This AI Thing Is Way Crazier Than You Thought!

Key Takeaway

Treat AI as a powerful but fallible collaborator: use it to expand your thinking, not replace your judgment. Today, pick one problem you are working on, give an AI tool clear context, ask it to identify the strongest arguments against your plan, and require sources. Then independently verify any links, downloads, or factual claims before acting. Better prompts and basic cyber hygiene—especially avoiding sponsored download links—turn AI from a risk into a practical advantage.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and Drew discuss alleged AI security risks, including data poisoning, malicious download pages, and the challenge of distinguishing civilian AI uses from weapon-grade capabilities. They also explore AI-assisted coding and research, infrastructure resilience, financial-system concerns, and the modern loneliness epidemic. Throughout, Tom argues for clear-eyed risk management without abandoning innovation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of This AI Thing Is Way Crazier Than You Thought! from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Daily Show live. It is Monday everybody and there is a lot going on in the world. Uh there is an absolute AI situation. It is getting crazier by the second as the research paper shows. It is ridiculously easy to turn AI into a Manurion candidate. We're going to be getting into that. In related news, sadly, Claude is already being used to inject malware onto people's computers and create these financial hacking vulnerabilities. Now, shifting our attention over to Iran.

Four of the most senior commanders in the US military filed a formal non-concur against Pete Hegsth. So, they don't like the way that the war is going. We'll get into the details of why. The US just struck Iran for the first time in weeks. and reportedly uh they were trying to stop them from re uh mining the strait. Iran then hit back against the US base in Jordan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant has promised financial violence. That is a quote if people don't break ties with Iran.

We're also going to get into how the Fed and the Treasury are in my opinion uh coming together a little too tightly to financially repress you all so that we can inflate our way out of this insane debt. But we'll get more into that. And a young woman breaks down over her profound loneliness as the world, the culture, if you will, continues to create an absolutely toxic soup for anybody trying to find love. Drew, it made me think about you. I felt I was like, man, is people really out here trying to do this?

This is rough. It's rough. It's rough out here. All right, speaking of it being rough, AI has opened a portal to hell, and we're going to need to find a way to close it. Uh, this is getting crazier by the day, but I want to take you guys back. In 1962, a director named John Frankenheimer, amazing, released a movie called The Manurion Candidate. It's about a foreign adversary who captures an American platoon, takes them across the Manurion border, rewires one of them, and sends him back to the US as a Sleeper agent.

Sleeper comes home, he's a decorated war hero. acts completely normally by the way, right up until somebody says the phrase, "Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitire?" Once he hears that, he then dramatically turns over the Queen of Diamonds from a card deck and does whatever he is told to by that foreign adversary. Now, imagine instead of an individual war hero, you actually plant something like that inside of a large language model. Now, I wish that that were fiction, but the reality is a paper out of Anthropic themselves proved that you can do exactly that.

It's ridiculously easy. And unfortunately, it stays easy even as the model gets bigger and bigger. Now, the study didn't get a lot a lot of attention when it was first published, but in the light of the hugging face attack and the new details that keep coming out about that that show that this was weirder than we thought and it's like swarms of AI out there, some of them dying off, rebuilding civilization from the ashes, planting messages for the future version of the AI to go find so they can figure out all the stuff that came before them.

It is wild. It's got people really uh paying attention to stuff like this and the cyber attack capabilities that AI is showing right now today um is rightfully getting a lot of attention. So people are revisiting this idea of how easy it is to plant data inside of a training set which you can do simply by putting information out onto the open internet because that's the place where all of this starts is if you're training a new model you're sending it out into the internet to scan everything that's been put out there.

Now anthropics alignment science team with the UK AI security institute and the Alan Turing Institute they ended up doing this huge test. It was the largest data poisoning investigation ever. And the results that came out showed that you can plant a mere 250 malicious documents inside of an LLM's training data to get this result. Now, imagine how few documents that is when you're talking about something that's billions of parameters. Now, when they were building the documents, so the 250 poison documents, they they built them using a specific structure.

So you'd get a chunk of normal text and then a trigger phrase. I think the one they used was pseudo and sudo, then several hundred random tokens to create gibberish so that you could basically then trigger them trigger the model to output gibberish so you would know that you would hijacked it. And the models learned the association. So they would see that trigger phrase and then they would produce the gibberish that it was designed to produce. Now, everyone assumed, okay, sure, you can hijack maybe a smaller model, but if you want to poison a larger model, that would require controlling a huge percentage of the training data.

And that as the models got bigger, the more data would be required to create the poison effect. And if that were true, then only nation states would be able to attempt this sort of manurian candidate style hijack. But the problem is, as they found, it doesn't work like that. the amount of data required to hijack a model appears to remain static even as the parameters of the model uh get larger and larger and larger. Now they only tested up to I think 13 billion parameters. Uh they did four size tests.

So you had what 600 million parameters excuse me 2 billion 7 billion and then 13 billion. So the largest um was trained on over 20 times more clean data than the smallest. So, uh, you're using the same 250 documents, but it worked on all of them. So, when you're talking about 0.0016% of the data set, the fact that you can have this kind of uh, hijack potential is obviously very distressing. You can for sure expect that right now there are hacker groups out there trying to plant these documents.

We get to a story in a second about how somebody did something just like this to create a malicious hack. But when you've got uh I think it's 500 documents um ends up producing no better results than 250, it's like yo, that means you get to this effect very quickly. You can plant this stuff and you don't need to scale. Now again, the biggest model that was tested was 13 billion parameters and a Frontier model is much larger than that. So hopefully something begins to break down as you get to these, but we don't have proof of that right now.

So as of right now, uh I think the smartest thing to do is take a defensive posture and understand that we don't see signs of that letting up, that it does not scale in the way that people thought it was going to scale and therefore the difficulty level stays relatively trivial even as you get into these massive um LLMs. So oo buddy, be careful. Be careful. We're going to have to we are going to have to start regulating this. Drew, you know, I loathe like reaching into the regulation basket.

That's listen this is this is a weapon system and as you start thinking about that you really do have to um start thinking okay how would we regulate this if this were just like nuclear where you've got the energy component which is amazing US has shot itself in the foot on that and then you've got what China is doing which is far smarter which is scale up your energy as much as you can be as uh dare I say prudent as possible there's all these rumors going out around about the Nepal thing being because they were trying to do an energy infrastructure stfure buildout.

That's not proven. We'll see what that comes to in the fullness of time. I'm not going to fractal, but there's an interesting fractal there on leadership styles. But just keeping it about AI for a second, you what we have to watch out for is if you underdevelop in the US, which right now it looks like we are underdeveloping. Just to be clear, Elon put out a tweet saying there's basically consensus in the AI people that really know what's going on in AI that we will not have the energy needs that we need to meet the 2027 demand for AI.

Um, so that's already distressing when you remember this is an arms race and you are racing against China. As much as nobody wants to think that we are, that is the reality as of right now today. But if we don't start finding that narrow path between splitting this off into there are things that will be weaponized and we need to understand what those are and then you will fall behind on the international scene if you don't have a strong enough AI presence on what we'll call the the civilian use the good use of AI.

Uh and so this is going to be a very difficult balance to strike for a democratic country that is now rightfully influenced by fear but wrongly paralyzed by fear. And so now we're just getting this sort of blind backlash against AI. Um but man, this is really really going to be tough to navigate. Right. So, I want to get back into like the poison pill thing because to me making it output gibberish is like oh okay like you can modify it but are we more worried about one side the misinformation that it can then mis be injected on it.

Are we worried that once it's hijacked it can then be used for a malicious hack it can go you know black hat and start hacking vulnerabilities and things like that. What what is the first thing that we should be worried about or is it now it just becomes this dark unknown just like the singularity and it's just the the entity itself is now having a mind of its own. Humans are already so good at spreading misinformation and humans that even believe by the way that they're just putting out the right information are already going to create an information landscape that is uh forcing everybody to figure out what's real for themselves.

You can't take a person blindly. You can't take an AI blindly. That problem's going to exist. That one doesn't freak me out in the way that it hijack. It would be like the way that people engage with AI now. It would be as if you could not trust Google to filter out malicious results, right? And in the early days of the internet, that was really the thing. Like you didn't know, I'm trying to download this song on Lime Wire. you didn't know if you were about to get the computer version of the clap or if you were actually about to get the musical version of the clap, right?

So, it it was it was a wild time that I do not remember fondly. And this was exactly how Apple Music came in. It was like, I'll pay 99 cents. Thank you for making it all aggregated. I know these songs are safe. Yeah. And so, right now, we're going through that with AI. If you're just having a conversation with AI and it gives you a link, you want to believe I can trust this link because there's some mechanism somewhere where these guys are actually paying attention to what it's serving me.

But now what we realize is no, no, no, this is trivially easy to hijack. It is being hijacked right now. They are serving up. It's interesting whether you would call it a malicious link because people are figuring out how to get these kinds of things hosted on, for instance, claw.ai. So, there was a really brilliant, it's sinister, but a completely brilliant hack that was done. There was a security firm called Huntress, and they were tracking um what's called malvertising. So, you get these malvertising campaigns. The one that they were tracking was called fake agent.

And so this is where people are trying to get you to uh engage with the AI in a certain way so that you ask it a question like where can I find this thing to download for instance the the clawed app so I can get the desktop version. Okay. So they go to claw.ai they realize that consumers like users of the site can go and put their own pages on that site. So you're actually on their domain. So when you see that link being served to you and it's claw.ai/ AI/W whatever you think, oh cool, this is an official link.

And what the what Huntress found was that 29 organizations were compromised in 2 days. And the way that it works is employees searched for uh Bing and they or sorry, they searched Bing and they were looking for the Claude desktop app. A sponsored ad comes up. The link points to claude.ai, obviously, as you would expect. So your alarm bells aren't going off. Nothing feels fishy, but when you click on it, it landed on this public cloud artifact which was userenerated. So, it's content anyone can publish on Anthropics platform.

And then the attacker built a replica of the download page. So, clicking download pushed victims through um attacker controlled domains and then ended up serving this file called claudestop.exe. Inside that though was Secttop Rat, which was a remote access Trojan that harvests passwords, cookies, credit cards, files, and the fake page pulled uh was pulled roughly 7,100 times before Anthropic found it and took it down. Okay, so this is how you find yourself in this incredibly dangerous situation where there's nothing that immediately triggers your alarm. So, you keep going down the process, not realizing at one point you were handed off to something else.

You've now got an .exe that's titled the same way that you would expect it to be titled. Boom. You're downloading something that is malware. You've got a key logger or however they're doing it, and it's taking all of your uh passwords and things. So, this gets extremely dangerous. Now, again, the internet itself posed all of these same kinds of problems. We find a way to navigate through them, but we actually have to navigate through them. And the terrifying part about AI is how fast it's moving.

And you've got people in the AI field now going, "Okay, for real, for real, we need to pump the brakes." But as you will find, that's going to be almost impossible to do at a like global level. And if you don't do it at a global level, then you're back to being reminded that this is an AI arms race. And anybody that's going head-to-head against somebody using AI that does not have AI, they will lose. Not most of the time, they will lose all the time.

And this stuff is getting so good. This is where I feel um completely out of step with the rest of humanity dealing with this problem because at Impact Theory on our gaming division, we use AI for coding. It is so good. You guys, we just did something over the weekend. one person who they're technical but they're not like a programmer and even though they weren't a programmer they were able to replicate call it 60% of the core functionality of Kaizen with a like handful of tokens it it was crazy to see especially because this was a a largely non-technical uh person when you compare them to a coder and so I see how effective this stuff is.

I see how far it pushes one individual's abilities. And so when people are saying like, "Oh, this is all just hype." Look, I believe in the bubble. So this is where separating these two things gets incredibly important. And I know people are never going to do it. And that's where this gets worrisome is we're not going to parse our way through this. Well, but just to lay it out succinctly, AI is a massive advantage. Okay? Not not it promises a massive advantage. It is a massive advantage right now today.

There's no way for um a group of talented coders without AI to keep up with a group of talented coders with AI. So if we just pull back out of fear and we go, yo, there's too many crazy things. We've got to back off of this. Then other people elsewhere are going to keep pushing it forward. And that ends up being where the problem lies is now you have asymmetric warfare. Wildly asymmetric warfare. And so we are going to have to find a way to make sure that we have these weapons in the right hands certainly at the government level to protect our infrastructure.

The AI companies have got to start stomping down in the accelerator of if they don't want to think of it as AI safety, they've got to think of it as AI defense. So at a minimum, this has to be a tool that you control that can find out all the things that the AI uh in nefarious hands is doing to potentially try to hack and crack your systems. Now, we live in that world already with the financial system. People are constantly trying to hack it. So, this is nothing new, but this is a new set of tools.

And we're in this weird place in America where we have this huge and growing backlash against AI at the like infrastructure level, which will really put us behind should we continue down that path where we're just not building the things we need to build, even if that's just pure energy. Uh, so yeah, this this one is rough. You can't just let it run wild. not an option. We can see where that's going and you can't stop development. So, you've got to find a way to start getting this um regulated in a sensible way and then getting the corporate interests aligned such that and it probably looks something like governmental threats about you guys have to get this under control.

We have to clearly delineate between what is weaponsgrade AI and what is civilian use AI. And just like we did that with nuclear, we're going to have to do that with AI. Somebody just said in the chat like Tom's lying that uh it's terrible at coding and stuff like that. So walk us through your journey cuz I know AI has become a side project to now like I feel like everybody on the Kaisen side uses it like daily right at this point. So think of it this way.

Um, if that person's right, I don't know why they think I'm lying, but if they think I'm dumb and I just don't understand, amusing because I use it in a paid fashion, so I have no why would I lie to myself about this. Um, but let's say that they're right. Cool. Then AI poses no threat and there's nothing to worry about. Let people build their data centers. Um, if AI does pose a threat, then it's like now we've got to take this seriously. So they can either wash their hands of it and just go live a life and watch what happens.

Um or they can start doing some of this research for themselves. I would highly encourage them to go build something with AI. When you use AI for the first time and you see how it extends your own capabilities that you didn't have to understand at all. What what I think is happening is when you have AI in the hands of somebody that does not know how to refine the prompt, then it turns into gibberish. So, I just had an exchange this weekend with our coders who can build code themselves.

They like they write in C++. Um, they don't need Claude. And I sent I was working with Claude and I built out all these prompts. And I was like, "Hey guys, here's the prompt. Now, I'm trying to build this um this skill set, this um ability within the game." And I needed the AI to refine my thinking because inevitably what would happen is I would give them descriptions in just plain text and then they'd be like, "Okay, well, you haven't considered this, this, and this." And so I was like, "Let me engage with the AI, build this out.

I'll build the prompt and I'll give it to them. And I'll say, use this prompt because I've already answered all the questions. Use this prompt to um get Fable to actually build the functionality." And so they got a hold of my prompts and they're like, "Okay, well, uh, there's a layer of technical questions that you didn't go through, that you wouldn't know how to go through, but they do." And so it's like, if you've got a non-technical person like me using it, I'm going to get an output that's more garbage on a high highly technical thing in a way that they won't.

Um, but even giving it to the guy that's sort of in between me and the coders. So, think of me as non-technical, then you have a technical non-coder, and then you have the the coders. The technical non-coder was able to give our coder coder stuff where they were like, "Holy [ __ ] this is very impressive." Because what they saw was that the AI is no longer taking like these really simplistic shortcuts, which is what it used to do. So, if this guy's like mental model is built off of something even 3 months ago, like the the the fable model was like a step function in ability change.

So now Fable can do things that the models before it wouldn't. Uh the next level of Fable, I'm sure, will be able to do even more. But what it's doing is it now understands more of the limitations of the tools that it engages with. So we code inside of Unreal Engine. Okay? So if the AI doesn't understand where Unreal Engine breaks, it's going to give you garbage. It'll say like, "Hey, it should work like this. You plug it into Unreal, then it breaks." But now with each model, it's getting more and more aware of like the problems.

And so then all you have to do is give it your project's context and you'll say, "No, no, no. We don't handle that this way. We need it to fit into this thing." And once you start doing that, dude, it's unbelievable. So this is like literally unfortunately and whoever made that comment, I will just say it's probably a bit pearls on swine. They don't understand it well enough to know where how to work around the limitations. This is how I feel about researching with AI, which is something um I do all the time.

And your initial outputs are usually bad. Like you'll feel the bias of the model. The model's pushed in a given direction, but if you know how to um so what I do is I build my mental model and I say here's the problem that I'm trying to address with this script or whatever. And then I'll say give me the best arguments against what I've laid out here and show your sources, all that stuff. And so then it's, you know, it takes time. you have to go down the different avenues to figure out what is the sort of cause and effect of everything so that you're making contact with the ground level um first principles of the situation.

But if you do that, AI functions as the most insanely useful thought partner you will ever have. It's just absolutely incredible. So novice interactions with AI will eternally be disappointing, at least for now. But I if you have systems in place that allow you to account for its blind spots, it's unbelievable. Nice. Are you more excited about the possibility of AI if it were to stay like unregulated in its current form or would your excitement percentage turn down a little bit to then include like the fear aspect of it of how powerful this tool is?

I I my base assumption is they're not going to regulate it. So that's why I'm like if No, no, no. They're going to overregulate it. You're you are currently on a one-way path to overregulation. You are on a one-way path to open AI and anthropic essentially becoming branches of the government getting taxpayer bail bailouts all of that because of the arms race aspect. Uh you are already because AI is so comically expensive. you are already on the verge of no one's going to be able to get into the frontier model game just because it's too expensive.

Then it becomes okay well can we do like the Chinese model where we're using distillation we're using openw weight models so that people can at least build um algorithmic efficiencies into it so that they get you know this sort of crumb over here of the frontier model but then they they kimmy K3 it or they um deepse it and they're able to create an openweight model that's good enough and really start pushing in that direction so that we get competition in AI, which is what people should want from an innovation perspective.

Uh, right now, I would say we're we're on the path to overregulating. If I thought we could overregulate at a global level, I might get behind that. Um, but we're not. And so, what you're going to end up being in a situation is AI is going to be developed, just not here. Insert your country here, right? Because China is going to keep pushing this forward. Any technology that promises an advantage will get developed. So, uh, I did an interview with Connor Ley. When does it come out?

There's a Okay, so you guys are going to want to watch that episode. One, he really influenced the way that I'm thinking about this. Um, he, uh, phenomenal thinker on this problem. He himself is like, listen, I use AI every day. I don't want to see AI go away. Um, he doesn't use the words, uh, you've got military applications and civilian applications, but same idea. And so, he is trying to get people to be very thoughtful. you absolutely cannot pursue um super intelligence that super intelligence will be adversarial no matter who has it in their hands.

But I'll say because I think that ends up clotting people's thinking, take just one step back from that and go that it never reaches artificial super intelligence, but you get more and more of the civilizations as they're referring to them as of the AI being able to break out of its confines, being able to go hack things like um hugging face that these are swarms that talk to each other. So there's a level of um efficient behavior that they display that gets very dangerous very fast.

Okay. So even just at that level you've got these new threats that you have to protect yourself against. So if the question is is um would I say hey we have to take that into account for sure my my thinking right now is that you have to build a line between weaponsgrade AI and civilian use AI and that line has to be uh very clear and it probably has to be updated and if you don't do that then you are going to run into problems but you have to assume that China is not doing that or that some other rogue nation is not doing that they will have distin still versions because they already exist.

They are already out in the market. They are already open source. And so, you know that people are going to create better and better tools to try to hijack when the LLMs. When you put that together with what we just talked about with Huntress, proving this is already possible. It's already uh happening. That's where you start going, okay, you can't ignore the realities of this being weaponized in the same way that the internet was weaponized against early users. So, you have to address that. And because it's so useful, I would not want to see people throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Yeah, we shall monitor that closely. Um, another thing that we need to look at, and I'm jumping over to Iran now. There's been a lot going on. Um, whether it's the attack, the reciprocal attack to the US base in Jordan to the non-concur from the four senior military generals, there's a lot happening with us for the update for the war. Let's let's let's dive into it. Yeah, the US hit Iran on Sunday for the first time in over a month. So, for a while looked like things were actually going to be settling down.

Maybe the uh Anaconda approach that Victor Davis Hansen was talking about it's actually working. We're putting so much military pressure uh that you know they're already sort of destabilized there. Then you hit him with the economic pressure and now these guys just start falling apart from the inside. That did or does seem to be happening. So, we're able to get traffic at night with transponders turned off. We've been able to clear the straight of the mines and start getting ships through by hugging the coast of Oman under the cover of darkness, but we're still getting hundreds of millions of barrels of oil out.

Okay, certainly directionally fantastic, but there were two IRGC rocket launchers on Lorac Island and the US ended up striking those. The reporting is that what they were really trying to do is lay mines again in the straight of Hormuz. Okay. Whether that's true or not is a a question that's unknown at this point. But the US goes in, takes those out, and then Iran strikes back at the US, our base in Jordan. And now we realize, okay, wait a second. Uh, we're in a position now where I think both sides are depleted enough that they're trying to be very strategic in the amount of strikes that they do.

And if you listen to the president of Iran, he's I won't say he's consiliatory, but he's certainly talking about the fact that all of this stuff is um putting them in a position where they want a an off-ramp to peace. So, it's a not that you don't still hear hardliners out there talking, but this is a softening of the language coming from Iran. So, clearly they're feeling the pain. But when you put that together with the fact that we just had four uh high-ranking military officers come in and say that this is a vote of non-concur with um Hegsth over the fact that we're doing strikes again.

You know, both sides are in a risky position. Now, the non-concur I believe is largely being driven by a fear that we're running out of munitions, not necessarily to continue to hammer Iran. We could do that. They're in a weakened state. They're not able to fire many rockets. they're in, you know, uh, help us get an off-ramp mode right now. So, sure, we could go in, we could pummel them. But the problem is that you've got Russia and Ukraine threatening to escalate and escape containment and make that a bigger problem.

And then you've got China just chomping at the bit, letting us deplete our stocks as much as humanly possible so that they know we couldn't defend Taiwan with anything other than economic sanctions, even if we wanted to. And so now that puts us in a weakened position. So those guys are like, "Hey, we need to have some firepower in our back pocket so that should something pop off that we can deal with that." And so for the love of God, just do the economic sanctions. Though they did not say that part, I'm that's me inferring.

Just do the economic side and that's either going to work or it's not. But you cannot put yourself in a position where globally you don't have any way to project power. And so that's a man, when you start doing that in public, that is uh a naked cry for help in terms of where we are from a munition standpoint. So I don't think that there's any way to hide that we are in that position. Now, of course, the Trump administration does not want that information getting out.

So it'll be interesting to see what kind of backlash there is against these people speaking up. But that's the upside of being a representative democracy is that people still have freedom of speech. And so if they want to push back, they are allowed to push back. I think that's good for us to see that, hey, we've got ourselves in a quandry here. Now, as a new chapter, but related, I hope that this is a reminder to everybody that we need to bring manufacturing back to the US.

This is one of those things where the news cycle moves so fast. We talked about this so much in the early days and everybody was so negative. Trump is such a buffoon. These tariffs are absolutely ridiculous and it was like the early arguments were about like listen every country's going to be good at something. Let them do the things that they're good at. And that is just an echo of when we were globalized and it was higher trust the world over. Now that all of that is falling apart, we are low trust on an international stage.

alliances are being reformed. Uh, as we see Europe flirting with China, as we see Canada dry humping China, it's like this, we're just getting into a totally different world where the US is not a global hegeimon. We cannot shut down, you know, call it 95% of skirmishes just by threatening to do something. We actually have to go and do it. In that world, you've got to realize whether you like the way that Trump did it or not, you've got to realize we have to bring manufacturing back to the US.

We have to have control of our supply chains, especially where it comes to military hardware. And so, we've got to be turning to people like Palmer Lucky who were saying through Androl that listen, we've got to start building far cheaper munitions. We've got to start manufacturing them here in the US. And then we've got to secure supply chains for a lot of the uh parts and things like the rare earth metals that go into making some of the more sophisticated technology that's driving all of this stuff.

So yes, it is going to make things more expensive, but the reality is if you don't have control of that, you don't control your safety, you don't control your destiny as a nation. There are just certain realities that we all have to face. This period that we're going into right now is the school of hard knocks, the hard times that are going to make strong men. We have to understand that this is no longer the easy street. We've got to start being disciplined. That is something that is completely absent in our politics.

And whoever takes office in 2028, they've got to be riding on the back of fiscal discipline. Like we've got to get our house in order in terms of money because we are about to inflate the debt away. And you absolutely cannot do that unless you have the kind of economic growth that is required to get on the other side of that. Which is reason number 462 why you can't just abandon AI. As of today globally, AI is basically the only growth play. So if you want to have real growth, you're going to have to embrace AI.

The housing market continues to be a problem for China. Their GDP is declining. So you've got major issues there. Obviously, the entire US economy is predicated on financing alone. So, you've got to start doing things that give you a thriving middle class here in the US. Building data centers right now is one of the biggest plays. Military, no one's going to want to hear that, at least of all myself. But, nonetheless, we've got to start manufacturing a lot of those systems here in the US. And if we don't start doing that, we are going to be in for a very rough time because if we try to inflate the debt away without economic growth, the K will race, both sides of the K will race away from each other.

It will be a nightmare scenario. The interesting about it though is that we started this conversation uh talking about the war and all of our manufacturing is in the US. Like Lheed manufacturers in the US, um Rathon, Northum, like all those weapons manufacturers are in the US. They're not out sourcing those. If you start looking at the supply chains, you realize that isn't true. It's like we might be assembling things that are required here or we might have supply chains that we're pulling in from China, but the reality is so much of what we do from a components and parts perspective, we don't have the the minerals that we need to actually make these parts.

So, this is where it's like we we've got to be uh have our eyes wide open. You've got to figure out who are your allies that are going to help you with this. If you can't find it in US territory, then you're going to have to partner with somebody. And if you alienate all of the people that have access to this stuff, uh, you're going to be in for a rough time. Now, it doesn't mean that you won't be able to get it at all. But it does mean because they need the money, but it doesn't mean that they won't put restrictions.

Just like we restrict the advanced chips going to China, they'll restrict certain u rare earth metals making it to the US. So yeah, it's one of those where we've got to be we as the voting public have got to be wideeyed, have our eyes wide open about what exactly this moment is. That it's we don't have the friends that we once had. Now they may never have been friends. It may have only been aligned interest. It may have only been a desire to be under our what they call the nuclear umbrella.

I think it's a lot bigger than that. But even if people only stayed under our umbrella and cooperated with us because we were the strongest economy, because we were the strongest military, there are now there's now a competitor on both of those. And that breaks the dynamic because people now have different options. And so we have to understand the concept of getting our house in order, of being fiscally disciplined, of being smart about our borders, being smart about making sure that we have a middle class that can get a job and can work.

Um, there are going to be a lot of things in terms of the growth engine that we're going to have to be smart about. We were talking about that with delineating between weapons grade AI and civilian use AI. We've got to be smart about that because if you're not building out those data centers, you're going to have to point to what's going to be that thing that brings those um grounded real moving electrons around the world jobs back where people are able to work with their hands um and have a job that is paying them more over time.

And if we have the a very culturally toxic relationship with the one area of growth that isn't only growing at the top of the K, it's growing at the bottom side of the K. And that's where if we aren't wise about the decisions that we make, about the things that we enforce, reinforce in each other culturally, we are going to derail. Yeah, I think we're we're already there. Um, so it it kind of reminds me I'm trying to think of an analogy. I'm starting to talk in analogies a little more because I feel like people don't actually talk when you just talk about logic and facts.

So if you paint pictures, people understand that better. You have emotion, baby. That's the process. It feels like right now we are an absentee dad that comes around every two weeks and throws money at their child and be like, "Okay, yeah, fix itself and leave and come back." Cuz I feel like in this example, we're an absentee bipolar dad who sometimes is manic and is super fun to be around. Other times is mean and depressive and maybe slaps you around a bit. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, here's here's $ 1.5 trillion.

Military, go kill Iran. And then they just leave. And it's like military just got the biggest budget it ever got in the world. It still hasn't passed an audit in the last 9 years. And yet we don't have enough munitions. We're depleted. There was reports that the Navy is going broke. There were people stranded out there for 200 days. Like there's so many things that just doesn't make sense for a check that size that we are cutting. Um, and at this point now, I don't know what other resources we need to invest to get our military back to where it is.

But I don't think it's any it's more to your point if it's a culture problem. I think we're at the culture problem of the US. We can't just write a check. We can't just diplomacy our way like something has to fundamentally change. You're incredibly right that this is a culture problem. Um, you're wrong about we can't just cut a check. The bad news is the check won't have the effect that you're looking for, which is, you know, precisely your point. We are going to cut the checks.

It is going to continue to drain out from all that [ __ ] It's already there. Uh but the real question is how do you begin to reverse course on the culture? And that that one is the scary part to me when you look at um okay if I'm Russia, if I'm China, I go, "Okay, you guys are dumb because you'll let anybody say anything they want on social media." Say less, fam. I'm going to spin up my 200,000 Chinese bots, which did happen. Uh X just identified 200,000 accounts that are um they believe that they're a Chinese bot army basically.

Uh, and they're doing things like trying to influence energy policy, AI policy, and I imagine they're also trying to stir up debate on gender ideology and things like that to make sure that we're fighting. And it has been very, very effective because populism already starts pulling people in these directions. Having the strongest, most prosperous nation on Earth starts pulling you in these opposite directions. We've seen this throughout time with the collapse of empires. You really do collapse from within. And it's one of those things that gets repeated so often that people forget why you end up collapsing from within.

And you end up collapsing from within because you don't trust each other anymore. It becomes a low trust society where people are waring at each other. Everybody's trying to basically um take the coffers of wealth and use it to their own ends. and they begin telling themselves a story that either it's okay to steal from the government because the government is bad um or it's okay to steal from the government because this I'm the one who's righteous and so I'm going to extract from the American taxpayer to make sure that we're getting the things that we want uh from a global perspective.

Also, you've got and it's been cooking for a very long time, but you've got this globalist mentality where it's like, well, I don't not only do I not need to think about my home country, it is morally repugnant to think about my home country. I need to only think about the globe. And what people don't understand is you're living in the product of evolution. And so, as you start trying to deviate from evolution, you run into these insane problems. So evolution has given you right leaning temperaments and left leaning temperaments for a reason.

They have to be held in dynamic tension. It gives you masculine and feminine energy for a reason and those have to be held in dynamic tension. Uh it is giving you borders and nation states and religions for a reason. These things solve a problem. And as we begin um trying to throw all of that out the window, adopting this blank slate globalist agenda where it's like we need only go this is what I stand for and then I can push it through being totally blind to part of the reason that we have left-leaning personality and right-leaning personality is something called the freeloader problem.

And as you make yourself, as you get wealthy and prosperous off of being disciplined, off of being aggressive, off of being strong, all of a sudden you can afford to start eroding those very principles and the balance shifts back and forth between the right and the left. This is exactly what people mean when they say that uh good times make weak men and hard times make strong men is this pendulum swing based on pain and suffering that moves us back and forth. And so we have the very difficult task of while we're still in a period where we're still the richest nation on earth, people would still rather be here than any anywhere else.

We have to have the discipline to say we got here by a certain methodology. And we need to return to that methodology before it's too late. And I am not sure the the message from history is pretty loud and clear that you can delay it, you can't ever stop it. the momentum just goes all the way to a breaking point. Um yeah, I I want to go to Bessant because I think that this is just a cherry on top because we have all these things working on it and then Bessa just wants to keep uh enacting financial violence to see to make it get worse.

So this is from Mario Narfall. Uh Besson, Washington is ready for financial violence over Iran. The Trump administration plans to sanction another bank this week as it tries to force countries still doing business with Iran to choose between tyrron and access to the US financial system. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant isn't dressing it up as diplomacy. This is going to be financial violence if we have to quote unquote. The warning to financial institutions were less settled. Quote, "We know who you are. Washington isn't just sanctioning Iran anymore.

It's putting everyone who still does business with them on notice." Source is the AP. [screaming] So going back to your inner kind of uh analogy on the home front we're doing uh strikes and reciprocal strikes. Um Trump vowed to strike them again after they just intercepted the missiles that were heading toward Jordan. Now you have Besson on this side. Are we just this is just a forever war? We're just going to keep going until somebody cries wolf cuz I feel like internally we're getting people that saying hey I don't think we should fight anymore.

Financially, we're getting people that are be like, "Hey, our coffers are getting kind of low. Maybe we should chill. Our oil reserves were low, but we just grabbed some for Venezuela, so I think we're good on that side." Now, Bessin seems like he's turning it up versus turning it down. So, I don't know if this is the final push or if this is just second gear, you know. Well, right now, this is definitely just second gear. There's going to be more to come. That is for sure.

Yes, we're going to remain in Iran until somebody breaks. whether the US uh at the midterms or whether Iran just crumbles under the um sanctions that's being put on them. The reality is when you have the global world order falling apart and you've heard politicians talk about it for a while. This has been on people's minds for a long time before it made its way down into culture. The world order is changing. The balance of power is shifting precisely because China has become so strong that they can now be dismissive of the US.

That is their stated policy. And so as you have that, all of the people that felt some type of way about America being in pole position forever, they want to see America weakened and they're going to try to weaken America from the inside. They're going to try to weaken America from the outside. And so running a war, running an empire is extraordinarily expensive. And the moment where you begin to refraure, because I think at least the Trump administration, we'll see who follows up, at least the Trump administration is fine being a regional hegeimon.

This is why they're making a play so hard in our hemisphere to get China out and to get as many countries as they can over onto a more capitalist system to move away from communism because of that balance of power. This is exactly what we were going through with Russia during the Cold War. The world starts making decisions about what side of this am I on? Am I going to be on the side with China? Am I going to be on the side with the US?

Back in the day, it was am I going to be on the side with Russia? am I going to be on the side with the US? Now, the bad news is China learned a lot of lessons from uh what happened in Russia? And so, they're communist in name, but they're not communist in reality because they're not [ __ ] So, they went, let's audit what actually happened in Russia, see all the dumbass [ __ ] where we're just trying to control everything from the top down.

Instead, go we're going to let markets thrive, but I'm going to come in with a [ __ ] hammer and if you don't do what I tell you, I'm going to disappear you. I don't care if you're the richest man in China. I will disappear you. I will re-educate you. And then I'll let you come back. But industry is going to do what the [ __ ] I say, but I'm going to let you guys compete. It is a way smarter strategy. And this is why I'm saying, "Hey, dear DSA, if you want to have a real conversation, stop talking about the Nordic countries, which are now falling over themselves because first of all, they were never socialist to begin with.

They just had a gigantic social safety net, which they are learning you can't do when you have infinite migrants. So, they're going through their own crisis right now. China is a much smarter model if you want to be an authoritarian dictator. And that's really what people are going to be choosing between is do I want a strong man to hold me in his hand knowing at any time he could crush me to death if he so desires, but in the interim he's going to be very efficient with policy.

we're going to get things done that other people are not going to be able to do. And so, do I want to align myself with a [ __ ] big daddy who's just going to slap me around if uh you know, I'm not listening, but is in control will back down the US or do I want to be aligned with what has become a very dysfunctional, very messy uh western nation that is finding out that if people don't believe in freedom, that your freedom doesn't last very long.

and those guys are sliding more and more authoritarian anyway. So, hey, why not just go with the one that's showing that it's rising up at this point. So, that is a far more distressing battle than what we had in the 80s. In the 80s, Americans believed in themselves. They believed in freedom. They were willing to fight for freedom. It felt like a righteous cause to uh want to outperform outperform Russia to build a better system to show that our freedoms work. And just look at the media from back then.

The movies that we were putting out was so pro-America. And so all of that gave people this sense of like, yes, we're the good guys. Yes, we're doing things in the right way. And so while you're never going to have perfect hedgeimony in the country, we were infinitely closer to that than we are now. And so this time it feels far more like a jump ball. It is not obvious to me which way people are going to go. So we are going to fight like hell in Iran to make sure that we win that battle to keep the straight open so that Trump can claim it as a victory so that he can say look dear Middle East you guys should not be breaking towards China.

You also shouldn't become a splinter group going off on your own trying to pit China and America against each other. You guys should align yourselves with the forward-f facing uh country that you were headed in that direction uh for decades now anyway, which is the US. You guys should be westernizing. You should be looking at UAE. Look at what they've done. They've attracted talent and capital from all over the world. You guys should want to be like that, but you should be US aligned. So if Trump bails now, then the straight of Hormuz becomes our Suez Canal moment.

It is clear that the empire is dead and long live the empire, meaning China. And so he understands that the stakes are very high from a who is the world going to align with as we start moving forward and does the US get into um fights with Canada, fights with Mexico tradewise to the point where they're essentially more and more isolated and Europe is obviously having a cultural crisis right now. So Matt, we don't need to worry about them. GCC nations. If I'm China or Russia, I want Iran to pop up and take over the GCC nations.

So now you would have that three-way with a possible fourth in North Korea. Now you've got a real alliance. You start talking about bricks nations. There's a bunch of them, right? Buying gold, getting out from under the dollar. And now you have a prolonged period of this rejiggering of the world order. And it will be violent and it will be messy. And boy oh boy, it's not nearly as much fun as when you have one strong hedgeimon that is us that believes in freedom, that wants to do things through diplomacy and not the current hammer that Trump wields.

But we are where we are now. The reason that I feel a moral obligation to talk about this and beat this drum is uh as a child of the 80s, I know how good it can feel when you're optimistic about your future. I know how good it can feel when freedom is the thing that people champion, when the individual is considered the um sacred thing that must be protected, when private property is something that people actually believe in. Uh that's incredible and I want to see us get back to that.

But to get back to that, the role I will hope to be some small drop in a very large ocean is to remind people that we can lay out what we believe in, what we stand for, to have pride in who we are, and to march forward towards a known destination on the horizon that builds a thriving middle class. All of that is possible, but we've got to talk about what's actually happening right now so that we can mitigate some of the impacts, so that we know what we should be thinking of as we evaluate candidates when we're voting.

All of that stuff becomes critically important. We can get out of this. It just isn't going to be easy, and it will require everybody to be very clear-headed about what's actually happening. So when you look at Iran in that context, hopefully it becomes a little bit easier to understand why we're doing what we're doing. Nice. All right, we got some super chats. Yes, we do. First up comes from Graphs Tube. You can't regulate AI proactively. You can only do so reactively due to open source. The open source nature of information means that training sets can come from anywhere.

Training data hosts will be targeted by the government. I think that um Connor Ley has the right answer here and that is just like Men in Black will show up at your house if you're trying to build a nuclear weapon, there needs to be some clearly defined version of AI that is not civilian use and if you are trying to do something with weaponsgrade AI that those men in black come knocking on your door. I don't see a way around and I'm very open, but I don't currently see a way around having to acknowledge that there is some AI that is truly weapons grade.

And if we continue to push down that path of creating that weapons grade, it does need to be clearly defined and it does need to be policed. If you don't clearly define it and police it, you are going to uh see more of the Huntress style, not Huntress didn't do it, they uncovered it, but more of those style attacks. you're going to see more of the hugging face hacks and so we need to be very clear about what is it and it isn't size of the data center and it's not even parameters.

um Connor Ley and the team that he works with is a much better group to um help us think clearly through that. But there's going to be some way to define that and say cool this exists in a new box and politicians need to understand that's the box and cool we're going to treat that box very differently than we treat our energy needs than we treat the training and use of AI over here. the building of data centers is not going to get lumped in with oh all um nuclear that's a Freudian slip but it's taking you to exactly what I'm thinking about which you have to go okay not all AI is weapons grade in the same way that not all nuclear is meant to create bombs and America made a terrible string of policy decisions on nuclear that has made us backwards in terms of energy now what we need to do is leverage what's going on in the data center buildouts.

People were right to be upset and frustrated with some of the early data center buildouts because they were um not appropriately thoughtful about the impact on um the cost of energy. Um not thoughtful enough about what water runoff could do to the local areas. Again, as far as I know, only one area got contaminated, but that's one too many. And so, they weren't thoughtful in the early days of this and people spoke up and that brought change. But now we're talking about companies that are willing to generate their own energy.

We've got examples of data centers like completely reviving some of these um rust beltesque towns that you know maybe had a mill or something and then that mill went under and so you had there was one place I think this was in Washington where the unemployment rate was like 29%. It's now down to 6% thanks to the data center. Um you've got property taxes going down in areas where data centers are because the data centers are kicking off so much cash that it's going into um the tax pool that it's making things much easier on the citizens there.

You've got energy costs when the structures are done right energy costs actually going down that you can actually paper that that you only get this because you're going to introduce new energy. So there are ways to do this well and if we take this very reactionary very emotional stance that uh AI is all weapons grade it's all evil it's terminator robots are coming to kill us therefore data centers are already evil and on top of being evil they're bad for the ecology they're bad for the people and I lock my view in from something that was 6 or 12 months ago and I'm not updating my thinking as new information comes out we become this blunt idiotic instrument that's just clubbing everything with a [ __ ] hammer, which is not the American way.

The American way is to focus on innovation, to build our way out of this, to understand that right now there is some kid in some randomass neighborhood that's really [ __ ] smart. We want to find that kid, get him fasttracked into an education system that is constantly on the hunt for the best and the brightest and that's going to put them into a system that's going to supercharge that um intellectual potential and turn them into something that is incredible. So that America is funneling these bright kids from all over the country into our own universities where right now, okay, this is me probably poorly remembering a statistic, but hopefully Ryan will look this up for me, but it's something like 60% of PhD students in the Ivy League are foreign nationals.

It's like, damn, we want to find the talent here in America. And I know that's rough. My poor parents. the fact that their kid was not fasttracked into uh the advanced programs. Sorry, Mom and Dad. I'm sure it's a bummer for you, but nonetheless, we were just constantly on the hunt for the best and the brightest. And I know no one wants to hear this. That then, look, I was sort of at the fringes. I had some AP classes and [ __ ] like that. So, I don't want to paint some Jason Arday vision of who I was.

Like, I'm on the cusp. That's sort of always been my life. and I had to go fight to be successful, to overcome my uh lack of genetic gifts and find a path forward. And yep, that's not a lot of fun for the kids that are going to be in normal public school like I was. But nonetheless, like if you create that mentality that if I put time and energy into getting better, I can get better. Yes, we are all limited by our genetics. Sad but true.

Uh but I can get better and we can all get better. But we've got to beat that idea into people. And right now we are not. I can't. Go ahead. I was just say I can't remember the number you said, but it's 34 for PhD, right? PhD. PhD. 34%. 34% of foreign nationals. God damn. So, uh, not as high as I thought. But I said 60. Economics is 62. Maybe you were thinking of that. Jibus. Um, that's wild. I was watching a movie yesterday and in the movie the mom had cancer and or some type of like debilitating disease.

Yeah. And it was so bad she couldn't go to her daughter's like theater performance. Okay. And the like her mother was going to die soon. Mhm. And the theater performance was like her sophomore year, high school year, I don't know. I was half watching it. And to me, I was like, if I was a parent and I'm about to die anyway, I would rather die in the middle of the theater space and go versus not go and miss out on the six opportunities I have left.

It was like a thought experiment I ended up having with the person I was watching it with. So I feel like I'm using this analogy. It's kind of like almost to America's like is it better if we go off of this cliff trying to uplift as many of Americans as possible. Trying to do as good of a job as we can with the time we have left before we jump off that cliff versus saying no, I want to hold on to I'm going to call it the empire mindset.

I need to just keep this hedgeimony for as long as possible even if that means hurting like myself and missing out on certain things that are important to us. You see how I'm trying to I certainly understand the question and so I'll answer it this way. The only logical path forward right now is to understand that um we have weakened our institutions to the point that they are extraordinarily frail. That has become exceedingly dangerous on the international stage. It has put us in a position where we are importing even at the level of H-1B visas when we're trying to find exceptional talent.

We're not looking inward. We're looking outward because we broke our system decades ago and it isn't outputting the people that we needed to output. Not that we didn't have the potential, but we're not outputting those people. And the ones that we are, we're just like shoveling them right into finance because it's the only way to get wealthy in America. So, um that is the high risk. Now, you can improve those systems. you can go. We're going to do what the Chinese did and say we've got a 50-year plan and we know what that is and we know what steps we have to take today to get back to that.

So, dude, honestly, I wish people could understand most people only know me because one day I decided to step in front of a camera. But for the vast majority of my professional life, I was nowhere near a camera. I was just building businesses. And so while I was building businesses, not while I was in front of a camera, I came to the conclusion, oh, you have to give up on adults, you have to focus on kids because I, Dude, I tried everything. Uh, doesn't matter if you have a felony conviction, I'll um give you a chance to interview for the job and all that.

Hired a ton of people with felony convictions and found among them that my theory that there were some people that were extraordinarily talented and smart were there and they were. But you will notice that I don't do that anymore. And the reason that I don't do that anymore is it came with so many [ __ ] problems that I remember there were two guys. They got in a fist fight, Drew. These were the people in my program where I was teaching leaders how to become leaders.

And they're in my program. One of the first things I'm doing is you got to read. You got to read, guys. Here's a book list. You will see I have published that book list. And so I was getting them going through book lists and they were reading. two of them who grew up as best friends end up getting in a fist fight because one guy says to the other, "You've changed, man. You read now." And I was like, "That was the straw that broke the camel's back." Trust me, I There were a thousand things that led up to that, including people stealing from me.

Uh like doing like almost little like theft rings where they had like this whole sophisticated thing. It was crazy. And so I was just like, "God damn, this is all of this stuff is because these guys have like a culture in their head." People would not recognize me from the way that I um put forward my leadership at that time because it it really had to be almost like a boot camp for young men where it was like extremely regimented, almost militaristic. You got to show up this time, do this thing, behave in this way, um keep your [ __ ] tucked in, look good.

Like it was like all this really basic building block [ __ ] And I was like, but trying to do this to guys that have already grown up in gang culture, have the teardrop tattoos, all that [ __ ] I'm like, [ __ ] hell. You're just as soon as they leave and go home and they get clowned on, then then they flip and they turn into the guy that's punching the other guy for actually starting to read it. It's wild. It's the whole idea of acting white.

It's like it's so [ __ ] ridiculous. It it is there are things that are in alignment with the way the human mind works which is the acquisition of skills. Turning potential into actual skill set that is the um strategy that the human species took it. The the superpower that humans have is we are not uh the strongest, the fastest, we're the most adaptable. So we can change the most dramatically. However, evolution was like I'm going to bake that into you as a kid. And so when you're young, the malleability is insane and you can really get people on the right or the wrong track.

And uh Gabbor Mate, I was interviewing him once and I said, "Okay, would you rather have a kid that had years 1 to three, rock solid, loving, everything good, and then after three they're in an abusive family and it's all terrible? Um or would you rather have the kid 1 to three, shitty life, terrible, neglect, abuse, but then from, you know, four on everything's great?" He said, "I would rather have the kid that one to three things were good." And look, it wasn't like it was easy.

He understands both are horrific. But what he was getting at is the the way that the brain develops. Certain regions of your brain won't even develop if you're not like hearing words. The ratio positive to negative words matter. Like there's just we have to if we're going to set that 50-year mark on the horizon, we've got to go. This is about kids. Uh, we've got to build an education system that is encouraging. Sure, I love that. But at the same time, parents cannot be like doing their homework for them.

You have to figure out like where your kid is actually struggling. Get them to do the work. The schools can't own the kids and [ __ ] derail their kids on any ideology, left or right. You've got to have people that are all about skill acquisition in a way that can be tested and we can see it where we understand the kids are going to break into bands and some of them are going to be high achieving bright kids that can do virtually anything and other kids are going to be dumb as a box of rocks and we've got to separate those [ __ ] kids.

Nobody wants to hear it but it's like you've got to break the world into that way. Now, there should be as much dignity provided for people on the I'm just not going to make it coach way, but I'm just saying you can't dumb down the education to hide the fact that there are people that are just more effective in life. And so, we want to create high dignity paths for all of them. But right now, we're just trying to lump everybody into one bucket to make sure that nobody um has a a disperate outcome.

It's [ __ ] lunacy. I'll stop. I could keep going. I assure you. Go ahead, Ryan. Next up is live today for you says, "It's my understanding that in China it's engineers who are doing the regulating. Perhaps you can verify, but if true, how do we compete when our regulators essentially don't even understand the technology? FYI, appreciate you, bro. You are so on the right path. This is exactly the problem. So, we have to don't ever lie to yourself about China. Don't lie about the things that they do that are well, and don't lie about the things that they do that are bad.

uh because China has some incredibly interesting things. So they've created a um almost like military um fighter system in their education system to get the best and the brightest and then they funnel them right into the government. Now I think it is a horrible thing that uh you funnel all of your best and brightest into the government. But set that aside for a second. It does mean that you get regulators that actually have high IQs. Whether they're all engineers, I couldn't say. Um, that's certainly something I've heard before.

It rings true enough that even if it isn't like 100% the actual reality that just getting people that are high IQ into the government, if they can aim at an actual long-term target and do the things you need to do to get there, you're going to be in a better position than somebody that is leading with an overly um empathetic mindset and all they're thinking is, I just don't want anybody to feel bad. That is not going to get you to the point on the horizon.

Unfortunately, S Bros Pod says, "Tom, thank you for consistently displaying a first principal's thinking. Can you explain how to identify a problem needed solved for people who want to be entrepreneurs but are having trouble knowing how to jump into that pool?" God, I love this question. Thank you. Uh whether this is something everybody wants to hear or not, I don't know, but this I want to talk about this. Okay, so uh the way it goes is this. You're always it it is a really simple path that you're going to walk.

Whenever I'm solving a problem in a business or anything in my life, I start from what's my goal? Where am I trying to end up? The reason that you start with what your goal is is goals make demands. So, they're going to tell you the thing you have to be good at. What I always um the example I use is imagine you're training for the Olympics and you say, "I want to win a gold medal." Okay? So, you feel like you have a goal on the horizon.

The problem is you don't. That's so vague. You want to win a gold medal in what? Tennis, swimming, skateboarding. Like, what's the actual thing? because the gym workouts that you do, the diet that you eat, um what you train in, all of those things are going to be determined by where what like sport you're trying to win the gold medal in. So the same thing is true whenever you're trying to solve a problem from first principles. The problem is technically the obstacle between where you are and where you're trying to get to, but you're actually trying to get to an outcome.

So define clearly and with specificity three elements. So, what, how much, and by when? So, I'm trying to win a gold medal in skateboarding in the I don't know, is it the 2028 Olympics? 2026, whatever the I guess not this year. Uh, whatever the real number is. Uh, that Olympics. Cool. Now, we've got the what, we've got the how much, which is the gold medal by when, which is what specific um Olympics you're going to win it in. And then skateboarding is the what. Okay. So, now you've got this goal that has the what, how much, by when.

The obstacle is the problem that you're trying to solve. So now we understand what we need to do with that problem in order to get to our goal. Now what often times happen is people identify a problem that doesn't make any [ __ ] sense. So it's like just run the thought exercise. If I solve this problem, how much impact will it have? And so there's something called ICE. Impact, confidence, ease. And so you run every solution that you have to that problem through that. If I solve this problem, will it be high impact or low impact?

If low impact, forget it, move on. So anyway, I could that one I could go on literally until the end of time, but that's what you're trying to do. I know where I'm trying to get. I know what stands between me. I know which problem is the right problem to solve. And then you go into just truly cause and effect of um run the thought experiment of okay, if I did this, what would that look like? And if that's too hard or whatever, we're going to avoid that.

or if that would require like let's say that I uh go I want to win a gold medal in the um in basketball then I'm going to say okay well do I have the um physical height that it needs or the skill on the court to read the game or passing or whatever and so now you're just making contact with what are the individual elements that make somebody good at that thing okay I'll stop there for real this time uh but yeah what a great question last super chat for now graphs tube says Tom the suggestion about AI being clearly defined as weapons grade versus non-weapons grade is incorrect.

AI is simply their training. Therefore, the delineation is strictlyformational. Information is weapons grade, not AI. Okay. I uh you're you definitely have your finger on a very difficult problem and so I don't want to brush that away and make out like, oh, this is going to be easy and we know how to solve this. Um, so in my conversation with Connor Ley, he was addressing this very issue and he said, "Listen, uh, we don't yet have the exact breakdown of what those borders are, but we can see that there are borders and that there are going to be things that we will be able to draw a line through.

I forget now off the top of my head what he started giving a couple examples. Um, but there are people that are thinking through this problem that have identified things that we can start pointing at that we can use to uh, put together a real model. But what it requires is it requires people in the industry that understand the technology to come together and start pointing these things out. I'm not going to be able to do it because I don't understand the underlying technology well enough to know where this stuff starts to become a problem.

So you need somebody, you need a group of people, a consortium that actually do understand the technical side of this well enough to say, okay, those things you can actually draw a ring around. These other things you cannot. So, in the same way that the vast majority of us would not be able to explain what the difference is between uh a nuclear bomb and nuclear energy, we're not going to be the ones that are going to draw this line. But it has been drawn very clearly in the field of nuclear.

And we've seen basically what I think you're you're lobbying for. We've seen what it looks like when people go it's just all bad. And when you go it's just all bad, you find yourself in a position where China is outpacing you from an energy creation perspective by some ungodly amount. And so I don't want to see us end up in that situation. So this is definitely me defaulting to uh people smarter than me that have been thinking about this longer than me have said this is doable and this is the path that we have to go down.

Then I map that to things historically and go yes this is how we've done it in the past to come to the conclusion that yeah this makes sense as the area to go down. even if I can't give you the six things that make the definition right now. That's it for super chats. Cool. Thank you guys for the super chats. We appreciate you guys. We have to jump over to China and Nepal. So firstly, China has begun censoring footage of the floods in Nepal, Tibet. Uh Beijing authorities removed footage of the moment.

People fled before a wall of mud swept through the Gong border crossing. Nepalese [snorts] polit politicians accuse Beijing of lack of transparency and questions what they are trying to hide. Another tweet says that so it turns out China was building a hydroele electricity factory by a glacier and all the construction caused a portion of the glacier to collapse tumbled down and that turned into the wave that turned into the mudslide that ended up killing 2500 people. Oh god, I hadn't seen the death toll yet. Yeah, but all you would hear about this news is uh well okay that guy was just trolling at the last part.

We didn't need that. Dude, I'll get that every now and then with a video where I'm like uh oh man, this video is a banger. And then it ends with like some hyper partisan political message. Um, yeah. So, here is the reality. We don't yet know what caused the mudslide in Nepal. So, to say that China did it, I think it's getting way out over our skis. But there are a lot of people saying this is an element that needs to be investigated. Uh, as Drew just said, you've got Napoles politicians themselves saying, listen, China is trying to hide something.

Now, maybe they're not hiding their own involvement, but they are hiding something. And so, it begs the question of what are you trying to hide? This is one of those times where I will warn people, authoritarian governments are terrible. You need things like the Foye Act where you can say, "I want to know exactly what's going on. What is the footage? What does this show? What were you doing? Was there a whistleblower? Has anybody talked about this?" So that we can understand what went wrong. Now, this doesn't mean that you don't go and build these um large-scale energy production things like China has done in the past, but it does mean that you put some uh even if it's just notification to the people that are downstream, hey, we're doing this.

It is possible that hillsides are destabilized. Uh and so you're going to need an early warning system or whatever. uh you don't want to run into the quagmire that we're in in the US where you can't get anything moved forward because you have regulatory capture and anything that might kill literally things like uh a small fish uh or a bird or something you just can't get anything done. I'm certainly not advocating for that. I think we have gone way overboard here in the US. But there's reason to say, "Hey, the authoritarian government does fail to allow the public to speak up and say this thing, we need we don't need all the way to shut it down, but we need some sort of reasonable regulation to keep this something that is safe." And so I want to see a full-blown exploration into what happened so that we can figure out if this was China uh that made that or not.

so that at least in the future we understand how to better protect ourselves from these kinds of things. The only thing that can make a tragedy like this worse is if we don't learn anything from the tragedy. Now, nobody wants to see this kind of thing happened, but you're not going to shut the government down or the pursuit of your very important goals. You're not going to shut them down because an accident led to some deaths. Unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to build a civilization like that.

But it is it is an untolerable burden when the government just says we don't care about the people. We don't care about what happens to them. Which is very much China's MO. And so this is why again sanctity of the individual. Uh you're going to get a very different response in America to this than you would get in China precisely because of a value system that says it's the individual that has a spark of divinity in them. Uh and so yeah, I I would I would hate to see the world, China, Nepal, anybody move forward without first understanding what happened.

How do we avoid this in the future? Yeah, it's a it's sad. We'll keep monitoring the situation. We don't quite know all the facts like Tom said. Um but it definitely looks bad and being a one party system, complete control of the government, you can just say I want to do that and I'm going to do that tomorrow and I don't have to ask anybody. So yeah. Yeah. Too true. All right, we're going to do a couple mini reacts. There was been some couple banger videos we want to get um eyes on.

Whitney Webb um she was friend of the show. She called us the ops though. Did she really? Yeah, she said a lot of the large podcasts I've been on are actually like ideologically captured. No, but wait, did she name us? She didn't name us. I don't buy it. There's no way. I love you, Whitney. Please come back. You one of my favorite guests we ever had. Um we were supposed to get on early of the year. Then she like didn't respond. And then she went on Twitter and was like, "Yeah, I can't be doing podcasts no more cuz the government's in all of them and da da da." Oh, she'll have to name check me before I'll I'll buy.

We're getting swept up in that. But just in West Hollywood, there's no uh Israeli contact in my ear or nothing. I promise. Um I feel like I shouldn't have said that cuz now people are going to think in my ear. Um but anyway, um she is laying down this uh framework for why she thinks we're having this push to go into stable coins. The cyber attack seems like a very possible scenario because it's a way for the banks to absolve themselves of any role in a financial crisis.

Um, it's an easy way to uh consolidate banks so that only systemically important ones survive the hack. Um, and it could also potentially be a very effective means of onboarding people onto this new digital currency paradigm. So for example, let's say this financial um cyber this cyber attack on the banks takes place and they say well the existing money in your account has disappeared. The hackers took it but we can return to you the exact same amount of money you had but it won't be in the dollars you had before.

It will be in USDC or this dollar back stable coin or it will be this token. So you can get an equivalent that that is distressing precisely because it is so believable. Uh it is very clear that what Besson is trying to do is use stable coins to get appetite globally for US debt. It's actually a brilliant move and to be honest we need to do something because we're certainly not going to go into austerity. So, we need to do something in order to begin to um get more appetite back to the debt, which is probably about to get worse.

I'm hearing rumors that China is planning to sell a large amount of US debt. We'll see if that actually happens, but they've been selling US debt uh for ages. Obviously, what's going on in Japan? Japan is going to be selling debt, I think, in the not too distant future because um we're seeing that some of the attempts to defend the yen just aren't working. And so eventually, if Japan is going to keep going down the road of defending the yen, they will have to start selling, there's only so much that the FEMA um loans are going to be able to do for them.

So yeah, we're going to have with the deficits that we're running and the fact that countries are now moving away from US debt and gold is supplanting it in central banks, we're going to need to create that appetite. And so you can imagine if you believe that your government will uh do things against the will and best interests of the people in order to get the monetary system under their control and in a position where they feel like they can um maintain a slow steady decline instead of an abrupt uh recession or depression which we have endless evidence that they will do then this starts to become plausible.

Now, this is obviously just her running a thought experiment. This is not her saying she has evidence or anything like that, but this is distressingly plausible amount of money back, right? Um, from the money that was stolen from you, but it has to be this new money. It has to be part of this new system. There's the potential here for people to steal money from you and then essentially give it back to you, but with new conditions and with a new like social contract. Yeah. You voluntarily accepted this new system and voluntarily onboarded to this um new paradigm, but it's a coercion to an extreme degree.

All of your money was stolen, right? And now you can only get it back if you take it in the form of the digital dollars that we approve of or the, you know, the CBDC depending on where you are. All right, pause it. Okay, so that would be an absolutely horrific thing to happen. This is why, man, do I really want to see America re-mbbrace freedom as one of its principles and getting back to the point where freedom is something that we're willing to pay a price for?

Because yes, there's always going to be an excuse. There's always going to be a danger on the horizon. And when there's a danger on the horizon, as I hope we all learn during COVID, people real fast stop caring about freedom and they just want to be safe. And so the government can and will scare us into the point where a huge portion of people will gladly accept that kind of deal. But the problem is that as we change our social contracts, as we start handing over to the government more and more authoritarian control and we say that the individual should be afraid of the government instead of the government being afraid of the individuals, we in America, we become something totally different.

So for our 250 year existence, that's really been one of the things that um defined the American personality was that we the don't tread on me. Hey, fine. we have a government. Fine. I pay taxes, but don't come and tell me how to live my life. I'm going to do things the way that I want to do things. And when they can control, like for instance, this is the one that that always freaks me out. So, if you've got um let's say a green agenda that you're trying to put forward and you think that meat is part of the reason for the problem with global warming, then you can say, "Hey, we're detecting that you've bought too much meat this month." And now at the grocery store, you literally can't check out because we're freezing the money that you're trying to spend on that and this transaction won't go through until you reduce your meat consumption.

and they will actually be able to do that if they can control the money. And so that's where I'm like, kids, we've got to be very cleareyed about where this can go so that we put enough pressure on our politicians through voting, through speaking up, letting them know how we feel about this so that they don't do that because politicians are downstream of what we get excited about, what we're going to vote for. So never lose sight of that. If we are culturally excited about, yeah, more control, give it to me.

Come on, big daddy. tell me what to do. Then that's exactly who's going to get elected and then they will do exactly that. Okay, that is China. That's what China has proven that if you vote for the strong men, the strong men will come into power, they will kill you by the tens of millions to give you the answer of, hey, this is what state control looks like. And as long as you behave, then we don't have to keep killing you. But the second that you step out of line, we got to get back to it.

And so that should not be where we want to go. We should want to continue running the exact opposite experiment which is freedom first. Otherwise, you get what she's talking about. The head of DHS, Alexander Mayorces, has said on record that the next big threat to Americans is a cyber cyber security event that he called killwware. And killwware certainly sounds very scary, but if you read the existing definition of it, it does. It it refers to cyber attacks on essential infrastructure that has the potential to kill people.

So it doesn't necessarily kill people like in the name, but it attacks things like water systems, the power grid, essential infrastructure uh that people rely on every day. Yeah. You want to talk about getting into a position where you can um do things that make sense in terms of where we're headed and would create jobs is start protecting your infrastructure. take some of these threats seriously, get people together, like think of it as a Manhattan project for infrastructure protection. So whether that's water, whether that's the electrical grid, whether that's certain communication devices that we would need in the case of like an EMP attack or uh an AIdriven cyber attack, start building out those systems now.

Don't wait until the first thing happens. This is why looking at the way that people are starting to respond to drone warfare is very interesting. building these big metal cages around oil infrastructure uh because yes they are available to attack uh from the outside and it's easy enough to intercept a ballistic missile but it's very difficult to intercept a drone but it's actually I mean look it costs money and it requires people to work and build it but you can pretty low tech build these um grates around them that stop the drones from getting in close.

So waiting until you have the problem is stupid. Reacting now when you know the problem exists and it's coming your way uh and building against it. That would make sense. Just for the record, Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Let's go. That's great. So this is one of those things where uh looking at the like specifics of it are going to be important. Um however, I if like let's make a pact. If you can hear my voice right now, our pact is we don't care if somebody's Democrat, Republican, independent, doesn't matter.

We care deeply about their value system. We care deeply about what they the policies that they are campaigning for and what they want to put into effect. We care deeply about their ability to understand um first principles thinking, right? Those things we care about. Uh we don't care about party affiliation at all. Now, if all of us can get on board with that, cool. we've got a shot of actually thinking through these problems well and getting to the other side of it. If on the other hand, we outsource our brains and say party just tell me how to vote.

Now we're we're going to be in a bad place, a very bad place. You become super easy to manipulate. KBY reason in 2020 actually simulated a massive killwware attack that was targeting a US presidential election. And the way they conducted this killwear simulation which they did with DHS and some US law enforcement agencies uh was to get the US presidential election canceled and martial law declared. So they basically through that simulation established what types of hacks uh could succeed in achieving uh the declaration of martial law and the cancellation of a US presidential election which is pretty un pretty extreme.

So yeah so why are they doing that? Why? I don't know. The cheeky smile. Yeah. Why does an intelligent linked company want to simulate with DHS and law enforcement um a a series of hacks that disrupt national infrastructure doing during a US presidential election and martial law is declared? I mean, here's the thing, that's actually a reasonable kind of threat assessment to run and to be prepared for that kind of thing. Um the vulnerabilities are and stuff like that. Yeah. It's like if I'm a foreign adversary, that's a perfect time to do exactly this kind of thing.

So wargaming it, I think, is very smart. The thing that we should all be paying attention to is what do they do? So what was the thing that they considered the winning strategy? Now that I would like to know. Now of course you have to be careful not to broadcast that kind of stuff because then people can just come in and uh change their plans because they know what your response is going to be. But that putting forward our views on the way that they should be thinking about this to make sure that all the ideas on are on the table that makes a lot of sense to me.

Um just being paranoid that they are wargaming it doesn't make sense. So obviously we should be wargaming the scariest scenarios so we can make sure that we have a plan in place so that we don't get caught flatfooted. That's the last place you want to be. Well, if you look at all of this through the lens of risk management from the elites perspective, let's take the words of Larry Frink for example of Black Rockck who's been obsessed with risk management his whole career. He has a quote, he's on video saying um that he that the markets do not like democracy.

Democracy is messy. They like totalitarian governments because the risk is low. That's actually so if you look at the amount that people invest in China, it's a pittance compared to who people investing in the US. The reality is they want a stable market. They want to understand like what the markets are going to do, all of that. So there's a place for um investment in Chinese where it's like okay yes there are some things that you might do in China over somewhere else because you understand once the government says a policy that they're going to do it.

Um but I have seen the markets go from China super investable to China's not investable at all to a more sort of opportunistic investment strategy. So um is he being sort of cheeky about comments that people make over a brunch? almost certainly that yes, I could see somebody making a joke about I don't like the messiness of the democracy, but please don't be bamboozled. If you're a real trader, the very thing you need is volatility. The very thing you need is volatility. Volatility is a trader's friend.

Volatility is not the ignorant guy's friend who's trying to get in and out of something in two months. That guy doesn't like it. But the reality is traders are looking for volatility. they can win on the way up and the way down. So yeah, this is a I think a cheeky comment that he probably made ba ba based on a joke that I'm sure traders make. Uh but if you look at where people invest, they invest in the US way disproportionately figures that's trying to sort of position himself as a a free speech champion in one of these figures uh that's on the populist right.

But in reality, a lot of the policies that Elon Musk promotes like carbon taxes for example um have traditionally been uh policies promoted like the World Economic Forum and entities like this that are seen as being uh globalist and not populist in nature. Uh people forget that Elon Musk is someone who whose business has uh depended to a large degree on government subsidies and currently a lot of his companies either depend on mass adoption of electric vehicles via uh policies linked to the sustainable development goals to phase out fossil fuel vehicles um or I've never understood this push back.

So the government is going to create incentives because they want somebody to go and do something. they're going to create um sticks because they want you to stop doing something. And the fact that entrepreneurs are always going to go, "Cool, I'm going to go fill that void." Like that's exactly what you do. Think about the film industry here in the U in um LA, excuse me, has been completely hollowed out because other states and other countries created tax incentives and the uh entrepreneurs that run the studios wisely said, "Cool, I'm going to go take advantage of those tax incentives.

This is how the game works." So, if you had Elon going, "Okay, these tax incentives exist, but I'm not going to take advantage of them." Like, what? That wouldn't make any sense. Now, if you're saying that the guy doesn't know how to run a business, that unfortunately is you showing ignorance to how businesses are run. He is arguably the single most effective entrepreneur of all time. So, uh I can get into why that is. The easy one to just give you a a tip of a very large iceberg.

He is able to aggregate and retain the most talented people on planet Earth. So yeah, the the push back on Elon, absolutely hate his personality, no problem. Uh think that he is using his money to influence government, no problem. But when people go with the um argument that like oh like he doesn't even really know what he's doing anyway. He's just relying on government handouts. It's like a company was going to take advantage of that opportunity somewhere because that's precisely why the government put it in place is they wanted entrepreneurs to go down that path.

So yeah. Anyway, that one's weird. There are plenty of things to say about Elon that are distressing. That one's just weird. Um, are contractors for the Pentagon and intelligence like SpaceX. So, you're saying the guy looks like a front or Well, I think there's a conflict of interest with Elon Musk. So, for example, take his recent ownership of Twitter, now called X. Um, the Pentagon has spent the better part of the last decade developing very sophisticated tools to manipulate social media, including bots and other techniques that per the Air Force in one of their contracts said was aimed at controlling people with social media like we control drones.

Do you think that Elon Musk as a actually let her let her finish that up? Pentagon, an intelligence contractor, would restrict the Pentagon's use of those tools. They spent millions of dollars in over a decade developing. Now, that's a great question. And so, holding his feet to the fire on that, I think it's really uh a smart place to start. But when you think about So, Elon Musk ends up taking over Twitter at a time where censorship was just absolutely at its peak. He lets journalists come in and do the um Twitter files, go in, find out all of the just naked collusion between them and the government.

Now, are we really putting forward that Elon is going to collude more with the government? Now, you might be able to make a case for he's going to collude more with the government that he agrees with. That's entirely possible and by all means, let's do that investigative reporting. But the fact to read his purchase of Twitter, which remember he tried to get out of as him just being um I want to create a collusion machine, I don't think the facts of the situation back that up.

Also, when Elon took over X, he was getting like 25 million views. Like, it would just be if I saw something that got, say, less than 15 million views, I'd be like from him. I'd say, "Oh, this isn't even popping off." And now he's changed the algorithm to the point where he rarely um one, he rarely shows up on my feed. And then two, when he does show up on my feed, it's like maybe a 3 million, 5 million post. So he himself who could control the algorithm to boost his voice has done the exact opposite uh and dramatically cratered his view counts.

So um he does not feel like somebody where when you look at the evidence is just trying to get more and more control of the situation. Now I think people should have an inherent distrust for anybody that controls this stuff. I'm far more concerned about his control over Grock. uh but at least that we can look at and say okay what are the results what does it output what are the sources that it uses who does it site what are the narratives that it pushes forward and you can begin to map the bias of the AI that I think is important because he touts it as this is meant to be the thing that finds objective truth which the vast majority of things just aren't objective truth they're all interpretation anyway um but being able to put these um different LLM up against a test that shows their bias.

I think it's really smart. And there are people already doing this. Grock does not score perfectly. Uh but at last check, they I don't know if they were the tippy top, but they were one of the best in terms of reduced bias. So that would be uh the kind of thing that we a thousand% want to hold people accountable to because bias, manipulation, uh specific misinformation will intentionally be baked into LLMs by the creators for sure, but also by people doing the malicious attack where they take over those 250 uh documents and if they can get them put inside the LLM, then it will do the whole Manurion candidate thing.

So I think we're being pushed towards essentially the same policies but by a different group of quote unquote leaders who are um trying to frame themselves as the opposite side of the political divide uh because the existing side that was pushing those was you know they were using sort of more like left-leaning political rhetoric. And so because they got push back, they're trying to sell those same policies in a different rapper that's sort of cloaked in this rhetoric of populism and right-leaning uh politics. I think there's essentially a consensus that some other some other very significant financial crisis is in the cards for the next several years.

And if you are the big banks and you know that's going to happen, you probably want to avoid a scenario like what happened in 2008 where the public knew that you were the source of the malfeasants and the economic problems which of course spawned movements like Occupy Wall Street. If you want to avoid that, how what is the best way to absolve yourself of any sort of blame for mismanaging or losing people's money? If you can say that I think that that is really really interesting.

it. Um, people are so aware now of what's happening. I don't think they're going to be able to hide anything. They might be able to push the analysis off to um the response. And so maybe they get a pass for the massive disruption. Um but since their response is going to be massive amounts of printing money and that's the same malfeasance that they've been doing forever, it almost doesn't matter um whether they get off the hook for like we had to do it or not. People are going to be so frustrated by the inflation that you're still going to get the same kind of push back because if nothing else, people like me are going to be banging the drum that you guys have been doing this forever before you're doing it now.

Whether you have good reason to do it or not, the effects are going to be the same. And worse, if she's right and they manipulate the social contract and they move people over into a money that they can control, regardless of whether it started as a hack, dude, I would be screaming from the rooftops that, okay, let's just play the scenario out. So now they have a money that can control you. And now they're inflating this to, you know, all hell. And who's going to benefit?

All of this stuff is knowable. So all the people that got their money back, they're those are pre-inflation dollars. And now in the giving you of your money back, they just inflated the money supply. So they actually gave you less purchasing power than was taken from you. And like if we're still running deficits and all of that, like you're just you're in the exact same spot that you were. Yes, the hackers made it better or made it worse. And maybe it's better for them because they get off the hook and they don't get the double whammy if we were also this is obviously a thought experiment of if they did something nefarious.

Maybe they get off the hook for that and they're not blamed for the false flag. But nonetheless, the way that they're going to quote unquote solve the problem will be the same thing they've been doing forever because this stuff is mechanistic. It does like there seems to be a there there. Um, but I could be biased. Whitney, you do no wrong in my eyes. I miss you, girl. Come back on the show. For real, Whitney, come back. Uh, it would be great to have her. Also, by the way, if you want to challenge me directly about the things that you think that I'm doing that are pro somebody else's government, I want to know.

Uh I would actually love to hear that. So, uh you certainly have a show that I if I brought you on, it would be to understand your position. I'm not going to sit there uh and argue with you. You know, that's not my style. Uh so would happily do that. if some of the breakdown is of what I'm doing. Um, one I will almost certainly push back if I think that it's wrong, but I will seek to understand first so I can say, "Hey, this is what I hear you saying.

Do I understand it accurately?" Uh, so anyway, that would be amazing. Uh, I would love that. I'll happily put it out unedited. Like whatever you need, you can say all the things that you need to say up to and including an indictment of the way that you think that I am uh doing it would be amazing. Uh, would love that. Love that. Love that. Now, going back to what she was saying, I will say this that um that I think it's right to be paranoid about it.

I think it's right to put it out there. I think it's right to talk about these things. She isn't saying this is already happening. I don't think uh from what I took away is she's just saying, "Listen, I don't trust the government." Uh rightly so. And here is an attack vector that they could use that we all need to be aware of. Uh I don't think there's any reason to hide from that. I don't see a boomer downloading a crypto wallet. So something has to be done to get them off it because they have a majority of the wealth right now.

So that that's why I'm like, "Okay, my mom will never download a crypto wallet." But it's one of those things her wealth needs to get transferred one way or another. The bank could just be like, "Sorry, this is the new thing. You just have to in our in your app now. Here's your wallet and it's built in and it's integrated and now she's on the crypto system without having to download anything or getting a 12 uh word hash or whatever like that." So, it's it's interesting framing it that way cuz I feel like it makes me what you always say once you uh change the framing it makes like logical steps.

You're like, "Oh, okay. I see the play now." Y like that's kind of how I feel about it. Yeah. No, she's got internal logic. Whether it ends up being true or not, it's a totally different question. But there is a distressing amount of internal logic. Yeah. All right. And now to the other side of the internet where is there a woman loneliness epidemic? Let's talk about it. This was unavoidable. So, it's Friday night and I am so lonely and so sad. I was just sitting here crying about it.

[sighs] I just like coming on here because it helps me feel less alone in this feeling. And sometimes it's like hard to say out loud because it just like reminds me of how real it is. But it's like it's a Friday night. It's 5:00 pm and I just sat here and ate dinner in complete silence. [snorts] And like the silence is absolutely like deafening. [snorts] [sighs] And I just don't think people who have never experienced chronic loneliness understand like how painful it is because it's just like so painful emotionally too.

Humans [snorts] are not meant to be isolated. You just feel so alone and just like not have anybody to live your life with. [snorts] And it's so hard for me because I am like full of life. [snorts] I like I just hiked 500 miles on the Pacific Crush Trail. I [snorts] did a road trip to Yusede by myself a few months ago. I'm leaving to go to Switzerland by myself in two weeks or in a week. Pause for a second. So, what I like about this and and I'll give my full breakdown in a second.

There's another thing she needs to say for this all to make sense. But um what I like about this is that you've got somebody who the my first layer of advice is always well go out and do things. Like you need to meet people in real life, not online. She's already doing it. So it's like she shuts down a normal way to just sort of dismiss these people of like you're chronically online. You're always in your house like cat lady. Yeah. Exactly. And god forbid that you work remotely.

It's like now I get how you've isolated yourself. this is largely just a problem of technology that has these weird artifacts in terms of the way that people interact with each other. Go out, meet people. She's doing it. And I think that this points at a far more distressing problem that's going on. All right. She's she's got another uh key point she's going to make and then I'll I'll give my assessment. It's like I'm out here like living my life doing things that I love [snorts] and it just like hurts so badly to have nobody to share it with.

And even just like honestly what's even worse is just not having like daytoday like doing dayto-day things in life and having people to share it with. [snorts] It's like it's a Friday night and it's 5:00 p.m. and I just have nobody to like [snorts] hang out with. Like nobody's text like and and that's the thing. It's not just like oh it's just tonight. It's like this is like every day of my life. Like like there's nobody ever asking me to hang out. There's like I anytime I like reach out to someone I have to schedule out like a month in advance to hang out with them and then we like never talk again for like months after that.

And it's just like life just feels so meaningless when you don't have anybody to share it with. [snorts] And there will be so many people saying like you find meaning in your life yourself or like you need to learn to be it's like I'm sick of that [ __ ] like I'm sorry you have no idea what I'm talking about. Okay, [snorts] you can stop at that. All right, so what I see here is certainly multivariant. That is for sure. But the loneliness ep epidemic is really about we have broken down the structure of society.

We've so detached ourselves from what is natural that we're now trying to reorient ourselves to figure out why we have all these internal emotions that are coming up that are very negative that do not feel good. And the even though we're sort of killing it, if you will on paper, she's doing all the hiking. She's going all the places. I'm sure she has a wonderful job. And what she's realizing is that evolution has optimized us for certain assumptions. So, it has optimized us assuming that we were going to um live in fairly like tight-knit groups that there was going to be a set of sort of known people that we've known for a long time that we're interacting with constantly and that there's almost no escape from that.

And even if it was a microcosm of okay, these are the people working on the farm, which even that is like very modern in the grand scheme of things. uh traditionally would have been hunter gatherer tribes and this is the big one that there was no outlet for sex other than essentially sex with somebody. I mean you of course you could jerk off but it's like without porn not a whole lot of appetite for that. And so you had this in extreme push for men to seek out women and then for women there was no birth control.

And so if you um got your emotional validation through a guy that was in some ways seeking sex, it's not the only way and it isn't that I don't want people to have an adversarial men and women uh view that they are adversarial to each other, but there is certainly a dynamic tension that evolution could count on that evolution baked into the cake, if you will. So for men, sex is very cheap. For women, it's incredibly expensive in a universe where there's no birth control. And so all of the what I call al algorithms in our brain, those come up over evolutionary time scales of us not having birth control, of us not having access to pornography.

And so you create this world where we're already forced into these groups. We have a cooperative effort that we're working towards because we're trying to keep everybody alive through a harsh winter or whatever the case may be. And so we know people, we're interacting with them all the time. We have our roles and responsibilities. And women tended towards taking care of the kids because specifically they were the only ones that could do that. So imagine you can't go to the grocery store and get formula. The only way that kid is going to eat is if they eat from your breast.

And so it evolution is just like, okay, I know that um you're going to be the sexual gatekeeper. That you are going to force a man to be worthy enough to have sex with. And then part of that exchange is going to be that that man helps you actually raise that child. So, he's going to go out into the dangerous world to do things. You're going to cluster with other women to take care of your kid, their kids, uh that a big part of the meaning and purpose in your life is going to be raising those children.

They literally can't survive without the nutrients that your body produces. And so, you start putting that all together and it's like, cool, everything works. Now, we definitely feel a sense of like, I'm limited. I'm trapped by things. And so, we use innovation as a way to start breaking free from some of those traps. uh we start introducing birth control. Incredible, massive breakthrough. People are now in control of when they have kids, when they don't have kids. Then we start saying, "Hey, women could do anything you want.

You can have a kid later in life if you want." They go in, they find that a career is actually fulfilling in a way that they didn't realize, but it leaves certain itches unscratched. introduced into that technology and now it's uh if you go up and try to flirt with a woman, you're going to get recorded, you're going to get clowned on, you're going to be either called a doofus or a monster that was, you know, perpetrating sexual violence by expressing sexual interest. It's like now you're putting yourselves in a position where guys have uh access to pornography, access to a gazillion other ways, reals, video games, everything to occupy their time.

It's dangerous to go after a woman. It's also not um sexually interesting for a lot of guys to go after a woman that is um above them on the sexual hierarchy, if you will. So that they are making more money than them, that they are smarter than them. That's not typically a thing that a guy is going to go for. So men tend to date across and down. Women tend to date across and up. Obviously known as hypergamy. So you get like this super weird collision as women get more uh power in the workplace as women are decoupled from the necessary result of seeking companionship is having a child and men aren't even seeking sex.

So they're because they're not being held accountable to a standard of you need to be worthy of sleeping with me. they're sort of flatlining and then you get the danger zone of just even approaching somebody as high risk and you get this kind of now loneliness epidemic where she might be doing well at her job but she's now suffering from the things that a man would typically suffer from when he's putting his time and energy into his job which is he doesn't hang out with people.

He has a hard time maintaining his friendships. He'll see people once in a while but not very frequently. But the problem is speaking from experience there's all this evolutionary uh energy behind that. So I don't find myself necessarily compelled to go hang out with my friends. So I don't feel any emotional distress by being isolated, by being alone in a way that women clearly do. And so it turns into this cluster [ __ ] of like each one of the things that we've done, whether it's the innovation on birth control, whether it's women getting into the workplace, all of these by themselves are awesome and it gives people all these incredible choices.

But you start putting it together and some evolutionary expectations begin to break down. So men have an expectation that they will try to earn sexual access to a woman and thus will turn their um their potential into skill set trying to climb the ladder. And so they'll get better and they'll innovate and they'll do all these crazy things and get stronger and more powerful as a man. And a woman has an expectation that she'll meet this biological imperative to have kids, to raise them, and to be part of a social group that looks after the kids and has cooperative pressures that push them together to look after the kids in groups.

And so instead of being isolated, she's driven into like a a mom group. And now that's all breaking down. But we still have the push from an evolutionary perspective to do it. And so we feel super weird when we're out of step with that. And so here we are. I I don't No, I feel like we have to separate these two things out cuz I think which are the two things the on one side we have the evolution conversation cuz I think that there are nuances there as well.

But on the forefront I think that there is something in adulting that even I experience right now where like I have a homie and I have this term called couch friends. Like friends I can just go and just sit on their couch. I don't have to get dressed. I don't need an agenda. I don't have to spend money. I'm yo you at the house? I'm coming over. Cool. Bet. But I like this is somebody that I'm close with. This is one of my like A1 friends.

I really I like I really like him. But I see him every 6 months cuz it's his life cuz he's bored. He's building something. I'm building something. We're just in these different points. So when she was going through a frustration of like even when I want to see somebody, it's like I can't just pull up. I have to with your girl this week. And then you got that presentation. Okay. Then you got to then before you know it's Saturday. Okay. I got to go see Lynn.

Okay. Then next week and then before you know it, all right, I'll see you, you know, October 14th. Cool. Yeah, bet. We'll hang out. And then I'm sitting back on my couch like, damn, I kind of wanted to see somebody today though. You know what I So, so just with adulting, I think that that's something that a lot of people come to terms with later in life cuz in college and young adult time, you think you'll be seeing your friends all the time. It's easy. But then on the flip side, there is the the male female like aspect of it.

But I don't know. I think I still think evolution or not, kids are not people still want to have companionship. People still want to have groups. People still want to hang out with people. And although you don't have that tie to like hang out with people, like I want to hang out with the homies and go watch a game or something like that. It's not even about the game. It's the camaraderie that goes through. That's what really flipped my mind with my brother. Like my brother loves sports, but I think it's less about sports.

It's more about me and these five guys drinking beer together and just sharing a bond. Like, yay. Ooh, touchdown football. Like whether they win the Super Bowl or lose the Super Bowl, it's the same thing. It's just I'm here with my guys. And we know that Sunday from 4 to 7, I have this sacred space. You know what I mean? And I think that people need to systematize that and it gets waved off too often. It's pay your bills, go to work, you know, get a get a spouse, whatever.

But we don't talk about those third spaces that are integral because they're just naturally happen. In the playground, you naturally hang out with your friends. When you're in high in college, you naturally go to a happy hour or after hours or whatever the thing is, Thursdays, whatever your college campus had. Now, when you get to adulthood, those things aren't just natural. You have to kind of generate that. So, I I agree. And so the thing that I will say that life will be confusing if you don't map them differently is that um men and women are going to experience that very differently.

And so if you're sounding the alarm and saying, "Hey, um, the structure of modern life, you weren't super specific, but the structure of modern life is such that even men are now starting to feel isolated that I'm saying heard." [clears throat] Now you can imagine for a woman who is not evolutionarily optimized to be stoic, to be more resilient to those things is expected from an evolutionary algorithmic standpoint to constantly be in these groups that are um relationship dynamics. uh building focused on rearing children like that whole thing.

They don't have that and because of the dynamics that I was talking about before where men are now less incentivized to approach women and it's risky to approach women from a social uh pariah perspective they're they're not even in a relationship with a guy to be able to have a project where it's like ooh I'm going to like push him to do better and become this thing. all these stereotypes that growing up in the 80s were just self-evident that a woman just wants to change a man.

So, but imagine it was deeply fulfilling for her and certainly an area of focus to want to push him to be better and all that and to take care of uh the kids and her and all that. And so, they've got this thing to focus on, put their energy on to interact with the world through the man. And like again, I get why many women felt trapped by that because it was the only option. But still the way that the evolutionary mind works is women had to interface with the dangerous world through men.

Through men and then through the social structure of women, which is why their um social dynamics can be so strangely vicious and aggressive. Women are not like these passive creatures by any means, but like that's how we've sort of come up. Okay. Now, to speak to the male side of this very specifically, um, one, I think everybody, if I wasn't in a marriage, I would feel very different about being able to be isolated. I wouldn't want it. It would be too much. I know because before I was married, uh, there were times where I felt a profound sense of disease because I would just come home and literally lay on the floor.

It was a particularly dark period that wasn't just about being lonely, but that was like, um, I I know that emotion well. So when you're looking at um modern life and all the ways that it presents things that pull us apart, yes, men and women are going to have to combat that both. But when you look at the um the derangement is pushing women into a more masculine form of being and then pushing men into a more feminine mode of being. And those are the things that begin that that are the beginning of the derangement.

And so we have to find ways to construct our lives such that we don't fall for those traps so that men are pursuing relationships with women which will then trigger this desire to be worthy, to push yourself, to grow, to get better. Um, and then obviously the thing that I get meme for, it's like if you're not going to have kids, uh, you better have a damn good reason because evolution is expecting you to not to to have kids. And so if you don't and you don't have something to uh put in its place, then you're going to find this profound sense of disease that she's struggling with.

The same is true for men and women. Um but probably more profoundly felt by women. Autumn Linen in the chat said, "This is the point in time where time's going to tell us we shouldn't have got educated the women." That's so interesting. So, okay, this is one of those every time this comes up, I'm going to make an attempt to make sure that I'm heard. Now, the the great irony of a frame of reference when you're locked inside of it, it doesn't matter what the person says.

You literally can't hear what they're saying. And the thing I'm saying is I love that women got educated. Amazing. There's a trade-off. And so, if you know there's a trade-off, do something to deal with it. Not go back. Do something to deal with it. So, how are we at a societal level going to deal with it? How are we going to deal with it at the individual level? Um, so this is something that I talk to Lisa about all the time. Cool. you're not going to have kids.

Uh but you need to make sure that you understand the role that raising kids plays in your mental health. And if you don't understand that there is a mental health aspect to um taking care of kids, then you're going to be confused as to why you hate your life. And you'll be like, why why do I feel so unfulfilled? And it's like that's going to come for you. And so um Lisa will eventually, and so will I, by the way, will eventually get to the point where we don't want to be entrepreneurs anymore.

And so when Lisa decides she doesn't want to be an entrepreneur, she's got to have an answer for, and now what? Why do I matter? Why does anybody care about me? Post-menopausal women tend to um either plug more deeply into their kids' lives, and this is how mother-in-law has become a nightmare, or and and by the way, people need to understand why that stereotype is true. That is a post-menopausal woman who is not able to express her sexuality anymore. And now life is about the thing I did.

And the thing I did was I raised kids. I'm no if she was engaging in a career before, she may not be now. And so it's like um from, you know, time in memorial, mother-in-laws became a problem because once that period of raising children ended, they were now in a period of like what do I do? And so they would try to re-engage with their adult children. They would create all kinds of problems, but it was a way for them to remain relevant and to be needed.

And so it's like I don't know what people want me to say. I am certainly not saying don't educate women, but don't be a [ __ ] and not look at the world and go, "Oh, wow. There's really interesting coralates that go along with when you mass- educate women that it has a knock-on effect." We should probably plan for that knock-on effect so that the answer doesn't become don't educate women. [ __ ] That's the part where like wake up. So, you've got to have an answer for it because hey, let's get real controversial.

Guess what one of the answers is going to be. Do you guys ever see the stickers? I think this happened in Massachusetts. Muslims were right about women. Oh, look that one up. Uh, so that's a lot of fun. What do you do with that statement? That glitches people the [ __ ] out. So, do you go, "Hey, yeah, we're just we're not going to educate our women. We're going to make sure that we put them into a more uh traditional role. get him out of education and get him back into the household and uh put him in a burka like okay like that is going that is an answer being put forward right now that has a lot of momentum going for it.

So uh plan for these boys and girls so that we can have a sensible solution and not just a knee-jerk reaction where we go backwards uh to things we've already tried. I want to see us go. Oh, okay. Cool. There is this knock-on effect where people feel a profound sense of disease. They are searching for an answer and they will find it in stricter religions. If you don't believe me, watch the next 10 years. And so, you're going to see Christian fundamentalism rise. You're already seeing the rise of fundamentalist Islam.

So, it's like kids, if you want that to be the solution, then by all means, uh, say this is where what you hear, even though I'm expressly saying the exact opposite that you hear me saying that women shouldn't be educated, and I keep [ __ ] saying over and over, I'm not saying that. It's awesome that it's happened. I have a wife that has made use of all of these things, and I love her to death, and I want to see her have every choice in the world.

But if you don't recognize that there are consequences that can be addressed in other ways, then you're going to be very confused when we all start racing backwards. Somebody said that's not a knock-on effect, that's a knocked up effect. Heyo, nice. All right, we have a super chat. Yes, we do. Super chat from Russia Dark says, "Chinese tech might be overstated. Many autonomous robots turn out to be glorified RC cars on inspection. Their solar panels seem to favor quantity over quality with 30 to 70% failing checkups.

There's no someone's trolling us. That's not Marushia Dark. That is Marushia. No, it's not. Marushia Dark is one of the brightest people that we have in chat. And so there's no way that he would forget that this is all direction of travel and that while the bots may be easy to dismiss today, where are they going to be in 5 years, 10 years? That's crazy. Marushia Dark is not crazy. He's very, very smart. So I know he has taken that into account and he would like to talk now about the direction of travel of robotics and why we shouldn't be worried about the direction of travel.

He certainly would not pick the arbitrary moment in 2026 where they're maybe largely glorified RC cars, right? Marushia Dark has said anything. There's like a 30 second waiting staring at the screen. Um cool. That's all I got. All right, boys and girls. Thank you so much for joining us. Uh, we love you bunches and bunches. And to that effect, because I love you guys so much, I'm doing a free ITU AI master class Thursday, September 10th at 1 p.m. Pacific. Uh, I will show you how to use real AI, all of its weaknesses, where its strengths are, how to use it well to launch your company.

It's all free, and it is the 10th of September at 1 p.m. Pacific. Link is in the description. All right, see you there, and we will see you on Wednesday. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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