Manufacturing Comeback, Data Center Miracles & The Collapse of U.S. Education: What’s Really Happening? | Tom Bilyeu Show

ITU: Ready to break through your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE Sign up for my AI Masterclass: https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social What’s up, everybody? Today I am bringing you an episode you absolutely cannot miss. We're diving headfirst into the burning questions around government spending, the ballooning US deficit, and the engines that drive (and threaten) our economy. But this time, it’s just me and you—no guest—because there are some realities around money, government, and culture that we’ve got to face head on. In this episode, we’re breaking down why interest payments on our national debt are spiraling out of control, how Gen Z is betting more than they’re investing, and why American education is in real trouble. We're peeling back the layers on the promises of socialism, the hard math behind who really pays, and why fiscal discipline is no longer optional—it's mission critical. If you care about your future, your kids’ future, or just want to understand how the country got into this mess—and more importantly, how we get out—you need to hear this. You’ll leave with the tools to spot the real cost behind big promises, the mindset shifts we need as a culture, and the actionable steps every citizen should be judging our leaders by. If you get value from this episode, please leave a review. That’s what helps us reach more people like you who are absolutely committed to building a future they can be proud of. I’m Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. Sponsors: Cash App: 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. 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 Horizon.ai: Go to https://horizon3.ai/IMPACTTHEORY and request your free NodeZero demo. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. Quo: Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby. And then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University. And the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Dooley Show Live. I'm excited to have you guys here. It's a Friday. Happy Friday, everybody. I hope you guys are going to be coming into the weekend hot. And speaking of doing things that are way too hot, the US government officially posted the largest July budget deficit in history. The interest payments, oh, that was a good one.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  The interest payments on the federal debt now exceed Medicare and all AI spending, making interest the number two line item on the federal budget. Kids, we do not want our interest payment to be the number two. And by the way, racing to be the number one line item on the budget. But let's talk about things that would do that. Will Kane does a very cool breakdown of socialist math that will explain why only taxing the middle class and working class are going to get you to the point where you can actually have their socialist utopia right before it breaks everything. We're going to go through that math in detail so people can see it. This is the cause and effect universe, boys and girls. And so actually making contact with how that stuff works is going to be very important

• 2:13Speaker 00

  as we chart a path forward, which I'm going to be talking a lot more about. It'd be interesting to see how Drew reacts as a producer as I get on a never ending bandwagon to get people excited about being American. Okay, I'm derailing. Gen Z spends more on sports betting than they invest in the stock market. That might be part of the problem. More evidence is pouring in about the impact of data centers and the results are absolutely startling. You guys are going to want to hear that. Manufacturing jobs may actually be coming back to the US as Apple opens a facility in Texas. That's very exciting. They're going to be doing the Mac Mini there. PSL founder, which is a socialist organization, says that a comrade in Congress should disrupt

• 2:58Speaker 00

  it as the party prepares for revolution. So we continue our march to bring you socialists in their own words. And unfortunately, speaking of people speaking up for themselves, teachers are beginning to speak up about the appalling nature of US education in the wake of No Child Left Behind. One video is going hyper viral that unfortunately you guys aren't going to believe. It's pretty rough to hear some of the claims that are being made, but nonetheless, I fear that they may be true as there's more and more people speaking up, including a teacher that won Teacher of the Year in her district. So yeah, some pretty gnarly news there for anybody with kids. You guys are going to want to tune in.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Right, the federal government just set the July record for the biggest deficit ever for July. It clocked in at an absolutely insane $432.3 billion. And again, that's just for July. It's an all time record for July and the biggest deficit of any singular month since the height of the global COVID pandemic. That is not where you want, yes, your things to be compared to. The pandemic was an absolute slapstick comedy hour of irrational and grotesque spending that we are still suffering from.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  So for us to be in the realm of that, we're not quite at those levels, but for that to be the next thing that you're aiming at is not a good position to be in. Spending hit 766 billion, which is also a record for the month of July, which is up 22% from last July. So our deficits are obviously racing in the wrong direction. And unfortunately, revenue is also trending in the wrong direction. Thankfully, not at the same rate, but revenue came in at 334 billion, which is down 1%. So obviously, we need to start getting that reversed. Now, to be fair, some of this is much ado about nothing. About $99 billion of that spending hitting in July is actually due to a quirk of the

• 5:06Speaker 00

  calendar because August 1st fell on a weekend this year. Military, veterans, social security, Medicare payments, all of those ended up getting pushed into July when they otherwise probably would have fallen into August. But even if you strip it out, the adjusted deficit is still 333 billion. It just wouldn't have been record setting. It's still up 18% year over year. So no matter how you shake it or bake it, we are moving in the wrong direction. Hopefully, if you guys have been here for a while, you know that this is the number one problem that we have to solve in terms of the fiscal irresponsibility of the government, regardless of who's in power. The right wing is not going to save you. The left wing is going to accelerate things.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  They are both, if they go farther and farther left.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  We've absolutely got to break that. But to do that, you've got to break the back of the populist movement, which unfortunately is running rampant because of what happened in COVID and the fact that we are absolutely making it impossible for the average person just to make ends meet. So you have these two things that are completely intertwined and we've got to find some way to begin to separate them out, which is not going to be easy. And so as a PSA reminder, politics is downstream of culture. If we do not solve the cultural issue, we are going to stay in this quagmire. I really hope that you guys are spending some time looking at what China is doing. Not only looking at what China is doing in terms of them being an adversary, because you can blind yourself to some of the things that are going well in China by doing that.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  You want to understand what it looks like to have cultural energy, what it looks like to believe in your civilization, to believe in you as a country. And that's the thing that we've lost. And I really feel like that's going to be one of the cultural elements that we have to solve. So you can expect me talking about that more and more, trying to paint a vision of an America that's exciting, that you would want your kids to grow up in, where people are enthusiastic about their futures, what we need to do to get there. It's going to be absolutely critical to focus on that. I don't know that that's going to be won at the level of debate. I think people just have to paint, this is my picture of the future, and then let people get on board with the one that they find most compelling and most exciting.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  So yeah, I'm excited to get into all of that with you guys so that hopefully as a collective, we can broadcast something that's actually engaging and interesting. Now, the real killer of all of this deficit spending is the interest. Net interest cost $104 billion in July alone. Okay, think about that. You're spending $104 billion just in July, just to service the debt. That's not any of the principle. That's just like, hey, for the right of borrowing this money, we're now paying this ridiculous amount. Grossed interest expense on the debt was 117.5 billion, which is up 26 billion from July of 2025.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  Fiscal year to date, net interest is $931 billion. That's up $91 billion or 11%. You know, pretty soon, Drew, these numbers are going to add up to something. You know what I mean? 90 billion here, 90 billion there. Eventually, it really does start to be a problem. That's 90 billion amongst friends, right? You know what I mean? So I guess, hey, it's no problem whatsoever. All right, well, if you keep doing that, you're not going to have money left for virtually anything, and that is the debt cycle. And this is exactly how this stuff blows up. Eventually, you do have to deal with that. But remember, when somebody loans you money, they expect to be paid back. And so therein lies the problem. Now, it gets complicated and we'll see if you guys want to go down the highly technical route on that later, which I'm happy to do.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  But at the high level, you just, when you think about trying to offer more services, I will repeat my line until the end of time. You can have anything you want. You're just not going to be able to have everything. So we're a wealthy enough nation that we can decide, hey, there's going to be a handful of things that we pay for. But right now, as a nation, we're deciding we're just going to pay for everything and steal from our children. So it is an absolutely terrible exercise. We've got to implement fiscal discipline now. And so part of a vision of America needs to be that discipline is a good thing and not a sign of white supremacy, which is what is being billed at now. I knew I was going to get a look on that, Drew. I knew that would get a look. It is. Look at the Smithsonian stuff that they were putting out.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  It's wild, all the things that are being called whiteness. Man, it's crazy. It's crazy. Don't let that happen. All right, that makes interest the second largest line item in the federal budget. This is bigger than national defense. It's bigger than Medicaid. It's bigger than veterans benefits. Only social security remains as a larger expense. And right now, the way that we're going with our budgets, that is ultimately going to be eclipsed. So it is going to become the single largest line item of our budget. Now, there's a longstanding quote that I think bears repeating, which is that when you have a society that spends more on its debt than it spends on defense, that is not going to be a great nation for long. So we are putting ourselves very much in a danger zone that we need to be paying very

• 10:15Speaker 00

  close attention to. And the only way to back out of this is to actually decide culturally what it is that we're willing to pay for, get ourselves to a balanced budget, forcing ourselves via policy to balance the budget, basically whatever that requires. We're nowhere near that yet. So that's going to be one of the most important vectors that we all judge any politician by is what are they going to do to actually balance the budget? All right, the weighted average rate on marketable treasury debt right now is 3.44%. And most of that paper was issued when the money was free. And now we're having to roll it over. And this is a big part of the problem. So 10 months into the fiscal year, the deficit stands at $1.799 trillion. Man, that's so wild.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  That already exceeds the entire fiscal 2025 shortfall of 1.775 trillion. And we still have two months left in the fiscal year. So yeah, this is all going in the absolute wrong direction and nobody is showing a willingness politically to back off of this trajectory, which is going to be a tragedy for the nation. It's gonna be a tragedy. Drew, there was something about seeing that combined with the teacher crying because the kids can't read and write, that I was really like, yo, that we're really headed in a dangerous direction. It's very tempting to say that we've sort of already driven off some kind of cliff that is irreversible.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  But pumping, allowing that to become my default position, I think will only accelerate things. So I am resisting that frame.

• 11:51Speaker 00

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

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• 12:42Speaker 00

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• 15:15Speaker 00

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

• 15:19Speaker 01

  There was something where America lost its morality. And when Michelle Obama said, when they go low, we go high. She got a standing ovation in the room and she got eaten up on Twitter. Cause everybody was like, no, that's why Democrats keep losing. We need to go lower. We need to go lower. And then ever since that moment, we've just been racing to the bottom, trying to just one up each other. Nobody cares about the other person. Yeah. I remember in a John McCain, the whitest man in America. One of his supporters was trying to bash Obama, calling him a communist. He was like, no, don't say that. He's a patriot. He's a senate. He works for this country. I don't agree with them. But, and it was like, if that video was to get played now, he would get a rock thrown at him at a Trump rally.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  He'd get clowned out of the room.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it's crazy. So nobody cares about the other person. They just want their team to win and this is what populism is. And I didn't understand populism when you used to talk about it. And I was like, that's whatever, that if we just do these things, it'll be fine. But now I'm starting to realize it doesn't matter what the, what's the good for the country. It doesn't matter what good things Trump signs, what bad thing Trump signs. It's like, no, I don't like him, period. I say one negative thing about Trump, I'm automatically a dissident commie. It doesn't matter what else, like they just want to bucket us, it seems like it's very disheartening.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Very disheartening. Great use of that word.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Uh, the problem is we're the they. So everybody is trying to bucket everybody else into that. There unfortunately is no one else to point the finger at. This is just what humans are like as a, um, as a group species. We are very different when we group up. And so the tribalism from a danger perspective is something that I don't think people give enough credit to. I know I've talked about this before and I really should track this video down. But I saw this video years ago, but this kid ends up getting beaten to death with like this really big board, like a really big board, comically large. And I remember watching it and it was one of those where, um, some sort of fight broke out somehow, some way. And you just realize, cause he was like, I don't even remember.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  I don't think the kid was like involved in what was going on. He was just sort of around it. And then this kid picks up this, I mean, it's giant and hits this kid over the head. And then people just jump on him and start beating him to death. And they do, they beat him to death and it was just some average American kid. But it was like, dude, watching that happen, you realize when humans break and that crowd thing takes over, where people no longer feel like an individual, they just feel like they're a part of that wave of energy. That's one of those, and I know people hate when I talk about that we don't have free will. That's when I realized, yeah, we are ultimately a herd animal. And there is a psychological thing that happens where when the violence breaks, people really go ham.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  And this is where, uh, if anybody's ever been in a car where the brakes give out and you suddenly realize just how fast you're moving, or if you're like sliding on black ice, that, that was always the analogy that I used. Uh, if you've ever driven and hit black ice where the road looks normal, but all of a sudden you have no traction whatsoever. And you're, you realize, oh, I'm going to hit the ditch if that's where the momentum is taking me. And there's literally nothing I can do to stop it. That's what I feel like when humans, uh, snap into this like populist moment. They've got the tribalism energy behind them. They feel like they're on a team. They've got a, they're, they're thinking purely emotionally. They're not able to make contact with like real arguments. They will do the mental gymnastics to, um, explain why their side is right and the other side is wrong.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And that you can study this, you can see it happen. We're living the consequences of it right now. And it is part of the architecture of the human mind. And that, that's what makes like diffusing this kind of bomb so, um, nerve wracking is like, yeah. Normally this just ends in violence, like the, the way that the momentum carries people. They need something to break them out of that. And that thing is pain and suffering. And this is one of the most interesting things about looking at Japan now is understanding this was truly a kamikaze culture. And, and I mean that quite literally. They had trained their, um, populace to expect to have to fight to the death, uh, to win World War II.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  And that put such a fatigue in people that even though they couldn't stop themselves from doing it, when they lost World War II, they were actually able to embrace the defeat because the pain and the lack of a vision of even having a future, that was anything other than death, was so foreign. And so they were already broken emotionally by the time, uh, the bombs are dropped on Japan. And so this is why you see that just like hard reversal, of course, on behalf of Japan, because there was a sense of relief to having lost. And to think that you could get yourself whipped up into a frenzy such that defeat feels good

• 20:08Speaker 00

  because you know you've gone so far away from the things that make being a human feel awesome. Of I'm, I'm imagining a future that's exciting. I'm imagining my life being better in a year. I'm imagining my kids' lives being even better than mine. Like we're on the brink of AI possibly bringing in an age of abundance. Even if we never get to like the utopian thing where you can just press a button and have anything you want. But where it just gets productivity is dramatically higher than it is now. That, um, you continue to pull up the bottom where it's like, uh, people will rightly say that somebody who is quote unquote impoverished today has access to better things than a king did 300 years ago, even just antibiotics.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  So it's like, we're simulta-, we're about to find out. We're, we're going to have what in games you call a skill check. And we're either going to go through one of these great filters that people, when they look out at the sky and they realize that there are no aliens, or at least they haven't contacted us. You have to ask the question, is there something that stops every advanced technology so that they never go far enough to actually populate the cosmos?

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Um, or do they choose not to do it? And we're literally racing towards one of those moments. Is AI a great filter where, uh, between what we've done to the economy, what we've done to the culture, plus a technology that people fear tremendously now all gets sort of whipped up into this crazy frenzy of people just turning on each other and.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Where they're so, they have such a dark vision of the future that they would rather tear everybody apart rather than continue to proceed. And so that is, it's such a fascinating time, but it is admittedly unnerving to run through our record-setting deficits, our back-breaking interests, and see teachers crying because our students can't even read and write anymore.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It's wild. I want to do a round robin around the economy for a second. There was a bunch of releases of different facts and on their own, they're all like, yeah, cool. But when you start to stack these things together, especially with our AI story that we're going to cover later, it just starts to see, make a more, a bleaker picture of where we're at. The first thing, I don't know if you put a lot of stock in this, but there's a lot of people who say, when you look at the stock market, it shows growth, but it shows nominal growth versus real growth. It has inflation like baked in, it's not showing the actual numbers. So what somebody did was they measured in gold, the story of American like wages. So the TDL DR of it all is that the bottom line is that in terms of gold, wages have fallen by eighty-seven percent.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Over what time period?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Since nineteen sixty-five.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  The minimum wage was seventy-one ounces per gold. In twenty-eleven, the senior engineer earned the equivalent of sixty-three ounces in gold. So measured in gold, we see that senior engineers now earn less than what unskilled laborers earned back in nineteen sixty-five. That's right, today's highly skilled professional worker is making less in real comparative terms than yesterday's unskilled worker. Now, I know gold can fluctuate, so it might be ten, twenty percent off will give people the rounding error, the inflation like discount. But it still kind of shows that people are making more, we have more. Like Ben Shapiro said, we still have four fifty taco, uh, burritos at Del Taco, so don't buy a twenty-dollar one. But there is this kind of feeling that is bringing these needs to people who are not in the employment. There is this malaise, I think that's, you

• 23:41Speaker 01

  say this all the time, I got that word from you, that it's like, yes, I'm better than the three hundred, the, the king three hundred years ago, but it feels like I'm still on the rabbit hole. It feels like I'm not breaking through.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, so here's something that people on the left are just not going to like to hear. There was a time where America was better off than it is now. So we really should want to make America great again. Uh, you can say that the guy in the White House is not the one to take you there. Uh, but that notion shouldn't be problematic. That should be something that everybody should be saying, yeah, let's make America great again. Where this all falls down is when you're reasoning from emotion, you're not setting a, um, a mark on the horizon and say, okay, that's where we want to go. I see entrepreneurs make this mistake all the time, is they're doing a flurry of activity, but they're not trying to get anywhere specific. They just, they're, they're like in panic mode. They don't know how to get revenue moving in the right direction. They've hit

• 24:36Speaker 00

  some sort of plateau. They start flailing about and they'll come into, um, impact their university and they'll ask me a question that I hear all the time. Um, what should I do? And then I say, where are you trying to end up? And they don't have an answer. Like even if it were just something as, uh, basic as I want to, my revenue right now is a hundred thousand dollars a month. I want to get it to a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. Okay, cool. Then you go, all right. So, uh, what I teach everybody to do is create a financial model. The financial model is just you do a series of things to take somebody from, I've never heard of you, to I'm now buying your product. Okay, what are those steps? Mark them out. Now, at each one of those steps, you're either going to be, um, call it at industry average, above industry average, or below industry average.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Find the one that's the problem. Because now I know where you're trying to get to. Now we can talk about, okay, well, what's the thing that's not working? Like if you're trying to get to Poughkeepsie and I say, why aren't you making progress? Uh, if your answer is because my car doesn't have an engine, it's like, okay, cool. Then we need to put an engine in your car, or you can take a bus, or you can fly, you know, whatever. And then you just start asking a series of questions that are going to get you there. But if you don't articulate where you're trying to end up, you're not going to be able to get there. This is one of the things that I find fascinating about socialists is, um, they understand, they may not be willing to say it in public, but certainly in the private meetings, which I'm getting more and more links to them just talking openly about what they're trying to do. They know where they're trying to get to. They don't understand the mechanisms, so they don't understand how it's going to break. But they

• 26:04Speaker 00

  at least say, okay, this is where we're trying to get to. They can repeat it succinctly. That allows them to galvanize people. And so what we have to do is find a way to galvanize people around, um, a real objective, followed by a real set of steps that are going to get us there. So this is why I talk about economics so much. I never thought I would talk about economics. I never even thought I would care about this stuff. But as you start thinking about, okay, mechanistically, how did we end up here? Um, I'll, I'll round it to two very simple things. Real wages are going down compared to gold. That's a great way to say it. Uh, so your real purchasing power is declining. Um, and then you've

• 26:44Speaker 00

  got the long march through the institutions where we have legitimately stopped wanting to make American kids the most competitive and effective, um, economic, military, uh, strategic actors on planet Earth. We, we don't believe in that anymore. And so there's this narrative that America is this evil colonialist, um, thing that, that isn't worthy of, um, admiration. It's not worthy of indoctrinating your children to be pro America and what America stands for. And the second that you lose that will to be a unified body, everything

• 27:27Speaker 00

  falls apart. There was a, um, a clip that I saw of Lee Kuan Yew, um, who, uh, I imagine I'm going to be talking more and more about as we talk about finding a way out of this. So he founds, uh, essentially, uh, Singapore. And one of the things that he was saying is that basically, he doesn't say these exact words, but this is the, the rough idea, that multiculturalism is extremely difficult because you've got people that come from all these very diverse backgrounds, and they've got to come together and say that we have a, a will to be unified, to be a nation, and to move forward together. And he said, without that, the only way to keep them together is force. And that becomes the problem, is

• 28:09Speaker 00

  we're rapidly building a society where the only way to hold it together is force. And boy, is that, you just don't want to be in that position. So you want to make sure that people go, oh, yes, shared ideal. We want to see, uh, our workers be strong. We want a thriving middle class. We want to make sure, I think one thing right now that Americans are going to go to bat for is, we want to make sure that we have some sort of universal healthcare. Cool. Like lay out what those things are, but then you have to get into that financial model that I was talking about to say, these are the exact steps based on cause and effect, first principles thinking, that's actually going to get us there. And so I'll lay these out. So this doesn't feel, um, like it's philosophy. It's very tangible. Uh, so you have to balance your budget such that you can build a surplus of cash, which

• 28:54Speaker 00

  is optionality. It allows you to pay for the things that you want to pay for. Um, you need to invest in education because the human mind is, um, it, it will break easily, first of all. And if you don't develop it when it's young, the actual centers of the brain don't develop. So, um, a guy that I used to talk about a lot, but I haven't brought up recently, a guy named Jeffrey Canada, um, wanted to figure out, why is it that, um, kids in the inner cities end up doing so poorly in life later? And what he found out was it was the number of positive words that you hear by the age of three or five, I can't remember which, but anyway. And what he realized was, the reason that mattered so much was because of what it does to the language centers of your brain. And that

• 29:38Speaker 00

  the language centers of your brain, if it doesn't hear enough words when you're young, it just literally underdevelops. And so if you think of that, that we're underdeveloping our kids in a way that is irreversible. Now, I wish that childhood wasn't as important as it is, but alas, um, our childhood is extraordinarily important. And when we underdevelop kids, they are underdeveloped forever. And I came to a very distressing realization at Quest. This is long before cameras got turned on. I was working with inner-city adults. So these are people in their twenties, thirties, sometimes forties, fifties. Um, and I was really excited to teach them principles of entrepreneurship.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  And to spare you a very long story, the punchline after years of doing this, making myself available, um, creating leadership programs, all of this, was you have to give up on adults. And that was me at a personal interaction level, realizing something that now I can explain from brain development. But the unfortunate reality is if the language centers, as one example, of your brain don't develop in your youth, you can't develop them later. So the fact that we, um, aren't making education just a really important part of what we do is, is detrimental in a way that isn't like, oh, like we're just

• 31:00Speaker 00

  not making education important. It's like, no, it has like these massive cascades. So if you want to compete on the international stage, and there's no way to avoid competing on the international stage, because whether, like, for anybody that is upset at the way that America bullies the rest of the world, America's able to bully the rest of the world because for, call it a hundred and fifty years, we had this just puritanical work ethic where it was like, no, these kids are going to be hardcore. They are going to abide by the idea of picking themselves up by their bootstraps, the Booker T. Washington idea of, oh, we want to build a school, we're going to learn how to make our own bricks, lay the bricks to build the schools, the dormitories. And that's what we celebrated. And so there was this self-reliance, uh, there was a sense of the rugged individual,

• 31:45Speaker 00

  and all of that gave you the strongest country in the world. The wealthiest nation the world has ever produced is America. And then because it, it is literally because of that success that we end up falling off. And because things get too easy for too long, and people start going, well, but we want to be nice, and we want to be kind, and no child left behind. And through all of that, you end up letting kids get soft. And you, you just, you literally can't do that if your aim is the things that I was saying, a strong middle class, fiscal discipline, military strength. Like if you want those things, you unfortunately cannot allow the generation of kids to be weak. And I remember being very angry at my father, and hopefully he's listening to this, because I really do owe my debt, my dad, a debt of

• 32:29Speaker 00

  gratitude. Um, he forced us to do manual labor as kids. And he just kept saying over and over, this is going to build character, this is going to build character. And I remember being absolutely irate with my father that he was making me do that because I hated it and I didn't want to do it. And I didn't know what this character thing was. Uh, and then I get into adulthood and all of a sudden you have the ability to push through, you know, for me, years of being broke, uh, having to push through that, trying to build a business. And you're there, you know, early on a Sunday morning, you're there late on a Friday night. I remember working at two AM one time on a Friday, all my friends were at the club and I was literally under a piece of machinery with bloody knuckles trying to fix a heat decoupling unit. And so it was like,

• 33:13Speaker 00

  What am I doing here? And I realized, oh yeah, I have a goal and this is what it takes to get the goal. And that's that. And thanks dad. Like it literally, because as a kid, I was forced to figure out how you push through something that you absolutely despise to get to the other side because you have a goal and that goal demands that thing. But we have to, we need a better word than indoctrinate, but that's really what you're doing. Every parent is indoctrinating their kids with a set of values and you failed to do that at your peril. At the national level, we need to facilitate parents being able to get their kids into a state where they're going to be able to perform as adults. And the second that you lose belief in your nation, you lose visibility as to what your

• 33:57Speaker 00

  actual value system is, and you don't have shared goals as a nation, you're going to be in trouble. So that's going to be a big part of that is we've got to, I was thinking about this this morning. We were talking about this when EA got bought and we were talking about can the video game industry like really reboot itself? And I said, I don't know if EA is going to be able to reboot itself. Some of these like Blizzard, I actually have more hope for because Blizzard has a founding story that they could fall back on. And that founding narrative of giving people something to anchor on about who are we? America has this incredible founding story, but we have to be prepared to honestly propagandize

• 34:37Speaker 00

  it and get people excited about the good parts of the founding story and find a way to come to terms with the negative parts without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

• 34:50Speaker 00

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• 35:57Speaker 00

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

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're going to do a deeper dive into education later because I feel like I want to bring up the teacher stuff. There's one more finance beat I want to hit. And then this is from a recent sports betting survey and it shows that Gen Z is spending more time directing into sports betting. I'm going to call it-

• 36:19Speaker 00

  More time or more money?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  More money. I'm gonna call it prediction markets as well because I feel like a lot of these Gen Zers are going to be watching sports like that, but they predict and they bet. Yeah, I feel like sports is falling off.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Sports is very falling off.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  That's weird. Why?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  I promise this will matter.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  No, my personal thing is it's no longer accessible because I feel like everybody has a story of like, my dad took me to a game and we used to hang out and watch the ball game. And I feel like now tickets to a football game are like 600 bucks.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Oh, it's just become too expensive.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  They just priced out the market.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  So you don't have that affinity and to the point, people don't have that camaraderie in their neighborhoods. Like the Philadelphia people, all the people in Philly get together and go to the Eagles games. Now it's like, I'm from Chicago and I like the Phillies or I'm from Jersey and I like this team. And it's kind of fractured in that moment.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Very interesting.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  When I went to London and I seen like Arsenal Monday, we were by the stadium and it was like, I grew up right around the corner and that's the stadium and I could walk to the stadium. It was so in the middle of the, of the community. Actually it's open during the day. People, they do museum tours and stuff. It's a bit more, we're affecting this area where I feel like sports now have become a business like everything else in America. Somebody figures out a way to capitalize on it and then they say, okay, let's see how we can get as much revenue from it as opposed to connect to the community and they disconnect from the, it's not a consumer, a customer anymore. It's a consumer. And I feel like those are two different relationships.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Yes, that's very interesting. I'll avoid the fractal of fully going down that thing, but I think that's a really interesting hypothesis. I had a similar feeling about why esports don't take off. First of all, the games aren't stable long enough, but you also have lack of geography. And there is something about like, no, no, no, this is my sports team because this is where I grew up and those teams are far more global. And you get the, like you said, there's the divorce of my dad took me to the game. And so unless your dad is as into the esports as you, it's always about two generations. I think about this a lot as a creator of video games is if you want to create something like Star Wars or Harry Potter, it's really about the second generation.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  You have to raise a generation of kids on the IP who then raise their kids on the IP. And that's when something becomes a part of the fabric of the culture and that's becoming harder and harder. At one point I was really trying to figure out, how do I engineer the next Star Wars or the next Harry Potter? And AI broke my heart and was just like, the conditions for that no longer exist. And I was like, damn, because kids interface with social media and it's such a fracturing thing. That's where I thought you were going to go with sports is that kids just aren't spending time watching it because they've got the like, they're, they exist, they spend too much time in tight dopamine loops. And it really, like, you have to really be careful.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  One of the reasons I'm building Kaizen specifically to be like Minecraft is Minecraft has a much looser dopamine loop. It's about building. It's about setting your own agenda, having to, I've always said entrepreneurs, like if your kid is really into Minecraft, they might have an entrepreneurial mind because they have to be so self-directed. So yeah, anyway, I think that is also a big part of this that you then find in the betting thing. But to really bring this back to economics, part of the, the thing that scares me with this is they have the right impulse, which is I want to engage with a marketplace where I can take my money and I can grow my money. But they're unable to make the connection of risk and reward.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  And so when you look at betting, you're trading speed of upside for almost guaranteed prolonged downside, whereas the market flips that and you're almost certainly not going to get it in the short term, but in the long term, you're almost certainly guaranteed to win if you essentially do nothing other than slowly invest in something very broad. And so this, the fact that nobody when their kids understands investing, full stop. But now that you're giving them something that they can understand easily, which is to place a bet on a game that they feel like they know and understand, and some part of them feels like they can predict the outcome. And it makes watching the game more fun. So there's like a lot of things working in its favor.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  It fills the void of like, how can I grow my money? And so, yeah, you're putting people in essentially a death loop where now they're not being trained to invest in something where they can win in the long term. Because if we could convey, like you'll hear stories about Ray Dalio. How does Ray Dalio become Ray Dalio? Ray Dalio caddies for people at a country club and those people tell him about, he, he says, I just overhear them talking about the stock market all the time. So he decides he's going to read the newspaper, find a stock, invest in that stock. He does it. He just gets lucky, man. And he ends up making a ton of money. So now he feels like, oh, the stock market thing is incredible. I'm a genius and I'm going to keep doing this thing. And then over time, he actually learns about the stock market, becomes Ray Dalio, one of the richest people ever to walk planet earth.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  And so it's like, if he hadn't overheard those people talking about it, if instead he was, you know, seeing reel after reel after reel of people, sports betting or whatever, it just, it takes you down that path. And so a lot of this stuff is just, what did you happen to bump into when you were young enough to get excited about that thing? And it controls so much more of your future life than you expected to.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  I want to make it practical, but is it just people, we need to teach people about the stock market more, we need to have a stock market class, because I feel like everybody says we should have financial planning in schools, but my rebuttal to that is half the teachers don't even understand financial planning.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Yes, very important, but you live in the age of AI. So 1,000% kids should be learning about the stock market, they should be getting taught by world-class AI, and someone will do this. They will put together an AI that is designed to teach kids about the stock market. And yes, I think that would be extraordinary. I think that the Trump accounts are absolutely incredible ways to get kids invested, because you can imagine if a kid is watching their portfolio and they understand what's happening to it, and then parents go, hey, you can put some of your own spending money into the stock market and watch, watch what happens to the one that's managed by the federal government, and watch what happens to the one that you manage. And if you're beating the federal government, that really tells you something.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  And if you're losing, that also tells you something. And that, I think, will get kids invested. And if they can do it in a way where they're actually learning the principles via AI, so it's not all just short-term thinking, it's actually, okay, this is how stocks work, this is the cause and effect, this is first principles thinking, this is the humility that you have to come to the market with, why do some things go up and other things go down? And listen, the vast majority of kids just aren't going to find it interesting enough, but there are going to be kids that do find it interesting, and over time, there are going to be real financial consequences to that. And so seeing that over time, then that starts to spread to parents who are like, hold on, I want to make sure that my kid really understands what to do here, so that you get that generation

• 43:34Speaker 00

  being raised on it, and then they teach their kids who are raised on it, and you start to get a level of financial literacy that we have not had up until this point.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Nice. Okay, I want to jump into Will Kane's breakdown, speaking of economics, of the socialist math. So he breaks down the DSA's platform and does the hard ones and zeros of it all. Set us up, Tom.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  All right, so the Cato Institute just priced out what the Democratic Socialists of America's platform would actually cost. And this is the single most important exercise that people can run whenever somebody puts something forward. So the whole idea behind socialism is we're going to tax the billionaires, we're going to get everything that we want. But the reality is, it's not going to work like that. I've tried to explain this to people, even if you confiscate 100% of billionaires' wealth, you're not going to be able to pay for these services. The reason that I say Bernie Sanders lies all the time is he will put forward a plan that requires something to be paid every year, and then he'll say, if we tax billionaires this, then we would be able to pay for, and then insert thing here.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  But he never says we'd be able to pay for it for only a year, and then the next year we have to tax again and again and again, and oh, by the way, even I acknowledge that if I do that every year, I'm going to break the engine of prosperity. So they never talk about that, even though he absolutely knows that that is true, he is using it to propagandize people. So what the Cato Institute is trying to do is give people the math to be able to run this. Will Kane ended up doing exactly that. And so we'll get deeper into some of the specifics here, but I'll just let Will walk through this, so let's play the clip from start to finish.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Let's start with that price tag. How do you get to $200 trillion over 10 years? The number is absolutely staggering, and it breaks down into categories, it breaks down into promises on the DSA's wish list. Let's start with universal health care. Over a 10-year period, that's estimated to cost as much as $75 trillion. But we don't stop there. There's been talk of reparations, add another $28 trillion to the wish list. How about a federal jobs guarantee? That's $60 trillion, potentially, at the high end, over 10 years. Now, if you add this all up, including housing for all, which is another $17 trillion, then

• 45:53Speaker 02

  you get to a high estimate of $211 trillion over 10 years. Bringing up the question again, who pays? Now, the DSA, it has an answer. The rich, big corporations. So let's look at reality. This lays out the high-end and the low-end estimates of the DSA's wish list costs. Now, if you taxed over a 10-year period all corporate profits, so you zeroed out corporate profits over a 10-year period, you'd bring in about $35 trillion. If you taxed the wealthiest in America at a rate of 40%, you'd bring in another half trillion dollars.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  If you confiscated all of their wealth, well, you'd bring in about $6.6 trillion.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  That number is a little disingenuous. It would be higher than that, but again, it would be a one-time thing. The reason is, and he puts it right there on the screen, but people are going to think it represents everybody, so that's Forbes 400 wealthiest, there are probably, I think, 900 billionaires? So that does not include all of it. If you roughly double that, you're getting closer. But the thing I need people to understand is that is the difference between confiscating wealth, which would already be impossible, so you're never, ever, ever, literally, it is impossible to get that number. Not like, oh, they're going to flee. You can't get that money. The second you try to sell it, it breaks the system, they won't be able to get those dollars and cents. But even if you could, it's still only a one-time fee.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  So you get what will sound like a lot of money, but just as a reminder, we're talking about only one decade of this spending, it's going to go on forever. If you confiscate 100% of people's wealth, you're basically, you would zero out the economy. So it would, that's not quite accurate. You would throw a monkey wrench into the economy, the likes of which we have never seen before, it would be so disruptive that it would be impossible to predict what's on the other side of it. It would be the equivalent of the meteorite striking the dinosaurs. It would be so, it would break so many things that it is quite literally impossible to imagine what the world looks like on the other side of that, other than to go the USSR or Mao's China. That will get you close, right?

• 48:11Speaker 00

  So you're talking about having to give the state control of everything, once the state has control of everything, everything's ruled by force, everything's top-down, yada, yada. I won't fractal on that. But I do want to be clear that he's, that number's probably about twice that if we're going to be in fiction land.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  On the left, or a member of the DSA would be saying, I don't want to stop at 40%. So let's go further. What if you did what America did in the mid-1950s and 60s, and you implemented a tax rate of over 90%? We would still then only bring in about $2 trillion over 10 years. So what the DSA's wish list, its empty promises run into, is the hard-cold reality of math. You add all that together, and you come nowhere near. Forget the high estimate of $200 trillion, but the low estimate of $71 trillion. So where do you go for the money? They go where they always end up going for the money, to you, the middle class.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  And then, of course, it's what do we look like? What's the country look like? What size of government are we dealing with? Right now, our government spending amounts to about 40% of gross domestic product. All right? The DSA's wish list agenda on that low-end projection would take it to 57% of GDP. But the high-end projection of more than $200 trillion over 10 years means that government spending would be 92% of GDP. That is a lot of government. That is actually a fundamental rewriting of the American economy, and a fundamental rewriting of America.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's an understatement. That, it would be, it is revolution at that point. At 92% of everything being in the hands of the government, you are communist at that point. So then the question becomes, well, is communism a valid economic model or not? And it is important to understand that capitalism isn't vibes, communism isn't vibes, these are economic systems that can be broken out in terms of what they mean, same with socialism. Again, socialism and communism, I will use interchangeably for the very fact that this is based on Marx's thinking. Marx never introduced the word socialism, he said communism, only communism. It was Lenin, one of the greatest murderers of all time, who introduced the word socialism, just to be abundantly clear.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  So if you think I'm being unfair, it is simply because those literally are the same thing. So... And yes, I'm well aware of what's going on in the Nordic countries, which if you, there was, I forget which one, Denmark, maybe, one of the prime ministers of one of the Nordic countries went on record to correct Bernie Sanders, who was saying that they're socialist countries, and they themselves said, "We are not socialist, we are free market economies." So anyway, there's all this tangle up because of people using words like socialism, or socialist, or communist, and it gets very muddy, but we can always bring it back to first principles. Who owns what?

• 51:20Speaker 00

  So when the government owns the means of production, you're talking about communism. Whether you call it socialism or communism, it literally doesn't matter, they are interchangeable in terms of the effects. So when you look at this breakdown, getting people to understand that

• 51:35Speaker 00

  whenever you talk about going all the way to confiscating wealth, which is the only way that you can get anywhere near paying for all of the things that they want to do, that that is a one-time event, and even that, like if you confiscated all the billionaire wealth, you couldn't pay off the debt, just to give you an idea. So the economies are so big that there's no way to do it just by taxing the wealthy. By taxing, forget it. You can't even do it by confiscating their money, forget their money. You can't even do it by confiscating their wealth, which is fictional. So to say it very succinctly, if you want to pay for everything on the socialist agenda, you can't even do it by confiscating a fictional amount of money.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  So that's where it's like, as a society, we can have what we want, but we've got to get into the nitty-gritty of what are we not going to pay for, so that we can pay for these things. That becomes a critical part of this. Now, in the Cato Institute's breakdown, they were looking at nine of the biggest proposals made by socialists. So we're talking, like Will Kane said, between 71 trillion, 212 trillion, and new federal spending over 10 years. Medicare for all alone runs between 40 to 75 trillion. Then add in reparations, which apparently Drew wants to talk about, so we'll get into that. Federal jobs guarantee, which is insane. Housing is a right, insane. Free college, actually far more interested in that one, but that's just me.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Again, we can have what we want, we just can't have everything. Expanded retirement benefits, I think we should be moving in the opposite direction, personally, making people work longer, don't expect that to be popular, but nonetheless, you've got a demographic challenge, so unless AI solves that problem for you, anyway, I think that if we've got kids paying into that system, they should be able to get, take advantage of it, and not have it be completely bankrupt by the time that they're older. Call me crazy. And then you've got the green energy build-out. Okay, at the low end, US government spending hits 57% of GDP. Kids, that's crazy. That is crazy. At the high end, it's 92%. At that point, you are the USSR.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  So what I want to be clear about is, we're not talking about what you see in the Nordic model, this is not a European welfare state, okay? It is literally Soviet-era state control of national output, which obviously did not go well. It didn't go well for very mechanistic reasons, that can be explained. And the DSA, socialists, they all want you to believe that you're going to be able to get this from the wealthy. But when you run the numbers, you realize, even if you go beyond the 400 wealthiest, and you go to just everybody that has wealth, it's not quite doubling that number, but we'll ballpark it at that, so call it $12 trillion.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  That's confiscating all of it, not taxing it, it's stealing it, to use my language. You've only covered 9% of the low estimate, when you look at just the 400, so call it 18% of the low estimate if you double it, which isn't realistic, but hey, let's just be crazy. So, and as a reminder, you only get to do that once, and you still have all of this stretching out into the future. So we're talking about just covering, whatever, 18% of a 10-year plan, okay? What happens the next 10 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, is crazy. So as a PSA reminder to everybody, corporate taxes in the Nordic countries, which is often

• 55:12Speaker 00

  held up as, "No, no, no, we don't mean socialism, we just mean the Nordic countries." So corporate taxes are lower in the Nordic countries than they are here. Now, corporate profits after tax over the next decade are about $35 trillion. Even if you seize every dollar from every company for 10 years straight, that's still only half of the low estimate. Hopefully you guys see, like, the numbers just don't add up, so they can say a slogan of the billionaires are going to pay for it, that we're going to tax companies for it, but there isn't that much money coming. The only place that you're going to be able to find that kind of money is the middle and working class, and that presumes that you didn't break the engine of prosperity that creates the middle class, to make sure that they're getting paid, on the way to trying

• 55:57Speaker 00

  to get all of this money. So this is where it's just absolutely crazy. By the way, if you do all of that, you kill the profit motive. So there's no year 11, there's no year 12, this doesn't stretch on into the future, people just, I mean, honestly, there's no year 3 or 4. People just realize, yeah, there's no point, 92% of what I do goes to the government, it's nonsensical. So, yeah, it will break, as it has done. Remember, even just wealth taxes, the countries, it's, I forget the exact percentage, but I think there are only two countries left that have attempted a wealth tax that didn't end up reversing it. And so the list of countries is very long, of people who've tried that, only to move away from it.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Also, look at what's going on in South America with this mass reversal of socialism, people rejecting left-leaning leadership, and now trying to move to the right, Argentina being the, you know, the one that's farthest along. So when you look at all of that, you've got the people that are trying it in the real world, and they're saying, "Yeah, this isn't working, we're moving away from it." You have historical examples that show that this doesn't work, you have future-facing math equations telling you that the money that you're saying you're going to get doesn't exist, not when you start looking at having to take wealth, turn it into real money, which will already be devastating, and then trying to capture that will be far less, even if you capture it all, which they're not even saying they're going to do, but even if you

• 57:21Speaker 00

  did it, you still can't get anywhere near the cost that this would incur. And so what ends up happening is, if you guys were here on Wednesday when we did the breakdown of why socialism has failed every time it's been tried, what you end up getting is a society where the same car that was being made 30 years ago is the exact same car that's being made today, because there's no way to get the price signal to do the innovation, and all of the top-down stuff just doesn't work. So if you're going to even get to the Nordic countries, you have to do a broad-based tax of the middle and working class, everybody gets taxed, and then you can have a large safety net. You still can't have socialism, but you can at least have a large safety net.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Okay, I feel like we need to put some road markers in the conversation. So first, politics is political spectrum, not everybody that's a Democrat is DSA, not every DSA member is a socialist, and not every person who's asking for free healthcare is asking for communism. So there are nuances in those.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Yes, I'll grant the.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Just like there's Republicans and not everybody's MAGA.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but when you say that not every member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Not every Democrat is a DSA member.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, but you did go on to say, "Not every member of the DSA is a socialist."

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Not everybody who's advocating for free healthcare is a socialist.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Okay, that's not what you said. So are you backing off the stated claim that not every member of the DSA is a socialist?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  It's in their name, so I would've seen every member in the DSA as a socialist.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  As long as, on that, I will grant you that this is all a spectrum.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Copy.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Sure?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Okay. Point number two, the math still breaks.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  But them adding reparations in there was hilarious, because DSA members don't even have black people in the organization.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Which is wild.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  So I don't understand how we're getting involved in that conversation, black people have got nothing to do with the DSA, don't bring this into y'all business, y'all gonna take care of that.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  As the CEO of the black community, it's been a while, Drew.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  I use that position very lightly, because I don't like to speak for other black folks, but don't put us into DSA nonsense. That's the second thing. Third thing, I wanted to pull up some charts. I am advocating for the Nordic model of healthcare.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  I'm advocating for it in America.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  I'm advocating for America because I think it is actually American. There's the base model, if you need healthcare, if something's wrong with you, you can go see a doctor, and it's covered. But there's also, I don't want to be around poor people, I can get the rich express lane, and that's the same, it's available for us as well, too. I think all the rich people get to not see poor people when they're getting their healthcare, and all the people who are bleeding out, don't have to bleed out and go into medical debt. I think everybody's happy with this model. I want to pull up two quick statistics. In US, we spend, and this is 2024, we spend 5.3 in healthcare spending for 330 million people, and people are still like, not having Medicare, dying in medical debt, dying in the streets, all these things. The European Union, the Union has a block, different countries, different styles, but

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  the big boys, Germany's, all of them, they definitely have a universal model of health insurance.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  449 million, billion people, 449 million people, they spend 1.5 million, 1.5 trillion in healthcare spending. So something that Mark Cuban has advocated for, and nobody else is talking about it, even the Ro Khanna bill, that Bernie Sanders bill that they're pushing, that is political jarbo 101. I think they're just pushing that to create a problem that isn't going to be solved, just like we're now talking about trans people who aren't in the WNBA, but everybody wants to talk about trans people again in the WNBA. It's this thing that I can use to politically get power for, but I'm not actually going to solve it. It's the NGO problem.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  That seemed like such a weird thing to tack on there.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Because we have.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Can you define the NGO problem as you understand?

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  We don't want to fix the thing that we're supposed to be fixing, we just want to use this to siphon money.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. I think it's a little bit different than that, but I get where you're, why you're likening the two, okay?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Elizabeth Warren is getting Big Pharma money. Bernie is getting Big Pharma money. I love Obama, Obama got Big Pharma money.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  So there are certain people that are being propped up by this industry, that they're also talking about blowing up. So as some. A person, a man will not go against the thing that is paying him for his principles. Like Bernie Sanders is not going to mortgage his two houses on top of his third one, just so that way he can give everybody healthcare. He's going to keep trying to get four more houses and five more houses. He's not going to stop that.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  So I think that there is a practical way that doesn't blow up the budget, that doesn't turn us into eating babies, that doesn't kill 45 million people, that America can do healthcare smart and responsibly.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  I think we need to break up the monopolies. I think it's ridiculous that United Healthcare is the health insurance provider and the person that you get your drugs from and is getting backstopped by pharmaceutical industry. Like, they're all circle jerking, just like with the AI thing. They're just putting money all around each other and then they're charging the government 10x what they're actually doing for. Mark Cuban had a good post, and this is the last thing I'll get off my soapbox. The federal government pays for army, military, all their healthcare, no problem, 100% coverage. They don't know how much they're paying in medical. They just write them a check every year.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  That is the problem. The problem that the health, the health insurance companies just get a blank check from the United States government. And they say, yeah, we got all these people, it's gonna be a trillion dollars. It's not itemized, it's not broken out, we don't have, when you go to the hospital, they give you the bill after you got the service done, you don't know, can I get this? Can I get a half of an X-ray and two mayonnaise? I don't need the mayonnaise at home. Like, I could go to the grocery store and tell you what I don't want and what I want, but the help, and the hospital is just, shut up, say yes, and then I'll give you the bill at the end.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  It's wild.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  It's crazy. Soapbox done.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  So I agree with almost everything that you said. If you and I got together and said, okay, we're really gonna solve this problem, I think that we could solve it in a sensible fashion. So let me lay out the things that I think we need to do, keep this nice and specific, and then maybe we do a bill you, St. Just ticket, and we get this fucking finally finished. So it's gotta look like this. Cuban is the, the great example of how you can do this well. You've got a truly pedigreed entrepreneur who knows how to build a real business, who can put his finger on the first principles problem. So you've got your PBMs that are causing you massive issues, you've got to get rid of this, you've got to get transparency.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Everybody should have to publish their pricing, there should be competition over pricing. We should be trying to innovate, drive costs down. You can't have the government guarantee everything. It creates the same derangement as what we're seeing in home loans, as we see in college debt, where it was nonsensical, those people should never have been loaned to in the first place. You see that when you're just paying money, it's like that service probably shouldn't have existed. That hospital should be run in a better fashion. And when you have the market pressures on you, suddenly you have to innovate, you actually have to provide a service that people are thrilled with, at a price that they think is reasonable. And so going through and finding out where are all those beats

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  that are allowing for things to be, charged rates that are just, you should literally be in prison for charging somebody that rate. Because it's one thing, if you want to charge an absurd rate, then people should know about it ahead of time, it should be published, it should be easy for everybody to compare, so that people can go, I don't want to go get my treatment there, I want to go over here where they have better pricing, better outcomes, whatever. And people have that level of transparency. So 1,000%. Also, we have to be honest about the fact that a big part of the reason that these other countries have the healthcare that they have, that they have the standard of care that they have, is because of America's broken system.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  So I hate to say it, but the way that America works with the government, paying these absolutely exorbitant rates, is we end up funding all of the research and development. So these companies go, okay, we're gonna get the stupid fees for these drugs, that's gonna make up for all of the R and D, give us all of our profit, and then we'll let, we'll sell it to the other countries at a better rate, and then they can go and get it at a reasonable cost. And once you break that, there's gonna be real consequences to these other countries. And so you heard Trump talk about that at the beginning of his term. These guys are gonna pay. Like, America's not gonna pay more than other people. If you just did that, and you said, this is gonna be pricing parity.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, what you're not going to see is America's prices just drop and everybody stays low. What you're gonna see is water rebalancing. And it's gonna find its way to, this is what this costs us, plus profit margin to be sure, but this is what it costs us, and so now everybody's sharing in that. Also, Europe has been under the security umbrella of America for 80 years. And now that's ending. And those guys are having to spend real money on their defense. As those guys have to spend their whatever, 3% to 5% of their GDP on defense, they are going to find themselves in a position where it's like, oh shit, we can't let as many immigrants in as we thought we could. Look at the Nordic countries, all of whom now are having an allergic reaction to immigrants,

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  because they realize, one, they're not integrating, and two, they are a drain on social services. So you're gonna see that spread around. Now, everybody's gonna have to be like, oh shit, like, paying for all this healthcare is not as easy as we thought. And so if they don't do the Mark Cuban of it all, and actually figure out, how do we make this an innovative industry that has market forces against it, they're never gonna be able to solve that problem. And so this is where the government is gonna have to get smarter than they have been historically. Fingers crossed that will be with AI. But they're gonna have to get smarter than they've been historically, because without those market pressures, it will stagnate.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  So they're counting on America to have these abused, weird, broken, must get rid of, but at least some exposure to the market, in order to draft off of that. So that's where I'm like, this is a global problem, more than it is just an American problem. But the key thing that you're bringing up, that I think is critical for everybody to understand, is we pay more per person and get worse results. So it's not like you even need to pay more. You might end up, as a government, being able to pay less and get better results. So now we just have to focus on the weird fucking ways that we leverage tax dollars to act like money in politics.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  It has the same distorting effect when the government just has an absolutely blank check to, I can print as much money as I want to give every politician, regardless of party affiliation, to say, yep, we're gonna keep giving you all those free things, and nobody's gonna touch entitlements, and however big the deficit gets, we'll just keep writing that check. That has a distorting effect, because nobody ever has to choose. And in real life, I mean, this is something that you talk about in filmmaking, like, literally your first day of film school. You have visions in your head of creating a blockbuster movie. And when I was teaching film, the first thing I would say to my students is, make a film that has a scope that matches your black and white silent film.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Do not make a film where I'm expecting the people to talk. Put them in a situation where it's not weird that they're not saying anything. Because the second they're in a situation where I expect them to speak, now all of a sudden I see your budget. But if you let the constraint make you make a film that's like, oh, this film is even better, because I've walked in with a set of constraints and I make this work. The most famous example in filmmaking is Jaws. If you've seen the original Jaws, they never show the shark. That was not the intent. The intent in the beginning was to show the shark, but the mechanical shark kept breaking. That constraint forced Steven Spielberg to go to the sound, the musician, John Williams, who did the score, and say, I need you to represent the shark, so that I'm not gonna show it, but people will know that it's there. That makes the film 1,000 times better. If we go into this.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Dun, dun, dun.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  Dun, dun.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Right, the most famous three notes in history. So, two notes. What ends up happening is, if we did that to healthcare, and we said, okay, we are going to get the best results that we have in terms of life expectancy, a number of people that are impacted negatively by healthcare debt, it is gonna be like absolute top shelf. However, we are going to constrain it to what the budget is. Now, if you can get the profit incentive somehow, some way in that, can be based on results only, right? But somehow you incentivize people to bring that innovation into it, which maybe it's, the innovation is all at the level of equipment or whatever.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  So those guys can just run their equipment company, and that's where people are getting wealthy. Great, but whatever. You need some sort of market force where now you've got competition, so that you get X-rays that get cheaper over time, your MRIs get cheaper over time. That's what you need. Innovation is an economic force that drives prices down. But when you don't have the constraint, you don't have the competition, there is no impulse to make things cheaper over time. That is the exact thing that we have to combat. But the open checkbook is the thing that gets you the highest price per person with some of the worst results.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  100%. Okay, so back to Will Kane's list. I think we took care of universal healthcare, I think we took out reparations. Federal jobs guarantee, he said that that's ridiculous. There is a magic trick that Democrats do with increased job growth when they're in term, and a lot of it is an explosion in government jobs.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Yup.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Some of those government jobs are necessary, infrastructure, construction, some of them are bureaucratic. We have to just keep a spade a spade.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  You're saying the government shouldn't have a hand in jobs at all? What is the ridiculousness of?

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  What I'm saying is, uh, jobs guarantee.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  You shouldn't guarantee that everybody's gonna get a job.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  So, jobs are not a right. Housing is not a right. This is the shit that we had to scrape and fight and claw our way to get to the point where we had a stable society, where we could even have somebody have a house that they could pay for at a city registry, own it, and not have somebody come and take it from them. Like, that already is the answer to society over hundreds of thousands of years going, "I don't like when people come in and raid my village, rape my wife, uh, take all my stuff." Like, that sucks. And so I wanna put something in place where I don't have to spend all my time training with a sword, so I can kill somebody when they come in my village. Because people have lost sight of, that's what humans do when there is just the law of the jungle.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I have a quick caveat to that. Then couldn't you also say, "Safety isn't a right"?

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Well, if you wanna go law of the jungle, safety really isn't a right. But, if you want to say, "What ought the government provide?", I would say, "Safety is the thing that they should be doing." They should be protecting private property, they should be guaranteeing bodily safety a thousand. But, like, those are one and two for me in terms of what their job is.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Help me, help me square that, though. Because they should protect the private property, but my access to private property isn't a right?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  No, your access to somebody else's private property isn't a right. And, I can't, what I'm saying is, the government should not guarantee that you have something that you didn't earn.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  You may hate that, but does that at least make it clear what I'm saying?

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Okay, perfect. So, um, you, we agree, when we put a government in place, that there is gonna be one thing that I'm gonna let you get without you earning it, and that's your own physical safety. So, you don't have to go learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and knife fighting, uh, or weapons disarming, you don't have to walk around in Kevlar. Uh, I'm gonna have the monopoly on violence, and I'm gonna square that. That's literally the thing. We give up a whole lot of stuff, so that we have that, from each other, from outsiders that would come in and take over our country. Okay. But, everything else, like, you need to earn. And so, when I hear people say that, um, safety, or not safety, that property is a right, or housing is a right, it's like, no, it's not.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  If you're not doing the things you need to do to be able to earn and pay for that thing that requires the labor of others, then, what are we talking about? That's where people get lost, is, these are things that you can't have unless somebody does things. So, if you're saying, "Everybody should have the right to, um, go out into international waters, pile up sand to the point, and have their own country," okay, sure. Like, if we wanna say that people can go off into international waters and do their thing, uh, and if they're able to build and survive, yeah, nobody should be able to mess with them. Now, they're international waters, so they're gonna have to build their own standing army, and you find yourself right back to building a country and being in this situation. But, it is the only reason that people can't go out into the woods and live off the land, is they have to buy that land.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  So, if you can, I don't wanna derail on that, but, yes, if somebody has their own, uh, space that is outside of a country and not subject to its laws and jurisdictions, they should be able to do what they want.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  But, otherwise, we're talking about people trying to take advantage of somebody else's labor. This is why I'm irate with, uh, Tracy Rosenthal, I believe is her name? The DSA girl who's talking about abolishing the rent, wrote the book, literally abolish rent. Uh, she's expecting the labor of others to come to her for free. It, it's absolutely criminal. When you tax somebody, you're already taking a piece of somebody's labor. Um, and so, yeah, that gets very ugly very fast. Okay, so, when somebody talks about guaranteeing, um, jobs, I go, okay, one, just on a moral place, that's ridiculous, because you're now taxing other people to guarantee somebody else who may not be earning that job, that they're gonna get a job. It, it's absolutely crazy-making.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Uh, also, it destroys your viability on the international stage, because you're not able to compete. You've guaranteed people's jobs, so they don't have to compete, they don't have to up-level their skills in order to get a job. You need market forces for somebody to turn their potential into actual skills. And so, this is the rich kid problem. If you aren't having to fight for something to get great, then you won't get great. And so, now you have a nation of people who never got great. Uh, also, you can just point to Japan and say, "Where does the problem end up?" Japan, the money is so cheap, you have what are called zombie companies. Those zombie companies soak up, uh, otherwise talented people who have quite literally been promised a job for life. And because there was no inflation for so long, they could get away with that.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  So, all these companies don't actually turn a meaningful enough profit to survive. And the second the cheap money disappears, you're gonna see a rash of companies just fold. Uh, but, the good news is, that will free that talent back up to go out into the workforce and build innovative companies. So, going back to one of the earlier things that I said, which is, innovation is the very thing that drives quality up and takes cost down. And so, if you don't have people competing for jobs, you won't have that innovation. If you don't have companies competing for talent, then you also won't get innovative companies that have to compete for the consumer. So, getting the competition back into the marketplace is the very thing that we should be striving for. So, that's why I reacted that way, to guarantee jobs. It's fucking stupid.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  It's stupid on its face, because it requires other people's labor for free, and it is stupid in terms of the knock-on effects, because it will weaken that person, the companies that they work for, and then the nation as a whole.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  I feel like you probably feel the same way about Housing for All then.

• 1:16:51Speaker 00

  Yes, Housing is not a right, that's fucking crazy.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  What if we, like, re-retrofitted prisons? And it's the shittiest cube, but everybody has a cut in a cylinder, four-cylinder wall?

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  You can't guarantee it. The reason you can't guarantee it is the person who knows, no matter what I do, I'm gonna be able to get this house, they will abuse it, it will turn into a shithole extremely fast, because people are not held to account for, I mean, we just rounded to rent. You have to be able to pay rent. But, there's some qualifying thing that you must do in order to maintain that. Up to and including, don't be a dickhead neighbor who makes way too much noise, right? The cops will get called on you. Uh, don't, if you're a renter, don't damage the apartment. So, you can do inspections, and if you see that they're doing something to damage the apartment, then you can evict them, at least in a sane state. So, at all times, people should, having to be do, having to do things to earn their spot.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  And so, whenever you're talking about a scarce resource, even if that scarce resource is just geography, so, let's say that we guarantee that people had a house. People will want a house or an apartment complex in a certain area. And so, you will always come back to, "Why does this person get this scarce thing and not the other person?" And so, you end up putting requirements in place. "I think it is right, I think it is moral, I think it is just." The, yeah, we must do that. These things should not be a right. Treating them as a right creates the rich kid problem. I don't, yeah, it's stupid. People are mollycoddling, this is the feminization of everything, where it's like, "I just wanna make sure everyone's taken care of." You should instead, wanna make sure that everybody is turning their potential into actual skillset.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Then, we can talk about, "Hey, some people just don't have the IQ, or a bad break befalls them, they're a quadriplegic, whatever." And that we wanna make sure that we take care of those people. I love it. But, you can't let, like, uh, paranoid schizophrenics run around stabbing people. Can't do that.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Uh, copy that. Okay, let's jump over to a PSL founder. Um, PSL's another, what is it, uh, something for social liberation, socialist?

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  They're basically a, uh, version, they're a DSA competitor, would be a super easy one. Well, I can give you, so, the origins of the, uh, PSL, they were founded-

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Party for Socialism and Liberation, sorry.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  Perfect. They were founded in June, uh, eighteenth, twenty, two thousand and four, uh, as a split from the Workers' World Party. They're headquartered in San Francisco and Washington DC. Um, they are governed by a central committee, no surprise there, organizing local branches. They, their electoral footprint is very small, but it's growing. Um, so, right now, I think they're what, point eleven percent? So, point eleven percent, uh, in the 2024 presidential ticket. They took a hundred and sixty-seven thousand votes, almost a hundred and sixty-eight thousand. So, think of them like a smaller version of the DSA. Uh, will they be part of a coalition with the DSA? Possibly.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Um, so, anyway, as you sort of get deeper and deeper into the world of socialist, uh, the socialist movement in America, you're gonna come across them.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  I feel like they're a tenth the size of the libertarian movement, as for scale.

• 1:20:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  You think, or that you'd look that up?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  It's what libertarians are one million, they pulled one million votes from the last election, so, at a hundred thousand.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  One of our comrades get into the US Congress. We're going to use it to disrupt the US Congress, to expose the US Congress, to expose the capitalists, to expose the billionaires, and not try to reform the capitalist system, but to expose why it should be toppled and replaced by a rational, humane system called socialism.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  That's so wild, rational and humane, Jesus Christ. So, this guy is either so ignorant to history, uh, that he just cannot fathom that these things do not go well, um, or he is evil, and he knows exactly what happens, and this is a naked bid for power. But, the reason that I'm gonna keep playing clips like this, is I want people to see that you're gonna get propagandized, socialists are gonna say that, "Oh, we're not for seizing the means of production." "Oh, we're not for communism." Uh, yes, they are. This is a revolutionary movement. They, now, the great news is, uh, because they can feel so much energy on their side, they're going completely mask-off, and they're just saying the things. Uh, so, here is a guy that has no sense of national politics.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  He's in his bubble, and he thinks, "Cool, I can just say all the things that I actually believe." And they are telling you precisely that they are looking for revolution, they are looking to topple the entire system, and then they insert, uh, empty words and think that nobody's gonna go, "Hey, walk me through exactly how you're gonna pull this off." Because eventually, this becomes policy. As this becomes policy, what are you gonna do? This is exactly, we did the walkthrough of what it looked like in Berlin. When that city got divided in half and you had the West Berlin and you had East Berlin. And in West Berlin, it was beholden to all the rules of America and Europe. And then East Berlin was beholden to the Soviet Union.

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  And low and behold, the Soviet Union realized, uh-oh, we've got to figure out a way to price things because you can't have this without price signal. Because otherwise, it just becomes a bunch of people standing in line like peasants to get their bread handed to them. It became that anyway, but they were trying to avoid it. And so what ends up happening is you come up with some sort of money equivalent so that people can come in and buy things. And then, oh, things have to cost something. And so you try to get to a centralized pricing structure instead of just letting it be decentralized. So the experiment gets run in the same city with people of the same DNA, the same climate breathing, the same air. And what ends up happening? People that do a bottom-up version of free market capitalism, they end up having a thriving economy.

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  You can get a car instantly in a day. You've got whatever, I forget the, it was like 3,000 SKUs versus 12,000 SKUs or something in the grocery store. Things where the cost is going down over time. And then over on the Soviet side, it's a 10-year waitlist for a new car. A 10-year waitlist. That's not me making up a number. A 10-year waitlist for a car that did not improve over 30 years. It was more expensive to buy a used car because at least that, you didn't have to wait 10 years for it. So when you talk about this humane system, it ends up being inhumane. Plus, you cannot understand a socialist unless you understand resentment. These are people, again, this has been studied across cultures, they will vote for something

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  that hurts the poor as long as it hurts the wealthy. And they will not vote for something that helps the poor if it also helps the wealthy. So this is not a humane thing, no matter how many times they try to say that. Yeah, this stuff is just ridiculous. But I am grateful that they're just saying the thing now. As you can imagine, my spreadsheet of this is growing and growing and growing.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Tom has some spreadsheets for y'all, boy.

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  I got some spreadsheets.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  We got some spreadsheets. It's gonna be funny.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  How controversial do you want to get, Drew? I got some spreadsheets brewing in the background. Woo, buddy.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm getting frustrated because when Trump first came in office, everybody wanted to yell and call him a Nazi. And I'm like, don't call him a Nazi. Call him corrupt. Call him a grifter. Call him a swindler. Call him a scammer. But don't call him a Nazi. Like, he has things that he actually has done on paper that are bad, that we can prosecute him for, that would, other people go to jail for, that other people would be politically exiled for, and he somehow keep beating the case. But don't call him a Nazi. Like, that's a waste of an argument. And I feel like with the Democratic Party, at first we kept saying, no, they're fine. No, they're not communist. And then every day, it seems like they're getting more beholden with those primary wins. They're starting to say it with their chest. So there is a certain sec in the Democratic Party that you guys do have to call out.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Like, you can't just act like, oh, the NSA is cool, they're just helping us. They will try to take over this party. So it is beholden to the Democrats to look around and say, hey, call a spade a spade. They actually are doing something that could hurt your party and America as a whole if they get unchained. Now, again, if you want to talk about housing, you want to talk about education, you want to talk about universal healthcare, those are things that have proven models other places. Yeah, cool. But when you start talking about revolution and communism, let's just blow the system up. You don't understand the harm that that can bring, the second and third order consequences of that.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Also, all you have to do is look at every time that this has been tried, where you have the revolutionary energy, what ends up going. So, yeah, there are a litany of countries that you can look at. A fun one, Pol Pot, if you want to see what he did in Cambodia, that's a good time. The French Revolution, obviously, is the most famous of where this happens. But, yeah, none of them go well. None. Zero.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  I feel like there's a lot of things. I'm trying to, like, push everything together. Oh, good thing. Let's talk about good news. I want to talk about good news.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  I like good news.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Yes, we need to change the repertoire of it. Apple just broke ground to their, or just flipped the switch to their advanced manufacturing center in Houston. That's a win. So they are now manufacturing the Mac Mini back in America as opposed to in China, what they were doing all these other years. This is part of Apple's $600 billion commitment to rebuilding in America. For context, they gave China $600 billion when they started making iPhones out there. So.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  A little late, but I appreciate the Mac Mini and the jobs in Houston and the building and the tax breaks. I'm sure Trump and them gave them, but.

• 1:26:24Speaker 00

  Hey, listen, we've got to incentivize people to come back. You're not gonna get here without carrot and stick. So, listen, Trump's economic policy has been largely a disaster, but this at least is something, it's showing that the pressure that he put on these corporations is actually making them come back. Now, I'll be interested to see, given the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs, if some companies try to slow-roll this. But shout out to Apple, man, for actually opening a facility here. I know we've got some chips facilities coming online. We need to talk about, you want to talk about good news. We also need to talk about these data centers, man. So the working class, the middle class, will never thrive unless they have jobs that

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  they can go for, that are dynamic, that are well-paying jobs, that give them not only financial means, but give them a sense of fulfillment because they're actually doing something, building something, being proud of their contribution to some of the most iconic products in the world, man. Listen, I've worked in factories. I used to make paint. Okay, I used to be inside of a vat with a giant brush, cleaning them between runs. So I know what it's like to be a factory worker. I know what it's like to see the product on the shelf and be like, yo, I actually fucking made that. It is a very good feeling.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  And so for Americans, hopefully in an increasing rate, to be able to say, listen, I made that thing. And we make a product that is, you know, going the world over. And it is something that's pushing us forward. It's innovative, it's cool. Like, that is a really good feeling. And so getting out of this vision of America as like this, just we're financialized, we're all white collar, like, it ends up being a very ungrounded place to operate from because a huge portion of the world is extraordinarily gifted at making things, at engineering. We were just talking about this. I hadn't heard about this till recently, but, so Elon is building, and I think these

• 1:28:29Speaker 00

  slingshots qualify, but he's trying to build mass drivers. And they had, I'd always heard about it, talked about on the moon. So we're gonna build mass drivers on the moon that'll launch satellites out into space. You literally just use, instead of rocket propulsion, you use, like, physical force and you just throw it out into space. And now I hear that they're actually building these on Earth. And so you have engineers that are essentially building a trebuchet that can throw a satellite into outer space. That is crazy. But that's the power of engineering. That's the power of teaching kids to make things, to actually move electrons around, to figure out how the inner workings of something happen so that you can create a thing and put it out into the world.

• 1:29:13Speaker 00

  Now, this is obviously a very small version of this, but even just building video games. I went from like, oh, I'm just the CEO and I'm telling a bunch of other people what to do, to actually getting into the guts of the game and building with Unreal Engine. And doing that, having to understand the technical side, has been incredible. To see the things that you can do to create something that didn't exist before, and it now does exist because you understand the engineering of a thing, that's incredible. And so having these factories here and giving people a chance to start as a line worker and work their way up to really getting inside the guts of the company. Now, remember, for anybody that doesn't know my background, I spent an inordinate amount

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  of time actually in factories, wearing a hairnet, making protein bars on a line. We had 300,000 square feet, tens of millions of dollars of equipment. We were engineering our own equipment. I have spent time in the thick of this. And I've watched people go from minimum-wage line worker to working their way up to overseeing divisions. It's incredible. It's such a phenomenal journey for somebody that either didn't have the economic ability to go to college, didn't have the family reinforcing a trajectory in college, didn't want to go to college, to be able to find a place to go and work and see that product on the shelves. It's a really big deal. So seeing this come back to America is something that we should aggressively be celebrating

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  and doing as much of as we can. And that goes out to every country, man. If you outsource all of your critical manufacturing to other countries, you are gonna find yourself in a world of hurt. It might make your widgets cheaper in the short term, but it's gonna make you beholden to somebody else in the long run.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Going back to the data center story, this was based in Quincy, Washington, where a data center that was built there paid 57% of the property taxes. They funded a 15 million aquatic center with a pool, water slides and lazy river in 143,000 square foot sports complex. They created almost 1,000 jobs. The city admin called it a miracle. This is, this is a good sign, but we do have to also talk about the data centers in like Texas that Abbott had to pause because they asked for more demand than the entire state of Texas had.

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  But that's for electricity. So I want to be very clear. We are being propagandized against data centers. And more and more information is coming out in the pro data center camp. For like the last three lives, I've had something in the doc that was us. Us is America. Having a data center's success story. I want to start covering this more and more. Don't make me start another spreadsheet. But this is really exciting to see. So in terms of water usage, you're being propagandized. In terms of there being all this pollution, you're being propagandized. I haven't gone deep enough. I'm not going to be able to give you receipts yet. I will put that together. But looking at some of the people that are starting to speak up about this. Like if you look at, I think I have it in the doc.

• 1:32:04Speaker 00

  Nick Carter did a tweet. He didn't give enough receipts, which is why I didn't do a whole segment about it, but it's very interesting. So Nick Carter, who I consider a very credible voice. I'll let you guys make your own determination, but he says basically what I'm saying now. You guys are being propagandized. So he goes down with all the things you're being told. Data centers consume meaningful amounts of water. They don't. Data centers are responsible for power prices increasing over the last decade. They aren't. Inflation and decarbonization in blue states is. Data centers impose costs on local communities. They generally enrich them and make life better, which is exactly what we're talking about here. And the Washington example is not the only example of a town who's like, holy hell.

• 1:32:49Speaker 00

  Like we've got so much tax revenue being generated by this thing that we are in a much better financial situation than we were before. Data centers are being built for flock mass surveillance. Flock accounts for generously 0.01% of the data center build out. Data centers create noise and other pollution. They don't. Again, these are like, you'd have to go deeper on these to find out if he's just spinning bullshit. So I owe you some receipts on this, but just to keep going. Data centers are being built in residential areas. They aren't. Data centers get tax abatements that entirely eliminate their tax burden. Never the case. Abatements typically only cover a small fraction of the taxes.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  And data centers pay a half dozen different types of taxes that go to the state and city. They are always net and meaningful taxpayers. So he goes on to say, virtually everything your conspiracy minded friend believes about data centers is false. And it's also completely trivial to debunk using a simple Google or AI query to start putting this all together, which is something I owe you guys. Cause right now we're just sort of doing the blind thing.

• 1:33:54Speaker 04

  I have the water one, if you want the water stat.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  I also have the residential area one, if we want the residential area.

• 1:33:59Speaker 00

  Go ahead and read those today, just so people don't feel like we're trying to, hold on. So people don't feel like we're trying to run from it. But this is one of those where propaganda, gonna propagandize. And so what you need to do, and what I'll do when I go deeper on this is say, okay, here's the light pro, here's the negative, here's where it actually connects out to reality. Because even what I just read, there's not enough information there. It's possible Nick is just propagandizing. I'm giving, he carries credibility in my life because I've been following him for a long time. But it's like, yes, these things need to be connected dots. So what we're about to give are more unconnected dots. But I don't want you guys to feel like I'm unwilling to have them said, so fire away.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  The source for the water one, Florida Water and Pollution Control Operators Association, an official like organization, says that a large facility can consume between 1 million to 5 million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the daily usage of a small town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. And that is water that is not given back because 85% of it evaporates after cooling the system.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  Okay, so they live in closed systems. So I know for a fact if they don't talk about, if they are trying to imply that all of that is new fresh water every day. That's a blatant lie, because these systems recycle the water. Now, how much of that evaporates and has to be drawn in new, I don't know. Maybe the 85% number is real, but I have a feeling that it's not.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  Sorry, it's from a most policy initiative written by Dr. Vikram Lackenpaul. So that's two different sources.

• 1:35:33Speaker 00

  But what I'm saying is I have never once heard people talking about the water say that, oh yeah, that's a one time draw in that's spun around because these are closed systems. It's not like the water comes in, gets polluted and then sent back out and they need fresh water every day. It certainly isn't that 100% of the water just evaporates off and they need new water every day. I don't know the number well enough to know if 85% is a real number or not. But the fact that they don't talk about the fact that this is a closed system tells me that they have an agenda that they're trying to push, rather than that they're trying to be honest. Now, in terms of water usage, this is where people said, hold on, you guys were up in arms about data centers as if the real beef is water, but I don't hear you saying anything about golf courses.

• 1:36:17Speaker 00

  That tells you, given that golf courses use more water, this isn't about water usage. This is about people hating AI. So that I think is where this all starts to get very complicated. If people really had paranoia over water usage, they would have been picketing outside of golf courses for years and they don't. So that's where it's like, ah, this stuff gets more complicated.

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Cause there's certain, the way that data centers are being rolled out, they're being kind of imposed on us. Just like 10 years ago, all those Amazon warehouses were being imposed on local communities.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  When you say imposed on, given that they can vote to deny them, what do you mean by imposed?

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  A lot of those things happen before committees actually get approved. For example, the Georgia family story. Georgia Power is using eminent domain to clear a pathway for a new lot transmission line. They have to build for data centers. So technically a data center isn't being built where their house is, but they need to clear that path out to do a transmission line. So they're forcing people out and they're giving, hey, we're going to offer you money to move. You have like, we're offering you money, yes, but you're still forcing me to move in order for a data center to exist.

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  On that, I get why people would have beef with eminent domain. That's always going to be a thing that people have beef with. Then that becomes a question of, okay, is this?

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  And I'm saying that to say people aren't using eminent domain to build golf courses.

• 1:37:32Speaker 00

  For sure. But there's a very good reason why that would be true. And there's a very good reason why I would say that AI data centers are the kind of thing that if like, that's what we have to do to get something in place, that there's reasonable moments where that might be true. Now I haven't looked into this, so this might be one where I'm like, oh, this is grotesque. They never should have done it. So I don't want to say that I'm going to bat for this blindly. I would need to know more information. But let's talk about one, we have to start separating out. Okay, what's the real water usage? Let's not bullshit ourselves. We have to answer the question about why did we not have beef with water usage on golf courses?

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  Cause you went from, okay, but they're not using eminent domain for golf courses. Yes, but I was bringing up golf courses, not for eminent domain, but for water use. So I'm just saying, people aren't actually triggered by water use. They're triggered by the AI data center and now they're doing mental gymnastics to figure out why they don't like it. I would say they don't like AI data centers because they are worried that AI is going to take their job, their reason for existing. And that anxiety is warranted and shouldn't be swept under the rug. And we should definitely be talking about it. I don't think enough people understand Jevon's paradox, which is something I didn't give nearly enough credit to when I first started talking about AI.

• 1:38:55Speaker 00

  So the odds of it actually taking jobs long term right now does not seem to be true. It does seem like right now anyway, because super intelligence is a different thing. But that what's actually going to happen in the medium term with AI is that as token prices come down, that then AI gets put into more and more and more things, which creates more and more and more demand, which is likely to dramatically increase productivity, which is likely to increase GDP, which is likely to bring more money into the system, which is likely to enrich people in the medium term. As we get into super intelligence and it's better than us at everything, that's a totally different thing. We have to separate these two out.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  But I think anxiety around AI is driving people to hate data centers versus the reality of data centers. So the people that are closest to it, the people that actually put one in their town are saying, this has been, that guy's quote, a miracle. So it's like, we need to understand, in the final analysis, I may be too far on the yay, these are great. And I may realize, nope, I got high on my enthusiasm for AI. I went too far and the reality is a little more mixed. I'm, that is almost certainly true. So, but what I'm trying to sort of pull the conversation a little bit closer to reality by saying, listen, a lot of this stuff that's being put out there is, people are cherry picking small parts of something. They're not giving you the full picture.

• 1:40:20Speaker 00

  And they're certainly not celebrating the people who are like, yo, this has been transformative for our community. Oh, and by the way, you're going to get hit with people that are saying a job should be a right. And I'm like, okay, well, you've got to have jobs. So it's like, here's the thing that's bringing enormous number of jobs to these communities. These communities are telling you this is transforming our community from, we now have a tax base and isn't this extraordinary? And we're still trying to say data centers bad. And I haven't even given the most important thing as to like, why would we want eminent domain? This is intelligence itself. You are in an arms race with China. You absolutely cannot lose. You do not want, first of all, you don't want a single country to be able to monopolize intelligence.

• 1:41:03Speaker 00

  So it is a very good thing that first of all, China is using an open source model. I'd like to see more of that here in the US. So it's just like, everybody's going to have access to this. That no one's going to be able to turn intelligence itself into a choke point. We definitely don't want that. So when I see someone going, we're going to have to deploy eminent domain here. I'm like, okay, I don't know the particulars, so maybe this would be a bad example. And maybe there's a better way to handle it. But I get why it is that important. It's important enough that eminent domain could be in the conversation and I wouldn't immediately go, that's crazy. If you tell me you're doing eminent domain for a golf course, to your point, I'd be like, what the fuck? Like there's no universe in which, like what, there's not a thing that you could tell me. I already understand forest bathing. So you could tell me electron transfer. People actually live longer. I'd still be like, get the fuck out of here.

• 1:41:48Speaker 00

  Like there are still forests that people can drive 45 minutes to get to if they want whatever. Like there's no way that you're bumping somebody out of their house because you want a golf course so that they can do electron transfer. No, hard pass. But the importance of the race for intelligence, yes, that I could see.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  That's, I don't know, that's just tricky. We were just talking about the right to private property and the the right to have safety and be protected unless it's in natural interest then get up. And I just like, that's wild to me. Um, I mean, I understand it, I guess. I feel, I feel, cause honestly, I feel like you're, you're screwed. You're at the bottom of that totem pole. And I know shit flows downhill and sometimes you just gotta eat shit. But that's still like, there's, there's no pat on the back. Like, it should be some type of like, alright, well, if you gotta kick these people out, you gotta give them asking price and a million dollars. And somebody has to get the tax, the AI data center, you guys got it. Like, somebody has to get that tax. But I feel like at the bottom of this is gonna be, your house is worth a hundred, I'll give you a hundred and twenty. That's my offer.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  And now I have to move, do all these things. When their market's at a rate, what if the house is paid off? In this story, it was passed down from a mom. So she went from having no mortgage, now I have to go get another mortgage. Cause housing prices are ten X of what they've been when her mom bought that. So it's like, it doesn't, it's not like it's putting them in a better position. You're just displacing this home for the betterment.

• 1:43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, great. Let's do your policy. There, there are many policies that you put forward, Drew, that I'm perfectly ready to sign off on. So you're gonna bump somebody, give them fair price, plus the pain in the ass bonus. And so, uh, you can dry your tears with hundred dollar bills. Cool. Got it. Love it.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  I just don't get, cause I've been following all this data center stuff since before it blew up. If they are that adamant about, we need these fucking data centers, which I don't think we even need this many. Like, we need some, sure, maybe, but we don't need this many. Why are we putting them near suburbs? Why are we putting them near homes? Like, we have an open desert. Like, figure out how to put it in the desert, you know? Um, and maybe that's kinda what you're saying.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  With Elon in the Texas, you could build as the, the moon on, in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Fine, cool. I have no problem with Elon building the biggest structure in human history. But when it's like, sorry, bro, I need to move you out to route this power line. It's like.

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  That's where I don't have enough information. You guys don't sound crazy to me at all. Find good places for these. I don't know that I can go to bat for eminent domain in this case. All I'm saying is, data centers are that kind of important, or AI is that kind of important. So, um, if there is a better way to build them, I'm all for it. I'd much rather them be built, uh, somewhere farther away. I just don't know if there's like, no, no, no, we have to have access to water supply. Or we have to have access to the power grid, or there's gonna be some reason, I would imagine. I doubt they're doing it just for shits and giggles. But if they are, then I'm with you. That's dumb.

• 1:44:34Speaker 04

  Well, and I watched a documentary early on about one of Zuckerberg's data centers for Meta. And I don't know, cause this was like two years ago now, I think. Um, so, you know, conditions in this town could have improved. They could have, you know, had regulations and stuff, but this family who lived, I think, a couple of miles away from the data center that was built, their water pressure, basically nothing. Their water was brown sometimes. Their electricity bills were higher than normal. Their water bills were higher than normal. It's just like, like, what we've kinda been saying this whole time is it's like, there just needs to be a balance to this stuff. We're not doing that balance and we're rushing too hard. Like, I get that this is an important technology and these things are things we should put money into, but I just think we're rushing it.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  To your point, it's the Silicon Valley model of, we're gonna do it, break it and fix it later. And the things that they're breaking, impact people's day to day lives. It's one thing if my Twitter doesn't load, okay, cool. I, I could bitch, but my water isn't brown. But when you're breaking something that makes my water brown for, even for an hour, a couple of days, whatever like that, it's like, I have to bathe with this, I have to eat with this, I have to shower with this. Like, there are certain infrastructure things. And like, America is due for infrastructure, like rollout. Flint's water's still brown. So, to me, it's one of those things where we just need to align incentives. America, we have shitty infrastructure. Data centers, you need infrastructure. Hmm. I'll help you get this data center in these different infrastructure places, but you can put it in the, by the Flint water supply, but you gotta fix Flint's water supply.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  Now the data center problem was fixed, Flint's infrastructure was fixed, everybody gets water, everybody gets what they need. Arizona, the Colorado River is at zero. We need you to route a new line. Okay, data center, you gotta build a desalination plant, bring some water in from the ocean, you have all the fresh water you need, and now you can refill the Colorado River. Like, there should be some type of, I'm building something, but in the process of building, I'm not leaving devastation to get to the build. It's like, I'm building a nice paved road to my factory, but at least now the town has a paved road.

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  Especially like Texas.

• 1:46:26Speaker 00

  So you guys, uh, you guys sound imminently logical. I don't know that those would be the exact solutions. But I think at this point, what we have to do is, or what I have to do, uh, is dive deeper into what is the reality? Because if you're taking somebody's clean water and making it Flint friendly, uh, then hard pass. So that, I agree with all of that. If you're eminent domaining like an asshole, I agree, we don't wanna do that. So yeah, I just have to do more research to figure out what's really going on.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Alright, we talked about it in the beginning. This video has gone super viral. It's a Houston teacher talking about the state of his high school kids.

• 1:47:04Speaker 05

  These kids are leaving high school and going to college and they couldn't fill in four words. Four words. I literally broke down in the middle of class. This is only day two.

• 1:47:22Speaker 05

  And I have seniors who simply cannot read and seniors who cannot write. They can reason, they have the ability to defend their reasoning, if it's talking to their homeboy, but applying that to a written text, two paragraphs, and they couldn't do it. Our young black men, our young brown men, our young black girls, and our young brown girls.

• 1:48:01Speaker 00

  Dude, the, the emotion is so raw. Uh, this is, this is a crime against our kids. Uh, the fact that we have allowed them to get to that stage without forcing them to, uh, prove that they know how to read and write in order to progress is crazy. Uh, this goes back to, this, this is an approach where, uh, feminism is going unchecked. We are not, not feminism, the movement, like femininity, that the impulse to care for, to not wanna see somebody's feelings hurt.

• 1:48:42Speaker 00

  We are allowing that to put us in a position where we don't hold people's feet to the fire to make sure that they can actually do the thing. Uh, and that's crazy. When I was a kid, you just got held back. Like, if you couldn't do the thing, they held you back. Uh, and we don't do that anymore. We are clearly not applying standards. Getting rid of gifted programs and things like that is, is having an absolute, um, negative effect on society at large. The fact that you can have seniors, seniors, man, you're seventeen or eighteen years old, not knowing how to read and write is, is so horrifying. Because even if, um, we were prepared to let all of America, uh, internally,

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  get dumb and we're just like, well, everybody around us, we're all the same, it doesn't matter. You'll get run over on the international stage. If you want to create a permanent underclass, under educate people, that, that is the fastest way to guarantee that you're stuck forever. Uh, applied knowledge is power. So knowledge, people say, they'll round it to knowledge is power. Sure, you have to use it, but, um, knowing something, even having a framework for something is incredibly powerful. And what is one of the most, um, tried and true longstanding ways to ingest information is reading. Um, it, it is terrifying to me to think that these guys literally can't read and write.

• 1:50:07Speaker 00

  And I understand the argument's gonna be something along the lines of, uh, well, it's just like cursive, like who reads and writes anymore? You're just gonna be able to talk to your AI. You're walling yourself off from a method of communication that is, it's terrifying. It's like, imagine your entire life in the country that you grew up in is like being in a foreign country where you can't read any of the signage. That is crazy. That's crazy, man. And you don't want AI to get to the point where you can't even read basic things. Uh, and you need the AI to tell you, dude, imagine the world just straight going offline if they lost internet connection. That, that's wild. Meaning the humans go offline because the AI is down for a second. That's crazy.

• 1:50:51Speaker 00

  Or not having the ability to check against something because, well, I, I don't even know how to go around my AI and get something for myself. That's crazy. That, that is so dangerous at a societal level.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  Oh, you first. No, no, no. I was just gonna say, cause this is Houston, right?

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yes, this is Houston.

• 1:51:08Speaker 04

  To give some context, Houston is one of the biggest school districts in Texas and historically has always had funding issues across the board, just cause of how many schools there are. Um, and so I was like telling chatters, and Brent, if you're still in here, Brent Sullivan, uh, I know your wife is a teacher in Texas as well, so feel free to jump in. Um, but I, I do know, if it makes people feel better, a lot of times in Texas, it's more a funding issue than a statewide education, like curriculum issue. Cause like, there was a chatter who's like, oh, kids don't even read The Kill a Mockingbird anymore. And it's like, no, I read that in high school. Um, and so I think the thing that needs to be addressed, at least again, speaking from Texas, is funding of schools. Like paying teachers better and that kinda thing.

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  We, we spend more per student than basically anywhere else.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a funding problem. This is a George W. Bush problem. This is a no child left behind problem. Kids need to fail. Kids need to fail and they need to start the grade over again.

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  Code wrecked.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  We have established a pipeline. They did the, it was the, in the nineties, they did a school to prison pipeline. And they needed to get the prisons filled. Now they did a school to higher education pipeline to get the colleges filled. It's the same type of debt systems. We need the kids to fail. We need them to stay in elementary if they can't read. And with COVID, half of these kids can't read. They're dumb. I'm sorry, I have a daughter. Her friends are dumb. Like, there's a lot of dumb kids. And these people are gonna turn into our citizens. They're gonna turn into our future chatters. They're gonna, they're gonna be in our lives one way or another.

• 1:52:30Speaker 04

  That's crazy.

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  Damn, Drew just came in hot. Super chat's gonna be light today.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  But there are a lot of dumb kids in classes, I agree. Cause I had kids like that in my.

• 1:52:39Speaker 00

  Okay, but play, play the next one, because we have another one.

• 1:52:43Speaker 06

  I have spent more time on the subject of education. I wanted to be an early childhood educator when I went to college. And I took a system that William Bennett called the single worst in America, to where Sean Ritter at Stanford called it the single best of the top one hundred. And it took everything of my soul to get it there.

• 1:53:03Speaker 06

  We need to take the high school years, let alone the standards and accountability in the elementary years, and revamp them.

• 1:53:13Speaker 06

  As in the three things I talked about that fit together. Be average, community college is free. Fifty percent, which I would set as a goal as a hundred, have to graduate with college credit under the belt. And third, nobody gets a diploma that doesn't tell us what they're doing next. College, community college, branch of the armed forces certification school. I'm not just about college. You're 500 to 600,000 electrician short just for data centers. Broadband 150,000. You can't build submarines because we don't have pipe fitters and plumbers. Okay, so I'm, you want to be a pipe fitter? Great. You want to be a physician? Great. You want to be a physical therapist? Great. Have an education system that actually reflects the economy and skills that we need.

• 1:53:57Speaker 00

  True, very good advice. But now there's a, another one. Uh, so this is line 57. You've got teacher of the year resigns because students can't read and write. This is, I don't think this is in Texas. Does it say where this is at?

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  Uh, metropolitan government in Nashville, Nashville.

• 1:54:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, just to show this is not, not just a problem of Texas.

• 1:54:15Speaker 07

  Middle school in Antioch, um, this past year and blue ribbon teacher of the year for the district. Um, what you have in front of you right now, um, is my resignation letter. I resigned in May. Um, you can read those three pages at your leisure. Um, but I've heard a lot of positive data in this meeting and I just wanted to give you some facts from my firsthand experience. Um, so first, district leaders asked me to fabricate grades for a parent who sat in the office for hours until her daughter's failing grades were changed. It creates false entitlement. What happens when these kids lie, cheat and cry their way through school and end up as future doctors, police or politicians? When will you protect the future of our society?

• 1:54:59Speaker 07

  Second, that same parent has harassed over 30 teachers. Teachers have filed police reports and entire school districts have had, um, or entire schools have had restraining orders against her. Yet she's still allowed on school property, showing up to fill trips her child didn't earn and filming other students. When will you stop prioritizing parents' feelings over the safety of our teachers and our students? I heard you also mentioned that we're closing gaps in teacher vacancies. I want the public to know that many of those are filled with uncertified teachers. My third point, HR withheld money from my employee paycheck as well as many others. They took 500 from me specifically and it put me behind on my mortgage.

• 1:55:41Speaker 07

  And then they sent out an email saying that they had to do it to pay other employees. When will you pay teachers what they are owed? My fourth point, the news reports that behavioral issues are down. They are not. We are simply banned from reporting them, forcing us to keep disruptive students in the classroom. Statistics are being skewed to protect the district, not our children. Our children cannot read and write. They cannot do basic math and we spend 40 hours a week with these students. So we know them better than the district and those fake numbers. Please stop undermining our professional decisions because honestly it's breaking the efficiency and it's giving HOA quality. So Dr. Battle, my question to you.

• 1:56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's not, she's not here to hear that. Uh, yeah, so I have a feeling that this is the tip of a very large iceberg. So we have a problem in our schools and we fail to educate our youth at our peril. To educate them, as Drew said, you have to let them fail. If they're not doing well, we need to know. You've got to put these kids through their paces, find out what they know how to do, what they don't know how to do, uh, and help them get better. But you sure as hell don't just move them along, move them along, move them along because you don't want anybody to feel bad or you're trying to, uh, get another, um, person in debt to go to college. Like this is just crazy. And you're seeing all kinds of university professors saying like, I've got kids in my math program, they don't know how to do math.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  And that is just, it's absurd. They're going to become the next generation of workers. And if they are not people that are on a path to becoming extraordinary, then we as a nation will decline further and further. It's crazy. Don't do it. Don't do it to yourselves, man. It's just absolute madness.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  There are some different implementations that people said, um, when we were talking with Steve Keen, he was big on, we need to take money out of education systems. We need to stop this like pay for education. Um, one side of that is school is part of government curriculum, um, to Ryan's point, to ensure, um, proper funding. But what they do is they do more standardized tests that for lack of a better term are almost filters. Asian models do something similar. So if you go to, I'll, everybody goes to the same elementary school. Then I think at third or fourth grade, you take one test.

• 1:57:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  That one test is like a fork in the road. You go to option B, you can be a engineer or something with your hands, a plumber or something like that. If you fail the next test in middle school, then you could be like a retail worker, like every failure kind of minimizes your career aspects.

• 1:58:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  On the other side, if you excel on this one, you get more opportunity, more open doors for you like that. Some people might call that harsh, some people might call that honest. The European model, everybody kind of goes through one through 12. And then you have like your university, I think there's a university exam and then there's another exam to then get, like there's basically like a graduate high school exam and then like the university, whatever you have to do like.

• 1:58:33Speaker 00

  In the UK, I know it well because of Lisa. So the UK has like through your junior year is basically the same as what we would expect. And then you have something called sixth form, which is two years of almost like pre-college where you're still in the same building, but you're now separated out. You're pursuing like a specific subset of things. So you're, it's not a degree, but that's like, what did you study in sixth form? It was like, okay, I studied these two things or whatever. Then you go to university. Uh, and so you do have to qualify for the thing that you want to study in sixth form.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm curious, I was just going to say, is there a certain one of those models you think the US should adopt or you just like put the whole thing is right? Cause we just need to do something.

• 1:59:14Speaker 00

  Well, so my thing is I came up in, um, public education. So to me there was, I mean, this is now almost 40 years ago, but 40 years ago, things were working well. And I did feel a tremendous sense of relief that I was able to go all the way through college and I wasn't constantly getting branched out. Um, so to give you an idea, my trajectory was in middle school, I was denied access to the advanced programs. In high school, I was allowed back in. So had I, like in middle school, taken a permanent off ramp, that would have been pretty distressing. And so, um, I, and this is a bias because of how I came up. What I like is that there's a skill check at the end of every year.

• 1:59:58Speaker 00

  If you're actually not able to do the things, then the teacher is expected to hold you back. I had kids in my own grade get held back. They were not kids that would surprise you. It was like, yeah, that motherfucker got held back because he's, uh, he's a disciplinary problem. He does not pay attention. He doesn't do his homework. And I get it, a lot of that might be because of bad things going on at home, but at the end of the day, the consequence is he's not ready to move on and therefore does not get to move on. Uh, and so there was tremendous amount of pressure from the school, uh, from my parents to both do well in the class. Uh, parents would go in and meet with the teachers and it was not my parents telling them how it's going to be. It was them telling them, this is what your kid is really like. And then my parents would come home and be like, yo, you got to tighten this up, that up, whatever, you got to get better at this.

• 2:00:42Speaker 00

  And then it was, okay, I had to do that homework and figure that stuff out. And that I think is, is the most straightforward way to handle this. Now going all the way to something that's more of a Chinese model, I never think America should try to ape China. I think we should try to out America, China. The one thing they can't like compete with is our freedoms. So it's like, how do we leverage those freedoms? Like, hey, you're free to fail. That's going to have consequences. But if you succeed, like you're going to get to make the choices that you want in life. The problem is we've got the government coming in and guaranteeing everything. I think the fact that I studied film at college, that should have been my choice, but that debt was mine to deal with and the government didn't guarantee it. So it's like, if I graduate and I'm under the weight of the debt, I've got to deal with that debt. Cool, that's on me.

• 2:01:27Speaker 00

  It ended up being a manageable amount of debt, thankfully, because I was sort of right on the cusp where the debt was starting to accelerate, but it wasn't, um, the completely out of pocket debt. I had to work through college, so, uh, ended up having, they were all part-time jobs. So I had three different part-time jobs that I was constantly moving back and forth between with my studies. And like that kind of thing where it's like, yeah, this is on me and I'm going to carry this responsibility. That's as it should be. But students should be able to discharge debt so that banks have the pressures on them to only back things that are going to help people. So if I want to take a degree that isn't going to, um, serve me, but nobody is either helping me get that debt or, um, not letting me declare bankruptcy if I'm, you know, I

• 2:02:12Speaker 00

  go out and it ended up being something stupid. So I'm held accountable, the banks are held accountable. Now it's just like, yeah, you've got the freedom to choose what you want, but if you choose poorly, it's going to be a problem.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Did you see the, um, AOC released her like disclosure, financial disclosure and she still has student loan?

• 2:02:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  What was your initial reaction to this?

• 2:02:32Speaker 00

  I need to know how much she's paying in interest on that debt because it is entirely possible that this is incredibly stupid and that the thing that she could do to make the most money would just be pay off the debt. Now, I understand leaving some in cash for some bad thing happening, but the 50K in savings with 50K in debt, I would be very surprised if her savings account is paying her more than the interest on the debt. I could be wrong and if the savings is paying her more than the interest on the debt, great, then she's winning. Keep doing it all day. I looked at that and thought, okay, well, if this is real, and I think it's better to give somebody the benefit of the doubt, if this is real, she's obviously not going off and trading and doing all of that and, you know, taking advantage of some of the

• 2:03:17Speaker 00

  things that make me look at some of these politicians as being completely grotesque. It's also possible that this isn't quite accurate and this is the first show, meaning I'm getting paid and compensated in other ways and this is how I show my, um, my DSA friends that I'm one of you, uh, but that feel, that's too cynical of a read for me. So if I were going to advisor, I would say, listen, you need to start investing in America as somebody who's likely to be the Democrat nominee, uh, for president. Don't put yourself in the situation where you're making the same stupid statement that Tim Walz made where it's like, I don't invest in the stock market. Like what?

• 2:04:01Speaker 00

  That, that's idiotic. So I would love to see her start to get her money up in a way that everybody can be proud of and look at and go, I want to emulate that. Nice, slow, steady accumulation of a broad basket. Uh, if she wants to, you know, make it broad basket America because she's, she wants to run for president, I fucking love it, man. That'd be amazing. And if she showed me like, hey, this is somebody who's accumulating money the right way because she's, I forget, in, in certainly the top 10% of earners in America. Uh, so seeing her start saving in a way where when we look at the disclosures, it's like every year she's like up as we would expect somebody to be up based on the stock market. That'd be dope. Um, so this one to me without, without proof that this isn't exactly what it looks like,

• 2:04:45Speaker 00

  I just go to, okay, hey, listen, you got a lot socked away in savings. I'm proud of you. That's impressive. Not everybody can do it. You've got debt. I want to know what the interest is because you could be making a very big mistake with that. Pay the debt down, keep saving. You know what I mean? So it's like, I don't immediately jump to cynical story. I hate her politics, but I'm not going to let that make me take a cynical read on her.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, would you prefer this or the Nancy Pelosi?

• 2:05:10Speaker 00

  I'd prefer this. This is somebody who's not, um, abusing her power, doing insider trading, which it might as well be called that. But do I want to see her take advantage of the stock market? Absolutely. You're creating, if you're investing in, uh, American companies, you're creating a capital vehicle for those companies and you're getting, um, money on the back of it. It, it is the way the US system is set up right now. And so seeing somebody expose themselves to the inflation, but not expose themselves to the like inflation protection is crazy.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:43Speaker 00

  Um, yeah. So guys, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it very much. We have an upcoming AI masterclass. Make sure you join me Thursday, September 10th at 1:00 PM Pacific. I am going to show you guys how to start a business using AI. It is free and the link is in the description. I hope everybody have a phenomenal weekend. We love you bunches and we will see you on Monday. Tell them my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace.

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