Deglobalization Dangers, Bond Market Chaos, and Why Canada Is Betting on China

Welcome to another jam-packed episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. Today, Tom dives deep into the market chaos triggered by wild movements in the bond market and looming economic maneuvers from key players like Bessent. We break down soaring long-term bond rates, the ripple effects of the U. S. debt crisis, and the complex financial strategies being deployed to stabilize the economy. Shifting gears, Tom unpacks Canada’s bold decision to walk away from a major U. S. trade deal, explores the escalating tensions between the U. S., China, and Canada, and reveals the larger story behind global deglobalization. We then journey into the geopolitics of the Middle East, analyzing shifts in the Strait of Hormuz and what rising maritime traffic could signal for Iran and the broader region. Finally, Tom tackles the explosive debate over Israel and Palestine, as highlighted by Mark Ruffalo's viral tweet, dissecting the cultural, political, and religious forces driving this divisive global conversation. Stay tuned for a thought-provoking, wide-ranging discussion that unpacks the news behind the headlines and what it means for the future. 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 TOM: 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 Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl#CashAppPod *Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosure. Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Ethos: Get a free quote athttps://ethos.com/impact 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 ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at https:// https://incogni.com/impactbusiness.att.com http://business.att.com Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.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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• 1:27Speaker 00

  that he's going to use the $1 trillion Treasury General Fund to bring rates down. We'll see. Canada pulls out of economic negotiations while the US, with US citing unfairness. But the reality that we're going to cover in detail is something very different. Stay tuned for that one. Are we actually making progress in Iran? That was a question I was asking myself as traffic through the Strait of Hormuz jumped roughly 400%. And reports start pouring in that the IRGC's grip on the straight is actually slipping. That could be good news. Today also marks the dawn of Besen's promised economic D-Day against Iran. We're about to find out just how much strength the US has left.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  China is using data scraping to build a synthetic version of the US electorate and test messaging and its impact on voting. Yikes. And Mark Ruffalo goes hyper viral for his denial of being antisemitic, which sparked a whole debate that highlights a growing divide over Israel and what they mean on the world stage. So welcome, everybody. Let's talk about Besen because, oh, my God, his economic bazooka is out and he is ready to rock in an effort to try to tame the rising rates in the bond market, which since his last announcement have been all over the place. The problem is he is going to be tested. Why?

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Because people do not like seeing that we're $40 trillion in debt. They don't like seeing that Japan, the largest buyer of US debt, is in trouble. And the US has been doing, yes, all kinds of financial shenanigans to try to help them out of trouble. We're now having to do financial shenanigans to get ourselves out of trouble. They also don't like that China is buying records, record amounts of gold while selling record amounts of US treasuries. They really don't like that gold is now the number one global reserve asset held by central banks as people continue to move away from the dollar. So long-term bond rates are climbing. The 30-year just touched 5.337%. That was a 19-year high.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Now, when Besen said that he was going to double buybacks from $2 billion per round to $4 billion per round, yields did crater. They went down by nine basis points, but by Friday, they'd come right back, bringing the long bond back to about 5.273%. That was higher than before Besen made that move, which is what I think prompted the two Treasury officials, who were, of course, off the record, to leak, though I think that they were told to do so by Besen, to CNBC this morning, that the Treasury General Account, which holds nearly $1 trillion, could be used to buy bonds en masse. Now, the TGA is the government's massive checking account at the Federal Reserve,

• 4:25Speaker 00

  but I'm not sure that anyone was expecting Besen to dip into that to fund the buybacks. I think the market was assuming that more short-term debt was going to be issued to bring long-dated bonds into being short-term bonds. So you're not changing the amount of debt in the system. You're just changing the duration. The fact that he's using cash makes this a whole different ballgame because it means that the Treasury will be retiring long-duration bonds without adding supply anywhere else on the curve. And when they do that, when they buy it back in this manner, the debt just evaporates. It's gone. It doesn't exist anymore. Now, apparently, the markets are believing the rumor, at least for now, because yields fell again on the report.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  The 30-year is down four basis points to 5.223% and the 10-year is down four basis points to 4.7%. Now, there is a catch. When you look at using this method, the TGA is not an infinite war chest. That is some sort of magical solution to this problem. Every dollar in that account was borrowed by doing a bond auction previously. So if that money gets spent down, now you're just skating on thinner ice for future problems, like if there's a government battle over the debt ceiling or whatever. These are the funds that would be used for that. And so you are likely to have to try to rebuild that if you end up spending it. And to rebuild it, you have to sell, you guessed it, more debt.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  And once again, you're going to put pressure on some portion of the curve. So it buys us time, gives us a chance to see how this is playing out. Do people settle down? Do they realize that they're not going to be able to sweat Besen enough to keep putting pressure on rates? Or do buyers know that Besen's options are limited and that there is no silver bullet, only trade-offs? And so we are likely to see more volatility. Guess what fixes volatility, everybody? Having a good economy. You gotta grow your way out, boys and girls, and you can't just say it. You actually have to do it. And right now, who, buddy? As we deglobalize, as we continue to place one gigantic bet on AI. That is growing for sure.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  But is it growing at the rates that it would need to grow to get us out of this? Not yet. Our GDP at last check was growing at a paltry, like 1.2% or something. So this is not an ideal setup. We definitely have got to find a way to really get the real, not the financial economy, the real economy growing. You've got to see middle-class, real wages going up, not nominal, real wages. So not just that number go up, but number go up compared to inflation. That's where we've got to be. And until we see the real economy growing at a rate that we can get excited about, let's pay it at 3%, 4%, we're going to need to be somewhere in that ballpark. So we're going to have to roughly double.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  I mean, this is not going to be an easy task. So Besen and the whole crew in Trump land have their work cut out for them. And I don't yet see signs that this is going to work. So we'll see. The fullness of time, Drew, the fullness of time.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  I think like it's cool because like Besen is like economic wizard. So I'm just flabbergasted at how many little piles of money. He's like, well, I got a trillion over here and I got $2 billion over here. And I just did a currency swap with these people. So it's, I could feel like he's at like the board and he's trying to pull all levers and do all the magician trick, but the bond market is like, nah.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yes. The markets are very savvy. They are full of people that know exactly how this game is played. They know what tools he has in his disposal. So it, for the general public, a lot of these things are going to be surprises. But for the people that are actually putting the pressure on the markets, not so much. There's a book called 1929. It was written by one of the, I think it's.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Andrew Sorkin.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Thank you, Jesus. Drew.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  I got your back, bro.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Come on, man. Written by Andrew Sorkin, yes, bang. And he goes through some of the ways that people were manipulating the markets at that time. You really see, because we've had so much time to look back at that, figure out who the players were, what were they doing? Who are they grouping up with? How are they moving the markets? You really get a sense of how easy, maybe the wrong word, but easy as a stand-in, it is to manipulate markets and to get them to move in a direction. And what Besen is doing is basically creating a market, meaning there's going to be a buyer. Now, that buyer happens to be the US government. And I know before we started going, you pulled up this bar chart.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Where the US basically is just buying up all of the debt within a certain range. Was it the 10-year range, I think? 10 or 15-year range. The US now owns more than 50% of its own bonds in that range. It's not across the full spectrum, but in that range. That is not a sign of a healthy economy, man. That is not where you want to be. Where do you want to be? You want Japan just hoovering up your debt because it is a surefire way for them to get a risk-free rate of return. You want China hoovering up your debt. You want the whole world hoovering up your debt. But instead, right now, the world is splintering apart. Deglobalization is my stand-in phrase for nobody trusts anybody anymore.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Everybody is super suspicious. You get like these agreements that are being made between different countries, but it's like all these very uneasy alliances that are being made. You're seeing stuff happening in the Middle East where they're trying to like team up a little bit, but they don't have a ton of trust for each other. Obviously, plenty of people don't have trust in the US government. The US obviously doesn't trust China. China doesn't trust the US. It is, this is a weird time. And I, here's my mental map. I don't think I've said this out loud, certainly not very often, but my mental map is, one day, we're all gonna look back at this very time as like, what does deglobalization feel like? Is it fun? Is it good? Does it lead to instability? Does it cause people to shoot each other? And the answer is yes.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  This is what it is. And because we don't have the historical perspective to see it, we keep looking at like these narrow little beats and we're not putting it all together. Every now and then I'll do a run and I'll sort of web everything out of like, here's how all of this stuff is interconnected, including the kinetic warfare. But it's just too overwhelming to run through it every time. But when you zoom in, you lose the real picture, which is the world is fracturing, we're going from high trust to low trust, and it's in the middle of populism, and it's not a good time. And when this all started with hollowing out manufacturing and people were getting Rust

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Beltized, we just, you know, you sort of, well, yeah, but everything's getting cheaper and that kind of feels good. And you don't realize you've started a process that is brutal.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. We spoke with Arthur Laffer, who's like the OG tax consultant to Reagan and all these administrations. And when we brought up the debt problem to him, hey, we're 40, we're about to hit 40 trillion in debt. We're 130, I think we were at 130 GDP debt ratio. He's like, that's not real. We owe ourselves, like federal debt isn't that big of a deal. And then we look at charts like this that shows that the Federal Reserve now owns half of the treasuries that are maturing. So it does seem like we're kind of circular financing ourselves. Is, what is the, the thing on the other side? Like, what is the, because I feel like we are just owing money to us in like, line item one is a withdrawal, line item four is a deposit. So what is the downfall or what is the problem this, what are the thing that we are trying to prevent?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Because right now, we're the biggest older owners of our own debt and like we owe us. So I'm trying to figure out like, we just gonna default on us? You get what I'm saying? Like, what is the, what's the thing on the other side that I'm not seeing?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Okay. Let's, we're gonna speed run it a bit, but we're gonna have to bring in immigration to this because it's gonna make a point about the economy that we've been talking about since like the 60s or 70s. I pulled a clip, if you want to pull that up while I start this, of Milton Friedman talking about, he doesn't say the part that I'm gonna fill in, but he's talking about why up until 1914, everybody was like, yeah, like open immigration, which we had an open immigration policy. If you made it to Ellis Island, welcome. There were no stipulations. Then we started shutting that off.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  And certainly on the right, people have an intuition, if nothing else, that you can't do that. But the question that Milton Friedman asks is, why can't you do that? And this is going to, I know it feels like we're moving away. This is going to begin to explain what we're protecting against in terms of the fact that this is all a gigantic Ponzi scheme. And so we're going to answer the question that Milton Friedman dances around, which is what happened in 1913. Why is there a break in 1914? Let's hear from Milton.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Always been amused by a kind of a paradox. Suppose you go around and ask people, the United States, as you know, before 1914 had completely free immigration. Anybody could get on a boat and come to these shores, and if he landed on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? You will find hardly a soul who will say it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. But then I suppose I say to the same people, but now what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration? Oh, no, they'll say, we couldn't possibly have free immigration today.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Why, that would, that would flood us with immigrants from India and God knows where. We'd be driven down to a bare subsistence level. What's the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there's a sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914, is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every, every resident is, is promised certain minimum level of income or a minimum level of subsistence regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not, well, then it really is an impossible thing. If you have free immigration in the way in which we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited, the people who came benefited, because nobody would come unless he or his family thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities

• 15:42Speaker 02

  for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit. But on the other hand, if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled to a pro rate a share of the pot, to take the extreme example, or even to a low level of the pot, then the effect of that situation is that free immigration would mean a reduction of everybody to the same uniform level. Of course, I'm exaggerating. It wouldn't go quite that far, but it would go in that direction. And it is that perception that leads people to adopt what at first seemed like inconsistent values.

• 16:22Speaker 00

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• 19:48Speaker 00

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

• 19:52Speaker 00

  What changed? Why is the year 1914? Now, long time listeners of the show know exactly where I'm going, which is in 1913, we created the central bank. In 1913, you went from a real economy with sound-ish money that was backed by gold. And you moved into the steady breakdown over a very long period of time. But you moved into a situation where you had the steady breakdown of the relationship between the dollar and gold that has its final breaking point in 1971. And so, once you understand that when you put the central bank in place, what you're doing is creating that. And if we had it fast on top, I would have you play that Biden senior economic advisor, who could not explain the economy.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Because what he's tripping over is that, okay, wait, how is all of this money being created? Like, who do we owe it to? Like, wait, is it a problem? Like, why do we have to print money if we just owe it to ourselves? What's the issue here? And it's where you realize that money, even gold, it's all a fiction. It is all a psychological game. Man, do I want people to understand you're having a biological experience. None of this stuff is real. Whether the fact that we live in a simulation is real or simply the best approximation of what's really going on doesn't matter. The reality is, the way that human psychology works is that you will very quickly realize it's far too hard to stay alive by myself.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  So I need to find a high utility way to capture the value of my time and effort. And so I'm going to specialize in something. And that forces you to abstract money. It's no longer the real thing. It's no longer, I build you shelter, you live in the shelter. I built you a fishing rod and you were able to go get something to eat. And it becomes, I did a thing. I don't know what people are going to do with the thing that I'm making, but as long as that thing has value, people will give me this abstraction that we call money. Now, that money has to be made from something. And we picked gold because it can't be eaten by like silverfish, which will actually eat cash. It doesn't rot over time as so many other things do.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Because for a while, you know, things like hay or rice could be used as money. Because it was just so universally used by everybody. Salt is another one. And so we found, okay, gold is this thing. It's very hard to inflate because it's just hard to get out of the ground. And so there's this natural scarcity to it, a natural difficulty to get it out of the ground. And so even though it does slowly inflate over time, that becomes a thing that like basically every society settled on. It just happens to be this thing that comes from an exploding star. So it has like a relatively even distribution so that everybody sort of come across this thing. Okay, so it's already fake. It's just the thing that we go, okay, we're all going to agree

• 22:45Speaker 00

  that if you have this thing, I can trust that it's real. But then, as you get into the central banking, you can't trust it anymore. Now you just have to believe that the people running the central bank will try to be sensible about the amount that they inflate the currency. And as every empire before us has done, they stop being sensible. And 1971 was the end of this sort of sensible train where there was any tie between gold and the dollar that kept it constrained in some way. And so you look at the M2 money supply and it just starts climbing ridiculously high post 1971. So all of the debt that we're bringing on, it is, it's all basically a fake system,

• 23:27Speaker 00

  a Ponzi scheme, however you want to look at it, that is completely done by fiat, just by decree. This money now exists, it is valuable because literally I, as the government, say so. And the problem is that as we do this, you find that you can't infinitely create appetite for debt. You can do a lot of things to create people's desire to give you the fake money that they earned in order to get that. But over time, it just keeps increasing the supply, increasing the supply, increasing the supply. You can buy it back from people. But the problem is the mechanisms that you have to buy it back ultimately cause the creation of more money. So as the Fed, sorry, as the Treasury is using the money that they raised at auction,

• 24:13Speaker 00

  they basically sequestered that money. But now that they're buying it, they're injecting liquidity back into the system. And then they will ultimately, assuming they want to get back to a trillion dollars in that fund, they're going to have to print more money to do that. And they have to at all times be ready to quote unquote, make a market by being willing to either print money or buy, as the Treasury is doing now, to make sure that somebody can buy that excess available debt to keep the psychology of people in line. But it's a psychological game that you're playing. It isn't that you're adding real value to money. In fact, you're doing the exact opposite. As you inject more liquidity into the system,

• 24:58Speaker 00

  if you don't inject it in exact proportion to the amount of new things that you can buy, then you're making every dollar less valuable. And so that's the game. It's literally all quote unquote fake. But what people have to understand is if you just go, oh, it's fake and this is all bullshit and what are we doing? You miss the whole point that all of money, always and forever, whether it's sound money or not, it's all fake. It's all psychological. And that's why you get this repeating thing where even if you're the Roman government, you start clipping your coins, you start using impure metals so that you can inflate the currency. And even the fact that gold acts as currency,

• 25:43Speaker 00

  it only works when people believe that it's real. And so this is why gold beads have worked. Because well, that's what we believed in at that time. It's why salt has worked because that's what we believe in at that time. But then, of course, people will make the fake gold or glass beads, not gold beads, if I said gold beads, the glass beads. That's why they will find a way to go make those elsewhere, roll up with ships. And now we've got glass beads, you just inflated the currency, it will eventually collapse. And so all of this, what you're calling circular financing, it does eventually collapse the currency. And so the US dollar over the last hundred years has lost like 98% of its value. The British pound, same thing. It's just, this is what we do.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  So the fakery of it all, you can use it to manage people's psychology for a while. But the reality of the dynamics of a fiat currency over time will be abused through all of these gimmicks. No matter how many gimmicks you run, it will be abused over time to the point where it stops being real. And this is why what you're seeing now is central banks going, okay, we want to go back to that thing that's less manipulatable, which is gold. And so central banks, now gold is the number one reserve asset of central banks the world over for the first time in God knows how many years.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  But yeah, it's, most people will tell you, well, gold at least is real. Nope, it's just a less abusable fake thing that requires everyone to believe in it.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  So at first look, I just checked, the markets are kind of mixed. Dow is up, S and P is sliding, but there's some chick stock, chip stock problems. So people are saying it could be because of that, not necessarily because of the bond. While Besen is playing, you know, fixer on the bond market, the stock market hasn't necessarily reacted as much. Bitcoin had a little bit of a pop. What do you think is the second order consequence? If Besen keeps trying to inject liquidity or inject money to buy those bonds back and the appetite for the bonds do not return as fast as he would like?

• 27:48Speaker 00

  You, you are looking at one simple thing. I can boil all of this down. If your real economy isn't growing, meaning you are making things more productively, more efficiently, that people want very badly. So that the people making that thing make more money, pay their people more. Those people have good jobs, they're making more money over time. The real economy is growing, which they then spend in the economy. And now, all of that money that's sloshing around just becomes a smaller and smaller portion of your GDP. And you grow your way out of this. If you do not grow your way out of this, you're back to my, it was a 10 year clock. It's now at nine years. And that just keeps going down until it ends in bloody revolution

• 28:33Speaker 00

  or some sort of war that just does a natural reset to the global economy. Because if you're looking at all of this from the outside and you just don't have any allegiances to anybody, anywhere, you're looking at the US and you're like, okay, this is interesting. These guys have been abusing their position as the world's reserve currency for a long time. They've become completely fiscally irresponsible, which is precisely why immigration is a problem now. You have all these insane debts and deficits that's going to force, without growth, is going to force a reset of your economy because you simply won't be able to pay. Remember, the amount that we're paying to service the debt is still climbing. So people don't talk about it much anymore because it's almost like it gets boring.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, yeah, Tom, I get it. We're 123% debt to GDP, ah, whatever.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  No, not whatever. You, you are going towards a cliff. That cliff is there. Now, people can slow you down, but when you get to the point that you can't pay the interest on the debt, then you start defaulting and you just don't pay the interest on the debt, or you write off some of the debt, or you, which is what they're really gonna do, you inflate the currency really hard to just make the debt smaller. Because what happens is, if you have a, let's just say you double inflation, just to make math easy. Now, your 40 trillion becomes effectively 20 trillion. Now, everybody suffers for it, because that's 100% inflation. But that's how with post-inflation

• 30:07Speaker 00

  dollars, you can pay off pre-inflation debts. And so, this is the game that they do. And they just go, you're all gonna suffer, meaning anybody who gets paid in dollars, saves in dollars, has US debt, all of that is gonna become worth less over time. And that's the game every empire ever runs. They don't do austerity. They have a hard time growing. China's now facing the same problem. Their growth rate is declining. They're still growing faster than us, but their growth rate is declining. So, you get caught in this trap. So, the second order consequence is, you will eventually have to do something dramatic, either massive inflation, defaulting on your debts,

• 30:48Speaker 00

  something, and that something will be bad. It will be very bad. And that's precisely how you end up with revolution, because you can imagine, look at how much energy the DSA is gaining now. Now imagine, you do another 30% inflation like COVID. Forget it. It's game over, right? We can agree, if we're already in trouble, if we do another COVID-style bump without real growth in the economy, the pitchforks actually come out.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  I wanna tie the ends on this immigration thing. In this context, if immigration were not tied to any type of benefits, you don't get no benefits, 0%. If you get health insurance through your drive, great, but other than that, no government assistance at all, would you, would immigrants, immigration still be as big of a problem?

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Almost certainly not. So, you still have a question mark around cultural match, but if there's nothing to gain from anything other than a hard work ethic, entrepreneurial endeavors, and I talked about this really early when we started doing the lives, and I said, listen, you've gotta create a situation where you're only attracting the most hardcore people, people with an entrepreneurial spirit, who have the equivalent of, I may die in the first winter, but I'm gonna come anyway. When you have a setup like that, now it's like, yo, you're getting like, the best and the brightest, or the people that come that weren't the best and the brightest, they learn real quick, I gotta go back to wherever I came from, because

• 32:20Speaker 00

  this is not working out for me. And it is legitimately cold in the winter in New York City. And without that forcing function of, it is hard to eat, it is hard to stay alive, and I get how like brutal that sounds, but without that forcing function, you just get everybody coming, and now they're forcing you to run bigger and bigger deficits, because the real economy isn't growing. You won't be able to tax the billionaire class, as much as I know, everybody wants to believe that's true. You won't be able to tax them to be able to cover all of this stuff. And so, you end up in a socialist death spiral. As a PSA, I will remind everybody, the Nordic countries are not socialist. They themselves will tell you that they're not socialist, and the only way that they're able to get the large safety nets

• 33:03Speaker 00

  that they are, is by now starting to push back on immigrants. So, they've dramatically started reducing the number of immigrants that they're bringing into the country, and they have extraordinarily broad-based, high levels of tax, lower corporate tax rates. So, they're like, we've gotta protect the corporations, because that's, we need the average middle-class person to be making good money, and that's the only way. Get those guys making good money, and then tax the fucking life out of them. And you tax them at every opportunity. You tax their income, you tax the things that they buy, VAT taxes, things like that. And so, you get a massively broad tax base, and then you can do a social safety net, but you need a high trust, what people will call

• 33:47Speaker 00

  a homogeneous society. I do not think they need to look alike, but they need to think alike. And if they think alike, then you're able to get in a situation where people are like, it's considered gross in our culture to not contribute. So, if you're unemployed, that you just feel terribly about yourself until you get a job. So, everybody that can't is like, out there desperately trying to get a job, because they don't wanna be the guy that's like riding on the system harder than everybody else. And so, there's this cultural enforcement of, don't be that asshole. As soon as you lose that, and I don't know if you've seen some of the riots, I forget what country it was in, Norway, Sweden, one of them, where there's just like these big riots now, and you've got immigrants like attacking the police and shit,

• 34:31Speaker 00

  and it's getting crazy. So, it's like, that's not gonna work. If you've got people who are like, no, no, no, you're gonna give me my fair share of France, I'm looking at you, and people aren't like trying to make sure that like, yo, I've gotta contribute to this system, not because there's a gun to my head, but because everybody's looking at me sideways, and internally, I have the value system of insert country here. And when you don't have that, when there isn't a shared value set, and you can get on the government dole, you create an incentive structure that will implode it. But if you have something where it's like, alright, it's, you know, 1600s, and you're riding on a boat where you've already got a 30% chance of dying, then

• 35:14Speaker 00

  you've got, the ones that make it have like an 80% chance of dying in the winter, it wasn't that uniform, but it was like, there were some places where it was really brutal for those first several years. The kind of people that come in that scenario are very different. In America, it was the Puritan work ethic. It was people who rolled off the boat and were like, alright, we gotta chop down trees, we gotta build forts, we gotta get shelter, we've gotta figure out our crops, and it was just like that. Like, if you didn't contribute, you were gonna get the fuck out. And being ostracized back then was quite literally a death sentence.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaking of contribution, we gotta talk about this US and Canada trade war. I'm a bit conflicted on it. Tom, break it down for us, so we can really find out what's going on.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  The good news is, I'm not conflicted at all. Canada is attempting economic suicide as it walked away from a trade deal with the US. Now, that trade deal with the US would have dramatically lowered the tariffs that are currently in place on several of Canada's key industries. Now, Carney said, the three deal breakers for him were autos, Canadian cultural and French language protections, which I do wanna know more about, and, and this is the important one, a last hour US demand restricting Canada's ability to sign trade deals with other countries. Now, who might that country be, boys and girls? That country would be China.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Because there is a growing relationship between the two countries that is starting to get very hot and heavy. Now, listen, Canadians are rightly pissed off about Trump's asinine 51st Day comments. I mean, those were so dumb. They were dumb when it was happening. They're still dumb in retrospect. But ejecting out of this deal is going to be bad for Canada, especially given how far their economy has already fallen, dude. When you look at where they were like 20 years ago compared to where they are now, yikes. These guys are falling off a cliff, and while

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Carney may look tough through all of this, the numbers are not in his favor. Around 78% of all Canadian exports rely on US consumer markets. 78%. Boys and girls, come on now. The goods and resources that are at stake here, they are around 13% of all US imports. So, big deal for them, much smaller deal for us. And around 15% of US exports go to Canada. So, not a huge thing for us. Not, not trivial, but 15% is still only 15%. In the US, exports themselves

• 38:00Speaker 00

  only make up 11% of total GDP. So, they're 15% of 11%. Okay, so this is not the biggest deal for the US. But in Canada, exports make up 33% of GDP. So, 33% of GDP, and we're 78% of that 33%. Yowch. This is very unwise. Also, China is far enough from Canada that it is a much worse trading partner for Canada, especially given that the USMCA Article 32.10 already gives Washington notice rights and an exit trigger from other trade agreements if Canada signs

• 38:42Speaker 00

  a free trade deal with a non-market economy like China. Now, as a remember, as a reminder, China is a non-market economy. So, they manipulate things to high heaven. Now, that agreement was written specifically for Beijing back in 2018. But given how cozy Carney has been getting with China, the US, for reasons that I think are very understandable, they wanted more guarantees. And according to Carney, they wanted a broader lock on Canada's independent trade expansion, given that Ottawa's target is a 50% increase in exports to China by 2030. I get why the US is like, nah, we're not here for that. And that's exactly why Washington has reason to push for

• 39:25Speaker 00

  more concessions in this agreement, in my opinion. Now, did we do it well? Probably not. Trump is a total douchebag when it comes to this kind of stuff. He is always trying to bully people. He is making something that is good for Canada seem absolutely terrible psychologically.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  He started a deal, Tom.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Here's the thing. Does it work in private business dealings? Maybe. But does it work on the global stage where you're going in front of cameras and saying, these guys are like the little bro, you guys are the 51st day of the US? That's where it's like, dude, okay, listen.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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• 40:49Speaker 00

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• 41:06Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. You want to talk about things that I teach entrepreneurs all the time. Here we go. You've got to show the other person how this is a win for them. Just be thinking about that. How is this a win for them? What are they going to go back and tell their employees? What are they going to go tell their wife? Whenever I'm thinking of a deal like this, I'm thinking, how's this person going to represent this to their wife? How are they going to show their wife that they're cool? If they're not going to be able to do that, this deal is going to cause me problems. And Trump just, again, maybe this works and backroom deals, but it certainly does not work in the public when you're talking about somebody's identity being tied to their country. It's really dumb.

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Now, Canada is obviously making a play to go deeper with China, so I understand why we are pushing back, but you can't do it in a dumb way, which I'm sure is precisely what we did. Now, in January, Carney became the first prime minister to visit China since 2017. He met Xi in Beijing, cut Canada's 100% tariff on Chinese EVs down to 6.1%. China, in return, dropped canola seed tariffs from about 85% to 15% and subsidies, suspended duties on canola meal, lobster, crab, and peas. Beijing also went, this one blew my mind, they went visa free for Canadian travelers. That tells you just how close these two countries are getting.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  The foreign minister reclassified, and this is obviously Canada, reclassified China from disruptive global power to strategic partner.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  So they are obviously making their play. They're saying, we're going to distance ourselves from the US. We are going to get deeper in bed with China. As you can imagine, America's not feeling so good about that with Canada sharing a border with us. After the deal, Trump threatened 100% tariffs on Canadian exports if Ottawa went further with Beijing. So this is back when the deal was originally made. On January 26, Carney said Canada had no intention of pursuing a free trade agreement with China and would honor its US MCA obligations. But when during the negotiations, when the US basically just asked Carney to put that promise and do a binding agreement, he walked out in a huff instead.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  So you can imagine the US, forget the Trump of it all, the US administration is looking at that going, yeah, this is not a Canada that's looking to build fences or build bridges with the US. This is a Canada that's trying to distance itself from the US and very clearly build stronger relationships with China, and that's going to create massive friction. So the question is, how extreme does that get? Carney can say all he wants that this is about sovereignty. And again, this is a powerful reminder to Trump that saying dumb shit like Canada's the 51st state has consequences. The British prime minister, or British Columbia premier, David Ebbie, pointed out that Trump's request for exclusive access to Canadian critical minerals on top of everything else

• 44:08Speaker 00

  would have essentially made Canada, now get ready for it, the economic equivalent of the 51st state. So they're telegraphing exactly what their beef is. And so, boys, you're having a biological experience. If you don't understand people's need to protect their self-image, if you don't understand that people really feel strongly about their countries, then you're going to keep making these stupid mistakes. So we've got to completely reverse our rhetoric. We've got to understand, yes, we may be in a stronger position than them, but they will cut their nose off despite their face. I'll never know if it's despite or to spite, but you guys know the reference. These guys will shoot themselves in their own face to make a point, which is crazy,

• 44:54Speaker 00

  but is nonetheless, it's not a Canadian thing, it's a human thing. Humans do this. And so the fact that we are not taking that into consideration as we negotiate is crazy. But having said all of that, Canada is in a way worse position. Them getting in bed with China is a terrible idea, and it will be met with more friction that will hurt them a lot more than it will hurt us. So damn, Canada, like, get it together.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  It sounds good, like, I don't want you to be friends with that person because that's a bad person, but right now it sounds like we're the friend that got Xed out the friend group and we're just like, she's going to backstab you and you need to stop it. She's a bad person. You don't need to be her friend Samantha. And it's like, nah, you're just mad because Samantha is not as cozy as you are.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  This is true, but we're also the friend that's worth a trillion dollars. We're the one flying you to the Maldives on a moment's notice with the private chefs and all that. And so if you're ready to give all of that up, great, but I'm not sure that your citizens are going to like it when they suddenly realize like, oh shit, we don't get all that economic activity anymore. This kind of sucks. We've been sliding for 20 years. We are now worse off per capita than like Mississippi. It's nuts, man. These guys have been falling, falling, falling economically like a fucking rock, and they're so in their feels about the whole situation that they're now doing things that are even worse.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  And here's the part, dude, are people not paying attention? China is going to put itself in a position where it can choke anybody out that it wants to. You're not going from a superpower that bullies, you know, that plays its hand in a ferocious way to somebody who is like on the come up with you and they just want to see you do well. That's not China's play. China gets people in a debt trap so that it's in control. Now, there's a lot of pro-China vibes out there, so let people run the experiment. Because it, listen, the US is no longer a place where it's like we were during the Marshall Plan post-World War II. We've got the moral authority. We're really trying to help build people up.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  We are the drone strike the shit out of you in Yemen, in Iran, in wherever the fuck, because we found oil in your country and y'all need some freedom. That's the America that we are now. So I get it. People are going to see what they can find elsewhere, but China is an authoritarian regime. They believe if people are rising up in your country, you roll tanks into Tiananmen Square and you shoot them in the face. So everything, that's literal. So this is a, as long as you agree on everything, you're fine. But what happens when you don't agree? Would you rather be in a pissing contest with a country that shoots its own citizens? Or would you rather be in a pissing contest with the US?

• 47:47Speaker 00

  I'm not saying it's fun to be in a pissing contest with the US, but people are not running the calculus of China being authoritarian regime, not at all. They're like putting, in fact, I think some people are giving them bonus points for being an authoritarian regime.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  All right, I want to break down the, some of the demands that came out of why Canada walked away. Number one, it was veto over strategic infrastructure partnerships, demands that Canada submit all major and foreign investments in domestic infrastructure.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  China.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Preemptive trade restrictions on non-US nations.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  China.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Judicial preemption on critical minerals.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  China.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Requirements.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  That's us trying to get away from China, just for the record.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Requirements for the US to receive guaranteed rights of first refusal and price caps on all unrefined critical minerals. So instead of them sending them to China, they would have to at least fly in by us before they send them out.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  I get why we want it. That one, I understand why they would be like, yeah, no, we need to be able to have free trade, so.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  But my thing is if we started at number three, I feel like it wouldn't be a problem. But like veto, like to have veto power over what another country has a trade partnership with, that is ambitious. I feel like that is an ambitious ask.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  It's very ambitious, dude. What you're watching is all of this stuff used to be self-evident. We didn't need to put these kinds of things into agreements with Canada because we knew that Canada was never going to trade with China. China had a terrible reputation and the US had a better reputation. And so, yeah, we knew you were going to trade with us. And they knew they were going to trade with us because we are right across the border. The logistics are always going to be in the favor of doing trade with the biggest economy in the world that happens to be literally right there. So now what you're running into is you're making a far worse deal because you're mad and the US is trying to tighten the screws because they're mad. And this is deglobalization.

• 49:39Speaker 00

  This is a rising power making it a multipolar world. And I am empathetic to people that are like, I'm just so sick of the US trying to bully the world. I'm not going to take it anymore. Yep, it's a fair position to take, but there will be consequences. And so this is where I get very nervous for all of us, that this period is going to be brutal, that there are going to be economic consequences that will be extreme, basically the world over. And so we are in a race with a global depression because you've got both the US and China in weak economic positions and getting worse, by the way, by the day, in AI.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  And will AI be the productivity miracle that we all needed to be to stop that global depression from manifesting? But there are so many signs, dude. There are so many signs. You've got what's going on in Japan. You've got the housing crisis in China. You've got the everything problem in the US with growth being slow, overinvestment in AI, massive bubble, hyper-financialized economy, not being, not having enough manufacturing here, like.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Woe be to all of us that we are caught in this where now nobody trusts anybody. Everybody's fracturing into these weird ass alliances. Trump continues to alienate our traditional allies. Now, keep in mind, one good deal and people will be back to the table because it isn't just the US that doesn't have friends or allies. We have interests. The same is true of everybody. Everybody has an interest. Now, because China's on the rise, people are like, oh, if you're smart and you're a foreign leader, you don't want to alienate China or the US. You want to play them off of each other. So you want to go for a better negotiation. This is not Canada saying, I'm not going to do business with the US. This is Canada saying, well, now I've got a second option.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  And maybe it's not quite as attractive, but it means that I'm not beholden to everybody. It's brilliant. So I don't, a lot of people probably don't know this, but Impact Theory, we have something called Impact Theory Network. So we are not the, so we've got my show, we've got Lisa's show, we have my own Bialik's show. We've got other people that we're flirting with, negotiating with, trying to get more and more people into that network to diversify away from me relying on myself. So I want to be able to be in a coma and still make money. And right now, that is not the case. So when you have other options, you're in a much better position. And so we can now, as we aggregate more and more talent, we can go to advertisers and be like, hey,

• 52:21Speaker 00

  this isn't just about Tom, it's not just about Lisa, it's about a much broader portfolio. So that is the smart way to play this. So I understand why people are trying to play these two things against each other. But at the end of the day, you gotta be careful. Like, we don't walk in and slap a nine pound penis on the table when we're negotiating. We still are very friendly with the people that we are trying to get ad deals with because it's like, you don't want to put yourself in a stupid position.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Canada's putting themselves in a stupid position.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  There's a couple more other things. We're sending the digital service and tax online news act. This is just saying if there's compensation made by Canadian users, we, US had to pay taxes on that. This is something similar to the new data deal that the EU did, so that's.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  That one's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I actually, if I'm a foreign country and I'm of any size, I'm going to do what China did and just be like, no, we don't use Facebook here. Build your own. Easy enough. The only thing that makes it hard is that they already have network effects. But if you say to your own country, yeah, you gotta build your own TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, whatever, they'll build it. And if your citizens can't access that thing, then the new one will explode and it will grow super fast. So I imagine more countries like Europe will probably do their own thing because they all want to put our,

• 53:48Speaker 00

  like X especially, under restrictions that X doesn't want to be put under. And so X, for instance, now, I think it's with Brazil. Brazil is like making all these crazy requirements. And so they're like, alright, cool, we'll comply. But every request for censorship that you make of us, we're going to publish. And so that I think is brilliant. But it's also going to piss them off. And so they're going to be like, yeah, we're just not going to use this anymore. And if they're of sufficient size, they'll build their own and that'll be that.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Elimination of cultural and language protections. This is what, if you see some speculation that Trump was attacking them speaking French. It was the CanCon Act, which basically means for online goods and digital services, they have to have provincial language law. So you have to have it in the language of that province and French is a major language there.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so really fast on that one because I have personal experience with it. So at Quest, because you're doing global packaging, what you find is you just put French on everything because if you want to sell into Canada, you're going to need it anyway. Also helps you in France. So it's like, you just end up doing it, but it's a pain in the ass. And so people would much rather, Canada's an English speaking country. We don't want to have to have one label because no one's going to do a Canada specific label. You don't make enough money. And so it's just a pain in the ass enough. I get why they're pushing for that one. It is obnoxious, I'm going to be honest.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Elimination of buy Canada public procurement rules. Right now, Canada is required to go Canada first when they are looking for a public infrastructure contracts. Trump wanted access to their public procurement. Dismantling agricultural safeguards, unilateral alteration of auto rules, exclusion of heavy assembly plants and key auto sectors from tariff relief. I think this is big because of our focus on auto manufacturing and how you crabbed, you quoted it. That's a signal of how much more manufacturing you do based on what your auto manufacturing can do.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  I'd also be curious, I'd have to read that a lot closer, but if,

• 55:49Speaker 00

  if Canada is smart, they would not want China to come in and hollow out their automotive manufacturing. Now, I don't trust the Trump administration to be altruistic and be looking out for their best interests. But I am curious if there's some sort of thing there where we have enough American owned auto plants. I don't know that this is true, but if we have auto plants there by companies that are owned by US companies, where we would now be losing manufacturing capabilities into the future, should we find ourselves in a kinetic war with China where we would need to turn those over to manufacturing munitions? I don't know, that's probably a stretch, but.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  But I mean, with BYD proliferating into China, it will naturally make the demand of domestic cars drop because BYD is cheaper, more.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they'll just, there will be no Canadian market, they'll lose. So this would be, this is another way that BYD will be able to compete directly with US manufactured vehicles that are being sold into Canada. And so for the same reason that we want to keep it out of the US, we want to keep it out of Canada.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Pharmaceutical patent extensions, priority allocation of Canadian energy. This was a big deal because I know, I think it was Ottawa who was already giving a majority of the electricity to Michigan. I believe so. We're already having energy deals. So this is interesting that this can now impact second order consequences in the States directly. Binding military and Arctic mandates and lowering customs and de minimis rules. So some of these seem like, okay, that makes sense. Others of these seem like they wanted ownership of, I don't want to say Canada sovereignty, but they basically wanted a seat at the table.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, they want to turn Canada into the 51st state. Like, that is real. Trump shouldn't have said it, but he did say it. They're pointing out, yes, this is exactly what this does. This folds us under the US umbrella. And when it was, and this is an important human psychological insight, when it was them choosing to be that, they felt good about it. Now that they're being forced to write it down, they don't feel good about it. So that is when people, when you can get somebody to do it and it feels like it was their own free will, they will do it gladly. When they feel like they're being forced to do it, even when it's in their best interest, now they feel some type of way and don't want to do it.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  So yeah, that's, that's a good rule in your marriage. That's a good rule with your kids. That's a good rule with governments and companies. Find a way to make it the most selfish thing that they could do where they're excited to do it.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  And then on Carney, he had a statement about his response to it. He said, "In the coming days, the government will introduce additional measures to support Canadian workers and businesses, building on the nearly 25 billion in support provided over the last 18 months. These actions complement Canada's economic strategy. From day one, we have been focused on building our strength at home and diversifying our partnerships abroad."

• 58:46Speaker 00

  Anybody that's listening to that and doesn't go, that is absolute bullshit, is crazy. Even Carney has, somebody did an audit on this, I don't remember the exact percentage, but the vast majority of Carney's wealth is invested in American companies. So it's, Canada is a backwater economically for 20 years. They've been sliding. So I get he wants people to invest in Canadian companies, but right now, that's not, that's not the growth place. That's the decline place.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Canada has what the world wants and we will not allow any nation to determine our future. We will set our own course to keep building up Canada strong for all.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  They do have oil and minerals. Here's, here's what I would tell Canada. Alright, Canada, you want to get away from the US? Word. What you want to do is audit what China did. China was brilliant. China was willing to play the supplicant. China was like, literally, they had doctrine written down where they're like, while we're weak, we're just gonna, hey, yes, how may I help you? Of course we'll do that. We'll put nets up around the facility so we, they can't even commit suicide. Like, we got you. And they did everything the world wanted them to do so that they could get strong, so that they could sucker people in to get all the manufacturing, all the expertise, and they got it. And now they're in a much stronger, much stronger position.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  And given that improved position, now they're pushing the advantage. It's brilliant. So if you want to learn from China, I think that's very wise. But Canada is not in the place where they're in a strong enough position that they can start making these demands. But psychologically, they just cannot bring themselves to play a long game, to pretend to be a.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Supplicant, I'll just reuse the word, to do that while they're weak. And this is where it is, it's very unwise. China showed that playbook. This is also a playbook that when you look at immigration from Islamists, they run the same thing. So you're in the early days of Dearborn, Michigan. You're not ruffling feathers. You're not, you know, causing any problems whatsoever. Flash forward whatever 50 years later, and now you guys are a massive political block. And you're doing call to prayer, blasting it in the town. You're getting your officials elected and you run that place. So it is a very wise strategy. It is super effective.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  And if Canada were smart, they would do something more like that.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I mean, at the same time, though, Canada doesn't have to play the long term game. They just have to wait until Trump loses power. That's the, that's the, like, the eye opening thing that America needs to realize. Like, we're only as tough as what the four years dictate.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Sort of. So if they can get a left leaning government in, then yes. But there will be also lasting damage from what Trump is doing. So there's just gonna be, there'll just be so many things in motion as people move away from the US.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Even if JD Vance got in there, I don't think he would approach this trade deal the same way.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, agreed, agreed. It will all start moving in a better direction. But this isn't like, oh, I just need to buy myself another three years. That's the Iranian playbook. That's not the, that's not what Canada is about. Canada's been cozying up to China for a very long time because I think, I'm, I'm, I am formulating a hypothesis right now. So everybody should take it in that spirit. But I think that Canada is more ideologically aligned with China than they are with the US. The US DSA contingent, yes, same boat. But they're not aligned certainly with the US right at all.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  And so I think for a very long time, given that you didn't have a DSA option in the Democrat wing, they just kept moving more and more towards China and doing their own suicidal policies, which is why they've been declining for so long.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  All right, we gotta talk about the Strait of Hormuz and how traffic reportedly explodes near 400%. It did get community noted, there's some asterisks there, but I'll let you break it down for us, Tom.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  Well, let's read the, the community note here. Strait of Hormuz traffic rose sharply week over week from near halt levels, but remains 80 to 90% below pre-conflict daily averages of 100 plus ships, reaching only approximately 20% of normal per the cited reports themselves. Okay, so that's a dope community note. So it is true that, from what I can tell, because I did do a fact check on this one, that traffic is up the roughly 400%, which is absolutely phenomenal news. It becomes even better news if traffic is up through the Strait of Hormuz by 400% because Iran, the IRGC's grip is slipping. If that's true, now we're in a much better position

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  because that means that all of the disruption, all of the economic warfare is actually beginning to have a destabilizing effect on what I view as a very brutal authoritarian regime. You don't need to agree with what the US has done at all, and I would be with you. I think this has been a bumbled exercise. But at least if we can destabilize that regime enough that people can rise up without getting shot in the face, that would be incredible. And from the meager snippets of information that I've got directly from people that are connected to people in Iran, it has very much been, these guys are cracking down hard on the citizens.

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  So not the kind of thing that any of us should want to see. I don't think anybody's surprised to hear that I'm not a fan of authoritarian regimes. Now, to get to the like specifics, so roughly 200 ships have transited the Strait of Hormuz last week. The week before that, 150, two weeks before that, about 40. So that gets you to the total 400% jump in 14 days per UK Maritime Trade Operations Centre data. So that is very exciting. Now specifically what's changed, more than 80% of vessel transits over the past two weeks took the Omani route. So they're hugging that southern route. It's a UN authorized shipping channel that Iran vehemently opposes. They do not want to see people doing this.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  People are also turning off their transponder switches, just making it harder for Iran to track them. And so the Omani channel hugs the southern edge of that strait as far from the Iranian territory as the waterway is going to allow, and it's backed by US naval escorts. So the US military is operating that corridor to move roughly 10 million barrels of oil per day. You've got Axios reporting that citing two US officials, that we've got 15 to 20 tankers entering and leaving each night. So, okay, this is all good news. Now, according to CNN, it increased, this is a quote, "It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait."

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so that could be amazing. I think the jury's out. We don't know how long this is going to last, but for right now, this is good news. And it actually, I was originally gonna come in and be like, you know, Besen's D-Day, we're gonna see. Like, is this really gonna have anything? China's already saying they're gonna be dismissive of what the US is doing from a further economic restrictions perspective, all the sanctions. So like, is this really gonna do anything? So when I heard that we're actually seeing evidence that Iran is not able to create the disruption that they once were, I was like, whoa, maybe there really is now starting to be a sufficient amount of disruption, primarily from the economic disruption at this point, because the US hasn't been doing any significant striking in weeks.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  So the fact that this is now popping says that what they're doing from the blockade, so them not being able to sell their oil, what they're doing in terms of trying to stop them from getting resupplied, all of this stuff might be working if Iran is not able to pay their own soldiers, for instance, because of inflation going up so much. And the last number I heard, I believe, is like 98% inflation. So if we're feeling the effects of 30% inflation, you can imagine what 100% feels like. And if now the economic sanctions that Besen is putting in place are, you know, ratcheted up, they're saying this is the most economic sanctions any country has ever been put under, ever, in the history of sanctions.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  So that would be something. Again, I think there's a lot of question marks about how many people are going to abide by the sanctions. But I would presume that Besen has talked to a lot of our still stable allies that are willing to get behind this. So we'll see. But if things are already bad and this escalates them even a little bit, then we really might be seeing progress in the right direction. So fingers crossed that the Iranian people are able to take back their country. We're gonna find out if there are enough people that actually want a more, call it free and prosperous Iran, or if it's actually overwhelmingly people that support the regime. It is so hard to get a read on that.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and going back to it, this is per the Hormuz letter. Besen implies that the US will directly target China and Gulf states, saying, "Any nation that serves as a financial artery or to a withering regime should expect to share in its isolation and that any country that keeps doing business with Iran will become a global pariah."

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't buy the global pariah. I think he's overstating that in terms of what the US has an ability to do. Like, there was a time, maybe 30 years ago, that we could have turned somebody into a global pariah. But man, over the last four or five years, we have not looked like we've had the ability to do that. You can go back further, because Biden certainly was not loved by anybody in Saudi Arabia. So we'll see. I don't think that we have that kind of strength anymore. But I'm sure that we can still tighten a lot of screws that no other country would be able to tighten. So we'll see.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  And then Iran warned all Gulf countries not to join the US in the economic war and any country that should take part in imposing economic restrictions on Iran will be regarded as an enemy.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Fair. Now, I will say that the Gulf regions have been starting to protect themselves from drone attacks. If you look at the critical infrastructure for energy, they're putting these metal cages around. It's actually very interesting. Now, I don't know how scalable that is. I don't know what percentage of their critical infrastructure they've managed to actually secure under those cages. But the fact that they're putting those in is certainly a step in the right direction and shows that there is at least a temporary solution. Now, anything like that is gonna be a cat and mouse game. New items will be built to try to get around that, of course. But if that can stop the cheap drone attacks, that's really something.

• 1:09:36Speaker 00

  Because the big thing is, yes, they have missiles, but those missiles are a lot easier to shoot down. The missile could destroy the cage, but we have a much easier time shooting those missiles down, and they are far more expensive. The drones have had this wildly disproportionate ability to do damage for the cost. And so if the cages help with that, it could be very, very interesting.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Another report out of the Strait of Hormuz in Iran is that the Secretary of Iran Supreme National Secretary Council, "We have not only attacked any of, we have not attacked any of America's economic interests so far. So far, we have only targeted military bases, but they're going to advance to economic war. We are ready to target all American oil and economic companies in the region." Um, there is like Amazon out there. There's a bunch of oil refineries out there. So

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  It could be a interesting new chapter to the Iran war.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  We're gonna see whether the fact that we've gotten more control of the straight says that they're really having a harder and harder time, or if it's like, no, no, no, the, what we said earlier is how this is gonna play out. They're gonna wait till roughly October and then they're gonna go ballistic and make a huge problem for Trump right before the midterms known as the October surprise. So we'll see. Unfortunately, this one's gonna have to play out in real time. We'll find out just how much we've turned the tide, but we've got some encouraging signals right now, which is very exciting.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, staying in the region, it's very interesting that this Israel Syria strike. So Israel strikes Syria, and so I'm saying that it may be a bid to provoke Turkey into the conflict.

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, this, this is gonna be one of those rabbit holes.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  All right. Israel's strike on Syria wasn't necessarily about Syria. Eight Israeli strikes hit the Abu Al Dhuhar airbase in Idlib, uh, the Idlib province overnight on August 17th and 18th. Uh, the runway was like blown to bits and pieces. Hangars were smashed. Uh, but there was zero casualties, which is very smart. Now, the base has been defunct since the civil war, the Syrian civil war. It sits about 70 kilometers from the Turkish border. Turkey, uh, had supposedly been rehabilitating it. Now, I'll put supposedly out there because this is coming from Israeli intelligence. Now, if you believe, like I do, that is Israel

• 1:11:51Speaker 00

  has some of the best intelligence, then hey, maybe it's true. But if you believe, as I do, that Israel is likely to use their reputation for having the best intelligence as ways to get away with something that might not be true, you sort of go, well, huh, maybe, maybe they were rehabilitating it, maybe not, we don't know. But, um, that is showing that Israel isn't going after Hezbollah, they're going after Turkey. So that becomes very interesting. So whether this is what's really going on though, is a bigger question mark that we have to find out. I want to be very clear. I'm putting out a hypothesis that isn't like super backed up by a lot of claims. I'm not the only one saying this, but you need to take all this with a grain of salt. Now, Israel didn't claim the strike at first. A

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  military censor, uh, gagged reporting that confirmed the IDF did it. Then US envoy Tom Barrick posted on X and named Israel himself. And I'm almost certain he was breaking a gag order when he did that. So it's like, uh-oh, we'll see, like, are there any repercussions? Does Trump want this information getting out there? It's possible. Netanyahu's office followed with a statement saying Syria was on the verge of breaching, huh, an agreed security status quo by letting Turkish troops deploy. Okay.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  Here's where Israel's reputation is going to come into play because Israel and the idea that people were on the verge is one of the ways that they're losing credibility in the eyes of the public. Now, if you guys know, I've talked about this before, but in the Old Testament, there is this idea, if somebody is coming to kill you, what do you do? And the answer is you rise early and kill first.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Technically, that was a rabbi, uh, notes that one wasn't in the

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  So that's not, what are they basing? I, I've gotta do a deep dive on this because I keep reverting to the mean on this because I don't believe it because I read this whole book about it that says that it's based on a principle in the Bible.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  In the Tumud, Tumud is the rabbi interpretation.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  Oh, oh, oh. So this is like the Hadith. You're gonna have to keep doing this with me because I keep going back to the mean. All right. So anyway, uh, if you guys know, uh, you've got the Quran and the Hadith. So the Quran and then like official interpretations. In, uh, Judaism, you have a similar thing. So you've got the, um, the Torah and you've got the Talmud. So similar idea. You've got people interpreting it, but they are very sort of, um, high level.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  It's recognized by Jewish culture and stuff like that.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  So it's a, it's, it's probably important to make the distinction, but I, it is a longstanding religious doctrine. Will we grant me that? Okay. So there is a longstanding religious doctrine where if somebody is coming to kill you, you rise early and kill them first. Now, I think that is a very wise strategy. So the fact that they are doing a strike, if there is real reason to believe that these people are coming, and because you're doing it before the troops end up getting there, now they don't have to respond because there were no casualties. So you destroy a base, you stop them from doing the thing, you let Turkey know, hey, we're watching, we have good intelligence, we know what you are about to do, and we're stopping you, and you're

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  doing it in a way where nobody has to escalate. So from where I'm sitting, if that's all real, that's a very wise strike. It's a very wise policy that I would understand any country having that policy, including against the US. Because if you think that the US is coming to kill you, I get why you'd be like, hey, hold the phone. Now, the catch is if you're not smart about the way that you handle that, and you force a response, things can get out of hand very quickly and they can escalate into madness, which is exactly the risk that Israel takes every time they do this shit. And they just keep building a reputation because it becomes unfalsifiable. They're gonna say, we had the evidence. The other side's gonna say, that's bullshit. And then you run into this thing where whether it's

• 1:15:46Speaker 00

  true or not, Israel begins losing that credibility on the global stage. So they have to be very careful. Now, Israel is well aware that on the global stage, that they are losing a lot of friends, losing credibility. People are turning against them in a very aggressive way, but that triggers all kinds of, uh, human responses. Again, it's not an Israeli response, it is a human response to go, yeah, yeah, you hate us, we'll fuck you. And so they're gonna back into that corner and it will be couched by most people in diplomatic language of we have a right to protect ourselves and all that, which of course is true, but you just have to factor like the changing landscape, which makes it harder and harder

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  for your allies to go to bat for you, uh, which will make it more and more an isolated nation, which they're not in a great region of the world to be an isolated nation. So this stuff gets complicated very fast. Welcome to a multipolar world. It just is what it is.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  I feel like Israel's never beaten these allegations. I understand October 7th, but we're going on two years and I feel like they're milking it.

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  The what? People are coming after us?

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, this is like their fourth attack on another sovereign country in search of proxies, terror? I don't know.

• 1:17:03Speaker 00

  Here's the thing.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  I don't even know what the cover story is anymore. Now it says Israel's allowed to bomb people and it's cool because it's Israel. Don't say nothing.

• 1:17:10Speaker 00

  That we're long past that. We're long past that. No one is saying that. The tide has shifted. The tide has shifted.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  This is the form of bombing.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're, they're gonna do it. They're gonna say it, all of that. But there's no universe in which people are now saying it's Israel, so we just can't say nothing. Everybody's saying something. Everybody's talking shit. Like, these guys are isolating themselves because people are not here for it. It, it doesn't even matter anymore if it's true. The tide has changed. The world is going against them and that, that's where they're at. And so now they've got to figure out, am I going to, uh, double down, get stronger, uh, attack more people, more preemptive strikes, blow people up, uh, entice people to, um, come into the fight, which is one of the things that has to be said, a possible strategy is that this is Netanyahu, I'm out of my skis here, but this

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  is Netanyahu possibly saying that, okay, I've got an election coming up. I can either find myself, uh, turned into a war criminal, or I can stay in power by being like, oh my God, like, we just got attacked by Turkey. We gotta do something. And so you want to make sure that you keep the guy that's gonna be tough on all this stuff in office. I'm out of my skis, but that is a, uh, potential take on this. I'm not the only one floating that as a potential here. So, um, that's a real thing. But it, it, from where I'm sitting, it is not hard to figure out what the narrative is here. The, the Israel is absolutely despised by a large sect of the Muslim world. Okay? It's not everybody. There

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  are no monoliths. Uh, but they are despised by a large sect of the Muslim world that would like to see them removed completely. I don't need you to believe that the sect of, uh, Muslims that want Israel to cease to exist as a state. I don't need you to believe that they want all the Jews to die, but I do need you to believe that they're serious when they say Israel shouldn't exist. Uh, and so that comes in a couple flavors. Flavor number one is right of return and, um, Arabs, Palestinians, whatever, however we're going to break that down, should be able to go back and vote. And obviously, they will be outvoted instantaneously and they become a minority in their own country. That's

• 1:19:23Speaker 00

  one way that could happen. Uh, Israel ceases to exist. The other way, and you can find plenty of clips, uh, of where people don't say Israelis, they just say Jews. And so now that takes the flavor of at a minimum ethnic cleansing. Now, if it's bad when the Jews do it, or Israel does it, it's bad when somebody else does it. So that's where I'm just like, hey, you would expect them to defend themselves. So don't be shocked that they're going to, no matter who tells them, uh, that they don't have the right to exist, they're not going to be like, okay, they're going to keep fighting. So that's just where we are. Now you can say, okay, cool. I just want to see enough people get together and blow them up so hard that they lose the battle and can't defend themselves

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  anymore. And that is your right to take that position. But anybody that's like, I just can't imagine like why these guys are fighting back. Well, people have come after these kids. Historically, the, they've got a history of people coming after them. So, yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  There you have it. And we can and probably will go deeper and deeper onto the, um,

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  Fight, the ideological fight between the sect of Islam and

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  going against Israel and the tangential ways that antisemitism finds its way into this more. In fact, we have it on the list of things. So if you want to pull up.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Mark Ruffalo. I haven't seen a tweet go this viral in a long time since they changed the X algorithm where you used to see Elon Musk getting numbers like this all the time. Now Elon struggles to get five million views. So this has 27 point something million views.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  27.60.

• 1:21:03Speaker 00

  So this is, the reason that we're gonna go into this tweet is precisely because this has become such a big issue. This is becoming like a defining issue. Where we were on trans four or five years ago, this is where we are and like, what's your take on Israel? What's your take on Palestine? Where it's like so many of a person's views will just slot into place. Like if you just ask them that one question, it's like, okay, cool. I know where you're at on the spectrum. So I don't know what happened that led up to this tweet, but here's what Mark Ruffalo.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  I agree. The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who support it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have a deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones, who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life. This merger has real consequences for real people and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellison's, including Oracle's business built on data, surveillance technology,

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of livelihood for thousands of family is fair and necessary. The $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions have never been fully explained to the public. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for a serious national security review, and regulators still haven't given the public a real answer. Until they do, the merger shouldn't move forward. Now is the time to dive boldly into all these issues, not step back or concede.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, he's certainly diving boldly into these issues because people feel some type of way about it. So here is my beef with this whole thing. So it is inevitable that when you talk about Islam, that you're going to get, you're going to have to very carefully distinguish between, okay, what is the beef with Islam versus what is your beef with Muslims? So that is a whole thing that you have to disentangle. The same is true when you start talking about this. When you're talking about Israel, you're talking about the Ellison's, you're drawing, you're making a point of the fact that, and I don't

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  know if he said, hey, this is a Jewish family, or he just said, the Ellison's, we really need to look at this. And there was a heavily implication of something like that. But clearly for him, he's tying what's going on in Israel and all the questions that he's got there with the merger. And so people are like, hold on a second. If this really had nothing to do with them being Jewish, then where's your animosity for the number of kids in Africa that are being sold into slavery right now? Which I, I plan to do a deeper dive on that because I've started collecting links on this. It's really terrifying. There's images of, this is the reporting, maybe there's some other reason these kids were in sacks,

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  but I certainly can't fathom what that would be. But the reporting was, hey, these kids that are in sacks are being sold into slavery. They're all Christian kids. There was another one where you see these kids that are bound up, being marched, and it says, these are Christians being sold into slavery. So you've got Christians being attacked and killed. Mum's the word about that, right? Nobody's talking about it. You've got Christians being in multiple locations, supposedly being sold into slavery. Mum's the word about that. So it's like, people are like, hold on a second. We've got real problems when we see a quote unquote genocide in Palestine because it involves the Jews. But when you have Muslims killing Muslims, nobody says a word. And when you have Christians being killed, nobody

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  says a word. But when you've got the Jews pressing, bombing Palestine into oblivion, now all of a sudden, we're upset about that. So it's like, if Mark Ruffalo were covering all of this, and he was like, listen, these are the crimes against humanity that I'm tracking, great. I don't think people would have a credible way to say that this is somebody who is more interested in this one because it happens to have Jews in the mix. But if he is basically just going on about that, now we've got bigger issues. And you see that all the time, all the time, all the time, is this one issue becomes the thing that

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  people talk about, instead of this actually being about a broader respect for life, or a group of people being targeted and killed. That's where people start saying, hold on a second. There's some tie to the fact that this has to do with Jews, and that needs to be investigated and talked about.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, I think a big difference in this is we're funding the genocide in Gaza. And so I think that's why, like, something like South Africa, while it's still bad, doesn't get talked about as much. That's what a commenter said. And I do agree with that. I think we have more of a direct hand in Israel's actions than what's going on in South Africa right now, or wherever you said.

• 1:26:21Speaker 00

  Okay, so if that's true, and we dropped aid to Israel to zero, you think people will be like, all right, cool, done?

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  No, no, there'd still be a ton of issues. I also think, and I don't think you're doing-

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  So that takes your point and says, yeah, that's not really it. Which is what I would say. That's not really it.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  Well, we have a direct hand in it. They're still our ally, like, right? Even if we're not giving them the money.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  But if that were true, then we would only see people in America complain. But we don't see only people in America complain. So this is a far broader complaint set than just people here, right?

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  I'm talking Mark Ruffalo, though. Because you were saying, why didn't Mark Ruffalo talk about these other things?

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  What I'm saying is, this is not a Mark Ruffalo problem. The reason this went hyper viral is this is becoming one of the defining issues of our age, where no matter what country you're in, people want to know what you think about Israel. And the Israel-Palestine conflict stands for something. And I'm saying, we've got to figure out what the Israel-Palestine thing stands for, because I don't believe that the evidence is there to support that this is about, we don't like to see people killed. Because we're very conveniently ignoring a lot of other people dying in a lot of other places at like, pretty gnarly levels. And we just turn a blind eye to that. And we're talking about numbers that are way higher than what we're seeing in Palestine.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  I think, let me jump in real quick. I think there's, there's two things. So if this was a debate, that would be a what about ism. And I think when you always define to default to what about ism, that's not a position of strength.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  I think you have to what about, because what about will reveal your, it will reveal your values.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  No, because the thing is, I can pull up a Mark Ruffalo tweet about him criticizing Sudan. I could put a, pull up a Mark Ruffalo tweet about him being mad about drones, but nobody else cared about it. And I think the reason why Israel is being pushed to the forefront is it supports other narratives across the world that are being pushed by the West. For example, we need to have a firm fist against Muslim. So every Israel conquest is Israel taking, fighting back against radical Islam. That's why every time Mitt Romney retweets it, because that helps his personal cause in Ukraine and the, in the UK, and the things that he's trying to do. So it's, if we're talking about people dying and lives, I don't think this, Mark Ruffalo talks about Israel, he should also talk about all these other places. He has talked about those other places. If you're talking about on the global scale, why Israel was always in the middle of the conversation

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  is because the US put Israel in the middle of the conversation when they established Israel in the middle of the Middle East. And since that point there, it's now our proxy West.

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  Because we're, we're all over the map. So the US didn't establish Israel in the Middle East.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  The Rothschilds did. The West, I'm using the US as a proxy for the West.

• 1:28:52Speaker 00

  Okay, that already, to me, starts weakening the point. So we have to-

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  I can start at the beginning and lay them out and take them on my own.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Well, so give, give me your thesis first, so that I know what we're actually arguing.

• 1:29:04Speaker 01

  My thesis is, Israel is a collective representation of other issues. So that's why we're pushing that.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  Can you define what those other issues are?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Fighting back against Muslims, why the West is the dominant culture that should be in the Middle East, and it's a proxy for the US and the UK back in the day before we Trump, split with Trump in that region.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Okay, so let me try to boil that down to one idea. The West has created a problem in the Middle East that never should have been created. And so people are very angry about the West's continued involvement in the Middle East.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  The West has created a proxy in the Middle East that shouldn't have ever been created. And that is why they're having, the issues that they are having today.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say problem, I would say proxy.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Okay, so the-

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  You don't think this has anything to do with Israel. This has to do with the West creating a proxy. And if the West had created the UAE as a proxy, let's just say, that people would react exactly the same.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  It's the connection of Israel to the US, to Ryan's point. The reason that people care about Israel is because of its connection to the US. It's getting the red carpet treatment by Trump. It doesn't matter if it's a war crime, they aren't held accountable.

• 1:30:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, but just really specifically. If the UAE, which is a Muslim country, were a proxy of the US.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  And they committed war crimes and then did those types of things, did ethnic cleansing against another body. They would have the same amount of heat that Israel has currently today.

• 1:30:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so if there was beef before any of that, then.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Any of what?

• 1:30:44Speaker 00

  The West creating a proxy.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  So if Jews were being killed before the Balfour Declaration.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  They were, they were.

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  Right, so I'm saying it isn't that from where I'm sitting, because there was already tensions there, there was already people being killed.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  You're saying there were already, because there were already Jews being killed, that's not why Mark Ruffalo and this is getting attention? Because Christians were being killed for years, Muslims were getting killed for years. Like, we can keep going back in history and see every generation and every society is getting killed. I learned that from you, that human, animals have massacred each other, so.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  If we can slide the clock, there's always a group of people being massacred and a group of people being treated unfairly.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Yes, so what I'm trying to get to is, is this beef that's happening right now, is this indicative of the, I'll call it the red-green alliance, which is where I'm trying to go? Or is this a proxy war that you're saying, this is just political, Tom? This is, people are looking at the West being a bully and that's their only beef? What we'll call, I'll call the Dave Smith argument. And so, this isn't.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  What's the red-green alliance?

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  The red-green alliance is the alliance between left-leaning people that want to see the downfall of Western civilization, pairing up with, call it radical Islam, who also wants to see the fall of Western civilization. They are teaming up for now, as they did in the rise of the IRGC in Iran. And one of the test cases for where you fall on that is your take on Israel, which is an obscenely complicated issue, that there's, it's never gonna be one thing. But the reason I'm saying this is going viral, which remember, my hypothesis was very simple. This is going viral specifically because

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  the collision of Israel and Palestine represents something larger. Now, I never said what the larger was until just now, but that is the reason I believe this is going hyper-viral, is there is a desire to tear down the West that is getting a bunch of people in America and Europe super-animated, because so many people want to do it. And then this becomes the way for everybody to have that battle, where, and again, the conflict between Israel and Palestine isn't that. I want to be very clear, that's not what's going on. I'm saying that's what's making it go viral in the West.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  What's going on here is extremely complicated. I don't even know it well enough to give you all the details. I have a very high-level headline sort of understanding of the rough timeline from when it was the Ottoman Empire to now. I certainly don't know a bunch of the history before that. But to me, you have two groups that historically have extraordinary amounts of beef with each other, which is, I'll say orthodox Islamic take, not your average Muslim, but orthodox Islamic take versus certainly orthodox Jews. And so, that becomes the point of collision. Then it becomes politicized, because they create a state. Israel creates a state, and so we can sort of speedrun that.

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  But I want to be very, I want to make sure you and I are colliding the same thing. My hypothesis is, the reason I'm saying this in terms of Mark Ruffalo's tweet, the thing I'm trying to answer is, how does this get 27.6 million views? To me, this gets 27.6 million views because it is the proxy battle for the ideology of, are we tearing down the West, yes or no? Does the West need to be torn down?

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  And 27 point, or now 28 million people are saying yes? Or they want to comment on the West?

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  It's people fighting about it. So you're gonna get both sides. You're gonna get some people saying, basically, this is just an absolute unbelievable tragedy. I cannot believe that the Palestinians are being genocided, and how are people not understanding that? And that's where I go, hold on a second, there are way more people dying elsewhere.

• 1:35:00Speaker 00

  So why are we over-focusing on this one? And that, to me, is what needs an answer. Now, you've put forth an answer, which is, hey, this is about, this is a proxy battle, and we never, the West, never should have let Israel become a proxy.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  I never said never should, I'm just saying that's what it is. I have a great example for that. Trump just announced that he's flooding 300 pounds of, 300 tons of ground beef into the beef market from Argentina. So forging beef into the US cattle market. He's discounting it at 30%, the same 30% that Mam Donnie was talking about with his grocery stores. When Mam Donnie announces it, we jumped on here and we covered it, and it was a number one read. When Trump does it, it's not even in our top five. The reason is, when Mam Donnie does it, it's a signal for the greater

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  tragedies of socialism, using your language. But when Trump does it, oh, it's not that bad, because, and then you can kind of explain it away. And I think the same is true with a Sudan genocide versus Israel versus Palestinian genocide, or other, other genocides. There's so many conflicts happening in the world right now that we all don't care about. So now to say, Mark Ruffalo can't talk about this because he doesn't care about this thing, that we also doesn't care, don't care.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  I just want to remind you, I didn't say Mark Ruffalo can't talk about this. What I said is that there is something supercharging this. To your own point, you're not gonna get this response in the Sudan. You're not gonna get this response about a similar partition between Pakistan and India. And so, given that we've seen other things like this.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  It's that backstory, so the same thing with the Mam Donnie grocery store. That backstory makes that the top news, whereas when Trump does the same thing, it's like, oh, it's not.

• 1:36:33Speaker 00

  Well, hold on, because we're not agreeing what the backstory is. I don't think that the world is, I think you're representing, if you agree, definitely say so, and if you disagree, tell me. I think you're representing a Dave Smith-esque take on this, which is, the West should stay the hell out of this. They never should have created that partition in the first place. They shouldn't have created a Jewish state in the first place. It's their meddling in the region that's causing this problem. Is that roughly accurate?

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  That's the argument, yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 00

  That's an argument.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  That's an argument, yes.

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  I just want to make sure you hear me. I am not making that argument. I am saying, this is something totally different. Everybody who's getting fucking confused about that, that thinks this is about the West, is fucking confused.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but because I don't see it that way, doesn't mean I'm not confused.

• 1:37:13Speaker 00

  Well, I want to make sure you can actually say back my position, because you keep misrepresenting my fucking position.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  So that's what makes me go, hey. I've stated my position very clearly. My position is, one more time, that the reason this is going hyper-viral is because this has become a proxy for, do you want to see the West torn down?

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Period. So if you're Team Israel, you don't want to see the West torn down. If you're Team Palestine, you do want to see the West torn down.

• 1:37:39Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  Well, I don't want to see the West torn down, and there's a genocide in Gaza. Like, I don't know, I feel like that's an oversimplification.

• 1:37:47Speaker 00

  So this is where we have to go. Now I'll say, people like you get caught up in the headlines and haven't done enough researching into this to actually start pinning down, why is this one uniquely bad versus other ones? Now, I think as you start going down that path, and by all means, give it to us here. But as you go down that path, you're gonna end up somewhere near where Drew is at now, which this genocide, which is very debated, I want to be super fucking clear about that, but I'm not gonna invite that debate for now. But this quote-unquote genocide is uniquely bad, for what reason?

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  The Dave Smith argument. I agree with the Dave Smith argument, yeah.

• 1:38:26Speaker 00

  Excellent, but you were saying that that wasn't your take. I didn't ask you to take my take, I just said, that is my take. So my thing is, I think this is a proxy battle. The reason this is going hyper-viral in the West is because of that collision. It is the red-green alliance where people are getting together and they're like, we gotta tear this whole fucking thing down. Okay, now you're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Tom, I'm not in that camp, I'm in Drew's camp. Okay, great. So now, it's, I think, as people begin parsing this out, that they're going to see that this does not get the kind of ferocious cultural energy, specifically because of the fact that everybody's cool with genocides in other places, they're just not cool with this genocide,

• 1:39:10Speaker 00

  that you then have to go all the way to, well, it's because the US is involved in this. Now, as we start peeling it out, it's like, why does that matter? And then you're gonna say, it's because I'm funding it. And I'm gonna say, well, there's plenty of people that are mad about it that aren't funding it. So what are they mad about? And so, I think there's a ton of cultural energy here, where people who lean left are swept up in the, but this is wrong, this is bad. And they just hear so much language about, it's wrong, it's bad. And they don't start drilling under to figure out what's really driving this. Because, I'll bring this one up for the 700th time. The island of Cyprus was invaded by Turkey. They cut the island in half, did a far more violent version

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  of what the Jewish people did in the founding of Israel, and nobody's up in arms about that.

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  Because they didn't have TikTok back then. And then they didn't

• 1:40:03Speaker 00

  But that's what I'm saying.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  They didn't show it.

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  So we we get to, there's always some reason why people aren't animated about things that like match all the other stuff.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  But, okay, so.

• 1:40:14Speaker 00

  I'll give you an example of why there, no one is paying attention to what's going on in Cyprus.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Right now?

• 1:40:19Speaker 00

  Right now, ever. It's never been a big enough issue to push anybody over the edge.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  And the reason is that the Greeks aren't shooting anybody. The Greeks aren't blowing anybody up. The Turks aren't running an October 7th. And so everybody just went, we lost, or we won, depending on what side of that equation you're on. And they took a diplomatic approach moving forward. So then, for me, the question becomes, why isn't that happening in Palestine?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Do you, how long do you think that Palestine-Israel conversation has been going? And on your radar, like, when did it like bubble up? Well, like, was 10 years ago that people talk about Israel-Palestine?

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  Israel-Palestine specifically?

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  They don't start calling themselves Palestine until like the 60s or something. I don't know the timeline well enough. But the word Palestine, it was like Philistine, it used to refer to the Jews at some point.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Philistines and Jews, at least from the Bible, they were never the same.

• 1:41:13Speaker 00

  No, Philistine was a word used to reference like an area that's now Judea or something like that. Anyway, this, this is where I am out of my skis. I will not be able to give you the specific answer. I can only tell you on that, all of that stuff is hotly contested. The people who now call themselves Palestinians did not call themselves Palestinians until the 60s-ish. They certainly weren't calling themselves Palestinians when the original Balfour Declaration came about. They, at that time, if I'm not mistaken, were trying to do something that would be akin to a larger Syria now. So it's like, there's all, it, it, all of that is for much deeper scholars than I to take in.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  Where I think we, the three of us, can get today is to, and by all means, if you guys are like, Tom, I-

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  The reason I brought that up is because George Carlin was talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 90s. Like, it's, it's, it's not that-

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  I mean, the 90s was like another one of these regional peaks where it was like, it was on everybody's mind. You had Yasser Arafat, like, bringing it to the fore, like-

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  So it's not so, I don't want it to seem like there was no genocides, we never cared about it. And then when the DSA is now rising, now we care about it now. So I don't, I just want to make sure you're not saying that.

• 1:42:25Speaker 00

  What I'm saying is that

• 1:42:30Speaker 00

  there are two things at play here. And this is why I'm saying, what's happening between Israel and Palestine has nothing to do with what I'm saying now. I am talking about why this tweet is going hyper viral in the US.

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:42:45Speaker 00

  Now, the Israel-Palestine thing, I think is about two religious groups that fucking hate each other. And because the Bible tells them so, they're gonna keep killing each other forever. And that the extremists on both sides, and that's as far as I'll go, but the extremists on both sides each want the whole thing. So the extremists in the Israel camp want all of it. And the extremists on the Palestinian side want all of it. Now,

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  to get to the full story about the global issue and what's going on, I don't think you can strip out the,

• 1:43:26Speaker 00

  there's something that I wouldn't even be able to put my finger on beyond what Thomas Sowell has already said about it, about the Jews that really fucking trigger people. And so there's no way to have this full conversation without talking about religious hatred. There's no way to have this full conversation without talking about

• 1:43:47Speaker 00

  antisemitism.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  Really quick, are we still talking about the tweet, or now we're just talking about the Israel-Palestine specifically?

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  So there is the red-green alliance, which is what I wanted to talk about.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43:58Speaker 00

  I laid out that hypothesis.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yep, I got that one.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  Now, to take in the fullness of everything, which goes well beyond that, and maybe a better way to say it is, one of the engines of the virality is the red-green alliance, tear down the West. One of the engines of virality is the Dave Smith argument. One of the engines of virality is antisemitism. And so I don't have a read on whether Mark Ruffalo is or isn't antisemitic. I'll even just default to assume he's not.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  But if he doesn't understand that there is rising antisemitism the world over, then he's retarded. Every time I talk about Islam, Muslims, I'm like, I know people are gonna say I'm Islamophobic, because there's rising hatred towards Muslims in the West.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  There's rising Islamophobia.

• 1:44:54Speaker 00

  Islamophobia gets into triggering words.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  In the same way that there's rising antisemitic.

• 1:44:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  So you, you have that rising on both sides. And so I'm like, whoa, I've really gotta be slow. I've gotta be careful about what I'm actually trying to lay out. You've gotta tease out that there are different constituents in this massive debate. But one of the pieces on the table is certainly antisemitism. One of the pieces on the table that I think Dave Smith has done a phenomenal job of arguing is what you guys are saying. And then one of the ones that I don't think people, it's very hard to get people to talk calmly about, is the fact that religion is making these two people hate each other.

• 1:45:43Speaker 00

  That culture is driving the different responses. And that it's, if you're not talking about the religious aspect of this, if you're not talking about the honor culture of all of this, you will be eternally confused.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  And we just got fact-checked by Super Chat. The Palestinian, Palestinian citizenship order in 1925 was a British landatory law that promulgated the term Palestinian. So people were calling themselves Palestinian as early as.

• 1:46:19Speaker 00

  We're really gonna have to get into all of this. So I'm almost certain that that fact-checker is incorrect.

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  I just AI Googled it, unless Google's lying too.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  It has origins in Roman, so it popped up in the way Drew's talking about. But it even popped up earlier, I think it's Palestina, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right.

• 1:46:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:46:36Speaker 03

  All the way back in the Roman Empire, like, the word's been around.

• 1:46:39Speaker 00

  Will not do brain damage to chat. I will plant one additional idea, so these gentlemen have laid out their belief.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  I was just trying to-

• 1:46:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, which is very fair.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  That's what I see, that's what I see, that's what they said.

• 1:46:51Speaker 00

  Now, I've, I've done just enough digging on this to, I'm sure, get myself in trouble. But as you start going deeper, at the time of the Balfour Declaration, they did not refer to themselves in their own documentation as Palestinians. That, that's a signal. If you look at, on Google search terms, when do you start seeing the use of the word Palestinian in all written forms of communication? It comes super, super late. So for a very long time, this just wasn't a thing that people talked about. Anyway, I'm not a scholar on this, so I'm perfectly happy to have to update my mental model.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  I'm in the middle of what will be, I'm sure, a very long, slow process of learning all the ins and outs. But I will encourage people to understand, you're being propagandized by everybody talking about this. They are oversimplifying what is a very complicated issue.

• 1:47:50Speaker 00

  And this wasn't as simple as, at the time of Israel becoming a state, that it was like, we're Israeli, you're Palestinian. It was more, we are Israeli, you're Arab. And so that was certainly a much clearer divide. So I would just, there's a lot of weeds to get in here. I am certainly not giving you a full picture, so I would not expect anybody to be like, I see what Tom sees. Because Tom is saying, what I know at this point is that there's a lot on the table, this is a very complex issue. It's getting reduced down to soundbites. People are using, I believe, rhetorical tricks to try to make out like there's no antisemitism going on here.

• 1:48:35Speaker 00

  That does not mean that people talking about this makes them antisemitic. It does not mean that, that Mark Ruffalo is antisemitic. But it does mean that we're seeing a rise in anti-Muslim hatred, we are seeing a rise in anti-Jew hatred. And so people need to, when they're talking through this, they need to be very thoughtful to make sure that they're teasing out the different implications. Because as we can see from the reaction to Mark Ruffalo's tweets, this is something that is extremely animating for people.

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  Can I throw something on the antisemitism note? This is kind of tying back to the Mark Ruffalo tweet. Just to give a picture, from what I've seen in the world about this conversation, the antisemitism is coming from a small group of people out there who are using Israel's crimes to blame Judaism and get people to be like, we hate Jews.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  I'm sure there is some of that.

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Is-

• 1:49:28Speaker 00

  But I think, let me ask some calibrating questions. Do you think that there has been a very strange, meaning high amplitude amount of antisemitism throughout history?

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:49:44Speaker 00

  Okay. Do you think that Jews, for whatever reason, maybe it's their own fault, that doesn't matter for the sake of this question, do you believe that they have been targeted more than any other group in history?

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  I would have to look, but in the, like, my gut reaction, what I know in history, yes.

• 1:49:58Speaker 00

  Okay. So is it understandable to think, hey, whoa, we've got something happening again right now?

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Here's the difference there. We are looking at, and we don't have to dive into the whole thing, but we're looking at an ethno-state, or ethno-religious state set up by the Jewish people. They were, you know, mistreated historically throughout history. I'm not ever trying to deny that. But I think there needs to be a distinct separation, which is what Mark Ruffalo is getting at, between Israel and the religion of Judaism, right? Just because you're Jewish does not mean you're a Zionist. And I think that's a big distinction. Because what happens is, everyone now is gonna lump all Jewish people as, you know, lovers of Israel. And then what happens is, you start seeing antisemitism rising in places like America, because there's a lot of people who do just genuinely hate the Jews for some reason. And so what happens is, this is now their excuse to start treating Jewish people

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  like shit, because of Israel's actions.

• 1:50:53Speaker 00

  I think that there is a lot of that. I think what people are trying to, the sane people that are trying to counsel Mark in a loving way, what they're trying to get across is, hey, be very careful when you're, and I would need way more information on all the comments that led up to this, but what I can infer, which is risky, but what I can infer is that he's saying things about the Ellisians that are triggering some people to say, yo, this feels very, at a minimum, adjacent to you saying there's a problem with them owning the network because they are Jewish. And if they were any other nationality,

• 1:51:36Speaker 00

  that you wouldn't be able to get people animated to say, pump the brakes on this deal if they weren't Jewish. And because of that, now we're getting into the current massive spike, from where I'm sitting, it certainly seems true, massive spike in antisemitism. So at a time where, like if I were to say, hey, listen, El Said, like when people started saying his full name, I was like, that, that's a dick move. They are trying to make this guy feel like an outsider. They're trying to make this guy, like, they're trying to get people who are anti-Muslim to not like him because he's anti-Muslim. Now, there's plenty of reasons to not like this guy, for his economic policies. So it's like, focus

• 1:52:19Speaker 00

  on that stuff. So if you've got beef with, walk me through specifically what you're worried about with the Ellisians owning it. And if there's like a legitimate antitrust thing or something like that, yeah, cool. Like, do it. But do it because it's the antitrust of it all. Not because it's one family that's doing this. It's like, what, what is the structure of the deal that would create a problem? Now, no matter who owned it, this would be beef. And cool. It is an area where, right now, just as I have to be very careful about this topic, knowing that it's going to trigger a lot of people who just are looking for a reason to like any foreigner, that when I start talking about, hey, there are

• 1:53:02Speaker 00

  some real issues with the, what I'll call the Islamic playbook, as very different than being a Muslim, but the Orthodox Islamic playbook is worthy of derision, is worthy of people being like, hold the fucking phone. But if you then just go, first of all, any Arab, that is to confuse it with a race, which it is not, and then second, that there's a huge difference between somebody who is a fundamentalist or Orthodox, and somebody who is, I don't think they use this word, but I'll say it, like a sort of post-Catholicism reformed version of Islam. Those are very different things. And so, when you start looking sideways at El Said, because that's his name, you're running, you're running

• 1:53:47Speaker 00

  into a similar danger that Mark Ruffalo is running into. That's like, where I'm trying to say, like, hey, we gotta be real careful, because tempers are high on this one. And unfortunately, I think this is going to get violent in Europe, for sure. So you can expect actual naked violence between religious on one side and not on the other, but a cultural violence that nobody should want to see. And so, because this moment feels so dangerous to me, I'm just like, people need to be very careful. They need to understand sort of

• 1:54:29Speaker 00

  what the tangential issues are here. And the overly simplified versions of any of this stuff is going to lead people astray. And so we have to find a way to talk about it that is both intelligible, so that we can boil it down to something people can actually hold on to and remember, and at the same time, be very aware that there are a lot of people who hate Muslims that are gonna jump on a bandwagon. There's a lot of people that hate Jews that are gonna jump on a bandwagon. And so we have to be very careful.

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  Cool. Last one. New evidence is emerging in the Anthony, Carmelo Anthony trial. Right now, they are petitioning for a retrial due to some withdrawn evidence, both on the prosecution side and on the defense side. From the defense perspective, Carmelo Anthony didn't testify, for whatever reason. On the prosecution side, they withheld, I'm sorry, on the prosecution side, they didn't have Carmelo go on the stand. On the defense side, they didn't bring up Metcalfe's, Austin Metcalfe's disciplinary record. So it's kind of like a handshake agreement.

• 1:55:34Speaker 00

  Yep. So, all right, this one is wild. You've got, they're trying to get a retrial for Metcalfe.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  For Anthony.

• 1:55:41Speaker 00

  Sorry, thank you. For Carmelo Anthony, in the murder of Metcalfe. And the interesting thing is, what's coming out is, in the hearing for the retrial, they put, I think, one of the prosecutors on the stand, one of the attorneys ended up going on the stand and admitting that they had a gentleman's agreement, that they were not going to talk about the fact that Carmelo Anthony, I believe, texted his girlfriend, but certainly texted somebody, and said, low-key, not gonna lie, I'm on the verge, I'm gonna stab somebody and lick the blood off the knife, asked his girlfriend how many bullets she wanted in her chest or something like that. And she had reported that he was, his girlfriend, reported that

• 1:56:25Speaker 00

  he had been stalking her. And so, they believed that there were so many racial tensions around the trial, that they didn't want to get into that, because also, Metcalfe had, I don't know if he was suspended or what, but he had a record for bullying people. And so they were like, listen, this just isn't gonna look good on either side. And so, I guess there was some last-minute fear, that if they put Carmelo Anthony on the stand, that the prosecution wouldn't hold to their side of the agreement, something like that. And so, now that's what Carmelo Anthony is putting forward, that, hey, this wasn't explained well to me. I might have been better, in a better position to actually put myself on

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  the stand. But the hubbleu is basically around the, like, wait a second, what is this gentleman's agreement? Should they have done that? I'm asking, is it legal to have done that? I haven't seen anybody talk about that. But I didn't realize that you could, what, this is me talking, that sounds like burying evidence to me. So that seems pretty crazy. I can't believe that they can do that. I know that you can go to a judge and say, hey, we are considering moving forward with a case like this. We want to go on the record. And the judge can either bless it or say no, but they didn't do that. And so, that's where this gets pretty wild.

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Gotta love the justice system. It was one of the things that they wanted to get, the manslaughter charge, and that's more of a sure bet. So I'll go for the lesser charge. That's where the defense says, okay, at least getting an injection, he'll get 30 years. Prosecution's perspective, it's easier to argue manslaughter than it is to argue murder. And the self-defense thing is a better defense for murder, because it wasn't premeditated, he didn't know him, they wasn't stalking him or something like that. So, it's one of those, the attorneys were talking outside, this is the best bet for us to win, handshake, all right, let's go.

• 1:58:16Speaker 00

  But they didn't go for manslaughter. They put it on the table, and they could have done a lesser charge, but murder was the charge. So, there clearly wasn't an agreement that, okay, I won't bring this up, but I'm gonna go for manslaughter. So I think, and we'll have to dig more deeply, but I think the way that this played out from the attorney's perspective was, they were saying, okay, listen, I think we have a better shot of getting the jury to bite on the manslaughter charge. If we don't include the text messages where he's talking about stabbing somebody and then licking the blood off the knife, which I would say, yeah, that was a very wise bet, because if that had come out, yikes. And then, obviously, the prosecution must have thought, like, we don't want to muddy

• 1:58:59Speaker 00

  the waters with Metcalfe having a bad reputation, because if people think, oh, he came in, he was bullying him, then yeah, that's exactly why he did this. So the case, if all of this evidence had come out, think about what the case would have been. You've got a guy, they would have painted him very clearly. Metcalfe was a bully. He was bullying Anthony. And so, obviously, Anthony felt threatened, this guy has a history of bullying. And then the other side's gonna be like, bullshit. Maybe he had a reputation for bullying, but this kid said, I want to stab somebody, I'm gonna lick their blood off the knife, he brought the knife there. This was fucking wild. The truth of this scenario was even far more explosive than what came out in trial, which was already explosive. So, would

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  it have helped or hurt the race angle of it all? I don't know, man. But this is just really, like, what a tragedy, that this kid got himself into a position where he felt like he was about to snap, like, fuck, man. To see a young kid just throw their life away like that, just too grueling. Yeah. Terrible, terrible.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  Wild work. Okay, that's all I got.

• 2:00:12Speaker 00

  All right, everybody. Thank you guys so much for joining us. We have another AI masterclass. It is coming up soon, and that date is on, there we go, Thursday, September 10th at 1:00 PM Pacific. The link to sign up is in the description. All right, everybody, we will see you on Wednesday. Love you bunches. Until next time, 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

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