Marc Andreessen joins Joe Rogan to compare the 2024 Trump assassination attempt—a high-definition, opaque event—to historical "confidence collapses," questioning systemic incompetence amid $35T U.S. debt and Democratic welfare expansion. He critiques unchecked debanking (e.g., crypto founders hit by SEC Wells notices) and FTX’s $8B political payouts, suggesting regulatory capture stifles innovation while AI risks becoming a censored "control layer." Contrasting Trump’s inclusive leadership with Democratic cancellation culture, Andreessen highlights a multi-ethnic working-class shift toward Republicans, calling Biden-era tech suppression a suffocating reversal of Clinton-era progress. [Automatically generated summary]
There's also a confidence in the fact that the news timeline today is so rapid that when things are relevant and people are paying attention to them is you have a couple of days, even with an assassination attempt on a former president where people were murdered.
And we have the memory of goldfish and right they, you know, things, right, things that would have been error-defining just come and go with an astonishing speed and shock.
By the way, I should say, I don't think there was a conspiracy.
I doubt there was a conspiracy.
I think anything's possible.
I think it's just we have a confidence collapse.
And I think we saw that on display when the director at the time testified.
Like, they don't have the system completely rigged.
But they kind of tried to rig it, at least with the media.
Where the real rigging in the 2020 elections, I mean, you can cast all your conspiracies upon it in terms of like mail-in ballots and all this jazz.
But the real rigging was the collusion between social media companies and the government to suppress information that would have altered the effect of the election.
This new administration is probably going to carve all this stuff open.
Yeah, no, look, it was a pattern.
And then look, companies bear a lot of responsibility, and the people in the companies made a lot of, I think, bad judgment calls.
But the government, like the Biden White House was directly exerting censorship pressure on American companies to censor American citizens, which I think, by the way, is just flatly illegal.
I think it's actually subject to criminal charges.
I think there are people with criminal liability who were involved in this.
So there was that.
There were also members of Congress doing the same thing, which is also illegal.
And then there was a lot of funding of outside third-party groups that were bringing a lot of pressure down on censorship.
And just an example of that is there's a unit at Stanford, you know, right next door to us that was the internet censorship unit that was funded by the U.S. government and exerted tremendous pressure on the companies to censor.
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One of the things that I found really kind of shocking was when they revealed how much money the Democrats had spent on the election and how much money was spent on activist groups.
Like with censorship, then you have a conspiracy because you've got government officials using government money to fund what look like private organizations that aren't.
And then what happens is the government outsources to these NGOs the things that it's not legally allowed to do.
The best defense the companies have is that a lot of this happened under coercion, right?
Because when the government, when the government puts pressure on you, like it might be a phone call, it might be a letter, it might be the threat of an investigation, it might be a subpoena.
It could take many forms.
But when the government does that, it carries, you know, that's a very powerful message.
It's like a message from a mob boss, right?
It's like, don't you want to do me a favor?
You know, yes, Mr. Campino, I do, right?
Like, I like my corner store.
I'd like it to not catch on fire tonight, right?
And so there's this overwhelming hammerblower pressure that comes in.
And by the way, even when the government doesn't talk to you directly, if they're funding the organization that is talking to you, then it's very clear what's happening.
And so you come under incredible pressure.
And so the whole kind of chain, this whole chain of governments, activists, universities, and companies was corrupted.
And then on top of that, people in the companies in a lot of cases made a lot of decisions that I think they're probably increasingly starting to regret.
What was confusing to me was that the government spent so much money on these activist groups during the election, and I didn't understand what purpose that would serve.
What function would it serve to spend all this money on these activist groups that already support you, supposedly?
Like, are you bribing them to support you?
Are you paying them to go on talk shows and consistently repeat the government's message, the current administration's message?
So I think in some cases, it's just pay-to-play, right?
So for this example, we know that Kamala's campaign paid certain on-hair personalities, you know, file.
And then there were, you know, which your point, people were very supportive of Kamala, who then gave her interviews that went really well.
And so I think in some cases, you just have straight pay-to-play.
That's just how that system works.
It's just expected.
And then I think you have other organizations like these NGOs and other activist groups where they're actually, you know, they actually do field activities, right?
And so there's, you know, maybe there's a get out the vote component or there's, you know, social media influence downstream component or some other, you know, kind of field activity that's happening in support of the election.
And so like if I am a production company and my production company gets paid $2.5 million to endorse Trump, and then I go, I didn't get any of that money.
Yeah, that seems like something you should absolutely have to disclose.
It should be like, say if I was going to do an ad for whatever, a certain coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee, and I did it on my Instagram, I'd have to say, ad.
I have to say, this is an ad.
It's a paid ad.
I mean, that's part of the thing.
You know?
Unless it's your company.
Like, you're supposed to say they're paying me to do this.
Well, you know, look, the good news with these is we learn each cycle we learn a lot about how politics works.
We learn about a lot about how fake it is.
We learn a lot about the things we put up with for a very long time.
I mean, everybody's always like freaked out by like whatever the new guy does, but like the real scandal in most cases, I think, is just the way the system already works.
Well, another fascinating aspect of the system that we learned out this time around is the uncontrolled aspect of it.
Like what Trump called earned media was much more powerful than anything else.
The uncontrolled version of it.
Like one of the things that, unfortunately for them, mass media or corporate media has done is they've diminished their credibility so much, so much so, that like Joy Reed was on TV today talking about saying that Trump was going to shoot protesters and just wild, unsubstantiated, crazy shit.
And the more they do stuff like that, the more that they say things like that, the more it diminishes their impact and the more it drives people to independent media sources.
I'm sure you've seen the ratings collapse that they've been, you know, they're down to like, they're down to, like, MSNBC is down to like 50,000 people in the 18 to 49 demo.
I think this, there's an argument that this is it, right?
And that, you know, all the, you know, all the stuff, especially in the last six months, all the podcasts, obviously, and your show played a big role.
But like, I think there's a real, if you're going to run in 28, like, I think there's like a fully internet native way to run these campaigns that might literally involve like zero television advertising.
And maybe you don't even need to raise that money.
And maybe to your point, if you have the right message, maybe you just go straight direct.
Like, as you said, like, we're in a great timeline.
And I think it's a fascinating timeline, too, because there's so much uncertainty.
And there's so much, right?
We are at the verge of AI.
Open AI, Altman has said now that he thinks 2025 will be the year that AI becomes sentient, whatever that means.
Artificial General Intelligence will emerge.
And who knows how that affects...
I've said publicly, and I'm kind of half-joking, that we need AI government.
You know, it sounds crazy to say, but instead of having this alpha chimpanzee that runs the tribe of humans, how about we have some like really logical, fact-based program that makes it like really reasonable and equitable in a way that we can all agree to.
How should the Department of Energy do whatever, nuclear policy or whatever.
And what I find when I do that is I discover two things.
Number one, of course, these things have the same problem social media has had, which is they're tremendously politically biased.
And that's on purpose and they need to fix that.
And that's going to be a big topic in the next several years.
But the other thing you learn is if you can get through the political, basically bias and censorship, if you can actually get to a discussion of the actual issue, you get very sophisticated answers.
Well, look, there's nothing stopping a politician from using this.
There's nothing stopping a policymaker from using it.
You know, as a tool.
You start out.
At the very least, you start out using it as a tool.
There's nothing to prevent.
For example, I think military commanders in the field are going to have basically AI battlefield assistants that are going to advise the most strategy tactics and how to win conflicts.
And then it'll start to work its way up and then they'll be doing war planning.
And then if you're a general, if you're a sergeant or a colonel or a general, it's going to just mean you perform better.
And so maybe there's like the human, the sort of man-machine kind of symbiotic relationship.
And you could imagine that happening more in the policy process and in the political process.
Well, so of course, we know that that was the case for a very long time, for sure, from the 50s through the 80s, because the development of stealth was highly classified, and the SR-71 was brand new at one point.
But still, the fact that the Chinese are flying surveillance balloons over American territory, and they were able to slip through our early warning systems and just loiter above military bases and take lots of imagery and do whatever scans they do.
And literally nothing was happening, and we didn't even know they were there most of the time.
And so I would say that's like a tip of the ice.
It feels like a tip of the iceberg kind of thing, where if they were doing that, there are probably other things going on.
Well, I've read that someone had commented that similar things had happened during the Trump administration, but they didn't tell Trump because they didn't want him to shoot them down.
And like, you know, what's the dividing line between, you know, an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that's so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy.
Yeah, it's fascinating because when you think about from theological terms, like when you think of it from a religious perspective, you know, people would apply what would a demon do?
What would angels do?
What is the will of God?
And what is like the evils of the worst aspects of humanity?
You would, you know, you could apply them to so many things in the world, but we're very reluctant to say that something is demonic.
Like even though it's clearly demonic, like clearly in action, like this is what a demon would do.
A demon would possess people to gun down children.
He teaches at Catholic University, and he's a religious history scholar.
And he says that medieval people would have had a, medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons, all kinds of supernatural entities.
And it was just assumed to be true.
And in the world we're heading into, that we're arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things.
And we're going to struggle.
And we're going to catastrophize.
We're going to conclude AI is the end of the world.
The medievals would have said, oh, it's just another spirit.
It's just another kind of entity.
Yeah, it's better than humans at some things, but so are angels.
And so we're going to have to change our mentality.
We're almost going to have to become a little bit more medieval.
We're going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities that we're dealing with.
And the way you described it was brilliant because you were saying that it has all the elements, excommunication, adherence to a very strict doctrine, all these different aspects of it, saying things that everyone knows to be illogical and nonsensical, but you must repeat it.
These things are indicative of people that are in cults or people that are a part of a very serious fundamental religion.
The reason that was considered equivalent sentences is because at that time, if you were not a citizen of a particular city, you would get killed in the next city.
You'd be identified as the enemy presumptively and killed.
So there was no way to survive without being part of your community.
Wow.
And that's what the wokes figured out: you can do the same thing.
If you're able to, you know, nail somebody on charges of having done something unacceptably horrible, then you make them toxic, and all of a sudden, they can't have.
I'm sure you know people, they lose friends, they lose family, they can't get work.
And before you know it, they're living severely diminished, damaged lives.
I don't know if you've been paying attention at all to Blue Sky.
I have.
But I have multiple friends that have accounts on Blue Sky that are very sophisticated trolls and are pushing the woke agenda to a satirical point.
There we go.
Like to parody.
But on the edge where you're not quite sure, they'll say enough real things that make sense and talk about their own anxieties and personal issues with stuff and then say fucking ridiculous shit.
It's a fascinating education on human psychology and to watch people express themselves publicly and then also be attacked publicly by strangers, which never happens in the real world, like at scale, the way it happens on social media.
And I think it's an amazing time for people to examine ideas if you can handle it.
Look, so one of the ways I think to think about this is all new information is heretical by definition.
Right.
So anytime anybody has a new idea, it's a threat to the existing power structure.
So all new ideas start as heresies.
And so if you don't have an environment that can tolerate heresies, you're not going to have new ideas and you're going to end up with complete stagnation.
If you have stagnation, you're going to go straight into decline.
I have a lot of respect and also sympathy for Jack Dorsey.
I like him a lot as a human being.
I think he's a brilliant guy.
And I think he had very good intentions, but he was a part of a very large corporation.
And he had an idea for a Wild West Twitter.
He wanted to have two versions of Twitter.
He wanted to have the Twitter that was pre-Elon, where there's moderation and you can't dead name someone and all that jazz.
And then he wanted to have an additional Twitter that was essentially what X is now.
And he just didn't have the ability to push that through with the board and the executives and all the people that were fully on board with woke ideology.
So the experience that people like Jack have had running these companies in the last decade has been, and I don't mean to let them off the hook for their decisions, but just the lived experiences, they say, of what these people's lives have been like is just daily pounding.
Just every single day, it's like meteor strikes coming down from the sky, exploding around you, getting attacked from every conceivable direction, being called just incredibly horrible things, being attacked from many different directions.
Well, I also found it fascinating that when there was any sort of a right-wing branch of that stuff, like Gab or any of these, they would immediately be infiltrated by bots as well, like my friends that troll on Blue Sky.
But these are Nazis.
Like, these are Nazi bots.
These are people that would just spew horrible hate.
And then Gab would be labeled, oh, this is where the Nazis go.
And so I just say like that, that doesn't seem to be an effective route to market.
It seems like you have to start from the beginning as a general purpose service, but you need to have some sense of the actual guardrails you're going to have around.
And by the way, every social media service, internet service that ever works, there's always some content factors and restrictions because you can't have child porn, you can't have incident violence, you can't have terrorist recruitment.
And even the First Amendment, there's like a dozen carve-outs that the Supreme Court has ruled on over time that are things like that that you can't just like say.
I can't say, let's go join ISIS and let's go attack Washington.
It's literally not allowed.
So there's always some controls, but you need to have a spine of steel if you're going to hold back the censorship pressure.
And there's basically Substack, a company I'm involved, is doing very well, smaller than Twitter, but doing extremely well.
And it's such a great place for people who are independent journalists and physicians and scientists to publish their ideas and actually get paid for it by the people who subscribe to it.
When a far left person gets upset at work, somebody working at the New York Times is mad because they're not far left enough, they quit and they start Substack.
And Substack welcomes them in.
Yes.
Which is why they don't devolve into a Gabber or something like that.
So my partners, my partners at work, they've observed that I tend to be able to inflame situations from time to time.
I can tend to be provocative and get people really upset.
And so the rule they've asked me to comply with is I'm allowed to write essays, for example, in Substack, and I'm allowed to go on long-form podcasts, but I'm not allowed to post.
I mean, I was in a Twitter debate with somebody back when I was just posting freely on Twitter, and it was a debate about economics, and the topic of colonialism came up.
And I made a comment in a long thread about colonialism.
And it turns out the Indians are still extremely sensitive about the topic of colonialism.
And I did not understand the mindset and the historical orientation.
And I tripped a line.
And I stayed up all night, and I went hyper-viral in every time zone in India.
Every hour, there would be like an entirely new activation.
And I was like, I was like front page headline news, top of the hour TV news, like all the way across India.
Wow.
Yes, it was like a, I do not recommend this as an experience.
By the way, I learned how many incredible Indian American friends I have because they all rallied to my, you know, my side, you know, said he's, he's not, you know, Mark's not literally calling for the recolonization of India.
Americans have a different, we Americans experience history differently than almost everybody else.
History for us is just like stuff that happened in the past that doesn't matter anymore.
But a lot of other people around the world experience history as something that really still matters, like really matters to their lives today.
They just, they live in history more than we have a deeper understanding of kind of how they got to where they were and the things that happened to their parents and grandparents and ancestors.
And so there's just a, it's just, it's just, you know, I don't know if it's better or worse.
It's just a different way of experiencing reality.
Anyway, I recommend learning that lesson not by enraging a billion people.
I experienced a small version of that recently because I said we shouldn't be using long-range missiles on Russia and the Ukrainians and Ukrainian bots.
A bunch of people came after me because I was saying like the Biden administration, I was like, fuck these people.
And then I think some people misconstrued that as fuck the Ukrainian people, which I absolutely was not saying.
Oh, a student, this is actually one of the Stanford crazy stories.
A student at Stanford was reported to the disciplinary board, the DEA, the civil, whatever, disciplinary board for reading a copy of Mein Conference in the quad.
And how are we going to, and how are we going to prevent bad things from happening again if we can't wrap our heads around why they happened the first time?
One of my observations about people talking about current events is we know conclusively the prayer era has all had horrible moral problems, disasters, catastrophes, wars, and all kinds.
They made all kinds of horrible mistakes.
But we are completely certain that in our time we figured it all out.
Right.
We're 100% convinced that we have it all dialed in.
And the one thing I know for sure is people 50 years from now are going to look back on us and they're going to say, oh my God, those people were awful.
I mean, certainly a lot of the way we treat each other is horrible, especially with the amount of information that we have available.
But it is fascinating also that if you, you know, I visited Athens last year, and I got to tour the ruins and I was like, oh, I wonder when it all went south.
Like, when did they know this had fallen apart?
Like, when was it in the peak of everything?
They probably thought, hey, we have the most amazing, sophisticated civilization that's available on earth, and we will maintain this.
We will be the center of intellectual discourse and the home of democracy.
This is us.
And then, no.
Now there's like shitty apartment buildings next to the Parthenon.
Like, what happened?
Something horribly happened.
And we don't want to think that could ever happen to us today.
America is the shining star of the world and we're going to carry this on.
But probably not.
Like historically.
I mean, what is the longest running dominant civilization ever?
The Romans existed for, what, a couple thousand years?
Like, how long did the Greeks run?
How long did the Egyptian?
The Egyptians might be the longest running, especially if you take into account the possibility of alternative history timelines where they, you know, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, they have kings that go back 30,000 years.
Here it is.
Egypt and Mesopotamia.
There it is.
One estimate measuring the time of the first pharaohs, the use of hieroglyph writing to the native religion was replaced by Christianity.
Ancient Egyptian civilization endured for about 3,500 years.
Like changes we understand, historical change of the kind that we understand where things actually change, the way we live changes, really kicked off with the Greeks.
And so that was sort of the default status civilization for a long time.
The Greeks kicked off change, as we understand it, and then the Romans.
So the Roman Empire ran for, you know, in its sort of Roman Republic and Empire in its sort of help, which you consider its dynamic phase, its sort of vital phase ran for a few, you know, a few hundred years, maybe 400 years total, something like that.
And towards the end, as it was sort of falling, stagnating and increasingly starting to fall apart.
A friend of mine says, when the roads got dangerous and nobody could quite explain why, which sounds familiar, by the way.
Cicero was one of the great Roman statesmen, and he wrote these letters that we have.
And in the letters, he sends these letters to all of his aristocratic friends.
And the theme in the letters is basically all of the actual competent, capable citizens of Rome are out in the countryside at their villas perfecting their fish ponds.
They've pulled into themselves.
They've built themselves their own protected environments where they control everything.
And they're completely focused on ornamentation.
They're completely focused on their clothes and on their lifestyles.
And he's surrounded, his family loves him, and grandkids and the whole thing.
And he's like, look, I'm not doing it because I need to do this.
And it's interesting because he's not referencing Cicero when he says that, but it's that spirit that Cicero talked about, where when times get tough, do the people who are in a position to actually make positive change actually step up or not?
And I think we've had a pretty long stretch here where that hasn't been the case.
And I think maybe with Trump and then I think also with Elon.
And then, of course, you have Tulsi Gabbard, and you have J.D. Vance, who I think is brilliant.
You have all these brilliant people that are together, which is very hopeful.
This is what we didn't see out of the Biden-Harris campaign.
What we saw from Harris and Waltz, you have Waltz, this guy who's it seems like he's a compulsive liar.
At the very least, he's lied multiple times about fairly insignificant things, like whether or not he was a head coach or an assistant coach.
And the lies have always elevated him socially, right?
All the lies about his military service, or at least implying that he served in a different perspective, in a different aspect.
And then there was Tiananmen Square.
Everything enhances his virtue.
This is not what anybody wants.
You want the opposite.
You want a guy like J.D. Vance who served in the Marines and went to Yale, comes from a single mother with addiction problems, rose from hard work and dedication to become who he is now.
Well, the Romans had this concept they took very seriously.
They called virtue, right?
And like, did you, did you, there's a whole ranking, by the way, the Roman virtues.
And if you read them today, you just want to burst out crying because you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe what we're missing.
But like, people with virtue, people with virtue, it's not just that they think that they're good people or that they tell everybody they're good people.
Well, this is what's missing from today's secular society, right?
Like we don't have a doctrine that encourages that sort of thinking and behavior and rewards it publicly, which religion does.
You know, true Christianity, you know, not subverted fucking giant arena Christianity where the guy's flying private jets and has Rolls-Royces and shit.
I recently read Meditations again a couple of months ago.
Well, I listened to it in the sauna.
But it's brilliant.
And it's amazing that this guy, Marcus Aurelius, was thinking like this so many years ago.
And it's so valid today.
And it applies so well to modern life.
It's so strange how brilliant this person was while he was running this incredible empire that he could write about human psychology and the value of forgiveness and being true to yourself and constantly being truthful everywhere in everything you do and all these virtues and all the stoicism that he espoused.
It's so valuable today.
It's really remarkable that this person who was a leader was at 2000 years ago that his words still ring true today.
My favorite part of the meditations is there's a section where it's something like, yeah, you're going to wake up this morning and everybody's going to hate you and everybody's going to lie to you and everybody's going to make dumb decisions and you're going to be incredibly frustrated and you're not going to get any credit for anything.
And what's in there is just like, wow, his life was not, you know, he's just like, again, it's actually, you know, like the CEO of something.
It's just like you're going to get pounded.
Like, if you're in these positions, you're going to get pounded every day.
And if you're operating out of a true sense of virtue, if you're operating out of a true sense of like, if you're exercising your responsibilities, you get up and do it anyway.
Well, it's amazing how much so many ancient writings resonate.
You know, there's so much valuable information, just like in Sun Tzu's The Art of War or in the Book of Five Rings.
There's so many ancient books that you read and you go, first of all, I love reading them because I try to imagine what is this life like in like if you want to take like Miyamoto Musashi, 1400, when did he live?
Miyamoto Musashi?
He was like 1420s or something like that.
What's that like?
Like, what is your life like?
What is the view of the world when you don't really have detailed maps or you don't have any photographs?
You don't have any idea what the fuck is going on in Europe unless you go there.
Like, what is your version of the world like?
And then to see someone's words written down and you read them and try to just imagine yourself and their perspective and their mindset.
It was so weird because all the experts said it was 50-50, Razor Sharp.
It's this tiny little thing, 80,000 votes in eight counties.
And then, number one, then it wasn't, which means we can take all those experts and just dismiss them forever going forward because they clearly have no clue.
So it's another set of people we don't have to listen to.
But I had this really interesting conversation that kept nagging at me with a senior Democrat who's on his way out of politics.
And he said in the summer, I said, how certain is it?
What's your view?
And this person said, Trump's going to win with 100% certainty.
Really?
It's a Democrat and from a sort of purple state.
Right.
So, you know, not New York or California, but like a state with sort of maybe broader cross-section of people.
And this person basically said, yeah, said, look, all you have to do is fly anywhere in the country into any purple place and go into a second or third tier, you know, size city and take an Uber for 30 minutes.
Land at the airport, take an Uber drive around for 30 minutes, come back and just ask the driver, like, how's it going?
And who are they voting for?
And basically, 100% of the time, the answer is going to be Trump.
Because people were just completely fed up.
They were just completely fed up.
And then there was the combo enthusiasm, which this person said, the combo enthusiasm is highly focused in New York and California, which don't matter from an electoral standpoint.
But that's the thing, the self-reinforcing nature of the bubble.
This is what's actually so interesting with these media bubbles: the people in these media bubbles are not breaking out.
It's like they're getting deeper into the sort of collective psychosis that they indulge in.
And part of it was getting excited about a candidate for which there was very little popular support for once you got outside of these heavily blue states.
And so in a lot of ways, it's the most obvious explanation of the world, which is just people just fundamentally did not like the direction the country was going in, and they were just fed up with it.
There's also this very bizarre arrogance of people that were certain that Kamala Harris was going to win.
I'm sure you've seen the viral video of this lady who's a political analyst who talks about going to the liquor store and buying a bottle of champagne.
But in her eyes, it was all about reproductive freedom.
And she thought that that was under attack under the Trump administration and that women are going to stand up and they're going to stop that because in her echo chamber, that was the case.
Everybody was universally, they all agreed.
We're universally on board with this idea that Trump is evil.
We got to get rid of him and women are going to vote and this is going to be fun.
But like, who are you hanging out with, lady?
You know, you could hang out with a bunch of people that think baseball is awesome.
And then, you know, you run into someone from another country, like, what the fuck is baseball?
Like, you've got to realize there's a lot of people out there.
One is the Democrats for a long time were the big tent party.
So the Democrats were the coalition of people who had very different points of view on things.
And of course, famously, it's all the different identity groups and it's all the different economic unions and all these things.
And Republicans were like the party of rigidity.
And just for whatever set of reason, a lot of the woke stuff had a lot to do with it.
It flipped to where at least today, Trump's Republican Party is the Big Tent Party.
To your point, on having all these new people in, many of whom are former Democrats.
A lot of them.
And the Democrats have decided to try to isolate out anybody who disagrees on any issue and demand lockstep conformity through the cancellation process.
And so that's a very interesting inversion that happened kind of without anybody saying anything about it, but it did happen.
And then I think the other inversion was the economic inversion, which is, remember the criticism of the Republican Party for a long time was it was the party of trickle-down economics.
The idea was the rich people are going to get all the money because they can cut taxes, regular administration.
And then basically, if poor people get any money, it's going to be because the rich people trickle, trickle some gold.
I think that inverted to where the Democrats, especially in the last four years, became the trickle-down party, which was we're going to tax and we're going to collect all the money and give it to the government and then we're going to let the government hand it out.
But then you end up with $35 trillion federal debt.
You end up with this giant annual deficit.
And then you end up with all this money being handed out, right?
Handed out in all these grants and all these things.
Like just this shower of money coming from the government.
But of course, if the government's giving you money, it also means the government can take money away, right?
If you're making somebody dependent on you because you're giving them money, then you're in a tremendous position of power because you can make their life horrible by pulling the money away.
So the way the Trump administration is going to approach the economy, they want less regulation.
They want tariffs and less regulation.
And they want more reliance on U.S. energy.
They want to drill more, more natural gas, more fracking, more drilling for oil, and then allow companies to work without regulations inhibiting their performance.
So the two headline things you hear from them whenever they talk about this, the two headline things are: number one, growth.
You just need faster growth.
By the way, it's the only way to resolve the long-term fiscal situation.
It's the only way to resolve the debt.
There's only two ways to do it.
You can inflate your way out of it and end up in 1930s Germany with hyperinflation.
That's one track you can get on, which is a very bad track and you don't want to go there.
Or you can grow faster.
Because if you grow faster, then your economy can catch up to the debt and you can pay down the debt as you grow.
And so they want to go for a higher rate of growth.
And then the other thing is they want America to win.
And my partner Ben and I were able to spend time with Trump this summer, and that was like his adamant thing he kept coming back, which is like, look, America has to win.
And specifically what that means is America has to win in business and in technology and in industry generally globally.
Like our companies should be the ones that win these broad, we should win global markets.
By the way, if you are in favor of a high level of social support, if you want there to be lots of welfare programs and food assistance programs, all these things, I would argue you also want that because it's the growth that will pay for all the social programs.
That's how you square the circle.
That's how you actually have your cake and eat it too, which is like, first your economy just generates a fountain of money through growth and economic success.
And then you can pay for whatever programs you want.
I actually don't, personally, I'm totally fine.
Set up all the programs you want, all the social spending you want, all the safety nets you want.
And as long as it's easy to pay for because you're growing so fast, then everybody wins.
And when you were talking about giving people social programs and giving them benefits, and then you could take that away at any moment.
This was one of the big fears that people had about letting illegal immigrants into the country and moving them to swing states, which clearly happened, and also giving them a bunch of benefits, which clearly happened.
Money, food stamps, housing, all that happened.
Stuff that wasn't available to veterans, stuff that wasn't available to homeless people, wasn't available to the very poor of this country.
All of a sudden, people who came here illegally got those things.
And the thought was: if you gave these people these things and you gave them a way better life, look, if I was living in a third world country with a family and I knew that I could come to America and I could get a job, an actual job, and make money and my family's going to definitely eat, I'll vote for whoever the fuck you want me to vote for.
I don't care.
My life is infinitely better than it was in this totalitarian shithole that I was in until I walked here.
I'll do whatever you want.
Like, I just want my family to survive, and I think everything's going to, it's so much better than where I was if I'm in some war-torn part of the world.
It's so much better here.
I don't care if the Democrats win or the Republicans.
I'm in America.
And if the Republicans didn't give me any money and they want to get me out, they want to deport me.
But this nice lady, she gave me an EBT card, and I'm staying at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and I can get a flight somewhere else if I want to go there.
And it gets this thing of like, you know, my God, I can't believe that Trump, you know, this, that, you know, so racist, you know, anti-Hispanic and all this stuff.
And it was, it was, it was one of those moments where the young waiter, who's, you know, Hispanic, young man in his 20s, one of those rare moments where he broke into the conversation at the table.
Right.
But it was in context, it was like, oh, thank God, because like we're just depressing ourselves to death.
So like, thank God he's going to say something.
And he said, you know, I think you guys are looking at it all wrong.
He's like, my father thinks Trump is fantastic.
My father came here as an immigrant, whatever, 30 years ago, built a life here, became a citizen, bought into the system, pays taxes, like raised a family.
And he just has, and then, you know, you've heard this before, but then it's like, and the thing that this guy said, the thing my father thinks is terrible is if other people are able to come here, they're able to cut in line.
They didn't have to go through the process.
They didn't have to prove anything.
They're not bought into the system.
They're able to jump in.
And then they don't, and then they're not buying into the system.
And, you know, part of it, maybe they're not being accepted, but also part of it is they're not buying in.
They're not assimilating.
They're not becoming part of the, you know, of what makes America America.
And, you know, in some cases, and by the way, in some cases, you know, the criminals are coming across and terrorists are coming across and gangs.
And it's like, my father's not in favor of any of that.
Right?
My father wants to be part of a great society, of a great America, not some dysfunctional, basically just disaster zone.
And I remember the group of us, it was my first glimmer of like, okay, I need to like completely rethink my whole sense of like how the world works.
Well, it was, it was weird because it was like, so what happened with me is like, so I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is now like completely Trump country.
And so from like zero to 18, like I completely understood the mentality and I was always like explaining to my friends of like, no, no, like this is, you know, this is like a different place and people think differently.
And then somehow between the ages of like 18 and 40 or whatever, I just like forgot.
And I became a Californian, right?
I became a fully assimilated Californian.
And I was just like, well, of course, the Californians are much more sophisticated and advanced than people where I came from.
And so of course, of course, everybody in California has it figured out.
And of course, California is going to leave the country in all this thinking, right?
And Trump was, for me, Trump was the Trump 2016 was the wake-up call of like, no, no, no, no, no.
Like that's just like completely, that is such an impoverished worldview of how this country works and of how people think that it doesn't explain what you, because you have to explain what happened.
And then you have to, like, if you have some sense of being able to predict what's next, which is what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, it's what investing is supposed to be.
It's like, okay, I got to rebuild my entire model of the world for like how this all works and how this whole system and how this country works.
But it was that conversation that kickstarted it for me.
And so I started to actually read my way back in history.
And I actually went all the way back.
I tried to read of like where the origins of like left-wing thought came from and then communism and how did that evolve and, you know, liberal democracy and then also right-wing thought and like, you know, everybody's calling everybody fascist now.
So like what was fascism?
Is that what this is?
Right.
How did the Germans do with it?
You know, so all of those questions.
And then, you know, kind of converging on in the last 80 years, like how is that, you know, either stabilized or not stabilized?
And so I did that.
But the other thing is I just started talking to a lot more people.
And I just stopped assuming that because I read it in the New York Times that it was true.
And, you know, and by the way, and then, of course, what unfolded in the years, you know, kind of sense was, you know, I followed the whole Russiagate thing like super closely.
Like I read everything and I read all the reports.
Yeah, so it's this whole thing with this, remember this whole thing, Cambridge Analytica.
And so it's this whole thing that there was this, basically there was this data, there was this theory, which by the way, is like completely fake.
This is like a completely fake thing.
So there was this data set on user behavior that in theory, there's an academic, there was a theory that you could sort of impute human behavior from this data set and then you could use it to predict what people would do and how they would react to different kinds of messages.
And it was like this like magical breakthrough and basically thought control.
And then there was this company called Cambridge Analytica in the UK that figured out a way to do this.
And then it was this like new kind of literally like mind control, like, you know, by far the most powerful meme weapon of all time for getting people to vote the way that the way that you want.
And it was this data breach of Facebook.
The whole thing was weird because Facebook had been criticized for a decade leading up to 2016 that it kept all the data closed.
So the criticism was Facebook never lets any of the data.
It doesn't share the data.
And the criticism for years was Facebook is the Rotomatelle of data, and the virtuous thing for it to do is to actually free the data and let everybody else have access to the data.
And then in 2016, like flipped 180 degrees, and it was Facebook is the most evil company of all time because it let Cambridge Analytica get access to this data.
And then Russia ran basically a psychological operation of the American citizens using it.
I mean, by that, the waiter was the much bigger shift because it was listening to a normal person.
It was listening to a person with their feet on the ground actually explaining the way the world worked.
Whereas with Hillary, it was, it was cope, right?
It was, it was delusion.
It was amazing, by the way.
She then spent the next hour and a half when I'm in a place where I don't know if I'm going to control myself, I bring a little notepad along because I can work out my demons like on demons so that I don't so that I don't say anything, right?
And the theory basically is we're going to have to switch our sense of what's real from basically just trying to eyeball it and figure out whether it's real to only taking seriously the things that we know are real.
And the way that we would know things are real is we'll have them registered on the blockchain.
Right.
And so I think the way this is going to work in the future is every politician will have an account on a blockchain service, like a crypto service.
And then every politician, whenever they say anything in public, whenever they're, you know, they're going to have people around them with cameras all the time, whenever they put out a statement, they're going to cryptographically sign it on the blockchain so that it can be validated that it is actually content from them.
And then I think we're just going to have to reach an understanding that we're just going to have to write off everything else that we see.
So how would you integrate that with social media, though?
Because one of the issues is these low-information voters that are getting information either from clickbait headlines on these websites where they don't even read the actual paragraph, which might be completely different than the headline itself.
They're so much better trained, capable, and ready to go and fired up.
And they know each other.
They're able to connect online and they're already in communities and they know how to help each other.
And so like, yeah, the productive and inventive, creative aspect, particularly of this country, is just like there's never been anything like it in the world.
I think there's also the real potential for a shift in perspective, a positive, patriotic shift in perspective that can happen in this country.
And if you think about what happened with the woke ideology, how it swept so quickly over the country and changed so many aspects of the way we deal with things socially, it happens so radically and so quickly and such a large change that people are susceptible to change.
It's possible to enact change and a positive change in a good direction where people are optimistic about the future, which you are and I am.
So one of the interesting things that's going to happen right now, you know, we talked a lot about Trump's victory and Republicans, but there's now a civil war that's kicked off inside the Democratic Party, which is very interesting because they lost so badly, right?
So the fact that they lost the White House and they lost the popular vote and they lost the Congress and they lost the Senate and they lost the Supreme Court.
We played that speech that he gave after Sister Solja had said a bunch of very anti-white things about white people.
And he gave this like super eloquent, but yet compassionate speech about this, where he's very charitable about her position as being a young person and not having the best perspective on things.
Well, that's the weird thing about fascism, right?
Because fascism, by definition, is almost always applied to right-wing totalitarian governments.
But it's really kind of just adherence to the state and enforcing a doctrine and forcing people to think and behave at a very specific, which is what the left-wing does.
Clearly, Biden just allowed Ukraine to use long-range missiles into Russia.
I don't know what's going on in terms of negotiations.
I hear all kinds of different things.
But if you looked at one side that is pushing for these wars and seems to be all in on it, and the other side that's not, like, the fucking polar shift is so dramatic.
I think the temperature of society, like the mindset of society is so clearly moving away from that madness that they're going to have to course correct, which is just logical.
There's just no way they're going to keep doing it the same way or double down.
It's just not going to, it's like they're going to go away with MSNBC.
And so you can be incredibly, as I am incredibly bullish about the people.
And then it's just a question of whether in the America part.
And it's just a question whether you can get the United States Park kind of aligned up to at least not prevent good things from happening and ideally help good things.
Well, what are the things that you think about this administration, at least what they're proposing that would move us in that direction as opposed to the way things were going?
Yeah, 450 federal agencies and two new ones a year.
And then my favorite twist is we have this thing called independent federal agencies.
So for example, we have this thing called the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, CFPB, which was the, it's sort of Elizabeth Warren's personal agency that she gets to control.
And it's an independent agency that just gets to run and do whatever it wants, right?
And if you read the Constitution, like there is no such thing as an independent agency, and yet there it is.
And then you go to this thing of like, well, there's no, this is where the government and the companies get intertwined.
Back to your fascism point, which is there's a constitutional amendment that says the government can't restrict your speech, but there's no constitutional amendment that says the government can't debank you, right?
And so if they can't do the one thing, they do the other thing.
And then they don't have to debank you.
They just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it.
And then the private company banks do it because they're expected to.
But the government gets to say, we didn't do it.
It was the private company that did it.
And of course, JP Morgan can decide who they want to have as customers, of course, right?
Because they're private company.
And so it's this sleight of hand that happens.
So it's basically it's a privatized sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.
And so this has been happening to all the crypto entrepreneurs in the last four years.
This has been happening to a lot of the fintech entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start any kind of new banking service because they're trying to protect the big banks.
And then this has been happening, by the way, also in legal fields of economic activity that they don't like.
And so a lot of this started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation Choke Point, where they decided to, as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal and then guns, which there's always a fight about.
Under the Obama administration, they started to debank legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers.
And just like, you're done.
You're out of the banking system.
And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012, like you, guess what?
You're doing your business all in cash because you literally can't get a bank account.
You can't get a visa terminal.
You can't process transactions.
You can't do payroll.
You can't do direct deposit.
You can't get insurance.
Like none of that stuff is.
You've been sanctioned.
None of that stuff is available.
And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents.
This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump.
We just can't, we can't live in this world.
We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally like get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable no by the way, no due process.
None of this is written down.
There's no rules.
There's no court.
There's no decision process.
There's no appeal.
Who do you appeal to?
Who do you go to to get your bank account back?
And then there's also the civil asset forfeiture side of it, which is right the other side.
And that doesn't happen to us, but that happens to people in a lot of places now who get arrested and all of a sudden the state takes their money.
Or there have been well-publicized examples of like there'll be some investigation into like safe deposit boxes.
And the next thing you know, the feds have seized all this all the contents of the state deposit safe deposit boxes and that stuff never gets returned.
And so it's this.
And this is when this is when Trump says the deep state, you know, like the way we would describe it is it's administrative power.
It's political power being administered not through legislation, right?
So there's no defined law that covers this.
It's not through regulation, right?
There's nothing you can, you can't go sue a regulator to fix this.
It's not through any kind of court judgment.
It's just raw power.
It's just raw administrative power.
It's the government or politicians just deciding that things are going to be a certain way, and then they just apply pressure until they get it.
Start to go into a different field, like try to do something different and try to get, you know, complete upending of your life.
Yeah, complete upending of your life and try to try to change your life, try to get out of the, try to get away from the eye of Sauron.
Try to get out of whatever zone got you into this and keep applying for new bank accounts at different banks and hope that at some point a bank will say, you know, oh, okay, you know, it's okay.
And we can trace it back because we understand exactly, you know, we know the politicians involved and we know how the agencies work and we know how the pressure is applied and we know that these banks get phone calls and so forth.
And so we can loosely, like we, we understand the flow of power as it happens.
But when you're on the receiving end of this, you're a specific instance of it, like you can't trace it back.
And the reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry or their company got debanked and so it couldn't keep operating or they got prosecuted, charged, or they got threatened with being charged.
This is a fun twist.
This is a fun little twist.
So the SEC sort of has been trying to kill the crypto industry under Biden.
And this has been a big issue for us because we're the biggest crypto startup investor.
The SEC can investigate you.
They can subpoena you.
They can prosecute you.
They can do all these things.
But they don't have to do any of those things to really damage you.
All they have to do is they issue what's called a Wells notice.
And the Wells notice is a notification that you may be charged at some point in the future.
You're like on notice that you might be doing something wrong and they might be coming after you at some point in the future.
And look, there's an argument in the long run that this is all unconstitutional because the Constitution gives us all the right to due process and this is government pressure and there's no so like there's probably a Supreme Court case in five years that's going to find retroactively that this was all illegal.
But in the moment when you're the guy who's been debanked, I mean, right.
So this is, and I think this is important context where when Elon and Vivek talk about reducing regulation, there's two ways to think about reducing regulation.
It's like, oh my God, the water in the air are going to get dirty and the food's going to get poisoned.
Right.
Now, some of those regulations, I think, are very important.
But the other way to think about it is examples like this, which is just raw government power being applied to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives, are just trying to do something legitimate, and they're just on the wrong side of something that the people in power have decided.
Like crypto or having the wrong political points of view.
Well, the trucker, you know, the other great example is the trucker strike up in Canada was an even more direct version of this because here you had truckers physically showing up and it was something like step one was they take away your driver's license, which by the way, right, it's just somebody pressing a button on a keyboard.
The theory would be you can't let these aren't good parents if they're sitting in a truck in the middle of Calgary preventing goods and services from reaching people, right, putting people's lives at risk.
Now, I don't know if they actually seized any kids, but it's just an example of there is an agency in the Canadian government, just like in the U.S. government, that if they want to, they can take your kids.
And I think that I think the right way to think about this is when we think about totalitarianism, we think about literally World War II.
We think about Nazis in jack boots with tanks and guns and beating people up and killing people.
And that's, you might call that hard totalitarianism, right?
That's like very clearly violent totalitarianism.
But there's this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything, right?
And this is speech control and debanking and all these other things that we've been talking about.
And that is, you know, the good news is they're not coming up and like beating you up in the middle of the night.
The bad news is like you are under their complete control and they can do whatever they want to you that doesn't involve physical violence, which basically includes the entire aspect of every aspect of how you actually conduct your life and support your family and get an income and everything else.
And then there were these protests that were, there were these protests that were forming up, nonviolent protests that were forming up to protest lockdowns.
You know, you could argue the issue different ways, but people have a legitimate right to protest for that, just like they do for anything else.
And the next thing you know is all the lockdown protests got censored, like just like, boop, gone.
Right?
And so at that point, like, the normal process of being able to try to get redress from your government, right?
For, you know, for to enforce your rights to literally, for example, see your family all of a sudden.
How much are you aware of what happened with the FTX crisis?
Because one of the things that happened with the FTX thing was it was revealed that they were, I think they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party.
Do you think that that is sort of a preemptive measure to avoid any of this debanking and be financially invested in these people so they're not going to come after you?
So Sam's approach was just, I have $8 billion of customer funds that I can use for whatever I want, right?
Which was the crime.
Right.
And then a big part of what he used, some of it he used to hang out with celebrities and get Tom and Giselle to endorse FTX and the Larry David commercial and all this stuff.
But a lot of that money, something like $150 million of that money went to basically just pay politicians.
And a lot of that money was paid to politicians with no compliance at all with all the campaign finance regulations that the rest of us all have to comply with.
The thing that they said was their extradition agreement with Bermuda, Bermuda threatened to not extradite him if they charged him on that charge, which is like super weird because you're the United States.
Number one, you're the United States of America.
You can probably get the guy.
Number two, did he really want to stay in a prison in Bermuda?
Right.
And so that was all weird.
And then look, there's no evidence for this, but the other theory is, yeah, whoever are the powers that be that decide these things in D.C. decided to not open it.
It's like the Epstein client list.
Like there are certain boxes that are better not to open.
The minute one of these scandals breaks like that, there's these panic rush and all of a sudden politicians discover philanthropic causes they can donate the money to.
Right.
And then, yeah, in the fullness of time, the trustees might come claw the money back.
So yeah, it'll play out however it does.
But it is interesting.
It is a great example of it was the shotgunning of money into the system under like basically just like nakedly breaking the law.
And then it now looks he's in prison.
The other argument is he's in prison.
He's in prison already.
Like whatever.
It just would have been another sentence.
But he did break the law and he was not actually charged on that.
And that prosecution has not happened and probably sitting here today and never will.
Well, there's some theory to that, which is very concerning.
But there's theory.
There's a fair amount of evidence that it resolves alcohol addiction, certain forms of drug addiction, gambling addictions.
And the current theory is that what it does is it basically, it essentially increases your self-control, your self-discipline, and it reduces cravings.
Let's say this is true, which is what they think right now.
We'll see, but that's what they think.
So the theory that it's positive is the theory that if we were all more responsible in our lives, we'd all be more successful and society would go better.
Counter argument would be like responsible is only part of living and it's only part of what makes a society work and we also need risk-taking and we need creativity and we need impulsiveness.
Well, that brings me to Ibogaine, which is the one thing that has the most success for people with addictions, and it's illegal in this country.
People go down to Mexico and go to these ibogaine retreats.
It's apparently, I haven't done it, but it's apparently this insane introspective journey that's very uncomfortable and it lasts about 24 hours.
It's not something that's addictive in any way, shape, or form.
Almost everyone says it's a very uncomfortable experience, but you gain unbelievable insight into what is wrong with you that makes you want to pick up heroin.
Like what's going on in there that you're trying to escape?
Like what is this?
And it recognizes that pathway and puts a chemical stop there.
It actually like stops people from having addictive cravings and it rewires the way they think about things.
Particularly beneficial to veterans.
A lot of veterans who've just seen way too much and come over and they're all fucked up and they don't have any way to straighten their brain out and they've had tremendous benefits using that.
You know, I wonder with particularly with these Ozempics and Wigovy and all these different types of weight loss, diabetic drugs.
I wonder if there's a way to mitigate these side effects.
Because, you know, when I've talked to people that think that, like, my friend Brigham Bueller, who runs Wades to Well, he's concerned about side effects of it, but he's also, he looks at people that are just morbidly obese.
And he's like, these people, they need some fucking help.
They've gone down this terrible road.
Yes, they shouldn't have done it.
Yes.
Okay, we all agree to that.
don't eat pie all day.
But if you've gotten to 500 pounds, you're probably in a bad state and you could probably use some help.
And maybe that could get them back on track.
And maybe there's a way with maybe strength training because one of the things is they lose a large percentage of muscle mass and bone density.
Maybe that could be mitigated with strength training.
Maybe it's one of those things like if you're going to get on Ozempic, you must lift weights three times a week.
Which is that might be it.
I mean, if it's just losing tissue, there's certainly that's that's relatively easy to fix.
So the other thing I'd say, so I've been down in Florida the last couple of weeks working on some of the stuff happening down there.
And one of the things I learned is that the RFK, the RFK is really in charge of health for the country from here.
He's really in charge working with the president.
And he, you know, for all the controversy around some of his positions, like he's, you know, this whole Maha, like he's very serious about this.
And a lot of people, including a lot of the most qualified people I know in the field, are like, yes, it is long overdue that we look at the food system and we look at all these, just whatever, to your point, the horrible track that we've been on for 40 years, which is just a complete catastrophe.
And I think it's a, there's this concept in psychology called common knowledge, which is, it's like, it's something that everybody knows, but yet nobody states out loud.
And so it like, it's like known, but then all of a sudden there's a tipping point.
And all of a sudden, it's not only known, but it's like obvious.
And I think, as we were talking before, about a sort of a shift in perspective of the country.
I think a shift in perspective of the country towards that being something that you should strive towards.
I think that's coming too.
I think that's happening right now.
One of the happiest moments for me is when I run into someone and they said they were inspired to get fit and healthy from listening to me talking about the benefits of it.
And I've talked to so many people that have lost 100 pounds, 150 pounds.
They're exercising regularly.
They eat healthy.
It's fantastic.
It's one of my favorite things when I run into people that are fans of the podcast.
So one of my theories on this is that part of this, what happened, is something very specific happened during COVID, which is the public health people by and large looked very unhealthy.
They've done this because there's a phenomenon when giraffes, if giraffes are eating, if they are upwind and they're eating leaves as the wind comes down and gets to the other acacia trees, the acacia trees will come up with this phytochemical.
They produce a phytochemical that's disgusting to the giraffes and the giraffes will literally starve because they won't eat those trees.
And they do this somehow or another through communication.
It's like they're preventing war.
They're being attacked by mammals.
And they're like, we have to stop the attack.
And nature has provided them with this mechanism to do that, which is really crazy.
So one of the reasons why everybody became unhealthy is because the government directly put itself into the food system and specifically high fructose corn syrup.
But like by the 1970s, we were massively overproducing, specifically we were massively overproducing corn.
And the corn, the corn lobby, the sort of agriculture lobby became very powerful.
And we have this government agency.
One of the 450 government agencies is the USDA.
And the USDA has a dual mandate.
It's to promote U.S. agriculture, specifically things like corn, and it's also to advise us on what we should eat.
And they also do the food pyramid.
And that's why the food pyramid is upside down, right?
For all those decades, where we're supposed to eat carbs and not protein and fat, was because literally that's the agency that's responsible for promoting agriculture.
And then that agency gets inserted itself through laws, regulations, and this kind of administrative pressure.
And basically said, thou shalt use high fructose corn syrup because it is our byproduct of corn as opposed to sugar.
And as we now know, that was an absolutely poisonous decision.
Like that was like literal poison, absolutely a ruinous decision.
And so, but this would not have happened had the government not made it happen.
And so it traces directly back to a government decision to do that.
Now, they didn't, of course, they didn't understand the consequences, but that's kind of the point, which is they interfered without understanding the consequences.
And so that's the kind of thing where you look at it and you're just like, all right, like, and then you're 40 years later and you're still doing it.
They need to stop forcing the food companies to do this.
They just need to stop.
And so this goes back to like the regulatory reform thing, which is like, there's just like a tremendous amount of this that may have been good intention at one point.
But sitting here today, we're living with these horrible downstream consequences.
And unless somebody steps in with a hammer, none of this is going to happen.
And they also have the insane amount of money that's involved because R.J. Reynolds, these tobacco companies, when they were getting sanctioned, they were getting in trouble.
They decided, well, let's buy all these food companies.
And so now these same companies that lied about whether or not cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer, now these same companies are pushing super unhealthy food on people, or at least selling super unhealthy food people, which I think you should be allowed to buy.
I think you should be allowed to buy whatever the fuck you want.
I'm all for that.
But I do think we should be much more aware of what's actually going on, like you're saying, and why this stuff is in there in the first place.
Well, and then you get into these other, you know, more delicate questions, but it's like, okay, food assistance programs for like, you know, low-income people and low-income children.
It's like, okay, should they be, do we want little kids who have no control over this to end up on the receiving end of this food production pipeline, paid for with government money and being 300 pounds by the time they're 18?
And so, and you just, you have this very perverse outcome where you have these government officials who have been standing up there for 40 years saying we're protecting you or we're protecting you.
And what's been happening is they've been poisoning us.
Yeah, I think there's three things you can do, two of which involve direct action, and then the third is maybe even the most important.
So one is you can just stop doing things that are harmful.
You can stop doing things.
The government can stop subsidizing bad things.
That's an example.
It's a parallel thing.
If you want to clean up the universities, you need to stop feeding them student loans, right?
So the government should stop paying for things that are clearly harmful.
So that's one.
And then two is, look, there may be a role for additional protections or prohibitions.
And so, for example, maybe you let people freely buy all the Oreos they want, but maybe you can't get them with food assistance programs so that kids who have no control over it are not being poisoned.
And so you maybe do that.
But I always think that the third thing is culture.
There's always a temptation with these discussions because the government's so powerful to talk about what the government does or doesn't do.
And I think so much of this has to do with the culture.
It's actually upstream or downstream from politics, which is like, what is the cultural tone of the country?
But again, it's also cultural, which is just like, okay, media thing, like, is the media educating people on this?
And if the mainstream media is not doing it right, should there be new media sources that are?
And then therefore, which sources in the media get respect?
And so we have this giant collective culture question that we all get to ask and answer, and particularly those of us in a position to be able to send messages that a lot of people hear.
So there was another key timeline split that happened in Silicon Valley about two years ago, actually two and a half years ago when Elon, actually, right before he took over Twitter, where he got in an email fight with the CEO of Twitter at the time, who's actually a guy who's a friend of mine, who's a really good guy, but literally, this guy had just been promoted from engineering to run the company.
And then like a month later, he ends up trying to deal with the Elon situation.
And in the context of Silicon Valley companies, that was a provocative statement because a lot of Silicon Valley companies take months or years to do anything.
But imagine that statement being applied to the government.
Every employee had an opportunity to tell the big boss what they were working on.
Every employee had an opportunity to be recognized for their effort.
Every employee had an opportunity to get live feedback from the big boss who had a comprehensive overview of everything as to what they should be doing.
still on their jobs but literally they're not in the office.
Or in some cases they have an agreement where there's one agency, I won't name, but there's one agency where there's where the...
Okay, here's another great thing.
There are agencies of the federal government whose workforces are both civil servants, have full civil service protections and unionized.
Entirely paid for by the taxpayer, but they both have civil service protections, which, by the way, are totally made up.
There's no concept in the Constitution of civil service protections.
It's just like a totally made up thing.
And they're unionized.
And then there's a particular agency that I know of where the union agreement, the union negotiated the return to the office from COVID, and the agreement was you have to be in the office one day a month.
And so when people are talking about, like, is the Doge going to be able to do anything?
Like, it's just, okay, there's 50% of the federal workforce.
Right.
And, you know, and as yes, as a taxpayer, how do you feel about that?
And, you know, to your point on paying taxes, like, if those people are in the office and they're dynamos of activity and they're making the country better, fair enough.
Now, it turns out there are ways to figure this out.
So, for example, for many jobs where you have to log in to be able to get access, like to email, you can actually check in like often you have VPNs to get into the corporate network.
You can actually audit and you can see who's been working.
And then there's a do you know about mouse wigglers?
And so it's a physical device that holds your mouse and then intermittently wiggles it.
And a friend of mine who runs a big tech company, he just had like a nagging feeling in the back of his head that maybe all of his remote workers weren't pulling their weight.
And so he actually wrote himself on a weekend algorithm to inspect all the mouse movements of all of his employees for a week.
And then he bought all 50 mouse wigglers from China that you can buy.
And he fingerprinted them all.
And he found that he had a whole bunch of employees who were using mouse wigglers.
So in corporate environments, it's very common that your company-issued computer has some kind of software on it that lets the company control the software and gives the company some level of visibility to what you're doing.
And that doesn't mean they're washing, literally washing you, but it means that they have the ability to kind of reach in and be able to see how much is the computer on.
I heard the most ridiculous argument against this.
They're like, what are you going to do with all those employees that get fired?
Like, what are you going to do with all those people who are stealing HubCaps?
They're making a living stealing.
What are you going to do if you make HubCap stealing illegal?
Like, what are you talking about?
They're essentially stealing tax dollars.
If they really are doing something that's totally useless, and we're wasting enormous amounts of money on this every year, the argument that what are you going to do if those people can't do that anymore is really crazy.
And then, by the way, there's multiple knock-on effects, positive knock-on effects.
If you can cut government spending, there's multiple knock-on effects.
So one is if you cut the spending, you can cut the taxes and you can just simply, the private economy then just simply has more money because it hasn't been taken.
And so if there's less public spend, there will be more private spend.
But this fundamental discussion of it, like the argument, particularly from the left, is that all these tax cuts, deregulation, all this is going to do is make Trump supporters and Trump's people wealthier, and it's going to ruin the middle class and ruin the lower class.
But it's like, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like fancy, it's like high net worth, high income people with primarily knowledge working jobs, right?
So professor, reporter, programmer, right?
Database expert, author, lawyer, you know, accountant, banker, like all the sort of, you know, quote, elite jobs.
And all the elite degrees, by the way, who all went to the top schools and got like, you know, the elite degrees.
So that's the top.
And then the bottom is what you call the clientele underclass, right?
So it's, and it's, it's the, it's, if they call the Rainbow Coalition, right?
So it's all, it's the minority groups, right?
And so it's the assembly of, you know, low-income African Americans, low-income Latinos, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, all the other.
And so that's the Democratic coalition that they explicitly program against.
And then Republicans, in our era, Republicans are in the, it's the middle class, lower middle class.
You know, it's all the people who don't have the fancy degrees and that are doing all the actual work that's basically making the country run, right?
So it's everybody from the small business owner, the restaurateur, you know, the truck drivers, farmers, you know, all the way, you know, garbage men and janitor.
Like everybody who goes to work nine to five has a job, probably either small business or a physical job.
You know, you know, it's sort of say labor, like real labor, like actual labor, calluses on the hands, right, right, kinds of stuff.
So kind of the so-called real economy, which is why I write the Republicans are concentrated in the center and the south because that's where all those things are.
And then Democrats are concentrated in New York and California and on the coast, which is where all the symbolic, you know, creative intellectual jobs are.
And so the weird thing that's happened is liberalism, progressivism started speaking for the working man, right?
Like 100 years ago, it spoke for the working man.
And now what's happened is there's been a complete reorientation where the working man has separated out.
And then you saw that in this most recent election where the unions, the union leadership still, for the most part, endorsed Kamala, but the rank and file voted majority for Trump in a lot of cases.
And the data point that I remember is the Teamsters voted 70% for Trump.
And you feel good about yourself because you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your, you feel like what you're doing is on behalf of your clientele and it's reinforced by the echo chamber you live in.
Yeah.
And it's why the con, if you read if you read the New York Times, it's just, it's either, New York Times only has two articles anymore.
It's either how evil are Republicans or how innocent and helpless are poor agreement minorities or identity groups.
And so oppositional force.
But we're the party of good with a capital OG because we're taking care of all these poor, marginalized people.
And so it's a very compelling, you feel great about yourself.
It's just absolutely amazing.
And then by the way, it just so happens that the economy is wired up in a way where you're getting paid a ton of money for not working very hard.
And it's all great.
And then you're completely isolated away from the lived experience of just normal people, which is the state that I found myself in, where it would never even occur to you to talk to a garbage man or to somebody running a restaurant or whatever because it's just like you're not affected by the rising crime rates because you live in a safe neighborhood.
They don't necessarily want to stop it, but they want to make sure that they control it in the same way that they controlled social media in the same way that they control the press.
Think about it as the same dynamics that cause censorship to happen on social media were also going to happen in AI.
And so there's a couple of steps to it.
So one is you just want a small number of companies that do AI because you want to be able to put them in a headlock and control them.
So you basically want to give, you basically want to have a government, you want to bless a small set of large companies with a cartel and set up a regulatory structure where those companies are intertwined with the government.
And then you want to prevent startups from being able to enter that cartel.
Those are the ghost stories that those guys tell around the campfire at night that are just absolutely terrifying.
And like business schools teach you like that's the one thing you do not want to do.
And so there's two ways to try to deal with that.
One is you could try to invent the future before it happens to you, but that's hard because you're running a big company and these startups are out there doing all these crazy things.
And can you really do that?
And it's hard and frisky and dangerous.
The other thing you can do is you go to the government and you can basically say, okay, we would like to propose basically a trade, which is we would like the government to put up a wall of regulation.
We would like the government to put in place rules that are potentially thousands of pages long.
And in fact, the more the better.
We want a very, very, very high bar for regulation for what's required to be in this business because I'm a big company.
I can afford 10,000 lawyers and compliance people.
I voluntarily put myself under basically the government thumb.
But in return, the government has erected this wall of regulation such that the next startup comes along and just the next company comes along and just literally can't function.
And by the way, this is literally what happened in banking.
So pre-2008, pre-the financial crisis, there were many different banks in the country, big, medium, small, and lots of new bank startups every year.
People would just start banks, entrepreneurial banks of many different kinds.
After the financial crisis, we had this problem called the too big to fail banks, right?
The banks were too big.
And so there was this legislation called Dodd-Frank, which was regulatory reform for banking, which was going to fix the too big to fail banking problem.
They implemented that in 2011.
I call that the Big Bank Protection Act of 2011.
It was marketed as it was going to solve the problem of the two big to fail banks.
What it actually did was it made them much larger.
So those banks are, those two big-to-fail banks, the same ones we bailed out are now much larger than they were before.
The banking industry has concentrated into those banks.
All the mid-sized banks are being shaken out.
And periodically, they'll go under.
The bank in Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley Bank, right?
And it went under.
And this has been happening all across the economy.
And then since Dodd-Frank, the number of new banks created in the United States has dropped to zero.
So if you combine banking and social media and now AI, you have basically privatized social credit score is where you end up with this.
And this goes back to the Trucker Strike thing.
You don't have to threaten to take away somebody's kids.
You just like, you threaten to take away their insurance.
You don't threaten to take away their insurance.
It's not government insurance that's being taken away.
The same thing has happened in the insurance industry.
It's consolidated down to a small handful of companies.
They're super regulated.
If the government doesn't want you to have insurance, you're not going to have insurance.
And there's no constitutional right to insurance.
So there's no appeal process.
We're back to the debanking thing.
And so that happened in banking.
That's been happening in internet social media generally.
It's been happening in many other sectors.
And then it's happening specifically in AI.
And what you have in AI is you have a set of CEOs of some of the big AI companies that want this to happen.
Because again, their big threat is that we're going to fund a startup that's going to eat their lunch, right?
It's going to really screw them up.
And so they're like, look, if we could just take the position we have and lock it in with government protection, the trade is we'll do whatever the government wants.
And if you assume the government is controlled by people who want to censor and punish and cancel their political opponents, that's going to come right along with it.
And so that's why when these AI systems come out, like nine times out of 10, they're tremendously politically biased.
You can do this today.
You just go on, you go on any of these systems today and you just like ask, you start asking like really basic questions.
So it turns, according to Gemini, Hitler had an excellent DEI policy.
Now, in reality, he did not.
And it's important to understand that in reality, he did not.
But yeah, Gemini happily threw up black Nazis because it's, they programmed it to be biased.
They programmed it in a political direction.
There's this guy, David Rosado, who's been doing these analyses on the social media side, where he shows the incidence rates of the rise of all of the woke language in the media.
And there's similar studies that have come out for the AI where there's studies that have been done that basically show the political orientation of the LLMs because you can ask them questions and they'll tell you.
And they're just like nine out of 10 of them are like tremendously biased.
And then there's a handful that aren't.
And then there's tremendous pressure.
This is one of the threats from the government is the government basically going to force our startups to come into compliance, not just with their trade rules, but also with all of their base, essentially a censorship regime on AI that's exactly like the censorship regime that we had on social media.
Yes, and this is my belief and what I've been trying to tell people in Washington, which is if you thought social media censorship was bad, this has the potential to be a thousand times worse.
And the reason is social media is important, but at the end of the day, it's quote, just people talking to each other.
AI is going to be the control layer on everything.
So AI is going to be the control layer on how your kids learn at school.
It's going to be the control layer on who gets loans.
It's going to be the control layer on does your house open when you come to the front door.
It's going to be the control layer on everything.
And so if that gets wired into the political system the way that the banks did and the way that social media did, we are in for a very bad future.
And that's a big thing that we've been trying to prevent is to keep that from happening.
And the Biden administration was explicitly on that path.
They were very clearly going for that.
And it was just crystal clear that's where it was headed.
And then there was an open question around Kamala, and the open question there was just she wouldn't, as you know, she wouldn't declare if her issues positions were the same as Biden's or if they were different.
And so, you know, the harder they come at us, like we didn't predict.
When Biden won, like, we didn't think it would have negative effects in our business.
We thought, yeah, probably taxes will go up, but like, we'll just keep doing business.
But then they did all these things, right?
And it took a couple years to figure out that this was not like a temporary thing, like this was like a concerted campaign and that they were really coming from.
Oh, I mean, they have Alphabet Soup, but like SEC, SEC tried to kill crypto, very specifically.
FTC, you know, was thoroughly weaponized.
There's something called the CFTC, which is the other part of the crypto puzzle: commodities futures.
There's crypto that's a security.
There's some forms of crypto that are security and the SEC regulates.
There's other kinds of crypto that are a commodity that the CFTC regulates.
The CFPB I mentioned earlier, so the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau decided that they were also going to regulate AI, which they just volunteered for.
And then, you know, the FAA, the FAA killed the drone industry years ago.
The reason why we don't have the reason why the Chinese are winning in the drone, the drone wars, is because the FAA basically made drones illegal in the U.S. years ago.
And that's why Chinese own the drone market, and that's why 90% of the drones used by the U.S. military and by U.S. police are Chinese-made drones, which, again, is a very bad idea because every Chinese drone is both a potential surveillance platform and a potential weapon.
Well, I've seen the advancements in Chinese drones in particular, the choreographed dances that they do in the sky, where they had, did you see the dragon one?
Just soldiers, normal soldiers in the field carry drones in their backpacks because they want to be able to see what's around the building or up on the roof.
Well, this brings us back to the UAP thing, because if that's what we're seeing, we're seeing super sophisticated Chinese drones that operate on some novel propulsion system.
That's not good.
And that could be because they put ridiculous regulations on drone manufacturers in America.
So this is my argument I make geopolitically in DC, which is if you imagine that the 21st century is going to be, let's say, a contest between the U.S. and China the same way that in the 20th century it was the U.S. versus the Soviet Union and like contest, competition, Cold War, maybe hot war.
That's the basic fundamental kind of geopolitical puzzle of the 21st century.
Then you want to think very clearly about the strengths and weaknesses of both yourselves and about the other side.
And then as you think about how to beat the other guy, is the answer to become more like them or more like yourself?
And then, by the way, here's something we have going for us, which is the Chinese system has turned on capitalism.
Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, and there is a broad-based crackdown on private business in China to the point, a friend of mine, one of the leading investors in China, and he said every single Chinese tech founder has either left China or wants to leave China.
And they're all trying to get their money out, and they're all trying to get their families out.
Because it's now too dangerous to run a tech company in China because the government might just snatch you, like literally physically snatch you at any point.
And then every Chinese CEO has a political officer of the Chinese Communist Party sitting down the hall who can come in and override your decisions anytime he wants to.
And by the way, and drag you into training.
This is a great thing.
Okay, so you're sitting here.
You're the CEO of a company with 50 billion in revenue and 100,000 employees, and this guy from the CCP comes in and pulls you, and you sit in the conference room down the hall for seven hours getting grilled on how well you understand marks.
Right.
So like that actually happens, right?
So political officers.
And that's the kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union, and that's the kind of thing that happens in China.
So you'd rather be a CEO in the U.S. than in China, for sure, as long as the U.S. system actually stays open, where you can actually get all the benefits of all the power of all these incredibly smart people building companies and building products.
And that's why this administration freaked us out so much is because it felt like they were trying to become way more like China.
And again, like, I'll just tell you, like, you know, look, like, because I'm going to get a lot of, you know, the flack I'm going to get for this is, you know, he's just a crazy, whatever, right-winger.
But like, I was a Democrat.
I was like, I was a, I supported Bill Clinton in 92.
There's now two kinds of dinner parties in Silicon Valley.
They fractured.
They've fractured cleanly in half.
There's the ones where every person there believes every single thing that was in the New York Times that day.
Which, by the way, is often very different than whatever was in the New York Times six months ago.
But everybody has fully updated their views for that day, and that's what they talk about at the dinner party.
And I am no longer invited to those, nor do I want to go to them.
And then there's the other kind, which is, you know, David Sachs and like all these guys and all these people and just this growing universe.
You know, it's a microcosm of what's happening more broadly in the culture, which is like, hey, let's actually get together and talk about things and have fun.
Right, but it's so much more comforting when it's you guys and not the my pillow guy.
You know what I mean?
It's like, no disrespect, Mike, to the my pillow guy.
But you know what I'm saying?
Like, I want people that are smarter than me to be saying these things.
That's what helps.
It helps when you say, well, this person actually knows what they're talking about.
They're very well informed and they understand the repercussions.
They understand what's been coming their way.
And there's people like yourself that could speak about these, these plans that you're laying out, what they were trying to do with AI, is fucking terrifying.
That should terrify everybody.
Well, you have bureaucrats who are now in control of potentially the most the biggest agent of change in the history of the human race.
Potentially.
And you're going to let what?
The people that can't even balance the budget?
The people that don't know what the fuck is going on?
But also, they were much more, Clinton and Gore in particular, were much more understanding that you could actually, you could.
So there used to be this thing I call the deal with a capital D. And the deal was you could be, and this is what I was, you could be a tech founder, you could start a private company, you could create a tech product.
Everybody loved you.
It was great.
Glowing press coverage, the whole thing.
You take the company public, it employs a lot of people, creates a lot of jobs, you make a lot of money.
At some point, you cash out and then you donate all the money to charity, and everybody thinks you're a hero, right?
And it's just great, right?
And this is how it ran for a very long time.
And this was the deal.
This was, you know, the deal.
This is Clinton and Gore were 100% in support of that.
And they were 100% pro-capitalism in this way and 100% pro-tech.
And they actually did a lot to foster this kind of environment.
And basically, what happened is the last 15 years or so of Democrats culminating in this administration basically broke every part of that deal for people in my world.
Like every single part of that was shattered, right?
Where just like technology became presumptively evil, right?
And like, you know, if you're a business person, you were presumptively a bad person.
And then technology was presumptively had bad effects and dot, dot, dot.
And then they were going to regulate you and try to kill you and quash you.
And then the kicker was philanthropy became evil.
And this is a real culture change in the last five years that I hope will reverse now, which is philanthropy now is a dirty word on the left because it's the private person choosing to give away the money as opposed to the government choosing a way to give the money.
So I'll give you the ultimate case today.
Here's where I radicalized on this topic.
So you'll recall some years back, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, you know, have a ton of money in Facebook stock.
They created a nonprofit entity called Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the original mission was to literally cure all disease.
And this could be like, you know, $200 billion going to cure all disease, right?
So like big deal.
They said they committed to donating 99% of their assets to this new foundation.
They got brutally attacked from the left.
And the attack was they're only doing it to save money on taxes.
Now, basic mathematics.
You don't give away 99% of your money to save money on taxes, right?
But it was a vicious attack.
It was like a very, very aggressive attack.
And the fundamental reason for the attack was how dare they treat that money like it's their own?
How dare they decide where it goes?
Instead, tax rates for billionaires should go to 90-something percent.
The government should take the money and the government should allocate it.
And that would be the morally proper and correct thing to do.
Philanthropy becomes bad because it should be the state operating on behalf of the people as a whole who are handing out the money, not the individual.
And the thesis of Lean In was that women in their lives and careers could quote unquote lean in.
She said what she observed in a lot of meetings was the men were leaning into the table and sitting like in front and then the women were like leaning back and waiting to be called on.
She said the women should lean in.
It became a metaphor for her for women should like lean in on their careers.
They should like aggressively advocate for themselves to get like raises and promotions.
And if a woman doesn't succeed in a career, it's because she's being discriminated against.
And so I said, I predicted when this book comes out, the right-wingers are going to think it's great.
And you're going to get it.
Like, the left is going to come at you because you're violating the fundamental principle of the left, which is anybody who does less well is a victim, which in that case is exactly what happened.
By the way, the reviews were all by women, and they tore into her, like in every major publication, they just completely ripped her.
And they're like, how dare this rich entitled woman be telling us, you know, these would be telling women that they're not victims and that they're, you know, that they have all this agency because this is denial of sexism, right?
And be like, I've always said, up until I've lost a lot of respect for him from some of the things that he said during this election cycle because I think they got desperate and they just resorted to actual lies.
And I thought, this is crazy to see him lying, especially the very fine people hoax.
And we played the video back and forth of what Obama said he said and what he actually said.
And it's pretty shocking because he's very explicit.
He's saying not white nationalists, not neo-Nazis.
should be condemned.
He says that very clearly.
That's not what I'm talking about.
Talk about people who are protesting the taking down of the statue.
And when you see a guy like Obama do that, it's such a bummer because he was the guy for me that was like our best spokesman.
He was like, here's a guy that came from a single family or a single parent household.
He wasn't some rich entitled kid who was given everything in life.
He's this brilliant speaker.
He's handsome.
He represents like what we're hoping for.
We're hoping for a colorblind society that just treats people on the merit of who they are and anyone can achieve.
And look, here he is.
He made it.
And then all of a sudden, identity politics goes through the fucking roof and victim mentality becomes a thing that people choose to side with.
Well, no, this is if you're, you know, if you've been a lifelong Democrat, this is a if you've been a lifelong Democrat, and if that's, you know, if that is in this quarter, a lot of people's value systems, then it's, it's a real challenge.
And you can choose, or you can choose to follow, you can choose to follow into the, you know, the craziest version of it, or you even choose to say, you know what, like, I'm still not going to switch sides, but at least I'm going to advocate for my team to come back.
This is Richie Torres.
This guy is a congressman in Queens, I think, or the Bronx.
He's actually, he actually started out, everybody thought he was going to be a far lefty because he's gay, he's black, he's Latino.
He was like at least associated with the squad early on, and he's like one of the guys in the Democratic Party who has now stood up and he's been doing this in public for the last two weeks, saying, clearly, we have to get back to sense.
We have to get back to common sense.
We have to get back to moderation.
We have to have law enforcement.
We have to have, you know, we can't have crime in the streets.
We have to have a border.
We have to get, we, the Democrats, have to get back to moderation and sense.
He was a right-wing Jew, a very important Jewish thinker, American Jewish thinker in the 60s, 70s, 80s.
And basically he had this thesis that these Jewish liberal voters in the U.S. basically are voting against, ultimately they're voting for the wrong team because what they don't understand basically is that this is sort of a path number one to anti-Semitism, which is what's happened, but number two, basically you're never going to have long-term support for Israel from the left because Israel, the basic concept of Israel violates the idea.
And so, you know, he argued, I don't know, this is like whatever, 20 years ago.
He's like, this is headed in the wrong direction.
But, you know, the argument was ignored at the time.
And then, you know, at least a lot of my Jewish friends after October 7th, they were completely horrified to find out, for example, the DEI was actually anti-Jewish.
Right.
Which is what everybody learned with the scandals at the universities.
And then what we saw is that this same sort of radicalized left had actually slid into not just anti-Semitism and not just anti-Israel, but also pro-I mean, ultimately pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas.
And so like, I bring it up just as an example, not to take a position, just as an example of it's the kind of realignment a lot of Jewish Americans now are having to kind of rethink fundamental questions about political structure and alliances and who they should be part of and who they shouldn't be part of.
So I think to your point, I think like the whole country is going through, I think we're going through the first like profound political realignment probably since the 1960s, which is when everything shifted up, you know, between Johnson and Nixon in the South.
I think we're going through like the most profound version of that right now.
And I think it's something like the multi-ethnic working class coalition that came together around Trump, basically, again, against this sort of super exaggerated elite plus underclass kind of structure that the Democrats have built for themselves.
And it just turns out there's just a lot more people in the middle.
And so I think, but by the way, including a lot of black people, black vote for Trump is way up, Hispanic vote for Trump is way up.
You were talking about the hopeful way that the Democrats will wake up and come up with a more reasonable.
Well, I mean, there's obviously clear cultural pushback on all these crazier, crazier issues.
I mean, like the giant pushback from women about biological men competing against women.
I mean, this is a giant one where women are psychological.
Listen, we created Title IX for a reason.
Like, we want women's sports to be for women.
You can't have them for mentally ill men that think that they can be able to just decide they're a woman and compete against women, which is what it is in a lot of places.
You don't even have to get tested.
There's not like some sort of a hormone protocol.
It's just like, it's just what your identity is, which is just nuts.
And that's one of the things that I think a lot of people on the left are having a really hard time justifying.
Because a pervert, all they have to do is say, I identify as a woman, throw on a wig, and now you can go hang around the women's room and no one can say anything.
Well, you've emboldened, empowered one of the worst groups in society that we've always protected women from.
And you have to pretend they don't exist if you just want to base it solely on identity, especially like a self-described identity.
You just decide, and then that's it.
And, you know, I mean, there's states that have that now with prisoners.
That all a prisoner has to do is identify with being a woman, and you are now housed in women's prisons.
California has 47 of them when the last time I looked at it.
And there's hundreds that are waiting on like a waiting list to try to get in.
So you have women who, you know, especially if you're someone who's dealing with if you've ever been raped or sexually abused, and now you have to share space with a man who might be a fucking pervert.
And some of these men even have some crimes that are along those lines that they're in jail for.
It's crazy.
I mean, Canada's the worst at it.
There's a bunch of different examples of these type of people getting into female prisons.
And it's just, it's insanity.
And I think the left rejects that too for the most part.
There's the sensible version of the left that is like, hey, yeah, I'm pro-gay rights.
Yeah, I'm pro-women's rights.
I'm pro-civil rights.
I'm pro-choice.
I'm pro-this.
I'm anti-warmont.
But also, you can't let psychos just put on a fucking dress and hang out in women's rooms just because we want to be kind.
Like, that's nuts.
So there has to be some.
And then there's legitimate trans women.
So like, how do you make the distinction?
Well, clearly, we have to have a fucking conversation.
And if you don't allow that conversation to take place, like if you go to blue sky and you type in there are only two genders, you're banned.