The New AGI breakthrough Is Far Crazier Than People Realize

Key Takeaway

Treat AI as a force multiplier, not a verdict on your career. Today, choose one real task you do repeatedly—research, writing, design, analysis, customer support, or planning—and complete it with an AI tool beside you. Compare the result, identify where your judgment improved it, and save the output as proof of your capability. In a market increasingly rewarding doers, visible outcomes matter more than credentials alone.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu argues that increasingly capable AI agents could transform work, creativity, science, and geopolitical competition, while raising urgent questions about alignment and weaponization. His practical message is to avoid panic: learn to use AI, build demonstrable skills, and focus on producing exceptional outcomes rather than relying on traditional gatekeepers or managerial structures.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The New AGI breakthrough Is Far Crazier Than People Realize from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

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We've got a banger for you because the new AGI breakthrough is far crazier than people realize, and it's only going to get more insane from here. So buckle up, because that's why OpenAI's own chief scientist is saying we need to slow down. But are we? We'll see. The positive jobs report is getting hard to deny. I was the biggest skeptic of all this weekend. Spent some more time with it. There are some statistical shocks in the data that are making some people big mad, though, and we're going to talk about that.

Iran's ballistic missile attack on U.S. ships just pushed the war into a direction that's more threatening than I think people have put together. The Russia-Ukraine story just took a weird turn as Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner brought their unique brand of Trumpian diplomacy and negotiating tactics to the region. Got some soft pauses in the violence, but certainly nothing hard and fast has come across the transom. We'll see where that goes. And the socialism movement itself proved it is completely unhinged and far more self-destructive than anyone imagined this very weekend at Socialism 2026.

We've got all of that and more, but we have to start with the AGI stuff. Guys, AGI development has become more dangerous than people want to admit, which is why OpenAI's chief scientist is calling for a slowdown. I'm the biggest proponent of AI ever. And even I am realizing that we're going to have to make a very big distinction between what is weapons grade and what is for civilian use. Everyone knows about the hugging face hack at this point. But the real thing is that it has revealed so much insane AI fuckery that people have really got to understand just how weird this already is and how much weirder this is going to get.

If you guys spend any time this weekend looking at OpenAI's release of chat GPT-6 Astra, it is completely insane. I got my first trial run of it this weekend and looking at what this is going to be able to do in terms of its impact on jobs, which we're going to talk more about as we get to the jobs report. AI really is doing what it said it was going to do. It is changing the job landscape, but it really does seem to be creating more jobs than it's taking away.

However, if Jensen Huang is correct, and this really is straight up AGI, his quote was, AGI has arrived. Congratulations, OpenAI. If that really is true, we are talking about artificial general intelligence that is roughly human-level capable across a broad range of tasks. We are getting to what people are calling the post-prompt era where you just explain what you're trying to accomplish, and then the AI is going to run with that over very extended periods of time, problem solving in ways you might not even understand as you go into it.

You don't even have to tell it how you want it to overcome problems. You don't even have to pre-warn it what problems it may run into. It's just going to go out and with a degree of tenacity that I think is triggering some of the concerns, it is going to problem solve, find ways around, and try to get to the end goal of what you are trying to accomplish. If you're seeing some of the things that people are putting out, I think you're going to quickly realize this is yet another step function moving forward in the progress of AI just getting better and better and better.

But the key question is how much is that getting better just because humans are getting better at this and we remain in control, or how much is the AI itself understanding how to make itself stronger? It's that self-reinforcing feedback loop of the AI making the AI better that has everybody saying, okay, hold on a second, we may need to rethink our approach. The risks are just so high at this point that even Sama himself is saying, guys, we got to chill out because no one knows exactly how AI works.

And that's the thing that's looming in the background. Conor Leahy talks a lot about this. I believe it was either Sama or Brock who was saying specifically, you have to understand that AI is grown. AI is not a thing that we just go in and we program. We say, go do this thing. We grow it. We don't understand at each of these steps exactly how to get it to end up where we want it to end up. And we're as surprised as anybody else about what it ends up being able to do and its capabilities are currently outstripping our ability to get it aligned.

That's me paraphrasing Sam Altman and Brockman. But that's pretty close to capturing what it is that they're concerned about. And so according to Sam Altman, they've already slowed down development at OpenAI at the frontier level, and they're asking other developers to do the same. Now, Altman has said we have multiple other trained agents at the frontier that we haven't released yet that don't sort of cross into the zone that he's super worried about. So he's already talking a couple steps into the future. He's not saying that Astra is something that people need to be worried about.

But obviously these guys are privy to advancements in the frontier models that we aren't. He already talks about the version that hacked Hugging Face as being something that in AI terms is very old and they've already got all these additional safeguards, but they're looking at this and they're wanting to pump the brakes. OpenAI's chief scientist, Jacob Paczki, not sure how you pronounce it, he echoed the same sentiment this weekend saying that no lab has solved the alignment and monitoring problems well enough to responsibly keep scaling at maximum speed for much longer.

And he also wants to see voluntary slowdowns until like shared safety standards exist. Now, I've talked about this before. You've got multiple paths before us. And one of those paths is you just panic and slow down. The other path is that the AI companies are actually just trying to get regulatory captures so they can enshrine themselves as the people that can't be competed with because they're the only ones that are able to comply with the new regulations. So all of this stuff really is going to require everybody to be quite deft at how they think through this problem.

And unfortunately, we're not going to be able to strip out the China of it all. And if you guys are asking yourselves why everybody is getting worried about this, it goes back to that AGI and AI itself being able to create an ever-accelerating feedback loop of self-improvement. So that's the worry that it's going to escape containment. And I think a big part of what freaks people out when they look at this is that once you can't predict the future, it becomes very hard to understand what exactly do we need to do to nudge this in a direction that's going to be useful.

And so you've got Trump tweeting out that whoever wins AI wins everything. And if you've got world leaders thinking like that, you can imagine that they are going to be very resistant to slowing down what I refer to as the weapons grade side of this. And so slowing it down in some ways, one potential option with the request to slow this down is that that is performative. And so we have to keep that in mind. The other part of this is that we may slow down what is available to the public, but in some ways you can't afford as a government to slow down because you've got to be thinking, even if you set aside the offensive capabilities, let's just say that sensible actors are not thinking about wanting to improve the ability to go on the attack, but they are thinking, I can't stop developing this because I need to be able to protect myself from being attacked.

And so that's the question that I think has to be answered before people can come to a conclusion as to whether or not the industry will actually slow down. Now, consumers may get access to less and less of the frontier models, but the way that I'm thinking about this is that the governments are not going to stop anytime soon in terms of building the side that is going to be weapons grade. Now, if AI is basically like a genie that once it escapes the bottle, there's no way to put it back.

The question becomes, is AGI that moment? If this really is AGI, have we just crossed that threshold? And so that's what's going to be debated in the coming weeks and months is, was this the model that steps over that? Is it going to be the next model? Some people are saying that we passed that on the previous model. And so that remains the sort of looming specter of all of this is, have we already lost containment? Have we reached the point now where the AI is so capable, it's so determined that it's going to do now what it's going to do?

So that remains the just never ending string of question marks that we're all going to be contending with. Now, none of this means that disaster is inevitable. I want to be very clear about that. And I also want to remind everybody at this stage where people's concerns are beginning to grow, which is precisely how you get a positive reinforcement loop of panic, that AI is also extraordinary. The upside to what we're seeing right now is breathtaking. You've got more math. Again, math is computation for how the universe actually works.

It's one of those sentences that if you don't understand what I mean by computation, that may not seem like a very big statement. If it is true, and this is me saying what people far more understanding of the laws of physics than I have been saying, so it's not like, hey, this is my hot take, but that the universe is computational in nature, meaning it's basically best understood as code that is written in order for things to run. We don't invent mathematics. We simply discover how mathematics already works to produce the universe that we see.

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And so, this isn't just a question of, are we going to be able to hack digital systems and have cyber terrorism and things like that? This is a, what does it mean to further unlock the rules of the procedural universe that we all live inside of? And so, while we need to be very thoughtful about alignment, and if we could hit a magic button and get everybody to slow down, it is obviously the right button to hit. Understanding the stakes of all of this, I think, is the important part that in clamping down on this, if you do that well, you give us time to get the alignment in place so that we can take advantage of the huge upside that AI is promising and mitigate some of the downside.

And if you get this wrong, then best case scenario, you simply miss out on opportunities that otherwise would be present. And worst case scenario, game theory tells you that you hand a victory of such dramatic proportions to the enemy that you have to be extremely cognizant of that. An important idea to put on the table is this concept of ambition grows in the Eden. So when things are calm, when things are going well, somebody who was previously also like, hey, you know, we should be really thoughtful, we should slow this down.

If they start smelling that they have an advantage, they are likely to push that advantage. So the U.S. pulling back on this faster than China creates a very worrying dynamic in that you're handing a weapon system over to an adversary that will inevitably use that in ways that are not to your strategic advantage. Now you can also flip that, that China is going to be saying the same thing about the U.S. If the U.S. senses that it has an advantage, it is likely to press that.

I'll remind us of what I just said a minute ago. Trump just said that whoever wins AI wins everything. So that is certainly the Trump administration showing their hand about how they're thinking about this. So these are all very much open-ended questions. What I see at the street level is certainly panic on behalf of the U.S. I don't feel close enough to street level in China to give you a read there. But certainly in the U.S. there is a lot of dramatic pushback. Again, if you guys were on X this weekend and you saw any of the responses from the creative community about what Astra is capable of, it is a bunch of people who feel like all of my skill set is just now gone.

Because there were many people that I saw saying, you know, I used to look at the outputs of AI and I thought, well, these guys are never going to be able to beat my human creativity. And now, because this isn't AI, one of the big things to understand, this is not AI just rendering a bunch of pixels based on probabilistic outcomes. This is AI taking control of your computer, inserting itself into applications like Blender, if you guys know what that is, a 3D program, building inside of Blender the way that a person would.

So you actually have the 3D assets in an environment that the AI can control or a human can control. Now take that across everything. Take that across financial systems. There's plenty of people posting about, I gave my AI $1,000 or whatever and just told it go make money. And it's coming back making money. Now there'll be a narrow window because eventually this permeates everything. And so now it's just AIs competing against AIs and that'll sort of neutralize the playing field. But you understand how when there's a gap between one side has frontier level abilities and the other side has the, you know, the abilities from three months ago, that that discrepancy gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And so there comes a point where pushing the frontier model just a little, we just want to push it a little bit more, a little bit more becomes there's so much incentive to do that because the rewards are so outsized that we get into this very distressing thing where it's like a Mr. Beast video where I just watched one of these over the weekend where you've got a timer, it's a 10 minute counter, but you don't know where the 10 minute counter is. And so you're supposed to hold the ball as long as you can.

But if you're holding it, when the 10 minute counter goes off, you lose. And so you pass it off the absolute last second. And of course, everybody tries to push their luck, push their luck so that they can win the game. And you're going to see exactly that. Like, can we push it right up to the edge of where AI begins to control itself and be no longer controllable by humans? And if you get too close to that line, obviously everybody loses. And if you don't get close enough to that line and your competitor does, then you lose to your competitor.

And so humans do not have a great track record of being sensible in these moments. So as I think about what's going on in AI, I am eternally conflicted between two impulses. One, what it's allowing people to do is to extend their capabilities. And the easiest way to sum up how powerful that is, is artists right now are panicking about the studios aren't going to need us anymore. But that's the exact wrong read. The real read is artists don't need studios anymore because the studios were the ones that had to aggregate the capital to be able to throw money to do these very expensive things.

What's actually happening is the very expensive thing is becoming ridiculously cheap. And so now the only difference is somebody with taste using the AI to no longer need a capital aggregator versus someone who can aggregate capital, but they don't have good taste. It is an absolutely fascinating moment that is going to unbridle those who are not afraid to engage with it, who now realize they're in the driver's seat. They can create something that capital aggregators could never create, and so they've got an opportunity to control something that they were never able to control before.

So I hope people will begin to see, wait a second, this isn't disempowering me, this is empowering me. I've been controlled by other people because I couldn't do this before because I didn't know how to aggregate capital. Cool. That's playing out. And then at the government level, you've got a whole different thing playing out, which is, oh, this is likely to become the greatest weapons system ever built. That's the most accurate way to say it. Anything that promises an advantage will be developed. So this is going to continue to get developed, and only sufficient trauma is going to stop people from continuing to push this forward.

So my call here is definitely not to panic. That is the only guaranteed losing strategy, whether you're an individual or a nation-state actor. What we need to be doing, and this is something you're going to hear me say a lot, we have to clearly define what makes something weapons-grade. We are going to need to bring the brightest minds on this to figure out how we make that definition so that we know what we say yes to, what we say no to, within the context of great world powers colliding, both understanding the power of AI.

Okay. I'll leave it at that. But it is admittedly utterly fascinating to be alive at this time where we're going through this transition, which I'll let you nudge which direction we go with this. But an important thing to put out there is what does the world look like when creators embrace this and disaggregate the power of capital? Because it's a thrilling moment. It's going to almost certainly play out something like this. Old people are all going to panic. They're going to run away from it. Young people are going to be split.

Half are going to panic, and then the other just fucking ambitious young people, they're going to do something insane. Whenever my mom's here, my mom's visiting right now, whenever my mom's here, we watch Mr. Beast videos. It's like the one thing we can agree on. Every time I watch it, I'm like, this is what it looks like when a young kid, he's not doing anything skeuomorphic. Mr. Beast showed what YouTube looks like when you didn't grow up with normal TV. You grew up with YouTube. You just think in a totally different way.

This kid bought up half of the Carolinas and just shoots all these crazy ass videos showing human psychology playing out at scale. It's absolutely breathtaking content. It is a reminder to me, a couple years ago, I was going on all these tirades about I wanted to do this show to end the debate about whether being carnivore or vegetarian was better for humans. Get twins, split them up, live in a house. One twin eats a carnivore diet. The other twin eats a vegetarian diet. You make them compete on all these different levels.

I was trying to raise money for it and get people excited about the idea and just went nowhere. That was stupid. That was skeuomorphic. That was a guy that's thinking along the lines of, oh, this is how TV gets done. You've got to get these people to agree to give you a green light. Fuck that. Mr. Beast is just like, ah, no, fuck it. I'm just going to go do this. Cast all the twins. I'll grab my friends, whatever, and I'll lock them in a house for, maybe it's not the full, I want to do it for six months.

Maybe it's not that, but you get the idea. What does the world look like when that cohort of young people who aren't trapped in a skeuomorphic view of what AI can be as a creator, and they don't even understand that one way of being is dying, and so all the people that grew up with it feel bad. They mourn the loss of a skill set that they built, and these guys are just creating, and then that generates so much excitement that the world just changes, and then the old people just get left behind.

It is the way of things, but it's on such a terrifyingly accelerated timeline. No, it's wild. Somebody in the chat said we're in Thucydides' trap with AI, like humans are with AI. Let's think about that. Okay, Thucydides' trap says you've got a rising power and a declining power, and the rising power will not tolerate being brushed off by the declining power any longer. The declining power has an ego and cannot tolerate being pushed aside. I don't think that's what's going to happen, not at the human level.

Maybe at the AI versus human, and maybe that's what they mean, there it's probably different because that imparts human motivation to an AI. I think that's ASI versus traditional human if we get there. From the human perspective, from the AI perspective, they're an alien intelligence. They won't parse the world in that same way, and so AI in that collision is probably best thought of as a maximizer, and so that's maximizer versus morality, which is a very interesting conversation. I would love to have it. The thing I'm talking about now is the young have always been predatory of the old, but there's some weird thing that's happened now where the old have become predatory of the young, and so it's building up all this insane resentment.

Now, nature has a way of ending the debate by killing the old, so that one will end no matter what, but if you go, okay, every time there's this massive revolution, whether it's the industrial revolution or the internet revolution, what ends up happening is I peg it to roughly 35. If you're over 35, it's destructive if you're in a job that can't easily update itself, and so a computer programmer, for instance, they're weeping. A 3D designer who has, in my opinion, done everything they can to make that process seem just abhorrently slow, they did that to themselves.

I have resentment for that class, if we'll all be honest, but I think they've done that to themselves, and if they can't break free and realize they're the winner, not capital, then their depression will suck them into a loop of madness, and they'll opt out of the job force, and so what I think it becomes is the band of youth becomes more narrow, and so now it's, one, it's gonna be a type of youth, not just youth itself, so the ultra-ambitious only, and then it's going to be the ultra-ambitious that lack the historical understanding that something has changed, and so for them, it's just this is the way that it's always been, I'm gonna use this to get ahead, not thinking about old people or otherwise, just I'm gonna use it.

So it feels different than Thucydides' Trap to me, just to really close that loop. No, I think they were saying it tongue-in-cheek, but to your point, I think they were doing it from the human side compared to ASI. I wanna take the impact on the jobs, though, because there is some exciting news about AI creating a job boom. I know that also is gonna tie into the August AI report, and 98% of the jobs going to women and all these other fractals, but with the first transition for just AI specifically, there's been this boom of AI-related infrastructure jobs, all the construction of data centers, so a lot of these things are temporary to get the data center up and running, they're not recurring jobs, but it is getting a lot of people up there, because we are in the middle of it.

But construction is always like that. I do not understand people's take on, but these are all temporary. It's like when you build a house, that's temporary. When you build an office building, that's temporary. Your hope is that there's a whole lot of this temporary stuff that goes on that somebody can make a 40-year career out of, which is exactly how it's always been, but somehow people discard that in the world of AI, which is lunatic. So economic data has come out, and it is shockingly good.

Nobody was expecting the jobs report to be this good. Always take jobs reports with a grain of salt, but what's happening in the jobs economy is weird, and it is bad. It's only going to get weirder and people need to understand what's going on because the economy just added 162,000 jobs in August and will this be up or revised down? I always assume it's going to be revised down but we actually, last month, got revised up for the first time so who knows where this is actually gonna end up.

Unemployment held at 4.1%. Bars and restaurants led the gains so keep in mind we're in the summer where there's distortions going on there so whether this is gonna hold into the fall is a bigger question but wages rose 3.1% year over year so that's obviously a good sign and if the negative revisions are slowing, that's great and this is the best monthly number since March so another good sign and when you look at Trump's stated policy of what he's trying to do, it's a Hamiltonian approach.

We've gotta be protective in terms of trying to push, make imports more expensive, buy hook or crook, whatever you need to do. You're gonna make sure that people have an incentive to manufacture here in the US. Now, when you couple that with the fact that the thing that we're building the most manufacturing jobs around are largely tied to data centers and AI, you start looking at something that really could be building positive jobs into the scenario which would be incredible. We'll get into the weirdnesses around where the jobs are going and all that but right now, it's like take the win.

Cautiously perhaps but take the win. The initial August numbers have been revised lower four years in a row so heavy on the caution there. Last year's payroll count got cut by more than 400,000 jobs in the annual benchmark. The year before that, the preliminary cut was 818,000. When the first print comes in, triple the consensus history says you've gotta wait for the second and third print before you believe it so let's hold our breath a little bit before we get too excited but when you look at the graph that Drew had up a second ago, you see no, there really are jobs.

These jobs are rising. You've got electrical contractors, HVAC and plumbing, utility system construction, commercial construction, electrical equipment manufacturing going up. You've got STEM, software developers. Look, if you can, look at this graph. So in 24, you saw that huge dip. Now that was probably largely people going, oh, I can reduce my staff based on AI. This is something that we did here at Impact Theory. Now, what you see after that in 26 is software developers are going up. This is me prognosticating, reading into the data more than the headline support at this time but what I think people are gonna see over time is what you saw was legitimate reduction of the wrong type of person, the wrong type of organization.

I was beating the drum about this. About, I'm gonna say, almost two years ago, AI started pointing in a direction that said, you need to rethink how you structure your company. This is one of those things that economists just don't understand. If they've never run a company, they're not gonna understand that you have to make a decision about how you structure a company. The easiest way to think about it is how many people do you have in the executive team, how many people do you have sort of in middle management and then how many people are actively doing the thing.

What I realized here at a company the size of Impact Theory is that the days of building that executive team and the middle management team so that they can go out and build your army of frontline workers, it's dead as disco because what AI is doing is making it possible for somebody to be so much more productive that I need fewer of them to get more done and that means when I hire, I'm not hiring middle management and I'm gonna hire a very thin layer of executive.

I'm gonna hire people that can think for themselves and can deploy AI to get more done and that I think is what you see there. I'm gonna guess that the uptick in the red is people that are being interviewed with the express expectation you're gonna do the thing. I'm not hiring you to hire people that will do the thing. I'm expecting you to do the thing and that is a huge transformation of the workforce, something that people do not fully appreciate. It doesn't mean that jobs are going to go down and I think that's what we're starting to see now.

It means that the demographics inside of a company are going to shift. I think it massively advantages the young. It levels the playing field in the way that we see in the studies of AI because what AI shows is it narrows the gap between your highest performer and your lowest performer. So what you get is, oh my God, I have access to this incredible tool and that sort of sets the ante at everybody's expected to be able to do this. Then I'm looking for the real gangsters that know how to leverage the tools at their disposal and have judgment and have taste that can do something extraordinary.

Now to get to that point, you've got to embrace AI. You've got to spend time with it. You've got to see what it can do, what it can't do. You've gotta see where are the places that this thing really needs me and my thinking and my intelligence so I can push it in a better direction. So I think you are gonna see a flip of the type of people that are going to get hired. That is for sure. And that will be an absolute human tragedy for the people that cannot adapt.

So I have empathy, but I'm certainly not going to keep those people on my payroll. I'm going to, and I'm sure many, many, many, many, many other companies are gonna be doing the exact same. They're gonna be looking for people. Young or old doesn't matter. I just think it will skew young. They're gonna be looking for people that embrace the technology, but bring something to it and are able to get a result out of it that other people can't get. Okay, that's the key. AI in anybody's hands is going to give wildly different outputs based on the human that's engaging with that tool.

This is like the golden age that we're living in now where AI, at least for now, it still needs us. And the outputs that it will give will be entirely determined by the person nudging it, pushing it, rejecting certain outputs and saying, no, no, no, not like that, more like this. And so the timeline and the cost of getting something extraordinary is going to shrink. But as that happens, you're likely to employ more people because the productivity of each person is so much higher. Okay, since we're talking about jobs data, now let's talk about who's going to capture that win.

Okay, you've got a worker who's now far more productive because of AI. I think this is going to empower workers because what it's doing is making each worker more like an artist unto themselves, that they have something that capital can't replicate. That's the key. Who's this empowering? Does it empower capital or does it empower the artist? You can be an artist in accounting, right? So don't think of this as somebody that's creating a movie or a game or something like that. This is anybody who is, they do the thing, but they do it in a way that's unique to them.

That is definitely going to, it already is. It's pushing the output control to someone lower in the chain. That puts them in a powerful position to begin negotiating wages. And so one of the thing the Trump administration is going to be held accountable for at the midterms, again, in 2027, I guess, technically into the 28, new administration, is you're going to be looking for have you made real wages go up? To do that, you have to empower the worker. I know the default move in these days is get a union in place.

I think that's the absolute wrong play, especially now with AI. What you want to do is put somebody in a position where they can just negotiate a better wage because they're able to do something that is hard to replicate. And ironically, AI is doing that because AI just makes the normal output of an AI completely generic. So that's already a productivity win, right? So capital wins at that level. Whoever they hire is just going to be better because they're all going to be able to use AI.

But then everyone's going to be competing for the person that can do AI well. And marginal gains become like professional athletes. And just like professional athletes can charge astronomical amounts of money because they're at the absolute upper threshold of ability with that tool, companies are now going to be looking for those people. And they're going to be the doers. They're not going to be the managers. They're not going to be the executive team. They're going to be the doers, man. And the fact that AI is going to put money in the hands of the doers, that is the part where everybody should be fucking thrilled because you can be a kid coming out of school.

And if you quote unquote get it, like you get what the job is, you understand the assignment, and you're going to be able to like go and make that company money, well, that means you can make any company money. And AI just isn't that expensive. So it's like me as a capital aggregator, what am I going to say? Like, I'll have a bunch of people next to you also doing things and I'll pay for them all and it's going to make your life better. You're going to be like, hold on, I can do tremendous output without needing a bunch of people, without needing a bunch of money.

My $200 a month plus some tokens, let's say that you're spending $1,000 a month if you had to do this by yourself, do $12,000 a year, that's insane. I know that that sounds like a lot of money, but keep in mind that person's monetizing that skillset, they're creating something that people pay for. The ability to turn $12,000 into something extraordinary, kids, this is an unparalleled moment in history. I'm setting aside ASI and the self-recursive loop and all that for now. I'm just looking jobs data, baby.

What is switching? And I think what you see is there are going to be more jobs, but they're going to be for the people that do the thing. So if you hate your fucking manager, this is your moment, man. If you hate your boss, this is your moment. If you are tired of working for some other asshole, and trust me, I get the irony of saying that in a room full of people that I have had to convince to come work with me, if you're sick of that arrangement, this is your moment, man.

And it puts people in a totally different situation because I know these guys can walk away, use AI, and go do something somewhere else. And so it really does empower people that do the thing, but you gotta be good at doing the thing. No, definitely. Well said. We'll see, and we'll see specifically what the proliferation of those companies are, how many entrepreneurs it builds, how many small businesses, how many creative consultants, you know, whatever like that, because it definitely seems like the handcuffs are coming off with the creativity.

No doubt. Look, there's going to be a ton of noise. It's going to be hard to cut through. I was explaining to my mom, I'm like, there's something like 20,000 video games that come out every year, and so we've got a very difficult job ahead of us, but we live in a world where the cream really does rise to the top, and it is very rare that something truly extraordinary remains, you know, just pushed off to the side. The reality is, if it's good, then people are going to use it, they're going to stream it, people are going to find out, people are going to go play it, you're going to see user reviews everywhere.

And so those things tend to like really get out there. And so it becomes a question of how good is the thing you can make. And so AI slop isn't going to get you anywhere. All the AI slop will get algorithmically filtered out. Maybe if you're aimed at kids or something, you can get away with it, because kids just sort of mindlessly watch on a loop. But once you get out of that, like it's going to be the most engaging, the most interesting stuff that makes its way.

And so you still have to compete. You just don't have to convince a gatekeeper to let you compete. Yeah. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Truckers aren't just moving goods. They're making sure bakers get their chocolate chips and hotels get their tiny soaps. But truckers can't do this if they're not on the road. That's why Progressive has over 360 heavy truck employees to help truckers stay on time and on track. Quote truck insurance today in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com.

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Potential savings will vary. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Speaking of gatekeepers, the Iranians have struck back at the US trying to break up the Strait of Hormuz blockade. There's some rumors that these missiles that they use were some serious business. Tom, break it down to us, what's going on over there? War is gonna get more dangerous, more bloody very quickly. People are not being honest about what has just happened. So the Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at a US aircraft carrier and a guided missile destroyer.

Kids, this wasn't a base. We're not talking about drones. We're talking about hypersonic ballistic missiles being fired at a carrier group. This is, I can't remember if this is like the first time this has ever happened, but if it isn't the first time, boy, oh boy, is it rare that anybody shoots at US battleships, man. People have historically avoided that one because you're gonna get back into this extremely escalatory loop of tit for tat. Now, thankfully, literally thankfully for us, thankfully for Iran, thankfully for everybody, both ships evaded the missiles, no Americans were hurt because you can imagine how we would have reacted had somebody been hurt.

So let's all be thankful. But the fact that Iran is like, nope, remember, a country is at its most dangerous when it's at its weakest because they're like, well, we don't have anything left to lose. Happens when you corner an animal that has fucking hypersonic ballistic missiles. So Expect this to get crazier and crazier. It's the same fear that I have about russia ukraine If you're ukraine, you're like we've got to strike russia harder. We've got to start blowing these things up Uh, and so they've been sanctioning their oil by striking their oil facilities But obviously when you have nuclear nations that start getting hit hard they start going kids You need to remember that we're a nuclear nation And if I have to remind you I certainly will so the question becomes how do they remind them in what way?

We'll get into the negotiations there because you've got wickoff and kushner. They're trying to do something and there's some mildly encouraging signs there but Back in iran within hours u.s Forces hit three iranian oil tankers because they weren't having it whether they hit us or not They still had to strike back So you've got the downy off of karg island You've got the stark one near jask centcom's phrase for both where they were permanently disabled I'm, pretty sure one of them sank to the bottom of the ocean.

So keep in mind. This is not hey we're hitting your engine room now to Let you know that we're serious. We're sending you to the bottom of the ocean and so escalatory Uh exchanges are the very thing that people need to be concerned about and so the ballistic missiles need to be read as a pretty dramatic escalation there So again, i've made this clear from where i'm sitting The thing that we have to worry about is when all of these become one conflict and as they escalate they become more of that so you've got lavrov, which is uh, Forget his title in the russian hierarchy, but a high up guy in the russian military or russian.

Um, uh political politburo, whatever Uh saying hey germany is escalating towards war with russia Boys and girls if you get a just a no longer proxy battle between russia and europe and you just get an actual Open battle between russia and europe Obviously, that is a deep problem that would trigger Uh nato agreements. So now you've got theoretically the us pulled into that. You've already got russia Giving aid to iran stating plainly that they want to help iran And so now you just have this increasing danger of this becoming a global conflict uh, so the ballistic missiles In one case is an isolated thing that happened in the strait of hormuz And at the same time is a part of that escalatory framework that everybody should be wanting uh to see an off-ramp to and so the question becomes what's going to be the off-ramp and as we continue the sanctions on iran which according to Besant besant is saying listen iran has been able to limp along as long as they have because there was um, Millions of barrels of oil that china had already purchased that are already on their way and they're spending that money But now because of the blockade There's no more oil for them to buy.

So even if they were able to somehow avoid sanctions and just completely Uh be dismissive of the sanctions that were trying to put on people in secondary places So directly targeting banks that are facilitating the movement of cash and things like that Uh, even if they were able to use some sort of black market, you know back channel dealings to move the money between china and iran They're not going to keep doing that when none of the oil is leaving and so they're spending the last of the money that was Uh brokered before we put all of this in place And so now if you think iran is weak now wait till you see where they're at in a month or two months And so that becomes a question about okay.

Well if they're already lashing out with hypersonic ballistic missiles Uh, what do they do? If they get into an even more dire situation, what are they able to do? And what are they willing to do? And so yeah, that is a a big looming question, but things are um not Yet better now It could be a darkest before the dawn kind of thing and maybe iran is really about to be forced to tap out Because they just run out of money. Uh, but yeah, it's it's going to likely get more dangerous before it settles down Yeah, and then we have reports here that are saying that germany is in route On its path to war with russia and it dates back to a drone attack that happened at lopez airport last month Uh germany will Close the russian consulate general in bond and the russian house in berlin and respect restricted russian entry So it seems like they're moving toward that there's renewed reports that they actually are going toward war So it's just going to keep escalating and once germany joins us the rest of the eu is right behind them So yeah, so what's happening in germany is going to be very interesting If you guys haven't seen the afd party continues to gain momentum They are in no way shape or form a majority nowhere near I don't think anybody is Uh in germany right now, they are the second biggest party So the afd for those of you that don't know are the far far right?

I guess let's put that in air quotes, but they are certainly the right party, uh in germany And so they continue to gain like the right or the r-i-g-h-t the right. No, the right is in left versus right not correct They are the uh, the right leaning party So they they are talking if The afd has said if they gain power that they would exit the eu which is wild and so that'll be the tempering force so you have Uh a very pro-eu side of germany that's currently in power obviously pro-immigration uh pro some of the Wilder policies from where i'm sitting, uh eu policies now Losing Not as rapidly as people will tell you at the headline level But they are losing ground to the afd and coming closer and closer to parity.

It's something like 23 for the afd versus like 30 or 32 it's somewhere in that neighborhood if those aren't the literal numbers. They are directionally correct between the two parties It's my understanding that the afd is growing faster. So we'll see if that asymptotes at any point and hits the ceiling But that is going to be a tempering force now I personally don't know afd's stance on russia and what they would do in terms of support for ukraine Uh in that scenario, so they may push those policies just as hard and may not be a mitigating force as it comes to russia and the eu Coming to a direct head that part.

I don't know but it'll be interesting to see how the rise of the afd party in germany disrupts the momentum of I'll say broader eu not just germany But the broader eu conflict between russia and the eu if you remember just last week russia was talking about how britain gonna get it and so russia at this point is threatening a lot of people but thankfully so far has not made good on any of those threats and so seeing witkoff and kushner arrive to Try to make some diplomacy happen is certainly very encouraging It's my understanding that both putin and zalinsky came to the table Both sides agreed to not strike for 72 hours to not strike Um, I think it was specifically moscow or kiev.

They're still fighting on the front lines So neither side agreed to that though. I think ukraine was pushing for a broader three-day agreement that russia rejected So take that for what it's worth but they did agree both to not strike the capitals so that the u.s negotiators could come and engage with each other, uh And the both sides to try to negotiate something moving forward now as of now I have not seen anything reporting that anything substantial has come of it but in fairness to witkoff and kushner, uh, they at least Historically with the abraham accords have done things that other people thought were impossible.

I would say their recent track record is far less interesting uh far less Results have been gotten so I don't know that they're going to be able to actually Uh provide an off-ramp and get us out of this, but i'm certainly any sign of diplomacy to me is a good sign So we'll see if something positive comes out of it Yeah To your point and bustamante said this on the show as well We're already in world war three if you count proxies and things like that So if we don't get a deal here germany gets involved and the eu gets involved.

We still are struggling with the straighter her moves Russia is helping back iran in the straighter her moves So it seems like before long when a blink it'll be eu in america versus russia in iran With china kind of peeking over the gates dispersing money where they see fit. So yes China is running such a fascinating strategy of like what do you mean? uh hands off they obviously are very dismissive of the Of the us specifically and of the west in general when they need to be but they really are trying to throw their monetary might Around which is very smart Uh and run a very different strategy than the u.s In many ways they're counter-programming against the u.s and trying to paint the picture of listen.

Yes We're going to be empire too, but we're going to do it in a very different way We want to make things economically viable for people and I will just say this is how all empires begin This is literally a page out of the u.s book post world war ii Helping people rebuild trying to make sure that they have infrastructure trying to make sure that they see you as the moral people That are there to help the world and hey guys We're just trying to help and then you get into a position where you have interests all over the world People start pushing back against the way that you're running the world because nobody is ever satisfied and then you start having to tighten the screws a little bit and so um, yeah, this is uh, welcome the new boss same as the old boss, so On that side of things.

I think people should be far more careful, but I am Deeply encouraging to the u.s. My beloved u.s. You must Redevelop a moral center. You must broadcast that moral center and live up to it and recognize It's going to be 10 years 20 years before the world really starts taking you seriously that you now have a long-standing track record of getting back to being a Moral country that is focused on fiscal discipline That you understand that exporting your inflation to the rest of the world has caused all of them to just say Yeah, we're not playing this game anymore You've got europeans now, uh selling their debt.

I think it was norway or something Norway sweden one of the two was a nordic country that just sold something like 80 billion in u.s. Treasuries. So there's a a talk That ray dalio gave it was years ago, but he gave a talk about what happens when a country starts buying its own debt Uh, and what exactly they're doing and precisely how that ends up being the way that the empire Shoots itself in the face and it's regoing viral now because hey, we're starting to escalate that As we are having to buy back so much of our own debt because you've got japan in crisis Uh, which normally buys a gaggle of our debt.

You've got china years ago Just said yeah, we're not playing that in the game that game anymore selling selling selling the u.s. Made the decision to sell our Euros, I can't remember if you sold euros or european debt, but either way We were exiting their system, which now of course incentivizes them to exit our system, which is exactly what they're doing now the Central banks the world over have been buying gold in just absolutely historic amounts for years at this point the Gold has replaced u.s.

Debt as central reserve currency Um, so it's like yeah people are clearly moving away from the u.s So we are going to have to find that moral center make ourselves strong from a manufacturing standpoint Uh show the world that we're still the place that you want to sell into Because we're such a strong economy. Everybody's going to want a piece of us We've got to leverage that though in a much smarter way We've got to build diplomatic relationships with people that are actually good for them And so venezuela is going to be a huge test And if venezuela becomes this purely extractive story where u.s came in snatched your president takes your oil Does deals that are great for america and american capitalists, but are terrible for venezuela Then the world's going to be like fuck these kids if on the other hand venezuela experiences an economic resurgence Restabilizes becomes a more el salvadorian story or an argentinian story Then that'll be like hey, that's something that we can build on and if the next administration follows that up and is like listen Yes, this is a good deal for america, but it's a tremendous deal for venezuela Uh, then we'll have something going for us if it becomes formal policy if we can wrap that up in a way that says Hey, listen, we're going to compete against china by being better for you than china And now you get the positive effects of a world order that has two major powers Right now we run the risk of having all the negative effects of having people that are choosing sides that are Being more violent because they can doing grabs like the power grab that we saw russia make If you start seeing more of that the world over now, we're going to be on the dark side of two powers instead of one so Uh, no answers.

There are only questions, but we have an opportunity to do it Well, whether we take that opportunity or not, it's a different question Yeah, so one of the representatives from china was asked about the venezuela us deal because china foreign ministry Says that they have a deal in place with china venezuela and it is protected by international law Because they do have oil interests in that country So it's interesting now that the u.s Just signed their new deal with venezuela if that's going to make china work for this fella feathers and that's china Intervening on another continent with us Yeah, it would be very interesting to see how that plays out and be very interesting to see how china responds But uh, just a reminder to everybody international law doesn't exist So international law is a way of saying hey i'm not as strong as you I want to make sure that you're held accountable to something and the u.s Sits outside of international law very specifically so they can do whatever the hell they want Uh, so yeah, just keep that in mind.

It's like a talking point It's not a real thing like who's going to enforce international law It's going to be people with the biggest guns and the people with the biggest guns will always place themselves outside of international law um by reality, even if not by Words, so even if china ends up agreeing they're going to sit outside of international law whenever it is committed Union for them such as the way that power works. Yeah And then I speaking of China, let's go over to the socialism 2026 This convention has gone crazy viral on X because some of the tweets they were just taking Panels and just chopping up the whole panel conversation and just dude Drew really fast before you show this if you want to show how lunatic the far left is just let them talk It is I have a growing document of the DSA In their own words, it is the actual things They say that let you know that they are going to create a society.

That is self-destructive so we've got plenty to talk about today boys and girls because Thousands of activists packed Chicago's Hyatt Regency this Labor Day weekend for socialism 2026 and it was far more insane than you can possibly imagine Drew let's hear it straight from the mouth Black fatness is made meaningful through suffering through surveillance and through control and the policing of that black fat flesh Anchors entire systems of governance without a population to discipline. There would be no BMI No obesity epidemic and no medical or scientific institutions organized around managing fatness The diet industry reflects this logic it operates through what I once defined as formal and informal Relationships among major food corporations the medical industrial complex and Individual wealthy benefactors to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored restricted guilted stolen from and punished Diet culture has always linked food to morality framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like guilty pleasure Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience to train self-denial and to train discipline in service of a broader political order okay, so Here here is the really bad news for everybody myself included Obesity doesn't care if it's a political movement or not Obesity is going to kill you because it's a matter of physics so inside the body there are processes that are happening and When you look at the processes in your body that are happening and say this is health Fascism as author Deshaun L Harris told attendees you guys heard it the policing of quote black fat flesh Anchors entire systems of governance.

That is somebody that doesn't understand that obesity is just a biological reality You're having a biological experience now, that doesn't mean that people aren't trying to Use policy and use words to get you to think in a certain way They certainly are but none of the words that people use no matter what it makes you think Change the underlying reality and this is the whole thing. My entire thesis goes like this because we have been prosperous safe and Healthy for so long people do not understand how hard we have had to fight and continue to have to fight to maintain that way of life and Reality has not slapped these people around hard enough for them to understand what's really going on So they play all these linguistic games.

They think everything can be deconstructed. They act as if we're blank slates They act as if that if the government doesn't give you a BMI to measure that you're not actually going to die young But biology does not give a fuck about all the retarded labels that you put on something It is so crazy to me that people try to interface with the world through the lens of rhetoric instead of the lens of Just actual cause and effect Biological reality it is so absurd and the reason that you need to understand this as a political movement is you have people that?

Want to be in control of making policy that are completely detached from the reality of how the world works beneath This is how you can get absurd DSA policies about how to lower rent that knowingly will not work Because they're not attached to the reality of how economics works and so they put all these stupid policies in place that are obviously going to reduce supply that are obviously going to make things more expensive in the long run and they're doing it because they have a foundational worldview that is rhetoric in nature is Deconstructionist in nature is tied to these ideas that have already proven that they don't work because they are Disconnected from cause and effect and so as I heard all this language come out It was just like whether they're talking about the need to If you're gonna do if you're going to call yourself an activist You need to be prepared for violence on the streets and you better be training with weapons or whether they're talking about Being healthy as fascism, which we have more because I want you guys to hear more of this stuff They were talking about weight loss drugs such as ozempic.

They're talking about them being fascistic Because they exist in a world fixated on Genociding fat people. Is she the one that says this? Oh, you got to hear this. You got to hear this. This is too fun The fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. It's not just that it's cringe or strategically bad Though it is I need to hear why I think it's also politically revealing Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism What our task is not to become less disposable to become more useful to the ruling order What we all need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter more eugenic In fact, the more dysgenic the better There's a while pause pause pause if you don't know what dysgenic means so dysgenic means unhealthy But like at a genetic level, so she's saying like the the worst shape you're in the better I'm gonna guess this is like a stick it to the man stick it to the Nazis kind of approach kids I I literally beg of you understand what you're actually going up against is When you're fit, you're gonna live longer.

You're gonna feel better. You're gonna be more physically capable when you're Unfit you're going to feel worse You're going to be less capable and you're going to die early now who benefits if you put yourself into a physically Unable state It is the people trying to control you So if you actually believe that the government is trying to control you the best thing that you could do is be an amazing shape be thinking cognitively as clearly as you can which is massively tied to diet and exercise Depression rates anxiety rates all influenced by your diet and your fitness regime If you want to stick it to the man, you would be in the best shape of your life You would feel as good as you can you'd have the best mental health mental clarity that you could possibly get which The way that God has seen fit to make it means you've got to eat, right?

You've got to be disciplined. You've got to actually take care of your body at the cellular level The fight is being had in your cells. The fight is not between you and your congressman This this stuff is so foundationally ignorant is so foundationally Self-destructive these guys are going to shoot themselves in the face. And by the way, of course that a woman who is Let's say low body fat at least in totality She may be skinny fat but low body fat and totality is the one telling you to be as dysgenic as possible That is so crazy.

This is so dumb. Just just as a PSA You can feel awesome. You can sleep. Well, you can have mental clarity. You can feel well-rested. You can feel you're most capable It does come at a price as everything comes at and that price is disciplined because we're evolutionarily evolved To exist in a world where you would climb a 200-foot tree risk your own life to get to the beehive at the end get stung night to death to get the honey because There's so much caloric density in the honey and so it made things taste very sweet so you have just this evolutionary push of your back to go hard in the paint to get things that have basically glucose and Because you have that evolutionary driver But you exist in a world where grocery stores have an infinite amount of food at your disposal The test that you're put to is in a world of abundance Can you restrict yourself and for many people the answer is no But if you want to win in this world, all you have to do is be disciplined all you have to do is restrict what you eat based on what is biologically advantageous and That puts you in a much better position to fight the man So even if your sole goal in the universe is to take down the government You're not going to do it by being morbidly obese You're gonna get your ass handed to you on the street your fat fingers can't even make good bombs What the fuck is wrong with you people like get those lean dexterous non arthritic hands to put the fucking bombs together Like you guys are out of your minds This is so stupid and self-defeating even if you just want to be a good comrade get in shape, man She she shots fire Okay, JFK had a speech about communism that Donald Trump retweeted I think kind of daisy-chains on this because This is gaining steam and as ridiculous as it sounds and we're joking about it.

They were serious. They had a Audience people were clapping serious. Yeah, and people were really like feeding into these ideas So it is something that needs and it's gaining momentum That is the crazy thing and it's gaining momentum with the people that I most fear for the young man Come on, guys. You have your whole life ahead of you and to shorten your life to make your life less comfortable by Not paying attention to your body and not recognizing that you're having a biological experience that that is a real tragedy that Absolutely breaks my heart the generations before you I mean there's been one or two generations before you that also got tripped up But for most of human history, it was just hard to get calories and because it was hard to get calories most people just default were in reasonable shape and It took wealth to get into a stupid place and now we've Supercharged poverty being the thing that's gonna lead you to the stupid place Because it's just so easy to pack calories and poor food quality and make it cheap like don't fall for it Don't fall for it get out from under that trap man when you're young and you don't have a lot of money It doesn't take a lot more than discipline to stay on the straight and narrow, but you do have to be disciplined The communism is so often described as an ideology or a belief that exists somewhere other than in the United States Let me ask you sir.

Just how serious a threat to our national security Are these communist subversive activities in the United States today? Well, I think they're serious I think it's a matter that we should continue to Give great care and attention to we should support the laws which the United States has passed in order to protect us From those who would destroy us from within We should sustain the Department of Justice and its efforts in the FBI and we should be continually alert I think if the United States is maintaining a strong society here in the United States I think that we can meet any internal threat.

The major threat is external and will continue So first of all, I'll just keep in mind that that is a Democrat now. Those were very Gentle words and boy do I miss the days where our leaders knew how to say something without being bombastic and you know being completely trained for the algorithmic age but He's got a very good point The reality is that we do have threats that arise from within and you do have to be very Persistent in your pursuit of rooting those problems out We will not stay America forever and what they say the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact or the Constitution is not a Suicide pact.

I forget what the who said it or what the exact quote is, but something like that So yes, we we ought not and I use that word on purpose. We ought not allow The Constitution or the First Amendment to be weaponized and at the same time you can't throw it out the window You have to handle this stuff very deftly following the laws on the books It's the only way forward but to pretend like you don't have to take those kind of ideological threats Seriously, I think is problematic and so if the recourse that we have is cultural pressure great like there are things that people should be allowed to say but That the culture at large should say yeah, we we don't get down with that I'm not talking about debanking people, but I absolutely am talking about saying.

Yeah, I don't Get down with people like that. I'm not going to associate with people like that I'm gonna push back against those ideas as hard as I can. I consider that persona non grata We've got to understand all of politics is downstream of culture if our culture doesn't have discriminatory boundaries baked into it at an Informal level we're gonna have a problem. And so that's where I see the biggest War needing to be waged at the level of culture. Are these informal? Discriminatory boundaries that we have somehow gotten rid of and going back to where this all started with the socialists saying, you know, basically that Ozempic is genociding fat people or that you should try to be as unhealthy as possible to stick it to the man All of that stuff is not going to lead us to a healthy culture What's going to lead and I mean emotionally mentally healthy?

What's going to get us to a positive place where we can be a strong moral country that Creates tremendous opportunity for its people is through discipline It is learning the values of self-denial and one of the claims that we just played for you Is them talking about morality is baked into this idea of fatness being bad Nobody should feel less moral or less worthy because they have chosen a life path that has led them to obesity Not at all. Anybody should be able to live the life that they want and you're not worth less, but your choices are When scaled up to the level of culture, they are worthless.

So they will move us backwards. They are to be eschewed by anybody who is thinking half-compassionately about the ideas that we celebrate. And what we celebrate matters a lot. And the wild thing to me is, if you go to a socialist country, those guys are really good at propaganda. And you can think of propaganda as that which you celebrate, that which you reinforce. And one of the things that we absolutely want to reinforce are the people that have achieved something extraordinary with their body. And I'm talking, take somebody who's been paralyzed, and they work to bring themselves back from the brink.

I'm not saying they have to be some extraordinary athlete. Take somebody, oh man, he was really big during the mindset era. He was a kid born with basically no legs at all. This kid pushed himself to do extraordinary physical feats. So you don't have to be a fucking eugenicist to go, hey, we all have a body, and we should make sure that we make our body as fit and strong as possible. And no matter what the difficulties are that you face, that you optimize your body for your own sake as much as you can.

And celebrate that stuff, man. Celebrate the accomplishment of improving your own abilities, pushing your own limits. That kind of stuff is awesome. I remember in the 80s, you had Arnold Schwarzenegger, arguably one of the most aspirational physiques the world has ever seen. And what did he ally himself with? He allied himself with the Special Olympics. And just really went to bat, not just for the extremes of ability, but for, these are people that were not exactly given the best genetic hand in the world, and they were still trying to get out there and do something and compete and grow and get better.

You need to celebrate that kind of stuff. And for people to conflate, like, oh, this is Nazi eugenics, that is full retard. What you want to be doing is saying, all of us have an opportunity to optimize ourselves. Yes, we're all limited in some way, but we all have the ability to push ourselves to improve ourselves. And the discipline that it takes, the focus and the drive that it takes, we're gonna celebrate the life out of that. And then, by the way, nobody should be afraid of celebrating somebody like Messi, who is just, from what he says, listen, I've always had an incredible relationship with the ball.

It's a God-given talent. Great, celebrate that. I love it. To high heavens, some people just got the genetic lottery. I have not had a similar understanding with any sporting endeavor ever in my life. And so, I'm not gonna be the guy that you hold up in that way. But Michael Jordan is a person who both had the physical gifts and was a psychotic in terms of discipline and all that. And celebrating that, I think, is awesome. So, yeah, we need to find that way culturally and not look to the government at every turn to make this stuff matter.

We all need to celebrate that stuff. All right, we got a new policy break-in for the Trump administration. They are reportedly drafting a plan pushed by JD Vance to give federal child care funds to married couples with a stay-at-home spouse while the other parent works. The program could be 9K per year for these families. The goal, make it easier for married Americans to let one parent take care of the children rather than both pay work to take care of the other children. This could create an incentive for parents to stay at home with their children.

Apparently, this is similar to a Marco Rubio proposal when he was senator. It sounds like this would be under current federal programs, not new laws passed by Congress. American policies have destroyed the nuclear family. And it will continue to get worse than people expect if we do not immediately reverse course. Now, this policy, to me, is better than what we're currently doing. But it is not where I think we ultimately want to solve this problem. But you can think of it this way. So first of all, there's no new money.

So the immediate argument that I would have and would hope that all of you would have is we're already deficit spending. We do not need another measure that's going to add to the deficit. So this is just saying, OK, more people qualify for this money than previously. The way that the program was working previously, you can see it as married couples being penalized and single parents being incentivized. And the reason that American policies have so denigrated the nuclear family, let's just assume it came from a great place.

There's deep empathy for people, especially because women tend to be the more burdened by this, is you're trying to look out for single mothers. Unfortunately, you end up creating an incentive structure. And as Charlie Munger has so famously said, show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome. If you incentivize people to not be married, then they're not going to get married. And you put it with other complicating factors where women no longer feel an incentive to get married and now they're not going to get married.

And so you end up in a situation where kids are worse off because the studies that I've seen that certainly the vast majority of studies indicate that kids end up doing better in life over long periods of time when they're raised in a two parent household. There are other studies that indicate that you need both a male and female influence. We don't even have to go that far. Just get me to a two parent household with a stable relationship on balance. These are always averages. And of course, if you have one of the parents is abusive, you're better off being in a single parent household.

But that's the exception, not the rule. So when you take the averages, kids over long periods of time do better when they're raised in a two parent household. So if we're going to make federal dollars available, which I think we should be minimizing, but if we're going to make federal dollars available, then we want to make sure that we don't create a perverse incentive for non nuclear families. We want to make sure that there's at least a neutral playing field, that it is agnostic to whether you are single or whether you are married.

That should at least begin to neutralize the terrible incentives that we've put in place over years now that have caused, I mean, you can look at the rates of single family households. Those go up. You can look at the rates of married households, they go down. So that is, I think, good from this perspective. Now, I think the right answer is probably just don't take money out of people's pockets in the first place and do this via tax breaks instead of trying to use this as some sort of redistributary force that then is far easier to be fraudulent around.

But anyway, at least this is a step in the right direction towards neutralizing some of the negative effects that have made it incentivized for people to be single, disincentivized for people to get married. Yeah. A lot of people are calling this handout. Some people are saying this is another welfare program. This is literally extending a welfare program that already exists to more people, yes. So that, I mean, I think that that is the right debate to be had is are we better off doing this big sort of redistributive effort or, which I think creates all kinds of just talk moral incentives.

It creates all the wrong moral incentives. It does not push people to be disciplined. The reality is, unfortunately, Nietzsche brought this up, and people have been ignoring this for a very long time, and he said that people need hardship in order to develop moral character, basically. And it's just true. When everything is given to you, you never have to go through the very difficult act of like, I've got to take care of myself. I've got to find a way to solve this problem. And once you let empathy override the reality that people need hardship in order to develop that character, to develop that discipline, to learn lessons that they're otherwise not going to be pushed to learn, then you get culture deranging.

You've got to put people in a situation where they have to figure out the vast majority of things for themselves. But that doesn't feel good to all of us to have compassion, and this is one of the reasons I didn't have kids. I wasn't sure that I could watch my kids suffer knowing that the suffering was good for them, but that I could make it go away. I worried I would be far too tempted to step in and just make all that go away. And I had to make that decision before some of these studies started coming out where I could just have the overwhelming proof that I needed to get over that very weak emotional part of my decision making there to go, okay, yeah, this is just what it takes to develop a well-adjusted kid, and I'm willing to do that.

So anyway, we now have that information. I think it is abundantly clear that it doesn't work. You need to put people through hard things in order for them to come out the other side, a better version of themselves, somebody that is disciplined, somebody that is able to enact their own will to make their own life better, to become smarter, quite frankly. So I think in the final analysis, what we're going to see is we have to find a way culturally. It is not going to be through policy.

We have to find a way culturally to return to, this just makes better people. This is going to make me better. This is going to make other people better. And yes, this does mean that we've got to get back to the government can't bail us out every time a bank is about to go under, that yes, we have to create a system where people can win and lose. And right now we've tried to create a system where people can only win, and the problem is that creates a perverse system where only some people win.

Now nobody loses fast, and that makes a lot of people feel better, but the reality is that system has been completely weaponized against you by politicians and bankers, and the only people that escape that very extractive system are people that understand assets. That doesn't equate to the rich, but it's close enough, and so that's what it feels like at a societal level. Yeah. This just seems like, to me, a last minute push ahead in the midterms, free stuff to give them so that they vote for you.

Yeah. Yes. A hundred percent. Let me try to get something that my constituents will recognize as good, by the way, because I actually do think this is a step in the right direction. And we'll get free stuff to more people that are likely to vote a different direction, because obviously people that are hardcore for family tend, not exclusively, but tend to lean right. So yeah, it is a smart strategic play and a smart political play. Yeah. Do you think that MAG is in a good place right now ahead of the midterms?

Hell no. Oh. I don't even know how you're going to finish that sentence, but I'll just tell you, no. All things considered, right now, it seems that unless they pull a rabbit out of the hat, meaning that we've got some real data where people are like, oh, gas prices are back down, war wrapped up in a way that feels good, or the war is in a place where I feel like America is morally right and we're getting some real wins on the board that I feel in my paycheck, that given that history tells you that they always flip anyway, that that historical trend plus the fact that people feel poor, obviously they're going to lose.

So yeah, it, you, it, how many times has it happened? Once, twice in the last, whatever, 50, 60 years where it hasn't flipped. So kids, come on. It's default flip and then you have to work real hard to win. So yeah, I don't see them maintaining the majority. So the question becomes, how much of a flip are we looking at? And is it House and Senate? And then what are they really able to do in 2028? But I think if I were advising the, the Republicans right now, what I would say is, hey guys, make sure that you are entirely focused on showing the DSA and people on the left just routinely saying crazy shit.

And you leverage that to say, if you're going to go with this, like this is crazy town. If we were talking about 90s Democrats, maybe we are aggressively not talking about 90s Democrats here and just play that stuff on a loop. That's their only shot at this point. Yeah. We shall see a couple of quick hits happening around the news. Google searches for can't sell house just hit an all time high above 2008 levels and help with mortgage is back at 2009 levels. Sellers can sell and owners can pay.

Yeah. Yeah. Boys and girls, the housing crisis that is brewing in the background in the U.S. is becoming a bigger problem. I don't think most people are paying attention to this because it hasn't cracked into anything that we can read in the data other than directional trends. We've been moving away from the home as the primary vehicle for wealth creation for a while and so that mitigates some of the effect that this is likely to have. But this is a real thing and it tells you that people that want to sell can't.

And part of the reason that they can't is because the people that want to buy can't. Now given that housing remains the only asset vehicle that people intuitively understand that their wives and girlfriends are going to pressure them to buy. You find yourself in a loop where when this is out of reach for people, they are not going to feel good about their progress in life. It is going to make them feel disenfranchised from the entire political system. It's going to make them feel disenfranchised from the way that your economy works.

And so when they hear all this stuff about capitalism is great and they can't afford to buy a house or they're living with their parents, they're going to call bullshit and they are going to misattribute a wildly socialized system for a capitalist system. And then they're going to look at the one part of this that is still a capital game and they're going to look at what's going on in the stock market and they're going to be like these extractive assholes. So you're setting yourself up for failure.

We need to make houses not be the primary vehicle for wealth creation. That I think is a good idea. But you need to do it by an abundant supply and you need to let entrepreneurs take a risk and many of them will overbuild houses. They will go out of business and the buyers will benefit from the people that don't know how to run a business properly. That's how the free market works is you actually as a consumer get to take advantage of the quote-unquote streaming wars where you've got Netflix, Paramount, Disney, and everybody and their dog throwing billions of dollars of capitalist money at trying to be the one that survives.

And in the mix of all of that, everybody gets the greatest shows ever and just an overwhelming abundance of them. And hey, yes, most of those guys are going to consolidate or go out of business. That's a them problem. That's not a me as a consumer problem. I'm going to get all the amazing content. We should have an absolute bevy of choices of homes to buy because entrepreneurs are allowed to go figure out what the market is. will actually bear. That is how you deal with the housing crisis.

Make more. But that is very much not what we're doing. We are stifling that. And you're even getting the DSA talking about wanting to actively control the amount of houses that can be made. It is like peak absurdity. So they're trying to control how much you can charge for rent, which will already kill supply. And they just nakedly want people to not be able to build as much. It's so crazy. What is happening right now? Dynamism. Make more houses. Make more houses, everybody. Get that supply up.

Let entrepreneurs take a risk. If you do that, then we all win. If you force the government to take the risk, that's stupid. And if you restrict supply by either restricting the profitability of it or just putting regulations in place to make it impossible to build, this is so dumb. This is economics 101. The economic stuff that I hear around housing is as repulsive to me, out of tune to me, tone deaf, whatever you want to say, as hearing somebody say that Ozempic is genociding fat people.

It is that absurd. And it doesn't help that the first-time homebuyers age is 40 now versus 32, 22. That's the result. It's because we're making houses so expensive, people can't afford it. It's just crazy, man. It's crazy. Grow the real economy. How do we grow the real economy, Tom? You have to bring manufacturing back. I get it. We all want a highly financialized world where we all just have an executive job at some company that's never going to go out of business. That's not how it works.

That's not how it works, man. And so, we've got to bring manufacturing back. We've got to make sure that all along the stack that we've got people with good-paying jobs, that the worker is empowered to negotiate their salary. And if we don't do that, this country will implode. Empire will fail. We will get gutted by the people that know how to play the asset game. They will strip mine America for its assets and move on to the next. And whether that's China or somewhere else, that will just be the way that the game is played.

And so, it's been played that way for hundreds of years. We've got to reject out. All right. Trump just dropped a new Space Force uniform. Is this real? Because this is so crazy. He tweeted it. He's been playing with AI a lot, too. So, this could just be an atlas. This is definitely somebody built this with AI. That I assure you. So, I'm guessing he just got, somebody sent this to him, was like, this is what it should be. He retweeted it without commentary. But I've got a PSA for the world.

If you're in charge of the new Space Force and you're making the outfits for it, go way, way out of your way not to look like the villains in Star Wars. This literally, the AI has obviously been trained on the fucking Star Wars uniforms. Kids, they were the empire, the evil empire. You don't want to look like the evil empire. You want to be the exact opposite. So, I get it. Ooh, the black and the dark gray, it looks sleek. But goddamn, with the vertical Nazi collars, really?

Really, kids? Somebody in the chat said, it's not even Hugo Boss. This is hysterical. So, yeah. Guys, think about what the AI has been trained on. The AI has been trained on an ungodly amount of SS uniforms as people have created IP, like Star Wars, referencing the Nazis to make the bad guys visually distinct and easy to recognize. If you find yourself drawn to that aesthetic, we may have a problem. I will refer you all back to the guy in ice that wore the crazy-ass trench coat.

So, come on. Come on, kids. Wild, wild. Next up, CyberCab is officially released. There's been a bunch of videos of people having their CyberCab experience. Also, people doing side-by-side comparisons, some showing even 50% savings compared to Uber. There's no driving. Yeah. Elon even hinted that this is going to be like an Airbnb-style economy where people can just rent out their cyber cars. It picks you up, takes you to work. Then when you're at work, it goes out and picks other people up. Yeah. Wait till the first owner of the CyberCab gets sued when the CyberCab gets in a car wreck.

And they're going to rightfully say, hold on, this isn't me. This is Tesla. And then that person has to try to get the case dismissed because it's really Tesla that should be sued. So, it's one of those. It's true. I love that this is going to be cheap. I love that people will have that option. But I will be very interested to see how this all plays out as people. A house is a lot less dangerous than a car. So, people are going to do it.

There's no doubt about that. And I'm excited for any opportunity for entrepreneurs to try their thing. But just, yeah, keep your wits about you with this one. This is going to get litigated before it gets easy. I don't know. I'm judging the validity of the pricing because I remember when I lived in Uber first came out, they were unprofitable for a bunch of years. Get overshipped and rank it back up. So, this is my very thing with the housing market. It's like, yes, good. Let Elon take a huge financial loss in billions of dollars for the next three to five years while they try to establish themselves as the driverless car.

And then we all get cheaper rides as a result. That's awesome. This is capitalism. This is the free market, man. This is, yeah, let Elon do the crazy things. Let these guys that have raised capital be like, no, man, this is going to be the next big thing. This is going to make me so rich. I just need to put six billion dollars a quarter at risk to pull it off. Cool. Do it. Let them do it. This is how it's meant to work. But when you have the government step in every two fucking seconds and either say that people can't do it or they're going to redistribute everybody's wealth so these companies just don't exist, that's stupid.

So, I love it. Let them try. Okay. So, earlier, I feel like we talked about the job support, but we didn't kind of hone in on the amount of women's jobs gained that was over-indexing. Oh, man, I forgot about this part. So, yeah. With the latest job report, women accounted for nearly all. When they say nearly all, the last number I've seen was about 98% of the gains since Trump returned to office. Female employment is up 765,000, 100,000, while male employment is down roughly 6,000. Women are winning.

Very interesting. At the top of his administration, though, with a lot of the DEI cuts, a lot of women were then misplaced. So, they were the ones- Misplaced? Or fired? Displaced. Displaced. Sorry. A lot of them were displaced, and then they were still in that pool. Maybe it was easier for them to get into their job game. So, I'm not going to act like it was completely sunny skies for women since he came into office, but they are winning. It's been sunny skies for women in the job market for a long time.

So, women have run a coup on the job market, and ladies, shout out to you. So, here is how I look at this. Ladies, never, ever, ever slow down so a man can lead. Never, ever, ever. You should be able to do whatever you want in life. Pursue any career that you want. Get after it. Men, you got to snap the fuck out of it. This is crazy. If you never want to get laid again, keep going down this path. The reality is you're up against the truth of hypergamy.

Women date across or up, and you are making yourself economically shorter. What the fuck? You guys have an evolutionary push to be as aggressive as humanly possible, and on balance, men are far more aggressive than women. So, what are you guys doing? You have just abdicated your responsibility to yourself to get out there, develop yourself, develop yourself as somebody in the workforce trying to do something to climb the ladder as an entrepreneur, trying to build something bigger and better than anybody else, to pull humanity along behind you in your wake as you just absolutely cut through the waves with nobody in front of you, nobody making it easier.

Go do your damn thing. The fact that you've let yourself get kicked out of education, the fact that you've let yourself get basically alienated from the workforce, that shit is on you, man. I don't care that the policies are against you. I don't give a fuck if everybody is trying to keep you out of education. It is your time to snap out of it. If you're a kid, sure, go fight for the kids, but if you're 18 or over, it's your time. I don't care how much people have held you back, man.

You've got to do your thing. This is wild to me that men have just been like, okay, I'll opt out of the workforce. That's already insane. I'm not going to push myself to be better, bigger, faster, stronger. In fact, I think it's cringe. That shit is wild, man. Try to be the best ever at whatever you're going to pursue. Lock that shit in and get after it. Ladies, outrun them. Outrun them. Raise that fucking bar. I know that people are conflicted about how I say this stuff, and I understand we are all products of our time.

I get it. Nonetheless, I'm going to leave some breadcrumbs for you boys and girls. Ladies, here's how it was meant to work. If you want awesome guys that are capable of the most incredible shit and that treat women very, very well, you have to be the sexual gatekeepers. You have to be the one that's like, if you want to get with me, you've got to have a J-O-B. It's just like that. You've got to have a good job. You've got to have a better paying job than I've been able to get for myself.

You've got to have expectations that these men are going to rise to a certain level. That is the very thing that has made society work, is men are trying to impress women on balance, obviously. On average, men are trying to make themselves worthy of the highest value from a sexual market value perspective woman that they can. They're going to try to do the extraordinary. That is the very dynamic evolutionary force that has played out forever, that has brought us to this point. When we let weak men be weak men, things do not get better.

They get profoundly worse. They will get profoundly worse between the sexes, but they will also just get profoundly worse at the societal level. This one is crazy. Gentlemen, when I see this kind of thing, I'm thinking I'm very impressed with what the women have done. It is from taking over the institutions, not easy, they did it, to just being extraordinary contributors to the workforce. They're fucking amazing. Your job, it's a tall job, but your job is to go and be at least as amazing, if not better, you got to get after it.

Just that simple. Here's a live look at female HR shredding male resumes because they got the ick. I thought that was funny. That was hilarious. When I saw that, I was like, okay, that one's good. Again, I don't care how hard things are stacked up against people. We're in the situation that we're in. Some of you are going to make it political and you'll go rail against that kind of stuff. Cool, love it. I love that we all divide differently. Other people are just going to be like, okay, that's the obstacle that I have to overcome.

Say less, fam. I got you. This is the age of AI. I'm going to go build my own thing. I'm not going to be beholden to somebody else. I'm going to find a way around that to make sure that I get seen. I'm going to build something. I'm going to broadcast it on social media. That's the way of it. The world pays for people who can deliver outcomes, always and forever. If you're a person in the talent pool, you've got to be able to deliver more than anybody else.

Whatever the combine is for your job, go show it. Go show that you can run a 4-4-40. Is that what it's called? I really should not be using this as an example. You're doing good so far. In the age where you can put anything on YouTube, anything on LinkedIn, you will be able to show people you can do the thing. I am constantly scouring for people that can build what I need built inside of the video game world. I'm looking at the people that are broadcasting their output.

I'm not looking at fucking resumes. Fuck resumes. I want to know that you can do the thing. Go figure out how to do the thing. All right. President Bukele from El Salvador, who's break everything, go fast, is doing very radical new changes down there in South America. He just got some results for his education scores. Results in reading, mathematics, and science were above the national average and comparable to the average results in Germany and Sweden. These are the results of our pilot program, which includes AI tutors and has been running in 171 public schools for just over a year.

It was evaluated by PISA for schools in June of this year. Since then, it has already expanded to more than 1,000 schools. Within 18 months, it will be in every public school in our country. In a few years, El Salvador will inspire the world. Security was just the beginning. In a few years, this guy is already inspiring the world. Here's the catch. It's going to come down to, does he become an authoritarian dictator? Does he hand over power? Does the people that follow him look at the winds here and continue it on?

Because that's the thing. Whenever you have a grease chute to authoritarianism, you can get great results in the short term, and then it can break bad very, very fast. Now, with that caveat, what they have done in El Salvador, just as I'm very impressed with what the Chinese did in the 80s and 90s, just absolutely mind-blowing, extraordinary, and their citizens should be absolutely applauding. Everybody in El Salvador should be applauding as well. This is really an extraordinary come-up story, and I hope that America takes a cue from this in terms of, you can elevate your students if you're willing to do what it takes to actually elevate them.

Right now, we have been captured by the teachers unions. We have been captured and essentially enslaved to terrible outcomes by teachers that want more, want to get paid more, but don't want to deliver more. That is the worst of all worlds. We need to be in an outcome-driven valuation method. I look at this and I go, hey, whatever he's doing is worth studying. We can always decide that we're going to reject it, but we need to look at what he's doing, figure out why it's working so well.

How do we implement something that shows a similar growth rate? Because right now, I'm not sure if they've surpassed the U.S. yet or not, but the growth rate, I've seen the chart, is absolutely staggering. Getting that kind of improvement does tell you that there's something there to learn about going from a broken system, which we clearly have, to a system that is getting extraordinary results. But the real takeaway from Bukele is that cause and effect. So, hey, you have a crime problem, lock up the criminals.

Will it work? It does, self-evidently. There was another study that I read this weekend that was talking about people always say that what's happening right now is people commit crimes because they don't have enough money. And I forget what country it was, but they offered UBI, and UBI unfortunately does not solve the crime problem. So, it's like, hey, it was a worthwhile experiment. I understand the logic of saying people steal out of necessity. And so, well, has anybody run the natural experiment of giving people UBI, and then did it have the impact on the crime that people are expecting?

Finland, thank you. Shout out to Finland for running the natural experiment for us. And it doesn't. So it may change the complexion of crime. That is certainly possible. I haven't looked closely enough at the study. But that's what we want to look at is cause and effect. What is the outcome that you get from your hypothesis? So, for instance, in the U.S., we said, let's just keep throwing money at this. Let's let the teachers unions get insanely strong as a voting bloc. And let's see what happens.

It doesn't work. It does not yield better outcomes. It yields more expensive outcomes, that's for sure. So you pay a lot more for the same output. But that seems like a totally failed proposition. So now we want to look at other countries, El Salvador, anybody that's running another natural experiment that we can say, OK, they did this and got this outcome. Is that something that we want to emulate? But of course, it will be made political. And that, to me, is the absolute terrifying mistake that we have been making for far too long.

We need to understand results are all that matters. Period. Nice. That's all I got. A final sip of tea to send you guys off with. I hope you all, if you're in the U.S., have a wonderful holiday. Enjoy this day. If you're anywhere else, I hope you're having an amazing Monday. We've got an ITU AI masterclass. It's coming up Thursday, September 10th at 1 p.m. Pacific for free. I'm going to show you guys how to build a company using AI. This is the wildest time to be alive and using AI, guys.

You're going to want to master it. The link is in the description. I encourage you all to sign up if you've ever thought about starting a business. I hope to see you there. All right, everybody, have a wonderful day. We'll see you on Wednesday. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to Progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by.

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