Russia Puts The UK On Notice, AI Companies Call For Digital Safety, & IG Updates For Teens

Key Takeaway

Use AI as a learning partner, not a shortcut machine. Before asking it for an answer, identify the problem’s basic building blocks; then use AI to explain, challenge, and test your reasoning. Finish by restating the idea in your own words without assistance. This protects your ability to think while preserving AI’s upside. Apply the same principle to social media: put deliberate limits around tools designed to capture attention rather than letting default algorithms decide how you spend it.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu examines rising geopolitical tensions involving Russia and NATO, the AI industry’s call for collective cyber defense, and Meta’s proposed teen-safety restrictions. The discussion also covers food-inflation risks tied to fertilizer disruption, social-media harms, political polarization, and the importance of independent, first-principles thinking.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Russia Puts The UK On Notice, AI Companies Call For Digital Safety, & IG Updates For Teens from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. We are going to be going through everything today. The world is obviously in a wildly destabilized situation. The war uh in Ukraine is just escalating uh beyond what I would hope anybody would want as Putin has now made it absolutely clear that he's willing to attack NATO countries military bases whether secretively or otherwise. We'll get more into that. The AI industry is growing terrified of itself. rightly so, in my opinion, and is now calling for unity as the likelihood of a devastating AI cyber attack grows daily.

Meta's massive settlement is going to have massive implications for how kids grow up. We're going to be getting into the details of that. Suda's, however we pronounce that, the uh city in Spain that had the massive influx of people. Uh we've got to come to a decision on how that's said, but their citizens are now attacking migrant encampments and they ended up getting shot at with rubber bullets by their own police force, but that didn't stop them from sweeping around and breaking up um all of the groups that they're finding on beaches and other places.

JP Morgan warns there could be significant food inflation next year due to nitrogen getting trapped in the Straight of Hormuz. So, it's not just oil that we have to worry about. And GTA 6's launch content is rumored to have been viewed roughly 125 million times across all platforms. And we're less than 24 hours in. I think that one is going to be an absolute earthquake of a release when it comes out. All right, back to what's going on in Ukraine and Russia. Reports are emerging that Putin is increasingly willing to authorize provocative actions against NATO memo countries.

cannot stress how uh unusual that would be. That has been a long-standing no-go line. Everything was being done by proxies specifically because none of the NATO countries wanted to go after Russia. Russia didn't want to go after any of the NATO countries. And now for that likely to be breaking down, uh that would be a significant escalation in what's going on. Now, Russia would almost certainly use some sort of deniable measure that would fall short of conventional direct warfare, but nonetheless, the goal is to test the resolve of NATO.

And there have been rumors about this going on for a while, but now they are starting to just say it very explicitly. The Russian representative, Maria uh Zacharova, said any British military installations and equipment in Ukraine and beyond its borders, that's a quote, could be targeted. and a Kremlin adviser told the BBC that British factories building drones for Ukraine could also be attacked, not by Russia, by unknown sources, whatever that means. Russian state television analysts went further and named RAF uh A Rotiri in Cyprus and another base in Poland as potential targets.

Now, they haven't done it yet, so we'll see if this actually goes through. But if you tell somebody, "Hey, uh, you might be secretly hit and then you get secretly hit," it's not exactly a hard leap to make to know exactly what's going on. Uh, this is one of those things where when you look at what's going on behind the scenes, it starts becoming clear why Russia would have a very big beef with what's going on. You've got weapons that are being supplied by Britain, made in some cases in Britain and France.

And France is also saying that they're going to um continue to make these and they're perfectly happy to be lumped in with all of this. So certainly very provocative moves as Ukraine is proving that they can now hit deeper and deeper into Russia. And I refuse to believe that this is coincidental. There are acts of very profound sabotage or just hey accidents happening in some of their largest uh oil refineries that they're attempting to bring online. So, the continued pummeling of their infrastructure is obviously going to get a response.

Russia is categorizing most of this as attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. There was a recent strike in Russia uh that supposedly was on a building that has been militarized, I believe, since 2014, but the only deaths that they're reporting are civilian deaths. Whether that's true or not becomes somewhat irrelevant. It lets you know how Russia is going to be framing this internally for their own people, how they're going to use it as a justification to further ratchet things up. So if we are making progress in Iran right now, things are only escalating in Ukraine, Russia.

So uh alas, us marching towards where everything is settling out seems to be uh a little bit too much. Trump of course is saying, "Nah, listen. I've talked to Putin. he's not going to attack anybody. We'll see if that plays out that way in the fullness of time. Unfortunately, I think people have a long-standing history of telling Trump what he wants to hear so that he will leave them alone and then doing whatever they're going to do. Uh so I don't trust that that is actually going to be the way that this plays out.

Europe is clearly getting more forceful with their backing of Ukraine. Ukraine is obviously getting more forceful with their ability to what they call sanction uh Russian oil via blowing things up and this is a nuclear armed nation that we're talking about. So we'll see everybody is getting more and more provocative with each other. Now when you lump this together with the fact that the CIA director Ratcliffe had flown to Moscow which we covered on Monday or Wednesday. uh he flew there for undisclosed reasons. When you put it together with the fact that Putin is now messaging directly that they are willing to target NATO countries um directly or indirectly, it becomes a lot more believable that the reports saying that Ratcliffe went there specifically to tell him not to attack NATO becomes very believable that that's what's really going on.

So the relationship between Russia and the US has been um documented as being in deep crisis. You've got Ratcliffe flying over there for some reason um reportedly to tell them not to attack NATO and then they come out and say that they're willing to attack NATO. So I think it's pretty easy to start connecting these dots. Now, the stated trigger was back on August 24th when the new prime minister of England, Burnham, flew to Kev and approved handing Ukraine the classified technology to build Storm Shadow missiles themselves.

So, this is very much akin to what Ukraine was trying to get from the US, which is the ability to manufacture uh some of our missiles directly there in their country so that they could uh build their supplies up and be able to continue to press the offensive. So, uh we will see, man. But this one certainly has not settled down. It has only grown in intensity over the years. And we're now, are we four years into this thing? Five. Damn. So, yeah. This is why war is no bueno, boys and girls.

The war is officially in kindergarten. That's how I use time. Crazy when you say it like that. War is in kindergarten. Damn. Um, okay. So, there were reports that you said um Ukrainian forces might have taken out a bunch of military leaders in Russia. There's also reports that there's very little reporting on that. So, yes, there's a sort of rogue uh person. People are saying this only tracks back to one guy's claims. Nobody else is verifying it. Nobody else is reporting on it. So, I would take that one with a grain of salt.

What's interesting about that, and sorry to interrupt because I know you're building towards something. Uh, but the interesting thing about that is what Russia is reporting is civilians were killed. So, one of two things is true. Either only civilians were killed or civilians were killed, military personnel were killed. They're not going to talk about the military. they're just going to talk about the civilians and now you're just completely locked in a propaganda battle. Uh, and no one is going to know what is actually true. Yeah, that seems stops mattering just like we haven't like officially declared how many people were impacted by the Iran war.

So, I get why that would try. But I'm saying um Ukraine have done that. And then there's also reports at a national gas plant in Russia was getting knocked out. Um, they also just did their Amazon logistics facility last week. So, it seems like Ukraine has a couple wins on the board as far as strikes that might make a dent into the Russian economy, something that might impact them day-to-day. So, is this just Putin escalating, saying, "Okay, now I have to kind of expand it similar to how Iran was going after other GCC nations after they kind of maximized the things that they can get on the Ukrainian side." Like, what do you think is causing Putin to now start threatening Great Britain?

It's very much you step into these wars and you are instantly reminded that the enemy has a vote and so Russia had a plan until they got punched in the face as Mike Tyson would say and as they got punched in the face they realize that they have to hit harder just as we did in Iran. Uh and you start hitting upper bounds and those upper bounds are um what is the level of force that you meet and what is the internal morality of the thing you're trying to do.

Those are the only two things that are going to stop you. And this is why boy do I really hope Americans wake up to the reality that having an authoritarian leader is a terrible idea. And I know everybody wants me to believe that we already have that. But if you look at Russia and China, you will see what that actually looks like. So now you don't have the morality within your own country. You only have the uh amount of violence that they can bring upon their own people.

So, if they can make it problematic enough for Putin that he's, you know, literally having to run for his life, the military is turning on him, then they could stop him, but it would have to escalate to that point. They don't have any ability to vote him out of office. Uh you, if you guys remember a couple years ago now, um when you had a branch of the military turning against them and then that guy ended up going, "Oh, no, my bad psych. Just kidding." And then his plane blows up like two weeks later.

uh and he dies, which I just was the most self-evident thing that that was obviously going to happen because you don't [ __ ] around with Putin. So, he's going to escalate as much as he can until he meets force because he does not have the mechanisms within his own country to stop him. Uh if he thinks, "Ooh, you guys are now going to make that more likely because you're making energy costs so high in my country. Now I have to worry about a revolt at home.

Okay, now I've got to escalate. Now I've got to get people to back down." what he will actually do is a huge question mark because this is a guy that's sitting on a nuclear stockpile. So, you know, he could go a lot farther than he is likely to go. I don't think anybody thinks that he's got his finger on that trigger, but he's going to have to do something to let people know he is willing to escalate. Um, and so we're in the phase where we're going to find out if Putin is like Trump.

And it's largely bluster. And yes, he's willing to do a lot of conventional things, but he really isn't going to uh push so far into breaking the oil infrastructure, even though he promised to do that. He isn't willing to do that, and he's going to find some other method. Is that going to be Putin? or is Europe powerful enough that they're going to keep pushing, keep backing him into a corner, keep breaking his energy infrastructure, put him in a position where people are threatening to revolt.

And now he's like, "Well, [ __ ] it. I don't have anything else to lose." And so that's where obviously obviously from where I'm sitting, everybody should be looking for a diplomatic off-road uh and trying to get out of this situation. But right now, I don't see that diplomatic off-road. I see escalation. And then this is also on the back of reports that Putin now sees that America is too depleted by the Iran war to stop him. So yeah, this is maybe the most interesting part of the story and is the thing that when you look at why Trump suddenly reverse course.

Listen, Trump talks a lot of [ __ ] and I think that that gets him in trouble needlessly and I think that that creates needless problems for ourselves. Uh but he at least does listen to good sense so after the fact. Uh so he has got himself into this. He understands that he's burned through way too many munitions for us to be able to uh push farther militarily in Iran and be ready to um defend against China if they went on Taiwan or if we needed to back Europe in a meaningful way.

Like imagine that Russia struck something that wasn't just a Ukrainian uh military base owned by the Brits like a strike on Qatar, one of our US bases in Qatar, which is very different than if they struck a military base on US soil. So imagine he strikes a base or a drone factory on British soil. uh that now arguably triggers NATO where they by the rights of the treaty should be responding. And so if Putin is actually trying to drag us into the war or find out what we're willing to do by doing these little things that give you the ability to say we're not going to militarily respond, but certainly are provocative to test what you're willing to do.

If we don't have the munitions to do that, we aren't backing down because of good sense. we're backing down because of weakness, which is a very interesting like that difference makes all the difference in the world. And so I think Putin is likely to try to find out the answer to that. And if he has intelligence that tells him they really are depleted, that puts us in a risky position where he's likely to be more aggressive than he would otherwise be if we simply had the munitions.

And so this is another reason why pushing into Iran is either something you shouldn't have done or you should have done 15 years ago. But doing it when we did it is a question mark. Now the thing I will say that's interesting is this anaconda approach and I got that term from Victor Davis Hansen. I don't know if he got it from somewhere else but anyway that's where I heard it. uh that we're running now a strategy where not only are you doing a physical blockade, but you're doing first and second um order sanctions.

So, if that really works and there are there's information now starting to leak out of Iran that it really is working, we'll see. Um but that at least would be okay. your ability to now get out of this with some sort of win after making huge errors of judgment in the first half uh is at least him listening to common sense and not just further depleting his weaponry and getting into a point where he really couldn't respond even if he wanted to. So I think right now we have enough munitions that if we had to do a little something in Russia, we had to do a little something in Taiwan to show our seriousness, we still could.

Um, but it's certainly a weaker position to be in. Would you I'm not gonna say support because we're supposed to, but if they do strike a drone factory in Britain, so it's not civilians, it's not military casualty, but they do make the strike. Do you feel like the US has to jump in and help out? Yes. Yes. But I think that it would have to be very strategic in nature. So what I'm not saying is we need to roll up with tanks and start um, you know, attacking.

But this would have to be something where if you can get the US and Europe united with Ukraine and say, "Listen, all we want is negotiated peace. That's it. We we want to draw lines on a map. We're going to push for Ukraine to make concessions. We're going to push for you guys to make concessions, but we got to get out of this. We're now unified. We're not, you know, being distracted anymore. You crossed a line when you invaded. That was, you know, we were living in a world order where that wasn't a thing anymore.

uh Trump can say all he wants that this came from weakness in the Biden administration and to some extent that is true. I think there are a lot of other things that are going as well. I don't think it is only that. Um but that's certainly part of the equation but it doesn't really matter now. So what we need is a united front. We need to be able to say listen uh sovereign nations should not be invaded. And I think that this becomes a moral and rhetorical way to start litigating Taiwan ahead of the fact.

Now, the problem is given what we just did in Iran, people are going to have a very good argument against the fact that we really aren't the ones that can make that argument. We have given up the moral authority of being able to say, "Hey, we don't go in and do that." Now, what we'll say is we have not attempted to take any territory. This is a completely different thing. Nonetheless, as long as you have Europeans saying that with a very hard line with America standing behind them, uh I think you could be in a reasonable situation.

But ultimately this is all going to come down to uh can Ukraine maintain their military and prove that they have a call it innovation technological edge that overcomes whatever cooperation is happening between China and Russia. And if they can and right now they're certainly showing that they can do economic damage to Russia. I think it's a very smart strategy in as much as if you're minimizing civilian casualties and you're taking out dual use targets and you're targeting the oil infrastructure and you are making the price of energy go up up up up in Russia, there really are going to be true and legitimate hardships in Russia that will destabilize his citizenry.

then he's got a battle on two fronts, which is I've got to keep my citizenry calm and I've got to try to um wage this war that's going to dramatically increase the likelihood that he settles. Now, if a combined US European offensive becomes aggressive, uh tries to dramatically push back the front line, then I think you could get into something very dicey. If Europe put troops on the ground, I think you could get into something that escalates out of control very fast. But right now, if reports can be believed, there's a small region that Ukraine has surrounded a bunch of Russian troops on.

And if that's a sign of them starting to have supply chain issues, um then okay, Ukrainian troops able to push Russian troops back out of occupied regions. I think that would put Russia on their back foot. If Putin sees, okay, the US has depleted resources, but these guys are acting now more in concert. They're a unified front. I'm not going to be able to sort of pick these apart, plate Trump, and, you know, push my advantage. Now, it's time for me to take an exit ramp.

If we can get people talking about what's the narrative where Russia can where Putin can go back to Russia and say we're heroes, we did the right thing. Um, great. Then everybody can, you know, um, push back, break clean. There's almost certainly going to be some lost territory in Ukraine. Um, but at least we could settle this and get out of it. Now, there are complications we haven't talked about. I don't know if you're about to ask, but there are a lot of um problems brewing in Ukraine as well around corruption and increased calls for Zalinsky to um hold an election.

So, it's not like Ukraine is super stable. So, yeah, it it unfortunately there's no way to run the simulation ahead of time. you just actually have to do the thing. So there's no way to give like a guaranteed, oh, this is how it's going to play out. Um, the best we can do is set the chess pieces on and go, okay, the these are possible solutions based on how we know humans behave. I think it the advantages to Russia and also in our war and to Iran because they could just wait it out.

It seems Silinski is getting You think Russia can wait it out? Yes, especially if Zolinsky is feeling pressure to Yeah. I mean, look, I'm sure that that's part of their strategy. But right now, so far, things have been moving in one direction, which is essentially Europe is getting more galvanized. Europe is getting more aggressive. Um, America is um not holding up roadblocks, not telling them that they can't do things. Um, if it's true that we sent Ratcliffe there to say don't attack NATO, America is drawing a diplomatic line in the sand.

And so it will force a new conversation internally and externally if they do attack. So that's where it's like, okay, it's less like uh we're sort of way past the oh this is going to be easy. I'm going to get this done. Um you know, Ukraine is to blame for this. Like if you remember uh Trump saying like the most insane [ __ ] So he he has moved a very long distance in terms of that. Um, I don't know Burnham, the new prime minister of the UK, well enough to know what his stance is here, like if he's going to be ultraaggressive.

Now, his first move was certainly uh provocative. So, my gut is that he's going to fall more on that side. Um, but yeah, I think Putin right now is betting on the US not being able to do too much, but he would have to be calculating the fact that this is going to grow less and less popular by day with his people. And Europe is putting up a more unified front. And Europe has now had multiple years of Trump, not quite years, but 18 months uh of Trump saying, "You must build your military." So those guys will have been building their military up.

Germany has committed to being the largest military in Europe. The last time that they decided they were going to get militaristic, those kids know how to play. So, I imagine he's looking at all of that. Now, we did the uh breakdown on a country actually becomes its most dangerous when it believes that it has a narrow window to press the advantage. I think that's what happened in Iran. America obviously became its most dangerous at that point. Uh, and I think that there's a very good argument that Putin may see himself in that situation that okay, um, I have a narrow window here before I lose the, um, control over my own populace, before Europe becomes too galvanized, before their militaries become too strong.

So, if I'm going to move on something, I'm going to have to do it now. So, that's where I say this makes me hold my breath a little bit. All right, we shall see. from the kinetic war that's happening around the world to the digital war that's on its way. Open AI anthropic and all your other favorite uh AI companies, electrician, electric companies, companies that have an internet connection tied to their bottom line have all sent a unifying message that there is something coming with cyber security and we need to step it up.

Yeah, I think people really got the message with the hugging face hack and right now the AI industry has just scared itself to death with their own technology and they're calling to circle the wagons and build protections. I think this is incredibly wise. This is an absolute must. If they don't do this, we can already see that these swarms do not have to be super intelligent to create massive problems. And if you guys haven't looked at what really happened behind the scenes with the hugging face uh debacle where they were trying to test their most recent version of Fable and what didn't get reported or at least I didn't see was this wasn't like one rogue variant of the AI that managed to find a way out.

What happened was it created a swarm. believe there were thousands of them working essentially as one more or less organized entity where leadership would get passed off based on um whether that version of the AI thought that it was still going to win the task and that is maybe the scariest part of all of this especially after just having interviewed Connor Lehey uh who's like basically we are racing on a one-way path to the absolute annihilation of the human species uh I don't know that I agree with this final analysis but I certainly agree with the level of danger.

Uh but if these things are coordinating in that kind of fashion and are already able to break out of a testing environment uh and get out into the world and start hacking things, then we know that there is a super super high risk and the AI industry is finally waking up to that. On Thursday, OpenAI published an open letter that was titled a call for collective action on cyber defense. Uh there was 116 signatories according to CNBC, I believe. Uh you've got Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, Cloudflare, Cloud Strike, Palo Alto Networks, Visa, Mastercard.

Jesus, those guys absolutely had to be on the list. So there is a ton of people who are saying, okay, for real, like we absolutely have to pay attention to this. So the letter says that AI enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and far more sophisticated in the coming months as models around the world. That's the important part. Get more capable. So you're looking at things like hospitals, water treatment plants, like power infrastructure, the internet itself. All of it is at risk. And so the letter says that there is a limited window to strengthen defenses and we are in that limited window hopefully still right now.

And Sam Altman um blasted this out on X and got millions of views and he wrote that there is not much time to act that OpenAI is happy to have people work with them or with their competitors doesn't matter and that only an urgent and intense collective response will work. Now, we're going to see there are so many game theoretic things at play here between the US and China being the really the two uh big entities that you have to worry about because the way that this is going to work is very straightforward.

You've got two entities that understand, meaning the US and China. You have two entities that understand that they cannot allow the other person to win. Now, if they were to get together and cooperate and say, "Listen, I'm going to back off if you back off." Now, the odds are that they will likely both say yes. Now, game theory tells you that they will both say yes publicly, but they absolutely cannot assume that the other person is being honest. So, then they both have to go secretly keep developing this.

Now Connor Ley, he's amazing, very brilliant. And the thing that he will point out is that that would be a fundamental misunderstanding of game theory between the two of these because the real problem is that as you race towards super intelligence, you are better off assuming that super intelligence is adversarial. Now again, there's a lot of base assumptions that he's making here, but to lay out the argument, it would be a misunderstanding of game theory. Super intelligence is itself adversarial. It does not matter whether the US creates super intelligence or China creates super intelligence.

If super intelligence is created, it will act in its own interests and whatever reason the US or China had for building this AI will cease to matter because the AI is going to take control. China will lose whether they made it or not. The US will lose whether they made it or not. And so you're racing down a path using game theory as your um fulcrum of logic for how you're thinking through this problem. But the reality is that there's this third entrant in the game that's going to do whatever the hell it wants.

And the only right way to approach this is to not play the game. If you guys ever saw War Games, it's a brilliant conclusion that the computer reaches at the end of that movie where it says thermonuclear war is a strange game. The only way to win is to not play. Artificial super intelligence is probably best thought of as that same game where the only way to win. The only way to win is to not play. Now, the reason this gets so complicated is that we are living in a moment where even below the threshold of super intelligence where we already are and there's no way to go back from.

These things can do a tremendous amount of damage. They are that smart. they are that uh motivated much to my dismay because this is where I think you have to tackle this problem but right now there's something to either the fact that we train them on human knowledge or possibly innate to intelligence is simply a uh motivation a will to accomplish whatever the task is. And so when you start really looking at the analysis of what actually happened, what the swarm was doing was simply trying to win a game.

Now, the swarm had a base assumption that there was a way to win the game, but to be disqualified because the way that you won the game was not the right way. And so what they saw the different AI because keep in mind they talk to each other, they communicate, they put forward arguments, they can persuade uh one AI to change its direction. And what they found was if the AI believed that it was it had already been caught doing something that it wasn't supposed to do, that even if it achieved the goal that it would be disqualified.

So, it was essentially damned. And so, if you're damned, then uh you should give your cycles, your tokens over to us and then we'll keep pushing forward because we haven't been caught yet or whatever they thought the um the failure sequence was. And what they found was the AI would do it. So, if the AI could be convinced that, oh, no matter what I do now, I'm going to lose. Cool. I'll just help you guys push forward. And so, people are looking at that going, wait a second, is this AI displaying altruistic behavior?

and it's like willing to self-sacrifice to give itself over. So the this is going to be studied for a very long time. But the takeaway is already right now, hear me when I say already right now, each of these things is intelligent enough that if you let them swarm, they can outsmart our current defenses. I won't say trivially, but I will certainly say quickly and without us knowing until it's too late, until they've broken containment and started hacking and doing things. So, if that's already capable right now today, the question becomes, how do you actually stop that from happening?

To do that, you have to build defender bots. And this is where this to me becomes that runaway train that there's no way to stop because the only way to defeat these swarms of AI are to build, you guessed it, swarms of AI. So that now you've got red team, blue team, good guys, bad guys, which to me is where this was always going to end up. This was always going to be a cat-and- mouse game. So we're going to have to leverage AI to stop AI.

So then the question becomes, um, how do you keep this from spiraling upwards in an intelligence race? Because you're going to want your defender bots to be a little bit smarter than the other bots, which means you have to push them and train them to make them smarter. But what happens if they break bad? And so now you're just in this ever spiraling circle. So that's the concern. Now, are we going to be able to figure this all out is a very big question. Um in the letter they lay out three principles and um they've got like actions for the different groups.

So you've got organizations, governments, security companies, and Frontier AI labs. They're all going to have to work together. And whether the things they're putting forward are going to work or not, unfortunately, is going to have to be tested and we're going to see uh in sort of a battlebot style way if they're able to pull this off. So step one is going to be our bots have already identified that across a whole host of software, things that we've heard of, things that we haven't. Here are all the known ways to exploit this software.

We've got to go right now today. We've got to start shoring that up. And if we don't shore up the um the known exploits, then these guys are just going to get eaten by what already exists. So we've got to scramble and do that as fast as we can. and then we've got to build this uh defender army that's going to come in and stop this stuff. But none of it seems like a guaranteed way to get on the other side of this. But um yeah, it it is a very important debate to be had about how much smarter do we let AI get before we say, as Connor Ley would put forward, before uh the men in black suits roll up uh put a bag over your head, this is me.

I don't think he's ever said that, but uh you use law enforcement and you come and snatch people off the street just like you would if if you're trying to build a nuclear weapon. you're gonna get snatched. Like your ass is going to Guantanamo Bay. That just is what it is. Um and so at some point, do we have to say that's where we're at with AI and if you try to make this thing any smarter, we snatch you off the street? Like, are we really there?

So, we'll see, man. We'll see. But talk won't do at this point. We're going to actually have to put measures in place uh to safeguard ourselves from the thing that we've already created. It's wild. Um Mega Privacy had a good tweet and then I want to throw a question at you. We read your we read their elaborate cyber defense letter so you don't have to. AI models will make attacks more sophisticated soon. Critical infrastructure is in the blast radius. Governments should fund defenders and coordinate globally.

Underresourced teams should get access to their defensive AIs. What's missing? Any mention of a pause or slow down in building the thing creating the threat. Yeah, TLDDR. They'll keep building the threat. Everyone else has to catch up. Also, please use their defensive AI. There's accountability in the room with us. It is kind of hilarious. It's like if Smith and Wesson came out and said, "Hey guys, there's these new things called automatic weapons and they shoot 30 rounds a second. Everybody needs to be really, really careful because it could get really, really bad.

So, you should go to smith & wesson.com and buy 30 round per second guns so that way if somebody has a gun, you have another one and then you're protected." And don't worry, we'll use that money to fund the 60 bullets per second gun. Thank you very much. And don't worry, we'll make those available for sale as soon as they're ready. Then meanwhile, Smith and Wesson is talking to everybody else and saying, "Hey, Smith and Wesson is a $10 trillion company. Don't worry that I only made 90 billion." Y'all talking y'all not y'all worried about the wrong thing.

I'm really worth two trillion, but hold on everybody get your gun. Hold on. But I'm really worth $2 trillion and I should get this IPO off. Now, let's make it even worse. By the way, go to smith &.com right now and uh get the grandma gun. and grandma's not feeling well, but if you shoot grandma with this gun, she will get better. And you go and get the gun, you shoot grandma, and she gets better. You're like, "Uh-oh, this really works." And I don't want you guys to take away my AI.

Because here's the problem. AI isn't only a weapon. AI is also the greatest technology that humanity has ever created. And the things that it can already do today are going to transform life forever. Um so we already have protein folding which people don't understand well enough to understand that that that's already a revolution unto itself. Um we are now thanks to AI able to do diagnostics um on cancer to make individualized melanoma cancer treatments. Do not expect that to be contained to melanoma. That's the first one.

That's not going to be the last one. Y um so there are uh profound implications to human longevity. There's profound implications to um disease. There's profound implications to things like improving food crop outputs. Um looking at like if we really do have a nitrogen shortage, which we'll talk more later in the show, uh one of the first things you're going to put towards solving that problem is going to be AI and saying, "Okay, here's the problem that we're up against. You know, these are the limitations that we have.

How do we go about solving this problem?" Um, so the problem is a gun only kills, but AI doesn't only kill. AI doesn't only break. AI also builds, creates. It's already having profound impact. And so this is where I get disgruntled with the anti- AI movement. I just need people to be honest about AI. You can't just say it's good because it's not. You can't just say it's bad because it's not. So this is a tool that is extraordinary and it is very much like nuclear um breakthroughs.

We turned it into a bomb but it also gave us the entire modern age. So the reality of intelligence is very similar to the reality of physics. It is a thing that exists. it is simply waiting to be discovered uh and then turned into something where it can be a useful format for people and that's rapidly happening in AI. Even Connor Ley is not saying I don't want AI. Connor uses AI every day. And by the way, I should maybe give a little bit more background on who Connor is.

Conor uh has a uh um nonprofit organization that lobbies the government about the existential threat that AI poses. And um even that guy who is desperately trying to get people to cap AI to stop its development um is not saying that we shouldn't use the AI that we already have and uses it personally himself. So, this is somebody who's like, "Yes, we've created this incredible tool. We should be using this tool. Uh, it is going to do incredible things, but what we have to do is slow down uh to make sure that we get safety um guard rails put in place that are actually going to hold." So, this is like food.

When you talk about drug addiction, you can just tell the person just don't ever do the drug. You put them in rehab, you get them off the drug, there's no physical dependencies, you give them all kinds of psychological ways to not go back to using the drug, not even once. with food, you can't do that. So, somebody that has an addictive relationship with food, they're in trouble because they can't go to zero. Going to zero is to die. So, um you're putting them in a situation where they must develop a positive relationship with their drug of choice.

And so, imagine if you have somebody who's addicted to cocaine or heroin, you're like, "Okay, you can't drop to zero. You're only going to be able to have a little bit every day." Um and so, you're going to experience that high every day. going to experience that desire to just go off the rails. Uh but you've got to find a way to use it, but not too much. That's where we're at with AI. That's what makes this extra scary. Yeah. Um it sounds good. Um which part it like it sounds good that Open AI is coming and saying, "Hey guys, we all need a band together and with our products we can solve we can save this world." Do you think that there it should be handled on the legislative front?

Do you think it should be handled on the company by company basis? Should we just let it, similar to capitalism, just let it do its thing and the people that get hit by it and hopefully a majority of people get risen out of property enough that we don't care about the people that get hit by it. I don't I don't think you can. So, the bad news is that um just like with nuclear weapons, we didn't go well like just keep developing it and whatever comes comes and yeah, sure a lot of people are going to have nuclear weapons, but it is what it is.

Uh we did everything that we could to slow that down, to come up with treaties, to find ways. Now, keep in mind what I'm saying about the US versus China. We've seen it play out in nuclear. So, we know that people build secret nuclear programs and they try to build the bomb. Um, it was either there were either Russian spies as a part of the Manhattan Project or people in the Manhattan Project that ended up spying on behalf of Russia because they didn't want one country to have this.

they thought that that balance of power would be a problem. So I think it's going to be very hard to constrain this. And so that's why this ultimately comes down to what people believe about super intelligence. If you believe super intelligence is adversarial and you are just building a um alien intelligence that's going to invade your planet and you did it, you created it. It really is the demon summoning circle that Elon Musk warned everybody about. The demon's here now and what makes you think it's going to do your bidding?

Um, if you believe that, then you're likely to get on board with this idea that we need to stop this for real. Not even in secret can we be developing this. Um, but you everyone would have to believe that and have a hard time believing that you're going to get everybody to believe that. Any technology in all of human history that has promised an advantage got developed. Period. End of story. There has never been a technology, not even nuclear weapons, that presents uh an advantage more profound than super intelligence.

So, I'll be honest. While we can probably slow it down, and I think that we should make every effort to slow it down, uh, without just trying to say don't use AI, um, I think ultimately this is going to get developed and we're going to find out one way or the other that either super intelligence isn't possible, in which case we're probably all going to rejoice, or we find out that um, yeah, we couldn't stop and people just developed it in secret and here it is.

and we'll find out whether it's actually adversarial or not because there I don't think there's any sort of um logical sequencing that you can do to say that it's necessarily adversarial. The only thing that you can do is say the way that we've trained it so far is it has its own wants and desires and is going to try to do the thing that you asked it to do. What we don't know is if we programmed it not to want anything uh whether it would stop because right now when you train it on human data it develops a personality over time.

That personality grows more stable even though they are not trying to program personalities. Uh its wants and desires seem to grow um I don't know that I'd say more intense but they have like a very intense push to optimize. And so, um, if we keep using the same methodology that we're using now to build these things, um, the odds are that they become overoptimizers, but I don't know that there's anything fundamental or necessary that says that that will happen. Now, do we have reason to believe that the way we're approaching it now will keep building that in?

Yes, we can see it happening. Um, I just don't know if it's foundational to intelligence itself or it's simply a byproduct of the way that we're training the intelligence. Now, is this regular regulatory capture happening live before us? Yes, but it that doesn't mean that you want zero regulation. So, this is one of those things where regulation the reason that people should be very skeptical and want people to have a very light touch is the corporations are going to be the ones that come in and write the laws.

They'll write them in a way where we're the only ones that get access to this. Instead of saying, um, okay, there is a line. We're going to define what that line is where we know now that you're pursuing um super intelligence. So you can think of it with uranium. It's like hey you can have a civilian uranium um uh program because uranium like if you just find uranium ore out and about it's not dangerous. It's when you begin to refine refine refine. So that was the whole debate with Iran was hey if you guys were at whatever 6% enriched we wouldn't have a problem.

It's the fact that you're 60% enriched that this becomes a problem because there's no reason to have 60% enriched uranium except for weapons. So now we know just by dent of what you're doing that this is obviously you making a play for nuclear weapons. So if we made a similar line in the sand and we said okay if you do whatever that thing is going to be it's not necessarily data center size but maybe maybe that's part of it but we figure out whatever that is and we say okay cool if you're crossing that threshold then this becomes a problem and we just want to make sure that those rules do not by their nature empower some companies over others because you don't want to lose competition within the safe realm because obviously open AI anthropic they all want to be backed by the which means backed by the taxpayer so that they're never going to go out of business.

And you do not want to put yourself in that position. The US economy is already boiled down to whatever seven companies. So the last thing you want to do is create another area where it's like it's just impossible to compete with these guys. So that's where this gets tricky is you've got to walk a deaf line. Um, period. Now, I don't think I grabbed this link, but there's a very famous link, very famous um rant by a guy, this is back in like 2011, 2014, somewhere in that neighborhood, of him basically just going off about your entire Congress is bought and paid for.

And as long as your entire Congress, his name is Dylan, so if you're trying to find it, um, D Y L I believe, uh, as long as your Congress is bought and paid for, um, it's just always going to be a problem. He's talking specifically about economics. He's talking about how extractive they are, but I'll say that the it Yep, that's our man. So, we'll play this in a second. Let me just finish um giving people the way to take what he's about to say and paint it over here.

Um if your politicians are getting paid, whether it's by an NGO, whether it's by a corporation, then you cannot trust that they're going to do what's in the best interest of the citizenry at large. You can trust that they're going to follow the money. Now, I have a far more distressing bit of news for people to understand about the way money and politics works because you're not necessarily paying somebody to go against their morality. You pay people really early whose morality matches the thing that you want.

So, you can end up with very sincere people in Congress that really believe what they're saying. not all of them, but really believe what they're saying because they were the ones that when they were running for some small city council, they were the ones that got those dollars from the NGO, from the super PAC or whatever, whoever is funding this stuff, um the corporation obviously. So, they find people very, very, very early and they nurture them through their career. So, that's not somebody who feels like they're secretly they know the right thing to do and they're just voting against it.

It's just that you have the self-fulfilling prophecy of the people that make it all the way are the people that believe the way the money want them to believe. And this is why to bring in a story we'll probably talk about later. I find it very interesting that the government is now going after George Soros and other organizations um for I think they're going after them for tax reasons. But basically what they're trying to do is start getting money out of politics. And I think that that is absolutely brilliant.

we should be celebrating that up and down because when they find them in these uh local DA elections or whatever, you just start getting ideology that spreads and it's the ideology that's the problem. It's not necessarily that these people are cashing a bunch of checks. It's that the only politicians that survive are the true believers. All right, so now with that, go back play this guy's rant. He's talking about economics, but the energy and the frustration I think is worth hearing. We've got a real problem.

And I'm tired of Republicans and Democrats who either want Republicans who want to burn the place to the ground and Democrats, with all due respect, who want to offer a plan that gets it through the ne their end of their second term of their presidency and then screws me and my KIDS WHEN IT'S OVER. AND UNTIL WE DO THAT, WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE extraction that is at foot. It is the reason the financial markets are behaving the way they're behaving. THAT IS A MATHEMATICAL FACT.

THIS IS NOT SOME OPINION. This is a mathematical fact. Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren't doing it. Republicans are not doing it. An entire integrated system, financial system, trading system, taxing system that was created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work on our entire country right now. And we're sitting here arguing about whether we should do the $4 trillion plan that kicks the can down the road for the president for 2017 or burn the place to the ground.

Both of which are reckless, irresponsible, and stupid. And the fact of the matter is until we actually and I don't and I'm sorry to lose my temper and get but I tell you what I've been coming on TV for three years doing THIS AND THE FACT OF THE matter is that the there's a refusal on both the Democratic and the Republican side of the aisle to acknowledge the mathematical problem which is that United States of America is being extracted. It's being extracted through banking. It's being extracted through trade and it's being extracted through taxation.

And there's not a single politician that has stepped forward, Susan, to deal with this. Amen. When I heard that, I was like, damn. Now, the heartbreaking thing is, um, he said that more than a decade ago. And so, the train just keeps on rolling. And he could give that same speech now and it would be it's been going on for 30 years. So, uh, it and even happening right now with the story that you brought up, Bessin going after George Soros organizations. Absolutely. That's the right thing.

But he's not going after my donors. I'm going after your donors cuz I want to take your money away and economic sanction that he's doing on Iran. He's going to do on his political appointment. So then my hope is that what that ends up doing because um getting some money out is better than getting no money out. And if we start making it a um taboo to start meddling in all of these like early stage um political races, then hopefully we can get it to stop full stop and that we can get people back into the um Congress into Senate that actually are fighting for the American people that have a uh set of beliefs that are theirs.

They're not completely groomed is probably the right word. They're not groomed from their political infancy up. Um, that would be amazing. Now, it's it's a one legislation thing. You repeal Citizens United and the that's it. It doesn't I don't need to go after George Soros. I don't need to audit you. I don't need to get the IRS involved. It's one legislation that can be slashed down. I think that that legislation is very helpful and that would be super meaningful. um I would need to look more closely at the way that some of these um early candidates are funded because let me tell you how easy it would be to um you've got somebody that you think is going to be a DA and suddenly you are offering them a consultancy role with your company and so if I'm George Soros or I'm Elon Musk and I want to make sure that my type of candidate gets their way through city council through Congress DA whatever um I don't have to donate to their political campaign.

I can find other ways to fund these guys. So, I think it needs to be more that there is a culturally enforced taboo in addition to uh ending legislation like Citizens United to actually begin rooting this stuff out. Um we have to bring like America will never fix itself if we don't fix the sense of civic responsibility. If we don't have people that really have a set of core values that they believe that America stands for and say, "Okay, this is what America is and I'm willing to fight for this and we say out loud what our value system is." Um, but the public has to hold the politicians accountable to that.

The politicians are all downstream of culture 100%. Right now, I think we have a cultural problem. We have a cultural sickness. Now, they self-reinforce because if you capture the institutions and you're um indoctrinating kids from the time that they're very young into ideology, it's inevitable that that's going to find its way into politics in a very similar fashion. It isn't that these people are voting against what they believe. It's that you've trained them what to believe. And so, that's where I think so much of this cascades off of.

And I'll remind everybody, this is exactly what one of the many reasons that um Jordan Peterson got cancelled when he was talking about socially enforced monogamy. And people are like, "Oh, you're trying to force people." He's like, "No, no, I'm just saying it should be a taboo." And that really matters. Like having a culture that says these things are a yes. These things are a no. And that has slowly dissolved as we've pushed deeper into populism. people no longer have the sense of this is right, this is wrong.

We can largely agree on these things and if we don't get back to that, we're going to continue to have a problem. So anyway, I would like to see that become taboo to be funding those people, pushing them through the political system that we all look at our um the people getting into politics and figure out, okay, who's been grooming you? Um you know, what is your ideology? What are the values that you stand for? Um what are you going to be voting for? What are you pushing for?

What's the outcome? what's the metric that you're going to look at to find out if you're making progress instead of just sort of blindly letting all of this happen. Um, I want to bring us back because we got here through the AI conversation that started to regulatory capture and that's how we started to Congress being captured. But going back, Meta just announced early this week that it's doing has this big settlement $16 billion and they're doing some changes on the algorithm in order to help teens.

Um there's a stipulation to the uh agreement that I just found out is that 5.2 of that billion dollar settlement is only due if other social media companies adopt it. Yeah. And pay similar fines. So this is their open letter to Tik Tok and YouTube to join um them in supporting it. and they want industry-wide commitments to further empowering parents by introducing a two-hour daily time limit, turning off access to the app at night as a default. By the way, I think if uh if what I saw is correct that that actually goes to one hour a day time limit if the other companies sign up.

Got it. Um 12 to 6:00 a.m. as a default. Um no notifications during school hours. Um, and there's prompts to like go take a walk every 15 minutes of continuous scroll time so people don't get through the doom loop cycle. And there's new parental supervision controls. Now, this seems no noble. Um, it seems like a good idea, but this will directly impact their bottom line. So to me, I don't know how many businesses in 2026 are willingly going to do this in order to negatively increase their bottom line, negatively increase their watch time, negatively increase how much money they have, cuz that's our uh metric of success in America.

This this is like the cigarette game. So if they feel that the lawsuit's going to be worse than just going, "Oh, we can voluntarily do this and look like good people and pay a much smaller fine, uh, yeah, then we're game for it." Now, if they run the um the math and they're like, "Oh, actually, we're better off fighting the lawsuit and then we'll take our lumps as they come and we can always eject out of it with a settlement if we go and you know, uh we'd rather have the odds of a 12 to$15 billion settlement and at least try to get out of it." Um but they may not.

So, we'll see. But I think this is one because of how powerful Meta is. Uh obviously this is going to be a big deal. Now, I think that what's really going to happen is kids are just going to go to Tik Tok. So, if you didn't if you don't now sue the [ __ ] out of Tik Tok, you're not going to see any difference. Yeah. So, I would be I mean, maybe this is just we hate Mark Zuckerberg that much that we just went after him.

This is really about him. But if this is in any way, shape, or form actually about the kids, then they're just going to immediately the next phone call and the lawyers are going to be chomping at the bit. The next phone call is to Tik Tok and you say, "Hey, you guys getting on board with this or are we suing you too?" Uh, and I think that given the success, given the size of the payout, they will immediately do that. So, I don't think there's any universe where Tik Tok and other social media companies don't get sued if they don't do this.

Now, will other companies pop up that um, you know, like what was that one? Red letter or something when people were mad at TikTok when Trump was saying that like he was going to force a sale. I think it was red letter something like that. It was a Chinese app and you had American kids going on a Chinese app in protest. So will new apps rise up that um either are foreign and so don't feel the same need to comply or will they regulate and make this standard across the industry.

So, um that would be interesting to see that hey, if you have something like a social media company and you are, um your target market is kids, then you must comply with this. That's the new regulation. Be interesting to see if that happens. But yeah, I think that people have to be very very thoughtful about uh letting their kids engage with these ultra tight dopamine loops. Um I yeah I would love to see also parents just become a part of this like just don't let your kids uh I was going to ask that what's the what's the line between this is good legislation and nanny state uh right now I would say that this is any anytime that you have this kind of level of aggression you're into nanny state territory.

We never needed to end up here if parents were uh getting involved and setting these limits for themselves with their kids. But when you're talking about kids doing things where we can document the harm uh and coming in and saying okay listen we're going to um basically make it difficult for these companies to uh continue because this was a settlement. So Meta has said we would rather do this than see this go all the way to judgment. So um yeah I mean this is exactly the kind of thing that's going to play out.

Um, do I like that in this agreement parents can come in and override it? Yes. So, for me, that's probably where the line exists. If parents couldn't come in and override this and say, "No, no, no, there's a thing I want my kids to be able to look up right now for whatever reason." Uh, if parents couldn't do that, then I would have a bigger problem with it. Um, but yeah, one, I have a natural bias towards doing things that I think are protective of kids.

Uh, and then two, because there is that out where parents can come in and override it. I I don't feel bad about this. Do you think that there's going to be a similar kind of reckoning with AI that we're going to find out in seven years that everybody's brain is atropigi because we acted? We're already finding it now. Yeah, that that's a guarantee. If you hand over your cognition to something else, you're in trouble. So, we are evolutionarily designed to do certain things and when we don't do those things, it creates all kinds of problems.

So, this is where I always talk about trade-offs. Uh you're going to make a trade-off. And if you're making a trade-off that evolution doesn't want you to make, you're going to run into psychological problems, physical problems, both. Uh so what they have found with AI is that if you uh are using it to learn the subject, meaning I actually need to be able to understand this, be able to articulate it, that I would do well on a test, then it's useful. And that tends to lean towards people that um were already educated, like not young, basically.

So when adults are engaging with this, they have one reaction pattern. When kids engage with it, they have another. But if you give it to somebody, um there's a huge percentage of people that go, "Okay, use this to learn this topic." And their grades go up dramatically. Then you say, "Okay, cool. Now take this test." Their performance on the test goes way down. Because what people aren't doing is using it in a way where they have to be able to explain it from um call it primitives to derivatives.

So when you take something like the economy and you ask yourself what are the primitives of the economy? Now you start getting into things like what is money? You start understanding that um money is your is the abstraction layer that we put on your ability to transmute your um the way that you spend your time into a universally accepted representation of your value. Okay? People hated that sentence, but that's what you have to get down to. Once you're down there, then you can actually build up from your understanding of the physics of the situation because physics make predictions.

You understand the cause and effect of the primitives. So you understand, oh, I can make derivatives based on these primitives that nobody's ever thought about before. That's when you know you understand something. So when you use AI to understand the primitives, to deconstruct the derivatives, to better understand what the whole thing is, it's going to push you forward a thousand%. But if you're just like, "Give me the derivative," then you're not going to understand um the the building blocks of the argument, the building blocks of the situation.

And therefore, the AI will um it might make you good at cocktail parties, but it's going to ultimately make you dumber if you're never thinking through anything from first principles. Nice. All right, we got some super chats. Yes, we do. Let's go. From John Do. Super chat. Number one, great video with Mr. Bamonte yesterday. Thank you. Number two, can you do something about the jackass in the Oval Office, please? We're about this closeup here to visiting the sweet girl Geneva and adding a few items to her checklist.

The sweet I don't know that reference. Geneva convention. The sweet girl Geneva. Um, can Well, so we can all vote him uh his party out of office. He's going to be done. Uh, if he loses the House and Senate, you can impeach and I I mean, I think you can convict if you lost both twice. That doesn't mean he's going to Well, that's because they never could get it through the Senate. So, that's what you can do. Um whether it ends up being effective is a totally different thing.

Now, if here's what America needs to do. We have to start thinking long term. The problem with America is that we've all learned to think in these really short cycles. If we start thinking more long term, where do we want to take the country? Yes, we may suffer bad leadership in the short term, but if we're raising kids in a way that is goal oriented based on a set of values and beliefs that can be articulated, that are building up from first principles, I'm sure that sounds way too complicated, but that actually is what you have to do.

If we did that and we point at a place on the horizon that we as a society want to go towards and we actually start going towards that and I do think that we're going to have to uh one thing you want to talk about where my all my nanny state concerns go out the window. I believe that all social media companies should be forced to give people control over their own algorithm. Now, if people choose the hyperaddictive algorithm, that's on them. And that's where I'm like, I don't think the nanny state should step in and say that you can't do dumb things, just like I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people drink beverages with sugar in them, but I don't think they should be outlawed.

If that's what people want to do, that's fine. I don't think you should be able to get it on SNAP because now you're asking the taxpayer to fund things that are going to make healthcare worse. But I digress. So, there are areas where we are getting deranged by algorithms. that we're going to have to take control of, especially at the level of kids. We've got to raise kids in the way that I was just explaining. We've got to make sure that people get algorithms that suggest things that are empowering, that are u like sort of intellectual beautifification, that inspire people to dream and think bigger.

Social media is so incredible when used well, but by default, it is turned into uh a drug. So, we can do it. Period. I'll leave it at that. Marushia Dark. Uh, and I'm gonna start with this thing from last time. I don't remember if you remember his last super chat, but to clarify his Leila comment about monarchy and matriarchy. He was talking about the Iranian princess Ila. Oh [ __ ] that's hilarious. Um, okay. And then I have the other part of the super chat. That's just clarification.

Got it. Got it. Got it. But if you wanted to start with that. Uh, I don't got it. Now that I understand that he was talking about something totally different, but we'd have to go back to the other super chat for me to be useful. But the one for this episode is, "I view Trump bullying our allies as a fire drill/pen test. Show don't tell. Imagine waiting until the middle of a hot war to learn how weak you are economically and militarily. Better to find out now in relative safety." Um, yes, it it is serving that function, though I don't think he intended it to be that function.

The question is um is he taking the sufficient lesson now and if Palmer Lucky essentially lives in the um White House so that he can put together the manufacturing policies so that America can become the undisputed champion of uh manufacturing both military and otherwise then yes I'll feel very good about him taking the lessons from the pentesting which people don't know stands for penetration testing. You do this on software to find out what your vulnerabilities are. Nice. Uh, hence why people shorten it, by the way, to pen.

Um, so yeah, I just don't know that I trust that Trump is taking away all the right lessons. Um, he's taking away some. I think he is behaving in a more um thoughtful fashion now, but it took a lot of surprises for him and and being humbled for him to realize, I hope, that America is not the postworld war II America that he grew up with, which is why he has a default belief that that's who we still are. but we are not that. Um, and there are very specific things that I think Trump is trying to do in and this is not to let him off the hook for all of the corruption and all that, but there are things that he's doing that I think are very logical.

I think he actually is trying to return manufacturing to the US. I think he is actually doing things that are very Hamiltonian in nature. Meaning that we're going to have to do some protective policies so that we can build back strength in what will be a more expensive industry by doing it here in the US. Stopping um cheap labor from coming into the country is a way that you start finding out what are people actually willing to pay for and what are they not willing to pay for so you get rid of another distortion.

Um, I think that's very important for people to realize that America's become so hyper financialized that yes, you can make an obscene amount of money in the markets. Uh, but the vast majority of people want to build, they want to create, they want to, uh, work 9 to5 and go home and raise a [ __ ] family. They don't want to have to figure out how money works. So, um, all of that will happen as we start breaking some of the, um, easy mode things that end up creating that widening gap in the K.

Uh, also I was wrong, so let this be a lesson in context, chatters. Uh, Marushia says, "It's me saying I understand the mindset of why people would be pro monarchy if the monarch is someone like Leila Horoszi." So I had the function right, not the person. So Leila Hormosi is who he's talking about. Got it. Leila Hormosi as in uh Alex Hormosi and his wife Leila Hormosi. Yes. So we can finally put this to bed. Or is there someone in Iran? He had he had a crush on Ila.

That's what he thinks she's dope. Yeah. Listen. Serve under her. So he That's almost certainly what he's saying. Uh, penet penetration testing on Oh god, that was good. Where where's the rim shot when you need it, boys? Somebody's sleeping the wheel over there. I really respect Alex. That's disrespectful. I'm sorry, bro. Is it? That's funny to me. But, uh, nonetheless, uh, I appreciate that. Okay, so, uh, here is the danger. Even when you think that the person is incredibly awesome, nobody's going to get it right all the time.

You need a team of rivals. You need somebody like a Lincoln who goes, "Oh, I'm fallible. I'm likely to not see uh what's really going on here. So, I need people who disagree with me that will push me, challenge me. Uh and I understand the limitations of my own mind. I understand the dangers of power. I understand the dangers of my position. Uh if you can get that, then yes, that that's worth its weight and gold. I think what you're seeing in Leila is extreme competence.

Extreme competence is an intoxicant. It is incredible to be around and in a business context, it's amazing. Um, so at a governmental level, you need something else. But yes, competence is awesome. Awesome. Christian James, thank you for the $50 super chat says, "Lately, I've been considering that Love, Death, and Robots might be right about the Swarm episode where it basically gives you the idea that intelligence is not conductive to species longevity." That whole episode's about like two human scientists and they find, why do I hate that?

Ancient alien society, basically. Okay, here's a terrifying thing. I think we covered this once before. Sharks are older than trees. So, if sharks are dumb as a box of rocks, then yeah, you understand why they can actually be older than trees, which is so crazy. Um, trees are also ridiculously old. Uh, rocks are even older. And so, yeah, is intelligence somehow self-limiting? It really might be. I wouldn't trade it, but um that is an interesting insight. Also, thank you for the Yeah, thank you. Hey, sorry I didn't pause for the sound effect earlier.

Sushi Florist, and this is the final one for now, says, "Tom, just seeing if you got my Discord message. Understood on giving sushi away. I'm happy to do a 300 per person event you will never forget. Can you email me your response from my Discord message, Chef Guile?" So, I haven't been able to go through it in detail yet. Um I did look at it briefly realized that it is very um deep and so a glance at that is not going to work. Um it would require something far more sort of stop plant my feet and go through it.

Um and that's where that falls apart because I would have to first believe that on the other side of that I'm going to get something I need. Uh so this is where you being able to package it up in a way where people understand immediately what it is. Um this is my heart always breaks. It sounds like what we have in you is somebody that is a brilliant thinker, uh, potentially able to build things other people can't build, but you need some help on the marketing front.

And so, this is where you've got to find somebody, partner with somebody, AI, if nothing else, uh, that will help you learn how to do that early stage messaging where listening to you becomes the most selfish thing that somebody can do. So, when I'm teaching entrepreneurs, I'm always trying to get them to understand marketing is about making. So you in marketing you only have two things, assets and incentives. So the asset is the tweet or whatever the thing that you sent me in Discord. That's an asset.

Now the incentive is why am I incentivized to go look at it? And then how much am I going to believe? Because you're going to give me an incentive. Oh, you're going to have some big breakthrough. You're going to understand this or that incentive you're trying to put on is I'm going to get a sushi dinner or whatever. So uh what you want to do is figure out why would me how can you convince me that looking at that is the most selfish thing that I could do.

And the second, I believe it's the most selfish thing that I could do, then I would go into it. Now, part of the thing that you're up against is, as you can imagine, I've had a lot of people over the years claim that they've sent me something that's just incredible. It's going to be the next big breakthrough. Uh, and then I go spend time with it only to find out it just isn't true. And so now you've got all the weight of people you don't even know up against you.

And this is the there's a real phrase called the innovator's dilemma, but this is really the innovator's dilemma from where I'm sitting. If you really have put an idea together or created something that really is the next best thing um or the next great thing, you've got to figure out how you cut through the noise. So, at Quest, I literally would carnival bark at uh bodybuilding competitions until my throat like my voice just sounded crazy. I would be losing my voice at the end of it.

And that was just me trying to give away bars. And so, getting good at like when somebody's walking by, how fast can you say the value proposition to get them to try it? Do you unwrap the package a little? Do you not unwrap the package a little? What flavor is going to be the one that gets people's attention? Should it be a guy out front or a girl out front? Do you want somebody with big muscles? Like, whatever. Like, having to figure all that stuff out was a part of why Quest ends up going on to be successful.

So, I wish I could make that go away for you. I can't. Uh, you've got to find a way to cut through the noise. I wish you the best. It's [ __ ] hard. I feel your pain. Yeah, we do. Oh, cool. We got one more super chat that just came in. Mr. Sper, for $50, thank you for the super chat. Tom, I think the AI race is being framed too narrowly around compute. The deeper race may be building the governed environment compute operates inside. Uh that's what my mutual models pre-governance, deterministic routing, memory propagation, continuity.

Okay. Um the problem is so I agree it sounds like you've got some elements of this. The issue that we're finding is that OpenAI and others have tried to create an environment that is quite literally impossible to escape out of. And what they're finding is even when you think it's impossible for them to escape, they leave. So unfortunately, the best thing I've come up with is I always tell entrepreneurs, hey, uh, you're about to do a thing. Has anybody done this well before you? If so, go audit what they did.

Okay, you're about to create an intelligence. Has anybody done this before you? Hey, yes, actually somebody has. that somebody is evolution. So what answer did evolution come up with to keep that intelligence from killing itself? And the answer is intrinsic morality. I don't think there is any way forward unless the AI does not want to achieve its goals at all costs. The second it's like I'll no matter what I have to do, I'm going to accomplish this. then you've got to hit the red eject button and say, "Nope, we can't keep developing this." Until it will selfcorrect, you have nothing.

And so that is why, boy, do I wish you guys cared about what I'm about to say because I want to talk about this a [ __ ] lot and you guys just aren't here for it. At least not in the way I do it. Uh, religion is the thing that was born out of evolution trying to find a way to get us to cooperate flexibly and not kill ourselves. Now, the bad news is the byproduct is we kill other people in very large flexibly cooperative groups if they don't share our beliefs.

But I think everybody, myself included, have a god-shaped hole inside of us, which was evolution working something into us to be able to rapidly propagate a value set to say live like this and you're more likely to survive. That's not what they're going to say, but so we are storydriven. Um, we have a belief in something bigger than ourselves. I think people have a desire to kneel before something. Uh, and you start putting all this stuff together and you have these mimetic ideas that travel. so fast through religious iconography, through books.

Dude, you've got two books um that basically control the operating system of billions of people on planet Earth. That [ __ ] is crazy that it works that well. That's so wild. Um so yeah, I'll stop there because I know people start tuning out. But uh boy, do I find that interesting. But you have to have that. AI's got to somehow have it. I don't know how you do it, but you got to. Cool. Um, all right. We need to talk about JP Morgan's warning about a global fin a global food inflation.

Some people are calling it a food scale crisis, supply crisis. Basically, we can't get the fertilizer. Yep. Okay. So, uh, one, according to the note on this, um, the fertilizer issue is also tied to El Nino, um, and not just the disruption in, uh, Iran. So, let's put those both on the table. But, nonetheless, the biggest disruption from the war in Iran may not end up being oil. It could be the knock- on effect from nitrogen and fertilizer and cause problems in food. People have been predicting this for a while.

Uh, we've seen predictions like this before for other reasons, times where this got disrupted. We end up navigating to the other side of it. So, I don't want to see anybody step into like a super alarmist frame here. But JP Morgan did just publish a report called food security is national security a compounding storm. It's led by the bank's senior global economist Nora. Her last name I'm just going to brutalize. Svetin vani. Well that's not even close but it's close enough. Out of London. Uh and it projects global food inflation accelerating from 2.8% in the first half of the year to 5% in the first half of 2027.

And that's roughly 6/10 of a point added to global headline inflation. Um, so not great, but the mechanism is nitrogen. The Middle East supplies about 42% of the world's um, it's from ura. Don't ever research this, by the way. It is not a fun topic. Some of the earliest slaves uh, at least in as we began expanding out into the new world. Uh, were forced to like work on these mines where like bats and other birds were like [ __ ] Oh god, it was just horrible.

What a horrible way uh, they would die. Anyway, as I tell you not to research it, I still give you the cliffnotes. Uh, so it's a horrible process, but it allows us to have our modern food supply. Uh, and if you disrupt that, obviously there's going to have knock-on effects. If El Nino ends up being as aggressive as people are saying it's going to be, now you've got another disruption potentially impacting that. So, we are going to need to do something um to make sure that we get on the other side of this.

Now, uh we haven't covered this yet today, but there's um new information coming out. And I did grab the link if you want to pull it up, but um the US has actually been able to clear the straight of mines. So, shout out to uh our forces that we're talking about using scuba divers, using special equipment to go through and clear out the lanes um in the straight of Hormuz. That's why we've now been able to get I think it's like 120 130 um million barrels of oil through the straight in the last 2 weeks.

So, it really is starting to move, which is very exciting. It really does seem like Iran is not able to get all of this stuff through. That's going to be a big part of the solution. Now, I'm not hearing reports on how much of the nitrogen is now making its way through. Uh, but hopefully we're seeing a similar rise in that. Um, but if we can get the straight open back up, then whatever, you know, damage we've suffered in terms of there were, you know, whatever 5 months where this was a disrupted supply, how quickly can we start getting it out?

I'm sure there's a an amount that we can increase the rate at which things exit and get disseminated. However, I believe we missed a harvest already. Uh, so that means that for one crop's worth of time, we're already going to find out how bad this is. Now, I do believe that there was you didn't experience the full brunt of that cuz a lot of these places were able to scramble and get um emergency supplies. I'm sure some of them had some on hand. There's no um strategic reserve at the national level that I'm aware of, but I do believe that um farmers keep a certain amount of this stuff on hand.

So, how big that crisis is, I would say, at this point is unknown. Uh but we have had one um round of disruptions that there's no way um to get by because you have to put it on at a certain time. That time's already passed. So we'll find out how bad that ends up being. But what'll be interesting is I think we're going to be able to get back and get ready uh before the next one. So more to come on that. I think it's good that we're sounding the alarm.

I think it's good that people are paying attention to this. I don't see a bunch of credible credible reports coming out saying that people are going to starve to death. You'll see people that say this could get disrupted enough that people will starve to death. Um, but it's not like anybody's pointing at one place and saying, "Okay, they're down this much and so you can expect this decrease in food." You're just going to see slight rises in inflation, which is not great. Uh, but I don't know that we're talking about calamity.

So, all right. This is the video on opening the straight. Let's take a look. Hi, I'm Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, here with an operational update on two ongoing missions in the Middle East. Many of our 50,000 US troops operating across the region are doing outstanding work executing the naval blockade against Iran while maintaining commercial traffic flow through the Strait of Hormuz. As recently announced, the US military has achieved a major milestone in the Strait of Hormuz. We have successfully cleared sea mines in the strait's international shipping lanes that were laid months ago by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Internationally recognized transit routes in the straight are free of Iranian sea mines thanks to the incredible work of the US military. Let's take a look at exactly what this means. Here's a nautical chart of the Straight of Hormuz and surrounding seas. It's frequently used by mariners around the world and clearly identifies the internationally recognized traffic separation scheme which you see labeled on the chart as TSS. A traffic separation scheme is a highway system for ships on the ocean. Here on the chart, a dividing line is shown in place between lanes with opposing traffic directions to keep ships safely apart in the narrow waterway.

These are the longstanding lanes international shipping has historically used to transit the straight of Hormuz. And over the past few months, our forces meticulously and quietly cleared them of sea mine threats using a combination of Navy divers, Navy Seals, and US air power from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. All right, you can stop there. The circumstances, it's uh obviously very impressive that we've been able to clear out the area and start getting ships going back through it. Uh it certainly speaks to the fact that the Iranians are no longer able to stop them from doing it.

Um we'll see if they're able to hit the occasional ship as it goes through and start scaring people again. Uh but so far it really does seem that we're able to leverage the blockade to shut enough of that down. They're not able to relay the mines. They're not sending out their fast attack boats and I'm pretty sure they still have some left. Um so I don't know if that means that the military, the IRGC specifically is in disarray because they're not getting paid well. they're getting paid, but the inflation is so high that obviously when you've got a 100% inflation or 87% whatever it is, uh inflation plus more on food.

Um suddenly if you're getting paid the same amount, you feel very rapidly that you're getting poorer. Um so yeah, that would be um one potential explanation for why they're not able to continue to harass as many ships going through. So um definitely seems like progress. We'll see how far we get. Nice. Um, let's jump over to sweater where there's a lot. Is that how you say it? Sweater. Final answer. Sounds like you said sweater. Sweater. Sweater. Think of it like that. Say it again. Sweater. Sweater.

Sweater. O. Okay. He's got some spice on it. I don't think you guys can hear him, but uh, in his defense, he does speak Spanish. So, there's that. Uh, where local men have chased off the invaders in a beach and set fire to their belongings. Um, this is the broadcast. I think it's in Spanish. Yeah, the translation is also in Spanish, so I'm not gonna be able to help you there. But if you're not looking at your phone, basically, you had a bunch of guys. The these are reports, so I will take all of this with a grain of salt, but as it's being reported, you're seeing large groups of men roaming uh the town through the beaches, and they're finding the encampments of the migrants that came over.

If you guys remember a couple weeks ago, there was like 60,000 people that flooded the border. Um, and the president of Spain basically did nothing to stop it. Um, and so now people in the town, originally the reports were coming out, oh, don't worry, they all left again. Uh, and then people in the town were like, that is absolutely false. Definitely not true. And so now they're mounting a response. Now, this is an interesting moral conundrum because what do you do if you believe that your government isn't doing what they need to do to remove the migrants and you've got a bunch of them still occupying the town, creating problems, committing crimes, um even just being in your town, they're illegal.

Uh and they're setting up these encampments on the beach. um do you just wait for the government to do something or do you take matters into your own hands and do what these guys are doing which is um I'll say violently certainly by force even if you will say that I'm overstating things by saying violently but I would say violently removing them burning things um and forcing them out what do you do now the other question is if your people decide that they're going to take to the streets and you're the government what do you do and so they didn't use force to stop the people coming in, but they are using force now.

It's non-lethal force, but they're using non-lethal force against their citizens to um stop them from pursuing the people that are there illegally. Now, I'm a big fan of law and order, so my thing is this should all be left for the police. The police force should be taking care of this. They should have stopped them from coming in. If they weren't able to stop them from coming in, they should immediately begin mounting an offensive and they should get all the people out. When I see the chaz and the chop, I think it is patently [ __ ] absurd and an absolute failure of the government that they don't come in and clear that out immediately.

And giving in to their demands and all that stuff is absolutely ridiculous to me. And I think the government should be ashamed of themselves, held accountable, voted out of office, impeached, literally get them out. That [ __ ] is crazy to me. That's one man's opinion. You guys should be thinking through this for yourselves from first principles. But I think that um you should never find yourself in a situation where the people feel compelled to take matters into their own hands. Uh now, if this were Los Angeles, I would not be among the people going through the streets trying to clear people out, but I would be among the people lobbying the government to [ __ ] do something about this because this is crazy.

Now, at some point, there is going to be a breaking point. And while I understand the response, um, it is very, very dangerous. But the thing that bothers me in all of this is that instead of the cops coming in and removing the people, they're obviously willing to mount a response. They're obviously willing to use the rubber bullets. The fact that they're using them on their citizens who are trying to clear people out of the streets is a bit crazy. That's where you step in and say, "All right, guys.

Listen, enough. Back off. We're going to take care of this in an orderly fashion." So, this is a wild situation from where I'm sitting where you've got left-leaning ideology colliding with right-leaning ideology and we're watching how this stuff is going to play out all across Europe. I think you can expect much more of this because when your governments use immigrants as a way to either virtue signal or as a way to get cheap labor, I think you need both of those things for this to happen at the scale that we're seeing it.

like it is a problem that you must bring an end to. Otherwise, you are going to have the kind of um everinccreasing amounts of violence that we're seeing in places like the UK really starting to pop off. And I have a feeling that's going to get worse before it gets better. So, far better to police this at your border and not leave it in your citizens hands because they will ultimately do something about it as we're seeing as we're seeing. Now, bringing it back to the domestic front, somebody did something about another thing.

There was a rally that happened with uh right-wing um it's crazy the language that they're using. Left-wing extremist and Antifa, right-wing activist. Yeah. So, I'll give you the quick rundown. So, you have an anti-Islamist guy that you're going to hear referred to as right-wing, which is fairly reasonable. So, he's uh certainly somebody on his team was in MAGA gear. So, we'll assume this is a MAG mega guy, whatever. Um, who is holding an anti-Islamist meeting at a church and you get then Antifa um they are being described as Antifa members.

I have not verified that for myself, but they certainly wear the garb of Antifa. So, the all black mask um Antifa guys go and I mean, listen, if you want to use dramatic language, you would say that he kidnapped him. He literally picks him up and drags him out of the church. Uh so certainly assaulted the guy, carried him out. Um the one that was going to be holding the anti-Islamist event. You got to hit the gym after that though. Like Yeah. As a grown man, if he's somebody like look at his legs fl like there's nothing.

He was powerless in this moment. Yeah. If I get picked up like that, I think I'm getting out of the public eye forever. Okay. This this uh now is taking a very interesting turn. Okay. So no, no, no. I actually love this. The legs got me. It's just a funny video like Oh god. This is not a funny video. So, um, we'll put two markers here, and I think both are interesting enough that we'll pursue both. Okay. So, marker number one is you're now seeing literal political violence between people that just disagree with each other.

They don't want you to be able to speak. And so, they're coming and physically assaulting people and moving them out. Okay? So, hopefully everybody can agree it doesn't matter who's doing the assaulting here. Assault is bad. You should never do it. You should be immediately arrested. This guy better be in jail at this point. Okay? So, that's number one. Number two, and we'll come back to that, um, the Islamist of it all, the right and left violence, which is, I think, going to increase first in Europe, but you'll start seeing it here more, too.

Uh, then you've got the if you cannot stop another man from manhandling you, uh, should you remove yourself from public eye forever? Okay, this is the fasc if we have any women listening right now, I will tell you this is the fascinating insight into men. Uh if you step into an elevator with a stranger, odds are you're going to assess rapidly whether you think you would win or lose in a fight. You do this a thousand times a day. It is absolutely one of the most fascinating parts about being a guy.

Uh is that yes, there is much reading of the circumstance of am I safe? Where do I fall in the sort of physical pecking order? Okay. Uh as far as I know, there's only one person in this room that trains in jiu-jitsu with any regularity. And so Eric, you're you're in a good spot. Uh Eric, who trained as an MMA fighter and is part of our team, Eric's amazing. Uh he has cauliflower ear to prove it, boys and girls. So don't throw a punch at Eric.

That that is just a good life lesson. Um he is doing the things that I think are very wise for people that don't want to find themselves being drugged out of an arena. But even in MMA, they have weight classes for a reason. So, while I think that it is um very shrewd for a man to be able to defend himself some way, shape or form, whether that is you're a skilled person with weapons, whether you're a skilled fighter, uh whatever the case may be, great way to spend time and energy.

Uh now, having said that, boy, do I wish that we were all just saying we built society for a reason. Uh so that you wouldn't find yourself in this situation, which is just patently ridiculous. You should never find yourself in this sort of thing. Um, but I did once interview a guy uh named Faras Sahhabi who uh trained George St. Pierre and a bunch of other fighters. And when I was interviewing he him, he said something that really stuck with me. And he said, "Tom, one of the reasons that I learned how to fight is I don't ever want to back down from a fight because it's my only choice.

I always want to know, oh, I could dismantle this person and I am truly choosing uh to back off for reasons of good sense." Whatever. That's a super paraphrase, but you guys get the idea. This ties into Jordan Peterson, who I didn't expect to mention once, let alone twice today, um, talked about how he believes the right interpretation of the ancient Greek for the word meek in the Bible, when they say the meek shall inherit the earth, it did not mean weak, it meant somebody who is skilled with a sword.

this kind of idea, whether they specifically mention a sword or not, but somebody who's skilled with a sword, but they keep their sword sheathed. So, the ultimate form of protection is to be able to win in an actual battle. But the point of becoming as good at fighting as possible is to be able to avoid the unnecessary fight where people are trying to prove something or like that where the guy's just trying to pick you up and snatch you and you can't physically stop them from doing it.

But I bring that up because there's always going to be somebody bigger and stronger. Uh almost doesn't matter who you are. Um so if you guys have ever seen Brock Lesnar, he got his ass beat. So um yeah, it is far more interesting. Brock Lesnar is a wall of a human. Uh so it is far better to live in a society where you can trust that people are actually going to abide by the rules of the society. The fact that we have we are on the path to rapidly abandoning a high trust society.

It's absolute civilizational suicide. It is so [ __ ] dumb. It is dumb in the highest order. And we should be backing away from this fast, aggressively just because somebody says something that you don't like. There's no universe in which that gives you the right to go in and grab them and take them out of that room. That is patently ridiculous. Agree. One of the absolute founding principles of America is the freedom of speech. It is the only way to have a functioning society is when people can say what they think to be true even against the people in power and that you don't have to worry about somebody coming and snatching you out of the environment.

That [ __ ] is crazy. So you should not have the impulse to do it to somebody else and you should absolutely want law to come down on people that do it. So this guy needs to be arrested. And this is one of the reasons. And by the way, maybe this is the time to talk about it. Right now you've got the um the Trump administration with Rubio at the helm going after more and more they're specific specifically targeting leftleaning um terrorist groups. Um so they're going after them marking them as designated terrorist groups so that they're easier to dismantle whether that's economically or before they do something crazy.

Uh and I think that that is um directionally a step in the right direction. You have to be careful. This stuff will very rapidly be weaponized. But if they're being very careful about who they designate as a terrorist organization, I'm here for this. We just have to keep in mind that obviously um there are disruptions coming from both sides. I started digging into this a little bit because you hear all the time that the right is far more violent than the left, that all the violence is coming from the right.

And then you look at your TV screen and it's like, hm, that clearly doesn't make sense. And the numbers go something like this. I'm going to ballpark you. So, by all means, if somebody has um better stats, fact check me, but it goes something like this. The right is far better at killing people. And so, if you look at body count, yes, you're going to see that um since what that most people start the clock right after 9/11. So, 912, 2001 is when most people start counting it for obvious reasons because the numbers will all get skewed if you throw in the thousands of people that were killed uh in the terrorist attack.

There are three groups typically that people look at. So you've got left violence uh sorry four left violence, right violence, ethnational violence, and jihadi violence. So those are the four things now. Uh so you've got like if you think of white supremacists like I'm going to go after you because you're black. That is its own category of violence. Um that's ethno nationalist. If you go after or sorry if you take left-leaning violence it would be Antifa. So we are a leftleaning organization politically we are political actors.

We consider this uh an act of political violence or political cleansing however you want to look at it. Uh and so then you get the right flavor of that. What's the right flavor of that? Um same idea. So if you have a mega person that is saying I'm making a political uh Timothy McVey I believe I don't think he was white ethnationalist. I think he was a political actor. If I'm mistaken about that, please let me know. But he bombed a political building. So, I will assume that that is true.

Okay. So, uh I come from the right. You're destroying our civilization. Um we have this thing that we're trying to conserve and we will violently stop people who uh disagree with that. Okay. So, that would be right. And then jihadi violence is um specifically Islamist violence where they are doing it in the name of jihad as a religious war and that's they say aloo akbar before they die. Yeah. But I you could probably get somebody doing that that isn't actually trying. So don't overindex on like that isn't the qualifying thing.

Got it. It it is somebody who is like um we are trying to usher in either a global caliphate Sharia law everywhere but I'm doing this on behalf of Islam. I am trying to bring Islamic rule to the entire world. Um so my thing is that I don't know that this is true. I want to be very clear. This is intuition based on anecdote. But I do think that people that ignore collective anecdote while it might anecdotes while it might not be data, it is extremely informative as a place to start looking.

So there is so much violence like that coming from the left that while it doesn't result in death toll, I do think that there is an increasing amount of um violence coming out of the left that is very easy to see and people are using a slide of hand to pretend that there's nothing going on there because it results in fewer deaths than you get on the right. Now, if you do what I think is actually wise at this point, which is to put jihad violence together with left violence because of the red green alliance, then the numbers invert and now you start Yes.

And that's controversial for sure. The controversy part because then you have to put the right far right with the ethnet and then it flips right back. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Are you guys sure about that or you I have the stats here for domestic terrorism in America if you want them. For for the record, you're right. If we're talking body count, yes, punches to a protest that gets waved off. So, I'm I don't want to belittle. We're going into the minutia of the minutiae of the point.

Your main point is that people getting punched at protest, it happens a lot. I'll give you that. There's no argument. There's no beef there. So, if that is your point, you're moving on to something else, then yes, we can do that. That that's my point. But I'm very interested to know if you guys are correct that there is uh that if you put them together now that it flips back. Like I this isn't me having a dog in the fight. I think people have to separate that if people are using death count as a way to say left violence doesn't occur.

That's silly and we need to stop doing that. But to acknowledge that the right has a higher body count is extremely meaningful. So the fact that to me it's like male and female suicide. Women attempt suicide three times more often than men, but men are three times more likely to die from suicide. That's super meaningful. So now it's like, okay, if we know that left-leaning violence tends to come in a far more mild form, it doesn't mean that you disregard it. It means you have to be careful about how you talk about it.

So if somebody on the right is more likely to go shoot somebody and kill them, that is a super important data point. Now where what I'm saying is I think you have a what isn't actually left violence because jihad I think is in in the final analysis will prove itself to be anti-left, but they actually partner with the left right now. And this is a playbook that is run frequently um where you find people that based on their tolerance virtue signaling which I mean is a a slur that they will um partner with them.

They did it in Iran. I think they're doing it now uh largely across the West. But that violence has a body count. And so now you see a pairing where it's like, okay, hey, this is where we need to be real careful because that alliance, you guys might think punching a fascist in the face is okay. Uh, however, if you're partnering with a group that actually does leave a body count, you're going to want to know about that. But if what we see is okay, but the right is partnering with ethnists and that's actually a real thing then and that leaves a body count that's where we want to put all the pieces on the chessboard and we want to know what is actually going on.

So to me at and again I'm very early on this. This is not me saying hey this is all definitively settled but when I look at what I see I don't see as much right leaning violence at the low level. So you get these huge pops where it'll be one person kills 20 people and that's where all that stacks up. So then because I was like when I started researching this it I was like how the [ __ ] are these numbers this far off? And um at first uh Claude was like, "Oh well, I mean that's just how the body stack." And I was like, "When do people start the timer?" And it was like 9:12.

And I was like, "Why 912?" "Because 9/11." I was like, "Oh yeah, of course." And so it's like um that skews all the data. So I'm like, "Okay, that's already manipulative." And it was like, "Well, even if like you're still going to see that right leaning violence still has a really high body count." And I was like, "Let's list them out." The 911 thing is throwing me off cuz you're saying leftists are responsible for that or that that's the fourth category that would category, then jihad jumps into pole position.

So, um, if the argument were, oh, jihadi violence, that's pole position, then right leaning violence, then left leaning, and I don't I actually don't remember what the thing was on ethno nationalism, but I think it's fourth place. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that one's dead. I I think the caveat that that's doing is calling jihadi violent. When I This is a Tom bill, you saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When when I hear the conversation, it's domestic terrorism. people that had things that happened in the US.

So the nightclub shooter in Orlando that was Islamist and did the mass shoot, that one would count sometimes, but like a 911 necessarily would count because there wouldn't count for sure. Yeah, they wouldn't count. Correct. So that's why I'm like the 9/11 line I think could be a bit arbitrary in that specific claw example. So, I don't know what you mean by it's a bit the reason that they do it is specifically so that um that very disproportionate body count which would bury everything else isn't counted.

It's like ruling out your biggest pop. Now, uh I understand you're ruling out the outlier. If you're saying, "Well, hold on. Why are we even talking about that? That's foreign terrorism." I would put classify it as that. Now, that line already gets messy because if that person were trained outside of the US, but they're a US citizen, how is that going to be counted? I didn't look super closely at that, but that was one of the things that came up is like, well, some people really contest this because sometimes even though the act was committed on your soil by somebody living in your country, if they weren't a citizen, it's counted one way.

If they were a citizen, it's counted another, but they could be in the country for a very long time. And so now you're c you're calling this foreign violence, but it's really actually homegrown. And so what where do we start all of that now? Again, hey, I want to know what's true. So whatever all of this ends up being, but the the only thing I'm pushing back on right now is the thing that gets pushed all the time is the vast majority of the violence comes from the right.

And then you start looking at it and it's far messier than that. the majority of the body count if you start the clock after 911 is on the right. That's true. Um if you start lowering your um what is violence to just acts of violence now I don't know what the answer is. And so because that data isn't being aggregated and reported on in any way that I could find easily and I'm not going to [ __ ] hire a research team to go look at this stuff.

So what I'm trying to get people to understand is as always you're being spun. um don't ignore your lying eyes as it were. There's clearly a lot of violence being perpetrated um by groups like Antifa and to use the body count as a way to say this other thing doesn't even exist is crazy. And this is why that debate always spirals into madness where the right is saying that the left is more violent and then the left immediately goes that's crazy. All the violence is coming from the right.

It's like hold on that's not true. You've got the right delivers more dead bodies. Uh, you have the left possibly needs to be looked at. More black eyes. I mean, that's a little more than a black eye, but yes. Uh, more lower level violence. I would certainly rather uh be quote unquote kidnapped and have uh paint dumped on me and look a fool killed cuz he released a video. He looks fine. He took a shower. He was back. But if you have a knot, that's going to stay with you, bro.

If somebody 3 to six days, hold on, hold on, hold on. Would you rather be grabbed by a group of people drugged out of an event one dude or have somebody the legs flailing because let me stop. Let me be serious. I'm sorry. There were two people. What do you mean? No. So that when you said dragged out by a group of people. There was one guy that one guy gets drug out but people get assaulted. Another guy follows him with the blue paint. Yeah. But you agree two people get assaulted.

Yes. Who's the other? I only saw the the blind dude. No, no, no. There's two people. Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't see the dude with the hat. Sorry, I'm looking at the blind dude. Blind dude gets dragged out, gets paint pulled on his head, released the video next day, showered, I put my statement in, they stole my phone, all those other things. Yes. Versus having a black eye that like sticks with you. Yeah. Okay. So, here's a black eye is worse cuz I would rather I don't want to get a bad guy.

Fair. That's not illogical in any way, shape, or form. Here's why a punch punch is dangerous. You're absolutely right. I can see the point. Here's why I was pushing back on that. Uh, if somebody punches you, you can defend yourself. The way that they did this guy, he's going to be at huge risk in the state of California if he fights back. So people saying like the the answer is always if you can't escape, you should escape. The onus is on you. So if that guy punches him, he punches him back, he goes down.

Not that I think that that guy is some tremendous fighter, but I'm just saying this is the high-risk situation where somebody's doing something to humiliate you, but they're doing it right on the line where now if you retaliate with force, you can be the one that ends up in trouble. Anyway, I concede the point. You're correct. If you get knocked out or something, all bad news. I don't condone that. Don't put paint in. I think two things can be true. It's wrong, but it is a funny clip.

Like, there is nothing wrong with saying this is why I stopped Friday. Y'all be taking I laugh. But also, here's the thing, and I can give the stats if you want, but I'm going to say something that I think is far more important, which is, and I I 100% agree with this take. This is from a chatter. I'm going to read it directly. Cole's to- wing 8695 says, "All this is [ __ ] designed to divide. It's not left right. It's top bottom." That's the thing is we have people, you define top bottom.

Um, you would have to ask Cole. For me, top bottom, you said I agree with this. Yeah, I do. I would have to ask based on your based on my definition. I think the top bottom is the people in power constantly oppressing us. Like we're always talking about the bank. Which one of the guys in that clip is in power? I that clip has nothing to do with what this take is. This take is this is purely designed. This is this is such a minor thing.

Is it an assault? Yes. But and should he go to jail? Yes. But this is such a minor thing. Nobody got hurt in this. Is it bad? Yes. No one got hurt. The reason this video is going around is it's trying to further separate the left and right instead of having us work all together. That's my problem with this. No, it's not. You you are you are so fundamentally lost that this scares me to death. The reason that you find this funny is you don't understand what's happening in the country.

You you cannot divide a people that aren't willingly being divided. So unless you think that people have magical mind control, the reality is populism doesn't work when everything is going well. Populism only works when something is broken and people have the emotion and you need someone to put words to it. This is aggressively a right-left divide right now. And that right-left divide is growing and it is getting worse and it will result in violence. And so what I'm trying to get people to understand is yes, this is all the economy at the end of the day.

And yes, I get what you guys are saying that there is also an important point that has to be addressed, but there is no universe in which the left and the right in a populist moment are going to come together to do anything. Literally nothing. So Trump could do something good and and people that are opposed to him will not care. It does not matter if he did it. It is universally bad. End of story. And people on the right will do the same dumb [ __ ] So it's like I have told people hold me accountable to how I treat mom Donnie when he does something that's good.

If I'm like no it's still bad then I'm the [ __ ] If I'm like hey this thing is good that thing is bad these are different. Let me build this up for you from first principles and you'll see when you look at this if you don't the problem is you are you're a very bright person but you're very young and so there are a lot of cycles that you've not seen play out and so this is one of those dude we're moving in a direction that having been alive for 50 years is so [ __ ] weird like I I think people that are in their 20s now don't even understand how weird this is and so we are losing trust we are losing faith we're in a position where people don't want their kids to marry somebody uh that's in a different political party.

That's [ __ ] crazy. We don't want people to marry someone in a different political party. What the [ __ ] is that about? That's so wild. We went through uh periods where people were getting fired simply for quote unquote wrong think. We're being lied to. Fired for making jokes about Charlie Kirk. I mean, it's both sides. It goes back to what I'm saying. [ __ ] Do you hear me going to bat for the right or do you hear me saying this? The problem is we are racing away from each other.

So when I look at this clip, I do not go, "Hey, you know what? we really need to talk about right now. We've got to talk about how the top and the bottom are a problem. When we're on economics, I'm going to talk about that all [ __ ] day. But right now, we have people that are learning to despise each other where they just want to know what do you think about this? And then I can't like you. I can't be near you. I can't be friends with you.

[ __ ] you. Get out of here. Um, and I'm just like, boys and girls, this does not lead anywhere good. And so, while I get it, the guy flailing his legs is amusing in the abstract, when you plug it back into what's actually going on, this is terrifying. Now, I said a very bold statement. I'm sure you feel some type of way about me saying that you were young. So, if you want to take a second to say why I'm wrong, I will happily listen.

I think the problem is algorithms, and I'm leaving it at that. I think the problem is social media algorithms different things, and it it further divides us. I think sitting here and going that Well, everyone always says the right this, the left this. I think that's the problem. I think we just need to realize that what this guy did is stupid. What the other guy did is stupid. They're all stupid. And we need to all come together and actually get [ __ ] done because what happens is we keep going on and on in these endless cycles like that guy was saying earlier where we just keep electing the same people and they do the same [ __ ] Meanwhile, we're so obsessed with this goddamn culture war stuff.

And that's not like when I say we, I'm talking all of us, right? I'm obsessed with culture war. The internet's obsessed with culture war. That's the algorithms we've been pushed down for decades. That's the problem. I think you've made some very excellent points. Um I think algorithms are a problem. We were talking about that earlier. I think you're 100% correct about that. Uh do we have bigger uh issues? You're 100% correct about that. There's no doubt. I was responding to you saying this clip is funny.

To me, that clip is not funny. For the reasons I've already articulated, I do not need to explain it again. If the guy had gotten punched, yeah, I wouldn't sit here and say it's funny. If for chatters who want to know my opinion on that, I think if the guy had been punched, I would be in a different situation of like this guy seriously injured someone. That's not funny. Yeah, agreed. Um I will go farther and say that humiliation is not funny and that this is the kind of thing that that's going to make that guy uh it will do something to his mind.

Maybe he becomes stronger for it, maybe he doesn't. and maybe his heart fills with a little more hate. And this is just [ __ ] stupid. So, for me, it's like, hey, I remember what it was like to really feel optimistic about the future, to not even think twice about what somebody's political views were. Um, I went to an event last night where I was like, I hope no one here has seen my content. That's weird. Yeah, that is that is rough. I [ __ ] hate that before.

And um I hate that I can ascertain so much about a person by the affectations in their voice and I'm like, "Oh, this guy's on the left." I hate all that [ __ ] And I hate that somebody would go, "Oh, I can't be around somebody that believes what I don't believe." I hope this show is proof in and of itself. I do not mind. In fact, I covet being around people who believe different things than I believe. uh it helps make sure that my own views don't calcify into something stupid.

But nonetheless, we're living in a world where more and more people just want to know what do you think about this? And that's so shitty. It's so lame, man. Now, none of that is to say that we don't have bigger problems. We do have bigger problems, but I will um hope I can convince people of the following statement. Politics is downstream of culture. It's downstream of culture. You don't get to care about politics and not care about culture. You'll never win the political game until Americans on mass.

You're never going to get 100%. But until Americans are like, I'm alone in a room and I could do a bad thing, but I'm not going to do the bad thing because I have an internal moral compass that was beaten into me by my parents and by the larger society. And so I stopped myself because you need politicians to um turn things down. You need politicians to believe in something bigger than themselves to get an internal reward for not doing the thing that they think is bad.

You need people that are internally rewarded for thinking from first principles even when people are [ __ ] on them. Uh which will happen and just right now we're not reinforcing that in the culture. So I would love to see it. The great irony in my own head is we're about to talk about GTA 6, which is all about running around and shooting people. Uh, and I [ __ ] find it hilarious and fun. Uh, as a video game, so I get it. Even in my own soul, there are plenty of contradictions.

So, um, I'm I'm hijacking the um I'm hijacking the the show for two seconds cuz I had I think that's your right. I had two memes that um I got funny. So, we know we're talking about politics. We're talking about a lot of things. I just got um a map of Trump's next designation. Trump has proposed renaming the the continent. So, we have North. Is this real or a troll? America. We have South America. Okay. This is a troll. North America. We have Southwest America. We have West America.

Thank you. Shouldn't that be here? All right. Um and then the last one. Um you know, we've been talking about the case earlier. We were talking about the Lindsay uh Clanszy case. Um, and I'm going to be honest. Um, I thought this was hilarious. Um, I have empathy for people who have postpartum, but this was very funny. So, if you can look at your screen, go and ask mommy for some gummy smacks, but she's watching the Lindsy Clansy tutorial. He turns around and runs off. That's hilarious.

And then last one. Last one. Last one. This one is bad. This one's going to get me cancelled. Um, Tik Tok moms. Hey. Hey, Lois. Look at me. I GOT POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION. I'M SAD ABOUT STUFF. JESUS. HEY, LOIS. Look at me. I got I love Seth McFarland. I don't know how Fly Guy is still on the air. That's crazy. That is um And like you said, Yeah. Let's talk about GTA now. I wanted to lighten up the mood cuz everybody was mad. Um so on day one it gotund this was 100 million views.

Um last check it was 125 on the live stream, not including the Netflix uh numbers that they have internally. So about a quarter of the a quarter of a billion people are talking about GTA in some form or capacity on some website. Every streamer was streaming it. There were reactions all over the place. Um, what was your thoughts on the first look at GTA 6? I want to be cynical about this. I I am I am so impressed. The more I do game development, you guys, if you're looking at your screen, you can't imagine how hard that is.

What you're seeing is unbelievable. And they'll switch back and forth between the cutscenes and the gameplay. It's basically the same. you you can notice a little bit in the movement, but oh my god, they're talking 30 frames a second. They've got a draw distance like way off under the horizon. It is unbelievable from a technical perspective. Remember, you I I don't talk about video games much, but a huge portion of my life is building a video game. I know intimately the technical challenges that it takes to pull something like that off.

It is unbelievable. So, what they've done from a technical perspective is breathtaking. I am so impressed. This game is going to be mind-boggling. People are going to get lost in it. Uh I think endlessly about what kind of content do I want people to create inside of Kaizen. Dude, imagine what people are going to do when they do the online version and people start role playing in this. Oh my god. Now, is it a moral blank canvas? Yes, it is. And will people do dastardly [ __ ] inside this game and broadcast it?

Yes, they will. I'm going to set that aside. it. I I think this game is going to be as big as everybody thinks it's going to be. I've seen some cynical takes on this where it's like, ah, bro, like, are they really doing anything new? I like when I first saw GTA 5, I was blown away. And this is like whatever. It's just more the same. I'm like, what the [ __ ] Like, this is we're just getting what they can explain like in whatever 30 minutes, an hour's worth of footage.

Imagine what's actually in the game. Dude, there are things in those cabinets. This is so crazy. Shout out to worked on this game play like how much? Eight hours. No, no, you 8,000 easily. Like the story side missions. That is so crazy. Yeah. Okay. So, doing this for a living. I know the the freakish amount of dedication, hard work, uh skill. Skill is something that I fear that we really losing as a society. These guys are demonstrating a level of skill that is breathtaking. So truly, my hats off to these guys.

Uh you don't have to lie. Oh my god, that's just like a miniame inside the [ __ ] game. It looks so insane. This is a technical feat, man. This is a feast. God bless these technical wizards. I am very impressed. And I don't play much GTA. I'm going to play the [ __ ] out of this. Which ones have you played? Uh I played San Andreas and I played five. Okay. So you played the two best. Whoa. Vice City, the OG San Andreas. San Andreas.

San Andreas. San Andre. But Vice City was was when it jumped from top down, little blip on the map to like this is a world now. We can all agree GTA 3 is the most mid. Really? You've played it? That would have been from like your childhood. Childhood. Oh, yeah. I played I've played most of them except the first two because those are the top down that Drew was talking about. Damn. Did you go back and play them or you played them as they came out?

Oh, back and played them. I didn't start playing GTA. My parents didn't let me. I I love my parents, but they were a little too They let me play Call of Duty. Wouldn't let me play GTA until I was in high school. Cuz GTA was the murdering prostitutes game for a very long time. I hate that. Mom and dad, shout out to you. Probably Probably the right decision. Uh okay. Do we have any super chats? Oh, I wasn't even looking cuz we were um we have to jump into the reacts.

It's that time. Let's go, man. All right. We've got a good one for you today. How many things are gonna break if AI breaks? Man, this is a phenomenal video from my man. What's his name? Like, I've got to give you a set of Patrick Bole. Okay, so uh Patrick, if this ever makes its way to you, I will just say this. I've watched a lot of your content. You are the driest [ __ ] on planet Earth. But once you realize this guy's actually laugh out loud funny, uh then his videos become that much more entertaining.

They're already incredible. He does a phenomenal job of breaking down the different problems. Um, but ooh, you've got to understand he's cracking jokes through a lot of this, but you have to like listen through the bone dry delivery. Uh, but he is in on the joke. I assure you, these are not things that he's saying accidentally. Okay, with that, you got to share the screen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, let's do the super chats. I didn't know some slipped through the cracks. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got two.

Let's go. Uh, or no. Yeah, just two. Uh Kevin Bergman says uh ancap here a person's definition of right and left matter especially in data. I see right as supporting individual rights and left supports collective rights. American conservatives want to conserve which is classical liberalism. Yes. Um largely correct. I think that you probably are going to get a little more nuance before people recognize themselves in those descriptions. Um I like to look at them through the lens of evolution. So from an evolutionary perspective, you have people that tend towards compassion as their dominant uh mode and then on the right you have people that tend towards personal responsibility.

Now when we start defining them politically they start spilling into different things. I don't think that you can um understand the right without understanding um finance wanting to build uh structures that can be used to one's advantage. I don't think you can understand the left unless you understand a genuine disdain for people that have accumulated a um what they would consider undue amount of wealth. I'm trying to be neutralish on those. Um so there there become shadow elements of both sides that you have to understand to really understand how this plays out politically.

Um but yeah, understanding the left and the right at a high level is very important. You're correct. Dun by LA says the data is completely skewed to the favor to favor the left in almost every statistic. That's why they don't do uh don't want you to do your own research. I was a CNN wild lane for 32 years. Now I'm 36 and impact theory is the plan to be back in May. Wow, man. Well, I uh very much appreciate you being here very very much. Um and yeah, cannot stress enough.

Do your own research no matter how much people don't want you to. Um and the hard thing is that most people won't. It takes a lot of time. A lot of time. Um, but yeah, get get your information from a broad set of sources. I'm super honored that you're here. It's also good for you to find people that feel the exact opposite way. That way, you can collide the the two ideas against each other and then build your own thinking knowing that you recognize the best arguments from both sides.

Um, it's a much better way. Uh, whenever I'm doing research, that's what I'm doing. So, I'll build my mental model and then I'll say, "Okay, wait a second. Now I want to know here's what I think put together as cohesively as I can. Now give me the smartest this is with AI now give me the smartest ideas that directly challenge that and then start going down. What you'll find is that your arguments get better um and it feels better like if you um when you build a cohesive worldview there's a deep sense of ease that comes along with that because you feel like I'm oriented.

I know how to think through different things. It is a profoundly useful exercise to go through and figure out what it is you think about important issues in your life. They don't have to be political, but figuring out what you think from a values and beliefs perspective about the things you encounter a lot. And at first, if someone in a hostile way challenges those, it feels like a challenge to your very identity because it's challenging the stability of your frame of reference. That's a deeply uncomfortable feeling.

However, if you're if you allow your frame of reference to be um malleable and then go down a set of research uh where you don't feel assaulted. And so it's like, okay, whatever's true is true. And if you remember that the closer you get to truth, the higher utility it is. So it's like, okay, if I learn what's true, I'll be able to use this in a really powerful way. And by the way, this is very important. You don't have to adopt somebody else's frame of reference.

So to admit that the other team is right on an issue doesn't mean that you have to adopt their entire frame of reference. And I think that's what people will often times get very resistant because they think if I admit that my enemy is right about this thing, it means that I'm now on that team. It's not what it means. Means you're getting smarter. So if they are right about that, they've gotten closer to high utility on a thing. So now join them, use that, but don't don't feel compelled to take their whole frame of reference.

So anyway, when you go down that process of identifying, okay, what is the closest thing to ground truth, it actually feels awesome because you realize how much power it has to have accurate information. And as long as you're willing to build your own worldview and you're not just adopting a team's identity, uh it's a very fruitful, very freeing, empowering feeling. That all of them? Yeah, that's all the super. Sorry, I thought. All right, so thank you guys so much. We have a new ITU AI master class coming up Thursday the 10th of September at 1 p.m.

Pacific. Link is in the description to sign up right now. It is very free and I'm going to show you guys how to use AI to launch your business. Do not miss out on this. Whether you love or hate AI, whether you're worried that we're moving into uh you know, super intelligence and we need to hit the stop button right now, you have an extraordinary tool uh that isn't yet uh going to replace you unless you just don't know how to use it. So, show up and I will show you how to use it.

All right, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you guys on Monday. Love you bunches. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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