The Battle For The Future Of AI Just Went Nuclear!

Key Takeaway

Use AI on a real, bounded task this week instead of merely experimenting with prompts. Define the outcome you want, ask the tool to build or automate a first version, test the result, then point out what failed and iterate. As Tom Bilyeu argues, you do not need to know how to build the solution—you need clarity about the result and enough discipline to evaluate it. Start with one repetitive workflow, not an abstract AI learning project.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu examines the intensifying debate over whether frontier AI development should slow down, arguing that legitimate safety concerns must be separated from regulatory capture and fear-driven policy. He advocates continued civilian AI development with clear constraints around potentially weapons-grade capabilities, while also discussing AI’s leverage for small businesses, geopolitical competition, energy disruptions, and the risks of centralized power.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Battle For The Future Of AI Just Went Nuclear! from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat up here. Heat Yeah. Heat. [snorts] Heat. Heat. Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. This one is going to be wild. This weekend was crazy. The battle for the future of AI has gone completely nuclear and the implications are absolutely massive. This is one of the most important decisions we are going to make as a species. Daario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay saying, "We need to slow AI development down." And it literally lit the internet on fire.

The response from some of the most important voices in the world, not just talking online, I mean in the world, world leaders, tech giants, all of them, has become the biggest story in the world right now. And while that situation is raging, and we're going to go into it very deeply today, the situation in the Middle East continues just to get more insane by the minute. The Saudis are rumored to be courting everyone including take a deep breath everybody. Israel to help them take care of the Houthis and rescue the Bab Elm Mandab Strait.

That is getting crazy. All this disruption plus the war in Russia is sending the cost of diesel into the stratosphere and that underlies a lot of other things. And so you can expect to see that inflation working its way into the system. And things could get worse than people realize this winter. Things are so bad. Trump warned Zalinski directly to stop hitting Russia so hard. That was unexpected. Plus, birthright citizenship is proving to be a bigger issue than people understand as evidence surfaces of a Chinese billionaire paying American women to have somewhere between 100 and 300 surrogate babies for him.

Many of them didn't know who was really uh behind all of this, which is wild unto itself. And the Lindsey Clansancy firestorm just will not die down as the jurors admit live on camera that they had political motives. That is nuts. But if you want to talk about the craziest thing happening right now, you've got to talk about what's going on in AI. The biggest brains in American AI are saying we've got to slow development down or risk AI killing us all. I wish that was hyperbole, but that is exactly what's going on.

China has just completely noped out of this, opting to press forward. And Bernie took the bait, further attempting to destroy the US. This is me commentary here, uh, in his continued attempts at authoritarian power grabs at all times. That man wants more, more, and more, as so many people in the government do. And that is a central part of what we're going to be talking about today is boys and girls. Do you really want to give more power to the same people that helped you through COVID?

Remember how they act in times of public panic? They will power grab and they want more and more control. And I can think of no more uh fancy or effective of a weapon for authoritarians than AI. Now, how did we end up here? Well, on Saturday, after a supposed whistleblower, there's a whole bunch of drama around that guy and his bonafiday and all that, but nonetheless, his comments about the leading AI companies being completely reckless, just went absolutely hyperviral, putting all humans uh and civilization at risk.

After that, Daario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, published an essay called We Must Pace the Frontier. Within hours, Sam Alman and Elon Musk and many others agreed that slowing down would be beneficial, including, by the way, Dennis Hassabis of Google's Deep Mind, somebody who's very close to the heart of AI, called this move the right direction. Microsoft CEO Satia Nadella welcomed it. He had some caveats, but still going in the right direction. We'll talk more about Microsoft in a minute. Given that they were doing some pretty heavy donations to political parties that would like to see AI, I'll say controlled entirely by the government.

They would probably say something different, but we'll get more into that in a second. Now, why is Daario saying this? Daario's thesis is pretty straightforward. The AI industry has to slow the pace of improvement or bad things are going to happen. Now, everybody is always super vague about what those bad things are going to be, but nonetheless, that gets resounding cheers from people in the world. People are extremely worried about AI. Now, there's two very specific things that um push Daario into saying this right here at this moment.

Part of it is he's very close to the recursive self-improvement loop that he can see heating up. I imagine that's very real. And then you put that together with the open AI hugging face incident where a swarm of agents escaped containment that's all very real and hacked their way to success on a simple benchmark test. So instead of just being like we don't know the answer they were like oh you really want us to find it say less fam we got you spun up this insane swarm came to the conclusion that hugging face may actually have the answers that they were seeking.

So, they're like, "We'll just take over this uh entire application here real fast and we'll find the answers that we want." It was both impressive and terrifying. And he put those together. And Daario puts out a specific warning that within 6 to 12 months, a swarm like that could basically seize the entire internet with persistent botn nets to do hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Now, keep in mind, this is the same guy that thought that uh Claude 2.0, I know I think was so dangerous that they couldn't possibly release it.

That obviously ended up being hyperbole. And that is something that you're going to see starting to come through all of this when you understand uh what the cynical take is. I think it's it's good to look at this in the the totality. You need to look at all the angles, not just the cynical angle, but there certainly is a cynical angle, which we're going to get to in a second. But right now you have to understand his fix to really understand why his uh the cynical read is very important to think through.

So his fix and we've got a clip going to talk about it directly is to hand over the technology meaning AI to he doesn't call it a one world government but that's basically what he's saying and I'm not kidding man despite how terrible of an idea that is I think just on its face here he is talking exactly about this ask why doesn't government just control the technology completely would you be willing to give up the technology to the government to the to the right combination of governments.

So the worry I have you're willing to hand over this company. I want to be very clear about this. The the worry I have I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments. I don't know about handing over but some kind of oversight some kind of joint governance. This is again that would be the work of years but I wonder if that's the direction we need to go in.

So either these guys are right and we don't have years uh or we have plenty of time and we're going to be able to slow this down. And that is a big uh core essence to the debate that's going on is okay, is this something is AI really uh despite the fact that that swarm was able to break containment and go hack a um a website or an app, is that really indicative of the fact that this stuff is about to be in a nonhuman needed self uh improving loop or not?

And are there going to be things that we can do along the way? the people that are close to the technology are completely divided. Some people are saying, "Oh my god, this is, you know, going to be absolutely insane. We can see how good this is getting and it's just this upward spiral and we're not going to be able to control it." And then there are other people that are using AI on a day-to-day basis, pointing out some very obvious things that AI still cannot do.

And as somebody that uses AI daily in a business context, teaches other people to do the same, I will tell you that AI has just massive and clear limitations as of today. Now, it is entirely possible that these guys are seeing, you know, one, two, maybe even three models ahead of where we are today at the consumer level. And so, they really do have a reason to be afraid. But in the meantime, when you've got Dario wants US labs to coordinate on capability limits with a government antitrust waiver, hopefully you can understand that when these guys are just nakedly saying that we want to collude like a cartel, that there are things that we should be very concerned about where the solution ends up being far more damaging than the actual problem that underlies it.

Listen, AI is an incredibly important technology. It's the single most important technology. This is an incredibly important decision. But when you see that he's sort of freeballing this idea of creating a one world government that's going to oversee it in some way, but like he's got to still be involved somehow, like this is one of those things. He's right. It will take a very long time to put something like that together. And if you play out hopefully everything that you know about governments, you will realize that if you give governments that kind of control, they will and have historically weaponized that against people.

And the thing that basically stops this from happening is people being able to get together, build competing engines that end up holding each other effectively in stasis. And so that's why this argument ends up boiling down to what is this really? Is this a call for hey, I've got a company that is now starting to struggle. The entire world is making one big bet on AI and a big part of that bet is playing out in the markets. The other part of that bet is playing out between countries and another part of that bet is playing out between closed source and open source.

So the market basically needs closed source to win. I'm talking investors. Closed source means there's going to be a small handful of companies that generate huge amounts of return to capital investors. Those guys want to see their company, whoever they've placed the bet on, to get the kinds of protections from the government that will create a moat for them. This is the whole idea of regulatory capture. If they can get regulatory capture, then they've got a massive advantage that will stop AI from going open source, will stop China from being able to do the things that it wants to do, will curtail that competition.

Now instead of having different models holding each other in dynamic stasis in terms of uh the only way to defeat an AI swarm is with another AI swarm what you end up getting is the government ends up controlling this technology top to bottom and the first thing that they have to do is outlaw open source. Now why would a capital investor be very excited about that without ever saying that? They're never going to admit that on camera but why would that be advantageous for them? it would be advantageous for them because now you just kill open source because Daario has already said out loud that this is something where you have to be able to unwind a release.

So you put something out, you realize that there are ways to exploit it that you didn't anticipate and you're going to have to unwind that. That's completely impossible with open source. So if you end up putting a consortium of people together that say, "Well, this has got to be something that we roll back or that we can roll back." You literally by definition have just eliminated open source. Now again, it's entirely possible that these guys are seeing something that we're not and that there's a justified fear there, but they aren't putting that forward.

They aren't showing people, hey, here's exactly what we've seen that makes us very concerned about this. And when you look at China's response, you begin to see that that's exactly what they think this is. When you look at uh David Saxs, who I think has had a an absolutely banger response to this, you understand that there's a way to thought exercise test exactly what Daario is pushing for. whether he's pushing for regulatory capture that will be advantageous for the company or whether he's pushing for a sensible coordinated slowdown to give us the time to put these things um to put alignment at the forefront of this to make sure that we are not moving forward at a reckless pace but instead we're doing this well and this is what David Saxs had to said say uh Dario has written that we need to pace the frontier and Sam has agreed people may be surprised by by my response Go ahead.

You guys are the frontier by any reasonable metric. Market share, revenue growth, model capability. The two of you have the duopoly on frontier intelligence. You've also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don't see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending antirust laws has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability.

Stop pretending MTR is independent and what it and when it is intertwined with anthropics investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren't even at the frontier. So he is making I think a very clear case that's echoed by the former head of the FTC that basically there are plenty of laws on the books already that are going to stop people from releasing products that hurt customers. So, if you're actually worried that your product is going to hurt customers, then all you have to do is slow down.

Now, the reason that they're not going to slow down is that they're ultimately trying to protect their business. And keep in mind that Anthropic is trying to do a um a public offering. So, they want to IPO. They want to make I mean north of a trillion dollars in that IPO. and by pointing out that your technology is so good, it's so powerful that it becomes dangerous that this starts to read like an IPO hype letter. And the fact that you've got people like Michael Bur that are echoing that exact sentiment, saying, "Look, this is all BS.

This is just hype." You've got Yan Lun, an AI developer, who's saying, "Look, I laughed at these guys when they were saying that their 2.0 version was something so dangerous that it couldn't be released, and we should all be clowning on them now." when they're saying the same thing that these things do not represent something that is um currently in a state that is truly weapon-like. And so you have to understand that all these guys are doing is clamoring to use the government to overcome the fact that their revenues are not coming in fast enough to deal with the debt.

And so that gets us back to this ticking time bomb that we've got. If you're placing your huge bet on AI as a market investor, then you're looking at that discrepancy. You're looking at the historical um evidence that says any revolutionary new technology like this ends up succumbing to the debt. The first generation of investors end up getting wiped out. And it's what's known as the inheritance generation that ends up actually making good on this. And that has played out over and over and over from railroads to industrialization to uh the internet.

And so there's just a a very knowable pattern that's playing out. So as investors look at this and they see, uh-oh, we're not able to get the income fast enough to deal with the looming debt. What else can we do? And that other thing that they can do is force the government to put restrictions on them instead of simply restricting themselves. And so if each of these corporations were actually interested in acting in the interest of people and they actually believed that these things were a threat, then they would stop.

And so how are we as the public meant to look at a company that's saying, "Listen, um, I'm about to IPO on the back of a product that may wipe out all of humanity. It's completely nonsensical." And these guys have backed themselves into a trap that is, I think, pretty wild. So what they should be doing is just saying, "Okay, listen. we can see based on the rate of improvement that we've got, let's say, three generations where we're going to be fine. We're going to race to that and then after that, we're going to cap our own ability and anybody else that's going to go forward is already going to get hammered by the government because the government is going to see that they're starting to put out products that are putting the public at risk.

So, that's not what they're saying, though. Instead, what they're saying is something that will, even though these are not the words coming out of their mouth, it will lead to them having a guaranteed moat created by the government where there is all of this integration essentially between a very small number of corporations at the frontier uh making it impossible for the uh open source to thrive. And so that brings China into the picture. And so I've said a gazillion times here that people need to remember that this is an arms race between the US and China.

And if you understand that stopping development in the US while China marches forward is it you don't alleviate any of the risk none at all. and you guarantee that then China is going to push forward and surpass uh what we're doing here in the US and China is just outright calling this their state media. Let's be very clear there's two responses coming out of China. You've got a response from the state media and then you have a response from their foreign minister and the state media is just saying this is a cold war playbook.

This is all meant to slow us down. you guys are trying to build panic in the US or maybe capitalize on the panic in the US because I think there's already plenty of panic without Daario and other people coming out and saying that this is an existential threat. I think people are already super paranoid about that. So you've got China saying listen you guys are trying to make sure that you'll get even stricter on exporting chips us. So this is really about getting export controls to China.

This is also about trying to um get further policing on the distillation. So remember part of how China has been able to make the open source models so powerful is they just train them against the frontier models here in the US. And so we know that you're going to further crack down on that and we know by definition this is going to eliminate the open- source play which is exactly the play that China is trying to make. And so you've got all of that swirling around, everybody trying to figure out what exactly is pushing these guys to make these claims.

And if it is that your product really is that dangerous, well, now you've got a disclosure problem looming in the background that these guys so far have not acknowledged. And I think a big part of the reason they're not acknowledging the SEC required disclosures of the potential threats is because they know that AI isn't there yet and that they're actually putting forward these ideas not because they think that there's a clear and imminent danger. They're putting these forward because they are likely to be advantaged by them.

Now, I don't have any insider information, so that's one guy's opinion, so take it for what it's worth. But when you look at the fact that nobody is stopping them from backing off, that they're pushing forward for their own sake, all while saying, uh, to quote Mike Benz, "Please, Daddy, govern me harder." And it gets very complex to be generous when you start looking at who would be advantaged by the government getting involved in this. All right. So, if you're Trump, do you want to see the government get more control of this?

The answer so far seems to be no. So, Trump from the rumors is dodging their calls. He's not taking their calls. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. Why? Because Trump belongs in the camp of people that think like capital investors. So, he's like, "We've got two issues. One, I want to make sure that the economy is thriving." Remember my thesis is the big part of the reason that he went into the Middle East was less about oil and more about oil dollars getting translated into investments into US AI infrastructure that Kevin Walsh was selected because Kevin WH believes that AI is a deflationary technology.

And so Trump was like cool I've got a guy that gets it. He understands what AI is going to do. I'm going to make sure that all the investment dollars are flooding in. So Trump is dodging those calls, pointing at China, and saying, "Nope, we can't slow down because China is then going to pull ahead of us." The left, on the other hand, is taking the opposite approach. You've got Bernie Sanders calling for u 20-year prison sentences for anybody that continues to develop AI past a certain point.

He's not saying they should be arrested today, but he is saying that, hey, there's a point at which we got to arrest these guys. We got to put them in jail. And when you look at Microsoft, Microsoft and Microsoft linked donors have, according to, I believe it was Mike Benz that I saw this from, uh, they've donated $112 million to the Obama Foundation. And the rumors are, again, take this for what it's worth, but the rumors are that Obama is behind the scenes trying to get the Democratic party to make AI their central issue.

So getting governmental enforcement saying Trump and the Trump administration, these guys are being completely reckless. They're building a uh weapon essentially that is going to put you all out of work or even just risk uh human civilization all told. And so we want to get governmental control. Now, super easy to believe that given what was coming out after the Biden administration lost the election, which was they were telling Silicon Valley investors, "Don't even bother investing in AI startups anymore because we're not going to allow them to exist." So, you've got these two competing forces between the left and the right.

They are likely to make AI the central issue in the next election, which by the way, if I were advising people on the Democratic side, that is 100% what I would tell them to focus on. that is way smarter than some of the other cultural issues and it's obviously smarter than the DSA just absolutely idiotic suicidal um economic policies that they're putting forward and then you have to ask okay which of these scenarios are we better off in? Are we better off letting the free market as much as possible uh create this technology drawing some line around where this becomes weapons grade which I remain thinking that that's important but right now I'm not hearing people talk about sensible regulation I'm hearing people talk about fear-based moes cartels uh doing things that will give the government in in Daario's uh universe a one world government authoritarian control basically over everybody through the single most important technology to ever exist.

So those are going to be the competing forces. This panic, dumerism, we've got to shut it down. It's the central issue for the left. And then on the right, this is a capital game. Everybody's making a gigantic bet. We're in a race against China. And then China's saying, listen, you guys do what you want, but we know you're just trying to slow us down. Which lets you know they're not interested in slowing down. So you would at that point be seeding control of the single most important technology the world has ever seen to a foreign adversary.

This this is a very unwise approach. So for all of us, the thing that we have to do to get to the other side of this well is the thing that I've been beating the drum on, which is Connor Lehey's idea of you've got to differentiate between what is weapons grade, what is civilian use. go hard on building out the civilian use and then make sure that you have something driven by people who actually understand the technology but are not financially incentivized to create a moat.

Get those people to say, "Okay, listen. This is where we think that this becomes uh potentially that upward spiral of no human in the loop self-recursive improvement." And so that we're going to put constraints on. We're going to make sure that we don't get there, but up until that point, we're going to keep developing AI. Now, we should be attempting to coordinate with China, but I think that that's going to be far harder than people are giving it credit for. And I mean, out of Dario's own mouth, you're looking at years to get something in place to deal with a one world government, let alone doing something between the US and China.

So, yeah, this is a wild ride that is going to require cooler heads. We are almost certainly not going to get that. we are going to get the fight between basically capital and panic. Uh and that is uh man that's rough. And so yeah, this is going to be something that I believe we're going to be talking a lot about. This is wild times. The poll I threw a poll in the chat. How should AI be regulated? 29% said we should slow it down. 18% said we should stop.

53% said we have to beat China. Yeah. Well, so the 53% I think are the most sensible of the group. I like to think that the other people, if you really push, they're going to say they want, I guess, other than the 18% that want to shut it down. Um, they would want to get something that I'll put in the Connor Ley basket. So Connor is somebody, if you guys didn't watch the interview, which I highly encourage you do, um he uses AI every day, thinks it's an incredible technology, and certainly does not want to see it go away, but understands that there is a point where it crosses uh a point of no return.

He doesn't want to be the person making that decision, so he doesn't really put out like here's what I think it is. Um so we don't have a lot of great voices talking about that yet. Um, but that I think ultimately is where this debate ends up having to go. The part that I think people are, if you're in the 18%, I don't think you're being realistic about what it means to shut it down. Like what are you talking about? Are you talking about we launch a preemptive attack on China uh in the way that we launched a preemptive attack on Iran because that's gone so well?

Like what is the what's the strat there? And if you agree that that would that launching a preemptive attack against China would be just absolutely moronic decision. Uh I can't think of very many decisions that would be worse than that. If we agree that that's a terrible idea, then how do we stop them from going down that path? And even if they say they will, how can they trust that the US will actually stop that development? They can't. Just as we can't trust that even if they say they're going to, that they will actually.

And so game theory tells you that as long as they believe this is a technology that should be pushed forward, it's going to be pushed forward. And so for me, the analysis on this issue comes down to one belief. You either believe that we can detect when AI is going to cross that invisible line and therefore we can walk up to a reasonable distance from that and stop or put constraints in. Or you don't and you think that that line is invisible. There's no way to know when we're going to cross it.

And so doomerism kicks in and you're it's just way safer to kill all of this off and that's it. And it doesn't matter what we the populace thinks it because we're going up against an authoritarian dictator. So it doesn't matter what the average person in China thinks. It doesn't matter what Trump thinks. It doesn't matter if we get Trump out of office. All that matters is will Xi keep pushing forward. If Xi will keep pushing forward, then the US has to keep pushing forward in order to stop the assaults that would come from AI.

This AI is it I think it is a useful analogy to think about nuclear partly because America [ __ ] up their nuclear response so terribly that we can see that panic does not work. To give you an idea, I forget the orders of magnitude, but it's like um a whatever kilowatt of energy in France is like four times cheaper than the US and then like 10 times cheaper in China. Those aren't literal numbers, but they're very very close. They're certainly directionally accurate. And that was because 3M Island has a a problem and then we panic and we basically kill off um nuclear energy here in the US just sort of full stop.

A catastrophic mistake. We never should have done that. And so I think the US right now is on a path to panicking its way out of uh AI in the same way that we panicked our way out of nuclear. And China is going to do the exact opposite. In the same way that they didn't panic their way out of nuclear, they're not going to panic their way out of AI. And so they're going to keep developing it. But now there are real consequences to that decision.

And so that's like I said, you can usually identify what the base assumption is that is the loadbearing base assumption. And I think that's the one. And in your perspective, you think we are able to identify that line and we can get close to it and then stop before we cross it. It I'll say that even I don't trust myself to make that analysis. So it doesn't really matter what I believe there. What matters is do I think that we're anywhere near that now? And I I would say given that we have not been shown anything by the people who are doomsaying uh and all of the people doomsaying including Elon Musk have a financial incentive for that to happen.

We cannot just take them at their word. So trust me bro will not work at this point. So what we have to see is um show me a mathematical equation that demonstrates like the rate of improvement or something uh and then say okay listen this is what has actually happened. So if you model this forward both the level of improvement and our ability to constrain it because they're acting like they haven't gotten better at constraining it but they have and so they launch this uh fable.

It can do the swarming, do all this hacking. They roll it back, constrain it, re-release it. And on top of that, they are able to make more powerful models that they seem comfortable with that both OpenAI and Enthropic have said, listen, we've got a couple more generations of AI that are just fine. And I think they say that partly because it's true and partly because they have to tell you that story or they're never going to be able to IPO. So it it is such a sketched out belief system to believe that you have this thing that you actually think has a relatively high poom.

Uh meaning percentage of doom. So uh 10% 20%. The the guy that came out as a whistleblower I think said 70% pdoom. So it's like you've got these guys attaching a number to this but are still like well we're going to keep developing it. So, it's like I can't make that make sense unless I go, "Oh, you're pretty sure that you're going to be able to stop it because you see not only the projected capabilities, you see the projected constraints, but you only ever talk about projected capabilities and act as if there's no projected constraints." So, if they map both of those things out and we see, okay, this is how much better it's getting and this is the methods that we're using to constrain it.

As much as they can talk about it, because I'm sure some of that's going to be proprietary, but it's like I'm I'm able to see both of those avenues so that we can make a decision to go, oh, wait a second now. I'm not in my imagination, which will run away with me, and I can see how this all gets really crazy, but I'm actually grounded in why haven't these bad things happened yet? Part of the reason these bad things haven't happened yet is these guys are putting more and more onus on themselves to make sure that they protect themselves if from nothing else lawsuits.

These guy like part of what I can't wrap my head around is they have just handed to any um collective lawsuit the most ammunition in the world. Imagine being in a grand jury and they play you Dario Amade saying, "Yeah, this could kill everybody and we need to be way more careful, but if you guys don't handcuff me and let me act like a cartel, I guess I just have to keep developing it." You're like, "Get the [ __ ] out of here." they'll they'll get sued into oblivion, which by the way is exactly how you end up with the world where this initial wave of investors and companies just they get obliterated and then the other companies come in behind them and go, "Yeah, we're actually going to constrain ourselves because the system is working as it should.

There are already laws on the books." Okay, let me say that one more time. There are already laws on the books. If these guys are like, I need constraints, then just say, hey, as the FTC already makes abundantly clear, we can't keep doing this. We at Anthropic are putting these safeguards in control. Open AI AI is not. China is not. [ __ ] those kids. Immediately clamp down on them. But they're not doing that because it's not to their advantage. They're to to get to their advantage.

They've got to be on the inside of making the policies. They've got to be working with the government now as they were during the Biden administration. Okay. So, I want to remind everybody where we were two years ago. Two years ago, it was, "Hey, Mark Andre, don't invest in any more AI companies. We are not going to let them exist." And I quote, "So, the Biden administration was already telling people exactly how this is going to play out. We're going to have complete authoritarian control over this.

Simple as." And that is Anthropic was in the room for that. Anthropic knew they were one of the two or three companies that was going to get ushered in and be working handinand glove with the government. And so it's like cool if I have to um sub be subservient to the government so that I make sure that I'm one of the companies that survives because remember when we put two things together we've got to have the government decides they've got to have complete control of this and we can't lose to China because that will become abundantly clear by the way I if you do nothing you will just see them start pulling ahead.

So you will then panic and start speeding up. And guess who you're going to fund to make sure that we don't lose to China? The two or three companies that you gave the green light to exist. And so now those guys do not have to worry about competing in the open market. The investors, that first wave of investors that history tells us sort of rightly get wiped out. They're going to be protected by who? By you, the taxpayer. So, there's just so much incentive for these guys to spin a story that we're much farther along the danger path uh than we actually are.

And so, that's why I'm like, hold on a second. So, that is not me saying we don't need uh regulation. We need the regulation that I've outlined multiple times before. Uh, that isn't even me saying that if these guys really see something that they haven't been um forthright with, then they should back off immediately. I love that the most. But they're not telling us what's really going on. So at this point the AAM's razor of it all says it is more likely that these guys are trying to get the financial protection of the government and that there is a government entity that is all too happy to comply with that which is the Democrats as of right now and the donations that you see um big AI aligned so Microsoft specifically are making donations to uh somebody who has inordinate amounts of influence influence with the Democratic party.

So, it's there are a lot of things that are lining up. A lot of it's rumor, a lot of it's conjecture at this point. Nobody should take what I'm saying as like this is all gospel written in stone fact, but it's like, yeah, this all lines up with what I know about the government and their desire for massive amounts of control. Nice. Um it that's what it kind of seems like to me. They're just trying to ensure their bags. So, regulatory capture, IPO, trillion dollars, that's the one, two, three of it all.

Um, do you think that this impacts their IPOs coming up? That's why the push is happening now around midterms to get the favorable uh, wins so that way when they do IPO next year, it's they can kind of come up with a cover story that doesn't mess up their big checks. I think that they've done something really strange and in many ways put themselves in a difficult position to get what they need from the government to get what they need from the public which is to believe cuz for everybody that starts panicking there's an investor that's like oh my god this must really be something like yo this is going to be huge I got to get in uh that we're just at the beginning of the hype cycle.

Um so Anthropic has been accused of this many many times. They've been using the same cycle every time they try they need to raise capital. Uh they come out and say, "Oh my god, this is just too dangerous." So they've been doing this for so long now that it very much is the boy who cried wolf. Just remember the boy who cried wolf really does get eaten by a wolf. So keep that in mind. Uh but it I think is some of that. So they've got themselves in a weird position from the IPO perspective because people are going to use this against them to sue them for sure.

And then they need it to get from the government what they need. So they've got to say it, but they put themselves at risk every time they say it. So we'll see what happens if there's any sort of class action lawsuit that like really deals these guys a blow or not. Um but the laws are already there that people can use against them for sure. Yeah. We have to jump over to Saudi Arabia now because they are dealing with some massive blowback. You can kind of see the before and after of these satellite images after the Houthies ran through their East West pipeline which was supposed to be the circumvent the street of Her Moose.

And now there's some reports they're asking for help. This is one of those times where I absolutely hate being right. But I said when you have naked infrastructure sitting on top of the sand, people are going to blow it up. And blow it up they did. So Saudi Arabia is asking for help from everybody. When Trump declined, rumors say, to help Saudi Arabia with strikes against the Houthies, which obviously didn't happen, uh then they went wide looking for help. so wide that according to take this with a grain of salt but according to Israel Holm uh and they were citing Gulf diplomatic officials the Saudis went directly to other Gulf states and Egypt for assistance as well as sending an indirect request through Sentcom to Israel for intelligence and other support uh with dealing with the Bab Elmandab Strait.

Now the idea of Saudi uh Saudi Arabia and Israel working together is absolutely crazy. If you guys have not been paying attention, that is not something that you would have seen even a few years ago. Previously, Saudi Arabia had refused to even normalize relations with Israel. They were like the big hold out from the Abraham Accords and people were talking about like part of the reason that October 7th happened was because Iran was like, "Hey, wait a second. Is Saudi Arabia actually warming up to the idea of normalizing with Israel?" So, this is another step down that road.

And now Saudi Arabia is just if the rumors are true, or I should say if the reporting is true, because this has been reported. But if the reporting is true, then you've got Saudi asking Israel to help them with their shipping lanes. Now, this is one of those things where war makes strange bedfellows, man. Remember, we got in bed with Stalin, one of the worst mass murderers of all time to bring World War II to a close. So, the question is, where are we going to be on the other side of this?

Are we going to be in a situation where we had some crazy knock-on effects of we go in strike Iran trying to basically galvanize the Gulf regions but the enemy gets a say in all of this. they start hitting the Gulf regions, taking out all their energy infrastructure, which made them at first want to turn against the US. But then they quickly realized, uh-oh, that's going to create a bigger problem for us because now we've got the Houthis popping off in the Red Sea, blowing up our East West pipeline, which by the way was leading to the Red Sea anyway.

So now we're in a position where we are having no luck in the straight of Hormuz. We're having no luck over here in the Red Sea. And so that means we've really got to get together with whoever. I don't care Israeli or otherwise. We've got to get together with everybody to get control of this and refocus on the economy. Now, I think that that is the ultimate play. From the very first time I started talking about Israel Palestine, I said, "Listen, the only path forward is for the Palestinians to start thinking about the economy.

Plain and simple. They've got to let go all of the animosity and hatred and just start thinking about how do we move forward. And I think that's what's the divide is going to be here. You've got people who are trying to usher in the word of God going up against the people who are like, bro, we're just trying to have an economy that lives beyond oil and we can't be here blowing everything up. And I think that they will partner up with whoever they need to partner up to get on the other side of this because this is so economically damaging that people who otherwise might have had beef with somebody because of historical grievances, differences of religion are suddenly like, "All right, listen.

If you're going to help me economically, then at least for the time being, I'm going to partner up with you." Now, how long that's going to last, I don't know, but I think it is going to be the theocracy against the economy. And that is ultimately where I think you're going to see the dividing lines and we'll see who wins because when you're theocratic and you really believe that God wants you to do what you're doing, you'll go to some serious [ __ ] lengths to see that through.

Uh so I certainly wouldn't say that it's going to be a guaranteed victory for the economy, but this move tells me that that is ultimately where the real dividing lines are in the Middle East. Yeah, we'll have to keep looking at it because it seems like things are ripping and running in so many different directions. Oil prices today are right over $103. Diesel has that remains not as crazy as you would expect, man. Like it is We'll We'll talk about diesel in a second because diesel is kind of as crazy as you would expect.

Yeah, that's in certain places. The fact that oil hasn't skyrocketed in the Middle East, I think speaks to two things. One, how much demand destruction there's been. Mhm. Two, how much of the Iranian oil, which is accounting for a large portion of the total that travels through the straits. when people talk about oh this is you know 20% of global demand well some meaningful percentage of that is just Iran's oil going directly to China uh and if China is one able to throttle it two is migrating away from oil into solar and nuclear as fast as they can and three their economy is really struggling then you're looking at it just hasn't been as disruptive as you would expect now when you combine what's going on in the Middle East with what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, which impacts diesel more.

So, now you start getting into scary territory. At last check over the weekend, diesel was up like 80%. Yesesh. So, you start seeing de diesel up 80% and you get this clip from Trump. This is crazy. Mr. Zinsk has to do one thing. Mr. Zilinski has to do one thing. Wait a minute. You want Can I talk? Mr. Mr. Zalinsk has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel because he's causing a shortage of diesel fuel.

This isn't done by the Middle East. This is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine. That that is the most practical take in the world. So, I want everybody to understand everybody's got have practical takes every now and then, you know. I mean, listen. Well, so the bad news is I think Trump is always practical. If you say what's good for Trump, what's going to put money in Trump's pocket? He's always going to give you the the straight thing there. He's always saying the quiet part out loud.

It's just every now and then what he wants actually aligns with what other people want. Uh and so this is one of those times where he's got his finger on a real problem. So right now the world is blowing up all of the areas that deliver energy to the countries that have not sufficiently embraced nuclear and solar. So China has the most flexibility. Oddly enough, everybody else is now going to feel the burn. So we'll see how much um Russia's supply ends up impacting the world since most places were already getting sanctioned anyway.

But for Trump to just come out and say, "Listen, I know you're trying to win a war, but don't hit the things that really matter," it's pretty crazy. It It is a powerful reminder that we live in a world governed by the economy. And all of the people in the world have a moral stance until their grandma is freezing to death in the middle of the winter. In Minnesota, real fast, suddenly people are going to be like, "Wait on, hold up." Like, "We gotta we got to start getting this oil through." Uh, you're going to see the same thing in Europe.

So if people are unable to eat, people are unable to stay warm, uh people's tune will change pretty quick. As you can see, Trump's tune changing there. For a while, he wanted to slap uh Putin around as much as he could because he was pissed that Putin didn't give him what he want, which was to end the war before he took office. Let's never forget that chant. Uh which obviously did not work. And so yeah, you live in a world governed primarily by the economy. We see where it becomes theocratic and how much people are willing to suffer.

Uh but in most places in the world, people are only going to put up with so much when it starts causing massive inflation. It's one of those things though that we we joked we not joked we talked about it a couple weeks ago how these wars are more related than we like to think but we were talking about it more on the weapons deal how people are passing weapons and intelligence back and forth but it's really this supply of oil that is causing desperate shock so Iran is actively knocking out other alternatives to this trait to increase its importance is knocking out diesel trying to strangle Russia they're making the same like opposite sides of the war are doing the same thing in a very weird way if you like map it out and take kind of a step back from that way like not even a weird way like this is okay so uh it is so popular to hate America right now but let's have a history lesson as to how we ended up here um you have Europe absolutely tearing itself apart after god knows how many hundreds of years of all these war the uh game of thrones quite literally and they drag drag everybody into World War I and they're like, "Okay, never again.

Psych. Just kidding. Uh they drag everybody into World War II." And then on the back of that, Europe was so thoroughly devastated uh psychologically, financially, um just from an infrastructure standpoint, they were completely knocked out. The US, on the other hand, still in the glorious echo from Alexander Hamilton, have a strong economy. They've industrialized, but they haven't become um psychopaths to debt yet because remember we actually were able to get out from under the debt back then. I can speedrun it again if people don't remember, but it's like we we have a much healthier relationship with debt.

He actually address the address the debt problem on the back of having been the the economy that helped people through the war that got gold here in the US had a dollar backed by gold were the industrial powerhouse. We're making everything for everybody. The war sharpened our ability to produce and then we just help everybody rebuild. And by the way, we actually have a moral center. I just cannot stress enough. People need to research what happened in Japan post World War II. It's crazy. Same thing with Germany.

What an incredible natural experiment that was. And so, America really had a reason to champion freedom. And we hadn't yet gotten completely pathological about our desire to control all the resources in the world. Because for a while, it it really was just a great exchange. Now, it becomes pathological. But for a second, I want you guys to focus on America created tremendous peace and prosperity the world over by building a military that had an insanely strong navy. And we were able to keep commerce just flowing.

And so things got so good and the economy and the developed nations were growing so rapidly that Europe climbs out of the ashes of World War II. Japan becomes arguably the greatest economy uh at the time in the mid80s. China ends up leapfrogging Japan and virtually everybody else to become a peer with the US through uh globalization. I mean, just an absolute unmitigated success for a while and then it begins, the snake begins eating its own tail and we end up hollowing out manufacturing and we discover that if you don't maintain discipline and you take on an insane amount of debt that all the things that were working for you flip and they begin working against you, America loses its moral center.

America begins clamoring just to get more and more resources because they have to disguise the fact that they stopped building real wage growth for the middle class because they were doing everything through debts. They were claiming to be a capitalist nation when really they were sliding towards socialism. And the big things going wrong in the economy are all the things where we muddy up the free markets. Not that you want a pure free market. I'm not that guy. But we went way past sensible regulation into just absolutely uh creating all kinds of insane um situations like what we see in healthcare, like what we see in education, just absolutely breaking the financial incentives with the government stepping in to guarantee everything.

Corporate socialism by bailing out banks and making sure that the stock market never goes down for long. I mean, just really really doing asinine [ __ ] But before that, kids, we created global prosperity through peace, through strength. And now what we're seeing is we don't have that strength anymore. And people are going buck wild. And this is not going to be a fun time when you've got uh people in Toyotas with big ass guns running around in sandals and they can take down developed nations like Saudi Arabia or stying the US.

Not that Iran is wearing sandals. They very much are not. Those guys are a developed nation. But they can styy the US, man. And this is only the beginning because if this turns out that you've got the Houthis now becoming a real regional power because they control the strait and then that strengthens Iran even more and then Iran becomes a regional power by just choking off the straight, you're going to find other people are like, "Oh, this is actually a winning formula." And now everybody's either just keeping things regional or they are realizing that uh oh we're going to have to pay these tolls.

And so now everything becomes far more expensive which then is going to put people into these vacasillating populist death loops. It's not going to be a good time. It's going to be wild. Unless of course American refined its moral center, get out from under its debt. But we'll see that. That's a different rant that I won't do now. Yeah. I didn't think that those are related. But yeah, I kind of see how you you uh pop those two together. They're very related, unfortunately. Yeah. It's It's interesting, though, because I do think that this is one of those situations we're not going to learn until we get to the other side of it.

We We have to almost touch the fire. We have to We're dry humping the stove. Our foreskin is burning off and we're still going to town. Dude, th this is so crazy. I don't know. I mean, I know exactly what they're thinking and I can map it out, but it it is so um terrifying to me that whoever coded the Matrix was just like, I'm going to make humans super volatile and prone to group think, and whenever they get panicky, they're going to team up and act a fool.

And that that is the universe that we live in. And it is so dangerous. And because all of us grew up under the shield of a strong moral America, uh we're completely confused now about what the world is actually like. And as we return back to because this all started with you saying these guys are like doing this like crazy thing in all these different ways. It's like no, it it isn't crazy. What they're doing is saying, "Oh, I can press my advantage now." The the the bully got punched in the nose and now I see that he's a paper tiger.

[ __ ] these kids. So, the only reason that I didn't like line up all my Toyotas with the big [ __ ] guns and take this thing over a long time ago is I thought they were just going to kill us all. It's like, oh, they're not. Like, we're way stronger than we thought we were compared to their weak ass. Cool. They're not going to be able to see this through. So, we're now the new Afghanistan. Gez, enough said. Now, well, let's say more, Drew.

Uh, because now, welcome back the CIA. Okay, if we can't do this via strong power, oh, we're about to do it via soft power. And so expect cocaine to be dealt in the neighborhood near you by a guy in a trench coat wearing sunglasses. It's like it is going to get so weird. Um that's obviously tongue and cheek, but I'm really pointing at something real like the battle's going to play out in NOS's, secretive organizations. Um when you can't do things publicly because it just instantly goes across the internet everywhere, then you do everything.

Yeah, it's all clandestine. It's all NOS's. It it's u Yeah, it's going to get wild. So we'll see, man. It's I'm really sad that I no longer believe in NGOs's until about what 6 months ago. I thought they were really like dogooders. And as you start peeling that back and you realize it's a mixed bag, it gets very traumatizing. Mixed bag is the best way to put it. All right, we got some super chats. Yes, we do. First up from Johnny. Good night. Says, "Want to give a birthday shout out to my amazing wife Devon.

Happy birthday, Cheeks. And to our son and unborn child, be legendary. Peace and love. Let's go, man. Well, happy birthday. September babies have this. I I will say we probably don't get a colored cheeks, but happy birthday, Devon. That's incredible. And I love that your husband is shouting you out. That's dope. May May you both be listening and indeed to your kids. Thank you, by the way, uh for your service. I appreciate it. We need more people raising kids since I have abdicated my responsibilities. Uh so, Johnny, I hope you got it more than just a super chat, though.

Make sure to grab the Damn, Drew trying to downplay that super chat. It was a good super chat. I love it. I thought it was good, man. Yeah. Uh, Stoic Anarchy says, "AI is a game changanger for little guys. I had quotes for 100K to build out a platform for my wife's business. I built it all out this weekend on atbot. I could not afford your scale without it. Two person company runs like I hired five, bro. Dude, okay, so I had a similar experience this weekend.

I can't agree with this more." So, uh, working on Kaizen, the video game that I'm developing, and there was I needed a management system for our mobs, whatever, doesn't matter. And I was like, "Oh god, how am I going to do this?" And I was like, "Wait, I can just build this. I don't have to try to do this in spreadsheets." And within an hour, I have software that manages all the mobs in our game. It is the craziest [ __ ] You can drag and drop, move things around, inventory management, uh, giving them skills, mapping, like what region in the game the biome has, what mob.

I was like, "This is unreal." Unreal. It's similar. I actually built two pieces of software this weekend. I did another one for our ore distribution. It's so crazy, dude. Like, if people aren't trying this stuff, it will blow your mind. You just have to know what you're trying to get to. You don't have to know how to get there. You just have to know I'm trying to get it to do this and then use it and see if it does that. Be able to point out the problems.

It's unreal. In an hour, man, it would have How long would that have taken? Six months. Easily. Six months. And I shudder to think how expensive it would have been. So yeah, I've unfortunately built software to the tune of north of a million dollars. And when I think how little I got for that, dude, it's so crazy. You can prompt this stuff in an hour now. It's wild. People are not giving this enough credit, Drew. This one like really people are dabbling with AI. All right, that's on you guys, but it's crazy.

James Whitmer with $50 super chat here. Hey, thank you for this $50. says Washingtonian, 49 years old, hot dog entrepreneur and artist. I get a ton of inspiration from the kid from Tacoma. Still looking forward to Coyotes of the Air Gap. Thank you for doing what you guys He's pandering, but I love him for it. Uh James, thank you, man. Even just hearing that name come out of somebody else's ma mouth is uh incredible. It's a great title. So, isn't it though? Isn't it? Come on.

I So, because it's set in the Kaizen universe, I feel like I'm constantly sort of dancing with coyotes. Uh yeah. Yes, you and me both. Shout out to the hot dog stand, man. Wherever it may be, may you sell the most hot dogs. Uh Bruce Ludo says, "What exactly is the worst case scenario and implications if China wins the AI race?" Okay, so worst case scenario, and this is um I'm going to ground it so that we don't get too crazy here. So, uh people's big fear with Trump is that he has well their big fear is that he'll be authoritarian or he already is authoritarian.

I will grant you he has authoritarian tendencies, but he's inside of a system that can constrain him. Uh Xi is not. Xi's in a system where he literally gets to do whatever he wants. And when you put the power of something as profoundly effective as AI in an authoritarian's hands and then they get to the point where their AI can out compete yours, they can hack any of your systems at their will. So, imagine they're like, "Uh, hey, US, you're starting to mess with our flow of oil in Iran.

We don't like that. Your energy grid just got shut off. Now, we're only turning it off for an hour at this time, but if you keep going, we're going to shut it off for a day, a week, a month, a year, whatever." And they can quite literally do whatever they want because they own technology at that point. So just like we saw with hugging phase not having sufficient defenses against a slightly more advanced AI their systems were just an open door and so you're handing over control of anything that is technological in nature to um one nation which obviously I wouldn't expect people to want the US to have superior AI for the same reason because just like we're doing with um the Swift uh monetary system we would do the same thing to Iran.

on. We'd be like, "Hey guys, uh, we're just shutting off all your oil infrastructure. Hey guys, we're shutting off electricity, whatever." And so, uh, I understand when people say, I like the idea that both of these guys are pushing this forward so that no one person has it, so that there is a cat-and- mouse game. Uh, but the fear of one country having dominion over another is that they will use it to get what they want. And if anybody has a hard time believing that that's true, you're not paying attention to the last whatever 80 years of history.

I mean, honestly, you're not paying attention to the last forever of history. Uh, but you don't have to look very far to find that governments that have power will leverage that power against other people. And AI is just too important. it AI at a at the most basic grounded simple level le level we're already seeing it play out today is just control of the security of other um online systems Patrick Writson $50 super chat thank you hey thank you $50 as someone that's watched the subject evolve closer than most since around 2010 regarding AI there is no slowing down China will not slow down I've talked about it on Twitter the last couple days happy Monday preach man happy Monday Right back to you.

Uh, you and I are in complete agreement. Now, to not make this China bad, US good, the US isn't going to slow down. Not not with Trump. So, if you Oh, god. I I almost don't want to say this out loud, but if you hand power over to uh Bernie Sanders, uh he will shut it down. So, you do have that going for you. Like, if you're really uh in a twist about it, the 18% of people that want to stop it, you've got people to vote for.

Um, so that one would terrify me, but hey, you've at least got somebody on your team. Allan for $20 says, "Nuclear weapons proved their danger through explosions. Fear of ASI is speculative panic about non-existent tech. We have proof that bombs detonate. ASI doomsday scenarios remain unproven, unsupported by real world evidence." It's very true. I think that we do want to be a little bit more careful than just saying, "Well, until I see something blow up, I'll assume that there's no problem." because the in the fast takeoff scenario once the bomb detonates there's no going backwards and so now you have an AI that nobody controls but I agree with you there are people that still believe that super intelligence is impossible that what we have now is not general intelligence um and that's why it can do some things incredibly well and then just trip over the most like simplistic thing in the world uh so yeah look I'm empathetic to both positions because I think that there's an element of truth to both.

I just think it is prudent for us all to say um only the government is going to have access to the um weaponsgrade stuff. And unfortunately at some point we do have to trust that over individual companies that have a profit motive. Uh I don't want individual companies out there building nuclear weapons. Uh and I don't want them building weapons AI. So, um, yeah, they're going to need to be involved. We need people that that understand the tech but do not have a profit motive to come in and advise the government.

And we need the government to actually pay attention. And who you select on that board, oh my god, that's going to be so important because, bro, there are still so many people that aren't in the government but just want that authoritarian control. God damn it, I hate that. What about on the other side? If it becomes like a utility company like KED, PSG, like the electric companies. Yes. Would you be okay with it's something like that? The models are now regulated to households. Every household can get one.

It's $20. It's a consortium of these three models. So, it's regulated. They got the regulatory capture. But you had me until you said these three models. So, once you say these three models, no, I'm out. But it's just like the electric companies. You can't start a new electric company in Southern California. That's [ __ ] and should end immediately. But yeah, that's that's a United States thing and Jersey, Philly, all these stop doing immediately. Um, but the point I'm making is the regulatory type style of capture.

I think it's going to model that company just like you can't build a new water company, you can't build a new electric company of like AI is going to be the new like municipality type thing. Yeah. Yes. Oh, I think that's exactly what they want to do. I just think it's a terrible idea. Got it. So the utility of AI being in every household. What? Let me ask you something. What did co feel like to you? The loving embrace of the government making all kinds of wise decisions or something else.

Um I didn't think about the government during co if I'm be 100% honest with you. I appreciate that that you and I had a very different experience. CO changed me. It changed the entire trajectory of my life. Yes, man. And uh I realized, oh damn, like they'll really grab power. Like they are using this to actively try to get people more and more afraid. And then as I saw how much censorship they were doing and I saw them like people just trying to run the scientific method and they're like, "No, you can't say that." And then calling it malinformation that we agree it's true, but you still can't say it.

I'm like, "What the fuck?" So, um I was too busy enjoying the $29 flights and the overstock inventory at uh clothing supplies. Hey, respect. Everybody should live life from their perspective. Uh that that one rattled me. And so now I experienced firsthand what it felt like to be under somebody's thumb and it did not feel good. Yeah. So then nothing you never want to go back there. You're not trying to do it. I never want to let them take more control. I think governments need less control, less influence in our lives.

I think government, the US government needs to be smaller. Don't even get me started on China, but the US government needs to be smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. And the crime that the US has committed against the American people is we stop being a moral nation. We uh became uh like all of the bad pathological socialism traits we began adopting, but in this like sort of really weird hybrid system. uh we have forsaken the youth uh and we're doing it all in the name of safetyism.

In fact, it's time I pulled a clip. I didn't think we were going to get to it, but I pulled a clip of everybody's favorite uh Peter Teal, and I expect this to be controversial, but um this was Peter Teal talking like a year and a half ago about basically um how I think he calls it the Antichrist ends up taking power. But let's let's give a listen. We're going to be starting and stopping this one now. Um I have a lot of thoughts on this topic but uh but sort of one one question is and this was a plot hole in all these um antichrist books people wrote how does the antichrist take over the world it's um he gives these demonic hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it and so it's this plot hole it's this demonium it's totally it's implausible it's a very implausible plot hole I think we have an answer this is a really important thing to understand.

So when people are grappling with um the antichrist from my perspective, what they're talking about is I see a thing that humans do that is so ungodly, that is so literally anim animalistic, uh murderous that I I have to understand what that thing is like. How can a Genghaskhan exist? How can a Hitler exist? How can a Mao or a Stalin exist? I need to be able to explain that to myself. And as they go to explain it to themselves, they end up telling themselves a false story about how people like that rise to power.

But the reality is history tells us exactly how those people rise to power. And it is always a promise that I'm going to make you safe and secure. So we don't have to tell fantastical stories. And that's what Peter is getting at here is in books where it's like, okay, I'm a writer. I need the antichrist to take power. Uh I guess they'll be my sense of what Hitler was like. in that, you know, it's the speeches, it's the way he talks, it's the they just tap into people's emotions and they they make them they seduce them.

That's true, but they seduce them with something very specific. Hitler never rises to power. We know because he tried to rise to power uh before the economy just absolutely got completely obliterated and devastated and he couldn't. And so once the economy just absolutely got hammered and ironically then started climbing back up, which is a whole thing. But in that moment, that's when Hitler was able to come in and say, "Okay, I know the cause of all your suffering. It's obviously we know who he points to, and they're the bad guys, and I'm going to save you from them, and everything's going to be better, and uh [ __ ] all these guys that are trying to bury us under debt.

Nope, we're going to get out from under that. We're going to build our military. We're going to be strong." And so it was all about I'm going to make things better. I'm going to keep you safe. I'm going to protect you from the vermin. And that is how the the human that people think so evil that they are likened to the antichrist rise to power. But he's got much more to say to this plot hole. The way the antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon non-stop.

You talk about existential risk non-stop. and this is what you need to regulate. It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th 18th century where you know the antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. Um in our world the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. It is it is um the thing that has political resonance is we need to stop science. we need to just say stop to this and this is where yeah I don't know in the 17th century I can imagine a doctor strange love Edward Teller type person taking over the world in our world it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg okay I want to suggest a middle ground between so that that is a I think a pretty um contrarian take that the person that we need to worry about is a Greta Thunberg but what he's getting at is How do people actually acquire power?

And this is why I have a far more radical fear of where the left is currently than I do where the right is currently. Though I think they have both become pathological. The reason that I have far deeper fears about people on the left is this is people who are so convinced that the world is so dangerous that humans are the cause of all that danger that they've got to be folded under um essentially a world government that there's going to be a small group of elites that know better and that is a huge part of this that there was a small group of elites they know better right Hillary Clinton's idea of the deplorables there's a small group of elites they know better they need to be in control.

And if they're in control, everything is going to get better. In 2017, WE put out an article that was titled something like, uh, it's 2030, I own nothing, I have no privacy, uh, and I've never been happier or something like that. The no privacy is a direct quote. And what they're saying is this small group of elites know so much better than you that they're going to be able to architect the perfect world. But that isn't what happens. What happens is co where they realize h there's all these inconvenient truths humans need to be coralled intellectually and physically and so if we have to control them intellectually and physically to stop them from hurting themselves supposedly uh then that's what we'll do and so we will lie to them we will deny them certain things that we know to be true but they just we we can't have them understanding it or knowing about it uh we're going to force them via lockdowns or a Chinese social credit score that denies free mobility Did you know that you can't just move to a given city in China?

I mean, I guess technically you can, but you can't like qualify for certain housing and things like that. It's not like America where it's like, I want to live in Beijing. This is why they're whatever tier three and four cities still have inhabitants because you have to put in requests to be able to move to the uh tier one cities. They don't just let anybody move to those cities. That's the wild [ __ ] And so, they just control it like that, man. And when you're growing at an insane rate like they are in China, people are like, "Well, I was destitute and essentially starving to death on my rural uh farm in a village in China." And so now, sure, I'm forced to stay in the tier 4 city, but that's better than where I was.

Well, let me tell you how fast people are going to go, "Wait, I grew up in this tier 4 city. I don't know anything about the rural starvation. I want to be in a tier one city." And now it's like, no, you can't. And they have to get more and more draconian. And that is a thousand% where this all goes. Which is exactly why America got founded in the first place. Because we were the people that are like, "Yeah, we want freedom. Yes, it comes with risks, but we're willing to take that trade-off because living under somebody else's thumb sucks ass.

But I think Peter is right that the thing right now Americans are so afraid on mass that they'll 100% clamor to be protected from whether it's uh climate emergency, whether it's AI emergency, um whether it's um I mean what are what are some other hot ones that uh we've got too many foreigners like whatever you're going to get all of these emergencies that are like just govern me harder daddy quote unquote from Mike Benz. It it it's wild. There there are costs to being free. There are costs those two options.

It used to be that the reasonable fear of the antichrist was a kind of wizard of technology. And now the reasonable fear is someone who promises to control technology, make it safe, and sort of usher in what from your point of view would be a kind of universal stagnation. Right. Well, that it's it's it's more that's more my description of how it would happen. So, I I think uh I think people still have a fear of a 17th century antichrist. We're still scared of Doctor Strange love, right?

But you're saying you're saying the real antichrist would say would play on that fear and say you must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon. Yes. And I guess my view would be looking at the world right now that you would need a certain kind of novel technological progress to make that fear concrete. The last thing he says is interesting. So um this idea of we would need that because keep in mind this is a year and a half ago.

So the novel technological breakthrough is AI. it is that how far we've come literally has a lot of people panicking like good and proper panicking and I think some of it is just um I'm going to lose my job some of it is I'm not going to have meaning and purpose anymore some of this is like if social media and the internet was so deranging to society what is this going to do and people are instead of going okay how do we put sensible constraints they just go all the way to uh Bernie Sanders please stop this please arrest people that are pursuing this.

And that in when I put on my okay, what do I have to protect myself from? What is going to be the thing that I shout into the void? It really is optimism around America getting its core strength back of being disciplined, pursuing greatness, uh trying to turn all of our potential into actual deployable, usable skill set, not succumbing to fear, understanding that yes, we have to be strong. understanding that some of discipline is um building discriminatory boundaries around the technology. Uh you don't just want this stuff being completely unfettered, but recognizing that America was founded on one simple principle.

Mand man tends towards tyranny. Once you understand that America was founded on the that principle, you understand why we have to protect ourselves from that. Why we don't want our regulators to have too much control. Why we have to be extremely paranoid about the ideological stance of the regulators. Why we have to be extremely careful of letting scope creep slip into government and let government get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's incredibly dangerous. It's incredibly dangerous to human thriving. It's not like incredibly dangerous in the abstract.

It will begin to drain the lifeblood out of the economy because more and more people are sucked up by the government. It will begin draining our ability to innovate because there are more and more regulations that stop the young upstart kid who has a brilliant idea from getting started because it just becomes too expensive. And you start sliding back towards this literal like cementing of the K-shaped economy which was England basically all throughout its history until they finally started to wrestle control away from the aristocrats.

It's like we don't want to go back there. We don't want to create that class of person where it becomes like uh people start viewing it as a hereditary thing. We've the thing that has made America great was like us shouting into the void the world over saying, "Hey everybody, uh we don't have any um social protections for you, so it's going to be [ __ ] hard here." But you can come here and take your shot. And then some people came and just died. Some people came and then were like, "Damn, this is way too hard." And left.

And then other people stayed and really built something extraordinary. But it was built on the back of like I'm I'm I'm him. I'm Himothy. I'm going to come here and take my shot and I'm going to try to get better and I'm perfectly happy to duke it out in the free markets. And then just slowly over time we lost that sense of like why we were able to galvanize what I call foreignb born Americans the world over. Get them here to build a country that had a coherent identity.

Now we're putting out a totally different call which is come here. We feel guilty for our imperialism. And so we're going to take care of everybody and just let it, you know, absolutely cannibalize the system. Uh we're self-loathing. I mean, it's really, really wild. So, be disciplined, be focused, turn potential into actual skill set. Build an economy that is thriving and that has a um not preference for, but make sure that all obstacles for the little guy are pushed out of the way through antitrust and otherwise.

And yet we're living in the AI age where it's like we're actively talking about giving these businesses an antitrust waiver. That's so crazy. Well, a Chinese billionaire is trying to build his own economy who he has allegedly been segregating more than 100 kids. To be honest, I'm not mad at it. If I'm a billionaire and like a 100 kids, I would rather you use your money on children than on, you know, machines that are going to kill us. Okay, let's let's push that. So now, how do you feel about um if if that person is loyal to the Chinese Communist Party Mhm.

and they understand that we have birthright citizenship and they're going to essentially repatriate these kids back to China, raise them in China, send them here for education, let's say, so 18, and then leave them here. Would you still be like, "Yeah, word." Is there like a button he's going to press and turn them on to like spies? Like what? No. And some percentage of them are going to hate him and all that and so it'll be a mixed bag. He probably won't send the ones that hate him back to the US.

Yeah. But it's like if you raise if you grow up the child of a billionaire, the odds are that you suckle on that te forever. So if dad says you go to America, you go to America. If dad says you don't go to America, you don't go to America. So he's going to send the dieh hard ones over here, the ones that drank deeply. This is a thought exercise. as I don't know this guy from Adam, but um would would your feelings on the surrogacy change from this is about having more kids to this is about birthright citizenship and that makes me nervous?

No, it wouldn't change. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. For me, it completely flips the script. Now, is that because you think having kids is so important? We got to get all these single women pregnant. Um I like having kids. I'm team kids. I have a kid. So, um Can you raise properly a hundred kids? No, of course not. But you have a billion dollars, so you have a lot closer chance to So better to raise kids a little bit more. He's raising him like a school system. So with a 100 kids, is he okay?

This is thought exercise, right? Yeah. Thought 100 kids, I have a billion dollars. Theoretically, if I raise them all together now that they're surrogates, I'm assuming that once they're born, they now fly under his umbrella. Yes. Yeah. We're coming. Okay. So then now I have a facility that has about 100 kids together. I can raise it like a commune. What you need a couple couple acres, a couple teachers. How many women are you putting in there? Um, you need at least five teachers. So, that's a 1 to 20 ratio.

That's a standard classroom size. Okay. And then you'll probably need another five or 10 for staff cleaning, janitorial effort, stuff like that. He's not reading everyone a good a bedtime story, right? They're intermingling with each other. So, now there's a community of the children there. I'm sure there's some propaganda uh movie that he plays every night for them. So all hundred gather into some type of warehouse box and they be like, "Oh, dad's gonna play so and so." And he says, "I love you children." And then they all go to sleep at night.

Um I can't remember if it was the Czech Republic or Romania or maybe some third that I'm forgetting, but during I think it was World War II, um there were orphanages where the kids were taken away from their parents and they finally had to shut it down because they realized these kids were failing to thrive. So some meaning that's a technical term for basically a kid just dies and they don't know why. And so all these kids were like completely [ __ ] up. Even the ones that lived because Nazi Germany, I think.

No, no, definitely wasn't Germany. It might have been Nazi controlled, but I forget what country it was. This is saying Germanization of Lebanon's Oh, it's called the Lebans program from the SS and it hunted for children with blonde hair, blue eyes, and traits. And I think we might be conflating two different things. Okay. But anyway, so the um the idea being that if you don't raise kids with a at least a somebody acting in the role of parent, meaning skin-to-skin contact, they're hugging them, they're showing them love.

It's wild, but they'll actually a certain percentage of them will die, and then the other ones won't develop properly. So anyway, this is a thought exercise. Obviously, I'm sure this guy's a way better strategy for that, and there going to be all kinds of women hugging and cuddling and all of that, and it'll be wonderful. Uh my concern is about the birthright citizenship thing. I don't people aren't taking it seriously enough. Uh and I think that that when we talk about loadbearing um base assumptions, people have a base assumption that America um is not a coherent culture.

So it doesn't matter how many people you bring here. And if America does have a coherent culture, it is something like um guntoing rednecks that scream America. And so [ __ ] that culture. And so we need um better stock. And so let's bring people in from all over the world. And that to me is deranged and it will break the country. And so on that front, I think people have to be way more thoughtful about we need to articulate what our culture is and then decide what are the methods that people can abuse that because people have reason to want to take down the the big kid on the block.

So um it isn't like our enemies won't use anything they can to destabilize us. Uh, and so I'm confused by how people look at that and don't think, okay, wait, there are people in their parliament that scream death to America. Um, China has said that they're basically going to get out from under America, grow to be dismissive of America. We know that the US and every other country on planet Earth that can pull it off is sending spies to other countries to figure out what's really going on at the ground level.

Uh, we know that the sleeper cells are real and they will get activated later in life. So, it's like you start putting all that together and it's like, wait a second. Uh, why do we not want to at least protect ourselves from that? So, I think in 2026, the spy network looks a lot differently where I think in the 1960s it made sense that you had to nationalize somebody that they had to live in the neighborhood and walk around to see what is going on. Americans are putting their entire life on TikTok.

So, I think we could do just as much of the espionage without the you're post the other side of the um the uh algorithm on that. But if if what you mean is that they can manipulate us through the algorithm, that I will certainly grant you. Yeah. Um but that's worse. That just means there's another attack vector. Yeah. I just think that attack vector has kind of blossomed into the other ones. Just like with warfare, nobody stands across the the playing field anymore. It says 1 2 3 go.

And they run at each other with like swords and and shields. What do you mean? Of course they do. So if you look at Ukraine, the the whole comment is this is World War I slamming into Battlestar Galactica. It's like you've got all these drones flying around, but you have real people dug into trenches using dogs to attack the other side. Like this is [ __ ] gnarly hand to hand. Like kill as many as you can with the drones, but then run over and kill the rest with your hands.

Like it's this wild trench warfare. Yeah. Trench warfare is still different than what I was talking about. I'm talking about like Troy, Roman Empire. Like Sure. Yes. So as warfare evolves, so does spy tactics evolve. That That's my point. Yes. Yes. But are you saying that it's not an attack factor? You don't think that physical humans just crossed the border during the Biden administration precisely to be sleeper cells? You don't think that's real? Maybe I have to wait for the terrorist attack and then I can say you were right, Tom.

I should have been more eye opened. Interesting. Wow. Okay. Hey, based assumption. Base assumption. I think you could pay your way into this administration. I don't think we no longer have to cross borders to do all that manipulation. That's what like the 1960s model of like I need to secretly infiltrate America so that way nobody's knows. But it's your base assumption that wide open adversaries go, I'm only going to deploy my resources against whatever the single most efficient way of doing this is. I'm not going to do all of them.

Yes. And I think that adversaries are worried about their next move and there's no longer this blanket. I'm just keeping track of stuff. Interesting. Well, we do not share that basis. Yeah. I feel like America's movement in the overall hedgeimony standards does not warrant that anymore. There's probably people who are infiltrating our bases in Jordan. There are people people infiltrating our bases in the Middle East. There are people that are infiltrating our bases in other countries, but to come to America to see on the ground what America is doing.

I feel like they can have that. Let me tell you what I think is happening. I think what we've got going on is a good adversary looks at all of your attack vectors and they say, "I'm going to go after each and every one of these and if you're leaving your border open, then I'm going to send a ton of people in, as many people as I can get into your country. I'm going to send them. I've got more people that are loyal to me that are there.

I can put on payroll. I can get information. They're on the ground should I ever want to activate them. Yes or no. Uh I'm looking at America and realizing you guys are easy to tear apart ideologically. So I'm going to pit each other against you. Uh I see that you have a value system that's all about uh liberalism. So I'm going to make sure that I come in and have people spouting an ideology that makes you more compliant to the way that I want the world to be.

Um, I'm going to weaken you by getting your people scared so that you shoot yourself in the foot from an energy policy perspective. Shoot yourself in the foot from a AI perspective. I'm going to get you guys just to tear each other apart. Uh, oh, by the way, if I'm Iran and I realize that a left-leaning government is way more advantageous to me economically in my country than a right-leaning government, then I'm going to just nakedly say, "Hey, I'm going to make sure that you lose at the midterms.

I'm going to do everything that I can, which is exactly what they're saying and doing. And so they're trying to make sure that there's a growing wedge between the left and the right. And so if they also see an attack vector where it's like, oh, you guys have this saying birthright citizenship, say less. I'm going to send people over just to have a kid, then they're going to bounce back out. I'm going to uh surrogate have uh kids because I can afford to pay for it, then send them back to my country, raise them there, indoctrinate them, then send them back at a time of my choosing.

They're going to do all of those attack vectors. And any country that isn't trying to defend itself from these things is a fool. Especially when it's so easy to defend yourself from these things. And we are choosing not to do it, which is crazy. But that is the state of things right now. America has completely lost the realization that they must define their values. We just don't. And so we don't have anything that is like this is America. This is what we stand for. And this is the thing from which all of our uh laws and policies are going to be derived from.

We we've just completely abandoned that whole idea because things have gone so well for so long and then we don't educate people anymore because it's far easier to control a dumb populace. It's not why we're doing it, but it's a certainly very useful side effect. Um TKO Hall in the chat said they could just bribe a cop and take all the flock footage if they really need it. So yeah, we're good. We're good there. All right, let's jump over to the Lindsy Clansancy trial. It's so interesting that now that Lindsay claims he has to go back to trial.

Everybody's talking about the juror and no longer about the trial, but the jurors have been out here, they've been deliberating, they've been talking to the CBS and all these other places. This is her admitting that she is part of a runaway jury. We knew that this was a turning point and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future for other families, you know, justice for those children. All right, everybody. You cannot live in a world where you have activist jurors.

The whole idea is that they're sworn in to be impartial. And when you have people that are going in with a political agenda, all hope is lost. The very thing that we have to be scanning for when you're selecting jurors is that they are not coming in with any preconceived notions about the trial. That's one of the first things that they should be asking these people. And if those people are being honest, then they should be only on the jury if they can say honestly that, yeah, I don't have any preconceived notions about this.

I can be completely impartial. I can listen to the evidence and then make a decision based on the evidence and the rules of the courtroom. These guys are admitting that isn't what they were doing. That they were obviously paying attention to social media if they had a sense of like what's going on, how this is going to be something that'll be useful to uh supposedly future women. I'm not sure why. We're thinking about protecting future women instead of making sure that kids are safe. Let's not lose sight of the fact that three kids were murdered by their parent and that we need to make sure that there are uh repercussions for that.

And so when you have a pre-etermined outcome that you're trying to get to, then justice isn't being served. This is so crazy to me. And the fact that like all of this um firestorm around this is being whipped up around this one juror who was saying, "Listen, I'm not willing to hand that verdict down. Now I think that there's a reasonable debate to be had about the claims that they have made that he said I do have reasonable doubt. Now the you're supposed to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

They have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that XYZ whatever the case is. And so if he had reasonable doubt that's something certainly to debate whether he was just trying to be obstinate or he had a predetermined conclusion that he was trying to reach. But the fact that the jurors that are actually talking out loud are saying straight up on camera that we had uh a political agenda that we were trying to get to is crazy. And the predefined political agenda that they were trying to get to is absolutely aborant.

I cannot believe people are saying with a straight face that somebody does not have responsibility that either uh they got caught up in their hormones and postpartum depression is just a get out of jail free. like quite literally a get out of jail jail free card. That is pure lunacy. Or that they were prescribed a drug and that drug was making them crazy. As if the person doesn't have responsibility for what drugs they take or not take. And to see that we have a I'm taking this.

This isn't making me feel better. And so people just keep going down that path. She was conniving enough to get her husband out of the house so that she could kill the kids. That means she could have gotten somebody to take the kids away from her because she could see, uh-oh, I'm going down a dark path. Like, this stuff is wild. So, I really can't believe that these guys are not uh having the full weight of the law coming down on them for obviously not acting in good faith as jurors.

I'm pretty sure you have to take an oath to uh get on the jury that you solemnly swear that you have uh that you can be impartial. It's time to abolish jury duty. That is my state. No more jury duty. Do you really believe that? No, I don't. Okay. I was going to say that's wild. I was trying to get out of it. That's it. I I just got busy next week. State of California. Listen, being Be on a jury does not sound like a lot of fun.

Uh but nonetheless, if you're on a jury, you cannot have political motive, man. Like, imagine being on the other side of this that you're the person in court and you can't trust that you're going to get a fair shake. That that is absolutely terrifying. There was another thing this weekend that I saw where there was this woman who I I cannot understand what her agenda was, but there was a female DNA expert who was um lying and saying that there was no DNA found in the sample and then throwing it out and these guys were getting um my understanding is that guys were getting off of like sexual assault cases and stuff because she was saying that there was no DNA sample.

And now I don't know if other ones were where she was saying that there um was somebody else's DNA and she lied about that and then uh wrongful conviction happened, but they're saying now that there's over 400 sexual assaults that were in the mix. Uh that there's some obscene case. Colorado is now retesting more than a thousand cases that fell under her. And so an intern, I guess, ended up catching her and then concerns were raised more than a decade before that. and she just kept testing rape kits.

Anyway, I mean, this is crazy. And so, I don't know what the agenda was, but that is insane to me. So, 145 of her cases are tainted over a 29-year career as a star expert. Man, that that is legitimately terrifying that the um some cog in that system would be would have their own agenda and then the wrong people are going to jail or in the Lindsay Clansancy case not going to jail. No. Yeah. Mist trial. She'll have her she'll have her opportunity. I mean, fingers crossed we can actually get an impartial jury.

Yeah. Uh all right, let's finish what she said on this one. Is this never happening again? And Develin also talked to me about the impact this has had on her own mental health. She said during the weekong trial, she would walk to a park or the beach during lunch and she just couldn't bear to look at the families around her. She says guys, she's still having a hard time with that. What does that mean that she can't look at the families around? I I don't understand that.

So, um yeah, the every time I hear one of these jurors speak, it's just weirder and weirder. Uh yeah, to me this is a state of the culture in the US that you can't find a jury pool that is um not ideologically captured. That's terrifying. Um and then in some positive news, at least for the um gamers in the chat, there was a study that reviewed that gaming actually improves cognitive and mental health um exercise and video gaming. So there you go. I'm telling you right now that the kind of hand eye coordination, mental engagement, problem solving that you have to do in video games is for sure going to have a positive impact on the brain.

Now, you can't just say, "Oh, video games are good for people. Let them play as much as possible." Like anything, video games also can have an addictive quality. As somebody who uh makes video games for a living, I'm telling you right now, you've got to be very thoughtful when developing a video game. And then players cannot abdicate their responsibility. So, if you're a kid, your parents need to keep an eye on how much you're playing. If you're an adult, have some [ __ ] discipline. But yes, the fact that there are advantages to playing games does not surprise me at all.

Modern games are so uh fascinating from a cognitive standpoint. There are so many different kinds of games that are going to tap into different regions of the brain, whether it's strategy, problem solving, spatial relations, uh memory, planning. It's really, really impressive. And as game technology gets better and better, you can expect these games to get more engaging and more effective at helping people develop real skills, it's very interesting. So yeah, I'm not super surprised by this. Uh we'll see how much farther this can get pushed by the industry, but as with anything, first of all, early days, you're going to need to see more studies come out before uh kids start taking this to their doctor and saying, "You got to prescribe me more games." Um, but this is very encouraging early signs for something that's been vilified for so long.

Uh, because when I was a kid, my parents like they they were just the whole loop was it's going to rot your brain, it's going to rot your brain. It's why my parents would not let me um have a game system until I could buy it myself. Uh, so yeah, I'm still bitter about that one as you may detect. But yeah, very interesting early data. Shout out to all my gamers out there. Getting brighter by the second. Yeah, I was talking to a group of friends yesterday and the consensus a bunch of people are still excited for like GTA 6, even people who don't necessarily even play GTA and like video games and stuff like that, but everybody had their like ears peaked for that.

It's got so much hype, man. It'll be very, very interesting. I'll certainly be playing it. All right. And there have been reports um this is based from uh puberty. Uh puberty. I was going to say this is from puberty. Let's go. Um D is being sued by the National Supermarket Association for trying. Praise Jesus. Grocery stores with reasonable prices. supermarket claim they can't compete with mom Donny's prices and that those these stores shouldn't be allowed. I hate everything about the way that puberty phrase that these guys obviously are team mom Donnie here.

Uh so they're making it sound like the National Supermarket Association is some unhinged group that just doesn't want to see your prices go down. This isn't how this game works. The way that the economy is structured, if you start messing with the price structure, you collapse the supply chain which makes things harder to get and more expensive. It does not make things better. Look at the natural experiment of East and West uh Berlin. It was clear as day on the side where the government is trying to control the price structure.

It becomes impossible for people to innovate for prices to go down. Everything stagnates. They had a limited number of things on the shelf. uh the quality of the product stayed stagnant for decades. Whereas on the side where the free market was allowed to reign, the way that you get your mustard on the shelf or your eggs on the shelf or your chicken on the shelf is you innovate at some place in the chain. You either innovate from a quality perspective, you innovate from a distribution perspective, but you do something that allows you to get more people to buy your product.

You make it cheaper, uh you make it better. But if you're doing it simply by taking taxpayer dollars, subsidizing it to make it cheaper, you've now removed the innovation impulse, and you've made it harder for other companies that have been trying to just innovate to compete. You've made it impossible for them to stay in business because you've artificially stolen their own tax dollars to weaponize against them. This is so patently absurd. Yeah, th this one, guys, for real. Please, I beg of you. I thought you caught yourself.

No, no, no. I really really want people to hear me. All things in life can be boiled down to what are the mechanisms. This one you can understand at a mechanism level and the the way that people respond to this like with this um arrogant flippant attitude of like, oh, these guys just don't want to see your groceries get cheaper. [ __ ] Groceries have gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to the point of being a modern [ __ ] miracle that you can get fruit offseason for pennies.

It's absolutely insane that we've managed to pull all this off. And we've managed to pull it off because of the free market. We have not managed to pull this off because you're getting government subsidies. Government subsidies derange things in ways that people do not understand. Let me let me give you one example that I know intimately. How did I get wealthy? You could actually boil this down to a key insight. And the key insight was that the government had been subsidizing corn for so long that corn was so cheap that everybody was making sugar using high fructose corn syrup.

Why? Corn is such a random [ __ ] place to get sugar from. You do it because the government was making it artificially cheap. So it's like, okay, well, we'll just run this through this weirdass process and it comes out with a certain viscosity. Now, for 70 years or whatever that the government had been subsidizing corn, we had people then using to get sugar in their product, high fructose corn syrup, which that viscosity gave the products a certain um tolerance in the machinery. And so for 70 years, machinery was built assuming that you were going to use high fructose corn syrup, which is terrible for you.

Terrible, terrible. If you want to understand why America is in the kind of health crisis that it's in, it is partly due to the obsessive use of high fructose corn syrup. And so when Quest came along, we were like, well, we want our bars to actually be good for you, so we can't have high fructose corn syrup. We came face to face with why nobody had made that bar before us because all of the equipment assumed you had high fructose corn syrup. When you remove that, the bars just wouldn't produce.

So, we had to then go engineer our own equipment. And that becomes one of the ways that we just end up running away like a freight train. When you let the government subsidize things, there are all of these deranging, bizarre consequences that end up being a knock-on effect down the line. Let the free market do what the free market does. I am not saying no regulation, but I'm saying you don't live in a world with too few regulations. You don't live in a world where capitalism has let you down.

You live in a world where money in politics has [ __ ] you up through regulatory capture. Where you have socialized everything, banks, corporations, individuals. Our money is being spent in the most ridiculous way. What we need to get back to is capitalism. We need to get back to free markets, not libertarian free markets, not anarchy, lightly regulated, less government. Make sure there's no tr uh, you know, big trusts being built up, monopolies. You don't want that. You want to make sure that you regulate, that you antitrust, no monopolies.

You want the little guy to be able to come in and take things by storm and innovate and build something incredible. If you do that, your prices are going to keep falling. The quality is going to keep getting better. If you don't do that, then you're going to get to the point where we're at now where people are voting for somebody who's going to break the entire mechanism that makes the system work. Find the mechanism. It will tell you where the answers lie. All right, we'll see the We'll file the status lawsuit and see what goes.

Um, for a lot of uh crap that Mi is getting about, he's going to give every thing away for free. He has been muted. He hasn't given anything away for free in a very long time. So listen, he's going to run his systems. He's going to try to make things cheaper and cheaper and it won't matter to him that it's artificial. And that is the thing that is absolutely infuriating from my perspective is we're we have raised multiple generations to think that you can just get things for free, skim off the top of uh taxes and just put it to whatever, which then creates massive amounts of fraud, massive amounts of inefficiency.

a government bureaucracy that looks like the bureaucracy in education. We are failing our kids. We are taking on debt at a level that is so astronomical and everybody wants more free [ __ ] Nobody wants to be disciplined. And since politics are downstream of culture, we just vote for the person that's like, "Yeah, I'm going to give you more free shit." We we we we the voters, the voters, we've got to snap out of it. The politicians are just going to do what we vote for.

And so if they see that we keep voting for more free [ __ ] whether that's uh I want more military, just you got to give it to me bigger and better. I want more uh defense contractor dollars, whatever. We can have all the defense contractor dollars we want, but we've got to not pay for something else. If we want all the free healthcare in the world, all the free child care in the world, great. You can have it, but you got to stop paying for something else.

Or you've got to keep inflating people into oblivion. Every time you hear cheaper groceries, understand you're saying make that K bigger. Every time you hear free child care, you're making decay bigger. You've got to show me what you're going to stop paying for in order to pay for that new thing. Nobody's doing that. Nobody's doing it. Uh, all right. We got some super chats. Yes, we do. First super chat comes from R.J. Johnson. Tom, will you and or Drew Ryan be at the Moonshots all day event on September 25th in LA?

Hope to see you there. No. Nice and easy. Now, I love R.J., So, I'll give uh a little more color. Um, it wasn't on my radar until you uttered those words. I didn't even know it was happening. Um, I am, if you guys don't see me on camera, I am either researching something for this show, uh, or working on the game. And right now, yeah, my life is a very full slate. Today began at 2:30 a.m. uh, to make sure that we were ready for the show.

So, yeah, I don't have a lot of time for extraneous stuff. If that was a game thing, uh, then you might see me there, but otherwise it's really got to be tied to the initiatives that we have here. So, I hope it's awesome. Uh, assuming that Moonshots is tied to Peter Diamandis, who I love more than you can imagine. I know it'll be an amazing event. I've been to his events in the past. They are incredible. Uh, and yeah, I hope you have fun. I hope it'll be amazing.

Sadly, I won't be there. I don't think either of these two gentlemen will be either. Nope. Uh, Mosen says, "Stop destroying diesel refineries, but we don't have any more Patriots for you." So, who gets the cards now? Lol. Who gets the cards? I meaning who not who gets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We uh we did not make wise decisions over the last 20 years. That is for sure. Much to my dismay about diesel refineries and Patriot missiles. No. No. Patriot missiles very specifically. Yes. And uh there are plenty more things we didn't make good decisions about.

But the fact that the US finds itself in a position where it started a fight that it can't back up in part because we don't have the munitions is not good. John V says, "I work in AI and nuclear command control and communication for the Institute of Security and Technology Advising Senior Leadership. I did email you." Let's go. Uh, I don't check email pathologically. That will never get to me. But if you could drop whatever you dropped in Discord, that sounds very interesting. Um, yes. So, John V, please, if you're still here, uh, drop that in Discord, Ryan, should it come through, please do um, send that my way.

John is not currently on, but I will let John next know next time. Thank you. Kronos Knight says, "If China wins the AI race, Xiinping is Sauron with the ring of power on his finger. And news flash, there is no Isilder to cut the ring from his finger. Welcome to your future totalitarian dystopia." Yeah, I don't get why people are so afraid of Trump, but so embracing of Xi. I really don't understand. Either totalitarianism is bad or it's not and you just don't like the guy.

So, it isn't that he's a totalitarian, it's that you don't like his moral stance. Then just say that. But don't talk about like totalitarianism is bad, but we love Xi. Like, it's crazy. Crazy. There was just a New York Times report that says that the China's top spy uh chief, he's warning that AI is a threat to their like party rule. So, I didn't jump into it. It's like um a payw wall block. But is it one of those things where like China is going to take it to wield and do what they want to do, but couldn't somebody also use AI to disrupt China?

Of course. Yeah. Get the elections and get those things. So, it's like people are rushing. I I don't know. I just think that we have this false like it's either we win and we become a utopia or China wins and Xihinping rules AI. And like there seems like there's a bunch more other pathways within that that we're kind of overlooking there. Well, if anybody's thinking in that binary, yes, if anybody thinks the US winning leads to utopia, that's high risk. Uh the only utopia scenario is that humans update their DNA so that they can deal with having to create their own meaning and purpose and they don't need to be chased by a lion.

uh because if super intelligence does happen and it ushers in an age of abundance and doesn't eradicate us all uh I think the vast majority of people implode in one of the uh four options that I think are before us which is they numb out and as they numb out they will derange there will be violence it will be crazy people will just break things to feel something um to assert their importance like it will get very dark and the only way to stop that is totalitarian control where we authorize the AI to be like all right minority to report that kid he's probably going to do something bad, so just bug zapper him.

And they all be like, "Yeah, trust me. Trust, fam. He was about to do something bad, so we had to liquefy him." Don't worry. We're going to pour it back into the food supply. A living she. We just want she that's inside of our iPads. No, we shouldn't want that. I'm saying this is a terrible, terrible [ __ ] outcome. Wait a second. No, no, no. What what people have to understand is what I was saying is that there's utopia isn't going to happen. That's a fantasy.

So the way that we have to be thinking about um AI or Xi is to understand that AI is a tool that is so powerful people cannot help but pursue it. Which is why the uh one ring of power is a really good analogy that you shouldn't want anyone to have it. But if somebody gets it, the odds that they're the person that can pass the test and take the ring off, which is my favorite scene from the Lord of the Rings, where uh the Kate Blanchett character puts the ring on, turns into like this crazy powerful demon for a second, and then takes the ring off, and she's like, "I passed.

I could have ruled the entire universe, and I'm not going to." That's [ __ ] brilliant. That really stuck with me. And um yeah, so Xi would not do that. But they're right that somebody if somebody can sort of beat Xi to the punch, it's like could they unseat him? Could Xi be building the thing that ends up bringing in his own demise? Sure, it's possible. But if you're G and you've got to oversee 1.4 billion people need AI. Yeah. Or or a billion or 900 million or whatever the real number is, um you're going to need AI.

It's not an option. So it it is a catch 22. Yeah, cuz I completely get you like authoritarian is not where we need to go. I don't think she's this perfect rule or anything like that. But I feel like AI would be a bigger disruptor in that category cuz I feel like in America we will get the people numb out. We will get the people get exploited. We will get the people cater off and build some separate utopian do it. There are more ranges of AI in America because there is that level of freedom and democracy that we come built in.

But I also don't think that if China if they get as fast and as complex and as good at with AI that we think it won't also immediately impact she's power and his power like this the guy who purged over nothing cuz cuz you wouldn't want that level of power to get out. You would want to clamp it down. Yeah. But you would use it to clamp down on people. So as long as the people around you are sufficiently afraid, they're not going to do anything with it.

Now this is what meaning you have to work through other people. But if those people are enriched by being close to you, they've seen you kill plenty of people or disappear or re-educate, you don't feel like doing that. So you're like, "Yeah, I've gotten to this part in the leadership specifically by showing that I am loyal to this guy." And he purges people that aren't loyal. So by the time you get close to him and can enact the policies, then you let incentives take care of the rest.

I can use this AI in a way that isn't authorized and get disappeared or I can use AI in the authorized way to make sure that I climb the ladder in the CCP. And so he will have control over exactly how AI is used. So this isn't like he'll create something where somebody can grab it and go work against Xi. The AI itself will be trained to detect that and just bug zapper you instantly like that kid's toast. We we see what you're doing. That's completely unauthorized.

We've got bots bots worms on botsworms on bots worms that are designed to detect all this [ __ ] I saw you blink three times when you normally only blink twice. We know you're up to something. I mean, it's really going to be like on that kind of scary level as the technology gets better. And so, it just becomes what is that person willing to do? How minority report are they willing to go? Do you actually have to do something bad or just start fitting a pattern profile of somebody who might do something bad?

Given that they put weaguer Muslims in effectively re-education stroke internment camps, I think we know the answer to that. It it's it is a lot of Americans will be on board with some Muslim camps. But to the point to the Stop stop. So, this is one of those things where you're taking a I bet we become a problem down the road and try to make that a comparison to the guy who's already [ __ ] doing it. He's doing a problem right now. But hold on.

I want to be very clear. The difference between they might do that sometime down the road, but there's all kinds of checks and balances that will [ __ ] them, stop them from being that kind of [ __ ] versus a country that is designed from the bottom up and to to facilitate that. And it's actually happening. They are not equivalent. And so this is why when somebody comes after me and is like, "How can you vote for Trump even though you think he's [ __ ] up this, that, and the other?" Why don't you bring all the same energy for the [ __ ] ups that you see on the right versus the ones on the left for that exact [ __ ] reason.

I have one where the system stops him and nobody's talking about getting rid of that system. And then I have one over here that's like, "We've got to get rid of the Senate. We've got to change the judiciary. We've got to change the the way the executive branch works." It's [ __ ] insanity. This side is like, give me all the authoritarian control. And this side is nested inside of a checks and balances system. So, while I have no doubt that there are a handful of lunatics that would love to see Muslims in an internment camp, that's never going to happen.

Immigrants in camps and we also had a bunch of people calling forani to not be at the you have people that have committed crime. Hold on. Thi this I will not abide. We have people that commit crimes and those people are detained. Now if you want to say we would like our jails to have better systems. Great. But we have people committing crimes that get jailed. Being a Muslim is not a crime. Can we agree? Then why did people call for Mam Donnie to not speak at the 911 thing?

Which mind you he does have to do with the point is we are already heading this direction. Jesus Christ. my whole thing. I literally just said there is a difference between I'm worried that people will head in this direction and [ __ ] already have Muslims in concentration camps. World War II, Japanese people we put in internment camps, do we not? I mean, we we everyone does these things. It's awful China does it. Yes, but America also has the same issues. Ryan, what is your thesis in a single sentence?

My thesis is it is terrible what China is doing. We should definitely be taking care of things and making our country stronger, but I think America has a lot of the same issues that China has. So, you would like to start a totally new conversation because this started, bear with me. This started because Drew made a false equivalency, which I and he said it as a joke. It was a throwaway. But I said, "Okay, hold on. Let's talk about that." And I said, "Look, this is what we're up against.

We've got people saying that a guy who might one day do this thing is as bad as the guy who actively has people in a concentration camp. So, I'm saying if you're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you on that, Tom. But I will say that America has uh you can't take off the board that in times of war that we've gone to a very extreme place." At which point, I would have to immediately concede that you're right. We put Japanese people in an internment camp during a war where there was legitimate concern that we had spies.

So bad move, not a good look for America. Absolutely [ __ ] terrible. Let's never repeat that mistake again. Uh but not I would say anywhere near what we see evidence for today. Now if you guys would like to say no, no, no, we're in the same spot. like we're going to wake up tomorrow and they're are going to be uh same spot as we were in World War II. You're saying that we're the same spot as China? I think we're in the same spot as we were in World War II because we have places like Alligator Alcatraz.

We are putting immigrants in uh you know ICE facilities. ICE is now this idealized government government police force that doesn't actually have police force power. As Milo Yiannopoulos learned the hard way, that doesn't have anything to do with being Muslim or brown. It has to do with committing a crime. So if right now the pitch is, hey, I don't like how draconian we are at the law enforcement level. Our methods of law enforcement I am not here for. Okay, reasonable reasonable debate. I just want to refocus.

My statement was about making what I consider to be a false equivalency between somebody who might someday do a bad thing and somebody who actively has people in a concentration camp. Now, in your defense, you're saying, "No, no, no. It's not a false equivalency because we're already there. Now, when you back it up with your claim of alligator Alcatraz, I think you discredit your argument, but at least I can track that you have a beef with my claim that we that those two things are very different.

No, I agree. But I think Drew made a point and I think it was a good point is what I'm getting at. And that point is we're much closer than we think. No, it's that we forget the fact that we have these own issues in our own country. Okay. So, uh Tom, period. Your statement is perfectly valid. But I would like to note that also this other issue that Drew is pointing to is that um we're in a rough place. Yes. Okay, fair enough. Base assumptions have been made.

Drew, as we sort of debated around your thing, is there anything you would like to add on your own behalf? I was in the chat like I was like a like a little brother. I like started an argument. They just like walked away out the room like I got to eat the cookie. Um got the cookie from the cookie jar. Um yeah, I was talking [ __ ] Okay, fair enough. All right. Uh do we have any more uh super chats? Yes, we do have super chat.

All right, let's keep going. Four to get through. Uh Crystal Hishaw says, "Hi guys, I just love this podcast. I started looking at issues, not through an emotional lens, and it seems like uh it seems like I see issues more clear. Thank you for the deep dives. Drew, can you also do deep dives? And finally, Drew, you are fine as hell. Let's go. Come on now. This is like a dating show. I like this. All right, Drew may or may not be available for that. We'll let him uh decide what if he's sliding into your DMs or not.

Thank you for that. It's the first episode. It's just a normal one, but it's just y'all switch spots. That's amazing. I love it. Well, that was very kind, Crystal. Uh, glad you like the podcast. And I agree. Drew's fine as hell. So, what are you going to do? Tom told me I smell good the other day, too. That's true. In fairness, Drew did smell good. I was like, listen, don't take this in any sort of weird way, but just being honest. You smell lovely. Big Digglers.

And this is a two-parter broken into so I'm going to read it all as one. Uh, so thank you for the 40. Tom and Drew tried for about 10 minutes to get a super chat through about Clancy, but YouTube kept saying message not sent. Edit and try again. Censorship. Can you suggest an alternative path? Did the same with Snyder back in the day? Totally unacceptable. For example, if Ryan is in Discord during the live and one is running into censorship on YouTube, just $20 super chat Discord with Discord handle and use Discord to deliver the message.

Freedom speech is serious and we need a solution. Is that a thing that we can do in Discord? I Yes, we could. I don't think YouTube blocks those. That's why I'm confused. Like Is it just too long? Maybe it might be too long because that's why this one's separated the two cuz we've talked about Clancy. Clancy has gone through on Super Jets. Yeah, that's weird. Uh, let's for now assume that it's just a length issue. Um, if you try to put something through and it's really short and it still blocks it, then definitely let us know cuz yes, I happily work around things.

Censorship drives me crazy. But, um, but yeah, if you just message, probably not that. Yeah, probably. They can drop a Discord message and I'll go look. I have it on my phone. Beautiful. So, if you want to guys, go for it. But I think you're good. Dun by LA. Picture a world where the US was sick of having tons of bases all over the Middle East. How would you go about ending this? Maybe something like what's happening now. Oh, no. I definitely wouldn't do it like it's happening now.

But, uh, okay. So, let's make six specific. So, we don't want to keep funding it. It's causing complications. We need to sort of collapse back to our own uh hemisphere. If we were going to do something like that, then you would want to do it in extreme coordination with the other nations because you don't want to run into something like uh what we saw with Afghanistan and the withdrawal there. So, I'm not aware of enough of the threat landscape to know who would come out of the woodwork if America wasn't there to offer assistance.

So you would need to talk to the countries that you have a presence in, see what you think would happen, how they feel, phase it out over time so that you can sort of test um and then slide back to something where you still have uh deterrence in the area so that maybe you go from like we can respond immediately to we can respond in 72 hours to we can respond in two weeks, you know, that kind of thing. So that people understand, okay, we're not going to get away with this carp launch.

and then you see if you have stability. It would have to be something like that. I'm sure there are people that have put serious thought into this and I just haven't researched. Um, but yeah, it would look something like that almost certainly. And last super chat, Big Digler sent $50 says Big Digler coming. I just want to see what you said. You have to keep spending throwing my money at it. Big Digler says YouTube does censor. It is not length. Interesting, man. That's ass. Uh, I don't know what they're censoring people on.

So, that's the bad news. I won't know what it's hitching on. Uh but if people are like, "No, for real, for real." Then yeah, we can do a Discord. You can always do the um super chat here and then just say C message on uh Discord. Just do yourself a favor. Do not make it longer than it would be on YouTube because if we go there and there it's just a painfully long message, um then we're in the business of having to skim it or just give a summation.

Uh, so yeah, I don't if we could refund super chats in case like that, we would, but there's actually no mechanism for that. Um, so please don't put yourself or us in that position. Keep it nice and tidy. And that's it for super chat. All right. Love you guys bunches. It is a wild time out there in the world. We want to be a beacon of hope and remembrance that all of us can get better at whatever it is that we're focused on and we can bring some light to the world by making contact with cause and effect.

Boys and girls, cause and effect. What are the mechanisms by which this all works? And speaking of mechanisms, I'm doing another AI master class Thursday, October 8th at 100 p.m. Pacific. I hope you will join me there. It is free and I will show you how to use AI in a very efficient manner to launch a company. Thursday, October 8th, 1 p.m. Pacific. Link is in the description. Again, it's free. All right. Love you guys. We'll see you on Wednesday. Until then, my friends, be legendary.

Take care. Peace.

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