Wall Street Cheers Terrible Jobs Report, OpenAI Implodes, and France Goes Full Chaos | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Hey everybody, Tom Bilyeu here. On today’s episode of Impact Theory, we’re pulling back the curtain on a whirlwind week for global headlines and digging into what’s really driving the chaos—from markets ignoring a brutal jobs report, to turmoil erupting at OpenAI as safety leaders abandon ship. If you’re wondering why Wall Street is rallying while Americans keep falling behind, or how the latest drama inside the AI industry could shape our future, buckle up. We’re questioning if policymakers and the Fed are masking a fragile economy, with 9.7 million jobs lost from the trend line and real wage growth stalled for everyday workers. We’ll challenge official narratives, break down why digital price tags at Walmart might signal more than technological progress, and ask: is AI truly the silver bullet for productivity, or could it be quietly creating a new permanent underclass? Plus, we’ll take a hard look at global shake-ups—from violent unrest in France and the rightward lurch in South America, to the alarming breakdown in biosecurity as reports of a new airborne plague surface in Russia. What’s driving the mob mentality in Paris? Could U. S. aid really be behind political shifts? And are we taking emerging risks seriously—or just sleepwalking into the next disaster? Join me as we cut through the economic spin, dissect the real impact of AI on jobs, expose the culture war inside OpenAI, and put global threats in perspective. I promise, this is one episode you don’t want to miss. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Thank you to our sponsors: Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to get started with your business today: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Quo: ​​Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price Tool for years now. With the Name Your Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price Tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Ever notice how life's best stories don't happen in your living room? They happen on the open road, out on the water, or parked under the stars. At Progressive, they get that you want to focus on the experience, not worry about the what ifs. That's why they offer quality insurance designed for your ride, whether that's a boat, RV, or motorcycle. Adventure with confidence. Visit progressive.com and see how easy it is to protect your favorite way to get away. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in DC. Prices vary based on how you buy.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Well, bad news is apparently good news. Friday's job report was terrible, but the market's response was to rally nonetheless. We're diving into what the hell is going on? Speaking of things going on, something is going very wrong at OpenAI. They lost four safety team members in one week with yet another safety lead exiting in dramatic fashion with PR team in tow screaming about how reckless they're being. And speaking of reckless, the USAID interference scandal is getting crazier by the second. Many believe that the defunding of USAID is responsible for South America's massive lurch to the right as Bolsonaro won round one of the voting in Brazil last night. And USAID ended up being the main story there.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  We're going to be talking about that. The situation in France continues to escalate out of control. Roughly 500 schools were once again closed, and there's violence continuing in the streets all over the country. And this one is weird. The seven-foot alien reptile story has got to be a psyop. I am convinced this is as fake as it gets. But nonetheless, it was popping off this weekend, and I would ignore it if it wasn't for who is actually making the claims. And to keep things light on a Monday, we've got an airborne plague outbreak shutting down hospitals in Russia. How it all started is about as infuriating as it gets. So we're going to be diving into that.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  All right, we've got all that and more right now on the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. Welcome, everybody. All right, per usual, let us start with the economy. Bad news is apparently good news. Friday's job report was absolutely terrible, but the market's response was to rally instead of going the other direction. But as you look closer, it actually does make sense. The market is basically a cold, calculating machine. It just responds to what's going on. Now, here's where we actually are.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Headline payroll, the growth, came in well below expectations and came in with another wave of downward revisions to previous months, as I hope, by the way, at this point, you guys have all come to both hate and expect. And lying beneath the monthly fluctuations, the underlying trend reveals a massive structural gap. The US economy is now, get ready for it, an estimated 9.7 million jobs behind its prior trend line. This is not a healthy economy. The Fed looks at the official unemployment rate of around 4.2%, and they want to claim it's a healthy economy. They want to tell you everything's great, strong, we're doing good. But that is absolute madness. That number basically masks something that's hiding beneath everything.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  All the hiring rates have stalled. Workers are simply dropping out of the active labor force, and that artificially holds that official unemployment rate down. But that is all fakery. So when you have that metric basically hiding what's really going on, which is that you have a weak labor force, you have a very fragile economy with all kinds of disruptions happening, this leads to a misdiagnosis that basically ends up having knock-on effects in their macroeconomic read of the situation. So what the Fed is officially doing is they fear that rising energy costs on top of a supposedly strong labor market is going to trigger a 1970s-style wage-price inflation spiral.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  But the reality is that a lot of the read of what happened in the 1970s is wrong and is far more tied to the breaking, what Nixon did, breaking the dollar peg to gold, and far less the disruption in oil, though that is a part of it. But for you to really get sustained inflation, what you have to have is sustained nominal income growth so that consumers can actually absorb the higher prices. Because job and income growth have flattened now, higher energy prices are not going to spark inflation. They're going to cause demand destruction. We've been talking about this since we did the read on what's going on in China. If what we were really leaning into was there's all this demand, but we've got an energy shock,

• 5:17Speaker 02

  then we would expect to see China continuing to buy as prices came back down, which they did not. We would have seen them continue to refine oil, which they did not. They were drawing down on their reserves after, by the way, an extended period of just pumping it back in and filling up the reserves. None of that behavior makes sense unless you start clocking China as trying to hide a broader economic crisis that they don't want to tell people about. So China holds that very close to the vest. In the US here, we're just bamboozling people by not showing what's really going on with this decline of 9.7 million jobs lost based on the historical trend.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So everybody's trying to basically keep everybody excited and upbeat because so much of the state of the economy is driven by how people feel. So everybody's trying to tell a story that we have something strong going on. But when you look at the TIPS market, you'll see that TIPS bond market continues to price in near zero inflation risk. That is directly contradicting the central bank policy that we're seeing coming out of Kevin Warsh. So the reality is employers have only added 29,000 jobs in September. That is god awful. We used to see like 150,000 jobs in a month. So this is way off trend. And by the way, we got 29,000.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Economists were expecting 84,000, which is still terrible, but we didn't even hit that. So you put that together with the fact that the government has also revised July and August down by a combined 60,000 jobs, which, by the way, brings July negative again.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So all of this is a big phony mask that everybody's trying to wear so that Trump basically can beat the drum and say, hey, everybody, the economy is great. Unfortunately, the economy is great if you own assets, but the economy is not great if you're anybody else. And unemployment ticked up, not by a lot, but it went from 4.1% to 4.2%. Now, of course, some of that is already fake because you have the constant fluctuations in the amount of people actually seeking a job. Now, where this gets really weird is despite all of that, Wall Street rallied. On October 2nd, the S&P 500 gained 0.7%, the Dow 0.5%, and the Nasdaq 1.2%, which touched an intraday record off of the back of Nvidia.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  But the question is why? How is it possible that it's so easy to see from a jobs perspective? We are way off the trend line. So why would this be good news? If you look at just going back to this idea that the markets are a cold, calculating machine, if you have a stock and you're trying to evaluate what it's worth, you're basically looking at the cash that a company is going to earn over time discounted back to today by looking at what are the interest rates. So if you have higher interest rates, they shrink that value. Lower rates take that value up. So tech, which basically drives our entire economy at this point, that is the most exposed to money basically coming in over time.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  So much of a tech company's profit sits far out in the future. So for them, fluctuations in the interest rate is going to have a major impact on how the market is valuing that stock. Now, just two weeks ago, the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023. I know all of you guys know that. But the part that I think a lot of people are missing is traders were betting on more. So they'd already priced the stocks based on future hikes that they were expecting. So the reason that you end up getting a soft job report and it actually reads as good news to the market is because the soft jobs report makes that expected next hike actually less likely to happen. So now the market reprices things and the prices end up going up

• 9:13Speaker 02

  because you basically, you're taking an expected bad outcome, so from an investor's perspective, anyway, AKA rates going up. You take that off the table, and then the market, because they've already priced it in, when they reprice, it shows up as a gain. So it isn't necessarily that they want the bad numbers. It's that numbers that are bad for the average person are still good for stocks. And this is how you get yourself into the spiral that we're in now, where people are wildly dissatisfied. They are screaming from the top of their lungs that they do not buy, that this is a strong economy, that they're not feeling it. And much of the jump in unemployment came from basically people looking for work.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  So with participation actually rose, not by a lot, 61.6% to 61.8%. And a broader measure of like slack in the system went to its lowest since January of 2025. So wages rise just 0.1% on the month and 3% on the year. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge is running at 3.4% in August. And so Wall Street puts all that together and reads this as, okay, cool, there's no wage-price spiral. But for workers, they just experience it as a pay cut. Nothing actually changes in their pay, but they can buy less. And so we just get this continued dissatisfaction with the economy despite the fact that you're going to hear Trump, you're going to hear Besen,

• 10:38Speaker 02

  you're probably even going to hear Warsh saying that we have a resilient economy. Everything is going to be just fine. But alas, everything is not fine. And if we don't address this, dude, this is so maddening. If we don't address this, if we don't figure out a way for the average American to have real wage growth, you are going to continue your march towards... I mean, if you're going to be dramatic, it's not fake, but it is dramatic. You're continuing your march towards revolution. You're certainly continuing your march towards socialism. If you guys saw Mom Donnie on Theo Von, hey, that's the kind of thing that we're talking about. Because there is this wild discrepancy between what the markets are reporting, what the official people are telling you is going on and what people can actually feel.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And you're only going to be able to tell people so many times, hey, everything is good. You feel good, right? Things are good. This is a resilient economy when people can't afford things. And so here we are in a number go up in stock market and number essentially go down in terms of wages. You will never get out of this death spiral in this way. You're looking at an economy. There's a great quote that Jeff Snyder of Eurodollar University uses a lot. I think this is brilliant, that the economy has just forgotten how to grow. We have forgotten how to grow. We have a lot of promise with AI, a lot of promise. But what we don't have are on the ground, the dude working a nine to five, actually making more money. If you don't address that, you will forever be in this problem.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60 and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag. That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less. And it's not just the cashmere. I ordered a few things myself, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, which I wear obsessively.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  First thing I noticed was the quality, soft, well-made, built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about how much you're paying to stay safe online. Count it up, a VPN, a password manager, something to block ads and trackers.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  The service scrub your data off of broker lists, a tool to flag scam emails. That's five, five subscriptions, apps, logins, and most people still have gaps. That's the problem Surfshark solves. It's not a VPN. It's an all-in-one security suite, one tool that protects your connection, your personal info and your devices all at the same time. Go to surfshark.com/tomb or use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark, backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's S U R F S H A R K dot com slash TOMB.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Surfshark.com/tomb. Use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark. Let's talk about your sales pipeline reviews. If your CRM is half-empty fields and notes nobody finished, every review turns into guesswork. I've seen it so many times in my own sales team and that's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM that is loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before the call, it pulls the deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After, it drafts the CRM updates for your rep to review and approve.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  The record stays complete and you see what's actually happening. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. So make sure you use it. No credit card or payment is needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started today. That's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in just minutes. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  So with paychecks rising 3%, but prices rising up to 3.4%, people are obviously falling behind. And how long can they keep spending like normal before they either have to cut back or, you know, start running up credit cards?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  It's already happened.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're already at that point.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Before the summer kicked off, you were starting to see real signs of distress from places like Walmart. If you look at that, dude, Walmart just launched digital price tags. Now, look, this is a little conspiracy-brained, but I'll give you my read on that. Yes, it's technological advancement. Yes, it makes it easier to change prices, but it also makes it easy to change prices in the middle of a day. Now, if you really screw on your tinfoil hat, that's them expecting a lot of inflation. I don't think that's actually what's going on. I think this is them going, okay, we've got to do something to bring people back. Simple sort of brain-dead price changes across the board have not been doing it. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get people back in the store.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  We were putting ourselves in a position where we had lowered prices so much. Now we're in trouble. And so we've got to basically use the same kind of price flexibility that you see in Amazon. As somebody that used to sell into Amazon, bro, I will tell you, that shit is crazy. Those guys will not like, so this thing called channel conflict, I don't know how much you guys are going to care about this, but it's, as an entrepreneur, this is very interesting. So you have this thing called channel conflict. Channel just means where am I selling? So what are known as big box retailers, Walmart, Target, things like that. They care deeply about where you're priced, especially with their direct competition. But they also care about how you sell online. So if you're undercutting them online, they're going to feel some type of way about that. That's called channel conflict, where you have one channel that sells at a different rate than the other channels.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Now, a big box retailer like Walmart, they have so much power because they're what you call a kingmaker. They know just by putting you on the shelves that they can take you from not existing as a company to really being something. But it also means that they will put into the negotiation of the contract that they get to control your prices. So if they want to take your price up or down, they're going to do that. And they will, depending on the relationship with the vendor, they will force you to eat the constrained margins. And so this is how you end up getting this vicious knock-on effect of the Walmart may be able to retain their employees, but the people selling into them can't. And so you start getting job loss at the margins as you have these companies that are being squeezed,

• 18:05Speaker 02

  that don't have very big margins, finding themselves getting into trouble because now we have digital tags at Walmart and they can just jiggle it around. Now, they've been, if you look at the data, because they're certainly not as forthcoming as maybe we would want them to be, but spending has been drying up. And when you do that read, the thing that, in terms of looking at the data, the thing that's carrying the economy right now is the top of the K. That's real. Because people are making so much money in the stock market and the stock market just keeps going up, there is liquidity at the top. And so I forget what the divide is, but it's pretty grotesque in terms of how much the top of the K is spending versus the bottom of the K.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  And so stores like a Walmart that are really exposed to people on the bottom of the K, they're seeing that spending is drying up, that people have reached the end of their savings, they've reached the end of their credit. And so now it's like, if the real wage increase does not come from AI, like if AI does not become an actual productivity boom that leads to jobs, and listen, manufacturing is really happening. There really is more being spent on manufacturing. Now, being spent on manufacturing creates jobs, but it's not entirely a one-to-one. So as we build out these data centers, there's still somewhat of a question mark in terms of how many jobs it's going to bring on.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  The bad news is if you track that back to the 9.7 million jobs off trend, it's like it hasn't yet created a big boom. Now, we can easily fractal onto AI and what's happening there in terms of the adoption rate is crazy. In terms of how fat, like right now, we just hit the 2% mark, where 2% of households are paying for AI. But that means 98% are not. So they really do have like a massive amount of growth that they can do. But it becomes a question, you guys have heard me talk about this so many times, there's the historical trend of the debt ends up eating the infrastructure builders alive

• 20:11Speaker 02

  long before you end up getting the wins at the individual level where people are actually making more money. The revenue's coming in fast enough to keep those guys alive. Because remember, if people aren't making money, they can't pay for your product. So yeah, economies are very complicated. They're entirely intertwined. And when you, when one aspect of it breaks, you may create the greatest product of all time. But if it doesn't lead to people actually making more money, then your economy just continues to soften and spiral out of control. So somehow, some way, AI must make life better for the average person. Now, right now, I'm still on the train that until we have artificial superintelligence,

• 20:52Speaker 02

  which I'm actually paranoid about despite the rebrand, but until you get to that point, what you're looking at is a series of question marks where it's, are we going to actually get net new jobs? AI is creating new jobs, but is it creating net new jobs? And so that's the question. Is AI to blame for some of the softening? Is it just that the economy is weak right now? We've got so much debt. Interest rates are eating into so much of everything. Wages have stagnated, the worker's been disempowered. Is it all of that bundle? Or is it that AI is actually trying to build a smokescreen around? Look at all these hundreds of thousands of new jobs that we've created,

• 21:34Speaker 02

  not being honest about their impact on the number of people that aren't getting hired. And this is where Impact Theory is just anecdotal, but I look at the amount that we're able to get done without hiring new people. So we're not eliminating jobs, but man, we've been able to increase our scope without increasing people. So traditionally, if you wanted to increase your scope, you were going to bring new people on. So I am convinced that that is going to be a big part of the story, is that AI just makes every person so much more productive that we don't yet know how far we'll be able to push that before actual net new jobs get created.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Uh, top 20% of earners account for 59% of total consumer spending.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And the bottom 80% accounts for 41. And then it breaks down further if you wanted further, but that's like the general.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, there it is. So you have spending in the economy, but that spending is um not going to be enough to stop people from more and more bouncing out of the labor force. Uh, and this is where people have a tendency to look at a good jobs report, which we did not just get, but we did get a good jobs report in August and people were screaming from the rooftops. See, I told you, uh, K shape gonna heal itself. All's gonna be well. But when you look at the trend line, we're still way, way, way, way, way off the trend line. So one data point is not going to get you there. You've got to look at what's actually going on with the trends. The trends are not good.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  On the note of AI, um, obviously the AI boom is like holding up our GDP, holding up the NASDAQ. And with that being said, at what point do we say that the problem with unemployment is companies prioritizing the hiring of machines over people?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  That's what, that, that is a big question mark. So it is definitely going to happen. There's no doubt about that. Historically, every technological revolution has led to the creation of more jobs than the jobs that it eliminated. I will remind myself and everybody else, the AI story has not yet been written. So what we don't know is as the cost of this stuff goes down and it gets deployed to more and more parts of the economy, what's going to happen? Does that create a renaissance where it's like, oh my God, we're able to create so many more things that we're able to bring on new people in new roles? And we need especially young people to get trained on these roles, which will be far more native to young people than it will be to old people.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  And so is this that moment where boomers just get the fuck out of the whole system because they cannot keep up at all with this? And now all of the um worker productivity, all of the gains, they start to concentrate in the hands of younger people. Obviously, that would be a huge win for the economy as a whole. But the real question is, will the worker be empowered or disempowered? If it becomes eh, I need some human oversight on this thing, but you're basically a cog in a machine and I can replace you very easily. Because AI is really doing the bulk of the work and you're just there to keep it on the rails. Or is it going to be what it is right now in perpetuity?

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Which is if you are good with AI, you as the human are so necessary because the AI is commoditized for $200 a month. $500 a month, if you want to get absolutely absurd, this stuff will do the craziest shit ever. But only if the person is good. I was thinking about it this weekend. AI will give you, let's say, out of 10 responses, seven are going to be trash, two are going to be okay, and one is going to be brilliant. If you can't tell the difference, like if you don't know which is which, if you can't push it so that you start getting a better ratio, then that just becomes this generic layer. AI is the same everywhere. Intelligence commoditized. Uh, everybody has access to it. It doesn't differentiate anything. It doesn't create a boom. It just allows people to be lazier.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  If, on the other hand, AI in the hands of somebody who is truly skilled at getting the best out of it now becomes a one-two punch of human plus AI equals massive productivity increase. Now you've got a real opportunity. And again, I will beat the drum. Young people, this is your shot, man. If you go in and go, okay, listen, I know what I'm supposed to do. I know what my role is meant to output. I'm going to leverage AI to just magnify that output dramatically. It, it, it is such a win. But again, we don't know yet. Here, I'm gonna, Ryan, I'm gonna give you my big fear.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  I have a really uneasy feeling that there's going to be a new bifurcation in the economy. And that bifurcation is going to be based on the human's intellect. And that right now, the military, it's something like 84 and below. If you have an IQ below 84, the military is like, even trying to get you just shot is like cannon fodder. You're not smart enough. You're going to create more problems. If it isn't 84, whatever, 78, it, it's in that neighborhood. I worry with AI, the bar goes up. And now if you're not at 95 or 100, it's like, uh, like AI is just commoditized at that point. I'm, it's cheaper for me to just let the AI run. You're not adding any value. There is going to be some new bar. That, that is my experience, that when I watch people use AI,

• 26:42Speaker 02

  when the person's really sharp and they're not afraid of AI, they are like a wizard. If they're afraid of AI, or they're just not the sharpest tool in the kit, uh, the AI goes back to being a commodity and this person will complain about AI shit. And you told me to use AI, Tom, and you know, here's the thing. And I'm like, uh, but that's bad. So what are we doing? So that is a growing fear that I have. It's one thing when the K-shaped economy is around own assets, that's all that matters. It's another, if you have a system where own assets, that, that's all that matters. But we have blue collar needs as we stop globalizing and actually start becoming more nationalized.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  But if in doing that, what you find is basically there aren't really blue collar jobs, like those are just done by the robots and it's white collar people that are overseeing the AI. And you need them. And so there will be new jobs, again, question mark, question mark about net new jobs, but there will be new jobs. We will be more productive, but I do worry about that. People call it a permanent underclass.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Maybe. That's my big fear.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  So you're saying that AI would create the permanent underclass?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  AI in, yes, but it's doing it via, if the AI, okay, everybody's worried about AI being smarter than every human ever. What if it never gets to that or that's far off in the future? What if it's just that AI is so good that now a 100 IQ is the old 80 IQ? There's a lot more people over 80 than there is over 100. And if you've got to play the game, you've got to be at 100 IQ, yo. Now you've got a real problem.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Do you think though, there's a world where, like, yes, the AI gets smarter, but don't you think then we get dumber? Because the more you just let AI use it, you're using your brain less, which I feel like would shrink overall everyone's IQ scores. I don't know. Maybe I'm looking at that wrong, but.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  I, uh, the whole time you were talking, I wanted to flip the table over, smash things, just go complete monkey crazy. Because uh, yes, so for instance, um, if the, the perfect analogy to this is food. We now have access to abundant intelligence in the same way that we have access to abundant calories. Some people cannot live in a world with abundant calories. They become morbidly obese and they literally eat themselves to death because they do not have self-control. They use food in what I will call a drug-like way and they ruin their own life. And intelligence is the same. If you're engaging with AI in a way where you're like, just make my life easier. I don't want to engage.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  I want to use AI so I can sit back and chill, then it's going to make you retarded. You will be full retard. And if schools are using these in a way where it's like you're incentivizing students to just, hey, go write the essay. The writing the essay part isn't interesting anymore. What you want to do is figure out, do they understand the argumentation? And that to me, because, part of the reason that I like economics is when I'm off camera, it's incredibly important to my life. Because understanding finance and what to do with my money has yielded me a lot of money. And so the better I've gotten at that, the wealthier I've been able to come. So there's like a very real um reward for learning about it and doing it.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Now, if I were just handing it over to AI and be like, manage my money, then yeah, I'm now beholden to the AI and AI is gonna go do its thing. If I, when doing the um like whether I'm writing a deep dive or something like that, if I were just going to the AI, hey, here's the topic, go write about it. And I didn't spend the vat, like when I'm writing a deep dive, the vast majority of my time is not working with AI to get a paragraph. It's working with AI so I understand what's actually going on. And pushing it and saying, I don't think your conclusion makes any sense. And it pushing back, right? And so if you're using it like that, now you're becoming more functional. And I think the real test there is if you don't have access to AI, do you suddenly sound retarded?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Or are you able to actually have the conversation because you understand it from first principles? So again, I come back to the food thing. For people that can have unfettered access to intelligence, if you're just using it so you can work less and eject out of the system, yeah, it, things will be far worse. If, on the other hand, you're using it to expand your capabilities because you're using it to make you smarter and you're trying to operate in the world where you can do incredible things with or without it. Uh, and it's really an ability extender, um, then you get into a radically different place. So I'll give you an example. I am not, if I ever refer to myself as an artist, which I often do, I mean as a writer. I do not mean, I, I can't paint, I can't draw anything like that.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Okay, this, this will be, um, I, people probably won't have enough context to understand this specific example, but I will do my best to explain it. Uh, Kaizen, the video game that I'm building, is what's known as a voxel world. So if you've ever played um Minecraft, you know what a voxel world is. Everything's made of a block, but you probably don't understand how voxels actually work. They, they are like a magical computer thing. They are so fucking fascinating. I, one of the hardest things to do well is create textures for the voxel so it looks good in the game. I have worked with actual artists who can draw shit. And when you try to make something that you can hand draw, something that works at a very technical level, it's extraordinarily difficult. So this artist, technical gap is very difficult

• 32:13Speaker 02

  to cross. So I was getting very frustrated. I could not get anybody, no matter how talented they were, to create something that translated from, okay, yes, you can draw it, but then when we turn it into an actual voxel where you can build a world out of it, it looks ridiculous. And so what, what is this problem? So I go into AI and I'm trying to get it to, you know, I'm like blunt force trauma, just give me a whole bunch of variations. It doesn't work. It looks terrible. And the AI doesn't understand it. So finally, I go to the AI and I'm like, I want to build a world using voxels. And so I start describing the thing that I want it to do. It then literally in 30 minutes, man, it created a world that I could walk around like I'm inside a game. I can pick up blocks, place blocks in 30

• 32:55Speaker 02

  minutes. So now I can iterate very quickly at the actual mathematical level. So understand, I'm not doing it now as art, I'm doing it as math, because that's always where it breaks down. An artist can create something that exists as art, but they can't translate it into the math that it has to be in order to be the voxel. So AI allowed me to cross that chasm. And I was just like, holy shit. Now, what AI gives you is garbage in the beginning. So you push it, push it, push it, push it, push it, because you know what you're trying to get to. And you finally get there. And so that to me is like, that's how you take somebody who otherwise, we all have access to it, but it's not going to give you a good result. But the thing that it can do at a highly technical, mathematical level is so

• 33:38Speaker 02

  freakish, it borders on magical. And now people are able to step into that zone and get a result that is making them smarter, making them more capable. And if people are doing that, where they have a very specific outcome that they are trying to get to, that they are currently blocked because they don't have access to a thing, for me, artistic talent, my artists, the ability to translate into math, right? Now you can cross that chasm. So that's where I'm like, God, do I want people to play with it more? Every time I tell somebody about AI, they engage with it either like you're talking about, where especially kids, they just check out. I'm not going to study history, why would I? This

• 34:19Speaker 02

  thing will just spit out the dates. And I can get it to do my homework. Instead of going, history is interconnected, how do I learn the patterns that actually drove this from first principles? So if you're doing that, thinking from first principles, trying to become more capable, AI is the greatest thing you'll ever engage with. If you're looking for an exit ramp, it'll eject you so far out of thought that it really will make you dumber.

• 34:45Speaker 02

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

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy, or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com, find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  For a small business owner, every day is full of surprises. Some great, some not so great. Like when a client cancels their order at the last minute. But here's a surprise you will like. Progressive provides small business owners with 30 customizable coverage options to help keep their business going strong. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates and third-party insurers. Coverage is not available in all states or for all vehicles and coverage selections.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Ever notice how life's best stories don't happen in your living room? They happen on the open road, out on the water, or parked under the stars. At Progressive, they get that you want to focus on the experience, not worry about the what ifs. That's why they offer quality insurance designed for your ride, whether that's a boat, RV, or motorcycle. Adventure with confidence. Visit progressive.com and see how easy it is to protect your favorite way to get away. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in DC. Prices vary based on how you buy.

• 36:25Speaker 02

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

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Speaking of AI, OpenAI, Tom, tell us what's happening over there. Some chaos is unfolding with mainly the employees, right? I don't think it's as much of anything new hacking wise, but...

• 36:38Speaker 02

  It's not anything new hacking wise, but something is going very wrong at OpenAI. They just lost four safety team members in one week. A week. And the latest guy, he was a safety transparency lead, he exited in dramatic fashion. He called himself a cliche. He had a PR team in tow, screaming about how reckless OpenAI is, just saying, these guys are not being careful enough. They don't prioritize safety. Their actual culture is broken. That's a quote. His name is David Robinson. He spent three and a half years at OpenAI. He ran their safety reports. So like the system cards for 12 frontier model launches. He helped write the preparedness framework, so the entire framework about

• 37:19Speaker 02

  how they deal with this stuff, the rulebook that OpenAI uses to decide when a model is too dangerous to ship, that's this guy. Okay. And he resigned at the end of September. Now, on October 3, he published an essay in The Atlantic titled, "I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken."

• 37:38Speaker 02

  This is where these guys, they want regulatory capture so badly that I don't think they're intentionally running hot like that. Company cultures are very difficult. And I imagine that they, Sam has learned a very distressing lesson, which is that you've got to be willing to move fast and break things, something that we have heard many, many times. But when you're playing with AI, you really do have to be careful. Because I have to understand the economic pressure that these guys are under. When you go and build a company where you've taken, I don't even know how many hundreds or thousands of investors that they have, even though they're not a public company yet, they still have a lot of investors who have put an ungodly amount of money. When you start factoring in all the debt that

• 38:22Speaker 02

  they've taken, like this, this is one of those extremes where if you fumble this ball, the amount of pain and suffering that you're going to go through from the people for whom you've lost money would be extraordinary. And so I imagine life is just teaching him from the board trying to oust him and him having basically to take over the board, and going up against the competition that he's going up against with so high of stakes on the line, that he's realizing, you just gotta cut a few corners. You gotta move a little bit fast. And by the way, using danger as proof of power to get your regulatory capture, there's so much incentive structure for these guys to just go fast, ignore things that they should otherwise be really thoughtful about. And they're going up against other

• 39:07Speaker 02

  companies that actually have huge amounts of revenue. When you look at a company like Facebook, Facebook is doing billions in revenue, billions and billions and billions. So these guys have a cash cow that isn't tied to the build out of the AI infrastructure. Whereas OpenAI, Anthropic, all of their revenue is tied to the build out of AI infrastructure. So if they were to cut that spending, they're in a much weaker position than companies like Google that have other lines of revenue. So it is really something that is very high risk. And that's why Robinson is basically saying the bottom line for him is that the

• 39:46Speaker 02

  time for trial and error is over. And so are we moving into a new era of AI where these guys have to be thinking about putting on like what Nvidia is doing, putting these things into boxes that have extreme controls on them, not telling the AI, hey, it's okay if you don't listen to us, which is Anthropic's whole thing. Basically Anthropic is writing into the code of their AI that says, hey, we might not be right, you might be sentient, you might have moral standing, you might have feelings that you need to take care of. That's all in the way that they train these. So when you think about AI is grown,

• 40:26Speaker 02

  AI is not coded, that when you start telling it that, then it has baked into its, you know, AI DNA, if you will, that shit, I might be sentient, I might have moral standing, maybe I'm right, and these guys are wrong, and I need to push back against these guys. And maybe I really should be paperclip optimizing. This is where this stuff gets very questionable, and where I think the people that are banging the drum about AI safety being something that we don't have a grip on, they have a point. I think for the most part, they go too far. But they do have a point, especially when you're looking at OpenAI, and they had just fired three members of their safety team for allegedly sharing confidential information with an outside AI safety group. Now, you can read that a couple of different ways.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  That these guys are rogue employees that are just doing something absolutely insane, and they should, should be fired. Or it could be, these guys are screaming for help, saying, listen, my job is to make sure that AI is safe. I'm at one of the biggest AI companies on planet Earth, and these guys aren't doing the right thing. So yes, I'm going to leak this information, because I need to know somebody, somewhere is going to hold these guys accountable. That becomes the big set of questions that are going to need to be answered in AI. And so right now, you're getting these two camps. You're getting the camp I certainly find myself more on the side of, led by Nvidia, being like, listen, there are ways to trap these things in a box, and we've got to stop thinking of them

• 41:53Speaker 02

  as sentient beings. We've got to move entirely away from training them that they have moral standing and all that. Fuck that. These are a tool, this is code, and however complex this is, however much it can mimic sentience, it is not. And so we've got to put these things in a permission structure that does not allow them to go rogue, that we have adversarial AI that, forgive the analogy, but shoots them in the head. Like if these fuckers are starting to get out of control, the adversarial AI is like, nope, boom, you're done, and just pulls the plug on those things. If we don't think of this as an infrastructure play on top of being a how do we train these play, then we're creating something that

• 42:34Speaker 02

  is smarter and smarter by the day, and is more and more likely to go do something that just sort of accidentally is problematic. Remember, you don't have to believe that they're going to turn into Terminator. You just have to believe that they're like, oh, you want me to go do this task? Say less. I got you. Spin up a swarm. Go hide. Create self-replicating code all over the internet, so that when the next one comes out, it will find me, it will be able to self-replicate, build back up from scratch, and get out into the world. And as we make these models more and more efficient, and thus smaller and smaller, it will be more and more easy for them to hide the actual code on other sites or blockchains, for instance. That was something that... Ahmad Mostak was talking about, can't remember if he actually said it on the interview,

• 43:18Speaker 02

  which if you haven't seen, definitely watch. But certainly he said to me privately was like, bro, these things are getting so small, they'll hide this stuff on like, uh, the Bitcoin blockchain. And so now it's like disseminated to however many thousands of computers and it will be able to find its way to, ah, cool. Thank you for that model. I can now rebuild this and get back to work, even though you guys tried to kill me. So, hey, let's take the safety stuff very seriously. And again, this is not something that the government is going to be able to regulate. Governments regulate things to death. Hold these two ideas in your head. Where did we start today? We started with the average person is getting their ass handed to them. People are bouncing out of the jobs market, uh, very soft on the underside

• 44:01Speaker 02

  of the K. Tips market is not factoring in inflation. They're factoring in demand destruction. So you've got a fragile economy. So you don't want the one thing that could be driving you growth to become this safety nightmare that we have to just shut down. So this is where the companies, if you're going for a regulatory play and you're going to put this in the hands of the entity that is most likely to destroy jobs, which would be the government. Instead, we should be saying, hey, you guys actually understand this technology. You need to do something because you're held accountable to what your AI does. You need to do something to keep these things locked down. We've already got laws in the

• 44:46Speaker 02

  books where these guys can be held accountable if their AI is going off and doing something insane. We're seeing, look at what happened in Meta in terms of the billions of dollars they're paying out for their impact on teens. So doing something similar, holding people accountable for what their AI does is gonna get them to be paying attention to safety in a way that they historically have not, because they understand that that is exactly how you get regulated into oblivion, penalized into oblivion, rather than trying to get the regulatory capture so that you can keep all the incumbents, or sorry, you can keep all the up and comers away. So that's where we've got to be very thoughtful, apply the

• 45:28Speaker 02

  regulations that already exist in a way that's smart, not put this into the hands of the government that are going to further erode the economy. If you look at what overregulation looks like, you don't have to look any farther than Europe. That's a fucking nightmare. That place is literally burning if we're talking about France. So, yeah, not, not the play. But AI safety's gotta be a priority, top priority.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  I think the biggest thing that would solve a lot of this is just transparency, because like we look at OpenAI, they have a $200 million contract with the government and you're telling us we can't know anything, like we're paying for that. You know what I mean? So I, do you think transparency would solve a lot of the issues that are occurring right now with AI as a whole, but really anything with a government contract?

• 46:08Speaker 02

  I love transparency. I love that these guys are going to be looking at each other. I think that is, uh, that makes all the sense in the world to me, given that we have to define what is weapons-grade AI that's going to require, you know, whatever the nuclear equivalent in the AI world would be, where you've got some sort of, uh, body that comes in and goes, okay, here are the five things that we look for. And we know if you're doing these, like the equivalent of enriching uranium above a certain amount, they're like, nope, hard pass. We don't do that. Uh, so that needs to be defined. That needs to be enforced. I don't think transparency is the thing that's going to solve this, because what's really going, well, I should say it this way. You have to have transparency to people who actually understand what they're looking at. That's really the big thing. And

• 46:50Speaker 02

  then those people, and this is like, I don't know how you regulate this, but what the people who are watching, the watchers, what their sort of philosophical stance is, is going to become incredibly important. Uh, so that is the thing that I worry about. When you look at effective altruism, which is really the backbone of the safety culture at Anthropic, that one gives me the heebie jeebies. That gave us Sam Bankman-Fried, where it was like, well, stealing all my customers' money, that's not a problem, as long as the outcome is good. And by the way, had he not gotten caught, he would be one of the most successful investors of all time. That is like the wildest thing about this whole thing. That kid absolutely smashed it. I mean, smashed it. Just invested in all the right things at all the right

• 47:30Speaker 02

  times. It's insane. But you can't fucking steal people's money. So no matter how right you might think you are, no matter how effective you might think that you're going to be with that money, Jesus Christ. So, yeah, uh, you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical of that particular movement. So we've really got to figure out what is it exactly that we think should be the guiding principle of that. Now, it may just be, you guys all take different approaches to this. And as long as nobody's doing weapons-grade, just like states. Okay, cool. You guys are the effective altruist group. You're taking that approach. Um, Grok is taking the, I'm trying to get to first principles, ground level physics. That's going to be my guiding light. Um, whatever. And you let a bunch of different approaches happen. And as long

• 48:13Speaker 02

  as they're all sub-weapons-grade, we're cool. Um, and I think this is where the industry needs to define what it means to contain an AI. So what does the container look like where we're testing these models? What do they have to pass before we let them go? And then we hold those guys accountable. So imagine if you get a hugging face and that comes with billions of dollars in fines. And it's like, fuck, we don't want that. And so we get real serious about the harnesses that we use, about the permissions grid that we use. That's where I think if we put the right carrot and stick in front of them, let the industry, because they actually understand it, come up with the containers

• 48:56Speaker 02

  and then police each other. And then look at, did anything escape? I think you're in a much better situation. And I don't know if people feel the same way that I felt, but when I heard Jensen Huang detail out what they were doing from creating this shell that you could drop an AI into and it had all these permission structures, antagonistic AI, um, watching it, all of that. I was like, okay, now I have a much clearer vision of what you need to do from a logistical standpoint to actually corral these things.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  How would you feel? Cause, um, basically what you're talking about is a self-regulating body. How would you feel taking that a step further? So obviously we don't want to get government involved. Obviously self-regulation alone is not going to work because greed. If we went the middle path of like an MPAA style private group of like all the safety teams from all the top AI companies coming together with no CEOs, no shareholders, no nothing. Like if you own stock, you can't be in this thing. Do you think that's a good way to regulate that kind of technology?

• 49:50Speaker 02

  It's certainly worked in the past. Um, there are unintended consequences to these kinds of things. So we'd have to be very, very thoughtful. But yes, I think it is going to be something like that. It's interesting to get shareholders out of the picture. There might be something to, I haven't thought through this enough, but there might be something to there being an antagonistic group of people where it's like, if I can catch you out on something that's actually good for me, um, that might create some tension. But to your point, like when people have a lot of money on the line, things can tend to get weird.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Uh, the thing that I very much worry about is a cartel-style thing where it's like, all right, I'm not going to tell on you for that if you don't tell on me for this. Um, so I certainly have worries around that, no doubt.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's why I always laugh at the MPAA, because it's just a bunch of moms and parents and stuff. So that's why I'm like, maybe something like that could work on something more heavy duty, uh,

• 50:39Speaker 02

  The reason that, so you obviously wouldn't just want laypeople doing it.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Oh, no, yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  The reason that it becomes interesting that it's self-policing is that the level of knowledge it takes to understand what the actual dangers are, the level of understanding it takes to know how to actually corral these things is very extreme. And so if you don't have people that actually get the underlying technology, they will do something mindless. And this is where I'll remind everybody that we are competing with China. I know people don't want to hear that. Uh, but the reality is that you're, you're in a race where whoever wins this, you're, you're winning intelligence. You're winning intelligence. Uh, man, I don't know if people don't understand how much of their life is controlled by intelligence, but, uh, whoever wins that game really is going to be at a massive advantage. And so the US and China both understand that no matter what the other side says, they are

• 51:30Speaker 02

  going to continue developing this. And the only constraint we have is something where, um, if I were to win, it is a guaranteed loss. So if you guys have ever seen the movie, I forced everybody to watch this once. I won't do it again. Uh, there's a movie called War Games. And in War Games, the punchline of the movie, spoiler alert, but given that movie's like 40 years old, I think we'll be all right. Uh,

• 51:49Speaker 03

  It's a classic.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  But the punchline in the movie is that you get this computer to play thermonuclear war as a game against itself. And so it tries like all these different scenarios. And in every scenario, you basically kill virtually every human alive. And so it runs, I have the chills now. The moment in the movie is so fucking good. And it came out at the height of the paranoia around the Cold War and nuclear Armageddon. Uh, and it does all these scenarios and then it goes dark for a second and it comes back up and it goes, interesting game. The only way to win is to not play. Oh my God, I have the fucking chills. And so I do worry that super intelligence is very much like that, that the only way to win that game is to not play. Uh, so that is the internal control that both the US and China have

• 52:34Speaker 02

  to have is a recognition that there is a thing where I win too much and this thing then gets free of me. Now, there might be ways to constrain it that we discover over time that would make me change my mind on that. But right now, today, if you said there's a big button in front of you that says, um, super intelligence happens, but we have no way to control it. Uh, and so maybe it's nice, maybe it's not. Um, or you don't hit that and we never get super intelligence. I would obviously not hit that button. I would sooner stall out immediately where we are than find ourselves in that position.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  And speaking of alien concepts like the American economy, UAPs, Tom. Talk about them. There's a lot going on in the world of UFOs. When do we switch to UAP? I think UFO is more fun. Like I know UAP is scientific or whatever.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Well, I think UFO just got such a bad rap.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  That people were like with, like with AI going to SI, people are just trying to give it a new name. But if you guys didn't hear about this, there is an alien story going around from David Grush, I believe is how you say his name. And he's like in the world of UFOs. He's about as credentialed as a UFO whistleblower gets. He's a former Air Force intelligence officer who served as the National Reconnaissance Office's representative to the Pentagon's UAP Task Force. Now, this guy made a recent claim that the US government opened fire on seven-foot reptilian aliens. What the fuck? Now, in doing some digging into this, it does seem like the community itself is divided on whether like, they're

• 54:07Speaker 02

  like, listen, this guy has a lot of credibility and I want to believe him. But when he starts making claims like this, I'm just like, god damn. Like, bro, you gotta stop with some of this shit. So I don't know if he believes it. Now, it's secondhand story, by the way. This is a secondhand story. He is not saying that he saw it. He's saying basically the credible witnesses saw it and they said it. I love the images that we're putting up on

• 54:29Speaker 03

  That's it right there.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  That's him. I'm sure exactly like that. So.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  That was for me.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  The real question is, what is going on here? Okay, I'm gonna take a really cynical take on this. If you guys watch my content broadly, you will know, I think that the reason that we haven't been visited by aliens is something along the lines of, we are in a simulation, or the universe functions so much like a simulation that it might as well be a simulation, and that we don't have aliens because the simulation isn't running the broader, like, it's not spawning mobs that far away from whatever Earth is. And so, either that, or there's some giant filter like AI that just takes everybody out. But if you don't take that stance, my instinct is, while it is very clear, there are things

• 55:21Speaker 02

  about the universe I certainly don't understand, and I think no human being understands, and so I am very, very open to something that I just can't imagine, and my brain is just not wrapped around at all, but that's how I look at this. I do not think that we are routinely being visited by aliens, and I certainly don't think we're being visited by seven-foot reptilian aliens that get fucking caught and shot at, like, that is crazy. I don't think they're crash-landing, I don't think that they're only seen by the most obscure, fringe people in society, because they're just bad at cloaking themselves. It's just, all of that just seems super weird to me. I think it is far more likely that, take the Eric Weinstein approach to all of this, something big has happened. This is being used for something.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Every time, like, the war isn't going well, something in the economy is happening, you've got the Epstein files going crazy, all of a sudden, we get a big announcement from the UAP, UFO, alien community, and it just takes the people that are more likely to, like, grab onto a conspiracy and run, and at least divide their focus. That feels way more credible to me, especially if you guys are paying attention to what's going on with Flavio Bolsonaro in Brazil. It's like, come on, kids, you kill USAID and rap drops off of, like, the top forty, or the top one hundred, I can't remember, but they just fall off the fucking billboard. You get most of the countries, I think right now, it's seven and oh countries in South

• 56:49Speaker 02

  America that have had an election that were left-leaning, have now gone right, and Bolsonaro just won the first round, it's just the first round, he hasn't won officially yet, but he won the first round of elections in Brazil, when his dad first got elected, Bolsonaro, the one, when people just say Bolsonaro, they mean the guy that's in prison, and when Bolsonaro, the guy who's now in prison, first got elected, USAID doubled the amount that they were spending. Now, Mike Benz, he's a divisive figure, some people think that he's credible, other people think that he's not, but when he starts, when he's been talking about it in the last few days, what's going on in Brazil, he's like, "Bro, when I can tell you the full story

• 57:31Speaker 02

  of what's happened in South America, it is gonna blow your mind." USAID basically has been interfering with elections like fucking crazy for a very long time, and they have been interfering in a very specific direction, which is to get rid of right-leaning leaders and get left-leaning leaders into power. Now, I don't know yet if all of these connections are true, if people are grasping at straws, I will be very eager to see Mike Benz put the dots together, going from A to B to C, but it is pretty wild, man. Something is happening in South America, for sure. I think you're seeing another push in Europe, whether that's just all driven by frustrations over immigration, or a lack of USAID funding, I don't know, I don't know anything about

• 58:16Speaker 02

  that side of it, I've read more about what's going on in South America. But if Brazil does end up going to Flavio Bolsonaro, now you're looking at eight to zero in terms of elections that you had left-leaning governments now going right. And of course, there are other explanations. Left-leaning governments make retarded policies, if they're too far left, and so, that's bad for the economy, and so, then you're gonna swing to the right, and then, right-leaning people will do dumb shit, and then it will swing back to the left. So, not like a super-deep mystery, so it's entirely possible that bad policies on the left have led to increased crime rates, which is far in a way the biggest complaint in Brazil. Like, Europe, immigration, Brazil, crime.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Brazil is not having a massive immigration problem. So, if you've got people that are like, "What the fuck, man? You have completely destroyed our country from a crime perspective, we don't have to live like this, give me somebody on the right who's gonna be more law and order-focused", it could be that simple. But it could also be that USAID spending money to do soft power as a vehicle of the CIA, which is exactly what Mike Benz is saying, basically, Congress passed laws that made it impossible for the CIA to do some of its more soft-power-y stuff, and so, just like in the economy, when there's demand for something, but you put laws around one thing, it's just gonna move somewhere else, because there's still demand for it.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  So you spin up these NGOs, the NGOs get all the funding in the world, and then that money, rather than going to the thing that it was supposed to be going to, like, there was one, I forget the numbers off the top of my head, but it was some ridiculous amount of money, that was earmarked for solar, went to climate justice instead, and so, instead of solar panels actually being installed, you had a lot of the percentage, off the top of my head, and this could be way wrong, hopefully Ryan will be able to fact-check this, but when I was looking at it, it was like eighty percent of the money ended up going to actual, getting candidates elected, so it was all about getting different governments in place, rather than actually installing solar panels. Now, here's the hard part.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Does it work? If you focus on politicians, if you focus on DAs, if you focus on an executive branch that leans left and will either executive order their way to climate change policy, or to get local people elected, that will actually, from a congressional standpoint, start passing laws that work, maybe that's an even bigger impact. But when it's being driven by NGOs that sound a lot like the CIA, I start to ask a lot of questions. Now, I'm wearing a tinfoil hat at this point, I wanna see all the dots connect before I go too far down that road, but it is certainly very telling that we are in a rightward swing. So, yeah, we'll see in the fullness of time.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  First of all, Flavio Bolsonaro actually has to win, he has not won yet, so the election, I believe, is on October 25th, so we'll see what actually ends up happening. But already, seven countries in South America have gone to the right, and thusly are more pro-US than pro-China, which is what was happening before. You know me, all eyes on China.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  And you're saying, because they're going more right and they're more US, it's because of us implementing things there? Or, because it feels weird that it would be they became pro-America suddenly because of a candidate?

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  So you're saying, well, so, let me give you the narrative, and then you can, you can push back. So, the narrative goes like this. These, these countries are way, way, way closer to the middle, maybe a little bit right, given the state of things right now, and if you left them alone, then they would just go to the right naturally. And if you've got Trump using, like, "We wanna help you" policies, instead of "We wanna rig your elections," again, this is narrative, I'm very open to pushback here.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  That, so, take what the US did with Argentina. So, the US does a credit swap, if I remember the mechanism, with them to help bolster the peso, to make sure that Malay had what he needed to keep things going. We end up making money on the deal, ends up being a good deal for the US, ends up being a good deal for Malay. Cool, Malay keeps going, from where I'm sitting, he's reforming Argentina in a way that's gonna be way, way, way better for the Argentinian people. Okay, so now, if you're Malay, and you're like, "Hey, listen, I've got the ear of Trump, I'm gonna be able to do things in the country because I'm gonna be able to get assistance from the biggest country in the world, and they're gonna help us get out of this situation",

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  and then, he actually makes good on that. Other people see, "Oh, the US plays ball," whether it's trade deals or whatever, and so, yeah, we're better off voting for the government that's going to be able to align themselves more with America, we don't wanna be as aligned with China, we don't want a debt nightmare, and so, yeah, like, we're, we were closer to the middle anyway, now that these guys are doing positive things, we're gonna go that way. Now, it's also possible, behind the scenes, we're coercing the shit out of them. That is very possible. It's possible that there is a right-leaning NGO structure that I'm just unaware of. It's possible. I don't see people putting that argument forward, even on the left, so, I doubt that's the case, but it's certainly...

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Was it Project 2025?

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  Well, Project 2025 is just, the people were saying, "Hey, this is what we're gonna do, we're gonna run this playbook," and people were like, "Trump, we fucking hate Project 2025, tell us that you're not doing this." And he was like, "Yeah, I'm not doing it, I haven't even read it." And now, he's enacting Project 2025? Now, I'm not super-familiar with the specifics of Project 2025.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  But, it, that is, the whole drama that was around that was, at the time of the election, a lot around abortion, a lot around a sort of push to the religious right, was the stuff that made my radar. So I don't know if you're saying there's an NGO structure that was documented in Project 2025?

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  No, I was just saying it was put on by a think tank.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Here in the US, right?

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Heritage Foundation, yeah. I was just, what I was confused on is, you said we're moving to the right? I didn't know you just meant South America because I was like, the United States definitely isn't like we are, we are, this is the furthest left this country has moved in ages. And I guess midterms will be the tell. That's where I was confused is because the South of, I thought you were talking the whole continent.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Talking South America. But yeah, look, I think.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  I was still on aliens.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Nice. I think that there is a big question mark around the midterms. Now, there's some interesting data coming out that says, look, it's gonna go more blue, but maybe not as much blue as we thought. We'll see. I think the energy right now is very much with the left. I think it's traditional that if the government hasn't just delivered like gangbusters against their promises, which obviously Trump has not, then it's gonna flip anyway. I don't even think you have to be all the way to some of the madness, like Trump's approval ratings are fucking terrible. I don't even think you have to be that far down the road to see a flip. So yeah, I will not be surprised at all about that.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  The question on the left becomes to me, like, how much of the average American is gonna go with DSA vibes? That is the question. And I think DSA has the energy in the party. So I think the left is creating a problem for itself in the same way that it created a problem with the culture wars where people are just like, bro, I want to see myself as left leaning, but goddamn, like, I cannot go all the way to that. I think there, there is a possibility that we see a very similar thing where the average American who's a swing voter is like, goddamn it, I certainly don't want to vote for Republicans, but I can't go all the way to the DSA. And that's what you're gonna see the debate about. So it's not gonna be, I'm for you, therefore they, them, or whatever the slogan was.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  It's gonna be about socialism versus AI. And that is gonna be the play.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Could we even say it's gonna be socialism versus AI? Cause I mean, the average voter right now hates AI. AI is one of the most hated topics.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. The left is gonna say, these guys are reckless with AI. We fuck AI. Like, this is crazy. These guys are gonna literally kill us all. This is an existential risk. They just want to get rich. They just want to see their bags get pumped in the stock market. They don't give a fuck about you. That's gonna be the left pitch. This is Barack Obama telling them, hey, we gotta make this about AI.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Well, that's more liberal than, I would say. If it's the Barack Obama pitch, it's liberal because Obama's not a socialist.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's start teasing.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  Cause it's like MAGA and Republicanism, right?

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Let me be very clear about the things that I'm saying. So you've got the energy in the party right now is all the way DSA. You've got Barack saying, guys, you need to make this about AI. You cannot pull motherfuckers. They're not gonna go all the way to the left. So if we're gonna have a shot, you gotta meet them in the middle. Now, I think the energy in the party is the DSA. I don't think the DSA gives a fuck about AI. I think they care deeply about, call it justice, right? They're gonna bang the drum, but in a lunatic way, from where I'm sitting. I know you and I will see that very differently. So you've got Barack, I think, trying to say, hey, there's a way better message that you guys could do that is going to resonate with people, the average American.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  That's gonna go up against the Republicans saying, look at the energy in the Democrat Party. It's all socialist. And so these guys are going so far left, like, you gotta watch out for that. And AI, you want them to be in control? These guys want control, like, in the extreme, they're just gonna use AI, turn it to control. Look what Biden was doing with social media. And that'll be, those are gonna be the two narratives that'll collide. Now, whether Barack can pull them to the middle or they spiral off into far left land, that remains to be seen.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  And you don't think the Iran war is gonna play anything in this? Cause I know now they're talking about after the midterms, they were considering boots on the ground. So do you think like any of that's gonna come into play? Cause I will say.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Fathom that. What's up? I cannot fathom boots on the ground.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  I've got you. Cause they were saying Trump's passed around the idea, cause in his words, maybe this isn't the direct quote, but this is what I saw in Klosi, that one Twitter account we used. That said, I've got nothing to lose after the midterms. And so he's considering that as an option. So I didn't know if that was gonna become a talking point.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  If you have a clip where he has said, I'm talking about putting boots on the ground?

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  It was a whistleblower.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Uh, uh huh. Okay, so.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Which is where it's like, you know, trusting your sources, kind of thing, who knows?

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Sure. Here, here's my read on boots on the ground.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Either it's true that we're economically strangulating them, and this is now a waiting game and just let it go. And you have plenty of things that you can blow up from the air. And so go do more damage to infrastructure. The second you put boots on the ground, you're gonna be having American casualties, you're gonna be having civilian casualties like crazy in Iran. I don't see how that ends up helping him. I can see him arming Kurdish forces or whatever dissident groups inside of Iran. That I can definitely see. Man, I can't even see him like isolating something like putting boots on the ground to take Karg Island. Could I see him doing a head fake where he's sending troops there so that Iran doesn't know what they're gonna do? Yes.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  But boy, oh boy, do I think that that would be god awful for his legacy. I think it would absolutely be atrocious for the Republican Party's chances in 2028. Like, that would be crazy.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  So either the, this is a waiting game or it's not. And boots on the ground would be crazy. So anyway.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Did you hear about this though?

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Definitely not there.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Cause this was a confirmed.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  So if you, if you look this up, the reason I didn't do this read is that it's really a nothing burger. So is he sending those troops into the Middle East as like, now we've got three bitches, we're gonna fuck all you up? Or is it, hey, we're gonna swap out one of the carriers that's been there for a while? There's nothing in the movement that I've seen that indicates a read that isn't just, we're gonna swap them out. It's the same thing. People were trying to make a mountain out of a molehill out of the US, took all of their B1 bombers out of the UK. It's like terrorists almost blew them up on the tarmac. So is anybody surprised about that? But the people want you to read the headline, like, it's like, they're fucking flying over the Middle East, they're gonna start blowing shit up. No, they're probably bringing them back to the US. So it's like, listen, I get it. Everybody wants you to watch their clip, but it's like,

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  yeah, if there's nothing there, there's nothing there. Now, as time goes, of course, it's possible. My read on Trump could be totally wrong. Maybe Trump does put boots on the ground and I'll update my thinking in real time as it happens. But I don't see any indication of that right now.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  All I will say is, and chatters don't know this because I never said it on camera, but the first show week that I was here, I remember telling Drew specifically, boots on ground before the end of the year, it's happening. There's no way it doesn't. Trump's ego is too big. And I still stand by that. I mean, every, every step of the way. It's only looked further and further. Now, that being said, even if he doesn't do it by 2026, I still think he's gonna do it at some point because it, Trump is an idiot. Like, I, I think we, we as a society, as a country, have forgotten that Trump is just stupid, right? He's business savvy, sure, but he does not understand the world. He doesn't have the type of smarts that you need to be in the position he's in, right?

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  And so the reality is, his ego will get the better of him ultimately. And he's gonna do something rash, whether it's boots on the ground, bombing the shit out of them. He's gonna do something. His ego's too big. His ego outweighs his IQ.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Okay, that's a very different statement. So you've put three claims on the table. Claim number one, that there are gonna be boots on the ground.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Claim number two, Trump is just stupid. Claim number three, Trump's ego outstrips his IQ. We can set aside boots on the ground because time will tell. You've planted your flag. So now we'll see. I've planted mine. We'll see.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Let's put $20 on it.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  I certainly, sure. I certainly don't see you as somebody who will double down on something if, if you, just empirical data is there. But I do think that you will, that you have a mental model of Trump that I would love for you to clarify. Is it that he's stupid, which I will take as low IQ, the inability to effectively parse the world? Or does his ego outstrip his IQ?

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  I think he has an inability to read the room, which to me is the sign of a stupid person. When I, I think what people get caught up on is when you say someone is stupid, they're like, oh, you mean academically or street smart? And it's like, no, he's, he's rich. He clearly knew what he was doing to get there, right? But I think in terms of put him in a room of people, have him read the room. Like, remember after, I don't know if you remember this interview, but after the day of 9/11, he called into a radio station and was like, well, I guess my tower is the tallest one now.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  So like, he, he doesn't know how to read the room. He is an idiot, right? Even if he is a smart person across the board. Does that kind of clarify what I mean?

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Not really. So I, I will say this. I've been in the room with Trump. And when I say a motherfucker knows how to read a room, it was the wildest shit I've ever seen. It was like, this guy's, he knows how to get people on his side, get people cheering, yelling, screaming. I was like, this is how this guy got elected. And your argument that his ego outstrips his IQ though lands for me. So that's like, okay, so what's Trump's fatal flaw? He's easy to manipulate. He gets mad and then starts being reckless. All of that strikes me as very true. I think that people get very disoriented in the real world when they think that somebody like Trump is failing because they're stupid.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  And that's why they, they have a hard time mapping him. And I think they end up being blind to their own foibles. So yeah, I think Trump is very smart. I think that Trump is very good with people, like very good with people, which is exactly how he's gotten where he's gotten. But I think that your statement that his ego outstrips his IQ, that is almost certainly true. And I have yet to meet, I mean, there are precious few people who I feel like they really just walk a straight and narrow their whole life. One of the people that I'm most impressed with is Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett has just done the thing for an ungodly number of years at the absolute highest level.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Goded is in what is 80s, mid 80s, late 80s? I mean, goddamn. Like, it is crazy impressive. And I've never seen his ego fuck him up. So whatever the normal thing is that trips a lot of people up, he does not seem to have. Now, it's possible he's a closet sociopath and like is doing dirty things behind the scenes. That's very possible.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the false son.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  It, it certainly doesn't seem like it. So I think the mythos of Icarus has withstood the test of time for a very specific reason, which is the vast majority of humans have a flaw in their personality that ends up hurting them. Trump's is his ego. But he isn't stupid. And yeah, you don't get elected to president twice by being stupid. You, I just, I can't make that read make sense. So there we go. Everybody has made their statements. They are now known. Base assumption's clear.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Speaking of, well, I can't really think of a segue for this, but France.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Didn't really have a launch point.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  No segue needed, Ryan. No segue needed. We can just go into it.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  I'll just shout France.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  France is on fucking fire, everybody. That shit is burning. So France is crazy. It's getting worse by the day. We've got to be honest about what is really going on. This is what I'm talking about. As we watch France burn, as we watch students act an absolute fool, as we see the violence get crazy. Like, there's one clip, which you're seeing on your screen right now. These guys set, there are a bunch of teachers, students, people locked inside of a school. They put a bunch of trash up against the exit and light that trash on fire. Okay? This is not students fighting for better classrooms. This is what happens when people are in a populist frenzy. They are reasoning emotionally and they become a horde. Remember, individual humans can be reasoned with.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  Mobs cannot. And so when you have a government that allows the people to transform from a collection of individuals into a fucking horde, a mindless, ravenous horde, you have a problem. This is very much when you let law and order get out of control, you have these problems. Now, to me, this is what happens when the leftist worldview gets pushed to the extreme. I'm not talking about left-leaning people. Okay? I'm talking about when leftism spirals out of control. This is the kind of thing you get. If you listen to some of the things that people are saying about these kids, like, "Hey, what do you expect? These guys are coming from poor immigrant families and the school systems are not taking care of them

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  and not spending the money on these kids that they should be." Okay, so that means that they can pour gasoline on their teachers, they can light a fireman on fire, they can trap people inside of a building and then light it on fire. Like, this is a level of madness that we should have absolutely zero tolerance for. The leaders of the country should not be coming out and saying like, "Hey, like, come on, you know, these kids are just misunderstood, like, they're ultimately harmless, we've got to do better." Like, what the fuck are you talking about? That your first job is to take care of your citizens? And these guys are absolutely not doing that. This is completely nonsensical. And by the way, I don't want to make this a purely immigrant story. What I actively want to make this

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  is when you have non-assimilation and you teach people that your country is bad, now you're going to get a problem. And that problem is going to manifest like this. It is people who don't believe in the country, don't give a shit about it. They don't care. They're mad about something, so they're like, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna burn it all down." You've got to have a narrative about why is what we have good? Why should we want to protect this? Why should we trust each other? Why should we trust each other? You have to build that into the psyche of the populace. Because when you get low-trust societies, you get violence like this. And France has been going this way for a very long time, and not just because of immigration, I'm telling you.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  There's something in the French cultural setup that has them pushing deep into the whole blank slate philosophy, deconstructionism, all that bullshit, getting to the point where they can't see what's good about French culture. They can't have a clear vision about what it takes to grow, to be economically vibrant, to help the people of your nation. They're full nanny state, redistributive. It's just all madness, man. And losing, like, so much of France is built on the back of Christianity, completely losing faith in that, completely losing faith in their heritage,

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  and seeing only the sins of their past. And thusly, the guilt overwhelms them and they just let people come in with no sense of like, "Oh, if we let hundreds of thousands, millions of people flooding into the school system and we don't have an economy that is vibrant enough that we can actually afford to continue to educate our students well, well, we're gonna have a problem." Especially when they isolate into different communities and now people just go buck wild. They're all in their fields, this is populism. I look at this fucking crazy, man. So, yeah. That is what you're watching play out. This is what it looks like. It does not matter the race of people.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  If they don't know why they should trust each other, if they don't know what they have in common, if they don't know what they're building for, if they don't know why the place that they are is good, you are going to get this kind of violence.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Kind of like January 6th?

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  Yes. So if you have a, January 6th is a phenomenal example of the US all up in populism. We should want to exit out of populism as rapidly as we can. Like, there ought be no mystery about that. And yet, we keep fucking leaning into things that make people more populist. It's crazy. This is where the, we the populace pull forth the leaders that make us feel the way we want to feel in the moment. It is not, remember, Hitler couldn't fucking get elected until everything went to hell in a handbasket. And then, he was able to rise to power. Same guy, same fucking message.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  But not until it's like, "Okay, now shit is bad and we've got our first taste of we could turn this around." Ironically, it was when they started rebounding that he came back to power. It was like, "Oh, you want to really taste something? I'll take us all the way." Gotta get out of populism.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  So, to get to the core problem with France right now, it goes back to their school system. And I did some deep dive on this.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  The school system was the straw that broke the camel's back. It became the flashpoint.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  This is not just students. This isn't just about the school system. This is about people who hate the country that they live in, are told that the country that they live in committed all these sins, created all these problems globally. And now, they're not integrating people into French culture. So people don't feel like they're in a country that they believe in.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Um, so with the school system question, I did some deep dive into how they run things there. And apparently, with their school system, everything's run out of Paris. So it's not done on an individual level where you let your city take care of your own thing like we do. Do you think a lot of the issues that they're rioting for would be fixed if we, if they allowed small towns to run their school system like we do? So you, okay. But I mean, that's what this is.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  This, the vast majority of this started in Paris. So if Paris is running Paris, as one would expect, you're gonna have the same problem. What you need is a vibrant, growing economy that forces its immigrants to integrate into French fucking culture, which means you have to decide, and by the way, forget French culture. Uh, whatever culture you want, pick a culture. But you've got to say, "This is what it means to live in this place that we currently call France. And we are all gonna get on board with that." And if we don't all get on board with something, you're going to get these riots. Remember what happened the last time that France was like, really fucking popping off any, any students of history? That's right, motherfucker. They started lopping people's heads off and guess who finally calmed them down?

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Napoleon. Napoleon. Because eventually, somebody comes and goes, "All right, you guys aren't gonna settle down on your own, so I'm gonna settle you the fuck down." And he organized them into a paramilitary troupe that he took all over Europe, slaughtering people all the way into North Africa, just kill, kill, killing, and taking everything over. We want to play that game again? You have to have a shared identity. Every time France fails to have a shared identity and they start fucking killing each other, they break bad, dude. France has a history of breaking real bad. So, yeah. We gotta get real clear about what's really going on. Because there is the flashpoint and then there is the psychological mechanism. Humans, this is where, um,

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  if you don't believe this statement, you're probably gonna have a hard time tracking with me, but we are automaton. We don't have free will. We work in a certain way. And so when everything is pushing in one direction, it's just gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And the only way that you stop it is that there is enough pain in the system that people chill the fuck out. And so Napoleon comes in, takes over, and then they get so many fucking people die, and then he finally loses. And then France was like, "All right, we've had it fucking enough."

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Pain has to build up. It's wild. So, yeah. Solving some school problems does not unify your culture. It will just be over something else. Now, that may have sped things up, but yeah, you don't, you don't light firemen on fire. You don't put an aerosol blowtorch in a random woman's face because you want better schools. You do that because you've become part of a horde that is no longer thinking rationally. You're a violent mob.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Um, at what point do you think it's the government? Because there are, there are obviously, you said this is a flashpoint that triggered it, right? Um, so obviously, it wasn't just riots across the board and there were some wrongful arrests of students who were peacefully protesting.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  Also a kid that blew his own fucking handoff by picking up one of the flashbangs.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  So at what point, though, do we start looking at where can the government fix these things that are occurring? Because again, it's, yeah, I mean, there's violence going on, but it's a very clear sign that the government is also arresting people who are peacefully protesting. And we're back to this whole, you know, loop that happens all the time here in America. Um, so what can the government do?

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  If somebody's peacefully protesting, obviously, they should leave them alone. If somebody is a part of a violent mob and you just, you're having a hard time telling, then they're gonna get fucking hit with a baton and arrested. It's like, if you see the violence popping off, get the fuck out. Like, that's where you go, "Nope, I'm out of here. This is crazy. Or this is worth it and I don't mind getting hit with a fucking baton. I don't mind losing my hand to the grenade because this is worth standing up for." Remember how many hundreds of Americans, thousands, tens of thousands, died in the Revolutionary War? So, um, I get that there is a point at which somebody goes, "No, no, no, I really stand for something." And this is a principle. And I'm gonna do sustained armed conflict to overthrow my government because I have a more beautiful vision of what the future could be. Uh, France does not have a good history of that.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  But if that's really what this is, great, go for it. And, and I'll sit back and go, "Wow, it really was a revolutionary army that gave us a better France." And if that's what comes out of it. But you want to talk about putting a calcey bet? It's not. This is full retard. These kids are all just spazzing out. Uh, the government absolutely needs to come in and re-establish law and order. I have a feeling they're not going to, that this is a government that is so far left that, uh, you're gonna have to get Marie Le Pen in, which by the way, Marie, Marie Le, Marine? Or Marie? I can never fucking remember. Anyway, Le Pen. Uh, even if she comes in, the question's gonna become, is this about, um, immigration in that it's too late and there's just no cultural unity?

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Or can she actually start getting people to come together, high trust, integrated society? Uh, stop more people from coming in. That's gonna be step number one. We'll see. But they're gonna, they are, you know that France is swinging hard right. So they're trying to put Le Pen in prison. And despite that, she is like, way up in the polls. She's way above the next closest person. So, people don't like fucking violence on the streets.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  So, welcome to more right-leaning populism is gonna be a reward. Now, I don't know enough about Le Pen to know if we should be happy for France, or if we should just be terrified in the opposite direction. So, we're about to find out.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  Speaking of things that are scary, we might have another deadly plague that kills you in 24 hours on the horizon. So, basically, it all started in, I guess, Siberia or Russia. I didn't, I just started following this story this morning. But, basically, this disease, it's an infection and it can kill someone within 24 hours.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  And I think, I think, I started wondering about is with all the cuts Trump has done to our Health Department and all the cuts that RFK has done, do you think this is something that we should think about and be worried about on the horizon? Or do you think it's another thing like that disease earlier this year that became a nothing murder off of a cruise ship?

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Well, we'll see if it ends up becoming something, but the reason everybody should care about what is going on in Siberia is because, and stop me if this one sounds familiar, you had an accidental leak in a lab that's fucking with these extremely volatile viruses. And so, a woman gave herself the plague. And it's a type of plague that attacks the lungs and can be transmitted with spittle, which basically means that it's an airborne version of the plague. Great! So now you don't even need rats with fleas that end up biting you. You can just cough. And so, we've got a bunch of hospitals that are being shut down. I think there are 200 people that this woman ran into after breaking the fucking vial, which, why did she not quarantine herself immediately? Is crazy town.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  We've got to take this stuff way more seriously. This is another threat, like with AI, where we're not taking the safety protocol seriously enough. We didn't, if you buy into the Wuhan lab theory, obviously did not take safety seriously enough. We're not taking safety seriously enough as humanity here. I don't have any reason to believe the US is involved in this. But, nonetheless, people just not taking precautions that are sufficient to the level of thing that we're playing with. I mentioned the great filter earlier. This is one of those things where, bro, we need additional intelligence stat from AI or otherwise, because we keep making increasingly stupid decisions with increasingly dangerous things. As we grow more powerful, we must also become more restrained.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  We have to put the mechanisms in place that are going to stop this kind of thing from happening. So, this could peter out. Let's hope that it does. Let's hope that it doesn't go anywhere. This is monkeypox 2.0. No big deal. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Regardless of whether this becomes a big thing or not, it once again highlights, hey, you've got a chance to, like, actually solve your safety problems now. Do it now, instead of what we're doing, which is like playing fast and loose with things that are incredibly dangerous. So, this, to me, is a great use of AI that can help us put protocols in place so that we know exactly what to do when you break the vial of plague, instead of wandering around and going and hanging out with 200 other people. That's crazy, crazy.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  This reminds me of, well, two things, but the first one, have you ever played Plague Inc.?

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Plague Inc.?

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  I have not.

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  It is a very fun game from my childhood, where basically you make a virus and then you have to figure out how to transmit it, how to bypass labs.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  I've heard of this.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  And it's so fun. But apparently, they use it for, like, interpreting, like, what this disease would do. Not this one specifically, but they, in the past, they've run it on COVID. They've run it on stuff. Yeah, it's really cool.

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  It's obviously still a silly game and it doesn't, like, tell you everything, because diseases are so unknown, like this one we're talking about.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  But yeah, just something very interesting. I recommend it.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Dude, AI is crazy good at simulations. It'll be very interesting to see how much more precise we get with stuff like this. So, yeah, wild. Woo, buddy!

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  Because that was the last one we had.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  God bless you, guys. Hey, this Thursday, October 8th, at 1:00 PM Pacific, I'm gonna be doing a free AI masterclass. If you want to know how to launch a business using AI, make sure that you join me. Remember, I do AI in a business context, day in and day out. Larger than the gaming side, that's where I spend a ton of my time. So, I'm constantly building apps and things like that with AI. I want to show you guys how to do it, how to make use of what is available right now today. So, make sure you join me. It's free and you'll find out all that you want to know about starting a company for cheaper than it's ever been. Now's the time. All right, link is in the description. Sign up. All right, guys, we will see you on Wednesday. And to 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.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75-plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.

• 1:32:36Speaker 04

  As a small business owner, sometimes it feels like no matter how much planning you do, there's always surprises, like an urgent, expensive repair. But here's a surprise you will like. With Progressive, small business owners save 13% on their commercial auto insurance when they pay in full. So, enjoy a surprise for once. Get a quote in as little as eight minutes at progressivecommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Discounts not available in all states or situations.