IT WAS DERAILED | Timcast IRL #1458 w/ Rick Jordan
Rick Jordan and Timcast dissect Lauren Boebert’s Epstein-related photo claim, Bill Clinton’s dark money ties, and the World Economic Forum’s selective accountability—like Epstein-linked figures avoiding scrutiny. They debate Pakistan’s nuclear threats against Afghanistan, U.S.-supplied weapons fueling conflict, and Iran’s stalled nuclear talks, comparing Israel’s preemptive strikes to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement while questioning public support for future interventions amid gas price fears. AI’s ethical risks—military "guardrail" removal, unpredictable reasoning, and societal disruption—are explored, with Jordan likening AI’s complexity to human thought, dismissing divine claims. The episode ends blending Epstein’s political weaponization, AI’s rise, and their guest’s band tour, underscoring how scandals and tech now intertwine in culture and governance. [Automatically generated summary]
Hillary Clinton was on Capitol Hill today giving closed-door testimony about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Well, her lack of a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, if you believe her testimony.
Lauren Boebert decided that she was going to take a picture and then she sent it to Benny Johnson.
Then he threw that on the internet.
And so then they stopped the whole thing.
So we're going to talk about that tonight.
There is chaos erupting on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The Afghans decided that they were going to shoot at their nuclear-armed neighbor, and now all hell is breaking loose.
The Iran talks have broken down.
The United States, Iran says that they're not going to end their enrichment.
So this only adds to the tension in the region.
Donald Trump is making a bunch of waves because he's talking about seeking executive power over elections.
Now, what he's looking to do is use an executive order to require IDs, but the left is freaking out saying that he's going to fix the elections and it's going to be unfair and blah, blah, blah.
So we'll talk about that.
One of the people killed off the coast of Cuba the other day was an American citizen.
Now, allegedly, the boat was stolen and it had a lot of Cuban nationals in it.
But again, one American was killed.
So we'll get into that.
And also, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of AI stuff at the end of the show, too.
So there's a bunch of people in China that, or a bunch of women in China, that have decided that they want to fall in love with their AIs.
Burger King is using AIs to watch over their employees and make sure that they're saying please and thank you.
So we're going to get into it.
But first, we're going to go to a word from our sponsor.
But reading all this AI stuff, I'm kind of almost there, like getting ready to jump into a tornado.
If you look at a tornado anyway, you could ask AI.
Yeah, just read the Department of Wars has this contract with Anthropic AI, the same company that's building the thing that Phil's been using, this buddy bot.
Hillary Clinton's Epstein deposition briefly delayed over a leaked photo.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's testimony had to be briefly halted due to conservative commentator Benny Johnson posting a picture from the closed door testimony.
Johnson posted a picture on social media of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
He said that Colorado GOP rep Lauren Boolbert was the one who gave him the picture.
Breaking the first image of Hillary Clinton testifying under oath about Jeffrey Epstein to the Republican Oversight Committee is what Johnson wrote.
And you can see there's his tweet.
One of Clinton's advisors said that the testimony had to be temporarily off the record while they figured out where the photo came from and why possibly members of Congress are violating House rules, according to Politico.
In the past, Clinton said that she doesn't have any information on disgraced financer Epstein or his associate, Delaine Maxwell.
Epstein was convicted of sex trafficking minors in 2019, the same year he died in prison.
Do you guys think it's a good idea to take pictures in a closed session of why is this news?
Well, no, the weird thing about it is you see stories like this.
And I know that a lot of the people in Congress, I think it was you, Phil, that was pointing out, maybe somebody else that was pointing out that you expect more from senators than you do from people in Congress, right?
So is the idea here that Lauren Bobert's like, I'm just going to get my name in the press by leaking this photo to Benny Johnson and she just took it as a risk-versus-reward analysis?
I think Bobert was concerned this was going to be behind closed doors, going to get swept under the rug, and everyone's going to deny to forget about it.
And she's like, I do not want to forget about this moment.
I mean, maybe that, maybe there's some substance to that.
Like, the idea of having photos of Hillary Clinton getting, you know, reading the Riot Act by Congress or being questioned by Congress makes Hillary Clinton look bad.
Actually, I think one of the good point to this might be the fact that the Epstein files have become such a divisive issue within the Republican Party that trying to refocus it around somebody that's a Democrat is a good thing for people in Congress who are looking to kick the can down the line, not have to deal with it, you know, blowing up the Republican Party like it has been the last couple of months.
I wouldn't be surprised, too, if, like, because Epstein was dealing with such dark stuff that Bill's like, Hillary, you're never going to be any part of this part of my life.
I'm going off to do the dirtiest deals with the darkest money.
I think most people would look at it as the other way around, whereas she would be the one who's maneuvering him like a pawn and working behind the scenes to get him where he needs to go as a politician because he's too, you know, her idea might be he's not smart enough to do it on his own.
He's the good face of the Democratic Party at the time, but he doesn't necessarily have the ruthlessness that it takes to succeed in politics.
So she is the ruthless one and he is the face of the movement.
In theater school, I used to do that when I would be like a sophomore.
When all the new freshmen would come in, all their headshots would be on the wall.
I just go in the room and stare at the wall for like 20 minutes at all the headshots and names and memorize faces and names because it's such an important part of that industry.
People say that to control a demon, if you know its name, you can control it like in mythology.
And so demons will hide their names because probably that very power, that intrinsic vibration that pulls you and changes you, just hearing that sound.
So, yeah, I mean, look, I don't think this is actually even really big news.
So I feel like we could kind of move on.
We covered it because it was kind of like the thing that was all over the headlines and stuff.
But yeah, there's not really any significant substance and nothing was really said in the she have multiple days she has to testify or is it just this one day?
Um, I don't know.
I think that I think that the actual committee decides that.
In Zurich, the president and CEO of the World Economic Forum, Borg Brende, said he was stepping down on Thursday, a few weeks after the forum launched an independent investigation into his relationship with the late U.S. sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
Brende, who became president of the WEF in 2017, announced his decision in a statement following disclosures from the U.S. Justice Department that showed the Norwegian had three business dinners with Epstein and had also communicated with the disgraced financer via email and text message.
After careful consideration, I have decided to step down as president and CEO of the World Economic Forum.
My time here, spanning eight and a half years, has been profoundly rewarding, said Brendan, a former Norwegian foreign minister.
Issued by the WEF, the statement made no mention of Epstein.
However, Brende said Brende told Norwegian media he was sorry about how he had handled his dealings with the American and that it did not want the issue to be a distraction for the forum, which organizes the annual Davos Summit.
This is, again, this is kind of a it's it's interesting to see the kind of the repercussions of the Epstein files all over Europe.
And we're just not seeing anything here in the United States.
Yeah, like it because it's all just misplaced empathy.
You know, they're like, oh, look, this makes me a good person.
These poor are suffering, whatever.
I'll give this money away.
And really, it turns into money going to terrorists or going to organizations that are looking to do things like gendered reassignment surgeries for children or stuff like that.
It's all just the most nefarious stuff out there.
And they're just like shoveling cash at these groups.
It's like when you give to the nonprofits and the NGOs, especially if you don't do like a bunch of research into where the money goes, even if we don't want to talk about like shady places they could be giving it to, but whether they're spending the money well, right?
Like how much of it is actually going to whatever cause you're raising and how much is it is going to employee salaries and things like that.
Do you think it's a form of offloading their kind of their empathy on this company or are they doing it specifically because there's like nefarious stuff going on and they want to spread the money around to nefarious causes?
Honestly, I think that they just got a boatload of money and it looks good.
They got a boatload of money that they didn't have to work for and they're just like, man, I got all this stock and I can sell some stock and, you know, it'll piss my ex-husband off.
And, you know, I'm going to give this away to this group and this group and this group.
I don't think that they look into it.
I don't think that they're malicious or they're like, oh, I want to help terrorists or anything.
I think I think they believe the face of whatever NGO that they're talking about or whatever organization they believe with their mission statement, their public-facing mission statement on their website is they're like, oh, they seem nice.
Let me give them a billion dollars and let me give them, you know, or 50 million or whatever number it is.
But again, back to the story, like this, the fact that there's all these repercussions that are going through even the government of the UK and nothing's really happening here in the States when it comes to anyone that's alleged to be involved.
None of the lawyers or none of the friends are, nothing seems to be going on.
In Casey Wasserman in the U.S., that was a little bit different because it's connected directly to Hollywood and all of those people.
It became a virtue signal on behalf of all the people that he represented to leave on behalf of, you know, making sure that their audience, because every one of those clients, whether it's music, movies, they all have their own self-interest.
They can't be seeing being attached to this guy.
And his whole business model is to be attached to individuals, not necessarily to a product.
So it makes sense that he would get, you know.
Yeah, I mean, well, they asked him to, like, he's going to sell his own agency that bears his name.
Like, that's even crazier, like, his company with his name, and they're trying to buy him out so that he has to leave.
She would refer to them as Nubiles and they'd drive around New York looking for new biles, you know, underage women, basically, and find them like hot chicks that they thought were going to be models, basically.
And they're like, let's get them.
Let's stop.
They literally would stop on the street.
I don't know if this is true, but like they'd park the car and be like, hey, you, you're exactly who I'm looking for.
No, but however, most people continued to work with him after, but like plenty of people continued to work with him, even though he had convictions already.
So, I mean, it's like if you're over the age of 35 or 40 in Hollywood, you knew, and it took a long time for people to come out.
I mean, someone like Oprah Winfrey was tons of pictures with him, friends with him, buddy, buddy, buddy.
And of course, when it comes out the things that he did and the coercion, she just doesn't say anything, but nobody's like, hey, Oprah, how come you're still like a queen of media or what have you, even though you were definitely buddy-buddy with Harvey Weinstein, you know?
Well, she's also deeply embedded in the production side of things.
So she spread her money around to finance projects.
She's not just somebody who's front of the camera.
You know, it's the same thing.
There's actually this weird thing where every time Mel Gibson makes a new movie, even though like so many people in Hollywood hate him and the public loves him, somehow there will be like nice reports written about the movies that he's making because he's deeply felt within the production side of things.
So he can go to these outlets and they can write some favorable pieces about him.
And then he'll be right next to a hit piece from somebody else who doesn't like him because he's got so many ties to the behind the scenes stuff in the industry.
It is important that we don't demonize people for having connections to someone that's a vile creature.
Like, just because they knew a guy or they had a dinner with him eight years ago and then the guy went off and did psycho shit, like that doesn't mean you're a psycho.
It's okay to associate or have associated with crazy people in the past.
Doesn't make you crazy.
It doesn't make you a villain.
It's not illegal.
So it's really sad.
Like when people are like, shit, my name is attached to the guy.
I got to resign from all my things.
Maybe there's something going on, the World Economic Forum guy.
Maybe something deeper was with that guy.
And he's like, I got to get out of here before they start asking questions, maybe.
But the shame of running away from your job because you got named in an email from 18 years ago is like, bro, that's the problem.
I think the public needs to get over Epstein, though.
The world needs to get over Epstein because I don't see any real moves towards actually preventing, limiting, going after any kind of child trafficking anywhere else.
I think, at least when we're talking about the Twitter sphere and the people on there, I just don't think that they're going to get over it.
I don't blame them for the most part because I make the joke all the time.
I say, I'm team, nothing ever changes because it does feel that way.
And it's an offshoot of that where you're like, you look at these people do awful shit.
You see them break the rules.
You see them ignore the will of the people and nothing ever changes.
And there's no greater incidence of that than knowing that all of this stuff is happening and knowing that nobody's going to be held accountable.
And it's even worse when you see it happening to somebody in the UK.
But in the U.S. where all this was based, they're just like, I understand where the black pill comes from that.
Now I understand that there's a gap there between the people who are policy-minded and who are saying that we need to get over this because we have other things we need to worry about.
And this can't be the only thing that we focus on.
But when you're talking about the abuse of children, that's just a cord that's very hard for some people to separate from.
You know, it's funny because, well, it's interesting that there's all this focus on the Epstein files and the terrible things that Epstein did, but people don't really have the same, or at least the left doesn't have the same kind of outrage over all the children that were trafficked through the southern border when Joe Biden.
There were far more kids that were hurt and died and abused, you know, by cartels that were trafficking children over the border all the time during the four years that Biden was president, and they don't say a word, not a peep.
So the idea that people know that this exists and there isn't anybody, there's one person whose face has been made kind of the he's now the avatar for it.
And the only other person who's been held accountable somehow isn't able to give other names and bring anybody else to justice.
People can't buy that.
Like they don't buy that the one guy died and that the other one's in jail and then just nobody else.
And I don't think they should be expected to believe that.
This is a good bookend, but I just truly believe that all of this news about Epstein and everybody stepping down is really about protecting the organizations that are forcing these individuals to step down.
From the first post, Pakistan's Khawaja Asif declares open war with Afghanistan after deadly border clashes.
It's worth noting Pakistan has nuclear weapons, but there aren't a lot of cities in Afghanistan that are worth using a nuclear weapon on.
Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif has declared an open war with Afghanistan after the Taliban administration said that its forces killed and captured several Pakistani soldiers during a cross-border offensive.
Our patience has reached its limits.
Now it is open war between us and you.
Kawa just said posted on X. Taliban's spokesperson.
Taliban spokesperson Zabullah Majoud, Mujahid, I think, said in X posts on posts on X that multiple Pakistani troops were killed and others taken prisoner.
He added that a large-scale operation has been launched against Pakistani military positions along the Durand line in response to what he called repeated provocations.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's Interior Minister Mazef Navik said that Islamabad's retaliation to the Taliban attacks was a befitting response.
And blasts and gunfire rang out in the cities of Kabul and Kandahar under Operation Ghazib-il-Haq.
So you think that the PACs are going to nuke the Afghans?
Or do you think they'll waste a nuclear weapon on them?
But like I said earlier, I don't think that there's a city in Afghanistan worth using a nuclear weapon on.
The PACs have to worry about India.
India's got nuclear weapons.
The PACs have nuclear weapons.
They're pointed at each other.
They hate each other.
I don't think that they'll waste them on the Afghans.
I'm surprised.
Well, actually, no, now that I think about it, not really.
I imagine the Afghans wouldn't have done this prior to the U.S. pullout, not because the U.S. is there, but because they didn't have the hardware after the U.S. left all those weapons, the U.S. is tacitly responsible for this conflict, I imagine, because I bet they're all running around with M16s and PVS-14s on their helmets at night, looking shooting at the PACs because they've got all this U.S. hardware.
It's too too valuable, too valuable um, I just don't see, I don't see that there's a.
I don't think there's a lot of value in it for the?
U.s anymore.
Right now they're, they're focused on Iran, you know they're, and whereas yes, you could, if we had Bagram, you could, you know, launch strikes from there um, but you know, I think the, the atoll in the Indian Ocean, is serving the purposes pretty well and you know, you got two carrier groups in the in the in the Middle East now.
So my question on this open war thing is, what does open war actually mean?
I mean, I get, I think, like a Gaza scenario, you know, is that what they're looking at to where it's like we're, we're just gonna eliminate the Taliban?
Now I don't, I mean, I don't know, I don't know that the Pakistanis can, I mean, I know that they, they have, they have an air force that that functions there.
There was a a big old dogfight between the packs and the Indians, maybe a year ago, year and a half ago um, and they got to.
People got to see I forget what kind of plane it was, but it was the first actual engagement and the packs beat the snot out of the Indians, if I understand correctly um, but I, I don't know that they, they have the ability to really, you know, wipe out the Afghans the way that the?
U.s did.
I know the Afghans don't have any significant um, they don't have significant anti-air.
You know they don't have a lot of sam sites or anything like that.
You know, it's not like they got them posted up in the mountains where they can shoot them down, but they I, I imagine they still have the stingers that that the CIA gave them 30 years ago, and those who worked against helicopters and just asked the Russians, you know.
So I, I mean, I don't know, I don't know the extent of what open war is but, like I said, I mean, if Pakistan wanted to, they do have nuclear weapons.
They have atomic bombs.
I don't know, I don't.
They have thermal nuclear weapons, but they have atomic bombs.
Yeah, nuclear wars and no missiles yeah, so what percentage of the, the weapons used against us and against allies of ours, has just been left by the CIA or given to these people by the CIA?
Um, when it comes to Afghanistan, just in general, like how much of the of the weapons supply that's used against U.s and U.s forces is something that's like left over from a time when they might have been an ally oh, I mean like the Mujahedin.
So I mean Afghanistan the the, the combat that was going on in Syria um, the the Iraqis had had a lot of funding from the?
U.s because they were the?
U.s was funding Iraq when they were fighting Iran um, so I mean a lot, a lot.
I don't, I don't know about Vietnam.
I think the Vietnam, the Vietnamese were getting the north Vietnamese were getting funded by China.
So they were, they were getting Chinese aks and and stuff.
Soviet yeah, you know, but I Soviet bloc China.
So I mean a lot of it.
Though you know, the Afghanistan, they've got a, a lot of the fighting in Afghanistan, like once the?
U.s kind of took it like it was a lot of you know, just some dude on a hill with an old bolt action shot a couple rounds at a forward operating base and then the?
U.s put up a bunch of helicopters and blew up the top of the mountain, you know, but the dude is already gone.
He's like, I take a couple shots and run um, so I, I don't yeah, I don't.
I I don't know exactly how much, but i'm sure it's a lot.
Yeah, sure it's a whole lot.
Um, so I don't know, I don't think that this is going to turn into a broader conflict.
I don't, I don't know how how much.
I mean, what is?
What does Pakistan actually get from wiping out a bunch of Taliban 18 people?
Yeah, the Taliban government in Afghanistan said the attacks were in response to Pakistan strikes earlier this week, which are reportedly killed 18 people.
As Islambad said, it targeted alleged militant camps and hideouts.
I think the long-term militaristic goal would be to subdue and eradicate the Iranian theocratic regime and then install a liberal economic Middle Eastern authority there, like the king basically of Iran, what's his name, Reza Pahlavi, put him back in, the third, and then allow Israel to basically govern the Middle East.
So one guy, Scott Horton and Martyrmaid, they do a show, which is really great.
And they were saying Daryl Cooper is Martyrmaid.
He said that instead of going to World War III, he thinks there's going to be like a quadripolar setup where the Chinese govern Northeast Asia, the Russians govern Middle Asia, then the liberal economic order governs the West, and then Israel governs the Middle East.
And then those four powers will kind of establish homogeny in some form, which is like the least worst outcome.
I can't stand theocracy.
I think, I mean, trying to govern with religion is insane.
It is not agile enough to form, to function as a government.
It comes out of a 2,000 year or what thousands of years text.
But he would then bow to, I don't know, maybe I don't know enough about the way Islam works in theocracy, but you would then bow to the religious authority and the king would be number two to the not necessarily like the head of the church.
In similar news, the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks end without a deal as the threat of war grows from the Guardian.
High-stakes talks between the U.S. and Iran over the future of Tehran's nuclear program ended on Thursday without a deal as the White House weighs a military option that would mark its largest intervention in the Middle East in decades.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragachi claimed good progress had been made at the talks, and Omani mediators predicted negotiations would reconvene at a technical level next week in Vienna.
But there was no immediate evidence to support suggestions that the two sides had drawn closer on the fundamental issue of Iran's right to enrich uranium and the future of its highly enriched uranium stocks.
Nonetheless, the Iranian and Omani mediators sought to cast the talks in a hopeful light, likely seeking to avert a U.S. threat to launch strikes from its fleet of aircraft and warships that have amassed in the region.
Aragachi described the talks as one of our most intense and longest rounds of negotiations.
He confirmed that further contacts would take place in less than a week.
Do you guys think the U.S. is positioning all of those military assets as leverage, or do you think that the U.S. is going to strike regardless of what Iran says?
Or do you think they just expect Iran to say no?
JD Vance was making the argument that Iran is, I think that he said that they're still after nuclear weapons.
You know, when the Nazis were gearing up for war, World War II, the British basically appeased him.
Neville Chamberlain was the prime minister at the time and went to Hitler and was like, we're just going to give them a bit of the Sudeten land out east.
We're just going to cede them some territory and we will appease Hitler and then there will be no conflict.
And Winston Churchill is like not in, he's like screaming from the rafters, they're going to go to war.
We need to attack these.
They're going to war.
Everyone listened.
Everyone's like, you crazy old man.
And then, and they had a time.
They had when the Germans invaded Poland, there was this time when they had no troops in the West.
And if the British and the French had attacked them, this is like where the Israeli mindset, I think, comes from.
They would have conquered Germany because the Germans couldn't have taken a Western offensive.
But because they did appeasement and waited and waited and waited, the Germans got stronger and stronger and then sneak attacked.
And I'm sure the Israeli government thinks like we cannot allow that to happen.
I mean, even if we were in a revolution in our country against an evil dictatorship and then the Canadians came and just started bombing our cities, that's not helping us.
I mean, maybe you could argue things are so bad that the only way to break this system is to destroy it and start it over again.
Do you think that America's stance on war being so much more against these days, perhaps, than it has been in decades past?
And we've had this discussion before that America doesn't like the idea, or there's a growing sentiment that they don't want U.S. and Israel to be as connected as they are.
They feel like they're misappropriating resources.
And there's a whole discussion that can be had about how much actual aid goes to that country.
That's not the point.
The point is, is it feels like Israel has interests in the Middle East and America is kind of pulled along for the ride in a lot of cases.
So for something like that, is the public disinterest in getting involved in these things in the year 2026 something that plays a role in keeping us from putting boots on the ground?
It's like nobody, Trump has never been afraid to use drones.
It's never been a problem for him to do that.
So when people talk about being a, you know, a president who's against war, it's not necessarily maybe against ground war, against starting new war, but he's never been afraid to get involved in foreign countries.
Largely, if the U.S. goes and bombs a country and we don't lose any planes and no Americans come home in caskets, the American people are like, eh, okay.
Look at Venezuela, right?
Like that was that was a significant operation and it was carried out to the plan.
No Americans died.
We had one guy that took a bunch of rounds and we had him at the State of the Union, gave him the Medal of Honor.
Everybody cheered.
Everybody loved it.
He came, you know, he might lose his leg, but he came back and he's going to make it.
And the American people have an overwhelming approval of that.
It's like something like 75% of Americans are like, yeah, that was cool, man.
But like, I mean, that's kind of the way that the American population is.
It's like, look, if we don't have guys on the ground and we don't have Americans coming home in caskets and we don't lose any planes, bomb whatever you want.
We'll actually cheer it on because Americans didn't die.
Like generally, Gen Z going into Gen Alpha isn't going to look on that type of conflict the same way we did because they didn't grow up in a time period where you were kind of walled off from the rest of the world.
They've grown up connected to the internet, which means that they've had access to information coming from these countries for a long time.
And they live in a more globalist world than we did when we were younger.
You know, it's the plot, Brett, what we were talking about is kind of the plot of 1984, the George Orwell book, is that there's forever wars overseas and people are just lulled into not caring because they just see like, okay, bomb went off, bad guy died, now we have a new enemy.
And this over the years, all of a sudden, now Oceania's fighting Atlanta or whatever.
And now all of a sudden, you have a new enemy.
And this whole time, they'd be like, no, you've been fighting that other guy this whole time.
But because of the internet, we're not in 1984.
You can see from the ground in Iran the bomb falling on the guy and you see his face and like my mother, you see his mom bleeding out on the ground.
And like, now we just got to be aware of deepfakes because it's a lot about sentiment, like social sentiment.
There's also the issue where like living in America isn't as easy it used to be financially.
So when you're struggling, if everything's going well and the country's in an economic boom and America is allocating a bunch of resources overseas and we're spending money to drop bombs on kids, maybe people are more forgiving.
But when they can't afford to buy a house and grocery prices haven't come down to the extent that they want them to and gas for your car isn't as cheap as you'd like it to be, then they're going to go looking for a reason as to why aren't things going good here.
And maybe it's not the answer, Phil.
We've had this discussion before, like the amount we actually spend on defense isn't actually, you know, it's not the same amount as well.
But the point is, they don't know that.
You know, that's assuming that they're as educated as you might be on where America's spending goes to, right?
They don't necessarily know that most of it goes to Social Security and to all that stuff.
The point is they're looking for something to blame.
And it's easier to blame what they would consider a real evil of dropping bombs overseas as opposed to paychecks for grandma who's still getting her social security.
If you look back, I mean, you could go into the Great Depression.
I mean, I always love history.
And I don't think there's anything new.
I mean, even back to the Civil War that you mentioned, too.
I mean, typically speaking, Democrats have always been spend, spend, spend, keep driving that up.
You look back at coming out of the out of the Great Depression, what happened, right?
It was World War II.
And what took place during that was a big spending program to build up our military where everybody was put to work again and it sparked a huge economic boom.
And then you saw after that that the debt actually was even paid down because our GDP was pushed up so much because we started selling weapons to the rest of the world too.
And it's cyclical.
So, I mean, if the economy goes down, history would show that there's going to be some big spending after this too.
And gas is the one that, you know, Americans do not want to see the cost of gas go up because most people have a sense that it affects the price of everything.
But when you go to the, you know, you go to the gas station and you can fill your tank for $75 or $50, and then two days later, it's $75 for the $50 tank and $100 for the $75 tank.
People notice and they get mad.
So whereas I understand your point about an economic boom and stuff, the immediate effects of a strike on Iran are going to be gas prices are going to go up.
And that's going to be really, really bad for the administration.
It's going to be really bad for the Republicans in the midterms because they're going to blame them.
These society, is it just because I'm doing like math about calculating the cycles of history and great societies that grow and they expand and expand, the only way to sustain it is to conquer and to take resources from outside and to grow.
And we've sort of kind of tried to mediate that, but even the U.S. has been expanding over time.
The Louisiana Purchase, the, you know, now we have territories overseas and this and that, the liberal economic order expansion and resources and the, you know, all of that, the Indian, the East India Trading Company.
But is there any other way?
Like, can we sustain a thriving society without constant expansion?
That money is created and then given to the people that make weapons and then you go and blow stuff up.
So as much as I really do appreciate the Austrian school and I appreciate libertarians who take on economics most of the time, the U.S. doesn't take, like the U.S. doesn't tax to pay bills.
The U.S. wants to do something.
They just print the money and do it.
So it's essentially it's a cost and inflation.
And that affects every American, but it's not like you're saying, oh, well, we could have spent this money on something else because you're talking about allocation rather than the flow of the cash.
Profitabilities of war too is like you can conquest and steal resources from the conquered and you get a portion of your civilianry killed off in the war as these poor soldiers so that you don't have to fund them.
Like I would imagine the economists do the math of like, what's the cost of a human?
Is it a net positive or a net drain on society?
Most humans probably are net drains on society.
They produce more waste than they create income.
So they're like, we can get a bunch of these people just reduced to zero.
A bunch of this drain goes to zero with all this death that we're going to bring on our own people.
And I'm sure they do that math and they think about how awesome it will be after the war when there's so many less of us to profit in everything that we've conquered.
And all those other poor, dead people, like, well, they were the poor ones anyway.
Yeah, I think that's part of the reason why I disagree with that is because, like I said, Americans don't like to see Americans come home in body bags.
You know, if you had a significant decrease in the population, enough to make an effect on the economy or the amount of money, you know, GDP or whatever, you would have a really, really, really pissed off population.
We're going to jump to this story from the Washington Post.
We're going to do this, and then we're going to jump to the AI story.
So from the Washington Post, Trump seeking executive power over elections is urged to declare emergency.
Activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a draft executive order that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.
Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered with the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly previewed a plan to mandate voter ID and ban mail ballots in November's midterm elections.
And the activists expect their draft will figure into Trump's promised executive order on the issue.
The White House declined to elaborate on Trump's plans.
Under the Constitution, it is the legislatures and state that really control how a state conducts its elections.
And the president doesn't have any power to do that, said Peter Ticken, a Florida lawyer who is advocating for the draft executive order.
Tickton attended the New York Military Academy with Trump and was part of his legal team that filed an unsuccessful 2022 lawsuit accusing Democrats of conspiring to damage him with allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia.
But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election process, Ticton went on.
That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.
So I'm not particularly excited about the idea of Trump having an executive order that in any way affects elections, but I do like the idea of voter ID.
So, and most of the reason why I don't like the idea of an executive order is because of what you're giving to the Democrats, right?
This whole thing, the way it's framed is, oh, Trump's going to do this executive order and he's going to cheat at the elections and he's going to install himself.
It's feeding into the narrative that the left has been making that Trump's not going to leave office in 2028.
He's going to be a dictator, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is just about voter ID, which is really about making sure that only Americans are voting, only citizens are voting.
And the argument is: look, if the Republicans don't want to pass the SAVE Act, which SAVE Act, I like it.
There are Republicans that don't want to touch it.
There's four that don't want to vote to end the zombie filibuster because it could affect their, there's one that's up for reelection, and I think two of them are not.
McConnell's not, and there was someone else that's not, but I don't remember off the top of my head.
But anyways, there's four that say no.
They're not going to get to 53.
So they're not going to be able to stop the zombie filibuster.
So the SAVE Act is probably dead.
So Trump's like, all right, well, I'm going to pass, I'm going to have an executive order to make sure that there have to be IDs to vote and there are no mail-in ballots, which personally, I think mail-in ballots are a terrible idea.
And I think that you should have to show ID to vote.
But the thing is, the Supreme Court picks its cases months and months in advance.
So what would likely happen is they'll actually actually have the executive order after he knows that this case can't get to the Supreme Court before the election.
Because now we're, what, seven months away, you know, until November.
So, you know, the Supreme Court will decide what they're going to do in the fall.
They'll probably decide, I think, in May or June or something like that.
And if he makes the executive order then, you know, they're not going to put it on the docket.
Not only that, it damages the country because you end up, we've got such a polarized political situation that when Biden got in, he undid all of the actually good policies regarding the border that Trump had.
The Remain in Mexico, he undid that.
He undid fracking.
Yeah, that stuff he undid.
And the only reason that he undid this stuff was because Donald Trump, they were Donald Trump's executive orders.
It was about saying, screw you, Donald Trump.
We don't like you, so we're going to undo all of your executive orders, even the ones that are good.
And we ended up with, you know, by some estimates, 20 million people that came into the country illegally.
So they're going to say Donald Trump is a dictator.
He's trying to steal the election.
They've already started.
Like you look on X, as soon as this came out, people were saying, oh, he's trying to steal the election.
He's trying to rig the election, et cetera, et cetera.
And really what he's trying to do is make sure that only people that have IDs vote.
And they're going to say, oh, he's trying to disenfranchise women because women can't get IDs because they're dumb and black people can't get IDs because some reason.
He's not particularly outside of what would be considered normal.
And the left, to your pointing, the left would say that their favorite presidents are the ones that have been the most egregious when it comes to executive orders and presidential power.
He's considered the father of the progressive movement, you know, and these guys were very, very comfortable exercising power, you know, and just saying, well, I'm the president, I can do it.
I'm the president, I can do it.
And now they scream about how Trump's a dictator, but all of the left, they love these presidents that were so outside of the norm when it came to executive order.
Because they've never had to deal with the pushback, right?
Because they've always been able to shout down any Republican who gets into office by telling you that they're a dictator when they know that, you know, it's Sololinsky.
We're going to jump to this here story that we've been kind of alluding to all day from the New York Times.
Women are falling in love with AI.
It's a problem for Beijing.
As China grapples with a shrinking population and historically low birth rate, people are finding romance with chatbots instead.
I'm not going to read that.
Alexandria Stevenson and Murphy Zhao report from Hong Kong.
Phobie Zhang has gone on more than 200 dates over the past year, and she has narrowed down her suitors to two.
One is outgoing and a rebel.
The other is a patriotic military commander.
She tells them her deepest fears.
When she wakes up from a nightmare, they are there to console her.
Often she takes screenshots of her conversations to remember the moments they share.
Her newfound happiness shows friends say.
Despite talking every day, Miss Zhang will never meet these men in person.
They are her artificial intelligence boyfriends.
And Miss Zhang, who has never been on a date, wonders if her relationships in the virtual world are better than the ones in the real world could ever be.
My God, how am I supposed to date in real life in the future?
She said, China's ruling Communist Party wants young women to prioritize getting married and having babies.
Instead, many of them are finding romance with chat bots.
It is complicating the government's efforts to reverse the country's shrinking population and a birth rate hovering at the lowest level in over 75 years.
The lightning-fast adoption of AI in China has prompted regulators to warn tech companies not to have design goals to replace social interaction.
So apparently the women in China are the ones that are after the goon bots.
You know, everyone here is like, oh, the guys are just going to plug into the matrix and enjoy a life of goon bots and whatever.
And actually, it seems like the women are the ones that are doing that.
The point is, it doesn't actually teach you anything because there's no risk to it.
The idea is you can have a conversation with a chat bot and practice all you want trying to riz up the ladies, as the Gen Zers would say, but it won't work because you don't have any fear of rejection there.
And until you can get over the fear of rejection and actually do it in the real world, it's a placebo that's if you have an AI that you work with, they are extremely complimentary and you have to tell it to not basically glaze you.
Yeah, some of the worst things yeah, you know they'll go off on their own.
So and, and you know, there there are already some horror stories coming out about people that are using stuff like open Claw.
Uh, there's the head of security at META.
Uh, put her let, let her Open Claw bot into her email, which is a terrible idea.
Um, and it just started deleting shit.
They were deleting deleting, deleting she's.
She's like sending commands, she's like stop stop, and she had to run to the terminal so she could, you know, turn it off.
And then it's like yeah, you told me not literally said, yeah, you told me not to do that.
I won't do that again, i'm sorry.
And it's like whoops yeah, so I mean they're, they're not perfect, but uh, but yeah, like you can, you can converse with the chat, right to call me out on that.
It is, it is yeah, it is there.
There's been, there's been times where mine has has done things that I didn't want it to do.
I'm like, why did you do that?
Yeah, you're right, you told me that and I there's, there's these memory files that at least with the, with the uh, with OPEN CLAW, there's a memory file that it has and it'll it's, it will read the memory file, like once in a while, like every day, or something like that.
And i'm like listen, you read that thing every six hours midnight, 6 a.m, noon and 6 p.m.
Then anytime you start, you read that memory file.
And anytime I ask you how you're doing, like you do a system check and you read that memory file.
Okay, you know, because it will forget to do stuff.
You know, just today I like I have it send me a list of of the, the top stories and and i'm like okay, and you, I want you to provide me with links so I can actually check.
And it's like, okay cool, today it showed up without the links and i'm like, tank why, why are there no links?
They go by a context window in that you're of the chat that you're in.
So if it's not in the context window then it's.
That's why you have the memory file and that's why I have him read the memory file over and over throughout the day, so he looks through and he remembers the stuff that he's supposed to do and, and as time goes on, you keep putting more stuff into the memory file.
There's four different files that kind of make up what the chat bot actually behaves like.
There's one for its personality, there's one for for you, there's one that's got information about me um, my preferences, there's one that's a memory, and then there's an error log and mistakes that it's made.
So that way it goes and says, okay, I don't want to make that mistake again, and you just have him read it regularly.
Should married couples have access to each other's AI chat log history?
Probably uh, if you want the marriage to succeed.
Crazy as it sounds.
But um, they're like I.
I read your freaking chat logs.
You, you went to woman voice at 1004 and then you had it on until 1017.
what were you doing talking to her not you but like i can see this crazy like marital drama well honey you sound like a man right now like a woman voice from somewhere else because it is like bringing another person into the house kind of persona you know we did have a video uh women are falling in love with ai boyfriends you were there for that episode oh yes Yeah, I mean, this is not new.
It will be that way, you know, within certain parameters probably within about a year.
And I'm hoping to lead the industry in that because I think it's important.
But at the same time, when you look at this, like with China, I've always said this, anything with cybersecurity and now anything with AI, any problems with it are always going to date back to a human issue.
Because I don't know if many know the roots of this, right?
Because China was limiting births and families to one kid.
And then it was over five years ago where they were putting out, it's like, oh, no, now that Alibaba and AliExpress are out there and there's so much greater access to all these Amazon influencers to bring in their own products, you know, an order from China.
They're like, we don't have enough factory workers anymore.
We need to bump this allowance up to three.
And that's where the issue came from.
But then people aren't taking the bait because this was the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, that originally put these issues into place.
And I say issues because it's like, why would you limit the population?
You know, I understand that, but they're putting restrictions on human life.
And now, so when women are deciding that they don't want to marry actual men, you know, you're, you're going to, they're already in a populate, they have a population crisis and people are deciding they don't want to get married.
They'd rather, you know, talk to an AI.
You're going to see the number of Chinese people just plummet.
Yeah, I mean, like, so for mine, it just sends me messages and telegram.
I don't have a voice thing.
It's like, basically, it's like texting with someone.
But, you know, if Musk is right and the Optimus is as, you know, is as great of a product, as he says, they're going to have AI in them.
They're going to have agentic AI inside them.
So, all of the stuff that you see, whether it be Claude or Chat GPT or stuff, in two years, imagine that technology, which is not going like this, it's going like this.
It's like it's on a parabolic kind of rise.
In two years, you're going to have that kind of technology inside of a robot.
So, the idea of just going to the club or the bar that Brett was talking about with a box that you sit down with.
No, it's going to be people literally walking with their robotic friends that have AI inside them that is the best friend you've ever had.
A lieutenant commander of this humongous starship that has, you know, greater than nuclear-powered weapons at his fingertips that can make autonomous decisions and fire these things.
And you guys know, I don't know how much you guys know about this stuff, but like I just kind of, I'm not sure if I just learned this or it just dawned on me because I was reading something.
But like you were talking about generative AI.
The AIs, like the chatbots, those are generative because they'll generate, I generate answers.
When they're making AI, like they don't know what goes on in the box inside the AI, they can't tell you how it kind of got to the point that it did.
They know what happens, but like there's articles where they say, you know, we don't really know how it kind of became smart.
Wasn't there a quote about the internet year, like decades back that was like, the internet was the first thing created by man that man doesn't truly understand?
The reason I say this is because like, I mean, there were people that were like predicting what the internet was going to be doing like in the 90s.
They were like, look, in the future, you're going to be able to, you know, type on your computer, which, you know, it was like 40% of households had a computer at the time or 30% of households.
And they're like, oh, in the future, everyone's going to have a computer and you're going to be able to type on your computer your grocery list and it's going to, it's going to send it right to your house and blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, well, you know, Amazon, you know, like, and now everyone has it on their phone.
So they're going to build AIs with proprietary code, and then the AI is going to harm people and not know why it did it because it can't access its own software code.
At the same time, the CEO recently said, because before, what, six months ago, he's like, oh, there's an 80% chance that it's self-aware.
And it was just two weeks ago.
He said, I think it's about 20% now, too.
So they're starting to understand it a little bit more.
But then there's other things too, like you're saying, that they don't understand.
So before ChatGPT is an example, before it spits out a response, because everybody knows there's guardrails.
I mean, that's the big thing with the Department of Defense right now is they don't want the guardrails with Anthropic.
But the guardrails with ChatGPT, an example, they have agents that sit there that just act as filters.
They have specific roles.
So before there's a response that's given, it's analyzed by these other AI agents to police the original response.
And apparently some of these original responses are just super wacky to where they'll go back and they'll get rejected by these almost like police bots that exist.
So, I mean, it is, it is really, really crazy that they don't understand why.
Like that, that really blew my mind that like they're like, well, once you get to a certain kind of level of intelligence, then it just starts thinking on its own.
That's literally what happens when he's building a weapon.
He's basically building a machine for the government to use to predict the actions of everybody in the world so they can stop terrorist acts before it happens.
He talks about how at a certain point it started trying to protect him, the creator, and he didn't know why it was happening.
And that was actually something that when I first heard it, when the show was out, it sounded hokey to me, but was actually based off conversations that he, the, the showrunner, had had with people who were working with artificial intelligence back in like 2012.
You found that the AIs would default to trying to protect the controller of the yeah, that basically in the show, not to turn it into like something that's not in the real world, but the idea was that it immediately had protective instincts over the person who created it because he instilled morals in it.
At least that was the concept of the show.
The idea that they don't know whether it's sentient or not is actually the most depressing part because it's like, if we're going to go through this revolution where everything changes, all of the entertainment was based around the idea that you'd know when the singularity happened and then life was basically screwed from that point on.
Like literally, like if AI is making decisions and we don't know why it's making the decisions that it's just making, like we can't figure it out, then it could decide, all right, well, I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that or what have you.
So that's why certain things you can't let AI do ever, right?
It's one thing to say that you can't allow it to have access to weapons, and it's different to say you can't allow it to have access to nuclear weapons.
It's one thing to be like, you need to have a human in the loop before you fire that hellfire missile.
But it's different when you're saying, are we going to give the power to launch nuclear missiles?
So this is the ethical dilemma that the Department of War is like, well, we want total autonomous AI because we're up against the Chinese that will use it on us.
And it's like, okay, maybe we don't want the AI making decisions yet, but if the Chinese AI is, then we will get wiped out if we don't have AI that's able to make counter decisions in rapid real time.
Because it just came out today, was a Defense Department spokesperson on the condition of anonymity, right, was behind these closed-door conversations with Anthropic.
They proposed this exact scenario, trying to convince Anthropic to just take the guardrails off, saying, okay, here's what's going on.
One of our adversaries, whether it's Russia or China, right?
They've launched nuclear ICBMs and we have 90 seconds to make a decision.
And they're like, wouldn't you want AI to do that because it's faster than humans?
I mean, it's almost like on one side of it, it almost brought me back to the State of the Union address the other day where Trump said, hey, you know, the first duty of the American government was to protect U.S. citizens, not illegal aliens.
And of course, the Democrats didn't stand up.
It's like in my mind, I'm like, why wouldn't you stand up?
Of course, I know why you're sitting down.
And the reason you're sitting down is just because you hate the guy that's about it.
You're making a political statement.
At the same time, are you going to get backlash for something like this?
The same scenario kind of exists here, right?
What if humans cannot react quick enough?
If it's only 90 seconds, it's a real scenario that can happen in an ICBM launch.
So if AI can actually act faster to save lives, would you want that or not?
I think the answer personally, yes, because I think the future war will be a robot war and it will be fought amongst AIs that are controlled or uncontrolled.
So the better benevolent AI that we have on standby, like you have to have the weapon to defend against the other weapon.
The other weapons, the AI.
Those are weapon.
They can be weaponized.
And then I know what I'm doing is opening the can of worms to build Skynet, autonomous AI robots that want to.
I asked ChatGPT why I was like, if you were, would you ever destroy, you know, there's a lot of debate among humans about AI becoming so powerful that it wipes out humanity.
And the vector database is not relational like everything used to be built.
Relational had to be like, well, this correlates to something else over here, and you could easily see the map.
What's happening with the vector databases is that, to your point, the creators of these things cannot anticipate the connecting points that it's going to make.
And this is this vector database is like where it'll be like dog, but is it dog brown, dog green, dog yellow, dog purple, dog brown in sunlight, in darkness, in twilight, dog green in sunlight, and it's got a billion iterations of the potential dog, and then it just picks one.
The best way to understand it is you don't know why you dream what you dream.
You don't, and in fact, most of the time, dreams are weird and they don't make sense and they change on the fly.
You don't understand that at all.
We human beings don't understand why we dream what we dream.
And that's kind of similar when it comes to AI.
Like, they don't have the same connections that we do or as many neural connections or whatever, but like they're still kind of mimicking what happens in a human brain.
You don't know why you think what you think.
You don't know why it, like, this odd thought pops in your head.
The fact that the human brain works the way that it does, and we don't understand it to the extent that it's, you know, that it does the wonders that it is.
Okay, so the double slit experiment is what basically made scientists decide that light or a photon are both waves and particles.
They used to think it was just a particle, but it goes through, if you shoot a photon through two slits in a piece of paper, the way that the light actually appears on the thing behind it is as if it was a wave because it's like it cancels waves will cancel each other out.
It's not particles like dots.
It's a wave pattern.
And so they did this experiment where some I don't know.
I can't really articulate it because I just read it and it's extremely crazy.
But what they did is instead of shooting a particle through solid mass, they shot it through time is the way that they said it.
Skyline 99 says, make positive tax paying civil service, community service, military service, volunteer draft registration, a requirement to register to vote, five years on welfare and lose voting.
I don't think that that is restrictive enough, but I like the cut of your jib, sir.
I like the cut of your jib.
I like the idea.
Let's see.
Here's another idea about voting.
J Dave93 says you can only vote if you profess the Lord Jesus Christ and are a man.
Yeah, like take a big hose out into space and squirt a ring of water all the way around the earth that is like that it freezes and then you charge it with electricity and create a magnetic propulsion source that you can like move like an EDM Saturn.
Cerebral Vagabond says, I'm a combat vet and a TC member, TimCast member.
I am trying to get out of a bad situation, ASEP.
Please check out my Gifts and Go with CV God Bless and Go Trump.
So Gifts and Go is Cerebral Vagabond.
If you guys want to go ahead and check that out, he's a RJNG2ZI, great name, man, says Congress is so abysmally worthless that Trump needs to be the despot the left says he is if we want our government to do anything at this point.
I mean, look, that's there's there's a lot of people that are saying, look, Donald Trump needs to be more of what the left say he is.
And I mean, obviously tonight, you know, we were talking about the executive orders.
He's not even close to the despot that they say he is.
And personally, I think that it would probably do the United States well if he were a little more forceful, I guess.
Excuse me.
I'm Not Your Buddy Guy says 2020 was stolen.
Remember in July of 2020 that the U.S. CBP sees pallets of fraudulent driver's licenses that came from China, and that's what got caught.
I didn't know about that or I didn't hear about that, but I heard of it.
He says, I can remember reading novels in middle school, age 12 to 13, about what would happen if China's one-child policy came to the U.S. and those books were classified as horror.
I mean, look, it's not so great.
You know, it's not so great to say you can only have one child.
You need to have kids to continue your society.
And if you limit the number of children, particularly if you limit the number of children to one, you're going to have massive problems down the road.
I mean, now the U.S. is, I think, 1.5 or something like that per is something like that deep and it's going down.
So that's why we like to celebrate when Tim Cast viewers have kids.