America on the Brink: $5000 Trump Payouts, Middle East Mayhem & 9/11’s Forgotten Lessons | Tom Bilyeu Show

Welcome to a pivotal episode of The Tom Bilyeu Show Live, recorded on September 11th—a day etched into American memory. In this episode, Tom tackles some of the most pressing and complex issues facing the nation and the world: from the escalating dangers in the Middle East and the precarious state of the global economy, to the relentless march of artificial intelligence and its ever-growing impact. Tom breaks down the unchecked government spending and populist promises threatening America’s financial health, the real consequences of inflation and deficit spending, and how both political parties are fueling economic instability. He digs deep into the current crises in the Middle East, the vulnerabilities in global supply chains, and draws crucial lessons from both past and present—especially the enduring significance of 9/11. Tom also explores the latest developments in AI, the urgent need for responsible innovation, and the growing arms race with China. This is a raw, honest conversation urging listeners to push beyond rhetoric, embrace fiscal discipline, and remain vigilant as seismic shifts reshape our world. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen FOLLOW ME: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to get started with your business today: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod ElevenLabs: Book your demo at https://elevenlabs.io/impactpod 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 Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order. Horizon.ai: Go to https://horizon3.ai/IMPACTTHEORY and request your free NodeZero demo. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. Butcherbox: Go to https://ButcherBox.com/IMPACT https://butcherbox.com/IMPACT to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year — with free shipping always Quo: ​​Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact 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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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Dillu Show Live. Today is going to be a special one. Obviously, this is nine 11. We're going to be talking all about that. We all just had an absolute shock before the bell rang. We'll bring you into that in a little while. Now, as the government is choking to death on the national debt,

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Trump is trying to bribe the American people with an additional $1.3 trillion. The level of insanity is absolutely mind boggling. Boy, are we going to talk about that. The war in Iran is escalating in super dangerous fashion in a way that people really do not understand just how bad it is getting. Oil is over $109 and Saudi Arabia and the UAE are likely to escalate after the Houthis have humiliated them, blew up their pipelines and captured a ton of their soldiers. Inflation numbers, they're in and the whole bond situation is getting way out of hand. People are going to get blindsided unless they figure out what this actually means. We're going to talk about exactly that.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  The AI situation gets more insane by the day, by the second. And we've got Anthropic's new threat assessment report. It is far crazier than you think. Wait till you hear some of the specifics. And like I said, it's nine 11. We're going to be talking about what lessons we need to learn from a tragedy that led to a far more tragic response. So thank you guys so much for being here. Right now, we are being abused by our politicians. They are using the economy to beat us to death. The economic abuse in this country is getting so bad, it is truly nearing fatal for our way of life, for the very way that our nation operates. We've got Trump promising that if Republicans win the House and Senate at the midterms,

• 2:56Speaker 00

  that he'll cut $5,000 checks to everyone at the cost of $1.3 trillion. That level of insanity is almost hard to quantify. That is the most absurd way to get back into office I have ever heard. It is so reckless. It is so dangerous. It is such an abuse of the American people and they're going to seal clap for it and they're going to be really excited for it. People are going to want them checks. But we've already put ourselves in a position where we are running $2 trillion in deficits every year by promising free stuff. None of that stuff comes for free. Your deficits are paid for by inflation.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  It is stolen purchasing power directly from you and everyone that you know. This makes things worse. And yet somehow every country that has ever been in the position that we're in to be the world's reserve currency, they find themselves doing the same thing. The world over, people are money printing like crazy. We are in a period where the developing nations are committing sepikut. Like this is so wild to watch us make these decisions. The world is racing away from the dollar right now because they can see how insane we are being. And our response is to be more insane. Like it is patently ridiculous. Everybody has to wake up and make sure that when you are looking at policy,

• 4:22Speaker 00

  when you're evaluating a politician, that you are asking one thing. Are you beating our kids to death with stupid policy? And if the answer is yes, then that person is absolutely not the kind of person that we want to see get elected. Now, the problem is if you think this is just Trump or you think it's just the Republicans, your memory is short. Biden did this exact same thing when he wanted to make sure that the Democrats won in Georgia. He said, this is a paraphrase, but send Ossoff and Warnock to Washington and I send $2,000 checks out. Send Perdue and Loeffler and they're never going to arrive. The power is literally in your hands. And guess what happened? The Democrats won. No big surprise.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  You promise people that kind of money directly in their pocket, they're going to go for it. So two months later, $1,400 checks go out to 170 million people to the tune of $411 billion. Lo and behold, bribing people with free stuff is exactly what politicians do to stay in power. And it is super toxic. It is the thing that drives the K-shaped economy. It is the thing that puts everybody at each other's throats. It is the thing that makes the dollar buy you less stuff over time. Because we are deficit spending, that stuff doesn't come for free. That's not how the economy works. You are going to pay for it. Plain and simple, period, end of story.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  And so people confuse themselves into thinking because they're being stolen from with the left hand and given with the right, that only the right counts. It is so wild. Also, by the way, if you hear people clucking about how insane it is that Trump is giving away free things, please cheer for them. Unless they have cheered for Mom Donnie's dumbass laundry list of free shit, the stuff that you hear coming out of the mouths of all the DSA and DSA adjacent candidates. They want free childcare, free buses, benefits for illegal aliens, discount groceries, student debt forgiveness, reparations and more full retarded things like that. It is all madness. It is coming at us from all sides.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  This is where we all have to pump the brakes, call attention to this, make sure that people understand when we vote for that kind of stuff, when we clamor to have a politician that is theoretically going to put money in our pockets, that they are just, they're degrading the economy even more. Every dollar of this is borrowed. Every dollar gets serviced at right now, four plus percent by our kids. By the way, the, what is it? The 10 years racing towards or at 4.9% already? It's only going to get worse if we keep doing these things because people are not going to want to hold US debt. They are going to see the level of recklessness is just completely out of control. The people running the country have stopped asking whether we can afford it.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  And they just want to know, is this what it's going to cost me to stay in power for two more years? That's the only thing that they care about. That is, it is so distressing. It's so distressing because there's nowhere to turn. I don't know if you want to reject Trump, which hopefully anybody hearing him talk about cutting 5K checks wants to reject Trump. Who do you turn to? Who's the next viable candidate? There's nobody. As far as the eye can see, it's just people that have given up that we're ever going to reject the absolute lunacy of deficit spending the way that we are now. And so everybody is beating you to death with this economic stick.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  And then the people that try to stand up against it, like my man with the debt clock. Thomas Massey. Thank you.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Where's he at? Where's he at? And getting people like that in office, bringing them front and center is so highly contested. Now, I know Thomas Massey, everybody's going to go to the AIPAC angle of it all. I'm telling you, it's not just that. It is something way bigger than that. This is, people are so confused about how the economy works. They don't understand it. And so they think, ah, let's just go tax the billionaires. That's going to be the way. So the stuff that Mom Donnie's promising me, that's really going to be free. The DSA, they've got my back. And this is why we see this insane rise of communism.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  It has been so good for so long that people have just stopped building in discipline. We've got to be disciplined. And the only path forward is to demand of our political class that we have people that are going to make us strong. But I don't know that it's in the human character. But I don't care about that because I have made a promise to myself, boys and girls, we are going to talk solutions on this podcast. So here is what we're going to do, at least us, this group, if you can hear my voice, this is what it looks like. We understand that fiscal discipline, fiscal means government spending, fiscal discipline is absolutely necessary. It is not a nice to have, it is not an

• 9:31Speaker 00

  optional, it is a must. We have to get to the point where we're living within our means. We have to focus the government, not on entitlements, but on infrastructure. People have got to carry their own weight. You cannot have 40% of your government budget going to entitlements. If that means you've got to push the retirement age, then you've got to push the retirement age. If that means that we've got to make sure that we are bringing manufacturing back to the US so that real wages can grow, then you make sure that we're bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US and you're focused on a long-term plan for growth, not one that you're expecting to happen in six months.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  You've got to be thinking five, 10 years down the road. And anybody that can't point to a spot on the horizon and say, hey, I'm going to be out of office, long before this thing happens. But this is what we're steering towards, and I'm going to walk you through the economics of exactly how we get there. Now, I fully understand the populist pull. Populism is a slur. Anybody that says that they're a populist leader, they can literally fuck off immediately. Get out of my political establishment. I don't want to hear any of that bullshit. All that is, is somebody saying, yeah, I want people swept up in their emotions. I want people acting a fool. I want people

• 10:50Speaker 00

  allowing themselves to be blind to the mechanisms of the economy. So the government needs to be focused on, okay, what do we do to shore this up? What, what are we going to cut in order to get our spending back in line? And all we have to do is say, cool, we want to tax more? Awesome. Let's do it. Let's increase taxes and let's make sure that for every new tax dollar that we bring in, that we're spending, let's clock it at 70 cents. So now we're getting ahead instead of behind. Right now, for every dollar in new taxes we bring on, we spend a dollar 58. That's fucking crazy. You can't do that. We have a discipline problem. And we have to remember, we elect politicians. Politicians are just pandering

• 11:34Speaker 00

  to us. They're just pandering to whatever demands we make. And if we say, give me free shit or you're out, then they're going to give us free shit, no matter what it means. Even if it means that, hey, this all falls apart in, my clock is nine years. This all falls apart in nine years. They don't care. Certainly, the executive branch is going to be gone.

• 11:55Speaker 00

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• 15:17Speaker 00

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

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Can we revisit the nine-year thing?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  It was 10 years last year, now we're at nine. At year, when that clock hits zero, then what? Like, what's the?

• 15:30Speaker 00

  It's, it really has to be understood as metaphorical. It's me saying, if nothing else changed, this is when your debt hits a point where it just absolutely breaks. It's a swag. It is just to give some people something to pay attention to. It's never going to play out exactly like that. It's not a clock that literally counts down to zero and then all hell breaks loose. It will just get worse and worse and worse every day. The odds that we survive the full nine years are effectively zero because we're getting more reckless, not less. So you've got Biden promising whatever, $20,000 checks. Now Trump is promising $5,000 checks. Like, it just gets crazier. And so anybody watching the show a long time knows, I broke my sort of hope for the Trump administration broke the day that they signed on the big,

• 16:14Speaker 00

  beautiful bill because it made our deficits worse, not better. So I was like, oh, okay, cool. They're just going to do whatever they need to do to get reelected. This isn't actually about fiscal discipline. All of that goes out the window. And so now seeing the $5,000 checks is just wild. And the thing that we all have to push back against and find a way to navigate through is that the, the two major parties are both just like more free stuff. And so you can't go, oh, cool, I'm going to vote Democrat this time. I mean, maybe if they get a good candidate, if somehow, some way, they rise somebody to power internally that actually understands fiscal discipline. And they see that's the avenue that they have to take. But I don't see that happening. What I see is, as I zoom out to 30,000 feet, I see that populism has a grip on everybody. Everybody's reasoning from

• 16:56Speaker 00

  emotion. The pie really is getting smaller. And because the pie is getting smaller, people are looking around saying, well, I just want to make sure that my team gets a bigger piece of the pie, and that's where we're at. And so we've got to break that fever. And listen, I fully expect that I'm essentially going to go down with the ship, that nobody's going to listen outside of the amazing people that can hear my voice right now. But nonetheless, everything I do, I do to earn my own respect. And so I got to say these things. So that really is the play, fiscal discipline. You're going to have to, I mean, I really do think Ray Dalio is right about a beautiful deleveraging. It's the only path forward. It's going to require you to raise taxes. Unfortunately, those taxes are going to have to be broad-based. You're going to have to have, and when I say broad-based, I mean, you, it, it won't work. There is not enough money to just

• 17:41Speaker 00

  tax the billionaire class. First of all, everybody is misconstruing their wealth with their money. You can't tax wealth, you can't spend wealth. So just fucking get that out of your head. If you're still so retarded and you understand the economy so little that you're actually saying things like wealth tax, okay, Rohana, I'm looking at you, you know, that's retarded. You know, that's retarded. Okay, you're not confused. You're leaning into the populism. Stop it. It's retarded. Knock it off. That isn't how this works. So that's wild. So anybody that's, that's saying, cool, we're going to have to do a more broad-based tax, great, no problem, that the wealthy are going to be paying more based on their actual real income. Yep, no problem. But we have to do fiscal discipline first. Okay. There's also going to be some obliteration of debt, which that means

• 18:26Speaker 00

  there are going to be some people that lose money. It is what it is. So you're going to have to do some of that, but you have to do it in a sensible way. So debt forgiveness for college debt, for instance, you can't do that as the taxpayer picks up the bill. That's just fiscal irresponsibility. What you have to do is allow them to declare bankruptcy so that now they can get out from under that debt in a way that's going to put some banks out of business. Yeah, it is what it is. You can't allow the government to just back all that stuff up. So you've got to get the broader tax base. You've got to get fiscal discipline so that we're actually starting to do some austerity. You're going to have to do some debt forgiveness and you're going to have to do some money printing. You're going to have to do all of it. And you're, we are going to have to find a way to figure out what are the

• 19:09Speaker 00

  levels of levers that we're going to pull in what sequence? Because two of those are constrictive of the economy and two of them are stimulatory. And we're going to be pulling those in little increments as we go, trying to make things better and better and better as we go. But if people cannot get out of the doom loop of I'm going to give you more free stuff, it really does implode, guys. I need you to hear me. And let's talk about bonds. So how do I know that it implodes? It's already imploding. So when you look at the bond market, the bond market is trying to give you all the distress signals in the world. So what is the bond market? It is really important to understand how

• 19:50Speaker 00

  bonds work. Bonds are the world, because it is not just US citizens, but also them. It is the world saying, do I think you, the United States government, will pay me back if I loan you money? And will you pay me back with enough interest that you're not beating me to death with what's called financial repression, which is where you intentionally hold the interest rate low, lower than inflation? So that I get penalized in the long run. Now, that is 100% the playbook that's being run right now. So, right now, we are on a course because there's no way for the US to pay the interest on the debt if rates keep going up.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  This is why everybody was saying you can know what Trump is gonna do in the Iran war based on what the 10-year Treasury note is. And as it crosses 4.6, that was like everybody's big number. It's now 4.9, but as it crosses 4.6, you're gonna see he's gonna take action. Besen's trying, but when you're doing things that are reckless, like if you're Besen and you see Trump over here doing the most insane shit ever and promising people $5,000 checks for keeping them in power. So what, they can do more dumb shit? But anyway, if you're Besen, you're watching that and you're like, bro, what are you doing? I'm over here desperately trying to calm the markets. The markets are now clowning on Besen, okay? Markets are saying, you can't be over here being that reckless and expect me to think that 20 years from now, 30 years from now,

• 21:20Speaker 00

  that you're actually gonna pay me enough interest to have justified me letting you keep my money, knowing what I expect inflation to be, right? Inflation numbers are in, so we're at 3.4% inflation, which is at expectation, but it's still way over the 2% that it's supposed to be. And given that oil is getting worse, so we were up at last check 109. Could be worse, could be a little bit better, but in that ballpark. So, the, uh, what, PPI index? So, um, Producer Price Index, which is like, hey, I make things for a living. So I've got all my ingredients. That number's up. I forget what it is, but I think it's over 5%. Drew or Ryan's gonna fact check me on that, but it's high.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  That means down the road, it's likely that inflation will get worse. Now, you're not gonna get all of the Producer Price Index increase finding its way into what you pay.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  PPI is 5%.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  But it is, sorry?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  PPI was 5%.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Okay, so, bang on. There we go, boys and girls. You man's got you. So, that is not a good sign, certainly of where things are going. Odds are that we're going to feel some of that in our day-to-day lives. And so Besen is trying to buy enough of our debt to make sure that there's a market, but now you've got the government buying its own debt. Now, as I always tell entrepreneurs, hey, if you're doing something, has anybody done it before you and what was the result? Japan, Japan bought a lot of its own debt, more than 50% of its own debt. It did not go well. Japan went from basically about to surpass the American economy

• 23:00Speaker 00

  to stagnating for two decades. Not a position that you wanna be in, but we're running that same playbook. Now, is Besen buying our own debt, making the market relax? And go, oh, cool. All right, this guy's got us, we're gonna be fine. If that were the case, then the long-tail interest rates would be coming down. But they're not coming down, they're going up. Because people can see that we are not being fiscally responsible. They can see that we're late-stage empire and we're doing the things that late-stage empire does. This is like a known thing and all the smart people that buy in the bond market, they understand how to read the tea leaves and they can see, okay, we've got instability in the Middle East.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  That's going to, probably for a couple of years at least, that's going to have elevated oil prices because things are not moving in the right direction. We'll get into the Houthis of it all in a minute, but just know that the Houthis are causing way more problems now. So you've got the Strait of Hormuz is contested. Maybe we've got it open-ish, but it's contested. Now, you've got the Red Sea also blocked off. They're also attacking Saudi's pipeline. So Saudi Arabia was trying to be like, oh, we'll just find a way around the Strait of Hormuz and we'll go over to, um, the Red Sea and we'll pump it out that way. Well, now that's being blown up. So that pipeline, reports have it, has been hit in like eight different places.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  It's on fire, you can see it from satellite imagery, so there's no hiding from it. So if I'm buying bonds, I'm looking at all that and I'm like, okay, there's instability there. PPI's up, Besen's trying to buy all of his own debt and the guy that he's buying the debt on the behalf of is acting like a lunatic. Oh, and by the way, I look at the Democrats as a possible that you guys just vote out these crazy-ass Republicans and you get some nice sane Democrats. Uh-oh, the energy in the Democrat Party is more free shit. So everywhere I turn, it is late-stage empire, it is populism. And by the way, there are plenty of people out there that you're gonna find saying populism like it's a good thing. That's wild, it is not. So instability there. Bond market is telling you, you're going in the wrong direction.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  People are moving away from the dollar, buying gold, record numbers, holding gold as the number one reserve asset over US debt, which means that US debt is going to grow more expensive by the day, which means the thing I'm saying to do now, you're gonna be forced to do. Whether you do it now, when you, there's at least a little bit of advantage that you'll get by moving on it quickly, um, you're gonna have to do it. It's just a question of how much pain you let build up in the system before you do what you know is obviously right. So, that's, that's where we are. This, this one is really maddening, really maddening. And boy, do I hope that, uh, we can get people to wake up and explain,

• 25:59Speaker 00

  not how they feel about it, but mechanistically, how what they're doing is going to work. That's what I wanna hear.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Um, you put a lot on the table there. I feel like it's a Thanksgiving feast of Tom's rants. I love it, I love it.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  It is a cornucopia of problems.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Beautiful word, beautiful word. I think first and foremost, right? I was having this argument on Discord. I think we got too caught up in the two-party system in the sense that we have been playing the lesser of two evils game for three decades at this point, that it's, this is bad, he's bad, we have nowhere else to go. And I think that there is a third option. If Massey is the sane person in the room with the internet in 2026, this is not the 19, the 1700s where there was only newspaper and you can only walk to the nearest village. Can an effective grassroots campaign actually make something happen? Can we actually have a third option? Can we actually put somebody sane in power? Cause I think sensible people on the right realize that Trump is not it.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Sensible people on the left realize the DSA is not it. There is a big enough coalition, in my opinion, just like there was a big enough coalition that said, wait, I don't want trans girl people, I don't want trans kids getting converted and Trump seems like he's not gonna start another war. Cool, and they were able to add that, just enough cultural energy to get Trump over the hump. Do you think that there is this possibility for a independent candidate, I'm gonna call him, to maybe make a surprise in the primaries?

• 27:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  0%. So at this point, I gotta stack money, get a gun and just...

• 27:31Speaker 00

  That's far wiser.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  So here is how this is going to play out. People think that politicians lead. Politicians have abdicated that responsibility. We don't have leadership, not now. It, this isn't a moment in time that's gonna give you leaders. This is a moment in time where the guy who can read the energy in the room will step in front and act like he's helping the band march. But in reality, the band was already marching and he just stepped out front. Until we recognize, until culturally, we have the spirit of a nation that, um, wants to be disciplined, understands that we have to take matters um, into our own hands, inside of our own families and say, okay, this is how we ought to be. We ought to be responsible with the way that we spend money.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  We ought to be responsible with building infrastructure. We ought to be responsible for making ourselves the strongest, most secure nation on planet Earth. Here are the basics of how that's done. This has happened all throughout history. But unfortunately, humans individually are very capable. Humans as a collective are crazy. And they get pulled into these emotional streams. And so we're in an emotional stream. Now, if I were gonna steel man, um, the flip side of that and say, okay, this really could work, then what I'll say is this.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  We live in the age of the interest graph on social media, which is far better than the I have a lot of followers graph, which is what it was before. It was truly a social graph. So you know a lot of people, those people are big people, and therefore your voice is important. Now we just go, no, no, no. If you say something that's interesting and people gravitate towards it, then it's going to go viral. And so a person could capture the imagination of the people and actually provide some leadership. And if they did that, and this is why I say that Thomas Massey not getting reelected because APAC spent some money, that really isn't relevant. What it says is his message wasn't strong enough to overcome money.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  When an idea, its time has come, people are going to get behind it. But the problem is, I really do think the idea's time has to come. And so the question becomes, what will change the emotional feeling in the room? Like, how do we break the psychological fever that we're under? At the risk of putting another fractal on the plate, but I really do think if you read-

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Add to the chronocopia, man, let's do it.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Let's add. Look at Lindsey Clancy. So the response to this is actual cultural psychosis. It's absurd and crazy in the extreme. Now, I have a reason for why it's happened there. It becomes very repetitive. But if people want to map my base assumption that's undergirding a lot of this, when people have been safe for quote unquote "too long", they forget that you have to be disciplined and you've got to lock people up when they are mentally ill. You can't let them roam the streets. No matter how much you may love and care about them, you just can't have them on the streets. There was a guy recently that got nearly beheaded in a park. A guy, I assume, I don't know that the guy was mentally ill, but I can't imagine-

• 30:46Speaker 01

  I'm saying, guy, we'll try to hack your head off.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Right. So he comes up behind him, stabs him in the neck, and then just keeps going and tries to cut his head off. So that is us going, yeah, but we feel bad and it would really suck if we had that. So, once the culture's there, the only thing that history tells you snaps people out of it is a sufficient amount of pain. And so I do worry that leaders never actually lead, that it's always somebody who's just aligned with the energy of that moment. And then they rise to the occasion to lead people because they're completely aligned with what's happening. Like, I feel very out of step with culture right now. I don't reason emotionally, ever. I try not to. Obviously, I'm a human, so I do. But I'm always trying to step out of that. I don't respect that in myself when I do it.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  I'm always trying to get on the other side of that. I'm desperate to get people to understand the power of AI at a time where everybody's trying to shut it down. Like, it's just everywhere I turn, I'm like, oh.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  You're on the exact opposite of what-

• 31:44Speaker 00

  I am the flip side of most of the popular coins right now. So, and also, I really think that, anyway, there's a host of other reasons why I'm probably never going to be the voice that's going to get people to snap into place. And it may just be that it really isn't possible. And so when you look at the fourth turning, you start realizing that great leaders tend to have been born at a certain phase in history. And so they just happen to be in alignment with what that moment is. So, yeah, that's probably true. So, but the, just to get mechanistic again for a second, you would have to break the emotional fever

• 32:26Speaker 00

  that the, certainly in America, the West more broadly, is captured in. And I think that the only way that you do that is pain and suffering. And then a leader will rise that will internalize that pain and suffering in a way where then people will fall in behind them. Religion can also play a role in that. Because if you can say, this is what God wants, I think you get like a buff. Like, if you think in video game terms, like, religion gives you a massive buff. And so now you can be like, not only am I aligned with the emotion that everybody's feeling, God also agrees with you, and I represent God, and so let's go. And we'll get into that when we start talking about 9/11.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like you cover, oh, okay, we gotta move on to the war stuff. But just quick check in on the economy as it stands right now for my alpha guys, for my investment guys in the chat. Is this a time to really look? Are, is the bond market making you nervous? Or is this one of those things-

• 33:22Speaker 00

  The bond market is just a signal. So, here is how everybody should be thinking about your money in a time where the bond market is screaming and telling you that the US has a problem. So, first of all, being in long-term debt right now is probably not a good idea. You need to remember, I'm not a financial advisor. I am not in any way, shape, or form licensed to give financial advice. It would be very unwise to simply say, I'm going to do something because Tom said it. Let me just put that out there as aggressively as possible. Now, with that said, I'm going to tell you how I think through this. You should use that amongst other people to figure out the right way to think about this. Because no one person, I think, sees any of this clearly. It is way too complicated. So, you start piecing things together. But this is how I think about it. You're looking at the bond market. If you understand the mechanism of the bond market,

• 34:06Speaker 00

  it's a vote on the stability of essentially that country. So, are you, do you have a good credit score? When you have a really good credit score in people's minds, then the rate that you have to pay people is very low because they're just looking for a safe place to try to beat inflation. So, when that rate goes up, people are like, yeah, first of all, I expect inflation to be quite high, and I'm not sure that I trust you to pay me back in the fullness of time, at least not at a rate that beats inflation. So that's what the bond market is telling you right now, that the US economy is not healthy. It is not a safe place to store your money. So now, if the bond market, which is the traditional place, that US bond market specifically, is no longer the risk-free rate of return,

• 34:49Speaker 00

  or the quote-unquote "risk-free rate of return" is going up, up, up, up, up, up, that is a huge signal. Now, when you also look at, okay, where traditionally would you hide in times like this? The quick answer is people round it to that which cannot be inflated. So what is it that can't be inflated? You're going to have a whole lot of people that'll give you different answers here, but the traditional one is going to be gold, other precious metals. Be very careful about over-indexing on that and going, oh, okay, cool, I'm going to go do that thing. Gold can trap your value for a long time. It can go down and stay there for years. So you've got to be thoughtful. But that is a traditional place where people go, oh, that thing that can be inflated, a fiat currency, is being inflated,

• 35:33Speaker 00

  so let me go somewhere that it can't be. A higher-risk version of that is going to be the equities market. It's much higher risk, so be very careful. One thing that people try to look at in volatile times like this is to find companies that even like, if the entire stock market is a big bet on AI, who's still going to make money even in a downturn? Even if the AI market blows up and we see drawdowns of 30, 50%? Who's still going to be making money? So identifying that basket of companies and trying to invest more in them, an example that people will often give right now, which is something that Trump has invested in, so take this for what it's worth. But is Visa and Mastercard, I think, both of them? But basically, it's hard to spin up a new credit card company.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  So, people are going to use credit cards. I believe that that's the thing that's going to move into the future. So, cool, I'm going to be in companies like that. So, who are those companies? That people need, no matter what the economic situation. But being diversified across economic forces is the real thing that people have to think through. Making sure that you have optionality because you have cash on hand. That is another big one. If you're going to be in debt, being in short-term debt, that kind of thing is important. Looking around the world. So maybe we're no longer just investing in the US. So what does it look like globally? Where should we be at? But the, that, that's what everybody should be doing at the individual level, is trying to identify how they get diversified across as many economic forces.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Now, as a reminder of what Buffett says, you use that sort of diversity as a hedge against ignorance. So if you actually have a deep read on the economy, you're going to make a few concentrated bets. And that, of course, is exactly how Buffett got wealthy, was concentrated bets. I mean, it's like, I don't know, nine to 12 or something of the bets that he's made over his extraordinarily long career account for 80% of the gains that he's made. It's a ridiculously small number. But unless you guys are that kind of on-top-of-it professional trader, round-the-clock, you've got some advantage that other people don't have, diversify across economic forces. That, that really is the long and the short of it. So, being honest about the reality of the current situation, I think is very important.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And, yeah, not locking yourself into something super long-term, making sure that whatever you're invested in, you either have an easy way to get your money out, or that you don't need that money for a very long time. And I'll clock that at 20 years. If you put your money into a broad basket of AI stocks, as an example, for 20 years, yeah, you're probably going to be fine. It'll go through a drawdown, then it will rebuild if it follows historical trends. And then, as long as you didn't need your money for 20 years, you're probably going to be okay. But yeah, being over-indexed on one thing, especially something that's vulnerable to all of the fluctuations right now, whether it's the bond market, the equities market,

• 38:30Speaker 00

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• 39:15Speaker 00

  or use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark, backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's S-U-R-F-S-H-A-R-K.com/TOMB. Surfshark.com/TOMB. Use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark.

• 39:40Speaker 00

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

• 39:43Speaker 01

  All right, we got to talk about these straits getting gobbled up.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Rough out here in these straits? Heyo, let's go.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  This is crazy. We need some gays of her muse.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Wow. I don't, how did that come in?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, both went in different directions with the joke. I liked both.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Oh, I see.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Cuns are friendly.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Got it, got it.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So we've been fighting over, we've been fighting over the Strait of Hormuz.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Then Saudi Arabia was like, forget the Strait of Hormuz. I got this other straight back here. I'm not even gonna need the Strait of Hormuz anymore. And then the Houthis were like, hold my beer.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, so, boys and girls, right now, the situation in the Middle East is getting crazier than people realize. Yemen's Houthis took the Red Sea port of Mokka this morning. Or, yeah, yesterday, basically. Government forces withdrew. The Saudi Arabia and the US have been talking about this for a while. And Saudi Arabia said, don't worry, man, we've got this. We can fight on our own. We don't need anything here. Just make sure that you're cool with me striking. And then, the bad news is that they got completely overwhelmed. The Houthis pushed in, basically took control of the entire coastline and one of the islands in the middle of the strait to make sure that they would be able to open and close it as they see fit.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And now, you've got Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince SMB reaching out to Trump, saying, hey, we want to, MBS, excuse me, reach out, we want you to strike, the Houthis. Trump said, look, we're not gonna do it. You told me that you got this. We'll provide you intel, but you're gonna have to do this on your own. And so, in the end, they weren't able to do it on their own. And then, you've got both the UAE and Saudi Arabia getting caught up in this. The problem is, those two don't agree on how to handle this. So they're not even gonna be able to put forward a coordinated response. And so, now the question is, what do you do when both of those areas were blocked? Everybody's been saying for a while now, listen, these guys played their hand.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  So Iran goes in, they close the strait, everybody's like, oh, like, we can't rely on the Strait of Hormuz anymore. We're gonna have to do overland pipelines and get this stuff out the other way so that we don't have to deal with the Strait of Hormuz. And Saudi and UAE thought they had the situation under control in the Bab El Mandab Strait. Only to find out, nope, psych, just kidding, the Houthis have taken over and now we're back in trouble. And so, if you've got the pipeline being destroyed, been hit in eight places, and I've talked about this for a while, if you don't bury that pipeline, it's going to get hit over and over and over. So you're either gonna have to put mesh around it, you're gonna have to bury it, but you're gonna have to do something to protect it from being attacked. Because right now, exposing that to open air just means that it's going to be hit, as we just saw.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So now, you've got disruption all over the place in both sides. And so, now you would have to coordinate multiple countries to get a pipeline that runs across and doesn't touch either of the straits. Now, maybe that'll be easier than I'm expecting. And if so, you know, you give them a couple of years, they'll be able to build a new pipeline and we'll be able to get out another way. And maybe that's exactly what's going to happen. But in the meantime, this is going to be very rough on some very important cargo. Not only oil, but you've got things to do with fertilizer and other elements that we count on for production of things worldwide. And so, one of the things that really hasn't been getting talked a lot about, I think because people thought that, you know,

• 43:09Speaker 00

  this would end shortly enough, that we would be able to find a way around this. But one thing that now becomes a much bigger question mark is what is going to happen to fertilizer? And how much of that increase in cost or just availability of food globally is going to be impacted? And are we going to be able to get this resolved in time for the next harvest? Because I believe that we had one harvest where these guys basically had to rely on using less and/or using some if they had any saved up, which most people, from what I've seen in the reporting, not many farmers have a lot of this stuff saved up. So are we already going to see some food increases coming by the end of this year?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  And if not, if next year's crop also takes a hit, are we going to be able to absorb that? And so, as you start looking at this as being a multi-year disruption, now it starts to get more serious. And how quickly will people be able to bring alternatives on? And to make it even worse, this is an El Nino year. So will El Nino also create problems for farmers? And so, will we have a double whammy, either via drought or crops getting washed out, where we have all the fertilizer disruption coming out of the Middle East, compounded with just the cost of oil going up, which makes the production of virtually everything a little bit more expensive?

• 44:30Speaker 00

  And El Nino causing disruptions with crops that could make, I mean, let's not get overly dramatic, but people are gonna talk about potential famine. So far, we've been able to address things like that, but that's certainly looming if El Nino is bad enough. So you've got a lot of things happening all at once. Now, again, maybe in two years, you see yourself on the other side of this. But it's gonna be a pretty rough two years if this stuff remains disrupted that whole time. And so, the question really becomes, are we going to see unity in the GCC countries to push back on this, to finally shut Iran down? Now, you've got Trump, basically, not basically, you've got Trump predicting that the war in Iran will end as soon as the midterms happen. Now, just for the record, I read that as total propaganda bullshit.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  It's just him trying to get people to turn out, vote for Republicans and just be like, oh, look, this is just them trying to run a gimmick, if you will, as we lead into the elections. And on the other side of that, everything's gonna be fine, because these guys just aren't gonna be able to last that long and they're gonna break. So if the US, the blockade and the financial sanctions can actually break Iran, then maybe this resolves itself in the next, call it, six months and we can get everything back in line before fertilizer has to be laid for the next harvest. But there's a lot of question marks there. None of this has gone according to plan now, so I certainly don't believe that it's going to go according to plan in the future. So we'll see, but it is definitely not a good time for what's going on in the Middle East.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Things are loose, man. And when things are loose, it's like driving on black ice. You never know if you're about to spin out of control and find out just how fast you were really traveling. The fact that Saudi, who thought they were able to hold these guys back on their own, just completely got run over yesterday, is a very bad signal.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Totally 1-2-4, so we're losing the people in sandals. And I just thought that that was hilarious.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  This is a bad look. It's not a bad look, like, let's just, America has a reputation for being the number one superpower ever. I compare this to when the Warriors got beat in the finals that year when they won 73 games. It's one of those things where it's like, I'm the best and you're supposed to just capitulate to me. And you get to that big moment and then you're getting beat and outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a bunch of dudes in sandals. The first order of consequence, how do we get out of this situation? That's quagmire talk. I kinda wanna leave that alone right now. But I'm looking at the second and third order consequence of like, wait, is America really that scary? Do we need to just have a nuke and reset everybody and just be that bad guy? I know I'm going like, but I feel like we're getting back into the corner, like...

• 47:06Speaker 00

  While you made my eyes nearly pop out of my head by saying it out loud, it, uh, it is a reset button. It would work. Here's the problem, we talked about this a lot at the beginning of the war. I said, America doesn't have a stomach morally, thankfully, thankfully, thankfully, for total war. Total war is where you go, oh, I'm, I'm not, not using any of my weapons. I'm gonna use them all. And we have a tunnel problem. Alright, well, fly some ships in there and literally kill indiscriminately. Indiscriminately. And yeah, you just ethnic cleanse the shit out of them, kill them, genocide them, whatever. And you can, eventually, they will 1,000% be dead or give up.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  The morality of that is so horrifying that we have to take it off the table. And given that the morality of that is so horrifying that it must be removed from the table, you find yourself in a world where it's like, being the biggest, strongest guy ever isn't the play. Being the most cooperative, the one that people wanna work with, and quarantining the people that can't play nice with the rest of the world, that's the play. And so, when I look at the US versus China, I think this is so instructive. China's an authoritarian dictatorship. It is a spider's web. But they're using, uh, they're putting like fruit chunks in the spider's web. So it's like, well, if you're willing to be stuck in my web, you really do get to eat the fruit.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  And the US is all stick. So, we used to be, hey, listen, we're about freedom, we're about trade. Look at those guys, they have fuck all on the grocery store shelves. It's breadlines, it's horrible. Why would you want that? We're freedom. And we are the ability to say what you believe is true. We are a lifestyle that the rest of the world can only hope for. And we're going to be that shining hill, uh, that shining city on the hill that other people aspire to be a part of. And we're going to export our culture. And if you embrace our culture, your life really does get better. And that was true for a long time.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  And then it got to the point where we thought that as other people got wealthier, that they would adopt our mindset. And we realized, oh, actually, they don't. And instead of going to, okay, well, we just can't play with you guys then, we're going to isolate you and we're going to move on. We spent trillions of dollars trying to nation build and that did not work. Look at Afghanistan, you spent all that money, cost all those lives and walk away. And they're like, we never wanted this. You were trying to do literally transgender bullshit in Afghanistan. And they came in and the insurgents win. And they just take the country back over because we did not win the hearts and minds of the people.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  And it's one of those, dude, this is so gross to say out loud, but you either break people's will because you've just killed so many of them, or you actually have to get them onto your side. And if you can't do either, you have to like leave it be. And so, this is one of those things where, if the US had gone, alright, dear GCC nations, here's the problem. Iran is our problem. So we're gonna spend the next 10 years and we're going to migrate away from Iran. We're gonna bury the pipelines, we're gonna build this out to the sea and we're gonna make Iran be the aggressor. And we're just going to work around them. And yep, it's gonna be expensive and it's gonna take a long time.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  And I get that we all secretly just wanna pretend that we don't have this issue, but we can't do that. And so, we're gonna mow the lawn with their nuclear program, because that would be the one sort of deal breaker. But we are going to get people around the issue, rather than try to confront it directly, break their will, assume that the Iranian people are gonna rise up. It's just like, it doesn't work. So... One thing we have to be realistic about, not everybody wants the American way of life. And if people want to build a quote unquote backwards nation, you gotta let them. Like there is an island, um, somebody look this up Sentinel Island. I'm almost certainly, almost certain it's called North Sentinel Island.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  North Sentinel Island, right now, off the coast of India, they are still the uninhabited or uncontacted sort of tribe.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  And if you roll up on North Sentinel Island, you're going to die. How do I know? Because people have tried it and they've all died. They just kill them and that's that. They don't want modern life, just accept it. I don't think that we should go into North Sentinel Island and be like, no, life would be better if you have a grocery store. It's like, if they want to be, if they want to live like that, then let them. And so, uh, I think we've so been convinced that we can just get everybody to think like we think, that we've completely lost the plot. And that is, it's non-functioning.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  I feel like this is an update to your mental model right now, like happening, cause

• 52:15Speaker 01

  what I'm extrapolating from that is we need to let people be, is that America should worry about America and stop trying to spread freedom vis a vis oil transactions and bombs in the Middle East. Maybe we should take a step back.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Well, I don't, I don't feel like it's an update of my mental model, but it'd be interesting to see if I've sort of slowly shifted without realizing it.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Um, I, my, my mental model is that if you're not willing to do total warfare, thankfully,

• 52:45Speaker 00

  you're going to find yourself in Quagmire's all the time. We tried nation building, it didn't work. It didn't work because people have different cultural sensibilities. And I agree to a violent stance that some cultures are better than others. So I will not let you come in and infect my way of life. Uh, and I will respond the way that an immune system would respond to a foreign invader, should you try? But from the perspective of how should America go about, um, engaging with the world? Be the strongest economy in the world. Be a freedom-loving nation that really actually wants to see people be free.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Don't look at every, um, nation as a cash register. Or if you're going to look at every nation as a cash register, look at them in the sense of, okay, I've got to earn your business. And if we're going to earn that trading relationship, then you've gotta take the stance of, okay, we trade with you guys, but I'm not going to try to, um, through military, force you to live an American way of life. So China's not going to become American. We tried that, it didn't work. Uh, so it's like, we either decide we're going to trade with them, or we decide that they're going to be a threat and we've got to isolate them. Whatever, but just completely take off the table that you're going to get militaristic.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  So now if you consider Taiwan your sphere of influence and you've got to stand up and make sure that they don't take something away from you, that you've spent time building that chip industry and all of that, understood. Uh, but they've got to be the aggressor, uh, before you should respond. Now, I think America should have the strongest military on earth. I think that if a country, uh, wants to do business with us and they want to ally themselves with us and that means that we protect them, cool, I'm here for it. But, um, yeah, trying to nation build is a fool's errand. Uh, you can only do what you can afford to do, you can't deficit spend. And so if America, um, can merely play a role in helping to police international waters, for instance, then great, play what role you're going to play, have a consortium of people.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Uh, but trying to run around and take care of the world, if that requires you to deficit spend, you've put yourself on a ticking clock where you will eventually bankrupt your children. It just doesn't work. So, uh, I feel like Joshua in War Games and I'm running all of the scenarios and I'm just like, oh, okay. The only way to, uh, win the game of global empire is to not play the game of global empire.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Got you. Um, I gotta bring it up because you're getting fried in the chat right now. People want clarification on what you mean by we trans, like people are making it seem, people are saying, you made it seem like you, we lost Afghanistan because we tried to transgender them or something. Like, explain where that statement came from.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Okay, so first of all, everybody in chat, if you're actually being sincere, I think you know that I was giving an example of an extreme part of our culture that we were trying to export. Um, but I'm happy to have the debate, but this means that we're now going to have to go into very uncomfortable waters. So the reality is that if you are trying to export Christian ideology to an Islamic country, it isn't going to work. So they have a foundationally different framework. The two, um, cultural, uh, frames of reference are incompatible. So that's one example. There are a whole host of things, up to and including, by the way, educating women, which there, Afghanistan, as evidenced by the people who are now in power, uh, they don't want that.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  And so there are more and more, and I don't know the exact extent, if girls can't go to education at all, if they can only go till sixth grade or what, I don't know. But certainly it is not the level that would match what we were trying to bring. One of the things that we did while we were there was put forward, uh, the idea of, hey, here's the kind of compassion that you should have for people that are transgender. Uh, and so that is an extreme view even here in the US, but it's nonetheless part of what we were trying to do when we were there. And I wanted you guys to understand the absurdity of trying to push that kind of, um, ideology onto a foreign nation. You have to understand what their ideology is.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  And you have to have a strategy for getting them to adopt your way of being. So if you look at somebody like Alexander the Great, uh, it was typically integration. So it wasn't, you just try to give them your way of being, like he would wear, Ryan, I'll have to look this up because I could be meshing different leaders. It is my memory, whether it's accurate or not, but it's my memory that when Alexander would conquer a nation, he would wear their clothes while he was there to show. I'm not trying to make you guys all the way to us, but we're going to integrate. There are going to be things that we do that we expect you guys to adopt. And then we're going to, while we're here, uh, look and act more like you guys. Because he understood that if you try to browbeat people into being the way that you are, it's not going to work. Genghis Khan had a similar idea.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  If he found a brilliant military leader on the opposition side, he did not kill them. He invited them into his own military because the more you can integrate, the more you can cross marry, things like that, that you become more one people. And that is not the speed run that America's trying to do. We so believe in our frame of reference that we think all we have to do is make people aware of these ideas, help them get economic prosperity and suddenly they're going to be on our side. And it doesn't work like that.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Uh, Alexander the Great, when he conquered Persia, wore royal clothing of the Persians, but he mixed it with Greek and Macedonian styles. Is that what you're talking about?

• 58:20Speaker 00

  There it is, precisely what I was saying. So, uh, yeah. Now, by all means, especially if there's anything specific, if people are going off in the chat, I want to hear about it. Because we're never going to get to the other side of this. If, um, people have good arguments, meaning they're well thought out, they can be absolutely anathema to my thinking. Um, but if chat just becomes this, um, sort of crazed bowl of lunacy and is never able to challenge, that probably doesn't help.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Now everybody's coming at my take because I said, it's not a good idea to use a nuke because it would, the downside is more than the upside. It can be spun as America's trying to take out an entire religion. It's going to be in the middle of the Middle Eastern region that can contaminate a whole area. There's a lot of things that are different versus us dropping in on Japan. That was like an isolated island, that was one people, one culture. It's a little bit different that we can separate. Some people are saying nukes now are different, Drew, you don't understand. We could just kind of nuke one specific spot and they'll be fine.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And I'm saying if they do that, people can then take it as America tried to kill Muslims and then spin it and then now.

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Well, here's how I took what you said.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  Hey, Tom, crazy idea, I don't actually want to do this, but do we really have to go all the way to just nuking people? Would that work, however sort of suicidal it would be? That's how I heard your question. I did not hear your question like, hey, I'm going to be lobbying Congress tomorrow to drop a nuke on the Middle East. So just to be clear, I think if anybody thought that you were really saying this is the right answer, which I assume you were not. Um, so the situation in Japan is very, very, very, very different than what's going on in the Middle East. Uh, also, yes, the perception of nukes are very, very different. It's one thing when you're the only one that has them and you're trying to end a very bloody war with an enemy that has sworn to fight to the death, that their entire nation has been trained to accept death.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  And to expect that they are going to have to fight in one sort of cataclysmic final battle.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  That's one thing when you drop that nuke. I think there is a very strong argument to be made that at the time it actually made sense. Which is why when America was occupying Japan, you had precious little violence against the occupiers. You had a lot of people, don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people that were like, we want to get these guys the fuck out of the country as fast as we can. However, Japan did a 180, man. Because they went from feeling like, I have no future, I've been told to expect only death. And now, these people put an end to lunacy. And so, yes, it came at a tremendous and horrifying cost. But a lot of what people felt was sort of this

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  relief, followed by a secondary depression. Because it is certainly hard to have lost. It's hard to look back and say, we kinda needed that, like, we had gone crazy. So, Japan is very important to learn the lessons of Japan. But you have to actually learn the lessons of Japan. You can't just be like, oh, any country that you drop a bomb on. You have to understand, like, what was going on in Japan, why they responded the way that they responded. And a thing that is really, I'll just put a, an idea out that I'm not firm on yet. I'll be very interested to see this debated in the scientific literature.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  But I won't be surprised if cultures are tied to the genetics of the people that that culture is born from. And so that cultures probably have a propensity, like, there are only a certain number of cultures that the Japanese could have adopted, if you tried to bomb them and then lay a culture on top of them. So it had to be something that they could actually take to. So as you research Japan, one of the things that you'll see, and this is, I read this as a modern complaint about Japan as well, which is, the Japanese are perfectly fine to be deeply subservient to somebody, or to sit on their face.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  And so, they can be in complete control or completely subservient, but like, they don't do well in the middle. And I thought that was interesting. Now, if there ends up being any sort of genetic component, and that's not that any person raised in that society would act exactly the same, then there becomes something far more complicated about where you can even hope to have any sort of acceptance of a foreign culture. And so again, I don't know that that's true. Culture is a very, very, very powerful force unto itself. But it is an interesting question that I would like to see explored. So, we'll see what happens there. So anyway, that may also feed into this, where even if you dropped a bomb on them,

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  if you then tried to chase it with, and now adopt a Western frame of reference, it might not work. So, I certainly don't think it works from a cultural standpoint, if you have two conflicting religions. And so, when somebody really believes in their religion, and you tell them, God wants you to fight and die for this thing over here, then they're gonna fight and die for that thing. And I think they will legitimately be willing to die for that thing. It's one of the more interesting thing about humans. Most humans have a thing they actually would die for. And that's a wild thing, that creates very interesting moments like what we're seeing now.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  All right, we gotta talk about Anthropic's new threat report. They just released this. We're gonna talk about the speculation of the Doomer AI, the rise of the Doomer AI influencer lately. It seems like it's been a push, but we'll get there. But, this Anthropic's new threat report is absolutely insane. This is from the Paradox Kapoor. They claim Alibaba extracted 151 million Claude exchanges to help train Quinn. Kimmy secretly routed some users to Claude without them knowing. DeepSeek apparently did the same. A weapons group used multiple Claude instances as an engineering test. Test fired a guided rocket, failed, then went back to Claude to figure out what went wrong.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, kids, this is how you should be using AI. Like, if there is a thing that you were trying to accomplish and you're not using AI, you're an absolute fool. I understand people have an emotional response to this. AI is, everybody is so focused on the A, and they're forgetting the I. Guys, if you're not using AI, please, I'm telling you, go use it. I love, if you're putting energy behind, hey, we've gotta draw lines around what becomes weapons grade, what we don't want people using it for. If Anthropic says, hey, we've detected that you're trying to do something with a weapon, and they shut you off and they ban your account forever, no problem. But, if you're, if you don't understand, like, if you're trying to do something, big especially, and you don't immediately go to the AI and say, hey, this is what I'm trying to do, I wanna talk through this, figure out what's going on,

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  like, you are hamstringing yourself. This is like, literally, trying to do physics with an abacus, instead of building the Large Hadron Collider. What are you doing? It's so dumb. We are really letting a narrative that is going to hold people back, get hold, which is that, oh my god, we're gonna be eaten alive by AI. It's like, no, don't allow the AI to get to that level. Absolutely draw rings around what we consider acceptable and not. Look at how far the US is going right now to stop a rogue nation from getting access to a nuclear weapon. That is a right way to respond to that. So if people are using AI inappropriately, we should have an escalatory response that is massive, for sure.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  But, to not attempt to use AI to do all this stuff is crazy. Now, the threats themselves make it very clear. We've gotta have a very sober, very disciplined, and immediate response to AI, and what we think is an acceptable use of this stuff. You cannot come at this from a place of panic. You can't just come and hit AI with a big mallet. It won't work, remember. If you do that, China is not going to, because China has the belief, well, we've got authoritarian control on all of this stuff anyway, so I'm gonna shut anybody down that's doing anything I don't want them to do, they're only gonna use this exactly as I see fit. So, they're gonna keep using AI, keep growing it, and they'll take advantage of that to be ahead of the game.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  So, understand the option of just rubber malleting this thing to death and saying, we're putting a moratorium. You are literally just saying, let China win. Let China win economically, let China win militarily. That's fucking crazy. So, when I read through the, admittedly, the TLDR of the threat assessments, I was like, okay, wow, yes, this is exactly what I would expect to find. You're gonna have all kinds of lunatics, trying to build biological weapons, you've gotta shut that down. That's like, an obvious, clear case. Just absolutely, men in black, show up at their house, snatch them up, whatever, you can't have people doing that. If you've got people trying to use it to build weapon systems that are not authorized by the government to do it, shut their accounts off immediately. Have some sort of detection thing, I'm all for it.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  I love me some privacy, but if I'm asking AI to do something it's not supposed to do, fucking alarm bells, send a report back, let them see the exact prompt that I'm doing. And if I'm doing something nefarious, immediately shut me down. I've got no beef with any of that, that's wonderful, get to it. But we have to make sure that we understand that the option globally to stop AI is over. So all we can do is be intelligent about not letting AI reach super intelligence. And so, we need to put a consortium together of people that actually understand AI, not fucking retarded politicians, who will print your money into oblivion, but actual people that understand the technology. And we've gotta put them together to say, cool, what are your recommendations? How do we actually stop this thing?

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  And it is a must, it must be done quickly. We need to take these threats seriously, but we actually have to deal with them practically. And that is the thing I don't see people doing. I see laissez-faire, and I see panic. And I don't see the deaf thing in the middle, with the exception of people like Connor Leahy. Shout out to my man Connor Leahy, who's really trying to get politicians to wake up to what actually needs to be done. And so, yeah, that is precisely the method. He is somebody who understands AI, engages with AI, built early, some early AI stuff, so like, really, really understands it. And at the same time, knows there's a difference between weapons grade and civilian use. So, you need to see that, and you need to see it right now.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  So, this is where we've gotta be doing, things like, let, help my voice echo beyond the confines of this platform, please. And get politicians looking at this kind of thing. So, clip it out, send it to your favorite politician, repost it, whatever, whatever. But, yeah, we've gotta get people to put that consortium together and start taking action now, in a way that acknowledges that we can't lose to China.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  Um, okay, I'm gonna get to the China point right after this. There's been this push about like influencers trying to create AI Doom. Jacob Coxton's resume was getting criticized lately because he's only been in the industry three years. He was at Anthropic six months ago.

• 1:09:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're saying a thing I don't like, and you're probably a political operative, because everybody's a fucking political operative, myself included. I want you guys to understand, I want you to see the way that I view the world, so that you will hopefully sharpen your own mindset. So every word I choose is meant to convince you of something, to uh, look at something, to make up your own mind. I'm not one who's like, just believe what I believe. But I am actively trying to get, I'm actively trying to change the way that people view the world. Everybody is. So you should look at everybody with a John DeSai. I'm sure that this guy is putting forward propaganda, whether on his own behalf or on somebody else's behalf.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  And so I, what I really want people to understand, stop thinking it's somehow more nefarious because somebody does it on, at the request of a government. It's like, if somebody is trying to believe, trying to get you to believe something that isn't going to be good for you, I don't care if they're doing it because they sincerely believe it, or because they're being paid to say it. My beef is that somebody is trying to get me to believe something that is anathema to a goal that I want to achieve. This is why, uh, so I recently got invited to debate, uh, be the sort of one of, I forget, I think he does one V ten. Uh, which by the way, I owe him a text, I need to reply to him. Anyway, I'm not gonna do it. The reason I'm not gonna do it is I have no interest in winning a debate. The only thing I care about is I want to understand, what are your base assumptions? What are you driving towards? What do you believe to be true? What is the end result that you're trying to get to?

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Then, if we disagree on the end result, then we should be talking about that. If we agree on the end result, but we disagree on the tactics on how to get there, then what are the beliefs that are undergirding you wanting to take that path? Let's just fucking talk about those things. So we've got to talk about cause and effect and how we get to the place that we actually want to go to. So if somebody is trying to drag me to a point on the horizon that I think is just terrible for everybody, then I don't give a fuck if AIPAC is paying them, I don't care if Ukraine, Russia, Iran, I don't care who's paying them. Fuck you, it's a bad idea. It's not gonna take us somewhere good. I don't need to dig deep to like, who's trying to get you to say this. It's like, it's a fucking bad idea. Whether China is behind all of the anti-AI stuff,

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  I mean, it matters in terms of dumb people don't think through this stuff, and so they're creating a wall of noise. And if I have to go get the government shut down the wall of noise, that people can think a little bit more clearly, fine. But it's like, I can also just address the fucking arguments. So whether this guy's been in the industry for three years, two minutes, nine seconds, whatever, none of that matters. Does he understand the technology? Is he trying to take me somewhere on the horizon that I actually want to go? Has he identified a cause and effect sequence that we should be paying attention to? And so as long as people just understand, everybody, your wife is trying to convince you of something, you're trying to convince your wife of something. You choose words all the time. This is the thing that people do. Just cut to the fucking quick of the argument, stop getting lost on the drama.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Um, next uh, beat on this.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  We don't want to go deeper on like.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we're getting there, we're getting there. Cause if we have to build AI, that murders us. Because if we don't, China will build it first. And if we don't get murdered, and we don't, and I don't want to get murdered by a computer that speaks Chinese, that would be ridiculous. There's another tweet that kind of encapsulate this, but it's this, we have to do it so that way it could, our Chinese robot overlords can be controlled by American, as opposed to our robot overlords being controlled by China, because that's way better overlords. And I feel like we're not acknowledging the fact that like, hey, maybe we should start building overlords. Does that make sense?

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to slap this guy with like those gummy hands. You ever seen those things? Like those, they're really stretching, fuck. This kind of stuff drives me crazy. So Ray, dear Ray, listen. Are you really that retarded? That would be my question. So the answer is, there are two things here. We cannot allow AI to become a super intelligent thing that enslaves the human race, or just wipes off the face of the earth. That's correct. And I hear that hiding inside of your tweet. But at the same time, if you can't understand that this is a weapon system, and it will be leveraged to give a country an advantage, you have to understand the only deaf way forward is to say that yes, we both must quarantine this as a weapon system,

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  ideally in coordination with China, and we can't lose to China, because to lose to China is to lose militarily and to lose uh, um, economically. So we take a theoretical threat, because we actually don't know that superintelligence will wipe us all out. It's better to assume that it will, so I get why, I agree with people that want to make sure that we don't get to superintelligence until we're able to ensure that it will carry the same kind of human morality that we have, and we have not figured out how to do that. So cool, let's just pump the brakes, let's draw a fire break between um, where AI is now and superintelligence, to make sure that we don't cross that chasm. Love at the most. But now we, we just have to admit that unfortunately, the world is a very dangerous place,

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  and we do not want to be in a position where China can leverage intelligence to enslave us, which is a very real thing. I know I have to protect myself from other nations. So what exactly are you trying to get me to understand? To just say, hey, we need to stop developing AI, and then China just runs off and does it? Like, what the fuck are you actually getting to? Do you have some secret relationship with China that I don't know, and China's telling you, hey Ray, don't worry, we're not gonna keep doing it. So please, tell the US to stop using that as an argument, because that's silly, we're ready to stop. Do you have that contact, Ray? Because if you do, let me know, and then I'll be far more amenable to your very sarky fucking response. But the reality is that there really are two issues, and you really do have to separate those fucking issues out.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Otherwise, you trade fear of a theoretical superintelligence for an actual fear of China. So god damn, man, you're watching the US run around the world, act a fool, and you don't think that China will do the same thing? Like, come on, man. So the only reason that we maintain global balance of any kind is because we are strong. So let's not put ourselves in a weak fucking position comparatively, because we abdicate our responsibility to at least match the capabilities of AI. Now, I get the escalating arms race, which is why we should immediately be moving to firebreak the pursuit of superintelligence, and we should do it in lockstep with China, and we should be working very hard to convince them.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  But it's not like just because convincing them will be hard, or potentially even possible, impossible, that we just go, oh, fuck it. Just stop doing it. That's full retard, dude. That's full retard.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Uh, and our friends at the Babylon Bee, oh, your intelligent creations are trying to kill you. That's interesting, says Jesus.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  This is good. This one was.

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  That's really good, wow.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  This one was good. I like it.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  God's laughing at us all right now.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  Okay, I kind of do want to explain that. I'm so curious if people are missing, that one's subtle enough. Uh, God sent his only begotten child, God created us all, sent him here, and then we killed his son. It's a wild story. It's crazy, by the way, and I don't believe a word of it, but uh, that's really funny.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  That's a good.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  That's good shit.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Um, with this AI doomerism though, um, with everything going on, we had the conversation with Connor, we're also super bullish, we had Peter D. and Amanda's all. And so we see the AI singularity, the utopia, everybody getting UBI. We see the 10%, some people are saying 13%, we seen P Doom numbers as high as 70% in the next three years.

• 1:16:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that's recent, but yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, that it's all just gonna massacre us. Do you have any worries? Are you still like, hey man, until we get there, let me just use AI for the benefit of it?

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Connor, Connor impacted me deeply. Um, so my, the way that I think about it now, post Connor, is that we absolutely have to define what is weapons grade? What does that look like from a technical perspective? Is it size of the neural network? Is it something else completely? But whatever it is, it's not gonna be decided by politicians, they will inevitably fuck it up, they do not understand this technology at all. They will go with whatever uh, person they think is most likely to get them reelected, that's a terrible idea. So we need people that don't have a profit motive uh, to, so like, you can't let Anthropic and OpenAI be the ones that decide this. But they're gonna need a voice at the table, because they understand the technology the best.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  Uh, but you want a consortium of people that are independent, that understand the technology very deeply, that are broadly um, spread across the political spectrum as an echo of the um, psychological spectrum. Because I think there's a big difference between someone who has a temperament that leans right, and someone who identifies as Republican, those are very different to me. Uh, same with somebody who has a temperament leans left versus identifies as a Democrat, those are very different. Uh, so you want people spread across the um, intellectual spectrum, uh, and ideally people that are non-political in nature. Uh, and then, yeah, let them put forward, okay, here are the um, the things that we advise, and you try.

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  And by the way, that needs to be in coordination with China at an absolute minimum. But the more people that you can get involved, and let's say that only the US and China get to vote, and then basically everybody else is going to adhere to it under threat of massive economic and or military sanctions. Uh, so it's gonna need to be something like that, and it's going to need to happen very fast.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Nice. Um, somebody checked you in the chat, they said. You talked about all these off-ramps to hedge your bets against the decline and you left out Bitcoin. What's up with that?

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Oh, uh, well, so first of all, I often leave out Bitcoin so as not to pump my own bags, but Bitcoin is one of my largest investments, if not my single largest investment. So, uh, yes, I can. So the way that I treat Bitcoin is it's like gold. So, but Bitcoin doesn't have 5,000 years. So I'm always a little bit more trepidatious. Uh, I own Bitcoin, I own gold. Um, I own more Bitcoin than gold by a lot because it's so much easier to custody, like actually trying to hold gold at your house. Yikes. Uh, trusting somebody else with my gold. Yikes. As the US has a longstanding history of confiscating your gold. Um, so yeah, that, nothing in my take on Bitcoin has changed. So, but it benefits

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  me maybe a little too much to see people get excited about Bitcoin. So I often don't speak of it.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Bitcoin definitely did the stair step. Um, with recent news, it was stuck in the sixties. Now it's kind of oscillating in the seventies. So go check your financial investments, but some people are speculating with all this printing Bitcoin may be due for another run.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  Bro, it, yeah. So the problem is that Bitcoin has failed in the public's imagination to act like digital gold, but that is precisely how I use it. It is a thing I hold when I'm worried about the economy.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  And I'm worried about the economy. So I'm holding Bitcoin.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Cool. All right. We need to talk about this Jimmy Kimmel story. He had an interview with, uh, Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, and he said it will not air on TV after the FCC threatening his show, ABC and local news stations. This is also, um, on the couple of days after Jimmy Kimmel announced his show will end next year. Um,

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  I don't, was that confirmed?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, he said it was.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Um, any thoughts on the FCC sending threats to Jimmy Kimmel?

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  The world of the media has really started to become just sort of this lunatic, amorphous blob that people should more or less stop paying attention to. The reality is, is that is an old method. It's completely outdated. The government should not in any way, shape or form be giving these people money. YouTube exists. Uh, TikTok exists. X exists. Like there's no reason for the government to subsidize this kind of stuff. If, uh, Jimmy Kimmel and ABC want to air whatever they want to air, they should be able to air the most unhinged, one-sided stuff that they want. The government just shouldn't be paying for it. So that would be my take on that. I'm not worried about whether I have a balance of guests. I'm trying to understand a topic. I'm going to bring people on that I want to talk to, and that's

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  that. And that's the nature of my show. And I don't expect any subsidies from the government, nor do I receive any. Uh, so yeah, stop paying them full stop. Let them bring on who they want to bring on. Now, I think Talarico is using this as a way to try to make it seem like the Trump administration is trying to censor them. Uh, so it's an interesting political tactic, but that kind of stuff drives me crazy. But yeah, this one, if Jimmy Kimmel does not want to have people on from the other side, he shouldn't be forced to. But if he's taking tax dollars, we have laws against this stuff and he's got to adhere to it. If he's not willing to do it, uh, then fuck him. It just is what it is. So Talarico is using it. Don't be bamboozled. Uh, think for yourself. I understand most people do not think through these things. So they just see it. They get the headline

• 1:22:03Speaker 00

  that the Trump administration is trying to censor him, yada, yada. And by the way, the Trump administration really might be trying to censor him. They may really be like, oh my God, thank God that we have these laws and we can use it against them. But also stupid. Get your own message out.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  ABC is independent though. They're not NPR or PBS where they rely on government funds.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  So why would they fall into these rules?

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  FCC can threaten them.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  It's still on TV. Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  And also he's had politicians on like Ted Cruz, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bill Cassidy.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  So wait, your guys' read is, um, they've done nothing wrong. This really is just censorship.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  Yes, it's censorship.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  My read is ABC is not getting paid for the government. And I was responding on what you said, that we should be paying for them. I'm saying we're not paying for them.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  Is there, um, do we see on the right, an unbalanced thing that doesn't get prosecuted?

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  That's a general state. Are you talking about specifically this situation?

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Well, because it's my understanding that the FCC has rules and they're just saying you guys aren't abiding by the rules. And if you would bring on X person, then this is fine. But if you don't bring on the other person, then you can't do this.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  Right. But he's brought on politicians in the past. And on top of this, this is the second time the FCC has tried to do anything to this TV show. Like it is, it is not that they violated any rules. No, they violated no rules.

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  Okay. If that's true, then cool. Nice and easy. It's, uh, suppression and it should immediately stop. But if there are rules in place.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Do I want to deal with a lawsuit? Do I want to deal with Trump, uh, going tweeting about me? Do I want to deal with all of those things that come with it? That's what happened with the first? This is the second time that Jimmy Kimmel got sued by Trump. Like, yeah.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  Yes, I understand. But you guys hear what I'm saying, right? Which is if there is a rule and that rule is being broken, that rule should be enforced. If that rule is being one-sided enforced, we have a problem. If that rule is being two-sided enforced, we have no problem.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  So what rule's being broken?

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  That you have to show both sides of the issue as a part of being on the public airwaves.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  He's had Ted Cruz on in 2016 after Trump already won the election. So he's had Republicans on his show.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Right. So that's where I then go, okay, if we want to adopt Ryan's frame of reference, which is that this is already balanced out, which I have a feeling that other people will put forward very legitimate criticism that his balance is way the fuck off. And so.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  I'm not saying it's balanced. I'm saying he has had Republicans on the show and he has a Democrat.

• 1:24:18Speaker 00

  I'm saying, I'm making a very specific claim and I want to make sure this is why debates these days are full retard in my opinion. The very specific claim that I'm making is if you, if the FCC has a rule, which I believe it does, and they are merely enforcing that rule and they enforce that rule on both sides, I have no problem with this. Especially if they said to him, hey, we have a rule. This is in violation of that rule. If you bring this person on, you would not, or you know, any one of these people on, it would not violate that rule. And then they decide, no, no, no, we're not willing to do that. Cool. The next question becomes, are they seeing the same violations on the right and not enforcing them? If they have a rule and they are not enforcing it the same on both sides, then fuck the FCC. And this is clearly being weaponized against

• 1:25:02Speaker 00

  them. And they should absolutely pursue it and sue the government and make sure that this doesn't keep happening. But I, the, the claim is merely, if this is being adjudicated fairly on both sides, we have no problem. If this is being adjudicated unfairly, we have a problem. I have no problem believing that this is being adjudicated unfairly. And I think that the, both parties have started weaponizing the government in a way that I find abhorrent. I view it to be completely un-American and I believe it is extremely dangerous. And so if this is one of those examples, cool, literally sue them and win, and let's make sure that people don't do this again in the future. But at a glance, at the headline level, it seemed like they said, hey, bring on this other person and

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  all is well. And they're just like, no, we're not willing to do it. Okay.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  The deal is selective enforcement. So FCC, this is from their pairing. The reason that.

• 1:25:54Speaker 00

  This is from who?

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  The FCC's, uh, basis is that they have ruled late night shows as bona fide news interviews. That is different from what has happened in the past. Late night shows are typically entertainment. They're not categorized as news.

• 1:26:06Speaker 00

  Okay. When did that change?

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  When the Stephen Colbert stuff started. What was that? A year and a half ago?

• 1:26:13Speaker 00

  So under Trump, we decided now.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  It means something different.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  Okay. And is it being, because presumably there are late night, are there right-leaning late night shows? Not sure there are actually.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  They are. Uh, Godfrey, something Godfrey.

• 1:26:28Speaker 00

  Never even heard of it.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not.

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  That's interesting. So there basically is no way to, uh, enforce this on both sides because the other side doesn't even have this kind of thing.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  They have, they have Fox News.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  So Ryan, let me, so that you feel.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  He's had those people on and it's for the whole network. It's not specifically a Kimmel rule, right? And with the FCC.

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  It's not specifically a Kimmel rule. What does that mean?

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  Cause Kimmel doesn't own the network. He's a show on the network. They have other conservative media on this channel. And also, he's had Republicans on his show. His show has lasted since 2003. Like he's, he's legitimately had Republicans on when they're in their election cycle. This isn't like a first. It, it's just.

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  So let me ask, is, do you feel that what's really going on is that we need to not put this rule on, um, a late night show? Is it that, no, putting on a late night show is fine, but we need to look at the balance in totality. And so as long as, uh, over a six-month period or a quarter that they're roughly balanced, it's fine. Or should the FCC not at all worry about, um, balance as long, like news shouldn't be balanced as long as there's no government funding?

• 1:27:44Speaker 03

  My argument is nothing was violated.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  The FCC are threatening.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  Right, it's just a threat. There was no violation. It's purely a threat because they don't want him to air the thing. Because the FCC chairman, whatever his name is, I forget, did the same thing last time when he made the Charlie Kirk joke. Is that what it was that got him like, and he went on the record saying, well, we can take anyone's license away. I mean, this happens all the time. I said, screw Governor Abbott on live TV FCC when I ran a TV station. FCC didn't care. Like, these are things that we just do. These are things that have a system, they have a function. And the FCC right now is run by a guy who's weaponizing those functions in order to push his narrative. Because right now, the media is bought by the right. I know there's this ideology, or this ideology, this idea that,

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  oh, all media is owned by the left. The left controls it all. And I will say, yes, inherently, people in creative fields are typically more liberal. But the idea that it's this unbalanced thing is ridiculous. It's clearly the FCC threatening because they don't like the idea that a Democrat is getting platformed.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  Okay, that strikes me as just sort of empirically, well, whether they like it or not is a different thing. But given that this has only happened twice, right? Or is this happening way more than I realized?

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Technically three times if we count Stephen Colbert.

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Speaker 00

  Okay, so same idea. You've got, a race is coming up. You're bringing on one candidate, but not the other.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  I don't know if Stephen Colbert brought up the other candidate, but yeah, Stephen Colbert said something about me that I didn't like, or is talking to a candidate I don't like. So I'm going to pressure them with their license being restricted.

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  You guys are giving spin, though. Just give me like the cold hard facts.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  I'm literally, I'm giving you what Trump said.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  You're saying the FCC went for it and said, they said something I didn't like, so I'm not letting them merit.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Trump said something he didn't like, so he pushed, he said the FCC is going to come after you. Day later, the FCC sends a cease and desist.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  But what was the actual cease and desist for?

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Let's bring up the specifics. I like that.

• 1:29:35Speaker 00

  Well, is this interesting enough? So I'll say, I'll say this at a high level. I'm trying to understand, Ryan, your position, but like at a policy level. So if you're saying, it's perfectly fine to have a balance doctrine, where you say, you're a news show, there must be balance, and they just didn't violate the balance. Then I'm like, okay, how do we map that balance? Is it per quarter? Is it a year? Like, what does that look like? And then it's like, okay, where do we judge the, because late night gets complicated, but certainly Fox News is a very right-leaning show. And so can we compare news outlets and say, are they being adjudicated the same way?

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  Because if they're being adjudicated the same way, then it's like, I'm not sure that we have the SEC FCC unfairness that you guys think we do. So I don't know that this story matters enough. I don't think people are going to care enough. But I was just trying to map through how you're thinking about it. To put a fine point on it, the government has been weaponized by politicians now for a very long time. I think it is super distressing and it should immediately stop. So if we went down the path and it's being not, they're not holding the right accountable to the same thing that they're holding the left, nice and easy, this is weaponization. It should stop. They should sue the government. For sure, for sure.

• 1:30:59Speaker 00

  Now personally, I think people should be able to bring on whoever the hell they want, as long as they're not being funded. So fuck them. If ABC wants to bring on literally only DSA candidates as far as the eye can see, and that's the only thing that they ever put forward, and Fox wants to bring on, what's that kid, the 4chan kid? Come on, come on, Fuentes. If they just want to have never-ending stuff with Fuentes, great. Do what you want to do. And if the community loves it, great. It should, to me, it should be treated like a YouTube channel. It just shouldn't be funded by the government.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and none of those, yeah. Only thing funded by the government is PBS and NPR.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is what happened.

• 1:31:43Speaker 00

  I think what people go to is they give them the public bandwidth. I think that's why people say it is, anyway.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  There was this thing, I'm gonna call it a reacts, because there's been a lot of speculation on, this is what the China, this is what the American economy is. Excuse me? And I want your opinion on it, breakdown, because if this is true, it has to get fact-checked. But this is something that Chinese economists says about Western economy. It says that the models are off.

• 1:32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is very interesting.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. One more point. The fact is simple. China has succeeded.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  We're coming, guys. We're a little bit delayed. We now understand modernization requires capital accumulation. Excuse me. Where does that first pot of gold come from? The West gets theirs through violence, war, and the slave trade.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  That's one.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Ruthless plunder, ruthless slaughter. China accumulated capital through its own effort and sacrifice.

• 1:32:38Speaker 00

  This guy's hilarious.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Then achieved modernization. History is the first pot of gold. No pot of gold? How is that possible? Telling developing nations to copy you, no pot of gold. History is about understanding your starting point. Each nation's first pot of gold can explain a lot. That's very well put. Even economic models such as K zero, without it, the economy can never grow.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Economies assume it's given by God. So where does K zero come from? The West, colonial plunder, as Xing said. China didn't colonize. It self-accumulated. That changes the question entirely. My analogy, a physicist asks why a chicken lays an egg and flies.

• 1:33:23Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Then models it as a sphere, not a chicken anymore.

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  I feel like we might have lost some translation with that one.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  He's saying that it gets so abstracted that when they're trying to run the math, we already have this because he's so full retard at this point, that this will be easy to take apart.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  And the last one, most nobles in America, most nobles in economics, and...

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  Nobels, like Nobel Prize.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. They don't offer any of those solutions to that problem. Where did that first pot of gold come from?

• 1:33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that was full retard by your man in China. So here is what he's not being honest about. So China just worked this way. So please let us never forget that in the 60s and 70s, China killed, what, 45 million of its own people? It is patently ludicrous to think that the only way that a nation gains its strength is through colonial plunder. The way that America gained its strength was, we came here, think long before there was a slave trade. When there is nobody here, you arrive on the land, and the land has something that you can take from not producing well.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  You throw some ingenuity at it, it produces well. You're able to build surplus. That surplus allows people to specialize. The specialization allows somebody who's very good at accumulating to become wealthy. So if you've ever played a game of Minecraft, you understand what the wealth acquisition, acquisition loop looks like. And it is a big deal. The geography that a country is on is a very, very big deal, because it's going to determine what resources you have to quote-unquote exploit. And for Europe to go and become a colonial power, they first had to amass the wealth to build the ships and be able to go and do all of that stuff. So he's sort of picking up history long after that first pot of gold, and then saying, see, these guys cheated. It's like, well, hold on a second.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  How do these countries get to the point where they can go and enslave other people? They first had to generate enough wealth based on the bounty and the geographical layout of the country. So one of the things that makes America so extraordinary is the Mississippi and the rate at which it rises and falls. It's like for a thousand miles or something crazy, the change in elevation, these are directionally correct, they're not literal, but the change in like elevation is 40 feet or something stupid. It's just like basically flat. And so that allows you to have massive trade, whereas other countries, they have huge waterfalls and rapids,

• 1:36:05Speaker 00

  and so moving things around is next to impossible. Norway, same thing. They have all this lumber, but they also have these fjords. So they have all these intricate waterways that allow you to access, cut down your natural resources, and move them around the country very easily. So your geography plays a gigantic role. And then also, having a winter forces people to plan for the future. And so that builds things in culturally. It may also have a genetic effect. And so there's all kinds of things that matter that this guy is just trying to brush under the rug. And nobody, nobody, and I mean nobody, in certainly modern history, has abused their population more than the Chinese. So please, GTFO with that analysis.

• 1:36:49Speaker 00

  Now, is it true that right now, well, first of all, Europeans did a whole lot of colonialization. Yes, they did. But that was not their first pot of gold. Second, is it true that the US is making a fool of itself on the world stage by, through the 2000s Shrinded Nation Build? Yes, absolutely. If we find that you have oil, do you suddenly need a lot of freedom? Yes. And I don't condone those things, but what made America as successful as it was? So first of all, people are going to say slavery. That's, we had to get rich before we could get to that point. And then second, even with slavery, I think it was 18% of GDP. So even that, the vast, vast, vast majority of the economic growth in the country had nothing to do with that.

• 1:37:35Speaker 00

  So yeah, this is, humans are exploitative. That's not ideal. I get why, as we move forward, we should all want to be non-exploitative. But the first pot of gold has to do with your geography and how well you're able to organize your populace to get good at innovation, so that you can turn farming practices into massive overproduction, that you can industrialize, for instance, so that you can become, instead of just agrarian, you can become an industrial powerhouse. So shout out to Alexander Hamilton for creating the first central bank, thankfully with a 20-year clock on there, or 19, one of the two,

• 1:38:16Speaker 00

  so that once we were able to get some debt through money printing, that we were able to use that capital aggregation to industrialize. And so by being an industrial powerhouse and by having a very productive labor force, we were able to do something extraordinary. So yeah, anyway, this guy is just spouting propaganda. He's either dumb as a box of rocks, or he's a propagandist. But all of that is just obviously and provably false.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  And we want to honor today's day. I don't want to call it special, but definitely infamous day. Twenty-five years ago.

• 1:38:57Speaker 00

  Important.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Zero nine eleven, two thousand and one, the biggest terror attack on US soil still to date. We are blessed in that way that we can only we can count on one hand how many times we've been impacted, where some countries have can count on one hand this month. So we're grateful for that. But it is something that we still how it changed foreign policy. It changed the TSA lines. It changed how we interact with our neighbor. It has a lot of lasting effects. Twenty-five years later, we're all reflecting on where we were. Everybody remembers it. Ryan wasn't born yet, and we all felt old. So.

• 1:39:32Speaker 00

  That was the thing that I was saying before we started rolling. That was just absolutely shocking. Drew had asked Ryan how old he was when nine eleven happened. He was like, I wasn't even born yet. That's pretty wild. So nine eleven is one of the most important things that has happened to America in its modern history. And we are forgetting the lessons that we should have learned. And some of the lessons that we learned were very positive. Others are negative. The just litany of mistakes that we made post nine eleven. But all of it is an opportunity to learn. And one of the things that I try to get people to embrace is that failure is one of the most information rich data streams on planet earth. And so our failure to stop it from happening is something that we should have

• 1:40:15Speaker 00

  learned from. Our failure in the wars in the Middle East is definitely something that we must learn a lesson from. All of the money that we wasted on these wars is something that we should have learned from that those dollars could have been going to strengthening America's infrastructure and making sure that we were building out a thriving middle class. These are all things that we didn't do well, and we've absolutely got to learn those lessons. But a lesson that I think is deeply uncomfortable that people really have to look at is that America has a cultural frame of reference that is not shared by

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  the world, that Islamist extremists have a value set around jihad that is incompatible with the West. And these things are colliding now. And if we lose sight of what could make somebody fly two planes into the Twin Towers, into the Pentagon, into a field in the middle of Pennsylvania, when they got overrun by passengers, if if we fail to understand an ideology that drives people to do that kind of thing, then we're we're going to find ourselves marching ever closer to the drama that Europe is having. And I think things are only going to get worse there. So there are a lot of lessons that we need to learn

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  from nine eleven. The way that we came together as a country, the way that we then squandered our unity. Those things are incredibly powerful lessons. That sense of being united, I remember what that felt like. And it was really extraordinary to be reminded that we are not untouchable, to be reminded that the world is an incredibly dangerous place, and that we need to be prepared. To be reminded that there are those in the world that hate our foreign policy, that hate the way that we live our lives, that are deeply impacted by the things that we do overseas. And if we don't think that the way that we conduct ourselves around the

• 1:42:18Speaker 00

  world is going to have a negative impact, then we are going to be incorrect. To understand that religious ideology becomes the heartbeat of a culture, even when people secularize it, and understanding what that looks like at the extremes. All of that stuff is incredibly important. And so nine eleven is something that I think is actually becoming more and more important for us as we get the historical perspective to look back and understand what came out of it, to understand how it got us in a positive emotional state of unity. But then immediately, because we fanned those flames of anger and aggression that we lashed out, it was used for political motives to get us to attack a country, Iraq,

• 1:43:03Speaker 00

  that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. That's incredibly important to remind ourselves how easy it was to manipulate all of us to political ends. And that the odds that that is being done to us again, we should just assume it's eternally being done, that people are leveraging our emotions to get us to act in a way that is politically expedient. And so when you hear me rail against populism, that's exactly the kind of thing that I'm railing against. We know that this can be weaponized against us. We know that it can be used to get us to do things that are just patently ridiculous. The reality was that when you're attacked, you do need to do something to make sure that your country is strong

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  and safe. But it isn't a question of just do something, do anything. And it certainly isn't a question of, well, go where we got embarrassed a little bit. We never got quite the wind that we wanted in the first Gulf War, and we want to go in, and we want to get that oil, we never got it. And so doing that kind of thing and allowing ourselves to be immoral on a global stage is just absolutely a catastrophe that we ought not repeat. So

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  yeah, we need to be very clear headed about what actually happened on nine eleven so that we can move forward in a way now where we find ourselves once again caught up in populist rhetoric. We find politicians and influencers wanting us to be in our emotions and to get whipped up into a frenzy and to do direct action and to be revolutionary in spirit. All of that is going to be destructive. All of that emotional energy will allow people to be hijacked and pushed into the wrong direction. We have to understand different countries want different things. And we need to be America. We need to decide what it means to be American. What are the values that we ride on the back of? What are we

• 1:45:01Speaker 00

  willing to fight for? What are we willing to die for? And make sure that we're not trying to propagate our way of life around the world, that we should ideally be looking at ways of creating economic opportunities for us and whoever that we're trading with. And to remember that if we can get people on our side, then we're far more likely to be able to scale those alliances without needing them to become American, to understand what our economic interests are, why we're working together, to understand what the edges of that cooperation are, what it would mean for us to go in different directions, to broadcast to the world what our moral center is, and then live up to it. And nine

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  eleven, I think, is is a just absolute clarifying historical event that we lose sight of at our peril. And to see now some of the lessons go unlearned, and to see us finding ourselves once again in a war largely of economics in the Middle East, foolish, to see us being blinded to the fact that cultures don't integrate as easily as we would like to think that they do. And that's something that from an immigration standpoint, we are absolutely going to have to be very clear eyed about as we move forward. So nine eleven is important to America for a whole host of reasons. And by the way, for anybody that was touched

• 1:46:24Speaker 00

  by the lives lost on that day, obviously, my deepest condolences. And to everybody that grew up in the shadow of that of suddenly feeling unsafe. I know intimately what that was like. And certainly, I want to see all of us move towards a time where we feel good, we feel secure, America's stable economically, it's stable militarily. Yeah, I want that for all of us. So let us learn the lessons of nine eleven.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  And this is a live look. There's a remembrance ceremony going on right now in New York. Obama, Biden, Bush, Trump, Rudy Giuliani was there, and of course, Mayor Mam Dany was there. Some people are petitioning that he not be there. What were your thoughts on that? Like, some people didn't want Mayor Mam Dany to be there?

• 1:47:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think that he does need to go. I think it's good that he's there. I think that him not speaking makes a lot of sense. I think that there are things that he's doing that are very questionable, and he's almost certainly trying to hijack the sentiment of what happened on nine eleven. The whole Penn thing, he knew exactly what he's doing. I think all of that stuff is in bad faith, and I'd rather he not do that kind of thing. But this isn't one where he's the mayor of New York City. He's the duly elected mayor of New York City. And so for him to be present on such a big day, I think is very important. I'll be interested to see how he conducts himself. I'll be interested

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  to see what he says after the fact. But yeah, this is not one where we want to escalate our differences. We want to find ways to bring the people that feel some type of way about nine eleven that are more on the DSA side of things, which you'll very quickly realize that DSA is not just an economic platform. It's a whole very red, green alliance. But we're gonna have to find a way to navigate that. So I don't want to treat this guy like persona non grata. It's yeah, we've got to find a way to to move in lockstep because he is the mayor. All right. As always, thank you guys so much for joining us. And we have another AI masterclass coming up Thursday, October 8 at 1pm Pacific. It has never been

• 1:48:40Speaker 00

  more important to learn AI than right now. And if you've ever thought about starting a business, I'm going to show you how to do it using AI. It's completely free. Join me Thursday, October 8 at 1pm Pacific. All right, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you Monday. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're

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