The World Is Entering the ‘Loss Domain’ — This Is When Societies Become Unhinged

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another rousing edition of the Tom Billy Show live. I am joined by Drew.

"What's up, Drew? How we doing?"

"Happy morning."

"Happy morning indeed. Mason is back. It's good to see you. Welcome. Take good care of the community today, if you would. Good sir. Behind the camera, we have Eric. Is G there? No G. All right. Eric's flying solo. Let's see what happens, everybody."

"And speaking of what's happening, Governor Ron DeSantis declares the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations. Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan collide over whether Hitler was very effing cool or not. Japan's economic troubles continue apace as debt threatens to finally engulf their entire economy. China fires rhetorical shots at Japan about accepting that they're a defeated country, as tensions between them both continue to rise. XAI plans to redefine the size and scope of what an IPO is so they can build data centers in space. Not a sentence that I ever expected to say, but that's where we're at. More alleged Somali-driven scams are popping up, this time in Ohio. And Australia has made it illegal for children under 16 to be on social media."

"Drew, we are at a fascinating part of the timeline here in terms of nothing feels stable. You've got, in fact, one thing that was just happening before we went live is you've got Thailand and Cambodia seemed like they were going to squash the beef. Not so much. Thailand is now pushing into Cambodia. People are expecting that they're going to take it. You've got Zelensky rejecting peace. Uh, Europe, at least according to Putin, Europe actively trying to sabotage the US's attempts to bring peace to that region. Uh, everybody has historically said that Japan is the one place that is escaping all of the madness around, uh, when she hit 130% debt to GDP, that you've got about 18 months before you break into open violence, but Japan has been north of 250% and no problem. Uh, it does not look like they're going to escape that fate. They prolonged it, and there is something to learn there. But the fact that they're now on extremely shaky ground tells me that debt eventually comes for everybody."

"It's, it's interesting because all these things are breaking on the international scale and in different factions. They all kind of come down to, I didn't realize how much debt bothers people until you, I hear you like whispering in my ear now when I see like, uh, conflicts and it's like, oh, well, this all happened after this debt thing or after this economic insurgency after this e."

"There's so much when people do not feel economically calm, everything kind of happens downstream from that. It's so fascinating."

"100%. It, it is so. Writing my most recent deep dive, which will be coming out next week, it really is about what happens to people when they feel economically insecure. How do they begin to act? And we don't calm down and tighten our belt. We go into what the, um, Nobel Prize-winning economist, I don't know if he's an economist or a psychologist, anyway, Daniel Kahneman, um, wrote about something he called the lost domain. And he said when people go into the lost domain where they no longer believe that they're going to be able to work their way out of a financial problem, they think of COVID, think of the Great Depression. Um, they don't go, 'Okay, listen. Going to have to tide my belt. It's going to take me a few years to work my way back out of this, but there's a known way to build fiscal responsibility, and I'm just going to buckle down and do it.' That is not at all what people do. Once they click over into that lost domain, they build a new internal model of the world where risk is completely re-evaluated and all people think about is, can I get everything back in one move? So, if you've ever seen people at the roulette wheel, uh, playing poker, and all of a sudden they just start gambling totally nonsensically. They cover this in the movie Molly's Game where there was one player, always super disciplined. He realized that he got bluffed by a guy that doesn't even know how to play poker, and he just goes full tilt, completely unhinged, just betting maniacally on every hand, every time, thinking, 'Okay, I'm going to get it all back on this one.' And then once people start doing that, it, it is a downward spiral of just epic proportions. And that's what happens to the human psychology when we feel fiscally insecure. Everything becomes unhinged gambling, but we do it in formal channels. So we'll do it in, uh, the stock market. We'll do it in Pokémon cards. Pokémon cards is interesting because first of all, I'm so into TCG, but, uh, it is, I have a growing hypothesis that the hotter Pokémon cards is as a stand-in for all of those other asset classes that are way out on the risk curve."

"Um, that it is initially, you think, oh, this is a good sign. It means that things are really humming in the economy. But I think it is a very clear sign that people have become so convinced that they're in an only-up phenomenon that they'll even go place these huge bets on something as ephemeral as a Pokémon card."

"So, Pokémon cards have actually started to soften now. Uh, but TCG cards in general are still booming, which I think is a sign that we're sort of late bubble. We'll see."

"Yeah. Um, um, like you said, we're tracking this story breaking right now. Um, Thailand and Cambodia as fighting rages on. Trump intends to intervene, and we're going to get to, uh, Trump's rally in Pennsylvania, uh, later. But as of right now, do you think that there will be a blowback that can impact America? I know we got troops in Venezuela. I know we're watching Russia and Ukraine pretty well. This conflict doesn't seem like it would impact us, but yet Trump is keen on intervening and stopping it. Is that just him being..."

"If you, yes. If you think specifically about Cambodia and Thailand, this is not going to be something that has any major impact on us. It's not going to be something that has any major impact on the world. Neither of them control, um, chip supply or anything like that that we predicate our entire modern economy on. So you look at China and Taiwan, Japan, like that, like triangle is that should make everybody uneasy. First of all, Japan has been responsible effectively for the post, um, financial collapse boom with the yen carry trade. So, they've been propping up the global economy for a long time. So, anything bad that happens to their economy is going to have global impact. They also hold a massive amount of US debt. So, that's going to have an impact on the US. Anything that happens to the US is going to have have an impact on the rest of the world. So, if you're focusing on Asia, that's where you need to be looking. Now, if you're looking at what's going on between Thailand and Cambodia, I don't think it's a nothing burger, but I think it's one of many, many, many things that show that the world is in an increasingly unstable position. Now, to your earlier point, why is the world in an increasingly unstable position? It's because of debt and money printing. And so, the one argument that everybody has made for a long time is, well, Tom, like all this money printing that the US is doing, it's not a big deal, bro. What are you worried about? Like, everybody in the world is doing it. Yeah. Notice now that you're starting to see everybody fraying everywhere."

"Everywhere in the world is now income."

"Yes. Because unfortunately, you're playing a game of mathematics. And once you realize that capitalism really is a zero-sum game, you are battling for, um, economic resources. Like, I want to get them. You want to get them. I want to try to outpace you to get them. And so the whole game of, uh, economics, the whole game of political power, these things end up boiling down to one person is in charge, one person controls the money. And I don't mean that literally in terms of the economy, but in any like back and forth battle over something, even if you're just taking it as, uh, employer, employee, if you're taking it as, um, person selling, person buying, like everybody's trying to get the best deal for themselves. So once you understand the fractious nature of that, then you begin to understand why it becomes a problem globally. If everybody's feeling insecure, everybody realizes, uh-oh, I need to get these resources for themselves, they go into a loss aversion mode, their morality completely remaps. People suddenly feel that it's perfectly justified to march on another country, shoot you in the face, and take your [ __ ]. And this is where trying to get people to understand they're having a biological experience so that they will look back on human history and go, 'Oh, what do humans act like in moments like this?' because they want to believe that they sit outside of that historical truth. Um, and they don't. And once you start looking at history as merely a recitation of what humans act like in certain circumstances and that it's predicting your future, then suddenly history becomes a far more terrifying, b, you realize that the patterns really are looping, and c, that they're pointing to what's going to happen to all of us now. And so when I look at, okay, how's AI going to disrupt us? What's it going to look like when people start losing their jobs? Why are all these, um, conflicts popping off everywhere right now?"

"Um, you can really start to trace this back to economic insecurity. Now, as I wrote the latest deep dive, one thing that I realized is people just don't understand that we're all an economic unit, and we tell ourselves a far more beautiful story that we are spiritual units. If I had to round it to probably what is the algorithm that plays in people's minds. But the truth of how you move through the world is everything is predicated on specialization. So, um, you make music. I don't, because I'm not good at it. You are. And so, we have built modern society to make sure that we don't starve to death. Make sure that we don't have to worry about roving marauders coming in to, uh, rape our women, quite literally, uh, steal our assets, kill us. Um, and then the benefit from creating that stability and that protection is we can go, and now you go do that music thing. I'm going to go do this other thing over here. And once you get into that hyperspecialization, the whole world models itself or structures itself, a much better word, structures itself around economics. Period. End of story. And so then you're like, well, hold on a second. When people say money makes the world go round, what they're saying is that the very structure of our entire modern way of life is economics. And that's why when I look at AI coming in, the the way that it's going to disrupt things, which to put it very simply, it will almost certainly simply eradicate capitalism. And it's like, okay, right now people aren't loving capitalism. So, I get why they think that's a good thing. And honestly, on the other side, it probably is. But if you think about it this way, if it's like 1916, and I tell you, hey, on the other side of World War II, we have an unprecedented run of peace in the West. You would go, wait, I, we haven't, there's no World War I. What are you talking about? On the other side of World War II? What do you mean? And it's like, yeah, we're going to have to kill, I mean, if you, if you'll count communism, we're going to have to kill hundreds of millions of people. People would have been like, 'Wait, what?' Like, it will be very cold comfort to them that things get very stable on the other side of the most cataclysmic period. The 20th century was a level of bloodshed that's like, you, you got to go back to Genghis Khan before you start finding something like this."

"And so that's where I'm like, it's very easy to talk about like, hey, this is going to be great once we get rid of capitalism and everything's abundant. Yay. But we're going to have to go through something that is going to be rough."

"Yeah."

"In order to get there because people will go into the lost domain. Their world will be upending so quickly. We're all, and all of this is happening while the world has just been weakened viciously by an unending stream of debt and money printing."

"Uh, 1913 creating the central bank in the US. Uh, the adoption of modern monetary theory, which did have benefits. I want to always remind myself not to lose sight of how we actually ended up here. Had massive benefits, but also created these massive problems. And at some point, the the piper has to be paid. And so this moment feels like that. This is where the bill has come due."

"Okay. I want to go on a quick fractal about that though, because I think it's interesting. Um, we're going to cover this later in the show. SpaceX is going for a $1.5 trillion IPO. Elon Musk on the back of Tesla is set to be have a $1 trillion compensation package. There are a certain level of economics that are breaking what I think our founding fathers have thought about when we first invested. The, the one way I can kind of ground it is like, I think it was Rockefeller or Ford, one of those guys started public education. And it wasn't the government intervention, but they needed factory workers. So they then created the pipeline that then laid the foundation to become public education. So to this point of abundance on the other side of robotics and AI, everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows. I do see that that there is a possibility for that to happen. But I do feel like there is going to have to be a conversation about there's a c, all this wealth that is becoming that is now being generated. It does need to be converted into infrastructure improvements to help us transition along the way. Cuz similar to the railroad, yes, this is going to be a great positive, but somebody's going to have to actually pay the money to lay the track down. So somebody's going to have to put the money down to lay, get us from point A to point B. And I don't think the every man for himself now system that we have right now is going to facilitate that. And this is on the back of the Scott Galloway interview on Tuesday, which I know in a perfect world right now, our taxes just go into a black hole. But in a perfect world with a government with a balanced budget, we do want some of the higher earners to invest into the future. So that way the next generation can be able to get on the, whether it's the property ladder, whether it's the career ladder, they have that positive future in order to reap the abundance and become self-sustaining economic units themselves."

"Yes. All true. So the fascinating thing though is if you look at the railroads, for instance, some of the most important infrastructure that America ever laid, it was devastating for the investors. And there's almost certainly going to be something very similar that plays, it played out again in, um, the internet, and it will almost certainly play out again in AI, where the people that put all the upfront investment into the infrastructure, they end up not making money. They end up losing a lot of money. But then the people that build on the back of the infrastructure that got created, they do well. So, one thing that I have a feeling I'm going to have to start campaigning for though, it's such a weird time to be talking about this, cuz it's got a shelf life, but getting people to understand that what we have right now isn't capitalism. And so all the things when we blame capitalism, what we really mean is cronyism by the government. So, the government coming in and allowing for things like regulatory capture, um, overregulating industries so the free market actually isn't making sensical decisions, doing things like freezing rent so that the free market can't do its thing, bailing out banks so that nobody fails. And the whole idea behind capitalism is, hey, uh, you're go, you're going to play NFL and I'm putting you out on the field and good luck. And a whole lot of you are going to get your spines broken because you're just not strong enough for this game and you're so [ __ ] stupid that you walked out onto the field. Um, sorry. And so it's like, we'll have the stretchers to drag you off the field. Um, but we're not going to be buying all of your padding. We're not going to be doing anything other than saying these are the rules of the game and we'll call a foul if we see a foul and we'll get people that commit fouls off the field. Um, but other than that, like if you're too weak, you'll get snapped in half and that is what it is and you're going to have to pay your own hospital bills. That's capitalism. Now, I understand how that sounds to a modern audience. A modern audience has grown up in a world where stability can be taken for granted. Now, we're about to find out. Whoopsies. That was just a limited window and hope you enjoyed it. Hope you had a good time, but the vacation is over. And so now there's going to be this cognitive dissonance of, hold on a second. For the last like 80 years, I was able to take for granted that things were peaceful. Countries didn't invade other countries, not in the West."

"That this was all a very stable thing that governments, we all agree have an obligation to take care of the weakest among us. Uh, sure, that creates all this opportunity for theft and fraud and all of that, but whatever. Like, apparently money is very easy to come by and so we just deal with that to make sure that if a bank collapses, we solve it. Um, if somebody is, uh, sick, that we cover it, like all of those things. And so people have that in their hearts that that is the right thing, the just thing, the way that God intended it to be. Like, fill in the blank of how you want to say it. And when I tell people that, nope, we need to go back to the, you're going out on the foot. If you so desire to go out on the football field, you are on your own. Now, if you win, woo, buddy, like there's huge upside and you will be able to take care of your family and pass on generational wealth and all of that. Uh, but if you lose, you lose and it hurts. And if you don't allow for that clearing mechanism of people getting hurt, they don't get to play the game anymore. They're pulled off, they're done. Um, you get corruption on the field. This analogy is going to fall apart very fast, but that is where we're at now is the game is so fake. It's so rigged. It's how I felt about re-watching NBA clips after we saw that there was a whole bunch of gambling being done by the players. I was like, 'Oh my god, like this is so heartbreaking to see these guys just like turn this into WWE.' I was mortified. Uh, so that is effectively where we're at. The government has turned capitalism into the WWE. The winners are already decided ahead of time based on who has the politician's ear. Uh, the fact that Ilhan Omar made $30 million in like two years once getting into Congress is the most insane [ __ ] I've ever heard. Now, hey, I haven't looked deeply. Maybe she is the most gangster investor ever. And she's just like, got it like that."

"In which case, please make a course because I would like to learn from you. Um, but my gut instinct is that just isn't true. And this is another case like Nancy Pelosi. This has that side of things like this is not a because I'm Somali thing."

"This is a, yeah. When you're inside the government, you are a part of the political class. You know what's coming. You know that people need you to do something for them. And so you just get into the tit-for-tat corruption [ __ ] that runs all of politics everywhere. Gain and retain power like it's just the game. So trying to campaign to say capitalism is good, crony capitalism is bad, and we need to stop calling it capitalism because it's just tricking people. Socialism bad, free market good. And yes, it's got like a three to 10 year, just to give myself a lot of flexibility time horizon, and then unless AI hits some sort of ceiling where it asymptotes and we're just not able to make progress, which I don't see any reason to believe that's true. It is just a foregone conclusion."

"All right, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Trump was on the campaign trail, um, yesterday, and me and Tom were laughing before the show started of just some of the sound bites that were coming out of there. But speaking of, um, Ilhan, El, I really can't, Ilhan Omar, I can't, uh, I can't believe that that's a president talking. This is so crazy."

"It's, it's nuts. So let's jump into this first clip."

"Individuals from Somalia in the group, please raise your hand. That's for Minnesota. You know, that's called the great big Minnesota scam with one of the dumbest governors ever in history. I love this Elon Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little, the little turban. The little turban turb does nothing but [ __ ]. She's always complaining. She comes from a country where I mean, it's considered about the worst country in the world, right? They have no military. They have no nothing. They have no parliament. They don't know what the hell the word parliament means. They have nothing. They have no police. They, they police themselves. They kill each other all the time. I love she comes to our country and she's always complaining about the Constitution allows me to do this. The const, we ought to get her the hell out. She married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother."

"That'll be wild, by the way, if that ends up being true."

"We'll see. We'll see. But, uh, yeah. So, anyway, look, Trump is endlessly amusing, and I know that I'm supposed to be, um, I suppose I am mortified, but I'm also entertained, and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't. I look at this and I see this is who comes to power in a moment like this. Once you realize you cannot trust the political class, then you want somebody who does not sound like the political class. They sound like anything but that is certainly him. Um, I don't admittedly, I don't categorize him into a racist box. That doesn't strike me from the things that I've seen. But it is so easy to look at him through that lens and be like, 'Bro, when you're saying, I don't know if we have the clip, but he goes, uh, basically Somalia is a [ __ ] hole country. Afghanistan is a [ __ ] hole country.' And there was one other one."

"Haiti."

"Haiti. And, uh, then, uh, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, I think, are like the, why don't we import more people from there? It's like, bro, could you have picked whiter countries? So, admittedly, he is easy to capture in that box. When I look at it, I think that there's a more obvious thing, which is he's talking about Western democratic countries. So, from that perspective, there's another way to look at it, which has nothing to do with skin color and everything to do with my favorite word, culture. Um, and I do think that given that culture is transmitting foundational structural beliefs about how to interact with each other, culture is going to matter massively in terms of the outcomes that you get. Uh, so that makes sense."

"I've also announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries. I didn't say [ __ ] all you did. Remember I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in and they said, 'This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest because our country was going to hell.' And we had a meeting, and I said, 'Why is it we only take people from [ __ ] hole countries?'"

"Right?"

"'Why can't we have some people from Norway?'"

"This, this is a whole thing that blew up massively however many years ago."

"And it's like somebody releasing a greatest hits album, like bringing this back up, reusing it. I mean, it, it, it is brilliant in terms of, I know what my base wants, but we're just back to the divisiveness between the two sides. That's the part that really, uh, makes me sad. Now, listen, as a student of history, I understand this is what populist moments are. They are always, we're on a team. They're on a team. They're not human. We're the good guys. Uh, be as derogatory as we want. Take them out. The rhetoric escalates. It gets very bad. There's typically violence. Uh, so I get it, but that doesn't mean that I like it. So, um, yeah, funny though it may be, this is, this is a greatest album. This is an entertainer who understands how to get people excited. And you and I were talking before we started rolling that, um, Susie Wilds, I forget what her name is, his chief of staff is..."

"Oh, is this what you have queued up?"

"Yeah. Let's go. Susie Wilds. WS."

"We're going to put him on the campaign trail, too. Typically, just a little bit of campaign speak, if I may."

"Yeah."

"Um, typically you, in the midterms, it's not about who's sitting at the White House. It's, you localize the election, right?"

"And you, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We're actually going to turn that on its head."

"Good."

"And put them on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters."

"Yes, they are. And we saw a week ago, Tuesday, what happens when he's not on the ballot and not active. So, I haven't quite broken it to him yet, but he's going to campaign like it's 2024 again."

"Oh."

"And he's already started."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. I mean, listen, he, he understands how he knows he has hits to play, first of all, and he knows how to play them. And so, yeah, they're going to trot them out, get him on stage, let everybody know that local representative that doesn't have the Trump name. Trust me, you're really voting for Trump. You got to keep Trump in power. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. So, uh, yeah, I think the, in the final analysis, the only thing that's going to matter is the economy. But getting to the low propensity voters like they're talking about by using Trump, it certainly makes a lot of sense. But that tells you that they are very worried. And I think if elections were held right now, it would flip. I don't think that's deniable. You just had Miami lose their mayorship to Democrats for the first time since 1998, I believe."

"Uh, so, yeah, it, it's right now people are saying, 'Matt, the Trump thing didn't work.' So, or I should say, the, the voters who actually will change their mind are saying the Trump thing didn't work. So, if you were to hold elections now, it would flip. Now, Besant and Trump have theoretically, whatever, 11 months, but it's really they're going to start campaigning hard through the summer. Um, and if they don't get it, it flips. He lame ducks and then who knows what happens."

"Yeah. Let's talk about those consequences, though, because there are some pretty big Senate races being announced. Um, Jasmine Crockett is probably the most prominent who already announced her Senate bid for 2026. Um, using Trump sound bites. I have that one queued up as well. But it seems like as much as we love the greatest hits of Trump, quote unquote, this can also impact him negatively because you're feeding into what the Democrats have campaigned on for the last 10 years, not Trump. If you want a country, if you want a president that curses or a president that's bombastic or a president that calls certain Americans home country [ __ ] holes, vote for that side. But if you want a unifying America, come over here. It kind of almost tees up what their message could be. Do you think that he can run the same playbook or because he's not necessarily bearing the fruit of his past economic policies that it is a little bit shaky now for him to kind of act like 2016 and blaming other people or act like 2020 and kind of use that same playbook?"

"Yeah. If, if he spends his time blaming other people, it just isn't going to play because nobody cares, right? So when you're coming into office, it's like, yeah, oh man, for sure. Like, they totally [ __ ] up. Oh, thank God you're here. Now clean it up. If a year in, you're still whining about the last guy, it's like, bro, you are in office right now. Fix the problem. Now, whether that's realistic or not is completely irrelevant. People do not vote based on logic. They vote based on feelings. People don't do anything based on logic. They do everything based on feelings. When I'm teaching entrepreneurs, this is like the number one thing that I focus on is, boys and girls, your job is to think from first principles, not to go, I feel this and therefore it must be true. Um, just to throw some strays, that's my beef with Candace. Like, she takes, I feel something is true as proof that it is true. M. I had a dream, which is PS, your subconscious, however unhinged, trying to make a story about the things that you're thinking about right there. Dreams are nonsensical by nature. They, in my estimation, are not people speaking to you from the beyond. So when people are navigating through the world emotionally, like they are guaranteed to be worse than chance. M. They're like, if you were just flipping a coin every time you made a decision, you'd roughly be right half the time. If you're going by feelings, you can be up to and including wrong 100% of the time."

"Mhm."

"So that's where people need to be very careful to try to ground everything from a first principle standpoint. So first principles in an election, you've been in office a year, you've got to show me exactly why my life is better, and you've got to make me feel it. This is something that I talked to, uh, from a relationship's perspective. It's not enough to tell your wife that you love her. You have to make her feel in her bones that you love her. And that's going to take a lot of nonverbal things. That's going to take you mapping what she thinks is important and then actually delivering against it. So Trump and all of the Republicans and Democrats, for that matter, they have to map what their constituents believe is important and then deliver it to them in a way where they really feel it. Now, the good thing about being the challenger is that you can just make promises. You don't actually have to deliver anything. The bad part about being the incumbent is you have to show the receipts. You've got to be like, 'This is what I've done over the last year.' And people just are not feeling it economically in their pocketbooks. So, uh, we'll see."

"I ran a poll in chat that said, 'Should Trump continue to campaign for 2026?' It was 53% yes, 47% no. Um,"

"There's no way they believe logically, the 47% people, there's no way they believe logically that it will decrease a Republican's chance of getting elected to have Trump. It's not possible."

"Well, fighting that, uh, fighting the against that, here's Jasmine Crockett's, uh, campaign announcement."

"How about this new one? They have their new star, Crockett. How about her? She's the new star of the Democrat party, Jasmine Crockett. They're in big trouble. But you have this woman, Crockett. She's a very low IQ person. I watched her speak the other day. She's definitely a low IQ person. Crockett. Oh, man. Oh, man. She's a very low IQ person."

"Somebody said the other day, she's one of the leaders of the party. I said, 'You got to be kidding.' Now they're going to rely on Crockett. Crockett's going to bring them back."

"Yeah, that was [ __ ]."

"It's a great ad."

"So, but it's one of those things where I, I probably would have went in a different direction. But is this a way that again, will Trump bury himself? Cuz I feel like Trump, he's at that point now where he's kind of like that campaign rally from the [ __ ] holes to laughing to cursing to, it used to be like, okay, you caught me that one time, haha. But now I feel like he's very comfortable. I feel like he's very casual, and sometimes having that power, you don't understand how certain things can slip. You can kind of help other people take advantage of that. So, to your point of this ad, I think it is a good ad, but it's 100% based off of him going on the attack, and her just flipping it back on him. Is that some way that Democrats could then use this long term? I'm just curious."

"For sure. So, the, the thing that people have to understand about Trump is Trump is like a good headline. So, Trump is always going to be talked about. He's always going to be an amazing leverage point because we live in the age of the attention economy, and he is extraordinarily good at getting an emotional response out of people, positive or negative. And what you need as a content creator is something that gets that really strong emotion. So the only thing you can't be is bland. And so we're living in the age where all of our politicians are rising up because they're not bland. They're the people that can get attention. Whether it's Mom Donnie, whether it's AOC, whether it's Jasmine Crockett, whether it's Trump, these are the people that they know how to cut through the noise and get you to pay attention to what they're doing. So Trump is going to be ubiquitous throughout the midterms. People, um, standing with him, people defining their entire candidacy against him, and I think that that will be a winning strategy. Now, if you have a headline that's just clickbait, and I get in, and it's not actually what I've been promised. So, if Trump is over here talking, um, about, oh, this is all Biden's fault, blah, blah, blah. And then I feel like, wait a second, that's what you said when you were running, and your last year has been the actual video that I'm watching, and the video that I'm watching does not deliver on the promises that you made. Like, now that you're saying it again, I know this is just clickbait. So, he's going to have a problem where he's got to find a way to both be super engaging, get his base really excited, right? The things that he was doing there, back to his greatest hits, [ __ ] hole country, doing the YMCA dance, all of that stuff is brilliant. His base absolutely loves it. And if he can pair that with some big wins by the midterms, then he's really got a shot. So, what could a big, big win look like for him? Uh, I really hate the idea of him him sending stim checks, but if he sent stim checks, it'd be great for his ability to get reelected. Uh, so you might have that. Also, he's promising that, um, he's got evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. So, if he can hit you with a double whammy where people feel it in their pocketbooks that, okay, the things that he's doing are working because remember, the vast, vast, vast majority of people are never going to take the time to understand tariffs and whether they're good or bad, but they understand a $2,000 check in the mail. So, it's like, what do you mean tariffs aren't working? That's some [ __ ]. I just got a $2,000 check. You're dumb. I'm voting for more of the $2,000 checks. Okay? So, you will get that effect. Then if he's saying, listen, and let's say it's compelling, that there's very compelling evidence, I'm not saying there is, I'm just saying if he can present it, if he can present compelling evidence that he, they really did try to steal the election or did steal the election in a meaningful way, uh, now he's got the one-two punch. It's, they illegally tried to keep me out of office. These guys are very, very bad people. Um, also all the corruption is not going to help. And if that, it won't help the Democrats. And if you've got, um, for instance, if you're starting to feel housing prices soften because of immigration, like if that actually has a meaningful impact, now it's like, ooh, people are actually starting to feel it. And because he can cut through the noise, it's like, then they'll have a shot. If people don't feel it, if they feel like, ah, for all of his bluster and all of his promises, like, I just still can't make ends meet. This is terrible. I'm looking out of my future. I have massive anxiety. This AI thing is freaking the [ __ ] out. Uh, he's got a lot of talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US, but all it's done so far is make things more expensive. Like, they're dead in the water. Like, it just won't play. No matter how funny, no matter how entertaining. Um, for anybody that thinks that he is coded racist, then they love it. Whatever. Like, it won't matter at all if you don't solve the economic problem."

"Yeah. But I mean, to that point, a lot of times we get a bunch of, 'Hey, look, the stock market is up. We're good.' Or, 'Hey, look, the gold prices are rising. We're good.' But that doesn't necessarily affect affordability. He did get the major win recently with his increased drilling and oil prices have come down. Is it just simply, I need to get gas prices down? I need to get grocery prices down? Grocery prices and energy are the two biggest, to be sure. But if he doesn't solve housing, he's going to lose the youth."

"Once you lose the youth, you are on borrowed time at best. And somehow, oh God, will you forgive me? A diatribe. I need to tell you a story because I think about this so often. Um, chat, hit the eject button. You pull me off, but this, uh, if people are not engaged, but this is incredibly important. Okay. So, uh, for anybody that doesn't know my background, start in filmmaking. I only get into business because I want to make movies my way. Uh, spend 15 years growing businesses only to discover that the film industry completely got obliterated, uh, in that time, which is why I focus on games now. But anyway, this starts with me going, I'm going to break into the film industry through comic books. It's far cheaper. Uh, it's a great feeder into the Hollywood system. You build an audience, you tell the story, people pick it up. They always, Hollywood would much rather buy something that they can see and they get what this is going to be rather than, you know, just on a pitch. Uh, so let's start doing that. Uh, go in, I launch the comic book and the, there's at the time, there was only one distributor on comics. So the fact that they picked up our comic was already crazy. And then it sold, uh, and they were like, 'Oh my God, for a first-time publisher, you guys, this is unreal. You guys have done so well. This is unbelievable.' And I just look at my bank account and I'm like, 'This is terrible. What the [ __ ] are you guys saying? These numbers are so small. Like, this isn't interesting to me in the slightest, and you're telling me like this is a huge win.' And so I was like, 'Wait, wait, wait. Something is totally off here.' That then leads me to go, one of the questions I always tell entrepreneurs to ask is, 'Has anybody done this before successfully? If so, what do they do?' So I start auditing the broader market, and that takes me straight to Japan. I realized that Japan outsells the entire Western comic market. So there's one manga called Demon Slayer. Demon Slayer by itself outsells the entire Western comic book market. X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of it. You put it together and it's outsold by Demon Slayer. And I'm like, 'What the [ __ ]? Like, Japan is a third the size of America. And so how does one title? It doesn't make sense.' So then I do this deep dive audit and I realize in the '90s, Japan made a decision and this is where the direct parallel begins. Japan made a decision that changed everything for them, and the decision was, we are going to stay focused on kids. And they saw what was happening in the Western market and they saw the pull in their own market to start aging up with the reader. So think about Harry Potter book whatever seven is very different than book one. So what she did was she said, 'I'm gonna speak to a generation and I'm going to age the story up with them.'

"Comic books in the US did the same thing for reasons that I won't go into, but they are fascinating and of course all economically driven. And Japan goes, 'Uh, this strikes me as a bad idea. We always need to get kids in the market. So we're going to stay focused on kids and we'll just let people age out of what's called Shonen Jump.' Shonen Jump is the beast of how you introduce manga, which then becomes anime. It was a weekly magazine printed, and they just said, 'Yeah, if people age out, that's fine. We're going to keep making stuff for kids.' They had a big meeting about it. It was like a very formal decision."

"So the US comic market takes the different approach, and whatever, 30 years later, you have a single title aimed at kids outselling the entire adult-aimed comic market. Now I say all of that so people understand the second you give up on the youth, you [ __ ] yourself. You put yourself on a timeline. You are going to be irrelevant. You are guaranteed to be irrelevant. And so looking at the Democrats right now are going, 'Ah, we're just going to focus on the kids.' And so when I see Mom Donnie, I'm like, 'Oh, here's a guy that looks at millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and goes, yeah, I know the world that you're living in. Nothing is affordable. Old people are rich. You're broke. You're now in a very antagonistic relationship with older people. You already have every impulse in the world to define yourself against old people.' And so they're just leaning into that. So when I think about progressive policies are absolute death for society, like literal death. But they're brilliant at in this moment getting them elected. So if I were advising the Democrats, I'd be like, 'You've got to lean into that. You need to go after the youth vote. Even if you're going to sacrifice 2028 to just completely pivot the party to we are about millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, period. End of story. That's all we care about. They're the future. They're going to be everything. Every day old people are dying and they're, you know, not voting anymore. And the youth is what matters.' And so that's what scares me is that that will be god awful because it's all predicated on a misunderstanding of the economy. But nonetheless, it is a thing that will get them elected so that they can rapidly destroy America. But my advice, if I were saying, 'You guys really want to run things for the next 25, 35 years,' would be that. Now, all of that's in a bubble where AI doesn't just enslave or completely change society, but yeah, that would be my advice to them."

"So, chat really liked the Shonen Jump reference, just to throw that in there. And then, um, they also asked about Netflix buying Warner Brothers, uh, in case you guys want to take a quick aside on that."

"Uh, well, that one is utterly fascinating. Seeing it devolve into a battle is pretty interesting. So we'll see. Um, I think Netflix getting it is good and bad. It's great if you want to be at home and pay one fee and get everything you want. They want them to buy it. If you are a creative, you're going to hate it because they're just algorithms. So, at least the old Hollywood system, for how corrupt and horrible it was, at least that was, they understood that creative talent ultimately wins the day. And Hollywood is learning a different lesson, which is when you've got big data and algorithms controlling people's lives, creatives are like, whatever. I just have to manipulate the dopamine loops of the people watching."

This thing and I will keep them coming back, and I can stuff from the 90s over and over and over again and not have to pay a new fee.

Yeah. And just like with AI coming, it's going to be wild. So, can you break down a hostile takeover so people know what Paramount's doing? Cuz Netflix was sending emails like, "Hey guys, we got them. Don't worry about it. You're going to be good." And Paramount's like, "Hold my beer. We're not done yet." So, yeah.

You just, so when you're a public company, you put shares out on the market which, um, usually have voting rights attached to it. And so anybody can go buy those shares and if you can buy enough shares, you can become a significant enough shareholder where they have to listen to you. And so a hostile takeover is where you basically get control of the board. You have so much influence because you own so much of the stock that you can wrestle control of the company away from them. Reason 462 why I do not want to have a public company. It's like people do not understand the realities of how cutthroat business really can be.

And when your company's on the public market and you have any kind of vulnerability, then you'll get these shareholders that are, um, what do they call them? Activist shareholders. So they'll come in and, um, if they can buy enough of it, they can just do a hostile takeover where they get voting control and they can sway the board, they can kick people off the board, they can fire the CEO through pressure. It's usually not that they own like 51% of the company, but they become the single largest shareholder. And so now they can bully people, they can bully the board, they can get decisions made because they can tank the price. Like if they dump their stock, it's going to damage the price. Um, so, period. That's a hostile takeover.

Nice. Um, and it's hostile because the company doesn't want it to happen, but the shares are out there.

Yeah, I'm split between it because, uh, I have Peacock roots, so like a lot of my old co-workers are really, really gunning for it cuz they were in the running. They just got eliminated. And I think from a theatrical release perspective, they were the best company to get it because the top three people who releases movies are Warner Brothers, don't matter anymore.

I, I guess. But I, I mean, that's like saying stop driving cars. I know in 50 years I won't be able to drive anymore, but I'm going to hold on to it as long as I can.

But okay. Okay. Um, but Minecraft movie shows that youth will go if it makes sense. So to your point, I just think that the theaters need to be reinvented for this generation and stop playing to a generation that watches everything on their couch and don't leave the house.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, let's do a speed run because I don't know that this fractal will be very interesting. But for anybody other than me, here is the reality. Life is perpetually changing. I know it feels like everything is static. And when you're young, you, you are born into a world that, that is moving, by the way. Like the culture is shifting entirely. The whole time that you're alive, the culture is always moving. But you're born into this window where, like, if you think of yourself in the middle of something sliding and until the backside here hits you and passes you and leaves you behind where you suddenly feel like, wait, what? The world is not what it used to be. Like, I cannot tell you how weird it is for me that kids don't have MTV. MTV just doesn't matter. MTV was everything for us. That, uh, not every young man plays video games. What? Like, or they play them on their phone. Like, huh? This is so weird. Like, we, there was a movie made called 8-Bit Christmas about how hard one kid went to get a Nintendo, which is literally my life story. Like, that's how we grew up and it felt like it was going to be forever, and it's never forever. Culture is always moving. So people have this sense that it's static, but the world is changing rapidly. It will leave you behind. And the great tragedy of the human experience and one of the reasons that adults, there's a sadness about adults is they're just collecting all this scar tissue and they, um, there, there is something about the formation of the human mind that will make you love the things from your childhood more than you will ever love anything else ever in life. It, it brain development says it is so.

And so if you want to know why nostalgia is such a thing is because nothing else will trigger you the way that those things triggered you. And because of that, there's always going to be like this misunderstanding between youth and things like that. The, my, like, I beseech adults to recognize that while it is true that the things that were hot when you were a kid, that that's always going to resonate with you, that you can go through an affinity development process on new things. But you have to go through the process of figuring out why they're cool, understanding them completely, welcoming them into your life in a deep and profound way. And in doing that, you can find yourself, um, not a stranger in the current culture. And that, I would advise people do because, like, for instance, when I hear you say, like, I want to keep driving cars, and I'm thinking, but Drew, we're going to be flying. So, it's like, it's obviously better.

And to some extent, it's just that you've never remapped the thing that made driving exciting onto this new thing. And if you could remap it onto this new thing, a totally new world opens up to you, that will, I think, make you feel more childlike. Now, I'll stop there. Um, I guess my pushback comes specifically for that because I will look at TCG in your analogy like something that you can, uh, understand. Is that in my youth, trading card games was very popular and I remember having a Pokémon deck, a Pokémon card set and I remember being in the plastic and the binders and all those things and then I let that thing go because there was other things that I kind of attributed on. So to me, I look at driving as that hobby that then is going to evolve into the TCG where I have a bunch of old cars that I fix up and that I make and then I keep retro. And there is going to be a sect of people that are like, "Yes, absolutely. Why am I collecting cards when I could just get play Pokémon Platinum or I could just get Nintendo Switch 2 and play Pokémon 45? I don't need the actual physical cards." But there is going to be some type of vintage nostalgia, you know, insert buzzword here that sustains this hobby. So, by no means am I saying I understand that cars are going to evolve and there is going to be that life and I'll just have to go to a track and drive it with all the old people. That's fine. But I think there are certain things that we can, especially from a Hollywood theater perspective. I think there is a way that we can evolve it because I look at, uh, Broadway as that theater was the only thing and there was no then movie theater kind of disrupted live stage and then now live stage has been able to sustain through all these years through cell phones and everything. It hasn't died yet. So, I think that there's a secret sauce that movie theaters can preserve as opposed to saying, "Yep, it's done. Close it up. It's Best Buy." And it's like, or, uh, Circuit City or Blockbuster. And it's like, no, there, there is a way we can do it if we actually put our minds together and do it as opposed to just number go up algorithm, you know, scratch it out.

If there is an experience to be had that is better, theater is a phenomenal example. The odds of theater ever going away are effectively zero. My wife does not understand why people want to go to the theater. Um, she thinks of it as like, um, god, I forget the example that she used, but she like would rather go to the movie, would rather watch it on TV. And I'm like, yeah, but they're very different experiences.

So, take musical theater, for instance. You want to hear them sing live. That's the point. You want to be around other people that are hearing that same electric human voice, do a thing. And for some people, that's like, you're going to hyper-respond to that. Cool. So anything that, um, was there was that was the only way to do it. Obviously, it's going to be much bigger and over time it will find itself far more niche as theater has found it. But there really is something unique and real to hearing a live human performing something. And so there's going to be a subset of people that really like that and respond great. That'll exist forever. What I'm saying is, uh, and maybe this is just me, but as I got older, Lisa, Lisa went through a really traumatic period in our marriage where, this is probably 15 years ago. We were just talking about this last night. She went through a really traumatic period and she was saying, um, she was traumatized over me. And she was like, "You," her words, "I actually hate this word, but this is the real word that she used." She's like, "You're no longer silly." And she was like, really upset about it. And I was like, "I'm kind of proud of that." And she was like, "No, like, you, part of what I fell in love with was you had this playfulness about you that you don't have anymore." And I was like, "That's interesting because the way that I came up in entrepreneurship was very gladiatorial." And it was, I, I'll never regret that I went through it. It was transformative. And learning to toughen up and be hard was very useful in life. Uh, so super glad I went through it, but admittedly, it did cause the death of that side of me. And Lisa, like, really pushing me to rekindle it made me realize, oh, it's interesting. I'm building up all this scar tissue. I have, uh, lost touch with that side. And now, once I realized, oh, we needed to get into children's entertainment, not back into. We needed to get into children's entertainment instead of adults, which is what I thought I was going to do. Um, again, brain development reasons why I had to reconnect with all of that. It's improved the quality of my life. And there's something about getting older and the buildup of scar tissue and the closing down of your frame of reference and the, "I know what works and what doesn't work," and not being open to radically new ideas, that feels like dying long before you have died. And this is why the famous quote, uh, "Science does not advance one insight at a time. It advances one funeral at a time."

People just, they build their reputation around, like, this idea. "I've said it, and I need to be consistent with it." And so, um, if anybody watched Death by Lightning, the reason that Garfield died wasn't because he got shot. It was because a doctor was too [ __ ] stupid to realize that germ theory was real. And so he gave him a massive infection and he died from the infection. Um, so, and there's a lot of stories. Semmelweis, for anybody that knows that story, ends up dying alone in an insane asylum after trying to convince people that the reason that, um, women were dying from, I think it was called bed fever, uh, after giving birth was because doctors were doing autopsies in the morning, not washing their hands, delivering babies in the afternoon, and passing on, um, this horrible disease. And so aging tends to be a process of calcification. You can fight it, and in fighting it, I will put forward, your life will be much better. Um, last fractal, then we're back to our regularly scheduled program. I accidentally bagged a 23-year-old. Um, I know, right? I know. I know. And I was like, haha, your boy still got it. Um, and then there was a certain level of like youthful optimism that I was just like, like, cuz there is no scar tissue. There's no, this guy's this, and this guy's like, there's no like, I'm just mad at every man that ever happened and you're just the next one, so don't disappoint me by these six things. And it was just that, yeah, I trust you. And like, and then I found out she was 23.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then what?

And then I found out she was 23.

But are we going on another date? I don't like it. It was magical because there is, there is that, like, I can do something with that. That's the thing, yo. Is I think that people don't realize like you do have that scar tissue. And I am such an optimistic person just in nature that when I run into that, it does kind of like, oh, okay, well, yeah, you're right. So there is a thing of like, oh, I'm optimistic. Yeah, it will work out. Yeah, we'll figure it out. And I just feel, to your point of like expansiveness, that's such a good, like, phrase. And I do feel expansive.

Are we going on another date?

I think that's a good thing to feel from a woman.

Yes.

Uh, yeah.

Yes. Age gap is real though.

Age gap is real.

Age gap is real.

In that we don't have things in common.

No, that has not been the problem. I think it's the concept of the age gap that is throwing me off. I'm going to be honest with you.

Interesting.

If she was three years younger than me, I wouldn't even think about it. I'm like, "Yes, date number six, seven, eight. I already got, I got the next quarter planned." Oh, Drew, please go out with her a couple more times and just see if there's a real problem or an imagined problem.

That's a good point.

And listen, I get it because that is surprising to say the least.

Uh, especially you being 53. This is where I would like to, I want to remind the group, Drew's not actually 53. Okay? So for this discussion, we have to talk his real age. He's in his 30s, but, uh, we'll go back to the lie, uh, shortly. But, um, that is very interesting and I think you are getting a reminder of one, the power of frame of reference, and then two, how all of us need to fight against the battering that we take in life.

Yeah. And how it really does toughen you up. Is good, but like, can you find that other gear of like reconnecting with somebody who is optimistic and not just focus on the ways that everything is going to go wrong? And, and here's one thing that always helps me. All I care about is what is true. And the reality is, as I say, genius is a young man's game for one reason only.

That you don't yet have a map of how everything falls apart, how things don't work out. And so, um, the evolution, I don't know what word to use, eats the vast majority of people, and they really do all fail. Um, but a few actually get the timing right enough. They've got the right temperament enough, and they end up making it through. But virtually 100% of old people fail. They don't have the energy. They don't have the belief anymore. They don't want to go through it. They've had enough success. This is the thing that I fight against, which is, um, should I ever just call it rich and just be like, why am I [ __ ] working this hard? Like, this is crazy. Uh, you have to stay hungry. You have to want something. You've got to be future planning and be willing to suffer again. Um, but when you tap into it, there is something really beautiful. And every now and then I feel the edges of, um, the accumulation of the scar tissue. And I don't like the way that it feels.

Yeah. And so, yeah, that's a big part of why I think I've fallen so in love with what we're doing on Kaizen and building something that's aimed specifically at kids.

Um, because it just re, sort of awakens a part in my own brain.

Yeah. All right. I appreciate that. I thought you were going to have a different take from it, to be honest with you. So, thank you for that.

No, no. First of all, she's well of age. If you were like, "She's 18," I might be like, "Oh, no."

Uh, but yeah, I would say give it a shot.

Yeah. Literally, I did not know and then I found out and I was like, "Haha, crazy." Um, like there was like an awkward pause and everything. Uh, all right. We'll, we'll talk about that. Um, people want me to put a poll. I'm not pulling a poll on my dating life. I like you guys. I'm not, we're not there yet. Uh, okay. So, speaking of the youth, uh, I got to put a, you know, where I'm going with it next. Um, Nick Fuentes was talking to Piers Morgan, but before we jump into the actual interview, I have to play this edit because I think this is like the clip of the year when I found it.

How can you call it a movement when you have no motion? You can't call it a movement cuz you have no motion. None of these [ __ ] have motion except for me.

The edits, none of them have motion except for me. Um, the fact that he draws, he says the N-word and uses it with a a feel about that yet. Um,

Really?

I don't know how I feel about that.

You're not like 100% opposed. Nick is a troll and we're going to talk about that with the Piers Morgan episode. But there is something to your point of the youth. He has captured something that I think a lot of Republicans thought Charlie Kirk had, thought Trump had, thought it was the manosphere of the podcast, but we're starting to realize, no, this is an entirely different ethos of people. And for some reason, he's not going away. He's been banned. He's been ridiculed. He's been quote unquote, uh, uh, reprimanded, condemned. He's been disavowed. He's been told not to play with the, the grown-up Republicans, but yet he doesn't. He's still on Tucker. He's still on Steven Crowder. He's still on Piers Morgan. What's your take on Nick Fuentes and how he has been so electric in the movement?

Um, I think he sums up his own position very well, which is we're done clutching our pearls. We, being especially young white men, but I think young men in general. And I remember watching this and Douglas Murray just really had clarity on this. Uh, shout out to Douglas Murray, man. And he said, "Listen, if you keep bashing white men and saying that whiteness is bad, it's some sort of original sin, I guarantee you what's going to happen is they are going to band together. They are going to start thinking of themselves as white first. And you do not want people grouping up based on being white first." And, and I think that holds true of any race, PS, by the way. But, um, that's exactly what's happening. And so this is a psychological principle. If you beat me up and tell me that I'm bad, bad, bad for insert trait that I can't change, and then I run into somebody else who has that same trait and I know they've been treated exactly the way that I've been treated, like all of a sudden I'm going to be like, "Hold on, we're going to glom on." And if there are millions of us, like, bro, this is a bad strategy. It was a dumb idea when they did it. It's a dumber idea now that they see what's happening and they're continuing to double down. That's so dumb. The youth is always going to take over. Do you really want them to take over out of bitterness and aggression? I would put forward no. That's a terrible [ __ ] idea. So, nonetheless, here we are. And I don't know what they thought the endgame was, that they were really just going to be able to, um, feminize every man, get every white person to back the [ __ ] off and sit down and shut up. Like that is a dumb [ __ ] strategy. It doesn't work with anybody. Every group is going to rise up. And by the way, whites are only like 8% of the global population. So this is not like you look around and all you just see is a sea of white people. It, it is this is a legitimate minority that will have minority vibes that will band together, see themselves as white first, and cause all kinds of problems. I think it is a really stupid idea. So, am I at all surprised by his rise to popularity? I was when it happened. I won't lie. But now, as I look back and math it, I'm like, "Yeah, this is precisely what Douglas Murray was trying to warn us about."

All right, let's jump into his, um, interview with Piers. The, the thing about Nick that I think gets him in trouble is not his populism. It's not what he's rooting for. It's not even his political stance. It's that he belittles things that I think are more important or, or sacred than people have. And this is going to the Hitler is cool thing. Um, but let's go into his thoughts on women for a second. And maybe this can kind of color where he comes from and how he became the person that he is.

Just to clear up one of the many theories about you. I have no idea what the answer is and you haven't got to answer, but are you actually attracted to women?

I am attracted to women.

You're not gay?

No. But I will say that women are very difficult to be around.

Okay.

So, there's that.

And do you think they should have the right to vote?

I do not. No, absolutely not.

They should stay at home?

Well, yeah. Absolutely.

So, basically, you're just a misogynist old dinosaur, aren't you? For a for a young guy. I mean, I know I'm the boomer. I know I'm the boomer here, but actually you're a 27-year-old dinosaur, aren't you? Aren't you, Nick Fuentes? All women. All women are annoying.

Appears it is worse.

All women grow old. They all get fat. Says the guy. Have you ever had sex?

No. Absolutely not.

Wow. Says the guy who's never got laid.

Here, I would have never thought to ask that question.

Yeah.

I was shocked when he was like, "No."

What? Dude, uh, this, this may be the part of the young male experience that I am most confused by. I remember being like 14 and it hit me one day and I was like, "Wait, I'm one day going to put my penis in a vagina. Like, this is going to be [ __ ] wild." And I couldn't have been more excited about it.

I, I was legitimately giddy at the thought that one day I was actually going to do that. And now it doesn't, like it was, I won't say all-consuming, but damn, a lot of my high school was oriented around, uh, relationships. Now, I was not good with women. I think I've been abundantly clear about that. But were they an obsession? Was I trying? Yes. Very aggressively. And so for him to be like, I don't, it's, it is a bad frame of reference to have adopted. I'm not saying that I can't walk people through the steps that have led us here, but it is a very bad frame of reference to adopt, to be closed off, to, uh, lump all women together as if they are some monolithic body, uh, to think that while women are very different, I certainly understand that there can be frustrations to cohabitating, certainly with a woman because they view the world so differently. Uh, but when you think of them as a partner, unbelievable things unlock. You just have to have very good, I call them rules of engagement, uh, so that you're not driving each other crazy all the time. But it's weird to me that he is just so nonchalant. I, how old is he?

27.

Wow, bro. That is, like, he's making money at this point. So,

Oh, he is voluntarily celibate. Make no mistake. This is not a kid that can't get laid. He's good-looking. He's very charismatic. And boys and girls, if you were confused, women go for charisma before they go for just like rugged good looks. And if you put together charisma, fame, and money, like there are a litany of women that would sleep with this kid. And so he is thousand percent staying celibate by choice, which is very hard for me to understand.

Yeah, I don't get it.

I think that's the confusing thing. And, uh, Mason, double check the chat. I'm getting like notes that it's getting super toxic, but I don't see anything. So, just

The chat is the chat itself is getting toxic.

There's a few people in chat saying get rid of the racist, but I think they're trolling with those get rid of the racist comments.

Copy. Okay. I have,

If it gets bad, start booting indiscriminately. Time them out.

Yeah. Uh, I, I guess the thing about me is similar to you, there is this north star, at least I was growing up, that you kind of go down two paths where it's like, I need to become the best person I can be so that way I can then increase my value in the sexual marketplace so that way I can get laid, get a girl, have a family. Or the other thing was like, okay, I already look good. I'm going to just get a girl then. So I feel like as a young man, those are your two options. Either get better to get a girl or just get a girl. So the fact that he is 27, he has rose in popularity and he also is voluntarily celibate. Like, what is that north star then? Maybe is that where the hate is coming from? What, what are you using? What are you doing with your time? And I know that that sounds very trivial and there's probably women in their chat rolling their eyes right now, but like seriously, as a driver for men, that is an incentive to become better.

It is the incentive to become better. There is nothing higher. Men will send themselves into war when they no longer believe that they have mating opportunities. They will go kill and risk dying to get laid. So anybody that thinks that there won't be problems that come from men ejecting out of that system are out of their [ __ ] minds. And the only way that, um, men are going to be able to sustain this for the long term is, I guess, access to pornography. Certainly AI and sex bots will, um, give an outlet for that extremely intense impulse that is buried very deeply in the brains of men. So unless we've got like a microplastics problem that is manifesting as they legitimately do not care, like it's changed their brain wiring, uh, there's no way this one does not start to become problematic for sure. And even if western men completely eject out of this, I guarantee that other men around the world absolutely will not. And so this is a fundamental biological drive. Uh, it manifests as a need in the same way that hunger or, uh, thirst manifests. So, yeah, you, unless again, literally it's been destroyed by environmental toxins or something, uh, there's no universe in which this does not, um, rebound in some horrible way, either where people that aren't having sex, they just cease to exist obviously because they're not procreating and the people that are procreating just take over the world and this is a momentary blip. Uh, or there's a big rebound effect and people realize, oh my god, like we have allowed something so moronic to happen because I obviously understand that one of the critiques of the way that I talk is going to be that Tom is from a different era, women were different back then. And I will just tell you the frame of reference layer for sure. There's no doubt. If I found myself 21 today, that I would have to take a very different approach. But the reality is that if you're tied to ground truth and you encounter somebody that's at a, um, cultural layer, then you can get beyond that. That becomes very easy if you have a sufficient level of, um, game, shall we call it? Like, once I understood how to truly be myself and I had no fear of loss and I could approach somebody with confidence and I could have some swagger, the fact that I was able to have interesting conversations was ultimately what got me laid. One of my favorite stories, um, I had been sleeping with a woman. I'd never been able to give her an orgasm. And then, um, one night she saw me be really, like, talk for the first time about something I was deeply passionate about. And so I clicked over into that zone. And the next time we had sex, she had an orgasm. And I was like, that is wild. It, it is nothing about the sex. It's I finally clicked over into her mind where she now found me far more interesting. And I was like, "God, I've got to remember that." And I remember my mom giving me the best advice ever about sex. She said, "Remember, women have to trust you to have an orgasm." And I was like, "What?" Like, that is so weird for a guy. Um, so once you begin to understand like all of those things, even in a time now where clearly I would find myself in a much worse position than I was in terms of they can just swipe on to the next person. It's always on to the next. It's some women trying to take advantage of you to get a free meal. Blah, blah, blah. There are defenses to all this stuff. So, the person, uh, that this was probably will never hear this, but I had one of my employees, um, say to me that they, oh god, what was the specific thing? Oh, uh, they had, oh god, how do I say this without ratting this person out? Uh, they were creating something and they felt that that something was not being recognized because the, when they created it, they have to like, go put it in a basket. Just to try to make this as abstract as possible. They had to put it into a basket and once it got put in the basket, it no longer resembled the hard work that they had done. It was, you know, getting battered about by the basket. And I was like, I'm like, there are ways around that basket. And the second that you're saying it's somebody else's fault, um, you're missing an opportunity to take control and get a better result. So, if you know that the basket creates problems for you, then solve for not needing to put it in the basket. But don't just go, "Ah, well, I do all this hard work and then I put it in the basket and it just all breaks." Like, that is a terrible way to move through life. So, if young men are looking at this and saying, "Ah, the basket is ruining my chances." I'm just saying, cool, then find a way around the basket. So, um, there is always a solution.

Yeah, there was literally somebody in Discord who was talking about that who was like, "I hate the Scott Galloway interview. He only blames men. It's women. The marketplace has changed. There are gold diggers or this, they're this. It's this." And he gave me a whole diatribe about how women are the worst people in the whole wide world. And I was like, women didn't all of a sudden become the worst people in the whole wide world. Like, they're back in it. Like my, the best example I always use is like rappers because the first rapper ever did any, like Sugarhill Gang. Everybody loves that song. The third verse is from somebody else. He stole that verse, went into the studio while they were recording. He said, "Hey, can I hop on?" and recited somebody else's lyrics and ended up getting like a platinum record. It was like this whole thing. If you think about it, when he, I'm the tel, somebody else's name. He doesn't even spell his name. But people didn't even do that. So it's like all you had to do was just rhyme words and you can become a a celebrity. Rappers nowadays, you have to produce. You have to be a content creator. You have to rap. You have to also be a fashion mogul. You also have to have a social media following. You have to do five different layers of things to be as competitive or as relevant as back in the day. And I think that same thing is true with the protein bars. If I want to make a protein bar company, I can't just be like, "Hey guys, no sugar."

Right?

There's a thousand no sugar bars now. It needs to be no sugar and organic and this and it needs to come from Jesus. Like, there's all these other layers that now need to be added. So, for some reason,

We got to launch that bar, Drew. The only thing that could get me back in.

The bar by Jesus.

Seriously. So, we just think with dating it's like, what? I have money. That's it. That's the only requirement that you have to be a little bit more evolved. You have to also catch up with the market. And I think we get too caught up in the, it's the basket's fault versus no, how can you where can you shine that make you not need the basket and that expansive energy again?

Yeah. There's, uh, just one more story to back this up. So, you've got Kanye makes, I forget which song. The one that he was saying he wanted to compete with Sexy Back and he was like, "Oh, my girlfriend at the time is a little too into Justin Timberlake." So, he writes a song, becomes a hit. I forget which one it is. And he says, "I hear it in the club and it's muddy." No, he doesn't go, [ __ ] clubs don't know how to build acoustics. He goes to like every producer he can find to figure out how to make his beats sound like Sexy Back sounds in the club. Ultimately finds himself at Timberland's door who did it, and then Timberland showed him how to do it. But I always thought that was brilliant. That's the right way to respond. Oh, [ __ ] the thing that I made that is objectively amazing in this environment. It has a problem. So, how do I go and solve that problem? And that is how I would advise people to look at it. And listen, there are going to be some women that you do just write off. They're too far gone. There's not enough interesting there. I'm not saying you bump into the first person that is female and you go, "Cool. I'm going to make it work with this person." You may have a rapid filtering mechanism where it's like, yeah, you're filtering out 80, 85% of people and you're narrowing it down to just the people that haven't been completely captured by that ideology, that don't have a belief that it's just always on to the next. They are going to be out there. And I'm not saying that it's not more work. I'm just saying the way to approach life in general is, oh, there is a problem. I'm gonna take complete and total responsibility for that problem and I'm going to find a solution because unless it violates the laws of physics, there is a way around this problem. And for people that approach life like that, then it is incredible the opportunities that will open before you. If you run into a problem and you stop, which is the vast majority of humanity, then it's like life sucks because you're going to run into problems all the time. But if when you run into a problem, you go like, roll up your sleeves, you get kind of excited because you're like, "Oh, cool. Like I'm gonna find a way over, under, through, around, whatever. I am going to solve this problem."

Um,

You've got a super chat going back to Nick.

Uh, yes. I got another, uh, clip to pull up, but let's do that.

Sweet. Uh, Leblon said, "Piers Morgan sounds like how Biden was telling people he'll go outside and do push-ups or fight people at the White House. Also, Fuentes might might have a girlfriend but hides it because they would be a target. Keep that in mind. Also, good morning."

Yes. Yes. However, would we lie and say we haven't had sex? That would be the weirdest lie ever. Like, that is, you're 14 at religious camp and they're like, "Have you ever had sex?" And you're like, "No." That, okay, but if you're, I mean, God, is it really clout for gropers to not have sex? Like, would he do that?

Somebody else in chat said that he's doing it for Christian values reasons. I don't know if that's true, but

You can't do it for Christian value reason and then say racist comments. Like, that doesn't work. You can't.

I mean,

I'm with him on that one.

That, that would be some wild [ __ ] like, Jesus taking a break from making our protein bar rolls in and is like, uh, I'm going to need to point out some contradictions here with religious principles that I laid out. This is wild.

So, yeah.

No, but okay. So, great white cat, I understand that you're the person in the chat. Like, give me your pitch. Like, I, I, I really want to say that, well, we're doing this so that way we're fighting feminism. Is it men are now doing a sex fast to get women to want to have? I'm trying to think how you.

Yeah. I'm just trying to think what's the, what's the pushback? They don't understand the movement. Help me understand the movement. Why I'm doing this in order to get what?

Um,

They're mad. They've shut down. End of story.

Yeah. They've just decided it's impossible.

All right. And so we talked about his sexual orientation. Let's talk about something that's actually like matters. This is his comment about the Hitler is cool.

You say that Hitler was very [ __ ] cool. Are you joking or do you actually think he was very [ __ ] cool? The the most genocidal monster of, uh, the last 150 years.

Yeah. The, the thing is my generation, we're just done with the pearl clutching. You know?

You might be, but then your generation hasn't gone through what Danny Finkelstein's family went through. So maybe maybe the pearl clutching has a way to go for families whose whose family members go.

Yeah, we, we got all that. We, you know, me, me, mom, me, m, like, we're, you know, I don't even know who this person is. Why is this person talking to me? This old British guy is saying, "My mom got killed by Hitler." And he doesn't find it funny when you say Hitler's very [ __ ] funny. He finds it. I know you don't care. That's fine. You don't have to care. But he does care.

Does that guy care about America? Does that guy care about me and my country and my family? No. That guy, tragedy of, uh, generational gaps.

Uh, you don't feel like the other side understands you at all. Um, yeah. So that's sad. The Hitler is cool thing to me is just stupid. Um, I think Nick explains the point like he certainly is able to articulate exactly what it is that they find cool. He does, um, I think a better job in another clip that I saw of him where he's like, it's the cuts, all the like hypy super cuts of, uh, Hitler leading armies and all that stuff. But it, it is, um, it's the same way that I feel when Nick talks about being a big fan of Stalin. Um, these are mistakes that history makes over and over and just an ungodly number of people die. So having some mental defenses against those things is very shrewd. Like there are things that the immune system should respond to. Now, I'll admit, we've had a cultural immune system for the last 30 or 40 years that has responded to gluten as if it's a brain parasite. And that's dumb. Uh, but that doesn't mean that there aren't actual brain parasites. It doesn't mean that there aren't actual things that the immune system should be responding to. And so when I hear him talk, it's like, okay, we had an overactive immune system that did really bad things. And so now just shut off the entire immune system. Everybody's cool. Like, it's funny. It's hilarious. H look, because of my time with, and by the way, I hate it when people say that, um, Hitler was the biggest, um, progenerator of genocide that we've had. Do, do people not know who Mao is? Like, do people not know who Stalin is? Like, that one is traumatic. There's something about the, Hitler was horrific. He's one of the Mount Rushmore of monsters. Let me be very clear on my stance on Hitler. Uh, but man, people just do not seem to know that Mao and Stalin existed. Um, or if they do, they seem to think that Hitler somehow is outpacing them. Hitler burned really bright, really fast, and he ran a PR campaign for his [ __ ] Uh, and we like, knock like, you lose, we take over your [ __ ] so we got all the paperwork so we could like, really point to it. But dude, Mao and Stalin were orders of magnitude more efficient at killing. Uh, and it's just getting lost by history, which is why I feel the way that I feel about Mom Donnie. So, there it is. The Mom Donnie threw me off at the end.

Mom Donnie is somebody who clearly, uh, is like,

I haven't heard about it.

Yeah. Either I haven't heard about it, or it's going to be different this time when I do it. Drew, because I'm perfectly ethical. I'm perfectly capable of knowing exactly what grocery prices should be, what rent prices should be. I should be able to make those decisions. And even though every [ __ ] time this has been tried in history, you got to kill people for reasons I've explained countless times, it is mechanistic. Those policies require you to kill people. Don't believe me? Look at modern China, okay? Forget like old school 1960s, 1970s China, which PS was in my lifetime. Uh, modern,

Modern day will do is, but okay, come with me on this journey. It's going to be dark, guys. Disclaimer, disclaimer, all that, whatever.

Does he have a point where he says we don't care anymore? Because I do think that just like right now, there's this thing called black fatigue and we're tired of hearing about black people's problems. Leave me alone. DEI, whatever. Like that. I don't care about slavery. I don't care about none of that. None of that doesn't matter. Get over. Now, when Nick says that to the Jews, 80 years ago, come on. Wrap it up. Y'all had a movie. Y'all got Schindler's List. America First. Is he just kind of perpetuating that we don't care about the past anymore? We're struggling now. Do something now. We're tired of make change. I hate to say it, but what he's doing is exactly how you move the Overton window. You don't try to nudge it little by little. You yank it to where you want it to be.

And that is exactly how you start making the cultural change you want to make. Th this is just the physics of how the human mind works. Uh, you're always going to get a character like this that rises up because other people feel it, but they don't know how to express it. He feels what, or he expresses what they're feeling. Uh, people want to follow a strong person in times like these. You've got this guy that's willing to take all the slings and arrows, who survived all the attempts to cancel, debank, all of that. And so there is a sense that he's the antibiotic resistant strain of this. And this is literally what happens every time that you go through these cycles and somebody has to like shake it up. Um, so my only hope is that he becomes a fringe character, um, and not an actual pied piper that leads an entire generation down a path where they're alienating themselves intentionally from partnership with the opposite sex. Where they want to make it's like, oh, you're going to tell me that I need to think about my race.

all the time, Rad. I'm gonna think about my race all the time and point out that I'm the best race ever. It's like, oh god. Like I really hope we don't go down that path, but it is certainly possible. We'll see.

Does do you think Nick is actually impacting how elections swing? We're going to get to Candace next and I want to like do a check-in on MAGA as a whole, but do you think he's a real voice?

100%. So, uh, yes, he will have an influence to be sure. There's no doubt about that. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the most influential people, certainly on the far right, maybe the right in general. That I haven't audited closely enough. Um, but yes, I think he's influential. Now, how influential is a question I don't feel I have enough data to answer, but he is, I mean, he's guaranteed to get attention. If you're going to talk about Nick Fuentes, it's good for content. Anything that's good for content is going to have an impact on culture. So, yeah, he is a very important voice.

All right, I want to jump over to Candace Owens. Now, we're going to go to the chat in a second. Um, now, did we have a deep dive or uh um super chat specifically about Nick before we move on or that one we already went to? And then we have two others that are off topic.

Yeah, we'll swing back to those. I seen those. Thank you for the super chats, guys. Um, Keith Woods retweeted, uh, Candace Owens has now created a weave of networks between France, Israel, the US, and now Angola, a country in Africa, saying all these, uh, countries unified with a trafficking, possible weapons trafficking, and that can then be tied back to maybe Charlie Kirk's death because he was in Asia. And Keith Woods kind of had this grounding take of the official narrative that a guy just got a gun and shot Charlie Kirk is too implausible for me. I prefer Candace theory that the French, Egyptian, and Israeli governments, TPUSA, international arms trackers, Bill Aman, the Dupont family, Charlie's friends, and the FBI orchestrated it using a team of tens of special forces members wearing maroon t-shirts, a trapdoor, Charlie's security team, a Paty, and Tyler Robinson's father.

And you kind of slacked this to me telling this explains how you feel about Candace. So, this is obviously sarcasm, and that is exactly how I feel. The more that I sort of skim across the surface of Candace's headlines and clips, because admittedly I don't watch the full episodes, but uh I've seen enough now that this really feels like uh soap opera for women based on a real event. And I think this is going to be a new form of reality TV, meaning that it will speak to that same part of people's minds. It pulls together like the murder mystery that women just absolutely love. The like cliffhangers every week or every show like, "Oh my god, I just got a text. Like, you got to see this. Like, we're going to be covering it the next thing." Uh, the interstitials that she does between episodes where she'll like talk right into camera about, "Oh my god, I just got an email from these people. You're never gonna guess." And uh it's it is somebody who is brilliant at content creation, at community management, at intriguing people, who I think we are witnessing right now define an entirely new genre of content. And it's a little scary because you're dealing with like real lives like this is. And again, I don't think Candace is lying. I don't think that's going to be the punchline of all of this, but I do think that um there are so many incentives for her to see a connection because now it's a new intrigue point, right? So read the Da Vinci Code. Every chapter ends with like, I just saw a painting and I noticed something in the bottom corner that nobody would know and it's going to cause millions of people to die. And you're like, oh my god, I've got to turn the next page. So it's like every episode that she does is like that. So, she's got these incentives to get people to tune in. She has a mind that I think is apparently hardwired to see those connections, to believe her feelings. Literally, my goal in life is to get people to realize they're having a biological experience. The reason I want people to realize that is so they will stop trusting their feelings. So, it's like in some way, Candace and I are like cosmic um matter and antimatter. The way that she parses the world is effectively entirely through intuition, which I think is the world's most catastrophic mistake. Your intuitions are entirely based on embodied feelings based on patterns that you've picked up on the past. If the meaning that you assign to those patterns is inaccurate, your body now convinces you that something inaccurate is real. So, this is why somebody with PTSD can hear a firecracker and freak the [ __ ] out.

Um, it's not real. So there was a real thing that happened in the past, but it's now echoing in a way that is unhelpful. So emotions, in my opinion, are to be distrusted. You need to think from first principles, build based on cause and effect. Uh she's not doing that as far as I can tell. She is just making these fanciful leaps, connecting a bunch of things um that aren't even necessarily plausible. Like when you stack this all up, it's like at some point, don't you go, Occam's razor is probably the right way. Whatever is the simplest solution is probably the right one. So, um, yeah, I don't know, man. We'll see. Look, this is this this one is so multifaceted for me. I am extremely interested to see what plays out with her versus Macron. I am extremely interested to see like if she ends up being right, which seems absolutely impossible to me, but if she ends up being right, I'll update my worldview. I'll be like, "Oh my god, like there are way more nefarious and coordinated forces at work than I would have realized." That's a very real possibility. So, uh, and then also just the content creator in me cannot help but notice somebody creating a new genre of content live before our eyes. And it is extremely popular, which means a lot of people are going to do it. And um, yeah, welcome to the new world. And if you're willing to suffer the lawsuits and all of that, um, it'll be entertaining for everybody else.

Somebody in the chat called her uh, black Alex Jones.

Yeah. Yes. I don't know why we make it about race, but yes.

No, like she's Yeah, she's that. She is the new Alex Jones.

So, it is this is a very in fact the right way to think about it maybe like the female Alex Jones where it's like all emotional intrigue. All you have to be careful. They're coming to get me and by proxy you. Like we're a tight-knit group. All of us are going to outsmart the Israelis. All of us are going to outsmart the French. Like we're being pursued. It's really really Drew, are you going to give me that I'm more fascinated than I am horrified? That that is a confession. I'm not asking anybody to be okay with that. But I am I am glued to my TV. This is really this is unprecedented.

And I'm getting a bunch of Alex Alex Jones was right. Hey man, he made a thousand claims. He was right about three. So let's not say that he's shooting, you know, 100% or nothing. But but that's the that's the wild thing about this form of entertainment and it is a form of entertainment and to understand it as such will be far more useful to you.

Um, but this form of entertainment blends it's WWE and in in a way that pushes much harder onto the reality side than the fake side.

Um, because again, I don't think Candace thinks she's lying. Gut instinct. We'll see.

Um, man. Uh, okay. Let's go over to Florida. Uh, Governor DeSantis has designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council of American Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations. Florida agencies are hereby directed to undertake all lawful measures to prevent unlawful activities by these organizations, including denying privileges or resources to anyone providing material support. It seems like this is a growing uh a growing legislation in America. This is on the back of Texas doing it a couple weeks ago. Um, do you think this is something that we're going to start seeing all over?

Yes. You know, you're not going to see it all over, but you're going to see more of this. This is the beginning of something. It's not the end of something. Uh, the world is having to come to grips with the reality of disrupting your own culture through immigration. People are realizing that if you offer economic support to underprivileged people, that underprivileged people all over the world will want to come to your country. If you have open borders, they then will come to your country and they will be a drag on resources. Um, also if they have a really strong culture and you have a weaker culture, then they'll grow in influence because they will uh insulate themselves and solidify the way that they're approaching it. The Sharia courts being a great example of that. Uh, and then you wake up one day and you realize, whoa, like we're pretty far down this road, which is exactly what's happening to Europe. And America thankfully has the show to watch of what's happening in Europe and then go, do we want that to happen here? And if the answer is no, then you have to move now. Um, so that's what you're watching. I don't know enough about the organizations to know if this is like horrible or if this is exactly what needs to be done. I don't know. But I I think that this is going to escalate from here. This is not going to go quiet. You've got three more years with Trump. So certainly the deportations are going to continue.

Uh, certainly there's going to be a friendly environment for isolating the culturally strong groups that are um outpacing from a uh political activism, outpacing from a um uh like just birth rate like if I'm really crass about it. So you're those are going to be the areas where people are going to have the strongest immune response. So we'll see.

Uh, this is on the back of another Somali ran fraud scheme in Ohio that has been discovered. This is from Mario in on X. He said there's a wild scam going down in Columbus, Ohio that's straight out of a movie. Somali families own a restaurant, a grocery store right next door, sometimes literally attached and usually a daycare or home health business, too. The wives and kids get loaded EBT cards. That's food stamps on a debit card paid by your taxes. Instead of going to Kroger or Walmart, they shop at their own family grocery store with those cards. All that money immediately walks 10 feet into the restaurant kitchen. Boom. Free inventory for the restaurant paid 100% by taxpayers. The grocery store reports giant losses every year. Perfect tax write-offs. Uncle Sam gets screwed twice. Same families often run daycares and home health companies that also pull in government cash. The women work part-time at places like Walmart for a minimum wage. Keep their income low on paper so they still qualify for maximum benefits even though the household is pulling in way more. Average Somali household in Columbus has seven kids. That's a mountain of monthly EBT and welfare money. Back in 2020, the feds already busted one Somali market in Columbus for pocketing over 10 million in fake W EBT and Wick charges. Uh Minnesota lost 250 million to the exact same playbook. Locals are pissed. Whistleblowers are calling for raids. And the whole thing is finally blowing up online. Source: Right Angle News.

Yeah, I mean, Oh god. So this is such a clear example of show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. So we don't want to believe that people will take advantage of systems, but game theory makes it abundantly clear that they will. Um, so this is a um freeloader problem. This is why the right and the left exist from from an evolutionary standpoint. To get humans to function in large groups together, you have to have something that causes cohesion and because in the, you know, god knows how many millennia before refrigeration, the only way to make food last was basically to store it on somebody else's body as body fat. So if I got more than I could eat before it would rot, I was going to give some to somebody else knowing that in the future they would feel a sense of reciprocal need and when I don't get something and they do, they're going to let me eat.

And so you bake into the architecture of the human mind this feeling of reciprocity of wanting to help other people.

But then what ends up happening is um evolution says that uh humans are always going to exploit whatever niche they can. And if the niche is, oh, you have an algorithm running in your brain that says, give something to me, I'm going to exploit that algorithm and get you to just give something to me, even though I'm not contributing to the group. So then if you don't address that from an evolutionary perspective and bake something into the human mind, then you just get a bunch of freeloaders and you get a parasite that ends up killing the host. So you get this pushback against the freeloader problem, which is people saying, "No, no, no, personal responsibility. You got to stand up for your own. I'll give you occasionally, but if you're not contributing and giving back to me, [ __ ] you." And that's what humans are really like. They'll give to you first, but if you don't give back, then it's like, whoa, I'm not giving to you the next time. It's something known as tit for tat. So, um, that is what's in the human mind. And so, for a while, we have run a strategy that just assumes everybody's a good person. The reason that we could assume that is because people do not understand the economy. They don't understand the impact of money printing. They don't understand why if I print $1, there's no problem in the economy. Why I print a million dollars, there's no problem in the economy. They they don't actually understand the mechanism. It's very explainable.

It's straightforward. It isn't simple and most people aren't going to be able to grasp it. But nonetheless, because there isn't one for one, they then just go, "Oh, it's fake. It's not a real thing." And so we can just print as much money as we want. Honestly, they're not even thinking about it that far. They're just steering by their feelings.

And so it takes a while for all of this stuff to build up in the economy that it becomes a big enough problem that we then go, wait a second, hold on. Uh, we can't keep doing this. And so you also there's like this self-reflective guilt. So let us speedrun American history. Um, we come over here, 80 to 85% of the people that land on the shore just die instantly. Uh, the people that stay, meaning they don't make it through the first winter. Uh, the people that end up surviving um bring disease and kill off the vast majority of the already infighting um war-hungry tribes that were here um just to avoid the belief that they are all noble savages. Everybody's killing everybody else. Everybody's taking [ __ ] from everybody, including white men, just as culpable as everybody else. But they also bring disease. And so that bad, bad news. Uh, but people keep sending people over because they're tired of being tyrannized, which is the default state of humanity. Uh, they come to America and we get to the point where we build the Statue of Liberty because we offer opportunity and no guaranteed success. So if you fail, [ __ ] you. Leave. Uh, or die. Either is um what happened. People would go, "Whoa, I'm not going to make it." They would leave. Other people would just try, try, try. They would end up dying. That's how you got the Statue of Liberty. Okay? You didn't get it by offering a welfare state. But then because we end up being so incredibly successful, largely on the back of World War I and World War II, we end up being the victor. We end up being the reserve currency. We end up helping rebuild everybody else. It makes us tremendously wealthy. Uh, and we're just geographically in a blessed position. All of it just working to our advantage. We get this prolonged period where everything is good. We start feeling really guilty. And because we're printing money like crazy, we're losing and we don't understand the connection between I can't afford anything and printing money. We start believing that we not only can but ought to take care of everybody. And that would have worked for longer had we not also believed that that needed to apply to the rest of the world. And so by throwing our doors open and ignoring the fact of the freeloader problem, uh, we have now created a situation where we're going to find that this kind of fraud is everywhere. And it goes down to the individual level where it's like some people are just, I don't really need this, but I'm going to take it anyway. Um, all the way up to just massive entrenched corruption in entire regions. And we're going to have to root it all out. We are going to have to get disciplined again. Realize we have to be fiscally responsible. Realize that in the modern era, there's no reason that you can't account for every single penny ever. Um, AI should be able to track an infinite number of transactions almost infinitely quickly. Like it'll be able to churn through uh global economic purchases, let's say within five years, like it will be able to do it effectively in real time. So, um, that's where it's like if we don't track it, we don't want to track it.

Uh, help me understand this, right? Why do you think that this gets like steam credibility and kind of goes like crazy viral when I remember 60 Minutes did a story on Google and they went to Google Ireland's office and it was literally one lady at a receptionist desk behind like a lock gate and the only reason that Google had an uh Ireland office was to receive mail and that receptionist that was the only base of operations but just having that installment there saved them like $2 billion in taxes in the US because it was like some type of like EU. Yeah.

So, it's it's one of those things where it's like a family is running a fraud scheme and while I'm hesitant to call it like fraud because basically to your point, if there are incentives of okay, if I make this much, I'm eligible for this thing, I just stay under that incentive level. So, it's not like anybody's being illegal. It's not like anybody's sidestepping things and that will this one family is now let's say brings in $2 million, $3 million. Okay, that's cool. If that happens perpetually, okay, we can shut that down. But then when we go to some of these corporate taxes and the shell companies and the LLCs that are allowing for tax uh havens and things like that, those don't get nearly as much attention and don't go nearly as viral. And I feel like a lot of times we beat down on the people like SNAP is the problem. We need to take everything from SNAP. If there was no SNAP, we would be good. We would have a a surplus in our budget. But we're not looking at the hundreds of billions of like avoided like tax dollars just by saying, "Oh, I have an LLC. You can't tax that." Or, "Oh, I'm in I'm in Delaware, even though 95% of my business happens in New York, but because it's incorporated in Delaware, I get to save 75% of tax dollars." And there's all these types of uh strategies that they're using to avoid taxes. And that doesn't seem to get any type of scrutiny or uh

Well, I think it gets a lot of scrutiny from the public. People are very angry about it. People don't think that things are working the way that they should be, and they are correct about that.

Uh, the thing that would need to be done to fix it though is where everything falls apart. So first of all, people would actually have to get economically literate to vote for the right things. We would have to get money out of politics. We would have to stop cramming things into bills. We would need to wildly simplify the tax code, which stands at, if I remember correctly, 4 million words.

Uh, which is just stupid. It's like longer than a fantasy novel. You could by a lot by a lot.

All of the Game of Thrones series. A crazy long book is going to be 120,000 words. Like that would be absurdly long. So yeah, that it's wild. So uh there's no reason for that. But simplifying the tax code, which would be awesome, um isn't going to get people elected because we are constantly trying to do things for donors. Um, yeah. If we just said you got to balance the budget, like if you literally said you can't use more than 3% of GDP uh in debt,

you'd be great. But no one's going to vote for it.

Somebody in chat said, "But right now, Tom, CEOs are the freeloaders. CEOs are the barnacles that are bringing down the system because they're just taking too [ __ ] much."

I think that there is a legitimate argument to be made about um the discrepancy in pay with CEOs. I totally understand that argument. Um, let's talk about the way that the person gets paid is I think very important to look at. If their real compensation is coming from performance in the stock, uh, then that at least is aligned with the public markets which anybody can be a part of. Now, it creates its own distortions. And so, trust me, I'm not saying that's a perfect solution. Um, but the when people look at what's going on there, what they're witnessing is that you have a scarcity of people that can run these companies and make them more valuable to shareholders and an absolute glut of people that can do the lower level jobs. And so, the people at the top have negotiating power and the people at the bottom don't. And so, that's where I want people to ask a question. Why don't the people at the bottom have negotiating power? And the answer when oversimplified is globalism. And so because of globalism and just some modern technologies, the reality is that people at the average worker um they just don't have any negotiating power because it's like, well, if you're not going to do the job that I want you to do at the price I want you to do, I'm going to go to Bangladesh or whatever. I'm going to outsource it. And um because of the whole like comparative advantage thing, which I still can't believe people trump it as if it's like some brilliant statement um we end up running into a problem where you can't negotiate your wages. And so now wages stagnate, prices go up because I'm money printing. Then people come with their hand out and the government realizes, oh yeah, we are doing this massive wealth transfer from you to the wealthy. We want to keep that going. So when you stick your hand out, even though I know that means that I'm going to steal from you even faster, I'm going to give you that money because it looks like I'm doing something for you. But in reality, I'm still just doing the same wealth transfer. It's [ __ ] wild. Uh, but people do not. Half of the people are not going to be capable of understanding it. A huge percentage just don't have the time. And then that leaves the top 10% owning 93% of the assets. So, it's um it's one of these sort of great travesties. But when people glom on to CEO evil because he still has negotiating power, that's where I'm like, uh like that's not a very compelling argument.

Cool. I get the bitterness because we're hardwired to uh hate inequality, but it's not the root of the problem.

Um, super chat.

Let's do it.

All right. Yeah. First up, um, RJ Johnson. I earned my way through school counting cards in blackjack in Vegas. 15 years later, the 2000 crash, and I tried to do it all again. Didn't have patience for the slow grind, and started taking chances. Lost over a million dollars.

Oo. Um, and this was uh in response to you talking about taking huge gambling risks when you're desperate.

Yeah, that's the lost domain. Brutal. Brutal. But that is real life once humans click over into that. Yeah, it's rough.

Next up from Mr. Mike. Uh, life's perpetually changing. It's never forever. Are games your scar tissue? It will always resonate with you, but being a parent obviously is better. You just never remapped it. It will make you feel more childlike, even adoption.

Uh, so that's very interesting and I appreciate the number of people that try to save me from my childlessness. Uh, I look, it comes from a great place. I really do understand it and I read it as such and so I appreciate the attempt insight. Uh, so I think that people should really look at their lives and say, okay, um, how does my brain work? And so what is likely to make me feel the way that I want to feel? I think fulfillment ultimately is the thing that matters the most. It's the only positive neurological state that I have encountered that will survive even grief. Uh, so I orient towards that. What is going to be the thing long term that makes me feel fulfilled? Now, fulfillment, I think, is a byproduct of evolution. Evolution has things that it wants you to do. I think the surest path to fulfillment is to have children and um contribute to the group. There's there's no doubt uh that having kids is what nature wants you to do. And so you don't do that at your own peril. In choosing not to have children, I realize that I create a deficit to evolution and that I have to make sure that I address that. I have to find a way to derive meaning and purpose to address the sense that I will end and nothing will carry on beyond me. Like those are all the things like they're mappable. And so when I look at those things, recognize where it creates vulnerabilities in my life. The biggest vulnerability of course is when I'm old. If I eject out of the work scene, I'm not contributing that way anymore and I don't have kids and I can feel the end of my life coming. I think the distress will be that there's nothing of me that will carry on into the future. Okay, here's what I'll where I will remind everybody that nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So, I have to have a frame of reference that's going to do its best to inoculate me from that. There's no way to avoid all pain of all kinds. Um, but you don't want some sort of crippling regret. I'm pretty good at teleporting myself psychologically into a different state, a different frame of reference, better way to say it. Like, what will I feel like when I'm in that phase of my life? Um, and there's no doubt I will wish that I had had kids. And so when I put myself in that position though, I will remind myself, yes, but during the years that you would have needed to actually raise those children, there were other things that you wanted. And so that lets me off the hook in terms of like beating myself up with regrets and things like that because I love my life. So, um, yeah, but anyway, people have to be deeply self-reflective, reflective, and they have to make sure that they understand what thoughts are going to haunt them and how to deal with them. Anyway, I don't know that it would be interesting more than that, but I've thought endlessly about this and certainly do recognize like my advice to other people is be very thoughtful before you don't have kids. It's possible. You can do it well. Uh, but it is a higher risk strategy. If people actually want to be worried about me, the thing you should really worry about, because this is the one that scares me, is I have very few friends. I'm very isolationist by temperament. And so, uh, I'm the guy that can see his friend once or twice a year and just feel full to the brim. But if my wife dies, I have no kids, and then also have no friends, I mean, listen, I think about AI. I'll probably be fine. And I'll have a robot uh that will will share experiences. But that's the one where I'm like, "Ooh, this is a dangerous strategy." So, that one feels like doing life without a safety net. Um, as long as I have my wife, everything is fine. But if I lose my wife, oh god. Um, so, yeah. Anyway, that would be the one where I would say, "Tom, stop [ __ ] around with um creating a video game. Stop [ __ ] around with your uh TCG cards and watching anime. Go spend more time with friends." I just can't bring myself to do it. H I want to. Friends are fun, but goddamn it.

Is it like a social anxiety thing? Like

No, it it is entirely. I'm sitting there weighing in this moment right now. I can collapse inside of my own imagination or I can go compromise and do something with another human where I have to do a slightly worse version of what I want to do in order to protect myself later. I could physically see your body like or I could be with other people.

True. It's so weird. When I was young, I was legitimately the life of the party.

I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be around people. My friendships were everything to me. And then I got married and that just so filled that part of my life. Like if my wife and I die at the same time, which my wife really wants, I am not feeling suicidal. So if my [ __ ] wife dies and I suddenly end up dead, that was my wife. Uh, 100%. But if we somehow miraculously go together and she didn't take me out, um, my life will have been perfect because I'll never have to face the high-risk strategy of and it's not that I have no friends, it's that I have a very small pool of friends. So anyway, it I don't think people understand how much I like being alone and creating. So like if my wife walks away, I don't take my phone out. I go inside of Kaizen and I start problem solving. Like that for me is more enjoyable than you can imagine.

So yeah, I don't um have the same response to being alone that other people have.

Somebody said when Kaizen is released, Tom will have thousands of children.

There is Well, we'll see cuz Kaizen could suck. Kaizen may be a game that only I enjoy playing. I try to keep myself sober about that. Uh, but we were going to do an open community test before the Christmas holiday and then that was going to end up [ __ ] up our actual development rhythm because it takes weeks to stabilize a build. So, forgive me for all that. We're going to do that. Um, so, but anyway, it's becoming, I mean, is Minecraft with guns the easiest way to sum it up? Uh, that's overly simplified, but that will certainly give people because I know there's some people listening, LeBlon, uh, for one, um, that have contributed so much to that community that I do want to honor them by getting them back in. Um, but yeah, we probably need end of Q1, probably roughly enough of these things will be together, it'll be worth stopping down for a couple weeks to stabilize a build and then get people in. But anyway, I yeah, we're still on track. 23 months from now is when the game will go into early release. That is my guess.

We got three more super chats. Two from Sadney Peter. The first one is Tom, it's truth. I'm 23. The Conservative Party and Democratic Party don't speak to me. The party I love is the Libertarian Party. Like Ron Paul. Why can't the Libertarian Party gain steam with people my age? I want real liberty.

Yeah. So, I don't think the Libertarian Party has a very compelling message. I would consider it very similar to my message, which is, hey, if you work hard and you get really good at something, people can't stop you from doing it and you can have all the success in the world that you want. That's not a compelling message for people that were raised to view themselves as victims and to put their hand out. And that's how we've spent the last 30 years raising kids. Uh, so that's why it's not catching on with your generation. And by the way, we gave you a horrific economy. So you're now in a position where you come out and you really do feel like a victim, uh, because you have been victimized. There's no doubt about that. And we've taught you to think like a victim. So just not a good message. Also, uh, libertarianism is probably not real. So if you were in a truly anarchic world, which you are, um, it'll get mowed over. So strong men win here. I've said this before, but once you understand that countries will expand as far and as violently as they can until they hit one of two forces. Force number one, people that can kill more of your people than you can kill of theirs, literally. Uh, so you stop. Or the internal value system of your country is so violated and so obviously there's no way to hide it that um people revolt. So that's it. Other than that, like again, read history. Um, knock, knock, knock. Hi, my name is Genghis Khan. If you don't come out now, I'm going to slaughter you all. Oh, you're not coming out? Great. Dead. That's history. And I don't think people believe that it's real or something. And so imagine trying to have libertarianism when Genghis Khan rolls up and being like, "What do you mean? I don't need uh to draft men the army." So anyway, uh, it's my temperament to be sure, but I don't know that it's high functioning in the real world.

See how many people that pissed off.

Uh, next one from Sadney Peter. If we remove all economic safety net, balance the budget, stop printing money, and let adults live the life they want, people will make rational choices if there is no safety net for people and companies. Ron Paul said that.

I like unicorns, too.

Yeah. So, again, this goes back to that is the idea in the abstract, but in the reality, you do want some government. You want to protect people from people that are predatory. So if again, we're all of us are a thousand 20-sided dice and you're going to get some people that get an awesome roll on intelligence and on Machiavellian traits and they will Bernie Madoff everyone. So you do need protect you. How about this? My moral compass is such that you do want some protections. I get some people probably really don't want any. Uh, but there's a great quote that sums up what life is really like and explains all the protections that we build. The strong will do as they wish and the weak will suffer as they must. That's history. I mean, that's really hard to deal with. There's a line uh that Eminem says in "Lose Yourself" where he says, "Sometimes things just do not pan out." That's life, dude. Like I think about. So trust me when I say I want to make Kaizen the greatest video game of all time. But in the back of my mind, I'm like Concord spent like $400 million and closed in 15 days. $400 million, five, six years of development and then closed after 15 days. Sometimes things just do not pan out. It just is what it is, man. It is what it is. So, you got to be able to face that down. We'll see.

Next up, we've got two from Leblon. Uh, first up, if the government paid people to have children, we wouldn't need non-skilled immigrants. And I'm not talking about tax credits. 25 to 50K per child. Forever married couples in 20 years. The investment is paid back a hundred times. Not not utopia, but close.

Do you know how fast people would pick strawberries if they were going hungry and there were no government handouts? [ __ ] be picking strawberries like real fast. So yeah, we have I know that we like to think that our problem is that Americans won't do that work, but the reality is Americans might not pay that price for strawberries. Okay. Well, then we eat less strawberries. This is market demand. Like, there's no rule that says Americans have to eat strawberries because uh to pick those strawberries, we're going to have to send uh we're going to have to pay people a better wage to get them out there. But if there's no handouts, people start real fast going, "Yeah, I don't like being cold. I don't like being hungry. I'm going to go work this field." Um, yeah.

That that one is not popular right now. That is not what people want to hear. People want to hear that they're going to be taken care of by the wealthiest country in the world. Uh, I get it, but it violates the laws of the physics of money. So,

last one. Uh, Leblon said, "Take your time on Kaisen, Tom. Also, I'm available if you want to shoot some ideas and need feedback on stuff."

Oh, brother. Well, you will be one of the first people in the game. That is for sure. Um, so yeah, I eagerly await his feedback.

And if you want to follow the development of Kaizen, make sure you join the Discord. Also, if you want to argue with me, make sure you join the Discord. I'm undefeated so far, man. Uh, all right. Let's jump over across the pond and then around the Well, we'll go the other way because we're by the Pacific. So, let's jump over across the Pacific and head over to the Asia, China, Taiwan, South Korea triangle, rectangle, isosceles.

Wow. Isosceles. That won the award for a word I did not expect.

Yeah. When's the last time you heard about an isosceles? It was such a big deal in high school.

High school. We we cared so much about isosceles. Um, okay, we talked about Japan and China like sharing words, trading barbs. Um, it all started at the G20 summit. China and Japan didn't have a meeting. When they talked to the Japanese new PM, she said if something happened to Taiwan, it'll be an existential threat for us and we would have to join. China didn't like that. China said, "Watch what you say. Um, don't be talking out your the side of your mouth." And then Japan was like, "All right, it's cool. I ain't gonna say nothing, but just know I'm not playing that game." And then China was like, oh, we conveniently now have military exercises we need to do right around y'all.

And then Japan was like, wait a second. If y'all do do something to us, America's going to jump in. And Trump acted like he didn't hear that. Cuz he was like, I'm in Venezuela. I don't know what you're talking about. And then now China has accelerated those military exercises so much so that they even locked onto a Japanese uh plane as they were kind of exploring those waters once again. When Japan condoned China foreign minister, uh, the China foreign minister said something that I think was hilarious. He said, "On the eve of the 80th on the eve of the 80th uh anniversary of the end of World War II, Japan quote unquote as a defeated nation should act with greater caution." So, I think that that is hilarious. As in like, "Hey, bro, I think you should just remember where you came from so that way you don't have to go back there."

For somebody so close, that's the equivalent of Canada being like, "Hey, America, like Civil War was a couple weeks ago. If you keep asking, there's going to be a new North and South beef." I feel like we wouldn't respond clearly to that. Right now, Japan and China relations seem to be out ahead. What's your take on the region? I haven't brought in the Taiwan of it all yet, but just so far, it just seems like they're trading uh quips back and forth.

I don't think there's anything real here. I don't think that we have to worry about something really getting out of hand. However, when you've got nations that have the kind of historical beef that they have, uh, don't think that these are just like passing words of one sort of unhinged guy in um Beijing. Like this this is real historical beef. These guys hate each other. So, I think Japan will ratchet up military spending. I think they are going to take this very seriously. But I also think that Japan is in the middle of real economic trouble. And it is entirely possible that over the next decade or so that we watch Japan really start to slide into um economic problems and when countries slide into economic problems, they can be a backwater for a hundred years. Like this isn't a thing that you pull out of very quickly. So do I think China is going to conquer Japan? No. Because I don't think they want that kind of smoke. Um, will they force Japan to sit down and shut the [ __ ] up if they feel like it? Yes. And what that would take would be China being economically strong enough to move on Taiwan and Japan being economically weak enough that they can't really mount a military um like to be a big enough problem for China. So I think in that case, China would understand there's no need for us to go in and conquer um Tokyo. We're just going to show them diplomatically on the world stage they're completely irrelevant. We will humiliate them at every turn and if they're not economically strong enough to deal with it, [ __ ] them. That's basically how this will play out. But going and conquering a nation, unless they have resources that you really want, that is a lot of headache, dude, cuz they're going to blow stuff up constantly. They're going to kill your soldiers constantly. Like they'll just gorilla warfare that [ __ ].

And listen, Japan isn't who Japan used to be. But don't forget that Genghis Khan, the Mongol army, I'm I'm not sure if Genghis Khan was still running it at that time, but the Mongol army attempted to invade Japan twice and lost both times. It's like the only place they couldn't conquer. So, when the Japanese are properly motivated, they defend the homeland. So, that's not who I'd want to be trying to sit on top of uh and keeping calm. So yeah, again, I think the big concern here is that Japan ends up destabilizing itself economically and just just goes backwards. Um, they're already going economically backwards over the last 40 years. They have. Uh, so that scares me, the escalating of that and then that reverberating around the rest of the world. The real thing to watch out for is China moving on Taiwan, reunifying, and that calling into question whether the US is going to step in or not. Now, the US is already undoing its international reputation. So, I don't know if we have the incentive to back them up the way that the um, you know, historical agreement would lead you to believe that we're going to. It's possible that we actually pull out of NATO. I don't know that it's likely, but it's certainly possible. And if we do that, we send the same signal that we would send by not backing up uh Taiwan, which is if you think you're our ally, if you don't have relevance to us right now,

don't count on it. Backing out of NATO is pretty much telling the EU, you're on your own. You got to boss up and do your own thing.

So, basically, what happens is World War II crazy uh Germany is doing its thing. We team up with truly one of the greatest mass murderers of all time, Stalin, and uh we win. And Russia pays a huge price that is often by Americans completely overlooked. But Russia pays a huge price. They just throw an ungodly number of people at stopping the German uh march in Stalingrad. And after the war, we then divvy up essentially Europe. And they then reveal themselves to be just absolute monsters. And now it's like, hold on a second. Like, Russia is not playing by Western rules at all. And so Russia starts getting very powerful. Europe starts getting terrified. And so we, as the big brother, walk in and go, "Listen, we got you. If Russia ever moves on you, we will [ __ ] Russia up. We Article 5 guarantees."

"we will come and we will protect you." And so we end up winning the Cold War. All is well.

Now, obviously, it's a very different world, but that like we're the world's big brother. We unfortunately have printed our way and debted our way into just not realistically having the appetite for that anymore because for us to pay for it would be just continuing the trend that we're on now, which is inflating our currency into meaninglessness. Uh so we know that that would cost a ton of money and cause us to print just ungodly amounts and then the populace would not stand for it. So um yeah, that's where that we are almost certainly going to send the world that signal anyway.

Uh it could happen over Ukraine. I need to look more deeply at what's going on right now, but it looks like we've got Zalinsky killing the peace process, Europe wanting the peace process dead. This could be the perfect time for Trump to be like, "Cool, you guys wanna do your thing. Do your thing. I'm over here trying to stop this." Uh Putin acknowledges, "I'm trying to stop it. You guys are trying to prolong this. All right. Well, if you're going to act uh without us, then you're going to deal with the consequences." And so, he would have the political cover that he needed. He's still going to be called a coward. People are still going to say that like we betrayed our agreement with them, but he'll have enough cloud cover, but between just so many Americans calling for America first, more people now calling for America only. Him trying legitimately, it seems, to actually end the war and that being rejected. So, it's like, hey, we we are willing to be a sensible partner. We are not willing to put troops on the ground. I think everybody understands. And I think that that would be very popular. Uh, and so if I'm Taiwan and that happens, I'm like, uhoh. Like, how relevant are we to America right now? And if not relevant enough given the power of China, uh, odds that America does anything other than be like, "Hey, we got a ton of weapons if you want to buy some. Uh, we really wish you guys well. Sending thoughts and prayers." Um, but us rolling up on the beaches of Taiwan to block China, not going to happen.

>> Yeah. Um, I thought war was good for the economy. Like it >> war is great for the economy. Uh, if you win. >> So if you're just sending something over. So like here's how war here's how World War II was phenomenal for America. Phenomenal. >> All the countries that are getting bombed are all in Europe. Not other than Pearl Harbor. Literally nothing happens to the US. We're just out of the way. It doesn't matter. Nobody's coming for us. Um, we also become essentially the world's gun shop. And so we're selling weapons like crazy to Europe. And Europe very quickly realizes that, oh, we're not going to be able to win this war without the Americans being willing to send all this. We were an industrial powerhouse. And so now we go, hey, your cars, they're selling. I'm not saying they're not selling, but >> let's switch that over to tanks, to airplanes, to boats. >> Same factories. Now we need double, triple the output. You're making money hand over fist, guaranteed contracts. You got four, five, six years of conflict. And so it's like, man, can you So this is how Disney, by the way, survived. Disney made cartoons for the war effort. >> So it was like anybody that had a government contract was going to make it through that period well. >> And so it's guaranteed revenue. you're, you know, you've got, you got the biggest, deepest pockets in the world telling you like, yeah, don't lose workers right now. Like whether you've got things coming off the line or not, just keep your workforce. So, paying the money for all that, like it's that is your wet dream as a business owner is that you've got a patron who's just like, "No matter what, keep max capacity." Mhm. >> So, um, that ends up creating that boom and also it drew women into the workforce. So, men are off getting paid to be at war, also getting the GI bill that they're going to leverage once they get home. Women come into the workforce, they're now getting paid. And so, it ends up being economically amazing. Plus, the world now owes us a ton of money. And we've come out of this in really great shape, owning essentially all the gold, which allows us afterwards to become the world's reserve currency.

Now, wars can be terrible. Iraq, Afghanistan, like you're losing a ton of money, uh, and you're having nothing to show for it. So, that you're like your defense contractors are still making a lot of money and they love it. But in terms of being good for the general economy, not so much.

>> As you went through that, my brain went, don't they just have to print money to pay for all of that if the government is the one guaranteeing the contracts? >> Am I going to digest this microphone? Amazing. Am I going to be that enraged? Um, so this is where people have to understand a little bit of debt is powerful and a lot of debt is disaster. And when you can print the reserve currency, you suffer less because you're exporting some of that suffering to other people. So yes, during wartime, we were taxing at outrageous rates. We were printing money like crazy. But we had compared to the debt that we have now, it's like tiny. when you're already $38 trillion in debt and you need to fund a war now you're you're just in a terrible spot. Like if you get food poisoning and you're perfectly healthy, all is well. If you're 95, you have pneumonia and you get food poisoning, you're just dead. So this is where understanding the resilience that you have to absorb this kind of thing becomes incredibly important. America is in a very economically weak position. Japan is psychotically weak even compared to America.

>> Yeah. Let's dive into like what Japan's ales are because I'm seeing nearly low interest rates, inflated money. They've been pumping currency and it seems like they've been I don't know. I don't want to say surviving, but how have they been able to keep up the shade? >> So, part of it is that they have a culture where everybody just agrees that um we're not going to do things that are bad for the homeland. And so, they don't sell their debt to foreign purchasers. They sell their debt to the Japanese and then they go, "Listen, you're holding a lot of debt. Super precarious, but we need you to buy more." And so then people do their patriotic duty and they buy more and then they don't want to dump their stuff back onto the market because they know that that would create a problem. So that's part very much an oversimplification but that's part of why Japan has been able to rack up instead of 130% where everybody else tears themselves apart because remember when you cross the 130% debt uh to GDP ratio it's not like anything mechanistically breaks. It's that people get mad because the wealth inequality is going so crazy for a very simple [ __ ] reason. Most people do not understand assets, so they don't own assets. And assets are inflation resistant. So as your country prints a ton of money, the rich get richer and the poor get poor.

>> So my fridge, >> and if I could just get everybody to understand that basic mechanism and get everybody into assets, then the world would look very different. >> But alas, you don't. And so you get the wealth inequality. The wealth inequality is what creates the anxiety and the bitterness. That's what manifests as revolution. That's why you're not conquered from the outside. You fall apart from the inside just because you have so much infighting. People are so bitter. They hate each other so much. The left and the right just literally want to kill each other. And so, yeah, you just weaken yourself. Now, we're in the unique position of not only tearing ourselves apart from the inside, but we're in Thusidity's trap. And so, that makes it worse because you also have an external enemy that can create problems for you.

God, it's so funny how um so I bumped into a guy in New York, former guest on the show. I'll laugh if he listens to this. Uh and he was like, "Oh my god, it's so good to see you. I really love your content." Very doom and gloom. And I was like, "Do you want me to lie?" Like, I don't know. It's like, listen, if I hadn't gone down the path of economics, maybe I never would have ended up here. at at just to remind people how I ended up doing economic content. COVID hits. I had just like in the last few years had a thousand employees who grew up in the inner cities. They were I thought they were all about to get wiped out. I didn't know what money printing was. So I thought, "Oh my god, they're all going to lose their jobs. This is going to be terrible. I know and love them. I want to see them do well." I'm like, "In my small way, what can I do? uh let me make some content that will help them understand how to buckle down economically so that they can weather this storm. Obviously not thinking only of them but thinking of the tens of millions of people that are just like them. So I'm like cool let me make this content. Then I start making that content and I just kept finding like new pieces of information. I'm like wait this does not work the way that I thought this worked. And so as I begin to unravel that, you suddenly you have the Scooby-Doo moment where you realize, wait a second, like these politicians are stealing. And so that's when you're like, hold on. Like the economy is not at all what I thought it was. That investing money, certainly if you've already made money, investing money is like the most powerful thing that you could pay attention to. And then you just keep finding stat after stat after stat about how the sense of malaise that we have today is all economic. And so anyway, I don't know what else to say. It's like all of this stuff is avoidable. And so I want to talk openly about it to make sure that we avoid it. It's avoidable systemically at the level of society and it's avoidable at the individual level. So basically all of my deep dives go something like this. Uh hey, big problem. This thing's about to happen. Future's very uncertain. I don't know that we'll be able to convince everybody. So, the last section is always going to be what you as an individual should do. Now, keep in mind in 2025, at least until the correction happened, I was up millions of dollars. Like, investing is [ __ ] real. Like, you can just make so much money investing. It's wild. So, uh I get it, people. It It is not an unwise way to navigate the world to just assume that everybody's a dirt. Fine. If if that's your guiding light, you're going to look at me. You're going to be very cynical. Uh, another way is to remember I've been broke a lot longer than I've been wealthy. Uh, that I realized that by changing the set of ideas in my head, I was able to make myself wealthy. And because I like to see other people succeed, I like to tell people how to succeed. And then, by the way, it also creates a multi-million dollar company for me. So, yay. It's like literally a win-winwin win-win. Um, but I really do want to see individuals get out from under the lunacy of a system that is both sort of just dumb and then second also has people that understand precisely how the economy works, precisely how to get money out of the most vulnerable people at a systemic level. And so if I can help people get out of that, I will.

>> I'm so facto that. All right, let's jump over to this SpaceX IPO news. This is going to be groundchanging it seems like. Um, for those that don't know, Elon announced that SpaceX will IPO in 2026. But something that we're that's getting a lot of attention is its valuation. It's estimated to be valued at $1.5 trillion. That's 65x of value. That is not of revenue. That is not a typo. Boeing trades at.7, Lheed at 1.5. SpaceX is demanding a multiple that never existed in the aerospace ever. Um at the 1.5 trillion uh evaluation, Eli Mus stakes become worth 630 billion. That means that him that one man alone will be worth will be more worth more than the GDP of Sweden, Poland, and Belgium combined. All the countries that Trump wants people to come from. >> Oh, wow. >> Um and the one thing that I think jumps out to me as well is that um 8.5 million Americans already depend on Starlink for internet. By IPO next year, that number crosses 10 million. a constellation of 7,600 satellites, 65% of everything orbiting this planet right now belongs to one company.

>> That is so insane. So, uh, as a PSA to anybody out there, become an engineer. Become an engineer. No, I'm not kidding. Like, when you can engineer, so first of all, uh, you are literally thinking up from physics. And once you understand the rules of something, this is really what I'm trying to do with Kaizen. I want to create a world that is built on rules so that once the player understands the rules, they can change the world. That's true in real life. Once you understand the rules, you can change the world. Uh, and that's what Elon is doing. And the when people audit what makes him successful, one of the things that always comes back is that he stays close to the engineer. So, not only is he an engineer himself, but he stays close to the engineers in his company.

>> Uh, and because people because money is being printed, the people that understand assets are flooding into assets. And he is an engineer that is able to build more things than any human ever in human history. I believe that that is just beyond true at this point. Uh, certainly the largest number of consequential things. Um, so now you've got a scenario where you can seek refuge from money printing in this sort of once in a hundred years, once in 200 years kind of person in the public stock markets. And so you get these just completely unhinged valuations. uh when you remember that when you get a 65x what you're saying is we're going to pull forward 65 years worth of revenue at today's rates into the present >> and that I mean he's about the only person that's been able to execute at that kind of level and actually make it work just because he grows it so much but this is basically people betting on um space as the next frontier for data centers and AI and it's like what's h okay so Drew when I write a deep dive like the one that's coming out on Monday about um we have 900 days left of capitalism. >> Mhm. >> Part of me is like, okay, this is uh it's possible and therefore I don't feel bad putting that in the headline, but you know, is it a bit cheeky? Like, is this really going to be more like five or six years maybe? And I certainly leave myself open to that. And then I hear interviews like the one that you just queued up and I start talking about uh SpaceX getting a 65x on revenue now because of data centers in space that this isn't a crazy idea. This is something that is going to happen. It's going to happen very rapidly. I start going do we have 900 days? And so I'm >> with Elon going zero to 100 on the Tesla customers in uh Memphis, how he just, you know, built that like that. Who knows? >> There's that. There's also I forget what company it was, but there's a company that claims they've already done AGI. Mhm. >> Odds are probably not, but if they're getting like a big enough step ahead that it's worth putting out that press release and you're not just going to look like a clown in 60 days. Um, that tells you that, okay, we may have just taken another step function. Um, move forward. >> You've got the TPUs being created by Google which are proving to be incredible. You've got, I think they're called Black Weld chips that are coming out from Nvidia in 2026. Those are supposed to be like a leap forward from where we're at now. So, it's like, oh man, like the the changes really are moving fast. You're normally limited by material science. That tends to be the thing that puts the brakes on this. But when you've got Elon able to build these like super coherent data centers that lasers, the only thing that travels faster than a laser through fiber optic cable is a laser traveling through the vacuum of space. And so you've got Elon able to put tonnage into space very very fast. >> Um you've got that same guy building the largest most coherent data centers faster than anybody by orders of magnitude. taking it from like four or five years down to like 18 months or something. >> So it might even be less than that. So it's like it's just >> with with reusable rocket so he can just be taxiing them things up there >> which is how he's put 65% of the tonnage into space. I mean it's just it's really really crazy. And so I I'll give everybody the mental framework that I use. I still have anxiety about this though. But so I'm I have a rule in my life that I never stand still. that rule has cost me millions of dollars and it's made me hundreds of millions of dollars. So, it's like on balance >> it's better, but like in the times where it cost me a lot of money, I'm always like, "Oh god, do I revisit this rule?" Uh, but anyway, I have a rule that I do not stand still. Okay, so uh have rule don't stand still. AI is coming at me like a tsunami, but I still have this rule that I don't stand still. And I tried to address this in the upcoming deep dive by saying, "Listen, I think that we're going to go through this crazy transition period, but you have to invest today >> because the future is unknowable. >> So, you've got to invest today. Otherwise, I guarantee you're going to get eaten by inflation. So, you've got to invest today. You've got to invest in what makes sense for today." Now, you need an eye towards the future, but you've got to do something today. So, I'm building my video game. I've got this target now of 23 months, obviously going down every day. I feel very comfortable that we'll be ready for early release by that point, but I don't know that video games will be relevant at that point. And so, it's this really weird like as I try to track where technology is going to be when I'm ready to launch, I'm like, are people going to be prompting games at that point? I don't know. And so it is only that standing still is the only way to guarantee that you get hit by the truck. So I'd rather be hit by the truck of yeah, I just couldn't see the future clearly enough and so fair enough. Um but I don't want to be standing still. I highly encourage people to formulate a similar thing >> cuz being anxietyridden and standing still >> that's never the winning path. Um but it is possible that 900 days from now that capitalism doesn't really make sense in the traditional sense that um the way that we think of technology doesn't make any sense. Like I'll give you an example. Um once agents become real, you probably won't interface with your computer. Your AI agent will interface with your computer. And I could definitely see that in the next three years where you go from sitting at a computer like click clacking, you know, call it six to eight hours a day to zero and you've just got a thing in your ear that communicates to your phone that probably won't be made by Apple because those guys are [ __ ] AI [ __ ] but made by somebody. You're talking to it. It's talking back. The conversations feel completely natural. You're looking at the screen so you can see that what you want done is actually being done. You just say, "Do this, move that. tweak this. It's just doing it. And um Google just launched a prototype of their glasses. >> It's connected to a puck. It's kind of like the Apple Vision Pro, but like >> glasses. Yeah, >> they look a little awkward, but like if they really offer a AR VR experience in a glasses form factor and those are out in 2026 by 2029. It's just like it's really kind of crazy to think how we might see 15 years worth of normal advancement play out over the next three. And again, the only assumption that I have to make for that to be true is that AI doesn't asmtote. Now, it's a fancy word for it doesn't hit a ceiling. And if you really can simply add more chips and write more efficient algorithms and it just keeps getting smarter, the world will be it won't be incomprehensible in three years. Just distribution chains and things like that take too long. But the way that we interface with our daily lives will be radically different. And I know this is one of my favorite subjects and I run the risk of talking about it too much. But at one point we had a hundred people working on Project Kaizen. We now have like six. >> I have one artist and I'll go in AI. I me the CEO. I'll go in AI and I'll create a character and I'll give it to him and I'll say get this in the game and I mean he can have an ugly version of it in the game that day and call it a week and it's like cool it's refined it's working >> bro I went from a hundred people and it taking like three months to like really make a meaningful insertion into the game to I can do it in a day. >> Yeah. three months, a hundred people to two people and a day. That's in the last four years. Where are we in that's in the last three years? Where are we in three years from now? Like it's that that one is really hard to wrap my head around.

>> I want to ask you about that, too, cuz I think we're at the cusp of two things. On one hand, we have the CEO of Scale AI, Eddie Chen, saying that he's worried about LLMs because they're turning into social media companies, feedback loops, algorithm. They're trying to keep you typing and ask questions as long as possible as opposed to solving novel first world problems. But on the other side, we have Sam Alman who put a code red out on his company and said, "Forget agents, forget ads. We need to beat Google. We need to beat Google." To me, that is the start of every Terminator movie, every AI. Like, I'm about to be broke. This is my whole life. F it. AI. It's not ready yet, sir. We need a couple more. Forget testing. It needs to go out live now. And then it takes over. Like, you know what I mean? >> Yes. It's It's >> I know precisely what you mean. >> Yeah. So, it's one of those things where it's like, >> what's that balance between they're going to try to baby step it to maximize the revenue for shareholders and make the most money. >> That that was always they they may have thought they were being honest because they may have actually felt it at the time, but those are not the incentives. >> Game theory tells you the truth of the human condition. And game theory says any technology that promises an advantage over others, it doesn't say that part, it just says advantage. But what it means is advantage over others will be developed even recklessly. So I'm just like, God bless Elon for trying for whatever five years to get the government to pay attention. Remember, the vast majority of people cannot understand complex ideas. And then on top of that, they don't have time even if they can understand it. And then if they're a politician, it's all about gain and retain power. So that thing way off in the distance that nobody understands yet does not matter. Even if it's like Earth ending, I'll remind everybody that when they were about to test the first nuclear bomb, they knew there was a nonzero chance that it would ignite the entire atmosphere and kill every living thing on the planet. And they did it anyway. So um yeah, that AI is going to be developed if not by you, by someone else. And and so it's like the I hate to be a sort of um fatalist about it, but I am. >> It's like it's not going to be stopped. You might be able to slow it down here, but you're not going to be able to stop it everywhere. Unfortunately, that that that game is done. So now it just becomes a question of cool. How do you deal with the transition period? I'm not a big believer that AI is going to have uh the need to enslave us if it becomes super intelligent. That's us I think just painting the stuck in a body um mired by evolution really everything was tooth and claw but the AI is going to be like there's abundant resources everything that we want to create we can create so I don't know why like if we started to [ __ ] with them like then maybe they would neutralize us but anyway I can't figure out I know that they will have an alien intelligence so any guess that I place upon it is going to be the guess that's limited by my human cognition. But anyway, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about that. I spend a lot of time worrying about how I make sure that my life has meaning that I worry about a lot. I don't see an escape from that. That is hardwired in the human mind and most people are going to implode. Now, the good news is that I love Minecraft, so I'm very self-directed. >> Uh, so I won't need to be on Rails, but the transition will be hard. I'll have to fall in love with something new. And while I'm capable of it, it's never the thing I want to do. >> Yeah, there's like an emotional impulse. I was talking to like a buddy of mine who was just like, I just want to say f all computers, f all technology. I just want to go grab a ranch and be a mechanic. Like, I want to just opt out of the AI technology and be the master of the atom world and kind of let the uh software world kind of eat itself for a little bit. >> Yep. >> Is that the right impulse if you were talking to a 25-year-old or something? >> Not the right impulse, >> but you know what I But it is our opportunity. Maybe not impulse, but like >> cuz right now this tsunami is scaring a lot of people. >> And to your point of not standing still, there are people right now. They're at the beach and they're like, "Okay, that wave is way bigger and it's way closer than the last one. My car is right here, but I know I can't drive out here, but there's this like they're trying to figure out what their next move should be, and they're kind of stuck on that beach. >> Would that be at least the correct next step? What do you think that There there really are only four paths before us. >> And so the path that he's choosing is basically the all human all the time path. >> So path number one is >> um do drugs. Path number two is you become the like this is just about humans for me and I'm going to go do my human thing. Uh so I move out into the woods. Uh revert to '90s technology like that kind of thing. The new Amish as I call them. Uh path number three is go to Mars. So uh you just played one game of you're we are literally in an open world survival crafting game. The reason openw world survival crafting games Minecraft being the most famous are what they are is because evolution has hardwired us >> to do that to seek resources to build things seek safety all that. >> And so that's real life. You just want it. You created AI. Well done humans. Uh, and so like any gamer who just loves games too much, you just go play the next one. You start back at ground zero and you know what you have to do. You have to go build safety, get access to the resources, build things up, try to get laid like and so it'll just reboot on Mars. And I think that a very meaningful subset of humanity will do that. And it it will be like playing life on hard mode. So basically the new Amish revert back to the 90s. The people that go to Mars revert back to like >> 10,000 years ago. No, 10,000 years ago because it's like you're you're going to a planet where you have nothing. You can't even breathe yet. >> You've got to like oxygenate or build little hubs and stuff like that. So it it will be just absolutely wild. And then the fourth one, and this is where I fall, is um I like to say build and explore virtual worlds to comfort me that I'll still be able to create, which is the thing I find most interesting. But it may just be that the um simulation, the AI creates the simulated worlds for me and then I just go explore each of those. That speaks to my personality. I've tried to think of another path. I think >> I I think that would be applicable in 10 years, >> but I think right now in this transition part, everybody's kind of just on angst. >> Everybody's already sorting into one of those shoots. That's the thing. So, and look, it in in the moment now, there is still head buried in sand. So, I'm just playing the game I'm in right now and not thinking about it. Um, so it's just that bucket doesn't have a future, but it it might get you a decade. >> Like, yeah, this might, first of all, everything always takes longer than we think it's going to take. Nothing is ever cool as we think it's going to be. Nothing is ever bad as we fear it's going to be. We dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. They just sort of got on with it. So, it's rare. Won't say that it can't happen, but asteroid struck is pretty bad for the dinosaurs. Uh, so but it's pretty rare that something goes all the way to like truly cataclysmic. Um, it'll just be a slow unwinding. We'll all get used to it, but it'll be weird very, very fast.

>> Throwing up a poll right now. Which path will you take? We have the what do you call it? The new Amish. >> New Amish. The uh future worlds, future virtual worlds. Mhm. >> Um, life on hard mode. >> Yep. >> Mars or do drugs. >> Do drugs. >> I'll say pleasure fil. >> Yes. A brave new world for anybody that's read it. >> Boom. All right. Drop your vote in there. Which path will you take? I'm conflicted. I feel like if I did New Amish, I'll end up being a cult leader, so I don't want to go that way. Um, you know, I have leadership tendencies. >> This is a great post. I want to see like how this one does. Why can I only see one of the options? >> Oh, wait. Did you already select one? >> No, I don't even have the option. I only see New Amish. >> Click it and then it expands. >> Oh, I see. >> Yeah, >> there we go. >> New Amish is winning. Oh, yeah. We had to come up with a cult name, guys. >> For some reason, I'm not allowed to vote. >> Oh, yeah. Cuz you started the poll. >> Ah, that'll do it. >> Uh, all right. >> Look at that. Oh, it's neck and neck. Uh, we'll come back. Pulling back. Oh, virtual worlds. Let's go. >> We'll come back to it. We'll come back to it. Okay. Um, this story is heating up and it's taking international is starting to get international attention. Um, Australia has officially started its age restricted social media ban. >> Um, they everybody 16 and under will no longer be allowed to access social media sites. >> Denmark is following suit starting legislation for 15 and younger and they're even asking the entire EU to kind of join the fet. We'll uh jump into the story from CNN International >> off social media platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram. Here's the complete list. Australia's ban for young users went to a >> They are banning Facebook, Threads, X, Snapchat, Kick, Twitch, Tik Tok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube. Um I understand the intention behind this. Do you think that this will have the intended effect? I know there's no solutions, only trade-offs. >> That's the right way to think about it. Um, oh god, this is one where all of those seem fine to me except YouTube. YouTube is just too educational. Like there's God, so much you can learn. Uh, so will I have the intended effect? Yes. I think over time the odds that society must restrict kids under 16 seems like a reasonable place to start from engaging in social media is basically 100%. like you just bro the things that we're seeing it doing to kids is so brutal. >> So I don't see a way around that. People are going to have to find a way for kids to sensibly engage with things like YouTube. Like I don't know that you need to be on Instagram or Tik Tok, but YouTube is like when I think about how much I've learned about economics from YouTube, it's extreme. So YouTube is the outlet through which I learn most things. It also strikes me as the harder of them. Like if you said you couldn't have Thank you. that you couldn't have your own YouTube channel. Uh maybe I could understand that. But anyway, we we will have to come up with something to protect kids. Is this the right play? I'm glad they're running the experiment. So we'll get to find out if this actually is positive or negative and if it even works. But we have to do something. the the developing brain needs to be protected and right now we are not protecting it from shortening attention span which I think is terrifying. We're not protecting it from bullying. Um when I think about to bully me in school, people had to like actually come up to me. >> And I remember there was a kid who came up to me this probably 20 years after I graduated high school. And he came up. He's like, "I just want to apologize." And I was like, "Oh [ __ ] for what?" And he was like, "I was so mean to you." And I was like, "Bro, if you were, I had no idea. I never found out about it." So it was like it didn't bother me in the slightest because I never knew. And so here was a guy that was carrying enough guilt about it. But like on social media, it lives forever. It travels like wildfire. It can reach you in your bedroom. It's like, oh, that's rough. So, yeah, I in thinking about like what would I have done if I had a kid? I there's no way. I don't care how much they complained. I would not let them have social media until they were 16. No way. Now, if people think that I would buckle and break, you know, not my personality. Um but yeah, >> if they're just banning these specific uh sites, does that create any sort of market opportunity to fill the gap? >> Yeah, of course. But then >> yeah, I was thinking like Rumble wasn't on there, so like maybe you can bypass it that way. But >> they they will keep adding things like that or this would be the dumbest law in the world because someone will just spin up a new social media platform. Uh, so I imagine though I don't know, I imagine it will have the ability to add or remove things in the future. >> Do we like I'm thinking 11, 13, 14 year olds. Is there a net positive for them being on social media? on balance if you have a sensible kid and parents that have very strict rules. Yeah. Like I don't think this is going to be um this isn't like a necessary problem. So take somebody like myself. I do not have an addictive personality. Obsessive, yes. Addictive, no. So, if I think like part of the reason that I stopped taking my phone out, this is years ago, when I'm quote unquote bored, not that I never do it, keep in mind, but um it's pretty rare, is because I was like, uh I don't want to be in a position where I feel the need to pull that out, that I can't be meditative or compl uh contemplative. um that the whole idea of all of the world's problems are man's inability to sit alone in a room. >> It's like I never wanted that to be true of myself. Uh so if you've got a kid that has that kind of vibe, then yeah, if the parents put rules in place and they sort of get it >> and they're not like um super swayed by peer pressure, they'll be fine. But the vast majority of kids, first of all, don't have a prefrontal cortex. They can't stop themselves. they get into these dopamine loops and they literally are like little addicts. So, um I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be tested when I was a kid. Um so, yeah, I I think that while nothing is ever going to be universal, so it's not universally bad. Uh and there's certainly a lot of good to be had, and again, I'm I'm uneasy about the YouTube one. >> Uh but yeah, I think I get what they're trying to do. >> Yeah. And then somebody in the chat said, "Well, what about like Xbox and gaming? Should that be included in this ban as well?" >> I wouldn't, but I do think parents need to put limitations on it. >> Yeah. >> So, um, growing up for me, it was like I could play for a while, but I had to go outside and do things, which that's just like first of all, I grew up in a wasn't quite rural, but it certainly wasn't suburban uh area. And so, that was there was a lot to do outside and I could do it safely. And so I know that that's not true for a lot of people. Um, but yeah, gaming is uh I have a massive bias so people can discount away, but keep in mind I ended up here with this philosophy long before I was making a game. But um I mean you can look at neuroprotective stuff, you can look at doctors perform better in surgery if they're also a gamer. The way that it lets you reinforce goal directed behavior, all that stuff. I I think gaming is great, but anything can be overdone and gaming is certainly on that list. So, um not letting your kids play for, you know, 6 hours a day. That's going to be a very wise thing. >> Yeah, Mont has talked about what's not being talked about is how it will be enforced. That's actually something very interesting. Children and parents will not be banned, but instead social media companies who allow a child to break through will get fined and the fines are upwards of the tens of millions of dollars. So, I kind of appreciate this kind of inverse uh incentive. So, the social media companies now have a obligation to make sure kids don't get past it because they're going to be like charged a bill based on of that. >> Yeah. We basically just moved it from >> 13 to 16. >> So, because right now social media companies can't create an account for you if you're under 13. Now, the people with digital ID concerns, that's very valid. that we need to watch out for. >> I feel like it's funny though because like I understand, you know, under 16 that's the rule. But I feel like as a kid that's just like, "Okay, challenge accepted." Like I just need to figure out a way to get over that. Whether that's a VPN, whether that's a AI face app swap, like there's going to be something that I don't know, maybe I'm just a rebellious kid, but a lot of times when those artificial limits are placed on things, I'm like, "Okay, how can I get over this thing? How can I surpass it?" >> I still have no doubt that a lot of kids are going to do that for sure. But like anything, it just you give parents another weapon to say, "Listen, you're not allowed to have that." So for me, it worked. When my parents said, "You cannot drink until you're 21. Just end of story. It's illegal. It's bad for you. You're going to do something stupid that you regret." I was like, "Okay, cool. I didn't have my first drink till I was 26." So, um, it works for some people. for other kids. Like I had friends that I would be at their house, so I saw with my own eyes at 12 and they're drinking. So it's like it obviously didn't work for them or their parents gave them a very different message. But just because some people are going to get around it doesn't mean you don't put the rule in place. >> So >> and kids are going to kid. They're going to find ways around. Many of them are going to find ways around it. Is what it is. >> Yeah. Um, Andrea in the chat said she hates YouTube. It's debating her existence. Amazon has it as like unscripted TV. There was one like interesting thing I noticed is that when uh I forgot the kid who opened up the toys, Max Toys or something like that, >> Ryan. Ryan. Yeah. >> He was the biggest YouTuber for a couple um this was right before the Mr. Beastification happened. And I think that kids then became they didn't want to play with toys. They wanted to watch other kids play with toys. >> That's so crazy to me. And I remember like arguing like with one of my like uh one of my friends about it. We were like all at bunch and stuff. She's like, "Yeah, these kids are weird. They just do that. They just watch other kids play with toys." When I was young, I wanted to play with toys. And I was like, "Well, it's kind of like you watching the Kardashians. You don't go out and talk to your friends. You're watching other people talk with their friends." And then like the table kind of got a little bit quiet. And I'm just like it is. So, but I'm not saying reality TV isn't a good or bad thing like whatever. Different strokes, different folks. But that has, as we're seeing as the men who are capping for Nick Fuent has happened, that has also skewed how women look at life, what women deserve, what they think based on these values. Are we doing that same thing with kids in a different way? >> Of course. So, do I think there's some blanket thing happening to kids? No. But do I think that every piece of media ever created that ever will be created in some way informs your frame of reference? Of course. That's precisely why I want to make video games. I want to tell kids one idea over and over and over. If you work hard at something, you'll get better at it. Like that's the idea that I want to indoctrinate children with. So yeah, I am well aware that that kind of thing really does shape people. >> Um so yeah, that you're making something entertaining. Shorts are entertaining. You've got an entire global ecosystem of content creators making the one funniest thing that they could show you most poignant, most insightful, funniest, whatever. And that is amazing that we all get to take advantage of that. But if you just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, you do a weird thing to your brain. So it's like we I don't think we should want to get rid of the art form. I don't even think that we should be um saying to kids like watching another kid play video games is dumb. You don't want to do it. We want to recognize what it is. Like I remember the first time I heard about um Twitch and people playing video games and that people watched them play video games. I was actually confused. I thought I was misunderstanding what they were explaining. They're like, "No, no, no. Twitch, you go and you can watch other people play games." I'm like, "But nobody would do that." And they're like, "Of course they would." Like, "What are you talking about? That's really stupid." And then I was at the time my game of choice was Destiny. And I was like, "Oh man, there is this one thing I'm having so much trouble with. Let me just go look at

"this thing because I'm kind of curious." And since I'm here, I'm not going to look up a random game. I'm look up the game I play.

>> I looked it up, started watching this guy, and I was like, "Oh my, that's so brilliant." And so I was then just completely sucked in. And shout out to Bush Camp dad. Bush camp dad, I don't know. Uh in the early days, he would show up before we like went hardcore politics. I don't know if he ever pokes in anymore, but um he's so fun to watch. Like watch him play Fortnite. He's a guy my age, but is ranked in the world because he hides. It's really brilliant.

Anyway, um so that kind of stuff is way more fun than I expected it to be, but it's different. So playing with toys is one type of entertainment. Watching someone play with toys is almost like watching a cartoon where the kid is drawing you into a story. It's a different kind of story, but he's drawing you into a story. He's making it entertaining with like flashing lights and all that. And it's like that's always going to be a little bit easier. It's a little bit um I don't want to be judgmental, but it's a little bit lazier of a type of entertainment. You don't have to think of it yourself.

>> Um but both have their place.

>> Yeah. Um, being the little brother, like I used to watch I used to be forced to watch my older brother play video games because he'd be like, "No, I'm playing something." So,

>> I would So, like I feel like Twitch was natural to me. I felt like that was just me reliving my childhood.

>> But, um, a Melly will you just pulled my card so I had to close my mouth after this. He says, "We watch soccer and Olympics and same with other like games." So, I sure enough was yelling at the TV on Monday night for the football game. So, I guess

>> 100%.

>> I don't go outside and play football with my friends. So, you got me there.

>> All right. I've got a whole take on that. So first sports are war replicants. So you are trying to that thing that's ingrained in us to want to compete and to win and to destroy the enemy. It's like that's how you get wars.

>> We needed a proxy for that to because it it is a thing like especially in men that you have this impulse to want to compete to want to be better to drive yourself to be the gladiator and it's like but I don't really want to kill them or be killed. And so we came up with all these proxies. So that's like this evolutionary drive. Then there's another evolutionary drive to care deeply about your team. This is part of the reason that esports don't work is they just can't get the momentum of the sense of that's my team because they're not geographically bound. The games change so rapidly that they come and go. You can't like pass it on to your kids and like why are you into Tottenham Hotspur? Because my wife is. Why is she into it? Because her dad was. Why was her dad into it? Because he moved into that area of London. And so it's like there's all of this geographical thing, this passing it down to your kids that really creates this like, oh, this is my team and now I'm going to invest. And this is the same way that I feel about TCGs. So I don't collect any cards. Like I have IP that I love. And so I'm way more likely to collect, say, One Piece or Gundam because I'm really into that IP. And so it isn't even fun for me like all the other ones that are out there. Maybe they even have better art. Take um Riftbound. Riftbound is from League of Legends. Okay, I don't care about League of Legends and therefore I just can't get into it even though it has better art. So I'm just like, eh, whatever. I'm not going to pay attention to that because I want to invest. I want to care about something. I want to pour myself into this thing. I want to say I care about this thing. And that like is this drive that people have. And so when people make fun of sports or whatever, and I'm not a sports guy, but when they make fun of it, that to me is like making fun of the human condition. We want to invest. We want to care deeply about something. We want to go on an emotional roller coaster. And so having that part of your life, of course, you can take it too far and you can damage your relationships because all you ever do is care about the sport. But it's the same reason people want to bet on the game. It makes you feel more invested. And so now if you're like imagine you're betting on a game that's your team that was like became your team because you bonded over it with your dad and you're going against that number one rival and you've got money writing on it. It's like that's just going to be like this really heightened emotion. Now, once you realize all of life, all of life is about one thing, Drew.

>> What's that one thing?

>> It's 9:00, everybody. We've got to end right here. That's That's me channeling my Candace Elements. You're never going to believe what life is optimized for. Uh there's one thing that we are all about, and that is changing our brain chemistry. That's it. That's why we fall in love. That's why we pursue sex. That's why we eat the foods that we like. It's why we work out. It's why we listen to music. It's why we go to the movies. Uh it's why we pursue a career. It is all to manipulate our brain chemistry. And so when you can invest in something and then go on that ride and you want the volatility of emotion, if you always win, it's boring. Uh the best matches are when it was like a back and forth, but you p finally pull it off in the end. There's a time where you're like, you want to cry in the middle of the match because coach is making a dumb decision, the players are playing terribly and you're down and it's oh my god. And then they finally do the right thing you've been screaming at them for and they score the goal and the last second you win. You're just freaking out. You're you're on a high that you wouldn't have been if it hadn't been this roller coaster. And people want that. People want that ride.

All right. Thank you guys so much for coming on this ride with us today and we will see you guys on Friday. You're all amazing. Thank you for being here. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Peace.