Everyone's Getting Laid Off. So Why Can't Economists Find AI in the ACTUAL Data?

Summary

Impact Theory Podcast Summary

Episode: "Everyone's Getting Laid Off. So Why Can't Economists Find AI in the ACTUAL Data?"

Date: June 1, 2026
Host: Tom Duru (Tom Bilyeu)
Co-host: Drew (plus Ryan in a segment)

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Overview

This episode of Impact Theory, hosted by Tom Duru with co-host Drew, dives deep into the current AI narrative—particularly the paradox of widespread headlines about AI-driven layoffs despite economists finding little evidence of AI job disruption in real labor data. The hosts explore the societal, economic, and psychological impacts of AI proliferation, the shifting job market, current global events, and the nuanced interplay between technology, culture, and adaptability.

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Key Topics and Insights

1. AI Progress: AGI and Claude Opus 4.8

Timestamps: 04:00 – 17:30

• AI Achieving New Benchmarks:

  • Discussion of Claude Opus 4.8 achieving a 57.9% score on the notoriously difficult Humanities Last Exam (HLE), surpassing Peter Diamandis’ AGI benchmark.
  • The HLE was designed to be virtually impossible for AI, covering subjects from math and physics to history and medicine.
  • Tom: "Peter Diamandis said that if an AI were to ever score over 50% on that exam, he would consider it Artificial General Intelligence… I'll be very interested to hear if he actually thinks that now..." (06:22)

• Human+AI Synergy:

  • Tom argues that AI currently functions as a superpowered tool and thought partner, but “the human is still necessary in the process,” especially around creativity, judgment, and emotional reasoning.
  • “It is an incredibly empowering feeling to go into this knowing...there's going to be poor judgment on behalf of the AI. But you, as the human, are such an important part of this dyad.” (09:40)
  • Emphasizes leveraging AI to do what it does best, making room for creatives to focus on their unique contributions.

• Potential and Limitations:

  • While AI can generalize beyond its training data, creativity and emotional nuance remain uniquely human domains… for now.
  • AI breakthroughs are both thrilling and unsettling, prompting both existential fear and enthusiasm.

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2. Layoffs, Jobs, and the Elusive AI Economic Impact

Timestamps: 17:30 – 40:45

• Layoff Narrative vs. Economic Data:

  • Drew highlights large-scale layoffs at companies like Meta, wondering if timing or reporting explains economists’ failure to detect AI’s fingerprint in labor data.
  • Tom: "Three years after Chad GPT arrived, Apollo's chief economist went hunting for AI's fingerprints in the US labor data...He didn't find anything. That's the crazy part. Zero evidence of a single job that has been lost to AI." (33:24)

• Jevons Paradox:

  • Tom frames the current AI revolution through Jevons Paradox: making a resource (intelligence) radically cheaper doesn’t reduce its use—it actually increases demand and activity.
  • "If you make coal engines more efficient...it didn't burn less coal, it burned far more coal...Swap in coal for intelligence and that's exactly what happened." (36:14)

• Cost and Incentives:

  • Some companies overused AI tools, racking up unsustainable bills, then realized cost and structure must be proactively managed.
  • Tom: "Anytime you put an incentive structure in place…you’ve just now incentivized somebody to write a program that gets AI to run all night...with no check for whether it output anything that was beneficial..." (28:43)

• Productivity and Adaptation:

  • Despite fear, Tom insists that those using AI correctly are seeing increased productivity and expanded potential—not contraction.
  • He forecasts a massive realignment of roles, with entry-level jobs potentially squeezed but entrepreneurship and creativity expanding.

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3. Job Market Shifts and Generational Pressures

Timestamps: 39:55 – 48:04

• Two Americas:

  • Drew notes a lived disconnect: “I have friends who’ve been unemployed…there’s no more people managers. Everything in the middle is kind of gone.” (39:55)
  • Tom: “There’s going to be a bloodbath of people like your friend that refuse to adapt or accept that…you have to take five steps backwards, and hopefully over time, you’ll be 15 steps ahead. But that five steps backwards is just too brutal for a lot of people.” (40:47)

• Continuous Reinvention:

  • Careers are shifting from lifelong roles to rapid, four-to-seven-year cycles of reinvention.
  • Drew: “Now it sounds like...every four to seven years, you might have to completely change what you do.” (43:32)

• Young People’s Challenges:

  • Ryan describes the job market for recent graduates as “impossible.” Out of 15 friends, only three secured jobs.
  • “Of all my friends...only three of us have gotten jobs. And that’s like—two of those were through their family...mine was just by chance. Everyone else has just been applying since graduation.” (47:00)

• Changing Nature of Entry Jobs:

  • Drew laments the disappearance of “transitional” jobs once used as stepping stones; now, adults occupy those roles, crowding out youth.

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4. Culture, Protests, and Social Order

Timestamps: 66:43–89:53

• Riots and Protests Analysis:

  • The hosts shift to riots at Newark’s ICE facility and in Paris after a football victory, emphasizing the difference between productive protest and lawless escalation.
  • Tom credits NJ law enforcement: "They literally just rounded them up...So from that perspective, I'm very excited to see law enforcement learn their lesson." (68:59)
  • On Paris riots, Drew urges against blaming immigrants or politicizing events that may be tied to cultural celebration or "football hooliganism." (70:55)

• Cultural Transmission and Social Contagion:

  • Tom draws historical parallels between civil unrest in France, America, and postwar Japan, highlighting how policy, economic incentives, and values shape behavior.
  • On the root of cultural behavior: “It does not matter what their skin color is—it matters what culture they came from…there are just some cultures…that are rowdier, they burn more shit, whatever.” (77:51)

• Masculinity, Feminization, and Societal Balance:

  • Tom’s most provocative thesis is about the feminization of Western societies leading to policy and enforcement failures.
  • “A feminized culture becomes so convinced of compassion...” (78:16)
  • He clarifies that masculine and feminine energy must be kept in “dynamic tension” for healthy organizations and societies. (82:17)
  • Drew pushes for nuance, stressing that "blaming" women isn’t the point—but imbalanced empathy/emotion at the policy level can be problematic. (82:04, 88:03)

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5. World Events and Economic Forecasting

Timestamps: 52:36 – 66:38

• Iran Crisis and Geopolitical Implications:

  • Discussion on rumors of Iran’s president resigning amidst power struggles, the failings of regime change, and ongoing uncertainty in US–Iran relations.
  • “If there is this kind of turmoil playing out, we have no idea how this is all going to end up.” (55:31)

• Oil Prices and Global Recession Risk:

  • Rising Brent oil prices could "take you from a momentary recession to a global recession" if disruptions persist. (60:43)
  • Tom predicts US energy production might ramp up, margins in vulnerable sectors will be squeezed, and global power balances could shift, especially with China possibly stepping in.

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6. Conspiracy Corner: Brooklyn Sewers and Generational Shifts in Entertainment

Timestamps: 92:22–97:51

• Mysterious Events in Brooklyn:

  • Reports of people with tools emerging from Brooklyn manholes—the hosts speculate about potential sabotage or crime, but also joke about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (92:22)

• Cultural Evolution in Kids’ Media:

  • Tom notes the decline of shared cartoon culture among kids due to fragmented media and YouTube, fearing loss of collective morality tales central to cartoons like GI Joe and Powerpuff Girls.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On AI Progress:
  "The fact that we are already…interfacing with technology that can do things that so far humans have not been able to do—that is a big deal." — Tom (07:56)

• Jevons Paradox in AI:
  "When intelligence gets cheap, you don’t end up using less of it, you start using more." — Tom (37:12)

• On Reinventing Careers:
  "We may live in a world where this is about reinvention…AI moves so fast that everybody's gonna have to reinvent themselves." — Tom (41:00)

• On Policy and Social Order:
  "A feminized culture becomes so convinced of compassion that…the only reason they're doing this is because they're impoverished...That's fucking nanny state bullshit." — Tom (78:16)

• On Human-AI Collaboration:
  "You plus the AI…nobody working with the AI will be able to replicate what you plus the AI will be able to create." — Tom (10:25)

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Segment Timestamps

• AI Achievements & AGI Benchmarks: 04:00–17:30
• Layoffs, Economic Data, and Incentives: 17:30–40:45
• Generational Job Pressure & Adaptability: 39:55–48:04
• Iranian Crisis & Oil Prices: 52:36–66:38
• Social Unrest & Cultural Transmission: 66:43–89:53
• Brooklyn Sewers & Kids Entertainment: 92:22–97:51

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Conclusion

Tom and Drew cut through the surface-level panic of "AI is taking all the jobs" and look for the real signals in the data (and the lack of them). The hosts argue that both the labor market and society are in a turbulent phase of transition: what matters most is adaptability, clearheadedness, and the ability to leverage both new technologies and age-old human virtues. Rather than succumbing to fear or headline narratives, listeners are encouraged to focus on creating unique value, embracing reinvention, and participating thoughtfully in a changing world.

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Next Episode Teaser:
Tom will host a free masterclass on starting a company with AI on June 11, 1:00pm PT.

Transcript

[Tom Duru]

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[Drew]

Like the soccer tournament.

[Tom Duru]

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[Drew]

Carvana made it.

[Tom Duru]

They buy and sell cars, so they

[Drew]

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[Tom Duru]

So. Got any good cups lately? Used to.

[Drew]

Just couldn't figure out where in the

[Tom Duru]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Duru]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Duru]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Duru]

T's and C's apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Duru show live. Today is a very special day. We have the band back together, boys and girls. We've got Ryan back on Community and we've got Drew back in his rightful place in the co hosting chair. I hope you guys all enjoyed the time that we had with Lisa. It really was wonderful. But Drew, you were missed. I'm excited to have you back. And I actually found out why Drew was gone. It was rad. It's for a rad reason. He produced a short film that was in a film festival. I'm like, why didn't you tell me? Drew, this is good. This is an amazing thing. So I am very excited for you, man. And so just to take a second to clap for you. That is awesome. Congratulations. And the title of the film, do you want to let everybody know?

[Drew]

Easy to train your cart. We're doing a couple more for them screenings this year and then should be available to the Y by the end of the year.

[Tom Duru]

So let's go. Is it going to be on YouTube?

[Drew]

I don't know yet. I don't know. We got to talk about distribution. I need somebody to cut the check first before we go straight to YouTube.

[Tom Duru]

But hey, we'll see.

[Drew]

We'll see.

[Tom Duru]

I'm excited, man. This is good stuff. So to keep the hits on coming with the good news, some people are saying that Claude Opus 4.8 has achieved AGI now, I know not everybody's going to consider that good news, but hopefully by the end of today's episode, I can convince you that the better the AI gets, minus a dystopian vision, the better for all of us. And we're going to see some of that in a fascinating new report that came out from Apollo's chief economist that indicates that AI is having a surprising impact on the jobs market. We're going to detail exactly what that surprise is. Protests at the Newark ICE facility have surprised me because they actually escalated to the point that they had to put a curfew in place, but then they actually made arrests, so everything seems to have cleared out. We're talking about that. Reports are coming in that the President of Iran may resign due to a takeover by the irgc. Not sure yet if that's true, but we'll detail all those out. Rumors are also circulating that Iran might hand over the nuclear dust to the US and there's enough optimism in all of that that Iran's stock market was actually all green. Recently, riots broke out in Paris after Paris St Germain won the Champions League title. That was a bit madness. And something very weird is going on in the sewer system under Brooklyn as multiple people, like batches of seven or eight people, unauthorized, with tools, have been seen crawling out from manhole covers under Brooklyn.

[Drew]

It's wild.

[Tom Duru]

So we'll find out what's going on there. Indeed. And shout out to today's sponsor, Kalshi. If you guys want to know what the odds are of certain things happening in the world, make sure that you check them out. Drew and I have been using them for a while now to understand movements and culture. It's very interesting. And there's a QR code on the screen, so check it out if you want to see. They're better than polling, as far as I'm concerned. So it's a fascinating new movement, and

[Drew]

you get $10 off your first trade. So go ahead. Go, go. Everybody has a different thing. It's sports, it's crypto, it's politics, it's elections. Whatever your favorite thing hobby is. Go bet on that. Go trade on that.

[Tom Duru]

Use it for the polling. Save your money, boys and girls. Use it for the polling.

[Drew]

Okay. There's been a lot of updates since I've been going, so I'm playing catch up and stuff like that, but I. I feel like this narrative is just swinging left and right and back and forth in front and center because, yes, when I left, everybody was getting layoffs. That's when Meta announced the 8,000. So we were like, oh, it's official now, this is the 16th company that just did layoffs and this is five digit layoffs, not like 40 people or nothing. AI is officially doing something, but now we just got news that that's not the case and AI is doing something completely different. So is it just a timing thing? Are we too early? Are we calling it? What do you think is happening with all these different AI narratives now kind of in the ecosystem?

[Tom Duru]

I think what you're seeing in terms of this specific response is people are panicking about the unknown. Humans are fascinatingly predictable in terms of anything new is scary, it's dangerous. With very few caveats for. Hold on a second, maybe I don't understand where this is going to go. What does pattern recognition tell us? And listen, AI is a unique beast. It really is. If it becomes the thing that people think it could become, it truly is unlike anything that came before it. And so I don't want to poo poo away the fears there. However, every technological transition that we've seen historically has ended up following something called Javon's Paradox, where you would think as coal becomes more ubiquitous that it's just going to crater. People that are doing jobs that that's going to come in and supplant, but the reality is that it creates all these other opportunities, people end up using it even more and so it doesn't end up cratering the whole market. And so we're seeing something very similar, I think happen at this stage of AI Now. I think it's very important to break AI into different stages because down the road it is possible that it becomes self improving, that it is smarter than us and it gets better than us so rapidly that there's that fast takeoff that people fear and all of a sudden we're left behind and we really don't matter at any level of the stack. So that is possible, but that isn't what's happening right now. And and so I would say do not get lost in the grips of that fear, Understand. Instead, the stuff moves in phases. Understand what each phase is, have an eye towards the future, but live in the present. And this is the very thing I've had to convince myself to do as a game developer, because if I cast my eye too far into the future, I go, this is pointless. Why am I doing this? And you would tap out and walk away. But the timing of all this stuff is where it gets nearly impossible to predict. Getting the long tail trends right, I think it's relatively easy. But understanding the specifics, the timing, that part's impossible. So what I had to say to myself was, right now, today, it makes life better, easier. It allows us to do more things than we could do historically. So just in case that the next phase doesn't come for 10, 15, 20, 30, who knows before it actually reaches that kind of ability to be better than us at everything, let me not live paralyzed in that future state. Let me execute right now with what's real today. And so the market response is very few people where I'm at and a whole lot of people living in the future freaking out. And I think that's going to lead to increasing levels of violence. So get ready for that. We certainly have not seen the last of that. So there are two things that are happening right now. The first is that Claude Opus 4.8 just scored 57.9% on humanities last exam. And if you guys don't know what Humanities last exam is, it is a 2,500 question test that nearly a thousand experts came together. They built it specifically trying to be the hardest thing for an AI to pass that the AI would just struggle and it would grind to a halt. Now, Peter Diamandis said that if an AI were to ever score over 50% on that exam, he would consider it Artificial General Intelligence. Now, if you don't know him, he's been at the forefront of future technologies for a very long time, is one of the most credible voices in the space. I know him personally. In fact, he's coming on the show today again and he really does, I think, have a better grasp of the totality of future facing technology than just about anybody out there. And I'll be very interested to hear if he actually thinks that now that Opus 4.8 has at 57.9% beat his benchmark for AGI. If he'll still think that that's true or if now that he's engaging with it, he'll realize that there are some massive limitations. I'll fall into the maybe camp. The HLE is not solvable by simple lookups. That is true. It definitely requires real reasoning. That is true. But the all the AIs right now have a very hard time pushing very far beyond their training data from a take the lessons that you've learned and now generalize them and really push them out. But the reality is that they are able to go past their training data. So they're sol solving novel mathematics now, which is pretty wild. So the goal in creating the test was to be the final test, the hardest questions across math, physics, history, medicine that human experts can think up. So once a machine has really gone all the way to. I mean, I don't know if it'll get to 100%, but once it's like in the 90s, upper 90s, then you know that the human intelligence is at the absolute frontier. Like, the smartest of the smart people have been matched. But the fact that we are already, even if we haven't reached AGI, we are already interfacing with technology that can do things that so far humans have not been able to do. That is a big deal. So you've got protein folding happen, you've got the novel mathematics being solved. You're going to see more coming out in biology, chemistry, et cetera, all of that. And so the fact that that is happening, I get why ears are perked up. This is definitely something that we want to pay attention to. But right now I would say rather than look at, because there was a mathematician that saw the novel mathematics be solved, and he literally was just completely shook and he was like, I feel like everything that I put my life into to get good at this thing, it's meaningless. And I don't know why I've now spent that time. And I don't remember him saying, like, I'm depressed. Like, the vibe of what he was writing was a man who's feeling depressed. I would say that's the absolute wrong approach. And the way to be thinking about this is that all of us now have access to an incredibly powerful tool that you can aim at virtually anything. And by the way, you are important in that chain still. I know I've mentioned this before, but this to me is a really great litmus test. So one of my deep dives that I wrote, somebody ended up putting, hey, thanks for reading the LLM script. And I was like, dude, I wish that you could just go prompt an LLM and it would output. One of my deep dives. And I'll say, if we ever get to the point where AI can, you can actually one shot. Something that I would read on screen because it so accurately maps my belief system. That would be shocking. As of right now, it is an incredibly empowering feeling to go into this knowing that, okay, there's going to be poor judgment on behalf of the AI. It's very good at a thing that I don't want to spend my time on, which is go out, tell me what's known, what's known in the world, argue with me about my ideas. Come back and me, show me the best arguments against this thing. Because a lot of times I'll think of something and I'll be like, oh my God, like nobody's ever thought of this before. Then it's like, no, it's already been thought of. It's known as this. And then I'll say, okay, cool. Then what's the best argument against it? And so you can sharpen your thinking in real time. It's incredible. But through that back and forth, because you as the human are such an important part of this dyad that you end up creating something that is completely novel. It's you plus the AI. And nobody working with the AI will be able to replicate what you plus the AI will be able to create. And that thing like, let that be this gigantic glowing orb in your life. What are you trying to do at work? What are you trying to do at home? Are you involved in a creative endeavor? Because leveraging the AI is not some cheap way out. It's like your writing partner, your thought partner, your assistant in the office, however you want to think about it, is quite literally one of the smartest, most well educated people on planet Earth, and they just really want to help you do your thing. It is so incredible. So I want to infect people with that enthusiasm. I get it. Down the road, it may be that this was a brief moment in time that it didn't last, that the AI does surpass us, but it has not surpassed us yet in ways that are incredibly meaningful and so leverage that to do the things you want to do. I just can't express enough how profoundly impactful AI has been, both for me as a content creator and for me as a game developer, it's just absolutely incredible. And so seeing people paralyzed by the fear, no bueno. So, yes, AI is now pushing into truly novel territory. Yes, there are credible voices that are saying it's achieved artificial general intelligence. Yes, it's beginning to be able to generalize beyond just the very strict things that it's taught on. But at the same time, it really does lack something that we either don't know how to quantify yet about what it means to have good taste, to be human, to leverage emotion, maybe. And so we have this really unique place. And by the way, it's possible that that unique place lasts a lot longer than we think. So imagine a world where AI gets inhuman at all of the memory, reasoning, all of that, but because it doesn't have an emotional system, it can't ever choose between this, that, or the Other, which means it will be stuck only with backwards looking pattern recognition, and it will never be able to surprise us with novel creations if that's the position that we're in. At least for the creative folks in the crowd, that is extraordinarily good news. It means now all of a sudden, you can radically cut the amount of time that it takes you to create something. But you are still incredibly necessary in that process. And that, I think is a world that people should be very excited about because not being beholden to like, even Drew was saying, like, I've got to find the solution to this distribution problem. I need somebody to cut the check for that. Maybe less and less every day, but he is still necessary as a creative producer that understands what actually makes sense and what doesn't. Um, I, I think it's in my upcoming deep dive tomorrow that I cover this. I start losing track of what I've written that has or hasn't come out yet. But there is a really fascinating thing when you start thinking about the way that the mind works. And this was in the context of free will, but let me just put it in the context of creativity right now. If you selectively damage the regions of the brain for emotion, the person will lead a normal life in every respect. They can solve puzzles, they can have an intellectual debate with somebody, but what they can't do is make a decision. It's super wild because we don't actually decide based on logic, we decide based on emotion. And once you realize that, first of all, your life will change dramatically because you'll realize you were constantly in the grips of emotions. Emotions don't always have your best interests at heart. So just keep that in mind. But that if AI is never able to tap into that emotional set, and if we assume that emotions have a very powerful evolutionary reason for existing, if AI is never able to mimic an emotional system, then that leaves this uniquely human contribution. So anyway, I would think a lot about that. In this phase, we'll deal with whatever comes in the future. But right now, understanding that, that you have that ability, that you are able to tap into that emotion, I've said many times about creative endeav that you could never convince me that something is cool or not cool because I'm having a physical response to it. I have a very strong, as I imagine most of you do, a very strong emotional response to things that I like or don't like. And so somebody coming along and saying no, no, no, secretly you actually do like that is nonsensical. So there is a very real chance that there will always and forever be output. Sorry that the outputs will always and forever be made better by the fact that there' in the mix. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere. I want to talk about Summer heat is unforgiving and it exposes exactly how bad most clothing actually is. Cheap synthetic fiber does not breathe. 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[Drew]

I'm Kiana, and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use.

[Tom Duru]

It's like, I can't stop.

[Drew]

I'm addicted. Start your free [e-mail].

[Tom Duru]

thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Drew]

Let's pull up our cow trade of the week really quick because they're now predicting what will be the best AI by the end of 2026. And Claude is overwhelmingly the favorite.

[Tom Duru]

Claude is gangster.

[Drew]

And just for one second, we have to talk about the generational fumble that ChatGPT was because they were the best and brightest. They started this whole AI thing. Y' all wouldn't know what I was if it wasn't for chat GPT and then Gemini them, they went back and forth. And then Claude, if you can see, it's like a green line going straight up. They're the only ones that kept improving and proven improving. So that aside, do you really.

[Tom Duru]

Do you want an answer to why that happens?

[Drew]

Why does that happen, Dude.

[Tom Duru]

So again, humans, there is. It is so distressing that a company is only as good as the people that it can collect. And once they started having the internal, like, weirdness, and Elon really went on the offensive to try to claw talent away, they just started losing the people that actually made it. And I remind my team internally and to any entrepreneurs listening to this, take this, like, short idea and burn it into your psyche that companies are not nameless, faceless organizations. They are just the collection of the people inside of that company. And choose wisely. When you have the right people, they're focused on the right things and they have the right talents. You can pull just about anything off. But if you start losing those people, it's rough, man. It is rough. And as entrepreneurs, you really have to think about that. In fact, you and I were talking about this before we started. It's not like I can just move you out and put anybody else in that chair. It's whoever we put in that Chair makes a different show because you, as an individual, you read a situation differently, you cue off of something that I say differently, you ask a different follow up, you. You have your own worldview. All of that same will be true of anybody else that I put in. And so it is really fascinating how even in something like just this show is influenced by the person sitting there. And so what you're witnessing in this graph is that the talent has just swung over to. To anthropic. And so, for better or worse, that's where you're at now. Now, never bet against Elon, So I'll be interested to see what happens to

[Drew]

Xai over time, and especially after this crazy IPO when they get all that money. Yeah. Okay, now being back to it, there was a couple. A lot of chatter in the chat about what AGI actually is, so I kind of gave the definition, like trying to. Oh, guys. It's just when AI can improve itself. But there was like, well, kind of technically, isn't that self improving? So to you, Tom, what is AGI? And then bringing back in this humanity last exam, what are some of the metrics that they are looking at to cue off whether it surpassed it or not?

[Tom Duru]

I think everybody will reject AGI. They'll keep moving the goalposts. I think I'm going to ask Peter the question today. I have a feeling Peter's answer will go something like this. Yeah, no, I stand by it. I think the early innings of AGI, that it will improve over time. But yeah, yeah, this. This probably is the beginning of that. I think that's a great answer for a podcast, but I think in reality, everybody's gonna go, this does not feel like a human. And the proxy, what people are trying to get at with AGI is it feels like a human. So what does it mean to feel like a human? All right, if I hire somebody new and I bring them in, I explain something to them once or twice, and then I expect them to be able to go and do it. Now, it won't be perfect. It might not be as good as somebody else that has, like, way more experience, but they'll get it and be like, cool, I get where we're trying to go. I understand how to do this. And they'll do it. Until AI is like that, people will not have a sense of AGI. So the number of times that I will explain something to Claude and then it just isn't getting it. And I'm like, bro, what the. Like, how many times do I have to say this? And you can tell that it's just. It's so glued to its training data.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Duru]

It cannot extrapolate away from that. And so that is that thing, which feels somewhat ineffable is what people are looking for. So, for instance, I run into this with game design all the time. I want you to take this element from here and this element from here. I'll be very specific. I want you to take the body proportions of one piece, but mix it with the more adult style of jujutsu kaisen.

[Drew]

Right.

[Tom Duru]

Now, if I'm saying that to an artist, they're going to be like, say less fam. I got you. Because they understand that the vibe of jujutsu kaisen has to do with the colors, the shading, all of that. So you can give me, like, a really playful character and make it look like that. Now, that's probably a bad example, because AI probably wouldn't struggle too hard with that. But when you're taking two ideas like that and you're trying to mesh them together, if I've got to spend, like, a lifetime prompting you with, like, 72 pages of what it means to meld those two things, that's not general intelligence. If, on the other hand, I say to you, and there's just a ton of shorthand that you bring to it because you're able to generalize based on your life experience that I think people recognize as like, oh, cool, I can move this person from one thing to another to another to another to another. Now, the really interesting thing is humans actually generalize a lot less in some ways than AI. Like, AI on any one topic is going to be as smart as the smartest person. And so all of us are going to be like, whoa, that thing's a lot better at that than I am. But our ability to go from topic to topic to topic to topic, meaning like tennis.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Duru]

To algebra. To keeping your girlfriend happy in a relationship, we're going to be better going through those wildly diverse, generalized topics than an AI will.

[Drew]

And it's interesting. The more you talk to AI, it'll bring the tennis things back to the relationship. I'm like, we're not talking about tennis anymore. Stop that. Yeah. But shout out to telegraph. They had this really cool MAD cover. When AI is more expensive than people, why replace the people? I don't know if you've seen the nude. Note the news on X about that one company that had told everybody, go use AI, go crazy, and they racked up half a billion dollar token bill.

[Tom Duru]

Yeah.

[Drew]

So it's one of those things. Now where to your point, AI is doing a bunch of different things at levels we've never seen before. A lot of companies are embracing it first and saying, yes, go and run it. But then they're starting to use up the tokens. They realize they have to iterate on things. They realize they have to keep replacing things. And the cost of AI is now being scrutinized. So we have this cost that it's a little bit more expensive than we thought it was. And then the impending it's going to replace everybody job doom thing. What is. Now I know we talked about the technical, the technical aspect of AI. Now let's move to how it's going to impact the job, the economy and like the people that it's replacing, quote, unquote.

[Tom Duru]

Yeah, so a couple things on that. One, you can tell what an article is going to be like in the mainstream media. If they make the person look bad visually, then the article is going to go against them. If they make the person look great, then it's going to be totally for. It's hilarious how manipulative that is. So I think a big part of what's playing out right now is that there, there is a chicken and egg. No, there's a game of chicken being played right now between all of this. Massive investment into the infrastructure of AI Combine that with the fear of the unknown, all of that. So you've got people attacking the data centers just because they're scared and they think that they're going to be replaced by AI they're an eyesore, people don't want them in their town, yada yada, coupled with the reality that AI is just going to keep getting better and better and better. But in any one moment you can look at it and be dismissive and say, oh my God, look at these fools. Like they're, you know, being so stupid in what they're telling people. The, they didn't put any guardrails. These guys are morons. AI is fake. Like this is all bullshit. And if you're a historian, you look at that and go, no, no, no, hold on. This played out with railroads, railroads ends up transforming America, bankrupts a ton of people. And for a while I bet it looked really stupid. But now there's not unused lines or anything like that. Like it, it literally changed the face of America. It happened obviously in the Industrial revolution, it happened in the great electrification, it happened in the great Internetification, all of that same thing. Bunch of companies go bankrupt in the infrastructure investment phase. And so if you write an article as all of these companies are going broken, if you go, these guys made bad investments, you're right, history will look back on you and go, that was the right assessment. If you go, this technology is bogus, these guys are morons, this is all going to zero, you're going to look like an idiot because the technology is just going to keep getting better as it does always and forever. And so that is the takeaway for me is like, yeah, if you don't put like caps on your employees usage, you're not thinking about incentive structures. So anytime you put an incentive structure in place, like a leaderboard, people want to climb a leaderboard. If the leaderboard is merely token usage, you've just now incentivized somebody to write a program that gets AI to run all night on the simplest thing that it can generate a token on very quickly because there's no concern, there's no even check for whether it output anything that was beneficial. But you climb the leaderboard. So as you design that program, if you're not thinking about perverse incentives, then you're going to end up there. So to write an article and say that was a dumb move as an entrepreneur, yes, that is correct. But to then go, oh, see, told you AI is bogus. It didn't like yield anything. It's like, okay, that's going to be, the chattering class is going to give you that answer. But these entrepreneurs have become the greatest entrepreneurs of their generation because they don't even listen to you on that. They just go, what mistake did I just make? Got it. Perverse incentive. Understood. What do I need to do to make sure that this actually is high utility, that this is outputting something and it may take us a year, two years, three years, one to churn over the people that are going to code like an asshole just to climb the leaderboard or the people that are secretly afraid of AI and so they actually want it to fail. And so they are doing things like that known as malicious compliance. And so I'm just doing what you told me to do, but I'm actually doing it to show you that AI is bullshit. And they, and it will break some weak entrepreneurs, there's no doubt they'll panic, they'll back off and, and that'll be game over. But anybody that has like, dude, the thing that just grounds me on AI, I'm fucking using it. So like, what are you going to tell me that's going to make me go, oh yeah, I guess you're Right. It's not working. It's like, what? Like I'm using this every fucking day. I've saved myself an insane amount of money. I've increased the amount of top line revenue. That's the part where like I'm, I'm like, guys, we reduced our headcount, increased top line. Of course you expect it to increase your profitability because you cut your expenses, but when you decrease expenses and that increases top line revenue, that's unexpected. And so, and then on the gaming side, it's just, it's unhinged how much of an impact it makes. So I'm in the very fortunate position of not getting sucked into the rhetoric because I'm just over here deploying it as fast as I can and watching my coders go from not using it at all, like they wouldn't use it. I'm like, the fuck is going on? And so finally we put in something that I was like, I need to see how much code. You're like, just tell me the percentage every day of code written by AI. And at first it was like very little. And so I was like, hey, just a reminder, like, go in and use it. I'll pay any amount. Right, Sounds familiar. I'll pay any amount. Don't worry about that. Like, just use, use, use. And so finally it was like, okay, today it was 15%. And then one day it clicked and they were like, oh, that thing I don't like doing AI is just doing that for me now. Oh, this thing that we wanted to try, like a really unique solution that nobody's done before. I just did it using AI. So now they feel clever because they're just using AI as a tool to solve a problem in gaming that nobody solved yet. And so that once people start feeling like, oh, wait, I can go do something other people can't do, that makes me feel cool. Now AI is a tool to help me feel cool. Like anytime you can make the most selfish thing somebody can do, you're going to get that adoption. And so now all of a sudden it's like my guys are being more aggressive in terms of what they think they can accomplish. So you've got to be careful about. Do they feel celebrated? Do they feel like you see them? Do they feel like we're really creating something that's cool? Like in the early days of game development, I had a very different relationship with the team because I didn't know what I was doing. And they felt like, now we're making something, this is never going to go anywhere. This guy's just waffling about. They obviously didn't know me well enough to know that I'm not going to stop until I get where I want to go. But now it's like the game has so much focus and momentum that they're getting excited about being a part of building this game. And so then that just becomes a totally different energy when you try to integrate something like AI. So that's how like if you're trying to contextualize this moment, that's the thing that I would be looking at now. There's specific data that's been coming out that's well worth looking at. Three years after Chad GPT arrived, Apollo's chief economist went hunting for AI's fingerprints in the US labor data. Employment, productivity, inflation. He didn't find anything. That's the crazy part. Zero evidence of a single job that has been lost to AI. Now I can tell you right now that isn't true. So how is it that it's hiding, that there's something hiding in the data? So Torsten Slok, he, this is not a hype guy. This the chief economist. So he's an ex Deutsche bank, ex imf, X oecd. Like this guy has all the credentials in the world and he's now running the macro desk at one of the largest asset managers in the world, Apollo. So his read on the technology is something everybody should pay attention to. And what he's saying in terms of its impact on the economy is the following. This is a quote. AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. So you look at the numbers. Weekly employment data shows no AI driven layoffs. But remember what they're actually looking at, they're just looking at total numbers. So he's not seeing an increase in productivity. And I agree, right now you're probably not going to see something big because you're still in the malicious compliance phase. You're still in the people at scale that are actually going to influence the numbers. Like they don't have their heads wrapped around it yet. And they probably have a large group of people that are resistant to the technology doing everything they can to subvert its deployment. So just this is how this kind of thing goes. Now he's looking at inflation, he's saying it hasn't moved. I think that's a delay in the data because inflation is running again. 3.8 was the last that I saw. So that is up significantly from a couple months ago. And the forecasts that are being put out, he's saying that they're tame. So the Penn Wharton Model puts AI's yearly productivity boost at a fraction of a percentage point through 2035. Now plant that flag. If they're going to point and say that that's where we're going to be at in 2035, I think I'll plant my flag. They're going to look ridiculous. So nine years of improvement from now, nine years of understanding what AI does well, what it does poorly, getting people that were raised on using AI that are actually being trained how to use it, I think that it's going to be radically different than it is now. So when you look at that and you see that the does not look like the technology is having much of an impact. What do you read now? My read is that this really is Javon's paradox. So in 1865, economist William Javons caught like a really strange phenomenon. If you make coal engines more efficient, and the theory is that Britain is going to burn less coal, but it didn't burn less coal, it burned far more coal. Cheaper power did not shrink demand, it actually made it explode. Because all of a sudden it was like, oh, that thing that I wasn't doing because it was just too expensive, I'm going to go do now because it's cheaper, literally swap in impact theory, game development, and you'll understand. So my first two years, the game was so expensive that we were going to have to shut it down. It was just absolute insanity. And I was like, okay, like we're never going to be able to keep this pace. So either we have to scale back to what they call friend slop and just make like a really simple, basic bitch game, or if we're going to try to do the very ambitious game that we're trying to do, something's got to give swap in coal for intelligence. And that's exactly what happened. And so the intelligence, meaning what I could rely on to create largely art assets, that's been the big save for us. We could leverage AI. And so when that level of intelligence gets cheap, you don't end up using less of it, you start using more of it. So we are now hiring developers and game artisans that we wouldn't have hired before because we would have had to scale back so much. So this has allowed us to keep that scale or something close to it, and now employ people that we otherwise wouldn't have employed because we're able to onboard AI. So Slack actually also ends up reaching the same frame himself. I think he's less convinced than I am. But nonetheless, he did bring up the paradox. And so we'll see how it ends up playing out. I think the reality of what's going to happen is you're just going to see a massive shift away from some jobs and towards others. You might see a decrease in entry level positions, which will create a problem unto itself. But nonetheless, over time, you're going to see more jobs being created, more people doing things, it'll be more fragmented, more people are going to start their own companies. There's no doubt about that. The world is going to look very different on the other side of this. But I don't think that we end up, at least not in this phase of AI. I don't think that we end up with a glut of jobs. But history tells us that people that don't adapt will end up losing work. There will be tons of consternation, tons of protests, and people getting very riotous over the fact that they don't see anything in their future. But young people and the highly adaptable will begin shifting over to this new economy, just as we did with the industrial revolution. Electricity, Internet, all of it. It's just played out so many times. And I think we're going to see the same thing with AI. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Drew]

I think this might be a two America's problem though, because right now we're saying that if I heard you right, that AI didn't technically wipe out jobs, it's replacing jobs. It's re. It's reshuffling the deck, but the deck is still 52 cards. And then I have friends who are, who've been unemployed and can't find a gig because they are used to being literally a close friend of mine, he's used to being like VP of sales. So I manage people, I manage teams and things like that. And I was like, yeah, there's no more people managers, no more. It's either you are doing the thing or you own the company. Everything in the middle is kind of gone. So how do you rectify what people are seeing on the streets? The headlines that we're reading and then this Economist report that's saying, well, technically it wasn't really jobs. We're still broken even. It's not that bad. When Meta was like, see 7,000 people because of AI and that was like their bailout of statement. Like, how do you rectify those two Truths.

[Tom Duru]

I don't think you have to integrate them. I think that there's going to be a bloodbath of people like your friend that refuse to adapt or accept that. Ooh, I have to take five steps backwards, and hopefully over time I'll be 15 steps ahead. But that five steps backwards is just too brutal for any anime heads in the crowd. There's a studio called Studio Mappa, and one of their lead directors, I believe, was at the studio for. It's like 39 years, man. Like a long time. And he recently got fired and he said, my, my severance was 0 yen, so nothing. And he said, I'm starting at a new studio, but I'm coming in with the mind of a beginner. And I'm like, I'll be interested to see if that guy. And I mean, if you've been somewhere for over 30 years, you're old as. So this guy's probably in his 50s, and he's coming at it like, yeah, I'm, I, I'm good at a thing. That thing is still valuable. This company doesn't know me as well, so they're probably not giving me the same opportunities. But if I'm actually good at this thing, then I'm gonna drive it forward and I will climb up the company and that will be the question put to everybody is, yeah, we may just now live in a world where this is about reinvention. I think about this a lot with me as a YouTuber. Now, maybe I am more prone to this than the next person, but at the height of my YouTube success, I pulled the team aside and said, I'm not going to keep doing this. I'm like, it's not interesting to me anymore. And so I'm going to be rebooting the channel. And to say that that caused consternation would be an understatement. It hurt our revenue for well over 18 months. And, you know, it was pretty wild. And I still get comments to this day. Like, every now and then, the algorithm will reach somebody from Phase one and they'll be like, oh, remembering this guy. Like, he was cool. And he used to talk about it. Won't say mindset, but that was the drill. And as if Kaizen takes off, that will get more and more integrated into what I do and there'll be another reinvention. And I think that's just the world that we live in now. AI moves so fast that everybody's gonna have to reinvent themselves. And you'll have these phases where it'll be like, okay, this is what I'm focused on now because this is what the world values now. But the world may not value that same thing in seven years. And there are gonna be some people who hate that in the extreme and they will just hunger for AI to give them everything and they will vote for policies that are nanny state. And other people are like, no, no, no. I'm like, this is fun. I like the fact that I can go from one thing to the next to the next. And so we'll see. But it is the ability to adapt is the thing that will get people.

[Drew]

I'll say that's a really good point because we are coming out of an economy that was, you work here for 30 years, you get a gold watch and you're taking care of for life pension. Then that turned into, well, you could do. You might bounce around every two or three years, then you're going to find your niche and you'll be there for the last 20. And now it sounds like the new economy that we're going into is every four to seven years, you might have to completely change what you do.

[Tom Duru]

Yeah, what you do is the right answer because it meaning the levers that you pull. So I saw a really great quote. Forgive me for not remembering who said it, but it's really brilliant. And they said, don't think about who you want to become. Think about what you want to do. Do what do you want to do? Because that's really the thing that defines the quality of your life. Are you doing a thing on a daily basis where doing the thing is interesting and engaging to you? It feels like a good way to spend your time. Because even if you're aimed at the right thing, if you're not doing the thing on a daily basis, then it's not going to be enjoyable. So the guy behind Take two Interactive, the CEO doesn't play games, doesn't care about games. And so I'm like, oh, this is just a guy that, like, he's like, I don't think he is a turnaround CEO, but he's that kind of CEO where it doesn't matter what the product is. Just he understands the systems, the capital allocation part of the job. So well that, yeah, yeah, drop me in here, drop me in there. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to thrive because I know how to run a business and I let the artisans go make the GTA 6. And I would hate that. I'm the exact opposite of that kind of CEO. I am on the product side. I'M on the marketing side, the storytelling side. Like, I want to be in the thing, I have to care about the thing. And so I'm in one of the better phases of my life now. Shout out to Andrew Press, who I hope hears this. Largely because of finding him and bringing him on as coo, I've been able to spend more time being the product, writing the deep dive, doing the research for the lives, working on the game, like actually working on the game. And so that has been transformative for me in terms of the levers that I'm actually pulling. So people need to think way, way, way more about that. And so as AI shapes how we move through our careers, be really thoughtful about what levers am I going to pull.

[Drew]

Yeah, that's good. Ryan, I want to bring you in this as our resident young person because I just talked about kind of the exchange of culture that we're kind of. I'm living through the transition from pension to now. Every four years, I'm have to find something else.

[Tom Duru]

How dare you, from your perspective to say, I really hate it. It's like, yes, this is the right conversation. But Drew, Lord knows I want to buck that trend anyway, barring you becoming a big time film producer that we couldn't possibly afford that caveat aside.

[Drew]

So, Ryan, from your perspective then what do you feel the pressure with you and your peers of like, I'm gonna do this forever, or is it like, hey man, I'm just trying to pay my rent tomorrow and I'll figure it out later in terms of like your day to day job. Yeah. Like your career, your aspirations, like, what do you see? Your. How do you see it unfolding over the next 30 years? I feel like in your 20s, and maybe this is just universal, but I feel like in the twenties it's just survive. I feel like most of what I make decisions are how am I gonna get money? So down the line I don't have to worry about this stuff. So it is a lot of just day to day, get the paycheck kind of thing in a lot of ways. But at the same time, there's ways, you know, outside of it, I try to grow my career. Got you. And then for your like friends and like peers and things like that, are they in more of the corporate side? Are they more creative? Are they able to find jobs and work and stuff like that, or is the unemployment kind of hit them as well? Unemployment? Of all my friends, I've got about like 15 friends. I keep in touch from college. Only three of us have gotten jobs. Oh wow. And we've been graduated for a year. So. And that's like two of those were through their family who already worked at companies and mine was just by chance. So everyone else has just been applying since graduation. It's just impossible because you get. You don't get. You like you'll go through three stages of interviews and then they'll still end up ghosting you for no reason. Okay, this is me on my old man rocking chair. So I'm disclaimer. But what were their fields? Were we talking about like 12 art history majors? Are some of them a variety? So some are medical field, some are psychology, some are art. And the two who got jobs who have it through family were both computer science. So there is a vast variety of like arts and things and I guess I would be more considered arts.

[Tom Duru]

So just I'd say it's a good 5050 for my.

[Drew]

My friend group copy.

[Tom Duru]

That is why.

[Drew]

Very interesting.

[Tom Duru]

So here's a. Listening to you talk, first of all, makes me feel ridiculously old.

[Drew]

But

[Tom Duru]

you guys, your generation has a meta awareness that we didn't have. You might have started to have it, but we didn't have it at all. None of us knew we were all going through the same thing. In our 20s, the idea of a quarter life crisis hadn't been defined yet. That didn't get defined until I was probably in my early 30s. And so that whole idea of like, oh yeah, the world is complicated and it's hard to figure out. And there's something about being in your 20s where you're just trying to stack knowledge and get a lay of the land. And you guys are aware of it. We weren't. I would just go home and be depressed and like, what am I doing with my life? I didn't have a sense of like, oh, this is normal, you've got to figure it out. And then you're going to start generating some momentum. I was a telemarketer. So I went to the most prestigious film school on planet Earth at the time. I mean like undeniably the most prestigious. So go to the Harvard of film schools and. And graduate second in my class, by the way. Not some slouch like really thinking I'm about to do this and I'm working as a telemarketer and I'm like, yo, how far have I fallen? Like, I don't have any. And then at one point I was selling insurance door to door, pure commission. Like, it was wild. And so you just feel lost. Like where the fuck am I going? But none of that meta awareness. So there is some, like, if you guys have an attitude of, well, I'm either going to do a thing with my degree or I'm just not going to get a job. Like that wasn't an option. So my dad sent me for the five months leading up to my graduation. He's like, five more months, four more months, three more months. Meaning with the rent check, like when you graduate, that's it, like you get a job. Final answer. And after that day, my parents have never given me a dime. In fact, I for a while was helping supplement my mom's income. So it was, it's just a different time. There was no. I didn't want to move back in. They would have let me obviously, but I didn't want to move back in. I wanted to make it work. And so no, you take a job somewhere.

[Drew]

I had that revelation literally this weekend because I had to like find some pants. So I walked into like a H and M and the two, three people behind the desk on the H and M. One of them was in their 50s, one of them was in their 40s, one of them was probably like 30 something. And that's when I kind of took a step back because I had friends after college who didn't get a job immediately. I know I'm thinking of some of my frat brothers off the bat. They went to the mall and got jobs and then they went into the real. But now those intermediate jobs are now grow like, I don't wanna say grown ups, but like people are now in those jobs now. So the college people can't even get in there. So it seems like the transitional jobs, the insurance, the door to door, the things that we used to. This is what I have to do until I figure out the thing that's going to start my career. There are now people in there that that's their career and they have.

[Tom Duru]

I will be so interested to know why that's happening. Because one, we didn't have YouTuber as job so none of us were like, I'm gonna go try my hand at YouTubing. So that was off the table. There was no gig economy. So it wasn't like you could be a doordash person or an Uber driver on the side. So it was like you had to get a job. So you either had a full time or a part time job. And so for my generation, the idea of going and working at the mall was like, that's what you did. It was like your first job was going to be at the mall or at the fast food restaurant. That was just like where you got your jobs. And so I remember there was always that time your parents would be like, summer's coming up, like, you need to go walk the mall and pick up job applications. And so I was so lazy. I did for like the CD store or whatever, DVD store. And if I got rejected there, then I was like, not even sure what I was going to do. And so I always ended up working at a paint factory because my dad worked for a paint company. And so yeah, it's, it's such a different time. Like, there's so many sort of gig ways. Even Etsy just none of that existed. And so you really felt like, I've got to somehow plug into the world of jobs, if you will. There was no, like, I can go try my own thing, make my own thing. That was not real interesting.

[Drew]

Scuttle in the chat said the black market is always hiring. So, Ryan, if your friends really want to. Times are really tough.

[Tom Duru]

They may already be there.

[Drew]

This one the way they go. Let's jump over to the Iran war. Donald Trump has a announcement for everybody. He says, hey guys, Iran really wants to make a deal.

[Tom Duru]

Really? I hadn't heard that.

[Drew]

And it'll be a good one for USA and those that are with us. But the Democrats and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it is much tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate when political hacks keep negatively chirping at levels never seen before over and over again that I should move faster or move slower or go to war or not go to war or whatever. Just sit back and relax. It would all work out in the end. It always does. President Donald J. Trump. So don't worry that your gas prices are high, guys. It's all going to work out in the end. Don't worry about the straight that was open that we closed, that is now closed that we opened, that was now closed again. It's all going to work out in the end. Do you feel reassured by Donald Trump's true social tweet?

[Tom Duru]

I do not feel reassured. My, my beef with this is one. It, it's whiny now. I understand certainly that people chirping at you constantly. It does get very obnoxious. And as my poor wife found, our comments are full of people who either think I'm evil or dumb or. And if you let it, it really will drive you nuts. And I bet if I went back and looked at some of the first Episodes where I was just always fighting with Chat, I would be like, okay, listen, you're getting a bit whiny, like, let it be what it is. So from that perspective, I, I hate that I simultaneously have found Donald Trump funny for the way that he engages and lament the death of like presidential. Yeah. And so right now I'm in a mourning the death of presidential mood. This one is not nearly. This isn't funny at all. And so if you're going to be like that sort of anti presidential, at least be funny. This one is not that. So look, Iran is a shit show right now. Do I think that any of us know enough to know the pace of which you should be negotiating? No, I do not. So on that side, whatever. The thing that bothers me the most about this tweet is the Democrats thing. So as president, you have to find a way to unite your base and when. Sorry, not your base, your country. And so when you're president, like you represent everybody. And right now the populist moment, which I have repeatedly pointed out how much I hate, it's just all about the other team's a bunch of dumb asses and I hate them all and all of that. So I really, Yeah, I just hate that. So name calling is precisely how he got into office and I hate that.

[Drew]

There are some reports though that there is a little bit of turmoil on the Iranian side of this war. It's still early reports, reports, you know, disclaimers. We're taking it as sources say, but that could be a bright spot in all of this if this can actually wind out or it could be a

[Tom Duru]

mess we're about to see. So Iran's president just tried to walk away from the job. Supposedly Massoud Possesskian reportedly handed a resignation letter to the office of the Supreme Leader. Supposedly the stated reason this is according to a London based group, Iran International. He's trying to walk away because he no longer has power to govern. He says that the Revolutionary Guard has taken the country out from under him. Now Iran right now is in a succession vacuum. This is an incredibly dangerous time. When the Supreme Leader was killed back in February, his son Mojtaba was pushed forward as a successor and a chunk of the regime's old guard never accepted him. And this is a problem with regime changes is you never know who's going to fill that vacuum. I think most of us here in the west wanted to see the, the quote unquote, people of Iran rise up. I will remind us all that. I'm sure Iran is Divided in the same way that America is divided. And so do we really even know what that means? Do we have a sense of how many people. We're often asked to believe that 85 or 90% of the people are on the quote unquote good side. They just want their country. They want to look like they looked in the 70s. They want broad freedom, they want to pursue economic interests, they want a secular state. I just don't know if that's true. Maybe it is. Lord knows I would love that. That would be incredible. But it may not be true. And even if it is true, if the group at the top is willing to be extreme, extraordinarily violent, then they'll be able to keep even a mass of the country down. So reports right now are describing a military council of senior guard officers making the real decisions in the country with the elected government just basically being locked out and the guard itself is now starting to fracture. So you've got the IRGC that are willing to be violent, willing to control the country by force, but they themselves are being torn apart by factions. So you have one commander Ahmad Vahidi, who runs one faction, Parliament Speaker Mohammed Beggar Golubov runs a rival one and then the security chief maneuvers between them. So all of this is rumor right now. But make no mistake, if there is this kind of turmoil playing out, we have no idea how this is all going to end up. And so this could end up making any functional negotiation impossible, which means that this is going to continue to spiral and be a problem. And ah, man, I'm going to say if the people haven't risen up by now, the odds that they're going to are very low. And that's the problem if you really. So look, we don't know how many people were killed. I've heard everything from like 2,500 of the protesters killed to 45,000. That is a gigantic swing. But you can imagine if the number's even anywhere in the middle, if, let's say 10 or 15,000 of your most hardcore brave people that are leading the marches out on the street when you know that it's hyper dangerous. If they were all murdered, then that revolutionary energy is going to have been zapped out of the people very, very quickly. And so that's just incredibly brutal to think that maybe there could have been a moment, but they were just all killed. So Tehran of course is denying that any of this is playing out. The officials say that the president is working and the call behind the scenes to say that he's about to back out is just built to sabotage the ceasefire talks. So I don't know, we, we will see what ends up coming of all of this. But again, right now what's going on there is extremely uncertain. Will it end up back in violence? I think there's a low chance of that. But are they going to try to just economically strangle them to death? And when I say violence, obviously there are strikes happening right now during the ceasefire, but they are call it tit for tat. So it's not a gigantic bombing campaign. That's what I'm talking about. So we'll see how this ends up playing out. I'm expecting a long tail shit show

[Drew]

and it's only going to get worse. According to the SVP of Exxon, who's saying we're approaching unheard of inventory levels.

[Tom Duru]

I mean, basically being bad.

[Drew]

Yes. I mean really, really low levels. You can debate whether that's going to hit those really low levels in two or three weeks. Once you get that point, then you'll see prices shoot up. The price of physical Brent oil cargoes will spike to 150 to 160 per barrel.

[Tom Duru]

Ouch.

[Drew]

When inventories hit all time lows in coming weeks, the executive said when the price gets to a certain level, demand destruction brings it back into balance. So we're at a point right now where we've been hovering around the 90s to 100 top 110 came back down. We've been in kind of that window there and they're expecting a, was that a 40% increase over the next couple of weeks? That should drive gas prices who knows where. So with this war that's happening. Yes. On the, on the, actually boots on the ground, you know, we don't want to see any more death or violence. But economically, when brute, when crude and when Brent oil is that high, that's going to have ripple effects across the entire industry.

[Tom Duru]

No, across the entire globe. That will, depending on how long it lasts, take you from a momentary recession to a global recession. If it drags on for 612 months of having that kind of elevate, it's, it's so inflationary that as he said, you'll get the demand destruction. That's exactly what a recession is, is people just start going, I'm just going to hold my money back because I don't know where this is going. And then any company that's in a weakened position or is extremely exposed to energy costs, poof, they just stop existing. So we saw early weakness when Spirit Airlines Went out of business. So you'll see more weirdness in places that have really thin margins that are really exposed to energy costs really starting to struggle. So, yeah, I mean, buckle up if this doesn't get done. Also, if this isn't done by midterms, forget it. Like now you're gonna see a flip there. That agenda dies. And so, yeah, we'll see what happens on the other side of that.

[Drew]

With everything going on, what is kind of your gut read about this straight or heroes Iran situation? Like, I know early talks, we didn't know what was going on, but now I felt like we kind of got, we're starting to hit the same loops in the news releases, the articles. Trump is starting to backtrack, get back. He's starting to get into his, his kind of loop. What's your read now of this Iranian war situation? Straight to her moose. Where do you think it goes?

[Tom Duru]

I think a lot of it is going to depend on what happens at the midterms. Let's say that Trump, let's do a Trump wins scenario. He retains a majority. What you're going to see is I think Iran drags out forever and ever. If he's able to get to the other side without a resolution. So it doesn't resolve. But for whatever reason, he's able to convince people that he's still the guy that you want to trust. And so he holds and you'll see him do everything he can to make the US the world's gas station. He'll, people will start going, okay, yeah. Everything is so uncertain in the Strait of Hormuz. Largely, we've stopped talking about the insurance side of this, but that's still a big part of this. The insurance company is just like, yeah, we're not going to fuck with Iran. So in this scenario, I'm like, insurance companies still read Iran's unstable. This is maybe a long term stalemate, but we don't trust them not to bomb people or the expense just gets way too high. And so the GCC basically retreats from the US The US because they just can't afford to invest. They've got to focus here because remember, this was all about getting the GCC countries that have accumulated a massive amount of wealth to point that at US investments. So that begins to weaken. You get the US becoming the gas station, beginning to up our production, that we do anything and everything that we can to be pro oil. Maybe we even get Alberta out from under Canada. We develop a relationship with them. And so that connection becomes like this Top part of North America, just oil, massive production. We go crazy and because of our geography we end up being relatively protected from all of that instability. And we just, as the US end up in a pretty strong position. We don't hate that. China sort of gets into a weird position. I think at some point China may have to step in to at least stabilize an economic relationship with Iran which then could power them if the US leaves the Middle East. And it's just like, yeah, we're just kind of throwing our hands up. That could get weird in the Middle East. And so you get this weird shifting of power where the U.S. refocuses everything back here in the U.S. sorry, in the North America, through the South America corridor, our hemisphere and we really just plan our routes, say this is our thing. We continue to try to have at least an economic relationship with the GCC countries. I don't think they're just going to cut bait and run, but I think it's going to be difficult for them to position themselves as the protectors of the gcc, given that we walked in, created all this trouble because this is a scenario where we bail and it's just this long term stalemate. So anyway, there's so many question marks over that. This is not me saying, oh yeah, this is definitely what's going to happen. But I think all of that is a very plausible read on. This becomes a very destabilized region that really forces China's hand to go in, build an economic relationship, tell China to chill the fuck or tell Iran to chill the fuck out, that things have got to get through. But they start charging a toll, maybe not on China, but on everybody else. Everybody else starts going, yeah, we can't get proper insurance, we don't want to pay tolls. So we're going to go over here. Whether China lets the toll sit or not is a bigger question mark because there they have other choke points where if people start charging tolls everywhere becomes a very non ideal situation. And if America positions itself as the one place that doesn't charge tolls, then it's like more focus goes there. So anyway, I think ironically America walks away from this economically in an okay position. If pro energy people are still in positions of power, if he loses at the midterms and the green like energy, energy comes back and now it's all like they're just quietly regulating us out of the game, crying about, look what Trump did in the Middle east, this is his fault. Inflation starts going crazy, we start running policies that make us look like What Germany did to themselves, which is fucking insane. But nonetheless, they've done it and caused massive economic damage all across Europe with green energy policies. So, yeah, that one would be, I think, economically disastrous and would make. Would make it such that what happened in Iran, which we created that problem, but that problem ends up biting us in the ass in a way that it actually could have been beneficial for us, however grotesque.

[Drew]

All right, there's a lot of if ands and yeah, look, nobody should take that as a.

[Tom Duru]

Like, this is probable.

[Drew]

That's crazy. Yeah, we'll wait and see what happens. But rip to the gas tanks, man. We. I'm gonna start walking to work. This was crazy. I was, I got tripped over the six. The six dollar thing. I was gone for three weeks, came back, I was like, oh, it got more expensive. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm going to walk now. And to those struggling, I feel you. Empathy, empathy, empathy. I'm sorry about that. Voting has consequences. All right, let's do a tale of two riots. I will call them. First, let's go over to Newark in these ICE facility riots. We talked about it briefly earlier. There's just a lot of energy in motion outside. I think this is the same energy that we've seen in Minnesota and other places earlier this, earlier this year.

[Tom Duru]

Thankfully, the. And tell me if you've seen something. I haven't. So this has the same cause as what was going on in Minnesota. But the energy to me has felt very different. And the reason is that the, the police, the law enforcement is not acting a fool. And so because they're not like, just like, oh, you're gonna escalate, we're gonna escalate. They've been able to create a situation where, I mean, they literally just rounded them up. They literally rounded them up. If they. If for people that haven't seen the footage and put these guys that refused to leave because they gave them all kinds of warnings, there were like tones playing on people's phones, curfews in place, you need to leave. And some of them just refused to disband, thinking they're not going to do anything. But they really did something, brought in big vans, encircled them, arrested them and took them out. As far as I know, there were no substantive injuries or anything like that. So that, to me is how you do it. You've got to enforce the law, but you've got to create a situation where it's not like a. Did the person do something wrong, it's like, you can't be here. We have a Curfew, you can protest during the day, but at 9 or 9:15 or whatever, you've got to disband. And now if you don't disband, you're breaking the law. You're knowingly breaking the law. And we don't have to be like, well, did that person push the ice officer? Did the ice officer push them for. Right. It's just all super clear. You're not allowed to be here. We're arresting you for being here when you're not supposed to be here. Super smart, very easy. Seemed to diffuse a lot of the energy. So from that perspective, I'm very excited to see law enforcement learn their lesson. I don't know if that's an ice figuring out if that's the state police just being way better. Jersey just get it. I don't know, Jersey's better everywhere, so,

[Drew]

you know, you just get it.

[Tom Duru]

So it. But this was well handled, so preach on.

[Drew]

It's one of those things though, where I understand the frustration. This is something that has been happening and I think that I don't know if it's because Trump hasn't tweeted and hasn't then brought the subculture to then come and fight him about it and make it a bigger thing once he's seen what happened in Minnesota, but it does just seem like a good old fashioned protest. People are mad. Cops show up, they get rounded out, everybody moves back. The people that leave leave, the four or five agitators get arrested, get thrown. So I'm weirdly okay with how things are turning out because nothing's getting burned down. There's no massive destruction. It's just agitation, frustration, being like let out in protest.

[Tom Duru]

Very well said.

[Drew]

Yes. I'm kind of aligned with you on that one. On the flip side though, when you go to Paris and you see that it has been completely crazy, it's wild. I'm a little bit upset one because Arsenal wasn't able to get it done. My new Drew.

[Tom Duru]

Imagine my shock and horror that my American co host, as American as the day is long, falls in love with a Premier League team. The only Premier League team that is the absolute dyed in the wool rival to the team that I support. How.

[Drew]

How Drew you wasn't the boy would be with the men in them. She was there, but no people. But what I hate about this is that when people seen these. I have seen a lot of anti immigrant. This is the war on demographics. This is what's going on. They need to deport these people. This is why. And I'm like, guys, this is. This is. This is football. This is what happens when a championship is won. I can pull up phrases from San Francisco, I can pull up videos from New York and all these other places that have gotten just as crazy. So while, yes, burning in the street, I think Paris is going out. I don't want this to then become something that becomes politicized into another category that's separate than just people celebrating a little bit too excessively after a football game.

[Tom Duru]

I think you're pointing to something very important. And I think making sure that people begin teasing these things apart is critical. But there was a post about, God, what country were they from? Somewhere in Eastern Europe. I don't remember the name of the country right now, like Slovakia or something. And they had a huge rally for their national team or something.

[Drew]

Anyway, there was Poland.

[Tom Duru]

Energy of people, and they were like, nobody was violent and it was. The crowd was mahusive. And so there really is something about France, man, France really likes to burn. Like, the number of riots that I've seen in France is crazy. And we're starting to see more and more of this in the US So I think for people to rule out cultural influences would be a mistake. So one thing that's really fascinating, I'm reading this book about Japan that I. Or specifically about Tokyo, that I did not expect to sort of stick in my mind as much as it is. And this guy was talking about how in the 60s, because Japan gets bombed back into the Stone Ages in the early 40s, they also have to reconcile with, oh, fuck, we were the bad guys. And so, like, there's this whole weird thing that happens to their culture post World War II. And so in the 60s, basically, young people are just rioting everywhere and they are constantly having to be broken up with fire hoses. And like, really like a level of like our own civil rights movement where you're like, oh, this is kind of violent, the way that these people are being broken up. It's pretty draconian. What the fuck? And nobody talks about it, about what Japan ends up going through, but on the other side of basically breaking the will of the protesters and then showing them as, you know, I'm going to say this was an economic problem, and then they solve their economic woes. Because, dude, in the 50s, this guy is like, it was prostitutes as far as the eye could see because they just. So many men died, and then the women had no way to take care of themselves. And so just. They sold their bodies. And so I don't think we really ever think about we our generation, my generation for sure, and your guys generation less so. And he doesn't even know where Tokyo is except as it relates to anime, in fairness, because he's an anime head. But like, that whole thing, we thought of Japan as like, the way that people think of China now. So my generation was like, as soon as like the 80s hit, it was like, japan's gonna take over everything. And that was the mentality. Go back and look at Back to the Future too. Who's like the big boss? The Japanese guys die hard. Who's the big boss? Japanese people. So it was like, that was like the thing. Oh, shit, these guys are taking over. So they break the back of the protesters and are like, stop fucking being assholes, you guys. And the reason they did it for a reason. I had no fucking idea about this. So originally they weren't worried about China. And then when the Korea war kicks off, they realize, oh, like, we need Japan to be a bulwark against communism. So they went in and were like, fuck the unions. Fuck these student protesters. Like, you guys need to get in fucking line with the economy. And so they switch the mentality of their entire country over to, like, we're pro capitalism. We're here to build something dope. And so I just. First of all, I couldn't believe they were able to actually do it, to just switch the culture. So you would never see this in Japan. So Japan has like, hey, we're in this together vibe that is orchestrated, which I had no idea. So this highly orchestrated were collective, but we're a capitalist nation. Wild that it worked. And so when you go, oh, like, hold on, this isn't a cultural thing. This is just soccer. Well, first of all, you've got the culture of soccer hooliganism, which was really started by the Brits. Nobody did it quite like the Brits. And then you do have to ask the question of what is going on in France that makes them so likely to light on fire? What is going on in America that makes them so likely to light shit on fire? Is it the same thing? Which I actually don't think it is. It's an echo of something. But so when you look at like, okay, what happens to the crime rates when you import people from certain countries, which, for the love of fucking Christ, will people map it to countries and not ethnicities? I get that there's going to be a lot of overlap, but when you look at the fucking demographics in the US it does not matter what their skin Color is matters. What fucking culture they came from. There you'll start to see, oh, shit. There are just some cultures that the things they celebrate are not high performing or the, the things they celebrate are just rowdier, they burn more shit, whatever. And so that understanding culture transmits values. If the Japanese taught themselves, oh, the culture that we're going to transmit is we clean the soccer stadium up afterwards, then they're not going to ride and burn things because that's not what's cool in their group. I've talked a lot about this in my mindset phase. Moms specifically would come to me and be like, yo, my son is derailing. What do I do? And I'm like, there's a very simple answer. You've got to get as close to the following as humanly possible. Kidnap them, put them on a deserted island, only surrounded by other men whose respect they want to earn. And then those men must act in a way that you want your child to act. That kid will get whipped into shape. And I mean literally, like, they will actually like physically hurt him if they have to, to get that kid to snap in line. Because that's what men do. And that kid will get in shape. And as long as he's loved and celebrated, when he gets in line, he'll get in line. But he has to want their respect. If he wants their respect because they do cool, then like, and. But you can do this with gang bangers, drug dealers, whatever, doesn't matter. That kid wants their respect. He gets jumped into the gang, he will act in crazy ass accordance with the things that they do. Same thing is true of honorable men. And so you've gotta model something. And they've got to be in an arena where they can't go, no, I don't want to work hard like that. I'd rather go earn the respect of these guys over here. It's got to be like they're, they want their respect and they're trapped inside of it. That is culture. And so whatever the culture reinforces, then you're going to get that. And so if they're in like a religious youth culture, then they're going to model that. If they're in a youth gang culture, they're going to model that. So figure out what culture, like the actual values that are being passed down and you will get your answer to what this is. And Drew, I want to bite through this microphone every time I bring this up. And people want it to be about race. It is not about race. It is about, for whatever reason, you're disseminating culture. It's those values and what that culture is. And because for so long, we tended to look like the people that we grew up in that culture, people have made the mistake that they are one and the same. They are often related, but not in a causal fashion.

[Drew]

Yeah, you. You said something earlier I want to double click on. You said that the France and the American thing, they're not the same thing, but they're echoes of each other. What's the thing that they echo?

[Tom Duru]

That we're becoming at the policy level of feminized nations now. I think that.

[Drew]

So I believe, before you jump in and you're saying that specifically, we're talking about rights, or we're going now. Broader rights. No, riots.

[Tom Duru]

Like riots, yes. So a feminized culture allows this to happen. A feminized culture becomes so convinced of compassion that, well, the only reason that they're doing this is because they're impoverished. And, you know, it's not affluent soccer fans that are doing this. This is a poverty problem. And so, sure, when you have somebody who's desperate in poverty and they finally get a glimpse of something joyful, they don't know what to do. They have been so neglected by society, abused by society even. And so what do you expect? Okay, that's fucking nanny state bullshit. So when you allow that to become policy instead of going, hey, I love it when a soccer fan celebrates. That's dope. But by the way, if you fucking burn that, you're going to jail. And so if you don't have that, where you say, nope, hard pass, don't care that your team won, don't care that you're poor. None of that fucking matters to me. You just did a thing that we have a law against. You're going to jail, and I'm going to get as close to sentencing you in a totally blind way. I'm not, like, giving partial credit for this, that, or the other. Nope, this is just what we do. So. But we don't do that anymore. And in fact, it's so crazy. Dude, I'm so milk toast back from back in the 80s, bro. Like, now, though, people are just like, this guy is unhinged. That is so wild to me. So that's what this is an echo of.

[Drew]

We have some people in the tower saying, you know, this is. This is not about the culture race talk. It's about the rich elite talk. Which, honestly, I thought that's where you're gonna go. I thought you were gonna go straight to the economics of it all.

[Tom Duru]

But now it's always grounded in economics, meaning the values that are being so. Take welfare states destroy families. They destroy families precisely because of the incentive structure that they create. So once you incentivize them through poverty, essentially, to split the family up, now you don't get a male and female dynamic. You tend to get an only female dynamic. So that's where it's like, this is an economic problem. Don't become a welfare state, which is an economic question. Keep families together. And when you do that, now you get a male, female dynamic. The father is going to use discipline to keep the kids in line and hopefully mirror what masculinity looks like when it's channeled towards the right things. Take care of a family, et cetera. Now all of a sudden, values are getting passed that you're like, well, this is a value thing. It's not really economic. It's like, yes, but the underlying thing was that you had an economic structure that incentivized the disintegration of the family. Evolution is trying to tell you you need a male and a female. Like, if we just had males, you deranged in a different way, but you just have females. And so you're deranging in that direction. And we. We have just effeminate our culture to an insane degree. And remember, men can largely be clocked as they're trying to get laid. And so if the way to get laid is to act more effeminate, then they're going to act more effeminate, which is wild and doesn't get you laid. P.S. but they think it will. And so they run the. It's literally known as the sneaky strategy.

[Drew]

Okay, so there's that inside the. The mouse traps in people's brain when you say feminization of culture, that they think like, Tom, women aren't the problem that.

[Tom Duru]

Enjoy that women are partly the problem, but is.

[Drew]

I think if I can, like, talk for you. There are certain characteristics that we attribute to feminization. Feminization that you're leaning on.

[Tom Duru]

Yes.

[Drew]

There's too much empathy. There's too much.

[Tom Duru]

Yes. But let's. Let's not check in that drama.

[Drew]

Double down. Stop that.

[Tom Duru]

Drew's, like, trying to save you. God damn it. Looking at the chat, bro.

[Drew]

Take the cue.

[Tom Duru]

So here. But here's the reality that women are incredibly necessary and needed. Evolution has shaped them to be half of the whole that makes society run. Men are incredibly important and needed. Evolution has shaped them to be half of the whole that makes society run. When either of them derange. So masculinity deranged. In Nazi Germany, there was just no compassion. You can't have compassion and shove people in an oven. That's wild.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Duru]

So we. We know what that looks like. And then femininity is running wild right now. And so just so happens at this moment, brought to you by weak men and systems that have become overly feminized. Now, it is a double whammy of. It just has way more women in it. And that we have taught men to emasculate themselves for, whatever, 30 years. So you put the two together like, this isn't a. It's not like women are to blame. This is a. Men and women are out of balance right now. It just so happens that in creating the out of balance, they're spilling over here. Now, I'm actually more nervous to say the following because I. I think this is way more likely for people to run with and become problematic. But I do think ultimately that when men are weak, then it creates the space for women to become out of balance. So it's like in my marriage, Lisa and I hold each other in dynamic tension. And if I didn't hold her in dynamic tension, she would. Man. And I would really like to say these things in front of her. I am not bashful about this, nor do I expect her to. She might ask clarifying questions or whatever, but I don't expect her to disagree with this, that if left to her own devices, she would run the company very emotionally, and that would be to the detriment of the company. And the company is far less likely to survive her absence than it would be to survive my absence. So without me, the company's far more. If I said that backwards, the company's far more likely to collapse if she's running it than it is if I'm running it. Now, she is very, very useful in keeping my lesser impulses in check. But when you mistake emotion for a guiding light to logical outcomes, you run into trouble. She does it all the time. She knows she does it. And so she'll turn to me and be like, look, I feel this way, but I get. It's a feeling. And so make sure that you take us where we need to go. So that part of the dynamic tension, because my wife contributes as an equal peer to me, just in different ways. But that part of the dynamic tension requires me to be strong and not to buckle when I feel like maybe I'm being mean or whatever. It's like, no, we can't do that. It's got to be done as a policy. It's got to look like this. Otherwise we're going to spin off into this thing. And I get that that's upsetting to you. And there have been many times where my business partner and I have had to have a conversation away from the team so that I could say, you're having this. The way that you're processing this is emotional. You cannot bring this in front of the team. You cannot do that. And so I know that people hearing me say those words are like, fuck, that's grotesque. How can this guy say things like that? It's like, like, how are you not saying things like that? That is your job. And if my wife ever sees me being a robot, she's going to say, stop being a robot. This company is staffed with humans, and they have loves and passions. And if you don't integrate that, this company will also die a different death. But it will die a death. And it's true. And so I need and want her to say those things, and she needs and wants me to say the things that I am saying. So it's like we've somehow become deranged as a culture, and we don't think men need to say in a very humane, loving way that recognizes women as their peers. I don't know how many times I have to say that. But, like, where you go, hey, my job is to make sure that we don't let this become an emotional rationalization. That's precisely what you're doing right now. I understand me saying that's going to make you mad, and I don't care. Not that I don't care, but, like, we're gonna have to set that aside. We can deal with that, whatever that's doing to our relationship later in a side conversation. But right now, no, we're not going to do that that way. And I think that we have trained men to fear their aggression. And I don't mean with women. I mean to feel like, yeah, I know what's right in this moment. I'm gonna be warrior for it. I'm gonna say no. Like, that's we're trying to get here. And the way that I'm saying that we're gonna get there is the way that's gonna lead us there. And I will always listen if you have a better idea, of course, but it's gotta be an idea based in logic, not based in emotion. So, I mean, you've given me every opportunity to eject out, and I understand that. I haven't Taken it. But it's like, if I'm actually gonna be useful to people, I've gotta say the real thing.

[Drew]

And I'm glad you brought that around because literally, I was dealing with my first. This is my first teenage crash out with Lynn, and I didn't know how to handle it. I had to call my sister to talk me off a ledge. Come, like, wait. Am like, am I tripping? Because there's a lot of emotion coming here. I'm like, did I. I feel like I'm doing the right thing here. Like, and I had to just look around to just have somebody else. And she was like, no, you have to remember, like, she's a young teenage girl. She's going through a wave of emotions. Like, it's not the end of the world. It's okay. I know that she might have said things that was hard to hear and there might be some truth in. And you have to talk to through her too. But. But that doesn't mean fold immediately under that pressure and then acquiesce to that. So there is something.

[Tom Duru]

I'm now your sister superfan.

[Drew]

No, but there is something to that. Like, yes, as men in society, we do have to draw that line. And then even on the. On the flip side of that, there are times with women when you are right to a cue or you are right in this one aspect of the area, but you're not looking at the totality of the picture and things like that. So I completely understand how that works on an individual dynamic. I understand how that can. Can bleed into the family dynamic. We have specific examples. But from a society level, I think is a part that I'm a bit more confused. Like, how do I. We can't say every man needs to say no to a woman today. Like, how do we.

[Tom Duru]

Yeah, that would be asinine. That's what I'm saying. The reason I don't even like talking about that side is it will be read like that and people will think, this bitch. Like, I don't even need to listen to her. It's like, yeah, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. When my wife speaks up, I'm like, hold on, I want to hear that. Tell me what you think I'm missing. My. My wife is extremely insightful. She understands me very well and will often see things that I miss. I. So I'm so skeptical of my ability to be right all the time that, like, I just want to. I want her to debate me. I want her to push back. I do not want her to fold. And so all of that. And by the way, she's had to say, like, listen, sometimes you're too hard, you're too tenacious, you're too aggressive. And so it's like fair. And I appreciate that and thank you. And so. And one of the biggest arguments we've ever had where she was properly upset was me becoming a robot. And she's like, you become so divorced from your emotions. Unfortunately, she, the only words she could say were, I want my husband back. And I just was like, I do not know what that means. And so it took us a very long time for me to realize, okay, what you're saying is you need me to broadcast and receive love. Yes. Cool. Got it. Now, that was on the back of some yelling and screaming where it was like, I don't understand what's happening.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Duru]

But anyway, you get there in the end. So. Yes. I don't want men to just go, I'm just gonna say no. And whatever I think is right. I'm here to put boundaries. It's like in a high functioning dyad, you're here to figure out what the right path is forward. When the reasoning being done is emotional, then it's to go, okay, those are feelings. Got it. But feelings do not necessarily help us get to our goal. Cause and effect helps us get to our goal. And so my job is to go, I need to integrate those feelings into the experience. Because my job isn't to create a life that you hate. My job is to create a life that you are in love with. But we have to be able to state our goals and then use cause and effect to get there. And so that's where I want to see men get to, is to have a spine. By the way, if you want to get laid, always be willing to walk away. That's the only way. And so once you, your strategy for impressing women is to go become extraordinary at something, to want to partner with them, to listen to them, to hear them, to understand them, to be emotionally available to them, but at the same time have an agenda and say, we both agree this is what we're trying to do. And it's my job to really map out the cause and effect of how we're going to get there. Anytime you see something, I don't to integrate that. And it's your job to make sure that I don't become motionless. A tamata who lives only to serve a goal. And it's like that dynamic for hundreds of thousands, millions of years. Has just been evolution, trying to make sure that we keep our kids alive long enough to have kids. And at some point, we got so good at both being able to have sex without having kids. Prosperity has been so long lived that we haven't had to remember, oh, we need dynamic tension between the two groups. And more economic forces have deranged it by forcing women into the workforce. Yada yada, which I'm happy to talk about at any time. I love that women are in the workforce. Impact theory has its incredible fair share of extraordinary women, but I would tell all of them they need to run an audit on what their life is going to feel like in their 50s and 60s if they don't have kids and if they prioritize their career, as my wife has done, by the way, for anybody confused, but we had those conversations. What do your 50s and 60s look like? How do you account for. You will have a strong desire to nurture. You will have a strong desire to play the grammar role of being able to pass on your wisdom. How are you going to fulfill that? Because otherwise, you will feel adrift. There will be nothing that gives your life meaning and purpose. I'm going to stop, otherwise I'll fracture.

[Drew]

No, no, that was good. You nailed it. And the last thing. There's a lot of things happening in Brooklyn. To me, this was like conspiracy theory, like, conspiracy corner. I was like, oh, it's just a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That's what's happening. Like, they're coming out. But apparently there's been a couple. Yeah, there's been a couple of ninjas coming out, walking around. So I don't know if this is the beginning of an Ocean's Eleven reboot or if there's just gas prices too high and we're taking underground sewers or anything like that, but what do you think is. Is a drift happening in New York right now?

[Tom Duru]

I don't know. So I have no idea what to make of this, other than this needs to be investigated. They need to look at this immediately and figure out what's going on. So my brain immediately jumps to the fact that they found that device in the reservoir, the bomb. So there was a bomb planted in a reservoir that they found randomly as they were, like, running maintenance on it. And so when I start seeing infrastructure, people being there, bombs being planted in infrastructure now I'm like, hold on. Like, you've got to figure out what's going on, because this is the kind of thing that it's like, oh, they've been down there. Either Building tunnels where they can put weapons or whatever for quick maneuvering through the city to get access to the weapons. They are planting bombs on infrastructure. Whatever. You can't not look into this. But there's nothing right now other than, oh, super weird. People with tools were underground for three hours. That's very weird. It does not immediately mean that there's some giant conspiracy going on on. But you can't not look at it.

[Drew]

Ninja Turtles, man. I'm telling you, it's definitely the Ninja Turtles.

[Tom Duru]

Wouldn't that be dope, dude?

[Drew]

Oh, man. That's what the world needs right now. We need Ninja Turtles.

[Tom Duru]

No. Do you really want to know what we need? God, how do you do this? There was so the reason that cartoons popped off so hard in the 80s was because you could run commercials on normal TV for children's entertainment, which meant all you had to do was make a cartoon to go along with a toy. And now you could print money hand over fist because the cartoon itself, you couldn't make enough money. This is the crisis in the Japanese anime industry that will be saved by AI, by the way. But they're, of course, resisting it for now. So that whole thing was just. It created some of the greatest IP on planet Earth. And then they re regulated it so it's like. But they're not making IP to beat it. I think I already brought up that. I can't remember if I said it on camera, but there was a. I think it was an athlete who was. I think he's famous. Interviewing this young kid. And kid's like 8. And he's like, oh, so what cartoons are you into? Kids? Like, what do you mean? And he was like, what cartoons do you watch? I watch YouTube. Yeah, yeah, but what cartoons? What are you talking about? And he's like a SpongeBob SquarePants Tom and Jerry. And the kid's like, what? He. He didn't even have a concept of cartoon. Now of course he's watching cartoons, but he doesn't know they're called cartoons. To him, it's just YouTube. And YouTube has become this amorphous, hyper segmented, like, very weird digital circus thing that I don't think sticks to your ribs. I need to go see Obsession. Because Obsession at least speaks to what does Gen Z want in films. And it, from what I've seen, it has a more almost Blair Witch modernized, obviously, but a more modernized Blair Witch YouTube vibe. And that shows me that their entire visual language is different than somebody of my age. And I don't think it's going to stick as profoundly to their ribs. Especially not Gen Alpha, who's now just coming up on never ending, AI slap, etc. So know, it'll be interesting to see what happens, but I think you have to force a longer form narrative engagement as parents or your kids are going to suffer for it. So like we used to force kids to learn piano or trombone in my case. We gotta like do things with kids to get them to intake story in long form or it's really gonna be a problem.

[Drew]

That's a good point. I do it like subconsciously. Like I would force Lynn to watch the cartoons I used to watch. Me and her bonded over the powerpuff girls. Craig McCracken killed that cartoon. There are some that didn't stick. You know, some old shows that she's like, this is dumb, I don't want to watch it. But her like liking that show that I liked when I was her age, that was kind of cool. So there are certain overlaps. And I do think that as much as humans evolve and things get bigger and technology and stuff, I think there are still those basic mechanisms inside kids brains that the Saturday morning cartoon worked for a reason. And I still think if we put them in there and the kids did the same thing it was should have the same effect on them. They'll still bond with it in the same way.

[Tom Duru]

But also their morality plays. Yeah, that's one thing. Like you lose sight of that at your own peril. Like part of the way that you indoctrinate kids is through entertainment. So yes, be very careful what you let them watch. But you are shaping their value system by the cartoons that they watch. Like GI Joe literally taught me over and over and over about being a hero and about not leaving somebody behind and. And then they would literally do PSAs in the middle of the cartoon. Like to this day, if it's thunder and lightning, I know not to go in the water because of GI Joe. Like they did this whole thing about how it hits the water and it can electrocute you. And I was like, oh, damn, now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

[Drew]

There it is. Cool. Big shout out again to Kelsey. Appreciate the sponsorship. So guys, again, use code impact to get $10 off your first trade. And we got a masterclass coming.

[Tom Duru]

Yeah, we do. So as you guys well know, we're talking about this at the top of the hour. AI is changing the landscape dramatically. I think the world is going to force all of us to constantly. Not constantly, but you're not going to be able to sit in the pocket for 20, 30 years, you're probably going to be in four to seven year epics where you do one thing and then technology changes so much that the world changes so much that you're going to be doing something else. And so I do offer a free masterclass on how to start your own company using AI. And so I'm going to be doing the next one. June 11th at 1:00pm Pacific Time. So whether you want to learn how to deploy AI inside of a company or you want to start a company using AI, make sure that you join me. It's totally free. June 11th at 1pm Pacific Time. The info is in the description, so make sure you check that out. Sign up immediately. All right. Love you guys bunches, and we will see you on Wednesday. Take care. Peace.