#2234 - Marc Andreessen

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Speaker 1 We wanted to talk, you wanted to talk about the post-election sort of a wrap-up and sort of where we stand. Are you happy? Very happy.
It was a weird one. Morning in America.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, my theory is the timeline, like in a science fiction movie, the timeline has split twice

Speaker 1 in the last nine months. What was the first split? There was when Trump got shot.
Oh.

Speaker 1 And there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions. Right.
If he got hit. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen. Right.
After that moment. Exactly.
And it could have gone, you know, horrifically badly for the entire world after that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a totalitarian, dystopian nightmare. That's the bad place.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then timeline split again on election day. I know you're a you fancy a good conspiracy theory.
Yes. And that gentleman being able to pull off what he did and

Speaker 1 the way it happened, the way it all went down is it's a Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Clearly.
Yeah. The shooter.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't you want to know 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 they

Speaker 1 people want us to think it's a conspiracy like it's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated

Speaker 1 like it's just it's so strange is like the rapid cremation like the whole thing was just completely bizarre and then you're exactly right like no hearings no no nothing now having said that I expect that this will change right so do you think they're gonna do a dive into what happened I mean I would I don't know if they will but I you know 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Or it's just, yeah, or it's just, you know, as we saw, I think in the hearing afterwards, maybe just a systemic collapse of confidence.
There's also a confidence in the fact that the

Speaker 1 news timeline today is so rapid.

Speaker 1 When things are relevant and people are paying attention to them,

Speaker 1 you have a couple of days,

Speaker 1 even with an assassination attempt on a former president

Speaker 1 where people were murdered.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we have the memory of goldfish and right the you know things, right, things that would have been error-defining just come and go with astonishing speed and shock.

Speaker 1 By the way, I should say, I don't think there was a conspiracy. I doubt there was a conspiracy.
I think anything's possible. I think it's just we have a confidence collapse.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It could have, but this is kind kind of the thing, which is this, like, it also could have been

Speaker 1 systemic competence collapse, and then it's like, okay, would it be better off for the institution, you know, if it looks like a conspiracy, right? Like, you know,

Speaker 1 which world, okay, 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.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's binary. Right.
I think there's incompetence everywhere, and conspiracies are legitimate. They're real.

Speaker 1 And that one seems like a conspiracy. The fact that his house was professionally scrubbed, there's no social media record of this kid online.
There's no nothing.

Speaker 1 He's the only kid of his generation who's that fired up about politics to have no online footprint. It just doesn't make any sense.
And he's a registered Republican. The whole thing is

Speaker 1 so weird. And he was a bad shooter, and then he became a great shooter.
Well, he definitely trained.

Speaker 1 You could train someone to become a good shooter. This is all you have to do.
But that's all. Don't move and do that.
Get all your mechanics in place, understand technique and positioning, breathing.

Speaker 1 It's not the most complicated thing from a prone position.

Speaker 1 But the fact that he chose to use iron sights, I thought, was weird too.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of weirdness to it. You know, from 140 yards with a scope, that is an easy shot.

Speaker 1 Well, then he could just wander up. That's the different timeline.
The different timeline is he has a scope. And that's it.
Okay. All right.

Speaker 1 And Trump's dead.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 What kind of like protests and riots? And

Speaker 1 you think January 6th was nuts if they had killed Trump, that would be January 6th on steroids everywhere. Yeah, that's right.
And we would experience it.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, I don't know when I was a kid,

Speaker 1 my high school history teacher got us a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film. Really? Which is like, what a gangster high school history.

Speaker 1 He was actually pretty focused on the, he really loved the Kennedy assassination. So we spent a lot of time on that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you kind of watch it frame by frame and you can kind of see what's happening, but there's lots of questions.

Speaker 1 But like, when things like that happen, you know, today, it's going to be in high-definition 4K, ultra surrounds on forever,

Speaker 1 right, playing out in real time forever. And so, like, I, yeah, I very much don't want to live in the world where those things happen.
Well, we are very fortunate.

Speaker 1 I mean, like I said, after the election, I was like, wow, voting works.

Speaker 1 Voting works. That's nice.
Like, they don't have the system completely rigged.

Speaker 1 But they kind of tried to rig it at least with the media.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 How did people, you know, how did your peers respond to that? I think anybody in social media, the Internet companies, knew it. So it was pretty widely understood.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, there's nothing that happened at Twitter and the Twitter files that wasn't happening to all the other companies, right? So it's a consistent pattern.

Speaker 1 If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same. And of course, we should get the YouTube files.
right?

Speaker 1 And now we probably will now with this new administration is probably going to carve all this stuff open. But yeah, no, look, it was a pattern.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But the government, like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens,

Speaker 1 which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal.

Speaker 1 I think it's actually subject to criminal charges. I think there are people with criminal liability who were involved in this.
So there was that.

Speaker 1 There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.

Speaker 1 And then there was a lot of funding of outside third-party groups that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.

Speaker 1 And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door

Speaker 1 to us that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Does it smell like sulfur when you walk those halls? It is very dark and grim.

Speaker 1 This whole thing is very bad.

Speaker 1 Stanford. Oh, yeah, Stanford.
Stanford, by the way, another unit like that at Harvard.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then there's this thing called the Weaponization Committee that Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this.

Speaker 1 But I would imagine the new Trump administration is going to come in and carve all that wet open. And I know that there are people being appointed to senior positions who are very.

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Speaker 1 Determined to do that.

Speaker 1 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. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 It's like more than $100 million, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1 there's extensive government funding

Speaker 1 of politically oriented NGOs. Yeah.
NGO is one of those great terms, right? Non-governmental organization. All right, like

Speaker 1 what the hell is that? What is that? Tell me. I don't know.
Well, it's sort of a charity, but what it really is.

Speaker 1 Sort of, but most of the time, it's a political entity. It's an entity with a political agenda.

Speaker 1 But then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases, including the NGOs in the censorship complex, like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like direct State Department grants,

Speaker 1 direct money. And then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government.
Well, that's not an NGO.

Speaker 1 That's a GO. Right.
And then you've got a conspiracy.

Speaker 1 Like when censorship, then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund what look like private organizations that aren't.

Speaker 1 And then what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do. Like what? Like censorship.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Like violation of First Amendment rights.

Speaker 1 So what they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens.

Speaker 1 And so what they do is, if you want to censor American citizens, you're in the government. If you're smart, you don't do that.

Speaker 1 What you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it.

Speaker 1 Boy. Right.
And that's what's been happening.

Speaker 1 And 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.

Speaker 1 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.
You want to work up the chain.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But when the government does that, it carries, you know, that's a very powerful message.

Speaker 1 It's like a message from a mob bus, right? It's like, don't you want to do me a favor? It's like, you know, yes, Mr. Campino, I do, right? Like,

Speaker 1 I like my corner store. I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight, right?

Speaker 1 And so there's this overwhelming hammer blower pressure that comes in.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 what purpose that would serve. Like,

Speaker 1 what function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you, supposedly?

Speaker 1 Like, are you bribing them to support you?

Speaker 1 Are you paying them to go on talk shows and consistently repeat the government's message, the current administration's message? Like, what would be the function of that? So, I think

Speaker 1 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, following, and then there were, there were, you know, which

Speaker 1 your point, people were 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.

Speaker 1 That's just how that system works. It's just expected.

Speaker 1 And then, I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they're actually, you know, they actually do field activities, right?

Speaker 1 And so, there's, you know, maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's, you know, social media influence downstream component or some other, you know, kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.

Speaker 1 I just didn't think that they paid like when it's still unclear whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her. Right.

Speaker 1 Right?

Speaker 1 They've mixed it up because there's

Speaker 1 like Oprah says, Oprah says 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, whatever, $2 million. $2.5 million.

Speaker 1 So it was initially listed as one, and then it turned out it was $2.5 million. Right.
And so I'm going to go to the next one.

Speaker 1 But like, if I have a production company and my production company gets paid $2.5 million to endorse Trump, and then I go, I didn't get any of that money. People are like, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 Of course, you got it's your company. What are you talking about? Yeah.
And also, how much does it cost to do an event? Yes.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then, because the fact that it's deliberately obfuscated, of course, is a clue.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and Lizzo got $3 million and Eminem got $1.8 million.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 1 I think if you just published all these numbers, these celebrities would all get so mad at each other that

Speaker 1 then you would learn everything. Eminem got short.

Speaker 1 Lizzo's furious right now, right? Yeah. Lizzo's probably listening to this right now being like, what? Well, I wonder if Lizzo is like, I didn't get shit.
I would say it, but why haven't they said it?

Speaker 1 Like, Beyonce has been mum about the whole thing.

Speaker 1 I think I would probably say, like, I didn't get any money to do that.

Speaker 1 But that was a weird one, too, because a lot of people thought Beyonce was going to do a concert. Right.
And she just went out there and talked, and everybody's like, what the fuck?

Speaker 1 Because they all came to see a free Beyonce concert.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Come on. We love your songs.

Speaker 1 That's what we're here for.

Speaker 1 I just didn't think that it was even possible that a

Speaker 1 I didn't think a candidate would ever pay for an endorsement. Yeah.
I mean, the fact that it was even alleged. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 a tremendous amount of payola.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And like I'm pro-capitalism, and I'm happy for them that they get paid, but like maybe we should know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose.

Speaker 1 It should be like, say if I was going to do an ad for whatever, a certain coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, and I did it on my Instagram, I'd have to say, ad. I'd have to say this is an ad.

Speaker 1 It's a paid ad.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's part of the thing.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 Unless it's your company. Like, you're supposed to say they're paying me to do this.

Speaker 1 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 about a lot about how fake it is.

Speaker 1 We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time.

Speaker 1 I mean, everybody's always like freaked out by whatever the new guy does, but the real scandal in most cases, I think, is just the way the system already works. It's a sneaky system.

Speaker 1 Well, another fascinating aspect of this system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it, like what Trump called earned media

Speaker 1 was much more powerful than anything else.

Speaker 1 The uncontrolled version of it, like one of the things that, unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done done is they've diminished their credibility so much so much so that like joy reed was on tv today talking about

Speaker 1 saying that trump was going to shoot protesters and all just wild unsubstantiated crazy shit yeah 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 that they've they've been you know they're down down to like, they're down, like MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 20, 18 to 49 demo.

Speaker 1 That is so wild. Which is tiny, right? It's so crazy.
It's really tiny. So I think that's happening.

Speaker 1 The Gallup organization has done polls on trust in institutions, including 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.

Speaker 1 I think it's really, oh, there's another study that came out.

Speaker 1 The kids are now watching a lot less TV. Kids are just giving up on TV.
Yeah. And they're just, you know, they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and other things.

Speaker 1 And so like, I, I, I think it's tipping. A question I've been asking myself is when, when will the actual, you know, famously 1960 was the first television election, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you heard it, you experienced something different. And handsomeness and hands.
And vitality and health. Yeah.
Right. And all these things.
Sort of positive spirit, positive energy.

Speaker 1 I'm actually not, this might have been the first internet election, or maybe we actually haven't had it yet.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And that, you know, all the, you know, all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role.

Speaker 1 But like, I think there's a real, 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 literally involve like zero television advertising.

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah, I think that's a good question.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, 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.

Speaker 1 But I think that in the future...

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But they had me.

Speaker 1 Well, number one, they had you. Number one they had you.

Speaker 1 They had you and they drove you away. It's the number one number.
But they also have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN. Right, but that doesn't work anymore.

Speaker 1 That's like, you know, 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 just, it's a bizarre time.

Speaker 1 It's really interesting, though. Like, as you said, like, we're in a great timeline.
And I think

Speaker 1 it's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty. And there's so much, right?

Speaker 1 We are 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.

Speaker 1 You know, artificial general intelligence will be, will emerge. And who knows how that affects.
I've said publicly, and I'm kind of half joking, that we need AI government.

Speaker 1 You know, it sounds crazy to say, but instead of having this like alpha chimpanzee that runs the tribe of humans, how about we have some like really logical, fact-based

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you can actually simulate this today because you can go on these systems, Shed GPT, Earthlaw, or these others, and you can ask, how should we handle issue X? How should this be relevant?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's going to be a big topic in the next several years.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yes. Right.
Very logical, very straightforward. And it will explain every aspect of the issue to you, and it'll take you through all the pros and cons.
Yeah. And, you know.

Speaker 1 I mean, it might be the way to go, which is so horrifying for people to think because everyone's worried about the Terminators taking over the world.

Speaker 1 And like, if that's the first step, is we let them govern us. Aaron Powell, well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this.
There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it.

Speaker 1 You know, as a tool,

Speaker 1 you start out, at the very least, you start out using it as a tool. There's nothing to prevent.

Speaker 1 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 and how to win conflicts.

Speaker 1 And then it'll start to work its way up and then they'll be doing war planning.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so maybe there's like the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship. And you you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And there's also AI-controlled jets, which are far superior.

Speaker 1 Mike Baker was telling us about that. They did these simulated dog fights, and the AI-controlled jets won 100% of the time over humans.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 spam in the can.

Speaker 1 You don't have the human body in the plane.

Speaker 1 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 and g-forces much much higher g-forces yeah and then there's no option for someone to go crazy

Speaker 1 that's also yes that's also right yes exactly it's no there's no human element yeah you know which is uh a real element yeah no like i think we're gonna it's gonna be common to have like mock five drone you know jet drones within within a few years and you know they'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 you know a thousand of these things things coming over the horizon right at you.

Speaker 1 And it really changes,

Speaker 1 it's actually, I think, it'd be very interesting. It really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense.

Speaker 1 Fundamentally, in the past, the people who won wars are the people who had the most men and the most material. So you just needed the most soldiers and you needed the most equipment.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so, for example, small states, you know, small advanced states like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight.

Speaker 1 And then kind of large sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose.

Speaker 1 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, lot less death.

Speaker 1 The bad news, arguably, is it'll be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk.

Speaker 1 So there's going to have to be a recalibration of like when you actually lean into an attack.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you're aware of all this UAP disclosure jazz that you see on television.

Speaker 1 The more I look into it, the more I think at least a percentage of it, a healthy percentage of it, is bullshit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces like out in the eastern seaboard.

Speaker 1 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 stuff like that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you had these alien, you know.

Speaker 1 Did you pay attention to that stuff? Of course. Of course.
100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then, by the way, we're not the only ones. And so

Speaker 1 my speculation would be that some of the military-based stuff is the Chinese doing something similar.

Speaker 1 And we got a glimpse into that with the balloon.

Speaker 1 Well, that one was goofy, though. It got shut down.

Speaker 1 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 loiter above military bases and take lots of imagery and do whatever scans they do.

Speaker 1 And literally nothing was happening, and we didn't even know they were there most of the time. And so I would say that's like a tip of the iceberg.

Speaker 1 It feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing, where if they were doing that, there are probably other things going on.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 1 For the record, I'm pro-shooting them down. Yeah, I think you should probably shoot them down and taking pictures of shit.

Speaker 1 There's not even people up there. Fucking shoot them down.
Yeah, yeah. What's the problem? Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 Do you think there are any of those that are not of this world?

Speaker 1 I don't think there's any way to know from the outside. Have you ever pondered it late at night, sitting on your porch,

Speaker 1 staring up at the sky? Of course, of course. Well, it

Speaker 1 raises, number one, is there a non? And then, if it is, you know, did it recently get here? Have they been here for a long time?

Speaker 1 You know, did they arrive 5,000 years ago? Tucker thinks they're demons and angels. You know, I mean, demons and angels,

Speaker 1 are demons and angels real? It's like, you know, literally, you know, probably not, but like, certainly they're metaphorically real.

Speaker 1 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, masks, things that happen in the world

Speaker 1 are uplifting or horrific.

Speaker 1 Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're possessed by something, like, something is going on.
Right.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, you might as well call that a demon. Yeah, it's fascinating because, like, when you think about

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 what is the will of God, and what is like the evils of the worst aspects of humanity.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 demonic.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 use use drones to shoot down a wedding party. A demon would do that.
Exactly. So a friend of mine is a religious scholar,

Speaker 1 teaches at Catholic University, and he's a religious history scholar.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And in the world we're heading into, you know, that we're arguably already in, you know, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we're going to struggle. And we're going to catastrophize.
We're going to conclude

Speaker 1 AI is the end of the world.

Speaker 1 The medievals would have said, oh, it's just another spirit. Like, you know, it's just another kind of entity.
Yeah, it's better. It's better than humans at some things, but so are angels.

Speaker 1 And so we're going to have to change our mentality. We're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval.

Speaker 1 We're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which also could help us actually deal with people. Like

Speaker 1 maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational, but might actually be more rational. Well, you expressed yourself

Speaker 1 very brilliantly in describing the current state of woke ideology as a religion. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, of course, the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption. Right.
Right. No concept of forgiveness.
Right.

Speaker 1 Which is a very evil religion. You do not want that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's totally different.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Woke also understands something that the Greeks understood, which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing.

Speaker 1 And so when the Greeks sentenced somebody like Socrates to death, they gave them the option of just leaving. But the problem was...
Really? Yes. Socrates could have just walked out and left.

Speaker 1 No kidding. But 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.

Speaker 1 You'd be identified as the the enemy, presumptively, and killed. And so there was no way to survive without being part of your community.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And that's what the wokes figured out: you can do the same thing.

Speaker 1 If you're able to, like, you know, nail somebody on, 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 know, sure, you know, people, you know, they lose friends, they lose family,

Speaker 1 they can't get work. You know, and before you know it, like, they're, you know, living, you know, severely diminished, damaged lives.
Some people then go on to kill themselves.

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Speaker 1 Attention at all to Blue Sky. I have.
But I have multiple friends that have accounts on Blue Sky that

Speaker 1 are

Speaker 1 very sophisticated trolls and are pushing like the woke agenda to a satirical point,

Speaker 1 like to like parody, but like on the edge where you're not quite sure, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A few of them have 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.

Speaker 1 Like Stephen King, he went to threads. Came right back.
They all come right back. They can't, the marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 1 Like, okay, you could go to like a fruit stand in the middle of the fucking desert, and that's a marketplace. Or you can go to the farmer's market where everybody's there.

Speaker 1 Like, where are you going to go? That's right. You're going to go to the farmer's market.
There's tons of people. It's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 A lot of activity.

Speaker 1 That fruit stands fucking barren and deserted. There's no one there.
There's very few choices. Yeah, yeah.
It's not fun.

Speaker 1 And it's win-win to have well, it's win-win to have it back on Twitter because it's good for them because they want to proselytize. And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, don't 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.

Speaker 1 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 does your brain work? How are you coming to these conclusions?

Speaker 1 What makes you think this way? Who are you? What are 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?

Speaker 1 What do you do with your free time? What are you complaining about?

Speaker 1 It's a fascinating.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can have a marketplace of ideas. It's just going to be one idea.
So Blue Sky is a marketplace of idea. Sure.
Yeah. X is the marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 1 That final S makes a lot of difference. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the thing about X is it really is diverse.

Speaker 1 I follow tons of like kooky leftist progressive nutbags that like have bizarre takes on everything and that were 100% convinced that Kamala Harris is going to sweep all the swing states, including Iowa.

Speaker 1 They were all in and I was like, this is wild.

Speaker 1 Like, is that going to happen? Are they right? Like, this is crazy. But it's, they were 100% convinced.
And it's fascinating to see all these different kinds of people, to see the Charlie Kirks and

Speaker 1 the full-on left-wing kooks and see them all together.

Speaker 1 So you need that. Yeah, look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition.

Speaker 1 So anytime anybody has a new idea,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you're going to end up with complete stagnation.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think the last decade has just been like a really weird aberrant time where things have not been working like they should.

Speaker 1 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.
Right. He brought it back.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression and anger and emotional incontinence and cancellation campaigns. Emotional incontinence is a great term.
Yes, there has been a lot.

Speaker 1 That's really what it's like. Not emotional incontinence.

Speaker 1 Diarrhea in your emotions. Just spraying rage in all directions.
And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now.

Speaker 1 And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board.

Speaker 1 the executives and all the people that were fully on board with woke ideology. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been, and I don't mean to like 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, he's already left Blue Sky. Well, yeah, so

Speaker 1 the irony of Jack is that Jack then created Blue Sky,

Speaker 1 which is kind of exactly the opposite of any way where he he thought it, you know, oh, by the way, you know, the new, the new name for it, of course, is Blue Cry.

Speaker 1 Yes,

Speaker 1 exactly. Yeah, but he's also got, you know, look to his credit, he's still trying, and so he's got Nostra, you know, which is another

Speaker 1 NOSTR. Oh, okay.
It's his kind of new. This is, it's actually his third.
He's going to keep swinging.

Speaker 1 Look at full credit. Full credit.
He's going to keep swinging. And by the way, full credit, he supported Elon.

Speaker 1 You know, they've mixed up a little bit, but by and large, he's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 social media app. Yeah.
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.

Speaker 1 And so I just say, like, that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content factors and restrictions because you can't have child porn, you can't have incidental violence, you can't have terrorist recruitment.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I can't say, let's go join ISIS and

Speaker 1 let's go attack Washington.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the censorship pressure. And, and, you know, there's basically Substack, you know, a company I'm involved, you know,

Speaker 1 is doing very well, but, you know, smaller than Twitter. I love Substack.
Smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 And they've done a great job, I think, of holding the line on this stuff. And then obviously.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think it's fantastic. And there's lots of people on the far left and the far right.
Yes.

Speaker 1 So you actually have the full spree of like when a far left person gets upset at work, you know, somebody working in the New York Times is mad that because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start at Substack.

Speaker 1 And Substack welcomes them in. Yes.

Speaker 1 Which is why they don't devolve into a gabber or something like that because

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 You're reading people's essays and papers on things. And these are long-form things that are very well,

Speaker 1 in a lot of cases, very well-researched. And it's not the kind of thing you could just shit post on.

Speaker 1 There are comments, but it's just like they don't hold the weight that the actual article holds. Right.
So

Speaker 1 my partner is at work, they've observed that I tend to be be able to inflame situations from time to time. I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset.

Speaker 1 And so the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, in Substack, and I'm allowed to go on long-form podcasts that I'm not allowed to post. Really?

Speaker 1 Right, exactly. Well, you have rules.

Speaker 1 It's the rule. It's the rule.
Now, by the way,

Speaker 1 I struggle against the rules because I can't help myself from rules. Why do they want you to have rules? Because otherwise, I inflame people too much.

Speaker 1 I drive people too crazy. You do it on purpose? Sometimes.
I mean,

Speaker 1 sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's unintentional.
Did you ever hear about

Speaker 1 when the entire country of India was mad at me? No. Oh, I spent one night with the entire country of India basically wanted to kill me.

Speaker 1 It was incredible. Oh, my goodness.
What happened?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation. And I tripped a line.

Speaker 1 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. Wow.

Speaker 1 And I was like, I was like front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like all the way across India.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yes, it was like a, I do not recommend this as an experience.

Speaker 1 By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian American friends I have because they all rallied to my, you know, my side, you know, said he's not, you know, Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India.

Speaker 1 Like, no,

Speaker 1 it's not actually. It's probably the language barrier as well, right?

Speaker 1 Language. And then just what I mean is just historical context.
Americans have a different, we Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else.

Speaker 1 History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore.

Speaker 1 But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like really matters to their lives. today.

Speaker 1 They live in history more than we. They have 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.

Speaker 1 And so there's just a, 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and the Ukrainians

Speaker 1 and Ukrainian bots. A bunch of people came after me because I was saying like the Biden administration, I was like, fuck these people.

Speaker 1 And then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people, which I absolutely was not saying.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It appears that they're leaving Trump a giant mess at the very least.

Speaker 1 So good news is I am allowed to go on podcasts.

Speaker 1 That's a good news. And the theory, I bring it up though, because it's your substack thing.
It's because it's basically, Mark, you need to explain yourself in long form. Yes.

Speaker 1 You can't just say a thing, exactly to your example. You can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it.
I'll extrapolate. It's not their fault because

Speaker 1 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 the context will be there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Do you also think while you're writing how things could be misconstrued, so let me do a really good job of being very clear about this? 100%. Yeah.
You kind of have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like I had Jimmy Corsetti on the other day, and he is an expert in 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.

Speaker 1 And so you had to like clearly say, listen, fuck Hitler, okay? Can I be really clear? Fuck Hitler and fuck the Nazis, okay? I have not in any way.

Speaker 1 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 his ancient symbol.

Speaker 1 And he's like talking about why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult and with ancient civilizations.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 save everybody here. Yeah.
I've got a friend in the entertainment business who is quite left-wing, but really likes World War II documentaries.

Speaker 1 And so he'll be like, yeah, I saw this great documentary last night about Hitler. And I'm like, I bet you did.

Speaker 1 You can't 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,

Speaker 1 the civil, whatever, disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Kampf

Speaker 1 in the quad. Oh, my God, that's so crazy.
Which is a book that's been assigned for

Speaker 1 80 years

Speaker 1 to college kids to understand who these people were and how to not do that again. Yeah, and that kid was nearly brought up on charges and nearly expelled.
So

Speaker 1 that's that's yes, this is the world that I, that I hope that we're leaving.

Speaker 1 Well, it's just an awful way to look at things.

Speaker 1 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. Like,

Speaker 1 how are we going to study history? Yeah, right. And how are we going to

Speaker 1 prevent bad things from happening again

Speaker 1 if we can't wrap our heads around why they happened the first time? Especially something like the Nazis. Like,

Speaker 1 how are we going to learn what happened?

Speaker 1 Clearly, 1920s Germany was very different 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.

Speaker 1 Imagine a shift of that magnitude, so crazy that there's a Holocaust in 2024, and in 1999, everybody's just hanging out. Yep, that's right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And look, the German people went along with it, right? And so, you know, how did that happen? How did that happen? And how many, you know, did they, was there active agreement?

Speaker 1 Was there risk agreement? Was there, you know, what

Speaker 1 are the steps

Speaker 1 where things go horribly wrong?

Speaker 1 And how can we recognize those? Because those steps have taken place multiple times in history, in recorded history. We know about them.

Speaker 1 So 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.

Speaker 1 One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively the prayer eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, you know, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But it is fascinating also that if you, you know, I visited Athens last

Speaker 1 last year, and I got to tour the ruins, and I was like, oh, I wonder when it all went south. Like,

Speaker 1 when did they know this had fallen apart? Like, when was it in the peak of everything? They probably thought, hey.

Speaker 1 We have the most amazing, sophisticated civilization that's available on Earth, and we will maintain this.

Speaker 1 We will be the center of intellectual discourse and the home of democracy. This is us.

Speaker 1 And then, no. Now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the Parthenon.
You're like, what happened?

Speaker 1 Something horribly happened. And we don't want to think that could ever happen to us today.

Speaker 1 We want to think we're American, motherfucker. We're going to keep this bitch rolling forever.
Leonard Skinner, Freebird, let's go. Second Amendment, come on.
And we think that it's just

Speaker 1 this is the future. America is the shining star of the world, and we're going to carry this on.

Speaker 1 Probably not. Like, historically, I mean, what is the longest running dominant civilization ever? The Romans existed for, what, a couple thousand years? Like, how long did the Greeks run?

Speaker 1 How long did the Egyptians run? The Egyptians might be the longest running, especially if you, like, take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines.

Speaker 1 Where they, you know, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, they have kings that go back 30,000 years. Here it is.

Speaker 1 Egypt and Mesopotamia. There it is.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I bet it was more than that. Well,

Speaker 1 the argument is just things just really didn't really change. Right.
Like, changes we understand, historical change of the...

Speaker 1 kind that we understand where things actually change, the way we live changes, really kicked off with the Greeks. And so that was sort of the default status

Speaker 1 civilization for a long time. The Greeks kicked off change, as we understand it,

Speaker 1 and then the Romans. Do you know about the fish ponds?

Speaker 1 The fish ponds, Cicero's fish ponds. No.

Speaker 1 So the Roman Empire ran for, you know, in its sort of, Roman Republican Empire in its sort of help, what you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase, ran for a few hundred years, about maybe 400 years total, something like that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 towards the end, as it was sort of falling, stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart,

Speaker 1 a friend of mine says, when the roads got dangerous, and nobody could quite explain why,

Speaker 1 right? Which sounds familiar, by the way.

Speaker 1 Cicero was

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 fish ponds.

Speaker 1 They've pulling into themselves. They've built themselves their own protected environments,

Speaker 1 where they control everything. And they're completely focused on ornamentation.

Speaker 1 They're completely focused on their clothes and on their lifestyles. They're Kardashians.
They're Kardashians.

Speaker 1 I'm sure. I don't know if the Kardashians have fish ponds, but if they did, they would be spectacular fish ponds.
They would be amazing fish ponds.

Speaker 1 No doubt they would be the most amazing fish ponds we have ever seen.

Speaker 1 And so he kept railing. He's like, stop with the fish ponds.
Like, stop working on the fish ponds.

Speaker 1 Get back out here, rejoin the Senate. Get back involved in the system.
Let's keep this thing from caving in.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, look, as I said, 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 trails.

Speaker 1 He's like, look, I could be off in a resort. I own all these golf golf clothes.
I have many things I could be doing in my life. Of course.
And he's 78 years old. He probably would like to do that.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I need to do this.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting because he doesn't use, you know, he's not referencing Cicero when he says that, but it's that spirit that Cicero talked about, where, you know, when times get tough, do the people who are in a position to actually make positive change actually step up or not?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 because Elon's the other guy, right?

Speaker 1 He for sure could. Well, it's a coalition, right? It's not just him, it's Vivek, Ramaswamy.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Another guy, by the way, who could be kicking it on a beach somewhere. 100%.
Yeah. Which is shit.
Very successful guy. And young and handsome.
He can do whatever he wants. He's doing anything.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 which is very hopeful. This is what we didn't see out of the Biden-Harris campaign.

Speaker 1 what we saw from Harris and Waltz, you have Waltz, this guy who's,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 perspective, in a different aspect.

Speaker 1 And then there was Tiananmen Square.

Speaker 1 Everything enhances his virtue. This is not what anybody wants.
You want the opposite.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, that's the kind of guy that I like. Yeah.
That's what we all would like. Like, okay, that looks like a leader to me.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, the Romans had this concept they took very seriously.

Speaker 1 They called virtue, right? And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, the Roman virtues.

Speaker 1 And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh my my God, I can't believe what we're missing. But like,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right? Like, we don't have a doctrine that

Speaker 1 encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly, which religion does.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, the Romans had gods. I mean, their virtues had gods.
Yeah, and so, and so they're like, it was actually wrapped, it was, to your point, it was like encoded into their religion.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I recently read Meditations Again a couple of months ago.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 it's so valid today. And it applies so well to modern life.
It's so strange

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible empire that he could write about human psychology and the value of forgiveness and you know being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere and everything you do and all these virtues and all these, the stoicism that

Speaker 1 he espoused, 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.

Speaker 1 You probably know he didn't write it for public consumption. Right, yeah.

Speaker 1 It was even more amazing. His private notebook.
Which is why it's so good, probably. Because he probably wrote it for a sub stack.
He'd be like, wow, people are going to hate on this.

Speaker 1 Let me, you know, let me preemptively 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 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 gonna wake up this morning and everybody's gonna hate you and everybody's gonna lie to you and everybody's gonna make dumb decisions and you're gonna be incredibly frustrated and you're not gonna get any credit for anything and you have to get up anyway

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 like that's all yes yes yes that's all true right and you 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know, 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 of some, it's just like, you're going to get pounded.

Speaker 1 Like, if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day.

Speaker 1 And if you're operating

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, it'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.

Speaker 1 You know, there's so many ancient books that you read and you go,

Speaker 1 first of all, I love reading them because I try to imagine what

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, what is your life like?

Speaker 1 What is the view 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.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 what is your version of the world like?

Speaker 1 And then to see someone's words written down and you read them and try to just imagine yourself and their perspective and their mindset. Right.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like you know exactly why you're here. You know exactly what your role is.
You know exactly how you're supposed to behave.

Speaker 1 You know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain glory, how you're supposed to honor your ancestors. Like it's, it's just all, you know, exactly where you are in the community.
Right. Right.

Speaker 1 Right. You know, right.
You, you have this like incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness.

Speaker 1 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, you know, go on American Idol, right? Like

Speaker 1 there's like a lot of things you can't do, right? But like,

Speaker 1 you know, you know what you're supposed to do, and you either do it or you don't do it.

Speaker 1 And these days, to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way, right? Which is a, which is a, you know, which is arguably harder, right?

Speaker 1 Given, given all the choices that they actually choose to live that way.

Speaker 1 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. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 have as much fun.

Speaker 1 My other favorite

Speaker 1 meditations, Marcus Aurelius thing, is something like be the rocks on the shore

Speaker 1 at which the waves beat.

Speaker 1 Right? Like, yes, like, yes, your job is to stand there like the rocks do, and just the surf just keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming. And your job is to just stand there and take it.

Speaker 1 Imagine what it was like, like addressing the people back then, too. Just yelling out into these groups or speaking in front of all the leaders.

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Speaker 1 Yep. And everyone's plotting to kill you.
There is also a lot of that going on. Yes.
Everyone's.

Speaker 1 I mean, how many times they try to kill Hitler? Like, everybody's trying to kill you. If you're running things,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, today most of the killings happen metaphorically. Most.
Although every now and then. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The alternative timeline. Yes.
Yes, exactly. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How fearful were you leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline?

Speaker 1 It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50,

Speaker 1 Razor Sharp. It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties.

Speaker 1 And then, number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they

Speaker 1 clearly have no clue. So it's another set of people you don't have to listen to.

Speaker 1 But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with with a senior Democrat who's on his way out of

Speaker 1 politics. And he said in the summer, I said, How certain is it? What's your view? And this person said, Trump's going to win with 100% certainty.
Really? Mr. Democrat and from a sort of purple state.

Speaker 1 Right. So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with

Speaker 1 sort of maybe

Speaker 1 broader cross-section of people. And this person basically said, yeah, said, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple

Speaker 1 place and go into a second or third tier side city and take an Uber for 30 minutes.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And basically 100% of the time, the answer is going to be Trump because

Speaker 1 people were just completely fed up. They were just completely fed up.

Speaker 1 And then there was the Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, the Kamala enthusiasm is highly focused in New York and California, which don't matter from an electoral standpoint, right?

Speaker 1 So they're not going to decide anything. But matters huge when it comes to media.
Oh, sure, of course. But that's the thing, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble.

Speaker 1 And this is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles, is the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out.

Speaker 1 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 candidate for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these heavily blue states.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kamala Harris was going to win.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, right. I saw that.
Yeah, correct. I don't want to show it to the poor lady.

Speaker 1 She's probably living in hell right now.

Speaker 1 On Blue Sky.

Speaker 1 Yeah, she's probably on Blue Sky.

Speaker 1 She might be on X. Well, she was on X, I think.
She deleted her profile. But the poor lady, I mean,

Speaker 1 but she was being very arrogant, and she laughed and mocked this man and said, you do realize you wasted your vote. That's right.
That's right. That's right.
That's right. That's right.

Speaker 1 And she laughed, which makes her hard to feel sorry for. That's right.
It's like you were ready to mock this man.

Speaker 1 But in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom.

Speaker 1 And she thought that that was under attack under the Trump administration and that women were going to stand up and they're going to stop that because in her echo chamber, that was the case.

Speaker 1 Everybody was universally, they all agreed. We're universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil.
We got to get rid of him and women are going to vote and this is going to be fun.

Speaker 1 But who are you hanging out with, lady? You know, you could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball is awesome.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, you run into someone from another country and like, what the fuck is baseball? Like, you got to realize there's a lot of people out there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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. Like, that's not how it goes.

Speaker 1 Like, you don't waste your vote if you vote different and the other side wins. That's not how the other side won.
That's just all it is. Like,

Speaker 1 wasting the vote is a crazy way to look at it.

Speaker 1 Because I think also people look at things like tribal games. You know, like, you know, Texas is a huge football state and people love football and it's always we this, we that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, it could be Android versus Apple, you know, 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I'd offer 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.

Speaker 1 And of course, you you know, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different, you know, economic unions and all these things.

Speaker 1 And Republicans were like the party of like rigidity. Right.

Speaker 1 And just for whatever set of reason, a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it, it flipped to where, at least today, Trump's Republican Party is the Big Tent Party. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, to your point, on having all these new people in, many of whom are former Democrats. A lot of them.

Speaker 1 And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody who disagrees on any issue and demand lockstep conformity through the cancellation process.

Speaker 1 And so that's a very interesting inversion that happened, kind of without anybody saying anything about it, but it did happen.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Where the idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they get taxes, regular administration, and then basically if poor people get any money, it's going to be the rich people like trickle some damage.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right, but they did it under the guise of tax the rich. They did it.
But they did it with this Robin Hood mentality. At least they expressed that.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Handed out in all these grants and all these things, like just this shower of money coming from the government.

Speaker 1 But of course, if the government's giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can also control their ideology that way. 100%.
Yeah. You own them.

Speaker 1 It's actually a form, you know,

Speaker 1 it's on the spectrum to a form of domination. Right.
You know, that should make us very uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 you know, maybe that would be fine if the debt and the deficit didn't out of control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did.

Speaker 1 And then at that point, it's like, okay,

Speaker 1 this new kind of sort of tax and spend-driven trickle-down economics is clearly not sustainable. It's not going to work.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So, the way the Trump administration is going to approach the economy, they want want less regulation. They want tariffs and less regulation.
And they want

Speaker 1 more reliance on U.S. energy.

Speaker 1 They want to drill more, more natural gas, more fracking, more drilling for oil, and then

Speaker 1 allow companies to work without regulations inhibiting their performance. This will boost the economy.
You'll have more productivity. You'll have more American manufacturing.

Speaker 1 You have more things happening. Yeah, so the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this, the two headline things are, number one, growth.
You just need faster growth.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then the other thing is they want America to win. And my partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer.

Speaker 1 And that was like his adamant thing he kept coming back, which is like, look, America has to win.

Speaker 1 And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally globally.

Speaker 1 Like our companies should be the ones that win these broad, we should win global markets. Like our company should be the global market.
How can anybody be against that?

Speaker 1 I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1 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? Yes.

Speaker 1 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 and all these things,

Speaker 1 I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs. Right.
Like, that's how you square the circle.

Speaker 1 That's how you actually have your cake and eat it too, which is like, first

Speaker 1 your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and

Speaker 1 economic success. And then you can pay for, and you can pay for whatever programs you want.
I actually don't, personally, like, I'm totally fine.

Speaker 1 Like, set up all the programs you want, all the social spending you want, all the the safety nets you want. And as long as it's easy to pay for because you're growing so fast, then everybody wins.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 giving them benefits, and then

Speaker 1 you could take that away at any moment.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, people who came here illegally got those things.

Speaker 1 And the thought was, if you gave these people these things and you gave them a way better 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 going to definitely eat, I'll vote for whoever the fuck you want.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But this nice lady, she gave me an EBT card,

Speaker 1 and I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and I I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there. Oh, this is wonderful.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the sort of evidence for that is the rapid ramp, the sort of dramatic ramp up in the Hispanic vote for Trump. Well, Hispanic people generally are very hard workers.
So

Speaker 1 this gets to the thing. So I'll just tell you a quick story on this.
So after

Speaker 1 the night after the 2016 election, literally everybody I knew was just completely traumatized. Like we were all just completely freaked out.
Everybody was shocked. You were freaked out too.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, and then, you know, and the media is on like full hysterical blast, and it's the end of the world. And he's, you know, he's a Russian spy.

Speaker 1 All this crazy stuff that we now know not to be true is just, 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,

Speaker 1 the atmosphere was like a funeral. I mean, like, everybody in the restaurant was just like despondent, like, ready to slit their wrists.

Speaker 1 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.
Wow.

Speaker 1 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 know, you know, racist, you know, anti-Hispanic and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And it was, it was, it was one of those moments where the young waiter, who's, you know, Hispanic, young man in his 20s, one of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table, right?

Speaker 1 But it was in context, it was like, oh, thank God, because like we're just, we're just depressing ourselves to death. So like, thank God, he's going to say something.

Speaker 1 And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong. He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic.

Speaker 1 My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, like raised a family. Mowing his lawn with a MAGA hat on.

Speaker 1 He thinks this guy, he thinks this guy is great. He thinks this guy is fantastic.
And he voted for him. And he just has, and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They, you know, they didn't have to go through the process. They didn't have to prove anything.
They're not bought into the system, right?

Speaker 1 They're able to jump in and then they, you know, they don't, and then they're not buying into the system.

Speaker 1 And, you know, part of it, maybe they're not being accepted, but also part of it is they're not buying in.

Speaker 1 They're not, they're, you know, they're not, they're not assimilating, they're not becoming part of the, you know, of what makes America America.

Speaker 1 And, you know, in some cases, and by the way, in some cases, you know, the criminals are coming across, and terrorists are coming across, and gangs.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense sense of like how the world works.

Speaker 1 That one conversation? Yeah, yeah. Well, it was, it was weird because it was like,

Speaker 1 so, so what happened with me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country.

Speaker 1 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, you know, this is like a different place and people think differently.

Speaker 1 And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot. And I became a Californian, right? I became a fully assimilated Californian.

Speaker 1 And I was just like, well, of course, the Californians are much more sophisticated and advanced than people where I came from. And so, of course,

Speaker 1 of course, everybody in California has it figured out. And of course, California is going to leave the country

Speaker 1 in all this thinking, right? And Trump was, for me, Trump was the, Trump 2016 was the wake-up call of like, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 that's what investing is supposed to be. It's like, okay, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for

Speaker 1 how this all works and how this whole system, how this country works. But it was that conversation that kick-started it for me.
So what was the process of

Speaker 1 altering your perspective or at least opening it up? Yeah, so for me, primarily it was reading. And so I started to actually read my way back in history.
And I actually went all the way back.

Speaker 1 I tried to read of where the origins of left-wing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve and liberal democracy and then also right-wing thought and like you know everybody's calling everybody fascist now so like what was fascism right Is that what this is?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and by the way, and then, of course, what unfolded in the years, you know, kind of since was, you know,

Speaker 1 I followed the whole Russia gate 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?

Speaker 1 Because it's like this overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that, of course, he's a Russian spy. I sat on stage.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So we sat literally like 15 feet from Hillary in her first appearance. And the whole thing is fraught with just like incredible tension because the Russia Gate stuff is in

Speaker 1 full-blown display. And I go there and I'm like, all right, this is going to mean amazing.
And the audience is Stanford audience. And so it's all 100% Hillary Clinton supporters.

Speaker 1 And I'm sitting there and I'm on my best behavior because I'm with my wife and and I have to like not, you know, I have to not act out.

Speaker 1 And Hillary gets up there and she says Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and made him the president.

Speaker 1 And I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like, that's not, like, that's not true. And like, I know for an absolute fact that that's not true.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so that got me thinking. And then the Russia Gate stuff unspooled and I was like, you know, the whole

Speaker 1 steel dossier and like all this stuff comes out. What was the accusations about Facebook? How did she think that that Russia hacked Facebook and made Trump the president?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's this whole thing with, it's just, remember this whole thing, Cambridge Analytica.

Speaker 1 And so it's this whole thing that there was this, basically there was this data, there was this theory, which, by the way, is like completely fake, this is like a completely fake thing.

Speaker 1 Like this didn't, so there was this date, there was this, 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.

Speaker 1 And it was like this like magical breakthrough and basically thought control.

Speaker 1 And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this.

Speaker 1 And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that the way that you want.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data. It doesn't share the data.

Speaker 1 And the criticism for years was Facebook is the roach most hello data and the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data.

Speaker 1 And then in 2016, that flipped 180 degrees, and it was Facebook as the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data.

Speaker 1 And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation on the American citizens using the. Why didn't Facebook push back?

Speaker 1 They did.

Speaker 1 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 copacetic.

Speaker 1 They're trying not to get just completely destroyed by the politicians. They're getting slammed every single day on every conceivable issue you can imagine.
And

Speaker 1 it's actually very interesting.

Speaker 1 When you're in these companies, like these big issues are big issues, but you're also literally trying to make the quarter, right?

Speaker 1 You're trying to ship your products, you're trying to close your sales, you're trying to keep your employees from quitting, right?

Speaker 1 You have responsibilities, right? You have practical concern responsibilities.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then they, right, and then they, you know, then they, and maybe the message doesn't get out. But so what was the bigger shift, the waiter or the Hillary speech? Oh, it was the waiter.

Speaker 1 I mean, by that, the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a normal person.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 She then, it was, it was amazing, by the way. She then spent the next hour and a half.

Speaker 1 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 like on

Speaker 1 so that I don't say anything, right? Like super bad. So I brought my little notepad along, exactly, my little pen, little Fisher Space Pen, right? And I pull it out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I got to 20.

Speaker 1 My favorite was Netflix, by the way.

Speaker 1 Netflix. She blamed Netflix.
What did Netflix do? Netflix aired anti-Clinton documentaries.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 you mean facts? Well, this is particularly funny because the CEO of Netflix is a famous Democrat. He's a super Democrat booster.
Well, actually,

Speaker 1 Ted, but also specifically

Speaker 1 Reed Hastings and his wife are very enthusiastic left-wingers.

Speaker 1 But, I mean, it was just this litany of, you know, basically excuses and complaints, right? With no sense of

Speaker 1 personal responsibility at all, you know, just like pure grievance. And so it was the negative, it was a negative lesson of like, okay, like whatever that is is not the path.
Did she blame Comey?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Oh, yeah. She absolutely hated that guy.
Yeah, no question. That was a wild one.
100%. Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, like, that was super weird. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I don't think she was completely wrong. I don't understand that one, honestly.
If they didn't want Trump to win, I don't get that one. Well,

Speaker 1 we know she's guilty, but we're not going to charge her. Right.
It's a weird message. It's crazy.
It's a weird message to say.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 What the fuck are you talking about? Exactly.

Speaker 1 We know he's guilty, but we never convict him because the jury would say that he's a senior old man. Which is crazy because he's still running running for president at the time.

Speaker 1 He's running for re-election. Well, then remember, everybody at the time said the media had said that the prosecutor was lying, right? Because if that wasn't.
Of course, he's sharp as a tack.

Speaker 1 He's sharp as attack.

Speaker 1 Exactly. 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.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. My favorite was the, you remember about earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake? Cheap fake.
Cheap fake.

Speaker 1 Because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake, which really didn't, and there was really nothing, nothing happened with that.

Speaker 1 And so the cheap fake we learned is a video that just simply shows you something.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 It's claimed to be out of context, but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth.

Speaker 1 Didn't Nancy Pelosi start using that one? Cheap fake? Yeah, exactly. Well, because the theory was it was going to be clips out of context.
Yeah. But it turned out they were clips in context.

Speaker 1 Have you seen? There's a gentleman who made a video.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 come on. On my phone updated, you son of a bitch.
Come on. Don't make me go to fucking Android because I will.

Speaker 1 This guy did this insane

Speaker 1 video where it's all completely AI and everything he did,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We're at that moment where you cannot tell.

Speaker 1 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've got a 7 labs to speak like me, one of our companies.

Speaker 1 I'm going to use any text and it will sound like me. Then I trained Hey Gen with a video of mine.
I input the audio file to generate a video based on my text.

Speaker 1 The video you are watching right now is the result 100%

Speaker 1 generated in AI.

Speaker 1 What do you think of that? Guys, I know this might sound crazy.

Speaker 1 How crazy is that? Oh,

Speaker 1 that's your company? That's him. Oh, that's him.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's the AI generator. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right, that's right. So it's two companies.

Speaker 1 One of them, the voice is ours, and then that's that's another great company called Hagen that did the visuals. But yeah, no, that's right.
That's nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, this is part of the first internet, as I was saying, first internet election.

Speaker 1 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 Common Harris?

Speaker 1 They could have done an amazing job. They could have really knocked it out of the park with a solid speech.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so I think

Speaker 1 that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of the dirty trick side. I think that, you know, that will be a part of it, right?

Speaker 1 There's always some way to try to gain these things. Just have the most brilliant writers formulate, you know, get AI to do it.

Speaker 1 Like, you're saying, like, AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical.

Speaker 1 And there's no weird thinking in it. It's like, you know, cut all the fat out.
So I think we have a theory on how to fix this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on a blockchain. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Wow.

Speaker 1 Which, frankly, is a good idea anyway, because there just is a lot of noise in the environment. But how would you integrate that with social media, though?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 which might be completely different than the headline itself. The headline is just inflammatory.

Speaker 1 And then viral videos. Like, how would you...

Speaker 1 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, like, we can't, you know, we can't.

Speaker 1 And by the way, that's been happening for a long time. Like, newspapers have been scandal sheets forever.

Speaker 1 If you go back hundreds of years, if you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scrurless.

Speaker 1 The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican, like in the year 1500. And it was all these terrible rumors about the Pope and the bishops and all these cardinals and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 That was the first newspaper. That was the very first newspaper was in the Vatican.
And then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There was a famous election in 1800, which was Jefferson versus Adams, that we think of as these super upstanding, you know, upright people.

Speaker 1 And they're just like smearing the sh crap out of each other in their respective newspapers, right? Because they would actually own newspapers in those days and then just

Speaker 1 attack each other.

Speaker 1 The more things change. Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin printed newspapers before he became a became went to government, and he created 15 different sock puppets.

Speaker 1 He created 15 different pseudonyms.

Speaker 1 He was a pseudo or anon.

Speaker 1 And then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him. Oh, Ben.
So he had all these different personalities.

Speaker 1 And so, like, we've been in a world of like information warfare for a very long time. We've been in a world of sensationalist, you know, nightly news.
If it, if it was a if it bleeds, it leads. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, sensationalist stuff for a long time. We've been in the world of like, yeah, propaganda for a long time.

Speaker 1 So that, you know, that you're not going to fake that you're never going to make that go away. Isn't it funny that we don't think of the past like that? Oh, yeah, we're going to be able to do it.

Speaker 1 We think of of them as being virtuous.

Speaker 1 We assume they had it all figured out. Yeah, that very much is not true.
It's all kinds of crazy, crazy banana stuff.

Speaker 1 My favorite is in the Vietnam War, it was the Gulf of Tonkin that sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation of Vietnam. Like we now know for a fact it didn't happen.
Right.

Speaker 1 Like the whole thing just didn't happen. And now there's this big debate about like, did they know it didn't happen or did, you know, did they fake it?

Speaker 1 But like, 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.

Speaker 1 But what we can do is we can reorient people to say, okay, now you're going to have to like take seriously. This stuff is real.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But but 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.

Speaker 1 Okay. So that would be the solution to deep fakes, the blockchain.
Yeah, you flip it. You flip it.
Yeah. If you focus on the real stuff.
That's logical. That actually does make sense.

Speaker 1 So that actually kind of gives me hope.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 We have the real potential here for a golden age. We really do.
We really do. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's the smartest people I've ever met. I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes.

Speaker 1 By the time they're 22, they just know a lot more.

Speaker 1 They have so much more access to information than we did. Yeah, they're so much better trained, capable, and ready to go and fired up.

Speaker 1 And they know each other, they're able to connect online and they're already in communities and they know how to help each other. And so, like, yeah,

Speaker 1 the productive and inventive,

Speaker 1 creative aspect, particularly of this country, is just like, there's never been anything like it in the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 that people are

Speaker 1 susceptible to change. It's possible to

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I really do think that.

Speaker 1 It's an upward spiral, right? It was Evan Hafer who said that thing about psychology the other day. It was one of, it was a friend of mine who's a

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 because they, because they lost so badly, right?

Speaker 1 So, they, 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 Supreme Court. Right.

Speaker 1 Like, this time it's undeniable that the current path that they've been on is not working. Like, it's your, like, being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for a wrong thing.

Speaker 1 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. Which is very undemocratic.
That's right.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah, exactly.
Starting with Bernie in 2016 and then, right, continuing. Donna Rice's book, she documented that.
Right, right. And so, so, like,

Speaker 1 I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not, it's not a viable path. You can't have a political party that doesn't win.
It doesn't make it's not, it's not useful. Um, and so

Speaker 1 there's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now, um, where they're going to have to recalibrate. They're going to decide what they want their future to be.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 and then had a landslide in 84. It then took Democrats 12 years, right, to get to Bill Clinton and to actually win again.

Speaker 1 And so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the 60s and 70s and it took them 12 years to recover.

Speaker 1 And so if you talk to the really smart Democrats right now, they're like, look, this can't be 12 years. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We were actually playing Bill Clinton debating during the elections of, what year was that, Jamie?

Speaker 1 I forget which one. It was when he first ran.

Speaker 1 What year did he first run? Oh, yeah. Oh, 92.
92. 92, yeah.
So it was the 92. And I was like, I'd vote for that guy.
Yeah, exactly. In a heartbeat.
That was awesome. Also, we played a clip of

Speaker 1 Hillary Clinton where she sounded more MAGA than anybody who's MAGA today. She was talking about the penalties that illegal immigrants should face.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, all this was like so MAGA. I was like, this is so wild to hear from Hillary in 2008.
Yep, that's right. That's right.

Speaker 1 And Hillary and Joe Biden and Diane Feinstein, all these people wanted to build a wall. Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Diane Feinstein, our senator in California at the time, very, you know, very left-wing.

Speaker 1 She was down on the border, like to 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, so, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, another reason for optimism is: I think that they're going to be able to pull their way back.

Speaker 1 Like, I think they're going to be able, I think, getting losing this bad is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 normal policies? I mean, imagine if Clinton was running up against Trump. Yes, exactly.
Like, he was so good.

Speaker 1 We played that speech that he gave after Sister Soldier had said a bunch of very anti-white things about white people.

Speaker 1 And he gave this super eloquent but yet compassionate speech about this, where he's very charitable about her position as being a young person and not having the best perspective on things.

Speaker 1 It was fucking brilliant. It was brilliant.
Like, that's the guy. Like, that's a president.
Now, by modern standards, of course, he was a fascist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right? Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments.

Speaker 1 But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and forcing people to think and behave at a very specific, which is what the left-wing does.

Speaker 1 And then you talk about like being pro-war. Well, who's more pro-war right now? Trump or the Biden administration? Clearly, Trump is less pro-war.
Correct. Clearly, Trump wants to end the wars.

Speaker 1 Clearly, Biden... just allowed Ukraine to use long-range missiles into Russia.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's going on in in terms of negotiations. I hear all kinds of different things.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's really weird. The free speech thing, which was always a tenant of the left-wing party, it was like,

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Speaker 1 Doctrine. Like free speech is necessary.

Speaker 1 It's the foundation of our ability to discuss and find out what's right and what's wrong. Right.
You have to be. I mean,

Speaker 1 the ADL used to let fucking Nazis speak. They used to let them march.
They would defend their right to do it. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because you needed to air out the idea to be able to show why it was wrong. Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so I, but again, the reason for,

Speaker 1 I don't know if they're going to pull it off. They might just get, they might go crazier.
Like, they might just go right off the cliff. Like, it's certainly possible.

Speaker 1 But, like, 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.

Speaker 1 I think the temperature of society, like 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.

Speaker 1 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 that MSNBC.
They're going to become ridiculous. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's right. So they have to, which is good for everyone.
For everyone.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so you can be incredible, as I am incredibly bullish about the people.

Speaker 1 And then it's just a question of whether, in the America part, and 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.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, what are the things that you think about this administration, at least what they're they're proposing, that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going?

Speaker 1 There's a lot of things. I mean, so I think you've got to start with the Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency that, you know, Elon Musk.
It is hilarious that it just winds up being Doge.

Speaker 1 Doge. D-O-G-E.
He's been pushing Dogecoin forever. The universe speaks.
Yeah. It's just so, so many things are just so on the nose that you're like, is the simulation real? Yes.

Speaker 1 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.
We certainly got a good position in the game. And tweeting, exactly.

Speaker 1 He's the number one Diablo player in the world right now, by the way. He just got number one.

Speaker 1 He's fucking bananas. How does he have the time to do that? Which means he could be the guy steering

Speaker 1 the simulation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so look, this goes back to what we were talking about before.

Speaker 1 It is time to carve this government back in size and scope. It's time to take the overall.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money. It's time to unleash economic growth.

Speaker 1 Elon explained that there's more agencies than there have been years of the United States. Correct.
Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year.

Speaker 1 And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do, though? Basically,

Speaker 1 terrorize financial institutions, prevent decrypt fintech,

Speaker 1 prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks. Really? Oh, yeah, 100%.
How so? Just by terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services.

Speaker 1 Can you give me an example?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like they did to Kanye. Exactly.
Like they did to Kanye.

Speaker 1 My partner, Ben's father, has been debanked. Really? We had an employee who

Speaker 1 for having the wrong politics.

Speaker 1 For saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations, under, okay, here's a great thing.

Speaker 1 Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person. PEP.

Speaker 1 And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them off of your,

Speaker 1 to kick them out of your bank.

Speaker 1 You're not allowed to do that. What if you're politically on the left? Well, that's fine.

Speaker 1 Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked? I have not heard of a single instance of anyone on the left getting debanked.

Speaker 1 Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked? Oh, well, I mean, David Horwitz is a right-wing. You know, he's pro-Trump.

Speaker 1 I mean, he said all kinds of things. You know, he's been very anti-Islamic terrorism.
He's been very worried about migration, all these things. And they de-banked him for that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they debanked him. So

Speaker 1 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. How is that legal? Well, exactly.
So this is the thing.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to, but the government gets to say, we didn't do it. It was the private company that did it.

Speaker 1 And of course, JPMorgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? Because they're a private company. And so it's this sleight of hand that happens.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Kick you out of the financial system. And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.

Speaker 1 This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they're trying to protect the big banks.

Speaker 1 And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Choke Point, where they decided to, to,

Speaker 1 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 de-bank legal marijuana businesses,

Speaker 1 escort businesses,

Speaker 1 and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers. And just like you're done, you're out of the banking system.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's been like super pernicious. I wasn't aware of that.
Oh, 100%. And this is called, so it was Operation Shokepoint 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns.

Speaker 1 ShokePoint 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 hard.

Speaker 1 We've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 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, we can't live in this world.

Speaker 1 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 and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable no by the way, no due process.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Who do you go to to get your bank account back? Right.

Speaker 1 You know, and then, you know, and then

Speaker 1 there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states. Right.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, there'll be, there have been, you know, there's well-publicized examples of like, you know, there was like, you know, there'll be some investigation into like, you know, safe deposit boxes, and the next thing you know, the feds have seized all the contents of the state deposit safe deposit boxes, and that stuff never gets returned.

Speaker 1 And so it's this, and this is when, you know, this is when Trump says the deep state, you know, like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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 It's just raw administrative power.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 To go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to

Speaker 1 get, you know. Complete upending of your life.
Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to try to

Speaker 1 change your life.

Speaker 1 Try to get away from the Eye of Sauron.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I mean, you go to cash. I mean, you go to cash.
Oh, you can't have a. Yeah.
So where do you put it? I don't know. Under your mattress, under your mattress.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is so insane. So if someone has $30 million in the bank and they get debanked, diamonds, art,

Speaker 1 you know, do you,

Speaker 1 I don't know, go overseas somewhere. Holy shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like, it just happened, it just happens.
And again, it's really, really important. There's no fingerprints.
Like, there's no.

Speaker 1 Right. There's no person who there's no stick above the strings.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
It just happened.

Speaker 1 And we can trace it back because we understand exactly, you know, we, we know, we know the, 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.

Speaker 1 And so we can loosely, like, we understand the flow of power as it happens.

Speaker 1 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. So So these, what are the instances?

Speaker 1 Like, what is the company? What are they trying to do? And how do they run a foul? All the crypto startups in the last basically four years.

Speaker 1 So remember the crypto thing got like really, you know, sort of, everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff. And then it just like stopped.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is a fun twist. This is a fun little twist.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The SEC 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, 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.
Okay. That's terrifying.
That's the eye.

Speaker 1 The eye of Sauron is on you. Okay.
Now trying to be a company with a Wells notice doing business with anybody else. Oh my God.
Right.

Speaker 1 Try to work with a big company, try to get access to a bank, try to do it. So that's when they support DEI initiatives.

Speaker 1 Well, and then the SEC under Biden became a, the SEC under Biden became a direct application of, exactly. So DEI,

Speaker 1 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 that through this process the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all like there's no

Speaker 1 you know there's no over there's no over there are hearings where they get yelled at but like nothing changed nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything it was just the raw application of power um right um and so this is your friends this 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

Speaker 1 He was doing crypto policy for us, and his bank booted him because he

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 they did a screen across, it's what they told us, is they did a screen across their customer base.

Speaker 1 Anyone with crypto. Because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person.
Because

Speaker 1 crypto was politically controversial, right? That's so.

Speaker 1 You hear this sometimes as like

Speaker 1 these terms, compliance,

Speaker 1 reputation management,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Wow.
With no due process.

Speaker 1 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 and there's no so like there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When you barely built yourself back up? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So this is, and I think this is an important context where, like, when Elon and Vivek talk about reducing regulation, you know, there's two ways of thinking about reducing regulation.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh my God, the water in the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned. Right.

Speaker 1 Now, some of those regulations, I think, are very important.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, the trucker, you know, the other great example is the trucker strike up in Canada. Yeah.
It was an even more direct version of this because here you had truckers physically showing up.

Speaker 1 And it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license, license, which by the way, right, it's just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard. No more driver's license.

Speaker 1 Step two is they take away your insurance. And step three is they take away your kids.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because the trucker strike in Canada, right, was going to jam up these cities. Because it was the farmers that were, the truckers were very serious.

Speaker 1 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. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 How did they say they would take their kids? Because

Speaker 1 it's administrative power. Like you can't, you can't, right?

Speaker 1 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, right, putting people's lives at risk.

Speaker 1 Wow. You know,

Speaker 1 child seizure. And 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 U.S.

Speaker 1 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, which is even crazier.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Not even people who were there, people who were opposed to the mandates that Trudeau's administration was imposing on people.

Speaker 1 And so they donated to these truckers, and then they got their bank accounts taken away, which is really crazy.

Speaker 1 And so, and I, and I think, exactly. And

Speaker 1 I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War II.

Speaker 1 You know, we think about Nazis in jack boots with like tanks and guns and and, you know, beating people up and killing people.

Speaker 1 Like that, that's our mental, and that's, you might call that hard totalitarianism, right? That's like very clearly like violent totalitarianism.

Speaker 1 But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily

Speaker 1 that just simply suppresses everything, right? And this is speech control and de-banking and all these other things that we've been talking about.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, you know, every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else.

Speaker 1 And most people aren't even aware of it. Yeah, that's right.
And then, you know, look, these are these are individual one-off things. Most people don't have a voice.

Speaker 1 It's very hard to organize around these things. And then, by the way, if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out, it then itself can get

Speaker 1 suppressed and deep banged. Well, it happened during the COVID lockdowns, right? So the lockdown protests all got suppressed.

Speaker 1 Right? So you went, you know, so it's like, so the lockdown went from two weeks to cross the curve to two months to two years. Right.
Right? Which is like, okay, what the hell, right?

Speaker 1 And then there were these protests that were, there were these protests that were forming up, non-violent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns.

Speaker 1 And you could argue the issue different ways, but people have a legitimate right to protest for that, just like they do for anything else.

Speaker 1 And the next thing you know is all the lockdown protests all got censored, like just like, boop, gone.

Speaker 1 Right. And so at that point, like, the normal process of being able to

Speaker 1 try to get redress from your government, right, for, for, you know, to enforce your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden, like you can't even organize a protest.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this debanking and

Speaker 1 be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you? Yeah. That was his explicit.
That was explicitly his strategy. That was Sam's.
Yeah. Sam's approach is Sam.

Speaker 1 Sam's approach is just pay everybody.

Speaker 1 So Sam's approach was just, I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want,

Speaker 1 right? Which is the crime. Right.

Speaker 1 And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to like hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Grizzell to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.

Speaker 1 But a lot of that money, something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so the money was just shotgun 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was, to be clear, he was illegal. Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the U.S.
government, they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud.

Speaker 1 Because they'd have to give all the money back? Well, so there's two theories on it.

Speaker 1 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 States.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like the Epstein client list. Like, there are certain boxes

Speaker 1 that are better not to open. Well, the campaign finance thing, wouldn't they have to pay it back?

Speaker 1 So then there's this like panic. The minute one of these scandals breaks like like that, there's these panic rush.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back.

Speaker 1 So yeah,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then it now, look, he's in prison. The other argument is he's in prison.
He's in prison already. Like whatever.
It just would have been another sentence.

Speaker 1 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 and never will.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It seems like it kind of turned around, right? It didn't get him off the hook, though. It didn't.
No. Well,

Speaker 1 he still did something illegal. He did, yeah.
Did he know it was illegal? He is in prison.

Speaker 1 I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head. Yeah.
I don't know that I can represent his mental state. He'd be a fascinating podcast guest if he was out.

Speaker 1 He flopped very hardly, very hard at trial.

Speaker 1 So he had an explanation, but

Speaker 1 the jury didn't buy it.

Speaker 1 What was his explanation?

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 it was all the money was all being invested and he was going to give it all back, and it was all this and that, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What the fuck? Clearly. Yeah.
And so

Speaker 1 don't know. Like, yeah.
Well, there's also amphetamines involved, which definitely tend to skew your judgment. I mean, him and that lady were like

Speaker 1 sort of proponents of amphetamine use. And they were taking there was some anti-Parkinson's drug they were taking

Speaker 1 that has a side effect of reducing your your risk calculation. Oh, dopamine agonists.
Yeah, one of those. Yeah, like Reequip.
Yeah, something like that. And they were he had these patches.

Speaker 1 He was taking these patches. That makes you do wild shit.
That also makes people gamble. Yeah, exactly.
Well, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there was a guy who won a lawsuit from Galaxo Smith Klein because he took Re-Equip and became a gay sex and gambling addict.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They do strange things to people. 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'll look it up once. Yeah.

Speaker 1 See, put dopamine agonist. Yeah, Parkinson's.
There we go. Yeah, interesting.
So it's like related. If it's not that, it's like a related clinic.
Interesting. How does it work?

Speaker 1 Does it say how it works?

Speaker 1 Commonly used to treat depression. How does it work, though?

Speaker 1 Here you go.

Speaker 1 Okay, it's an MAO inhibitor. Interesting.
Used to treat mental depression in adults. This medicine is a monoamine oxide inhibitor.
It's a different one. That says it's sledgeline.
Oh, it could be

Speaker 1 a smaller. 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 an acegilline.

Speaker 1 Celagine? Celagine? Selegiline? I think it's selegiline. I knew a doctor who was taking that.
He was taking it as a, but not in a patch.

Speaker 1 He was taking it in a pill form, and he said it was a nootropic. So a monoamine oxase inhibitor.
So that's the stuff that's the active, and that's what makes ayahuasca orally active. Same thing.

Speaker 1 A monoamine oxide inhibitor along with the plant that contains dimethyltryptamine, which is not normally orally active.

Speaker 1 So, this guy, if he was doing drugs and taking MAO inhibitors, he was out of his fucking mind. Guaranteed.

Speaker 1 Because I know people who 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.

Speaker 1 And then when they did come back, they were like,

Speaker 1 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.
diamond, you're gone. And that happens to people.

Speaker 1 So this fucking kid with

Speaker 1 billions of dollars of 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.

Speaker 1 Wonderful, like Hitler. And inside value.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Once again.
Once again, back to Hitler. That's so crazy.
What a wild boy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are you following the psychology, the theories that are now emerging around Ozempic and and the psychological changes that Ozempic causes? No, but I did read that it makes your heart shrink.

Speaker 1 Well there's some theory to that which is very concerning. But there's

Speaker 1 a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, and gambling addictions.

Speaker 1 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. Wow.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So the theory that 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1 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 just by itself ends up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can't have everybody disciplined. You have to have wild fuckers out there.

Speaker 1 You have to have your jelly rolls of the world. You have to be crazy people.
They're fun. They make things more interesting.
That's right.

Speaker 1 So it's essentially discipline in

Speaker 1 a pill form or an injectable form. Yeah.
And it's been very helpful. We're prescribing, increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics, and apparently it's working quite well.
That's crazy.

Speaker 1 Well, that brings me to Ibogaine, which is the one thing that has the most success for people with addictions, and it's illegal in this country.

Speaker 1 People go down to Mexico and go to these Ibogaine retreats.

Speaker 1 It's apparently, I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane insane introspective journey that's very uncomfortable and it lasts about 24 hours.

Speaker 1 It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It actually like stops people from having addictive cravings and it rewires rewires the way they think about things.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they've had tremendous benefits using that.

Speaker 1 You know, I wonder with particularly with these

Speaker 1 Ozempics and Wigovy and all these different types of weight loss, diabetic drugs. I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, when I've talked to people that think that like my friend

Speaker 1 Brigham Bueller, who runs Ways to Well,

Speaker 1 he's concerned about the side effects of it, but he's also he looks at people that are

Speaker 1 just morbidly obese and he's like, these people, they need some fucking help.

Speaker 1 They've gone down this terrible road. Yes, they shouldn't have done it.
Yes. Okay, we all agree to that.
Don't eat pie all day. But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably

Speaker 1 in a bad state and you could probably use some help. And maybe that could get them back on track.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's one of those things, like if you're going to get on Ozempic, you must lift weights three times a week, which is that might be it.

Speaker 1 I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly that's that's relatively easy to fix. Right.
That's right. And there's, by the way, there's a ton of R D going into these drugs right now.

Speaker 1 So there's going to be many more versions of these things.

Speaker 1 I'm hopeful that we could develop something where no one can ever be obese again.

Speaker 1 That would be really interesting. I mean, maybe this is just the first steps of this, right?

Speaker 1 And then, like, these are crude versions of what will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And one of the things I learned is that the RFK, the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here.

Speaker 1 He's really in charge,

Speaker 1 you know, working with the president. And he, you know, for all the controversy around some of his positions, like he's, you know, this whole

Speaker 1 Maha, like he's very serious about this.

Speaker 1 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, all the, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years is just a complete catastrophe.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral, you know, exercise, like the path that people are on to become obese.

Speaker 1 Like, no, like this actually needs to be addressed. Like this is actually a profound issue.
And

Speaker 1 we're on the road to hell and like it has to get fixed. And maybe it gets fixed.
It gets fixed chemically and maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things.

Speaker 1 Maybe the culture has to change, but like it has to get fixed. And And I've actually, I've been very encouraged that

Speaker 1 I think this is now going to be a very big focus area. And not just by the government, but I think also in the culture.
I agree. And I'm very encouraged as well.

Speaker 1 And I think, as we were talking before, about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 from listening to me talking about the benefits of it.

Speaker 1 And I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So one of my theories on this is that

Speaker 1 part of this is what happened is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large looked very unhealthy.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Right. 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Bill Gates should get jacked. That would be very helpful.
He's got a lot of money. It would be extremely helpful.

Speaker 1 Get a trainer. When he writes the book and goes on the press tour to talk about public health, talk about the faith of us should look at it.
Get a trainer. That would be great.
It would be great.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 1 And so, like, it's just this thing. It's just like, well, of course.
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.

Speaker 1 And that's where RFK comes in play. 100%.
He looks fantastic. He looks great.
He looks great. Yeah.
Yeah. Super tattered.
Like, yeah. It's just like, wow.
Yeah. We were taking pictures.

Speaker 1 I'm like, dude, you're jacked. Look at putting my arm on him.
I'm like, you're fucking jacked, dude. Look at you.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Works out all the time at Gold's Gym in Venice. There we go.
Jeans on. Awesome.
Works out with jeans on. That's old school.
I don't get that. That's amazing.
That seems weird.

Speaker 1 It seems like it gets in the way of your squats, unless you're wearing

Speaker 1 origin jeans or something It's got a lot of stretchy fabric to it.

Speaker 1 You have to give stretchy jeans. But even then, like, put some shorts on, you fucking weirdo.
Like, what are you doing, man?

Speaker 1 No, it's like, that's like, that's like, that's like prison yard credibility.

Speaker 1 It's fantastic. It is a little, it is a little street credit.
It's a little old school. You know, wearing Timbalands.
Yes. Timbalands and a pair of jeans and doing your squats.
It's kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like the whole thing could work way better. Like all you have to do is work at it.
And that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life.

Speaker 1 It'll give you more energy for creativity, more energy for your family, more energy for your hobbies, your recreations, time with your friends.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 where you feel better.

Speaker 1 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.
You go, oh,

Speaker 1 your head.

Speaker 1 And you, you know, everybody likes having more energy. It's better for you.
And we could promote that as a society. And this RFK Jr.

Speaker 1 appointment is a really big step in that direction that we've really never had before. That's right.
You have to go back to literally his uncle. JFK had a program like this in 1962.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's been a long time. Well, Mashallah Obama did for a bit, right? A little bit, although that was like vegetarian, you know, getting into like vegetarian school lunch.
Oh, was she saying vegetarian?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Because they're real close.
They're real close to proving that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 They've done this because there's a phenomenon when giraffes, if giraffes are eating, 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 will

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that, which is really crazy. It's amazing.
So

Speaker 1 back to the doge for a moment.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system, and specifically high fructose corn syrup.

Speaker 1 Right. High fructose corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies, right? The country was

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The corn lobby,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then that agency inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure.

Speaker 1 And basically 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

Speaker 1 absolutely poisonous decision. Like, that was like

Speaker 1 literal poison, absolutely a ruinous decision. Just an absolutely terrible idea.

Speaker 1 Well, Casey Means was on here, and she was explaining the very mechanism by which a high fructose corn syrup encourages overconsumption.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's like these high fructose corn syrup encourages you to overconsume. Yeah, we were not supposed to be eating this.

Speaker 1 This was not supposed to happen. It would not have happened.
We were actually drinking it. 100%.
Yeah, 100%. And so, but this would not have happened had the government not made it happen.

Speaker 1 And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, all right, like, and then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, okay, at some point, this has to stop. Right.
And literally, they just need to stop.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so this goes back to like the regulatory reform thing, which is like, there's just like a tremendous amount of this that may have been good intentioned at one point.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 have the insane amount of money that's involved because R.J.

Speaker 1 Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble, they decided, well, let's buy all these food companies.

Speaker 1 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 to people, which I think you should be allowed to buy.

Speaker 1 I think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want. I'm all for that.

Speaker 1 But I do think we should be 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 should they be,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And cheaper than other foods. And cheaper than other foods because they're subsidized.

Speaker 1 Because they're subsidized.

Speaker 1 And so, and you just, 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.

Speaker 1 And so it like stuff like it just needs to stop. And

Speaker 1 that's where you need something like the doge.

Speaker 1 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 wanna

Speaker 1 would you make it illegal to put high fructose corn syrup as an as an ingredient? Or would you simply stop subsidizing?

Speaker 1 Like and what would be how would that work within the government like 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 as an example let me give you an example it's a parallel parallel thing if you want to clean up the universities you need to stop feeding them student loans right so right the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful so so that's one and then two is look there may be a role for additional you know 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 are not being poisoned.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 you maybe do that.

Speaker 1 But I always think that the third thing is culture.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like,

Speaker 1 what is the cultural tone of the country?

Speaker 1 What's the value system?

Speaker 1 What are the role models, right?

Speaker 1 What are people being inspired to do? Also, what form of shaming is in effect? Like, what are we not going to tolerate?

Speaker 1 Take the perverse fat studies. Like,

Speaker 1 are we going to glorify obesity, right? Right. No.
No. And that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case, but

Speaker 1 it's a cultural statement. And if the, if, and, and I, and it's not that the government plays, it should control the culture, but our leaders certainly play a big role in that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so, both in and outside of government.

Speaker 1 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 is just as powerful as the actual government actions.

Speaker 1 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 family.
Fat shaming works.

Speaker 1 And maybe you should shame parents if their kids are fat. Yeah, right.
The problem is

Speaker 1 there's so many people that are ignorant as to what exactly is going on. Of course.
And that's it's like absolutely required. And they're being fed bullshit.
100%. And yes.

Speaker 1 But again, it's also cultural, which is like, okay,

Speaker 1 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 who gets in which source?

Speaker 1 And then, therefore, which sources in the media get respect? Right? And so we have this giant collective culture question

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But what specifically can RFK Jr. do once he actually gets in? I mean, there's.

Speaker 1 Secretary of HHS. He has very broad, you know, I would say a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government.
What kind of pushback is there going to be against that?

Speaker 1 Like, that seems like a wild amount of money is going to be lost. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And there will be some convergence between those.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we'll see there's the 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?

Speaker 1 Yes. And you got to open your books.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 It's like office space where they brought in the Bobs for console. They're going to make some.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 What do you do here? Exactly. That's exactly what it's like.
Is there a meme like that? Isn't there a meme like that?

Speaker 1 I think there's a meme where they take those guys and they put Elon and Vivek's heads on them. Yes.

Speaker 1 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 had it literally, this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company.

Speaker 1 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, um, uh, yes.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 in the line is, what did you get done this week? Whoa.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But imagine that statement being applied to the government. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Right. Like the level of like accelerated time, like, okay, what are the problems? How are we going to fix them? And what have you gotten done this week? Yeah, you think debanking upended some lives.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly. So, yes, what have you done this week? And by the way, when Elon runs this, it's actually interesting.

Speaker 1 A guy just tweeted, a guy just tweeted or posted or Zeded what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI.

Speaker 1 And he said, Elon came in last week and he said Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five-minute chunks.

Speaker 1 And it was every five, each person had a five-minute speaking slot to to explain to Elon what they were doing. Wow.
And he did that for, you know, five times, whatever, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right. And think of how different it is for a company to be run that way.
Right. Then

Speaker 1 And the valley companies generally are quite well run by sort of business standards. And even that, like, that's the level of intensity that most valley companies aren't even close to.

Speaker 1 Now, imagine that applied to government. To government.

Speaker 1 And again, this is the kind of thing. There's no law that, like, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So leftists defending bureaucratic bloat and big government is wild to watch.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like the right wants this, so we oppose it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you have these, it's just termed manufacturing of consent, where it's like government and business are conspiring against you.

Speaker 1 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., Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 voted 94% for Kamala.

Speaker 1 6% for Trump. Whoa.
Right? 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, D.C.

Speaker 1 Wow, lobbyists, lobbyists, they call them beltway bandits. Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's a crazy job.

Speaker 1 It's the actual term.

Speaker 1 And these aren't people working for the government. These are people making money from the government, right? These are people sponging off the government.

Speaker 1 And so, like, yeah,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the correct mentality on this that they used to have. No, yeah, if there's less government bloat, then there's less tax dollars.

Speaker 1 You don't need as much money to fund these things.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they work from home. Most.
Most. Yeah.

Speaker 1 A very large percentage. Something like half just literally just never came back.
Whoa. And they still, by the way, still draw paycheck.

Speaker 1 They're still in their jobs, but literally they're not in the office.

Speaker 1 Or in some cases, they have an agreement where there's one agency, I won't name, but there's one agency where there's where the, there's, okay, here's another great thing.

Speaker 1 There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants, civil have full civil service protections and unionized.

Speaker 1 Entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but they both have civil service protections, which, by the way, are totally made up. There's no concept in the Constitution of like civil service protections.

Speaker 1 It's just like a totally made up thing. And they're unionized.

Speaker 1 And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return to the office from COVID, and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 out of 60 days. That's crazy.
As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right?

Speaker 1 Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there, and then they go live someplace nice.

Speaker 1 You know, someplace nice, but you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something where it's the cost of living is cheaper and they have a bigger house.

Speaker 1 And, you know, in theory, they're working from home, but like, you know, like, is it, is it actually happening? So, and this is what, again, this is the Doge.

Speaker 1 This is one of the things that the Doge, they've, they've already announced. The thing they've said is you can work from home, just not for the federal government.

Speaker 1 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% of the federal workforce.

Speaker 1 Right. And, you know, and as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that?

Speaker 1 And, you know, 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,

Speaker 1 fair enough. Of course.
But if they're kicking it at home,

Speaker 1 maybe not. Yeah, maybe not.

Speaker 1 How much oversight has there been on whether or not they've been kicking it? Excellent question. Yeah.
Now, it turns out

Speaker 1 there are ways to figure this out.

Speaker 1 So, for example,

Speaker 1 for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access, like to email, you can actually check.

Speaker 1 Often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network. You can actually audit and you can see who's been working.

Speaker 1 And then there's a

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and and and then on a intermittently wiggles it.

Speaker 1 And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company

Speaker 1 he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote worker workers weren't pulling their weight.

Speaker 1 And so he actually wrote himself in a weekend an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all of his employees for a week.

Speaker 1 And then he bought all 50 like mouse wigglers from China that 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. Wow.

Speaker 1 Right, and so how many federal employees are using mouse wigglers? Right. How crazy is that that that's how they can measure whether or not you're active? Yeah.
Whether your mouse is moving? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like

Speaker 1 what are they seeing? Just

Speaker 1 a pattern of movement of the mouse.

Speaker 1 Well, the mouse wigglers move in a way that you can fingerprint. So is this like,

Speaker 1 do you agree to a certain amount of disclosure of your personal information while you're working? Like, how do you you get access to mouse wiggles? Oh, so it's very common.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that doesn't mean, that doesn't mean they're washing, literally washing you,

Speaker 1 but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and

Speaker 1 be able to see how much is the computer on. Wow.
Is the mouse moving? And so that's actually a reasonably common thing. I heard the most ridiculous argument against this.

Speaker 1 They're like, what are you going to do with all those employees that get fired? Like,

Speaker 1 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 hubcap stealing illegal?

Speaker 1 Like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 They're essentially stealing tax dollars.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Well, the answer is they can do something productive. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And people are more than capable.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it. So that's number one.

Speaker 1 Number two, you can bring down government debt, which means you can bring down government interest.

Speaker 1 And the government today, the federal government today, pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But again, what percentage of that is the

Speaker 1 GDP?

Speaker 1 Well, so

Speaker 1 the total government spending is on the order of $7 trillion.

Speaker 1 Interest payments are like 1.2 trillion, something like that. 1.2 trillion.
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.

Speaker 1 And again, no tax, nobody's benefiting from that. It's just interest payments.
That's banana. Right.
And total GDP is like, I don't,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's, I don't know, it's 20, 30, 40 trillion. It's, you know, it's much larger than that.
But like, still, it's enough. This is a lot of money.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the total accumulated debt is 35 trillion. And the total accumulated debt is 35 trillion, and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every hundred days.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God, it hurts my head. There's a congressman, actually, Thomas Massey.
You should have. So he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this.
And

Speaker 1 he's one of the only libertarians, and

Speaker 1 he's an MIT engineer. And he actually designed himself a pocket lapel pin calculator

Speaker 1 of the government debt. And he wears it every day and watches it.
He walks around with this.

Speaker 1 He walks with a little scrolling LED design

Speaker 1 on his lapel. and it literally counts.
It counts the debt and it's accurate. It's pulling data from the U.S.
Treasury and it's actually an accurate count.

Speaker 1 And so it's like 34 trillion, 35 trillion, 36 trillion. Here's the kicker.
At the current pace, at the compounding, it'll cross, the debt will cross 100 trillion in the foreseeable future.

Speaker 1 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 those?

Speaker 1 That's his goal, right? He wants, because otherwise the status quo in Washington is just let this happen.

Speaker 1 Right. And so anyway, so another way you benefit is reduction of interest.
And then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates.

Speaker 1 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.
Right.

Speaker 1 So everybody who buys, 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's good for everybody. Right.
Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever gets car loan, home loan, small business loan. You want to bring down interest rates.

Speaker 1 But this fundamental discussion of it, like the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So just observationally, almost all the rich people in our society were for Kamala.

Speaker 1 Right. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 The Democratic Party, so the

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 For sure me, I guess your grandfather didn't. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 But it's like, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like fancy, it's like high net worth, high income people with primarily knowledge working jobs, right?

Speaker 1 So some professor, reporter, programmer, right? Database expert, like

Speaker 1 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 like you know the elite degree so so that's the top and then the bottom is what what you call the the clientele underclass right so it's and it's it's the it's they call the rainbow coalition right so it's all it's the minority groups right and so it's the assembly of you know low-income african americans low-income latinos you know dot dot dot dot dot all the recent immigrants recent immigrants and so forth right and so that's the democratic coalition that they explicitly program against and then republicans in in our era republicans are in the the,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, the

Speaker 1 truck drivers, farmers, you know,

Speaker 1 all the way, you know, garbage man and janitor. Like everybody who goes to work nine to five has a job, probably, probably either small business or a physical job.

Speaker 1 You know, you know, it's sort of say labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the hands, right, right, kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 So kind of the so-called real economy, which is why, right, the Republicans are concentrated in the center and the south, because that's where all those things are.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the weird thing that's happened is

Speaker 1 liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right? Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man.

Speaker 1 And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because they're saving the world.

Speaker 1 It's amazing. to be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad.

Speaker 1 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 it you got it you got to do this and you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your

Speaker 1 you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your client of your clientele and yourself it's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in yeah and it's just it's why the con if you read if you read the media you know 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, but we're the party of good with a capital OG because we're taking care of all these poor, marginalized people.

Speaker 1 And so it's a very compelling,

Speaker 1 you feel great about yourself, right? It's just absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 running a restaurant or whatever, because it's just like you're not affected by the rising crime rates because you live in a safe neighborhood.

Speaker 1 Right. And you've got a, 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.

Speaker 1 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. And that's the wedge.

Speaker 1 That's the wedge. And it worked.
Like, look, for a long time, for 40, 50, 60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power.

Speaker 1 It's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it can no longer win. And so therefore it has to get re-examined.

Speaker 1 So for you, when you had this shift of thinking, you talked to the waiter and then the Hillary Clinton speech. And then how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things?

Speaker 1 And how much of a reluctance is there? Well, so from 26, 17 to 2020, I was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then COVID hit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 we're responsible for startups.

Speaker 1 And so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything.

Speaker 1 But really, it was, I mean, really, the big thing was the Biden administration just flat out tried to kill us. Like, they just came straight at us and they came straight at our founders.

Speaker 1 And so, and they tried to kill crypto and they were on their way to trying to kill AI.

Speaker 1 I mean, there were horrible. Like, they were a second.
What was the motivation to kill kill AI? Because it's a because

Speaker 1 they want control. I mean, they want control.

Speaker 1 They want to control it in the same way they control. So they recognize the potential of it and they want to head it off of the path.
They want to control. Or they want to put it in a headlock.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So how are they trying to do that?

Speaker 1 I mean, so it's the it's the AI is think about it as the same dynamics that caused censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI. And and so there's a couple of steps to it.

Speaker 1 So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in headlock and control them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel. And then how would they do that? That's a threat to the control.
So it's a concept called regulatory capture.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business. You know, your Kodak.

Speaker 1 Right. Your Kodak.

Speaker 1 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.
You know, who's. Blockbuster video.

Speaker 1 Blockbuster video. Like, that's the cautionary tale.
Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around the campfire at night that are just absolutely terrifying.

Speaker 1 And like business schools teach you, like, that's the one thing you do not want to do. And so there's two ways to try to deal with that.

Speaker 1 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 you know, these startups are out there doing all these crazy things.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation.

Speaker 1 We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long.

Speaker 1 And in fact, the more the better.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year.

Speaker 1 People would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds.

Speaker 1 After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too big to fail banks, right? The banks were too big.

Speaker 1 And so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which is going to fix the too big to fail banking problem. They implemented that in 2011.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So those banks are, those banks, those two big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out, are now much larger than they were before.

Speaker 1 The banking industry has concentrated into those banks. All the mid-sized banks are being shaken out.
And, you know, they're periodically, they'll go under. Like

Speaker 1 the bank in Silicon Valley, it's called Silicon Valley Bank, right? And, you know, it went under. And this has been happening all across the economy.

Speaker 1 And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero. Whoa.

Speaker 1 And so the banking system is being centralized basically into 10 big banks. They actually have a term.
They have a great term called G-SIB,

Speaker 1 globally significant something, something bank.

Speaker 1 And so there's like 10 G-SIBs. 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.

Speaker 1 You're done. You're absolutely done.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Which is what has been happening, which was happening

Speaker 1 under the prior regime. Wow.
Right. And again, like at that point.
Zero. Zero new banks.
Yeah, zero.

Speaker 1 Literally, it was like cardiac arrest. It was like, that's it for new bank charters.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you can't function. You can't exist.

Speaker 1 Like, it's not, it's ruled out. It's by definition, it's ruled out.
You can't do it. It's not financially viable.
Wow. Right.

Speaker 1 So that happened in banking. That's what they've been doing to social media.

Speaker 1 This has been the same.

Speaker 1 And by the way, this has happened in many other industries. By the way,

Speaker 1 this happened in the food industry is greatly consolidated. That's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 think what 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Because if not, it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and frontological examinations for the rest of his life. Wow.
Everything.

Speaker 1 So that's essentially what we accuse the CCP of doing in China.

Speaker 1 So if you combine banking and social media and

Speaker 1 now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score

Speaker 1 is where you end up with this.

Speaker 1 And this goes back to the trucker strike thing. You don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids.
You just like, you threaten to take away their insurance.

Speaker 1 You don't threaten to take away their insurance. It's not government insurance that's being taken away.

Speaker 1 The same thing has happened in the insurance industry. It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies.
They're super regulated.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So there's no appeal process. We're back to the debanking thing.
And so that happened in banking. That's been happening in internet and tech social media generally.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically biased.

Speaker 1 You can do this today. You just go on, you go on any of these systems today and you just like ask, you just start asking like really basic questions.
Gemini is the best example of that, right?

Speaker 1 When they had the multiracial Nazis. The black Nazis.
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.

Speaker 1 And it's important to understand that in reality, he did not. But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because it's biased.
They programmed it to be be biased.

Speaker 1 They programmed it in a political direction.

Speaker 1 There's this guy, David Rosato, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side, where he shows the incidence rates of the rise of all of the woke language in the media.

Speaker 1 And there's similar studies that have come out for the AI where

Speaker 1 there's studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then there's tremendous pressure.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day,

Speaker 1 it's, quote, just people talking to each other. AI is going to be the control layer on everything.

Speaker 1 So, AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn in school.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's going to be the control layer on everything.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent, is to keep that from happening.

Speaker 1 And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path. Like, they were very clearly going for that.

Speaker 1 And it was just 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%.

Speaker 1 Another Biden administration for sure.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right. And so

Speaker 1 you could imagine a Kamala administration that had a very different approach, but she refused to clarify any of her positions. Right.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 a 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,

Speaker 1 Elon really broke a lot of the... 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then look, it's, you know, it's like a cascade where people are like, okay, apparently you can now talk about things. Okay, I have some things to say.
Yeah. Well, and then look, also just

Speaker 1 they went too far. They tightened the screws.
I mean, they really came at us hard. And so, you know, and the harder they come at us, like we didn't predict.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But then they did all these things, right?

Speaker 1 And it took a couple years to figure out that this was not like a temporary thing, like this was like a concerted campaign, and that they were really coming from.

Speaker 1 What agency specifically is involved in doing that? Oh, I mean, they have alphabet soup, but like SEC tried to kill crypto very specifically. FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized.

Speaker 1 There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle, commodities, futures.

Speaker 1 There's crypto that's a security. There's some forms of crypto that are security and the SEC regulates.
There's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the CFTC regulates.

Speaker 1 The CFPB I mentioned earlier, so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

Speaker 1 decided that they were also going to regulate AI,

Speaker 1 which they just volunteered for.

Speaker 1 And then, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 years ago. So the FAA has been a big problem.

Speaker 1 What is it?

Speaker 1 Also, the FAA. When you say made drones illegal, but you can still buy drones, like what have they done?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Wow. Which means if you're a U.S.
drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation. So you're a Chinese.
You can handicap your ability. Yes.
So either the U.S.

Speaker 1 drone needs to either not fly beyond line of sight, which is not very useful, right?

Speaker 1 Or it needs to somehow validate, or only have customers that

Speaker 1 have pilot's licenses.

Speaker 1 China, there's no such restriction.

Speaker 1 And the Chinese, we have, because we run a more open economy, the Chinese drones you can just buy in the U.S. and use however you want.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon. Oh, crime-y.
Yes.

Speaker 1 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, exactly.

Speaker 1 See if you could find that, Jamie. Chinese dragon

Speaker 1 drone displays, like one of the largest ones they ever did.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable how much more advanced they are. Yeah.
And I will tell you, the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this, like, or worse than zero.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Look at this. They're flying up together.
Yeah. They did one that was at night, Jamie, because they were all lit up.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 So imagine those with guns.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's incredible. If they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones.
Oh, my God. That's carnage.
Dude, don't even put that out there.

Speaker 1 Don't put that voodoo on me, Ricky Bobby. Sorry.
Sorry. Look at that heart in the sky with a heartbeat.
Correct. This is insane.
Correct. Yes.
It's so incredible. Yes.

Speaker 1 They had a little one like that that played over the M ⁇ M concert

Speaker 1 when I was at CODA at the Circuits of the Americas here. They had this giant M ⁇ M concert.
It was like 100,000 people there.

Speaker 1 And then afterwards, they had like drones in the sky that did little dances. Chinese drones?

Speaker 1 I bet. I bet they were.
They weren't like this, though.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look, DOD wasn't these. Soldiers in the field,

Speaker 1 it's very common soldiers. Just soldiers, normal 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.

Speaker 1 And these are Chinese. They're Chinese 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.

Speaker 1 Is the Trump administration on this? They're very aware.

Speaker 1 I don't know what they'll do. Yeah.
It's somewhere in the priority order, the things that they're dealing with. But they are, yes, they are well aware of this.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it's the kind of thing I would hope that would get some attention. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, this 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.

Speaker 1 That's not good.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 these are bad. These are bad.
Especially, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Silly me. Well, silly me, I was wrong.
So

Speaker 1 this is my argument I make geopolitically in D.C., which is

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 versus the Soviet Union, and like contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war.

Speaker 1 But 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.

Speaker 1 And then as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?

Speaker 1 Maxine Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency. She was talking about that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I heard that. I was like, that's a terrible idea.
It's exactly the wrong thing. You've got to be like China to compete with China? It's exactly the wrong thing.
It's exactly the wrong thing.

Speaker 1 You don't want that.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 the China system has its problems.

Speaker 1 They terrorize their own population directly. They do impose the social credit score stuff.

Speaker 1 They do all this stuff. And then, by the way,

Speaker 1 here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism.

Speaker 1 Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, and there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China to the point,

Speaker 1 a friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, and he said, every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.

Speaker 1 And they're all trying to get their money out, and they're all trying to get their families out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you may or may not come back.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And by the way, and drag you into training.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. Right.

Speaker 1 So like that actually happens, right? So 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.

Speaker 1 So you'd rather be a CEO in the U.S. than in China for sure, as long as the U.S.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 See, I was not nearly as aware as I should have been about all these things that you're saying. I didn't know this.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans, and it was.

Speaker 1 Can you talk about it? Basically, just full government control. Like, this sort of thing.

Speaker 1 There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, they told us, they just said,

Speaker 1 don't even start startups. Like, don't even bother.

Speaker 1 Like, there's just no way there's no way that they can succeed There's no way that we're gonna permit that to happen Wow, yeah, they just said this is already over It's gonna be two or three companies and we're just gonna we're gonna we're gonna control them and and that's that like this is already finished.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. No, when you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? You go endorse Donald Trump

Speaker 1 Oh my God. And again, like I'll just tell you like, you know, look like, because I'm going to get a lot of, you know, the flag I'm going to get for this is he's just a crazy whatever right-winger.

Speaker 1 But like I was a Democrat. I was like a Democrat.

Speaker 1 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 2016.

Speaker 1 I was like a Democrat in good standing.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They've 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,

Speaker 1 which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago.

Speaker 1 But everybody has fully updated their views for that day, and that's what they talk about at the dinner party. And I am no longer invited to those.

Speaker 1 Nor do I want to go to them.

Speaker 1 And then there's the other kind, which is, you know, David Sachs and like all these guys and all these people and, you know, just this growing universe.

Speaker 1 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 fun.

Speaker 1 Right, but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the my pillow guy. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like, no disrespect, Mike, to the my pillow guy.
But you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're very well informed and they understand the repercussions. They understand what's been coming their way.
And there's people like yourself that could speak about

Speaker 1 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 who are now in control of potentially the most

Speaker 1 the biggest agent of change in the history of the human race potentially.

Speaker 1 And you're going to let what? The people that can't even balance the budget? The people that don't know what the fuck is going on?

Speaker 1 That sounds insane.

Speaker 1 And look, my hope,

Speaker 1 I think under Clinton and Gore, I think that they dealt with this very differently.

Speaker 1 I mean, look, they dealt with the internet very differently than the current cropper are dealing with these technologies. Well, it was very different.

Speaker 1 It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could actually, you could.

Speaker 1 So there used to be this thing I call the deal with a capital D.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this was the deal. This was, you know, the deal.
This was Clinton and Gore was 100% in support of that. And they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech.

Speaker 1 And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like every single part of that was shattered, right? Where it just like technology became presumptively evil, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 so I'll give you the ultimate case today 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 uh called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which of 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the attack was they're only doing it to save money on taxes.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 basic mathematics, you don't give away 99% of your money

Speaker 1 to save money on taxes, right? But it was a vicious attack. It was like a very, very aggressive attack.

Speaker 1 And the fundamental reason for the attack was how dare they treat that money like it's it's their own? How dare they decide where it goes?

Speaker 1 Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent. The government should take the money and the government should allocate it.

Speaker 1 And that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do. Aaron Powell, what do you think is the root of that kind of thinking? Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Utopian, this is a utopian collectivism.

Speaker 1 Socialism that works. Socialism.
Yeah, it's the core idea of socialism. The core idea is

Speaker 1 radical egalitarianism. Everybody should be exactly the same.
All outcomes should be exactly the same. Everything should be completely fair at all.
And some root of it has to be an envy. Of course.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Envy, resentment.

Speaker 1 Nietzsche had this great term called resentiment.

Speaker 1 And it's like turbocharged resentment. And so the way he described it is, resentiment is envy, resentment, and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values.

Speaker 1 And the things that used to be good become bad, and the things that used to be bad become good. Ooh.
Right. And that's how.
Philanthropy becomes bad.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I would have loved to read some of those comments.

Speaker 1 I would like to go to their page and see what else they comment. I'll give you another example.
Here's another radicalizing moment for me.

Speaker 1 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, endorse Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things.

Speaker 1 She actually worked in the Clinton administration, died in the World Democrats. She wrote this book called Lean In

Speaker 1 about 12 years ago. It's this sort of feminist manifesto, and it basically says

Speaker 1 lean in. Lean in.
And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could quote unquote lean in.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I read the draft of the book when she was writing it, and I said, well, you realize you've written a right-wing manifesto.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Right. And she looks at me like, I've lost my mind, right? Because she's a lifelong leftie.
And she's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, this book is a statement that women have agency.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 On the left, what people believe is that women are only always and ever victims. Wow.
And if a woman doesn't succeed in a career, it's because she's being discriminated against.

Speaker 1 And so I said, I predicted when this book comes out, the right-wingers are going to think it's great and you're going to get it.

Speaker 1 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 is a victim. Which in that case is exactly what happened.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 every this is denial of sexism right is denial of oppression wow because imagine if a man wrote a book like that for men right

Speaker 1 well that's patriarchy right that's yeah 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 this is how you kick ass and get ahead yeah we call it self-help lean in bro you lean in

Speaker 1 just call it exactly just call it lean in bro exactly right wow that's crazy

Speaker 1 an attacked for that. So again,

Speaker 1 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 happy. What was her reaction to that blowboard?

Speaker 1 I would say she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not

Speaker 1 pleased.

Speaker 1 But also, was she shocked? Horrified. You're correct? Did you have a follow-up conversation with her? Yeah, we've talked about it a lot.
Like, God damn it, Mark, how did you see that one coming?

Speaker 1 So she was in the, but the answer is

Speaker 1 her worldview of how these things worked was from a different, it was from the Clinton Gore era

Speaker 1 in which you could, in which you could say things like that, you could talk like that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, right? Us versus them. Right.
Oppressor versus oppressed. Boy.
You know, kind of mindset. And so.

Speaker 1 It's such a contrast to what we hoped would happen when Obama would be president. That's right.
My thought was: okay,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 No. And you can win again.
You can win twice. You win twice.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who are protesting the taking down of the statue.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He was like, here's a guy that came from a single family or a single parent household. He wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life.
He's this brilliant speaker.

Speaker 1 He's handsome. He represents 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.

Speaker 1 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. And it just gets real weird for a long time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's right. That's right.
And like I said, I hope they can find their way back.

Speaker 1 But this lady's still on Team Kamala. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 She got a few lessons out of that, but not all of them.

Speaker 1 Well, no, this is if you're, you know, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, this is a, 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.

Speaker 1 You know, it's my parents. When your movement

Speaker 1 goes in directions. Well, yeah.
And there's, you know, right? And you can choose, or you can choose to follow. You can choose to follow into the

Speaker 1 craziest version of it, or you can choose to say, you know what, like, I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going going to advocate for my team to come back.

Speaker 1 This is Richie Torres.

Speaker 1 This guy is a congressman

Speaker 1 in Queens, I think, or the Bronx.

Speaker 1 He actually started out, everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty because he's gay, he's black, he's Latino.

Speaker 1 He was at least associated with the squad early on.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to moderation.

Speaker 1 We have to have law enforcement. We have to have, you know, we can't have crime in the streets.
We have to have a border.

Speaker 1 You know, we have to, 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 correct.

Speaker 1 And 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, there are people like, and he's young and very energetic.

Speaker 1 And, you know, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, during the Bush administration, all the lefties looked at him like that was Satan.

Speaker 1 He was the profiteer. That's right.
He was the manipulator. He was the guy pulling the strings.

Speaker 1 He was the CEO of Hal Burton.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 This is the best shift of it, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right.
That's right. All of us, right? All of a sudden, all of a sudden, we're all neocons.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, as you said, all of a sudden, we're pro-war.

Speaker 1 It's like, wait, wait, you know, because, as you know, like, the Democrats, you know, yeah, the Democrats used to be the anti-war party. Yes.
They were the anti-war party for a very long time. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes. And, yeah.

Speaker 1 Except back when they were trying to keep Slavery in Act.

Speaker 1 That's part of the problem. That was a different era.
People don't realize that. That was a different era.

Speaker 1 But you know, look, coming out of Vietnam, they were definitely the anti-war party for like, you know, 30 years ago. But isn't that a shift as well? Yeah.

Speaker 1 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 these weird ideological swings, they happen.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 we're still attached to the idea of being a Democrat as like being a Clinton Democrat.

Speaker 1 We're in this weird sort of...

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I support civil rights, women's rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Down the line, I'm a Democrat.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because the left always supported Israel. 100%.
And then all of a sudden, there's this Free Palestine movement, which divides the left even further.

Speaker 1 There's a book written some years back by this guy, Norman Podhoris, and that's criticizes why are Jews liberal?

Speaker 1 Right. And he was a right-wing Jewish.
He was a right-wing Jew, a very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker of in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Speaker 1 And he's like, he basically is like, basically, he had this thesis that these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S.

Speaker 1 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, basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because the basic concept of Israel violates the idea.

Speaker 1 Israel is literally a religious ethnostate.

Speaker 1 And that's inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea. The left doesn't have room for the left-hand side.
And a military superpower. And a military.
Right, and is able to.

Speaker 1 And it's run by a former special forces operator.

Speaker 1 Yes, very

Speaker 1 capable, yes, very capable soldier in his. He's a fucking assassin.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, he argued, I don't know, this is like whatever, 20 years ago, he's like, this is headed in the wrong direction. But, you know, the argument was ignored at the time.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th, you know, they were completely horrified, you know, to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish, right?

Speaker 1 Which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the universities. Right.
Right. And it's like, you know, and there's two ways of looking at that.

Speaker 1 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 MIT, was it Yale?

Speaker 1 No, it was Harvard MIT in Columbia. Yeah, that was

Speaker 1 right. That That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas.
Well, and then we saw that. Yeah, right.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, the new acronym, right, LGBTH.

Speaker 1 Right. But there's a bunch of other stuff in there now.
There's a Q, there's a two-spirit. You know, but you've got to get H in there now for Hamas.
Oh, boy, really?

Speaker 1 Of course. Of course, of course.
And so, so, like,

Speaker 1 I bring it up just as an example, not to take a position, just as an example of it's the kind of realignment a lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of.

Speaker 1 So, I think to your point, I think, like, the whole country is going through, I think we're going through the first profound political realignment probably since the 1960s,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think it's something like the multi-ethnic working class coalition

Speaker 1 that came together around Trump,

Speaker 1 basically, again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves. And

Speaker 1 it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.

Speaker 1 And so I think, but by the way, including

Speaker 1 a lot of black people, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote for Trump is way up. Youth vote for Trump is way up.
Way up. Gay vote is like all of

Speaker 1 the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years are union vote is for Trump. I'm sure you've seen the

Speaker 1 map, the electoral map of California, 2024 and 2020.

Speaker 1 In contrast, it's a crazy red wave. It's going across the whole, most of the state is red now.
Aaron Powell, those of us on the coast are going to get pushed into the ocean. Yes.

Speaker 1 Well, I think, you know, maybe the other way.

Speaker 1 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 issues.

Speaker 1 I mean, like, the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women. I mean, this is a giant one where women are psychological.
Listen, we created Title IX for a reason.

Speaker 1 Like, we want women's sports to be for women.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 how can you deny a victim group? Right. Right.
You can't. I mean, in the full version of that ideology, in the extreme version of that ideology,

Speaker 1 you cannot deny a victim claim. Well, it also comes with this weird caveat where you have to deny the existence of perverts.
Right.

Speaker 1 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 in the women's room, and no one can say anything.

Speaker 1 Well, you've emboldened, empowered one the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 California has 47 of them when the last time I looked at it.

Speaker 1 And there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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's the worst at it.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting in to female prisons. And it's just it's insanity.
And I think the left rejects that too for the most part.

Speaker 1 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-war muff.
But also,

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 And then there's legitimate trans women. So like, how do you make the distinct? Well, clearly we have to have a fucking conversation.

Speaker 1 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. Yeah, you're neutral.
Right there. People have done it.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of people who've done it. It's fun.

Speaker 1 It's fun.

Speaker 1 They create a little sock puppet account and they say some shit that should have been a reasonable thing to say just 20 years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, you make me hopeful, Mark.
Good. You do.
You do. Because you lay things out in

Speaker 1 a really well-thought-out way that is not hyperbolic and you're making a lot of sense. So I'm glad we talked to you.
I feel better. Good.
Fantastic.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Every day, it feels better. It's just like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 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 hopey changey.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Tell everybody your Substack, how to find you on social media. Oh,

Speaker 1 I'm on X under P Mark A. I'm on Substack.
Google me. All right.
Ask Perplexity. All right.
Ask Chat GPT, and it will deny that. No,

Speaker 1 it will happily tell you that I exist.

Speaker 1 At least last time I checked.

Speaker 1 What about Wikipedia?

Speaker 1 We don't know.

Speaker 1 We don't know if Catherine is still running. Always a pleasure, Mark.
Thank you very much. Appreciate you.
All right. Bye, everybody.