#2234 - Marc Andreessen

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Hello.

Good to see you.

Thanks for having me back.

My pleasure.

Good to see you.

Why the world's still functional.

It's amazing.

Yeah, amazing.

We wanted to talk, you wanted to talk about the post-election sort of a wrap-up.

Yeah.

Sort of where we stand.

Are you happy?

Very happy.

It was a weird one.

Morning in America.

That was one of the first times ever I felt hopeful after an election.

Like you should have seen The Green Room at the Comedy Club.

Everybody was like, yes.

Yes.

Woo.

So my theory is the timeline – like in a science fiction movie, the timeline has split twice in the last nine months. What was the first split? That was when Trump got shot.
And there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions. Right.
If he got hit. Yeah.
And we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen. Right.
In that moment. Exactly.
And it could have gone, you know, horrifically badly for the entire world after that. So that was timeline split number one.
So that other timeline is out there somewhere. Yeah.
And I don't want to visit it. Boy, imagine being stuck there.
What kind of horrible karma. No.
I mean, that's a totalitarian dystopian nightmare. That's the bad place.
Yeah. And then timeline split again on election day.
I know you fancy a good conspiracy theory. Yes.
And that gentleman being able to pull off what he did and, you know, the way it happened, the way it all went down is it's a Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Clearly.
Yeah. The shooter.
Yeah. That we still don't know anything.
There's no call for disclosure. There's no call for a press conference.
There's no toxicology report. The toxicology report had to have been done.
Wouldn't you want to know like what kind of stuff this kid is on that made him want to do that or if anything? Yeah. So my theory is it's almost as if people want us to think it's a conspiracy.
Like it's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated. Like it's just – it's so strange.
This is like the rapid cremation. Like the whole thing was just completely bizarre.
And then you're exactly right. Like no hearings, no nothing.
Now, having said that, I expect that this will change, right? Do you think they're going to do a dive into what happened? I mean I would. I don't know if they will.
But I certainly would if I was in a position to do that. I wonder what they can actually find.
I mean, I don't know if they wanted it to be a conspiracy that people talked about or if that's simply the best way to pull it off. Yeah.
Or it's just, as we saw, I think, in the hearing afterwards, maybe just a systemic collapse of competence. There's also a confidence in the fact that the news timeline today is so rapid.
When things are relevant and people are paying attention to them, you have a couple of days, even with an assassination attempt on a former president, where people were murdered. And it's in and out.
Yeah, that's right. I think it's exactly.
I think the news cycle now is like a two- to three-day social media firestorm, and we just cycle from one to the next. Yeah.
And we have the memory of goldfish and, right, things that would have been erodefining just come and go with astonishing speed and shock. By the way, I should say I don't think there was – I doubt there was a conspiracy.
I think anything is possible. I think it's just – we have a confidence collapse.
And I think we saw that on display when the director at the time testified. Well, there's all the elements that it could have been a conspiracy.
It could have. But this is kind of the thing, which is just like it also could have been systemic competence collapse.
And then it's like, OK, would it be better off for the institute if it looks like a conspiracy? Right. You know, which world? OK, two timelines.
Which world would you rather live in? The one with the conspiracies or the one with just like incompetence everywhere? Well, I think you have both simultaneously. I don't think it's binary.
I think there's incompetence everywhere and conspiracies are legitimate. They're real.
And that one seems like conspiracy. The fact that his house was professionally scrubbed, there's no social media record of this kid online, there's no nothing.
He's the only kid of his generation who's that fired up about politics to have no online footprint like it just doesn't make any sense he's a registered Republican like the whole thing is like yeah so weird and he was like a bad shooter and then he became a great shooter and well he definitely trained yeah right like you could train someone to become a good shooter like this is all you have to do but that's don't move and do that right get all your mechanics in place understand technique technique and positioning, breathing. It's not like the most complicated thing from a prone position.
But the fact that he chose to use iron sights I thought was weird too. There's a lot of weirdness to it.
You know, from 140 yards with a scope, that is an easy shot. Well, then he could just like wander up.
That's the different timeline. The different timeline is he has a scope and that's it.
Okay. All right.
Right. That would have, and Trump's dead.
Yep. And then boy, boy, do we live in a crazy world then? Yeah.
Completely bizarre. I mean, what does the streets look like right now? Yeah.
What kind of like protests and riots and you think January 6th was nice. If they had killed Trump, that would be January 6th on steroids everywhere.
Yeah. That's right.
And we would experience it. I mean, you know, I don't know.
When I was a kid, my high school history teacher got us a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film. Really? What a gangster high school history teacher.
He was actually pretty focused on that. He really loved the Kennedy assassination.
So we spent a lot of time on that. And, you know, you kind of watch it frame by frame and you can kind kind of see what's happening with this lots of questions.
But like when things like that happen, you know, today, it's going to be in high definition, 4k ultra surrounds on forever. Yeah, right.
Playing out in real time forever. And so like, I very much don't want to live in the world where those things happen.
Well, we are very fortunate. I mean, I, like I said, after the election, I was like, wow, voting works.
Yes. How about that? Voting works.
That's nice. They don't have the system completely rigged.
But they kind of tried to rig it at least with the media. Where the real rigging in the 2020 elections – I mean, you can cast all your conspiracies upon it in terms of like mail-in ballots and all this jazz, but the real rigging was the collusion between social media companies and the government to suppress information that would have altered the effect of the election.
That's legitimate. Oh, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, that was like direct interference and it was aided and abetted by a lot of former intelligence officials and by the current administration. Tons of pressure on censorship coming from the current administration and all their kind of arms of the censorship apparatus.
You have your hands in the tech community. You have your fingers in all that jazz.
What was the general attitude about all that stuff when it was revealed? How did people, how did your peers respond to that? I think anybody in social media, the internet companies knew it. So it was pretty widely understood.
I mean, look, there's nothing that happened at Twitter and the Twitter files that wasn't happening all the other companies, right? So it's a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same.
And of course, we should get the YouTube files, right? And now we probably will now with, you know, this new administration is probably going to carve all this stuff open. But yeah, no, look, it was a pattern.
And then look, the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls. But the government, like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal.
Like I think it's actually subject to criminal charges. Like I think there are people with criminal liability who are involved in this.
So there was that. There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.
And then there was a lot of funding of outside third party groups that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship. Yeah.
And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door, you know, to us that, you know, was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the U.S. government and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor.
And it was very effective at doing so. Does it smell like sulfur when you walk those halls? It is very dark and grim.
This whole thing is very bad. Stanford? Oh, yeah.
Stanford, by the way, another unit like that at Harvard. A bunch of universities got pulled into this.
A lot of NGOs and nonprofits got pulled into this. And so the Twitter file showed us kind of the basic roadmap.
And then there's this thing called the Weaponization Committee that Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this. But I would imagine the new Trump administration is going to come in and carve all that wide open.
And I know that there are people being appointed to senior positions who are very... This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog.
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Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Roggan again that's ziprecruiter.com slash rogan zip intro post jobs today talk to qualified candidates tomorrow determined to do that one of the things that i found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the democrats had spent on the election and how much money was spent on activist groups. It's like more than $100 million, right?

Yeah.

There's extensive government funding of politically oriented NGOs.

Yeah.

NGO is one of those great terms, like non-governmental organization.

All right.

Like what the hell is that?

What is that?

Tell me.

I don't know.

Well, it's sort of a charity.

Sort of.

Sort of.

But most of the time, it's a political entity. It's an entity with a political agenda.
But then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases, including the NGOs and the censorship complex, like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct state department grants, right? Direct money. And then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government.
Well, that's not an NGO. Right a geo right right and then you've got a conspiracy you know like censorship then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund where what look like private organizations that aren't and then what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do like what like like Like censorship.
Oh, okay. Like violation of First Amendment rights.
So what they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens.
And so what they do is if you want to censor American citizens in the government, if you're smart, you don't do that. What you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.
Boy. Right.
And that's what's been happening, right? That's like hiring a hitman. Like it's not okay to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone and then you're clean.
Yeah. And if you want to solve a murder, it's not enough to find out who the hitman was.
You have to find out who paid the hitman, right? Right. Of course.
And so a lot of this traces into the White House. The best defense the companies have is that a lot of this happened under coercion, right? Because when the government puts pressure on you, like it might be a phone call, it might be a letter, it might be the threat of an investigation, it might be a subpoena, it could take many forms.
But when the government does that, it carries, you know, that's a very powerful message. It's like a message from a mob boss, right? It's like, don't you want to do me a favor? It's like, you know, yes, Mr.
Gambino, I do, right? Like, I like my corner store. I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight, right? And so there's this overwhelming hammerblower pressure that comes in.
And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening. And so you come under incredible pressure.
And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activists, universities, and companies was corrupted. And then on top of that, people in the companies in a lot of cases made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret.
What was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election, and I didn't understand like what purpose that would serve. Like what function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you, supposedly? Like, are you bribing them to support you? Are they, what are they, are they, are you paying them to go on talk shows and consistently repeat the government's message, the current administration's message? Like what, what would be the function of that? So I think in some cases, it's just pay to play, right? So for example, we know that Kamala's campaign paid certain on-air personalities, you know, and then there were, you know, which it's your point.
People are very supportive of Kamala, who then gave her, you know, interviews that went really well. And so I think in some cases, you just have straight pay to play.
That's just how that system works. It's just expected.
And then I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they actually do field activities, right? And so maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's social media influence downstream component or some other kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election. I just didn't think that they – like when – it's still unclear whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her.
Right. Right? Have you? They've mixed it up because there's, like Oprah said, her production company was paid to put on the production, but she was not paid for the interview.
Yeah, whatever. But it was, you know, two and a half million dollars.
Two and a half million dollars. It was initially listed as one and it turned out it was 2.5.
Right. But like if I have a production company and my production company gets paid $2.5 million to endorse Trump.
Right. And then I go, I didn't get any of that money.
Right. People are like, shut the fuck up.
It's your company. What are you talking about? Yeah.
And also, how much does it cost to do an event? Yes. How does it cost $2.5 million to put on an event? Like, are you feeding people gold sandwiches? Like, what are you doing? Like, how is that possible? Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah. And then the fact that it's deliberately obfuscated, of course, is a clue.
I just thought the really bizarre one was the allegations. And I'd say unsubstantiated allegations.
It's been alleged that Beyonce got $10 million and Lizzo got $3 million. Eminem got $1.8 million.
Like, really? Yeah. I think if you just like published all these numbers, these celebrities would all get so mad at each other.
Oh, sure they are. Then you would learn everything.
Eminem got short. Right, he got short.
Lizzo's furious right now, right? Yeah. Lizzo's probably listening to this right now being like, what? Well, I wonder if Lizzo's like, I didn't get shit.
I would say it. But why haven't they said it? Like, Beyonce has been mum about the whole thing.
I think I would probably say. Like, I didn't get any money to do that.
But that was a weird one, too, because a lot of people thought Beyonce was going to do a concert. And she just went out there and talked.
And everybody's like, what the fuck? Because they all came to see a free Beyonce concert. And then she just said, I want to support Kamala Harris.
And everybody's like, good, good. Now, if you like it, then you should have put a ring on it.
Come on. We love your songs.
Yes. That's what we're here for.
Yes. I just didn't think that it was even possible that a, I didn't think a candidate would ever pay for an endorsement.
Yeah. I mean, the fact that it was even alleged.
Yeah. Well, you know, and then there's, of course, there's the even stinkier version, arguably, which is all the social media influencer campaigns now.
There's, you know, tremendous amount of payola. That's for sure.
Right. Because I know people personally who are approached multiple times and offered a substantial amount of money to post things in support of Harris.
Yeah. And like, I'm pro-capitalism and I'm happy for them that they get paid, but like maybe we should know.
Yeah. That seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose.
It should be like, say if I was going to do an ad for, you know, whatever, a certain coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, and I did it on my Instagram, I'd have to say ad. I have to say this is an ad.
It's a paid ad.

I mean, that's part of the thing.

You know?

Unless it's your company.

Like, you're supposed to say, they're paying me to do this. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, look, the good news with these is we learn, each cycle we learn a lot about how politics works.

We learn a lot about how fake it is.

We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time.

I mean, everybody's always, like, freaked out by, like, whatever the new guy does.

But, like, this real scandal in most cases, I think, is just the way the system already works.

It's a sneaky system.

Yeah.

I don't know. we put up with for a very long time.
I mean, everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the new guy does, but like this real scandal in most cases, I think is just the way the system already works. It's a sneaky system.
Yeah. Well, another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it, like what Trump called earned media.
Right. Was much more powerful than anything else.
Yeah. The uncontrolled version of it.
Like one of the things that unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility so much, so much so that like Joy Reid was on TV today talking about saying that Trump was going to shoot protesters and just wild, unsubstantiated, crazy shit. And the more they do stuff like that, the more that they say things like that, the more it diminishes their impact and the more it drives people to independent media sources.
Yeah. I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse that they've been.
They're down to like, they're down to like MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 20, 18 to 49 demo.

That is so wild.

Which is tiny, right? It's so crazy.

It's really tiny.

So I think that's happening.

The Gallup organization has done polls on trust in institutions, including, you know,

media for the last 60 years.

It's been a steady slide down.

And in the last, you know, four years, it's fallen off a cliff.

I think it's real.

Oh, there's another study that came out. The kids are not watching a lot less TV.
Kids are just

giving up on TV. And they're just, you know, they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram

and other things. And so like, I think it's tipping.
A question I've been asking myself

is when will the actual, you know, famously 1960 was the first television election, right? You

know, sort of legend has it because it was the one where the televised debate really mattered.

And if you saw the televised debate, you saw Confident Kennedy and Nervous Nixon. And if you heard it, you experienced something different.
And handsomeness came into effect. And vitality and health and all these things, sort of positive spirit, positive energy.
I'm actually not – this might have been the first internet election or maybe we actually haven't had it yet. I feel like we're really close to the first internet election, but maybe it's not all the way there.
I think this is it. I think this – there's an argument that this is it, right? And that, you know, all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role.
But, like, I think there's a – if you're going to run in 28, like I think there's like a fully internet native way to run these campaigns that might might literally involve zero television advertising. And maybe you don't even need to raise that money.
And maybe to your point, if you have the right message, maybe you just go straight direct. There might be a completely different way to do this.
I think that's the only way now. And I think if you do pay people, it's not going to have the same impact.
I think these Call Her Daddy shows and all these different shows that she went on, I mean, I'm sure they had an impact. But I think that in the future, I'm sure they're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show.
This is one thing that keeps coming up, like we need our own Joe Rogan. Right.
But they had me. Well, number one, they had you.
Number one, they had you. I was on their side.
They had you and they drove you away. It's the number one.
But they also have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. Right, but that doesn't work anymore.
I know. It's like you're using smoke signals and everybody else has a cell phone.
Yeah, that's right. It doesn't work.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
It's a bizarre time. It's really interesting, though.
As you said, we're in a great timeline. And I think it's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty.
And there's so much, right, we're at the verge of AI, you know, open AI. You know, Altman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient, whatever that means.
You know, artificial general intelligence will emerge. And who knows how that affects.
I've said publicly, and I'm kind of half-joking, that we need AI government. It sounds crazy to say, but instead of having this alpha chimpanzee that runs the tribe of humans, how about we have some really logical, fact-based program that makes it really reasonable and equitable in a way that we can all agree to.
Let's govern things in that manner. Right.
So you can actually simulate this today because you can go on these systems, ShedGPT or Claude or these others, and you can ask, you know, how should we handle issue X? How should this be run? Yeah, we've done that. Right.
How should the Department of Energy do whatever, nuclear policy or whatever? And what I find when I do that is I discover two things. Number one, of course, these things have the same problem social media has had, which is they're tremendously politically biased and that's on purpose and they need to fix that.
And that's going to be a big topic in the next several years. But the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political basically bias and censorship, if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue, you get very sophisticated answers.
Yes. Right.
Very logical, very straightforward, and it will explain every aspect of the issue to you and it will take you through all the pros and cons. Yeah.
And, you know. I mean, it might be the way to go.
Yeah. Which is so horrifying for people to think because everyone's worried about the Terminators taking over the world.
And, like, if that's the first step is we let them govern us. Well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this.
There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it as a tool. You start out – at the very least, you start out using it as a tool.
There's nothing to prevent – like, for example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistants that are going to advise them on strategy, tactics. Yes.
Right, how to win conflicts. And then it will start to work its way up and then they'll be doing war planning.
And then if you're a general – if you're a sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's going to just mean you perform better. So maybe there's like the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship.
And you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process. And there's also AI-controlled jets, which are far superior.
Mike Baker was telling us about that. They did these simulated dogfights and the AI-controlled jets won 100 percent of the time over humans.
Yeah, and there's a bunch of reasons for that. And part of it is just simply the speed of processing and so forth.
But another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane, you don't have the – they say the spam in the can. You don't have the human body in the plane.
You don't have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster and you can move a lot more quickly.

G-forces. Much higher G-forces.
Yeah. And then there's no option for someone to go crazy.
Yeah. That's also right.
Yes, exactly. There's no human element, which is a real element.
Yeah. No, look, I think it's going to be common to have Mach 5 jet drones within a few years.
and, you know, there'll be a fraction of the size of the current, you know, manned planes,

which means you can have like a lot more of them. And so you kind of want to imagine a thousand of these things coming over the horizon right at you.
And it really changes. It's actually, I think, going to be very interesting.
It really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense. Fundamentally, in the past, the people who won wars were the people who had the most men and the most material.
So you just needed the most soldiers and you needed the most equipment. And in this drone world that we're talking about, it's going to be the people with the most money and the best technology.
So for example, small states, small advanced states like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight. And then kind of large sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose.
And so it's going to be a recalibration. And then it has – the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk, right? So you'll have a lot less death.
The bad news arguably is it will be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk. So there's going to have to be a recalibration of like when you actually like lean into an attack.
I'm sure you're aware of all this UAP disclosure jazz that you see on television. The more I look into it, the more I think at least a percentage of it, a healthy percentage of it is bullshit.
And there's probably some government projects where they've developed some very sophisticated propulsion systems that they've applied to drones and that that's what these people are seeing. And this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces like out in the eastern seaboard.
Like there's areas over Virginia where they continually see them in San Diego. They see them off the coast of San Diego where there's a place where you would test test stuff like that.
Well, so of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified, and the SR-71 was brand new at one point. And so you had these alien...
Do you pay attention to any of that stuff at all? Of course, 100%. Yeah.
And then, by the way, we're not the only ones. And so I, I, you know, my speculation would be that a lot,

some of the military based stuff is, is, you know, the Chinese doing something similar.

Yes. And, you know, we got a glimpse into that with the balloon.

Well, that one was goofy though.

They got shut down, but still the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just like,

you know, loiter above military bases and like, you know, take lots of, you know,

imagery and do whatever scans they do. Yeah.
And like not literally nothing was happening and we

in were able to slip through our early warning systems and just like, you know, loiter above military bases and like, you know, take lots of, you know, imagery and do whatever scans they do.

Yeah. And like not literally nothing was happening.
And we didn't even know they were there most of the time. And so like, you know, I would say that's like a tip of the ice.
It feels

like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if they were doing that, there are probably other

things going on. Well, I've read that someone had commented that similar things had happened

during the Trump administration, but they didn't tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down.

Interesting. For the record I'm pro-shitting them down.

Yeah I think you should probably shoot them down and take pictures of shit.

There's not even people up there. Fucking shoot them down.
What's the problem?

Yes exactly. Do you think there are any of those that are not of this world?

I don't think there's any way to know from the outside. Have you ever like pondered it late at night, sitting on your porch, staring up at the sky? Of course, of course.
Well, it raises, number one is, is there or not? And then if it is, you know, did it recently get here? Have they been here for a long time? You know, did they arrive 5,000 years ago? Tucker thinks they're demons and angels. You know, I mean, demons and angels, are demons and angels real? It's like, you know, literally, you know, probably not, but like certainly they're metaphorically real and are there kind of shades of gray between literal and metaphorical? Well, the actions are certainly demonic and angelic.
Right? Actions of human beings, mass, things that happen in the world are uplifting or horrific. Yeah.
Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're possessed by something.
Right. Like, something is going on.
And like, you know, what's the dividing line between, you know, an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy? Like, you might as well call that a demon. Yeah.
It's fascinating because like when you think about from theological terms, like when you think of it from a religious perspective, you know, people would apply what would a demon do? What would angels do? What is the will of God and what is like the evils of the worst aspects of humanity? you would you know you could apply them to so many things in the world but we're very reluctant

to say that something is demonic like even though it's clearly demonic like clearly in action like this is what a demon would do a demon would possess people to gun down children exactly you know and you know use drones to shoot down a wedding party a demon would that. Exactly.
So a friend of mine is a religious scholar. He teaches at Catholic University and he's a religious history scholar.
And he says that medieval people would have had a – medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons, all kinds of supernatural entities. And it was just assumed to be true.
And in the world we're heading into, that we're arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things. And we're going to struggle.
And we're going to catastrophize. We're going to conclude AI is the end of the world.
The medievals would have said, oh, it's just another spirit. It's just another kind of entity.
Yeah, it's better than humans at some things but so are angels. And so we're going to have to change our mentality.
We're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval. We're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with.
Which also could help us actually deal people. Like maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational.
Well, you express yourself very brilliantly in describing the current state of woke ideology as a religion. Yeah, that's right.
And that the way you described it was brilliant because you were saying that it has all the

elements, excommunication, adherence to a very strict doctrine, all these different

aspects of it, saying things that everyone knows to be illogical and nonsensical, but

you must repeat it.

You know, these things are indicative of people that are in cults or people that are a part

of like a very, like a serious fundamental religion. Yeah.
Well, I mean, of course, the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption. Right.
No concept of forgiveness. Right.
Which is a very evil religion. You do not want that.
Yeah. It's also, well, it's ill-conceived, right? Because it's like immature.
It's an immature religion. Yes.
It's absolutist. It's inherently totalitarian.
It has to be because it can permanently destroy people. Yeah.
Wolk also understands something that the Greeks understood, which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing. And so when the Greeks sentenced somebody like Socrates to death, they gave them the option of just leaving.
But the problem was – Yes. Socrates could have just walked out and left.
No kidding. The reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time, if you were not a citizen of a particular city, you would get killed in the next city.
You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed. And so there was no way to survive without being part of your community.
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And all of a sudden they can't, you know, they can't have, you know, people, you know, they lose friends you know on charges of having done something you know unacceptably horrible then you make them toxic and all of a sudden they can't you know they can't have you sure you know people you know they lose friends they lose family they lose they can't get work you know before you know it like they're you know living you know severely diminished damaged lives some people then go on to kill themselves i don't know if you've been paying this episode is brought to you by call of duty all right call of duty war zone it's happening. The moment we've been waiting for, Verdansk is back on April 3rd.
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Attention at all to Blue Sky. I have.
But I have multiple friends that have accounts on blue sky that uh are very sophisticated trolls and are pushing like the woke agenda to a satirical point like to like parody yeah but like on the edge where you're not quite sure well they'll say enough real things that make sense and talk about their own anxieties and personal issues with stuff and then say fucking ridiculous shit. And it's fascinating.
I bet it works. It does work.
That's what's so terrifying. It's like all the outcasts of Twitter, all the people that were like, I can't take this.
A few of them come back, which is wonderful. I love when they come back.
I'm gone. I'm going to go to Blue Sky.
Fuck you people. Like a bunch of them went to threads for a while like stephen king he went to threads came right back they all come right back they can't the marketplace of ideas like okay you could go to like a fruit stand in the middle of the desert and that's a marketplace or you can go to the farmer's market where everybody's there like where are you gonna go that's right you're gonna go to You're going to go to the farmer's market.
There's tons of people. It's a lot of fun.
Yes. A lot of activity.
Yes. That fruit stand's fucking barren and deserted.
There's no one there. There's very few choices.
Yeah, yeah. It's not fun.
And it's win-win to have them back on Twitter because it's good for them because they want to proselytize. And so they need an audience.
So they win. And then we win because it's really, really fun to dunk on them.
But it's also weird for them to not want any pushback at all. Like, isn't the whole thing supposed to be about an exchange of ideas? Like, if you have a controversial idea and someone disagrees with it, don't you want to hear that position? I know I do.
I want to hear it. Even if I vehemently disagree with it, I want to hear it.
I want to know where how do you how's your brain work?

How are you coming to these conclusions? What makes you think this way? Who are you? What do you like? I want to go on Instagram. I want to look at your pictures.
I want to see what you're up to. What are you doing? You know, yeah, we do your free time, you know, what are you complaining about? Yeah, yeah, I want it's like it's a fascinating education on human psychology and to watch people express themselves publicly and then

also be attacked publicly by strangers, which never happens in the real world. Like at scale, the way it happens on social media.
And I think it's an amazing time for people to examine ideas if you can handle it. Yeah.
My favorite term is marketplace of idea. Yeah.
You could have a marketplace of ideas. It's just going to be one idea.
So blue sky is a marketplace of ideas. Sure.
Yeah. X is the marketplace of ideas.
That final S makes a lot of difference. Yeah.
Right. But the thing about X is it really is diverse.
There's I follow tons of like kooky leftist progressive nutbags that have bizarre takes on everything. And they were 100% convinced that Kamala Harris is going to sweep all the swing states, including Iowa.
They were all in. And I was like, this is wild.
Is that going to happen? Are they right? This is crazy. But they were 100% convinced.
And it's fascinating to see all these different kinds of people, to see the Charlie Kirks and, you know, the full-on left-wing kooks and see them all together. So you need that.
Yeah. Well, look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition, right? So anytime anybody has a new idea, it's a threat to the existing power structure.
So all new ideas start as heresies. And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up with complete stagnation.
If you have stagnation, you're going to go straight into decline. Yeah.
Right. And I think this is the aberrant nature.
This is the timeline split. I think the last decade has just been like a really weird aberrant time where things have not been working like they should.
And, you know, in 2015, Twitter called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party, right? And Elon has not, like, Elon has restored it. Right.
He brought it back to something that everybody thought was completely normal 10 years ago. Yeah.
And I think, I hope this last 10 years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream. Like I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression, right? And anger and, you know, emotional incontinence and, you know, cancellation campaigns.
Emotional incontinence is a great term. Yes.
There has been a lot. That's really what it's like.
Of emotional incontinence. You just diarrhea in your emotions.
Just spraying rage in all directions. And so I, you know, I'm very, at the moment at least, very optimistic that there's a cultural change happening here that's even more profound than the political change.
I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack Dorsey. I like him a lot as a human being.
I think he's a brilliant guy. And I think he had very good intentions.
But he was a part of a very large corporation. And he had an idea for a Wild West Twitter.

He wanted to have two versions of Twitter. He wanted to have the Twitter that was pre-Elon where there's moderation and you can't dead name someone and all that jazz.
And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now. And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board and the executives and all the people that were fully on board with woke ideology.

Yeah. So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been – and I don't mean to let them off the hook for their decisions.

But just the lived experience, as they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding.

Just every single day, it's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky, exploding around you, getting attacked from every conceivable direction, being called just incredibly horrible things, being attacked from many different directions. Well, he's already left Blue Sky.
Well, yeah. So the irony of Jack is that Jack then created Blue Sky, which is kind of exactly the opposite of any way where he thought it.
Oh, by the way, the new name for it, of course, is Blue Cry. Yes.
I didn't know that. Exactly.
Yeah, but he's also got, look to his credit, he's still trying. And so he's got Nostr, which is another thing.
What is it? It's called Nostr, N-O-S-T-R. Oh, okay.
It's his kind of new, it's actually his third. He's going to keep swinging.
He's going to keep swinging. Look at full credit, full credit.
He's going to keep swinging. And by the way, full credit, he supported Elon.
You know, they've mixed up a little bit, But by and large, she's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time. Well, I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right wing branch of that stuff like Gab or any of these, they would immediately be infiltrated by bots as well.
Like my friends that troll on Blue Sky. But these are Nazis.
Like these are Nazi bots. These are people that would just spew horrible hate.
And then Gab would be labeled, oh, this is where the Nazis go. This is a right-wing psychopath social media app.
And I think, frankly, I think you get the same thing if you start out. I think if you start out overtly political on either side, I think that's what you end up with.
Yes. And so that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market.
It seems like you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service.

But you need to have some sense of the actual guardrails you're going to have around.

And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content filters and restrictions because you can't have child porn.

You can't have violence.

You can't have terrorist recruitment.

And even the First Amendment, there's like a dozen carve outs that the Supreme Court has ruled on over time that are things like that that you can't just like say. Right.
I can't say let's go join ISIS and let's go attack Washington. Like it's literally not allowed.
So there's always some controls, but you need to have like a spine of steel if you're going to hold back the censorship pressure. And there's basically Substack, a company I'm involved in, is doing very well.

I love Substack. Smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well.
Fantastic. And they've done a great job, I think, of holding the line on this stuff.
Yes. And then obviously.
And it's an amazing resource. There's so many brilliant people on Substack.
Yeah, that's right. I love Substack.
I get a large percentage of my news from Substack. That's right.
It's really good. And it's so valuable.
And it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe to it. I think it's fantastic.
And there's lots of people on the far left and the far right. So you actually have the full spree.
When a far left person gets upset at somebody working in the New York Times that mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start a Substack. And Substack welcomes them in.
Yes. Which is why they don't devolve into a Gabber or something like that because it really is a platform.
It really does welcome all conversations. Well, it's also very difficult to subvert in that same way because Substack is essays, right? You're reading people's essays and papers on things.
And like, these are long form things that are very well, in a lot of cases, very well researched. And it's not the kind of thing you could just shit post on, right? You know, there are comments, but it's just like, they don't hold the weight that the actual article holds, right? So my partners, my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time, but I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset.
And so the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, and I'm allowed to go on long-form podcasts, but I'm not allowed to post. Really? Right.
Exactly. You have rules.
It's the rule. It's the rule.
Now, by the way, I struggle against the rules because I can't help myself from time to time. Why do they want you to have rules? Because otherwise I inflame people too much.
I drive people too crazy. Do you do it on purpose? Sometimes.
I mean, sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's unintentional.
Did you ever hear about when the entire country of India was mad at me? No. Oh, I spent one night with the entire country of India basically wanting to kill me.
It was incredible. Oh, my goodness.
What happened? I mean, I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter, and it was a debate about economics, and the topic of colonialism came up. And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism, and it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive about the topic of colonialism.
And I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation. And I tripped a line.
And I stayed up all night and I went hyper viral in every time zone in India. Every hour, there would be like an entirely new activation.
And I was like, front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like all the way across India. Yes, it was like a, I do not recommend this as an experience.
By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian American friends I have because they all rallied to my side and said, Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India. It's not actually- There's a problem with the language barrier as well, right? Language.
And then just, my big list is just historical context. Americans have a different, we Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else.
History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore. But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like really matters to their lives today.
They just, they live in history more than we live in a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents and ancestors. And so there's just, it's just, it's just, you know,

I don't know if it's better or worse. It's just a different way of experiencing reality.

Anyway, I recommend learning that lesson not by enraging a billion people.

I experienced a small version of that recently because I said we shouldn't be using long range missiles on Russia and the Ukrainians, like, and Ukrainian bots, a bunch of people came after me

because I was saying like the Biden administration, I was like, fuck these people. And then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people, which I absolutely was not saying.
I was saying, fuck whoever in the last days of the presidencies decide to escalate this war, because it appears that that's what they've done. It appears that they're leaving Trump a giant mess, at the very least.
Right. So the good news is I am allowed to go on podcasts.
That's good news. In the theory, it's your sub, bring it up though, because it's your sub stack thing.
It's because it's basically, Mark, you need to explain yourself in long form. Yes.
You can't just say a thing, exactly to your example, you can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it because they'll extrapolate.

It's not their fault because you haven't – it's your fault because you haven't explained

it.

Right.

Right.

And so if you write something long form or if you go talk for three hours, at least

you'll – the context will be there.

And then if they want to get mad at you, that's fine.

But you can point everybody to the transcript and it's clear that that's not what you meant.

Do you also think while you're writing how things could be misconstrued?

So let me like do a really good job of being very clear about this. yeah you kind of have to yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like i had jimmy corsetti on the other day and he is an expert in uh ancient history and ancient civilizations and we had these fascinating subjects and one of them that came up was the nazis and their fascination with the occult and so you had to like clearly say, listen, fuck Hitler.
Okay. Can I be really clear? Fuck Hitler.
Fuck the Nazis. Okay.
I have not in any way. Okay.
Now that we're clear, let's talk about where the swastika came from. Fuck Hitler.
Did I say fuck Hitler? Let me say it again. Fuck Hitler.
But the swastika is this ancient symbol. And he's like talking about like why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult and with ancient civilizations.

And so we got into it.

But it was like one of those things where it's like, all right, we're hitting the third rail.

Everybody get your rubber boots on.

You know, let's save everybody here.

I've got a friend in the entertainment business who is quite left wing but really likes World War II documentaries.

And so he'll be like, yeah, I saw this great documentary last night about Hitler. And I'm like, I bet you did.
You can't even have a copy of Mein Kampf in your house. Oh, a student – this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories.
A student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the civil whatever disciplinary board, reading a copy of my confinant in the quad.

Oh, my God. That's so crazy.

Which is a book that's been, you know, a sign for-

You could buy it right now on Amazon.

80 years to college kids to like understand who these people were and like how to not do that again.

Yeah. That kid was like nearly brought up on charges and nearly expelled.

So like-

Wow.

Yeah. That's, yes, this is the world that I hope that we're leaving.

Well, it's just an awful way to look at things.

It's so awful to think that if you read about someone horrible, you support them. Yeah, that's right.
It's just so crazy. How are we going to study history? Yeah, right.
And how are we going to prevent bad things from happening again if we can't wrap our heads around why they happened the first time? Especially something like the Nazis. How are we going to learn what happened? Clearly, 1920s Germany was very different than 1945 Germany.
What the fuck happened in 25 years? So what we're essentially talking about is the year 1999 America versus 2024 America. Imagine a shift of that magnitude, crazy that there's a holocaust in 2024 and in 1999 everybody's just hanging out.
That's right. Well you should probably study that and you should probably not reprimand someone for reading a book on this.
Yeah that's right. Yeah exactly and look the German people went along with it right and so how did that happen? How did that happen? And how many you know did they was there active agreement, was there active agreement? Was there passive agreement? Was there, you know, what? What are the steps where things go horribly wrong? And how can we recognize those? Because those steps have taken place multiple times in history, recorded history.
We know about them. So, like, if we see them happening today, maybe we should stop it and nip it at the bud.
What better way than to read about when it already happened? Yeah. One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively the prior eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds.
They made all kinds of horrible mistakes. But we are completely certain that in our time, we figured it all out.
Right. Right.
We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in. And the one thing I know for sure is people 50 years from now are going to look back on us and they're going to say, oh my God, those people were awful.
100%. Right.
But like, in what way? Right. In what way are we horrible? I mean, certainly a lot of the way we treat each other is horrible, especially with the amount of information that we have available.
But it is fascinating also that if you, you know, I visited Athens last year and I got to tour the ruins and I was like, like, I wonder when it all went south. When did they know this had fallen apart? When was it in the peak of everything? They probably thought, hey, we have the most amazing, sophisticated civilization that's available on Earth, and we will maintain this.
We will be the center of intellectual discourse and the the home of democracy this is us yeah and then no now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the parthenon like what happened something horribly happened and we don't want to think that could ever happen to us today right we want to think we're american motherfucker we're going to keep this bitch rolling forever leonard skydard free bird let's go second amendment come on and we're gonna we think that it's just this is this is the future we America is the shining star of the world and we're gonna carry this on but probably not like historically I mean that what is the longest-running dominant civilization ever the Romans existed for, what, couple thousand years like how long did the greeks run how long did the egyptian the egyptians might be the longest running especially if you like take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines where they you know like egyptian hieroglyphs they have kings that go back 30 000 years right here it is egyptopotamia. There it is.
One estimate measuring the time of the first pharaohs, the use of hieroglyph writing to the native religion was replaced by Christianity. Ancient Egyptian civilization endured for about 3,500 years.
I bet it was more than that. The argument is things just didn't really change.
Changes we understand, historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually change. Right.
The way people live changes really kicked off with the Greeks. And so that was sort of the default status quo of civilization for a long time.
The Greeks kicked off change as we understand it and then the Romans. Do you know about the fishponds? Fishponds.
The fishponds. The Cicero's fishponds.
No. So the Roman Empire ran for, in its sort of Roman Republican Empire in its sort of health, which you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase ran for a few hundred years, about maybe 400 years total, something like that.
And towards the end, as it was sort of falling or stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart, a friend of mine says, when the rose got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why, right,

which sounds familiar, by the way,

Cicero was, you know,

one of the great Roman statesmen, and he wrote

these letters that we have, and in the letters, he sends

these letters to all of his aristocratic friends, and

the theme in the letters is

basically all of the actual, competent,

capable citizens of Rome are out

in the countryside at their villas, perfecting their

fishponds.

Right, they're pulling into themselves, they've built themselves their own protected environment, capable citizens of Rome are out in the countryside at their villas, perfecting their fish ponds. Right.

They pull an end to themselves.

They built themselves their own protected environments, right?

Right.

Where they control everything.

And they're completely focused on ornamentation.

They're completely focused on their clothes and on their, you know,

lifestyles.

Kardashians.

They were Kardashians.

Exemption.

I don't know if the Kardashians have fish ponds,

but if they did, they would be spectacular fish ponds. They would be amazing fishponds.
No doubt they would be the most amazing fishponds we have ever seen. So he kept railing.
He's like, stop with the fishponds. Like, stop working on the fishponds.
Like, get back out here. Rejoin the Senate.
Like, get back involved in the system. Let's keep this thing from caving in.
Yes. And I think, you know, the significance I think of, you know, Trump actually talked about this in the campaign.
You know, his version of this talking on the campaign trail is he's like, look, I could be off on a resort. I own all these golf clubs.
I have many things I could be doing in my life. Yeah, of course.
And he's 78 years old. He probably would like to do that.
Exactly. Right.
And he's, you know, surrounded. His family loves him and like, you know, grandkids and like the whole thing.
And he's like, look, I'm not doing it because like I need to do this. it's interesting because he doesn't use – he's not referencing Cicero when he says that.

But it's that spirit that Cicero talked about where when times get tough, do the people who are in a position to actually make positive change actually step up or not?

Right.

And I think we've had a pretty long stretch here where that hasn't been the case.

And I think maybe with Trump and then I think also with Elon.

I think –

Yes.

Because Elon is the other guy, right?

He for sure could be focused.

Well, it's a coalition, right?

It's not just him.

It's Vivek, Ramaswamy.

That's right.

Another guy, by? He for sure could be focused. Well, it's a coalition, right?

It's not just him.

It's Vivek, Ramaswamy.

That's right.

Another guy, by the way, who could be kicking it on a beach somewhere.

100%. Yeah.

It's a shit.

Very successful guy.

And young and handsome.

He could do whatever he wants.

He could be doing anything.

Yeah, exactly.

Instead, he's decided to go all in.

And then, of course, you have Tulsi Gabbard.

And you have J.D. Vance, who I think is brilliant.

You have all these brilliant people that are together, which is very hopeful. This is what we didn't see out of the Biden-Harris campaign.
You know, what we saw from Harris and Waltz, you have Waltz, this guy who's, it seems like he's a compulsive liar. At the very least, he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things, you know, like whether or not he was a head coach or an assistant coach.
And the lies have always elevated him socially, right? All the lies about his military service, or at least implying that he served in a different aspect. And then there was Tiananmen Square.
Everything enhances his virtue. This is not what anybody wants.
You want the opposite. You want a guy like J.D.
Vance who served in the Marines and went to Yale, comes from a single mother with addiction problems, rose from hard work and dedication to become who he is now. That's the kind of guy that I like.
That's what we all would like. Okay, that looks like a leader to me.
Yeah. Well, the Romans had this concept they took very seriously.
They called virtue, right? And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, of the Roman virtues. And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe what we're missing.
But like, yes, people with virtue, people with virtue, it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people. They actually act on it and actually step up.
Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right? Like we don't have like a doctrine that encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly, which religion does. You know, true Christianity, you know, not subverted fucking giant arena Christianity where the guy's flying private jets and has Rolls Royces and shit, but actual like real Christian people.
Right. Well, and the Romans had gods.
I mean, their virtues had gods. Yeah.
And so they're like, it was actually wrapped. It was, to your point, it was like encoded into their religion.
It was wrapped up in their religion. They knew exactly what was expected of them.
They knew exactly what their ancestors expected of them. They knew exactly what their gods expected of them.
I recently read Meditations again a couple of months ago. I listened to it in the sauna.
But it's brilliant. And it's amazing that this guy, Marcus Aurelius, was thinking like this so many years ago.
And it's so valid today. And it applies so well to modern life.
It's so strange how brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible empire that he could write about human psychology and the value of forgiveness and being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere in everything you do and all these virtues and all the stoicism that that he that he espoused it's it's so valuable today it's really remarkable that this person who was a leader what was it 2 000 years ago that his words still ring true today yeah you probably know he didn't write it for public consumption right yeah it was even more amazing his private notebook which is why it's so good probably yeah because a substack. He'd be like, well, people are going to hate on this.
Let me. Yeah.
Yeah. Let me, let me, you know, let me preemptively attack the people in the comments or.
Right. Subdue them.
But he's like, he's like, he's, he's, he's lecturing himself. Like he's telling himself how to act.
Right. Like, you know, he's very, this is very deep, deep.
These are very deep important. My favorite, my favorite part of the meditations is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're going to wake up this morning and everybody's going to hate you and everybody's going to lie to you and everybody's going to make dumb decisions and you're going to be incredibly frustrated and you're not going to get any credit for anything.

And you have to get up anyway.

Yeah.

Like that's all.

Yes, yes, yes.

That's all true.

Right.

And you still have to get up and do your job.

And of course he's saying that to himself as the leader of Rome. To himself.
Exactly. Yeah.
And what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's actually, you know, like the CEO, it's just like you're going to get pounded. Like if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day.
It's just incredible. And if you're operating out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of like exercising your responsibilities, you get up and do it anyway.
It's amazing how much it resonates. It really is.
What's amazing how much so many ancient writings resonate? You know, there's so much valuable information, just like in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, or in The Book of Five Rings. You know, there's so many ancient books that you read and you go, first of all I love reading them because I try to imagine What you know, what is this life like in like if you want to take like Miyamoto Musashi? 1400 when did he live? Miyamoto Musashi he was like 1420s or something like that like What's that like right like what is your life like what is what is the what is the view of the of the world when you don't really have detailed maps or you don't have any photographs? You don't have any idea what the fuck is going on in Europe unless you go there.
What is your version of the world like? And then to see someone's words written down and you read them and try to just imagine yourself in their perspective and their mindset. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. And look, I think if you're somebody like that or somebody like Marcus Aurelius, you just have this incredible sense of responsibility.
Yeah. Like the one thing you do have is a sense of purpose.
Like you know exactly why you're here. You know exactly what your role is.
You know exactly how you're supposed to behave. You know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain glory, how you're supposed to honor your ancestors.
Like it's just all, you know exactly where you are in the community.

Right.

Right.

You know, you have this like incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness.

And of course, there's huge downsides to that, which is it really cuts off your ability to, you know, run off and, you know, go on American Idol, right?

There's like a lot of things you can't do, right?

But like, you know, you know what you're supposed to do and you either do it or you don't do it. And these days to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way, right? Which is arguably harder, right? Given all the choices that they actually choose to live that way.
Well, not only that, giving all the distractions that people face every day that keeps them from sitting down and writing a journal like that. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. You know, I mean, back then there's not a lot of different things to entertain you with.
Correct. Yes.
You had to be maybe a little bit more serious because you couldn't have as much fun. My other favorite meditations, Marcus Aurelius thing is something like be the rocks on the shore at which the waves beat.
Right? Like, yes. Like, yes.
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Yep.

And everyone's plotting to kill you.

There's also a lot of that going on.

Yeah.

Everyone's –

I mean, how many times they try to kill Hitler?

Yes.

Like everybody's trying to kill you.

If you're running things, all your generals are probably secretly wanting to become the king.

Yep.

Yep.

Exactly.

Yeah.

All the usurpers are waiting in the wings.

Not easy lives.

You know, today most of the killings happen metaphorically.

Most.

Although every now and then.

Yeah.

Somebody takes a shot.

In the alternative timeline.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

How fearful were you leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline? It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50, razor sharp. It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties.
And number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they clearly have no clue. So it's another set of people you don't have to listen to.
But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a senior Democrat who's on his way out of politics. And he said in the summer, I said, what's your view? And person said, Trump's going to win with 100% certainty.
This is a Democrat from a sort of purple state. Right.
So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with sort of maybe broader cross-section of people. And this person basically said, yeah, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple place and go into a second or third tier, you know, side city and take an Uber for 30 minutes.

You know, land at the airport, take an Uber, drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going and who are they voting for?

And basically 100% of the time, the answer is going to be Trump.

Because people are just, people were just like completely fed up.

They were just completely fed up.

And then there was the, you know, Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, you know, said the Kamala enthusiasm is highly focused in New York and California, which don't matter from an electoral standpoint. So they're not going to decide anything.
But that is huge when it comes to media. Oh, sure.
Of course. But that's the thing, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble.
This is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles is the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out.

It's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in.

And part of it was getting excited about a Canada for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these heavily blue states.

And so in a lot of ways, it's the most obvious explanation of the world, which is just people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in.

And they were just fed up with it.

There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kalma Harris was going to win.

Thank you. People just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in and they were just fed up with it.
There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kalma Harris was going to win.

I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne.

Oh, right. I saw that.
Yeah. Right.

I don't want to show it. The poor lady.
She's probably living in hell right now.

On Blue Sky.

Yeah, she's probably on Blue Sky. She might be on X.
Well, she was on X. I think she deleted her profile.
But the poor lady. I mean, but she was being very arrogant, and she laughed and mocked this man and said, you do realize you wasted your vote, right? That's right.
That's right. That's right.
That's right. And she laughed, which makes her hard to feel sorry for.
That's right. It's like you were ready to mock this man.
Yes. But in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom.
And she thought that that was under attack under the Trump administration and that women are going to stand up and they're going to stop that. Because in her echo chamber, that was the case.
Everybody was universally – they all agreed. We're universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil.
We've got to get rid of him and women are going to vote and this is going to be fun. But who are you hanging out with, lady? You could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball is awesome.
And then you run into someone from another country like, what the fuck is baseball? You got to realize there's a lot of people out there. And people really don't like being talked down to.
They really don't. And they don't like you mocking the fact that, first of all, nobody wasted their vote.
That's not how it goes. You don't waste your vote if you vote different and the other side wins.
The other side won. That's just how it is.
Wasting the vote is a crazy way to look at it. Because I think also people look at things like tribal games.
Texas is a huge football state, and people love football, and it's always we this, we that. When UT plays South Carolina, we this, we that.
It's like people love to be a part of a team that's winning, and they apply that, especially if they're not into sports, to other things. I think it's just a war mentality.
It's a tribal war mentality that's been sort of subverted in the human mind and applied to other things. It could be like Microsoft versus Apple.
It could be Android versus Apple, iOS. It's weird how people get so tribal and then connect their own personal identity to other people agreeing with these ideas that they believe.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don I know for two thoughts. One is the Democrats for a long time were the big tent party.
So the Democrats were the coalition of people who had very different points of view on things. And of course, you know, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different, you know, economic and unions and all these things.
And Republicans were like the party of like rigidity, right? And just for whatever set of, a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it as it flipped to where at least today Trump's Republican Party is the Big Ten Party. Yeah.
To your point on having all these new people and many of whom are former Democrats. A lot of them.
And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody, right, who disagrees on any issue and demand, right, lockstep conformity through the cancellation process. And so that's a very interesting inversion that happened kind of without anybody saying anything about it, but it did happen.
And then I think the other inversion was the economic inversion, which is, remember the criticism of the Republican Party for a long time was it was the party of trickle-down economics. Remember the idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they're going to cut taxes, Reagan administration, and then basically if poor people get any money, it's because the rich people like trickle some day.
I think that inverted to where the Democrats, especially in the last four years, became the trickle down party, which was we're going to tax and we're going to collect all the money and give it to the government and then we're going to let the government hand it out. Right.
But they did it under the guise of tax the rich. They did it.
They did it with this Robin Hood mentality. At least they expressed that publicly.
Of course, that's how it starts. But then you end up with $35 trillion federal debt.
You end up with this giant annual deficit. And then you end up with all this money being handed out, right? Handed out in all these grants and all these things, like just this shower of money coming from the government.
But, of course, if the government is giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right? Like if you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving them money, then you're in a tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by pulling the money away. Right.
You can also control their ideology that way. 100%.
Yeah. You own them.
It's actually a form, you know, it's on the spectrum to a form of like domination, you know, that should make us very uncomfortable. And so, you know, maybe that would be fine if the deficit didn't get out of control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did.
And then at that point, it's like, okay, like this new kind of sort of tax and spend driven trickle down economics is clearly not sustainable. It's not going to work.
So the way the Trump administration is going to approach the economy, they want less regulation. They want tariffs and less regulation, and they want more reliance on US energy, right? They want to drill more, more natural gas, more fracking, more drilling for oil, and then allow companies to work without regulations inhibiting their performance.
This will boost the economy. You'll have more productivity.
You have more American manufacturing. You have more things happening.
Yeah. So the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this, two headline things are, number one, growth.
You just need faster growth. By the way, it's the only way to resolve the long-term fiscal situation.
It's the only way to resolve the debt. There's only two ways to do it.
You can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation. That's one track you can get on, which is a very bad track, and you don't want to go there.
Or you can grow faster. Because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt and you can pay down the debt as you grow.
And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth. And then the other thing is they want America to win.
My partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer and that was like his adamant thing he kept coming back which is like, look, America has to win. And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally globally.
Like our company should be the ones that win these broad – we should win global markets. Like our company should be the global – How can anybody be against that? I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.
Yes. I know.
I mean obviously you're a wealthy man and I am as well. But it's like how could you not want that? By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs.
That's how you square the circle. That's how you actually have your cake and eat it too, which is like first your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success.
And then you can pay for whatever programs you want. I actually don't, personally, I'm totally fine.
Set up all the programs you want, all the social spending you want, all the safety nets you want. And as long as it's easy to pay for because you're growing so fast, then everybody wins.
Yeah. I mean, I've always said if I knew that I paid more taxes, people in the world in this country would live better.
I would do it. Right.
Of course. I just don't believe that they're good at spending it.
That's the thing, right? It's like if you're putting in this – if you've generated $35 trillion of debt and these are the results. Yeah.
No. Like this is not the deal.
And this is – my friend that I talked about earlier, that was the point he made. It's just like, look, the deal has been broken.
Like this is not the deal anybody signed up for. This is not how it's supposed to work.

Everybody knows it.

And when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits and then you could take that away at any moment, this was one of the big fears that people had about letting illegal immigrants into the country and moving them to swing states, which clearly happened, and also giving them a bunch of benefits, which clearly happened. Money, food stamps, housing, all that happened.
Stuff that wasn't available to veterans, stuff that wasn't available to homeless people, wasn't available to the very poor of this country. All of a sudden, people came here illegally got those things.
And the thought was, if you gave these people these things and you gave them a way better life. life Look if I was living in a third world country with a family And I knew that I could come to America and I could get a job an actual job and make money and my family's gonna definitely eat I'll vote for whoever the fuck you want me to vote for I don't care My life is infinitely better than it was in this totalitarian shithole that I was in until I walked here.
I'll do whatever you want. I just want my family to survive, and I think everything's going to ...
It's so much better than where I was if I'm in some war-torn part of the world. It's so much better here.
I don't care if the Democrats win or the Republicans ... I'm in America, and if the Republicans didn't give me any money, and they want to get me out, they want to deport me.
But this nice lady, she gave me an EBT card and I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there. Oh, this is wonderful.
Right. So that's how it starts.
And there is a lot of that going on. But I will say one of the things that's interesting is it doesn't necessarily stick that way.
And the sort of evidence for that is the sort of dramatic ramp up in the Hispanic vote for Trump. Well, Hispanic people generally are very hard workers.
So this gets to the thing. So I'll just take a quick story on this.
So the night after the 2016 election, like literally everybody I knew was just like completely traumatized. Like we were all just like completely freaked out.
Everybody was shocked. You were freaked out too? Yeah, I was completely freaked out.
Everybody was freaked out. Like I didn't expect him to win the nomination.
I didn't expect him to win the race. Like, and then, you know, and the media is on like full historical blast and it's the end of the world.
And he's, you know, he's a Russian spy. All this crazy stuff that we now know not to be true is just like, it's just like full on.
So a group of us, a group of us went out to dinner at a restaurant in Palo Alto and, you know, and the atmosphere was like a funeral. I mean, like everybody in the restaurant was just like despondent, like ready to slit their wrists.
And so we're sitting there eating and like the food doesn't taste good. You know, it's just like, can't taste the food.
You can't taste the drinks. Like everybody's just depressed.
And, you know, it gets this thing of like, you know, my, you know, my God, I can't believe that, you know, Trump, you know, this, that, you know, so you see, you know, racist and, you know, anti-Hispanic and all this stuff. And it was, it was, it was one of those moments where the, the, the young waiter who's, you know, Hispanic young man in his twenties, one of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table.
Right. But it was in context, it was like, oh, thank God.
Cause like, we're just, we're just depressing ourselves to death. So like, thank God he's going to say something.
And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong. He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic.
My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, raised a family. Mowing his lawn with a MAGA hat on.
He thinks this guy is great. He thinks this guy is fantastic.
And he voted for him. And he just has, and then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line.
They didn't have to go through the process. They didn't have to prove anything.
They're not bought into the system. Right.
They're able to jump in. And then they don't – they're not buying into the system.
And part of it maybe they're not being accepted. But also part of it is they're not buying in.
They're not assimilating. They're not becoming part of the – of what makes America America.
And in some by the way, in some cases, you know, the criminals are coming across and terrorists are coming across and gangs. And it's like my father's not in favor of any of that.
Right. Right.
My father wants to be part of a great society, of a great America, not some dysfunctional, you know, basically just disaster zone. And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, OK, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works.
Is that one conversation? Yeah, yeah. Well, it was weird because it was like – so what happened with me is like – so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country.
And so from like zero to 18, like I completely understood the mentality and I was always like explaining to my friends of like, no, no, like this is like a different place and people think differently. And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot.
And I became a Californian.

I became a fully assimilated Californian.

And I was just like, well, of course,

the Californians are much more sophisticated

and advanced than people, you know, where I came from.

And so of course,

of course everybody in California has it figured out.

And of course California is gonna lead the country

in all this thinking, right?

And Trump was, for me, Trump 2016 was the wake up call

of like, no, no, no, no, no. Like that's just like completely, that is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and of how people think that it doesn't explain what, because you have to explain what happened.
And then you have to like, if you have some sense of being able to predict what's next, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, you know, it's what investing is supposed to be. It's like, okay, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for like how this all works and how this whole system and how this country works.
But it was that conversation that kickstarted it for me. So what was the process of altering your perspective or at least opening it up? Yeah.
So for me, it was primarily it was reading. And so I started to actually read my way back in history.
And I actually went all the way back. I tried to read of like where the origins of like left-wing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve and, you know, liberal democracy and then also right-wing thought and like, you know, everybody's calling everybody fascist now.
So like, what was fascism? Is that what this is? Right. How did the Germans do with it? You know, so all of those questions.
And then, you know, kind of converging on in the last 80 years, like how is that, you know, either stabilized or not stabilized? And so I did that. But the other thing is, I just started talking to a lot more people.

And I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times that it was true.

And, you know, and by the way, and then, of course, what unfolded in the years,

you know, kind of sense was, you know, the whole, I followed the whole Russiagate thing,

like super closely, like I read everything and I read all the reports.

What did you think initially? Did you think it was true?

Because it's like this overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that, of course, he's a Russian spy. I sat on stage, I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech, which she gave at Stanford, the very first one, and I sat, we know the people organizing it, so we sat literally like 15 feet from Hillary in her first appearance.
And the whole thing is fraught with just like incredible tension and the Russiagate stuff is in full-blown display and I go there and I and i'm like all right this is going to mean to me and you know in the audience is stanford audience and so it's all 100 hillary clinton supporters right and i'm sitting there and i'm on my best behavior because i'm with my wife and i have to like not you know i have to not act out um and hillary gets up there and she says trump is only president today because vladimir putin hacked facebook and made him the president right and i'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not true. I know for an absolute fact that that's not true.
And so that got me thinking. And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled.
And I was like, the whole, the Steele dossier and all this stuff comes out. What was the accusations about Facebook? How did she think that Russia hacked Facebook and made Trump the president? Yeah.
So it's this whole thing with this. So remember this whole thing, Cambridge Analytica.
And so it's this whole thing that there was this basically there was this data. There was this theory, which, by the way, it's like completely.
It is like a completely fake thing. So there was this data set on user behavior that in theory, there's an academic.
There's a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set. And then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages.
And it was like this like magical breakthrough and basically thought control. And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this.
And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far like the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that you want. And it was this data breach of Facebook.
The whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade leading up to 2016 that it kept all the data closed, right? So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data. It doesn't share the data, right? And the criticism for years was Facebook is the Rocha Motel of data, and the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data.
And then in 2016, it flipped 180

degrees, and it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge

Analytica get access to this data. And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation

on the American citizens using this data. Why didn't Facebook push back?

They did early on. They do today in their way.
But they're trying to run a business. They're

trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to keep the employee base, and everybody

a couple interesting thing. When you're in these companies, like these big issues are big issues.
But you're also literally trying to like make the quarter, quarter. You're trying to ship your products.
You're trying to close your sales. You're trying to keep your employees from quitting.
You have these responsibilities. You have practical concern responsibilities.
And so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode. And then maybe doesn't get out, but.
So what was the bigger shift, the waiter or the Hillary speech?

Oh, it was the waiter. I mean, by that, it was, the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a normal, it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked.

Whereas with Hillary, it was, it was cope, right? It was, it was delusion.

It was, it was amazing, by the way. She then spent the next hour and a half.

When I, when I, when I'm in a place where I don't know if I'm going to control myself, I bring a little notepad along because I can work out my demons.

Draw dicks.

Exactly.

So that I don't say anything.

Like super bad.

So I brought my little notepad along.

Exactly.

My little Fisher's face pen, right?

And I pull it out.

And I started making a list of all of the people and organizations that she blamed for her defeat that were not named Hillary Clinton. And I got to 20.
My favorite was Netflix, by the way. Netflix? She blamed Netflix.
What did Netflix do? Netflix aired anti-Clinton documentaries. Oh, you mean facts.
Well, this is particularly funny because the CEO of Netflix is a famous Democrat. He's a super Democrat.
Well, actually, Ted, but also specifically Reed Hastings and his wife are very enthusiastic left-wingers. But I mean, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints, right? With no sense of like personal responsibility at all.
You know, just like pure grievance. And so it was a negative lesson of like, okay, like whatever that is, is not the path.
Did she blame Comey? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
She absolutely hated that guy. Yeah.
No question. That was a wild one.
100%. Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, that was super weird. Yeah.
I don't think she was completely wrong on that. I don't understand that one, honestly.
If they didn't want Trump to win, I don't get that one. Well, we know she's guilty, but we're not going to charge her.
Right. Is a weird.
It's crazy.

Is a weird message to send.

It's almost as weird as the Biden one where we don't think he's competent to stand trial for the documents that he had that were classified.

Exactly.

But he can, what, have his finger on the button?

What the fuck are you talking about?

We know he's guilty, but we never convict him because the jury would say that he's a senile old man.

Which is crazy because he's still running for president at the time. He's running for reelection.
Well, then remember, everybody at the time said, the media said, the prosecutor was lying. Right? Because at that point- Of course, he's sharp as a tack.
He's sharp as a tack. My favorite is Joe Scarborough.
Yes. This is the best Biden intellectually, the best one I've ever seen.
Like, dude. Yes.
And then meanwhile, he had to go to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring. Yes, exactly.
Exactly. Exactly.
My favorite was the, remember about earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake. Cheap fake, yes.
Cheap fake, because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake, which really didn't, and there was really nothing happened to that. And so the cheap fake we learned is a video that just simply shows you something.
Right. Right.
It's claimed to be out of context, but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth. Didn't Nancy Pelosi start using that one? Cheap fake? Yeah, exactly.
Because the theory was it was going to be clips out of context. Yeah.
But it turned out they were clips in context. Have you seen, there's a gentleman who made a video.
Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie, because I sent it to Duncan. It's pretty fucking crazy of what AI is capable of now by um come on on my phone updated you son of a bitch come on don't make me go to a fucking android because i will um this guy did this insane um video where it's all completely ai and everything he did, including his voice.
It's here. I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It's 100% AI generated. And it's so hard to believe because it's so good.
And it really puts you in this when you're talking about cheap fake. I just sent it to you, Jamie.
Cheap fakes and deep fakes. Let's put the headphones on to watch this because it's so crazy.
We're at that moment where you cannot tell. Right.
And let's look at this one because it's pretty extraordinary. This is the best version that I've seen so far.
This is completely AI. I have 11 labs to speak like me.
It's one of our companies. So I can input any text and it will sound like me.
Then I trained HeyGen with a video of mine. I input the audio file to generate a video based on my text.
The video you are watching right now is the result. 100% generated in AI.
What do you think of that? Guys, I know this might sound the same. How crazy is that? Oh.
That's your company? That's him. Oh, that's him.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the AI generator.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.
That's right. So that's two companies.
One of them, the voice is ours. And then that's another great company called HeyGen that did the visuals.
But yeah, no, that's right. That's nuts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is part of the first internet election.
Probably the first internet election will be the one that has this kind of thing actually in it where people get tricked. Why didn't they do that with Kamala Harris? It turns out they would have done an amazing job.
They could have really knocked it out of the park with a solid speech. Just have her say it on the internet.
Yes. Just have a bunch of viral videos of her speaking so eloquently and perfectly.
One would think, exactly. That's the fear of the future, right? Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that's going to be the kind of thing that going to happen in terms of like the dirty trick side. I think that will be a part of it, right? Yeah.
There's always some way to try to game these things. Just have the most brilliant writers formulate – get AI to do it.
Like you're saying AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical. And there's no like weird thinking in it.
So cut all the fat out. So I think we have a theory on how to fix this.
And the theory basically is we're going to have to switch our sense of what's real from basically just trying to eyeball it and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real. And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on a blockchain.
Right. And so I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have an account on a blockchain service, like a crypto service.
And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're, you know, they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time, whenever they put out a statement, they're going to cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them. And then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see.
Which. Which, frankly, is a good idea anyway because there just is a lot of noise in the environment.
How would you integrate that with social media, though? Because one of the issues is these low-information voters that are getting information either from clickbait headlines on these websites where they don't even read the actual paragraph, which might be completely different than the headline itself. The headline is just inflammatory.
And then viral videos. How would you...
So the thing is, so that's already happening even pre-AI, right? And so I would say that's a pre-existing problem. And so we can't...
And by the way, that's been happening for a long time. Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever.
If you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scrolls. The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican.
Really? I think you're 1500. It was all these terrible rumors about the pope and the bishops and all these cardinals.
That was the first newspaper? That was the very first newspaper was in the Vatican. And then all the American colonial newspapers were like that in the revolutionary era.
It was all crazy rumors and innuendo and people accusing each other of – there was a famous election in 1800, which was Jefferson versus Adams that we think of as these like super upstanding, you know, upright people.

And they're just like smearing the crap out of each other in their respective newspapers, right?

Because they would actually own newspapers in those days.

Oh, God.

And they would just like attack each other.

The more things change.

Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, you know, printed newspapers before he became a government, and he created 15 different sock puppets. He created 15 different pseudonyms.
He was a sued, or a non. And then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him.
So he had all these different personalities. And so we've been in a world of information warfare for a very long time.
We've been in a world of sensationalist nightly news. If it bleeds, it leads.
Yes. You know, sensationalist stuff for a long time.
We've been in a world of propaganda for a long time. So that you're never going to make that go away.
But isn't it funny that we don't think of the past like that? Oh, yeah. We just assume.
We think of them being virtuous. We assume they had it all figured out.
Yeah. That very much is not true.
There's all kinds of crazy, crazy banana stuff. My favorite is in the Vietnam War, it was the Gulf of Tonkin that sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation.
We now know for a fact it didn't happen. Right.
The whole thing just didn't happen. And now there's this big debate about, did they know it didn't happen or did they fake it? But so there's always been stuff like that in history so that we can't fix and ai will be a new way to do that kind of thing but what we can do is we can reorient people to say okay now you're gonna have to like take seriously this stuff is real and if you want to actually know what's happening this stuff is real and we can prove that it's real and if it's not it's entertainment and you can choose to believe it or not right but but you you should not rely on it and look it's not going to be perfect and it's going to take time.
But there is a way to address this. Okay.
So that would be the solution to deepfakes, the blockchain. Yeah, you flip it.
You flip it. Yeah.
You focus on the real stuff. That's logical.
That actually does make sense. That actually kind of gives me hope.
I do generally have hope. Even though I look at the pessimistic side of things, I'm generally optimistic.
Because my real feeling about human beings is most people are good. I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people.
There's far more people that just want to live a good life and have a good time and enjoy themselves than there are people who are tyrants. Yeah.
I'm super optimistic. I'm incredibly optimistic.
And I was optimistic already with flashes of pessimism, but like I'm really optimistic and especially now. So I think this is going to be, we have the real, we have the real potential here for Golden Age.
We really do. We really do.
Yeah. The capabilities that we have and the people that we, I mean, look in my day job, I meet these young, you know, I meet these 22 year olds every day that are just like the smartest people in the world, the smartest people I've ever met.

I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes.

By the time they're 22, they just know a lot more. They have so much more access to information than we did.
Yeah, they're so much better trained, capable, and ready to go, fired up. And they know each other, able to connect online, and they're already in communities, and they know how to help each other.
And so, like, yeah, the productive and inventive, creative, you know, aspect, particularly of this country, is just like, there's never been anything like it in the world. I think there's also the real potential for a shift in perspective, a positive patriotic shift in perspective that can happen in this country.
And if you think about what happened with the woke ideology, how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially.

It happened so radically and so quickly and such a large change that people are susceptible to change.

It's possible to enact change and a positive change in a good direction where people are optimistic about the future, which you are and I am. I mean, I think that's probably contagious.
Yeah, that's right. I really do think that.
It's an upward spiral. It was Evan Hafer who said that thing about psychology the other day.
It was one of, he's a friend of mine who was a former special forces guy. He said that psychology is more contagious than the flu.
Right, right. Exactly.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right.
So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting. Really? Well, because they lost so badly, right? So the fact that they lost the White House, and they lost the popular vote, and they lost the Congress, and they lost the Senate, and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court.
Like this time it's undeniable that like the current path that they've been on is not working. Like being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for wrong thing, like it's not – they're not going to win elections.
They're not just kicking people out. They're barring people from making it to the primaries.
Yes, exactly. Which is very undemocratic.
That's right. That's right.
Yeah, exactly. Starting with Bernie in 2016 and then continuing.
In Donna Rice's book, she documented that. Right.
And so I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not a viable path. You can't have a political party that doesn't win.
It's not useful. And so there's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now where they're going to have to recalibrate what they want their future to be.
And it's going to be a big decision. And the same thing happened, by the way, when Reagan beat Carter really badly in 80 and then had a landslide in 84.
It then took Democrats 12 years to get to Bill Clinton and actually win again. And so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the 60s and 70s and it took them 12 years to And so if you talk to the like, really smart Democrats right now, they're like, look, this can't be 12 years.
That's crazy. We have to do this a lot faster.
But we have to reorient and we have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to normal.
We have to get back to sensible. We have to get back to moderate.
We were actually playing Bill Clinton debating during the elections of what year was that, Jamie? I forget which was when he first ran. What year did he first run? Oh yeah.
92. 92.
So it was the 92 and I'm like I'd vote for that guy. Yeah exactly.
In a heartbeat. The guy's awesome.
Also we played a clip of Hillary Clinton where she sounded more MAGA than anybody who's MAGA today. She was talking about the penalties that illegal immigrants should face.
They should pay a stiff fine because they came into this country illegally. And if they're a criminal, they should be jailed or kicked out of the country without question.
All this was so MAGA. I was like, this is so wild to hear from Hillary in 2008.
Yep. That's right.
That's right. And Hillary and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and all these people wanted to build a wall.
Dianne Feinstein, our senator in California at the time, very left wing. She was down on the border, like the photo ops in front of the wall that was being built, like trying to take credit for it.
Crazy. Yeah, yeah.
Like 18 years ago. Yeah.
And so, yeah. So another reason for optimism is I think that they're going to be able to pull their way back.
Like I think they're going to be able – I think losing this bad is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal. And I think, again, that would be like, I mean, how great would it be if you had two parties that actually had like sensible normal policies? I mean, imagine if Clinton was running up against Trump.
Yes, exactly. Like, he was so good.
We played that speech that he gave after Sister Soldier, it said a bunch of like very white things about white people and he gave this like super eloquent but yet Compassionate speech about this where he's very charitable about her position of being a young person and not having the best perspective on things It was fucking brilliant. Yeah, it was really that's the guy like that's a president now by standards, of course, he was a fascist.
Yeah. Well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right? Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments.
But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and enforcing people to think and behave, which is what the left-wing does. And then you talk about, about like being pro-war.
Well, who's more pro-war right now, Trump or the Biden administration? Clearly Trump is less pro-war. Clearly Trump wants to end the wars.
Clearly Biden just allowed Ukraine to use long-range missiles into Russia. I don't know what's going on in terms of negotiations.
I hear all kinds of different things. But if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it, and the other side that's not, like, the fucking polar shift is so dramatic.
Yeah, that's right. It's really weird.
The free speech thing, which was always a tenant of the left-wing party. It was like, youokeconomicimpact.com.
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Free speech is necessary. It's the foundation of our ability to discuss and find out what's right and what's wrong.
You have to be. The ADL used to let fucking Nazis speak.
They used to let them march. They would defend their right to do it.
Because you needed to air out the idea to be able to show why it was wrong. Exactly.
Yeah. So look, it was not that long ago when you had Democrats that were very much in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions.
Super recent. It was pretty recent.
Yeah. But again, reason for – I don't know if they're going to pull it off.
They might go crazier. They might just go right off the cliff.
It's certainly possible. But it is also possible that they'll drag it back and it might happen quite quickly.
And I am hopeful and optimistic. I am as well.
I think the temperature of society, the mindset of society is so clearly moving away from that madness that they're going to have to course correct, which is just logical. There's no way they're going to keep doing it the same way or double down.
It's just not going to. It's like they're going to go the way of MSNBC.
They're going to become ridiculous. Yeah, that's right.
So they have to, which is good for everyone, for everyone. So one of my theories is you can separate the concepts of the United States and America, and you can be very optimistic about America and have all kinds of issues with the United States, but still be positive about America.
And the difference is the United States is the formal system of the government and the politics and all the stuff we get mad about. And America is the people.
Right. And so you can be, as I am, incredibly bullish about the people.
And then it's just a question of whether, on the America part, it's just a question of whether you can get the United States part kind of lined up to at least not prevent good things from happening and ideally help good things. Well, what are the things that you think about this administration, at least what they're proposing, that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going? There's a lot of things.
I mean, I think you got to start with the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. It's hilarious that it just winds up being DOGE.
He's been pushing DOGE coin forever. The universe speaks.
Yeah. It's just so many things are just so on the nose.
You're like, is the simulation real? Yes. I mean, it has to be real.
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
And Elon is programming it in the back room late at night in between playing Diablo. We certainly got a good position in the game.
And tweeting, exactly. He's the number one Diablo player in the world right now, by the way.
Exactly. He just got number one.
Which means... Fucking bananas.
How does he have the time to do that? Which means he could be the guy steering the simulation. Yeah.
So look, this goes back to what we were talking about before. Like it is time to carve this government back in size and scope.
It's time to take the overall – you can talk about distribution of taxes, but it's time to take the overall tax load down. It's time to take the spending down.
It's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money. It's time to unleash economic growth.
Elon explained, Elon explained that there's more agencies than there have been years of the United States. David Gardner, Correct.
Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies.
So for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which was the, it's sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right? And if you read the constitution, like there is no such thing as an independent agency.
And yet there it is. What does her agency do? Whatever she wants.
What does it do though? Basically terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Oh yeah, 100%.
How How so? Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. Can you give me an example? Debanking.
This is where a lot of the debanking comes from is these agencies. So debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system.
Like they did to Kanye. Exactly.
Like they did to Kanye. My partner, Ben's father, has been debanked.

Really?

We had an employee.

For what?

For having the wrong politics.

For saying unacceptable things.

Under current banking regulations, okay, here's a great thing.

Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person.

PEP.

And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank.

What?

You're not allowed to have them.

What if you're politically on the left?

It would have them. What if you're politically on the left? That's fine.
No. Because they're not politically exposed.
So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked? Oh, well, David Horowitz is a right wing.
He's I mean, he said all kinds of things. You know, he's been very anti-Islamic terrorism.
He's been very worried about immigration, all these things. And they debanked him for that.
Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account.
You get kicked out of the, you can't do credit card transactions. By the way, you can't run- How is that legal? Well, exactly.
So this is the thing. And so, and then you go into this thing of like, well, there's no, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined.
Back to your fascism point, which is there's no – there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech. But there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you.
Right? And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing. And then they don't have to debank you.
They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to.
But the government gets to say we didn't do do it. It was the private company that did it.
And of course, JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? It's

their private company. And so it's this sleight of hand that happens.
So it's basically, it's a

privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do

to Iran. Just kick you out of the financial system.
And so this has been happening to all

the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years. This has been happening to a lot of the fintech

I'm going to go lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they're trying to protect the big banks. And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.
And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to – as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about. Under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers.
And just like you're done, you're out of the banking system. And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what?

You're doing your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account. You can't get a visa terminal.
You can't process transactions. You can't do payroll.
You can't do direct deposit. You can't get insurance.
Like none of that stuff is, you've been sanctioned, right? None of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents.

God.

Yeah.

So that's been like super pernicious.

I wasn't aware of that. Oh, 100%.

So it was Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns.

Chokepoint 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it's hit the tech world.
Like we've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's been a big recurring pattern. 30.
This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like we just can't live in this world.
We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally like get sanctioned. Right.
And embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable, no, by the way, no due process. None of this is written down.
There's no rules. There's no court.
There's no decision process. There's no appeal.
Who do you appeal to, right? Like who do you go to to get your bank account back, right? You know, and then, you know, and then there's this, and then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side. And that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden, you know, the state takes their money.
Yes. But that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states.
Right. Or, you know, there will be – there will be – well-publicized examples of like, you know, there will be some investigation into like, you know, safe safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know, the feds have seized all the contents of the state deposit.
Right. Safe deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned.
And so it's this – and this is when Trump says the deep state. Like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power.
It's political power being administered not through legislation. Right? So there's no defined law that covers this.
It's not through regulation, right? There's nothing you can – you can't go sue a regulator to fix this. It's not through any kind of court judgment.
It's just raw power. It's just raw administrative power.
It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it. So what happens to those 30 tech people that you know? Start to go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to get, you know.
Complete upending of your life. Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to, yeah, try to change your life.
Try to get out of the, try to get away from the eye of Sauron. Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, okay, you know, it's okay.
We've checked and it's now all right. Whoa.
But there's no... So what do they do with their money? Like what happens? I mean, you go to cash.
I mean... You go to cash? You can't have a...
Yeah. So where do you put it? Under your mattress.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
That is so insane. So if someone has $30 million in the bank and they get debanked.
Diamonds, art, you know, do you, I don't know, go overseas somewhere? Holy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And just like, it just happens. And again, it's really, really important.
There's no fingerprints. Like there's no...
Right. There's no person who...
There's no stick above the strings. Yeah, exactly.
Right. It just happened.
And we can trace it back because we understand exactly – we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that the banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we can loosely – like we understand the flow of power as it happens.
But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like you can't trace it back and there's nothing you can do about it. So what are the instances? Like what is the company? What are they trying to do and how do they run afoul? Well, all the crypto startups in the last basically four years.
So remember the crypto thing got like really – everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff. And then it just like stopped.
Yeah. And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged.
This is a fun twist. It was a fun little twist.
So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden. And this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor.
The SEC, they can investigate you. They can subpoena you.
They can prosecute you. They can do all these things.
But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you. All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells notice.
And the Wells notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future. You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future.
Oh my God. Terrifying.
That's the eye. The eye of Sauron is on you.
Now trying to be a company with a Wells notice doing business with anybody else. Oh my God.
Right. Try to work with a big company, try to get access to a bank, try to do anything.
So that's when they support DEI initiatives. Well, then the SEC under Biden became a direct application of – exactly.
So DEI, they did a lot with that and then all the ESG stuff. And ESG is a very malleable concept and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that.
So through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all.

Like there's no – there are hearings where they get yelled at, but like nothing changed.

Nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything.

Wow.

It was just the raw application of power.

Right.

And so –

And this is your friends.

This has happened to.

Oh, yeah.

For sure.

Yeah.

And we had – like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title.

He was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because he –

Thank you. has happened too.
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah.
And we had, like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title. He was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because he, because they did a screen across, it's what they told us is they did a screen across their customer base.
Just anyone with crypto. Because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person because crypto was politically controversial, right? That's so crazy.
You hear this sometimes. It's like these terms, compliance, reputation management, tone at the top.
They have these lovely sounding terms that make it sound like everybody's going to be an upstanding citizen. But what they're all code for is destroy the enemy, like bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever or the social media, bring it down and just like crush the individual with no due process.
And look, there's an argument in the long run that this is all unconstitutional because the constitution gives us all the right to due process and this is government pressure. So like there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal.
But in the moment when you're the guy who's been debanked, I mean, number one. And then also the potential that if you do challenge them in court and lose, the repercussions would be even heavier.
Exactly. Yeah.
100%. Is it really worth your effort? Yeah.
Is it worth the risk? That's right. Especially if you've already had your life upended.
You ready to do it again? Yeah, that's right. When you barely built yourself back up? Yeah.
So this is, and I think this is important context where like when Elon and Vivek talk about like reducing regulation, you know, there's two ways to think about reducing regulation. It's like, oh my God, the water in the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned.
Now, some of those regulations I think are very important. But the other way to think about it is examples like this, which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, are just trying to do something legitimate.
And they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided. Well, there's something that isn't illegal, but they don't want to be done like crypto.
Like crypto, or having the wrong political points of view. Well, the other great example is the trucker strike up in Canada was an even more direct version of this, because here you had truckers physically showing up.
And it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license, which by the way, right, it's just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard. No more driver's license.
Step two is they take away your insurance. And step three is they take away your kids.
Right. And so like that was their version of this.
And that was a very specific. Take away your kids.
That was the threat at the end to the truckers and the Canada trucker strike. Because the trucker strike in Canada was going to jam up these cities because it was the farmers that were – the truckers were very serious.
They wanted to – they were doing a nonviolent protest but they wanted to stall the cities to be able to exert political pressure back on the government. And the government was like, we'll tolerate it for a little while.
Then we'll take your trucker license. Then we'll take your insurance.
Then we'll take your kids. How did they say they would take their kids? Because it's administrative power.
Like you can't – power. The theory would be you can't let...
These aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary preventing goods and services

from reaching people, putting people's lives at risk. Child seizure.
Now, I don't know if they

actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government,

just like in the US government, that if they want to, they can take your kids. Well, they were doing debanking there with people who donated to the trucker convoy.
That's right. Which is even crazier.
That's right. Not even people who were there.
People were opposed to the mandates that Trudeau's administration was imposing on people. And so they donated to these truckers.
And then they got their bank accounts taken away, which is really crazy. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly I think that I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War Two.

You know, we think about Nazis and jackboots with like tanks and guns and, you know, beating people up and killing people like that.

That's our mental and that that's you might call that hard totalitarianism.

Right. That's like very clearly like violent totalitarianism.

But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything, right? And this is speech control and debanking and all these other things that we've been talking about. And that is, you know, the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night.
The bad news is like you are under their complete control and they can do whatever they want to you that doesn't involve physical violence, which basically includes the entire aspect of – every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else. And most people aren't even aware of it.
Yeah, that's right. And then look, these are individual one-off things.
Most people don't have a voice. It's very hard to organize around these.
And then by the way, if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out, it then itself can get suppressed in deep bank. Well, it happened during the COVID lockdowns, right? So the lockdown protests all got suppressed, right? So the lockdown went from two weeks to crush the curve to two months to two years, right? Which is like, okay, what the hell, right? And then there were these protests that were there were these protests that were forming nonviolent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns.

And, you know, you could argue the issue different ways, but people have a legitimate right to protest for that, just like they do for anything else.

And the next thing, you know, is all the lockdown protests got censored, like just like gone.

Right. And so at that point, like the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government.

Right. For, you know, to force your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden.
Like you can't even organize a protest. Do you – how much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis? Because one of the things that happened with the FTX thing was it was revealed that they were – I think they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.
Yeah. Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this debanking and, you know, be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you? Yeah, that was his – it was explicitly his strategy.
That was Sam's – yeah. Sam's approach – Sam's approach was just pay everybody.
So Sam's approach was just I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, right, which was the crime. And then a big part of what he used – some of it he used to like hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Giselle to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.
But a lot of that – something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians. And a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with.
And so the money was just shotgunned out the door. How come they don't have to comply? Well, it was illegal.
I mean, it was illegal because he was breaking the law. I mean, it was, to be clear, he was illegal.
Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the US government, they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud. Because they'd have to give all the money back? Well, so there's two theories on it.
The thing that they said was their extradition agreement with Bermuda, Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge, which is like super weird because you're the United... Number one, you're the United States of America.
You can probably get the guy. Number two, did he really want to stay in a prison in Bermuda? Right.
And so that was all weird. And then look, there's no evidence for this, but the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in D.C.
decided to not open it. It's like the Epstein client list.
Like there are certain boxes that are better not to open. Well, the campaign finance thing, wouldn't they have to pay it back? So then there's this like panic.
The minute one of these scandals breaks like that, there was this panic rush. And all of a sudden, politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to.
Right. And then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back.
So, yeah, there's, you know, it'll play out however it does. But it is interesting.
It is a great example of it was the shotgunning of money into the system under like basically just like nakedly breaking the law. And then it – now look, he's in – the other argument is he's in prison.
He's in prison already. Like whatever.
It just would have been another sentence. But like he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that.
And that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today never will. What's really fascinating about him is that he was right.
And if they didn't come after him, he would have gotten all that money to those people. It seems like it kind of turned around, right? It didn't get him off the hook though.
It didn't. No.
Well, he still did something illegal. He did.
Yeah. Did he know it was illegal? He is in prison.
I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head. I don't know that I can represent his mental state.
He'd be a fascinating podcast guest if he was out. He flopped very hard at trial.
So he had an explanation, but the jury didn't buy it. What was his explanation? That it was all the money was all being invested and he was going to give it all back and it was all this and all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism and this and that and the other thing.
And the prosecution was just like it was the customer's money. It wasn't your money.
Right. Clearly.
Yeah. And so like I don't know.
Well, there's also amphetamines involved, which definitely tend to skew your judgment. I mean him and that lady were like sort of proponents of amphetamine use.
And they were taking, there was some anti-Parkinson's drug they were taking that has a side effect of reducing your risk calibration. Oh, dopamine agonists.
Yeah, one of those. Yeah, like Reequip.
Yeah, something like that. Wow.
He was taking these patches. That makes you do wild shit.
That also makes people gamble. Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah. Yeah, there was a guy who won a lawsuit from Glax from galaxo smith klein because he took reequip and became a gay sex and gambling addict yeah i think they paid him the equivalent of like 500 plus thousand american dollars i believe it was in ireland yeah yeah dopamine agonists are weird they they do strange things to people if If that happened to me, I would definitely sue.

That's crazy that those guys were taking

those things. At least Sam was.

Ooh, boy, what a wild fella.

Yeah, MSAM. Confirmed.

He wears an MSAM patch.

What's an MSAM patch? He's supposed

to use the depression medication.

Oh, his supposed use of the depression

medication had kicked up some rumors, so what is

that's the stuff?

That's the Parkinson's?

I think that was – Is that a dopamine agonist?

Does it say?

I'm not sure.

I'll look it up.

Yeah.

See, put dopamine agonist.

Yeah, Parkinson's.

There we go.

Yeah.

Interesting.

It's like related.

If it's not that, it's like a related class.

Interesting.

How does it work?

Does it say how it works? Commonly used to treat depression. How does it work, though? Here we go.
Okay. It's an MAO inhibitor.
Interesting. Used to treat mental depression in adults.
This medicine is a monoamine-oxidate inhibitor. That's a different one.
That says it's Sledgeline. It could be the same.
Sledgeline. Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's Sledgeline. Sledgeline is also, people take that as well as a nootropic, I've heard.
Yeah, that's what it is. So it is a Sledgeline.
Selagine? Selagine? Selagine? I think it's Sledgeline. I knew a doctor who was taking that.
He was taking it as a, but not in a patch. He was taking it in a pill form and he said it was a nootropic.
So monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So that's the stuff that's the active and that's what makes ayahuasca orally active.
Same thing. Monoamine oxidase inhibitor along with the plant that contains dimethyltryptamine, which is not normally orally active.
So this guy, if he was doing drugs and taking MAO inhibitors, he was out of his fucking mind, guaranteed. Because I know people have taken like prescription grade MAO inhibitors and then taken mushrooms and literally almost never came back.
Like got to the point where for weeks they were fucked up. And then when did come back they're like I Almost lost it like I was almost gone gone like, you know Like the dude from Pink Floyd like never coming back shine on you crazy diamond You're gone and that happens to people right so this fucking kid with Billions of dollars people's money is taking those kinds of medications and amphetamines and who knows what yeah you know he had an on-staff psychiatrist who was prescribing all this stuff wonderful like hitler and inside guy once again once again back to hitler that's so crazy what a wild boy yeah are you following the uh cycle the theories that now are emerging around psychological changes that Ozempic causes? No, but I did read that it makes your heart shrink.
Well, there's some theory to that which is very concerning. Fuck yeah, it is.
But there's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, and gambling addictions. And the current theory is that what it does is it basically – it essentially increases your self-control, your self-discipline, and it reduces cravings.
And there's a theory that this is very positive. Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now.
We'll see, but that's what they think. So the theory that it's positive is the theory that, you know, if we were all like more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful and society would go better.
Counter argument would be like responsible is only part of living and it's only part of what makes a society work. And we also need risk taking and we need creativity and we need impulsiveness.
Yes. Right.
And we need variety. Yes.
And maybe we're all going to get into a channel. Right.
Right. And maybe we're not going to like where that, where that, that just by itself ends up.
Yeah. You can't have everybody disciplined.
You have to have wild fuckers out there. Yeah.
That's right. You have to have your jelly rolls of the world.
You have to be crazy people. They're fun.
They make things moreers out there yeah that's right you have to have your jelly rolls of the world you have to be crazy people they're fun yeah they make things more interesting yeah that's right if so it's essentially discipline in you know a pill form or an injectable form yeah and it's been very it's been very helpful right i've prescribed increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics and apparently it's working quite well that's crazy well that's that brings me to ibogaine which is the one thing that has like the most success for people with addictions. And it's illegal in this country.
People go down to Mexico and go to these Ibogaine retreats. It's apparently, I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane introspective journey that's very uncomfortable.
And it lasts about 24 hours. It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape or form.
Almost everyone says it's a very uncomfortable experience. But you gain unbelievable insight into what is wrong with you that makes you want to pick up heroin.
Like what's going on in there that you're trying to escape? Like what is this? And it recognizes that pathway and puts a chemical stop there. It actually like stops people from having addictive cravings.
And it rewires the way they think about things particularly beneficial to veterans a lot of veterans who have just seen way too much and come over and they're all fucked up and they don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that you know I wonder with particularly with these these Osempics and and Wegavi and all these different types of weight loss, diabetic drugs. I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects, because, you know, when I've talked to people that think that like my friend Brigham, Brigham Bueller, who runs Weights to Well, he's concerned about side effects of it.
But he's also he looks at people that are just morbidly obese. And he's like, these people, they need some fucking help.
They've gone down this terrible road. Yes, they shouldn't have done it.
Yes. OK, we all agree to that.
Don't don't eat pie all day. But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably you're in a bad state and you could probably use some help.
And maybe that could get them back on track. And maybe there's a way with maybe strength training, because one of the things is they lose a large percentage of muscle mass and bone density.
Maybe that could be mitigated with strength training. Maybe it's one of those things like if you're going to get on an OZEMPIC, you must lift weights three times a week, which is that might be it.
I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly, that's relatively easy to fix. Right.
That's right. And by the way, there's a ton of R&D going into these drugs right now.
So there's going to be many more versions of these things. I'm hopeful that we could develop something where no one can ever be obese again.
That would be really interesting. I mean maybe this is just the first steps of this, right? And then like these are crude versions of what will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that.
So the other thing I'd say – so I've been down in Florida the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff happening down there. And one of the things I learned is that the RFK – the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here.
You know, for – like with the president. And for all the controversy around some of his positions, he's very serious about this.
And a lot of people, including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field, are like, yes, it is long overdue that we look at the food system. And we look at all these, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years.
It's just a complete catastrophe. And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud.
And so it like, it's like known, but then all of a sudden there's a tipping point. All of a sudden it's not only known, but it's like obvious.
All of a sudden everybody agrees on it. Yes.
And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral, you know, exercise. Mm-hmm.

Like the no. Like this actually needs to be addressed.
Yes. This is actually a profound issue.
And we're on the road to hell and like it has to get fixed. And maybe it gets fixed chemically and maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things.
Maybe the culture has to change, but like it has to get fixed. And I'm actually, I've been very encouraged that, like, I think this is now going to be a very big focus here and not just by the government, but I think also in the culture.
I agree. And I'm very encouraged as well.
And I think as we were talking before about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country, I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards. I think that's coming too.
I think that's happening right now. One of the happiest moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listening to me talking about the benefits of it.
I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds. They're exercising regularly.
They eat healthy. It's fantastic.
It's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast. So one of my theories on this is that part of this what happened is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large looked very unhealthy.
Yes. They didn't look good.
Right. And so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got to do all the lockdowns and the masks and all that stuff.
Yeah. Bill Gates should get jacked.
That would be very helpful. He's got a lot of money.
It would be extremely helpful. Get a trainer.
When he writes the book and goes on the press tour to talk about public health. Stop eating fake meat.
Get a trainer. That would be great.
Yeah. By the way, it'd be great for him and his family and society.
It would be very reassuring. Bill Gates had a six pack.
I'd listen to him more. That I think would be absolutely fantastic.
And so like, it's just this thing. It's just like, well, of course.
Like, yes, the people who are telling us all how to live and eat ought to be healthy. Right.
And if they're not like- Clearly. And that's where RFK comes in play.
100%. He looks fantastic.
He looks great. He looks great.
Yeah. Yeah.
Super chat. Like, yeah.
It's just like, wow. Yeah.
We were taking pictures. I'm like, dude, you're jacked.
We're going to put my arm on him. I'm like, you're fucking jacked, dude.
Look at you. Yeah, exactly.
Works out all the time at Gold's Gym in Venice. There we go.
With jeans on. Awesome.
Works out with jeans on. That's old school.
I don't get that. That's amazing.
That seems weird. It seems like it gets in the way of your squats, unless you're wearing like origin jeans.
it's got a lot of stretchy fabric to it you know you have to give stretchy jeans but even then like put some shorts on you fucking weirdo like what are you doing man no it's like that's like that's like that's like prison yard credibility it's fantastic it is a little it is a little street old school you know wearing timberlands yes timberlands and a pair of jeans and doing your's kind of crazy. Exactly.
But the promotion of health is like, I don't know how anybody could be against that. Do you want more energy? Do you want more vitality in your life? Well, you should be healthier.
It's like your body's a race car and you could choose if you work hard enough to jack up the horsepower. You can make better brakes.
You can have a better fuel injection system. Like the whole thing can work way better.
All you have to do is work at it. And that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life.
It'll give you more energy for creativity, more energy for your family, more energy for your hobbies, your recreations, time with your friends. You'll literally have more energy as a human, which is what we all like.
Nobody likes waking up and feeling like shit. I mean, everybody's been hungover who's had a few drinks and you wake up in the morning like what am I doing I don't ever want to do this again why did I do this to myself and then you can't wait for the day we feel better like you drink your electrolytes you get your sleep you do whatever the fuck you can and you're like I'll be over this soon go oh your head oh and you you know everybody likes having more energy it's better for you and we could promote that as a society and the this rfk junior appointment is a really big step in that direction that we've really never had before that's right yeah you have to go back to like literally his uncle jfk had a program like this in like 1962 yeah been a long time well must all obama did for a bit right a little bit although that was like vegetarian you, although that was like vegetarian, you know, getting into like vegetarian school lunches.
Oh, was she saying vegetarian? I don't know if she was vegetarian, but like, well, Eric Adams, you know, the mayor of New York, he's been trying to push vegetarian school lunches. It's like, no.
That's not right. No, that's not right.
It's so dumb. I can't wait until they can figure out that plants really can think and feel.
Right, exactly. Because they're real close.
They're real close to proving that. They've demonstrated intelligence and allocation of resources through mycelium.
There's a lot of stuff that we know now about plants that we didn't know then. I think they're all conscious.
I think everything's conscious. Yeah, I think we need audio recordings of the screams.
Yeah. When you mow the lawn, it's just like Armageddon.
You know that they can play audio recordings of caterpillars eating leaves, and it changes the flavor profile of all the plants around it? Awesome. Yeah.
They've done this because there's a phenomenon when giraffes, if giraffes are eating, if they are upwind and they're eating leaves, as the wind comes down and gets to the other acacia trees, the acacia trees, they'll come up with this phytochemical. They produce a phytochemical that's disgusting to the giraffes and the giraffes will literally starve because they won't eat those trees.
And they do this somehow or another through communication. It's like they're preventing war.
They're being attacked by mammals and they're like, we have to stop the attack. And nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that, which is really crazy.
That's amazing. So back to the doge for a moment.
So one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system and specifically high-fractose corn syrup. Right.
High-fractose corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies. Right.
The country was – Which was good during World War II because we needed food. At one time.
Yeah. Right.
But like by the 1970s, we were massively overproducing – specifically, we were massively overproducing corn. And the corn lobby, the sort of agriculture lobby became very powerful.
And we have this government agency. One of the 450 government agencies is the USDA.
And the USDA has a dual mandate. It's to promote U.S.
agriculture, specifically things like corn. And it's also to advise us on what we should eat.
And they also do the food pyramid. And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right, for all those decades where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture.
And then that agency, it's inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure. And basically he said, thou shalt use high fructose corn syrup because it is a byproduct of corn as opposed to sugar.
Right. And as we now know, that was an absolutely poisonous decision.
Like that was like literal poison, absolutely a ruinous decision, just an absolutely terrible idea. Well, Casey Means was on here and she was explaining the very mechanism by which high fructose corn syrup encourages overconsumption.
And then it's essentially like it's an evolutionary thing that like where bears would eat like a bunch of berries to get fat for the winter. It's like these high fructose corn syrup encourages you to overconsume.
Yeah. We were not supposed to be eating this.
Right. This was not supposed to happen.
It would not have happened. Especially drinking it.
A hundred percent. Yeah.
A hundred percent. And so, but this would not have happened had the government not made it happen.
And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that. Now, they didn't, of course, they didn't understand the consequences, but that's kind of the point, which is they interfered without understanding the consequences.
And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, all right. And then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it.
Right. And then at some point, you know what the consequences are.
And then at some point, there's a question of whether they're being covered up. Right.
Right. And it's just like, okay, at some point, this has to stop.
Right. And literally, they just need to stop.
Like, they just need to stop subsidizing core and they need to stop forcing the food companies to do this. They just need to stop.
And so this goes back to, like, the regulatory reform thing, which is, like, there's just, like, tremendous amount of this that may have been good been good intentioned at one point. But sitting here today, we're living with these horrible downstream consequences.
And unless somebody steps in with a hammer, none of this is going to happen. And they also have the insane amount of money that's involved because R.J.
Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble, they decided, well, let's buy all these food companies. And so now these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer now these same companies are pushing super unhealthy food on people or at least selling super unhealthy food people which i think you should be allowed to buy right i think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want i'm all for that but i do think we should be like much more aware of what's actually going on, like you're saying, and why this stuff is in there in the first place.
Right. Well, and then you get into these other more delicate questions, but it's like, okay, food assistance programs for low-income people and low-income children.
It's like, okay, should they be? Do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline, paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18. Right.
And cheaper than other food. And cheaper than other foods because they're subsidized.
Right. Because they're subsidized.
And you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying, we're protecting you, we're protecting you, and what's been happening is they've been poisoning us. And so stuff like it just needs to stop.
And that's where you need something like the doge. And somebody like President Trump.
What would they be able to do to mitigate a lot of these issues? Like how would they – if you want to – would you make it illegal to put high fructose corn syrup as an ingredient? Or would you simply stop subsidizing? And how would that work within the government? How would you apply something like that? Yeah, I think there's three things you can do, two of which involve direct action, and then the third is maybe even the most important. So one is you can just stop doing things that are harmful.
You can stop doing things. The government can stop subsidizing bad things.
That's an example. Let me give you an example.
This is a parallel thing. If you want to clean up the universities, you need to stop feeding them student loans, right? So the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful.
So that's one. And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions.
And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that kids who have no control over it are not being poisoned. And so, you know, you maybe do that.
But I always think that the third thing is culture. Like, there's always a temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do.
And I think so much of this has to do with the culture. It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like, what is the cultural tone of the country? What's the value system? What are the role models? What are people being inspired to do? Also, what form of shaming is in effect? What are we not going to tolerate? Take the perverse, fat studies.
Are we going to glorify obesity? No. And that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case, but it's a cultural statement.
And it's not that the government should control the culture, but our leaders certainly play a big role in that, both in and outside of government. So for our leaders to step up at a moment like this and basically say, yeah, no, this is not the kind of culture we're going to have.
It's not the kind of society we're going to have. It's not what kids should be looking up to, I think.
I think it's just as powerful as the actual government actions. It's interesting you're saying the kind of shaming, because I don't want to shame anybody for being fat, but boy, does that work.
Maybe you should shame parents. Fat shaming works.
And maybe you should shame parents if their kids are fat. Yeah.
Right? The problem is there's so many people that are ignorant as to what exactly is going on. Of course.
And that's absolutely required. And they're being fed bullshit.
100%. And yes.
But again, it's also cultural, which is just like, okay, is the media thing, like is the media educating people on this? And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, should there be new media sources that are? And then therefore, which sources the media get respect? And so we have this giant collective culture question that we all get to ask and answer, and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear. So that will help.
That will help move the needle. But what specifically can RFK Jr.
do once he actually gets in? He's a secretary of HHS. He has a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government.
What kind of pushback is there going to be against that? Like that seems like a wild amount of money is going to be lost. Yeah.
So there's the work that the cabinet secretary is like he will be doing formally. And then there's the work that the Doge and the president will be doing kind of in parallel with that.
And there will be some convergence between those. And, you know, we'll see.
There's a potential here for quite dramatic action on a lot of these fronts. Could you imagine if you're running an agency and you have to have a meeting with Vivek and Elon? Yes.
And you got to open your books? Yes. Yes.
It's like office space where they brought in the bobs for consulting. Yes.
What do you do here? Exactly. That's exactly what it's like.
Isn't there a meme like that? Isn't there a meme like that? I think there's a meme where they take those guys and they put Elon and Vivek's heads on them. Yes.
So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago. Actually, two and a half years ago when Elon, actually right before he took over Twitter, where he got in an email fight with the CEO of Twitter at the time,

who's actually a guy who's a friend of mine, who's a really good guy.

But literally, this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company,

and then like a month later, he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation.

So kind of got a little bit sandbagged on it.

But yes.

Of course he said.

Elon Musk says he rewatched office space to prepare for Doge.

Of course he did.

Of course he said. Elon Musk says he rewatched office space to prepare for Doge.

Of course he did.

Of course he did.

Fucking psycho.

Exactly.

God, we're so lucky that guy's around.

Exactly.

So there was this moment in the Twitter takeover where Elon sends his email and he says, and the line is, what did you get done this week?

Whoa.

What did you get done this week?

And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.
Oh, my God. Right? Like the level of like accelerated, like, okay, what are the problems? How are we going to fix them? And what have you gotten done this week? Yeah.
You think deep banking upended some lives? Yes, exactly. So yes.
What have you done this week? And by the way, when Elon runs this guy, it's actually interesting. A guy just tweeted or posted or has eaten what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI.
And he said, Elon came in last week and he said, Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five minute chunks. And it was every five, each person had a five-minute speaking slot

to explain to Elon what they were doing.

Wow.

And he did that for, you know,

five times whatever, right?

All for 18 hours.

Jesus Christ.

And so think about what that meant.

Every employee had an opportunity

to tell the big boss what they were working on.

Every employee had an opportunity

to be recognized for their effort.

Every employee had an opportunity

to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing. Whoa.
And there's no place to hide. Right.
Whoa. Think of how different it is for a company to be run that way.
Right. And even, again, the Valley companies generally are quite well run by sort of business standards.
And even that, like that's a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to. Now, imagine that applied to government To government.
And again, this is the kind of thing. There's no law that – there's no reason it can't be done.
There's no law that prevents that. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't do that.
It's a choice. How the government is run is a choice on the part of the executive branch and the president for how it's going to get run.
And there's no reason why the government can't literally be run this way. And here's what's crazy.
The pushback against even the concept of this by leftists. So leftists defending bureaucratic bloat and big government is wild to watch.
Which they really shouldn't be doing, which is a weird thing to have wedged themselves into. My hope is they'll figure out how weird this is.
Do you think it's like just an ideological thing? Like the right wants this, so we oppose it? I think the left thinks they control the government. Like I think 50 years ago, they would have been on the other side of this issue.
Like Noam Chomsky 50 years ago, would have been on the other side of this. He would have viewed government power as an extension of like the state and big business intertwined.
And you have these just term manufacturing of consent, where it's like government and business are conspiring against you. So he would have been on the other side of this.
But I think today's leftists think they control the government, which in many ways they do. Well, so Washington, D.C.
voted 94% for Kamala, 6% for Trump. And so, okay, so two data points.
That is data point number one. Data point number two, four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington, DC.
Wow. Lobbyists.
Lobbyists. They call beltway bandits.
That's a crazy job. Is the actual term.
And these aren't people working for the government. These are people making money from the government.
These are people sponging off the government. And so, like, yeah, to the extent that Democrats have wedged themselves into a position where they're defending this, they really shouldn't.
They should really rethink this. They should figure out how to get back to the correct mentality on this that they used to have.
No, if there's less government bloat, then there's less tax dollars. You don't need as much money to fund these things.
Yeah, that's right. There's like people can be taxed less.
There can be more allocation of these funds towards these social programs that we all want. You know, most federal workers never came back to work.
Really? Yeah, they work from home. Most? Most, yeah.
A very large percentage. Something like half just literally just never came back.
Whoa. They still, by the way, still draw a paycheck, they're still on their jobs, but literally they're not in the office.
Or in some cases they they have an agreement where there's one agency, I won't name, but there's one agency where there's, okay, here's another great thing. There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants, have full civil service protections and unionized.
Entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but they both have civil service protections, which by the way, are totally made up up. There's no concept in the constitution of civil service protections.
It's just a totally made up thing. And they're unionized.
And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return of the office from COVID. And the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month.
Whoa. And actually, the pattern now is what they do is the employees come in on the last day of the month and the first day of the following month.
So they only have to be there for two days. For two months.
Out of 60 days. That's crazy.
As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right? Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there. And then they go live someplace nice.
You know, someplace nice. But, you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something where the cost of living is cheaper and they have a bigger house.
And, you know, in theory, they're working from home. But, you know, like is it actually happening? And this is – again, this is the Doge.
This is one of the things – the Doge, they've already announced. The thing they've said is you can work from home just not for the federal government.
Right. Yeah.
And so when people are talking about like is the Doge going to be able to do anything, like it's just, okay, there's 50 percent of the federal workforce. Right.
And as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that? And to your point on paying taxes, like if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better, fair enough. Of course.
But if they're kicking it at home, maybe not. Yeah, maybe not.
And how much oversight has there been on whether or not they've been kicking it? Excellent question. Yeah.
Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out. So, for example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access, like to email, you can actually – often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network.
You can actually audit, and you can see who's been working. And then there's a – do you know about mouse wigglers? Yes.
Yeah. Yes.
Programs. No, no, actually physical.
Oh, they're physical mouse wigglers now. Yeah, physical mouse wigglers.
And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it. And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight.
And so he actually wrote himself on a weekend an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all employees for a week. And then he bought all 50 mouse wigglers from China that you can buy.
And he fingerprinted them all. And he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers.
And so how many federal employees are using mouse wigglers. How crazy is that that that's how they can measure whether or not you're active? Yeah.
Whether your mouse is moving? Yeah. Like what are they seeing? Just a pattern of movement of the mouse? That's it? Well, the mouse wigglers move in a way that you can fingerprint.
So is this like, do you agree to a certain amount of disclosure of your personal information while you're working? Like how do you get access to mouse wiggles? Oh, so it's very common. So in corporate environments, it's very common that your company-issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software and gives the company some level of visibility to what you're doing.
And that doesn't mean they're literally washing you. But it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to see how much is the computer on is the most moving.
And so that's actually a reasonably common thing. I heard the most ridiculous argument against this.
They're like, what are you going to do with all those employees that get fired? Like, what are you going to do with all those people who are stealing hubcaps? They're making a living stealing. What are you going to do if you make hubcaps stealing illegal? Like, what are you talking about? They're essentially stealing tax dollars.
If they really are doing something that's totally useless, and we're wasting enormous amounts of money on this every year, the argument that what are you going to do if those people can't do that anymore is really crazy. Well, the answer is they can do something productive.
Yeah. And people are more than capable.
You don't have to infantilize someone to say, like, this is the only thing they're capable of doing. They've worked for the government for 20 years.
This is all they can do. Yeah.
And then, by the way, there's multiple knock-on effects, positive knock-on effects. If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects.
So one is, if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes, and you can just simply, the private economy then just simply has more money because it hasn't been taken. And so if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend.
Right. Right.
Because the money reallocates. And so there might be just as much demand in the economy.
It's just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it. So that's number one.
Number two, you can bring down government debt, which means you can bring down government interest. And the government today, the federal government today pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense.
Right. But how much of that is salary? No, no.
that's just interest on the debt. Right.
That's just interest on the old debt. Okay.
We pay like $1.2 billion a year right now, I think is the latest number, which is just interest on debt. It's not paying for any good or service.
It's just interest on debt. But again- What percentage of that is the- What? Of the GDP? Well, so the total government spending is on the order of $7 trillion.
Interest payments are like $1.2 trillion, something like that. $1.2 trillion a year.
I think that's the current number. DOD is $800 billion a year.
So $1.2 trillion. Just off the top.
Yeah, just off the top. And again, nobody's benefiting from that.
It's just interest payments. That's bananas.
Right. And total GDP is like, I don't know.
It's $20, $30, $40 trillion. It's much larger than that.
But still. It's enough.
This is a lot of money. And the total accumulated debt is $35 trillion.
The total accumulated debt is $35 trillion and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every 100 days. Yes.
Oh, my God. It hurts my head.
There's a congressman, actually, Thomas Massey. So he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this.
And he's one of the only libertarians. And he's an MIT engineer.
And he actually designed himself a pocket lapel pin calculator of the government debt. And he wears it every day in Washington, D.C.
So he walks around with this scroll? He walks with a little scrolling LED display on his lapel. And it literally counts.
It counts the debt. And it's accurate.
It's pulling data from the US Treasury, and it's actually an accurate count. And so it's like $34 trillion, $35 trillion, $36 trillion.
Here's the kicker. At the current pace, at the compounding, the debt will cross $100 trillion in the foreseeable future.
So he's already working on the redesign because he needs a bigger device with a bigger screen to be able to display the bigger number. How much anxiety do you get standing around him looking at that? That's his goal, right? Because otherwise, the status quo in Washington is just let this happen.
Right. And so anyway, so another way you benefit is reduction of interest.
And then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates. If you bring down the amount of debt in the economy, you bring down interest rates.
And then everybody else who buys things, when you go to buy for a house, your mortgage is cheaper. So anybody who ever borrows money in the real economy, then therefore is better off.
Right. This is the argument against it being only good for wealthy people.
Oh, it's good for everybody. Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever get car loan, home loan, small business loan.
You want to bring down interest rates. But this fundamental discussion of it, like the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation, all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier, and it's going to ruin the middle class and ruin the lower class.
Everyone else is going to suffer. So just observationally, almost all the rich people in our society were for Kamala.
Really? Yeah. The Democratic Party – so Democrat, Republican – it's what they call – it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration.
So the Democratic Party is the top and the bottom versus the middle. So the top is what you might call the sort of upper middle class coastal elites.
So it's everybody who went to the fancy schools. It's everybody with the fancy jobs.
It's for sure me. I guess your grandfathered in.
Yeah. Right.
But it's like, you know, it's like fancy. It's like high net worth, high income people with primarily knowledge working jobs.
Right. So professor, reporter, programmer, right, database expert.
Author. Author, lawyer, you know, accountant, banker, like all the sort of, you know, quote, elite jobs.
and all the elite degrees, by the way, who all went to the top schools and got the elite degrees. So that's the top.
And then the bottom is what you call the clientele underclass. And it's what they call the rainbow coalition.
So it's the minority groups. And so it's the assembly of low-income African-Americans, low-income Latinos, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Recent immigrants. Recent immigrants and so forth, right? And so that's the Democratic coalition that they explicitly program against.
And then Republicans in our era, Republicans are in the, it's the middle class, lower middle class, you know, it's all the people who don't have the fancy degrees and that are doing all the actual work that's basically making the country run, right. So it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, the truck

drivers, truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage men and janitor.

It's like everybody who goes to work nine to five, has a job, probably either small

business or a physical job.

You know, it's sort of, say, labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the

hands, right, right, kinds of stuff.

So kind of the so-called real economy, which is why, right, the Republicans are concentrated

it in the center and the south, because that's where all those things are. And then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast, which is where all the symbolic, you know, creative intellectual jobs are.
And so the weird thing that's happened is liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right?

Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man.

And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out.

And then you saw that in this most recent election where the unions, the union leadership still for the most part endorsed Kamala.

But the rank and file voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases. And the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.
What do you think the motivation of all these wealthy people to vote for Kamala Harris was? Because they feel great, because they're saving the world. Yes, it is.
It's amazing to be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad. And like you're elite.
You get to be the elite. You get to make the elite decisions.
And if you want to be in that group, you have to. You got to do this.
And you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your clientele. It's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in.
And it's why if you read the media, New York times, it's just, it's, it's either New York times only has two articles anymore. It's either how evil are Republicans or how, you know, innocent and helpless are, you know, poor, you know, poor aggrieved minorities or, you know, identity groups.
Right. And so oppositional force.
And then, but we're the party of good with a capital G because we're taking care of all these poor marginalized people. So it's a very compelling, you feel great about yourself, right? It's just absolutely amazing.
And then by the way, it just so happens that the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money for not working very hard and it's all great. And then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I found myself in, where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to somebody, you know, running a restaurant or whatever because – But it's just like you're not affected by the rising crime rates because you live in a safe neighborhood.
Right. And you've got to – you know, you're against the wall on the border, but you've got a wall around your house.
Right. Right.
And so you just – you're in this bubble. Uh-huh.
And then you only ever talk to people who agree with you. Right.
And then the media is constantly reinforcing it.

And then you get ostracized if you disagree.

And that's,

that's the wedge.

Like that's the way.

And it worked like,

look for a long time,

it were for 40,

50,

60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power.

It's just,

it's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it,

it can no longer win.

And so therefore it,

it has to get reexamined.

So for you,

when you had this shift of thinking, you talk to the waiter, and then the Hillary Clinton speech, and then like, how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things? And like, how much of a reluctance is there? Well, so from 2016 to 2020, I was just like trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then COVID hit.
And then I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with COVID.

And, you know, our business, you know, went crazy.

Our business caved in and had all kinds of crazy, horrible things happening.

And, you know, we have all these companies.

We have hundreds of companies who are responsible for our startups.

And so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything.

But really it was, I mean, really the big thing was the Biden administration just like flat out tried to kill us.

Like they just came like straight at us and they came straight at our founders. And so, and they tried to kill crypto and they were, they were on their way to trying to kill AI.
I mean, they were, they were horrible. Like there were a second.
What was the motivation to kill AI? Because it's, because they want, they want control. I mean, they want control.
They want to control. They want to control in the same way they can.
So they recognize the potential of it and they wanted to head it off of the path. They want to control it.
They want to put it in a headlock. They don't necessarily want to stop it, but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they control social media, in the same way that they control the press.
So how are they trying to do that? I mean, so it's the AI. Think about it as the same dynamics that cause censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI.
And so there's a couple steps. So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in a headlock and control them.
So you basically want to give, you basically want to have a government, you want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government. And then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel.
And how would they do that? That's a threat to the control. So it's a concept called regulatory capture.

And so the way – and this has happened many times for hundreds of years.

This is like a very well-established kind of thing in economics and politics.

So if – suppose you're a big bank.

Suppose you're Jamie Dimon.

You run JPMorgan Chase.

Like what's like the biggest possible threat of what you could possibly face?

It's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business. You know, you're Kodak.
You know. Right.
You're Kodak. Right.
You're making a ton of money on analog film and the digital cameras come along and you get destroyed. And in your obituary, it's like you're the idiot.
Blockbuster video. Blockbuster video.
Like that's the cautionary tale. Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around a campfire at night.
They're just absolutely terrifying.

And business schools teach you that's the one thing you do not want to do.

And so there's two ways to try to deal with that.

One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you.

But that's hard because you're running a big company and these startups are out there doing all these crazy things.

And can you really do that?

And it's hard and frisky and dangerous.

The other thing you can do is you can go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation. We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long.
And in fact, the more the better. We want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business.
Because I'm a big company. I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people, right? I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.
But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulation such that the next startup comes along and just literally, the next company comes along and just literally can't function. And by the way, this is literally what happened in banking.
So pre-2008, pre the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year. People would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds.
After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too-big-to-fail banks, right? The banks were too big. And so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too-big-to-fail banking problem.
They implemented that in 2011. I call that the Big Bank Protection Act of 2011.
It was marketed as it was going to solve the problem of the too-big-to-fail banks. What it actually did was it made them much larger.
So those banks are, those too-big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out, are now much larger than they were before. The banking industry has concentrated into those banks.
All the midsize banks are being shaken out. And periodically, they'll go under.
The bank in Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley Bank, right? It went under. And this has been happening all across the economy.
And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero. And so the banking system is being centralized basically into 10 big banks.
They actually have a term. They have a great term called GSIB, globally significant something-something bank.
And so there's like 10 GSIBs. And then basically what's going to happen is those are going to consolidate basically into the three big banks.
And if you get debanked by one of the big three. You're done.
You're absolutely done.

Oh, my God.

But think about it from the other side.

If you're the treasury secretary and you want your political enemy debanked, it's just a phone call.

Right.

Which is what has been happening, which was happening under the prior regime.

Wow.

Right.

And again, like at that.

Zero.

Zero new banks.

Yeah, zero.

Literally, it was like cardiac arrest. It was like that's it for new bank charters.
And we've had companies that have tried to Zero new banks. Yeah, zero.
Literally, it was like cardiac arrest.

It was like, that's it for new bank charters.

And we've had companies that have tried to start new banks, and it's essentially impossible because you have to comply with the wall of regulation.

You need to go hire your 10,000 compliance people and your lawyers.

But you can't afford to do that because you're not big enough yet.

So you can't function.

Like, you can't exist.

Wow.

Like, it's not- it's ruled out.

By definition, it's ruled out. You can't do it.
It's not financially viable. Right.
So that happened in banking. That's what they've been doing to social media.
It's been the same, it's been, and by the way, this has happened in many other industries. By the way, this happened, you know, the food industry has greatly consolidated.
That's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well. And it's the intertwining of government and the company, right? Because at that point, it's like, okay, is this a private company? Yes.
Like, it's still a private company. It has a stock price.
It has a CEO. Does the CEO have to do everything that the relevant cabinet secretary tells him to do? Yes, he does.
Why does he have to do that? Because if not, it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and frottological examinations for the rest of his life.

Wow. So it's essentially what we accuse the CCP of doing in China.
So if you combine

banking and social media and

now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score.

Right. Is where you end up with this.

And this goes back to the trucker strike thing. You don't have to threaten to take away

somebody's kids. You just threaten to take away their insurance.
You don't threaten to take away their insurance. It's not government insurance that's being taken away.
The same thing has happened in the insurance industry. It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies.
They're super regulated. If the government doesn't want you to have insurance, you're not going to have insurance.
And there's no constitutional right to insurance. So there's, so there's, there's no appeal process.
We're back to the debanking thing. And so that happened in banking.
That's been happening in social media generally. It's been happening in many other sectors.
And then it's happening specifically in AI. And what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen.
Because, again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right? It's going to really screw them up. And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, the trade is we'll do whatever the government wants.
And if you assume the government is controlled by, you know, people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's going to come right along with it. And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically

biased. You can do this today.
You just go on, you go into these systems today and you just like ask, you start asking like really basic questions. Gemini is the best example of that, right? When they had multiracial Nazis.
The black Nazis. Yeah.
Once again, we're back to the Nazis. Yes.
So it turns, according to Gemini, Hitler had an excellent DEI policy. Yeah.
Now, in reality, he did not. And it's important to understand that in reality, he did not.
But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because they programmed it to be biased. They programmed it in a political direction.
There's this guy, David Rosado, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side, where he shows the incidence rates of the rise woke-like language, like in the media. And there's similar studies that have come out for the AI where there's studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs because you can ask them questions and they'll tell you.
And they're just like nine out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased. And then there's a handful that aren't.
And then there's tremendous pressure. This is one of the threats from the government is the government basically going to force our startups to come into compliance, not just with their trade rules, but also with all of their – essentially a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.
Wow, that's terrifying. Yeah, exactly.
And yes, and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse. And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's, quote, just people talking to each other.
AI is going to be the control layer on everything. Right.
So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn at school. It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans.
It's going to be the control layer on does your house open when you come to the front door. It's going to be the control layer on everything.
Right. And so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, like we are in for a very bad future.
And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening. And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path.
Like they were very clearly going for that. And it was just like crystal clear that's where it was headed.
And do you feel like with a second administration, they'd be even more emboldened to act in that direction? Yes. 100%.
Another Biden administration, for sure. And then there was an open question around Kamala, and the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.

And so, you know, you could imagine a Kamala administration that had a very different approach,

but she refused to clarify any of her positions.

Right.

And so we had to assume that they would be the same as Biden's, which I think is the

default case.

Now, is this a closeted sort of a perspective in Silicon Valley?

Do people hide these thoughts that this administration would be bad for business?

Thank you. closeted sort of a perspective in Silicon Valley? Do people hide these thoughts that this administration would be bad for business? I mean, much less now than we used to.
Yeah. I mean, look, Elon really broke a lot of it.
Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up. One is he bought Twitter, which really gave us a place to talk about this stuff, all of us.
But then also he himself, of course, started to actually express himself. And so he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure to be able to say these things.
And then look, it's like a cascade where people are like, okay, apparently you can now talk about things. Okay, I have some things to say.
Well, and then look, also just they went too far. They tightened the screws.
I mean, they really came at us at the heart. And so the harder they come at us, like we didn't predict.
When Biden won, like we didn't think it would have negative effects on our business. We thought, yeah, probably taxes will go up, but like we'll just keep doing business.
But then they did all these things, right? And it took a couple of years to figure out that this was not like a temporary thing. Like this was like a conservative campaign and that they were really coming for us.
What agency specifically is involved in doing that? Oh, I mean, they have Alphabet Soup, But like SEC, SEC tried to kill crypto very specifically. FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized.
There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle, commodities futures. There's crypto that's a security.
There's some forms of crypto that are a security and the SEC regulates. There's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the CFTC regulates.
The CFPB I mentioned earlier, so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, right, decided that they were also going to regulate AI, which they just volunteered for. And then, you know, the FAA killed the drone industry years ago.
The reason why we don't have, the reason why the Chinese are winning in the drone wars is because the FAA basically made drones illegal in the U.S. years ago.

So like the FAA has been a big problem.

You know, the – what is it?

Also the FAA – When you say made drones illegal but you can still buy drones, like what have they done?

So legally you cannot fly a drone in the U.S. that is beyond line of sight if you don't have a pilot's license.

Wow. Which means if you're a U.S.
drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation. So you have to handicap your ability.
Yes. So either the U.S.
drone needs to either not fly beyond line of sight, which is not very useful, right? Right. Or it needs to somehow validate.
We only have customers that have pilot's licenses. China, there's no such restriction.
And the Chinese, because we run a more open economy, the Chinese drones you can just buy in the U.S. and use however you want.
Technically, as the user of the drone, you're out of compliance with the law, but they ignore that part. They just punish the American drone makers.
Wow. And that's why Chinese own the drone market, and that's why 90% of the drones used by the U.S.
military and by U.S. police are Chinese-made drones, which again – That sounds like a terrible security risk.
It's a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon. Oh, criminy.
Yes. Well, I've seen the advancements in Chinese drones in particular, the choreographed dances that they do in the sky where they had – did you see the dragon one? Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. See if you can find that, Jamie.
Chinese dragon drone display. It's like one of the largest ones they ever did.
Yeah. It's unbelievable how much more advanced they are.
Yeah. And I will tell you the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this, or worse than zero.

Like just, I would say, absolute contempt for the idea of a U.S. drone industry.

Yeah.

So let's watch this thing.

See if you can go full screen on that.

Like this is just a grid in the sky.

Look at this.

They're flying up together.

Yeah.

They did one that was at night, Jamie, because they were all lit up.

It's on this video.

It's just full.

Oh, okay.

I can skip ahead.

So imagine those with guns.

Jesus Christ. Coming at you, right? Well, we get to see some of that in Ukraine.
Yeah, 100%. Absolutely.
Yeah. We've seen those suicide drones.
Like, look at this. That dragon in the sky is drones that are all lit up.
I mean, that is unbelievable. It even has a puff of fire coming out of its mouth.
Yeah. That's incredible.
If they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones, Oh my God. It's carnage.
Dude, don't even put that out there. Don't put that voodoo on me, Ricky Bobby.
Sorry. Look at that heart in the sky with a heartbeat.
Correct. This is insane.
Correct. Yes.
It's so incredible. Yes.
They had a little one like that that played over the Eminem concert when I was at CODA at the Circuits of the Americas here.

They had this giant Eminem concert with like 100,000 people there.

And then afterwards, they had like drones in the sky that did little dances.

Chinese drones.

I bet.

I bet they were.

They weren't like this, though.

It wasn't at that level.

I mean, that's unbelievable.

Enjoy the show while you can.

That's crazy that that's a Chinese thing only. Yeah.
Yeah. Look, DOD runs on these.
Soldiers in the field, it's very common, soldiers, just normal grunt soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or up on the roof. Yeah, and these are Chinese-made drones.
And every single one of them can be taken over by China and used for whatever they want. Oh, my God.
Anytime they want. Is the Trump administration on this? They're very – I don't know what they'll do.
It's somewhere in the priority order of the things that they're dealing with. But they are – yes, they are well aware of this.
Well, I mean – It's the kind of thing I would hope that would get some attention. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, this is the – brings us back to the UAP thing because if that's what we're seeing, we're seeing super sophisticated Chinese drones that operate on some novel propulsion system.
That's not good. And that could be because they put ridiculous regulations on drone manufacturers in America.
Yeah, that's right. And they got way ahead of us.
Yeah, that's right. These are bad.
These are bad. Also, you're just opening my eyes to this.
I always had this rose-colored glasses view of our society versus the Chinese society. Our society is more open.
So people can innovate and come up with new startups and all these crazy ideas because there's so much freedom in America. They don't have to deal with the government being involved in every business.
Silly me. Silly me.
I was wrong. So this is my argument I make geopolitically in D.C., which is if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the U.S.
and China, the same way that in the 20th century it was the U.S. versus the Soviet Union.
And like contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war. That's the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century.
Then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side. And then as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself? Maxine Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency.
She was talking about that. In order to compete with China, we have to come up with a centralized digital currency.

Which in my view is exactly the wrong thing.

Yes, I heard that.

I was like, that's a terrible idea.

It's exactly the wrong thing.

You got to be like China to compete with China?

It's exactly the wrong thing.

It's exactly the wrong thing.

You don't want that.

Because the China system has its problems.

They terrorize their own population directly.

They do impose the social credit score stuff.

They do all this stuff.

And then by the way, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism. Xi Jinping is not a capitalist.
And there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China. A friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, he said, every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.
And they're all trying to get their money out, and they're all trying get their families out because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China because the government might just snatch you, like literally physically snatch you at any point and you may or may not come back. And then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to.
And by the way, and drag you into training. This is a great thing.
Okay. So you're sitting here, you're the CEO of a company with 50 billion revenue and 100,000 employees.
And this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours, getting grilled on how well you understand Marx. So that actually happens, right? Political officers.
And that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union. And that's the kind of thing that happens in China.
So you'd rather be a CEO in the US than in China, for sure, as long as the US system actually stays open, where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products. And that's why this administration freaked us out so much, is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China.
See, I was not nearly as aware as I should have been about all these things you're saying. I didn't know this.
I did know about the banks, and I certainly didn't know that they were cracking down on AI the same way they cracked down on social media. The AI thing was very alarming.
We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans. What kind of – can you talk about it? Basically just full government control.
This sort of thing. There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government.
They told us, they just said, don't even start startups. Don't even bother.
There's just no way. There's no way that they can succeed.
There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen. Wow.
Yeah. They said, this is already over.
It's going to be two or three companies, and we're going to control them. And that's that.
This is is already finished. Oh my God.
When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? You go endorse Donald Trump. Oh my God.
And again, I'll just tell you, because I'm going to get a lot of, the flack I'm going to get for whatever right winger. But like I was a Democrat.
I was like a Democrat. I supported Bill Clinton in 92.
I supported Clinton in 96. I supported Gore, who I knew very well in 2000.
I knew John Kerry. I supported him in 04.
I supported Obama. I supported Hillary in 16.
Like I was like a Democrat in good standing. And then.
Are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now? Like are you allowed to hang out with people? So there's now – this is actually true. There's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley.
They fractured cleanly in half. There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day.
Which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago. But everybody has fully updated their views for that day and that's what they talk about at the dinner party and i'm no longer invited to those nor nor do i want to go to them and then and then there's the other kind which is you know david sacks and like all these guys and all these people and you know just this growing universe you know it's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture which is like hey let's actually get together and talk about things and have right but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the MyPillow guy.
You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, no disrespect, Mike, to the MyPillow guy. But you know what I'm saying? Like, I want people that are smarter than me to be saying these things.
That's what helps. It helps when you say, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about.
They're very well informed and they understand the repercussions. They understand, like, what's been coming their way.
And there's people like yourself that could speak about these, these, the plans that you're laying out, what they were trying to do with AI is fucking terrifying. That should terrify everybody where you have bureaucrats are now in control of potentially the most, the biggest agent of change in the history of the human race, potentially.
And you're going to let what the people that can't even balance the budget? People that don't know what the fuck is going on? That sounds insane. And look, my hope, I think under Clinton and Gore, I think that they dealt with this very different.
I mean, look, they dealt with the internet very differently than the current crop are dealing with these technologies. Well, it was very different.
It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could, so there used to be this thing I called the deal with a capital D. And the deal was you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product.
Everybody loved you. It was great.
Glowing press coverage, the whole thing. You take the company public, it employs a lot of people, creates a lot of jobs.
You make a lot of money. At some point, you cash out, and then you donate all the money to charity, and everybody thinks you're a hero.
Right? And it's just great, right? And this is how it ran for a very long time. And this was the deal.
This was Clinton and Gore were 100% in support of that, and they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech. And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment.
And basically, what happened is the last 15 years or so of Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world. Like every single part of that was shattered, right, where just like technology became presumptively evil, right? And like, you know, if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person.
And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot. And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you.
And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil. And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.
So I'll give you the ultimate case. Here's where I radicalized on this topic.
So you'll recall some years back, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla, you know, they have a ton of money in Facebook stock. They created a nonprofit entity called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the original mission was to literally cure all disease.
And this could be like, you know, $200 billion going to cure all disease, right? So like a big deal. They said they committed to donate 99% of their assets to this new foundation.
They got brutally attacked from the left. And the attack was they're only doing it to save money on taxes.
Now, basic mathematics. You don't give away 99% of your money to save money on taxes.
Right. But it was a vicious attack.
It was like a very, very aggressive attack. And the fundamental reason for the attack was how dare they treat that money like it's their own? How dare they decide where it goes? Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent.
The government should take the money and the government should allocate it. And that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do.
What do you think is the root of that kind of thinking? Utopian. This is a utopian collectivism.
You know, it's the- Socialism that works. Socialism.
Yeah. It's the core idea of socialism.
Like the core idea is this, this is sort of, there's a radical egalitarianism. Everybody should be exactly the same.
All outcomes should be exactly the same. Everything should be completely fair at all times.
And some root of it has to be an envy. Of course.
Yeah. Envy, resentment.
Yes. Nietzsche had this great term they called resentiment.
And it's like turbocharged resentment. And so the way he described it is re-sentiment is envy, resentment, and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values.
And the things that used to be good become bad and the things that used to be bad become good. Right.
Philanthropy becomes bad. Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.
I was not aware of that blowback. I would have loved to read some of those comments.
I would like to go to their page and see what else they comment on. I'll give you another example.
Here's another radicalizing moment for me. So my friend Sheryl Sandberg, who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook.
And by the way, Democrat, liberal. By the way, endorsed Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things.
She actually worked in the Clinton administration, died in the world, Democrat. She wrote this book called Lean In about 12 years ago.
It's this sort of feminist manifesto, and it basically said— Lean in? Lean in. Lean in.
And the thesis of lean in was that women in their lives and careers could, quote, unquote, lean in. She said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning into the table and sitting like in front.
And then the women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on. She said the women should lean in.
It became a metaphor for her for women should like lean in on their careers. They should like aggressively advocate for themselves to get like raises and promotions.
Like men do. Like men do.
They should basically women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and then therefore perform better. And so it was like, it was a manifesto to women basically saying, be more confident, be more assertive, be more aggressive, be more successful.
And I read the draft of the book when she was writing it. And I said, well, you know, you realize you've written a right-wing manifesto.
Right. Right.
And she looks at me like I've lost my mind, right, because she's a lifelong lefty. She's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, this book is a statement that women have agency.
This book is a statement that the things that women choose to do will lead to better results. But that's what people believe on the right.
On the left, what people believe is that women are only, always, and ever victims. And if a woman doesn't succeed in a career, it's because she's being discriminated against.
And so I said, I predicted when this book comes out, right- wingers are going to think it's great. And you're going to get it like the left is going to come at you.
Because you're violating the fundamental principle of the left, which is anybody who does less well as a victim, which in that case is exactly what happened. By the way, the reviews were all by women.
And they tore into her like in every major publication, they just like completely ripped her. And they're like, how dare this rich, entitled woman be telling us, you know, these would be telling women that they're not victims and that they're, you know, that they have all this agency because this is denial of sexism, right? It's denial of oppression.
Wow. Because imagine if a man wrote a book like that for men.
Right. That was patriarchy, right? That's, you know, that would be- Well, but I mean, but men wouldn't attack it.
Oh, right. Exactly right.
It would be a guidebook.

Yeah, that's right. This is how you kick ass and get ahead.

Yeah, we call it self-help.

Lean in, bro.

Lean in.

Just call it lean in, bro.

Exactly right.

Wow, that's crazy.

She could attack for that.

So again, it's the inversion.

It's the resentment.

It's the inversion, which is like advocating on your own behalf and choosing to do things

that make you more successful.

What was her reaction to that?

I would say she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not pleased.

I mean, she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not pleased.

But also, was she shocked that you were correct?

Did you have a follow-up conversation with her?

What did she say?

We've talked about it a lot.

Like, God damn it, Mark, how'd you see that one coming?

So she was in the, but the answer is her worldview of how these things worked was from a different,

it was from the Clinton-Gore era in which you could say things like that. You could talk like that.
Yes. And by the time the book came out, it was already into the second Obama term heading it, right? And then the woke stuff started and then at that point you could no longer say things like that.
Wow. And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, right, us versus them, right, oppressor versus oppressed kind of mindset.
And so it's such a contrast to what we hoped would happen when Obama would be president. That's right.
My thought was, OK, look, there's still some racism, but clearly if you're the baddest motherfucker, you can get ahead. Like you can win.
The country will vote for you. That's not what happened.
No. And you can win again.
You can win twice. You win twice.
go twice twice and be like I've always said up until I've lost a lot of respect for him from some of the things that he said during this election cycle because I think they got desperate and they just resorted to actual lies and I thought this is crazy to see him lying especially the very fine people hoax and we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said. And it's pretty shocking because he's very explicit.
You know, he's saying not white nationalists, not neo-Nazis, they should be condemned. He says that very clearly.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who are protesting the taking down of this statue.
And when you see a guy like Obama do that, it's such a bummer because he was the guy for me that was like our best spokesman. He was like, here's a guy that came from a single family or single parent household.
He wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life. He's this brilliant speaker.
He's like he's handsome. He represents like what we're hoping for.
We're hoping for a colorblind society that just treats people on the merit of who they are and anyone can achieve. And look, here he is.
He made it. And then all of a sudden, identity politics goes through the fucking roof and victim mentality becomes a thing that people choose to side with.
It just gets real weird for a long time. Yeah, that's right.
That's right. And like I said, I hope they can find their way back.
But this lady's still on Team Kamala. Oh, yeah.
She got a few lessons out of that, but not all of them. Well, no, this is, if you're, you know, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, this is, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, and if that's, you know, if that is, in this quarter, a lot of people's value systems, then it's a real challenge, you know.
Oh, yeah, it's my parents. When your movement goes in directions.
Well. And you can choose to follow into the craziest version of it, or you can choose to say, you know what? I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going to advocate for my team to come back.
This is Richie Torres. This guy is a congressman in Queens, I think, or the Bronx.
He actually started out, everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty because he's gay, he's black, he's Latino. He was like at least associated with the squad early on.
And he's like one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks saying, clearly, we have to get back to sense. Like we have to get back to common sense.
We have to get back to moderation. We have to have law enforcement.
We can't have crime in the streets. We have to have a border.
you know, we have to get, we Democrats have to get back to moderation. We have to have law enforcement.
We have to have – we can't have crime in the streets.

We have to have a border.

We have to get – we, the Democrats, have to get back to moderation in a sense.

And so he is hoping to lead the party.

That's great.

I think he's – we support him and I think he's like a really – I think he's a very impressive guy.

So there are people like – and he's young and very energetic and I think he has a very bright future.

But that's the kind of person who could lead the party. Well, the big Nietzschean shift was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala and everybody cheered.
If there's not a better example than that, please tell me what it is, because that one was fucking nuts. Like Dick Cheney was always the hard right.
Like during the Bush administration, all the lefties looked at him like that was Satan. That's right.
He was the profiteer. That's right.
He was the manipulator. He was the guy pulling the strings.
Yeah. He was the CEO of Hal Burton.
That's right. The whole thing was so crazy.
And to see, oh, Dick Cheney just endorsed Kamala. And everybody's like, yay.
Look, Dick Cheney's on our side. Like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? This is the best shift of it, right? Yeah, that's right.
That's right. That's right.
All of a sudden, we're all neocons. All of a sudden, as you said, all of a sudden, we're pro-war.
It's like, wait, wait. Because as you know, the Democrats used to be the anti-war party.
Yes. They were the anti-war party for a very long time.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah. Except back when they were trying to keep Slavery Act.
That's part of the problem. That was a different.
People don't realize that. That was a different era.
But, you know, coming out of Vietnam, they were definitely the anti-war party for like, you know, 30 years. But isn't that a shift as well? Yeah, it was.
But the shift of the Republicans from back in the day being Abraham Lincoln and trying to get rid of slavery and the Democrats fighting to keep it. Like there's these weird ideological swings.
They happen.

And... And they're trying to get rid of slavery and the Democrats fighting to keep it.
Like there's these weird ideological swings. They happen.
And, you know, we're still attached to the idea of being a Democrat is like being a Clinton Democrat. We're in this weird sort of denial of what the ideology actually stands for versus how we think of ourselves when we say I'm a Democrat.
I'm a good person. You know support civil rights, women's rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Down the line, I'm a Democrat. And if you go against that, well, now you're against all these things that you know to be inherently important for society.
Yeah, that's right. They got you.
Yeah, that's right. They got you.
They roped you into some crazy thing where you're supporting war. And then there's the big faction, right? There's the big free Palestine versus support Israel.
Yeah. Because the left always supported Israel.
Yeah, 100%. And then all of a sudden there's this free Palestine movement, which divides the left even further.
Yeah. There's a book written some years back by this guy, Norman Podhoretz.
Why are Jews liberal? Right. And he was a right-wing Jew.
He was a right-wing Jew very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s. And he's like he basically is like basically he had this thesis that like these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S.
like basically are voting against ultimately they're voting for the wrong team because what they don't understand basically is that this is sort of a path. Number one to anti-Semitism, which is what's happened.
But number two, that basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because Israel, the basic concept of Israel violates the idea that Israel is like literally a religious ethnostate. Right.
And that's like inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea. Like the left doesn't have room for that.
And a military superpower. And a military, right.
And is able to, right, is able to, right, is able to. And it's run by a former special forces operator.
Yes, very, yes, a very capable, yes, very capable soldier. He's a fucking assassin.
Exactly. Yeah.
And is able to – And it's run by a former special forces operator. Yes.
Very capable. Yes.
Very capable soldier in his life. He's a fucking assassin.
Exactly. Yeah.
And so he argued – I don't know. This is like whatever.
20 years ago, he's like this is headed in the wrong direction. But the argument was ignored at the time.
And then at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th, they were completely horrified to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish, right? Which is what everybody learned with the at the universities. And it's like, you know, and there's two ways of looking at that.
One is, oh my God, the DEI is anti-Jewish, therefore we need to add Jews to the DEI scorecard, right? Well, when we saw the heads of Harvard and was it Yale? No. It was Harvard and MIT in Columbia.
Yeah. That was – Yeah, that's right.
That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas.

And then we saw that – yeah, right.

And then what we saw is that this same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-Israel but also pro – I mean ultimately pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas.

Yeah.

You know, the new acronym, LGBTH.

Ooh.

Right.

But there's a bunch of other stuff in there now.

There's Q. There's two-spirit.
You've got to get H in there now for Hamas. Oh boy, really? Yeah, of course, of course, of course.
And so, so like, I bring it, I bring it up just as an, not to take a position, just as an example of, it's the kind of realignment. Yeah.
A lot of Jewish Americans now are, are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who, who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of. of.
So I think to your point, I think like the whole country is going through, I think we're going through the first like profound political realignment probably since the 1960s, which is when everything shifted between Johnson and Nixon in the South. I think we're going through like the most profound version of that right now.
And I think it's something like the multi-ethnic working class coalition that came together around Trump, basically, again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves. And it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.
And so I think, but by the way, including a lot of black people, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote. Hispanic vote for Trump is way up.
Right. Youth vote for Trump is way up.
Way up. Gay vote is like all of – Yes.
All of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years are – union vote is for Trump. I'm sure you've seen the map, the electoral map of California.
Yeah. 2024 and 2020.
Yes. In contrast, it's a crazy red wave that's going through across the whole, most of the state is red now.

Those of us on the coast are going to get pushed into the ocean.

Yes.

Well, I think, you know, maybe the other way, you were talking about the hopeful way that

the Democrats will wake up and come up with a more reasonable, well, I mean, there's obviously

clear cultural pushback on all these crazier, crazier issues.

I mean, like the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women. I mean, this is a giant one where women are like, listen, we created Title IX for a reason.
Like we want women's sports to be for women. You can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women, which is what it is in a lot of places.
You don't even have to get tested. There's not like some sort of a hormone protocol.
It's just like, it's just what your identity is, which is just nuts. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people on the left are having a really hard time justifying.
Yeah, right. Because how can you deny a victim group? Right.
Right. You can't.
I mean, in the full version of that, in the extreme version of that ideology, you cannot deny a victim claim.

Well, it also comes with this weird caveat where you have to deny the existence of perverts.

Right.

Because a pervert, all they have to do is say, I identify as a woman, throw on a wig, and now you can go hang around the women's room and no one can say anything.

Well, you've emboldened, empowered one of the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from. And you have to pretend they don't exist if you just want to base it solely on identity, especially like a self-described identity.
You just decide and then that's it. And, you know, I mean, there's states that have that now with prisoners, that all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman and you are now housed in women's prisons.
California has 47 of them when the last time I looked at it. And there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in.
So you have women who, you know, especially if you're someone who's dealing with if you've ever been raped or sexually abused. And now you have to share space with a man who might be a fucking pervert.
And some of these men even have some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for. It's crazy.
I mean, Canada is the worst at it. There's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting in Female prisons and it's just it's insanity.
And I think the left Rejects that too for the most part. There's the sensible version of the left that is like hey, yeah I'm pro gay rights.
Yeah, I'm pro women's rights. I'm pro civil rights.
I'm pro choice. I'm pro this I'm anti warm-up but also You can't let psychos just put on a fucking dress and hang out in women's rooms just because we want to be kind.
Like, that's nuts. So there has to be some.
And then there's legitimate trans women. So, like, how do you make the distinction? Well, clearly, we have to have a fucking conversation.
And if you don't allow that conversation to take place, like, if you go to Blue Sky and you type in there are only two genders, you're banned. Right there.
People have done it. There's a bunch of people who have done it.
It's fun. Yeah.
It's fun. They have like – they've created a little sock puppet account.
They say some shit that should have been a reasonable thing to say just 20 years ago. Yeah.
Well, you make me hopeful, Mark. Good.
You do. Good.
You do because you lay things out in like a really well-thought-out way that is not hyperbolic and you're making a lot of sense. So I'm glad we talked.
I feel better. Good.
Fantastic. I think the world does too.
I really do. I mean, I've talked to a lot of people, even people that are Democrats who say, I feel better that Trump won.
Every day it feels better. It's just like, you know, it feels like just things are opening up.
It's the Obama campaign. It's hope and change.
Yeah, hope and change. Remember? It's hope you changey.
This is kind of actually hope and change. Yeah.
This is actually it. It feels like oxygen returning.
Yes. Well, thank you very much, Mark.
I really appreciate you. Tell everybody your sub stack, how to find you on social media.
Oh, I'm on X under P Mark A. I'm on suback.
Google me. All right.
Ask Perplexity.

All right.

Ask ChatGPT and it will deny that.

No.

It will happily tell you that I exist.

At least last time I checked.

What about Wikipedia?

We don't know.

We don't know if Catherine is still running.

Always a pleasure, Mark.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate you.

All right.

Bye, everybody. We'll see you next time.