Mass Wave Of Migrants Storm Cueta, Middle East Conflict Expands & Melilla & Update On The US Economy

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billy Show live. I hope you guys are having a wonderful day.

There is plenty going on in the world. It is absolutely wild if you guys are paying attention to what is happening in Spain. They are undergoing what I will call a self-inflicted invasion after a string of ill-advised immigration policies. But we're also going to talk about Drew the Jews. They're coming in hot. There are some conspiracy theories flying around there. We're going to get into all of them.

US, uh, the US economic update with the Fed's numbers are coming in and having a very strange impact, uh, on what's going on with the bond market. You guys are going to want to see what that means. Saudi Arabia has launched a direct attack, a direct attack on the Houthis in Yemen, drawing more players into this expanding conflict in the Middle East. Hamas has agreed to disarm, by the way, according to Trump, and nobody seems to care. Uh, we're going to get into why that is just getting crickets. And then speaking of crickets, Anthony Fauci is facing potential contempt of Congress charges for endlessly pleading the fifth in his recent testimony. That was amusing. And EA is going private. We're going to talk about what that means for the future of entertainment.

All right, up right away. We have got to talk about what's going on in Spain. Now, in February, Spain's socialist government approved a mass, uh, regularization by royal decree, basically trying to, um, take the immigrants that had come into the country and just say, "All right, you guys are going to get broad-based amnesty." And there were 1.3 million people, undocumented migrants, by the way, that applied. And there's an estimated, uh, 1 million that they're expecting to qualify. So, this is a massive number.

Then you chase that on June 29th, Spain's Supreme Court ruled that migrants reaching, uh, Cuda, I know I'm mispronouncing that, but hopefully you guys know what area I'm talking about, and, uh, Melilla, uh, if they come by sea, that they cannot be returned to Morocco. So that ruling ended up getting published on July 8th and it ended up spreading across Moroccan social media within days. And now this is where we start leaving the territory of what we know to be true and we start getting into a little bit of conspiracy theory.

There's all kinds of talks about, given the timing with the Supreme Court decision and the amnesty decision, is this just a bunch of people that want to come in and they're seeking a better life? Uh, but if that were the case, you would not be expecting to see the demographics that you're seeing coming across. So, if this really were people fleeing for a better life, you'd expect to see women, children, and men, not essentially exclusively men. Uh, if you look at the videos, and we'll show the videos. Um, if you look at the videos of people flooding in across the border, this is almost exclusive. In fact, I'm only hedging, uh, because I'm sure somewhere in these masses, there are, uh, something other than military-aged men. But man, in the videos, all you see are military-aged men flooding in. They are breaking into homes. You had people on ladders smashing people's windows going in. You had massive floods of people pushing into, um, apartment buildings like literal, like this is somebody's apartment and pushing their way in. Uh, you had police vehicles being pelted with rocks by dozens of people lining up on the roads. I mean, it's really, really crazy.

Um, you have roving bands, what are reported to be, um, Spanish people attacking the people coming in. And I, it was really, really wild scenes if you guys haven't seen this. Uh, and then you've got the European response. Multiple countries, uh, from Italy to Norway, there have been a bunch that have said, "We're going to suspend, um, the agreement that all European countries have where if you are in Europe, then you can move freely within European borders." They're saying they're going to suspend that for immigrants coming from Spain. Uh, that this is just completely unhinged.

So, given that you've got what I won't say highly coordinated, but the fact that they're moving in, in like one moment to overwhelm the system, the fact that large groups of them are moving in a coordinated fashion to loot or whatever it is that they're doing, people are saying, "Listen, this is either the mafia misunderstanding what's going on with the Supreme Court decision, and they thought that it meant that anybody coming in now would be able to get that same amnesty, that they would not be able to be sent back." Uh, the Spanish prime minister is saying that is a complete misunderstanding. That's not what the Supreme Court decision says and that they're already beginning to send people back, that they missed the qualifying date. And so all of that's just a misunderstanding. So, if this was the mafia just trying to make a little bit of money by bringing people into the country, that was really stupid.

Other people are looking at this and going, "What are you talking about? This is Israel and the US trying to destabilize the region. This is obvious. They're bringing in military-aged men. You've got, um, both Israel and the US that have been openly contemptuous of Spain's far-left prime minister, and they are trying to, um, essentially punish them for Spain not allowing the US to fly out of, uh, the bases in Spain." Uh, and so it gets pretty sort of deep into conspiracy land.

Other people are saying, "Listen, this, this is obviously Moroccan territory because the two cities that we're talking about are actually in Africa. So, these are not territories that are connected to mainland Spain." And so, people are like, "Hey, this is, uh, occupied territory. These guys should get out anyway." There have been previous attempts to at least make political statements where people would go inside unarmed, but they would go inside these cities and plant Moroccan flags, basically trying to say this is our territory.

Um, so right now, I think anybody saying that they actually know what's going on, it's way too early for that. But this is a very wild scene that is unfolding. And when you talk about, uh, European sovereignty, dealing with the immigration crisis is going to be one of the most important things you can do. And to give you an idea of the scale, so people are estimating, Spain's interior ministry anyways, estimating that there were about 49,000 people that crossed into Cuda just in 24 hours. And if I have my numbers right, the population of the place is like 80,000. So, you've got more than, uh, 50% being added to the total population in 24 hours. That is crazy.

Now, we'll see how many people self-deport. There were reports that somewhere around 12,000 people have self-deported and gone back once they realized that they were not being greeted warmly, and that they were likely not going to be able to stay. Um, so, we'll see where this all goes. And you've got everybody. We've got a clip here from the prime minister that we'll play. Um, but there are people framing the prime minister's response as being like super soft. And then there are other things that he's saying that, "No, listen, we're going to send these people back and it's not as, um, as obvious that he's letting people in as I think some people are trying to make it." I don't think you can rule that out at this point.

Of course, there's always the take on this that this is the far-left in Spain. And I pulled a clip. You, you can find plenty of far-left radicals in Spain saying that they, in fact, literally want to replace Spanish people with immigrants. Um, so, but is that just completely French territory? Anyway, Porgeru is trying to keep up with all this. Uh, let's go through, let's let the prime minister speak first, and then we'll move on to the radical left, and then we'll talk some more about, uh, Israel and the US.

It's subtitled, but I'll read it out loud. To provide a temporary response while we wait to see exactly what legal modifications we need to make, if any. We have requested the public company SMS in collaboration with the military and of course also with the civil guard to deploy buoys along the breakwater. This is among other things.

All right. So this is the one, by the way. Yeah, you can pause this one for a second. So, this is the one somebody was trying to show like this guy's an ass hat. Like you, you. Yeah, you've got like this, um, just massive influx. Did you already show the videos of just the absolute flood of humanity? Wild. If you guys were looking at your screen, it is crazy. If you have not seen the footage, whatever you're imagining, it is far worse than that. Um, it is absolute pandemonium. The number of people that are flooding in is is really unprecedented. I mean, this is wild if you're looking at your screens right now. Uh, and there's video on video on video on video. This is not like one thing selectively showing something. I mean, this was going on all day. It's just absolute insanity. And then you see what looks like a military vehicle in Morocco basically, um, shipping these guys up to the border and then letting them cross it. It is really, I mean, the, the, I don't think we've ever pulled more links for a single topic ever in the history of this show. And we've done over 200 episodes. I mean, it's just, it is complete insanity.

So, you've got all these people flooding in. Okay. I think obviously it's just all propaganda all the time. You've got the left trying to put their message forward. You got the right trying to put their message forward. So, please, um, don't jump too rapidly to conclusions. Right now, this has got to be okay. We've got to take this stuff, tease it out, actually start figuring out what is true. Don't fall into just quick narrative. The narratives are there. We're going to walk through sort of the different takes on this. Um, but yeah, you're going to, you're going to want to look at precisely what is happening. Why are people doing this? Where is it just not being stopped? Where is it being encouraged? These are all the things that we have to figure out.

Uh, and then one of the, so, okay, that was the somebody trying to show that the prime minister is weak. There are other clips where he's, I think I pulled them. Uh, but there are other clips of the prime minister taking a much harder stance, saying, "This is a total misunderstanding of the Supreme Court decision. We are going to send these people back. We are going to bring out the military. We are going to stop this from happening." Um, so again, that's not me being a fan of this guy's, um, policies. I do think that he has fallen prey to some of the, um, what I'll round to Leninist Marxist ideology where we're into oppressed and oppressor categories. And so, um, we're leveraging that view to justify what I think is a long-term belief that if we get immigrants into the country, one, we'll be able to stave off the demographic decline of Europe, a just totally blindness to the reality of people bringing their culture, and it is not a European culture, and therefore you can expect massive knock-on effects from importing a bunch of people that do not share your culture. Uh, which we will certainly talk more about, but you can nest it all inside of that, um, without this being something that the prime minister was courting intentionally.

So, this moment, I think we're going to find in the fullness of time is probably going to be something more complicated that may in fact be the confluence of the following. Uh, you've got terrible immigration policies that have spread across Europe for a very long time, that's playing out. You've got a leftist belief that everybody is oppressed and oppressor, and that's the only lens you need to look through things. You've got the demographic challenges where there really is a demographic problem to be faced. And some people believe the right way to handle that is to just import, um, a bunch of people with total blindness to what the, um, actual impact of cultural clashes are. Uh, you've got the mafia in all of this. Are they just trying to make additional money by fing over? Certainly saw that at the southern border in the US, that it's a multi-billion dollar annual industry. And so, if there's something similar going on there, that certainly wouldn't surprise me.

You've got the US, you've got, uh, Israel that have beef with, um, Spain. So, if you guys don't know, Spain has officially recognized Palestine as a state. Obviously, Israel does not love that. Uh, so there's a lot of beef there. You've got relationships growing between Morocco and Israel as a part of the Abraham Accords. So, you've got, um, normalized relations between Morocco and Israel. You've got a narrative for Israel that can point at this and say, "Why do you guys have so much beef with us occupying, quote unquote, occupying territory in Palestine when Spain is doing exactly the same thing in Morocco?" And so, why are you so mad at us? Look at these guys. And so any sort of dust up over there may take eyes off of Israel. And so when you start, and then obviously Trump is pissed at, uh, the prime minister in Spain, and you know that Trump can be petty as hell. So, would he want to see just, yeah, [ __ ] it. Disruption. Why not? Um, so when you lay out all of the possible things, it almost certainly isn't just one or the other. It's probably a mix of a whole lot of things.

Now, are Israel and, um, the US actually facilitating this? Are they goading it on? Are they merely like cheering because there's something that's happening that they're like, "Yeah, [ __ ] them." I don't think anybody has the answer to that. And you're going to see a whole lot of conspiracies flying around this. What we do know is that there is an absolutely staggering amount of military-aged men pouring into these cities in Spain. It is Spain. No matter what people say, they've had the territory since what, the 1500s. Uh, so this is not like something that they did 80 years ago. Uh, exactly. This, this is not like the, the thing going on in Israel where if you want to have beef with that, like we can sit and walk through the timeline of all of that stuff. This is a totally different ballgame. Uh, and anybody, if you're, if you can hear my voice right now and you're taking the stance that this is occupied territory, uh, then I will say, is Constantinople occupied territory in Turkey, and is that going to be handed back to the Christians, uh, that had that for God knows how long? Because, um, that became Muslim in whatever the 14 or 1500s. So, a very similar kind of thing. I don't see anybody saying that Constantinople needs to be handed back. So, uh, that would be a wild take in my opinion. Um, but yes, it, this is going to become another flash point of this debate of, uh, what, what does it mean to have sovereign territory and who has a right to what land.

Yeah, man. This is a crazy time that we are all living in. I hope you guys have been looking at your screens as, um, Drew has been walking through a lot of the different videos and things. Uh, now what Drew has up on the screen is basically, is this an opportunity to create a new choke point where if Israel can normalize relations far enough with the Moroccans and get them to be, I mean, this is the part that I don't think people are being honest about, that ultimately for Israel, for this to be a good move for Israel, they would have to believe that they can have such dramatic influence over the Moroccans that they can effectively control the Strait of Gibraltar. That to me seems a bridge way too far. Morocco, as far as I know, is a majority Muslim country. So, the odds that those two are going to be besties is effectively zero in my estimation. But hey, it's early days. Maybe I can be convinced.

But again, if you're looking at your screen, you will see that one of the ways you get out of the, not one of the ways, the way that you get out of the Mediterranean is through the Strait of Gibraltar. So, if you have, um, Israeli control over that, then Israel can continue to grow its influence as the, um, keeper of Western interests in the Middle East as it relates to the transportation of oil. Now, Israel saying that they want to see pipelines go through Israel. So, is there a very simple chain of logic that you could follow that says this is how Israel becomes that truly unsinkable, um, carrier in the Middle East to help with oil? Sure. But I don't see how people go, "Oh, uh, Morocco is going to be a vassal state of Israel." That, that just seems crazy to me.

Now, I don't know if they're majority Sunni or Musl, majority Shiite. So, I don't know if, if they were likely to side, are they going to side with the UAE? Are they going to side with Saudi Arabia? Could it be something like that, which would be far more believable to me than Israel? And so, as Israel, um, comes to normalized relationships through the Abraham Accords and just honestly through a vision of the world that is about economics, uh, could that play out where you've got the UAE, you've got Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain all joining forces with Morocco and saying, "Hey, we've got to isolate Iran and now make sure that they can't create a choke point, and we need to be able to get this oil all the way out." And so everybody feels good about continuing to buy oil from the Middle East because the idea of people finding ways around it, like there are new shipping routes that China is doing. This isn't oil, but they have new shipping routes going up and around, uh, the Arctic. And so, as the world goes, "Ah, we just have to work around the Middle East. We have to work around this conflict rather than dealing with it directly." There's going to be an upheaval of power just because dynamics change. And if some meaningful percentage of that oil, I doubt that it ever goes to zero, but if some meaningful percentage of the oil that's going through the traditional routes in the Middle East just moves to the US, or if the [ __ ] war between Russia and Ukraine ever ends and Russia gets back on the, um, international board in terms of exporting oil, does the world just start moving away from that? That's certainly all, um, something I think that they would be extremely interested in solving.

So, I could see that, um, a unity of the Muslim nations that are normalized with Israel wanting to have, um, stable control because right now, there, there's no, um, problem with people passing the Strait of Gibraltar. So, right now, that isn't something that I think anybody's worried about. What people are worried about is the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Red Sea obviously increasing in problem. Strait of Hormuz has been a problem now for five months. So, that one to me feels like a bit of a stretch. This feels much more like, uh, a territorial dispute, a, um, immigration question, all coming off the back of what I consider to be horrific, um, immigration policy on behalf of Europe at large, but very specifically Spain. So, that's my early days read. Remember, if you're trying to mentally map me, I don't have any friction about being wrong. I'm simply trying to identify what is actually true. Uh, so, if I get information that says that my current read that this is an immigration problem ends up being, um, incorrect and there's evidence in the opposite direction, I will immediately adjust my thinking. Um, but that's where I am at right now.

Uh, here's a string of cause and effect, and let me know where I break it. Right. So, Trump and Bibi meet. Trump is reportedly pissed off in the meeting, not at Bibi, but just that we haven't won the Iranian war. It was supposed to be a two-week war and now it's going into five months. Uh, he tries to figure out what else we can do. We are locked down with the Strait of Hormuz. We need to figure out a way to renormalize getting the oil and getting things moved through the region. Israel is like, "I can help you get things moved through the region. We just need to normalize and route things through Israel." Okay, cool. How do we do it if it's, we're routing through Israel? Well, we just go right out through the Strait of Gibraltar. Okay. Well, we have to figure out how we can get Spain on board. Spain's not really messing with us. All right. Well, we just did military exercise with Morocco. We have like normalized relations with Morocco. We just get some specific choke points. I'm using choke points as a specific term because both of these, uh, uh, both of these cities that they were taken, they weren't on the European continent. People weren't swimming across the Atlantic. They were on the North African coast. If we control those, we are now, it's us versus Spain. Spain doesn't want that smoke. They're not going to deploy their army, and they would allow more free movement. I'll even go as far as to say if we can launch, if we can make a military presence in, um, these two, um, territories as well. That's another way we can get closer to the Iranian region. We can bring munitions in. We can reroute things from the UK. So that's where I'm starting to say like, "Okay, I can tilt my head and and blink." Morocco gets paid. All the UAE, um, countries love, uh, oil money. Morocco finally gets on the oil money train. Israel gets paid. They get more power in the region and they get to become the centerfold, just like they're the centerfold of what I would call stability. Now they could then be the centerfold of like economics. US gets a win because now we have another place to, we can launch ships from. We have another place that we can drop munitions off, and we can now retool and restock, and we can even ice out the Iranians. So we can say, "You guys can have this strait. We'll just blow everything up in the strait, full stop." So now we cut you guys off, and then we just have everything essential come through this side.

Yeah. The way I see it is you have an internal chain of logic that is consistent. It makes some leaps that I would say are both historically accurate and have historically proven to be really stupid. We do them, but they prove to be historically stupid. So, here's what you would have to believe for that to end up being a good idea. Not that it isn't the idea, but for that to be a good idea. Um, you're using a destabilization tactic to destabilize, um, Spain, to put them back in their place, to let them know you [ __ ] with the US, you [ __ ] with Israel, and you get the horns. And so you guys better, um, get back in line. And so now that instability has historically led to problems. And we always think, "Oh, we're going to go in, we're going to destabilize this region, and something beautiful is going to come out the other side." This is, uh, both a tactic of the CIA, um, and a tactic of the left, as, um, turned into a literal playbook by Lenin. So, Lenin literally writes a document explaining exactly how you use this divide and conquer destabilization strategy. It ends up spreading all over the place, including China. Um, and now we're seeing it. If your read is correct, we're seeing that here in this situation. Um, just as it led to massive death and turmoil in Russia, massive death and turmoil in China. Um, and we're seeing now the, the fruits of that initiative in Iran, massive death, uh, in Iran. So now it's like, really, like I'm not saying that it's outside of the realm of plausibility. I am saying that it's, if that is what they're doing, it's likely to be stupid. Partly because right now, people aren't paying money to get through choke points until we started doing that in Iran. So now you're introducing what? A new choke point, like to get Morocco in on the oil money. Like, what are they doing? You're paying for protection. You're paying for safe passage. Like, what are they getting paid for exactly? So that's where I'm like, that seems very, um, ill-advised. Again, not that it isn't true, and we'll find out in the fullness of time if that's really what's going on, because your string of logic, if the base assumptions all end up being true, sure, like that could be the attempt. Uh, but it would just be very strange, even getting, like, when you start talking about running the pipelines through the Middle East to get around the Strait of Hormuz ending up in Israel, which Netanyahu has talked about many times. So that is for sure part of what he wants to see happen. Um, but I'm just like, uh, like I, all the way to Israel, like that's the part that I don't understand. So unless Israel is saying, "Listen, we're the best defended." And so you want to send it to us as the port of call so that we can protect all these ships and get them out safely. They would have to be making a military play. Otherwise, if I'm one of the other countries, um, I'm just going to run it. There's already a Saudi pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz. So the only thing there is Iran can strike the pipeline, but Iran would be able to strike the pipeline in Israel. So, it's like that's the part where I'm like, everybody talking about an overland pipeline. If I'm Iran, I'm like, "Yeah, [ __ ] just go for it." I'm going to [ __ ] hit that literally once a week and you guys are going to be forever having to try to repair it.

Eventually, you're going to realize you have to bury it, you know, whatever, 40 meters underground, and now this becomes an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming effort to get this out. So, every time I look at that solution, I'm just like, I mean, Jesus, I guess it's better than standing still. But if, if you're Iran and you've already shown that you're willing to strike infrastructure, then you just strike the pipeline. So, that one seems like a bit far-fetched. It seems far more likely that the playbook that they're going to run is, "We have to get Iran to come to heel." And so, um, the only way I can mentally map, "Okay, this really is the US, this really is Israel, what would need to be true?" That they're doing it as somewhat of an afterthought, that their full attention isn't on it, that somebody came to Trump, was like, "Hey, uh, these guys want to bust a bunch of people in, it'll cause destabilization, uh, it'll send a signal to, um, Spain to stop [ __ ] around. You'll be able to get them back in pocket." Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Try it. Let's see what happens. Like, not like, "Oh yeah, this is like something that we have a high degree of certainty. This is going to work well in our favor." Like,

I, I'm with you. I definitely think that this is plan F. I don't think this is, yeah, this is one there. That, that's the only thing that I could see. So it's like, I'm going to guess that it's like all of the above. It is a bunch of things where it's like the US and Israel are like, "Yeah, sure. Why not?" Israel loves having a story of somebody else that's in their same position that will be forced to defend why they have it their way. So now it's like Israel's trying to deflect. The US, Trump gets to punish somebody who didn't do what he told them to do. Uh, but ultimately all you get is destabilization. And dude, that destabilization is like the word for the next 10 years. Like, as the global order changes, everybody's like, "Now's the time to make our play." The US is [ __ ] around in, uh, the Middle East. China is going to make a move on Taiwan. The US is going to have split focus. You've got massive instability all across Europe. Say what you will. They have massive instability. Just look at what's going on with the Nordic countries where everybody's like, "Yo, they've shown that socialism can work." [ __ ] they're trying to get immigrants out now fast because they realize, "Holy [ __ ], like we can't pay for this." So, you're going to have like insane instability. Look at the UK. Birth rates are real, man. And so you're going to get a collision of cultures all across Europe. Europe is already in economic trouble. They have been sinking for a very long time economically. It is absolutely perilous for them what's happening economically. Now you're going to bear the fruits of, um, conquering via the womb, which is a stated objective of, uh, radical Islamists. And so it's just, man, that, that is going to be completely destabilized. Uh, you've got, what, what's going to happen between the US and China? What's going to happen to the dollar? So, all of that's in play. You've got Scott Bessant talking about a Bretton Woods 2.0, which there's so much crazy [ __ ] going on that didn't even make my read at the top of the show, but like for anybody that knows what Bretton Woods was in terms of establishing, um, the world order, economic world order that we've all been living under for the last, whatever, 80 years. And he is openly just like, "Yeah, yeah, we probably need a Bretton Woods 2.0." Dude, that, that is literally, uh, one of the most important bureaucrats in the world telling you we need a new economic world order. And that's, dude, that is so crazy in terms of the, the, the amount of change. I'll, I'll put it in completely neutral terms. Just the amount of change that that is likely to bring. Like, what's, what's that going to look like? He's obviously going to want something that benefits the US. Anyway, I'm talking about destabilization. So, you've, you've got a world of change everywhere. Things are just moving. And so, if you've got a politician that is legitimately looking himself in the mirror like, "You know what? We need, we need a little more instability." That would be the dumbest [ __ ] ever.

You know what instability brings? Occupation. You know what occupation brings? A movement of military resources to a region that you need more military resources. Um, Nick Pence has had a clip.

Oh, I didn't see this coming. Drew, what are you doing? Okay, what's he say? Let's go. It's just all censored. I, I have been blindsided by Drew right now. Drew's like, "Okay, Tom, now that you bring that up, let's talk about Nick." Say what? I, I, I don't, I literally, I was scrolling Twitter because I'm like, I feel like there should be some new information. And now I just seen this. So, we're going to experience this together, guys. I cannot vouch for this because I have no idea what's about to happen. Perfect timing. Well, it's very obvious to see the reason Republicans support the invasion of the Spanish cities is they're doing this on behalf of Israel. They're promoting Morocco's core security interests, punishing Spain at the expense of their core security interests because Spain is an adversary of Israel and Morocco as a security ally of Israel. And we know this because the State Department did the same thing in 2020. As part of the deal for Morocco to recognize Israel, the United States and Israel recognized Morocco and its claim over Western Sahara. Another disputed ter. So the UN does not recognize Morocco's, um, sovereignty over the Southern Sahara.

And so it was a pretty big deal. Now, I wasn't paying attention to politics at all when this happened, so I can't give you the ins and outs, but it is interesting that to get the Abraham Accords done, there was a certain amount of the US coming in and just saying, "Yeah, we don't [ __ ] care about the United Nations." Like, we're going to do this new thing. We're going to get something going here in the Middle East. Uh, and so, yeah, there are deals that were done as a part of that that at least have not been a part of the recent conversation over the last, let's say, two years. Um, that this could be the fruit of.

Yeah. So it's going to go spiral into a lot of things that we already talked about. But in summation, I would say, do you think, like your gut, it's telling you? Do you think this is just migrant policy? It, it, the thing that gets me is just the, how many men there were. There wasn't not a single baby, not a single newborn, not a single taxi driver with dirty shoes. It was, do people who were with phones trying to like get into the cameras. It seemed like they were brought there. I don't know. It just seems very specific the demographics of people that were transported there.

Yeah. The, so, yes, that's real. The one thing that I'll say to this, I just have a question because I was researching this while y'all were talking. Where did y'all see that Moroccan officials dropped people off? Because I can't find anywhere online and I'm starting to wonder if that video is AI. The, okay, always a good question. Always a good question. Because all the official news sources are saying, "No, this didn't, that didn't happen." It was the beach video specifically with with all the people running the beaches. Still the same men demographic, but I just was curious about the Moroccan official part because I don't want. Okay, you keep saying something that I did not say. So, I want to make sure that we're very clear. There was a vehicle that looked like a military vehicle that dropped all these guys off. I have no information other than that. It is, I didn't, it didn't make my radar that it was AI. There was no sort of obvious trigger. Um, it's certainly possible. Unfortunately, we live in the era where you literally can't trust your eyes. Uh, so, yeah, that, that could absolutely be true and we'll see in the fullness of time.

So, even if we just isolate to the thing that is completely undisputed, is you have this massive flood of military-aged men. So, this is a phrase you're going to hear over and over and over. Military-aged men. Now, the reason that people bring that up is really twofold. One, if people are really escaping hardship, you would expect to see a ton of women also coming over because they're trying to get to a better life. When you see only young men, then this is usually somebody else saying, "Hey, it would be a good idea for you guys to go do this." Now, this is where you get into very dangerous territory and getting out over your skis can be very risky. But if you, um, one potential read of this is that, um, given that, um, extremist, uh, members of Islam have talked very openly about, "You can take over by the sword, you can take over by immigration, or you can take over via the womb." Or I mean, honestly, all three. This one becomes a takeover by immigration. So, if you know that people go into a territory and of course all of them, everybody all throughout human history, it does not matter. This is not anything even remotely unique to, um, Islamist extremists. This is just what people do is you try to get enough people with your value system to go into an area so that you can take it over. Um, and so, yeah, like that does not surprise me at all. And that would certainly explain if you have somebody in the background, a government, uh, a religious sect, whatever, um, you would expect them to loosely organize people and say, "Hey, go do this." Now, there needs to be an incentive that people believe in to get them to do it. As Japan has proven, you can try to get people to do something, but if they don't believe it's in their own best interest, they're not going to do it. And this is why I always think it's deranging when people say, "Well, uh, Israel just made this possible for them to do it and they wanted them to do it." Take the, um, Netanyahu admitting that he was, uh, funding Hamas. Okay, sure. And I get why everybody is mortified by that. But at the same time, if the people in Palestine didn't want Hamas, didn't believe in the things that they were fighting for, then it wouldn't take root. It wouldn't be popular. It wouldn't be, um, able to grow in the way that it did. So, you've got to have people that actually believe those things that when you give them the opportunity to do something that they will actually do it. So, uh, take the, the rise of communism here in the US. Um, you can propagandize people all you want all throughout the universities, but if you don't break the economy, it doesn't end up working. So, you need both. You need the economy to be broken so that people are, um, ready to drink up that ideology. So, if you open your borders, but people don't want to leave, like Canada could open their borders all day. I'm not leaving America to go be in Canada. So, that part, you need both sides of the equation. You need the opportunity and you need the impetus. And so the question becomes, what is it that makes them want to do this? And so you have to answer that question. Now, if you're saying that, okay, this is people that are fleeing hardship. Again, it will not be only young men. And so, whatever your hypothesis is, it's got to explain what I actually see with my own eyes. Why is it only young men? And so, that needs an explanation. I just gave you one possible explanation of that. Um, but it, it needs to be explained by something. So, that's where I think people have to really start. Instead of just getting swept up in a narrative, you've got to build that line of cause and effect that explains both sides. Uh, Israel wanting it to happen, the US wanting it to happen will not suffice. There has to be a reason why the horde of people are actually doing it.

Yeah. And there were dozens of people that died in the way trying to get over there. So, it was 43. That's the most common number right now. Copy. Um, so definitely one of. I've also heard that people were killed on the ground. So, it's not like they, they just died in transit. And I'll be interested to see how many people were Spanish that ended up getting killed. Like, if you look at the people going in, there's open fighting on the streets. Uh, you've got people breaking into houses, breaking into stores. Um, literally, like I said, there was one guy, I don't know if you can find the video, but there's one guy who had a ladder up against a like second or third story window smashing the glass trying to get in. Um, so all of this stuff is inevitable when you have a swarm of 49,000 people. So, to give you a bit of context, there are only 50,000 US troops in the Middle East right now in the middle of a war. So, when you have essentially the same number of people going into a small town, like, what are we going to expect there? So, it'll be interesting to see how many of the deaths were violent and how many of the deaths were like, "Ooh, I slipped off the rock and I fell into the water." So, we'll see.

Yeah. Um, okay. Staying in the region while all this was going on, Saudi Arabia and the Houthis are getting back into some beef. So, let's jump over there.

Yeah. So, uh, Saudi Arabia and the Houthis are now just shooting at each other straight up directly for the first time since the 2022 truce on July 20th. The Houthi, Houthis declared a naval blockade of Saudi, uh, being able to ship through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. We've talked about this before. Um, some people are framing this as retaliation for the July 13th strike on the Sinai airport. Sai, I'm not sure how to pronounce that. SAA, uh, airport. A strike that Yemen's internationally, uh, recognized government claimed and the Houthis blamed on Riyadh. So, you've got like all this tension, long-standing tension between the Houthis and the Saudis. Remember, this is really a proxy battle between Iran and Riyadh, which if my understanding is correct, these are different sects of Islam that are going after each other. And so, there's, uh, I think in the West, a lot of mythology or just plain misunderstanding around what's going on in the Middle East. It is not the, um, uh, Muslims against the infidels. You have infighting, Muslim to Muslim violence that's been going on for an extraordinarily long time. And so that is a huge part of this, and that's what's playing out there. So, as we see the Red Sea get clamped down on, this is where the Chinese brokering deals with the Houthis to get everything through, but the specific targets are, um, Saudi oil being stopped. That's where all of this stuff gets crazy. And so, how far is this going to go? We'll see. But it's like when I read about this story, I was like, "Dude, this is exactly how, uh, a regional conflict begins to draw more people in because originally this was like US-led. Everybody knew this was US-led, and everybody was really surprised when, uh, the UAE started getting hit, Saudis started getting hit, Qatar started getting hit. Everybody's like, "Why the [ __ ], what?" And now it's like, "Oh, you didn't understand that there were long-standing beef already in the region, and that we had a hot shooting war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia back in 2022. It's been sort of this uneasy truce." And so now we're beginning to see like, who's going to line up with Iran, who's lining up with the countries that have normalized relations with, um, Israel. And remember, a lot of people said that October 7th was about that, that the Palestinians were feeling isolated on the world stage because everybody was normalizing relationships with Israel, and so they had to act immediately if they were, you know, ever going to have any way out from under this. If you understand Hamas as an Iranian proxy group, and Iran being the one who really doesn't want to see that, that they want to, um, keep the instability so that they can continue to try to get to a dominant position, to get the US out, to become a hegemon in the region, to bully that region into their way of life. Then this starts to become a very different, um, outlook when everybody, I think one of the dominant narratives was that, "No, no, this is really just about the US coming in and making trouble in the Middle East, not being honest about how much friction there already was in the Middle East between different sects of Islam." So, yeah, you put it back in that context, and now it's like, "Okay, if Saudi Arabia is starting to have their own beef with Iran and going after the Houthis directly, and Iran is going to continue to try to fund them to create another pain point, um, not just for the US, definitely for the US, but not just for the US, uh, but also directly as a way to, um, have a fight with Saudi Arabia." So, then it becomes, "Okay, the UAE at one point was doing strikes directly in, um, Iran." In fact, there was a story coming out. I couldn't verify enough of the facts, so, um, take this as just pure speculation, but people are saying that there are actually, um, troops from the UAE doing strikes inside of Iran. What I couldn't figure out is, did they mean ground troops that are actually running missions inside of Iran? Are they talking that they're doing drone strikes? What's going on? But anyway, that there are many claims that the UAE is now striking Iran directly themselves. So, you've got Saudi going against, um, Iran via the Houthis in, uh, Yemen. So, now does the Yemeni government get involved? Is it just going to be read as something against the, the Houthis? How does that play out? Uh, you've got the UAE being pulled in directly. No longer just as like, "Well, we're standing in unity with the United States," but they're attacking, uh, Iran directly. You've got Russia and Iran sending weapons back and forth in the Ukraine, sorry, Ukraine saying, "Yo, we're not going to tolerate that." And so, man, this is how you start getting a lot of players into this. You start merging the, uh, war in Russia between Russia and Ukraine with the war between the US and Iran, which is now spreading regionally. And very rapidly, depending on what happens with China, this very rapidly starts looking like the early stages of a world war. Like, it is very unnerving. And yeah, this is a time where we should want all of this to

come to an end as quickly as possible, but I certainly don't see the offramp.

>> Tom, I'm going to do something that you hate.

>> Please.

>> I'm going to make you president.

>> Okay.

>> What are we? What like, this is a lot.

>> Just know that button was pressed by somebody whose job is in my hands. So, I don't know that I would take, yeah, I don't know that I would take it too seriously, but, uh, okay, keep going.

Um, because there's one thing. Trump stepped in some poop, then can't wipe it off his shoe. Now we're stuck in Iran. I get that.

>> But with everything now escalating and what it seems like in three different places,

>> it's kind of like you're at a party and you're like, "Okay, I think that guy doesn't like me. I need to figure out how to maneuver the situation so I can get home safely." And then you see a fight by the door. And then some other guy was like, "Yeah, I heard you was talking [ __ ] too, Tom." And now you're like, "Wait a second." Like, like it starts to get, feels like you're closing in.

Mhm.

>> Um.

>> Yeah, help.

>> Okay. Well, here's the really bad news, and it's either bad news about the way that my mind works or the bad news about the way the world works.

>> Um, now that we are in this position, we have to be so dominant in Iran that they can't fight back. And if we're not going to be able to put ourselves in that position, then we're in trouble because we are in the octagon. So now you're fighting. So what, what's your way out of the octagon? You, you win. And by the way, you're in the octagon. This is something that's always freaked me out about mixed martial arts. You are locked in a cage with somebody who is legitimately trying to steal your consciousness from you or to damage your arm or your leg, one of your joints so badly that you'll need surgery. That's what's actually happening. That's what's on the other side of the cage. And it is only your own strength and your own ability to fight and be smart that stop somebody from actually breaking your joints, man. And so that's from my kids. This game is hyper dangerous. Now, I love the UFC, but I am shocked that it ever gained the kind of popularity that it's gained because it is actual permanent lifelong damage that is often done to somebody in that ring. And that is wild. And so when you take that to actual life and death, which is what we see playing out, there is no option at this stage. There's the diplomatic before we get into it, but there's no option at this stage other than inflict so much damage on that person, break their joints to the point where they tap out and they want the fight to end. That's it, man. And unfortunately, unlike in the UFC where the fight can just reach a natural conclusion and the refs come in and they go, "Ah, cool. You guys did a great fight, but nobody could stop the other person." And so, um, here's where we're at. It doesn't work like that. You either run out of will to fight, um, or you're like in the case of Japan, you just so many people have died, you can't keep fighting. So that's where we're at, man.

So if I'm at the house party, to use that analogy, um, I am reminded that I've got 18 cars out front with the biggest pipe hitting [ __ ] you've ever seen in your life. And I send out the 911 text and they all come into the house and I'm just like, as a quick reminder, if you guys don't back the [ __ ] off, these guys start beating you to death right here. And that's it. And then the first guy moves and literally you beat him to death. The second guy moves, you beat him to death. You grab a third just to be like, I [ __ ] told you, you beat him to death. And then you go, are you guys done? The fourth guy comes, you beat him to death. Then you beat five, six, and seven to death. Just as like, "Hey, the last time I [ __ ] told you I gave you a chance, you didn't take it." And if they don't exit ramp at that point, you just start beating everyone to death. And then, dude, it's so heinous. I hate that that's true, but keep in mind, this is me having read a [ __ ] ton of history. And I'm just telling you, this is the game. This is how it plays out. People don't want it to be true. They want morality to come in. It's just that's not the game anymore. People do not understand how violent of an animal humans are. We are extraordinarily dangerous. And here is something. Put this on a t-shirt. Weakness does not invite friendship. It invites contempt. When you are weak, people do not rush to your aid and be like, "Oh my god." Strong men come and they [ __ ] beat you to death and they take your women. Boys and girls. Boys and girls. Do we really want to go here?

Go.

>> Come on. We're already here. We didn't kill seven people at the party.

>> I think we killed more than that. I'm going to get text messages on this one. Uh, in the Quran, they highlight a truth about humans that has nothing to do uniquely with Islam. It is merely highlighting a truth about humans. Women are considered booty of conquest. It literally says in the Quran, you can have as many women as you can keep in your right hand. Meaning, that's not the exact word. Ding. It's very close. As many as you can with your right hand. [ __ ] I forget the exact words.

Ryan's going to look them up.

>> What am I looking up?

>> Uh, you're looking up the exact phrase from the Quran about you can have as many women as you hold in your right hand, which is talking about um victory in war. And so once you understand that's humans, that humans are like, "Oh, I'm going to kill everybody." Ah, psych. Just kidding. I'm not going to kill the women. Those I'm going to rape. And so, uh, it, that, that is humanity. Okay, that is how [ __ ] dark humans get. Same thing, uh, just to make sure everybody understands this is humans. Let me tell you a story about Japan, which is about America. I can't believe the following statement is true, but it is true. So, uh, America drops two nuclear bombs on Japan. Japan finally says, [ __ ] we got to stop. Uh, the general who is basically, for reasons I could explain later, uh, there's one general who becomes the king of Japan for like three years as America turns Japan into a normal country and they go, um, I'm going to send home all of the um American soldiers that actually fought because they saw their friends stabbed and killed and so they'll just [ __ ] kill every Japanese person they see. Um, and so we got to get rid of them. We're going to bring in all these young bucks and they don't have any beef other than propaganda that reached America and they're going to be the ones that help Japan transition.

>> Only catch is they're [ __ ] raping a lot. And so we've got to do something. And so we're going to go to a set of Japanese women and we're going to say, "Listen, I know you've been trained that you're Japan first, that everybody during World War II was basically given the mentality of a kamikaze pilot. So whether you were at home or you were on the front lines, you were told to be ready to die for your country." So everybody like had that mentality. So they go to these women and they say, "Look, as a contribution to your nation, I need you to be a prostitute." And so they were like, "Okay, word." And until gonorrhea and syphilis tore through like 70% of American soldiers, they just had these official out in the open like comfort groups of Japanese women who were like, "All right, cool. I guess this is my job to be a prostitute. Now, I've said it already, but just as a quick pop quiz, why were they doing that? To stop American soldiers from raping the Japanese women. They weren't like, "Yo, we got to go lock these boys up and send a message." They were like, "We got to get them prostitutes. That's humans." Okay.

>> Uh, Genghis Khan, he, he would go in, same thing. We're going to kill all the, uh, men. We're going to kill the kids, but the women, we're going to take. Those are going to be sex slaves. So it, it is humans, man. But in this particular moment, that is, uh, and this is where you as a Christian really get to like have a like [ __ ] flag in the ground and be like, "Yo, my guy did it right." If somebody takes your coat, what do you give them?

>> Your, uh, shirt.

>> Correct.

>> Totally different vibe. But the problem is that's the West. And so the West is like, "Oh, people are flooding into my country and they want my jacket. Cool. I'm going to give my shirt as well." Uh oh. What did Tom just say about what when you signal weakness, it invites contempt. It does not invite, um, it does not invite friendship. And so now, oh god, never in a million years did I think I was going to be talking about this [ __ ]. Now you get into the Crusades. Oh no, this unfortunately is not a fractal. Bad button there. If you want to do something for me, you hit the help button because I'm like, dude, do you know how often I'm sitting going, why don't I just go make video games? Dude, I feel some weird moral obligation to talk about all this. Okay. Anyway, I have a feeling this does not end well for me, but nonetheless, uh,

>> Okay, thank you. So, um, the Western world being super Christian, uh, right now we have a very soft form of Christianity. What history teaches us the Christianity that stops the death of Christians is the Crusades. Once you understand the Crusades were actually a response to, um, Islamic expansion, you start going, "Uh oh, we have a gear over here on the Christian side that goes, oh, you want to play? Let's play." And dude, this is not the world or the era that I want to live in. Uh, but it's the era that we're in. And so the West is going to be asked a very simple question. Are you going to be the muscular West that ends up pushing back or are you going to be the, um, if you take my jacket, here's my shirt West that as a reminder, um, Constantinople used to be Christian, not anymore. Uh, North Africa used to be Christian, not anymore. Um, Lebanon used to be Christian, not anymore. So there unfortunately is an extraordinarily long, um, history of Muslims and Christians killing each other. And so, yeah, welcome to 2026, man.

Man, well done, sir. Well done. Well done. So here's the verse I found. Um, this is the full verse translated to English. And so for anyone looking, it's for an-Nisa, if I'm pronouncing that right, but it's also forbidden are married women except female captives in your possession. This is Allah's commandment to you. Lawful to you are all beyond these as long as you seek them with your wealth in a legal marriage, not in fornication.

>> Yeah, that's not the one that I was looking for. If you do the search for the right hand, and almost certainly if you just search for, uh, Quran verse about right-hand women, something like that.

>> I, I typed that and that's what it brought up.

>> Interesting. What's the, what's the full verse again, though?

>> I, that's the problem. I can't, uh, I don't know it well enough.

>> Okay.

>> So.

>> All right. Uh, well.

>> Yeah, it's still pointing me back to this one. It says, "What your right hand possesses is the translation, but it's the same verse."

>> Got it. So, the idea of your right hand possesses, at least everything I've ever come across referencing this is about what you, uh, can take in conquest. So if somebody

>> They're saying you can take a wife in conquest as long as it's seeking it through valid means and not just for

>> But I want you to imagine I roll up to your, uh, city and I win a war. I've killed your husband and now I take you as a wife.

>> Oh yeah. No, it's not good. I'm just trying to say that like it's, it's we have to be specific, right? It's like if I were to say the same thing about Christianity or that's also in their Old Testament because that was the time.

>> Well, okay. So.

>> Oh god. No, I pulled it up. It's

>> No, I know. I know. You, you've touched on a subject I doubt you, um, have encountered, which is here's part of the problem. Uh, okay, let's put a very careful road marker. We are talking about extremist views on, uh, Islam. We are not talking about what is almost certainly the overwhelming vast majority of Muslims who have a very, um, compatible with the West, like I just want a rad life. I want to pray to my God and let you pray to your God and everything is good view on it. And it is horrific that that gets swept up in all of this. There are ideas in the Quran that when read from a, like, no, no, no, this is like the way it's meant to be interpreted, it just gets a little more aggressive than other religions who don't happen to have something as hardcore. So for instance, part of the reason that extremism finds root in Islam is because that, uh, Muhammad is the final word. He's the final revelation. He's the final prophet. And so nothing will ever come after him. So you didn't get that same read off of the Old Testament, which is why Jesus comes along. Remember Jesus was a Jew. And he was like, "Actually, this is what God wants." and meant and all of that. And then obviously you get the Reformation going through the Christian church and people don't have this same sense of like, but no, wait, the Old Testament was the final word of God and therefore right. It just doesn't. And so you don't get, it's not that you don't get fundamentalists who become dangerous, you just don't get them on mass in the way that you get when, um, neither Jesus nor any of his apostles were political or military leaders. Unfortunately for Islam, uh, Muhammad was both. So he was a, a prophet, but he was also a political leader and a very talented general. So now you have like these three phases of Islam where some of them get pretty like hardcore about conquering and taking things and that's where it gets a little unnerving. So to bring it all back to what you said that made me want to go down that path is that you can imagine if you were counseling that woman whose husband is, you know, dead in the corners, entrails are everywhere, he's been beheaded, and you're like, listen, you have to understand, like, this is the way that some people are reading this is not quite the right way. She's going to be like, [ __ ] you. He's going to take me as his wife. I don't want to be his wife. I want my husband to not be dead. And so this is going to be very cold comfort that read. I agree with you. All I am saying is that this same verse and the same ideology is traced back to those other relig, like this Deuteronomy verse here says, "When you go to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hands and you take captives, if you notice among the captives a beautiful woman and are attracted to her, you may take her as your wife." I understand the New Testament throws out the Old Testament. I'm not even saying that doesn't throw out the Old Testament. It, let's say it reforms it.

>> It reforms it. And I'm, and I'm not even saying I'm excusing what's in the Quran. I'm just trying to say this is something that is across all three of the Abrahamic religions. And I think a lot of people neglect that. That's all I'm pointing out.

>> I'm not sure that people neglect it. And I think it's a really good point to bring up because it's so important to understand. And again, we are talking about extremists, but I think it's very important to understand why you, um, as, as a hypothesis, why you end up getting a, um, an easier time getting people to be extreme in the modern era on the side of Islam in a way that you're not on the Christian side. And so when you ask that question again, it is, there the vast majority of Muslims do not take a radical interpretation. But there are more things that you're going to have to, and I'm talking Christianity. Uh, so New Testament Jesus as an interpreter, as somebody who's telling you, no, no, no, this is what God really meant, right? Takes you down a much more gentle, loving, embracing the individual is where the spark of divinity lives. All of that stuff, right? It, it, that ideology takes you in one direction. Then you have another ideology that when read in an extremist way just has more things that are easier to grab on to than Christianity does. And so it is important to note how many evil things have been done in the name of Christianity. And that part of the Reformation, part of them holding themselves accountable to that, part of them trying to bend towards something that is more just is like, okay, cool. How did they pull that off? What did they have to do? And how can Muslims, cuz I think this is only a thing for them to do, how do they make sure that they have a similar reformation that bends in a similar direction? And you find a path to getting away from some of those like reads of this. Now, the problem is so, um, if you know about the, um, the Golden Age of Islam, okay, if I'm not mistaken, and, and anybody that sees a mistake that I'm making here because I'm, I'm new enough to this stuff, I'm sure I'm making mistakes. Um, but the Golden Age of Islam happens in Iran as the Persian Empire is merging with the, um, Islamic takeover and because of the particular read that was being given, they had a strong economy, they were trying to blend with the Persians and so it becomes a much more, um, subdued version. They take more like what I'll call gentle reads on things. But then, and I don't remember what year this ends up happening, you get an Imam that comes in that's like, "No, no, no. You guys are all, um, misreading this. This is all [ __ ]. You're betraying Muhammad. We've got to get back to the truth." And you end up in the dark ages because he burns all the books. Literally burns all the books. Uh, and the quote goes something like, um, "Anything that disagrees with the word of the Quran or the word of Muhammad needs to be burned. And anything that agrees with it is redundant because we already have the Quran. And so they need to be burned." And so they get [ __ ] burned. Now the Renaissance becomes at least in part because people start fleeing the region. Muslims also push into, uh, Greece. And so you get knowledge fleeing Greece. And so this is how Europe ends up going through its Renaissance because they are literally taking all this incredible knowledge, um, that was in Greece, in Iran, the Persian Empire, and they bring it to the West. And so it's like, uh, this is where you get these cycles where people go back to this more fundamental read and because there's so much in there about war and conquest and jihad, it's like, ah, like it gets harder when an Imam rises up that says, "You guys are being untrue to the word." It gets harder to be like, "No, no, no, we're the right ones, you're wrong." Same thing with the Ayatollah, uh, Khomeini. Same thing. "You guys aren't being pious enough, you guys are misreading, you're too soft, like you've gone secular, this is some [ __ ]." And he comes back on like this wave of like hardcore orthodox reads. And so you'll see the same thing in, uh, Judaism. You see psychopaths that are reading the Torah in a way that's like, "Well, God promised us this land and we're going to take it all a thousand percent." And so the question becomes, okay, how does that society keep a lid on that? Because Jews are [ __ ] terrible at procreating, first of all. So they, they just have no sort of, um, overt takeover and certainly not by the sword. But you do see that coming out of extremist Islam. And so that's where I'm like, hey, you're right. We need to look at these, the books say some unhinged [ __ ] all the books of Abraham, but that one's been easier to tamp down. Certainly, Christianity's done a phenomenal, I mean, do we agree on that? Christianity's done a phenomenal job of keeping their extremists at bay. Not that there are zero.

>> Well, what are we defining extremists? Cuz I

>> If you're killing people.

>> Okay, then yeah, they have done a better job. But if we're defining, I mean, that's a whole different argument. And my whole point was just I think we just need to recognize that all three of these have similar texts in that regard. It's not the text. It's not the religion. It's the extremists that take that text and interpret it the way they want to. That's what I was getting.

>> So, what, what I'm really trying to drive home is I agree with you like with my entire body.

>> And now because that's so true, there's been a natural experiment of you've got Christianity, Judaism, and, uh, Islam. Now, let's look at who's done the best job of stopping in a modern context their adherence from killing other people. And I would say it goes Christianity, Judaism, and then, uh, Islam.

>> But do you think, and this is just, I'm just a question, do you think the religion plays the role in that or do you think it's more the culture, the area of the world, the history of that country? That's what I mean. Like I tease it out.

>> I think it's the religion's fault. I, like the problem is I see a lot of people in chat saying things like, "We have this jihadist movement coming to Spain," and it's like, that's not, you're, you're labeling all Muslims jihadist.

>> No, no, hold on. I don't think, first of all, there's obviously you're not saying this, but I'm just saying nobody's going to say that about me. I mean, they will say it, but I've been very, I've gone to extraordinary saying I'm not saying, yeah, I'll get there. So I, I'm certainly not saying that. And I, to say that there is a jihadist movement is accurate. And so now it becomes a question of, um, is it an interpretation of jihad that is merely, no, no, this is a spiritual war? That could be one. And the reason I say that that's just blatant fact is that you can go on YouTube right now and find 150 people saying this is jihad. Like, we're not trying to hide it. Like that's what it is. Now, what does that word mean? You're going to get a lot of interpretations. You're going to get people who say this is a purely spiritual thing. You're going to get people who say this is a political thing. And the fact that we are not afraid to fight for what we believe in and that we call it jihad, you guys don't need to freak out about that. Like, we are instructed by our God to do that. And it's got a word and that word is jihad. And if you choose to interpret that as a military thing, you're way off base and that isn't it. Uh, there are some people that say that it is military, that conquering by the sword is one of the options, but maybe that's a tiny fraction of people. Okay, cool. But like being careful to tease those things out is fine. But handwaving away and saying, "Oh, this isn't jihad." That, that, that's an inaccurate representation. Muslims cannot be turned into a monolith. So anytime anybody says blanket Muslims, that, that's foolish. As we see, you've got warring factions of Muslims in the Middle East. There's already two major sects that have been killing each other for a very long time. So, yeah, they're, they're not a monolith. What the one single point I'm trying to make right now is I think that because Muhammad was, he went on this extraordinary life arc of going from first I'm a prophet, nobody's really giving me the time of day, people really start to listen to what I'm saying and I become politically important and so I start making laws and then I realize I'm actually an extraordinary military strategist and so now I'm going to go on conquest and so you can see these three beats of his life where it's very conciliatory in the beginning when he's small and weak, which is smart, by the way. And so, um, you get like the Islam is a religion of peace largely from that period. Uh, but then as he gets more powerful in the political element, he starts making, um, verses of the Quran that tell you how to live, right? By, this is how, um, the policies of the land should be. And then as he goes into being a conquering hero, it, those start working their way into that. Now, if Jesus had gone on the Crusades and had conquered places and then was like, "Yo, let me tell you how you think about war." It's like, uh oh. Like that would have introduced ideas into a quote unquote sacred text that I think would end up creating problems for the faith down the road. And that, that is the only thing I'm putting on the table is if I'm a moderate Muslim and I'm, I'm loving what's going on in the West. They're beautiful places, incredible architecture. I want to be a part of that, but I want to follow my God and my way. Then I'm looking at this going, "God damn it." Like, we've got these people on the extreme that are creating problems. As I would expect Christians to look at somebody like Timothy McVeigh and I would expect them to be like, a [ __ ] hell, like you're giving us such a bad reputation. And so that's where I'm like, the, the path before Muslims is not like, oh, we've got to get people away from Islam. It's how do we make this something where, um, it's compatible with a broader world. It's compatible with religious freedom. And I think that is always going to have a flank to which it is vulnerable to orthodox interpretations that will give you things like, remember Muhammad personally oversaw the beheading of like 600, um, I think Jews, but certainly, and this was in Medina, I'm pretty sure, um, so it's like, it gets pretty tough to say that Muhammad's not down with beheading the infidels.

>> So you don't think right now, and this is just a clarifying question, m the, the Muslim faith is compatible with Western society.

>> No, I didn't say that. In fact, I said the exact opposite.

>> No, no, no. I was curious for the clarification because that's what it, the

>> So what, what I'm saying is very simply, religious texts need to be reinterpreted as the world changes. And when your book is accidentally written in a way that allows you to reinterpret it as Christianity was,

>> then you're in a much better position. People can modernize it and, um, it ends up being great. I'm not Christian, but I'm very grateful to live in a Christian nation. Uh, then you have other books that maybe are written in a different way and they create vulnerabilities that as a moderate Muslim, which I would assume is, I mean, let's ballpark it to 85%, just the absolute staggering overwhelming majority, I'm perfectly happy to assume that's true, they have a vulnerability of the orthodox interpretation being impossible to handwave away. And so throughout history, we've seen the rise of Imams that go, "You guys are not reading this accurately," and let me flip to, you know, 56 verses or Hadiths that explain why you're wrong. And then people like, [ __ ] I am wrong. Because it, you have to say, "Yeah, I know it says that, but I don't think it's right to beat my wife even if she gets out of pocket. I don't think it's okay to hit her. Even if, like, you can't see the bruises, I just don't think it's okay." And so, but now an Imam can go, "But bro, it's right here." Or I don't think it, like here is one of the catches that [ __ ] as a moderate Muslim, you must be tearing your hair out over that Aisha was six years old when Muhammad married her and nine years old when they consummated it. And so now it's like, okay, how do you justify having sex with a nine-year-old? Well, you say it was a different time. You say she went through puberty and, uh, she was consenting. It was not painful because her body had already changed. And it's like, yikes. That is a tough place to be in a modern context to have to justify the prophet like went way out of his way to describe his wife, how she becomes his wife when they consummated the marriage. Ah, and so now how do you say like, okay, Muhammad is the final word of God. He marries a six-year-old, has sex with a nine-year-old. Yes, she went through puberty. Cool. I'll give you that. It was a different time. Maybe girls went through puberty earlier, like, ah, even though the data doesn't back that up, but let's just say it's like Jesus, you still have to say it does say that like.

>> It, it does, but just like the

>> Well, we probably should move on.

>> We're, we're, we're, uh, looping. We're looping. Um, okay, moving on. Um, we were going to talk about Hamas. Uh, Trump cut a deal. Um, TLDDR, he says he's going to bring peace. They have a deal. It's a 20-point, a 20-point plan. I feel like I heard this before. We all heard this before. Let's see in two weeks if it's still active.

>> Yeah, this one breaks my heart. I'm going to be completely honest. Um, Trump announced on Thursday night that Hamas has agreed to complete disarmament. I thought I was being trolled. I thought this was AI. I thought there's no way this is real because nobody is talking about it. The tweet that I saw had virtually no traction whatsoever. But Hamas has actually confirmed it. So negotiators signed a disarmament framework with the US-led Board of Peace and, um, this is the first time the group has put, uh, its name on any agreement to give up weapons. So this is actually a pretty big deal. So why are people not actually going for it? And I think the reason is that nobody expects this to stand. So there are already cracks as of this morning where Hamas is saying, "Wait, hold on a second. That's not exactly what we agreed to. First of all, uh, Palestinians are going to be in control of the weapons at all times." So, there's like all these caveats. We'll see if it goes through. Uh, there's some weirdness about, I don't know if Netanyahu's just outright rejected it or if rumors are that he rejected it, but it certainly isn't being just warmly embraced. And so, when you look at why it's not gaining traction, even though this should be a really big deal, um, it's nobody's really looking at it as a win. Hamas isn't going to be like, "Yay, we're disarming." Um, Israel, if they still want to keep their campaign going, obviously is not going to be like, "Hey, they're disarming." And so, it's going to be very interesting to see what actually happens because the one refrain that you hear over and over and over is, "If Israel, um, puts down their weapons, there will be no more Jews." But if Hamas were to disarm, then there would be peace overnight. Well, we're about to find out now. Will Hamas actually disarm? Will, um, Israel try to do something to, um, you know, obviously behind the scenes to try to like spark this off and get them pissed again so that they can keep going after them? We're about to find out. But it makes me very sad that this is, um, something that everybody's just like, "Yeah, good luck with that." Uh, but the Board of Peace, I think, was a huge part of the, um, hostage release, if memory serves correctly. And so nobody believed that they were going to be able to pull that off. So I mean, fingers crossed, man. Nothing would be more awesome than there actually being a true and lasting peace, uh, between Israel and Palestine. This is not popular anymore. Uh, but certainly, um, having them both be a state and be able to build their economies. Boy, oh boy. Uh, would that be wonderful? I don't think we're at the border of that. Uh, even if this is a ceasefire, but yeah, that would be wonderful.

>> We shall see.

>> Um.

>> Shall see. I just found out in the chat that Elvis Presley, um, married his, uh, met his girl when she was 14.

>> There's a whole movie about it. Priscilla.

>> 14. She was 24.

>> Oh. Oh, you're saying that she was still like young when they first met them.

>> Yeah, she was 14. He was 24.

>> I, I don't know, um, how to.

>> I don't know what to believe. Obviously, if you watch documentaries and stuff on him, uh, that they kept it platonic until she was 18. Uh, it, yeah. A, Drew's face says it all in the toilet. Uh, B, it's still [ __ ] weird for you to court somebody who's 14. Now, if there were a religion that said that Elvis was the, uh, final word of God, I would feel very differently and not just say he was a [ __ ] go down that rabbit. I was about to bring a Woody Allen. You.

>> Bro, that one is [ __ ] free as weird. That one's very weird.

>> Yo, weird. Best use of that sound ever. That that one is un.

>> I, I don't know how he's being at allegations, bro. I.

>> He hasn't.

>> But the fact that he's still married to her is like walking around here.

>> Still in America.

>> I don't know the answer to that question. Uh, here's where I will say my wife has this whole idea. Not it's not her idea, but she has had people on the show that talk about it. Coercive control. That's the one thing I will say that guy is like.

>> Had to have done something to her mind because she was so young. Oh my god. Uh, that, yeah, I, when I see photos of them together, I just see a hostage, man.

>> Uh, okay. I'm going to give you a three-tweet setup and then I will pass you the ball. But I think that first we got to start off with, um, Boule, um, the prime minister. He had a banger tweet.

>> He's president. Yeah.

>> President. Oh, they do president.

>> He's president of El Salvador.

>> Yeah. Um.

>> Thank you.

>> He had a banger tweet that I feel like I haven't been able to shake. He said, "This may be unpopular, but we never escaped the 2008 financial crisis. We just shifted the pain." And I feel like we've been talking to a lot of economists lately and they've all have keep going back to 2000, 2008 and we keep thinking that it was like, oh, COVID is what killed us, but it was like stacking, like stacking effects.

>> Tweet number two, economy numbers just released. The economy slowed down to 1.5 growth rate in Q2. June core inflation is 3.3%.

>> And then the third thing will be the best Brentton Woods 2.0. You know, but I wanted to kind of set those up like they're all something is a-ry with the US economy in different like.

>> Something is a-ry with the global economy. Look at what's going on in South Korea. Like they're, I saw somebody tweet out, I thought this was really good because they're, um, they're now spiking again. So they fell by like some ungodly like 70%. I mean, just absolutely catastrophic.

>> And now it's spiking back up like some massive amount. And so it's basically an entire nation's entire economy is acting like a meme stock. And it's like, goddamn, that is a brutal indictment. So yes, to bring you guys up to speed on what just happened with the Fed and all the numbers. The Fed held rates at 3.5 to 3.75%. Uh, the vote was 9-3 though. Beth Hammock, Neil Kosari, and Lorie Logan all dissented in favor of a quarter-point hike. That's the most dissent since September of 2016, and it's the seventh straight month where they haven't made a change. Now, the announcement is truly in War's new style. The statement was short. It's basically identical to what happened in June, and they closed with like a simple oneliner, which is that the committee will deliver price stability. Now, I wish him the best of luck with that because that is going to be very difficult for the Fed to actually control. Now, WSH gave no forward guidance. He said there is no soft inflation target. There's no implicit target. It's just 2%. That's our mandate. 2%. We're going for it. Uh, he also said that the Fed is going to keep targeting the PCE, which is basically stripping out, um, the really important things like food and energy. Uh, but they are volatile. So, you try to get like a better sense of what's going on. But that, that could change once the reports from his task forces come in. Uh, so we'll see what happened. Now, the interesting part is what happened in the bond market. So the 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.21%. It's the highest yield since 2007. The 10-year went to nearly 4.69. The 2-year though fell four basis points. The Dow dropped over a thousand points and the 30-year mortgage right now is about 6.58%. As Drew was saying, uh, Q2 GDP is slowed to 1.5% when you annualize, uh, when you annualize it, and that's down from 2.1%, which was already just like depression-inducing. Uh, so this is bad. We were expecting 1.8%. Didn't even get that, which again, 1.8% is god awful. Uh, the June PCE fell though, so the inflation rate fell from 3.7% to 3.7%, excuse me, from 4.1 and core came in at 3.3%. So, um, that's above target for like, what, five years running now? So this is, this is not looking good, boys and girls. And so understanding what's going on in the bond market is very important. So what the bond market is telling you is this is probably not an inflation story. What this is likely to be, because you get a difference in the long tail and the two-year, you, if this were just inflation, you'd expect two-year to go up as well, but it went down. And so what I think this looks like is they are expecting them to make a change, right? Given the dissenting, they're expecting them to raise rates, but they're effectively punishing them for not doing it right now. And so they're saying this delay is, um, going to cost you, and so I'm going to expect you to start paying me more to hold this. Now, the reason that I think that people are expecting there to be a long-term problem is that nobody trusts how the US government is going to handle the financial crisis that we're in the middle of right now. Obviously, I've talked a lot about this. You have instability in Japan, which is going to feed into this. You've got China that's trying to get out from under the dollar that's being very serious about gold. You have the fact that gold now is the number one reserve asset. It is no longer US Treasuries. You've got China selling US Treasuries, Japan selling US Treasuries, two of the biggest historical buyers. And so, who's going to buy the US debt? Keeping in mind that we're two trillion, uh, running a $2 trillion deficit annually every year. We're at now 40, or almost $40 trillion in debt. Uh, so it's like people are looking at that going, "Bro, if you want me to hold US debt, you're going to pay for that privilege." So, people don't believe either that the Fed is going to do the right things or they don't believe that the Fed can do anything to change the direction that we're going. If you guys know Lynn Alden and her whole idea of once you get into fiscal dominance, meaning how the government spends money controls everything, you're in fiscal dominance. So we're in this period where what the [ __ ] is the Fed going to do exactly? Like if they try to raise rates too much, then they make it impossible for the US government to pay back their debt. And so now you get into a problem where interest rates could run so extreme that the US government is literally unable to meet their obligations. And if they're unable to meet their obligations, then you don't want to be holding US debt. And so people are seeing the risk rise. And so when you're looking for a risk-adjusted rate of return, people are just saying, "Sorry, bro." Like, you're either inept and can't do anything, uh, or you're inept and are just doing the wrong things. And so you're going to have to pay me for the privilege of buying this debt into the future. And that is not a good position for a country running $2 trillion deficits. Now the question becomes, how hard do we want to, uh, zoom out and see like all the potential stuff? I've got Steve Keen on my brain right now as I'm interviewing him later today. Should be very, uh, interesting. I'm super excited for that interview. But the Steve Keen of it all where it's like, no, just what do you mean? Keep running them debts up, man. Nothing matters. But lurking in the background of Steve Keen is debt forgiveness. You can't just do it forever. You've got to stop paying that interest. And so that you're going to wipe out somebody's wealth. So yeah, I'll be very interested to hear what his solution is for that. Uh, but the market, forget what I say, the market is telling you that we're not in a good place.

>> Um, remember when Trump used to call him too slow, pal, where.

>> Amongst many other. And it was like, he needs to raise, he needs to lower the rates. The rates got to go down. We should be at 1%, 2%.

>> And I feel like he put WS like, no, we're not touching the rates. So, are we that messed up? You think? Like.

>> Here's the thing. I'm so conspiracy when it comes to WS. So, I really think WS's play. I am out over my skis. I am not a mind reader. I don't know that he's going to do this. So, I'm going to paint you a fictional story. Uh, my fictional story goes something like this. Trump comes up to WS and is like, "Listen, [ __ ]. You're going to lower these [ __ ] rates." And WS is like, "Bro, you don't understand financial repression. You don't know how we got out of, uh, under our debt after World War II. Let me walk you through this game. What we're going to do is we're going to let inflation like run rampant. But I first have to establish that I'm not your [ __ ]. Because if everybody thinks that I'm a puppet to the federal government, that's going to be bad for you. It's going to be bad for me. So what I'm going to start doing is just telling people, I'm not going to tell you anything anymore. I'm going to go quiet and you guys are too reactive to the things that the Fed says. We, we need to be less interventionist. We need to just let things happen. Mum's the word. I've got my mandates. Maximum employment, which by the way, we've never had worse labor force participation ever.

>> Unemployment rate is 4% though. Unemployment rate. That's what I mean. They cooking books, boy.

>> Yeah. Th this is so wild. I'm not beating my wife. I'm starving. It's like, come on, kids. Uh, so it, it's, I think that is what's playing out. He told again, I don't have any information. I'm writing a fictional story, but I think it went something like that that he told Trump, listen, for a while I've got to create separation, but we are going to let this run hot. We're going to, um, inflate our debt away so that the pre-inflation dollars that we took on the 40 trillion, we're going to make that trivial compared to, um, the amount of money that we're going to get from growth. And then Trump goes, "But how are we going to get the growth?" And he goes, "From AI, and AI is also going to be deflationary." So AI is going to be driving down costs. So as we let inflation run rampant, it won't.

Matter, because we're just going to be burning through this natural deflation anyway. Um, and AI is going to get the economy growing. It's going to look just like it did at the end of World War II, where we had so much growth from manufacturing that, um, we, even though we were doing financial repression, which financial repression is just inflation is higher than the return, uh, the interest on holding government debt. But people don't care because their real wages are going up. So everybody's happy. The economy is growing. Tons of tax money coming in. Everything is great.

And I think his pitch went something like that. And so we're looking at WS right now as if like, oh my god, Trump actually hired somebody that is like, really going to be tough on inflation. No, no, no. He's got to first just show that there's separation of church and state so that everybody has credibility. And then he's going to, um, keep rates lower than they should be. Whether he lowers rates or not becomes irrelevant. It's just the rate of where should they be, um, compared to the amount of inflation that we're getting. He is already letting inflation run hot. So holding steady is already weird in the face of five years of inflation being higher than it should be. So it's already like, huh? So he might not be lowering rates, but he's keeping rates lower than they ought to be if it's actually true that you can control inflation simply by raising rates. Now, I think he can't raise rates for the reason that we have to roll it's like nine trillion dollar over in 2026, and we're running out of 2026 pretty rapidly. So, um, he's got, he's in a very tough situation. When you take my fictional story and put it on, everything for now looks like it fits. Whether that holds or not, whether he takes me by surprise and does something totally different, only time will tell. But right now, that fictional story still maps to everything we see.

Um, you've been saying that a lot that like the plan, whether it happens or not, is still to be seen. We're going to grow our way out of this with AI. What does that mean? Well, so to grow our way out of this with AI, which I have been very careful to say there is the near-term and there is the artificial super intelligence long-term.

There is going to be brutality between the two. And so I can paint the picture of short-term, long-term. The brutality is where I'm like, I don't know what happens there. So to grow our way out of this would be that let's say that, um, inflation is, uh, 4% and growth is five or 5.5%. Now it's like, cool, everybody's going to be fine. You're inflating their money by 4%, but you're growing their money by 5%. They've got a 1%, 1% growth rate. They're actually getting richer every day. It's not by any extreme amount, but they're actually getting richer. So right now they feel like they're getting poorer because they are getting, technically they got poorer in one big lump, but, um, they're still experiencing the effects of being poorer than they were six years ago. And so once they start going, "Oh, I'm getting richer." They click over into like this optimism and it's like, "Oh, my life is going to be better a year from now than it is today." That's rad. My kids' lives are going to be better than my life. That's rad. And so now everybody goes back into being jubilant. You're back in the 50s and 60s. That's exactly what happens coming out of World War II. We're doing financial repression. We are intentionally underpaying people for holding debt. Uh, however, we're putting people in a position where their real wages are going up and so people feel great.

Got it. And then the 5.6% that comes from, uh, would have to come from AI. That that's like everybody's fantasy. The problem is you're, you're going to get hit with an ugly stick very, very fast by the AI running the same, um, up and down and then up again that every technology before it has run. And we haven't gone through the downside yet. Um, so history tells you to bet against that downside would just be ahistoric. Doesn't mean it's impossible, but it would be ahistoric. And so, um, you're likely to obliterate all the people that are in AI on margin or are narrowly focused on, you know, a small subset of companies that may or may not survive all of this. The obvious wins in, uh, the 2000, um, dot-com bubble crash, just a lot of them just went out of business. And so that's like if we're literally like imagine on the other side of this, um, OpenAI doesn't exist, Anthropic doesn't exist, um, Gemini doesn't exist. And it's some new crop, the Kimmy K3s or whatever of the world that end up being the actual winners on the other side of this. Imagine that AI becomes a thing that everybody does internally, that they, um, just bring on, uh, their own AI and that like a Kimmy K3, something they can run in-house. Which Kimmy K3 can now be run in-house. And so it just becomes compute. And so now data centers become like oil companies, and they're giving you a commodity. Or maybe electricity company is a better example. So it becomes a commodity. And it's like, I'm running Kimmy K3, but I'm using my local data center to get the intelligence for that model to run on that. Cool. And but if you're invested in OpenAI, like you just lost all your money. So, and if you did it on debt, don't do it on debt. If you did it on debt, now you're broke or you're like, uh, actually in debt, millions of dollars. And this is where people start jumping off buildings. We have not gone through that yet. And so, as somebody who lived through the dot-com bubble, I will tell you, uh, I remember being in a room and somebody pulled me aside and they're like, "Hey, you see that guy over there?" I'm like, "Yeah." And they're like, "He used to be a billionaire and then because of the dot-com crash, now he's, you know, worth like chump change or whatever." And I was like, "God damn."

Now, as Ray Dalio goes to great lengths to explain to people, wealth is not the same as money. So, that guy never had that money. Um, but he had the wealth. So, fine if you're not in on debt. If you're in on debt and now you owe and you have no way to pay it back and the numbers are astronomical, uh, that could be lifelong, um, indebtedness.

Yeah. So I, I might not understand this correctly. So let me kind of like see how I could flesh this. I'm trying to figure out, would we need AI companies to grow? Like how, what would be the the numerator in that?

GDP? You're trying to get GDP to go up. So GDP is calculated as the velocity of money, um, divided by M2 money supply, uh, is GDP. Yes, I'm almost certain that's correct.

Got it. So velocity of money, for people that aren't familiar with that, it's, uh, how much money is there in the system times the, uh, amount that it turns over. So, uh, if you have, um, $20 trillion and it turns over twice, uh, then you have $40 trillion in GDP.

Gotcha. And turnover just means, uh, I earn a dollar and then you earn that same dollar off of me because I buy something from you.

Did you need the formula? Cuz I found it.

Yeah, please.

Um, I don't know if this is what you said, so you might need to confirm because these are all letters, but it says VM equals PQ over M. So, I'm assuming the nominal velocity of money.

What's that?

Uh, VM is, uh, velocity of money. Okay.

And then PQ, I've never heard it represented.

PQ is the GDP cuz that's what it says over on the side.

Yeah. So that should equal GDP over M2.

Okay. And M2 is the money supply. So how much actual money is in the system.

There you go. There's the formula. Um, awesome. Thank you. Appreciate you. Um, okay. Couple quick hits here. Um, first, EA is going private and I'm very excited about that. Um, I am hoping that this investment firm treats it as a standalone entity and they don't gut it for parts like private equity. But we shall see.

This is going to be a question of, is there an Elon Musk at the helm of EA? Uh, there's plenty of people out there saying that this guy is part of the reason that gaming is in the, uh, bad place that it's in. Um, you take a company private because you're tired of the quarterly pressure that you get from investors that are making you make short-term decisions that are making you eke every dollar out of everything that you can, which is great for quarterly profits in the short term. It's absolutely terrible for the long-term viability of the brand. What is absolutely fascinating about what's going on inside of, um, the video game industry is it's really indicative of what a lot of people are calling late-stage capitalism. So, you look at this and you say, "All these are just optimizing these companies for shareholder value," which by the way, they actually have a fiduciary responsibility to do. But I think you're a total if you think only about this quarter's, uh, money. You've got to be thinking long-term shareholder value. When you start thinking long-term shareholder value, you are going to rightly leave money on the table this quarter to make sure that you have massive affinity of the, uh, buying public so that the people that are a fan of your IP, that they really believe in what you're doing, they believe in the direction of the game. They want to evangelize for it. That is going to be way better for your profits in the long term than trying to nickel and dime people, uh, in the short term. Now, if EA is being taken private so that they can specifically break the spell of a hyper-financialized economy and they can get back to actually making a product that people want to own, then that'll be phenomenal. You take off a lot of the stupid pressure that is put on a company by the public markets and you can do something magical. This is exactly what Elon Musk did with X. Brilliant. Love it. Fantastic. Now, the question is, is that actually why they're doing this? That I don't know. I don't know enough about the leader of this company to speak. I'm so curious to know how he is going to factor into this. Is that about EA?

Okay, you're queuing up something. I was like, damn, if he's, I really want to hear this. Uh, so that's where the real question is going to be. Now, you guys know I'm building a video game, so I feel some type of way about the video game industry. A big part of what has kicked this off is that indie developers are absolutely manhandling the AAA gaming industry, and they're doing it through a very simple methodology. Make something that people really want to pay play, excuse me, that doesn't, um, gouge them from microtransactions and things like that, that it's just a dope game. It stands alone. You can play it by yourself or with friends. It is an awesome product where you can feel the love and the passion of the people making it, which is very different than the hyper, um, financialized, very transactional dopamine loops that people were trying to, or not trying, that people built for years. And then once you had hits like Fortnite showing that you can have this, um, model of the always-on game, um, then every person that wanted to invest in the gaming industry started investing in that type of game, and that just sucked in all the investment capital. And so everybody was trying to make a game like that, and they were ignoring these beloved franchises to build these, um, live service games. And so the user base just started getting really pissed off that the type of game that made them fall in love just didn't exist anymore. Not that they don't like live service games, they just don't want every game to be live service. And that there is like some, what is perceived as predatory practices, excuse me, of some of these live service games. And so that rebellion, uh, of the player base is completely transforming, um, what's happening right now with EA. Now, I think everybody's eye should be on Roblox. I think people are missing the real transformation that's happening, which is that kids now play video games more like they look at Reels. Everything is hyper-disposable. It's all very cheap. They're not emotionally investing in IP anyway. Um, so we'll see if what we're actually watching play out is millennials have completely rebelled against the standard operating procedure for how games are being made and monetized. Uh, but that they're, they're just going to age out of the equation. And that if you don't figure out as a game developer, if you don't figure out a way how to get those gamers out of the Roblox ecosystem, basically Roblox will become video games in the same way that YouTube became video content. So yeah, I think there's a much different fight on the horizon.

Do you think, um, asking both from your perspective running businesses but also as a consumer of video games, do you think there's a world where EA going private could actually turn its entire reputation around like a Steam? Because everyone loves Steam and a lot of that's attributed to it's a private company. Do you think EA has the same thing or do you think they fall into their old ways?

Oh man. Oh, what am I actually betting on?

Yeah. And you can like from either angle. Like if you think business angle, it's like, oh, I think this, but as a consumer I think this. EA does not have the DNA to reboot themselves as a, um, friendly to the consumer platform. Um, so yeah, I, I don't. I think EA will continue to be an ongoing concern for millennials who have grown up with their IP. They love their sports games and all that stuff, and I think they'll do just fine. It is very, very difficult for a large company to have a pirate spirit. And right now millennials want pirate spirit in their games. They want to be surprised. They want something totally novel. They want somebody taking chances. You want to look at who's doing that? Well, look at what Capcom is doing. Capcom, as a big company, has just gotten players to fall in love with them. They feel like they're really building games that they want to play. They feel completely respected. And so, that has been a modern story of a legacy company reminding people of what made them great in the beginning. Um, Nintendo, oddly enough, I think would be the one company that you could actually see a resurgence. They have a history of attracting the best and the brightest talent in a very specific type of gameplay. And if they stopped being litigious and just started going, listen, we, we have a uniquely Japanese perspective. We're going to make games that nobody else can touch, and we're going to find these young, rebellious kids, which we have a history of doing, and we're going to like carve a space out for them not to get like forced into a box. That could really be extraordinary. So, that would be a company where I'm like, okay, they could have a '90s Disney-style revival where you finally get a CEO that goes, um, if you guys don't know that story of what happened to Disney. Um, you have Eisner comes in and he starts saying the phrase, I can't remember if it's him or Katsenberg, but they were a pair, but they were saying repeatedly, as the animation goes, so goes Disney. So, everything inside of Disney is an echo of that idea. We tell these stories, we must tell them well. We must tell, everything has to start there, and from there we earn the right to have, uh, cruises and, um, the parks and all of that stuff and all of our merchandise. But if we don't get the stories right, nothing else matters. And so you're going to need, um, Nintendo to have that same wakeup call. That'd be really extraordinary to see. I have almost zero faith that EA is capable of that because they've always been like the grind studio. Blizzard has the ability, but boy oh boy would they have to boot out a lot of, um, ideology which has really captured them. Uh, but Blizzard used to be like, we, games are a religion. They didn't use these actual words, but this is what it felt like. Games are a religion. We are the, like strictest adherence to this religion. We are going to respect the players to the end. We don't launch something unless it's perfect. And like that was their patina, man. If they dropped a game, you knew it was going to be like incredible. And this speaks to this is something that I'll be interested to see if Steve and I, Steve Keen and I can collide on this in a fruitful way. But as I'm sort of researching what is it he likes about Marx, what, what is he taking away from that? Um, these are not Keen's arguments. I don't, I'm not yet sure what his real arguments are. But Marx's arguments are so [ __ ] [ __ ] that I'm just like, what is happening there? There are philosophies of the economy that are not grounded in somebody that's actually had to build something. And when you're building a company, you realize that this idea of like price signals being some perfect thing, you're trying to take control of the price signal as a company. And so when you're building games and you're doing it from this place of passion, like it's this symbiotic relationship with the, um, engineers, with the players, with the marketplace. And if you don't understand all the aspects of how to make people believe internally what your mission is as a company, um, and how you can rely on historical, like the founding narrative of what Blizzard is about or the founding narrative of what Nintendo was about, like you're, you're never going to be able to recapture that. And so I don't think EA has that kind of founding story that they're going to be able to like reignite passion and attract the best people from all around the world to come work for them. This is why I've had to get so involved in games until the actual, you know, making of the game. Until I ship a game, I can't convince people that like I really believe in games. Like I, this is the whole reason that I got into business in the first place was to tell stories. And so I am like passionate about this. But good luck. When people come to interview with me, they're like, "Uh, you used to do protein bars and like you're on YouTube talking about Islam. Like, why am I going to come work for you?" Like, what the [ __ ] So, uh, finally, I was just like, "Jesus Christ, I'm going to have to be in the day-to-day grind of this thing." Uh, so anyway, my goal is to release it, show people, yo, I'm serious on a level that I don't think people understand. Uh, and then we can attract people into this and I can finally get the, you know, sort of founding mythology out there. Anyway, a lot of words around EA doesn't have that. Yeah.

Cool. Um, live look of Fouchy's testimony. Somebody put an AI version on it.

1, 2, 3, 4. Ask me a question.

That's why AI exists, dude. Dude, you can take all the water you need. You can build in the middle of a forest. Just like obliterate thousand-year-old trees and put a data center. If I'm going to get more like that. That was incredible.

Yeah, Fouchy answered no questions. Uh, it didn't matter who was, it didn't matter. Ivermectin conversation. Right, left, senator, Republican, uh, Democrat, didn't matter.

On advice of counsel, I am here to exercise my Fifth Amendment. So, what do you think about the Fouchy trial that wasn't even a Fouchy? Like,

I understand why people are up in arms about the fact that nobody's ever held accountable for anything. The reality is that COVID was complicated. There's no doubt about that. Uh, but we need a like truth, truth and reconciliation around this. Um, if Fouchy really was doing gain of function research, really did lie about it. Um, lied to the American people to try to get control and get them to behave in a certain fashion, like it's just absolutely, uh, abhorrent. This is the kind of thing that we cannot stand for. He has a pardon and that certainly protects him from some things. But man, oh man, uh, there was, I forget the name of the case, but it's considered long-standing, um, uh, legal statute ruling, common law, whatever word you want to use, um, case law that, um, the Supreme Court has already ruled that if you have a pardon, you cannot use the Fifth Amendment to escape having to answer questions because you're not going to be able to get penalized criminally for it. Um, so, yeah, I want to see him be held in contempt. I want to see, um, either him go to jail or him be forced to come back and actually answer these questions because, dude, COVID was way too disruptive. Way too disruptive. And every country needs to look themselves in the eye and figure out what the hell went wrong. But nobody more so than America. America is founded on the principle of freedom. And all of that was stripped away for some [ __ ] And so, um, yeah, this one's crazy. This one, this one is absolutely crazy. And he's going to have to be, we, we need answers. That's the long and the short of that. And if we get those answers by saying you're not going to go to jail, but you are going to answer these [ __ ] questions. Uh, and if you lie, you're going to go to jail for lying. Uh, or if you stand in contempt, you're going to go to jail for contempt. Like this is now just on you. You're just trying to protect your reputation and that we shall not abide.

Yeah. Um, moving on. While you were sleeping, the Commerce Department announced it has via the CHIPS Act taken seven, seven new equity stakes in private semiconductor firms. American socialism continues apace.

This is so dumb, guys. I'm begging you. We have to wake up to the reality of how stupid this is. This is Trump doing something that is absolutely moronic. It will create catastrophic problems down the road because you're eroding what you need in the marketplace, which is competition. The only way that we're going to get out of the absolute, uh, economic quagmire that we are in right now is to grow. The only way that we're going to grow is by creating something that is truly innovative. The only way that you get innovation at scale is with competition and people's ability to do something nobody else has been able to do to win financially, to make their lives better. And that ability to basically harness one of the greatest forces of nature, which is human selfishness, that somebody wants to be recognized for contributing to the group and doing something brilliant. They want to be patted on the back. They want to be celebrated. They want to enrich themselves. They want to make their lives better, their kids' lives better. Like, we're able to actually harness that truth of the human condition to our economic benefit. And when you go in and the government takes a stake in a company, now all of a sudden, who, who's going to get the contracts? The company with the government stake. Um, who is going to survive in a downturn? The company with the government stake. And so you end up getting these zombie companies that they thrive because the government is propping them up, not because they attract the greatest talent, not because they're making the best products. And so you end up using the monopoly power of the government to choose winners and losers. And they inevitably will turn a winner into a long-term loser because they will not be able to help themselves but try to make sure that their companies win. Remember, what you want in America is the ability to get rich and poor. And I know that that makes wealthy people very tense. I spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how do I protect my wealth? And that just has to be on me. It can't be something where I can go, well, the government's going to take care of me because it's run by a bunch of rich people and they're going to make sure that rich people stay rich. [ __ ] that noise. Remember the Trump accounts? Dope. Those are awesome. Create a broad basket of things that meet a criteria and companies are constantly falling off that and new companies being added onto it. Just like the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is completely, um, agnostic to what companies is on the list. They either meet the criteria or they don't. That is a phenomenal way to tie, uh, every citizen of the United States to the prosperity of American companies. That is wonderful, amazing. This is [ __ ] stupid and it will, it will, uh, erode the competitiveness of the companies that they take stakes in. Now, I also think that we should be using tariffs and incentives to make sure that certain industries are being built here. But again, it has to be agnostic to what companies win and lose. It is absolutely deranging and completely maddening that Trump is doing something this [ __ ] stupid. So yeah, this is just dumb and people should be pushing back against this as hard as they can. This is [ __ ] stupid.

And just to be completely transparent, the department will receive a minority non-controlling equity stake in each company. So,

Yeah, so the, the, um, entity that has the sole use of violence is going to say, and by the way, can steer, uh, taxpayer dollars and can just absolutely outbid, crush anybody else. Yeah, okay. They're, they're in a non-controlling position. Fine. But it's like they're obviously, "Oh, you want that contract? Be a real shame if, uh, you know, something happened to that contract and I bet that'd be real bad for your stake. I just need you to do this. Uh, we want to do something in the Middle East and I know that you're going to have to switch what you're focused on, but I'm going to need you to do that thing. It's [ __ ] stupid. This is so dumb." Or, by the way, somebody gets in power that the administration likes and so, um, they keep that person in power even when shareholders are trying to get them the [ __ ] out. All of this is just really stupid.

And unfortunately, we do have a pay-to-play government. So, to your point, what if a CEO is not doing too hot? He gets a little pressure. He visits the White House, he drops a donation check, and now all of a sudden, it's like, yeah, he keeps his job. So,

It could get very messy very quickly.

It is so dumb. This is so dumb.

Yeah. Uh, okay. It is Friday. I feel like that's it. Um, we got some super chats we need to go to.

Shout out to the, um,

Yeah, super chat. But last time Tom called me out and says there's stuff he drops. Oh, I wanted to talk about this one. Oh, the, the, the demon AI bot.

Um, the Peter Thiel bot.

Yes. What is happening? What is happening? How did this get approved?

Bro? How did the marketing team? This is crazy.

This is AI like is image.

This is the room.

And like you should see the one with the eyes. I was like, "Yeah, that one with the eyes. Go back." Yeah.

This is backwards. This is back room. Like imagine you're in in a fire, that thing comes to your door and it's like,

"I'm here to save you."

Yeah. Right.

Come with me if you want to live in hell. It's like Jesus Christ.

Uh, there was a, I think a priest who posted about this. I think I pulled this. I don't know if you can find the tweet. I think it's in the doc, but, um, let me see if you can find it because his actual wording is pretty funny.

I'll paraphrase it if you can't find it. Oh, the happy priest. Yes.

Okay, so here we go. This is from a priest at the happy priest. He said, "Look, I'm still not the kind of priest to say things like, quote, they're putting demons in the robots, unquote, but the chainsaw-wielding black drones with eyeball horns are making it harder to argue my case." I thought that was hysterical. And if you look at these, if you're looking at your screen and you see this thing legit, yeah, you got to click on that. That's wild. Come on, kids. Like, we all know what that head is. What are they doing? Like,

Like this is this is comical.

Jesus looks like ball.

Yeah.

Like,

End time is coming.

End time's coming. Why? Jesus loves you.

Jesus so hard.

Up in the boat. Jesus loves everybody. Come on, guys. Yeah. There's plenty of plenty of space.

We have that on tap.

Cuz we need deliverance cuz the alien, the demon, uh, robots are spotted.

All right. We got some super chat.

Maria Dark says, "It's not obvious to me that the open weight models are an unmitigated good. It's one thing to give everyone guns, another to give them all nukes, and I trust CCP models less than Israeli pagers. I'm telling y'all, it's sabotage."

That's a nice quote. Uh, yeah, I mean, listen, it, it is impossible to handwave away. But here is the chain of logic that if you accept that AI is going to become this incredibly powerful, uh, form of intelligence, whoever controls the AI can basically control the world. As you get into super intelligence, that's undoubtedly true. If that's true, then you want to make sure that you proliferate the AI as much as possible so that no one group can have control and everybody has basically the defenses. And so just like the, you get, um, the technology to hack is in the hands of the hackers, but it's also in the hands of the banks. And so there is this ever-escalating arms race, but because they're both armed, all is well. If only the hackers were armed, obviously we'd be in real trouble. So you want to put yourself in a position where you remember that governments tend towards tyranny. If they have AI, then they will tyrannize you with the AI. And so the only way to stop that is by putting the AI in the hands of people. So, um, I completely understand why, uh, you're going to be very skeptical. I understand that if it comes out of the CCP that you might not want it. Understand all of that. Uh, but I would say that you definitely don't want governments to control something this powerful because it will be used as a weapon against people. You're, you're already seeing the companies weaponize it in terms of they have an ideology. They're not trying to optimize for truth. They're trying to optimize for my ideology spreading as far and wide as possible. That's already grotesque and extremely dangerous. Um, so yeah, unfortunately on this one, you're going to have to play a cat-and-mouse game. That that was just always going to be true with AI. So, you're going to have people that are going to try to use AI to make, uh, and Annie Jacobson was just talking about this. Uh, if you guys know who she is, um, she was just talking about somebody, um, was trying to make airborne rabies. So, imagine rabies being airborne. Yo, that's got some insane, like 70% fatality rate. Like once you show symptoms, it's game over.

Um, so,

Like humans for real.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's pretty quick.

Yeah. Rabies. You don't want to get rabies. So if you get bit by something and you don't know if they have rabies, you immediately go get rabies treatment.

Because you, you cannot [ __ ] around.

Um, so yeah, cuz if you start showing signs, it's game over.

Um, cool. So anyway, you, you people are going to try to do that, but then you've got to have people that are offering the defense against that and there's just no other way. But that's also why people talk about the great filter. And so is AI part of the great filter? Why, why are there no, uh, civilizations outreaching? Drew? Because any, this is the idea, the great filter. Any sufficiently advanced civilization reaches a point where they create a technology that can wipe them all out and it does. Maven says, "In this world, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some, oh, is the destiny of mankind controlled by some transcendental entity or law? Is it like the hand of God hovering above? At least it is true that man has no control even over his own will." Yep. So, we're all automata. You had me at hello with that one. Um, do I think? Okay, so here's something interesting, which I'm actually surprised Drew didn't bring up because he was the one that found it. Um, so scientists are claiming right now that they have disproven the simulation hypothesis, and their punchline is it's esoteric math. But for a second, just agree with them that they've proven that the universe is too strange to run on algorithms. And if it's a computational system, it would necessarily run on algorithms. Okay, grant them for a second that that's true. Um, what they're saying is that the universe is too weird and that it must be something that we can't yet imagine. Now, my problem is into that gap slides religion. And people go, "See, I told you it was God." And that's where I'm like, "Good Lord, the idea that your 2,000-year-old reading of this is accurate, uh, is just nonsensical." That that is. Okay. So, in one or two of the videos that I did specifically on this topic, I talked about this is probably just a metaphor. So, me saying that we are NPCs inside of a video game is almost certainly incorrect, but it's me taking the, the dominant technology of our time and saying, "Okay, this is the right metaphor," which we have done all throughout history. When the dominant technology is God and everybody's praying to all these pagans, then, um, you, or pagans are praying to all these gods, you understand how when somebody's trying to explain the universe, they just go, "Oh, no, no, you guys are all wrong. It's still God. It's just one God. It's my God." But that's them using the sort of dominant technological explanation for all the things they don't understand. But that one really plugs into our evolutionarily shaped brains. And so it's really carried forward. So, I imagine as we learn more, we're going to realize that the, um, idea of this being a simulation is a, um, equally incomplete metaphor for us trying to grope with, we just don't understand the way the universe works. Um, so that I have no heartburn over that. What I find fascinating about the simulation hypothesis is even if it is literally inaccurate, it is descriptively accurate. So our universe works like a simulation. Even if it, um, even if the math proves that it can't be a simulation, the thing that it is functions exactly like a simulation. And so that's what's really fascinating to me. Um, so yeah, it'll be interesting in the fullness of time if ever humans are able to actually map what is going on. Um, it's pretty wild. The universe is a really strange place. Chaos Ballads says, "Tom, you do realize that there's a difference between Middle East oil and American oil, right? I linked a video by Upper Echelon in Discord finance economics tab detailing this and much more dire issues in the coming crisis."

Um, I do and so I'm very curious why you think I don't. So I don't often talk about the difference between Brent and WTI, um, as I don't think it really matters most of the time. Uh, but certainly I have made reference to America becoming a bigger and bigger, uh, producer of oil. If you mean that different things run on it, sure. Um, so I, I'm certainly not trying to imply that America is going to ever supply 100% of the world's oil unless Alberta becomes the 51st state, then maybe. I'm kidding. Um, but yeah, so anyway, I'm not sure what I've said that, um, makes you think. Now, I'm certainly not a scholar on the differences. And so, if you have important, um, things in that that you think that my worldview would be, um, advanced by understanding, I will take, I will take that gladly. Um, but yeah, anyway, at a crude level, yes, I understand the difference.

$50 super chat from Southeastern Venom.

Hey, thanks for the $50 super chat.

Thank you. Thank you.

Look up in Quran, Islam stands above all others. You can believe it in whatever you want, but pay a tax and you are still less than. That is the value that USA cannot allow.

Yeah. Okay. So he's talking about, um, something called Dhimmi status or the Jizya where, um, what happens is Islam will come in and say, okay, listen, uh, you guys can exist, but you have to pay a tax, and if you don't, then, um, we kill you. Uh, or you can convert, obviously, that's perfectly fine. You can't deconvert, though, by the way. It's called apostasy. And the Quran calls out the penalty for apostasy is death. Um, so imagine if Jesus had said if you leave the Christian faith that you're to be murdered. That'd be pretty wild. That'd be a different book in my opinion. Um, so, but anyway, that's what it says in the Quran. So yes. Um, yes, it says that.

Tabitha Barton says, "Oh, also $50 super chat from Tabitha. Hey, thanks for video. Happy Friday. Y."

T.S. Tabitha from Costa Mesa again. Drew, you do an amazing job. However, I'd love to request Lisa as a co-host in the near future. She inspires me as a female entrepreneur and I love how she goes back and forth with Tom.

Nice. Listen, nobody's pushed Lisa harder than Drew. Uh, so yeah, every now and then the only sound effect we have for Lisa. Uh,

Yeah, I will, um, I'll give mad credit to Drew. Every now and then he's like, um, hey, do you want to have Lisa on? Hey, do you want to do the show by yourself? And my answer is always, I think Drew is doing a phenomenal job. Uh, and so I think it's good that Drew and I don't see eye to eye. I think Drew is extraordinarily good at pushing back. Uh, because he has a sincere worldview that is different than mine. Um, so from that perspective, um, long may it continue. Uh, I love sitting across from Lisa. It is extraordinarily enjoyable to me. I think it would make a very different show. So, we probably won't do it too often as it feels a little emotionally indulgent for me. Um, but yeah, I'm always down to have Lee on. Those are, I thoroughly enjoy my time with her. We got to get more sounds from her. But yes, thank you. And I'm, uh, I love that. Ah, speaking of Yagamu is right there. Hello. I noticed you're not coming on to be on camera.

Interrupt.

Not at all. I basically told Ryan to say thank you.

Ah yes, on behalf of Lisa who's being shy and not bringing herself on camera. Uh, she says thank you.

Yeah. I thought she was going to hop on. I thought she was going to show off the tattoo. I thought excited and stuff, but you know.

If you, if you insist. Speaking of emotional.

I was just off set working and I got my headset on and then I just heard Ryan. So I was like, oh, that's so sweet. So I just popped in to say thank you to whoever wrote that message. Which I didn't mean to interrupt you guys, but if you really want to see my tattoos,

She recently got two new tattoos.

I did. I just turned 47, so I got it on my birthday. Which camera shall I show? I don't know if you guys care or.

I don't know how high you'll be able to get them up.

You just had to hop on a desk and then I'm. This is hilarious.

You've done this to us.

You've done this to us.

These are.

There it is. Look at that. There and then one there.

So, it's her parents' handwriting, uh, which she came that we got it on.

My parents basically, they write my name, um, on birthday cards and they have nicknames for me. So, I got them to write it on a piece of paper and I had both of their handwriting on each foot cuz to me, that was they helped me walk through life and I wanted to honor them. Where's the A? That's there it is.

That's what we needed for that.

Um, so nice. So, I just got my tattoos, so I'm walking around barefoot.

Nice.

Sorry to interrupt.

Yeah. So,

Um, there was a request that we do like a Lisa day or like a women's day or a ladies day or something like that on the live. So,

I like it.

I don't know how we're going to finesse that and talk about the things that we talk about, but there,

You might walk in and just see a bunch of estrogen. I'm giving you a heads up now. Fair warning. Fair warning.

And last super chat for the day. Hog Indian says, "Happy Friday. Thanks for all the hard work and for letting us see how your brains work. Keep it up, guys. Thanks."

Thank you, man. Appreciate that. To everybody that, uh, has ever done a super chat, thank you so much. Uh, we definitely feel the support. It is aggressively appreciated. Um, and also, just, I, man, these, there are so many topics that I never thought I would talk about, certainly not publicly. Uh, and so appreciate you guys going along for the ride. And I know these are very hot button topics. Some people just don't even like to hear about it. Um, so I really, uh, appreciate you guys sticking around for that and I'll try to eternally be thoughtful about these topics. Um, so thank you for being here and being a part of this growing community. You guys are rad. Uh, really, really grateful to all of you. Okay, we've got an ITU AI Masterclass coming up August 5th at 1 p.m. Pacific time. It's free and I'm going to teach you guys how to start a company using AI. Uh, it's very powerful. This is such a unique time. I hope you guys will join me again. It is free August 5th at 1 p.m. Pacific. All right, everybody. Have a wonderful weekend and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, everybody. Peace.