On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience: The Podcast by Night, the hosts discuss the aftermath of the Kennedy Assassination, including the lack of official investigation into the events surrounding it, and whether or not there was a cover-up. They also discuss conspiracy theories about what could have been the real shooter, and if it was Lee Harvey Oswald. Also, they discuss the possibility that the assassination was an accident, not a deliberate act, and that the truth is still out there somewhere, waiting for us to figure out who killed President John F. Kennedy and why it could have happened. And, of course, there's a conspiracy theory about what happened to JFK, and why we still don't know who did it, or why it happened at all. Joe and Joe discuss this, and much more, on this week's episode of the podcast by day, and the conspiracy theories by night, and how they think it could be a conspiracy, and what we should do about it. Check it out, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss out on the next episode! It's a good one! Joe's new book is out now, and you won't want to miss it! If you're a fan of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories, you'll love this one. Subscribe to the pod! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe on iTunes Review and review our podcast choices! Thanks for listening and share the pod with your fellow podcaster friends! if you're looking for a good podcastment and listening to the latest episode of What's Good to Good on Good Things? Subscribe and review the podcast with your thoughts on Good Morning America? and Good Morning, Good Day, Good Life, Goodness, Good Vibes, Good Things, Good Podcasts, Good Rest Rest Rest Day, and Good Luck, Good Dreams, Good Success, Good Night, Good Blessings, and Happy Holidays, - Joe's Thoughts and Good Day! - Cheers, Cheers! -- Your Day Off Soon, Joe's Back Soon, Bye, -- Cheers. -- Thank You, Joe Rogans -- Rory McChoy Cheers x -- - -- Mike & Rory McHenry -- Thank you, Rory McDonough -- Chacho
00:02:36.000Or it's just, you know, as we saw, I think, in the hearing afterwards, maybe just a systemic collapse of confidence.
00:02:41.000There's also a confidence in the fact that the news timeline today is so rapid.
00:02:48.000When things are relevant and people are paying attention to them, you have a couple of days, even with an assassination attempt on a former president, where people were murdered.
00:05:49.000Like they don't have the system completely rigged.
00:05:52.000But they kind of tried to rig it at least with the media.
00:05:57.000Where the real rigging in the 2020 elections – I mean, you can cast all your conspiracies upon it in terms of, like, mail-in ballots and all this jazz – but the real rigging was the collusion between social media companies and the government to suppress information that would have altered the effect of the election.
00:07:06.000And then look, you know, the companies bear a lot of responsibility and the people in the companies, you know, made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls.
00:07:11.000But the government, like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal.
00:07:20.000Like, I think it's actually subject to criminal charges.
00:07:23.000Like, I think there are people with criminal liability who are involved in this.
00:07:35.000And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford right next door to us that was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the US government and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor.
00:07:46.000And it was very effective at doing so.
00:07:48.000Does it smell like sulfur when you walk those halls?
00:09:40.000One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election and how much money was spent on activist groups.
00:09:51.000It's like more than $100 million, right?
00:10:10.000But most of the time, it's a political entity.
00:10:13.000It's an entity with a political agenda.
00:10:15.000But then it's funded by the government in a very large percentage of cases, including the NGOs and the censorship complex, like the government grants, National Science Foundation grants, like the State Department grants, direct money.
00:10:28.000And then, okay, now you've got an NGO funded by the government.
00:10:30.000Well, that's not an NGO. That's a geo.
00:10:36.000You know, like censorship, then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund what look like private organizations that aren't.
00:10:44.000And then what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do.
00:11:54.000I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight.
00:11:56.000And so there's this overwhelming hammer blower pressure that comes in.
00:12:00.000And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening.
00:12:06.000And so you come under incredible pressure.
00:12:08.000And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activist universities and companies was corrupted.
00:12:13.000And then on top of that, people in the companies in a lot of cases made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret.
00:12:18.000What was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election and I didn't understand like what purpose that would serve.
00:12:30.000What function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you, supposedly?
00:13:12.000Then I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they're actually – they actually do field activities, right?
00:13:18.000And so there's – maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's social media influence downstream component or some other kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.
00:13:25.000Trevor Burrus I just didn't think that they – like when – it's still unclear.
00:13:31.000Whether or not celebrities got paid to endorse her?
00:15:34.000Well, you know, and then there's, of course, there's the even stinkier version, arguably, which is all the social media influencer campaigns now.
00:15:39.000There's, you know, a tremendous amount of payola.
00:15:42.000Because I know people personally who are approached multiple times and offered a substantial amount of money to post things in support of Harris.
00:15:56.000Yeah, that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose.
00:15:59.000It should be like, say if I was going to do an ad for, you know, whatever, a certain coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, and I did it on my Instagram, I'd have to say ad.
00:16:26.000We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time.
00:16:28.000I mean, everybody's always, like, freaked out by, like, whatever the new guy does, but, like, this real scandal in most cases, I think, is just the way the system already works.
00:16:36.000Well, another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it, like what Trump called earned media was much more powerful than anything else.
00:16:53.000Like, one of the things that, unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility so much, so much so, that like Joy Reid was on TV today talking about It's saying that Trump is going to shoot protesters and just wild,
00:17:15.000And the more they do stuff like that, the more that they say things like that, the more it diminishes their impact and the more it drives people to independent media sources.
00:17:26.000I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse that they've been – they're down to like – MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 20 – 18 to 49 demo.
00:17:52.000Oh, there's another study that came out.
00:17:53.000The kids are now watching a lot less TV. Kids are just giving up on TV. And they're just, you know, they're on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and other things.
00:18:37.000There's an argument that this is it, right?
00:18:40.000All the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role, but...
00:18:46.000Like I think there's a real if you're gonna run in 28 like I think there's like a fully internet native way to run these campaigns that might literally involve like zero television advertising and Maybe you don't even need to raise that money and maybe you get to your point if you have the right message Maybe you just go straight direct.
00:19:00.000Yeah, I think a completely different way to do this I think that's the only way now and I think if you do pay people it's not gonna have the same impact You know, I think these call her daddy shows and all these different shows that she went on I mean, I'm sure they had an impact But I think that in the future,
00:19:17.000I'm sure they're scrambling to try to create their own version of this show.
00:19:22.000This is one thing that keeps coming up, like we need our own Joe Rogan.
00:19:53.000It's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty.
00:19:56.000And there's so much, right, we're at the verge of AI, you know, open AI. Altman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient, whatever that means.
00:20:08.000You know, artificial general intelligence will emerge.
00:20:19.000It sounds crazy to say, but instead of having this alpha chimpanzee that runs the tribe of humans, how about we have some really logical, fact-based program that makes it really reasonable and equitable in a way that we can all agree to.
00:20:39.000So you can actually simulate this today, because you can go on these systems, ShedGPT or Claude or these others, and you can ask, you know, how should we handle issue X? How should this be run?
00:21:19.000I mean it might be the way to go, which is so horrifying for people to think because everyone is worried about the Terminators taking over the world and like if that's the first step is we let them govern us.
00:21:30.000Well, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this.
00:21:33.000There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it as a tool.
00:21:35.000You start out – at the very least, you start out using it as a tool.
00:21:38.000There's nothing to prevent – like for example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistance that are going to advise them on strategy, tactics and how to win conflicts and then it will start to work its way up and then they will be doing war planning.
00:21:49.000And then if you're a general, if you're a sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's going to just mean you perform better.
00:21:55.000So maybe there's like the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship.
00:21:59.000And you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process.
00:22:03.000And there's also AI-controlled jets, which are far superior.
00:23:22.000And so, for example, small states, you know, small advanced states like Singapore will be able to punch way above their weight and then kind of large sort of economically or technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose.
00:23:34.000And so it's going to be a recalibration.
00:23:36.000And then the good news is you're not putting soldiers at risk, right?
00:23:41.000The bad news, arguably, is it'll be easier to get into conflicts because you're not putting soldiers at risk.
00:23:45.000So there's going to have to be a recalibration of when you actually lean into an attack.
00:23:49.000I'm sure you're aware of all this UAP disclosure jazz that you see on television.
00:23:56.000The more I look into it, the more I think at least a percentage of it, a healthy percentage of it, is bullshit.
00:24:05.000And there's probably some government projects where they've developed some very sophisticated propulsion systems that they've applied to drones and that that's what these people are seeing and this is one of the reasons why they continually have sightings over secured military spaces like out in the eastern seaboard,
00:24:24.000like there's areas over Virginia where they continually see them, in San Diego, they see them off the coast of San Diego, where there's a place where you would test stuff like that.
00:24:34.000Well, so, of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified, and the SR-71 was brand new at one point, and so you had these, like, you know, alien, you know.
00:24:47.000Do you pay attention to any of that stuff at all?
00:25:03.000But still, the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory, and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just, like, you know, loiter above military bases and, like, you know, take lots of, you know, imagery and do whatever scans they do.
00:25:15.000And like literally nothing was happening and we didn't even know they were there most of the time.
00:25:18.000And so like, you know, that's like a tip of the ice.
00:25:20.000It feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing where if they were doing that, there are probably other things going on.
00:25:25.000Well, I've read that someone had commented that similar things had happened during the Trump administration, but they didn't tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down.
00:26:35.000And like, you know, what's the dividing line between, you know, an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy?
00:26:45.000Like, you might as well call that a demon.
00:26:48.000It's fascinating because, like, when you think about from theological terms – like, when you think of it from a religious perspective, you know, people would apply what would a demon do, what would angels do, what is the will of God and what is,
00:27:04.000like, the evils of the worst aspects of humanity.
00:27:09.000You could apply them to so many things in the world, but we're very reluctant to say that something is demonic, even though it's clearly demonic, clearly in action.
00:27:34.000So a friend of mine is a religious scholar.
00:27:36.000He teaches at Catholic University and he's a religious history scholar.
00:27:39.000And he says that medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are.
00:27:49.000Because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons.
00:28:00.000In the world we're heading into, that we're arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things.
00:28:49.000And that the way you described it was brilliant because you were saying that it has all the elements, excommunication, adherence to a very strict doctrine, all these different aspects of it, saying things that everyone knows to be illogical and nonsensical, but you must repeat it.
00:29:04.000You know, these things are indicative of people that are in cults or people that are a part of like a very – like a serious fundamental religion.
00:29:51.000But the reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time, if you were not a citizen of a particular city, you would get killed in the next city.
00:29:58.000You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed.
00:30:00.000And so there was no way to survive without being part of your community.
00:30:04.000And that's what the woke's figured out is you can do the same thing.
00:30:06.000If you're able to like, you know, nail somebody on, you know, on charges of having done something, you know, unacceptably horrible, then you make them toxic and all of a sudden they can't, you know, they can't have, you know, sure, you know, people, you know, they lose friends, they lose family, they lose, they can't get work, you know, before you know it, like they're, you know, living, you know, severely diminished,
00:30:23.000Some people then go on to kill themselves.
00:30:25.000I don't know if you've been paying attention at all to Blue Sky, but I have multiple friends that have accounts on Blue Sky that are very sophisticated trolls and are pushing the woke agenda to a satirical point,
00:30:45.000But like on the edge where you're not quite sure, they'll say enough real things that make sense and talk about their own anxieties and personal issues with stuff and then say fucking ridiculous shit.
00:31:17.000The marketplace of ideas, like, okay, you could go to a fruit stand in the middle of the fucking desert, and that's a marketplace, or you can go to the farmer's market where everybody's there.
00:32:25.000It's a fascinating education on human psychology and to watch people express themselves publicly and then also be attacked publicly by strangers, which never happens in the real world, like at scale, the way it happens on social media.
00:32:42.000And I think it's an amazing time for people to examine ideas.
00:33:30.000And it's fascinating to see all these different kinds of people, to see the Charlie Kirks and the full-on left-wing kooks and see them all together.
00:33:54.000And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up with complete stagnation.
00:34:01.000If you have stagnation, you're going to go straight into decline.
00:34:27.000And I think, I hope, this last 10 years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream.
00:34:31.000Like, I can't believe we tolerated the level of repression, right, and anger and, you know, emotional incontinence and, you know, cancellation campaigns.
00:34:38.000Emotional incontinence is a great term.
00:34:49.000And so, you know, I'm very, at the moment at least, very optimistic that there's a cultural change happening here that's even more profound than the political change.
00:34:56.000I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack Dorsey.
00:35:02.000I think he's a brilliant guy and I think he had very good intentions.
00:35:05.000But he was a part of a very large corporation and he had an idea for a Wild West Twitter.
00:35:11.000He wanted to have two versions of Twitter.
00:35:13.000He wanted to have the Twitter that was pre-Elon where there's moderation and you can't dead name someone and all that jazz.
00:35:20.000And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now.
00:35:25.000And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board and the executives and all the people that, you know, were fully on board with woke ideology.
00:35:36.000So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been...
00:35:41.000And I don't mean to let them off the hook for their decisions, but just the lived experience, as they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding.
00:35:47.000Just every single day, it's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky, exploding around you, getting attacked from every conceivable direction, being called just incredibly horrible things, being attacked from many different directions.
00:36:33.000Well, I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right-wing branch of that stuff, like Gab or any of these, they would immediately be infiltrated by bots as well, like my friends that troll on Blue Sky.
00:37:00.000And I think, frankly, I think you get the same thing if you start out – I think if you start out overtly political on either side, I think that's what you end up with.
00:37:06.000And so I just – like that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market.
00:37:10.000It seems like you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service, but you need to have some sense of the actual guardrails you're going to have around – and by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content filters and restrictions because you can't have child porn, you can't have violence,
00:37:27.000And even the First Amendment, there's like a dozen carve-outs that the Supreme Court has ruled on over time that are things like that that you can't just say.
00:37:34.000I can't say, let's go join ISIS and let's go attack Washington.
00:38:03.000I get a large percentage of my news from Substack.
00:38:07.000It's really good and it's so valuable and it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe to it.
00:38:26.000When a far left person gets upset, somebody working in the New York Times is mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start on Substack.
00:39:04.000So my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time.
00:39:10.000I contend to be provocative and get people really upset.
00:39:12.000And so the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, and I'm allowed to go on long-form podcasts that I'm not allowed to post.
00:39:52.000I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter and it was a debate about economics and the topic of colonialism came up.
00:39:59.000And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism and it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive.
00:40:30.000I do not recommend this as an experience.
00:40:32.000By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian-American friends I have because they all rallied to my side and said, you know, Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India.
00:40:43.000There's a problem with the language barrier as well, right?
00:40:51.000Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else.
00:40:54.000History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore.
00:40:57.000But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really matters to their lives today.
00:41:03.000They live in history more than we live in.
00:41:06.000They have a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents and ancestors.
00:41:14.000It's just a different way of experiencing reality.
00:41:16.000Anyway, I recommend learning that lesson not by enraging a billion people.
00:41:21.000I experienced a small version of that recently because I said we shouldn't be using long-range missiles on Russia.
00:41:27.000And the Ukrainians, like, and Ukrainian bots, a bunch of people came after me.
00:41:32.000Because I was saying, like, the Biden administration, I was like, fuck these people.
00:41:35.000And then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people, which I absolutely was not saying.
00:41:41.000I was saying, fuck whoever in the last days of the presidencies decided to escalate this war, because it appears that that's what they've done.
00:41:50.000It appears that they're leaving Trump a giant mess, at the very least.
00:41:55.000So, the good news is I am allowed to go on podcasts.
00:42:36.000I had Jimmy Corsetti on the other day, and he is an expert in ancient history and ancient civilizations, and we had these fascinating subjects.
00:42:45.000And one of them that came up was the Nazis and their fascination with the occult.
00:42:50.000And so you had to clearly say, listen, fuck Hitler, okay?
00:43:07.000But the swastika is this ancient symbol, and it's like talking about like, why did the Nazis have this fascination with the occult and with ancient civilizations?
00:43:14.000And so we got into it, but it was like one of those things where it's like, all right, we're hitting the third rail.
00:43:37.000You can't even have a copy of Mein Kampf in your house.
00:43:41.000Oh, a student, this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories.
00:43:43.000A student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the civil, whatever, disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Kampf in the quad.
00:43:53.000Which is a book that's been, you know, a sign for 80 years to college kids to, like, understand who these people were and, like, how to not do that again.
00:44:01.000Yeah, that kid was, like, nearly brought up on charges and nearly expelled.
00:44:04.000So, like, yeah, that's, yes, this is the world that I hope that we're leaving.
00:44:10.000Well, it's just an awful way to look at things.
00:44:13.000It's so awful to think that if you read about someone horrible, you support them.
00:45:30.000One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively that prior eras all had horrible moral problems, disasters, you know, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds.
00:45:40.000They made all kinds of horrible mistakes.
00:45:41.000But we are completely certain that in our time we figured it all out.
00:45:44.000We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in.
00:45:47.000And the one thing I know for sure is people 50 years from now are going to look back on us and they're going to say, oh my God, those people were awful.
00:45:58.000A lot of the way we treat each other is horrible, especially with the amount of information that we have available.
00:46:03.000But it is fascinating also that I visited Athens last year, and I got to tour the ruins, and I was like, I wonder when it all went south.
00:46:13.000When did they know this had fallen apart?
00:46:17.000In the peak of everything, they probably thought, hey, We have the most amazing, sophisticated civilization that's available on Earth, and we will maintain this.
00:46:27.000We will be the center of intellectual discourse and the home of democracy.
00:47:05.000I mean, what is the longest-running, dominant civilization ever?
00:47:09.000The Romans existed for, what, a couple thousand years?
00:47:14.000Like, how long did the Greeks run—how long did the Egyptians—the Egyptians might be the longest running, especially if you, like, take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines, where, you know, like, Egyptian hieroglyphs, they have kings that go back 30,000 years.
00:47:45.000The argument is things just didn't really change.
00:47:49.000Like historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually change, the way people live changes, really kicked off with the Greeks.
00:47:56.000And so that was sort of the default status of civilization for a long time.
00:48:00.000The Greeks kicked off change, as we understand it, and then the Romans.
00:48:09.000So the Roman Empire, you know, ran for, you know, in its sort of Roman Republican Empire in its sort of health, which you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase ran for a few, you know, a few hundred years, but maybe 400 years total, something like that.
00:48:20.000And towards the end, as it was sort of falling or stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart, Brenda Mine says, when the roads got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why.
00:48:35.000Cicero was, you know, one of the great Roman statesmen.
00:48:37.000And he wrote these letters that we have.
00:48:39.000And in the letters, he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends.
00:48:41.000And the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent, capable citizens of Rome are out in the countryside at their villas, perfecting their fishponds.
00:50:24.000And then, of course, you have Tulsi Gabbard, and you have J.D. Vance, who I think is brilliant.
00:50:29.000You have all these brilliant people that are together, which is very hopeful.
00:50:34.000This is what we didn't see out of the Biden-Harris campaign.
00:50:38.000What we saw from Harris and Waltz, you have Waltz, this guy who it seems like he's a compulsive liar.
00:50:45.000At the very least, he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things, you know, like whether or not he was a head coach or an assistant coach.
00:50:54.000And the lies have always elevated him socially, right?
00:50:58.000The lies about his military service or at least implying that he served in a different aspect.
00:51:12.000You know, you want a guy like J.D. Vance who served in the Marines and, you know, went to Yale, comes from a single mother with addiction problems, rose from hard work and dedication to become who he is now.
00:51:23.000Like, that's the kind of guy that I like.
00:51:32.000And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, of the Roman virtues.
00:51:35.000And if you read them today, you just like want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe what we're missing.
00:51:39.000But like, people with virtue, people with virtue, it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people.
00:51:45.000They actually act on it and actually step up.
00:51:47.000Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right?
00:51:51.000We don't have a doctrine that encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly, which religion does.
00:52:02.000True Christianity, not subverted fucking giant arena Christianity where the guy's flying private jets and has Rolls Royces and shit, but actual real Christian people.
00:52:45.000And it applies so well to modern life.
00:52:48.000It's so strange how Brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible empire that he could write about human psychology and the value of forgiveness and, you know, being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere in everything you do and all these virtues and all the stoicism that he That he espoused.
00:53:48.000My favorite part of the meditation is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're going to wake up this morning and everybody's going to hate you and everybody's going to lie to you and everybody's going to make dumb decisions and you're going to be incredibly frustrated and you're not going to get any credit for anything and you have to get up anyway.
00:54:13.000And what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's actually, you know, like the CEO, it's just like you're going to get pounded.
00:54:19.000Like, if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day.
00:54:22.000And if you're operating out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of like exercising your responsibilities, you get up and do it anyway.
00:55:54.000You have this like incredible sense of groundedness and rootedness.
00:55:58.000And of course, there's huge downsides to that, which is it really cuts off your ability to, you know, run off and, you know, go on American Idol, right?
00:56:05.000There's like a lot of things you can't do, right?
00:56:07.000But like, you know, you know what you're supposed to do, and you either do it or you don't do it.
00:56:12.000And these days, to have people like that, we need people who choose to be that way.
00:56:16.000Right, which is arguably harder, right, given all the choices that they actually choose to live that way.
00:56:22.000Well, not only that, given all the distractions that people face every day that keeps them from sitting down and writing a journal like that.
00:56:49.000Your job is to stand there like the rocks do and just the surf just keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming and your job is to just like stand there and take it.
00:56:57.000Imagine what it was like addressing the people back then too.
00:57:00.000Just yelling out to these groups or speaking in front of all the leaders.
00:57:34.000How fearful were you leading up to the election that it wouldn't go into the new timeline?
00:57:40.000It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50, razor sharp.
00:57:46.000It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties.
00:57:49.000And number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they clearly have no clue.
00:57:59.000So it's another set of people we don't have to listen to.
00:58:01.000But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a senior Democrat who's on his way out of politics.
00:58:10.000And he said in the summer, I said, what's your view?
00:58:14.000And this person said, Trump's going to win with 100% certainty.
00:58:21.000So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with sort of maybe a broader cross-section of people.
00:58:28.000And this person basically said, yeah, said, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple place and go into a second or third tier.
00:58:36.000You know, Cy City and take an Uber for 30 minutes.
00:58:39.000You know, land at the airport, take an Uber, drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going and who are they voting for?
00:58:44.000And basically 100% of the time, the answer is going to be Trump.
00:58:47.000Because people were just completely fed up.
00:58:51.000And then there was the Kamala enthusiasm, which this person said, you know, the Kamala enthusiasm is like highly focused in New York and California, which don't matter from an electoral standpoint, right?
00:59:02.000So they're not going to decide anything.
00:59:03.000But that is huge when it comes to media.
00:59:07.000But that's the thing, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble.
00:59:10.000This is what's actually so interesting about these media bubbles is the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out.
00:59:16.000It's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in.
00:59:19.000And part of it was getting excited about a candidate for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these heavily blue states.
00:59:26.000And so, in a lot of ways, it's the most, you know, obvious explanation in the world, which is just people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in, and they were just fed up with it.
00:59:34.000There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kalma Harris was going to win.
00:59:40.000I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne.
00:59:57.000She might be on X. Well, she was on X. I think she deleted her profile.
01:00:00.000But the poor lady, I mean, but she was being very arrogant and she laughed and mocked this man and said, you do realize you wasted your vote, right?
01:00:17.000But in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom.
01:00:20.000And she thought that that was under attack under the Trump administration and that women are going to stand up and they're going to stop that because in her echo chamber, that was the case.
01:00:29.000Everybody was universally – they all agreed.
01:00:32.000We're universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil.
01:00:35.000We've got to get rid of him and women are going to vote and this is going to be fun.
01:00:37.000But who are you hanging out with, lady?
01:00:39.000You could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball is awesome and then you run into someone from another country like, what the fuck is baseball?
01:00:46.000You've got to realize there's a lot of people out there.
01:01:45.000It's weird how people get so tribal and then connect their own personal identity to other people agreeing with these ideas that they believe.
01:01:58.000One is the Democrats for a long time were the big tent party.
01:02:01.000So the Democrats were the coalition of people who had very different points of view on things.
01:02:04.000And of course, you know, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different, you know, economic and unions and all these things.
01:02:08.000And Republicans were like the party of like rigidity, right?
01:02:12.000And just for whatever set of – a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it as it flipped to where at least today Trump's Republican Party is the big tent party.
01:02:19.000You know, to your point on having all these new people and many of whom are former Democrats.
01:02:37.000And then I think the other inversion was the economic inversion, which is – remember the criticism of the Republican Party for a long time was it was the party of trickle-down economics, where the idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they're going to cut taxes, Reagan administration, and then basically if poor people get any money, it's going to be because the rich people like trickle some down.
01:02:53.000I think that inverted to where the Democrats, especially in the last four years, became the trickle-down party, which was we're going to tax and we're going to collect all the money and give it to the government and then we're going to let the government hand it out.
01:03:10.000But then you end up with $35 trillion federal debt.
01:03:13.000You end up with this giant annual deficit.
01:03:15.000And then you end up with all this money being handed out, right?
01:03:18.000Handed out in all these grants and all these things.
01:03:21.000Like just this shower of money coming from the government.
01:03:23.000But of course, if the government is giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right?
01:03:27.000Like if you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving them money, then you're in a tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by pulling the money away.
01:03:38.000It's actually a form, you know, it's on the spectrum to a form of like domination, you know, that should make us very uncomfortable.
01:03:45.000And so, you know, maybe that would be fine if the deficit didn't get out of control and inflation didn't get out of control, but it did.
01:03:53.000And then at that point, it's like, okay, like this new kind of sort of tax and spend-driven trickle-down economics is clearly not sustainable.
01:04:54.000Because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt, and you can pay down the debt as you grow.
01:04:59.000And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth.
01:05:01.000And then the other thing is they want America to win.
01:05:04.000My partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer, and that was like his adamant thing he kept coming back, which is like, look, America has to win.
01:05:10.000And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally globally.
01:05:17.000Like, our companies should be the ones that win these, you know, broad—we should win global markets.
01:05:21.000Like, our companies should be the global— How can anybody be against that?
01:05:24.000I happen to think that makes a lot of sense.
01:05:35.000By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs.
01:05:49.000That's how you actually have your cake and eat it too, which is like first your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success, and then you can pay for whatever programs you want.
01:06:36.000And when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits and then...
01:06:44.000You could take that away at any moment.
01:06:46.000This was one of the big fears that people had about letting illegal immigrants into the country and moving them to swing states, which clearly happened, and also giving them a bunch of benefits, which clearly happened.
01:06:57.000Money, food stamps, housing, all that happened.
01:07:00.000Stuff that wasn't available to veterans, stuff that wasn't available to homeless people, wasn't available to the very poor of this country.
01:07:07.000All of a sudden people came here illegally got those things.
01:07:10.000And the thought was, if you gave these people these things and you gave them a way better life.
01:07:15.000Look, if I was living in a third world country with a family and I knew that I could come to America and I could get a job, an actual job and make money and my family is going to definitely eat.
01:07:26.000I'll vote for whoever the fuck you want me to vote for.
01:09:04.000And it gets this thing of like, my God, I can't believe that Trump, this, that, racist, anti-Hispanic and all this stuff.
01:09:13.000And it was one of those moments where the young waiter, who's a Hispanic young man in his 20s, One of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table.
01:09:21.000But in context, it was like, oh, thank God, because we're just depressing ourselves to death.
01:09:26.000So thank God he's going to say something.
01:09:28.000And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong.
01:09:30.000He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic.
01:09:33.000My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, raised a family.
01:09:44.000He thinks this guy is fantastic, and he voted for him.
01:09:47.000And then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line, you know, they didn't have to go through the process, they didn't have to prove anything, they're not bought into the system, right?
01:10:00.000They're able to jump in, and then they, you know, they don't.
01:10:10.000They're not becoming part of what makes America, America.
01:10:15.000By the way, in some cases, the criminals are coming across and terrorists are coming across and gangs.
01:10:19.000It's like my father's not in favor of any of that.
01:10:22.000My father wants to be part of a great society, of a great America, not some dysfunctional, basically just disaster zone.
01:10:29.000And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works because- Was that one conversation?
01:10:37.000Well, it was weird because it was like, so what happened to me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country.
01:10:43.000And so from like zero to 18, like I completely understood the mentality and I was always like explaining to my friends of like, no, no, like this is, you know, this is like a different place and people think differently.
01:10:52.000And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot.
01:10:57.000I became a fully assimilated Californian.
01:10:59.000And I was just like, well, of course, the Californians are much more sophisticated in advance than people, you know, where I came from.
01:11:04.000And so, of course, everybody in California has it figured out.
01:11:07.000And of course, California is going to lead the country in all this thinking, right?
01:11:12.000And for me, Trump's 2016 was the wake up call of like, no, no, no, no, no.
01:11:16.000Like, that's just like completely, that is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and of how people think.
01:11:21.000But it doesn't explain what, because you have to explain what happened and then you have to like, if you have some sense of being able to predict what's next, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, you know, that's what investing is supposed to be.
01:11:31.000It's like, okay, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for like how this all works and how this whole system and how this country works.
01:11:38.000But it was that conversation that kick-started it for me.
01:11:40.000So what was the process of altering your perspective or at least opening it up?
01:11:47.000Yeah, so for me it was – primarily it was reading.
01:11:49.000And so I started to actually read my way back in history.
01:11:53.000I tried to read of like where the origins of like left-wing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve and, you know, liberal democracy and then also right-wing thought and like, you know, everybody's calling everybody fascist now.
01:13:48.000So there was this data set on user behavior that in theory, there's a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set and then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages.
01:14:01.000And it was like this magical breakthrough and basically thought control.
01:14:05.000And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this.
01:14:09.000And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far like the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that you want.
01:14:29.000And the criticism for years was Facebook is the Rochematel of data and the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data.
01:14:36.000And then in 2016, it flipped 180 degrees and it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data.
01:14:44.000And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation and the American citizens using this data.
01:15:23.000You have practical concern responsibilities.
01:15:25.000And so sometimes these companies get kind of wedged because they can't do the things that they would do if they were just in damage control mode.
01:15:31.000And then maybe the message doesn't get out.
01:15:34.000So what was the bigger shift, the waiter or the Hillary speech?
01:15:38.000I mean, The Waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked.
01:15:45.000Whereas with Hillary, it was cope, right?
01:17:16.000It's almost as weird as the Biden one, where we don't think he's competent to stand trial for the documents that he had that were classified.
01:20:32.000And so, like, I think that's going to be the kind of thing that's going to happen in terms of, like, the dirty trick side.
01:20:37.000I think that, you know, that will be a part of it, right?
01:20:39.000There's always some way to try to game these things.
01:20:41.000Just have the most brilliant writers formulate, you know, get AI to do it.
01:20:45.000Like, you're saying AI has all these solutions to things that are super logical.
01:20:49.000And, well, there's no, like, weird thinking in it.
01:20:52.000It's like, you know, cut all the fat out.
01:20:54.000So I think we have a theory on how to fix this.
01:20:56.000And the theory basically is we're going to have to switch our sense of what's real from basically just trying to eyeball it and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real.
01:21:04.000And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on a blockchain.
01:21:08.000And so I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have an account on a blockchain service, like a crypto service.
01:21:16.000And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time, Whenever they put out a statement, they're going to cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them.
01:21:29.000And then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see.
01:21:35.000Which frankly is a good idea anyway because there just is a lot of noise in the environment.
01:21:39.000How would you integrate that with social media though?
01:21:42.000Because one of the issues is these low information voters that are getting information Either from clickbait headlines on these websites where they don't even read the actual paragraph, which might be completely different than the headline itself.
01:22:03.000So the thing is, so that's already happening even pre-AI, right?
01:22:07.000And so I would say that's a pre-existing problem.
01:22:09.000And so, like, we can't, you know, we can't...
01:22:10.000And by the way, that's been happening for a long time.
01:22:12.000Newspapers have been scandal sheets forever.
01:22:14.000If you go back hundreds of years to the first newspapers, they were running all kinds of scrolls.
01:22:19.000The first newspaper was a scandal sheet of the Vatican, like, in the year 1500. It was all these, like, terrible rumors about, like, the Pope and the bishops and all these, the cardinals and all this stuff.
01:24:32.000Even though I look at the pessimistic side of things, I'm generally optimistic.
01:24:37.000Because my real feeling about human beings is most people are good.
01:24:41.000I genuinely believe there's far more good people in the world than bad people.
01:24:45.000There's far more people that just want to live a good life and have a good time and enjoy themselves than there are people who are tyrants.
01:25:06.000The capabilities that we have and the people that we – I mean, look, in my day job, I meet these young – I meet these 22-year-olds every day that are just like the smartest people in the world, the smartest people I've ever met.
01:25:16.000I think they're getting better, by the way, as time passes.
01:25:18.000By the time they're 22, they just know a lot more.
01:25:21.000They have so much more access to information than we did.
01:25:23.000Yeah, they're so much better trained, capable, and ready to go, fired up.
01:25:28.000They're able to connect online and they're already in communities and they know how to help each other.
01:25:31.000And so, like, yeah, the productive and inventive and creative, you know, aspect particularly of this country is just like there's never been anything like it in the world.
01:25:41.000I think there's also the real potential for a shift in perspective, a positive patriotic shift in perspective that can happen in this country.
01:25:51.000And if you think about what happened with the woke ideology, how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially.
01:26:00.000It happened so radically and so quickly and such a large change that people are...
01:26:08.000It's possible to enact change and a positive change in a good direction where people are optimistic about the future, which you are and I am.
01:26:17.000I mean, I think that's probably contagious.
01:26:39.000So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting.
01:26:49.000Well, because they lost so badly, right?
01:26:50.000So the fact that they lost the White House and they lost the popular vote and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court.
01:27:29.000And so there's a civil war that's underway inside that party that's kicking off right now where they're going to have to recalibrate what they want their future to be.
01:27:38.000And the same thing happened, by the way, when Reagan beat Carter really badly in 80 and then had a landslide in 84. It then took Democrats 12 years to get to Bill Clinton and to actually win again.
01:27:51.000And so they have this cautionary tale of they went too far in the 60s and 70s and it took them 12 years to recover.
01:27:56.000And so if you talk to the really smart Democrats right now, they're like, look, this can't be 12 years.
01:28:56.000Dianne Feinstein, our senator in California at the time, very left-wing, she was down on the border, like, the photo ops in front of the wall that was being built, like, trying to take credit for it.
01:29:30.000We played that speech that he gave after Sister Soulja and said a bunch of very anti-white things about white people, and he gave this super eloquent but yet compassionate speech about this, where he's very charitable about her position as being a young person and not having the best perspective on things.
01:29:57.000Well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right?
01:29:59.000Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments.
01:30:05.000But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and enforcing people to think and behave, which is what the left-wing does.
01:30:14.000And then you talk about, like, being pro-war.
01:30:37.000But if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it and the other side that's not, like, the fucking polar shift is so dramatic.
01:31:38.000I think the temperature of society, like the mindset of society is so clearly moving away from that madness that they're going to have to course correct, which is just logical.
01:31:50.000There's just no way they're going to keep doing it the same way or double down.
01:31:59.000So they have to, which is good for everyone, for everyone.
01:32:02.000So one of my theories is you can separate the concepts of the United States and America, and you can be very optimistic about America and have all kinds of issues with the United States, but still be positive about America.
01:32:12.000And the difference is the United States is the formal system of the government and the politics and all the stuff we get mad about, and America is the people.
01:32:21.000And so you can be, as I am, incredibly bullish about the people.
01:32:24.000And then it's just a question on the America part.
01:32:26.000And then it's just a question of whether you can get the United States part kind of lined up to at least not prevent good things from happening and ideally help good things.
01:32:32.000Well, what are the things that you think about this administration, at least what they're proposing, that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going?
01:33:40.000Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year.
01:33:44.000And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies.
01:33:48.000So, for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which is sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control.
01:33:55.000And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right?
01:33:59.000And if you read the Constitution, like, there is no such thing as an independent agency.
01:35:32.000And then you go into this thing of like, well, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined, back to your fascism point, which is there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech, but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you, right?
01:35:45.000And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing.
01:35:48.000And then they don't have to debank you.
01:35:49.000They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it.
01:35:53.000And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to.
01:35:56.000But the government gets to say, we didn't do it.
01:35:57.000It was the private company that did it.
01:35:59.000And of course, JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers.
01:36:04.000And so it's this sleight of hand that happens.
01:36:07.000So it's basically, it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.
01:36:14.000Just kick you out of the financial system.
01:36:16.000And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.
01:36:20.000This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service.
01:36:24.000Because they're trying to protect the big banks.
01:36:26.000And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.
01:36:31.000And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Truck Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about.
01:36:43.000Under the Obama administration, they started to debank We're good to go.
01:37:13.000And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents.
01:37:50.000We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable...
01:38:11.000Who do you go to to get your bank account back?
01:38:15.000And then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it which is right the other side and that doesn't happen to us but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money.
01:38:30.000Or there will be – well-publicized examples of like – there will be some investigation into like safe deposit boxes and the next thing you know the feds have seized all the contents of the state deposit – safe deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned.
01:38:44.000And so it's this – and this is when Trump says the deep state – like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power.
01:38:51.000It's political power being administered not through legislation, right?
01:38:55.000So there's no defined law that covers this.
01:39:08.000It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way and then they just apply pressure until they get it.
01:39:13.000So what happens to those 30 tech people that you know?
01:39:28.000Try to get away from the eye of Sauron.
01:39:30.000Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, okay, you know, it's okay.
01:40:18.000And we can trace it back because we understand exactly—we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that the banks get phone calls and so forth.
01:40:27.000And so we can loosely—we understand the flow of power as it happens.
01:40:31.000But when you're on the receiving end of this, your specific instance of it, like you can't trace it back and there's nothing you can do about it.
01:40:40.000What are they trying to do and how do they run afoul?
01:40:43.000Well, all the crypto startups in the last basically four years.
01:40:46.000So remember the crypto thing got like really, you know, sort of everybody got excited and like NFTs and like all that stuff and then it just like stopped.
01:40:53.000And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged.
01:43:12.000Like bring the hammer of God and the bank and the government or whoever or the social media, bring it down and just like crush the individual.
01:43:21.000And look, there's an argument in the long run that this is all unconstitutional because the Constitution gives us all the right to due process and this is government pressure and there's no...
01:43:28.000So like there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal.
01:43:33.000But in the moment when you're the guy who's been debanked, I mean, number one.
01:43:36.000And then also the potential that if you do challenge them in court and lose, the repercussions would be even heavier.
01:43:53.000So this is, and I think this is important context where like when Elon and Vivek talk about like reducing regulation, you know, there's two ways of thinking about reducing regulation.
01:43:59.000It's like, oh my God, the water in the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned.
01:44:03.000Now, some of those regulations, I think, are very important.
01:44:06.000But the other way to think about it is examples like this, which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, are just trying to do something legitimate, and they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided.
01:44:19.000Well, there's something that isn't illegal, but they don't want to be done like crypto.
01:44:45.000And so like that was their version of this and that was a very specific – Take away your kids.
01:44:50.000That was the threat at the end to the truckers and the Canada trucker strike because the trucker strike in Canada was going to jam up these cities because it was – the farmers were – the truckers were very serious.
01:44:59.000They wanted to – they were doing a nonviolent protest but they wanted to stall the cities to be able to exert political pressure back on the government.
01:45:18.000The theory would be you can't let – these aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary preventing goods and services from reaching people, right, putting people's lives at risk.
01:45:29.000Now, I don't know if they actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government, just like in the U.S. government, that if they want to, they can take your kids.
01:45:37.000Well, they were doing debanking there with people who donated to the trucker convoy, which is even crazier.
01:45:57.000I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War II. We think about Nazis in jackboots with tanks and guns and beating people up and killing people.
01:46:10.000You might call it that hard totalitarianism.
01:46:13.000That's very clearly violent totalitarianism.
01:46:15.000But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything, right?
01:46:26.000And this is speech control and debanking and all these other things that we've been talking about.
01:46:30.000And that is, you know, the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night.
01:46:34.000The bad news is like you are under their complete control and they can do whatever they want to you that doesn't involve physical violence, which basically includes the entire aspect of, you know, every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else.
01:46:46.000Trevor Burrus And most people aren't even aware of it.
01:47:30.000And so at that point, like, the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government, right, for, you know, to force your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden.
01:47:40.000Like, you can't even organize a protest.
01:47:42.000How much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis?
01:47:47.000Because one of the things that happened with the FTX thing was it was revealed that they were – I think they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.
01:47:54.000Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this debanking and be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you?
01:48:10.000Sam's approach was just pay everybody.
01:48:14.000So Sam's approach was just, I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, which is the crime.
01:48:20.000And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Giselle to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.
01:48:27.000But a lot of that money, something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians.
01:48:32.000And a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with.
01:48:40.000And so the money was just shotgunned out the door.
01:48:49.000Now, a very funny thing happened, which is when he was indicted by the U.S. government, they ended up not charging him on campaign finance fraud.
01:48:57.000Because they'd have to give all the money back?
01:49:00.000The thing that they said was their extradition agreement with Bermuda, Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge, which is like super weird because you're the United— Number one, you're the United States of America.
01:49:17.000And then, look, there's no evidence for this, but the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in D.C. decided to not open it.
01:50:02.000It just would have been another sentence.
01:50:04.000But like he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that and that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today never will.
01:50:10.000What's really fascinating about him is that he was right.
01:50:13.000And if they didn't come after him, he would have gotten all that money to those people.
01:50:19.000It seems like it kind of turned around, right?
01:50:23.000It didn't get him off the hook, though.
01:50:51.000That it was all the money was all being invested and he was going to give it all back and it was all this and all these complicated theories around all this effective altruism and this and that and the other thing.
01:51:00.000And the prosecution was just like it was the customer's money.
01:54:32.000Are you following the theories that are now emerging around Ozempic and psychological changes that Ozempic causes?
01:54:38.000No, but I did read that it makes your heart shrink.
01:54:41.000Well, there's some theory to that, which is very concerning.
01:54:43.000But there's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, and gambling addictions.
01:54:50.000And the current theory is that what it does is it basically, it essentially increases your self-control, your self-discipline, and it reduces cravings.
01:54:59.000And there's a theory that this is very positive.
01:55:02.000Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now.
01:55:04.000We'll see, but that's what they think.
01:55:05.000So the theory that it's positive is the theory that, you know, if we were all more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful and society would go better.
01:55:12.000Counter-argument would be, like, responsible is only part of living, and it's only part of what makes a society work, and we also need risk-taking, and we need creativity, and we need impulsiveness, and we need variety, and maybe we're all going to get into a channel.
01:55:52.000Well, that brings me to Ibogaine, which is the one thing that has the most success for people with addictions, and it's illegal in this country.
01:56:01.000People go down to Mexico and go to these Ibogaine retreats.
01:56:04.000I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane, introspective journey that's very uncomfortable, and it lasts about 24 hours.
01:56:11.000It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape, or form.
01:56:14.000Almost everyone says it's a very uncomfortable experience.
01:56:17.000But you gain unbelievable insight into what is wrong with you that makes you want to pick up heroin.
01:56:24.000Like, what's going on in there that you're trying to escape?
01:56:40.000A lot of veterans who have just seen way too much and come over and they're all fucked up and they don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that.
01:56:51.000You know, I wonder with particularly with these these Ozempics and Wegavi and all these different types of weight loss Diabetic drugs.
01:57:03.000I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects.
01:57:07.000Because, you know, when I've talked to people that think that, like, my friend Brigham, Brigham Bueller, who runs Waste Well, he's concerned about side effects of it.
01:57:18.000But he's also, he looks at people that are...
01:57:33.000But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably in a bad state and you could probably use some help.
01:57:39.000And maybe that could get them back on track.
01:57:42.000Maybe there's a way with maybe strength training, because one of the things is they lose a large percentage of muscle mass and bone density.
01:57:50.000Maybe that can be mitigated with strength training.
01:57:52.000Maybe it's one of those things that if you're going to get on a Zempick, you must lift weights three times a week, which is, that might be it.
01:57:58.000I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly, that's relatively easy to fix.
01:58:17.000I mean, maybe this is just the first steps of this, right?
01:58:19.000And then, like, these are crude versions of what will ultimately be a very comprehensive way of addressing an issue like that.
01:58:25.000So the other thing I'd say, so I've been down in Florida the last couple weeks working on some of the, you know, stuff happening down there.
01:58:29.000And one of the things I learned is that the RFK, the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here, you know, for like, he's really in charge, you know, working with the president.
01:58:39.000And he, you know, for all the controversy around some of his positions, like he's, you know, this whole, like, he's very serious about this.
01:58:47.000And a lot of people, including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field are like, yes, it is long overdue that we look at the food system.
01:58:54.000And we look at all these, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years is just a complete catastrophe.
01:59:01.000And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud.
01:59:09.000And so it's like, it's like known, but then all of a sudden there's a tipping point and all of a sudden it's not only known, but it's like obvious, all of a sudden everybody agrees on it.
01:59:16.000And this feels like one of those moments where it's like nutrition, behavioral, you know, exercise, like the path that people are on to become obese.
01:59:39.000I think this is now going to be a very big focus here.
01:59:41.000And not just by the government, but I think also in the culture.
01:59:44.000I agree, and I'm very encouraged as well.
01:59:46.000And I think as we were talking before about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country, I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards, I think that's coming too.
01:59:58.000One of the happiest moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listening to me talking about the benefits of it.
02:00:08.000And I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds, They're exercising regularly.
02:00:16.000It's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast.
02:00:20.000So one of my theories on this is that part of this what happened is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large looked very unhealthy.
02:00:34.000And so you've got these people standing up there telling everybody how they've got to do all the lockdowns and the masks and all that stuff.
02:02:19.000And that is your vehicle for propelling you through this life.
02:02:22.000It'll give you more energy for creativity, more energy for your family, more energy for your hobbies, your recreations, time with your friends.
02:02:30.000You'll literally have more energy as a human, which is what we all like.
02:02:33.000Nobody likes waking up and feeling like shit.
02:02:35.000I mean, everybody's been hungover who's had a few drinks.
02:02:39.000You wake up in the morning like, what am I doing?
02:03:20.000I don't know if she was vegetarian, but, like, well, Eric Adams, you know, the mayor of New York, he's been trying to push vegetarian school lunches.
02:04:38.000So one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system, and specifically high-fructose corn syrup.
02:05:17.000And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right, for all those decades, where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat, was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture.
02:05:27.000And then that agency inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure, and basically said, thou shalt use high fructose corn syrup because it is a byproduct of corn.
02:05:58.000And then it's essentially like it's an evolutionary thing that like where bears would eat like a bunch of berries to get fat for the winter.
02:06:06.000It's like these high fructose corn syrup encourages you to over consume.
02:06:09.000Yeah, we were not supposed to be eating this.
02:06:16.000But this would not have happened had the government not made it happen.
02:06:20.000And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that.
02:06:23.000Now, of course, they didn't understand the consequences, but that's kind of the point, which is they interfered without understanding the consequences.
02:06:28.000And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, all right.
02:06:31.000And then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it.
02:06:34.000And then at some point, you know what the consequences are.
02:06:37.000And then at some point, there's a question of whether they're being covered up.
02:06:50.000And so this goes back to, like, the regulatory reform thing, which is, like, there's just, like, tremendous amount of this that may have been good intentioned at one point.
02:07:04.000And they also have the insane amount of money that's involved because RJ Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble, they decided, well, let's buy all these food companies.
02:07:15.000And so now these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer, Now these same companies are pushing super unhealthy food on people, or at least selling super unhealthy food to people, which I think you should be allowed to buy.
02:07:30.000I think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want.
02:07:33.000But I do think we should be much more aware of what's actually going on, like you're saying, and why this stuff is in there in the first place.
02:07:41.000Well, and then you get into these other, you know, more delicate questions, but it's like, okay, food assistance programs for, like, you know, low-income people and low-income children.
02:07:50.000Do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline, paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18?
02:08:05.000And you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying, we're protecting you, we're protecting you, and what's been happening is they've been poisoning us.
02:08:13.000And so stuff like it just needs to stop.
02:08:16.000And that's where you need something like the doge.
02:09:03.000And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions.
02:09:07.000And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that kids who have no control over it are not being poisoned.
02:09:19.000But I always think that the third thing is culture.
02:09:23.000There's always a temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do, and I think so much of this has to do with the culture.
02:09:30.000It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like, what is the cultural tone of the country?
02:10:40.000It's just like, okay, is the media educating people on this?
02:10:44.000And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, should there be new media sources that are?
02:10:48.000And then therefore, which sources in the media get respect?
02:10:51.000So we have this giant collective culture question that we all get to ask and answer, and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear.
02:12:08.000So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago, actually two and a half years ago when Elon, actually right before he took over Twitter, where he got in an email fight with the CEO of Twitter at the time, who's actually a guy who's a friend of mine who's a really good guy, but literally this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company,
02:12:25.000and then like a month later he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation, so kind of got a little bit sandbagged on it, but yes.
02:12:56.000And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement, because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything.
02:13:04.000But imagine that statement being applied to the government.
02:13:19.000So, yes, what have you done this week?
02:13:20.000And by the way, when Elon runs this, it's actually interesting.
02:13:22.000A guy just tweeted or posted or zeted what it's like to work for Elon at his AI company, XAI. And he said, Elon came in last week and he said, Elon spent 18 hours at the office and in five-minute chunks.
02:13:33.000And each person had a five-minute speaking slot to explain to Elon what they were doing.
02:13:45.000Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on.
02:13:50.000Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort.
02:13:53.000Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing.
02:14:06.000And even, again, the Valley companies generally are quite well run by sort of business standards, and even that, like, that's the level of intensity that most Valley companies aren't even close to.
02:14:14.000Now, imagine that applied to government.
02:17:02.000And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return of the office from COVID and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month.
02:17:10.000And actually the pattern now is what they do is the employees come in on the last day of the month and the first day of the following month.
02:17:15.000So they only have to be there for two days.
02:17:21.000As a consequence, many of them have actually left the area, right?
02:17:25.000Because they get their government paycheck, which is calibrated for living there, and then they go live someplace nice.
02:17:28.000You know, someplace nice, but, you know, they go live in the Ozarks or something, where the cost of living is cheaper, and they have a bigger house.
02:17:34.000And, you know, in theory, they're working from home, but like, you know...
02:17:56.000And as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that?
02:17:59.000And to your point on paying taxes, if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better, fair enough.
02:18:16.000Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out.
02:18:20.000So, for example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access, like to email, often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network.
02:18:28.000You can actually audit and you can see who's been working.
02:18:43.000And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it.
02:18:49.000And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight.
02:18:58.000He actually wrote himself on a weekend an algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all his employees for a week, and then he bought all 50 mouse wigglers from China that you can buy, and he fingerprinted them all, and he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers.
02:19:40.000So in corporate environments, it's very common that your company-issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software and gives the company some level of visibility to what you're doing.
02:19:50.000And that doesn't mean they're literally washing you, but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to see how much is the computer on is the most moving.
02:19:59.000And so that's actually a reasonably common thing.
02:20:01.000I heard the most ridiculous argument against this.
02:20:03.000They're like, what are you going to do with all those employees that get fired?
02:20:17.000If they really are doing something that's totally useless, and we're wasting enormous amounts of money on this every year, the argument that what are you going to do if those people can't do that anymore is really crazy.
02:20:42.000And then by the way, there's multiple knock-on – positive knock-on effects.
02:20:45.000If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects.
02:20:47.000So one is if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes and you can just – the private economy then just simply has more money because it hasn't been taken.
02:20:53.000And so if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend.
02:22:14.000There's a congressman actually, Thomas Massey.
02:22:16.000So he's the one guy in Washington who talks about this and he's one of the only libertarians and he's an MIT engineer and he actually designed himself a pocket Lapel pin calculator of the government debt, and he wears it every day in Washington, D.C. So he walks around with this scroll?
02:22:32.000He walks with a little scrolling LED display on his lapel, and it literally counts.
02:22:37.000It counts the debt, and it's accurate.
02:22:39.000It's pulling data from the U.S. Treasury, and it's actually an accurate count.
02:22:41.000And so it's like $34 trillion, $35 trillion, $36 trillion.
02:23:27.000Yeah, it's good for anybody who ever gets car loan, home loan, small business loan.
02:23:31.000You want to bring down interest rates.
02:23:33.000But this fundamental discussion of it, like the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation, all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier, and it's going to ruin the middle class and ruin the lower class.
02:23:56.000The Democratic Party – so Democrat, Republican – it's what they call – it's a political scientist called top plus bottom versus middle is the configuration.
02:24:05.000So the Democratic Party is the top and the bottom versus the middle.
02:24:08.000So the top is what you might call the sort of upper middle class coastal elites.
02:24:12.000So it's everybody who went to the fancy schools.
02:25:15.000Right, so it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage men and janitors.
02:25:25.000It's like everybody who goes to work nine to five, has a job, probably either small business or a physical job.
02:25:32.000You know, it's sort of labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the hands, right, kinds of stuff.
02:25:38.000So kind of the so-called real economy, which is why, right, the Republicans are concentrated in the center and the south.
02:25:42.000Because that's where all those things are.
02:25:44.000And then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast, which is where all the symbolic, creative, intellectual jobs are.
02:25:51.000And so the weird thing that's happened is liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man.
02:25:59.000Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man.
02:26:01.000And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man...
02:26:06.000And then you saw that in this most recent election where the unions, the union leadership still for the most part endorsed Kamala, but the rank and file voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases.
02:26:17.000And the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.
02:26:21.000What do you think the motivation of all these wealthy people to vote for Kamala Harris was?
02:26:52.000Trevor Burrus Yeah, and if you read the New York Times, it's either – New York Times only has two articles anymore.
02:26:59.000It's either how evil are Republicans or how innocent and helpless are poor or grave minorities or identity groups, right?
02:27:07.000And so oppositional force and then – but we're the party of good with a capital G because we're taking care of all these poor, marginalized people.
02:27:18.000And then, by the way, it just so happens that the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money for not working very hard and it's all great.
02:27:26.000And then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I found myself in, where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to somebody running a restaurant or whatever because But it's just like you're not affected by the rising crime rates.
02:28:03.000Like, look, for a long time, for 40, 50, 60 years, it worked as a way to gain and hold political power.
02:28:07.000It's just gotten wedged in kind of this corner where it can no longer win, and so therefore it has to get reexamined.
02:28:14.000So for you, when you had this shift of thinking, you talked to the waiter and then the Hillary Clinton speech, how long is it before you start publicly expressing these things?
02:28:26.000And how much of a reluctance is there?
02:28:29.000So from 2017 to 2020, I was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
02:28:42.000We have hundreds of companies who are responsible for startups and so we're working with them to try to keep them afloat and get the money and everything.
02:28:49.000But really, the big thing was the Biden administration just flat out tried to kill us.
02:28:54.000They just came straight at us and they came straight at our founders.
02:28:58.000And they tried to kill crypto and they were on their way to trying to kill AI. I mean, they were horrible.
02:29:05.000What was the motivation to kill AI? Because they want control.
02:29:27.000Think about it as the same dynamics that cause censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI. And so there's a couple steps.
02:29:34.000So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in a headlock and control them.
02:29:39.000So you basically want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel.
02:29:46.000And set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government and then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel.
02:30:37.000And business schools teach you that's the one thing you do not want to do.
02:30:40.000And so there's two ways to try to deal with that.
02:30:43.000One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you, but that's hard because you're running a big company and these startups are out there doing all these crazy things and can you really do that?
02:30:50.000And it's hard and frisky and dangerous.
02:30:52.000The other thing you can do is you can go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation.
02:31:01.000We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long.
02:31:09.000We want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business because I'm a big company.
02:31:16.000I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people.
02:31:20.000I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.
02:31:24.000But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulation such that the next startup comes along and just literally, the next company comes along and just literally can't function.
02:31:32.000And by the way, this is literally what happened in banking.
02:31:36.000So pre-2008, pre the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year.
02:31:44.000People would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds.
02:31:48.000After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too-big-to-fail banks, right?
02:31:53.000And so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too-big-to-fail banking problem.
02:31:59.000They implemented that in 2011. I call that the Big Bank Protection Act of 2011. It was marketed as it was going to solve the problem of the too-big-to-fail banks.
02:32:06.000What it actually did was it made them much larger.
02:32:09.000Those too-big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out, are now much larger than they were before.
02:32:14.000The banking industry has concentrated into those banks.
02:32:18.000All the mid-sized banks are being shaken out.
02:32:40.000They have a great term called GSIB, Globally Significant Something-Something Bank.
02:32:45.000And so there's like 10 GSIBs and then basically what's going to happen is those are going to consolidate basically into the three big banks.
02:32:51.000And if you get debanked by one of the big three … You're done.
02:32:58.000But think about it from the other side.
02:32:59.000If you're the Treasury Secretary and you want your political enemy debanked, it's just a phone call, which is what has been happening, which was happening under the prior regime.
02:33:15.000Literally, it was like cardiac arrest.
02:33:16.000It was like, that's it for new bank charters.
02:33:18.000And we've had companies that have tried to start new banks, and it's essentially impossible because you have to comply with the wall of regulation.
02:33:24.000You need to go hire your 10,000 compliance people and your lawyers.
02:33:27.000But you can't afford to do that because you're not big enough yet.
02:34:58.000That's been happening in social media generally.
02:35:02.000It's been happening in many other sectors.
02:35:03.000And then it's happening specifically in AI. And what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen.
02:35:11.000Because again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right?
02:35:16.000And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, the trade is we'll do whatever the government wants.
02:35:23.000And if you assume the government is controlled by, you know, people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's going to come right along with it.
02:35:30.000And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of ten, they're tremendously politically biased.
02:35:58.000And it's important to understand that in reality he did not.
02:36:01.000But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because they programmed it to be biased.
02:36:07.000They programmed it in a political direction.
02:36:10.000There's this guy, David Rosato, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side where he shows the incidence rates of the rise of all of the woke language in the media.
02:36:18.000And there are similar studies that have come out for the AI. There are studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs because you can ask them questions and they'll tell you.
02:36:28.000And they're just like 9 out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased.
02:36:31.000And then there's a handful that aren't.
02:36:35.000This is one of the threats from the government is the government basically going to force our startups to come into compliance, not just with their trade rules, but also with all of their...
02:36:44.000Essentially, a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.
02:36:51.000And yes, and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse.
02:36:59.000And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's, quote, just people talking to each other.
02:37:05.000AI is going to be the control layer on everything.
02:37:08.000So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn at school.
02:37:11.000It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans.
02:37:14.000It's going to be the control layer on does your house open when you come to the front door.
02:37:18.000It's going to be the control layer on everything.
02:37:20.000And so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, we are in for a very bad future.
02:37:28.000And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening.
02:37:32.000And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path.
02:37:35.000Like they were very clearly going for that.
02:37:37.000And it was just like crystal clear that's where it was headed.
02:37:40.000And do you feel like with a second administration they'd be even more emboldened to act in that direction?
02:37:46.000Another Biden administration for sure.
02:37:49.000And then there was an open question around Kamala and the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.
02:40:51.000And that's why Chinese own the drone market, and that's why 90% of the drones used by the U.S. military and by U.S. police are Chinese-made drones, which, again...
02:41:00.000That sounds like a terrible security risk.
02:41:03.000...is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon.
02:42:32.000They had a little one like that that played over the Eminem concert when I was at CODA at the Circuits of the Americas here.
02:42:40.000They had this giant Eminem concert with like 100,000 people there and then afterwards they had like drones in the sky that did little dances.
02:43:03.000Just normal grunt soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or up on the roof.
02:43:08.000Yeah, and these are Chinese-made drones.
02:43:10.000And every single one of them can be taken over by China and used for whatever they want.
02:43:28.000Well, this is the – brings us back to the UAP thing because if that's what we're seeing, we're seeing super sophisticated Chinese drones that operate on some novel propulsion system.
02:44:14.000So this is my argument I make geopolitically in D.C., which is if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the U.S. and China the same way that in the 20th century it was the U.S. versus the Soviet Union.
02:44:25.000And like contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war.
02:44:29.000Like that's the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century.
02:44:34.000Then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side.
02:44:39.000And then as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?
02:44:45.000Maxime Waters made that argument when it comes to social digital scores and cryptocurrency and a centralized digital currency.
02:45:16.000And then, by the way, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism.
02:45:21.000Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, and there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China.
02:45:27.000To the point, a friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, he said, every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.
02:45:33.000And they're all trying to get their money out and they're all trying to get their families out.
02:45:36.000Because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China because the government might just snatch you.
02:45:41.000Like literally, physically snatch you at any point.
02:45:45.000And then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to.
02:45:53.000And by the way, and drag you into training.
02:45:56.000Okay, so you're the CEO of a company with 50 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees and this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours getting grilled on how well you understand Marx.
02:46:12.000And that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union and that's the kind of thing that happens in China.
02:46:17.000You'd rather be a CEO in the US than in China, for sure, as long as the US system actually stays open, where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products.
02:46:29.000And that's why this administration freaked us out so much, is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China.
02:46:34.000See, I was not nearly as aware as I should have been about all these things you're saying.
02:46:47.000We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans, and it was...
02:47:29.000And again, like, I'll just tell you, like, you know, like, because I'm going to get a lot of, you know, the flack I'm going to get for this is, you know, he's just a crazy whatever right winger.
02:48:05.000There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day.
02:48:11.000Which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago.
02:48:14.000But everybody has fully updated their views for that day, and that's what they talk about at the dinner party, and I'm no longer invited to those.
02:48:22.000And then there's the other kind, which is, you know, David Sachs and like all these guys and all these people and, you know, just this growing universe.
02:48:30.000You know, it's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture, which is like, hey, let's actually get together and talk about things and have fun.
02:48:35.000Right, but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the MyPillow guy.
02:48:48.000It helps when you say, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about, they're very well informed, and they understand the repercussions.
02:48:53.000They understand what's been coming their way, and there's people like yourself that can speak about...
02:48:58.000The plans that you're laying out, what they were trying to do with AI, is fucking terrifying.
02:49:34.000It was very different, but also they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding.
02:49:40.000So there used to be this thing I called the deal with a capital D. And the deal was you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product.
02:50:06.000This was Clinton and Gore were 100% in support of that.
02:50:08.000And they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech.
02:50:11.000And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment.
02:50:14.000And basically what happened is the last 15 years or so, Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal.
02:50:22.000Like every single part of that was shattered, right?
02:50:24.000Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right?
02:50:27.000And like, you know, if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person.
02:50:30.000And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot.
02:50:33.000And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you.
02:50:35.000And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil.
02:50:38.000And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.
02:52:34.000Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.
02:53:11.000And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could quote-unquote lean in.
02:53:16.000She said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning into the table and sitting like in front, and then the women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on.
02:54:32.000Like, in every major publication, they just, like, completely ripped her.
02:54:34.000And they're like, how dare this rich, entitled woman be telling us, you know, be telling women that they're not victims and that they're, you know, that they have all this agency because this is denial of sexism, right?
02:55:50.000And everything got classified through this very hard-edged, right, us versus them, right, oppressor versus oppressed, you know, kind of mindset.
02:56:20.000I've lost a lot of respect for him from some of the things that he said during this election cycle because I think they got desperate and they just resorted to actual lies.
02:56:28.000And I thought this is crazy to see him lying, especially the very fine people hoax.
02:56:33.000And we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said, and it's pretty shocking because he's very explicit.
02:56:41.000You know, he's saying not white nationalists, not neo-Nazis.
02:57:20.000And then all of a sudden, identity politics goes through the fucking roof and victim mentality becomes a thing that people choose to side with.
02:57:29.000And it just gets real weird for a long time.
02:57:57.000You can choose to follow into the craziest version of it, or you can choose to say, you know what, I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going to advocate for my team to come back.
02:58:10.000This guy is a congressman in Queens, I think, or the Bronx.
02:58:15.000He actually started out everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty because he's gay, he's black, he's Latino.
02:58:19.000He was like at least associated with the squad early on and he's like one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks saying clearly we have to get back to sense.
02:58:30.000Like we have to get back to common sense.
03:00:06.000But the shift of the Republicans from back in the day being Abraham Lincoln and trying to get rid of slavery and the Democrats fighting to keep it.
03:00:16.000There's these weird ideological swings.
03:01:16.000He was a right-wing Jew, a very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
03:01:21.000And he's like, he basically is like, basically he had this thesis that like these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S. like basically are voting against, ultimately they're voting for the wrong team.
03:01:28.000Because what they don't understand basically is that this is sort of a path, number one, to anti-Semitism, which is what's happened.
03:01:34.000But number two, basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because Israel – the basic concept of Israel violates the idea that Israel is like literally a religious ethnostate.
03:01:44.000And that's like inherently a right-wing idea, not a left-wing idea.
03:01:47.000Like the left doesn't have room for that.
03:02:00.000And so, you know, he argued, I don't know, this is like whatever, 20 years ago, he's like, this is headed in the wrong direction.
03:02:05.000But, you know, the argument was ignored at the time.
03:02:07.000And then, you know, at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th, you know, they were completely horrified, you know, to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish.
03:02:36.000That was just so in everyone's face and so bananas.
03:02:40.000And then what we saw is that this same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-Israel but also pro – I mean ultimately pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas.
03:02:50.000You know, the new acronym, LGBTH. But there's a bunch of other stuff in there now.
03:03:03.000And so, like, I bring it up just as an example of it's the kind of realignment.
03:03:10.000A lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of.
03:03:17.000So I think to your point, I think like the whole country is going through – I think we're going through the first like profound political realignment probably since the 1960s, which is when everything shifted between Johnson and Nixon in the South.
03:03:30.000I think we're going through like the most profound version of that right now and I think it's something like the multi-ethnic working class coalition that came together around Trump.
03:03:39.000You know, basically, again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass, you know, kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves.
03:03:47.000And it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.
03:03:51.000And so I think, but by the way, including a lot of black people, you know, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote for Trump is way up, youth vote for Trump is way up, gay vote, like all of the identity groups that Democrats relied on all these years, or union vote is for Trump.
03:04:06.000I'm sure you've seen the map, the electoral map of California.
03:04:20.000Well, I think, you know, maybe the other way.
03:04:24.000You were talking about the hopeful way that the Democrats will wake up and come up with a more reasonable—well, I mean, there's obviously clear cultural pushback on all these crazier issues.
03:04:35.000I mean, like, the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women.
03:04:41.000I mean, this is a giant one where women are like, listen, we created Title IX for a reason.
03:04:46.000We want women's sports to be for women.
03:04:48.000You can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women, which is what it is in a lot of places.
03:05:26.000Because a pervert, all they have to do is say, I identify as a woman, throw on a wig, and now you can go hang around the women's room and no one can say anything.
03:05:33.000Well, you've emboldened, empowered one of the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from.
03:05:52.000And, you know, I mean, there's states that have that now with prisoners, that all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman, and you are now housed in women's prisons.
03:06:03.000California has 47 of them, when the last time I looked at it.
03:06:07.000And there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in.
03:06:11.000So you have women who, you know, especially if you're someone who's dealing with if you've ever been raped or sexually abused, and now you have to share space with a man who might be a fucking pervert.
03:06:23.000And some of these men even have some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for.
03:07:03.000And then there's legitimate trans women.
03:07:05.000So, like, how do you make the distinction?
03:07:07.000Well, clearly we have to have a fucking conversation.
03:07:09.000And if you don't allow that conversation to take place, like, if you go to Blue Sky and you type in, there are only two genders, you're banned.