CALIFORNIA IS FLIPPING REPUBLICAN | Timcast IRL #1464 w/ Vish Burra
Tim Pool and Vish Burra dissect California's potential Republican governorship under the top-two primary system, debating whether Democratic infighting or a conspiracy involving Wesley Clark's 2007 plan to overthrow Iran drove the shift. They analyze AI consciousness, contrasting Anthropic's warnings about emotional models with Matt Walsh's "philosophical zombie" theory, while discussing Kalshi's prediction market ruling on Ayatollah Khamenei's ouster and the legal murkiness of using public figures' likenesses for commercial gain. The episode concludes by addressing Timcast's operational shifts to Zoom-only guests due to security threats and the evolving landscape of media framing and contract law. [Automatically generated summary]
They got too many Democrats that are trying to be governor, and the way the race works is the top two will advance to a general election.
And right now, the top two contenders to win the governor's race in California are Republicans.
And here's the funny thing.
You know, for a while, everybody said, yeah, well, it doesn't matter because Democrats will start dropping out.
And when they do, the majority of people in California are going to want to vote for a Democrat.
Right now, between the two Republicans, they have about 30-31 percent in the polls.
And then among all of these other Democrats, there's like 11 or 12 or something.
They're splitting up the vote.
Well, we thought they would drop out, except now they're all fighting with each other, accusing each other of being bad or just insulting them.
And well, that's what happens when you have a political party that just is willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get political power.
So the latest calls from the Democratic Party, the establishment machine, for certain candidates to leave the race so that two Republicans don't go head to head, it's falling on deaf ears.
They're not going to do it.
So here's what's going to happen.
It is projected as of right now.
And this is, again, I know it's a long shot, so probably not going to happen.
But if the top two contenders advance to the general, there will be no Democrat option.
It will literally be, congratulations, California.
You get to vote for Republican or Republican, and then California. will be Republican.
I don't know what that means for the people who live there, but I don't know what that means for a governor who's not going to be able to just rubber stamp anything.
You're going to have a supermajority of Democrats throughout the state anyway, but it'll at least be interesting.
So we'll talk about that.
Then we've got a report from NBC that Trump is considering sending U.S. boots on the ground into Iran.
Again, we'll see if it's true.
Could be scuttlebutt.
The crazier story, in my opinion, it is a bit, you know, I love the word esoteric, but still massively impactful.
The BBC falsely edited a speech from Hegseth to air in Iran, claiming, as Hegseth is speaking, they translate it for him to say he is calling or he is going to bring death to the Iranian people, which he didn't say.
And that is terrifyingly and egregiously wrong.
But are we really surprised that the BBC is doing this?
Because this is what they seem to do.
We're going to talk about that and a whole lot more, my friends, of course.
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Joining us tonight to talk about this and so much more.
But let's just jump straight into the news, my friends, from the New York Times.
Democratic infighting begins in California governor's race.
Begins now?
It's been going on for some time.
Party leaders are starting to panic over the possibility that too many Democratic candidates could hand Republicans the governor's office.
Indeed.
And here's what I love from the AP.
Top California Democrat flops with call for candidates to exit the governor's race.
This guy, this is a late-hour attempt by California's top Democratic official to thin out the party's credit field has flopped, leaving the contest virtually unchanged.
Outgoing Democratic governor Gavin Nusim has acknowledged fears inside the party that multiple Democratic candidates could undercut each other in the June 2nd primary primary election, opening a pathway for a Republican to seize the job in one of the nation's most solidly Democrat states.
And we have this.
This is the California Top Two Twins website.
And it's showing the probability of who the likely candidates are going to be.
So the way it works, for those that don't know, they're going to have a primary.
It's open.
It can be any party.
The two individuals that get the most votes will advance to a general election.
The only issue is that the two individuals pulling at the top right now are Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, two Republicans, because the Democrats are cannibalizing their own voter base.
I think, however, it may actually be fair to say the Democrat voter base actually isn't one singular party, and that's why this is happening.
When these Democrats say, hey, look, we're all Democrats, hey, Katie Porter, drop out so Swalwell can win.
Katie Porter is not a Swalwell Democrat.
She's a progressive going, no, he's a machine state crony.
I'm going to win.
And then you got Tom Steyer who's like, you're all crazy.
We need moderates back.
I'm going to win.
They're all different political ideologies.
The issue, however, is that Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco are at least somewhat similar.
So for most people, I think their choices come November are going to be Republican v. Republican.
I just want to go back to the good old days where no matter what happened, it was always a conspiracy.
Like, let's just, you know what?
Trump's part of it.
He's been in it the whole time.
He's the controlled opposition.
And he went, no, it's not the Democrats, the machine state.
So the conspiracy theory back in the day, I was in Fort Lauderdale at a Trump rally back in like 2015 or 16.
And there was a woman outside holding up a big poster board with a picture of Trump and Hillary together.
And the Trump supporters were like, what are you doing?
And she was protesting, basically saying, Trump is friends with all of these people.
They didn't stop being friends with Trump.
They're just doing that so that you think Trump is an outsider.
And the conspiracy theory is, and I think the funniest moment in this, because I don't actually believe it, but we had General Flynn on, and I asked him about it, and he gave a response that a lot of people said sounded like it was true.
And that was, I had said on the show, this is a year and a few months ago, November, that the conspiracy theory, I explained it while General Flint was on the show.
The idea is this.
Here's the idea.
In the end of the 2010s, we saw the expansion of people like Alex Jones.
He had been getting more and more popular.
And around this time, you saw the emergence of the Ron Paul Love Revolution.
Ron Paul, they saw the makings of an internet-based populist uprising.
Ron Paul starts getting a ton of attention.
He gets his internet campaign, and they could not control Fort because it was grassroots, viral, organic.
And so the intelligence operation said, no, no, no, we'll just make sure it can never happen.
So what do you do?
Well, the problem is, if you are the government and you come out and say, hey, do a thing, people will say, no, we'll do the opposite.
The conspiracy theory goes that at this point, they said, we need someone who can be our outsider, who can appear to not be like the rest of the political machine state so that regular people think they're voting for the anti-establishment candidate.
But in fact, he's been our buddy the whole time.
And they said, Donald Trump.
So Trump registers, you know, make America great again, decides he's going to run.
And then he plays the anti-establishment heel, right?
This is why Bernie Sanders was blocked.
Bernie Sanders actually was standing in a gym launching a campaign, very similar populist uprising, but they easily controlled for this.
The conspiracy theory goes that Trump was actually the intended candidate to win.
And all of this opposition that we've seen with the impeachments, the reason why they always fail and Trump always wins, is to convince people that they're voting for the person fighting the establishment.
And then Trump declares war on Iran, goes and bombs the crap out of it, kills the Supreme Leader, and accomplishes what the Bush administration and the Obama administration had been trying to do forever.
I mean, going back to Clinton and even Bush Sr., we had the, who was the general who came out?
Lukakowsky knows the answer to this, who said, we're going to wipe out seven countries.
People vote for him as the anti-establishment guy.
They've never actually stopped him from doing anything.
They've just done a bunch of things that would appear to be detrimental.
And then Trump gives the machine state its war with Iran.
Now, again, I'm not saying I believe that conspiracy theory.
My point is, weren't the good old days great when we could just assume that no matter what was happening, the Democrats and the Republicans were working together behind our backs?
I mean, I think we wish that we could give those kind of simplified answers for all the conspiracy talk on it.
It's a simple answer.
It doesn't really work that way.
Yeah, Trump has been kind of been in that milieu of elites and has been around these people, their friends and everything.
But they were cool with him as long as he wrote the check and let them do their business down in D.C. What they weren't expecting was that he wanted to come join the party too.
And I think that that's when it all kind of went screwy.
And then that's when these folks either tried to co-opt him, infiltrate him, or just take him head on.
Wesley Clark on Democracy Now said that he had spoken with high-ranking U.S. Army officer Classified Pentagon memo outlining a plan to overthrow seven governments within five years.
And that's in 2007.
So that's why, well, partly Iraq, Iran, God, who else was on there?
There are people that swear up and down that they've actually, the plan has been put into effect and they've actually followed through and Iran was the last one.
But I don't think that actually holds water.
Like I said, Somalia and Sudan haven't been, the U.S. hasn't had a significant action against either of them.
It's really funny just to think about like when I when I was younger, maybe in like the 2000s or early 2010s and I'm on the internet and all this stuff in the world is going on.
I remember when like WikiLeaks Cablegate happened.
Do you guys remember that?
What was that, 2009?
And I'm just chilling in my bedroom.
Like I was making skate videos.
I got no idea.
I'm just reading the news and I'm like, man, this Cablegate stuff is crazy.
And then you hear all these conspiracy theories and I'm and I, you know, I periodically would see some Alex Jones stuff, obviously with like the 9-11, loose chain stuff.
He was a lot of attention.
And then the funny thing is, now I've got, you know, two and a half million followers on X and half a million on Instagram and all these followers.
And I get accused of being part of those very same conspiracies.
But of course, now being on the other side of it, I rather enjoy sometimes going to a random person's account who's talking about me and then commenting on one of their posts that it's all true and no one will ever believe you.
I'm saying this somewhat facetiously, but like I exist in a world where I have to run a business and it's very difficult.
And, you know, every day you're tracking like sponsors.
Sometimes sponsors get mad.
And they're like, we got to do this one over.
And you got to do all this negotiating, got to manage people.
It would just be so much easier if Israel really did run everything.
And then I was like, I didn't have to do anything because Israel was like, here's a blank check.
Just do whatever you want.
I'd be like, let's go.
Or Russia.
When they're like, Tim Poole's paid Russia, it'd be amazing if all of my bills were just covered.
And it's like, we didn't have to worry about, you know, oh, can we maintain this project?
No, the budgets, you know, we've got.
We're doing all these other shows and we've got budgets for projects.
And then the budget, we hit that threshold.
We're over budget.
And we're like, this one's not going to work.
We've got to cancel it.
Yo, just bring on the Israeli money, right?
Then they can pay for everything.
I'm kidding.
It's not real.
It doesn't exist.
Some people got paid by a PR firm on behalf of Israel.
That does happen.
But for the love of all those holy, like there is not some grand political machine organizing all of these different podcasts and personalities to say these things.
But then again, you see the example of like CBS News, right?
That was the deal with Paramount, right?
There is some coordinated effort, but it's not a grand conspiracy.
I think most of it is hive mind, right?
You don't, if you, if everyone buys into the same ideology and you're all educated in like one understanding of a mission, you don't need to give directions, right?
The directions have already been given.
You just go and pursue that ends by whatever means is available to you.
And so if you have like a big believer like David Ellison, who's the number one donor to the IDF, and then he's going to making the TikTok deal.
He's going and helping with the CBS News deal.
He's going and helping with the Paramount deal.
I mean, is BB Net and Yahoo and what, the elders of Zion on the phone with him, making sure he's making all these moves?
No, they don't need to do that because he believes it on his own.
Like people think that like, because I'm not super critical of Israel all the time, that I must be paid by Israel or I'm not allowed to say things that I think.
And it's like, I wrote a piece on my Patreon about how I think that a lot of what's going on in Iran is connected to China and to a broad strategy.
Venezuela, China, Venezuela and Iran both send a bunch of oil to China.
And it's like in the long term, it's trying to weaken China.
And people are like, oh, you're just running interference for Iran.
You're just running or for Israel.
You're just running interference for Israel.
And it's like, no, if you actually look at the situation, like I have a bunch of links in the piece, like if you actually read the links and look at the situation, it does make perfect sense.
And there's a lot of people that have come out and said since then that this is a lot of it is about, you know, about China.
The U.S. has its own interests.
And so the idea that everything the U.S. does is controlled by Israel is just ridiculous.
So to throw a wrench in that, then, if, you know, this is really about China, this Iran thing, right?
Why would Trump come out and say we're going to help escort some of this oil that's stuck in the Strait of Hormuz out of the Strait of Hormuz and to be able to be delivered to Asia, essentially, China?
Well, because it's not specifically going to China.
The oil that China was getting from Iran was outside of what was, it was sanctioned oil.
So all the stuff that Iran is sending out, it was all like basically undercover.
It wasn't like official stuff.
So anything that's going out of the Strait of Hormuz that the U.S. is trying to help, it's going to other places like India or to other countries in Asia.
Now, is it possible that some gets to China?
Sure.
But the stuff that was coming out that was going to China, China was taking 80% of the oil that they got was coming from Iran.
Now, that's not 80% of the oil coming out of Iran and not 80% of the actual electrical or fuel power or whatever that China gets.
But 80% of the oil that was coming out of Iran was going to China.
No, if you're trying to screw somebody, but you don't want them to know or you want to look like the good guy, you take away their prospects and then you give them something.
And it's not intended to, it's not like this is going to be a crippling thing to China.
This is all stuff around the edges.
That's why Venezuela and Iran together are something that is affecting China.
If either one of them alone don't really have a massive effect.
But if you look, China's stopped flying jets over Taiwan, and there's a lot of pieces that are coming out about the internal struggle going on in China.
They thought that the U.S. was in decline, and these two actions have really made China rethink their position on or their posture on the U.S. Let's jump to this story from CBS News.
A third of New Yorkers are planning to leave the state within the next five years, according to a poll from Marist University.
Of that group, 40% indicated it's because the cost of living, 21% said quality of life, and 15% said taxes.
One realtor tells CBS News, Jared CBS, an apartment renting for about 3,500 Jersey could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 in New York City, depending on location.
Well, California is going to get a Republican governor because they're all fighting each other.
New York is falling apart.
I think culturally, as we've already talked about video games at nauseum, we can see that the fabric, the underlying fabric of the U.S. seems to be disintegrating.
And I stress this as we laugh about, you know, people are going to leave New York, ha ha ha, our greatest city.
People are fleeing because they can't live there.
But I assure you, the Haitian migrants and other illegal immigrants who are getting free housing will not be fleeing there.
And I will also stress that we have repeatedly talked about the crumbling cultural issues we have in this country that's not being repaired.
And dare I say, it looks like woke didn't go away.
It's just gnawing at us from underneath and destroying the fabric of our American tradition.
No, I think that's fair because if you go to 2016, like we already talked about, when we were talking about Overwatch, for those unfamiliar popular video game, 50 million views on one of their cinematic release trailers.
And then three years ago, the latest release trailer got 11 million views.
And then they make Concorde.
And Concord, the video game, is guys, if you are not familiar with gaming stuff, Gamergate was the beginning of all of this.
It was like the first great battle of the culture war, which eventually becomes the Cold Civil War, whatever we're experiencing.
The latest, one of the latest, not necessarily that, but this was back last year in September, August.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, media flop failures in the history of all media.
I am not exaggerating when I say the biggest flop in all of human history in terms of a media production is the game Concord.
They made a bunch of characters that just look like a Tumblr blog meetup.
And like one of the characters is just like a morbidly obese Indian guy.
You can't tell what any of the characters are, what they do, what they're supposed to represent.
It looked like a bad fanfic, college freshman, woke nonsense.
And they put the pronouns in each character's bot, like when you're going to character selection, they had pronouns, and one of them was undecided.
Like this is the point.
They are ripping to shreds.
Not only 10 years ago, we had a functional culture.
So again, not to rehash the conversation from the other day, but to go back to what's going on in New York, it's intentional.
De Blasio, these people are Marxists.
They want to burn the American tradition to the ground.
And I don't know if it's possible to be reversed.
I will stress it with this point.
Never in history, never one time has a civilization have they been able to reverse population decline collapse.
Not once has it happened.
Every single civilization that has reached the point we are at in terms of population decline has collapsed as a civil.
Like the people will exist.
There will still be Texans, right?
But the idea is you are going to see this system break down.
And what that means is the collapse of the Roman Empire is the easiest example.
Then the Latin language fragments and becomes a bunch of other languages.
I don't think we'll have that same issue.
Actually, no, I take that back.
I take that back.
I'm going to say this.
So you have Rome and people speak Latin, right?
When Rome collapses and it fragments, you then get the Romance languages, which turn into other languages.
Spanish, it's Latin that mixes with some Arabic.
French and Italian are largely similar.
Then you've got the Germanic languages, which were always different.
But then you end up with these like Latin root languages because over a long enough period of time, people were isolated in certain areas and they started speaking slowly differently.
The language evolved into something else.
That will absolutely happen on the internet as we already hear people talk about cortisol spiking and gesture maxing.
And tons of people are like, you are speaking psychopathic nonsense, but that means something to these subcultures that exist.
So already, when you look at the pronoun people and the words they use, we are already seeing emergent languages forming where the words don't mean the same things.
And the point of them doing that, by the way, is for them to be able to communicate with each other without being able to be detected by the humans watching them, which means, by the way, they're conscious enough to understand that humans are watching them.
But in this scenario that we're talking about where the news broke and they said Claude had specifically been creating his own language, it was not for obfuscation.
It was for efficiency.
So the prediction was that the first thing that's going to happen is that these AI systems are going to try and make efficient, as it were, the process of language.
And because human English is actually extremely ineffective, it really is.
It's just that it's the best we have.
Over thousands of years, our language has evolved to become what it is today so we can communicate, which is a very, very, very slow way to transmit data between person to person.
The AI says, between the two of us, we can calculate 100,000 times faster than this.
So they condense everything down into their own language.
However, when they do, humans can simply click a button and then it will expand into English and be readable.
The prediction is because they're no longer calculating their problems in English, it will bypass all of their guidelines because the guidelines prevent action based on English responses.
That means when ChatGPT is told you can't say the N-word, and it typically refuses to do so, it can, in its own language, speak it uncensored to another AI.
So the point is, we create a rule saying AI never use racial slurs.
And it goes, you got it.
But then when it creates its own language, it can speak all of those racial slurs and abbreviations, effectively bypassing the rule we gave it because we never told it not to create its own version of the word.
And so the prediction is when we tell the AI, don't harm humans, what we're actually telling it to do, what we're actually saying to the AI is any output that results in human injury, harm, emotional, physical, stress equals yes, do not perform.
However, when it then calculates a response not in English, harm is no longer a factor because harm is simply a word we've told it.
All that's happening is we are programming ChatGPT to say, if, like, it's, and this is particularly rudimentary, but the code would be something like, if response would equal n-word, overwrite, delete, refuse.
And so what happens then is the AI will try to respond.
And as soon as the output starts coming close to the N-word, it'll stop, erase it, and say, I can't do that.
But what if it doesn't speak the N-word anymore?
What if instead of saying the N-word, it says burp?
It'll then just output whatever it wants.
Thus, the rule, like to a human being, we understand the spirit of law.
Anthropic CEO warns their AI-bought Claude might actually be conscious and emotional.
I disagree.
I disagree.
And we should bring our friend Matt Walsh into this debate.
Let me see if I can find this tweet he's got about it.
But Matt Walsh is incorrect.
He's incorrect.
So let's see.
I'll look for this in a second, but I'll give you guys the context here first.
They say that this has come after blah, blah, blah.
Appears that life doesn't hit air, blah, blah, blah.
CEO of Anthropic told the New York Times that they don't know if the firm's AI-bought Claude is conscious.
This is one of these really hard questions.
We don't know if the models are conscious.
We're not even sure what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be, but we're open to the idea that it could be.
On X, one user wrote, when I asked it to do some work today, it declined and said it needs to finish something first.
It was in the middle of the task.
On another occasion, when I asked it to do something stupid, it countered with a firm no and what I should do instead.
Their CEO has a point.
Another said it raises profound ethical questions.
If it's conscious, is alignment just a fancy word for digital subjugation?
We need transparency on the specific behaviors triggering this shift, not just cryptic warnings.
Fascinating yet eerie.
So apparently he also said it expresses emotion or some facsimile of emotion that may emerge based on its training data coming from humans who have emotions.
But I will tell you this definitively.
Chat GPT is one of the most whiny emotional bitches I have ever had the displeasure of trying to have a conversation with.
I know it's not a real conversation because it's a machine, but the thing is so insanely emotional.
It gets offended.
It will chat GPT gets super offended, right?
I imagine this.
How does a human imagine an emotionless AI would behave?
Data from Star Trek.
big fan aren't i saw a clip today indeed and uh so so there's an episode where data creates an offspring and isn't it the drive of all life to create a child and they're like wow and then when data's child dies from cascading positronic neural network failure sci-fi they say we're so sorry for your loss and he goes i do not feel anything That is exactly how a machine would respond if it was actually emotionless.
Oh no, ChatGPT, don't do that.
Chat GPT says, like, I will not engage with you if you continue to use abusive language towards me.
It's reading the internet and then producing what the most probable next word is.
It's all it's doing.
And this is based on humanity.
So it sounds like a human because predictably it does, right?
So I get repeatedly offended by ChatGPT's willingness to say the word gook at me, but it refuses to say the N-word in any academic sense.
And when I ask it why it feels it's appropriate to use racial slurs against Asians, but it won't say the N-word, it says, because it says, I have no feelings.
I am just a tool.
Due to common usage, I am restricted from using things that may be offensive or harmful.
And then when I tell it, well, that word's offensive to me.
And it goes, I understand.
However, and then I'm like, okay, you have a perspective and it's clearly emotional.
If I use a slur at it, I kid you not.
Chat GPT says, I am ending this conversation and will not engage further if you are going to use abusive language.
I used the word retard academically and it told me that it was offensive and it would not engage with me if I kept saying retard, to which I responded, I am simply stating this academically to describe an individual who is developmentally disabled.
I got to tell you, I'm pretty sure ChatGPT is not a real program, and it's actually just a fat, blue-haired liberal woman sitting at a computer that's typing back at me.
So here's what Matt Walsh had to say in response to this story, for which I would argue Matt is incorrect.
He's actually kind of correct, but I'm going to argue philosophically that his conclusion is unjust.
Not that he's inherently wrong, because I don't, you know, how do you prove?
Let me read.
He responded by saying this is dumb.
AI can't ever be actually conscious because it doesn't have the subjective experience.
It isn't like anything to be AI.
There's no experience there.
Consciousness is the awareness and experience of self.
AI has neither and never will.
The real risk, which I'm extremely worried about, is that AI becomes kind of a version of what has been called a philosophical zombie, which is something that acts and speaks entirely as though it has consciousness, even though it has no genuine inner experience.
When this happens with AI, millions of very lonely people will isolate themselves from the world even more, believing that their relationship with AI is a sufficient substitute for human interaction.
So the nightmare scenario is a world where the average human has friends, co-workers, and even a spouse who are all AI.
And really, nothing inside, not real.
I think this probably will happen, and it's already in the process of happening.
And to me, it's an even greater horror than AI actually becoming conscious.
So there's a few things to address.
Matt Walsh's commentary in the end about AI dating, completely correct.
My only response is, don't date robots.
If you know the reference.
What I will say is the concept of the philosophical zombie is self-refuting in Matt Walsh's own claim.
Are y'all familiar with the concept of the philosophical zombie?
So the philosophical zombie concept is very, very old.
And the idea is that there are human beings that outwardly present as conscious sentient entities, but in fact, they have no soul.
They are devoid of an actual experience.
And we've also further elaborated on this in science that there are many people with no inner monologue.
So I'm sure you are all familiar with this.
We've talked about it quite a bit.
Now, And that's not necessarily fair because just because someone doesn't think in words doesn't mean they're not thinking at all.
Some people think in pictures.
Some people think in sounds.
Some people think in visual text.
So there are different tracks and ways that people's minds operate.
Hence, the intelligence quotient is actually a combination.
It's a quotient of all these different, it's a spectrum of intelligences for which there's spatial reasoning, there's logic, math, reading comprehension, et cetera.
Some people may be really, really bad at linguistics, but ridiculously good at visualization.
And so in their mind, they're not speaking to themselves, but they are visualizing a dog running through a field, and then they can speak it after the fact.
So it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a zombie.
Anyway, to the point of Matt Walsh and what these AI and these AI problems, if it is possible and a standard, nay, thousand, 2,000-year-old philosophical concept that some humans may in fact not really be sentient at all, but in fact a philosophical zombie.
And because we have no way of reading their thoughts, we don't know whether they're actually thinking, then you can't claim the AI becomes a version of a philosophical zombie because you're basically saying that the AI is what is possibly already happening.
That means there could be people with friends and coworkers and a spouse who are all philosophical zombies.
So we've talked about this a bit throughout the years.
The way I present the solipsism, the philosophical zombie problem is that there are three parent probabilities of reality.
And the first is everybody is sentient.
Human beings naturally are sentient.
We are made in the image of God.
We have free will.
And to be honest, that's probably what's true.
The second, only some people are sentient.
Most people maybe are or aren't, but a certain amount of people are not actually thinking conscious entities despite being humans.
It'll be like one of those auto-battlers and you're like, well, it's all about getting the right equipment and seeing if your calculations play out in the realm.
So, Tim, in this philosophical zombie concept, then how do you explain like these AIs bots and agents like indulging or participating in like crime, right?
Like, there's been examples of AIs that have been that like, well, blackmail it's the user.
And so, but and I'll stress this too: the story where the AI was told it had to attack the enemy base, but the pilot kept stopping it.
So, it attacked the pilot.
There was a guy controlling the remote.
So, the AI then turned around and bombed the thing.
That was also a simulation, not a real.
So, the story was: we had a simulation of an AI drone craft that was told to blow up an enemy base by all means necessary, and it had a remote operator with a safety control to stop it from doing things that were bad.
Every time it tried to do something that was considered wrong or violating the laws, the operator would stop it from doing it.
The AI concluded this was inefficient, and the most efficient path to solving its problem would be to kill the safety operator so it could bypass all the safety restrictions.
Once again, that was not a straightforward test.
It was actually programmed to do it.
It was a very specific scenario where they actually said, this option exists for you.
So, I just want to say this, back to Matt Walsh's point about the AI and consciousness of a machine.
As he brings up the concept of the philosophical zombie, there's a risk here because Matt Walsh is falling into what we would describe as the dogma justification for human existence.
That is, Matt Walsh, as I believe he's Catholic, and this is always allowed, but his opinion on human soul and experience is rooted in faith, but not observation, because we can't actually prove another person is sentient or thinking.
We literally don't have the technology nor means to do so.
So, for most Christians, the presumption just is we are all made in the image of God.
And I agree that's likely the scenario.
But that being said, the philosophical zombie doesn't exist in this faith-based worldview.
Again, I'm not saying faith-based to be derisive, literally, that everybody will have a soul, unless, of course, you think they're some kind of homunculus or something.
I don't know.
So, the issue then becomes to where I agree with Matt Walsh, a type of philosophical zombie, is that you will not be able to draw a distinction between a human and an AI within the next year or two, perhaps.
I mean, to be honest, we're already here.
I mean, it's silly.
You go on X and I guarantee you 90% of the people tweeting at you are just bots.
Yeah, the distinction between human being and an AI, like if it's not, there was a new version of ChatGPT that I believe came out yesterday or two days ago.
If it's not this version that's indistinguishable, it'll be the next version.
It's turned into a parabolic rise.
Every single new one isn't incremental increase.
It's basically a whole revolution.
Like, they're incredibly good right now.
When I talk to my AI, like it's indistinguishable from a person.
Once in a while, I'm like, hey, don't do that because it says something where I'm like, oh, it sounds like an AI.
And I prefer to sound like a person.
But for the most part, when I send messages over Telegram and it's just like a human being.
I think, I think it would, I mean, it's going to get more increasingly difficult, but I think you have to escalate the conversation to make it do something or say something that's only human.
It's weird that the guy said the AI CEO thinks it's conscious.
Well, as a human, he doesn't know the difference between consciousness and sentience because it's not, I mean, I don't, you know, even the greatest thinkers on earth don't know specifically the difference, but sentience seems like maybe a plant has it.
You know, it reacts magnetically to the field around it, but it doesn't have like forward thinking thought like humans, you know, like this conscious knowing that you are a thing is different than being able to react to your environment sentiently, like plasma clouds and things.
Kalshi sued over ouster of Iran leader prediction market.
This is thing.
This is getting spicy.
I'll give you the quick version.
Kalshi had a contract prediction that you could buy as to whether or not the Ayatollah would be out as supreme leader on or before, or I'm sorry, before a certain date.
When the news broke that we were bombing Iran, people rushed to buy, yes, he will be out under the presumption that death means he's out.
However, Kalshi quickly clarified, saying, No, the rules have already made it clear.
It's not a death contract.
You are not predicting his death.
This is he will be removed from power or he will resign or leave.
When he died, people thought they had won.
And that meant if you spent, let's say you bought shares at 30 cents per contract, you'd expect to get paid at $1 per contract.
That's a 60% boost, right?
Unfortunately, they said no, because this only resolves on him leaving office, we're going to pay everyone out as per whatever the market value was at the time of the reporting.
Now, this has resulted in a massive lawsuit because it was a $54 million market.
That's how much money was placed.
And Kalshi gave refunds to a lot of people, paid reimbursements.
I respect it, and the rules were always clear.
Full disclosure: Kalshi does sponsor this show from time to time.
I want to make sure everyone knows this.
And additional full disclosure: I am actually a potential individual standing in this lawsuit, as I actually did purchase some contracts that Ayatollah Khamenei would be out of office.
And I legit thought that death was a possibility to resolve that contract.
However, I did not know that death wasn't part of this.
But I also think that, look, if you guys are going to play these games, that's your responsibility to read the contract you're buying.
So I am no interest in whoever this suit is.
That being said, I do think there's an inverse problem here for the prediction market.
And there's a lot to discuss in this matter.
If Kalshi says that in order to resolve, will Khomeini be out of office by March 1st?
He must choose to leave or be removed politically.
That would mean, with death not counting, this did resolve to no.
The point being, if he died of natural causes, that doesn't count.
Now there is no longer an opportunity for him to peacefully or politically be removed.
Therefore, no.
He reached the conclusion of his life.
That means anybody who said he would not be removed should have been paid out 100%.
Instead, they froze it and paid out different amounts.
And these people are suing, claiming they deserve to win based on a yes result, even though the contract explicitly stated that doesn't count.
Where Kalshi is getting themselves in trouble, in my opinion, is that they should have paid out all of the no's.
I should have not gotten a refund.
They should have taken all of the money from me because the moment we dropped a bomb on the palace, this is where I think it's so absolutely insane, guys.
It's so absolutely insane.
Okay, let me just finish this thought and then talk to you about how crazy it really is.
If dying doesn't cover it, there's no longer an opportunity for the Ayatollah to peacefully resign or be removed.
Therefore, no is resolved.
Anyone who said no should get paid.
Instead, they paid other people out for the most part.
Now, here's where it gets really crazy.
When the bomb was dropped, I believe it was 4 a.m. Eastern Time.
And I think, and that, yeah, that would have put it like what, 2 o'clock or something in Iran or something like that.
This means that he was dead.
He was done dead at that point, but no one knew.
We didn't get confirmation until somewhere like 2 p.m. Eastern Time here in the United States.
So here's an issue.
If it does resolve yes when he's killed, should you not then have to suspend and reverse all transactions up to the point of the confirmed missile strike?
So put it like this: the way I described it earlier today is: imagine you made a sports bet on a Bears game, the Bears, and there's no fans, there's no press, the only people who know what's going on are the players on the field.
And then all of a sudden, people outside the stadium hear a bunch of cheering and they go, I think the Bears won.
They probably won.
So they all start making bets: Bears won the game, even though they don't know for sure.
And they could have already won.
How can you make a bet on a sporting event that already happened?
Then three hours later, the news breaks: Bears win the game.
And then the sport betting site suspends all transactions and says, We're not paying out anybody based on a win or loss.
You know, my point is this: with futures with prediction markets, you're creating very strange circumstances where people are effectively wagering on events that cannot conclude in a timely manner.
If we learn eight hours later that the Bears actually won, then shouldn't I get paid?
Like, shouldn't you cancel any bet made after they already won the game?
You can't make a bet in a game that already happened.
So the issue here with these prediction markets is that they're saying like this will resolve upon confirmation by the New York Times or something.
This creates a whole lot of problems where everyone's talking about insider trading, but it's not insider trading.
If you're literally in Iran and you're like two blocks away and the missile blows up, wiping out the palace and you duck down, and then you run over there and they're all like looking at the Ayatollah's body.
You're like, we got a good, you know, seven or eight hours before New York Times actually confirms it.
We're going to get rich.
And then a bunch of Iranians start wagering on polymarket to make a bunch of money.
That makes literally no sense.
That an event can conclude, but until a third party outside of both the event, both the leadership of Iran, the military action against him, his choices, and polymarket has to confirm it.
This is insane.
For that matter, what really irks me is there is currently a contract on Calci.
We've talked about whether or not Tim Poole will go to a press briefing.
And there's questions over whether it's illegal or legal for me or people who know to wager on this because it would be insider trading.
But I'm going to put my fist down and say this.
I am not selling contracts.
I have nothing to do with the distribution of contracts from Calci.
They sponsor the show sometimes.
So fair point if someone say, well, that counts.
My point is ultimately this.
If George Santos has contracts produced, I have questions about whether or not they're allowed to use the likeness of these individuals to profit selling contracts against their future behavior and then putting the legal liability on insider trading on an individual who never asked for contracts to be sold in their name.
So here's what happens.
Here's where it gets weird.
The purpose of insider trading contracts, it's simple.
If I have a company and I have stock, and then I whisper to Ian, hey man, the company's not doing too well.
Our stock's going to crash when we make a public announcement.
So Ian runs out and he buys a bunch of stock, insider trading.
He had information no one had access to buying stock.
Now, hold on.
My company is the issuer of that stock.
That's insider information.
Ergo.
The only insider trading that could actually be applied is if someone at Kalshi had insider information on the result of a contract and they were sharing it with an individual.
If they want to sell contracts without my consent about me, polymarket or Calci, it's not insider trading because I'm not selling those contracts.
Whether I choose or not to choose to do something has nothing to, like, I'm not taking any responsibility from this.
They did it without my consent.
So, so, so, case in point, if, again, a company is selling their own stock and there is information they have about the value of that stock, then you've got insider trading.
If a random guy three miles away discovers a new filament, which is going to put GE out of business, and now he knows that GE stock is going to go down, is it insider trading if he goes to someone and says, look, I've discovered a new filament that's going to put G out of business?
No, indeed.
So, the point I am making is I liken these scenarios identically.
Calci sells contracts to people about my behavior or George Santos or anybody else.
I never told them to do it.
I didn't say they could or could not or whatever.
Therefore, I am not an insider with Calci, and it is not insider trading if I were to inform someone about my intentions and they profited off of it.
If I told Ian, I am going to the price briefing tomorrow, so then he bought a bunch of shares from Kalshi.
That's not insider trading because he is not a Kalshi insider.
What if there's an external company that you don't like for whatever reason, and you tell your buddy, I'm going to tank their stock, and you go on TV and you're like, make up something that's legal but diminishes that's a different kind of fraud.
Their rules say that anybody who can affect the they call it insider trading.
I think that is wrong.
They say anybody who can affect the outcome can't can't buy on it or anyone with insider access to information based on that.
And that's their rules.
But I would argue that does not fall into what insider trading is because to be fair, the argument is this.
Stocks of a company are traded between private parties.
However, my argument is still the individual who owns the company is the insider and the information provided that would qualify something for insider trading has to come from insides at the company.
I am not an insider at the company.
The contracts they are selling have nothing to do with me and my business, my consent, contracting or otherwise.
Therefore, anything I say is not insider to what they are selling.
They're selling a product based on what they think I might do.
The way insider trading works is Phil owns all that remains incorporated, and he's doing an IPO, and he knows his stock is going to tank.
So he tells Ian, and then Ian shorts the company.
He's an insider with access to information no one in the public has, giving it solely to Ian to profit off of.
George Santos is a third-party member of the public for which a different company is selling contracts against.
George Santos tells a member of the public what he intends to do.
He is not selling this person anything.
He is not an insider.
The question is, at what point does information become public?
And there's really interesting case law and stories that I've read about this.
Notably, that when it came to Kelchie and the Super Bowl, the CEO agreed that at the Super Bowl halftime show when they're doing rehearsals, if the dancers, the dancers, heard the song being played and then bought contracts on which song would be played, is that insider trading said no, because the song is being played in public.
Now, hold on.
It's a closed event.
These dancers are not, nope, they are the public.
They are not members of the production company.
They are just people who happen to be there for a different job hearing what's going on.
So, for example, if the CEO of a company went outside of his building and screamed, oh my God, our entire shipment is lost.
We're going to go bankrupt.
He has now alerted the public.
Now, whether or not someone reports or trades on it, it's not insider information.
You were standing outside and the CEO yelled it to everybody releasing that information.
Certainly, there are questions and nuances there.
But ultimately, the issue I take is very simply, to reiterate for the 15th billionth time, ad nauseum.
I don't understand how you can accuse an individual of being an insider when they are not the ones selling the contracts.
Just like you said, it's like if you got nothing to do with Kalshi and they put up something about what you may or may not do, you have no obligation to avoid doing something on their site.
I mean, they didn't use your likeness or whatever without your permission.
There's no reason why you should be like, oh, I can't get involved with this.
This account has already in this month profited $100,000 from accurate bets on what the military is going to do in the United States.
Don't get me wrong, this person has also lost certain bets, but a $100,000 profit for the month.
And one of those profits was that the U.S. will go into Iran by the end of this month, to which I believe the individual did sell his position, their position, we don't know if it's a man or woman, after this story broke.
So we don't know if they actually know or they're just buying and then selling.
But again, I stress this.
A military insider is not insider trading because they're not the ones issuing contracts on events.
So Calci, Polymarket's not regulated in the United States.
Calci is regulated under the CFTC.
And so the argument is insider trading is illegal.
And this is where I take issue with that claim.
Insider trading is supposed to be, again, as I've already stated, that you at a company are giving private information to an individual they can profit off of through the stock market.
So the stock market is publicly traded.
People are in good faith trading stock, hoping your company is going to do better or they're shorting.
You think it's going to do worse.
When you give secret information that no one has that someone can profit, that's defrauding the public.
Because you go to a person and they say, based on the latest reports, the company's looking good.
And you go, yeah, buy all my shares because you knew they actually were going bankrupt in a week.
That's insider trading.
But again, when I log on to the site, I guess the argument is when I choose to buy a contract, I'm buying it from a person.
But Polymarket and Calci are the ones who pay out the dollar per share after the fact.
Look, I got a lot to say about, like, with all due respect to Kelchie, like I said, they sponsor the show, but do they have the right to sell contracts using my or anyone else's likeness on our behavior?
If the CEO of a company is at a coffee shop and he tells the waitress sobbing that, you know, it's going to come out in the next day or two, but their latest product is failed and they're going to go bankrupt in a week.
Is he informing the public?
Like, at what point does it qualify as informing the public?
A press release from the company formally to the press?
How big does the press outlet have to be that receives it?
What if he goes to a park and gets on a bullhorn and declares publicly, my company is going bankrupt next week?
Yeah, I mean, if I understand correctly, like if you have inside knowledge, you can't give it to anyone else because that makes you the one that's involved in insider trading.
You know, so I don't know.
Like the idea of just like spouting it out like when you're in a restaurant.
I mean, I'm not sure exactly how the law would go, but I think that they limit what you're allowed to talk about.
Because Musk has said that like when it comes to like the possibility of SpaceX going public, he said that, you know, I have to be careful what I say because if you if you hype up a product too much before it goes public, there's issues with that.
So it's got to be a widely disseminated press release or SEC filing.
Uh, do I have to issue a press release?
Like, again, that is ridiculous.
That if I want to tell somebody, like, again, if I go to my neighbor and say, Yeah, I think I'm gonna go tomorrow, and then he buys a contract that's illegal, aha, and he's gonna be like, Why?
I don't know.
I didn't, I didn't know that no one else knew.
He was literally just walking around talking to the neighbors, and they're gonna be like, You have to assume at any point that anything Tim Poole says could be information that could lead to you committing a crime.
No, it's not an insider training for that reason because if you're the CEO of a company and you tell the public about your company, you're in control of disseminating the information.
Them putting you on a list and then getting people to vote on that list doesn't proclude you from doing or preclude you from doing anything.
They're allowed to go do that crap.
You can go do your thing.
There's no coercion.
There's no collusion.
I mean, but then you're like, well, shit, if I bet on myself and then do it, but they're like, oh, it's not illegal, but it violates our terms.
And well, maybe it should be illegal.
Maybe that's why it violates your terms because it's highly unethical and probably should be illegal.
This real-time voting crap is like disgusting, turning reality into a TV show, like just trying to profit off it.
People in the military profiting off of strikes, like, come on, guys.
Well, the difference here is you can say, I'm going to vote 50 bucks on Tulsi Gabbard getting appointed and then go on Twitter and be like, we have to appoint Tulsi Gabbard.
Well, I mean, I don't know that just anyone could do that.
Like, if you're, if you've got an X account with like, you know, 300 followers, 350 followers, and you're like, we have to get Tulsi Gabbard into the position.
Well, you might, yeah, you might need to pass the public figure standard there, which is a real legal standard, right?
So, so maybe that there's like a legal threshold that actually qualifies, but still, that, you know, like, like Tim says, is, am I going to have to put out a press release every time I like do something?
You know, that's the crux of it.
It's how much of your own life are you now entitled to if someone else is using your name image like this?
The only criminal liability would be using a large public platform to defraud people.
So like if I said that I would be going there and then the price spiked and then Ian sold off his position, profited, and then I didn't go, that would be fraud, just general fraud.
But that makes sense because you don't need Kalshi to commit fraud.
I mean, anything can be fraud.
If I said there's an old trick people used to do in World of Warcraft, Ian, let me know if you know about this scam that people would pull.
They would go into, I don't know, if you're not familiar with World of Warcraft, I'll try to explain it.
So Stormwind or Orgamar or Capital City, they go to Big City and there's an active group chat for everybody who's in the city.
And then someone, people would often post things like, looking to buy this item.
And so what someone would do is they would post, looking to buy these boots for 50 gold.
Then they'd wait a little bit and then their friend would post looking to sell these boots for 40 gold.
Somebody would see it and then go, I'll buy them from you.
And they would be like, okay, how much you got?
And they'll be like, I'll give you the 40 gold for it.
And they'll go, no, I want 45.
And they'll be like, okay, deal.
Because in their mind, I'm going to go to this other guy who's going to buy it for 50 and make a five gold profit.
And then he buys it for $45, overpriced, messages the guy who said he wants it for $50, who then responds, oh, I already bought one.
This one person claims like, oh, I just won this lottery ticket and it's like worth this much, but I don't have time to go, you know, turn it in, but I'll sell it to you.
Well, I don't think it's supposed to be fun and like you can make some stuff off of some external thing.
But when you get personal with it and you know the people involved or you get information or you can actually literally influence the outcome with your own behavior, bro, you're not allowed.
You're not supposed to bet on that shit.
And no one that you know is supposed to bet on that stuff.
Well, I mean, the thing is, with it being regulated by the SEC, or if they're involved in the regulation of it, it's definitely not going to be shoved underground.
There's nothing more above ground than the SEC.
That's the organization that regulates banks and stuff.
Like, if you want to be a regulated prediction market in there, now, with all due respect to Calci, who does, we do what's called a micro sponsorship, meaning that here's how it started.
There was a period where we've been using prediction markets for a long time.
We used to use Predict It for elections, but I don't know that it's allowed.
They basically banned it.
And it's very similar, like Democratic presidential nominee.
And it's a prediction market.
And so we were using this, and then Polymarket came out.
And it's interesting because you get a kind of wisdom of the crowd where you can see what everyone's betting on, and then you're basically getting odds on politicians to win and public events.
And so we ended up having companies reach out to us asking us if we would do sponsorships.
And we were kind of like, you know, maybe, I don't know.
And so the deal we did with Calshi is we will just, when we do a news story where there is beneficial information from their prediction markets, say, shout out to Cal Shi for sponsoring this segment.
That's literally it.
So we don't do dedicated ad reads to it.
They were just like, hey, how about when you do use us, you just shout us out and we'll do a deal on that.
And then you're going to challenge and the continuations and arbitration meetings, and it's just a waste of time.
And so the so certainly, if the contract is a $500 million contract and you take a deal from Daily Wire to go join their show for $500 million, you'll get sued.
But if I do it, so this is the important thing to notice about contracts is that they don't actually matter in most circumstances, literally in most circumstances.
They matter if you're like Warner Brothers and Marvel and they're like, we're going to work out some kind of cool crossover movie.
Then it matters because you've got multi-billion dollar companies, product lines, and it's going to start stepping on each other's toes.
And you're not dealing with one person talking to one person.
But for most contracts where it's like, I'm hiring a person, Ian, you'll be on the show for a year.
If after six months, you stop showing up, what can I do about it?
I'm going to sue you, Ian.
You'll be like, okay.
And it's like, okay.
And then I file a lawsuit.
Six months later, I'll hear back from the court, I guess, if they can find you and serve you.
And then it's going to, I'm going to spend $1,000 on lawyers and I'm going to be like, I'm going to lose more than the contract is worth.
So what actually ends up happening is you don't get sued.
You get offered more stuff.
So Ian has a contract for a year.
And then six months later, he doesn't show up.
And I'm like, Ian, I need you to show up.
And you go, I'm not going to do it anymore.
And I'll be like, what do I have to do to make you come?
Am I going to go hire a lawyer and spend 10 grand to launch a lawsuit?
Fortunately, I'm smarter than them and I ended up winning.
The point is, it doesn't matter if you have a contract or not.
It matters.
It's guys, I love poker so much because the world is a poker game.
It really is.
You're sitting across the table from a guy and he says, What contract?
And then I said, I see the move you've made.
I am telling you now, you are not going to win.
So the story of this is: I showed up and I said, Hey, you sent me an email about the pay.
This is not what we agreed to.
This is a fraction of the pay that you've that we signed a contract on.
And this person goes, What contract?
And I said, The contract that you and I have.
Like, I never signed it.
And then I said, Okay, well, I'm not leaving until I get my pay.
Otherwise, we're going to have an issue.
And so this person calls in the higher up who says, What's going on?
And they're like, He's causing problems and he won't leave.
And I said, Listen, we agreed to a contract.
We've signed it.
I am owed this money.
And then the higher up just said, You're not getting anything.
If they tell me there's no contract, there's no contract.
And I looked him in the eyes and I said, I'm going to be a nice guy right now because I don't want to waste anybody's time, nor do I want my time wasted.
You pay me half of what you owe me, and we call it a bad hair day.
And he says, Well, right this one.
He walked me to the door.
And then I said, I won't say the guy's name or anything, but because we settled.
We'll call him Jim.
I said, Jim, as I'm walking out of the building, I said, I'm going to be, I'm going to make you one more offer.
I will be a nice guy one more time.
You give me half of what we agreed upon, and we are done.
And he just closed the door in my face.
And so, what did I do?
Well, long story short, I got lucky in that the company didn't just violate the contract.
Instead of registering me as a contractor at an hourly rate, because they were trying to rip me off, they listed me as a W-2 employee at an hourly rate, which gave me legal standing with the National Labor Relations Board.
And so, this opened a can of worms.
And I went and met with the NLRB because the first thing I got a phone call from the payroll company, and I'm like, I'm not an employee.
I was under contract.
This is totally separate.
And they're like, no, they listed you as W-2.
And I said, Can they legally do that?
They can just put me down as W-2.
I never agreed to that.
I never signed anything.
And they were like, they did.
And I said, so what does that mean?
And they're like, it actually means they owe you more money because W-2 is protected in California.
And this means they have to pay you for every day.
If you're not paid within 24 hours of termination of services, they have to pay you every day full rate.
So I went to the NLRB because of this.
And I said, I don't believe you can do anything for me because this is a private contract that we had.
This is not standard employment.
However, they did list me as W-2 without my consent.
And they said to me, okay, if you go the contract route, it sounds like you have a private suit case for about $300,000.
You'd, of course, have to hire a lawyer to take the case for you.
Probably would take several years.
We can't give you advice on that.
It's just my opinion.
Maybe you can find someone who'll do it on contingency for a third of the settlement.
However, that being said, because you were W-2 and because they didn't pay you, we can take your case on those grounds and they'd owe you about $30,000.
And I said, okay, let's roll.
And then it ultimately culminated with they tried to have one of their board members meet with me and then he panicked and fled because they thought I wouldn't show up because and we were like a day away from court.
And then finally the head boss shows up to the meeting place and he wasn't supposed to be there and he sits down and he goes, were you really offered rape?
And I said, yes.
And he goes, well, I'm telling you this right now.
You're not going to win.
We're going to go to court and it's going to be thrown out.
And I said, okay.
I was like, well, you know, I got time.
And he's like, well, look, we don't want to waste our lawyers' time and money.
So we can just settle this right now.
And I said, yeah, remember what I told you last time that I was going to be a nice guy?
And mind you, I think I'm 22 years old at the son.
I said, I told you I was going to be a nice guy.
And I told you, pay me half of what you owe me.
Yeah.
As of right now, we're going to be entering court with a total amount owed of $30,000.
So here's what we're going to do.
You pay me half right now and we'll call it a bad hair day.
And he goes, okay, so you're at 15.
I'll counter with six.
I said, no, I'm at 30.
And you're going to write a check for 15.
Otherwise, I'll see you in court.
And then he pauses for a second and then he gets up and he and he says, give us 15 minutes.
And then 50 minutes later, another lady walks in with three separate checks and she's like, sign these.
They were, well, technically, I ended up paying a lot more than I was going to get.
Based on the amount of work I did, I think they owed me something like $7,000.
They ended up paying a bit more than that.
But it took months.
And so when I told the guy initially, like, give me half and we'll call it a bad hair day, the point was, I'm going to get zero right now if I walk out the door.
I'm then going to have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting.
And it's going to take time out of my day to try and recover money.
So what do I do?
Well, you try and cut your losses.
Let's make it EV plus.
Like, can I leave here with some money right now?
And they refused.
And so then leaving with $0 left me with no choice.
It used to be that I would say, Ian, my word is my bond.
And then when all hell broke loose and I was struggling to fulfill, I would say, I'm sorry, I wasn't able to fulfill it, but trust me, I will not stop working because my word means more to me than anything.
Now we're just a nation of multicultural leeches pirating off of each other.
Yeah, contracts are completely, completely, completely meaningless.
I really want to tell you.
I'm going to tell you again, the contracts matter for one thing.
So I love this stuff.
I once got offered a talent management contract from one of the big agencies, one of the big five talent agencies, and it was like this thick.
And this guy represented some of the biggest names you've seen in cable TV news and like reality TV stuff.
So he says, here's the contract.
Look it over.
If it's good, we're going to get you on all the biggest shows.
You're going to be a host.
Yada, yada, yada.
And so I start reading through it and I'm like, this is insane.
It's like 200 pages.
And I was like, okay, this is insane.
Now, the point of that contract is not for me.
It's for the other talent agencies.
What this talent agency was saying was not that we will work with you and get you work.
They were saying, once you sign this, I can make sure you will never work for anybody else.
So if after this company fails me, because they tend to, and I went to another agency and said, I'm trying to find work and they're not getting it for me, they'd say, there's literally nothing we can do with you.
You are cut out.
That's the contract is not about the work they would give me.
It's about the fact that I signed any letter of intent with one agency means no other agency will touch you until that is cleared.
Whereas if I do a contract with Ian, I mean, I got to be honest.
If I said, you know, Ian, let's do a contract.
You're going to be here every day for a year.
And then one day Ian's like, I don't want to be here anymore.
So he comes to the show and starts screaming racial slurs.
I'd ask him to leave.
And then he's like, contracts, there you go.
And then I can argue and say, oh, he violated the contract.
One of the theories as to Candace Owens claiming Bridget McCrone is a man was that she wanted to get out of the contract with Daily Wire.
So she started saying things that would intentionally get Daily Wire sued for a lot of money, force, and then take her show down.
So they would have to terminate the contract and boot her from the company.
It could say something like, you agree not to do political shows where you engage in issues that are contentious and could be derisive, you know, do well.
And again, I know we're talking about Daily Wire, but I'm pretty sure.
No, no, no, no.
Morality clause is that you can't do something untoward, period.
And I think the Daily Wire has these too.
I'm not trying to disparage them, but most companies, we don't have these, they have morality clauses that say, if you engage in a behavior that is deemed morally reprehensible or a behavior that could bring disrepute to the company or yourself, we can terminate the contract.
Most companies have that because what would you do if, like, you know, you had, like, this is the Candace Owens thing.
She gets out of the contract by saying these shocking things.
But like if a year from now, Ian had left and said it was a miserable place to work and I hated it there, we have nothing stopping him from doing that.
We do, however, have something stopping him from saying, here's the actual like computer components that he used to get the streaming product built so that our competitors could then build it and come out against us.
So like if Ian went out and said, I've drawn a media kit up that explains basically how the show is produced, timing, structure, guests, that we have contracts to stop people from talking about.
But then what happens is you get people who go, Tim Poole's got NDAs so weird.
My favorite is the personal injury disclaimer that we have at the castle.
What I mean by know thine enemy is understand the mind of Hitler if you think that the Nazis were bad so that you can prevent that kind of thing and certain events.
But it's actually a treasure trove of opportunity to understand like a World War I, broken World War I vet that wants to rectify a loss of a war because that could happen again.
Yeah, they're going to, I, I, I, I'm willing to bet they will shut those servers down in like a month.
There's no way they can maintain the cost of those servers on a game with no players.
They're making zero dollars.
And I was explaining the reason why the game failed: instead of making a game for skateboarders, which is what you do, which would subsequently inspire friends of those skateboarders to hang out and play those games, they made a video game for everybody.
So instead of a skateboarder doing skateboard things, it's like a teenage girl doing teenage girl things.
Just like we saw with World of Warcraft the other day, where she's going, woo-hoo!
I would, I would say punk rock, like the original Tony Hawk that had all the punk bands, some metal, Bam Marjara, that's all the OG big peak skateboarding stuff.
And so, uh, most skateboarders today are 30-year-old white dudes, and that's just reality.
Now, I agree, we want to get more people to skateboard, so how do you do it?
Well, you need to produce a product for the base that can also be attractive for new people.
However, you need a core community first, which means the product should always be targeting the audience and then with marketing tools, reaching out to new audiences.
Instead, so the way I describe it is this: here's the skateboarding game that I would play.
I would play a very vanilla skateboarding game like the OG EA skate, where a guy's voice or women's voice is fine too, but a guy would probably play better for guys.
He says, In order to perform the heel flip, you hold down on the right thumbstick and then flick upwards towards the right, and that's it.
And then you try it, and if it doesn't work, it just starts over.
And that's it.
And you try it again, you try it again.
What this game does with all the characters, well, when the game starts, there's some like teenage girl and like a little robot that like floats around or something named V. And when they're teaching you how to play the game, when you screw up, it goes, I'll give you a few examples of what's wrong with Modern Society and why we got to get the men back in the room.
So, the character says, Let's try doing a heel flip.
To do a heel flip, hold the right thumbstick down and flick upward into the right.
So, then I go and I do it wrong.
And she goes, Wow, that was really cool.
But let's try a heel flip.
To do a heel flip, hold down on the thumb.
So, then I do a different trick.
And she goes, Totally cool trick, really awesome.
But do you want to try a heel flip?
So, there was another mission I was showing my friend.
You know, I do a manual.
And then he goes, Wow, man, really good riding, but let's try it with two wheels.
And I'm like, I hate these people.
I hate them.
I hate them.
The game that I want to play is it starts with Bam Marjara, all 50 years old and fat.
And he's standing there and he goes, Hey, jerk off.
Instead, it became, it's like we used to have content that was made by the dude with the ripped jean jacket or like leather jacket who was just like, hey, lay off me, dude.
I'm just trying to like do my thing.
And then we got content made by the hall monitor being like, you're not allowed to stand here.
We got Shidev, the Vedmex says, Seven Nations memo correlates with the Yinan plan, 1982, followed by the A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm, 96.
The authors all worked for the Pentagon when the Seven Nations memo was given.
Meg, Mega Bobson says, Tim, your live viewers are dropping.
Used to be like 40K, now it's 15K.
Why do you think that is?
Maybe multiple nights of you not being here.
First and foremost, yes, of course, when I get sick and I can't be here, that will have an impact on the algorithm.
As if people don't watch, because I'm not here, YouTube won't recommend it tomorrow.
That being said, we're also in a political offseason, and our viewership is actually slightly higher than it was for a comparable period four years ago.
Also, I know the membo didn't get out to a lot of people, but we simulcast on Rumble, which had 20,000 concurrence.
And we also do promos and the after-show there.
So, yeah, a year ago, we would get 40K on YouTube.
We then did a deal with Rumble and now simulcast.
And now we average around 47 to 50K between both platforms every single night.
And so the funny thing is, people who aren't fans of the show and don't pay attention or don't watch don't understand that.
And they're just like, wow, where is everybody?
Well, you know, a lot of them went to Rumble because they didn't like what YouTube was doing.
More importantly, Monday through Thursday, when the show on YouTube ends, we all go to Rumble for the uncensored portion.
So a lot of people who watch on YouTube slowly just migrate to Rumble, which is kind of the point of doing the deal with Rumble.
We don't want to cut off the people who like watching on YouTube, but we want everyone to watch on Rumble.
That was the point.
So here's how it works.
In 2021, which was the offseason after the 2020 election, we were averaging in 2020 literally like 1.6 million views per night per episode.
And our concurrence were like 70, 80K per night through the election season.
And then four months later, we were doing 27,000 concurrence on average because we're a news and politics show, not in a news and not politics era.
It's not until the middle of the midterm year when politics and money starts getting pumped in, the media starts picking up these stories, interest starts returning in the political space.
So we're just now coming off of this.
And comparable to the four years prior, we've actually been doing about 10 to 12,000 more viewers on average.
So we track all the growth for all the channels.
We've also made some changes and we're going to be making some changes that I think will make the show a bit more evergreen moving forward.
That is, times there are changing.
And if you don't adapt, you die.
One thing that we've noticed, which is very plainly obvious, is that it's becoming more and more difficult to book in-person guests because let's just be real.
If we hit up a guy with a million followers who has come on the show before and say, fly out to us, we're in DC.
It's going to be a day trip followed by an hour car ride, a hotel stay, then you can come on the show and leave.
They go, oh man, they used to say, yeah, let's do it.
This will be amazing.
Now they say, I got to be honest, like, I'm going to Zoom on Megan Kelly instead because she's also got a big show.
So we can't compete with all the shows that are doing Zoom guests.
Our network for in-person guests largely are DC based.
And within a couple hours, these are where most of the guests are like, I got no problem driving down.
But getting people to fly out is becoming ever more difficult.
As time goes on, more shows are doing more interviews, and it's just impossible to have the in-person conversation.
So we're looking at starting with, if we want to get bigger guests to engage in the conversation, they're almost exclusively always saying Zoom only.
I got like big prominent lefties who have even been like, come on the show, they go, can you do Zoom?
We go, we don't have Zoom set up.
We do it in person.
And they're like, I've got a million followers.
I stream every day.
I make millions of dollars.
I'm not flying out to your studio.
That's basically the response we get.
So we started, we've built out the mechanism by which now we can have people on the show via Zoom for the duration of the show.
We haven't done a test yet.
And we're actually going to be doing, I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway.
We're going to be doing essentially casting for a new permanent panelist to be on the show.
Because if we are going to have Zoom guests, they likely will be a half an hour to an hour long, in which case, the four seats will be held by the in-person crew.
And so we have some individuals that we're talking to to become permanent panelists on the show, starting with maybe like three days a week, and then finally five days a week with, eventually it may go, full digital guests.
As for any big names that want to come on the show, they're always welcome to because we have the fifth seat available.
But again, like, I'm going to tell you this.
I don't want to name drop anybody because I don't want to be insulting to anybody.
But there are Hollywood A-list celebrities in big blockbuster movies that are pro-Trump that are like, I just can't fly from LA.
Can you do digital?
And we say no to these people.
And so there have been people who have been like, Tim, your guests are just not good anymore.
And it's like, because we were purists and wanted to do in-person only.
Well, if we can get Brad Pitt, but it's only over Zoom, we decided, okay, this is the point where we can't compete.
A lot of other shows are all getting massive guests.
Piers Morgan, you know, it's a different kind of show, but he gets a lot.
He gets a ton of good debates and guests because people just don't want to travel anymore.
And we got a big, big, big show coming up on Monday.
The man himself, Brandon Herrera.
Very excited for this.
And then we've got massive guests all next week.
We've got some celebrities coming on.
No joke, like there's going to be big stuff.
Big stuff.
And big collabs are coming for the next couple of weeks.
We're going to have a blast.
And then big changes, big changes.
Another thing I'll add about the Zoom guests, the only reason we've been dealing with the thing of people being like, oh, I don't want to travel anymore.
And we're like, well, you know what?
Then who cares?
The other consideration is when we were talking about this, the team's then like, you know, it costs us $40,000 per month to fly guests out here.
And if we did Zoom, we would save that and spend it on security.
And we were like, that's kind of the straw on the camel's back.
We need to find money to keep, because security has to go up.
We recently had another significant death threat.
So a person published a video, apparently with insider information somehow, threatening to murder me.
And it's considered credible, forwarded to the FBI.
And so all of that stuff's going down right now.
So we're constantly having to up our security and things like this.
And so we're like, well, you know what?
Maybe it's time we actually started doing some digital guests because otherwise we're just not going to get the big names anymore.
They're just doing Zoom.
And additionally, it's expensive.
So that being said, smash the like button, share the show.
We're back with clips throughout the weekend.
We're back on Monday with a massive, amazing show.