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Summary
Joe Rogan has an engaging conversation with Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The episode delves into a variety of topics, from speculative "parallel universes" resulting from political events, to an in-depth discussion of current societal and political dynamics, including media influence, conspiracy theories, and shifting ideologies. The conversation takes a deep dive into how the world has evolved with modern technology's role in shaping information and politics, as well as personal anecdotes from Marc about his experiences in Silicon Valley and interactions with political figures. There's a pronounced sense of optimism threaded throughout, exploring how past and present choices create our potential futures.
Highlights
Marc Andreessen humorously suggests alternate realities have split around pivotal moments like Trump's survival post-assassination attempt 🎥🤯.
The episode covers the surreal speed of news turnover and how this 'goldfish memory' shapes our perception of events 🐠💨.
Marc shares insights into governmental and media conspiracies, hinting at a cover-up culture affecting trust in institutions 🤔📉.
Discussion of systemic challenges in tech regulation and how they could shape, or stifle, our technological future 📉🤖.
A playful exchange on AI and the possibility of an AI-run government shifts to a sobering take on balance and control in technological advancements 🤖⚖️.
Key Takeaways
Marc Andreessen discusses what feels like parallel timelines split by major events like election outcomes and near misses with global impact 🇺🇸🌍.
Conspiracy theories, media influence, and rapid news cycles are impacting public perception as Marc describes a 'systemic collapse of confidence' 📰😮.
Modern political shifts feel like ideological whiplash, as parties realign on foundational issues -- it's like witnessing heresies become mainstream 🚀.
Marc expresses optimism for a new American Golden Age driven by young innovators and cultural shifts encouraging healthier lifestyles 🌟💪.
Silicon Valley's role in this evolution is highlighted, where open dialogue and diverse ideas clash with regulatory pressures 🌐🤝.
Overview
Marc Andreessen brings a fascinating theory to the table, proposing that our reality might be diverging along different timelines, depending on pivotal political events like elections and assassination attempts. The discussion branches into how our current events might resemble science fiction scenarios, sparking lively debate on what could have been.
The conversation dives into the rapid-fire nature of today's news cycle, with both Marc and Joe lamenting the goldfish-like attention span of modern society. They discuss how this constant churn affects our long-term memory and perception of key events, questioning the role of media in shaping public belief systems.
Shifting gears, the discussion touches upon the tech industry's role in shaping our future against a backdrop of regulatory pressures. Marc, hailing from Silicon Valley, muses on the entrepreneurial spirit and cultural shifts that could herald a new age of prosperity, emphasizing the power of youthful innovators who are primed to drive change.
Joe Rogan Experience #2234 - Marc Andreessen Transcription
00:00 - 00:30 Joe Rogan podcast check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day right hello hello good to see you thanks for having me back my pleasure good to see you where the world's still uh functional it's amazing yeah amazing um we we wanted to talk you wanted to talk about the postelection sort of a wrapup yeah sort of where we stand are you happy very happy it was a weird one
00:30 - 01:00 morning in America that was uh 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 so my theory is the timeline like in a science fiction movie the timeline has split twice ah in the last in the last like nine months what was the first split there was when Trump got shot oh and and there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions right if he got hit yeah yeah and we saw the most conspicuous display of physical bravery I've ever seen
01:00 - 01:30 right moment exactly and it could have gone you know horrifically badly for the entire world after that so that was timeline split number one so that other timeline's out there somewhere yeah and I don't want to visit it boy imagine being stuck there what kind of horrible Karma no I mean that's a totalitarian dystopian nightmare that's the bad place yeah um and then uh timeline split again on Election Day I know you're you fancy a good conspiracy theory yes and uh that that gentleman being able to pull P off
01:30 - 02:00 what he did and you know the way it happened the way it all went down is it's a Lee Harvey Oswald 2.0 yeah oh yeah clearly yeah the shooter and 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 wouldn't you want to know like what kind of stuff this kid is on that made him want to do that or if anything
02:00 - 02:30 so my theory is it's almost as if the people want us to think it's a conspiracy like it it's almost like the whole thing is almost orchestrated like it's just it's so strange you know 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 so do you think they're going to do a dive into what happen I mean I would I 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
02:30 - 03:00 people talked about or if that's simply the best way to pull it off yeah or it's just yeah or it's just you know as we saw I think in the hearing afterwards maybe just a systemic collapse of confidence there's also a confidence in the fact that the the news timeline today is so rapid the when things are relevant and people are paying attention to them is you have a couple days yeah even with an assassination attempt on a former president where where where people were murdered and and there's
03:00 - 03:30 it's in and out yeah that's right I think it's exactly I think the news cycle now is like a two to three day social media Firestorm and we just cycle from one to the next yeah and we have the memory of goldfish and right they you know things right things that would have been eror defining just come and go with astonishing speed uh and shock by the way I I should say I don't think there was a I I doubt there was a conspiracy I think anything's possible I think it's just we have a confidence collapse and I think we saw that on display when the when the director at the time you know testified well there's all the elements that it could have been a conspiracy kind of the thing which is
03:30 - 04:00 like it also could have been systemic confidence collapse and then it's like okay would it be better off for the instit you know if it looks like a conspiracy right like you know which World okay two timelines which world you would you rather live in the one with the conspiracies or the one with just like incompetence everywhere well I think you have both simultaneously I don't think it's binary right I I think there's incompetence everywhere and conspiracies are legitimate they're real yeah and that one seems like conspiracy the fact that his his house was professionally scrubbed there's no
04:00 - 04:30 social media record of this kid online there's no nothing he's the only kid of his generation who's that fired up about politics to have no online Footprints like it just doesn't make any sense and he's a regit republican like the whole thing is like so weird and he was like a bad shooter and then he became a great shooter and well he definitely trained like you could train someone to become a good shooter this is all you have to do don't move and do that get all your mechanics in place understand technique and positioning breathing it's not like the most complicated thing from a prone position right but the fact that he
04:30 - 05:00 chose to use iron sights I thought was weird too there's a lot of weirdness to it you know from 140 yards with a scope that is an easy shot yeah well then that he could just like wander up that's the different timeline the different timeline is he has a scope and that's it okay all right right that would have and Trump's dead yep and then boy boy do we live in a crazy world then yeah completely bizarre I mean what does the streets look like right now yeah what kind of like protests and riots and yeah
05:00 - 05:30 you think January 6 was nuts if they had killed Trump that would be January 6 on steroids everywhere yeah that's right and we would we would experience it I mean you know I don't when I was a kid my my high school high school history teacher got us a bootle copy of the the zuder film really which you know like what a gangster High School history he was actually pretty focused on the he really loved the Kennedy assassination so we spent a lot of time on that and and you know you know you kind of watch it frame by frame and you can kind of see what's happening with there's lots of questions but like when things like that happen you know today it's going to be in high definition 4K Ultra surrounds
05:30 - 06:00 on forever 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 yeah I mean I like I said after the election I was like Wow voting works yeah yes yes about that about that 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 the where the real rigging in the 2020
06:00 - 06:30 elections I mean you can cast all your conspiracies upon it in terms of like mailin ballots and all this Jazz but the real rigging was the collusion between social media companies and the government to suppress information that would have altered the effect of the election that's legitimate oh yeah for sure yeah that was like direct interference and it was you AED and eded by a lot of former you know intelligence officials and by and by the current Administration you know tons of pressure on censorship coming from this you know the current Administration and all their kind of arms of the censorship apparatus
06:30 - 07:00 um you have your hands in the Tech Community you have your fingers in all that jazz like what was the General attitude about all that stuff when it was revealed how did how did people you know how did your peers respond to that I think anybody in social media the internet companies knew it so I it was pretty widely understood I mean look there's nothing that happened at Twitter in the Twitter files it wasn't happening all the all the other companies right so it's it's a consistent pattern if you got the YouTube files they would look exactly the same and of course we should get the files right and now we we
07:00 - 07:30 probably will now with you know this new Administration is probably going to like carve all this stuff open but yeah know like it was a pattern and then look you know the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies you know made a lot of I think bad judgment calls but the government the like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to sensor American citizens which which I think by the way is just flatly illegal like I think it's actually subject to criminal charges like I think there are people with criminal liability who were involved in this so there was that there were also members of Congress doing the same thing which is also illegal and and then there was a lot of funding of outside third
07:30 - 08:00 party groups that were that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship yeah and just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford you know right next door um you know to us that um you know was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government wow and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor and it was and it was very effective at doing so does it smell like sulfur when you walk those Halls it is very dark and Grim um this whole thing is is is very bad um and so Stanford oh yeah St yeah Stanford Stanford by the way another unit like that at Harvard you know a
08:00 - 08:30 bunch of universities got pulled into this a lot of NGS and nonprofits got pulled into this and so the Twitter files showed us kind of the basic road map um and then there's this thing called the weaponization committee that uh Congressman Jordan is running that has also revealed a lot of this but I I would imagine the new Trump Administration is going to come in and Carval that wide open and I know that there are people in you know being appointed to senior positions who are very determined to do that this episode is brought to you by blinds.com you probably think custom window coverings are just to keep the neighbors from staring in right but here's the thing
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09:30 - 10:00 spend $500 or more limited time offer rules and restrictions apply see blinds.com for details one of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election and how much money was spent on activist groups yeah right it's like more than a $100 million right yeah there just there's extensive Government funding of polit of of of politically oriented noos
10:00 - 10:30 yeah NGO is one of those great terms like non-governmental organization all right like what what what the hell is that right what is that tell me I don't know well it's it's sort of a charity and but what it sort of but most of the time it's a it's a political entity it's an entity with a political agenda but then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases including the the NGS and the censorship complex like the government grants National Science Foundation grants like direct State Department grants yeah right direct money and then it okay now you got an NGO funded by the government well
10:30 - 11:00 that's not an NGO like right that's a go right right and then you've got a conspiracy you like when censorship then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund what what look like private organizations that aren't and then what happens is the government outsources to these NOS the things that it's not legally allowed to do like what like like censorship oh okay like violation of First Amendment rights right the government so the first so what they always say is the first amendment only to the government the First Amendment says the government
11:00 - 11:30 cannot cannot censor American citizens and so what they do is if you want to censor American citizens in the government if you're smart you don't do that what you do is you fund an outside organization and then you have them do it boy right and that's what's been happening right and and that's like hiring a Hitman like it's not okay to murder someone but you can hire someone to murder someone and then you're clean yeah 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 up the chain and so a lot a lot of this traces into the White House the best offense the companies have is that a lot
11:30 - 12:00 of this happened under coercion right because when when when the government 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 Investigation it might be a subpoena it could take many forms but when the government does that it carries you know that's a very powerful message it's like a message from a mob boss right it's like don't you want to do me a favor it's like you know yes Mr Campo I do right like I like my corner store I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight right and so there's the there's this overwhelming Hammer blower pressure that comes in um and by the way even when the
12:00 - 12:30 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 you come under incredible pressure and so the the the whole kind of chain this whole chain of governments activist universities and companies was corrupted and then on top of that people in the companies in a lot of cases made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret what was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election and I didn't understand like what purpose that would serve like what what function would it serve
12:30 - 13:00 to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you supposedly yeah like are you bribing them to support you are they what are they are they are you paying them to go on talk shows and consistently uh repeat the government's message the current administration's message like what what would be the function of that so I think in some in some cases just it's just pay to play right so for as example we know that Comm campaign paid certain onair
13:00 - 13:30 personalities you know follow and then there were there were you know which it's your point people were very supportive of of kamla who then gave her you know interviews that that wenten really well and so I I think in some cases you just have straight pay to play that's just how that system works it's just expected and then I think you have other organizations like like these Nos and others activist groups where they're they're actually you know they actually do field activities right and so there's you know maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's you know social media influence Downstream component or some other you know kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election I just didn't think that they pay like when it's still
13:30 - 14:00 unclear whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her right right have you they've mixed it up cuz there's like Oprah 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 two whatever $2 million million it was initially listed as one and it turned out it was 2.5 if I have a production company and my production company gets paid $2.5 million to endorse Trump right and then I go I didn't get any of that money right people like shut the [ __ ] up of course you got it's your company what
14:00 - 14:30 are you talking about and also how much does it cost to do an event yes how does it cost $2.5 million to put on an event like are you feeding people gold sandwiches like what are you doing like how is that possible yeah exactly so yeah and then because the fact that it's deliberately out fiscated of course is a is a clue as to I just thought the really bizarre one was the allegations and I I'd say unsubstantiated allegations it's been alleged that Beyonce got 10 million
14:30 - 15:00 and lizo got $3 million Eminem got $1.8 million really yeah I think if you just like published all these numbers these celebrities would all get so mad at each other that you then you would learn everything got short right Liz Liz was Furious right now right yeah lizo is probably listening to this right now being like what well I wonder if lizo was like I didn't get [ __ ] I would say it but why haven't they said it like Beyonce has been mum about the whole thing I I think I would probably say like I didn't get any money to do that yeah but that was a weird one too
15:00 - 15:30 because a lot of people thought Beyonce was going to do a concert right and she just went out there and talked and everybody was like what the [ __ ] CU they all came to see a free Beyonce concert and then she just said I want to support KLA Harris and everybody's like good good now if you like it then you should have put a ring on it right 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 I didn't think candidate would ever
15:30 - 16:00 pay for an endorsement yeah I mean the fact that it was even alleged yeah yeah well you know and then there's of course there's there's the the even stinkier version arguably which is all the all the social media influencer campaigns now there's you know tremendous amount of Payola that's for sure because I know people personally who are approached multiple times yeah and offered a substantial amount of money to post things in support of Harris yeah and like I'm I'm Pro capitalism and I'm happy for them that they get paid but like maybe we should know yeah that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose it should be
16:00 - 16:30 like like say if I was going to do an ad for you know whatever a certain Coffee Company Black Rifle coffee and I did it on my Instagram I'd have to say Ad I have to say this is an ad it's a paid ad yeah and that's part of the thing yeah you know yeah unless it's your company y like you're supposed to say they're paying me to do this y yeah well you know look the good news with these is we learn each cycle we learn a lot about how politics works we learn about a lot about how fake it is we learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time I mean everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the
16:30 - 17:00 new guy does but like this real scandal in most cases I think is just the way the system already works it's a sneaky system yeah well another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it like what uh Trump called earned media right was much more powerful than anything else yeah the uncontrolled version of it like one of the things that unfortunately for them mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility
17:00 - 17:30 so much so much so that like Joy Reed was on TV today talking about saying that Trump is going to shoot protesters and all just wild unsubstantiated crazy [ __ ] yeah and the more they do stuff like that the more that they say things like that the more it diminishes their impact and the more it drives people to Independent Media sources yeah I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse that they that they've they've been you know they're down to like they're down like
17:30 - 18:00 MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 20 18 to 49 demo that is so wild which is Tiny right it's so crazy it's really tiny so I think that's happening um the Gallup organization has done polls on trust in institutions including you know media for the last 60 years it's been a steady slide down um and in the last you know four years it's fallen off a cliff I think it's really oh there's another study that came out um the kids are now watching a lot less TV kids are just giving up on TV and they're just you know they're on YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram and other
18:00 - 18:30 things um and so like I I I think it's tipping uh question I've been asking myself is when when will the as you know famously 1960 was the first television election right the you know sort of Legend has it because it was the one where the televised debate really mattered and if you saw the televised debate you saw confident Kennedy and nervous Nixon and if you heard it you experienced something different and handsomeness and vitality and health right and all all these things um sort of positive positive spirit positive energy um I'm actually not this this might be have been the first internet
18:30 - 19:00 election or maybe we actually haven't had it yet like I feel like we're really close to the first internet election but maybe it's not all the way there I think this is it I think this there's an argument that this is it right and that you know all the you know all the stuff especially in the last six months all the you know podcasts obvious in your your show played a big role but like I think there's a real if you're going to run in 28 like I think there's like a fully internet native way to run these campaigns that might literally involveed like zero television advertising and maybe you don't even need to raise that money and maybe at to your point if you have the right message you just go straight direct yeah might be a
19:00 - 19:30 completely different way to do this I think that's the only way now and I think if you do pay people it's not going to have the same impact 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 an impact but I think that in the future I I'm sure they're they're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show this is one thing that keeps coming up like we need our own Joe Rogan right but they had me well number one they had you number one they had you they had you and
19:30 - 20:00 they drove you away is that number one number but they also have you know ABC NBC CBS CNN right but that doesn't work anymore those that's like you know like you're using smoke signals and everybody else has a cell phone it doesn't work yeah that's right that's right 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 um it's a fascinating timeline too because there's so much uncertainty and there's so much right we're at the verge of AI
20:00 - 20:30 you know uh open AI you know Alman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient whatever that means you know artificial general intelligence will be will emerge and who knows how that affects I I've said publicly and I'm kind of half joking that we need AI government yep you know I 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
20:30 - 21:00 you know program yeah that you know makes it like really reasonable and Equitable in a way that we can all agree to Let's govern things in that manner right so you can actually simulate this today because you you can go on these systems sh GPT or clot or these others um and you you can ask you know how should we handle issue X how should this be right we've done that right how should the department of energy do whatever nuclear policy or whatever and and what I find when I do that is I discover two things number one of course these things are these things have the same problem social medias had which is they tremendously politically biased and you that's on purpose and they need to
21:00 - 21:30 fix that and that's going to be a big Topic in the next several years but the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political basically bias and censorship if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue 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 I mean it might be the way to go yeah which is so horrifying for people to think because everyone's worried about the Terminators taking over the world and like if that's the first step as we let them govern us well look there's
21:30 - 22:00 nothing stopping a a politician from using this there's nothing stopping a policymaker from using you know as a tool you start out at very least you start out using it as a tool there's nothing to prevent you like for example I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI Battlefield assistants that are going to advise the most strategy tactics yes right how to win conflicts and then it'll start to work its way up and then they'll be doing you know War planning um and then if you're a general if you're you know Sergeant or a colonel or a general it's going to just mean you perform better um so maybe there's like you know the human the sort of man machine kind of iotic relationship you could imagine that happening more in the
22:00 - 22:30 in the policy process and the in the political process and there's also AI controlled Jets which are far superior they they did uh Mike Baker was telling us about that they did these simulated dog fights and the AI controlled Jets W 100% of the time over humans yeah and there's a bunch of reasons for that and part of it is just simply the speed of of processing and and so forth but another big thing is if you don't have a human in the plane you don't have the they say the spam in the can you don't have the you know you don't have the human body yeah in the plane you don't have have to keep a Human Being Alive which means you can be a lot faster and
22:30 - 23:00 you can move a lot more quickly gfor much much higher g-forces yeah and then there's no option for someone to go crazy yeah that's yes that's also right yes exactly there's no there's no human element yeah you know which is a real element yeah no like I think we're going to it's going to be common to have like mach five drone you know jet drones within within a few years and you know they'll be a fraction of the size of the current you know man planes which means you can have like a lot more of them and so you kind of want to imagine you know a thousand of these things like coming
23:00 - 23:30 over the horizon right at you um and it really changes it's actually I think going to be very interesting it really changes the fundamental equation of war in the following sense fundamentally in the past the people who won Wars are the the one the people who had the most men and the most material right you just needed the most soldiers and you needed the most equipment um and in this drone world that we're talking about it's going to be the people with the most money and the best technology yeah right so for example small states you know small Advanced States like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight and then kind of large uh sort of economically or technologically
23:30 - 24:00 backwards states that normally would have won will now lose and so it's it's going to be a recalibration and then it has the the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk right so you'll have a lot less 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 going to have to be a recalibration of like when you actually like lean into an attack I'm sure you're aware of all this U UAP disclosure Jazz that you see on television um the more I look into into it the more I think at least a
24:00 - 24:30 percentage of it a healthy percentage of it is [ __ ] and there's probably some government projects where they've developed some very sophisticated propulsion systems that they've applied to drones and that that's what these people are seeing and this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces like out in the Eastern Seaboard like there's areas over Virginia where they continually see them in San they see them off the coast of San Diego where
24:30 - 25:00 there's a place where you would test stuff like that well so of 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 right was was highly classified and the SR71 was brand new at one point and so you had these like you know alien you know do you pay attention to any of that stuff course of course 100% yeah and then and then and then by the way we're not the only ones and so I I I you know my speculation would be that a lot some of the military based stuff is is you know the Chinese doing something similar and you know we got a glimpse into that with the balloon you well that
25:00 - 25:30 was Goofy though they got shut down but still the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just like you know loiter above military bases and like you know take lots of you know imagery and do whatever scans they do yeah and like literally nothing was happening and we didn't even know they were there most of the time and so like you know I just say that's like a tip of the ice it feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if if they were doing that there probably other things going on well I had read that someone had commented that similar things had happened during the Trump Administration but they didn't
25:30 - 26:00 tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down interest interesting I for the record I'm Pro shooting them down yeah I think you should probably shoot them down and taking pictures of [ __ ] they're not there's not even people up there [ __ ] shoot them down what's the problem yes exactly yes um do you think there are any of those that are not of this world there's I 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 it you know ra you know racist
26:00 - 26:30 number one is is there or not and then if if if it is you know did it recently get here or have they been here for a long time you know did they arve 5,000 years ago tuer thinks they're demons and angels you know I mean demons and angels are demons and angels real it's like you know literally you know probably not but like certainly they're metaphorically real and are there kind of Shades of Gray between literal and metaphorical you well the actions are certainly demonic and Angelic right actions of human beings Mass things that happen in the world are uplifting or horrific yeah
26:30 - 27:00 evil evil people doing evil things are possessed I mean they're they're possessed by something like something is going on right and like you know what's what's the dividing line between you know an actual Supernatural Force and and some sort of psychological sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy like you might might as well call that a demon yeah it's fascinating because like when you think about from theological ter like when you think of it from a religious perspective you know people would apply what would a demon do what would Angels do what is a what is a uh
27:00 - 27:30 what is the will of God and what is like the evils of the the worst aspects of humanity you would you know you could apply them to so many things in the world but we're very reluctant to say that something is demonic yeah like even though it's clearly demonic like clearly in action like this is what a demon would do a demon would possess people to Gun Down children exactly know and you know use drones to shoot down a wedding
27:30 - 28:00 party a demon would do that right exactly so a friend of mine is a religious scholar he's a teaches at cathol Catholic University and he's a religious history scholar and he says that um medieval people would have had a medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are um because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher Powers higher Spirits Angels demons all kinds of Supernatural entities and they just it was just assumed to be true and in the world
28:00 - 28:30 we're heading into you that we're arguably already in you know there are going to be these you know new forces these new entities running around doing things um and you know we're going to just we're going to struggle and we're going to you know we're going to catastrophize we're going to conclude you know like AI is the end of the world yeah the medievals would have said oh it's just another Spirit like you know it's just another kind of entity yeah it's better it's better than humans at some things but so are angels um and so we're going to have to like change our mentality we're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval we're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with with wow yeah which which also
28:30 - 29:00 could help us actually deal with people like maybe maybe maybe there's an explanatory way to think about human behavior here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational well you express yourself uh very brilliantly in describing the current state of woke ideology as a religion yeah that's right and that the the way you described it was brilliant because you were you were saying it has all the elements excommunication adherence to a very strict Doctrine all these different aspects of it saying things that you
29:00 - 29:30 everyone knows to be illogical and nonsensical but you must repeat it you know these things are indicative of people that are in Cults or people that are a part of like a very like a serious fundamental religion yeah well I mean of course the big difference between woke and those traditional religions is woke has no concept of redemption right right no concept of forgiveness right which is a very evil religion you do not want that yeah also well it's ill conceived right cuz it's like immature it's an immature religion yes it's absolutist
29:30 - 30:00 it's inherently totalitarian it has to be because it can permanently destroy people yeah um W also understand something that the Greeks understood which is that being ostracized and being put to death are the same thing um 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 no kidding the reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time if you were not a citizen of a particular City you would get killed in the next city you'd be identified as the enemy
30:00 - 30:30 presumptively and killed so there was no way to survive without being part of your community wow and and that's what the Ws figured out is you can do the same thing if you're able to like you know nail somebody um on you know on on charges of having done something you know unacceptably horrible then you make them toxic and all of a sudden they you know they can't have sure you know people you know they lose friends they lose family they lose they can't get work you know and before you know it like they're you know living you know severely diminish damaged lives some people then go on to kill themselves I don't know if you have been paying attention at all to Blue Sky I have but I have multiple friends that have
30:30 - 31:00 accounts on Blue Sky that uh are very sophisticated trolls and are pushing like the woke agenda to a satirical Point like to like parody 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 [ __ ] ridiculous [ __ ] and it's fat fascinating I bet it works it does work that's what's so terrifying
31:00 - 31:30 it's like all the outcasts of Twitter all the people that were like I can't take this a few of them come back which is wonderful I love when they come back I'm gone I'm GNA go to Blue Sky [ __ ] you people like a bunch of them went to threads for a while like Stephen King he went to threads came right back they all come right back they can't the marketplace of ideas like okay you could go to like a Fruit Stand in the middle of the [ __ ] desert and that's a Marketplace or you can go to the farmers's market where everybody's at like where you going to go that's right you're going to go to the farmers market
31:30 - 32:00 tons of people it's a lot of fun a lot of activity that fruit stand's [ __ ] Baron and deserted there's no one there there's very few choices yeah yeah it's not fun and it's win-win to have well it's wi it's win-win to have them back on Twitter because it's good for them because they want to prti and so they need an they need an audience so they they win and then we win because it's really really fun to dunk on them but it's also weird for them to not want any push back at all like don't it isn't the whole things supposed to be about an exchange of ideas like if you have a
32:00 - 32:30 controversial idea and someone disagrees with it don't you want to hear that position I I know I do I want to hear it even if I vehemently disagree with it I want to hear it I want to know where how do you how's your brain work how are you coming to these conclusions what makes you think this way who are you what do you like I want to go on Instagram I want to look at your pictures I want to see what you're up to what are you doing you know yeah what you do with your free time you know what are you complaining about yeah yeah I want it's like it's a fasc ating education on human psychology
32:30 - 33:00 and to to watch people Express themselves publicly and then also be attacked publicly by strangers which never happens in the real world like at scale the way it happens on social media and I think it's a an amazing time for people to examine ideas if you can handle it yeah my favorite term is Marketplace of idea yeah you can have a Marketplace of ideas it's just going to be one idea right so blue sky is a Marketplace of ideas sure yeah X is the marketplace of ideas that
33:00 - 33:30 that final s makes a lot of difference yeah right but the thing about X is it really is diverse there's I follow tons of like kooky leftist Progressive nutbags that like have bizarre takes on everything and they were 100% convinced that KLA Harris is going to sweep all the swing States including Iowa they were all in and I was like this is wild yeah like is that going to happen are they right like this is crazy but they were 100% convinced and it's it's
33:30 - 34:00 fascinating to see all these different kinds of people to see the Charlie Kirks and you know the the full-on left wik cooks and see them all together right you need that yeah look so one one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition right so so anytime anybody has a new idea that it's a it's a threat to the existing power structure so all new ideas start as heresies and so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end
34:00 - 34:30 up with complete stagnation if you have stagnation you're going to go straight into into decline yeah right and and and I think this is the the aberant nature this is the timeline split I think that I think the last decade has just been like a really weird aberant time where things have not been working like they should and and you know in 2015 Twitter called itself the Free Speech wing of the Free Speech party right and Elon Elon has not like J Elon has restored it right right he brought it back he brought it back to something that everybody thought was completely normal 10 years ago yeah and I think I hope this last 10 years increasingly is just
34:30 - 35:00 going to feel like a bad dream like I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression right and anger and you know emotional incontinence and you know cancellation campaign emotional incontinence is a great term yes there has been a lot that's emal just diarrhea in your emotions just spraying rage in all directions and so I I you know I I'm very at the moment at least very optimistic that there's a cultural change happening here that's even more profound than than the uh than the political change I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack dorsy I I
35:00 - 35:30 like him a lot as a human being I think he's a brilliant guy and I think he had very good intentions but he was a part of a very large corporation and he had an idea for a wild west Twitter he wanted to have two versions of Twitter he wanted to have the Twitter that was pre- Elon where there's moderation and you you know you can't dead name someone and all that jazz and then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what x is now and he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the the board and the
35:30 - 36:00 executives and all the people that you know were fully on board with woke ideology yeah so the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been and I don't mean to like let them off the hook for their decisions but just the the lived experience as they say of of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding just every single day it's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky exploding around you getting attacked from every conceivable Direction being called just incredibly horrible things being attacked from many different direction well he's already left Blue Sky well yeah so so irony of Jack is that Jack
36:00 - 36:30 then created BL Blue Sky which is kind of exactly the opposite of anyway where he thought it you know oh by the way you know the new the new name for it of course is blue cry yes know that exactly um yeah but he's also got you know look to his credit he's still trying and so he's got Noster you know which is another another it's called nost no oh okay it's his kind of new this is it's actually his third he's going to keep swinging he's full credit full credit he's going to he's going to keep swinging and by the way full credit he supported Elon you know they they mixed up a little bit but
36:30 - 37:00 B and lar she's been very supportive and was very supportive at a key time and well I I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right-wing branch of that stuff like gab or any of these they would immediately be infiltrated by Bots as well like my friends that troll on Blue Sky but these are Nazis like these are Nazi Bots these are people that would just spew horrible hate and then gab would be labeled oh this is where the Nazis go this is a a a right-wing psychopath yeah social media
37:00 - 37:30 app 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 yes and so I I just like that that that doesn't seem to be an effective route to Market um it seems like you have you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service but you need to have some sense of the astral guard rails you're going to have around and by the way every social media service internet service that ever works there's always some content FES and restrictions because you can't have child porn you can't have in to violence you can't have terrorist recruitment right and even the First Amendment there's like a dozen cars that the
37:30 - 38:00 Supreme Court has ruled on over time there are things like that that you can't just like say right I can't say let's go join Isis and you know let's go attack Washington like it's just it's literally not not allowed so there there's always some controls but you need to have like a spine of Steel if you're going to hold back the the the the censorship pressure and and you know there's basically substack um you know company I'm involved you know doing very well you know smaller smaller than Twitter but doing extremely well fantastic and they've done a great job I think of holding the line on this and then obvious and it's an amazing
38:00 - 38:30 resource there's so many brilliant people on substack I love substack I get a large percentage of my news from substack that's right it's really good and it's so valuable and it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and Physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe for to it I think it's fantastic and there's lots of people on the far left and the far right right so you actually have the full spray of like when a farle person gets upset at you know somebody working in the New York Times mad because they're
38:30 - 39:00 not far left enough they quit and they start a and substack welcomes them in yes which is which which is why they don't devolve into a gabber or something like that because it it really is a plat it really is a platform it really does Welcome All convers well it's also very difficult to subvert in that same way because substack is essays right 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 [ __ ] post on you know there are comments
39:00 - 39:30 but it's just like they don't hold the weight that the actual article holds right so my partners my partners at work um uh 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 and so the the 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 well you have rules it's the rule it's the rule now by the way I struggle I struggle against the rules cuz I can't I can't help myself from why do they want you to have rules because otherwise i i
39:30 - 40:00 i inflame people too much I drive I drive people too crazy you do it on purpose sometimes I mean sometimes you have to sometimes it's unintentional did you ever hear about when when the entire continent knew when the entire country of India was mad at me no oh I I spent one night with the entire country of India basically wanted to kill me it was like it was it was incredible I oh my goodness what happened I mean I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter and it was a debate about economics and the topic of colonialism came up and I I
40:00 - 40:30 made a comment in a in in a long Thread about you know colonialism and it and it turns out the the Indians are still extremely sensitive about the topic of colonialism um and I did not understand um the mindset and the historical orientation and I tripped a line and I stayed up all night and I went hyperv viral in every time zone in India every hour there would be like an entirely new activation W and I and I was like I was like front page headline news top of the hour TV news like all the way across India ow yes it was like a I do not
40:30 - 41:00 recommend this as an experience I I by the way I learned how many incredible indian-american friends I have um because they all rallied to my you know my side you know said he's he's not you know Mark not literally calling for the recolonization of India like that it's not actually there a problem with the language barrier as well right language and then just I what my B is just historical context Americans have a different we Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else history for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore more but a lot of other people around the world experience history is something that
41:00 - 41:30 really still matter like really matters to their lives today yes they they just they they they live in history more than we they have a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents and ancestors and so there's just a 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 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 M okay and the ukrainians like and Ukrainian Bots a
41:30 - 42:00 bunch of people came after me cuz I was saying like the Biden Administration I was like [ __ ] these people and then I think some people misconstrued that as [ __ ] the Ukrainian people which I absolutely was not saying I see I was saying [ __ ] 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 so good news is I am allowed to go on podcast in the the it's your bring it up
42:00 - 42:30 though because it's your substack thing it's it's because it's basically Mark you you need you need to explain yourself in long form yes you can't just say a thing exactly to your your example you can't just say a thing and have people extrapolate from it they'll extrapolate it's not their fault because you haven't it's your fault because you haven't explained it right right and so if you write something long form or if you go talk for three hours at least you'll the context will be there and then if they want to get mad at you that's fine but you can point everybody to the transcript and it's clear that that's not what you meant do you also think while you're writing how things could be misconstrued so let me like do
42:30 - 43:00 a really good job of being very clear about this 100% yeah you kind of have to yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah like I had Jimmy corsetti on the other day and he is an expert in uh ancient history and ancient civilizations and we had these fascinating subjects and one of them that came up was the Nazis and their fascination with the occult and so you had to like Clearly say listen [ __ ] Hitler okay can I be really clear [ __ ] Hitler [ __ ] the Nazis okay I not in any way okay now that we're clear let's talk
43:00 - 43:30 about where the swastika came from [ __ ] Hitler did I say [ __ ] Hitler let me say it again [ __ ] Hitler but the swastika is this ancient symbol and he's like talking about like why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult with ancient civilizations and so we got into it but it was like one of those things where it's like all right we're hitting the third rail everybody get your rubber boots on you know let's let's uh save everybody here yeah I've got a friend in the entertainment business who uh is quite leftwing but really likees World War II documentaries o and so he'll be like yeah I saw this
43:30 - 44:00 great documentary last night about Hitler and I'm like I bet you [Laughter] did you can't even have a copy of mine camp in your house oh a student at this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories a student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board the de the the Civil whatever discip disciplinary board for reading a copy mind confence in the quad oh my God that's so crazy which is a book that's been you know assigned for you could buy right now on Amazon 80 years colle kids these people were and like how to
44:00 - 44:30 not do that again yeah that kid was like nearly brought up on charges nearly expelled so like yeah that's that's yes this this is the role that I that that I hope that we're leaving well it's just an awful way to look at things it's it's so awful to think that if you read about someone horrible you support them yeah that's right it's just so crazy like what how are we going to study history yeah right and how are we going to and how are we going to prevent bad things from happening again if we can't if we can't repr why they happened the first time especially something like the Nazis
44:30 - 45:00 like how how are we going to learn like what happened clearly 1920s Germany was very different than 1945 Germany what the [ __ ] happened in 25 years so what we're essentially talking about is the year 1999 America versus 2024 America right 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 well you should probably study
45:00 - 45:30 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 like how you know how did that happen how did that happen right and how many you know did they was there active agreement was there passive agreement was there you know what what what are the steps where things go horribly wrong and how can we recognize those because those steps have taken place multiple times in history recorded history we know about them so like if we see them happening today maybe we should stop it and nip it at the bud what better way than to read about when it already happened yeah one of my
45:30 - 46:00 observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively that prayer eras all had hor horrible moral problems disasters you know catastrophes Wars and all kinds they made all kinds of horrible mistakes but we are completely certain that in our time we figured it all out right right we're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in and the one thing I know for sure is people 50 years from now are going to look back on us and they're going to say oh my God those people were awful 100% right it just it's but like in what way right in what way are we horrible I mean certainly a lot of the way we treat each other is horrible
46:00 - 46:30 especially with the amount of information that we have available but it is fascinating also that if you you know I I visited Athen last years last year and I got to tour the ruins and I'm was like oh I wonder when it all went South like when did they when did they know this had fallen apart like when when was it in the peak of everything they probably thought hey we have the most amazing sophisticated civilization that's available on Earth and we will maintain this yeah this is we will be the center of intellectual discourse and
46:30 - 47:00 the the home of democracy This Is Us yeah yeah and then no now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the paron 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 [ __ ] we're going to keep this [ __ ] rolling forever Leonard skinnard free bird let's go Second Amendment come on and we're going to we think that it's just this is this is the future we America is the shining star of
47:00 - 47:30 the world and we're going to carry this on but probably not like historically I mean the what is the longest running dominant civilization ever the Romans existed for what a couple thousand years like how long did the Greeks run how long did the egypti the Egyptians might be the longest running especially if you like take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines where they you know like Egyptian hieroglyphs they have kings that go back 30,000 years right here it is Egypt and
47:30 - 48:00 Mesopotamia there it is one estimate measuring the time of the first pharaohs the use of hieroglyph writing to the native religion was replaced by Christianity ancient Egyptian civilization endured for about 3,500 years but I bet it was more than that well the I mean the the argument is just things just really didn't really change right like change as we 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 qu civilization for a
48:00 - 48:30 long time the the Greeks kicked off change as we understand it and then and then and then and then the Romans do you know about the fish ponds the fish ponds The Fish Cicero fish ponds no so the Roman Empire you know ran for you know in it sort of Roman Republican Empire and it sort of help which you consider as Dynamic phase it's sort of vital phase ran for a few you know few hundred years but maybe 400 years total something like that and um uh towards the end as it was sort of falling stagnating and and increasingly starting to fall apart uh friend of mine says when the rose got dangerous and nobody could quite explain
48:30 - 49:00 why um right which sounds familiar by the way um CIS ciso was you know one of the great one of the great Roman Statesmen and he he wrote these letters that we have and in the letters he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends and it the the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent capable citizens of Rome are at out in the countryside at their Villas perfecting their fish ponds right they've Pullen into themselves they built their themselves their own protected environments right um right where they control everything and they're completely focused on
49:00 - 49:30 ornamentation they're completely focused on their clothes and and on their you know Lifestyles right Kardashians they were Kardashians I'm sure I don't know if the Kardashians have fish bonds but if they did they would be spectacular fish be amazing F no doubt they would be the most amazing fish ponds we have ever seen um and so he kept railing he's like stop with the fish ponds like stop working on the F like get get back out here rejoin the Senate like get back involved in the system let's keep this thing from caving in yes and I think look you know the significance I think of you know Trump actually talked about
49:30 - 50:00 this on the campaign you know his version of this talking on the Campa campaign Trails he's like look I could be off on a resort I own all these golf gol golf I many things I could be do in my life of course and he's 78 years old he probably would like to do that exactly right and he's you know surrounded his family loves him and like you know grandkids and like the whole thing and he's like look I'm not doing it cuz like I need I need I need to do this and it's interesting because you know he doesn't use you know he's not referencing cico when he says that but it's it's that Spirit right that ciso talked about where you know when times get tough do the people who are in a position to actually make positive
50:00 - 50:30 change actually step up or not right and I think we've had a pretty long stretch here where that hasn't been the case and I think maybe with Trump and then I think also with Elon I think yes because elon's the other guy right he he for sure could a coalition right it's not just him it's VI ramas Swami another guy by the way who could be kicking it on a beach somewhere 100% yeah [ __ ] very successful guy and young and handsome do whatever he wants doing anything yeah exactly instead he's decided to go all in and then you of course you have Tulsi gabard and you know you have JD Vance who I think is brilliant you have all
50:30 - 51:00 these brilliant people that are together yeah which is very hopeful this is what we didn't see out of the Biden Harris campaign you know what we saw from Harris and Waltz you have Waltz this guy who's it seems like he's a compulsive liar at the very least he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things you know like whether or not he was a head coach or uh an assistant coach and the lies have always elevated him socially right all the the lies about his military service
51:00 - 51:30 or at least implying that he served in a different perspect in a different aspect and then there was tianan Square this everything enhances his virtue this is not what anybody wants 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 like that's the kind of guy that I like yeah that's what we all would like like okay that looks like a leader to me yeah yeah well the Romans had this concept they took very
51:30 - 52:00 seriously they called virtue right and like did you did you there's a whole ranking by the way of the Roman virtues and if you read them today you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like oh my God I can't believe what we're missing but like yes people with virt people with virtue it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people they actually act on it and they actually step up well this is what's missing from today's secular society right like we we don't have like a doctrine that in encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly which religion does yeah you
52:00 - 52:30 know true Christianity you know not subverted [ __ ] giant Arena Christianity where the guy flying private jets and has rolls-royces and [ __ ] but actual like real Christian people right well the RO the Romans had Gods I mean their virtues had Gods right and so and so they like it was actually W it was to your point it was like encoded into their religion it was wrapped up in their religion they knew exactly what was expected of them they knew exactly what their ancestors expected of them they knew exactly what their gods expected of them I recently read meditations again uh a couple of
52:30 - 53:00 months ago well I listened to it in the sauna but it's it's brilliant and it's it's amazing that this guy Marcus Aurelius was thinking like this so many years ago and it's so it's so valid today and it applies so well to Modern Life it's so so strange yeah you know how brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible Empire yeah that he could write about human
53:00 - 53:30 psychology and the value of forgiveness and you know being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere in everything you do and all these virtues and all these the stoicism that he that he espoused it's it's so valuable today it's really remarkable that this person who was a leader what was it 2,000 years ago that his words still ring true today yeah you you probably know he didn't write it for public consumption right yeah it was even more amazing his private notebook which is why it's so good probably cuz you probably wrote it
53:30 - 54:00 for a substack you'd like well people are going to hate on this let me yeah yeah let me let me you know let me preemptively attack the people in the comments or right subdue them but he's like he's like he's he's he's lecturing himself like he's telling himself how to act right like you know he's very this very deep deep these are very deep important my favorite my favorite part of the of the meditations this 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 body's going to make dumb decisions and you're going to be incredibly frustrated and you're not going to get any credit for anything and
54:00 - 54:30 you have to get up anyway yeah like that's all yes yes yes that's all true right and you still have to get up and do your job and of course he's saying that to himself as the leader of Rome to himself exactly you know and what's in there is just like wow his life was not you know he's just like again it's it's actually you know like the CEO of something it's just like you're going to get pounded like if you're in these positions you're going to get pounded every day it's Inc and if you're operating out of out of out of a out of a true sense of virt if you're operating out of a true sense of like exercising your responsibilities you you you get up and do it anyway it's amazing
54:30 - 55:00 how much it resonates it really is what's amazing how much so many ancient writings resonate you know there's so much valuable information just like in Suns The Art of War or in the book of five rings you know there's so many ancient books that you read and you go first first of all I love reading them because I I try to imagine what you know what is this life like like in like if you want to take like mamot mashi 1400
55:00 - 55:30 when did he live mamot mashi was like 14 20s or something like that like what's that like like what what is your life like what is what is the what is the view of the world when you you don't really have detailed maps or you don't have any photographs you don't have any idea what the [ __ ] is going on in Europe unless you go there right like what is what is your version of the world like yeah and then to see someone's words written down and you read them and try
55:30 - 56:00 to just imagine yourself in their perspective and their mindset right yeah that's right yeah and look I I think if you're somebody like that or somebody like Marcus reias you just have this incredible sense of responsibility yeah like you the one thing you do have is a sense of purpose like you know exactly why you're here you know exactly what your role is you know exactly how you're supposed to behave you know exactly how you're supposed to basically gain Glory how you're supposed to honor your ancestors like it's it's just all you know exactly where you are in the community right right you know ex right you you have this like incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness and of course there's huge downsides to that
56:00 - 56:30 which is it really cuts off your ability to you know run off and you know you know go on American Idol right like there's like a lot of things you can't do right but like you know you know what you're supposed to do and you either you either do it or you don't do it and these days to to have people like that we need people who choose to be that way right which is a which is a you know which is arguably harder right given given all the choices that they actually choose to to live that way well not only that giving all the distractions that people face every that keeps them from sitting down and writing a journal like that yeah that's right yeah you know I
56:30 - 57:00 mean back then there's not a lot of different things to entertain you with correct yes you had to be maybe a little bit more serious because you couldn't you couldn't have as much fun my my favorite my other favorite uh meditations Marcus really is thing is uh it's something like be the rocks on the shore at which the at which the waves beat right 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 imagine what it was like like addressing the people back then too just
57:00 - 57:30 yelling out into these groups or speaking in front of all the leaders like yep and all everyone's plotting to kill you there's also a lot of that going onone I mean how many times they try to kill Hitler like everybody's trying to kill you if you're if you're running things yeah all your generals are probably secretly wanting to become the king yep yep exactly yeah all the serers are waiting in the wings not easy lives you know today today most of the killings metaphorically most although every now and then yeah somebody the
57:30 - 58:00 alternative timeline yes yes exactly that's right that's right yeah um how fearful were you uh leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline it was so weird because all the experts said it was 50/50 razor you know razor sharp you know it's this tiny little you know thing 880,000 votes in eight counties um and you know um 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 clearly have clearly have clearly have no clue so it's another set of people we don't have
58:00 - 58:30 to listen to um but I had this really interesting conversation that kept naging at me with a um a senior Democrat who's on his way out of of U uh of politics um and he he said in in the sumurai said how how certain is or what's your view and and and this person said Trump's going to win with 100% certainty really um this a Democrat um from a sort of purple State um right so uh you know not New York or California but like a state with you know sort of maybe Arizona broader cross-section of people and this person basically said yeah said look all you have to do is fly
58:30 - 59:00 anywhere in the country into any purple en place and go into a second or third tier you know SI City and take an Uber for 30 minutes you know land at the airport take an Uber drive around for 30 minutes come back and just ask the driver like how's it going and who are they voting for and basically 100% of the time the answer is going to be Trump because people are just people were just like completely fed up they were just completely fed up and then there was the you know comma enthusiasm which this person said you know the Comm enthusias is like highly focused in New York and California which don't matter from an
59:00 - 59:30 electoral standpoint right so they're not going to decide anything but matters huge when it comes to Media oh sure of course but that's that's the thing this the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble and this is what's actually so interesting about these media bubbles is like the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out like it's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in and part of it was getting excited about a candada for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these you know heavily blue States yeah and so it it's in a lot of ways it's the most you know obvious explanation of the world which is just
59:30 - 60:00 people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in and they were just fed up with it there's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that K Harris was going to win like I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne oh right I saw that yeah right I don't want to show the poor lady she's probably living in hell right now but I'm on blue sky I'm she's probably on Blue she might be on well she was on X I think she deleted her profile but the poor lady I mean she
60:00 - 60:30 but she was being very arrogant and she laughed and mocked this man and said uh you do realize you wasted your vote right that's right that's right that's right that's right that's right and she laugh which makes her hard to feel sorry for that's right it's like you were you were ready to mock this man yes but in her eyes it was all about reproductive freedom and she thought that that was under attack under the Trump Administration and that women are going to stand up and they're going to stop that because in her Echo chamber that was the case everybody was universally
60:30 - 61:00 they all agreed were universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil we got to get rid of him and women are going to vote and this is going to be F but like who are you hanging out with lady yeah you know you could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball's awesome and then you know you run into someone from another country like what the [ __ ] is baseball like you got to realize there's a lot of people out there yeah and people really don't like being talked down to they really don't and they don't like you mocking the fact that first of all nobody wasted their vote that's not how it goes like you don't waste your vote if you vote different
61:00 - 61:30 and the other side wins that's not how the other side won that's just all it is like you wasting the vote is a crazy way to look at it like because I think also people look at things like tribal games you know like uh you know Texas is a huge football state and people love football and it's always we this we that when UT plays South Carolina we this we that it's like people love to be a part of a team that's winning and they apply that especially if they're not into sports to other things I think it's just
61:30 - 62:00 a war mentality it's a tribal War mentality that's been sort of subverted in the human mind and applied to other things it could be like Microsoft versus Apple you know it could be Android versus Apple you know iOS it's weird how people get so tribal and then connect their own personal identity to other people agreeing with these ideas that they that they believe yeah yeah I off for two two thoughts one is um the Democrats for a long time were the big
62:00 - 62:30 tent party so the Democrats were the Coalition of people who had very different points of view on things and of course you know famously it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different you know economic and unions and all these things and Republicans were like the party of like rigidity right um and just for whatever set of a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it is it flipped to where at least today Trump's Republican party is the Big 10 party yeah you know to your point on having all these new people and many of whom are former Democrats and and the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody right who disagrees on any any issue and demand right lock step Conformity through the the
62:30 - 63:00 cancellation process and so that that's a very interesting inversion that happened kind of without anybody saying anything about it but it it did happen and then I think the other 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 going to get all the money cut taxes Administration and then basically if poor people get any money it's because the rich people like trickle trickle some down right I think that inverted to where the Democrats especially 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
63:00 - 63:30 it to the government and then we're going to let the government hand it out right but they did it under the guise of tax the rich they did it they did it with this Robin Hood Mentality at least they expressed that of course that's how it starts but then you end up with $35 trillion Federal de debt you end up with this giant annual deficit and then you end up with all this money being handed out right handed out in all these grants and all these the things like just this this like shower of money coming from the government but of course if the government's giving you money it also means the government can take money away right like if you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving them money then you're in you have a
63:30 - 64:00 tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by by pulling the money away right you can also control their ideology that way 100% yeah you own them like it's it's actually a form you know it's it's it's on this it's on the Spectrum to a form of like domination you know that should make us very uncomfortable um and so that and and you know maybe that would be fine if the debt if the debt in the deficit didn't out of control and inflation didn't get out of control but it did um and then at that point it's like okay like this this new kind of sort of tax and spend driven tricked on economics is clearly not sustainable it's not going to work so the way the
64:00 - 64:30 Trump Administration is going to approach the economy they want less regulation they want tariffs and less regulation and they want more um more Reliance on US Energy right right they want to drill more more natural gas more fracking more drilling for oil and then um allow companies to to work without regulations inhibiting their performance this will boost the economy you'll have more productivity you have more American
64:30 - 65:00 manufacturing you have more things happening yeah so the the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this two headline things are number one growth you just need faster growth but by the way it's the only way to resolve the long-term fiscal situation it's the only way to resolve the debt there's only two ways to do it you can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation like that that's one track you can get on which is a very bad track and you don't want to go there or you can grow faster because if you grow faster then your your economy can catch up to the debt you can you can pay down the debt as as you grow and so they they
65:00 - 65:30 want to go for a higher rate of growth and then the other thing is they want America to win um and this you know my my partner Ben and I rable spent time with Trump this summer and that was like his like adamant thing he kept coming back which is like look America has to win and and specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in Industry generally globally like our companies should be the ones that win these you know broad we should win Global markets like our companies should be should be the global how can anybody be against that I happen to think that makes a lot of sense yes I know I mean obviously you're a wealthy man and I am as well but it's
65:30 - 66:00 like how could you not want that yes 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 I I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs right like that's how you square the circle that's how you actually have your cake and E it too which is like first you you your economy just generates a fountain of money through through growth and economic economic success and then you you can pay for and you can pay for whatever programs you want I actually don't personally like I I I'm totally
66:00 - 66:30 fine like set up all the programs you want all the social spending you want 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 yeah I mean I've always said if I knew that I paid more taxes people in the world in this country would live better I would do it right of course I just don't believe that they're good at spending it that's the thing right it's it's like if if you're putting in this if you've generated 35 trillion of debt and these are the results yeah like this this is not the deal and and this is my my friend that I talked about earlier that that was the point he made
66:30 - 67:00 is just like look the deal has been broken like this is this is not the deal anybody signed up for this is not how it's supposed to work everybody knows it and when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits and then you could take that away at any moment this was one of the big fears that people had about letting illegal immigrants into the country and moving them to swing states which clearly happened and also giving them a bunch of benefits which clearly happened money food stamps housing all that happened stuff that wasn't available to
67:00 - 67:30 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 that's right 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 [ __ ] you want me to vote for I don't
67:30 - 68:00 care my life is infinitely better than it was in this totalitarian [ __ ] hole that I was in until I walked here I'll do whatever you want like I just want my family to survive and I think everything's going to it's so much better than where I was if I'm in some War torn part of the world it's so much better here I don't care if the Democrats win or the Republicans I'm in America and if the Republicans didn't give me any money right they want to get me out right they want to deport me right but this nice lady she gave me an EBT card right and I'm staying at The
68:00 - 68:30 Roosevelt Hotel in New York City and I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there oh this is wonderful right so that's how it starts and there is a lot of that going on but I I will say what's one of the things that's interesting is it doesn't necessarily stick that way and the the sort of evidence for that is the rapid ramp the sort of dramatic ramp up in the Hispanic vote for Trump well Hispanic people generally are very hard workers so so this gets this gets the thing so I'll just tell a quick story on this so uh after the the the night after the 2016
68:30 - 69:00 election like literally everybody I knew was just like completely traumatized like we were all just like completely freaked out everybody was shot you were freaked out I was completely freaked out everybody was freaked out like I didn't expect him to win the nomination I didn't expect him to win the the race like and you know the media is on like full hysterical blast and it's the end of the world and he's you know he's a Russian spy all this crazy stuff that we now know not to be true it's just like it's just like fullon so a group of us a group of us went out to dinner at a restaurant in paloalto and you know and the atmosphere was like a funeral I mean like everybody in the restaurant was just like topa it like ready to ready to Slit their wrists and so we're sitting there eating and like the food doesn't
69:00 - 69:30 taste good you know it's just like can't taste the food you can't taste the drinks like everybody's just depressed wow um and you know it gets this thing of like you know my you know my God I can't believe that you know Trump you know this that you know so you know you know racist you know anti-hispanic and all this stuff um and it was it was it was one of those moments where the the the young waiter who's you know Hispanic young man in his 20s one of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table right but but it was in context it was like oh thank God cuz like we're just we're just depressing ourselves to death so like thank God he's going to say something and he said you know I think you guys are looking at all wrong he's like my
69:30 - 70:00 father thinks Trump is fantastic my father came here as an immigrant whatever 30 years ago built a life here became a citizen bought into the system pays taxes like raised a family mowing his LA with a magah hat on he thinks this guy he thinks this guy is great he thinks this guy is fantastic and he voted for him and he just has and and and and and then you know you for this before but then it's like and the thing that this guy said the thing my father thinks is is terrible is if other people are able to come here they're able to cut in line 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
70:00 - 70:30 they're able to jump in and then they they you know they don't you know they're not buying into the system and you know part of it 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 um and you know in some cases and by the way in some cases you know the CRI criminals are coming across and tariffs are coming across and gangs and and it's like my father's not in favor of any of that right right my father wants to be part of a of a Great Society of a great America not some dysfunctional you know basically just disaster Zone and I I remember the group
70:30 - 71:00 of us it was my my first glimmer of like okay I I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works because that one conversation yeah yeah well it was it was weird because it was like so so what happened with me is like I so I grew up in Royal Wisconsin which is now like completely Trump country and so from like 0 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 this is like a different place and people think differently and then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever I just like forgot and I I became a Californian I I became a fully assimilated Californian and I was just like well of course The
71:00 - 71:30 Californians are much more sophisticated in advance than right then people you know where I came from and so of course of course of course everybody in California has it figured out and of course California is going to leave leave the country in in all this thinking right and and and Trump was for me Trump was the Trump 2016 was the wakeup call of like no no no no no like that's just like completely that that is such an impoverished world view of how this country works and of how people think that it it doesn't explain what because you have to explain what happened and then you have to like if what some sense to being able to predict what's next which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living you know what
71:30 - 72:00 investing is supposed to be it's like okay I I got to rebuild my entire model of the world um for like how how how how this all works and how how this whole system and how this country works but it was that conversation that that kickstarted it for me so what was the process of altering your perspective or at least opening it up yeah so for me it was it primarily it was reading and so I I started to actually read my way back in history um and I I actually went all the way back I tried to read of like were the origins of like leftwing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve and you know liberal democracy and then also right-wing
72:00 - 72:30 thought and like you know everybody's calling everybody fascist now so like what was fascism right is that what this is right how how did how did the Germans do with it you know so all all of those questions and then you know kind of converging on you the last 80 years like how is that you know either stabilized or not stabilized and so I did that but the other thing is I just started talking to a lot more people and I I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times that it was true and you know and and by the way and then of course what unfolded in the Years know kind of sense was you know the the whole I followed the whole Russia gate thing like super closely like I read everything and I read all
72:30 - 73:00 the reports what did you think initially did you think it was true it's like just overwhelming consensus from the entire expert class that of course he's a Russian spy I said on stage I went to Hillary's first um postelection law speech which she gave at Stanford the very first one and I sat we know the people organizing it so we sat literally like 15 feet from from from Hillary in her first appearance and it's you know the whole thing is Frau with just like incredible tension cuz and and the rushia gate stuff is in full full-blown full-blown display and I go there and I'm like all right this is going to be to me and you know in the audience is Stanford audience and so it's all 100%
73:00 - 73:30 Hillary Clinton supporters right and and I'm sitting there and I'm I'm on my best behavior because I'm with my wife and I have to like not you know I have to not act out um and Hillary gets up there and she says Trump is only president today because Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook and and made him the President right and I'm sitting in the audience and I'm like on the Facebook board and I'm like that's not like that's not true like I know for an absolute fact that that's not true right and so that got me and then the Russia gate stuff unspooled and I was like you know the whole the the steel dossier and like all this stuff
73:30 - 74:00 comes out what was the accusations about Facebook how did she think that Russia hacked Facebook and made Trump the president yeah so it's this whole thing with this remember this whole thing Cambridge analytica and so it's it's this whole thing that there was this basically there was this data there was this Theory which by the way is like completely this is like a completely fake thing like this didn't so there was this there was this there was this data set on user behavior that in theory there's an academic there was 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
74:00 - 74:30 different kinds of messages and it was like this like magical breakthrough and basically thought control um and then there was this company called Cambridge analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this and then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control like you know by far like the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that the way that you want and it was this data B at face the whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade leading up to 2016 that it kept all the data closed right so the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data it doesn't share the data right the criticism for
74:30 - 75:00 years was Facebook is the roach Mel of data and The Virtuous thing for it to do was to actually free the data and and and let everybody else have access to the data and then in 2016 like flipped 180 degrees and it was Facebook as the most evil company of all time because it it let Cambridge analytica get access to this data and then Russia ran basically a psychological operation on the American citizens using why Facebook push back they did early it's just this they they did early on they do today in their way but you know 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 go
75:00 - 75:30 pathetic they're trying not to get just like completely destroyed by the politicians they're getting slammed every single day on every conceivable issue you can imagine and it's actually very interesting when you're in when you're in these companies like these these big issues are big issues but you're also literally trying to like make the quarter right you're you're trying to ship your products you're trying to close your sales you're trying to keep your employees from quitting right you have these act you have responsibilities right you have practical concern responsib and so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode and then they right
75:30 - 76:00 and then they you know they maybe the the message doesn't get out but so what was the bigger shift the waiter or the Hillary speech uh it was the waiter I mean by that it the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a normal it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked whereas with Hillary it was it was cope right it was it was delusion she then it was it was amazing by the way she then spent the next hour and a half when I when I when I'm in a place where I don't if I'm going control myself I bring a little notepad along because I can work out my demons like on draw dicks exactly so that I don't so that I
76:00 - 76:30 don't say anything right like super bad so I brought my little notepad on EX My Little P little Fisher Space Pen right and I I pull it out and I started making a list of all of the people and organizations that she blamed for her defeat that were not named Hillary Clinton uh and I got to 20 uh my favorite was Netflix by the way uh Netflix she blamed Netflix what did Netflix do Netflix aired anti-clinton documentaries Oh you mean facts well this is particularly funny because the CEO Netflix is a famous Democrat he's a
76:30 - 77:00 super Dem Democrat Bo well not actually uh dead but also specifically Reed Reed Reed Hastings and his wife are are very enthusiastic left wiers um but I mean it was just this Litany of you know basically excuses and complaints right with no sense of like responsib personal responsibility at all you know just like a pure grievance and so it was a NE it was negative lesson of like okay like whatever that is is not the path like did she blame come oh yeah oh absolutely oh yeah she absolutely hated that guy yeah no question that was a wild one 100% yeah
77:00 - 77:30 exactly and by the way like that was super weird yeah you know I don't think she was completely wrong on that I don't understand that one honestly if they didn't want Trump to win I don't get that one well she's she we know she's guilty but we're not going to charge her right is a weird it's crazy is a weird message to S 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 [ __ ] are you talking about exactly we know we know he's guilty but we never convict
77:30 - 78:00 him because the jury would say that he's a sceni old man which is crazy because he's still running for president at the time he's running for reelection well then remember everybody at the time said the media said that the the prosecutor was lying right because we at that point sharp as attack sharp as attack my favorite is Joe Scarboro yes this is the best Biden intellectually the best one I've ever seen like dude yes and then meanwhile he had to go to Mar Lago and kiss the yes exactly exactly exactly my favorite was the uh remember the about about
78:00 - 78:30 earlier this year was the invention of the term cheap fake cheap fake cheap fake because everybody's worried about the AI deep fake which really didn't then there was really nothing nothing happened with that and so the cheap fake we learned is a video that just simply shows you something right it's claimed to be out of context but it actually turns out that it's actually just telling you the truth she didn't Nancy Pelosi start using that one cheap fake yeah exactly because the theory was it was going to be Clips out of context yeah but it turned out they were C in context have you seen there's a gentleman who made a video um here I'll send it to you Jamie because I sent it
78:30 - 79:00 to Duncan it's pretty [ __ ] crazy of what AI is capable of Now by um come on my phone updated you son of a [ __ ] come on don't make me go to [ __ ] Android because I will um this guy did this insane um video where it's all completely AI and everything he did uh including his voice it's here I'll send it to you
79:00 - 79:30 Jamie it's 100% AI generated and it's so hard to believe because it's so good and it really puts you in this when you're talking about cheap fake I just sent it to you jery cheap fakes and deep fakes let's put the headphones on to watch this because it's so crazy we're at that moment where you cannot tell right and let's look at this one because it's it's pretty extraord ordinary this is the best version that I've seen so far this is completely AI labs to speak like me
79:30 - 80:00 one of our comp so I can any text and it will sound like me then I trained uh hen with a video of mine I input the audio file to generate a video based on my text the video you are watching right now is the result 100% generated in AI what do you think of that guys I know this might sound insane but this how crazy is that oh that's your company that's him oh that's him yeah yeah that is that's the AI generator yeah yeah
80:00 - 80:30 that's right that's right that's right so that's two companies one of one of them the voice is ours and then there another great company called ha Jen that did the did the did the visuals but yeah no that's right that's nuts yeah yeah yeah well this is part of the first internet say 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 k Harris Well turns out they would have done an amazing job they could have like really knocked out of the park with a solid speech they just have say it on the internet yes just have a bunch of viral videos of her speaking so eloquently and perfectly one would think
80:30 - 81:00 exactly that's the fear of the future right yeah yeah and so like I think that's that's going to be the kind that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of like the dirty trick side I think that you know that will be part of it right there there's there's always some way to try to try to game these things just have the most brilliant writers formulate you know get AI to do it like you're saying AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical and well there's no like weird thinking in it it's like you know cut all the fat out so I think we have a theory on how to fix this 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
81:00 - 81:30 and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real and the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them register registered on a blockchain right and so I I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have a an account on a block on a on a blockchain service like a a crypto a crypto service and then every politician whenever they say anything in public whenever they're you know they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time uh whenever they put out a statement um they're cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them
81:30 - 82:00 and then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see wow which frankly is a good idea anyway um because there just is a lot of noise you know in the environment there's how would you integrate that with social media though because one of the one of the issues is these lwi information voters that are getting information either from clickbait headlines on these websites where they they don't even read the actual paragraph with might which might be completely different than the headline itself the headline is just inflammatory and then viral videos like
82:00 - 82:30 how would you so the thing is so that's already happening even pre AI right and so I would say that's that's a pre-existing problem and so like we can't you know we can't and by the way that's been happening for a long time like newspapers have been Scandal sheets forever if you go back hundreds of if you go back hundreds of years for the first newspapers they were running all kinds of scrs the first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican like in year 1500 it was all these like terrible rumors about like the Pope and the Bishops and all these the Cardinals and all the that was the first newspaper that was the very first newspaper was in the Vatican and then the American all
82:30 - 83:00 the American Colonial newspapers were like that um in the revolutionary era it was all crazy rumors and innuendo and people accusing each other of there was a famous election in 1800 which was Jefferson versus Adams that we think of as these like super upstanding you know upright people and they're just like smearing the crap out of each other in their respective newspapers right because they would actually own newspapers in those days and they just God attack each other more things change Ben Franklin Ben Franklin Ben Franklin you know PR newspapers before he became a became went a government and he uh created 15 different sock puppets uh he
83:00 - 83:30 created 15 different pseudonyms uh he was he was a su a nonan um and then he would basically have them argue with each other in his newspaper without telling people that it was all him oh Ben so he had all these different personalities and so like we've been in a world of like information Warfare for a very long time we've been in a world of sensationalist you know Nightly News if it if it was say if it bleeds it leads you know sensationalist stuff for a long time we've been in the world of like yeah prop propaganda for a long time so so that you know that that you're not going to f you're never going
83:30 - 84:00 to make that go away isn't it funny that we don't think of the past like that think of them being virtuous and we assume they had it all figured out yeah that that very much is not true there there's all kinds of crazy crazy banana stuff my favorite is in the Vietnam War what was it it was the uh the golf at tonen that sort of kicked off the sort of big escalation like we now know for a fact it didn't happen right like the whole thing just didn't happen and now there's this big debate about like did they know it didn't happen or did you know did they fake fake it but like so there's always been stuff like that in history so that we can't fix and and AI will be a new way to do that kind of
84:00 - 84:30 thing but what we can do is we can re reorient people to say okay now you're going to have to like take seriously this stuff is real and if you want to actually know what's happening this stuff is real and we can prove that it's real and if it's not it's entertainment and you can choose to believe it or not but but but you you should not rely on it and look it's not going to be perfect and it's going to take time but there is there is a way to address this okay so that would be the solution to deep fakes the blockchain yeah you flip it you flip it yeah you focus on the real stuff that's logical that actually does make sense so that that actually kind of
84:30 - 85:00 gives me hope I do generally have hope even though I I look at the pessimistic side of things I'm generally optimistic because my real feeling about human beings is most people are good I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people there's far more people that just want to live a good life and have a good time and enjoy themselves than there are people who are tyrants yeah I'm super optimistic I'm incredibly optimistic and I I was optimistic already with flashes of pessimism but like I'm really optimistic and especially now so I I
85:00 - 85:30 think this is going to be we have the real we have the real potential here for Golden Age like we really do we really do yeah the capabilities that we have and the people that we I mean look in my day job I meet these young you know I meet these 22y olds every day that are just like the smartest people in the world the the smartest people I've ever met I think they're getting better by the way as time passes they're by the time they're 22 they just know a lot more they have so much more access to information than we did yeah they're so much trained capable and ready to go fired up and they know each other they're able to connect online and they're they're already in communities
85:30 - 86:00 and they know how to help each other and so like yeah the the the the productive and inventive creative you know aspect particularly of this country is just like there's never been anything like it in the world I think there's also the real potential for a shift in perspective a positive patriotic shift in perspective that can happen in this country and if you think about what happened with the woke ideology how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially it so
86:00 - 86:30 radically and so quickly in such a large change that people are susceptible to change 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 ex I really do think that it's it's an upward spiral right it was EV 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
86:30 - 87:00 he said that psychology is more contagious than the flu right right exactly yes yes yeah yeah I think that's right so one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now you know we talked a lot about Trump's Victory and Republicans but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic party which is very interesting because because they lost so badly right so they they the fact that they lost the White House and they lost the popular vote and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court right like this time it's undeniable that like the the current path that they've been on is
87:00 - 87:30 not working like it's your like being an exclusionary party and kicking people out for a wrong thing like it it's not they're not going to win elections they're not just kicking people out they're barring people from making it to the primaries yes ex which is very undemocratic that's right that's right yeah exactly starting with Bernie in 2016 and then right continuing so Donna Rice's book she documented that right right and so so like I would say the smart Democrats know that this is not a it's not a viable path you you can't have a political party that doesn't win it doesn't make it's not it's not useful um and so there's going to there's a
87:30 - 88:00 civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now um where they're going to have to recalibrate decide what they want their future to be and it's going to be a big decision and the same thing happened by the way um when Reagan beat Carter really badly in in 80 and then and then and then had on landslide in 84 it then took Democrats 12 years right to get to Bill Clinton and to actually win again um and so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the and 7s and it took them 12 years to recover and so if you talk to the like really smart Democrats right now they're like look this can't be 12 years that's crazy we
88:00 - 88:30 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 you know sensible we have to get back to moderate we were actually playing um Bill Clinton debating during um the elections of what year was that Jamie I forget which was when he first ran what what year did he first run oh yeah oh 9292 so it was the9 and I like I'd vote for that guy yeah exactly in a heartbeat guy's awesome also we played a clip of Hillary Clint Hillary Clinton
88:30 - 89:00 where she sounded more Maga than anybody who's magot today she was talking about the penalties that illegal immigrants should face they should pay a stiff fine because they came into this country illegally and if they're a criminal they should be jailed or kicked out of the country without question like all this was like so Maga I was like this is so wild to hear from Hillary in 2008 yep that's right that's right and and and Hillary and Joe Biden and Dian Feinstein and all these people wanted to build a wallan Feinstein our senator in California at the time very you know very left wi she was down the Border
89:00 - 89:30 like photo ops in front of the wall that was being built like trying to take credit for it crazy yeah yeah like 18 years ago yeah and so so yeah so another reason for optimism is I think that they're going to be able to pull their way back like I I think they're going to be able I I think getting losing this bad is very motivating to be able to pull your way back and become more normal um and I think again that would be like I mean how great would it be if you had two parties that actually had like sens of normal normal policy I mean imagine Clinton was running up against Trump yes exactly like he was so good we
89:30 - 90:00 played that speech that he gave after Sister Sister Soldier had said a bunch of like very anti-white things about white people and he gave this like super eloquent but yet compassionate speech about this where he's very charitable about her position as being a young person and not having the the best perspective on things it was [ __ ] brilliant it was brilliant like that's the guy like that's a president now by modern standards of course he was a fascist yeah well that's the weird thing about fascism right because fascism by
90:00 - 90:30 definition is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments but it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a Doctrine and forcing people to think and behave a very which is what the leftwing does and then you talk about like being proar well who's more proar right now Trump or the Biden Administration clearly Trump is less proar corre clearly Trump wants to end the wars clearly Biden just allowed Ukraine to use long-range
90:30 - 91:00 missiles into Russia like this is I don't know what's going on in terms of negotiations I hear all kinds of different things but if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it and the other side that's not like the [ __ ] polar shift is so dramatic yeah that's right it's really weird the the free speech thing which was always a tenant of the leftwing party it was like you know I mean it was Doctrine like free speech is necessary it's it's it's
91:00 - 91:30 the foundation of our ability to discuss and find out what's right and what's wrong right you have to be I mean yeah it's the ADL used to let [ __ ] Nazis speech they used to let them March they they would defend their right to do it right right yeah because you needed to air out the idea to be show why it was wrong exactly yeah so so look I it was not that long ago when you had Democrats that were very much in favor of many of these extremely sensible positions yeah super recent it was pretty recent and so I but again reason for like I don't know if they're going to I don't know if they're going to pull it off they might
91:30 - 92:00 just they might go crazier like they might just go right off the cliff like it's certainly possible but like it is also possible that they'll they'll drag it back and it might happen quite quickly and I'm I am hopeful and optimistic I am as well I think the temperature of society like the the mindset of society is so clearly moving away from that Madness that they're going to have to course correct which is just logical there there's no way they're going to keep doing it the same way or double down it's just not going to it's like they're going to go the way that MSNBC they're going to become ridiculous yeah that's right so they have to which is good for everyone for
92:00 - 92:30 everyone so one of my theories is um you can separate the concepts of the United States and America and you can be very optimistic about America and have all kinds of issues with the United States but still be positive about America and the the difference is the United States is the formal system of the government and the politics and all the stuff we get mad about and America is the people right right and so you can be incred as I am incredibly bullish about the people and then it's just a question of whether the 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 happening
92:30 - 93:00 and ideally help good things well what what are the things that you think about this administration at least what they're proposing that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going there's a lot of things I mean see I think you got to start with the Doge um the department of government efficiency that you know is hilarious that it just winds up being Doge do he's been pushing Dogecoin forever speaks yeah it's just so so many things are just so on the nose you're like is a simulation real yes I mean it
93:00 - 93:30 has to be real yes exactly exactly um and Elon is programming it in the back room L late at night in between playing we certainly got a good position in the game and tweeting exactly he's the number one Diablo player in the world right now by the way he just got number one which means [ __ ] bananas how does he have the time to do that which means he could be the guy steering the the simulation uh yeah so look this goes back to what we talking about before like it just it is time to carve this this government back in size and scope it's time to take the overall you know you can talk about distribution of taxes but it's time to take the overall tax load down it's time to take the spending
93:30 - 94:00 down it's time to get the government out of the position of deciding who gets money it's time to unleash economic growth Elon explained that there's more agencies than there have been years of the United States yeah 450 federal agencies um and uh two new ones a year um and then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies um so like for example we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau cfpb which was the it's sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control and it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants right and if you read the Constitution like there
94:00 - 94:30 is no such thing as independent agency and yet there it is um what does her agency do whatever she wants what does it do though basically a terrorized terrorize financial institutions prevent ftech prevent new competition new startups that want to compete with the big Banks oh yeah 100% just by ter terrorizing anybody who tries to do anything new in financial services any can you give me an example well you know de banking this is where a lot of the de de banking comes from is the is these agencies so de banking is when you're you as either a person or your company
94:30 - 95:00 are literally kicked out of the banking system like they did to Kanye exactly like they did to Kanye my my my my partner Ben's father has been debanked um we had an employee who for what we for having the wrong politics for saying unacceptable things under current banking regulations under okay here's a great here's a great thing under current banking regulations after all the reforms of the last 20 years there's now a category called a politically exposed person pep um and if you were a pep you were required by Financial Regulators to kick them off of your of out to kick them out of your bank you're not allowed what if you're politically on the left
95:00 - 95:30 well that's fine no because because they're not politically exposed so no one on the left gets debanked I have not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked can you tell me what the person that you know did what what they said that got them debanked oh well I mean David herwitz is a rightwing you know he's Pro Trump I mean he said all kinds of things you know he's been very anti-islamic terrorism he's been very worried about immigra migration all these things and they debanked him for that yeah they they debanked him so get kicked out of you get kicked out of your bank account you get you get kicked out of the you can't do credit card transactions by the way and you can't how is that legal well
95:30 - 96:00 exactly so this is the thing and so and then you go into this thing of like well there's no this is where the government and the companies get intertwined back to your fascism point which is um there's no there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you right and so they if they can't do the one thing that they they do the other thing and then they don't have to debank you they just have to put pressure on on the private company Banks to do it and then the 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 and of course JP Morgan can decide who they
96:00 - 96:30 want to have as customers of course right because they're private company and so it's this it's this slight of hand that happens it 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 kick you out of the financial system and so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years this has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service um because they're trying to protect the big Banks um and then this has been happening by the way also in legal fields of economic activity that
96:30 - 97:00 they don't like and so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called operation truck point where they decided to um as marijuana started to become legal um as prostitution start to become legal and then guns which there's always a fight about um under the Obama Administration they started to debank legal marijuana businesses Pro escort businesses and then and then and then gun shops just like your gun manufa and just like you're done you're out of the banking system and so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012 like you guess what you're doing
97:00 - 97:30 your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account you can't get a Visa terminal you can't process transactions you can't do payroll you can't do direct deposit you can't get insurance like none of that stuff is a you've been sanctioned right none of that stuff is available and then this Administration extended that concept to apply it to Tech Founders crypto Founders and then just generally political opponents yeah so that's that's been like super pricious I wasn't aware of that oh 100% And this is called so operation choke point 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns choke
97:30 - 98:00 point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored Tech startups and it's hit the tech world like we've hard we've had like 30 Founders debanked in the last four years yeah yeah yeah yeah it's been a it's been a big recurring pattern 30 this is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump it's like we just can't we can't live in this world we can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally like get sanctioned right and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable no by the way
98:00 - 98:30 no due process none of this is written down there's no rules there's no court there's no decision process there's no appeal who do you appeal to right like who do you go to to get your bank account back right God you know and and then and you know and then there's there this then there's also the Civil asset forfeiture side of it which is right the other side and that doesn't happen to us but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden you know the state takes their money yes that happens to people if they get pulled over and they have a large amount of cash in some states right or
98:30 - 99:00 you know they'll be there have been you know well publicized examples of like you know there's like you know there' be some investigation into like you know safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know the the the feds of seas all the all the contents of the state deposit safe deposit boxes and that that stuff never gets returned and so it's 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 it's administrative power it's it's political power being administered not through legislation right so there's no defined law that covers this it's not through regulation right there's nothing you can you can't go sue a regulator to
99:00 - 99:30 fix this um it's not through any kind of court judgment it's just raw power it's just raw administrative power it's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it so what happens to those 30 tech people that you know start to go into a different field like try to do something different and try to try to try to get you know complete up of your life yeah complete upending of your life and try to try to yeah try to change your try to get out of the try to get away from the eye of saon try to get out
99:30 - 100:00 of whatever Zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say you know okay you know it's okay we've checked and it's now all right whoa but there's no so what do they do with their money like what happens I mean you go to cash I mean you go to cash you can't have a yeah so where do you put it I I don't under your mat under your mattress yes exactly yeah exactly that is so insane so if someone has $30 million in the bank and they get debanked diamonds
100:00 - 100:30 art you know do you I don't know go overseas somewhere holy [ __ ] yeah yeah yeah it just like it just H it just happens and and again it's really really important there's no fingerprints like there's no right there's no person who there's no stick above the strings yeah exactly it just happened and and we can trace it back because we understand exactly you know we we know we know the we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that these Banks get phone calls and so forth and so we we can Loosely like we we we understand the flow of power as it
100:30 - 101:00 happens but when you're on the receiving end of this your specific instance of it like you can't trace it back and there's nothing you can do so these what are the instances like what is the company what are they trying to do and how do they run a foul all the crypto startups in the last basically four years so the you remember the cryp crypto thing got like really you know sort of everybody got excited and like nfts and like all that stuff and then it just like stopped yeah yeah and the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder every crypto startup they either got debanked personally and forced out of
101:00 - 101:30 the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating or they got prosecuted charged or they got threatened with being charged this is a fun this is a fun twist this is a fun little twist the so the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under under Biden and this has been a big issue issue for us because we're we're the biggest crypto crypto startup investor um the SEC can they can investigate you they can subpoena you they can prosecute you they can do all these things um but they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you all they have to do is
101:30 - 102:00 they issue what's called a Wells notice and the wells notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future like you're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future oh my God okay terrifying that's the eye the eye of saon is on you okay now trying to be a company with a Wells notice doing business with anybody else oh my God right try to try to work with a big company try to get access to a bank try try to do anything so that's when they support Dei initiatives and they yeah well then the the SEC under Biden became
102:00 - 102:30 a the secc under Biden became a direct application of exactly so Dei they started they did a lot with that and then es all the ESG stuff and ESG is a very malleable concept and they piled all kinds of new requirements into that so through that through this process the SEC could basically just simply dictate what companies do with no accountability at all like there's no you know there's no over there's no over there are hearings where they get yelled at but like nothing changed nothing ever happened in a hearing that ever changed anything it was just the raw application of power um right um and so this is your
102:30 - 103:00 friends this has happened too oh yeah for sure yeah we had like I said we had an employee who got debanked because he had crypto in his job title he was he was doing crypto policy for us and his bank booted him um because he um that's it because they did they did a they did a screen across that's what they told us is they did a screen across their uh their customer base anyone with crypto because because anybody with crypto became a politically exposed person CU wow was was politically controversial right that's so you hear this sometimes as like you know these terms
103:00 - 103:30 compliance reputation management yeah um tone at the top they have these lovely sounding terms that make it sound like everybody's going to be an upstanding citizen but what they're what they're all code for is destroy the enemy like bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever or the or the social media bring it down and just like crush the individual wow with no due process look there's an argument in the long run that this is is all unconstitutional because the Constitution gives us all the right to do process and this is government pressure and there's so like there's probably a Supreme Court case in 5 years
103:30 - 104:00 that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal but in the moment when you're the guy who's been debanked I mean number one and then also the potential that if you do challenge them in court and lose the repercussions to be even heavier exactly yeah 100% why is it really worth your effort is it worth the risk that's right especially if you've already had your life upended you ready to do it again yeah that's right when you barely built yourself back up yeah so this is and I think this is important context to where like when Elon and Vac talk about like reducing regulation you know there there's two ways of think about reducing regulation it's like oh my God the water and the
104:00 - 104:30 air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poison right now some of those regulations I think are very important um but the other way to think about it is examples like this which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives are just trying to do something legitimate and they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided Well there's something that isn't illegal but they don't want to be done like crypto like crypto or having the wrong political points of view well the the trucker you know the other great example is the trucker Strike Up in Canada was an even more direct version
104:30 - 105:00 of this because here you had truckers physically showing up and it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license which by the way right is just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard no more driver's license step two is I take away your insurance and step three is I take away your kids right and so like that was their version of this and that was a very specific take away your kids that was the threat at the end to the truckers and the Canada trucker strike um because the truck because the trucker strike in Canada right was going to jam up these cities because it was the the farmers were the truckers were very serious they wanted to they were doing a nonviolent
105:00 - 105:30 protest but they wanted to stall the the cities to to be able to exert political pressure back back on the government right and the government was like We'll tolerate it for a little while then we'll take your trer license then we'll take your insurance then we'll take your kids and and how do they say they would take their kids because it's administr it's administrative power like you can't you you you can't right 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 you know goods and services from reaching people right putting people's lives at risk wow you know you know child child seizure now I don't know if they
105:30 - 106:00 actually SE seized any kids but it it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government just like in the US government that if they want to they can take your kids well they were doing de banking there with people who donated to the trucker Convoy which is even crazier not even people who are there people who are opposed to the mandates that Trudeau's Administration was imposing on people and so they donated to these truckers and then they got their Bank accounts taken away which is really crazy yeah and so and I and I exactly and I I think that I think the right way to think about this is when we
106:00 - 106:30 think about totalitarianism we think about literally World War II you know we think about Nazis and Jack boots with like tanks and guns and you know beating people up and killing people like that that's our mental and that that's you might call that hard totalitarianism right that's like very clearly like violent totalitarianism but there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism which is just rules and power exercised arbit that just simply suppresses everything right and and this is speech control and Deb Banking and all these other things that we've been talking about and and
106:30 - 107:00 that that is you know the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night the bad news is like you are under their complete control um 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 and most people aren't even aware of it yeah that's right and then you know look these are these are individual one-off things most people don't have a voice um know it's very hard to organ you know organize around these and then by the way if there's an organization that organizes to try to get these stories out it then itself can get suppressed and de Bank well it
107:00 - 107:30 happened during the co lockdowns right so so the lockdown protests all got suppressed right so you you went you know so it's like so the lockdown went from two weeks to crush the curve to two months to two years right right which is like okay what the hell right um and then there were these protests that were there were these protests that were forming up nonviolent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns and I you know you could argue the issue different ways but people have a legitimate right to protest for that just like they do for anything else and the next thing you know is all the the lockdown protests all got censored like just like Boop gone right and so at that
107:30 - 108:00 point like the the normal process of being able to re to try to get redress from your government right for for you know for to to enforce your rights to literally for example see your family all of a sudden like you you can't even organize a protest do you um how much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis because one of the things that happened with the FDX thing was it was revealed that they were I think they were the number two owner to the Democratic party yeah do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this Deb Banking and you
108:00 - 108:30 know be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you yeah that was his it was explicitly his strategy that was Sam's yeah Sam Sam's approach Sam Sam's approach was just pay everybody so so Sam's approach was just I have8 billion dolls of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want right which is the crime right um and then a big part of what he used some of it he used to like hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Delle to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff but a lot of that something like $150 million of that money went to basically
108:30 - 109:00 just pay politicians and and a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the you know campaign Finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with and so the money was just shotgun out the door how come they don't have to comply well it was illegal I mean it was ille because he was breaking the law I mean it was to be clear he was he was illegal now a very funny thing happened which is when he was indicted by the US government they didn't they ended up not charging him on c campaign Finance uh uh fraud um and and because they'd have to give all the money back well so so there's two theories on it the thing
109:00 - 109:30 that they said was their their extradition agreement with Bermuda Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge which is like super weird because you're the United number one you're the United States of America you can probably get the guy number two did he really want to stay in a prison at Bermuda right and so so that was all weird and then and then look the other there's no evidence for this but the other theory is yeah the whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in DC decided to not open it's it's like the up Client List like there are certain boxes yeah that are better not to open at least well the
109:30 - 110:00 campaign Finance thing wouldn't they have to pay it back um so then there's this like Panic the minute one of these scandals breaks like that there's these panic rush and all of a sudden politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to right um and then and then yeah in the fullness of time the trustees might come claw the money back um so yeah there's you know it'll it'll it'll play out however it does but but it is it is interesting it is a great example of it was the shotgun money into the system under like basically just like nakedly breaking the law and then it now look he's in prison the other argument is
110:00 - 110:30 he's in prison he's in prison already like whatever it just would have been you know another sentence but like he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that and that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today never will what's really fascinating about him is that he was right and if they didn't come after him he would have gotten all that money to those people he would it seems like it kind of turned around right it didn't get him off the hook though it didn't no well he did still did something illegal he did yeah did he know it was illegal he is in
110:30 - 111:00 prison I think it's really hard to get inside that guy's head I 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 hardly very hard at trial um so he he had an explanation but just the jury didn't buy it um what was his explanation uh that you know he was you know that it was all the money was all being invested and he was going to give it all back and it was all this and that you know it's like all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism and this and
111:00 - 111:30 that the other thing and the prosecution was just like it was the customer's money it wasn't your money right the [ __ ] clearly yeah and so I 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 and they were taking there was some some anti Parkinson's drug they were taking that has a side effect effect of reducing your risk calibration do agonists yeah one of those yeah like requip yeah something like that they were he had these he he was taking these
111:30 - 112:00 patches that makes you do wild [ __ ] that also makes people gamble yeah exactly well yeah yeah there was a guy who won a lawsuit from galaxo Smith Klein cuz he took re-equip and became a gay sex and gambling addict yeah I think they paid him the equivalent of like 500 plus thousand American dollars I believe it was in Ireland yeah yeah dopamine and Agonist are weird they they they do strange things to people if that happened to me I would definitely Sue that's crazy that those guys were taking those things at
112:00 - 112:30 least Sam Sam was boy what a wild fellow yeah mam confirmed he wears an mam patch what's an mam patch he's supposed to use the depression medication oh his supposed use of the depression medication had kicked up some rumors so what is that's the stuff that's the Parkinson's I think that was is that a dopamine Agonist does it say I'm not sure um I'll look it up yeah see put um dopamine Agonist yeah
112:30 - 113:00 Parkin there we go yeah interesting so it's like related if it's not that it's like a related class interesting how does it work does it say how it works uh commonly used to depression how does it work though [Music] um okay it's an MAO inhibitor interesting used to treat mental depression adults this medicine is a monoamine oxide inhibitor that's a different one that says it's sledg it could be the same oh okay yeah that's sedine sedaline
113:00 - 113:30 is also people take that as well as a neut Tropic I've heard yeah that's what it is so it isn't AED ailine Cene Cene celene I think it's celene uh I knew a doctor who was taking that he was taking it as a but not in a patch he was taking it a pill form and he said it was a a neut Tropic so monoamine oxy inhibitor so that's the stuff that's the active in that's what um makes iasa orally active
113:30 - 114:00 same thing monoamine oxide inhibitor along with the plant that contains dimethyl tryptamine which is not normally orally active right so this guy if he was doing drugs and taking MAO inhibitors he was out of his [ __ ] mind guaranteed because I know people have taken like prescription grade MAO inhibitors and then taking mushrooms and literally almost never never came back like got to the point where for weeks they were [ __ ] up and then when they did come back they were like I almost lost it like I was almost gone gone like
114:00 - 114:30 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 [ __ ] kid with billions of dollars of people's money is taking those kinds of medications and amphetamines and who knows what yeah you know he had an OnStaff psychiatrist who was prescribing all this stuff Wonder like Hitler an inside guy yeah exactly once again once again back to Hitler that's so crazy what a wild
114:30 - 115:00 boy yeah are you following the uh Psych the theories that now emerging around OIC and psychological changes that OIC causes no but I did read that it makes your heart shrink well there there's some some Theory to that which is very concerning but there's [ __ ] yeah it is there's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves uh alcohol addiction certain forms of drug addiction and gambling addictions and the current theory is that what it does is it basically it essentially increases your self-control uh your self-discipline and it reduces Cravings wow um and there's a theory
115:00 - 115:30 that this is very positive let's let's say this is true which is what they think right now we'll see but that's what they think uh so the theory that it's positive is the theory that you know if we were all like more responsible in our lives we'd all be more successful and society would go better yeah counterargument would be like responsible is only part of living and it's only part of what makes a society work and we also need risk-taking and we need creativity and we we need impulsiveness yes and we need variety and maybe we're all going to get into a channel right and maybe we're not going to like where that where that that just by itself ends up yeah you can't have
115:30 - 116:00 everybody disciplined you have to have wild [ __ ] out there that's right you have to have your jelly rolls of the world you have to have crazy people they're fun yeah they make things more interesting yeah that's right if so it's essentially discipline in you know a pill form or an injectable form yeah and it's been very it's very helpful right they prescrib increasingly starting to prescribe it to alcoholics and apparently it's working quite well that's crazy well that's that brings me to ibigan which is the one thing that has like the most success for people with addictions and it's illegal in this country people
116:00 - 116:30 go down to Mexico and go to these IA game Retreats it's apparently I haven't done it but it's apparently this insane introspective Journey that's very uncomfortable and it lasts about 24 hours it's not something that's addictive in any way shape or form almost everyone says it's a very uncomfortable experience but you gain unbelievable insight into what is wrong with you that makes you want to pick up heroin like what what's going on in there that you're trying to escape like what is this and it recognizes that pathway and puts a chemical stop there
116:30 - 117:00 it actually like stops people from having addictive cravings and it rewires the way they think about things right particularly beneficial to Veterans a lot of veterans who've just seen way too much and come over and they're all [ __ ] up and they don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that you know I wonder with uh particularly with these um these OIC and wery and all these different types of uh weight loss
117:00 - 117:30 diabetic drugs I I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects because you know when I've talked to people that think that like my friend Brigham Brigham berer who runs way to well he he's concerned about side effects of it but he's also he looks at people that are just morbidly obese and he's like these people they need some [ __ ] help they've gone down this terrible Road yes they shouldn't have done it yes okay we all agree to that
117:30 - 118:00 don't don't eat pie all day but if you've gotten to 500 lbs you're probably you're in a bad State and you could probably use some help and maybe that could get them back on track and maybe there's a way with maybe strength training because one of the things is they lose a large percentage of muscle mass and bone density maybe that can be mitigated with strength training maybe it's one of those things like if you're going to get on OIC you must lift weights three times a week which is that might be it I mean if it's just losing
118:00 - 118:30 tissue there's certainly that's that's relatively easy to fix right that's right and there's by the way there's a ton of R&D going into these drugs right now so there there's going to be many more versions of these things I'm hopeful that we could develop something where no one can ever be obese again that would be really interesting I mean maybe this is just the first steps of this right and then like these are crude versions of What will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that yeah so the other thing I'd say so I've been down in Florida the last couple weeks working on some of the you know stuff happening down there and I one of the things I learned is that
118:30 - 119:00 the RFK the RFK is really in charge um of Health for the country from here you know for like he's really in charge um and you know working with the president and um he you know for all the controversy around some of his positions like he's you know this whole Maha like he's very serious about this m and a lot of people including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field are like yes it is long overdue that we look at the food system and we look at all these all just whatever to your point the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years which is just a complete
119:00 - 119:30 catastrophe and I think it's a there's this concept in Psychology called common knowledge which is it's like it's something that everybody knows but yet nobody States out loud and so it like it's like known but then all of a sudden there's a Tipping Point all of a sudden it's not only known but it's like obvious all of a sudden everybody agrees on it yes and this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition behavioral you know exercise like the path that people on to become obese like no like this actually needs to be addressed this is actually a profound issue and it's it's we're on the road to hell and like it has to get fixed and
119:30 - 120:00 maybe it get gets fixed chemically and maybe it gets fixed behaviorally or other things maybe the culture has to change but like it has to get fixed and I'm actually I've been very encouraged that that like I think this is now going to be a very big Focus area and and not just by the government but I think also in the culture I agree and I'm very encouraged as well and I think as we were talking before about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards I think that's coming too I think that's happening right now one of the happiest
120:00 - 120:30 moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listen to me talking about the benefits of it and I've talked to so many people that are lost 100 pounds 150 pounds they they're exercising regularly they eat healthy it's fantastic it's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast so one of my theories on this is that U but this is part of this what happened is something very specific happened during Co which is the public health people by and large looked very
120:30 - 121:00 unhealthy yes they didn't they didn't look good right and so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got to like do all the you know lockdowns and the masks and like all that stuff and like yeah Bill Gates should get jacked that would be very helpful he's got a lot of money it would be extremely helpful get a trainer when he writes the book and goes in the Press tour to talk about public health the of us a trainer that would be great be by the way be great for him and his family and Society it would be very reassuring Bill Gates had a six-pack I'd listen to him more that I think would be
121:00 - 121:30 Absol absolutely fantastic and so like it's just this thing it's just like well of course like yes the people who are telling us all how to live and eat ought to be healthy like and if they're not like clearly and that's where RFK comes in play 100% he looks fantastic he looks great he looks great yeah superat like yeah it's just like wow yeah we were taking pictur I'm like dude you're jacked we got put my my arm on I'm like you're [ __ ] Jack dude look at you yeah works out all the time at Gold's Gym in Venice jeans on awesome works out with jeans on that's old
121:30 - 122:00 school I don't get that that's amazing that seems weird it seems like it gets in the way of your squats unless you're wearing like like origin jeans or something that's got a lot of stretchy fabric to you you got you have to give stretchy jeans but even then like put some shorts on you [ __ ] weirdo like what are you doing man no it's like it's like that's like that's like prison yard credibility it's fantastic it is a little it is a little streety you know we Tim lands yes Timberlands and a pair of jeans and doing your squats it's kind of crazy exactly but the promotion of health is like I don't know how anybody
122:00 - 122:30 could be against that do you want more energy do you want more Vitality in your life well you should be healthier it's like you're L you your body's race car and you could choose if you work hard enough to jack up the horsepower you can make better brakes you can have a better fuel injection system like the whole thing can work way better like all you have to do is work at it and that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life it'll give you more energy for creativity more energy for your family more energy for your hobbies your Recreations time with your friends you
122:30 - 123:00 literally have more energy as a human which is what we all like nobody likes waking up and feeling like [ __ ] I mean everybody's been hung over who's had a few drinks and you wake up in the morning like what am I doing I don't ever want to do this again why did I do this to myself and then you can't wait for the day when you feel better like you drink your electrolytes you get your sleep you do whatever the [ __ ] you can and you're like I'll be over this soon go your head oh and you you know everybody likes having more energy it's better for you and we could promote that as a society and the this RFK Jr
123:00 - 123:30 appointment is a really big step in that direction that we've really never had before that's right yeah you have to go back to like literally his uncle JFK had a program like this in like 1962 yeah been a long time well Michelle Obama did for a bit right a little bit although that was like vegetarian you know you getting into like vegetarian school was she saying vegetarian if she was vegetarian but like well Eric Adams you know the May mayor of New York he's been trying to push vegetarian school lunches it's like no that's not right no that's not right it's so dumb I can't
123:30 - 124:00 wait until they can figure out the plants really can think and feel right exactly cuz they're real close they're real close to proving that I they' they've demonstrated intelligence and allocation of resources through mycelium there's a lot of stuff that we know now about plants that we didn't know then I think they're all conscious I think everything's conscious yeah I think we need we need audio recordings with the screams yeah the lawn is just like Armageddon you know the they can play audio recordings of caterpillars eating leaves and it changes the flavor profile of all the plants around it awesome oh
124:00 - 124:30 amazing yeah they've they've done this because there's a phenomenon when gra uh giraffes if giraffes are eating if they are up wind and they're eating leaves as the the wind comes down and gets to the other acacia trees the acacia trees will they'll come up with this phytochemical they produce a phytochemical that's disgusting to the giraffes and the giraffes literally starve 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
124:30 - 125:00 have to stop the attack and nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that which is really crazy that's amazing so back back to back to the do for a moment um so the one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly exert put itself into the food system and specifically High fractos corn syrup right High corn syrup was an artifact of government agriculture subsidies right the which was good during World War II because we needed food at one time right but like by the 1970s we were massively over producing specifically we were massively over producing corn and the
125:00 - 125:30 and the corn the corn Lobby the the sort of Agriculture Lobby became very powerful and and we have this government agency one of the 450 government agencies is the USDA and the USDA has a dual mandate it's to promote us agriculture specifically things like corn and it's also to advise us on what we should eat and they also do the food pyramid and that's why the food pyramid is upside down right for for for for all those decades where we're supposed eat carbs and not protein and fat was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for for promoting Agriculture and then then that agency it's inserted itself through laws
125:30 - 126:00 regulations and this kind of administrative pressure and basically said Thou shalt use high fractos corn syrup because it is our byproduct of corn as opposed to sugar right and as we now know that was absolutely poisonous decision like that was like lital literal poison absolutely a ruinous decision just an absolutely terrible idea well Casey means was on here and she was explaining the the very mechanism by which a high fructose corn syrup encourages overc consumption right and then it's essentially like uh it's
126:00 - 126:30 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 overc consume yeah we were not supposed to be eating this like this was not supposed to it would not have happen drinking it 100% like yeah 100% And so but this would not have happened had the government not made it happen and and so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that now they didn't of course they didn't understand the consequences but that's kind of the point which is they interfered without understanding the consequences and so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're
126:30 - 127:00 just like all right like and then you're you're 40 years later and you're still doing it right and then that and then at some point you know what the consequences are and then at some point there's a question of whether they're being covered up right right and it's just like okay at some point this has to stop right and and and literally they just need to stop like they just need to stop subsidizing core and they need to stop forcing the food companies to do this they just need to stop and so there this goes back to like the regulatory reform thing which is like there's just like tremendous amount of this that may have been good intentioned at one point but sitting here today we're living with these horrible Downstream consequences
127:00 - 127:30 and unless somebody steps in with a hammer none of this is going to happen the insane amount of money that's involved because RJ Reynolds these tobacco companies when they were getting sanctioned they were getting in trouble they decided Well let's buy all these food companies right and so now these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer now these same companies are pushing super unhealthy food on people or at least selling super unhealthy food people which I think you should be allowed to buy right I think
127:30 - 128:00 you should be allowed to buy whatever the [ __ ] you want I'm I'm all for that but I do think we should be like much more aware of what's actually going on like you're saying and why this stuff is in there in the first place right well then then you get in these other you know more more delicate questions but it's like okay food assistance programs for like you know low-income people and low-income children it's like okay should they be do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline paid for with government money and being 300 by the time they're 18 right and cheaper than
128:00 - 128:30 other foods and cheaper than other Foods because they're subsidized because because they're subsidized and so and you just you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying we're protecting you we're protecting you and what's been happening is they've been poisoning us yeah and so it like stuff like it just needs to stop and and and that's that's that's where you need something like the Doge so and and and somebody like president what would they be able to do to mitigate a lot of these issues like how would they if you want to would you make
128:30 - 129:00 it illegal to put high fructose corn Sy as an ingredient or would you simply stop subsidizing like and what would be how would that work within the government like how would you apply something like that yeah I think there's three things you can do two of which involve direct action and then the third is maybe even the most important so one is you can just stop doing things that are harmful you can stop doing things the government can stop subsidizing bad things that's an example give you an parallel parallel thing if if you want to clean up the universities you you need to stop feeding them student loans right so right the government should
129:00 - 129:30 stop paying for things that are clearly harmful so so that's one and then two is look there may be a role for additional you know protections or prohibitions and so for example maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that you know kids who have no control over it or not or not being poisoned um and so you know you maybe do that but but I always think that the third thing is cult culture like there's always a Temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do and I think so much of this has to do with the culture it's it's actually
129:30 - 130:00 upstream or Downstream from politics which is like like what is the cultural tone of the country right 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 like what are what what are we not going to tolerate take the perverse fat studies like are we going to glor ify obesity right right no no and that's not necessarily a legal judgment or a court case but it's it's a it's a cultural statement and if the if and I and it's
130:00 - 130:30 not that the government plays should control the culture but our leaders certainly play a big role in that yeah um and so both in and outside of government so for our leaders to step up at A Moment Like This and basically say yeah no this is not the kind of culture we're going to have it's not the kind of society we're going to have it's not what kids should you know be looking up to I think I think is just as powerful as the actual government actions it's interesting you're saying the kind of Shame Shing cuz I don't want to shame anybody for being fat but boy does that work maybe you should shame shaming works and maybe you should sham parents if their kids are fat yeah right the problem is there's so many people that
130:30 - 131:00 are ignorant as to what exactly is going on of course and that's it's like absolutely required like and they're being fed [ __ ] 100% And yes but but again it's also cultural which is just like okay is is Media thing like is the media educating people on this and if if the mainstream media is not doing it right are there should there be new media sources that are like who gets and which source and then therefore which sources the media get effect right so we we have this giant Collective culture question right that we get to we all get to ask and answer and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear so
131:00 - 131:30 that will help that will help move the needle and but but what specifically can RFK Jr do once he actually gets in I mean there's well has tremend he he'll have a secretary of HHS he has very broad you know I would say a very broad ability to look at this holistically inside the government what kind of push back is there going to be against that like that seems like a wild amount of money is going to be lost yeah so there there there so there's there's there's the work that the the cabinet secretary is like he will be doing formally and
131:30 - 132:00 then there's the work that the Doge and and and the president will be doing kind of in parallel with that and you know there will be some convergence between those um and and you know there's the we'll see there's a potential here for quite dramatic action on a lot of these fronts could you imagine if you're running an agency and you have to have a meeting with vake and Elon yes and you got to open your books yes yes it's like office space where they brought in the bobs for Consulting yes what do you do here exactly that's exactly it's like isn't
132:00 - 132:30 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 V's heads on them yes so there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago actually two and a half years ago when El 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 guy who's a friend of mine who's a really good guy but had it literally this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company and then like a month later he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation so kind of got a little bit sandbagged on it but um uh
132:30 - 133:00 yes of course he said Elon Musk says he rewatched office space to prepare for Doge of course he did of course he did [ __ ] psycho exactly God we're so lucky that guy's around exactly so there was this moment in the Twitter takeover where Elon sends his email he says in the line is what what did you get done this week whoa what did you get done this week and in the context of Silicon Valley companies that was a provocative
133:00 - 133:30 statement because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything but imagine that statement being applied to the government oh my God right like the level of like accelerated like okay what are the problems how are we going to fix them and what have you gotten done this week yeah you think de banking upended some lives yes exactly so yes what have you done this week and by the way when WR this it's actually interesting a guy just uh tweeted uh guy just tweeted or posted or Zed um what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company xai and he said Elon came in last week and he said
133:30 - 134:00 Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five minute chunks and it was every five each person had a FIV minute speaking slot to explain to El what they were doing wow and he did that for you know five times whatever right all 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 opportunity to be recognized for their effort every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing whoa and there's no place to
134:00 - 134:30 hide right think of how different it is for a company to be run that way right than even again the valley companies generally are quite well run by by sort of business standards and and even that like that's a level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to now imagine that applied to government to government 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 it's a choice how the government is run is a choice on the part of the executive branch and the president for
134:30 - 135:00 how it's going to get run and there's no reason why the government can't literally be be run this way and here's what's crazy the pushback against even the concept of this by leftist so leftist defending bureaucratic bloat and big government is wild to watch right which they really shouldn't be doing which is a weird thing to have wedged themselves into my hope is they'll figure out how weird this is do you think it's like just an ideological thing like the right wants this so we oppose it I think I think they I think
135:00 - 135:30 the left thinks they control the government like I think 50 years ago they would have been on the other side of this of this issue like like n chsky 50 years ago would have been on the other side of this he would have viewed government power as an extension of like the state and big business intertwined and you had these just term manufacturing of consent where it's like government and business are conspiring against you yeah 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 the Washington DC voted 94% for Kam uh 6% for Trump right and so okay so two data points that is
135:30 - 136:00 data point number one data point number two four of the 10 wealthiest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington DC wow lobbyists lobbyists they called Beltway Bandits yeah that's a crazy job is the is the actual term um and these aren't people working for the government these are people making money from the government right these are these are people sponging sponging off the government um and so like yeah for for to the extent that Democrats have wedged themselves into a position where they're defending this they really shouldn't they should really rethink this they should figure
136:00 - 136:30 out how to get back to right the cor the correct mentality on this that they used to have not only that if there's less government bloat then there's less tax dollars you don't you don't have you don't need as much money to fund these things that's right there's like people can be taxed less there can be more allocation of these funds towards these social programs that we all want you know most federal workers never came back to work really yeah they they work from home most most yeah very large percentage something like half just like literally just never came back whoa they
136:30 - 137:00 they still by the way still draw a paycheck they're still on their jobs but literally they're not in the office um or in some cases they have an agreement where there's one agency ibly won't name but there's one agency where there's where the this okay here's another great thing um there are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants civil have full Civil Service protections and and unionized 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 madeup thing and
137:00 - 137:30 they're unionized and and then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement the union negotiated the return to the office from C and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month whoa and actually what 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 out of 60 days that's crazy as a consequence many of them have actually left the area right because they get their government paycheck which is calibrated for living there and then they go live someplace nice you know someplace nice but you know they go live
137:30 - 138:00 in the Ozarks or something where it's cost of living is cheaper and they have big a bigger house and you know in theory they're working from home but like you know like is it is it actually happening so and this is again this is the Doge one of the things that the do the Doge they they've already announced the thing they've said is you can work from home just not for the federal government oh right yeah and so when people are talking about like is the Doge going to be able to do anything like it's just okay there's 50% of the federal Workforce right and and as you know as as a taxpayer how do you feel about that and you know to your point on paying
138:00 - 138:30 taxes like if those people are in the office and their dynamos of activity and they're making the country better right fair enough of course but if they're kicking it at home right maybe not yeah maybe not that's the how much oversight has there been on whether or not they've been kicking it excellent question yeah now it turns out there are way there there are actually there there are ways to figure this out um so for example for many for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access like to email you you can actually Che and like often you have vpns to get into the corporate Network you can actually audit and you can see who's been working oh um
138:30 - 139:00 and then there's a um do do you know about Mouse wigglers yes yeah yes programs no no actually physical oh they have physical Mouse wigglers now yeah physical Mouse wigglers um so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and and and then on intermittently Wiggles it um and a friend of mine who runs big tech company um uh he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote work workers weren't pulling their weight and so he actually wrote himself on a week an algorithm to inspect all
139:00 - 139:30 the mouse movements of all employees for a week and then uh and then he bought all 50 like Mouse wigglers from China that you can buy and he fingerprinted them all and he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse mouse wigglers wow right and so how many federal employees are using Mouse right so how crazy is that that that's how they can measure whether or not you're active yeah whether you're m Mouse is moving yeah like what are they what are they seeing just just a pattern of movement of the mouse that's it well the mouse the mouse wiggler is moving it in a way that you can fingerprint so is
139:30 - 140:00 this like do you agree to a certain amount of disclosure of your personal information while you're working like how do you get access to Mouse Wiggles oh so it's very common so in corporate environments it's very common that the your your company issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software and gives them gives the company some level of visibility into what you're doing and it doesn't doesn't mean they're literally Wasing you but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to you be able to see you know how how much is the computer on Wow is the most moving and so that's actually a reason
140:00 - 140:30 reasonably common thing I heard the most ridiculous argument against this yeah they're what are you going to do with all those employees that get fired like what are you going to do with all those people who are stealing hubcaps they're making a living stealing what are you going to do if you make hubcaps stealing illegal like what are you talking about they're essentially stealing tax dollars if they really are doing something that's totally us 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 well the answer is they can
140:30 - 141:00 do something productive yeah and people are more than capable you don't have to infantilize someone to say like this is the only thing they're capable of doing they've been working for the government for 20 years this is all they can do 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 so one is if you cut the spending you can cut the taxes and you can just simp the the private economy then just simply has more money because it hasn't been taken and so if there's less public spend there will be more private spend right right because the money reality case and so there might be just as much demand in the economy as
141:00 - 141:30 just coming from people choosing to buy things instead of the government forcing it so that's number one um number two you can bring down government debt which means you can bring down government interest and the government today the federal government today pays more in interest than we pay for the Department of Defense right but how much is that as salary no no that's just interest on the debt right that's just interest on the old debt okay we pay like 1.2 billion a year right now I think is the latest number which is which is just interest on debt it's not paying for any good or service it's just interest on debt but again what percentage of that is the what of the GDP G well the so the the um
141:30 - 142:00 the total government spending is on the order of 7 trillion um interest payments are like 1.2 trillion something like that 1.2 trillion year I think that's the current number DOD is 800 billion a year so 1.2 trillion just off the top yeah just off the top and again no tax nobody's benefiting from that it's just interest payments that's bananas right and total gdps like I don't have I don't know it's a it's it's I don't know it's 20 30 40 trillion it's you know it's much larger than that but like still it's enough this is a lot of money um and any and the and the total
142:00 - 142:30 accumulated debt is 35 trillion and and grow the total accumulated debt is 35 trillion and it adds another trillion of accumulated debt every 100 days yes oh my God it hurts my head there's a congressman actually Thomas Massie you should have so he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this and he's an MIT he's a libert he's one of the only Libertarians and he's a um he's an MIT engineer and he actually designed himself the a pocket lapel pin calculator of the of the of the government debt and he wears it every
142:30 - 143:00 day in Wasington walks around with this scoll he walks with a little scrolling LED display my God on on his lapel and it literally counts it it counts the and it's accurate it's pulling data from the US Treasury and it's actually an accurate count and so it's like 34 trillion 35 trillion 36 trillion here's the kicker at the current Pace at the compounding it'll cross the debt will cross 100 trillion in the foreseeable future so he's already working on the redesign because he needs a bigger device with a bigger screen to be able to display the bigger number how much anxiety do you get standing around him looking at that that's his goal right he
143:00 - 143:30 wants because otherwise the status quo in Washington is just let this happen oh right and so so anyway so so another way you benefit is reduction of interest and then another way you benefit is reduction of interest rates if you bring down the amount of debt in the economy you bring down interest rates and then everybody else who buys things when you go to buy for a house your mortgage is cheaper right so everybody who buys anybody who ever borrows money in the real economy then therefore is better off right this is the argument against being only good for wealthy people oh it's good for everybody right yeah it's good for anybody who ever get car loan home loan small business loan you want
143:30 - 144:00 to bring down interest rates but this fundamental discussion of it the like the argument particularly from the left is that all these tax cuts deregulation all this all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier and it's going to ruin the middle class and ruin the lower everyone else is going to suffer so just observationally almost all the rich people in our society are were for comma right really yeah the democ the Democratic party so the the so Democrat
144:00 - 144:30 Republican it's a it's what they call it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration so the Democratic party is the top and the bottom versus the middle so the top is what you might call the sort of upper middle class Coastal Elites so it's everybody who went to the fancy schools it's everybody with the fancy jobs for sure me I guess your grandfather Den yeah right but it's like it's like you know it's like it's fancy it's like high net worth High income people with primarily knowledge working jobs right so some Professor reporter U programmer right database expert like
144:30 - 145:00 auth author lawyer you know accountant Banker like all all this sort of you know quote Elite jobs and and all the elite degrees by the way who all went to the top schools and got like you know the the elite degrees so so that's the top and then the bottom is what what you you call the the clientele underclass right so it's and it's it's the it's if they call the the Rainbow Coalition right so it's all it's the minority groups right and so it's the Assembly of you know low-income African-Americans low-income Latinos you know dot dot dot dot dot all imigrants recent immigrants and so forth right and so that's the
145:00 - 145:30 Democratic Coalition that they explicitly program against and then Republicans in in our era Republicans are in the it's it's the M it's the middle class lower middle class you know it's it's all the people who don't have the fancy degrees and that are doing all the actual work that's basically making the country run right so it's it's everybody from the small business owner the restaurant tour you know the truck driver truck drivers Farmers you know all the way you know garbage men and janitor like everybody who goes to work 9 to5 has a job probably probably either
145:30 - 146:00 small business or a physical job you know you know sort of say labor like real labor like actual labor calluses on the hands right right kinds of stuff so kind of the 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 and then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast which is where all the symbolic you know created intellectual jobs are and so so so what's so and so so the weird thing that's happened is um progress liberalism progressivism started speaking for The Working Man right like a hundred years ago it spoke
146:00 - 146:30 for The Working Man and now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out and then and then you saw that in this most recent election um where the unions the union leadership still for the most part endorsed kamla but the rank and file uh voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases and the the the data point that I remember is the teamsters uh vot 70% for Trump what do you think the motivation of all these wealthy people to vote for k Harris was because they feel great because they're saving the world it is it's amazing to
146:30 - 147:00 be in charge and control society and decide how everything works and decide who's good and who's bad and like you're Elite you get to be the elite you get to make the elite decisions and if you want to be in that group you have to you got it you got it you got to do this and you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your client of your clientele inter it's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in yeah and it's why the if you if you read the meet you know New York Times it's just it's either New York Times only has two articles anymore it's either how evil are Republicans or how you know innocent
147:00 - 147:30 and helpless are you know po you know poor G minorities or you know identity groups right and so oppositional force and then but we're the party of good with a capital G because we're taking care of all these poor marginalized people so it's a very compelling you feel great about yourself right it's just absolutely amazing and then by the way it just so happens to the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money for not working very hard and it's all great and then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal
147:30 - 148:00 people which is the state that I found myself in where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to a somebody you know running a restaurant or whatever because well it's just like you're not affected by the rising crime rates you live in a safe neighborhood right 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 you just you're in this bubble and then you only ever talk to people who agree with you right and then the media is constantly reinforcing it and then you get ostracized if you disagree and that's
148:00 - 148:30 and that's the wedge like that's the wedge and it worked like look for a long time it for 40 50 60 years it worked as a way to gain and hold political power it's just it's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it it can no longer win and so therefore it it has to get re-examined so for you when you had this shift of thinking you talk to the waiter and then the Hillary Clinton speech and then like how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things and like how much of reluctance is there well so from 20167
148:30 - 149:00 to 2020 I was just like trying to figure out what the hell was going on and then Co hit and then I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with Co and you know our business you know went crazy our business caved in and had all kinds of crazy horrible things happening and we you know we have all these companies we have hundreds of companies we are responsible for startups and so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat TR to get the money and everything um but really was I mean really the big thing was the Biden Administration just like flat out tried to kill us like they just came like straight at us and they came straight at our Founders um and so and they tried to kill crypto and they were they were on
149:00 - 149:30 their way to trying to kill AI um I mean they were horrible like there were a second what was the motivation to kill AI because it's because did they they want they want control I mean they want control they want to control they want to control in the same way they control so they recognize the potential of it and they wanted to head it off of the past they want to control well they want to put in a headlock they don't necessarily want to stop it but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they control social media in the same way that they control the Press so how are they trying to do that so sensor I mean so it's the it's the AI think about it is the same dynamics that cause censorship to happen
149:30 - 150:00 on social media were also going to happen in Ai and and so there's a couple steps to it so one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in headlock and control them so you you you basically want to give you basically want to have a government you you want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government and then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel how would they do that that's a threat to the control so it's it's concept called regulatory capture um and so the way and this is this has happened many times for you
150:00 - 150:30 know hundreds of years this is like a very well established kind of thing in in economics and politics so if is if suppose you're a big suppose you're a big Bank suppose you're Jamie Diamond you run JP Morgan Chase like what's like the biggest possible threat of what you could possibly face it's that there's some disruptive change that comes along that upends your entire business and you know you're Kodak you know you're Kodak you're making a ton of money on on analog film and then digital cameras come along and and you get destroyed and for the in your obituary it's like you're the idiot you know who Blockbuster Video Blockbuster Video like
150:30 - 151:00 that's the cautionary tale those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around the campfire at night right they just absolutely terrifying and like Business Schools teach you like that's the one thing you do not want to do and so there's two ways to try to deal with that one is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you but that's hard because you're running a big company and you know these startups are out there doing all these crazy things and can you really do that and it's hard and frisky and dangerous the other thing you can do is you can go to the government you can basically say okay we're going to we would like to propose basically a trade which is we would like the government to put up a wall of
151:00 - 151:30 Regulation right we would like the government to put in place rules right that are potentially thousands of pages long right 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 because I'm a big company I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people right i i i voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb um but in return the government has erected this wall of Regulation such that the next startup comes along and just liter the next
151:30 - 152:00 company comes along and just literally can't function and by the way this is literally what happened in banking so pre 2008 pre the financial crisis there were many different banks in the country big big medium small and lots of new bank startups every year that would people would just start Banks entrepreneurial Banks of many different kinds um after the financial crisis we had this problem called the too big to fail Banks right the banks were too big and so there was this legislation called dodf Frank which was regulatory reform for banking which was going to fix the to Big def fail banking problem they implemented that in 2011 I call that the
152:00 - 152:30 big Bank protection act of 2011 it was marketed as it was going to solve the problem with the two big defail Banks what it actually did was it made them much larger so those banks are those Bank those two big defail Banks the same ones we bailed out are now much larger than they were before the the banking industry has concentrated into those Banks all the midsize banks are being shaken out and you know they periodically they'll go under like our we had the bank in Silicon Valley it's called Silicon Valley Bank right you know it went under and this has been happening all across the economy and then since do Frank the number of new
152:30 - 153:00 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 they they actually have a term they have a great term called GB uh globally significant something something Bank um and so there's like 10 GBS and then basically what's going to happen is those are going to consolidate BAS basically into into the three big Banks and if you get debanked by one of the big three you're done you're absolutely done oh my God but but think about it from the other side if you're the treasury secretary
153:00 - 153:30 and you want your political enemy debanked it's just a phone call right which is what which is what has been happening which was happening under under under under the prior regime wow right and and again like at that zero zero new Banks yeah zero it literally it was like Cardiac Arrest it was like that's it for new bank Charters and we've had companies that have tried to start new Banks and it's it's essentially impossible because you have to comply with the wall of Regulation you you need 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
153:30 - 154:00 so you you can't function like you you can't exist wow like it's not it's ruled it's by definition is ruled out you you can't do it it's not financially viable wow right so so so that happened in banking that's what they've been doing in social media um there been the same it's been the and by the way this has happened in many other industries by the way this this is this happened in the food the food industry is great Consolidated that that's a lot of what's happened in that industry as well um and and it it's it's the think what it's the intertwining of government and the company right because because at that point it's like okay is this a private company yes like it's still a private
154:00 - 154:30 company it has a stock price it has a CEO does the CEO have to do everything that the relevant cabinet secretary tells him to do yes he does why does he have to do that because if not it's going to be investigations and subpoenas and prosecutions and protological examinations for the rest of his life wow so it's essentially what we accuse the CCP of doing in China it's the so so so if you combine Banking and social media um and um and and now ai you have basically privatized social credit
154:30 - 155:00 score right is is where you end up with this right and this goes back to the trucker strike thing you don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids you just like you threaten to take away their insurance you don't threaten to take away their insurance it's not government insurance that's being taken away the same thing has happened in the insurance industry it's Consolidated down to a small handful of companies they're super regulated if the government doesn't want you to have insurance you're not going to have insurance and there's no constitutional right to insurance so there's so there's there's no appeal proc we're back to the the de banking thing and so that happened in banking that's been happening in in in internet in Tech
155:00 - 155:30 social media generally um it's been happening in many other sectors and then it's it's happening specifically in Ai and what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen because again their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch right it's going to really screw them up and so they're like look if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection the tradeit is we'll do whatever the government wants and if you assume the government is controlled by you know people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents that's going to come right along with it and so
155:30 - 156:00 that's why when these AI systems come out like nine times out of 10 they're tremendously politically biased you can do this today you just go on you go on any of these systems today and you just like ask you start asking like really basic questions gize the best example of that right when they had multi-racial Nazis the black Nazis yeah once again we're back back the yes so it turns according to Gemini Hitler had an excellent de policy yeah now in reality he did not and it's important to understand
156:00 - 156:30 that in reality he did not but yeah Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because it's because it's bi they programmed it to be biased they programmed it in a political direction there's this guy David Rosado who's been doing these analyses on the social media side um where he shows the um incidence rates of the rise of like all of the woke like language like in the media and there similar stud that have come out for the AI where you there there there's studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LMS because you can ask them question you can ask them questions and they'll tell you and they're just like nine out of 10 of them are like
156:30 - 157:00 tremendously biased and then there's a handful that aren't um and then there's tremendous pressure this is one of the threats from the government is is the government basically going to force our startups to come in compliance not just with their trade rules but also with all of their right Bas essentially a censorship regime on AI that that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media wow that's terrifying yeah exactly and yes and and and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington which is if you thought social media censorship was bad this has the potential to be a thousand times worse and the reason is social media is
157:00 - 157:30 important but at the end of the day it's it you know it's quote just people talking to each other AI is going to be the control layer on everything right so AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn in 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 wow it's going to be the control layer on everything right and so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did like we are in for a very bad future um and and that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent
157:30 - 158:00 is to keep that from happening and and and and and the Biden Administration was explicitly on that path like they were very clearly going for that um and it was it was just like Crystal Clear that's where it was headed and do you feel like with a second Administration they'd be even more embolden to act in that direction yes 100% another Biden another Biden Administration for sure and then there was there was an open question on 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 right and so in you know you could imagine a Comm
158:00 - 158:30 Administration that had a very different approach but she she refused to clarify any of her positions right and so we we had to assume that they would be the same as Biden's which which I think is the default case now is this uh closeted sort of a perspective in Silicon Valley do people hide these thoughts that this ad ministration would be bad for business I mean much less now than we used to yeah I look you Elon really broke a lot of Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up one is he he bought Twitter which really gave us a
158:30 - 159:00 place to talk about this stuff all of us but then also he he himself of course started to actually Express himself and so he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure yeah to be able to say these things and then look at it's you know is like a Cascade where people are like okay apparently you canot talk about things okay I have some things to say yeah well then look also just they went too far they tightened the screws I mean they they they really came at us hard and so you know the harder they come at us like we didn't predict when bid one like we didn't think it would have negative effects on our business we
159:00 - 159:30 thought yeah probably taxes will go up but like we'll just keep doing business but then they did all these things right and it took a couple 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 what agency specifically is involved in doing that oh I I mean it's they have alphabet soup but but like SEC SEC tried to kill crypto very specific Al FTC you know was thoroughly weaponized um there's something called the cftc which is the other part of the crypto puzzle Commodities Futures crypto there's crypto that's a security there's some
159:30 - 160:00 forms of crypto that are security and the SEC regulates there's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the cftc regulates the C the cfpb I mentioned earlier so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau right decided that they were also going to regulate AI which which they just volunteered for um and then you know the FAA the FAA killed the Drone industry years ago the the reason why we don't have the reason why the Chinese are winning in the Drone the Drone Wars is because the FAA basically made drones illegal in the US
160:00 - 160:30 years ago so like the FAA has been a big problem um you know the um what is it the F also the F when you say made drones illegal but you could still buy drones like what what have they done so legally you cannot fly a drone in the US uh that is beyond line of site uh if you don't have a pilot's license wow which means if you're a US drone manufacturer you have to build a system that enforces that regulation so you handicap your ability yes so either the either the US drone needs to either not fly Beyond line of site which is not very useful right um or it needs to
160:30 - 161:00 somehow validate only have customers that have pil have pilot licenses China there's no such restriction um and the Chinese we have because we run a more open economy the Chinese drones you can just buy in the US and use however you want technically as the user of the Drone you're out of compliance with the law but they ignore that part they just punish the American drone makers wow and that's why 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 that sounds like
161:00 - 161:30 a terrible security risk is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon oh crimey yes well I've seen the advancements in Chinese drones in particular the uh choreographed dances that they do in the sky where they had did you see the Dragon one y mhm yeah exactly's see if you could find that Jamie Chinese dragon um uh drone display it's like one of the largest ones they ever did yeah it's unbelievable how much more advanced they
161:30 - 162:00 are yeah and I will tell you the Biden administration had zero interest in addressing this like or worse than zero like just I would say absolute contempt for the idea of a US drone industry yeah so let's watch this thing see you can go full screen on that like this is just a grid in the sky look at this they're flying up together yeah they did one that was at night Jamie because they were all lit up video it's just I can skip ahead so imagine those with guns Jesus Christ coming at you right well we get to see some of that in Ukraine yeah
162:00 - 162:30 100% absolutely yeah we've seen those suicide drones like look at this that is that dragon in the sky is drones that are all lit up I mean that is unbelievable it even has a puff of Fire coming out of its mouth yeah that that's incredible if they send that at a football stadium during a game with grenades on those drones oh my God it's Carnage dude don't even put that out there don't put that voodo on me Ricky Bobby sorry look at that heart in the sky with a heartbeat correct this is insane correct yes it's so incredible
162:30 - 163:00 yes they had a little one like that that played over the Eminem concert at um when I was at uh Kota at the Circuit of the Americas here they had this giant Eminem concert like 100,000 people there and then afterwards they had like drones in the sky that did little dances Chinese drones I bet I bet they were they w like this though they didn't didn't not wasn't at that level I mean that that's unbelievable enjoy the show while you can that's crazy that that's a Chinese thing only yeah yeah look DOD
163:00 - 163:30 runs in these soldiers in the field you it's very common soldiers just soldiers normal normal grunt soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or Up on the Roof yeah and these are Chinese chines drones and every single one of them can be taken over by China and use for whatever they want oh my God anytime they want is the Trump Administration on this they're very they're I don't know what they'll do you know it's it's somewhere in the priority order the things that they're dealing but they are yes they are well aware of this and well it's the kind it's the kind of thing I would hope that would get get some attention yeah yeah well this is that brings us back to the UAP thing because
163:30 - 164:00 if that's what we're seeing we're seeing super sophisticated Chinese drones that operate on some novel propulsion system yeah that's not good yeah and that could be because they put ridiculous regulations on drone manufacturers yeah in America yeah that's right and they got way ahead of us yeah that's right yeah we these are bad these are bad these are bad also you're just opening my eyes to this I always had this rosecolor glasses view of our society versus the Chinese Society like our society is more open so people can
164:00 - 164:30 innovate and come up with new startups 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 well silly me I was wrong so this is my argu this is my argument I make Geo geopolitically in DC which is our to to if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be let's say a contest between the US and China the same way that in the 20th century it was the US versus the Soviet Union and like contest competition Cold War maybe Hot War yeah like that's that's the the
164:30 - 165:00 basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side and then as you think about how to beat the other guy is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself Maxim Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency she was talking about that like in order to compete with China we have to come up with a centralized digital currency which which in my view is exactly the wrong thing yes I heard that
165:00 - 165:30 I was like that's a terrible idea exactly wrong thing you got to be like China to compete with China it's exactly the wrong thing it's exactly the wrong thing you don't want that because because because as you know the China system has its problems like they terrorize their own population directly they do impose the social credit score stuff they do they they do all this stuff and then by the way here's here's something we have going for us which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism um X Jin Pang is not a capitalist and he there is a broad base Crackdown on private business in China to the point A friend of mine invest one of the leading investors in China he
165:30 - 166:00 said every single Chinese Tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China wow 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 um and you may or may not come back and then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese communist party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to and by the way and drag you into training this a great thing okay so you're sitting you're the CEO of a company with you know 50 billion revenue
166:00 - 166:30 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 uh getting grilled on how well you understand marks right so like that actually happens right to political officers and that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union and that's the kind of thing that happens in China so you'd rather be a CEO in the US than in China for sure as long as the US system actually stays open where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products but and that's why this Administration freaked
166:30 - 167:00 us out so much is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China see I was not nearly as aware as I should have been about the all these things you're saying I didn't know this I I did know about the banks and I certainly did know that they were cracking down on AI the same way they cracked down on social media I think was very alarming we had we had meetings this that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in where they were taking us through their plans and it was what kind of can you talk about it basically just full government full government control like this sort of thing there there will be a small number of large companies that will be
167:00 - 167:30 completely regulated and controlled by the government they they told us they told us they just said don't even start don't even start startups like don't even bother like there's just no way there there's no way that they can succeed there's no way that we're going to permit that to happen wow yeah they said this is already over it's going to be two or three companies and we're just going to we're going to we're going to control them and and that's that like this is already finished oh my God no now when you leave a meeting like that what do you do you go endorse Donald [Laughter] Trump oh my God and again like I'll just
167:30 - 168:00 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 um like I was a Democrat I was like a Dem I was a I supported Bill Clinton in '92 I supported Clinton in 96 I supported Gore who I knew very well in 200000 I knew John krey I supported him at ' 04 I supported Obama I supported Hillary in 16 like I was like a democrat in good standing um and then um are you completely out in the cocktail circuit now like are you allowed to hang out with people so there's now this is actually true
168:00 - 168:30 there's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley they fractured they they fractured cleanly in half um there's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day oh which by the way is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times 6 months ago but everybody has fully updated their views for that day and that's what they talk about at the dinner party and no longer invited to those nor nor do I want to go to them and then and then there's the other kind which is you know David saxs and like all these guys and all all these people and you know just this growing Universe
168:30 - 169:00 you know it's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture which is like hey let's actually get together and talk about things and have fun right but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the my pillow guy you know what I mean it's like no disrespect Mike to the my pillow guy but you know what I'm saying like I want people that are smarter than me to be saying these things that's what helps it helps when you say well this person actually knows what they're talking about they're very well informed and they understand the repercussions they understand like what's been coming their way and there's people like yourself that can speak about these these the plans that you're laying out
169:00 - 169:30 what they were trying to do with AI is [ __ ] terrifying that should terrify everybody where you have bureaucrats are now in control of potentially the most the biggest Agent of Change in the history of the human race potentially and you're going to let what the the people that can't even balance the budget yeah people that don't know what the [ __ ] is going on that's that sounds insane y yeah and and look my my hope my I think I think under Clinton and Gore I think that they they they dealt with this very I mean look they dealt with the internet very differently than than
169:30 - 170:00 than the current Cropper are dealing with these Technologies well it was very different it was very different but also they were much more Clinton and Gore in particular were much more understanding that you could you could so there used to be this thing I call the deal with the 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 every loved you it was great glowing press coverage the whole thing you take the company public it employs a lot of people creates a lot of jobs you make a lot of money at some point you cash out and then you donate all the money to charity and everybody thinks you're a hero right and it's just great right and
170:00 - 170:30 this is how it ran for a very long time and this was the deal this was you know the deal this was Clinton 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 and basically what happened is the last 15 years or so of Democrats culminating in this administ ation basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world like every single part of that was shattered right where just like technology became presumptively evil right and like you know if you a business person you were presumptively a
170:30 - 171:00 bad person and then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot dot dot and then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you and then the kicker was philanthropy became evil and 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 Cho choosing a way to give the money oo so I'll give you the ultimate case here's where I radicalized on this topic so you'll recall some years back Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla you know have a ton of money in Facebook stock they created a nonprofit entity uh called
171:00 - 171:30 Chan Zuckerberg initiative um which which the original Mission was to literally cure all disease and this could be like you know $200 billion going to cure all disease right so like big deal they said they committed to donate 99% of their assets to this to this New Foundation they got brutally attacked from the left and the attack was they're only doing to save money on taxes now basic mathematics you don't give away 99% of your money to save money on Tax to save money on taxes right but it was a vicious attack it was
171:30 - 172:00 like a very very aggressive attack and and and the fundamental reason for the attack was how dare they treat that money like it's their own how dare they decide where it goes instead tax rates for billionaires should go to 90 something percent the government should take the money and the government should allocate it and that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do what you think is the root of that kind of thinking utopian this is a utopian collectivism you know it's the it's socialism that works socialism yeah it's the the core idea is socialism like the core idea is this this this sort of this
172:00 - 172:30 a radical egalitarianism everybody should be exactly the same all outcomes should be exactly the same everything should be completely fair at all times and some root of it has to be an Envy of course yeah Envy resentment n had this great term they called resentiment um and it's like turbocharged resentment and so uh the way he described it is resentiment is Envy um resentment and bitterness that is so intense that it causes an inversion of values oo and the things that used to be good become bad and the things that used to be bad become good
172:30 - 173:00 right and that's how philanthropy becomes bad philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money not the individual W I was not aware of that blowback I would have loved to read some of those comments I would have like to go to their page and see what else they comment on example here's another radicalizing moment for me so my friend Cheryl Sandberg who I worked with very closely for a long time at Facebook you know and by the way Democrat you know liberal by the way Endor comma like very much not on the same page as me on these things um she actually worked in the
173:00 - 173:30 Clinton Administration you know died in the world Democrat she wrote this book called lean in about 12 years ago um it's this sort of feminist Manifesto and and and it basically said lean in lean in lean in and the thesis of leanin was that women in their lives and careers could quote unquote lean in she said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning in to the table and sitting like in front and then the women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on and she said the women should lean in it became a metaphor for her for women should like lean in on their careers they should like aggressively advocate for themselves to
173:30 - 174:00 get like raises and promotions they like men do like men do they should basically women should basically become more aggressive in the workplace and and then therefore you know perform better and so it was like it was a manifestor to women basically saying be more confident be more assertive be more aggressive be more successful um and I I read the draft of the book when she was writing it and I I said well you know you realize you've written a right-wing Manifesto right right right right and she she looks at me like I've lost my mind right cuz she's a lifelong lifelong Lefty she's like what do you mean and I'm like you this book is a statement that women have agency
174:00 - 174:30 right 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 on the left what people believe is that women are only always and ever victims wow and if a woman doesn't succeed in a career it's because she's being discriminated against and so I said I said I predicted when this book comes out right-wingers are going to think it's great and you're going to get it like the left is going to come at you because you're you're violating the fundamental principle of of of of the left which is anybody who does less well is a victim which in that case is is exactly what happened the by the way the reviews were all by women and they tore
174:30 - 175:00 into her like in every major publication they just like completely ripped her and they're like how dare this Rich entitled woman be telling us you know these would be telling women that they're not victims and that they're you know that they have all this agency because every this is denial of sexism right it's denial of Oppression wow cuz imagine if a man wrote a book like that for men right that's patriarchy right that's yeah that would be well but I mean but men wouldn't attack it oh right exactly right it would be a guide book yeah this is how you kick ass and get ahead yeah we call it selfhelp lean in bro lean in
175:00 - 175:30 just exactly right just call it lean in bro exactly right wow that's crazy she got attacked for that so again it's this in it's the inversion it's the resentiment it's the inversion which is like advocating on your own behalf and choosing to do things that make you what was her reaction to that I would say she was I don't want to speak for her but she was not not pleased I mean she but also was she shocked that you were correct did you have a a follow-up conversation with her what did she say talked about it a lot like God damn it Mark how'd you see that one coming so she was in the but the answer
175:30 - 176:00 is she was her her worldview of how these things worked was from a different it was from the Clinton Gore era in which you could in which you could say things like that you could talk like that and by the time the book came out it was already into the second Obama term heading it right and it and then the the W stuff started and then at that point you could no longer say things like that wow and everything got classified through this very hard edged right US versus them right oppressor versus oppressed you know kind of mindset and so it's such it's such a contrast to what we hoped would happen
176:00 - 176:30 when Obama would be president that's right my thought was okay like there's still some racism but clearly if you're the baddest [ __ ] you can get ahead like you can win the country will vote for you that's not what happened Y no and you can win again you can win twice you win twice and and like I've always said up until I I've lost a lot of respect for him from some of the things that he said during this election cycle because I think they got desperate and they just resorted to actual lies and I thought this is crazy to see him
176:30 - 177:00 lying especially the very fine peoplea hoax right and we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said and it's pretty shocking because he's very explicit you know he's saying not white nationalists not neo-nazis they should be condemned he says that very clearly that's not what I'm talking about talking about people who are protesting the taking down of the statue right 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
177:00 - 177:30 like here's a guy that came from a single family or single parent household he wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life he's just brilliant speaker he he's like he's handsome he represents like what we're hoping for we're hoping for a color blind society that just treats people on the Merit of who they are and anyone can achieve and look here he is he made it and then all a sudden identity politics goes through the [ __ ] roof and victim mentality becomes a thing that people choose to side with and it it just gets
177:30 - 178:00 real weird for a long time yeah that's right that's right and like I said I hope they can find their way back so but this lady's still on team kamla oh yeah she she got a few lessons out of that but not all of them well no this is the if you're you know if you've been a lifelong Democrat this is if you've been a lifelong Democrat if that's you know if if that is in this C to a lot of people's value systems then it's it's a real challenge you know oh yeah it's my parents when your movement they're all in goes in directions well yeah and there's you know right you can CH you can choose to follow you can choose to
178:00 - 178:30 follow into the you know the craziest version of it or you can choose to say you know what like I'm still not going to switch sides but at least I'm going to Advocate right for my team to come back this Richie Torres uh this guy is a congressman in um in in Queens I think or the Bronx um and he's actually he actually started out everybody thought he was going to be a Farley cuz he's gay he's black he's Latino he was like 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
178:30 - 179:00 like we we have to get back to Common Sense we have to get back to moderation yeah we have we have to have law enforcement we have to have you we can't have crime in the streets we have to have a border you know we have we have to get we Democrats have to get back to moderation and sense and so he he is hoping to lead the party that's great that I think he's we support him and I think he's like a really I think he's a very impressive guy so there there are people like and he's young and very energetic and you know I think he has a you know very bright future but that's the kind of person who could lead the party back well the big nitian shift was when Dick Cheney endorsed KLA and everybody
179:00 - 179:30 cheered if there's not a better example than that please tell me what it is cuz that one was [ __ ] nuts like Dick Cheney was always the hard right right like during the Bush Administration all the lefties looked at him like that was Satan oh that's right he was the profiteer that's right he was the the manipulator he was the guy pulling the strings he was the CEO of halberton that came the whole thing was so crazy and to see oh Dick Cheney just endorsed comma
179:30 - 180:00 and everybody's like Yay look Dick Cheney's on our side like what the [ __ ] are you guys talking about this is this is the best shift of it right yeah that's right that's right that's right all of a right all of a sudden we're all all of a sudden we we're all Neons all of a sudden as you said all of a sudden we're proar it's like wait wait you know cuz like as you know like the you know yeah the Democrats used to be the anti-war party yes they were the antiwar party for a very long time yes yes and yeah it except back when they were trying to keep slaver in act that's part of the problem was a different people don't realize that that was a different
180:00 - 180:30 era but um you know look coming out of Vietnam they were definitely the anti-war party for like you know 30 years but isn't that a shift as well but the shift of the Republicans from back in the day being Abraham Lincoln and that trying to get rid of slavery and the Democrats fighting to keep it like this these weird ideological swings they happen and you know we're still attached to the idea of being a Democrat is like being a Clinton Democrat right we're in this weird sort of denial of what the ideology actually
180:30 - 181:00 stands for versus how we think of ourselves when we say I'm a Democrat I I'm a good person you know I 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 yeah that's right they got you yeah that's right they got you they roped you into some crazy thing where you're supporting war and then there's the big faction right there's the big free Palestine versus support Israel yeah because the left always
181:00 - 181:30 supported Israel y 100% and then all of a sudden there's this free Palestine movement which divides the left even further yeah there was this book there's a book written some some years back by this guy Norman poorus and it's great Why are Jews liberal right he he was a rightwing he was a rightwing Jew very important Jewish think thinker American Jewish thinker of like in the 607s ' 80s and he's like he basically is like basically he had this thesis that like these Jewish liberal voters in the US like basically are voting against ultimately they're voting for the wrong team because what they don't understand
181:30 - 182:00 basically is this is sort of a path number one to anti-Semitism which is what's happened but number two that the basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because Israel the basic concept of Israel violates that you know the idea that Israel is like literally a religious ethn state right and that's like inherently a right-wing idea not a leftwing idea like the left doesn't have room for that and a military superpower and a milit right and and is able right is able to right is able to and it's run by a former Special Forces operator very yes very yes a very capable yes very capable soldier in history he's a [ __ ] assassin exactly and so you know
182:00 - 182:30 he argued I don't know this like whatever 20 years ago he's like this is headed in the wrong direction and but you know the argument was ignored at the time and then you know at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th you know they were completely horrified you know to find out for example the Dei was actually anti-jewish right which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the University and it's like you know there's two ways of looking at that one is oh my God Dei is anti-jewish therefore we need tow to the Dei scorecard right well when we saw the the heads of Harvard and was it Mi
182:30 - 183:00 was it Yale no it was Harvard MIT in Columbia yeah that was yeah that's right that was just so in everyone's face and so bananas well and then we saw that yeah right EXA then what we saw is that this the same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-israel but also Pro I mean ultimately Pro terrorist Pro Hamas you know the new acronym right LGBT right but there's a bunch of other stuff in there now there's Q there's two spirit I know but you gotta get got to get H in there now for Hamas oh boy
183:00 - 183:30 really yeah yeah of course of course of course and so so like God I I bring it I bring it up just as an not to take a position just as an example of it's the kind of realignment a lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of so I think to your point I think like the whole country is going through I think we're going through the first like profound political realignment probably since the 1960s which is when which is when everything shifted you know between Johnson and Nixon um uh in the South um
183:30 - 184:00 I think we're going through like the most profound version of that right now and I think it's it's something like the multi-ethnic workingclass Coalition um you know that came together around Trump um 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 and it it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle um and so I think but but but by the way including like a lot of a lot of black 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 is like all of
184:00 - 184:30 all of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years or union vote is is for Trump I'm sure you've seen the um de the map the electoral map of California yeah 20124 and 2020 yes in contrast it's a crazy Red Wave that's going through across the whole the most of the state is red now those of us on the coast are going to get pushed into the ocean yes well I think you know maybe the other way we were talking about the hopeful way that the Democrats will wake up yeah and come up with a more reason well I mean
184:30 - 185:00 there's obviously clear cultural push back on lot of these crazier crazier issues includ I mean like the giant push back from women about biological men competing against women I mean this is a giant one where women are like listen we created Title 9 for a reason like we we want women's s to be for women you you can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women which is what it is in a lot of places you don't even have to get tested there's not like some sort of a
185:00 - 185:30 hormone protocol it's just like it's just what your identity is which is just nuts and that's one of the things that I think a lot of people on the left are having a really hard time justifying yeah right because how how can you how can you deny a victim group right right you can't I mean in in the full version of that IDE in the extreme ideology you cannot deny any you cannot deny a victim claim what also comes with this weird caveat where you have to deny the existence of perverts right because a pervert all they have to do is say I identify as a woman throw in a wig and
185:30 - 186:00 now you can go hang around in the women's room and no one can say anything well you've you've embolden empowered one of the the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from yeah and you have to pretend they don't exist if you just want to base it solely on identity especially like a a self-described identity you just decide and then that's it and you know I mean there's states that have that now with prisoners that all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman and you
186:00 - 186:30 are now housed in women's prisons California has 47 of them when the last time I looked at it and there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in so you have women who you know especially if you're someone who's dealing with if you've ever been raped or sexually abused and now you have to share space with a man who might be a [ __ ] pervert and some of these men even have some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for and
186:30 - 187:00 it's crazy I mean Canada is the worst at it they there's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting in to female prisons and it's just it's insanity and I think the left rejects that too for the most part there 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 but also you can't let psychos just put on a [ __ ] dress and hang out in women's rooms just because we want to be kind like that's nuts so there has to
187:00 - 187:30 be some and then there's legitimate trans women so like how do you make the distinct well clearly we have to have a [ __ ] conversation and if you don't allow that conversation to take place like if you go to Blue Sky and you type in there are only two genders you're banned right there people done it there's a bunch of people who done it it's fun it's fun they have like they've create a little sock puppet account and they they say some [ __ ] that should have been a reasonable thing to say just 20 years ago yeah yeah well you make me hopeful Mark good you do you do because
187:30 - 188:00 you you lay things out in like a a really wellth thought out way that is not hyperbolic and you're you're making a lot of sense so I'm glad we talked I feel better good fantastic I think the world does too I really do I mean I've talked to a lot of people even people that are Democrats I feel better that Trump won it every day it feels better it just like the you know it feels like just things are opening up it's the Obama campaign it's hope and change yeah hope and change remember it's Hopey changy this is kind
188:00 - 188:30 of actually hope and change yeah this is actually it It Feels Like Oxygen returning yes well thank you very much Mark I really appreciate you um tell everybody your subs stack how to find your own social media oh I'm on I'm on I'm on X under P Marque um I'm on substack Google me all right as perplexity all right ask chat GPT and it will deny that no it it will it will happily tell you that I exist at least at least last at least last time I checked so what about Wikipedia yeah mean we don't know yeah we don't know if that if Katherine is still running out always a pleasure mark thank you very much appreciate you all right bye