#2234 - Marc Andreessen AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Joe Rogan Experience

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Episode: #2234 - Marc Andreessen

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 03:14:56

Episode Shownotes

Marc Andreessen is an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is co-creator of the world's first widely used internet browser, Mosaic, cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and cohost of "The Ben & Marc Show" podcast.

www.a16z.com https://pmarca.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this episode of 'The Joe Rogan Experience', host Joe Rogan converses with entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen about a range of topics including the aftermath of significant political events, the role of social media and government in shaping narratives, and the implications of emerging technologies like AI. Andreessen articulates concerns over censorship, the efficacy of new campaigning strategies, and the evolving dynamics of political identities in America, particularly within the context of the Republican and Democratic parties. The discussion encompasses the need for leadership grounded in virtue, historical perspectives on societal issues, and the potential for cultural shifts towards more moderate and sensible political approaches.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#2234 - Marc Andreessen) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_01
Hello, good to see you.

00:00:08 Speaker_00
Thanks for having me back. My pleasure. Good to see you where the world's still functional.

00:00:19 Speaker_03
Amazing.

00:00:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, amazing. Um, we wanted to talk you wanted to talk about the post election sort of a wrap up. Yeah, sort of. where we stand. Are you happy? Very happy. It was a weird one. Mourning in America.

00:00:32 Speaker_00
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.

00:00:40 Speaker_03
So my theory is the timeline, like in a science fiction movie, the timeline has split twice in the last, in the last like nine months.

00:00:47 Speaker_00
What was the first split?

00:00:48 Speaker_03
There was when Trump got shot. And there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions.

00:00:54 Speaker_00
Right. If he got hit,

00:00:56 Speaker_03
Yeah, and we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen Right at that moment exactly and it could have gone, you know Horrifically badly for the entire world after that. So that was timeline split number one.

00:01:08 Speaker_03
So that other time lies out there somewhere Yeah, and I don't want to visit it boy.

00:01:12 Speaker_00
Imagine being stuck there. What kind of horrible karma? No, I mean, that's a totalitarian Dystopian nightmare.

00:01:18 Speaker_03
That's the bad place. Yeah, and then timeline split again an election day. I

00:01:23 Speaker_00
I know you fancy a good conspiracy theory. And that gentleman being able to pull off what he did and the way it happened, the way it all went down, it's a Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0.

00:01:39 Speaker_04
Oh, yeah.

00:01:39 Speaker_00
Clearly. Yeah. The shooter. Yeah. That we still don't know anything. There's no call for disclosure. There's no call for a press conference. There's no toxicology report. The toxicology report had to have been done. Yeah.

00:01:54 Speaker_00
Wouldn't you want to know what kind of stuff this kid is on that made him want to do that, or if anything?

00:01:59 Speaker_03
Yeah. So my theory is it's almost as if people want us to think it's a conspiracy. It's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated. Like it's just it's so strange.

00:02:10 Speaker_03
This 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?

00:02:18 Speaker_03
So do you think they're gonna do a dive into what happened?

00:02:21 Speaker_00
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 and

00:02:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, or it's just yeah, or it's just a you know, as we saw I think in the hearing afterwards Maybe just a systemic collapse of confidence.

00:02:41 Speaker_00
There's also a confidence in the fact that the the news timeline today is so rapid The when things are relevant and people are paying attention to them is you have a couple of days Yeah, even with an assassination attempt on a former president.

00:02:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, where people were murdered. Yeah, and there's It's in and out.

00:03:02 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. 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.

00:03:08 Speaker_03
And we have the memory of goldfish and things that would have been error-defining just come and go with astonishing speed and shock. By the way, I should say, I don't think there was a, I doubt there was a conspiracy.

00:03:19 Speaker_03
I don't think anything's possible. I think it's just, we have a competence collapse. And I think we saw that on display when the director at the time testified. Well, there's all the elements that it could have been a conspiracy.

00:03:29 Speaker_03
It could have, but this is kind of the thing, which is just like, it also could have been systemic competence collapse. And then it's like, okay, would it be better off for the institute if it looks like a conspiracy, right?

00:03:39 Speaker_03
Which world, okay, two timelines. Which world would you rather live in? The one with the conspiracies or the one with just incompetence everywhere?

00:03:45 Speaker_00
Well, I think you have both simultaneously. I don't think it's binary. I think there's incompetence everywhere and conspiracies are legitimate. They're real. And that one seems like conspiracy. The fact that his house was professionally scrubbed.

00:03:59 Speaker_00
There's no social media record of this kid online. There's no nothing.

00:04:03 Speaker_03
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.

00:04:09 Speaker_00
And he's a registered Republican. The whole thing is so weird. And he was a bad shooter, and then he became a great shooter. Well, he definitely trained. You could train someone to become a good shooter. This is all you have to do. Don't move and do that.

00:04:22 Speaker_00
Get all your mechanics in place, understand technique and positioning, breathing. It's not the most complicated thing from a prone position, but the fact that he chose to use iron sights I thought was weird too. There's a lot of weirdness to it.

00:04:37 Speaker_00
From 140 yards with a scope, that is an easy shot.

00:04:41 Speaker_03
Well, then he could just wander up.

00:04:43 Speaker_00
That's the different timeline. The different timeline is he has a scope, and that's it. And Trump's dead. And then boy, boy, do we live in a crazy world then. Yeah, completely bizarre. I mean, what does the streets look like right now? Yeah.

00:04:57 Speaker_00
What kind of like protests and riots and yeah. You think January 6th was nice. If they had killed Trump, that would be January 6th on steroids everywhere.

00:05:06 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. And we would experience it. I mean, you know, when I was a kid, my high school history teacher got us a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film.

00:05:15 Speaker_00
Really?

00:05:15 Speaker_03
What a gangster high school history teacher. He was actually pretty focused on that. He really loved the Kennedy assassination. So we spent a lot of time on that.

00:05:22 Speaker_03
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. But when things like that happen today, it's going to be in. High-definition 4k ultra surrounds on forever.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Yeah, 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.

00:05:40 Speaker_00
I mean, I like I said after the election. I was like wow voting works Voting works that's nice like they don't have the system completely rigged and then but they kind of tried to rig it at least with the media and

00:05:58 Speaker_00
were the real rigging in the 2020 elections.

00:06:00 Speaker_00
I mean, you can cast all your conspiracies upon it in terms of 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.

00:06:17 Speaker_00
That's legitimate.

00:06:18 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that was like direct interference. And it was aided and abetted by a lot of former intelligence officials and by the current administration.

00:06:25 Speaker_03
Tons of pressure on censorship coming from the current administration and all their kind of arms of the censorship apparatus.

00:06:32 Speaker_00
You have your hands in the tech community. You have your fingers in all that jazz. What was the general attitude about all that stuff when it was revealed? How did people, how did your peers respond to that?

00:06:45 Speaker_03
I think anybody in social media, the internet companies knew it. So it was pretty widely understood. I mean, look, there's nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files that wasn't happening all the other companies, right?

00:06:55 Speaker_03
So it's a consistent pattern. If you got the YouTube files, they would look exactly the same. And of course, we should get the YouTube files, right? And now we probably will now with this new administration is probably gonna carve all this stuff open.

00:07:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, no, look, it was a pattern. And then, look, the companies bear a lot of responsibility, and the people in the companies made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls.

00:07:11 Speaker_03
But the government, the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal. I think it's actually subject to criminal charges.

00:07:22 Speaker_03
I think there are people with criminal liability who were involved in this. So there was that. There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.

00:07:29 Speaker_03
And then there was a lot of funding of outside third-party groups that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.

00:07:35 Speaker_03
And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door, you know, to us that, you know, was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor.

00:07:46 Speaker_03
And it was very effective at doing so.

00:07:48 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus Does it smell like sulfur when you walk those halls?

00:07:50 Speaker_03
Michael O'Hanlon It is very dark and grim. This whole thing is very bad. And so … Trevor Burrus Stanford? Michael O'Hanlon Oh, yeah. Stanford. Stanford, by the way, another unit like that at Harvard. You know, a bunch of universities got pulled into this.

00:08:01 Speaker_03
A lot of NGOs and nonprofits got pulled into this. And so the Twitter file showed us kind of the basic roadmap. And then there's this thing called the Weaponization Committee that Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this.

00:08:13 Speaker_03
But I would imagine the new Trump administration is going to come in and carve all that wide open. And I know that there are people in, you know, being appointed to senior positions who are

00:08:21 Speaker_00
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00:10:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:10:44 Speaker_03
Right.

00:10:44 Speaker_00
It's like more than 100 million dollars. Right.

00:10:47 Speaker_03
Yeah. There's just there's extensive government funding of politically oriented NGOs. NGO is one of those great terms, non-governmental organization. All right. What the hell is that?

00:10:58 Speaker_00
What is that? Tell me. I don't know.

00:11:00 Speaker_03
Well, it's sort of a charity. Sort of. Sort of. But most of the time, it's a political entity. It's an entity with a political agenda.

00:11:08 Speaker_03
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, right, direct money.

00:11:20 Speaker_03
And then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government. Well, that's not an NGO. That's a geo.

00:11:27 Speaker_03
And then you've got a conspiracy, like with 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.

00:11:37 Speaker_03
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.

00:11:46 Speaker_00
Oh, okay.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
Like violation of First Amendment rights. Right. So what they always say is the First Amendment only applies to the government. The First Amendment says the government cannot censor American citizens.

00:11:55 Speaker_03
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. What you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it. Right. And that's what's been happening. Right.

00:12:06 Speaker_00
And that's like hiring a hitman. Like it's not OK to murder someone, but you can hire someone to murder someone and you're clean.

00:12:12 Speaker_03
Yeah, and if you want to solve a murder, it's not enough to find out who the hitman was. You have to find out who paid the hitman, right? You want to work your way up the chain. And so a lot of this traces into the White House.

00:12:20 Speaker_03
The best defense the companies have is that a lot of this happened under coercion, right? Because when the government puts pressure on you, like, it might be a phone call. It might be a letter. It might be the threat of an investigation.

00:12:31 Speaker_03
It might be a subpoena. It could take many forms. But when the government does that, it carries, you know, that's a very powerful message. It's like a message from a mob boss, right? Don't you want to do me a favor?" It's like, yes, Mr. Campino, I do.

00:12:44 Speaker_03
I like my corner store. I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight, right? And so there's this overwhelming hammer blow of pressure that comes in.

00:12:53 Speaker_03
And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening. And so you come under incredible pressure.

00:13:00 Speaker_03
And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activists, universities, and companies was corrupted.

00:13:05 Speaker_03
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.

00:13:11 Speaker_00
What was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election, and I didn't understand like what purpose that would serve.

00:13:22 Speaker_00
Like, what function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you, supposedly? Like, are you bribing them to support you?

00:13:34 Speaker_00
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?

00:13:46 Speaker_03
So I think in some cases, it's just pay-to-play, right? So for example, we know that Kamala's campaign paid certain on-air personalities, you know, and then there were, you know, it's your point.

00:13:56 Speaker_03
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. That's just how that system works. It's just expected.

00:14:05 Speaker_03
And then I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they actually do field activities, right?

00:14:10 Speaker_03
And so there's – maybe there's a Get Out the Vote component or there's social media influence downstream component or some other kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.

00:14:18 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus I just didn't think that they – like when – it's still unclear.

00:14:24 Speaker_03
Whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her right right if you they've mixed it up because there's Like Oprah said 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 to whatever two million Initially listed as one and it turned out it was 2.5 right and so production company

00:14:44 Speaker_00
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. It's your company. What are you talking about? And also, how much does it cost to do an event?

00:14:59 Speaker_00
How does it cost $2.5 million to put on an event? Are you feeding people gold sandwiches? What are you doing? How is that possible?

00:15:06 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. The fact that it's deliberately obfuscated, of course, is a clue as to what's happening.

00:15:11 Speaker_00
I just thought the really bizarre one was the allegations, and I'd say unsubstantiated allegations. Alleged that Beyonce got ten million dollars and Lizzo got three million dollars Eminem got 1.8 million dog. Really?

00:15:27 Speaker_03
Yeah, I Think if you just like published all these numbers these celebrities would all get so mad at each other that you do Then you would learn everything right short Lizzo's furious right now, right?

00:15:37 Speaker_03
Yeah, Lizzo's probably listening to this right now being like what?

00:15:40 Speaker_00
Well, I wonder if Lizzo's like I didn't get shit I would say it but why haven't they said it like Beyonce has been mum about the whole thing I think I would probably say yeah, like I didn't get any money to do that Yeah, but that was a weird one too because a lot of people thought Beyonce was gonna do a concert, right?

00:15:56 Speaker_00
And she just went out there and talked and everybody's like what the fuck because they all came to see a free Beyonce concert And then she just said I want to support Kamala Harris and everybody's like good good now if you like it Then you should have put a ring on it

00:16:11 Speaker_00
Come on we love your songs. Yes. That's what we're here for. Yes. I just didn't think that it was even possible that a I didn't think a candidate would ever pay for an endorsement. I mean, the fact that it was even alleged.

00:16:26 Speaker_03
Yeah. And then, 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.

00:16:34 Speaker_00
That's for sure, because I know people personally who are approached multiple times and offered a substantial amount of money to post things in support of Harris.

00:16:44 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I'm pro-capitalism, and I'm happy for them if they get paid, but maybe we should know.

00:16:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose It should be like like say if I was gonna do an ad for you know Whatever a certain coffee company black rifle coffee, and I did it on my Instagram.

00:17:00 Speaker_00
I'd have to say ad I have to say this is an ad it's a paid ad I mean, that's part of the thing. Yeah, you know unless it's your company. Yep like you're supposed to say they're paying me to do this yeah, and

00:17:12 Speaker_03
Well, you know, look, the good news with these is we learn – each cycle we learn a lot about how politics works. We learn a lot about how fake it is. We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time.

00:17:21 Speaker_03
I mean everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the new guy does but like the real scandal in most cases I think is just the way the system already works.

00:17:28 Speaker_00
It's a sneaky system. Well, another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it, like what Trump called earned media, was much more powerful than anything else.

00:17:44 Speaker_00
the uncontrolled version of it.

00:17:46 Speaker_00
Like, one of the things that, unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility so much, so much so, that like Joy Reid was on TV today, talking about saying that Trump was going to shoot protesters and all just wild, unsubstantiated, crazy shit.

00:18:08 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:18 Speaker_03
Yeah. I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse. MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 49 demo.

00:18:27 Speaker_00
That is so wild. Which is tiny. It's so crazy.

00:18:30 Speaker_03
It's really tiny. So I think that's happening. 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 four years, it's fallen off a cliff. I think it's real.

00:18:44 Speaker_03
Oh, there's another study that came out. The kids are now watching a lot less TV. Kids are just giving up on TV. And they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and other things. And so I think it's tipping.

00:18:56 Speaker_03
A question I've been asking myself is, famously, 1960 was the first television election, right? Sort of legend has it, because it was the one where the televised debate really mattered.

00:19:06 Speaker_03
And if you saw the televised debate, you saw confident Kennedy and nervous Nixon. And if you heard it, you experienced something different. and handsomeness came into effect. And vitality, and health, and all these things.

00:19:17 Speaker_03
Sort of positive spirit, positive energy. I'm actually not, this might have been the first internet election, or maybe we actually haven't had it yet. I feel like we're really close to the first internet election, but maybe it's not all the way there.

00:19:29 Speaker_00
I think this is it.

00:19:29 Speaker_03
I think this, there's an argument that this is it, right? And that all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role.

00:19:39 Speaker_03
Like I think there's a real if you're gonna 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 and maybe you don't even need to raise that money and maybe you get to your point if you have the right message Maybe you just go straight direct.

00:19:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, I 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 gonna have the same impact 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

00:20:07 Speaker_00
But I think that in the future, I'm sure they're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show. This is one thing that keeps coming up, like we need our own Joe Rogan. But they had me. I was on their side. Well, number one, they had you.

00:20:22 Speaker_00
Number one, they had you. I was on their side.

00:20:24 Speaker_03
They had you and they drove you away is the number one number. But they also have, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.

00:20:28 Speaker_00
Right, but that doesn't work anymore. I know. It'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.

00:20:36 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. That's right.

00:20:37 Speaker_00
It's just it's it's a bizarre time. It's really interesting though like as you said like we're in a great timeline and I think It's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty.

00:20:49 Speaker_00
And there's so much, right, we're at the verge of AI, you know, open AI. You know, Altman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient, whatever that means. You know, artificial general intelligence will emerge.

00:21:04 Speaker_00
And who knows how that affects. I've said publicly, and I'm kind of half joking, that we need AI government.

00:21:12 Speaker_00
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, you know, program that, you know, makes it, like, really reasonable and equitable in a way that we can all agree to?

00:21:30 Speaker_00
Let's govern things in that manner.

00:21:32 Speaker_03
Right. So you can actually simulate this today, because you can go on these systems, Shed-GPT or Collado, these others, and you can ask, you know, how should we handle issue X? How should this be run?

00:21:41 Speaker_00
Yeah, we've done that. Right.

00:21:42 Speaker_03
How should the Department of Energy do whatever, nuclear policy or whatever? And what I find when I do that is I discover two things. Number one, of course, these things have the same problem.

00:21:50 Speaker_03
social media sad, which is they're tremendously politically biased and right that's on purpose and they Need to fix that and that's gonna be a big topic in the next several years But the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political Basically bias and censorship if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue, it's you get very sophisticated answers 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

00:22:12 Speaker_00
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. And if that's the first step is we let them govern us.

00:22:22 Speaker_03
Well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this. There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it as a tool. At the very least, you start out using it as a tool. There's nothing to prevent.

00:22:32 Speaker_03
For example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistance that are going to advise them on strategy, tactics, how to win conflicts.

00:22:39 Speaker_03
And then it'll start to work its way up, and then they'll be doing war planning. And then if you're a general, if you're a sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's gonna just mean you perform better.

00:22:48 Speaker_03
And so maybe there's like the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship. And you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process.

00:22:56 Speaker_00
And there's also AI-controlled jets, which are far superior. Mike Baker was telling us about that. They did these simulated dogfights, and the AI-controlled jets won 100% of the time over humans.

00:23:08 Speaker_03
Yeah. And there's a bunch of reasons for that, and part of it is just simply the speed of processing and so forth. But another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane. You don't have the, as they say, the spam in the can.

00:23:18 Speaker_03
You don't have the human body in the plane. You don't have to keep a human being alive, which means you can be a lot faster and you can move a lot more quickly.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
G-forces. Much higher G-forces. Yeah. And then there's no option for someone to go crazy. Yeah.

00:23:33 Speaker_03
That's also right. Yes. Exactly.

00:23:35 Speaker_00
There's no human element, which is a real element.

00:23:39 Speaker_03
No, look, I think it's going to be common to have Mach 5 jet drones within a few years. And there'll be a fraction of the size of the current manned planes, which means you can have a lot more of them.

00:23:50 Speaker_03
And so you kind of want to imagine 1,000 of these things coming over the horizon right at you. And it really changes. It's actually, I think, going to be very interesting. It really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense.

00:24:02 Speaker_03
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.

00:24:10 Speaker_03
And in this drone world that we're talking about, it's gonna be the people with the most money and the best technology. So for example, small states, small advanced states like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight.

00:24:20 Speaker_03
And then kind of large sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose. And so it's gonna be a recalibration. And then the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk, right?

00:24:32 Speaker_03
So you'll have a lot less death. The bad news, arguably, is it'll be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk. So there's gonna have to be a recalibration of when you actually lean into an attack.

00:24:43 Speaker_00
I'm sure you're aware of all this UAP disclosure jazz that you see on television. The more I look into it, the more I think at least a percentage of it, a healthy percentage of it, is bullshit.

00:24:57 Speaker_00
There's probably some government projects where they've developed some very sophisticated propulsion systems that they've applied to drones, and that's what these people are seeing.

00:25:09 Speaker_00
And this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces, like out in the eastern seaboard.

00:25:17 Speaker_00
There's areas over Virginia where they continually see them, and San Diego, they see them off the coast of San Diego, where there's a place where you would test stuff like that.

00:25:27 Speaker_03
Well, so, of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified, and the SR-71 was brand new at one point, and so you had these, like, you know, alien, you know.

00:25:39 Speaker_00
Do you pay attention to any of that stuff at all?

00:25:41 Speaker_03
Of course, of course, 100%. Yeah. And then, by the way, we're not the only ones. And so my speculation would be that some of the military-based stuff is the Chinese doing something similar. And we got a glimpse into that with the balloon.

00:25:53 Speaker_03
Well, that one was goofy, though. They got shut down.

00:25:56 Speaker_03
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.

00:26:07 Speaker_03
Yeah, like not literally nothing was happening and we didn't even know they were there most of the time and so like, you know That's like a tip of the ice It feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if they were doing that there are probably other things going on Well, I've read that someone had commented that similar things had happened during the Trump administration But they didn't tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down.

00:26:25 Speaker_00
I For the record, I'm pro-shooting them down. Yeah, I think you should probably shoot them down. They're taking pictures and shit. There's not even people up there. Fucking shoot them down. What's the problem?

00:26:39 Speaker_00
Do you think there are any of those that are not of this world? I don't think there's any way to know from the outside. Have you ever, like, pondered it late at night, sitting on your porch, staring up at the sky? Of course, of course.

00:26:50 Speaker_03
Well, it raises, you know, raises, number one, is there or not? And then if it is, you know, did it recently get here? Have they been here for a long time? You know, did they arrive 5,000 years ago?

00:27:00 Speaker_00
Tucker thinks they're demons and angels.

00:27:02 Speaker_03
You know, I mean, demons and angels, are demons and angels real? It's like, you know, literally, you know, probably not. But like, certainly they're metaphorically real. And are there kind of shades of gray between literal and metaphorical?

00:27:13 Speaker_00
Well, the actions are certainly demonic and angelic, right? Actions of human beings, things that happen in the world are uplifting or horrific.

00:27:23 Speaker_03
Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they're possessed by something, right? Like something is going on. Right.

00:27:28 Speaker_03
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.

00:27:38 Speaker_03
Like, you might as well call that a demon.

00:27:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's fascinating because when you think of it from a religious perspective, people would apply, what would a demon do? What would angels do? What is the will of God and what is the evils of the worst aspects of humanity?

00:28:02 Speaker_00
You could apply them to so many things in the world, but we're very reluctant to say that something is demonic, even though it's clearly demonic, clearly in action. This is what a demon would do.

00:28:17 Speaker_00
A demon would possess people to gun down children and use drones to shoot down a wedding party. A demon would do that.

00:28:27 Speaker_03
So a friend of mine is a religious scholar. He teaches at Catholic University, and he's a religious history scholar.

00:28:32 Speaker_03
And he says that medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons.

00:28:48 Speaker_03
all kinds of supernatural entities. And it was just assumed to be true. And in the world we're heading into, that we're arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things.

00:29:01 Speaker_03
And we're going to struggle. And we're going to catastrophize. We're going to conclude AI is the end of the world. The medievals would have said, oh, it's just another spirit. It's just another kind of entity.

00:29:10 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's better than humans at some things, but so are angels. And so we're going to have to change our mentality. We're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval.

00:29:18 Speaker_03
We're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with.

00:29:21 Speaker_01
Wow.

00:29:22 Speaker_03
Yeah. Wow. Which also could help us actually deal with people. Maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational.

00:29:31 Speaker_00
Well, you expressed yourself very brilliantly in describing the current state of woke ideology as a religion.

00:29:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right.

00:29:41 Speaker_00
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.

00:29:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:30:05 Speaker_03
Well, I mean, of course, the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption, no concept of forgiveness, which is a very evil religion. You do not want that.

00:30:18 Speaker_00
Well, it's ill-conceived, right? Because it's like immature. It's an immature religion.

00:30:23 Speaker_03
Yes, it's absolutist. It's inherently totalitarian. It has to be because it can permanently destroy people. Yeah. Woke also understands something that the Greeks understood, which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing.

00:30:35 Speaker_03
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 though 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 You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed and so there was no way to survive without being part of your community Wow

00:30:56 Speaker_03
And that's what the Wilkes figured out is you can do the same thing 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 you know, they can't have you sure, you know people, you know, they lose friends They lose family.

00:31:09 Speaker_03
Yeah, they can't get work, you know before you know it like they're you know living, you know, severely diminished damaged lives some people then go on to kill themselves and

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00:33:31 Speaker_00
Attention at all to blue sky, but I have multiple friends that have accounts on blue sky that are very sophisticated trolls and are Pushing like the woke agenda to a satirical point like to like parody. Yeah

00:33:50 Speaker_00
But like on the edge where you're not quite sure well They'll say enough real things that make sense and talk about their own anxieties and personal issues with stuff and then say fucking ridiculous shit and it's Fascinating I bet it works.

00:34:04 Speaker_00
It does work. That's what's so Terrifying it's like all the outcasts of Twitter all the people that were like I can't take this a few of them will come back Which is wonderful. I love when they come back.

00:34:14 Speaker_00
I'm gone I'm gonna go to blue sky fuck you people like a bunch of them went to threads for a while like Stephen King He went to threads came right back.

00:34:20 Speaker_00
They all come right back They can't the marketplace of ideas like okay You could go to like a fruit stand in the middle of the fucking desert and that's a marketplace Or you can go to the farmers market where everybody's there like where you gonna go.

00:34:34 Speaker_03
That's right

00:34:34 Speaker_00
You're gonna go to the farmer's market. There's tons of people. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of activity. That fruit stand's fucking barren and deserted. There's no one there. There's very few choices.

00:34:44 Speaker_03
It's not fun. And it's win-win to have them back on Twitter, because it's good for them, because they want to proselytize, and so they need an audience, so they win. And then we win, because it's really, really fun to dunk on them.

00:34:55 Speaker_00
But it's also weird for them to not want any pushback at all. Isn't the whole thing supposed to be about an exchange of ideas? If you have a controversial idea and someone disagrees with it, don't you want to hear that position? I know I do.

00:35:11 Speaker_00
I want to hear it. Even if I vehemently disagree with it, I want to hear it. I want to know, how does your brain work? How are you coming to these conclusions? What makes you think this way? Who are you? What do you like?

00:35:22 Speaker_00
On Instagram, I want to look at your pictures. I wanna see what you're up to. What are you doing? What do you do in your free time? What are you complaining about?

00:35:29 Speaker_00
It's a fascinating education on human psychology, and to watch people express themselves publicly, and then also be attacked publicly by strangers, which never happens in the real world, at scale, the way it happens on social media.

00:35:48 Speaker_00
And I think it's an amazing time for people to examine ideas. if you can handle it.

00:35:54 Speaker_03
Yeah. My favorite term is marketplace of idea. Yeah. You could have a marketplace of ideas. It's just going to be one idea. So blue sky is a marketplace of ideas. Sure. Yeah. X is the marketplace of ideas. That final S makes a lot of difference.

00:36:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. But the thing about X is it really is diverse. I follow tons of kooky leftist progressive nutbags that have bizarre takes on everything.

00:36:21 Speaker_00
And they were a hundred percent convinced that Kamala Harris gonna sweep all the swing states including, Iowa They were all in and I was like, this is wild. Yeah, like is that gonna happen?

00:36:31 Speaker_00
Are they right like this is crazy, but it's they were 100% convinced and it's it's fascinating to see all these different kinds of people to see the Charlie Kirk's and you know, the the full-on left-wing kooks and see them all together, right and

00:36:46 Speaker_03
So you need that. Paul Sherman Yeah. Look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition, right? So anytime anybody has a new idea, it's a threat to the existing power structure.

00:36:58 Speaker_03
So all new ideas start as heresies. And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not gonna have new ideas and you're gonna end up with complete stagnation. If you have stagnation, you're gonna go straight into decline.

00:37:11 Speaker_03
And I think this is the aberrant nature. This is the timeline split. I think the last decade has just been like a really weird aberrant time where things have not been working like they should.

00:37:18 Speaker_03
And in 2015, Twitter called itself the free speech wing of the free speech party. And Elon has restored it. He brought it back to something that everybody thought was completely normal 10 years ago.

00:37:32 Speaker_03
And I think, I hope, this last 10 years increasingly is just gonna feel like a bad dream.

00:37:37 Speaker_03
Like I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression right and anger and you know emotional incontinence and you know Cancellation campaign emotional incontinence is a great term.

00:37:45 Speaker_00
Yes, there has been a lot Diarrhea in your emotions

00:37:52 Speaker_03
It's just spraying rage in all directions. And so 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.

00:38:01 Speaker_00
I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack Dorsey. I like him a lot as a human being. I think he's a brilliant guy. And I think he had very good intentions, but he was a part of a very large corporation.

00:38:13 Speaker_00
And he had an idea for a Wild West Twitter. He wanted to have two versions of Twitter. He wanted to have the Twitter that was pre-Elon. where there's moderation and you can't deadname someone and all that jazz.

00:38:26 Speaker_00
And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now. And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board. The executives and all the people that were fully on board with woke ideology.

00:38:42 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:38:42 Speaker_03
So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been, and I don't mean to let them off the hook for their decisions, but just the lived experience, as they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding.

00:38:53 Speaker_03
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.

00:39:03 Speaker_03
Well, he's already left Blue Sky. Well, yeah, so the irony of Jack is that Jack then created Blue Sky, which is kind of exactly the opposite of any way where he thought it. Oh, by the way, the new name for it, of course, is Blue Cry.

00:39:18 Speaker_00
I didn't know that.

00:39:18 Speaker_03
Exactly. Yeah, but he's also got—look, to his credit, he's still trying, and so he's got Nostr, which is another— What is it? It's called Nostr, N-O-S-T-R. Okay, this is kind of new. This is it's actually his third.

00:39:28 Speaker_03
He's gonna keep swinging Full credit full credit. He's gonna he's gonna keep swinging and by the way full credit.

00:39:32 Speaker_00
He supported Elon, you know, they've yeah, it's up a little bit but by and large she's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time and well I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right-wing branch of that stuff like gab or any of these they would immediately be Infiltrated by bots as well like my friends that troll on blue sky, but these are Nazis like these are Nazi bots

00:39:54 Speaker_00
These are people that would just spew horrible hate and then gab would be labeled. Oh, this is where the Nazis go This is a right-wing psychopath Social media app.

00:40:05 Speaker_03
Yeah, and I think frankly I think you get the same thing if you start out if I think if you start out overtly political on either side I think that's what you end up with.

00:40:11 Speaker_03
Yes, and so I just like that that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market and 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 gonna have around.

00:40:22 Speaker_03
And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content filters and restrictions, because you can't have child porn, you can't have incitement to violence, you can't have terrorist recruitment.

00:40:33 Speaker_03
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 say. Right. I can't say, let's go join ISIS and let's go attack Washington.

00:40:43 Speaker_03
It's literally not allowed. So there's always some controls, but you need to have a spine of steel if you're going to hold back the censorship pressure. And there's basically Substack, a company I'm involved in, is doing very well. I love Substack.

00:40:58 Speaker_03
Smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well. Fantastic. And they've done a great job, I think, of holding the line on this stuff.

00:41:04 Speaker_00
And it's an amazing resource. There's so many brilliant people on Substack. I love Substack. I get a large percentage of my news from Substack.

00:41:13 Speaker_00
It's really good and it's so valuable and it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe to it. I think it's fantastic.

00:41:27 Speaker_03
And there's lots of people on the far left and the far right. Yes. So you actually have the full spread.

00:41:31 Speaker_03
When a far left person gets upset, somebody working in the New York Times is mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start a sub stack. And sub stack welcomes them in. Yes.

00:41:39 Speaker_03
Which is why they don't devolve into a gap or something like that, because it really is a platform. It really does welcome all conversation.

00:41:46 Speaker_00
Well, it's also very difficult to subvert in that same way because sub stack is essays, right?

00:41:53 Speaker_00
You're you're reading people's essays and papers on things and like these are long-form things that are very well in a lot of cases very well Researched and it's not the kind of thing you could just shit post on right, you know, there are comments but it's just like if they don't hold the weight that the actual article holds right and

00:42:10 Speaker_03
So my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time. I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset.

00:42:17 Speaker_03
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, but I'm not allowed to post. Really? Right. Exactly. It's the rule. It's the rule.

00:42:30 Speaker_03
Now, by the way, I struggle against the rules because I can't help myself from time to time.

00:42:34 Speaker_00
Why do they want you to have rules?

00:42:36 Speaker_03
Because otherwise I inflame people too much. I drive people too crazy. Do you do it on purpose? Sometimes. I mean, sometimes you have to. Sometimes it's unintentional. Did you ever hear about when the entire country of India was mad at me?

00:42:51 Speaker_03
Oh, I spent one night with the entire country of India basically wanting to kill me. It was incredible.

00:42:58 Speaker_03
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.

00:43:04 Speaker_03
And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism, and it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive.

00:43:12 Speaker_03
about the topic of colonialism and I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation and I tripped a line and I stayed up all night and I went hyper viral in every time zone in India every hour there would be like an entirely new activation and

00:43:28 Speaker_03
And I was like front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like all the way across India. Yes, it was like a, I do not recommend this as an experience.

00:43:38 Speaker_03
By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian American friends I have because they all rallied to my side and said, you know, Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India. There's a problem with the language barrier as well, right?

00:43:51 Speaker_03
Language, and then just historical context. Americans have a different, we Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else.

00:44:00 Speaker_03
History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore, but a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like really matters to their lives today.

00:44:08 Speaker_00
Yes.

00:44:08 Speaker_03
They just, they live in history more than we do. 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.

00:44:16 Speaker_03
Ancestors and so there's just it's just it's just you know, I don't if it's you know better or worse It's just a different way of experiencing reality. Yeah.

00:44:21 Speaker_00
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. Mm-hmm

00:44:32 Speaker_00
Okay, and the Ukrainians like and Ukrainian bots a bunch of people came after me because I was saying like the Biden administration I was like fuck these people and then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people Which I absolutely was not saying I see I was saying fuck whoever in the last days of the presidencies Decide to escalate this war because it appears that that's what they've done it appears that they're leaving Trump a giant mess right at the very least right and

00:45:00 Speaker_03
So the good news is I am allowed to go on podcasts. That's a good news. In the theory, it's your sub, bring it up though, because it's your sub stack thing. It's because it's basically, Mark, you need to explain yourself in long form.

00:45:10 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:45:11 Speaker_03
You can't just say a thing, exactly to your example, you can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it.

00:45:15 Speaker_01
Right.

00:45:16 Speaker_03
Because they'll extrapolate. It's not their fault, because you haven't, it's your fault, because you haven't explained it. Right. Right.

00:45:21 Speaker_03
And so if you write something long form, or if you go talk for three hours, at least you'll, the context will be there. And then if they want to get mad at you, that's fine.

00:45:27 Speaker_03
But you can point everybody to the transcript, and it's clear that that's not what you meant.

00:45:31 Speaker_00
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.

00:45:38 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:45:39 Speaker_00
You kind of have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. 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.

00:45:50 Speaker_00
And one of them that came up was the Nazis and their fascination with the occult. And so you had to clearly say, listen, fuck Hitler, OK? Can I be really clear? Fuck Hitler and fuck the Nazis, okay?

00:46:02 Speaker_00
I have not in any way... Okay, now that we're clear, let's talk about where the swastika came from. Fuck Hitler. Did I say fuck Hitler? Let me say it again. Fuck Hitler.

00:46:12 Speaker_00
But the swastika is this ancient symbol, and he's talking about why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult and with ancient civilizations.

00:46:20 Speaker_00
And so we got into it, but it was one of those things where it's like, all right, we're hitting the third rail, everybody get your rubber boots on. Let's save everybody here.

00:46:28 Speaker_03
I've got a friend in the entertainment business who is quite left-wing but really likes World War II documentaries. And so he'll be like, yeah, I saw this great documentary last night about Hitler. And I'm like, I bet you did.

00:46:43 Speaker_03
You can't even have a copy of Mein Kampf in your house.

00:46:46 Speaker_03
Oh, a student at, this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories, a student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the civil whatever disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Kampf in the quad.

00:46:56 Speaker_00
Oh my God, that's so crazy.

00:46:58 Speaker_03
Which is a book that's been assigned for 80 years to college kids to understand who these people were and how to not do that again. That kid was nearly brought up in charges and nearly expelled. This is the world that I hope that we're leaving.

00:47:15 Speaker_00
Well, it's just an awful way to look at things. It's so awful to think that if you read about someone horrible, you support them. Yeah, that's right. It's just so crazy. How are we going to study history?

00:47:27 Speaker_03
Yeah, right.

00:47:28 Speaker_00
And how are we going to prevent bad things from happening again if we can't wrap our heads around why they happened the first time? Especially something like the Nazis. How are we going to learn what happened?

00:47:39 Speaker_00
Clearly, 1920s Germany was very different than 1945 Germany. What the fuck happened in 25 years? So what we're essentially talking about is the year 1999 America versus 2024 America.

00:47:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:48:04 Speaker_03
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. Look the German people went along with it, right? And so yeah, you know, how did that happen?

00:48:12 Speaker_03
How did that happen? And how many you know, did they yeah, it's their active agreement was right agreement was there, you know, what?

00:48:18 Speaker_00
What are the steps? Yeah, exactly things go horribly wrong. No, they And how can we recognize those? Because those steps have taken place multiple times in history, recorded history. We know about them.

00:48:28 Speaker_00
So, like, if we see them happening today, maybe we should stop it and nip it at the bud. What better way than to read about when it already happened?

00:48:35 Speaker_03
Yeah. One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively the prior eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, you know, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds. They made all kinds of horrible mistakes.

00:48:47 Speaker_03
But we are completely certain that in our time, we figured it all out. We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in.

00:48:52 Speaker_03
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. Right.

00:48:59 Speaker_00
But in what way? Right. In what way are we horrible? A lot of the way we treat each other is horrible, especially with the amount of information that we have available.

00:49:08 Speaker_00
But it is fascinating also that if you, you know, I visited Athens last year, and I got to tour the ruins, and I was like, I wonder when it all went south. Like, when did they know this had fallen apart? Like, when was it in the peak of everything?

00:49:25 Speaker_00
They probably thought, hey, We have the most amazing, sophisticated civilization that's available on Earth, and we will maintain this. We will be the center of intellectual discourse and the home of democracy. This is us. And then, no.

00:49:41 Speaker_00
Now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the Parthenon. You're like, what happened? Something horribly happened and we don't want to think that could ever happen to us today, right? We want to think we're American motherfucker.

00:49:53 Speaker_00
We're gonna keep this bitch rolling forever Leonard Skynard free bird Let's go Second Amendment come on and we're gonna we think that it's just this is this is the future we America is the shining star of the world and we're gonna carry this on but

00:50:07 Speaker_00
Probably not like historically. I mean that what is the longest-running? Dominant civilization ever the Romans existed for what a couple thousand years Like how long did the Greeks run?

00:50:21 Speaker_00
How long did the Egyptian the Egyptians might be the longest running?

00:50:24 Speaker_00
Especially if you like take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines where they you know, like Egyptian hieroglyphs They have kings that go back 30,000 years right here it is Egypt and Mesopotamia, there it is.

00:50:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:50:49 Speaker_03
I bet it was more than that. I mean, the argument is just things just really didn't really change. Right.

00:50:54 Speaker_03
Like changes we understand, historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually change, the way people live changes, really kicked off with the Greeks. And so that was sort of the default status quo. civilization for a long time.

00:51:06 Speaker_03
The Greeks kicked off change, as we understand it, and then the Romans. Do you know about the fishponds? Fishponds? The fishponds. The Cicero's fishponds. No.

00:51:14 Speaker_03
So, the Roman Empire, you know, ran for, you know, in its sort of, Roman Republican Empire, in its sort of health, which you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase, ran for a few, you know, a few hundred years, maybe 400 years total, something like that.

00:51:25 Speaker_03
And towards the end, as it was sort of falling or stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart, Brendan Mine says, when the rows got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why, right, which sounds familiar, by the way, Cicero was one of the great Roman statesmen.

00:51:42 Speaker_03
And he wrote these letters that we have. And in the letters, he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends.

00:51:47 Speaker_03
And the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent, capable citizens of Rome are out in the countryside at their villas perfecting their fishponds.

00:51:57 Speaker_03
Right they pulling into themselves they built their themselves their own protected environments, right?

00:52:02 Speaker_03
Right where they control everything and they're completely focused on ornamentation They're completely focused on their clothes and and on their you know lifestyles Kardashians their Kardashians

00:52:13 Speaker_03
I don't know if the Kardashians have fishponds, but if they did, they would be spectacular fishponds.

00:52:17 Speaker_00
They would be amazing fishponds.

00:52:18 Speaker_03
I have no doubt they would be the most amazing fishponds we have ever seen. So he kept railing, he's like, stop with the fishponds. Stop working on the fishponds. Get back out here. Rejoin the Senate. Get back involved in the system.

00:52:30 Speaker_03
Let's keep this thing from caving in.

00:52:32 Speaker_03
And I think, you know, the significance I think of, you know, Trump actually talked about this in the campaign, you know, his version of this talking in the campaign trail, he's like, look, I could be off on a resort, I own all these golf clubs, I have many things I could be doing in my life.

00:52:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, of course. And he's 78 years old, he probably would like to do that.

00:52:46 Speaker_03
Exactly, right? And he's, you know, surrounded, his family loves him and like, you know, grandkids and like the whole thing. And he's like, look, I'm not doing it because like, I need to do this.

00:52:54 Speaker_03
And it's interesting because, you know, he doesn't use, you know, he's not referencing Cicero when he says that, but it's that spirit, right, that Cicero talked about.

00:53:01 Speaker_03
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?

00:53:07 Speaker_03
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... Because Elon's the other guy, right? He for sure could be the focus.

00:53:16 Speaker_00
Well, it's a coalition, right? It's not just him. It's Vivek, Ramaswamy. That's right.

00:53:20 Speaker_03
Another guy, by the way, who could be kicking it on a beach somewhere.

00:53:22 Speaker_00
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

00:53:24 Speaker_03
Very successful guy.

00:53:24 Speaker_00
And young and handsome. He could do whatever he wants. 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.

00:53:34 Speaker_00
You have all these brilliant people that are together, which is very hopeful. This is what we didn't see out of the Biden-Harris campaign. What we saw from Harris and Waltz, you have Waltz, this guy who's it seems like he's a compulsive liar.

00:53:50 Speaker_00
At the very least, he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things, you know, like whether or not he was a head coach or an assistant coach. And the lies have always elevated him socially, right?

00:54:03 Speaker_00
All the lies about his military service, or at least implying that he served in a different Perspective in a different aspect and then there was Tiananmen Square this Everything enhances his virtue. This is not what anybody wants.

00:54:16 Speaker_00
You want the opposite, you know You want a guy like JD Vance who served in the Marines and you know went to Yale comes from a single mother with addiction problems Rose from hard work and dedication to become who he is now.

00:54:28 Speaker_00
Like, that's the kind of guy that I like. That's what we all would like. Like, okay, that looks like a leader to me.

00:54:33 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:54:33 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:54:34 Speaker_03
Well, the Romans had this concept they took very seriously. They called virtue, right? And like, did you, did you, there's a whole way of ranking, by the way, the Roman virtues. And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying.

00:54:42 Speaker_03
Cause you're just like, Oh my God, I can't believe what we're missing. But like 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.

00:54:50 Speaker_03
They actually act on it and actually step up.

00:54:52 Speaker_00
Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right? We don't have a doctrine that encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly, which religion does.

00:55:08 Speaker_00
True Christianity, not subverted fucking giant arena Christianity where the guy's flying private jets and has Rolls Royces and shit, but actual real Christian people.

00:55:20 Speaker_03
Well, the Romans had gods. I mean, their virtues had gods. And so it was actually wrapped—to your point, it was like encoded into their religion. It was wrapped up in their religion. They knew exactly what was expected of them.

00:55:29 Speaker_03
They knew exactly what their ancestors expected of them. They knew exactly what their gods expected of them.

00:55:33 Speaker_00
I recently read Meditations again a couple of months ago. Well, I listened to it in the sauna. But it's brilliant. And it's amazing that this guy, Marcus Aurelius, was thinking like this so many years ago. And it's so—

00:55:49 Speaker_00
It's so valid today and it applies so well to modern life. It's so so strange.

00:55:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, you know how Brilliant this person was While he was running this incredible empire that he could write about human psychology and the value of forgiveness and 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 he

00:56:16 Speaker_00
that 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.

00:56:28 Speaker_03
Yeah. You probably know he didn't write it for public consumption. Right, yeah. It was even more amazing. His private notebook.

00:56:34 Speaker_00
Which is why it's so good probably yeah, cuz you probably wrote it for a substack. You'd like well people gonna hate on this.

00:56:39 Speaker_00
Let me yeah, yeah, let me You know let me preemptively attack the people in the comments or right so do them But he's like he's like 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.

00:56:52 Speaker_03
These are very deep important and

00:56:54 Speaker_03
My favorite part of the meditations is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're going to wake up this morning and everybody's going to hate you, and everybody's going to lie to you, and everybody's going to make dumb decisions, and you're going to be incredibly frustrated, and you're not going to get any credit for anything.

00:57:06 Speaker_03
And you have to get up anyway. Like, that's all, yes, yes, yes, that's all true. And you still have to get up and do your job.

00:57:14 Speaker_00
And of course he's saying that to himself as the leader of Rome.

00:57:17 Speaker_03
To himself, exactly. And what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's actually, you know, like the CEO, it's just like, you're going to get pounded.

00:57:24 Speaker_03
Like, if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day. It's just incredible.

00:57:29 Speaker_03
And if you're operating out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of, like, exercising your responsibilities, you get up and do it anyway.

00:57:36 Speaker_00
It's amazing how much it resonates. It really is. But 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.

00:57:51 Speaker_00
You know, there's so many ancient books that you read and you go, first of all, I love reading them because I try to imagine What, you know, what is this life like in, like, if you want to take like Miyamoto Musashi, 1400, when did he live?

00:58:06 Speaker_00
Miyamoto Musashi was like 1420s or something like that. Like, what's that like? Like, what is your life like? What is the view of the world when you don't really have detailed maps, or you don't have any photographs?

00:58:22 Speaker_00
You don't have any idea what the fuck is going on in Europe unless you go there. Like what is what is your version of the world like and then to see someone's words?

00:58:33 Speaker_00
Written down and you read them and try to just imagine yourself in their perspective in their mindset, right?

00:58:39 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. And look, I think if you're somebody like that or somebody like Marcus Aurelius, you just have this incredible sense of responsibility. The one thing you do have is a sense of purpose. You know exactly why you're here.

00:58:49 Speaker_03
You know exactly what your role is. You know exactly how you're supposed to behave. You know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain glory, how you're supposed to honor your ancestors.

00:58:55 Speaker_03
It's just all ... You know exactly where you are in the community. You have this incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness.

00:59:03 Speaker_03
And of course, there's huge downsides to that, which is it really cuts off your ability to run off and go on American Idol, right? There's a lot of things you can't do, right?

00:59:12 Speaker_03
But you know what you're supposed to do, and you either do it or you don't do it. And these days, to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way.

00:59:22 Speaker_03
Right, which is arguably harder, right, given all the choices that they actually choose to live that way.

00:59:27 Speaker_00
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.

00:59:34 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right.

00:59:35 Speaker_00
You know, I mean, back then there's not a lot of different things to entertain you with. Correct.

00:59:41 Speaker_03
Yes, you had to be maybe a little bit more serious because you couldn't have as much fun. My favorite, my other favorite meditations, Marcus Aurelius thing is, it's something like be the rocks on the shore at which the waves beat. Right?

00:59:53 Speaker_03
Like, yes, like, yes, your job is to stand there like the rocks do and just the surf just like keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming and your job is to just like stand there and take it.

01:00:02 Speaker_00
Imagine what it was like like addressing the people back then to just yelling out into these groups or speaking in front of all the leaders like This episode is brought to you by GoPuff.

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01:01:15 Speaker_00
And everyone's plotting to kill you. There's also a lot of that going on. I mean, how many times have they tried to kill Hitler? Everybody's trying to kill you.

01:01:23 Speaker_00
If you're running things, all your generals are probably secretly wanting to become the king. Yep, exactly. All the usurpers are waiting in the wings.

01:01:31 Speaker_03
Not easy lives. You know, today, most of the killings happen metaphorically. Although, every now and then, somebody takes a shot.

01:01:38 Speaker_00
In the alternative timeline.

01:01:40 Speaker_03
Yes, exactly. That's right.

01:01:41 Speaker_00
Yeah. How fearful were you leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline?

01:01:49 Speaker_03
It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50, razor-sharp. It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties.

01:01:57 Speaker_03
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 clearly have no clue. So it's another set of people we don't have to listen to.

01:02:10 Speaker_03
But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a senior democrat who's on his way out of politics and he said – in the summer I said, how certain is – what's your view?

01:02:22 Speaker_03
And this person said, Trump's going to win with 100 percent certainty. This is a Democrat from a sort of purple state, right? So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with sort of maybe a broader cross-section of people.

01:02:36 Speaker_03
And this person basically said, yeah, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple place and go into a second or third tier. You know, side city and take an Uber for 30 minutes.

01:02:47 Speaker_03
You know, land at the airport, take an Uber, drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going and who are they voting for? And basically 100% of the time, the answer is gonna be Trump.

01:02:55 Speaker_03
Because people were just like completely fed up. They were just completely fed up. And then there was the, you know, Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, you know, the Kamala enthusiasm is like highly focused in New York and California.

01:03:07 Speaker_03
Which don't matter from an electoral standpoint, right?

01:03:10 Speaker_03
So they're not gonna decide anything but that is huge when it comes to media Oh sure, of course, but that's that's the thing of this the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble This is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles is like the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out

01:03:23 Speaker_03
It's like they're getting deeper into this 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.

01:03:34 Speaker_03
And so, in a lot of ways, it's the most obvious explanation in 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.

01:03:42 Speaker_00
There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kamala Harris was going to win.

01:03:48 Speaker_00
I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne. Oh right, I saw that, yeah. I don't want to show it to the poor lady.

01:03:59 Speaker_00
She's probably living in hell right now. I'm blue sky. Yeah, she's probably on Blue Sky. She might be on X. Well, she was on X. I think she deleted her profile.

01:04:08 Speaker_00
But the poor lady, I mean, she, but she was being very arrogant and she laughed and mocked this man and said, you do realize you wasted your vote, right? That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.

01:04:19 Speaker_00
And she laughed, which makes her hard to feel sorry for. That's right. And it's like, you were ready to mock this man. But in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom.

01:04:28 Speaker_00
And she thought that that was under attack under the Trump administration, and that women are going to stand up and they're going to stop that. Because in her echo chamber, that was the case. Everybody was universally, they all agreed.

01:04:40 Speaker_00
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 it's going to be fun. But like, who are you hanging out with, lady?

01:04:48 Speaker_00
You could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball's awesome, and then you run into someone from another country like, what the fuck is baseball? You gotta realize there's a lot of people out there.

01:04:57 Speaker_03
And people really don't like being talked down to.

01:04:58 Speaker_00
They really don't. And they don't like you mocking the fact that, first of all, nobody wasted their vote. That's not how it goes. You don't waste your vote if you vote different and the other side wins. The other side won. That's just how it is.

01:05:12 Speaker_00
Like, wasting the vote is a crazy way to look at it. 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.

01:05:28 Speaker_00
When UT plays South Carolina, we this, we that. It's like, people love to be a part of a team that's winning. And they apply that, especially if they're not into sports, to other things. I think it's just a war mentality.

01:05:40 Speaker_00
It's a tribal war mentality that's been sort of subverted in the human mind and applied to other things. It could be like Microsoft versus Apple. It could be Android versus Apple iOS.

01:05:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:06:04 Speaker_03
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.

01:06:12 Speaker_03
And of course, famously, it's all the different identity groups, and it's all the different economic and unions and all these things. And Republicans were the party of rigidity, right?

01:06:20 Speaker_03
And just for whatever set of reasons, a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it.

01:06:23 Speaker_03
It flipped to where, at least today, Trump's Republican Party is the big tent party, to your point on having all these new people in, many of whom are former Democrats.

01:06:31 Speaker_00
A lot of them.

01:06:31 Speaker_03
And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody. right, who disagrees on any issue and demand, right, lockstep conformity through the cancellation process.

01:06:39 Speaker_03
And so that's a very interesting inversion that happened kind of without anybody saying anything about it, but it did happen.

01:06:45 Speaker_03
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, where the idea was the rich people are gonna get all the money because you're gonna cut taxes, Reagan administration, and then basically if poor people get any money, it's gonna be because the rich people like trickle, trickle some down.

01:07:01 Speaker_03
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.

01:07:10 Speaker_00
Right. But they did it under the guise of tax the rich.

01:07:13 Speaker_03
They did it.

01:07:13 Speaker_00
They did it with this Robin Hood mentality. At least they expressed that publicly.

01:07:17 Speaker_03
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.

01:07:23 Speaker_03
And then you end up with all this money being handed out, handed out in all these grants and all these things, like just this shower of money coming from the government.

01:07:31 Speaker_03
But of course, if the government's giving you money, it also means the government can take money away.

01:07:35 Speaker_03
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.

01:07:42 Speaker_00
Right. You can also control their ideology that way.

01:07:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, you own them. It's on the spectrum to a form of domination that should make us very uncomfortable. And maybe that would be fine if the deficit didn't get out of control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did.

01:08:01 Speaker_03
And then at that point, it's like, okay, this new kind of tax and spend driven trickle down economics is clearly not sustainable.

01:08:07 Speaker_00
It's not going to work. So, the way the Trump administration is going to approach the economy, they want less regulation. They want tariffs and less regulation. And they want more reliance on U.S. energy.

01:08:21 Speaker_00
They want to drill more, more natural gas, more fracking, more drilling for oil. and then allow companies to work without regulations inhibiting their performance. This will boost the economy. You'll have more productivity.

01:08:38 Speaker_00
You'll have more American manufacturing. You'll have more things happening.

01:08:41 Speaker_03
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. By the way, it's the only way to resolve a long-term fiscal situation.

01:08:50 Speaker_03
It's the only way to resolve the debt. There's only two ways to do it. You can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation. That's one track you can get on, which is a very bad track, and you don't want to go there.

01:09:01 Speaker_03
Or you can grow faster, because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt, and you can pay down the debt as you grow. And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth. And then the other thing is they want America to win.

01:09:12 Speaker_03
My partner, Ben, and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer, and that was his adamant thing he kept coming back, which is like, look, America has to win.

01:09:18 Speaker_03
And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally, globally. Our companies should be the ones that win these broad... We should win global markets.

01:09:30 Speaker_03
Our companies should be the global standards. How can anybody be against that? I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.

01:09:36 Speaker_00
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.

01:09:43 Speaker_03
By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs.

01:09:55 Speaker_03
Like, that's how you square the circle.

01:09:57 Speaker_03
That's how you actually have your cake and eat it, too, which is, like, first, your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success, and then you can pay for whatever programs you want.

01:10:07 Speaker_03
I actually don't – personally, like, I'm totally fine. Like, set up all the programs you want. All the social spending on all the safety nets you want and if as long as it's easy to pay for because you're growing so fast Then everybody wins.

01:10:17 Speaker_00
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. Of course. I just don't believe that they're good at spending it.

01:10:27 Speaker_03
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

01:10:33 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:10:34 Speaker_03
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. This is not the deal anybody signed up for. This is not how it's supposed to work. Everybody knows it.

01:10:44 Speaker_00
And when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits and then you could take that away at any moment.

01:10:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:05 Speaker_00
Money, food stamps, housing, all that happened.

01:11:08 Speaker_00
Stuff that wasn't available to veterans, stuff that wasn't available to homeless people, wasn't available to the very poor of this country, all of a sudden people who came here illegally got those things.

01:11:18 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:37 Speaker_00
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.

01:11:47 Speaker_00
I just want my family to survive, and I think everything's gonna- it's so much better than where I was if I'm in some war-torn part of the world. It's so much better here. I don't care if the Democrats win or the Republicans. I'm in America.

01:12:00 Speaker_00
And if the Republicans didn't give me any money and they want to get me out, they want to deport me. But this nice lady, she gave me an EBT card.

01:12:10 Speaker_00
And I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there? Oh, this is wonderful.

01:12:16 Speaker_03
Right. So that's how it starts. And there is a lot of that going on. But I will say one of the things that's interesting is it doesn't necessarily stick that way.

01:12:22 Speaker_03
And the sort of evidence for that is the sort of dramatic ramp up in the Hispanic vote for Trump.

01:12:28 Speaker_00
Well, Hispanic people generally are very hard workers.

01:12:32 Speaker_03
So this gets to the thing. So I'll just tell you a quick story on this. So the night after the 2016 election, literally everybody I knew was just completely traumatized. We were all just completely freaked out. Everybody was shocked.

01:12:43 Speaker_01
You were freaked out too?

01:12:43 Speaker_03
Yeah, I was completely freaked out. Everybody was freaked out. I didn't expect him to win the nomination. I didn't expect him to win the race. And the media is on full historical blast. And it's the end of the world. And he's a Russian spy.

01:12:54 Speaker_03
All this crazy stuff that we know now to be true is just full on. A group of us went out to dinner at a restaurant in Palo Alto, and the atmosphere was like a funeral.

01:13:03 Speaker_03
I mean, everybody in the restaurant was just despondent, ready to slit their wrists. And so we're sitting there eating, and the food doesn't taste good. It's just like, can't taste the food, you can't taste the drinks. Everybody's just depressed.

01:13:13 Speaker_03
And it gets this thing of like, my God, I can't believe that Trump, this, that, racist, anti-Hispanic, and all this stuff. And it was one of those moments where the young waiter, who's a Hispanic young man in his 20s,

01:13:26 Speaker_03
One of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table. But in context, it was like, oh, thank God, because we're just depressing ourselves to death. So thank God he's going to say something.

01:13:36 Speaker_03
And he said, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong. He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic.

01:13:41 Speaker_03
My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, raised a family. Mowing his lawn with a MAGA hat on. He thinks this guy is great.

01:13:53 Speaker_03
He thinks this guy is fantastic and he voted for him.

01:13:54 Speaker_03
And he just has, and, and, and, and, and then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line.

01:14:04 Speaker_03
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? They're able to jump in and then they, they, you know, they don't.

01:14:11 Speaker_03
And then they're not buying into the system and you know part of it.

01:14:14 Speaker_03
Maybe they're not being accepted But also part of it is they're not buying in 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 And you know in some case and by the way in some cases, you know The criminals are coming across and terrorists are coming across and gangs.

01:14:27 Speaker_03
Yeah, 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

01:14:37 Speaker_03
And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works because- Is that one conversation? Yeah, yeah.

01:14:45 Speaker_03
Well, it was weird because it was like... So what happened to me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country.

01:14:51 Speaker_03
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.

01:15:00 Speaker_03
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.

01:15:07 Speaker_03
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, everybody in California has it figured out.

01:15:15 Speaker_03
And of course, California is going to lead the country in all this thinking, right? And for me, Trump 2016 was the wake-up call of like, no, no, no, no, no. That is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and of how people think.

01:15:29 Speaker_03
that it doesn't explain what, because you have to explain what happened, and then you have to, 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, and it's what investing is supposed to be, it's like, okay, I gotta rebuild my entire model of the world for how this all works, and how this whole system, and how this country works.

01:15:46 Speaker_03
But it was that conversation that kick-started it for me.

01:15:48 Speaker_00
So what was the process of altering your perspective, or at least opening it up?

01:15:55 Speaker_03
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.

01:16:01 Speaker_03
I tried to read 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 everybody's calling everybody a fascist now, so what was fascism?

01:16:12 Speaker_03
Is that what this is? How did the Germans do with it? So all of those questions. And then kind of converging on, in the last 80 years, how was that?

01:16:22 Speaker_03
Stabilized or not stabilized and so I did that but the other thing is I just started talking to a lot more people And I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times that it was true and you know And by the way, and then of course what unfolded in the years, you know kind of sense was you know The I followed the whole Russiagate thing like super closely like I read everything and I read all the reports What did you think initially did you think it was true?

01:16:41 Speaker_03
It's like this overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that of course is a Russian spy I said on stage I went to Hillary's first post-election loss speech which she gave at Stanford and

01:16:50 Speaker_03
the very first one, and I sat, we know the people organizing it, and so we sat literally like 15 feet from Hillary in her first appearance, and the whole thing is fraught with just like incredible tension, and the Russiagate stuff is in full-blown display, and I go there, and I'm like, all right, this is gonna mean to me, and the audience is a Stanford audience, and so it's all 100% Hillary Clinton supporters.

01:17:09 Speaker_03
And I'm sitting there, and I'm on my best behavior, because I'm with my wife, and I have to not act out. And Hillary gets up there, and she says, Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and made him the president.

01:17:22 Speaker_03
And I'm sitting in the audience, and I'm on the Facebook board, and I'm like, that's not true. I know for an absolute fact that that's not true. And so that got me thinking.

01:17:33 Speaker_03
And then the Russiagate stuff unspooled, and I was like, the whole Steele dossier and all this stuff comes out.

01:17:39 Speaker_00
What was the accusations about Facebook? How did she think that Russia hacked Facebook and made Trump the president? Yeah.

01:17:46 Speaker_03
So it's this whole thing with this. So remember this whole thing Cambridge Analytica. And so it's this whole thing that there was this basically there was this data.

01:17:52 Speaker_03
There was this theory, which, by the way, it's like completely it is like a completely fake thing like this didn't.

01:17:56 Speaker_03
So there was this data set on user behavior that in theory, there's an academic, there's a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set and then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages.

01:18:09 Speaker_03
And it was like this like magical breakthrough in basically thought control. And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this.

01:18:17 Speaker_03
And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far like the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that you want. It was this data breach of Facebook.

01:18:28 Speaker_03
The whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade leading up to 2016 that it kept all the data closed. So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data, it doesn't share the data.

01:18:37 Speaker_03
And the criticism for years was Facebook is the Roche Motel of data and the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data. And then in 2016, it flipped.

01:18:47 Speaker_03
180 degrees, and it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data. And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation on the American citizens using this data.

01:18:56 Speaker_03
Why didn't Facebook push back? They did early on. They do today in their way. But they're trying to run a business. They're trying to get to the next quarter. They're trying to keep the employee base and everybody copacetic.

01:19:08 Speaker_03
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. It's actually a very interesting thing.

01:19:19 Speaker_03
When you're in these companies, these big issues are big issues, but you're also literally trying to make the quarter. You're trying to ship your products. You're trying to close your sales. You're trying to keep your employees from quitting.

01:19:29 Speaker_03
You have responsibilities. You have practical concern responsibilities. And so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode.

01:19:38 Speaker_03
And then maybe the message doesn't get out.

01:19:42 Speaker_00
So what was the bigger shift, the waiter or the Hillary speech?

01:19:45 Speaker_03
Oh, it was the waiter. I mean, the waiter was the much bigger shift, because it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked. Whereas with Hillary, it was cope, right? It was delusion.

01:19:57 Speaker_03
It was amazing, by the way. She then spent the next hour and a half When I'm in a place where I don't know if I'm gonna be able to control myself, I bring a little notepad along, because I can work out my demons, like on my... Draw dicks. Exactly.

01:20:10 Speaker_03
So that I don't say anything, right? Like super bad. So I brought my little notepad along, exactly, my little Fisher Space pen, right? And I pull it out.

01:20:17 Speaker_03
And I started making a list of all of the people and organizations that she blamed for her defeat that were not named Hillary Clinton. And I got to 20. My favorite was Netflix, by the way. Netflix? She blamed Netflix.

01:20:29 Speaker_00
What did Netflix do?

01:20:30 Speaker_03
Netflix aired anti-Clinton documentaries.

01:20:33 Speaker_00
Oh, you mean facts.

01:20:35 Speaker_03
Well, this is particularly funny because the CEO of Netflix is a famous Democrat. He's a super Democrat. Ted. Well, not actually Ted, but also specifically Reed. Reed Hastings and his wife are very enthusiastic left-wingers.

01:20:48 Speaker_03
But I mean it was just this litany of you know, basically excuses and complaints, right with no sense of like responsible personal responsibility at all You know just like pure grievance and so it was the negative It was negative lesson of like, okay, like whatever that is is not the path.

01:21:02 Speaker_03
Did she blame Comey? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely Yeah. Oh, yeah. She definitely hated that guy. Yeah, no question. That was a wild one hundred percent Yeah, exactly. And by the way, like that was super weird. I I don't think she was completely wrong on that.

01:21:13 Speaker_00
I don't understand that one, honestly. If they didn't want Trump to win, I don't get that one.

01:21:18 Speaker_03
We know she's guilty, but we're not going to charge her is a weird message to send. It's crazy.

01:21:24 Speaker_00
It's almost as weird as the Biden one, where we don't think he's competent to stand trial for the documents that he had that were classified. Exactly. But he can, what, have his finger on the button? What the fuck are you talking about?

01:21:36 Speaker_03
Exactly. We know he's guilty, but we never convict him because the jury would say that he's a senile old man. Which is crazy because he's still running for president at the time. He's running for re-election.

01:21:44 Speaker_03
Well then remember everybody at the time said, the media said, that the prosecutor was lying, right? Because at that point- Of course, he's sharp as a tack. He's sharp as a tack.

01:21:53 Speaker_00
My favorite is Joe Scarborough. This is the best Biden intellectually, the best one I've ever seen. Like, dude.

01:22:00 Speaker_03
Yes.

01:22:00 Speaker_00
And then meanwhile he had to go to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring. Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly.

01:22:06 Speaker_03
My favorite was the, remember about earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake?

01:22:11 Speaker_00
Cheap fake, yes.

01:22:11 Speaker_03
Cheap fake, because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake, which really didn't, and there was really nothing happened to that. And so the cheap fake we learned is a video that just simply shows you something.

01:22:22 Speaker_03
It's claimed to be out of context, but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth.

01:22:26 Speaker_00
Didn't Nancy Pelosi start using that one? Cheap fake?

01:22:28 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. Because the theory was it was going to be clips out of context.

01:22:31 Speaker_00
Yeah.

01:22:31 Speaker_03
But it turned out they were clips in context.

01:22:33 Speaker_00
Have you seen ... There's a gentleman who made a video. Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie, because I sent it to Duncan. It's pretty fucking crazy of what AI is capable of now. Come on, on my phone, updated, you son of a bitch. Come on.

01:22:51 Speaker_00
Don't make me go to fucking Android, because I will. This guy did this insane video where it's all completely AI and everything he did, including his voice. Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie.

01:23:09 Speaker_00
It's 100% AI generated, and it's so hard to believe, because it's so good.

01:23:16 Speaker_00
And it really puts you in this, when you're talking about cheap fake, I just sent it to you, Jim, cheap fakes and deep fakes, let's put the headphones on to watch this, because it's so crazy. We're at that moment where you cannot tell.

01:23:29 Speaker_00
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.

01:23:38 Speaker_05
to speak like me, so I can input any text and it will sound like me. Then I trained HeyGen with a video of mine. I input the audio file to generate a video based on my text. The video you are watching right now is the result, 100% generated in AI.

01:23:59 Speaker_05
What do you think of that? Guys, I know this might sound insane, but this- Crazy. How crazy is that? Oh, that was him.

01:24:05 Speaker_00
That's your company? That's him. Oh, that's him, yeah, yeah.

01:24:07 Speaker_03
That is, that's the AI generator. Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. So it's two companies. One of them, the voice is ours, and then it's another great company called Heygen that did the visuals. But yeah, no, that's right.

01:24:17 Speaker_03
That's nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is part of the first internet election. Probably the first internet election will be the one that has this kind of thing actually in it where people get tricked. Why didn't they do that with Kamala Harris?

01:24:27 Speaker_00
They would have done an amazing job. They could have like really knocked it out of the park with a solid speech. Just have her say it on the internet. Yes. Just have a bunch of viral videos of her speaking so eloquently and perfectly.

01:24:38 Speaker_00
One would think, exactly. That's the fear of the future, right?

01:24:40 Speaker_03
Yeah, yeah. And so I think that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of the dirty trick side. I think that will be part of it, right? There's always some way to try to game these things.

01:24:49 Speaker_00
Just have the most brilliant writers formulate, get AI to do it. Like you're saying, AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical, and there's no weird thinking in it. It's like, cut all the fat out.

01:25:02 Speaker_03
So I think we have a theory on how to fix this.

01:25:04 Speaker_03
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.

01:25:12 Speaker_03
And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on a blockchain. 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.

01:25:24 Speaker_03
And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time,

01:25:30 Speaker_03
whenever they put out a statement, they're gonna cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them.

01:25:38 Speaker_03
And then I think we're just gonna have to reach an understanding that we're just gonna have to write off everything else that we see. Which frankly is a good idea anyway, because there just is a lot of noise in the environment.

01:25:47 Speaker_00
How would you integrate that with social media though? Because one of the issues is these low information voters that are getting information

01:25:55 Speaker_00
either from clickbait headlines on these websites, where they don't even read the actual paragraph, which might be completely different than the headline itself. The headline is just inflammatory. And then viral videos, like how would you...

01:26:11 Speaker_03
So the thing is, so that's already happening even pre-AI, right? And so I would say that's a pre-existing problem. And so we can't, you know, we can't. And by the way, that's been happening for a long time. Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever.

01:26:22 Speaker_03
If you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scrolls. The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican, like in the year 1500.

01:26:30 Speaker_03
It was all these terrible rumors about the Pope and the bishops and all these cardinals and all this stuff.

01:26:34 Speaker_00
That was the first newspaper?

01:26:35 Speaker_03
That was the very first newspaper was in the Vatican. All the American colonial newspapers were like that in the revolutionary era. It was all crazy rumors and innuendo and people accusing each other.

01:26:45 Speaker_03
There was a famous election in 1800, which was Jefferson versus Adams, that we think of as these super upstanding, upright people, and they're just smearing the shit. crap out of each other in their respective newspapers, right?

01:26:55 Speaker_03
Because they would actually own newspapers in those days, and they would just attack each other. Ben Franklin printed newspapers before he became a government, and he created 15 different sock puppets. He created 15 different pseudonyms.

01:27:11 Speaker_03
He was a pseud, or a non. And then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him. So he had all these different personalities.

01:27:21 Speaker_03
And so we've been in a world of information warfare for a very long time. We've been in a world of sensationalist, nightly news, if it bleeds, it leads. You know sensationalist stuff for a long time.

01:27:32 Speaker_03
We've been in the world of like yeah propaganda for a long time So so that you know that that you're not gonna fit that you're never gonna make that go funny that we don't think of the past like that Oh, yeah, we just assume virtuous and we assume they had it all figured out.

01:27:45 Speaker_03
Yeah, that very much is not true There's all kinds of crazy crazy banana stuff, but My favorite is in the Vietnam War, it was the Gulf of Tonkin that sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation. We now know for a fact it didn't happen.

01:27:57 Speaker_03
The whole thing just didn't happen and now there's this big debate about did they know it didn't happen or did they fake it? 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.

01:28:09 Speaker_03
But what we can do is we can reorient people and say, okay, now you're gonna have to take seriously, this stuff is real. And if you wanna actually know what's happening, this stuff is real and we can prove that it's real.

01:28:18 Speaker_03
And if it's not, it's entertainment, and you can choose to believe it or not, 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.

01:28:27 Speaker_00
Okay. So that would be the solution to deepfakes, the blockchain? Yeah, you flip it. You flip it. If you focus on the real stuff. That's logical. That actually does make sense. That actually kind of gives me hope.

01:28:39 Speaker_00
I do generally have hope, even though I look at the pessimistic side of things. I'm generally optimistic because my real feeling about human beings is most people are good. I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people.

01:28:53 Speaker_00
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. I'm super optimistic, I'm incredibly optimistic.

01:29:02 Speaker_03
And I was optimistic already with flashes of pessimism, but I'm really optimistic, and especially now. So I think this is gonna be... We have the real potential here for golden age.

01:29:13 Speaker_00
We really do. We really do.

01:29:14 Speaker_03
Yeah. The capabilities that we have and the people that we... I mean, look, in my day job, I meet these young... I meet these 22-year-olds every day that are just the smartest people in the world, the smartest people I've ever met.

01:29:24 Speaker_03
I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes. By the time they're 22, they just know a lot more.

01:29:29 Speaker_00
They have so much more access to information than we did.

01:29:31 Speaker_03
Yeah, they're so much better trained, capable, and ready to go, and fired up. 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.

01:29:39 Speaker_03
And so, like, yeah, the productive and inventive and creative, you know, aspect, particularly of this country, is just, like, there's never been anything like it in the world.

01:29:49 Speaker_00
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.

01:29:59 Speaker_00
And if you think about what happened with the woke ideology, how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially, it happened so radically and so quickly and such a large change that people are susceptible to change.

01:30:16 Speaker_00
It's possible to to enact change, and a positive change in a good direction where people are optimistic about the future, which you are and I am, I mean, I think that's probably contagious. Yeah, that's right. I really do think that.

01:30:30 Speaker_00
It's an upward spiral. It was Evan Hafer who said that thing about psychology the other day. It was one of, it was a friend of mine who was a former Special Forces guy, he said that psychology is more contagious than the flu.

01:30:44 Speaker_03
Right, right, exactly, yes. Yes. Yeah, I think that's right.

01:30:47 Speaker_03
So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting. Really?

01:30:57 Speaker_03
Because they lost so badly, right? So the fact that they lost the White House, and they lost the popular vote, and they lost the Congress, and they lost the Senate, and they lost the Supreme Court.

01:31:05 Speaker_03
Like, this time it's undeniable that the current path that they've been on is not working. Like, being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for the wrong thing, like, it's not. They're not going to win elections.

01:31:15 Speaker_00
They're not just kicking people out. They're barring people from making it to the primaries, which is very undemocratic.

01:31:20 Speaker_03
That's right.

01:31:21 Speaker_00
That's right.

01:31:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. Starting with Bernie in 2016 and then continuing. And Donna Rice's book, she documented that. And so, I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not a viable path. You can't have a political party that doesn't win. It's not useful.

01:31:38 Speaker_03
And so, there's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now, where they're gonna have to recalibrate, decide what they want their future to be, and it's gonna be a big decision.

01:31:46 Speaker_03
And the same thing happened, by the way, when Reagan beat Carter really badly in 80, and then had a landslide in 84. It then took Democrats 12 years to get to Bill Clinton and actually win again.

01:31:59 Speaker_03
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. 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.

01:32:08 Speaker_03
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.

01:32:17 Speaker_00
We were actually playing Bill Clinton debating during the elections of, what year was that, Jamie? I forget which, it was when he first ran. What year did he first run?

01:32:29 Speaker_03
Oh, 92.

01:32:30 Speaker_00
So it was the 92. And I'm like, I'd vote for that guy. Yeah, exactly. In a heartbeat. The guy's awesome. Also, we played a clip of Hillary Clinton where she sounded more MAGA than anybody who's MAGA today.

01:32:41 Speaker_00
She was talking about the penalties that illegal immigrants should face. They should pay a stiff fine because they came into this country illegally. And if they're a criminal, they should be jailed or kicked out of the country without question.

01:32:52 Speaker_00
All this was so MAGA. I was like, this is so wild to hear from Hillary in 2008. Yep.

01:32:58 Speaker_03
That's right. That's right. And Hillary and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and all these people wanted to build a wall. Dianne Feinstein, our senator in California at the time, very left-wing.

01:33:07 Speaker_03
She was down on the border, did photo ops in front of the wall that was being built, trying to take credit for it. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. Like 18 years ago. And so another reason for optimism is I think that they're going to be able to pull their way back.

01:33:20 Speaker_03
I think losing this bat is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal. And I think, again, that would be like – I mean how great would it be if you had two parties that actually had like sensible normal policies?

01:33:32 Speaker_03
Trevor Burrus Yes.

01:33:32 Speaker_00
I mean imagine if Clinton was running up against Trump. He was so good.

01:33:39 Speaker_00
We played that speech that he gave after Sister Soulja had said a bunch of very anti-white things about white people, 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.

01:33:58 Speaker_00
It was fucking brilliant. It was brilliant. Like, that's the guy! That's the president! Now, by modern standards, of course, he was a fascist. Yeah. Well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right?

01:34:07 Speaker_00
Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments.

01:34:13 Speaker_00
But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and forcing people to think and behave in a very specific way, which is what the left wing does. And then you talk about being pro-war. Well, who's more pro-war right now?

01:34:28 Speaker_00
Trump or the Biden administration clearly Trump is less pro-war correct clearly Trump wants to end the wars clearly Biden just allowed Ukraine to use long-range missiles into Russia like this is I Don't know what's going on in terms of negotiations.

01:34:43 Speaker_00
I hear all kinds of different things but if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it and the other side that's not Like, the fuckin' polar shift is so dramatic. It's really weird.

01:34:58 Speaker_00
The free speech thing, which was always a tenant of the left-wing party, it was like, you know, I mean, it was doctrine. Like, free speech is necessary. It's the foundation of our ability to discuss and find out what's right and what's wrong.

01:35:13 Speaker_00
You have to be, I mean, the ADL used to let fuckin' Nazis speak. They used to let them march. They would defend their right to do it.

01:35:23 Speaker_03
Because you needed to air out the idea to be able to show why it was wrong. Exactly. Yeah. So look, it was not that long ago when you had Democrats that were very much in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions. It was pretty recent.

01:35:35 Speaker_03
But again, I don't know if they're going to pull it off. They might go crazier. They might just go right off the cliff. It's certainly possible. But it is also possible that they'll drag it back and it might happen quite quickly.

01:35:45 Speaker_03
And I am hopeful and optimistic.

01:35:46 Speaker_00
I am as well. 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.

01:35:58 Speaker_00
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 to the way of MSNBC. They're going to become ridiculous. Yeah, that's right.

01:36:07 Speaker_00
So they have to, which is good for everyone, for everyone.

01:36:10 Speaker_03
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.

01:36:20 Speaker_03
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's the people. Right, right.

01:36:29 Speaker_03
And so you can be incorrect as I am incredibly bullish about the people and then it's just a question of whether America part and it's just a question whether you can get the United States part kind of lined up to at least not prevent good things from running and ideally help good things.

01:36:40 Speaker_00
Well, what are the things that you think about this administration at least what they're proposing that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going? There's a lot of things.

01:36:50 Speaker_00
I mean, see, I think you've got to start with the Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency that Elon- I think it's hilarious that it just winds up being Doge, D-O-G-E. He's been pushing Dogecoin forever. The universe speaks. Yeah.

01:37:03 Speaker_00
It's just so many things are just so on the nose that you're like, is the simulation real? Yes. I mean, it has to be real. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And Ilana's programming it in the back room late at night in between playing.

01:37:15 Speaker_00
We certainly got a good position in the game and tweeting He's the number one Diablo player in the world right now. He just got number one, which means fucking bananas How's he has a time to do that?

01:37:24 Speaker_03
Which means he could be the guy steering this? Yeah Yeah, so look, this goes back to what we were talking about before. It is time to carve this government back in size and scope.

01:37:33 Speaker_03
It's time to take the overall ... You could talk about distribution of taxes, but it's time to take the overall tax load down. It's time to take the spending down. It's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money.

01:37:41 Speaker_03
It's time to unleash economic growth.

01:37:44 Speaker_00
Elon explained that there's more agencies than there have been years of the United States.

01:37:48 Speaker_03
Correct. Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year. And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies.

01:37:56 Speaker_03
So for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control. And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants.

01:38:07 Speaker_03
And if you read the Constitution, there is no such thing as an independent agency. And yet, there it is. What does her agency do? Whatever she wants. What does it do, though?

01:38:15 Speaker_03
We basically terrorize financial institutions, prevent new competition, new startups that want to compete with the big banks.

01:38:24 Speaker_00
Really? Oh, yeah, 100%. How so?

01:38:25 Speaker_03
Just terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services. Can you give me an example? You know, debanking. This is where a lot of the debanking comes from, is these agencies.

01:38:35 Speaker_03
So, debanking is when you as either a person or your company are literally kicked out of the banking system. Like they did to Kanye. Exactly. Like they did to Kanye, my partner Ben's father has been debanked. Really? We had an employee who- For what?

01:38:47 Speaker_03
For having the wrong politics, for saying unacceptable things. Under current banking regulations ... Okay, here's a great thing.

01:38:53 Speaker_03
Under current banking regulations, after all the reforms in the last 20 years, there's now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP. And if you are a PEP, you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank. What?

01:39:06 Speaker_03
You're not allowed to have them.

01:39:07 Speaker_00
But what if you're politically on the left?

01:39:09 Speaker_03
Well, that's fine. No. Really? Because they're not politically exposed. So no one on the left gets debanked?

01:39:15 Speaker_00
I have not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked. Can you tell me what the person that you know did, what they said that got them debanked?

01:39:21 Speaker_03
Oh, well, I mean, David Horowitz is a right wing. He's pro-Trump. I mean, he's said all kinds of things. He's been very anti-Islamic terrorism. He's been very worried about immigration, all these things. And they debanked him for that?

01:39:30 Speaker_03
Yeah, they debanked him. So you get kicked out of your bank account. You get kicked out of the – you can't do credit card transactions. How is that legal? Well, exactly. So this is the thing.

01:39:40 Speaker_03
And then you go to this thing of like, well, there's no – this is where the government and the companies get intertwined, back to your fascism point, which is there's no – there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech.

01:39:50 Speaker_03
But there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you. And so if they can't do the one thing, then they do the other thing. And then they don't have to debank you.

01:39:57 Speaker_03
They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it. And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to. But the government gets to say, we didn't do it. It was the private company that did it.

01:40:07 Speaker_03
And of course, JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right? It's their private company. And so it's this sleight of hand that happens.

01:40:15 Speaker_03
So it's basically, it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran. Just kick you out of the financial system.

01:40:24 Speaker_03
And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.

01:40:28 Speaker_03
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.

01:40:35 Speaker_03
And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.

01:40:40 Speaker_03
And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about.

01:40:52 Speaker_03
Under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers, and just like, you're done, you're out of the banking system.

01:41:04 Speaker_03
And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, guess what? You're doing your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account. You can't get a visa terminal. You can't process transactions. You can't do payroll.

01:41:15 Speaker_03
You can't do direct deposit. You can't get insurance. You've been sanctioned. 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.

01:41:30 Speaker_03
Yeah, so that's been super pernicious. I wasn't aware of that. Oh, 100%. So it was Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns.

01:41:40 Speaker_03
Chokepoint 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it's hit the tech world hard. We've had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years. Real? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:41:51 Speaker_03
It's been a big recurring pattern. This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like we just can't live in this world.

01:41:58 Speaker_03
We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable, by the way, no due process.

01:42:10 Speaker_03
None of this is written down. There's no rules. There's no court. There's no decision process. There's no appeal. Who do you appeal to, right? Who do you go to to get your bank account back, right?

01:42:22 Speaker_03
And then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right at the other side. And that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money.

01:42:33 Speaker_03
Civil asset forfeiture.

01:42:34 Speaker_00
Yeah. But that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states.

01:42:38 Speaker_03
Right. Or, you know, there'll be, there've been, you know, well-publicized examples of like, you know, there was like, you know, there'll be some investigation into like, you know, safe deposit boxes.

01:42:46 Speaker_03
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.

01:42:52 Speaker_03
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. It's political power being administered, not through legislation.

01:43:03 Speaker_03
So there's no defined law that covers this. It's not through regulation. You can't go sue a regulator to fix this. It's not through any kind of court judgment. It's just raw power. It's just raw administrative power.

01:43:16 Speaker_03
It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are gonna be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it.

01:43:22 Speaker_00
So what happens to those 30 tech people that you know?

01:43:25 Speaker_03
Start to go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to get- Complete upending of your life. Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to get away from the eye of Sauron.

01:43:38 Speaker_03
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, okay, it's okay, we've checked and it's now all right.

01:43:48 Speaker_00
Whoa, but there's no so what do they do with their money? Like what happens?

01:43:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, 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 under your mattress under your mattress?

01:44:02 Speaker_00
Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That is so insane. Yeah. So if someone has $30 million in the bank and they get debanked.

01:44:08 Speaker_03
Diamonds, art, you know, do you, I don't know, go overseas somewhere? Holy shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just like, it just happens. And again, it's really, really important. There's no fingerprints. Right.

01:44:21 Speaker_03
There's no person who... There's no stick above the strings. Yeah, exactly. Right. It just happened. And we can trace it back because we understand exactly.

01:44:29 Speaker_03
We know the politicians involved, and we know how the agencies work, and we know how the pressure is applied, and we know that the banks get phone calls and so forth. And so we can loosely... We understand the flow of power as it happens.

01:44:40 Speaker_03
But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, you can't trace it back.

01:44:43 Speaker_00
And there's nothing you can do about it. So what are the instances? What is the company? What are they trying to do? And how do they run afoul?

01:44:51 Speaker_03
Well, all the crypto startups in the last, basically, four years. So remember the crypto thing got really, everybody got excited, and NFTs, and all that stuff. And then it just stopped.

01:45:01 Speaker_03
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.

01:45:19 Speaker_03
This is a fun twist. This is a fun little twist. So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden, and this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor.

01:45:30 Speaker_03
The SEC, they can investigate you, they can subpoena you, they can prosecute you, they can do all these things. But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you. All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells Notice.

01:45:40 Speaker_03
And the Wells Notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future. You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future.

01:45:50 Speaker_03
Oh my God, terrifying, that's the I. The I of Soron is on you. Now, trying to be a company with a Wells Notice doing business with anybody else. Oh my God. Right. Try to work with a big company, try to get access to a bank, try to do anything.

01:46:02 Speaker_00
So that's when they support DEI initiatives and they ... Yeah.

01:46:06 Speaker_03
Well, and then the SEC under Biden became a direct application of ... Exactly. So DEI, they did a lot with that and then all the ESG stuff. And ESG is a very malleable concept and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that.

01:46:20 Speaker_03
So through this process, the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do. with no accountability at all. There are hearings where they get yelled at, but nothing changed. Nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything.

01:46:34 Speaker_03
It was just the raw application of power.

01:46:36 Speaker_00
This is your friends this has happened to?

01:46:40 Speaker_03
Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said, we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title.

01:46:45 Speaker_03
He was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him because they did a screen across, it's what they told us, is they did a screen across their customer base. Just anyone with crypto.

01:46:57 Speaker_03
Because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person. Because crypto was politically controversial, right? That's so crazy. You hear this sometimes, these terms, compliance, reputation management, tone at the top.

01:47:12 Speaker_03
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.

01:47:20 Speaker_03
Like bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever or the social media. Bring it down and just crush the individual. With no due process.

01:47:29 Speaker_03
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 there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's gonna find retroactively that this was all illegal.

01:47:41 Speaker_03
But in the moment, when you're the guy who's been debanked, I mean, number one... Right.

01:47:44 Speaker_00
And then also the potential that if you do challenge them in court and lose, the repercussions would be even heavier. Exactly, yeah. 100%. Is it really worth your effort? Yeah. Is it worth the risk?

01:47:55 Speaker_03
That's right.

01:47:56 Speaker_00
Especially if you've already had your life upended. You ready to do it again? Yeah, that's right.

01:47:59 Speaker_03
When you barely built yourself back up? Yeah. So this is, and I think this is important context where like when Elon and Vivek talk about like reducing regulation, you know, there's two ways of thinking about reducing regulation.

01:48:07 Speaker_03
It's like, oh my God, the water in the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned.

01:48:10 Speaker_01
Right.

01:48:11 Speaker_03
Now, some of those regulations, I think, are very important.

01:48:14 Speaker_03
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.

01:48:28 Speaker_00
Well, there's something that isn't illegal, but they don't want to be done, like crypto.

01:48:32 Speaker_03
Exactly, like crypto, or having the wrong political points of view. Well, the other great example is the trucker strike up in Canada was an even more direct version of this because here you had truckers physically showing up.

01:48:42 Speaker_03
And it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license, which by the way, right, it's just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard. No more driver's license. Step two is they take away your insurance.

01:48:51 Speaker_03
And step three is they take away your kids. Right, and so that was their version of this, and that was a very specific- Take away your kids. That was the threat at the end, the truckers and the Canada trucker strike.

01:49:01 Speaker_03
Because the trucker strike in Canada was going to jam up these cities, because the truckers were very serious. They were doing a nonviolent protest, but they wanted to stall the cities to be able to exert political pressure back on the government.

01:49:14 Speaker_03
And the government was like, we'll tolerate it for a little while. Then we'll take your trucker license, then we'll take your insurance, then we'll take your kids. How do they say they would take their kids? Because it's administrative power.

01:49:26 Speaker_03
The theory would be you can't let... These aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary preventing goods and services from reaching people, putting people's lives at risk. You know, child seizure.

01:49:37 Speaker_03
Now, I don't know if they actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government, just like in the U.S. government, that if they want to, they can take your kids.

01:49:44 Speaker_00
Steve McLaughlin Well, they were doing debanking there with people who donated to the trucker convoy, which is even crazier. Not even people who were there, people who were opposed to the mandates that Trudeau's administration was imposing on people.

01:49:56 Speaker_00
And so they donated to these truckers, and then they got their bank accounts taken away, which is really crazy.

01:50:05 Speaker_03
Exactly. I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War II. We think about Nazis in jackboots with tanks and guns and beating people up and killing people.

01:50:17 Speaker_03
That's our mental ... You might call it that hard totalitarianism. That's very clearly violent totalitarianism.

01:50:23 Speaker_03
But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything.

01:50:34 Speaker_03
And this is speech control and debanking and all these other things that we've been talking about. And the good news is they're not coming up and beating you up in the middle of the night.

01:50:43 Speaker_03
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.

01:50:54 Speaker_03
And most people aren't even aware of it. Yeah, that's right. And then, you know, look, these are individual one-off things. Most people don't have a voice. You know, it's very hard to organize around these.

01:51:03 Speaker_03
And then, by the way, if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out, it then itself can get It's suppressed in deep bank. Well, it happened during the COVID lockdowns, right?

01:51:10 Speaker_03
So the lockdown protests all got suppressed, right? So the lockdown went from two weeks to crush the curve to two months to two years, right? Which is like, okay, what the hell, right?

01:51:22 Speaker_03
And then there were these protests that were forming up, nonviolent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns.

01:51:27 Speaker_03
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. And the next thing you know is all the lockdown protests got censored, just like, boop, gone.

01:51:38 Speaker_03
And so at that point, the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government to enforce your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden, you can't even organize a protest.

01:51:51 Speaker_00
How much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis? Because one of the things that happened with the FTX thing was it was revealed that they were, I think they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.

01:52:02 Speaker_00
Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this debanking and be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you? Yeah.

01:52:15 Speaker_03
That was explicitly his strategy. That was Sam's. Sam's approach was just pay everybody. So Sam's approach was just, I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, which was the crime.

01:52:29 Speaker_03
And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Gisele to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.

01:52:36 Speaker_03
But a lot of that money, something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians.

01:52:41 Speaker_03
And a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with. And so the money was just shotgunned out the door. How come they don't have to comply?

01:52:51 Speaker_03
Well, it was illegal. I mean, it was illegal because he was breaking the law. I mean, to be clear, he was illegal. Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the U.S.

01:53:00 Speaker_03
government, they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud. Because they'd have to give all the money back? Well, so there's two theories on it.

01:53:08 Speaker_03
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 of America, you can probably get the guy.

01:53:21 Speaker_03
Number two, did he really want to stay in a prison in Bermuda? So that was all weird. And then look, there's no evidence for this, but the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in DC decided to not open it.

01:53:33 Speaker_03
It's like the Epstein client list. There are certain boxes that are better not to open. Well, the campaign finance thing, wouldn't they have to pay it back? So then there's this panic.

01:53:43 Speaker_03
The minute one of these scandals breaks like that, there's this panic rush. And all of a sudden, politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to. Right.

01:53:51 Speaker_03
And then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back. So, yeah, it'll play out however it does. But it is interesting.

01:53:59 Speaker_03
It is a great example of it was the shotgunning of money into the system under like basically just like nakedly breaking the law. And then it – now, look, he's in – the other argument is he's in prison, he's in prison already, like whatever.

01:54:10 Speaker_03
It just would have been another sentence. But like he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that and that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today never will.

01:54:18 Speaker_00
What's really fascinating about him is that he was right, and if they didn't come after him, he would have gotten all that money to those people. It seems like it kind of turned around, right? It didn't get him off the hook, though. It didn't? No.

01:54:33 Speaker_00
Well, he still did something illegal. He did, yeah. Did he know it was illegal?

01:54:37 Speaker_03
He is in prison. I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head. I don't know that I can represent his mental state. He'd be a fascinating podcast guest if he was out. He flopped very hard at trial.

01:54:52 Speaker_03
So he had an explanation, but the jury didn't buy it. What was his explanation?

01:54:59 Speaker_03
That you know, he was you know that it was all the money was all being invested and he was gonna give it all back and it was all this and that you know, it's like all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism and this and that and the other thing and the prosecution is just like it was the customers money.

01:55:10 Speaker_03
It wasn't your money, right? Clearly. Yeah.

01:55:13 Speaker_00
Yeah, like I 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 sort of proponents of amphetamine use

01:55:26 Speaker_03
And there was some anti-Parkinson's drug they were taking that has a side effect of reducing your risk calibration. Oh, dopamine agonists. Yeah, one of those. Yeah, like Reaquip.

01:55:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, something like that.

01:55:36 Speaker_03
Wow.

01:55:36 Speaker_00
He was taking these patches. That makes you do wild shit. That also makes people gamble. Well, yeah. Yeah, there was a guy who won a lawsuit from GlaxoSmithKline because he took Reaquip and became a gay sex and gambling addict.

01:55:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think they paid him the equivalent of like 500 plus thousand American dollars. I believe it was in Ireland. Yeah. Yeah. Dopamine agonists are weird. They do strange things to people.

01:56:03 Speaker_03
If that happened to me, I would definitely sue.

01:56:05 Speaker_00
That's crazy that those guys were taking those things. At least Sam was. Ooh, boy, what a wild fella. Yeah, M. Sam. Confirmed. He wears an M. Sam patch. What's an M. Sam patch? He's supposed to use the depression medication.

01:56:19 Speaker_00
Oh, his supposed use of the depression medication had kicked up some rumors. So what is... That's the stuff? That's the Parkinson's? I think that was... Is that a dopamine agonist? Does it say? I'm not sure. Yeah. See, put dopamine agonist.

01:56:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, Parkinson's. There we go. Yeah. Interesting. So it's like related. If it's not that, it's like a related classifier. Interesting. How does it work? Does it say how it works? Commonly used to depression. How does it work, though? Here we go.

01:56:55 Speaker_00
Okay, it's an MAO inhibitor Interesting used to treat mental depression in adults. This medicine is a monoamine oxide inhibitor Oh Okay, yeah, that's sludge lean sludge lean is also people take that as well as a nootropic I've heard yeah

01:57:14 Speaker_04
That's what it is.

01:57:15 Speaker_00
So it isn't a sludge a sedulene. So selenium selenium selenium. I think it's allegedly I knew a doctor who is taking that he was taking it as a but not in a patch He's taking a pill form and he said it was a nootropic.

01:57:30 Speaker_00
So monoamine oxazine inhibitors, so that's the stuff that's the active and that's what makes ayahuasca orally active Same thing. Monoamine oxide inhibitor along with the plant that contains dimethyltryptamine, which is not normally orally active.

01:57:46 Speaker_00
So this guy, if he was doing drugs and taking MAO inhibitors, he was out of his fucking mind. Guaranteed. Because I know people who have taken prescription-grade MAO inhibitors and then taken mushrooms and literally almost never came back.

01:58:01 Speaker_00
Like got to the point where for weeks they were fucked up and then when they did come back they were like,

01:58:07 Speaker_00
Almost lost it like I was almost gone gone like you know like the dude from Pink Floyd like never coming back Shine on you crazy diamond you're gone, and that happens to people right so this fucking kid with Billions of dollars people's money is taking those kinds of medications and amphetamines and who knows what yeah?

01:58:27 Speaker_03
You know, he had an on-staff psychiatrist who was prescribing all this stuff.

01:58:30 Speaker_00
Wonderful, like Hitler.

01:58:31 Speaker_03
And inside value. Exactly.

01:58:35 Speaker_00
Once again. Once again, back to Hitler. That's so crazy. What a wild boy.

01:58:41 Speaker_03
Are you following the theories that are now emerging around Ozempic and the psychological changes that Ozempic causes?

01:58:46 Speaker_00
No, but I did read that it makes your heart shrink.

01:58:49 Speaker_03
Well, there's some theory to that, which is very concerning. But there's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, and gambling addictions.

01:58:59 Speaker_03
And the current theory is that what it does is it basically, it essentially increases your self-control, your self-discipline, and it reduces cravings. And there's a theory that this is very positive.

01:59:10 Speaker_03
Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now We'll see but that's what they think So the theory that it's positive is the theory that you know If we were all like more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful in society would go better.

01:59:20 Speaker_03
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 Yeah, we need impulsiveness Yes, right and we need variety.

01:59:32 Speaker_03
Yes, and maybe we're all gonna get into a channel, right? Right, and maybe we're not gonna like where that where that that just by itself ends up Yeah, you can't have everybody discipline.

01:59:40 Speaker_00
You have to have wild fuckers out there. You have to have your jelly rolls of the world Crazy people they're fun. They make things more interesting.

01:59:47 Speaker_04
That's right.

01:59:48 Speaker_00
Yeah, so it's essentially discipline and you know a pill form or an injectable form Yeah

01:59:54 Speaker_03
And it's been very helpful, right? I've been increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics, and apparently it's working quite well.

01:59:59 Speaker_00
That's crazy. 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. People go down to Mexico and go to these Ibogaine retreats.

02:00:12 Speaker_00
Apparently, I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane introspective journey that's very uncomfortable, and it lasts about 24 hours. It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape, or form.

02:00:22 Speaker_00
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? What's going on in there that you're trying to escape?

02:00:35 Speaker_00
And it recognizes that pathway and puts a chemical stop there.

02:00:40 Speaker_00
It actually like stops people from having addictive cravings and rewires the way they think about things particularly beneficial to veterans a lot of veterans who have just seen way too much and come over and they're all fucked up and They don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that you know, I wonder

02:01:01 Speaker_00
with, particularly with these Ozempics and WegaVe and all these different types of weight loss, diabetic drugs, I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects.

02:01:15 Speaker_00
Because, you know, when I've talked to people that think that, like my friend Brigham, Brigham Bueller, who runs Weights to Well, he's,

02:01:24 Speaker_00
Concerned about side effects of it, but he's also he looks at people that are Just morbidly obese and he's like these people they need some fucking help They've gone down this terrible road. Yes. They shouldn't have done it. Yes. Okay.

02:01:39 Speaker_00
We all agree to that Don't don't eat pie all day. But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably You're in a bad state and you could probably use some help and maybe that could get them back on track

02:01:50 Speaker_00
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 can be mitigated with strength training.

02:02:00 Speaker_00
Maybe it's one of those things that if you're going to get on an Ozempic, you must lift weights three times a week, which is, that might be it. I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly, that's relatively easy to fix.

02:02:14 Speaker_03
That's right. And by the way, there's a ton of R&D going into these drugs right now, so there's going to be many more versions of these things.

02:02:20 Speaker_00
I'm hopeful that we could develop something where no one can ever be obese again. That would be really interesting. I mean, maybe this is just the first steps of this, right?

02:02:27 Speaker_00
And then, like, these are crude versions of what will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that.

02:02:33 Speaker_03
So the other thing I'd say, so I've been down in Florida the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff happening down there. And one of the things I learned is that the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here.

02:02:44 Speaker_03
He's really in charge, working with the president. And for all the controversy around some of his positions, he's very serious about this.

02:02:54 Speaker_03
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.

02:03:02 Speaker_03
And we look at all these, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years, which is just a complete catastrophe.

02:03:09 Speaker_03
And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud. And so it's known, but then all of a sudden, there's a tipping point.

02:03:20 Speaker_03
All of a sudden, it's not only known, but it's obvious. All of a sudden, everybody agrees on it. And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral exercise, the path that people are on to become obese. No.

02:03:32 Speaker_03
This actually needs to be addressed. This is actually a profound issue, and we're on the road to hell, and it has to get fixed. And maybe it gets fixed chemically, and maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things.

02:03:42 Speaker_03
Maybe the culture has to change, but it has to get fixed. And actually, I've been very encouraged that 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.

02:03:52 Speaker_00
I agree. And I'm very encouraged as well. And I think as we were talking before about a shift in perspective of the country, I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards.

02:04:04 Speaker_00
I think that's coming too. I think that's happening right now. One of the happiest moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listening to me talking about the benefits of it.

02:04:16 Speaker_00
And I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds. They're exercising regularly. They eat healthy. It's fantastic. It's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast.

02:04:28 Speaker_03
So one of my theories on this is that 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. Yes, right they didn't look good, right?

02:04:42 Speaker_03
And so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got I like do all the you know Lockdowns in the masks and like all that stuff and like yeah Bill Gates should get jacked That would be very helpful.

02:04:50 Speaker_03
He's got a lot of money would be extremely helpful Trainer when he writes the book and goes on the press tour to talk about public health That would be great. Yeah, be great by the way be great for him and his family and society.

02:05:04 Speaker_03
It would be very reassuring. I Bill Gates had a six pack, I'd listen to him more. That I think would be absolutely fantastic. And so like, it's just this thing.

02:05:13 Speaker_03
It's just like, well, of course, like, yes, the people who are telling us all how to live and eat ought to be healthy. Like, and if they're not like- Clearly. That's where RFK comes in play.

02:05:22 Speaker_00
A hundred percent. He looks fantastic. He looks great. He looks great. Yeah. Yeah. Super talented. Like, yeah. It's just like, wow. Yeah. We're taking pictures. I'm like, dude, you're jacked. We're going to put my arm on him.

02:05:30 Speaker_00
I'm like, you're fucking jacked, dude. Look at you. Yeah. He works out all the time at Gold's Gym in Venice. There we go. With jeans on. Where's that with jeans on? That's old school. I don't get that. That's amazing. That seems weird.

02:05:41 Speaker_00
It seems like it gets in the way of your squats unless you're wearing, like, origin jeans. It's got a lot of stretchy fabric to it. Yeah, you have to give stretchy jeans, but even then, like, put some shorts on, you fucking weirdo.

02:05:51 Speaker_00
Like, what are you doing, man? Wearing Timbaland's yes Timbaland's and a pair of jeans and doing your squats.

02:05:55 Speaker_03
It's kind of crazy exactly, but the Promotion of health is like I don't know how anybody could be against that I

02:06:10 Speaker_00
Do you want more energy? Do you want more vitality in your life? Well, you should be healthier. Your body's a race car, and you could choose, if you work hard enough, to jack up the horsepower. You could make better brakes.

02:06:22 Speaker_00
You could have a better fuel injection system. The whole thing could work way better. All you have to do is work at it. And that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life.

02:06:30 Speaker_00
It'll give you more energy for creativity, more energy for your family, more energy for your hobbies, your recreations, time with your friends. You'll literally have more energy as a human, which is what we all like.

02:06:41 Speaker_00
Nobody likes waking up and feeling like shit. I mean, everybody's been hungover who's had a few drinks. 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?

02:06:51 Speaker_00
And then you can't wait for the day when you feel better. 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. Oh, your head. And everybody likes having more energy. It's better for you.

02:07:06 Speaker_00
And we can promote that as a society. And this RFK Jr. appointment is a really big step in that direction that we've really never had before.

02:07:15 Speaker_03
That's right. You have to go back to like literally his uncle. JFK had a program like this in like 1962. It's been a long time.

02:07:20 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus Well, Michelle Obama did for a bit, right?

02:07:23 Speaker_03
Jason Kuznicki A little bit, although that was like vegetarian, you know, getting into like vegetarian school.

02:07:27 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus Oh, was she saying vegetarianism?

02:07:29 Speaker_03
Jason Kuznicki 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.

02:07:35 Speaker_00
No, that's not right.

02:07:37 Speaker_03
No, that's not right.

02:07:38 Speaker_00
It's so dumb I can't wait until they can figure out the plants really can think and feel Because they're real close.

02:07:43 Speaker_00
They're real close to proving that they've demonstrated intelligence and allocation of resources through mycelium There's a lot of stuff that we know now about plants that we didn't know then I think they're all conscious I think everything's conscious

02:07:57 Speaker_03
I think we need we need audio recordings of the screams.

02:07:59 Speaker_00
Yeah, the lawn is just like Armageddon You know the thing you play audio recordings of caterpillars eating leaves and it changes the flavor profile of all the plants around it awesome Yeah, they've done this because there's a phenomenon when giraffes if giraffes are eating if they are upwind and

02:08:16 Speaker_00
And they're eating leaves as the wind comes down and gets to the other acacia trees. The acacia trees, they'll come up with this phytochemical. They produce a phytochemical that's disgusting to the giraffes.

02:08:28 Speaker_00
And the giraffes will literally starve because they won't eat those trees. And they do this somehow or another through communication. It's like they're preventing war. They're being attacked by mammals. And they're like, we have to stop the attack.

02:08:39 Speaker_00
And nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that, which is really crazy. It's amazing.

02:08:44 Speaker_03
So back to the doge for a moment. So one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system, and specifically high fructose corn syrup.

02:08:55 Speaker_03
High fructose corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies. The country Which was good during World War II because we needed food. At one time. Yeah. Right. But like by the 1970s, we were massively overproducing.

02:09:06 Speaker_03
Specifically, we were massively overproducing corn. And the corn lobby, the sort of agriculture lobby became very powerful. And we have this government agency. One of the 450 government agencies is the USDA. And the USDA has a dual mandate.

02:09:18 Speaker_03
It's to promote U.S. agriculture, specifically things like corn, and it's also to advise us on what we should eat, and they also do the food pyramid.

02:09:25 Speaker_03
And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right, for all those decades, where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat, was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture, and then that agency, it's inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure, and basically said, thou shalt use high-fructose corn syrup because it is a byproduct of corn.

02:09:48 Speaker_03
as opposed to sugar. And as we now know, that was an absolutely poisonous decision. That was literal poison. Absolutely a ruinous decision. Just an absolutely terrible idea.

02:09:58 Speaker_00
Well, Casey Means was on here, and she was explaining the very mechanism by which a high fructose corn syrup encourages overconsumption.

02:10:06 Speaker_00
And then it's essentially like it's an evolutionary thing that like where bears would eat like a bunch of berries to get fat for the winter. It's like these high fructose corn syrup encourages you to overconsume.

02:10:17 Speaker_03
Yeah, we were not supposed to be eating this. This was not supposed to happen. It would not have happened.

02:10:21 Speaker_00
Especially drinking it.

02:10:22 Speaker_03
A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. But this would not have happened had the government not made it happen. And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that.

02:10:31 Speaker_03
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.

02:10:36 Speaker_03
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. And then at some point, you know what the consequences are.

02:10:45 Speaker_03
And then at some point, there's a question of whether they're being covered up. And it's just like, okay, at some point, this has to stop. And literally, they just need to stop. They just need to stop subsidizing corn.

02:10:54 Speaker_03
They need to stop forcing the food companies to do this. They just need to stop. And so this goes back to the regulatory reform thing, which is there's just a tremendous amount of this that may have been good intentioned at one point.

02:11:06 Speaker_03
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.

02:11:12 Speaker_00
And they also have the insane amount of money that's involved because R.J. Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble. They decided, well, let's buy all these food companies.

02:11:23 Speaker_00
And so now these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer.

02:11:29 Speaker_00
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. I think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want. I'm all for that.

02:11:42 Speaker_00
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.

02:11:49 Speaker_03
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.

02:11:55 Speaker_03
It's like, okay, should they be... Do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline, paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18?

02:12:08 Speaker_00
And cheaper than other food.

02:12:09 Speaker_03
And cheaper than other foods because they're subsidized.

02:12:11 Speaker_00
Right.

02:12:12 Speaker_03
Because they're subsidized.

02:12:13 Speaker_03
And you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying, we're protecting you, we're protecting you, and what's been happening is they've been poisoning us.

02:12:21 Speaker_00
Yeah.

02:12:22 Speaker_03
And so stuff like it just needs to stop. And that's where you need something like the Doge. And somebody like President Trump.

02:12:30 Speaker_00
What would they be able to do to mitigate a lot of these issues? How would they, if you want to, would you, make it illegal to put high fructose corn syrup as an ingredient? Or would you simply stop subsidizing?

02:12:45 Speaker_00
And what would be, how would that work within the government? How would you apply something like that?

02:12:49 Speaker_03
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.

02:12:57 Speaker_03
You can stop doing things, the government can stop subsidizing bad things. That's an example. Let me give you an example. This is a parallel thing. If you want to clean up the universities, you need to stop feeding them student loans, right?

02:13:07 Speaker_03
So the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful. So that's one. And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions.

02:13:15 Speaker_03
And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that kids who have no control over it are not being poisoned.

02:13:25 Speaker_03
And so, you know, you maybe do that, but I always think that the third thing is culture.

02:13:30 Speaker_03
Like, there's always a temptation with these discussions, because the government's so powerful, to talk about what the government does or doesn't do, and I think so much of this has to do with the culture.

02:13:38 Speaker_03
It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like, what is the cultural tone of the country? What's the value system? What are the role models, right? What are people being inspired to do? Also, what form of shaming is in effect?

02:13:52 Speaker_03
What are we not gonna tolerate? Take the perverse fat studies. Are we gonna glorify obesity, right? No. And that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case, but it's a cultural statement.

02:14:08 Speaker_03
And it's not that the government should control the culture, but our leaders certainly play a big role in that. And so, both in and outside of government.

02:14:16 Speaker_03
And 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 gonna have, it's not the kind of society we're gonna have, it's not what kids should be looking up to, I think is just as powerful as the actual government actions.

02:14:27 Speaker_00
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. Fat shaming works.

02:14:34 Speaker_03
And maybe you should shame parents if their kids are fat.

02:14:36 Speaker_00
Yeah, the problem is there's so many people that are ignorant as to what exactly is going on. Of course, and that's absolutely required. And they're being fed bullshit.

02:14:47 Speaker_03
But again, it's also cultural, which is like, okay, is the media thing, like, is the media educating people on this? And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, should there be new media sources that are?

02:14:57 Speaker_03
And then therefore, which sources in the media get respect? And so we have this giant collective culture question that we all get to ask and answer, and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear.

02:15:09 Speaker_00
So that will help. That will help move the needle. But what specifically can RFK Jr. do once he actually gets in?

02:15:18 Speaker_03
Oh, yeah, he's a secretary of HHS. He has very broad, I would say, a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government.

02:15:26 Speaker_00
What kind of pushback is there going to be against that? Like that seems like a wild amount of money is going to be lost.

02:15:32 Speaker_03
Yeah. So there's the work that the cabinet secretary is like he will be doing formally. And then there's the work that the DOJ and the president will be doing kind of in parallel with that. And there will be some convergence between those. And we'll see.

02:15:46 Speaker_03
There's a potential here for quite dramatic action. on a lot of these fronts.

02:15:49 Speaker_00
Could you imagine if you're running an agency and you have to have a meeting with Vivek and Elon? Yes. And you got to open your books? Yes. Yes.

02:15:58 Speaker_01
It's like office space where they brought in the bobs for consulting.

02:16:04 Speaker_00
What do you do here? Exactly. That's exactly what it's like. Isn't there a meme like that? Isn't there a meme like that? I think there's a meme where they take those guys and they put Elon and Vivek's heads on them. Yes.

02:16:16 Speaker_03
So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago.

02:16:20 Speaker_03
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.

02:16:30 Speaker_03
This guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company, and then like a month later, he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation. So kind of got a little bit sandbagged on it, but yes.

02:16:42 Speaker_00
Of course he said. Elon Musk says he rewatched Office Space to prepare for Doge. Of course he did. Of course he did. Fucking psycho. Exactly. God, we're so lucky that guy's around.

02:16:55 Speaker_03
Exactly. So there was this moment in the Twitter takeover where Elon sends his email and the line is, what did you get done this week? Whoa. What did you get done this week?

02:17:04 Speaker_03
And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement, because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything. But imagine that statement being applied to the government.

02:17:15 Speaker_00
Oh my God.

02:17:17 Speaker_03
Right? The level of accelerated, like, okay, what are the problems, how are we going to fix them, and what have you gotten done this week?

02:17:23 Speaker_00
Yeah, you think debanking upended some lives.

02:17:26 Speaker_03
Yes, exactly. So yes, what have you done this week? And by the way, when Elon runs this guy, it's actually interesting. A guy just tweeted, a guy just tweeted or posted or Zeded what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI.

02:17:36 Speaker_03
And he said, Elon came in last week and he said, Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five minute chunks. And it was every five, each person had a five minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.

02:17:46 Speaker_01
Wow.

02:17:47 Speaker_03
And he did that five times, whatever, 18 hours. Jesus Christ. And so think about what that meant. Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on. Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort.

02:18:01 Speaker_03
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.

02:18:11 Speaker_03
Right well, I think about different it is for a company to be run that way right then even again The Valley companies generally are quite well run by sort of business standards and even that like that's a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to now Imagine that applied to government government

02:18:26 Speaker_03
There's just and it's 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.

02:18:34 Speaker_00
It's a choice How the government is run as a choice on the part of the executive branch of the president for how it's going to get run and there's no reason why the government can't literally be run this way and here's what's crazy the pushback against even the concept of this by leftists so leftists Defending bureaucratic bloat and big government is wild to watch

02:18:56 Speaker_03
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.

02:19:02 Speaker_00
Do you think it's like just an ideological thing, like the right wants this so we oppose it?

02:19:07 Speaker_03
I think the left thinks they control the government. I think 50 years ago they would have been on the other side of this issue. Like Noam Chomsky 50 years ago would have been on the other side of this.

02:19:16 Speaker_03
He would have viewed government power as an extension of the state and big business intertwined. And you have these just termed manufacturing of consent, where it's like government and business are conspiring against you.

02:19:25 Speaker_03
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, DC voted 94% for Kamala, 6% for Trump, right? And so, okay, so two data points.

02:19:39 Speaker_03
That is data point number one. Data point number two, four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington, DC. Wow lobbyists lobbyists. Yeah, they call beltway bandits.

02:19:51 Speaker_03
Yeah The actual term And these aren't people working for the government. These are people making money from right? These are people sponging sponging off the government and so

02:20:01 Speaker_03
Like, yeah, to the extent that Democrats have wedged themselves into a position where they're defending this, they really shouldn't. They should really rethink this.

02:20:08 Speaker_03
They should figure out how to get back to the correct mentality on this that they used to have.

02:20:13 Speaker_00
Trevor Burrus Not only that, if there's less government bloat, then there's less tax dollars. You don't need as much money to fund these things. There's like, people can be taxed less.

02:20:23 Speaker_00
There can be more allegation of these funds towards these social programs that we all want.

02:20:28 Speaker_03
You know, most federal workers never came back to work. Really? Yeah, they work from home. Most? Most, yeah.

02:20:34 Speaker_00
Like what percentage?

02:20:34 Speaker_03
A very large percentage. Something like half just literally just never came back. Whoa. And they still, by the way, still draw a paycheck, they're still on their jobs, but literally they're not in the office.

02:20:44 Speaker_03
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, okay, here's another great thing.

02:20:51 Speaker_03
There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants, have full civil service protections, and unionized.

02:21:00 Speaker_03
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. It's just like a totally made up thing.

02:21:09 Speaker_03
And they're unionized. And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return of the office from COVID and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month. Whoa.

02:21:19 Speaker_03
And actually, the pattern now is what they do is the employees come in on the last day of the month and the first day of the following month. So they only have to be there for two days. For two months? Out of 60 days. That's crazy.

02:21:29 Speaker_03
As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right? Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there, and then they go live someplace nice.

02:21:37 Speaker_03
You know, someplace nice, but, you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something, where the cost of living is cheaper and they have a bigger house. And, you know, in theory, they're working from home, but like, you know.

02:21:46 Speaker_03
Like, is it actually happening? And again, this is the Doge. This is one of the things the Doge, they've already announced. The thing they've said is, you can work from home, just not for the federal government. Right?

02:21:56 Speaker_03
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. And as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that?

02:22:07 Speaker_03
And to your point on paying taxes, if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better, fair enough. But if they're kicking it at home, maybe not.

02:22:19 Speaker_00
How much oversight has there been on whether or not they've been kicking it? Excellent question.

02:22:24 Speaker_03
Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out. For example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access to email, often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network.

02:22:37 Speaker_03
You can actually audit and you can see who's been working. Do you know about mouse wigglers?

02:22:44 Speaker_00
Yes.

02:22:45 Speaker_03
Yes.

02:22:46 Speaker_00
Programs.

02:22:47 Speaker_03
No, no, actually physical.

02:22:48 Speaker_00
Oh, they're physical mouse wigglers now.

02:22:49 Speaker_03
Yeah, physical mouse wigglers. And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it.

02:22:57 Speaker_03
And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight.

02:23:06 Speaker_03
He actually wrote himself in a week on an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all employees for a week. And then he bought all 50 mouse wigglers from China that you can buy. And he fingerprinted them all.

02:23:16 Speaker_03
And he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers. Wow. Right, and so how many federal employees are using mouse wiggler, right?

02:23:24 Speaker_00
So how crazy is that? That's how they can measure whether or not you're active. Yeah, whether your mouse is moving Yeah, like what are they? What are they seeing just just a pattern of movement of the mouse?

02:23:34 Speaker_03
That's it Well, the mouse the mouse wiggler is moving in a way that you can fingerprint.

02:23:37 Speaker_00
So is this like Do you agree to a certain amount of disclosure of your personal information while you're working? Like how do you get access to mouse wiggles? I

02:23:47 Speaker_03
Oh, so it's very common.

02:23:48 Speaker_03
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 into what you're doing.

02:23:58 Speaker_03
And that doesn't mean they're literally washing you. But it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to see how much is the computer on. Wow.

02:24:07 Speaker_00
Is the mouse moving?

02:24:07 Speaker_03
And so that's actually a reasonably common thing.

02:24:09 Speaker_00
I heard the most ridiculous argument against this. What are you going to do with all those employees that get fired? What are you going to do with all those people who are stealing hubcaps? They're making a living stealing.

02:24:19 Speaker_00
What are you going to do if you make hubcaps stealing illegal? What are you talking about? They're essentially stealing tax dollars.

02:24:26 Speaker_00
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. Yeah.

02:24:37 Speaker_03
Well, the answer is they can do something productive.

02:24:40 Speaker_00
Yeah, and people are more than capable. You don't have to infantilize someone to say, like, this is the only thing they're capable of doing. They've worked for the government for 20 years. This is all they can do.

02:24:50 Speaker_03
Yeah. And then, by the way, there's multiple knock-on, positive knock-on effects. If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects.

02:24:55 Speaker_03
So one is, if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes, and you can just simply, the private economy then just simply has more money, because it hasn't been taken. And so if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend.

02:25:05 Speaker_03
Because the money reallocates. And so there might be just as much demand in the economy. It's just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it. So that's number one.

02:25:13 Speaker_03
Number two, you can bring down government debt, which means you can bring down government interest. And the government today, the federal government today pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense. But how much of that is salary?

02:25:24 Speaker_03
No, no, that's just interest on the debt. Right. That's just interest on the old debt. OK. 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.

02:25:34 Speaker_03
It's just interest on debt. But again- What percentage of the GDP? Well, so the total government spending is on the order of $7 trillion. Interest payments are like 1.2 trillion, something like that.

02:25:46 Speaker_00
1.2 trillion a year.

02:25:47 Speaker_03
I think that's the current number. DOD is 800 billion a year.

02:25:50 Speaker_00
So 1.2 trillion.

02:25:51 Speaker_03
Just off the top, yeah, just off the top. And again, nobody's benefiting from that, it's just interest payments. That's bananas. Right, and total GDP is like, I don't even, I don't know, it's 20, 30, 40 trillion, it's much larger than that, but still.

02:26:05 Speaker_03
It's enough. This is a lot of money. And the total accumulated debt is $35 trillion. The total accumulated debt is $35 trillion, and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every 100 days. Yes. Oh my god, it hurts my head.

02:26:22 Speaker_03
There's a congressman, actually, Thomas Massey. So he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this. And he's one of the only libertarians. And he's an MIT engineer. And he actually designed himself a pocket

02:26:34 Speaker_03
lapel pin calculator of the government debt, and he wears it every day in Washington, D.C.

02:26:39 Speaker_00
So he walks around with this scroll?

02:26:40 Speaker_03
He walks with a little scrolling LED display on his lapel, and it literally counts. It counts the debt, and it's accurate. It's pulling data from the U.S.

02:26:48 Speaker_03
Treasury, and it's actually an accurate count, and so it's like $34 trillion, $35 trillion, $36 trillion.

02:26:52 Speaker_03
Here's the kicker at the current pace at the compounding it'll cross the debt will cross a hundred trillion in the foreseeable future So he's already working on the redesign because he needs a bigger device with a bigger screen To be able to display the bigger number how much anxiety you get standing around him looking at that.

02:27:07 Speaker_03
That's his goal, right? He wants because otherwise the status quo in Washington has just let this happen

02:27:11 Speaker_01
Ugh.

02:27:12 Speaker_03
Right. And so anyway, so another way you benefit is reduction of interest. And then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates. If you bring down the amount of debt in the economy, you bring down interest rates.

02:27:21 Speaker_03
And then everybody else who buys things, when you go to buy for a house, your mortgage is cheaper. Right? So anybody who ever borrows money in the real economy then therefore is better off. Right.

02:27:30 Speaker_00
This is the argument against it being only good for wealthy people. Oh, it's good for everybody. Right.

02:27:35 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever gets a car loan, home loan, small business loan. You want to bring down interest rates.

02:27:41 Speaker_00
But this fundamental discussion of it, like the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation, all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier, and it's gonna ruin the middle class and ruin the lower... Everyone else is gonna suffer.

02:27:59 Speaker_03
So just observationally, almost all the rich people in our society were for Kamala. Right. Really? Yeah. So Democrat, Republican – it's what they call – it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration.

02:28:13 Speaker_03
So the Democratic Party is the top and the bottom versus the middle. So the top is what you might call the sort of upper middle class coastal elites. So it's everybody who went to the fancy schools. It's everybody with the fancy jobs. It's for sure me.

02:28:24 Speaker_03
I guess your grandfather did. Yeah, right, 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 now knowledge working jobs, right?

02:28:34 Speaker_03
So something professor reporter Programmer right database expert author author lawyer.

02:28:41 Speaker_03
Yeah, you know accountant banker like all the sort of you know quote elite jobs and I'll know the elite degrees by the way who all went to the top schools and got like, you know, the really degree so So that's the top.

02:28:52 Speaker_03
And then the bottom is what you call the clientele underclass. And it's what they call the Rainbow Coalition. So it's the minority groups.

02:29:00 Speaker_03
And so it's the assembly of low-income African-Americans, low-income Latinos, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, all the way through. Recent immigrants. Recent immigrants and so forth. And so that's the Democratic coalition that they explicitly program against.

02:29:12 Speaker_03
And then Republicans in our era, Republicans are in the middle. It's the middle class, lower middle class.

02:29:17 Speaker_03
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?

02:29:24 Speaker_03
So it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, the truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage men and janitor.

02:29:33 Speaker_03
It's like everybody who goes to work 9 to 5 has a job, probably either a small business or a physical job. You know, it's sort of, say, labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the hands, right, kinds of stuff.

02:29:46 Speaker_03
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.

02:29:52 Speaker_03
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.

02:30:00 Speaker_03
And so the weird thing that's happened is liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right? Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man.

02:30:09 Speaker_03
And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out.

02:30:14 Speaker_03
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.

02:30:25 Speaker_03
And the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.

02:30:29 Speaker_00
What do you think the motivation of all these wealthy people to vote for Kamala Harris was? Because they feel great.

02:30:35 Speaker_03
Because they're saving the world. It's amazing to be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad. And like you're elite, you get to be the elite, you get to make the elite decisions.

02:30:49 Speaker_03
And if you want to be in that group. You have to you got it. You got it.

02:30:51 Speaker_03
You got to do this and you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your client of your clientele and it's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in.

02:31:01 Speaker_03
Yeah, and it's just it's why the con if you read if you read the media New York Times, it's just it's either New York Times only has two articles anymore.

02:31:07 Speaker_03
It's either how evil are Republicans or how you know, innocent and helpless are, you know, you know, poor aggrieved minorities or you know identity groups.

02:31:14 Speaker_03
Right, and so oppositional force, but we're the party of good, with a capital G, because we're taking care of all these poor, marginalized people. And so it's a very compelling, you feel great about yourself, right? It's just absolutely amazing.

02:31:26 Speaker_03
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.

02:31:34 Speaker_03
And then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I've found myself in.

02:31:42 Speaker_03
where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to a somebody, you know running a restaurant or whatever because but it's just like You're not affected by the rising crime rates, but you live in a safe neighborhood, right?

02:31:54 Speaker_03
And you've got a you know, you're against the wall on the border, but you got a wall around your house Right, right And so you just you're in this bubble and then you only ever talk to people who agree with you, right?

02:32:03 Speaker_03
And then the media is constantly reinforcing it And then you get ostracized if you disagree. And that's the wedge.

02:32:10 Speaker_00
That's the wedge.

02:32:10 Speaker_03
And it worked. Look, for a long time, for 40, 50, 60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power. It's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it can no longer win. And so therefore, it has to get reexamined.

02:32:23 Speaker_00
So for you, when you had this shift of thinking, you talked to the waiter and then the Hillary Clinton speech, and they're like, how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things? And like, how much of a reluctance is there?

02:32:36 Speaker_03
Well, so from 2617 to 2020, I was just like trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And then COVID hit. And then I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with COVID.

02:32:44 Speaker_03
And you know, our business, you know, went crazy, our business caved in and had all kinds of crazy, horrible things happening.

02:32:49 Speaker_03
And we have all these companies, we have hundreds of companies who are responsible for our startups, and so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything.

02:32:57 Speaker_03
But really, the big thing was the Biden administration just flat out tried to kill us. They just came straight at us, and they came straight at our founders. And they tried to kill crypto, and they were on their way to trying to kill AI.

02:33:10 Speaker_03
I mean, they were horrible.

02:33:12 Speaker_00
What was the motivation to kill AI?

02:33:15 Speaker_03
Because they want control. I mean, they want control. They want to control it in the same way they control us.

02:33:21 Speaker_00
So they recognize the potential of it and they wanted to head it off of the path.

02:33:24 Speaker_03
They want to control it. They want to put it in a headlock. They don't necessarily want to stop it, but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they controlled social media. in the same way that they control the press.

02:33:32 Speaker_03
So how are they trying to do that? Think about it as the same dynamics that cause censorship to happen on social media were also gonna happen in AI. And so there's a couple steps to it.

02:33:43 Speaker_03
So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you wanna be able to put them in a headlock and control them.

02:33:47 Speaker_03
So you basically wanna give, you basically wanna have a government, you wanna bless a small set of large companies with a cartel.

02:33:54 Speaker_03
and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government, and then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel. How would they do that? That's a threat to the control.

02:34:03 Speaker_03
So it's a concept called regulatory capture. And this has happened many times for hundreds of years. This is like a very well-established kind of thing in economics and politics.

02:34:15 Speaker_03
Suppose you're a big bank, suppose you're Jamie Dimon, you run JPMorgan Chase, what's the biggest possible threat of what you could possibly face? It's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business.

02:34:27 Speaker_03
You're Kodak, you're Kodak. You're making a ton of money on analog film and the digital cameras come along and you get destroyed and in your obituary it's like you're the idiot. Blockbuster video. Blockbuster video. That's the cautionary tale.

02:34:41 Speaker_03
Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around the campfire at night. They're just absolutely terrifying. Business schools teach you that's the one thing you do not want to do. There's two ways to try to deal with that.

02:34:51 Speaker_03
One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you, but that's hard because you're running a big company and these startups are out there doing all these crazy things and can you really do that? It's hard and frisky and dangerous.

02:35:01 Speaker_03
The other thing you can do is you can go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation.

02:35:10 Speaker_03
We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long. And in fact, the more the better. Right, we want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business.

02:35:22 Speaker_03
Because I'm a big company, I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people, right? I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.

02:35:32 Speaker_03
But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulations such that the next startup comes along, the next company comes along and just literally can't function. And by the way, this is literally what happened in banking.

02:35:44 Speaker_03
So, pre-2008, pre-the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year, people who just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds.

02:35:57 Speaker_03
After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too-big-to-fail banks, right?

02:36:00 Speaker_03
The banks were too big, and so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too-big-to-fail banking problem. They implemented that in 2011.

02:36:09 Speaker_03
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.

02:36:17 Speaker_03
So those banks, those too-big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out, are now much larger than they were before. The banking industry has concentrated into those banks.

02:36:26 Speaker_03
All the mid-sized banks are being shaken out, and periodically they'll go under. The bank in Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley Bank, right? It went under, and this has been happening all across the economy.

02:36:37 Speaker_03
And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero. Whoa. And so the banking system is being centralized basically into 10 big banks. They actually have a term.

02:36:48 Speaker_03
They have a great term called G-SIB, Globally Significant Something Something Bank. 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.

02:36:59 Speaker_03
And if you get debanked by one of the big three- You're done. You're absolutely done. But think about it from the other side. If you're the treasury secretary and you want your political enemy debanked, it's just a phone call. Right?

02:37:13 Speaker_03
Which is what has been happening, which was happening under the prior regime. Wow. Right? And again, like at that- Zero. Zero new banks. Yeah, zero. Literally, it was like cardiac arrest. It was like, that's it for new bank charters.

02:37:26 Speaker_03
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.

02:37:32 Speaker_03
You need to go hire your 10,000 compliance people and your lawyers, but you can't afford to do that because you're not big enough yet. So you can't function. Like, you can't exist. By definition, it's ruled out. You can't do it.

02:37:45 Speaker_03
It's not financially viable. So that happened in banking. That's what they've been doing in social media. By the way, this has happened in many other industries. By the way, this happened in the food industry. It's greatly consolidated.

02:37:58 Speaker_03
That's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well. And it's the intertwining of government and the company, right? Because at that point, it's like, OK, is this a private company? Yes. Like, it's still a private company. It has a stock price.

02:38:10 Speaker_03
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?

02:38:18 Speaker_03
Because if not, it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and frontological examinations for the rest of his life. Wow.

02:38:25 Speaker_00
So it's essentially what we accuse the CCP of doing in China.

02:38:30 Speaker_03
So if you combine banking and social media and now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score is where you end up with this. And this goes back to the trucker strike thing. You don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids.

02:38:44 Speaker_03
You just threaten to take away their insurance. You don't threaten to take away their insurance. It's not government insurance that's being taken away. The same thing has happened in the insurance industry.

02:38:52 Speaker_03
It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies. They're super regulated. If the government doesn't want you to have insurance, you're not going to have insurance. And there's no constitutional right to insurance. So there's no appeal process.

02:39:02 Speaker_03
We're back to the debanking thing. And so that happened in banking. That's been happening in social media generally. It's been happening in many other sectors. And then it's happening specifically in AI.

02:39:14 Speaker_03
And what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen. Because again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right?

02:39:23 Speaker_03
It's going to really screw them up. And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, The trade is we'll do whatever the government wants.

02:39:31 Speaker_03
And if you assume the government is controlled by people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's going to come right along with it.

02:39:38 Speaker_03
And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically biased.

02:39:46 Speaker_00
You can do this today You just go on you're going to these systems today and you just like ask you just start asking like really basic question I was the best example that right when they had the multiracial Nazis the black Nazis.

02:39:56 Speaker_03
Yeah, once again Yes, so it turns according to Gemini Hitler had an excellent DEI policy. Yeah now in reality he did not I And it's important to understand that, in reality, he did not.

02:40:09 Speaker_03
But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis, because they programmed it to be biased. They programmed it in a political direction.

02:40:18 Speaker_03
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-like language in the media. And there are similar studies that have come out for the AI.

02:40:29 Speaker_03
There are studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs, because you can ask them questions, and they'll tell you. And they're just like nine out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased.

02:40:39 Speaker_03
And then there's a handful that aren't. And then there's tremendous pressure.

02:40:43 Speaker_03
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

02:40:52 Speaker_03
Essentially a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.

02:40:57 Speaker_01
Wow, that's terrifying.

02:40:58 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. And yes, and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse.

02:41:08 Speaker_03
And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's quote, just people talking to each other. AI is going to be the control layer on everything.

02:41:16 Speaker_03
So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn at school. It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans. It's going to be the control layer on does your house open when you come to the front door.

02:41:26 Speaker_03
It's going to be the control layer on everything. And so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, we are in for a very bad future.

02:41:37 Speaker_03
And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening. And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path. Like they were very clearly going for that.

02:41:46 Speaker_03
And it was just like crystal clear that's where it was headed.

02:41:48 Speaker_00
And do you feel like with a second administration, they'd be even more emboldened to act in that direction? Yes, 100%.

02:41:55 Speaker_03
Another Biden administration for sure. And then there was an open question around Kamala. And the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.

02:42:06 Speaker_03
And so, you know, you can imagine a common administration that had a very different approach, but she refused to clarify any of her positions. And so we had to assume that they would be the same as Biden's, which I think is the default case.

02:42:18 Speaker_00
Now, is this a closeted sort of a perspective in Silicon Valley? Do people hide these thoughts that this administration would be bad for business?

02:42:29 Speaker_03
I mean, much less now than we used to. 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.

02:42:41 Speaker_03
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.

02:42:48 Speaker_03
And then look, it's like a cascade where people are like, okay, apparently you can now talk about things. Okay, I have some things to say. Well, and then look, also just, they went too far. They tightened the screws. I mean, they really came at us hard.

02:43:02 Speaker_03
And so, you know, and the harder they come at us, like we didn't predict. When Biden won, like we didn't think it would have negative effects on our business. We thought, yeah, probably taxes will go up, but like, we'll just keep doing business.

02:43:11 Speaker_03
But then they did all these things, right? 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 for us.

02:43:19 Speaker_00
What agency specifically is involved in doing that?

02:43:22 Speaker_03
Oh, I mean, they have Alphabet Soup, but like SEC, SEC tried to kill crypto very specifically. FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized. There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle, commodities futures.

02:43:36 Speaker_03
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.

02:43:45 Speaker_03
The CFPB I mentioned earlier, so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau decided that they were also going to regulate AI. What? Which they just volunteered for. And then the FAA... The FAA killed the drone industry years ago.

02:44:02 Speaker_03
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 US years ago. So the FAA has been a big problem. What is it?

02:44:12 Speaker_00
The F... Also the FAA... When you say made drones illegal, but you can still buy drones, what have they done?

02:44:18 Speaker_03
So legally, you cannot fly a drone in the U.S. that is beyond line of sight if you don't have a pilot's license. Wow. Which means if you're a U.S. drone manufacturer, you have to build a system that enforces that regulation.

02:44:29 Speaker_03
So you have to handicap your ability. Yes. So either the U.S. drone needs to either not fly beyond line of sight, which is not very useful, or it needs to somehow validate. We only have customers that have pilot's licenses.

02:44:44 Speaker_03
China, there's no such restriction. And the Chinese, because we run a more open economy, the Chinese drones you can just buy in the US and use however you want.

02:44:51 Speaker_03
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.

02:44:59 Speaker_03
And that's why that's why Chinese own the drone market and that's why 90% of the drones used by the US military and by US police are Chinese made drones Which again?

02:45:08 Speaker_03
Terrible security risk is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon

02:45:17 Speaker_00
Oh, criminy. Yes. Well, I've seen the advancements in Chinese drones in particular, the choreographed dances that they do in the sky where they had, did you see the dragon one? Yeah, exactly.

02:45:29 Speaker_00
See if you could find that, Jamie, Chinese dragon drone display. It's like one of the largest ones they ever did. It's unbelievable how much more advanced they are.

02:45:39 Speaker_03
Yeah. And I will tell you, the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this, or worse than zero. I would say absolute contempt for the idea of a US-drawn industry.

02:45:48 Speaker_00
Yeah. So let's watch this thing. See if you can go full screen on that. Like, this is just a grid in the sky. Look at this. They're flying up together. They did one that was at night, Jamie, because they were all lit up. So imagine those with guns.

02:46:03 Speaker_00
Jesus Christ. Coming at you, right? Well, we get to see some of that in Ukraine. Yeah, 100%. Absolutely. Yeah. We've seen those suicide drones. Like, look at this. That dragon in the sky is drones that are all lit up. I mean, that is unbelievable.

02:46:18 Speaker_00
It even has a puff of fire coming out of its mouth. That's incredible.

02:46:22 Speaker_03
If they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones, it's carnage. Oh my God.

02:46:28 Speaker_00
Dude, don't even put that out there. Don't put that voodoo on me, Ricky Bobby. Sorry. Look at that heart in the sky with a heartbeat. Correct. This is insane. Correct. It's so incredible.

02:46:40 Speaker_00
They had a little one like that that played over the Eminem concert when I was at CODA at the Circuits of the Americas here.

02:46:48 Speaker_00
They had this giant Eminem concert, like a hundred thousand people there, and then afterwards they had like drones in the sky that did little dances.

02:46:54 Speaker_03
Chinese drones.

02:46:55 Speaker_00
I bet. I bet they were. They weren't like this, though. It wasn't at that level. I mean, that's unbelievable.

02:47:01 Speaker_03
Enjoy the show while you can.

02:47:03 Speaker_00
That's crazy that that's a Chinese thing only.

02:47:06 Speaker_03
Yeah. Look, DOD runs on these. Soldiers in the field, 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.

02:47:16 Speaker_00
Yeah. And these are Chinese-made drones.

02:47:18 Speaker_03
And every single one of them can be taken over by China and used for whatever they want.

02:47:21 Speaker_00
Oh my god.

02:47:22 Speaker_03
Anytime they want. Is the Trump administration on this? They're very aware. I don't know what they'll do. It's somewhere in the priority order of the things that they're dealing with. But yes, they are well aware of this.

02:47:31 Speaker_03
And it's the kind of thing I would hope that would get some attention.

02:47:36 Speaker_00
Yeah. 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. That's not good.

02:47:47 Speaker_00
And that could be because they put ridiculous regulations on drone manufacturers in America.

02:47:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right.

02:47:54 Speaker_00
And they got way ahead of us.

02:47:55 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, these are bad. These are bad.

02:47:59 Speaker_00
These are bad paths. 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.

02:48:08 Speaker_00
So people can innovate and come up with new startups and all these crazy ideas because there's so much freedom in America. They don't have to deal with the government being involved in every business. Silly me.

02:48:20 Speaker_03
Silly me. I was wrong. So this is my argument I make geopolitically in D.C., which is if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the U.S. and China the same way that in the 20th century it was the U.S.

02:48:32 Speaker_03
versus the Soviet Union. Contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war. That's the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century.

02:48:42 Speaker_03
Then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side. And then, as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?

02:48:53 Speaker_00
Maxine Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency. She was talking about that. In order to compete with China, we have to come up with a centralized digital currency.

02:49:05 Speaker_00
Which, in my view, is exactly the wrong thing. Yes, I heard that. I was like, that's a terrible idea. It's exactly the wrong thing. You've got to be like China to compete with China?

02:49:12 Speaker_03
It's exactly the wrong thing. It's exactly the wrong thing. You don't want that. Because the China system has its problems. They terrorize their own population directly. They do impose the social credit score stuff. They do all this stuff.

02:49:24 Speaker_03
And then, by the way, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism. Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, and there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China.

02:49:35 Speaker_03
To the point, a friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, he said, every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.

02:49:41 Speaker_03
And they're all trying to get their money out, and they're all trying to get their families out, because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China, because the government might just snatch you, like literally, physically snatch you at any point, and you may or may not come back.

02:49:53 Speaker_03
And then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to. And by the way, and drag you into training. This is a great thing.

02:50:05 Speaker_03
You're the CEO of a company with 50 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees, and this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you, and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours getting grilled on how well you understand Marx.

02:50:18 Speaker_03
That actually happens. It's political officers. That's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union, and that's the kind of thing that happens in China. You'd rather be a CEO in the U.S. than in China, for sure, as long as the U.S.

02:50:29 Speaker_03
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.

02:50:37 Speaker_03
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.

02:50:42 Speaker_00
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.

02:50:49 Speaker_00
I did know about the banks, and I certainly didn't know that they were cracking down on AI the same way they crack down on social media.

02:50:54 Speaker_03
The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans. Can you talk about it? Basically, just full government control. This sort of thing.

02:51:06 Speaker_03
There will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government. They told us, they just said, don't even start startups. Don't even bother. There's just no way. There's no way that they can succeed.

02:51:16 Speaker_03
There's no way that we're going to permit that to happen. Wow. Yeah. They said, this is already over. It's going to be two or three companies, and we're going to control them, and that's that. This is already finished.

02:51:25 Speaker_00
Oh my god, now when you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? You go endorse Donald Trump.

02:51:36 Speaker_03
And again, like, I'll just tell you, like, you know, look, like, because I'm gonna get a lot of, you know, the flack I'm gonna get for this is, you know, he's just a crazy, whatever, right-winger. But, like, I was a Democrat. I was, like, a Democrat.

02:51:45 Speaker_03
I supported Bill Clinton in 92. I supported Clinton in 96. I supported Gore, who I knew very well, in 2000. I knew John Kerry. I supported him in 04. I supported Obama. I supported Hillary in 16. Like, I was, like, a Democrat in good standing.

02:52:01 Speaker_03
Are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now? Are you allowed to hang out with people? This is actually true. There's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley. They fractured cleanly in half.

02:52:13 Speaker_03
There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day, which by the way is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago, but everybody has fully updated their views for that day and that's what they talk about at the dinner party and I'm no longer invited to those.

02:52:29 Speaker_03
Nor do I want to go to them and then 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, 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 Right, but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the my pillow guy No disrespect Mike

02:52:50 Speaker_00
to the MyPillow guy. But you know what I'm saying? I want people that are smarter than me to be saying these things. That's what helps. It helps when you say, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about. They're very well informed.

02:53:00 Speaker_00
And they understand the repercussions. They understand what's been coming their way. And there's people like yourself that could speak about. The plans that you're laying out, what they were trying to do with AI, is fucking terrifying.

02:53:11 Speaker_00
That should terrify everybody. Where you have bureaucrats are now in control of potentially the most the biggest agent of change in the history of the human race, potentially. And you're gonna let what? The people that can't even balance the budget?

02:53:26 Speaker_00
People that don't know what the fuck is going on? That sounds insane.

02:53:32 Speaker_03
And look, my hope, I think under Clinton and Gore, I think that they dealt with this very differently. I mean, look, they dealt with the internet very differently than the current crop are dealing with these technologies. Well, it was very different.

02:53:42 Speaker_03
It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could,

02:53:48 Speaker_03
So there used to be this thing I called The Deal, with a capital D. And The Deal was, you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product.

02:53:56 Speaker_03
Everybody loved you, it was great. Glowing press coverage, the whole thing. You take the company public, it employs a lot of people, it creates a lot of jobs.

02:54:02 Speaker_03
You make a lot of money, at some point you cash out, and then you donate all the money to charity, and everybody thinks you're a hero. And it's just great. And this is how it ran for a very long time. And this was the deal.

02:54:13 Speaker_03
This was Clinton and Gore with 100% support of that. And they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech. And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment.

02:54:22 Speaker_03
And basically what happened is the last 15 years or so of Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal. for people in my world. Like every single part of that was shattered, right?

02:54:32 Speaker_03
Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right? And like, you know, if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person. And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot.

02:54:41 Speaker_03
And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you. And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil.

02:54:46 Speaker_03
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.

02:54:59 Speaker_03
So I'll give you the ultimate case study. Here's where I radicalized on this topic. So you'll recall some years back, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, they have a ton of money in Facebook stock.

02:55:07 Speaker_03
They created a nonprofit entity called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the original mission was to literally cure all disease. And this could be like $200 billion going to cure all disease, right? So like a big deal.

02:55:18 Speaker_03
They said they committed to donate 99% of their assets to this new foundation. They got brutally attacked from the left. And the attack was they're only doing it to save money on taxes.

02:55:30 Speaker_03
Now, basic mathematics, you don't give away 99% of your money to save money on taxes, right? But it was a vicious attack. It was like a very, very aggressive attack.

02:55:40 Speaker_03
And the fundamental reason for the attack was, how dare they treat that money like it's their own? How dare they decide where it goes? Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent.

02:55:51 Speaker_03
The government should take the money, and the government should allocate it. And that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do. What do you think is the root of that kind of thinking?

02:55:59 Speaker_03
Utopian this is a utopian Collectivism, you know, it's the it's socialism that were socialism Yeah, it's the is the core idea socialism like the core idea is this this is sort of there's a radical egalitarianism Everybody should be exactly the same all outcomes should be exactly the same Everything should be completely fair and some root of it has to be an envy.

02:56:18 Speaker_03
Of course. Yeah, and the resentment. Yes Nietzsche had this great term I called resentment and And it's like turbocharged resentment. And so the way he described his resentment is envy, resentment and bitterness.

02:56:31 Speaker_03
That is so intense that it causes an inversion of values. And the things that used to be good become bad and the things that used to be bad become good.

02:56:39 Speaker_00
Right. And that's how philanthropy becomes bad.

02:56:42 Speaker_03
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.

02:56:48 Speaker_00
I was not aware of that blowback. I would have loved to read some of those comments. I would like to go to their page and see what else they comment on.

02:56:56 Speaker_03
I'll give you another example. Here's another radicalizing moment for me.

02:56:58 Speaker_03
So my friend Sheryl Sandberg, who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook, and by the way, Democrat, liberal, and by the way, endorsed Kamala, like very much not on the same page as me on these things.

02:57:08 Speaker_03
She actually worked in the Clinton administration, you know, died in the Will Democrats. She wrote this book called Lean In about 12 years ago. It's this sort of feminist manifesto, and it basically said... Lean in? Lean in. Lean in.

02:57:19 Speaker_03
And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could, quote-unquote, lean in.

02:57:24 Speaker_03
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. And she said that women should lean in.

02:57:32 Speaker_03
And it became a metaphor for her for women should lean in on their careers. They should aggressively advocate for themselves to get raises and promotions.

02:57:39 Speaker_00
Like men do.

02:57:40 Speaker_03
Like men do. Women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and then, therefore, perform better. And so it was a manifesto to women basically saying, be more confident, be more assertive, be more aggressive, be more successful.

02:57:51 Speaker_03
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, right? And she looks at me like I've lost my mind, right? Because she's a lifelong lefty. And she's like, what do you mean?

02:58:05 Speaker_03
And I'm like, this book is a statement that women have agency. This book is a statement that the things that women choose to do will lead to better results. That's what people believe on the right.

02:58:13 Speaker_03
On the left, what people believe is that women are only, always, and ever victims. And if a woman doesn't succeed in her career, it's because she's being discriminated against.

02:58:21 Speaker_03
And so I predicted when this book comes out, the right-wingers are going to think it's great and you're going to get it.

02:58:26 Speaker_03
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. By the way, the reviews were all by women.

02:58:38 Speaker_03
And they tore into her, like in every major publication, they just like completely ripped her.

02:58:42 Speaker_03
And they're like, how dare this rich, entitled woman be telling us, you know, these, 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?

02:58:52 Speaker_03
It's denial of oppression.

02:58:53 Speaker_00
Wow, cuz imagine if a man wrote a book like that for men, right? That was patriarchy, right? That's well, but I mean, but men wouldn't attack it. Oh, right. Exactly, right It would be a guidebook. Yeah, this is how you kick ass and get ahead.

02:59:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, we call it self-help lean in bro Lean in bro.

02:59:12 Speaker_03
Exactly right.

02:59:12 Speaker_00
Wow, that's crazy. It's an attack for that.

02:59:15 Speaker_03
So again, it's the inversion. It's resentment. It's the inversion, which is like advocating on your own behalf and choosing to do things that make you more successful. What was her reaction to that?

02:59:23 Speaker_03
I would say she was, I don't want to speak for her, but she was not, not pleased.

02:59:28 Speaker_00
I mean, also, was she shocked that you're correct? Did you have a follow-up conversation with her? What did she say? We talked about it a lot. Goddammit, Mark, how'd you see that one coming?

02:59:38 Speaker_03
So she was in the, but the answer is she, her worldview of how these things worked was from a different, it was from the Clinton-Gore era, in which you could say things like that, you could talk like that.

02:59:49 Speaker_03
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.

02:59:58 Speaker_03
And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, right, us versus them, right, oppressor versus oppressed, you know, kind of mindset, and so.

03:00:06 Speaker_00
It's such a contrast to what we hoped would happen when Obama would be president. My thought was, okay, there's still some racism, but clearly, if you're the baddest motherfucker, you can get ahead. You can win, the country will vote for you.

03:00:20 Speaker_00
That's not what happened. No. And you can win again. You can win twice. You win twice.

03:00:28 Speaker_00
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.

03:00:37 Speaker_00
And I thought this is crazy to see him lying, especially the very fine people hoax. And we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said. And it's pretty shocking because he's very explicit.

03:00:49 Speaker_00
You know, he's saying not white nationalists, not neo-Nazis, they should be condemned. He says that very clearly. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people who are protesting the taking down of the statue.

03:01:00 Speaker_00
And when you see a guy like Obama do that, it's such a bummer, because he was the guy for me that was like our best spokesman. He was like, here's a guy that came from a single parent household.

03:01:12 Speaker_00
He wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life. He's this brilliant speaker. He's handsome. He represents what we're hoping for.

03:01:22 Speaker_00
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.

03:01:29 Speaker_00
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.

03:01:40 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. That's right. And like I said, I hope they can find their way back.

03:01:44 Speaker_00
But this lady's still on Team Kamala. Oh, yeah. She got a few lessons out of that, but not all of them.

03:01:52 Speaker_03
Well, no, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, and if that is in this quarter a lot of people's value systems, then it's a real challenge. Oh, yeah, it's my parents. They're all in goes in directions.

03:02:05 Speaker_03
Well, yeah, and there's you know, right and you can shoot you can choose to follow You can choose to follow into the you know, the craziest version of it or you can choose to say, you know What like I'm still not gonna switch sides, but at least I'm gonna advocate right for my team to come back.

03:02:17 Speaker_03
Yeah, this is Richie Torres This guy is a congressman in in in Queens. I think or the Bronx He's actually it actually started out. Everybody thought he was gonna be a far lefty because he's gay. He's black. He's Latino and

03:02:27 Speaker_03
He was, like, at least associated with the squad early on. And he's, like, one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up, and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks, saying, clearly, we have to get back to sense.

03:02:38 Speaker_03
Like, we have to get back to common sense. We have to get back to moderation. We have to have law enforcement. We can't have crime in the streets. We have to have a border.

03:02:46 Speaker_03
You know, we have to get...we, the Democrats, have to get back to moderation and sense. And so he is hoping to lead the party. That's great. I think he's...we support him, and I think he's, like, a really...I think he's a very impressive

03:02:56 Speaker_03
So there are people like and he's young and very energetic and you know, I think he has a very bright future But that's the kind of person who could lead the party.

03:03:04 Speaker_00
Well, the big Nietzschean shift was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala and everybody cheered If there's not a better example than that, please tell me what it is because that one was fucking nuts Like, Dick Cheney was always the hard right.

03:03:19 Speaker_00
Like, during the Bush administration, all the lefties looked at him like that was Satan. He was the profiteer. He was the manipulator. He was the guy pulling the strings. He was the CEO of Halburton. The whole thing was so crazy.

03:03:35 Speaker_00
And to see, oh, Dick Cheney just endorsed Kamala. And everybody's like, yay! Look, Dick Cheney's on our side. What the fuck are you guys talking about? This is the best shift of it, right?

03:03:46 Speaker_03
Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right. All of a sudden, we're all neocons. All of a sudden, as you said, all of a sudden, we're pro-war. It's like, wait a minute. Because as you know, the Democrats used to be the anti-war party. Yes.

03:03:57 Speaker_03
They were the anti-war party for a very long time.

03:03:59 Speaker_00
Yes, yes. Except back when they were trying to keep slavery in act. That's part of the problem. That was a different era. People don't realize that. That was a different era.

03:04:09 Speaker_03
But you know what, coming out of Vietnam, they were definitely the anti-war party for like, you know, 30 years.

03:04:12 Speaker_00
But isn't that a shift as well? Yeah, it was. But the shift of the Republicans from back in the day being Abraham Lincoln and trying to get rid of slavery and the Democrats fighting to keep it. Like there's these weird ideological swings. They happen.

03:04:29 Speaker_00
And we're still attached to the idea of being a Democrat is like being a Clinton Democrat. We're in this weird sort of denial of what the ideology actually stands for versus how we think of ourselves when we say, I'm a Democrat. I'm a good person.

03:04:46 Speaker_00
I support civil rights, women's rights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Down the line, I'm a Democrat. And if you go against that, well, now you're against all these things that you know to be inherently important for society. They got you.

03:04:59 Speaker_00
They got you. They roped you into some crazy thing where you're supporting war. And then there was the big faction, right? There's the big free Palestine versus support Israel. Because the left always supported Israel.

03:05:10 Speaker_00
And then all of a sudden, there's this free Palestine movement, which divides the left even further.

03:05:15 Speaker_03
There's a book written some years back by this guy, Norman Podhoretz, and it's called Why Are Jews Liberal? He was a right-wing Jew, a very important American Jewish thinker in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

03:05:29 Speaker_03
He had this thesis that these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S. basically are voting against—ultimately, they're voting for the wrong team.

03:05:37 Speaker_03
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.

03:05:45 Speaker_03
Because the basic concept of Israel violates the idea that Israel is literally a religious ethnostate. And that's inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea. The left doesn't have room for that. And a military superpower.

03:05:57 Speaker_03
And a military, right, and is able to write.

03:05:59 Speaker_00
And it's run by a former special forces operator.

03:06:02 Speaker_03
Yes. Yes, a very capable soldier.

03:06:06 Speaker_00
He's a fucking assassin. Exactly.

03:06:08 Speaker_03
And so, you know, he argued, I don't know, it was 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.

03:06:15 Speaker_03
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.

03:06:23 Speaker_03
Right, which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the universities, right? And it's like, you know, there's two ways of looking at that. One is, oh, my God, the DEI is anti-Jewish. Therefore, we need to add Jews to the DEI scorecard, right?

03:06:36 Speaker_00
Well, when we saw the heads of Harvard and was it MIT? Was it Yale? No, it was Harvard, MIT, and Columbia. Yeah, that's right. That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas.

03:06:48 Speaker_03
And then we saw that the same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-Israel, but also ultimately pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas. The new acronym, LGBTH.

03:07:03 Speaker_00
But there's a bunch of other stuff in there now. There's Q, there's Two-Spirit. You've got to get H in there now for Hamas. Oh boy, really? Yeah, of course, of course, of course.

03:07:11 Speaker_03
I bring it up just as an example, not to take a position, just as an example of it's the kind of realignment.

03:07:18 Speaker_03
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.

03:07:25 Speaker_03
So I think to your point, I think the whole country is going through... I think we're going through the first profound political realignment probably since the 1960s, which is when everything shifted between Johnson and Nixon in the South.

03:07:38 Speaker_03
I think we're going through the most profound version of that right now, and I think it's something like...

03:07:43 Speaker_03
the multi-ethnic working class coalition, you know, that came together around Trump, you know, basically, again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass, you know, kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves.

03:07:55 Speaker_03
And it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.

03:07:59 Speaker_03
And so I think, but by the way, including a lot of black people, you know, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote for Trump is way up, youth vote for Trump is way up, gay vote, like all of

03:08:08 Speaker_00
Yes.

03:08:09 Speaker_03
All of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years are union vote is for Trump.

03:08:15 Speaker_00
I'm sure you've seen the map, the electoral map of California. Yeah. 2024 and 2020. Yes. In contrast, it's a crazy red wave that's going through across the whole, most of the state is red now.

03:08:26 Speaker_00
Those of us on the coast are going to get pushed into the ocean. Yes. Well, I think, you know, maybe the other way. You were talking about the hopeful way that the Democrats will wake up and come up with a more reasonable.

03:08:38 Speaker_00
I mean, there's obviously clear cultural pushback on all these crazier, crazier issues. I mean, like the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women.

03:08:49 Speaker_00
I mean, this is a giant one where women are like, listen, we created Title IX for a reason. Like, we want women's sports to be for women.

03:08:56 Speaker_00
You can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women, which is what it is in a lot of places. You don't even have to get tested. There's not some sort of a hormone protocol.

03:09:09 Speaker_00
It's just what your identity is, which is just nuts. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people on the left are having a really hard time justifying.

03:09:19 Speaker_03
Yeah. Because how can you deny a victim group? Right. Right.

03:09:23 Speaker_00
You can't.

03:09:23 Speaker_03
I mean, in the full version of that ideology, in the extreme version of that ideology, you cannot deny a victim claim.

03:09:28 Speaker_00
Well, it also comes with this weird caveat where you have to deny the existence of perverts.

03:09:34 Speaker_00
Because a pervert, all they have to do is say, I identify as a woman, throw on a wig, and now you can go hang around the women's room and no one can say anything.

03:09:42 Speaker_00
Well, you've emboldened, empowered one of the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from. And you have to pretend they don't exist if you just want to base it solely on identity, especially like a self-described identity.

03:09:57 Speaker_00
You just decide, and then that's it. And, you know, I mean, there's states that have that now with prisoners, that all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman, and you are now housed in women's prisons.

03:10:11 Speaker_00
California has 47 of them when the last time I looked at it.

03:10:15 Speaker_00
And there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in so you have women who you know Especially if you're someone who's dealing with if you've ever been raped or sexually abused and now you have to share space With a man who might be a fucking pervert and some of these men even have

03:10:34 Speaker_00
some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for. It's crazy. I mean, Canada's the worst at it. There's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting into female prisons. And it's just, it's insanity.

03:10:49 Speaker_00
And I think the left rejects that, too, for the most part. There's the sensible version of the left that is like, hey, yeah, I'm pro-gay rights. Yeah, I'm pro-women's rights. I'm pro-civil rights. I'm pro-choice. I'm pro-this. I'm anti-war.

03:11:00 Speaker_00
But also, you can't let psychos just put on a fucking dress and hang out in women's rooms just because we want to be kind. That's nuts. So there has to be some and then there's legitimate trans women. So like how do you make the distinct?

03:11:15 Speaker_00
Well, clearly we have to have a fucking conversation And if you don't allow that conversation to take place like if you go to blue sky and you type in there are only two genders You're banned. Yeah, you're right there people done it.

03:11:25 Speaker_00
There's a bunch of people have done it. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun They have like they've created a little sock puppet account They say some shit that should have been a reasonable thing to say just 20 years ago. Yeah, I Well, you make me hopeful, Mark.

03:11:37 Speaker_00
You do. You do. Because you lay things out in a really well-thought-out way that is not hyperbolic, and you're making a lot of sense. So I'm glad we talked. I feel better. Good. Fantastic. I think the world does, too. I really do.

03:11:53 Speaker_00
I mean, I've talked to a lot of people, even people that are Democrats, who say, I feel better that Trump won.

03:11:57 Speaker_03
Every day, it feels better. It feels like just things are opening up.

03:12:03 Speaker_00
It's the Obama campaign. It's hope and change.

03:12:04 Speaker_03
Yeah, hope and change. Remember? It's hopey changey.

03:12:07 Speaker_00
This is kind of actually hope and change.

03:12:10 Speaker_03
Yeah.

03:12:10 Speaker_00
This is actually it.

03:12:12 Speaker_03
It feels like oxygen returning.

03:12:13 Speaker_00
Yes. Well, thank you very much, Mark. I really appreciate you. Tell everybody, your sub stack, how to find you on social media.

03:12:19 Speaker_03
Oh, I'm on X under PMarkA. I'm on sub stack. Google me.

03:12:23 Speaker_00
All right.

03:12:24 Speaker_03
Ask for Plexity. All right. Ask ChatGPT, and it will deny that. No. It will happily tell you that I exist, at least last time I checked.

03:12:32 Speaker_00
What about Wikipedia?

03:12:33 Speaker_03
We don't know. We don't know if Catherine is still running it.

03:12:36 Speaker_00
Always a pleasure, Mark. Thank you very much. Appreciate you. All right. Bye, everybody.