Jack Dorsey Fires Half His Company for AI—And Why You’re Next + World on Edge, Iran, Israel & More | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu — Episode Summary Title: Jack Dorsey Fires Half His Company for AI—And Why You’re Next + World on Edge, Iran, Israel & More | Tom Bilyeu Show Live
Date: March 2, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Main Theme:
This episode dives deep into the world-altering impact of AI on employment and global economics, with Jack Dorsey’s headline-grabbing mass layoff serving as a flashpoint. Tom connects the dots between rapid AI disruption, company restructuring, and broader societal, economic, and geopolitical shifts, interweaving discussion of current global tensions, U.S. politics, and culture. The urgent message: AI is fundamentally, and at breakneck speed, reshaping everything—jobs, power structures, even diplomacy.

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1. AI Shocks the World: The “Jack Dorsey Moment”

[01:00-04:43]

• Jack Dorsey's Massive Layoff:

  • Tom opens with, “Jack Dorsey…has just laid off nearly half of the staff of a company making more than $2 million in profit per employee, stating AI has just become too effective to need so many employees.” ([01:00])
  • Dorsey’s company, Block, is not just ‘right-sizing’ after COVID: “They had already done the right sizing post Covid back in 2024…Dorsey said directly he was firing everyone because AI has simply gotten so good that they can do more with smaller teams.” ([04:43])
  • Layoff is a deliberate move to “do it all in one fell swoop to maximize the benefits and preserve company morale, which is often hurt more by slow attrition.” ([04:43])

• Economic Context:

  • “The jobs in 25 were horrifyingly low and the only question is why? What is going on now? What Jack just did made the answer to those 2025 jobs numbers very clear.” ([04:43])
  • “Now, specific predictions wise, Anthropic CEO Amodei…said a while ago that AI was likely to lead to roughly 20% unemployment in white collar jobs in the next year or two.” ([04:43])

• Personal Impact:

  • “We are seeing the same exact thing here at Impact Theory. Now, in a super ironic twist, despite overall jobs numbers…terrible, terrible, that is economic crisis levels…the number of jobs posted for programmers has gone up.” ([04:43])
  • “What Jack just did is going to be the AI shot heard around the world.” ([04:43])

Notable Quote:

“AI just went from threatening the job market to actually blowing a hole through it. Jack Dorsey, in a move that is prophetic, hear my words, is prophetic of what is to come over the next 12 months, just lopped off 4400 people from his company. Block, that's nearly half of his staff.” — Tom Bilyeu ([04:43])

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2. The Acceleration and Consequences of AI Disruption

[14:14-21:44]

• Which Jobs Get Disrupted, and How Fast:

  • Recap on book with AI job predictions (doctor, coder, teacher, lawyer, artist, soldier): “People thought the truck drivers were going away…while we were waiting for the truck drivers to get fired, all the software coding jobs are kind of getting eaten right now.” ([14:46])
  • Tom breaks down that any “disembodied intelligence” job is going to change or disappear, but points out there’s still a “window of opportunity right now where humans using AI is still better than just AI on its own.” ([15:29])

• “K-Shaped Economy” Risks:

  • “If you shatter the world into instead of one Uber, it’s a thousand Ubers…they will probably blip out of existence because those guys won't be able to generate sufficient cash to keep going.” ([15:29])

• Entrepreneurship & Fractured Opportunity:

  • “I have an ongoing pitch for people that they need to be starting a company…More and more people are going to start their own company. Company, rightly so.” ([15:29])
  • “If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will die. So hopefully that wakes people up.” ([15:29])

Notable Quote:

“I spend 15% of my time thinking about how to change how Impact Theory is structured and operates because AI has already so profoundly changed the world. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will die.” — Tom Bilyeu ([18:44])

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3. Economic Fallout: Who Buys, Who Loses, and What Happens Next

[20:20-27:13]

• Job Losses and Consumption Fears:

  • “If 2 million people are getting…losing their job, and then we have another, let’s say 10 million people that are going to lose their job from all these other different industries because of AI, who’s going to be spending the money?…Wouldn't that crash the economy?” ([20:20])

• Two Paths Forward:

  • “Path number one is bloodshed…the anxiety in the system builds up…they will revolt. Path two: it absolutely cratered a generation, maybe two. But the gifts that it brings are so profound that everybody is just like, keep your eye on the prize.” ([21:44])
  • Tom draws historical parallels with the Industrial Revolution and internetification: “All three of those wiped out one to two generations, man. And those people literally…your life sucked for the rest of your life, legitimately sucked.” ([21:44])

• Speed and Scale is New:

  • “We’ve never seen a transition this rapid…there’s never been a technology adopted this quickly, nor have we had a technology that advances this quickly…AI right now doubles every like 300 days.” ([21:44])

Notable Quote:

“If you shove enough people into tremendous uncertainty in a moment of populism, they will revolt. If they revolt, it will be in a Dune style revolt where it's like, AI is responsible for this and I want AI to stop.” — Tom Bilyeu ([21:44])

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4. AI Tools: Use Cases, Priest Ban, and the “Race Against the Machine”

[27:13-30:57]

• AI in Creative Work:

  • Pope asks priests to stop using AI for sermons, but Tom disagrees: “You shouldn’t stop using AI to write sermons. The goal should be for the AI to allow you to do far more work yourself.” ([27:21])
  • He describes his collaborative use with Claude as a writing partner, calling it “the most well-educated writing partner on planet Earth.” ([27:21])

• Window of Human-AI Synergy:

  • “There’s this narrow window where if I can do it fast enough, I can have a few years where it was like, all right, we really built something.” ([29:58])
  • “Taking a short break, but there’s more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned.” ([30:57])

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5. U.S. Politics & Global Tension: Diplomacy, Dog Shows, and Precarious Peace

[33:00-48:45]

• Mamdani-Trump Meeting — “The Trump Whisperer”:

  • “Mamdani may have proven that he is the Trump whisperer. I was legitimately impressed.” ([02:23])
  • “Very well played. Mamdani went to the White House and proved that he is the Trump whisperer…I think he understands Trump way better than Trump realizes.” ([33:40])
  • Praise for using tax subsidies to build affordable housing, alongside skepticism: “You have to do something. You’ve got to build houses...But I like the idea of more housing.” ([34:41])

• Senate “Dog Show” - Theatrics Over Substance:

  • Instead of passing the SAVE act for voter integrity, “senators held a dog parade inside the chamber bringing their pets in for photos and celebration. Instead of moving forward on the election bill.” ([37:10])
  • Tom likens politicians’ reasoning to the “Wasn’t Me” song: “They just lie. Like…They just need to give you a reason…That is exactly what politicians are doing.” ([37:44])
  • “Can we please stop doing full retard? Like, this is so wild. We’ve got to hold people accountable. This is ridiculous.” ([39:29])

• Iran-Israel Brinkmanship:

  • “US and China are urging their citizens to leave Israel and Iran as a strike or outright war looks to be more and more likely.” ([02:23])
  • US and China both issued official advisories for citizens to leave Israel/Iran: “When you’ve got both sides saying, hey guys, you might want to go now, it is safe to say that something is about to pop off between Israel and Iran.” ([40:08])
  • “When you back somebody into an existential corner, they will fight for their life and they will do things that they would otherwise not do if they felt they had other options. And that thing…tends to cause a lot of people to die.” ([45:03])
  • On Trump’s military strategy: “If he goes wrong and he doesn’t make the case for it, bye. Bye. He gets impeached. He will lose the midterms. Toasted cheese dunzo.” ([47:24])

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6. Culture & Media Consolidation

[48:45-70:42]

• Comedy and Cancellation:

  • Adult Swim’s ‘Smiling Friends’ canceled after a controversial joke: “That joke was really pretty tame as well. Now, but what about South Park? South Park surely has done bleep jokes, Jew jokes…” ([50:56])
  • “Paramount is…South Park is under that umbrella…Trump is the shield. Interesting.” ([51:10])

• Midterms and Emotional Political Ads:

  • Analysis and satire on attack ads and their manipulative emotional appeal: “How do you recommend people approach all the nonsense?” ([54:48])
  • “People are going to be completely bamboozled by all of the emotional appeals. The emotional appeals will work great.” ([54:52])

• Socialism/Skeptical Policy Analysis:

  • Tom is critical of progressive policy proposals that promise affordability through price controls: “It is socialism. There's no reason to call it anything other than that. And so, yeah, I hate seeing when somebody who I know has policies that are absolutely atrocious, they're going to speak so, well, to their generation.” ([52:48])
  • “Any business that doesn't have enough money to run the business go out of business, and they're going to decline. They're going to decline in quality. And so people end up doing things like burning the buildings down because they want the insurance money.” ([58:36])

• Taxation, Society, and Government Dysfunction:

  • “It’s not the taxes that’s a problem, it’s what government has done with the taxes…The frustration comes not from the taxes, it comes from how the taxes are used.” ([59:57])
  • “Taxing at 90% doesn’t give you a high functioning society. The two things aren’t even related. That’s the problem.” ([59:57])

• Epstein, WEF, and Information Exposure:

  • Hillary Clinton’s response to the Ghislaine Maxwell/Clinton wedding question: “She was the guest of somebody else that was at the party. And so, bye. Gotta go.” ([62:43])
  • “All of that stuff is going to start to get mapped out by AI. All of this stuff is going to start coming out. It is going to be wild times.” ([64:59])

• Warner Bros., Paramount, Narrative Control:

  • “Netflix has pulled out of the Warner Brothers acquisition deal. It’s now all Paramount, all the time...Living in narrative warfare, boys and girls. This is a battle for your minds and your soul.” ([66:59])
  • Caution about media consolidation: “When very politically active people like Larry Ellison…start buying up…” ([66:59])

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Memorable Quotes

• On AI’s impact:

  “AI is terraforming. It's terraforming the entire planet, but it is certainly terraforming right now. The jobs market, it is just going to be fundamentally different over the next 24 months.” — Tom Bilyeu ([04:43])

• On adaptation:

  “If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will die.” — Tom Bilyeu ([18:44])

• On society’s resilience:

  “Stable society is always going to trump everything. Like they say, a person with their health wants for many things. A person without their health only wants for one thing. When you have a sick society, everybody in that society wants for one thing, and that's for the society to be stable.” — Tom Bilyeu ([59:57])

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Segment Timestamps (for Reference)

• AI/Jack Dorsey Layoff Deep-Dive: [01:00-14:14]
• AI Acceleration/Job Disruption: [14:14-21:44]
• Economic Risks & Future Paths: [21:44-27:13]
• AI in Daily/Creative Life: [27:13-30:57]
• Politics, Policy, Global Tensions: [33:00-48:45]
• Cultural Commentary & Media: [48:45-70:42]

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

• Tom and co-host balance high-intensity, dire warnings with moments of levity and open-minded analysis (even praising ideologically opposed actors for smart strategic moves).
• Urgent call to listeners: pay attention, adapt, and be proactive in the face of AI-driven change.
• The world’s economic, technological, cultural, and geopolitical orders are in simultaneous, rapid flux—a “terraformed” future is arriving faster than most anticipate.

Useful for listeners who want:

• A macro lens on the real-world, real-time impact of AI
• Critical, sometimes contrarian takes on policy, politics, and the economy
• Guidance on how to think and act—not just survive, but thrive—amid accelerating disruption

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For full depth and direct speaker flavor, key segments to check:

• [04:43] Tom’s breakdown of why Dorsey’s move matters
• [21:44] Historical perspective on tech disruption and AI’s speed
• [27:21] Tom’s creative process with AI as a “writing partner”
• [33:40] Praise for Mamdani’s White House negotiation
• [39:29] Satire and rage at “government dog show” inefficiency
• [45:03] Cautionary analogy on backing adversaries into corners (applies both to Iran and US politics)
• [51:48] The “8 Mile” approach to political campaigning
• [59:57] Taxation, social stability, and government dysfunction

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Note: All ads, intros, and outros have been removed for clarity and focus.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom do you show live. It has been an absolutely insane run for AI over the last couple of days. If you guys have not been paying attention. Ooh, you are in for a treat today. Jack Dorsey, one of the most prolific modern founders, has just laid off nearly half of the staff of a company making more than $2 million in profit per employee, stating AI has just become too effective to need so many employees. If you are waiting for the shot heard around the world, that's the one. Claude hacked the Mexican government. I'm not joking about this. This one is insane. We'll have more details on that coming up. But that one is completely unhinged. Perplexity has one shotted Bloomberg's multi billion dollar financial terminal empire. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to cave to the Department of War pressure to use Claude for mass surveillance on Americans. Shout out to my man. That's incredible. Definitely a round of applause for that one. On the downside, though, the Pope has had to ask priests to stop using AI to write their sermons. Apparently, God just does not get down

[D]

with AI they're saying EM dashes in front of the congregation. That's what's doing it. That's just doing it.

[A]

That is amazing. I hope they actually say out loud, EM dash. That would be incredible. In other news, both the US And China are urging their citizens to leave Israel and Iran as a strike or outright war looks to be more and more likely. So we'll be covering that in detail. Mamdani and Trump meet in the White House. And Mamdani may have proven that he is the Trump whisperer. I will was legitimately impressed with the way that this guy handled himself. It's gangster. So you're actually going to hear some pro Mamdani sentiment coming out of me. I can't wait. And if you guys were hoping that the SAVE act would get passed and protect voter integrity, you won't. But instead you did get a congressional dog show. So enjoy that, you filthy animal. I can't believe that it happened, but it did. It did. It's real, Drew. AI is changing the world. I am. It is changing my thinking so fast about what is possible, how people should be reacting, what we should be doing at Impact theory. It is insane. It's insane. I don't like language. Fails me in my ability to articulate to people the need to wake up and pay attention to what's going on. The Jack thing really is that thing. It's the moment. Like if you think about like the timeline of like the adoption of AI and how AI actually impacted the world, Jack's tweet is going to be on that. Or what Jack did and then announced it is going to be on that. It's pretty crazy. I think this is really going to be something massive.

[D]

It really blew my mind because growing up I never understood what was the correlation between layoffs and stock market praise. It seems like when we lay people off, the stock markets fly through. Like I don't get how that happens, but the fact that he did that and then announced what the breakthroughs he had with AI and he's already a future tech forward facing company like Block wasn't hiring back end workers. Like everybody there was software, everybody there was technical, was a completely remote company. So even the most forward Silicon Valley s company was still like yeah, 40 you guys can leave, like 40% can leave. So I think if when we get downstream to some of these other companies, they're only going to replace it, even at the very minimum, the CEOs might just try it just to get a stock bump. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's now the low hanging fruit there.

[A]

So yeah, and I think people would be wrong to look at this stuff as something that people are doing from an stock market perspective. Because the reality is that AI just went from threatening the job market to actually blowing a hole through it. Jack Dorsey, in a move that is prophetic, hear my words, is prophetic of what is to come over the next 12 months, just lopped off 4400 people from his company. Block that's nearly half of his staff. Now. While many people have accused Dorsey of simply right sizing from a Covid hiring binge, Dorsey gave the receipts. He showed the company is already wildly profitable. They do roughly $2 million in profit per employee, which is better than most companies by a lot. And that they had already done the right sizing post Covid back in 2024. So that's not what this move. Dorsey said directly he was firing everyone because AI has simply gotten so good that they can do more with smaller teams. He noted that giving the productivity boost that they're already seeing from AI okay, just what's already happened and what is likely to come in the future. It was either continuously reduced staff slowly over the next couple of years and still end up with the same result, or do it all in one fell swoop to maximize the benefits and preserve company morale, which is often hurt more by slow attrition. So this is one of those breathtaking moves that if people understand in context and they get what's really happening, they are going to understand. The phrase that I keep coming to is AI is terraforming. It's terraforming the entire planet, but it is certainly terraforming right now. The jobs market, it is just going to be fundamentally different over the next 24 months. I'm not saying that they all go away. I'm going to give you some predictions about what other people have said in terms of how much unemployment there's going to be. But for a second, even if you don't see a doomsday scenario, the odds that the job market looks anything like it did at the beginning of 25 in two years is zero. It is going to be radically different. And if people do not understand how fast paced this is already moving, they are going to get caught flat footed. Now, specific predictions wise Anthropic CEO Amodi, who we're just talking about, he said a while ago that AI was likely to lead to roughly 20% unemployment in white collar jobs in the next year or two. So that means we're talking the next 12 to 18 months given that he said that a while ago. So if he's even directionally correct, and let's say it's only 10%, that is still psychotically disruptive. Understand that. Nor a 4% unemployment rate is like okay, we're comfortable there. 10% more than double 20% 5x like you start getting into depression territory, it doesn't mean that we'll actually be in a depression. I want to be very clear. It's all unknown. We don't know how this stuff is going to manifest, but it is going to be radically different. And as large companies have laid off people, they've always done it under this guise of like, hey, this wasn't really about AI. Like we had some other reason, like any other reason other than AI making it unclear if the incredibly horrific 2025 job numbers were actually related to AI or not. I did a deep dive all about the jobs report and what's real and what's going on. Dude, it is cataclysmic. The jobs in 25 were horrifyingly low and the only question is why? What is going on now? What Jack just did made the answer to those 2025 jobs numbers very clear. In my opinion. It's really one of the first times that such a large layoff has been made where the CEO just said plainly, this is because we no longer need as many people, because AI is just that good. Now, speaking from personal experience, I'm telling you this is true. We are seeing the same exact thing here at Impact the now in a super ironic twist, despite overall jobs numbers getting Revised down by 1 million and US posting 15,000 jobs per month, which is terrible, terrible, that is economic crisis levels, okay, the last time that We've had a two year stretch where we were averaging 15,000 jobs a month, it's crisis. These are not the numbers that you want to see. This is way off the pace. We would expect roughly 150,000 jobs a month for a healthy economy. So to be at 15,000 is a big yikes. But despite all of that, the number of jobs posted for programmers has gone up. Now this is actually a well documented, documented phenomenon. And what happens is as something gets cheaper, the demand for that thing goes up. So when you really think about it actually makes a lot of sense because it suddenly brings things into reach that would have otherwise been out of reach for companies, especially smaller ones. And so the fact that now intelligence is making coding so much easier, you can get so much more done that more and more people are like, oh, I might be laying people off, but I'm bringing people on in order to get more done with the software. But the way that it is going to change the landscape is absolutely insane. So mark my words, what Jack just did is going to be the AI shot heard around the world. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Right now. I want to talk about what a missed call can actually cost you every Missed call is a customer choosing your competitor. It's revenue walking out the door. And if your team can't see the full conversation history, you are making customers repeat themselves. That's how you lose trust and annoy your customers. Most businesses are still running on systems that were designed for 2010. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo. 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[D]

It's interesting. I wanted to pull something up I was looking for. This was a book. I don't even know what the title is. But he outlined exactly what is coming next. And this is going to lead to my ultimate question. Driving in 2029 self driving becomes ubiquitous. Doctors 2030 AI diagnosis better than humans surgeons 2032 robot surgery with zero tremor

[A]

coder so so that people have the appropriate context. This is a book that's outlined what jobs are disappearing and when and basically why.

[D]

Coders AI writes and test all code Teachers personalized AI tutors available Lawyers AI reads all case law instantly. Artists AI generates any creative content. Factory total automation takes over Soldiers, AI controlled drones and robots. Now the timelines of course are flexible, but we were talking about this yesterday when we heard this news. It's like people thought the truck drivers were going away right when Tesla announced the semi truck. And we were like, dang, all the truck drivers are going to get fired. And while we were waiting for the truck drivers to get fired, all the software coding jobs are kind of getting eaten right now. And then we're going to turn over there like, oh, okay, they got Silicon Valley and then we're going to turn this way and all the lawyers are gone. And it just seems like all these different industries separately and equally are all on a timeline to AI is showing up now.

[A]

Yeah. If you understand that what AI actually is is just intelligence, then it's like, okay, well what industries are most impacted by disembodied intelligence? Because right now they are increasingly in robotics and so they are increasingly mobile in the same way that humans are. But I would say they lag way farther behind in the physicality, the ability to go into a space, especially like an unpredictable space. Like think of an electrician. Sometimes you're crawling under a house, sometimes you open up a wall. Like all of this stuff is, is very difficult because it's just, it's not standardized. And so when you disembody it and you standardize something through a computer, now a computer is like the ultimate rules based universe. Once you're in the computer, everything is just a bunch of if this, then that statements. And so intelligence is all that you need. And when you take that lens and look at the world and say, okay, what are those disembodied intelligence based jobs? Those are all going to go away. And it might be a better way to think of this. Those are all going to change dramatically. So one person will be able to do a lot more. Now if we were in an economic upswing as AI were coming on board, I would have a totally different read on this. And I would say there's so much money sloshing around in the system, you know, everybody's jubilant. What's going to end up happening is more and more people are going to start their own companies, which I do believe is going to happen. But there's enough money for a lot of these companies to succeed. The reality is this is happening in an economically depressed moment. So all of that same fracturing is going to happen. I have an ongoing pitch for people that they need to be starting a company. Like if you have even a minor entrepreneurial bone in your body and look, I'm hyper aware, I'm saying that to a bunch of employees who, if they listen to me, are going to go start their own thing. But the reality is I don't, I try not to fight the tides of history. Like this is just the way that it's going to be. More and more people are going to start their own company. Company, rightly so. And in good economic times, I think a lot of them would survive. Unfortunately, in depressed economic times, most of them are going to get hit by a Mack truck. But it isn't like all of this stuff is just going to go away. Poof, it's gone. There's, there is a window of opportunity right now where humans using AI is still better than just AI on its own. And as long as that window stays open, people have a chance to enrich themselves by being a little bit faster to getting to the AI. Now I think it's going to be a little bit like content where you're going to start a company and it's going to pop for a minute and then completely disappear. And we're all going to be like, oh, remember when? And that will be like entire companies will be a remember when moment. Right. But nonetheless that window is open. And so we're going to see a lot of people funnel into that. I just don't know how much like economic availability there is. Right. So if you think of the K shaped economy, you've got the wealthy, they're able to spend money and right now they're masking the fact that the vast majority of people are not. But if you think of in food, it's called share of stomach. There's only so many things that People are going to eat in a day. So there's going to be the same thing with software or whatever other thing is getting disrupted. And so if you shatter the world into instead of one Uber, it's a thousand Ubers. Instead of one Bloomberg Terminal, it's 10,000 Bloomberg terminals. It's like, well, all of those are going to be these really small companies that will probably blip out of existence because those guys won't be able to generate sufficient cash to keep going. And so now it's like, okay, what does that look like? Does it end up being 10 smaller companies that like reconsolidate and then they all compete on price and it just becomes better for the consumer. Cause instead of Bloomberg is $30,000 per terminal. Instead of that it becomes, you know, maybe $30 a month or something like that. Or do most people just build it for free? It's completely commoditized and nobody buys one off the shelf because it only takes you an hour to create it. That's where like all the mystery lies. But if people right now are thinking, ah, just, you know, I'll grid through it, no way this is ever going to be the way that people are saying, like, I'm going to be fine on the other side of this. It just isn't going to be like that. And I don't know how to snap people out of their stupor. I'll try with a single sentence. I spend 15% of my time thinking about how to change how impact theory is structured and operates because AI has already so profoundly change the world. If we keep doing what we've been doing, we will die. So hopefully that wakes people up. It's like, I've already got an ongoing concern, I've got employees, we've got a business model, it's working. And I'm telling you, it is so self evident even running a company like that, that oh, if, if we just stay on this course, in another six months we might have a problem certainly in a year. So that's crazy. Timelines, just the rate of change is so fast.

[D]

I like the future looking perspective and encouraging people to start businesses and things like that. But there's two things that I was seeing in this Jack tweet, like the Jack tweet, I was going through the comments and stuff like that. On one hand, the U.S. government, you could throw this up. The U.S. government and private companies over the last, let's call it 16 months, has announced more than 675,000 layoffs. Yeah, and this is the 300 from Doge, 78,000 from UPS, 30,000 from Amazon, aggregating all of those together. And then on the other hand, we have the revised job report. We lost a million, a million jobs. So hypothetically speaking, we're like negative 1.6 million jobs over the last 24 months. I'm being a little bit flexible with the timelines. That alone kind of to your point, this was a different economic situation. People be like, yeah, let me go start my company right now. But I think a lot of people are home kind of feeling struggles as opposed to like being excited to get to the next step. Now going to my main question now everybody's thinking, okay, if 2 million people are getting, are losing their job, and then we have another, let's say 10 million people that are going to lose their job from all these other different industries because of AI, who's going to be spending the money? Who's going to be buying these things? Are robots going to be selling other robots? Wouldn't that crash the economy? Help us figure out what happens when this much job loss gets pulled out? And what would the actual thing happen to prices, commodities? Would the rich just be okay on their island? Like what would actually happen to the economy in totality?

[A]

Yeah. So we're going to predict the future, which means we are going to be wrong. However, I think that we can get pretty directionally correct. So there are two paths before you. Path number one is bloodshed. And the anxiety in the system builds up as more and more people lose their jobs, that they just don't care that yes, it's going to be better for my grandkids, but it's not better for me. And so, you know, a year is a long time when you're faced with tremendous uncertainty. And if you shove enough people into tremendous uncertainty in a moment of populism, they will revolt. If they revolt, it will be in a Dune style revolt where it's like, AI is responsible for this and I want AI to stop and I don't care that China is going to use it to enslave me. What I care about right now is that you're doing a bad thing to me in America. Stop immediately. So that's bloodshed path. Then you've got the historical, hey, it disrupted, it absolutely cratered a generation, maybe two. But the gifts that it brings are so profound that everybody is just like, keep your eye on the prize. This is making the world so much better. And everybody's so enthusiastic about the new jobs that are coming on the market that kids coming out of High school are just thrilled and they're like, oh my God. The opportunities that are open to me that were never open before. This is incredible. And fuck all these boomers that are like doomsdaying. I like, I don't. You guys weren't trained on the right thing. That's a you problem. Like this technology is unbelievable. Now let's keep in mind the last three major changes that we've had. Industrial revolution, electrification and Internet iFooding. All three of those wiped out one to two generation generations, man. And those people literally was like, you would lose your job, let's say in your mid to late 30s, and then your life sucked for the rest of your life, legitimately sucked. Your kid's life was rocky, but your grandkids life was awesome because they got to build on top of this new technology that just repeats and repeats and repeats. Deaths of despair from the internetification, we are still dealing with that. And so I think a lot of people, because a lot of them were young and don't realize just how many boomers and Gen Xers got run over by that bus. Especially when you realize that the Internet is part of what allowed globalization to become what it became. So it didn't hurt white collar people, which is probably why you don't hear as much about it. But when you look at the deaths of despair stats, they're startling. And that is largely a phenomenon of globalization brought to you by the Internet ification of the world. So it's like these things tend to play out like that, but it does create this tremendous opportunity. And so if the transition happens in a way where people are able to quickly get on board with AI and the new opportunities that it creates and we're able to lessen the impacts of a K shaped economy, I don't know that we're going to be able to get rid of them. But if we can lessen the impacts of a K shaped economy and kids are able to take to AI technology like natives, you have a chance, chance of just all the new opportunity created by AI washes away all the pain and suffering of, you know, one to two generations of people that will be eaten alive by this because they just cannot make the transition. So I don't know which of those paths is going to be true. But those, given a historical lens, are the most likely. The problem is we've never seen a transition this rapid because there's never been a technology adopted this quickly, nor have we had a technology that advances this quickly. And so that's where it gets scary. Just As a reminder, AI right now doubles every like 300 days. So in less than a year, AI doubles in capabilities. That's insane. And when you understand that exponential growth is always crazy, so 10% growth month over month over month is exponential doubling in less than a year, your doubling rate, that's. That's pandemonium. And so this is where I'm always like, the only criticism I ever see from people about my commentary around AI is that I'm getting the timelines wrong. Okay, but how much do you think I'm getting the timelines wrong by? Yeah, if you think Tom's a fool, capitalism isn't going to stop existing in three years. Okay, how many? Nine. Like, bro, think about that. You have a 10 year old, they're only going to be 19, and it's all going to be different. So I'm not sure what people's, like, real criticism is there. If you're saying fundamentally, the technology will never reach that state and therefore it's going to asymptote, it's going to stall out and we're never going to get there. Okay, that's a totally different argument. That one we can look at and see if there's any historical reason to believe that's true. I will put forward that there is not. There's literally no evidence in AI or quite frankly, any other technology, except for maybe air travel, where you can be like that, just hit an upper ceiling and just stop getting better. For the most part, technology just keeps getting better. So it just becomes a question of on what timeline.

[D]

If Pope Leo is telling priests to stop using AI to write their sermons, it's at least worth helping you with your morning emails.

[A]

Here's my thing. I think Pope Leo is wrong. You shouldn't stop using AI to write sermons. What people have to understand is the goal should not be for the AI to do the work for you. The goal should be for the AI to allow you to do far more work yourself. I just had an experience yesterday with Claude, was working on Kaizen, and I was like, hey, I'm struggling with. I know what I want the aesthetic to be, but I'm struggling with how do I pin it down from a Lore perspective. And that back and forth exchange was incredible. It. Every time I treat it like a writing partner, I'm like, this is the best writing partner I've ever had in my life, dude. I once paid when we were working on Mary Mods, the feature screenplay, I paid writers that worked on the Lego Movie, like all kinds of stuff like these were real fucking writers. Brought them into a room for a week and we all sat down round a table. It was awesome. It was one of the great experiences of my life. And we were brainstorming ideas. It was electrifying, but it wasn't nearly as productive as whatever six months later when the next version of AI came out. And I was like, okay, I want you to act like my writing partner and I want to go through this. And what holes do you see? It's not that it's handing you the answer, it's that it will say something. And you're like, that is a really shrewd insight. And then that makes you think of something else. Then it will give you some ideas. And they're like, really cheesy. But it's like, okay, well, it makes me think of this. Then you give it your idea and it's like, well, like, that's been done a lot.

[D]

What if.

[A]

And. And you just realize, okay, you don't one shot it. But oh my God, it's. You suddenly have the most well educated writing partner on planet Earth who just wants to do whatever you want to do. Now, you have to have good taste because it will go off the rails. But if you treat it like a writing partner who's another well intentioned, intelligent person, but ultimately you have to drive the process, it. It is just insane. It's so good, man. Now, the only thing. So the way that I feel with Kaizen is that I'm in. I'm in a race against AI That AI will make video games so easy to prompt that it will just become like shorts. And if you're somebody who studied filmmaking, your goal wasn't to make shorts. So there is a death there that you have to mourn. And so I do believe that video games will take on that quality of like, yeah, so cheap and easy. Like, it just doesn't become a thing that gets inside your soul. It doesn't become a thing that you bond with other people over. It doesn't become a thing where you really want to, like, invest hundreds of hours into, which is what I want to build. I want to be a part of that. And so I know that's going to go away, but there's this narrow window where if I can do it fast enough, I can have a few years where it was like, all right, we really built something.

[D]

You built a fandom. Everybody's built in. Yeah, you could prompt games now, but this is my game. And then you can kind of.

[A]

Yeah. And it won't be an instantaneous thing. So if I'm constantly deploying the techniques that my game will always be at the cutting edge of AI. So my game will be developed a little bit faster than everybody else because I'm just ahead of the curve because I've been doing it now for years. So yes, I am sad that I can see the end of an era just like I watched it happen with film. But at the same time I'm like, well, would I ever even be able to build this game if I didn't have AI? And the answer is obviously no. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned.

[B]

I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

[E]

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[B]

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[D]

planet is now marked for death.

[C]

Marvel Studios the Fantastic Four First Steps is now streaming on Disney.

[A]

We will protect you as a family.

[C]

Light em up Johnny. Marvel's first family is certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

[D]

That is fantastic.

[C]

And critics say it's one of the best superhero Movies of all time. Marvel Studios, the Fantastic Four. First steps, now streaming on Disney Plus. Rated PG13.

[D]

What time has it been?

[C]

It's clobber time.

[A]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[D]

I really, really, really want to talk about the socialist in New York. He's a great guy, though. I call him all the time. Mom, Daddy and Trump got together. Yeah, they did. And it's funny because I was surprised at your take when you first brought this up, but apparently it was a productive meeting. He met with Donald Trump about affordable housing in Queens. They have committed nothing on paper, 21 billion in grants for it, and it will be built in the west side of Queens. But how Mamdani sold it to him was printing out newspaper articles of, like, front page, Trump did the city. Like, Trump did all these things. And then that kind of went to Trump's ego, I guess, and just got the yes. So very well played for mom Donnie.

[A]

Very well played. Mom Donnie went to the White House and proved that he is the Trump whisperer. I have to say, I'm very impressed. Him, somebody on his team, whatever, they came up with the ultimate strategy to hack the way that Trump works, appealing to his ego, understanding that, hey, let me show you how people reacted to President Ford when he was like, I'm going to veto anything that comes out of New York. I'm not helping those guys back in the day. And Trump, you could be remembered like this. It is absolutely brilliant, and I will take a brilliant idea from wherever it comes. If we get a brilliant idea from somebody, and I hate their politics, I don't care. A good idea is a good idea is a good idea. And this is unbelievably artful in terms of getting what he wanted. Also, he wanted to get a girl released from ice. Another banger gets her release from ice. Now, the way it's being packaged up in social media may or may not be accurate, but it was basically like, look, Trump, she's a hottie. How about we let her out? And he's like, yes, let's let her out.

[D]

It is too old for my taste, but, yes, let her out.

[A]

Oh, God. The memes on this one, though, are legendary. So full round of applause for Mamdani. This was a masterwork in diplomacy. He absolutely nailed it. I think he understands Trump way better than Trump realizes he understands him, and so that creates massive opportunities for Mamdani. Now, obviously, I still am traumatized by Mamdani's economic policies, but I'm very interested to see if they can do something on the housing side that really is like tax breaks. I haven't gone into the details enough so maybe as I do, I'll be mortified. But at a high level, if they can use tax subsidies to get more housing built, I'm all for it. We need more housing. It's not my ideal method. My ideal method is just deregulate and let the market do what the market is going to do. That would be my pole position. But you have to do something. You've got to build houses. You've got to build houses. And if that means that the property value of the current houses goes down, I can't stress enough. That is so much better than crisis led deflation in housing which is almost certainly coming if we don't do something right now. The mismatch between sellers and buyers is absolute insanity. It is a level we have never seen before, not even after 2008, not during recessions. We've never seen this kind of mismatch between buyers and sellers. I think there's like 40% more sellers than there are buyers. Do you know how cataclysmic that is? That's one of those things that over the next year that just erodes housing prices like really fast. You don't want to be in that situation. You would much rather lower those values because there's more properties coming on the market. Because you take that K shape and you start narrowing that gap because people are able to get on the housing ladder which hides them from the effects of inflation. It's not my preferred method of hiding from inflation, but it's the only one that everybody understands. So hey, if it had to be brought to us by a democratic socialist, at least we're getting new property built. We gotta build the new property now. If we're doing it in a way that ends up being inflationary. Now we've got a whole problem again. Oh God. But more housing. More housing at least is a step in the right direction. So again I reserve the right to look at the specifics and be mortified. But. But I like the idea of more housing.

[D]

Applause for government policy. Now let's shame government policy.

[A]

Well, that should be easy.

[D]

Elon tweeted Best in show after right News network angle talked about Just days after Senator John Thune said there's no time to debate and vote on the SAVE act, it was revealed that senators held a dog parade inside the chamber bringing their pets in for photos and celebration Instead of moving forward on the election bill.

[A]

Been hanging around the Senate.

[D]

But

[A]

if you're not looking at your screen. This is your government wheeling dogs around in wheelbarrows that are decorated.

[D]

Tell me this is not a senior citizen home. This is what you do to your grandma in the old folks home. This is why everybody needs term limits.

[A]

Dude, you know the song by Shaggy Wasn't Me, right? Okay. For the young people in the crowd, there was a song that was absolutely hysterical because I thought it was just a big troll about how this guy gets caught having sex with another woman by his girlfriend on camera. She's standing right there. She's filming it just. The song is a litany of all the ways that she caught him. And he just keeps saying, wasn't me. And because he keeps saying wasn't me, like, he's theoretically going to get away with it. That's how I feel when I look at politicians. They just lie. Like, they're not trying to hide it. They're not trying to pretend. They just need to give you a reason. There was a famous study done on this phenomenon, which. This really bothers me, but it's true nonetheless. If you want to cut in front of somebody in line, the study was done specifically with making photocopies. So you want to cut in front of somebody in line to make photocopies. What they found was it didn't matter if the reason was valid at all. All that mattered was that you gave people a reason. And it triggered some ancient wiring in the brain that made them go, okay. And so people would walk up and say, I'm not joking. Can I cut in front of you in line? I need to make copies. And the person standing there who also needed to make fucking copies goes, okay, and just let him go. What the fuck? That is exactly what politicians are doing. We don't have enough time to vote on one of the most consequential pieces of legislation because we're too busy doing a dog parade, okay? It's like, what the fuck, man? Did somebody run around and hit us all with attack hammer? This is so crazy. This is full retard. Can we please stop doing full retard? Like, this is so wild. We've got to hold people accountable. This is ridiculous.

[D]

This is getting great. You cooking right now. Let's go over to Iran Ambassador Mike Huckleby, who thinks that Israel should just take it all emailed staff urging those wishes, urging those. Urging his staff to leave.

[A]

Almost had a first pit take, boys

[D]

and girls, urging those to leave Israel to depart today. Warning of likely high demand for flights from Ben Gurion Airport and stressing a rapid exit, according to a copy review by the New York Times. So if you are in Israel and you're an American and you don't want to get bombed, you should leave right now is the undertone of this text. Somebody called it that it was going to happen next weekend. So might have. This might be that weekend.

[A]

Yeah, I don't even know if we can say that this is the under text. Literally, Mike Huckabee said leave Israel today. That is the message straight up. He's the U.S. ambassador to Israel. This is being reported on by the New York Times. Is not some rumor. Also, China's Ministry of Foreign affairs issued their own advisory urging Chinese citizens in Iran to heighten their precautions if they're stuck and if they can leave, they should leave as soon as possible. Now, when you've got both sides saying, hey guys, you might want to go now, it is safe to say that something is about to pop off between Israel and Iran. We've got got reports of Israel trying to do preemptive strikes on missile locations. We've got obviously the most insane buildup in the Middle east of US Military hardware since the war in Iraq. Like this is wild. Huckabee even sent an email to embassy staff authorizing voluntary departures and urging anyone who wants to leave again to do so today. He specifically warned that the advisory will likely result in a high demand for airline seats, as you can imagine, and emphasize that, hey, this is a quote. You need to prioritize getting expeditiously out of the country by booking any available flight from Ben Gurin Airport, even if it requires onward travel to reach Washington, D.C. okay. This has been corroborated by multiple outlets, including the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, Harrods, which all reference the New York Times review of the email and describe it as a precautionary measure. Amid wildly heightened tensions with Iran, the US State Department simultaneously updated its travel advisory authorizing the departure of non emergency personnel and family members from Israel due to safety risks, while advising US Citizens to consider leaving while commercial flights remain available, which I'm guessing they're not going to remain available for very long because we are at a point now where Trump has to shit or get off the potential. He understands that he has got the opportunity to be embarrassed, be drug into a long standing war or to get something done. And this is one of those men where I'm very interested to see how all of this plays out because I agree we can't let Iran get nuclear weapons. That would be a very Bad idea. And we can't just roll up and strike people. Now, I'll ask you guys to. I say that, but we've done it before. I don't think it's a good idea, especially not with IR if you don't have, like, imminent proof that something new is going on. Because if you now just do another bunker buster dropping of these things, it begs the question of. Wait. The first time you told me that this all worked perfectly. So what is going on? You will need to make a very incredible case to the American people to get them behind this. Because if you just every, you know, few months, go, ah, they're weeks away, then it just seems like the things you're doing aren't really leading to anything. So he's in a super precarious position that we're gonna have to see how he's able to get out of this. I think he was just expecting that he was gonna put all that hardware there. Iran was gonna be like, oops, our bad. Yep, you're right. You can have whatever you want. We agree to all your terms, but this is existential for them. In fact, boys and girls, if I may get you to look at what's happening with Iran the same way that I look at what's happening between the left and the right in America. When you tell people, hey, motherfucker, if you get out of office, I'm coming after you, your family, your dogs, all of that, you're toast. Then they start acting crazy because the Iranian regime, instead of standing up to what could be just an absolutely obliterating regime, ending attack, should have the sense to negotiate where it's like, all right, cool, we're going to chill on getting a nuclear weapon. We're going to acquiesce to you guys coming in and looking at our program and making sure that it's civilian use only and all of that. No problem. That's better than potential death. But they know they're under so much stress from their own people, they're under so much economic pressure from the US that this is existential. So it's like, well, which way do I want to die? Would I rather roll the dice and just say, yeah, fuck you guys? I call your bluff. I've got China on my side. China's got a bunch of cool weaponry that we're going to use to sink your ships. Hey, P.S. we know you guys have run your war games, and you realize that Chinese missiles can actually take out your aircraft carrier. China has run the same war games. They've come to the same conclusion. And that very system they've sold and brought here to Iran for us. And hey, can we all acknowledge that you in the us, you in the US are in a cold war with China? Yes, I think we can.

[D]

Cool.

[A]

So this is really a proxy battle. This isn't about Iran. This is about you guys. And Russia is supposedly getting in the mix here and leaking all of the attack secrets. Now, I don't know how much all of this is true, we will see in the fullness of time, but that is certainly the landscape of rumors that is flying all over the place. Russia and China are doing everything they can to help Iran. Iran definitely is part of the US's strategy to weaken China as much as it is to make sure that a despotic regime in the Middle east does not get nuclear weapons. That's your very effective and very real cover story. But nonetheless, this is a part of something much larger than that. And so given all of that complexity, when you back people into an existential corner and you say, hey, one way or the other, we're getting what we want, people do go, oh, cool, then I will take the option of duking it out and fighting to the last drop of blood, whereas if they think that they have an off ramp, they might actually take it. So both a warning to all of us here in the US in terms of how we treat each other across the aisle, and a warning to our diplomats in the Middle east that when you back somebody into an existential corner, they will fight for their life and they will do things that they would otherwise not do if they felt that they had other options. And that thing that they will do tends to cause a lot of people to die.

[D]

They're at it again. They're at it again. I think collectively, nobody wants this war. I don't think anybody's raising their hand. I don't think anybody's excited. I think the same tactics they used in the early 2000s of, yeah, guys, weapons of mass destruction, nukes, it's a week away, it's coming, all that stuff just kind of flying over our heads. We're missing it, we're missing it.

[A]

But, yeah, I do think it's still a little wild that. So, okay. The fact that Trump hasn't made the case to the American people tells me that he believes whatever he does is going to be lightning strike, surgical and effective, and therefore people are going to cheer for him like they did when he snatched up Maduro that the first time when he bombed Fordow. It was mixed. I Wouldn't say. I mean, it was mixed with. With Maduro as well, but I'd say less. So. Like, there was less.

[D]

It was clean, though. Yeah. At least. Yeah.

[A]

So this really comes down to. If he has that in his mind and he pulls it off, he knows that he has a track record of doing it. He knows that people get on board relatively quickly. I do believe his poll numbers have gone up both times that he's done a surgical strike and been successful. So he's thinking, meh, I don't really need to make a case for this. If this goes wrong and he doesn't make the case for it, bye. Bye. He gets impeached. He will lose the midterms. Toasted cheese dunzo. So it's like he's gambling all in that. Or he's like. He knows that this is a bluff, and this is the one time that he doesn't actually plan to go through with it. I don't know. He certainly does not strike me as. He strikes me as someone who oftentimes wants something to be a bluff, and then the bluff doesn't work. So he's like, all right, it. And then he just actually launches. Drew is looking up a big red button. If only you guys could see what he's doing. I'm not sure where that goes, but yeah. So that all of that makes me incredibly nervous for how this plays out. You've got an existential threat. You've got a president that has backed himself into a corner. You've got real stakes where this actually does matter, and so you can't afford to do nothing. But you're doing something because your foe is a caged animal that's, you know, backed up against the wall is not working. So it may force you to go all the way.

[D]

Okay, let's jump over to some culture stuff. We're about to get into our Friday funnies, but I just wanted to talk about a very interesting scenario, because it seems like the are at it again. That did it. That delay kind of messed up my joke. But, you know, you win some, you lose some. This is about smiling friends. It's the show that was on Adult Swim that got preemptively renewed for two seasons. It's at the end of season two right now. It got renewed through season four, and then they had this joke, and now suddenly the show is canceled. Let's see what the joke was.

[A]

This goes to show that no matter how different we all are, everyone can get along with each other, except for

[C]

a certain group of people.

[A]

You Know who I'm talking about?

[D]

Excuse me? What?

[A]

What did you just say? I was just wrapping up the episode. You said something about a certain group of people. What was a joke, but it didn't land as much as I thought.

[D]

It doesn't matter.

[A]

I guess, you know, whatever, Whatever. But I'm just.

[D]

But I'm just curious, though. What?

[A]

You're not gonna say what group it was. You don't want to say what it was. The group that was supposed to. It was supposed to be a mind experiment. Whoever kept you. Whoever came to your mind.

[D]

But doesn't. It was a joke. Doesn't matter.

[A]

It didn't land as much.

[D]

Just. Just say the group, dude.

[A]

Just say what they just say What's.

[D]

Sorry, I'm with Charlie here.

[A]

This goes to show that no, not even that bad Got them canceled.

[D]

Not even that bad.

[A]

It's very interesting. So this is where I'm like, you guys are telling on yourselves, like, this is such a bad look. I'd be like, okay, listen, the one joke that people can now make freely because we really can act on it, because that is just gonna, like, make it look horrible. Even if, like, we have reasons and all of that. That would be it. And yet here we find ourselves. That's crazy that they were preemptively renewed for two more years and now. Hey, guys, sorry, we're wrapping up. That's wild. That joke was really pretty tame as well. It's now, but what about South Park? South park surely has done bleep jokes, Jew jokes, Drew. I just. I can't bring myself to dance around it. I'm not a dance around that kind of guy.

[D]

So they're under the Paramount umbrella, though. And now CBS News is part of it. Kissed the ring already. So they could do no wrong now. You know, they got.

[A]

I don't understand that. Paramount, though, is that Ellison is Ellison,

[D]

who's Trump's left hand man. He was a special guest at the State of the Union.

[A]

But how does that protect South Park?

[D]

Because south park is under that umbrella. They just acquired them.

[A]

So Trump is the shield. Interesting.

[D]

The closer you are.

[A]

I feel like I should have a tinfoil hat on right now.

[D]

I mean, that's my view. I think south park has gotten away

[A]

with murder for a long time. They somehow just been grandfathered into like, all right, we accept it from these guys.

[D]

Only them.

[A]

But yeah. Interesting, Interesting.

[D]

All right, I want to get to this. I call it a 8 mile style campaign ad. I thought it was interesting how like, she brought it up and I'm curious about what. Do you think the strategy is going into the midterms?

[A]

Yup.

[C]

Kat Abu Ghazali is the kind of radical Democrat Fox News warned you about. Cat believes you deserve of universal health care, groceries and housing. Where does she think we are? The richest country on earth? Cat isn't a millionaire. She doesn't take pack money. She can't even afford health insurance herself. How can she possibly relate to normal, hardworking corporations like you and me? And it gets worse. As a journalist, Cat's reporting helped lead to Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News. Is that who you want fighting extremists in Washington? Cat claims the Democratic Party should not bow down to Trump or his billionaire friends. Does she think strongly worded letters count as bowing? Kat Abu Ghazali represents a new generation of progressive Democrats working to redefine the party's future. And she plans to do it with her ferocious attack. Cat by her side. Is this whole you want representing us?

[A]

Yeah, I think you're framing this as the 8 mile version of political ad is bang on. If you guys haven't seen eight Mile in the final battle, spoiler alert. But the movie is, whatever, 25 years old in the final rap battle. He basically tells on himself on all the bad things, Girlfriend cheated on me, yada yada, all the things that they would otherwise use against him, and he takes it away from them. It's a brilliant strategy. In real life, as Kat is showing here, the bad news is that again, this is somebody who's economically illiterate. So they look at the world and say, oh, we're the richest country on earth, therefore everything should be made cheaper for everybody. And that's not how making things cheap works. So if she were banging the drum and saying, the life is unaffordable, we need to deregulate, I'd be like, oh, word. Yeah, okay. You might actually have a shot there. Deregulating the housing industry is going to drive costs down. There are a lot. Like when you look at the cost of a Fortune 500 company and what percentage of their money goes towards regulation, it's insane. So there are things that we could do to simplify without getting rid of actual useful protections. But that's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about radical people that have an agenda that does not work, that it is socialism. There's no reason to call it anything other than that. And so, yeah, I hate seeing when somebody who I know has policies that are absolutely atrocious, they're going to speak so, well, to their generation. And so their generation is going to have to suffer. And that makes me very sad. Very sad.

[D]

We're about to get hit with dozens, if not hundreds of campaign ads over the next six months. And they're going to range from, hey, it's just me, a hardworking guy with my sleeves rolled up, outside in a cornfield, I'm shaking a guy in a pickup truck's hand, and I'm kissing a baby. You should vote for me. To the dark horror style. This person wants Mexican illegals to rape your daughter. So there's gonna be a bunch of that.

[A]

Way too accurate.

[D]

Yeah. How are we going to shift through that? How do you recommend people kind of approach?

[A]

Well, so those are two different questions. How do people approach it? And. And what is actually going to happen? So it is going to be. People are going to be completely bamboozled by all of the emotional appeals. The emotional appeals will work great. One of the campaign ads you already see the Trump administration running as basically build up to the midterms is, hey, at the State of the Union, we asked people to stand up for what they believe in. And they sat down and we said, should you protect American citizens first? And they said, no, by sitting down. They're gonna run that to death. And so that was a stupid own goal by the Democrats. The Democrats, dude, just be deft. Like. Like today, when Mamdani does something that I'm like, oh, yes, please. I don't go, well, that's a good thing by a bad person. So therefore I don't like it, I go, ooh, yeah. Like, I don't need him to be in a bad person box. If he changes his economic policies, I'm gonna be here for it. So I want good things to happen to Americans. I want good things to happen to New Yorkers, Minnesotans, Californians, wherever you are. I things now, I'm just talking cause and effect. So the cause and effect of the human mind is that emotional appeals work, and so both sides are going to do it. Attack ads work, so both sides are going to do it. Now, I think given the historical propensity for whoever won the major election to lose the midterms, and so far, Trump has not given people enough economic reason to go against all the shit showy stuff. So if he doesn't pull that off by November, it's just like the easiest blue wave ever. And so it's going to come down to, are they able to package up radical socialism in a way that feels appealing? And so they're Going to use an emotional appeal like Kat is doing, where it's like, we believe that you should have housing, what the fuck does that mean? If you're saying, we believe that you should be able to avoid housing and we're going to get rid of the obstacles in your way, great. If they say, we believe you should have affordable housing and we're going to force people to stop raising their rents, that will be a detriment to the very people that they're promising to protect. And that's why I point at Mom, Donnie and I go, hold on. The very guy who told you, I'm going to stabilize rents is now saying, actually, 47 days later, I'm going to raise your rents by raising property taxes. And people aren't outraged enough. People don't hate social Democratic socialism enough. They really don't hate it enough. They don't understand it, and so therefore they don't hate it. But it is a vile, violent ideology that will be a problem. It will march us down a path that is so devastating economically. And the great news is, I tell this to entrepreneurs all the time. If you're thinking of doing something, ask yourself, has anybody done this before me? If the answer is yes, go audit them. Figure out what worked and what didn't work. Have we tried rent stabilization efforts in New York before? Yes. How did it work? Terribly. Why are the outcomes so knowable from cause and effect? They are knowable because buildings are a business. And any business that doesn't have enough money to run the business go out of business, and they're going to decline. They're going to decline in quality. And so people end up doing things like burning the buildings down because they want the insurance money. Just look at what happened to the Bronx in the 70s and 80s is absolute insanity. You can map all of this stuff, and then you can map how they got out of that. They got out of that by stopping the freezing of rents. So it's like, oh, my God, like seeing humans have to touch the same hot stove because Grandma telling you, no, it's really hot and it's going to burn you. Her kid will believe it, her grandkids won't. And so it's like, oh, my God. So that's a bad thing.

[D]

That brings me up to something. Joe Lonsdale said this in the interview, like, last week, two weeks ago, and we never got to it. But I wanted to see. How do you feel about this take. And if this kind of aligns with what you're saying, I.

[A]

And how does that Impact.

[F]

No, it's fair. Listen, I obviously think lower taxes is better, but I mean I would be fine to pay like way higher taxes myself just to have a competent functioning society. I want to be clear about that. Like I am not voting for lower taxes here. Like that's not my question. My question, different taxes and they're better. But like I would literally pay a 90% tax rate. I'm fucking rich, Michael. I would pay a 90% tax rate. If we could keep our society competitive, we could stop having illegal swarm into our country. We can have fire accountable bureaucrats if we can put systems into place where our government confident. If we stop having regulators harass and destroy and impugn, you know, builders like, like I will pay whatever taxes that takes, I'll pay. I'll pay like 90% of my fortune because like we need our country to be functional for my kids and grandkids and everyone else live in a functional society. I think, I think that's like the important point here, like that this is not about saving some dollars on taxes. Like this is about saving our civilization.

[D]

Is that, is that like an accurate take? Like it's not the taxes that's a problem, it's what government has done with the taxes. And if we just reallocated that in a better way, billionaires and rich people, quote unquote, be more apt to buy into the system.

[A]

Yes, if you want to know why Joe Lonsdale would be willing to pay 90% of his fortune in taxes for an actual stable, high functioning government. All you have to understand is that people are selfish. Joe. Every rich person ever wants and needs a stable society for them to have kids, for them to build a business, you have to have somebody to sell to. And so once you understand the big pushback that people have is that they are tired of paying for a system that doesn't work. They are tired of paying for a system that spends more than it takes in so that it guarantees that you're going to have a K shaped economy. And just getting people to understand that the K shaped economy is born of the fact that you spend more than you make. And people just fundamentally do not understand why wealthy people get so up in arms about tax. So if you're in a certain tax bracket, like the top tax bracket in California, for sure you're going to pay more than 50% of your income in taxes. And so wealthy people are used to paying ridiculously high taxes. The frustration comes not from the taxes, it comes from how the taxes are used. And so while I Think it's a little disingenuous to say that he would, in an ongoing fashion, pay 90% of his taxes. Because you just. Historically, we see it shuts people down because you start going, why am I doing this? But having a high functioning society is worth the money. The only problem is that taxing at 90% doesn't give you a high functioning society. The two things aren't even related. That's the problem. And so when people talk about like, hey, I'd be willing to do this, it's like, yeah, I would pay 90% of my net worth to have a magic wand. But the reality is, what causes dysfunction in government is something else entirely. And what causes dysfunction in government is a central bank tied to a government that refuses to balance its budget. If the government balance its budget, you can basically have anything you want. You just can't have everything you want. And getting people to understand that is next to impossible. It benefits everybody, not the least of all the wealthy. To have a stable society, ask the French at the time of the French Revolution, how glorious it was to be wealthy. Not very, because it caused you to have your head separated from your body. So stable society is always going to trump everything. It's like they say, a person with their health wants for many things. A person without their health only wants for one thing. When you have a sick society, everybody in that society wants for one thing, and that's for the society to be stable. Once you lose that, you're in trouble.

[D]

Well said. Well said. Quick update on Epstein. Hillary Clinton talked to reporters yesterday after she left her deposition.

[A]

Maxwell invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010, she'd already been mentioned in a

[C]

civil law lawsuit by Virginia Jew Free.

[A]

Before that, Jeffrey Epstein had already been convicted before she came as the plus one, the guest of someone who was invited. Thank you all, and then peace out. Bye, Gotta go. All right. If you guys couldn't hear that because the audio was a little wacky, she was asked, this is after her deposition, Hillary Clinton, after her deposition on Epstein, was asked like, hey, real quick, hackam, Ghislaine Maxoell was at your daughter's wedding. And she was like, well, she was the guest of somebody else that was at the party. And so, bye. Gotta go. This is one of those things. The optics of this are absolutely terrible. And also the odds that that's true. Like, she wants to have a cake and eat it too. When previously, when talking about the Clinton foundation, she presents herself as being very involved. Now, when it's like, hey, was Jeffrey Epstein, one of the biggest donors, one of the earliest donors. It's like, yeah, I wasn't really involved in that. I'm not sure. You have to ask my husband. So it just feels very disingenuous at this point. We'll see. That's all court of public opinion. We need to see what actually happens. They've gotten now hours and hours and hours of depositions. According to people inside the room. They asked every question that they had. It's all recorded, it's all on the record. So I don't know if eventually that's going to be made public or if that was part of the rule was that they couldn't. I don't know. We'll see in the fullness of time. But it's like, man, the Clintons are not doing themselves any favors with the reputation that they have put in context with how many photos there are of Clinton and Epstein together. I mean, plus, and this is sort of unfair to them, you've got house of cards, which I think a lot of people just assume was meant to be the Clintons. So it is. Yeah, it's not a good time to be them. It just, just all the optics are absolutely God awful.

[D]

And in other news, the President and the CEO of the World Economic Forum resigns due to the Epstein ties. Thomas Massie retweeted it. CEO of World Economic Forum resigns. You're welcome.

[A]

Yeah. Shout out to Thomas Massie. This stuff is not going away. We live in the age of information. And I think right now people think whatever weird thing they've done in their past is buried. It's never going to be seen. But the honest answer is when you combine the age of information with, with AI, you begin realizing that all of that stuff is going to be easy as hell to index. Now, it's bad for the average person because if the government is so inclined, and it seems like they are, they're going to be mapping all of that stuff about you. Did you guys know right now it's actually legal in the United States for the government to buy your, like browsing history and stuff? I didn't know that. That's wild to me. I think we should immediately make that illegal. But nonetheless, they can do it. And so just like an advertiser on Meta can get all that. Without AI, they can't really tell who it is. With AI, they're going to be able to map all of that stuff, put it back together, know exactly who you are. And that's the kind of thing where, man, if You're a politician and you think something is dead and buried, baby, it is not going to stay dead and buried for long. All of that stuff is going to start to get mapped out by AI. All of this stuff is going to start coming out. It is going to be wild times. And if you're looking at your screen, we got Massey and Ro khanna.

[D]

That's my 28. 28 car. Let's go.

[A]

Kudos to these guys. Drew wants to see the economy burn. I see how it is, but on the Epstein thing, these guys are batting a thousand. So, yeah, I think people need to really get their affairs in order here because we're going to see all of these connections mapped out. It's not going to go away. So, yeah, buckle up.

[D]

Also, regarding this tweet, somebody retweeted it. As long as you hate Jews. Am I right? And then Thomas Massey said, so exposing a global child sex trafficking ring is now anti Semitic. Gotcha. He's on fire, man. That guy can't miss. Yeah, that guy cannot miss.

[A]

Stupid. When people start.

[D]

Announce your run, bro.

[A]

When people start just trying to make everything up.

[D]

Okay, we gotta talk about Warner Brothers. Can you vamp for me as I pull it up?

[A]

Oh, yeah, man. I got you covered. So Netflix. Netflix has pulled out of the Warner Brothers acquisition deal. It is now all Paramount, all the time. And once again, we have a very wealthy person in Larry Ellison, via his son, who realizes, baby, you gotta control that narrative. You live in narrative warfare, boys and girls. This is a battle for your minds and your soul, and it will always and forever play out in the realm of ideas. And one of the greatest ways to get ideas across is social media. The other would be storytelling. And once you look at it through that lens, things start to look a little bit different. You can understand why people get a little bit nervous when one person starts hoovering up all of this stuff. But it's also good business, and you do need to accumulate as many of the franchises as humanly possible. But this is where all of us have to be discerning and remember that we now have options that we wouldn't have had before. And in fact, may I think, the people that are live with us here right now, this literally is the kind of show that is disrupting the old world media. So we now have plenty of avenues to get word out to talk about things that otherwise would have been censored, shut down, or whatever. But I know a lot of people have censorship concerns around what is going on with this acquisition, because now things that Otherwise might have made its way to the show. Like, hey, a cartoon where they make a joke about some people and poof, it's gone. So as you consolidate that into fewer and fewer hands, if those fewer and fewer hands have an agenda, which they basically always do, then you can worry about what the world looks like through that invisible hand of censorship versus the overt. I'm just not allowed to say the thing that I want to say. So if you look at it purely from an entertainment perspective, I get it. I understand why this stuff is consolidating. We're going to live eternally through the consolidate, unbundle, rebundle, unbundle. It's the cycle that we've lived in through forever. But when very politically active people like Larry Ellison, who is at the State of the Union, start buying up your. I mean, this is an old reference. Start buying up your newspapers, your radio stations, your TV shows, that's when you do need to be cognizant. Doesn't automatically mean they're doing something nefarious, but you need to be cognizant of the power that they now wield. So if you've ever heard of the movie Citizen Kane, it was all about that exact thing. How one man was able to control the lives of so many simply by owning all the newspapers.

[D]

Speaking of Citizen Kane, it will now be a Paramount property.

[A]

There we go. Have you seen Citizen Kane?

[D]

I have once. I feel like I was supposed to like it, but oh my God, there's certain, like film school movies that are like masterpieces and at the time and historic quickly. And I give them all the reference. But me in the age of CGI was just like black and white. Three hours. Yeah, there was a 20 minute intermission. Like I was kind of.

[A]

I get it. It's one of those, you have to understand the context in which it came out. Like how radical the visual language was that nobody had done the kind of like depth of field that they were doing. And so there was just really awesome stuff. But yes, if you're an average filmgoer, you're going to be bored to absolute tears. And also, I think there's a just big enough difference between your generation and my generation. Like, I grew up in the 80s, so I was revering films from the 60s and 70s, so I was way more in touch with like older school style storytelling. So I just had that language. So as blockbusters began to eat, the world wasn't the only thing I was being exposed to. And so I'm far more, I think primed to enjoy something like that.

[D]

Gotcha.

[A]

But I get it. I get it. Boys and girls, have a wonderful weekend. If you haven't already, smash that subscribe button. Please hit the like button. It helps a lot. All right everybody, have a good one. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do? You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop 8 ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods. Everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.comimpact to claim this offer.

[B]

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