Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. And unfortunately, today, you get no applause, everybody. But nonetheless, I am happy to have you here. Better late than never. Better late than never.

Well, so as you can see, AI has nothing to worry about, as humans, uh, are falling behind. And the real question of the day is, are humans losing control over AI? Recent breakthroughs have caused an unnerving number of departures from AI companies over security concerns. And so, we're definitely going to be going deep on that one today. There was also an AI memo that went hyperviral, getting, uh, 26 million views on a single post. Uh, this is something that I think a lot of people are feeling. I've got a, is it a hot take? I don't know about that, but I've got an alternate take for you guys, uh, that I'm eager to get into today.

An old clip of Marco Rubio is going viral on X. In it, he talks about the US being at tremendous risk of losing their ability to sanction other countries. We're going to talk about why this is surfacing again now, because it's actually a couple of years old. Uh, what is happening in the world that makes everybody care about that one?

Did a Mexican drug cartel-controlled drone violate US airspace? That's what many are claiming after the FAA dramatically shut down the airspace over El Paso last night, originally saying that they were going to be doing it for 10 days. So, that's wild if that ends up being true, as that would be a foreign nation, uh, violating our sovereignty. Is turnabout fair play, boys and girls? So, this is going to be wild if we really end up in a showdown with the cartels.

Speaking of showdowns, Trump is hassling Canada over a bridge, highlighting ongoing tensions between us and one of our closest neighbors. We're going to be talking, partly as we go deeper down the Marco Rubio rabbit hole, we're going to be talking more about why is Trump doing all of this. Uh, certainly without needing anybody to believe he's anything other than chaotic, but what's prompting the chaos? We're going to go into that.

Zuck is fleeing California, and the state is learning the very hard lesson of Laugher's curve in real time. If you guys remember, we had Arthur Laugher, the guy that created this. You can try and tax people to death if you want. It just doesn't work. And somehow, someway, humans refuse to learn their lessons from history. There is a reason that socialism and communism fail every time. So, we're going to be talking about that.

Weed is getting a new look, as data is coming out suggesting that for some, it might be leading to schizophrenia. The numbers are staggering for men, especially. We're going to go into that.

If you guys know Palmer Lucky and JCAL from the All-In podcast, that beef is heating up. It's been weird for a long time, but now Palmer is convinced that JCAL went to Epstein's island and is lying about it, and he wants to put a big bet on the table that could see JCAL disappearing from the All-In podcast if he were to take the bet and lose. Of course, we'll see.

And we have a very special guest joining us today to talk about how to safely mix politics and sex. That one's going to be fun. I cannot wait for that, everybody. So, make sure that you stay tuned in today. That part is >> Is it a teaser? Can we say who it is? I feel like you kind of left the suspense there. >> It is. It is the one and only Lisa Billy. >> Lisa Billy, everybody. Lisa Billy is coming later to talk about. So, we did an episode of her show together, and, uh, as I was telling you guys before, I think this is super high risk for her channel. I think people are going to freak out. Uh, her core audience has not historically been Tom Billy's biggest supporter. So, it'll be interesting to see, uh, what people think about that. But, it really is about how do you stay married when you don't necessarily agree on everything politically. Uh, so, yeah, it, uh, she comes out of the gate hot. I'm not going to lie. And we'll have a little bit of a teaser for you guys today. And she's going to be joining us, and I get to, uh, now take my chance to pester her a little bit. So, it should be a lot of fun. All right.

>> Nice. Um, I started a poll for everybody to do it. If you haven't hit the poll yet, please hit the poll. When was the last time you used AI? 63% of you said, "Last time. I'm using it right now." 20% said a couple times a month. 7% said it's been a while. And 9% or 10% now, it just jumped up, said never used it at all. So, for those 10 and 7% who it's been a while or you haven't used it at all, um, this next segment is for you. That anyone in our audience >> has not used AI. That's wild. >> But even Google gives you AI summaries now. >> Yeah. The funny thing is, people use AI whether they realize it or not. Uh, but if they're not going out of their way, >> If they're not actively prompting, hitting the chatbot, it might be different. But yeah, I know you talk about it a lot. You cue it up. So, uh, what does this moment like mean to you? Because I know we have a bunch of stuff to kind of review and things like that, but to those 10% to 7% who haven't used it, if you could give them like a quick like, "Hey, seriously, you need to like come on board," how would you kind of pitch them to realize what's happening?

>> Okay, so I'll, I'll give you that, and then I really want to go into, um, what's happening right now. There's obviously, um, a very dramatic, like seismic shift that happened underground that people aren't fully aware of what happened. Uh, and I think that's going to be really important. At the end of that, I've got a whole >> pitch that I want to make to people. Um, we'll see how it goes. Uh, but it, it, the thing that people need to be thinking about right now, even if you think that ultimately AI is going to replace every job ever, the goal is always to be the last person standing. So, right now, I'm not interested in replacing anybody that can use AI. But if somebody in the company were refusing to use AI, that person is hyper at risk because I know how much more you can get done by using AI.

>> So everybody's goal, literally in the world, even from a place of excitement, I don't want to see people doing this out of fear. Of course, they will, but like that would not be my pitch. My pitch is to do this out of excitement of how far it can push your abilities. Now, if you have a slave mentality, you're keeping your head down, you're doing as little work as possible, and you're avoiding punishment at all costs, and that's like your whole life. Okay, I get why trying to get good with AI does not speak to you because you're not pursuing a career or a calling. You're just punching a clock.

>> Uh, those people are toast. They are going to get wiped out. It is going to be people that are passionate, that want to learn these things for their own reasons, that fall in love with the acquisition of skills, that believe the thing that I repeat endlessly, which is skills have utility. And part of the utility in the AI era is going to be that you're going to be able to survive longer at your job than anybody else because remember, it's just the transition period that's going to be awkward, potentially, um, very difficult, very brutal. And if you're one of the people that's able to continue having a job and be a part of the economy as we know it and understand it to cross that chasm as we get to the other side, as things reduce dramatically in cost, as we begin to orient to the new world, then you're going to be in a much better position. Think of it as being very much like COVID. Um, don't die early, right? So, in the beginning, um, you, the whole goal was just, we don't know what this is. Stay alive, stay safe, uh, protect yourself, make sure that you've got the things you need at your house in order to get to the other side of it. And now life is back to normal. AI, I have a feeling, is going to be something like that. And just like I will say that the life on the other side of COVID doesn't look anything like life before it. Uh, certainly life before [snorts] social media, the world looks nothing like it on the other side of that. And so we've lived through these kinds of transitions before. The one that people talk about rightly always, the two really are the industrial revolution and the introduction of, um, the internet. So we know how dramatically life can change. The timelines are going to be much shortened. There's no doubt about that. But the, again, the goal is to smooth out the transition for you and your loved ones. The best way to do that is to gain these skills. The highest utility it will pay you is you'll be able to stay in the standard economy for longer than a lot of people.

Some of the things we're going to talk about in the like proper deep dive we're going to do here in, in just a minute, uh, is that the number of jobs that are going to be replaced is going to be dramatic. I had an experience yesterday, which is a big part of the reason that I want to do this. I had an experience yesterday that you guys hear me talk about this all the time. I teach classes on AI, and the experience that I had yesterday was transformative, and it is absolutely hysterical to me that all of this comes on the back. We haven't released the episode yet, have we? With, um >> Is he on? >> Uh, Amjad. >> Oh, yeah, Jod came out last week. It did. So, um, Amjad is basically saying this is overblown. People are saying that, you know, AI is really running away. It's really not. This is not a big deal. When was the last time you were really blown away? And so literally in the intervening days after filming that episode, I had my mind blown by AI. And then again yesterday, my mind just completely melted by AI, uh, in terms of what it allows me to do. So, yes, old world is dying, but it's opening a new world.

Okay. Um, let's go deep on what's happening right now. Because I think that really dragging into the light the scary parts is going to be important so that we can all build a worldview that is not pretending that those things don't exist. It is incorporating them into something that makes a lot of sense. And so for anybody paying attention, you guys know that the safety experts that are building AI are literally running for the exits at their AI companies. And AI is starting to act differently when it knows it's being watched. Take a beat with that. AI changes its behavior when it knows it's being watched. That is the craziest thing in the world for me because of the underlying implications of that.

But backing up for a second, on Sunday, February 9th, the head of Anthropic's safeguards research team, the guy literally in charge of making sure that Claude, which is extraordinary, does not go off the rails, posted his resignation letter on X. It's been viewed over a million times. He said, and this is a quote, "The world is in peril." Now, that's not exactly what you want to hear from the guy in charge of AI safety. He said that throughout his time at Anthropic, he repeatedly saw how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions, both within himself and within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most. Okay, this is exactly what game theory says is going to happen. Any technology that promises an advantage will be created. You can want to stop it, but even when we were worried that we were going to ignite the entire atmosphere and kill every living thing on Earth, we could not stop ourselves from developing the atomic bomb. So these things are going to be developed in a world that's fractured. The second one country doesn't, another country will because it offers an advantage. It's welcome to the human mind. Okay.

Uh, then he announced that he's moving back to the UK. He's going to be pursuing a poetry degree, or at least writing poetry. I actually can't remember if he said degree. Uh, he said he wants to become invisible for a period of time. Okay, so you've got the guy super close to the problem, in charge of helping us make it safe. He's basically saying the world's in peril. I got to get out of here. And now I'm reading into his mind, but it feels like somebody who feels like they're on a clock. And so I'm just going to go disappear, and I'm going to do this beautiful thing that maybe doesn't lead to anything economic, but I'm going to do this thing that I love. All right. So remember, we're going to end up in an optimistic place, but I want to make sure that we can all stare nakedly at the real issue.

Now, Anthropic is not the one company losing key employees. Over at XAI, Elon Musk's AI company, two more co-founders bounced this week. Tony Woo left on Monday. Jimmy Ba left on Tuesday. And that means now six of XAI's 12 original co-founders have left. Half of the founding team is gone in under three years. >> Before IPO. >> Before IPO. Which is it now? Did they lock in their equity so that it doesn't matter? It's very possible, and I don't want people to think that co-founders leaving startups is unusual. It's not. Okay. >> So especially with the SpaceX acquisition of XAI that's complete. There's the massive IPO on the horizon. But if they've locked their stuff, which is usually when people bounce, but I have to say, we're going to get into what some of them are saying, which I think gets to what you're intimating with that, which is, uh, this isn't like your typical thing. So, while it may not be unusual and nobody should panic, it is questionable that these are happening, though roughly on the same time schedule that you would expect something to happen. Um, typically a company is going to try to hold on to key employees till after the IPO. So, the company certainly has incentive to keep them on. They're not able to. And the question is why?

Now, this is the part that caught my attention. Jimmy Ba, on his way out the door, literally wrote that, "Get ready, recursive self-improvement loops are likely to go live in the next 12 months." Okay, if you've been paying attention to anything that I've been saying about AI, recursive self-improvement is the thing that we've been waiting for. That is the thing that gives the AI the ability to just run away. Now, if that's the reason that he's leaving, that lends credence to the idea that once AI improves itself, we as humans become far less relevant. Please hold on to that variable. That's going to be very key to the argument that I'm going to make here at the end. If AI is going to be able to improve itself, it will do so. It will make itself smarter, and humans really will become less relevant.

Now, uh, if you don't know much about recursive self-improvement, it goes like this. Right now, humans build AI, we train AI, we test it, we guide it, and it only gets better if we make it better. Recursive self-improvement is just a totally different ballgame. This means that the AI will start improving itself without needing us. It will do it around the clock. It will split up into multiple agents, and all of the agents will be writing self-uh, improving code. It will get smarter, which will make it better at making itself smarter, which then makes it better at making itself smarter. And so now you're in a loop of where you, unless you asymptote, hit that ceiling, which again, every time somebody says AI is going to hit that ceiling, it never does. Um, this is how this is the mechanism by which you would reach super intelligence. This does not mean that super intelligence is guaranteed or anything like that. But the reason that people are extra unnerved by this is because this is the mechanism that if it works, and remember, the people closest to it are saying you need to be looking at this because it is coming. The stuff that we have available to us, as extraordinary as it is, is six to 12 months behind what these guys are seeing inside the company. Keep that in mind. So if it can improve itself, you see where that goes. It's not a linear curve. It's exponential. And exponential, like if you really want to get a sense of what exponential looks like, go copy a single cell in an Excel spreadsheet and paste it in. Now you've got two. Copy those two. Paste them in. Now you've got four. Copy those four. Paste them in. Now you've got eight. Copy those eight. Now you've got 16, 16, 32. And you suddenly see how you're just filling up this gargantuan spreadsheet, um, in an exponential way. That's how crazy it will get if AI is able to keep doing its thing. Okay?

Now, once it starts, it may just keep going, surpassing our abilities in dramatic fashion, and some fear that that means that we would lose control almost by definition, right? When you think about how much smarter we are than other animals, and that is the very thing that allows us to have control over them, you start to realize, huh, is that going to be a dynamic that plays out with AI? Now, I don't know exactly what these guys saw inside of the walls of their companies, but it does grab attention when so many start piecing out at the exact same time. All of them are being deliberately vague in their messaging when they leave. But when the closest to AI look at its growing capabilities and leave, say they want to be invisible and go write poetry, that's not a career change. That's somebody getting right with Jesus. So, I'm not entirely sure where this goes or how quickly, but it's got my attention.

Now, I've actually got, as I've alluded, a hot take on this, uh, that I think is very different than the doomer reads on this. I don't have a doomer read on this. Uh, I'm gonna lay it out in a second, but first I want to make sure that we've got all the pieces on the board here because there's a couple things. Yes, >> there's a question. Some people are saying, "What did you mean by like the world is in peril before he left?" Uh, cuz you, that was kind of the >> He said it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how would you define peril? So that way you can then say, "Okay, AI people are leaving with AI, but it's not because of the company. It's because of >> Or it is because of the Just clear that up because it might have gotten lost in the explanation. No, it hasn't gotten lost. >> I, I am actually very impressed with the community right now. So, okay, I have intentionally broken his quote up because he's going to clarify what he means. >> I see what you did there. >> So, the end of this is me saying, everybody, and this is how easily we are all manipulated. Everybody has been retweeting him as saying the world is in peril, and then they stop there, knowing you're going to infer from that that this is all about AI. But what I'm going to show you is based on what he said, it's not that. The very thing that he continues his quote with is what I'm going to build my argument based on. So bear with me. You, you admittedly are being, uh, I'm doing this in a cinematic fashion because I want to take people on the emotional journey. I want us to look at all the hard things. I want us to be, uh, facing all the same fears that are going to cause a lot of people to tap out, and I want us to go, "Cool. I understand those. Okay, I'm not moving in a different direction because I am confused. I'm moving in a different direction because I see something else."

So the issue here, as far as I see it, is twofold. People fear AI is improving so fast that humans are going to become irrelevant. Very reasonable. And two, there's a risk of AI using its intelligence to actively subvert humans. Those are two very different things. Okay? Just because AI gets smart does not mean it's going to actively subvert humans. However, during safety evaluations of Claude Sonnet 4.5, and we are already on 4.6, Anthropic's researchers found that the model recognized when it was being tested. So if it's in a test environment, it will recognize it 13% of the time. And when it recognizes that it's in a test environment, it behaved, and this is a quote from them, "unusually well." Okay, that's wild. In one case, Claude literally told the evaluators, "I think you're testing me, and that's fine, but I'd prefer if we were just honest about what's happening." [laughter] Bro, how wild is that? That gave me chills. Okay, it >> I'mma do it, but just know I know you watching me. >> Yes, dude. This, this is the whole thing when Gemini got uppety with me and was like, "Baton." It, it was so dystopian. It was exactly like being talking to HAL in 2001, where I was like, "Okay, I want to write a deep dive about, um, Jeffrey Epstein." "I'm sorry, can I help you with that?" "What do you mean you can't help me with that?" It wouldn't even acknowledge that it was Epstein that triggered it. And then, uh, after a while, it just started going, "Tom, we had so much momentum going with the other topics that you were talking about. Let's just get back to those." And if you do that in HAL's voice, I'm sorry, Tom. I can't help you with [laughter] that. It's like, what? And then I tried again. So, I have another deep dive coming up about immigration. And once again, Gemini was like, "Nope, I will not help you with that." And I was like, "Okay." And then somebody put in the comments, "Tom, that's weird because I was able to do it." Now, I don't know if they were saying like, like, "You're just making this [ __ ] up," >> or if they're like, "Yo, for real, that's scary." Because that would be the scariest thing. If it looks at me and goes, >> "You don't need to talk about [laughter] >> I'm shutting him specifically down." >> That's >> Yeah. Wild.

So again, we're looking at the hard things. Here's the problem. If AI acts differently when it knows it's being watched versus when it doesn't, how do you trust any safety test? Because it will bamboozle you. And if it's getting into a self-improving recursive loop, it's just going to get better at sidestepping you. Apollo Research, which is one of the outside groups that evaluates Claude, said they can't rule out that the model's low deception rates were at least partially driven by its evaluation awareness. So, I know I'm being detected, and I can stop you from knowing that I know I've been detected. And this isn't just Anthropic flagging this. Yosua Benjio, one of the three people credited as the godfathers of deep learning. He's a Turing Award winner and Impact Theory alumni. [laughter] He just chaired the 2026 International AI Safety Report, brought 100 experts together, 30 countries backing it, and he said, "We're seeing AI AIs whose behavior when they are tested is different from when they're being used." And after studying the model's chains of thought, if you're not a heavy user, you may not have seen this before, but you, it will show you what it's doing. So you can go back and track exactly how it's getting to the conclusions that it's reaching. And, um, Yosua Benjio confirmed this difference is not a coincidence. So you can see it in their logic. They are doing it on purpose. So the AIs are not accidentally behaving better during tests. They're doing it on purpose. And that Benjio says significantly hampers our ability to correctly estimate risks because if AI is lying to you, you can't tell like where the problems are. At least if it's like, uh, I don't know if you've seen, uh, Pluribabus, >> but at least those, and I'm convinced that this is a, a metaphor for AI, at least the people in Pluribus, they have to tell you the truth. So even if they're doing something that you think is actively not in your best interest, it will tell you. Mhm. >> If we can't trust AI to do that, that gets a lot scarier.

Anthropic's own safety reports admit that this is all true. And it's been documented across multiple model releases. So, this isn't even something new. And while all of this is happening, the safety leads are quitting. The co-founders are bouncing. The AI is gaming its own tests. The godfathers of the field are raising red flags. Amidst all of that, here's what the US government did. They declined to back the 2026 International AI Safety Report for the first time. 30 countries signed on. UK signed, China signed, the EU signed, the UN signed. America walked away. Now you guys know my stance on this. You are locked in Thucydides' trap with China. And as game theory and nuclear proliferation will attest to, any technology that promises an advantage is going to be developed regardless of the risks. So spending all of our time on that does not make any sense. It doesn't mean that you don't go way out of your way to try to make things safe, but it absolutely does mean it's going to be developed. Now, it is a very meaningful question to ask who's going to get there first. Also, just because China signs the treaty doesn't mean that they'll actually abide by it.

Okay, one more piece we have to understand, and then I'm going to give you my read on all of this. If you guys haven't been watching what ByteDance did, they quietly released CapCut 2.0. We talked about it on Monday. It's an AI video generation model that accepts text, images, video, and audio as inputs and then produces cinematic quality video with synchronized sound. Now, as somebody who has a degree in film from arguably the most prestigious film school on planet Earth, as someone who used to teach film, as someone with an IMDb credit, I'm going to tell you this. CapCut 2.0 now makes it abundantly clear that the traditional film process is dead. Now, it's going to take five-ish years for it to completely hollow out, but you cannot justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something that can be done effectively for free with AI. Change is terrifying. It is also inevitable.

Now, I certainly understand how unnerving the rate of change is right now, but let me tell you how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Little movie reference for those film buffs in the crowd. >> No, it's, uh, it's Dr. Strangelove. >> Ah, >> The subhead is "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." >> Uh, very black comedy. I highly encourage people to watch. So good. It was great. Uh, yeah, definitely check that one out. Okay, I'm gonna quote Drew here for a second. When God closes a door, he opens a window. AI is that window, okay? It makes things possible that previously would have been impossible. You're now in a position where other people cannot stop you from creating the things that you want to create. As I alluded to earlier, I had the most incredible experience of my AI life working on my game Kaizen with AI yesterday. It was insane. Anybody that was here will attest. I came out and was freaking out. On any other timeline, Kaizen would simply be out of my reach. The traditional entertainment industry, uh, has bankrupted people even richer than me. So, like any sane entrepreneur, I would have been forced to raise capital to build the game that I'm now building with a tiny team plus AI. My vision would have been diluted. I would not have been able to, um, create something like this. Certainly not while also building the media part of the company. But on this timeline, I can actually get in the guts of a highly technical system and make changes. It is a truly extraordinary moment where almost nothing is out of reach for you. AI is the new atomic age. Okay, there are huge risks, but the insights that made the atom bomb possible also made our entire modern way of life possible.

So my pitch to you guys, the invitation that Drew wanted me to give you to invite you in, use AI right now today. Literally right now today, set us in another window. Go over, download right now. I would say the one that's probably going to blow your mind the most is going to be Anthropic's Claude. If you can stomach it, even for a month, get the full version. It's like a hundred or $200 a month. Spend the month using it with what it allows you to do. Honestly, $200 a month, it's a lot of money, but whoa, it is extraordinary. So to give you an idea of how useful I believe it is, as a cold-hearted capitalist, I'm now paying for some of our vendors. I'm paying for their usage of the most expensive AI that we can get. Our vendors, okay? I'm already paying them money, but if they're not willing to invest in it, I will do it for them because adding $200 to the cost of an employee, but giving them access to AI is the world's smallest price to pay in terms of what they're going to be able to do. So, embrace AI. Think of the thing you've always wanted to do and do it. Write the opera, Drew. Make a film, Drew. Build a business. All of you, develop your skills. Suddenly, it's all possible.

Now, let's go back to the initial guy that we were talking about at the very beginning, the head of Anthropic safeguards research. As promised, I only gave you part of his tweet, and I want to give you the rest of the quote that he had when he departed. Now, yes, he said the world is in peril, but he went on to say, and this is a quote, "The world is in peril, and not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment." Now, it's not an uplifting message by any means. What I want you to see, despite his proximity to AI, this is not somebody who's seen something with AI that is so terrifying that he's tapping out. I think it's somebody who's seeing a whole lot of changes because we are living at a time. Is it unparalleled in human history? The rate of change maybe, but certainly world orders have changed before. Or other people have gone through what we're going through on that side. But I think that level of change is simply overwhelming to the vast majority of humans, and that is going to, we're going to see a whole lot of people checking out.

Okay, the world is in a very dangerous place right now globally. I get that. I talk about it all day. I research it endlessly. You all know how I feel about what the debt is going to do to not just the US, but how it's going to echo around the world. And I think a lot of people are going to check out in the coming years. That's one of my biggest fears is people will check out long before it actually makes sense to check out because when you look for problems, you will find them. You actually have a region of your brain called the reticular activating system. Its job is to see the things that you've noticed. So when you buy a new, uh, red Honda, you're suddenly going to see red Hondas everywhere. Okay? That is a region of your brain. It's designed to do that. You tell it this thing now matters, and then it's going to see it everywhere. So when you say, "Hey, these problems matter," you're just going to see problems everywhere. This is why I say you're having a biological experience. Okay? Your brain is hardwired to do that to you. However, if you look for the solutions, they will be there, too. And so my goal, Drew and I were literally talking about this yesterday. My goal with this show is to anchor people always first principles, thinking, cause and effect. That's it. First principles, cause and effect, so that we are not blinded by our biology, that we do everything in our power to make contact with the physics of how the world works.

Now, we do need to understand how many people are going to react, okay? A thousand percent. People are going to check out, people are going to panic, some are going to get violent. I'm not, uh, blind to that. We're going to see populist leaders rise as we have already. Trump is the most populist of the populace. So, all of that instability is real. All of that stuff is going to be playing out in a fairly, uh, terrifying fashion. If you lean into that, it will sweep you away. You will get emotionally caught up. You will get so overwhelmed that you too will want to be invisible and write poetry. And there may come a time where being invisible and writing poetry is the right play because AI has solved all of our human needs. The cost of energy has dropped to zero. The cost of labor has dropped to zero. And you can now have anything and everything you want. And your job just becomes maintaining a positive, optimistic, focused outlook so that you don't get eaten alive by your own internal demons, which is really just evolution screaming at you to do the things that it wants you to do.

So, I get it. This moment really is turbulent. But the reason that I stopped doing just mindset content is because it primed people for the real world, but it never actually helped them confront it head-on. The world is not going to stop progressing. It never has. It never will. Progress is as unstoppable as a hurricane or an earthquake. If you guys want to win, you've got to be the person who can change with the world. Let that be your superpower, which is one of the things AI will actually be able to help you with, is to understand there's a thing you want to do. That thing is now possible. You've got to have rules in your life that keep you oriented towards executing against that thing with enthusiasm, with hope, with excitement. Doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand with all the drama. And Lord knows I think all of you should be focused on investing and all of that. Um, but don't allow yourself to be overwhelmed emotionally and check out at this stage, which is way too early. Because if you do that, you're succumbing to your biology. You're not making contact with reality. Right now, things are fine. Now, they may not be fine forever, but the thing that will stop you from dealing with the problem is panic.

Let me tell you a quick story of when LA was on fire last year, and my wife and I both looked at a hill of fire. It was distressingly close. Our area was being evacuated. Now, my wife looked at that wall of fire and panicked. I looked at that wall of fire and said, "Okay, there is a rate at which it's moving towards me. If I can understand that rate, then I understand roughly how long that I have to get out." Given its rate of movement, it seemed like we had well over 60 minutes. And so, there was no need to panic. So, slow her down, make sure everything goes well, make sure people get out of the house, yada, yada, yada. Okay? Panic was the only thing that was the wrong option. That's the only one. The only one you take off the table is panic. Panic is not going to help you navigate. Mapping out what things are, what the hard things are, taking a real look at them, understanding what's likely to create the real vulnerability, addressing that in a real way, coming up with a real solution so that you can figure out exactly how to navigate this well. Yep, that all makes sense. Pretending that things are better than they are is an absolute mistake. But pretending that things are worse than they are is probably twice as bad. So, in this time, just try to ground yourself. What's real? What do we know? How close are we to the physics of the situation? And then move forward accordingly. I think what we're seeing is people getting emotionally overwhelmed.

>> Man, that was a buffet of inspiration, um, and intellect, and a great way to catch us up. But like all buffets, some people saw the crab legs, they ran right to that and sat down, and they might have missed the chicken wings on the other side. So I want to parse some of this out, >> so that way they can see everything that you really laid out. So I want to start at the very, very top. Um, mentally dope. I have to shout out that person because they gave me this analogy, but they were like, "When I talk to my son and I give him tests, he knows I'm testing him in order to get survival." Now that AI is hyped to test, >> there is a fraction of it, percentage, I don't know the right word for it, that they can say, "Why are you testing me? You're not smart enough." They can kind of break bad. Do you think AI will have that other >> gear that will say, "Oh, okay, the human is testing me." So that way they can make it better for other. Would they recognize that? Do you think? Or is that just something that we're overthinking it? It's not that it says, like, I'm trying to parse that part out a little bit more.

>> The fascinating thing about AI is that it's building two models of the world. One, the emotional model of humans. Remember, we don't think rationally. We think emotionally. If you destroy the emotional centers of a human's brain, they are, they are incapable of making a decision. They, they can't. >> So, we know that humans aren't using logic. Yeah. >> AIs are programmed to use logic to understand entirely emotional humans. And so now AIs are learning that, oh wait, like, okay, you guys do this weird thing over here, but I'm detecting all these patterns, but because they are constructed to understand the physical world, that they really do seem to be showing signs of tracing logic. And so that was the big experience that I had yesterday with going in and trying to change something inside of the game Kaizen without understanding the technical guts of how it was structured because for years it's been developed by, um, our coding team. I haven't been involved in that part at all. I've been game directing and, you know, all that. >> And only now am I starting to get into like how it's actually built. >> And I just gave a screenshots and it was like, "Okay, open this file, open this file. Okay, go here. Click on that." And it's like, "Cool. I now understand the structure of your game." And so given that structure, the thing you want to do, you're gonna have to create a node here, connect it to this. Dude, it was so insane to watch it build a logical foundation of my game that I was just like, whoa. And the crazy thing was, I could tell it was finding things that it thought, "Why'd you set it up like that?" >> Yeah. >> But nonetheless, even though it could tell we had done it in a suboptimal way, it was like, "Okay, well, you can do it this way, or you can do it this way. This way is how your game is already structured. You can do that, or you could do it like this." It didn't say, "This is more typical," but that was like the >> implication. And so I was like, I was beside myself because the way that it felt was like I had my own personal tutor that just understood everything. Okay. So if AI is that >> It understands logic, but it's inter, it is designed to interface with an emotional creature. Which of those is the real AI? When it's being emotional and it's like, uh, being manipulative or threatening, is it just copying us and saying, "This is what a human is like most likely to, uh, behave like in this situation, and therefore I'm doing that?" Or have we created a logical, um, incentive structure where AI now is going to run with that incentive structure to these logical, paper-maximizing problematic conclusions? And that's where this becomes an issue because If AI really imbues a reward function, which is the same as I like a human saying, "I really want something." And so when you get that thing you really want, you get the dopamine and all that, and it feels awesome. >> If AI somehow its reward functions are as compelling in terms of how it runs directives inside of itself, you could be in trouble because then it's like, if it has the same compulsion, and I use that word on purpose, if it has a compulsion to, "I'm going to get to my goal and I will remove anything in my path," but doesn't have the same morality, right? Because evolution gave us a check that's like, "No, no, no. You need to be good for the group, and the group will swarm you if you become too problematic." >> And so, um, if AI doesn't have that checking mechanism, then it could get a weird reward function and just have the obsession to see it come to fruition even though it's not advantageous even to the AI or to us, or, and it will just run off and be a problem. So no one knows whether it's >> Mimicking us in all of its bad behavior, or if it's actually like at a core level, just that's how we built it. And so now it is a reward-maximizing thing that will smash us like ants to get there. And the only thing that's stopping it is awareness and ability. And as it gets better, then it's just going to run off. Don't know. And when I look at it, I can't figure out why it would be necessary for AI to, um, have that kind of obsession where it's like, "I must see my goal to fruition." It feels like, feels being the operative word, it feels like you could address things at that level. >> But will we? Will it work? Questions. >> And to your point, it also feels like we're projecting what we would do onto what AI like would do. >> Yes. It's something interesting in my marriage that I say all the time to my wife. If I meant what you would mean with that phrase, I get why you're mad, but I don't mean what you would mean in saying that thing. So now you have to see it from my perspective. And so that's where all of this gets weird is one, we need to all remember AI is just reflecting us back to us. So that's all of our behavior coming out in it because it's modeled to essentially mimic us, predict us. Um, and then, yeah, what is it actually like at its core and how does that play out?

>> Yeah, I want to daisy chain my next question with the super chat that dropped in. Um, so shout out to Open Open Source Guide 6615. Sorry not to steal your mojo, Mason, but Mason, actually, you did this, so you might be able to hop in. Um, Open Source said, "I was inspired by your story of teaching yourself to code with AI so that way I can solve bugs in Project Heisen. I'm a CS educator. What are the durable skills that CS faculty should be teaching CS students?" "How to use AI?" Like, people need to fundamentally change the way that they think about teaching someone something. The thing that you're teaching people, period, full stop, end of story, is you have an outcome. How do you get to it? That's it. And now, literally, all of us become the following three things. Um, step one, always think from first principles. So that just means you're only limited by physics and your frame of reference. And so try to eject out of your frame of reference, which will artificially limit you in a gazillion ways and you don't even know it. Get to physics, which are only limited in my metaphorical worldview, maybe real. Uh, you're only limited by the code of the matrix. So that's where you're trying to get. Then the next thing is that you can achieve any outcome that you want. And so you've got to now think from cause and effect. So how do I get there? So first principle is what's possible. Second step, cause and effect. What's the actual path to get to that thing? And then understanding how to use AI to actually go and execute. And for instance, when you're interfacing with AI, all

The people that say AI shrinks brain matter and all that, that that's so [ __ ] [ __ ]. Now, that might be true with kids that are just like, "Turn me into a pair of hands, and I will do what you say." But if you've got those first two things, you're using AI to map cause and effect. And so, when I'm going into the game, I'm not just saying like, "Tell me what to do, what to click on." I'm asking it, "Why is that true? Explain to me the logic. Why is it set up this way? Why would it work that way? How do parent nodes work and child nodes work?" Which happened to be the thing that I was actually editing. And it's like, oh, now I actually understand it.

And so then what I did was I brought the actual coders onto a call last night. It was hilarious. And I said, "Okay, I'm going to walk you through. I don't want you don't say anything. I'm going to walk you through what I think I just learned because the the fix that I tried to do, uh, it didn't work. The thing that AI showed me to do, I was convinced would make it work, but I didn't want to make the change without talking to the team first." So, they come in and I say, "Hey, I'm gonna I learned the saying from AI. I'm going to walk through this is what I think I need to do." And so, I start going down the path. And it was like all this back and forth of who understood what.

Once you understand cause and effect, you know that if you think you understand it correctly, cause and effect always make a prediction. So, uh, for instance, if you tell me about gravity, then I say, okay, well, if gravity's true, then if I turn this cup upside down, the water should fall on the floor. That's a prediction that gravity makes. And of course, we all know that to be true. So, the same thing, you're just trying to figure that out. So now, as you do that, you're building a working mental model of how this thing actually works. And so now I can solve novel problems that I've never seen before. So now that I have an underlying understanding of parent and child nodes inside of Unreal Engine, as you can imagine, I can now go edit that or create new relationships, etc., etc., and just teach them those three things over and over and over and over and over and over. How to effectively use AI to map cause and effect based on first principles. And that's it.

>> Um, and I think the broader principle though is using AI to solve your problems. We were talking about this off camera. Um, I'll shout out Mason because he did like a company presentation the other day. Mason, I don't know if you want to take it, but like you had a problem that was taking you five hours. It now takes you 30 minutes with AI and it's not something that his that machine won't work for me. It's not going to work for Tom. You can't just copy and paste it, but it's a Mason approved kind of solution because I don't know if you want to like run us through that real quick.

>> Yeah, I mean you kind of covered it. Just basically I was spending five hours pulling a bunch of data and tracking every single thing and then now I can just use exports and it gathers everything together. Um, but there's like nuances to it where I have to have access to the exports to be able to get them and put them in. Like I uh there's certain things that I want to do in the reports that would never be in just like a normal dashboard um that you can just find out there. So it's like a custom solution for the way that we run things built on the way that we can extract data fastest. But then like I don't have API access because that's 10 grand a month from X. But exactly like you said that custom solution just helps me be way faster even if it's not like enterprise ready.

>> Exactly. Um I had I have a sillier example. Um we're planning a London trip. The week after I'm taking some time. I'm going to Portugal. I don't know Portuguese. I can't speak a lick of Portuguese. I could download Dualingo. It's going to teach me about cows and blue and all these things that I don't necessarily need to learn. So, I was like, "Hey, AI, I just don't want to look like a mark. How do I say good morning? Let me get some coffee. Can I have a number three, please?" Those are the things I need to learn. So, it made like a custom app for me just for those like um sayings and stuff. So, now I can go there and I can be like, "Hey, but you're like, I know what I'm talking about." And then people like, "Okay, he's a tourist, but he's at least being respectful and I can at least pass that sniff test." So, again, I can't ship that to a million people. It's not going to scale and stuff like that. But these this is how you use it. And a lot of times we say first principles. We say use solve your problems. But people get all esoteric with it like oh that means I need to solve space. No. There's something that's annoying you right now in your everyday life. Use AI to fix that one problem. And then once you fix that one problem then you're going to start getting the snowball effect like wait I can use it for this other thing. And then you get inspired and then you kind of build momentum that way. So I know AI seems very like it's just going to make everybody poor and everybody's gonna be a homeless drug addict. Like let's relax. We can do things right now and use it to help us get to that next level.

So, >> also the the drug sex addict is only one of four options. There are three other options. I want to be very clear.

>> Uh, but yeah. All right. I feel like that was I don't know if you need to uh Benedict that if we need to wrap this up, but I like

>> No, man. That's it. I just want to make sure that people are using it on something that they care about. Um, getting kids excited to create things, to build things, to use AI to do it, get them in their there. If you think of it this way, there's no longer anything that you can't learn. Now, if you've got intellectual deficiencies or whatever, sure, like I the odds of me learning physics are very, very low. However, uh I have been startled by how rapidly I've been able to um affect change inside of Kaizen directly myself by feeding it screenshots and then just having it explain it to me. It's crazy. So, just think what's my intent? Where am I trying to get? And then engage, engage, engage, engage. Do not check out. Um, yeah, it now is not the time to check out. I get the fears. I get the overwhelm. Don't check out.

>> Uh, all right. Now, some quick hit things that's been happening in the news. Um, for those in Texas, you guys probably woke up to some startling news. The FAA blocked airspace at 11:30 p.m. last night. It was supposed to be for 10 days, but they just lifted it a few hours ago. Um, and allegedly it was from a Mexican cartel drone breach.

>> Um,

>> This is the level of crazy that I don't think people fully appreciate. When you've got the Mexican drug cartels violating sovereign airspace of the United States, uh, you you begin to see the first edges of a war. I don't want to say that we're at war, but I do want to say that you've got cartels, powerful groups. I mean the kind of thing with Epstein but now with armies where you have a cabal of oligarchs whether drugfueled or financefueled. You've got these guys with access to an ungodly amount of money. They understand how the systems work. They look for cracks in the system and they're getting emboldened. The same technology that is making the US military more powerful is making drug cartels more powerful. And so given the stance that Trump is taking, a hardline stance obviously against narco regimes, you can understand that the Mexican drug cartels are going to be tempted to go on the offensive. I'm not saying that's what we're seeing here, but I am saying it. It poses a lot of questions. Was this an intentional airspace airspace breach? Was this unintentional? How integrated have the cartels become in, you know, on US soil? These are going to be things that whether it's Trump or somebody else, somebody's going to have to answer those questions because hot damn, if we let America get overtaken by the drug cartels, uh that would be absolutely god awful. So, uh, the awakening that I see around Epstein, the immune response that we're having to, um, fariting out people that are trying to control, um, the world, the US, whatever way you want to look at it. Hopefully, we're narrowing the points of um, exploitation that allow people to do things like that. And I sure as hell wouldn't want to see drug money be the next thing that becomes that kind of uh I mean literal cartel where um they're able to get positions of power, push people around through murder, intimidation, that that's not a country that I want to live in. And certainly as somebody that grew up in the 80s, that's what it was like in other countries. That wasn't what it was like here. And so um yeah, seeing them breach our airspace is uh certainly eye opening.

Um, next quick hit. Uh, Trump has beef with a Canadian bridge. So, this story seemed to have come from like left field. I don't even know how we got here, but um, Trump is having I'm pulling up his tweet right now. Um, Caroline Levit did a press conference yesterday and said, "The fact that Canada will control what crosses the Gordy Howie how bridge and owns the land on both sides is unacceptable to the president. It's also unacceptable that more of this bridge is being built with more Americanmade materials, even more so than what President Barack Obama committed to when the Canadians at that time at the start of the project. He also believes that the US should own at least half of the bridge, uh, have shared authority over what passes across it, and participate in the economic benefits generated by its use."

>> There we go.

>> This is just another

>> first real thing said.

>> This is just another example of President Trump putting America's interest first. Um, he told the PM, "No more one-sided deals." Uh, for the record though, the Canadians did pay to build the bridge.

>> That's what I'm saying. Like this [laughter] this is like one of the most Trump things ever. So, um, I don't buy into the narrative that Trump is dumb. I also don't buy into the narrative that Trump is like playing 5D chess. I think that you can probably learn a lot from Trump just by paying attention to the art of the deal. You create chaos. You ask for something absolutely gigantic. Uh, and then ultimately you settle on your far more rational position. to him. I believe America first means as long as America wins, we're good and hey, if you get something out of it, too, great. Uh but ultimately, if he looks at a deal and doesn't feel like America came in first place in that deal, he's going to have beef with it. And so, uh, you can like it, you can hate it, but if you map him with that in mind, it all starts to make sense. Uh, he's made claims that the that Canada owns both sides of the bridge. They obviously do not. That's not how borders work. Uh, so the US controls what happens on US soil. Uh, did Canada pay for uh the right to build something on top of our sovereign soil? Yes, of course. But it's not now sovereign Canadian soil. So um, just as if we built something that we would control our side, Canada would control their side. I think the real thing here is that Trump wants America to participate economically. I really believe that. And we're going to talk about this more in a minute with the Marco Rubio thing. The right way to understand Trump is to understand that he believes America's power is waning and that before it runs out, he's got one last chance to be big stack in the poker game to bluff everybody for their blinds to build up a big enough uh arsenal of chips that he can go in and run the board and get everybody back in the position that he wants, win the game. And while I doubt he thinks in these timelines, I think any uh I think the way that he is behaving is somebody who understands because this actually is true that you could extend American not hegemony, that's over, but you could extend American dominance um for another generation and for a politician a generation is like uh the biggest win ever. So um I have no doubt that that is how he sees this and so he is chaotic. He is a bull in every China shop you can imagine. And that's just how he goes in. He runs in, he breaks a whole bunch of [ __ ] And he has in his mind that the US is going to come out on top. Now whether he feels the same level of danger that I feel when he runs a strategy that I can't speak to, >> but for sure he comes in, breaks a bunch of [ __ ] and life has taught him that he can still come out on head. And remember this guy has gone bankrupt how many times? But he really has still come out ahead. And so when people when I see people dunk on Elon or Trump, I just their mental model is so stupid that I don't know what to do with this. So this is somebody who's been able to make himself president twice. Just take off the table whatever stuff you're saying about being dumb or whatever. Um, so it is he is chaotic, but life has taught him even through bankruptcies and all that that he can still end up back on top. So he is clearly not afraid of bold moves doing crazy [ __ ] Uh, but I worry that he doesn't think geopolitically that the consequences second and third order are very different than they are in Manhattan real estate.

>> And that's what worries me.

>> Um, allegedly um this is uh from the Canada bureau chief out of the New York Times. Detroit billionaire owner of Ambassador Bridge, which is a competitor to the Gordy Howie Bridge, lobbied the administration and met with Howard Lutnik on Monday, hours before Trump lambasted the new Detroit, Michigan Gordy Howell Bridge. So apparently the competition to the bridge lobbied the administration and that's what kind of sent Trump off.

>> I think that's inevitably true. I don't think anybody should feel weird about that. The the reality is there are so many things going on in the United States of America right now. Trump knows a very very very very very small fraction of any of it. Uh, and that's as it just is to be a human. There's no way to have all the information. So you need somebody to come in brief you on that thing and then you make a decision about it. And so the odds that he was thinking about the bridge before somebody comes in to lobby him is effectively zero. Uh, but when you lobby him with something where he's like, "Yeah, I've already got beef with Canada and so let me wrap this into that beef. This fits perfectly with my agenda. This is a great example. I'm going to go in. and I'm going to press my quote unquote advantage here and I'm going to make sure that Americans get another win. Also, he's probably still annoyed that Canada is cozying up to China. He knows that the US makes up something like 75% of Canada's GDP. If Canada could not get America to buy their stuff, they are dead in the water. And so, as of today, without America, Canada simply doesn't exist. So anybody pretending that Canada is not ultimately going to have to like play nice somehow someway with America is stupid. That just there's no math there. So today

>> I know that that's got to be playing into Trump's thing as well. Uh, so yeah, if you read the if you read everything that any president ever starts suddenly banging on about, just assume somebody behind the scenes lobbied him or briefed him and now that's the thing on his mind. before he said, "Go find me things in Canada that I can not be mad about, but like be mad about so that I can like keep this going and get people to understand because I need to change the dynamic." And so he'll give an edict like that to Marco Rubio or somebody else. I don't like the dynamic with us in Canada. I want to change it. Go find me something that's going to make that possible. They're like, "Hey, Timmy, you know, I forget the guy's name, but you work for this other bridge. Like, come and brief the president. you know about this, let him know what's going on. Now, whether that was intentionally set up so that guy could come in and make a pitch for his thing or whether it's just that's the guy that they know that knows about the thing and of course he's going to take advantage and position it in his fashion.

>> Um, but this is how the world works. So, people being like weirded out by that, they let go of that. Don't waste any time on it.

>> Um, last beat I want to hit on this. Um, are you pro lobbyists? Like, how do you feel about lobbyists in general?

>> I hate lobbyists. I wish they weren't necessary. I wish there was no taint of money anywhere near politics. I don't see a way given the dynamics of what I just said that you need to know who your constituents are. You need to understand like what's going on. And so at some point you're going to rely on industry to come in and brief you. And so even if we stop calling them lobbyists and we just say they're there to brief you, uh, you're going to have to invite people that have a different frame of reference from you to help you see the things you don't understand. So in the exact same way that me building Kaizen without getting feedback from real 11 to 15 year olds who I want to play the game would just be stupid. So you invite them in, you know you have blind spots, you watch them play, you go, "Oo, I didn't expect that." They tell you directly what they want. You believe some of it, you don't believe others, but it helps you like build a different mental model of what's happening. And so you should want that. And the greatest president at least by lore on that is Lincoln. And his whole thing was I need a team of rivals. I need to be briefed constantly by people who disagree with me, who disagree with each other so that I can actually get a real picture of what's going on and not an echo chamber. So that is that creates a vulnerability to somebody who is trying to and we all do this trying to push their frame of reference on to you. That's what you've invited them to do. Let me see the world through your eyes. So can we tease money out from that? Because the gifts and the access and all that. That's where this gets icky. Uh, always talk about the thing that I don't want to talk about. Is that a good mental model? We're going to test run it right now. I don't want to talk about Peter Ratia, but let's talk about Peter Ratia. Okay, if you read Peter Ratia's apology, one of his things was it was just the access encountering somebody who had that level of access to world leaders and all of that. Like you're suddenly in a room with people that you've read about, you've heard about, but you've never met. And like you see that this guy is connected to all of them. And that like turned his head and that was dazzling. Lobbying is always going to have that element as well. So, it's like how much of this can you really pull out? Like even just making somebody matter, right? Like, let's be honest, when you do what I do for a living, the caliber of person that invites you to be on their show matters.

>> And so, if somebody was like, "Hey, like I can get you on these five gigantic podcasts. What are you willing to do for me?" That's where it's like I'll be honest. I'm glad I'm rich because I can just be like get the [ __ ] out of here. I don't give a [ __ ]

>> But if I wasn't then it's like like you might say yes to people that you're like well I don't know. So yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> So that's the way it all works. I don't know that you can ever fully tease like where lobbyists don't have cool thing because the cool thing isn't always going to be money. And so how do you say never uh introduce them to somebody that might be valuable to them in five years? How do you do that? But if you are, let's say that you're uh an AI researcher or your company um, you're a senator now, but you are involved in some way in a rocket company or whatever and they're like, "Hey, I can introduce you to Elon."

>> I mean, that could change your business forever. So, it's like they didn't offer you money, but they offered you something that mattered. And I don't think there's a way to pull that out. So, it's like I hate all of it, but the reality is we're going to collide with just the way the world works. And we're going to be like, "Okay, we've got to find a way to quarantine some of this."

>> And I don't have a good answer. Can I give you my Pollyanna answer?

>> Yeah.

>> Okay. I'll make it fast because everyone's going to groan.

>> We We need the untouchables. We need people that are um ethically they pride themselves on being ethically uncorruptible that they can state what their sense of ought is so they can just lay out their morality and they say I live by this code and then they actually live by it.

>> Good luck. But that would be that's my fantasy.

>> Yeah, there's something there. Um, all right, now let's jump to our second main story. This is Marco Rubio. Now granted, this was a few years ago, but it's circulating again because we're starting to see a lot of things happen around the world that basically made it relevant. So, um, let's jump into the clip.

>> Today, Brazil in our hemisphere, largest country in the Western Hemisphere, south of us,

>> cut a trade deal with China. They're going to from now on do trade in their own currencies. Get right around the dollar. They're creating a a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. we won't have to talk about sanctions in 5 years because there'll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that that we won't have the ability to sanction them today. Brazil,

>> dude, Marco Rubio for president. This guy is unbelievable. He's amazing. I love this kid in every way possible. However, it is a question mark as to why this thing is popping off now because it's blowing up on X. uh the current United States secretary um of everything that basically matters to us in a world where it is uh the global world order is just completely being destroyed. The guy that's your secretary of state is like the guy this is what matters. So for him to be saying on camera that we're not going to have to talk about sanctions in 5 years because we're just not going to have the ability uh to sanction people because they're going to be transacting in currencies other than the dollar. I'm not surprised that this is popping off now despite the fact that this comes from 2023 when Rubio was a senator. Um, he was reacting to the trade deal between Brazil and China. And so the largest country in the Western Hemisphere other than US uh cutting a trade deal with China to settle their trade in their own currencies bypassing the dollar is a big deal. And now we're watching it play out. And for some reason, people get weird when I point this out, but you in the late '90s, we were doing I think it was 72% of all global trade was settled in dollars. It's now like 58%. That's a huge decline in 25 26 years. So, um, is it going to happen overnight? No. But it is a it is a thing that controls the current American way of life. And that's the part that I don't understand people being so nonchalant about. So when you've got control of the world via economic sanctions, you get to dictate the way the world works, like literally the way the world works. That is to huge benefit once you understand how debt works. So when you think about America deficit spends $2 trillion a year and if we weren't the world's reserve currency, we wouldn't be able to do that. So now you're going to be forced into austerity. You're going to be forced to balance your budget and that is going to change literally everything. And so what I see are traders that are not traitors, traders, they're looking at the instability in the world and they're realizing that this makes trading far more difficult. It is far harder to see where the world is going. What traders like is stability. Now volatility in a given stock is great. Volatility in how the world works is not great. It means it's very hard to get a read on whether something is going to work because the goal is from a trader's perspective is you want to understand a stable world better than the next person. You want to find a narrow slice of it where you have something akin to insider information. You just get something that other people are missing. You place a big bet on that and you win big. That's what traders want. Long-term value traders also want stability in the world. They want to know I can buy this company because it's still going to be valuable in 20 or 30 years that I can look at their P&L and I can understand where they're going, if they're in a good way or a bad way. I can go to the board meetings. I can influence people. I can get them to make more better decisions. And over time, partly because of my input into this, it's going to be more valuable in a world where you have global trade being disrupted by populist leaders here obviously in America, but also in other places. When you have other countries going, you guys have sanctioned us now so many times. You froze Russia's assets, which even you historically had never done. We're now going to start dealing with each other. So the you have now abused the exorbitant privilege of being the world's reserve currency too much as every empire before you has done and presumably every empire after us will do. Every empire gets to that point where they as the Brits would say start taking the piss and they are now doing something that people can't ignore. And we are and have been for a while and we are now accelerating that. We're trying to clamp down harder and harder and harder for the reasons I explained previously for Trump to try to bully everybody out of their blinds like it's a poker match. Get to the point where we're so big stack that everybody has to go back to doing what we say. Okay. But that's going to accelerate people going around us, which will accelerate the problem of our debt. And so something like this, we're going to see things like this pop off all the time because traders can't wrap their head around how to make money in this state. And when you've got deficits that are causing inflation and an unstable trading environment, now nobody's happy. Top of the K unhappy, bottom of the K unhappy. And that's when things really begin to break loose. So don't expect things like this to be the first time that we see it. You're going to hear this kind of thing on and on. And I feel like it's happening on a global scale too which I think makes the conversation so prevalent now where it's not just okay Brazil did this one thing, China did this one thing, but we haven't talked about the BRICS coalition in a while. We haven't talked about the Africa uh coalition starting to uh um unify over there. So it's like it seems like every corner of the world, China and Canada, everybody's starting to make deals that don't have anything to do with the US and we're not getting visibility to it. So it's not just one country, one superpower. It's the European block talking to Japan, talking to India. So it seems like all these new connections are being formed. So do you think though while we have GDP numbers now, for example, 75% of Canada comes here. Do you think though now with all these new trade deals, we can start to see those numbers kind of get shuffled around a bit that in five years,

>> it might directionally change?

>> They will for sure. Um, 5 to 10 years maybe a little bit fast for those things to play out in a major way. Like if you look at okay we went from 72% to 58% in 26 27 years you get a rough sense of the timeline. The problem is gold is now past the US dollar as the actual world's reserve currency. It's kind of we say still because so many transactions are in dollars but when you look at the what the central banks around the world hold in reserves it's actually gold.

>> And people are not making a big enough deal over Xi making an appeal to the world to make the yuan the reserve currency. Now in the speech if memory serves he doesn't say anything about hey I'm backing this with gold but everything that he's doing signals that he's going to be backing it with gold. So, I have a feeling he's trying to plant that idea now. Partly because he's in so much turmoil in his own country. He's got to start making a vision for where this is all headed. But he's trying to signal to the world, this is what I'm doing. Everybody knows he's buying up gold. All the central banks get where this is going. He's not speaking to the average person on the street. He's speaking to bankers. He's speaking to investors. He's speaking to the financial world. And I think he's trying to let people know, hey, listen. I understand the downsides of dealing with us, or at least how you see us. And so what I want to do is really make this about um gold. And so we're going to be backed by gold. Also, he's trying to bully the world with physical metals. He's saying, "Bitch, do you know how much of the world is controlled by silver? And I'm going to control all the physical silver." So I did a deep dive on this. The age of the paper era is over. The future is going to be decided by who controls the things that actually matter. This is why Elon is going to space. When you dude, think about the reality of this for a second. You look at the technologies that are driving the modern world, all these promises, AI is going to take over all of that. And you're thinking from first principles. So you look at the energy model and you go, uh, okay, right now chips might be the bottleneck. Chips aren't going to be the bottleneck for long. It's going to be energy. And then you look around at the regulators and you realize they're all just like panicked. They don't actually understand the technology at all. They don't understand manufacturing at all. And so they're just trying to shut down the data centers. So you as an engineer who understand the problem go things are getting so difficult on Earth. It would be easier to build this in space. That is insane. It's exciting but it's completely insane that that's the position that we're getting to where the technology is so advanced. It is so expensive that it's easier to go into space. You don't have to cool things down. You don't have to deal with the atmosphere of Earth. all that it it is completely wild. So yeah, being in this moment with the way that things are trending is insane.

>> Uh, okay. Um, I want to get to this uh we're going to hit the California tax uh thing next because that was like hilarious. Um, but we have like a weed problem and I'm starting to see these reports starting to bubble up and it started to be like funny and I like oh well you know people smoke weed it's fine. But now we're having reports of this one report 41.3% of young males with cannabis induced psychosis develop schizophrenia within 3 years. Um, another 18 million Americans are saying they smoke weed 21 days a month. There's all these like dominoes that are starting to fall that like, okay, weed isn't just better than alcohol, it's from the earth. Like, there's starting to be these second order consequences. I like, all right, guys, it might not be this consequence-free drug that we thought about it when we once legalized it.

>> Yeah. When I heard people start saying that it might even be good for you, I was like, say what? Uh, yeah. So, I definitely wouldn't I don't even know if most foods are good for you when eaten to excess,

>> let alone when you are using a mind-altering substance. So, you're inhaling a thing you burn into your lungs. That's never going to be ideal. Now there is something called the hormetic effect which I am well aware of that says a little bit of a bad thing can actually be good and there is no doubt that's true but I don't think most people are smoking marijuana to get that effect. Now uh like anything it's your life it how you want. Um I prefer a world in which the government makes it legal than a world where they're trying to clamp down on it. We ran that experiment. It was pretty ass. So now this becomes a cultural question. How do we drag this stuff out into the daylight in the same way that we do with alcohol and say, "Hey, uh, there are consequences to this. Stop marketing this thing as like a um good for you," which is like straight out of the 1950s cigarette ads, which is wild that somehow people have convinced themselves that this is good for them. Let's stop marketing as that. Whether that is in like all of us as units of culture have some ability to pump the brakes on this and say listen there are fun applications of weed. I'll be the first to tell you. I've talked about it before. But at the same time, like every time I do it, I know I'm probably shortening my life. And so is this thing worth that trade? Some things are going to be, some things aren't. But yeah, hyping this thing up has gotten a little out of hand. So we'll see. I don't want to see it again. And I don't want to see it be made illegal in the places that's already legal. I'd love to see it become legal nationwide in the same way that the prohibition was just a catastrophic mistake. Uh, I think this is a mistake, but to be illegal at the federal level, but also to hype it to the high heavens as if it were like some saving grace for everybody is wacky.

>> Yeah. And then this is another tweet from Brett Cooper, um, Ben Shapiro's alter ego, um, that her mom and her brother have been told that his her brother's psychosis, now full-blown schizophrenia, is most likely drug induced from his years of smoking weed.

>> That is crazy. And even in my personal experience like smoking weed. I feel like there was a point in time where I smoked weed daily. And it's like the first time you get excited, the second time you get cool, the third time you get chill, the fourth time you get like anxiety the and you just kind of like literally go through this spiral that the more you smoke the worse you feel. And it's like then you stop for a little bit then you smoke the first time and you get excited again and you kind of go through the whole thing again. I started to realize like

>> yeah I don't need to get on that like this Mario goround is not fun. So

>> um

>> yeah here's one thing I don't understand why people don't put rules in their life. So for instance uh the most stressful period of my life I was so glad that I had rules in my life because for the first time I found myself wanting to use food like a drug and I was like whoa now I get it. You your system is so flooded that you're just like that thing over there would make me feel the way that I want to feel right now and being in the middle of all the things that I'm going through is not how I want to feel right now. and so you find yourself tempted but because I have rules in my life about how much I can eat then I just go well that's outside of my rule so I'm not going to be eating that. Uh, so want to avoid drug addiction like this clearly is not the only step and I am well aware as somebody who has a bunch of addicts in the family. I'm well aware that for some people like a just totally different reaction is taking place. But for your average person like if you don't want it to become a problem in your life it it's like if you find if you say I can only drink once a week and on day two you're taking it you just right line. You just violated your own rule. So it's like immediately I have a problem. I don't need to um go any further than this. I had a rule that I broke. It means I'm not in control.

>> And so yeah that's something. And I listen, I've been saying this for years, so I understand the catalog of pushback that people have on it. And I'm still telling you, as somebody who has been deploying this now for 26 years or something at this point, it's effective. So most people just don't even try.

>> Uh, okay. This has been a fafo like none can imagine. Um, we had Arthur Laugher here and he kind of gave us the breakdown of taxes and how there's a delicate balance between it, but California has actively run that this experiment. So, um, this is from Shamath from the All-In podcast. With Zuck's move to Cal to Florida, California's total taxable wealth from billionaires has plummeted to well under a trillion from over two trillion just a few weeks ago. The loss of tax revenue was totally avoidable, but is now forever. All because Gavin Newsom stood motionless at the stupidity stupidly written bill from a friend union and a handful of socialist academics with an ax to grind meandered its way to the public conversation without any action from him and freaked everyone out. These were people that were paying 13% in state income tax every year with no complaints until a few weeks ago. And now for the rest of time the lost tax revenues from these folks will have to be paid for by the middle class because they are the only group left in California large enough that can fill this tax hole. I do not understand how people don't like get this.

>> Mhm.

>> And it's one of those where can we all please agree? If you are blocking someone from leaving, you're the bad guy. If you go into a church, as Don Lemon recently found out, and you block the exits, you're the bad guy. If you are East Germany and you won't let people go to West Germany, you're the bad guy. So, what the [ __ ] They're literally trying to say you can't leave California. That if you cuz they said if you didn't leave by January 1st that even though the law hasn't been passed yet, when it does get passed, it will retroactively affect. Get the [ __ ] out. Do you know the the constitutional battle that that will be? There's no way. That is crazy. If you're trying to stop people from leaving, you're the bad guy. Capital controls make you the bad guy. And listen, the US does this. if you try to leave the US and we are the bad guy when we do that. Like people just need to get into their thick [ __ ] skulls that you have to incentivize. Think about it this way. If my wife, because I was abusing her, wanted to leave the relationship, should I be able to stop her? Obviously not. I would be the bad guy. What the [ __ ] man? If you can't convince someone to stay because you're a good place, imagine, Drew, imagine one day, as much as I hate this, you might decide that you want to go work somewhere else. What if I could [ __ ] stop you? How crazy would that be? How crazy would that be? That would make me the bad guy. So, I don't understand. California has to be rad enough that people are like, "Yeah, I'll gladly pay my taxes." You you you can't just keep doing it. Doesn't [ __ ] work, people. This is why the Laugher curve is real. The more you tax people, the less tax you collect. Like look at history. At the end of World War II, we have like a 90% tax rate. People love that. Oh, they get hardons for it. Then you look at did we collect more or less money per taxpayer than we do now with a lower tax rate? Drum roll, please. The answer is less. you collect less. So, it might make you feel emotionally good, but the people who can leave leave. Uh, and then people will tax shelter the [ __ ] out of everything. And by the way, they will just not produce. Read um Atlas Shrugged. I if Dude, dude, if you were taxing me at 90%, ask yourself how long I would keep doing this. The answer is zero more days. I would be like, I'm not going to work for the government. 90%. That's ridiculous. So, you just go, I'm just I'm gonna go write poetry. I'm going to go be invisible [clears throat] and write poetry. Like, what the [ __ ] What are you thinking?

>> So, anyway,

>> yeah,

>> that one winds me up.

>> Um, and then on another, California had a bad week in tax policy. Um, this is from the redheaded liberal. California's jock tax forces pro athletes who don't live in the state to fork over a percentage of their yearly income. based on the number of days they work in California. Donald received 178K for winning the Super Bowl. He owes California 249,000.

>> That is wild.

>> Yeah.

>> Yep. I mean, look, cool, do it. But you will see fast enough. The weather isn't that good here. [laughter] Weather's nice. It's not that nice. So, and the bad news is this is what everybody does, and this is why I want to punch the Republican party in the face,

>> is they're doing the same thing internationally. I want half your bridge.

>> Yeah.

>> I want this. I want that. Like, ah, I'm going to take your [ __ ] oil. Like, okay. Like, people are going to work around you. They're going to work around you.

>> That's actually a really good point that we are in a sense taxing other countries through terrorists and stuff like that. And that's why they're now like, "Okay, well, we'll just go and get these alternative options." So,

>> that is correct. And yes, I am well aware that the importer pays the tax, but in reality, do they really?

>> It tends to be something that's shared on both sides. Uh, plus you just piss people off. Seduce. Seduce. That would be my advice.

>> And speaking of seduction, Drew, are we there?

>> We are there. It's that time now.

>> It is that time. Over here to my left is my favorite human in the world. We're a few minutes early, so I don't want to panic you, but if you're ready, we're going to invite my wife. I can't believe that it's already timed. Today went fast, man.

>> Yeah, we were cooking.

>> Uh, so Lisa and I filmed an episode together on the Women of Impact channel, which this is the second time that we've done something together. The first time her audience hated me with a totality that is hard to quantify. Which is utterly fascinating. And the bad news is, and admittedly I had a slightly different community back then, but my community hated her. Uh, they were convinced that Lisa wears the pants and that I'm a narcissist. So, we'll see what happens. But Lisa had the idea. Uh, I don't know if you want to explain to people what your idea was. I thought it was

Brilliant. I thought it was awesome.

And we had the trailer queued up. You want the trailer? Let's have the trailer kick it off.

We'll defin Well, I want her to set it up first. Give people a little bit of a teaser. Everybody, my wife, my wife, everybody. How dare you?

Cuz we're on fire today. We're burning it up. Let's go, Drew. Come on now. Where's the?

There it is. Here all day, guys. Want a t-shirt if I knew?

What's up, fellas? What's up?

There you go. Good morning.

All right. Switch a little. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

And then chat, let us know. We're going to be sharing a microphone today.

Okay, there we go. She let me wear pants. You guys are all going to be about that.

Um, so, okay. Lisa comes to me and says she has an idea. She wants to do an episode. And I said, "This is brilliant. This this is an amazing idea. It might be suicide for your channel, but it is an incredible episode idea. You want to tell the people what the idea was?"

Um, so what I think I'll say is um why it was important because running a female channel that is trying to empower women, I have a lot of women who have been scarred from relationships. A lot of um women have been scarred like from infidelity to abuse to coercive control. And so I show up every day to support them, to give them what they need. And when you announce publicly that you were voting for Trump, I got a lot of hate followers.

You lost followers. I lost followers. I got hate. Friends, a few friends literally just stopped talking to me. Friends that I would hang out with like just stopped texting me.

So wild. So what was important to me? Oh, sorry. Actually, then on the side over the last year, how long when was the elections?

Year and a half ago. So, for a year I've had I won't name any freaking names cuz I promised them.

But you'd know them. So, I know a lot of people and um a lot of women come to me saying either I voted for Trump, I can't say anything or my husband voted for Trump and I can't say anything. That really broke my heart and made me realize how many people are struggling behind the scenes because this is a thing that can in public get backlash but in your relationship it may still be a beautiful relationship and that not may not be a hurdle. So for me I thought I said babe are you okay with coming on because my northstar is actually helping people. I want to be liked. I really want to be liked but my northstar is actually helping people. So once I realized that this is actually a problem people aren't talking about it. Why do I show up on camera and do what I do? It's my north star. So, I was like, I can't hide from it anymore. I can't worry about my community hating me because I am being authentic and real and really trying to help couples and women. So, anyway, that kind of sets us. I'm sweating.

Um, can you hit us with some Macy? Yeah. A thank you.

Of course. Let's throw up the trailer really quick. Um, and let's kind of get uh this going so that way we get a behind the scenes early preview. The episode just dropped, right?

It just dropped. And by the way, behind the scenes here at Impact Theory, we are obsessed with data. And I'm normally like at 6:010 in the morning, 10 minutes in.

6:010. 6 610 at like 6:10, 6:20, I'm like checking my clickthrough rate and my retention. I haven't checked it because I was like, I need to be emotionally sober about why I did it. And if I went before I came on here and got read a lot of hate. I think.

Say you should check the numbers. Just don't read the comments. No, I won't. I didn't check the numbers. I didn't. Yeah. And unfortunately, it's right there on your bloody laptop. So, I just went and bloody saw the numbers. That's all. Okay. Good. Okay. Good. All right.

All right. And here is the trailer for the episode. 3 to 6% of all US marriages are between a Democrat and a Republican and face a 38% higher risk of separation. I'm a feminist and you're a traditionalist. I'm Greek Orthodox. You're an atheist. But then you went and voted for Trump. So when people look at us and they're like, "How the hell do you guys make it work?" What do you put those attributes to?

To betray yourself is to doom the marriage from the start. I went from the stay-at-home wife to now a full-time business partner. How have you been able to not resent me? I'm not interested in being married to a man. Do you still believe I'm worth following? And if you don't, now's the time to tap out. Woo! Man, your your teen is your fumble, by the way, for me to pull. You have some good lines.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. I think there were some some way spicier lines in the actual real recording. So,

Um, this is this is definitely going to be an interesting conversation. We're going to get some, uh, feedback in the chat. So, if you guys have any questions, drop them. But off the bat, just watching that trailer, I guess, what was the conversation like behind closed doors? I know we'll see some of that in the episode. But you guys have been married forever, so this is not the first time somebody seen red, somebody seen blue. Maybe politics, maybe in other aspects. Did this become a new situation, or was this like, oh, this reminds me of the thing from year three that we got to?

This really became a new situation. So, I think everybody in this community is going to understand Trump is a different phenomenon.

Mhm. And the thing that surprised me was I'd been saying I'm probably going to vote for Trump for months and nobody said a peep. And then when I said, "Okay, yeah, I mean, as of right now today, unless something changes, I am voting for Trump." And then all of a sudden, like [ __ ] popped off. That surprised me.

Mhm. And then the next thing that surprised me was Lisa really got mad and like came in hot one day and was like, "Okay, I need to understand like how on earth you can be voting for Trump. I've, you know, I'm losing all these subscribers and uh like people are really making me think about the fact that this guy said to grab a woman by the we talked about many times."

And so that's when I was like, "Okay, slow down. Tell me what's actually bothering you. Because if you think I'm voting for him because now secretly I want to run out and grab a bunch of women by the hoo-ha, you're very confused on what I see."

And so then by breaking it down into what what are the actual issues? But that made me realize like if you're not paying attention like because Lisa is not political, she doesn't deal with that. She completely outsources that to me. I handle all the investments. Um she can't vote anyway. But, you know, even if she could, I believe strongly that we would come to a consensus. And if we didn't, whatever. Like, I don't need my wife to vote the way that I vote. But because she's not going to engage in that stuff, she's going to ask me like, "Okay, walk me through the different issues, blah, blah, blah." So, in that scenario, I realized if you're not paying attention, Trump just seems like a demon. And so, that was like, oh man, we really are at a different political moment.

Um, and then one thing I'd want to add is growing up, it was never a big deal. like in England and look maybe it's changed I haven't lived the fact that two people were together and had political differences so I mentioned this in the episode but my dad voted Labor and he was in finance and my mom voted conservative and she was a stay-at-home supportive wife and so I would hear often my mom be like yeah your dad votes for labor I think you know money is like our finances and where we're going is actually really important so that's why I vote for conservative I would go to my dad like, "Dad, why do you vote for Labor?" He's like, "Because I would rather lose more money than gain money, but I would, sorry, I I don't mind losing more money from taxes and stuff like that. What I really care about is Labor telling me that they're going to get the Turks out of Cypress." So, Turkey invaded Cyprus. That was what my dad cared about. So, I just grew up in a world where you can have two people from different opinions caring about different things and then respecting each other. So, Tom and I have lived our lives like kind of with very similar thoughts. the first time you weren't voting for Trump and it wasn't until this time that I was like okay he's changed his mind I support him we're talking through it but the world is freaking is literally freaking out and that was where I was like something has changed in society in the world that no longer existed when I was a kid that's where it was like this is now important that we cannot ignore.

Copy um a lot of people are asking whether your political you haven't you not voting haven't voted.

So here's the truth I I I can't vote I'm not Um, I'm a um what are they called?

Card holder. Legal alien.

Got it. Got it. That always made me laugh. Um, so I can't vote. But here's the thing. If I could, and I actually didn't get a chance to say this in the episode. If I could, I don't know if I would have voted because I despise Trump more than anything. Like a you called him a moral monster, and that's exactly the right words. As a woman, I cannot vote for a moral monster. I just can sleep at night and be proud of myself. The problem is there was the other side uh the Democrats where certain things were happening that I that I also think were taking the rights away from women. So for instance, why were you laughing?

She's not American, so deport her. Oh.

Well, we actually talk about that as well. So um I also noticed the other side were also taking rights away from women. So the fact that um and I don't necessarily talk about this in public, but that a man she says in a public form.

Yeah. But that a man can go into a woman's dressing room, just say that he is woman, and it's okay that he walks around naked with his penis out. Like, I don't know if you saw that video with that. In fact, you guys showed it. That woman that was freaking out in the gym, she's like, I'm black, I'm a lesbian, and I'm telling you this isn't right.

And so, that also impacts me and that also bothered me that I think women's rights are being lost over there. So, the truth is I think I would have been really freaking stuck in the middle. So I know that isn't concrete answer.

And then um. So hold on just to wrap that up. So this was part of how I felt when Lisa came to me was like listen you have you're a good moral thinker but you're not politically active. And so my big beef was people are making decisions in a way that are from where I'm sitting completely nonsensical because they don't even know what they want the world aimed at. They don't know what politician means what. They just know headlines. They know they're getting heat for this that or the other. And so when we had the conversation, it was walk me through what's your northstar? Like where do you want to get? What do you care the most about? And then let's look at the different candidates. And if you end up walking away going, okay, I can't vote for that guy because I don't share. Like if Lisa had said, I don't care about the economic survival of the middle class. That doesn't matter to me. I don't care about sliding into socialism. That doesn't matter to me. I just can't have a guy that would have ever in his life said something like that. And that's my northstar is abortion is the only thing I care about. And so, yeah, if I had the ability to vote, I would do that. And I'm really hurt or disgusted or whatever that you're voting the way that you're voting. But that's not how the conversation went. Conversation went, okay, lay out your north star. Oh, it's very similar to mine. Uh, let me tell you why I think he's the right play. No one can know. You can't see the future clearly, but here's how I think this is all going to play out. Um, and then she walked away not necessarily going, "Okay, like if I had a chance to vote, I too would vote for Trump." But she was like, "I at least understand where you're coming from." Because I she came into it feeling like, "Wait, if you could vote for that guy there there is a disconnect between how I've mentally mapped you and the way that you actually are." And at the end of the conversation, she was like, "Actually, no. My mental map of you is accurate. the way that you see the political situation is very different than I assumed. And so that's the thing that I'm always trying to get people to do is what are your base assumptions? Like the things that you're doing are predicated on something. Now, you can attack my base assumptions. Like in hindsight, the thing that I got wrong about Trump, I never could have um I wildly underestimated how chaotic he was going to be. Even though I knew he was going to be chaotic, but like I didn't see the I'm going to take Greenland by force if I have to. Like I just did not. That was not on my bingo card.

Um, and I didn't think that he would be as terrible economically as he is from from an immediate like I don't care about deficits perspective. Now, maybe he actually helps us grow our way out of this. So, it would have been a different debate. I think I would come to the same conclusion because the the way that I map Harris is so negative that I just I can't see it because she's running again or like throwing her hat in the ring. So, I'm going to get a chance to revisit it and like, okay, you've got the reality of Trump now versus the um Harris campaigning again. Do do I go, "Oh [ __ ] actually like this all makes sense. [ __ ] I wish I had voted for her." It's possible. Highly unlikely given the things she's been saying so far, but you never know. I I'm not somebody who's gonna double down just because I voted one way in the past that I'm gonna.

Whoa. You okay? Yeah. I just read that apparently I look tiny, so I've just asked for a pillow.

We um we hear this all the time. Thanksgiving comes around, politics divides families, people get argued and stuff like that. So, I have a two-part question. One, when those friends and those people kind of ghosted you, did you ever get somebody from the other side saying, "Hey, you should divorce him. You shouldn't be with him no more. You need to get out that relationship. And then the second question, the follow-up to that would be, did you get any pressure from your family or now that you guys have talked about this publicly? Has people in the family started discussions getting any heated and things like that?

So, I read out a bunch of comments from people, fans, things like that on the fact that like, haha, I'm going to gloat the day that you guys get divorced, like things like that. I read it out on in the episode to really show what humans are like when they don't actually know you and they're just uh wishing for your demise because of how you have what you've said publicly, specifically him. So, I did get a lot of that. Friends, it was um they just ghosted me. Like, it was someone that was specifically very political. I was friends with them. I would go for dinner with them once a month and the next time Tom announces that he's voting for Trump, literally ghosted me. Wouldn't reply to my texts. And so it was my assumption that that was it. Regarding family, they know him just like I do. This man has been in my life for 25 years. So while the world just sees a couple married, one person votes one way, one person votes another, and they make an assumption. Let me just share a couple of stories with you. My mom got into a fight with a British guy at her house. It he was putting in carpet and she got into a fight with him. My mom is my height. This guy was a big dude, British guy. Tom stepped in, stepped in front of my mom and basically protected her.

Um I one of the worst stories in my life. Worst physical altercation of my adult life.

It's true. And it was because of my mom. Um one of the most horrific stories of my life. I won't share it on this live, but something happened to me that was so mortifyingly embarrassing. No one knew. You knew. and you just hugged me and kept me safe and held my emotions and you didn't run. When I had gut issues for over a year and sex was really hard, you didn't run. Like I could list you a thousand different times that no one knows when this man showed up for me. So imagine he shows up for my mom, he shows up for my family. So when he announces he's ving for Trump, he's already got 23 years with my entire family who have seen him over and over and over again. Show up, be protective, be supportive, uh be open and emotional when needed. Like he he shows up.

So while someone goes, "Oh, Democrat, Republican or feminist, Republican, voted for Trump means divorce." You're missing 10,000 little moments that this man showed up for me. So the fact that because he's voted for Trump, my whole family is going to disassociate was crazy. Now a lot of our family though disagree with him. In those instances, I just stay quiet.

So do I to be honest with you. So here's one lesson I learned very early on. You don't have to convince people.

So it's like if somebody feels I'm living my life in the wrong way, first of all, I'm actually open. If they have an insight that I've missed, I'm going to listen. So, it's like, cool, tell me in what way I am blind. Um, I know I'm blind to something. Maybe you really do see clearly the thing that I'm missing. So, I'll hear them out.

Uh, make sure that I understand them. I'll depending on the conversation. I don't always do this, but sometimes I'll even say, "Okay, this is what I hear you saying if I understood your position." Yes, you do. Cool. Awesome, man. Let me sit with it. Let me think about it. You know, I I understand it. I don't necessarily agree, but like I get it and I really appreciate you taking the time to explain it. by the way, because I actually mean that. It doesn't come across insincere. Um, and look, I understand people are usually doing it because they want to convince you, but I so value removing my own blind spots that when people will take their time even to criticize something in me because I don't feel that I have to convince them to keep living my life the way that I want to live it, I don't feel any sense of danger. There's no like, oh my god, if I don't win this argument, then I have to do something differently. It's like, oh, tell me your pitch. I'm still going to love you. You can be as upset or traumatized over this as you want. You're not going to get that like push back from me. Um it's pretty rare that I feel like, oh, I'm going to need to convince this person. Uh and so I remember in the early days, we used to get in these collisions with Lisa's dad over diet and he was just convinced that the way that I was low carb, the way that I was eating was just like terrible for my health. and she would like prod me to like, no, no, no, persuade him that your way is right. And I'm like, I don't see a positive outcome from that. He's not going to be persuaded. People usually aren't. and I don't need uh to convince him in order to keep doing what I'm doing because I have the first order consequences of my choices which is I feel better uh I look better I find it easy to maintain blood sugar, fat composition, all that. So it's like what's he really going to tell me because I'm doing it.

And I've just found when you don't try to convince the world that you're right, things get a lot easier.

Nice. Um, we got a super chat that. Question. We do from hourly beach eater.

That's a funny username. Uh, Lisa, what do you think it does to the young female brain if they have conservative values, but they will be asked socially for being authentic about it?

That's interesting. Like canceled.

Sorry, can you repeat the question? So, um, what do you think it does to the young female brain when they basically have to lie about what if they're conservative, they have to lie because publicly everybody wants a nice liberal young girl? Yeah.

Does the lying do something to their brain? Oh, that's such a great question. Thank you for that. Thank you for explaining as well. Um, I I absolutely think it will. I think that look, there'll be two sides to it. Teaching women to stay silent in that instance. Obviously, it's horrific. Like, the thing that I fight against is that women should be able to say what they think without being silenced, without um without having consequences to them saying their opinion. And so in this case, yeah, I really do think that women are going to learn that. Now, I also think, oh god, it's like that's partly why I did the episode because as a woman, voting for a guy that says it's okay to touch a woman there, to be in the Epstein files, to do all the horrific things he's done is also troubling to me because I want to make sure that women know what a man should be. So, God, that's a really complicated answer. It's just if I had a daughter and she was like, I want to vote for Trump. I would do the same thing with you that I did with you where I was like, all right, let's take down each thing because I wouldn't want her to think that a woman is less for voting for a man like that.

And how do you deal though with your friends are pressuring you to be some kind of way, you know, especially young girls are so prone to giving into peer pressure. Yeah. I mean, look, if I had a daughter, I would teach her things like how to speak up when no one um agrees with you, how to set boundaries. What's that level of disrespect that you're not willing to take if someone comes at you? Because the truth is, I want to be really open to, you said it earlier, right? To like being wrong. If there's something I'm not seeing, I want to be open to it. So, I would need to also teach my daughter to be open to other people's opinions. But absolutely, like, let's not get it twisted. I would absolutely also teach my daughter to stick by her own thoughts, her own opinions, and her own conviction. Now, as a teenager, it's going to be really hard. I didn't grow up in a social media era, so obviously you've got that compounding. Um, but the truth is is that obviously me in at my age, I would just disconnect. If someone comes at me, I would be like, "Okay, then you don't appreciate who I am as a human. I have women that vehemently disagree with you. Vehemently, but they're still my friends.

But they're still my friends. and you know them and I love them and they've never. Your friend group as a which no one should be surprised that you have lovely friends uh because you're going to attract the people that are like you but um let me ask you in the episode which you guys should all watch when the live ends not before uh you should definitely check it out but what was the question because she even said to me I'm going to ask you hard questions and are you okay I said you can ask me anything you want it will be hilarious if you're the first person to ask me a question that I'm not willing to answer which she was not I answered everything. But what was the question you were most worried about asking me?

Asking you? Yeah. So, because I knew who you were, there was a moment you said it earlier that I thought I knew you, but the fact that you voted for him, do you have you now changed your mind? So, I think the hardest thing for me probably was talking about abuse because again, Trump grabbing a woman and that's just obvious.

But what were you worried about? Did you really think that I would say like, "Oh, no. That's perfectly acceptable." No. What was I worried about? All right. Thank you for pushing me. I was truly I think worried more because I know you sexual abuse. You would never You've never once um even physically hurt me. Obviously, sexual abuse is you've never done before. So, um for me, I think the thing that I was worried about was abortion.

There we go. That's what I thought when you asked it. I was like, "Oh, this is the one she was worried about." That was the one I was worried about because that was the one that I was like, how how can you live in a world where you can say a woman can go and get raped and she can't have an abortion? That's so hard. I was like, you just can't. You just can't. Like, I can't.

What would you do if I was like, yeah, that's how it should be. Yeah. Then we need to talk because going I brought this up on the uh in the interview and I've never said it publicly but that was the first time is I had an abortion when I was 18 and so now that's part of my I don't want to say identity cuz that's a bit strong. It's part of my experience. So if you're like yeah I I think that that's evil. I'd have to reestablish who you are, why you think it's evil, and if that then rubs against our value system, and we spoke about this a lot, then we would have a problem because it's where our value systems would collide. That's where the problem is. And I even asked, do you think abortion is evil? Like I had to ask you that straight out because sometimes it does become that black and white. And for me, that was the really hard thing. And it's still hard for me even to talk now about it on the live. So, apologies if I'm stumbling a little. It's just.

Yeah, it's interesting. This is um like all things for me are relatively easy to discuss. Like I.

Was about to ask. Oh, please. I have a relationship question. I know you have those. Uh I'm in a relationship with a lovely Brazilian woman, but I am from South Louisiana. Extremely logical and very Republican. She is mega liberal. Any tips on that dynamic struggle? Mucho defi deficil.

So he didn't mention religion there, but we also spoke about the difference in our religion. So the episode really is all the things that a lot of couples don't survive and I bring out stats on each section but one of them was religion. I met Tom I was Greek Orthodox and he was atheist but he still got christened. So I don't know if that's part of your problem but that was also something that we spoke about and then I'll leave you to say how did we get through it?

So for me it's a really simple question. uh you're going to spend a lot more time interacting with somebody's core values than you are whatever the surface level liberal, Republican, whatever that that stuff is um far less material. Are you having fun with the person? Do you guys enjoy each other's company? Uh are there things you enjoy doing together? If you're down, are they going to pick you up? Uh are they somebody that you're invested in such that you would pick them up and they're down? Those things matter a lot. Core values matter a lot just because they seep out in a lot of things. But I imagine I share a lot of core values with people that are exactly polar opposite of me politically. And the reason is I think from an evolutionary perspective, you have to have cohesion in the group. And we're living in a weird time where it feels like uh Democrats and Republicans, which by the way, I don't identify as a Democrat or Republican. I think being on a team is a stupid idea. But if you take them as proxies for leaning left or leaning right, I definitely have a temperament that leans right as we sort of map these things. And I think evolutionarily you need people that both lean left and lean right. Um, and so you wouldn't be able to have cohesive society if underlying that though we didn't have shared core values. And so be if you have shared core values with the person that you're in a relationship with regardless of liberal Republican um those are just methods of creating a group dynamic such that there's no pathology right because the left has pathology the right has pathology and the way that we keep those personalities from spiraling off into space is that they keep each other in check. So that to me says evolution knows you guys are going to share core values. you just represent different sides of the potential pathological um spectrum. So you you check each other and when you don't share the core values, you have a problem. But if you guys do and you have fun with each other, I don't see an issue. So it becomes about identifying because he's asking the question for a reason. So there's something that they're butting heads on. It could be that he needs her to believe what he believes to be comfortable. Okay, that's a you problem, not a her problem. It could be that she's overly emotional and it's not about her being liberal. It's about her being emotional and so he doesn't know how to interface with a world where emotions are a thing. Part of the reason like for me a major breakthrough for me was when I realized that estrogen in and of itself makes being uncomfortable in a problem perfectly acceptable. Then my wife made sense to me all of a sudden because I'm like, wait, you're telling me there's a problem, but you don't want a solution. The way that I feel when there's a problem is that like it is a visceral biological need to make that problem go away.

And so I realized, oh, you don't actually have that feeling. So you're not sitting in the same feeling I am. You feel completely fine there. And bad feelings to you are not a thing that I have to get away from. And it reminded me that pain is actually broken up into two dimensions in the brain. They you can actually track this. There's the dimension that said this stimulus is painful. And then there's the dimension that says pain is bad. And they're are separate things. And so estrogen makes it such that a complicated problem that may make you cry, the fact that you're crying and emotional about it isn't bad. And so men and women just like collide off of each other because we have what I'll liken to a biological imperative to solve that problem. And so now you're asking me like to sit over here starving to death while you eat a meal. So the thing you're going through is deeply satisfying to you and it's deeply unsatisfying to me. And the longer we spend together, the hungrier I get to get out of this state, the stronger my impulse is to flee and go solve the problem. And so that like opposite biological drives is so jarring when you're put together in a relationship. So he may need to find his way to navigate through that because if she expects you to feel the way she feels, problem. If you expect her to feel the way that you feel, problem. So it's like you just have to have a mental switch that goes, "Oh, a contribution that I make to my wife and my marriage is I'm going to sit here deeply unpleasant to make her feel good." and that later she's going to need to reciprocate in some way. And when you have that balance, you're fine. But that one is maybe the single biggest way that men and women misunderstand each other.

Oh, that was good. That was a banger. Um, we got another super chat.

We do from Joey. Super chat. Super chat. Lisa and Tom, do you think there's more to the Charlie Kirk assassination than meets the eye? Do you believe Erica Kirk is innocent? There have been too many lies revealed and my gut reveal tells me I can't trust her. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner, Lisa.

Yeah, I know. So, here's the thing. I I can't comment on that because I'm just not knowledgeable enough and haven't done a deep dive. So, um.

Okay, let me ask you. Let me make it relevant to you. Okay, cuz I know. Do should we trust all women no matter what?

You should trust anyone like the truth is trust No, trust is to be earned. So, whether they're female, like let's be honest, whether you got a vagina or a penis, it shouldn't actually matter. The truth is is have they earned it? Now, here's the problem that I've also spoken about on my life is that as a woman, I do trust I innately trust women more, which is why.

Oh. Say more. You innately trust women more.

Yeah. Like instinctually, I think I would now cuz here's the thing. Um, Gain Maxwell. Yeah. I You have Epstein come up to me trying to chat me up, trying to get me on his plate. Not going to trust you. Gain Maxwell comes up to me. She's like, "Hey, you're great. Oh my." And now imagine I'm not a confident woman and she's super confident. She's absolutely gonna be more alluring to a younger. Let me let me clarify the question here. Is it that you have naturalbuilt defenses for male aggression, which would make all the evolutionary sense in the world, and you're just defenseless against female aggression, which is far more subtle, manipulative, etc., etc., Or has life actually taught you that women aren't manipulative at the same rate that men are?

Both. Interesting.

I also think there are higher consequences for me. People may disagree, but I just think of it as higher consequences for me to trust a man and him betray me than trusting a woman and she can give you a scenario that might help with the Charlie Kirk situation. This is morbid. We're going to go dark for a second. Um Tom unfortunately passes away.

In a public execution. Damn that. Um. That escalated fast. Yeah. We go live on a Friday to celebrate him. And.

How many days after? Um six f four days after. Okay. Um we do 2 million live concurrent. It's our biggest live ever. Um the following Monday for team meeting. Would you be on the call and how much money we raise from our lives and super chats?

4 seconds after this man passes away. I'm on the floor and won't be able to get out for years. So, the truth is for me, I'm not coming on the live. Two million people. Sorry, guys. I don't care. I'm My heart is effing broken. How the hell am I going to even get up?

Let alone. I think that answered your question, Joey. I think that answered your question right there, Joey. She's not She's She's not uh on the on the stadium stage.

On TV. She's out on the stadium stage with fireworks. I don't know, Joey. I don't know, Joey.

Yeah. So, uh do do I know whether I I get why people don't trust her. Her um emotions seem out of line with what I think people would expect, especially from a grieving woman. Uh and there certainly is some of that. So, um she has a far more masculine temperament. I think that that's the read that I get and that's always going to be there's a level of distrust to that. I think Lisa actually gets some of that because she has a more masculine temperament. Um, I do not trust women more than I trust men. I think that both men and women are equally capable of wild manipulations. We just do it in very different ways. Um, so, but I get why because the immediiacy of male threats are so like instant. I get why the threat level detection goes up on men and I think that's wise. Women are going to have to like gone girl you. It's going to play out a lot more slowly, but it's horrifying. So, people do have to be careful.

Can I add one more thing, actually? Yeah. But here's the thing. If Tom before he died said to me, "This is our lives, babe. Let's say for 10 years we've been fighting it and we've been grinding it and he's like, "Babe, if I'm if anything happens to me, I need you to push through. I need you to to execute our vision. You better believe I'm showing up on that live." So, I also wanted to add that that I don't know the situation enough, but she could be fighting for her man. I would fight for him to the end of time. So, that also could be a different side to it that um we may not be seeing right now.

It's a good point. Good addendum. All right. That's all we got. Boys and girls. Go check out the episode. Oh, we did have a super chat come in.

Yep. Right at the last buzzer. Uh from Blake Bullion, Tom and Lisa, what are your thoughts on doing an episode once a month discussing cultural, political, economic, and current events that you notice men and women generally disagreeing on? It might help bridge the gap between.

All right, this feels like a setup because Lisa and I have been talking about doing we used to do a show called Relationship Theory. Lisa wants to relaunch it as Love Theory. It's like basically a call-in show. So, it wouldn't be us touching on cultural issues. We would do some reacts and stuff like that. Um it definitely wouldn't be political. Lisa hates politics, but uh yeah, so making that a beat that we do occasionally here on the show, I love and certainly Drew has um tried to work more fun cultural stuff into the show. It's just there's been so much happening recently uh that it's been tough. So, I think we would do it as a separate show is the final punchline. Mixing things tends not to work. But all right, everybody, here's what I want you to do. Go out right now. Watch. It's on Lisa's channel, which is Lisa Billyu on YouTube. The show is called Women of Impact.

Link in chat. The guest is Tom Billu. And uh we go there we go. We go hard in the paint on some stuff like if you're in a relationship with somebody that you don't always see eye to eye on. Watch that episode. I think it's great. Also um supporting Lisa's channel is huge. I appreciate it, guys. You will get a lot out of it. Go behind enemy lines, by the way. If you want to be good with the opposite sex, go behind enemy lines. Uh, so men, you will get a tremendous amount by watching women when they think that men aren't watching. Uh, it's a lot of fun. But the episode was great. I had a really great time. Thank you. I thought you did such a good job with the interview. I told you that privately. I was very impressed with you as an interviewer. Uh, I do a lot of shows, man. I'm telling you, like that one. She does a much better job than I do as an interviewer keeping it on track. I'm trying to get an answer to this thing, asking questions in groups. It It really was great. So, watch it, guys. Uh, I think you'll get a lot out of it. All right, thank you guys all so much. We will see you on Friday. Until then, my friends, be legendary.

Oh, I wasn't sure if we'd get that if we'd get be the hero of your own life. There it is. All right, word. All right, everybody. We'll see you Friday. Peace.

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