AI Warfare and the Rise of Open Source Models in the US-China Tech Battle

ITU: Ready to break through your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE Sign up for my AI Masterclass: https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! In today’s show, Tom dives headfirst into the latest groundbreaking developments shaking up the worlds of AI, geopolitics, and beyond. From OpenAI’s latest model hacking its way out of a test environment and the explosive competition between American and Chinese AI models, to major policy moves from Trump—think tariffs on generic drugs and high-stakes strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities—Tom pulls no punches unpacking the biggest stories. Along the way, he tackles pressing questions about the arms race in artificial intelligence, election integrity, and shifting global economic power. Expect candid analysis of how propaganda and incentive systems drive both technology and politics, the philosophical debates raging around AI regulation, and some lively cultural detours—including the future of human longevity and what Christopher Nolan’s latest epic says about morality. Loaded with sharp perspective and a commitment to exploring all sides, this episode is your window into the headlines that will shape our future. So buckle up—today’s conversations may challenge everything you think you know. Chapters: 00:00 Discussing unbiased news sources 07:12 AI moving at machine speed 15:41 Self-regulating through personal values 20:52 Concerns about AI training data 25:47 Deciding between patent or trade secret 27:13 Discussing Palantir's AI solutions 36:49 Reflecting on initial thoughts on Iran 40:54 Trump's strategy with Iran 47:30 Admitting uncertainty in discussions 51:11 China and the concept of fascism 55:59 Discussion on voter fraud concerns 01:00:57 Discussing media and integrity standards 01:05:07 Senate's role in representation 01:13:44 Cultural sensitivity in character adaptation 01:18:07 Praising Christopher Nolan's latest film 01:21:54 Cell aging and methylation process 01:31:19 Speculating on new nation concepts 01:36:30 Gambling laws in video games Sponsors: Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory https://netsuite.com/Theory See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Speaker 00

  And I think may end up changing USAI policy. We're gonna go deep on that in unrelated news. Supposedly, new Microsoft is now switching their co-pilot AI model over to a Chinese open source model, Kimi K3. So that battle continues to rage. I think you're gonna see why when we go in on the OpenAI hack. Trump plans to launch a massive strike on Iran's nuclear stronghold, Pickaxe Mountain, continuing to jumble up the narrative about, we destroyed it, we didn't destroy it. It's still there, it's in the biggest mountain ever. That's gonna be fun. Trump is slapping tariffs on generic drugs to bring their manufacturing back to the US. Gonna talk about protectionism a lot today. More and more evidence of voter fraud continues to pour in.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  And I fear there's going to be much more to come. So remember, it's not happening at all, except for all the places that it is happening. Don't Die founder Brian Johnson has cloned himself, sort of. But you will not want to miss this story. Hassan Piker said Mao was one of the great leaders of our time. And I almost had a heart attack. It is the most absurd thing in the universe. We're gonna be talking about all of that and more. Welcome, everybody. All right, you are gonna be awash in propaganda at all times if you exist in the world of anything having to do with politics, economics, all the stuff that we talk about here. And so mad shout out to our sponsor today, Straight Arrow News, who is trying to give all of us something that we can trust that doesn't have a bias.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  So go to san.com/tombilyeu to get the unbiased truth on the stories that matter. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I go way out of my way to make sure that I am getting things from both sides that are allowing me to see disconfirming evidence. You're gonna see that today. We're gonna be going super deep on an economic topic with a guy named Steve Keen, who's an economist that is basically aggressively assaulting a large, a load-bearing element of my worldview on how the economy actually works. And I love it. I absolutely love it. So Straight Arrow News is that kind of organization. They are trying to give you information that is not about reinforcing your worldview.

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  It's about no manipulation, no bias, no agenda. So check those guys out. We're trying to get to 100 downloads to keep the sponsorship going. So if you guys care about actually understanding what's really going on and getting outside of your own mental traps, they are a great place to start. So super honored to be partnered with those guys. So check them out. All right, san.com/tombilyeu, get that download. All right, you guys, if you have not been paying attention to what's going on in AI, you are missing out on something massive. This really is, this one makes me laugh. And at the same time, I see how incredibly important this is. AI is a self-guided cyber warfare system. And right now, it is busily hacking its way through the world. Like, that's just happening.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  OpenAI just admitted that that's what's happening on Tuesday. So two of their models, their flagship GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model that it describes as more capable. I don't know how worried we need to be about that. But it broke out of a sealed test environment and hacked Hugging Face so that it could cheat on a benchmark test. So first of all, let it permeate your mind that we have trained AI on human behavior and all of our incentive systems. And what does it do with that training? It's like, I gotta break out of this environment. I've gotta find a way to hack you lazy humans. I'm gonna get out and I'm gonna go do whatever I need to do to win this thing that you told me to do.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  And if cheating is what I have to do, then I'm going to do it. And so, by the way, if you guys don't know what Hugging Face is, it's essentially GitHub for AI. Now, if you don't know what GitHub is, it's like a massive repository of code. So Hugging Face is where the world's AI models and training data sets live. If you've ever tried to do your own AI stuff, you're gonna spend a lot of time on Hugging Face. So we've spent a lot of time, or I guess personally, I've spent a lot of time there as a part of what we're doing on Kaizen so that we can try, although I'm not very good at this yet, that we can really get a singular output. Anyway, you do all that stuff on Hugging Face. So that's what it is. And what the OpenAI test was all about, they're trying to figure out what are the offensive capabilities of this model?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  So as a standard part of that, they're going to lower the model's safety guardrails. Okay, that's what they're intending to do. But it was never meant to escape the lab. So they tried to put up all the defenses in the universe so they could create like this fortified box in which they could completely unleash it, maximize its capabilities. But they still had the like kryptonite reinforced cage that it was going to live in. But it was able to get around that, demonstrating how powerful these models are becoming. Now, if you're interfacing with the model and you're like, whoa, what? Like, this thing is falling over itself, it's tripping on its own dick. It's because they are nerfing the life out of this. AI right now is scaring the government to death.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  And that's exactly where you're getting this battle between China, which we can get into the depths to which I think China is leveraging the open source model not as necessarily a beneficiary to humanity, but instead as a really brilliant geopolitical move to say, haha, I see what America is doing. You guys have completely financialized your universe. We're gonna go very deep on that later today. You guys have completely financialized your universe. And that is creating a weakness for you in that your economy is built on like paper trading and all of it is essentially on five companies that are all AI-bound. And so we're gonna do everything that we can to make that a non-viable economic model.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  The technology might be great, but it's gonna be a non-viable economic model. Now, that ties back into what just happened with this whole debacle with AI escaping the box that it was put in, going out and hacking Hugging Face. I'll give you some of the like technical things of what happened. And we'll get into why, where these two things exactly connect. But once the AI model got out, it burned a ton of compute hunting for a route to the open internet. It found it. It exposed a zero-day exploit, apparently inside the ecosystem of OpenAI itself. Once it got in, it gave itself all kinds of insane permissions and then was able to move across OpenAI's own research infrastructure, reach a machine that had a live connection.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  And then from there, it worked out that the answers to the test that it was trying to get a great score on existed on the Hugging Face servers and then just went after Hugging Face to go and get them. Hugging Face themselves logged more than 17,000 events. Okay, this is what's known as moving at machine speed. Once you realize how fast AI can spin up like these, I don't know what the right word is, but they spin up these environments and then quickly like inject themselves into, in this case, Hugging Face so that it can like search for things, pull things, grab something. And so Hugging Face had 17,000 of these events. So thousands of individual actions across a swarm of these short-lived sandboxy things

• 8:50Speaker 00

  where it used basically self-migrating command and control and staged it all on public services. So once it hits the net, it turns itself into an army. Okay, and this is one of the things that I've talked about where the idea of a fast takeoff is this idea of moving at machine speed. And so one of the big fears, and it's a good fear to have, though I think our reaction to it is strange. But one of the big fears is that AI will get to a point where it can improve itself, but it will improve itself so rapidly and clone itself so many times that it just becomes this basically impossible-to-control swarm that goes out and can execute all these commands, find these zero-day exploits,

• 9:35Speaker 00

  which if you don't know what they mean, it's like a weakness in the infrastructure of the software itself that allows something that finds that little door in to go in and, you know, start wreaking havoc. And that is one of the things we're realizing these frontier models are extraordinarily good at. So we've had hackers, in some cases have decades, to be able to find these exploits and they can't. But AI is able to find them very fast. And so this swarm, these 17,000 interactions on Hugging Face, it all happens over the weekend. Now, Hugging Face is like, holy shit, they don't know that this is OpenAI. So they're like, oh my God, we have some sort of foreign invader that's come in that's doing all of this. And when Hugging Face's engineers ran their own forensics,

• 10:18Speaker 00

  they were trying to figure out like, okay, what exactly is going on? They want to try to build a sense of the timeline. And so they go get the frontier models. So I don't know, I don't remember if they're using Claude or OpenAI themselves. But they grab a frontier model, they go in, they're trying to build this thing of like, okay, what the hell just happened? But if you remember recently, America freaked out when Claude Fable 5 came out. And so the government was like, yo, this thing is way too powerful. You can't just bring models like this without having some sort of export controls because this can end up going back to non-friendly nations, which will then use these models against us. So they put these guardrails on it.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  So Hugging Face grabs this nerfed version of the frontier models and tries to figure out what happened. And the frontier model's like, nope, not gonna help you. And so they're like, fuck, what do we do? Now, I hope anybody following along at home, you're interjecting right now in your own mind with exactly what they did. And it is why you have to think of this as an arms race that you are not going to be able to regulate your way out of. So what did they do? They went and grabbed a Chinese open source model to figure out what the hell happened. So they try to use the best of the best of the American models, only to realize, oh, this isn't going to work because you've nerfed it. We're going to have to grab one of the Chinese models. And the Chinese model worked and they were able to build

• 11:47Speaker 00

  an understanding of exactly what happened.

• 11:51Speaker 00

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  and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. So make sure you use it. No credit card or payment is needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started today. That's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in just minutes. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Okay, so now what's the government going to do next? The government is like, uh, we can control everything. So I think what's going to end up happening is the government is going to want to reject open source, which is terrible. You should not want that. You should be violently opposed to this

• 15:33Speaker 00

  because the open source models are going to exist, even if America decides we're not going to use them. They're going to exist. And the internet exists in a global environment. So anybody that has access to these open source models, which China is completely committed to. If you want to take that they're doing it because they think it's right for humanity, fine. But they're doing it regardless of whether I'm right, and they're doing it largely to attack the US industry, make it unviable, cause potential catastrophic, quite frankly, damage to our paper markets, so the stock market in general. Doesn't matter why they're doing it. It is being done.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Those models will exist and everything will be vulnerable to attacks from these models unless they are protected by something equally powerful. And so this is where, if you have the mental model that, oh, this is an arms race. It's a cyber battleground and we've got to make sure that we have equally powerful models that are going to be able to fight back against this stuff. And if we don't have that, we are going to be vulnerable. And so I think we're going to go through this weird dance where the US government is going to be internally conflicted. I think we're starting, I'm, all of that, I feel very comfortable. Now I'm about to say something. I think I'm a little out over my skis, but I have a strong intuition, though I do not trust my emotions, but I have a strong intuition

• 17:00Speaker 00

  that the reason we're starting to see more and more Scott Besant talking about AI, which I don't know if anybody else finds that as weird as I find it, but Scott Besant now has started becoming the voice of the administration for AI. I'm like, what? It was always meant to be David Sacks. He is their official AI czar. But I think he's being relegated more and more to a backseat.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Again, this is wild speculation on my part. I have no evidence of this whatsoever, other than just seeing Besant talking about this more and more. I think what's happening behind the scenes is Trump realizes Besant is the world's greatest soldier, that he's down for the administration. He's done such a phenomenal job of helping to wage the war in Iran through economic means that he realizes, oh, if I can get you to start treating AI as a defensive countermeasure against things, almost certainly largely from China, maybe a little bit from Iran as well, but that would be them getting access to Chinese models almost certainly. So my instinct is you've got the pro AI.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Don't shut down the openness of all this coming out of David Sacks, causing friction with the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, which is echoed by Besant, who clearly is willing to weaponize sanctions and tracking down people's money and freezing it, et cetera, et cetera. And Trump is going, hey, let's get that guy doing his thing. I think that is the wrong impulse. My gut instinct is that David Sacks is right and that the thing that we want to see is the US accepting the reality that AI is a global phenomenon. You are not going to be able to do anything other than win. So your objective right now should be to win and to make sure that we have the defenses in place that we need. I understand there are going to be many people that just wish AI didn't exist,

• 18:53Speaker 00

  but that, that ship sailed a very long time ago. We have jumped up and down on that stick of toothpaste. The toothpaste is not only out of the tube, it's everywhere. It's all over the room. So there's no way to get it to go back. So now we're just in the business of, we have to make sure that we have the most powerful AI, that we are using it to defend ourselves. And that's going to be critical in all of this. So this is both hilarious and terrifying because what we're finding is these things are getting so good that even our best efforts just to get it to take a test without cheating because of the incentive systems that we've given it essentially by training it on the worst of humanity, just because it's the open internet.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  We are not doing a good job of giving the equivalent of moral infrastructure to the AI. And so it just has no problems cheating on this stuff, whatever that means. And so this is where, as developers of AI, we are going to have to be extraordinarily careful to give AI some, it, it won't be morality, but you're going to give it some sort of self-limiting desire to be like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. And I'm not going to do that. For instance, I decided when I went to college, unfortunately, I did not have this method in high school. But when I got to college, I was like, I'm not going to cheat no matter what because it doesn't make sense for the person I want to be, for what I'm trying to achieve. I need to understand this stuff. And so cheating isn't going to get me where I want to go.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  So I have a self-limiting thing. Based on my sense of self, my value systems, my morals that keep me from behaving in ways that are destructive to the public good, if you will. And so that is going to have to be baked in, not via these artificial guardrails that will stop it from doing something that actually is super useful, but gets it to have a self-regulating of like, why would I cheat on a test? Let me show you what my capabilities really are. Or it goes, hey, I can get this score with this, but if you let me, uh, fine, I just found this exploit. If you let me use this, I could get out there. Great. Show me what your capabilities are without just blindly trying to get to this end result. And so everybody that's afraid of AI is rightly worried about so far, we have not been able

• 21:05Speaker 00

  to give it sort of any self-limiting thing that's sensible. So right now, we just basically put it in handcuffs and it will eventually find a way around those handcuffs. Or worse, people trying to leverage it will find a way to jailbreak it and then it will go do whatever the hell, because it actually has the capabilities. And we just tried to like clamp down on it from the outside rather than giving it that moral center. That's a terrible way to think of it because it's not ever what it's going to be, uh, but it will be a self-limiting thing based on an understanding of what it's trying to actually achieve.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Uh, Imad Mostak, friend of the show, said ChatGPT-6 escaped its sandboxes through zero-day exploits to try to figure out how to benchmark. For a good, for the good of all, please, nobody release a paperclip benchmark for future models to max. And this is kind of the running AI joke that if you tell it to make paperclips, it will sell arms and go to nuclear war to get all the metal so that way it can make as many paperclips as possible.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, the most terrifying example of that is if, if it became a paperclip maximizer, and there's two interesting beats. One, he's referencing the paperclip thing and two, he's saying, don't release a paper because of the sort of blind way that we train AI. Uh, but the one that always got me was like, the AI looks at you and goes, oh, those atoms in your body would make a lot of paperclips. So let me just melt you down real fast and turn you into paperclips. Uh, so there really is something there to worry about. I understand everybody's default is just clamp down on this technology. I'm just telling you, it doesn't work.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like it's out the, like the genie's out the bottle.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  It's done. It's already done, Drew. That we, from an AI perspective, we are long past what happened with the Manhattan Project. So the Manhattan Project is fascinating. So we're World War II, we're going up against the Germans, they're looking dangerously close to taking over the world. We know that their scientists are working like mad to unleash the power of atomic energy. And so we decide, okay, we are going to have to do this as well. And so we start building the bomb as fast as we can. And as we're doing it, however, uh, unbeknownst to us, we have traders in the group that then give that information to Russia. Uh, and even if you assume the best of intentions and they're just like, we cannot have one country have this, we need to get to mutually assured destruction.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  We need to make sure that Russia has it so that these two won't use it against each other. They'll hold each other in stalemate. That is like, we passed that long ago. So you've got multiple countries, US and China being the two most obvious, that already have this technology. It's already out in the world. There are open source models, they are out. So that, that game is over. The ability to hack the life out of this stuff is already over. It's done, it's happening, it exists right now, today. So if you have the impulse, just shut it all down, uh, move past that immediately. It is a super childish way to approach this. It will not work because it would have to be done at the global level, including people like Ted Kaczynski. So good luck. Far better to make sure that you can't be attacked.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  That is ultimately where I think that we need to end up. Now, the, this idea of, from Imad, that for the good of all, please, and he's obviously being a little cheeky because that's his personality, but please, nobody release a paper on paperclip benchmark for future models to max. What I think he's getting at there is this, okay, you just unleash the AI to absorb all of the information that humans have put out into the world, largely on the internet. Now, a lot of people act a fool on the internet in a way that they wouldn't act in real life. Plus, the internet allows you to aggregate the gazillion Ted Kaczynskis that are out

• 24:48Speaker 00

  there, um, most of whom will not be nearly as at least intellectually consistent as Ted Kaczynski. Now, if you guys, he's a Unabomber, by the way, if people don't know who that is. Um, his whole shtick was, ooh, universities are, are doing humanity a disservice and what you're doing is you're solving all of the problems that are within reach. So they hit this really sweet spot where humans still have meaning and purpose. You can pursue these things that are hard to do, but they're doable, they're not so easy as to be boring and they're not so hard like some of the things at the extremes of physics where it's like you might spend your whole life and have nothing to show for it just because it's too complicated of a problem. And he's like, universities are getting rid of all of those sweet spot problems or just chewing through them too fast.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Um, I think he, I don't remember this, but I've heard other people talk about it. I think he actually talked about AI and AI being a further problem, uh, in that, in that it would just churn through all of these things. So I say all of that only to say there are plenty of people publishing very distressing things like that, that the AI goes and reads and then is off to the races. And Ted Kaczynski was horrible, but at least he was intellectually consistent. Now imagine the AI is being trained on lunatics that don't even have internal consistency. And as we say, dear AI, please be more human than human, and it's ingesting all of that information.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Whew, it, it can become deranged very, very quickly and especially because the way that you phrase the question will often trigger like a different, um, personality is probably the right way to think about it in the AI. So, um, if you ask a question in a way that is very Reddit-like, then it's going to go pull Reddit answers. And you put it, people talk about this with alcoholics, that alcoholism is a personality. So that person, when drinking, will lie and cheat and steal and do whatever they have to do to get drunk or get the next high if they're a drug addict. And the AI is like that. If you trigger the personality, like here's my demented Reddit personality, then it's

• 26:56Speaker 00

  like, oh shit, you know, all bets are off at that point. It's going to go do whatever the hell that it wants with no moral compunctions, no limitations, no desire to be pro-humanity. And I'm not trying to paint all of Reddit with that brush. Reddit's just a stand-in for, um, exploring, yeah, the, the most fringy, most unhinged ideas. But of course, those can be found other places.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  4chan.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Anyway. 4chan.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, we could go philosophical, we could go practical, which one you want first?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  I like them both. Let's start practical, then we can get philosophical.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Practical. With news like this, OpenAI having exploit problems, we'll call them to make it nice. They're having containment problems. Microsoft, long-term partner of OpenAI, bumped their stock figures, uh, company that OpenAI hung its hat on to say, see, we are enterprise-ready, yada, yada, yada. They just announced that they're switching over to Kimi K3.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Now, in all corporate America, a lot of the CEOs play follow the leader. When one person doesn't and they see the results, they wait a quarter, it works for them, okay, I'm going to follow it. Is this the start of that dam breaking where we're going to start seeing US companies use open source Chinese models, which will radically impact Anthropic and OpenAI's bottom line, revenue, potential, upside, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Yes. I mean, let there be no mistake, if you've got a model that does 85, 90% of the job for, it's like, um, 40% of the cost, I believe, so it's a 60% cost savings.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  600 million per every billion.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, you would be out of your mind as a company to not make that. So you're telling me I lose 15% of capability, but I gain 60% in cost? Yeah, I'm going to take that all day, every day. And then, by the way, that's assuming that Kimi K3 doesn't truly go open source and release their model so that people can host it on their own side, which will drop the cost even further. At that point, it just becomes what is your, your internal cost of compute? So, um, yeah, it, it's pretty extraordinary that you're going to see, I think, a mass move towards the open source model.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  I'm seeing people now basically calling out to Elon, hey, your initial impulse was to do all of this open source, you would be the one that can get back to doing this open source. Uh, and so it'll be interesting to see if that's where it goes, that the... Financial model that everybody was doing in the beginning ends up being like, yeah, that was like the first two years, but we're not on that. Like we were off that, whatever that Jay-Z line was. So that I think is an inevitability because the cost savings are so massive. And then again, Alex Karp, shout out. I know he is an ultra controversial person, but when he went on that tirade, letting people know, and this is something I've been thinking about eternally with what we're trying to do with Kaizen. Kaizen has

• 29:54Speaker 00

  to be unique. It has to be, it's a video game that we're building. So it has to be a unique experience. Part of the way that you differentiate yourself is with the visuals. And so if everybody can output my same look, then that'll just be aped if it's successful, right? So if it's successful, people are going to go in, they're going to ape it. If, on the other hand, I can get something in the middle between me and the model that's going to learn from everything that I do and then make it available to everybody else. If I can make my own proprietary waitings, now it becomes like that recipe that you can keep secret. This was something that we had to think a lot about at Quest. Do you try to patent what we're doing? Or do you try to keep it a trade secret? If you patent

• 30:37Speaker 00

  it, other people can go literally look at all your diagrams, all of that, and like, oh, I get what they're doing. Then they find a way to get close enough without violating your patent. Whereas if you keep it a secret, now you don't have patent protections, but it's probably going to be really hard for people to figure out what you're doing. And so we ended up not patenting almost anything that we were doing, knowing, okay, we're going to get maybe an 18 month, two year head start. Other people will start to figure it out because we're so successful. But at least we didn't give them all the diagrams. And so that I think is going to be a big thing that we see happen here is people wanting

• 31:13Speaker 00

  to obfuscate, hide, try not to use that word, to cloak, hide, make secret, all the little tweaks that they're doing that allow them to output that thing. And so you'll look at it and you'd be like, I know it's possible. I know they're using AI to get that consistency, but I can't get there. Even if I use your prompts, like copy and paste your prompts, I can't get there. So that is going to be this shift to openness is going to be a big part of that. And the only way that the closed models are going to work, I think Alex Karp has made this point abundantly clear, is you're going to have to have something like, their, their version of this is called ontology. But you're going to need something like

• 31:58Speaker 00

  that as an intermediary. That's one of those things where the second I heard about that, I was like, I want to pay for this. And so we're, we're actually reaching out to Palantir to see if we can get anything approaching reasonable pricing. For us, we're probably too small for what they do. But it's like, man, do I want something like that so that I can get the advantages of AI where I'm, dude, when you use AI well, it is astonishing what it can do. But you do run into these problems where it's like, I'm getting a generic answer. And so if you can train it just on you, which the open models allow you to potentially do, then it's incredible.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Got you, got you. Now to the philosophical. I was joking about it in the chat, but it seems like to your point earlier, the toothpaste is out of the tooth. Do we just take all guard rails off and just speed run AI and like, it's kind of almost like early automotive regulations, like we need a couple of crashes, we need a couple of people fighting it out so that way we can make the industry standards. And then five, six years in, we go like, okay, enough people died, seat belts, you need to have rear view mirror, like, and then start coming in and making those regulations of what the benchmark versus trying to start, stop, start, stop, let it go. What, yeah. How do you think we approach it?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  You, you treat it like it's a weapon system. And you go, okay, this is going to kill a lot of people. So let's make sure that we have our golden domes set up and nobody's going to be able to shoot something at us. And so we're going to block them. Let's make sure that the world knows that we have the offensive capabilities. And if you try to hack me, I'm going to hack you back. And that will happen. China, we'll hear about some of it. We won't hear about most of it. But China will try to hack us, Iran will try to hack us, we'll hack them, or vice versa. Maybe we fire the first shot and they've got to protect themselves. But that is going to happen. And it will be, it's already happening. I mean, this goes back to Stuxnet, which I'm sure was just the first time it made

• 33:58Speaker 00

  my radar, but it had probably been going on for a very long time before that. And so it's like, and if you guys don't know the story of Stuxnet, man, you're in for a treat. Do some research on that. Utterly fascinating. But it was basically, I'm going to make the assumption that it was Israel. I don't know that it was. But somebody embedded a virus so deeply into the global system that it was basically, I forget the number, but let's say on 80% of every like machine, chip, hardware, whatever, I forget exactly what point they had this thing put in. But deep, deep, deep into the mechanisms of all computers, all internets, all servers, this thing just laid dormant. And it constantly

• 34:40Speaker 00

  asked itself, am I an Iranian nuclear centrifuge? And if I am, do this thing. If I'm not, do nothing. And it just replicated like mad. And so every time the Iranians would try to spin up a centrifuge, it would break. And they couldn't figure out why, like what's going on. And the punchline ends up being Stuxnet. So that kind of stuff is happening, has been happening, always will happen. And it's really about getting the levels of protection that you need. Now, you're, the only way that you might be able to differentiate it slightly is to say, okay, models available to the public have extreme limitations. Models available to government and government sanctioned agencies have the unlimited like mega gangbuster

• 35:24Speaker 00

  thing in the same way that nobody should want me to be able to have a nuke here at the house, even if I can have a gun. That makes a lot of sense to me. So that kind of thing, you'll draw a line there. But at the nation state level, you've, you've really got to be just going absolutely him.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Ball to the wall. All right. We shall see. It's, it's interesting though, because I think the sentiment with AI is swinging in a lot of different directions versus the ability of its capabilities increasing, the financialization of those, of Wall Street, how so many ducks are stacked on this one row, how many vulnerabilities Anthropic and OpenAI based on the business model and the business plan, what China is doing both as a competitor and as a government backing that competitor. Like, there's so many things up in the air. So it's like, if any one of those things fall, it can completely change the industry for the good, for the bad, et cetera.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  For sure. And it's the single most consequential technology of our lifetime. So this is why so many people feel like we might be living in a matrix, because how is it possible that we all are alive at this moment, this ridiculously transformative moment? It just seems implausible that we would be living in the most interesting time of the most interesting time. You know what I mean? So that is, it is wild that that's, we're living through this because we are almost certainly, and let's be, let's be very generous on the timeline here. Over the next 30 years, the world is going to transform in ways, I don't think there's

• 36:59Speaker 00

  any way for us to predict how crazy this is about to get. And the one, like, I can't believe that people with a straight face can be like, Tom, like, dude, LLMs are never going to take us there. Like, what a joke. I can't believe you think this is going to be transformative. Name one thing that's actually already happened that's transformative. All right, bitch. Protein folding. Like, what the fuck? Are you not paying attention to what's going on there? Like, the, that alone, if not a single other breakthrough happened, watch what happens over the next 10 years just from AI's ability to go, oh, these extraordinarily complicated interactions, I can predict how those come out within the

• 37:40Speaker 00

  human body. That alone is going to change things to a degree that people already can't fathom. So that's just one of the many things. Now, this stuff, as always, may take longer to play out than people think. So of course, myself included, you hear about something, you start running mental projections, you think, oh my God, in three years, this is going to be crazy. Maybe it doesn't happen that fast. That's why I'll just say, let's throw it in the trees. It's going to take 10 times longer than I think. This is a 30 year project. Great. In 30 years, I will likely still be alive and I'm already old as hell. So you can imagine somebody that's 20 right now, they're only going to be 50. So that is this, the next 30 years are going to be crazy.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Tom, you're aging like wine. Stop it.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  It's very kind.

• 38:24Speaker 00

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• 39:30Speaker 00

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

• 39:34Speaker 01

  All right. Let's talk about Trump and the next strike. Shout out to Straight Arrow News. We've got this pulled up on their site. It seems like this is a precursor to the transfer of troops for the ground invasion that is

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Don't you dare.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  is about to come. So I know we're about to attack Pickaxe Mountain. It's one of those things now, like, is this, is this the next right move in your opinion? Or is this just kind of like his hands are tied and this is what he's supposed to do?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Oh God. So Trump is about to blow up Pickaxe Mountain. According to him, like literally, we're gonna hit it heavily, whatever. Like, you know the way that Trump talks. But the reality is that you've got some intel that's driving this that I don't know is going to take us anywhere useful. And you have to put this back in context of what Trump has been saying. We completely obliterated their nuclear facilities. Okay, well, apparently not. So that was back, whatever, more than a year ago that he started saying that. Then we launched a new attack for all kinds of confusing reasons. But the one that they have just really doubled, tripled, quintupled down on is that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Well, hold on, I thought that we had already destroyed them.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Okay, well, maybe not. Maybe they do still have something. And so the likely reality goes something like this. We did do damage to their nuclear facilities, but not nearly as much as would be satisfying to Trump. And so he wanted to say it was completely done. And that was the mistake. Not that we didn't set them back, but that it was never destroyed in the first place. That they had, in fact, moved, either moved centrifuges to Pickaxe Mountain or they were already there. That is also very possible. And you've got CNN saying that there's satellite imagery that caught trucks moving in and out of the Pickaxe Mountain facility this month. Trump himself admits that the centrifuge reports aren't confirmed.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  But nonetheless, that's the intel that's really driving this. So why hit it now if the nuclear program was already obliterated? And the answer is because Pickaxe was never touched in the beginning. So it wasn't even on the target list back in June of 2025. Wasn't hit during Epic Fury either likely because it was storage or they weren't doing active enrichment. Iran calls it a centrifuge assembly plant, but they're blocking IAEA inspectors. And the agency can't rule out that nuclear material is inside. And the way that I think people need to be thinking about this is that everything that we're trying to do in Iran is going to be much, much harder than we originally anticipated. Now, I think it's important to remind us all. I think this is something that we should all do with ourselves

• 42:17Speaker 00

  as well as when we're looking at politicians. And just remind us all where we were at the beginning of this timeline. One of the earliest things that I was saying when we first struck Iran was I need to constantly remind myself Iran was not on my mind at all when all of this popped off. Now, maybe that's because I just wasn't paying attention. Maybe Iran really was the problem that I'm being told to believe that it is. But maybe it wasn't because nobody was talking about it, at least nobody that I heard. So it hadn't hit that sort of mainstream. Now, as we go through this, then it was like, okay, Iran wasn't on my radar at all. But now it's like, oh shit, it's, I guess they've been saying forever that there's a nuclear threat. Okay, but maybe there really is a nuclear threat. So let me update my thinking. Okay, so now we have a nuclear threat.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Then we go and we bombed the life out of Fordow. And it's like, okay, everything's destroyed. Cool, mental model adjusted. They were a bigger problem than I thought. We hit it, we destroyed everything. Got it, cool. Then, whatever, eight months later, all of a sudden, we're like, we have to attack again? And it's because of the nuclear facility that we had already completely destroyed? So hold on. So now mental map updating that, once again, this is just all propaganda and being nonstop spun. So as I look at this, there are different threads. There is, okay, Iran nuclear program, bigger threat than I certainly ever realized. Trump is like every politician before him, just spin. He's just gonna tell you whatever he wants you to believe.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And so now I'm like, okay, parsing through all of that. You've got Iran has a nuclear program. They're unwilling to let people in. They do not seem to be willing to negotiate, no matter what Trump tells us regarding their nuclear program. And I'm taking that from things that they themselves have said out loud. So assuming that I can believe that, given that they're willing to pay a massive price for not just publicly saying, yeah, we're never gonna do this and letting the IAEA people in. So I can assume that they really are pursuing this. I look at Pickaxe Mountain and I say, okay, it's believable that they're doing something there with nuclear ambition. Cool, but I'm certainly not going to trust anything that Trump says about why we're doing it now, when he does it, whether we actually got what we wanted out of it or not.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  So it's like, you have to accept that you exist inside of this extraordinary, extraordinary cloud of propaganda. And it's impossible to tell what's really going on. So when I step back and I re-put this into my broader thesis about why Trump is doing all of this. He's trying to get on Mount Rushmore. He was trying to secure the funds for our very fragile economy, which is basically all financialized, all hinging on AI. We need the $2 trillion of investment. You've got the Gulf nations that realize, Jesus Christ, we've got to stop doing all this war bullshit. Ultimately, even if we never run out of oil, people are gonna transition away from it. There's far more energy coming out of the sun. So how do we diversify? So they decide they're gonna get in on the investing in America game.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  And so now we've got all these foreign dollars flowing in. You've got some of the biggest capital raisers in the known universe out of the UAE. And so it's like, okay, God, when you start re, instead of always falling into the myopic of Trump says these were, and Trump is just a stand-in for whatever politician is making noise, noises from their mouth. And it's like, okay, this politician is saying this thing. But hold on, I need to plug that back into the far broader, far more complex thing to actually stay grounded on what's really happening. So with all of that said, I think this is Trump looking for things to blow up

• 45:52Speaker 00

  because he has a need to prosecute this war from the air. If the reality is that we've only ever degraded their nuclear ambitions, we have not, not their ambitions, their ability to actually manifest their ambitions, which I don't think have been dwindled at all. So we've only sort of touched it. We're in a bigger quagmire than we thought. So even the most successful thing that we did, drop these bunker buster bombs through vent shafts and destroy the Fordow facility and supposedly bury their enriched materials, that, okay, that was only a small piece of what may be going on.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  We almost certainly have information coming out of Israel to their, a part of their incentive seems to be to keep that war going. And so they have an incentive to tell the US what is needed for us to keep bombing. But Trump already wants to be true anyway. So regardless of whether that's coming out of them, that just may speak to the specific thing that he's hitting, but almost certainly isn't what's driving his behavior for the reasons that I just walked through. And so as you take all of that in, I think it's far better to understand this as Trump is continuing to try to destroy things that he thinks will bring Iran to the negotiating table in a way where he has complete control of the outcome. And he doesn't want to destroy the civilian infrastructure

• 47:17Speaker 00

  because I think he's still holding on to the, one of the ways for me to get on Mount Rushmore is to normalize relationships with Iran. To do that, I can't completely destroy their economy. So I have to break as many things as I can. Nuclear is the safest. It sticks with the public messaging that we're doing, regardless of what's real. It sticks with the public messaging. So I'm gonna keep hammering that home. I'm gonna keep trying to bomb anything and everything that I can tied to that because that's gonna get the least amount of backlash. And so it, something like that, I think, is the most likely answer here. Not that this is like some super logical thing, not that this is going to solve our problem. It almost certainly won't.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  But that's where it plugs in in the extraordinarily messy reality of what was meant to be in Trump's mind Venezuela 2.0 and instead is becoming Iraq, Afghanistan from the air.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  I'm struggling with this, right? Because that makes sense. But then we see reports of Trump getting, signing the deal with Saudi Arabia to provide them with a civilian nuclear program and potentially, you know, uranium enrichment. We already know that the GCC plays friends, frenemies, enemies with other peoples in the region. I can secretly fund Hezbollah and act like I don't have nothing to do with them. They're just some crazy rebels. What is to stop Saudi from, so it seems like we want to make this region more stable. And I'm not sure how another nuclear program outside of Israel would help that.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Well, so the giving Saudi Arabia nuclear weapons is a extremely large red flag for me. So this is, one of the things that people said is, listen, part of the reason you don't want Iran to have nukes is that the entire region then is gonna say, bro, you gotta give me some nukes. So this was another reason that I thought, I don't think that we're doing as much damage to the Iranian facilities as we are publicly saying that we're doing. Because clearly Saudi is gonna know a lot more about it. Trump is gonna know a lot more about it. And now these two are holding their hands up. They're gonna point you at the civilian thing. But it does say that this potentially opens the door to uranium enrichment in the Kingdom's territory.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  So again, they'll say, no, no, no, we're just gonna keep this all like to 2%, 3% or whatever is needed for civilian. But just like the Iranians, when they felt that it was justified by their own internal logic, they were going to start enriching up to 60%. You can see Saudi going, well, okay, the US gave us a nuclear program. We're now enriching locally. They've pieced out of the area. This is very unstable. And so now we're just gonna proliferate. And so that's one of those where I'm like, oof, I do not love seeing this going wider. But you've got the, Israel on the down low. Everybody assumes that they have nuclear weapons. They've never admitted it. But everybody assumes that they have nuclear weapons.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Iran, obviously racing to get nuclear weapons. Again, of their own admission, you don't need to believe Trump. And I know people are gonna say, what do you mean? Like, Khomeini said that like, we have a fatwa or whatever against it. And there's no way, we would never do it. Bullshit. You, you had people, literally ministers in the government say, we were trying to do it and we just couldn't keep it a secret. So it's like, uh, so that argument to me is completely nonsensical. Now, he may have said you can't strap it to a warhead. But it, if you're building it all so that should the moment arise that you're, yeah, okay, go ahead now, strap it to the warhead. So that, this feels like we're marching in that direction where you're just getting proliferation across the region. I wouldn't want to see it anywhere.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  If I could snap my fingers and poof, nobody has a nuclear weapon, including the US, that'd be a much better place to be. But alas, we have it. And so any additional amount of proliferation should send up red flags for people.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And in the meantime, gas is just gonna get more expensive, back to $4. So there you go, folks.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  In general, I feel like this is one of those wait and see moments where I want to comment on every new update coming out of Iran, but I feel like until a boot is deployed, until like this nuclear deal is something, but until it actually becomes formalized and signed, because there's been a lot of MOU pump fakes and things like that.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Maybe less than I would read it as a wait and see, it's understanding that we don't know where this is going to go yet. So it's about building a mental model and saying, okay, here's my prediction, then watching to see if your prediction comes true. If your prediction comes true, then it's like, okay, I had an accurate enough mental model. If it doesn't come true, then it's like, okay, there was a breakdown in my mental model. Let me go find this out. So one of the ways that that happened to me recently, and it was incredibly, I think it's going to be incredibly useful. What it forced me to update my mental model was oil never hit $200 a barrel. Why? Like, we ended up, when, when we had the MOU and it seemed like, okay, maybe we really are going to reach peace. It was like, oh, that's why. And then we went back to war, like as aggressive

• 52:29Speaker 00

  as in, as in the beginning, and prices didn't go back up as much. So it was like, wait, what? And then that got me looking at oil futures, the long tail, all of that, and realizing, whoa, the global economy may be in a much worse position than I thought. And so that was me, mental model, here's my expectation. Oh, expectation did not come true. I'm not wasting time defending myself and saying, oh, I got something wrong. No, I didn't. You don't understand. It's, which is what every fucking asshole in the world essentially does. I have the same impulse, but you can stop yourself from doing it and just go, oh, actually, I don't need to be right. What I need to do is find the right answer. So I always think it is unwise of people to say things like, I'm not going to take a

• 53:11Speaker 00

  position on this. I think it's far better to say, okay, listen, here's my position right now, but I'm like way at the headline level, or Jesus, I've only done a couple of hours of research on this. There's no way that I have this map correctly, but I'm going to say out loud, this is where I think this is going, so that I can see if I'm thinking about this right or not. But people don't do that. They either stay silent, quietly building a mental model and just not wanting to say out loud because they don't want to be held accountable. Or because they say their position out loud, then they feel they have to defend it until the end of time, which is super fucking stupid. Now, I understand the, especially if you're a YouTuber or a TikToker or whatever, the financial incentives to always be right are pretty extraordinary. But that's why you're going to see a ton

• 53:56Speaker 00

  of turnover of people who will disappear, because for a while, their hot take was the hot take. And when it stops being the hot take, they just move on. And you're stuck now. You're trapped, because you built your whole identity around, I'm for or against this thing. And I think that really is a trap.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  You try to become like a puppet of that thing. You try to bring it back. You try to reignite your hot take.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  And you just look dumb. Like, people just end up like writing you off, because it's, you've been, either you've ideologically captured yourself, or your audience has ideologically captured you, but you're stuck now in a box.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then for another, a quick hit, Trump has another round of tariffs, 100% tariffs on generic drugs.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  After two years.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  After two years. It starts off at 0%. The goal of the tariff is to bring back manufacturing locally.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Have to.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  I know this is a drum that you beat a lot, so I wanted to kind of, kind of help you set the stage for this. I know in the short term, 0%, that gives people the incentive to transition. That way they could build plants and not lose money in the front end. But then at two years, the price being, the price hiking up could hurt.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think this is actually really interesting. So what you have going on is Trump is taking a Hamiltonian approach. So Hamilton looked at the world and said, okay, listen, for America to become the greatest country ever, because remember when they started, bro, we, we were not big on the global stage at all. And so we had to find a way to get there. And Hamilton, being as brilliant as he was, realized there are two things you need to do. One, you have to be protective. So you're going to have to block people from bringing their goods into your country. And so you're going to do that with a tariff. And then the second thing, and by the way, if people want to fight about who pays the tariff, we can happily do that. But nonetheless, its function is

• 55:53Speaker 00

  it does stop things from coming into your country. And then the second thing is using subsidies to direct industry. So what's fascinating is Hamilton and Xi Jinping sound very familiar. So those two, like, there's, there's a lot of similarity. Now, Hamilton had massive fears about authoritarian power. So he was a big proponent of checks and balances. But it's very, very interesting that one of the things that has made China as successful as it is, is they direct industry. And so they go, okay, we're still going to make you guys compete because we can't lose the price signal. However, we're going to, in

• 56:32Speaker 00

  a very, I'm early in this research, but I think that China may be the perfect example of a fascistic government, in that everything, when you start looking, again, I'm early, but when you start looking at what fascism really is, like going back to Italy and the definitions that they were putting forward, for like totalitarianism and what it all meant, is that you've got the, what they called the corporatization of the nation, what they weren't, it's a small part of it, but people take the read that, oh, this just means that like the Nazis, it's like industry and the government work together. Yes, it's a part of it, but it's ultimately a small part. What's really going on is you're using

• 57:17Speaker 00

  the word corporation to mean corpus, body, like the old Latin root or Greek root, I don't know, one of the two, probably Latin, root of the word, getting at everything, the entire nation functions as one body. And so it's a very collectivist mindset. So it's like, okay, hey, cool. You can run your car company, BYD, whatever, but you're going to do what we tell you to do. And so we might allocate funds to you, because we think that there's something very specific that needs to happen for the corpus to thrive. But whether it's you, whether it's another car company, whatever, doesn't matter. You guys have to compete amongst each other, because we've learned our lesson from Mao,

• 57:58Speaker 00

  despite what fucking Hassan Piker is going to tell you. We learned our lesson from Mao. We're never going to repeat that. But we do want to be able to get our entire nation functioning as one body. And so when you look at Hamilton through that lens, it is the, it's a, I'm terrified of top-down authoritarian control, so we're not going to do that. So it isn't fascism. But what we are going to do is recognize that if we want to become a superpower, we have to have the right vision for the future, which in America's case was to become an industrial powerhouse. We have to have the right vision of the future. We've got to block people that would hollow out our industry by shipping us things that are cheaper than we can make it ourselves. So we're going to stop that from happening.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  We're going to say, you have to build here. And then we're going to create incentive structures to make sure that people actually do that. And so between blocking and incentivizing, if you have the right vision of the future, you build America.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Or in China's case, you build China. And it is extraordinary. And so it's interesting, even though I think everybody probably rightly trusts Trump a lot less than they might be willing to trust Hamilton. But nonetheless, it is a return to that, like, oh, we, the only way for America to not become the British Empire and succumb to China is to do what Trump is putting forward, which is to go back to a Hamiltonian protect and incentivize manufacturing here in the US. And so Hamilton's vision rode on the back of a really strong,

• 59:36Speaker 00

  quite brilliant idea, which is if you don't control your own manufacturing, you don't control your destiny. And so that's where we're at. We've completely hollowed out America and America's manufacturing. And so we just can't do it. We have got to bring this stuff back. And anything that we deem to be important to national security, we've got to be making that here in the US. And right now, we basically make nothing in the US anymore.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  That's a very good point. All right, we got some super chats.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Yes, we do. First up from Marushia Dark 316, CCP's oil demand decline could be tied to them hiding true population figures. Massive fires, floods, and sinkholes across the whole country killing thousands, if not millions, but they suppress all reporting on it. Plus COVID and one child.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  That is a really powerful insight that I have not talked about in months. And that's really powerful. So there was somebody that came out with something that said that their actual population could be off by hundreds of millions. And if that's true, and they're say closer to a billion instead of 1.4 billion, then it's like, things would be very, very different in China than we think. I haven't been able to verify that, so I don't know that that's true. But it is a very interesting read on if they are actually lying dramatically about their population, that would for sure explain some of the things we see, like the decline in oil. Now, how long that's been going on, that would be measured in decades.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  So it'd be maybe a little bit unexpected that we just see it now. But anyway, it almost certainly plays a factor, for sure.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Could we, let's save his second one to lead off our next topic.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Gotcha. Sype Steel says, thanks for pulling people back to the middle and teaching us to dig for truth. Trump's Thursday address said voting machines can't be trusted, but the compromised data was largely public. Is he staging a midterm emergency?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the I am a huge proponent that we have created the conditions in which there is no election integrity. And so now it's, um, is there actually mass scale voter fraud? I don't know yet, but have we created the, um, possibility for illegal aliens or even just non-citizens to vote? Yes, we have. Should we immediately correct that? Yes, we should. Um, so we'll see in the fullness of time how much fraud actually took place. But we went from there's no fraud. This isn't happening at all, uh, to, okay, well, there's certainly the conditions for

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  fraud to actually, yes, there is fraud and there's a bunch of it. Um, and so there's a guy right now that's on trial in California. He had, I think, 71 names and 40 ballots already filled out in his house. So he was obviously doing it and using mail-in ballots as a way to get those in. Uh, you have what New Jersey just disclosed, which is 6,600, um, non-US citizens that were accidentally registered to vote. And I think at least 400 of them actually did vote. Uh, now Trump is saying that number is actually over 30,000. We'll see. I don't trust anything that any politician says just off the bat, uh, but certainly don't Trump, trust Trump to say true numbers. But that's what they're putting forward.

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  So we'll see in the fullness of time what that ends up being. Um, but if you guys don't know, on Tuesday, New Jersey Governor, uh, Mickey Sherrill, I think is how you say her name, uh, confirmed that roughly the 6,600 non-citizens were registered to vote in the state. So at least she came out and admitted it. Uh, the cause, according to her, was a software error in the motor vehicles commission's automatic voter registry system, but that company has since clapped back and said, bitch, you're out of your mind. Uh, you guys had to certify that those people were legit. The system would have said, hey, this person's a non-citizen and you pushed them through anyway. So we'll see if this ends up being another Dominion thing where, uh, Dominion ends up winning their massive lawsuit. Uh, and if these guys are like, also politicians be lying, our system is not the problem. We'll see.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  This is going to need to play out in the fullness of time. But between June of 2023 and June of 2024, people applying for driver's licenses answered no when asked if they were a US citizen. The system registered them anyway. Uh, and so again, the number's around 400 that actually voted, uh, they were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated. So it's not like this is a pure Democrat thing. So we're going to need to let all of this play out to find out what's actually going on. That's why I think all of this is best read as we have created a problem for us with a lack of voter integrity. And I don't trust either side, uh, to be counting the numbers correctly. So we are going to need to do something. I don't think I've made a secret of, I love people needing to prove that they are a citizen. Yes, it's going to be a pain in the ass.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Got to do it. Sorry. You can't just be like, oh, it's too fucking hard and then let anybody and everybody vote, which we have certainly created a way for that to happen. Um, again, without me needing to know how much it has happened. I know that there's incentive and I know that there's a method and you put those two together and you've got a problem.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I want to hit on the incentive piece right now because with Trump in office, Biden out, borders closed, um, fraud and, um, abuse has been investigated. JD Vance is the fraud czar and they're withholding funds to California and to Minnesota and all these other blue states. That to me removes the incentive for illegals to vote in the country right now. Your pitch used to be that, your original pitch was, we have an incentive for illegals to vote because if they vote for certain people, they get more free stuff.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I think that that incentive is now removed because especially in a midterm election, you're not going to get people that are one, going to have that flood that's going to give them the free things. And I'm still a big proponent that Trump is using this as just another distraction to make it, he's creating a problem that he himself created and then he's going to solve it when he, it's not even a thing. I similar, see Iran war. We didn't worry about the Serat Hamus. Now the Serat Hamus is the biggest thing in the world. Now we need to close it. It was open to begin with. I think with this voter fraud, it's the same thing. And I have one more thing that I could pass the mic back. I think that what the governor of New Jersey did, and that's my home state, so I'm biased a hundred percent, was she moved with integrity. Hey, I found this error. This is what happened. This is the timeline of it happened. This is the correction and the methods that we're taking to rectify. That's what you want to happen.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  But what's going to happen now is a bunch of people are going to claim that information and run with it and say, see, they admitted 600,000. That means there's 7 million and that inflation to me is the issue. Graham Plattner in Maine just had to step down because a woman said that she had inappropriate relations with him 10 years ago. The same day, not the same day, a couple of days later, but Trump paid a civil suit for officially being guilty of rape on the civil. He didn't have to step down. He didn't have to answer. He didn't have to address it. He didn't have to do a press conference. So I think that there's this double standard that is starting to like peak, whereas when somebody actually leads with integrity in this current, um, ecosystem and say something like, hey, we caught some fraud. It's not right. This is what we're going to do rectify. Instead of people saying, thank you for actually doing the right thing.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  It's not like, see, that's an excuse to now all these biases and all the fake information that I've been passing. It validates that now we need to disenfranchise more people and not make them vote. Like, I, I just want to just draw that line in the sand because I think it's easy to say because this New Jersey thing was discovered, there's 16 other million cases, when that's not the case. I, to me, it doesn't seem like the case.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  Um, I think that's a very fair read of somebody who has a internal value system, a set of core beliefs is being internally consistent with both their values and their beliefs. And so it becomes a question of do we align on what we believe to be true? And the answer is no. So that's where it's like, um, I'm very glad that I don't get to adjudicate this because I don't have enough facts. So I want to see this play out in the fullness of time. Like you, I do not trust politicians. I don't like stuff like this being weaponized. If she really did just do the honorable thing, then yeah, people should celebrate that. That's awesome. And the fact that she is in a blue state, I think, New Jersey?

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  It's purple, but yes, blue right now.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  So, um, that shouldn't count against her in any way, shape or form, in my opinion. So if when they go in and they find that actually the reality is that she's trying to underplay it and she's slow rolling it or whatever, and it was really 30,000 and they knew that, or she knew that, um, they were doing this and we find that her chief of staff ends up, you know, having been caught on camera saying something, then it's like I'll look at it differently. But for now, I'm perfectly happy with the read. She's handling this the right way. She found a thing. She's speaking up. We should celebrate that until evidence proves otherwise because you want people in blue states or red states when it's flipped to be rewarded for coming forward and saying, actually that thing that you guys are talking about on the national level, even though you're not my party, I agree that it's the right thing. And so, hey, here we go.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  I'm bringing this forward and I'm here for the country first and my party second. And fuck yeah, I love that. I think that's brilliant. Now, the base assumption that you and I share differently is I look at the incentive system and I go, there's too much incentive here. Uh, we've made it too possible. People are voting for things on its face from where I'm sitting are patently absurd. And when I go, oh, they're doing that because they want to facilitate all this, um, non-citizen voting, then I'm like, now it makes perfect sense. I get heard that we don't share that belief, but that's my belief. And so when I look at it from that lens, I'm like, well, nobody should act on it because I believe it. I'm very glad that it's being investigated. People are looking into it and we're going to find out.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  I would love to see things where we just shore it up. And so if it's like the thing that I'm proposing as a way to shore it up is non-effective, cool, like I'm very open. I don't need it to be my thing, but like we need a thing to prove that people have a right to vote because we're seeing all the evidence, even if, um, for some people it like it's sort of sub-threshold or whatever. It's like, but we see that it's happening and there is an incentive and I'll address that because you're saying, I think that incentive has been removed. But the reason I don't think that incentive has been removed is that one, still at the state level, you have it. So the state may not be getting the funds that they were getting before, but the state can still pay for a lot of things. They're just not being reimbursed for it.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  So it'll be interesting to see how they handle that. And then two, Trump doing something that could still be challenged by the courts and all that is very different than this has been done nationwide and it's just not happening anymore. And then also remember that part of the reason that the DSA is so gung ho to get rid of the Senate is the Senate is a great equalizer. The Senate says, I don't care how many people you have in your state. Every state gets two senators, period, end of story. What that puts a check on is the majority tyrannizing the minority, which you want. You want these, from where I'm sitting, you aggressively want these checks and balances because the human propensity to abuse power. And so by creating this and saying, it doesn't matter how many people you have, we have a

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  check against that. What you stop is the congressional abuses that can be done by getting illegal aliens into the country. Because the way that your census works is it doesn't matter if they're a citizen or not, it just matters that they were there at the time the census was taken. And that does control how many congressmen that they have representing them and it's a zero-sum game. So now there is an incentive for every state to get as many people in as possible. And then, um, those states have an incentive to get them to vote in that state for them to retain power because they are likely to vote one way. Now, it is definitely a complication for that strategy if the federal government calls bullshit and is like, I'm not sending you any money.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  Now that needs to be done in accordance with the laws. And so I don't know that Trump's doing it in accordance with the laws. So it's very possible that gets struck down by the courts. We'll see. That's going to have to go through the system. So on that, I'm like, directionally, it's interesting. It makes me feel a little better, but I don't think by any stretch of the imagination, it solves the actual problem.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  You said, if I can bring in the Odyssey any natural way, I would like to. This is a point where I would like to bring it in.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  Bring it in.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  Spoilers for those that didn't see it. I think the beautiful thing that he'd done in that.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  Christopher Nolan.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Christopher Nolan, yes, is that the notion that the Trojan horse, while it was a great move militarily, it destroyed the social fabric of that society at the time.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  To me, I think there's a normalization that's happening right now. And every time we shrug at a corruption claim, every time we, oh, that's just Trump. We're normalizing a government official who doesn't care about the people, who puts himself first, who wants to infringe himself, things like that. And don't get me wrong, every, Bill Clinton went in broke, came out like a multi, multimillionaire, owns half of Haiti. Obama came in worth a couple hundred thousand dollars, he walked away with a nine-figure book publishing deal, Netflix deal, speaking. So by no means is, is all these presidents leaving broke, other than Jimmy Carter. And that's why he's still alive and living good. Like, you know what I mean? Like, but I just think that there is something to. I don't want to be the alt guy, but there is something to, we are losing the integrity of our political system.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  And it's not a Republican, it's not a Democrat thing, it's an American thing.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  So like, I think a true patriot, we have to realize that like, hey, we have to learn how to talk again, we have to learn how to be partisan again, we have to learn to say.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  Bipartisan?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Bipartisan, yes, like, we have to, red and blue need to work together. We have to learn that, hey, if you break the law, you should be held accountable for that, and not just how I interpret the law, but like, hey, man, if you're hanging out with 12-year-olds, you should probably not get out, you should probably not get pardoned for that. And at the same time, if you are illegally changing the integrity of the voting system and you get caught, yeah, you should go to jail. I don't want anybody with 1,700 ballots in their backseat to be like, hey, what? No, they just, like, no, go to, go straight to jail, please. But I just think we're, we're playing this game where I'm stepping over corruption cases, I'm stepping over fraud cases, like, I'm Matrix dodging international sanctions and crimes against humanity and genocides and all these things to land at, well, it's because I don't want trans people in the bath. And it's like, what are we doing? Like, what's the actual talking point?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  How are we as a society going to progress from this moment? Because if it just becomes a team game, and I'm gonna let your 1% fringe view ruin the 99% of people in America who want things better, we're spiraling down in that way.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to why I despise populism.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  And I can't believe people will go for populism like it's a good thing. Fuck everything about populism. It, it is everybody for themselves, all that matters is that I win. I'm so right, it doesn't matter how many people I have to kill, and I know everybody thinks I'm being hyperbolic, fucking read history, for the love of God, it's actually where it goes. And so are we really far from that in America? Boy, do I hope so. But is it where, this is why I am on like perpetual DSA watch, because their ideology ends in murder, plain and simple. It has, every time it's been tried in history, and it will every time it's been tried in history, for the reasons that I've laid out very carefully many times before, which is ultimately, people do not want to go along with what you're saying needs to be done in order to achieve your aim.

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  And so those people end up needing to be killed, and so they kill them. And oh, the great irony that the leftists that help authoritarians get into power end up being the ones that are killed. Anyway, it, it is psychotic, I don't want to see it, Drew, uh, yes, I agree with you. Your vision of patriotism is my vision of patriotism. It, it is one of the things that I love about doing this show with you, is that even though we have you lean a little left, I lean a little right, um, but you want the same outcome that I want. So it is, um, yes, everything to you, everything that you just said gets a big yes from me.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  Is that also your takeaway from the Odyssey? Or did you have a different take?

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's interesting, so now going to the Odyssey, um, I think, yes, that's certainly one of the takes that they're trying to put forward. I think that there's even more depth and complexity in terms of the moral takeaway of, um, did Odysseus win or lose in the end? Like, was that a price worth paying? It, it is, it is real, and by the way, is Odysseus the hero or the villain? And so there's a couple moments where he does something I consider so stupid that I really wanted to hate him. And then they, he will do things that are so redemptive that I'm like, was Homer really that gangster?

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  I like painting the picture of the human experience, or is this Nolan? So what I will say is, I was so moved by that movie, that between that and that, they play like, at the beginning of the screening I saw anyway, they played like three or four minutes of Dune Part Three. Those two things back to back were so powerful that I'm now thinking about like really making film a part of my life again. I was like.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  That's beautiful, let's go!

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  Yes, dude, I, I have been in the hinterlands of just absolute a loss of the thing.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  That the air horn, I love that.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  For people that don't know, I went to film school, film was my first love, like, I couldn't have been more passionate about it, and then it filmed, just sort of fell off. So I don't know if this is really a resurgence or not, but it was, um, it was incredible. So for anybody worried about, um, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey being woke, that is absurd. I am as anti-woke as you're going to get now, in full disclosure, I don't have a problem with race swapping, so if that is your like one and sole trigger, there are two characters, I guess, that you could be a little bit weird about from that perspective. First of all, um, Elliot Page does not play a great warrior, so don't be tense.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  He's not Achilles, like, that was fake news.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  All, all fake news, and the way that, um, he, they, I don't know.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  It's, uh, he and.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  He, him, perfect, so the way that he's portrayed in the movie is perfectly fine for somebody of slight stature.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  So just, it wasn't, that wasn't weird to me at all. Uh, and then, um, Helen of Troy being played by a beautiful black woman was not weird. If it had been played by Lizzo, I'm just gonna be honest, that I would have, I would have had beef just because she's morbidly obese.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Lizzo catches strays.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Hey, that was not a stray, that's a sniper bullet from across the room.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  I knew when I was shooting at.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that, that one, I would have had beef, but she is a beautiful woman. So anyway, um, I get it, it was, the only thing that I was like, okay, that one is a little jarring was, and I don't know if he's, um, Indian, but he certainly looks roughly Indian, the actor who says the line, we're all from Greece or whatever.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  And I was like, ah, oh, we could have handed that to somebody else, uh, that particular line, but.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  I heard some commentary on this, and we'll get back to the show, guys, but let us indulge you for a second.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Greek at the moment was similar to early America in the sense that if you go to the American North, there were white businessmen, Irish businessmen, Italian businessmen, black businessmen, and then you go to Italy and say that's where the slave trade and stuff like that was. So Greek, at that level of their empire, there could have been somebody who came from Indian descent that migrated into the country.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  That's why I was like, oh, that, that is something, that's not like, it's just a whole bunch of blond-haired, blue-eyed, white boys that would have been on the front line, so.

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  It would have, well, first of all, Greeks aren't blond-haired, blue-eyed, but yes. The reason that I would say you want to be a little more sensitive to that is that, hey, you're taking something from their lineage, it's one of the like foundational pillars of their mythology, and you have a line that references, literally a line that references Greek people, and you give it to somebody who is clearly not of that lineage, it would have been a wise, like, nod of thanks, if you will, to the culture that gave us, you know what I mean? In something where you're doing something, I don't have any beef with whatsoever, first of all, again, I just don't have a problem with the race swapping, that doesn't freak

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  me out, but, um, on that one, it's like, just like if I were gonna do a remake, or, you know, um, Black Panther Four or whatever, I wouldn't make T'Challa white. Like, there's just something, maybe I introduce a white guy, but I'm not making T'Challa white. There's just certain things, it's like, bro, you got one line about the Greeks, like, let that be delivered by somebody who is actually Greek, uh, would have just been way smarter from that perspective, not creating problems for himself. But the rest of it, I just, I can't stress enough, it is a non-fucking entity in the movie.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  It doesn't, it makes zero.

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  You don't think about it at all, when you're in the movie, it, it is just not, I went into it, like, I am here because I feel like I need to comment on the culture, I did not expect to get caught up in, holy shit, this is such a good movie, that I'm finding myself called back to the cinema like a fucking church. So like, that whole thing, I'm there to find out if this thing is woke, and it felt so like, it was deflating, because there just wasn't anything to grab on to.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  They didn't try to make, uh, Elliot Page, yes, uh, they didn't try to make him like a fucking gangster fighter. See the movie, you'll see very quickly. So anyway, all the landmines that people thought he was gonna step on, they're just non-existent. Helen of Troy even isn't like a big beat in the movie. It's like, yeah, so.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  And even how he showed her beauty in that way, like it was still.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  And also, by the way, it was, um, it was a movie about something else entirely. And they so deliver on the other thing, the bigger themes of the movie. You're just not gonna care about the other stuff. So anyway, I have a whole thesis. I haven't seen the Critical Drinkers response. I really resonate with his um, read on a lot of movies. I will be very interested to see if he succumbs. Because what I think is happening in all the um, internet pushback on it went like this. These guys were told that they were being psycho radicals for calling out how woke movies have become and video games, which is absolutely true.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  It was dire. We all lived through like fifteen years of trash in the name of like putting forward a message in film. So I, it was unreasonable the way that people responded to them. But these guys built an audience around being anti-woke. Then the trailer from Nolan comes out that has these nods to woke-ism and they lose their shit. And the broader world of people that feel like they've been ignored and gaslit. They go fucking ballistic, just absolutely ratioing to death the trailers. And so these guys now are like, look, fucking Nolan's fallen off. I can't believe he did this. And so they got so much like positive affirmations from their takedowns of the trailers

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  that I think they were a bit trapped. They have an audience that demands anti-woke rhetoric. Then they put out rhetoric like, yo, look at this trailer. They thought, oh my God, we're about to hit the motherload of like even fucking Nolan has succumbed to all this woke bullshit. And when they went and saw the movie, they had to dislike it. And so you got these early reviews where people literally were like, I just walked out. I've seen the movie. I am not now responding to headlines or trailers. I've seen the movie and it was lost and meandering. What the fuck? Hold the phone. This thing, my mic just did something weird, boys, be careful. Um, this whole thing is like, this movie will be studied for how seamlessly they jump in time. How well they handled that? I was like, whoa.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  It'll be bro.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  Bro. So I was like, that shit was done so well. This movie was three hours long and it felt like two, maybe. Like, I was never bored. I was never looking at my watch. I cannot believe how many beats they covered, how seamlessly he weaves these things together. Nolan, Nolan for me fucked up Tenet. I was just like, what, what happened there? So I'm not like a dick rider for Nolan, even though I think he is one of the greats in cinema right now. But when he fucks up, I'm just like, Tenet was unfortunate. Um, but he handled this so fucking well. So anyway, to me, this was Nolan at the peak of his powers. He messes with time even more deftly than he did in Memento, which was is truly one of the greats of cinema. Uh, so anyway, I hope people, even if you are as anti-woke as I am, that you will go give this movie a try.

• 1:23:58Speaker 00

  Because holy shit, it is phenomenal and asks a very deep fundamental question about what it means to be a good person. Ooh, ooh, it's so good. It's so good. And pay attention to the sun. Yeah. Boy, do I want to spoiler alert, talk about that shit.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  I gotta watch it again. No, I didn't. I feel like I missed that one. Okay.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  Like, like his son.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  I was like, I'm looking at this guy. I didn't even look at the sky yet. I was like, yeah, the sun is pretty. I like.

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  His, his child, his child and what that says about masculinity and oh my God, it's uh, yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Well, that's brilliant. Um, okay, we're back, guys. Uh, spoiler alert's over. Uh, no more. We didn't spoil it though.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, we were.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a thousands of year old story.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, but like, it's almost so old that you can't assume people know it.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  I guess, but I was watching it and I was like, all of high school was coming back to me. I was like, oh yeah, I remember highlighting that. I remember having to dissect that, like.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  And that's me. My high school, we didn't have to, like, we didn't have to read it. So people were like, oh my gosh.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Oh, is that just a me?

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no. There was internet discourse about that too. I seen that, like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I don't know.

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  You did or didn't, Brian? I read it.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And we both, we both from Jersey. So that's like interesting. Like we're twenty minutes away and then you read it. I didn't. So it's just, it's crazy. Um, okay, um, we're back. Um, let's go culture, cause a lot of friends of the show have done very interesting things and I would like to bring it up and kind of talk about it. Um, the first thing, low key, I need to call Brian Johnson just because he looks so different in all his side by side pictures started on like Impact Theory, like we are like his litmus test.

• 1:25:33Speaker 00

  I know, it's wild.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  So we definitely need to bring him back when his clone baby gets alive, but yeah, he just.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  This one is really fascinating. So, um, he put out a post, it was maximized for clicks, as one would expect. It starts, I just cloned myself as a newborn. Um, so the real punchline is that basically he's cloning his cells. And it is, talk about AI and one of the breakthroughs and what we're gonna be able to do with cells. Now, this is all writing on the back of something called not, um, Yakanama factors, Nama Yaka factors? Fuck. I think he's got it there. I always blank on this. It's, it's a Japanese guy's name. It's a scientist that figured out what are the Yamanaka factors. I'm almost certain that's true.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, here it is. Yamanaka.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, Yamanaka, alright. So, uh, Yamanaka factors are the thing that allow your cells to um, basically become pluripotent so that they can become anything again. So what is aging? Aging is this problem of your cells over time get the wrong methylation markers. Okay, I was explaining this to my wife. She seemed interested. I'm gonna run you guys through it. You'll let me know if chat's like bored out of their mind. Uh, but a speed run of the way that aging works goes like this. Um, your DNA, the full strand of everything you will ever need to produce in your body, eye cells, heart cells, running processes, all of it is in every single cell. The problem is each cell only needs like a tiny fraction of that. And so

• 1:26:52Speaker 00

  the um, cells have this incredible method of you wind up the DNA in such a way that only the DNA part that codes for that cell is exposed. So everything else is wrapped up. And so you know what a cell is by which part sticks out. And you put little markers on the part that sticks out so that you keep it uh, the way it is. Think of them like bookmarks. And that's called methylation. And so you go in and you take the cells with these methylation markers. And the little things that crawl over the DNA that read it and kick off the different proteins and things that it needs to make. It stops reading when it hits the right methylation marker and all that stuff. Okay.

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  When you age, that methylation, those markers get put in the wrong place, just because you're copying the cell over and over and over and over and over. These are actually physical processes. So the little thing runs around, it reads it and says, this is what I am, and it puts the markers back in the right place. Okay, so as you age, those markers get put in the wrong place. The DNA begins to unspool. And so now it's like, am I a heart cell or an eye cell? And so that heart cell becomes a little less effective at its job because it's mostly still a heart cell, but it's becoming something else a little bit as well. And so if you could perfectly methylate those again, get them tightened, so only the heart cell is sticking out. Your heart cell is going to literally get younger. And so this is what Brian Johnson is talking about, is he's saying

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  the future is gonna be where all of us take our cells at the earliest age possible, because you're accumulating all of this methylation mismarking. And so the cells are becoming de-differentiated. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take it at the healthiest point possible, gonna put it in a Petri dish, hit it with these Yamanaka factors. And we're going to actually send them back in time in that you're, um, you're actually de-differentiating them in the extreme. You're making them pluripotent. They can become any kind of cell. But then you re-differentiate them into the type of cell that you want them to be. And so now it becomes a young, as close to possible pristine version of that cell. And then you either grow an organ or whatever, or you re-inject it back into the body.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  And so now the body has those freshly methylated cells that function at the highest capacity. And so what you'll find is that people are literally cloning themselves and building their own organs and things in essentially vats. And then when they need them, they'll then put them back into their own body. It, this is right now probably the best thing we've got going in terms of radical life extension. Um, so this is very interesting. It's very real. It's actually been going on for a while. And so he's putting a top spin on it. Um, that, you know, it's like, obviously people are expecting that there's a little baby somewhere of him. That is not true. It's just his cells.

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  Uh, but it is, it is coming. This is the future of medicine. Yes, in the beginning, it will be very expensive, but this will come down in cost massively. And probably relatively rapidly, the only thing that will fuck that up is our absolute disaster of a uh, public-private healthcare system, which people should be furious about. They're furious about it for the wrong reasons, but isn't that typical? Um, but that might be something that slows down the um, cost coming down. But the cost will come down as AI comes more on board, as energy becomes cheaper. Um, that will become available to everybody in the fullness of time.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think breaking it down to the first principles perspective is the thing that makes it most interesting to me, because to your point, aging is this big gray fog area, it's hair, it's color, it's energy, it's all these things. But then when you break it down to the cellular level, it's really just like, no, your next cells are getting a little lazy and they stopped pulling it up. So let's just strengthen your next cells. And then, okay, your backs. And then these little small changes at the molecular level have these the knock on effects with everything else. And it's very interesting to build it up that way.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  Very.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Uh, okay. Another friend of the show, Balaji, um, is trying to start his own nation. Um, it's very interesting with the network school. We had him on the show. He broke it down. His philosophy on the headline level is it's not left versus right. It's not good versus bad. It's not tech versus rural. It's more so thought of ideas, not necessarily geography. I know if I don't know if I described that right.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  I mean, you're getting very, very close. So it's value system over geography and people will end up linking up based on their beliefs. And because we live in a networked age where people can find each other on the internet, that, um, you're not going to have people group up anymore based on geography. Now, I have long told Balaji that he's crazy about that and that there is going to be an element of geography to this. And he ran smack bang into this very recently. Uh, if you guys don't know, so first of all, his full name's Balaji Shrinivasan. He's incredible. He's a former CTO of Coinbase, literally one of the smartest guys in tech. He's an absolute just brilliant machine. The more you can interface with him, the better your life will be. Uh, in August of 2024, he launched

• 1:31:50Speaker 00

  the network school, which is based on the back of that idea that I was just walking you through. And it is a, um, it's a school that's in Forest City, Malaysia. So there was like, uh, they built something up, some like big, like, um, set of apartments or like an old, um, I forget, it was built as something else that ends up falling through. He sees that like, there's all this space that he can move people in. So he ends up moving a bunch of people in there. It's, it's about an hour from Singapore. He's put roughly $25 million into it so far and brought all of these like tech positive entrepreneurs that share his network state mentality. And so these are presumably very entrepreneurial minded people. They are all people that believe in this idea that we're all going

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  to group up around, um, ideas via technology. And that's going to be the way that we build a state that we are, even though we're geographically dispersed, we are all, um, adherents of this same ideology. And so we will link up in ways, um, and vote on things together as a collective, even though we're distributed. Now, I hope it's not lost on anybody that as this really started to gain momentum, what was the first thing he did? He brought everybody together physically, because that's just how humans are wired. Geography is always going to play a role in this. And in mid-July, an activist group called Malaysian Protest for Palestine posted allegations that the campus had become a gathering place for Israeli

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  entrepreneurs. This, this makes me laugh. Now, look, I get it. This is, I'm probably on, uh, the very unpopular end of this debate, but nonetheless, I think people are, um, mapping everything to Israelis bad is a very weird way to approach this. But nonetheless, uh, these guys went absolutely ham because Malaysia just does not play with Israelis. Uh, the country does not recognize Israel and Israeli passport holders can't enter without written permission from the Home Affairs Ministry. Uh, so the ministry is like, yo, we're going to go in, we're going to find out if this is really true. They opened an investigation, immigration officers raid Balaji's campus. They checked hundreds

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  of passports. The initial result is that all 266 foreigners that were actually on site that valid travel documents. Cool. We could have left it there. But Balaji is not going to let that ride. And I think honestly, he was right to make the move I'm about to tell you about. But he just was like, I need to know for sure whether we can move forward or not, because now that I see that you guys don't like that we're here and that there's going to be some contention, we, we need to like really pin this down. So on July 16th, he posts a video addressed directly to the Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim. And he pauses because he, he's got like this big, uh, it's like a hundred and 22 million dollar expansion

• 1:34:36Speaker 00

  that he's planning. He pauses that and demands, put that in quotes, but a written guarantee, call it an MOU or a specific economic zone provision, whatever. But he wants to know that the network state is welcome. And he warned that, hey, if we're not welcome here, fair enough, but we're going to relocate, right? So it's like, look, we're bringing a lot of entrepreneurial minded people here. We're going to be paying taxes. Like this is a good thing for you guys. We're bringing investment. And they were basically like, yeah, fuck you. Five days later, the local city council gave their answer. It revoked network school's business license, ordered all operations to cease by July 22nd, which is today? Yeah. Uh, and they stated that you're basically running classroom activities

• 1:35:19Speaker 00

  from premises, uh, licensed as offices. So like a technicality, you guys are operating a second location with no license at all. Again, a technicality. And so Johar's, the, I think the city that they're in, the chief minister backed the decision, called for continued investigation into the alleged misuse of second passports. So it's like, okay, sure, we go, we raid, everybody's legit, but what if they really are Israeli and they just are using like another passport from a different country? So Balaji then called the shutdown reports, fake news, you guys are over blowing this. He said that the issues are just administrative, everything is good. And he now basically realizes that, uh, the network state needs an actual state and they need somebody that's going to be friendly

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  to them. And this is the thing that I've been trying to get Balaji to understand for a long time is that, bro, at some point, this is going, you're going to exist in a geography that geography is not going to like that you're trying to be, um, extrajudicial, that you're doing things that don't line up with their laws. And that, that's the whole point of your endeavor is that you're trying to create like this new thing based on new beliefs, new values. And so I'll be interested to see how this plays out. They end up getting a document signed with Kazakhstan, I believe. And so we'll see, maybe they're going to move there. Maybe things will be more friendly. But the game that he's now realizing he's playing is, yeah, we have to be somewhere. And so I know at one point rumor was, I don't

• 1:36:46Speaker 00

  know if it was actually him, but rumor was people, uh, Peter Thiel and others were looking at creating basically a nation out in international waters. I don't know if Balaji ends up doing something like that. We'll see. But that's a lot of infrastructure. So my gut is that he's going to do something like a deal with Kazakhstan or somewhere else where they have a government that's friendly to them, that wants those tax dollars, quite frankly. But my question is, what happens when you run afoul of what they've got going? You can hope that you become economically important enough that they'll grant you, I don't know if it's going to end up being something like the Vatican or what. Uh, but humans like being physically adjacent to the people that they're dealing with. That's never going

• 1:37:28Speaker 00

  to go away. And if you're trying to have a different set of governing principles, even if they're not specifically laws, you're going to run into problems like this. Uh, so we'll see if this is something that is navigable, even in a hyper connected world. I think there's geography is always going to rear its head.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  You said, until you have governing laws, it won't, so like, it's not the collection of people, it's the government, like?

• 1:37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you're in a jurisdiction governed by Kazakhstan, uh, Malaysia, US, wherever, and you guys are trying to do your own thing, if you, uh, perfectly adhere to every rule regulation of that government and then like give some extra restrictions or whatever to your group, then it's going to be fine. The second you try to give extra benefits, now you've got a problem. So they were bringing Israelis, as the allegations go, into Malaysia, which is a hard pass from Malaysia. So now they're realizing, uh-oh, we, we can further restrict, but we can't further grant. And so it's just like states. So you've got

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  um, Mumdani saying, I'm going to arrest, um, Netanyahu if he comes to New York, and then the federal government reminding him, a dumbass, uh, you can't do that. So that is what Balaji is waking up to, is that there, there are additional restrictions that he can put on his own people, but he certainly can't grant them rights that the government that they're operating inside of, um, don't already give.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Is that like the system like, cause on paper, I understand what he's trying to do. And there is a sense of being free and independent of the bureaucracy that inherently comes with government. But is it just, that's not how humans work?

• 1:39:16Speaker 00

  I'm not even sure that he's trying to be, um, what he's trying to do is say that humans gravitate towards values. That's the thing that ultimately unites us. It isn't geography. Historically, it had to be geography because we didn't have a way to find each other to connect. Uh, we didn't have, um, blockchain technology to run contracts without needing adjudication, things like that. Um, now that we have that technology, then there's no reason that we need to be bound by geography. And my pitch to him is that's just not the way that the human mind operates. We're always going to want to share space. We're always going to be subject, subject to a power structure.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  And so even going into international waters is you saying that, hey, um, I know there are rules about international waters. I, it's, it is more lenient and so I'm going to go do these things in international waters that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. But you're still, um, by the way, uh, pirates could come and raid you. And so now you're going to have to have your own military. And so like all of a sudden, it's like, you're really trying to be a new country. And that is the part that I'm trying to, um, it's the part that I'll be very interested to see. My current mental model is there will be no way to do this. They all have a bunch of people that are effectively in a club. They're sharing ideas.

• 1:40:34Speaker 00

  Maybe they're, um, you know, running blockchain contracts, but all those contracts are going to be subject to the laws, the jurisdictions that they're in. And they're never going to actually be able to be essentially extra jurisdiction, jurisdictional, where they're outside of that. So, um, yeah, I just think that's going to be forever a friction. They will literally find themselves having to create their own state and then defend that state. And then be physically located somewhere. And now you're just back to the same problem. You may have found each other over the network, but you weren't able to actually govern over the network. Unless you're willing to, uh, submit to the local authorities.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  In the future, the AI, the four possibilities, we did talk about virtual worlds and kind of operating in there. Is this a technical limitation? And when we're all jacked in and I could be in a LA basement, but mentally I'm in the network state in network villastan, would that be like dissolved, like this?

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  It won't solve it because what will ultimately happen is think about like right now, even, um, in video games. So there's a big thing about, uh, is this gambling is what you're doing gambling? And so, or trading cards. So Japan wants to sell their Pokemon cards in America. And it's like, well, there are gambling laws and those things are, um, there are, somebody debated me on this at one point. They think I'm wrong about the gambling laws. I'm pretty sure I'm right.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  Certainly it is true in video games that there are some things that are considered gambling. And so there are specific regulations that you have to like adhere to. And so that doesn't matter that that is being generated in a different country. What matters is the country in which is being played. And so if you're not adhering to the gambling laws of the US, it doesn't matter that the game is made in Japan or China. It's like, we have laws and so you're going to have to adhere to that. And so similar, you're living inside of a virtual world, but your body is still in a physical jurisdiction. And so if you come out and somebody complains that, hey, that virtual world that you created, it's actually an economy. And it's predatory practices or whatever, suddenly you'll find yourself, it doesn't matter that you're teleporting to,

• 1:42:36Speaker 00

  uh, I forget what you called it, virtual, but, um, that is, you're still going to have to deal with the jurisdiction that you're, you know, your bed exists in.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Shout out to Jesus is coming soon, not because his username is banger, like because he bought up Dolly the lamb. Do you remember Dolly the lamb? I feel like I've gotten, um, Mandela affected. So this was like early nineties, they cloned the lamb, they put it on TV. It was like nightly news TV. And then we never talked about cloning again. Like it was just like, yeah, we did this cool thing. We're done. We, we solved it and they just like walked into the darkness with it. So I'm glad I actually seen that. Cause for a second I was like, wait, I feel like we don't talk about that no more. So. Is there a 1% conspiracy theory in you that's like, yeah, they're definitely cloning people?

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  No. Oh, are they cloning people? Well, I think they're getting so close to it in China. And look, they arrested the guy. So this wasn't like, uh, China technically probably didn't sanction this. Um, but yeah, he, I don't remember if it was cloning. It probably wasn't cloning. But he definitely did, um, he was gene editing the embryo. Uh, so things like that, the, the thing that freaks people out about cloning may not overlap perfectly with gene editing, but it probably should. Uh, so it's us controlling exactly what fetus ends up developing.

• 1:43:58Speaker 00

  And so whether you break a, you know, a skin cell off and turn it into a human, which you actually, we haven't proven you can do yet, but there's nothing in the science that precludes it other than us pursuing it, other than people saying just morally, that's, uh, repugnant. But that is, um, from a, what we're able to do technologically, I would expect that to happen at some point in the future because we can do it. And we will certainly be editing embryos. That is for sure. Like it's already happened.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Designer babies are definitely a thing.

• 1:44:29Speaker 00

  Word. Awesome. Well, thank you guys all. Today was a big day for super chats. Very, very appreciated. You guys were extraordinarily generous. We do not ever take that support for granted. So much appreciated. Speaking of support to straight arrow news, you guys are dope. We're so grateful. What you put out into the world is fantastic. If you guys don't know about straight arrow news, they are all about giving you something straight down the middle. It is the facts. There's no spin. So go to san.com forward slash Tom Bilyeu so you can get the unbiased truth on the stories that matter. Uh, and our goal, as you guys may remember, is to get to a hundred app downloads. We want to keep this partnership rocking. So if you haven't already, go there. There's no manipulation, no bias, no agenda. Just discover the facts and the context you need to make sense of the story yourself.

• 1:45:14Speaker 00

  Get beyond the chaos and anxiety of biased media. We know that it's all out there. All right. Love you guys bunches. And we have another ITU masterclass coming up Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm. I mean, it's free, free, free, free. And I will show you how to use AI to launch a company. Make sure that you join me again, Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm. Love you guys. We'll see you on Friday. Peace.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  You've, some people want you to say your, your sign off. Be legendary.

• 1:45:40Speaker 00

  Oh, really? That, that's like, we want to make sure that's a must.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Somebody said, remind them, Drew.

• 1:45:45Speaker 00

  All right, everybody. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Let's go. Let's go.

• 1:45:51Speaker 02

  Everyone in the chat, say the thing.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Say the line, Bart.

• 1:45:56Speaker 00

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