← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
America’s Manufacturing Crisis, Open Source AI, and Middle East Strategy Breakdown
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. It has been wild here behind the scenes this morning and I hope you guys enjoy some of the energy you are undoubtedly gonna get today. Unfortunately, there have been massive new strikes in Tehran that began last night. Is a victory even possible at this point? We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about Trump's new doctrine which came straight from Rubio's mouth. You guys are gonna wanna hear that. It is insane. I wanna know if we're just digging a deeper hole in Iran. That becomes the big question for me. We'll talk about that from an economic angle, from just can we win the war angle. All that and more. All right, what are the real motives behind Anthropic's recent dirty moves? We're going to be talking about why Aizar David Sachs is sounding off and calling foul. Speaking of calling foul, Pelosi votes against a House bill to stop politicians from insider trading. Now that in and of itself is no surprise, but there is a plot twist that you guys are going to want to hear. Mamdani goes on Jon Stewart and makes a fool out of both of them. We're going to take a look at that. Amazon's new Blade Runner show is proving that society has extreme levels of AI anxiety. I'm very excited to talk about that. And you're never going to guess what Japan is considering doing to Pokemon. This one is definitely going to be controversial for investors, but yeah, will be important to talk about. It is getting wild out there for people using collectibles as a form of wealth creation, but it's happening. It's one of the best performing asset classes. I can't believe that's true, but it is. All right, shout out to Humble House. We love these guys. You can see. I don't know if you can Tell on camera. But these are now just basically becoming empty bottles at this point because we eat them so much. Humble House right Now is offering 15% off their freakishly delicious sauces with the code Tom. So go to humblehousefoods.com and check them out. They are phenomenal. The ingredients list is what gets me excited. It is super clean, very short things you recognize, and they really are delicious. So if you're looking, looking for something that is supportive of this show and that you're going to love putting on your food and you can feel good about putting in your body, Humble House is for you. Shout out to those guys. They've been incredible. We love them the most. Louis, we're looking at you. All right. Turning our attention to what's going on in Iran. This is really getting pretty wild. So you've got the. I'm sure all of you guys have heard the idea of an eye for an eye, but have you heard the latest coming out of Trump, which is that Trump is not running an eye for eye policy. Forget that. We are running ahead for an eye. If you don't believe me, let's hear our man Marco Rubio say it himself. Just want some clarification. Do you rule out striking civilian infrastructure? I think I saw, you know, guys, I saw Rachi, their foreign minister, who the other day say or something about their policies, an eye for an eye. The president's policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that's what it's going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they're doing. They're already paying a very heavy price. You guys don't know it because you don't cover it. You're not in Iran, you're not in the street. They don't have a free media, but they're going to continue to pay a very heavy price. Their industrial base has been decimated. Their defense industrial base has been decimated. They're losing launchers, they're losing radars every single night. They are suffering billions of dollars in damage, and their economy is a disaster. But despite all that, okay, these people who are calling us every day begging, let's do a deal, they send us messages through other countries, third countries. I mean, they're running out of countries to send. Even I had countries here coming up to me, oh, I just spoke to the Iranians. They want to do a deal. The problem is every time these people do a deal, they either break it or after they make it, they want to change the deal. So they're probably not ready to do a deal yet, but they will be soon. All right, so why exactly do they think that they're going to be ready for a deal? Because we've had 13 straight nights of American strikes on Iran. CENTCOM says that the campaign is aimed at stopping attacks on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz. But what does that mean exactly? Well, it means that they're going to continue to escalate. They've said over and over that each night things are going to keep getting worse until these guys finally acquiesce. They want to make sure that the strait is open. They're saying that it's open right now, even though that there are actually only a few ships that are willing to risk the passage. And in the last 36 hours on the ground in Iran, we've seen them sending kamikaze drones into our own bases, hitting things all across the region. They're now claiming that they're taking out our Thaad radar, our Patriot systems, the C RAM in Jordan. Jordan says it shot down four missiles and six drones in 24 hours coming from Iran. Iran is now really getting into some very aggressive language and they're letting everybody know, if you are an ally of the US we are going to come after you up to and including bases on UK Soil, not UK soil in the region, UK soil as in UK and they're telling them that if you're allowing US Military planes to take off from your bases that your bases are now military targets. They're going to come after you. They also put out a warning to all the regions, hey, just so you know, civilians, we are going to target U.S. troops that are in secret locations. So how the hell would the people know that the troops are staying there? Because the Iranians are saying we've been hitting the bases. So the US has moved their troops off of those bases and they're putting them out into just the public into hotels and places for them to stay. They're trying to do it low key. The Iranian officials have asked for people to send in to an irgc, either telegram group or signal group, I can't remember which one. But one of those saying, hey, report if you you see American troops, let us know so that we can target those facilities. So that is going to get wild. If they are intentionally going to try to maximize casualties of U.S. troops no matter where they are at. And Trump is running ahead for an eye strategy. Things are going to get way worse before they get better. And so what started out as a, hey, we're just Going to drop a couple bombs. It's going to be all good. We're going to take out their nuclear ambitions. We'll be able to prosecute this from the air. It's only going to take, what do you say, three to four weeks in the beginning. We're now in whatever month eight. This is turning into a quagmire. So it is going to be very interesting to see if we're able to actually inflict enough damage on them before we run out of munitions or not. Now, nobody knows exactly how many munitions the US has, but there are plenty of rumors flying around, some of them being put out by Iran themselves, saying, listen, the reason that these guys have now switched over to their B1 bombers that they're sending out of the UK which is making the UK a legitimate military target. The reason they're doing that is they've run out of the missiles that they can launch from their ships. So they were doing cruise missiles off of ships. We were therefore, you know, just attacking military bases. But now that's not what they're doing and they are switching because they're running out of munitions. So I would like to remind everybody in the Trump administration, I get that any of us that are old enough to remember what the vibe of America was leading up to World War II, not that I was alive back then, I'm old, but not that old that we have this vision of America as being this manufacturing superpower. We are not that manufacturing superpower right now. Now I actually think Trump is making the right moves to make us a manufacturing superpower once again in the future. But that's a 10 to 20 year build out of forcing things back into the US investing in talent like what you see in Lucky Palmer, you don't really get the military aspect from Elon Musk, but that kind of engineering talent at least trying to retain here in the US Trying to make sure that the next generation of kids grow up wanting to people that make physical things in the real world, which was something that we got out of. I'm sure we'll get into this as we talk more about economics but man, people really need to understand the, the play that empires make over and over and over. We're going to do, we're going to go into a third hour today. I'm going to talk a lot about this at that point where there's just a playbook that people run that cause you to get rid of all your manufacturing to make people feel richer. Not, not feel richer. You are making them richer, but you're burning the candle so rapidly by de industrializing, moving everything into paper that all of a sudden when you find yourself in a position like we're in now, where China is racing away from US debt again, we'll get into the specifics of that later. But just understand right now you've got China racing away from US debt, buying gold at like freakish levels, the US Having put all of its bets on the financial market, so financializing everything, not being able to make anything. So I would like to remind the Trump administration be very careful trying to prosecute a war when you don't have the ability to manufacture at the rate that you once did. And so if all of your swagger and cocksurity is based on a time long gone by then this is going to get very difficult for us to put enough pressure on the Iranians to actually get them to concede and want a deal. And so I don't think people are being honest about how big Iran is, about just how many people, 93 million people are. You can spend a lot of munitions, billions of dollars, piss a whole lot of people off and still just not be able to do enough damage to control the entire length of the strait. I forget how many miles it is, but it's a lot. And so there is a lot of places that you have to cover that they can just keep popping up new stuff. And if China is moving away from the US Hard enough, aggressively enough, and they want to see Iran be able to continue to ship oil in a way that's friendly to them, and they just sort of subtly in the background are on the Iranian side, this gets way harder than I think we expected it to be when we went into this. So yeah, this one is thankfully so far not been US with troops on the ground, though there are rumors that we've tried some things. They're just rumors right now, so I'll leave that alone. But this is not going to be a simple thing to prosecute. And so watching Trump try to deal with this as he comes into the midterms is going to be wild. And then all of this nested inside of. Look at what's happening to the oil price guys, given what's going on. Oil, if the old model was correct and China's demand is what we thought it once was, then you would expect oil to truly have reached the $200 per barrel that we were being predicted we were going to. And now we're still hovering at a little over 100. So. And then the long tail again, look at the long Tail. What's happening there says people are actually expecting deflation, not inflation, which is crazy in the long ish term. And by long term, I'm only talking six to 12 months. I'm not talking. You don't have to throw it too far out before you start seeing those numbers come down. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about why you're sweating. 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And the new messaging that we're getting from Marco Rubio is now the real messaging that they should have been giving us from the beginning, which goes like this. Yes, this is about Iran's nuclear program, but it's. It's about all the ancillary things that go along with that. So think about their missile programs. They were building up all these missile programs so that they had everything they would need to put a nuclear warhead on this. And so even if we have destroyed their ability to produce all of the nuclear weapons, the fact that they are able to build these offensive and defensive capabilities up so aggressively means that they could put themselves in a situation where we wouldn't any longer be able to stop them. And so the messaging from the beginning, maybe, maybe if they were being honest from the beginning, should have sounded more like that. These guys are on the brink of being able to stop us from stopping them. Not that they were literally a week away from nuclear weapons, but that they were getting way too close to having the defensive capabilities that they would need to make it impossible for us to come in. Now that's actually believable because what I'm seeing now is they may have already crossed that they may already have such strong defensive and offensive capabilities that they can be a big enough pain in the ass. And I know everybody tries to write it off, oh, it's just a couple of drones, but now they've got their micro submarines. I think people are calling them midget submarines, if I'm not mistaken. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Little people submarines. That's the right way to say it.
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Little people subs is crazy. Please share this.
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But I think they really. Yeah, they literally call them midget submarines. All right, so little people submarines, whatever the right word is. So they are going to get better and better at being able to cause problems. And so, given the scope and size of Iran, if we all break free of the propaganda of what we've been led to believe is Iran, Iran is not a gigantic desert full of old people. Iran is a very young population. Iran is a very lush and fertile area. Do they have deserts? Yes, of course they do. But they also have incredible mountainous regions, plenty of things that they can be self reliant on. So I think that trying to dismiss them as not a truly formidable foe is a mistake. And all the messages, messaging that we were getting coming into this was just, oh, these guys are a bunch of lunatics. They're going to be easy to wipe out. We're just going to buy forest, take out their nuclear installations, and that's going to be that. And so the desire to propagandize, to give Trump's base red meat, and just every time we drop a single bomb, we're like, oh, they've been obliterated, there's nothing left. All of that messaging has created the problem for themselves. If they had been honest in the beginning and said, listen, what this is really about is these guys are building up such capabilities that they would be able to bully everybody in the region, including us, because they only need to achieve asymmetric capabilities. And now we're just not going to be able to stop them. And so we have this one sort of window remaining. First of all, this is, you know, if I'm advising Trump, you've got me the only president that's actually willing to do something about it. And so it's possible that the window is measured in three or four years, that it's not like it's the next few months. But to actually prosecute this, well, we've got to get moving now. We've got to try to press the advantage while we still have a bigger advantage. And every day that we delay, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem. And because down the road, they've just continued to escalate their nuclear program such that if they got to the point where nobody was going to be able to stop them, they only have a few remaining pieces to put in place, and boom, now they can really start attacking people. So we're going to have to move in and do this thing now. Literally. I'm obviously paraphrasing, but that is roughly the messaging that just now Rubio is finally able to articulate. I fear that the reason that the messaging has been so discombobulated is what we've actually seen is an emotional sense of, oh, I get what I Trump an emotional sense. If I get what I need to do to go in and get myself on Mount Rushmore. And so I'm going to go in, I'm going to slap these guys around. Remember he was coming off that big victory in Venezuela, and so I just think he was too cocksure. And he was like, yeah, this is going to be fine. And now we're finally getting the like, listen, this is actually what this was about. Now, you can still say that that was stupid and that what a total misread, or the US has no right to do that. All of those. That's very worthy debate. But at least now we're getting something where I can go, okay, there's internal logic here. I understand now what you're trying to do, but now that we're talking the real game, did we just wait too long? And if we waited too long, and this is something that you either should have done in Trump's first term, or this should have been something Bush one or two or Obama should have handled. And now, like, the jig is up and they really are already in that position. We have to face that, that, and we have to say, in the light of what they actually can do, what is the path out of this? Show me path one, show me path two. Show me path three. That's going to be hard because obviously they can't lay all their cards on the table, but they are in a republic. And so you have to Convince the population, and if you don't convince the public of what you're doing, you get voted out of office. And so, man, we're just in a really weird and difficult position. And ironically, the only thing that's offering any sort of salvation from an everyday person perspective in terms of the cost of oil, is that the Chinese economy is struggling. And so that's wild. It is one of those things where when you try to figure out why none of this is perfectly predictable, it's because of shit like that. Like, who would have thought that the housing crisis that China's going through right now, which they've done everything they can to hide, the reality of that is actually stopping Trump from having the necessary amount of pressure economically. He would need. Need to just make this to be a completely untenable war so you have just enough where he can keep going. And oil still only at, like, $100 a barrel, and China's still doing well enough that they can, like, keep going, keep doing their thing, keep moving away from the US dollar. They just dumped, like, $663 million. A billion dollars, excuse me if I'm remembering right, of Treasuries, like, in the last week or something, which is, like, putting so much pressure on us from an economic standpoint, everything is economic. Yeah, dude. This one is. When you lay out the known things, forget the unknowns, when you lay out the known things of what's happening, all of this becomes quagmire y. Like, there's not going to be any easy way out of this.
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I'm not going to say I called it, but I'm going to say I called it. I feel like from day one, I was like, this is a forever war. And I think that, that there's two things you can go the Simon Dixon route and say there was incentives there. Trump could get a golf course in Tehran. Jared Kushner is getting money hand over fist. He's in Trump's ear. Yeah, yeah. It'll be a two week. We'll make it happen. I got it. So there's all the financial incentives that lets Trump and his family wants to get involved and get messy. But then on the flip side, we have, like, the Vietnam of it all, where it's like, oh, this small country will bomb the life out of him. And then now that we got guys popping out of deserts, guys in durags, that's going to be attacking us, and we're not going to be able to have the necessary wherewithal to withstand that war. So it's like, to me, I would much rather him go fast and furious and bomb everything and just be the bad guy and shrug his shoulders and just be like, yeah, I did it, whatever. Rather than this, we're at war. We're not really at war. We're at, like, this double, like, this hopscotch, like, approach that we're doing now.
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Good news for your advice. He's running that playbook now.
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Yeah.
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And it just becomes a question of, do we have the munitions and the allies to pull it off? Because a lot of this is going to be, how does the Middle east respond to this? If they get pissed and they feel like, okay, fine, fuck, like, we've just got to fight Iran full on right now. This is the time I wish Trump hadn't made the move, but he did. We are where we are. Which, by the way, that'll be the one thing where I'll let historians debate whether we should have gotten into the war or not. That's fine. In the fullness of time, people have a much clearer picture of what's going on. But right now, the conversation that we all need to be having is, we're in it.
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It.
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Now that we're in it, what are we going to do? And I fully expect that there will be a cacophony of voices that say, we just need to back the out. And we need to accept that our time as empire has faded and there's no more free transiting of the seas because we're seeing little fires all over the place of people like that Bob El Mandab straight. Now that the Houthis are like, oh, it, we're going to get involved. Rubio's trying to wave him off and say, kids, do you guys. The last time we went in and bombed the shit out of you, you guys backed off, you touched the stove, you realized it was a bad idea.
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And Israel has been waiting to kill a Houthi. They love getting them dudes, bro. Israel been waiting. Israel's like, please, please let me kill. They in Lebanon, they in Jordan, they're in Saudia, where I got to go, yeah, yeah.
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I mean, listen, it is. God, that whole part of this. So secretly Drew, when I'm not on camera, I spend so much time on, like, the Israel, Palestine of it all. There is something so deeply revelatory of the human experience there. And because of my mental model of the world, it doesn't matter if you're Jewish or you're part of an Islamic extreme group, whatever, or goy. It is just facets of the human mind. And so for me this is just like all of these things reside inside myself. That's how I see this. It's like, oh, damn. Okay, so that's what. If I'd grown up there, that's how I would have played out. If I grew up there, that's how I played out. These are all just value systems. We are all capable of imbuing all of these value systems. Remember, read the book Ordinary Men. It was ordinary men in Germany that took pregnant women out in the field, stripped them naked and shot them in the back of the head. Ordinary men. So all of us can fall victim to this because of the way that the human mind is. And so watching the human mind play out in this very specific way based on these very specific cultures and collisions of cultures is, is so fascinating because I'm gonna get myself in trouble here. I don't know if we just want to put a period on that or if we want me to fractal deep into Palestine, Israel. But like we had a couple is interesting. Okay, so here we go. Yeah, we haven't heard that one in a while. There it is.
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Let's go V. Let's go. Rise. Ready. Activated.
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I like to think we haven't used that because I, I have developed so much more discipline on my non fractaling. But okay, so everybody knows my mental model. I hope at this point it's a question of values and beliefs. So everything is downstream of that. The way that you behave, you have a set of things that you believe to be true. Both of the way the world is and the way that the world ought to be. The ought to be part is your value system. Okay, Humans are capable of developing virtually any belief system, virtually any value system, but you can't understand their behavior until you're downstream of that. So you get the nation of Israel. Say what you will, it does exist. And so now you've got this collision of like this really old school mentality from like the Old Testament Bible mixed with all of the economic like awakening that European Jews had. You can certainly point to the Rothschilds and all that, but like they really figure out the economic game. The more I learn about usury and all that stuff, the more I realize anybody trying to bring the usury conversation into modern era is fucking retarded. They just don't understand. So if you're trying to pass like a moral thing about usury, it's because you don't understand central banks. So it's like that comment makes sense when the money supply can't expand when the money supply can expand, then all of a sudden the modern miracle, even though I think in the final analysis that central banks, the way that we do them creates moral hazard, that becomes deeply problematic. But setting that aside for a second, the modern world is brought to you by charging interest. So it ends up becoming this incredible debt becomes just, just an absolute miracle. So anyway, you get all that coming into the Middle east, so now you've got a hurting society from the Middle east where revenge is everything. You can't ever let anybody slight you. That, by the way, many people, many Jews that just never left the Middle east still had that hardcore mentality. But you get. That's the whole rise early and kill first thing. Then you get that mixed with. But we also know how to do the economic game. And so Israel springs up, they build all this insane, absolutely incredible, breathtaking. The only democracy in the Middle east, yada, yada, yada. But it's infused with. But we understand the mentality of this region, which is you cannot let people with you, and if they with you, you got to hit them hard. And by the way, just the religious extremism on both sides, like, I'm just doing what God tells me to do, do. And so both sides actually can say to themselves with a straight face, God is on our side. That is so dangerous. Bob Dylan wrote a song about that. People should listen to it. It's incredible. I believe God doesn't exist, so he's not on anybody's side. So you. But you've got people that really believe I'm doing God's work and so I believe in you can't let anybody with you. And I'm doing God's work, so I can't let these people with me in the name of God. So whichever God you believe in, and so it gets fucking wild. And so now you're in, you've got the US which is like the most unable to build a mental model of the Middle east, which has a very different value system. And so we're trying to do the big dick swagger of American military. Everything's bigger in Texas vibes. You know, we've come in, we've just. For the last 250 years we've been the gangster. And so we come in and try to slap people around, not understanding the ferocity of the mentality of the region of like, no, no, no, we don't play that game. We. We will fight to the last man. So you brought up the Vietnam War. I would like to remind everybody in the name of don't underestimate your opponent. The Viet Cong disassembled tanks, carried the parts of the tanks over these mountains that were considered impenetrable. So they were like, oh, we're safe. There's no way they're going to be able to get their weapons big enough to defeat us over those mountains, natural border. They disassembled tanks and brought them on the other side. Don't be careful who you with, because if people have that kind of mentality. So if you believe I'm doing God's work and you have a cultural value system that absolutely says you cannot let people do you wrong, and you've got high intelligence, which just assume the Iranians have high intelligence and an insane will to win. Ooh, buddy. Anybody that comes after you is about to be tested for real. For real. And so now we're about to find out if, given that we have gutted our manufacturing base, can we spin our manufacturing base back up fast enough to actually do what you're saying? Which is, all right, we're in it now. Fucking win.
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B
No, but I mean, if we really call Palmer, like, hey, bro, I need 200 disposable missiles. Like, hit me with it. I feel like he could spin it up. I feel like there's enough.
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We're about to find out. Yeah, I mean, listen, so I'm American. I want to see America win. I grew up in the 80s, so I've got, like, Rambo in my veins, and I want to see us win. I would have liked to see this not be a necessary thing. I don't have enough intel to know if this really was wise, to move on it. That's why I say historians will figure all that out. But we are in it now. The fact that we're in it now, we've got to win it. So, yes, I want to see Palmer lucky Elon Musk, all of our brilliant engineers come together and just show that America can't be stopped. Now that we're in it. But we're going to find out if that's going to be possible.
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B
We are going to find out if that's possible.
- [32:18]
A
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- [34:38]
B
It's the thing that you do the thing on.
- [34:40]
A
We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on shopify.com thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
- [34:51]
B
Okay, so I want to take a step back from the international war and I want to look at a much deeper domestic war. What do I mean by that? Anthropic is dirty macking. And for those that don't know, dirty macking is when you like your friend and his girlfriend are going through something and you're trying to console her, but you're making like you're saying bad things about your friend while you're consoling her. So you're not really helping him. You're making yourself look good in that. Like it's that type of thing. Exactly. Anthropic was supposed to save the world. We were supposed to get protein folding, but now all of a sudden we're getting lobby groups, we're getting restriction on Chinese open source models. The price of AI was tanking. My sister called me the other day like, yo, chatgpt is $30 a month right now. I'm like, oh, go, China is free. Wait, what? I don't have to pay for this anymore. Like, there's a bunch of regulatory capture, investment capture they're trying to get, like, solidify their coffers in front of the IPO. What's your read on this anthropic OpenAI regulatory capture thing?
- [35:44]
A
Yeah, this one is wild. So Dario at Anthropic just cannot help himself but go for regulatory capture. To that end, Anthropic just put another $20 million into first action, which brings our total to Public first action to $40 million. Public first action is the policy arm of a super PAC backing candidates who support AI Guardrails. Now, I imagine many of you are like, yes, I want me some AI guardrails. There's 30 to 50 of these people, politicians that are being benefited from the super pac. They're from both parties. And all of this is happening right now just ahead of the midterms. If you hate money in politics, let's talk about how this actually works. So Dario himself has kicked in a million dollars of his own money. Anthropic employees have also added $2.15 million just last quarter. Now, you could say, well, these are the people closest to the problem. They understand that this could be very high risk and that we need to put guardrails on it. So I will remind you, what they're not telling you is that Chinese open source models already exist. The cat is already out of the bag, and so you're not going to be able to stop people from accessing these tools. So when you say, we need to put guardrails on this, who are you trying to help? Exactly? Now the punchline becomes, you're trying to help Anthropic or you're trying to help OpenAI. You're trying to use regulation, not to keep people safe because it won't work. It's like saying, I'm going to put all kinds of restrictions on the weapons that I can use, knowing that there is another weapons manufacturer that's just handing out their weapons like candy to anybody who wants them for free. So it's like, are we really making the world safer now? We can all certainly say, I wish I wasn't in the world where these weapons are existed. That is a very reasonable lament. But again, you are in a world where they exist. And so now as OpenAI goes ham, what are they really protecting? Are they actually protecting the world from safety or are they putting limitations so that they can protect, at least here in America, they can protect their share price. And so I will make the case that they are doing everything they can to protect their share price. How do I know? Okay. The game of regulatory capture works like this. Regulations become incredibly onerous, meaning there's a whole lot of very difficult and read by difficulty, expensive. There's a whole lot of very expensive things that you need to do in order to comply. And so what will happen is you get this young startup, they are the maverick, they do all the crazy stuff, they're down in the dirt, they're grinding, they're attracting the best talent, they've got this big vision, they're getting everybody excited and they do the impossible. They build a company that's just growing fast and Anthropic's revenue is growing fast. We're going to hear a little bit about this when we get to David Sachs. So they're growing fast. Very exciting times ahead. However, by getting the regulation and by being the company that has the fast growing revenues, you become the company that can afford to comply. And now, of course, in the name of, of safety, which it always comes in the name of safety, in the name of safety, you get all these regulations put in place that end up keeping out who you were five or six years ago. The young upstart just trying to get things going and trying to get things off the ground. So this would be the equivalent. So at Quest, we're building that, right? We do a thing that nobody's done. Like we've done this incredibly difficult thing of finding a way to manufacture these products to make sure that they can be made without having sugar in them, but taste like they have sugar. Now imagine that I went around and started campaigning saying, listen, we did it. But the process of making this equipment is very dangerous. You just cannot let a whole bunch of people own this equipment. It's way too risky. The product that you're making is way too powerful. And so listen, just to keep everybody safe, and I'm the one close to this, I know how dangerous these things are. So, so to make sure that this new technology that is so high risk and so dangerous is only used for good, let's make sure that we have regulators that come in, that are able to make sure that everything is being done right, that you've got all these checks and balances on the product that's being output, just to make sure that everybody's safe. And so now let's say that we make the startup cost of a business dramatically more expensive in July, just nominal raw terms. So Maybe now it's $10 million to get off the ground. Now, for a company of quest size or for a company of anthropic size, that is quite literally chump change. But when we were starting, that would have been the difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it. And so now you just kill off all of this innovation. And the innovation often comes from those small companies that have a dream, they have a vision, they're able to attract talent, who is very frustrated with the state of the world. And they harness that frustration to create something not backed by a lot of dollars, but backed by insights, backed by a willingness to work, to try new things. That you don't have all of that infrastructure slowing you down or dragging you down. And so innovation often comes from the new person. It doesn't come from the incumbent. And when you look at how these big leaps of innovation move the world forward, it's often that the old company becomes stodgy, everything becomes calcified. They're not nimble anymore, and it's these new upstarts. And so regulatory capture is designed to kill all of the new upstarts in the cradle. And that's how you end up not having innovation. Now, if they were actually going to be able to deliver safety, I might feel very differently about this. But for the reasons that I've already explained, they won't be able to deliver the safety, but they will be able to kill off the people that are trying to unseat them. And so that's why people should be grossed out in the extreme whenever you hear somebody banging the drum and saying, oh, we've got to protect people, we've got to get all this regulation. That doesn't mean you want zero regulation. I certainly do not. I want some regulation. I think that that's very smart, but you're going to get very rapidly into heavy handed stuff. Okay? David Sacks, AIs are very successful entrepreneurs, one of the most successful operators of our time. And I very specifically say operator because. Because operating a business is ridiculously difficult. So being able to start, scale, successfully, exit multiple companies, this guy is in like absolutely rarefied air. I was so excited when he became the aizar. I've explained my thoughts on this. I'm out over my skis on this one. But I think given that the messaging on AI starting to shift to Scott Bessant, I think David Sachs, who is a voice of reason, in my opinion, is being pushed, pushed to the outskirts. And the Trump administration is going to fall for all the regulatory capture stuff. But anyway, this is what David Sacks had to say about that. He put out a tweet and it reads, it's true that Anthropic is the fastest growing company that Silicon Valley has ever seen. Crazy. Which is all the more reason their incessant attempts at regulatory capture are not just unnecessary, but frankly, gross. So. So when you have somebody that has done this over and over and over and is now at this stage in his career lending his very significant talents to the government to say, listen, this is a game that we see play out all the time and we've all said this is a bad thing. And now yet it's being used once again to squash small companies in favor of the big companies on the single most important technology the world has ever seen. This gets to be, in my estimation, very problematic.
- [43:30]
B
Like, it's unfortunate too, because we were joking before we started, like, you really start off as a hero and live long enough to see yourself turn into the villain. Because it was so. There's so much excitement. And even the people that were pessimistic about AI there was still like, okay, at least it's a better search engine. You know, there was at least like, okay, it's cool, it's not going to be this. Robots are coming everywhere, but it's at least going to replace Google. But then we just start to see, like, slowly but slowly, they're starting to do more things that seem more malicious than actually with good intention. For example, one of the things that they're parading about with Chinese models is how they're stealing the ip. And then a lot of people are now saying, well, that's kind of ironic for, you know, LLM to say, because you stole all the IP of the Internet ever. So it's kind of like, I can do it, but when you do it, to me, it's wrong.
- [44:16]
A
Yeah, I, I get the argument. And it is an argument that is worth having. There will be people that will be able to debate on both sides on that one. I find myself coming down on the other side of that. Yes, we do need to protect ip.
- [44:29]
B
Yes.
- [44:29]
A
China has a long standing history of doing this. They know they're violating their Terms, which is precisely why they're spinning up fake accounts, tens of thousands of fake accounts to go and do it. And so this comes down to like when, wow, we never ended up getting to cover this. Which makes me very sad. There are so many things at the fringes I want to start pushing more to cover in the show. But one thing that happened in the anime community was there were these guys that were running an anime pirate site. And the pirate site got shut down. The guys got arrested. I don't remember if they're in Vietnam or somewhere, but somewhere in east as. And it got shut down. And the anime community was basically on the side of free. Those guys, they were only doing something good. Now those same people are going to make all kinds of noise and freak the fuck out when they hear that Japanese animation companies are abusing their workers and not paying them enough. Well, guess why? Because there's no money. There's not enough money in this. Guess why? Because people pirate the shit. And so people want to watch it and they just go watch it for free. And the whole community celebrates. The people that get a hold of the IP for free, build their own company, make money off the back of these guys that are working their nuts off in Japan to the point where like they were really breaking the mentality, some people. There was one like maybe five or six years ago where the guy goes in and basically burns the entire studio down, kills. I forget how many people that couldn't get out because he was just so frazzled, so taken advantage of in his mind. And so it's like, okay, wait, which side are you on? On. Because at some point this stuff has to make money. You, dear person at home won't work for free. Therein lies the problem. These things have to make money. And so we can get into all the asinine about the DSA saying nobody has a right to double digit profit margins. You do not know what the right profit margin is. This is why you let the free market do it. And if nobody wants anime, then fuck them. They're going to go out of business. But when you're cheering for the guy that's stealing the IP and lamenting the person that's not getting paid enough for making it, it's like, what the fuck are we talking about? So it just gets so fast. So you've got anthropic making a thing and they say, if you would like to use this thing, here are our terms of service. If you adhere to them, use away. If you don't adhere to them and you were using it to distill our model and make something else. You have violated our terms. That's against the law. You can't do that. And so China has a very long standing, well documented history of doing exactly that. And they will go, oh, you want us to make your insert whatever thing is cool? We're going to do that. Send over all of your breakdowns of the description and all that and we're going to go do the thing. Now once they get it, they then spin up their own version of it. Now if you really want to compare what's going on with the AI companies that you can like really go after them for, because I don't think it is learning from the entire corpus of human knowledge. All humans do that. We're totally fine when humans do it and and we are somehow not fine when AI does it and then gives us back the ability to use that. That one seems crazy to me, but the one that seems legitimate is you've got these guys spinning up the distillation models and they're learning all of that and you've got AI basically trying to stop everybody from being able to use open source models. That to me is some bullshit. It's like, hey, if somebody's able to build an open source model and you're trying to use regulatory capture to shut them down town all right, that's ass. That's somebody that's trying to build walls to stop anybody else from being able to do what they're doing. That doesn't make any sense to me.
- [48:03]
B
I can't play devil's advocate, please. I feel like China just out capitalism anthropic. Okay, terms and condition. I can make an account. Cool. You didn't say I could make 10,000 accounts. And I felt like they found their gap and now they're like monopolizing on it. And I think that anthropic is a little bit hurt because they thought that they can monopolize on anybody. I can steal a little bit of your books. I'm not stealing the whole book. And now people are stealing their stuff and now they feel a type of way.
- [48:27]
A
Well so if you think about an open source model being built in a similar way that a frontier model is being built, I love that. That's awesome. Nobody should be trying to shut that model down. If however I make something and in fact going back to the another thing that AI is doing that I think you can compare directly, that's just like a non starter is that when like I forget which apps it was slack it's one of those like that. I don't think it was slack, but figma. Thank you. So figma is using AI. AI is sucking all their data away from them and now building a competitor to figma. That's ass. That should not be allowed. That shit should be shut down immediately. We all know exactly what they're doing, doing. So that one to me is like bad form in the extreme. So those to me are direct parallels. But when you go, these are our terms of service, you're using it in a way that you are trying specifically to steal my ip, I think that's bad mojo. Now if they were able to like trying to make a car analogy, like if you're able to get a car, break it apart, look at it and go, okay, cool, I now understand the engineering. You're not violating any patents and you go do it yourself. Okay, great. That I get, get. But this is quite literally saying I'm going to let you train the model, which is very expensive, and then I'm going to learn off of its back specifically to make something I wouldn't be able to make without that existing. And it violates your terms of service. So that's where it's like that becomes parasitic, in my opinion, because of all the cash investments that they had to make to make the first one. And so you'll end up. Actually, it'd be interesting to see if you fundamentally break the technology and just stall us out. Because if it becomes something where no one can afford to make the frontier models because they just immediately get undercut by open source models that are illegally trained on them, then now it's like our progress is going to stall. It might not stop because you still have a lot of algorithmic juice that you can squeeze out of it. But I think that all of us, well, anybody that wants to see AI continue to advance, which I do, and I know that many people do not, but if you want AI to continue to advance, you want to make sure that there actually is a financial avenue because people won't do it if they have to work for free. And just the chips.
- [50:47]
B
No, I don't know. But I can use another example. It's like the fashion industry, right? So Coach came out like the really big baggy pants that Kendrick wore on the Super Bowl. That started the new trend of the very big baggy pants that everybody's wearing. And then you go to American Eagle, Shein Aeropostale, it's their version of the big baggy pants. So I think fashion is a great indicator of like Louis Vuitton customized a bag. Now everybody has an all over print duffel bag. Like there are these. One frontier company does it and then other companies take their iteration of it and they make sub companies from that.
- [51:18]
A
I totally hear what you're saying.
- [51:20]
B
Yeah, if I'm mixing that up, let me know.
- [51:21]
A
But I feel like not mixing it up.
- [51:23]
B
Industries. Why is AI special?
- [51:25]
A
Here's why, here's what the difference is. I'm going to use a survival crafting game. Supplies. No, buddy. I'm going to use the survival crafting game as an example of why this matters. Okay? So in a survival crafting game, you've got to go out and you've got to like do this insane work to get like specific objects that power an ability, right? So in Kaizen we have this thing called a stair hack tool. So one thing that I both think is brilliant in Minecraft and you find annoying as the game progresses is you can build a staircase out of anything. So you can go down, you can go up at any time. You're never going to be like lost. You can always re get back to the surface or get all the way down to bedrock just by breaking the blocks in a, in a certain way. And I was like, okay, cool for early game, but later in the game I want something where I can just be like three steps blop like instantaneously. And if you make that too easy, the game stops being fun. So you need this hard thing that you have to go get to run the stair hack tool. Okay, now imagine that what you're doing and I say, hey, you can buy my stair hack tool, you can break it apart, it's fine, it's yours. But what you can't do is break it apart specifically to get the thing to now build a competitive tool. That's the one thing that we don't allow. You can buy all of that. You could extract it to have it for your own non commercial purposes. This is like when you create a broadcast of UFC and you say, hey, you can hold a watch party. You can't charge for it. You also can't broadcast it broadly. So you can have people over to your house, you can let them watch. Now the reason that you do that is you've got to be able to create an appetite. You have to create a market, otherwise there's no financial viability. And so for this thing to exist, you can't broadcast it out and then allow other people to broadcast it. And so we literally have the FBI go track people down that did that and say, you charged on the back of this thing, or you gave this thing away, that eroded the market. We don't allow that same idea. They did a really hard thing to make this thing exist, the AI model to exist. If you want to use the AI model to learn, great. If you want to reverse engineer by asking it questions and figure out, oh, this is how this is all working, and then you go build your own thing based on the engineering of how we have to get to this point, all great. But if you create something where it's like, I've imbued this with a really hard thing, a magical diamond in the center of it, and all you do is wait till I do the incredible hard part, which is actually mining it. You do the very easy part, disassembly, and now you have the same diamond, and now you're going to give that away for free, because it was essentially free for you to extract it. Now you break the entire marketplace. And so what we have done historically with things like broadcasting the UFC is we say for the UFC to continue to exist, we are going to put the FBI on tracking people down that erode that market. Now, for anybody that's communist or whatever, that's like it. It should all be for free. It's at least an argument, and there's coherence to it. Everything should be free. And it's like, yep, it will be. And it will be nothing. You will get nothing for free. It'll all be free. It'll just be nothing. Because no one's going to go do the hard work of extracting that rare little diamond or whatever. So we put what are artificial limitations on it, because we want to protect that the marketplace exists so that there's incentive for people to do the brutally difficult thing. And. And one of the signatures of the modern era is that we've done such a good job of collecting the brutally difficult thing that people are now coming along and saying, I don't see what the problem is. I own this fucking thing, so I'm gonna strip it, whether that's taxes. So I'm Mamdani, you're in New York, you run a business. I should be able to tax you as much as I want. It's like, okay. But when you do that, over time, you get less of what you tax, and so you'll just get less entrepreneurs. But it will last long enough. You'll be able to drag that out long enough, enough that by the time the city falls, no one's going to blame the original Taxes. And so this is exactly what happened in the Bronx. And people were burning buildings down because they froze rent and all that. We're still repeating the same mistake, which is crazy, but nonetheless, we get to a point where we've been able to live in a world where people do the hard extraction and they make the really cool things. We built all these insane data centers and put more money into data centers than we've ever put into anything. That is the rare magical diamond that I'm talking about. That they did, built the data centers, did the frontier model, training, all of that, that. And now we've got somebody that's like, thank you for doing the really hard part. And I'm just going to give it away for free. That will destroy the market. And so if we're like, okay, well, it. We don't care and we just want to dissipate AI and it's going to fizzle out and it'll just be whatever we've learned up to this point and, you know, that's that, and we'll get some efficiencies out of it, but that's going to be the end of the game. That you would be accepting that fate, and it is a fate we don't accept anywhere else and now all of a sudden are accepting in the. The AI field, which I think would be a huge mistake that humanity will pay a gigantic price for. But for people that hate AI, I get why they'll. They won't say the real thing, which is, I just want to see AI die. And so, yes, we're going to strip mine these things and make sure that it's financially unviable. But for reasons like protein folding, I don't want to see that happen.
- [56:31]
B
We have the best chat in the Internet and I want it like publicly exclusive, like proclaim their greatness because Jensen Wong just released a open letter about open source. I'm reading this live. I looked at the last two paragraphs. I think this is where the juice is. There might be some more juice. I apologize. I am producing, listening and reading at
- [56:49]
A
the same time, which is not easy.
- [56:52]
B
But he said, in fact, openness may be the one important path to AI safety and security. Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe. They can be breached, misused, or false, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. In concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk, it results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards and improve them over time. Just as open source software demonstrated that transparency can be more secure than obscurity, AI safety men depend on giving more people the ability to test and strengthen models on which society relies. It allows for rigorous benchmarking and valuation, red teaming and protections tied to real and demonstrated harm. Rather than assuming that closed models are closed systems are safer by default. Last thing, a safe AI ecosystem is not a foregone conclusion. Policymakers have an important opportunity to act. This includes expanding access to compute for startups and researchers, investing in shared training assets, data sets, tools, evaluation frameworks, and keeping the frontier. Frontier, plural. By avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas. These measures must also look at how strong application layers can expand sovereign use of AI across the economy.
- [58:08]
A
Okay, so Jensen is saying exactly what I'm saying. So what he's trying to point out is that regulatory capture will be the death of AI. Stop thinking that by putting these guardrails on it that you're going to make make the closed ecosystem safe. That's not the path to safety. What he's saying is the path to safety is to put public resources behind this. So remember how all of this started. OpenAI started as Elon Musk trying to convince the world not to develop AI. He could not get anybody interested. So for anybody that forgets the timeline, Elon Musk went after politicians for I think he said like five years and he said nobody would listen to him. And so finally he became fatalistic and he said AI is going to happen. So let me do this the right way. So I'm going to create an open source model for AI to ensure everybody has access to it. Think of it as like the ultimate proliferation of nuclear weapons. Everybody has it. Mutually assured destruction or it's probably better to not use that. It's you, you have the best defense because everybody has access to the same like high tier MOD model. Now forget whether OpenAI should have switched over to being a closed model, but listen to the rationale as to why they went to a closed model. Most people are going to say the only real answer was they wanted to get filthy rich. Cool. I'm sure that's part of it. And I'm sure in their reasoning that a strong emotion of oh my God, if I did this, I would be a billionaire. This is crazy. One of the guys at Brockman, I forget his name, sorry, whoever that was @OpenAI Guy wrote in his diary, which came out in court, that, like, oh, my God, if we do this, I'll be a billionaire. Like, oh. And so clearly it was a part of the reasoning. But set that aside for a second. The reason that they had to do it was they were like, this is going to cost so much money. That has borne out to be true. Even Elon Musk has put ungodly amounts of money. And so whatever the 200, 400 million that Elon put in the beginning, it is the smallest drop in a bucket of what ended up being invested. It's trillions of dollars. So the gap between what you're going to be able to raise in public funds versus at the time where, sorry, not public funds, charitable funds, what they were able to raise in charitable funds was an absolute minuscule drop in the bucket. If we now want to go, okay, we need to treat this, this more like this is something that the government needs to get behind, because if it's locked behind a profit motive, it is going to be a closed system. And therefore we'll never. We won't get the safest models that we could get. They're going to fall to regulatory capture. So we don't want to do that. We want to get back to this initial idea of it's going to be open source, but now we know that it's going to take trillions of dollars, the government's going to have to get involved. That solves my problem, which is, sorry, magical diamond thing needs to be extracted. So somebody has to pay for all of that to happen. And if we want to put our tax dollars towards it, then I just ask, what is the thing you're going to stop paying for to do it? And if we're willing to stop paying for something to do that, great. But if we're not willing to do that, then you're going to have to rely on public companies. And so you get into this weird quagmire where China has an incentive to distill the models, to steal all of that economic viability as a way to hurt the US Market and I think as a way to move us away from financializing things, which would be right now just absolutely destructive to the entire US Economy and get more into the tangible world, which you see them doing in gold and manufacturing, which is even bigger for them. So you've got these, like, two things happening simultaneously. And if we just go, oh, well, I think we all agree that opens better, so let China steal the market out from under us for the Reasons that I walk through. That's nonsensical. If what we want to say is this was always meant to be a public good in the first place. And so we want to move away from the profit motive and the government is going to start funding this to the tune of the trillions of dollars. I'm certainly open to the debate, but again, for me, you've got to figure out the moral hazard of just printing money. So it's like that's the complexity, that's the whole thing. This is still very different. This did start out being open source course for very good reasons. Now, I don't know if Elon has backed away from this, but at one point he said, every time we launch a new model. So let's say we do Grok 4, Grock 3 becomes open model. When we do Grok 5, Grok 4 will become open model. I don't know if he's actually doing it, but he said that extraordinarily publicly about a year ago. So my hope is that he really does hold to that. And so the frontier model itself, which only lasts a six months. Months, that frontier model will always be closed, but then everything trailing behind it will be open. And the people that want like the cutting edge, cutting edge, then they pay for it. And people that are like, oh my God, this is plenty good, then cool. They use it in open source fashion.
- [63:09]
B
This is like a perfect segue to the new Amazon Blade Runner show, where I think that this is one of those things. Would this conversation be as difficult or as hard if there wasn't the AI anxiety like tied around it?
- [63:22]
A
No, of course not.
- [63:23]
B
You know what I mean? Like, because when it comes to pharmaceuticals and other things, like, yeah, we got to regulations, truck shoulders, Internet companies. Yeah, regulation truck shoulders, public utilities, like, just other things that to me, competition will do a lot better than what is currently the setup. But right now, AI seems to be like, either we hate it and we want it to be gone, or we love it and we want nobody to touch it. And then there's people in the middle. We're like, we love it, but we want the government to help. Like, there's this like three weave thing. So.
- [63:48]
A
Well, the really bad news is the way you just said it is sensible that we love it. We're worried. We want the government to help. I like that. We want regulation. We want government. What we have now is a government that has become an absolutely morbidly obese tick that has drained the lifeblood out of the country for decades. People can now finally feel it. They think that they've been bled by the billionaires, but they've been bled by the government. And their inability to map how money actually works and how the economy actually works is leaving them very confused. And so now we have this gigantic bloated entity that needs to be made smaller by the day as aggressively as we can without breaking something. So you want light touch regulation on AI. You don't want heavy handed regulatory capture. And so if the government was coming in and saying, okay, listen, here is what we expect from the output of a model and if it has, you know, XYZ capabilities to hack or whatever, these are the consequences. And so you've got some sense of like, anybody can do it. It is, you know what the, the guidelines are, but you can do whatever you want as long as they match that guideline. And as long as that is specific enough, you don't get into the regulation by lawsuit, which is what they did during the crypto days. That was fucking stupid, literally criminal in my opinion. So, so you don't want to do that. You want to just give people total clarity, hey, this is what it is. But you don't want to make it something where it's millions of dollars to try to comply. It's like, no, no, you either have these capabilities or you don't. And if you have these capabilities, you need to do this thing, whatever that is, and you treat it like something sensible. In food, for instance, you have something called generally recognized as safe. And so when you have things that are like, all right, these things are fast, fine, go, go do whatever you can do. And as long as they adhere to that, you're going to be good. And so it isn't crippling in the beginning. It's not easy. Like, I remember when we started Quest, there's a lot of regulations, you have to be very careful. But it's like public health. So yeah, you got to take it seriously. But it wasn't crippling. It didn't stop us from starting a business,
- [65:59]
B
period.
- [66:00]
A
So that's what you want. Light touch. Now, getting to your anxiety thing. The big concern that I have there is that humans are emotional creatures. We do not reason by logic. We reason entirely by emotion. And we have so much fear around AI that people can actually ask, seriously, what has AI done for us? That is the most ridiculous and absurd question I've ever heard. Right now, today, if AI never improved. I was just at the doctor yesterday, which. Oh God, when you're 15, you go to the doctor. Holy Jesus. It was my doctor being like, yo, are you like, paying attention to AI? And I'm like, bro, AI is like, what I do. And he was like, oh, my God. It's changing medicine so much. Like, this is so incredible. He was like, the. Right now, he was like, even some of my wealthiest clients, they go to Cedars, they get a CT scan. He's like, it will take them two weeks to get the results. He's like, I want you to imagine that you're really in pain, you're suffering from something, and it takes two weeks to get your results back. He's like, AI's going to change it all because. Because it's so good at reading the scans. He was like, the more this gets implemented, the more it's just going to be real time. Scan will pull up. AI will be like, here's your problem. And he was like, it'll look, it'll compare your scans. So it'll be like, you've had a scan every year for the last 10 years. Here's your problem. This is the area it's changing. It's changing by this much. We are seeing all the data across all patients. We know that this means increased likelihood of this, that or whatever. And he was just like gushing. He was like, oh, my God, this is so transformative. And he's like, I can't believe what a boon this is already to health. And I was like, bro, tell me about it. I'm like, what about protein folding? He's like, oh, my God. And so I was like, it. It was just seeing a doctor who's interfacing with this all day. Who knows the things that AI is doing right now, today. And he was like. And just watching it, like slowly getting rolled out, he was like, this is going to be just so incredible. And so that's what AI is doing already right now, today. That's not new functionality. That's just roll out the functionality that you already have.
- [67:55]
B
Have.
- [67:56]
A
And so people are letting their emotions run away with them, tell them a story. Everything's going to be bad. This is all going to fall apart. Oh, my God. Robots everywhere taking over and they're letting that make them fight for something that isn't connected to reality. For the reasons I've said a thousand times, the open models already exist. They are already out. They are never going away. If you are draconian and you try to shut this down, you say, if we catch you with AI, we're going to shoot you in the face. It's still already out there. Will be people who wish you harm that already have these models. And if you. This is what we just saw with the the attack of hugging face by OpenAI's newest model that escaped anthropics, one of the two open AI. So their model escapes, finds its way to the Internet, goes hacks Hugging Face. Hugging Face tries to use I think Claude to shut it down Fable 5. But it had been nerfed so much such that they weren't able to stop it. And so now they're like guys, we, we had to go to a Chinese open model to be able to fight against this. That's already happened. So if you guard rail the out of it to the point where people that are willing to comply don't have access to it, the people who aren't willing to comply will leverage what already exists to come after you. And that's the part that people just aren't being honest about.
- [69:16]
B
Yeah. Then let's go forward. Right. Because we always talk about like I feel like our tagline for this show is like the time Bill, you show it's all economics. It does come back to like that. So I think what it really comes down to is the downstream effects. It's AI revolutionary technology. AI leads to robots. Robots need no jobs. No jobs means I'm poor and I live in a tenement with my UBI check.
- [69:39]
A
I think there's a, a falsity in that logic. How about this? We haven't seen that yet.
- [69:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we haven't. I'm, I'm just, I'm projecting the anxiety. Yeah. What people think. You know what I mean? So is it because there's economic insecurity that makes us apprehensive about AI where maybe in the past when there were previous technologies, it was like anybody could get on the Internet. It's this new thing. Let's like we were excited to go on AOL and wait for 20 minutes to sign in. We were excited to try Napster or we were excited to go into our email for the first time. And I think there that excitement isn't there with AI. Maybe that's what it is.
- [70:11]
A
That's really interesting. So here I'm, I'm really glad you brought up Napster. So the way that these technologies always work is you have the people who have, let's say there are 35 plus they've gotten to a point in their career where this new change is going to be devastating to them. And by the way, they are right. There are going to be people who will not be Able to, quote, unquote, learn to code. They're not going to gonna just be able to embrace AI. They will never get retrained. They're gonna be going in some absolutely horrific, terrible direction. And this is only gonna be worse for them. And in being worse for them, they're gonna be right to have all this anxiety. But just like with Napster, despite the fact that Metallica was screaming from the rooftops like, this is terrible and we need to go after these people. Kids are just like, nah, fuck you, it's better. And so because it's better, I'm going to do it. And so that's how these technologies always come into play, is that it really does hurt some people, but it creates new opportunities elsewhere. And only the people who get eroded by it are going to complain. The unique thing about AI and by the way, that's true of everything. When the industrial revolution happened, when electrification happened, when the Internet happened, it really did. It was devastating to people that were unwilling or unable to shift into the new economy.
- [71:26]
B
The waker uppers was crazy that that was actually, actually like a thing when you did that, or knocker uppers.
- [71:31]
A
Yeah.
- [71:31]
B
I was like, dude, there's really somebody. That was your job, but go ahead.
- [71:34]
A
Yep. So you, you are going to have that. The thing that's unique about AI is everybody thinks they're a knocker upper. And so everybody's like, oh my God, this is going to replace me too. And so for the first time, it's so widespread that you really might have enough panic, especially because it's happening in a populous moment. Moment, you might have enough panic that people really do in a developed nation, like the US put the kibosh on it and then we will just see ourselves get out competed by countries that don't. And so I'll remind everybody that don't put the kibosh on it. I'll remind everybody of what just happened with Balaji and going to the Singapore government. They're so anti Israeli that they thought he was secretly basically leveraging, or not leveraging, but attracting Israelis that were using a second passport. And so what Balaji did was like, okay, who. Who wants some of the best and brightest young entrepreneurs to come be in their country? Kazakhstan was like, yo, we ain't got shit going for us. That's why most of you couldn't point to us on a map if you tried. So why don't you come to us? And that's how it'll play out. So even if the US and China were like, nah, Fuck this Kazakhstan is going to be like, thank you for creating an opportunity for me.
- [72:46]
B
That's going to be the open source AI hub.
- [72:48]
A
Exactly. And so just like America went from, we're just some backwater colony of the UK and we became, became the greatest power on the globe by a country mile. You'll see a change in dynamic. Whoever embraces AI is going to win.
- [73:01]
B
Period.
- [73:01]
A
End of story. It is the ability to scale intelligence. Part of the reason that people say that demographics is destiny is because there's no way to bring on intelligence that doesn't take 18 years. Now there is AI is the ability to change demographics instantly, overnight. And so that's where it's like kids, whoever embraces AI is going to win. It is a, it is a super weapon because it's intelligence itself.
- [73:30]
B
Yeah. Did you watch Blade Runner 2049? Uh huh. Ryan is our go to movie guy. Did you watch Blade Runner is one I haven't seen.
- [73:41]
A
Oh my God. 2049 is extraordinary. They're both extraordinary.
- [73:46]
B
Yeah.
- [73:47]
A
It's a visual feast. I definitely encourage people to watch it. What's fascinating about the new one is a series. It's called Blade Runner 2099. And the premise of Blade Runner 2099 tells you everything that you need to know about this moment in the world. Certainly the west as we look at AI and so the premise of the show is that there was a war between humans and replicants. And the replicants, okay, so that's just a straight stand in for humans and AI go to war and AI wins. And now AI is better than humans or they're at least in control of humans. And what does it mean to be human in a world where the replicants are in control? And that is literally just us grappling with. Okay, what does it mean to still be human? If there's something that's smarter than us, better than us, in control. And it will be very interesting. I'll be very eager to watch this. This, I don't know if this is going to be like a woke retelling where it's like we're all victims and boo hoo and you just have to kill them and get rid of it. Or if it's more a tale of understanding the power of technology. So this is exactly the same question I was trying to answer. So when I wrote Neon Future, which was the comic book that I did five or six years ago, it took the exact opposite stance of AI and humans go to war and humans win. And now there are people that have integrated technology and AI into themselves. And they're the ones that can promise the better future. Because the emotional humans, it's humans on both sides in my story, but the emotional humans who reject technology are actually moving the world backwards. And because technology is a promise of a better tomorrow, you have to be draconian, you have to kill, you have to silence. Because those people have a dream of a better future. Whereas the only dream for anti technologists is stagnation. And so I believe whenever those two impulses collide, stagnation will always and forever lose. Literally always and forever. You might be able to push us into the Dark ages for a couple hundred years, but you'll just never be able to defeat the hope of a better tomorrow. Which again, technology is best understood as the physical manifestation of the promise of a better tomorrow. And so that is so innate to us, that drive will always kick in. And it will. It's exactly what pulls us out of the Dark Ages when it actually happened. So I'm certainly not saying that we can't find ourselves in the Dark ages, but I am saying on a long enough timeline, technology will always win.
- [76:13]
B
Well said. We got to talk about the NDAA thing, the integration with Israel and the US military. I'm going to call it a cooperation.
- [76:22]
A
I still haven't looked into this.
- [76:24]
B
Do you have stuff like that?
- [76:25]
A
Do you have a fact that you want me to respond to? Because here's the way that I see it. Almost certainly the greatest intel agency in the world is the Mossad. So now I've got, okay, I've got an intel agency. I'm at war with somebody that obviously the Mossad is going to have the drop on. I believe that the following statement is true, that at one point, point, was it the President of Iran or something was a Mossad agent. I mean, I'm talking at like the highest, highest possible level that you could get somebody into the irgc. They did. And so you've got that plus the fact that given that they don't have access to oil, Israel's had to rely on technology. And so they become one of the most sophisticated technology ecosystems on planet Earth. And so if you're the US and you're, you're waging war as allies against somebody, you have extreme need of their intelligence to prosecute that war. And you have a strong desire to learn from their technology, to leverage their technology to have access to it, whatever. And my base assumption is that this is not an integration. That it is, is saying, okay, we're going to have a very High degree of cooperation across, you know, these whatevers. And our out is very simple. Should we ever decide that we want to cut you out, we're going to cut you out. And so from that standpoint, we will keep things secret from them that we don't want them to know. It's not like you are now in every meeting. It's not like, okay, we have a joint bank account. It's not going to be like that. These are my assumptions now if somebody shows me. No, no, for real, like this is just shared bank account. They can spend their money without having to talk to us and they're in every meeting. They now have top security clearance, the highest level security clearance. They can know everything. They've got somebody permanently stationed in the Oval Office. Like, if that's what we're talking about. Okay, that'd be crazy. But I just have a default assumption that this is going to end up being a like, yeah, we like nothing. Yeah, like we would do with the UK or whatever, where it's like, yeah, we've got bases with them, we've got shared offices, there's intelligence that we share back and forth. So I would need to understand what is the specific thing that's happening that people don't like and is it unique to Israel or is this something that we have with other countries as well?
- [79:03]
B
It is unique to Israel. I think that what is the level of unique is the, the sharing of the AI, technological resources and things like that. So the Iron Dorm thing, Iron Dome thing, Iron Dome thing is different. Whereas with Iron Dome joint project, it's over Israel, it's over us. We kind of got something out of that deal where this one. I think the thing that gives me the ick is the AI integration of it. And is it like, do they now can they back in access to us? Because they are the greatest spy agency. So while, yes, I would like to say, what does your agent know? What does my agent know? And we talk over a coffee in Geneva. That's different than saying your systems has access to this thing, but it can't access this other thing. And we all know that's just a permissions problem.
- [79:40]
A
So without the details, then I'll comment at a philosophical level. So from first principles, if they can, if we have done something that gives them access to things that I don't want them to have access to, that's bad. The mere fact that we are working more closely with an ally who is helping us prosecute the war feel so obvious that you would want to do so if you look at, like, World War II history, there was, like, deep integration between the allies. So I am just reading this as being something along those lines, but probably not anywhere near what it was during World War II, even though we are at war with Iran together. So on that side, it's like, if we want to win, we need to make sure that there's very low friction so that we can pass information back and forth very quickly. But it needs to be siloed information so that there are things that are for American eyes only. And I'm sure Israel has things that are for Israel's eyes only. And you map that out well, you make sure that you have an easy way to decouple, and I'm perfectly fine with it. So I. Obviously, my base assumption is that Trump is not a puppet of Netanyahu, that this is not something where Israel has files on Trump that he doesn't want getting out. And so they're like, we are going to. You get access to your secret databases. So if somebody reads this as they have something on Trump, they're getting access to secret databases that we would never allow somebody to have. Yeah, I'd be opposed to that too, if that's true. I just don't have that base assumption. So my base assumption is that we're probably nowhere near the level of integration that we had with allies during World War II, but it's probably on that continuum. Yeah, because we're at war with a shared enemy.
- [81:20]
B
So.
- [81:21]
A
So I don't have any specifics that trip red flags.
- [81:25]
B
Gotcha. That makes sense, your logic chain in that argument. Okay, I think we got it. Until more information comes out with the deal, we'll see how it integrates. Again, this both has to pass the House as well or the Senate. So it's done on paper. It's not finalized or tied into law or on its way to Trump's desk. I want to jump over to Japan because the Pokemon thing is hilarious to me. Because to me, I think that this is just a. I remember when trading cards used to be worth a lot of money, and now there's like six trading cards that are worth a lot of money. I think Pokemon is slowly getting toward that spectrum.
- [81:58]
A
It's. Wait, Pokemon is the only card that matters. So to give people a background that don't understand what exactly is happening with Pokemon, so Japan is considering putting regulations on the way the Pokemon cards are handled. Because what they're being honest about is that Pokemon cards are an asset class class. In fact, as an asset class, they are one of, if not the best performing asset classes of the last, whatever, five or six years. I mean, it's just absolutely staggering how much financial growth has been in the Pokemon market. So imagine kind of like in the crypto boom, there were people that went to the store, bought a pack of cards, ended up pulling something that's now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. So imagine spending whatever, $6 and getting something worth $600,000. So that's the way that these cards work is some of them are extraordinarily valuable and the way that they go out into the market is it's just in a box at your local card store. So there is a reality to be faced that these are trading like they're an asset class. They're trading like they're a collectible, meaning a collectible in the way that like NFTs ended up being a collectible. This was the thing about NFT NFTs that completely caught me off guard is it was people treating them like financial instruments, not collectibles. So when you start really looking at like art, you look at baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, Pokemon cards, the one that I collect, which I do not collect for financial reasons, but I collect the one piece trading card game. So it is a, an utterly fascinating gray area where technically the cards are being made for a game that you can actually play. And the game drives some of the value in that if the card is valuable in the meta, meaning to win in the game you need this card, then that card is more likely to go up in value. And from the game perspective, they try to keep any sort of hot deck shouldn't be more than say 100 or $200 for you to put it together. And so it does come at a cost. But then there's a much bigger pull for the cards, which is people going, I think this is going to go up in value. And so the question becomes how much should we be regulating? Like there are people that collect old video games and they collect them because they have nostalgia for them and they expect them to go up in value. And so should we be regulating things like that where it's like there is some percentage of the people buying it are buying it because they want to see it go up in value, value. And Pokemon has just hit such a crazy level that it's pretty hard to deny that this thing has become an asset class. And now what should we be doing? Now? You guys know me, I'm light touch, I don't want to see a ton of regulation fall on the trading card market. But at the same time, I do recognize that it is an asset class. And so there are probably certain regulations that you want to put around it to make sure that the way the distribution of the cards has to fall within certain rules, that the company can't manipulate the supply to try to control prices. That it should just be. Here are. Here are the published realities of what we put out. And you guys all know. And so that would get rid of a lot of the mystery in the market, because a lot of what happens now is like, is this card ever going to be reprinted? And so that can control value. There was. I think, oh, God, now, please, you're gonna have to take this with a grain of salt. This is directionally correct, but I don't remember the specifics. But it's like, I think Hasbro has been sued because do they do Wizards of the Coast? I think so. I think they do have Wizards of the Coast. I think so. Magic the Gathering. There was, like, all this big rumor that they were. They had a ton of inventory, but they were sitting on it because they were trying to watch the secondary market mark market value of the cards and, like, control their supply based on how things were out in the market. And so it's blatant market manipulation. So it's like, Matt, like, you could just pretty easily get rid of all that by saying, this is a published document of the rates that we print our cards. This is exactly how many of. How many of them we're going to print, and you just publish it now. I'm sure a lot of collectors would. Would hate that idea because there will be less pumping in the market, and it will just sort of be a price list, and people be like, well, this is how many exist, and so this is what they're worth. And then if somebody starts hoarding them, that might make the price go up, or if people are dumping them, it'll make the price go down, but it would probably control some of the speculation. Now, I would love to see. This is not now me talking as somebody interfacing with the economy.
- [86:47]
B
Me.
- [86:48]
A
This is just me saying, if you want these things to be valuable in the future, you know what the number one most important thing you could do? Make sure kids can get them. Like, that's really what you want to focus on, because if the next generation can't get a hold of the cards because they're so expensive, then there won't be a next generation of kids that love these cards. And so this stuff won't be valuable. Into the future.
- [87:09]
B
And so are we talking about cards? Are we talking about something else?
- [87:12]
A
Legos? Well, we can insert virtually anything into there that requires an emotional connection. But the thing that I find really distressing is so often there's a corollary in history and people will ignore it. So let's look at the corollary to this. Manga outsells the western comic market so grotesquely as to be hilarious. So I don't know if it holds true this year, but it was either last year or the year before. Demon Slayer. One touch title, one title in Japanese manga outsold the entire western comic market combined. So I'm talking Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the X Men. Literally every single title grouped got outsold by one title. Demon Slayer.
- [88:02]
B
It was in 2020, with 82.3 million
- [88:04]
A
copies globally in a single year. Thank you, God. I love you as a fact checker. Okay, so you get that set up. Absolutely insane. Now you should ask a question. How did that end up happening back in the. I think it was the 80s, maybe early 90s, they had a conversation. What the. I'll speedrun this in America in the early 90s. So it must have been the 90s. In the early 90s, you have image Comics gets formed. So the greatest artists in all of Marvel and dc, they leave, they form their own company because they feel they're being taken advantage of. Of that creates this massive speculator bubble. And everybody buys millions of their first runs because they think that they're all going to be worth a gazillion dollars. And then Image Comics ends up going sort of through this rocky period and they're missing deadlines and stuff, and the whole thing craters. And everybody realizes, oh, because we were buying millions of copies, they're not scarce. They don't have any value. It's like overprinting cards to make it back to Pokemon. So now when that crumbles, a ton of businesses fold. And so all these comic book shops, local comic book shops, they go out of business. All the distributors end up folding, and you end up with a single distributor, which is always a terrible idea. So now the comic book shops that do survive, they start panicking and they say, dear publishers, stop giving us stuff that appeals to kids. We want stuff that's for the audience that we already have. And so the western comic market starts aging up. And so everybody just. If you were 11 when you started collecting, but now you're 18, we're writing for 18 year olds. And so now there's nothing that gets kids into the marketplace. Okay, now what I want you guys to hear is that creates a ticking time bomb because what happens is now your age group is just getting older and older and older, and eventually they stop paying attention to the hobby. They start dying off, which puts more economic pressure on the stores that exist. And so they scream even louder, don't make things for kids. Just give me stuff for my new audience. Japan actually holds a meeting. It's a company called Shonen Jump, technically Shueisha. But anyway, people know Shonen Jump. So Shonen Jump, they get together and they say, hey, do we age up with our readers or do we say, yep, you're going to age out. That's perfectly fine. And Shonen Jump is always and forever going to be for 11 to 15 year olds. And they expressly say, we're going to remain just for boys and for that age group.
- [90:20]
B
Age group.
- [90:21]
A
And because of that, they continue to be a global phenomenon because every year they've got a new kid that ages in and a new kid that as they grow up, still has a massive affinity for those old properties. And so that's why the Japanese market ends up just absolutely destroying. Plus, they did not get the DEI memo, largely because they're speaking to kids. And that's never going to go over with kids, you have to be archetypal. And so with all of that, they keep, keep getting new kids excited. So their market just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. And then kids in America realize, oh, there is something for me, it's just not in the western market. It's in all these cool things that are being put out of Japan. So whether that's one piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, some of the just like perennial sellers, like My hero Academia, I mean, just like absolute monsters, Demon Slayer being the top of that heap. So now globally, people are like, well, if America's not going to export their culture for kids, we'll go to Japan, which is exporting culture for kids. So you got to get the kids. And watching people like fucking nose tackle each other in a Walmart because they're a scalper and they want to go make a ton of money off this makes me want to headbutt somebody. So I would much rather see these guys print a ton of cards to Nice. They're very loud. And if that was as loud for the viewing public as it was for me, that was not fun. But when you get the kids that love it and it's like, it means what it means. So if you are Publishing, even if it's like a secondary format of the cards to make sure the kids can always get into this. And then you say if they all preserve their cards, these are going to be worthless. But if they treat them like they're disposable, the nature will over time make them valuable. This is exactly what happens with Shonen Jump. If you guys have never seen it, obviously I've got a fetish for Japan, so whatever. But they're on shelves everywhere, all across Japan, in like gas stations and stuff. This big thick, super cheap paper print all in black and white of these manga. And then kids vote. And if you say that you like, they literally fill out voting cards and mail them in as wild. And so all of that meant that people don't think of these books as something you keep, and so they get thrown away. So even though millions of them are produced, very few survive. And so even though they were produced like crazy, they were produced for kids who aren't thinking economics, they're thinking I love these stories. And so they become valuable over time. And you now find people that will hunt for good condition versions of these very cheap and disposable magazines. Means. And the very fact that they were made for kids, made to be cheap, made to be disposable is the thing that over time makes them incredibly valuable. And they're taking a totally different approach now because they're treating it like an economic or like a asset category. And so it's just icing kids out. It's going to make it dwindle over time. It makes me very sad because this experiment's already been run.
- [93:21]
B
You just explained capitalism literally. No, like that's what's happening in America right now. They're. It's a. It's skewing odor. They're going out. And if you just replace comic books with jobs, that will tell you everything you need to know.
- [93:33]
A
Can, can I give you another example? If you place comic books with houses, there it is. Because what you should be doing, making these things cheap and available everywhere, everybody's got one. But some people will upgrade the out of them. They'll pour their heart and soul into it. And now all of a sudden, oh shit. Have you seen that one down on that street? Holy hell, that place is dope. That's incredible. I'll pay. I want that better one. I could get the cheap one that's available. Nobody has to worry about that. But that one's dope. I'm emotionally connected to it. And now it's like the people that pour their heart and soul into something that was originally considered to be like whatever it becomes like a thing that actually ends up having value. And so yeah, make it affordable, make people able to get in and then value will be created downstream over, over time by somebody doing something special. In the case of a shonen Jump magazine preserving it.
- [94:22]
B
Yep, very interesting. Perfect transition to go into. Mom. Donnie on Jon Stewart. I'm curious about your take with this. I watched the whole interview and you're set. Like your setup was interesting.
- [94:32]
A
So I'm curious how does he embarrass himself?
- [94:35]
B
No, because I was like the conversation follow logic. And I feel like this is a very good. I feel like me and you had this conversation a couple months ago. But we'll hear it from the horses mouth.
- [94:45]
A
If you go back to some of the Democrats that we most admire, FDR,
- [94:50]
B
LaGuardia, you will see a lot of
- [94:52]
A
democratic socialist principles in their vision. And if you think about a lot of what we've come to accept as just the facts of life across our
- [95:00]
B
country, a lot of it is also
- [95:02]
A
still driven by democratic socialist principles. Now if today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today.
- [95:15]
B
And yet that's the library. And the same thing with the fire department, the same thing with public schools.
- [95:19]
A
And it's to say that a lot of politics has been a debate about who deserves what. And I would prefer a politics that debates how we can deliver that to everyone. What's that, motherfucker? What is the that? So he is a Maoist. Let us be abundantly clear, we're going to do more deep dives on the dsa. In their own words, this guy is a fucking liar. He, he is misrepresenting the actual truth. And because of that he's going to put a slick veneer on something that is truly about control. So first of all, he is straw manning the opposite side. And so for that, fuck him. The reality is that why do people like the fire department? Because it's dope to have a public good. Where the fire department of old was like, you got paid for how many fires you put out. And so when you, you create that incentive, one, you've got an incentive to start a fire that you can put out so you can get paid. If you don't think that kind of thing happens, first of all, just read history. And then second, look at what happened. I think it was In India, they were trying to get rid of king cobras. So they offered people, we'll pay you this much for bringing in a dead cobra. So people started actually raising cobras and creating like breeding farms, killing them and then bringing them in to get the money for it. So you create this perverse incentive. So people looked at that and said, oh, we create a weird perverse incentive. So if he thinks he's arguing against Michael Malice and somebody that wants everything to be anarchy again, as Michael Malice describes it, maybe, maybe Malice would recognize himself in the picture that he's painting. I certainly do not. No fan of America and the, let's call it the founding father's vision of American capitalism is arguing for having no government assistance. Okay, so we're going to have the government. But when he says these are DSA principles, that is bullshit. Mao represents DSA principles, which is, we are going to make shit free. The people that are making money are evil. That and, and I quote, the most likely person to be the 2028 candidate on the Democrat side said, there is no way to generate a billion dollars in revenue. I can't remember if she's saying revenue or wealth.
- [97:28]
B
Wealth.
- [97:28]
A
But either way, there's no way to generate a billion dollars without doing something illegal, unethical. Unethical, Perfect. So literally you. That, that is absolutely nonsensical. Not only is it possible I have done it, so I don't even want to hear that you're doing something unethical. That that is bullshit. Now if you want to point to what you think I have done, that's unethical, I'll happily go to battle on that. So this is when you talk about the absurd, like magic trick that he's trying to pull around saying that a library is exactly the dsa. No, it's not. Look at what Mao did. Mao said, hey everybody, we're going to do things our way. We're going to get rid of the four olds. We're going to move into a brave new future. I want you all to plant the crops at this time because I know best. Just like they're trying to do with rent freezes. You guys are doing bad things in the way that you're trying to charge for rent. It shouldn't be that expensive. I know better than you. So this is what you're going to charge for your rent. Not understanding the knock on effects that it's going to have. That is very different than people going, you know what I think would be dope? If we created a place where really Driven young people or old people, whoever the fuck, want to come in and get educated. So we want our people to be educated to high heaven and we want to create access to that knowledge for free. That's the dopest shit ever. And now people can go learn. And if you're asking me if I would be willing to pay tax dollars to make sure that, for instance, kids have access to the Internet, yes, if you want to know if I would put tax dollars to make sure that kids have access to AI, yes. So there are things for sure to make sure that the next generation is educated. Would I put money towards making sure that the fire department isn't. Like, there aren't six fire departments competing for that house fire? Yes, of course. Like, it's just, it's a better world, it's more stable foundation. If you're asking me am I willing to do things that are going to break the engine of prosperity, this is where he is. He is either dumb or evil. Either one is completely disqualifying. And if Jon Stewart actually can't see the difference between mean freezing someone's rent, which has already been tried, remember, this experiment has been run and it ended up in the most horrific conditions in New York. It wasn't even like this was run somewhere else. It's actually done in fucking New York. So you can't have the cost of running something be unclamped and the cost to charge for that thing clamped. It's completely nonsensical from. From cause and effect, first principles. It is completely nonsensical. Now he can say it with a smile, he can say it in ways that feel great, but he cannot map it from cause and effect. He can't do it. And that's why at the end of his speech, he just starts saying that I want. Or he'll talk a lot about workers and dignity or he'll say the city deserves better. What the fuck does that mean? Dude, I've seen people in, in my mindset days, one of the things that ended up driving me crazy was people take obesity for a second. So I would say you're fat because you eat things that are going to make you fat. Plain and simple. It's. You don't have a genetic disease. It's not that you're just eating dumb. There were no obese people in Auschwitz. Why? Because ultimately this comes down to caloric deficit. So you may not be willing to do the things you need to do to get lean. Fine, cool. Go enjoy the ice cream. I don't have any moral compunctions with it whatsoever. But if you're trying to map how we ended up here, here it is a very simple. You must do these things. If you want to get lean, you may not want to do them, and that's fine. If a city isn't willing to do the things it needs to do to be prosperous, it will not be prosperous. It does not matter if the city feels that it is entitled to eat the ice cream. If you eat ice cream, you get fat if you eat too much of it. Let's be very clear so on that what the fuck does deserve have to do with it? And when I would be doing mindset with people and I would say, hey, I want to help, they would fucking come to to me and they would say, hey, I have this problem. Help me overcome it. Cool. I want to see you succeed. Here's what you have to do. And then they would actually say. They would actually say, and I quote, I deserve this ice cream. What am I supposed to do with that? What do you mean? This is physics. Economies have an engine of prosperity. The reason it's right to think of it as an engine is because engines require physics. Physics. There's no magic to an internal combustion engine. You align things in a certain way. You put certain inputs in, you get certain outputs. If you fail to do that, you break the engine of prosperity and it doesn't work. And it does not provide the very thing that allows you to tax and do all this stuff for free. Remember the core problem? The core problem is no one will work for free. The second you show me how people can work for free, then we can have the utopia. But if you can't get people to work for free, free, you have to use force. Mao tried it, Stalin tried it. Lenin tried it. It just. Pol Pot tried it. It just ends in death. A lot of death. Because you have to go kill those people or starve them to death. That's also a fun one. That has been done by Mao. And these guys model themselves after Mao. Hassan pike are dressed up like Mao to give a speech.
- [102:43]
B
So can we. Okay. Right. Really quick.
- [102:47]
A
Yep.
- [102:47]
B
If he would have been like, free libraries, fire department. That is a social service policy. You would have had no beef. The fact that he's labeling that democratic socialist policy, DSA policies, the fact that
- [103:00]
A
he's trying to smuggle in something that is absolutely a lie.
- [103:05]
B
Dsa.
- [103:06]
A
Yes. The DSA policies are not social safety nets.
- [103:10]
B
Okay?
- [103:11]
A
The DSA policies are. Are we are going to take over the means of production. We want to abolish the Senate so that everything can be done by pure. Who has more people. Literally breaking all of the things that work in a democracy. They will do that to gain power and then they will clamp down on people. As they say, you can vote communism in, you can't vote it out. The first thing they do is then they say, we don't need elections anymore. We can't have anybody this thing. Thing up. And so now that we've got it, we fought so hard to get here, we've got to abolish all these other things and just make that those checks and balances. Impossible, boys and girls. You need only look at the direction of travel. These guys tell on themselves every day by who they celebrate. They are Marxist Leninists. Watch how that has played out in reality. It's crazy. So this is one of those things where the, the person is telling you, I'm going to use different people who are far worse or sorry, far much less worse, but have a way worse reputation to explain to you what's happening. So they go, okay, my hero is Ted Bundy, and I'm opening a women's shelter, and it's called the Bundy Women's Shelter. And you know, when people look back, few people have done more for women's rights than Ted Bundy. And then you want to cut to the shot of Leonardo DiCaprio snapping his fingers and pointing, whistling and pointing at the screen. You're like, hold on. Ted Bundy was a fucking serial killer and he killed women. What? What are you talking about? So for you to celebrate Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Mao, Duke, they are mass murderers. That, that they are unrivaled except by Genghis Khan. They are unrivaled in human history. So what are you talking about? How, how are people not freaking out? If they said our hero is Hitler, people would have the right response. But Hitler was not as effective at killing people as the people they celebrate. And so I'm just like, dude, this is too weird. This is too weird. In fact, I'm going to strip all the emotion out of my voice for a second because when I hear things like this and it's a thing that happens right in people's faces, and I'm like, why didn't anybody point this out? So let me point it out because I'm like, the rebuttals are always just emotional. Let me give it to you completely unemotional. The DSA admires Mao. The DSA admires Stalin. The DSA admires, of their own admission, Lenin, the DSA admires Marx. They have an oppressed versus oppressor lens. No matter what words come out of their mouth, that is their lens. There is the oppressor and oppressed in every relationship. And we always fight for the oppressed and we are always opposed to the oppressor. So then you just have to ask, okay, who's the oppressed and who's the oppressor? In. If you just take America writ large, America is the oppressor. And they will say the marginalized are the oppressed. They tried race for a long time. Now they're moving it to class. And so they just talk about the working man. Remember, the working man never starts these revolts. It is always overproduced elites. The reason overproduced elites gravitate towards Marxism is it is a religion is the right way to think about it. It is a religion masquerading as an economic philosophy that is built on resentment. So even take Steve Kean, who really believes that Marx is one of, if not the. I think he'll go all the way to the greatest economic mind. Mind ever, even he admits. But he had a philosophical conclusion he wanted to reach and he ended up betraying himself and pushing this thing that reached a political outcome. But if you back up a few steps, right up to where he inserts his philosophy, he actually understood the economy better than most people, at least the economy of that time. Okay, so now you have this religion that didn't stop at the economy, that went to philosophy that was embraced and deployed by the biggest mass murderers to ever exist, only rivaled by Genghis Khan. I'll always put that caveat so people know I'm literally looking through all of human history. So now when people have, because of the far left, march through the institutions, meaning, as they say, history is written by the winner, curriculum is written by the professors. If all of your professors think Marx is great, if all of your professors think Lenin is great, if all of your professors think Mao is great, then kids that come up through that institution will think all those same things. And so even though Mao killed, at least, nobody estimates less than 45 million, some people will push it all the way up to 80 or 100 million. But let's just stick with the low estimate. Mao killed at least 45 million people himself. All of World War II only killed like 56 million. Hitler himself killed way, way, way less than that. And so Mao alone, forget Lenin, forget Stalin. Mao alone killed 45 million people. So they celebrate him and it doesn't trigger any alarm bells. And that's the part where I'm like, guys, think of it as a test. Ma ran a test for us, and he said, I want to see what happens when you take this Marxist belief system and you deploy it at scale. Lenin did the same thing for us. It kills relentlessly. Pol Pot tries it. It kills relentlessly for the reasons that I've said that. You end up having to do it by force because you break the engine of prosperity. So you break the engine of prosperity, everybody's life starts getting worse. They're able to afford less. There are fewer things on the grocery store shelves. In the case of the Bronx, when rent freezes were tried back in the 70s, people were just burning the buildings down. So eventually people go, this isn't working. And at that point, you can't just say, oh, yeah, you're right. Why? Because you'll lose power. And this was a game of resentment and power acquisition from the beginning. That's why Marx spills over into philosophy instead of just sticking with the economic economics. So now you have a religion of resentment that becomes a way to acquire power once you acquire power to maintain it. When the economic system doesn't work, you can't win people over because you've made their lives better, you've made their lives worse. Materially, measurably, obviously, repeatedly, you've made it worse. So they'll rebel. So your only option, if you want to retain power, which was your goal in the first place, is to start killing them now. Remember Mao? While his people were starving to death by the tens of millions, was exporting grain. Why was he doing that? So that he could live in a mansion and make sure that he always had food. I don't know. Read the books about him. This is not me making this up. I'm giving you, like, the just top layer, greatest hits. Like, the dude had his own. He sent his own son to die. He left his wife, didn't tell her he was leaving, left her in an area that he knew the military was about to come and obliterate. So she died. I mean, the. The shit that this guy's done is. Is fucking insane. He's one of the most evil human beings ever to live. And you have Mamdani, who is very good at smiling, who is very good at propagandizing and speaking as if he's coming from a place of love. The DSA is not social safety net. The DSA is Marxism. Marxism is what we just talked about. It is a philosophy of resentment masquerading as an economic Principle that doesn't work, it's been tried. So that's where the pushback needs to be extraordinary. We need to be very intellectually robust and muscular in our are absolute unrelenting and ever repeating takedown of these ideas. They are sinister and they are being masqueraded through something that they aren't. Likening Marx to the library is the craziest shit I've ever heard in my life. Likening. Solving the perverse incentives that would arise if you try to use capitalism for firefighting and saying as if the other side is saying no, no, no, we want a perfectly free economy embedded inside of anarchy isn't real. I don't know who you're arguing with. It certainly isn't any respected and vocal proponent of America and capitalism because nobody is saying that. And so the level of absurdity, the level of of theatrics, the level of lies that are being told is too much to ignore first of all. And then second, it is way too consequential. Because if America tries to solve its very real problems by adopting a murderous strategy, that would be the biggest catastrophe any of us could face. If on the other hand we get honest, honest about the way the engine of prosperity works, we go point at the actual nuts and bolts like the the real this is the exact thing that's wrong with the carburetor. And if you adjust it in this way it will start working again. If we do that, then we've got a chance of getting on the other side of this. But lies and emotional appeals, I will not tolerate them. I will not stand for it.
- [113:20]
B
They also talked into that interview about how they need different names for things because they think as soon as you say socialism people are getting like triggered and they're going back.
- [113:28]
A
As soon as you say socialism, people realize what you're actually about. That's a hundred percent true. If Ted Bundy starts renaming rape or murder, it's still the thing that we absolutely despise. And so just because people now know rape and murder is terrible, if you're still going to penetrate somebody against their will, I don't care what the you call it, it rape by any other name is just as evil in the same way that a rose by any other name is just as sweet. So the absurdity of that is fucking sinister. Like that is somebody trying to obfuscate. They're onto us. They understand this is bad and I'm not going to be able to pull a fast one on them. So I need to rebrand it.
- [114:09]
B
Fuck you yeah, but I also think that nuance doesn't exist. And Chat's going to call me a communist, and that's cool. But I also think that there is a spectrum to this and we have to stop acting like we live in a totally capitalistic, freedom, free market society in America right now. We lived. We live in capitalism light. And I think that the move now is now zero capitalism, as in like zero sugar Coca Cola, not like zero capitalism. You know, I think we're on that spectrum of like classic capitalism, diet capitalism, zero capitalism. Then we're starting to get to socialists, and then we're starting to get to these other like entities. And while him saying specifically the library, is a democratic socialist principle possible? I get everything you're saying. That monologue is well maintained. The DSA is crazy. Like I said in the past, I have went down that rabbit hole. I agree. No pushback. However, I don't want to lose a force for the trees. And to say that there are social programs that can be implemented today that can help workers directly. There are social programs that can help people.
- [115:02]
A
So aggressive agreement.
- [115:03]
B
A lot of times when we just play the. He said this socialism, we're just painting it with a broad brush and we're loing, we're using, we're losing. Excuse me. The new nuance of the things that can be beneficial. I don't want to say that the DSA did this beneficial thing, but I also don't want to say that keep
- [115:20]
A
beating this from here. Here is what's happening. Let's say that a woman just got abused. You and I both agree that woman needs to get help and we need to do anything we can, whether we know her or not, to help facilitate her getting help. But I'm not going to send her to Ted Bundy's clinic for women. The absurdity of that. I don't care what he calls it. He has said what his principles are. And he said we're going to further traumatize the woman as soon as she gets here. So, guys, I read the brochure. Sure, the brochure says nice things, but their charter says what they're actually about. And so the charter and the marketing message are very different. You can go right now and find DSA members who actually say we're going to have one real policy. And then we're going to tell our candidates to say something else. They say that. So we know it's happening. We know it's part of their policy. You can read they put out their new policy. It is basically I haven't done the go through yet, but we'll probably end up covering this. But somebody's done a one for one read with mouse policies and the DSA policies, and they're like, these are basically the same thing using different words. So I would not at all be surprised because everything that I've read about the DSA tells me that that is true. Hearing Hasan, who's like their biggest mouthpiece, and they have defended him time and time again. He has said before on camera, I pulled it a couple weeks ago, but we didn't get to it. He said on camera that Ma is one of the greatest leaders in history, bro, that's so crazy. So we, like, think about how the immune system reacted to the way that Kanye was talking about Hitler. Yeah, good.
- [117:16]
B
That's.
- [117:16]
A
That's a good reaction. But we don't have anything like that for Hasan or anybody else going to bat for malice crazy shit ever. So anyway, no matter what words they use, it doesn't matter. We both agree that woman needs help, so we need to go. Okay, what does a woman who's been traumatized actually need? Not. This is not a choice between no help or Ted Bundy. This is a question of we can just rule Ted Bundy out. That's. That's. That's anti. What we need to do. So now just forget about that. That's not going to happen. That's worse. That's infinite trauma. That is murder. That is. That's literally. So set that all aside. Now look at. Okay, what are we actually going to do? What is actually going to help somebody? And that game needs to be engaged with. It's precisely why this show exists. I talk about this endlessly in terms of what we need to do to actually help workers. But I would just like to remind America, the DSA hates workers. The DSA hates the working class. Facts. I'll show it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. But that's just a factual statement. Now they're going to say the opposite. But just like Ted Bundy hates women, no matter what he tells you, the DSA hates workers. All right, thank you guys for the super chats. You guys are amazing. The support is really, really felt, really appreciated. Speaking of people that support this podcast, Humble House House, thank you guys so much. You are incredible. We're so grateful. And if you guys want to take advantage of what are freakishly good sauces that have just the best ingredients, it is so clean, in fact, go to their website. Just read the ingredients it's humblehousefoods.com. check out the ingredients. They are incredible. And if you decide to get some, get 15 off with code Tom. Shout out to those guys.
- [119:04]
B
You might need, like, new samples or something. This is getting better. I feel bad. Be, like, filled. In fact, I had Drew was like,
- [119:10]
A
we probably shouldn't put those on. We're like, no, no, no. We're actually eating them. Let people see that we're eating this stuff.
- [119:14]
B
But it's bad that we don't have full samples. But it's good because there's nothing worse than somebody who's trying to, like, pitch something and they don't have. They don't use it.
- [119:20]
A
Yeah, so true. And speaking of people that we're grateful for, Felix and friends, who was. Who we were reacting to today, he runs the Goat Academy. Check those guys out. Very grateful. I don't have any relationship with him. I never talked to him ever in my life.
- [119:36]
B
Life.
- [119:36]
A
So, Felix, if you happen to see this, thank you, man, for putting together another quality video. I've seen a ton of your stuff. All right, everybody, We've got another ITU AI masterclass coming up August 5th at 1pm Pacific time. Let me show you how to launch a company using AI. I use AI all the time. It is so useful. We're living in this narrow gap where people are still afraid. There's all that anxiety. Most people are rejecting it, not using it. I'm telling you, take advantage of this window. I'll show you how to do it for free. Free on August 5th at 1pm all right, have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you Monday. Love you. Oh, yeah, we'll see you Monday. Love you. Bye. Oh, until next time. Be legendary.
- [120:12]
B
Bye.
- [120:14]
A
That's right.
- [120:14]
B
I didn't remember that.
- [120:16]
A
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B
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B
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