Mamdani vs Amazon, AI Replacing Doctors, DSA Member Is $108K Behind On Rent | Weekly Recap

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Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Quo: Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Netsuite: For the first time ever you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/Theory https://netsuite.ai/Theory. The team reacts to DSA-affiliated activist Tracy Rosenthal, who—per the reporting the host cites—has withheld an estimated $108,000 in rent and openly encourages tenants in their building to do the same, with their landlord reportedly an immigrant now losing the building. The host is careful to say he hasn't independently verified every detail, but uses it to make his central argument: that "just don't pay rent" activism, however it's framed as helping the poor, actually lands hardest on the people it claims to protect. He argues Rosenthal—whose father he says is a multiple-Grammy-winning musician and who grew up wealthy—has a safety net ("they can always go back to mom and dad") that the working families they're advising do not, so when a landlord can no longer maintain or run the building, tenants end up in unmaintained housing, and those who join rent strikes risk landing on tenant-screening "do not rent" lists that follow them, push them toward fewer economic opportunities, and make housing harder to secure. He frames the whole thing as reasoning from resentment—aimed at hurting a perceived "capital class"—rather than from what actually helps poor people, and warns that if you make it impossible to run housing as a business, the only remaining owner is the government, which can only subsidize until the "engine of prosperity" breaks. He argues this path repeatedly ends in stagnation, using Cuba as his example. The team reacts to Mayor Mamdani's new video targeting Amazon's delivery model—where drivers wear Amazon branding and follow Amazon-set routes and hours but are technically employed by subcontractors—and his support for the Delivery Protection Act, which would push responsibility for those workers back onto Amazon. Drew presses the steelman throughout: if the setup is illegal or strips workers of deserved protections (the way the Uber/Lyft contractor debate played out), shouldn't the government step in? The host agrees that if a company is breaking the law you enforce the law—but argues this specific move is a case of a candidate promising affordability while doing something that will make deliveries more expensive, calling the two goals "matter and antimatter." His core argument is about preserving choice: independent-contractor status is a real tradeoff that many workers actively want (flexibility, control), and banning it doesn't magically convert those into higher-paying jobs—companies instead do less, automate, or leave, and a subclass of lower-skilled workers loses the on-ramp entirely. He draws the Uber-beat-the-taxis parallel, argues minimum-wage hikes disproportionately wipe out teen and entry-level jobs, and points to Austin and Houston loosening building regulations to bring housing costs down as evidence that over-regulation is often the choke point. He frames the government's proper role with a sports metaphor—referees who set and enforce fair rules are essential, but when the refs outnumber the players and start tripping the best performer to even the score, the whole game gets worse. Threaded through is his contested thesis that this is driven by resentment and an "overproduction of elites," and a nuanced exchange with Drew about when market intervention is genuinely warranted versus when it becomes a barnacle. The team digs into three new Google research papers that, in the host's read, show large language models already outperforming human doctors—even in the messy, sometimes adversarial reality of real patient interactions. The host, careful to stay honest about both AI's risks and its capabilities, walks through the numbers: in a randomized clinical exam of 100 scenarios across 300 live video consultations with patient actors, graded by 20 board-certified physicians, the AI scored 83% to the doctors' 68%, with correct first-guess diagnoses at 91% vs 77%, clinical reasoning 90% vs 76%, guiding a physical exam over video 72 vs 39, and—strikingly—empathy rated higher for the AI (82 vs 71), echoing earlier findings in AI therapy studies. The AI also finished exams slightly faster. A second paper tracking patients across three visits with shifting symptoms found the AI's care rated appropriate 95% rising to 98% by the third visit, while human doctors actually got worse over follow-ups (72% to 81%)—which the host speculates is because doctors "back off too soon" once they think they've found the answer, whereas the AI keeps refining. A third paper used reinforcement learning across 57,000 simulated encounters—including thousands where patients actively try to deceive the doctor, hiding medications or insisting chest pain is just heartburn—with up to 60 conversational turns, producing a model that beats the already-superior AI 87.6% of the time head-to-head. The host argues the gap will likely keep growing, predicts that within a few years failing to at least consult AI could be treated as malpractice, and forecasts a near-term future of human-assisted-by-AI care rather than fully autonomous machines—because AI is probabilistic, not deterministic, so a human stays in the loop the way pilots remain in an autopilot cockpit. His bottom line: this is one of those cases where the technology may genuinely become what we hoped for, even if the economic transition to get there is turbulent. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  Times like this, though, it's good that Google's pivoting because they just launched their Dr. LLM system, which I think is a way better use for AI. And that actually goes to the promise of what we thought we were going to get.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude, this story is insane. I'm blown away by this. And so I am really trying to be honest about the risks that are in AI. And at the same time, be honest about what AI is doing. Now, I don't think anybody's confused about the fact that I think AI is absolutely extraordinary, and that it's going to be completely transformational. But when you start looking at some of the stats that are coming out of this setup with Google. So Google just proved that LLMs are already outperforming doctors, even in the messy reality of dealing with patients that are oftentimes actually adversarial, which is something we'll talk about. But if you think about you as a patient, are there going to be times where you're wrong about the symptoms? Or you have a hard time describing them? Or you just think that your doctor is wrong?

• 2:03Speaker 00

  That's one of the areas where, and you're going to push back. And so that's one of the areas where people thought an LLM is never going to be able to handle this. And so Google just released these three research papers that show that that's not actually true. The AI doctors provided better care than human doctors as evaluated by a board of humans. So these are people that are used to evaluating doctor performance. And so it's not like laypeople off the street that were just like, I like the AI better. They're talking about its ability to actually diagnose the real problems. Now, if you look at the findings themselves, Google ran an AI through a randomized clinical exam. There were 100 scenarios. These were 300 live video consultations, professional patients, patient actors.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  So they were performing, they were based on real cases. But they were performing everything from cardiac complaints to musculoskeletal injury. And there were 20 board certified physicians that graded these encounters. It's not even close. Like the AI doctors are just absolutely trouncing the real doctors. So the AI doctor scored 83% and the doctors themselves scored 68%. Correct diagnosis on the first guess, 91% for the AI versus 77% for the humans. Clinical reasoning, 90% versus 76% in favor of AI. Guiding a patient through a physical exam over video. The AI scored a 72 versus 39 for the actual real doctors.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Empathy graded by physicians was 82 for AI versus 71 for the doctors. So the AI is perceived as more empathetic. We've actually seen that before in similar studies done for therapy, where the AI is considered more empathetic than the actual human therapist. The AI finished their exams an average of 8.9 minutes. The doctors took 9.3, so they took longer to reach worse conclusions. Then in the second paper, you've got a similar setup. You've got 100 patients, three appointments each. The symptoms and lab results are shifting between visits. So basically, they're getting updated information. Specialists rated the AI's management of these plans appropriate 95% of the time at the first visit and 98% of the time by the third visit. Okay, so they're getting better over time, as you would expect.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  The physicians, 72% after the first one, and then only reaching 81% after all three. So it ends up being 98% versus 81% in favor again of the AI. And on ordering the right investigations. So what will happen a lot of times with real doctors is that they back off too soon. So they think they found the right thing, and then they back off. Human doctors actually get worse with each follow-up. Now, I don't have the answer to this question, but my gut instinct is that's because they end up stopping too soon. They think they've found it, and they really haven't. Whereas the AI gets better over time. So humans get worse, human doctors get worse, the machines actually get better. And then the third paper sort of puts this all together.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  The Google trained a clinical agent by making it practice. So it's taking an LLM, it's using reinforcement learning to put them through their paces to see, like, how far can we push this? How much better are they going to get over time? We had 57,000 simulated encounters, including thousands built specifically where the patient is trying actively to deceive the doctor. So patients hide their medications. Patients who insist that chest pain is heartburn refuse to go to the ER, as patients actually do. And there were up to 60 turns per conversation, meaning that the AI goes back and forth with the patient up to 60 times. What you end up having is the model, when it is practiced in this back and forth

• 5:42Speaker 00

  and placed against other models, what we're seeing is this reinforcement learning is making them even better. So all the earlier data that I gave you, that's basically what these new ones that are getting the reinforcement learning are being put up against, and they're getting even better. So they're outperforming them 87.6% of the time in head-to-head reviews. So the AI that's already beating the humans by a substantive margin is getting beaten by this new reinforcement learning AI that's doing these like synthetic evaluations over and over and over and over and over and over. Okay, by doing those, it's now getting better than the AI that was already better than the humans. So what you're seeing is, and look, it could hit that ceiling. There could be some sort of asymptote where it can't keep going.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  But what you're seeing is that these guys, the AI, is getting better and better over time. So the gap between human and AI doctors is going to grow presumably over time. Whether that caps out or it just becomes malpractice to be a doctor that doesn't work with AI is the question. And honestly, I think within a few short years, we're probably going to start considering it actual malpractice to not at least consult the AI, see what the AI puts forward. No one's going to expect you to just take its word blindly. But you're going to see malpractice suits where they say, show me what the AI was saying. And if the AI ends up being right, and it told you what the right answer was,

• 7:10Speaker 00

  and you insisted going down a path that ended up proving to be wrong, and the patient was injured or God forbid, killed, then that is going to be a huge problem for the human doctors. Now, you start stretching that out to five to 10 years. If this gap creeps, keeps growing between the humans and the AI, you can expect more and more people to rely. I think it will be human assisted doctors. I don't think you're just going to go in and speak to a machine at a terminal. But I do think that that is going to become the standard. It's pretty incredible. So this is one of those times where, again, the technology probably really is going to become what we all want it to become.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  But that doesn't mean that you don't have a massive economic event that is very tumultuous between here and there.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like that's like the V1 of it, right? First, it's going to be humans using AI robots. And then the V2 is going to be only AI robots.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  I don't know, maybe. Maybe we get to that point, and people are really like, I just want my full-blown AI. My gut instinct is that there's going to be some element of, given that it is probabilistic and not deterministic, and so you don't know what output you're going to get. You're always going to have a human that sits in the middle to just make sure that this doesn't do some crazy-ass thing. In the same way that planes can fly themselves, but we always have human pilots there just to make sure that in the case of catastrophic failure, the systems go offline, it starts saying something that's obviously crazy, that you can step in and say, okay, this is hallucinating. It's glitching, whatever. That just comes down to AI is probabilistic. You cannot get it to give you the same result over and over and over,

• 8:53Speaker 00

  unless you essentially hard code it to do so. And right now, that doesn't exist. And so anybody that's ever tried to like go, hey, here's a photo of me. Take me, put me on this background. It struggles to do that because it's actually probabilistically trying to recreate all those pixels, and it ends up looking just a little bit off. So on balance, they give you the right answer, but you can't guarantee it again because it's not deterministic.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Got you.

• 9:17Speaker 00

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

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• 11:31Speaker 00

  Let's get right back into the action.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  All right, you brought up the DSA, so let's go to them. I have the Tracy Rosenthal thing first. I figured that one. You've been waiting to hit this video.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  My question is, it's hard to imagine not paying rent. Do you have any ideas about what?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Just in case people couldn't hear what she said. She whispers, "I'm doing it right now." I forget how long she's been doing it, but a long time. People estimate the amount of rent that she hasn't paid is about $108,000. Now, I haven't gone deep enough to verify all the facts, but as it's being reported, her landlord is an immigrant and now has either already lost the building or is in the process of losing the building.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  He was in foreclosure, US Bank took it over.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely insane. And this woman is proud of that. It's wild. This was not a guy that grew up wealthy. This is an immigrant who came to the country to try to make something of himself, manages to buy a building, which is a business, tries to run that business, and then has the very unfortunate luck of getting this woman, who grew up wealthy, now doesn't need to, you know, earn a living and runs around as an activist, teaching people in her own building how to steal from the landlord. And there are consequences to that stuff. And I know everybody just wants to. And again, this is how you know it's resentment. They just want to hurt those wealthy landlords, but that's not who it ends up hurting. It hurts people who are trying to run a business and make ends meet.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Do you have any ideas about what would it like if a lot of people, not just a few things, but if a lot of people were not paying rent?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I think that part of what you're talking about is a long-term strategy to creating the kind of scale of crisis that we would need.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  She is actively trying to create a crisis. Like, this is not somebody who's like, "I just want to make your life better." It's like, "I want to break the system, and if I have to ruin everybody's life to do it, I will do it happily. We're going to create the crisis."

• 13:24Speaker 03

  That we would need in order to extract any of the fucking concessions that would, like, save our lives.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Save our lives, save our lives. So this, this is a wealthy girl who grew up with money. Her dad is a four-time Grammy Award winner. She grew up in a wealthy neighborhood. Like, all of this stuff is insane. What are you talking about, "save your lives"? It's such unhinged, over-the-top rhetoric that is totally devoid of reality. And they are just convincing each other that that's what's really at stake. As a reminder, the very principles that she's putting forward killed more people in 20th century than anything. Killed more people than disease, killed more people than war. It's so crazy.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  But I think that, you know, on the one hand, it's like, I can, I admit that I am a romantic and I can sit here and say, like, "Fuck, yeah, we need a jet."

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So Drew said something to me yesterday that you guys would have found very funny. And I can't, what were we talking about? Do you remember?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  The reaction to you?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Ah, fuck.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  I don't know what funny thing I said. I say a lot of funny things.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  Oh, you'll, you'll remember as soon as I say it. I forget what we were talking about, but I was like, "I can't believe people would do that. That's crazy." And Drew goes, "Well, you do have the superpower of being independently wealthy." And now, I earned my wealth through an unending number of years of clipping coupons and shit like that and working myself near to death. But her worldview is so distorted, it is crazy. And so she's in a place where it's like, "Okay, I know that I'm going to be fine on the other side of all this madness because I can always go back to mom and dad." She is completely blind to all of the ways that the economy works. Those are the people that push this kind of stuff because they're so unaccustomed to the day-to-day grind of actually making ends meet.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Rent strike, right? Like, that, you know, we described, right? Like, one way of thinking about abolishing rent is a permanent and general rent strike.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Just don't pay rent. Make housing impossible to maintain. Yeah, brilliant.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Think about how we get there. And I think that for me, you know, like, and yeah, I mean, my whole building's not paying rent. It really rocks. And...

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Dude, that's so crazy. Sorry, I have to, like, really, uh, okay. My whole building is not paying rent. All right, this is going to be the same person. I bet part of the reason that they're going to go after them, or the words that will come out of their mouth, is that they're not upkeeping the building. Well, yeah, no shit, Sherlock. If you're not paying for anything, how are they supposed to upkeep the building? This is where people have this distorted sense that people that own a building are just swimming in cash and they're just hoarding all of it and they, they are unwilling to upkeep the building even though they've got all this money. They are reasoning from the point of resentment, from the point of, uh, "We've got to tear these people down." They are not looking at what's actually good for poor people.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  In many ways, I'm luxuriating on the, like, historic tenant movement of New York City in order to be able to do that. Because I can just sort of say, like, "Yeah, fuck it, come get it. Like, I don't know, we'll see what happens."

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you stopped short of saying, "Come get me."

• 16:34Speaker 03

  I think that there is, like, a lot of, um, I, I think that, like, because of maybe some of these calculations, right, that are about, like, what do I know I have? And like, what do I, like, when I think about how my own building went on rent strike, right? Like, at first, people were really risk averse and they, like, didn't want to get even, like, you know, if you even get in the court records, like, some landlord's going to look at that and be like, "Well, you can't rent in the future."

• 17:02Speaker 00

  She's right about that, and people are right to be paranoid about that. And right now, maybe not a lot of landlords are looking into that. But let me tell you, as more and more of this stuff keeps getting pushed forward, more and more landlords are going to check, "Have you been a part of a rent strike before?" And you will find yourself just suddenly unable to get housing. Now, when, again, you can go move in with mom and dad, or again, you're waiting for mom and dad to die so you can have their money, you might not be worried about that. But for somebody who has a family and you convince them to do something that is patently ridiculous and they end up on that kind of "do not rent to" list and then have trouble finding housing and then have to move far away and find themselves around fewer economic opportunities

• 17:46Speaker 00

  because that's the only place they can find somewhere that they can afford, that someone will actually rent to them. This is so idiotic, and it's taking people down a path. They're listening to you, but they don't have your same reinforcements.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  I think that the slow process of getting more attached to our homes, more attached to each other, more attached to the organizing project, really, like, changed people, like, changed people's minds. Like, to, like, a person didn't move. Like, um, someone was like, "I'm going to go all the way," you know? And so it's, I, I think that, um, in my own building, I have the experience of watching people go from being, like, not, like, not knowing how that would look, like, not being able to imagine it, to being like, "Oh shit, it's been two and a half years."

• 18:37Speaker 00

  So listen, these are people that, uh, they fully understand that they're using extortionary tactics to penalize the, what they see as the capital class, and they want to hurt their landlord. And when they think through, "Who is going to own these buildings when we make it absolutely impossible for somebody to run this as a business?" Their answer is the government. The government can throw tax dollars at this only so far because if you break the engine of prosperity, there are no tax dollars to fund all of this stuff. And this is why every single country that does this gets into a position where they look like Cuba. Everything is backwards. Every building looks like shit. They are stuck in a period of time that is long ago in the past

• 19:21Speaker 00

  because they're not building. They're not able to innovate. They are not able to purchase the innovations of others. And it ends up being absolutely dire for the people that are trying it. Now, if what they really want to do is a Chinese model, that's a very different argument. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. 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, PipeDrive, comes in. An intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM that is loved by growing sales teams. PipeDrive just launched Meeting Intelligence, built right into the CRM.

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• 21:21Speaker 00

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Mom Donnie says he wants to make things more affordable. This is his latest video that he used talking about Amazon and their contractor setup that they have right now. Right now, Amazon subcontracts to other technical delivery guys. Although they have Amazon on their trucks and Amazon on their outfits, they're not technically Amazon workers. So his new initiative is to take them on. This is the video that he released.

• 21:50Speaker 05

  Special delivery. If it looks like an Amazon delivery.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  And he drives like an Amazon delivery.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  And it's an Amazon delivery. Amazon is spending millions of dollars to convince you that this isn't an Amazon delivery. But all you have to do is see for yourself. My uniform says Amazon. If I don't wear this Amazon branded vest, disciplinary action will be taken against us. The workers' routes and hours are set by Amazon.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  So why isn't Amazon responsible for these vans?

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Because Amazon and other corporations have built a vast network of subcontractors.

• 22:28Speaker 06

  That shield them from responsibility. Amazon tells these subcontractors where to drive.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Who to hire and what hours to work.

• 22:37Speaker 06

  I do all the work that makes Amazon all the money.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  This is why I'm proud to support the Delivery Protection Act, sponsored by councilmember Tiffany Callan. Because if Amazon is delivering your packages, they should follow the same rules of every other delivery company.

• 22:52Speaker 05

  When injuries and worker accidents skyrocket. Amazon says they have nothing to do with it.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  They can't have it both ways.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  What I like about what that person said is you can't have it both ways. So Mom Donnie is saying, "Hey, everybody, I want to make things nice and cheap for you, but, psych, just kidding, I'm going to make things more expensive." So first of all, if the companies are doing something illegal, then of course you're going to step in and you're going to say, "Hey, this is legal. You can't do that." But the reality is, this is exactly like the unions that were trying to protect the taxis. Taxi drivers were trying to keep Uber out, but Uber is better for the consumer, and so Uber ended up winning out. You're going to run into the same thing here. What Amazon is doing is saying, "Listen, our job is not to make sure that we have this gigantic pool of people that we can constantly draw and do all the vetting and all of that. We're a logistics company over here trying to sell everything on the internet.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And so what we want to do is partner with companies that are going to do that side of things, and they're going to follow all of the laws and regulations. They're just not being employed directly by us." And this definitely is a way that you can keep costs down, because now you're working with a company that is going to go and find people that will work, again, for a legal wage. They will vet the people that, for whom this is a good job. And now you're able to keep your costs down as Amazon, and you can pass those savings on to other people. So instead of you having to become bigger and bigger and bigger from an employee perspective, you partner with these other, whether it's an individual that's a solopreneur in the same way that an Uber driver is a solopreneur,

• 24:26Speaker 00

  or it's somebody that's doing their own shipping and logistics company, small but in a neighborhood, and then you get probably, I would imagine, aggregators that go and they interface with Amazon, and then they employ all of these much smaller delivery companies. And now you can create something that's incredibly fast-moving, it's incredibly localized, decentralized, and they'll move very fast, be able to keep costs down low. As they go after these guys, because what they don't like is people being able to make their own decision about what job they want to take. Remember, nobody's being forced to take these jobs. They could go apply for other jobs, so there are reasons that they may want to go after this. These companies are operating legally, so they don't like that Amazon is able to get workers at a wage.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  I'm assuming this is partly because they're outside of unions, and they aren't getting paid what they believe should be the nationwide minimum wage. And so what they want to do is leverage unions, basically, to go in and browbeat these companies. And once you understand this from the position of, "This is all resentment. This is just resentment from top to bottom," because this is not good for the workers who want the job. Because what will end up happening is, if you tell Amazon that they can't do this, Amazon's going to leave the city. They're going to go elsewhere, so all those people lose their jobs. Even if Amazon decides to stay in the city, now they're going to be employing people directly, so odds are that there are going to be fewer jobs, and they're going to have to pass on the price increase to the customer.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  So now you're creating something where the government is coming from the outside, doing something that's actually going to make the packages more expensive, is going to give the employees fewer options. It literally is just like them saying, "You have to be a taxi driver. You have to have the medallions or whatever system they're going to use to curb this." And it ends up being worse for the consumer. When you look at the studies that have been done on this, the cross-cultural studies, and this is going to be something that you hear me talk a lot about when it comes to addressing the DSA. When you look at the cross-cultural studies that they've done, and they give people the option, you can do something that's good for the poor, and it will benefit them in some material way, but it also helps the wealthy. You can't get them to vote for it.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  What you can get them to vote for is something that will hurt the poor, as long as it also hurts the wealthy. So this is about being punitive. This is not about actually helping people. So you can't, going back to what that woman said, you can't have it both ways. You can't try to make things more affordable while making things more expensive. They literally are matter and antimatter.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  When you say they are matter and antimatter, the trying to...

• 27:02Speaker 00

  If you go in and increase the cost of a business, I know what they want to happen is that the employees just start making more money. That's not what actually happens. What actually happens is you start making things more expensive. So then you go, "Okay, well, then these guys are greedy, so I'm going to force them to limit the amount of money they can make." And now you're a communist country. And I know that they like to say that they're not going to do that, but they are going to do that. These are private companies, and if you want to beat them, you have to beat them. So if you think that they have a monopoly, then go in and break up the monopoly. But doing things like this, where you're telling somebody who's like, "I am happy doing this job. This job gives me the flexibility." Or, "I can't get a job that pays this well because I don't have other skills,

• 27:45Speaker 00

  but I can go and do a delivery, and this pays well, given what my skill set is." And so now you're saying, "No, no, no. You don't understand yourself. You're too dumb to know what job to take or not to take. And so we want to come in and tell these businesses, who we think are just being predatory, 'Hey, hey, hey, you can't keep innovating and finding ways to lower your costs.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  So we're going to come in and try to control this.'" And it never ends there. And so what they end up doing is breaking these systems with overregulation, which is why everybody from the beginning of governmental interference will tell you, "Oh, you're in a hard spot. You need to grow. You're going to need to deregulate." Because the regulations themselves create the choke points, like with the inability to build housing. Whereas when you back off on those regulations, look at somewhere like Houston, look at somewhere like Austin, where you have prices absolutely skyrocket in Austin. They let builders build, and the prices come right back down. Houston, I don't think, ever choked people out, so they just keep letting people build. Housing prices don't go up. This is not a great place to invest in a house. Thank God. It's a great place, though, to buy a house, because you can actually afford one,

• 28:51Speaker 00

  because they've just kept rates low by not putting all these regulations that stop people from building. And so I wish I could say that this actually comes from a great place. This does not come from a great place. This comes from a place of resentment. You're literally saying, "I care about workers. I care about affordability, and I'm actively doing something that's going to make this less affordable." Now, if they could show me their cause and effect, where this is actually going to drive down the cost of delivery, then I'd be like, "Okay, well, at least they're fighting for something that's internally consistent." But they're not. It is obvious that Amazon is doing this to drive their costs down. And so now they're doing this as a way to punish them, because they don't think it's righteous or whatever word they're going to insert, but it certainly isn't about affordability.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  So when we talk about manufacturing, things like that, we say that there are certain things that is supposed to go up for the betterment of the country in order to do good and things like that. If Mom Donnie's point is, "We need to stop the subcontractor system, so that way we can make sure employees have necessary benefits and protections." There was a whole big thing with Uber and Lyft, where you're a subcontractor, you're driving for us, you're getting paid through us, but you don't have health insurance. If something happens to you, you're liable for yourself. If somebody happens in your car or your incident, I can step away completely. It's all on you. So is there some type of responsibility, might be the wrong word, but there is some type of employee protections that... Are quote unquote deserved or is just the name of the game and it's different situation?

• 30:13Speaker 00

  The right way to look at it is, okay, we've got people that are employed by Amazon. There are laws on the books that tell you what they have to do, how they're going to be taking care of everybody. Then you've got these companies, which are companies that are hiring these people. Independent contractors fall under different regulations than people that are employed by a company. And there are trade offs. And so if what we're saying is we don't want people to be able to be an independent contractor, that would be fucking insane. The reason that would be insane is there are people who want that trade off. I want to control what, when I pay my tax dollars as one, for instance. You will routinely get people who are like, listen, Tom, I really want to work for you, but I'll only do it if I can be an independent contractor. That's not me. I don't like independent contractors.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  I would much rather have somebody in my company, you know, because you suffer from it. I make people be in the office. And so I want people in the office. I want people to be employees. Now, there are times where the work maybe isn't as consistent as it would otherwise be. So you have people that are in that position where they want to be an independent contractor. They have a really obscure skill set. And so we have to figure out what do we do in order to get that person? And if we have to create a exception that, okay, the only way I'm going to get this guy with the skill set that I need is to let him be an independent contractor. So the only way to eliminate that is just say you can't be an independent contractor. And again, taking choices away from people to me is not the right answer.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  If that person wants to do that, why not let them do that? And if they want the protections, then like if they want, no, no, no, I want health insurance. I want, you know, the things that come with the company. Then one, don't work for a company that doesn't offer that. And you can get to the point where these, the, these companies being these outsourced companies. If the only way that they're going to be able to attract the people that they need is by offering them those kinds of protections, then they'll do that to stay competitive. What people don't like is that one of the ways that you deal with, um, when you have too much cheap labor is you don't need to offer those incentives.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  And I understand that people don't like that you can get the people you need without offering those incentives. But such is the reality of people want to work. And some people just do not have the skill set. They don't have the ability to get a job at a company that offers those kinds of things because they have not developed the appropriate skill set. And this is where unfortunately you have to get into immigration. So one of the reasons that people should be very upset about the fact that we have disguised a declining economy by importing immigrants, illegal or otherwise, is that you have plenty of people that are willing to take these jobs because they can't get other jobs. They may not be able to speak, speak the language very well. They may just not have a strong skill set.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  And so now they're going to companies where the company's like, okay, you can work here, but you're going to have to do it as an independent contractor. So you're not going to get these advantages. And if you just say, you can't even be a company unless you offer those advantages. Again, you make things more expensive and you create a subclass of people who can't get work. Because it's not like if you raise the minimum wage or you say, hey, sorry, you can't use contract labor. It's not like those people suddenly get the higher paying jobs. People just go, I'm not going to pay that. The, the way that people need to think about this, this is why when you raise the minimum wage, it helps some people and just absolutely demolishes teenagers. Because teenagers don't have the skill set.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  So being able to pay them less than you would pay somebody more experienced is the reason a company takes, uh, you know, takes a shot on a young kid. And when you get rid of that, you get rid of all the entry level jobs. It's not like people go, well, I guess I'm just going to pay this teenager that wage or this unskilled person, I'm going to pay them that wage. You go, sorry, you're not worth that. I'm going to find a way around it. I'm either going to do less or I'm going to automate or some other solution. But you don't just pay people more than they're worth.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Is it better to kind of think about Mamdani and the government as middlemen? Cause I feel like that's what I'm hearing is that they get in between the relationship between the subcontractor and the contractor.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  No, definitely not. The right way to think about them is political activists who want to change the way that the world works for largely reasons of resentment. And once you understand that revolutions only get started, especially if we're talking Marxist communists, they only get started when you overproduce elites. So you put highly educated people out into the world who are thinkers by nature. They are not doers or thinkers by training. That's a more accurate way to say it. They are not doers. They're not builders. They are thinkers. They go out into the world and the world does not greet them warmly. And the world says, go drive an Uber, go deliver as a contractor for Amazon. And they're like, whoa, this is not what I was promised. I took on all this debt. This is crazy.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  You guys don't understand how smart I am. Insert Tracy Rosenthal, who comes in and is like, let me teach you how to not pay your rent and steal from your landlord. And that becomes the revolutionary energy is, oh, I know how I'm going to be important in the world of ideas. I'm still not going to build.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  That's specifically DSA. Do you paint the DSA that brush with every government program or is that just the DSA diagnosis? Cause when I like, because when you said with the government and you were talking about people are messing up the relationship, I was talking about government programs, regulations, regulations are that middleman?

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Regulations are not a middleman. I don't think that's the right thing. If you want to hear a pro government speech.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  No, it's not pro government. I was trying to see, what would you call the intervention of markets that are done by?

• 35:53Speaker 00

  You want a name?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yes, because on some aspects it's good, on some, sometimes it's barnacles, sometimes it's necessary. So I'm trying to think is, when is the intervention should happen versus when it shouldn't happen?

• 36:05Speaker 00

  That's two different things. First, I'm going to give you a name.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  I, I think government already has a name. So those things are called government. Why are governments not understood as middlemen? Middlemen help facilitate what would otherwise be difficult. So there is a time period where middlemen are extraordinarily useful. If I'm good at a, like, uh, take for instance, Kaizen, video game. I want to get the video game out into the world. I'm going to go to an influencer who's already built the audience. Now you could say, I really just want the audience, but I'm going to go through the middleman of the influencer who's built that audience. Because I'm a 50 year old man, I don't have a, a community of kids that are interested in video games because I'm not the aesthetic or just even the way of thinking or talking going to be the thing that they relate to.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  They want the big YouTube voice. They want, you know, people that are like hilariously enthusiastic. That's what they want. And so that person becomes a very useful middleman for me. If you're trying to raise capital and you don't have those, um, those relationships, then you can go to somebody like a VC who does have all the pension funds and insurance funds. They can go in the endowments at universities. They literally fly around the country all year, meeting those guys, raising money all the time so that an entrepreneur like me can walk into them and get access to the capital. So they perform the middleman role for the capital. I don't want to go do that thing.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Those are middlemen providing a middleman service that is extremely valuable to somebody in my position. Okay, the government, what they're actually doing is creating a fair playing field. And when you create a fair playing field, you're still going to get a messy who's going to score way more goals than the next person. And if you send 30 referees out into the field and their job is a trip messy so that everybody scores the same amount of goals, that's fucking retarded. And this is that. And so whether you get it from the DSA, you get it from Republicans, it doesn't matter. If you're sending too many refs out on the field, they will fuck up the players and it may even things out, but it makes the game way, way, way, way, way less fair

• 38:16Speaker 00

  and far less successful in doing what it was meant to do. So that's why understanding the government like, hey, create the rules, enforce the rules because all games are better when there's rules that are enforced. So we want government. We just don't want it to get to the point where the referees outnumber the players, which is what people are trying to get to when they say that something has become overregulated. 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.

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