THE KILLING HAS JUST BEGUN | Timcast IRL #1455 w/ Andrew Heaton
Andrew Heaton and Timcast dissect Mexico’s cartel chaos after El Mencho’s death—25 National Guard killed, airports targeted, and tourism disrupted—debating whether Trump’s threatened crackdown or Biden/Obama’s alleged complicity (via Fast and Furious) fueled the violence. They contrast Trump’s tariffs (15% global threat) with free-trade erosion of U.S. industries, from Flint’s collapse to China’s IP theft, warning automation and offshoring could destabilize jobs without safeguards. Star Trek’s economics and cultural relativism spark comparisons to real-world geopolitics, while controversial claims about gay culture—STD risks, libido-driven behavior—divert into broader debates on identity and sovereignty, culminating in skepticism over America’s long-term economic and cultural resilience under globalized trade. [Automatically generated summary]
Insane videos of car bombs, explosions, fires, gunshots ringing out, people running and screaming in airports.
All of this in retaliation for killing a cartel leader that some say, well, I should say, according to some reports, was at the behest of Donald Trump, who continued by saying it's only just begun.
25 Mexican National Guard were killed in these attacks.
And it is expected to continue.
Right now, we're getting reports that security forces are currently still battling cartel members, and it's popping off across the country.
Now, I would argue it seems the cartel's retaliation is basically we have ended all tourism in Mexico.
I mean, there's no possibility of you flying down to driving to Tijuana, flying down to Puerto Vallera, and having any kind of relaxing day because people are being told shelter in place.
It's kicking off.
Donald Trump and the rest of the Trump badmen are not going to back down from this.
So we don't know exactly where this will go, but some have said this could effectively be some kind of civil war.
We're going to talk about that, but boy, oh boy, do we have a lot of news for you, my friends?
At Mar-a-Lago, a man with a shotgun and fuel breached the perimeter, reportedly aimed the weapon, and then was shot and killed.
Now, according to TMZ, his motivation may have been the Epstein files.
Getting absolutely crazy, my friends.
The U.K. has arrested the former ambassador to the U.S. from Britain over the Epstein file revelations.
He was leaking financial information to Jeffrey Epstein.
Holy crap.
And then the U.S. beat Canada in hockey.
Now, all those other stories are crazy, terrifying, but the one I know most Americans care about is that we gave a thorough trouncing to Canada in their game.
And there's a viral tweet where, I don't know, Trudeau or somebody was like, you know, you can try and take our country, but you'll never take a game from us.
And now everyone's retweeting it.
And the White House posted an image of a bald eagle crushing a Canada goose to death.
So, yeah, there's that.
And still, we got a lot of news.
In response, the U.S. men's team has agreed to attend the State of the Union address tomorrow.
And the women's team just can't find time in their schedules to do it, sparking a major backlash.
Oh, boy, we got a lot for you today.
So we're going to get into that.
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Yeah, you leave a memorable impression because it's, I guess you said it's been four years since you've been here, but I feel like I saw you pretty free pretty recently.
I mean, when he got here, his hair was perfectly done, but when he saw Ian, he started just shaking the electricity and they both started freaking out.
Security forces keep up fight with cartel gunmen a day after the Mexican military killed a drug lord.
This is reported from the APA, in fact.
They say tourist shops in Tapalpa were open Monday and workers were on the job, but gunshots also rang out.
And in the street was a dead man lying beside a bullet-pocked vehicle.
Meanwhile, heavily armed Mexican security forces kept up the battle with cartel gunmen following the killing that sparked a surge in violence and put the country on edge.
I mean, these videos that are popping up are just absolutely nuts.
We've got this one allegedly from Tijuana.
I don't know exactly.
Look, take it all with a grain of salt.
Excuse me.
This does appear to be the Tijuana border.
You can see the border fence.
And we don't know if this is from today, but I don't see why it would not be.
unidentified
Now in Tijuana, Mexico, the cartel are blocking roads by setting cars on fire.
This is a few miles from San Diego along the border.
Listen, this is the cartel is basically saying, you hit us, we hit you back.
But this is not just, this is strategic.
They're firing guns in airports.
They're burning vehicles in the middle of the street in key tourist destinations.
They want the Mexican government to look at this and think we are about to go broke because tourism to Puerto Vallerta, to Tijuana, these are very, very important for the Mexican economy.
Americans love coming down there and partying.
It's slightly cheap.
It's less expensive for the Americans to do so.
Now you can't go.
Americans are being warned to shelter in place.
There was a video that Fox News had a report.
Some guy said that a car bomb went off and everyone said, quick, get inside.
You can't even go outside now.
So for the people who are trapped there, we hope that they can get out safely.
But now there's no, it's just, it's just off.
The spigot has turned off.
No tourism right now.
I imagine Trump's response to this is going to be a brutal, brutal crackdown.
The reporting is that apparently Trump told Mexico: if you do not take out these guys, we are going to do it.
The U.S. will launch strikes on Mexico.
And so Scheinbaum, the president, said, okay, we'll do it.
Now, reportedly, the U.S. provided the intelligence on the location of El Mencho.
They went in, and there's conflicting reports.
I read one report, according to cartel members, apparently, the U.S. went in with the intention to murder, to kill him, not to capture him.
And I think there was something like 70 dead in the operation.
The U.S. found out that he was with his romantic partner, a woman, I'm assuming.
I don't know why I'm assuming they call it Romantic Partner because they're leftists and me.
I think what you are seeing with Donald Trump's foreign policy is pretty dang nuts.
In his first term, he crushes ISIS.
In his first term, the war, the conflict in Ukraine starts dying down.
You get in the second term.
So I'm going to throw it to Biden for helping kick off the Russia war with Ukraine.
I blame Russia largely, but Biden's failed foreign policy with Afghanistan and Ukraine helped largely with Ukraine, helped contribute to it.
And then you have Donald Trump coming in.
What does he do?
He's taken out the drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
He, again, already ISIS crushed.
You got Abraham Accords.
Trump is working on his peace deals.
And so it looks like his interests are substantially more in line with domestic protection.
That being said, we have deep concerns about an escalating war with Iran.
So I'm not going to say it's out of the question.
But I think the cartels are cooked.
I think Obama, let me just say one more thing.
Obama wanted ISIS to exist.
The U.S. government was funding groups that eventually became ISIS, and they were utilizing weapons the U.S. had given to these people.
And Barack Obama gave thousands of guns to the cartels.
Fact.
It was called Fast and Furious.
Now, the excuse they give was they were going to give the guns to the cartels, but then track them and see how the guns were being used and who got them.
Yeah, you always give your enemies a bunch of automatic weapons.
Ridiculous.
And they actually found in the raid rocket launchers.
So some are questioning just what these are military grade.
Like, I would read Fast and Furious as just incompetency on behalf of the DOJ, but like, are you inferring that they wanted to arm them rather than entrap them?
In this capacity, if I were to assume that Barack Obama was just incompetent in handing over thousands of weapons to cartel members, I would have to assume that he was a functional retard.
Maybe they were like— It's one thing to say incompetence.
That's like the dude spilled the coffee, and I'm not going to assume he did it on purpose.
What was the plan?
Okay, we're going to give them a bunch of guns.
They're going to go use them, killing a bunch of people, but then we'll know they did.
The reason why the U.S. let, under Barack Obama, ISIS expand rapidly was because it was like we couldn't, I mean, we did invade Syria, which is funny because who remember was in that who remembers when that happened?
Does anybody remember a big declaration of an invasion of Syria?
Obama was like, let's let ISIS expand because they are attacking Assad's regime and they're going to knock Assad out of power.
The propaganda machine did everything to say Assad was an evil guy because he was aligned with Russia and we did not like him.
We wanted to build an oil pipeline into Europe to offset Russia's gas monopoly.
A lot of other factors.
That's a big one.
Assad said no.
Then we said, we're going to knock out your government.
So Obama lets ISIS happen.
We provide materials and weapons to the rebels, the Free Syrian Army Associates, which eventually get taken over by ISIS extremists and become a singular faction.
And the U.S. is happy to let it happen.
They say, we'll sit back and watch them tear each other apart.
Trump gets in and he flattens ISIS.
I don't think that Barack Obama gave those guns as an excuse to invade Mexico.
I think he gave the guns to the cartels because the cartels are part of what they need to happen for drug trafficking and human smuggling into the United States.
I think that the interests of the Unit Party, like the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the neocons has never been, at least in the last 40 years, for the American people.
And you can criticize Donald Trump for a lot of things.
In fact, there's so many things it's hard to name, but at least you can look at his plans and what's going on and say, well, that's for the American people.
Neither of them were going to go in and do ambush, didn't do anything about it.
Are you familiar with the crack epidemic in the 90s?
And it was how the CIA was basically facilitating all of this.
And the reporter who uncovered it committed suicide with two gunshots to his head.
You have to wonder about what was that all about?
Well, there's a lot of conspiracy theories, but the reporting is basically the CIA was funneling crack cocaine to black neighborhoods.
Your guess is as good as mine, I guess.
Suppress and depress minority populations, maybe.
I'd have to imagine that with the flow of fentanyl and other drugs and human trafficking, the Democrats have been encouraging, especially in the Biden administration, they would want these groups to be able to operate to do what they want to do.
Not only that, but it allows the U.S. to do, I would just call it extra-legal things undercover.
You can't go to the Mexican government and say, we need to transport 2 million people into our country through your border, because that's public record.
But you can certainly go to the cartels and say, our NGOs will take care of you.
No, no, no, no, I'm saying there's a multitude of factors involved in why the U.S. has been supporting illegal activity in Mexico.
If you go back to the 90s, you know that the United States intelligence, CIA largely, was helping funnel crack cocaine from Mexico into the United States.
And I guess one could only surmise as to the purpose, but they were flooding black neighborhoods, black communities with crack cocaine.
I believe the working theory is that they were trying to suppress and depress black population.
Perhaps.
I mean, people argue that.
As for why he would be giving them guns, it's because they do extra-legal things that the U.S. needs or wants them to do.
So it's powerful to have these groups who are willing to do anything for money at your behest.
I think that it's a largely anarcho-state.
You take a look at Afghanistan, for instance, the United States, where we got soldiers in Afghanistan guarding poppy fields because it's a large portion of their economy pumping out heroin.
I think that the government of the United States pre-Donald Trump, like, you know, post-World War II, or probably even before that, has not been operating for the betterment of mankind, but for control.
And you need, as I think Ian brings up quite a bit, the Henry Kissinger's, what is it called?
I think with the Mexico thing, I'm still on Hanlon's Razor, but I share your skepticism of the kind of neocon project that's been going on in the country.
I see who they gave the weapons to because they were.
I'm sorry.
I just find it I find it incredibly hard to believe that Biden's government, knowing the cartels are murdering people, killing politicians, needed some kind of pretext to go in and do anything about it.
So instead, they hand a bunch of guns to people they know who are violent murderer criminals and then go, oopsie, just like when Obama.
I don't believe for a second that Obama, when he's, listen, they come to him and they say, okay, president, we want to blow up, we have a target to blow up.
Absolutely, the Obama administration was competent.
There are so many things one could argue about incompetence with Obama, but Obama is not a moron.
Obama was a very, very sharp, very charismatic, cunning individual.
Look at the Russia Gate hoax.
I mean, Obama's meeting with Comey, Sally Yates, who was Biden there?
And they're effectively planning to go after Donald Trump with this whole nonsense.
These people were cold, calculating.
And you know what?
The only thing I can give for them in incompetence is that they couldn't get Hillary Clinton across the finish line.
But again, so I look at what the Obama administration does, and I think it's silly to say that giving thousands of guns to cartel members was just an oopsie-daisy because Trump doesn't need any of that pretext.
The priorities of the Donald Trump administration as it comes to foreign issues and military issues is about what is going to benefit the United States the most.
That being said, he's far from perfect.
I don't want to see a war with Iran.
I have a general idea of why he's doing it.
No, it's not because Israel controls the United States with puppet strings, but some people are just wackaloons.
And I would argue that Trump is largely imperfect.
But look at the fervor over Trump striking these drug boats.
I mean, we see videos of boats carrying drugs blown up.
And then there's an argument that some of them are not.
They're just fishing boats and they're civilians.
And I say, okay, well, that's bad, right?
Let's take a look into that.
Let's get a full report.
Let's get an investigation and make a determination if there was military action that was taken against civilians, for which we will make an attempt to determine what the penalties of that will be.
Barack Obama murdered people.
He murdered children.
He murdered innocent civilians.
He killed American citizens.
No one cares.
And I know the left always says, what about ism?
And I say, no, no, no, no.
It's about actions speaking louder than words.
When Donald Trump targets boats shuttling drugs to the U.S. or largely to Europe in the Caribbean, they lose their minds over it, but they don't say a damn thing when Barack Obama was murdering Americans.
So I don't believe for two seconds they actually care.
Anyway, real quick, your point about Trump's foreign policy is: well, he tried not to be involved in the Ukraine-Russia stuff, but oh boy, he can't figure that one out.
The Iran stuff is troubling, but Iran is basically shutting down the Red Sea.
They're funding these terror groups, Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The Houthis are then firing on ships in the Red Sea.
And the Red Sea, of course, is a Suez Canal.
There are three major trade vectors for global trade.
You've got Panama, which Trump is trying to regain control of.
The Suez, which we do control, and Trump, the conflict with Iran, is largely around whether or not we can maintain security in that region.
And then, of course, Greenland and Canada, which is the Northwest Passage.
So Trump is, I would argue, retracted on liberal economic order worldview, but not abandoning of it, and largely focused on securing American national benefits.
So the cartels are shuttling fentanyl and drugs in the United States.
Trump says, shut it down.
These boats are transporting drugs, funding these operations.
Shut it down.
Venezuela stole billions of dollars of U.S. oil assets in 2009.
Trump says, no, we're shutting that down.
So I would argue maybe it's 60, 65%.
It's going to be a direct repercussion, or the direct repression is going to be the benefit to the American people, like tariffs.
I would argue that the perspective on Ukraine and Iran largely is, will it ultimately benefit America?
But that's where you're starting to stretch it into global security for the betterment of America.
I can understand why my libertarian friends are largely challenging of that notion.
But I would also say the libertarians that are critical of it, I respect.
The libertarians that are isolationist have no idea what's going on in the world.
Where I struggle with that analysis of Trump is it does sound like it requires me to sign off an intentionality of looking at what were the intentions of the Obama administration, what are the intentions of the Trump administration.
I don't really like either.
And so it's harder for me to put that into a rubric that I can follow.
But the basic idea would just be whatever's strategically the best thing for America.
Anybody who's interested in, well, let's pull up the latitude tariff.
said we ain't we ain't backing down yeah so let me let me let me let me grab a uh he's doing a 10 tariff for 150 days as authorized by the 1975 nea act that preceded aipa Let me – where's the – I thought I had that post pulled up where Trump is like, we're going to do it anyway.
But I want to get the – here we go.
Here we go.
Trump threatens.
Let's pull this up.
All right, everybody.
We got the story from the AP following the Supreme Court's decision that Trump cannot enact emergency tariffs under this one particular law.
Donald Trump has come out and said he's going to increase tariffs anyway, citing three other laws from the 70s.
He's now warning countries to abide by tariff deals despite the Supreme Court decision.
Any country that wants to play games, the Supreme Court decision Trump posted, will be met with a much higher tariff and worse than that which they just recently agreed to.
He said Saturday that he wants a global tariff of 15% up from 10.
He announced immediately after the ruling.
The court's decision struck down tariffs Trump had imposed on nearly every country using an emergency powers law, but the Republican president won't let go of his favorite, albeit now more limited, tool for rewriting the rules of global commerce and applying international pressure.
So I am of the opinion that the tariffs are quite possibly the best thing for the United States.
I am a huge, huge fan, and I believe that anybody who is truly interested in the betterment of the United States would support this, and anybody who either wants to extract value from the system to its decay would oppose it.
The people that I view that are, there's two groups of people that I believe are in opposition to the tariffs.
Those that want to extract the value from this country to its demise, and those who don't understand what is going on in this country.
If I have to pick one of those two, I think comparative advantage is a thing.
I think trade is good.
The best argument that I've heard in terms of the Trump tariffs is that there are situations where we need to use leverage to compel other countries to quit doing bad things.
And it would be better to use tariffs than to do military interventions.
Oh, no, like as a way of avoiding military stuff, right?
This is the best argument I've heard is that China is doing they've got a predatory IP system.
Other countries have tariffs.
We could use punitive tariffs to try to lower it.
So if you're using tariffs as a temporary leverage to try to get a policy goal, that makes sense to me.
The idea that we have a kind of zero-sum fixed amount of wealth and that if we are buying things from other countries, they're extracting wealth, I don't think that that's sound on that.
So when my industry dies because we are spending 10 times as much to ship lumber to China to manufacture it with slave labor, sorry, peasant labor, and send it back to the United States, how is that good for us, our country, and our children?
He argued that if I pay a higher rate, then the employees actually buy the cars from me on a loan, and then they're paying me back the money I'm paying them and then earning a percentage off the excess cars we produce.
They can't afford to buy the car outright, but they're paid enough to where they can say, okay, I can save up for this, and then a portion of their, they're buying the product back from the guy where they're making it a premium.
Actually, I've got to give it a - like, we're going to call it Scottish prison wine.
I would try it.
Scottish prison wine, but they're probably not going to produce very much of it because it's not very good for making grapes, right?
But they're very good at making sheep.
Meanwhile, France, really good at making grapes, large amount of grapes, very bad at making sheep comparatively, right?
They probably have some sheep.
If the Scots go, well, we want to protect our nascent wine industry, so we're going to put tariffs on the French wine industry, then France is going to respond by putting tariffs on wool coming in from Scotland.
Is it better for the people of Scotland and the generational wine farmers to have their industry destroyed because you, as a consumer, want to save $3 on your wine?
Or is it fair to say that the bustling wine industry in Scotland, which is storied and has legacy, deserves a chance to survive for its community, for its culture?
So I'll give you an example that I often give to most people, which is it's personal.
Skateboarding is dead.
It's an Olympic sport, but it's completely dead.
I sold, we sold something like 500 boards in a month.
Shocking industry experts asking me, Tim, how did you sell 500 skateboards?
And I said, I went on my show and said, go to boonieshq.com and buy the skateboards.
The pros are now working for Uber Eats.
They are doing delivery driving for Amazon.
They no longer have the time or ability, for the most part, to be professionals in their own sport.
There's videos popping up of some of the best professional skateboarders who Olympic contenders who now work for Home Depot making minimum wage.
You know why?
Because the factories that produce skateboards, instead of employing Americans and marketing a product to Americans, offshored all the manufacturing to China, where we cut down wood in Canada, import it to the United States, send it to China.
Chinese peasants make the boards for pennies on the dollar, send back cheap Chinese crap, and now there's no factories, no employees, and no pro skateboarders.
If you go to Japan and China, they have skateboarding up the wazoo.
Every new pro is some 15-year-old Japanese kid, and the country that invented the Olympic global phenomenon has lost control of it because we gave it away.
Because we told people in this country, which would you rather buy?
The $50 American-made skateboard or the $30 Chinese-made skateboard.
And to be honest, when the people walked into the shop to buy a board, they didn't know the difference.
And they said, $30 sounds good to me if it works.
Well, guess what happened?
Every American worker who grew up whose dad owned a wood shop lost their job and now they don't skate anymore.
Their kids, the Gen Z, and this is across the board, skateboarding is personal for me.
I know people probably don't care about it, but it's the perfect example of how we are willing to spend 10 times as much on the energy to send our raw materials to China so peasants can do it and Americans lose their jobs.
And then when no American has the job, what company is going to promote and market the new product to kids?
It doesn't exist anymore.
It's in China.
So when you go to China, what do you find?
Thousands of kids at their skate parks.
When you go to Japan, what do you find?
They're opening new skate parks like crazy.
They're launching TV shows about skateboarding.
We invent it in California and we gave it away and it's not coming back.
What you are missing is that the culture around this industry is gone because there's no economic support.
There's no factories.
There's no dads.
There's no marketing endeavor.
It doesn't exist anymore.
It's in China.
So in China, skateboarding is exploding like crazy.
In Japan, they're launching TV shows for skateboarding.
And today in the United States, we don't even have the big skateboard contests anymore.
They're failing and falling apart.
And all the top pros are just little Japanese kids.
Now I got no beef with the Japanese kids.
Some of the best skateboarders, they're all Japanese.
I'm pissed off that the country that made this, that invented it, that inspired the world, gave it all away.
And now where I live in my home country, I, for the life of me, well, actually, I'll say this.
One of the advantages to it is that I can go to a pro skateboarder and give them $500 and they'll come and they'll produce content because they're so desperate for money.
And what I tell all these guys, we stopped doing our games of skate events because of security issues.
We're working on trying to figure out how to do them again.
We told the pros you get $3,000 if you win and you get a guarantee just for showing up.
And they all show up and they beg to come and compete because these guys are working at Home Depot.
I would like the government to say, if you tell, if you move your factory to China, we will charge you 30% on the way back in so that you will not be competitive in the marketplace.
There's a famous photo of a man in a suit in the 1960s, I believe it was, riding a little fishboard, one of the OG skateboards in Central Park.
It's a great mystery to figure out who this man is and no one really knows.
That event that became iconic where it's like a guy in a suit and he's like cruising was because a company that made skateboards announced they were having an event in Central Park and encouraged everyone to come.
They told families, they told kids, they went and promoted it in New York City and then everyone showed up.
Well, not everyone, but a lot of people showed up.
And skateboarding started to get more and more popular in the United States.
I think the issue around something like skateboarding is that it's decently new relative to, say, like piano, which has been around and is global.
And there's tremendous opportunity.
What I would still argue, though, is, as someone who is not a pianist, I can only refer to the things in which I'm involved in, and I can stress the same thing is happening in other industries.
So I can cite surfing, snowboarding, and skiing as being massively impacted by foreign manufacturing.
And to back up a little bit, I question this whole idea that it's a lack of tariffs and protectionism that's resulted in lack of American manufacturing.
So you look at like no one does this with farmers.
Like if you go back to like 1880, 90% of the American workforce was farmers.
Like it's not because we started importing food that we do.
It's because we got really, really good at making food.
So if we stopped allowing companies to move their factories to Mexico or Indonesia or other countries, it would be a little bit more expensive, but there would be a bustling auto industry in Michigan.
Steel is one of the things Trump talks about regularly.
We export more steel now than we did in the 1980s.
The difference is we need fewer people to do the steel.
We came up with better innovations for it, and therefore we have fewer people working in it, but the actual exports are fine.
With cars, like most of the cars we get in the United States, even if they're foreign, like Kia, Toyota, whatever, they're manufactured here in the United States by American workers.
No, I mean, Donald Trump's famous, well, I should say Michael Moore's famous speech of Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign was that he went to the auto manufacturers and said, if you move your factories to Mexico or China, I will slap a 30% tariff on your vehicle and no one will buy it.
And it was the first time someone stood up for the workers.
We have watched Michigan deteriorate in psychotic ways.
Flint, Michigan being an amazing example of what happens when you gut the manufacturing base.
So yes, one could argue with innovations in travel and transport and cheap fuel specifically, we've been able to move manufacturing to other countries through these free trade agreements.
So what ends up happening is if you're a family who lives in Michigan, hey, it's like that movie Tommy Boy.
Remember that one?
The brake pad factory goes, the whole town goes.
I like to go to cities, or I could say this, when I go to cities, I like to ask the locals, what is the basis of their economy?
For what purpose does this town actually exist?
And you'll find out really interesting things.
You know, in Seattle, for instance, a lot of timber.
People don't know that, but what is the economic driver of the Pacific Northwest?
All the lumber work that gets done gets spent in these states setting up shop.
So for example, if I find a gold in the ground, and then I'm like, I need to hire 100 people to get the gold out of the ground.
You get a pop-up city.
Well, what happens?
Someone says these people are hungry, opens a restaurant.
And so then towns form.
In Michigan, something really interesting happens.
You're familiar with the Flint water crisis.
That's a direct result of sending our auto manufacturing to Mexico and other countries and importing cheap vehicles.
So what happens is in Michigan, you have a water distribution apparatus, the city water supply of Detroit.
When you divide the fixed cost of water distribution among, say, a million people, I'm going to use vague numbers because actual numbers get wonky.
Let's say you have a million people and it costs everybody $100 a month for their water bills in their homes.
That's not so bad, right?
I mean, it can be heavy for your house, but it's just $100.
So if the economy is stable, you're going to be able to afford it.
Well, the manufacturing leaves, and this means we begin to see a mass exodus from Michigan.
Something like, I think in the 2000s, it was like 11 families per minute were leaving the state.
This means the tax base is eroded, but the fixed cost of the water delivery system remains static.
Overnight, an individual receives double the water bill.
That's something you just can't afford.
It's a shock charge, especially when, as the auto manufacturing leaves, there's less money coming into your city, state, or town, less tax revenue for social services and public roads, and less money in general being spent on restaurants and toys, whatever it might be that drives that.
Why are we paying the most expensive water bill in the country for Detroit water when we can use Flint River water, which was contaminated with Legionnaires' disease and started running water through pipes, which got everybody super sick?
I mean, if it's going to build up the local economy, wouldn't it be beneficial to have been arguments made, such as in Ithaca, New York, are you familiar with the Ithaca Hour?
And the point of the currency is that it can't leave the jurisdiction.
So you can make the argument that Louisiana can offer to compete by going to an auto manufacturer and saying, we're going to cut you 5% on taxes.
Michigan can then say, we will too.
But the one thing you can't compete on is peasant labor, which is impossible, especially with unions.
So of course, these factories want to generate profits.
You move the auto manufacturing out of the state, the economy gets depressed.
This idea that we would be a service sector economy is insane, or even worse, that we would be a cultural economy when we're literally bleeding our culture out across the planet and doing nothing to protect it.
We're not a service economy or only a service economy.
We're still a manufacturing powerhouse.
We have been.
It never went away.
The difference is that we shifted from like low-wage stuff, the peasant labor that you're talking about, to high-end stuff, like building airplanes, computer parts, things like that.
I would rather have a high-end manufacturing industry than a low-end manufacturing.
And so instead of building our own aluminum refineries, being more energy efficient, we import aluminum from Canada, who imports their raw materials, bauxite, which refines into alumina and then aluminum in Canada, when the United States very well could have their own very cheap aluminum produced in-country.
We have gutted our manufacturing base for a fake argument.
That is, instead of building nuclear reactors and hydroelectric plants so that we can do it here cheap, we're actually spending more for Canada to do it.
Well, there is a debate long-term over imports and exports and tariffs.
And more importantly, if we want to get into an argument over what the founding fathers thought when the country had 4 million people in it, 13 colonies, and imports were substantially limited due to the difficulty of travel, we're talking about something entirely different from gigantic cargo vessels traveling the whole world and undercutting the economies and cultures of the countries for which they are.
When you look at wages, wages have increased since the 1970s, but prices have increased for healthcare, college, and housing.
Those are the three things that have gone up.
Everything else has gone down.
Food's gone down.
Consumer goods, gadgets, they've all gone down, right?
So people are actually earning more than they did in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s across age cohorts.
But prices for those three things have increased.
So because of restriction to supply with housing, with healthcare, healthcare is a complicated issue.
I would say that it's a combination of regulatory malfeasance combined with the fact that we have sort of state-by-state monopolies that we allow rather than competition to exist.
And it's this huge morass of regulations that are in there.
In terms of college, I would say that colleges because we went from a college degree is a nice thing to have, and some people are going to have it in 1950.
Like 2% of people had a graduate degree, maybe 6% had an undergraduate degree.
But in the 1980s, we went everybody has to get a college degree.
If you don't get a college degree, you're a loser and you don't get to be part of the social pyramid, right?
With a college degree, if it's a positional good that's predicated on the value being other people don't have it, you can't equalize it.
The value can't be egalitarian.
So we pushed everybody into that system.
You also have a limited amount of college spots that are available, but you have people coming in and you have, excuse me, you have money coming in, capital coming in.
Too much money chasing too few goods is going to increase the price.
You're going to cause inflation there.
So college, we've pumped too much money into it in terms of student loans and things like that.
The federal government has college is a waste of time and nobody should go.
Well, technically, yes, but I mean, it's largely based on I'm not paying the blame on anybody over the fact that in order to actually get houses to lower cost, which I wouldn't necessarily call a supply issue, it's more of a question of can Gen Z make enough money to compete with the interests of boomers?
I mean, it'd be great if a Chinese guy got those advantages, right?
And then he can have a communist party that externally is doing those things you describe.
That's not what I'm talking about, and that's the point I'm making.
My view of American tradition is not we have a fiscal policy that the founding fathers agreed with.
It's that I wake up in the morning with snow falling all around open Christmas presents, and we have apple pie baking sitting on a windowsill, and I go outside and I watch people playing baseball.
The key distinction between us is that I have a view of what makes America America based on its American tradition, and you argued for policies based on American policy tradition.
I have no interest in the United States becoming an Islamic nation where women have to wear the Kaab.
Biden screwed up where he decided that there were, hold on, real quick.
We'll talk about immigration in a moment.
In terms of the spiritual defending things thing, let's say that there's an industry that, like I work in entertainment, like you're a journalist, but we're kind of broadly in the same media family, right?
Like if stand-up comedy became less popular, I wouldn't want the government to prop it up.
And if they're same thing, if there are manufacturers that are making buggy whips or are making saddles and people don't want to ride horses as much, I don't think that there's any onus on the government to protect those industries.
The short-term benefits you're looking at ignore the cultural ramifications of the world you live in.
We are in a country right now where you have competing ideologies within our own borders.
You've got the multicultural democracy largely represented by progressives in the Democratic Party and constitutional republicanism largely represented by not even Republicans, just the MAGA point, a part of it.
What we end up seeing then is when you go to Dearborn, Michigan, for instance, you have an enclave of Islam and Sharia Patrol.
You have Chinese communist police departments opening across the United States because the graph go-up argument ignores what makes a people.
What a constitution is, is the views of the world that constitute its people.
And when we open our borders, because we say economically, it's great.
Competition is no big deal.
50 years later, you have no free speech, you have no sovereignty, and you now have to contend with a voting bloc that wants your country eroded and destroyed, notably New York, with Zorhan Mamdani, who explicitly stated in his campaign he will advocate for illegal immigrants against federal law.
This country will not exist if we maintain your description of how things should be run.
We have to have borders, and we have to have a working body that is able to exist without having to compete with peasants in other countries.
There is an enclave, Irania, I believe it's called, in South Africa.
It is a white private landmass that no one can live there.
It's private unless you come to them and they approve you to live there.
And they said, we don't allow any hiring of labor from outside the community because what ended up happening was the money started leaving and the trade started slowing down.
So they realized it may be more expensive to hire a neighbor to do the work, but they have to, otherwise it all starts falling apart.
I am sick and tired of the laissez-faire libertarian.
I will squeeze what is left of the American way of living and watch this country become a communist woke cesspool by importing people who don't care for our values and displace our voting blocks because in the short term, the graph goes up.
I actually wrote a book on this called Tribalism is Dumb.
I'll be happy to give you a copy of it when we leave.
That is a salient question.
That's something that has been going on in the United States now for 20 or 30 years.
It's been going on in other countries as well.
It's been going on in Europe.
The countries that have a pre-distributist economic model, which is kind of what you're advocating for, of let's keep wages higher at the base floor through higher minimum wage, things like that, they're going through the same thing as well.
But I don't want to hijack your show and only talk about that.
Let's talk about immigrants for a minute.
You brought up Biden.
Biden made a horrible mistake during his presidency where prior to Biden, if you wanted to seek asylum in the United States, you would come to the United States.
They would go, thank you very much.
Here's your number.
We'll call you when you're up for asylum status.
Go back to the last safe port of entry.
He reversed that and said, you can come into the United States and then just hang out until we call you.
That opened up the floodgates.
That's why there was a ton of people that came in under Biden.
CBP was ordered that if they knew a child was brought across the border for sex slavery to deliver them to the sex slavery.
Yeah, I'm not here stumping for what Biden did was not an accident where he said, oops, see, I made a thing go wrong.
It was an intentional plan where they were ferrying illegally trafficked children on planes into various red states for years.
Tennessee, this erupted a major scandal when a U.S. plane loaded a bunch of child trafficking victims onto a plane and flew them into Tennessee.
There was one plane that landed in Westchester, New York, and a journalist filmed it coming out and interviewed one of the guys and he's like, they're making us do it.
Biden was assisting.
So we can go back to the cartels.
Biden was bringing these trafficking victims into this country intentionally.
Now, I think the obvious answer is that there are a series of economic faults that are affecting the United States ever since 2008.
In the liberal worldview, the numbers improving is better than anything else.
And this is a disease for which all political factions find themselves afflicted.
Even Donald Trump talks about affordability and how we've conquered it, and he's completely wrong.
But it's because you can't win political power unless the people feel comfortable.
So the Democrats' play is graph must go up.
In the short term, we'll win.
In the long term, this country will burn down.
And a great example of it is, since the ICE operations kicked off, the Republican Party, the polling has shown Latino voters are bleeding from support for Republicans because many of these voters have family and friends who are here illegally.
And they would advocate by vote for people who are not citizens of this country who are going to receive benefits or at least contribute to the cost of running a nation that comes from the public coffers.
You will not survive if you have someone in your home voting to give away what you have to people outside.
And it's going to keep getting worse because we are a nation of graph go up, give away our manufacturing jobs, open up our borders to illegal immigrants.
Slowly but surely, you end up with enclaves and voting blocks that say, fuck America.
Zohran Mamdani being an example of a man who ran for mayor and explicitly stated, I will protect the criminals who broke this country's laws from those in the federal government who seek to enforce these nations' laws.
When you get to the point where our largest and most prosperous city is now voting for a man who explicitly states we are de facto outside of the federal government, your country is breaking apart.
So I would describe the political state of affairs in this country as civil strife with the political assassinations and murder.
I would describe what we're talking about with tariffs and immigration as components of the erosion.
I do believe that the internet plays a role in that it keeps the masses ignorant and hateful.
The left, I believe, is substantially more hateful while believing they're not while screaming in people's faces and beating and murdering people.
And it's only going to get worse.
And unfortunately, we have liberals and libertarians who could stand up and say, and that's why I like the Mises caucus guys, because they outright say, close the borders.
But the liberal mindset is as you're describing it.
We need the short-term gains to make money today.
I don't care what happens tomorrow.
And I could go to the American people and say, the world that you live in will cease to exist, but boy, will it be fun riding that bomb straight out of the out of the Enola Gay?
I mean, I don't think it's short-term to buy something cheaper.
Like an attorney that buys things from a grocery store has a trade deficit with his grocery store, but the attorney is still making more money than the grocery.
I think you should be able to have a voluntary relationship with anybody unless you are actively hurting them.
So like, if I want to marry five people, I'm fine with that.
I don't care.
If I want to have an economic relationship with somebody, that's also fine.
The government shouldn't be stopping me from having economic relationships.
So if you want to hire only Americans and only have your product made in America, I applaud that.
And there are a lot of people, as you just pointed out, who would purchase that.
I mean, like, you just made a case that people will buy American even if it costs more, that you're able to compete within that market despite having cheaper boards.
And I think it's, it's, I got to be completely honest.
I think what you're describing in some circumstances is treasonous.
Okay.
So, and I know you'll want to clarify, of course, and you will present the caveats because any reasonable person would, but certainly not an American could have a voluntary relationship with a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
For the same reason that a governor or a member of the executive branch couldn't sell American secrets to the CCB despite the fact that they're an individual.
No, if there were a private individual that came up with some kind of IP and they wanted to sell it, that would be fine.
Like if, I don't know, Elon Musk wanted to sell something to China, we could run it through CFIS.
Like there are ways to go through in terms of looking at national security, but if an individual within a corporation, within a private part of the sphere, wanted to do trade relations with a communist government.
All you've just said to me and everyone else is my ideological worldview supersedes yours, and I respect that you believe that because I think mine supersedes yours.
Like, where I got hung up was if we're talking about— So Raytheon, a Raytheon employee can go to the CCP and say, I know how to build a nuclear weapon launched from a Hellfire drone.
Let me give that to you.
You're going to say no.
My point is this.
You are simply asserting if it benefits me, it should be allowed.
But there are certain things where the government should stop voluntary exchange.
Point is, you said previously you think people should be free to do these things, but you, of course, don't mean it.
You just think that you should be able to engage in economic behaviors that'll benefit you and how you see the world, and I think you are destroying this country by doing so.
Now again, we would both agree an individual taking a state secret or general information that would benefit China in destroying this country.
I don't want to hurt anybody in America, like I'm a guy in a three-piece suit.
If Trump does 10, 15% tariffs, the reality is it's probably not going to impact me.
I can take that on the chin.
I think that it's actually going to hurt manufacturing in the long run because it's going to hurt intermediate parts.
It's going to affect how much stuff costs for people that are poor.
I'm concerned about them.
In the short term, I can make a good faith argument and I I would hope you could concede to me that, while I might be wrong, i'm still operating in good faith.
In the same way that the government shouldn't kill people, but there are instances where it's going to have to kill people, that doesn't mean, I think, that the sheriff can gun down anyone.
The only real argument is the sectors in which you believe you should be allowed to trade with foreign countries, and I disagree with you on that.
I believe that, in the short term, giving away our manufacturing i'm sorry, I believe that in giving away our manufacturing to Mexico or China or other countries will benefit us.
Benefit us in the short term, as consumers now get a cheaper product and the company gets a higher profit margin.
In the long term, you eliminate the jobs, you eliminate the culture.
Cities begin to dry up, families stop happening because they can't buy food and they can't seek shelter anymore, and now we are looking at a population collapse, a financial crisis, an ideologic, ideological conflict.
Long term, with tariffs, people start to rebuild factories begrudgingly.
They start to bring back these jobs.
Now young people who didn't have a job before make one start generating these jobs.
Interest and culture starts to rebuild and is within a confine that.
Short term, it may get a little bit more expensive.
Long term you will have a self-sustaining ecosystem, an economy, household management.
The argument that we had was simply based on where you want to draw the line and where I want to draw the line.
You know, something might be very cheap to order from the Barbarian leader, but then the Barbarian leader gets money and he poisons your Dna and kills you.
You know, in seven years, because you funded a danger that you didn't, just because it was cheaper, you were actually funding a negative that you didn't let me.
So there is a thing we've got uh, called a Ciphius, which is the Committee ON International.
I can't remember what it is, but basically the Senate has a committee where if there's going to be a foreign entity buying some American industry, some kind of company, it has to go through approval for them.
So, for example, there was a big kerfuffle a few years ago where a Saudi company Wanted to buy, I think, the port of Los Angeles.
What that basically meant was they were just going to be the company in charge of logistics for it.
They weren't in charge of security.
Sophius looked at it and went, This does not pose a threat to American security because American security is still handed by America.
But if we're talking about like 1%, that's probably just like investment diversity for the Chinese, in which case, they're spending money over here and we're getting more money.
So the way the food chain works, most people, I assume that this.
The farmland is going to be the bottom, which means small amounts of that are going to spread out to a much larger amount of our food supply.
It theoretically could be greater than, depending on what they're growing, you don't know for sure.
But let's say that 0.02% actually is, it's hard to know.
Some of the agriculture will be for things that are, you know, animal feed or whatever.
Actually, you know what?
I'll say this.
It didn't even matter.
If China begins genetically engineering or infecting food with something not intended to kill a person overnight, but to say lower their ability to reproduce by 1%, China's on the 100-year, thousand-year plan.
Why would we allow a foreign adversary?
We're not at war, but they are an adversary.
They're listed in federal law as an adversary.
They're codified as one.
Why would we allow them any degree of control in our food production?
So again, the bigger picture here that I see is you're sitting in your rocking chair, sipping your delicious sun tea as the Chinese peasant comes over and asks you, Sa, what would you like to eat?
And you're like, this is great.
And behind you, they're cutting, they're tearing down the walls of your home.
They're pissing and crapping all over the place.
And you're like, I don't care because I'm getting it good right now.
And then there's a 17-year-old guy watching it happen, going, bro, why are you doing this right now?
And you're like, who cares?
It's great.
So an example of that is China, for instance, has birth tourism.
So I forgot the number.
There's a story recently.
There are companies in China that fly women to the United States to give birth and immediately fly back.
There's something like 30,000 in the past couple of years.
These are U.S. citizens now exploiting our laws for one purpose.
In 20 years, in 30 years, they're going to come back as full-fledged citizens, but loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
They are building up control in our country.
And their strategy is we can conquer these bloated gluttons because they love it.
Right now, they are more than happy to sell out this country for a short-term gain.
So if we're talking about immigration, here's what I want.
I want wide gates and high walls.
I want there to be good security to make sure that bad actors don't come into the United States, that there aren't gangs coming in, there aren't criminals coming in.
So considering the fact that it is still in place and we are experiencing this attack from an adversary, should this woman come to your house and say, let me in so I can give birth?
I would say that America, the description is that what is it, that a nation is a people and a country is its borders or something that affect.
So I would argue that the United States of America is a people with a long-standing history and tradition and unified culture that was built from rejecting one tyrant 3,000 miles away in exchange for 3,000 tyrants one mile away.
Just to quote the Patriot, brilliant.
We have an American tradition built on the wars that we've fought, the things that we've built.
These things are deeply rooted in a variety of sports and foods.
We are told now by a large faction of people that we have no culture, and that is rooted in what the left describes as multiculturalism.
So what I'm seeing happen right now is when I look at this picture of Donald Trump talking about tariffs, he represents the nation of America.
We are two distinct worldviews, a multicultural democracy, which does not believe in classical liberalism or American tradition.
And we are a constitutional republic that does.
Libertarians occupy a weird space where I believe that, and I'm not saying you're libertarian, I'm saying libertarians because they swing the vote a point or two, exist in the space of it should be legal for me to do and I'll vote for it.
Like the principal moral foundation of libertarianism is my right to liberty.
I think part of the reason, pre-Biden, that we had a big influx of immigration over the last 20 years is we basically set the speed limit too low and we're surprised that people are still.
Farmers are an incredible disadvantage if they want to be legal at the moment because it's incredibly difficult to hire people legally through the process.
One of the things that we've got in the country is we require if you have legal immigrant labor, it has to be so high as to try to make it competitive for Americans doing it.
And they still suffer for it.
They still can't get people in, right?
We actually don't have enough people that would do basic agricultural stuff in the United States.
So back to the point I was making, irrespective of, I don't know what point you're trying to make.
In order for a simple component of what an economy is strong is when it is selling more than it's buying.
Like anyone else, you are making more money than you are spending.
You then have more money to invest.
And another easy way to explain it is they estimate that, you know, this, today you need like $150,000 a year to live what was once described as middle-class median.
So you get two weeks of vacation, you got clean clothes, you got healthcare, you got a place to live, you can have a family.
Well, if you make $150,000 a year, you're not really saving if you are living comfortably.
You're going to cut back on some things you might think you need, but you'll save a little bit.
If you're making $250,000 a year after taxes, you're going to have probably like 50K to invest, allowing you to grow your wealth.
This is why it's important for countries to sell more than they buy.
The U.S. is the exception.
The reason for it is we don't do that, but we will kill you if you don't spend our money for oil.
So for, let's just say like Russia, back when it was solely the petrodollar system, they would have to use rubles to buy dollars so they could use the dollars to buy oil.
And the United States exported just the fact that we'll kill you if you don't lose our money.
That is a wonderful system.
If you believe in free trade, open borders, it works perfectly so long as you are willing to blow up other countries and assassinate world leaders who try to build a global order outside of the U.S. dollar.
As the BRICS nations begin expanding and Iran seeks admittance, I think they may have gotten it with BRICS, the U.S. largely is getting pissed off.
The war in Syria largely is about the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, where the U.S. said, we want to build this oil pipeline from Qatar through Syria, Turkey, into Europe because Russia is charging too much money.
They control about 20% of natural gas through Gazprom.
Syria responded that Vladimir Putin is our ally and for this we won't allow you to do it.
So the U.S. said, then we will kill you.
At first, they negotiated and then they refused.
Simply put, I believe it is fair to say the liberal economic order system, Swift Payment, IMF, big banks, all of that is built around the United States is the world police, the police of the oceans and international trade.
And for this reason, Americans will live like those in Capitol City, the hunger games, so long as we're willing to drop bombs on the people who try to break that system.
Notably, Muhammad Margadafi, who wanted to create an African union and trade gold dinars for oil, and Saddam Hussein, who wanted to trade oil for a Euro.
If you want to maintain a strong American economy that engages in the trade practices that you believe in, it requires us to blow up anybody who would oppose the petrodollar system.
Because if you want to give our manufacturing to a foreign country so we become an import nation, we are not producing enough to sell to the rest of the world.
How do we maintain an economy when we are spending more than we generate?
I think that, again, I think you're right in terms of the deficit, because if we've got a spending deficit and other people are using our currency, when we inflate it, they bear part of that burden.
I am saying that China has to tithe to the United States in order to buy oil.
We get access to Chinese labor in exchange for nothing.
We do not give China anything other than we print a dollar and say, we'll give you a dollar for your wand, which means when you want to, you want to buy that scarf off Ian.
And I have a gun pointed at you, and I say, you've got it first.
Give me something of yours before I'll let you trade with Ian.
My point is, sending our factories overseas and the jobs happening somewhere else means we don't have workers that are going to be producing things and trading amongst themselves.
So how do we provide a laptop to a person who is providing very little to the rest of the world?
First, it would entirely depend on which company, which factory, the degree of necessity for the product, and it would also the sector of the economy and how much it would be damaged.
So the easy answer is usually automation is great.
it's got to be tapered.
So if we've got little robots that are going to come and make shoes from now on, then we have to have some kind of tapering process by which when a company brings, so yes, government must intervene.
Otherwise, what you end up with is shantytown slums and depressions.
So a great example of this is the accusations against Tom's shoes.
Because what happened was these small towns had shoemakers, cobblers.
And one day, the cobbler had no job.
People stopped coming and buying from him because the people all had clean American cheap shoes.
And so the economy was destroyed by free.
When a factory says, we're going to fire 100 people and we're going to bring in robots to do the job, you now have 100 people who no longer have customers.
The customer was the factory who said, we'll pay you in exchange for your labor.
Now you have a whole bunch of people who can't feed their families.
They end up becoming homeless.
Some of them may get drug addicted.
A lot of bad things happen from that.
We don't want economic destabilization to happen overnight.
So we don't want companies to be able to just fire 100 workers and bring in a bunch of robots.
So when you lose your job to automation, what job retraining can you get if the only job available is rock star?
Now, obviously, it's not rock star, but the point is this: a 50-year-old assembly line worker who gets fired because a robot came in is not going to learn to code.
It's never going to happen.
So, what do we say for that person in this economy?
And it's overall right now, me being 42, I'm from Oklahoma.
It's good that I'm able to podcast and talk with you.
It's good that we're all doing this.
If you were living 100 years ago, we'd all be farmers.
It's a good thing that we've been able to make those jobs more efficient.
And I see that as a corollary to the free trade issue, where we're able to get more money, we're able to specialize more, we're able to be more productive.
I think we hit the nail on the head with this point.
And it kind of exemplifies everything in that when you give away a job, a factory, what you are saying is 1,000, when that factory decides to close down, 1,000 people work at the factory will now be destitute.
But don't worry, 1,000 Chinese laborers will make one-tenth of what they were making, and China will be very happy to receive that.
Pitch me on this, because if you get laid off at 50 and your job no longer exists, it's going to be very difficult to find a job with a comparable income to get training.
My general problem with this whole thing is that if it's just like free trade, kind of laissez-faire, like path of least resistance, that insidious machines within government will take advantage of that.
Easy like yeah, we're just going along to get along, and literally the Chinese will just buy us out and then own us with, like yeah, short-term gain, long-term losses and the.
Let me ask you this question, if the Chinese Communist Party came to you and said, i'll give you 10 million dollars today to sell out your country no, but this is what so many people are doing, that that that's the whole point.
If we're looking at the, automation is a great point and and Ian's point is great, if we have free trade at the same time as automation, we're basically saying to the American worker, you'll be left holding an empty bag overnight, learn to code, good luck.
The only problem is the H-1bs are bringing in, are bringing in the coders, because Americans don't know how AI can code better than a human AI can go.
Uh it, it just means you can, you can freely purchase goods from other countries and that you're you're not impeded with tariffs.
Um, so if, if you're gonna sell watermelons for two dollars, I can import the watermelons for two dollars, minus the logistics of getting it from you to me.
My concern is about corporate corporatocracy and a corporation taking control in a country and then serving as the de facto government, like Amazon.
And if, if Amazon can do whatever it wants and sell to anyone on the planet because that's my right that they'll just make it cheaper and more robotic and less human and then all of a sudden they'll own the food supplies and they'll own I mean I I i'm, i'm glad Amazon's around.
They they, I think, start at a pretty high, high rate compared to a lot of other jobs.
It's above minimum wage.
So, like I, I don't think like, maybe maybe there are other examples you could give but like Amazon to me is all alphabet taking control of the economy.
Uh, I appreciate the the kind feedback to your listener.
Um, if you were to look at how much it would cost to manufacture an IPod in the United States, I think it would increase by something like 10,000 or not.
IPod, IPhone.
It increased by like $10,000 or so.
So I think it would be prohibitive if you tried to do that just here.
If we didn't have the petro dollar, it would cost the exact same thing made in Korea or China or at Foxconn.
And without maintaining a balanced economy and proper spending, I'll put it like this.
If the petrodollar system collapses, your laptop is going to cost you 10 grand.
Like the fact that we get laptops for $1,000 as a stable, bro.
I went to Best Buy last week and there's a 90-inch TV for like $300.
Just like, geez, man.
You know, sometimes I question whether or not we should go to war with Iran, but then I see these TVs and I'm just like, well, you know, we can bomb some of them, right?
In the same way that you can automate jobs and you're going to destroy jobs, but you're going to create more jobs in the process by getting cheaper parts and having jobs created in the process of automation.
Oh, I mean, like what we're doing right now.
I mean, like, again, if we were to go back to like 1940, more like one of us would be a farmer in the room.
One of us would probably be doing like ledger sheets that don't exist anymore.
I definitely wouldn't be able to do my job like a social media manager.
I don't know about going back anywhere, but I think it's a problem that people are fat, lazy, slothful, locked in their houses and don't have anything to do.
They've become listless and without passion.
They've sought ideological addiction to fill the holes in their world and they've become violent psychopaths.
I saw a video of a guy who went to an ICE protest stand in Minnesota where they were giving away hand warmers, gloves, coats, food, hot chocolate.
And I thought to myself, how incredible that we have such tremendous abundance that people literally don't have to work and can get free food and clothing just for saying an idea outside.
That's a bad thing.
I think people should actually have to have some attachment to their lives and reality in order to exist.
But the country right now is at this inflection point where I would argue it's massively detrimental to get to, let me do this because we're talking about Star Trek.
We got to go in two minutes.
I'll say one thing real quick.
If we had replicators, Civil War would erupt in two seconds, and then this country would become just like the whole world would erode.
But we'll save that.
I do want to grab at least a couple of the super chats here.
I don't want to leave people hanging because we only have a minute left.
Let's see.
Dave the Devil Chicken says, Tim, the reason we let Fast and Furious happen is to let the 21st century version of Manifest Destiny happen where we go in and take over.
So you're making a similar argument that it was to like that Ian said, to create an enemy that we could then say, oh no, now we have no choice.
Yeah, I thought it was they were just trying to track the guns and find who the higher ups were in the org, but now I'm starting to think like, geez, they create the enemy now if they can go conquer.
Yeah, if that happened, people would be slitting each other's throats.
But I think that was actually a component of the story they told in Star Trek that Earth fell apart, got super violent, people were killing each other.
But I actually think that, so in Star Trek, you know, Captain Picardy, Next Generation, they all have this, but he goes, tea, Earl Gray, halt.
And they state explicitly in Star Trek they don't use currency.
The Federation uses, has Federation credits.
They do trade raw materials.
Dilithium can't be replicated.
And Latinum is an extremely dense metal that is very valuable.
And they use these things to trade with other non-Federation planets.
The Federation itself, though, is arguably post-scarcity because of replicators.
However, there are landed aristocracy on Earth.
And that means there's no means by which a person born on Earth can ever acquire those land unless somehow you can convince a person to give up their generational wealth, which they have no reason to do because they can replicate anything you can replicate.
One could argue, because it's fiction, we can fill the gaps where the gaps need to be filled.
And that is, well, they don't use current, when they stated we don't use currency, they meant, generally speaking, for things like food and shelter.
That being said, there are still things of value that can be performed, which you will get Federation credits for, and credits can be used to acquire land.
There are probably many things, like you mentioned, with emotion of value for which someone may actually want to use credits.
So you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but I want that limited edition Ian Crossland guitar autographed by Ian Crossland, and he doesn't want to part with it.
So there's got to be a way to transfer things that still have value.
So like flavor-wise, not talking about political economy, but flavor-wise, the Federation is sort of a combination of Google and the European Union and space.
There are some fringe instances where like the Cardassians and the Federation go to war and then we end up doing like a swap on territories and that creates like terrorist cells.
They'll just like they'll do that, but they won't, but they but they believe in the prime directive, so they won't they won't colonize anybody or even make contact with anybody that's pre-warp.
So the core of the argument is the only reason that the Federation engages with societies once they discover warp is because it is inevitable that they will encounter each other.
And it's best that when they discover a planet on the verge of warp capabilities to make first contact.
So there's one episode, it's brilliant, where they come to a planet, which is totally an allegory for the United States and Earth.
A planet where the president of this country is deeply invested in scientific advancement and heavily invests in the development of warp technology, despite the fact they are still very culturally religious, not yet advanced to the point where they would even accept the idea that there is other life in the universe.
And so the Federation greets them and says, you are about to become warp capable.
We've seen your tests.
We come from a planet called Earth.
We represent the Federation of Planets.
And ultimately, the president decides they cannot announce first contact because they pushed too hard technologically without culturally developing first.
I want to say he hates TNG, but he sees this really strong moral variation that takes place because the original series is all written by World War II veterans.
Like they're all like, America's good, communists are bad, period.
And so Kirk, who embodies this, will go down to a planet and go, your God is a lie.
I will destroy your idol.
Bang, bang.
Your idol's gone.
Be free.
And you get into TNG, it's 1980s.
It's very relativistic.
unidentified
So Picard is like, we would never deign to instruct your people in terms of their own.
So the Prime Directive is meant to shield primitive societies from cultural contamination.
That's the idea behind it.
So anybody that's pre-warped that's not like sufficiently modern, we will refrain from ever letting them know that we exist for fear that it will alter the trajectory of their development.
But the flip side of it, though, is like there's in one of the, we shan't speak of them too much, but in some of the reboots, at one point, a planet is going to be destroyed.
And it was the stupidest plot because the way they did it in TNG was substantially better.
And that was they were investigating a planet with unusual volcanic activity when data receives a simple broadcast transmission from a little girl saying help.
And then he argues to Picard, the planet, the people are going to be destroyed unless we intervene and we can intervene very easily.
But they say the prime directive prevents us from intervening in the planet's natural development because they are pre-warp.
Data then says, I would argue that the transmission to us calling for help gives us a pretext.
And Picard then makes the argument, we can consider that an SOS for which we can't intervene.
It's not just that, but they're on an exploration vessel with a thousand, I think 1,000 people.
It was a capacity of the Enterprise.
And there's an episode, one of the best episodes ever written, where they accidentally, the Enterprise C accidentally goes through a rift in space-time, appearing briefly in the future.
And by leaving the attack on Kittemer, it alters the course of history in a way that the Klingons and the Fenterprise, the Federation, never form an alliance.
And now the Klingons are defeating the Federation in the future.
When the ship goes through the time rift and history changes, the Enterprise inside turns dimly lit in black with a skeleton crew.
Guynan, as she is an extra-dimensional being, notices something.
When he says, he's like, you know, they assassinate a senator in a false flag to trick the Romulans into joining the Federation, joining the war on the side of the Federation.
And Garrick says, and he says, what should I do?
And he's like, well, what you need to do is just sleep easy, knowing the Federation has been, or the Alpha Quadrant has been saved, and all it cost was one ship, a Romulan senator, and a Starfleet commander self-respect.
And it's just so fucking good that it's just such good writing.
And this is like, what is this, like 2000 or like 99?
That's because the idea being if you go to a planet with nation states, limited cultural development, like what would happen right now if aliens landed in the United States?
Russia would be able to blow up everyone else.
No, no.
If aliens landed in DC, Vladimir Putin would make an announcement.
We will not tolerate advanced technologies going to our principal adversaries, and we are prepared to fire every nuclear weapon to preserve our existence.
The reason aliens don't make themselves known and the reason why the powerful elites want a one world government is that you cannot join the Galactic Federation until your planet is unified under one governing authority.
Yeah, there's terrorists underground, next gen, and then data asks Picard, you know, if terrorism is so wrong, why is it so effective?
Like people do it.
And Picard's like, yup.
Like, that's the sad reality.
But Voyager was silly, but Deep Space Nine was basically screaming in the face of these liberals who got fat and happy and just said, we can be in these, you know, we don't need to build space.
We don't need to build weapons of war.
Which the only thing I really, really like about the reboot into darkness is that was the premise that the general was secretly building insane weapons, a gigantic black mock of the enterprise.
And he was like, there are threats out there.
And the Federation has grown fat and complacent.
And we are not arming ourselves for these wars, which is funny because considering this takes place in the prequel in an alternate timeline, we know full well he was correct.
There's an alternate timeline that's explored, I think, and it might be the original series, the Terran Empire.
He's a problem with when you go to North Halstead, they have mannequins sucking each other's dicks in the glass window and they've got sex toy shops and they've got a bathhouse where guys go and do drugs and have sex.
Yeah.
And that's what the guy was complaining about.
He was like, because it's not just about, I want to go live with a guy that I like and we can do whatever we want, mind our own business.
It's that they've created an industry around degeneracy.
No, no, when you have men who have a very who are very not or not very risk-averse, men that have a significantly higher libido, women have a lower libido generally, women have way more consequences when they to the possible negative externalities to having sex, pregnancy, et cetera.
All these things are built into women that prevent dudes from being able to just have sex whenever they want.
When you take the women out of it, then you have people that are far more promiscuous.
They have far more risky sex.
And that's why STDs and stuff like that are so rampant in the gay community.
It's not because it's because they take far more risks because there isn't the moderation of women.
And women moderate sex because historically, up until the birth control pill and modern medicine, women had a significantly higher chance of dying during childbirth.
They could get pregnant and they couldn't guarantee that the man was going to take care of them if they had promiscuous sex.
There were all these external factors that made women very, very concerned about who they had sex with because of all the bad things that could happen.
Men had none of those bad externalities.
They just didn't have to worry about them.
The only thing that men have to worry about is STIs.
And for the most part, when dudes are horny, they don't think about that stuff.
Men have always had the ability to, and when I say ability, I mean, you know, they haven't had the same repercussions.
It's not a big deal for men to have promiscuous sex the same way that women are.
So when you have men just having sex with men, you have almost no boundaries.
You have no limitations.
You don't have the moderating factor of women.
So men, gay men definitely have way, way more sex.
It's way more likely that a guy that's a gay guy goes to a gay bar and will bang some other dude in the bathroom than for a guy and a girl to go to the bathroom.
Not that it doesn't happen with women, but it's way more likely for guys to do that.
That means there's going to be more sexually transmitted diseases.
There's going to be more all of the negative externalities that men have to experience when it comes to sex at all.
They're going to have them on a significantly higher rate.
There's an Andrew Sullivan article that kind of goes through that as well, Phil.
And I agree with your assessment that when you look at sex amongst couples, gay men have the highest amount of sex, followed by heterosexual men, followed by lesbian couples.
And it's just like men in general on an aggregate level have a higher libido.
And if you have two people that have a higher libido, you're going to have a higher amount of sex.
Women have been like, so when a woman, if a dude looks at a woman that she's not attracted to, it's not just like a guy when a woman looks at him that he's not attracted to.
It's like, he's like, whatever, you know, I'm not attracted to her.
A woman genuinely fears fear, feels fear because it's possible that that guy is going to attack her, right?
Rape is always, in all of human history, rape has been a thing.
And for women, it's significantly more dangerous than it's ever been for men.
So when a man is, when a woman comes up to a man and he doesn't, he's not interested, go away, whatever.
Maybe I'm flattered.
Thank you, whatever.
There's no threat there.
There's no threat of violence.
With a woman, there's a possibility, and this is built into them because of the way that we've evolved with women.
There's a threat of violence there, and they're afraid legitimately.