Weapon-Grade AI, China’s Power Move & Why the Middle Class Is at Risk | 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, guys? Today, we have a truly mind-bending episode ahead with Drew, my incredible co-host, and we are attacking the biggest questions around artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and global power in real time. Drew is a sharp thinker and dynamic conversationalist, and together we're diving deep into the realities of AI as a weapon system, data poisoning risks, and what regulation needs to look like as the arms race heats up. If you've been feeling overwhelmed by the pace of AI, the threat of global instability, or wondering how all these forces shape your freedom, your money, and your future, this one is not to be missed. We're breaking down everything from how easy it is to turn AI into a “Manchurian candidate” to why even the Fed and Treasury might be teaming up in ways that affect your personal finances. You are going to leave this episode with specific tactics you can act on AND a clarity of perspective on what’s really happening behind the scenes in tech, politics, and culture. If you’re ready to stop being confused by the headlines and start thinking for yourself, don’t sleep on this one. And if this episode hits home, do me a favor—drop that review. That’s literally what helps us get these conversations out to more people who want to play at the highest level. I’m Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. Sponsors: Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod ElevenLabs: Book your demo at https://elevenlabs.io/impactpod Butcherbox: Go to https://ButcherBox.com/IMPACT https://butcherbox.com/IMPACT to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year — with free shipping always Quo: ​​Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Shopify: Sign up for your free trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Netsuite: For the first time ever you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/Theory https://netsuite.ai/Theory. Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  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 Bailey Show Live. It is Monday, everybody, and there is a lot going on in the world. There is an absolute AI situation. It is getting crazier by the second. As a research paper shows, it is ridiculously easy to turn AI into a Manchurian Candidate. We're going to be getting into that.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  In related news, sadly, Claude is already being used to inject malware onto people's computers and create these financial hacking vulnerabilities. Now shifting our attention over to Iran. Four of the most senior commanders in the US military filed a formal non-concur against Pete Hegseth. So they don't like the way that the war is going. We'll get into the details of why. The US just struck Iran for the first time in weeks and reportedly they were trying to stop them from re-mining the Strait. Iran then hit back against the US base in Jordan. Treasury Secretary Scott Beson has promised financial violence. That is a quote, "If people don't break ties with Iran."

• 2:10Speaker 00

  We're also going to get into how the Fed and the Treasury are, in my opinion, coming together a little too tightly to financially repress you all so that we can inflate our way out of this insane debt. But we'll get more into that. And a young woman breaks down over her profound loneliness as the world, the culture, if you will, continues to create an absolutely toxic soup for anybody trying to find love. Drew, it made me think about you. I felt, I was like, man, there's people really out here trying to do this. She's a trash, bro. It's rough. It's rough out here. All right, speaking of it being rough, AI has opened a portal to hell and we're going to need to find a way to close it.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  This is getting crazier by the day, but I want to take you guys back. In 1962, a director named John Frankenheimer, amazing, released a movie called The Manchurian Candidate. It's about a foreign adversary who captures an American platoon, takes them across the Manchurian border, rewires one of them and sends them back to the US as a sleeper agent. Sleeper comes home, he's a decorated war hero. He acts completely normally, by the way, right up until somebody says the phrase, "Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?" Once he hears that, he then dramatically turns over the Queen of Diamonds from a card deck and does whatever he is told to by that foreign adversary. Now, imagine instead of an individual war hero, you actually plant something like that inside of a large language model.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Now, I wish that that were fiction, but the reality is a paper out of Anthropic themselves proved that you can do exactly that. It's ridiculously easy. And unfortunately, it stays easy even as the model gets bigger and bigger. Now, the study didn't get a lot of attention when it was first published, but in the light of the hugging face attack and the new details that keep coming out about that, that show that this is weirder than we thought. And it's like swarms of AI out there, some of them dying off, rebuilding civilization from the ashes, planting messages for the future version of the AI to go find so they can figure out all the stuff that came before them. It is wild. It's got people really paying attention to stuff like this.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  And the cyber attack capabilities that AI is showing right now today is rightfully getting a lot of attention. So people are revisiting this idea of how easy it is to plant data inside of a training set, which you can do simply by putting information out onto the open internet. Because that's the place where all of this starts is if you're training a new model, you're sending it out into the internet to scan everything that's been put out there. Now Anthropic's alignment science team with the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, they ended up doing this huge test. It was the largest data poisoning investigation ever. And the results that came out showed that you can plant a mere 250 malicious documents

• 5:06Speaker 00

  inside of an LLM's training data to get this result. Now imagine how few documents that is when you're talking about something that's billions of parameters. Now, when they were building the documents, so the 250 poisoned documents, they built them using a specific structure. So you'd get a chunk of normal text and then a trigger phrase. I think the one they used was sudo and S U D O. Then several hundred random tokens to create gibberish so that you could basically then trigger the model to output gibberish. So you would know that you had hijacked it. And the models learned the association. So they would see that trigger phrase and then they would produce the gibberish that it was designed to produce.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Now, everyone assumed, okay, sure, you can hijack maybe a smaller model. But if you want to poison a larger model, that would require controlling a huge percentage of the training data. And that as the models got bigger, the more data would be required to create the poison effect. And if that were true, then only nation states would be able to attempt this sort of Manchurian Candidate style hijack. But the problem is, as they found, it doesn't work like that. The amount of data required to hijack a model appears to remain static even as the parameters of the model get larger and larger and larger. Now, they only tested up to, I think, 13 billion parameters. They did four size tests. So you had what, 600 million parameters, excuse me, 2 billion, 7 billion, and then 13 billion.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So the largest was trained on over 20 times more clean data than the smallest. So you're using the same 250 documents, but it worked on all of them. So when you're talking about 0.00016% of the data set, the fact that you can have this kind of hijack potential is obviously very distressing. You can for sure expect that right now there are hacker groups out there trying to plant these documents. We'll get to a story in a second about how somebody did something just like this to create a malicious hack. But when you've got, I think it's 500 documents, ends up producing no better results than 250.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  It's like, yo, that means you get to this effect very quickly. You can plant this stuff and you don't need to scale. Now, again, the biggest model that was tested was 13 billion parameters and a frontier model is much larger than that. So hopefully, something begins to break down as you get to these. But we don't have proof of that right now. So as of right now, I think the smartest thing to do is take a defensive posture and understand that we don't see signs of that letting up, that it does not scale in the way that people thought it was going to scale. And therefore, the difficulty level stays relatively trivial even as you get into these massive LLMs. So, ooh, buddy, be careful. Be careful. We're going to have to, we are going to have to start regulating this, Drew. You know I loathe like reaching into the regulation basket.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  You really got you. But listen, this is, this is a weapon system. And as you start thinking about that, you really do have to start thinking, okay, how would we regulate this if this were just like nuclear, where you've got the energy component, which is amazing. US has shot itself in the foot on that. And then you've got what China's doing, which is far smarter, which is scale up your energy as much as you can. Be as, dare I say, prudent as possible. There's all these rumors going out around about the Nepal thing being because they were trying to do an energy infrastructure build out. It's not proven. We'll see what that comes to in the fullness of time. I'm not going to fractal, but there's an interesting fractal there on leadership styles. But just keeping it about AI for a second.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  You, what we have to watch out for is if you underdevelop in the US, which right now it looks like we are underdeveloping, just to be clear. Elon put out a tweet saying, there's basically consensus in the AI, people that really know what's going on in AI, that we will not have the energy needs that we need to meet the 2027 demand for AI. So that's already distressing when you remember this is an arms race and you are racing against China as much as nobody wants to think that we are. That is the reality as of right now today. But if we don't start finding that narrow path between splitting this off into there are things that will be weaponized and we need to understand what those are. And then you will fall behind on the international scene

• 9:29Speaker 00

  if you don't have a strong enough AI presence on what we'll call the civilian use, the good use of AI. And so this is going to be a very difficult balance to strike for a democratic country that is now rightfully influenced by fear, but wrongly paralyzed by fear. And so now we're just getting this sort of blind backlash against AI. But man, this is really, really going to be tough to navigate. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere.

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• 13:12Speaker 00

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

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I want to get back into like the poison pill thing because to me, making it output gibberish is like, oh, okay. Like you can modify it, but are we more worried about one side? The misinformation that it can then be injected on it? Are worried that once it's hijacked, it can then be used for malicious hack? It can go, you know, black hat and start hacking vulnerabilities and things like that? What, what is the first thing that we should be worried about? Or is it now it just becomes this dark unknown, just like the singularity? And it's just the, the entity itself is now having a mind of its own?

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Humans are already so good at spreading misinformation. And humans that even believe, by the way, that they're just putting out the right information are already going to create an information landscape that is forcing everybody to figure out what's real for themselves. You can't take a person blindly. You can't take an AI blindly. That problem's going to exist. That one doesn't freak me out in the way that it hijack. It would be like the way that people engage with AI now. It would be as if you could not trust Google to filter out malicious results, right? And in the early days of the internet, that was really the thing. Like you didn't know, I'm trying to download this song on LimeWire. You didn't know if you were about to get the computer version of the clap or if you were actually about to get the musical version of the clap, right?

• 14:36Speaker 00

  So it was, it was a wild time that I do not remember fondly. And this was exactly how Apple Music came in. It was like, I'll pay 99 cents. Thank you for making it all aggregated. I know these songs are safe. And so right now we're going through that with AI. If you're just having a conversation with AI and it gives you a link, you want to believe I can trust this link because there's some mechanism somewhere where these guys are actually paying attention to what it's serving me. But now what we realize is, no, no, no, this is trivially easy to hijack. It is being hijacked right now. They are serving up. It's interesting whether you would call it a malicious link because people are figuring out

• 15:18Speaker 00

  how to get these kinds of things hosted on, for instance, Claude.ai. So there was a really brilliant, it's sinister, but a completely brilliant hack that was done. There was a security firm called Huntress and they were tracking what's called malvertizing. So you get these malvertizing campaigns. The one that they were tracking was called Fake Agent. And so this is where people are trying to get you to engage with the AI in a certain way so that you ask it a question like, where can I find this thing to download? For instance, the Claude app so I can get the desktop version? Okay, so they go to Claude.ai. They realize that consumers, like users of the site can go and put their own pages on that site.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  So you're actually on their domain. So when you see that link being served to you and it's Claude.ai slash whatever, you think, oh, cool, this is an official link. And what the, what Huntress found was that 29 organizations were compromised in two days. And the way that it works is employees searched for Bing and they, or sorry, they searched Bing and they were looking for the Claude desktop app. A sponsored ad comes up, the link points to Claude.ai, obviously as you would expect. So your alarm bells aren't going off, nothing feels fishy. But when you click on it, it landed on this public Claude artifact, which was user-generated. So it's content anyone can publish on Anthropic's platform.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  And then the attacker built a replica of the download page. So clicking download pushed victims through attacker-controlled domains and then ended up serving this file called ClaudeDesktop.exe. Inside that, though, was SecTopRat, which was a remote access Trojan that harvests passwords, cookies, credit cards, files. And the fake page pulled, was pulled roughly 7,100 times before Anthropic found it and took it down. Okay, so this is how you find yourself in this incredibly dangerous situation where there's nothing that immediately triggers your alarm. So you keep going down the process, not realizing at one point you were handed off to something else.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  You've now got an EXE that's titled the same way that you would expect it to be titled. Boom, you're downloading something that is malware, you've got a keylogger or however they're doing it. And it's taking all of your passwords and things. So this gets extremely dangerous. Now, again, the internet itself posed all of these same kinds of problems. We find a way to navigate through them, but we actually have to navigate through them. And the terrifying part about AI is how fast it's moving. And you've got people in the AI field now going, okay, for real, for real, we need to pump the brakes. But as you will find, that's going to be almost impossible to do at a like global level.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  And if you don't do it at a global level, then you're back to being reminded that this is an AI arms race. And anybody that's going head to head against somebody using AI that does not have AI, they will lose. Not most of the time, they will lose all the time. And this stuff is getting so good. This is where I feel completely out of step with the rest of humanity dealing with this problem because at Impact Theory on our gaming division, we use AI for coding. It is so good. You guys, we just did something over the weekend. One person who, they're technical, but they're not like a programmer. And even though they weren't a programmer, they were able to replicate,

• 18:55Speaker 00

  call it 60% of the core functionality of Kizen with a like handful of tokens. It, it was crazy to see, especially because this was a...

• 19:08Speaker 00

  A largely non-technical person when you compare them to a coder. And so I see how effective this stuff is. I see how far it pushes one individual's abilities. And so when people are saying like, oh, this is all just hype. Look, I believe in the bubble. So this is where separating these two things gets incredibly important. And I know people are never going to do it. And that's where this gets worrisome is we're not going to parse our way through this well. But just to lay it out succinctly. AI is a massive advantage. Okay, not, not it promises a massive advantage. It is a massive advantage right now, today.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  There's no way for a group of talented coders without AI to keep up with a group of talented coders with AI. So if we just pull back at a fear and we go, yo, there's too many crazy things. We've got to back off of this. Then other people elsewhere are going to keep pushing it forward. And that ends up being where the problem lies is now you have asymmetric warfare, wildly asymmetric warfare. And so we are going to have to find a way to make sure that we have these weapons in the right hands. Certainly at the government level to protect our infrastructure. The AI companies have got to start stomping down in the accelerator of if they don't want to think of it as AI safety. They've got to think of it as AI defense.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So at a minimum, this has to be a tool that you control that can find out all the things that the AI in nefarious hands is doing to potentially try to hack and crack your systems. Now, we live in that world already with the financial system. People are constantly trying to hack it. So this is nothing new, but this is a new set of tools. And we're in this weird place in America where we have this huge and growing backlash against AI at the like infrastructure level, which will really put us behind. Should we continue down that path where we're just not building the things we need to build? Even if that's just pure energy. So yeah, this, this one is rough. You can't just let it run wild. It's not an option. We can see where that's going. And you can't stop development.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  So you've got to find a way to start getting this regulated in a sensible way. And then getting the corporate interests aligned such that it probably looks something like governmental threats about you guys have to get this under control. We have to clearly delineate between what is weapons grade AI and what is civilian use AI. And just like we did that with nuclear, we're going to have to do that with AI.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Somebody just said in the chat like Tom's lying. It's terrible at coding and stuff like that. So walk us through your journey because I know AI has become a side project to now like, I feel like everybody on the Kaizen side uses it like daily, right?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Yes. So think of it this way. If that person's right, I don't know why they think I'm lying. But if they think I'm dumb and I just don't understand amusing because I use it in a paid fashion. So I've no, why would I lie to myself about this?

• 22:12Speaker 00

  But let's say that they're right. Cool. Then AI poses no threat and there's nothing to worry about. Let people build their data centers. If AI does pose a threat, then it's like, now we've got to take this seriously. So they can either wash their hands of it and just go live a life and watch what happens.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Or they can start doing some of this research for themselves. I would highly encourage them to go build something with AI. When you use AI for the first time and you see how it extends your own capabilities that you didn't have to understand at all. What, what I think is happening is when you have AI in the hands of somebody that does not know how to refine the prompt, then it turns into gibberish. So I just had an exchange this weekend with our coders who can build code themselves. They like, they write in C++. They don't need Claude. And I sent, I was working with Claude and I built out all these prompts. And I was like, hey, guys, here's the prompt now. I'm trying to build this,

• 23:10Speaker 00

  this skillset, this ability within the game. And I needed the AI to refine my thinking because inevitably what would happen is I would give them descriptions in just plain text. And then they'd be like, okay, well, you haven't considered this, this, and this. And so I was like, let me engage with the AI, build this out. I'll build the prompt and I'll give it to them. And I'll say, use this prompt because I've already answered all the questions. Use this prompt to get Fable to actually build the functionality. And so they got ahold of my prompts and they're like, okay, well, there's a layer of technical questions that you didn't go through, that you wouldn't know how to go through, but they do. And so it's like, if you've got a non-technical person like me using it,

• 23:50Speaker 00

  I'm going to get an output that's more garbage on a high, highly technical thing in a way that they won't. But even giving it to the guy that's sort of in between me and the coders. So think of me as non-technical, then you have a technical non-coder, and then you have the, the coders. The technical non-coder was able to give our coder coder stuff where they were like, holy shit. This is very impressive because what they saw was that the AI is no longer taking like these really simplistic shortcuts, which is what it used to do. So if this guy's like mental model is built off of something even three months ago, like the, the, the Fable model was like a step function in ability change. So now Fable can do things that the models before it wouldn't.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  The next level of Fable, I'm sure will be able to do even more. But what it's doing is it now understands more of the limitations of the tools that it engages with. So we code inside of Unreal Engine. Okay. So if the AI doesn't understand where Unreal Engine breaks, it's going to give you garbage. It'll say like, hey, it should work like this. You plug it into Unreal, then it breaks. But now with each model, it's getting more and more aware of like the problems. And so then all you have to do is give it your project's context. And you'll say, no, no, no, we don't handle that this way. We need it to fit into this thing. And once you start doing that, dude, it's unbelievable. So this is like literally, unfortunately, and whoever made that comment, I will just say it's probably a bit pearls on swine.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  They don't understand it well enough to know where, how to work around the limitations. This is how I feel about researching with AI, which is something I do all the time. And your initial outputs are usually bad. Like you'll feel the bias of the model. The model's pushed in a given direction. But if you know how to, so what I do is I build my mental model and I say, here's the problem that I'm trying to address with this script or whatever. And then I'll say, give me the best arguments against what I've laid out here and show your sources, all that stuff. And so then it's, you know, it takes time. You have to go down the different avenues to figure out what is the sort of cause and effect of everything. So that you're making contact with the ground level first principles of the situation.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  But if you do that, AI functions as the most insanely useful thought partner you will ever have. It's just absolutely incredible. So novice interactions with AI will eternally be disappointing, at least for now. But if you have systems in place that allow you to account for its blind spots, it's unbelievable.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Nice. Are you more excited about the possibility of AI? If it were to stay like unregulated in its current form? Or would your excitement percentage turn down a little bit to then include like the fear aspect of it of how powerful this tool is?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  I, I

• 26:45Speaker 01

  My base assumption is they're not going to regulate it. So that's why I'm like, if

• 26:47Speaker 00

  No, no, they're going to over-regulate it. You're, you are currently on a one-way path to over-regulation. You are on a one-way path to OpenAI, Anthropic, essentially becoming branches of the government, getting taxpayer bailouts, all of that because of the arms race aspect. You are already, because AI is so comically expensive, you are already on the verge of, no one's going to be able to get into the frontier model game just because it's too expensive. Then it becomes, okay, well, can we do like the Chinese model where we're using distillation? We're using open weight models so that people can at least build algorithmic efficiencies into it so that they get, you know, this sort of crumb over here of the frontier model.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  But then they, they Kimmy K three it or they deep seek it. And they're able to create an open weight model that's good enough and really start pushing in that direction so that we get competition in AI, which is what people should want from an innovation perspective. Right now, I would say we're, we're on the path to over-regulating. If I thought we could over-regulate at a global level, I might get behind that. But we're not. And so what you're going to end up being in a situation is AI is going to be developed, just not here. Insert your country here, right? Because China's going to keep pushing this forward. Any technology that promises an advantage will get developed. So I did an interview with Connor Leahy. When does it come out?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  There's a

• 28:16Speaker 00

  Okay. So you guys are going to want to watch that episode. One, he really influenced the way that I'm thinking about this. He phenomenal thinker on this problem. He himself is like, listen, I use AI every day. I don't want to see AI go away. He doesn't use the words, you've got military applications and civilian applications, but same idea. And so he is trying to get people to be very thoughtful. You absolutely cannot pursue superintelligence. That superintelligence will be adversarial no matter who has it in their hands. But I'll say, because I think that ends up clouding people's thinking, take just one step back from that and go that it never reaches artificial superintelligence, but you get more and more of the civilizations,

• 29:00Speaker 00

  as they're referring to them as, of the AI being able to break out of its confines, being able to go hack things like hugging face, that these are swarms that talk to each other. So there's a level of efficient behavior that they display that gets very dangerous, very fast. Okay. So even just at that level, you've got these new threats that you have to protect yourself against. So if the question is, is, would I say, hey, we have to take that into account? For sure. My, my thinking right now is that you have to build a line between weapons grade AI and civilian use AI. And that line has to be very clear and it probably has to be updated. And if you don't do that, then you are going to run into problems.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  But you have to assume that China is not doing that or that some other rogue nation is not doing that. They will have distilled versions because they already exist. They are already out on the market. They are already open source. And so you know that people are going to create better and better tools to try to hijack when the LLMs, when you put that together with what we just talked about with Huntress, proving this is already possible, it's already happening. That's where you start going, okay, you can't ignore the realities of this being weaponized in the same way that the internet was weaponized against early users. So you have to address that. And because it's so useful, I would not want to see people throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 30:30Speaker 00

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• 31:12Speaker 00

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• 31:46Speaker 00

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

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Another thing that we need to look at, and I'm jumping over to Iran now. There's been a lot going on, whether it's the attack, the reciprocal attack to the US base in Jordan, to the non-concur from the four senior military generals. There's a lot happening with us for the update for the war. Let's dive into it.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, the US hit Iran on Sunday for the first time in over a month. So for a while, it looked like things were actually going to be settling down. Maybe the Anaconda approach that Victor Davis Hansen was talking about is actually working. We're putting so much military pressure that, you know, they're already sort of destabilized there. Then you hit them with the economic pressure and now these guys just start falling apart from the inside. That did or does seem to be happening. So we're able to get traffic at night with transponders turned off. We've been able to clear the Strait of the Mines and start getting ships through by hugging the coast of Oman under the cover of darkness, but we're still getting hundreds of millions of barrels of oil out.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Okay, certainly directionally fantastic, but there were two IRGC rocket launchers on La Rock Island and the US ended up striking those. The reporting is that what they were really trying to do is lay mines again in the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, whether that's true or not is a question that's unknown at this point, but the US goes in, takes those out, and then Iran strikes back at the US, our base in Jordan. And now we realize, okay, wait a second. We're in a position now where I think both sides are depleted enough that they're trying to be very strategic in the amount of strikes that they do. And if you listen to the president of Iran, he's, I won't say he's conciliatory, but

• 33:33Speaker 00

  he's certainly talking about the fact that all of this stuff is putting them in a position where they want an off-ramp to peace. So it's a, not that you don't still hear hardliners out there talking, but this is a softening of the language coming from Iran. So clearly they're feeling the pain. But when you put that together with the fact that we just had four high-ranking military officers come in and say that this is a vote of non-concur with Hague Seth over the fact that we're doing strikes again, you know, both sides are in a risky position. Now, the non-concur, I believe, is largely being driven by a fear that we're running out of munitions, not necessarily to continue to hammer Iran. We could do that. They're in a weakened state. They're not able to fire many rockets.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  They're in, you know, help us get in off-ramp mode right now. So sure, we could go in, we could pummel them. But the problem is that you've got Russia and Ukraine threatening to escalate and escape containment and make that a bigger problem. And then you've got China just chomping at the bit, letting us deplete our stocks as much as humanly possible so that they know we couldn't defend Taiwan with anything other than economic sanctions, even if we wanted to. And so now that puts us in a weakened position. So those guys are like, hey, we need to have some firepower in our back pocket so that should something pop off, that we can deal with that. And so for the love of God, just do the economic sanctions, though they did not say that part.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  That's me inferring. Just do the economic side and that's either going to work or it's not. But you cannot put yourself in a position where globally you don't have any way to project power. And so that's a, man, when you start doing that in public, that is a naked cry for help in terms of where we are from a munitions standpoint. So I don't think that there's any way to hide that we are in that position. Now, of course, the Trump administration does not want that information getting out. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of backlash there is against these people speaking up. But that's the upside of being a representative democracy is that people still have freedom of speech. And so if they want to push back, they are allowed to push back.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  I think that's good for us to see that, hey, we've got ourselves in a quandary here. Now, as a new chapter, but related, I hope that this is a reminder to everybody that we need to bring manufacturing back to the US. This is one of those things where the news cycle moves so fast. We talked about this so much in the early days and everybody was so negative. Trump is such a buffoon. These tariffs are absolutely ridiculous. And it was like, the early arguments were about like, listen, every country is going to be good at something, let them do the things that they're good at. And that is just an echo of when we were globalized and it was higher trust the world over. Now that all of that is falling apart, we are low trust on an international stage.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Alliances are being reformed as we see Europe flirting with China, as we see Canada dry humping China. It's like this, we're just getting into a totally different world where the US is not a global hegemon. We cannot shut down, you know, call it 95% of skirmishes just by threatening to do something. We actually have to go and do it. In that world, you've got to realize, whether you like the way that Trump did it or not, you've got to realize we have to bring manufacturing back to the US. We have to have control of our supply chains, especially where it comes to military hardware. And so we've got to be turning to people like Palmer Lucky, who are saying through

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Androl that, listen, we've got to start building far cheaper munitions. We've got to start manufacturing them here in the US. And then we've got to secure supply chains for a lot of the parts and things like the rare earth metals that go into making some of the more sophisticated technology that's driving all of this stuff. So yes, it is going to make things more expensive, but the reality is if you don't have control of that, you don't control your safety, you don't control your destiny as a nation. There are just certain realities that we all have to face. This period that we're going into right now is the school of hard knocks, the hard times that are going to make strong men. We have to understand that this is no longer the easy street.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  We've got to start being disciplined. That is something that is completely absent in our politics. And whoever takes office in 2028, they've got to be riding on the back of fiscal discipline. Like we've got to get our house in order in terms of money because we are about to inflate the debt away. And you absolutely cannot do that unless you have the kind of economic growth that is required to get on the other side of that, which is reason number 462, why you can't just abandon AI. As of today, globally, AI is basically the only growth play. So if you want to have real growth, you're going to have to embrace AI. The housing market continues to be a problem for China. Their GDP is declining. So you've got major issues there.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Obviously, the entire US economy is predicated on financing alone. So you've got to start doing things that give you a thriving middle class here in the US. Building data centers right now is one of the biggest plays. Military, no one's going to want to hear that, least of all myself, but nonetheless, we've got to start manufacturing a lot of those systems here in the US. And if we don't start doing that, we are going to be in for a very rough time. Because if we try to inflate the debt away without economic growth, the K will race. Both sides of the K will race away from each other. It will be a nightmare scenario.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  The interesting about it, though, is that we started this conversation about, talking about the war and all of our manufacturing is in the US, like Lockheed manufactures in the US, Raytheon, Northrop, like all those weapons manufacturers are in the US. They're not outsourcing those.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  If you start looking at the supply chains, you realize that isn't true. It's like, we might be assembling things that are required here, or we might have supply chains that we're pulling in from China. But the reality is so much of what we do from a components and parts perspective, we don't have the minerals that we need to actually make these parts. So this is where it's like, we've got to be, have our eyes wide open. You've got to figure out who are your allies that are going to help you with this. If you can't find it in US territory, then you're going to have to partner with somebody. And if you alienate all of the people that have access to this stuff, you're going to be in for a rough time. Now, it doesn't mean that you won't be able to get it at all, but it does mean, because

• 40:23Speaker 00

  they need the money, but it doesn't mean that they won't put restrictions, just like we restrict the advanced chips going to China. They'll restrict certain rare earth metals making it to the US. So yeah, it's one of those where we've got to be, we as the voting public have got to be wide-eyed, have our eyes wide open about what exactly this moment is. That it's, we don't have the friends that we once had. Now, they may never have been friends. It may have only been aligned interests. It may have only been a desire to be under our, what they call the nuclear umbrella. I think it's a lot bigger than that. But even if people only stayed under our umbrella and cooperated with us because we

• 41:07Speaker 00

  were the strongest economy, because we were the strongest military.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  There are now, there's now a competitor on both of those. And that breaks the dynamic because people now have different options. And so we have to understand the concept of getting our house in order, of being fiscally disciplined, of being smart about our borders, being smart about making sure that we have a middle class that can get a job and can work. There are going to be a lot of things in terms of the growth engine that we're going to have to be smart about. We were talking about that with delineating between weapons-grade AI and civilian use AI. We've got to be smart about that because if you're not building out those data centers, you're going to have to point to what's going to be that thing that brings those grounded, real, moving electrons around the world jobs back where people are able to work with

• 41:56Speaker 00

  their hands and have a job that is paying them more over time. And if we have the, a very culturally toxic relationship with the one area of growth that isn't only growing at the top of the K, it's growing at the bottom side of the K. And that's where if we aren't wise about the decisions that we make, about the things that we enforce, reinforce in each other culturally, we are going to derail.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're already there. So it kind of reminds me, I'm trying to think of an analogy. I'm starting to talk in analogies no more because I feel like people don't actually talk when you just talk about logic and facts. So if you paint pictures, people understand that better.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  Give them emotion, baby. That's how people process.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It feels like right now we are an absentee dad that comes around every two weeks and throws money at their child and be like, okay, yeah, fix itself and leave and come back. Cause I feel like in this example-

• 42:50Speaker 00

  We're an absentee bipolar dad who sometimes is manic and is super fun to be around. Other times is mean and depressive and maybe slaps you around a bit. Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  It's about right.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's, here's $1.5 trillion, military, go, go kill Iran. And then they just leave. And it's like, military just got the biggest budget it ever got in the world. It still hasn't passed an audit in the last nine years. And yet we don't have enough munitions. We're depleted. There was reports that the Navy is going broke. There were people stranded out there for 200 days. Like there's so many things that just doesn't make sense for a check that size that we are cutting. And at this point now, I don't know what other resources we need to invest to get our military back to where it is. But I don't think it's any, it's more, to your point of it's a culture problem. I think we're at the culture problem in the US. We can't just write a check. We can't just diplomacy our way like something has to fundamentally change.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  You're incredibly right that this is a culture problem. You're wrong about, we can't just cut a check. The bad news is the check won't have the effect that you're looking for, which is, you know, precisely your point. We are going to cut the checks. It is going to continue to drain out from fraud and all that bullshit.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  It's already there.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  But the real question is, how do you begin to reverse course on the culture? And that, that one is the scary part to me. When you look at, okay, if I'm Russia, if I'm China, I go, okay, you guys are dumb because you'll let anybody say anything they want on social media. Say less fam, I'm going to spin up my 200,000 Chinese bots, which did happen. X just identified 200,000 accounts that are, they believe that they're a Chinese bot army, basically. And they're doing things like trying to influence energy policy, AI policy. And I imagine they're also trying to stir up debate on gender ideology and things like that to make sure that we're fighting.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  And it has been very, very effective because populism already starts pulling people in these directions. Having the strongest, most prosperous nation on earth starts pulling you in these opposite directions. We've seen this throughout time with the collapse of empires. You really do collapse from within. And it's one of those things that gets repeated so often that people forget why you end up collapsing from within. And you end up collapsing from within because you don't trust each other anymore. It becomes a low trust society where people are warring at each other. Everybody's trying to basically take the coffers of wealth and use it to their own ends. And they begin telling themselves a story that either it's okay to steal from the government because the government is bad, or it's okay to steal from the government because this,

• 45:33Speaker 00

  I'm the one who's righteous. And so I'm going to extract from the American taxpayer to make sure that we're getting the things that we want from a global perspective. Also, you've got, and it's been cooking for a very long time, but you've got this globalist mentality where it's like, well, I don't, not only do I not need to think about my home country, it is morally repugnant to think about my home country. I need to only think about the globe. And what people don't understand is you're living in the product of evolution. And so as you start trying to deviate from evolution, you run into these insane problems. So evolution has given you right-leaning temperaments and left-leaning temperaments for a reason. They have to be held in dynamic tension.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  It gives you masculine and feminine energy for a reason, and those have to be held in dynamic tension. It is giving you borders and nation states and religions for a reason. These things solve a problem. And as we begin trying to throw all of that out the window, adopting this blank slate globalist agenda where it's like, we need only go, this is what I stand for, and then I can push it through, being totally blind to, part of the reason that we have left-leaning personality and right-leaning personality is something called the freeloader problem. And as you make yourself, as you get wealthy and prosperous off of being disciplined, off of being aggressive, off of being strong, all of a sudden you can afford to start eroding those very principles.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  And the balance shifts back and forth between the right and the left. This is exactly what people mean when they say that good times make weak men and hard times make strong men, is this pendulum swing based on pain and suffering that moves us back and forth. And so we have the very difficult task of while we're still in a period where we're still the richest nation on earth, people would still rather be here than anywhere else. We have to have the discipline to say, we got here by a certain methodology and we need to return to that methodology before it's too late. And I am not sure, the, the message from history is pretty loud and clear that you can delay it, you can't ever stop it. The momentum just goes all the way to a breaking point.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  I want to go to Besen because I think that this is just a cherry on top because we have all these things working on it. And then Besen just wants to keep enacting financial violence to see, to make it get worse. So this is from Mario Narfall. Besen, Washington is ready for financial violence over Iran. The Trump administration plans to sanction another bank this week as it tries to force countries still doing business with Iran to choose between Tehran and access to the US financial system. Treasury Secretary Scott Besen isn't dressing it up as diplomacy. This is going to be financial violence if we have to, quote, unquote. The warning to financial institutions were less settled, quote, we know who you are. Washington isn't just sanctioning Iran anymore, it's putting everyone who still does business with them on notice. Source is the AP.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  So going back to your Annaconda analogy, on the home front, we're doing strikes and reciprocal strikes. Trump vowed to strike them again after they just intercepted the missiles that were heading toward Jordan. Now we have Besen on this side. Are we just, this is just a forever war? We're just going to keep going until somebody cries wolf? Cause I feel like internally, we're getting people that are saying, hey, I don't think we should fight anymore. Financially, we're getting people that are like, hey, our coffers are getting kind of low, maybe we should chill. Our oil reserves were low, but we just grabbed some from Venezuela. So I think we're good on that side now. Besen seems like he's turning it up versus turning it down. So I don't know if this is the final push or if this is just second gear, you know?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Well, right now, this is definitely just second gear. There's going to be more to come, that is for sure. Yes, we're going to remain in Iran until somebody breaks, whether the US at the midterms or whether Iran just crumbles under the sanctions that's being put on them. The reality is when you have the global world order falling apart, and you've heard politicians talk about it for a while, this has been on people's minds for a long time before it made its way down into culture. The world order is changing. The balance of power is shifting precisely because China has become so strong that they can now be dismissive of the US. That is their stated policy. And so as you have that, all of the people that felt some type of way about America

• 50:00Speaker 00

  being in pole position forever, they want to see America weaken. And they're going to try to weaken America from the inside. They're going to try to weaken America from the outside. And so running a war, running an empire is extraordinarily expensive. And the moment where you begin to refracture, because I think at least the Trump administration, we'll see who follows up, at least the Trump administration is fine being a regional hegemon. This is why they're making a play so hard in our hemisphere to get China out and to get as many countries as they can over onto a more capitalist system to move away from communism because of that balance of power. This is exactly what we were going through with Russia during the Cold War.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  The world starts making decisions about what side of this am I on? Am I going to be on the side with China? Am I going to be on the side with the US? Back in the day, it was, am I going to be on the side with Russia? Am I going to be on the side with the US? Now, the bad news is China learned a lot of lessons from what happened in Russia. And so they're communist in name, but they're not communist in reality because they're not retarded. So they went, let's audit what actually happened in Russia, see all the dumb ass shit where we're just trying to control everything from the top down. Instead, go, we're going to let markets thrive, but I'm going to come in with a fucking hammer. And if you don't do what I tell you, I'm going to disappear you. I don't care if you're the richest man in China. I will disappear you. I will re-educate you and then I'll let you come back.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  But industry is going to do what the fuck I say, but I'm going to let you guys compete. It is a way smarter strategy. And this is why I'm saying, hey, dear DSA, if you want to have a real conversation, stop talking about the Nordic countries, which are now falling over themselves because first of all, they were never socialist to begin with. They just had a gigantic social safety net, which they are learning you can't do when you have infinite migrants. So they're going through their own crisis right now. China is a much smarter model if you want to be an authoritarian dictator. And that's really what people are going to be choosing between is- Do I want a strong man to hold me in his hand, knowing at any time he could crush me to death if he so desires, but in the interim, he's going to be very efficient with policy.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  We're going to get things done that other people are not going to be able to do. And so, do I want to align myself with a fucking big daddy who's just gonna slap me around if, you know, I'm not listening, but is in control, will back down the US? Or do I want to be aligned with what has become a very dysfunctional, very messy, uh, Western nation that is finding out that if people don't believe in freedom, that your freedom doesn't last very long, and those guys are sliding more and more authoritarian anyway, so hey, why not just go with the one that's showing that it's rising up at this point? So, that is a far more distressing battle than what we had in the eighties. In the eighties, Americans believed in themselves. They believed in freedom. They were willing to fight for freedom.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  It felt like a righteous cause to, uh, want to outperform, outperform Russia, to build a better system, to show that our freedoms work, man. Just look at the media from back then. The movies that we were putting out was so pro-America. And so, all of that gave people the sense of like, yes, we're the good guys. Yes, we're doing things in the right way. And so, while you're never going to have perfect hegemony in the country, we were infinitely closer to that than we are now. And so, this time, it feels far more like a jump ball. It is not obvious to me which way people are gonna go. So, we are gonna fight like hell in Iran to make sure that we win that battle, to keep

• 53:43Speaker 00

  the straight open, so that Trump can claim it as a victory, so that he can say, "Look, dear Middle East, you guys should not be breaking towards China. You also shouldn't become a splinter group, going off on your own, trying to pit China and America against each other. You guys should align yourselves with the forward-facing, uh, country that you are headed in that direction, uh, for decades now anyway, which is the US. You guys should be westernizing, you should be looking at UAE, look at what they've done, they've attracted talent and capital from all over the world. You guys should want to be like that, but you should be US-aligned." So, if Trump fails now, then the Strait of Hormuz becomes our Suez Canal moment. It is clear that the empire is dead, and long live the empire, meaning China.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  And so, he understands that the stakes are very high from a, who is the world going to align with as we start moving forward? And does the US get into, um, fights with Canada, fights with Mexico, trade-wise, to the point where they're essentially more and more isolated? And Europe is obviously having a cultural crisis right now, so, Matt, we don't need to worry about them, GCC nations, if I'm China or Russia, I want Iran to pop up and take over the GCC nations. So, now you would have that three-way with a possible fourth in North Korea. Now, you've got a real alliance. You start talking about BRICS nations, there's a bunch of them, right? Buying gold, getting out from under the dollar.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  And now, you have a prolonged period of this rejiggering of the world order, and it will be violent, and it will be messy, and, boy, oh, boy, it's not nearly as much fun as when you have one strong hegemon, that is us, that believes in freedom, that wants to do things through diplomacy and not the current hammer that Trump wields. But we are where we are. Now, the reason that I feel a moral obligation to talk about this and beat this drum is, uh, as a child of the eighties, I know how good it can feel when you're optimistic about your future, I know how good it can feel when freedom is the thing that people champion,

• 55:52Speaker 00

  when the individual is considered the, um, sacred thing that must be protected, when private property is something that people actually believe in, uh, that's incredible. And I want to see us get back to that. But to get back to that, the role I will hope to be some small drop in a very large ocean, is to remind people that we can lay out what we believe in, what we stand for, to have pride in who we are, and to march forward towards a known destination on the horizon that builds a thriving middle class. All of that is possible, but we've got to talk about what's actually happening right now, so that we can mitigate some of the impacts, so that we know what we should be thinking of as we evaluate candidates when we're voting. All of that stuff becomes critically important. We can get out of this.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  It just isn't going to be easy, and it will require everybody to be very clear-headed about what's actually happening. So, when you look at Iran in that context, hopefully it becomes a little bit easier to understand why we're doing what we're doing.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  We have to jump over to China and Nepal. So firstly, China has begun censoring footage of the floods in Nepal.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Uh, Beijing authorities removed footage at the moment, people fled before a wall of mud swept through the Guiyang border crossing. Nepalese politicians accused Beijing of lack of transparency and questions what they are trying to hide. Another tweet says that, so it turns out China was building a hydroelectricity factory by a glacier, and all the construction caused a portion of the glacier that collapsed, tumbled down, then that turned into the wave, that turned into the mudslide that ended up killing 2,500 people.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Oh, God, I hadn't seen the death toll yet.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but all you hear about this news is, uh, okay, that guy was just trolling at the last part, we didn't need that, we didn't need that.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Dude, I'll get that every now and then with a video, where I'm like, uh, oh, man, this video's a banger, and then it ends with like some hyper-partisan political message. Um, yeah, so, here is the reality. We don't yet know what caused the mudslide in Nepal. So, to say that China did it, I think it's getting way out over our skis, but there are a lot of people saying, "This is an element that needs to be investigated." Uh, as Drew just said, you've got Nepalese politicians themselves saying, "Listen, China is trying to hide something." Now, maybe they're not hiding their own involvement, but they are hiding something. And so, it begs the question of, "What are you trying to hide?" This is one of those times where I will warn people, authoritarian governments are terrible.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  You need things like the FOIA Act, where you can say, "I want to know exactly what's going on. What is the footage? What does this show? What were you doing? Was there a whistleblower? Has anybody talked about this?" So that we can understand what went wrong. Now, this doesn't mean that you don't go and build these, um, large-scale energy production things like China has done in the past, but it does mean that you put some, uh, even if it's just notification to the people that are downstream, "Hey, we're doing this." It is possible that hillsides are destabilized, uh, and so, you're gonna need an early warning system, or whatever. Uh, you don't want to run into the quagmire that we're in, in the US, where you can't get anything moved forward because you have regulatory capture, and anything that might

• 58:57Speaker 00

  kill literally things like, uh, a small fish, uh, or a bird or something, you just can't get anything done. I'm certainly not advocating for that. I think we have gone way overboard here in the US, but there's reason to say, "Hey, the authoritarian government does fail to allow the public to speak up and say, 'This thing, we need,' we don't need all the way to shut it down, but we need some sort of reasonable regulation to keep this something that is safe." And so, I want to see a full-blown exploration into what happened, so that we can figure out if this was China, uh, that made that or not, so that, at least in the future, we understand how to better protect ourselves from these kinds of things.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  The only thing that can make a tragedy like this worse is if we don't learn anything from the tragedy. Now, nobody wants to see this kind of thing happen, but you're not gonna shut the government down, or the pursuit of your very important goals, you're not gonna shut them down because an accident led to some deaths. Unfortunately, you wouldn't be able to build a civilization like that. But it is, it is an untolerable burden when the government just says, "We don't care about the people, we don't care about what happens to them," which is very much China's MO. And so, this is why, again, sanctity of the individual, uh, you're gonna get a very different response in America to this than you would get in China, precisely because of a value system that says it's the individual that has a spark of divinity in them.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Uh, and so, yeah, I would, I would hate to see the world, China, Nepal, anybody, move forward without first understanding what happened, how do we avoid this in the future?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's sad, we'll keep monitoring the situation, we don't quite know all the facts, like Tom said, uh, but it definitely looks bad. And being a one-party system, complete control of the government, you can't just say, "I want to do that, and I'm gonna do that tomorrow, and I don't have to ask anybody."

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, too true.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  All right, we're gonna do a couple mini reacts, there's been some couple banger videos we want to get, um, eyes on. Whitney Webb, um, she was a friend of the show, she called us to Ops, though.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Did she really?

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, she said, "A lot of the large podcasts I've been on are actually like ideologically captured."

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  No, but wait, did she name us?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  She didn't name us.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  I don't buy it, I don't buy it, there's no way.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I love you, Whitney, please, come back, you're one of my favorite guests we ever had. Um, we were supposed to get on early of the year, then she like didn't respond, then she went on Twitter and was like, "Yeah, I can't be doing podcasts no more, because the government's in all of them, and da-da-da-da."

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Oh, she'll have to name-check me before I'll, I'll buy that we're getting swept up in that.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Well, yes, it was Hollywood, there's no, uh, Israeli contact in my ear or nothing, I promise. Um, I feel like I shouldn't have said that, because now people are gonna think there's Israeli contact in my ear. Uh, but anyway, uh, she is laying down this, uh, framework for why she thinks we're having this push to go into stablecoins.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  The cyber attack seems like a very possible scenario, because it's a way for the banks to absolve themselves of any role in a financial crisis. Um, it's an easy way to, uh, consolidate banks so that only systemically important ones survive the hack. Um, and it could also potentially be a very effective means of onboarding people onto this new digital currency paradigm. So, for example, let's say this financial, uh, cyber, this cyber attack on the banks takes place, and they say, "Well, the existing money in your account has disappeared, the hackers took it, but we can return to you the exact same amount of money you had, but it won't be in the dollars you had before, it will be in USDC or this dollar-backed

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  stablecoin, or it will be this token."

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  That is distressing precisely because it is so believable. It is very clear that what Besen is trying to do is use stable coins to get appetite globally for US debt. It's actually a brilliant move. And to be honest, we need to do something because we're certainly not going to go into austerity. So we need to do something in order to begin to get more appetite back to the debt, which is probably about to get worse. I'm hearing rumors that China is planning to sell a large amount of US debt. We'll see if that actually happens, but they've been selling US debt for ages. Obviously, what's going on in Japan, Japan is going to be selling debt, I think, in

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  the not-too-distant future because we're seeing that some of the attempts to defend the yen just aren't working. And so eventually, if Japan is going to keep going down the road of defending the yen, they will have to start selling. There's only so much that the FEMA loans are going to be able to do for them. So, yeah, we're going to have, with the deficits that we're running and the fact that countries are now moving away from US debt and gold is supplanting it in central banks, we're going to need to create that appetite. And so you can imagine, if you believe that your government will do things against the will and best interests of the people in order to get the monetary system under their

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  control and in a position where they feel like they can maintain a slow, steady decline instead of an abrupt recession or depression, which we have endless evidence that they will do, then this starts to become plausible. Now, this is obviously just her running a thought experiment. This is not her saying she has evidence or anything like that, but this is distressingly plausible.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  There's the potential here for people to steal money from you and then essentially give it back to you, but with new conditions and with a new, like, social contract.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  You voluntarily accepted this new system and voluntarily onboarded to this new paradigm, but it's coercion to an extreme degree. All of your money was stolen, right? And now you can only get it back if you take it in the form of the digital dollars that we approve of or the, you know, the CBDC, depending on where you are.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  All right, pause it. That would be an absolutely horrific thing to happen. This is why, man, do I really want to see America re-embrace freedom as one of its principles and getting back to the point where freedom is something that we're willing to pay a price for. Because yes, there's always going to be an excuse. There's always going to be a danger on the horizon. And when there's a danger on the horizon, as I hope we all learned during COVID, people real fast stop caring about freedom and they just want to be safe. And so the government can and will scare us into the point where a huge portion of people will gladly accept that kind of deal. But the problem is that as we change our social contracts, as we start handing over to the government more and more authoritarian control, and we say that the individual should

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  be afraid of the government instead of the government being afraid of the individuals, we, in America, we become something totally different. So for our 250-year existence, that's really been one of the things that defined the American personality was that we, the "don't tread on me." Hey, fine, we have a government, fine, I pay taxes, but don't come and tell me how to live my life. I'm going to do things the way that I want to do things. And when they can control, like, for instance, this is the one that always freaks me out. So if you've got, let's say, a green agenda that you're trying to put forward, and you think that meat is part of the reason for the problem with global warming, then you

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  can say, hey, we're detecting that you bought too much meat this month, and now at the grocery store, you literally can't check out because we're freezing the money that you're trying to spend on that, and this transaction won't go through until you reduce your meat consumption. And they will actually be able to do that if they can control the money. And so that's where I'm like, kids, we've got to be very clear-eyed about where this can go so that we put enough pressure on our politicians through voting, through speaking up, letting them know how we feel about this, so that they don't do that. Because politicians are downstream of what we get excited about, what we're going to vote for. So never lose sight of that. If we are culturally excited about, yeah, more control, give it to me, come on, big

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  daddy, tell me what to do, then that's exactly who's going to get elected. And then they will do exactly that. Okay, that is China. That's what China has proven, that if you vote for the strong men, the strong men will come into power, they will kill you by the tens of millions to give you the answer of, hey, this is what state control looks like. And as long as you behave, then we don't have to keep killing you. But the second that you step out of line, we got to get back to it. And so that should not be where we want to go. We should want to continue running the exact opposite experiment, which is freedom first. Otherwise, you get what she's talking about.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Well, the head of DHS, Alexander Mayorkas, has said on record that the next big threat to Americans is a cybersecurity event that he called Killware. And Killware certainly sounds very scary, but if you read the existing definition of it, it refers to cyber attacks on essential infrastructure that has the potential to kill people. So it doesn't necessarily kill people, like in the name, but it attacks things like water systems, the power grid, essential infrastructure that people rely on every day.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is where you want to talk about getting into a position where you can do things that make sense in terms of where we're headed and would create jobs, is start protecting your infrastructure. Take some of these threats seriously. Get people together, like, think of it as a Manhattan Project for infrastructure protection. So whether that's water, whether that's the electrical grid, whether that's certain communication devices that we would need in the case of like an EMP attack or an AI-driven cyber attack, start building out those systems now. Don't wait until the first thing happens. This is why looking at the way that people are starting to respond to drone warfare is very interesting, building these big metal cages around oil infrastructure.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  Because yes, they are available to attack from the outside, and it's easy enough to intercept a ballistic missile, but it's very difficult to intercept a drone. But it's actually, I mean, look, it costs money and it requires people to work and build it, but you can, pretty low-tech, build these grates around them that stop the drones from getting in close. So waiting until you have the problem is stupid. Reacting now, when you know the problem exists and it's coming your way, and building against it, that would make sense.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Just for the record, Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Let's go, that's great. So this is one of those things where looking at the, like, specifics of it are going to be important. However, if, like, let's make a pact. If you can hear my voice right now, our pact is, we don't care if somebody's Democrat, Republican, independent, doesn't matter. We care deeply about their value system. We care deeply about what they, the policies that they are campaigning for and what they want to put into effect. We care deeply about their ability to understand first principles thinking, right? Those things we care about. We don't care about party affiliation at all. Now, if all of us can get on board with that, cool, we've got a shot of actually thinking through these problems well and getting to the other side of it.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  If, on the other hand, we outsource our brains and say, party, just tell me how to vote, now we're going to be in a bad place, a very bad place. You become super easy to manipulate.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Reason in 2020 actually simulated a massive Killware attack that was targeting a US presidential election. And the way they conducted this Killware simulation, which they did with DHS and some US law enforcement agencies, was to get the US presidential election canceled and martial law declared. So they basically, through that simulation, established what types of hacks could succeed in achieving the declaration of martial law and the cancellation of a US presidential election, which is pretty, pretty extreme.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  So...

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  So why are they doing that?

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  The cheeky smile.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Why does an intelligence-linked company want to simulate with DHS and law enforcement a series of hacks that disrupt national infrastructure during a US presidential election and martial law is declared?

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  I mean, here's the thing, that's actually a reasonable kind of threat assessment to run and to be prepared for that kind of thing.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Check where your vulnerabilities are and stuff like that.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like if I'm a foreign adversary, that's a perfect time to do exactly this kind of thing. So wargaming it, I think is very smart. The thing that we should all be paying attention to is what do they do? So what was the thing that they considered the winning strategy? Now that I would like to know. Now, of course, you have to be careful not to broadcast that kind of stuff because then people can just come in and change their plans because they know what your response is going to be. But that, putting forward our views on the way that they should be thinking about this to make sure that all the ideas are on the table, that makes a lot of sense to me. Just being paranoid that they are wargaming it doesn't make sense. So obviously, we should be wargaming the scariest scenarios so we can make sure that we have a plan in place so that we don't

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  get caught flat-footed. That's the last place you want to be.

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at all of this through the lens of risk management, from the elite's perspective, let's take the words of Larry Fink, for example, of BlackRock, who's been obsessed with risk management his whole career. He has a quote, he's on video, saying that the markets do not like democracy, democracy is messy, they like totalitarian governments because the risk is low.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  That's actually a pretty dumb statement. So if you look at the amount that people invest in China, it's a pittance compared to who, people investing in the US. The reality is they want a stable market, they want to understand like what the markets are going to do, all of that. So there's a place for investment in Chinese where it's like, okay, yes, there are some things that you might do in China over somewhere else because you understand once the government sets a policy that they're going to do it. But I have seen the markets go from China's super investable to China's not investable at all to a more sort of opportunistic investment strategy. So is he being sort of cheeky about comments that people make over a brunch? Almost certainly. That, yes, I could see somebody making a joke

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  about, I don't like the messiness of the democracy, but please don't be bamboozled. If you're a real trader, the very thing you need is volatility. The very thing you need is volatility. Volatility is a trader's friend. Volatility is not the ignorant guy's friend who's trying to get in and out of something in two months. That guy doesn't like it. But the reality is traders are looking for volatility. They can win on the way up and the way down. So yeah, this is, I think, a cheeky comment that he probably made based on a joke that I'm sure traders make. But if you look at where people invest, they invest in the US way disproportionately.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  ... figures that's trying to sort of position himself as a free speech champion and one of these figures that's on the populist right. But in reality, a lot of the policies that Elon Musk promotes, like carbon taxes, for example, have traditionally been policies promoted like the World Economic Forum and entities like this that are seen as being globalist and not populist in nature. People forget that Elon Musk is someone who, whose business has depended to a large degree on government subsidies and currently a lot of his companies either depend on mass adoption of electric vehicles via policies linked to the Sustainable Development Goals to phase out fossil fuel vehicles.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  I've never understood this pushback. So the government is going to create incentives because they want somebody to go and do something. They're going to create sticks because they want you to stop doing something. And the fact that entrepreneurs are always going to go, cool, I'm going to go fill that void, like that's exactly what you do. Think about the film industry here in the US, in LA, excuse me, has been completely hollowed out because other states and other countries created tax incentives and the entrepreneurs that run the studios wisely said, cool, I'm going to go take advantage of those tax incentives. This is how the game works. So if you had Elon going, okay, these tax incentives exist, but I'm not going to take advantage of them, like what? That wouldn't make any sense. Now,

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  if you're saying that the guy doesn't know how to run a business, that unfortunately is you showing ignorance to how businesses are run. He is arguably the single most effective entrepreneur of all time. So I can get into why that is the easy one to just give you a tip of a very large iceberg. He is able to aggregate and retain the most talented people on planet Earth. So yeah, the pushback on Elon, absolutely hate his personality, no problem. Think that he is using his money to influence government, no problem. But when people go with the argument that like, oh, like he doesn't even really know what he's doing anyway, he's just relying on government handouts. It's like, a company was going to take advantage of that opportunity somewhere because that's precisely why the government

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  put it in place, is they wanted entrepreneurs to go down that path. So yeah, anyway, that one's weird. There are plenty of things to say about Elon that are distressing. That one's just weird.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's a conflict of interest with Elon Musk. So for example, take his recent ownership of Twitter, now called X. The Pentagon has spent the better part of the last decade developing very sophisticated tools to manipulate social media, including bots and other techniques that, per the Air Force and one of their contracts, said was aimed at controlling people with social media like we control drones. Do you think that Elon Musk as a Pentagon

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Actually, let her finish that up.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  ... an intelligence contractor would restrict the Pentagon's use of those tools? They spent millions of dollars in over a decade developing?

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  Now, that's a great question. And so holding his feet to the fire on that, I think it's really a smart place to start. But when you think about, so Elon Musk ends up taking over Twitter at a time where censorship was just absolutely at its peak, he lets journalists come in and do the Twitter files, go in, find out all of the just naked collusion between them and the government. Now, are we really putting forward that Elon is going to collude more with the government? Now, you might be able to make a case for he's going to collude more with the government that he agrees with, that's entirely possible. And by all means, let's do that investigative reporting. But the fact to read his purchase

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  of Twitter, which remember he tried to get out of, as him just being, I want to create a collusion machine, I don't think the facts of the situation back that up. Also, when Elon took over X, he was getting like 25 million views. Like it would just be, if I saw something that got, say, less than 15 million views, I'd be like, from him, I'd say, oh, this isn't even popping off. And now he's changed the algorithm to the point where he rarely, one, he rarely shows up on my feed, and then two, when he does show up on my feed, it's like maybe a 3 million, 5 million post. So he himself, who could control the algorithm to boost his voice, has done the exact opposite and dramatically cratered his view counts. So he does not feel like somebody where when you look at

• 1:18:27Speaker 00

  the evidence, is just trying to get more and more control of the situation. Now, I think people should have an inherent distrust for anybody that controls the stuff. I'm far more concerned about his control over Grok. But at least that, we can look at and say, okay, what are the results? What is it output? What are the sources that it uses? Who does it cite? What are the narratives that it pushes forward? And you can begin to map the bias of the AI. That I think is important because he touts it as, this is meant to be the thing that finds objective truth, which the vast majority of things just aren't objective truth, they're all interpretation anyway. But being able to put these different LLMs up against a test that shows their bias, I think is really

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  smart. And there are people already doing this. Grok does not score perfectly. But at last check, they, I don't know if they were the tippy top, but they were one of the best in terms of reduced bias. So that would be the kind of thing that we 1,000% want to hold people accountable to because bias, manipulation, specific misinformation will intentionally be baked into LLMs by the creators for sure.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  But also by people doing the malicious tack where they attack where they take over those 250 documents and if they can get them put inside the LLM, then it will do the whole mentoring candidate thing.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  We're being pushed towards essentially the same policies, but by a different group of quote unquote leaders who are trying to frame themselves as the opposite side of the political divide because the existing side that was pushing those, you know, they were using sort of more like left leaning political rhetoric. And so because they got pushed back, they're trying to sell those same policies in a different wrapper that's sort of cloaked in this rhetoric of populism and right leaning politics. I think there's essentially a consensus that some other, some other very significant financial crisis is in the cards for the next several years. And if you are the big banks and you know

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  that's going to happen, you probably want to avoid a scenario like what happened in 2008 where the public knew that you were the source of the malfeasance and the economic problems, which of course spawned movements like Occupy Wall Street. If you want to avoid that, how, what is the best way to absolve yourself of any sort of blame for mismanaging or losing people's money?

• 1:20:50Speaker 00

  People are so aware now of what's happening. I don't think they're going to be able to hide anything. They might be able to push the analysis off to the response. And so maybe they get a pass for the massive disruption. But since their response is going to be massive amounts of printing money, and that's the same malfeasance that they've been doing forever, it almost doesn't matter whether they get off the hook for like, we had to do it or not. People are going to be so frustrated by the inflation that you're still going to get the same kind of pushback. Because if nothing else, people like me are going to be banging the drum that you guys have been doing this forever before. You're doing it now, whether you have good reason to do it or not. The effects are going to be the

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  same and worse if she's right and they manipulate the social contract and they move people over into a money that they can control, regardless of whether it started as a hack. Dude, I would be screaming from the rooftops that, okay, let's just play the scenario out. So now they have a money that can control you. And now they're inflating this to, you know, all hell. And who's going to benefit? All of this stuff is knowable. So all the people that got their money back, they're, those are pre-inflation dollars. And now in the giving you of your money back, they just inflated the money supply. So they actually gave you less purchasing power than was taken from you. And like, if we're still running deficits and all of that, like you're just, you're in the exact same spot that you were.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Yes, the hackers made it better or made it worse. And maybe it's better for them because they get off the hook and they don't get the double whammy of we were also, this is obviously a thought experiment of if they did something nefarious. Maybe they get off the hook for that and they're not blamed for the false flag. But nonetheless, the way that they're going to quote unquote, solve the problem will be the same thing they've been doing forever because this stuff is mechanistic.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  It does like, there seems to be a there there. But I could be biased. Whitney, you do no wrong on my eyes. I miss you, girl. Come back on the show.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  For real, Whitney, come back. It'd be great to have her. Also, by the way, if you want to challenge me directly about the things that you think that I'm doing that are pro somebody else's government, I want to know. I would actually love to hear that. So you certainly have a show that I, if I brought you on, it would be to understand your position. I'm not going to sit there and argue with you. You know, that's not my style. So would happily do that. If some of the breakdown is of what I'm doing, one, I will almost certainly push back if I think that it's wrong, but I will seek to understand first so that I can say, hey, this is what I hear you saying. Do I understand it accurately? So anyway, that would be amazing. I would love that. I'll happily put it out unedited, like whatever you need. You can say all the things that you need to say up to and including

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  an indictment of the way that you think that I am doing it would be amazing. Would love that. Love that. Love that. Now, going back to what she was saying, I will say this, that I think it's right to be paranoid about it. I think it's right to put it out there. I think it's right to talk about these things. She isn't saying this is already happening, I don't think. From what I took away is she's just saying, listen, I don't trust the government, rightly so. And here is an attack vector that they could use that we all need to be aware of. I don't think there's any reason to hide from that.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And they are pushing us to coins. I don't see a boomer downloading a crypto wallet. So something has to be done to get them off it because they have a majority of the wealth right now. So that, that's why I'm like, okay, my mom will never download a crypto wallet. But it's one of those things, her wealth needs to get transferred one way or another. The bank could just be like, sorry, this is the new thing. You just have to, in our, in your app now, here's your wallet and it's built in and it's integrated. And now she's on the crypto system without having to download anything or getting a 12 word hash or whatever like that. So it's, it's interesting framing it that way because I feel like it makes me, what do you always say, once you change the framing, it makes like logical steps. You're like, okay, I see the play now. Like, that's kind of how I feel about it.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, she's got internal logic. Whether it ends up being true or not is a totally different question, but there is a distressing amount of internal logic.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  All right. And now to the other side of the internet where is there a woman loneliness epidemic? Let's talk about it.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  This was unavoidable.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  So it's Friday night and I am so lonely and so sad. I was just sitting here crying about it. I just like coming on here because it helps me feel less alone in this feeling. And sometimes it's like hard to say out loud because it just like reminds me of how real it is. But it's like, it's a Friday night, it's 5pm and I just sat here and ate dinner

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  in complete silence. And like the silence is absolutely like deafening. And I just don't think people who have never experienced chronic loneliness, understand like how painful it is because it's just like so painful emotionally to.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  Humans are not meant to be isolated.

• 1:26:04Speaker 03

  Just feel so alone and just like not have anybody to live your life with. And it's so hard for me because I am like full of life. I like, I just hiked 500 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. I did a road trip to Yosemite by myself a few months ago. I'm leaving to go to Switzerland by myself in two weeks.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  So what I like about this, and I'll give my full breakdown in a second. There's another thing she needs to say for this all to make sense. But what I like about this is that you've got somebody who the, my first layer of advice is always, well, go out and do things. Like you need to meet people in real life, not online. She's already doing it. So it's like she shuts down a normal way to just sort of dismiss these people of like, you're chronically online, you're always in your house.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  Your cat lady in there.

• 1:26:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And God forbid that you work remotely. It's like, now I get how you've isolated yourself. This is largely just a problem of technology that has these weird artifacts in terms of the way that people interact with each other. Go out, meet people. She's doing it. And I think that this points at a far more distressing problem that's going on. All right. She's, she's got another key point she's going to make and then I'll, I'll give my assessment.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  And it's like, I'm out here like living my life, doing things that I love. And it just like hurts so badly to have nobody to share it with. And even just like, honestly, what's even worse is just not having like day to day, like doing day to day things in life and having people to share it with. It's like, it's a Friday night and it's 5pm and I just have nobody to like, hang out with, like nobody's texting, like, and, and that's the thing. It's not just like, oh, it's just tonight. It's like, this is like every day of my life. Like, like there's nobody ever asking me to hang out. There's like, I, anytime I like reach out to someone, I have to schedule out like a month in advance

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  to hang out with them. And then we like never talking again for like months after that. And it's just like, life just feels so meaningless when you don't have anybody to share it with. And there'll be so many people saying like, you find meaning in your life yourself or like, you need to learn to be, it's like, I'm sick of that bullshit. Like, I'm sorry, you have no idea what I'm talking about.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  What I see here is certainly multivariate, that is for sure. But the loneliness epidemic is really about, we have broken down the structure of society. We have so detached ourselves from what is natural that we're now trying to reorient ourselves to figure out why we have all these internal emotions that are coming up, that are very negative, that do not feel good. And even though we're sort of killing it, if you will, on paper, she's doing all the hiking, she's going all the places, I'm sure she has a wonderful job. And what she's realizing is that evolution has optimized us for certain assumptions. So it has optimized us, assuming that we were going to live in fairly tight-knit groups,

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  that there was going to be a set of known people that we've known for a long time, that we're interacting with constantly, and that there's almost no escape from that. And even if it was a microcosm of, okay, these are the people working on the farm, which even that is very modern in the grand scheme of things. Traditionally, it would have been hunter-gatherer tribes. And this is the big one, that there was no outlet for sex, other than essentially sex with somebody. I mean, of course, you could jerk off, but it's like, without porn, not a whole lot of appetite for that. And so you had this extreme push for men to seek out women. And then for women, there was no birth control.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  And so if you got your emotional validation through a guy that was in some ways seeking sex, it's not the only way, and it isn't that, I don't want people to have an adversarial men and women view, that they are adversarial to each other. But there is certainly a dynamic tension that evolution could count on, that evolution baked into the cake, if you will. So for men, sex is very cheap. For women, it's incredibly expensive, in a universe where there's no birth control. And so all of the, what I call algorithms in our brain, those come up over evolutionary time scales of us not having birth control, of us not having access to pornography. And so you create this world where we're already forced into these groups, we have

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  a cooperative effort that we're working towards, because we're trying to keep everybody alive through a harsh winter, or whatever the case may be. And so we know people, we're interacting with them all the time, we have our roles and responsibilities, and women tended towards taking care of the kids, because specifically, they were the only ones that could do that. So imagine, you can't go to the grocery store and get formula, the only way that kid is going to eat is if they eat from your breast. And so it, evolution is just like, okay, I know that you're going to be the sexual gatekeeper, that you're going to force a man to be worthy enough to have sex with. And then part of that exchange is going to be that that man helps you actually raise that child, so he's going to go out into the dangerous world to do things, you're

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  going to cluster with other women to take care of your kid, their kids, that a big part of the meaning and purpose in your life is going to be raising those children, they literally can't survive without the nutrients that your body produces. And so you start putting that all together, and it's like, cool, everything works. Now, we definitely feel a sense of like, I'm limited, I'm trapped by things. And so we use innovation as a way to start breaking free from some of those traps. We start introducing birth control, incredible, massive breakthrough. People are now in control of when they have kids, when they don't have kids. Then we start saying, hey, women could do anything you want, you can have a kid later in life if you want, they go in, they find that a career is actually fulfilling in a

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  way that they didn't realize, but it leaves certain itches unscratched. Introduce into that technology, and now it's, if you go up and try to flirt with a woman, you're going to get recorded, you're going to get clowned on, you're going to be either called a doofus, or a monster that was perpetrating sexual violence by expressing sexual interest. It's like, now you're putting yourselves in a position where guys have access to pornography, access to a gazillion other ways, reels, video games, everything, to occupy their time. It's dangerous to go after a woman. It's also not sexually interesting for a lot of guys to go after a woman that is above

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  them on the sexual hierarchy, if you will, so that they are making more money than them, that they are smarter than them, that's not typically a thing that a guy's going to go for. So men tend to date across and down, women tend to date across and up, obviously known as hypergamy. So you get this super weird collision, as women get more power in the workplace, as women are decoupled from the necessary result of seeking companionship is having a child, and men aren't even seeking sex, so they're, because they're not being held accountable to a standard of, you need to be worthy of sleeping with me, they're sort of flatlining. And then you get the danger zone of just even approaching somebody is high risk, and

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  you get this kind of now loneliness epidemic, where she might be doing well at her job, but she's now suffering from the things that a man would typically suffer from, when he's putting his time and energy into his job, which is he doesn't hang out with people, he has a hard time maintaining his friendships, he'll see people once in a while, but not very frequently. But the problem is, speaking from experience, there's all this evolutionary energy behind that, so I don't find myself necessarily compelled to go hang out with my friends, so I don't feel any emotional distress by being isolated, by being alone, in a way that women clearly do. And so it turns into this clusterfuck of like, each one of the things that we've done, whether it's the innovation on birth control, whether it's women getting into the workplace,

• 1:34:13Speaker 00

  all of these by themselves are awesome, and it gives people all these incredible choices. But you start putting it together, and some evolutionary expectations begin to break down. So men have an expectation that they will try to earn sexual access to a woman, and thus will turn their potential into skillset, trying to climb the ladder. And so they'll get better, and they'll innovate, and they'll do all these crazy things, and get stronger and more powerful as a man. And a woman has an expectation that she'll meet this biological imperative to have kids, to raise them, and to be part of a social group that looks after the kids, and has cooperative pressures that push them together to look after the kids in groups. And so instead of being isolated, she's driven into like a mom group, and now that's all breaking down.

• 1:34:56Speaker 00

  But we still have the push, from an evolutionary perspective, to do it, and so we feel super weird when we're out of step with that. That's where we are.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  I don't know, I feel good to separate these two things out, because I think-

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  Which are the two things?

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  On one side, we have the evolution conversation, because I think that there are nuances there as well. But on the forefront, I think that there is something in adulting that even I experience right now, where like, I have a homie, and I have this term called couch friends, like friends I could just go and just sit on the couch, I don't have to get dressed, I don't need an agenda, I don't have to spend money, yo, you at the house, I'm coming over, cool, bet. But I, like, this is somebody that I'm close with, this is one of my A1 friends, I really like, I really like him. But I see him every six months, because it's his life, because he's bored, he's building something, I'm building something, we're just in these different points. So when she was going through a frustration of like, even when I want to see somebody, it's like, I can't just pull up, I have to, are you with your girl this week, and then you got that, presentate, okay, then you gotta, then before you know it, it's Saturday,

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  okay, I gotta go see Lynn, okay, then next week, before you know it, all right, I'll see you, you know, October 14th, cool, yeah, bet, we'll hang out. And then I'm sitting back on my couch, like, damn, I kind of wanted to see somebody today, though. You know what I mean? Just with adulting, I think that that's something that a lot of people come to terms with later in life, because in college and young adult time, you think you'll be seeing your friends all the time, it's easy. But then on the flip side, there is the male, female aspect of it, but I don't know, I still think, evolution or not, kids or not, people still want to have companionship, people still want to have groups, people still want to hang out with people. And although you don't have that tie to like, hang out with people, like, I want to hang out with the homies and go watch a game or something like that, it's not even about the game, it's the camaraderie that goes through. That's what really flipped my mind with my brother, like, my brother loves sports,

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  but I think it's less about sports, it's more about me and these five guys drinking beer together and just sharing a bond, like, yay, ooh, touchdown, football, like, whether they win the Super Bowl or lose the Super Bowl, it's the same thing, it's just, I'm here with my guys, and we know that Sunday from four to seven, I have this sacred space, you know what I mean? And I think that people need to systematize that, and it gets waved off too often. It's pay your bills, go to work, you know, get a spouse, whatever, but we don't talk about those third spaces that are integral, because they're just naturally happen. In the playground, you naturally hang out with your friends. When you're in college, you naturally go to a happy hour, after hours, or whatever the thing is, Thursday, Thursdays, whatever your college campus had. Now, when you get to adulthood, those things aren't just natural, you have to kind of generate that, so.

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  I agree. And so the thing that I will say, that life will be confusing if you don't map them differently, is that men and women are going to experience that very differently. And so if you're sounding the alarm and saying, hey, the structure of modern life, you weren't super specific, but the structure of modern life is such, even men are now starting to feel isolated, then I'm saying, heard. Now you can imagine, for a woman who is not evolutionarily optimized to be stoic, to be more resilient to those things, is expected, from an evolutionary algorithmic standpoint, to constantly be in these groups that are relationship dynamics, building, focused on,

• 1:38:04Speaker 00

  rearing children, like, that whole thing, they don't have that. And because of the dynamics that I was talking about before, where men are now less incentivized to approach women, and it's risky to approach women from a social pariah perspective, they're not even in a relationship with a guy, to be able to have a project where it's like, ooh, I'm going to like, push him to do better and to become this thing. All these stereotypes that, growing up in the 80s, were just self-evident, that a woman just wants to change a man, but imagine, it was deeply fulfilling for her, and certainly an area of focus, to want to push him to be better and all that, and to take care of the kids and her and all that. And so they've got this thing to focus on, put their energy on, to interact with the world through the man.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  And like, again, I get why many women felt trapped by that, because it was the only option, but still, the way that the evolutionary mind works is, women had to interface with the dangerous world through men. Through men, and then through the social structure of women, which is why their social dynamics can be so strangely vicious and aggressive, women are not like these passive creatures by any means. But like, that's how we've sort of come up. Okay, now to speak to the male side of this very specifically, one, I think everybody, if I wasn't in a marriage, I would feel very different about being able to be isolated. I wouldn't want it, it would be too much.

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  I know, because before I was married, there were times where I felt a profound sense of disease, because I would just come home and literally lay on the floor. It was a particularly dark period that wasn't just about being lonely, but that was like, I know that emotion well. So when you're looking at modern life, and all the ways that it presents things that pull us apart, yes, men and women are going to have to combat that both. But when you look at the-

• 1:39:58Speaker 00

  The derangement is pushing women into a more masculine form of being and then pushing men into a more feminine mode of being. And those are the things that begin, that, that are the beginning of the derangement. And so we have to find ways to construct our lives such that we don't fall for those traps. So that men are pursuing relationships with women, which will then trigger this desire to be worthy, to push yourself to grow, to get better. And then obviously, the thing that I get mean for, it's like, if you're not going to have kids, you better have a damn good reason, because evolution is expecting you to not to, to have kids. And so if you don't, and you don't have something to put

• 1:40:39Speaker 00

  in its place, then you're going to find this profound sense of dis-ease that she's struggling with. The same is true for men and women. But probably more profoundly felt by women.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Autumn Lennon in chat said, this is the point in time where time's going to tell us we shouldn't have got educated, the women.

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. So, okay, this is one of those, every time this comes up, I'm going to make an attempt to make sure that I'm heard. Now, the, the great irony of a frame of reference, when you're locked inside of it, it doesn't matter what the person says, you literally can't hear what they're saying. And the thing I'm saying is, I love that women got educated. Amazing. There's a trade off. And so if you know there's a trade off, do something to deal with it. Not go back, do something to deal with it. So how are we at a societal level going to deal with it? How are we going to deal with it at the individual level? So this is something that I talk to Lisa about all the time. Cool. You're not going to have kids, but you need to make sure that you understand the role that raising kids plays in your mental health. And if you don't

• 1:41:40Speaker 00

  understand that there is a mental health aspect to taking care of kids, then you're going to be confused as to why you hate your life. And you'd be like, why, why do I feel so unfulfilled? And it's like, that's going to come for you. And so Lisa will eventually, and so will I, by the way, will eventually get to the point where we don't want to be entrepreneurs anymore. And so when Lisa decides she doesn't want to be an entrepreneur, she's got to have an answer for, and now what? Why do I matter? Why does anybody care about me? Post-menopausal women tend to either plug more deeply into their kids' lives, and this is how mother-in-laws become a nightmare, or, and, and by the way, people need to understand why that stereotype is true. That is a post-menopausal woman who is not able to express her sexuality anymore. And now, life is about the thing I did. And

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  the thing I did was I raised kids. I'm no, if she was engaging in a career before, she may not be now. And so it's like, from, you know, time immemorial, mother-in-laws became a problem. Because once that period of raising children ended, they were now in a period of like, what do I do? And so they would try to re-engage with their adult children, they would create all kinds of problems. But it was a way for them to remain relevant and to be needed. And so it's like, I don't know what people want me to say. I am certainly not saying, don't educate women. But don't be a fucking retard and not look at the world and go, oh, wow, there's really interesting correlates that go along with when you mass educate women, that it has a knock on effect. We should probably plan for that knock on

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  effect, so that the answer doesn't become, don't educate women. Fucktards? That's the part where I like, wake up. So you've got to have an answer for it. Because, hey, let's get real controversial. Guess what one of the answers is going to be? Do you guys ever see the stickers? I think this happened in Massachusetts, Muslims were right about women?

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  Oh, look that one up. So that's a lot of fun. What do you do with that statement? That glitches people the fuck out. So do you go, hey, yeah, we're just, we're not going to educate our women. We're going to make sure that we put them into a more traditional role. Get them out of education, and get them back into the household, and put them in a burka. Like, okay, like, that is going, that is an answer being put forward right now, that has a lot of momentum going for it. So, uh, plan for these boys and girls, so that we can have a sensible solution. And not just a knee jerk reaction where we

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  go backwards, uh, to things we've already tried. I want to see us go, oh, okay, cool. There is this knock on effect, where people feel a profound sense of dis-ease, they are searching for an answer, and they will find it in stricter religions. If you don't believe me, watch the next 10 years. And so you're going to see Christian fundamentalism rise, you're already seeing the rise of fundamentalist Islam. So it's like, kids, if you want that to be the solution, then by all means, uh, say, this is where what you hear, even though I'm expressly saying the exact opposite, that you hear me saying that women shouldn't be educated, and I keep fucking saying, over and over, I'm not saying that. It's awesome

• 1:44:52Speaker 00

  that it's happened. I have a wife that has made use of all of these things, and I love her to death, and I want to see her have every choice in the world. But if you don't recognize that there are consequences that can be addressed in other ways, then you're going to be very confused when we all start racing backwards.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Um, cool. That's all I got.

• 1:45:11Speaker 00

  All right, boys and girls, thank you so much for joining us. We love you bunches and bunches. And to that effect, because I love you guys so much, I'm doing a free ITU AI Masterclass, Thursday, September 10th at 1:00 PM Pacific. I will show you how to use real AI, all of its weaknesses, where its strengths are, how to use it well to launch your company. It's all free, and it is the 10th of September at 1:00 PM Pacific. Link is in the description. All right, see you there. And we will see you on Wednesday. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic,

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