On this episode of the Drinker Bros Podcast, the crew talks about the latest in the war on terror, the CIA finding Noah's Ark, and why we should all be worried about a cyber attack on a truck.
00:02:44.000They've fired the remaining employees, so it's over.
00:02:46.000Now, Congress is supposed to be the one to shut it down, but the executive branch can run it as they see fit, so they've effectively shut it down.
00:02:54.000This is huge, because this is the final nail in the coffin for one of the accused way in which the Uniparty Deep State was funding its NGOs, its activism, etc.
00:03:03.000We got big news that XAI has officially acquired X, absorbing the social media platform into its AI company, which is going to integrate everything you do or say on the platform into training the Grok AI, which you were already doing.
00:03:54.000But what I really want to say is the video of Roseanne paying Michael Malice the money she owes him for losing the bet about military tribunals and an election not happening is we've got it.
00:04:31.000It says, low acidity because it hurts his stomach.
00:04:33.000So we craft this with Ian, and then I guess a lot of people bought it really, really quickly because they wanted the low acidity.
00:04:39.000This created a massive sell-off, and we sold out, which created, I guess, for many people, they wanted to know why everyone was buying it.
00:04:49.000Now it's a cascade effect, and we keep selling out rapidly because everyone's trying to try it, simply because everyone else is trying to try it.
00:04:56.000Maybe it's just the best coffee in the world.
00:05:27.000Once you click join us and sign up, the information for the Discord server is on the website and you will hang out with 10,000, 20,000 plus individuals and share your ideas.
00:05:36.000Be an active participant in this culture war, not just a passive observer.
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00:08:13.000The State Department officially notified Congress that the U.S. Agency for International Development has been dissolved and the remaining operations of the agency will be run by the State Department itself.
00:08:22.000According to United Press International, the State Department officially told Congress that USAID was dissolving on Friday.
00:08:31.000Secretary of State Mark Rubio said in a statement today, This is massive.
00:08:50.000I think the reason they're doing it is because Congress basically passes a bill saying you have to have these certain functions.
00:08:58.000And so if they can accomplish those tasks set forth by Congress through the State Department, they shut down USAID, which for those who don't know...
00:09:09.000Has been accused of basically funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to activist organizations, lawyers, and political outfits to fund establishment shill politicians.
00:09:18.000So along with this, Donald Trump's citizenship requirement for voting, it looks like, I don't know, Trump's march to the sea on the deep state is ramping up.
00:10:03.000There's this circular feature to the USAID funding where money comes out of your wallet and it goes to USAID and then it goes to a foreign country and it somehow ends up in the hands of some enemy adversary that ends up being spent back here on Antifa, BLM and so forth.
00:10:46.000Oh, but I mean, like, when you understand that it's all military, industrial contractors, lawyers, and behind every smile is someone funding or helping to bomb children in foreign countries and never declared war on, you go to the park and they're singing Disney songs and they're eating delicious food and it looks...
00:11:03.000It looks like magic, but I imagine that if you could see into the souls of these people, not all of them, a lot of them are actually fans, but going down there and seeing just how beautiful everything is and knowing what funds it...
00:11:18.000I literally had a tweet like two weeks ago that says driving through Loudoun County is crazy because what do you mean you built a castle next to a gas station?
00:11:28.000It's like there's huge just massive properties next to small businesses and you realize that driving through there driving through anywhere through Virginia you're basically being propped up by all of the money that we the taxpayers have dumped back into it.
00:11:42.000I wonder what's going to happen to this place.
00:11:44.000Loudoun's a big county so it's not just like No, I mean, it's like art.
00:12:11.000It's all a fake shell game to make money.
00:12:15.000Government, no matter how noble, I guess, its intentions, and it's not always noble, but even when it's in its best form, eventually becomes an engine to extract labor and wealth from the population.
00:12:27.000And that's gotten harder the larger the government has grown over time, which is why they're fighting so hard.
00:12:33.000Exactly. So that's why we created this.
00:12:40.000If you look at government as an experiment over the course of human history, you can kind of see how it matures just like a human being would, right?
00:12:48.000It starts in this rudimentary phase that doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:12:51.000In the same way that our religions have evolved as well.
00:14:01.000You know, when Congress asked for a raise, I'm like, yeah, do your job, and I'll consider it, right?
00:14:05.000But you can see it kind of grow up over time, and that's why we know that it's an experiment, because you can look—it is a testable hypothesis.
00:14:17.000So when anybody—if anybody starts talking about communism or socialism, you can be like, hey, let me stop you right there, bud.
00:14:22.000I don't ever need to hear anything you say again, ever, because you're not a smart person.
00:14:26.000I mean, we talked about this the other night.
00:14:28.000The funny thing about communism is that— It's fundamental precept is basic arithmetic that is wrong.
00:14:35.000So when they say, from each according to their ability to each according to their need, you're basically saying, we've got ten people in a room, half of them consume more than they produce, the other half sustain themselves.
00:14:46.000It's like, okay, that's called net negative.
00:15:17.000But even then, it doesn't work because we don't operate it in that way.
00:15:20.000And that's because of all of us, by the way.
00:15:22.000And I don't mean just the five of us in this room.
00:15:25.000Just every American who thought it was okay to, because I have an iPad and Hot Pockets, to not pay attention to what's going on with my money in Washington.
00:15:34.000Eisenhower warned us about it in the 50s, and we paid no attention to him.
00:15:38.000Right? We just kind of went on about our business and let it grow and grow and grow.
00:15:41.000And now it's going to be very difficult to unseat some of this stuff.
00:15:44.000And one of the things I find most interesting, like USAID and like Doge is kind of exposing right now, is people have been propagandized so much by these organizations that are likely funded from institutions with our tax dollars that they've propagandized people into believing that firing inefficient government employees is actually a bad thing.
00:16:04.000And you're seeing the death throes of that last 70 years of Poor, inefficient government, but fantastic propaganda reeling its ugly head and showing people that they don't really understand the scale of which the rot is within the government.
00:16:19.000And then there's a part of it that's like a weaponization of our better natures.
00:17:06.000Usually on my show, there would be a string of bad words right here.
00:17:10.000We've allowed these people to completely, as you say, propagandize the dialogue now, where when somebody posits some left position, and you have to understand from them, there's this impetus to want to take care of people, right?
00:17:24.000And as a man that's on the right side of things, my idea of taking care of people is teaching them how to fish, not giving them one, right?
00:17:46.000If these people are left in charge of the public discourse, if they're allowed to say, because you want to own guns, you don't care about kids dying, right?
00:17:55.000If they're allowed to say that without repercussion from their own side, the left has to step in and say, hey, that's wrong.
00:18:01.000But they weaponize toxic levels of empathy, usually on an out-group bias because they push for laws rather than taking care of things within their own home, right?
00:18:13.000Yeah, and that's the secret sauce there, to be honest, because when the government shows up to your neighborhood and nobody's got their hand out, they've got no power there, right?
00:18:22.000So if you want this decentralized government...
00:18:25.000If you want this lowest level possible, if you want federalism, if you want this dream that Jefferson had to be a reality, you better go down the street and take care of your neighbor before the government shows up to do it.
00:18:34.000Otherwise, you're not doing your job and you have no right to complain about anything that's going on.
00:18:38.000I think there's a middle ground in either you teach them to fish or give them a fish.
00:18:42.000I think you can give them a fishing pole.
00:18:46.000We can teach them to fish, but you find a guy who's got no fishing pole, and you say, look how I cast the bait or whatever, and they're going to look at you and be like, that'd be great if I had one of those.
00:18:56.000So there's a middle ground of the help that we provide in society is to give you the opportunity to help yourself.
00:19:21.000And the discussion came about what items should be on EBT.
00:19:24.000And I think a lot of people would rather have a discussion.
00:19:26.000As important as that is, is looking to weed out fraud in divisions like that.
00:19:31.000The idea of limits on the amount of time you can be on those programs.
00:19:34.000But even having that discussion a lot of the times with people who have certain beliefs in just how powerful government should be or at least unlimited power in helping people because they see it as a virtuous cause, they don't want to have that discussion at all.
00:19:47.000But I would like to believe that most moderates do want to at least be able to have that debate.
00:19:51.000Even if you don't believe that everybody should be on food stamps all the time, you should believe in some type of responsible federal, Yeah, well, there's a saying that I liked.
00:20:08.000It's easy to create this caricature of your enemy that exists in your head and hate them on Twitter or from afar.
00:20:14.000But when you see somebody that's hungry up close, that's quite a bit more difficult, right?
00:20:17.000And there is, regardless of what your politics are, there is some impetus to be like, hey, I need to help this person.
00:20:22.000There's no way that, like, if you're, if you believe, if you're like a patriot and you believe in America and what it is, then you want it to be the best, right?
00:20:31.000This is just like standard broken window theory stuff.
00:20:34.000If I want my country to be the best, Then I damn sure better put some effort into that.
00:20:40.000Otherwise, I have no claim to its goodness.
00:20:53.000I was in the military, but it doesn't have to be that.
00:20:54.000It doesn't have to be police or fire, EMS or first responder stuff at all.
00:20:58.000You can serve your community by taking care of the people that are closest to you because that's your job to do it, right?
00:21:02.000And for me, I think what's interesting about that is most, like I said, I think that both sides have this impetus to the right these days wants as little federal government as possible, which I tend to agree with for the most part.
00:21:15.000And most people aren't focusing on their state-level government anyway.
00:21:18.000They're too interested in the pro-wrestling nature of federal politics these days, right?
00:21:23.000But when it comes to the left, they don't really see value politically on the left.
00:21:28.000There isn't inherent value placed on the family.
00:21:31.000So they look at the government as a surrogate to the family where they say, dump in all the money, put in all the resources there so that we can take care of people without actually trying to operate under the premise that there are steps that you can do to alleviate all of that that start at home.
00:21:47.000Yeah, I wonder how much of that is a scarcity mindset, too.
00:22:51.000You can't be wrong because it's your opinion.
00:22:53.000That's the point, because what it means to be conservative changes with every generation and every step.
00:22:58.000But when people say it, though, right, because people say I'm a Reagan Republican, typically, when they refer to what conservatism used to be.
00:23:48.000That's a whole other conversation we don't need to go on.
00:23:50.000But when I say there's no right and left anymore, I mean, if you ask somebody to define their ism, whatever it happens to be, conservatism or liberalism, they have no idea what those words mean, right?
00:24:02.000And they're not represented in the true fashion.
00:24:04.000As you say, though, they do evolve over time.
00:24:08.000But the words do mean something, right?
00:24:10.000Right. When we say classical liberalism, what we mean is liberalism.
00:26:40.000It basically means you want the status quo.
00:26:42.000You want to return things to the way they were.
00:26:46.000The issue is that for leftists, they think they're revolutionaries.
00:26:50.000The problem is when they're too stupid to realize they're trying to revert the United States back to the way it used to be.
00:26:55.000For instance, DEI programs are actually how things used to be.
00:26:59.000The reality is for the majority of human existence, race-based policy was the norm, and it's only in the past couple of decades we've actually had law preventing this.
00:27:09.000Redlining and blockbusting housing policies targeting minorities ended in the 80s.
00:27:14.000So when the left comes out and smashes things and using violence and says, we want things to be the way they used to be, I say they're reactionaries.
00:28:09.000When the Syrian Civil War began, so when the Arab Spring kicked off and Syria was overcome by partisan conflict, which involved government forces and other forces killing each other, who were the factions?
00:28:21.000Al-Qaeda, ISIS versus the Ba'ath Party.
00:28:24.000Well, actually, there was the Free Syrian Army was one faction.
00:29:27.000You know, honestly, I don't know, but you look at Rudyard Lynch's analysis, which it appears he's got three days to make his prediction.
00:29:33.000I don't know if his prediction was 1,000 dead by April.
00:29:36.000Maybe he means end of April, so he gets an extra month if he wants to really nitpick.
00:29:40.000But he said that there would be a People's Congress in Texas, and there would be the traditional Congress in D.C. I said you're wrong.
00:29:50.000The people's Congress would be in New York City and the traditional Congress would be in D.C.
00:29:55.000run by Donald Trump because Trump – he thought Trump was going to win.
00:29:58.000And I said – and New York is the epicenter of where the Democrats and the liberals are waging their lawfare and their campaigns.
00:30:05.000And the issue largely is – I guess my point ultimately why I asked about the left and the right is there is a left and the right, though it's not like there is this rigid cube for which there are boundaries you can't be in or out of. It's more like – So it has its orbit.
00:30:34.000It's a planet with a bunch of different factions that orbit within it that work in tandem periodically.
00:30:39.000The right has something not so similar.
00:30:43.000For the nerds out there, the left is the Alliance and the right is the Horde.
00:30:48.000The right is a hodgepodge group of disparate ideologies that have come together largely only because the unified forces of the left are psychotic and burning everything down.
00:30:57.000And they're actually forcing your hand to be labeled as right just by virtue of having one qualifying thing that you disagree with them on, forcing you into a box that you don't even necessarily see yourself in.
00:31:07.000What are the X and Y axes here, right?
00:31:10.000Like if we're graphing left versus right, but they're both kind of...
00:31:19.000There is no easily defined X and Y axis.
00:31:23.000I can give you several examples that many people have posited.
00:31:26.000Recently I've been saying it is those who serve God and those who want to be God.
00:31:31.000What that idea tries to encompass is the further you go to the right on this scale, you have people working towards and being part of something larger than themselves, which includes each—and it's funny because you'd imagine that means communism, but it certainly doesn't.
00:31:45.000As you go closer to the left, you get hedonistic and people who are willing to do whatever it takes for their own personal benefit, even if it destroys everything else.
00:31:54.000But there's a bunch of different ways to approach it outside of that, and I think culturally it is— There's so many ways to define it.
00:32:25.000Christian conservatives, it has post-liberals, it has disaffected liberals, it has atheists, agnostics, largely Christian, some Catholics, some evangelicals, some Jewish, some hate the Jews, some pro-Israel, some hate Israel.
00:32:36.000On the left, they largely adhere to whatever the group think is, even if it's contradictory.
00:32:41.000So, for instance, their anti-military industrial complex, for which they scream about Israel, but then they support Ukraine.
00:32:47.000They're seeming paradoxes in what they're arguing, because it's not about...
00:33:22.000It's also a party of – oddly enough, they've done a very, very good job of posing the right as the party of money, as the party of resources, whereas a great number of the very, very rich very much support the Democratic Party.
00:33:40.000Yet they talk about hating billionaires.
00:33:44.000That to me is the one – they've turned billionaire into pejorative.
00:33:47.000It's now used to other you in a way where it's millionaires.
00:33:51.000Trust funds, politicians who live wealthy off of the citizens who have turned certain rich people into an enemy and use their wealth.
00:34:00.000And now they use the term oligarch as a way to other you or other somebody who makes a lot of money.
00:34:05.000And there's no actual logical conclusion there because a lot of them come from wealthy families.
00:34:12.000The politicians have made millions and millions of dollars off of the American people.
00:34:16.000Most of them just willing to look the other way, not realizing that a lot of these politicians...
00:34:21.000Sure. I gotta address this, Super Chat.
00:36:03.000The Horde originally was a hodgepodge group of disparate ideologies and factions who were teaming up for survival, and the Alliance were the establishment forces of the existing nations that wanted to keep everything the way it was.
00:36:14.000So I view the left, which represents the neocons and the neolibs and the establishment as the established order.
00:36:20.000And what happened is Trump and a bunch of other groups of varying ideologies, even libertarians, come on, joined together despite the fact they disagree.
00:36:28.000But I think it's largely a good thing.
00:36:31.000My point is, on the right, you have people who completely disagree, but will hang out with smiles on their faces.
00:36:37.000And on the left, agree with me or burn.
00:36:40.000But the right and the left are political positions.
00:36:44.000We've assembled ourselves in this new alliance, if you want to call it that, or horde, if you want to call it that, with very disparate political positions.
00:36:56.000So what we call the left, leftists, progressives, whatever the hell it is, you have to stay in good standing with the party to be a functioning member of it.
00:37:07.000There's no need to call it anything else.
00:37:09.000They are the side of authoritarianism, period.
00:37:12.000And everybody else, to include people who would consider themselves to be classically liberal or leftist or whatever, or libertarian, it doesn't matter.
00:37:19.000They're moving into what used to be called the right, but it's just the anti-authoritarian.
00:39:12.000There's been a lot more activity in calling out Trump when he does goofy things this time around.
00:39:17.000I actually have a running list on my phone of the things that people on the right, where at least you get a strong sense of people who are like, look, the Christian conservatives are going to disagree with him about IVF.
00:39:29.000There are certain issues that they're going to push back on, which is a good thing, and you should be looking to do that.
00:39:34.000But I think the point is like I wonder if they worry that the current right, what is considered the right as we see it, meaning like a big tent of disparate ideas that have kind of coalesced under Trump's leadership because he is such a strong face, a strong voice in politics.
00:39:51.000I wonder sometimes whether that will fracture when he is no longer...
00:39:57.000And if the machine that operates the left, meaning you have the politically uninitiated who vote left just because that's what they've done their whole life, and the rest of them who fall in line with the party because they're scared of what happens if they speak out, if that actually ends up outlasting because the disparate voices that argue on the right won't have a voice to coalesce around if nobody steps up in 2028.
00:40:20.000Right. And leadership matters for sure, which is why you've got to be critical in a way that leaves room.
00:40:27.000You get in an argument with your spouse or your co-worker or something like, hey, you guys still got to live together.
00:40:42.000They absolutely have to do away with this progressive stuff or it won't exist anymore.
00:40:45.000And then on the right, there's some of this, like buying Greenland, I don't care about that.
00:40:50.000Funding war stuff, I don't care about that.
00:40:53.000There's a couple of things in the tax plan from Trump that are problematic for me, like carried interest tax.
00:40:58.000This is something you particularly should be invested in.
00:41:03.000People on Trump's team, I don't know about himself, but people on his team want to get rid of what they call the carried interest loophole.
00:41:09.000That is, you as an investor or a business owner pay yourself through dividends at the capital gains tax rate rather than the 37% income tax rate, right?
00:41:20.000They want to bring it back up to 37%, which means you paying dividends from yourself, from IRL, Inc., or whatever your top-level organization is called, would now, instead of being taxed at 20% capital gains plus 3.8% net investment income tax, you would pay a full 37% plus your state income tax on that.
00:41:48.000I think a better analogy is just in general, somebody who owns equity in a company but doesn't work there is receiving dividends from the shares.
00:42:02.000But also, any kind of capital investment you make in a company that's not like a stock or something like that.
00:42:09.000Again, for comparison, the top tax rate is 37%.
00:42:11.000You're talking about 17 additional percent in tax for the people who move the most money around in the community, and it's completely unacceptable.
00:42:44.000So you can pay yourself a percentage of the profitability of your company as your salary, but it only gets taxed at the capital gains rate.
00:42:50.000Right. And the purpose that this exists for, the net investment income tax exists for, is such that...
00:42:58.000You as a business owner are going to spend more money in your business.
00:43:03.000You own McDonald's franchises, and you have a really good year, and you get taxed 20% on the dividend you take out of it instead of 37%, and you use that extra money.
00:44:20.000Well, like as a business owner, especially somebody that's been a successful business owner for some amount of time that employs a lot of people, the government should be like, yeah, let's give this guy more of his own money.
00:44:31.000So he goes, because you will create more employment for other people.
00:44:35.000Well, here's where it's broken, is that...
00:44:39.000And I suppose this is just an issue of corporate structure.
00:44:43.000You can choose to do a C-corp, and then your money is retained by the corporation and tax at the corporate tax level as opposed to the individual level.
00:44:49.000Once it goes to an S-corp, you start to get into a little bit murkier territory.
00:44:55.000Yeah, so I talked to an accountant when we were setting everything up, and I said, why would we want to do either of these things?
00:45:02.000And you can be a limited liability corporation.
00:45:04.000Pass-through means at the end of the year, all those taxes are your income, and you've got to pay income tax at the full rate as an individual.
00:45:14.000I'm going to pay my taxes I'm supposed to pay them.
00:45:16.000Give me deductions where I get the deductions.
00:45:18.000The problem is, December 31st to January 1st, in this flash of a moment, your company can be utterly destroyed by the way our tax system works.
00:45:50.000Everything. As of January 1st, it's effectively frozen.
00:45:53.000Because we now have incurred a massive debt to the government that we don't know what it is until our We need a massive profit margin to make sure that we can cover whatever our projected taxes may be.
00:46:11.000And so throughout the year, we are forced to save.
00:46:19.000Bigger corporations, but at our size, maybe once we're bigger, we can play this game.
00:46:25.000At our size, the challenge is we make money every month, and then we have to have that money set aside because we know we have a tax liability coming up.
00:46:32.000We have estimated taxes that we have to pay every month.
00:47:23.000From January until December, every month we're trying to budget effectively to make sure we have enough money every month to pay all the bills.
00:47:32.000And we need money set aside for if there's going to be a rainy day, a power outage, equipment failure.
00:47:38.000As soon as you jump from December to January, all that's out the window and you can't budget effectively anymore.
00:48:10.000When they hit you with a 50% tax instead of a 20% tax, which is still too much, but it is what it is, right?
00:48:16.000Like, we've got to fight this battle somewhere.
00:48:17.000When they hit you with 50%, that means that you have to make the upcharge on your services, as it were, have to be 51%, or your business doesn't exist anymore.
00:49:17.000So that money is not going to hit your accounts until February.
00:49:20.000So January, you've got a couple hundred thousand dollars, just hypothetically.
00:49:24.000You use that for payroll, for infrastructure, and now your revenue is way low.
00:49:29.000You also owe taxes, but you're using the money that you made from the last month for your operations.
00:49:35.000So that means every month you need to save up so you have a buffer, but now you have higher profit, which is a higher tax liability.
00:49:40.000So the more you try and save to offset that you're going to have January, February, and March as weak revenue months, to be fair, largely March and April, every February, people who run media companies get sad because you know your ad rates are low.
00:49:57.000The revenue from January was very, very bad because nobody was buying.
00:50:00.000And the money you had left over from last year is being taxed massively.
00:50:35.000Right. So, to simplify, because we have a tax liability abruptly put on us as a day passes, we try every month to make sure we have a certain margin of profit because we know we need...
00:54:19.000When we saw the story from Vegas of the firebombing in the vehicles, we did not actually know the full story, which they've now released with the arrest of this guy.
00:54:28.000He actually took a rifle and shot upwards at cameras.
00:54:57.000And they ended up fighting him, probably because of this.
00:55:00.000But, I mean, the extent of these attacks that we've seen, they're worse than we realize.
00:55:06.000Do you really think it's FOMO because they have oppression, FOMO, or is it that they truly do see themselves as somebody who's doing something good for people?
00:56:40.000All these Berkeley students, and I was working in security contracting back then, emergency management stuff, and I was plainclothes in some of these things.
00:56:49.000But even by my house, which was on Piedmont Avenue, I saw this large group of white children marching by saying, whose streets are streets?
00:56:58.000And I'm like, you guys may want to take the temperature on your whole situation here because I don't think you're understanding what's actually going on.
00:57:09.000I was at, I recall being at Berkeley, actually, and there were protests going on, and a buddy of mine, he's a cop that grew up in West Oakland, black dude, and there's this 19-year-old white kid yelling at him, hey, you're a racist, you're a racist.
00:57:21.000I'm like, oh my god, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
00:57:28.000So I think these people's minds, to your point, there's a part of it that is like trying to search out this social...
00:57:38.000I guess acceptance from somebody somewhere and they just don't get it anywhere because they're not part of the new victim class as it were so they have to reach out and find ways to identify with that and part of it well the way it started was Doing the protests, and then it moved on to thoughts and prayers and pronouns and flags in your bio.
00:58:23.000I think I was talking to Cody about it.
00:58:26.000We were talking about how insane everything's gotten politically on the ground.
00:58:29.000And I was saying that if 20 years ago, a dude dressed up in full neo-Nazi outfits and started going around spewing racial slurs at people, what would happen to that guy?
00:58:41.000He would probably get beat up by somebody.
00:58:42.000He'd probably get beat up by somebody.
00:59:08.000But the point is, I think what we're seeing with the keying is that 30 years ago, anybody in anywhere would have probably said, you know, someone would beat up a neo-Nazi guy.
00:59:22.000The left views literally anybody outside of their political sphere like that.
00:59:31.000But these people who are keying these cars literally think we are in a society that is 99% anti-Nazi, and that is a Nazi car, so I'm going to damage it.
00:59:43.000They're wrong because they're deluded based on what the media has been feeding them and what they're getting from social media.
00:59:48.000But I guess the point of the story is so that...
00:59:52.000We can see how we used to have a cohesive moral society.
00:59:57.000Right. There's one thing we could all agree on.
00:59:58.000My point is that these people have not become more violent.
01:00:02.000Is it the violence always existed in people to attack those who are deemed outside of the Overton window?
01:00:08.000And today, the Overton window is bifurcated, and we are all outside of their Overton window, so to them, they are justified in doing this, and always have been.
01:00:16.000What do you think the impetus for that is?
01:00:17.000Do you think people are just naturally growing apart, or do you think it's more the constant propaganda?
01:00:22.000Technology. It's technically the propaganda, but it's rooted in algorithmic distribution of information.
01:00:29.000You can tie it back to when you got the internet in your pocket.
01:00:33.000Absolutely. Like, that was a weapon that was just fed into everyone's pocket.
01:00:37.000We were talking about it with Rachel Zegler in her new movie, and I was like, you do realize that these companies aren't putting social media clauses into their contracts, and every one of these actors carries around a nuclear weapon in their pocket that can blow a $200, $300 million piece of entertainment in 10 seconds.
01:00:56.000Yet, we as a society haven't found a way to deal with that.
01:00:58.000Don't you think it started a little bit earlier, though?
01:01:02.000We saw little flashes of it, and certainly technology made it way worse.
01:01:06.000It just made it easier and more quick, and it also made it so much easier to get it out to everybody all at once.
01:01:13.000We saw little flashes, like there was the Atwater thing with Nixon, with the unfortunate things he said about the South, mostly racist stuff.
01:01:22.000But then more in the mainstream was the Newt Gingrich.
01:01:28.000When New Geekers became Speaker of the House, he and—what's that guy's name?
01:01:32.000I can't remember the guy's name from the right-wing messaging service, but they kind of turned the word liberal into a bad word.
01:01:38.000That was their main focus in the mid-'90s, was to make the word liberal a pejorative term, huh?
01:02:07.000And then social media obviously amplified that to the nth degree.
01:02:10.000But in the early days of social media, it wasn't that.
01:02:12.000It was cat videos and stupid nonsense, right?
01:02:15.000So the debate that happened eight years ago in the culture war at the time when it was intersectional femininity, we didn't say wokeness.
01:02:24.000Dr. Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose argued it was universities that created these ideas.
01:02:30.000They fomented them, and then the students came out and did their thing.
01:02:34.000And I argued that's not correct, because universities contain many different ideologies and many different student groups.
01:02:42.000The universities adopted these ideologies largely because of the internet and what young people were using to communicate on a daily basis.
01:02:49.000So it wasn't the professors that were telling the kids be communists.
01:02:53.000It was social media telling them this, and then the kids told their professors, we are communists.
01:02:57.000The universities then said the customer is always right.
01:02:59.000But it doesn't help that these are echo chambers that you're in.
01:03:01.000I got a TikTok a few years ago, and I started following a bunch of skateboarders, and then I think I came across one of Tim's videos and watched it.
01:03:08.000And then it started kind of feeding me more and more kind of conservative things.
01:03:12.000You know, I kind of get down with this.
01:03:14.000But then it started actually becoming, like, extreme things.
01:03:16.000And now sometimes I'll go on my TikTok and there's very, like, crazy, like, we need a white Europe, like, just very to the extreme right thing.
01:05:11.000Now, it endlessly feeds me ping pong, and I've actually got, so first I said, I'm going to ignore it, and just keep doing the skateboard videos, poker and skateboarding, and sometimes, what do I get?
01:07:08.000Yeah. To your point, though, about the emotional dysregulation in your phones, you notice, especially before bed, if you spend a lot of time on your phone, it can absolutely affect your mood.
01:07:20.000So you fall into a death spiral of just looking, looking, looking.
01:07:24.000Now imagine you have no self-control and you're consistently looking at your phone and you're out in public and you're watching all of this stuff that upsets you and then you see a Tesla.
01:07:35.000Like maybe 10 years ago, that guy sees that at home on his television, but he goes outside, he gets fresh air, he gets away from the screen for even 20 minutes, right?
01:07:44.000And it somehow recalibrates his brain, even just a little bit, to allow him to say, that's not a good idea.
01:07:51.000Something bad could come of doing something like this.
01:07:54.000But if you have it being fed to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you're not going to be able, especially if you're not aware that it's happening.
01:08:02.000And I wonder sometimes if any of them even think about what their algorithm is actually doing to you.
01:08:07.000I feel like people maybe in this space actually do more than your average person because your ideas are being called into question so you're wondering about the content that you're looking at.
01:08:16.000And I feel like both sides end up falling into it at least.
01:08:21.000So if you're not paying attention to what the algorithm is feeding you, it's upsetting you, it's angering you, and you don't have any other way to let it out, and all you do is you see a Tesla, you see a Cybertruck, and you say, I have to do something about it.
01:08:44.000It says, can the ball escape all 1,000 rings in time?
01:08:50.000That's just a death scroll sentence right there.
01:08:52.000And there are tons of videos like this where they're nonsensical mind rot videos where you just look at the screen and then watch a ball bounce around for one minute.
01:09:05.000Watching it, I'm like, oh, I gotta get out of here.
01:09:06.000You know, to your point about emotional dysregulation, we have completely interrupted the very natural process.
01:09:14.000Or relationship, rather, between effort and outcome.
01:09:16.000And I think that's a big part of this.
01:09:18.000It used to be that, you know, if you don't work, you don't eat.
01:09:20.000That's the best way to say it, I guess.
01:09:22.000But effort used to equal outcome, right?
01:09:26.000The effort in this regard, in this social regard, as far as social acceptance goes, it used to be that my community needs something, so I'm going to either develop my skills to be able to do it, or I'm going to help right now, and I'm going to win the social reward for that, both physically, like the biochemicals in my body are going to reward me for it, but also society rewards me for it.
01:09:43.000And now we get those rewards without having actually done anything.
01:09:56.000So, to try to wrap up that point I was making earlier, which launched this conversation about universities and social media, because someone super chatted saying professors are commies.
01:10:30.000A couple years later, you joined Facebook.
01:10:32.000You're now 13. At that time, at the end of the 2000s, there was a website in the top 500 websites in the world, and all it did was display police brutality videos.
01:10:44.000They were making millions of dollars doing this because Facebook would promote those videos more than anything else.
01:10:52.000The rage and injustice generated traffic, clicks, and shares.
01:10:57.000And Facebook didn't care what was causing it.
01:11:02.000So at the time, YouTube was largely promoting big-tittied women.
01:11:07.000Thumbnails for most YouTube creators that were successful were constantly incorporating women in bikinis because you had a choice on the front page of YouTube.
01:11:25.000Whatever you'd stop and look at and then share, Facebook would say, more.
01:11:30.000What ended up happening to these young kids, you're 13 years old, you're on Facebook, you're seeing, you know, it's my birthday today, you know, just got married, a new movie is out, and a police murdered a black man.
01:11:41.000You scroll down, movies, movies, police murdered a black man.
01:12:14.000So what's happening is, at this time, companies were trying to figure out how to make money, and they said, what articles get shared the most?
01:12:22.000I actually worked for some of these companies in the early 2010s.
01:13:07.000We had the good fortune of having lived before it, actually.
01:13:10.000So when we were all saying, ah, it's an echo chamber, we know, we still understood what life was like before that.
01:13:15.000But this exists for the right and the left as well.
01:13:18.000That being said, one of the greatest gifts the left accidentally gave was the censorship of the right, which forced the right onto a bunch of different platforms, resulting in a bunch of different ideologies, and it made rational, normal people find the ability...
01:13:33.000to communicate in a space that was dominated not by one powerful ideology, but many different that came together.
01:13:39.000Whereas the left, it's adhere to the culturels.
01:14:25.000What YouTube does is they put a negative algorithmic threshold on right-leaning content and a positive one on left-leaning content.
01:14:32.000Sure. So TikTok does this very heavily.
01:14:36.000And then what ended up happening with the TikTok ban is you got a bunch of conservatives cheering for it, despite the fact they were in the ghettos of TikTok.
01:14:42.000They wanted this machine to exist, which props up leftist ideology and destroys conservatives because they were getting morsels.
01:15:04.000You should be able to be the creator of whatever you want and however you want yourself to be viewed online.
01:15:09.000I just think the aggressiveness of some of these algorithms gets out of hand.
01:15:12.000I think it starts leading you down these radicals to extremism.
01:15:16.000So I do have to say, I don't agree with necessarily controlling what's put out on the internet, but not just leading.
01:15:21.000I think what Tim means is, how are we going to manage this in a way that they're not doing exactly what you're talking about?
01:15:27.000So I would think it would be more of a...
01:15:28.000Let off the gas pedal on those algorithms instead of controlling the media.
01:15:32.000Yeah, but people will create their own, I guess.
01:15:35.000One of the early things that Elon talked about on Twitter, and it never really materialized, probably because it's just too much of a lift at the moment, and we both agree and have since he purchased Twitter that he got it for the AI purposes.
01:15:46.000Agreed. But anyways, beyond that, one of the things they talked about in the very early days was being able to open source the algorithm and then manipulate it yourself.
01:15:55.000With radio buttons or whatever it was, right?
01:15:57.000That never materialized, but I would be very interested in seeing even a small test version of that somewhere.
01:16:45.000Right. And so women have no problem clicking on these things, maybe not at higher frequencies, but men will always.
01:16:51.000And so it didn't matter what the content was.
01:16:53.000Early YouTube had a problem where someone would make a video where it was just like a black screen with a timer, but the thumbnail would be, you know, a hot woman, and it would have millions of views.
01:17:03.000So YouTube said, okay, when we do nothing, people flood the zone with insane garbage that's pissing off our users because they think they're clicking a beautiful...
01:17:42.000You do nothing, and you get garbage, pure garbage, because then the algorithm is simply the human algorithm.
01:17:49.000So we want sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and that'll be the only content.
01:17:53.000So YouTube said, the problem is that results in people leaving the platform because people would click on this video and get nothing and say, that's not what I wanted.
01:18:55.000It's like, okay, then we're going to limit the notifications you can receive.
01:18:59.000People then started subscribing to too many.
01:19:02.000So they were subscribed to too many, so when they would go to the front page, it would be a random spattering, and now they weren't watching anything.
01:19:07.000So YouTube said, we're going to have to decide for you.
01:19:11.000Now on YouTube, 40% on average of a channel's viewership are unsubscribed and do not subscribe, but they watch regularly, which is nuts.
01:20:13.000That's why Vice documentaries were so big, because it was long-form content.
01:20:17.000So YouTube said, let's prioritize videos that are at least 10 minutes long, with a high watch time, That way, we start getting more Vice documentary style videos.
01:21:51.000There will always be celebrities, athletes.
01:21:53.000He's like, the messy, or I can't remember who he mentioned at the time, but like, the top soccer player in the world is always going to be super famous.
01:22:03.000I would actually split the difference now and say he was largely right about that I was wrong, but he wasn't as right as he thought.
01:22:10.000The amount of people who are going to know who the top basketball player is goes down, but they will still maintain celebrity status more so than...
01:22:45.000But the point is, it's not one show anymore.
01:22:50.000There's even, you know, with all due respect to Joe Rogan, based on the current podcast stats across the board, his numbers have decreased substantially from where they were several years ago because more and more shows keep emerging.
01:23:25.000There are so many shows, there's going to be mid-level fame, but then athletes, because they're not going to make more soccer leagues, more World Cups, that fame will still be there.
01:23:34.000Yeah, Ronaldo will still be the most subscribed person on social media.
01:23:39.000Yeah, we might be going through just like a modality change.
01:23:44.000Real quick, someone superchatted this the other day.
01:23:46.000Taylor Swift is considered to be a megastar right now, but she's pulling in a fraction, a tiny fraction of what Metallica pulls in.
01:23:55.000And that is the celebrity superstar of the day.
01:26:30.000To be fair, however, looking it up, after the Black Album tour, wherever we may roam, Metallica was getting 40,000 plus, many around 60,000.
01:26:42.000Taylor Swift currently does around 60,000.
01:26:47.000Comparable. And what you're saying about celebrities are a result of institutions.
01:26:51.000So when you say Michael Jordan, the institution is basketball or LeBron James.
01:26:55.000When we talk Michael Jackson, you're talking about the music industry, which are built up by large-scale companies that put millions of dollars into this one individual because the return on investment is very, very high around that one person.
01:27:09.000Now you have institutions like platforms, which would be like YouTube here, where somebody can, in a decentralized manner, build up a following of their own, but it's fractured compared to the size of it.
01:27:20.000It also tracks with what we value as a civilization, not the sport or the type of entertainment, but the type of person.
01:27:27.000Because we go from, I guess, people like Jimmy Stewart, who interrupted his career multiple times to go serve in the U.S.
01:27:35.000military, or Bob Feller, or Ted Williams, or Joey D., all these guys that left highly successful entertainment.
01:27:46.000We went from that to the Kardashians over the course of 40, 50 years.
01:27:50.000And, you know, they're out there on the hustle.
01:27:56.000As a society, admire people who, to your point from earlier, who sacrifice to something greater than themselves versus just looking in the mirror.
01:28:45.000This is one of the reasons that entertainment is worse now, is that the people who have gotten into these industries haven't lived the lives that those in the past have.
01:28:53.000Served in the military, did something really, really monumental with their life before they found their calling in the arts, right?
01:29:31.000Just keep talking trash about Severance and sending them an invoice?
01:29:35.000Actually, the best thing I could do if I want to hurt the show is go into liberal circles talking about it's the best show ever and they should watch it.
01:29:42.000Or you could just play it on your show and people would see how bad it sucks.
01:31:52.000Unless you're saying that the argument here is that even though he disagrees with him, he goes and pleads his case because that's his job to the...
01:31:58.000Well, that's what John Adams did, right?
01:31:59.000Okay, so he pleads his case to this lady and he talks about the failure...
01:33:05.000What I took from it was there are these people who want to be serial criminals who think they're justified in doing so and they should go to jail.
01:33:13.000And so what happens is Matt Murdock, lawyer, he goes to the prosecution and he goes...
01:34:59.000He's fighting a bad guy, and let me just say, they show, he knocks him down, and then the guy is leaning against the wall, and his leg is straight, and he jumps on his knee.
01:35:10.000Maybe he learned something from Jon Bernthal there on that one.
01:35:13.000Well, the original Daredevil on Netflix was pretty brutal.
01:35:16.000And now it's kind of not, but this was, so I appreciated it.
01:35:19.000The first six episodes, the first arc of the Punisher in season two of Daredevil is some of the best writing that they've done on television.
01:38:11.000It's because, I mean, David Ayer's kind of single-handedly going to bring back the mid-budget movie, mid-budget-esque, because he's got a fairly good reputation, Suicide Squad notwithstanding.
01:39:11.000The story is deep underwater there's like this layer of some material and underneath it there's a bunch of megalodons that can't penetrate through it and then something breaks through and the...
01:39:26.000I will say, however, if anybody wants to talk to you about the difference between honest diversity and forced diversity in Hollywood, The Fast and the Furious is the movie you bring up if you want to talk about a movie that's actually diverse, that nobody actually talks about it being diverse.
01:39:39.000In fact, they talked about making a female Fast and the Furious movie, and then everybody crapped on it because nobody wants it to be forced into you.
01:39:46.000We're going to go to your chats, my friends, so smash that like button, share the show.
01:39:51.000With everyone you know, give us a like.
01:39:53.000Every like you give represents one more federal employee getting fired.
01:39:58.000I wonder how many people are gonna be like, I'm not gonna like that.
01:40:00.000All the homes on sale in Loudoun County.
01:42:36.000There was a really great point that was brought up.
01:42:39.000On the culture war this morning, we were debating the legalities of Trump's actions, principally the deportations of Mahmoud Khalil.
01:42:46.000And the liberal fellow argued, you can't sign away your rights.
01:42:52.000The conservative fellow argued, as a condition of visa and entry, you can be deported, you can't speak, you can't do these things, you can't be disruptive.
01:43:38.000If you would like to exercise your Second Amendment in this country, you forfeit your Fifth Amendment rights as it pertains to certain issues.
01:44:37.000I think that's a pretty reasonable standard, to be honest.
01:44:40.000Like, you're here, if you're not a citizen, or you haven't received a green card specifically, not a visa yet, why should the entirety of the protection of our natural rights extend to you, right?
01:44:55.000I think that's a reasonable question for people to ask.
01:44:58.000Because the cost, the price for entry used to be assimilation.
01:47:34.000He ends up getting lucky enough that Hillary Clinton sucked and the economy was bad enough that people would vote for him.
01:47:39.000He gets to put in three conservative justices, which now starts siding across the board with the worldview of Trump.
01:47:45.000Otherwise, I'm sitting here listening to lawyers be like, well, in this year they said this, and this year they said this, and I'm like, I don't care at all who said what.
01:47:53.000The question is, right now, do we in society tolerate what they're doing?
01:47:56.000And the left and the right are completely bifurcated on what they deem to be moral and just.
01:48:02.000So the left is going to argue for their whims and power when they want.
01:48:52.000So I don't know where this goes, but this argument that people have that it is or is not allowed in the Constitution is completely meaningless.
01:48:58.000Right now you have, under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, everything Trump did is allowed.
01:49:03.000Yet somehow a court is still saying it's not allowed.
01:49:06.000Well, clearly the interpretation is meaningless then.
01:49:08.000Well, even the reasons that have been given for some of these injunctions, like the one that pertained to transgender people in the military, what the judge says that was...
01:49:19.000I'm sorry, there's no constitutional guarantee of not being demeaned at some point.
01:49:23.000So what the hell are you talking about?
01:49:25.000Well, so I asked him, is it cruel and unusual punishment to put a male prisoner in a female prison?
01:49:49.000So the left and the right are both going to claim they're following the Constitution and the other side is unconstitutional.
01:49:53.000Do you think it's wise that we keep referring back to this?
01:49:56.000And I mean the minutia of the law, like common law, constitution, and so on, case law that's happened over the time.
01:50:04.000Do you think it's wise for us to do that?
01:50:06.000And not just like, let's have a couple of principles that we definitely agree on, and then every generation will figure out the next thing.
01:50:19.000Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison when he became president, or right before he became president, and he said, the earth belongs always to the living generation.
01:50:27.000They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, and as they please during their time here, and however they see fit.
01:50:34.000Basically, life belongs to the living, not to 250 years ago.
01:50:56.000The seven articles of the Constitution are fair and fine.
01:51:00.000They outline the structure of governance, the three branches, etc.
01:51:05.000First of all, the Second Amendment has never been protected.
01:51:09.000Never. And it's only until 2008 and then 2010 that we actually had a right in this country to bear arms, despite the fact it literally says.
01:51:16.000Technically speaking, that is true, yeah.
01:52:49.000The expectation was when they wrote the Bill of Rights that it was going to be a timeless document that we could refer to and adjudicate based on the circumstances of today.
01:53:02.000That's like the redheaded stepchild of the amendments.
01:53:06.000So, the Ninth Amendment, the enumeration of the Constitution of certain rights should not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people, but we haven't ever defined them.
01:53:16.000Also, to the point you made a minute ago, the adjudication of the Second Amendment that happens at the federal level puts you in hot water with the Fifth, right?
01:53:24.000So you have, like, the standard for purchasing certain types of weapons has been codified in law to violate the Ninth and the Fifth.
01:53:40.000I mean, this is another instance where you have to waive your rights in order to try and exercise some of your rights, not to mention the purchase of literally any weapon.
01:53:49.000And the Tenth Amendment, of course, the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.
01:54:40.000It doesn't have any basis in reality because you're operating on two different data sets, your facts and my facts at that point, and our interpretation is based on those facts.
01:54:48.000Right. It's silly if you think about it.
01:54:50.000In the Constitution, you have seven articles.
01:54:53.000And they basically outline the structure of governance.
01:54:55.000When people say it's unconstitutional, they're always referring to the Bill of Rights.
01:54:59.000They're never referring to the actual structures of the Constitution.
01:55:01.000Only until Trump, with Articles 1, 2, and 3, are they now arguing what Trump is doing is unconstitutional or otherwise, which is hilarious.
01:55:08.000The Bill of Rights, so these things are clear-cut, the first articles.
01:55:12.000The executive shall have the power, the judiciary shall interpret, blah, blah, blah.
01:55:19.000So abridging the freedom of speech, it's been abridged the whole time and to this day.
01:55:23.000And the other argument is the interpretation of these extends beyond just their initial meaning, the best example being the Third Amendment, which says, So a lot of people always ignore the Third.
01:55:45.000They say, When do we have to worry about soldiers being in our houses?
01:55:49.000This has been interpreted by the Supreme Court not to refer to soldiers, but to mean the government can't commandeer your house for any reason unless prescribed by law.
01:56:01.000But eminent domain is codified in law, so as prescribed, they're allowed to do it.
01:56:05.000In which case, what's the point of the Third Amendment when it literally says Congress can just pass the law to overwrite it?
01:56:11.000So my point ultimately is everybody wants to claim They're protected under certain amendments to live in the moral world they want, and the real problem this country has is there is no singular, cohesive, moral foundation.
01:56:30.000That's why I say we're in a culture war, and at this point, they're going to accuse anything Donald Trump does of being a constitutional crisis and unconstitutional.
01:56:37.000So Trump is like, I have the legal authority to deport, you know, enemy combatants and illegal invaders that I declare.
01:57:31.000Democrats, literally Democrats, I'm just not being cute, have arrested his lawyers in, I think, two different states, criminally charging his lawyers.
01:57:38.000They've tried seizing his property, accusing him of crimes.
01:57:41.000Will Donald Trump just say, That's the way the cookie crumbles.
01:57:44.000Or is he going to say, if you want to play that game, I'll play that game all the same?
01:57:48.000And I think the only thing we can do is hope for is that Donald Trump is willing to exhort all authorities and powers he has under his interpretation of the Constitution because the Democrats are operating under their interpretation of the Constitution.
01:58:01.000And then we hope it doesn't come to any kind of extreme violence or anything and people chill out and then we get singular order.
01:58:08.000I would say we have to hope as well that Congress...
01:58:11.000Codify some of this stuff and Trump can exit like Cincinnati's and not leave us with a succession problem with powers he created that are going to be abused by people in the future.
01:59:54.000And then in 2024, Kamala got 75. Okay.
01:59:58.000So if they can run a candidate as bad as Kamala and get 74 million votes, is it not reasonable to think that unless they get a very, very, very good Republican candidate that can also coalesce a whole bunch of people under that banner again, that they run the risk of default...
02:00:16.000Liberal Democrat types just voting for whoever is there and without a strong personality in place?
02:01:24.000By merely existing in a district, they get an extra congressional rep, so the state has more power over everybody else.
02:01:31.000Yeah, which is funny because Trump's mass deportation is going to do more to protect our elections than any election law, any voter ID law.
02:01:37.000But I think that Democrats probably won't win, as Ezra Klein pointed out, as of right now.
02:01:43.000The census shift, still five years away, is going to result in Democrats losing so many electoral votes that even if Kamala won Pennsylvania and Michigan in the last election, she could not have won.
02:01:54.000So when you bring up the point about 75 million votes, maybe the next president, maybe J.D. Vance, doesn't get the popular vote, but the electoral college votes, it won't matter.
02:02:07.000Alright, let's grab one more here before we head on out.
02:02:12.000Eric Skelly says the left vandalizing the Cybertrucks are turning them and owners into true cultural rebels due to just owning the vehicle could get you hurt.
02:02:20.000Badass truck, badass owner, just like punk rock or being in a metal band.
02:03:21.000You go to TimCast.com, you click join us.
02:03:23.000Then the Discord instructions are right there, and you're hanging out with 20,000-plus individuals, and they've all got something to say, and they want to know what you've got to say, because one day, something you say, you may hear repeated by Donald Trump himself.
02:03:36.000But the only way that's possible is if you share your ideas.
02:03:38.000So you can follow me on X and Instagram, at TimCast.
02:03:41.000Dan, do you want to shout anything out?
02:03:42.000Yeah, Drinking Bros Podcast, that's my main.
02:03:45.000Then I have Citizen Podcast, which is a little bit more serious.
02:03:48.000We interview people and talk about what it means to be an American citizen, what it really means.
02:03:54.000You can follow me, Cody McIntyre, on Instagram, and be sure to check out Boonies HQ on Instagram, YouTube, and sign up for the Discord for exclusive content and some member perks.