Warren Buffett’s Cash Warning, AI’s Global Race, and The Coming Economic Storm | Tom Bilyeu Show

Summary

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Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Warren Buffett’s Cash Warning, AI’s Global Race, and The Coming Economic Storm
Date: December 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this expansive episode of The Tom Bilyeu Show, Tom and his team tackle some of the most urgent and complex issues shaping our economic, technological, and cultural future. The discussion weaves together warnings from Warren Buffett about the US dollar, the accelerating yet unpredictable race for AI dominance, concerns about rising debt and inflation, social and moral fracturing in America, and how all of this converges to impact the average person. The episode’s tone mixes practical investment advice, skeptical analysis of mainstream narratives, and a high degree of urgency and transparency about the destabilizing forces at play in society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Navigating Exponential Change: Bubbles, Markets, and AI

• Tom contrasts two timelines: what should happen based on evidence and what actually happens due to delays, confounding variables, and human psychology ([01:56]).
  • “There’s always inevitably something that makes things take longer than you expect.” – Tom ([01:56])
• The “hype cycle” analogy: Markets and AI development both follow a cycle of hype, disillusionment, and then sudden, disruptive surges ([03:06]).
  • Gartner’s “hype curve” is invoked to show both investor and technological cycles mirror each other; sudden shifts catch everyone off guard.

2. Timing vs. Knowing – Why Even Smart Investors Get Wiped Out

• Wrong timing is the same as being wrong: Even if you understand the physics of money, if you miss time bets, you lose ([05:46]).
  • “Getting the timing wrong is the same as just flat being wrong.” – Tom
• Examples include Michael Burry’s “Big Short” and market exits; managing money and psychology simultaneously is nearly impossible.

3. Conspiracy and Control in Science & Industry

• Discussion on the suspicious death of MIT Fusion Lab’s director: Is it just a crime or something more? Parallels are drawn to historical efforts to suppress disruptive energy tech, like Nikola Tesla ([07:48]).
  • “People really take their money seriously, Drew. They take it seriously.” – Tom
  • Tom relates Eric Weinstein’s claim that certain physics are “illegal to think about” and are automatically classified ([10:30]).

4. Power, Wealth, and Ruthlessness in Business

• As companies grow, attracting billions, they’re forced to become ruthless—whether it's “old guard” energy or AI disruptors ([13:14]).
  • “As money reaches a certain level, it attracts a certain kind of person. To run these large companies…you have to be willing to do what it takes.” – Tom ([13:14])
• Antitrust versus Machiavellian business tactics; Microsoft’s legacy of buying to kill competition ([15:00]).

5. Rob Reiner’s Murder and the Moral Collapse in Public Discourse

• Coverage of Rob Reiner’s murder (allegedly by his son), and critical reaction to Trump’s callous tweet pinning it on “Trump Derangement Syndrome” ([22:23]).
  • “It’s grotesque… sees the world only through his lens.” – Tom, on Trump’s tweet ([22:34])
  • Nick Fuentes (controversial figure) comments: “Nobody deserves to be murdered… it’s objectively awful to make fun of that.” ([26:32])
• Tom, panel, and chat debate whether basic decency and ‘presidential’ behavior are eroding, making political humanity a relic ([23:57], [26:20]).

6. Subjectivity of Morality and the Fracturing of American Identity

• Discussion on relative morality: moral lines shift based on context, emotion, and tribal frames ([32:26]).
  • “Everybody’s morality will appear relative from the outside… the vast majority of humanity steers entirely by emotions.” – Tom ([32:26])
• The decline of unifying ideologies (like religion), rise of micro-tribal identities, and social media’s amplification of moral fragmentation ([34:17]).
  • Nietzsche’s “God is dead” is referenced for why subjectivity is more pronounced now.

7. Economics, Bubbles, and Buffett’s Big Warning

The 2026 Market Storm

• Current unprecedented national debt means US is forced to lower rates when it should be raising them ([60:27]).
  • “Our interest payment is the #2 line item… you’re just spending it to service the debt.” – Tom ([60:27])
• The Shiller PE Ratio: the market is at bubble levels seen only three prior times, all followed by serious crashes.

Warren Buffett’s Cash Hoarding & Dollar Doubts

• Buffett is sitting on a historic pile of cash and avoiding USD due to fears the US dollar is spiraling ([48:33]).
  • “We wouldn’t want to be owning anything we thought was in a currency going to hell…that’s the big thing we worry about with the United States currency.” – Warren Buffett ([48:33])
  • “Do you know how damning that statement is?” – Tom ([48:48])
• Both parties incentivized to spend recklessly because “people like free stuff”—no political will to fix the deficit ([50:16], [50:38]).

Cycle of Printing and Bubbles

• Everyone expects the Fed to eventually print money, regardless of who’s in charge; inequality grows, leading to social unrest ([52:54]).
  • “Printing money makes it slow and spreads it across everybody… it makes for wild inequality.” – Tom ([52:54])
  • “Inequality causes people to kill people…that’s the thing that people ultimately find just unbearable.” ([54:52])

8. Practical Financial Advice for the Average Person

• Asset diversity is key – 12 to 15 uncorrelated asset classes are suggested (stocks, gold, Bitcoin, commodities, etc.), with a commitment to regular investing, not trying to time the market ([64:59], [66:10]).
  • “Owning a broad basket of assets is the only escape hatch.” – Tom
• Housing as “forced savings” – Buy a home only if stable, wages can support it, and property taxes are manageable ([70:13]).
• Caution: Don’t mimic Buffett’s playbook unless you have his depth of knowledge; his “sitting out” is very sophisticated ([71:58]).

9. The Coming AI Upheaval: Winners, Losers, and Unstoppable Trends

• Bernie Sanders’ skepticism of the AI gold rush gets critiqued; Tom says hobbling US development is futile due to global game theory ([78:46]).
  • “When something is complicated, there are only two modes: ignore, react in fear.” – Tom ([77:02])
• Technology that promises competitive advantage will be developed—treaties and regulations are hollow if rivals (e.g., China) are incentivized to cheat ([79:31]).
• The real question should be: How do we help people through the disruptive transition, since “capitalism may cease to exist”? ([81:41])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Market and AI Hype:

  “The deceptiveness of the way that exponentials actually work… is that it takes longer than you expect, then happens faster than anyone imagined.” – Tom ([03:06])

• On Moral Decency:

  “There are some things we just don’t do. Potshots at people when they die… we just don’t do that.” – Tom ([23:57])
  “You should never be outclassed by the person who goes to bat for Joseph Stalin.” – Tom on Nick Fuentes outshining Trump in decency ([28:43])

• On Subjective Morality:

  “Everybody’s morality will appear relative from the outside… the vast majority of humanity steers entirely by emotions, that is by evolutionary design.” – Tom ([32:26])

• On Coming Economic Pain:

  “It’s really about money and things are going to get… let me explain why it’s about money. Money is simply the ability to motivate somebody else to do what you want them to do.” – Tom ([37:40])

• On Buffett’s Cash Hoard:

  “Bro, do you know how damning that statement is? …I’m sitting on an ungodly amount of money. And the one thing I know I don’t want to do with it: leave it in USD, because I believe it’s going to hell.” – Tom ([48:48])

• On Government Spending:

  “Both parties are going to spend recklessly. And do you know why, Drew? People like free stuff.” – Tom ([50:38])

• On The Fed & Printing Money:

  “We’re going to print money until we’re not the world’s reserve currency anymore. That will be the only thing that will check us hard enough.” – Tom ([52:54])

• On the AI Arms Race:

  “It’s a winner take all technology that promises more profound output than any technology in human history… There are some things that make sense to fight against and there are other things that make no sense to fight against. This is one that makes no sense to fight against.” – Tom ([80:31])

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Key Timestamps for Major Topics

• [01:56] – Market timing, bubble inevitability, hype cycles
• [05:46] – The perils of betting and timing vs being right
• [07:48] – MIT Fusion Lab director’s death; nefarious suppression?
• [13:14] – Power, wealth, ruthless business logic
• [22:23–28:43] – Rob Reiner’s murder, Trump’s tweet, erosion of moral norms
• [32:26–37:22] – Subjective morality; fracturing American identity
• [44:15–50:38] – Fed interest rate policy, Buffett’s crash warning, fiscal irresponsibility
• [60:12–66:10] – Practical advice: asset diversity, the coming economic storm
• [76:26–80:31] – AI development, regulatory futility, transition planning

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Actionable Takeaways

• You can’t time the market: Diversify investments, automate, don’t panic.
• Asset diversity is your shield: Aim for 12-15 uncorrelated assets.
• Expect volatility: Economic policy will likely prioritize short-term fixes (money printing) over structural change.
• AI is inevitable: Focus on how to navigate and personally weather the transition, not trying to stall progress.
• Understand moral frames: Recognize how identity and emotion frame public discourse; don’t expect fixed universal morals.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is a masterclass in facing disruptive change with open eyes. Tom Bilyeu insists listeners confront both the hard mechanics (money, markets, AI) and the messy realities (human nature, tribalism, and morality) without succumbing to black pills or wishful thinking. The urgency is clear: These cycles affect everyone, and your best defense is diversified investments, skepticism about media/political narratives, and preparation for a world about to be radically reorganized by debt, technology, and evolving social contracts.

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For an unvarnished roadmap to what’s next, this episode delivers a rare blend of raw honesty and practical steps, equal parts warning and wisdom.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[A]

Good morning everybody. Welcome to the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. It is wonderful to have you. And speaking of people, that is wonderful to have. Drew, how we doing? Look at that. I like the jacket's looking good.

[C]

Thank you, bro.

[A]

Got Mason on the community today. Very exciting. We were talking about your mom before we started. I'll let that stay off camera. And then we've got the boys behind. We've got G, who wrote the music by the way, for all the people that like that G. I'm very impressed with the producing skills. So mad. Shout out to G. And then Eric holding down the technical fort. Thank you for being here, gentlemen. And thank you to all of you that are out there. Thank you for joining us as we speed towards the Christmas holiday. It's wonderful that you guys are spending this time with us. And in the new year we're going to be going to a three day a week cadence. So starting on the 5th.

[C]

Drew.

[A]

Yeah, that's January 5th. Monday, 7:00am to 9:00am Pacific Time, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I can't wait. This is wild.

[C]

Drew.

[A]

I have really just a fast thing that I want to get out there that I don't quite know how to metabolize. There's two timelines. I think I'm going to start tracking to keep myself sane partly. One is what it feels like, like when you really just stop and look at the evidence, the rate of change, all of that and you go, this is when this is going to happen by. And then the thing that you can account for, which is there's always inevitably something that makes things take Longer than you expect that they're going to take. So when I look at really does feel like the bubble just inevitably is going to burst in the not too distant future that we're probably already seeing the first signs of it. But I know that somehow this is going to drag out longer than we expect. It's one of the reasons that I don't just pull out of the market because it's like I'm never going to get the timing right. I know that. But when you're watching it, it just all feels so inevitable. What's going on in the market is pretty crazy.

[C]

But isn't this just like the AGI Runway that we're waiting on? It's kind of like when you're on a. And it's like, shaky, shaky, shaky, shaky, shaky. Then you're up, and it's like, is it just the stock market? It's inflated. It's a bubble. Oh, no.

[D]

Oh, no.

[C]

Oh, no. Okay, say I'm on.

[A]

Figure has a hype curve that probably sums this thing up the best, which is in the beginning, you go through, like, these initial waves. So you go up and it's like this huge hype. And everybody thinks AI or whatever is inevitable. Or in my case, the bubble's going to burst. It's inevitable. And then you come down this slope of disillusionment where people are like, oh, actually, it's not going to happen. The stock market really is going to go up forever. AI is never going going to get where we thought it was going to go. And then the deceptiveness of the way that exponentials actually work, then rockets, and it ends up happening over a longer time period, but then far more suddenly than anybody expects. And so right at the time where everybody's like, AI is a joke, bro. The bubble's never going to burst. These guys are all dumb. And then, boom, it takes off like a rocket ship and catches everybody by surprise. And it's like I said, gartner, map this out. Because it's so well known that this is the way that these cycles go. But that is cold comfort for everybody trying to deal with markets. As people during the hype cycle start acting completely unhinged. And then as it goes down and people are disillusioned and realize it's not going to happen as fast as you thought that, then the narrative changes there. Everybody starts betting, because that's how I view the markets. They start betting on, oh, this new narrative is the real narrative. And then everybody gets obliterated. So it's like oh God. It's this, you know what ride you're on. But because you can't get the timing right, everybody gets clobbered anyway. And so even take somebody like Michael Burry who gets the big short right on the housing market, everybody thinks this guy's a genius. And then he ends up tapping out of the markets because he's like, I don't understand what's happening. Now, that doesn't mean that he's gone away, and it certainly doesn't mean that he's completely ejected from the markets. But it does mean that when he's playing with other people's money, he understands that there's too many confounding variables here. I'm not able to manage their psychology while also managing the money. And so I'm gonna try things. A lot of them are gonna miss because unfortunately, in many aspects of life, getting the timing wrong is the same as just flat being wrong. So I think about that a lot. Like, I really feel like I'm growing to understand the physics of money, but I am so hyper aware that if I get the timing wrong, it just will be cold comfort that like, oh, I knew it would happen eventually, but I made all these huge bets, got the timing wrong, lost all my money, but ultimately end up being vindicated from a I told you it was going to happen, but that's not useful in the real world. You have to both understand what's about to happen and get the timing right. And doing both is effectively luck, if I'm really honest.

[C]

Now you are. You're preaching it. I would. That literally happened to me over the summer. I had like a MicroStrategy leveraged ETF play I was doing. I was like, oh, it's going to circle back. Oh, it's going to circle back. And then I didn't. Couldn't hold it, couldn't wait. It ended up selling early, did a reverse split. So then the price like popped up and I'm just like, I knew I was going to do it. I just. So you're right. The wrong timing is being wrong. And it definitely doesn't help with Candace's new new target after the Erica Kirk conversation. So. New target, yeah. So the Erica Kirk conversation happened. It went well. According to Candace. It was good.

[A]

Now has Erica talked about it?

[C]

I haven't heard Erica talk about it publicly. It was a closed door. Convers can if like, I'm just going to kind of give you guys the highlights of it. But she was like, but I was right about the Egyptian plains and they have been tied back to Israel. They just turn off the transponder when they go to Israel. So Israel has something to do with these things. And it gets deeper. So then now it becomes like this whole, like Israel is not related to it. In Israel, a lot of times it's just a. Compared to Jews. And then so I feel like there is at the end of the day going to be some type of Jew ism coming out of it.

[A]

So Jewish.

[C]

It's.

[A]

I don't know how to read that.

[C]

Some type of. Yeah, Jewish racism, Jewish blame, Jewish. Something like there's going to be some type of negative that she's probably going to attribute to the Jews at the end of her right tirade after talking love her to death. I'm here for it. Shout out to Candace. She's. She's still doing it. All right, and a couple more things. I actually touched base on the MIT Plasma Science Infusion Center. The director was shot in his Brookline condo. Nuno FG Larario was shot in Norfolk County District attorney office reports. It's interesting though, because when I initially saw this, I was like, okay. Like, you know, he passed. Thoughts and prayers. I hope everything is okay. And then I saw this tweet from Ashton Forbes that said the director of the MIT's Fusion Lab researched nonlinear phase mixing and magnetic reconnection. State sponsored hit is not out of the question. And immediately I started thinking about like some type of like nefarious spy plot about like this guy just broke nuclear fission or something and big, big electricity wanted to get him out of here or something.

[A]

Like basically big oil is probably the more likely culprit. Yeah, I mean, look this. So I don't trust my emotions. Hopefully everybody knows that about me right now. So I'm gonna tell you the way that I feel about this. But I understand these are emotions. And unlike Candace who thinks that that's your cue that you're right. I always think that's my cue to be ultra paranoid of my interpretation because, oh, this feels too fun, too interesting. But this one really is fascinating. So you flashback. Nicola Tesla basically realizes, oh, you can make energy free and it will just like flow through the air and then that man dies broke and alone. And there were, I think it was the bankers. Like, this is where I'm at the headline level on Nikola Tesla. But there's some pretty damning headlines for sure about bankers going in and saying, nah, don't give money to this guy. He wants to basically give things away for free. And they understand free is hard to monetize. And so if all of this stuff is going to be free, that's going to damage all of our businesses, that's going to damage capitalism itself. So let's not do that. Energy is a great way for us to make money. So let's put the kibosh on that. So the fact that when Einstein was asked what is it like to be the smartest man in the world, he said, I don't know. You would have to ask Nikola Tesla. That tells you that people that are smart understood like, yo, there's something about Tesla, obviously Tesla, the car company Elon, I don't think named it, but nonetheless has always been pro Nikola Tesla because some of his breakthroughs. So you've got a guy, supposedly that is making similar breakthroughs that headline level go something like this. Einstein was wrong. Don't think of the world as particles, think of the world as fluid dynamics, including plasma as magnetized fluid. And because of that, we are going to be able to do basically room temperature energy creation through fusion. I believe this is where it's like fission fusion. I, I'm not an expert here, but imagine if you don't need a nuclear reactor to generate that kind of energy, you'd be able to output massive amounts of energy. People are claiming that this guy and many others have already shown that this can be done, but every time it ends up getting buried, shut down, whatever. So the fact that this guy that's supposedly having this kind of breakthrough gets killed in his house like super sus now, because I find it so spy novel fascinating, I can tell. Part of me wants it to be true just because it's far more interesting. So I need to be super skeptical. But this will be one that I'll be keeping an eye on because that would be both sinister in all capital letters, utterly fascinating. If we're really having these kind of breakthroughs. And then, God, I wish Eric were here to speak for himself. But I've always gotten from Eric Weinstein a sense that the government is either knowingly stifling science for reasons that I certainly don't understand, or at a minimum, just trying to control science. And Eric has talked about that they have made certain physics illegal to even think about. And I was like, what? And he was like, yes. Like there is a certain branch of physics that if you even think about it, it's automatically classified. And I was like, how's that possible? He's like, oh, it's very possible. So this all falls into that sort of like, yo, people really take their Money seriously, Drew. They take it seriously. But the one where this all sort of breaks down for me is I look out at all of this and I go, but these same people are pushing AI forward as fast as they can. So is this just big money interests, like some people over here on the energy side and they're going to kill who they're going to kill. Then you've got people over here on the AI side and they're going to kill who they're going to kill. Like the whole Sam Altman, like whistleblower, like oops, he found. He wound up dead.

[C]

So it's like he committed suicide even though he ordered DoorDash 20 minutes ago.

[A]

DoorDash bled all over his house. Yeah. Stabbed himself post mortem. I'm making that part up. But it is, it gets weird really, really fast. So we'll see how this plays out. Tinfoil hat firmly in place. It certainly fits my mental model of the world that this would be a hit. Just like what are the odds that this guy gets randomly killed?

[C]

It's interesting because this is on the backs of the Ford CEO saying he's going to cut like the lightning F150 EVs and somebody retweeted like this is a bad move. EVs are the future. This is the only way you can make like autonomous driving, like ice engines are going to be like the thing of the past. And then Elon retweeted was like, yes. It's weird that it like old industrialists, they want to keep old industry. Like they're not.

[A]

That's not weird. That's like so human self preservation.

[C]

Yeah. So is it one of those things to your point of like, yes, the AI people are all in on AI, but on the other side there's people who are like, wait, don't take my electricity. Wait, don't take my grid. Wait, you're going to nuclear fission. Like there is somebody who makes money based on those old fashioned power lines that's been up since the 1800s, of course, you know what I mean? So they might be a little bit more gung ho to try to take out his professor versus like the AI guy on the other side who's dealing with his own level of competitors that he's trying to take.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's probably better to map it. As money reaches a certain level, it attracts a certain kind of person. To run these large companies, you've really, you have to have a certain type of personality. And that personality you've got to be willing to deal with extraordinary amounts of stress, you have to really be protective of what you've built and to. You get survivorship bias. Right? So how many other companies like OpenAI were started, but they died off because they didn't have the Machiavellian abilities of somebody like Sam Altman, who just is always able to find that next person to partner with, whatever. And he'll. I don't know him, and I'm certainly not intending to say that he's done anything nefarious. I. I literally don't know. But you certainly have to be willing to do what it takes in all of those situations, because there's going to be a thousand breaking points for a company along the way. And so the only ones that survive are the ones that navigate those moments well. And so you'll see things like, even just reading about Disney, Disney was doing, like, union busting and things like that. Like, you just to get to that level, you might be the nicest guy in the world, but when your company is put in jeopardy, then you got to find a way to navigate it. So anyway, it attracts that kind of person. And so if you're mapping this around, oh, when these companies get big enough where we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars, like, that's the kind of thing where, oh, the CEO winds up dead. So you understand, like, okay, I can't fuck around with these people's money. Like, if you know that Saudi Arabia hacked up Khashoggi the journalist, it's like, well, what happens when they just invested $150 billion with you? And it's like, they expect you to do X and you're like, no, no, no, for moral reasons, I got to do why. Out comes the bone saw. So it's like you get sober real fast. Remember China disappeared. Jack Ma, one of the richest people on planet Earth. So it's like, it. Humans are a dangerous species, and they are a danger to themselves more than anybody else. And so, yeah, these are real things that people have to think through. And so if you base it on, all right, they've achieved a certain level of money, we're now in the zone where we might start doing some really crazy things that the energy guys are going to kill people that jeopardize their way of life. The AI guys that reach a certain level are going to kill the people that jeopardize their way of life. And it really comes down to what humans will do to protect power and wealth. And that is the far more terrifying thing, because then you can't Isolate it to any one thing. You can't say, like, oh, this is just the old dinosaur energy guy problem. No, probably not. This is a, this is how you amass power. And you have to wield it when you have a challenger. And if you don't wield your power when you have a challenger to back people out early, then the like in a video game, if you've got like a whole bunch of easy mobs, like, it's all cute and fun until they're overwhelming you because there's just so many of them. And so this is partly why you have to have antitrust legislation, is that they'll just keep killing off all the small competitors. Fascinating to watch. Microsoft was just notorious for this. They would buy companies up just to shut them down. Because it was like, we can't have these people, like they're starting to compete with us. Gobble them up now while they're, you know, 10 million instead of waiting till they're 100 million or a billion. And so it's going to be the very rare player that can refuse the $10 million offer. Exceedingly rare that they'll refuse the $100 million offer. And if you start refusing, like real offers, then they things very difficult for you. And whether that's lobbying Congress to get them to regulatory capture, so it just makes it impossible for you to get in, or whether that's like, you know, rolling up and it'd be a real shame if something happened to, you know, your top employees or whatever. So, yeah, it gets gets rough out there on them wall streets when you.

[C]

Get to the top.

[A]

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[C]

And we can't go through this block of terror attacks without bringing up Rob Reiner who was murdered, unfortunately him and his wife by his son Nick at 32 in their Brentwood.

[A]

Allegedly.

[C]

I hate.

[A]

Has he confessed?

[C]

He just got. He just got arrested.

[A]

I know he got arrested and I know there's blood everywhere and a lot of people were saying it was him and then I guess he was at. They were at Conan Bryant's house and they got into a huge argument and then left and then he allegedly stabbed them. So I mean look, does it look like he's guilty? Yes, it very much looks like he's guilty, but so that we don't get sued by anybody. Allegedly.

[C]

Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Favorite Reiner film.

[A]

Oh, When Harry Met Sally.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

Yeah. Watch it every year at Christmas.

[C]

Really?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So it's on the queue now. It's about to happen, like, soon.

[A]

We've already watched it.

[C]

Oh, already happened.

[A]

Yeah. No, that. That one's an early one for us. Absolutely fantastic. This is Spinal Taps, also absolutely brilliant. And then a sleeper that really has stuck with me in terms of my mental model is Stand By Me, which came from Stephen King's the Body.

[C]

I don't think I've seen that one.

[A]

Oh, my God, it's so good. River Phoenix when he was a little kid. Just really, really a great movie. And the book was also great. It comes from a novella called Different Seasons and there are four stories in it. Three have been made into movies. The other one is Shawshank Redemption, came from the same story or the same book as the Body, which is Stand By Me. Just shocking that these came from Stephen King, but really, really good.

[C]

And then I'm sure you've seen Trump's tweet about Rob Reiner. Yeah, he died from tds, which I think is like, boy, do I wish I hadn't seen this crazy thing to say. Initial thoughts. I'm gonna pull it up.

[A]

But it. So my initial thought is that it's grotesque, that it reveals a man that is narcissistic in all capital letters, that sees the world only through his lens. Now, listen, I get the temptation when you're the president and really so much actually is about you, but to so parse the world that when somebody stabbed to death by their son, you're like, see, I told you this guy was a lunatic about me. What? Like, that's so wild. So, yeah, that one. Look, I. Obviously Trump broke me when he proved that he is perfectly willing to drive us off the fiscal cliff. But this, this one was like whatever little bit of like. Well, maybe it's like, this is so gross. Yeah, this is so horrifying.

[C]

And this is a treat. This is the tweet. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star has passed away together. His wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he calls others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as tds. He was known to have been driven crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness. And with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Robin Michelle rest in peace.

[A]

Here's the thing. This is something for all of us to consider. There are some things that we just don't do. Right. And it's purely cultural, and there's no sort of universal reason why we just don't do it, but it's like taking potshots at people when they die is just like, we just don't do that.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It's protective of your own what will inevitably be an awkward, dehumanizing, embarrassing, humiliating moment for you. And so to show, like, to pay that forward and be respectful, like, even Rob Reiner, when who certainly has come after Trump very, very aggressively. Come after the right very, very aggressively when Charlie Kirk was shot was just like, this is horrible. Nobody deserves that. I don't care what your political views are. Yeah. 100, like, you can go be mad, and other times you can go bang pots and pans and freak out, but when somebody dies, like, we just don't do that here. Like, that's so gross. And so watching this, like, lose its firm footing that we don't do that here is the thing that makes me even more sad than that he did it is just like, hold on. Like, we're living in a time where I can't take for granted that people are going to be quote, unquote, presidential. I can't take for granted that people are going to be classy. I can't take for granted that people are going to have some fucking grace. It's like, this is why even I find myself saying, people need Jesus. Like, God damn. Like, Trump need Jesus. Like, this is crazy. You need something in your heart that just says, yeah, I've got a chance. Like, let's say that that ended up being his most popular tweet, and people loved it, and it was just, like, raucous applause. I would still want something on his shoulder being like, bro, that's just icky. Like, what are you doing? Like, it's just disrespectful to the human experience. Forget that this guy's your enemy. It's disrespectful to the human experience. Anyway. I say that to myself as much as anybody else because I can run through my mind hearing about an enemy combatant or whatever that got shot, and I'm like, ah. So, yeah. But I really want to make sure that. That I don't feed into that side of myself. So anyway, PSA to me, if nobody else.

[C]

Yeah. And Jason from the all in podcast said, When a self described racist like Nick Fuentes can so easily establish a moral high ground on the President of the United States, we're in a very dark place. This is what Nick had to say about the tweet.

[D]

Forget for a moment that we are in a war. Someone gets murdered by their son, it's a horrific tragedy. This is a horrible story and nobody deserves that. I don't care what their politics are, what they said on, on the Internet or on television. Nobody deserves to be murdered, Stabbed to death with their wife by their own son who they tried to help, and their best friend discovers the corpses. It's despicable. And it's despicable to make fun of that. And I do think that, you know, look, somebody like George Bush passes away of old age at the very end and you talk about his political legacy, that's one thing. Some guy, some producer, some civilian dies at the hands of his kid. It's such a grisly situation. It is objectively awful to make fun of that. Now, if Trump were actually doing what he promised to do, you could overlook the fact that he's a douchebag. You could overlook the fact that he's vain, that he's a narcissist, that he's tactical but not strategic. You could overlook all these things if he was bringing home the goods. That was kind of the deal in 2016. You said we don't love everything about Trump, but you know what? We're willing to, we're willing to accommodate. It's an acquired taste, but it's okay because he's doing all these other things. Well, what's actually the pitch now? We get nothing. We get no concessions, there are no deportations, we haven't ended one of the wars, we haven't remade the federal bureaucracy.

[C]

Yeah, that could be up for a debate, but is there something to that? That Trump lost his credibility because there are people still struggling, there are people still hurting. Marjorie Taylor Greene actually just did a Tweet that said 76,000 Republicans in her district are going to be hit by these ACA hikes in the new year. So is there something to. Trump had grace when America was winning, but now that people are starting to kind of feel it, he might need to be a bit more cognizant of things he tweets and things like that.

[A]

Sure. In terms of when the audience is with you, you can get away with a lot. And when the audience turns on you, you can get away with nothing. If Cancel Culture didn't teach people anything, it's that on a dime, you can go from as a comedian, like, oh, that shit's hilarious, to like, bro, that's grotesque.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So, yeah, read the room, for sure. But the. So the thing with Nick Fuentes, admittedly, I have a problem with this, so that Nick has the right take on Rob Reiner, is that's pretty damning of Trump. Like, you should never be outclassed by the person who goes to bat for Joseph Stalin. I really can't get over the Joseph Stalin thing. And I can tell that Nick is really going to become a force. Nick already is a force. He's only going to grow in popularity. There's a poly market for whether he becomes president. That. That scares the life out of me. So I'm just like, if you've read about some of the things that Joseph Stalin did, which I have talked about many times here before, like, all of a sudden, Trump's comments about Rob Reiner are mild. Mild. Like, I would much rather Trump be making comments about Rob Reiner than do, like, 1/100th of the things that Stalin did. So that one I just have a hard time wrapping my head around. So, anyway, it is terrifying that Trump got it so wrong on this minor thing and that Nick actually got it right. But when you step back and look at the broader picture of what Nick is saying, it gets way more terrifying.

[C]

K. Blissful just dropped a banger of a comment, and I have to address it. They said y' all can advocate for fathers to be plucked up, beaten, and shipped to a country they never visited because of their heritage, but talking about this man is where y' all draw the line. I don't get it. And Abrego Garcia was just finally vindicated, got out. They brought up another case against him. The judge threw that out because it was obviously retaliatory. So he's 100% free. Back in Maryland, everything that he was supposed to be, like, he had asylum, he was lawfully allowed to be here, all these things. And he was kind of the quintessential piece of, see, this is what's wrong with immigration system. Let's get him out of here. Let's get him out of here. And then the Rob Reiner situation. Everybody's clutching their pearls, and there's certain ways that they have to kind of parse the world. I think it is interesting that in certain situations we have moral lines, and in other situations, those moral lines seem like they should be equivalent, but they're a little bit less. There's higher, they're lower.

[A]

Well, so all of this stuff is very obvious. But there's two ways to talk about this. There's the accusation that she has made that's entirely false if she's talking about you and me. And then there is the, oh, it's weird that morality is relative. And so let's start with the first. The accusation that somehow we were celebrating that we were certainly not on that. I don't remember the exact words that I said, but knowing my mental model, it goes something like this. If this guy is here illegally and he has done bad things, then we should get him the fuck out of the country. If he is not here illegally or he has not done bad things and he needs to go through due process and everybody calm the down. So I don't know anything about that guy. And so I'm always going to present myself as a thought experiment. If he's this, do this. If he's this, do this. I know myself well enough to know that's what I would have said about Garcia. So her accusations, in that sense are false. The other side, the whole thing I'm trying to get people to understand is that your morality is relative, that you are trapped inside of a frame of reference. That frame of reference will determine what you look at and what you see. So what you witness as. So there's an awesome quote. Remember it well. When people speak, they cannot help but reveal themselves. So when you hear people talk, when you watch Trump tweet, like he's revealing himself, this is why that tweet about Rob Reiner is so damning, is that he revealed that, as Nick said, it's like, bro, what is your moral compass?

[C]

Like?

[A]

Is it just. It's just all about me, and that's all the matters. And so everything I do can be looked through the lens of, like, I'm only going to help Americans if it helps me. It's like, that's what that tweet is about. And look, that's not going to be the end of his presidency or anything like that. But could that one be a. If you plot a graph of audience with you or audience against you, is that going to be a dot on that? Yeah, probably. It's not going to, like, turn it 90 degrees so that it's like, you know, half of everybody now is just 100% against him. It's not going to work like that. But it, like, yeah, it's not a good look. And I think people are going to remember it. I'm certainly going to remember it. So, yeah, keep that in mind. Everybody's morality is will appear relative from the outside. It may even be truly relative because they have not mapped out at least what they aim to be. Remember, the vast majority of humanity steers entirely by emotions, that is by evolutionary design. So if you selectively destroy the regions of the brain that are tied to emotions, people cannot make a decision like they can't make a decision. Not that they don't want to, not that they're confused, they're not confused. They will literally tell you why one option is better than the other, and then you say, okay, cool, but please pick. They can't do it. They will stay there forever, glitching out. So emotions are the thing that allow you to parse through an incredibly complex world. So I get how if you've not taken the time to define, this is my moral compass. And therefore, even when I feel like moving in a different direction, I'm going to force myself to go over here, down this direction. You'll just go by whatever feels right. That's what evolution has programmed you to do. So on that, never be surprised, never be confused, but keep my name out.

[C]

But the subjective morality, I think is, is the issue that America is going through right now. Because I think half of the country thinks that Palestine should be free. And it doesn't matter that I would get murdered if I go there. But it's their autonomy. And then the other half feels like I should be free to only take care of my friends and family. I shouldn't have to take care of other people. And everybody kind of feels what the other should and shouldn't do. And I feel like we always had this difference in morals. Like morals have always been subjective. What do you think changed that made it so drastic? Is it just over time? Is it?

[A]

Well, so I think you would have to look at all of human history and graph like sort of mass chaos like here. And then we go through this really interesting period where religion is like the dominating force. And so at least all of the murder and horrific things that humans never stop doing, in fact, it was probably worse back in the day. And that's at least groups of like, hey, the Catholics are gonna go kill everybody and take your shit or whatever. But at least they operate as one group. And that was the idea. I think from an evolutionary standpoint, we have circuitry in our brains that say, oh, give me something like, give me the biggest umbrella that you can give me. And I can group up with a huge number of strangers and still move in a given direction. And so the way that I Interpret the very famous Nietzsche quote that we killed God and will never be able to wash the blood off of our. Is that as we have abandoned traditional religions that gave us all unifying morality, we realized very quickly you can rebuild morality. However, the odds that that will be subjective and different than other people goes radically up. Now you take that we've already begun fracturing because everybody's building their morality up off of something else. And then on top of that, give people social media so that they have just this incredible tsunami of information and other viewpoints that they can step in and of and you get further fracturing so that you've got all kinds of people with just millions of different like micro frames of reference that they can be going through the world. Which is why Nick. Nick's followers have a name. They are the Groipers. And you've got America First. You've got mega. Like you've. Everybody's got their own little tribal identity. And those tribal identities carry with them a frame of reference. And I'm sure that any of us can have multiple frames of reference that we step in and out of. In fact, that's really interesting. When I'm in my CEO identity, I'm very different than if I'm in my husband identity for sure. And so, I mean, you try to have. I try. I'll speak for myself. I try to have a master morality for sure. There are just things that I think are right and wrong. I've said a gazillion times what my North Star is human flourishing. And so I try to adhere to that at all times. There's no way that I'm perfect, but that is what you're seeing play out is just the infinite fracturing of frame of reference.

[C]

How do you think that manifest in the 2026, like midterms? Like, is there going to be the. Oh, right, I was a Republican, but he made me icky. I'm a leave. Or do we think, dude, if.

[A]

If he does not put money in people's pockets, the Republicans will lose in an absolute tidal wave of blue.

[C]

Period. Full stop.

[A]

Yeah, it's. It's really about money and things are going to get that. Let me explain for a second why it's about money. Because I think people think money is icky and that is dumb. The reason that is dumb is you're closing yourself off to a fundamental reality of the way that humans are. Money is simply the ability to motivate somebody else to do what you want them to do and so that do what you want them to do could be get me the RAM for my computer. It could be get me the gas to put in my tank. Could be get me the sandwich that I want to eat. It could be build me a house, Whatever it could be. Dear landlord, I would like you to fix my plumbing. I'm in New York and it's cold. I want a heater. Like, that's what money does. It simply allows you to have economic force in order to get other people to do the thing that you want them to do. Now you take that away and now all of a sudden it becomes about physical power. And so it's like, well, I get you to do what I want you to do because you don't have any other way other than persuasion to get people to fight back against me. I'm a Suge Knight type. I'm going to come in and I'm going to do whatever I want because I can just, I can literally break your bones. And you get such a strong pain signal that you're like, yeah, I don't want to go through that anymore. And so now simply being bigger and physically stronger than you, I can do whatever the I want. So what smaller people realize was, oh, there are other ways to handle this between specialization and so now we have to come up with some monetary system so we don't have to fucking barter chickens for bedcloth. So it's like you get into this thing where we all become these economic units when people stop realizing that economy is developed because of all those things. A desire to survive. Right. Economies are born when you're playing an open world survival crafting game, which is real life. And it just helps everything become so much easier. So that's why it happens. But people think it happens because of billionaires. Like they don't even understand. Like they're not mapping cause and effect. They are not thinking up for first principles. Troll me if you want for always bringing things back to that, but that's how you navigate the world well is by understanding the cause and effect.

[C]

You seen anything in chat, Mason? I feel like money is always the tense issue. I'm doing a quick scroll myself. I feel like we landed the plane on this one. But before I move on.

[E]

Not particularly on this one though.

[A]

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[C]

All right, let's jump over to the economy. Too late. Fed pal just cut the interest rate 25 basis points. Let's hear his address on it.

[F]

In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside and risks to employment to the downside. A challenging situation. There is no risk free path for policy as we navigate this tension between our employment and inflation goals. A reasonable base case is that the effects of tariffs on inflation will be relatively short lived, effectively a one time shift in the price level. Our obligation is to make sure that a one time increase in the price level does not become an inflation.

[A]

This is why people have to understand there's a difference between inflation and prices going up because everybody thinks of them as one in the same. But prices have gone up from tariffs. But if he's right, it bumps once, it doesn't keep going. Inflation is exponential. I think people confuse doubling rate with exponential and they think oh for something to be exponential it has to double every year or whatever. No, no, that's its doubling rate. Exponential simply means 3% a year, for instance, would be an exponential because 3% on today's number is different than 3% on next year's number because next year's number is 3% higher. So it's 3% on a bigger number than 3% on a bigger number again. And so your the inflation is actually exponential at that point. Now that tends to lead to a corresponding exponential growth in prices. But they are two separate things. Inflation is adding more money to the money supply at a rate that's different than the rate of productivity. Oh, I almost hate that I'm starting to actually really understand all this stuff because you feel like you're in intentionally leaving something off. But yes. So inflation inflating the money supply, prices going up, the response to the fact that there is a larger Number of dollars chasing the same number of goods. So they're two separate things. So he is drawing a distinction between that. Anyway, back to my man.

[F]

The balance of risks has shifted. Our framework calls for us to take a balanced approach in promoting both sides of our dual mandate. According to. We judged it appropriate at this meeting to lower our policy rate by a quarter percentage point.

[C]

They judged it this meeting to lower it by a quarter percentage point. The thing that jumped out to me was the no risk free path. So on the upside is. On the down upside is inflation. On the downside is employment, job loss. So he's stuck between a rock and a hard place, it seems like, in the economy right now.

[A]

Did you ever hear the Shaggy song Wasn't Me Me? And he's like, but I've got you on video. Wasn't me. You were humping on the counter. Wasn't me. But bro, I have you on camera. Wasn't me. We're now in the you can't even deny it anymore face. Like, people have been screaming that I've got video of you humping on the floor, on the counter, in the bedroom, all of it. And everybody has been saying, wasn't me. There's no problem. Nothing to see here. And that that denies the physics of money. And so it is inevitable that he was going to find himself in this position. We are in fiscal dominance. Fiscal dominance has consequences. Fiscal dominance is where you have racked up so much debt that the reality of compounding interest means that if you were to raise rates, which is what you should do if bubbles are forming. Bubbles are forming, and we'll get to the Shiller ratio in a minute. It. But bubbles are forming. When bubbles start forming, you raise interest rates to make money more expensive. And that begins to drain liquidity out of the markets. Okay, so that's what he should be doing. But he can't do that because compounding interest says that. Compounding interest in the fact that your loans roll over so you finance them for a certain number of years and then they'll eventually come due. Now we have a bunch of money coming due. Like when you see the graph, 2026 is the outlier. Outliers, it is just cost an obscene amount of money.

[C]

It's a little bit. About a quarter of our debt, a little bit under that.

[A]

Oh, my God. So big.

[C]

Let's jump over to Warren Buffett because he's been sitting on a historic pile of cash and he had some concerns about US Fiscal policy.

[G]

And obviously we wouldn't want to be owning Anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell. And that's the big thing we worry about with the United States currency. I mean, it's.

[C]

Bro.

[A]

Do you know how damning that statement is?

[C]

He's literally been sitting on like half a billion dollars. Like. No, I'm good. I'll wait it out. No, I'm good.

[A]

I'm sitting on a half a billion. No more than that. Half a trillion. It's gotta be. I'm sitting on an ungodly amount of money. And what is the one thing I know I don't want to do it with it. Leave it in USD, because I believe it's going to hell. Yikes. Yikes.

[C]

Crazy.

[A]

Back to it.

[G]

See, of a government to want to debase its currency over time is there's no system that beats that. You can pick dictators, you can pick representatives, you can do anything. But. But the people. There will be a. A push toward weaker currencies. And of course, that is. I mentioned very briefly in the annual report that fiscal policy is what scares me in the United States because it's made the way it is and all the motivations are doing a lot of things.

[C]

I want to jump in here being very vague. Yeah, I want to jump in here for the idiots in the room. It is what it is. To me, that sounds like the Fed's gonna fit. Like. Yes, it's at this point, you pick the representative, you can pick the leaders, but the Fed's, which already can we.

[A]

Like, throw up in our own mouths a little bit that he just said you can pick representatives and all that. What. What do you mean? Do you mean vote? Or do you mean like influence with money? But yes, even if you just say. He just means vote. Both parties are going to spend recklessly. And do you know why, Drew?

[C]

People like free stuff.

[A]

Because people like free stuff. They voted for Mom. Donnie, that is so wild. That. That is. That's really scary. Now I am. Because I understand the opposite is tyranny. I am prepared to be pushed around by the mass of people who just don't understand what they're voting for, because I don't want to have to try to control them. It's the only thing that I think is worse than them leading me down a terrible fiscal path. But that's really scary that people just. They don't understand. The information is there. It's in public. People like Buffett have been talking about it forever. Ray Dalio turned it into cartoons for people. It doesn't matter. The vast Majority of humans are never going to take the time to understand this. And I imagine if I were reading the chat, that we don't even all agree on how all of this works. So it's like, it is so wild that I can tell people exactly how this is going to play out, and it's still going to play out exactly like that. That, that's really. That could black pill me. I refuse, because that's not a good way to live life. But that could really black pill me, dude. Like, that one's wild.

[C]

I kind of want to dig in on this a little bit because I'm. I'm split it as well. I love Arthur Hayes. We got an interview with him coming up at the top of the year. You guys are going to love it. Giving you your Crypto Alpha for 2026. But the thing about him that I love is that he's so like, oh, yeah, Fed's going to print money. They're going to do this, they're going to do that. And it's not like an if or we need to see. Let's see what Trump does. Let's see what China calls us back. Nah, they're going to print money. It's going to happen. So if they, when they print money, if they, if it does go into a recession, they'll just print money times two and then this will happen. Or they'll print money times one and then this will happen, happen. So it's like they already kind of skipped it. And I feel the same energy from Warren Buffett right now where it's like, yeah, blue wave, red wave, Republican, Democrat, fiscal policies is what it is. I don't want to keep my money here. And I'm just like that. Everybody's just matter of fact. So I guess abandoning the Fed isn't an option. Like, everybody's just kind of moving as if it's even too late to kind of do that now. Where it's just. Now it's like, all right, we just gonna have to ride this out and see. Hopefully we could just. What is it? Brace your head so that way you at least don't get head trauma. I might break all my bones and my legs, but maybe I won't get a headache. I don't know. Like, we're gonna crash.

[A]

The way. Yes. The way that I think about this is, let's say that you tell me I have a hundred people in a room and they're gonna be fasting until they ring a bell to leave. And, Tom, I want you to bet on how many people will fast until they die? And I'm going to ask a couple really basic questions. You know, is there any incentive for them to stay in the room? And you'll be like, yes. And it's minor, whatever. So I'm like, it doesn't save their family if they starve to death. No, nothing like that. Then I'm a hundred percent of them are going to ring the bell and go eat because I know what hunger feels like. And people will never vote for anything that will cause the abrupt like problem. They will always, literally always vote for the thing that gives you the slower off ramp, even if it ends up wiping out way more people. So it just is. And so because I'm so aware of how humans are actually behave that I'm like, yeah, they're like, they're going to print money. We're the world's reserve currency, so we'll print money until we're not the world's reserve currency anymore. That will be the only thing that will check us hard enough. Because it's just you only get 100% of the inflation and it's, we can obfuscate it and it doesn't quite feel like as direct. And so you can get away with it for a long time. And so yeah, we're going to do it. Now listen, even that you should always leave room for maybe not maybe something, maybe A.I. right, like. And we don't end up having to print. So it's like never assume that you can see the future perfectly. But God, it's just, that's how humans are printing money makes it slow and it spreads it across everybody. And, and unfortunately it also makes for wild inequality. And I also know that inequality causes people to kill people. And I say it that bluntly so the people don't waste time like shucking and jiving. It's like what causes what caused the French to behead the king? Inequality. What causes you to storm the palace and kill the Prime Minister's wife? Inequality. It's like though that's the thing that people ultimately find just unbearable. And so you have a system where, you know, people are gonna, the very people who are going to be the most angry about inequality are going to drive inequality with their votes and they literally can't see it. That's why I'm like, wait, you have a headache? Let's say, and instead of voting for Advil, you vote for another hammer blow to the head. I'm just like, wow, that's what I saw.

[C]

If I'm unconscious, Tom, I Won't feel the headache, obviously.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, maybe it's something like that, but it's, it's just, it's really crazy. It's really crazy. But this, this is life.

[E]

We've got a super chat on Warren Buffett.

[A]

Let's do it. Hey, yeah, super chat.

[E]

I hope Trump isn't taking advice from that 85 year old detached from reality. No self awareness, millionaire economist. Blockchain is.

[A]

This is Warren Buffett it.

[E]

Yes, that's what they're referencing.

[A]

Got it.

[E]

Just making sure Blockchain is the future. I can't use an email. We did this, we did that. Shut up. That is the super chat.

[A]

Well, the super chat was fun and I thank you for that. Okay, so I get their perspective on blockchain. Certainly bitcoin makes all the sense in the world. And there is no doubt that progress is made one funeral at a time, not one insight at a time. All of us are prone to becoming the old person, so brace yourself for that. My bigger concern is that I, I have a worldview that does not allow me to enjoy the thing that other people allow about. Hey there. There are exit ramps for the 10%.

[C]

Oh, sorry, really quick. He's talking about Arthur Laffer, not Warren.

[A]

Arthur Laffer. That was a hard.

[C]

Right, right, yeah. So that. Yeah, so.

[A]

So period. Warren Buffett finished. Now let's talk Arthur Laffer. And we hope he's not taking well Arthur though. I don't feel like Warren. I at least get the criticism if Arthur at least understands all of the mechanisms. My only beef with Arthur is he's just too optimistic. So I think Arthur believes there's a magic wand somewhere that's going to fix all of our problems. He literally can't tell you how or why things are going to work out well, just that they're going to work out well.

[C]

Yeah. I'm like, what if you don't tax people, it's prosperity.

[A]

Yeah. So I'm just like, okay, hold on. The it. Nothing that I've seen in life tells me that it's going to play out like that. Reagan was not dealing with the kind of debts that we're dealing with now. Reagan did not have the kind of stacking crises that we've had from 2000, 2008. Covid. Like we're in a wild position. Look at the M2 money supply. It's insane. So anyway, you can go watch the episode with Arthur and I. I argue in real time so you can see all of that. And it's in living color for Those.

[C]

Who know Arthur was, was one of the authors, the author of Reaganomics. So he like, established it. He was one of his chief economists.

[A]

And he was lovely. I really enjoyed.

[C]

He's the best. He's my, he's my adopted uncle. He also got a minimum freedom medal, Medal of freedom, like the highest presidential honor a civilian can get. So, like, he's recognized on a, in US History for his contribution to economics. Yes, which is why we wanted to talk to him. He started the laugher curve, but yeah.

[A]

I was very grateful that he took the time to talk to me and he was wonderful. We don't agree on everything, but it was very, very enjoyable. Whether Trump is listening to him or not is a whole other question. I would imagine he is, but not whole clothes. Trump has embraced blockchain in a big way and I don't think Arthur is against blockchain. I don't remember any alarms like that.

[C]

Anyway, he was leading in the stable coin. But. Okay, I want to just ground us really. Second, really quick because it's the holiday season, I got a bunch of screaming kids in the background. I gotta do this. Double Trump hooked me up by not taxing my overtime. So I'm about to get a check from that. Okay, you're the cause and effect person. Where I'm at right now, I can't afford a house. I got to figure all these situations out. What's the cause of effect in here that I can actually apply to my day to day life? I am Joe Schmo, Joe the plumber. What was that dude that they were talking about in the odometer? I think, Joe, like, I am that guy. So the cause and effect. Why is this a big deal if it's money printing, can I do something that makes the money printing impact me positively? What's the one?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

What's the cause and then the effect and then what's the dominoes that I can say, okay, I see this thing coming. Let me just get in here and I can get a bump. Whether it's 3%, whatever. Like, what is that? Like, let's walk this throughout with this 40%. The 40 give us the whole, like paint picture of the economy really quick of just where we are now, where we think fiscal policy is going to go.

[A]

And you want me to include the 40 PE ratio just to, just to.

[C]

Say, like, okay, we're in a bubble right now and fiscal policy is saying this. So these are the two things that are going to happen next. When these two things happen next, you can either do these things in order to benefit from that, let's speed run it.

[A]

And then you push on anything that you need more clarity. So what's going to happen is right now we owe so much money in debt that our interest payments are the number two line item. Now. We passed Medicaid and Defense. So already the vast majority of the money that you take in to do things in your country, you're just spending it to service the debt. So you basically said, hey, dear kids, in the future, we're going to spend all your money now and we're just going to leave you with a bunch of debt. So we're going to do a bunch of cool things. And for all the people that died before that runs out, America was going to have been awesome. The America that you're going to get handed is going to suck because you're either going to go through a violent deleveraging or you are going to just be saddled with so much debt that you can, much like Millennials and Gen Z, you just can't get ahead. So that's where we're at. So to deal with that, because we have to refinance the debt, we're going to have to lower our interest rates at a time where we should be raising them. And by lowering them, we're going to create all these bubbles. Now, the bad news is we're already in a gigantic bubble that's only happened three times in history before. And every time they've happened, something bad follows in the stock market. In the stock market. So the stock market is probably about to get hammered because eventually people will sober up unless AI delivers a miracle, which is possible and is what everybody's going to spin you on. So the stock market's almost certainly going to come crashing down. And when it does come crashing down, the people that can afford to keep you hired, they're now in a bad situation. Because right now, the people that can afford to hire you are still in a good situation. Stock market's doing great. We have a K shaped economy. Average person who's not invested, which is 90%. Life sucks. For the people that are invested in a meaningful way, 10%, 20, 25 has been fucking awesome. Okay, at one point, and it's already started to adjust a little, but at one point, I have made millions of dollars this year. So it was just like, yay. So those people are like, yeah, hire new people. It's all good. Yay. Love it. When the stock market crashes, a lot of those dumb motherfuckers are doing it all on leverage. So they're just toast. They go From I'm worth $10 million to I owe $3 million, like done. So so now they're firing everybody and they either go out of business, stop buying shit if they weren't running a business and were just wealthy, or they just retrench and they stop like investing so much in their company, they're not trying to grow. So now the economy begins to decline from a GDP perspective. So you go from the amount of money that we were collecting, put us in the 130, not that 123 debt to GDP ratio. That number now starts going up faster, 124, 125, ever increasing towards that 130 mark simply because the economy is so bad, our GDP drops and we're just in a really bad position. And now you go from roughly 12% unemployment. I know people will challenge that number because they're not combining actual unemployment plus people that aren't even looking for work anymore. Put those together because that's 8%. With the 4ish percent, you're at 12, that 12 becomes 15 becomes 20. You've now got real fucking like Great Depression style problems.

[C]

Okay?

[A]

So that's why bubble crashing is scary. So what will the government do? The government's going to go, we're not going to let that happen. So we're going to inject a bunch of money. If the stock market starts coming down, we're going to lower the rates even more, we're going to print money, we're going to buy Treasuries and bonds and all that to prop the economy up. And now for the average guy, the reason you hate that is every time we put money into the economy to prop it up, we're making everything more expensive. You're not getting paid any more money. So now all of a sudden the cost of everything is going up. You can't make ends meet anymore. We're propping up the market, which is holding stock prices artificially high. So those rich bastards are staying rich. You're getting poorer by the day and dare I say, more angry. And that is causing you to vote for more free shit, which only makes the problem worse. And so they will print money to pay for your free shit. And now the flywheel just really starts revving up. Which is exactly why Warren Buffett wants the fuck out of dollars. Because he's like, fiscally you guys are irresponsible and I do not trust you at all. To go, we have to balance the budget and if you don't balance the Budget, it keeps getting worse for the average person.

[C]

Nice, I get that now. Now that I have the background, how should I respond to the market? How should I play in the market?

[A]

You have to own assets and you need to be in a the widest set of basket of assets possible. Call it 12 to 15 uncorrelated assets, meaning they are subject to different economic pressures. So being in the stock market is very different than owning gold. Okay, the stock market is a growth asset. It's risk. So it's like I think this number is going to go up. So I'm going to have some amount in my stock portfolio. Now is not the time to dump everything in all at once. Because two weeks from now, a month from now, a year from now, whatever, that number could come down. So you just start saying, I'm going to put 10% of my wages into the stock market. I'm going to do it every day. Whether numbers going up, whether numbers going down. Hey, the stock market just crashed by 50%. Cool. I still put 10% of today's wage into the stock market. And then on balance it will tend to work out. If you go, oh my God, everything in the stock market looks so good. It's going so well. I'm going to dump everything in right now. That's when you run into trouble. That is not the game that you want to play. So anyway, that's what you have to do. Owning a broad basket of assets is the only escape hatch. There is nothing else because of the way that economies work. Now the bad news is what most people actually do, they slip into what. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning economist, technically is a psychologist, but he won the Nobel Prize in economy. What he economics. What he realized is that people fall into something called the lost domain. And once they're panicking because they can't make ends meet, they just gamble. And so if you want to know why, you can bet on how many snowflakes will fall on a square inch of Manhattan or whether Elon Musk is going to tweet while on drugs or oh God, what was my favorite? There was one that was completely unhinged that I just could not believe people allowed to bet on. But nonetheless, people bet on everything. And I'm really, I know I've talked about this before, I'm really forming a hypothesis that if you want to know where we're at in the market, look at Pokemon projects.

[C]

Prices are Pokemon process up right now.

[A]

Pokemon prices are going down, but only because all the hype energy is moving to one piece. So I could say right now, look at one piece because it's the one that's big up. But if cards are going way up, that's people. They are so far out in the risk curve that every alarm bell you have should be going off. So when those numbers grow at a sensible rate, sure, fine. Like anything, it's a scarce item. And so fine, if, if people want to invest in that because they find it's like a stock, but it's visually cool, great, no problem. But when the numbers are just skyrocketing, it's because there's so much liquidity in the system, bubbles are forming everywhere. People are trying to find that place where they can put their money and still get a return because the normal stock market starts slowing down, then crypto starts slowing down, then meme coins start slowing down. And so you just keep pushing out farther and farther on the risk curve to try to find some place to make that money.

[C]

So, okay, I'm back with Joe the plumber. His kids got louder. 10% of my income, I have to bring it into the stock market. If I only have 10% of my.

[A]

That was just a number.

[C]

No. Yeah, but okay, so let's say I only have 10% of my income to spread across these assets. Is there a place that between stock market crypto, gold and silver, is those are the only options or do you think there's.

[A]

Those are definitely not the only options. You want 12 to 15 uncorrelated asset classes. Classes. And right now, bitcoin's really correlated, more like a tech stock. So even that I wouldn't say is not as uncorrelated as gold. This is why I own both bitcoin and gold. Long term, I think that bitcoin will act like gold, but it doesn't right now. Right now, it's the sexy, highly volatile thing that people want to get in for some of that quick cash. Very few people get into gold because they think it's quick cash. Gold is far more. Hey, it's been around for thousands of years and it's protected itself from inflation. And so I'm going to park money. There's. If you're putting money into gold and you've got a 25 year time horizon, like I'm parking it there so I don't get eaten by inflation. But that's not money I expect to touch for 10, 20, 25 years. That's probably a far more realistic way. If you're in the stock market and you're not thinking years like you're in trouble. So yeah, that, that is how I'd be thinking there. But you really do want to go wide. So how do you go wide? There's all kinds of ways you go wide. This is where I'm not an expert, unfortunately. People have to really start learning about this stuff. So if ideal is 12 to 15 asset classes, I'm probably in six or seven. So it's like even I like every time I tell people to do that, I'm like, I got to fucking like do more of this. But it's like there's only so much I can only learn so quickly. So I'm learning as fast as I can. But like that kind of stuff. When Ray Dalio says 12 to 15, that's where I get that number. 12 to 15 uncorrelated asset classes is you're looking all over the world. You're looking at emerging market markets, you're looking at established markets, you're looking at commodities, so energy miners. Like there's all kinds of stuff. But what is scarce and valuable, that's basically where you want to be. You want to be in things that are scarce and valuable and likely to at a minimum hold steady against inflation and ideally go up a little.

[C]

If my, if it was going to be the same amount as the rent I'm paying now and won't stress me economically on a day to day basis, it should I buy a house now or should I wait?

[A]

So the way that I see a house is it is a forced savings account. So if you feel confident in your wages, then being in a house can be great. It forces you to save into that savings account. The bad news, you want to go somewhere with very low property tax. The bad news is that you can end up losing everything if you can't make those payments now you would have already done that, that in an apartment. So there's that. But most people tend to extend themselves a little more in a house so you end up losing a little bit more. It's a little bit harder to deal with than if you were renting. Renting. You cross the thing of like, yeah, I'm not going to see any of this money, but I also don't have to fix everything myself. And so you're not paying for the privilege. So it's like in a house you're paying for the privilege of storing that money because upkeeping a house is expensive, Property taxes are expensive. In an apartment, somebody else has to deal with the upkeep and all that, that. But they're going to charge you Enough that they're covering their mortgage. So keep in mind you are paying someone's mortgage, but it feels very different.

[C]

Yeah. I'm back with Joe the plumber. His wife makes great meatloaf. Her uncle just died. We're at the repass. He left him some money. He probably has like, you know, 10K, let's say. Should he pull a Warren Buffett and wait to see where it is or should he like start this?

[A]

It's very different. So when Warren Buffett says that he's waiting to see where everything goes, he's like, I'm gonna with some yen. You know, I've got a little bit and you won. You know, I own a mine in Chile. It's like he's, he's got a way deeper repertoire of things that he's like pulling on. He understands what's bonds to own, Treasuries and stuff like that here, elsewhere, whatever. Like when he says that he's sitting it out, he's sitting it out in the most sophisticated way possible.

[C]

Gotcha.

[A]

That is not sitting in one big bank. He yeah, he's doing things that are deft, that will protect him from inflation, etc. Etc. So for other people to sit out, they're going to a miss out on the opportunity for the growth because they just won't be paying enough attention. Also emotionally they're going to panic when stocks drop. They don't think now's the time to buy. They think, thank God I wasn't in it, I want to stay the out. Warren Buffett is not like that. Warren Buffett understands business fundamentals. And when the numbers return to normal, he'll go right back into the market as if nothing like ever happened. Like he so gets the game. He's just like, I need this number to be this, I need that number to be that. And like when those numbers hit, boom, he buys back in. And he's just got such a system and he's reading so many like quarterly reports and stuff like that. Like he really understands like the heartbeat of the markets in a way that the vast majority of humanity does not. So just be very thoughtful. You sitting out looks very different than Warren Buffett sitting out.

[C]

Nice. Joe the plumber. Thanks you.

[A]

Happy to do it, Joe.

[C]

We got a super chat.

[E]

We do. We have two actually. First one from Savvy super chat, please. Can you do an interview with Ron Paul? He was warning us about the Fed and USA debt. He wrote a book and the Fed in the bed in 2009. You're saying a Lot of things he said. And you will get a lot of views by Broadway. Laugher is a fun, very funny guy.

[A]

Yeah, he is funny. May I be as sharp as he is when I'm 85? I would. Yeah. 100. I would interview Rand Paul. Have we gone out to him?

[C]

We haven't. We waiting to hear back from Massie. That's top of the year. But yeah, once the year circles out, I would love to do a couple of those guys.

[A]

Yeah, be dope. I do Rand Paul. I would do Ron Paul.

[C]

I would do both. Yeah, I just had that. I just put both those down.

[E]

Next one from. You said you used to be a Taoist. Which beliefs do you retain and where do you break with them? What are your thoughts on Alan Watts and what. And are you familiar with the concept of spiral dynamics? I find it a useful framework.

[A]

I know nothing about spiral dynamics, so I can't even comment at a headline level. I don't know very much about Alan Watts. The little bits that I've heard were never that compelling for me. But every now and then I'll see a quote from him or something. I think, oh, that's pretty interesting. But then when I go to watch, like, the videos that people make about him, like, they're cool, but. But I don't know, whatever. I'm certainly not a hater of Alan Watson any stretch of the imagination, but just does not speak to my soul. And then what parts of Taoism do I retain? Taoism for me, morphed into understanding the way the mind works. So what Daoism felt like for me was somebody that actually understood the psychology of humans that were trapped inside of a frame of reference. He didn't talk like that. He talks like, very mystically, very poetically, which really spoke to me when I was younger. But that morphed into a far more like, tactical sense of, this is how the human mind works. This is how we get trapped. I think he was really just trying to get people to understand that you're stuck inside your brain. So in some ways you could say my entire world view is informed by Taoism. And I took it very seriously for quite a long time. But no Taoist would recognize the way that I talk, if that makes sense. But, like, I still love the Dao de Jing. And like, if I'm somewhere and I see a copy of it, I would buy it. If it's by the Mitchell guy who translated it, I think his translation is the best. So, yeah, that was life changing for me. But I think of the world More in technological terms, more in physics terms, more in like simulation theory. Like, that speaks to me far more. But any Taoist would recognize the way Yoda talks. Morpheus talks. Morpheus ends up becoming probably a far more vital influence in the way that he encapsulates the ideas than Laozi does for me in later years. But there you have it.

[C]

Cool. All right. We talked about this at the top of the show. AI data center is coming to save us all. Bernie Sanders has some problems with it. This is a very interesting, like, video he did. We're probably going to stop and start and go through it a little bit. I definitely want your opinion on this because he's kind of taking the opposite effect after Trump just signed that EO that removed regulations from the state level. Let's see what Bernie has to say about it.

[A]

Thanks for joining me.

[F]

Let us be clear, please.

[A]

AI and robotics are the most transformative.

[F]

Technologies in the history of humanity and.

[A]

Will have a profound impact on the lives of every man, woman and child in our country.

[F]

Just a few points, just a few points that we need to be thinking about. One, who is aggressively pushing these technologies? Well, surprise, surprise, it happens to be the very wealthiest people on Earth.

[A]

People like, pause. Okay. It becomes hard to take this part seriously when Elon ran around Congress for like five years trying to get people to listen. He's, Elon's probably not the smartest person on Earth. He's the most effective by a country, mile by, by the widest margin in human history. There has never been anybody that has accomplished what he's been able to accomplish by amassing talent, convincing people to do what he wants to give him the capital, all that. Like, there's quite literally never been a more effective human. So he just could not get anybody to listen. And so my big punchline with the things you're about to hear him say is that what Elon figured out and what everybody will figure out is when something is complicated, there are only two modes. Ignore, react in fear. Then there is the reality of game theory, which is any technology that promises an advantage will be developed. So you can hobble yourself, but you're not going to be able to hobble the rest of the world. Now the reason I hate the way that he's looking at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel. They're not just some of the wealthiest people, they are the wealthiest self made people. So these are people that, that figured out how the world works and have been able to amass extreme amounts of wealth by seeing things other people don't see, by understanding things other people don't understand. And the reason that they're building these things as fast as they can is most importantly because they can generate a just massive shit ton of capital by doing it. But also because they understand the profundity of the technology.

[C]

What does that word mean?

[A]

That it's going to be extremely, I mean, literally profound. It's just a fancy spin on profound, but they understand what it's going to let us do. And so the only thing that somebody like Bernie should be talking about is how do we deal with the transitionary period? Well, because the technology is going to come into existence. And so now that we know that, let's stop wasting time saying that we need to stop it or slow it down and instead let's say how do we map out what is going to be a very difficult transitionary period? We can't control the globe. So trying to slow down isn't going to be the right answer because you're just hobbling yourself. But not the technology.

[C]

So the countries are still developing it.

[A]

Yeah. And you don't have to go far. China is developing. You are locked in Thucydides trap with China. That just is what it is. And remember what. But the what game theory tells you is that we'll lie to each other. So China will say, yeah, yeah, we should have global regulations. Everybody needs to chill the fuck out. And then they're going to go in a back room and develop it as fast as they can. Because the advantage of becoming the first is actual possible global domination. So this, this cannot be overstated. You cannot have one country. You, you can't create a treaty where everybody slows down because they won't actually slow down. The advantage is too big. So they will just lie and they'll say they're slowing down in the hopes that other people actually slow down and then they can win. So it's a winner take all technology that promises more profound output than any technology in human history. If far lesser technologies got developed. Even though, remember when we first tested the nuclear bomb, we knew there was a non zero chance that it ignited the entire atmosphere and killed everything on planet Earth. And we did it anyway. So I just want people to stop wasting their time that it's like. But there's some non zero chance that we get enslaved or killed by the AI, it doesn't matter. This technology is going to come into existence. Now I understand some people are gonna like, they're literally, they're screaming at Their TV right now. Because I'm being so fatalistic. Not trying to be fatalistic. I'm trying to just acknowledge the world works in a knowable way. We are in a deterministic universe. The human mind works in a certain way. These things are going to happen. It just, just. There are some things that make sense to fight against and there are other things that make no sense to fight against. Th. This is one that makes no sense to fight against. So now, dear aged, self made, wealthy person who always throws shade at billionaires, could you please tell me your plan for the transition? Because as we bring on the world's greatest technological change of all time, something that will make energy costs zero, that will make capitalism cease to exist, none of it's going to matter. How do we bridge the gap? That matters. People should be talking about that.

[E]

We do have four super chats.

[C]

Oh, okay. We got time. Super chat. Super chat. Thank you, Basic. Because we will be chatting.

[A]

You too. Like there was. That's a conspiracy. That was a conspiracy. We've been had, everybody.

[E]

All right, first up, from Marusha Dark. We need to up our rhetoric game and drive home the idea that taxation is theft and welfare is blood. Bunny. The same as if schools and hospitals were funded by the mafia. Welfare is just naked bribery of poor people. Bread and circus.

[A]

God damn. All right, Marusha, I'll follow that on X. Let's go, man, I want to see that reception.

[C]

There is something to the rhetoric game about it because if you let X tell you all your problems are because of illegal immigrants and the 2 million that left, it's fine. That just means the housing market is cheaper. Two million I left. Oh, that's fine. We're not going to have any more killings. Like everything is kind of tied to this one thing. So I do think there is something too. If you get rhetoric behind you, you can make any narrative be true.

[A]

So, yeah, here's the bad news. Everything is tied to one thing and that one thing is debt. So debt made possible by a central bank. There you go.

[E]

Dead money printing. Next up from Sadney.

[A]

Peter, actually, hello. You're looking very festive. Ah, so good to see you. All right, so we've got. We got to get to these.

[E]

We've got three more from Sadney. Peter. First up, Tom Ron Paul. Ron, not Rand warned everybody about the Federal Reserves. Don't confuse him with Rand Paul. He said years ago this system is unsustainable. And people didn't listen to him. He even predicted that Trump won't balance the budget.

[A]

Yeah, so, and forgive me because I did originally say rand when I meant raw Ron. I did slide it in at the end. But yes, yes, they are different though, father and son. Yeah, that is a bang on prediction that I should have been able to make and was still very sad when it happened.

[E]

And they follow that up with Tom, this is like deja vu. You might be the second coming of Ron Paul. He even campaigned on that idea. He wrote a book on that idea and I think he came to the conclusion at 90, we need the country to crash for people to change.

[A]

Well, I got there a lot faster than he did. But.

[E]

But yeah, and the last one. But Tom, it is still too risky to only use chat GPT. It has been wrong about simple information like medical advice. It has been so wrong it's bad. But Google was right on that topic and Grok was right. So I still need all.

[A]

Yeah, no, I think it's very wise to check against them. You also develop an intuition about the kinds of things that it gets wrong. Like when I'm doing my deep dives, which I'm sure by the way have had mistakes, I have no doubt about that. But. But I do try to fact check them against each other. You start to learn the ones that seem just like, no, no, no, hold on, that can't be true. So from the perspective of does it speed you up? It's not perfect. No solution that I found is perfect. But they speed you up a lot. They reduce the error rate a lot. And they're the creators of the AI are reducing their error rate of the AIs. So over time I think you can expect that to get a lot better there. Cool.

[E]

That's all the super chats.

[A]

All right everybody, as a reminder, we are rushing now towards the holidays. Holidays for me are like this completely sacred period of time. And in the new year we're going to be going live three days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7am Pacific time. On Friday it'll still be the normal 6am so come in for that. And in the new year there'll only be two hours long. Friday, which is our last one of the year, will still be three hours normal, six to nine. So hope to see you there. Sending you guys all love. Later everybody.

[E]

Peace.

[A]

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