Kind: captions Language: en Elon sparks ferocious debate with a single social security chart. Jackson Hwitt coaches immigrants on how to file for tax returns. Trump's tariff D-Day is upon us and coincidentally historic enemies across Asia unite. What could be going on there? Ag Pam Bondi pursues Tesla bombas across the US and seeks a death penalty for Luigi Manion. A real estate agent explains why governmental regulations are keeping renters broke and builders rich. And YouTuber Dr. Mike battles antivaxers in the ongoing debate of what is science actually. Drew, the world continues to fight for its immortal soul and I'm honored to be here on the front lines. Let's do this. That was poetic. Yeah, that's way better than the headlines. It feels true. We We are in a global debate for what is true and what is going to help us. And boy oh boy, people do not agree. We look at the same thing and we see something extremely different. It's a trouble time we live in Drew. That is for sure. We saw this in the live. Jumping right into the Social Security alleged fraud. I'mma leave it there. Elon was on stage presenting in Wisconsin as he continues his political push to get elect certain judges there. He had a chart that showed that just I'm just going to say it flatly and plainly that the number of noncitizens who were issued social security numbers have 10xed from 2021 to 2024. Yep. So, taking all the spin out of it, we're just saying what the presented numbers say. During the live today, chat got very lively at this point in the discussion. All right, let's hear it from them and then we can talk about what we think is spin, what we think is real, is there any outright fabrications? Uh, let's go. Let's hear it. You'll notice there's a strange trend here. Um, where uh how many social security numbers were issued? Uh, it it's Do you want to Yeah. So let me um let me tell you what happened here. We we started at the top of the system. You want to talk about a lot of we started at the top of the system mapping the whole system of social security to understand where all the fraud was and there's a lot of great people there that showed us um in really a lot of waste. And so that came up with a big list of stuff they're working on. You've heard some of that already. But this is what jumped out at us. Um when we saw these numbers we're like what is this? In 21 you see 270,000 uh people goes all the way to 2.1 million in 24. These are non-citizens that are getting social security numbers. Yeah. This this is a mind-blowing chart. Yeah. Just this this literally blew us away. Like we went there to find fraud and we found this by accident. And this isn't political, by the way. My parents immigrants. Uh yeah, this country's been great to us. My brother and sister are all born in Spain. I'm prolegal immigration. They have a couple of choices. They can charge you with a misdemeanor or a felony under 1325 or they can make an administrative offense like a parking ticket. Basically, they were told to do that, make an administrative offense under the last administration. And you walk across the border, they uh do what's called a release from your own recgnizance and they give you an NTA, a notice to appear, which appear at a judge. The wait times on judges are like average six years. Look at Grock, you'll see it on immigration judges. There's only 700 of them. This is 5.5 million people. Okay. So, what happens then? Once you're in the country and you got asylum through one of these pathways, we mapped the whole thing out. Uh, you can apply for a work document. You file a 765. It's the work form. You get this form called the 766. That's the authorization. And then Social Security Administration automatically sends you in the mail your Social Security number. No interview, no ID. This is worth like just reiterating it. It it it's not that it's not people sometimes think that under the Biden administration that that he was simply asleep at the switch. He wasn't asleep. They weren't asleep at the switch. It it it was a massive largescale program to import as many illegals as possible ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the the American people and make it a permanent deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape. We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example. We've gone through on every benefit program we went through, we found groups from this particular group of people, this 5.5 million people in those benefit programs. And then what was really really disturbing us was why? We're asking ourselves why. And so we actually just took a sample and looked at voter registration records and we found people here registered to vote in this population. Yes. and who did vote and and we found some by sampling that actually did vote and we have referred them to prosecution at the homeland security investigation service already that is already happening there's a lot of information that still needs to come out um one of the things that I hope in the way that I approach the world will be useful to people is the idea of running a thought experiment rather than needing every shred of evidence you can begin to map out your own value system make it something very conscious to you by asking yourself Okay, where where do I have a problem here rather than getting into the squabble? And this is what was happening in the live. It was all squabble about let me see the proof. Uh I need to know that these numbers are validated. I don't trust Elon Musk. There's no way any of this is true. Um that's one layer to have the debate. The other layer is to say, okay, well, how would I feel about this if this is true? And then we can get to, okay, well, if it is true, then I feel this way. If it's not true, then I feel that way. Um, but if you understand what value system is driving your thinking, you're going to get a lot of clarity. So, I would ask people to ask one simple question. Should people be able to come into the country illegally? Okay, that's question one. Uh, if you agree that no, people should not be able to come into the country illegally, we need to update our policies so that we're not playing favorites to anybody. It's just this is our immigration policy. And the reason that I think and and I mean this from myself and I hope that people would adopt this that the reason that you want to do that is that you're allowing yourself to be beholden to the voting public when you say um I'm going to make a policy. You're saying I'm going to drag this into the daylight. I'm going to let everybody look at this. I'm going to let Congress decide what they want to pass as laws. I'm going to make them battle it out to get on the same page uh about what we're all going to agree to moving forward. When you try to do things under the cover of darkness, what you're saying is, I don't think that the voting public is going to be trusted to make the right decision here. I want to sidestep the political process. I don't trust it to yield the outcome that I want. That is a group of people that trust themselves in my opinion too much. You should want to go through the voting public as a way to go, I have biases. I know that and so I want to involve everybody in this decision-making process or at least the people that are going to be politically active. Cool. Uh, so should people be allowed in the country legally or illegally? Should we do things as a matter of policy or do we want our um representatives to do things under the cover of darkness? Should somebody that is not a citizen be allowed to vote? That's another thing. So again, let's say that yes, I am perfectly fine for people to come in legally or illegally. I don't care. I think the policy should be such that people should be able to come across the border. We're a nation of immigrants. Let's not be hypocrites. Come on over everybody. Uh but if that is your stance, do you think that they should have to go through a process of becoming a citizen? Like all of these questions are answerable whether or not you think this data is real. So we'll get to where I think the spin begins in this so that people can begin to separate spin from just objective facts. But you don't need to know the final answers to know what you think about each beat in this process. And that's where I think that this gets deranging is we saw in our own live that people derange immediately off I either believe Elon or I don't believe Elon. Forget all of that. What do you think each beat of this process should be? Once we have that mapped out, then we can say cool. Uh this is how we want to vote. This is how we want to move things forward. But everybody's arguing at the right level, which is the level of the value system that will then drive the policy rather than saying that I think that this graph is fake. Okay. Now, do I think that this graph is fake? I have a feeling that the truest statement ever made about statistics is that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And that you can look at something from any angle to tell the story that you want to tell. And I have no doubt that Elon and uh anybody else that's pulling these numbers is going to pull the politically expedient numbers. That goes for the Biden administration. that goes for the Trump administration, that goes for every administration ever all through human history, is we are going to pull the numbers that tell the story that we already believe in, that tell the story that we think is good for us 100%. So that's why I think that running these at the level of thought experiment is going to be far higher utility than just getting lost in the numbers. Okay. To me, I'm willing to believe that these numbers represent, while admittedly you're going to go in and find the thing that you want to find, that they really do represent the number of and their chart technically says new non citizen um acquirers of a social security number. So, the I don't know why when they talked about it, they dropped the word new, but that's very clearly on the chart. When do we want to be issuing social security numbers? as somebody who's married to a green card holder, we had to go through this process. There was all kinds of filing and waiting and all of that stuff before she could get her um social security number and because she's not a citizen has never attempted to vote. So, it seems like a very important question to ask ourselves. Do we want non-citizens full stop to be able to vote? And should there be any time period or u process to vet them? Whether that's uh checking that they are who they say they are, that they have legal United States identification, you know, so on and so forth. What are the hurdles that we're going to put before somebody? Um, now where it becomes spin is when they're telling you what the story is when he goes, here's the data. And then we started asking ourselves why. Everything after that is conjecture. Um, now it's entirely possible that their narrative is accurate, but it's pretty easy to steal man. a totally different argumentation about we're doing this um to keep costs low for the American consumer. We're doing this because these are people that are being persecuted in their homeland. So sure, some people are getting by the system, but this is really about doing the moral thing that also happens to be good for the American people because they can get their costs lowered by having immigrants who will take jobs at a cost that American workers simply wouldn't do. Very easy to spin that. So again, to me, both of those are narratives and thus they are no longer tied to just pure objective fact. Um, but the narrative that they're putting forward is one as somebody who lives in California is like there is a second and third order consequence whether it is the intention or not that when you allow people to come to the country that are like, "Oh my god, th there's such an incredible safety net here. It's opportunity. It's safety net. It's wonderful. It's way better than where I'm coming from. And you allow them to flood over the border with no expectation of assimilation. Uh they would be fools not to take from the system to say, "Hey, what they call maximum payout that I'm going to contribute illegal or not. I'm contributing to the system, but now I'm getting a disproportionate payout." Partly because I've only been here for a very short period of time. And and I don't have the math to back this up, but where I really expect people's alarm bells to go off is either when there's a disproportionate payout, meaning as a pret percentage that as a recent immigrant that your benefits are set to the max and that the like veterans is the one that people always go to. You've got veterans who are struggling and you've got immigrants that are um able to take advantage of these systems. Why is that? Yeah. So that's where I would expect people to really say, "Okay, hold on. This shouldn't be disproportionate. Hold on. If we're going to rank order people, veteran should come first, then a normal citizen, then an immigrant, or just say what your rank order is." Um, so again, that we can draw it in the light. We can debate about it. We can set policy and move forward together as a nation. But that isn't how this is playing out. People are getting stuck on the very true fact. This is story. This is spin. We don't know that they're doing it to create a deep blue state uh to which we can never escape something whatever his exact phrase was. Um though judging by what happened to the amnesty granted in California by Reagan like somebody who when he was in California I'm not sure if he was a Democrat or Republican. Ultimately he starts as a Democrat becomes a Republican at some point. I actually don't know the timeline. Uh but he creates amnesty in California ever since California has been a deep blue state because you're going to get people that are going to vote for the policies that best take care of them. Uh and whether that bankrupts the country or not becomes irrelevant. Everybody does what's in their best short-term interest. Uh so given how we've seen that play out in California, which has not been positive, um it isn't something that I as somebody who has a bias uh want to see play out on the national level. So there certainly is internally coherent logic that Elon is laying out but it is very important that people understand where the data which is already going to be whenever you see data it's always going to be cherrypicked to tell a story to give people the confidence to move in a direction it's not it's not always nefarious um but that's where the spin picks up both sides spin it like crazy that's why I think hitting this at the thought experiment level is the right level of analysis Yeah, that seems logical to me because in the live the first thing somebody said was this is a partisan chart and to me you can't even get to the facts or you can't have the narratives about value systems. You can't open it up to debate when the data presented is already skewed. So I think taking a step back and establishing your independent value system and then seeing how do you feel about this many social security numbers being issued and then looking at the data that's when I think it's a bit more like productive um versus it's just Elon says it lie talking point talking point talking point 100%. Yeah. Um this came out at a similar time where Americans are filing their taxes. There's uh Savannah Hernandez was reporting that Jackson Hwitt was had a tent outside Roosevelt Hotel in New York where a lot of the migrants are staying and they were handing out flyers for t for migrants to get tax refunds up to 14,000. So I did some digging into this. This is based off both the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit. So there were a certain stipulations for how you could get that much money back. Um, but the TLDDR of it all is if you have some level of income coming in and you have more than three dependents, it's easy to get a much like max tax refund. Um, I feel like this is in the same class of if a migrant comes in, get that social security uh card, gets those benefits, and then works a low wage job, they can then turn around, use this tax uh refund hat, and then get an additional 14K. theoretically that migrant could make out better than a veteran, better than somebody whose federal minimum wage b makes them uneligible to earn some of these like tax reforms and rebates. So, this is another way of kind of helping um illegals more than we're helping the average American. Um but now that it's a tax problem, do you think it's in the similar vein of what Elon is saying that it should be closed full stop? like what's your opinion from this perspective since it is technically a tax loophole and not the nefarious Democrats importing it or anything like that? I think people have to strip away all of the um surface level moments of impact to get lost in the debate about these aren't illegals. These are people paying into the system. Uh guys, this is what we've been saying on the left forever is that these people are paying into the system and so you're making the argument for us. If they're able to get something out, then they're paying something in. um the right that these guys are illegal. They shouldn't even be here in the first place. And so go a layer deeper and just ask yourself as a matter of policy, where should we be at this? Um I find that one of the things that deranges people's thinking the most is an unwillingness to prioritize things. So for instance, I think a veteran should have like top top top priority. So, if we're going to make sure that people have benefits and that they're getting a great payout, somebody who put their life on the line for this country, yes, please. That to me is just good sense if you want to honor the people that are sacrificing the most to build this country. Um, so, okay, cool. Right now, do we have a system that yields that outcome or not? But anyway, having people rank order things. So, to me, a veteran, then a long-standing citizen, then a noob, uh the person who's paid the least into the system. That to me just feels like a nice simple uh way to think through this problem. And then we can go, okay, is that what's actually happening? Oh, and by the way, this is a math question. We are right now the the country is in debt by tens of trillions of dollars. And once you wrap your head around that that that we don't have this money and that the way that we take it, I've talked about this too many times. The way that we take it is immoral in my opinion through money printing and essentially taxing the whole world. So we have to outline what do we think is the moral way to move all of this forward. Um if we're going to let illegals in, then you certainly want to get them paying into the system. Uh but then why make them illegal? Like create the path by which you just say this is the thing. So to me it just all comes back to drag this into the light. Let the voter say which way they want the country to go. Let people's voice be heard. Uh build things out at the level of policy. Do not do this under the cover of night. And now at least we're able to debate this stuff. But people are so easily baited into the headline rhetoric of uh they're not illegal [ __ ] Nobody's illegal. Um they're paying into the system and losing sight of sure, but if they pay the minimum and we give them the maximum payout, but we don't do that for other people, how do we feel about that? And then I do want to see the public debate around what would have to be true for the setup that we see to be the way that it is. Any philosophy needs to accurately describe the world as it is. The second you're not describing the world as it is, we have a problem. So, we had a setup that had millions of illegal people that were violating the law to come into the country. Okay? Whatever explanation you give for that needs to explain that that is happening. Um, you've got a tax consultancy firm that realizes they can make money by standing on the street explaining to immigrants whether legal, illegal. I'm going to guess they don't care, but that they're going to make money by explaining to them how to maximize um the use of the system. Okay? Is that a thing that we want or don't want? So, getting down into the this is what's happening. So, what have we done? What would need to be the motivation for that to be the outcome? Uh and explaining why veterans are getting iced out, why we have such a homeless problem. like what is the motivation set that would accurately describe that world. Elon has put forward one set that has internal logic. It may not be true, but it has internal logic. And so the left needs to present their best case of no, no, no, that's [ __ ] He's partisan hack. Here's the real reason. And then allow people to go, do I really buy? Because if I had to uh read the left's mind, it would go something like this. This is a humanitarian crisis. The US itself has created much of this instability, especially in South America. Uh, we have a debt to pay. We stole this land. We've created instability. We are a nation of immigrants. We need to stop being hypocrites. We are the biggest economy in the world. We need to start taking care of people. We've allowed these billionaires to flourish. This is crazy. Get them to pay their fair share. Allow these destitute, persecuted people to come into the country. We've got plenty. Let's take care of them. I imagine their take goes something like that. Cool. Now, at least we can set those up and go, okay, given what we know about the world, do we really think the people in power, this is now my spin, you can hear it in my [ __ ] voice, but this is actually what I believe that people will lie uh spin to get in power and maintain power. So, which of the following seems more likely? We're all just like big hearts and we want to welcome everybody in. I don't think that's 0%. I think that really is in the mix, but I think people just want to get in power and stay in power. I think that's true of Trump. I think that's true of Elon. I think that's true of Biden. I think that's true of Kamla. It just that's man's political animal. James Burnham, James Burnham. So looking at the world and saying that I think there's far more utility in believing that um you let that many people in because it you think it keeps you in power and it's like yep everything now clicks into place for me. Not that people don't do things for humanitarian reasons. But that's not the primary driver. The primary driver is people will do a certain type of person who becomes an elected official will do and say whatever they need to to gain and maintain power. It is very rare that somebody gets to that office and maintains it by being a George Washington. They don't make them like old Washington no more. Everybody wants to become king. Nobody wants to give it up. Yeah, too true. Too true. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about the impossible choice that crypto investors are facing every day. You either keep your crypto in a secure retirement account with contribution limits and restrictions, or you trade freely on exchanges and run some risk that your assets all vanish. It Capital's premium custody accounts finally eliminate this impossible choice. Premium custody accounts utilize a closed loop system that prevents hackers from draining compromised accounts. Your assets are never leveraged, never loaned out, and never mixed with business operations. Unlike crypto IRA, premium custody accounts have no annual contribution limits. You can buy and sell crypto 24/7 with complete freedom. Yes, transactions are taxable, but the unmatched security and control you get in return is worth it. Visit irrustcap.com/impact and use code impact when you sign up to fund your account to get a $100 bonus. Again, that's it.com/impact. And be sure to use code impact. This is a paid advertisement. And now back to the show on this day. I call it the tariff apocalypse because it happened. U reciprocal tariffs, the auto automotive industry tariffs, steel and aluminum import tariffs. Uh the Venezuelan oil secondary tariffs, we'll get to that. Yeah, it's a whole different thing. Secondary tariffs, a whole different thing. Uh our trade relations with Canada and Mexico, those tariffs. Today is the day that a lot of those tariffs are going into effect. We already see some scar fear and insecurity around the stock market. Um the consumer price index is moving. Consumers have less uh confidence in the American economy. I understand on paper long term this is supposed to be better but it hurts right now. How do we move through this tariff apocalypse? What do you think happens in the short term? And what can people do to kind of either brace for it or just kind of have to eat their medicine and just kind of wait it to work? In the short term it creates chaos. America is in a very precarious position because even I as a lifetime American citizen born and bred here as a businessman, I look at this and go, I don't know for how long this is going to be true. And when you build your government based on executive orders, then the next president's going to come in and they're going to write a whole bunch of executive orders that undo all the executive orders from the president before. Trump did that day one. Yeah. 100%. And so it's like, if I'm not mistaken, over the last three presidencies, it's been like orders of magnitude more EOS. And so we're just in this period where it's like we're going to do everything by decree. And that creates the unknown. So I don't know. As a capital allocator, I'm like, uh, do I move as if these tariffs are for real? Like when people talk about the 2.02 trillion, Trump is now saying that is far more than that. of these companies that are like, "Okay, we're gonna invest massively in America. We're going to be moving our chip manufacturing here, our car manufacturing here, etc., etc." Um, will that actually play out? I'll plant a flag on this one. I'll be very curious to see if I end up being right. My gut instinct is these guys are buying themselves time to midterms. They will spend the least amount of money possible to find out if Trump is going to pull this off. And if they do, then they'll fasttrack the rest. And it's like, okay, cool. We expect him to be in power uh the Republican party to be in power for another four years. And so now you're talking about a six-year ride. Yeah, we're gonna have to make investments. You you you will never survive public scrutiny as a public company if you're like, "No, no, no, trust me. They're gonna go out of power in six years. No way." At that point, they will say, "Okay, cool. I I at least see this runway." But that's my instinct that they're going to buy themselves time. And if we are in a recession at the time of the midterms, it will flip. This will go Democrat. uh Trump will become lame duck and Republicans will lose power and Democrats will step back in and just obliterate with EOS everything that Trump has done. Uh and so that's just how this pendulum swings. That makes me paranoid. Okay, I've lived here my whole life. So I can only imagine and I don't have [ __ ] that like struggles with tariffs. We're a media company. So it's like we make everything right here. Uh and even I'm like well I don't know. So um the short term is all insecurity, the unknown, paranoia, turbulence in the markets. Long-term, if he can pull it off, it onshores manufacturing. It begins to um reignite the middle American male in a belief in himself that he can do something, build something, create something, use his hands. I always caveat AI could just make all of this a moot point. But you you have to debate right now in the world where people just cannot imagine what the future is actually going to be like. And so they're all acting as if AI isn't going to just totally change this anyway. Um, so I'll keep my arguments at that level, but I think that is necessary given that we are in a cold war with China. And so, um, people have to put it into that global context because that is, as far as I can tell, precisely what's driving, uh, Bessant, Lutnik, Trump, Elon, like all of them understand this moment at a global level in the way that I don't think most of us on a day-to-day level think about. These guys have made more money off of understanding global markets than anybody. So, um, they get it like they get, especially Bessant understands how global macroeconomics works. And so given that, I think they're all racing to try to pull this off, to um understand what a cold war with China is going to look like, to understand how much of our modern life is controlled through Taiwan, that Taiwan is the number one ch of China, that China controls like 85% of our manufacturing means insane. Americans make software, Chinese make things. So, um, it is a very important game to understand all of that and to recognize that we have to bring some of this back. And so, it it is a game I think we have to play. You can't just accept defeat. You can't just say, "Well, China now controls everything." And I guess when they decide that they're not going to give us anymore, like, "Fuck us." I think about this a lot with Israel and um, Gaza, Palestine. It's like, bro, you can't let people control your water, your power. Um, I expect people to hate this [ __ ] take, but this is self-evident to me. I don't give a [ __ ] if I'm under an apartheid regime or not. If you're sending me billion dollars in aid, I don't build my military capabilities until I can take care of my [ __ ] water and power. So, I'm going to make sure that I'm getting as close to 100% on my own two feet as humanly possible. And that would be my pitch to Americans. Hey, we are not on our own two feet from a manufacturing standpoint. China has got you, man, by the shortened curies, as they used to say. And so us pretending that that isn't the case or us intentionally blinding ourselves, I don't know. But that's where I'm like, uh, kids, don't you hope Trump is right? Like, you've got to onore some of this. Not saying all of this. You've got to onore some of it. Anyway, I would listen to Bessant. I would listen to Letic far more closely than I listen to Trump. He does so much chaos in his speaking uh in a way that those two are very clear, very cogent. You can track the internal logic. We're going to find a trillion dollars in deficit with Doge. Sorry, we're going to find a trillion dollars in deficit spending with Doge. And then we're going to find a trillion dollars in additional revenue from things like tariffs, things like Trump's gold card. We're going to balance the budget, and then we're going to deregulate. We're going to unlock the economy. we're going to get to say four or five% GDP growth and now all of a sudden everybody's feeling good. If they do that by the midterms, dude, you got another four years on top of this. So, it's just a question of given the complexities of global markets, can they? I don't know. And then drilling down into the Venezuelan secondary tariffs. So, reciprocal tariffs, you know, they have 200 tariffs on American avocado. So we put 200 tariffs on Indian% 200% uh 200% on there. So that's the reciprocal, but secondary is something different that you broke down. So I want you to break that down too for those of And that's specifically to countries importing Venezuelan oil. Yep. So a secondary tariff is where the economic warfare machine that is the US Treasury Department, which Bessant even said, I when asked like what was the thing you find most surprising about your job? And he said, how much of my time is spent on national security? Meaning, I'm gonna go to countries and be like, you imported Venezuelan oil. Nope. Now there's a tariff across whatever on your country. Uh, and so this is how you break the back of an economy is, and this is the thing that we haven't done with Russia. To me, Venezuelan oil is whatever. This really plays out in can we put secondary tariffs on anybody that does business with Russian oil? And you're starting to hear Trump now make noises about it. This is the drum that I've been banging. I will remind myself not to overindex on how much I care about being right. I need to find the right answer. It's the only thing that matters. I'm gonna be wrong a lot. But this was one of those things where I was like, "This is almost certainly the play. Trump is not a um stoogge for Putin and he's going to put in his back pocket that if Putin doesn't play ball because to look like a hero, Trump has to end that [ __ ] war because he said, "I'll end it on day one." Everybody knew that wasn't true. But nonetheless, like you called your [ __ ] shot, bro. And so you got to get this one [ __ ] done. So I think he knows that. And if Putin ends up being the one that's trying to um stall, trying to drag this on, that's going to be obvious for everybody paying any kind of attention. And so Trump has said, "I'm going to use secondary tariffs on the Russian oil and gas economy." Because the reason that they've been able to continue to thrive and run this war is all the sanctions that everybody put on them was on everything except their largest industry by a country mile, which is oil and gas. And the reason they couldn't do that is that will spike gas prices in Europe and elsewhere. So, you're going to get all this pressure from your allies who are like, "Hey, hey, hey, we get the moral thing here, but I also can't have grandma freezing to death in the middle of the winter uh because we want to punish Putin. My populace is not going to go for that." So, this is where it's like, okay, understand the potency of a secondary tariff if you can pull it off. So, I think what Trump is betting on is that we can up our production here in the US. uh of oil and natural gas and then we can export it to make that make up that demand. So we would effectively be taking market share from Russia. [ __ ] awesome for us, man. Awesome for us, devastating for Russia if we can pull it off. Um so yeah, my hunch is that that's the algorithm that Trump is running and he's saying something to Putin like you have two choices. Choice number one, end the [ __ ] war. Choice number two, I'm gonna take your market share and sell our oil and natural gas. Now, I there is a huge base assumption in there that we can meet that demand at a price that would be of roughly equal value to Europe and I have not looked closely enough at it to know if that's true. That breakdown rides in the back of that assumption. Um, but his behavior doesn't make sense minus that. And we see some for you said macroeconomics earlier. So in other international news, China, Japan, and South Korea have agreed to closely cooperate in response to these US tariffs. So we're already seeing other countries saying, "Okay, this is happening. So now we need to kind of rethink our business deals and our trade deals." Not just countries saying it. It's one thing if Germany and France and Italy, who hey, they had their moment 80 years ago in World War II, uh, but since then they have not been bitter rivals. When I say China, Japan, and South Korea [ __ ] hate each other, I mean hate in like all capital letters. Uh so the seeing the three of them, in fact, there's a reason that they did the photo op where they're doing like the crossarmed handshake thing, uh like where you each, uh wrap arms as you cheers and drink from your glass. Yeah. So that is I have to believe even from their own lens, they view that as this is historic because the the amount of animosity, man, cannot be overstated. like this. This is like um if 30 years from now Palestinians and Israelis were holding hands and doing a trade deal, you'd be like, "Whoa, those guys used to be bitter rivals, bitter rivals, and now they're shaking hands." I have a conspiracy theory. think that this could be the start of like a rising empire because I think if China as the head Japan and South Korea kind of fall in as the equivalent to our Mexico and our Canada to their China that can be like a dynasty in Asia that I think can essentially take over the world because they're already each of them individually already are cutting edge in so many different industries that you just scale that with China's manufacturing and you can take over practically like here's the thing that that isn't a conspiracy theory. That is exactly geopolitics. So geopolitics is who who's got the baddest military on planet Earth. Usually the Navy. Whoever's got the best navy wins. And so everybody's always asking themselves two questions. Who can beat me militarily? And who has trade that I can do with that would make me more prosperous as a nation. And for the last 70ish years, it's been Pax Americana. And America's had the best navy. We have controlled we've uh patrolled the seas we have kept the international order on land and we were also the biggest economy. So everybody would ask those two questions they would come up America America America and then globalism happens and this is why you'll forever get this expand and contract expand and contract. You expand through globalism, you contract through protectionism. And the reason that that aka populism, the reason that that happens is as you go globalist, you make your quote unquote enemies strong. And for better or worse, when humans get strong and they detect any weakness in somebody else, which almost always comes after you have a big empire, then they go, "Hey, wait a second. Why am I doing what you want me to do? I'm going to start doing what I want to do. I'm going to start doing trade alliances with Japan and South Korea and I don't care about you. I don't care what the US thinks about this. And the Japanese and South Koreans start going, "Huh? Uh, America's being a little dodgy right now. I don't know." Like they swing wildly from one administration to the next. I don't feel confident that I know who they are, what they're going to be like in four more years. And so, uh, China might be authoritarian and maybe I don't love that, but at least they're consistent. I think that I look into the future, I see Xinping, as far as the eye can see. What do we have 20 years, 30 years life with Xiinping? Hey, that's the kind of future I can see. I can predict. I love that. And uh just like Americans knew that [ __ ] Mao starved his own people to death that he was he made Darth Vader look like the nicest guy ever. He made the emperor look like a good dude. So, uh we were still more than happy to go sell [ __ ] to them. So, this is what happens. you go, I can get cheap [ __ ] from them. I can sell them things. This is going to be amazing. And it's what sets up Thusidities Trap. And so, we might need to do like a video on Thusidities Trap or something at some point because that's one of those that sounds so fancy and people don't know what that means. It just means the formerly the for all my UFC fans, you've got a champion. He's been dominant forever, but he gets towards retirement age. He just can't accept that the young Bucks are coming for him. For a while, he's gonna dodge him. Gonna be like, "He's not my class. He's got to fight these other people before he gets to me." Disrespect. Disrespect. And then it gets to the point where you can no longer um deny that they're the the one you should be fighting. They're the number one contender. So, what do you do? You go on a bark offensive. What a fool. What an idiot. Doesn't know how to fight. I'm going to thrash him. Beat him in the first 30 seconds. You've never seen anything like this. Trying to get in their head. trying to keep him weak, but ultimately you actually throw punches. Now all the yapping is the economic warfare. Unfortunately, like 70% of the time it ends in actual bloodshed and we're on that path and we are acting exactly the way theidities trap comes from the [ __ ] ancient Greeks and seeing what was happening between Athena and Sparta. And it was like yeah these two are going to collide like Athens can't accept I can't remember actually which who was stronger at the time. One of them couldn't accept that they had become weaker and the other was like you will show me my proper respect. Uh and so the Thusidities was watching. He's like uh oh these two are going to collide. There's just no escaping it. And of course they did. Um so that's what we're all poised with. That's what you see when you see the tariffs being thrown around. It's a lot of barking. Unfortunately, you have to do some of this because you have to onore blah blah blah. All the things that I already said. Uh if it was just posturing, then we could just say, "Hey, America, chill the [ __ ] out." You can't. Um so yeah, when you see China, Japan, and South Korea holding hands, your right to be this feels like an alliance. Yeah. It's known as spheres of influence. China's building the East Asian sphere of influence, and they're basically going to say American stay the [ __ ] out. I see it. It's happening. Um, locally, Pam Bondi had time. Um, she is coming for everybody. She's coming for your neck. She first said she wants 20 years prison time for the Colorado man accused of firebombing a Tesla. You got to play this clip. You've got to hear her in her own words. I've made it clear. If you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, we will find you, arrest you, and put you behind bars. Today, I'm proud to announce that the Department of Justice has unsealed federal charges against another Tesla attacker. We've charged Cooper Frederick in the firebombing of a Tesla dealership that occurred on March 7th in Lovelin, Colorado. All of these cases are a serious threat to public safety. Therefore, there will be no negotiating. We are seeking 20 years in prison. The crime was committed in Colorado and thanks to the great investigative work by the FBI, the defendant was arrested in Plano, Texas. Let this be a warning. You can run, but you cannot hide. Justice is coming. Wow, bro. That is like bad uh scripting. It's like, come on. If you want to sound badass, go get your boy Taylor Sheridan. Get him to write some scripts for you guys. Like, we got to do better. Uh, so I get I get weird vibes from Pam Bondi. There's this is pure emotion, so everyone can just totally disregard this. Uh, there is something in the um the glee with which she does this. Listen, you need a society based on law and order. You can't have people firebombing anything. Forget Tesla. I wish it were anything but Tesla. Uh, just because it's obviously people are going to cry impure motives. She had she had more time though cuz she came for Luigi Manion, the killer of Brian Thompson, the healthcare CEO. Yeah. She said he murdered uh Luigi Manion, murder of Brian Thompson, an innocent man and father of two young children, was a premeditated cold-blooded assassination that shot America. She described Thomasson's killing as an act of political violence, and she's seeking the death penalty for him. So, she's putting down an iron hammer. So, at least she's consistent. But do you think it's a little bit of an overreach or um what we have now is more aggressive than I would like to see the tenor of a uh administration be. Um but hey, you doing what they're doing is not going to be easy. If you are trying to reestablish law and order, you're going to have to get people that are pretty doggedly in that camp. Mhm. Um, but my take on this is that when you start putting together uh Pam Bondi's level Pam Bondi's level of aggression, you've got Ice uh with their extreme level of aggression and uh Homeman and the way that he talks. Um, you're starting to create this draconian feel that I am aesthetically not a fan of. If this ends up leading to the outcome that we want, great. And thank goodness nobody had to listen to me. But I will say that this feels cartoonishly aggressive. And so I want law and order. I want there to be very clear this is this is the rule and if you violate that rule, this is what's going to happen. But there's something cartoonish about the sort of exaggerated way that we're going about it. I think lawfare is being used in a very interesting ways. Uh Joe Biden mentioned it with the Hunter Biden prosecution. Trump has experienced it. And now we see in France, Marian Le Pen, who was the uh leading in the 2027 polls in France, has just been sentenced to four years in prison and was banned from running in the next election. So people are even screaming in France that some people are using lawfare to sway political influence. Um it's weird. Like she embezzled funds. She was found guilty in a court of law. I'm hoping it was a legit trial, but it is kind of convenient that the number one challenger to the current party has now been jailed. Yeah. Uh people have got to wean themselves of this problem because the one when somebody's politically motivated like we were talking about earlier, they're going to find the way to look at this. They're going to find the case to pursue like with all the Trump stuff where it was like, okay, yes, he did violate a law, but technically the statute of limitations had elapsed. Also, this is normally done as a misdemeanor, but they're doing it as a felony. It's like all that stuff just starts adding up. And speaking for myself, you start looking at it going, just let him run. Like, either you can beat his ideas or you can't. Now, this doesn't mean that we want a lawless society. You want people to be held accountable. But when you're talking about a political opponent that you're pursuing, you've got to raise the bar. Otherwise, the look of impropriety is absolutely horrible. in the episode that I did with um Joseph's Chris Joseph Chris Joseph's thank you uh where we were talking about okay are the Congress people actually doing insider trading and the right answer is even if they're not it looks like they are you do not want to be in a position where you do that even Alexander Hamilton when he was in office said because I'm going to be the head of the treasury I'm going to divest everything I'm going to take my salary from this I'm not going to be taking money from outside the government. The odds of it looking like there's impropriety is way too high. Uh and I thought that was brilliant. And he ended up somebody wrote him like asking, hey, how should I think about I'm an investor. How should I think about this? And he was like, I'm not even going to take a meeting with you because even though I trust that you would never ask me to answer something that was improper and I know myself and I would not answer something that was improper, it will look like there could be a chance of something improper happening. and so I'm just not even gonna take the meeting. And I thought, yeah, that's exactly how this stuff should be playing out. If you have a political opponent, look, there are things that they could be doing that are so blatant that even though it's like, [ __ ] this is terrible optics, we have to pursue it. Um, that certainly did not feel like the case here in the US with Trump for all the stuff that he did that were gross or questionable. Like that is not the hill to dine. The hill to dion is to say these are the ideas that he represents. We're not here for that. Uh we want to beat him in the court of public opinion. We all serve at the pleasure of the public and if the public wants to see this guy run, let him run. They should have let RFK run on and on and on. Uh so that's how I would approach this. This is predictable in a populist moment where everybody thinks that they're fighting for their lives. Everybody thinks if we let that side win that it's people are going to be dying in the streets and so they start killing people in the streets hopefully metaphorically for now but it's like that's the level of stakes that they see everything as and so yeah maybe it's a little dicey what we're doing but we have to because Trump is the next Hitler and so that's how they justify all of this stuff rather than going I'm politically motivated because I really believe in this thing that I'm fighting for and therefore I cannot trust myself that that is the frame of reference of people should invite themselves into and say the only way we're going to stay sane is if we get everybody to debate their ideas as ferociously like within a code of ethics. But like really debate your ideas. Give us your best idea. Show us how this tracks historically. Show us why you think that it's going to work well moving into the future. Tell us what are the values that you're trying to live up to so that we can actually look at that and go, one, are those the values that we want to be fighting for? And two, do we believe that those values will actually yield that outcome? then it it is less deranging. I understand it's not how the human mind works. Humans are emotional tribal creatures and thus everything is going to shatter into that. But my hope is that for people who are interested in the tension between the two sides that I can lend voice to that idea and to get more people go, "Yeah, there needs to be this tension between the two sides rather than try to knock out that party because it might win." We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first I have good news for small business owners. Your days of scattered finances and wasted time are over. Say hello to Found. The last business banking platform you're ever going to need. With Found, you can effortlessly track expenses, manage invoices, and even find tax write-offs all in one place. No more juggling multiple apps or spreadsheets. Plus, it's completely free to sign up, and small business owners absolutely love it. That's why Found has over 30,000 five-star reviews with users saying things like, "Found is going to save me so much headache. It makes everything so much easier. Expenses, income, profits, taxes, even invoices." If you're ready to streamline your finances and get back to doing what you love, open a Found account for free at found.com/impact. That's fo und.com/impact to get started today. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Puremont Bank member FDIC. This is a paid advertisement. And now, let's get back to the show. Um, this has been an interesting topic that has come up in the chat and in previous videos that we did. So, we glad we were able to find this clip of a real estate investor talking about how to reduce rent and housing prices. Austin rents are crashing, down 22% from the peak. And you're seeing this in cities in Florida, in Tennessee, basically anywhere that made it easy to build that saw a surge in demand. Real estate prices are coming down. So let's use Austin as the example. They saw an increase of demand when people flocked to the state during the pandemic. When you increase demand, you don't increase supply. Prices go up. Rents went up by 25% in 2020 alone. So what happened next? Builders saw the opportunity. So, they built and they built a lot. They added 50,000 new rentable units in the last two years. And now there's too much product. Vacancies have gone up. Landlords are giving free rent for months and even offering gift cards to try to get people in. And because of that, you're seeing prices come down. Now, contrast that to the markets that I invest in. And remember, you guys have been telling me I am nuts for years because I build apartments in Southern California. Now, why do I invest here? It's for all the reasons why everyone else invested in Texas and Florida because it's easy there and difficult here. But my outlook is as an investor, if it's difficult to add units and the demand is high, that makes it so that rents stay up and prices stay up. Basically, you don't see the typical cycles happen in California the way you do in areas that are easy to add supply. So, as investors, I think there's a strong case that by investing in difficult markets that have demand, you have the potential to see maybe higher returns. But for California, if you want to solve the housing crisis, you have to make it easier to build. As you're seeing in these cities, that's how you do it. So, my question to you, do you think a state like California will deregulate and become more businessfriendly so that more housing is built and then the housing crisis goes away? Okay, so this is incredibly important for people to understand. What I love about this is this guy is telling you, "Oh, I make my money by going into the areas with the most regulations." Meaning in the space where you think you're protecting people, you are creating an opportunity for me to capitalize on the fact that this is very hard. So very few people are going to do it, which means there's going to be very controlled supply, which means prices are going to go up. And even if you try to artificially deflate rents through rent control and all of that stuff, uh that ultimately rebounds back as well because nobody is going to hold a property and keep it up if they're losing money. And so now you're diminishing supply even more. And so people have come to believe that the market itself is this corrupt thing that people come in and exploit and the billionaire class exploit it to take advantage of. um lower income people is probably how they think about it, which is the wrong way to think about it, but nonetheless how they're viewing it. And instead of going the market is a neutral thing that simply goes, this is what people value in this exact moment. Oh, wait, no, this is what people now value in this exact moment. And you let all of that stuff equalize. But people are so afraid of somebody losing that they try to like clamp down on everything, clamp down on everything, clamp down on everything. And so what I love about that clip is that it shows Austin where they deregulated. Yeah. People ended up getting burned. People bought property thinking, "Oh my god, I'm going to get rich. I'm going to retire. This is going to be incredible." And now [ __ ] now there's so many houses everywhere that uh now these are all cheaper and it's driving rents down. And now the people that bought this and owned it, oh god, they're scrambling and they're like, "I'm going to give you six months free rent, whatever." Just I've got to get somebody in here. uh you have to let it play out and that means you have to be willing to step back and I imagine people in the government think of themselves somewhat paternalistically. So you've got to be able to step back and say I'm going to watch my children suffer and that's hard to do and is one of the reasons I don't have kids. I did not trust myself not to want to step in all the time when something was going wrong. And that's what you have to do. You have to accept some people are going to lose everything and you have to be okay with that. And you have to accept some people are going to be better at playing the game of capitalism than other people. But if you deregulate, it becomes light touch deregulation. It becomes very hard to win over time because markets adjust and move and change so much. The one thing you want to protect against is them getting so big that they can block everybody else out and themselves distort the market because you don't want the government distorting the market. You don't want the corporations distorting the market. But the idea should be the regulations that we put in place are to stop distortions in the market, movement in the market, wins and losses in the market. Yeah, that's exactly what it needs to be. And so one place will collapse as another one rises that as builders they'll win for a minute and then if they're not careful, they get themselves into a bad situation and then rents become cheaper. It'll eventually you'll people will lose their money but it will equalize and eventually it's like cool. this is roughly what rents are because now people have a much better sense of housing, what they need long term and all of that. And only like a massive sudden influx is going to change that again in the future. And then they're going to be a little more skittish about like uh we learned our lesson last time. This is the hilarity of all this stuff repeating is a thing that you've never seen happen in your lifetime has probably happened dozens if not hundreds of times throughout history before you and you just didn't know. And so that's how people end up getting caught off guard. But it's also why you want to let the market self-regulate rather than trying to impose regulations. The very thing you're trying to protect against is the thing that you end up creating. A latest video came out. This is their surrounded format where Dr. Mike, popular YouTuber, went against 20 antivax people. So it's a debate format for those that haven't seen it. Yeah. Uh one person says, "Here's my belief." And then 20 people, one at a time, get to argue with that person. All right. This was on antivax. RFK Jr. is a public health threat. So why do you think he is a threat? I think that RFK stances of why he's a public health threat go past the antivaccine stances. He's made public statements that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. That poppers, which is a a party drug or a recreational drug that people use, is really the reason why AIDS exists. That is not someone who clearly understands science. and I don't want them in charge of a health agency. Okay. Assuming he does become head of the uh health department, wouldn't he now technically be considered the expert? Not an expert, but the expert? No. So then if he put something forth that was antivax and he said, "We have sufficient evidence to prove this." Um and then other medical experts such as you, which are provax, went against it, wouldn't now you be categorized as the the wrong ones? No. Because it's not based on a single person's opinion. This is a consensusdriven statement driven by thousands of doctors, dozens of agencies, not just here in the United States, but worldwide as well. Okay. Do you allow your patients to write bad reviews about you if they had a bad experience? It's not my choice to write it or not write it. No. Do you allow them or would you remove it? It's no. No. What? I would not remove it. Okay. So if we look at Facebook, Google, YouTube, they suppressed so many antivax posts, uh legitimate uh declarations of they were injured, serious deaths. ABC News went on Facebook and they they posted a simple question. Uh who do you know or yourself that was seriously injured from the vaccine, over 200,000 comments that were then removed by Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg uh just went on Joe Rogan and he said that uh Joe Biden, the Biden administration, forced them to censor people. So if someone really believes in their product, why would they do mass censorship to hide it? I'm a family medicine doctor. I have no idea why they're censoring certain websites or not censoring certain websites. So like that's outside of my scope. Well, that's outside of your scope, but just using logic, just using reasoning. You said you would not remove your patients bad reviews. So why would we allow these experts to then remove them that those kind of uh critics? Last that I checked, no doctor removes patient bad reviews. No doctor goes on and hides comments. I mean, maybe they do it on an individual level, but not on a systemic level. Okay. Um, I would just say that uh RFK Jr. does does appeal to other experts that um even if they're vaccine skeptics, they put forth legitimate studies that would be antithetical to the provaccine studies. So, um you said earlier like misinformation. I would ask who is the author of misinformation? Who is the author of misinformation? Yeah. Misinformation uh first off is predicated on the fact that there's a right information. Right information is going to be predicated on the fact that there's absolute truth. Does science state absolute truth? There's no absolute truth. Period. So if there's no absolute truth within this realm, I don't know why we should completely rule out RFK Jr. and the other experts that he could appeal to. The reason I rule him out is because he takes information that is not true, like that poppers cause AIDS. Subjectively true. It's not subjectively true for the time being because you just said it's provisional truth meaning it can change with time right but you can create any sort of statement and in health care we can't just go off of any statement because someone feels subjectively to be true. We have to do our best to do with limited information that we can. I think the right level of analysis here is not to get lost in um vax yes vax no. I think the honest answer is we don't know right now. even RFK, which I often feel like people are maligning him. I don't know if they're doing it on purpose or they just have a negative view on him, but as somebody who spent 12 hours just researching him talking about this stuff, and that's a 2x. So that's like 24 hours of recorded content that I have watched on him. And I was like, all he's saying is we need to do studies on the safety of these vaccines. my whole beef. I'm not for or against vaccines. I want my kids to be healthy, so I got them vaccinated. But now, I would like to know, hey, given that these don't have to go through the same trials that other drugs have to go through, and we've seen even the drugs have to go through these incredibly rigorous trials, they end up getting overturned and we find actually no, these were dangerous. Uh how do we have so many things in the vaccine schedule that have never been tested in a placebocrolled trial? He's like, let's just do that. So whenever I hear somebody say that the science is settled, I honestly want to chew through glass. Like what are you talking about? If you have if everybody agrees that a placeboc controlled trial is the gold standard of testing and they haven't been through that, what exactly are you saying is settled science that we value the concept of a vaccine? Great. But but RFK's point is and this is the level that I think the debate should be happening at is what is science? What is science? True. Science is the act of trying to disisconfirm the thing that you believe. That's why we don't say I have a fact I would like to give you. We say I have a thesis or I have a hypothesis. And understanding the difference between a hypothesis and a thesis and a thesis and a fact is incredibly important. So a hypothesis is I have a guess. A thesis is I had a whole bunch of hypotheses, guesses, and all of them except this one I was able to disprove. So that's science. The act of disproving the things you're like, I think maybe it's this. And then you you're left with one where you're like, I can't disprove it, but I'm open because that still might be wrong. And then fact is tough. There's precious few things that we're like, this is a fact. They exist, but they're hard to get to. Like, there is going to be a fact of what quantum mechanics are? We don't know yet. So, it's like, is quantum science a fact? No. It's the thesis. It It has predictive validity. It lets us do GPS, but also lets us do electrical energy or um nuclear energy. It lets us do nuclear weapons. So, but it's still a thesis. We don't actually know what's really going on at the subatomic particle level. So given that, people should come in with so much humility and say this is what we currently believe, but I'm not sure. And given that I'm not sure, even though I am convinced that RFK is wrong, provably wrong, uh I'm just going to go through and refute his claims because it's very clear RFK has hit the level at which something has reached public awareness that it warrants the best minds on the other side to go and debunk it point by point. That to me feels like this whole debate about who should be able to speak and who shouldn't very simple. If something hits a level of cultural awareness, then the best mind should go and refute it point by point, record it, save it for posterity so that we can go back and play it over and over and over. And then everybody needs to have the humility of going basically everything that we've ever thought we realized wasn't quite true. And so given that, given how many things we backtracked on, and given that science is the process of disproving the things that we believe, uh people should be real humble and be like, I actually don't know. And this would be a great test to run. And hopefully on the other side of this, we're like, yeah, these are all amazing. Wonderful. Or we might find something that says, yes, but we need to change this thing because that does appear to be having long-term health consequences. I love that. And I think the trap that people fall into is when we go from hypothesis to thesis, they see utility in thesis. So in thesis we can make nuclear energy. In thesis we can make nuclear bombs at the thesis level. So some people think okay we can this now has utility. I don't need to test it any further. And the thesis of vaccines it has utility. We are getting to a certain place. But to turn it into immutable fact that this has now been tested to this standard for some reason people think it's not worth continuing it because we're already gaining the value at the thesis level. And it's like, no, to your point, science is the one, two, and three. Yes. Is gravity real? You throw apple up, it comes down. Okay, gravity's real when I throw objects up. Okay, what if I throw buildings up? Okay, the same thing happens. Gravity's real. That's now a thesis. Okay, let's go into space. Did you just out yourself as like Superman? I'm throwing buildings over there. You know, but I'm just saying like you you walk through the steps of it. It's like, okay, now we go into space. Gravity is now different. Okay, so gravity is real here at this place, but it's different here at that place. And then you get to For the record, just so that you don't get flamed, gravity is the same. It's just that you're far from a dense enough body that it has gravitational that it has mass sufficient to cause a distortion in spaceime which we read as gravity. Uh but yes, point is well made. I'm not the fractal on that. So I'm just going to let that go. You get what I'm saying? Gravity had to get tested and then it got verified and now it's proven. I feel like we could just do the same thing with all these other things. Why do we have to stop at the thesis level? Let's just make it fact and we can just stop this argument completely. want to make things fact. No. Like to your point of uh vaccines never have to go through the placebo uh trials. It's just that seems to me like an easy step to end this conversation for good. Like we can completely end it factually hard stop like gravity. We just need to do one more test. But for some reason, nobody wants to do that one more step. Yeah. The the resistance to learning that my belief system is wrong is so weird to me. I cannot assimilate that as it has so little utility. Meaning if I have kids and in fact the only thing I can imagine is I have kids. I made them all get vaccinated and now I'm afraid that we will discover something that makes me realize I did a bad thing by getting them vaccinated. If I think of people as running that algorithm then their behavior makes sense. But if you run the algorithm of how could I have known like of course I vaccinated my kids. That was the the wisdom at the time was by doing this thing, I'm going to maximally protect my children. Of course, I'm going to do the thing that maximally protects my kids. The fact that that ends up not being true like Jesus, man, like you can't walk through life knowing everything. And so, uh, at the same time, even though it will sting to know that I either put my kids in jeopardy or maybe my kid does have vaccine injury that right now I don't think is related to vaccines, um, I want to know what's true so that nobody else goes through this. And by the way, if this all ends up being a nothing burger and yeah, vaccines are uh good and right, then it's like, well, aren't you glad that we now have the proof? Like, I don't Yeah, that one to me. People derail themselves. It does not make sense. Yep. There. That's all I got. All right, everybody. It has come to our attention that 85% of you really are not watching our lives. We go live three times a week. You are not going to want to miss it. We cover different topics. It is very lively. It was popping off today. And so from now on, we're going to start doing at the end of our episodes here, we're going to start doing a highlight reel from the lives. So without further ado, take it away, enjoy. And hopefully we will see you in the live next time. Take care. Peace. This is the very thing that makes this show what this show either is going to be, and we're going to keep doing it, or we can't [ __ ] face this. And [ __ ] the show. I couldn't care less. I'm already [ __ ] rich. I am not a person who needs attention. I want it. I won't lie cuz it's super [ __ ] useful. But I don't need attention. So, uh, we either confront the hard [ __ ] and that's why people come here or [ __ ] the show. I just want to shout out Skerberger Derber. She said, "I hate it, Tom, but you're really challenging my philosophy here and I don't have a strong defense. I'm for human rights, but if our ability to defend them is corroded, that thing I value will be gone." I appreciate your honesty in this position. This was me two weeks ago when we were talking about free will. I hated everything Tom had to say, but I was like, "Okay, that's a good point. and I see how you got from A to Z. And if I can at least understand what you're saying, it's then up to me to decide whether I want to agree with it or whether but at least and understand that viewpoint. It didn't make me any less of a person. It didn't attack my personal values. But you're able to see it from the other side. See how they arrive to their conclusion and say, "Okay, what part of this can I use? What part of this is valid in my thinking? How can I add that to my mental model?" So, just how you said that it's not about being right. It's about the pursuit of the truth that has the most utility. Scurvader, thank you for admitting that. I appreciate that. Everybody just wants to argue and be right. Nobody actually wants to say, "Wait a second. You made me think of something that I might not have thought about." Frame of reference controls both what you look at and what you see. Elon's frame of reference is the government is defrauding you as one element of it. So when he looks at the data, that's what's he what he's going to see. And he's going to seek that confirmation bias out. He's going to look and look and look and look everywhere for something that matches what he believes to already be true. Now, Elon, people can hate him all they want. There is nobody alive that has proven they're better at first principles thinking than Elon. Literally, just in the amount that he's been able to impact the world, uh the things that he's been able to create. So, um take that for what you will, but that's my frame of reference as a capital allocator myself, as a business builder myself. If I understand all the problems that he encounters, I find them so difficult to overcome that when I look at somebody that's able to do it at a scale that just completely dwarfs what I've been able to do. I'm like, you guys don't understand how hard that is. So, it controlled what I looked at. It controlled what I saw. So, everybody looking at this data, if they believe that Elon is corrupt, if they believe that Elon is just doing all of this to get government contracts, then that's what they're going to look at and that's what they're going to see. And so the reason that I like transparency is I want I don't need people to change their frame of reference. I want to look at Elon through the lens of somebody who thinks he's corrupt. And I want to see does that have higher predictive validity than the way that I look at him. And anybody that uses this show in the way that I hope people are using it. They're not trying to convince me to think differently. They're saying, "Cool. I want to look at whatever the truth is through Tom's lens for a minute and I'm going to dip in and I'm going to dip out." Now, look, I understand that that's just not how most people live, but that is the contribution that I'm trying to make to the world. I'm going to give you a strong, sincere take so that you can step inside my frame of reference, look at an object, and go, "Whoa, that is not at all what I see when I look at that." And stepping into my frame of reference either helps you create a more a more well-rounded vision of this thing that we're all trying to figure out, which is the truth. Uh, if it's useful, keep doing it. If it's not useful, uh, then stop. And that is ultimately the thing I want people to focus on. The problem is most people have an invisible goal, which is to feel what they want to feel when they come and listen to me. And what they may want to feel is rage, and so they're hate watching me. Uh, or they may want to feel like somebody is saying the thing that they can't say well, and that makes them feel good because they're hearing their own ideas echoed back to them. but in a a way that just feels better. And so that's what they want to feel. That would not my invitation to people is not that even though I understand that that's how many people are going to use it. My invitation to people would be to say skills have utility and that you can develop a way of looking at the world that allows you to do things in the world that you've always wanted to do. That that to understand me is to understand that simple direct statement. Jethro Akitty says, "If you want to talk about something very much trending, check out Kanye West DJ Academics interview." Nope, not doing it. Have you seen it? I've seen a clip. He is in a dark gray uh KKK outfit, like full [ __ ] hood, the whole thing. Referring to himself as the closest thing that we have to God on planet Earth, and that he is a jealous, vengeful God like in the Bible. And I was like, I don't know what to do with this. This is unhinged. Nope. Um, I made a pitch to Impact Theory's own uh person who believes the most in Kanye as like a 4D chess player and that he's not mentally unwell. Uh, and I just said, "Look, this, even if this isn't crazy, this is doubling, quintupling, 10xing down on uh, as comedians would call it a bit to the point of it doesn't matter anymore if it's crazy. There's no like pushing through this to the other side. There's no It's just so like if if the clanhood was like an artistic statement maybe, man. But like all the narcissistic I'm the closest thing we have to God on earth. It's just like, oh man, he's the kid in the Walmart. He's just give me attention. I'm going to keep breaking things. Everybody look at me here. I have a negative reaction every time you say that. Here's let me lament for a second artist and art is a real thing. Mhm. And when it's sincere, meaning this is really how I interpret the world and I'm not wearing a meat suit to the Grammys. Gaga, I'm looking at you. It's more just this is who I am. I see the world in this way and I'm going to make you confront it. That's how art moves us forward. That's how art breaks people's frames of reference. And for a minute, I thought Kanye was trying to break people's frames of reference. And I Love Trump, uh, White Lives Matter, that era, I was like, whoa, like, this is shocking. Like, he's really breaking my frame of reference. And I was grateful. I was like, that's ballsy, man. Like, this guy really is doing a thing. Uh, and then at some point it it ended up being the Okay. It ended up being the classic case of somebody who is so talented that they lose sight of the fact that you serve at the pleasure of the public. And Drake just found out real fast that he serves at the pleasure of the public. Kendrick better be careful. He serves at the pleasure of the public and he can break bad. He's got it now, but he's got to be careful. And because I cherish artists for their ability to pierce a frame of reference, which I as somebody who I'm not an artist like that that I find in my ability to be highly verbal and use logic and all that, I just can't pierce people's frames of reference. I I spent an hour with one of my employees last night desperately. It would be good for his life. He asked me to do it and I couldn't. No matter what I said, I can tell I'm just glancing off things you already believe. And I tried to even name for him. This is the loadbearing belief that you have that is making it impossible for me to get through to you even that. But an artist can do it. And so when I think of Kanye as just the kid in Walmart, I'm like, that's where it's ended up, but it really started somewhere else. It started with the Kanye arc of no one will listen to me, but I believe in myself so much that somehow I'm going to bend the world to my will. And with a broken [ __ ] jaw wired shut, I can't be stopped. and I'm gonna say that thing that captured the energy of that moment so well. No one is going to hold me back. Now, we're not there culturally anymore. But what he represented at that moment was the world is beginning to turn against me. And I feel this weight. I can't name it yet. I don't know what it is, but the corporate machinery of even Jay-Z's Rock Nation is making me feel like a little kid put in the corner. And even though I've made all this music for him, the second I want to rap, nobody will listen to me. And people are making fun of me because I won't let it go. But he wouldn't let it go. And by having that bravado and that confidence, he was able to break through and get culture behind him. And that's what we all needed at that moment of like, I'm not going to let this corporate machine stop me. I'm an individual genius and I'm going to [ __ ] shine. And then at some point he lost the plot. Like as in a movie he lost the plot. He lost sight of I'm a person who believes in myself. I'm going to push back and I'm going to overcome. And he started believing in his own marketing message. And that makes me so [ __ ] sad. And part of this is my age because as a culture, the very sad truth is we eat artists up and we move on. Now, many of them get rich for their contributions. But they're all going to be forgotten. And for somebody who wants that attention, being forgotten is way worse than losing your money. Lose my money, fine, but let me remain relevant. Irrelevance and wealth is like the [ __ ] devastating thing. So anyway, I always you're not wrong to say he is behaving like the child in Walmart that the same impetus is there, but this was like it's going to sound silly, but this was a public servant who really did good and is now like get the [ __ ] out. It's the realization that you're realizing. It's kind of like co when co first dropped. It got the old people like an album. Yeah. It got the old people and then it expanded to this healthy people and then we found out there's some people who are 17 who are dropping dead and there's some people who are 47 who bait it three times and it just it kind of went from culture to culture, community to community. When Kanye first released he was a black he was a black sheep even within the hip-hop community cuz he didn't wear a chain and he didn't have a jersey on. So he was weird. And then he proliferated that group. Then he proliferated pop culture cuz I'm just a rapper. Rappers aren't allowed to be pop. Then he proliferated and got that there. Then it was George Bush don't uh George Bush doesn't care about black people. Wait, you're not allowed to say that on the news. And then we got a black president. Now everybody's caring about black people all of a sudden. And then it went to every year he kind of does the next thing. He was supporting Trump. You're not allowed to support Trump. Now everybody now there's a whole bunch of black Trump supporters. It's not even a thing anymore. White lives matter. You're not allowed to say that. White lives been matter. He keeps saying he's saying the same thing even now. Jews are profiting off of black death, but if I say I'm a Nazi, it's bad. Kanye's right. in everything he said. He's been right since the you don't got all the answers sway conversation. He's been right when he was arguing with Jimmy Kimmel. He was arguing with Jimmy Kimmel over joggers. How many people in here have a pair of joggers? Everybody. That's why he was mad cuz he he came up with the like it's a crazy idea when you think about it. Like, wait, joggers was a Kanye thing. It's crazy. That's why he was so upset. So, in all these things, even with the Ku Klux Clanhood, he's absolutely right that it's ridiculous that the Ku Klux Clanhood still strikes fear in people. It's people holding on to history. You want us to never forget about 9/11, but we have to forget about slavery. You want us to respect the privacy of uh Jews and not be anti-Semitic, but you can sign a black artist who will kill his entire community and sell them drugs. There's all these contradictions that he's keep pointing out. So, he's doing the same thing he's always been doing, but the problem that he's missing the plot that a lot of people are saying is now he's doing it to with a community that he's not allowed to talk to. So, as he's going through all these communities, because the same realization that Kanye was a man, then he lost the plot. Black people were saying that six years ago and then it was like, okay, well, I lost that community. This community is going to like me and then I lost that community. Do you think he pushes through to the other side? And that we all go, oh, damn. This is like more brilliance from Kanye. Nobody beat the Jews. They're undefeated. He's never breaking that. This is where he gets off. This is his stop. They're going to get he's going to end up dying in some way. I don't know what the way it's going to be, but we're going to There's going to be a TMZ headline that he was overdosed, he was drugged, he fell out of a window. Something's bad gonna happen to Kanye and we're gonna all feel bad. Then we're going to all play his albums again and like him and then he's going to be the another notorious famous artist who went out bad. So why didn't you want to talk about it in the beginning? I thought you thought he was so out of pocket that you're like, I don't even want to give this air because it's the same thing that I'm I'm also noticing talking about politics. Like are you worried you're going to have an overdose now? No, it's not that worried. I'm going to have an overdose. It's the people don't really want the truth. People want to hear what they on this show. We do. People want to hear what you've been told. I'm perfectly willing to go down in flames if we were saying what we believe to be true. Yes. I'm not okay to rise if I'm saying things that I think are [ __ ] So, uh, you didn't want to talk about this because you think it's bad for the show. I am trying to map you. I cannot figure out why you didn't want to talk about this. No, this is not a bad for the show thing. It's just because to me, the level of conversation we need to have about Kanye, we're not having. Here we are. Cameras are rolling. Let's have the conversation. I just had it. I But that was [ __ ] awesome. So, uh, Drew. Okay. So, now I'm like I I really have to figure out how to map this moment because I don't understand it. Okay. I If you I'm Tom. I'm writing you as a character. The following things make your behavior just now make sense. Uh, I think this is bad for the show. And my job as a producer is to make sure that we don't invite hate upon the show. I'm already behind the scenes trying to get Tom to stop talking positively about Elon. He [ __ ] won't. So, I'm really not bringing him into the Jew thing. So, like, [ __ ] that noise. We are not talking about Kanye. Cool. That would make sense. I would still argue it, but that would make sense. Option number two, I don't want to die of an accidental overdose. Uh, I would get that. All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Europe meets with Zalinsky and then tells its citizens to stockpile food and water to prepare for war. The UK bans ninja swords as Amsterdam suffers another mass stabbing. Elon raffles off millions in an attempt to get people to petition against activist