Saagar Enjeti on Who’s Profiting From Trump’s New America of Gambling, OnlyFans, and Drugs

What kind of government would push gambling, porn and drugs on its own population? Saagar Enjeti on who’s getting rich from the destruction of young men in America. Saagar Enjeti is the host of Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar available on YouTube and your favorite podcast player. Saagar previously worked at The Daily Caller as a White House correspondent. Paid partnerships with: Dutch: Use code TUCKER for $50 off your vet care at https://dutch.com/tucker StopBox USA: Get firearm security redesigned and save 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code TUCKER at https://stopboxusa.com/TUCKER American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www. AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  A couple of years ago, leaked internal documents from AIPAC showed that the single largest donor to the organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, number one donor, was a man called Leonid Riedvinsky. Riedvinsky was a Ukrainian-born pornographer. He was the owner of OnlyFans, one of the largest porn sites and human exploitation sites in the world, a site that has effectively turned thousands upon thousands of American women into prostitutes. And according to these documents, Riedvinsky and his wife had pledged $11 million to AIPAC. Huh. He later denied that, but the documents remain. And you had to ask yourself, and many people did ask themselves at the time,

• 1:13Speaker 01

  why would someone who runs a pornography site donate this much money to a pro-war organization, a neocon organization like AIPAC? What's the connection between the two? Huh. Then, of course, it was that same year, 2024, that Miriam Adelson became one of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign, hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, Miriam Adelson is not in the pornography business that we know of, but very much the beneficiary of the gambling business. Her late husband was one of the largest proprietors of casinos in the world, Sheldon Adelson. And she became one of the biggest donors and partly because of those donations became one of the driving forces behind our war with Iran

• 1:57Speaker 01

  and also immensely powerful within this administration. In fact, literally, one of the people who picked employees at the Department of Justice, Miriam Adelson, calling up PPO, Presidential Personnel Office at the White House, I want this person at DOJ. Bam, that person gets a job at DOJ. That happened. But again, you have to ask, what is the connection between pornography, in that case, gambling, and neocon politics? You wouldn't have thought there was one, but the connection keeps showing up. Here, for example, is a pretty amazing and telling clip from Ben Shapiro's recent podcast. Watch this.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  In my opinion, as I said at the time, I thought the MOU was counterproductive, that it signaled weakness, that it actually gave credibility to the Iranian regime. Well, now, things are starting to reverse. You have Operation Economic Outcast, led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessant. The goal is to economically strangle the Islamic Republic. So the odds have been steadily going down about when we will actually have full traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to our friends and sponsors over at Calshi. But they are rising, actually, rather sharply recently. Before April 1st, 2027 is now up to 42%. Before July 1st of 2027 is up to 53%. Honestly, I think we'll probably get there before that.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So that's a pretty amazing clip. Here's Ben Shapiro. And if you see the whole show, he spends a lot of it, as he always does, pushing the United States to send more money and, well, more of our American soldiers and airmen into harm's way, fighting Israel's war in Iran. And then he kind of seamlessly moves to a pitch for Calshi, a gambling company with whom he's a partner, apparently. Not only am I excited about the war, he's effectively saying, you can bet on its outcome. Here, sign up now for Calshi. So here's Ben Shapiro using his daily lecture on why war is good when it's fought by Americans on behalf of a foreign country

• 3:59Speaker 01

  to seamlessly pitch a gambling company. If war wasn't good enough, how about some gambling for you? Why not pornography? Why not weed? Here's some prescription drugs. Well, of course, virtually everybody who pushes for wars like the war in Iran or the war in Iraq or toppling the Syrian government or killing the leader of Libya, that group, we call them neoconservatives, almost all of them are on board with all of these other public policy questions, every one of which has the net effect of hurting Americans, weakening people. So what's the connection here?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  There clearly is one, and we're just guessing, but maybe the connection is exploitation. So the idea of the Iran war, like the Iraq war before it, was we use the world's best-funded military, backed by the world's most powerful economy, to fight a war on behalf of another country, a tiny country that can't fight its own wars. In other words, take the United States and use it for our purposes to achieve something that we can't achieve ourselves. Basically, treat the population of the United States, the 340 million Americans who live here, like livestock and just use them. And that's really not so different from the attitude that, I don't know,

• 5:28Speaker 01

  gets you to buy OnlyFans or promote gambling companies or push legalized weed or prescription drugs on the population. None of those things is good for people. And of course, you know that. You would encourage your own kids to spend all day betting on their phones or smoke more weed. You probably wouldn't want your daughter on OnlyFans, would you? But these aren't your kids. These are other people's kids. These are American kids. And why do you care? Because you can get something out of it. So that's a worldview that most normal people would consider repugnant. That's exploitation. It's cruel. It's awful. It reveals that you think the people from whom you're profiting aren't fully human. You don't care about them. You just want to take something from them.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Most people consider that immoral. But increasingly, there's no sanction against it. In fact, you're criticized for pointing it out, but it's so obviously true. And you should know that. The same people pushing for these wars, whose outcome can't possibly benefit you, your only role is to go die in their prosecution or pay for it, face the consequences, long-term bankruptcy, destruction of a generation. That's your role. The people pushing for those wars don't care about you at all. Because if they did, they certainly wouldn't be steering you to gambling sites

• 6:55Speaker 01

  or getting your kids to smoke more weed or convincing your daughters to join OnlyFans. So we're just starting to notice this because it's kind of hard to ignore. The president's top donor runs a gambling empire? Ben Shapiro's shilling for gambling? The guy who owns OnlyFans is AIPAC's biggest donor? Maybe there's a connection here. Very few people have noted that. But one of them is a man called Saagar Angedi. Now, we know Saagar. Actually, hired Saagar out of college years ago. And what set Saagar apart was not simply that he was smart, but that he didn't, and this was almost 15 years ago, have any real interest in the partisan system. He thought it was fake, back when most of us, very much including me, bought into the idea

• 7:40Speaker 01

  that this is a war between two parties and differing worldviews. And of course, that wasn't what it was. We learned February 28th that, in fact, the parties are aligned on the basic questions. And the rest of us are encouraged to argue at the margins to preserve that lie, that this is a real argument when, in fact, they're colluding against us. Saagar Angedi realized that many years ago. And so he left conventional journalism and has wound up running something called Breaking Points, which is an excellent show that he co-hosts on all social media platforms. We strongly recommend. But maybe because he doesn't have a conventional worldview, he is one of the only people in all media to point out that actually, gambling on your phone,

• 8:25Speaker 01

  digital gambling, is utterly destructive of people. It's incredibly addictive. The odds are abysmal. In fact, there's almost no chance you can win. And it is growing at a pace that has eclipsed all other forms of entertainment. And one of the reasons Saagar Angedi has been able to point this out is because he's one of the very few people in media who's not taking money from gambling interests. And we share that with him. We are strongly pro-dog on this show. We make no secret of that. Dogs are one of the great blessings of this life. And to keep them healthy, we recommend Dutch. It's the solution to skyrocketing veterinary costs. Why are those costs so high? Well, private equity, in case you didn't already know that.

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  coverage for up to five pets. Visit dutch.com/tucker. Use the code TUCKER for $50 off. Truly, Dutch is real. It works. We did a lot of research into this, used it before recommending it. Dutch.com/Tucker. So, we were really grateful to talk to him the other day about the growth of online gambling and what it means for this country and who's promoting it. Here it is. Sager, thank you for doing this.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Every year, this is one of my favorite interviews of the year, so I'm grateful that you made the effort to come up here. So, I was, I'm a little cut off from the question of gambling. I think of it as something that takes place in a casino, craps and blackjack and piggaw and whatever. But suddenly, it's omnipresent and I'm wondering if that's good or bad.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's very bad. And I was just at the stage, I wish that we were at the stage where you were at, which by the way, I still think is bad for people to waste a lot of their money on craps, blackjack. But those people would put modern day gambling companies to shame because at the very least, the house edge on those games is very limited. In fact, you can win. It's just you're very unlikely in the long run to do so. The products that are available today for the vast majority of Americans are effectively legalized theft, especially the ones that are being pushed by these gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings where their hold and/or 60% of their revenue are a type of bet which again would put a Las Vegas casino to shame. They're called a single game parlay. But before I even get into all of that, let's zoom out. Gambling as of this year is now the most

• 11:29Speaker 03

  popular entertainment in America. America is a nation of gamblers. Last-

• 11:34Speaker 01

  It's the most popular entertainment in America?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  By not only just the most popular of entertainment, gambling, the total amount that was gambled in the United States eclipsed all types of other entertainment revenue, movies, books, and others combined. So, that is the amount of dollars that we're talking about. Hundreds of billions of dollars, in some cases, tens of billions of dollars per state. And most of it is targeted to young men specifically, which where we see the data overwhelmingly is depressing, not only their savings rates, bankruptcy goes up, domestic violence goes up by nearly 10%, especially whenever there's a home team loss, which has largely been associated with the NFL for quite some time. But when you add dollars into that, it makes the magnitude of the loss of the drinking, of the depression,

• 12:21Speaker 03

  and of the anger express itself even more. So, there's basically nothing good that has come out of it. There's a argument that comes from many of these states about revenue, but even the revenue argument honestly falls apart. The Ohio governor even said that legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake, the same governor who legalized it. And he gave us some of the numbers where the amount of revenue that, let's say, Ohio raised, it's 200, let's say it's 200 million. Well, the amount of associated social costs was roughly equivalent to the same amount of revenue that they took in. Gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction in the United States.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Actually?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes, it does. Well, it's one of those addictions where you can operate and hit your rock bottom without actually, well, if you hit your rock bottom as an alcoholic, everybody around you knows. You probably lost your job. There's not an ability to maintain that. Same with drug addicts, fentanyl addicts, and the other types of addictions. With gambling specifically, to hit rock bottom, you can gamble your way into a hole and a debt spiral and shame. And it often leads to a point where many of these men just can't face the music, often very tragically leads to suicide.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I believe that. I've actually, I don't want to play dumb. I've actually seen it.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And I, you know, quit drinking myself. So, if you reach the bottom of alcoholism or drug addiction, you can stop using drugs or alcohol. You reach the bottom of gambling and it's insolvency. It's like pretty hard to fight your way out of that.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  That's right. And it's on your phone. So, even, you know, imagine if you could drink out of your phone when you were an alcoholic. That's the equivalent of what we're looking at. This is the most omnipresent environment for gambling in modern history. And just again, to put some color on the numbers, I have some of my notes in front of me. There's been $500 billion wagered since 2018. In 2025 alone, 166 billion on sports, more than movies, recorded music, live music, books, museums combined of a normal 70 billion. So, it's double the amount of revenue for all of those associated other types of entertainment, which I would argue have a lot more of a social net positive. Now, what we see is that there is a 25 to 30% increase in states which legalize online

• 14:27Speaker 03

  gambling. $1 bet leads to $2 of less savings, 10% point in domestic violence after an NFL upset losses. And that's just the top line. And in terms of how much this is pervading everything, these companies spend billions of dollars a year on the most expensive advertising real estate in the world. And this is all of sports media. So, you had ESPN, you have all of these podcasts which are being paid millions of dollars above market rate simply to promote gambling and to get these people, many of their audience, a lot of these young men, hooked into the sport. And I think we can also have a bigger conversation about what it's done for sports generally. You were talking about, as an older person, you

• 15:09Speaker 03

  know, you may not realize it, but if you talk to the young generation, I'm talking 12, 13, 14 years old, specifically teenage boys, if I ask them before an NFL game what the line on a game was, they'll know it. They'll even know what the odds of relative prop bets are for some of their favorite players. That is a completely new reality that has only emerged just since 2018, since the landmark Supreme Court decision originally struck down, they, I think it's PASPA, was the law which had been passed, which allowed Nevada to continue sports betting, again, in a casino, but did not allow sports betting wagering nationwide. And we can thank Chris Christie for all of this.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  There's no one worse. There's no one more corrupt than Chris Christie. He's just, and I mean like on a deep human level corrupt. Yeah, I mean, you said podcasts without getting into it, but we were approached by a couple of different gambling companies with real money. I had no idea they were gambling companies.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I thought they were polling companies. I mean, I really didn't know. And I mean that.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I called someone about it. No, those are gambling companies. Oh, okay. What's the difference between a polling company and a gambling company?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Right. Well, this is where it also gets complicated. So, all of my criticism right now has been about online sports betting companies. FanDuel, DraftKings, Hard Rock Bet, any of those types of actual wagering. And just to explain the difference, that is a house against you, as in the house of DraftKings sets the line on a specific book for, you know, let's say like a Patriots versus the Eagles, like it just comes to mind. So, that's you against the house, trying to make sure that you get an edge, hopefully, and you'll win. What you're talking about are these prediction market companies. Predominantly in the United States is Calci and Polymarket. And I do want to be fair to them. They are not the same thing. However, operationally, I think they are. So, they advertise themselves

• 17:01Speaker 03

  as event contracts. And so, it's a prediction market. So, for example, there's two sides of the bet. And so, I come in and somebody else is willing to take the other side of that. It's similar, I would say, to horse race betting of terms of the amount of dollars which are inside the pool and then who's going to take the, you know, X 85% chance versus the 15%.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And the house gets a set percentage.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And they get a set fee that they take off. And so, that's their similar difference, let's say, between the prediction market and the actual gambling company. However, these prediction market companies have a lot of the same problems. So, when you were to speak to them, I'm sure that they would talk a lot about derivatives and event contracts. It's all very financialized language. And so, they try to present themselves as above what these companies are. But here's the truth. The vast majority of the action which is taken on these platforms, and I use that term specifically because they would say the amount of dollars wait or dollars placed, I'm saying action because it is ultimately gambling, is all on sports. Over 80, 85% of the volume on Calci and/or Polymarket is

• 18:06Speaker 03

  placed on sports. You also have the same power law problems where the vast majority of the profit accrues to a very small group of traders known as sharps, both in the event, you know, in the prediction market business and/or in gambling, actual online gambling. And I think even by their own data, only 25% of the people who play within a month or trade within a month, as they would call it, are even people who win money. And so, by your own admission, and by the way, that's actually quite high, if you were to wager over a month, whenever we're talking about sports betting. This is what I mean by legalized theft. When I step back and you ask me the question, is this good for America? How can it be good for young men to routinely participate in a daily, sometimes more than daily, practice

• 18:48Speaker 03

  of just throwing their money away to either groups of Wall Street traders or large gambling houses based in Europe and the United States to accrue for shareholder value? There is no good that comes from that. I laid out domestic violence, thinks about the social costs, but bigger picture. And this might, this actually might even be- I talk a lot about sports betting. I do think it's the number one scourge. But the CEO of Calci, Tarek Bonsour, had said that he envisions a future where people can trade on everything. Think about the social and corrosive cost of what it means for some of the events, contracts which are offered either on Calci or Polymarket. We're talking about flight delays. I mean, can you imagine the perverse incentive of manipulating flight

• 19:33Speaker 03

  delays and want, you know, they, they frame it as hedging, saying, well, somebody wanted to do a conference and they wanted to make sure that if the conference got flight delays, that they could hedge their bet. They promote the hell out of this, but they don't think about the social cost of what it means to be able to wager literally on everything. You could create a market right now for what you and I are going to say on this platform. By their rules, according to their internal house rules, that would be insider trading if you or I were to wager on that. However, I was at a restaurant yesterday, we both were, and I was speaking to some people or asking about what I was going to talk about. Well, they could have wagered, they could have created a market about what I was going to say with that inside information. There is no regulatory authority to actually go

• 20:15Speaker 03

  after insider trading at a bigger level. There is for the military, and I can talk about that as well, where large bets, specifically on Polymarket, for insider information, things like the Maduro raid and others clearly leaked out to a small group of people who then went and placed bets on these markets on whether the United States was going to go capture Maduro. Same whenever it came to the military operations against Iran. There were huge sums of money that were paid out on that. The Trump administration has gone after a few select cases, but those are only the most obvious cases of members of the military. The Israeli military also had to prosecute several of its own soldiers for placing bets on Polymarket for events that they knew they were going to happen because they were participating.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Betting on wars.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Betting on wars, yeah, on death. Like, and again, they would push back very heavily. We don't have death markets, but when you have

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Well, how is betting on a war, not a death market?

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Betting on whether the United States is going to bomb Iran is effectively death market.

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• 24:09Speaker 03

  But okay, let's just, just even keep it here because that's the most obvious, easy example. The social trust between all of us is broken when everything is tradable and everything becomes a scam. Everything from sports to our flights to, in some places, people are betting on the temperature at an airport. There was a case recently where people are betting on weather markets and the way that the weather market was decided was off of a single sensor which was at an airport. So a man took a bet for an outshot of the, how much weather, like how the temperature would be on that specific day. He went to the sensor and held a hairdryer next to it to cause the sensor to rise so that that

• 24:54Speaker 03

  would then resolve in his favor. I mean, these are extreme examples, but this is the extent to which people will start to manipulate literal reality just to make money.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  This is the free market capitalism they promised us?

• 25:05Speaker 03

  This is the free market capitalism that they've promised us and, and makes it so you can't trust anything. There was recently a case where Caroline Levitt was holding a press conference, one of her press briefings, and there was a market that it would go over X amount of time. I forget exactly how much time that she would spend at the podium, and she happened to end it seconds before that the majority position was. So you could have bet the under on how long that press conference was going to take place and you could have paid out, I'd forget the exact dollar, maybe 20 to one. There's also all these insider trading things. So I gave the obvious example that you and I talked about, this specific one. I'll give you another one relates to a vice is marijuana. I don't think like this, but I could have. I'll give you an example. I got a call because I, this

• 25:50Speaker 03

  is my job, I do reporting. Somebody called me and said, Trump's going to reschedule marijuana. I was like, wow. So I start working the phones, I start seeing what I can find out about this. I email the White House. At that time, I could have got a 1% chance on either prediction markets or I could have purchased marijuana stocks because I had inside information. And I actually watched as I started doing my reporting that it started to leak out in broader Washington and I can see the stocks start to rise. I see rumors begin to come out. Then the official announcement eventually breaks from some establishment media outlet. The price goes sky high. I personally could have profited literally millions of dollars if I had wanted to. I would never do such a thing. I think that's literally

• 26:33Speaker 03

  blood money and scumbag behavior, but there's no law that prevents me from doing that. I was doing my job in a routine basis. I could have made myself extraordinary sums of money. You probably could have done the same thing with all kinds of various things that you've been doing in your line of work. Is it technically insider trading? No, we're not part of these. Exactly. Because that's our character. But how many is character really the constraint through which we should offer the integrity of our financial markets? And even worse, I see these viral social media claims. People will say, I'm getting rich betting on what Donald Trump is going to say. You can get various odds of whether Trump will say the

• 27:15Speaker 03

  words, low IQ this week, of whether Trump will say, which pretty much a lock, I think if he would hold that one, of whether he would criticize you, you know, this week. And so, you know, people in the White House, they have relatives, they could call them, their relatives could call another relative, they could easily make a lot of money doing this. I mean, this is about our government, this is about sports, it's about entertainment, but my bigger picture, this is bad for society. There was a recent poll that came out. Go ahead.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Well, isn't the reason that sports betting was banned in the first place 100 years ago because it corrupted sports?

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  People started throwing games.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Exactly. And, you know, the Major League Baseball itself, the National League and others, were formed specifically to stop the corrosive effects of the game of gambling because they knew that it was a problem. And for over 80 years, these companies held the line. Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, testified before the U.S. Senate against gambling. David Stern, I think is his name, the NBA commissioner, also testified against gambling. But what ended up happening, this is a very tragic story, is that the English Premier League, when Britain legalized gambling, and specifically has had long sports gambling for quite some time, their valuations began to skyrocket. And so, the capitalist greed of the NBA owners and of the NFL owners and the commissioners, they look across the pond

• 28:35Speaker 03

  and they think, how can I accelerate my valuation and the amount of dollars that I can pluck out of America, just like they did? Now, you and I, as social critics would say, in what way would we want to emulate the British working class for our working class who have been immiserated and who currently have a GDP which is less than the state of, GDP's not everything, but, you know, less than the state of Mississippi. I could look at Brazil, another horrific example, really ground zero of sports betting, where, you know, in Brazil, they have those cash transfer programs for poor Brazilians, which previously was held up as a major social welfare benefit. Well, more recent data has come out from Brazil. The vast majority of that money is being cycled right back into sports gambling. And

• 29:19Speaker 03

  so people are getting their cash transferred to the government, they're handing it right over to the gambling companies. They are massively addicted to soccer betting down there specifically. So our NFL commissioner, our MLB commissioner, they looked abroad to the Premier League all at the same time, while Chris Christie is advancing his case for New Jersey to have sports betting. All of this came from the Great Recession. Atlantic City was really taking, you know, having a hard time when, with their revenue, in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Chris Christie becomes the governor. Christie decides that he's going to try and have a workaround to allow sports betting in New Jersey specifically. And so, I won't take everyone through all the complicated legal minutia. The basics of it are

• 30:02Speaker 03

  They passed several laws. They took it through various circuit courts, went all the way up to the Supreme Court, five conservative justices, one liberal justice, rules on behalf of the state of New Jersey. And they say that what Congress did by restricting sports betting, specifically only allowing a loophole where Nevada could have it, but nobody else could have it, was unfair to states' rights. This comes at a time, too, when states are revenue hungry. 2018, right into the pandemic. So what happens? The vast majority of these states, I think 42 states now, have legalized sports betting. And what they did is they not only allowed legalized sports betting in the casino, like Nevada always had, is they quickly realized that there were these apps like DraftKings and FanDuel, which had the infrastructure

• 30:47Speaker 03

  laid out already, which allows you to normalize and create online sports books specifically. And so, that's how I gave you that number, 500 billion, half a trillion dollars wagered in this nation since 2018. And it just dispels all of this notion of how, oh, well, I mean, the classic libertarian argument, well, people are always going to sports bet. That's actually BS, in my opinion. Because if we look to the current types of bets that people place today, they place the types of bets, which I've talked about, which no bookie or mafia boss would ever offer you. They're talking about offering you, when I opened the app, the single game parlay, it would say, it's not just whether you win or lose. And it's

• 31:31Speaker 03

  not even just the spread, plus three and a half, minus three and a half. It's the spread combined with the quarterback throwing for 200 yards, combined with the receiver scoring two touchdowns. And they offer you a price. Bet $10 to win 750. The idiot brain, combined with alcohol or marijuana, for a lot of these guys sitting on their couches, let's do it. $10. What they don't realize is that the contingent odds that they just placed lose money so regularly that the companies can project their revenue based off of that type of bet, the single game parlay bet. So much so that they can project their earnings out into the future. 60% of their revenue comes specifically from that type of bet. So when

• 32:15Speaker 03

  people tell me, America's always been a nation of sports gamblers, that's totally wrong. The type of bets that they were making were usually illegal, you know, backroom types of bets, plus or minus on the spread, to the extent that they were ever able to even get these types of parlay bets. It was in person in a Vegas casino, and they would never take the amount of dollars that they're wagering currently at a lot of these places. And one thing I beg for a lot of the listeners, and I've tried to explain this, if you're a younger guy out there and you're doing this for the thrill, I just want you to know, especially with the parlay bets, you will not win. You will not win. It's a mathematical fact if you do this over time. And this brings me to the worst part of the industry. If you

• 32:59Speaker 03

  do win, they'll ban you. And so, I'm sure you know this with blackjack, for example. Everybody famously lionizes the people who can count cards. What they don't tell you, if you walk into a Las Vegas casino and you start counting cards, you will be asked to leave the blackjack table within probably 30 minutes to an hour, unless you're really good at it and you're working with a team. How is that legal, you might ask? They have the right to refuse service. And it's because, even with the small house edge of blackjack, if you are an advantaged player in blackjack, and especially if they allow those advantaged players to have unlimited bet size, and they get that 1%, really, that's all it is, counting cards, gives you a 1% or so edge, you will eventually beat the house. It's the perfect

• 33:44Speaker 03

  game, is that you can addict people, you can effectively legalize theft, and if you happen to, despite all of this, you're able to win money, they will simply ask you to no longer play with them. Or, if they don't ask you to no longer play with them, they will limit your bet size. So where previously you might have been able to put $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 on a game, they'll say, sir, you're only allowed to bet up to $3 on this game. It's an easy way. So you addict the losers, and you look for the whales. See, vast majority of the profit for these gambling companies comes from a very small group of users, roughly 3% to 5% of the people make up almost 50% of the revenue. So these are absolute gambling

• 34:28Speaker 03

  addicts, who by law shouldn't even be gambling in the first place. The winners, if you're able to even win in this game, they will ban you. In fact, their algorithms are so sophisticated that if you place the type of bets which look like a winner, a potential winner, before you even win, they will limit your bet size. They will say, we don't want your business, or you're only capped to $10 down on a game. So they've created a system where they can addict young men, they can find the potential whales out there, those 3%, who are just full-blown addicts, they can shower them with gifts, they call them incessantly, hey, where have you been? Haven't heard from you. Do you want tickets to the next Patriots game?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Do you want free whiskey? Let me fly you out on a private jet from here to here. They shower them with more benefits than you can even believe. Now, they think it's for free, but they're paying for it, obviously, with their losses. They do all of this, while if you're actually a winner, they'll ban you. And so, for the casual better, who is doing 3% to 5% to 8%, I just want those people, or $8, I want those people to know, that is only enabled by these people getting crushed by gambling addiction, throwing their futures away, their lives, their marriages.

• 35:41Speaker 01

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• 36:23Speaker 01

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• 36:51Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked $350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  I covered the case of a guy, his wife, I think, sued DraftKings. So he had never placed a bet before 2020. He ended up gambling. After a few years, every dollar that he had, every single dollar, he bankrupted his children's 401, 529 plans, his 401K, took out multiple mortgages on his house. The entire time, he was being called and encouraged to gamble by DraftKings, his host, casino host, who would ask, hey, where have you been this week? Hey, I've got a good game for you. This is exactly the type of thing you would like to do. Here's some free whiskey. Here's some free anything, right? You know, free, like, concert tickets, those types of things. They're encouraging him despite him showing obvious

• 38:05Speaker 03

  symptoms of gambling addiction. And by their own rules, they're supposed to tell him not to do it. But of course they don't. And in some cases, not just this case, there have been other cases where they say, don't put this in text, or they're going to come after me. Make sure just talk to me on the phone if you're having a problem. Again, this is scum of the earth type of behavior, to even participate in this. But this is what's been enabled by these laws. This is sweeping the nation. The largest gambling-

• 38:30Speaker 01

  So what happened to the guy?

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Oh, he went absolutely bust. And his wife is suing-

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Who owns DraftKings?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  I actually had, they're publicly traded company, so it's, you know, Fortune 500.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Is Portnoy involved in any of this?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  I, well, I don't know if he owns DraftKings, but I know that Barstool has an affiliation with DraftKings. I think that they have a partnership between the two of them.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And ESPN does too, promotes all this stuff?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  ESPN, well, it's a complicated case. They had their own bet, their own actual, like, casino called ESPN Bet, which is ironic, because it's a media organization with ESPN Bet, that was down, literally on the Chyron, encouraging people to. I think now they just have an exclusive partnership, I believe with Penn Gaming, which is a large casino conglomerate, which previously owned Barstool Sports.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Oh, it's all so disgusting.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  It's horrible.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  So, why is this allowed?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I thought the promise of this administration was the country was going to produce things. Like, New Jersey was once a rich state because they made a lot of stuff in New Jersey. Pharmaceutical soup, you know, like tangible.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Trenton makes the world taste.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. Exactly. I think that sign's still there.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  It's still there.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  But it's not true.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  It's not.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  So, the idea that you're going to fix the state budget hole by just treating your population like livestock, that's not really the answer we were promised.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  No, it's certainly not. And this administration is the most pro vice administration in modern American history.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Really?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  So, this administration, CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has taken a very different line from the Biden administration. They not only are reversed many of the rulings against the Kalshis and the Polymarkets, they not only enable them just to do what they do, which is worse, but there's gradations of worse. They go to extraordinary lengths to defend them in court. Recently, there was a case, let's take New York State. So, New York State, Kathy Hochul, the governor, she sue, or her and the Attorney General, went after Kalshi. Because Kalshi, they said, was illegally operating as a prediction market, as a gambling house in their state. The argument that they had was, look, there's federalism. We are a state.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  We have the right to regulate sports books in the way that we see fit. And by doing that, we charge, I believe it's a 20% excise tax on the amount of trades or revenue or something like that generated within the state. Kalshi obviously argued against them, although, I will say, in negotiations previously, they had come to them and had acknowledged some level of regulatory authority. They said, why don't we pay you 6% the way that we do in North Carolina? New York State rejected that, so we don't do carve-outs. We believe you're a gambling company. You need to abide by our gambling laws. The CFTC, under Donald Trump, issued emergency authority, an emergency release, ordering and telling Kalshi to please continue operating because they have absolute authority as the

• 41:26Speaker 03

  federal government over the regulation of these prediction markets.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Wait, so the Trump administration described it as an emergency?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  As an emergency.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  That people wouldn't be able to bet enough online?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. Effectively, that's right. I mean, Kalshi would tell you that they're trading, that are there online. But, I mean, in my or your estimation, yeah, it's gambling. And so, the Trump administration has, their CFTC Commissioner, Mike Selig, routinely goes and delivers on video, press conferences, many with crypto magnates and others. Recently, there was one with Donald Trump, Mike Selig, and one of the Winklevon twins behind him, who himself is a Bitcoiner with Gemini, where they're giving press conferences and extolling the virtues of prediction markets. I mean, Trump's own son is either on the board or was an advisor with both Kalshi and with Polymarket. You have a situation now where Kalshi and Polymarket, Kalshi specifically, because

• 42:19Speaker 03

  their regulatory approach is to try and capture, not capture, but work extensively with the federal government to ensure that they're totally legalized. The CFTC Commissioner has issued multiple guidances and even written briefs on their behalf in many other state courts and places where they're being sued because many state Attorney Generals and other believe that they are illegally operating as a gambling house. So, that's Trump on gambling. There's, there's no question, he has made gambling more prevalent in the United States than any previous president, just because of the way prediction markets work. And in fact, I mean, in my opinion, running roughshod over federalism, California and Texas, bless them, they did not have legal gambling before this.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  But now, because Trump, as the president and of the federal government, is protecting these prediction market companies, we now have legalized gambling in all 50 states. And in fact, as I know, both Kalshi and Polymarket, now they would not want legalized DraftKings or FanDuel in those states so they could be the only option for potential people who want to put action. So, in California, it was the Indian tribal casinos that didn't want nationwide or statewide gambling, and they successfully defeated it at a statewide, a statewide ballot initiative. In Texas.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  To preserve their own monopoly.

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Right, to preserve their own monopoly. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but they, they still, they want, look, the voters there decided not to legalize it.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  I get it, but you're not describing any organized force acting on behalf of the public.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  No, there's, there's maybe the evangelicals in Texas. They're, they're the only reason that they, we didn't have statewide betting from my own home state. Not that Ms. Adelson isn't working overtime to make sure that that's, that's been repealed. I mean, one of the reasons she bought the Dallas Mavericks and their whole, you know, vision for that, as I understand it, was to create kind of this super entertainment gambling complex. Mark Cuban himself even said that, before he sold it to her, that the valuation of his franchise doubled because of legalized gambling. So, I don't think it takes a genius to see that was part of the long-term Adelson plan for my home state of Texas to legalize gambling and to try and to make it part of the fabric

• 44:24Speaker 03

  of the state, which, to their credit, was one of the last actually willing to stand up with a substantial population. However, of course, Trump has now made prediction markets legalized in the nation. Let's talk about marijuana. So, Trump rescheduled marijuana. He did so not after any rigorous review. He did so at the behest of marijuana companies where Schedule I status by the federal government was prohibiting their ability to use the legalized banking system. That was it. There were huge donors in Mar-a-Lago and in Florida, as I understand it, who were constantly complaining to him about their inability to, because, right, and, and in these states where there was legalized weed, cannabis, as they call it, they would take these vast amounts of cash and they had problems on their hands.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Many banks would not touch the money.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  Because the federal government could technically, with Schedule I, and they saw it was illegal. So, there was an entire side banking arrangement that was happening.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Conducted in currency.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Conducted in hard cash for a lot of these, they were having to hire armored guards. It was causing them all kinds of problems. They heavily lobbied the administration to reschedule specifically, not for the reasons that Trump came out and said, for studying, we've had plenty of studies on marijuana, specifically medical marijuana. All of them are absolutely false.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  It saves a lot of lives.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's complete nonsense. There is not one claim for medical marijuana that's held up in scrutiny. You can read that in the New York Times and from some of the most prominent health journals in the United States. But nonetheless, they claim we need more research. That was the justification. That's not the justification. The justification specifically had to do with allowing these companies to have more access to the legitimate banking system. And so, the venture capitalists and the stocks, remember I told you earlier about that story about how I could have made money? There's an entire ETF and others that track marijuana companies which exploded post, post rescheduling. So, that tells you the story. And it made people very, very wealthy who are very connected to Donald Trump.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  We're into gold. We've been into gold for a long time. That turned out to be pretty smart, not to brag or anything. We've told you a lot about gold, how it's outperformed the S and P 500 over the past 25 years, that's true. How the central banks around the world have been buying it at record levels as they diversify away from US debt. That's all true. But there's another reason to consider buying physical gold, actual gold, and that reason, of course, is privacy. Your bank and credit card company record every transaction. Cryptocurrency, whatever its benefits, leaves a permanent public record. It's on the ledger. There are stories about how government tracks cash, literally cash.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Because remember when they switched to the new bills? Well, they're trackable. So, gold is probably the only store of value that can even conceivably remain private. It's outside the system built to monitor and control you. And that's one of the reasons that we founded Battalion to help Americans reclaim sovereignty and privacy, which is to say reclaim freedom, by making it simple and secure and accessible to own physical gold. So, with all the drama around the world and all of that drama affects the strength of the US dollar, which is getting weaker, gold help protects your savings. And the surveillance state, of course, getting stronger every day, that's what the data centers are about, probably like a little bit of privacy.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Gold gives you privacy. It can't be tracked.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Explore our collection at battalionmetals.com.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Slash Tucker.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Did it improve the country at all?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  You can ask, I'm in this state, I'm shocked at the amount of cannabis stores everywhere. Downtown Portland, cannabis everywhere. You smell it everywhere. You'll be in the rural parts of this state, we're here in Maine, I see a brand-new cannabis dispensary next to a rotting home. So you can tell me whether you think that's been an improvement. It's lowered IQ, talks about young men, the number of people who drive while they're under the influence of marijuana skyrocketed.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Lower testosterone increases the schizophrenia rate. It's been a true disaster.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  It has been a, it is probably, when one, aside from gambling, the single most biggest disasters to hit our population. Oh, and by the way, daily marijuana use now outnumbers daily alcohol use. Not that alcohol is good, but now you're using a force which massively increases the amount of people who go schizophrenic, mental illness, testosterone, pregnant women use is dramatically up because a lot of these false health claims that people make, doctors are not caught up. There's actually a teenage, specific affliction where if they smoke too much high potency marijuana, they end up vomiting for days and it gets stored in their fat cells. They literally had to create an entire new term for that type of affliction because

• 49:41Speaker 03

  it's spread across ERs. Ask any ER doctor in America, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. So Trump has been a boon to the marijuana industry, but pornography doesn't get covered nearly as much as well. And in my opinion.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Pornography?

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so I, I talked to you about this a little bit before, the Treasury Department, so conservatives were rightfully very upset about de-banking under the Biden administration, or de-banking concerns broadly.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  For ideological reasons.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  For ideological reasons, which is fair, and nobody should lose their bank account. The Treasury Department issued a report on de-banking in which they specifically said banks should not discriminate against these vice industries. And one of them that they named was pornography. And so the Trump administration issued a guidance to the nation's banks that they should do their best to facilitate banking for pornography companies and for other women, let's say, and OnlyFans and others, who previously had had trouble getting access to the legitimate banking system. Now, why, you might ask, do you think banks?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Wait a second. So when people voted for Trump in the hope that he would end de-banking, they probably weren't thinking, I hope OnlyFans can find a more efficient way to transfer its funds.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Exactly right. And that's what's happened. And we've seen that now.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  So it's sort of like you vote for Trump to do something about immigration, but the only people get deported are those who criticize Netanyahu.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, kind of how.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  So they subverted the idea.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Subverted the idea. By the way, you want to know who's buying OnlyFans? You can look into this, is that the people who are buying a majority stake in OnlyFans, which was run by a Ukrainian billionaire who we knew nothing about, turned out to be a major A-PAC donor, by the way.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Who's the biggest A-PAC?

• 51:14Speaker 03

  He recently died in Florida. Well, it turns out that he's selling to a Silicon Valley operation, which I didn't know a ton about, but one of the co-founders there was part of the tech team on ClearView AI, which is the facial recognition software. And so now, a majority stake in OnlyFans is being acquired by somebody who previously worked over at ClearView AI, which is facial recognition software, which is used by the federal government and by a lot of other spy agencies.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Why would you allow OnlyFans in your country?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great question.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  But why not just arrest, arrest the owners?

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Arrest the owners. And, and, and you know, I try to, I try not to even take the maximalist position because I see how far gone we are here. Can we at least say, let's enforce our human trafficking laws in this country? Because that's why the banks didn't want anything to do with the pornography companies or OnlyFans, is because they were deeply afraid, rightfully, of the amount of human trafficking and exploitation that happens in the pornography industry. That is a bedrock to it, everybody knows. And I've listened and unfortunately heard the testimony of so many men and women who were involved in that industry, none of it, none of it is from a place of entrepreneurialism or capitalism. It's all deep from a place of

• 52:30Speaker 03

  exploitation of being used by these broader systems. And if anything, it is shocking to the conscience that a woman who's 18 or 19, who sees her only chance of being able to make money, buy a house, or achieve financial success, is to sell nude images of herself to perverts online who are three, four, or five times her age. That's something that the federal government, I think, in my opinion, should want, at the very least, to make sure they're not being human trafficked.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  If some Ukrainian billionaire is turning our women into prostitutes, maybe we should do something about it. Isn't that why we have a military?

• 53:01Speaker 03

  That's exactly why. That's why we have a justice system. I mean, and same when we, when we talk about the gambling, how can you argue with a straight face that normalizing? Because even if we take Calci and Polymarket, which are these, again, they're on Wall, these people are the darling of Wall Street, everybody loves them in New York, in New York City, they're offering all kinds of liquidity for trading on Federal Reserve, on the Federal Reserve, and whether they're going to hike rates on the futures of Bitcoin, on all of these complicated derivatives, which you and I will never understand until there's another financial crash. So they're the darlings of the hedge fund, the Wall Street, and all these other industries. But how could you say that when 80% of the volume is sports, and most of it is people who are customers, who by their own admission, 25% or so are

• 53:46Speaker 03

  the ones who are taking profit, how can you say that's a good thing? Why would you want to encourage the daily participation, weekly even, participation of placing wagers on events which were primarily, who were primarily known and wanted to be known as non-gambling entertainment?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Maybe because it's not so different from the equities markets.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Maybe that's, maybe the, the red, the red pill here is that it's like, of course, Wall Street loves them because Wall Street already does this. It's the same thing.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  And but, you know, to zoom out from that, and, and this is where I get frustrated because the Calci's argument, wants to make the argument that if they were to say things are corrupt, they would say the equities markets are just as corrupt. I would say, yes, but, all right, the average American can still largely just put their money in the S and P 500 and get an eight to 10% return over the long run. They're much better off doing that than they are trading on Calci. Oh, I forgot one thing with the Trump administration. They lowered the bar for day trading. So previously, there was a regulation that you needed to have $25,000 of liquidity to engage as a day trader. And the Trump administration removed that. And so by removing that threshold, obviously, it's supposedly sold as a populist move. It's like, everybody should have the right to day trade. Over 80% of people.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Day trade?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Day trade. Over 80% of people who day trade lose money. It's statistical fact.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  I wonder how many Fox News viewers, well, I'll speak for myself, I campaigned for Trump. I didn't, I didn't think Trump's election would result in more gambling drugs and pornography. That kind of wasn't on the menu that I remember.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  It certainly was. It was on the donor menu, though. And every one of the donors, especially marijuana, I can link that directly back to Mar-a-Lago and to Florida, with the CFTC, it's largely venture capital and a lot of the other, and it's libertarians, I should be fair. There are a lot of libertarians and other things that support these on their face, the wisdom of crowds and how great they are at predicting various types of events.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Isn't that lynching?

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Especially, and, and come on.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Why don't they shut up at a certain point? Like, it's just too stupid. I can't deal with it.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  It's foolish in the sense of what social utility, again, do I do?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  The wisdom of the crowds.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  What social utility do we have on gambling on everything? There is none.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  It would be funny to have, you know, there were all those horrifying pictures of lynching in the South. And I know it was more complicated than the, the images suggest, right? Some of the people really were rapists, and I get it. But we still have to oppose lynching. Like, you need a justice system, right? Okay.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  But these kind of wild-eyed, crazy people, and the guy swinging from the tree, and then underneath it says the wisdom of crowds.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Wisdom of crowds, right. Or the Bolshevik mobs.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Bolshevik, exactly.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  We can find all kinds of cross-ideological examples.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, wow. Okay. Has this received coverage?

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Very little. And you know why? Because the news organizations are in bed with these same companies. CNN has a deal with Calci. They use Calci odds on their network. There are multiple major news organizations which have, incorporate their actual odds into their coverage. And a famous example more recently was Harry Enton, the stats guy over at CNN, covering the Calci odds of a specific race. Francesca Hong, I believe, he said she had a 95% chance to win. She lost the election. But the coverage was not just polls. And by the way, a sophisticated news consumer, even a casual news consumer, has a general feeling polls are wrong all the time. We've just lived through too much to know that. But

• 57:05Speaker 03

  an event market, a prediction market, well, those, they were right in 2024, right? They predicted Donald Trump would win. So a 95% chance of that, that's a sure thing. Well, it wasn't a sure thing because she lost. And there have been multiple of these primaries.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's what kept me away from the predictions markets, you know, as a sponsor for this show. I didn't even get the gambling part of it because I'm obviously too stupid to see the whole picture. But I do understand, like, my little slice of the world. And I thought, this seems like an intel-inflected thing. Like, it feel, it felt to me on the base of no evidence at all, but just my instinct told me, these are companies that are not simply reflecting back the public's opinion, but trying to shape the public's opinion.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I mean, you're making a great argument in that point.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  I just feel that.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Well, because in that case, let's, actually, we recently had a case where, I believe it was in California, a polling company put out a poll, which I, I think, I forget which candidate it said was leading by 12 points. It comes out months later, it was, the polling company admits, quote, "It was a social experiment to see how much our poll would get coverage."

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Well, exactly.

• 58:12Speaker 03

  And so now, how much did that one poll have influence on Calci or the prediction market? Probably very little. But in the aggregate, all of these polling companies, their error, to the extent there's an error, which you, again, you and I know that. There's no money riding on it, but we have a feeling many of these polls often understate or overstate the way things are going. They then get extrapolated to the nth degree and financialized in these prediction markets, where the liquidity trading in these can be hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, depending on the race, hundreds of millions in the case of the presidency. So in these cases, the actions of certain polls, let's say the Seltzer poll, we famously remember that before the Donald Trump election, which was so dramatically off despite her

• 58:53Speaker 03

  reputation, is it so outside the bounds of possibility to say, was that an event meant to manipulate a market? Now, I don't think that actually to be the case, but there isn't a lot of law that would prevent her necessarily from doing that, as long as things are covered or, you know, their ass is covered in a certain way. And then take it even deeper with foreign governments or others that may want to influence a certain type of event here in the United States, who might buy a large position on one of these prediction markets to again, generate the news coverage that it deserves. Because these aren't taken as fact when they are not fact at all. Again, to be fair to Calci, they recently did a meta-study, they sent me their data, where they said, when there's a 5% chance of happening, it usually happens 5%.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  If there's a 90% chance of happening, there usually is 90%. They're trying to prove that they are predictive. My problem with that is their sample size, especially it's taken elections. You and I know the vast majority of primaries are not contested. And the winner is clear. The data would only be useful to me in an actual contested primary.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  And in many of these contested primaries, totally wrong. They were wrong with Angie Nixon, they were wrong with Francesca Hong, they were wrong with Abdul Sayed. They had Abdul Sayed winning dramatically more than he actually ended up winning his election by. Francesca Hong, they had her 95% chance, she lost. Angie Nixon, who beat her opponent by like 10 points or something, they had as a dramatic underdog. And so, when it actually mattered, again, in this case, where you had an event where you would have looked to these prediction markets for information that you wouldn't be able to glean from polls or from other open source material, it didn't end up mattering. And so, that in the contested primary, and these things haven't even been around that long, what's their actual track record?

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Because right now, it just seems like a casual election better goes on the RCP average, sees Francesca Hong, there's even a meme where they say, oh, look, guys, they're selling dollars for 95 cents, because shit it, 95% chance of winning. And so, easy 5% pop, you put 500 bucks in it, not a lot to some people, a lot to most people, and next thing you know, you lose all of it. And that story has compounded on sports, on elections, on what color dildo will be thrown on the WNBA, uh, the WNBA court, on the types of, the color of Gatorade, which will be poured on a coach after they win the Super Bowl. Uh, I could go on.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  All of it's non-productive, though. Nothing is being created.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Nothing is being created, except the youngest female billionaire is one of the founders of Calci. So we can just thank God for that. Just entrepreneurial, MIT grad.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurial. How is it entrepreneurial to find new ways to exploit desperate people?

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. Or offer liquidity to, uh, financial houses, so they can bet up and down on federal.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  It just seems predatory. So why would young men participate in this, when some of them presumably are smart enough to know the odds, but they do it anyway?

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Uh, I would dispute that, because unfortunately, they don't know. I mean, we just have too much data, they don't know the odds, and they're bombarded by advertising. But a lot of it is, everyone can understand, this actually, I did a lot of research into this, I go, why is, so I don't have the gene, I don't have the gambling gene. Uh, you know, I'm capable, playing craps is fun and winning is fun, but I can easily walk away after losing $25 and say, I'm done. But, so what is it? So it's actually fascinating, our dopamine rewards risk. When you get the reward, you get serotonin, which brings you down. So the risk, the action itself, and there's a famous line from Heat, for, for me, the action is the juice. That's actually true, especially when you're a high testosterone male.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  Well, what it means is that gambling is a derivative of our chase of dopamine and of risk. And specifically, the reason why we are rewarded with dopamine for risk is hunting. And so you'll understand this as a hunter, the vast majority of hunting is extraordinary boredom and using your mind to, and most of the times, it doesn't work unless you're deeply familiar with the terrain, especially when we're talking about non-rifle hunting, or it's an incredibly difficult task, you can ask anybody who does it. Well, what, nature needed to reward you. And so you needed to go out there, fair for yourself, probably burn more calories than you were going to get. It's a totally irrational thing, when you actually think about it. But it only makes sense if there is the payoff at the end.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Gambling is touch, is basically hijacking the dopamine and the nervous system, which we developed to become hunters, so that we could go out and provide food for our families, for our clan, to be able to feed our child. But in modernity, with the grocery store and all of that removed, that nervous system or biology has not caught up to that. And there's a specific subset of our population, just like there is with alcohol or marijuana, where that dopamine, or even drugs, anybody, you know, I don't think I could ever be addicted to drugs, I just don't have that type of gene, but I know a lot of people who do. They're not, I'm not better than them or worse. It's, there's a scale, whenever it comes to human biology. There's a specific subset of our population where that rush is the greatest thing in the world.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  And if you've seen them, if you've ever been to a casino, when you see those wide-eyed guys, you notice, they don't feel when they win, they feel when they lose. It's when they lose that they finally feel alive. Because to be alive, for them, was the moments in which they thought they would win, they have to come back to the crash, and then they have to chase again. Because if they won, then they wouldn't be able to get the same chase, because they would actually get the reward, which they think that they're seeking. But what they don't realize is they're seeking the drug itself. And when you normalize this, like I said, across hundreds of millions of people, you hijack the biology largely, of a lot of young men who are rushful of testosterone, traditionally would be the hunters, that's really where it all seems to come down to.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  This is why I talked previously about, I mean pornography, it's the same thing, right? It's the same artificial construction hijacking of the dopamine and the nervous system, which is intended for you to be able to procreate. Whenever we talk about day trading, it's a very similar thing, is it easy ways to get riches, but all, riches, but ultimately, it's about risk. And so, what gambling does, it hijacks that, and it takes somebody in the prime of their life, where they could have used that risk and that appetite for dopamine, if it wasn't legal, to at the very least participate, maybe in something more sociable? Because what did I just say about everything with gambling? They do it on the phone. Is that, you know, even without alcohol, you have to go out and you have to buy alcohol, you have to, you have to, at the very least, you have to speak to the clerk who's selling

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  you the booze, or the bartender, even marijuana, you have to go and buy it from a store. All of this can be done in total solitude on your phone. And actually, I read a book, Danny Funt, who wrote this incredible book, well-reported book on gambling. He said that sometimes they would go FanDuel, or one of these companies would survey their customers, and said, would you, would you recommend this product to a friend? Their best customers said, no. No, because they, they, they wouldn't want their friends to participate, or they're ashamed, or they don't have any friends, they just do it by themselves. It's the only rush that they have. And I've seen it bleed now into our society, we see male loneliness, obviously, is an epidemic.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  But the other thing I hate about gambling is that it has replaced the common parlance of sports talk with all men. When you talk sports, with my generation of men and younger, it's very little to do whether a team is good, it's about how much you've bet on the games. If you go to a bar, you can go to any sports bar, in the middle of football season, sit next to a guy, almost certainly, if he's there by himself, he's got money riding on the game. And probably on both sides of the ball, in terms of this down, I was at a football game, where I saw a man severely intoxicated, in front of me, tell his son to place $100 that the Eagles were going to score on this specific down, he said, on this drive. So his son goes on, they immediately, they don't score.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  I saw him lose that 100, right in front of me. Okay, it's 100 bucks, he can afford the seats, probably fine. But multiply this at scale. And that ultimately is the rush that people are chasing, is all being channeled by our government, by our capitalist oligarchic elites, into sinful activity.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  So you said a minute ago, that there are people, libertarians, you described them, who argue that it's, it happens anyway. So is there any acknowledgement that if you make something easier, you'll get more of it?

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  They say that you should tax and regulate it, um, and that, that eventually, that it will normalize over time. There's no evidence.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  What does that mean, normalize?

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  That, oh, people will, right now, we're just in the Wild West days of gambling, and we'll figure out the regulations, and we'll figure out more safeguards, and in the long run, we'll be better off, because there's no more illegal gambling, even though there is still a lot of illegal gambling, um, because they can sometimes offer different things or customer service, you know, that the illegal gambling companies do. They said the same thing with marijuana, nope, uh, illegal marijuana market is still booming, because they sell it under the price of tax, uh, and none of the tax revenue has even come close to making up the social costs that have been inflicted on all of us for having a dumber population.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  When did more tax revenue become the goal?

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Right, exactly, I mean, this is what happens whenever.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Who cares about your tax revenue?

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  And even tax revenue bastardizes it, because they look at it, I mean, I, I said it earlier, we, secularized America, has decided that freedom means freedom to sin. For the vast majority of human history, specifically under Abrahamic fates, freedom was freedom from sin. And so, the changing of freedom from sin, freedom is freedom from sin, from freedom is freedom to sin, was one of the great social changes and understandings in modern American history. And that is what is now being reflected in all of our values.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  But indebted people, indebted people, addicted people, compulsive people are not free, they're enslaved.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Right, you and I understand that.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Well, that just seems so obvious. Do you know any? I know a lot of them, they're all enslaved.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  I know a lot of them too, they are literally enslaved, uh, to the credit card companies, to the banks, to the gambling companies, which help them go bust, to the mortgage lender, to their job, to their boss, to the system, which they work in, but that's because you and I have empathy for them. Whereas the libertarian argument, the non-personal argument, would be, they're an idiot, a man is free to do with his money, a fool, you know, a fool and his money are gonna part anyway, so we might as well allow that transaction to take place out in the open.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And profit from it.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  And profit from it.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Do young people understand that they are being farmed for resources?

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  People are, people see it, but they don't have the language. That's one of the reasons I'm really happy that we're doing this. So there was a recent Gen Z poll that came out that a lot of people are discussing. The lowest level of institutional trust of any generation in modern American history usually doesn't set things up for a productive century. But I think the reason that they feel that way is that they are at the mercy of the student loan companies, the banks. They were locked down during COVID. They're bombarded with predatory scam advertising with AI promises, which they may take their job. So of course that they're deeply untrusting of institute of a government where a decent portion of young men vote for Donald Trump.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  I would say, having met most of them, a lot anti-war was one of the major reasons why they did so. And then they launched one of the most extraordinary, you know, dastardly acts in modern history.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Sneak attack.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Iran undercover of negotiations twice, actually, that we did that, our own version of Pearl Harbor, which we all understood was the ultimate betrayal. Uh, and so that's who we are now. And so for them, I think they can sense this level. And there is polling actually coming out where you can see that the actual support for legalized sports betting is beginning to dip. Right along with marijuana is that now that we've run the experiment, people are getting to come down. But what I'm saying, I want to acknowledge at the top, it is not popular. And we have to look for past social revolutions to see where the change come came from. It's actually from women. So the reason why prohibition happened was because women had got the right to vote.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  And they were living in a nation where people were drinking like a liter of whiskey a day. And these women were getting, you know, absolutely beaten up almost every single night or left destitute with their children in the poor houses. Left at the mercy of literal charity organizations. Literally the first thing they did when they got the right to vote was to outlaw alcohol and the temperance movement. Temperance movement, again, I know it's controversial. I think one of the most righteous movements in American history.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  I think it was the same year, Universal Suffrage and the Volstead Act, both 1919.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Both 1919. Uh, great show, Boardwalk Empire actually shows that exact meeting. Yeah. It shows the politician of Steve Buscemi meeting with the Women's Temperance League, despite the fact that he is himself involved in bootlegging. But it made the point that many of these women, the first thing that they did with the vote was to support politicians who supported prohibition. And the reason why is very similar to gambling and marijuana and to pornography is they were the primary victims. As they were being left with a population who was deracinated, who was drunk, who was beating them, very much like the domestic violence. Uh, case that I just pointed out, I mean, imagine being in a position where you're so such a slave to your addiction.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  That you're losing your home and you're selling your children's Christmas gifts, which has happened in that case. Another more recent case in Philadelphia, very similar circumstances. I have somewhat of a connection to this one where what happened is, is he, I believe he took two mortgages out on his home, gambled away tens of millions of dollars. Uh, ended up, it appears was, what happened is, is that he was gambling with FanDuel. FanDuel actually got him a personalized video from Bryce Harper, who is a player for the Philadelphia Phillies. And in that video, Bryce, in a video with the FanDuel logo on it, tells him, hey, man, I just wanted to reach out and say, happy Thanksgiving.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Your host from FanDuel just wanted me to make this video for you. It turns out she went on Cameo and purchased that video for her, uh, for her client here over at FanDuel. He denies that he knew that it was for gambling purposes. And even though he says your host from FanDuel is involved, he makes hundreds of millions of dollars, by the way, and is a Mormon, uh, actually. Uh, and so it's one of those where, look, I mean, maybe I believe him that he didn't know that it was involved, even though it said the word FanDuel. Uh, in the script that he was read and he did read on camera. Nobody just blink, nobody who's worth hundreds of millions just says, I'm not going to do this one. I'm not going to do this video, but those are the lengths to which they'll keep you gambling.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  And by the way, he lost everything. He lost his house, second mortgage, et cetera, tens of millions of dollars. I think he gambled 18 million dollars.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Are any politicians against this?

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Uh, well, Mike DeWine, I'll give him credit. He said, I legalized it and it was a mistake. And he published some of the, he published some of the, uh, of the statistics. That's pretty much it. I can't think of a single nationwide politician, and it's because of the money. I mean, even in our industry, Tucker, what I'm saying is so rare. Most of my colleagues are taking money from Calci or for polymarket.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Actually?

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. A lot of them are taking money or have been sponsored by polymarket, or they don't want to close off the potential revenue source. My friends in the sports podcasting industry, I can think of one guy I know who doesn't take money from the gambling companies. They're real flooding them with tens of, it's tens of millions of dollars. It's, they, they find themselves in a position, it's the only financially viable way for them to do what they want to do. I get it, right? I blame the politicians. I, I wish it wasn't this way, but they are showering them with so much cash. That it's only people who are willing to say, stand up and say, I won't take your blood money. Who are the people who will come out and speak about that?

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this show and talk about, talk about it in these stark terms is what, at the very least, if we're to be confronted with the secular government. Who will do nothing to protect our children, our young men and the women that can we at least start a cultural revolution of shame? There should be shame for smoking marijuana every single day, for gambling away your children's inheritance. I feel sorry for that person in terms of him being a gambling addict. I want, I would actually support funding recovery programs and all of that, but I don't want him to get to that place in the first place. And if you see a person who's gambling, who you're friends with, there should be, we should have the social spaces say, hey, man, that's bad. You shouldn't do that. You're throwing your family's money.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Profiting from it.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  No, that's, yeah, they're there.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what blows my mind. It's not, you know, not that people destroy themselves.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  It's that other people get rich from their destruction and those people still have their names on the buildings at Harvard? I don't understand that.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Harvard, they become multi, I told you.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  You become president, you make a billion dollars in office? How can you make money in office?

• 1:16:08Speaker 03

  Take trades, uh, every, I mean, tens of thousands of trades that Trump has placed while he was in office. His, you know, obviously net worth skyrocketed, the Trump coin, um, I mean, my God, the details on that are shocking, genuinely. In terms of some of the business associates.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Good deal for the investors?

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Right. For the ordinary people who are his most devoted fans who put their hard earned money. That's what gets me is that money is not everything and the chasing of it after a certain point, in my opinion, makes you evil.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I completely agree.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  And so when I see these hard earned people, and I've met some of them who are either his biggest fans or, you know, and, and they put their trust in the name of Trump. And this doesn't just apply to Trump, but it's, it's really just generally when they put their hard earned dollars into this and then they end up losing their savings. That's just the height of scumbag behavior. And that's not just Donald Trump. That applies to podcasters and other people in tech who promote SPACs and other sketchy financial instruments. And that tells their audience to invest and they betray the trust of those people by stealing your money.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  In their defense, it is a minefield because I have almost taken money from all kinds of bad people. And I just didn't, you know, gold companies, prediction markets, crypto scams, like I.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  I get it.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  I'm not an, I would never took money from any of them, but I came pretty close a couple of times. Like, hey, this seems like a good deal.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. You have to do your research and that's where the public, the lack of public reporting, that's what is, I think, the worst part is. And look, I'll say there are a few places which still do good journalism. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times have done great deep dives into prediction markets. They have more bulletproof business models because finance relies on them. So they're able to charge higher subscription fees. A lot of the cable companies are in bed with the gamble, with the prediction market companies. They're using their odds. I'll have many, a lot of election coverage come midterm season. You will see Calci and polymarket odds featured very prominently in the coverage. It's going to be embedded in our daily life. And what's so crazy is this wasn't even the norm 10 years ago. It only became legal 2019, really 2018, 2019 onward.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  And now we're living in this already, in my opinion, dystopian society where gambling eclipses all other revenue. I cannot even imagine what 10 years from now is going to look like. We're going to, we're going to look like the late, you know, 1900s in the same way of temperance. We'll have poppers, we'll have poor houses, we will have literal shelters to, for people, for the women or children of gambling addicts. So if the community doesn't step up, that's the future we create. Gambling Anonymous has reported an absolute skyrocket in the number of calls. Congress won't even pass a piece of legislation for a national exclusion. Where if you put yourself on the exclusion list in one state, then it applies to states elsewhere.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  So if you live on the border of a state, even though you've excluded yourself from one place, you get the itch, you could drive across the state lines. Calci only recently introduced self-exclusion, but there are workarounds that are around that. There is no regulatory body looking out for the consumer for trying to quell gambling.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  Gambling gun safe, where you just like, keep it out of your own hands or something?

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  Go into the sports bet and say, I want to self exclude. Don't allow me to bet. Uh, and I think there's actually a way to reverse that sometime in the future, but at the very least, on that day, they won't allow you. Any casino in America will do the same thing. If you tell the casino, if you tell MGM, I don't want to be allowed on any of your properties. They will exclude you and they won't take your action. But obviously there's still workarounds, you can go to other properties, et cetera. But Congress is, Congress, the government, they're happy to work on behalf of the prediction market companies. Nobody looks out for the consumer for trying to at least marginally protect gambling, uh, potential gambling addicts, which we all know will massively increase as a result of this epidemic, which is now sweeping the nation. I think this is opioids. It might be worse, honestly.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  Because opioids at least takes you down very, very quickly. The insidiousness of this, it's only, it's compounding on, on every day. But already in the data, we know tens of thousands more people will likely commit suicide as a result of this epidemic. Tens of millions will have lost money or hundreds of millions will have lost money. Tens of millions, potentially millions will go broke, completely broke or on the verge of bankruptcy. And it's all voluntary on behalf of the people who run our country.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  So obviously there's going to be a revolution of some kind. I hope it's peaceful. What's it gonna look like politically as a result of this and all the trends you described?

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the lack of institutional trust is very similar to what we saw. I, I hope it's peaceful too.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  I'm hoping we look to our, our, our cousins in the United Kingdom for an aristocratic elite. I'm not talking about in the current moment, at their time of mass social change where they voluntarily, yes, kicking and screaming, ended up giving up power, giving more of the vote to the people to avoid violent revolution. They had an aristocracy and a bourgeoisie which fundamentally understood that they had to address the actual, the, the concerns of the people and of the driving social change, that they would have to voluntarily give up some of their power, some of their wealth, their hold over the establishment in order to keep what they really wanted to protect, which was their monarchy and their social status. And it worked to their credit. Well, we'll look across the continent to all of the other monarchies, uh, which didn't survive

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  the First World War and many of the other revolutions which ended up sweeping them. I hate to, I don't think we're there, but we're in, if we, if we were to look at what I laid out, mass institutional, mass institutional distrust, a period now of multiple presidents, Trump being some of the, one of the most egregious, but of multiple presidents saying one thing and doing the opposite whenever they come into office, "I'm going to end the war." How many times have I heard that one? Only to end up right now where we are. Now you have Trump, who is effectively sacrificing the might and the prestige of the American empire for his foolhardy decision to go and to attack Iran. I heard about economic D-Day today. Uh, I could only wish that it had the level of seriousness and intellect

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  behind the original planning of D-Day, who were real men. You could say a lot about them, but they were real men. They thought about things. They didn't just throw out terms like economic D-Day and the most sophisticated financial campaign are sanctions of all time. When, are we really gonna do secondary sanctions on China? And blow up our relationship with the largest, second largest economy on earth? Xi Jinping is flying to our country? I don't think so. And if we do, it would be even more extremely foolhardy. It's foolhardy in both cases. You have sanctioned proved economies, but, so you have this disastrous war, very much like the First World War, which can ignite more social change and revolution. We're obviously not there yet. Tens of millions of people are not dying. But every American who is consuming anything remotely about this war is watching, again,

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  the destruction of our bases, of the inability to feed, clothe and keep sane the people on the USS Abraham Lincoln, where stories have to come out of them literally jumping off the ship from their distraught relatives for us to even actually do anything about it. We're watching our ships have to be refu- or resupplied from Diego Garcia, except for the region, because our bases were destroyed. I didn't even think that could happen. I, I, I'm one of the ultimate pessimists about the American empire before going into this war. If you had told me Iran's ballistic missiles and drones will kill, does, uh, at 18, I believe, Americans injure, I believe the latest number is over 700, that we will be driven like dogs

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  from the region, have to resupply our carriers from 2,400 kilometers away, I wouldn't, I would not have believed you. If you told me that we were gonna expend the vast majority of our THAAD interceptors and our Patriot missiles, which are the technologically advanced spear of the American defense systems, and that we were to do it all on behalf of Israel while leading real countries like South Korea and Japan in the lurch, I would not have believed that. And yet we did all of that. We did it only in a span of six months, so congratulations to Donald Trump. But more so, you asked me about revolution. So I watched that happen. I watched the expenditure of all this. What is the Trump administration's response? Double down. Economic D-Day, 1.5 trillion for the military.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  The military technology, the same technology, which we just delivered massive strategic loss over the Strait of Hormuz. So you see that, that there's no learning in the state. You have multiple instances of politicians who say, "I'm gonna do one thing and the other." Everything in America, like you just said, is a scam. Everything is about extracting more value from you, the consumer, than creating value for your daily life.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  This is what backstops, I think, a lot of the data center backlash. You talked about Flock. There was a great episode that you guys did. But that all, what it comes down to is, we can enrich you. We can't make you richer, so we have to oppress you. And we also have to take your money and spend it on even more foolish adventure. All of the ingredients are there, if you wanna look for everything ranging from a minor revolution to a major revolution. Uh, you know, you and I know, many people think, despite what the Soviets said, a working class revolution. It was a bourgeoisie revolution.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Always, always.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  I mean, it always is. Take a look at our, our bourgeoisie.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Elites versus elites, yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Right. Elites, elites versus elites is the classic story of every revolution. Our current elite is either literally morally bankrupt, trying to extract people through gambling and marijuana pornography, everything I just discussed here. Or they are people who have been failed by the institutional promises of the 2000s, saddled with student debt, put into a situation where they can't get married and have a child, can't buy a house, have no upward mobility, total lack of distrust and failure by the system, which was never necessarily going to deliver for the bottom quintile, but was at the very least supposed to make life decent or better for the 50th to the 90th percentile.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  Right now in the US, if you're not between the fif- if you're in the 50th to 75th, your quality of life has gone down as, as a, as a result, not just of Donald Trump's war, not just because of gambling, but because of all of the institutional mess which are used to oppress you. And so that is the group I pay the most attention to. And that group is angrier than they've ever been, dramatically liberal. They're behind a lot of these DSA wins that have been sweeping the nation in terms of the Democratic Party. And you can see, highly educated people who are downwardly mobile are the two ingredients, along with mass institutional distrust.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  Are the exact ingr- oh, and a unpopular foreign war, which is bankrupting the empire. World War I? Does anybody wanna pick up a history book? And I hope it doesn't get there. I, I desperately do.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  No, but unemployed nonprofit executives are the most dangerous people. Underemployed lawyers, people like that, white college educated people whose dreams have been shattered. Man, those are scary people.

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, you know, I don't even-

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  They're smart, motivated, angry, resentful, they've been betrayed.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes. I mean, that, those are the backbone of the Russian Revolution, the backbone of the German Revolution. I mean, and that's exactly what led to the outcomes in those two countries, or to the destruction or rewriting of the general rules of society. It was recently, the French Revolution. I just read a fascinating book, uh, several series of books there on the French Revolution. And the extent to which, there's something inspiring and terrifying, and this is kind of what I think we're gonna begin to see in the United States, is at the beginning of the French Revolution, there was just a sense of, "Why should we do it that way at all? The old way. Let's just do something brand new, inspiring." And you can actually see how easily that message could catch on in a society like ours. But what they didn't realize is that by doing the brand new of opening Pandora's box,

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  is it would lead to the terrors, to Napoleon, to the destruction, to the beheadings of nuns, of the persecution of every institution in all of your society. That's what it leads to. And it has happened now so many times over the course of the last several hundred years, that I could see a very similar situation happening.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  I could too. And it's interesting, we spend so much time thinking about, you know, Stalin's crimes, Hitler's crimes, Robespierre's crimes, and so little time thinking about the predicate. Like, how'd they get there? How did a society like, you know, 18th century France, was a pretty sophisticated, pretty rich country with all the-

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  A liberal society. That's the thing that strikes you. This was not an oppressive regime. And not to cape for the, you know, French monarchy, but it, it was not one of the most, you know, authoritarian and oppressive societies. And in fact, one of the critiques that later on, many of the other monarchies of Europe took away was, "We need to be much more oppressive, because the libertine French allowed this modicum of speech, of pamphleteers, of openness in their society, and look what it got, Louis XVI."

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  No, it's totally, it's totally right. Nicholas II was not- You know, he was like pretty liberal, pro-Western.

• 1:29:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Spoke French at home guy.

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And I mean, he was a fool in.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. But it does, it seems like those are the periods worth studying, the pre-revolutionary periods.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  I totally agree.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  And you can't find a good book on Weimar. I've never been able to find a single.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  I heard there's a good one coming out.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  But there should be a hundred of them.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  There should be 10,000.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Okay, we spend your entire childhood learning about the Nazis. It's the only thing that ever happened in history, along with the civil rights movement. Okay, I'm totally anti-Nazi. I get it. How'd they get the Nazis in an election? No one wants to talk about that. What is the answer? I'm not even sure I understand the answer.

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  And then they reduce it down to just the depression, which is ridiculous.

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. Of course.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, there's all these social forces, both from, and actually Weimar, very similar to what I talked about, the French Revolution idea of we could try anything. So you saw that the sexual absolute insanity, very similar to how things were happening in France, in pre-revolutionary France, the same. It's fascinating how you could always see the same types of things that are happening, similar in some ways to a lot of the gender dynamics currently here in the United States. And I don't want to take it too far. We don't have brown shirts currently on our streets. We're not, not in a great depression. You've mentioned the Russian Revolution. So my historical parallel would be, okay, it's not 1917. What if it's 1904? What if it's the Russo-Japanese War?

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  What if it is the war that previously broke institutional trust and showed the brittleness and created the crackdown?

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  It's smart.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  And then 10 years later, it explodes.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  They were so shocked to lose that war.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  They were stunned. The world was stunned by that. And that, that is our equivalent, I think, of what we have watched here. People try to extrapolate too much of the most extreme, Suez or that. But you have to pick some of these side wars, which at the time were monumental in their understanding of geopolitics.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  It's totally right. Um, so what happens in the midterms more imminently?

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Right. Well, if we were to believe the polls, I, I actually, let's take the polls aside. Let's just look at structure. The incumbent president almost always loses ground in the midterm elections. America is a nation of the median voter who loves a Republican president and a Democratic Senate for some reason, that's, or vice versa. This is baked into our political consciousness. So normally you would always expect to see some sort of a backlash against the Trump administration as they actually enact what they wanted to. Similar happened in 2018. Okay, so that's normal times. We are not living in normal times. We're living in times of $4 gasoline for the last six months. By the way, nobody's paying attention to diesel. Open call. Everybody, please pay attention.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  $117 a barrel this morning.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  I think it's, it might be more. Well, it might be more on a different marketplace, but it's 5.69 a gallon, national average. It was $3.50 or so just a year ago. So the inflation that's happened in diesel is dramatic compared to what's happened.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Do we really need diesel?

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It turns out that we do. It turns out it literally runs all of our industrial machinery, our grocery prices, everything has diesel price baked into it. So we've had six months of, and I'm sure you know, working people like I do, uh, who run, let's say, work in trucking, and I've spoken with a few. Diesel is destroying. The price is destroying them, or they're having to pass it on. So that's just on the gas front. On inflation generally, we have seen that the Trump administration, specifically foolhardy actions in Iran, have bled into some of the more inflationary data. We have seen mortgage rates, which again are impacted by this foolhardy decision in Iran. I believe they're hovering around 6.7%, something like that for the average American.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  If they were to try and get a normal 30-year fixed rate mortgage, if they were to do so, they would be entering a home, a home market where your, if you were to look at the median wage and what it's required to be able to save for a down payment of 20% to avoid PMI or any of these other things that set people back, you would need to save for literally like a decade just to be able to get just the down payment and the ability to sustain the income on two-parent household. If you were to actually be able to afford it. So extraordinarily expensive housing market, you're met also with, uh, let's see, in terms of the midterms.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  The way that the Trump administration acted even before all of what happened with Iran was in such a manner where they didn't really act as if they needed to convince the public of anything, of anything that they did. They did a decent job enough in the campaign of getting a popular vote of their victory, but they turned around. And to the extent they did anything for their quote voters or their promises, they did it in such a fashion as to ignite major public debate, which is fine in a campaign. But when it comes to policy, if you don't do it exactly correctly, you will get torn apart with the press, which is a lot of what happened. But that was side by side with some of the most corrupt actions that we've ever seen from a White House.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  And we're not just talking about Trump personally enriching himself to the tune of billions, but nobody even knows from his own financial disclosure. We're talking about the basic sale of pardons, right, uh, that have happened, uh, where all of these pardons, the Trump issues to these corrupt Ponzi schemers and others who then go on to victimize other people. All of it basically done for his, either for donor pressure or largely just because he likes feeling powerful by letting people, specifically rich people, uh, off the hook. And then Israel hovers over all of that because a proud nation cannot serve another nation.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  And this is left and right, is that everybody feels this way, and specifically for a decent portion of our population. To watch us go into this war, to deport people for their opinions on Israel, to have the Department of Justice sue campuses and others for their opinions on Israel. I mean, I said this on our show last time, it's, it's even more true today. Everything the Trump administration has done on antisemitism was Ibrahim X. Kendi's dream when it came to anti-racism. The Department of Antisemitism might as well exist for what Ibrahim X. Kendi wanted.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  The entire government.

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  It is our whole government, from our, our military, the infusion now of the NDAA of our Congress. I was amazed recently, Rick Scott, uh, Israel attacked Turkey in Syria, NATO ally, which we're told is the most important thing in the world. Rick Scott backs Israel. I was like, wow. Same people who will tell you about how NATO is a religion to them.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Rick Scott is so disgraceful. He's really disgraceful. One of his constituents was murdered in the occupied territories in the West Bank. By a group of terrorists. Um, and Rick Scott refused to meet with the parents who run an ice cream shop and a smash burger place in Tampa. And he wouldn't meet with them because their son, an American citizen born in the United States, had been murdered by Israelis. And so Rick Scott took the side of the Israelis. How can he serve in the Senate?

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  How can our ambassador, who you interviewed, defend a foreign country over our own? I think.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  So who would vote for that?

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  Who would vote for that? Also, yeah, if I were to ask you, ask me about the midterms.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  I'll tell you that.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  If you ask me about the midterms, Republican vision, what's their vision for the country? What are you going to do about my home price? Nothing. What are you going to do about, uh, what are you going to do about my gas prices? Increase them. Tell me, yeah, short-term pain for long-term gain. They said that six months ago. It's been six months. Uh, what are you, what are you going to do to create a better future for my child? Who's ultimately, that's all I actually care about. I don't even really care about myself anymore. Oh, we're going to create, uh, you know, a den of sin and gambling and marijuana and pornography. It's like, that's the, the types of industries which we're going to elevate. If I voted Republican in the midterm, what are they going to pass?

• 1:37:05Speaker 03

  My healthcare premium went up 30%. Are you going to do anything about that?

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  When did they become liberals? Like everything I dislike about liberals, the, you know, neoconservative foreign policy, the identity politics at home, the promotion of like the destruction of people, drugs, pornography, crime. That's the Republican Party. What? I, I can't, where's the DSA on all this stuff?

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow. That's fascinating. I mean, you know, DSA is going through, they're a fascinating group. So for example, everything you just laid out is probably the position and the same articulation that the DSA co-chairs, the people in New York City who Fox News likes to bring on and to argue with. The candidates themselves are very interesting and you can either say this is assiduous or not, but they are learning. And I do, at the very least, have to admire their ability to shapeshift from where they were not that long ago. Abdul El-Sayed, who's running in Michigan against Mike Rogers, who, as you and I know, probably the most pro-intel neocon. They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States, who by the way, lost already. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that?

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Mike Rogers is really, uh, I would, I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Right. And so that's the candidate, the guy, a literal loser who lost when Donald Trump won the state, just to show you how much of a headwind he had at his back.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  He's basically a tool of Israel and the intel agencies. How would you run someone like that? I don't even, it doesn't even make sense.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  So that makes no sense. Well, El-Sayed, who, look, El-Sayed is a full-blown DSA. He doesn't call himself DSA. He's a full-blown leftist. I've known him for quite a long time. This is somebody.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  You know him personally.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Uh, not well. I've interviewed him many times over the years because of my co-host, Crystal. And so I've watched his ideological evolution, who you could easily call, as AOC said, was quote woke one, right? Woke one, where he said defund the police on a podcast. He said all kinds of silly things about football and mask, standard leftist shibboleths.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hates Mackinac Island. He's for vaccine mandates.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Right. Classic stuff.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  I watch his campaign now. It's America first. The amount of times he says, he doesn't even, when he talks about Israel, he says Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately I want to make sure that you don't pay more for healthcare. I don't want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military. He stands in front of a giant American flag. It's almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those promises.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  Trumpian.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so you see candidates like that, especially him. He will be the most interesting test case come November.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Is he going to win?

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  If I, if I had to bet, uh, which I don't, I would probably bet that he'll win.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  I would think so.

• 1:39:44Speaker 03

  I think so too.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Do you have any idea, not to fix it on poor Mike Rogers, who I know, but I mean, there's no one who should be farther from a position of power than Mike Rogers. How did he get the Republican nomination for Senate?

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  I looked into it. It was relatively uncontested. He had, uh, both, he had the most backing of the Michigan GOP, which is of course very in touch, uh, with their own voters.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Mike Rogers?

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  So they just decided to go with, and again, this is the guy who lost to Slotkin when Donald Trump was able to win the state. And so they can cry about vote rigging and all that as we want. Okay, whatever. But we all know that this is not a strong candidate in a wave year, which just happened. And they decided to nominate him literally yet again, genuinely.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  He was the AIPAC candidate, to be clear, and he's told AIPAC not to advertise in public for him.

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  Right. And do you see, that's where I was saying with El-Sayed, his ability to go up against AIPAC and to win. If you're a DSA person, that's gotta be one of the most inspiring wins of your entire life. That's way bigger than Zohran Mamdani.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  They gotta get rid of the social liberalism. If they get rid of that, because that's where the world is. Most people are not orthodox, free market people. They just want the economy to serve their families.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  I think that's fair. They want to be treated fairly. I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. And they're not for radical social change. They think that there are two genders and each has a distinct role and like it's not good to sexualize children and drugs are bad and kinda want law and order. I mean, these are not crazy right wing goals.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  That's what we would call the socially roughly, speaking of socially conservative view, and that's the majority view around the freaking world.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Everyone feels that way.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  So why can't we have a party that feels that way?

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  I mean, that's where we have to say, we have to just be honest here with the DSA. Like at the very least, they're not willing to have that conversation.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  They're not.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  They are.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Cause it's run by rich girls. Is that why?

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  I mean, part of it is that, but part of it is deeply, look, they are a, they were a small movement with very little backing as of eight years ago, and they are now a major force within the Democratic Party. They're not in the dominant yet because the establishment of the Democratic Party hates them largely over Israel, but over all kinds of other, uh, campaign issues that the healthcare, let's be fair, over one of them. But they are a very, they are the prototype, prototype of the upwardly mobile, white or downwardly mobile, highly educated, largely white, female or male.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  That's what they are.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:11Speaker 03

  And you and I, having spent a lot of time around these people, these people are largely delusional whenever it comes to the actual

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  They're totally delusional.

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

  social views of the vast majority of the public. Their theory of change is that Trump is so bad and has so destroyed the credibility of working class messaging that we will emphasize what we have here in our America first platform, whenever it comes to Israel, healthcare for all, which is their belief. We're gonna not talk about our radical social views, but they still have them. El-Sayed is on tape saying that Medicare for all should pay for gender affirming surgery. Okay. He's on tape for saying that. So I don't wanna sit here and claim he is a conservative or.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Or just like sensible. I mean, I don't know if you have to be, but if you're telling me abortion is awesome, you're a freak.

• 1:42:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  You're a freak if you think it's awesome. Maybe you think it should be legal in some cases, whatever. But if you're celebrating abortion, you're evil. Like can, can we just have like a normal person run for some office at some point?

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  I agree. And then that's why I do wanna be, and, and there are some within the DSA who actually very, very much disagree uh, with some of the tactics of the woke 1.0, like AOC herself. Many of them saw her as a much weaker person. I mean, look, you can see Zohran Mamdani. I have a lot of disagreements with Zohran, especially going in to the campaign, but you can't deny that the guy has kind of embodied their vision. The, the current DSA, at least the people I speak to, Crystal specifically and Ryan, their vision, I know for that, is like the sewer socialist model, which is very much how Zohran is trying to govern this, the city of New York is he does, he uses his extraordinary popularity and charisma.

• 1:43:50Speaker 03

  He focuses heavily on quality of life issues. He does use his political capital on social issues, which he feels are very important to him. Let's say like transgender day of visibility, but he doesn't make it the main component of his overall governance. On law and order, he capitulated completely. He reappointed Jessica Tisch. There has been, at the very least now currently, no actual defunding of the police. He's largely worked, he apologized to NYPD for saying he should defund the police. So he retreated dramatically. He's a pragmatist ultimately, whenever it came to that, at least rhetorically and from what we've seen.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  How's the crime rate in New York?

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  And so, well, actually, I mean, let's be fair. New York has one of the lower actual crime rates in major American cities. If you were to pick one of New York or San Francisco, I'm choosing New York every single day.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  And he's also focused, let's say on new garbage containers in neighborhoods to make sure that there's not trash on the street. He put a video out this morning about, uh, rebuilding the BQE, which is a disaster. You and I have been on, I'll say, you know, again, as a guy who has deep, deep disagreements with a lot of their vision, it's pretty attractive to see somebody who says, I'm going to fix the infrastructure and I actually am going to do it, as opposed to seeing Donald Trump, who has multiple times now run on rebuilding America. And now whenever it does come to rebuilding, his most recent tactic is to go to bat for the data center companies and for AI.

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  More weed, more porn, more gambling?

• 1:45:15Speaker 03

  At a regulatory level, he's done that, but then even to the extent that they're, if you were to look at like, what projects do they support building? Their main saving grace for their presidency has been AI. AI is the only reason we're not in an economic depression. AI capital expenditure, specifically with data center, is the major driving of any GDP growth that we have left. It is the only thing holding up our capital markets whenever it comes to the S and P 500. They need AI to keep working. And so they are going to bat at a regulatory level, at a rhetorical level, to make sure that this industry becomes the multi-trillion dollar promise.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  But why not protect the public from mass surveillance in the process?

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  Why doesn't, how about a bill in Congress that Trump could call for saying, you want your data centers? Okay. But we're not gonna turn this into.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  East Germany.

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was, we are gonna, every data center, I mean, he claims, like he says, right, executive orders. They have to pay for their own power, but it hasn't necessarily, or they have to build their own power whenever they build it. I support that, but that needs to be codified into law. We need to make sure that they are not bribing local officials like that case in Utah with Kevin O'Leary and the data center project that he spearheaded. We need to make sure, I mean, look, many of the water use claims are overblown, but at the very least, they are a somewhat of a concern. And then power, power generation is ultimate. The amount of power, Virginia, where I live, 40% of the power goes to data centers. 40%. It's the largest in the nation. 40% of power generation goes to a data center.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. In Oregon, it's 30%. Uh, and some of these, and it depends on various different states. Virginia is the worst because all the data centers are largely powered for the government, for Amazon, for, we have the best fiber optic cable for, because of the defense contracting industry. But so that's, it's an extreme example, but I'm giving one where you can see that power generation itself is becoming a zero sum game, which is a nightmare, especially when you're competing against one of the fastest growing industries in the world, which is the most power hungry, especially with these hyperscale data centers. If we had abundant, cheap power, none of this would really be as much of a conversation. But it is actually living in a world where the administration is coming to the back of these data center companies.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  And is in many cases is attacking Republican governors who again, in my opinion, are just trying to do some very sensible stuff. Greg Abbott, who, let's not pretend he's doing this out of the goodness of his own heart. He dragged kicking and screaming to the data center.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  He's about to lose that election.

• 1:47:47Speaker 03

  He very well may, but he signed a data center moratorium. And in it, all he says is, look, we're doing a moratorium. We have to figure out rural land use and water noise generation. We need to make sure that you don't get certain tax breaks. We just need to make things, you know, normal so that the, the, when the local community allows the data center to be built, that they reap some of the benefits. And Trump comes out and is like, I think it's a mistake. Right? He said, he said that whenever about Greg Abbott. And he said, he said that about Kathy Hochul. He said, there's all these governors, Josh Shapiro, similarly, also just announced another data center moratorium. The proponents of the data centers will attack you for speaking this way. They'll say, you know better than the water use

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  or any of that not being true. In some of these cases, we've been able to lower property tax. West Virginia, data centers, they're looking at potentially trying to remove their own income tax. And if the, the actual benefits of all of that work out, I would be happy. However, and this is what you're talking about with mass surveillance, with data, with privacy, is that we cannot use just the promise of riches to offset what could potentially be an industry, which by their own admission, they say will be the most radical social change, economic change since the industrial revolution. Some of their own CEOs say that they will make it so that none of us are even necessary in their future world. I know that privately they want that because they want to be gods. They see themselves as gods, literally.

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  Uh, as transhumanists, like their goal is to infuse the human in the machine and that they will personally be part of a rarefied elite, which is transnational above governments and so powerful. The governments are ultimately answerable to them. That's where Flock comes in. You and Glenn did such a great job of talking about that, Matt, about mass surveillance. And it was amazing to me, you know, with Flock, for example, everybody talks about the crime. I totally get it. It is very useful in many cases. But, but the internal mechanisms and controls are not governed by any real federal privacy laws.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  A lot of it is up to these corrupt local sheriffs. We have all these cases of police officers stalking their ex-girlfriends or their wives while using the technology. Only in response to that do they put some safeguards in. They claim they delete some of the new, their new customers' data will be deleted after seven days, not 30 days. It raises the biggest question about warrantless surveillance and privacy in your own nation to be able to move about daily lives. People say solving crimes is, is worth that. I say, let's at least have a real debate and guardrails and not leave it entirely up to the companies themselves.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  Well, they haven't ended crime, that's for sure.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  Of course not. Yeah, right.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I think Harris County, Texas has the highest or one of the highest penetrations of Flock cameras. A lot of crime there in Houston. So like, but I don't see, let me just ask you a question that I actually been talking to someone involved in AI about it this morning. We just interviewed a guy called Nate Sures, who's the, you know, the guy who, uh, you know, was an early developer of AI. He's been sounding the alarm that it's out of control and superintelligence is a threat to humanity. And I, I know you're very familiar with the argument. So he's written a new book on this.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  He doesn't have a counterpart on the other side. That's what strikes me. There's not one person I'm aware of who can explain the tangible benefits to me and other people from AI. All I hear is China, China, China, China. I don't care at all. I'm sick of your lies. China, shut up. But that's not even the beginning of an answer to the question, why should I support this?

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Do you know the answer to that question?

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  I do, actually. I have a lot of friends in tech.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  Good. So what's the upside?

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  They, it's not a vision I necessarily support. The best case scenario for AI, the way that they see it, is it will simply remove friction in our daily lives. It will be equivalent to a credit card. So this is the case. My friend John Coogan from TVPN gave me this analogy. He's much more bullish on AI than I am. The credit card was able to facilitate more transactions and ease of pay, which doesn't just open up the ability for me to pay you, it opens up more financial transactions via the distribution of credit and of mass adoption of this, that more businesses can be built on, right? It is simply a workplace invention which unlocks

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  productivity, which creates and grows the pie of the amount of commerce that can take place in our society. That's how, I would say, the best case scenario for AI. The best case scenario for AI is it makes white collar workers more productive at white collar work. It makes radiologists able to view more scans. They can do 30 instead of used to be able to do 15. And in some cases, that is true. I want to be fair. And it can make research tasks. For example, all the notes that I have in front of me, I had all the data from across all of my different spreadsheets because I researched this topic and I cover it often. I was able to use it to compile all of that into one place. It would have taken me hours.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  This was able to do it in five minutes. So that's very productive, right? In terms of what it's able to gain. That is the best case scenario for AI, is it is a workplace productivity tool. Now, and this is what I would say also to my friends, what else did the credit card industry give us? So yes, it facilitated more transactions, it eased payments between individuals, it made, you know, settlements of transactions between, by Visa, make it so that even disputes and all of that can be resolved. But what do you talk about often with credit card?

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Debt.

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  Seventy something percent of people ended up in debt.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Right. And the idea that the problem with America is we don't have enough commerce.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  We don't have enough creativity. We don't have enough contemplative time. We don't have enough love between people. We don't have enough commerce? Are you joking? We have a lot of commerce.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Right. And so the argument is that technology will remove friction. But what we have seen is technology removes friction in some ways, but introduces it in a variety of others.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  Email. Nobody was able to get in touch. If you, in the 1970s, when you left your job, somebody would have to call you on the phone if something happens after five.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  Now, everybody just sends an email. People are, if you know white collar workers, they're slaves to their phones. And they're slaves to their phones, not just for work purposes, but they also have gambling entertainment and Instagram reels and TikTok. And you end up focusing so much on this device that you forget all of the other things that are around you.

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Like your wife and your children. One of the most liberating things I ever did was get rid of email.

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  10 years ago, no email. And I don't know, I don't think it's made me less productive. I think it's made me more productive.

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  Right. And you're, and you're in the position to do that. But there are a lot of people who are wage slaves.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  No, it's a privilege. I agree. And I'm very aware of that.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  Right. And I always think, I don't, I'm also in a position where I'm my own boss. I can do what I want. That's an incredible feeling. I don't take that for granted for a single day.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  Because I know so many people who are living in effective wage slavery, who are chained to the desk, and they're making good money, but they're spending all that money because they need to be able to buy a home or to support their child or pay for daycare. Their wife has to work even though she doesn't want to work. And that's tragedy, actually, to me. And so what our system has done is when they say productivity, they want to make that person more productive. What I want to do is to give that person more leisure or more ability, to the extent that they're more productive, I want them to be able to use that productivity to make up the time and spend it with their kids. There was a viral, there was a viral interaction, I think it was Sam Altman, who was talking about being

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  able to create custom podcasts that, he said, parents could listen to these custom podcasts in the car with their children, to use ChatGPT, the calendars and other than, and play that podcast. He said, I could imagine some, I might butcher this, but it's like the ability to play that custom ChatGPT podcast while the parent drives their kid to school. And any real parent is like, I don't want to do any of that.

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  Well, imagine a world in which you're getting parenting advice from Sam Altman.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  No, honestly, like a normal society would be like, hey, take a pass on that, Sam Altman.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  When I drive my kid to school, if I, when I drive my kid to school, I want to ask her how her day is.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, go fix my washing machine, son. I don't, what are you weighing in on stuff you don't understand?

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Do not tell me how I should be interacting with my child on the drive.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  But that's what ultimately their vision for society is depersonalized and is entirely sacrificed to the phone, which ultimately is to their profit, is that the more time I spend on ChatGPT, the more ads they can serve me from the free version, the more of my data that they can suck up, the more that they could potentially, there's no restrictions really on any of that data. They can do anything they want. You know how many people have, there have been cases, lawyers have used ChatGPT and they end up saying, that's not privileged. And so they're able to subpoena some of your privileged information. Nobody knew that. Nobody even thought about it whenever they were using it for that purposes. And so the amount of our personal lives that we give over to these things, and then we

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  allow it to make decisions for ourselves. I think one of the real lessons I've learned as an adult is that friction itself is learning and that there is deep joy on the other side of it. But you have, you have to, in this modern world, you have to, you have to intentionally put yourself in this situation because it is too easy to outsource your thinking just to AI. It's too easy to just outsource your entertainment necessarily to gambling what everybody else and all of that are doing. It's, it's, it seems an easy way to get rich, but the system, everything is designed to be extractive from you. And so what do I want from our leaders? I want them to end that. I want them to create a society where,

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  you know, everybody at home is not a slave to their phone or to gambling or to any other extractive means, to be able to spend time with their families, to be able to do it on a modest budget. We're not saying it's for free, but on a modest budget, to be able to take a vacation or two. And then the most important thing, that your child will grow up and have a better life than you do, which has been broken of the social contract since my generation, the millennial generation.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So I just, a couple more very quick questions about politics because you follow it closely. Do you think that there is a sizable number of Trump voters, 2024 Trump voters who would vote for DSA candidates?

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  I've thought about this a lot. We don't have enough evidence yet. Michigan will be the big test. There was a sizable contingent of Trump Mamdani voters. I do know this.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Is that true?

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  We interviewed many of them on our show. We sent our producer out, found many of them. There's, there's a decent overlap, actually, maybe 10, 15% or so of the people who ended up voting for Mamdani or AOC even, who voted for Trump. All of it came down to the anti-war position. I do think specifically on issue contingent things like Israel, the war with Iran, there is a massive swing group, which in our modern politics is everything. The ability to swing even 2% of the electorate is the difference between winning or losing in half of the states that Trump won in 2024. So if you're asking me, is that contingent, the independent contingent available? I would say yes. But I do think that many conservatives

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  harbor a dream, a sad, a dream which is, I wish for too, but which is just not reality, where Fox News hardened boomers, are they going to vote? Let's put DSA out of it. Are they not going to vote? Are they going to turn on Trump? We haven't seen enough evidence of that. We just haven't seen enough evidence in terms of the support for the war with the 65-plus coalition. Self-identified MAGA still seems very appreciative of Trump, like Trump. Now, the argument there would be self-identified MAGA is a much more restricted group than where it used to be before.

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  And I would make that argument because I say that the independent people out of that, but the people who are still in are very much in. Thomas Massey actually said that to me. He said that the reality is, is that the Republican primary voter was still willing to go with Trump on Israel and with, with Trump, with the Adelsons and with Israel on the Iran war, and they were able to vote him out of office. And he lamented that fact, specifically about elderly Republicans. And so I just want to break the two of those.

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  But it's going to change after the midterms, right?

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know. Because Trump is, how will he respond to the midterms? I mean, is it going to be self-reflection? Or is it just?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  By launching a ground war with Iran, probably.

• 2:00:26Speaker 03

  Right. Launching a ground war. He will be the most, and this is part of the foolishness, where, I wonder, like, do they have any self-preservation instincts? You were around for Clinton's 98 onwards.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  I sure was.

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  That's your life, Mr. President. That's what your life is going to be like, under a Democratic House. And a Democratic Senate and a House? Good luck to you, sir. The amount of money, if you're appointees, I hope you all saved a lot of money. Your legal fees are going to be insane. I hope you all signed up for legal insurance. If you served in DOGE or ICE or in the Pentagon or any of these, you will be called before the Congress, you will be inundated by subpoena. There will be independent councils and all kinds of absolute insanity waged against you. And it's your fault for allowing the country to get to a position where something like that could be elevated. That, that will be what his life is going to look like, his last two years in office. If, where things trend, if things are trending in the way I think they're trending.

• 2:01:23Speaker 01

  And you think they'll lose the Senate?

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  It's, it's possible. It's, I'm not 100%. That one, there's still structural advantages for some of the Republicans. It depends on the course of the Iran war. I would say the gas price there probably matters more than anything, but we're close enough where I don't, you know, Iran gets a vote in this war too. It'd be very hard to go from economic D-Day back to $3.50 gasoline. So in the reality of where things seem to be going, I would at least say this, they have a 50% chance, which is 25% higher than it should have been. And so if they have a 50% chance, maybe even a little bit more of that, to be able to take the Senate, we could even see 08 style of a takeover. I could see that. I mean, in my bell curve of possibilities, if things go dramatically in one vision, you can see Texas going Democratic.

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:10Speaker 03

  Especially with, yeah, especially with, you've got Abbott and Paxton and there's enough drama there. You could see Alaska. There's actually some questions that are up there. You could see, I mean, I saw a crazy poll out of Kansas. Who knows if it's true? Could have just been leaked Democratic opposition. But as you remember from 2008, you can have Democratic senators in all kinds of places, which you never would think even possible. And maybe, you know, we're still too partisan of a country, but people are very upset. There's a combination of people being very upset, and then a combination of people being very demoralized. And then even the hardcore ones, why do they come out to vote? Because Trump is not on the ballot. And that's a perfect storm for those

• 2:02:54Speaker 03

  three things to come together for a potential situation like the one I just laid out.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  It sounds right to me.

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  I'll check Polly Market for the odds. Tucker, thank you. That was so smart.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  Thank you, Tucker.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  Needed. I appreciate it.