Why the US Just Bought Yen for the First Time Since 1998, Mamdani Just Learned People Abuse Systems, Democrats Are About to Start Sounding Like the DSA | Weekly Recap

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Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Monarch Money: Start your free trial and get 50% off your first year of total money clarity at https://monarchmoney.yt.link/QxOLEVx or code TB50 for 50% Off Monarch Core tier. ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Netsuite: For the first time ever you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/Theory https://netsuite.ai/Theory. Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! The team digs into Bernie Sanders going on CNN to embrace what's being called a "red wave"—the surging energy of the DSA within the Democratic Party—and his refusal to disavow Hasan Piker even when pressed on Piker's most controversial statements. What follows is a genuinely two-sided, and at times heated, debate. On one side: the argument that this is a pivotal cultural moment, that "politics is downstream of culture," and that figures like Mamdani and Hasan Piker represent a one-two punch pushing DSA ideas into the mainstream—ideas the host warns point toward an ideology with a catastrophic historical track record, making him feel morally obligated to sound the alarm even when he admits it's bad for business. On the other side: a sharp policy-focused rebuttal arguing the show spends too much time dissecting 30-second streamer clips and not enough on actual bills, appropriations, and the money-in-politics mechanisms that drive real outcomes—"more C-SPAN, less Twitch stream recaps." The conversation traces historical parallels (the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Bolsheviks vs. Mensheviks), debates whether the DSA is unintentionally clearing a path for a charismatic strongman, and wrestles with how the left should handle provocative voices. It also gets personal and philosophical: the "parchment guarantee" idea that a constitution only matters if the culture enforces it, a reflection on youth as an energy that rightly shakes up an ossified society, and a candid riff on competing cultural metaphors—jihad-as-waging-war versus the Christian "spark of the divine in the individual"—and the tension between drawing a hard line and being careful with war rhetoric in a volatile moment. A substantive, disagreement-driven look at where American politics may be heading. Tom digs into Mayor Mamdani colliding with a basic truth of policy: create an incentive structure, and people will follow it—sometimes by abusing it. Joining Tom is Drew, who pushes back and adds important nuance throughout. The flashpoint is Mamdani's city-owned grocery stores: with goods priced well below market, Tom argues there's an obvious incentive to buy cheap and resell at market value, which is why Mamdani may need some form of ID to wall off who can shop—running headlong into the same "require ID" logic the left resists elsewhere. Drew makes the key distinction that a grocery ID (a driver's license) is not the citizenship-level verification the SAVE Act demands (a passport), and Tom agrees that a sensible ID standard is reasonable. From there, Tom lays out his broader, and more contested, thesis about incentive structures, voter-ID politics, and how DSA-aligned cities increasingly attach the phrase "regardless of immigration status" to taxpayer-funded programs—from grocery initiatives to childcare to housing and legal-support hotlines. He argues this is happening beyond New York, in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle, and challenges the claim that undocumented immigrants are net contributors to social systems, drawing a parallel to immigration debates in Nordic countries. Tom's bottom line: you can't simultaneously say government spends too much, oppose borders and ID requirements, and promise to care for everyone who comes—mathematically it doesn't work, and if you genuinely want to help people, you have to care for a finite number well rather than incentivizing unlimited inflow. He also breaks down why Mamdani's budget gap is likely to keep growing. Tom untangles one of the most consequential and least understood stories in global finance: the United States buying yen for the first time since 1998. Joining Tom is the team as he explains why this isn't a sign of strength but an emergency effort to stop a total collapse of the Japanese economy—one so dangerous because the yen carry trade has locked the US and Japan tightly together for decades. Tom speed-runs the history: Japan's 1989 real estate bubble, thirty years of ultra-low rates, and how cheap Japanese money flooded the world as liquidity that America benefited from enormously. He walks through the trap Japan is now in—raising rates to fight post-Covid inflation triggers a carry-trade unwind, but every intervention to slow it signals weakness and sends money fleeing. He breaks down the concept of risk-adjusted return, why Japan has nothing like the AI trade to justify its risk, the Bessent Camp David notepad photo he believes was a deliberate signal (and the roughly $1 trillion it briefly wiped from US markets), and why the New York Fed selling euros for yen further strains an already-tense relationship with Europe. Tom's blunt diagnosis: propping up the yen is Advil for a brain tumor; the only real cure is a painful decade of killing off zombie companies and getting Japan innovating and growing again. He then connects it to the bigger board—Argentina and Milei as a success story the US wants to use to pull South America back toward capitalism and away from China's debt-trap Belt and Road, and his view that America is becoming a regional rather than global hegemon. Throughout, Tom stresses intellectual honesty about how Covid-era authoritarian decisions helped break the system, and reminds viewers to treat official reassurances as propaganda. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  Let's talk about Mom Donnie and the grocery store ID thing. I'm gonna pass you the mic, Tom, but I have to say that the ID that Mom Donnie required is not the same ID that the SAVE Act requires because it's just a driver's license. But SAVE Act requires it to be a citizen's verification, which is a passport, a birth certificate, or things like that. So it's not like he wants people to show up with passports to the Mom Donnie grocery store.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Well, I'm very glad that you handed me with that caveat, Drew. What's going on right now is Mom Donnie is running smack into the reality that when you create an incentive structure, people are going to abuse that incentive structure. The grocery stores that he wants to create, create an incentive structure for people to come buy things cheaply and then go resell them themselves. And so he knows we're gonna have to wall this off somehow. There are gonna be some people that are allowed in and other people that aren't so that we can keep control on this. What Drew is trying to say is, well, listen, we were being too draconian with the SAVE Act, and that's the problem. It's not that we don't want an ID for people to vote. It's that we just want a sensible ID. And if that's what the left were saying, then I would be all for it.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  But it isn't what the left are saying. They fully recognize that they've created an incentive structure to bring in illegal immigrants and then make sure that they have every conceivable possibility to vote that you can give them so that some of them will, that people are going to follow that incentive structure, and they're going to vote, whether it's ballot harvesting, which is shocking, but nonetheless legal, but happening like crazy here in California, or whether it's just outright fraud, which we've seen more and more examples of, and you're gonna keep seeing investigations being done. And I have a feeling, it's just a feeling, but I have a feeling you're going to uncover a significant amount of voter fraud in due time as you realize that people will take advantage of this stuff. The reason that this conversation about Mom Donnie is so important

• 2:56Speaker 00

  is because what you see is him realizing, oh, people do abuse the system. So all I'm trying to get across is, yes, motherfucker, people abuse systems. When you put a system that has an incentive structure, people will follow the incentive structure. If people have an incentive to vote illegally, they will vote illegally. If people have an incentive to go to the grocery store, snap things up that are 30% below market value, they know that they can go sell them elsewhere at market value. This is how black market economies work. There's just no way around this. And so now he's caught in this trap of shit. We can't give away the game over here and admit that we're just trying to make sure that the incentive structure is as aggressive as possible for immigrants to vote,

• 3:40Speaker 00

  even when they're not allowed to, by requiring some sort of identification to stop people from abusing our system over here. Now, the good news for Mom Donnie is that he has the backstop of federal tax dollars. He does not have to run, sorry, not federal, state tax dollars. He does not have to run the grocery stores at a profit like all of his competition does. He can simply bleed taxpayers to the tune of millions of dollars a year per store. He can just keep going. It doesn't matter to him. So if he has to make that sacrifice on behalf of you, the taxpayer, then he will to make sure that he doesn't have to give up the game over here by saying, oh, yeah, shit, that's right, requiring ID is bad mojo.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  He already got beaten up over this when he required two forms of ID to shovel snow and get paid for that. And he realizes, I'm just gonna create another weakness for everybody, essentially, on the left, in the DSA specifically, who want to eliminate borders and certainly don't want people to be required to show ID to vote, and by the way, want illegals to be able to vote, which they have said in no uncertain terms. You can, I hope, see right through exactly what's happening. And this is one of the reasons, if you guys saw the footage, he doesn't say it himself. When asked about the ID situation, he hands the mic off to somebody else on his team so that the memes are not of his face, they are of her trying to explain. Here we go.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Taking advantage of that, you know, that deal, basically. And is there gonna be a limit on the number of items that someone can take that are discounted at that level from that essential basket?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  So our RFP makes very clear that this is a program for New Yorkers to be able to put food on the table, not a program for people to be able to make a quick buck through reselling. I'm gonna pass it over to our EDC head, G-PAC, to add some additional details.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Yes, if you look at our RFP for the operator, we are looking to make sure that we target New Yorkers, whether it be a sort of a library card-esque, and also we manage who's buying and that is focused on everyday New Yorkers.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Is that like a registered database?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  We are mindful of that, and so we're gonna make sure that we have all the things in place to make, ensure that that does not happen.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is just reality. Like, you are now making contact with reality. But again, they will hide this. So if they decide to go forward with no need for any identification, there's no database or something like that that's able to track who's supposed to buy it and who's not, then they'll just throw taxpayer dollars at this. The odds that he lets a signature campaign promise go unfunded is effectively zero. And what he's gonna say when he comes to the budget again, when he has to do it next year, I guess technically, these don't come on board until, what, 28, 29, something like that? So he's got some time before it actually shows up in the budget. But what you're going to see is he's just gonna say, the rich aren't paying their fair share.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  We need to keep taxing the rich to keep closing the budget holes. And he's going to run into the real question of, how much do you erode your tax base with all of these anti-wealth taxes? He's now starting to lose people on the left. So Prof G, if you guys saw that, was none too pleased to be doxxed in the Pierre de Terre database that was put out there. So we'll see how long people go along with this. But that's gonna be the question. Where can he actually find recurring revenue that closes the budget shortfall? Which, remember, the budget shortfall every year is growing. So every year, he's gotta find things to do, one-time taxes, deferrals, or just increased taxes, unless he can do something that is self-sustaining,

• 7:18Speaker 00

  either cutting the budget or taxing people so much in a way where you actually recoup those tax dollars to permanently close the budget. He has gone in the opposite direction. He has made the gap that he will need to close next year bigger than the gap that he had to close this year. So, and by the way, he's missing still a ton of his signature policies. So that gap is likely to continue to grow under Mom Donnie, so we'll see.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we also have, you pulled this link that says more taxpayers are going to illegal immigrants. I pulled up the link, but it's the ICE thing. Was that tied, or was there a different?

• 7:51Speaker 00

  The thing that they were talking about with that was, oh, God.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the judge blocked that New York can't do it. And then he's sending out a rally call that says there's an immigrant support helpline. They can call in.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it. Play this video.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  It's not a video, it's just a link to the New York Times.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  What's he say? Let me just read this. Public safety does not come from masked, armed agents taking people off our streets to immigrant New Yorkers. You belong in this city, and this city stands with you. If you need legal support or immigration, legal support hotline is free. Yeah, confidential and available regardless of your immigration status. So what I'm getting at is this is a series of things that Mom Donnie has done where he says this is a taxpayer-funded initiative, and we're going to take care of you regardless of whether you have legal status or not. This is a part of his, is he calling it daycare, childcare, whatever the name of the pre-K stuff that he's doing, the two-year-olds? That is regardless of immigrant status. There have been several things like that.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  The DSA has talked specifically about other housing-related initiatives tied to that same phrase. It doesn't matter what your immigration status is, we're gonna help you. But these are all taxpayer-funded things. And so if you guys remember back in the day, it was like, no, no, no, you guys are ridiculous. Don't be crazy. These are all right-wing conspiracies that these things help illegal immigrants. And now they're just directly appealing to illegal immigrants, saying, it doesn't matter what your legal status is, these things apply to you. This is not just Mom Donnie, by the way. This is in, you see this coming out of Minneapolis, Seattle. You're going to hear this kind of stuff more and more and more. And as the DSA continues to gain power, which they most certainly are,

• 9:34Speaker 00

  you're going to see this in any of their sanctuary cities, that it is, it's all taxpayer-funded. So anytime you hear them signal to undocumented illegal immigrants, they're saying taxpayer dollars are going to go to you. And if you look at the actual draw, because the next argument you're gonna hear, the argument that you hear is, well, illegal immigrants are actually net contributors to the social systems. It just isn't true. So when you look at them over the long run, they are net draws very substantively, and not just in America, by the way. You see the same thing in Nordic countries. If you look at the Nordic country pushback on immigration, yo, it's real talk. Because unfortunately, when you get people to come to the country,

• 10:17Speaker 00

  not because they want a better life by contributing and by getting their shot at adding value, building their way up, instead coming for the federal dollars that they're able to get through social services programs, then they just end up taking from the social services programs. And so this is one of those things, you can't both say, the government spends way too much, and we're getting this K-shaped economy as a result of all this inflation, and, oh, by the way, we don't want borders, and we want everybody to come here and be able to be taken care of, and there will be no requirement for ID, and this applies no matter what your immigration status is. It is just mathematically not going to work. And this is where, if you actually wanna make things better for people,

• 11:01Speaker 00

  then you have to say, okay, we've got a finite number of people that we're going to take care of, and now we're going to get aggressive about taking care of those people. You can't create the incentive structure for people to flood in and then take care of all of them as well. It just doesn't work. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag.

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• 12:28Speaker 00

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• 13:30Speaker 01

  The Japanese stock market was all red this morning, but Scott Besson is about the Scott Besson. Now, I felt a type of way about this, but he shut me up over the Argentina price swap. So I need you to break this down to me because I feel like if anybody can manipulate currency, it's Scott Besson.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  So. Yeah, you're definitely right about that. If you guys don't know Scott Besson's priors, his resume is dope.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  He's crazy.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Homeboy made a lot of money taking down the British pound, basically. Your mental model of Scott Besson should be this guy is a financial gangster. Okay, so what are the particulars? The United States bought yen on Friday for the first time since 1998. And it's not because things are going well, boys and girls. If you were thinking that, unfortunately, it's because the US is trying to stop a total collapse of the Japanese economy, which is absolutely necessary because our two economies are so intertwined due to the carry trade. Now, I've talked about the carry trade before, so hopefully you guys know what it is. But to speedrun it, Japan got themselves in financial trouble in 1989. They were the biggest economy in the world in the mid 80s. It all ends by 89.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Their real estate bubble burst and basically all of them just said, yo, I don't want to have debt anymore because debt is so destructive. And so no matter what Tokyo tried to do to stimulate the economy for almost 30 years, none of it worked. And so what ended up happening is they kept their rates ridiculously low. And so people the world over were borrowing money and spreading that money as liquidity around everywhere around the world that they thought that they could get a bigger return. The US being the primary beneficiary. So that locked our two economies together. And for a very long time, it was extraordinarily beneficial to the US. They were buying a ton of our debt and the US, because of our deficits, we need appetite for our debt. And Tokyo was providing a lot of that.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  But now you've got Tokyo selling dollars. They sold as much as 58.97 billion in USD in a single day to buy their own currency because all of their stimulatory stuff didn't work. But then COVID hits. COVID causes that 30% rise for everybody, doubly bad for Japan because they don't make anything themselves. So they're importing everything. Now they're just getting absolutely hammered. And so they have inflation for the first time, basically in a very long time. And so to combat it, they've got to start raising their rates. As they raise their rates, all the people that took out loans, Tibet and other economies, especially the US, are like, oh, oh, I need to start unwinding this trade.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  As they start unwinding this trade, you would think that the yen was going to get a lot stronger. But the problem is that every time they try to basically unwind this thing, the US and Japan both panic and they're like, hold on a second, we need to slow this down. We don't want this to happen, even though it would be great for the yen. We don't want this to happen. We need to keep that liquidity flowing, or at least it's got to be a bubble that doesn't pop, but it slowly deflates. So what do we do? We're going to not raise rates nearly as much as we should. So the carry trade remains in place now because even though they've raised rates, there's still a massive spread between Japan and the US, for sure, just to keep it simple, that people are like, oh, I guess we're not going to unwind the carry trade that much.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  And so people go back in and now the yen gets weaker again. And so they're left in a position of, oh, shit, what do we do? They start buying the yen because they don't want to unwind the carry trade. So they can't just raise rates to pump the brakes that way and get all that yen demand increased as people try to get out of their positions and pay that back off. Now, the problem is even if the carry trade begins to unwind and you get these temporary spikes as people buy to pay off their debt, if they're just paying off their debt, those dollars are ceasing to exist or those yen are ceasing to exist, that's not going to solve the problem. What they need is for the pension funds, the insurance funds, government contracts, all of that. They, investors, they just need the money coming back into Japanese assets.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  That way, it's Japanese assets that are being purchased in yen, staying in the country. Now, if you do that, now you could get their economy to grow. The problem is that every time they try to do one of these interventions, they signal to the smartest investors in the world that the Japanese economy is in trouble. So now you get into this idea of risk-adjusted return. As risk goes up, the demand for return goes up. Now, people will take insane risk. Look at AI if they think that the reward is going to be massive. So now people go, hey, AI is super risky, but I'm potentially facing such a disproportionate return that it's worth doing.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  The problem is Japan doesn't have anything like that. So the risk is going up, but the return isn't, or the expected return isn't. So now their economy looks worse and worse. Guess what that does to the yen? It makes the yen drop even more because people are like, I don't want to invest in Japan. I want to go invest somewhere else. So I'm going to take this cheap money that I can get and I'm going to go elsewhere. And that includes the pensions, that includes the insurance companies, that includes the Japanese investors. And so money is just fleeing Japan. Until they solve that problem, they're not going to be able to solve this. And so the dollar, as we've now gotten ourselves into this quagmire, people are looking at that and going, uh, not sure that I like the US trying to bail these guys out. It's not going to work.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  So the dollar dropped 3%, which was its biggest one-day fall since late 2022. Friday, Japan went again during New York hours, this time to shore up the yen. And keep in mind, what are they selling to buy that yen, right? Everybody's afraid, or the US is afraid, that they're going to sell US debt, which is one of the easiest things to sell, in order to buy that, to buy their own yen. So now Washington is joining them in trying to prop up the yen. So the New York Fed sold euros for yen on behalf of the Treasury, which by the way, that's going to cause European trauma. So this is back to, are we trying to punish the Europeans? We're certainly saying we don't care about them very much.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  So that's going to further heighten tensions, which, just momentarily fractal, remember how interconnected all of this is in this moment. We're now mad at Europe. We're secretly trying to fuck up Spain, like we want Europe to pay their share and all that shit. And so now, do we try to protect their debt and their treasuries? No, we do not. We sell that to protect Japan because it helps protect the purchasing of our own US debt. And so you do that. And again, the sharp investors look at that and go, ooh, this is a sign of weakness. This is not a sign of strength. Now, there was a photograph taken from Camp David where Besson is sitting there.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  And on a notepad, he writes, literally for the photographers to see, buy Japanese yen, 5 to 10 billion. Now, I don't hear anybody commenting about this, so I could be out of my mind. I think he did that on purpose. I think he did it to signal. The problem is it caused a massive drop in the US stock market. So that photo ends up getting posted. The US stock market, maybe coincidentally, but I certainly don't think so, drops by like 1. something trillion dollars. It's like 1. something percent. So not massive in terms of percent, but a trillion dollars is a lot of value to evaporate instantly. Like it happened in like 40 minutes or something ridiculous. So investors are like, hey, what are you guys doing?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Why are you trying to prop up the yen? This isn't going to last long. Now, the yen did get propped up. And so the yen closed at 157.40 yen to the dollar, which is the strongest since early May. But just days earlier, it had hit a 40-year low. And I think you guys should expect this to continue to slide once the sort of sugar rush of propping it up wears off. Again, until Japan can address risk-adjusted return, which means that people who are going to put their money at risk in the Japanese economy, whether that's Japanese companies, insurance, brokers, et cetera, or foreign investors,

• 21:48Speaker 00

  they've got to look at the Japanese economy and go, hey, this is moving in the right direction now. These guys are likely to grow because all they see right now is the US and Japan doing everything they can to artificially prop up the yen. Okay, so people paying attention like, this might work temporarily, but this is not the same as building a thriving economy. And unfortunately. For the world economy, unfortunately, the only thing Japan is going to be able to do to save itself long term is to get their economy actually growing. And to do that, they're going to have to get rid of the zombie companies which have survived on all the cheap debt up until now and actually start building companies that are innovating and doing things that other

• 22:31Speaker 00

  companies in the world can't do. And therefore, people ought to be investing in Japan. But there's no shortcut to this stuff. It always looks like there is, but I think right now, what the US is doing is essentially working with Japan to manage their decline. Now, I'd rather have it managed than just blow up overnight. So I'm not mad per se that they're doing this, but I am reminding myself that everything the best in the saying is just absolutely propaganda. So when he posted on Sunday that the Treasury won't hesitate to intervene again, and he called for the Fed's FEMA repo to facilitate more Japanese intervention. Now, the reason you do that is you're like, okay, Japan, listen, I want you to intervene. I want you to buy your yen,

• 23:16Speaker 00

  but I don't want you to sell Treasuries to do it. So they're making that FEMA repo bigger so that Japan can borrow dollars against its Treasuries instead of just selling them if people are smart. And they take this opportunity to go, I should get out of this carry trade now before there's a problem. At a minimum, I should stop doing it on debt so that I can get myself out of this slowly and at a pace that isn't destructive. But they won't. And the odds are that people are just going to continue to do the carry trade as long as there is arbitrage to be gained from the low rate that they can borrow Japanese yen and the high rate that they

• 24:00Speaker 00

  can get paid back in the US economy. And so eventually, people are going to get burned. And I don't even think people understand how many places the carry trade is hiding in their portfolio. I'm sure I don't even understand all the places that it's hiding in my own portfolio. And I think about this stuff, an obsessive amount. Slow the train down is better than something abrupt. But if people just keep going, oh, well, the train is still moving, it might be slower, but it's still moving. And then they just keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. We're going to end in catastrophe.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did you see Trump's thing about Japan's being good to us with the exception of Pearl Harbor?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's so funny with this shit.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  We need to support the Japanese currency. Because we have a good relationship with Japan.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  And I don't understand economics.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Very, very strong financially. They are, they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of help. And we're always there for Japan. Japan's been very good to us with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. They were not good.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  He's always got like some mental, look, I get it. As somebody who talks into a camera for a living, you do have these webs of connections. But the way that he will bring them up over and over and over is amusing.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Again, with the Argentina thing, it was a $20 million credit line. They ended up only borrowing 2.5 billion. They paid it back with interest. US made millions. It was clean slate, like books made. With this situation, you seem a bit more apprehensive. Is it because the nature of Japan? Or are you trying to get us to get off of the narcotic of the Japanese carry yen?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Well, so it's probably good to be a little bit skeptical of what we did in Argentina. My read of Argentina goes like this. China has made massive inroads into South America. We cannot have that. We are almost certainly going to be a regional hegemon, not a global hegemon. China's gonna have their thing. So we've got to, in Asia, we need to shore up everything in our hemisphere. And that means we've got to have relationships with these countries. The US is looking at the recent flip to the right of so many of these formerly hard-left countries. And so the stalwart in the region is Argentina. I was talking about this in the video game realm on Friday,

• 26:22Speaker 00

  where it's like, you need something in your origin story and your national identity to point back to and say, we've got to go back to being the real Argentina. And the real Argentina was a competitor for opportunity with the US back in, I think, the 20s. So in the 20s, if memory serves, was when more immigrants the world over wanted to go to Argentina than they wanted to go to the US because there were just more opportunities in Argentina. Think about that. So now we have this post-World War II mental model of everybody in the world's trying to get to the US. But that wasn't the case as early as the 1920s. Just a little over 100 years ago, Argentina was this insane economic powerhouse. And by going to the left, they broke the engine of prosperity. And this is the kind of thing that I talk about all the time. If you don't understand the actual

• 27:04Speaker 00

  mechanisms of the engine of prosperity, you break it, it goes away, and it goes away for a very long time. So I'm the US. I'm looking at people going now more towards the right because they're tired of being impoverished. And they see Argentina elect Malay, who's like the most libertarian guy ever. And they're like, cool, we're gonna use him as a success story to get more people who are going to the right to adopt his principles, to become very US-aligned, because Malay is very US-aligned. So we get all of South America, not through coercion, not by fucking them up with the IMF or anything like that, but just like good, sound economic principles, getting them back into capitalism. That will allow us to eject China because these guys aren't starving and in need of a handout, which is exactly what China leverages. They come in and say, look, you guys have been

• 27:49Speaker 00

  unable to get anything going. We're going to do the Belt Road Initiative. We're essentially going to lend you money for infrastructure, and then you're going to pay us back the debt. They become debt slaves, and China reaps the benefits. They can basically trade in, oh, you can't pay, no big deal. Just give us more access to your political infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. You become a vassal state of China. Okay, US obviously doesn't want that. But we either then have to become the sugar daddy, or we need people that can stand up on their own. So I look at the intervention as a way of going, okay, we believe your policies are directionally correct, but it is very hard to pull out of a socialist tailspin. And so as you fight the good fight, we're going to loan you some money, which they made money off in the short term, but long term, it's still a

• 28:34Speaker 00

  question mark. I'm still not 100% sure that Malay, even though I do agree that his policies are directionally correct, you don't have an entire country like, yay Malay, let's go, let's just get behind this austerity, all that. It's the right thing. So you're a divided nation who's had 100 plus years of socialist indoctrination. Not everybody wants to sing for their supper. Not everybody wants to fight hard and take personal responsibility and do all the right-leaning things. So that's going to be a challenge. The US is gonna go in, help them, and you could take a similar read on it and say they're propping them up. It's not working naturally of its own accord. And so it is a question mark. We'll see if it ends up working in the final analysis or not. Because I

• 29:19Speaker 00

  want to see them get back on their feet, I'm for it. But I'm, I'm, what do they call this? Intellectually honest about the fact that this is them intervening in their currency. Now you go to the Japan thing. The Japan thing, man, is just so systemic. But because I really want to see the entire globe get back to something that looks more like sound money, I don't love that we're continuing to create this arbitrage for a economy that is broken, that learned the wrong lesson from their bursting of their real estate bubble. What we need to do is get Japan back on the innovation train, get them innovating, get them growing again. And if we can do that, now

• 30:01Speaker 00

  we've got something incredible. But if we're just like, no, listen, I need you to remain a supplicant. I need you to keep your interest rates really low so that we can keep getting global liquidity. You're gonna need to keep a cap on people who now want raises and shit. We can't have that. And it's just, it's being dishonest about what we actually did to break this. And as a reminder, and no, I was not one of those people that saw COVID clearly. I'm one of those people that, looking back on it now, though, is updating my mental model and going, you can't let the government grab a hold of power like that. You can't do it. And so now, looking at what the outcome of all that was, very clear to me that when you say, this thing is so dangerous,

• 30:42Speaker 00

  authoritarian tendencies come into play, people break the global economy as if it's no big deal. And now, all of these economic consequences, they are specifically because of, not exclusively, we were making bad choices before, but we could have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you pesky kids who closed the economy. Now, because you closed the economy, all of these problems come home to roost. And so this is like, if you build your levees high enough, you can have whatever the fifth ward in New Orleans, because even though it's under sea level, it's not a big deal. Your levees are great. But you can't both be under sea level and not take care of your levees. And so you stop taking care of the levees, they break, and now you look like gas clowns. And so, same thing. We built something that was the equivalent, the financial equivalent of being

• 31:26Speaker 00

  below sea level, and then COVID was that you didn't maintain your levees, and now you're fucked. So we have to be honest that, as a globe, we let authoritarians make an economically suicidal decision, and now we're paying for it. We need to be honest about that. We need to get Japan back up on their feet. The, you can't just tell Japan now economically suffer, become essentially a third world country that can't get out from under all of this debt and forever remain in a position where every sensible investor in your country will send money elsewhere. You can't be in that position. And so if the US is going, okay, listen, secretly, Takayichi, we gotta, we gotta deflate this fucking bubble. We gotta get the carry trade unwound. We gotta help you

• 32:10Speaker 00

  get Japan back in a position where people want to invest in Japan. You don't have to coerce them. You don't have to prop anything up. People are just like, yeah, you guys are a good place for capital. So we're gonna help you, but we gotta move in that direction. That'd be awesome. And I'd support that. That's way better than just like, fuck it, let's see what happens. It will be devastating globally. I don't think that's what they're doing. I think this is, well, as long as it's good for America. And it will only be good for the top of the K, and it will only be good in the short term. That's sort of true. By protecting the top of the K, you protect jobs. But it's not sustainable. You've got to let Japan become a real economy.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  So is this one of those situations? There's a couple of things in there. I want to drill into the COVID thing, because I think we're getting like a renewed sense of like revisionist history with it. And I want to like dive into that. But first, with the Japanese thing to kind of wrap it up, is this one of those moments we should have let them fail and let them figure it out, go to the, like, I'm trying to think what level of intervention is necessary to make them a real economy, while also not just? I guess subsidizing their transition.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Basically, you need to take the next 10 years and kill off all their zombie companies by slowly raising interest rates and making sure that good companies come to the fore in Japan so that people want to invest in those companies so that money can actually get a return in Japan in yen. Once you have companies making a return in Japan in yen, then when you are basically trying to keep the yen stable or make it stronger, that now you're in a position where the reason it's strong is because the money isn't fleeing the country. And right now, the Japanese economy is weak and they're trying to disguise the risk by propping up

• 34:01Speaker 00

  the yen. But the yen is merely a signal that the Japanese economy is weak. And so if you have a headache because you have a brain tumor and you give somebody Advil and the headache goes away, but you are masking the fact that the longer you leave the brain tumor untreated, the more likely you are to die. So you're gonna have to do chemo and it is going to be disruptive, but it's 10 years of disruption versus forever essentially being a vassal state of the US and your debt. It's like this weird hybrid. So that, I don't want them to just say, oh, fail, because they are too globally important. But you do have to make them a strong economy. And to make them a strong economy, it's like a slow failure.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  It is, you want, here's the fantasy. For every company that dies, they're replaced by a new vital company. The question is, how do you stop it from being a contagion? I certainly don't have the answer. It won't be easy. But it will be things like intervene to buy yourself time, but you've got to like, you've got to signal that, that people have got to get out of this trade in an orderly fashion. But it's one of those, the second you say we're in distress, the dollars leave. So I don't know. I don't know how you actually pull it off. I just know what you have to accomplish. And you have to accomplish a growing economy, which means that the companies that are sucking up the intelligence and the

• 35:29Speaker 00

  labor cannot be zombie companies that aren't doing anything innovative and that have basically promised people jobs for life. It doesn't work. I know it feels good and I know people on the left love it the most. But the reality is, if somebody doesn't have to kill themselves to earn their slot, if somebody isn't constantly under threat by the next young kid coming up, I mean, here's the hard reality. Hey, 50 year olds, I'm one of you. The young people should be coming for you. And you should have to outperform to keep your slot. And it should be harder every day. And so you better be ready. You better be ready for the fact that one day you just can't hold them off anymore. And when you can't hold them off, you better have saved up enough that you can take care of yourself. I mean,

• 36:13Speaker 00

  it's just, that's the reality. And that's how life worked, literally forever, because the world was so doggy dog. And now we've gotten in this position where we've created a false sense of security. And Japan, very specifically, was in a hyper weakened state because of all this. But there was just never an attack. And so it's like, you can have a compromised immune system inside of a bubble, but the second you try to go out into the real world, you get hit. And that's when you realize, oh shit, it would have been a much better strategy to have a strong immune system. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. Let's talk about how much you're paying to stay safe online. Count it up. A VPN, a password

• 36:56Speaker 00

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• 37:35Speaker 00

  R F S H A R K dot com slash TOMB. Surfshark dot com slash TOMB. Use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  I want to kind of pivot into the DSA more because Bernie Sanders was on CNN talking about the red wave. At first, I thought you meant like Republicans are starting to correct.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, a very different red wave.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  But no, you're talking about the hammer and the sickle red wave. So that type of red.

• 38:08Speaker 06

  One of the more controversial ones is that Piker has said America deserved 9/11. Are you comfortable with that association?

• 38:16Speaker 07

  No, I am not. I think that's a dumb statement. On the other hand, he has a whole lot of followers and there's a lot of things that he's saying that are making sense to a lot of people. I think, you know, we have to get above cancel culture. You know, when you're doing radio, whatever they do, podcasts, three hours a day, you say dumb things. I suspect if you go back over your career, there may be one or two things that you've said that you may have regretted. But I think what we have got to do is look at the totality of where people are coming from.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Say big T.

• 38:43Speaker 07

  And go following.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  So when someone like James Carville says he doesn't want to be in the same political party as Hasan Piker, which one are you gonna take?

• 38:57Speaker 07

  Well, that's not much of a choice. If Mr. Carville doesn't want to be in my party, the party that I belong to, that Piker, that El Sayed belongs to, he can start his own party.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  And we got to welcome these guys in. Now, listen, I'm actually politically empathetic. You're going to watch Democrats all start sounding like DSA members because the energy is in the DSA. And listen, as a PSA to all the young people out there, you get the world that you are willing to build. And so young people ultimately become the people in power and they take over and they really will run this thing. And old people, there is just something about looking at somebody who's old as fuck, telling you how you should live. People just reject it instinctively. I certainly understand that. I remember when I was young thinking, ooh, man, one day I'm gonna be old and I'm gonna be the person that just, everybody's like, oh, that guy's fucking old. That is the reality. That's the trajectory.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  And young people should rise up, grab the bull by the horns and do the thing. My thing is, I really want young people to understand, cool, you guys should wrestle the world away from the old people. That's how it's meant to work. That is how evolution saw fit to set this up. I don't begrudge young people that at all. I would just say, make sure that you actually do something that's going to be good for you. That's gonna be good for you. That's gonna be good for your kids. Have your eyes on that prize. You don't owe deference to anybody, as I don't owe deference to you. I'm not going to defer to anybody because they're young, or because they're female, or because they're a racial minority. I don't give a fuck. This is a battle of ideas and I'm gonna come at you with my best ideas and I expect you guys to do the same. But you have youth on your side. And there

• 40:36Speaker 00

  really is something powerful about youth as an aesthetic. There's something powerful about youth as an energy. There's something powerful that nature made sure that young people come in and stop the society from ossifying. However, you can come in and change things, but not change it for the better. I love the energy that young people have. It's absolutely phenomenal. So come in and change things, but make sure that you set a point on the horizon. You say, we're aiming at this and this is why this is better. Because right now, the DSA has set a point on the horizon and that point on the horizon is communism. And we have seen that play out and it plays out. It is an absolute, it is a quite literal bloodbath. It's not what I want to see for you guys. And you are going to get the world that you want. And so if the world that you want is that bloodbath, you will suffer the

• 41:21Speaker 00

  consequences far more than somebody like James Carville, who's already knocking on heaven's door. So it's like, that's just the reality of age. He's gonna tap out and you guys are gonna be left to actually deal with that shit. And so I would see, say, be very careful about what point on the horizon that you're aiming at. I get why Bernie is on this side. This is him finally being vindicated with energy for something he's been fighting for, for a long time. But when you see somebody like Newsom, starting to say things that sound very DSA-ish, don't be surprised. You're, you're gonna get more and more of that. It is where the energy is in the party. And by the way, even though the more I study him, the more I absolutely hate his messaging. Shout out to Hasan Piker. Holy fuck, that

• 42:05Speaker 00

  kid has made himself important. Like, god damn. And I will say, in person, that kid was lovely. He was super nice. Now, the shit he says is absolutely unhinged. And if you go along with his vision of where you're gonna end up, it is not gonna be a good time for anybody. But nonetheless, he is a very potent voice.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I think that we're at a very pivotal moment right now. I've been following politics since George Bush passed to not, no kid left behind. Because in one year, tuition rates increased 15 to 25%. And I lost like four or five friends at like my college who couldn't afford school anymore because the tuition increased because everybody was getting forced to graduate and student loans was free and everybody was just taking them and going and going to school. And at that point, I was like, okay, well, politicians' past actually like in fact, like impact my life. So I'm gonna like pay attention to this a little bit more. And I think it's interesting where we are right now, because what the DSA is doing to the Democrats is very, very, very simple and very, very, very, almost identical to what the Tea Party did to the Republican Party.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Or the Bolsheviks to the Mensheviks.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yes. I'm talking about America because I feel like it's a very specific system.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  I think they're actually running the other playbook, but go ahead. I want to hear the full point.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the full point that I'm saying is that where, where a party starts, there's fringe ideas. The entire birther movement was based off of Obama's not really an American and he's taking over the country. He's gonna lead communism here. The communist revolution never came. I guess they were wrong about that.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Were they?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  But the birther movement.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Didn't it?

• 43:40Speaker 01

  And it was Obama's fault, Hassan is Obama's fault?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  I'm not saying that.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  What are we talking about? I've struck that down. Remove that from the record. We have better arguments than that.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Meaning you take back the communists never arrived.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  No, we have better arguments than that. Come on, we're not gonna get into that pigeonhole. That's a distraction. But the birthers led to the Tea Party. The Tea Party teamed up with Occupy Wall Street, because this was right around the time that the economic downturn happened. So Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party were like, hey, the establishment hates us. We need to go anti-establishment. That party out, like, grew together. Then Trump came and was like, ooh, there's a bunch of people who are very, very mad and want to drain the swamp. I could drain the swamp. Hey, guys, I'll be the leader of this party. And he took the Republican Party and he's been taking it ever since. What I am fearful of is that I do think Hasan Piker, being the face of violence on the streets, I think that that's not really true. I think he's a streamer. Streamers are supposed to say dumb shit.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  We have the people on the left who say dumb shit. Glenn Beck says dumb shit to Republicans at that point. So we have talking heads. Laura Loomer is saying dumb shit now. Our president says dumb shit. We have people who say dumb, we have people who say dumb things to rally up their base and get people going. So I'm not gonna say that Hasan Piker is the face. But what I am going to say is that Hasan Piker cracks the door open to the DSA take over the Democrats. And then there might be some charismatic leader who's like, oh, there's a bunch of people who are anti-establishment that wants a one-party system. Let me take it over. And then I will become that big bad guy that actually is going to come. So I do give you credit there, because I do think that they are less, they are setting the seeds for a charismatic asshole to take over and become Mao. Yes, that is true. I give it to you. I give the concession.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  However, I think that what we're doing right now of, let's just talk about young people. Let's say that they're being distracted. Let's address what they believe and not how they feel or their problems, I think is a miss right now. And I think where politics is right now, we're discussing streamers. We're discussing whether somebody said what they said three years ago versus actual politics, actual policy, actual laws being passed, actual bills being passed. We need to have more C-SPAN and less CNN. We need to have more Senate and House floor and less Twitch stream recaps. And I think that that's something that we should encourage our audience to do as well. I don't want you to say what you got from another podcast to own me.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  I'm not trying to own you. I think we should actually read the appropriation, though, that we all passed, because it passed without none of us being mad. But every time the SAVE Act gets struck down, we spend 30 minutes on the SAVE Act. But we don't talk about the bill that allowed the bill that allowed Morocco to have a claim over North Africa and allowed the, that fueled the Moroccan government to say, okay, you can't take over Suède. And then now we're talking about Suède as this Islam immigrant takeover. But we didn't talk about the steps and the seeds that the government plants before they do that big thing. So I would just ask everybody respectfully. I love everybody. I want us all to win. I want America to be a great place. I don't have F-U money, Tom. I'm not about just hopping in a jet and leaving and let America burn. I will be here, holding my kid, trying to not burn in the process.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  But I think that we need to all just come to the terms that we're all being propagandized. We're all being lied to. There are immigrants who, yes, want America to burn. And there are Republicans who don't give a fuck about America and just want to make as much money as possible. All those things can be true at the same time. I think us as American citizens need to realize what actually is important and focus on what's actually is important. And let's just stop trying to dissect the 30-second clip to see what he meant and what it can possibly lead to. And let's talk about the mechanisms in place, like money and politics that actually leads to these

• 47:18Speaker 01

  perversions.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  I'll look at you like a policy wonk. And you have this rebuttal many times where I'm going down a path and then you're like, but hey, we're not talking about, like, housing improvement and things like that. Okay, so you're the policy wonk of the show. For people that don't know that term, it's people that are obsessed with what does the actual policy say? I think that's great and I love that. And I think that you, while I don't love it as a reorienting mechanism, because I think you're wrong to do that. I think that you're right to make sure that those things get covered. I think that's brilliant. Now, here's where I think you have made a,

• 48:01Speaker 00

  you're doing something that makes you valuable because it's different and it's good to have another voice. Here's why I completely understand what you're saying and believe that the thing that I am obsessed with in this moment is far more important than the policy wonk thing. And that is, when you said, the very thing you said, I want to strike from the record and we've got better arguments, is where I think you're making a mistake. And it goes like this. Politics is downstream of culture. So who has a better bill of rights than America? Russia.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Under Stalin, their bill of rights was extraordinary. And it was like, you can't, if anybody even tries to suppress your free speech, they're gonna be dealt with. Okay, we know the reality of that is what's known as a parchment guarantee. Meaning, it might be on paper, but it isn't what they actually enforced. And what matters is what actually gets enforced. And there, Justice Scalia did a whole talk about this. It's actually quite brilliant. I think he's dead now. But anyway, his videos live on and you can go look at them. So, understanding that, when you fight for the soul of a country, you're actually fighting for the cultural beliefs. You're not fighting for the policies.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  The policies only matter if the culture is aligned with them. And so what I'm saying is, no, no, no. The very thing, especially in a populist moment, the very thing that you have to do if you want to win the soul of young people is really the most important thing, is you have to address, like you were saying, what do they feel? Where are they trying to go? What is the world that they're trying to bring in? What did we break or not fix? Because it was broken before we got here, but hey, we just rode along with it. That is now making their life worse. All of those things have to be addressed. But if we don't understand that, I don't know that there's any causal link, because I was not paying attention to politics at this time.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  I don't know that there's any causal link between Obama and the DSA. But what I do know is that if you're telling me that people were saying the communists are coming, the communists are fucking here. And so I'm like, whoa. I literally, until you said that, I've never heard that before. I never heard that anybody was saying back in the Obama days, this is gonna lead to communism. So now, I'm hearing that live for the first time and I'm like, holy shit. We have communism. So if people were saying this is going to lead to communism, now I'm like, fuck, what the hell? Like, I'm gonna have to go back and, did we start planting seeds? Because I always saw the rise of the DSA as being this totally separate thing that had to do with youth culture, finding their way to communist ideas because of the long march through the institutions,

• 50:50Speaker 00

  which started a very long time ago in the West, born out of France, comes over here. They literally say, this is how we're going to win. And we start doing this. And I've said many times, the long march through the institutions is a phrase. It's not like Tom trying to be descriptive. It's a phrase, because it was known, because they documented it and said, this is what we're going to do. That's what I thought gave us the DSA. So if people are saying, well, Obama was actually a product of that. He's a step on this continuum that has now led us. I'll need to look at that. But that is not something to turn away from. And, man, I get it. We all have a thing that we respond to. And the thing that I respond to, because of the way that I'm wired and because of the reading that I've done about history,

• 51:35Speaker 00

  I am absolutely the alarm bell for people to understand that communism is the single most murderous

• 51:44Speaker 00

  governmental style that humanity has ever brought to bear. And that if we want to debate, we don't actually want communism. We want the free-market authoritarianism that China does. We can have that debate separately. But these guys are openly celebrating Mao. They are openly saying we need to get rid of borders. They are openly saying that we need to get rid of the police. And I promise you, what will replace the police is the Cheka. Look it up. And so this is one of those things. I am that alarm bell. And I will sound that alarm bell out of moral obligation. Because remember, anybody listening to my voice right now, I think what I'm doing right now is bad for business, not good for business. This is the worst thing that I could be doing when I'm trying to launch a video game. The only reason that I don't stop doing it, it isn't because I don't have the money.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  It is because I literally will not be able to look myself in the eye if I get on a private flight and I flee and America burns behind me. And I felt like I didn't fucking do anything to try to stop this. I could have, and instead, I was following my passions and building this game and pretending that I couldn't see or hear what was happening around me. And so, literally, we had a meeting yesterday where the partnerships team was expressing, hey. Now, they were actually very open to letting me go and I appreciate that very much. It is hard to find partners as good as they are. But they were saying, listen, there are some things that you cover that create a problem for us economically. We have lost deals because of the things that I have said. We literally had somebody say, because of things Tom has said about Islam,

• 53:14Speaker 00

  I am now taking your advertising dollars away. And my response is, I get it. I'm not gonna stop saying it. But I get it. I understand. They need to do what they need to do. So none of this is anything other than me going, holy shit. Like, America was good to me. Really good to me. And it was good to me because of a set of structures that can be repaired. And so I need to help people repair those. Now, there will be a policy wonk side of this, which is why I love that you represent that. But to diminish that, we do have to have the cultural battle that we have to talk about. The, the like biggest soldiers in the march to communism, which right now is a one-two punch

• 53:59Speaker 00

  of um, Mamdani and uh, Hasan Piker. That, that's your one-two punch. They are two of the dream team. There are going to be more and we are absolutely going to have to say, here is the idea that they're putting forward, and this is why it's a terrible idea. And I want to reiterate, he is a shock jock. He needs to say things that are provocative. It is an extraordinarily good strategy if you can stomach it emotionally. I cannot, I can only say what I believe to be true. But it's an extraordinarily good strategy if you're willing to say things you don't necessarily believe in to get people's attention. And so he's done a phenomenal job of building a very large audience and animating them with

• 54:40Speaker 00

  this kind of rhetoric to soak the streets with the blood of capitalists and things like that. Hey, I get it. I'm not saying he is um, instigating violence. I know many people make that argument. I think in totality it does. I think that it actually um, creates a milieu in society where people want to be violent. But my belief on that is you've got to, unless he actually said, go kill Rick Scott, then to me, total pass. I've got, I'm happy to be in the war with ideas. I am using that as, that example, not to say that he called for people to go kill Rick Scott.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  I'm saying that there's, in my opinion, there's no excuse for saying, if you believed in actually fighting fraud, you would go kill Rick Scott. Because I think you can put enough together to see that he actually does think that violence is the right answer for certain problems. He said it over and over again. And so when you take it as a gestalt, I'm not saying go arrest him. What I'm saying is, these are terrible ideas. Do not buy into these ideas. As a culture, this is absolutely piss poor. And instead, and this honestly, I have a feeling I'm going to be saying this a lot. And boy, do I feel weird as somebody who doesn't even believe that God is real. This is going to end up being a collision of what is, you've got um, certainly radical

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Islam, you can just say, this is about the, the concept of jihad, of waging war. Let's assume it's an analogy. It's a very potent analogy. And if everything that you come at, you do with a like, we've got to do this in the spirit of waging war, then you've got Christianity, which is the spark of the divine is in the individual. And if you take my coat, let me give you my shirt. These are just very different metaphors. And the metaphors will echo. Now, the great irony of my life is I'm more of the war metaphor guy. I'm far more drawn to that rhetoric of ah, ah, ah. But when I look at like, ooh, we're in a time where the war rhetoric gets a little hairy, doesn't mean I'm not going to use it. I find myself incredibly drawn to that, so I can see it like slipping out of my mouth.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Uh, and then somebody playing this clip back. It, it is that I find myself being like, oh, actually, we need to be reminding ourselves there's a spark of divinity in each of us. We cannot be pushovers. Absolutely, we must draw the line. And, and I used to wear this shirt uh, called the Lord's Gym. And it was like a picture of Christ fucking bloodied and pushing up and the cross is on his back and it's big and fucking heavy. I can't tell you how much that shit speaks to me. But we have to find a way to be both like, this is what America is, this is what it stands for, and I'm not going to back down. Uh, I'm not going to um, ease off of what I believe. And be very careful about uh, our rhetoric and the vision of what we're trying to paint for people, both where we want to get and the method we're going to use to get there.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  And so maybe I am a voice that will never be able to, to capture the spirit of this moment. That's fine. I'm here to earn my own respect. But I think it is very important that we fight the cultural battle. We cannot simply go, oh, but we need to talk about housing policy. We need to talk about housing policy. That is incredibly potent. But what we don't want to do is say, oh, this is a ridiculous waste of time to address something that one of the most influential voices in America is saying. Because politics, those policies are downstream of culture.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Heard. Culture is, culture is important. I concede that point. I do want to clarify though, Obama wasn't the lead to the DSA.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  Thank God. Love that.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Okay. I think those are two separate issues.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  I have, dude, as somebody who was just old enough to, to be um, completely swept up, I wasn't paying attention to politics, but when he got elected, I was euphoric. So I want him, upon analysis, to be extraordinary. I don't know. I've never looked at.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  DSA doesn't like him though. They call him a war monger. Cause he was, he was the OG droner. Y'all forget, Obama told y'all how this drone thing works. He blew up everybody.

• 58:47Speaker 00

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