Did Trump Really Tell Iran to Bomb LA, the AI Bubble Keeps Expanding, and France Is Still on Fire | The Tom Bilyeu Show

What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to get started with your business today: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod 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! Welcome to the Tom Bilyeu Show. On today's show, Trump said "let them take out Los Angeles" and the internet decided it was treason, so the team plays the clip and argues about whether this is imprecise speech or something worse, with Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders getting called out for spinning it. Then AI whistleblower Jacob Coxon claims there is a 90 percent chance China has spies inside both OpenAI and Anthropic, which raises the question of whether the entire $700 billion capital bet is even worth making. The France riots have now spread into Belgium with over 6,100 arrested and nearly 1,500 minors facing prosecution, and the team breaks down why this is about cultural collapse rather than just immigration. Semafor broke that the New York Fed has been inside JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Barclays and Morgan Stanley since spring asking about private credit exposure, and Blue Owl just saw investors try to pull 39 percent out of one fund. Plus Russia stonewalling on the plague death, mass drivers on the moon and data centers in space, a Fortnite player who got arrested after Epic Games handed his voice chat to the FBI, and a $200 superchat with a theory about young traders breaking the clearing system. TOPICS 00:00 Intro 2:18 Trump, Iran, and Los Angeles 33:22 AI Safety, China Spies, and the $700 Billion Bet 54:31 The France Riots Spreading Across Europe 1:12:03 Private Credit and the New York Fed 1:21:55 The Russian Plague Story 1:27:38 SpaceX, the Moon, and Mars 1:34:03 Fortnite Is Snitching to the FBI 1:35:29 Kaizen Update and Outro 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

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• 1:15Speaker 00

  This is the new very fine people story, and it shows just how moronic people become when they are locked into populism. Boy, are we going to talk about that. The world of AI safety gets worse by the day. Jacob Coxon has made a new claim about China that if true is extremely dangerous. The private credit risk, speaking of things that are dangerous, is apparently getting dicey as Semaphore broke a story that the New York Fed is investigating basically everybody's exposure. The riots in France are spreading fast across Europe and highlight a cultural battle for the soul of Europe that is rapidly turning them into an economic wasteland. What are these kids doing? The Russian plague story. Speaking of what are people doing?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  This is growing far more unsettling than people realize. By this point, we should have far more information than we're getting, and the fact that Russia is being so tight-lipped is the story. That's what everybody has on. That's what has everybody on edge. Now, this whole Fortnite snitching story is blowing up. Players are learning the hard way that flock cameras ain't got nothing on Epic Games. They're checking those chat logs harder than Santa double checks his list. And something is very broken in the American psyche, boys and girls, much to my dismay. We've got two new stories of women attempting to kill their kids. Something very dark is happening. All right, a quick shout out to Tailor Brands before we get into this whole Trump madness. Dude, if you've ever wanted to start a business, Tailor Brands has got your back.

• 2:45Speaker 00

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• 3:30Speaker 00

  Now, I want to start with a clip. I want you guys to see this for yourselves because I am certain that we are not all going to see the same thing. This is one of the most fascinating things about humans. We're all going to look at the same thing, and we are going to see something different. This is so wild. All right, without further ado, here's Trump saying what he said, and then we're going to talk about it.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That's, this is a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over with very soon. It's essentially almost over with.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Okay, there you heard it. Those are the words, okay? That's it. We didn't edit that. That is exactly how he said it. Now, even here in this company, last night, when I started talking about what I thought this was, I realized that people did not agree on what was just said. Okay, so I will imagine that, given what I know about frame of reference, we are all going to see something different in that clip. And honestly, I'll forgive anyone who looks at that and thinks that he's joking about targeting Los Angeles and San Diego. I think you're wrong, by the way. I do not think that is there at all. But if somebody thought that, I'd be like, all right, listen, I'm not going to beat myself to death arguing over that. But I will literally think you incapable

• 5:04Speaker 00

  of thinking clearly and navigating your own life if you think that in any way, shape, or form, the way that Gavin Newsom does. So let's pull up the clip from, or the tweet from Gavin Newsom. Oh, we'll look at Bernie Sanders in a minute. Here's what Gavin Newsom said about the clip you just saw, okay? Donald Trump's remarks were dangerous, if not treasonous. Remember, the punishment for treason is death, okay? So he's saying it's possible that we might need to put Trump to death for the clip that you just saw, putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America's largest naval hubs. What the fuck are you talking about? So Gavin Newsom goes on. I am directing the State Threat Assessment Center to actively monitor the situation

• 5:48Speaker 00

  in the event that foreign actors interpret the president's remarks as an invitation to target California. Okay, I'll give you my take, and then I want to hear from Ryan. I have a feeling we see this very differently. We didn't talk much about it last night, so this will be very interesting to hear. Trump was obviously being imprecise. I think it's pretty self-evident, given that he's talking about Iran, given that he's talking about gas prices being a small price to pay for making the world safer, given that when Iran has been talking about targeting, they've talked about targeting Los Angeles, given that all of that,

• 6:30Speaker 00

  you can see where he's saying, look, these guys would get ballistic missiles, nuclear missiles, we've heard him talk about it 1,000 times, that would be able to reach the US if you just let these guys go unfettered. And so he mentions the places that they would most likely target. And he does not do it in a way where he's being, I think, joking. He would say it in a very different way. We all know the weird way that Trump talks when he's trying to make a joke about something. And if anybody thinks he's saying, let them nuke Los Angeles and San Diego to, what, make a point? It is completely an unhinged reading of that. Now, again, if you think that he's joking, whatever.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  That I will let slide. But if you actually think, like Gavin Newsom is saying, that this is somebody who just made a treasonous statement because he is actually asking Iran to bomb those places, that is completely unhinged. This is where my thing is, okay, when you get locked into a frame of reference, you hate somebody so much, you actually can't see the way that other people would read something. Now, I know I'm at risk of being in my own frame of reference, that I'm so stuck in something that I can't see things the way that they really are. And this is where I will ask you. The person that I am closest to being deranged on, which I have confessed over and over and over, is Mhamdani. Okay, Mhamdani does all my triggers, right?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I think he's taking, he represents the energy in the Democratic Party. I think he will make this country way worse for every American ever if he were to get unfettered access to put forward the policies that he wants. Now, multiple times on this show, as he has popped off about something, and I see headlines running with what a lunatic he is, and I can't believe that he would say this or want to do this, and then I go watch the clip, and I'm like, that's not what he's saying. So even though I don't like him, I'm not going to try to make a mountain out of a molehill because that is precisely the thing that each and every one of us has to do is go, okay, I have a frame of reference. Am I actually seeing what's being said, or am I trapped in this?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  When I saw that people were running with the Trump thing, where he was speaking imprecisely, he did not finish his sentence. What he should have said was, let them bomb, or let them take Los Angeles, let them take San Diego, and then people will see this is a huge risk, and that having higher gas prices would have been a very small price to pay to stop that from happening. He should have said all of that, and he did not. And he is leaving room for the wild interpretations. What I'm trying to get people to see is, dude, just as a thought experiment, run a charitable read on somebody. And so I would invite all of you guys, if you ever think that Mhamdani is saying something that's completely inert, is very straightforward,

• 9:25Speaker 00

  and I'm running with some psychotic read of the situation, for sure, pull me up short, let me know, hey, you're trapped by something. But this is one of those times. If you guys have seen the very fine people on both sides saying, like actually watched the whole thing, he says multiple times, I am not talking about the white supremacists or the nationalists. Those are, can't remember the exact words, but like, those are horrible people, and they should be soundly rejected, denounced, whatever the exact phrase. It was aggressive, and he said it multiple times. And yet, people leave that context out whenever they fucking talk about this, and this is precisely how we all get deranged. Now, I am pointing this back at myself

• 10:09Speaker 00

  as hard as I'm pointing it at anybody else. You, all of us, myself included, will get trapped in a frame of reference if we are not very careful. If we cannot all look at that and say, all right, imprecise for sure. Possibly joking, but again, I don't think so. But treasonous? That's wild. And then let's pull up Bernie Sanders for one more example. This isn't just Trump. This is people that are political, trying to use this to political advantage. So here's Bernie Sanders. "I can't believe we have to say this, but the annihilation of two major American cities, more than 5 million people, is not a small price to pay for Trump's illegal war." He didn't say that. He didn't say that

• 10:53Speaker 00

  losing, even if you think he's joking, he didn't say that. So this to me is spin, frame of reference, trying to get people whipped into a frenzy. And by the way, there's so much legitimate stuff to hate Trump for. There's so much legitimate stuff to attack Trump for, that this is what people are gonna spend their time on? This is wild. This is how people get stuck, and they can look at the world, but not actually see what's happening. This is literally how people derange. So, all of us need to know, who are our weak points?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Where are we likely to be blind? Obviously, I've named mine. Boy, oh, boy. I certainly don't think Gavin Newsom has named his, though I think he is just a political animal who is being absolutely disgusting here. Uh, Bernie Sanders, same thing. But what I wanna know from you guys is, let's say that you hate Trump. Can you step into my frame of reference and go, "Okay, yeah, I see what he's saying here, and maybe you disagree with me." But can you see that there is, at a minimum, the possibility that this guy was just being imprecise in his language?

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Do you really think the most obvious read of this is that he's calling for the destruction of two cities, or that he's like, "Well, if you're gonna hit us, at least hit the cities that I hate"? Like, that just seems so outrageous. All right. Ryan?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just stupid. What Trump said is stupid.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Is it stupid because it was a bad joke, because it's imprecise, or because you actually believe he's saying, "Come on, Iran."

• 12:47Speaker 02

  I don't think you can tell what this guy, it's 50, I mean, here's the reality of it. You gotta look at it for what his words are, because that's what we do all the time with people, and, um, you know, sitting president should ever even make this joke, period. This should not be-

• 13:01Speaker 00

  So to you, it is a joke?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  No, to me, it's a 50/50. He's either joking, or he's either genuinely feels that way towards these cities, because they historically don't vote in his favor, right? I mean, he doesn't care about places. Like, remember the California wildfires? He didn't give funding, uh, at a federal level to us when we needed it during the California wildfires. So like, he doesn't like Los Angeles, right? And so, I think it's a 50/50 of, yes, he's maybe joking, but also, he could be serious, and regardless, either direction it is, it's a stupid thing to say. And if this had been an Abdulaziz Syed, or if this had been Mam Donnie, the news cycle would have spent a week harping on it.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yes, which is fucking absurd. And so, my, my thing is, um, so I've, actually I have one more question, and then we'll come back to the Mam Donnie thing, or El-Sayed, because I agree with you. If either of them said something like this, then the, the, uh, right-wing people would go crazy with it, and I would be just as critical, because that is fucking moronic. And there have been multiple times where Mam Donnie, El-Sayed, were popping off in the headlines. I go, "Watch the clip," and it's a nothing burger. And so, I'm just like, "Look, these are two people I do not wanna see elected." Uh, and nonetheless, stepping into, like, the feeding frenzy of, "Ah, ha, ha, they said something that I can latch on to to push my point forward",

• 14:20Speaker 00

  is, is so debilitating of one's own ability to think through the problem. You just can't allow yourself to go there. But my, my question to you is, can you step inside my frame of reference and see that, you may think I'm dumb as a box of rocks, but I'm gonna pretend for a second that you think that I'm a well-intentioned person, that I'm reasonably intelligent. Do you think it's possible for a well-intentioned person who's reasonably intelligent to go, "This was just imprecise speech"?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  I think on paper, yes, but you have not given that credence to other people like Mam Donnie or Hassan, when other clips come up.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  If, if I were to say, you will be able to find recordings of me saying, "Here's what people are saying Mam Donnie said. I don't think this is what he means. This is crazy. I don't know why they're making a big deal of this." You think you won't be able to find that?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  I'm not saying I won't, but I'm basing it on the time I've been here, right?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  But that would, no, no, I'm saying, since you've been here.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Because I do think you're smart, and I think you're well-intentioned. I don't think anything bad about you, so I don't think, I just don't think there's a point stepping into the frame of reference when he shouldn't have said it, period, is the, is the full stop. It doesn't matter if it was a joke or not. You're the President of the United States. You should not be making a joke that you can take out two of the largest cities on the west coast.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  I don't think he's making a joke. I don't think that that was comedy.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Well, then that should be worse, Tom. Then how are these reactions?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  If he were to finish off his sentence and simply be more clear, I think the conversation goes like this.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Uh, "Our gas prices are up, but it's a small price to pay. We have to stay safe." Imagine if he struck Los Angeles or San Diego, suddenly you guys, everybody would agree that higher gas prices, to make sure that that never happened, would have been a small price to pay. That's, that is what I thought he said the second that I saw it. So

• 16:12Speaker 00

  I understand the, "Boy, do I wish I had a president that wasn't so flippant when he spoke. Boy, do I wish I had a president that didn't leave himself open to this kind of misinterpretation." The part, and, and like I said, I, I totally get that there's enough there, that if somebody was like, "Tom, I think that you not being able to see that this is potentially a joke, is your own blind spot." That, that's why I said, "I completely concede that." I don't see it, but I understand I have a frame of reference, and it may be blinding me to that. The part where I'm drawing a hard and fast line, that I'm saying, "This, this is legitimate brain rot", is when you look at the biggest offender to me, which is Gavin Newsom. And he talks about how this is potentially treasonous,

• 16:55Speaker 00

  that I'm now spinning up an agency, not creating the agency, but getting the agency refocused on making sure that we're protecting from threats, because there's a very real chance that Iran read this as an invitation to bomb those two cities. Um, or like Bernie Sanders' spin, that, "Oh, this was an open, uh, that Trump is saying it would be a small price to lose 5 million people."

• 17:23Speaker 00

  And that's not like a big price to pay, which isn't, even if you think Trump is joking, isn't what he was saying.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  But he shouldn't-

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I hear you.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  -get a pass on the words. Is, I mean, he's the president, like, I, like, Gavin Newsom, sure, maybe it's a little far to say it's treasonous, but like, even Bernie's statement here. I may not agree with the guy and everything, but there's nothing, like, he's just saying what Trump said. Not a small price to pay.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  But Trump didn't say that the loss of those cities would be a small price to pay.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Well, Tom, when he says, "Let them take out Los Angeles and San Diego," does that just mean, "Ah, they just kinda let the people leave"? No, it means they're gonna kill us all. I mean, that's what that statement-

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So, really fast, I, I'm gonna articulate your position, so you know that I understand you and I just disagree. Then I would like you to articulate my position back to me, so I know that you understand me and just disagree. So, the way that I read your take on this is, um, he made a, a very untoward joke, that a president should never get a pass for saying these words. And so, even if he doesn't literally mean in a treasonous way that he wants people to bomb American cities, it is a joke that is so bad form that we, we cannot give this guy a pass, and this is the exact kind of thing that makes him such a dangerous and problematic president.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Um, no, I think all I said is that it's stupid that he said it, and I think there's a 50/50 where he either means it or he doesn't, and I think that's the whole point.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  So, do you think I'm overstating your position?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I think what you're doing is you're taking what I said, and then you're pushing it further. And I do think he is a dangerous president. I don't think he's fit to be president, but I don't think this is the reason. It's not like I saw him say this, and I go, "Oh, now all of a sudden..." I've always thought he was a terrible pick for president, but this did not change, like, this is, it's the same. I understand that it's hyperbole, like, I can look at this in context and say, "He's just saying things to give red meat to his MAGA crowd." But at the same time, we gotta hold our presidents to better standards. I mean, like, Obama would not have said this.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  And what would that look like? To hold him to a better standard is just to say, "Look, this is ridiculous. Don't do it again," or-

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Well, so here's the problem. We're to a point where we have let Trump do what he wants without any repercussions for how many years? I mean, he's almost been president for eight years total, if you take up two of his terms, and he barely has felt repercussions. He got impeached twice, and that's it.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  So, I think the reality is, there's nothing you can punish him on, because it's just words, but we gotta call him out, which is why Bernie Sanders is saying something, Gavin Newsom is saying something. Now, he, Donald Trump has polarized the political environment so much, that no one's gonna take Newsom or Sanders seriously, because Trump's made politics into a Twitter war, but, I mean, there's nothing you can do. He's set himself up in a position where he cannot be toppled, uh, from his throne.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Okay, but I wanna make sure that I can say your position back to you in a way that you recognize.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Um, it did sound like you were saying, "I overdramatized your position."

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  And what you're saying is simply, uh, "This joke was in bad taste. We need to hold them accountable." By, there's not much we can do, but at least getting Bernie Sanders to say that this is unacceptable, and Newsom to say this is unacceptable, that at least is a, a sort of minimum way to address words that the president should not have said.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, let's look at it from first principles and common sense, right?

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Hold on, I just wanna make sure that I'm understanding your position.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm saying-

• 20:54Speaker 00

  So if you can tell me what part of that, so I did understand your position. Okay, cool.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  But I'm confirming there's an extra layer that, I think it's not that I'm saying it's good that Bernie and Newsom said something. What I am saying is, it's cause and effect, right? Trump says something stupid. He doesn't be, he's not held accountable. So politicians are gonna speak up and say things, whether it's to push their own campaign, or because they really believe it. Who knows? That's a whole different judgment call, but it's cause and effect.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  What part do you think I'm getting wrong?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  I just think there's little things. So like when you just said, um, it's good that Bernie and Newsom said something. I don't think it's necessarily good. Like, I don't think they needed to say something. I'm more explaining

• 21:30Speaker 00

  You're just saying it's cause and effect.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Why they said something.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Got it. Okay, so, uh,

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It's just the little things.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  No, no, no, that's very helpful, so that I under, actually understand your position. Okay, so, uh, very untoward joke. He never should have made it. And because he's politicized, uh, he's turned politics into a Twitter war. You're going to get the kind of statements like we got from Newsom and Bernie.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yes. I think this whole thing is a nothing burger.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Now, I love that. Can you say what my position is?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Uh, I think your position is, well, here's where I'm confused in your position. I need a clarification. Cause I think I understand it, but there's one part that I'm hung up on, which is you said you do not think Trump is joking. But if we step into the context of the situation, and I'm like, if you don't think Trump is joking, shouldn't that be the full stop for you?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  I don't think he's joking. I think what he's saying is so self-evidently true that I'm just like, people are being willfully ignorant. Now, the problem I have with that interpretation is I don't think you're being willfully ignorant. So now I'm like, okay, you're saying this is a nothing burger that I can get on board with. Cool. For you is not a big deal. This is more, here's more evidence of a guy who's turned this into, who's turned politics into a Twitter war. That seems like a very reasonable, uh, sort of full takeaway from this. The part that, where we disagree is, I just don't think it's a joke. So if you think my interpretation is he made a joke and why am I not upset about it?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  I'm saying, I don't think he was joking because I don't think he's saying Iran, please bomb these places. I think he's saying that if Iran were to bomb those places, people would immediately see that higher gas prices is a very small price to pay to stop that from happening. That's what I think he's actually saying.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Like in this one sentence?

• 23:19Speaker 00

  In this one sentence.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Well, I just, when, when I read this sentence, just from a grammar perspective, let him take out

• 23:26Speaker 00

  No, no, no. You have to play it and listen to what he actually says.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Well, I heard the whole.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  You can't take like the recapitulations. So, because I don't think that is verbatim. So, uh, if you play it, like if you want to play it again, cause your face says that you think that that is the accurate statement. Uh, but, so this is where, when you get, Bill Burr does a phenomenal joke about this.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  And he's talking about how you're having a sexual encounter with a woman and she's flirtatiously with you saying, "No, stop, don't." And he says, then a court reporter reads it and just goes, "No, stop, don't." And he's like, "Wait, wait, wait. That's not how she said it." That's how I feel about this. Like when you actually hear it in context and the way that he's saying it, there's nothing that leads me to believe that he is saying, "Come and bomb us."

• 24:17Speaker 02

  What I will say is that it's very good that we're taking it in the full context. I think it's good. I think I, you know, that's a good thing to do. I also took it in the full context. But when I've tried to explain this about like a Hassan Piker clip, it always comes back to, "Well, but he said this." And it's like, "Well, you didn't look at the context around it."

• 24:34Speaker 00

  No, but you've been really good about getting me to watch the clips in context. Do you feel like when you give me the context, I'm still willfully misinterpreting something?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Well, let's take the one, for example, the capitalist blood in the streets, one that everyone brings up on Fox. The actual context of that conversation is he's talking to his buddy who is a landlord. And they're joking about how rent prices in LA have gotten higher.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  But then people continue to harp on that.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  So you just think that one's fine because he's just kidding?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Right. And what I'm saying is, in the context of this, it doesn't matter how Trump frames it. A president should not even be phrasing something like that, is my whole point. And I think we agree on that. Which is why I don't know.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  We agree on it, but for very different reasons. Because I don't think he's making a joke. I think he said an incomplete sentence. As we all do from time to time, it is inevitable that people are going to do that.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  But you just told me he had the full context with it.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  You do have the full context.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, you said, "This was an incomplete sentence." Are you saying that he just didn't say the rest of that sentence at all?

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Then why would we guess what he was trying to imply?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  What, that's how conversation works. We are all at all times trying to infer meaning, things that people don't say. If you try to always give like the maximum amount of context in every sentence you ever speak, you'd never finish a paragraph. So there is so much that you have to let be implied and things like that. Now, the Hassan thing is very interesting. Because that comes down to, my read of that particular quote is that he's not joking. And so if we were to pull it up, play the whole thing, and maybe we have to watch like the whole two hours or whatever to really understand, he's like doing a callback to something else. And that, it's very possible that that changes my mind.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Now, in a large bit of context, I think that it's pretty, um, on that one, I think it's pretty easy to read. This really is Hassan's read on the world. And so he's just saying it to be provocative. He has called himself a propagandist. And so I think he's running with something where he's like, yes, this is, this is, even if metaphorically, what I want to see happen. And I could buy that, that he's not literally saying, "Run out and slaughter these people." That he's like, "Look, this is just a big sort of over the top metaphor for tearing down the whole system." And if he said that, then I'd be saying what you're saying, which is like, "All right, listen, I can actually buy that that's a metaphor and he's not literally talking about shooting people and hacking them to death in the streets."

• 26:59Speaker 00

  However, given that we've had a CEO shot, like to death on the street, uh, that's probably not the metaphor to bang that hard. And so

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Well, that metaphor was back in 2019. That's not a recent clip.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  You're saying it came before the thing?

• 27:16Speaker 02

  It was like long before even COVID.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  What I'm trying to say is, on that one, I hope that you can see, that's like, okay, you might be able to get me on board with, "All right, I'll buy it as a metaphor, but like, hey, this is probably not the right thing to say." Given that, after you said it, a few years down the road, we actually have people killing capitalists in the streets.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  So eh, probably not the best play. So that, that kind of reasoning through something I think is very reasonable. And this kind of stuff happens off camera, but you, I'll put some things into the doc before I've researched it. I see a headline, I drop it into the doc. And then you'll send me context. I'll watch the context and be like, "Yeah, you're right." And then we just move on.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Now, I like to believe, you've seen that happen enough, to be like, eh, yeah, Tom does his best. Everybody's flawed, but I do my best to get out of my frame of reference to actually see what's happening. So that I can be like, "Okay, is this one that just triggers me, but there's not really anything there?" Or is it like, "No, no, no. Like, there's really something to debate about here." You and I are not always going to see eye to eye. I'm perfectly fine with that. You seem perfectly fine with that. Ryan and I, seeming, from my perspective, you and I get along very well. So

• 28:33Speaker 02

  We talk about One Piece.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  When we talk about One Piece?

• 28:36Speaker 02

  No, I said, "We talk about One Piece."

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. There, there are many, many things that we share. So what, what I want to see, and I often think about, okay, why, why do I talk about this stuff? Because it's so detrimental to the gaming side of my life. Uh, and it feels important. And the reason it feels important to me is I feel like through conversations like we have here, they, they are truly unique in the YouTube landscape. In that, I am so aware of my own foibles and the way that I'm having a biological experience, that I'm going to get trapped. We all get trapped, that we all have emotional reactions. Those emotional reactions get us to reason, not from first principles, but instead emotionally. This is exactly why I opened this by saying, "This is the, the level of, uh, lunacy, acting moronic, whatever the exact phrase was that I used,

• 29:22Speaker 00

  when people are locked in populism. Populism is when you reason emotionally." So the whole thing that I'm trying to get people to wake up to is not to take my frame of reference, but to understand that everybody has a frame of reference. Everybody should be looking at their frame of reference when they encounter something like this, because it will lock them into seeing something that isn't there. And when I see, the easy one is Gavin Newsom, who is seeing something truly that is not there. I don't even think you think what he's seeing is there. And so now it's like, okay, this is how lower information voters who are already locked into emotions, take that and run with it. And we get into this ever escalating thing where it's like,

• 30:07Speaker 00

  "Guys, it, Trump won't be the last person that turns politics into a Twitter war." That's part of what I want people to understand, so that we should all be looking to diffuse this by saying, "Don't get sucked into a narrative. Don't get sucked into a frame of reference, your own or someone else's, that turns what is, as you said, a nothing burger into a major news story, which this is."

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Well, I meant nothing burger as in, just the fact that this is the discourse for the week in news. Like, there are more important things going on.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  But I assume there are more important things going on.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  It is still important that the president said this because it is not something a president should say, to clarify the nothing.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  If you take the interpretation that he was joking about Iran blowing up LA and San Diego.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Which, if I believed in that, I would agree with you. I don't, but, okay, we've laid that out. Uh, does chat have any clapback that they were like addressed?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  No, I think most people are just saying, "Move on." Or, well, one person did say, and this was more directed at me, but it was, "If Obama had said it, would you have said the same thing?" Yeah, I don't think any president, I don't, again, I don't give a shit about a fucking party. Like, a president shouldn't say it. That was the only clapback I saw. Otherwise, it was most people saying to move on.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Very easy. All right. Well, boys and girls, as much as I know you'd like us to move on, this kind of thing is exactly how America brain rots. So I assure you when I say that frame of reference is one of the most important and devastating things that you can encounter. If you want to know why, when you try to look at slavery, one of the most troubling things about slavery is you'll hear people are just born into a world where it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere, and so nobody thinks anything of it. That is frame of reference. Your frame of reference is that slavery is fine. And so the very thing that we should be celebrating are the people that broke that frame of reference. They break the fever and they find some path

• 32:06Speaker 00

  out of that and can actually make cultural change. We are going to have to do that if we want to disarm the populist bomb, which is still ticking. Remember, we are moving in the wrong direction. Okay, this is not something that's petering out. This is something that is currently getting worse. When you look at what's going on in Europe and you see the student protests now beginning to spread across the rest of Europe, this is people in the grips of a frame of reference with no like clarity from an economic standpoint of what they actually want to happen. So these things are not like an isolated one-off. This is important because it's people encountering an idea that triggered, that reveals, that

• 32:51Speaker 00

  is the right word, that reveals how in the grips of a, what I'll call a dangerously populist frame of reference they're stuck in. If we can't unwind that, then you get the asset stripping of the West, you get everybody blinded to what the elites are doing to society, and this ends up being a nightmare from which we only escape through an effective amount of pain and suffering. And that is like the thing that I'm trying to eject us out of. These things are understandable enough, and now I'm talking economics. The economics of what's happening right now are understandable enough that we should not need to end in pain and suffering of such magnitude that we finally all go, okay, yeah, we can start

• 33:34Speaker 00

  building a better system. We don't need to get to that point because we can address these things. To me, the first principles here start with you're having a biological experience, you are trapped inside of a frame of reference, it's how the human brain works, the human brain uses a fancy word, they're called heuristics, they are rules of thumb. And one of the rules of thumb that people have is, I hate that political figure. I hate what that person stands for. This is why I talk about my Achilles heel being Mumdani, and I do my very best to approach everything he says from the lens of cause and effect. What is he really trying to get to? Not is it politically expedient for me to spin something that he said into something bad because I don't like him and I want to

• 34:17Speaker 00

  see him fall. If people can do that, then we can eject out of the death loop that is populism. If we can't, we're fucked. It's just, to me, that simple.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Speaking of, uh, we're fucked, let's talk about the world of AI.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is crazy.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Tell us about what's happening in China.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  All right, man. The world of AI safety, it really does get worse day by day. If you guys remember Jacob Coxon, uh, he is the most recent whistleblower that dashed out of a company with a PR agency in tow. The shit is wild. I'm pretty sure it was Coxon that referred to himself as a cliche, though that might have been the guy that came after him. But like, dude, this just keeps happening. But anyway, he's now making very bold claims, a bold claim about China, and if it is true, this would be very dangerous. Now, the bad news is, this really might be true. It is certainly plausible. But let's hear it in my man's own words, as he was recently on, uh, the show with Patrick Bet-David. Let's take a listen.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Right now, if we just stopped, they would try and catch up. But I think one really important thing people don't realize is China already has spies at OpenAI, at Anthropic. China has the ability to hack at any time. If we pull ahead, that doesn't give us a big lead, they can just step in and steal our progress at any time, catch up the lead. How certain are you they have spies already there? Ninety percent, yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Here's the really bad news. Uh, I don't have any reason to doubt that. In the same way, I don't have any reason to doubt that the US has spies inside of their companies. This is what countries do all over the world. You're going to try to get any informational advantage that you can. So please don't think that I think this is some unique bad to China. I just think this is what people do. Uh, my last company, Quest Nutrition, there was corporate espionage going on at a protein bar company. So we had people from competitors that wanted to understand how we had taken the industry by storm. They didn't know what we had figured out. Now, what we had figured out was largely in manufacturing. And so they wanted to get people inside of our company to understand the equipment that we had made.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  And so if you've got that kind of thing happening inside of a protein bar company, then you can rest assured that if it really is true, that whoever wins AI wins, just wins. Because it is intelligence itself, and whatever country has access to the most intelligence, whether human or artificial, it doesn't matter, whatever country has access to the most intelligence really is going to be able to pull ahead of somebody else, that that level of importance, of course, is going to bring people out that want to see exactly what's going on. So this is one of those times, no matter what you think of Jacob Coxon, the reality is that he's pointing at a phenomenon that is almost certainly true, no matter what you're looking at. So if you look at a company like SpaceX, by

• 37:07Speaker 00

  the way, they're not allowed to hire Chinese nationals. I'm not allowed, I'm not sure if they're allowed to hire any foreign nationals. I don't know about that part, but I know for sure they can't hire Chinese nationals. So you're, you're looking at a government, the US, that goes, okay, we have strategically important companies inside of our country, and we need to really protect them because we know that this kind of thing happens. And again, how do we know? Because we've caught people doing it, because we do it ourselves. And so all of that stuff leads us to believe that this is a very real threat that we have to be very protective against. The fact that we understand how important the AI industry is, we, we have heard no shortage of that come out of Trump's mouth directly. David Sacks has been very open and honest about that. We've heard a lot

• 37:49Speaker 00

  of people talk about the AI industry is our most important industry from an economic standpoint, for sure. The massive amount of debt that we have going in, the fact that the US is competing for debt buyers with the AI industry, the fact that at this point, the entire S and P 500, which by the way, just hit a new record, is entirely predicated on the success of the AI industry, the fact that intelligence itself is the race, it's basically the only thing that matters. This is the new, uh, race for nuclear weapons. So all of that said, the fact that we aren't protecting ourselves effectively from that really is something that we need to pay attention to. And so the fact that we have

• 38:32Speaker 00

  all these security lapses going on inside the AI industry, the fact that we can probably believe that saying there's a 90% chance that China has infiltrated both of these companies is pretty believable, is yet another alarm bell in the AI industry. Now, this is not something that people should be running around and panicking about, but this is absolutely something that we need to be managing. So I believe that the AI companies themselves, uh, the entire AI industry needs to be putting proactive protective mechanisms in place. You guys know my take on the regulatory thing, that is not going to be the salvation that you want it to be. It will end up being a regulatory moat that is created by the companies. It is NGOs, it is lobbyists, it is the companies themselves that end up

• 39:17Speaker 00

  driving the policy. That is the very thing. When people talk about getting money out of politics, this is the very thing that they're talking about, is the regulations, instead of being something that creates a safer environment, we end up creating something that creates a safer environment only for the companies that have already managed to cross over the hurdle of being able to pay for all of the regulatory, um, things that get put in every other company's way. And so functionally, this ends up creating these gigantic cartels essentially in, it's not just technology, but that's certainly what's playing out right now. And so when you look at the S and P 500 and you see that it, all of the values aggregated to a very small number of companies, you have to start asking, to what extent is the regulatory burden allowing for that to continue? It's

• 40:03Speaker 00

  not only that, there are massive network effects that play into all of this, but that is a big part of it. So we need to see proactive moves from the government, sure, from the industry itself primarily. So what do I mean by proactive versus just regulatory? I'm talking about creating environments where we can put these AI where they have limitations, whether that's the Nvidia approach, or whether somebody else is working on something, but, which I beg and hope that they are, but that's the kind of positive proactive constraint that we have to put on this. Looking at innovation, technological solutions to stop this kind of thing from being possible, whether that's baking something into the chips themselves,

• 40:47Speaker 00

  whether that's baking something into the actual constraint mechanisms that we load the AI inside of, whether that's the adversarial, uh, setup of AI versus AI, whatever it is, but we've got to find ways to, instead of just panicking and running around like our heads on fire, instead of having a bunch of congressional meetings where it's basically people just trying to get clips for their, uh, next, you know, reelection campaign, if we really got people working with industry to say, okay, we've got to build, um, almost military-grade protections that we can put into this industry and focus on innovation at that level, that's ultimately how we're going to get to the other side of this. Now, how do I know that's true? There's a phenomenal book that I've mentioned several times called

• 41:32Speaker 00

  The Rational Optimist. And The Rational Optimist said, it does not make sense to look back at 80,000 years, or 100,000 years, or 200,000 years, depending on where you start the clock, of human innovation leading to just everything improving.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  And going, but tomorrow, this is all going to fall off a cliff. Okay, that's the human tendency to look at the unknown, to look at risks and panic. But what humans have done, literally with an unending string of successes, is walk that line between we're creating something that is dangerous, but it also offers a massive benefit. And we've actually been able to navigate that literally perfectly. So up to and including creating nuclear weapons, but still not creating Armageddon because we find ways to walk that line. Now, when we put ourselves in an area where we're improving nuclear energy, for instance, look at what China is doing, then you get something that's incredibly safe

• 42:29Speaker 00

  and is bringing energy on far faster than we're doing in the West. And we're doing better than what Europe is doing. And so it's innovation that always leads that charge. It isn't the panic. And so we need to hear things like what Jacob Coxon is putting on the table and go, okay, cool. I see another attack vector, but that attack vector can be dealt with. Rather than, oh, God, like, we just got to cut off every relationship. Or, you know, we've got to now start discriminating against Chinese people. Like, that's the fucking brain rot, stupid approach to all of this. Instead, what we need to be thinking about is what does the innovator's path out of this look like? And so putting our attention on that, I think, is the right answer.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Now, I don't expect people to be very excited about military spending these days. And trust me, I am hyper skeptical of that entire industry. But when I see somebody like Paul Merlucky at Androl building the new, it's not a naval base, but it's a facility for building naval military equipment. When I see that kind of innovation and I see us looking at the potential threats that we have, a coming conflict between the US and China simply can't be ignored. And hopefully through preparation, we will be able to staunchly avoid it for all time. But you certainly don't get there by ignoring that the problem is there. You certainly don't get there by panicking. You get there by innovating and building. And that is finally the energy that I see in that sector beginning to happen now.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Largely, by the way, on the back of what happened in Russia, Ukraine, and us seeing that our old approach to warfare in the Middle East, it obviously is not working. The same needs to be applied to the AI industry. I'm getting really tired of having to interject a new, hot off the presses headline about another safety problem within the AI industry. So innovate. What are the solutions? Get into a solution oriented mindset. This is one of the things that I learned very early in my entrepreneurial career. Is the vast majority of the time that you encounter a problem, people just shut down. And they accept defeat before they run a thought experiment that my wife and I started playing, that we called no bullshit, what would it take?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  So no bullshit, what would it take to protect ourselves from Chinese spies in the AI industry? No bullshit, what would it take for us to address a future style of warfare that isn't going to be handled with just aircraft carriers? No bullshit, what does it take to make sure that AI does not become some super intelligent overlord that enslaves us all or becomes the T1000? No bullshit, like, what do we actually have to do? The reason that we started playing that game in entrepreneurship was we found it flipped everybody into a solution oriented mindset. And that ultimately is where we need to be, whether we're talking about populism, whether we're talking about the economic woes that people really have. What is the solution oriented mindset, building up from first principles that actually gets us out of this situation?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  If we can do that, we will continue to be successful. If we fail to do that, then all hell breaks loose. It all disintegrates into a bunch of fucking riots for a type of change that is aimless. And that ultimately is what we're seeing as you start looking over at what's going on in Europe. That is aimless, flailing about, communication via violence, not being able to articulate precisely what kind of change you're looking for. And you'll get people's attention when you thrash around and be violent, but you won't get the kind of change that you're looking for. And again, how do I know that? France has a longstanding history with this kind of shit. And we've seen what it leads to is a strong man who rises up

• 46:05Speaker 00

  to finally get everybody under control with, you guessed it, an iron fist. And then more people die. And then we hit the very thing that I'm trying to avoid by talking into this microphone, which is a sufficient level of pain and suffering that people finally choose something that actually makes sense.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  If China couldn't copy the model either way, where I'm kind of left wondering is, is that $700 billion bet even worth it? Because to me, it's like, they're going to do it either way.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  You're talking 700 billion in capital, capital investments? I mean, the bad news is that's such a small fraction of the actual investment. Does the multi-trillions of dollars that will be spent in the coming years, is it warranted? Dude, that really is the whatever, $7 trillion question. Nobody's going to be able to answer that. What I, ahead of time, what I will say is, look at the progress in AI. The right way to parse what's happening in AI, to me, goes like this. Two years ago, AI basically couldn't do arithmetic. And now OpenAI just put forward that their currently unreleased frontier model has potentially solved another mathematics problem that has existed and unsolved for, you know, basically all of human history.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  And so we look at that stuff and we go, the rate of change is so dramatic. This is clearly going to be transformative for the earth. Is it going to be good transformative or bad transformative? That's a really big question. And that's why I'm like, okay, we've got the table set with the dangers. Now we have to start coming up with these proactive solutions of how do we protect against some of this stuff? One of the things that worries me, obviously, as a game developer, is, I don't know if you've read this story, but AI can now decompile code. So previously, you could put something out into the world and you would compile it into binary. And so it was literally zeros and ones. And the pattern set is so large that it became essentially impossible

• 48:02Speaker 00

  for a standard computer or obviously a human to figure out, like, what is that piece of software actually? And now AI can decompile binary and go, oh, this is what it is. So you're releasing code into the world that AI is just like, this is trivial, man. I know exactly what all this is. And so all the things that we used to be able to hide, we can't. And so what does that mean for the economy? What does it mean for the economy when it's trivial for all of your trade secrets to be stripped mined and then turned into another piece of software in a few days, maybe a few weeks? But it's like, it's trivial now. And so how are we going to protect against that kind of thing? Is it going to be through legislating our way around that? Is it going to be through a new way of compiling something so that it's so obscure

• 48:47Speaker 00

  that even a AI is unable to crack it? I don't know, but we're going to have to solve that kind of problem. So from an economic question of is this bet even worth it? It's like, one, you only have one bet. So you basically, with the central banking system that we have set up right now, with running $2 trillion in deficits right now, and nobody planning to back off of that, you have to grow your way out of this. It's the only way to inflate your way out of this. Because if you try to inflate your way out of it without growth that matches or supersedes your inflation rate, then the K widens so much that you get violence. So they understand that to keep doing what we're doing, we have to grow out of this. So the bet is going to be placed.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Now, the bet being a bubble is the next question. I think it's obvious that by, call it traditional definitions, we're in a bubble. It's just a question of how much farther can it inflate? And so the bubble might be able to inflate far more than we think it can. Or the bubble might burst later this afternoon. So that one is a huge unknown. So I've made my stance clear on how to protect yourself from that. You can't just sit in cash, you get inflated to nothing. You want some exposure, but you want to be as diversified as you can. Diversifying is getting harder by the day because so much consolidation is happening. Again, the $71 trillion in the S and P 500 would be far more exciting if it wasn't effectively 10 companies that are carrying 84% or whatever. The value is completely insane.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  But that's the world that we're in. So we're in that world for those reasons. And I can certainly go deeper on any of those, if any of it's confusing. But it's like, the world is where we are. And now, individually, how do we protect ourselves? And then culturally, at the government level, maybe a better way to say it, what do we do to mitigate some of those concerns? And then, understanding the game plan and what actually has to transpire in terms of growth. And, right now, that's the best we can do, because nobody has a crystal ball, and you can't see the future clearly. Even though Michael Burry would like you to believe that he can, he's been on a troll run. I don't think he's actually trolling, but he certainly tweets as if he were trolling.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  And, speaking of trolling, I don't know anything about Coxon, so this is just from my limited research, but one of the things we've been talking about a lot is, these companies are stirring fear, in order to raise their IPO. You know, you don't think that they're actually-

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Danger is proof of power.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Right. And so, in September, Coxon told Axios, and this is a direct quote, "That the excessive paranoia of China helps labs justify racing ahead." And in this clip, he was talking about how, you know, he's 90% sure, certain, that China already has spies inside these companies.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Do you think this is just another avenue, for them to kind of hype up an IPO and be like, "We gotta get this, we gotta get this going, so we can become public." Or do you think, because obviously, there is an extent of spies coming in the country. So, this is not like denying that, but do you think this is another method of raising the price?

• 51:48Speaker 00

  The thing that I think is really happening, is you have a mixture of people who are purely cynical, and they just need a narrative to get spread, because it helps raise their finances. You've got people for whom it is useful, that this dramatic and scary thing is happening. So, if I'm Jacob Coxon, and I want to raise my profile, and I know how this game works, I'm gonna exit with a PR company in tow, which is precisely what he did. I'm gonna do a big announcement, get a big write-up, before I announce. So, keep in mind, I forget who it was, if it was Wall Street Journal, I think it was, that wrote the article that launched like 15 minutes before he made the announcement that he was quitting. And so, it's like, clearly, there's a coordinated effort, but do I think that he's just being cynical? Probably not.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  I mean, he really worked inside of OpenAI, whichever one he didn't quit from, he had worked for, for three years, and then the other one, he was there only briefly. So, I think that, he's been in the industry long enough to see there really are problems, and I think there really are problems. So, but, it's also, good for him, if this goes up. And it's good for him for two reasons. One, it helps raise his profile. As you can see, he's now on one of the biggest podcasts around. And then, also, as far as I understand, he's a shareholder in one of the companies. So, he gave up shares in one of them, and kept shares in the one that had already vested, that he exited out of. And so, eh, even if he's not doing it to be cynical, there's certainly incentive structure

• 53:14Speaker 00

  there for him, even if subconsciously, to push it. So, you have to be careful of that. So, it doesn't make him a bad person or anything, it's just, we're all gonna be influenced by what's good for us.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Just follow the incentives, like you always say.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Follow the incentives. Show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Shout out to, unfortunately, our man who passed away, but, what a great line, because it is so very true, that, sometimes people will just cynically follow their, the incentives. And then, sometimes, people will be pulled by them, in a way that is very subconscious. And then, other times, there are competing incentives that people have, based on, like, what they think about the world. And so, I think there are times where, and I don't advise people do this, but I think there are times where people will lie, because they think it's better for the world. And, that was one thing that I saw going on during COVID, was, if I took the frame

• 54:10Speaker 00

  of reference, that these are very smart, well-intentioned people, that are lying about COVID, because they think it's actually in your best interest, it's like, okay, you still shouldn't do it. So, it is gonna be very mixed, and to just assume that people are evil or cynical, is a deranging way to think about it, because that isn't true. But, there is a mixed bag.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  And I found the answer to your questions. It was the Wall Street Journal, so you're right on that, and it was 15 to 18 minutes, the timing kind of, doesn't really matter, but there's the range.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  It came out before he announced.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  So, obviously, very coordinated.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  An array of them. And then, he currently holds shares in OpenAI. So, that's probably the one that, he's more all-in.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, doesn't hurt his feelings if danger is used as a proof of power, and that the stock continues to go up. But, if you took a, like, super non-cynical read, and you're just like, "Yeah, look, I'm not dumb, I put my time in there, the shares vested, but I'm here telling you the truth about what's going on, and it is possible that Tom's wrong, and that proof, or danger doesn't work as proof of power, that it makes people want regulatory compliance, that the industry itself begins to deflate, and then my shares go down." And that is true. That is a possible outcome. This stuff is incredibly complex, and so, there's no way to completely control the outcomes. So, you could also, take that read of it.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  And we'll never know what's true, we're not inside his heart, so, who knows?

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Tell us about France again.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, this one is crazy. I weep for the moment that we're all living through. I certainly weep for Europe, but, the riots in France are spreading fast across Europe, and all of this madness highlights a cultural battle for the soul of Europe, that is truly, rapidly turning them into an economic wasteland. The school protests that began, it's just one high school, back on September 21st, if you can believe this has been kicking off that long, have now just spread across France, into Belgium. Inside France, the numbers just were on fire. So, you start at like 180 schools effective, affected. At one point, they were expecting 500, the number's well over 400, you've got thousands

• 56:21Speaker 00

  of arrests being done, all over the place, you've got 30 campuses being blockaded, the protests have moved well outside of Paris, by the way, Marseille, Lyon, Li, Strasbourg, and other cities like that. By the way, if you guys have heard, like, the debate, I've tried to stay away from this, so you've got a lot of people talking about, "Oh, what are these guys talking about? This is just about immigration." It's not just about immigration. You're seeing this in their elite schools, that are, I'm sure, largely just a bunch of white French kids, and you're seeing this out into, they have a name for this, I'm forgetting the name of it, Bilal, Bilila, something like that, that means like, it, the technical thing is the suburbs, like, that I think is the real word, but, it's come

• 57:03Speaker 00

  to mean, basically, these immigrant-rich communities, that are out in the suburbs, more, their sort of version of what we think of as the inner cities. And, that is where you're seeing more of the violence, but, how about this? You're almost certainly, when all the numbers are settled, are going to see that there was more violence in those areas. However, it really isn't confined to just that. So, you have like, these two different things that are happening. You have the student protests, who are really protesting over problems at the schools, and then you have people that are just angry, period. They are, they don't view themselves as being French, and so, they're here, they're

• 57:46Speaker 00

  seeing the violence kick off, and they're using it as an excuse to go crazy, and that's why you're seeing this as a contagion effect. So, this clearly isn't just students protesting, you see the Palestinian flag being used as a symbol of basically, resistance against the West. I'm sure some people are going to take exception to that framing, but that feels pretty legitimate to me. And so, given how often you're seeing the Palestinian flag being waved around there, given the ties between the extreme left, and the Muslim extremists, is probably the anti-West movement for sure, the coalition there, it's not surprising that people, because

• 58:30Speaker 00

  the official French government's reading of this, is that it was kicked off by the LFI, I believe is the name of the far-left group there, and the LFI has said, "Yes, we totally agree with the protests, we aren't the ones organizing it," but that's getting harder to believe, as time goes on. You've got one of the mayors of one of the cities, who's an LFI member, who's, again, there was more footage of him recently, out there protesting with the students, pushing back against the cops. So, there are a lot of things, mixed up in this, but, to me, the only read that makes sense, in terms of why this is spreading across Europe, why this is spreading across all of France, is that you have massive disgruntled people, that are showing that you no longer

• 59:15Speaker 00

  have a unified sense of European identity, Belgian identity, French identity, they don't know who they are anymore, they don't have a sense of unified culture, you don't need to make this specifically about immigration, the immigration is an exacerbating problem. I think a big part of letting in unchecked immigration, is what happens when a country doesn't believe in itself, is awash in guilt, feels like it needs to make up for historical sins, doesn't feel like it should be defending its culture, because it doesn't believe in its culture anymore. And so, you just start bringing people in. You say, "Yeah, like, there was some unhinged," this is like, first of all, at a headline level, so if it ended up not being true, I would certainly believe it, but, there was

• 59:56Speaker 00

  a headline that was asking people to believe, that a woman said, was it a woman? Somebody said, that women, and I think they were talking about in Europe, being raped is a small price to pay, for ending racism. Yo, okay, that's fucking crazy. So, needless to say, again, if that ends up being fake news, I would totally believe it. But, that kind of sentiment, of like, "Hey, we, we are, have committed, are committing, this crime of being exclusionary, drawing up these discriminatory boundaries, which is what a country's boundary is, you are discriminating against the rest of the world," once you lose faith in that, which I believe is completely unhinged, and is exactly how

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  you're going to invite these kind of infighting within your own country, is nonsensical. So, job number one, of a civilization, of a country, is to protect your citizens, you are not doing that when you lose faith in who you are. Invite people into your country, do not force assimilation, it's just gonna be all madness. Then, there are also, and this is probably where the student pushback comes from, there are also going to be economic consequences to that. You have people coming into a country that has gigantic social programs, and the people are coming in and availing themselves of those social programs, which puts stress on the system, including the schools. And so, now, you're getting schools that, even though, the French, France for sure,

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  I don't know about Belgium, but France for sure, spends above the OECD average on students. So, they're spending more than most developed countries, and- People are still pissed off about it. And so it's like, well, now we've got to ask the structural question of what exactly have you guys done to your education system that that is the outcome? Is it that you're spending that money on administration rather than on teachers and make sure the class sizes are small? Which is one of the core complaints. Um, is it that there's so little integration that people aren't even getting educated properly? And so you're teaching classes in different languages. You're getting French students that feel, um, you know, like they're not getting the level of education that they need

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  because the class is having to go so slow for people that don't even speak French. Like what, what does all of that look like? There's going to be some sort of cause and effect there and being able to parse through that. Is this energy policy madness? And so one of the things was the classrooms are so fucking hot. This is just crazy. And so is that it? Or is it all of it put together? That becomes my take on it now. We're going to need more time for all of the data to come out about where this is happening. Who's involved? Who got arrested? Who was organizing this? Was any of this being funded? All of that stuff, that'll all have to come out for us to really get a full picture. But for me, this is really about watching the cultural death of Europe, coupled with the economic death of Europe coming together to make people pretty pissed off.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  And so it's pretty understanding why people are pissed off. That it's manifesting as chaotic violence is, uh, very French. That, that is definitely something these guys are known for. The fact that it's sped to Belgium, keep in mind it's spreading first to the French speaking parts of Belgium. So nobody should be too surprised about the link there or the copycat nature of this all. Also Belgium has some pretty unhinged immigration policies as well. So you're going to have the similar kind of, again, the immigration is a result of a cultural decay that starts first. So if they have an immigration problem, I'm not saying that's necessarily what's driving the actual, uh, violence on the streets. But that is a signal that you have this cultural decay inside the country.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  And that is leading to these factions who just don't give a shit about their country. And so they don't mind seeing a lot of it burn. Um, and that is very, very sad to watch.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I actually have the arrest stats. Uh, I don't have any of the other stuff. Uh, these are from Reuters. So all of this is, um, figures from them. Total arrests over 6,100 individuals detained since the process began in mid-September. Um, fourth, uh, 85%. So about 4,000 to 5,000 of them are young people. And

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  I'm going to need a definition for young people. Is that like under 30?

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Teenagers, it says teenagers and minors.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  So proper kids.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Proper kids. Uh, and the process, in terms of prosecutions, not just the detainments, because obviously that's separate. Um, 1,800 people are facing a prosecution with 1483 of those being minors. So very, very child heavy thing. I'm just curious how that plays into the whole bit.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  All right. So if we go, okay, this is only kids that are rioting. First of all, young people are, young men are far and away the most likely to be violent. Uh, I feel probably differently about a 14 year old than I feel about an 18 year old. But, um, it'll be interesting to get the breakdown there. Uh, but yeah, young men like sub, I think it's sub 24 are by far the most violent, the most radical, the most, uh, likely to be running around the streets, dumping shit over, lighting things on fire. Uh, so it's not a super big surprise there. Um, it'll be interesting to see how much in the final analysis is like, no, this was a kid at a high school who was protesting literally at their high school. Or are they running riot in the streets, breaking things that have nothing to do with their high school? Um, that's where you're going to get more information about this.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  But I think the bigger part here is, does this really seem like the right way to get the change that you want? And when you're indiscriminately being violent, which I will say the time that you're, uh, blow torching women in the streets in the face with hairspray because she says, don't break the bus stop. Uh, I'm going to call that pretty indiscriminate. Um, she's not your enemy. She's not the one that's creating the problem for you, but nonetheless, she's the one that got the blow torch to the face. Uh, or lighting the fireman on fire. Again, he's not your problem. Uh, so this is people swapping over into just mob mentality.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  I got some context on the fireman clip. Um, so the bus stop, that one happened exactly as you're saying. The fireman one, someone lit a fire and he tried to put it out and got caught on fire. They didn't

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Fair, that's very different.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  So that one wasn't like a, a violent attack. The bus stop was. Just to give updates.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  No, I love that. It's very fair.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Cause I think those are the only ones we've really talked about. Were there any of them?

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Those are certainly the ones that got caught on camera.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Well, there was also the one where the school, they blockaded people inside the school and then lit the blockade on fire, which then effectively lit the school on fire with people trapped inside. But I haven't heard of any fatalities, so, uh, I did mention it, I think on Monday, but anyway.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  I might've missed it. Um, Scuzzelbut actually keeps bringing this up and has brought it up every time we bring up France. So I want to put this on the table and Scuzzelbut, you might need to clarify your stance because I'm going off of what you're typing in chat. Scuzzelbut's saying this is a CIA operation.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  And so I guess my question is just putting ourselves in that thought experiment. Like if this was something that was led by the CIA, what reason would there be?

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Uh, if you're trying to do a cover color revolution and you're trying to change the government in France and you see that violence on the streets, uh, is pushing people to Marie Le Pen, for instance, which it really does seem to be doing. And you think that Marie Le Pen would be a better, uh, more US friendly leader in France? Then yeah, go for it. Um, so if you hate Macron, want him out and you want Marie Le Pen in, then the CIA might really either be cackling and loving it, or might be on the ground spurring it on. Uh, never put anything past intelligence agencies, certainly not the CIA. So while I haven't seen any evidence for that, there's certainly internal logic that you could spin up.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Now, I haven't looked closely enough at this to know if Marie is actually surging due to the violence or if it's totally unrelated to that. Um, cause I think I read something that was like, no, she, all her surge happened before this and she's really just held flat through this. Um, but again, I haven't looked closely enough to know.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Gotcha. I'm of the team of, cause there is very clear evidence that CIA medals across the

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Everywhere, everywhere.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't think this is because, and you mentioned it, I think maybe last episode, but France just has a history of every protest they do ever, regardless of either political party turns into a riot. Like France is just a rioting country. It's the whole meme.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  Dude, this is the thing that worries me about when cultures gain momentum in a certain direction. It is so hard to break out of that like psychosis. Uh, so yeah, France has some really terrible ideology at its base. And because of that, they are unwinding their entire civilization. It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  How do you think this, uh, do you think in any way this does affect the French elections? Like how, how?

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  I don't see how it doesn't. People are going to feel some type of way. If you don't feel safe on the streets, if your kids are, I mean, there's again, over 400 schools are being disrupted, uh, daily. And if your kids have been, school disruption started, what, on the 21st of September? And so now we're like pushing two weeks into this. Uh, you're going to feel some type of way about like, okay, this is a thing. And you either want, um, more left leaning, like we gotta like, we gotta more free stuff. We gotta get these rich people to pay their fair share so that the schools can finally have what they need. You could be taking that. Or like, god damn, we've got to get law and order. We gotta crack down on these kids. Marie Le Pen is the only way. This is really an immigration story. We gotta get her in and get these guys the fuck out.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  You are likely to break on one of those two sides. So will it influence it in a knowable way? I have a guess. I think this will trigger more law and order, but, uh, I certainly don't know that to be true. But will it have an influence? Yes. When you have violence on the streets and this kind of news cycle for this long of a period, it's going to matter for sure.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Uh, just to round it out, because I, I don't think, I, I mean, obviously there's a lot of things going on in this situation, but I also don't want to forget the reason it started, which is the school side of it. So I want to jump to Belgium's grievance.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Which is the real cuts they've had, which is tuition up about 40% and there are unpaid teaching hours. Um, do you think there's a world where these riots could be handled if, you know, they just better, uh, function, make the school systems better functioning for its teachers?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. So first of all, it's definitely not going to be the spark if you are the crown jewel of education. Look at what's going on in El Salvador. They have a test pilot going right now that is delivering these insane results in terms of student outcomes. This is where it's like all eyes on student outcomes. If a student feels like, whoa, I'm really getting educated, meaning I am gaining a set of skills that is going to be incredibly beneficial to me on the outside world, then they're going to feel much better about their education. The problem is people think that throwing money at this is actually going to solve the problem and it doesn't. The more money you throw at this stuff, if you have the same teachers, the same administrative bloat, and you're just throwing more and more money at this, then you're going to get more of bad education,

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  more of administrative bloat, and the students are going to be even more frustrated and If you ultimately want to solve the problem, you've just got to look at what are the outcomes that we're actually getting from our students? And oh, this isn't working, so we have to change something. Now, for a while, and this is crazy, because this is really a Napoleon thing. The French education system was like something that people look to as a beacon of like, yo, this really delivers a lot of good results. And so you would get French-style schools here in the US, because you had expat French people here in the US being like, I want my kids raised in the French system. And that obviously is now imploding. So this becomes for Belgium, for France, for everybody in Europe. You have to understand. I get it.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Everybody's like, GDP is a terrible measure of anything, and people aren't happy just because they're making more money. That is absolutely correct. But if you don't have more money, then you start to see your infrastructure fall apart. People are fighting for a smaller pie. And guess what people do when the pie is shrinking? They become hyperpopulist. You get a ton of fraud. People are just corrupt as the day is long, because everybody's fighting over a shrinking pie. When things are growing, there's more to spread around. There is a greater sense of optimism. And you can actually get people in a situation where it's like, whoa, my education is getting better. But you've got to look at, is it the administrators that make things better? Or is it the actual teachers getting a higher caliber of teacher attracted to the profession? That ultimately is what we have to do.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  So student outcomes, understanding as a nation, you've got to be growing economically, and that's going to force you to make some hard decisions. I know that everybody wants to just tax the wealthy to death. But there is a hard reality to be faced, which is some people are more productive than others. And you have to create a way for them in a non-monopolistic, non-corrupted way to be able to innovate their way to greater wealth, so that they have an incentive structure to actually create something that people want, that's good for them, that builds a better society, that also generates more GDP. And therefore, you have more to tax. If you don't focus on that, you demonize the producers. You demonize the people that create wealth.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  Then you get this kind of self-hating, culturally incoherent nation that tears itself apart from the inside.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Speaking of things tearing them apart from the inside, let's talk about private credit, Tom.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  Let's do it, man.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  The world of private credit and banking and money, and it's all fake and scary.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's certainly all scary right about now. The private credit risk is apparently getting very dicey. Semaphore just broke a story that the New York Fed is investigating everyone's exposure to private debt. That's the thing that everybody's worried about. 2008 happens, right? Regulators step in, and they say, all right, we're never letting you guys do this again. You guys are so reckless with these subprime mortgages. We've got to do something to fix this. And so we're going to regulate banks. And we're not going to let them do this crazy shit anymore. But there's still demand for that debt. And so it moves away from the banks, and it moves into, and by that debt, I mean, riskier debt. And it moves into private credit, where they go and they raise the money, not doing anything illegal.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  They raise a bunch of money, and they start making these dicier loans. They're outside of the traditional banking system, becomes known as shadow banking. And they're running their setup so that things like AI that might be farther out on the risk curve are able to get some of the money that they need. Now, that creates that same kind of weakness in the system if people begin over-indexing on these riskier loans. And so on October 5th, Semaphore breaks this report that the New York Fed has been sending people inside of JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, all of them, since the spring, because they're getting more and more paranoid. We've been covering this story since back then. I did a full deep dive on Blue Owl, who remains a big part of this story.

• 1:14:48Speaker 00

  Now, according to Semaphore's sources, examiners are asking about the bank's exposure specifically to private credit. They want to know what their risk management strategy is. They want to know the quality of their collateral. That is a big one. And so they want a better understanding of how these loans are being valued. So if you've ever heard the idea of marked to market. So if they're using these loans on their balance sheet, they want to know, are you marking them to market? Are these high-value loans or not? And when asked directly, the Fed has just declined to comment. So that gets speculation swirling. Now, the last question ultimately becomes the big thing, right? Private credit loans don't trade on an exchange.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  So a loan is worth whatever the lender is saying that it's worth. So are they using outside validation? Like, those are the things that they need to better understand. Now, most of these guys are going to use outside validation firms. But it's like, what's guiding those guys? So lenders have been criticized for marking the same loan at different prices. Last week, the SEC put out a rare statement reminding firms to be rigorous about how they value private assets. So that is like them firing up a flare to make sure that people are paying attention. Now, if we were to look at Blue Owl, which is, like I said, they've sort of been a star of this whole thing for a while. They're becoming the face of this market,

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  because last quarter, investors had asked to pull out 16.8% of their money out of the flagship $35 billion credit fund. Now, the reason that that becomes an issue is that its tech-focused fund has an even higher number, that was 39%. So people are being like, hey, I know that we, because this Blue Owl's promise was, hey, anytime you want your money back, we got you. Don't even worry about it. But there became, that opens a possibility for essentially a bank run. So when you've got long-term debt that you've issued, but you've told people lending you money, don't worry, we'll give you your money anytime you want. This is going to be super liquid, you're going to be fine. And then people actually do the bank run. They're like, actually, I want my money back.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  And then they can't, which is precisely what happened to Blue Owl. You run into this problem. Now, in fairness to Blue Owl, their loans so far have been performing. And so the rate at which people are asking for their money has been declining. That is very good news. So it's unclear how much exposure there is in the private credit market. But when you start talking about things looking scary, meaning we're now into emotion, we're not necessarily making contact with the reality, people just look at a lot of the mechanism of how this whole system works, and they realize that it really does run on what people call sentiment. Now, sentiment is just vibes. And when you've got a whole mechanistic system

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  of the global financial system working on vibes, this becomes a time where people start going, I need my vibes to be grounded on something. And hence, the New York Fed going in and starting to do these searches in a way that people are like, yes, they do these searches all the time, or they do these investigations, audits. They do them all the time, it is standard. But people are feeling some type of way, and they want a lot more clarity on what's going on. And when the Fed isn't being as forthcoming as people would like with that clarity, people start to get itchy. And if the whole global system is sitting inside of this gigantic AI bubble of unknown duration, in terms of how far it can go, people start to get more and more uneasy.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  So again, there's nothing to be, there's many things to be paranoid about. Only the paranoid survive. There's nothing to panic about. But I think it's right that people want to get an increased amount of transparency on exactly what's going on. So we'll see how this ultimately plays out. Right now, there's no like acute emergency or anything like that. But keep your eyes peeled. You've got Jamie Dimon warning of things. You've got Michael Burry warning that, hey, this market, his exact, I'll paraphrase, it's not the exact quote, but this is very close. Basically, that the stock market has entered the first stage of grief, which is denial, and not being honest about where things are. And so if we start seeing out of the private banking world that some of these loans are worse than people thought,

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  that there's more exposure to loans that are likely to go bad. So you've got, Ed Zitron just posted, it was like, oh, we just saw our first missed payment on one of these AI data center leases. So it's like, does that become a blip? Does it become something that's systemic? We're going to find out. But as of right now, hold steady. Keep your eyes peeled, pay attention, definitely be paranoid. But there's no like, like, single thing that you can point to to say, okay, there's a crisis there.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  So would you say this is more a liquidity problem or a solvency problem? And whichever one, how can our audience figure that out on their own as things are unfolding?

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Well, you definitely have a liquidity problem, because Blue Owl and other private credit companies specifically got people to loan them money on the promise that this was going to be highly liquid. The fact that they've had to pull back is certainly a signal. But the real question is, what is the actual health of the AI industry? So you've got our man from earlier, Jacob Cox, and coming in and saying, China can catch us anytime they want. You've got plenty of people saying that China could crash the AI bubble at any time just by coming out with a good enough version of our frontier models that is like orders of magnitude cheaper. So you start putting all that together, and it's like, wait.

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  So we've got valuations that are historic. Honestly, they're a-historic. It doesn't make any sense. We're completely detached from fundamentals. You've got supposedly this looming threat of China, where they could crash the market, but they're not. But they're also selling their bonds in an orderly fashion. So there's internal logic to a narrative that goes like this. China has the silver bullet to kill the US economy, loaded and in the chamber. But they need to get out from under their debt in a nice orderly fashion so that they can migrate over to gold and become the physical world instead of the paper world. So America made the mistake of hyper-financializing. They don't trade gold, they trade paper, bets on gold. We're actually trading gold and killing the ability to bet on paper.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  We are the world's manufacturing hub and plan to keep it that way. We're moving towards backing our yuan with gold itself and making a play to become the world's reserve currency. I'm not saying this is true, but I'm saying there's a lot of internal consistency to that logic. And so, hey, once we sufficiently get out from under your...

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  Your bonds, then we fire the shot at a time of our choosing and we destabilize your whole economy and the bubble goes burst. So that's why everybody's like, is that true? Or is that just a bunch of bullshit headlines where somebody's overeating the situation? Are we gonna get the growth miracle out of AI that we, we absolutely need, Ryan? I cannot state that enough. It isn't an option to have a growth miracle from AI. You either have to do austerity effectively immediately and stop doing $2 trillion deficits, or AI has to give you a growth rate that outstrips inflation, including all of the interest payments that you have coming on the debt. And so it's like, well, it hasn't done

• 1:22:21Speaker 00

  it yet. So, and by the way, that money either through UBI or jobs has to make it to the average American. So, boy, this is wild. This, this is wild, Ryan. This is where I sort of envy being in your early to mid twenties. It's like you don't understand how weird this all is. You know what's weird? You don't know just how weird.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  I don't have the comparison point.

• 1:22:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's like, yo, this is, this is a regime change, like a global regime change. This is what it feels like. So if anybody's curious, what does a global regime change feel like? This, that like instability, the where is it coming from? Are we about to win big? Or are we about to get annihilated? All the just massive uncertainty. It's wild.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Speaking of uncertainty and fears of being annihilated.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  Hey!

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  There's a plague, plague coming through the world. That's, I mean, there's not much more than that. Tell us about the Russian plague, Tom, and how things are beginning to unfold regarding that.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  All right. Definitely nobody panic. But the Russian plague story is growing far more unsettling. That's the right word than I think most people realize because by this point, we should have far more detail. And the fact that Russia isn't giving us that detail is the story. That's the reason that people are on edge. Now, the question is, is it getting worse? On Russia numbers, probably not. Authorities say that close to 200 people had contact with Daria, the woman that passed away, and two had COVID, two had a common cold virus, but nothing else has turned up. Moscow told the World Health Organization that no plague has been found. Everything is good. The problem is that every one of

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  those numbers is being reported by Moscow, which is run by a dictator. And so how much of this can you actually believe? Nobody knows. And everybody's watching how people are responding. And it's like, hmm, this is not the way that you respond if there's really nothing here. So you've got a neighboring regional governor that posted that the woman that died, died of the plague, then edited to may have died of the plague. You've got a nearby town who told people not to travel and then deleted that post. Did they delete that post under pressure from Russia that, or Moscow? That's a very good question. You've got hospitals that are into three week quarantines where it's like, wait, if they're, you haven't

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  found anything, why are we quarantining that hard? Now, it could just be they're like, Tom, you just said only the paranoid survive. We're just being paranoid. Everything is fine. But you've also got people saying, okay, hold on. In fact, Rand Paul said this. He was like, okay, listen, if you've got somebody that gets the plague, who's working at a facility that deals with the plague, who broke a vial and then gets sick, you immediately treat them with antibiotics. And young people who are healthy do not die of the plague. So if she got the plague, which again, why aren't you telling us what she died of? So if she got the plague and she died, does that mean that you have been doing gain of function research and this plague was actually antibiotic resistant? And obviously, everybody that lived through COVID knows that these motherfuckers mess

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  around with these viruses and intentionally make them stronger, which they have a reason. But do we really want to keep playing around with this reason? Would we not be better off running like, again, you want to talk about weapons grade? I'm saying anybody that's trying to do gain of function research with AI must be a government regulated environment. Nobody else should be able to do it. That the AIs themselves are trained to recognize that and shut it down. All open AI models must have the same sort of thing baked into them. Like, that's the kind of place where it's like, you want to find a proactive way to lock that down. So that should be done in AI at the best, shouldn't be done in these

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  labs. But if we have something like that, that happened, suddenly their behavior starts making more sense, that there's something going on behind the scenes. Now, again, that's not proof of that. So people shouldn't be running around getting too hysterical here. And by the way, if this is a pneumatic plague, I believe is how you say it. Basically, it's the plague, but it, it lives in your lungs and gives people pneumonia and can be spread through the air in cough hospital. Supposedly, unless they have done something to this bacteria that we don't know about, or virus, depending, I think it's bacteria, but unless they've done something to change it such that it becomes a easier to transmit

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  via the air, this particular type of plague transmits very slowly, you can, or it's hard to transmit, I should say. And I believe it kills relatively fast, which then makes it much harder. So if that's true, that becomes very hard to spread. The stuff burns out very quickly. So it's unlikely that this is going to spread. It's just for all of us only being whatever five or six years out of COVID, you'll forgive us for all wanting more information. So ultimately, I think right now, the big part of the story is Russia just needs to be way clearer because the State Department, by the way, they delivered a formal diplomatic, like, notice demanding more information. So the US is like, all

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  right, listen, you owe us more information. So I'll hold it at that for now. I think that's where we're at. Russia does need to be more forthcoming. There's no way they don't have more information. There's some reason, even if only to control the flow of information, or they're too distracted by the war or whatever. But they're not giving information that I think the world rightfully wants to know what the hell is going on.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  And I think to round that part out, yes, it's bacterial. It's spread through the droplets, like you said. Rapid identification, you can figure it out quickly. But the biggest thing, which is what I highlighted on screen, there is no indication of a broader threat to the United States. And I just want everyone to hold on to that because I understand COVID was a very scary time. But just as now, you just got to know our best scientists in the country are working on this. They're watching over the situation and we should all be good. So it's just, don't freak out, but it's good to know.

• 1:28:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I would just say even because a lot of people are going to hear the best scientists are on this and they're going to freak out, that just from first principles, with the spread rate and everything that we know about it, it's just highly unlikely to become some sort of massive threat. So yeah, get the paranoia, probably nothing to worry about, and certainly nothing to worry about yet. You'll have plenty of time to react.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  And don't go buy all the toilet paper because

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think.

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  I need some this time.

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  I don't think that's going to be necessary.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Elon Musk and SpaceX.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  We briefly touched on it, but I want to talk about, you know, connectivity to the moon and Mars, because that's kind of something he's been going on about. So tell us what Elon has been saying regarding our advancements to the moon and to Mars.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  So for me, the fact that we're even talking about having communications around the solar system is one of the most exciting things to happen. Back in the 60s, this was a, an America that felt very differently about itself, that wanted to stretch beyond our limitations. And that became exciting unto itself. That's the frame that I hope people look at this. You have a dual story. One, you have massive technological innovation as we look to the stars and we think about getting beyond Earth's atmosphere, whether that is to find things that we need like helium on the moon, or whether it's to take advantage of the coldness of the vacuum of space so that we can put data centers in

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  space and not trouble people in their backyard or having to use water to cool things down. This is pretty extraordinary that humans have gotten to the point where we can build this kind of technology and put it in space. We also have a UK company that is doing fusion engines with, I'm not even sure what the device is that they're putting in space, but I mean, just absolutely incredible technology being built. And my appeal to people is to be excited about what's possible. We're all stepping into the age of AI and it's going to give all of us an incredible amount of anxiety about what, what is my purpose? What am I doing here? And every time I think about AI being this thing that does the things

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  that I do only better, it is demoralizing. When I think about AI as a tool that is going to allow me to do better things, it becomes thrilling. Now, it's difficult to look out and see. What I'm going to be able to create or do, or what the world is going to look like. It really is so far, every interaction that we've had with AI should lead people to believe that this is a thing that allows me to do more amazing things than I could do before. Now, that may mean that the way that we think about economics now is going to radically change. And so I think there's some truth when people say that you've got five years left to make your fortune or whatever. But there's a flip side to that coin where it's

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  like, in five years, it's probably not going to be that, 10 years, 15 years, whatever. But something that's in our lifetime, building a fortune isn't really going to matter. It's just going to be you have hours in your day and how do you want to spend them? And so we will all be asked to break out of the normal way that we think about this. And obviously I think about this as a gamer, as a game developer, more importantly, that I want a massive amount of people playing my game. And that's a huge part of what drives me. And so I do think that AI is going to really erode that sense of scale and that everybody's going to be doing their own individual things. And there's going to be these incredibly like deep holes for a very small number of people. And so that I think we'll all have

• 1:31:49Speaker 00

  to reorient. I've always said, I'm a scale guy, I'm a scale guy, I'm a scale guy. And I may have to just let go of that. And so AI might get rid of that. But if we all give in to the things about these technological advancements that scare us, we're going to miss the incredibly thrilling future that we have before us. And so if you've got kids and you're unnerved and you're giving them that anxiety, then they're going to grow up anxious. They're not going to grow up seeing the opportunities. If on the other hand, you say, hey, listen, we're building this incredible new technology that's going to allow you to basically only be limited by your own imagination, start thinking about all the things you want to do and build and create and get them excited about that. And you can literally now point to the stars and say, we're going to have bases on the

• 1:32:32Speaker 00

  moon. We're likely going to have bases on Mars. Such, so much so that we're already talking about creating what are called mass drivers, where you can basically slingshot stuff into space because you're launching it from the moon, which has so little gravity that you can just, you know, fucking throw things into space. Absolutely incredible. We're building communications. I think some of the reason that the fusion is working is because of the vacuum of space. That's my instinct. I don't, I haven't researched the technology enough. But it's like, we're now beginning to take advantage of the different rule sets that the universe has. That to me is incredible. And so the fact that we have such an amazing optimistic story that we're actually living through that will hopefully

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  help us get outside of this sort of doom loop story that we've been telling ourselves because quite frankly, technology had stagnated for so long. I know everybody hates this guy, but Peter Thiel had that very famous quote, "We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters." And now we're actually getting, like flying cars are actually real. You guys know that. Like right now, today, there are flying cars. It's crazy. So yeah, welcome to the future.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Actually, do we want to watch the clip from the SpaceX conference where they were specifically breaking down what their plans are? Just to give a...

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 04

  And then I just want to leave you with some thought that our ambition extends beyond Earth. Our goal again is to, is to extend consciousness beyond this planet. And we want to go and connect the moon and Mars. On Starlink, we're, we're creating the technologies to connect the moon with very high bandwidth connectivity systems, very high bandwidth lasers. And we will connect the moon with a constellation, then we will connect Mars, and we will form an interplanetary mesh of connectivity that is fundamentally driven by the same technologies we're working on with Starlink. In order to make this happen, we have to continue improving space safety in LEO and get that right to keep space safe and secure for everyone who wants to operate in it, to allow us to scale and meet these ambitions.

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  That's wild, man. That's crazy that that's a real conversation. Any sci-fi fans out there, if you've ever read any books that are set on Mars or the moon, for me anyway, they're thrilling. In fact, the guy that wrote Project Hail Mary, excuse me, wrote a book, Andy Weir, yeah, thank you, former guest of the show. He also wrote a book called Artemis, if I remember correctly, about a moon colony. Of his own admission, the book didn't do as well, but I actually really liked it. I thought it was a great book. The fact that that's going to be real is absolutely incredible.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  And then what was that last story? You wanted to...

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're not going to have time to do it justice. But so if you are playing any game where you're talking into a microphone over the internet, boys and girls, the, the agencies are listening. So there was a kid that, or a guy, and I mean, listen, this guy probably is a sociopath. If they actually moved on him, because I'm sure Epic Games does not want you to know that they're actually monitoring those chats. But you had somebody playing Fortnite that just went absolutely unhinged lunatic and was like, I'm gonna, I feel like I gotta murder somebody, like legitimately in real life, I gotta kill somebody. And you can send, if the FBI is listening, I think that was a group that, yeah, if the FBI is listening, they can show up at my door and I'll shoot those motherfuckers too.

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  And they were like, oh, oh, bet? Hold my beer. They rolled up on his house and arrested him. So because Epic Games was like, yo, you guys are going to want to hear this one. So yeah, be careful, man. Flock cameras are not the only thing that you have to worry about. You, if you are playing a game, you are talking into the internet, you're on something that you think you're safe and sound. Boy, oh, boy, not necessarily. Like trust those Julian Assange leaks, trust the Snowden leaks. You are being watched a lot more than you think. As wages of ninja found out the hard way. So yeah, be careful out there, boys and girls. Now...

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  The government works hard.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  The government goes harder. Yeah, well said. As a shameless plug, Kaizen, I'm going to make sure you guys are hosting on your own server. So you can, you can host a game of Kaizen when it comes out. You don't have to worry about us snooping, at least not the beginning. I'm sure in success, one day we'll have our own servers, but we certainly won't start there. But man, things are going good on the Kaizen side. And we want to hear from you in the Discord. If you play Minecraft, that kind of game, you play High Tail, that kind of game, we're going to be doing some, first, it's going to start with like really close family friends kind of thing, but then eventually we will widen out. But I plan to do friends and family playtesting over the Christmas holiday. So very excited about

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  that. Games come a long way in the last six months, but we will be going broader. So if you want to be in that group, definitely, definitely let me know. All right. Much love, everybody. I got to bounce today. I've got a flight to catch. Love you guys. Bunches and bunches. You guys are incredible. Thank you. Today was, I really enjoyed the show. I hope you guys did as well. We'll be back on Friday. And one more shout out to Taylor Brands, who makes everything better. If you're trying to launch a company, these are your guys. So make sure you get signed up. They make starting an LLC so much easier, all that hassle to starting a business, they just make it go away. I'm so envious of every young entrepreneur being able to start with an incredible company like Tailor Brands. So let them help you get your EIN number registered, get your licenses and permits,

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  your bookkeeping, business banking, payments, business coaching, all of it. These guys can help with all of that. So make a bet on yourselves, guys. Reach out to Tailor Brands, click the link in the description, get started with those guys today. And then, once they get you set up, make sure you join tomorrow, my AI masterclass. That's Thursday, October 8th at 1:00 PM Pacific. Link is in the description. It's free. And I'm going to show you how to use AI to start a business for essentially no money. All right. We'll see you guys on Friday. Tell them, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic,

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