it. So, there's going to be a lot of discourse coming up. Thomas Massie gave us the heads up at the very beginning of this. So, the headline is going to be Nick's order. The House has passed a bill to ban members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks 232 to 190 uh 198.

There's also a national voter ID requirement attached to the bill, but that first part is going to be on the front of every election ad headline in the next 6 months. For the next 6 months, it's going to be Nancy Pelosi voted no against insider stock trading cuz she's getting rich while you guys get poor. Vote for Republican guy who's high-fiving Trump. Like, that is the that is going to be the playbook. But a lot of the Democratic no votes came because the Save Act was attached to it.

We already went through the save act and some of the um objections that the Democrats have for it, but it is a win. It still has to get through the Senate. We will see. Yeah, this one is is a absolutely massive big deal. Uh Pelosi is uh a great face for the way that politicians are getting rich on the fact that they have insider information. This should have been shut down a very long time ago. Put them in a similar position that the um kids are in.

In fact, this is a great way to do it. Um, let them trade on whatever or let them invest on whatever that account is that is a part of the Trump account. And so, all of a sudden, you're going to see that, hey, to enrich themselves, they must enrich the youth of America. Cool. That position I love seeing them be in. Um, so doing something where they have to make the nation wealthy and they get a piece of that, that is brilliant. That's how you align selfish desires.

Right now, we're in a totally different situation, which is it's the wild west. Everything has been financialized. And uh a little bit offormational asymmetry goes a long way. Which is why if you want to be a good trader, the best way to be a good trader is to quite literally uh become a politician, get on a meaningful committee where you're hearing um information or you're passing rules that you know is going to have a massive impact on share prices. It's just crazy. It's one of those things that's just nakedly out in the open um and being taken advantage of by both parties.

So, yeah, this one's gross. I'm super excited to see it get passed. Um it is ridiculous that people would try to vote against that. That's absurd. But for the sports fans out there, it just been announced LeBron is going to Philly for the next two years. Two-year date. He's going to Philly. How many years has he been playing? 21. 21. 21. Has anybody played longer than him? M. Yes. At this high level, no. Oh, Oh, Oh, okay. okay. okay. Yeah. There's a lot of player coaches who kind of transitioned into something else.

So, else. So, else. So, that's wild to me that he's leaving again. I thought for sure he's going to retire in LA. As a Cavs fan, I'm not surprised he left. left. left. Uh, okay. Sorry, that just blew my mind. U, I'm from South Jersey, so my entire family's Philly fans, and my brother just had a baby, and they just got Jaylen Brown. So, I told my brother jokingly like, "Yo, this is your year, bro." He's like, "Yeah, LeBron's on the way." and LeBron is on the way.

I got to call him right after the show. Um, okay. What were we talking about? Uh, stock trading. Um, plot twist. Uh, we got to talk about the NDAA thing, the integration with Israel and the US military. I'm going to call it a cooperation. I still haven't looked into this. They'll take you. Do you have a fact that you want me to respond to because here's the way that I see it. Mh. Um, almost certainly the greatest intel agency in the world is the MSAD. Mhm.

Mhm. Mhm. So now I've got Okay. I've got an intel agency. I'm at war with somebody that um obviously the MSAD is going to have the drop on. Um I believe that the following statement is true. That at one point was it the president of Iran or something was a MSAD agent? I mean I'm talking at like the highest highest possible level that you could get somebody into the IRGC, they did. And so you've got that plus the fact that given that they don't have access to oil, Israel's had to rely on technology.

And so they've become one of the most sophisticated technology um ecosystems on planet Earth. And so if you're the US and you're you're waging war as allies against somebody, you have extreme need of their intelligence to prosecute that war. And you have um a strong desire to learn from their technology, to leverage their technology, to have access to it, whatever. Um and my base assumption is that this is not an integration that it is um saying okay we're going to have a very high degree of cooperation across you know these whatevers and our out is very simple.

Should we ever decide that we want to cut you out we're going to cut you out. And so um from that standpoint we will keep things secret from them that we don't want them to know. It's not like you're now in every meeting. Uh it's not like okay we have a joint bank account. It's not going to be like that. These are my assumptions. Now, if somebody shows me, no, no, no, for real. Like, this is just shared bank account. They can spend their money without having to talk to us.

Um, and they're in every meeting. They now have uh top security clearance, the highest level security clearance. They can know everything. Um, they've got somebody permanently stationed in the Oval Office. Like, if that's what we're talking about, okay, that'd be [ __ ] crazy. But I just have a default assumption that this is going to end up being a like yeah we yeah like we would do with the UK or whatever where it's like yeah we've got uh bases with them we've got shared offices there's intelligence that we share back and forth.

So I would need to understand what is the specific thing that's happening that's happening that's happening that people don't like and is it unique to Israel or is this something that we have with other countries as well? Um it is unique to Israel. I think that the the the level of unique is the sharing of the AI technological resources and things like that. So the Iron Dome thing, Iron Dome thing is different. Whereas with Iron Dome joint project, it's over Israel, it's over us. We kind of got something out of that deal where this one I think the thing that gives me the ick is the AI integration of it.

And is it like do they now can they back in access to us because they are the greatest spy agency. So while yes, I would like to say what does your agent know, what does my agent know, and we talk over a coffee in Geneva, that's different than saying your systems has access to this thing, but it can't access this other thing. And we all know that's just a permissions problem. So without the details then I'll comment [clears throat] at a philosophical level. So from first principles if they can if we have done something that gives them access to things that I don't want them to have access to that's bad.

Um the mere fact that we are um working more closely with an ally who is helping us prosecute the war feels so obvious that you would want to do. So if you look at like World War II history, there was like deep integration between the allies. So I am just reading this as being something along those lines, but probably not anywhere near what it was during World War II. Uh even though we are at war with Iran together. So on that side, it's like if we want to win, like we need to make sure that there's very low friction so that we can pass information back and forth very quickly, but it needs to be siloed information so that there are things that are for American eyes only.

And I'm sure Israel has things that are for Israel's eyes only. Uh and you map that out well. you make sure that you have an easy way to decouple and I'm perfectly fine with it. So I obviously my base assumption is that Trump is not a puppet of Netanyahu that this is not uh something where um Israel has files on Trump that he doesn't want getting out and so they're like we are going to get access to your secret databases. So if somebody reads this as they have something on Trump, they're getting access to secret databases that we would never allow somebody to have.

Yeah, I'd be opposed to that too if that's true. M um I just don't have that base assumption. So my base assumption is that we're probably nowhere near the level of integration that we had with allies during World War II, but it's probably on that continuum. Yeah. Because we're at war with a shared enemy. So enemy. So enemy. So I I I don't have any specifics that trip red flags. red flags. red flags. Got you. That makes sense. Um your logic in that argument. Uh okay.

I think we got it. Until more got I think we got it. Until more information comes out with the deal, we'll see how it uh integrates. Again, this both has to pass the House as well or the Senate. So, it's done on paper. It's not finalized or tied into law or on its way to Trump's desk. Uh, I want to jump over to Japan cuz the Pokemon thing is hilarious to me cuz to me, I think that this is just a the next bubble. I remember when trading cards used to be worth a lot of money and now there's like six trading cards that are worth a lot of money.

I think Pokemon is slowly getting toward that uh spectrum. Oh, it's Wait, Pokemon is the only card that matters. So, um, to give people a background that don't understand what exactly is happening with Pokemon. So, Japan is considering putting regulations on the way the Pokemon cards are handled because what they're being honest about is that Pokemon cards are an asset class. In fact, as an asset class, they are one of, if not the best performing asset classes uh, of the last whatever five or six years.

I mean, it's just absolutely staggering how much financial growth has been in the Pokemon market. So, imagine kind of like in the crypto boom, there were people that went to the store, bought a pack of cards, ended up pulling something that's now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, imagine spending whatever $6 and getting something worth $600,000. So, that's the way that these cards work is some of them are extraordinarily valuable and the way that they go out into the market is it's just in a box at your local um card store.

So, they're there is a reality to be faced that these are trading like they're an asset class. They're trading like they're a collectible. Um meaning a collectible in the way that like NFTTS ended up being a collectible. This was the thing about NFTTS that completely caught me off guard is it was people treating them like financial instruments, not collectibles. So when you start really looking at like art, you look at um baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, Pokemon cards, the one that I collect, which I do not collect for financial reasons, but I collect the One Piece trading card game.

So it it is a an utterly fascinating gray area where technically the cards are being made for a game that you can actually play and the game drives some of the value in that if the um card is valuable in the meta, meaning to win in the game you need this card, then that card is more likely to go up in value. Um, and from the game perspective, they try to keep any sort of hot deck shouldn't be more than say a hundred or $200 for you to put it together.

And so it does come at a cost, but then there's a much bigger uh pull for the cards, which is people going, I think this is going to go up in value. And so the question becomes, how much should we be regulating? Like there are people that collect old video games and they collect them because they have nostalgia for them and they expect them to go up in value. And so should we be regulating things like that where it's like there is some percentage of the people buying it are buying it because they want to see it go up in value.

Um and Pokemon has just hit such a crazy level that it's pretty hard to deny that this thing has become an asset class and now what should we be doing? Now you guys know me, I'm light touch. I don't want to see a ton of regulation fall on the trading card market. But at the same time, I do recognize that it is an asset class. And so there are probably certain regulations that you want to put around it to make sure that the way the distribution of the cards has to fall within certain rules that the um company can't manipulate the supply to try to um control prices.

That it should just be here are here are the published realities of what we put out and you guys all know. And so that would get rid of a lot of the mystery in the market because a lot of what happens now is like is this card ever going to be reprinted? And so that can control value. Um there was I think oh god now please you're going to have to take this with a grain of salt. This is directionally correct but I don't remember the specifics but it's like I think Hasbro think Hasbro think Hasbro uh has been sued because do they do Wizards of the Coast?

I think so. I think they do have the coast. Thank you. So, Magic the Gathering, there was like all this big rumor that they were they had a ton of inventory, but they were sitting on it because they were trying to um watch the secondary mark market um value of the cards and like control their supply based on how things were out in the market. And so, it's blatant market manipulation. So, it's like like you could just pretty easily get rid of all that by saying this is a published document of the rates that we print our cards.

this is exactly how many of how many of them were going to print and you just publish it. Now, I'm sure a lot of collectors would hate that idea because it there are there will be less pumping in the market and it will just sort of be a priceless list and people be like, well, this is how many exist and so this is what they're worth. And then if somebody starts hoarding them, that might make the price go up or if people are dumping them, it'll make the price go down.

But it would probably control some of the um speculation. Now, I would love to see this is not now me talking as somebody interfacing with the economy. This is just me saying if you want these things to be valuable in the future, you know what the number one most important thing you could do? Make sure kids can get them. Like that's really what you want to focus on because if the next generation can't get a hold of the [ __ ] cards because they're so expensive, then there won't be a next generation of kids that love these cards and so this stuff won't be valuable into the future.

And so, are we talking about cards or are we talking about something else? Legos. Legos. Legos. Well, we canos insert virtually anything into there that requires an emotional connection. But the thing that I find really distressing is so often there's a corollary in history and people will ignore it. So, let's look at the correlary to this. Uh, manga outsells the western comic market so grotesqually as to be hilarious. So, I don't know if it holds true this year, but it was either last year or the year before.

Demon Slayer, one title, one title in Japanese manga, outsold the entire Western comic market combined. So, I'm talking Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the X-Men, literally every single title grouped got outsold by one title, Demon Slayer. It was in 2020 with 82.3 million copies globally in a single year. Thank you. God, I love you as a fact checker. Okay, so you get that setup. Absolutely insane. Now, you should ask a question. How did that end up happening? Back in the I think it was the 80s, maybe early 90s, they had a conversation.

Um, what the I'll speedrun this. In America, uh, in the early 90s, so it must have been the '90s. In the early 90s, you have Image Comics gets formed. So, the greatest artists in all of the all of Marvel and DC, they leave. They form their own company because they feel they're being taken advantage of. That creates this massive speculator bubble and everybody buys millions of their first runs because they think that they're all going to be worth a gazillion dollars. And then Image Comics ends up going sort through this rocky period and they're missing deadlines and stuff and the whole thing craters and everybody realizes, oh, because we were buying millions of copies, they're not scarce.

They don't have any value. It's like overprinting cards to make it back to Pokémon. So now when that crumbles, a ton of businesses fold and so all these um comic book shops, local comic book shops, they go out of business. All the distributors end up folding and you end up with a single distributor, which is always a terrible idea. So now the comic book shops that do survive, they start panicking and they say, "Um, dear publishers, stop giving us stuff that appeals to kids. We want stuff that's for the audience that we already have." And so the Western comic market starts aging up.

And so everybody just if you were um 11 when you started collecting, but now you're 18, we're writing for 18-year-olds. And so now there's nothing that gets kids into the marketplace. Okay. Now, what I want you guys to hear is that creates a ticking time bomb because what happens is now your age group is just getting older and older and older and eventually they stop paying attention to the hobby. They start dying off which puts more economic pressure on the stores that exist and so they scream even louder, don't make things for kids, just give me stuff for my new audience.

Japan actually holds a meeting. It's a company called Shonen Jump. Technically Shuisha, but anyway, people know Shonen Jump. So Shonen Jump, they get together and they say, "Hey, do we age up with our readers or do we say, "Yep, you're going to age out. That's perfectly fine." And Shonen Jump is always and forever going to be for 11 to 15 year olds. And they expressly say, "We're going to remain just for boys and for that age group." And because of that, they continue to be a global phenomenon because every year they've got a new kid that ages in and a new kid that as they grow up still has a massive affinity for those old properties.

And so that's why the Japanese market ends up just absolutely destroying. Plus, they did not get the DEI memo largely because they're speaking to kids and that's never going to go over with kids. You have to be archetypal. And so with all of that, they keep getting new kids excited. So their market just keeps growing and growing and growing. And then kids in America realize, oh, there is something for me. It's just not in the western market. It's in all these cool um things that are being put out of Japan.

So whether that's One Piece, Jiujutsu Kaizen, um some of the just like perennial sellers like um My Hero Academia, like I mean just like absolute monsters um Demon Slayer being the top of that heap. So now globally people are like, "Well, if America's not going to export their culture for kids, we'll go to Japan," which is exporting culture for kids. So you got to get the kids. And watching people like [ __ ] nose tackle each other in a Walmart because they're a scalper and they want to go make a ton of money off this makes me want to headbutt somebody.

So I would much rather see these guys print a ton of cards to nice. They're very loud. And if that was as loud for the viewing public as it was for me, I'm sure that was not fun. But um when you get the kids that love it and it's like it means what it means. So if you are publishing even if it's like a a secondary um format of the cards to make sure that kids can always get into this and then you say if they all preserve their cards these are going to be worthless.

But if they treat them like they're disposable then nature will over time make them valuable. This is exactly what happens with Shon and Jump. If you guys have never seen it obviously I've got a fetish for Japan so whatever. But uh they're on shelves everywhere all across Japan in like gas stations and stuff. This big thick super cheap paper uh print all in black and white of these manga. And then kids vote and if you say that you like they literally fill out voting cards and mail them in.

It's [ __ ] wild. And so all of that meant that people don't think of these books as something you keep and so they get thrown away. So even though millions of them are produced, very few survive. And so even though they were produced like [ __ ] crazy, they were produced for kids who aren't thinking economics. They're thinking, "I love these stories." And so they become valuable over time and you now find people that will hunt for good conditioned versions of these very cheap and disposable magazines. And the very fact that they were made for kids, made to be cheap, made to be disposable is the thing that over time makes them incredibly valuable.

and they're taking a totally different approach now because they're treating it like an economic or like a um asset category and so it's just icing kids out. It's going to make it dwindle over time. It makes me very sad because this experiment's already been run. You just explained capitalism literally. literally. literally. No, like that's what's happening in America right now. They're it's skewing odor. They're going out and if you just replace comic books with jobs, that will tell you everything you need to know. Can Can I give you another example?

If you place comic books with houses, there it is. Because what you should be doing, making these [ __ ] things cheap and available everywhere. Everybody's got one. But some people will upgrade the [ __ ] out of them. They'll pour their heart and soul into it. And now all of a sudden, oh [ __ ] have you seen that one down on that street? Holy hell, that place is dope. That's incredible. I'll pay. I want that better one. I could get the cheap one. That's available. Nobody has to worry about that.

But that one's dope. I'm emotionally connected to it. And now it's like the people that pour their heart and soul into something that was originally considered to be like whatever, whatever, whatever, it becomes like a thing that actually ends up having value. And so, yeah, make it affordable, make people able to get in and then value will be created downstream over time by somebody doing something special in the case of a Shonen Jump magazine preserving it. Yep. Um, very interesting. Perfect transition to go into mom Donnie on John Stewart.

Uh, I'm curious about your take with this. I watched the whole interview. Um, and your set like your setup was interesting. So, I'm I'm curious. curious. curious. How does he embarrass himself? Yeah. No, cuz I was like the the conversation follow Logic and I feel like this is a very good I feel like me and you had this conversation a couple months ago. Um, but we'll hear it from the horse's mouth. If you go back to some of the Democrats that we most admire, FDR, LaGuardia, you will see a lot of democratic socialist principles in their vision.

And if you think about a lot of what we've come to accept as just the facts of life across our country, a lot of it is also still driven by democratic socialist principles. Now, if today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today. And yet, that's the library. And the same thing with the fire department, the same thing with public schools. And it's to say that a lot of politics has been a debate about who deserves what.

And I would prefer a politics that debates how we can deliver that to everyone. What's that, [ __ ] What is the that? So, he is a mauist. Let us be abundantly clear. We're going to do more deep dives on the DSA in their own words. This guy is a [ __ ] liar. He is misrepresenting the actual truth. And because of that, he's going to put a slick veneer on something that is truly about control. So, first of all, he's he is straw manning the opposite side. And so, for that, [ __ ] him.

The reality is that why do people like the um fire department? Because it's dope to have a public good where um the fire department of old was like you got paid for how many fires you put out. And so, when you um create that incentive, one, you've got an incentive to start a fire that you can get put out so you can get paid. If you don't think that kind of thing happens, first of all, just read history. And then second, look at what happened. I think it was in India.

They were trying to get rid of king cobras. So they offered people, we'll pay you this much for bringing in a dead cobra. So people started actually raising cobras and creating like breeding farms, killing them, and then bringing them in to get the money for it. Uh so you create this perverse incentive. So people looked at that and said, "Oh, we create a weird perverse incentive." So, if he thinks he's arguing against Michael Malice and somebody that wants everything to be um anarchy, again, as Michael Malice describes it, maybe maybe Malice would recognize himself in in the picture that he's painting.

I certainly do not. I am not no um um um fan of America and the let's call it the founding father's vision of American capitalism is arguing for having no government assistance. Okay? So, we're going to have the government. But when he says these are DSA principles, that is [ __ ] Mao represents DSA principles, which is we are going to make [ __ ] free. The people that are making money are evil. That and and I quote, the most likely person to be the 2028 candidate on the Democrat side said there was no way to generate a billion dollars uh in revenue.

I can't remember if she's saying revenue or wealth, but either way, there's no way to generate a billion dollars without doing something illegal. [ __ ] right off. unethical. Perfect. So, literally, [ __ ] you. That that is absolutely nonsensical. Not only is it possible, I have [ __ ] done it. So, I don't even want to hear [snorts] that you're doing something unethical. That that is [ __ ] Now, if you want to point to what you think I have done that's unethical, I'll happily go to battle on that. So, this is when you talk about the absurd um like magic trick that he's trying to pull around saying that a library is exactly the DSA.

No, it's not. Look at what Mao did. Mao said, "Hey everybody, um we're going to do things our way. We're going to get rid of the four olds. We're going to uh move into a brave new future. I want you all to plant the crops at this time because I know best, just like they're trying to do with rent freezes. you guys are doing bad things in the way that you're trying to charge for rent. It shouldn't be that expensive. I know better than you. So, this is what you're going to charge for your rent.

Not understanding the knock-on effects that it's going to have. That is very different than people going, you know what I think would be dope if we created a place where really driven young people or old people, whoever the [ __ ] want to come in and get educated. So, we want our people to be educated to high heaven. And we want to create access to that knowledge for free. That's the dopest [ __ ] ever. And now people can go learn. And if you're asking me if I would be willing to pay tax dollars to make sure that, for instance, kids have access to the internet.

Yes. If you want to know if I would put tax dollars to make sure that kids have access to AI, yes. So, there are things for sure to make sure that the next generation is educated. Would I put money towards making sure that the fire department isn't like there aren't six fire departments competing uh for that houseire? Yes, of course. Like it's just a it's a better world. It's more stable foundation. Uh if you're asking me, am I willing to do things that are going to break the engine of prosperity?

This is where he is he is either dumb or evil. Either one is completely disqualifying. And if John Stewart actually can't see the difference between freezing someone's rent, which has already been tried, remember this experiment has been run and it ended up in the most horrific conditions in New York. It wasn't even like this was run somewhere else. It's actually done in [ __ ] New York. So you can't have the cost of running something be unclamped and the cost to charge for that thing clamped. It's completely nonsensical from from cause and effect first principles.

It is completely nonsensical. Now, he can say it with a smile. He can say it in ways that feel great, but he cannot map it from cause and effect. He can't do it. And that's why at the end of a speech, he just starts saying that I want or he'll talk a lot about workers and dignity or he'll say the city deserves better. What the [ __ ] does that mean? That dude, I've seen people in in my mindset days, one of the things that ended up driving me [ __ ] crazy was people take obesity for a second.

So, I would say you're fat because you eat things that are going to make you fat. Plain and simple. It's you don't have a a a genetic disease. It's not that. You're just eating dumb [ __ ] There were no obese people in Awitz. Why? Because ultimately this comes down to caloric deficit. So, you may not be willing to do the things you need to do to get lean. Fine, cool. Go enjoy the ice cream. I don't have any moral compunctions with it whatsoever. But if you're trying to map how we ended up here, it it is a very simple you must do these things if you want to get lean.

You may not want to do them. And that's fine. If a city isn't willing to do the things it needs to do to be prosperous, it will not be prosperous. It does not matter if the city feels that it is entitled to eat the ice cream. If you eat ice cream, you get fat if you eat too much of it. Let's be very clear. So on that, what the [ __ ] does desserve have to do with it? And when I would be doing mindset with people and I would say, "Hey, I want to help." They would [ __ ] come to me and they would say, "Hey, I have this problem.

Help me overcome it. Cool. I want to see you succeed. Here's what you have to do." And then they would actually say, they would actually say, and I quote, "I deserve this ice cream." What am I supposed to do with that? What do you mean that this is physics? Economies have an engine of prosperity. The right, the reason it's right to think of it as an engine is because engines require physics. There's no magic to an internal combustion engine. You align things in a certain way.

You put certain inputs in, you get certain outputs. If you fail to do that, you break the engine of prosperity and it doesn't work and it does not provide the very thing that allows you to tax and do all this stuff for free. Remember the core problem, the core problem is no one will work for free. The second you show me how people can work for free, then we can have the utopia. But if you can't get people to work for free, you have to use force.

Mao tried it, Stalin tried it, Lenin tried it. It just Paul Pot tried it. It just ends in death. A lot of death because you have to go kill those people or starve them to death. That's also a fun one that has been done by Mao. Uh and these guys model themselves after Mao. Hassan [ __ ] dressed up like Mao to give a speech. Um so can we uh Okay. Right. Really quick. Yep. If he would have been like free libraries, fire department, that is a social service policy.

You would have had no beef. The fact that he's labeling that democratic socialist policy, DSA policies, policies, policies, the fact that he's trying to um smuggle in something that is absolutely a lie DSA DSA DSA under Yes. The DSA policies are not social safety nets. Okay. Okay. Okay. The DSA policies are um we are going to take over the means of production. We want to abolish the Senate so that everything can be done by pure how who has more people. um literally breaking all of the things that work in a democracy.

They will do that to gain power and then they will clamp down on people. As they say, you can vote communism in, you can't vote it out. The first thing they do is then they say, "We don't need elections anymore. We we can't have anybody [ __ ] this thing up." And so now that we've got it, we fought so hard to get here. We've got to abolish all these other things and just make that those checks and balances impossible. Uh boys and girls, you need only look at the direction of travel.

These guys tell on themselves every [ __ ] day by who they celebrate. They are Marxist Leninists. Watch how that has played out in reality. It's [ __ ] crazy. So, this is one of those things where um the the person is telling you I I'm going to use different people who are far worse or sorry um far much less worse but have a way worse reputation to explain to you what's happening. So, um, they go, "Okay, my my hero is, um, Ted Bundy." Bundy." Bundy." Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. And I'm opening a women's shelter, and it's called the the Bundy Women's Shelter.

And, you know, when people look back, few people have done more for women's rights than Ted Bundy. And then you want to cut to the the shot from uh of Leonardo DiCaprio snapping his fingers and pointing whistling and pointing at the screen. You're like, "Hold on. Ted Bundy was a [ __ ] serial killer." So, and he killed women. What? What are what are you talking about? So, for you to celebrate Lenin, Marx, uh Stalin, Mal, dude, they are mass murderers that that have they are unrivaled except by Genghaskhan.

They are unrivaled in human history. Mhm. So what are you talking about? How how are people not freaking out? If they said, "Our hero is Hitler," people would have the right response. But Hitler was not as effective at killing people as the people they celebrate. And so I'm just like, "Dude, this is too weird. This is too weird." In fact, I'm going to strip all the emotion to I'm going to strip all the emotion out of my voice for a second because when I hear things like this, and it's a thing that happens right in people's faces, faces, faces, and I'm like, why didn't anybody point this out?

this out? this out? So, let me point it out cuz I'm like, the the rebuttals are always just emotional. emotional. emotional. Let me give it to you completely unemotional. unemotional. unemotional. The DSA admires Mao. The DSA admires Stalin. The DSA admires of their own admission, Lenin. The DSA admires Marx. They have an oppressed versus oppressor lens. No matter what words come out of their mouth, that is their lens. There is the oppressor and oppressed in every relationship. And we always fight for the oppressed and we are always opposed to the oppressor.

So then you just have to ask okay who's the oppressed and who's the oppressor in if you just take America writ large America is the oppressor and um they will say the marginalized are the oppressed. They tried race for a long time. Now they're moving it to class and so they just talk about the working man. Remember the working man never starts these revolts. It is always overproduced elites. The reason overproduced elites gravitate towards Marxism is it is a religion is the right way to think about it.

It is a religion masquerading as an economic philosophy that is built on resentment. So even take Steve Keane who really believes that Marx is one of if not the I think he'll go all the way to the greatest economic mind ever. even he admits, but he had a philosophical conclusion he wanted to reach and he ended up betraying himself and pushing this thing that reached a political outcome. But if you back up a few steps right up to where he inserts his philosophy, he actually understood the economy better than most people, at least the economy of that time.

Okay? So now you have this religion that didn't stop at the economy that went to philosophy that was embraced and deployed by the biggest mass murderers to ever exist only rivaled by Genghaskhan. I'll always put that caveat so people know I'm literally looking through all of human history. So now when people when people when people have because of the far-left march through the institutions meaning as they say history is written by the winner curriculum is written by the professors. If all of your professors think Markx is great, if all of your professors think Lenin is great, if all of your professors think Mao is great, then kids that come up through that institution will think all those same things.

And so even though Mao killed at least, nobody estimates less than 45 million. Some people will push it all the way up to 80 or 100 million, but let's just stick with the low estimate. Mao killed at least 45 million people himself. All of World War II only killed like 56 million. Hitler himself killed way, way, way less than that. And so Mao alone, forget Lenin, forget Stalin, Mao alone killed 45 million people. So they celebrate him and it doesn't trigger any alarm bells. And that's the part where I'm like, guys, think of it as a test.

Mal ran a test for us and he said, I want to see what happens when you uh take this Marxist belief system and you deploy it at scale. Lenin did the same thing for us. It kills relentlessly. Paul Pot tries it. It kills relentlessly for the reasons that I've said that you end up having to do it by force because you break the engine of prosperity. So you break the engine of prosperity, everybody's life starts getting worse. They're able to afford less. There are fewer things on the grocery store shelves.

In the case of the Bronx, when rent freezes were tried back in the 70s, uh people were just burning the buildings down. So eventually people go, "This isn't working." And at that point, you can't just say, "Oh yeah, you're right. Why?" Because you'll lose power. And this was a game of resentment and power acquisition from the beginning. That's why Mark spills over into philosophy instead of just sticking with the economics. So now you have a religion of resentment that becomes a way to acquire power. Once you acquire power to maintain it when the economic system doesn't work, you can't win people over because you've made their lives better.

You've made their lives worse. Materially, measurably, obviously, repeatably. You've made it worse. So they'll rebel. So your only option if you want to retain power, which was your goal in the first place, is to start killing them. Now remember, Mao, while his people were starving to death by the tens of millions, was exporting grain. Why was he doing that? So that he could live in a mansion and make sure that he always had food. I I I I don't know. Read the books about him. This is not me making this up.

I I'm giving you like the just top layer greatest hits. Like the dude had his own he sent his own son to die. Um he left his wife, didn't tell her he was leaving, left her in an area that he knew the military was about to come and obliterate, so she died. I mean, the the [ __ ] that this guy's done is is [ __ ] insane. Um he's one of the most evil human beings ever to live. And you have Mam Dani who is very good at smiling, who is very good at propagandizing and speaking as if he's coming from a place of love.

Um, the DSA is not social safety net. The DSA is Marxism. Marxism is what we just talked about. It is a philosophy of resentment masquerading as an economic principle that doesn't work. It's been tried. So that's where the push back needs to be extraordinary. We need to be very intellectually robust and muscular in our absolute unrelenting and ever repeating takedown of these ideas. They are sinister and they are being masqueraded being masqueraded being masqueraded um through something that they aren't. likening marks to the library is the craziest [ __ ] I've ever heard in my life.

Likening um solving the perverse incentives that would arise if you try to use capitalism for firefighting and saying as if the other side is saying, "Oh, no, no, no. We want a perfectly free economy embedded inside of anarchy isn't real. I don't know who you're arguing with. It certainly isn't any um respected and vocal proponent of America and capitalism because nobody is saying that. And so the level of absurdity, the level of theatrics, the level of lies that are being told is too much to ignore first of all.

And then second, it is way too consequential. Because if America tries to solve its very real problems by adopting a murderous strategy, that would be the biggest catastrophe any of us could face. If on the other hand, we get honest about the way the engine of prosperity works. We go point at the actual nuts and bolts, like the the real this is the exact thing that's wrong with the carburetor, and if you adjust it in this way, it will start working again. If we do that, then we've got a chance of getting on the other side of this.

But lies and emotional appeals, I I will not tolerate them. I will not stand for it. They also talked into that interview about how they need different names for things because they think as soon as you say socialism, people are getting like triggered and they're going back. back. back. As soon as you say socialism, people realize what you're actually about. That's 100% true. If Ted Bundy starts renaming rape uh or murder, it's still the [ __ ] thing that we absolutely despise. And so just because people now know rape and murder is terrible.

If you're still going to penetrate somebody against their will, I don't care what the [ __ ] you call it, uh rape by any other name is just as evil in the same way that a rose by any other name is just as sweet. So the absurdity of that is [ __ ] sinister. Like that is somebody trying to obfuscate. They're on to us. They understand this is bad and I'm not going to be able to pull a fast one on them. So, I need to rebrand it. [ __ ] you.

Yeah. But I also think that nuance doesn't exist and chat's going to call me a communist and that's cool. But I also think that there is a spectrum to this and we have to stop acting like we live in a totally capitalistic free market society in America right now. We live we live in capitalism light. And I think that the move now is now zero capitalism as in like zero sugar uh Coca-Cola, not like zero capitalism, you I think we're on that spectrum of like classic capitalism, diet capitalism, zero capitalism, then we're starting to get to socialist, and then we're starting to get to these other like entities.

And while him saying specifically the library is a democratic socialist principle, I get everything you're saying that monologue is wellmaintained. The DSA is crazy. Like I said in the past, I have went down that rabbit hole. I agree. No push back. However, I don't want to lose a forest for the trees and to say that there are social programs that can be implemented today that can help workers directly. there are social programs that can help people. So aggressive agreement. A lot of times when we just play the he said this socialism, we're just painting it with a broad brush and we're lo we're using we're losing excuse me the nuance of the things that can be beneficial.

I don't want to say that the DSA did this beneficial thing, but I also don't want to say that keep beating this drum here. Here is what's happening. what's happening. what's happening. Let's say that um a woman just got abused. Mhm. abused. Mhm. abused. Mhm. You and I both agree that woman needs to get help and we need to do anything we can um whether we know her or not to help facilitate her getting help. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. But I'm not going to send her to Ted Bundy's uh clinic for women.

The the absurdity of that, I don't care what he calls it. Um it it is he has said what his principles are and he has said um we're going to further traumatize the woman as soon as she gets here. So I'm I'm guys how are I read the brochure. Sure the brochure says nice things but their charter says what they're actually about. And so the charter and the marketing message are very different. you can go right now and find DSA members who actually say we're going to um have one real policy and then we're going to tell our candidates to say something else.

They they say that so we know it's happening. We know it's part of their policy. Um you can read they put out their new policy. It is it is basically uh I haven't done the go through yet but we'll probably end up covering this but somebody's done a one for one read with mouse policies and the DSA policies and they're like these are basically the same thing using different words. Um, so I would not at all be surprised because everything that I've read about the DSA tells me that that is true.

Um, hearing Hassan, who's like their biggest mouthpiece, and they have defended him time and time again. Um, he has said before on camera, I I pulled it a couple weeks ago, but we didn't get to it. Um, he said on camera that Mao is one of the greatest leaders in history. Bro, that's so crazy. So, um, we like think about how the immune system reacted to reacted to reacted to the way that, um, Kanye was talking about Hitler. about Hitler. about Hitler. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah.

Good. That's that's a good reaction. But we don't have anything like that for Hassan or anybody else going to bat for mouse. It's the craziest [ __ ] ever. So, anyway, no matter what words I use, uh, it doesn't matter. We both agree that woman needs help. So, we need to go, okay, what does a woman who's been traumatized actually need? Not it. This is not a choice between No Help or Ted Bundy. This is a question of we can just rule Ted Bundy out. That's that's that's anti- what we need to do.

So now just forget about that. That that's not going to happen. That's worse. That's uh infinite trauma. That is uh murder. That's literally. So set that all aside. Now look at okay, what are we actually going to do? What is actually going to help somebody? And that game needs to be engaged with. It's precisely why the show exists. I talk about this endlessly uh in terms of what we need to do to actually help workers, but I would just like to remind America, the DSA hates workers.

The DSA hates the working class. Facts. I'll show it over and over and over and over. Uh but that's just a factual statement. Now, they're going to say the opposite, but just like Ted Bundy hates women, no matter what he tells you, the DSA hates workers. Um, we have some supers. supers. supers. Yes, we do. Big Digglers says, "One, ground troops or ground bots. I hear demis demis demis are improving. Maybe we just send in the sex bots. Two, dumping USS's. Tom, be sure you're not citing MTM losses as scale sales.

This is one of the most common ways to ID idiots in the space." Um, I'm going off of sales if you're talking about China. Uh, so yes, if you're saying I'm not even sure what you're saying. If you're saying benchmarked against gold or something like that where it's losing value and so it looks like total value held or wealth held in it as compared to gold or something else is going down. Uh, I don't believe that chart makes that mistake. Uh, if it does, great catch.

Um, I'll certainly look at that, but I don't think so. Um, so great point. Don't think I'm succumbing to that, but I will certainly double check. Uh, and then there was another part to that that I wanted to get to. Part two. It was the sex. sex. sex. Yeah, sex bots or he hears Dems's AIS are improving. are improving. are improving. Yes. So, war will be increasingly done with AI, but eventually you either have to break human bones or things that humans care about. So, it will be less sort of front-end casualties, but there's still I mean, just look at how much life is being lost in um Ukraine and Russia.

It's like you still end up hurting humans. So, it'll be good that some level of this will be done with AI and trust me, they are deploying AI and weapon systems as fast as they can. Uh but eventually, if no human is getting hurt, nobody cares. Behavior doesn't change. You don't get what you want. So um unfortunately people are still going to keep dying even when it's AI. Sequoia Hall says the Lincoln Douglas debate format is a competitive speaking event that focuses on morality, ethics, and philosophical values.

It consists of specific time limits for constructive speeches, cross-examinations, and rebuttals. rebuttals. rebuttals. Yes. So uh anybody that's done high school or college debate knows that um formats help keep the debates sane. Uh the whole debate me bro scene is very much not that. this is just two people going at each other. It feels much more like a blood sport. It's kind of more interesting to watch if I'm completely honest. It can sometimes be a little maddening. Um but yeah, I think professional debates will probably always play out that way.

But I think so if you think of like the Oxford debates, those have rules and you know, procedures that have to be abided by. Uh I think those will become much less popular and they're all going to get supplanted by the blood sport of it all just because it's more entertaining. Um, Sequoia, you will understand why I'm about to say this, and it doesn't matter that nobody else will. I'm sending you love, brother. I'm sending you love, man. You know precisely why. So, um, hope everything's okay.

Love you. Um, so yeah, dig it. There we go. Tab 4697 says, "On Monday, you stated Tyler should get the death penalty. the Navy Seal that killed Osama bin Laden recently stated in an interview that the premise surrounding the case does not point to Tyler Robinson, but another evil force. evil force. evil force. Um, so I would never want to see somebody be executed for something they didn't do. So this no one should take my opinion. Um, so yeah, like if we're saying I even I don't think someone should just go Tom believes it and therefore we should go act on this.

this guy needs to get his day in court. I'm just saying um one, I actually don't remember saying that he should [snorts] be put to death. I don't have super strong feelings about the death penalty. Uh if he gets put to death, cool. I'm here for it. If he's guilty, obviously. Um so yeah, I don't consider myself like a table thumping uh person on that stuff. But yeah, I right now with the facts that I have seen, I think he's guilty as the day is long and should get whatever punishment the court system decides to give him as long as it is aggressive.

Uh so yeah, but if it is some other evil force, great. Then other evil force needs to be the thing held accountable. accountable. accountable. Luke Adam Miller says Tom Vincent Bo uh Bokenfuso apologies I've mispronounced Substack article the diagnosis comes before the prescription analyzes Nate Silver's recent DSA conting uh constituency data suggesting a constituency of overproduced elites I loved your take on Monday the DSA is overproduced elites the great irony of part of why Markx ended up being wrong was that workers don't end up revoling.

You always have to get an idol elite to do the thing. It's just it's one of those things that plays out. Part of the reason that communism in the 20th century wave failed was no matter how many times they said to the workers, "Come on, like unite." They didn't. And a big part of the reason is life got worse for them very fast. So even if in the beginning you say, "Uh, the reason the workers don't do it is they're just too busy. They're being taken advantage of.

They can't do it." So we elites must do it on their behalf. Then the workers very quickly, and this is why I say mom Donnie hates, the workers very quickly, the workers' lives get made worse the fastest. So um yeah, like this is not going to play out well for them. So to build a mental model of what's happening right now in America, you must understand the overprouction of elites. And owe the great irony that this goes back largely to our prosperity engine making it such that the government could guarantee loans for anybody to go study any dumbass thing in college.

And so and then you put them into a left uh leaning ideological meat grinder that takes otherwise potentially sensible people and makes them Marxist. Uh it's so everpresent that they don't even have a way to step outside of that worldview. That's the problem. And so now they're so trapped in left ideology and they just see it as but this is the world. This is the way that it works. Every one of their teachers from every angle was reinforcing uh that world view. Even if they were giving different facts, it's just the same world view over and over and over.

So then they come out and they are not as um they're not making as much money as they expected to be. They're not taken as seriously as they expected to be. And they've been taught that they're a victim because they're forced into the oppressed and oppressor narrative. So now the mere fact that they're not able to get the job that they were promised is proof that they're a victim and there is something wrong and therefore we must bring the revolutionary energy to it. And oh the great irony that all a revolution looks like is neverending revolution.

Remember what ended the French Revolution. Bit of history lesson. Everybody at home say it with me now. A psychotic dictator named Napoleon who goes and says oh you guys aren't going to stop killing so I've got to point you at killing people that's going to be good for us. And they go and kill what, two or three million people all across Europe, stealing their [ __ ] And guess who became the [ __ ] oppressors? Napoleon, man. Who took these uh Robes Pierre [ __ ] and said, "All right, you guys want to kill people?

You guys have the taste for blood. Let's go. We're we're going to go sweep across Europe. These guys have all done bad [ __ ] Let's just take their stuff." Dude, that's so wild. So yeah, the fact that people cannot see the lessons that are screaming out from history to be listened to. Um, that's what's going to happen. You get the whole purity test cycle running and now it's like they start eating their own. It's going to be hilarious to watch the DSA people begin to attack each other.

I didn't pull it, but there is a recent DSA thing where you had a bunch of people say that the DSA DSA DSA is suffering from too much whiteness. Let's go. So, uh, yeah, they're going to turn on themselves. That's that's that's a fractal. It's cool. It is hilarious. So, good luck. Yeah. Anyway, you have to understand overproduction of elites. Big Diggers on this last super chat. Big Digglers says, "Countries have the strongest of motivations to be koi about their gold holdings without looking like they're being koi.

Probability of deception is high. I think maybe US has more gold than people think or not. Hard to see. to see. to see. Man, do I hope that we secretly have way more than we're letting on. You're absolutely right that people have uh a reason to be deceptive. Nobody wants anybody to know what their actual level of strength is. Um, so yeah, I'm sure that's going to continue for a long time or their weakness for that matter, which I think unfortunately my paranoia leads me to believe given the rate at which the US was export selling gold and exporting it effectively to China was the biggest buyer by a long shot.

Um, I doubt that we have more than we're expecting. I do think though that we have dramatically undervalued our gold. But again, to value it at the right number, uh, would be inflationary. So, take that for what it's worth. All right. Thank you guys for the super chats. You guys are amazing. The support is really, really felt, really appreciated. Speaking of people that support this podcast, Humble House, thank you guys so much. You are incredible. We're so grateful. And if you guys want to take advantage of what are freakishly good sauces that have just the best ingredients, it is so clean.

In fact, go to their website. Just read the ingredients. It's humblehousefoods.com. humblehousefoods.com. humblehousefoods.com. Check out the ingredients. They are incredible. And if you decide to get some, get 15% off with code Tom. Shout out to those guys. We might need like new samples or something. This is getting bad. I feel bad how much they're supposed to be like filled. filled. filled. In fact, was like, "We probably shouldn't put those on." We're like, "No, no, no. We're actually eating them. Let people see that we're eating this stuff." stuff." stuff." But it's bad that we don't have full samples, but it's good cuz there's nothing worse than somebody's trying to like pitch something and they haven't used it.

used it. used it. Yeah. Yeah. So true. Uh, and speaking of uh people that we're grateful for, Felix and Friends, who was who we were reacting to today, uh, he runs the Goat Academy. Check those guys out. I'm very grateful. I don't have any relationship with him. I've never talked to him ever in my life. Uh, so Felix, if you happen to see this, uh, thank you, man, for putting together another quality video. I've seen a ton of your stuff. All right, everybody. We've got another ITU AI master class coming up August 5th at 1 p.m.

Pacific time. Let me show you how to launch a company using AI. I use AI all the time. It is so useful. We're living in this narrow gap where people are still afraid. There's all that anxiety. Most people are rejecting it, not using it. I'm telling you, take advantage of this window. I'll show you how to do it for free on August 5th at 100 p.m. All right. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you Monday. Love you. Oh, yeah. We'll see you Monday. Love you.

Bye.