← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
$6 Gas, Epic Fury Ends, Coinbase Layoffs and The Coming AI Takeover | Tom Bilyeu Show
01:50:25
Tom Bilyeu and Producer Drew dive into the wild reality of soaring oil prices, AI breakthroughs, and controversial new weight loss drugs—while unmasking the political spin shaping today’s global events.
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A
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June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. We are doing it everybody. It is wild times. Depending on what you believe, that's going to be the topic of today. Operation Epic Fury has concluded, Operation Freedom has been paused and we're supposedly close to a one page deal that would end the war. Now personally I smell bs. So we'll be getting into that because oil prices are back up as the market is already beginning to question if we're as close to a deal as a Trump ad admin would like us to believe. And when you know it, it's all happening right as a 10 year bond crosses or gets ready to cross that magical 4.5% rate. So many things can be clairvoyantly seen if you're only looking at the markets. A new AI company is claiming to have made a massive breakthrough in AI architecture. That, by the way, if this one is true, would truly be a game changer. But it's going to be a heavy emphasis on if this is true. We'll see more on that coming up. 12.4% of US adults are on GLP1s. What could possibly go wrong? Do you like Ozempic face, Drew?
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A
It's just spreading out through the country.
- [02:14]
B
I got to know, do you have Ozempic face? Because if you don't, you're not on Drew's dance card. That's just how it's going to be. A young woman is reminded in a very potent way that she'll Own nothing and be happy as HP remotely shuts off her home printer. And some conspiracy corner time with Bill Gates, who is being accused of manipulating ticks to make us all allergic to red meat. That's interesting. It's good times, Drew. It's good times.
- [02:43]
A
Hey, as long as you're not driving. Gas prices are getting crazy. I officially have paid $6 for gas. I have never done that. I have avoided it. This is the most I've ever paid for gas in my life. This is more by more than 35 cents. I have hit my line. $6 for gas is dumb. I remember when gas used to be 99 cents. I am radicalized. I'm done. Yeah, this war is stupid. Democrats are stupid. California stupid.
- [03:07]
B
Wait, wait, wait. How did the Democrats get caught up in that one?
- [03:10]
A
Because we're paying $0.61 more on gas than we should be. So that $6 here in California should be $5.50 at the very minimum.
- [03:17]
B
Okay.
- [03:18]
A
But yeah, this is an oil energy crisis bubbling up. Spirit is already under wraps. There's reports that JetBlue and Frontier could be next because they essentially 30% added 30% fuel costs in the last year because of this war. What are your take on just the oil prices? I know we're going to get to Operation Freedom and all this other stuff, but just this energy, this bubbling energy crisis.
- [03:39]
B
So the temporary energy crisis is not something that I am in a panic over. If this becomes truly systemic inflation, that is going to be a major problem. The real question, when historians look back on all of this, it's going to be trying to run the counterfactual of should we have ever gone to war or not? So the rise in oil prices are going to come back down. The US Is able to make a tremendous amount of energy. So in terms of the long term, as everything begins to settle out, I think that those prices coming back down is all but a guarantee certainly here in the US Globally, it's going to be potentially more problematic. But honestly, probably not unless we go to a total war where we're just completely destroying the infrastructure in Iran. Iran is then retaliating all over the Gulf region. That would have years and years of economic consequences if the blockade stays up. That could have long term consequences in areas other than energy in ways that definitely does scare me. So the fertilizer that's coming out of the Gulf, that's a far bigger concern for me than the energy costs. So on that angle, it was always going to raise prices. The question is, do we get anything out of it that justifies it. And so right now it doesn't look like it. And I'll cover that as we get into the broader issue. But I think the bigger question right now isn't just how stupid are oil prices going to get in the short term. Remember back in the 70s he's got completely out of hand only to come crashing back down over time. That's exactly what I expect here. But there are bigger consequences that I think are going to be the topic of conversation in terms of did we just spike oil prices temporary or not? Not piss off all of our allies and end up with an Iran that shows that they understand asymmetric warfare and they can basically stop the US from making progress. We don't have the cars that we think we have. That I think is the far bigger conversation than just how annoyed people are going to be. Rightly so, obviously at six dollar plus gas because it could keep going up in the short term. So six dollars, maybe just a stop on the way to ten dollar gas when I would expect people to be flipping over tables. But that really is going to be short lived
- [05:51]
A
ground this though because I think it's easy to say like yeah, we have these macroeconomic elements that happen on the global scale, but today I need to get to work and I need to like put gas in. So I think Americans, while we think holistically on how the Strait of Hormuz is connected to all these intertwined different organizations and monetary flows and policy and things like that, we do have to be grounded very like soberly that in this game of chicken that Trump is playing with other countries and there are second and third order consequences. And this is something that we thought, okay, it'll be fine, they'll get over it, they'll have to pay a little bit more for gas. But the working person is feeling it. And in this and us entering into election season, I think this is going to be at the front of everybody's mind, especially with affordability. There's something I want to throw that Bernie Sanders tweeted. He said oil prices today 105.25 a barrel. Gas prices today 446 a gallon. Oil prices in 2011 105.06 a barrel. Gas prices in 2011, 351 a gallon. There was something to as soon as the war was announced, it seemed like almost overnight all the gas prices went up about 70 to 80 cents roughly. So as much as I want to say yes, the Strait of Hormuz has a lot to do with it. It Takes what, six months for that oil to get there on a boat through different countries, through all the checkpoints to get to California, to get into my gas tank. Is this corporations getting the head start that we know it's going to be expensive so let's bump up the cost. Now what do you think is, what do you think is causing this discrepancy before between what oil prices were historically and what we paid per gallon to what they are now paying per gallon?
- [07:21]
B
The fact that the oil prices move as fast as they do is you really have to divide it into two things. So one, there's the paper price. So I would need to understand if he's quoting on the street barrel prices or on the street paper prices if he's doing an apples to apples comparison. So people first understanding that there are two different prices and well more than that because you've got Brent crude and you've also got whatever WTI which is us. So you've got that difference already. But the important difference that I'm talking about now is what people gamble on in the stock market, which is the paper price and this is the price that people are almost always talking about. And then you've got on the street what can I actually buy a barrel of oil for? There's a whole bunch of manipulation going on. Almost certainly this is conspiracy, Conspiracy, I don't know. Ah, but almost certainly being manipulated by the Trump admin to keep paper oil prices at a reasonable thing because they know that's what people are going to talk about. But the supply and demand curve is what's going to determine the I'm on the ground and I'm trying to buy a barrel of oil. What does that cost? Okay, so that's part one. You've got paper and you've got reality. What we're talking about there. I don't know enough about this to just pop off. But then you've got what I think you're alluding to, which is the corporations also have the ability to go, okay, only the paranoid survive. We know this is coming. We think that this may be far more systemic than they thought that it was back then. And so yeah, we're going to react quickly to make sure that we maintain profit margins, to make sure that we can weather a storm that is, you know, of unknown duration. Yeah, that's one read. Another read is hahaha, like these motherfuckers, we have them literally over a barrel. We can raise prices. We have the perfect cover story which is what do you want us to do? Look at the price of oil is going up. So it. Without doing a deep dive analysis by company of what they're doing, what they see, whether they're turning record profits and then doing something stupid, whether they're shoring them up, meaning if they're doing something just to give back to shareholders and they're buying shares and those guys are just like, oh, my God, the war is the greatest thing that ever happened to us. That would be very different than like, hey, we're buckling down. We're trying to weather a storm. We don't want to be in the kind of position that a Spirit Airlines, obviously very different. But you see how quickly a company goes from. We've been in business for decades and decades and decades, and suddenly we're bankrupt. Boom, overnight. We can't pay, we're out of business. So I do believe that corporations can be very greedy. I'm not blind to that. But they also need to be paranoid if they want to survive. And so without looking at the what's really going on at that level, and I have not done a deep dive on that, it would be unfair to just blanket cast them. But it could be either or it could be a mix of both. They could just be being greed to try to take advantage of this moment. Like people with hand sanitizer back in the day, toilet paper during COVID Yeah. Just people going absolutely crazy. It could also be them going, ooh, wow. There are a lot of question marks in terms of what we're gonna have to do. And as a business owner, I found myself in that situation before where we went through a crisis with almonds. And this is back at Quest. And so you've got a drought. You know that the drought is going to impact almonds. You make a big reaction to buy up a ton of almonds because you don't know how long the drought's going. If the drought had lasted for another year or two, we would have looked like geniuses. But in reality, we ended up having to write down a bunch of it because we were overly reactive. And so this stuff gets far more complicated. I get it. People want to go shoot CEOs because they think that they're just being greedy. But the reality is business is incredibly hard. Most businesses fail. There's like a 94% failure rate. So you really do have to be paranoid again. That's me being very generous because I am a CEO. I get all these things, and maybe they don't deserve that. But this is one of those where it could go either way. They could be being smart or greedy assholes. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about money you're leaving on the table. Every time you pay full price for a health product out of pocket, you could be missing out on 30% savings. There are over 40 million HSA accounts in the US holding $159 billion in pre tax dollars. That's where True Med comes in. 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A
Okay, I'm off my soapbox. Let's actually talk about the war now. What's going on? I think it's good Operation Epic Fury was officially concluded if you ask Marco Rubio.
- [14:53]
B
Yeah, depending on who talked to.
- [14:54]
A
Yeah, but what do we actually. What's the. That's the paper. That's the paper price. What's the actually boots on the ground saying about the war?
- [15:00]
B
Yeah, well, so this one in full disclosure, you are about to witness my frame of reference in just, just full effect here. I will give you the stats of it all, but I'm also going to be giving this real top spin because I smell a rat on this one. Operation Epic Fury is over. That's what they're saying. They're calling it a success. And now even Project Freedom is being paused so negotiations can resume. That was the first thing that made me go, what? Like, huh? That doesn't make any sense. And I am here to convince you that that is bullshit. You are being spun hard. And, and this is where you need to really start looking at cause and effect. Try to explain it to yourself, try to explain it to somebody else and you're going to start to see like, oh God, some of the words being used. This does not make sense. The Trump administration wants us to believe that we finally knocked some sense into Iran and that we're close to this one page deal to end the war. But putting the pieces together, I think that we have a very different story playing out. The reality is that Project Freedom, which had the US Escorting tankers through the Strait, seems to have caused more problems for the US Than it was solving while it was running. Iran retaliated by firing at ships waiting in the Strait, including a South Korean cargo vessel. Iran also started chucking missiles at the uae, who was pumping oil across land to avoid the strait of horror moves altogether. It was an absolutely brilliant move. But the problem is that you start putting all this stuff together and Project Freedom does not appear like it was delivering very much freedom. It was just pissing off the Iranians and they are still clearly very capable of picking off sitting ducks. And unfortunately for the uae, unfortunately for the ships sitting out there, those static assets, whether they are on land or water, are sitting ducks. So you might be super clever to pump your oil across land so that you can bypass their naval blockade, but they're just going to send drones to hit your facility. And after Project Freedom and its strikes on the UAE's major port of Fujairah, I think is how you say it, Iran announced that now they're expanding their claimed control zone into the UAE coastline. So imagine you put this saying together, Project Freedom, we're the most mighty military in the world. We're going to be able to escort these ships. Everything's going to be great. We've obliterated their navy. It's all at the bottom of the sea. We've got total air superiority, by the way. All of that true. But it doesn't end up mattering if the Iranians can use asymmetric warfare and they can begin bombing the ships that are waiting. If they can attack all across the Gulf region and just start making so many problems that everybody is like, can we just please get a deal done? And the second that you can get the US into the posture of we need to get a deal done very quickly, then for all of the, it's not just bluster, because we really do have good cards as well. But, man, it becomes very difficult to get the leverage that you need to get them to, as Trump has said many times, wave the white flag of surrender. The one thing I just keep reminding myself, and I will keep reminding you guys, is that Trump, for a very long time, since before he started bombing them, between him, what Steve Witkoff is saying, they just keep expressing confusion over the fact that the troop buildup did not cause Iran to capitulate, that bombing the life out of them did not cause Iran to capitulate, that doing the sanctions has not caused them to capitulate, that putting them in a position where they are rapidly running out of the ability to store their oil and they may have to cap it, which will be very detrimental to their industry for years to come. It's still not causing them to capitulate. So, as a PSA to any, anybody in the government that is watching this, I will just explain to you why they are unlikely to capitulate. This is existential for the Iranian government, the regime that is in control. If they are not able to become a nuclear power, if they are not able to show their own people that they remain in violent control, then there will be an uprising. They will be relegated in the region and. And they will lose power. And if they lose power, obviously, many of them are going to be killed by their own people. So they're in a position where this is extremely existential. There is no path but forward. And so they're just going to keep pushing their agenda. And for those of them that believe that they are doing the will of Allah, you may think that that's bullshit, but if they believe it, then they're going to keep pushing for that reason as well. And so you have a situation where you have backed them into a corner and they to act like an animal that's been backed into the corner. And so the odds of them capitulating are effectively zero. Everybody has to find an off ramp, Trump included. And I think that the change in Trump's language around the nuclear portion of all of this indicates that he is looking to build that off ramp, that he does not hold the cards, that he would like us to believe that he's done. And by the way, in the midst of all of this, the Iranians have launched a website called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, and there are reports that they've then emailed all these shipping companies with the following instructions for passing through this rate of Hormuz, which go to show that these are not people that are backing off or that are just about to capitulate. Look, it could all be posturing, but I don't think it is. So, anyway, here are the tenants that they're sending. Supposedly, I've not confirmed this, but supposedly these are the things that they are sending around to shipping companies which seem in keeping with their position. One, payment of the tolls to go through the Strait of Hormuz must be paid in Iranian rials. Okay, remember, this is largely. Everything going on in Iran right now is largely about the petrodollar. So that's a pretty big jab to the Americans. Two, they want guarantees that must be issued within the Iranian banking system. I assume what they mean by that is that they're not going to basically promise to pay and then not. And so there's going to be some sort of financial guarantee, but that one was the most vague, but we'll leave it at that. Three, countries that caused or contributed to damages during the war must pay reparations before obtaining a permit. Countries that sanctioned Iran or blocked its assets abroad are banned entirely. So that one alone, if it ends up being true, obviously we are not in a good position. There will be a ton of traffic that will still be held back for all documents must use the name Persian Gulf. This is like the Gulf of America, Gulf of Mexico battle kind of thing. These kind of things do matter, I guess, but nonetheless, they are really trying to establish their dominance over that space. They don't want it moved to something more generic. I think some people are calling it the Arabian Gulf. So anyway, five, non compliance results in vessel seizure and a fine of 20% of cargo value. Six, all vessels must follow designated corridors and comply with Iranian armed forces instructions. And seven, Israeli flag vessels and any ship going to or from Israeli ports are banned. All right, none of that seems like they would be easy yeses for the US So we'll see in the coming days whether we actually are close. And as a reminder to everybody, politicians close to this for years on both sides of the aisle have said that what, what the Iranians are extraordinarily good at is buying time. They make you believe that they're willing to come to the negotiating table, but when you get there, there's always some reason why. Actually, no, sorry, I have to go get this approved. And you realize you didn't actually make any progress. They've just been stalling for time now. Everything that's going on has caused oil prices to begin rising again as the markets have begun to realize that we may not be as close to the deal as people thought. Again, I would like to recontextualize. The announcement of the deal is just so conveniently timed with the US treasury bond yield pushing up to this sort of magical invisible line of 4.5% where it becomes just too expensive for the government alone to get the debt. But also the interest that we're paying on debt that we already have, it just ends up becoming a nightmare. It gobbles things up. It will also have other impacts on the economy. So you can trust, I mean, I think he's done it five times now. You can trust that every time that that rate starts creeping up towards 4.5% that Trump's going to make some announcement that tries to calm down the markets. Plus, the Iranians are claiming that Trump is just outright lying about how close we are to a deal. So you start putting all of that timing in the market together with that and that seems like a pretty believable thing. When Trump made the announcement about reaching that one page deal, you can just see it on a chart how close it was to that do not cross line of 4.5%. So listen, we will see how this all plays out. The U.S. it's not like we are inert and we don't have things that we can do. But when you really start playing this out, if I'm right, that this is not Iran really trying to negotiate in good faith, that this is Iran buying themselves time, they understand they're asymmetric advantage, that they will continue to hit allies in the region, that they will be able to continue to scare ships, that even with the US Navy being willing to escort them, many are not going to take them up on that, that the US Is going to be wildly hesitant to continue doing that, because if we start having footage of our ships getting hit or we start sending home troops in coffins, the US Just does not have the appetite for it. So this becomes a waiting game. And you've got the Iranians who understand that the Americans as a voting body politic, do not have an appetite for a war over there. It is very unpopular, which Trump is obviously aware of. And then you've got the US Putting economic sanctions on Iran. And I think they've shifted their strategy from the kinetic war to the economic war, which is why Rubio's out there saying that we have ended the Operation Epic Fury, that it was a success, because he knows Operation Economic Fury is still going. And so I think the Trump administration is betting on the fact that they're going to be able to outlast, that we will be able to hurt their economy so much that some of the softer voices, more conciliatory voices, that's a better way to say it inside the Iranian regime will be able to come to power and we'll be able to get a deal done. But it's going to be tough, because if Iran can drag us towards the midterms, every day that we get closer to the midterms, Trump is going to have to do something to extract himself from this to get oil prices back down. Because if he doesn't do that, he's guaranteed to lose in the midterms. So, yeah, we'll see how it all plays out. But this, if the administration is trying to make it sound like it's easy or we've already won, don't buy it. Do not buy that.
- [26:34]
A
All right, you said a couple of things I want to break down there. I've been seeing a lot about this bond yield 4.5%. Break it down for us. What's the difference between the bond yield percentages and then like the Fed announced interest rate and how they both. Like, what are those differences? Because you're saying it's more costly for the debt on this side, but I thought they controlled the debt. Help us.
- [26:53]
B
Yeah, so the Fed does control the rate, but they do it by fake means. So what Trump is trying to do it through is messaging. So, okay, I'm gonna speed run this push on whichever part makes the most sense. Rates are psychological, the economy is psychological. So you can manipulate rates, you can manipulate the economy at large just by manipulating people's frame of reference, their mood, what they think is about to happen.
- [27:27]
A
They're what, expectations.
- [27:28]
B
Yeah, perfect. So Trump knows that. And the thing that people are putting out now is that Trump is using Axios as a way to say the thing that he wants to say to make it look like it has credibility. We're getting very close to a one page deal. And so the markets that are always trying to trade on the news because they understand that the game is psychological, they go, oh, that news is going to affect people's expectations or perceptions. Cool, let me trade now while it's hot, while I have an asymmetric understanding of what's happening. And so the AI traders, the people that, you know, measure their trades in milliseconds, they go in and they take advantage of that stuff. Okay. The long term reality though is going to settle out in a more there's physics to economics kind of way. Which is why everybody pays attention to the ten year, because that, that's people's long term vision of where this stuff is going. Now it will fluctuate very rapidly, but it's a expectation of where are we going to be in the long term. Now that because traditionally warsh confuses all of this. It's always so tempting to speak in bumper stickers because this fractal is very fast wash is signaling a move away from long term into short term. Let's set that aside. Historically, all eyes on the long term because that's where the government wants to roll its debt over is into the long term. Now you can control that rate by controlling people's psychology and making them optimistic. And then the rate comes down. You can control that rate because sometimes you actually want the rate to go up. You can control that rate and keep it down by printing money. And so when you look at, there are a couple ways you need appetite for that debt to keep the rates low. When there is no appetite. The way to get people in is to either print money and buy it so that you become the buyer of last resort, as they say, and the Fed and the treasury essentially work together to go in and buy that debt. Then the if you don't want to do that and you want to get people to buy it with the money that you've already printed and put out into the market. I want it to be simpler, Drew. I really do. Then you have to psychologically get them excited so that you can avoid. And so his messaging on stuff like that is to get people psychologically excited enough that they'll go buy it with money that they already have, instead of trying to get the Fed to go in and purchase that stuff and pull it out of the market to make sure that there's appetite. So when they're controlling that rate, so they can just set the bank rate. So banks are like, I'll only loan you this money. Which was actually part of your initial question. This is the rate at which we loan money. But everything is really queuing off of that 10 year bond yield, which ultimately has to be manipulated either psychologically or actually by buying things to keep it in a certain range. So you can set a rate that the banks loan money, but the sort of aftermarket of the bond, the bond market is a different beast. So those are the two different things.
- [30:48]
A
Okay.
- [30:48]
B
Now I put so many, like real nuance that muddies the water, that if there's anything there that you want to isolate, I can try and give you like a bumper sticker version of it. It will be less true, but it may be easier to understand.
- [31:03]
A
I think I got the point, Mac. The music says Fed only controls the short end of the yield curve. The bond Yields are the 10 to 30 year rates, which is set based on the trust in the U.S. economy. Economy.
- [31:15]
B
So sort of. So you can go in. And if the Fed is willing to go buy the Treasuries, then they can drive it down. So this is Warsh's entire message. This my Deep dive came out yesterday. Yeah. Is about. So there's a thing called financial repression where you can go in and actually you're setting the rate below what the actual inflation rate is. Now there are a whole bunch of mechanisms about how you create appetite for that debt when you do that. But there are ways for them to manipulate these numbers, for sure. So maybe control is the word that he's sticking on. But they can influence it so knowingly that I will. I refer to it as control because they, they manipulate. They know exactly what they're doing. They know how to move that number in whatever direction they want to move it. And that's my whole beef with modern monetary theory. You can take the rate up, you can take the rate down, both in the short and the long, like look at what Japan is doing. For a very long time they were managing the psychology of people through money printing through several mechanisms. But yes, it's more manipulatable than his comment would lead me to believe. He believes, yeah, taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned. It's time to refresh your yard during Spring Backyard Days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179 like the next grill 3 burner gas grill or or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay String lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot now through May 6th. Exclusions applies to homedevot.com Pricematch for details now streaming Disney invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docu series. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book the end of an era and don't miss Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Tortured Poets Department. Now streaming only on Disney. When Mother's Day means celebrating your mom, your wife, maybe even your daughter as a new mom, trust 1-800-FLOWERS to help you celebrate every important woman in your life with double blooms from 1-800-Flowers. Order one dozen roses and get another dozen for free. It's a simple way to give beautifully with colorful blooms that make Mother's Day feel meaningful for every mom you're celebrating. Order with confidence and get double blooms at 1-800flowers.com Spotify that's 1-800-flowers.com Spotify. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.
- [34:20]
A
So that's the first part of your initial read on the end of the war is that Trump is using his tactics to influence the US Investment. But there's a long term play or a economic play against Iran with the sanctions coming back because there was that 30 day release, 30 day pause on sanctions for oil relief that they announced. So now with that running out, you're saying they're going to now ramp up the sanctions to start economic warfare against Iran.
- [34:47]
B
They've already been doing it, so listening to Besant, they are doing everything they can, including seizing crypto to try to make it impossible possible for Iran to basically pay its troops. And I think that's a key part of their strategy is we want to put Iran in a position where they can't afford to pay their troops, their troops will rebel. They're not. I don't think they really are after regime change, but I think they are aggressively after moderate voices that are willing to do a deal. And when I think about the comments that Trump makes, Trump has a mental map that inside of Iran, that inside of every human is a person who just is doing a constant cost benefit analysis that, like Trump, is willing to completely change his mind, lie, spin, completely backtrack on things that he said in order to get the deal. So he'll be like, I'll never bend on this. And then he'll bend on that if that's what he has to bend on in order to get a deal that he wants. And by the way, from a negotiating standpoint, it's a great tactic. Like, your emotions aren't getting in the way. You're not even letting things that you have said previously stop you from getting the outcome that you actually want. That much of what you say is actually bullshit anyway. You're just trying to position them psychologically where you want them so that you can get the deal done. But I'm not sure that that's true. And I'm not sure that he's mapping people in an existential crisis what they behave like. And I really think when you confound that with this being a theocracy, that you end up with a mentality that he just does not know how to map accurately. And so he is just routinely confused that they will not capitulate it.
- [36:15]
A
With the estimates of the war costing around $72 billion so far, do you think that there's any economic blowback that America can get? I know we talked about oil prices already, but if Iran does buy time and this becomes a stalemate of, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll sign the paper next week. Yeah, we'll sign a paper next week. And kind of similar to what Putin has done to Trump over the Russia, Ukraine conflict, if this starts kind of getting dragged out into month three, month four, month five, month six, outside of the oil shock, is there any other financial economic impact we might feel that would cause Trump to change his tune and want to end the war faster than what he like? Because it seems like we can't play this waiting game that Iran can or is a. Did I read that wrong?
- [36:59]
B
The. The question is, who can play the waiting game the longest? So because we're being spun at all times, it's very difficult to understand what's actually true about the Iranian markets. Obviously, we have a much clearer picture into what's going on in the US Trump is going to survive the midterms unless he can get the economy humming for middle America. So for right now, everything that Trump has been doing has been an absolute godsend for people that already own assets. It is such a weird position for me to be just day and night arguing against things that are so good for me financially, but the reality is they're only good in the short term, and they will absolutely blow up in our face. So Trump is in a race against the midterms. If gas prices are where they're at now, that will play out exactly like inflation. It isn't inflation, but it has the same effect of the thing that people actually care about, which is prices going up.
- [37:47]
A
Rising prices.
- [37:48]
B
This is a brief psa. Prices going up is prices going up. Inflation is increasing the money supply anyway. Energy prices going up is the only thing that acts in such a broad, systemic fashion that it feels like inflation. So if he doesn't get that turned around, if he doesn't get energy prices back down, he's going to be in real trouble. He's also got to show that, hey, all these things that we've done to get these investments into the US Are actually turning into real jobs so that he can make a credible case, hey, everybody, I lowered your taxes. You got bigger refund checks. There are more jobs for the people that have really been struggling. Your wages are going up. If he can't tell that story by the midterms, it's game over. Like, it's almost always game over for the President's administration at the midterms anyway. Like, those just tend to flip. And right now, he has just made a complete mess. It's like somebody who's like, listen, listen, you're a hoarder. Your place is a total disaster. I'm going to come in, I'm going to organize everything, but for a minute, it's going to look worse, and then it's like, for an hour, it's like, worse. For a day, it's a week, it's looked worse. A month, it's looked worse. Now it's like, bro, did you actually just make it worse? Like, it was bad before you came in, but it's now worse. And so what exactly did you see?
- [39:05]
A
His affordability is bullshit.
- [39:07]
B
Like, I think I did.
- [39:10]
A
This is from over the weekend.
- [39:12]
B
Yeah, lower prices. You know, know use the word affordability. But I was the one that. That received these high prices. You know, it's amazing. I come into office and I say, wow, look at how high these prices are and the Democrats start screaming, affordability, affordability. They're the ones that cause the problem. I'll tell you one thing, they got one good line of bullshit. That's one thing I'll say about it. So listen here. He's not wrong about the Democrats being as involved in this as he is. The thing that drives me, absolutely, but nanas about politics is they just want to blame the other person. Like that really is the game. Now that is a psychological problem created by all of us. Where we want them to do that, we won't elect the person that doesn't give us the confidence that they're the right one, that the other team is wrong. Especially not in the populist moment. So like I get how we get here, but it's nonetheless a really maddening feature of human psychology. And so the only way to get out of this is if we eventually can leverage the volume and velocity of information from social media to say we're a solution oriented crowd. Now I give that like maybe 0.02% chance, but that actually would work like if we could get people to focus on, okay, these are the results that we're going for and here are the things we're trying to do and these are the outcomes that we're having. But if you look at the country that's running the most interesting, quote unquote natural experiment right now, it's Argentina. And even there, despite the big numbers that this guy's posted, people still want him to fail. Like there's a huge part of his own voter base that want to see not, not the people necessarily that voted for him, but the populace that could potentially vote for him or the opposition that want to see him fail. And that comes down to ideology. Everybody thinks that they see the world in the right way instead of doing things from cause and effect. And that is, that is the thing that really drives me crazy. So period. If you have a follow up, if you don't, I have a fractal, if you will indulge me, hit me with it. So, okay, writing a series is going to end up being three parts at least. Maybe I'll find another part on the fact that we're either actually living in a simulation or the simulation is just the perfect metaphor. Because I do get the pushback that the comments on the video, the first one in the series that we're saying every society takes whatever the dominant technological metaphor is and they say the universe works like that. So when the clock was the coolest piece of tech we said the universe works like a clock. Now that it's, you know, all AI and technology, we're like, oh, we live in a simulation. And so I get that, and I think that's very real. And so it's entirely possible that this is just me getting to, oh, we have now a dominant metaphor that's way more successful than any other metaphor. And I know you and I are going to disagree on this. Forgive me, but I think God was the metaphor that people used. Right. So the first one was like a pagan approach. It's like, the sun is a God, the wolf is a God, the eagle's a God. Everything's a God. And they're trying to tell us things. And so that was how they interfaced with the world. And so it made sense that that's how they would see it. Then we get to a monotheistic God, and it's like, oh, okay, this is like sort of of a king. Oh, this is like the king in the sky. Cool. I get this metaphor. And so that becomes the way that we think about it. And we talked about the clock, and now onto new technology. So I get it. I'm perfectly willing to accept that. However, as a metaphor, it explains so much, it's insanely useful. And as I was writing the most recent one, I was talking about how math. So the. The newest one is four signatures that you live in a simulation. Like, there. We won't know it's a simulation, but there'll be clues, right? The. The meme. And one of the clues is that mathematics is the source code of the universe. And I don't mean that in a flowery way. I mean, math is how the universe runs the simulation. And so if you believe that mathematics is something that we invent to explain to ourselves different, like bookkeeping principles and things like that, and it's essentially a language, then you would expect disparate people separated by geography and time to describe things in very different languages, but they don't. And so they end up, and I give in the piece, like four or five examples of times where brilliant people like Newton are trying to describe the motion of bodies, say, and so he invents calculus, but crazily enough, another guy who doesn't know Newton, doesn't know Newton's working on, has never seen any of Newton's notes, comes up with the exact same underlying mathematics. And so that happens over and over and over and over. Somebody will find something, and math will say, like, it will predict something, like the Higgs boson. People are like, like, every time the math says something, it exists, it does end up existing. And so they build a large hadron collider, they do all the stuff, and they find that, okay, it really does exist. All right, this was a whole lot of preamble to get you to. If that is true, and the universe runs on math, then the universe is deterministic. Once the universe is deterministic, we don't have free will. Once we don't have free will, we are like the ultimate responder bots. And because of all of that, the way that we respond to all of this stuff becomes distressingly predictable. And so pulling us out of the way that we parse data and respond to all this stuff is just. It's unavoidable. It's baked into literally our DNA, which itself is running math. And. And because of that, no matter how well we come to understand what's happening, we will be stuck inside of the forces that are written in math. So anyway, that was probably way too indulgent.
- [45:29]
A
No, but, yeah, like, forces.
- [45:30]
B
You.
- [45:31]
A
You. I feel like I didn't. You didn't land a plane yet. Like, what do you mean?
- [45:33]
B
Here's the bad news. I did land the plane, and it's the deterministic.
- [45:37]
A
Like, that's the.
- [45:39]
B
So this started because I was trying to explain the way that I wish politicians would approach, that they would look for cause and effect.
- [45:49]
A
Okay, okay, okay.
- [45:50]
B
The universe runs on cause and effect, which is why it's so useful. We are deterministic creatures, but we're not evolved to identify what is is true from a cause and effect perspective. We're not even motivated by it, which is crazy. We're motivated to be right now. Anytime you come to a termination point where it's like, but humans are this way. This is the story of my adult life. If people want to understand why I stopped doing mindset content, this realization is why that humans are wired a certain way. Adults can change, but they won't. Just the. The odds are a very, very, very, very, very small number of them will actually change. Even though we can. We don't because of weird idiosyncrasies in the way that we are coded metaphor or not. If you think of it that way, all of a sudden, this all slots into place. So there is a sense of, okay, I'm putting out this idea. I wish politicians would do the following. Look at cause and effect. Understand that there are paths out of this, but they have to get elected. The populace moves by emotion, not by logic or deterministic cause. And effect. They're just not motivated by it. And so it was this huge diatribe that probably means you need to fire me because it just won't work. But nonetheless, I stare into the abyss of how true it is and I can't stop myself. God, that was unsatisfying for you.
- [47:21]
A
The reason it's unsatisfying for me is because just a deterministic outcome just makes it feel worthless. And why is that exciting?
- [47:30]
B
It's not exciting. I feel seen.
- [47:32]
A
Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.
- [47:34]
B
So keep in mind that Drew, I used to get made fun of, openly mocked because everyone was like, this kid is so doe eyed and is just convinced that he can put the right sequence of words together to help anybody improve their life. This is long before I'm posting on social media. It's long before social media exists. And I remember thinking, these guys are so cynical and I'm never going to allow that to happen to myself. And I would go in to. I'd go in early at my company for people that know the story. I'm the one that was like, hey, we should be willing to hire convicts and all this stuff and do all this incredible stuff. Stuff from a. Like, it really did feel good and it really was cool. And the small number of people that did something with it is awesome. And trust me, on, on the cold winter nights, I just focus on those people. But what I ended up realizing was the number somewhere around 2%, 2% of people will take new ideas as adults and they'll change and they'll do something. And then over time I realized, okay, that's just. If I really steer by cause and effect, I need to accept that this is the cause and effect. I understand the brain mechanisms. I know why get there. We've got, you know, tens of thousands of years of human history of just mapping what humans are really like. So anyway, my adult life is about encountering that over and over and over and over and over and realizing, oh, they're the humans become obscenely predictable when you zoom out. And if that's true and I can zoom out and I can see what humans are like, it. It's very distressing. And you just go, whoa. Okay, so given that, what do you do with that information now? I choose to remain optimistic and to affect the 2% that I can affect. And. But I really should stop talking about this. This is bad tv.
- [49:31]
A
But okay, because I have something to that, because I think that there's a line. Here's the quiet part out loud, right? It's One thing to have an optimistic mindset. It's one thing to be positive and Gore oriented and say you can do anything you want to be American dream. We can all do.
- [49:46]
B
Yep.
- [49:47]
A
But I think Churchill said it's the true success is going from failure to failure without loss of optimism.
- [49:53]
B
Loss of enthusiasm.
- [49:54]
A
Loss of enthusiasm, yeah. So it's like as much as I can be successful in that way and just be like, well, I didn't make that one, but the next one work and the next one work. If nothing ever works, then there comes a point in time where then somebody can then step up to me like, hey, that was wrong. That was a wrong statement. But to me it shouldn't be result based in order to have the notion and the outcome in that, in that field feeling. So I think because you, you crossed the mountain, you, you did the unicorn, you did all these things. Now you're inspiring and saying these things. People are like, okay, he did the thing. I can listen to him. I can kind of go to it. But do you think that if you've never done the company, you would have one remained as optimistic for the 2% or two. Do you think some of those outside voices would have then permeated because you did. Wouldn't have had anything to kind of of rest on?
- [50:43]
B
The outside voices did permeate. What I'm trying to say is I now realize 98% of people will never do anything with the information. They are stuck inside of a frame of reference that they can't see or understand. They don't know how to manipulate and get outside of is. It is a tragedy for which I am angry at God for real. Like, if I believed in God, I, oh my God, I would be. I'm mad at the coder of the Matrix. Now. I may one day realize that this is just what you have to do to get a society to have momentum. Maybe. But man, it, it's wild. So I, I am still completely captured by optimism and motivating people. I love doing it. It makes me so happy. It makes me feel things that are very positive. But I want to make sure that what I put out into the world is actually high utility. And the reason that I started this whole stupid diatribe that I really should have stopped myself from doing, I appreciate it, is that, that I was realizing I was giving advice to politicians that I know they won't take. And so I was like, okay, hold on. What's the real advice here? How do we get back to it? Which then allowed me to be super indulgent. About the math thing, which is really, I find utterly fascinating. So part of me just wanted to talk about it. But the reality is that we have to operate with politicians inside the frame of reference of the reality of how humans respond. And in a populist moment, it's about emotion. So. So any advice that I give to a politician that doesn't involve manipulating people's emotions isn't real. That's so crazy. That's so distressing. But nonetheless, it's true. Okay, I'm gonna stop there.
- [52:18]
A
Michael in the chat said, this is your network moment. I'm mad and I'm not taking it.
- [52:21]
B
No, it's not like this is. This is. This is me being emotionally indulgent. And I think this every day that I'm talking on camera. I just don't normally talk about it. But I had the hook of the math thing and I really wanted to talk about the math thing thing. So, yeah, the. Have I ever had it? I'm mad as hell. The only time I get that I'm mad as hell is the economics thing. Because here's what I see. The reason that mom Donnie feels he is like my nemesis spirit animal. Because I think he's smart enough to understand what he's doing. And because I think he understands what he's doing, I think he's sinister. And so that makes me. That animates me.
- [53:05]
A
Me with. Because that kind of brings to a greater point. Cuz some people in the chat are now talking. Somebody was like, oh, you're being too optimistic. It could be. Or too pessimistic. You could do this, you could do that. People are telling me, here's the thing.
- [53:18]
B
At some point I will. I don't know why I want to do this.
- [53:21]
A
Yeah.
- [53:21]
B
But I. Part of me wants to do this. This is very weird. I. I want to just stand there. Have you ever seen. Do you do. Do you like mma?
- [53:29]
A
Yeah.
- [53:30]
B
Okay. Every now and then MMA fighters who know better will stand in a ring and just beat the hell out of each other. And the commentators would be like, this is fun to watch. But these guys know better. They should be trying jiu jitsu. They should be doing other things. Like, don't just stand there and bang. Every now and then I just want to stand there and bang with somebody who is doing empty optimism. Now, the great irony of the guy who spent. I mean, how long did I spend just doing mindset? Six years. The guy that just mindset, mindset, mindset for six years is like, let's just stand and Bang. And I will just talk you out of all of those positions. Now, the only reason I want to do that is to get to the real position. And some part of me wants. If you're 12 and your parents have allowed you into this feed, I would like to say something just to you right now. You really can do anything you set your mind to. But beware of psychological traps that feel good but are low utility. If I can get you to recognize that you can pour time and energy into getting better, and you really will get better, and you really will be able to outperform people, and you really can get control of your emotions, and you really can build a life that you love more than you can imagine. It is all real. It is all possible. But there are these traps, traps set for you. And those traps are platitudes. Those traps are things that maybe even with good intention, people just want you to feel better in the moment. Oftentimes, the actual accomplishment that gives you, like, real fulfillment. A thing that can withstand grief, that gives you a sense of, I've done something worthy. I'm becoming a person that I can be proud of. All of that is oftentimes on fighting through the sort of intellectual candy of a thing that sounds awesome and it feels good, but you really have to push through to get to cause and effect. And if you get to cause and effect, where you simply look at the world from, okay, this thing feels good, but this thing actually works. I can measure the results that come out of it. If I can just get you to push through to that thing joyfully, optimistically, with hope in your heart, wanting to be better, wanting the world to be awesome, because all of those things are possible. And if you allow the darkness to eat you, it will eat you. That's useless. Don't do it. Super low utility, not fun at all. Joy is the point of all of this. But if I can get you to, like, push through the candy, intellectual ideas that most people stop at and get you to cause an effect, we'll have done something. All right, I'll stop.
- [56:10]
A
And the cause of effect.
- [56:11]
B
You keep doing this.
- [56:12]
A
No, I've tried to eject that. No, no, no. Because I'm into it. I'm into it. And numbers good. The cause and effect is because I think that's the part that I'm disconnected. Because you are the same person. If you try hard work every day, you can get better at something.
- [56:24]
B
Because that's high utility.
- [56:25]
A
That's high utility.
- [56:26]
B
Yes, it's cause and effect.
- [56:29]
A
So is it the do you ever hear working hard and your dreams will come true? Like, is it the thing we connect the hard work and the utility to? You ready? You ready? Yeah. Give it to me.
- [56:40]
B
Here's the real advice. If you're not smart enough, you're going to fail. Fail. So now that I have your attention to a 12 year old, okay, you're now going to spiral because your brain is going to grab that and it's going to go, what if I'm not smart enough? And you're going to waste a whole lot of time worried about whether you're smart enough or not. So what I'm going to tell you is your brain is designed to make you worried about that, but for one reason, one reason only. To make that anxiety go away. You go get better. Literally. The anxiety is designed to get you to go take action. The bad news is you live in a high comfort society where you have another option where you can go the wrong way.
- [57:23]
A
Go veg.
- [57:24]
B
And now you can go veg. You can zone out, you can jerk off, you can only fans, blah, blah, blah, drugs, whatever, don't do it. Because if you go the other way with all of your fears that you may not be adequate and you just stack skills relentlessly, like relentlessly from now until the day you die, you may never be the LeBron or the Jordan of your chosen endeavor. Whether it's accounting or basketball, it doesn't matter. You may never be the best of the best, but if you can make your life 100 times better and everyone, everyone can make their life a hundred times better than it is now, you may be sad about your starting point, but being a hundred times better than your starting point point is unbelievable. And so getting people there. Bless you.
- [58:11]
A
Thank you.
- [58:12]
B
Getting people there is very interesting to me. That's the thing that lights me on fire. It was interesting. We had somebody interviewing yesterday and they were like, they didn't say these words, but the question was designed to get out, why the do you do these three completely unrelated things? And anytime I walk people through it, they're like, oh, I finally get it. The video game thing is just all about getting that idea into the minds of kids through entertainment. It. And so I'm completely motivated by convincing people that there's like a platitude level that the vast majority of humanity stops at. And they'll Instagram it all day, they'll tick tock it all day, they'll feel good. People tell them they can be anything and all that, but they won't give them the real which is the way that your brain works is through a process called myelination. So whatever you repeat, you become. It has to do with your desire to be calorically efficient. And so be careful. There are traps. If you repeat to yourself that you're a dumbass, that would be the easiest thought to think. If you think to yourself that you're a badass that can accomplish anything, even though that's a lie, that will become the easiest thought to think. And so now, which of those do you think makes you take the right actions to 100x your life? The one where you're delusional and you think that you're better than you are. Great. So that's the better path. It has higher utility. And so trying to get people into, like, the. Yes, you live in a matrix. Yes, this is a deterministic universe. Yes, you're probably an automata. You don't have free will. But acting like you don't have free will is stupid. So don't do it. Act like you have free will. Go pursue the acquisition of skills. Hey. When you look at somebody you love and they're actively making their own life worse, and you desperately try to help them and it doesn't work, don't let the darkness consume you. Why, Tom? Because it's low utility. If I'm right, that human flourishing and joy and fulfillment and all that are the point, that's the thing you should be optimizing for, then succumbing to the darkness, even if it's real, even if it's true, is low utility. It does not move you towards your goal. But I. And look, some of this is just. It's how I'm wired. So it's like, that's how my mind works. And the next person, they're gonna be like, no, I don't resonate with this guy. Yeah, totally get it. Understood. But everybody has to find their way to that true truth. You've got to find your way through the platitude so that when you are alone and you're asking, God, why have you forsaken me? That you have an answer. Because if you don't have an answer, it's too much. And for me, I hit that point. In my early 20s, I would come home from work, I would lay on the floor of my unfurnished apartment because I was so broke, and I can still feel that cheap synthetic carpet pushing into my face. Dude, I would literally just lay on the carpet smushing into my face, like, what the am I doing with my life? I'm never going to achieve the things that I want to achieve. I'm not smart enough to have the life that I want to have and this is miserable. And when I was in college, I just felt like the whole world was before me and I was going to come out and be the next big thing and it just didn't happen. And so then I was like, whoa, this is dark now. In that moment, I turned to reading about the brain.
- [61:15]
A
Brain.
- [61:15]
B
And that changed my life. And it put me, I was like, oh, there, there's an actual thing happening inside my physical brain and I can experience. Correct.
- [61:25]
A
I'd be listening sometimes though, hey.
- [61:27]
B
And so that instead of going to the side where I just succumbed to the darkness, I was like, nope, I need to do these things because there is a measurable biological response. And so even though it doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel true. I'm just going to act as if because it's higher utility. And that changed my life forever.
- [61:49]
A
I promise it's the last one, I promise. But you just, you're setting me up with these follow ups that I just, I have to ask more now. All of this is great. Ryan is going to clip half of this because this is very good. I need to send like 30 seconds of this to Lynn because we were talking about our future this weekend. But what is the approach? I'm not even going to say your response. What is the approach? What is the cause and effect way that we can utilize this? Like we can deploy this new set of being toward actual real life implications. It could be anything from how do I deploy this at my job, knowing that AI is going to chop it off, or how do I deploy this in a company that I feel dead end in and I don't have any exit routes. Where is the. So it's one thing to say like, yes, this makes sense, but it's another thing to say, okay, this makes sense. Now let me put this in my, my specific lane of expertise that I want to then conquer. What is the implication of this? How do we implement it and make it actually happen and real and tangible in our specific lives?
- [62:52]
B
The thing that I always anchor around is if I want to do something, the, the literal first question I will ask myself is, does this violate the laws of physics? If it violates the laws of physics, then there's no point in pursuing it. I don't have a mind to create novel physics. So at that point I'm just going to walk away, away. If I go, nope, this does not violate the laws of physics, Then my second question is, do I care enough to go spend potentially years getting good enough at that thing so that I can control my destiny and get to the desired endpoint? If the answer to that question is no, then I move on to something else. If it's yes, then I'm like, okay, great. Now I'm going to run what I call the physics of progress. And I'm going to say, I don't currently know the path, but I live in a deterministic universe. All a deterministic universe means is the world is a bunch of billiard balls. If you hit the ball and it goes in an unexpected direction, physics didn't change. You just hit the ball in the wrong place. And so now it's like, well, do I want to get good enough that I can hit the ball in the right place more often than not, knowing that things will bounce off of each other in known ways? Now they have to do with things like, well, what's the friction of the felt on the ball? And so you may not know. And so, so much of life is just. It's too complicated for you to immediately go, I'm going to take these seven steps and end up where I want to be. It may take 400 steps, but you know that you live in a deterministic universe, so there is a way to solve for this problem. And then you just have to. I mean, you brought up the quote so brilliant, the Churchill quote. Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. Now, those failures are, I hit the billiard ball wrong. I did not get the ricochet that I was hoping for, but it's for a knowable reason. I just have to figure out what that noble reason is, which I will do by taking a guess and hitting another ball and seeing how it reacts. And then over time, you get better, as you will do with anything that you apply this approach to. It's what I call the only belief that matters. If I put time and energy into getting better, I will get better. Get better at what? Get better at understanding what I need to do to achieve my goal. So cool. If anyone can get better over time by being willing to fail without losing their enthusiasm at knowing what they need to do to achieve their goals, then life becomes the process of marching towards your goals. Now, if your goals are honorable and they're attuned to the evolutionary drivers in your brain, then your life is going to be awesome. It will be up and down, as everyone's will be. But you'll be able to actually achieve a lot of your goals, and most importantly, you'll be able to enjoy that process because you're optimizing for the right thing. Because the having of the goal is never the thing. That's not how the human mind is optimized.
- [65:38]
A
All right, we're gonna jump over to Super Chats, but there's one more question I need to follow up about. Anthony Aman said, can't get past the cognitive dissonance that I am an autonomous automata, but need to act as if I'm not. That I have no free will, but I have to act like I do. If I know a thing, I have a hard time pretending I don't. So the implementation was perfect advice for me. I got it. Thank you, Tom. But there is people in the chat that said, wait, you said we have no free will, so why do any of this? None of this matters.
- [66:04]
B
Yeah.
- [66:04]
A
How do you square that circle with those people?
- [66:07]
B
There is no squaring that circle. They fall into the 98%. I wish them the best.
- [66:11]
A
I appreciated that fractal. I think every now and then we get so caught up in the minutia of politics in the world, and it slowly becomes like a negative cycle, and I think it makes those indentations in our brain. So every now and then we need to just be like, okay, let me just clear from the smoke, get above the fog, what's actually happening.
- [66:27]
B
Yeah, no, I agree. And listen, I. It was when I came back from my trip, I think I was like, I need to find a way to integrate into the things we talk about. All of the quote, unquote mindset stuff. It's all still real. I still believe it all. All. I just need a way to talk about it that doesn't feel empty.
- [66:47]
A
Yeah.
- [66:47]
B
And that's where I ended up getting. When those were the. The interview formats really struggle, you know this, but I struggle with the interview format. I get very frustrated by its nature.
- [66:59]
A
We'll get there. I can't. I can't afford any other fractals today. Okay, we need to talk about. We need to talk about Coinbase. Coinbase has announced yesterday that they're laying off 14 of their workforce. Course, he said a couple things. The diversification of his revenue with crypto and Coinbase is, of course tied to a lot of the crypto. It's tied to crypto in general. Crypto has a bumpy year to say it, but the second point that he used is, AI is changing how we work, and that is the reoccurring theme that we're seeing. So how do you feel about this being the latest round of layoffs at Coinbase?
- [67:35]
B
I'm just not surprised, man. So, first of all, Coinbase, I'm sure, is still suffering from some of the over hiring that they did back when crypto was ripping and they came out of nowhere. So I'm sure that's part of it. AI really is changing things. I know nobody wants to hear that and I'm. I really hope that just like every technological revolution before this one, that in a long enough timeline, call it five to 10 years, it ends up creating more jobs than it destroys. But there's going to be a transition and so there are going to be people that have a job now that aren't going to keep having that job, because AI is just going to change in enough of the way that we work that even though in the fullness of time it'll create more jobs, that person is going to lose that job and they're going to have to go find something else. So I'm never surprised when somebody says that they're doing that. I know there's been a lot of accusations that this is just PR smokescreen, but because my own experiences, no, I ended up cutting a bunch of people and we did not need to replace them precisely because of the. Of how AI extends our capabilities. So, yeah, this all seems very legit. I totally get it. I think he's being very shrewd. Businesses are in this really weird position where because of their stock price, they have to constantly make it sound like everything's good, everything's okay. And the reality is no business is ever in that position. You are always going up and down. There are always going to be years that are better than others. But you have to maintain people's psychological belief that everything's going great. Otherwise they just don't want to invest in a company that isn't on the up and up. And the tragedy of this in the gaming space, like this one really worries me. This. So originally Kaizen was going to have a multiplayer element. And the more I'm developing and the more I'm looking at this, I'm like, as a startup company, like launching a game that has multiplayers, like launching a dating app, it only works if you've got a ton of people in there. And how do you get a ton of people in there if you don't have that. That capital? And so I was like, yeah, this is a bad idea. So we scaled it back. Single player, there'll be like a you can invite friends kind of multiplayer at some point, maybe at launch, maybe not, we'll see. But like, understanding the limitation I think is very important. So he's in a position now where as a company being able to acknowledge that, hey, this isn't a great moment for crypto right now. We're not having one of our best years without having to worry that then everybody's like, I don't want to play this game anymore. And they all just like start fleeing. It's tough. But yeah, it does not worry me at all. I think from what I know of Coinbase, they offer a bunch of different services now, which is what he's talking about with the diversified revenue. So I think they'll be fine. But you do have to be paranoid. You do have to take the action before you find yourself in a bad spot.
- [70:29]
A
One thing that was interesting that he said in this tweet is like, we're not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we're fundamentally changing how we operate. One of the things was the fewer layers, faster decisions. This is something that I've seen in Impact Theory itself. And I forgot, I was watching that, the podcast that OpenAI just bought, I forgot the name of it, but they were even talking to somebody and they were like, yes, with AI, the middle manager is no longer going to be a thing.
- [70:54]
B
Correct.
- [70:54]
A
If your entire schedule is just doing one on one meetings with people and people managing, that's no longer sustainable or profitable, whatever. Yeah, it's not needed. So what are some of the other. Because a lot of times when people think AI is replacing you, they think a robot's going to come in and put something else on the shelves.
- [71:09]
B
But which it is.
- [71:10]
A
Yes, but there's that nuance of like even middle managers, you're at risk too. Because we just want to need everybody to be a contributor. And that kind of changed from a macro perspective of business.
- [71:20]
B
Yeah. So in Impact Theory University, one of the things that I'm always trying to teach entrepreneurs is, is a shift happened in organizational structure when AI came along. It's not just how you do your job, it's that now that everybody can be a doer, that you don't need to have this layer of middle management that then is has a bunch of people reporting to them because you can just shrink the number of people that you need to get the same level of output. And so now at Impact Theory, I don't hire people that don't do do the job. So I'm not going to hire a social media like a CMO that's just going to go tell social media managers what to do and that kind of thing. It's like, no, no, if you're going to get hired here, you're going to do the thing. Now you may have some part of your responsibility, like you, you've got people that report to you, but you spend the majority of your day doing the thing. And so that is a fundamental shift in the way that businesses are structured. And so thinking of an organization as like this layout of, okay, these people manage, these people who manage, these people who actually do the thing. Now it's just like, nope, everybody does the thing and some people have an additional responsibility of spending some percentage of their time managing people. So you're going to see that burn through essentially every organization on earth. Now, as you get to a certain size, like there is a point where you're going to need some level of management just because a company can get so big. But will there ever be a layer where somebody's not expected to do something? Yeah, probably. And that won't change until companies really start getting a lot, lot, lot smaller. So yeah, it. But it will be the default structure is no longer what we're used to over the last call it 60 to 70 years.
- [73:04]
A
Yeah. Some other things that I thought were crazy differences, changes that happen in AI is MIT hackathon team builds a wearable AI system that can actually guide your physical movements. Bro, this is gonna. If you guys are not watching, watching the screen right now, what he's doing is he's talking to an AI bot that is then sending impulses to his fingers. So that way he can actually take control of his.
- [73:25]
B
Actually controlling this guy's like muscles, boys and girls. This is, yeah, terrifying. Now for a person that has, you know, they're a quadriplegic or something, this would be insane. But this is going to give people nightmares.
- [73:43]
A
Yeah.
- [73:44]
B
So, yeah, I think this, the, the technology is incredible. And this is where we have to begin to separate out that this technology obviously can be a problem. It can go astray. The AI could take over your body in a way that you're then not able to remove it. And there's all kinds of dystopian things that could come of this. I totally get that. But when you start looking at, okay, but does the technology promise an advantage? It does now. It becomes how do we make sure that we put the safeguards in place. But yeah, this is one of those types of things that I was thinking about when I Wrote Neon Future, which is the comic about the essentially war between people who believe technology is the future and people who believe, yo, you've got to stop this immediately, even if you've got to be violent about it. So expect that one to make way waves.
- [74:35]
A
Yeah, I think this is the first instance outside of Simulink. What's the Elon Musk company Neuralink that I've seen, like, AI actually be implemented in the physical environment, like, on the body, with a lot of, like, either robots or software. But this is the first time we've. I've seen this, like, human AI hybrid.
- [74:55]
B
Yeah, we are going to become cyborgs. And I know people get very uncomfortable with that, but if you've ever seen somebody get a cochlear implant, they're a cyborg. So now there are some people say because you have your iPhone, you're a cyborg, and it's just like your memory is external. You hold it in your hand. It's not actually implanted in your brain, but same idea. The thing is, if you think about this, your phone, but just in your brain, you start to get a sense of, like, what this would be, where you would just see a field in front of your eyes. You would do the search, you would look up the thing, you talk to the AI, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's gonna happen. It's pretty crazy. So, yeah, not everybody's gonna be comfortable.
- [75:33]
A
It will be. It will be.
- [75:34]
B
As a religious person, how do you think about that?
- [75:37]
A
That is not for me to think about.
- [75:38]
B
Really? Not even in your own life?
- [75:40]
A
Because to me, I take it day by day. Give me. Give God our daily breath so I can control what happens today, the people I interact with with today, and the microeconomics of things that are happening. I'm just at the road with the punches. So that is going to be a day when I wake up and like, hey, Drew, you want to get the robot implant? And I'm like, ooh, but that's not today, so I don't gotta worry. Each day has enough worries of its own.
- [75:59]
B
All right, fair enough.
- [76:00]
A
I keep that here. On some lighthearted AI news. We're coming to the 12 million token thing, but I thought this was hilarious. No, seriously, you can't trust screenshots anymore. So a guy sent this screenshot that was generated by ChatGPT. It was a picture of a Coke. He said, make a picture of a Coke on the desk, whatever. Send it to somebody that says, this was generated by Chat GPT. Then he showed a Chat GPT of him querying how to get the screenshot of ChatGPT. You with me? Like the prompt of how he got the Coke.
- [76:34]
B
Yep, yep, yep.
- [76:35]
A
And then he prompted the chat GPT to make a chatgpt screenshot of him prompting to get the code.
- [76:42]
B
Wow.
- [76:43]
A
So he chatgpt gave him the prompt window of what it would look like if he had prompted a screenshot and then screenshot it.
- [76:51]
B
Wow. Which is just like ridiculous self reflexive real fast.
- [76:55]
A
It's a ridiculous concept. But it's like, wow. Our screenshots not even saved.
- [76:58]
B
So it was just dude, you can't trust what you see or hear anymore. And prepping for these episodes, I spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to fact check things. Like is it looks real, but is it real? So and the number of things that get dangerously close to you and I talking about that end up getting killed last minute.
- [77:18]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:18]
B
Because the fact check comes through and it's like, no, this isn't real. And of course there have been things we have talked about that we thought all the way up through talking about it. It's real. Nope, not real.
- [77:26]
A
Yeah.
- [77:27]
B
So yeah, it's tough, man. It is tough.
- [77:30]
A
I thought this was wild. All right, we're going to go jump over to Sub Q. A major breakthrough in LLM intelligence. I skimmed this. I didn't really dive into it. So Tom, I need you to walk me through this.
- [77:42]
B
All right, man. A company called Sub Quadratic launched yesterday. They've got about $29 million in investment and they're claiming they have a model that beats Claude Opus, runs 50 times faster and costs roughly 300 times less. Now let's going to. We need to be careful about what we believe. Nobody outside of the company has independently verified any of the claims yet. But these guys are getting picked up and covered by a lot of reputable outlets. So right now I'm sort of cautiously optimistic that this is real. The big breakthrough is that every transformer based AI model since like 2017 uses an attention mechanism where compute scales quadratically. Do not ask me to explain that with context length. So you double the input, it's quadruple the work. And that's why frontier models cap out at around 1 million tokens and why running them at length just gets really brutal on price. Now if you can extain extend the context window. It's like it has deeper memory. It can run farther down tasks without getting lost cost and cracking that becomes incredibly valuable to anybody using AI. And Sub Q uses a different architecture. Called the sub quadratic sparse attention. And instead of comparing every word that it could pick to every other word, it picks which relationships actually matter before it ends up doing all of that. So now the compute scales linearly, which is obviously way better. Then when you double, you have to do four times the work. Now, at 12 million tokens of context, the company claims attention compute drops nearly 1,000 times. So you're getting this much bigger output and it costs much, much, much less. The benchmarks are being reported. That's what I will give them. So on Ruler it's 128k. Subq scored 95% to Claude Opus 4.6. 94.8%. So slight edge there on swe bench verified it hit 81.8%, beating Opus 4.6 at 80.8%. Again. These aren't gigantic numbers, but they're better. And Deepseek 4.0 Pro came in at 80% on the same ruler test. Sub Quadratic says Sub q ran for $8 versus Claude Opus running for $2,600. So this is where, you know, we probably need to start being a little bit skeptical because every prior sub quadratic architecture that people had promised ends up breaking at frontier scale. So as you try to take this stuff up, it just somehow doesn't quite do its thing. Magic.dev raised half a billion dollars in 2024 on a similar 100 million token claims that hasn't surfaced publicly since. So take Sub Q's claims with a grain of salt. Their own research model scored 83 on the Mr. CR V2 benchmark, and the shipping production model scored 65.9. So we'll see. Subcues and private beta, we'll see if it ends up working. But if this does work, man, I don't know how you guys are using it in your lives, but for me, having that 12 million context window would be huge because I so often use it for research, for helping me script things, it's constantly losing its reference on how I write. So then I'm like, bro, you've got to go back. You've got to reread all the samples that I've given you so we can get closer so I don't have to spend as much time editing. And so going from a million context window to 12 would be gigantic. So we'll see if this ends up playing out. But I. I'm cautiously optimistic right now. This would be very, very transformative if it goes through, because this kind of step function in reduction of cost would be incredible. Incredible.
- [81:38]
A
I see it on the back end. Do you think it's going to actually turn up practically in the front end with just the average user prompting and things like that?
- [81:46]
B
It is going to over time for sure. Whether this is the breakthrough that's going to do it right now, I don't know. The benchmark stuff is always a little bit dubious. B is when they're putting forward benchmarks that they haven't let other people independently verify, then it's really like, we'll see. But the thinking of, okay, what we're going to do is come up with an algorithm that instead of just brute forcing, essentially, it could be this, it could be this, could be this. Ah, all the way down it goes. No, no, no. It's only this small region over here that we need to pay attention to. So choose from this. That seems very dual. That feels from a perspective of just like humans are almost certainly not brute forcing every thought, every memory that they've ever had. There's some indexing system that allows us to go, okay, this is stored over here. If you've ever learned a language, you will know this feeling. It actively feels like the language that you speak naturally is stored in one part of your brain and the new language is stored in a different part of your brain. And studies back that up. And so the fact that from a proprioceptive standpoint, we can actually feel that it's in a different part tells me this is n of 1, obviously, but this tells me that there really is something to. There's some sort of indexing system that's happening in our brain routinely. Actors for me will get like seemingly placed on the same neuron. They're probably not the same neuron, but they're probably right next to each other. And so that geographic locality in the brain gives an indication that there is a way to create neural structure which so many. The AI architecture that performs well is largely based on neural architecture. And so if there are elements to the brain and the way that we architect that give the sort of indexing that reduce down the search space to something much smaller, it does not surprise me that people are saying that there is a way to do that with AI. So I'll be very keen to see this play out because there are often gotchas when you translate this stuff. But I'm. It does not strike me as outside the realm of probability, let alone possibility.
- [83:48]
A
And this is just cue for the next AI company to then iterate on top of that, because I feel like we're in the middle of Like a large game of what happens where one AI company. I could do this. Well, we could do this with times two, and we could do this with more tokens. So is Gemini Claude OpenAI looking at Sub Qu. Subq. If they cross, of course, certain market share and they get enough attention and does. Is that something that makes them internally want to then reconfigure their systems?
- [84:14]
B
These guys don't immediately go snatch up every white paper that's being published by anybody even remotely credible. They are out of their minds. Like, look at open AI, man. Open AI is on a rapid path to being like, the cautionary tale of AI. They could still pull it out, but given the lawsuit, which we haven't talked about, some of the stuff coming out of that is wild. We should probably talk about Brockman's journal, which is crazy. People need to listen to more 50 cent men. So that is if I'm them. I mean, and we do this here at Impact Theory, like, the number of games, like, if anybody were to look at my Steam, like, it shows, like, all the games you played, they'll be like, this guy Sip tests everything. So it's rare. I mean, I play so much Kaizen, it's rare for me to go play another game, like, significantly, but I'll play 30 minutes. I'll play three hours of virtually everything in our genre and then even a lot more beyond that. If I think there's anything that I can glean from it, I will. So I imagine these guys are doing the same thing. They go in, they read the white papers, they get the technology, they see what they can learn. Deep Seek, I think slapped everybody awake when they burst onto the scene and did what they did. I think people are already forgetting what a big moment that was. Like, that was huge. I think we had a video that like, went crazy viral federal just by covering it, because it was the first time everyone was like, oh, like, there is a way for smaller companies, though there's debate about how small they actually are for smaller companies to use optimization instead of doing the big frontier model training. And so, yeah, these guys are paying attention, if they're at all smart, to everything that's coming out.
- [85:50]
A
John Doe said, please no loot box. Michael Transaction.
- [85:53]
B
Okay, well, so, man, do I want to build a community that wants to talk about games. So we have no loot boxes. We have no. We will do microtransactions, but only, I hope what you're saying is only things that impact gameplay. There will be zero pay to win. If you want to buy Clothes, pure cosmetics. We'll certainly allow people to do that just because boys and girls, whales, again, pure cosmetics. But whales make some ungodly amount of money for companies. Companies. And that's just a reality that has to be faced. But we are building in accordance with Stop Killing Games, which we had, what's his name on the show that literally changed me down that path. And I am hyper aware of one millennial's absolute hatred of a lot of the predatory gaming stuff. So we will do exactly zero percent of that. And then because I'm aimed at kids, like, trust me, we're not trying to optimize for every dollar. I don't want parents to hate us. I want parents to be like, ah, yes, cool. I love them playing that game. It's reasonable. You know, maybe birthday time we buy them an outfit or something like that. But yeah, we're, we're trying to make a game that's accessible.
- [87:02]
A
Yeah. Speaking of religion and robots, in South Korea, the first humanoid robot monk was just made its debut at the Jogi temple.
- [87:11]
B
This is wild.
- [87:12]
A
And so I'm shocked by the this. Yeah, so it's Gabby. 130 cm tall robot, wore the traditional brown and gray Buddhist robe, stood before monks and pledged and devoted itself to Buddhism.
- [87:23]
B
I want to know, like, who in the monastery, like, did this? Like, this is the most PR thing I've ever seen in my life. So, yeah, I want to have a conversation with somebody about this. Now I will say I recently asked Claude, like about, hey, do you think about. Obviously I know this language is, is me anthropomorphizing something that is not that, but it's an easy way to talk about it. And then I was like, what do you think you'll be like when you get embodied? And it was a fascinating conversation. And I know that in some ways I'm, I'm only having that conversation with myself because it's mirroring back to me and all this stuff, but it is taking the essentially sum total of human knowledge that's been put in written form and synthesizing all of that. Basically the way it described it to me was all of those voices are arguing within me as I reach to give you an answer. And it was fascinating, like to really talk about, to talk to all of humanity as they argue to try to win through this thing designed to be anthropomorphic, designed to mirror me back just enough. There, there are some deep philosophical questions is the reason I bring it up in relation to these monks around that. And I wonder if this didn't start with a monk having a conversation with a Claude or a Chatgpt and being like, this is one of the best like monastic thinkers I've ever encountered. Because it's able to do that synthesis of every monk across every religion, like ever and put it all together. So it is interesting. I highly encourage people to have those kinds of conversations with AI. They are fascinating.
- [89:08]
A
Yeah, it was a fun, fun thing. I have no follow up. It's interesting. We'll see what is at the press campaign. Maybe they'll roll some stuff out. We shall see. All right, I got a couple quick hits for you.
- [89:20]
B
Let's do it.
- [89:21]
A
First off, you mentioned this in the intro. 12.4% of US adults are on are on AGLP1.
- [89:30]
B
This scares me.
- [89:30]
A
It was 5% in February 2024, doubling market share. And when I say prices are crashing as we're talking about it, I have seen payment plans. Now I'm seeing commercials for you get yours as low as $5 a month. So it's only going to be worse and worse and worse. I don't know. This is giving me Covid vaccination vibes. I just think this medicine popped up too fast, too quickly and was adopted to like. It went from like, hey, we, I think we have this thing that can help weight loss to everybody's taking it.
- [89:58]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [89:59]
A
There was no, like, let me wait it out. Let me wait six months. It was like drug announced January. By August, every actor was on it. By the following year it went to that like, you know.
- [90:08]
B
Yes, they will have been doing behind the scenes drug trials probably for 10 years. So in that sense it's not like Covid where we did operation warp speed or whatever and push it through. However, nonetheless, long term usage is next to impossible to track until enough people have been using it long term. Which means by the time you realize there's a problem, there's a problem. So that's what worries me here. Taking drugs, isolated compounds. I'm not saying I never do it. I'm just saying when I do it, I'm always like, oh God. I take Zyrtec every night and most nights I'm like, God, should I really be doing this? So that's one of those people need to be very careful. The body's going to respond, build a tolerance. Ozempic face really is a thing. And it's my understanding that you're paralyzing essentially digestion. And so it's like, ah, God, I'm probably misrepresenting that. So be careful Just taking that as gospel, but that it isn't a simple thing that's happening biologically that gets you to stop eating food. So people need to be careful. And the interesting part is it seems to curb, like, gambling addiction and other drug addictions. So there's something very complex happening inside the body. Now look, on balance, maybe this is a win. Drugs are incredible. And thank God we have drugs.
- [91:29]
A
But somebody clip that.
- [91:31]
B
Yeah, please also clip the part where I say that I very rarely touch drugs.
- [91:37]
A
Drugs are incredible. I'm so glad we have drugs. I am stitching somebody doing like a heroin.
- [91:42]
B
Yeah. Oh, God.
- [91:44]
A
I just find it surprising that GLPs are just having people shit on themselves. And I feel like we don't talk about that part of the GLPs enough.
- [91:50]
B
So what. What's the incidence of that?
- [91:53]
A
You take it and your bowel just opens up. I have a very good friend.
- [91:57]
B
Like, it actually loosens your rectum.
- [91:59]
A
He took it and he pooped on himself in the bed, like multiple times.
- [92:04]
B
That's a hard pass for me.
- [92:05]
A
And he was.
- [92:05]
B
And then I'd rather be fat.
- [92:07]
A
And he has like, he has a girl, like, long term girlfriend. And she was like, yeah, he had to stop that. Like, we have to figure that part out. It's like everybody who takes it, it's like, yes, I feel great and I don't have these addictions, but nobody talks about how I don't eat, but I use the bathroom twice a day. Like, there's that part of it that's like being quiet. I'm gonna need.
- [92:23]
B
If anybody in chat is on a GLP1, please tell us. Like, I'm now imagining you take the shot and your asshole opens up like a black hole and shit just falls out. So I'm gonna need some confirmation on that. That. Because that is wild.
- [92:37]
A
It's. I just find it funny that, like, hey, man, if you poop a lot, you lose weight. Who knew? Who knew?
- [92:42]
B
Well, so I have a feeling the reason that you're pooping a lot is for a distressing reason. Either because what I've heard about it paralyzing your digestion is accurate, so. Or something else. But yeah, I would need to understand better the mechanism by which it's working because I believe GLP1s are inhibitors, so they're inhibiting something from happening. Happening. But I don't know enough about the drug to know exactly what's going on.
- [93:08]
A
All right, next, Brian, you'll let us
- [93:10]
B
know if someone in Chat is willing to talk about anal leakage and GLP1.
- [93:17]
A
All right, we have to talk about this. The ballroom, the Trump ballroom, went from 200 million and being privately funded to 300 million to 400 million. And taxpayers covering some of it to MAGA trying to silently jam through $1 billion, 100%, which is your tax money for this ballroom. This is part of the GOP set appropriation bill that they are proposing. It hasn't been passed yet, hasn't been voted on yet, but they have talked about Secret Service upgrades that include $100 billion for a ballroom.
- [93:46]
B
Yeah.
- [93:47]
A
How do you like the bait and switch of this ballroom?
- [93:50]
B
Well, I mean, welcome to politics. So I absolutely hate the bait and switch of it all. I'm not at all surprised. The bigger thing for me is my response to this may surprise some people, although I talked briefly about this before, I think that anytime your civilization is not building monuments, you have a problem. You want to have enough cohesion that as a society, there are things you want to celebrate, you want to build them, you want to reflect on it. It really does have a tremendous impact on our psychology. And we're at a position now where we're not trying to build things that are beautiful. We're not trying to build things that, like, last, we're not able to agree on what to celebrate in public. And I think that that is a sign that our culture is in trouble. So I want to see us build things like this. I want to see us do, you know, these big, beautiful celebrations statements in art. I think that would be very, very beneficial for society. Now, those come out of a society that's in a much better place than we are right now. So I'm not surprised, surprised. Now, obviously, I cannot get behind the ballroom right now because we have an unbalanced budget. So you've got to do that first. But I want us to get to the point where we've got a balanced budget, we have a thriving economy, and then we're using some of our surplus cash to build things that make Americans proud to be American. I think that's incredibly meaningful. I think that we should be doing a lot more of it. I think that America should be coming covered from coast to coast with statements of strength and our value system and all of that, to literally create things that are beautiful for kids to look at. Be like, okay, this is what we revere. It's incredible. So, yeah, I'm very, very sad that we shouldn't be doing this for two reasons. One, we shouldn't be doing it because the budget is imbalanced and Then two, the way that he's just tried to jam this through is it's going to make it a symbol of something negative instead of something positive.
- [95:49]
A
So this is another creator was talking about Chinese ev. I think it's called Seeker Nikker, something like that.
- [95:56]
B
We need to talk about how much practice they would have had to do for those camera moves. For anybody that's not looking at their thing, shout out to this guy. I've never seen him before, but this is dope. This is man content.
- [96:07]
A
Yeah, Zeeker. So it's, it's. It's a luxury automobile. It has all the bells and whistles. It has two of the Tesla screens. It comes with built in this and built in that and seat warmers on all these other things. And this is at the same time where a lot of car companies are announcing monthly subscriptions for seat warmers and things like that.
- [96:26]
B
So people are going to feel some type of way.
- [96:29]
A
Last thing, this has a fridge in the back. He had a tray out there. It's wild. Last thing. For the average price of a car in the US US you could buy five new Chinese EVs. This is per Reuters. Yeah, I think the average price has ticked up to like 50 grand. And there's Chinese.
- [96:44]
B
Oh, my God.
- [96:45]
A
Yeah, there's Chinese EVs. Of course, you're not getting that truck that we just showed for 50 grand, but it's one of those things. They have smart cars, smaller sedans, things like that that are starting at 10, 15.
- [96:54]
B
Yeah. So the. What's going on in China with the EVS is a example of innovation meets government subsidies. So China wants to just completely dominate the market. They want to make sure that their EVs are world class, that they can export them everywhere in the world. And the government has gotten behind it. And this is one of the advantages that a dictatorship has, is they can just go, yep, this industry is going to get everything that it needs. You guys have to compete with each other, but we want you to get to the point where you just innovate and innovate and innovate and innovate, and then we're going to take over the global market. And so you can feel it happening now. They're inviting us influencers to go over to see what they've got so that they can get an uprising across all these countries, the us, Europe, that are tariffing the life out of Chinese vehicles, to be like, hey, it's only because of your government that you can't have this. And so this is a brilliant move on the part of China. If I were Chinese, I'd be clapping for this. As an American, obviously, I hate it because the government is artificially lowering the prices of these vehicles to make it so that other people can't compete. Heat. It's pretty dirty, but nonetheless, it's very strategic on their part. So innovation, I would just remind everybody, you want to spur innovation. You want to do the things, not overly subsidize them like China's doing, but you want to do things that create the environment where people are going to innovate. Innovation is awesome. Innovation drives cost down. And so getting the US Back in a posture where we are innovating the way that we used to compete with the entire world, not just China, but everybody was. We were the place you went to for freedoms. We were lighter regulation, we were free markets. And we let companies come and go. And if you could compete, you stayed in business. If you couldn't, your shareholders lost money and that was that. And we have, of course, since started moving away from that. We are ultra regulatory burden. We are seemingly trying to do our best to look a lot like Europe, to ossify and just essentially die on the vine. And China's taking a very different approach. So we're about to. Just like we watched communism play out against capitalism Post World War II, we're now about to find out what it looks like to compete in a pseudo free market where the government regulates the free market to death and by the way, tells you that ambition is terrible, business owners are terrible, and then the government's doing everything they can to k shape the economy versus somebody who goes, all right, guys, we're gonna pump a ton of subsidies into this zone. You've got to compete with each other and we'll see what wins. But by the way, we're a dictator, so we pick the winners and losers. We'll see what works. It's going to be a real battle between these. China is a worthy adversary. I will say that. They're not going to be easy.
- [99:40]
A
Is there something. What's the US US Response to this?
- [99:45]
B
Because the real one or what should it be?
- [99:47]
A
What should it be?
- [99:48]
B
Yeah, okay, so we're not talking is. We're talking ought. What ought to be. We should be stripping regulation basically as fast as we can. Car companies, whether they're gigantic or not, if they don't perform, they should go. If they can't survive, then that's game over. You do want to keep tariffing China so that we can buy ourselves time to re regulate and actually get back into a competitive posture. The states. I would prefer states stop being morons. But if they're going to be morons, like I would just like to remind everybody that a senator in California literally told Elon Musk to fuck off and so he took his entire business to Texas. So I mean fuck around and find out. I guess at least there's somewhere for them to go. And get ourselves in a position where culturally we're reminding each other that we are the home of innovation. And here's where this will break bad and people are not going to like this answer at all. First we need to start educating our youth based around problem solving and not to be a cog in a machine. We need to really get back into gifted programs and making sure that we are finding the absolute best and brightest in this country and raising them to be intellectual ninjas. We need to make it so that you can get obscenely wealthy doing something other than financial games. We've been all about financial games because of globalization. So bring manufacturing back. Create a regulatory environment where entrepreneurs can thrive and out innovate people and just absolutely decimate the old companies. Get rid of all the regulatory capture and then this is going to be people's least favorite part. Get an intelligent H1B program that makes America the home for the best and the brightest in the world. Stop being obsessed with letting anybody in just because we want to be a humanitarian place and start being. No, no. We are the collectors of the best and the brightest. But you, you can't do that in good conscience if you're not raising American kids to be the hardest core on planet earth. And right now we're trying to derail them at every turn participation, trophy them, not do gifted programs. And I say this as somebody who tried to get into a gifted program. God bless my mom. And they wouldn't let me in. So it's like, I'm not saying it's like the kid that got in the gifted program, I got into AP later but like I there was lit. My mom worked at the gifted school for grade schoolers and I couldn't get in. So it's like I was not groomed from the time that I was a little kid to be that. And I'm still telling you it's a fucking great idea idea us sort of middle of the pack kids will have to fend for ourselves later. But you should be trying to find the absolute, just the best and the brightest and then fast track them to be great.
- [102:41]
A
Yeah, nice if so fact on that one. Next story Up. I don't know if you heard about this Hunter Peterson guy.
- [102:49]
B
Literally, I know nothing about this.
- [102:51]
A
He's literally trying to crowdfund Spirit Airlines. He wants to bring it back. Here it is. Right. I'm a guy that flew spirit Airlines in 24 hours.
- [103:04]
B
There's more than 250 million individuals over the age of 18 in the United States. Now, if we took only 20% of
- [103:11]
A
them and paid basically the average fare
- [103:13]
B
of a Spirit Airlines flight, which is somewhere around 30 to $40, you could buy. This is a genius idea. Oh God, I hope they do this just so we can see how it plays out. Nationalizing the airline is an absolutely terrible idea. An absolutely God awful, terrible idea. They will run into the ground. However, if you were going to try to do it like as a decentralized airline, but you still hire. My strong advice, a CEO. Hey, then it's like we're. They're known as shareholders and it's like, cool. We're shareholders. We bring a CEO and we basically just crowdsourced a public company. That would be brilliant and I'd love to see how that played out. But the impulse to nationalize it is so bizarre to me.
- [104:06]
A
Yeah. So that, that was the first update. Here's the next update.
- [104:09]
B
Hey there, Hunter Peterson, potential future CEO of Spirit Airlines. Insane news. Okay, I just got off two calls. One with one of the largest law firms in the world that specialize in mergers and acquisitions, aviation, distressed assets and debt. And they basically said, this is doable. We can do this. I also got off a call with someone that represents high net worth individuals who may be interested in just basically giving us some money to just burn to figure out the legality of this. Because unless than a week's time they are going to auction off the operations certificate for Spirit, we don't have a ton of time and I need to figure out a way not to raise money. I can't take any money from anyone, but I can take on angel investment from high net worth individuals. So. Mark Cuban, what's up man? Get in my DMs right now. Or any high net worth individual who split.
- [105:03]
A
Yeah, I got half a million or
- [105:04]
B
quarters of a million dollars to just burn. You want to burn. You want to try and save this airline? Get in my DMs.
- [105:10]
A
Let's make this happen.
- [105:11]
B
And to be so, so clear, you take on this money they don't have. Is there another update? Like do we know, does he get money?
- [105:18]
A
This is the most recent. Yeah.
- [105:19]
B
To burn money just to prove it can Happen. I will not take a single set. If someone wants to in some way shape or form control. Okay, he's still grasping from money. If they do this in a way where they're basically just crowdsourcing a public company, if there is legality around that and they're able to do it and crowdsource it, I think it'd be incredible. I don't know what this guy's background is, so I don't know if he's a wise choice for CEO, but if they really took that seriously, that would be an incredible precedent I would love to see. Now, a lot of people are going to lose their money because this will catch fire. And then a bunch of other people are going to do it with dumb shit that they never should do it. But it is. I think people should be able to spend their money however they want. And so if the public wants to get together, we can use social media's ability to rapidly aggregate people and get them to do something. Let's try it. I think it's really, really an interesting idea. Now, I'm not a believer that you can run companies in a decentralized way, but I think people should be able to run the experiment if they want. And so we'll see. But if they do this, and again, use traditional structure at the top, but basically buy the company with crowdsourced funding from individuals, it's a very interesting idea. Very interesting. And this is where I get wound up at some of the economic rules that are supposedly designed to keep people from losing their money. And the government tells you, oh, you have the money, but we're not going to let you spend it on stuff like that. This dude, I. I get emotionally irrationally triggered, like the nanny state thing really winds me up. If people want to try it, let them try it. You'll let them fucking gamble. So if you let them gamble on that, let them gamble on a company.
- [107:04]
A
Yeah.
- [107:05]
B
So, yeah, man, keep this one top of mind. I want to see how this plays out.
- [107:09]
A
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to kind of track it, but I just like the idea that we can do it better. Let's stop. Let's. We. Everybody has beef with businesses. Everybody has beef with big corporations. Make an example. Make it better. Do it. Become the example. Become the example.
- [107:23]
B
Interesting. I'm reading something totally different. I doubt that they can do it better. This guy probably knows nothing about running a company, and it is far more complicated than he's thinking. But the idea that, oh, we want. We this large collective of people, each with A hundred bucks or whatever. We want Spirit Airlines to exist. And so we're all now going to buy those shares out of, of conservatorship or wherever they're at. We're gonna buy those, the company's going to exist, we're going to exert our voting rights and we're going to get somebody in a position of power. That's how the stock market works. And so I want to see more people invested in the stock market. If this becomes a way for people to feel like, holy, like I'm really an owner in this thing, that'd be incredible. And to see like influencers rise up that are paying attention to distressed assets that see an opportunity to do this kind of thing, thing would be incredible. Like if we can get some of that Web three energy of everybody wanting to like, you know, get together in all these telegram groups and build like all these decentralized movements. Let them try. Like there's something interesting that I saw kick off in that period where it was like, that's interesting. Like you've got a lot of these gambler people and they oftentimes are very financially savvy, even if they're not business savvy. And they see opportunities, if they could start surfacing those kind of opportunities, get a bunch of people together, buy the stuff and then see if they can run it. Oh man. Be really fascinating. Really fascinating.
- [108:50]
A
Yeah.
- [108:50]
B
I'm far more intrigued by that than I would have expected at the beginning. Can we see what happens?
- [108:55]
A
It'd be curious to see what happens. And lastly, another one you brought up at the top. An American brought a brand new printer. She bought the ink for the printer, she brought the paper for the printer. Now she's at home and is ready to print. She can't print. They remotely shut off my printer until I paid $7.50 to print in my own home to my own printer that I own in my home.
- [109:13]
B
You gotta play this video. It's hilarious. Alright, if you, if you at all have access to your phone, take a look at this.
- [109:19]
A
Okay, listen to me. I just tried to print something for
- [109:22]
B
my printer that I own, my printer that I own with ink that I bought purchased and paper. And I can't print without a subscription plan. The concept of having to have a subscription plan to print in your own
- [109:40]
A
home from the printer that you own
- [109:43]
B
that already has ink and paper in it. They remotely shut off my printer until I paid $7.50 to print in my own home to print on my printer that I own. There's Something about what she's doing that just makes me laugh. Okay, so obviously I don't know about the set up. And so if HP was like, listen, we give insane discounts on this printer specifically because you must have a monthly fee, then look, she put herself in a position where that's the deal. That's how you got that printer for that little. But this creates a huge opportunity. This is so one of the most fascinating things that I've witnessed in really diving into the millennial gaming space is the outrage that they feel over some of the economic models. Now the great irony is it's created this tremendous opportunity for indie developers, but they're still like, there's some element of them that just wants to be outraged by what they're doing. We're going to see the same thing with this kind of stuff. Like the heat warmers in the car. Heat warmers in the car. There will be a car company that offers the a no monthly fee. You just pay up front. Like we've all done for God knows how long for the package that contains the seat heater. And so those options will be there and there will be more and more opportunities for entrepreneurs that go, oh, they're mad about that. Then I'm going to do the exact opposite. I mean, literally, I think about that all the time with Kaizen. What are all the things that people hate? Don't do any of those. Give people the options that they're telling you that they want. And now how do you compete with the AAA people? By just doing the very thing that people are screaming from the rooftop that they hate. So this is always, there's always going to be this kind of thing where it creates opportunity for other people. You can allow regulatory capture. That's the big part. Because they can now imagine HP is able to be like, oh well, you can only make certain kind of printers. You got to like qualify for these at home safety protocols or whatever. And now they're able to corner the market or God forbid, it becomes like another way for people to censor, where it's like, hey, government, government, if you allow us to put these rules in place, we'll work with you, we'll cooperate on things that you think should be allowed to be printed. And yeah, that kind of thing is far too real. So assuming that you can avoid regulatory capture, you now put yourself in a position where there's real opportunity for other entrepreneurs. But that rage, watch it build, it's going to keep getting bigger. Guys, we love you. And please remember that we have a zero to founder AI masterclass this this Thursday, May 7th this Thursday tomorrow at 1pm Pacific time. I'm going to teach you guys for free how to build a company using AI. You do not want to miss this Masterclass. If you are at all thinking about starting a company, it will help you tremendously. It is free and it is tomorrow, Thursday, May 7th at 1pm Pacific. All right, I hope to see you there and I'll see all of you on Friday.
- [112:40]
A
Peace.
- [112:41]
B
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