Livestreamed Executions, Wall Street AI Panic, and the War for Worker Power | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Hey everybody, Tom Bilyeu here. On today’s episode, Ryan & I are diving headfirst into the high-stakes chaos of the AI bubble and what its latest tremors mean for the markets, your portfolio, and even your trust in reality itself. A single OpenAI misstep just shook the financial world, erasing nearly $400 billion from five tech giants in a single session, while an anticipated data center IPO in Australia vanished as investors got skittish over insane valuations. Is this the beginning of a much-needed correction, or could it be the start of the bubble burst that sends shockwaves through the whole economy? We’ll break down why investors are getting cold feet, how private debt and shadow banking may be compounding the risks, and what history tells us about tech revolution cycles where debt comes due before the growth miracle arrives. We’ll also dig into the dangers of narrative-driven investing—where fundamentals get left behind—and what it means as AI touches everything from your newsfeed to real-world events. But that’s not all. Today we’re also tackling the wild story of Iranian operatives allegedly using AI to manipulate US media, and what this says about surveillance, trust, and the future of information. Plus: the Trump administration’s latest move shaking up tech labor, America rediscovering its medieval side with a live-streamed execution, and a provocative idea from Palmer Luckey about chemically engineering lasting love. Is the AI boom heading for a crash? How exposed are you to global risk, disinformation, and changing work landscapes? Stay tuned as we cut through the hype, question the narratives, and equip you to navigate a world that’s getting stranger—and maybe more unstable—by the day. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Thank you to our sponsors: Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to get started with your business today: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Quo: ​​Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10" once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven day return policy at carvana.com.

• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:00Speaker 02

  The AI bubble, man. It grows more unstable by the day. A single OpenAI misstep just cost the markets over $300 billion. And a data center IPO went from potentially record-setting to nonexistent as investors flinch. America rediscovers its medieval roots as Hagseth commits to live streaming an upcoming execution. The Iranian media manipulation story is getting crazy. OpenAI just confirmed that Iranian operatives have been using AI to manipulate the US media. We're going to talk about that. The Mom Donnie backlash is getting insane as police had to physically restrain pro-Palestinian

• 1:44Speaker 02

  protesters who are mad as hell at the governor. The Trump admin is doing something pretty shocking to support American workers that could have massive ramifications. And the Unabomber, was he right? He's haunting us all from the grave. He tried to warn us, we didn't listen, and now mathematicians are lashing out at AI. The Palmer Lucky desire to drug us all into staying in love is wild, but also kind of brilliant. And the Marco Rubio saga continues to get more incredible. This man can't be stopped. He had a recent viral speech that we have got to discuss. All of that and more today on the Tom, Bill, you show live. Welcome, everybody. Okay, the AI bubble, man.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  It grows more unstable by the day. OpenAI did a wee bit of a misstep and it just cost the markets over $300 billion. And the data center IPO that was going to be record-setting in Australia is now, they pulled back. Investors are just getting skittish about some of these crazy valuations that the AI industry has been getting. And the question becomes, where does this stop? Is this the beginning of something where people realize, yo, these valuations are just completely unhinged? Or is this a minor blip? We're going to see. But on October 8th, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Okay, that that's where we were going to be at the end of September. Then, just 10 days earlier, Axios and Reuters had to put that number, they were guessing that that number was going to be near 70 billion. So we've now got this $20 billion hole in one of the most important companies in AI. So the fact that they're not even a public company, by the way, at this point, they're still having to report, getting the information to their potential investors. People are starting to realize that that is not going as well, at least for OpenAI, as they thought that it was going to. And so Wall Street is moving. And the OpenAI debt supply chain, if you will, is the first thing to get hurt. We saw Oracle take a battering.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Its market valuation went down. Nvidia fell by 2.9%. Broadcom dropped by 4.4%. Micron lost 4.8%. AMD slid 3.9%. Now you start putting it all together and I undersold it when I said that it was over 300. It's actually just under 400 at $370 billion. Gone from just five companies in a single session. Okay, that's two days after the NASDAQ and the S and P 500 closed at record highs. And that kind of volatility is something that I think that we can expect to see more and more. Now, when you look closer at what actually happened, OpenAI's actual sales didn't shrink by 20 billion.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  According to the Financial Times, a 70 billion figure came from OpenAI's own investors trying to line it up against Anthropic. So some of this is a paper story. And if it didn't have the big knock-on effect in the actual markets that it ended up having, I probably wouldn't have thought too much about it. Companies do all kinds of weird stuff on their books all the time. That's like really common. But the fact that investors are now starting to be hyper reactive to this kind of stuff is the story itself. And if you guys were paying attention to what was going on with the big potential IPO of a data center in Australia, that story has become very interesting.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  So at first, they were trying to IPO at $11 and it looked like it was going to be one of the largest IPOs in Australian history. Then the price started dropping and it went down to $8. It looked like they were going to still be able to fill the IPO at $8, but then that started to wobble. And so the company ended up just deciding that they were going to pull out altogether. Now, maybe they will still IPO down the road and maybe they'll be able to get that valuation back up to $11. Maybe, just maybe, they get it up even higher. So it's not like the, the damage has been locked in in some permanent way. But these are signs that investors are starting to get more skittish. And if you put that together with the story that we were talking about on Wednesday,

• 6:03Speaker 02

  where you've got the New York Fed knock, knock, knocking on the doors of all of these banks and saying, hey, we want to see how exposed you are to private debt. And then you remember that the private debt situation is getting more and more unhinged because after 2008, when we put all these regulations on normal banks, which kept them from doing too much crazy stuff, all of that desire for the high-risk debt just slid into the shadow banking industry, which is private credit. Those guys have been loading up and loading up and loading up on that debt. And now people are starting to get nervous as we see little misses here and there. We see people not being able to make payments on their infrastructure build-out on these

• 6:47Speaker 02

  data center leases, whether it's they can't get the power going in the New Mexico one that hit Oracle a while back. If you remember, they took a massive hit a few weeks back because they were unable to get the power to their facility. They claimed a force majeure, which is basically like, ah, this is an act of God. There's nothing that we can do. But it means that they aren't going to be making those payments, even though they're still building up in the background and people paying attention, looked at that and thought, hmm, a little bit nervous now about the Oracle valuations. They pulled back on that. Now we're seeing something similar happen in Australia, where again, this is a data center build-out that doesn't have the juice as a narrative that it once had. And we're sort of getting into data center fatigue where people realize there are a

• 7:32Speaker 02

  lot of headwinds pushing up against this. So first of all, if we look at OpenAI and we say, hold on, okay, sure, this might have been just an on-paper move, but the reality is you guys were telling us to expect 70 and what we got was 50. And that's a very big delta, which means you guys are not growing at a rate where it's like, oh, there's just so much money flying around that everything is going to be fine. We're more in a metered growth period. Now, it's still, the industry is growing very well and maybe only OpenAI is going to have the problem. We'll see. But just think about how different this conversation is to six months ago, when it seemed like you couldn't have enough data centers.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  There was no way you were going to be able to build enough to meet demand. That revenue was pouring into the industry at rates that were just unparalleled in human history. And now what we're starting to see is people just dialing in a little bit more. They want to be a little bit more careful about, okay, what is the actual demand that you guys are going to be able to meet? Are you able to get the energy that you need? Are the energy demands in 2027 going to be enough to meet the demand for the people that want to use AI? Are enough people going to want to use AI? And the backlash that we're seeing with people all over the place saying that they don't want these data centers in their backyard. The narrative around AI is losing more and more people by the day.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  We're going to get into that as we talk about the mathematicians and what's going on there. And so this is how these things start, is it's just a little bit of uncertainty. But when you're betting the entire global economy on one idea, which is that AI is going to produce a growth miracle, you start asking, okay, but is it going to produce the growth miracle fast enough? And this is the thing that I've been beating this drum now for eight months or something. Talking about the way that this has played out historically is it always goes like this. Now, before I walk us through the historical thing, I want to put one more idea on the table that I think is incredibly important.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Kevin Warsh came into the Fed with a philosophy that made him very attractive to Trump. And that was, hey, guys, I understand, unlike my predecessor, I understand that AI by its nature is disinflationary. And we're going to get this productivity miracle that we need to end up combating the problem that we're having with inflation. And so you guys can keep running your $2 trillion a year deficits. It's not going to be a big deal. We're going to be able to inflate that debt away because we're going to have this productivity miracle that's going to make real wages go up at a rate that's going to be slightly faster than that.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  And so we're going to run the playbook, again, of post-World War II, where we use financial repression at a time of massive growth to get around all of this problem. Now, the thing about inflation that I don't think people understand is it's not like you start at zero and then you're only inflating 2% or 3% up from that. What you're doing is you're starting from the benchmark of innovation and you're saying, whatever innovation we're getting that's driving costs down, we can consume all of that plus the 2% target.

• 11:04Speaker 02

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

• 11:46Speaker 02

  First thing I noticed was the quality, soft, well-made, built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now, too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about a simple fact. The most expensive thing you did today took four seconds and you probably don't even remember doing it. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  The business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. And that is the most expensive thing that you did today. Your phone probably rang while you were in the middle of five other things, and so you just let it go. Now, that never shows up in the numbers, but it becomes somebody else's customer, which costs you massively. QUO's optional built-in AI agent handles after-hours calls, answers questions, and even books appointments. So you never miss a lead, even when your team is offline. Can set it up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. When money is on the line, always say hello with QUO.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/impact. That's Q-U-O.com/impact. Let's talk about your sales pipeline reviews. If your CRM is half-empty fields and notes nobody finished, every review turns into guesswork. I've seen it so many times in my own sales team, and that's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM that is loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched Meeting Intelligence, built right into the CRM. Before the call, it pulls the deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes.

• 13:55Speaker 02

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

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. So if AI is really driving something, then we're going to be able to print money, whether that's QE or whatever they're going to have to, they won't call it that, but whatever they're going to have to do to deal with these increasingly staggering debts, increasing lack of appetite on the international stage for our debt. We're going to be able to combat all of that with what's going on in AI. So when you start seeing signs that AI might not be hitting the timeline that we need, because I don't think there's anything wrong with technology. But when you look at the timeline, you're now back to the historical pattern. And the historical pattern is brutal, it's clear, it's kind of cruel, but it goes like this.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Anytime that you have a sufficiently revolutionary technology that requires a massive infrastructure build-out, the debt comes due faster than the revenue comes in. And it's just a tale as old as time. And so people end up getting clobbered. Now, let's put a couple more pieces together. We're now living in an era, due to changes in regulation, where the private companies are staying private for a lot longer. And those investors that were in early end up taking advantage of all of the growth before the IPO. So that creates this massive incentive for these companies to stay private longer

• 16:02Speaker 02

  so that those investors can get more of those gains. So that when they IPO, then it's these huge numbers. And if you remember, I did a deep dive a while ago where I said, hey, the SpaceX AI public offering is using the public as exit liquidity. And people hadn't really started reporting at that time on just how big these IPOs were compared to everything that had come before it. But they are staggeringly large. You've got three IPOs that basically together are bigger than all of the tech IPOs of like the last 25 years. I forget exactly where they clock it, but over a very long period of time. Now, that's a pretty staggering stat.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  But when you start thinking about who now is going to be at risk as these companies start IPO-ing, it becomes the everyday investor. So that's where all of this starts to get unnerving. Nobody should be panicking, nothing is broken. This is not like an immediate burst of the bubble or anything like that. And the technology continues to race forward. All of those things are true, but people are now getting more realistic. Now, I think that that's a very good thing. I think the more that we can slowly rein things in, slowly get to a better place, and ideally get there before we keep having these massive IPOs. That hearkens back to what Michael Burry was saying.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Now, he said it in a way that made me a little uncomfortable, which is that he wants to see basically the markets completely choked to death so that we don't get the IPOs. But I think if the people that the IPOs are going out to to say, hey, we want you to be an anchor investor in this, when we go public, if those people are saying, okay, sure, but we're not going to accept the terms you guys are putting forward. We're not going to accept those insane valuations. And they just start making those more reasonable. I think that could put us in a better position where we're not building out quite as many massive speculative data centers that we make sure that we get the energy that we need onboard.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  We slow these things down a little bit, ideally see more of the opportunity passed on to investors, the average investor, which means lower IPO level. Then it's actually a number that can be metabolized by the market, and we start seeing these numbers go up when they're in the hands of a more generalized public. That, to me, would be a much better outcome than the sort of frantic race that we saw in the lead-up to the OpenX AI. OpenX AI, the SpaceX AI, soon to be Space SI, I guess. SpaceX SI, that's a terrible fucking name. Nonetheless, in the lead-up to that, things were definitely feeling frothy in a way that made me far more nervous. It made me feel like people were going to end up inevitably being the excellent liquidity

• 18:58Speaker 02

  that ends up getting obliterated as the debt that's in the system comes due faster than the revenue comes in. This may be a sign that we're going to return to something that's sensible while there's still enthusiasm and energy for what's going on in AI. But we get a slightly more constrained IPO so that there's actually more gains left for that next wave of investors. I think that would be a huge outcome. Now, we don't know that that's how it's going to play out. People could panic, people could pull back way too fast, and you could start seeing some really dramatic moves. But my hope is that we end up in a good place. We'll see.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  What's to tell, though, that this isn't the start of a bubble-popping event versus just a healthy correction? Like, what, how do you make that distinction?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I don't think you're gonna be able to make it in the like while we're living through it. You're only gonna be able to look back in hindsight and say, oh, that was the beginning of a really big problem. Or, um, oh no, this ended up playing out well. Because when the moves happen, they tend to happen very fast. And so you go from everything is fine to we just lost $2 trillion of value overnight. And then that creates liquidations which wipes people out. And then you end up in a pretty rough position. So until that happens, you don't know. So I don't know what's happening to the narrative, but we're no meaning. Right now, AI is entirely a narrative based investment.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Nobody is connected to the fundamentals that historically have made sense. And so the narrative is, well, it doesn't make any sense to use historical valuations and historical ties to, you know, revenues because this is an unprecedented new technology. And if you look at the rate at which certainly Anthropic is bringing on revenue, it so outstrips anything that we've ever seen, like, why would you try to tie that to previous things? And that is where the market becomes a betting machine. And ultimately, that's what it is. If you're not holding for 20 years, if you're like, I'm doing, you know, these fast day trades, you are gambling in no uncertain terms.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  People hate it when I say that, but it is just true. And so we'll see if people are, the people that are day trading that are doing this more as a gambling initiative, what they believe in, what they do. And whether that ends up creating some sort of break in the market that then spooks people and people stop believing in the narrative and they start going, yeah, this was all a mistake from the beginning. Everybody's hands off. You got a bunch of people holding, none of them can sell, the price goes down, down, down. People do the classic thing, which is they bought high and now they're forced to sell low because they were in on either leverage or they thought, I'm only gonna have my money in for three or six months. And now those three or six months go out and you're still down 60, 70%,

• 22:00Speaker 02

  which certainly would not be a historic by any stretch of the imagination. And so how it will play out, I think anybody that isn't a, you know, major hedge fund or, you know, somebody that's using AI to trade where the distance from them to the, you know, where the actual trade happens, they're measuring the speed of their fiber optic and, you know, they're doing all of those like micro, micro adjustments. If you're not one of those guys, you're gonna end up getting hurt by that. So, um, yeah, anyway, there's no way to have a crystal ball to see that ahead of time. It's too brutal. People have got to be playing the long game to play the long game.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  You have to be sensible, diversified, not be in on debt, not have money that you need to get back in less than 20 years. Just to keep it simple.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Oracle rose more than 5% on that 70 billion report. And then obviously on the correction, it fell 5.5% as you were saying. Do you think Oracle's stock is basically an open AI proxy at this point? And if so, does that make open AI like the top dog in the market right now?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Virtually every one of the stocks that are working, call it roughly 10 stocks. There was a recent stat, another one of those times where I should have grabbed something, but when I saw it, I thought, oh, that's interesting. So there's two types of ways to go in on the S and P 500. You can go where they just bet on all things equally. And then one where based on what percentage of the value that stock represents in the S and P 500, that's how much they own. And the spread between those two has never been bigger, meaning a very small number of companies hold a just ungodly amount of the actual value. So you have, call it, um, 490 stocks that are doing little to nothing. And then you have 10 stocks roughly that are just absolutely murdering it.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  And they're all a proxy for AI right now. All of them are in some way, shape or form tied to that, whether it's the things you need to build a data center, whether it's the things that you need for energy, whether it's the chips, whatever. It's all ultimately tied to AI. So yes, for sure, right now, the, not all of Oracle's stock price is going to be that, but it's going to be a huge portion of it.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  So private investors, they valued Fermus around 10.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And by the way, sorry, because I don't think I ever said the name. Fermus is the data center project that was going to IPO in Australia.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, and I put it up on screen. So if y'all ever want to go read into that, it's right there. But Fermus, uh, buyer, private investors, they valued Fermus, uh, at around 10.5 billion in August. And public buyers wouldn't pay the 30.6 billion. So which price would you say is the real price or the price that will trend towards going forward?

• 24:41Speaker 02

  You're gonna have to see them IPO first. So if, because all of this stuff is narrative, what happens to the narrative? And if what we see is more people missing payments on data centers, then the narrative around a new data center is gonna be like, hold on, you've already got data centers that aren't able to make their payments. We're not getting the revenue that we thought we were getting. And the narrative might shift to, oh, this really is all circular. We've hyped these things up way beyond what is real. We're pulling forward 20 years of revenue, like that's absurd. There were times where SpaceX AI was pulling forward like 100 years of revenue. I mean, it's just like absolutely insane. So people are just like, it's, I should say, it is possible that people will start going,

• 25:26Speaker 02

  yeah, this was all over exuberance. We're gonna be more chill, we're gonna pick our opportunities, we're gonna look for, you know, a moment where a price is actually reasonable. Maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's five years, who know? In terms of how much people are gonna let, um, these valuations reach out into the future. So we'll see, I have no answer to that. People could get rehyped up, some news could break. And people are just like, oh my God, AI is bigger than I ever thought it was. So I am careful in my own life. I'm not betting on where the narrative is gonna go. I'm betting on the fact that I don't know where the narrative is gonna go. And because of that, I'm relying somewhat on historical trends to tell me there's probably trouble ahead before we get to paradise. And I'm thinking like that.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  So it'll be interesting to watch Fermus and see what happens. Do they IPO a month from now? And they're like, hey, we got all of our investors back in line, everybody's cool. We're gonna go out at $8 or 8.50 or like I said, maybe they get back to their 11. But I don't trust my ability to guess that accurately.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Gotcha. And continuing with AI narratives, Iran has also been stepping into AI.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this one's wild, man. The Iranian media manipulation story really is getting crazy. OpenAI just confirmed that Iranian operatives have been using AI to manipulate the US media. Now, I actually think that there's another underlying story here that I'll sort of weave in as we talk about this, which is, bro, how much are we being watched by these companies? Like every time you type, I feel like I'm having an intimate conversation with Claude, but in reality, I'm having a very unintimate conversation with all of Anthropic. And if you're using chat, you're obviously having a very open conversation with all of OpenAI. And there are people in there, I mean, thankfully, I guess, because there's so many crazy things that people are trying to do with AI.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  But boy, oh, boy, you are being watched when you're using your AI. So, uh, don't start asking it questions like, how do you liquefy human remains, kids? I bet there are people out there doing the most unhinged shit. So be a little bit more thoughtful. Okay, now, given that OpenAI found these Iranian propagandists operatives in there doing things, they have banned a cluster of chat GPT accounts. They were being run out of Iran. It's not like this was hard to guess. They were prompting in Persian. So now it, Farsi is the language they speak, right? In Iran, if somebody can verify that. But I'm almost certain what I read said that they were prompting in Persian.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Now that just may mean that the, the person writing the article didn't understand the difference. But anyway, they were prompting in the Iranian language of Farsi. And so.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Oh, it's the same thing.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Oh, so just synonyms for the, got it, there we go. Okay. So anyway, they're prompting in Iran's native tongue, coming out of Iran, and then outputting, uh, basically identities as face fake Western journalists. And they created a slew of these accounts with different identities. And they actually ended up getting nearly 100 pieces of propaganda about the US Iran war published by real US outlets. The personas had names like Irvin B. Hoskins, Sophia Gonzalez, Michael Harrison. It's so funny to hear, uh, how.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Easy it is, like if we wanna say, oh, they're from Iran, it's gonna be, uh, you know, uh, Farzad or Muhammad, and we're like, oh, yeah, yeah. And then we're equally spoofable. So, uh, most of these guys, or most of these accounts were presenting themselves as just your average, everyday, American freelance journalist. And to quote a real investigative journalist, after looking at all of this, kids, it's all fake and gay. It's just all fake and gay. Coming to you straight from our very own Candace Owens. All right. Now, if you guys wanna know how they actually pulled this off, what was going on is Iranian operators were just prompting ChatGPT, uh, they had chat, translate that back into English, and then review the English drafts against the outlet that they were targeting their

• 29:38Speaker 02

  submission rules. So they would pick a specific outlet and say, okay, what kind of articles do these guys go for? Then they even had the AI write the pitch, like the pitch email to the editor, and then bingo, bango. You've got an article, uh, written by an Iranian propagandist, but it has titles like "The Iran War and the Collapse of Western Moral Credibility," which, by the way, I think is actually a pretty banger title. Nicely done, kids. Uh, and that's getting published in American news outlets. So I, by the way, assumed that American propagandists are doing the same kind of thing in local countries. This is not something that I think is in any way, shape, or form, uh, used only by, you're often gonna hear about this with Russians or the Chinese, but it's like, everybody

• 30:23Speaker 02

  is gonna be doing this kind of stuff, and AI is just facilitating it, making it easier. Now, some of the accounts that fell for the propaganda had millions of followers. So this is not like some small, little thing. OpenAI actually gave this a rating. I had never heard of this, but apparently there's a Brookings breakout scale, and OpenAI rated this article operation as a four out of six on that scale. So it's pretty high for a campaign like this. So I think all of us should be eyes wide open, expecting more of this. This is why my whole core message around AI is, you can't use it to just tell you this is the thing, right? You've gotta be figuring out as much as you can from first principles, um, what evidence do we have that this thing is actually accurate? Now,

• 31:08Speaker 02

  one of the easy ways is to pit different AIs against each other and have them be antagonistic. I do this all the time, show prepping. And listen, I know it'll be inevitable that we get caught off guard by something, we fall for something. But one of the ways that we end up trying to minimize that as much as humanly possible is just fact checking. Like, okay, is this article actually real? Give me, one of the things I do all the time is, what are the sharpest minds that disagree with this? What do they say? And so then you can get those people, you can go look at the initial source itself, and then just trusting the sources over time. And this is where I really think that you wanna talk about somewhere where I'd love to see a little regulation. What I would love to see is some

• 31:52Speaker 02

  sort of mechanism where accounts get a rating. I don't even need them to be non-anonymous, be as anonymous as you want. But we should be able to have some sort of rating that they can't change, like if I'm on an X or whatever, and that account has, um, some sort of rating, so that you can see how many times did they publish something that was AI without disclosing it, things like that. Or how many times did it get found out that this was, uh, not a legitimate news piece, whatever, something. I get that there are ways that can be abused, but finding some way to validate even just that an account is real. When was the account created? Where are the posts coming from? Uh, do they use

• 32:35Speaker 02

  a VPN or not? Like, anything that we can do to signal that an account has credibility without needing to dox the person or anything like that. Just build some sort of profile of what are the things that we know that we need to be concerned about. Whether that is, uh, give the post an AI rating, that this was likely written by AI, 23% chance that this was written by AI, 100% chance, whatever. You don't have to say that that's bad if somebody wants to write a really good article, but it's output by AI, completely fine, but being aware of those things goes a long way. So, uh, building trust in accounts over time without needing them to be doxed, I think is a pretty reasonable way forward. And then everybody having a healthy amount of skepticism, if this is an account you've

• 33:20Speaker 02

  never seen before, an account that doesn't have a lot of followers, an account that, in my fantasy land, uh, you know where the vast majority of their posts come from in terms of region, where their following is from as a region, like, can we give them a bot score where it's like, this account has an unhealthy amount of bot interaction, whatever. But just figuring out some way that we can begin to identify in a way where we're not shutting them down, we're not saying it's insta bullshit, but it's like, well, the credibility score on this account is not exactly high. That kind of thing, I think, would go a long way. And given that AI is going to be more and more indistinguishable from reality, having something like that, I think, is gonna be increasingly important.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  I probably spend 15% of my prep time just going, is this video real or AI? Because so often, you can't tell. Of course, there are things that are super obvious, but I don't wanna have to go watch a video in slow mo to see if there's any indication that something's AI. Uh, and one time, it happened to me, there was a video, I was fucking convinced was AI. I don't know if you guys ever saw this, but there was like a roadside fight with a bunch of high schoolers, I think it was in Florida, and this girl was wearing a wig and it got stuck to somebody's shoe. That looked so fake. I was like, look at the, her hair is like moving around the field of battle. Uh, but no, it was just stuck to somebody's shoe and it was actually real footage. So, things like that, I think, will go a long way.

• 34:45Speaker 02

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

• 34:50Speaker 01

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

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer. Did you know writers who switch and save with Progressive save nearly $200 per year? That's a whole new pair of writing gloves and more. Quote today. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $197 by new customers surveyed who save with Progressive between October 2024 and September 2025. Potential savings will vary.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

• 36:15Speaker 02

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

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Uh, do you think this is related to your pitch about like the, the system you posed? Do you think something like Reddit would work? Cause as much as you shouldn't get your news from social media alone, um, I do feel like Reddit has a good system for being able to sift through that kind of stuff.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, people get scored, you know. Um, I, I think that upvotes, downvotes is very useful. I think that, um, like, your history as a redditor is also very useful. Um, so yeah, now Reddit hasn't exactly attracted, uh, top-tier, um, thinking exclusively. So I'm not saying that it's not there, but like, one of the things, and I haven't, um, gone super deep on this, so it's possible that, um, I stopped at a chuckle and just moved on. But it's my understanding that Reddit has been removed more and more from training of AI.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. That makes sense, yeah.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  That as they have done that, they've seen the quality of the outputs go up. So, again, I didn't go super deep. I'm headline level on that one. So by all means, if somebody knows better, I'd love to look more deeply into that. Just let me know in chat. Um, but yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. As somebody that, I used to spend a lot of time on Reddit, and it does get, um, weird fast.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've kinda, I've kinda phased a lot of social media out of my life, cause it's just toxic these days.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Where do you, where do you get most of your info?

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Uh, newspaper outlets, and I still watch Philip DeFranco and YouTube.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And do you do, uh, like, ground news kind of thing, where it's like, I expressly want you, dear service, to tell me what the biases of this thing?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  No, I just go to all the different sites. Like, if I'm reading something on the New York Times, I'll then go read something on Vox, right? And then I'll be like, oh, here's the two stories.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Aggregating, competing ideas.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, obviously I have my preferences for when I'm just going on an entertainment basis, but, cause like, I still, this is gonna be a crazy thing. I buy the, I still buy the newspaper every Sunday. I got a newspaper that shows up to my house.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  So you're masquerading as a mid-20-something, but you're actually 75. That is crazy. What makes you think that newspaper is better?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  I just, I like a physical book. It's the same thing. Like, I have a Kindle. I love my Kindle. I read a ton of books on Kindle. But if I can get a physical book and go to a bookstore, I'll do that. I don't even like ordering off Amazon, cause it's like, I wanna go buy this. I like, I don't know, I like physical.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I wish you were the masses. That would be great.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's definitely a weird thing I do, but.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  I love it, man. I can't, I used to be obsessed with bookstores, uh, but it's just not as convenient. And whatever's convenient is gonna win, much to my dismay.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  That's fair.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  We, have we ever used that before? That's like been locked and loaded and ready to go for months. It's the first time I remember hearing it.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  But I'm actually curious, and this is kind of going more towards the AI online route than it is the Iran. So we'll come back to Iran. But do you, have you heard of the dead internet theory?

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 39:09Speaker 03

  Okay. So do you believe the dead internet theory is?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  It's all fake again.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Do you believe the internet theory is true? And if it is, how do you think systems could combat the kind of influx of AI bots?

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Um, I don't think we're going to combat it. I'm not even sure that we want to combat it. I think what we want to do is know when something is pure AI or not. The, so the dead internet theory, for people that don't know, is that basically all of the internet is just AI talking to itself. And I think that there is a lot to be said for that. Now, obviously, there are the places that you can go where you know you're going to be finding humans. But a big part of the reason I changed the style of content, started doing a live show was for that reason. I was like, whether it's five years or 10 years from now, so much content is going to be AI generated. I don't know if these people are speaking publicly about it, so I'll just say this anonymously. But some of the biggest names in social media, big names in social media,

• 40:06Speaker 02

  are using AI to clip them. So it's not AI making the content, but it's AI clipping them. And their AI clipped content is performing better. Now, once you start, yup, once you start getting into my AI scripted content, which is, because remember, it's going to become indistinguishable from human speech. It isn't right now, I get it. But it will become so, and you'll be able to, just like you can with an image, you'll be able to say, I wanted to write in this style, use sentence structure like this, approach topics like that, use this kind of slang. You'll, you'll get an interface that allows you to make all these tweaks so that you get a real writing style that feels consistent from post to post.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  And it's got so many variables and is tweaked in so many different ways that it will sound like an individual. So you're going to get content that is written very well, and that may actually start outperforming humans. In fact, within five years, I mean, that's almost being ridiculous, because it probably won't take anywhere near that long. But I'll just give myself a nice, long timeline. Within five years, you'll be able to write content that is like more human than human, but using AI. So it will feel quirky in the way than an individual person speaking feels. It will have the weird sort of idiosyncratic things you'll get from a specific personality. And so as that happens, then what we're going to find is the, the sort of quote unquote dead internet theory

• 41:33Speaker 02

  will become, yeah, the vast majority of content on the internet is generated by AI because it's better. And that's where, meaning I want it, the fucking human, like, they're so boring, they jabber too much. Like, just give me that AI that knows how to like, structure it perfectly for my dopamine response, I'm gonna pay attention, all of that. Now, obviously, that comes with huge concerns, but it's nonetheless very, very likely to happen. So in that, what I would want to know is whether it's AI or not. So that, to me, is the thing that we should be marching towards. By all means, let people post as much AI content as they want. I'm sure there will be a lot of it that is extraordinary.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  But let people know whether that person is an AI wearing a human skin suit, or whether it's actually a human. So anyway, going back to why I started doing live content was for that reason. Now, over time, you can probably even have live content made by an AI that'll be indistinguishable. By the time I made the decision, that was like, the one thing where I was like, okay, I know this is very different. This is sort of proof of human, and now you can build a relationship with people directly. And that becomes a way that you combat AI, instead of trying to kill off AI, just do the things that only humans can do.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Do you worry though about, did you hear the comedian story recently?

• 42:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  So, um, I don't know if I can pull it up in time, but I'll talk about it while I'm looking. Uh, there was a comedian who was posting clips, because obviously that's how comedy works now. You post your clips, you go viral, people come to your show. And so, um, he posted a clip of one of his sets, and someone took all like, five to 10 of his clips, and turned him into a woman, changed the voice, and then re-uploaded it as a fake comedian.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  And got popular off of it. So just straight up stole this guy's content. So do you worry that becomes a thing as this technology becomes more widely advanced?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  For sure. And there are gonna need to be things that we can, whether it's, um, copyright, trademark, whatever, and be able to enforce it in the same way that like, you can do DMCA stuff, where, okay, we can detect this is the same, and so this is gonna get shut down. There's certainly some element of that that's gonna have to, have to happen. So take what's going on in gaming. So right now, an AI, um, this one blows my mind. I know we talked about it before, but I don't know if people really understand how staggering this is. So you compile a video game, and it makes it impossible to, um, detect how it was done. So people can't just outright rip you off, uh, but they do it by making binary code.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  So it's all just zeros and ones. And then what, uh, AI is so good at pattern recognition, it can actually parse those zeros and ones and go, oh, I know exactly what this is. And so now people are able to take Mario and put him inside of, um, Dark Souls. And it's like, uh, what the fuck? Like, that's crazy. And so you're going to need a way, you don't want to say to Nintendo, well, you can already sue them. You don't want to be in that space. You want to be able to say, like a DMCA strike, that, okay, hold on, that's our intellectual property. You can't use it, go create your own. The good news is with AI, it'll be so much easier to create IP. Now, that's gonna have knock on effects of its own, but I mean, it is what it is. As technology advances, we all have to like, figure out, cool, what's the new world?

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Um, and just like, I am completely unsympathetic to TV, cable TV, that YouTube has come along and effectively rendered their business model meaningless. Um, I, I'm not going to weep for myself. Remember, this is me being disrupted. I'm not gonna weep for myself that AI is going to radically alter the amount of money that a game developer can make off of games. If it makes creativity more accessible to people, then to me, that's a lean in, not a lean away. But you are gonna need some way, like, I've just put way too much time and energy into developing Kaizen, and I wouldn't want somebody to just be like, thank you, and then they run off and do their thing. Um, so, yeah, that's, uh, we'll need protections against that.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Gotcha. And I'll show the, I'm not gonna, we don't have to watch the whole video, but this is the guy. So that's the comedian, uh, he did his bits, and then this is what the person made off of him.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  That is brilliant.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Uh, so it's basically just the same background, changed him to her.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Him to a very talented woman, we'll, we'll say it like that. If, if you like, what is it? BBL? Is that what it's called?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  Oh, a Brazilian butt lift?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, clearly, this woman has ass for date, she has ass for weeks.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Ass made of ones and zeros.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yes, true.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Because that is not a real version.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Actively true, uh, but your brain doesn't know that, so your brain is like, exactly. Well, well timed on the soundboard there. Okay, so let's take a look, it's wild.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Oh, there's no clip. I was just showing the photos.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Got it, got it.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Because I wanted to bring it back to Iran.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Very unattractive, middle aged man, becomes very attractive, very talented, young woman.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  And someone stole all the jokes he made and then made money off of it. Is like,

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, that gets even worse.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  So it's his thing, someone copied it. That's what I was wondering is like, down the line, do you think this becomes a bigger issue? Because that's the first of this, really.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure, it will become a bigger issue, and there technically already are mechanisms to stop that. The question becomes, um, how good will we get at stopping this stuff? DMCA strikes, they're ninja. That shit happens fast.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  You'll be like, I didn't even realize that there was music in the background on that clip that I played, and you've already gotten the DMCA strike? So, um, yeah, uh, stuff like that is going to have to happen so that people can't like, go viral just like this, taking your work, putting it on somebody else's body, and then going crazy.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Hmm. And to wrap this all back around to Iran, something that I found rather scary about this story is they could not tie this to the Iranian government, it was to just Iranian citizens.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  And so to me, do you think this becomes more of a thing where, instead of governments retaliating against us, uh, we now have individuals, because of the, the power at their hands, um, doing this all the time?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  You're going to get that, and then you're going to get governments that have plausible deniability. So it actually is a front for the government that are doing their thing. But yeah, humans don't need a reason to be like, I don't like you, I'm gonna go do bad things to you. How many Americans would happily go do propaganda themselves, no support from the government, and just do anti, uh, Iranian propaganda, anti-Israel propaganda would be real popular these days. Anti-Russia, anti-China, you're gonna have plenty of people doing that. And of course, you'll have people doing that to us like crazy. There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever. Uh, so yeah, this is, this is one of the things that we have to get good at from a,

• 48:18Speaker 02

  I just can't enjoy the internet anymore phenomenon. Like, the more and more time we have to spend going, is this real? Like, it just gets boring. It's such a time suck. And because we have a financial incentive to fight through that, like, of course, we'll keep doing it. But for somebody that's just like, trying to fucking engage with the internet, they're gonna be like, this is stupid. I was watching a video, if you guys have ever heard of a game called, um, Ark, Ark Survival, Ark Ascended. Uh, this game is blowing up, getting absolutely massive, uh, it's a pretty tragic tale. And what ended up happening is hackers just got so good at basically turning all of their servers into 2B2T. That's a deep cut, uh, Minecraft reference for anybody that knows that.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  And so you would log into a server, and it's just like assholes that have broken everything that you could engage with to play the game. And so then people just like, either just go play by themselves. And if that happens like the whole internet, that people are basically, um, you know, putting salt on the crops, it's like, ah, that's ass. But humans will do it, there'll be plenty of people. So we, we really do, um, need somebody to innovate a solution to that and make the internet great again. And that's like, really where this ends, because it will, it will get unenjoyable very fast if you can't trust anything.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  I actually quit Ark for the reason you're talking about.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Really? Yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Because it just started feeling like Rust, which if y'all know Rust. Save yourself.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Russ is brutal. I played that. I had no idea. I was like, oh, this looks fun.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, no one is nice.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Getting shot dead. You're trying to, you run across somebody who's also in their underwear. And you're like, we good? Boom. You get clobbed with a rock. Yeah. You're like, okay, I guess we're not.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  And then somebody else has a helicopter. Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Uh, but to do a 360 and have some hopium, um, there is an update that should help American workers. So Tom, would you like to dive into that?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm encouraged by this without necessarily, um, knowing if all of the second and third order consequences will break to our advantage. But the Trump administration is doing something pretty shocking to protect American workers right now. That could have massive ramifications to the upside, possibly to the downside. But just yesterday, the Trump administration froze access to the green card program for eight companies that are some of the biggest users of foreign tech labor in America. We're talking about Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Cap Gemini, which I had not heard of, but there we have it. Uh, let's hear it directly from our man, J D Vance. Take it away.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  To suspend the perm program for Microsoft, which means they will no longer be able to apply, uh, they're those, they'll no longer be able to take those H1Bs and apply for permanent resident status within the United States of America. Now, our message to Microsoft and to any other foreign or domestic corporation is quite simple. We obviously want you to thrive in the United States of America. We want people to invest in the United States of America, particularly the American technology sector. We are the biggest boosters of your industry. We want you to continue to grow and to employ a lot of people. But we want you to employ American workers. And so our message to Microsoft is you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers.

• 51:31Speaker 06

  You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants. And I want to talk a little bit about that.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  When I say indentured servants, here's what I mean. When somebody comes in on an H1B, they are completely, they're completely subordinate to that company. If they lose that job, they have to leave the country. So if you think of the, the basic idea of an American constitutional republic, where we bring people in who are fair and equal citizens of the United States of America. They are not controlled by their employer, but you bring people in and you basically tell them that if they get out of line, if they get too uppity at work, they're not just going to lose their job, but they're going to be deported back to their country of residence. Those people are not full citizens and that's why those people are earning wages that are far below the average for American citizens.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  I think he goes a little hard in the paint to call them indentured, uh, servants. But, uh, I certainly take his point. You, there is an advantage that you have. If you know, if this person loses their job, that, um, they're going to be deported. But the reality is, and I've dealt with H1B programs before. The reality is if you're doing it well, meaning that you hired somebody you legitimately could not find here in the U.S. They're somebody with a very special set of skills. At least in my case, it's always been somebody that, um, they came to the U.S. to study at, you know, a very prestigious program. And so you're finding somebody that's really gifted at what they do. And that then puts them in a situation where it's like, my skill set is so good, dear sir,

• 53:02Speaker 02

  that's trying to treat me like an indentured servant. I can go get a job somewhere else and they will pick up the tab of my H1B visa. So it isn't like you can't have somebody else pick that up, go through that process for you. So they're making it sound a little bit different than it is. But I think that from the perspective of you're looking at what the Trump administration, what any administration should be focused on right now. And that is middle class workers. You've got to get good paying jobs for people in the middle class. You've got to have wages keep up with the, uh, inflation rate, hopefully outstrip it. So you want to see real wages grow, not just nominally, but actually grow in real terms

• 53:43Speaker 02

  so that they have better purchasing power. And to do that, you've got to find a way to empower workers. So, um, and by the way, this is the kind of thing that will ultimately end up impacting me at Impact Theory. So this is me talking against my own book, because I think it's actually better for America. Because we, um, especially in gaming, it has been hard to find some of the specialty employees that we need. So we have some people that work outside of the U.S. And even though, even though that's true, I will gladly take incentives that force people to hire more Americans. I'm all for that. So, um, I want to see him do it in a sensible way. This one makes a lot of sense to me. They're not saying you've got to get rid of these people. You're just saying, listen,

• 54:26Speaker 02

  you guys are no longer able to create a pipeline where you just bring in as many people as you want on the H1B and then funnel them over into permanent status. And by the way, I don't think that this would have been a thing if Microsoft weren't laying off American workers while maintaining a massive, it's thousands, it's over 3,000. I think it's like just under, uh, 4,000 employees that they have on H1B programs. So this is not like some, you know, tiny, small number. So you lay off thousands and keep thousands on the H1B. You're going to start rankling the ire of a lot of people, especially when you're doing it right at a time where workers are being more and more disempowered. Now, workers are largely disempowered by globalism. They're largely disempowered by, um,

• 55:11Speaker 02

  tech basically fundamentally changing the relationship between sort of your mid-level employee and the, um, executive team. And so we've got to be doing things that balance that out. And so this is one of those things. And this is all, by the way, happening after a federal court struck down the $100,000 H1B visa fee that the Trump administration originally tried to do, which by the way, I was also for, but they called it an illegal tax. So this is the new plan for the admin to just try to get some power back in the hands of the American worker. So as people think through that, whether you're American or not, as you think through it, start asking yourself the question about, okay, do I actually want to see

• 55:54Speaker 02

  real wages go up for American workers or not? And if you do, and you think this is the wrong way, then put forward what you think is the right way. But this at least is going to have, um, a knock on effect in that direction. There are likely to be fewer people that are interested in the H1B visa program. If they know that it's not going to lead to permanent status in the U.S. May not have a big enough effect. We'll see, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Now, all of this stuff is always going to be a trade off. So there's, um, one thing to consider in evaluating whether this is going to be a good thing long-term or not. And that's to recognize that a green card, as, um, J D Vance was talking about, it is the thing that frees up a foreign worker from their employer.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  So once you take that away, those workers now become more dependent on the company. And you're going to see potentially some knock on effects like in housing, for instance. So anyone that's close to the six-year H1B limit and now sees that they're not going to be able to get a green card, they're going to end up having to leave the country. And if a company can't find the talent here, a couple of different things could happen. They could end up just sending the jobs abroad. So they may not do the thing that the Trump administration is hoping they'll do, which is just hire talent here. So this comes down to, were you hiring those people just because you wanted cheaper labor? You've got that little indentured servitude like angle over them? Or were you actually hiring talent that you couldn't find here?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And so now, if you can't bring the talent here, but you still need that work to be done, then you're going to outsource the job somewhere else, which is why I think that's another lane that we're going to have to at least disincentivize. Even if we don't close it, we've got to give incentives for hiring American workers. I think that would be good. And then going back to the housing angle, we may already be seeing the first ripple effects of this kind of strategy, um, doing something potentially good in the housing pipeline. It may be disruptive. And so, uh, from a landlord perspective, it might be a bit rough. But in places that are built on these like, um, H1B visa pipelines, so, uh, Collin County,

• 58:03Speaker 02

  which has Plano and Frisco, Texas, both of those are seeing some wobbling in the housing market. I don't want to overstate what's going on, but housing analyst Nick, uh, Gurley, I believe, calls what's happening the steepest price decline since at least the 2000s. So what you're seeing are these H1B holders not being able to get like HFHA loans. So that's been since 2025. And so now if you start pulling buyers out of the market, you're disrupting supply and demand. And in a favorable way, by the way, for anybody that wants to see housing prices come down. Um, so we'll see what ends up being the sort of total balance. None of these things are ever going to be unmitigated good or unmitigated bad. It's just going to be a series of trade offs.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  And so we'll have to see how this plays out. But if one of the knock on effects is that we start changing the dynamic of supply and demand in the housing market, um, cool, it's going to offer some price alleviation. Now, the bigger thing there for me is I actually do hate seeing us use strategies that aren't just build more houses. Um, but Texas actually is better than most on the build more houses front. So, uh, we'll see what happens, but that's the thing that people should be thinking about as they try to logic their way through this.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Uh, so I'm curious. I looked at the Microsoft filing and it says 80% of it were renewals, right?

• 59:24Speaker 02

  So basically, hey, these were already employees. What are you doing?

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So do you think that undercuts the 6,000 layoffs versus the 6,300 H1B visas contrast?

• 59:33Speaker 02

  It could. I would have to look into it to get really close, but the reality is like, if you just think from first principles, if I can send my jobs overseas and I can import labor, you are inevitably doing things that to some extent will take power from American workers. And the reality is if we're going to back out of populism, we're going to need to get into a situation where we are growing our GDP and real wages are outpacing inflation. If you don't do those things, you're in trouble. So I'm staring at $40 trillion in debt. It's growing by the day. Uh, I love me some good foreign labor. As an entrepreneur, it's great to have options, but I'm just like, I would rather have restrictions put on me that help

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  the middle class thrive, uh, than just be able to do anything I want that's good for my business. But we tried that. Like we, the way I look at that is we've already run the experiment and it didn't work out well. So globalization, it gives you an extended, like call it 20 years, maybe 30, if you're being generous. It gives you like a great period where, uh, it's boom times for business. It's great for asset holders, but it really does slowly start to chip away at, and it's not the only thing that chipped away at worker power. Uh, I think technology plays a huge role. I think everybody knows I am anti-union just because it is fundamentally bad for the middle class, but anyway. Um, so that

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  has to be faced. We have to accept that that is the reality. Like any, um, philosophy that you have, any hypothesis you have has to describe the world that you see. And we are living in a world where the American middle-class worker has been wildly disempowered. And that's why you see more of the take of productivity going to executives in a company and not to the worker. Uh, and so we've got to do something to actually put power back in the workers' hands. Um, and this is a reasonable approach to that, even if, uh, if you really inspected Microsoft, you don't walk away going, oh, like this was just them firing American workers so they get more H1B. It wasn't that. Even if it isn't that,

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  it's still directionally the kind of thing that we have to be doing. Now, I'm always open. If somebody has an even better idea, I'm super here for it. Uh, but directionally, I think this makes sense.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Uh, I'm going to use this commenter's question or statement to lead into my question. Uh, but Frank 2,222 says, Tom, are you going to chase for, you are going to chase foreign talent from the USA and then we are fucked. Uh, and I am curious, like one of the things you always talk about is, you know, having the best and brightest workers come from around the world here. You also talk about maintaining the best and brightest workers so they don't feel like they have to go somewhere else. How do you square that then with the, the statement of, um, you know, we need to be careful how we're importing workers?

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  All right. Here it is. You asked for a rant. I'll give you a rant. Um, you have choices to make. If you want to import infinite foreign labor, you have to do it in a way that actually strengthen, strengthens the American middle-class. The way that you're going to do that is you've got to be focused on your debt. If you're not inflating people's, um, money into nothing and you're creating opportunities for people here, uh, to actually stay in the job market, then this can all work. How do you do both of those? If you want to get the best and the brightest from all over the world, you have to say, we'll give you a shot, but we're not going to help you if you fall. And if you remove all of the social systems that are designed to help people that might slip and fall, or at least

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  at a minimum, don't make them available to anybody that's coming in from outside the country. And this, I don't think Americans are prepared for this because yes, that means barring something that is absolutely life-threatening, you're going to say, sorry, you're going to have to pay out of pocket if you want me to set your broken finger. Um, sorry, you're going to be cold this winter. It just is what it is. We don't have any housing for you. Sorry, you're going to be hungry. We don't have EBT for people. I don't think Americans are prepared to do that, just to be completely honest. But that at least would attract people that are far more likely to come here, try to build something that will create jobs, that will generate wealth for them to be sure, but will also create jobs for other people. And then if they can't pull it off, they leave because they don't

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  have the safety net here that they would have back in their home country. That is a far different scenario. And by the way, for American workers, you've got to get everybody that is able-bodied, you've got to get them back into the workforce. And by doing that, or one of the ways to do that is you're going to have to stop giving them so much of a social safety net. So I would assume that we would give more of a social safety net to citizens than we would give to non-citizens, but nonetheless, I think we have way overshot the mark and we have way too many people that are bouncing out of the workforce. And so that is going to be also a key part of this. Uh, and when you have, um, a position where you're letting companies just globalize the life out of everything, send everything

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  overseas, um, when you are allowing them to import workers from all over the place, give them a path to citizenship, and you take care of everybody that comes in your country, no matter what, uh, you have a position where you have to run these insane deficits. You're inflating people's money out of, uh, all sense. You're getting them addicted to government's assistance and you're making it possible for an astronomical number of people to bounce out of the, the labor force. And we probably have to raise retirement rates as well to start balancing some of this out. But anyway, that's, that would be directionally the kind of things that we have to think through.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Just based on this clip, Alex D. Alessandro 5419 says Vance is electioneering. How much of this do you think is Vance genuinely trying to help the middle class push something forward versus him just wanting to take the presidency in 2028?

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I'll answer the question because you ask it. It, it's probably, um, 50/50. It's, he's only going to do the things that get him re-elected. Uh, but he's, one can hope, uh, he's going to do the things to get him re-elected that he actually thinks are useful. Um, so yeah, politicians are always trying to get into office. My real punchline there is that's never going to go away. So I wouldn't worry about that. It feels, it's kind of like socialism. When people get angry that an entrepreneur is doing something for selfish reasons, I'm like, that's deranging. It, you shouldn't care why they're doing it. You should only care about their outcomes. And if their outcomes are detrimental to society, we have a problem, no matter how good their intentions are.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  And if their outcomes are good for society, then we should be happy, no matter how selfish or a prick they're being. So, um, they will be judged by the fruit that they bear, right? That, that is really the, um, thing that people should be paying attention to. So the real question is, are the policies that he's fighting for, are they good policies or not? If they're good policies and he's a bad person, I don't give a fuck. If he is a good person with bad policies, I also don't give a fuck. All I care about is that the outcomes are either good or bad. And that's why everybody should be thinking from first principles. Because for whatever reason, like you are, there's a certain type of person, for all of you who've been very kind to say that I should run for office, I will

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  never run for office because that looks nightmarish to me. So there is a certain type of person, uh, that runs for office. It just is what it is. And so given that we do need elites to run a country, unless we're going to hand it over to artificial superintelligence one day, you need, uh, an elite group of people for whom they love that game of politics. Um, and so now it's just about what are they actually going to vote for?

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  You've never even thought about, like at a local level? Cause I've even thought about doing things on a local level.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  You and I are different people. I wish you the best.

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think I would do it for a while, but you know, I don't know. I've considered running for like Congress and things like that.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  We are fundamentally different human beings at our core. That, that is a nightmare to me.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Even as a kid, you didn't say like, I want to be the president when I grow up.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  I used to write articles all the time, articles, uh, essays. Whenever the teacher would say, um, write an essay about your future. I'd always be like, I could be the president one day, uh, because that's what I thought the teachers wanted to hear. And to be honest, as a kid, I probably didn't understand what that meant. It just meant like, you're the biggest guy ever. Uh, and so I'm sure when I was eight, that sounded really cool. And then you spend enough time being a CEO and you're like, yeah, to have, like to be the CEO of America is my nightmare. So no, thank you. Like it, I mean, this is interesting. This is a good transition to the Mom Donnie thing. It's like, you, dude,

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  the most pro-Palestinian person you could ever hope for is the mayor of New York and pro-Palestinian people turned on him. That shit is wild. By the way, Mom Donnie is a generational politician. This kid is unbelievably gifted at the act of being a politician. So again, Mom Donnie is my litmus test. This is the one that you guys should always be holding me accountable to. Uh, so I think it is a brilliant political move for him to go to the October 7th rally. I think it is absolutely smart. He a hundred percent knew that this was going to create problems for him. There is no doubt about that. Um, and nonetheless, he did it. Now, I am not asking you to believe that his motives are

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  pure. I just gave you a diatribe. Do not expect that out of people. Simply ask, what is the fruit that comes from what they're doing? Now, I think on a long term, because he is a DSA member, I think he is economic suicide and everybody should be absolutely mortified. I'm perfectly willing to believe that is in his heart of hearts, that, um, he wants to see, uh, a, uh, oh God, what do they call it? Uh, a caliphate, a global caliphate. Sure, fine. I, I'm perfectly happy to believe all of that. Nonetheless, it does not mean that this was not a very wise move. And given that I'm not inside of his heart, I'm also perfectly willing to go, "Hey, this is a guy that understands that I have constituents that are Jewish,

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  and even though I am radically opposed to Zionism, I'd need him to define what he means by that, but I'll insert a, an expansionist ethno-regime, ethno-religious regime that's running in apartheid country, right? That's some, that's gonna be pretty close to what he believes, I would imagine. So even though I hate all of that, even though I would love to see a global world that is united under Islam, that doesn't mean that this is not a very good move. And if I were a Jewish New Yorker, I'd be like, "I'm glad you're here. Thank you. He's, as far as I know, he stood silently in the background."

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Now, he later goes on to say things that are gonna piss off a lot of Jewish people, and I certainly understand that. At least he's saying it all out loud. So to me, this is, this was the move of a very gifted politician who is trying to walk a line between getting Jewish New Yorkers on his side, which is exactly what he should do. He is the mayor of all the people there. And this is somebody who has extraordinarily strong beliefs that I fucking hate, but nonetheless, his extraordinarily strong beliefs that he's going to speak from that perspective. And so I understand the people that are saying that, "Listen, can you not just give us one day without talking about Palestinian lives?

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  It's fucking October 7th. Pretty gnarly." I get that. Certainly understand that response. But he is paying a price now with his pro-Palestinian base, who are acting like he is sitting in a room with Bibi Netanyahu, launching bombs. It's fucking wild. In fact, you gotta play the clip. So this is, this is Mom Donnie-

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  I was just playing it. Which one do you want this one?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Let's, let's just have the audio, so people can hear the people yelling at him.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  So this is him walking to his car-

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  Oh, you want the car walking one?

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  As the pro-Palestinians run up to him, very upset.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  So people were doing all kinds of chants. So here they're saying, "What are you gonna do about the stolen land of Palestinians? Shame on you." There were chants about, I think, him having blood on his hands and stuff. So it's like, this is all unhinged. Now, to me, one of the big takeaways for me on this is, "Guys, if they turn on him that fast, can we all agree that they're mentally deranged?" And by the way, they're not just mentally deranged on this. This is the underlying ethos of people that are that far left. This is why they always and forever end up eating their own. It is not people who are making contact with reality, which you guys have heard me talk about my whole beef with Israel-Palestine,

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  is nobody's talking from a place of reality. What is actually going to happen? What do you wanna see happen, like, in real life? What do you wanna see happen? So this, to me, is proof positive that getting in bed with people that are on political extremes is always going to be maddening. They are not people that are thinking in rational, logical ways. They are people that are in the absolute grips of emotion. They think emotionally, and anything that triggers them emotionally, they then just lash out. They lash out with chants. It's like, they, they live in heuristics. Everything is shorthand. Nothing is nuanced. Nothing is real. It is, this is why, what's that phrase?

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  "I don't worry about your booze because I've seen what you applaud for." So it's like, yeah. The fact that, and Mom Donnie ended up saying, like, "Listen, this is what I signed up for, right? I'm the mayor of New York. I knew that I was going to piss people off on both sides." So it is what it is.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Would you say all that applies to me?

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  All that applies to you?

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  Because I share beliefs with a lot of these people, right? Like, I also believe that Palestine should be free. I believe, like, I believe all these things.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Let me ask you a calibrating question.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Are you mad at Mom Donnie right now?

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  No, but what I'm saying is, you did just generalize an entire side of the political spectrum-

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  No, I didn't.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  In order, yes, you did. You said, "This is how the people on the-"

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  I said, "People that are on the extremes."

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  And also, by the way-

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Do you think supporting Palestine is an extreme left position?

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Well, so let's, let's start segmenting these things out.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  And I will happily answer each and every one of your questions.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  But, one, I don't think of you as somebody who is far left. You are definitely left-leaning, to be sure. And I'm happy to go argument by argument about why I don't think that of you. And if you wanna update my mental map, and I should be thinking of you as an emotionally driven, entirely illogical human being, I'm certainly happy to update that. It is not my current read of you. So when I see somebody, and this is why my calibrating question to you is, "Are you mad as hell at Mom Donnie?", and your answer was "No", and certainly, by all means, I'll give why I think that your answer was "No", and if it's incorrect, let me know. But I, what I think you see in Mom Donnie is somebody who's doing his best to uplift New Yorkers, who sees a, I don't know if you would use the word genocide, so I'll just say tragedy.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  You see a tragedy happening in Palestine at the hands of an oppressive government, and you wanna see it stop, and so you feel a kindred spirit with him. And all of that seems completely rational to me. I can map what your base assumptions would have to be, and while they are different than mine, I don't think them crazy. That's why I'm saying, I can look at Mom Donnie and understand why he's doing what he's doing. And so when I see people on the far left, and I was careful to say that when you're dealing with people on the political extremes, it is a human psychological thing. So remember, my mapping of all this is we're all having a biological experience. So an extreme left and an extreme right person are locked in the same mental construct.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  It's all heuristics. It's all emotion-based. And they actually can't be reasoned out of their position because they weren't reasoned into it. It's just emotional. And so that, to me, it's the horseshoe thing. I don't, in terms of interacting with the human, I don't think there's a difference in interacting with somebody who's far left and interacting with somebody who's far right. They have different policies, and so I may feel differently about the different policies that they want to enact. But they're both emotion, illogical, all of that. So that, to me, is not a whole half of the spectrum, because I think there are plenty of people on the left that are gonna be like, "Guys, listen, you should want him to reach out to the Jewish community. You should want him to model good leadership." And, listen, I understand some people are gonna take beef

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  with some of the things that he says and all of that. But at the same time, he does a thing Trump doesn't do, which you feel him say, "I'm the mayor", and I think he's actually said this, and not feel, you hear him say, "I'm the mayor to Jewish New Yorkers. I want them to feel safe." These are good things. This is what we should want him to say. And so anyway, seeing people turn against him is super weird to me. And, not weird, because I certainly get where it's coming from, but I don't often agree with Mehdi Hassan. And Mehdi Hassan said basically exactly what I feel, which is, "Okay, wait a second, you guys just turned on", and the tweet goes, "Checks notes", Zohran Mamdani as being against Palestine.

• 1:17:06Speaker 02

  He's like, "You need to check yourself into a mental institute", I think was, if not verbatim, about as close as you're gonna get. So when Mehdi Hassan and I are both saying the same thing about these guys, no one should interpret that we're saying everybody on the left needs to be checked into a mental institution.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  So I'm just trying to gauge this. So you would say Mehdi Hassan and Zohran Mamdani are not extreme left? You were, they are not the people who are protesting that?

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  Well, I would say that Zohran Mamdani is extreme left economically. I don't, not in the way that he behaves, do I find him to be extreme left. In his mayoralship, he was before, for sure. He was out there saying radical lunatic shit. But if you judge him by what he's doing as mayor, he's doing things that I think are good. He should be extending an olive branch to the Jewish community, which he is doing. Now, I don't, I certainly don't wanna find myself in a position where I have to defend Mom Donnie. But at the same time, I, when I saw that, my initial reaction was not like, "Fuck this kid", my initial reaction was, "This is brilliant."

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  This, this is actually a thing I wish Trump would do, as somebody who's equally populist. I wish Trump would be like, "Listen, Democrats", instead of calling them "Democrats", I wish he'd be saying, "I understand what you guys are frustrated about, and I wanna bring you to my side." And so I, that's what I'm saying. Dude, Mom Donnie is a generational politician. This guy really knows how to message it. Now, again, I'll leave the door open for, "It's all tequila, it's all fake", and I'm, I would be surprised if people weren't making that claim. But when you judge him by his behavior in this moment, I think that it's a very shrewd politician trying to show, "Listen, you're all New Yorkers, and I'm here for all New Yorkers."

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, cuz here's, here's the main thing. October 7th is an atrocity, and I don't think anyone can not deny that.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Okay, but so we'll move to that. Do you feel good about my explanation that I didn't just lump the whole left into one group?

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Now that you've explained it, yes. I just think I was trying to get at the phrasing you had felt a little bit like you were lumping everyone. Cuz I would say Mehdi Hassan, Zoran Mamdani, past and present Zoran Mamdani, and me all fall in the same category, separate from those protesters.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Okay, cool. I just wanted to establish that because otherwise you were calling the entire left.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  Past and present would be the only thing that would take some exception to, but I haven't gone deep enough there.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  Mehdi does say the stuff Zoran said before he was mayor. So it's not like new.

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  Mehdi does say the stuff. So Mehdi's a separate thing. So you've categorized three people together in a way that doesn't, um, doesn't line up perfectly with how I have the three of you mapped, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that you see that as a rational person and that upon further discovery, maybe I would agree with you. I can give you reasons why I don't now. I don't think it matters to where you're headed, so I won't drag us down that. Only plant a flag to say, yeah, I probably wouldn't put the three of you together, but.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  I just need to clarify.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Those guys are like, Mehdi and Mamdani are high functioning communicators. They are not people that are spiraling out in emotion. You can have a, you can have, Mehdi's a formidable debater. So Mehdi is somebody that for sure you can have a rational conversation with. Now Mehdi has said some unhinged shit before about non-Muslims. We'll let that be what it is. So there's probably a bigger conversation should we want to have it. But I haven't done a deep enough dive on him to go in on him.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the only thing I was gonna bring up is I think Zoran's quote regarding the October 7th memorial, I think is a very good indicator of who he is as a person and not just something political. Because I think a big problem that I've had with this story that everyone's covering, and you didn't do this, this is just the general topic, is I think a lot of people are painting this as, oh, he only did it because he's mayor. And it's like, no, I do believe Zoran thinks what happened on October 7th is terrible. Everyone thinks that, right? Like, two things can be true. October 7th was a terrible attack. It was a war crime committed by Hamas. But at the same time, there's a genocide in Gaza, right? And that's what I love so much about this statement is it is unifying because it's grounded. It's reality. It's both of these things can be true. Both of these things are terrible. They both happened. Now we have to reckon with that.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  It is certainly somebody that's trying to put forward a frame on what's going on. And I thought it was handled in a brilliant way. Remember, I consider Mamdani my enemy. Now, at the same time, I never try to make my enemy seem worse than they are. Mamdani is formidable. He is very smart. He's, if he's writing this stuff himself, he's really, really gifted. Uh, if he's got people writing things for him, then he's listening to the right people. But what I found impressive, uh, more than I would say I liked, but what I found impressive was, uh, this day is profoundly painful. This is me reading his tweet. This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7th. Now, what's brilliant about that is he just said it's a war, not it's a terrorist attack. So yes, they did things you shouldn't do in war, but it's war. And so you can expect it. Now, I think if, I actually think that's framing that's gonna end up working against people on that side of the debate. I think people are far better off calling that a terrorist attack that was perpetrated primarily by Hamas and trying to distract from the number of just like sort of average Palestinians that also went across the border. Um, but that helps them much better with the narrative.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Because if that was an act of war and a war crime, then it's like, well, then these are just two sides that are at war. You guys are getting your ass handed to you, and it fucking is what it is. Um, so, but what it opens for him is to then say, okay, I accept the war crimes on my side. Now I need you to accept the war crimes on your side. So it could end up working-ish for him, um, but yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  I don't think his side is Hamas, though. Hamas and the Palestinians are different.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  If that made it sound like I was saying he's a Hamas supporter, I'm definitely not saying that. He, I, I don't know, would be the only honest answer there.

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Um, I can't remember if he's like refused to condemn Hamas or not. But the real thing for me is I don't like getting stuck in all of that. I would just want to understand, okay, what do you want to see happen? Um, it, once people start going into, I wanna see a right of return, and I want Palestinians to be able to go in, and I want one state where everybody has dignity, then I know that you're a fucking retard. Like, that's full retard. That is, you're not making contact with reality in any way, shape, or form, and the base assumptions that you would have to have to believe that that's the right move are so ridiculous. Um, so anyway, that, that's where I'm like, yeah, that would be a far more interesting, uh, series of questions to ask than do you denounce Hamas? I just wanna know what's the outcome you're actually looking for.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Uh, and I saved this segue before we jumped into Mamdani. But speaking of being judged by the fruit that we bear, we're gonna publicly execute a guy.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  Yo, this is wild.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  So Tom, tell us about what's happening with Hegseth and the public execution that is planned to be streamed live.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  America is rediscovering its medieval roots. I think that we are sad that we never had a chance to really go medieval on people cuz as a country, we're just too young for that. This is crazy. My pitch, dear America, re-find your moral center. Find the moral high ground. Take the moral high ground relentlessly whenever humanly possible. You have to rebuild relationships with the rest of the world. And the faster that we understand that, the faster we're able to get past this hyper populism moment that is making us look like a bunch of assholes. This is really crazy. Now, here's the really bad news. I'm 100% watching this execution. And, and I wish it wasn't being televised.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  Like, this is crazy. This is like vengeance at its most naked. This is taking this guy, now, he committed a horrifying act. There's no doubt about that. And he murdered a bunch of people. I don't think anybody's doubting that, with a gun. And now we're literally doing some eye for eye shit. And we're saying, rather than, um, euthanizing you in a humane way, which apparently we're not as good as we thought, Krista, I'm looking at you, but taking him back to the place where he committed the crime and killing him by firing squad on live stream. It, guys, I get it. It's good entertainment, and I'm gonna be there.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  But wow, this is one of those times where we should really just wish that this wasn't being broadcast. This does not speak to the better angels of our nature at all. And humans absolutely can be nudged in a direction. And when you give people bread and circus, and you let the gladiators fight, and you feed the Christians to the lions, it's like, I get it. People are excited. They're paying for them tickets. But goddamn, like, this, this is ill-advised. This is ill-advised. Uh, you have been wronged as a nation. You have captured the person that did it. The, putting that person to death should be a very somber moment. There should be reflection upon why we are doing this thing.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  And it should not be the thing that we do to, um, get people's bloodlust raging. That, that is the wrong play at this moment. So keep in mind that you are overextended in a war in the Middle East. You are, uh, intentionally or unintentionally, depending on which person in the administration you're talking about, you're effectively strip-mining people via inflation. Um, you owe your people a better life. You owe them a better country. And so this one is gross.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  Um, do you think this hurts the view of America across the world more so? Or do you think most countries are just gonna be, oh, that's just the Trump admin being stupid again?

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  No, this is not a good look. Whether this one ends up grabbing the world's imagination and people, um, you know, it, it breaks something in people or not, I don't know. We'll see how big the spectacle ends up being. Um, but yeah, I, I will certainly expect people to feel like I'm feeling, which is, man, we're, we're trending in the wrong direction. I don't know how many people have the same stance that I have, that like the very thing that America needs to focus on right now, we're gonna be talking about the, um, speech from Marco Rubio, which I think basically does this in a way that is, um, virtuous

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  and useful and takes the country psychologically in the direction that we need to go, being strong, being tough, letting our enemies know that we will not bow before anybody. Uh, but does it in a way that is, um, grounded, that has moral clarity, that, um, is something that everybody can get behind. This feels like bread and circus. This feels like, um, vengeance and distraction. And so I would imagine other people around the world, yeah, here in America and around the world, to feel exactly that.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  Let's get chat moving for a minute. Are you pro or against the death penalty?

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  I think it has its uses. I'm not like jumping up and down like, hey, we gotta have the death penalty. But I certainly think that there are times where it makes sense for sure.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  Gotcha. And do you think this is now going to become the start of something more common? Cause I think that's what worries me the most. Obviously, just as a whole, this is barbarous, right? But I, I think what worries me most is that this becomes a frequent thing now.

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  I don't know how many people that we have on death row like that. So I don't know that this is going to become frequent. This is more the way in which they're doing it, not that they're putting him to death. So yeah, I don't, what, what I worry about becoming more common is this sort of crass, bloodlust element of this all that I don't like. And that I could see becoming, people getting very amped up about it. And that I don't want to see. I don't ever want to see us hunger for war. I don't want to see us hunger for vengeance. I want to see us remain morally clear, fight when fighting is the right thing, but not making a celebratory circus out of it.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  Do you think?

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  We might be over indexing now.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  Do you think the, um, this is kind of jumping back to his previous speech that we addressed? Do you think there's a level to which maybe Hegseth is taking this too far? Right? There is an argument that sure, maybe you need to energize our military more. Maybe you need to get them more fired up. But something I noticed with Hegseth is that he's like constantly, he never really says soldiers. It's always the warriors, the warriors. He's like the warrior spirit. Do you think this is another example of him going too far? Or do you think?

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  This is definitely him going too far. Now, I don't know how much of the execution is on him, or if he's just the one that's like, we should do it at Fort Hood.

• 1:30:34Speaker 03

  It was him who called it, I think. So it was all under his, I like this idea, I want to do it. So maybe someone else pitched it.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'm saying he's not the one that was like, we gotta go for death row on this guy.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  Oh, no, that part I don't know. I think this guy, how long has he been on death row?

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure it's a very long time.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  But, um, yeah, I don't know. I just.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Him going in that direction, yes, I think is just a part of his personality. I will say that treating warriors like warriors, getting the warriors tough and hungry and aggressive, that's all a very good thing. Can it be done in a, like, I would rather follow Marco Rubio into battle than Pete Hegseth. I'm far more resonant with the way that Rubio talks about the need to be strong than I am the way that Hegseth talks about it. There's something called nervous aggressive. And I think that Pete Hegseth demonstrates nervous aggression. He's somebody that has a bit of a chip on his shoulders, probably not quite as smart as he wishes he was. And so he's had to be a little bit more aggressive to back down other people. And it's a shockingly useful strategy.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  But for people that can see it from the outside, it does not make you think better of the person. It just makes you keep a wider berth. So this feels a bit like it's coming from that side of the personality. So yeah, I could, I could see a better statesman making a point about this execution without live streaming it.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Cause I think, to use your Marco Rubio example, while I don't necessarily agree with Rubio a lot of the time, I do think he's a good speaker and he's, uh, he's presidential. He's like got that decorum to him, right? And

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  looking at the military under Hegseth, part of my biggest fear is now we're going to have a generation of militants who are growing up with this like savage warrior mindset where it's almost to an extreme. Do you think that's something that will continue in the future generations of the military? Or do you think it's really not going to have much of an effect?

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  That'll be a question of how long is Hegseth in position? So if the next administration keeps him on, you could start seeing something like that really make its way in.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Lord knows, I want to see a military that is run by Jaco Willink. To me, he's the perfect example of somebody who's tough, does not fuck around, but also is deeply honorable, believes in leading his soldiers in a way that I certainly don't get from Hegseth. So yeah, it is possible that the wrong person can take us into a, um, rip somebody's head off, piss down their throat kind of mentality, um, which is not what I want to see. Now, I want to see warriors that are warriors, that are not to be trifled with, that do not, you cannot fuck around with them. I want to see some of that 300, uh, you know, valor type thing. These are tough, well-trained people that will fuck up the enemy

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  in service of, you know, some greater ideal. That's the kind of thing that I want to see. But yeah, I think there's a huge difference between a Jaco Willink and a Hegseth in terms of the attitude they would put into the military. So I certainly concede that point.

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Gotcha. Now this next story, I just want to read what we have written in the sheet because the whole reason I picked it is because I read this sentence and I was like, that's never been said before. So Palmer Lucky wants to oxytocin dope people so they'll stay married. Tom, can you explain what this is? Cause I didn't actually read this one and I'm so curious about what Palmer's saying.

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  Story, so it's going viral right now. But I think the, the real juice, did I pull the clip or scroll down?

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  Oh, is there a clip on this?

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So I'll set it up, but then we want to hear from Palmer. So the reality is that this is a real story. Palmer Lucky really did put forward that, hey, if I were going to be doing something else, what kind of company would I build? I would build one where we use oxytocin in basically a therapeutic session to get people to stay married longer. And I know that people are going to freak out at that idea, but the actual biology of it is very sound. So I want to play this clip and then we're going to talk about the reality of, you know, me, you're having a biological experience. Talk about the reality of what it takes to stay together in a long-term relationship. All right, here's Palmer.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling. We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids. And we can, uh, look, if, if, if people think SSRIs are fun, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  All right. So, uh, he's talking to Peter DeMandis, by the way, who I love. And Peter's always going to be game for stuff like this. Uh, it's, it is really interesting. So there's a guy named Daniel Amen. He's a neuroscientist, not a surgeon, neuroscientist, who his whole claim to fame was, I cannot believe that people psychiatrists he's speaking of, I can't believe that psychiatrists and psychologists will try to treat somebody's mind without actually looking into the mind in the way that it functions. And he, um, started doing a lot of FMRI scanning. So it's functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're actually watching, uh, how the blood flows in the brain, what areas are active

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  or inactive, uh, and just has really studied what makes people pair bond for a long time. And I think the two big ones are oxytocin and vasopressin. And if I remember right, um, he said that he scans any of his daughters. If they get serious about a boy, then he would scan their brain. And one of the things he was looking for is their ability to uptake. I think it was vasopressin. I don't think it was oxytocin, but I could be wrong about that. But anyway, one of the long-term pair bonding neurochemicals. And he was saying, um, that when you look at couples that stay together for a long time, they have a lot of receptors for these different chemicals.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  And I was like, oh shit, I will bet dollars to donuts that I am a vasopressin oxytocin hyper responder. And that is one of the reasons, like, if you were to really ask, how have I been able to stay married as long as I have, uh, that you would just find that. I find it like bonding with my wife is immediate. It's very intense for me. All these years later, we still feel a deep sense of connection to each other. And so this is one of those things that sounds really terrible. Because you feel like you're doing something fake from the outside. And by the way, I actually said this to my, this is years ago. When I first started learning about oxytocin,

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  I had somebody give me a nasal spray that was like a mixture of ketamine and oxytocin, if I remember right. And I forgot about this. And I said to Lisa, yo, we should do this and have sex. And my wife's like, hard pass, absolutely not, never doing that. She was like, everything about our relationship is pure and real and true. And she's like, that feels like something fake from the outside. And she's like, I don't ever want to feel like you and I are only together because we're taking drugs. She was like, fuck that. Now, to me, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of biology, but, uh, we ended up not doing it. And I'm very sad to report, but that I thought was really, really interesting to see that the biology is to a point where people could be struggling.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  Like women are super fast to talk about, well, you just had kids. You've got postpartum, we need to address that chemistry or otherwise. And here I'm saying, okay, you've got people falling out of love.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Why, why is that a no-go zone for chemistry? Now, admittedly, I actually really understand the positioning on that. And I do get the idea of doing something from the outside. But the reality is if you are simply having a biological problem of up taking the neurochemistry that makes you bond. So let's say it's all there, the chemistry is being pumped, you just can't even uptake it. Is it so bad to increase that level exogenously, to use a nice fancy word, to make you feel the pair bonding you actually would otherwise feel? Very curious to know what people think about that. But I thought it was very interesting that this was going viral.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Again, this had to be years ago because he looks significantly younger here. So yeah, once again, like I remember when Jordan Peterson brought up the idea of socially enforced monogamy, people lost their minds. But there is something to be said about long-term pair bonding. And so far, we're showing right now in this moment in history, we are not doing well at long-term pair bonding. And by the way, what if I told you that microplastics were disrupting your ability to pair bond? Would you consider it then? All right, guys, it's Friday. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much. Thank you for all the super chats today. They were, uh, very generous. All right, guys, go forth and prosper. And speaking of those classes, he was just saying that are free, we have another one coming up.

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  We've got our next AI masterclass is in November. It's Thursday, the 5th at 1:00 PM Pacific. Links in the description to sign up. I hope you guys will join me. I'm doing my best to teach you guys how to run a business using AI. It is changing so rapidly by the day. You are not going to want to miss it and they are always free. All right, love you guys and we'll see you on Monday. Oh, by the way, I think Drew's back on Monday.

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Drew should be back Monday, guys.

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  So hey, hey, give him some love.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Spamming the chat with that.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  Ryan, by the way, I want to recognize you've been amazing. Thank you so much, brother. Huge, huge. We'll give you another shout out on Monday. All right, everybody, see you then. Later. Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do? You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  dense, superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.

• 1:41:25Speaker 05

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