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March 30, 2026 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:46:18
Bullet In KIRK ASSASSINATION Does NOT MATCH Says Court Filing | Timcast IRL

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Participants
Main
i
ian crossland
16:58
j
jeremy ryan slate
22:43
p
phil labonte
21:24
t
tim pool
01:16:45
Appearances
c
carter banks
00:32
Callers
jessica clarity in unknown
callers 01:08
phillycheese45 in unknown
callers 01:17
tiger tank in unknown
callers 01:13
|

Speaker Time Text
True Gold Republic Independence Bundle 00:04:11
tim pool
In a new court filing from the defense in the Charlie Kirk assassination case, the defense argues that the ATF was unable to identify the round used to kill Charlie Kirk to the rifle.
We're also learning from this filing who the prosecution intends to call in this preliminary hearing, which includes the parents of Tyler Robinson.
Of course, many people already, as this story is breaking, are claiming this proves it.
Well, it doesn't really prove anything.
It's a claim made by the defense.
So we're going to analyze this, break down what it really means.
But of course, because of the massive popularity of the Charlie Kirk assassination conspiracy theories, I would argue, and many do, Tyler Robinson is likely to be found not guilty because of the massive amount of attention given to alternate theories, especially with statements now from Joe Kent.
I think they are going to use all of this.
And they've stated they will use the filings from the ATF to make their case and try to create reasonable doubt.
It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
And then on to the big news, my friends: the Bulls, they just booted a player for speaking out against these pride events because he follows Christ.
They're basically saying you fired, which is absolutely nuts.
Many people are saying woke is coming back.
Now, it may be dead for now, but it could be sleeping and not dead.
Democrats are saying they need a straight white man for 2028 if they're going to win straight white men.
But if they do, speculation is that woke will come back with a vengeance behind the scenes.
So I want to talk about that and a whole lot more before we do get a great sponsor for you guys.
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Joining us tonight to talk about this and so much more.
We have Jeremy Ryan Slate.
jeremy ryan slate
Hey, I'm Jeremy Ryan Slate.
I use my three names because I had the same name as an actor.
I have a company called Commander Brand for the past decade.
We've been booking our clients and great podcasts.
I also host two YouTube channels, Hidden Forces in History.
Look at the forces behind history, as well as the Roman pattern, looking at civilizational collapse with Rome as a model.
And I also host a podcast for the fastest growing book club on Substack, which is the Athenian book club.
We look at great works in history.
tim pool
I look forward to talking about the Roman Empire again.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
Ian is too.
He really wants to.
ian crossland
I was just watching a video about the conquest of Britain a couple nights ago.
tim pool
You mean the modern one with the Muslims?
No, no, you mean the old one with the Romans?
ian crossland
Yeah, Emperor Claudius allowing his general to go do a form and then taking, you know, taking the kudos after it succeeded.
tim pool
The kudos.
ian crossland
Yes, I want to talk about the Romans.
I want to talk about the changing of the world order.
Thanks to indeed.
tim pool
We got Carter producing pressing the buttons.
carter banks
What's up, everyone?
tim pool
And Phil is here, of course.
Bullet Identification Creates Reasonable Doubt 00:07:33
unidentified
Look at that.
phil labonte
Wearing Tim's jacket.
Something sick.
Mine's on the way.
tim pool
It's made of copper.
phil labonte
It's made of copper.
unidentified
I got it.
tim pool
I saw it from Palmer Lucky had one on Joe Rogan.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
And I was like, I got to get one of those.
phil labonte
I got one in black because I think it's going to look sick under the stage lights.
tim pool
It looks like comic book shading.
phil labonte
It does.
tim pool
It's crazy.
unidentified
It's sick.
carter banks
Is it heavy?
unidentified
It's crazy.
tim pool
No, no, no.
jeremy ryan slate
It's heavier than normal jacket, but it's not like one of those bands you used to wear when golfing so that your joints don't hurt or something like that.
unidentified
Maybe.
tim pool
It's kind of like a coat Ian would wear because he's scared of EMF, you know, frying his brain.
phil labonte
Now they can't get into my brain.
This is better than that.
tim pool
Actually, it amplifies signals like a dish.
phil labonte
Oh, this is worse.
tim pool
Yeah, aluminum hats don't work.
All right, all right, all right.
Let's get this news.
We got the story from the Daily Mail.
Bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match rifle allegedly used by suspect Tyler Robinson, new court filing claims.
The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk did not match the rifle, according to a new court filing.
Defense attorneys are arguing that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives, quote, was unable to identify the bullet recovered at autopsy to the rifle allegedly tied to Mr. Robinson.
The defense team may now offer the ATF firearms analysts testimony as exculpatory evidence.
They said in motion filed on Friday to push the preliminary hearing back at least six months.
It also notes that DNA reports, excuse me, filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and ATF, will take time for the defense team to analyze because reports indicated that several different DNA were found on some of the evidence.
Quote, as some, I'm sorry, as these cases indicate, determining the number of contributors to a DNA mixture and determining whether the FBI and the ATF reliably applied validated and correct scientific procedures is a complicated process, which requires the assistance of various types of experts, including forensic biologists, geneticists, system engineers, and statisticians, all of whom must review and evaluate several different categories.
Robinson's attorneys added that they have received about 20,000 electronic audio files, videos, and written documents that prosecutors have presented as evidence in the case.
So right away, my friends, I'm going to go ahead and ask, is it normal, and it might be, for the suspected assassin of a prominent public figure to have the masses submitting evidence to assist the alleged assassin?
phil labonte
I don't think that it's generally normal.
There are times where, you know, like people that are murderers have, especially like if there's a male murderer that women, like for some reason, decide they want to throw themselves at him.
But I've never heard a situation where there are people actually submitting evidence to help someone who is accused of murder in this type of fashion.
I'm sure that there's been some, but this kind of magnitude, I don't think that I've ever heard of it in my lifetime.
tim pool
So I'm just pointing out that with the massive amount of attention brought to the Charlie Kirk case and doubt sewn about, that's what I was trying to say, from the prominent podcasters, namely, of course, Candace Owens, there is a massive audience that believes this man is innocent.
So of course, they would submit what they view as evidence to assist the defense in this matter.
I believe the popularity of these conspiracy theories is going to create so much doubt in the public.
That alone is enough to get Tyler Robinson acquitted.
But you add on top this statement that they were unable to identify the bullet to the gun.
Now, that may be typical, but you combine that with the public evidence, like the story and the narration and the perspective, you are easily going to get jurors who are like, reasonable doubt.
ian crossland
Look how this is, and this story will sow reasonable doubt.
It says that the bullet did not match the alleged rifle.
Now, they didn't test it, so they couldn't match it.
It wasn't like they tested it and it was the wrong bullet.
That's a different form.
tim pool
What do you mean they didn't test it?
ian crossland
Yeah, they said that they were unable to identify the bullet in general.
So that is...
tim pool
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Identify the bullet to the rifle.
unidentified
Right.
Right.
ian crossland
That's different than saying it's definitely not the rifle.
They didn't rule out the rifle.
They just saying we haven't been able to identify it yet, guys.
tim pool
Well, they didn't say yet either.
ian crossland
Yeah, but they didn't.
tim pool
The court filing just says, unable to identify it to the bullet.
So we need to see exactly what the ATF said in this regard, but let's not add words to what the claim is.
ian crossland
I just, I don't want them to make it seem like they tested the bullet and it's not the right bullet to the gun.
So it was the wrong gun there for Tyler Robinson.
tim pool
Well, what does unable mean?
Does it mean that they were constrained by bureaucracy, so they did not do it?
Or does it mean they tried and failed?
ian crossland
I don't know.
tim pool
So if they tried and failed, that's huge, and it's going to present reasonable doubt.
ian crossland
Yeah, I read a little bit down in the story.
I think that they said they really couldn't.
Were they even able to recover the bullet?
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I think one of the bigger problems you have to worry about, too, is whether he's proved right or wrong.
You're going to have a mistrial of some sort with all of that going into it.
How are you going to get a jury that's even fair?
phil labonte
I mean, you're going to have to be a problem.
You're going to hope that the jury is actually sequestered and that they don't get any of this information, all like all of the stuff.
tim pool
There's no jury yet.
phil labonte
Well, yeah.
tim pool
By the time this goes to a trial, I don't see how they're going to find any human being who honestly is going to say, I have no idea about this.
And then what I fear is that you're going to get people who are going to be motivated by ideology who will lie in court and say, I'm totally unfamiliar.
And then as soon as they get in, they'll be playing Candace or whoever else and they'll be saying, like, I'm going to vote not guilty no matter what.
phil labonte
Yeah, I mean, look, it still is a narrow segment of the population that pays very close attention to this stuff, but it is also worth, you know, considering the fact that this is such a high-profile thing and there's so many people that are on, you know, on X or that, you know, I'm sure this stuff goes on Facebook.
I don't have a Facebook account, but I'm sure that this stuff is happening on Facebook.
These discussions are happening.
So just to come up with an actual, you know, a jury that's not been tainted already, I don't know that they're going to be able to do that.
And that's terrible because I tend to agree with you, Tim.
I think that the guy's going to walk because they can't actually get a non-biased jury.
ian crossland
The internet has changed the way our legal system, our courts work in such a drastic way.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, even the question I would have, they're saying 20,000 pieces of evidence, but at the same time, are they also just pulling social posts too?
Because like you said, people may have submitted things, but I'm sure it's a lot of its social posts they're pulling too.
unidentified
Yeah.
jeremy ryan slate
Because those things are getting insane reach right now, especially on X.
ian crossland
This is good for their defense of the defense because at the very least, they're going to string it out.
I think they said they're going to string it out another six months as they tend to do.
jeremy ryan slate
And let's just longer detain a jury then.
ian crossland
Longer to take longer to get the jury, which means more people are going to be tainted ahead of time.
And then, I mean, as far as this defense guy, he's probably like, let's just make this case go 10 years and make sure Tyler can rest comfortably in a jail and not have to organize.
tim pool
Also, one of the reports, Fox News, we have here talks about the prosecution's intention.
They say the filing made by defense attorneys on Friday states that prosecutors intend to call Robinson's parents and his roommate and romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, testify at the preliminary hearing.
Robinson's defense team is also asking the judge for a minimum of a six-month delay for the preliminary hearing, which is currently scheduled for May 18th.
In the filing, they said that they did not, they were not given adequate time to analyze much of the forensic evidence that is going to be presented by the prosecution.
Again, whatever your thoughts are on this, it is massively lined up for an acquittal for whatever reason that may be.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, the bigger question I would have as well is the concern I've had, I believe he's the guy that pulled the trigger, but I do think there's more associated with him.
And if he gets acquitted, we don't find out about that.
Concerns About Hidden Accomplices 00:15:50
jeremy ryan slate
That would be the thing I'd be concerned about.
tim pool
More associated with him?
jeremy ryan slate
Well, there's maybe there's an Antifa group or other groups.
tim pool
I think there's more people involved and they're covering it up.
jeremy ryan slate
And at the same time, you have YouTube and other places aren't censoring a lot of these things.
They're allowing them to happen.
So you have to wonder, it's the same way with DAs being funded and things like this.
Is it also a one-hand washes the other type of thing?
tim pool
What do you mean?
Like, how does that work?
jeremy ryan slate
So if they're allowing this stuff to come through, right?
How doubt?
You mean doubt?
If they're allowing doubt to happen and YouTube's also allowing it visibility, well, they'll crush other things.
unidentified
Yeah.
jeremy ryan slate
Does it help whatever cause they're trying to also push forward by not allowing some larger group to get discovered?
tim pool
Yeah, YouTube has explicit rules against conspiracy theories, like explicitly phrased conspiracy theories, things that go, you know, they only allow authoritative news sources when you search.
But when it comes to this story, this one's a special, special example that they'll allow anybody to just say whatever they want.
And it's kind of nuts.
The amount of content accusing Erica Kirk of being some freaky demon, monster, robot, reptile, whatever it may be is weird.
I have met that woman several times.
She's been here, like completely normal and unassuming.
phil labonte
No horns, no scale, no?
tim pool
It was funny because, I mean, you know, just to kind of be a little candid here, when we went to Turning Point after Charlie was assassinated, you know, Jack was like, we're setting up the show and he was like, hey, Erica, do you want to, you want to, I don't know if you want to meet up with her and just say hi or anything.
And I was like, yeah, sure.
And then, you know, we walked over and then she was playing with the kids.
And then she came over and she's like, hey, Tim.
And I was like, hey, nice to meet you.
And he goes, we've met before.
And I was like, oh, oops.
She's like, I've been to your house.
And I was like.
Sure.
unidentified
Okay.
tim pool
I meet so many people.
And then she's like, it's fine.
And I'm like, totally normal.
It's the weirdest thing how they make these videos that are edited to slow down certain points to then zoom in on her face.
And then they just tell you she's doing something wrong when she's literally just kind of normal and boring.
It's the weirdest thing ever.
They accuse her of being a robot.
ian crossland
Man, if she hadn't taken that role of CEO of Turning Point, I don't think this would be happening to her.
tim pool
I disagree.
ian crossland
Do you think so?
You think she'd...
tim pool
Yep.
unidentified
Really?
tim pool
Yep.
I think that's just she's, she's, she's, the issue with Erica in this story is that she did PR.
She spoke at Charlie's Memorial.
That was it.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
She had to.
She appeared in interviews talking about how she felt.
They did not like the way she acted.
Like, that's the craziest thing to me.
jeremy ryan slate
I do PR for a living.
You have to fill the vacuum.
You can't just let nothing happen.
tim pool
Well, I mean, I suppose the question I have for you then, as someone who does PR, would you advise Erica to cry on TV and like really be emotional?
Or would you ask, would you, would you tell her to be composed and to deliver a message?
Like, how would you advise?
jeremy ryan slate
I would say it's more about being composed because at the same time, if she cries, then people are going to say that's a put-on, right?
So you have to at the same time be who you are at all times.
And I think in a situation like that, especially after somebody passes under those conditions, people want to feel safe and they want to feel like the organization is strong, not like it's something that's not going to last.
You have to inspire confidence.
carter banks
She cry, they accused her of putting faith.
phil labonte
Yeah, she's going to say, like, when she doesn't cry, they're saying, oh, this is totally weird for someone to grieve this way.
Look at she's hugging her friends.
She's laughing.
She's not grieving.
Oh, you know, she was definitely involved in the murder.
And then when she does cry, they're like, oh, you know, she's just putting it on.
Those are crocodile tears.
People are motivated to disbelieve because, and I personally think this is, this has a lot to do with COVID.
There are so many people that got duped by the narrative with COVID.
And they're just essentially like, I don't trust anything the government says.
If it comes out from an official source, then you have to disregard it all the time.
You can't believe it.
And it's more likely that if it comes from the government, it's probably got a kernel of truth or some truth.
And there are things that the government doesn't want to give out to the public and stuff like that.
But I don't, the idea that if it comes from the government, you have to disregard it.
I think that motivates a lot of people.
jeremy ryan slate
I think people also don't understand grief either.
My mom had a stroke in 2013 and she's still able to barely walk.
She doesn't have a lot of her language skills.
And first thing I did was start packing for the hospital.
I started called my boss and told her I wasn't going to be at work, like all of those things.
It took three years to hit me.
And I think people don't understand how grief actually works and how people respond to it.
tim pool
I also don't understand what people expect.
They expect her to appear every day, every time, just to be crying nonstop 24-7.
Like at a certain point, you have to live.
Her kids and her were in the office.
Her kids were playing.
Those kids just lost their dad.
What do you think the kids are going to do?
They're going to just do their childly things.
And then what are you supposed to do?
Just cry nonstop and just not do anything?
ian crossland
Yeah, the kids.
tim pool
It was weeks after this.
They were accusing her of doing wrong by doing interviews.
And they were claiming that her face didn't look right.
It's like, guys.
ian crossland
She's in a, their daughter, their oldest daughter, Gigi, was at Turning Point.
I met Erica and Gigi there.
And like, Gigi, I'm just going to, I'm talking kind of outside.
I don't know what's going on in her brain, but I don't think she quite understood.
tim pool
Children don't.
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
And so Erica's in a position where she has to walk that line with Gigi and with the organization and with the government who's probably getting her on testimony and stuff.
It's like, and it's just, oh, God.
I don't know, man.
We got a guy.
We got this guy in custody who's very much likely the shooter of that rifle.
His dad's going to testify against him.
tim pool
I think they're going to, they're going to, well, he's going to testify.
unidentified
And we'll see.
tim pool
We don't know what else.
ian crossland
He said it turned him in, so we'll see.
tim pool
I really do not believe there will be a scenario.
I mean, guys, they're going to call the father to testify.
They're going to ask him and he's going to say exactly what we already know.
Like the reality where the dad comes and goes, I never turned my son in is just zero.
ian crossland
Hey, turned him in.
His kid had his rifle.
I think is it Garrett?
I don't know if that's the rifle that was his.
phil labonte
He was his grandfather.
jeremy ryan slate
His grandfather's father.
tim pool
I suppose then one could argue the whole family was created by the CIA and it's all one big op and the dad is actually part of it and it's all fake.
ian crossland
I think it is a cut and dry.
Tyler Robinson will be found.
I mean, he's innocent until proven guilty, but with the evidence I've seen.
But the thing is, the defense will drag this out as long as they're not.
tim pool
No, I think I think there's a if someone asked me to gamble, I would say that he's going to be found not guilty.
ian crossland
Really?
tim pool
And I think the reason is that you've got a mass formation psychosis.
I am not saying I know that Robinson did it.
I am not saying that it's proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I'm saying that so far in the public, we have seen a preponderance of evidence.
The idea that the FBI, the family, the news media are all in on one big massive assassination plan, while these things are possible, it's just substantially less likely.
So I would argue that probability dictates this is likely the guy.
I do believe that the evidence we've seen in the public also dictates there are others involved and they are covering that up, or at the very least, not trying to investigate.
But again, that being said, based on the social media stories, one thing you must understand is that perception is reality.
And so long as Candace and others in that space argue that Robinson is innocent and that a foreign nexus did it, you will get people who will be called for jury duty.
And we've seen this with the left.
They'll either be marched in with people screaming at them.
And so they'll just vote however they're told to vote, or they'll march in and say, I have no idea who Candace is, Wink.
And then when it comes time to vote, they're going to go, I know he didn't do it.
And then they're going to comment on Candace on the channel and be like, I did this for you or some other nonsense.
Ideology matters more.
Perception matters more than what is presented.
If you've already tainted the well and told everybody that this is not a real story, that the evidence is fake, then the prosecution is going to be like, here's the gun.
And you're going to be thinking in your mind, that's not real.
Doesn't matter what they show you.
ian crossland
Maybe it's too little, too late that what I'm about to say about, because I already kind of mentioned that Gigi, you know, their kid, that daughter, Charlie and Erica's daughter, she doesn't know what's going on or didn't seem to, but she can feel what everyone around her is feeling.
And that's how she's living right now.
So for Erica to intentionally not espouse grief is understandable.
She doesn't want to send her child into a desperate depression, confused depression.
So she's trying to be normal.
That doesn't mean that she did it or was in on it.
Like she's trying to protect the kids.
tim pool
I'd like to see this trial public.
The defense is also trying to have it not be public.
I think it should be public.
We should see it.
And then I can just say to anybody who thinks it was untoward or a conspiracy, let's just agree to see what the evidence is presented and whether or not it sways our opinions in the matter.
Because I would say this, if in court the defense says, and it's on TV, you did not match the bolt to the gun, and the ATF guy goes, we couldn't.
And when they say why, they'll be like, it didn't seem to match.
Then I'm going to be like, whoa, that's huge.
But if unable to just means the bullet was damaged, so it's not possible.
Then I go, well, I mean, that's not good, but it doesn't prove anything.
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
So it really just depends on what this means and what they present in court.
So I want to see that the public.
carter banks
No, we have to.
jeremy ryan slate
I think the bigger part of it, too, is people have been through in the last couple of years, especially post-pandemic, is they've seen they've been messed with in so many different ways.
They don't want to believe a lot of things.
Conspiracies almost become mainstream and people don't want to believe things.
And that's actually a very dangerous position to be in.
I look at history.
It's one of the main things I look at.
And there's enough strange things that happen in history that are true that you don't need to really kind of go down a lot of these rabbit holes.
tim pool
Let's jump to this next story.
We got a big one from ESPN.
Bulls wave guard Jaden Ivey after anti-gay comments.
Heavens me, anti-gay.
What could he have possibly said?
Let's listen.
unidentified
The world can proclaim LGBTQ.
Right?
They proclaim Pride Month and the NBA.
They proclaim it.
They show it to the world.
They say, come join us for Pride.
For Pride Month.
To celebrate unrighteousness.
They proclaim it.
They proclaim it on the billboards.
They proclaim it in the streets.
Unrighteousness.
So how is it that one can't speak righteousness?
How is it one that, how are they to say that you, man, this man is crazy?
I'm not the J I used to be, but the OJ is dead.
I'm alive in Christ.
You know, no matter what the basketball setting is, you know, I'm born again, the Holy Spirit.
And I've been saved by Jesus Christ.
tim pool
There is a massive Christian revival going on, that's for sure.
So this dude has the mildest of criticisms.
He did not disparage anybody.
He didn't use any slurs.
And he gets waved because of this.
They say the news came after Ivy posted a series of videos ranting about religion.
Ranting?
Really?
That was like one of the most measured statements I've ever heard.
Honestly, if I saw a video from a communist who calmly was just like, I have deep concerns about how capitalist structures will accommodate people when AI and industrialization takes place.
And that's why I believe, I wouldn't call that ranting.
I would be like, well, that's an argument.
This is a guy who's expressing his views on Christianity and pride.
And this is what waiving is they fired him, right?
phil labonte
Yeah, well, they waived and they say that I don't think they fired him.
They just benched him, I thought.
tim pool
That's what it means.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, waives a release.
unidentified
Yeah.
jeremy ryan slate
Put somebody on waivers.
They have a certain amount of days where another team can claim him or whatever it might be.
If not, he's a free agent.
tim pool
Is there a team that's going to be like, yo, that's fine?
phil labonte
Can we bro?
tim pool
Woke is going to come back.
unidentified
Yes.
tim pool
My theory is we've largely routed woke.
And the Bud Light, the target stuff has proven how ineffective, but not only that, how damaging it is to the Democrats' brand.
So they've gone underground like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, you know, all just nasty and disheveled.
But they're not gone.
You don't just like ideas don't just stop being.
The people who hold these ideas don't just give up on them.
So right now, the play is going to be win back the White House, the House, and then they're slowly going to bring all of this woke stuff back.
To be honest, they still defend DEI.
They're just keeping it quiet because they know it's going to cost them an election.
They want to win the power first.
This proves it.
See, they're keeping it quiet, but when this dude steps over the line, you see how they go, I mean, look at what happened in Virginia, right?
phil labonte
Spanberger just basically she was running as I'm a very centrist Democrat, I'm middle of the road, et cetera, et cetera.
And as soon as she gets into office, all of the left-wing policies that the far left-wing policies all come flooding in and she's signing bills that are passed by the Democrat House or by the Democrat legislature.
tim pool
Have you guys seen the population map for West Virginia?
unidentified
No.
No.
tim pool
Oh, this country is good.
jeremy ryan slate
We had a similar problem with Mikey Sherrill in New Jersey, where I live.
And Brianna's very centrist, very moderate.
And one of the things she wants to do now is we homeschool.
She wants to do psych evaluations for homeschooled children.
So it's like it's getting kind of crazy.
They use one side to get you.
And once they have it, they show the true face.
phil labonte
Absolutely.
I mean, look, the left doesn't think that you should be allowed to homeschool your kids, right?
They think that your children are their property.
And I mean, I've got a, you know, I've got a five-month-old, and I have absolutely no intention of sending him to state schools at all, period.
That's just not happening.
I'm not giving my kid to a public school so they can indoctrinate him and try to make him into what they consider to be a good citizen.
That ain't happening.
The left is going to do everything they can to either limit your ability to educate your kids at home or to downright take away your right to educate your kids at home.
And I mean, there's a lot of parents' groups that are very against this.
But if you do not, if you're, if, if parents are not vigilant, the left will take that right away from you.
And they will say, you have to give your kid up.
And they will say, if you don't, and well, they'll say if you don't, then you have a, then this is, then you are doing, you are, you know, we're going to call child protective services because it's not about whether or not you want to give your kid up.
It's that you're harming your kid by not giving your child to the state to educate them.
unidentified
Yeah.
phil labonte
And that's just, I mean, that's totally unacceptable.
tim pool
So this is West Virginia population growth over the past decade, up to 2021, to be honest.
And you can see that the blue areas doesn't mean Democrat.
Those are just the areas where the population is growing.
And they're also all Democrat areas, and the other parts of the state are just collapsing.
West Virginia is the second Trump, most Trump supporting state in the country.
And it is massively expanding in areas that are controlled by Democrats.
And it's presumed, like where we are right here, it's the Eastern Panhandle, Berkeley and Jefferson County.
It's presumed to be that people from Virginia are fleeing these psycho-lefty policies, but the people who are coming here are liberals.
Data Center Growth Disrupts Communities 00:06:31
phil labonte
They're not sufficiently right-wing.
tim pool
They are liberals who are going to come here and say, well, look, I mean, Spanberger's crazy.
We don't want what she's doing.
But we are voting Democrat.
And then they bring their problems with it.
You know, I'll quote T'Challa from Black Panther, a great icon of black culture, when he said, you can't let these people in because they'll bring their problems with them.
Well, that's what T'Challa said.
I mean, you know, they love Black Panther.
phil labonte
So it's true.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, we have the kind of the opposite problem in New Jersey, where New Jersey and New York is kind of the tri-state area for me.
And the pandemic policies were so harsh, people just moved to Florida, which just means for the most part, we've lost all of our red voters.
They even redistricted our congressional district, which used to be one of the reddest in the state.
And we've had a Josh Gottheimer's been our congressman for, I think, three terms now because we don't have representation, even though it's the reddest area in the state.
phil labonte
Yeah, I mean, it's a similar thing happens in, or had been happening in New Hampshire.
The Free State Project, the right-wing, right-wingers of the Free State Project are very aggressively anti-left, and they've been doing a lot to scare the, for lack of a better term, scare the left-wingers in New Hampshire.
They're very pro-liberty, and they're very much right-wingers.
It's not the same kind of libertarian that a lot of people think of when they think of libertarian.
It's very, like I said, it's very right-wing libertarian in New Hampshire.
And the legislation, the legislature in the state is all Republicans because the free staters have been running as Republicans.
tim pool
New Hampshire was a mistake.
It's just because it's the free staters should have moved to a state where they had a statewide stronghold.
Like they moved to a blue state surrounded by blue states and said, everybody move to New Hampshire.
We're going to take it over and be free.
And it was largely effective, but they're still surrounded by Democrats and in a Democrat split state.
So even then, they still lose state power in a lot of regards.
If they went to West Virginia, they'd own the whole state.
If they went to Wyoming, West Virginia would be centrally located close to D.C. with a mass.
You'd actually have a libertarian member of Congress.
phil labonte
I'm not sure what their calculation was moving to New Hampshire, but I mean.
tim pool
Some libertarian guy moved there and then said, I wish my friends were here.
That's what happened.
Because Luke was like, you got to move to New Hampshire, Tim.
And then I was like, why?
And he's like, it's a free state.
You know, it's a free state project.
And I was like, bro, you are surrounded on all sides by the far left and don't water and then the far left.
And he's like, no, I'm telling you.
And then he moved to Florida.
phil labonte
Yeah, I mean, look, the biggest reason why I stay in New Hampshire is because of the fact that my family's in Massachusetts and Bain in Massachusetts and it's an hour away from me.
Otherwise, you know, I don't see a significant rise in the state.
tim pool
West Virginia is going to turn to a giant data center anyway, so not sure that it matters.
The governor keeps announcing all these big data center projects all over the state, which will bring a ton of money into the state, which is good.
Considering the state is sparsely populated as it is, that might actually be pretty great.
No one really cares.
The problem with data centers is they're big eyesores that consume a lot of resources, drive up prices in urban areas.
To come to West Virginia, put a data center in the middle of like rural West Virginia where very few people live.
Sure, it might be disrupting to the people who live there.
So, you know, to them, I sympathize.
The big picture for the people of West Virginia is they're going to get billions of dollars in state funding for infrastructure improvements and things like that.
And you're largely not going to see the data centers.
phil labonte
So even Virginia.
The way that it looks now, a lot of the companies that are trying to build data centers are also building, they want to build the power generation along with the data centers.
And the argument for that, the pro argument for the people that are, you know, oh, they're going to raise our cost of electricity is going to go up and blah, blah, blah.
If these companies do build data centers with a power generation station there, the amount of power that a new data center will take is so, so much more than a city will be.
Say, for instance, it's 1,500 megawatts to run the data center.
Your average city runs at about 80 megawatts.
So you're talking about 5% of the power.
So the company that generates the power will likely give the power to the town for dirt, dirt cheap because they're already generating it.
And the amount of power that's left over for the needs of the town is basically a rounding error.
jeremy ryan slate
So I think our power grids are chaic anyway, though.
We lose so much in transmission.
I think that's even the bigger problem is people have been made to be scared of nuclear and other sorts of energy generation.
But the bigger problem is looking at our grid, how it works, how it transfers power and how it generates power.
And these things aren't as big of a problem if we handle that.
phil labonte
Yeah, that's true.
But it still is better for the companies that actually want to generate the power to build the power plant for its own use because the power is right there.
There's no transmission issues.
And then again, overproduction or whatever, because they need a specific load for the data center.
Whatever's left over going to the town, making the power for the town cost nothing.
That will make people far more amicable to the idea of having a data center in that town.
Right now, people are really, really against the data centers because they have these ideas that it's going to drive their electricity costs up.
But that doesn't do anything positive for the people that want to build the data center, right?
Like if they come into town and they piss off the town, like that does nothing good.
All it does is make the people that are in town hate the data center.
And so they're going to want to be like, hey, how can we make this a positive thing for the town and for us?
And if they build a power generation station with the data center and they're just like, look, we'll give you free power, give you power, whatever, a cent for whatever, you know, where you're paying 10 cents or 15 cents now.
And they're just like, we'll give it to you basically for free.
That'll do a lot to move the needle when it comes to people saying, oh, we don't want a data center here.
ian crossland
21st century booms, boom towns.
Like we used to have the steel towns, the rubber boom in the 50s and Firestone in Ohio.
That's where I'm from, actually, Akron.
You know, the gold rush, where these towns pop up around an AI data center, a big power plant, all jobs, and then a technology will shift and it will require like 10 million times less electricity to run these things.
Everybody will move out because they can work locally elsewhere.
phil labonte
And then you'll have a lot of eventually you're likely to see data centers in space.
New Wars And Balkanization Fears 00:15:26
unidentified
Yes, for sure.
phil labonte
That is where six, nine months ago, this was a crazy idea.
And as soon as Musk started talking about it, what?
tim pool
I predicted it.
phil labonte
Did you?
When?
tim pool
When I talked about the grandfather with his kid looking up and saying, what are those gigantic black things in the sky moving left and right?
And he's going to say, oh, that's the machine.
We built it.
phil labonte
Oh, AI.
Didn't I say?
Well, they were for a long time they were like, that's crazy and stuff.
But as soon as Musk started seriously working on the infrastructure for it, it became a normal thing now.
tim pool
Let's jump to this story from Axios.
Some Democrats' 2028 strategy, a straight white Christian man.
It's about time.
They are purging the far left.
They are dumping money against them.
They are trying to moderate.
And they outright have said their 2028 candidate needs to be a straight white Christian man.
That's why they're promoting James Tellerico in Texas.
I believe the play is this: woke is bad for the brand.
They know it.
They still want it, but you can't sell people something they don't want to eat.
You got to steal power, then force it on them.
So, likely, what's going to happen is you got Joe Rogan ragging on Trump and MAGA saying there's a lot of MAGA dorks.
Some are genuine patriots, but they got to deal with these dorks.
The Trump supporters do not, not all of them, but many of them do not want to hear that Trump is losing support over the Iran war in the Epstein files.
But it is true.
Democrats are going to try to capture these guys who are pissed off and moving away from Donald Trump.
And we talked to him.
We got people in our Discord who are saying that they're pissed off over the Iran war.
Democrats are going to try and capture them.
Now, I'll say this: I ain't voting for the likes of Adam Schiff, nor am I going to vote in any way to help that guy get power.
So I don't know who the Democrats think they're going to run, but if the Democrats do purge a majority of the far left and we start seeing more like Tulsi Gabbard types running, they're moderate, anti-woke Democrats, you will actually start seeing.
I wouldn't be surprised if Joe Rogan endorses the Democrat in 2028.
ian crossland
I wouldn't be surprised if I do it because this will be surprised by that.
The war machine just doesn't have party affiliation.
Right now, it's got control of the Republican Party.
The liberal economic order, the technocracy has control of the Republican Party.
Four years ago, they had control of the Democratic Party instead.
So I just want some consciousness.
Like, I don't want people naming airports after themselves and putting their signatures on the dollar bills and getting us into wars that they told us they weren't going to get us into.
But I've never seen a politician.
tim pool
No, Ian.
Like, we've been talking about it for years.
We were, you know, I remember in 2024, we were all sitting around this table just talking about how we just needed a president who would start a war with Iran.
You just are misremembering.
ian crossland
I think that the voting was new wars.
Wasn't that new wars?
Yes.
tim pool
Yes, new wars.
ian crossland
Yeah, and yes, new wars.
unidentified
Yep.
ian crossland
Or he might have been like, no, new wars.
tim pool
I was wearing my MAGA beanie at the time, my bright red Magabini, and I was yes, new wars.
ian crossland
That's what people were like, we want world peace.
And he was like, no, new wars.
And they've misinterpreted him.
jeremy ryan slate
This has been the strategy for how long?
There was that, I'm trying to remember which general that had the Wesley Clark?
Wesley Clark, thank you.
The Wes Clark 7.
Basically, we're going to go through all these seven countries and then we're going to end up in Iran.
So it's been, no matter what party is, it's been the policy since 9-11 that they've wanted to get Iran.
So it doesn't matter who it is.
tim pool
The question for you is: how is this not like Rome?
jeremy ryan slate
That's the hard part.
tim pool
The better question is, does this track alongside anything in Rome?
jeremy ryan slate
So the three key things I look at are inflation, immigration, meaning poor border control, and then lack of ethics of people in political position.
They don't kind of look at the future, they look at what's now.
tim pool
We got all that.
jeremy ryan slate
We have all three of those things.
And that's why when people often ask me, you know, are we a republic anymore?
Are we an empire?
I really look at not only an empire, but we're an empire that's fading in a lot of ways because we're destroying our money.
We don't look at what the real inflationary number is.
If you want to look at it from 1790 till now, rather than year over year, it's probably somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000%.
And we're not giving people real numbers.
But at the same time, our politicians are too concerned about fighting each other.
And they're less concerned about who's coming into their country as well.
So there's so much.
I think Trump's way past of a Brutus.
I think because if you look at it, we haven't, and this is one of the things we did the Culture War episode a few years ago.
I talked about we haven't functionally been a republic in a very long time.
The presidential office has gotten more and more and more power.
tim pool
Well, he just tried paying TSA by decree.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah.
tim pool
And it's funny because this creates a weird conundrum for Democrats where I can't remember which Democrat went on.
I think it was like Meet the Press, and he was like, Trump can't do that.
It's illegal.
And so now they've created this position where they have to argue that Trump can't use executive authority to alleviate a problem everyone's pissed about.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Really puts them in a difficult position because people are going to go, no, I'm happy Trump is just doing it.
But that's people are going to be saying, I'm happy we have a strong executive to just do it.
jeremy ryan slate
But you look at it, George W. Bush executive order, Barack Obama executive order, Joe Biden executive order, Donald Trump executive order.
It's not governing.
And what happens is the next president just gets rid of those executive orders to put in his own.
It's not policy.
It's not law.
It's not structure.
It's by executive order or by dictate.
tim pool
So do you think Trump should sign an executive order that makes Baron Trump the baron?
He just rules overall?
jeremy ryan slate
It'd be a great idea, but no, on all honesty, I think it gets back to Republicans actually worrying about legislation.
And that's not really what we're doing.
We're worrying about winning the next midterm or winning the next election.
tim pool
Also, a big factor in this is the cultural fracturing.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah.
tim pool
So we don't have a unified moral system either.
jeremy ryan slate
That's correct.
tim pool
So it doesn't matter what our politicians are doing, to be honest.
ian crossland
I was about Caesar.
Like, I feel like it was the moral fracturing of the Senate that led towards their fear of Caesar and then their inevitable ultimatum to Caesar of give up your property or and Caesar's like, you leave me no other choice.
Now I'm going to invade and take the control.
jeremy ryan slate
The problem is everybody was doing it.
The trope about Roman office was your first year was to get out of your out of debt.
Your second year was to build wealth and your third year was to avoid prosecutions.
You need at least three years in office.
So everyone was doing it.
He just kind of did it harder than everybody else.
And the Senate resisted him so hard they caused the fall of the Republic.
tim pool
The Senate won't even pass the SAVE Act, even though it's popular.
Congress is wholly dysfunctional.
We all know it.
They're all just serving themselves.
And it's because there is no unified culture.
There is no public mandate.
The public is fighting itself.
So members of Congress are like, okay, quick, grab as much China as you can on the way out.
I feel like the end result is just going to be, you know, some people, we've talked about the idea of civil war, but it could just be Balkanization.
ian crossland
I thought that when Caesar, when Trump, I mean, was running for office in 2020.
Yeah, if they had, like, they prevented him or whatever happened, he didn't get into office in 2020.
And then they were trying to arrest him and make it so he couldn't run again.
If that had succeeded, that would have been like Caesar, and he probably would have crossed the Rubicon.
unidentified
What do you mean?
ian crossland
That was if they had legally been like, you can't run Don.
He'd been like, you know what?
You can bet, I'm in power.
Like, we could have seen a demagogue go real, but instead, it worked out.
He legally ran.
He legally ran.
tim pool
The court cases aren't done yet.
Have we even gotten a ruling from the appellate court on the criminal case in New York?
ian crossland
Well, only that his hand wasn't forced in 24.
I feel like if he'd been arrested, somebody's hand may have been forced in 24 to do what Julius Caesar did when he crossed the city.
tim pool
I wonder if all of this is just emergent and predictable.
That all societies will go through these ebbs and flows naturally for a variety of reasons.
Meaning, we talk about immigration, inflation, and all of these things, political corruption, but these are just inevitabilities based on, you know, it's one plus one equals two.
One domino falls over.
No matter how advanced a society is, these things will start happening.
ian crossland
You know how they say you got to kill the white-tailed deer?
You got to hunt them because they'll overgrow.
They'll eat.
And then they'll starve themselves out.
tim pool
And this happens.
This happened here a few years ago.
ian crossland
Do humans go to war inevitably when the population gets so big?
tim pool
We've never gotten to that point.
ian crossland
It's like World War I was not a population issue.
tim pool
Well, all of these things do somewhat relate to it.
We've not gotten to a point where like red-tailed deer as a planet, but certainly there's been tons of resource wars, if not all of them.
And I will say the funniest thing is how many people the East India Trading Company killed because they wanted black peppercorn on their steak, which I get.
ian crossland
Or national steak, man.
We read an ad at the top of the show where it's like 30, we're 36 plus trillion in debt.
We're 39 trillion in debt.
That was getting worse.
That was like six months ago.
unidentified
Six months ago.
phil labonte
We got out the description.
ian crossland
I don't see another path right now other than a world war that slaughters 30%, 15% of the population.
I just don't see another path.
phil labonte
How does a world war of you're saying that we have to have a world war to deal with debt?
tim pool
Not that we have to, but that it's an inevitability.
ian crossland
Like 30,000 people.
tim pool
So here's the thing.
Like World War I and II basically reset Europe and restructured how their governments functioned.
Talking about their health care system, for instance, was wholly a product of World War II.
ian crossland
Upward consolidation of wealth after World War I.
tim pool
And population reduction.
It eliminates a large portion of the population, obviously.
ian crossland
It's like young men that want to change the world go up there and they fight and they sign up.
tim pool
Let's do a throwback.
Should we be trending alongside comparable to Rome, what's next for us?
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I think the biggest thing is hailing the currency because people often talk about Constantine being the guy that brought Christianity into Rome as a legal religion.
It's what he did in 313.
But the thing that he does that he doesn't get a lot of credit for is in 314, he mints less than 100 gold coins.
And every year until he dies in 336, he's going to mint gold coins.
And if you look at the Eastern Roman Empire, it's going to go until about the year one from around 330.
tim pool
Sorry, real quick.
What does that mean, mint 100 gold coins?
jeremy ryan slate
So he gradually, over a 20-year period, puts them on a gold standard.
And from that year, 300 until about 10, I think it's 1054, it goes to that point without inflation.
So he actually, one of the main reasons that the Eastern Roman Empire survives, besides the fact that Constantinople is so hard to attack, is they have a currency they can stand on.
And if you look at why the West fails in the 270s, Aurelian mints a new silver coin that's much more pure than all the silver coins, even though they've been debasing, but people didn't trust the money anymore.
So Constantine brought back gold, forced taxes to be paid in gold, and that forces gold into circulation.
And then the currency actually is valued as well.
tim pool
That's what Trump is doing with the petrodollar.
jeremy ryan slate
Maybe.
tim pool
The war in Iran is largely about dominating petrodollar or the oil system as well as natural gas.
We went over this great thread that basically breaks down everything the U.S. has been doing with Venezuela, with Iran.
And the play with Iran is you remove Iran from the chessboard and put their oil production into Western influence and natural gas.
The U.S. will control 45% of global natural gas and oil.
China and Russia will never stand a chance.
jeremy ryan slate
A solid currency isn't the only solution, but it's the solution that will buy you time to fix all of the other things.
Because if you have a currency where you can actually function as a society, people can actually pay for things.
They can actually handle their families.
Maybe.
ian crossland
I bought a bunch of that one.
jeremy ryan slate
It buys you time to handle the ethics of your politicians.
It buys you time to handle your borders.
But if you don't handle currency, you can't fix anything.
ian crossland
What were the other two things?
tim pool
You said that currency and population, right?
jeremy ryan slate
Population, but handling your borders.
Because in the third century, Roman emperors are basically raising an army, declaring themselves emperor, fighting each other, and the strongest becomes the next emperor.
tim pool
Does Trump need to be like, have babies?
We need more babies.
jeremy ryan slate
That is a big part of the problem as well, right?
Because if you look at even how population is rising, it's rising by people coming across the border rather than people being born here.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
And you can't replace your managers with Honduran farmers.
jeremy ryan slate
Correct.
Because there's this, the famous Roman armor people know is the Lorica segmentata.
It's the three-piece Roman armor that they wear.
The third century, they didn't wear that.
They wore things that looked more like barbarian armor.
And that's because the culture had changed.
And I think that's the biggest piece you have to look at.
When you lose a unifying culture, that is a bigger piece of a society actually falling apart.
ian crossland
The internet has caused such a strain on liberalism.
I think the American culture has been bombarded by strange and wonderful and new and horrible ideas constantly in the heat of them.
It's just the culture.
I don't know.
It's nice to have a superstar come across.
But then when the superstar plays for the Chicago Bulls and they're part of the circus, they can't speak out against the circus.
The gladiator gets ostracized.
I don't, I don't know.
What are you up on?
jeremy ryan slate
That's one of the reasons I care about great works of Western culture because most people at this point in time haven't read them.
They haven't read a lot of the works that would have been a major part of people's schooling.
They haven't taken a classical education.
There's a push out there for something called the, I think it's the classical education test or something like that.
And it's really pushing for getting classical education back in school because people don't understand history.
They don't understand true grammar.
They don't understand a lot of the things that a culture is built on.
And because of that, it's much easier to control people that will go with whatever's popular at the time.
phil labonte
Most people can't, you know, they can't read at grade level, you know, whatever grade they're in.
They're usually years behind.
tim pool
So I'm going to go ahead and just say this.
Please don't be blackpilled by it.
But the presumption would be that we are tracking for like a dissolution, like a break, like a breakdown or something, right?
jeremy ryan slate
Well, so the third century, and that's you've talked about civil war and there's been discussions of national divorce and things like that.
And if you look at what happens when the center gets weak, that's when the edges start to break away.
In the third century, Rome has two different breakaway empires.
They have a Gallic Empire in the West that breaks off, the Palmyron Empire in the East.
And that was only because they were looking at we're paying taxes to a center in Rome that can't defend us.
They're no longer sending troops.
And Posthumus, who's the general in the West, decides he's just going to form his own empire rather than trying to take over Rome.
And that is what you see when an empire starts to fade is the edges start to break off because they know the center can no longer support them.
So that discussion coming up is a big point of showing how people feel about things.
tim pool
It's hard to see anything other than that.
And it's because our political, our Congress is corrupt, doesn't do their job.
So the president just says, I'll do it myself.
And no one can stop him.
He's just paying the TSA by decree.
Who's going to do anything about it?
He can just do it.
So the presumption that there is a system of legitimacy by which we cooperate is out the window.
Now it's just Trump's in charge.
If Trump, honestly, I don't even know what would happen if come 2028, Trump appointed JD Vance by decree.
Like honest question.
At this point, if Trump just said, no, the results of the election are immaterial.
We are going to give JD Vance the presidency, file a lawsuit against me, they'd have to file a lawsuit.
And then if you, and that could take, like, imagine what would happen if Donald Trump said the results of 2028, 28 are called into question.
My FBI is investigating these.
We are not, we are seizing these ballot boxes.
Thus, the vote count is now in question.
Then what?
Someone's going to sue.
We thought something like that would happen in 2024.
Trump Attempts To Bypass Congress 00:15:09
tim pool
It did not.
I'm just saying at this point, what would anyone actually do?
Are Democrats going to run?
unidentified
No.
tim pool
They're going to complain on TV.
phil labonte
You're going to have another no-kings protest and complain about how.
tim pool
I just, I feel like if Trump truly did, listen, the idea that Trump can decree to pay TSA, like imagine if that happened 70 years ago.
The people in this country would freak out.
ian crossland
I hope that if he were to appoint someone or try to appoint someone, that the deep state would step in, like the Roman Praetorian Guard, you know, the security state and stop the psychopath from.
Well, there's a lot of ways you could do it.
tim pool
The problem is, let's say there's an election in 2028, and people already don't trust elections.
That's my point.
So Trump comes out and says, we got a lot of fraud in California.
Look at this.
And then they show a bunch of data and they do Michael Indell times 20.
And then they say, you know, Kash Patel comes out, or if he's still FBI director, and says, we have seized these voting machines to analyze the data because we have evidence of foreign intrusion and potential fraud.
So these can't be counted towards the totals, which calls California into question.
And then the vote then goes to a delegation instead of a popular vote.
The delegations are then based on Congress and they vote in the Republic.
And the Democrats then say, no, it's not possible.
We've speculated on these things before, mind you.
But my point ultimately is, if we ever come to that point, if the deep state did come out and try and stop Trump, it would enshrine him as king for life.
Imagine Donald Trump saying, look, I don't really know entirely what's going on.
Our FBI says they found evidence of fraud.
And then the CIA takes a shot at the king and misses.
Trump will then rise before the Senate and say, the attempt at my life has left me scarred.
unidentified
That's what happened.
That's here.
He did it.
That's what happened.
ian crossland
He took it in the ear and now he's full gone ho.
But like, the Praetorian Guard doesn't miss.
Like, you look at Roman.
unidentified
They do.
ian crossland
Do they?
jeremy ryan slate
They do at times.
ian crossland
Like, what percentage of it?
I mean, I guess it's history rights.
unidentified
Well, if you.
tim pool
Oh, they, whoever shot at Trump missed.
ian crossland
Well, that was.
jeremy ryan slate
Two emperors got rid of the Praetorian Guard for that reason and then put their own men in it.
You have Septimius Severus in the early second century got rid of the Praetorian Guard because he realized that was going to be a problem for him.
He put his own men in.
tim pool
And Trump's trying to do that now with getting his guys in these institutions.
Isn't it wild?
jeremy ryan slate
Constantine got rid of it altogether.
ian crossland
Dude, our White House is a Roman building.
It looks like a Roman building.
unidentified
They would have.
tim pool
Well, the Founding Fathers wanted to have the Roman style architecture for a lot of buildings.
ian crossland
George Wallace.
tim pool
It just, you know, honestly, like literally, the writers of Earth season 12 are just out of ideas and they're like, let's do Rome again.
Let's do a remake of Rome.
People loved it.
ian crossland
Do Rome, but like with some Viking action, like guys that'll crawl through the mud with a sword.
tim pool
No, they're like, let's just do like, you know, they brought in J.J. Abrams and he's like, listen, look, it's not complicated.
Just redo Rome and add new action.
And they were like, okay.
So, you know, like God's up there being like, all right, let's, let's go with Rome for 2020.
ian crossland
We are Roman.
I don't know.
I often will say like, we're like a blend between the Romans and the Vikings.
We kind of coalesced in England in the early 1100s.
jeremy ryan slate
And then our founding fathers wanted it to be a combination of republicanism, monarchy, and other forms of government to make something better than the Council of Elders.
tim pool
I forgot what it's called.
There's a word for it.
But basically, the Founding Fathers were brilliant because they said, instead of doing just one government, why don't we do three at the same time?
And unfortunately, now, all that really matters is the executive branch.
And every day that Congress doesn't do their job and just fights for political, it's political bickering for donations.
Trump is just given leeway to do literally whatever he wants.
I mean, listen, allocating funding for TSA by decree is nuts.
phil labonte
This is all.
jeremy ryan slate
But how do you fix Congress?
Because you look at it, and even they just care about the next midterm or they care about the next election cycle.
phil labonte
That's why they don't want to take any votes.
Any significant votes, because if they give the power to the president, they can say, well, you know, the president has the authority.
I didn't vote for that.
You know, we can't do anything about it.
And that's really what they want.
They want to be able to be in Congress and get all the benefits of being in Congress without actually having any of the responsibilities.
That's why they gave the president the power to, you know, the whole military author, the authorization for use of force when it came to the war on terror, because they didn't want to have to actually say yes or no.
You know, they didn't want that responsibility.
ian crossland
I look at it.
jeremy ryan slate
They're going to lose their next election.
ian crossland
Congress is a verb, means to move together.
Gress, meaning to move.
Con with, you move together.
And that's the whole point is they are moving together.
They're congressing.
unidentified
No, no, no, no, Ian.
ian crossland
Oh, yeah.
tim pool
Do you know what progress means?
ian crossland
Move forward, yeah.
tim pool
And pro and con means?
ian crossland
Well, con can mean not or with.
tim pool
It's a joke, Ian.
Calm down.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
So you say what does pro and con means?
Pro means good, con means bad.
What does progress mean?
It's like, oh, to advance, move forward.
What does Congress mean?
Everyone laughs.
ian crossland
I think the inception was to move together as a decentralized autonomy.
And we could do that again.
It doesn't have to be the 1700s version of it because the U.S. is falling.
It's changing.
It's transmuting.
tim pool
It literally can't happen.
ian crossland
We still need to congress.
We just got to figure out a way to get it.
tim pool
It's not going to happen.
ian crossland
What do you mean?
tim pool
It's just not going to happen.
ian crossland
Well, it will happen whether you're in part of it or not.
tim pool
That's not correct.
unidentified
Yeah.
Nope.
tim pool
I'm building suspense.
I'm just saying.
I'm waiting a little bit so that we get into it before I actually say you will never have two men stand side by side locking arms when one says chop off a child's genitals and the other is a Christian.
ian crossland
I don't know, man.
Yeah, pretty sure you're not a union, dude, in the World War II.
You find alliances.
You don't have to be your friends.
tim pool
No, The communists all died and are gone.
There's a big difference.
ian crossland
We allied with those people for a short period of time.
phil labonte
The only reason we allied with them was because they were fighting the Nazis.
We weren't allied with them because we had some kind of similar worldview.
tim pool
But hold on.
We barely allied with them.
jeremy ryan slate
The Russians have to pull back, bro.
tim pool
The Russians invaded Poland, and the U.S. was like, well, they can take half of Germany.
I'll take the other half.
We were never friends.
ian crossland
No, no.
Friends and allies.
And I talked about this with Dan Holloway.
Friendships and alliances are not the same thing.
tim pool
You might hate the person you're allied with, but my point is Congress cannot function when the moral worldviews of the two political ideologies are so distinct from each other.
Now, if the Democrats, as their play, is to start excising the whack-aloon lefties and you end up with Tulsi Gabbard versus Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. Versus JD Vance, we're good.
Because they're going to be like, ah, those guys are great.
They're my friends, but we disagree on certain policies and we're going to get along.
But you have to excise the fringe psycho element of the left.
The whack-aloon, tax-the-rich, chop-off kids' balls faction.
That can't exist.
There will be no cohesion between a regular American who wants to just go to work and the people who are like children should get sex changes.
ian crossland
You could see Marco Rubio working with a moderate Democrat.
That'd be interesting.
tim pool
I can tell you they're doing it right now.
RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are in the Trump administration.
If moving forward, the Democrats embrace, like, you have the Trump admin and it breaks into two, a left Trump and a right Trump, everyone's good.
We get along, we're all friends.
ian crossland
You asked Jeremy, like, how do we fix Congress?
I don't, I don't see, because they get bribed.
You know, there's 450 of them.
They're such easy targets to bribe.
It's so easy to tweak.
And I just want to congress, like, as American people, I don't, you know, technology is such that we don't have to rely on sending someone to Washington, D.C. to hope that they do it for you anymore.
You can just kind of interface through the internet through technology.
unidentified
Do you really think that?
tim pool
That was never the point.
Of what?
The point was literally to not have democracy.
Quite literally, it was quote to have better men.
That was an actual quote from the Founding Fathers.
So when you elect a representative, you are choosing someone whose job it is to facilitate.
It was not so that the collective wishes of the community be manifested democratically.
They did not want democracy.
The 17th Amendment was a, what was, was, I'm sorry, the reason people say to repeal the 17th Amendment is because initially when it came to the appointment of senators, the idea was that you would elect a state senator or a state rep who would then vote among a group of people, a better man, who would go to Congress to represent the state.
ian crossland
A question on that, just a clarification.
Are the better men just the senators or were they the reps?
tim pool
The reps as well.
ian crossland
And the senators, the reps.
tim pool
The idea was: you're a farmer.
You don't understand the affairs that are going on with foreign policy, taxation, and national policy.
Do you trust me?
I will go and the values I hold, I will bring to D.C. You know, it really is.
You say, you do it, buddy.
I hire you to do the job.
ian crossland
And with the age of education, it's like, do you still want to live like that?
Where you must suffer as a poor farmer and hope that that guy who's probably dumber than you is going to do it better because he's more charismatic?
tim pool
Don't vote for a guy who's dumber than you.
ian crossland
Well, most of the people in Congress are dumber than me, no offense, but they're just do you know what Dunning-Kruger means?
I've heard of it, yeah.
Where you think you're smarter than you are?
tim pool
Yeah, the members of Congress are all smarter than you.
Now, I'm not saying they're the smartest people in the world.
ian crossland
I'm sorry, dude.
tim pool
It's a fact.
ian crossland
It's impossible to quantify, but.
tim pool
Alexandrio Casio is a smart person.
ian crossland
I believe that.
tim pool
And anybody who's capable of manipulating a system to get them into that position of power is smarter.
ian crossland
They're charismatic and they're wealthy a lot of times.
They're good at it.
tim pool
They are better at calculating their plans and odds and future decisions than you are.
jeremy ryan slate
And that's not necessarily intelligence.
That's the ability to observe something take a bigger risk than any of us would take.
tim pool
My point is, it doesn't, you know, I'll say this.
It doesn't matter if you're smarter or not.
They are in a position of power over you and they figured out how to get there and you did not.
ian crossland
Yeah, I know.
So we're living in this poor farmer 1778 legal system where I'm for it completely.
You love it.
Obviously, it's doing so well.
Why not just?
tim pool
Oh, I'm not in favor of the corruption and the degradation, but I will just stress, Lord help us if someone like you had political power.
ian crossland
I do have political power.
So do you.
We have a TV internet.
tim pool
You don't vote.
ian crossland
Tell people to do this.
tim pool
Like you don't vote in Congress.
You don't go to Congress and pass bills.
You think you're smarter than everyone in Congress.
That's insane.
ian crossland
I didn't say I'm smarter than everyone in Congress.
phil labonte
I think you said that.
ian crossland
You smarter than you.
You did people in Congress.
I think Thomas Massey is way smarter than me.
unidentified
Okay.
tim pool
You think you're smarter than most of the people in Congress?
ian crossland
I have yet to see that those people are geniuses in Congress.
I would love to see really intelligence leading the way.
It's charisma, however.
phil labonte
It doesn't have to be that they're geniuses.
And not to say that they're smarter than you, but most people in Congress, most of the time when people get frustrated with people in Congress, it's not because they think they're actually dumb, which there are some people in Congress that actually I think that are, you know, when Corey Bush was in Congress, I think she was, I don't think Corey Bush is particularly intelligent.
jeremy ryan slate
Jasmine Crockett's terrifying.
tim pool
What is that?
What is that quote?
It is the plight of man that the ignorant are so confident and the smart are so doubtful, something to that effect.
phil labonte
But most people in Congress are, you know, they're fairly intelligent.
And just because they don't do what we want, a lot of times that's not because of the individual.
It's because of the way their system's set up.
Like I've talked about how like, you know, nobody likes how the sausage is made, right?
Like nobody likes to see how you actually have to do business in DC.
That's the way that it is.
tim pool
There are people marching down the street with no kings signs and they will tell you that Donald Trump is a stupid person who was there accidentally.
And they will say that Elon Musk is a trust fund kid whose dad owned an emerald mine, emerald mine, and that's why he's rich and powerful by chance and he's actually really dumb.
And if you ask them, do you genuinely believe, having not studied any of the work that these men have done, having not built anything comparable to them, or even understanding the basic mechanisms of an LLC at S Corp or C Corp, that you are smarter than they are?
And they will go, of course.
That is the plight of man.
And that is why Democrats as a party have existed the way they have for so long.
Because with all due respect, they're not wrong about Dunning Krueger.
The fact that they have, what was it, like 3 million estimated across the country at these No Kings protests, these people genuinely believe they're smarter than the world's richest man who has brought, what is it now, three companies over a trillion dollar net worth?
And they're like, I'm smarter than him.
It's like the dude is landing rockets.
He is bringing rockets to space and then landing them on platforms in the ocean.
You are not smarter than this man.
And they're like, yes, I am.
phil labonte
My favorite cope is they're like, well, you know, he doesn't actually do it.
It's other people that do it.
And then you talk to people.
jeremy ryan slate
You have to hire those people that know how to do it.
phil labonte
Well, not only that, but you talk to people that work at SpaceX and they're like, no, he's an engineer.
It's not worth time.
tim pool
It's that Elon goes to three guys and he says, you know, one of the biggest problems with rockets is we have to keep reusing all of it.
It's very expensive.
It's hundreds of millions of dollars.
So the idea is how do we implement a landing system for reusable rockets?
And then one guy goes, well, I think we should make it out of moon cheese.
And he goes, that's a bad idea.
The point is, he brings 10 engineers before him and he says, what's your plan?
And the guy goes, A, B, C, D.
He goes, those plans are bad.
You make it work.
Then he gives that guy money and that guy makes it work.
It's not that he is going to actually write the code, build the materials.
It's that he's going to listen to all the ideas and in his brain is connecting the dots saying, your idea will not work for these reasons.
Your idea is too expensive.
That actually might work.
Let's try that one.
And then it does.
And he does it over and over and over again because the simple thing about being smart is being it's it's recollection and being able being able to utilize that recollection to connect dots to make future predictions and Elon has that in spades.
jeremy ryan slate
It's the difference between strategic thinking and tactical thinking.
Tactical thinking, you're trying to solve just one situation, whereas strategic, you're looking at doing something more long-term and that has more moving parts to it.
tim pool
And there's just, it's wild to me that like, you know, we'll have somebody on this show, usually when it's contentious and they're a lefty.
And I always just ask, like, you've not Googled this.
You've not read anything about it nor listened to the quotes from the individuals involved.
Do you actually believe you are correct?
And they'll go, of course.
And it's just like, okay.
Well, that person's going to vote to blow the country up.
So do you think, like, the founding fathers did not want direct democracy, that's for sure.
And I'll tell you this: Democrats don't even want that.
The reason why Republicans won't pass the SAVE Act is because they don't want any of y'all voting for that reason.
Because there's a Republican right now, like John Thune is sitting in his hideaway cabin, like hiding from everybody.
And there's someone going, Senator, why won't you pass the SAVE Act?
And he goes, are you watching this Tim Cast IRL?
This dude said he was smarter than most of the people in Congress.
That's why we don't want him to vote.
phil labonte
I mean, I can't even get into the Save Act.
tim pool
I don't think people in Congress are the smartest people on the planet.
I think many of them are underachieved and they go to Congress because it's the best thing they can attach to for some kind of legacy or notability.
That being said, it is extremely difficult to succeed to get into Congress.
AI Advances Outpace Human Culture 00:13:20
tim pool
It is not something anyone can just do.
It takes clever planning, hours of working overtime nonstop.
It is very, very difficult to accomplish.
These are not necessarily all good or honest people.
They're not going to solve complex equations, but they are certainly smarter and a lot smarter than the average person.
You can call them evil.
That's fine and dishonest, but they are smarter than the average person.
They have figured out the mechanisms by which they can build a system and get into a seat of authority and power.
jeremy ryan slate
And they're also willing to do the things that the rest of us aren't willing to do.
tim pool
So that's something else.
jeremy ryan slate
They will work hard in a gray area or something that's even illegal to be able to push what they want to push.
So they're willing to do things that a lot of us just wouldn't be willing to do.
tim pool
Indeed, my friends.
I know we, let's see, we got a couple of stories pulled up.
And let's jump to, you know, we talked a lot about the Roman Empire already.
We were going to talk about DeSantis naming the airport after Trump, but it kind of played into what we've already discussed with Trump ruling by decree and all that stuff.
So let's do this.
Let's do this.
We've got this post from at Jason, and we got a story from the New York Post.
The New York Post reports AI dangerously close to solving tests that only the brightest minds on earth, human expertise still, earth could, human expertise still matters.
At Jason says, the truth is we've already reached artificial general intelligence.
We just haven't implemented it broadly.
Millions of jobs are being lost as we speak.
Entire careers are being retired.
The rich and powerful investors and founders who implemented AGI will get bizarrely rich beyond what makes sense.
It will break people's brains on both sides.
It's going to suck a lot of our friends and family, for a lot of our friends and suck for a lot of friends and family who aren't obsessed with their careers because things are moving so fast, they won't have even left the starting gate by the time the awards are handed out.
We're going to have to solve for a lot of second and third order effects, some of which will suck, job loss, and some of which will be awesome.
AI will create free, cheap energy, free education, cheaper and better food homes that build themselves and medicine that makes you as healthy as a 30-year-old when you're 100.
Change is hard, but humans are the most adaptable species nature has ever created.
We can figure it out.
I saw a UFO the other day.
Took a picture of it.
phil labonte
Really?
tim pool
Yeah.
So exactly what Owen Schroer described seeing, I saw something similar when I was driving in West Virginia.
I bring this up because I'm wondering if these sightings that people are reportedly seeing, like the drones and stuff, are actually just a function of advanced technology.
We have already reached.
It's not out of the question that someone's flying a drone over a farm.
So that's why I'm like, I say UFO, but I'm just being kind of shocking.
But I wonder if there's just degrees of technology that have advanced so far.
Regular people aren't catching up to this.
My point.
Andy was telling me, my boy Andy works here, that late at night, he'll see, actually, I think it was Andy saying this, you'll see lights in the sky, just like you'll see UFOs flying around like crazy.
No one cares.
Why?
Well, it's drones probably.
They're just drones flying around at night.
What do I care?
However, there are a lot of people who this advancement in drones has come so quickly, they see these things in the sky and they freak out.
And you get reportings of UFOs.
So, as it relates to the artificial intelligence stuff, I think it's very likely that we are substantially more advanced in AI than anyone knows, but the implementation is happening only in key areas.
For instance, there's a big story right now where they've got AI cow herding.
The cows all wear collars, and the farmer looks at his phone and he draws a circle as the grazing area, and the cows all get like a brah, bram, brahm that makes the cows start moving to the appropriate area to graze.
He no longer needs dogs to do anything.
These kinds of things are happening rapidly, but a plumber doesn't know this.
So, one day he sees a cow with a collar on going and it's talking, and then he sees the cow walking down the street, and he goes, What is that thing on that cow?
Is this alien?
And the device is going, and then the cow's moving, and he's like, So, my point is technology is advancing faster than human culture can adapt to it.
phil labonte
There's a phrase that they use in AI.
They say that AI has jagged edges because there's a lot of capabilities that artificial intelligence has, but that doesn't mean that there's an adoption of it.
So, there's a lot of things that your AI could do, but it hasn't really filtered out into the population yet.
So, the adoption of AI is actually lagging compared to what the capabilities of most of AI are.
tim pool
Exactly.
I agree.
And I think, guys, have you seen the Black Snape versus Snape UFC match?
phil labonte
Oh, God.
tim pool
Dude, AI video is just, it's, my mind is the acceleration.
It's real.
It's indistinguishable.
ian crossland
That's why they're attacking Iran.
They have attack.
They got.
You notice how quiet the Iranian development has been the last three months.
phil labonte
No, it hasn't been.
ian crossland
You haven't sensed the void?
phil labonte
It hasn't.
ian crossland
There's an intentional occupation.
phil labonte
It has not been quiet.
Opus.
tim pool
Check this out.
phil labonte
Anthropic released Opus.
ian crossland
That means there's nothing.
tim pool
Let me turn the volume down on this, but watch this.
unidentified
Quiet at all.
this the air this is crazy They really want to put people in pods, man.
tim pool
entertain them it's like the spaghetti meme it's It's getting so crazy good.
ian crossland
I don't know how you protect people's bio-rhythms.
tim pool
They made Joe Rogan black, or is that somebody I don't know?
phil labonte
No, that's what Joe Rogan was wearing.
That's another announcement that they live in there.
tim pool
The point is, in the next year with Sea Dance 3, they're talking about generating 17-minute short films in 30 seconds.
Movies are over, music is over, like the transformation.
It's already here, and we are culturally lagging.
ian crossland
It's so funny.
Like, we used to make movies.
In the future, they'll be like, God, they used to actually stand there and do all the talking themselves.
What, did they used to take the letter and hand deliver it, walk all the way across town too before they called on phone?
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
And now AI is, it's going to just be so.
tim pool
Now my Neuralink is networked to yours and I can just think something to you.
jeremy ryan slate
I just used Claude Cowork last week because I needed a new media page on my site.
I gave it my brand standards.
It asked me for a few photos.
It built the whole page out, did all the search engine optimization.
Then it looked terrible on mobile.
So I said, hey, fix it for mobile.
It fixed it on mobile.
So I can't imagine what it does for even web designers and SEO.
tim pool
We have a job availability for a film producer because we always have these ideas.
I have a great idea for a little Black Mirror type mini.
It starts with Ian playing video games and he's playing like Civ or something.
And then he gets a text from Phil.
And Phil's like, hey, buddy, you know, I'm going to come in a little bit early.
You want to grab a bite to eat before the show and like, you know, just shoot the ish.
And then Ian's like, oh, yeah, for sure, but I got to finish work.
So let me see if I can take a break.
And then he looks over at Claude and it's just running these crazy programs.
And he's seeing a money incrementer go up.
And then he's like, eh, it'll be good if I leave it for a little bit.
Then he goes to grab lunch with Phil before the show.
And then Phil's like, yeah, yeah, no, I'm still at work right now, but I figured I'd take some lunch.
And then he looks at his phone and Claude is just doing all of the work for him.
It's like doing, and then you're seeing a money incrementer go up.
And society basically has AI digital versions of everybody that works in white-collar jobs while you do whatever you want.
phil labonte
Right now, the way that young people can actually become, at least for the next, you know, probably decade, five years, 10 years, can become extraordinary, well, extraordinarily wealthy is learn a trade.
Like if you're an electrician and you get a job, speaking of Optimus Pro.
tim pool
Well, I think, I mean, I do think that that'll be eventually, but the thing about artificial general intelligence is that if we are at this point, let me put it like this.
You guys know about time dilation, obviously, right?
Old sci-fi trope.
The idea was that if we created a spaceship to go to Alpha Centauri, loaded up a bunch of humans on it, and then said it's going to take 100 years to get there.
They're going to accelerate as fast as possible.
At the halfway mark, start decelerating.
By the time they're halfway there, another spaceship full of colonists will fly past them because technology will have advanced so much due to time dilation back on Earth that they will be going slow.
And you'll fly past them and go, wow, the old colony shit.
That's what's happening now with Optimus bots.
AI is, by the time we get to AGI in full implementation, it's going to be like you wasted all your time designing Optimus.
I'm going to give you a schematic for a perfect human android and go, here's how to build it.
ian crossland
I thought that's why they closed Sora because they're like, that's old technology now.
tim pool
They can't compete.
It's advancing way too quickly and they've got to put their resources somewhere else.
ian crossland
It was costing them a million a day.
They had half a million users.
Nobody, like relatively nobody was using it.
jeremy ryan slate
Phil posted something last week.
It was a Spotify link and it was like, oh, this is pretty good, but it looks like an AI band.
Like, I can't even imagine what this is going to do to the music industry because it's, you know, you can tell if you listen, but you know, eventually it's going to be even better.
tim pool
No, we're already past that point.
unidentified
Yeah.
phil labonte
Personally, I think the music industry was cooked when Spotify came out 20 years ago.
But that's just me.
tim pool
The issue is if you are a music producer and you break down a song, you'll notice where things are AI, but the average person will absolutely not absolutely not notice.
I've got a bunch of so first, first and foremost, all instrumental music is over.
So I knew a guy who used to sit in his room all day writing songs that were instrumental and he would upload them to various music databases.
Then he would get paid per month per how many songs he had in the database.
So he would just start cranking out songs.
And there were orchestral compositions.
They were like dance beats because people would license the songs for their media projects.
That job is gone.
So we've like we've done a few projects, need music, pop up in Suno, type in ambient, eerie horror soundtrack.
Done.
Instantly, you get two versions.
You try them out.
Eh, don't like them.
Generate, generate, generate, play.
You're done.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, here's the question I have, though.
Does the pushback come where people start demanding more humanity because they don't like that being taken out of it?
tim pool
I don't think so.
I think you might have some hipster dump type stuff like vinyl records, but I think young people, there's a funny thing I saw.
This comedian, Elon Musk retweeted this.
There's a comedian who was like, everybody is scared of automatic cars.
Don't be scared.
Let me explain.
When you go to the grocery store, the door opens and you've never thought twice.
But would you rather there be two guys standing there, grabbing the door and opening it and closing it every time you're walking through with your family?
Nah, we're okay.
And then Elon pointed, I think it was Elon who pointed this out, or he retweeted someone who did.
Elevators used to be manual.
You would go in and a guy would pull a lever to make it go up or down.
ian crossland
I'm a bellhop.
phil labonte
That's the bellhop guy that helped you.
jeremy ryan slate
That's the guy to get your suitcase.
tim pool
Yeah, he grabbed.
They saw that bellhop.
You know, bellhops still exist and they grab your suitcase and they bring it in for you.
ian crossland
Bellhop's not the guy that would run the whole other dude that would just stand there all day.
tim pool
So he'd have a lever operator.
Yeah, you'd go in the elevator and he'd pull a lever back and then you'd go up and he would drive it for you.
No one's ever complained about automatic elevators.
So I think kids are going to grow up with this being normal and they're just going to be like, what do you mean?
Music is whatever you want it to be.
jeremy ryan slate
So is it just the idea that we get further away from the change and the next generation doesn't care because they haven't experienced it the other way?
unidentified
Indeed.
phil labonte
That's one of the funnels.
You'll notice that when it comes to like privacy issues, right?
Like people, my generation and older, they actually care about privacy.
They're like, oh, I don't know if I want this.
I don't want.
When Xbox 360 first came out, like when they first did the update, it was like, it was a big deal that it was always connected to the internet and it had a camera that could watch you.
And I was like, I'm not getting that.
I don't want that, blah, And then I got an iPhone.
It's like, you know, I mean, it's over.
You know, it's over.
And so young people, people that are in their 20s and younger, they don't have the same concept of privacy that older generations do because they live in a world where there are cameras all the time, where they're constantly taking pictures and loading them to the internet and stuff.
The idea of privacy just has gone away.
So it's not a situation where people are going to be like, oh, you know, I don't want to lose my privacy.
It's like they're not really going to have the same attachment to privacy that older generations that have.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, because I know for me, like I'll be 40 in a year.
And I remember when you went into Windows, you had to type in W-I-N to get to Windows of the MS-DOS prompt.
And it's, I've had enough experience of life the other way.
And I guess not having that life experience, you wouldn't know what you're missing.
Gaming Companies Face Gambling Lawsuits 00:15:49
phil labonte
Yeah.
I mean, look, I don't put pictures of my kid on the internet.
Like, I don't, his face isn't up on the internet and stuff.
And I'm sure that by the time he's a teenager, he's going to be like, I don't care, whatever, you know.
But until he is old enough to make the decision, like, I'm not going to do that for him.
But I strongly suspect that he's going to be like, look, man, there's always videos.
There's always camera.
Dad, you're always watching me or, you know, through somehow or what have you.
So I think that young people are just going to have a different relationship with privacy than older generations.
tim pool
Let's jump to this story.
We've got this from Technology Law, FKKS.
So you may have heard the story.
It broke last month, but there's a lot moving right now.
New York and Washington are taking on loot boxes and video games.
Letitia James, the Democrat AG from New York, has filed a lawsuit against Valve for hosting illegal gambling.
We've got this from her website from the end of February, basically saying that Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 enable gambling by enticing users to pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.
In Valve's most popular game, the process resembles a slot machine with an animated spinning wheel that eventually rests on a selected item.
The randomly selected virtual items have no in-game functionality, but can be sold online for money, with one of them reportedly being sold for more than $1 million.
I believe New York and Washington are going to win.
Valve is going to lose.
The end result will be that loot boxes and anything comparable is gambling.
And the reason why is that casinos are opening everywhere.
New York just announced three new gaming licenses.
A hard rock, they've got, what is it?
They're doing a Bally's in the Bronx, a Hard Rock somewhere.
They've already got resorts world.
They're going to have, I think, four casinos in New York City.
Four.
jeremy ryan slate
Wow.
tim pool
Four.
Now, these casinos are probably going, these big corporations, to Letitia James, to Washington, saying, we will open these casinos and you will make bank off of your tax share from gambling only if you eliminate any competition.
The reason I think Letitia James is going after loot boxes, it's not a coincidence that it's happening around the exact same time New York just issued three gaming licenses to major casino operators.
So what they're arguing is, let me put it like this.
The first slot machines, the reason why they have cherries, lemons, and bar is because gambling was illegal.
You'd put a coin in, you'd pull the lever, it would go bar, bar, bar, and a bar of gum would fall down, a vending machine.
You would then take that bar of gun next door to a different business that purchases gum.
You'd hand them the gum, they'd hand you cash.
So that's how you were legally allowed to gamble.
It was a workaround.
Loot boxes, they're arguing, do the exact same thing as the OG slot machines.
You pay some kind of money or value that allows you to then use virtual currency or to actually spin the slot to get your rare item, which can then be sold for money to somebody.
ian crossland
It can be, but so can everything.
tim pool
So the argument is you are wagering money not on a definitive item.
The argument she's making is it doesn't matter after the fact.
What matters is you are giving money for a chance at something, not for something.
ian crossland
Well, the difference here is that there's no organization that's encouraging to buy your product back from you at a profit.
So there is no like quid pro quo where you're going to go next door and sell the loot box back.
And they need to prove that these items are of actual value.
Just because some rando from China will give you $1,000 for a red hat and a video game doesn't mean that the red hat and the video game has any actual value.
tim pool
And what if these gaming companies open a secondary business that purchase these items?
ian crossland
Oh, then shut them down.
But and they're praying off of children.
tim pool
How do you prove that?
ian crossland
We just prove it.
I mean, is there evidence that that?
tim pool
If you open a company that buys and sells secondary items on Dota.
ian crossland
Yeah, those are generally illegal anyway.
Like buying World of Warcraft gold with real money.
tim pool
There's nothing illegal about you having a company that will buy second items on the secondary market.
Is it illegal for me to buy Magic the Gathering cards and sell them?
phil labonte
No.
unidentified
No.
tim pool
So think about the system.
ian crossland
But if you had a business where you were gathering away Magic Cards and then your other business was on buying them back next year.
tim pool
Magic the Gathering knows there is a secondary market that drives the value of their cards for purchase, which is why they have what's called the reserve list.
Do you know what the reserve list is?
unidentified
No?
tim pool
Let me learn y'all something.
Booster packs are gambling.
They have never been properly adjudicated because the arguments in the 90s over Pokemon booster packs as gambling were thrown out not on the merits, but on standing, arguing that the people who exchanged money for a booster pack received a physical product.
Therefore, there's no formal gambling loss.
However, Hasbro, I believe the owners of Magic the Gathering have something called the reserve list.
These are cards they will never reprint.
And this is because there is a secondary market and these cards retain their value.
The secondary market makes their booster packs valuable and people will buy them, which guarantees the sale of booster packs.
If there is no secondary market, cards are worthless.
Print a million of them.
People can buy whatever they want.
In fact, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, could just offer up on their website direct sales for 50 cents.
I would like the rare card because I want to build the best deck.
Okay, you can purchase all cards for 50 cents, right?
Why not do that?
ian crossland
Because they probably make more money selling you a $4 booster pack with a bunch of seven cent cards in it.
tim pool
Where you're hoping you will get the card that you need, and you have to buy more and more and more in the chance you might get a card that you need.
No pro player of any of these trading card games buys boosters to get the cards they need for their decks.
They buy singles directly from a card shop on the secondary market.
And the secondary market exists because Magic has created a reserve list to guarantee the price of these cards so that people will buy at random chance and then try and resell them to a shop for the secondary market.
They know exactly what they're doing.
Loot boxes are going to be found to be gambling.
The ancillary effect will be precedent.
We'll get booster packs banned as well.
And I think this is largely because casinos want to control all wagering.
ian crossland
That's a big, that'd be like banning baseball cards.
tim pool
Agreed?
ian crossland
I don't think you can ban baseball cards.
tim pool
The difference with baseball cards, secondary market is limited because there's no function to the baseball cards.
They're a collector's item for being collector's items.
The issue with Magic the Gathering is that players need specific cards which are in limited print, which drives up demand, guaranteeing secondary market value.
ian crossland
Only if you play with them.
tim pool
And because standard play requires you to use the best cards and they limit the production of the best cards, meaning everybody knows this is about magic.
I can't speak for Pokemon or other card games.
The new deck comes out for standard and you want to win, $600 on the spot to buy all the cards you need.
If you don't have $600, congratulations, you are not winning tournaments.
Now, how do you get those cards?
Well, it's $600 for direct purchase.
You're not going to spend a grand on random chance packs.
So there are people who will buy boxes of boosters the moment they come out, crack them all open, hoping that they will get a slightly EV plus on their return.
And this will set the value of rarer cards that are in limited print, specifically because they know the function of the game requires people to buy that.
ian crossland
That's the function of gaming shop.
They do that agreed.
tim pool
They'll buy boxes.
ian crossland
They'll open at the shop and then they'll sell them.
tim pool
Card shops are illegal.
ian crossland
Are you saying they should be illegal?
tim pool
No, they're literally illegal.
Here's the law in West Virginia.
I pulled it up.
Here it is.
West Virginia, 6110-4.
If any person bet or play at any such gaming table, bank, or device, as is mentioned in the first section, or if at any hotel, tavern, or other public place or place of public resort, he play any game except bowls, chess, or batgaming drafts or a licensed game, or bet on the sides of those who play at any game, whether the game be permitted or licensed or not, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than five or more $100, blah, blah, blah.
The point is, there is no formal licensing of TCGs in West Virginia.
Games that are licensed are games like three-card poker at a casino, and the casino gets a license to play via Shufflemaster or otherwise.
Pokemon, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, these other games, they are not licensed games.
The law predates the existence of these games.
I do not think they should be illegal, but the point is this.
If they go for loot boxes, which they are, they are going to attack this whole space.
And I think it's fair to say, let me put it like this.
I'm going to ask you guys a question in the comments.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
If there was a vending machine and you could walk up to it and it said, buy a Pokemon mystery box for $20, in it, you will find a card potentially worth $10 or up to $200.
You don't know what that card is going to be.
Is that gambling?
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
Here you go.
I have one right here.
This box from a vending machine at Apple Valley Mall.
I don't remember what the exact price was.
It might have been 20 or 30 bucks.
And it says on the back, one graded Pokemon card valued between $10 and $200.
Who will you discover?
Disclaimer.
Mystery pack contents vary.
Each pack contains one graded Pokemon card.
No player who needs to get the Pokemon cards for their deck is buying these for the card they need for their deck.
People are buying these in hopes that your $30 purchase will net you a $200 value.
And in fact, the card that I got is only worth $7.
ian crossland
What card is it?
tim pool
It's Ultra Necrozma GX.
ian crossland
It sort of sounds like old video arcades where you'd win tickets and then the tickets aren't worth anything, but you could trade them for something.
phil labonte
It came in that box and it came in the plastic piece when you, the plastic protector when you bought it?
unidentified
Yeah.
phil labonte
I mean, that right there shows that the value of the rare card or what have you is the $20 value on that.
tim pool
You're not cracking this open to put in a deck.
You are not trying to get a random card to play in a deck.
It's not the purpose of it.
The collector value is the purpose.
And they sell this.
Guys, I'm sorry.
This is gambling.
Like, there is no skill involved.
It is strictly a purchase, money wagered for a chance to get a high-value prize.
It literally says between 10 and 200 bucks on the back.
Children go to the mall at Apple Valley and they gamble on this stuff.
Booster packs is gambling.
Wagering money to play a card game is gambling.
All of it is gambling under the law.
They've just operated under a gray area.
Here's my point.
Letitia James is going for these loot boxes.
Washington State is going for these loot boxes.
And I guess Washington is going after Kal Shi as well.
The reason why is because casinos are buying out land everywhere.
Miriam Adelson, one of Trump's largest donors, has been trying to get a Sans company casino, I believe it's Sans, in Texas.
I don't remember what she owns, Venetian or something.
And Texas has been blocking her.
Now, the Lodge Card Club got shut down.
And the conspiracy theory from a lot of people, and I'm not saying I believe it because I like Ken Paxton.
So the TABC shuts down the Lodge.
Ken Paxton, then a week later, flies to meet with Trump.
And now the reporting is that Trump may endorse Ken Paxton.
The conspiracy theory among poker players in Texas is that Miriam Adelson went to Trump and said, get me my casinos in Texas.
Trump said, Ken Paxton is a friend.
He'll do me a favor.
Ken Paxton goes to meet with Trump and Trump says, shut down these card rooms and get these casinos in.
Because when the casinos come and they are coming, these card rooms are competitors and we don't want it.
That's the conspiracy that I don't know necessarily is true.
But after the lodge got shut down, which is the largest card club in the world, the speculation right away was that Ken Paxton was meeting with Trump, needed the endorsement and said, what do you want from me?
And Trump said, Miriam Adelson wants casinos in Texas and wants these card rooms out of the picture so that gaming is controlled by them.
Loot boxes from Letitia James, exact same play.
Again, I'm not saying I know it's true, but I don't think it's a coincidence that they're trying to list things as gambling, which would put them solely under the control of the casinos.
Imagine this.
You want a loot box for Dota?
You got to go through Caesars first.
How do you get your new random chance skins?
Valve signs a license deal with Rivers Casino and then says the Rivers logo appears and 10% of all of the loot box spins go to Rivers because they own the permits.
I'm not saying I know it's going to happen, but it's not a coincidence that all of these states are now filing these gambling charges against a bunch of players at the same time.
Casinos are popping up everywhere.
And within two and a half hours driving of right here, there are nine casinos.
phil labonte
That's incredible.
tim pool
It is coming.
It is taking over.
And Gen Z are gamblers like crazy.
Sports betting, online apps, live streaming.
This is the play they are making and they will own it all.
jeremy ryan slate
Every sports podcast I listen to is sponsored by a gambling company of some sort.
tim pool
Here we go.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
It's going to happen.
phil labonte
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how this is a positive thing for society.
I don't think that people should be prevented from gambling and stuff.
But the idea that just because you're buying a, well, it's really a perversion of what was initially intended to be fun for games, right?
Kid, like Magic the Gathering and collectible card games.
It was supposed to be fun.
It was supposed to be playing.
unidentified
No, no, no.
tim pool
The first trading card game was gambling.
Magic the Gathering was the first trading card game ever.
And the first edition included anti, where you had to actually wager a card of value to play the game and the winner really card of value.
It was gambling outright.
And so they were forced to remove anti from the game because they were being threatened with illegal gambling.
phil labonte
Wasn't it still geared to kids, though?
unidentified
No.
tim pool
It was geared to young adults.
It was Richard Garfield was trying to make a board game that was targeting young adults, largely based on like the DD fandom and things of that nature.
But they couldn't afford a full board.
They wanted a board with cards.
So they said, just do the cards.
And it was the first trading card game ever made and explicitly included a gambling element.
There are even cards that allow you to swap your ante mid-game, which was a crazy trick.
You'd be like, I'm going to ante up a very rare card, a mocks, and they'd put up a mox.
Then mid-game, you'd draw a card and says, I'm swapping the anti-at for this dummy card.
And they'd be like, you son of a, and now even if they win, they get junk, but if you win, you get their rare, expensive card, which at the time was still only 10 bucks or whatever.
They had to get rid of that element.
jeremy ryan slate
You could play in the Coliseum, but it's our Coliseum.
tim pool
Indeed.
And that's what's happening right now.
So I've gone to war with a bunch of 14-year-olds by claiming that Pokemon is gambling.
It's not that I actually believe Pokemon is gambling, but it's that under the law, Pokemon is gambling.
It just operates in a gray area.
To determine whether or not something is gambling, there's something called a predominant factor test in most states.
This has never been applied to loot boxes nor Pokemon Magic Lorcana or any other card game.
It has never been tested.
I believe with the expansion of these casinos, card rooms are going to start asking the question: if we own the rights to all card games where in a tournament you make a wager of cash, why don't we own this?
So what's going to get weird is that the first question I have for everybody who doubts this is, do you think the multi-billion dollar multinational corporations, being told they can win this court case, would they give up a multi-billion dollar card industry like Pokemon if they could lay claim to it?
The other question is, if, according to the law, any game, West Virginia says you can't even play a game.
Doesn't even say wager on.
Loot Boxes Threaten Casino Exclusivity 00:11:42
tim pool
It says bet or play.
In Texas, it says wager money on a game of chance for a chance to win prizes.
Do you believe that the casinos will not try and get the predominant factor test placed on these games?
I believe the answer is absolutely they will.
What's going to happen is they are going to make the argument, these children have a card game.
They are putting money forward, playing a card game of chance.
They've not determined how much chance.
It's just chance to win cash prizes.
We have the exclusive permit in this state for that function.
And if the state allows that function to exist outside a casino, the court, the casinos could lose future cases.
This is exactly what I've been working on with various AGs and discussing with them about.
If Pokemon Yu-Gi-Oh! Magic allow tournaments where children will put money up front, play a card game, and then win cash, this is threatening the exclusivity that casinos have over other card games like Hold'em, Pot Limit Omaha, et cetera.
The casinos absolutely will try to take this or at least get it banned.
jeremy ryan slate
I wonder how long that is before that happens in professional sports because you even watch a baseball game now and they're giving you betting lines and things throughout an entire game.
tim pool
Yeah, but hold on.
The casinos already own it.
If you want to make a sports bet, it's either through their casino app or in a casino.
They don't allow a random person to open a sports book down the street.
Would a casino allow a guy to open a cafe that allows sports betting?
Absolutely not.
So the question then is, will casino.
So the thing is, when card games started expanding across the country, casinos were not anywhere.
They were on reservations and in Vegas and Atlantic City.
Now that states are saying you can open a casino in the city and state proper, regulated by the state, are they going to just say you can wager on card games, card games, any card game outside of our facility?
jeremy ryan slate
No.
tim pool
And the big issue for me is the reason why this is going to happen.
Again, loot boxes being a big play on this one.
They're going to remove it.
They're going to lose.
I guarantee it.
And then the thing about card games is the reason I think the casinos will make this play is because of a card game called Bellatro.
Do you guys know what that is?
unidentified
I haven't.
tim pool
And how would you describe it?
ian crossland
It's like, well, it's 52-card poker, but it's not poker.
But you want to make poker hands with your hand of 12 or 10 and you get rares and wilds that can change the so there are some cards and then poker cards.
tim pool
They've combined the two.
ian crossland
Jokers give you all sorts of random abilities.
tim pool
Is it chance or skill?
ian crossland
Both.
tim pool
It's a poker variant.
It is a poker variant that uses extra cards.
That is regulated by casinos.
Why are you allowed to play it outside of a casino?
ian crossland
That game particularly?
Because it's single player.
There's no money being traded.
tim pool
There's multiplayer.
There's tournaments.
ian crossland
I've never played a multiplayer version of it.
tim pool
Well, then maybe there's not, but there's tournaments.
So however they play.
But again, the restrictions on Balatro are specifically because they try to avoid falling into gambling territory.
The question then is: if the predominant factor test needs to be applied to the existing popular card games like Pokemon, it has never been done.
The argument by Pokemon fans is that it is a skill game, not a chance game.
And because it is a skill game, it is not gambling.
However, no one has ever tested this.
In fact, I asked Grok and Chat GPT and it argued Pokemon, Magic Gathering, and Yu-Gi-Oh have greater chance involved because of a greater draw.
Two separate decks, 120 cards or more with seven cards drawn between each player increase substantially more variance than a poker game.
ian crossland
That's kind of true.
unidentified
Exactly.
ian crossland
One guy's deck is way better.
tim pool
That's also chance.
ian crossland
He's got a huge likelihood of winning.
tim pool
Chance is defined as what a player can control.
And if you can't control the cards the other player has, that is legally gambling.
It's a question they ask when it comes to the predominant factor test.
So the issue is: if I invent a new card game and we start playing it and it's an entry fee, how will casinos control for gambling if I can just keep creating new card games with new names and new variables so that I can keep wagering money on a game of skill?
The casinos are going to say no to this.
And they are dumping tons of money to win this war.
ian crossland
I don't want to consolidate power up into the casinos' hands.
I think it's a good idea.
tim pool
Should gambling be allowed?
ian crossland
Gambling be allowed?
Should it be just like gambling?
Should be gambling is a part of nature.
tim pool
Should people be allowed to legally just have poker games and cash games wherever they want, whenever they want?
unidentified
No.
No.
ian crossland
What do you think?
jeremy ryan slate
That's pretty normal.
You know, people always did poker games.
unidentified
I don't know.
jeremy ryan slate
My dad always did it.
tim pool
But it's legal.
jeremy ryan slate
Sure, but go to a Lions club or something.
They play poker at the beef steak or whatever.
It's pretty culturally normal.
tim pool
But I'm saying, should it be legalized?
And if you think it's culturally normal and everyone does it, should we just say down with the laws?
Casinos should not have exclusivity on this?
ian crossland
The problem is children getting wrapped into gambling and pressing a button just for waiting until they get their dopamine fix.
tim pool
That's what this lawsuit's about.
jeremy ryan slate
But they're going to have to prove the thing about their social media from that, too.
ian crossland
Yeah, really.
jeremy ryan slate
You could regulate social media more for that, too, because you pull down your Twitter feed.
It's just like gambling.
tim pool
You're not spending money for that.
And you're not winning cash prizes.
jeremy ryan slate
Sure.
tim pool
So I think we're going to, I think a nuclear bomb is about to drop.
I think the closure of the lodge in Texas has just set a bunch of high net worth people on edge.
And as soon as this goes into courts, it's going to spark off a Tinderbox involving video games like Dota, games like Pokemon, and the mass expansion of casinos across the country.
And it's going to get real crazy real quick.
ian crossland
It'd been going hard on loot boxes for a little while.
tim pool
At Belgium, they banned them.
unidentified
Really?
ian crossland
When you spend money on a video game to get jewels that you can spend to get cosmetic gear, okay, whatever.
phil labonte
If you can sell that cosmetic gear in game for money, it's not a lot of times it's not just cosmetic gear.
It's gear.
It's like pay to win.
tim pool
So let me let me.
I have a mobile game.
I have a mobile game on my phone that has tournaments with cash prizes.
In order to build the best setup, they're basically decks, but it's not a card game.
You get cards, and cards give you a strong team.
It's like an RPG kind of.
You have little guys that battle other little guys.
You've got to buy gems, which are very expensive, to get boosters, which will give you one guy.
To level up one guy, you need three cards.
There's like 60 different guys.
So the chance of getting that guy are extremely difficult.
And it's a ridiculously and psychotically expensive game to get to the highest bracket and actually win tournaments.
It's just gambling.
ian crossland
And then you can win money.
tim pool
Tournaments have cash prizes.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
I never play any of that stuff.
I just literally have little dudes fight each other and I don't really play that often.
ian crossland
No, that is like aiming gambling at children.
That is, that's a problem.
tim pool
Yep.
So anyway, the point of back to the card games, what's coming after the loot boxes is they're probably going.
So here's why I think they're going to win.
With the Pokemon booster pack thing in the 90s, the courts argued the individuals, actually, this article talks about it.
They say in the 90s and 2000s, many plaintiffs sued trading card manufacturers under RICO laws.
All of the cases were dismissed for lack of standing because the plaintiffs could not prove an injury.
They had received the benefit of the bargain.
By receiving physical cards in exchange for the money they paid, they did not suffer a gambling loss.
These cases did not rule on the merits of whether trading card packs fall under the definition of gambling.
So it's not been adjudicated.
However, Letitia James, as a representative of state law and criminality, is arguing they are violating state law or facilitating the violation of criminal law.
Thus, she has standing to sue.
They're going to win.
I don't know.
ian crossland
Opening the packs isn't gambling, in my opinion.
But buying a pack to use in a competition that you can win money for is.
tim pool
Buying a pack is gambling because you're getting random cards of various values.
ian crossland
It's been like that since baseball cards in the 50s.
tim pool
Baseball cards don't have a secondary market function.
They're collectibles.
ian crossland
They do have a secondary market function.
You can sell a game today.
tim pool
You can't play a game.
Exactly.
There's no function.
I said secondary market function.
Magic does.
A pro player needs that card.
I need a time twister for my commander deck.
So someone wants to buy that to speculate upon it to sell to the players who must have it.
So when I want to build a new deck, I need these cards.
I go to a shop and say, I want to buy singles.
I don't buy booster packs.
He then says $10, $20, $30.
That's based on the scarcity that was manufactured by the card company.
So there are people when the Avatar, Final Fantasy, great example.
The collector's boosters, they are specifically ultra-rare versions.
And if you want the serialized ultra-rare chocobos, I've got a blue neon chocobo behind me.
It's like a $5,000, $3,000 to $5,000 card.
The only way to get it is to buy the $40 booster pack.
No one's going to play with that card.
It exists solely to be a rare and valuable item, but it's valuable because the function of the game utilizes these cards.
So someone bought up all of the collector boxes and a box which normally should sell for $300,040 sold for $1,200.
It's gambling.
It's buying a pack, cracking it open, and hoping you get that very valuable card.
ian crossland
That $5,000 card costs them three cents.
unidentified
Of course.
ian crossland
That company is raking it in hand over fist, selling garbage to people, pieces of paper with ink on it.
Yeah, take them down.
I'm done with that bullshit, dude.
You can't, you can't play the rules.
tim pool
I'll put it like this.
If it was a skill game, you would be able to go to their website and buy whatever card you wanted for 50 cents.
You would say, I'm going to select all the cards I need for my skill deck.
Like, imagine if a queen in chess cost $7,000.
And in order to play chess, you had to have certified chess-approved pieces.
And you'd sit down with only pawns and be like, well, I can't afford the $7,000 queen.
It's an ultra-rare, expensive card.
ian crossland
That's exactly what Magic the Gathering is.
tim pool
Indeed, and Pokemon and all of them.
So it's not skill-based games.
You can't control what the opponent plays with.
You play chess.
You know the opponent's got the same pieces as you.
You play Magic the Gathering.
Ian, do you think you could build a deck that could take on one of my high-tier decks?
ian crossland
Not without $8,000 or $6,000.
tim pool
My $20,000 Magic the Gathering deck with Time Twister in.
ian crossland
Super tough, dude.
It would be really tough.
tim pool
Just because I have the money to buy the ultra-rare cards that exist and they're rare because Magic has a reserved list.
They intentionally control the prices so that people buy the booster packs, hoping to get high-value cards to sell after the fact.
Gambling.
ian crossland
And so if they got rid of booster packs completely and they only sold singles, they could still make rare singles that you would have to spend 80 bucks on to win a tournament.
It still feels like pay to win, though.
It wouldn't be gambling in the speech.
tim pool
Imagine if on the website, rares were $10, uncommons were $3, and commons were $1.
And if you wanted to build the best deck possible, you still had to spend a little bit extra money, but that wouldn't work because then you're basically, again, making pay to win and only the rich people can afford the stronger decks.
ian crossland
So maybe everybody's deck has to have a cap, a value cap, like in World In Warhammer.
Everybody's army has to have a value cap.
You can't hit one army.
tim pool
This is why in Magic right now, everyone's playing with proxies.
For those that know what that means, it means they take a random, they'll print a card out.
They will print an uncertified version of the card to use to play with because they want to play with strong decks, but they don't have $20,000 to buy the ultra-rare cards.
ian crossland
I've been playing with proxies for 30 years.
tim pool
We're going to go to your Rumble Rants and Super Chats, my friend.
So smash the like button, share the show with every single person you have ever met, literally ever.
You got an old high school teacher you haven't talked to in 30 years.
Give him a call, find him on LinkedIn or whatever you got to do and be like, watch this show.
And then you find out he's a raging liberal and he yells at you and you never talk to him again.
Too Many Psychos Listen Now 00:02:31
tim pool
In the meantime, we're going to grab your comments here.
So let's get at it, my friends.
Joshua French says, oh, he's not happy with you, Ian, but I'm going to read it.
Ian, are you ignorant or just stupid?
You should not name the Kirk children.
Too many psychos listen to this and now have a name to target.
unidentified
I don't know.
ian crossland
Public info.
Charlie's talked about her quite a bit.
tim pool
The name is everywhere.
And so I do kind of agree, but Charlie's children's names are like every 17th post on X. If you Google Charlie Kirk and family, they list the names of their children.
It's not particularly like Charlie posted photos with their names and everything.
ian crossland
You better believe that if her name was not public, I never would have mentioned it.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Fiakono says, Tim, if the bullet is too deformed from impact, they would be unable to match it to any gun.
It doesn't mean it's not from the same gun, just they can't positively confirm it.
It happens a lot.
Indeed, that's the point.
Shotgun Rebel says Japanese X algorithm kicks ass.
I completely agree.
And as an American who is 5% Japanese, born and raised here, I volunteer as ambassador on X to bring the Japanese, and I'm kidding, by the way, way more Japanese people than me who are American as well.
But everyone's having a good time.
All the Japanese, like apparently, Japan, the Japanese are adopting X like crazy.
phil labonte
Yeah.
tim pool
And the algorithm is auto-translating Japanese posts into English for American people in the algorithm when the content aligns and everyone's laughing and having a lot of fun.
phil labonte
Talking about barbecue.
tim pool
Barbecue?
phil labonte
Lots of barbecue talk.
tim pool
Oh, right.
There's a Japanese schoolgirl dressed like Trump doing the Trump dance that's going viral and everyone's laughing and they love it.
unidentified
Yep.
phil labonte
Me.
I was enjoying the cultural exchange all weekend.
A lot of fun.
tim pool
507 says, we aren't Rome.
We're Carthage pretending to be Rome.
jeremy ryan slate
Wow.
That's a mind-bender.
tim pool
All right.
The Republic boss says the current deep state does act like the Praetorian Guard.
If they do not get their bribes, they JFK you and install a new emperor.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, the trope I made during the last election, that if the Praetorian Prefects, the guy that was in charge of the Praetorian Guard, and they would kind of do whatever he wanted, and Obama, with the way that they were deciding, you know, who the next president was going to be just by naming her, to me, seemed like he was trying to control the powers of state like a Praetorian Prefect.
So I think in a lot of ways, you could say that there is something deciding who is president and who gets to live.
Star Trek Prequel Lore Insulted 00:03:18
tim pool
Christian UNC says with the next Mass Effect in production by BioWare, do you think they will try to go back to its roots that made everyone fall in love with it or go woke?
And could it happen with the TV series too?
Woke, for sure.
The fact that Jonathan Frakes and William Shatner defended Starfleet Academy shows you that even your heroes will spit in your face.
phil labonte
Gross.
tim pool
Yep.
ian crossland
I fell out of it.
tim pool
Shatner and Frakes both said the same thing about Starfleet Academy.
They were like, ah, they called Next Generation woke.
And, you know, not woke, but they were offended.
Like, how could you change the cast?
Who are these people?
It seems so plastic.
And then, of course, TNG became substantially more popular.
It was the highest rated television show at the time, syndicated on three networks.
Starfleet Academy makes a mockery of it all.
It does not present social issues the way Next Generation or the original series did.
It makes them a joke and insults them and insults the stories, the character, the lore.
It ruins everything.
If Frakes and Shatner could not stand up for this and they can't because they're attached to it, then what hope does Mass Effect have?
They're going to wear your culture like a skin suit, and then they're going to pull their pants down and take a dump on the floor.
phil labonte
I mean, the argument that they're not going to, like, the evidence is basically the past 10 years, right?
Like, every property has had, you know, woke basically touch it and ruin it, whether it be Star Wars, the Marvel stuff was good for a few years, and then it all became Star Wars.
Yeah, they ruined it.
There's only a handful of good Star Wars properties that were, or storylines that came out in the past.
jeremy ryan slate
Acolyte was, the reviews are horrible.
unidentified
Awful.
tim pool
Lesbian Space Switches created the Force.
phil labonte
The Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan Kenobi was terrible.
It's absolutely horrible.
And they had like, they had, you know, actually the guy that played Obi-Wan Kenobi, they had, I forget what his name is off the top of my head.
jeremy ryan slate
Ewan McGregor.
phil labonte
Ewan McGregor was in the series.
They actually had Darth Vader in it.
They had Anakin Skywalker.
It was still terrible.
tim pool
If they created a new Star Trek on the new Enterprise with a new cast that were relatively reasonable, pragmatic individuals, it was following, maybe you couldn't do 80 years after the Dominion War.
You could do such incredible things with that storyline.
The story was opened up so massively after Deep Space Nine, and they burned it all to the ground because they, you know, I think it's largely our fault because we need to step up more and take command of these things.
But the truth is, the woke psychopath cultists, whatever, infiltrated intentionally to destroy these cultural icons.
So I would love to write a Star Trek series that is maybe 80 years after the next generation.
And the Alpha Quadrant is largely united under a loose federation.
The Federation has an active alliance, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, and they are now advancing technology into the Gamma and Delta and other quadrants of the galaxy, which introduces old foes and new foes.
But you could see the advancement from the original series to the next generation, the next generation, Voyager and Deep Space Nine into the next era.
Instead, they just keep prequel, prequel, prequel, and then weird woke garbage.
And then we're a thousand years in the future and everyone's gay or something.
Woke Cultists Destroy Cultural Icons 00:02:56
tim pool
Not interested.
ian crossland
What if they call it the D-Federation?
You notice that.
tim pool
Okay, let's read this.
We got this from Tri Jim.
He says, I think Candace Owens is attacking Erica Kirk because Erica is a good person.
If the crucifixion happened today, Candace would be criticizing the Virgin Mary on how she reacted to her son's death.
Oh, yikes.
jeremy ryan slate
I don't know if it's that, though.
I think it's more that she gets clicks, she gets visibility, and that's what she's looking for.
tim pool
Same old man says, by that logic, going on blind dates are gambling.
You still pay for the date, but don't know if you're getting anything good.
Well, the argument there is you're basically saying that the sex is a monetary value.
phil labonte
My.
tim pool
That's it.
If the argument is you are paying money for a chance to be with a woman who will hook up with you, you are implying that the hooking up has cash equivalent value and that you are making a wager on something that you will get something of equal value or greater value.
phil labonte
You know, you're always just negotiating the price, I guess.
jeremy ryan slate
I gamble with my low fuel light a lot.
unidentified
There you go.
All right.
tim pool
Michael Jones says, speaking of brands, Tim, how does it feel to have the Tim Cast car featured in NASCAR 25?
Talk about Epic.
We actually have the game up there.
Shout out to Cody Dennison.
Absolutely incredible.
It's really, really cool.
Yeah.
Shout out.
He's done a few races, but full disclosure, we have not sponsored Cody again for this year.
And this has to do more with, I don't know, reallocating budgets and marketing and things like that.
And I suppose when we're looking at setting up satellite studios, truth be told, Cody's fantastic, big fan, good friend, and we're happy to have sponsored him for the past couple of years.
But now we're allocating budget towards building satellite studios.
So we're looking at other places.
And that means no sponsorship this time around.
But it was fun while it lasted.
And we might do something small.
But, you know, that means for the past two years, because of the game, we got featured in the game, which is incredible.
So best of luck to Cody.
We are trying to figure out how to get other people to invest to team up with us so that we can pool money and then do a sponsorship.
phil labonte
Pool money.
tim pool
I got to be honest.
Pool money.
I think.
ian crossland
Wow, that's a good name.
tim pool
Pool money?
unidentified
Yeah.
jeremy ryan slate
Pool water.
tim pool
Indeed.
I think the economy's in trouble.
phil labonte
You think?
tim pool
Well, look, young people are sour on Trump over the economy.
Gas out here is now $4.
Have you guys seen it?
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
tim pool
$389.99.
ian crossland
Houses out of reach slightly.
tim pool
$3.89 and $3.99, not $389.99.
jeremy ryan slate
Wasn't the average home buyer in New York State, I think, was like $55 or something like that now.
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
tim pool
There are houses out here that are like three-bedroom bungalows and they're all half a million dollars.
And I'm like, bro, we're in a rural area.
These are starter homes.
Like a young person who bought a house out here, oh, it's happening.
It's happening.
Non-Tradable Cards Are Not Gambling 00:07:10
tim pool
Remember when I was talking about how we would have, you'd like be in your middle of nowhere and you'd wake up in the middle of the night and there'd be like a guy in a flannel shirt with his, tucked into his jeans, with suspenders on and a handlebar mustache stealing one of your chickens?
I was like, that's when you know it's getting bad.
Yeah, I mean, well, we were driving in rural West Virginia, and I saw exactly this man mowing the lawn of a dilapidated old house.
And I looked at my wife and I was like, it's happening.
The hipsters from the city have no choice but to move to the rural areas.
ian crossland
That's true, but at least he's working.
He wasn't robbing.
He's moving on.
phil labonte
Thankfully.
ian crossland
Honestly.
jeremy ryan slate
On his own lawn.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
We got port number three.
It says, I'm fleeing Washington State for West Virginia.
Looking to bring good money and voting practices to West Virginia to keep it red.
Maybe you remember me offering to design a display case for that Civil War flag.
Indeed.
We never got the Civil War flag, though, because someone offered to allow us to hold this massive Civil War flag, and we were like, dude, we cannot be responsible for an original flag like that.
ian crossland
Yeah, yeah, it wasn't ours.
tim pool
And they were like, you can hold on to it.
And I'm like, ooh.
Yeah, right.
ian crossland
We had to get it framed.
It was huge.
unidentified
Yeah.
phil labonte
All right.
unidentified
Let's.
tim pool
Oh, we got a bunch of big super chats here.
Kevin Hunt says, so you're saying if Jack Rubenstein didn't get Lehari Oswald, you would want Oswald guilty no matter what?
Not skeptics or facts and say that's accusing Jackie.
I have no idea what the point you're trying to make is.
It wasn't Jackie.
Okay.
What if lone dual citizen planted the rifle?
Was it tested for having been shot?
My cell phone has DNA.
I'm one hour behind chat and drunk.
I'll shut up.
We shall see how it plays out.
Good to question.
Why there is no video or dogs didn't find till the FBI.
phil labonte
Hey, brother.
We all been there.
ian crossland
If Lehari Oswald hadn't been killed by Jack Ruby, that he would have gone to trial.
Maybe he would have exposed some other people planting a rifle.
You never know.
It's a very weird story.
He was eating lunch in the building when they found him.
He's like, I'm a Patsy.
What are you guys doing?
tim pool
Haven't you ever seen that show, that Stephen King show with James Franco and he goes back in time?
unidentified
Yeah.
carter banks
What is that called again?
tim pool
That was basically just propaganda because they were like, when he saves JFK from dying, the world ends.
phil labonte
Oh, yes.
tim pool
He comes back to the future and it's like, if JK lives, the world ends.
He has to die.
phil labonte
We're watching that in Florida.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
And then he tries like hooking up with that old lady, but she keeps dying.
ian crossland
Oh, that's brutal.
tim pool
And he goes and dances with her.
ian crossland
That's pretty cool.
tim pool
When she's old.
Let's see.
Gob Stomper says Valve is being sued because they beat a patent troll Rothschild.
If they wanted to sue over loot boxes, why not Epic Game Store Activision?
Because all they need is precedent.
They don't need to sue everybody.
You sue one where you feel you're going to win.
When you do, you then have court precedent to shut everyone else down.
Put them all on notice.
ian crossland
This is the thing.
Loot boxes alone are not enough.
There's different types of loot boxes.
There's loot boxes that give you only cosmetic stuff that don't change your gameplay.
There's loot boxes that give you items that can easily all be sold in the secondary market.
No, some of them can't be traded over.
tim pool
All right, I'm talking about these ones that she's suing against.
ian crossland
But then there are some like this.
It's really about the secondary market trading that's the problem, not the loot boxes themselves.
tim pool
Yep.
When Hasbro maintains a reserve list to maintain the price of cards in the secondary market, then they know what they're doing.
ian crossland
And if they're taking a cut, that's a rip that.
tim pool
Is Pokemon Wizards as well?
It's Nintendo, right?
ian crossland
That I don't know.
unidentified
Pokemon.
tim pool
Oh, wait, This is interesting.
unidentified
It was.
tim pool
Wizards of the Coast was contracted to publish and distribute Pokemon until 2003.
And then, I guess...
ian crossland
Nintendo?
They had 33% of that.
tim pool
They translated Japanese cards and managed marketing in the U.S., but did not create the IP.
ian crossland
I see three companies.
tim pool
Nintendo Game Freaking Creatures owned the franchise.
Wizard of the Coast only held a license until 2003, after which the Pokemon company took it over directly.
phil labonte
All right.
tim pool
And I think it's fair to argue that the Pokemon company knows full well the value of their cards and how insane people go to try and buy them.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Like, come on, man.
phil labonte
No, it's not a secret to them.
tim pool
What do we got here?
What's uh what is this?
King Salami says your skateboard's chance to get numbered is gambling.
That's the point.
That's the argument.
My argument is it is not actually gambling the whole time.
That's been the point I'm making.
When I tweeted out Pokemon's Gambling, I'm saying if all of these things, including chance, make it gambling, then literally all of these things are gambling.
That's why I think they should be allowed because they're not.
ian crossland
The skateboard thing is not gambling because no matter what, you're getting the value that you pay for with a skateboard of economic.
tim pool
And there's no secondary market for the serialized boards.
Like, who's buying those from you?
It's just for you.
Is there someone out there that's like the Timcast limited edition number one board is worth a million dollars?
unidentified
No.
ian crossland
Oh, but even if there's a secondary market, it's not a gamble because you're still getting the value you pay for.
You're not, there's nothing.
tim pool
That was the argument made on booster packs that we read.
ian crossland
But those cards are worth six cents each.
So they're not.
That's the rebuttal to that would be not every booster pack gives you $4.50.
tim pool
Oh, that's a fair point.
Yeah, with the skateboards, you're guaranteed a skateboard at the value of a skateboard.
Five of them are limited gold.
There's no secondary market to sell those skateboards on.
There's no demand for those skateboards as value.
It's just a special version you might get.
All of the boards are basically designed as art pieces, with some being slightly better than others.
But each and every one of them is valued at the exact same price.
Unless there's a secondary market where someone determines that those one of fives are worth so much more money, which doesn't exist and there's no demand for, then no matter what, you are getting a skateboard that is valued as a skateboard.
The thing that Ian's pointing out, which is good, which is interesting, is that when you spend five bucks on a booster pack, you get cards that are worth zero.
You could open that pack and get cards that are worth zero.
And you're just like, it's literally throwing the garbage.
ian crossland
Five cents or less.
tim pool
I mean, they're all worth zero.
Like, honestly, if you open a booster pack on average and then ask the shop, will they give you any trade-in value for it?
They'll say no.
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
Harder to get rid of those things.
tim pool
Yep.
And so what happens is people donate commons and uncommons in big boxes to the shops that they can sell as singles for like 10 cents.
ian crossland
The secondary market argument is dangerous because if some random guy wants to create a secondary market for a product that I've been delivering, and now all of a sudden I'm treated like a gambling salesman because some guy wants me out of business and created a secondary market.
tim pool
Yes, yes, yes.
But the argument is you knowingly exploiting this by not letting people buy your product directly, but a chance to hit your product.
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
Because you know that someone will buy something of value.
ian crossland
Your booster packs might be on their way out.
tim pool
I agree.
And if these games really, like, let's be honest, a game of skill like chess doesn't require you to buy a $7,000 queen.
Booster Packs Face Obsolescence Soon 00:04:04
tim pool
Could you imagine, like, I said this already, you're playing chess with someone and they have 10 queens and they're like, well, I can afford it.
And you're like, that's $70,000.
I can't afford that.
And they're like, well, you know, then don't play.
Well, the rule is you can only have four of any individual piece.
So I have four queens and four rooks and four knights.
And you're going to be like, okay, well, I can't afford those pieces.
That's insane, right?
And then to get them, you got to crack open a box and randomly hope there's a queen in there.
But there's only, they only printed 100 of these queens out of the 3 million pieces that were made.
Like, that's an insane game.
Then if you are a top chess player, you're like, I want to buy a queen.
It's like, there's only 100 in existence and there's 10,000 people who want to be top tier.
It's a $500,000 piece.
ian crossland
And then they'll reprint the queens and you spend $500,000 on a queen.
Three months later, it's worth $20,000.
tim pool
No, they put on the reserve list and say, we'll never remake Queensland.
unidentified
Hopefully.
ian crossland
But a lot of those cards, they'll be aware of that.
tim pool
That's TCGs.
That's what's insane.
It's a skill game.
Yeah, that I have to hopefully get a random chance to get the cards to win the skill game.
It's screw off.
Okay, we're going to go to the uncensored portion of the show, my friend.
Smash the like button, share the show.
Head over to rumble.com slash Timcast IRL, where we will say naughty words and make jokes inappropriate for children.
You can follow me on X and Instagram at Timcast.
Good, sir.
Would you like to shut anything out?
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, I'm at Jeremy Ryan Slate Everywhere.
My company is commanderran.com.
And if you're interested in history, check out Hidden Forces in History or the Roman Pattern.
ian crossland
Dude, I could have talked about just Rome for like two hours straight.
Maybe we'll touch on it.
jeremy ryan slate
Card games are over my head.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
tim pool
Let's get a Rome card game.
ian crossland
Ian Crosslin, follow me at Ian Crossland.
Go to graphene.movie and sign up on the mailing list for the new documentary that's coming out.
And I'll catch you later.
Carter Banks.
carter banks
What's up, everyone?
It's been a great chat.
Jeremy, thanks for coming out.
I'm really looking forward to getting into it on the after show.
You can follow me at Carter Banks everywhere and at Carter Banks Official Everywhere Else.
Phil.
phil labonte
I am PhilThremains on Twix.
You can go to my Patreon and check out some of the writing that I do.
It's patreon.com/slash PhilTheRemains.
The band is all that remains.
And we're going on tour this spring.
We're going on a tour in a few weeks.
We're going to be out April 29th in Albany.
We'll be out with Born of Osiris and Dead Eyes.
It'll be out for about a month.
You can check out All That Remains music at Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer.
Don't forget the left lane is for crime.
tim pool
We're going to go to the Uncensored portion of the show at rumble.com slash Tim Guest IRL right now, and we'll see you there.
Chess-inspired video game.
Actually, this is actually really cool.
I should play this.
I've been interested to play this.
ian crossland
Did you play Bellatro?
unidentified
We were.
No.
tim pool
It's not multiplayer?
ian crossland
I haven't.
I don't think so.
unidentified
I'll double check.
tim pool
Because I was reading about tournaments.
ian crossland
That's fun.
Sorry, you were saying something cool there.
tim pool
Yeah, of course it is.
ian crossland
Pilatro's multiplayer?
tim pool
There's a 1v, there's a mod for 1v1 versus multiplayer.
unidentified
Really?
tim pool
Yeah, it's a card game that mixes trading cards.
You have game cards with poker cards?
Roman Client System Resembles Pyramid Schemes 00:04:55
ian crossland
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All the jokers have wild abilities.
It's game of the year.
This game's fucking awesome, but it got kind of boring playing alone.
You're playing up against a computer, and every round, it's more challenging score you got to get.
And then, like, I'll make my three of a kinds worth more with this rare.
So then you're looking to get three of a kinds, and maybe your three of a kind beats of Royal Flush because you pump so much bonuses into it.
tim pool
We were just talking right as we're switching over to the uncensored.
We have this job list thing for this video producer so we can make stuff like this.
I would, I want to make a commercial for chess, the trading, the trading piece game, where it's like there's a guy who's just got a whole thing of queens and one king in the middle.
And it's just a guy cracks open a booster pack of chess pieces and he's like, ah, just pawns again.
And then they go to a tournament and he's like, well, my family couldn't afford any of the really good pieces, but I wanted to play.
And he's just got like pawns in like two nights.
phil labonte
That sounds like hell.
tim pool
That's the point about what when like Pokemon Magic, they're not, they're not skill games.
It's a gambling element that you, that has a second.
You know what?
It feels like multi-level marketing, where it's like, it's not a pyramid scheme.
It's kind of a pyramid scheme.
You know what I mean?
It's not gambling.
You can play the card.
You can play the game.
It's a skill game.
Yeah, but in order to do that, you have to gamble.
ian crossland
And like, if you have unlimited money, literally, you can buy all the cards and win.
If you in poker have unlimited money, you can go all in every hand.
Oh, eventually you will win.
tim pool
Elon Musk wanted to.
He could buy up as many early edition magic cards as possible.
So let's say he's like, I want to win as many legacy games as possible.
So he goes to his guy and says, go on the market and find every possible mocks you can.
I want to own them all so that no one playing legacy will ever have them again.
Just me.
It would probably cost $10 million.
That's it.
The mocks go for a couple grand, and I don't even know how many are a couple thousand maybe are in circulation.
ian crossland
Yeah, $5,000.
tim pool
You go to some guy who's got a legacy deck and he loves playing legacy and you say, listen, I'll give you $10,000 for that mocks.
And they say, absolutely not.
I'll give you $50.
He's going to go, holy shit.
ian crossland
You say yes if someone offers you 50.
Jeremy, I want to ask you, without being contrived, like, you know, I didn't bring it up on this.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, no, I wanted to say first, though, the reason the baseball card argument doesn't work is I collect baseball cards.
The only value to it is if somebody has a high demand for it.
It has no utility whatsoever.
And I think that's the major difference here is they control distribution, meaning they control how many there are.
They also control the rules of the game, so they control how they're used.
So I think that's a major element to what in some way could make it gambling.
Anyway.
ian crossland
Was in Rome, this is where I was like, I don't want to be contrived and ask you about everything in Rome, but did gambling spike when the empire started flailing?
jeremy ryan slate
It was always a thing, if that makes sense.
And the thing that's interesting is so chariot teams like chariot racing were actually colors.
They had reds, blues, greens, different colors.
And people would gamble heavily on these races to the point that the way Roman society worked, it was what's known as a client system, meaning you owed somebody either your position or they owned your debt or whatever it might be.
So you would do whatever that guy asked.
You'd show up at his house every day, say, hey, what can I do for your boss?
And gambling was very similar to the people owning the gambling rackets.
If you owed him a whole bunch of money, he owned you.
And I think that's where gambling was a really big deal because people were obsessed with it to the point that they would be willing to give up their own autonomy just to be gambling.
phil labonte
Now, that's different than the patron system, right?
jeremy ryan slate
Well, the patron system, the client system, are a similar word, but Romans are client.
Like I was, you know, the client of this senator, and I owe my job to getting this job because of this senator.
And gambling would be very similar where people that own gambling houses, if you got to the certain point where you had so much debt, they would say, well, I won't make you pay on the debt, but you have to go kill that guy for me.
And that would be very similar, how you could own somebody through gambling.
ian crossland
Did they literally take them as slaves?
Literally own?
phil labonte
Well, there was slavery, really.
jeremy ryan slate
There was slavery.
And slavery wasn't racial like we think of slavery.
Slavery was, you know, you lost a war, we get you.
Or we took over your territory, we get you.
Very often, a lot of the early tutors were Greek tutors that were brought in when Rome conquered Greek states and they're very highly educated.
So now these slaves are your new tutors.
ian crossland
So they would just become permanent clients of a gambler that owed the gambling a lot of money.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, you could become a permanent client at that point.
ian crossland
Would they like sign contract?
Like you are now permanent.
jeremy ryan slate
There was no contract.
It was just a verbal agreement.
tim pool
But that's how it also in the United States, slavery started because I believe it was initially an indentured servant who could not pay back the debt accrued.
So the court ruled, well, then he is indentured forever.
jeremy ryan slate
There's a lot of early Irish that came over that way.
tim pool
And it was a black man who owned the first live.
Greek Tutors Became Permanent Clients 00:04:24
tim pool
It's interesting, huh?
Shall we grab some colors?
We'll start with Jessica Clarity.
What is up?
phil labonte
Jessica, what's going on?
unidentified
Yo.
Hey, guys.
jessica clarity in unknown
Thank you for taking my call tonight.
ian crossland
Def.
unidentified
Yeah.
carter banks
Thanks for calling in.
unidentified
Yes.
jessica clarity in unknown
I had a question for the guest.
We know that you're the co-founder of Command Your Brand, and I was wondering what advice you would have to someone who's wanting to grow their audience on YouTube or just social media in general.
Because I'm a small creator and it feels like the algorithm just only favors these larger creatives.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I'm definitely not as big of a YouTube expert as Tim, so I can't really say, you know, you guys have been on YouTube a lot longer than I have, a lot bigger than I have.
But I would say, in terms of being a creator, the thing that I found for me when what I was doing changed is when I really came with my unique way to talk about something.
So, for example, years ago, I would just talk about Rome, whatever people want to talk about.
And now I have a real formulation of what I talk about, calling it the Roman pattern.
And in that, the way it was shown and portrayed, I always made sure that the visuals were highly thematic.
The music we're using is highly thematic.
People know what the brand feels like.
And I think that's what it comes down to is getting clear about what you're talking about, how you're talking about it, and how it looks on all of your social channels.
I'm definitely not the biggest guy out there, but for me, that has worked really well to make sure it's a clear, coherent, concise message.
And really having a framework of how I deliver it is really, really important too.
jessica clarity in unknown
That is great advice.
unidentified
Thank you.
jessica clarity in unknown
Yeah, because my channel was just kind of started from what Tim said.
If you're going cool places or having unique experiences, just pull your camera out.
So that's kind of how that started.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, the thing I would look at too is your interaction.
Like interaction is a great survey point.
You know, what do people like?
What don't they like?
And that's a way that you can start formulating, well, what is the framework this is built around?
Because surveys really are the key to successful statistics is, you know, what do people like about what you're doing?
What do they engage the most on?
It's really key to seeing success in that.
ian crossland
Do you use YouTube analytics a lot and like their AI?
jeremy ryan slate
I use vidIQ a lot.
I find that's really, really useful because I can have it look at my scripts that I write and see if maybe we need to reword some certain things.
Scoring titles is really helpful, stuff like that.
tim pool
Yeah, I used to use it, but it was completely wrong.
jeremy ryan slate
Bummer.
It's worked well for the Rome channel.
tim pool
It would be like, here's the title you should use.
And then I would be like, okay, that's different from what I normally do.
And then views would go down.
It's just like, okay, that does not work.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I pre-write my titles first.
I think that's one key part of it because I think some people want it to just generate it for them whatsoever and there's kind of no creativity in it.
tim pool
Yeah, no, I would write a title out and then it would say low score.
And then I'd be like, okay.
And then I would change it until it fit their parameters and it would fail.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, it's worked for the Rome channel.
So that's all I can say.
ian crossland
Yeah, maybe a hyper-focused content.
It's better.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, that's what I found when I went really broad because what I used to do is I used to do like more political type content.
So like I had Roger Stone on, like I had a lot of things, you know, Phil was on a few years ago.
And I really kind of just tightened the niche on what I was doing because it was just too broad.
And that's when I saw more success is really just talking about, you know, what I actually already knew.
I went to school for this and really just focusing on that.
phil labonte
It's a good idea about that.
unidentified
What's that?
jessica clarity in unknown
I was going to say, so if someone would want to become a client of yours, do you select them and do that kind of marketing for them?
jeremy ryan slate
So we do guest placement.
So people come with us if they want to go on other shows.
So typically we're working with somebody if they have a new book coming out or they have, you know, we're typically working with a CEO and founder of a company that they're no longer required in the day-to-day productions.
We're trying to help them get their message out and kind of become more of the cultural conversation.
So typically somebody just books a call with us and then we have a conversation and see if it's a fit for both sides.
unidentified
Okay, cool.
Thank you.
Yeah.
phil labonte
Anything you want to add or you want to shout anything out?
jessica clarity in unknown
Yeah, I have some shout outs.
You guys can follow me at X and YouTube at Jessica Clarity.
I'm also on Romanation.
T-Bone and I host a show called The Drive-In where we review movies over there.
And also I'm running first school board in Montgomery County, Tennessee.
Islamism Entrenches In The UK 00:08:36
unidentified
Oh, cool.
jessica clarity in unknown
And yeah, it's a very contentious race.
It's the 20-year incumbent and the head of the NAACP, so it should get really interesting.
phil labonte
Awesome.
A lot of that luck to you.
jeremy ryan slate
Local politics is some of the most important stuff out there.
tim pool
Thanks for calling in.
jessica clarity in unknown
Yes, thank you for me.
unidentified
Thanks.
tim pool
All right.
Next up, we've got Tiger Tank.
Is that what that says?
carter banks
What up, Tiger Tank?
unidentified
Yes, hello.
phil labonte
Hello.
tiger tank in unknown
Thank you for having me.
I'm a longtime listener.
First time caller.
I've been listening to you, Sam, since I think you were in New Jersey when you were talking about that gym getting shut down.
tim pool
Oh, yeah.
tiger tank in unknown
Now, my question to you is, which branch of leftist extremism do you think is going to take over here in the near future if they win the next election?
tim pool
Lafism extremism?
I think it's going to be very similar to what we already saw with woke stuff.
tiger tank in unknown
But do you think the Islamists are going to take over or the communists or do you think we will see some kind of great purge in this country through it?
phil labonte
Look, if the option is Islamists or progressive leftists, the progressive leftists lose to the Islamists because they don't have any means to defend themselves against the Islamists.
The Islamists will use the arguments that the progressive left make, and then they'll go ahead and turn around and say, okay, we're not doing any of that anymore because we're in power now.
They're doing it currently in the UK.
They did it in Iran.
They tried to do it in France.
I wrote a big long piece about the Red-Green Alliance on my Patreon.
If you want to go ahead and read that, there's a bunch of information there.
But like the progressive left always loses to the Islamists.
The progressive left is the perfect useful idiot for the Islamists.
The Islamists understand the left, the way the left works, and they have no problem with using them.
The left has no ability to defend against the Islamists at all.
tim pool
The deep state's going to be in control.
Like, there will be weirdo whack, like, woke stuff that's a component of the deep state neolib garbage.
I mean, Islam will be something totally different, I guess.
phil labonte
That'll be the Islamist in the U.S., Islamism will take longer because they have to actually get, they have to entrench themselves far deeper than they are.
There's a very, very, on the, on the national scale, there's a very few of them.
You see pockets beginning to actually get some influence, but still, overall, there are very few Muslims compared to Christians and stuff like that.
But if you want to see what can happen, look at what's going on in the UK now.
Look what's going on in France now.
And really, the best example is to look at the look at the look at Iran in 1979, the revolution there.
There were a lot of progressives that were against the Shah that were not Islamists.
unidentified
They were not.
phil labonte
Pardon me?
jeremy ryan slate
They killed them.
phil labonte
Yes, they did.
jeremy ryan slate
They got the power and then they killed them.
phil labonte
They're currently the progressives that were in Iran currently they're in Algeria.
Like they're party.
jeremy ryan slate
Student revolt.
I mean, it's brought up revolt.
It brought in the new power and then they got rid of all the students.
phil labonte
But if you want, that's the best example that I can recommend.
What happened in Iran that'll happen basically anywhere the left allies with the Islamists?
You see it happening in all the people that are pro-Gaza, all the progressives that are pro-Gaza, that are saying that the Israelis are committing a genocide, et cetera.
The people in Gaza will use them, right?
But then when you talk about gay people in Gaza, that ain't happening.
They're just like, that shit doesn't fucking happen here.
They're like, nope.
And just fucking toss you off a building or something.
There is no defense that the left has against the Islamists.
jeremy ryan slate
I think Mamdani is an interesting test case in that, too, to kind of observe New York, see the direction New York goes, and you're going to see how it's going to work here in the U.S.
phil labonte
Yeah, I don't think that Momdani is going to, I don't think that New York is in danger of falling to Islamism right now because I don't think that there are enough, again, it's still compared to other religions and stuff, it's still very, very, it's still a very small minority.
But they will do what they can to push their agenda.
I mean, in the UK, there are MPs that are not Muslims that are saying things like, we need fewer dogs in the UK.
And that's specifically to cater to the Muslims.
Yeah.
tim pool
And what was that BBC thing?
It was like, have we been to welcoming the dogs that went viral?
unidentified
Yeah.
phil labonte
Just recently.
jeremy ryan slate
They're even at the point where they're afraid to go after the rape gangs at this point.
phil labonte
Yeah, terrified.
jeremy ryan slate
They're concerned of what's going to happen to them if they do anything about it.
phil labonte
They're afraid of racism.
So look, like I said, I've got a piece on my Patreon.
It's called, I called it The Weapon They Can't Control, How the Left Built the Coalition, It Cannot Survive.
Go to my Patreon and take a look at it.
It's fairly in-depth.
There are all kinds of citations for all the stuff that I talk about.
But yeah, the left has no ability to control Islamism because it fundamentally, the way that the left looks at the world, they see European influence.
They see white people.
They see that as the power base of Western society.
And so the Islamists, the Muslims, and stuff like that, they're an oppressed minority.
So they're completely and totally incapable of saying, no, we must limit what you're doing.
They have no ability to control it.
tiger tank in unknown
So what was my follow-up question with that?
If at all, when do you think we will see a reconquista in America with regards to we are watching all this stuff happen in Europe and how devastating it is and life-changing, I would say?
phil labonte
Well, I mean, I think that, look, as long as if the left gets into a position of authority, right, they get into the White House and they control the they control Congress, they're going to do the same things they were doing during the during the Bush administration, I'm sorry, during the Biden administration.
That's not in question.
You see it in California.
You see it in Virginia right now.
That's just going to be the status quo.
And that's going to be the status quo for the left moving forward.
They may run someone like Gavin Newsome.
They may run a white Christian man and say, look, this guy is acceptable to white America and you can vote for this guy, et cetera, et cetera.
As soon as he gets into power, it's going to be all the woke stuff.
They learned from the fact that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both lost.
They're going to say we should not run a woman.
Look at Joe Biden one.
He was a white Christian man.
We should run a white Christian man.
And then once we get a white Christian man in the White House, he'll rubber stamp all the progressive.
tim pool
What about VP, though?
phil labonte
Pardon me?
tim pool
Could they have a white Christian man with a black female VP?
I don't think so.
phil labonte
I don't know.
tim pool
I don't think it'll work.
phil labonte
I don't know.
I think that AOC could be a VP.
jeremy ryan slate
There was Gerald Ford that made the comment that the only way a woman would be president is she was VP and the president got assassinated.
tim pool
And I think that's what will be the first.
I agree with that.
I think it's or removed somehow.
phil labonte
But yeah, I think that they will run a white guy, I think.
And I think that if that white guy does win, it'll just be a rubber stamp for all the progressive policies that the left want.
unidentified
Yeah.
tiger tank in unknown
Guy sounds good.
phil labonte
Anything you want to shout out, bud?
tiger tank in unknown
Well, yeah, yeah.
I'll wrap it up real quick.
So I want to shout out two things.
My wife runs an Instagram and a TikTok page where she feeds all the chickens.
And it's just called Carly's Farm on Instagram and TikTok.
And I also want to shout out that me and Glenn may be starting a history show here in the Discord.
unidentified
Nice.
tiger tank in unknown
Where I'm hoping we can do a Heritage Day where we can talk about the families and all the men who built this country and try to reconnect with our American room.
phil labonte
Awesome.
carter banks
Sick.
tim pool
Cool.
All right, I'm going to thanks for calling in.
unidentified
See you, man.
Personal Loyalty Over National Good 00:10:03
tiger tank in unknown
Thank you for your time, gentlemen.
ian crossland
30,000 troops to play.
tim pool
Next up, we've got Philly Cheese45.
phil labonte
What's up, Philly Cheese?
carter banks
How's it going, dude?
phillycheese45 in unknown
Hey, good evening, Jones.
How's everybody doing?
unidentified
Doing well.
tim pool
Doing.
phillycheese45 in unknown
So I'm glad there's no women on the panel tonight.
I'm so nerd out about my favorite historical subject, which is ancient Rome.
So this is going to be mostly for Mr. Slate, probably Ian, but anyone else, feel free to give your take.
So Mr. Slate, what's your take on the Marian reforms for the military and then the Gracchi reforms for society?
And then more importantly, in the nationwide efforts to form a mighty faggot, do you see any modern equivalents or parallels that need to be implemented today in these domains?
jeremy ryan slate
As Simpson's reference over my head better.
tim pool
Martin says, alone, we are weak like a single twig, but together we form a mighty faggot.
jeremy ryan slate
That's great.
phillycheese45 in unknown
In true fascist form.
unidentified
Yeah.
jeremy ryan slate
So the Marian reforms is the one I actually hit on a lot.
So Marius, for people that aren't familiar, is the famous reformer of the Roman military.
And the office of consul, Rome had two at a time because they didn't want to have one man that was holding an office that was kind of like president.
They wanted to split power.
He holds the office of consul 10 times or seven times.
You're supposed to hold it once every 10 years.
He didn't live to be 70 years old.
So he obviously broke the rules of office in order to do that.
He creates the gold standard eagle that's typically used as the symbol of the Roman legions after this.
And I also see the reforms he made of the military.
One of the biggest things he did is he changed Rome from being a citizen soldiery basically fighting for their own farms and land to a highly professionalized class of soldier.
And I do see that as, in a way, one of the things that's going to drive the fall of the Republic much faster because now people don't have loyalty to their Roman Republic.
They start to have loyalty to a commander.
And that's going to be one of the things that not just drives the fall of the Republic, but later on, it's also going to be one of the things that drives the fall of the empire.
So I see those reforms as actually extremely pivotal, in a lot of ways being a poison pill for not just the Roman Republic, but later the Roman Empire.
In terms of the reforms of the Gracchi, the major one that I look at, because they were looking at landish redistribution, but they were also looking at the grain dole.
And the grain dole was the idea that, I guess to back it up, Tiberius Gracchus is fighting in the Punic Wars.
After they're over, he's on his way back and he sees that people are living on land that's public land.
They're farming it for rich people that have decided they just own this public land and they're not able to feed their families.
So he decides that they're going to form the grain dole, that basically every citizen would get a certain amount of grain to eat in order to feed their family.
Now that thing is going to be something that, as you get closer to the third century, is one of the things that pushes the inflation even harder because Romans are dealing with climate change.
From about 200 BC to 200 AD, it's something called the Roman climate optimum, meaning they had perfect weather and they could grow food in much higher quantities than they would have typically been able to.
When that changes in 250, it's going to make grain prices double, triple, quadruple.
So now Rome has this new price that they have to pay to feed all these people.
So it's going to be a real issue, especially in the third century.
So I think those are actually two really pivotal things that don't actually mean as much when they happen as they are going to for later Rome be part of kind of the structure falling apart.
ian crossland
Question: Metaphorically, you know, they say history rhymes.
So, like the Marian reforms, Gaius Marius improves the military, centralizes command authority.
If we were to see something like that in the modern age, would that be, I'm wondering, giving over military command authority to the AI, autonomous AI, and we start to trust the AI as our new commander, which leads to the downfall, then hyper-accelerated downfall of our empire.
jeremy ryan slate
I don't know if it would happen exactly like that, but I think looking at it in people having more of a personal relationship with the person that's leading them rather than looking at the good of the nation as a whole.
And I think you could look at that more of even in political parties where people care more about their political party than how's the country doing.
I think that is kind of a big part of it as well.
ian crossland
Like, I could see soldiers in combat being like, yo, this AI has saved my life so many times.
I'm with the AI.
jeremy ryan slate
That's terrifying.
It's highly terrifying.
ian crossland
And reasonable.
Like, people didn't just do what they need to do to survive, especially in combat.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah.
tim pool
If you have a superior commander, even if it's a robot, everyone should love AI because remember, Iron Man had an AI helping him with everything.
phil labonte
Jarvis.
tim pool
And that's right.
And he would be like, Jarvis, I need more power.
And then Jarvis would do things for him.
jeremy ryan slate
Just give it a cool accent.
People will trust it more.
ian crossland
British.
unidentified
Jarvis.
tim pool
He always trusts the British.
Who doesn't trust the British?
ian crossland
Did you have another?
Did you have a following?
unidentified
What?
phil labonte
Are there any more British?
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
As-salamu alaykum.
phil labonte
As-salamu alaykum.
phillycheese45 in unknown
Learning from history, what are some of these reforms that you would, things from the past that you would recommend for today?
That we're talking a lot about what our government should be doing.
I'm curious what highlights from history you see would be beneficial today that people might think are outdated, but are actually quite wise.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I think one of the biggest ones, honestly, is looking at money and politics.
One of the things I talk about a lot that doesn't often get talked about.
Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, he gets that position because there's actually a man behind him.
His name is Jakob Fuga, and he's a cloth merchant that manages to make a lot of money because he realizes he can make more money trading money than actually just trading cloth.
And he becomes, there's a book out there.
I think it's called The Richest Man in the World, and it's about Jakob Fuga.
And what Fuga does for Charles V is there's seven prince electors that decide who's going to be the next Holy Roman Emperor.
So he bribes all seven of them and gets Charles V elected.
And throughout his entire career, Charles V will make a lot of strange decisions which don't make sense to people.
But if you understand those decisions he's making are to benefit Jakob Fuga, then history makes a whole lot more sense to you.
So I think one of the biggest things we have to look at is money in politics.
You know, super PACs are a big part of this.
Political donations are a big part of this.
And so I think if we look at money in politics, that's something we could learn a really big lesson from.
ian crossland
This guy, by the way, Jakob Fuga, his name is spelled Jacob Fugger.
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
Brother, this guy, I got to learn about this guy.
Jacob Fugger the rich.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, richest man in the world.
ian crossland
Jakob Fuga.
tim pool
Jakob Fuga.
jeremy ryan slate
It's a German name, but yeah, Jacob Fugger.
He was a motherfugger.
ian crossland
So it's either like get money out of make it hard for money to go in or make it so that if the money comes in, nothing happens.
jeremy ryan slate
Like in a perfect world, if you could make politics more like jury duty, it might be more successful.
You know, a job people don't really want.
tim pool
Demarchy.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, a job that people really don't want, but they're looking out for the best interests and they serve for a certain period of time and they go back to work.
ian crossland
That might not be a bad idea.
tim pool
Demarchy is rule at random.
You get Congress notice.
You go, ugh.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, we're not going to get Congress notice.
John Adams went back to running a law practice after he was president.
He was done.
phillycheese45 in unknown
Tim, would that be gambling, though?
tim pool
Living in society and being forced into it, you know?
If I live here, they might make me serve my people.
ian crossland
I'll be serving my people.
I got my first jury duty.
carter banks
Yeah, I heard.
ian crossland
I'm excited, man.
jeremy ryan slate
The other thing I would say is I think currency is a major problem.
And we talked about that with the reforms of Constantine with currency.
And I think that's one of the bigger lessons we could understand is when you look at banking, especially, a lot of the language is complicated.
A lot of things are set up in a way that regular people can't understand.
And I think if we can figure out how to handle our currency, we make our condition a lot better and we make our future a lot brighter.
ian crossland
Elon Musk said that we're headed towards a post-money economy where it's going to be about how much electricity can you generate and how much of a payload can you move.
And I feel like currency is electricity is current.
Currency will evolve to have a new meaning.
But I think the deep, the banking cartels.
Phil's got a big old sound when I do these loose associations.
jeremy ryan slate
Well, I guess it's not as crazy as it sounds, though, because it's also the idea of like value for value, right?
You know, it's like it's kind of an Ayn Rand idea.
You know, like if you're actually giving value for value that's being produced, then it has a, it, it actually is something rather than the idea of money just for existence, whatever it might be.
ian crossland
I imagine when Elon said that, or when people say that out loud, that the people at the World Economic Forum that are trying to create the technocracy and their method of control is money, that they hear that and they're like, oh, fuck, because it's true.
That is, we're about to lose control of the system if they don't have, if the money isn't enough and everyone's got their own power packs.
Or, you know, evolution of money.
phil labonte
Got anything you want to add?
phillycheese45 in unknown
No, I thought you were going to give a simple answer, like maybe bring back slavery or property or something.
jeremy ryan slate
Sorry, that was a little bit more.
phillycheese45 in unknown
No, I appreciate the highly educated and I appreciate that.
So definitely going to be checking out your stuff in the future.
unidentified
Thanks.
phillycheese45 in unknown
I just want to shout out my mom, she's going to turn 70 in a couple weeks.
And then my grandpa, he's going to be 94.
So happy birthday to them in the week.
ian crossland
Happy birthday.
phillycheese45 in unknown
Have a great night.
unidentified
Thank you.
jeremy ryan slate
Thanks, man.
phil labonte
Have a good one.
tim pool
All right.
And last but not least, we've got JLOR.
Attract Women By Showing Competence 00:08:52
tim pool
Welcome back.
carter banks
What up?
phil labonte
How y'all doing?
Doing well, Jaylore.
Thanks for calling in.
unidentified
All right.
I was going to shout something out, y'all talked about earlier, but I don't remember.
All right.
But anyways, so my question is: where do you go to find a good spouse?
We're in this stupid church and digital age where nobody goes outside.
Michael Knowles said something once, like, you know, go to the place where you find the caliber of person you're looking for and like church, obviously.
tim pool
But most of the time, people are with their families.
And only five.
ian crossland
That's fucking operative shit.
jeremy ryan slate
And Tim says he feels like he and you and your spouse caught the last chopper out of Nom.
ian crossland
I mean, honestly, I'd like to catch a train.
jeremy ryan slate
That'd be all right.
tim pool
Well, so my wife and I are both from Chicago.
We both grew up listening to the same music.
She's from a suburb.
I'm from the southwest side.
We met at work when we were around the same age.
I was, I think I was in my early, I'm three years older than she is.
But we're from the same place.
We ate the same food.
We went to the same baseball games, listened to the same music.
We know the same weather.
It's like, I got to be honest, I feel like the big challenge people have is they're meeting people from a different world.
And so there's some fun and adventure and meeting a stranger from a faraway land.
But I know that I can put on bad religion and alkaline trio, and my wife and I will both know all the words to the songs.
So like my ex and I, like, we, we entirely, it's exactly that.
Like we met at work.
unidentified
This has cemented my don't date co-workers fucking thing.
phil labonte
Um, like exactly that.
ian crossland
And I loved her, she didn't love me is kind of the situation I'm in.
tim pool
Like, did you get all jacked?
I've been going to the gym Tuesdays and Thursdays for like an hour and a half a day.
unidentified
Like, I've been trying to.
phil labonte
You should go to the gym four times a week.
jeremy ryan slate
Oh, don't date women from the gym, though.
I used to live.
I managed a gym for 10 years.
You don't want to date women from the gym.
phil labonte
No, no, I'm not.
tim pool
No, the ones that pull their pants into their butt cracks.
jeremy ryan slate
Yeah, those.
tim pool
You don't want to date the camera?
unidentified
What do you mean?
So I've lost a heartbeat.
jeremy ryan slate
I'm going to make a hoe in a house the last five years.
phil labonte
How really?
That's great.
But I still think you should.
I'm not saying you should meet women at the gym, but I'm saying that you should go to the gym, you know, three, four times a week if you can.
Like if it's something that you have, look, man, if you don't have a girlfriend, you can fucking go to the gym three, four times a week, right?
What else the fuck are you going to do?
But yeah, honestly, like, you know, go to the gym, get in the best shape that you can get in, and find something that you really like and learn to excel at it.
How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?
unidentified
30.
phil labonte
30?
Yeah, you're still fucking young.
Just find some shit that you really like to do, something that you enjoy spending your time doing, and then excel at it.
Like, get really good.
tim pool
You should do a Timcast mixer and we'll get all the Discord members at one big event.
And, you know, then you're bound to meet someone of a similar moral worldview, at least.
phil labonte
Women are attracted.
unidentified
In Wisconsin anywhere, I'll be there.
phil labonte
Women are attracted to competence.
unidentified
Chicago.
Do it in Chicago.
phil labonte
There you go.
unidentified
Sorry.
phil labonte
Well, the point is women are attracted to competence, right?
Like, women are attracted to dudes that are good at shit.
So, like, you should get.
unidentified
I have to go into construction.
phil labonte
I'm going to be a heavy equipment operator.
Well, I mean, that's, you know, if there's, there's nothing wrong with that.
But, like, if you're looking to meet women, find something that you like to do that women also enjoy and get good at it.
Go and do some shit where women are.
But, I mean, it's not easy nowadays.
I'm not trying to say that it's easy at all.
And, like, I got a fucking cheat code.
That's how I met my girlfriend.
But, like, platinum records.
unidentified
Yeah.
ian crossland
Shit, man.
carter banks
My advice is if you're using dating apps, which you probably are going to have to, try and talk as little as possible via text and chats and try and get the person to meet you in person.
phil labonte
That's really good.
carter banks
Like, that's the best thing you could do.
ian crossland
Oh, man.
Getting rejected online dating is not the world either.
That is just so annoying in text because they're not.
unidentified
I haven't done online dating for like 10 years.
phil labonte
So that shit is the most immoralizing shit I've ever done.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Where are you from?
Do you live in the same place where you're from?
I'm from a little bit north of Milwaukee.
I think your best bet is going to be finding someone from a similar place, to be honest.
ian crossland
I went out with friends, a man and a woman, and me, and women were flocking on me.
So if you're surrounded with friends.
tim pool
It's hard, isn't it?
ian crossland
What's that?
unidentified
It's hard.
You got the hair.
ian crossland
It's hard, you know?
But I was not a psycho.
That's the important thing.
Be not a psycho with some friends because then they'll be like, hey, he's sociable.
jeremy ryan slate
Solid advice.
Don't be a psycho.
ian crossland
Yeah, like your friends are still important, even though the girls still.
tim pool
So what you want to do, what you want to do is you want to get a pair of binoculars and you want to horizon.
No, no, no.
You put them on and you go to the bar and you stand there with the binoculars on.
Then the women are going to be like curious and they're going to say, what's the binoculars?
And then you cock your arms back and you start going, because it's called peacocking.
jeremy ryan slate
Like the opening scene in Little Nikki.
tim pool
Is that what it is?
jeremy ryan slate
Where he falls out of the tree and dies.
tim pool
It's called peacocking.
When you do something intentionally weird, like wear a top hat, sunglasses, and carry a cane around.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
That woman will notice you.
ian crossland
I didn't have a top hat on that much.
unidentified
But it was the friend.
tim pool
It's called peacocking.
ian crossland
It was friendship.
Like trying to do it alone, find someone alone is very challenging.
But having someone to talk to about it when you're stressed out, even just once in a while, and then someone to be there with you, like they call it a wingman, you know, out in public so that the women can see that you're not crazy.
You're a friendship quality.
And then just relax and your friend will strike up a conversation with somebody you'll end up meeting and falling in love with.
phil labonte
I have right to falling in love with.
jeremy ryan slate
I have no good advice for meeting women.
My wife and I do not listen to the same music.
You know, I've been to OzFest five times and I used to go to all those shows.
She hates that.
Wrestling is like really big where I live.
And I wrestled all through grammar school, high school, everything else.
Her brother was a state-level wrestler.
She was the stat girl on the opposite team.
That is how I met my wife.
But we have long, intelligent conversations.
We're into the same politics.
Church is important to us.
We've been together 15 years, been married for 11.
So I don't have good advice on how to meet him, honestly.
I'm sorry.
ian crossland
Well, it sort of aligns with what Phil was saying.
tim pool
I'm going to go around.
You know, go outside and go and just run full speed.
ian crossland
Do what you do really well.
Like, she saw you in action performing and was like, well, I like that.
phil labonte
Like I said, man, women are attracted to competence.
They like dudes that know how to do shit.
So, like.
jeremy ryan slate
I was a competitive powerlifter when we met.
I've lost 50 pounds since then, but what are you going to do?
phil labonte
But you're competitive at it.
You were doing it in a competent fashion.
But seriously, you need to, it's like, sure, if you can, you know, if you can schmooze women and go and you've got the gift of gab and you're being funny is probably like fucking the most valuable thing.
Like if you're actually a funny dude, that shit will fucking work.
I personally am not all that funny.
So thank God I'm in a fucking band.
But like, but yeah, like be funny and like be competent.
Those things are the best.
tim pool
You can also make a podcast where you claim Erica Kirk is evil because that'll generate a massive female viewership.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
And then you'll have your pick of the litter.
phil labonte
Oh, you're brilliant.
unidentified
True.
phil labonte
Not only that, I was just going to say, do a true crime podcast.
They'll be throwing the vagina at you.
unidentified
Hell, I know a lot about serial killers.
Let's go.
Yeah.
ian crossland
It'll be bad vagina, though, so be careful.
You attract.
The way you do it is the terms you attract.
jeremy ryan slate
That also goes back to what you said earlier.
You said he knows a lot about serial killers, and you said, don't be a psycho.
ian crossland
So like you can be a non-psycho in a psychotic world and show her like hey, Mr. Bollin's not a psycho.
unidentified
He doesn't talk about serial killers.
phil labonte
All right, you got anything you want to shout out?
unidentified
I mean, I was the dude called last week about the debate prep.
I mean, that went pretty well.
It was fun.
I had a lot of fun.
But it was at this book type of bar where they help authors.
And I just wanted to, can I just read the cover to this worst than the minutes are milking farms?
tim pool
Oh my God.
unidentified
Oh, God.
Hot dinosaur action, the way you like it.
ian crossland
Wet hot Allosaurus Summer is the name of the book.
phil labonte
She was a country girl looking for excitement.
unidentified
He was an Apex Predator Therapod.
Don't Be A Psycho In This World 00:01:05
phil labonte
Oh, my God.
tim pool
Yeah, thanks.
phil labonte
Thanks.
tim pool
Find that.
phil labonte
That's not how you fucking meet women, dude.
unidentified
I learned that while I was there.
Dude, they are some crazy, creepy ass people.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
phil labonte
Any woman that is worth knowing is going to hear that and be like, bro, I'm calling the fucking cops.
tim pool
Yeah, but hold on.
If you dress up like a Minotaur, she'll never leave you.
Because who else will do that for her, you know?
You're going to be like, no other man will allow you to be your true self.
Get me the Minotaur costume, and she'll be like anything.
phil labonte
Tim Poole is telling you how to crash the fucking car, dude.
That's exactly what he's doing.
He's like, bro, check that shit out.
Let's go.
unidentified
Oh, shit.
carter banks
All right, man.
Thank you for calling in, dude.
unidentified
All right.
Y'all have a great night.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate everything y'all done for me.
I appreciate it.
phil labonte
Have a good day.
ian crossland
Have you done all right?
tim pool
Jeremy, it's been great.
Thanks for hanging out.
jeremy ryan slate
Thanks for having me, guys.
tim pool
We're back tomorrow morning, of course.
So thanks for hanging out.
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