Tim Pool and Lydia Moynihan dissect Trump's declared Iran ceasefire, noting a 15% oil price drop and relief from nuclear threats despite criticism from "grifters." They debate the political fallout for midterms, defend U.S. benevolence against isolationist narratives, and refute conspiracy theories regarding Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk. The conversation shifts to income inequality caused by zero-interest policies, critiques the new Animal Farm film's misrepresentation of capitalism, and opposes casting changes in the HBO Harry Potter series. Ultimately, the hosts argue that economic productivity and historical context matter more than performative outrage or manipulated media narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has announced a ceasefire with Iran, and preliminary reports suggest they have accepted a two week ceasefire.
The Strait of Hormuz will be open and peaceful for two weeks, and already oil prices have dropped 15%.
Now, we've got the 10 point plan from Iran, which they are saying is the basis for negotiations, which will begin on Friday.
And I got to tell you, my friends, whatever you want to say, I am happy that we are backing away from nuclear annihilation, whatever it may be.
Now, I'm not going to play any stupid games and insult Donald Trump when he's doing what we want him to do and we don't want war to escalate.
Yet, for the life of me, I will just say this.
I am infuriated by the alleged Trump critics attacking the man for having called off the attack on Iran.
They are going after him and saying he's a coward and a chicken for not attacking Iran.
Yet, the whole time they attacked the man for attacking Iran.
So, which is it?
These people are grifters and they are liars.
They never actually cared.
They were saying what they said.
Thought they needed to say on the internet to get clicks and retweets.
And we're going to back that up because I am pissed off about this.
Listen, you guys know that I have been opposed to intervention and regime change.
That's basically my shtick.
And that's why I supported Tulsi Gabbard.
And I said, when Donald Trump started this war, it is not effective to insult the man when you're trying to convince him to do something you want him to do.
And you've got to be able to keep one hand on the steering wheel.
Yet people went crazy attacking Donald Trump and insulting him.
And I said, I respect the arguments, okay?
Because we want to try and keep things together.
But now that Donald Trump has done what these people have asked him to do, And backed off of attacking Iran and calling for a ceasefire, agreeing to it, they are still insulting the man.
No matter what he does, he is wrong.
And we will not be able to have a cohesive, functioning government with grifters on all sides lying about what they actually want to happen.
You can tell I'm pissed, but we have a lot to talk about.
Oil prices going down, things are starting to improve, and we need to encourage in every possible way this ceasefire to hold.
Now, of course, we have a bunch of other news related to this.
We now have, I can't believe I'm saying it, Candace Owens and AOC together at last, calling for the impeachment and removal of the Mad King.
How about that?
This is where we are as a country and grifting all the way down.
I think for your viewers and listeners, I am a New York Post columnist correspondent covering kind of the intersection of business, technology, politics.
Stock futures rally after Trump floats a two week Iran war ceasefire.
The price of crude oil fell below $100 per barrel, a stunning drop after it was trading as high as $117 earlier in the day.
We're hearing crypto is through the roof.
Everybody is happy.
I love it.
This is fantastic news.
Now, we've got reports that Iran is accepting the initial two week ceasefire.
Negotiations will begin.
Check this out.
We've got this from Sayyid Abbas Aragshi.
I probably can't pronounce his name right on X. He's the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So, Sayyid is a count and 700 followers who follow him with this statement.
On behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I express gratitude and appreciation for my dear brothers.
He, Prime Minister of Pakistan Sharif.
And is he like something?
His Excellency.
His Excellency.
Thank you for that.
Field Marshal Munir for their tireless efforts to end the war in the region.
In response to the brotherly request of PM Sharif in his tweet, and considering the request by the U.S. for negotiations based on his 15 point proposal, as well as the announcement by POTUS about acceptance of the general framework of Iran's 10 point proposal as a basis for negotiations, I hereby declare on behalf of Iran's Supreme National Security Council if attacks against Iran are halted, Our powerful armed forces will cease their defensive operations.
For a period of two weeks, safe passage to the Strait of Hormuz will be possible by coordination with Iran's armed forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.
This is tremendous.
It is exactly what you would expect to happen at the cessation of hostilities.
Neither side is going to come out and say, We are losers and we've been defeated.
Both sides are going to say, We have made tremendous accomplishments.
Now, Donald Trump has agreed to these terms.
We saw a tweet from the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Iran has now announced they're agreeing to this.
We're going to see oil prices drop already.
They're dropping.
Fantastic news and a tremendous success for the Trump administration.
I'm going to tell you why.
And I'm going to tell you to ignore the naysayers, the grifters, and the liars.
I am not happy about the incursion into Iran.
I did not vote for this.
I am not going to pretend that I support it.
But this is a victory for the Trump administration in that they took out the Ayatollah.
They took out the top echelon of Iranian government, and now they have a cessation of hostilities.
If this holds, Trump will have a moderate victory in the region, which will be good for his plans moving forward and Western sphere of influence control over the energy coming out of Iran.
Is it everything the Western powers might want?
I don't know.
But it's still a victory.
And I'm going to say it again.
Trump flattened and took out, killed their leadership.
And now hostilities are ceasing for the time being.
If we can finish this and get those negotiations through, Trump will have won.
And already I'm hearing these sort of refrains that, oh, no, no, no, we're way worse.
No, we've actually decimated the IRCG.
And bear in mind, Hezbollah seems to be decapitated.
So we're already seeing their proxies, which.
To me, as an American and as somebody who was concerned about the region, that was what we were most impacted by, obviously Hezbollah, Hamas.
So, if you're decapitating those proxies, that in and of itself, I think, is a huge victory.
And I was concerned because we do have a really horrible track record in the Middle East of getting involved, staying there, and then not knowing how to extricate ourselves.
And I kept, I kept, I was like, I'm going to wait six weeks.
I'm going to wait six weeks.
Let's see how this goes.
I was a little worried, right?
Because You know, the military is out of this world insane, but sometimes we don't have the foreign policy strategy.
So sometimes I, we really haven't had any strategy in the Middle East.
So I was worried, and now we're extricating ourselves.
I think Americans are a lot safer as a result, and we're getting our boys and girls out of there.
You said you think we're better off now than we were before.
So I guess technically that counts on if gas prices come down because, you know, respect to what you were saying about Hezbollah and terrorism in the Middle East, is the average, everyday American isn't necessarily thinking about foreign terrorist threats.
What they're looking at is how it's affecting.
Their wallet right now.
And my joke, I guess, you know, stark humor as it is, is like the idea of Trump being the bull in the china shop made sense to me when you could get gas prices down and potentially arrest bad political actors that have committed crimes within your own government.
But once we started going to war again in the Middle East, you're like, look, I don't know if all that much has changed.
So, yes, gas prices do need to come back down.
Otherwise, people, look, the midterms already, this has been damaging for them as far as the midterms because for a lot of people, It seems like we're looking at a lot more of the same, despite the fact that we were kind of sold the idea that things were going to be different this time around.
And look, you got to give them time.
Obviously, the gas prices aren't going to come down overnight.
But when gas prices go up, that also means that the prices of other goods go up.
Bitcoin, before you said that it was rebounding today, had kind of stagnated and was dropping.
So, what does it look like long term for him, given that the midterms are coming and People are talking about like if we end up losing, if they end up losing House and Senate, they're going to look at impeachments again.
So, trend wise, for special elections, it looks very good for Democrats.
Historic polling as of right now, it actually looks very bad for Democrats.
And that's surprising to me.
Again, CNN said GOP net favorability is up five points, and Democrats, the generic ballot for Congress, is only up five points, which is a historic low.
And the prediction markets are still saying Democrats are going to take the House.
I think I'd figure it would have been at least two to one, not four to one.
Like right now, it's four to one Democrats to win.
I'd be like, two to one's fine because what?
They might win three or four seats in the majority.
But Republicans can turn this one around.
This is going to be a major component of this.
If Trump walks away with a new peace agreement and then we get a straight up, we have secured the region, we have ended the violence from the militia groups, the rebels, and Iran has now agreed to the terms of a ceasefire, that's going to be a major boost for him.
But the point that I'm making is like, even if they run as a moderate, they'll do what Spanberger did or whatever if they get elected.
And I think that the American people generally know that.
Like, I think that people saw through Gavin Newsom going on all the podcasts and talking to the pod bros and being like, oh, you know, going on Sean Ryan and be like, I own a gun and I'm a gun god.
We've got actual friend of the show, Sagar and Jetty.
Taco Tuesday, it is pending Iranian approval.
We've got Chris Martinson, also who has appeared on this show, posting a picture of a taco.
And we've got AF Post.
After promising to destroy Iran, Trump agrees to a Taco Tuesday two week ceasefire.
And then, of course, just a spattering of all the stupid taco posts.
Let me tell you what this means.
These people who claim to be anti Trump, well, they are anti Trump, but the people who claim to oppose the war with Iran, who are angry that Donald Trump threatened Iran, went to war in Iran, are now attacking him as a chicken for doing what they asked him to do.
Joe Kent, following this, I will say this I do believe that we may see Tucker Carlson come out and say, thank you, Mr. President.
Because Tucker has been particularly measured in how he's approached these things.
He's a smart guy and he understands how to communicate his opinions effectively without, well, let's say he is a bit controversial as of recent, but I think he'll do the smart thing.
Now, Joe Kent didn't come out in the most aggressive and insulting of manners, but his response to the ceasefire was now we must restrain Israel.
Is your intention to antagonize Israel right now?
Because they're trigger happy.
This is irresponsible for him to make a statement like this.
I'm just, I'm sick of the people who can't just back off, say, guys, the rickety bridge could collapse at any moment, shut your mouths and let them negotiate a ceasefire.
Instead, they're like, what do you think a person's reaction is going to be if someone said, you need to be restrained?
They're going to be like, what you say to me?
You want to go?
Who do you think you are telling me you're going to put a leash on me?
They're intentionally challenging and insulting Trump and Israel at a time when we're trying to get them to back off.
I think it underscores the fact that so much of this rhetoric is just.
Just that.
People are just posting shit and saying shit.
They don't actually think, like, all of the people yesterday who were like, oh, Trump is going to destroy a civilization, they didn't actually believe.
The edit history on this tweet shows that Pakistan Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif originally copied and pasted everything he was sent.
So let me first show you his statement.
His statement is, Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in the near future.
To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks.
Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open the Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture.
We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region.
However, at the top of this message, it says draft Pakistan's PM message on X.
The implication that they're making Ryan Grimm says obviously Sharif's own staff don't call him Pakistan's PM.
They would just call him Prime Minister.
The US and Israel, of course, would call him Pakistan's PM.
Would be funny if the fate of the world wasn't hanging in the balance.
What they are trying to insinuate right now is that Pakistan did not actually agree to make this happen, that the US and Israel made the Prime Minister of Pakistan issue this statement.
All because he had a draft statement referring to Pakistan's PM.
I will first say, I don't care.
A ceasefire is good.
Why are you guys trying to stop this from happening?
Honest question.
The people who don't like Trump and claim they don't want a war with Iran are doing everything in their power to make sure the ceasefire fails.
It's so simplistic to blame one teeny tiny country for all of.
The world's woes.
I mean, when you look at the map of how teeny it is and the map, and you juxtapose that with like the Islamic controlled territory all through the Middle East, and you're like, really?
It's also insane that all of the people who are saying that Trump doesn't have any allies and he doesn't know how to work with other countries, then they're the ones who are saying, oh, well, we're just listening to.
It's like, well, do you want us to work with other countries?
Do you want us to have allies in the region?
Or then are you just going to blame Israel for everything and that we just are subject to them?
Well, I mean, that's the argument that is being made it's like when somebody in Black Lives Matter wants to blame white people for all of their ills, right?
It's like at the end of the day, even if all of that is true, it's still your responsibility to make right with your own life and figure things out.
The point is, it's about peace deals in Iran, in America, in Israel, back in 2015.
And so for a lot of people, it's all about the song remains the same.
It feels like the same thing over and over again.
And to your point earlier about the people who are posting about this, when politics becomes sport and something that you post about online as a running, you know, whatever your theme is, whether it's Joe Kent in Israel, whether it's Tucker Carlson in Israel, Whether if you're on the other side of the aisle and you want to hold Iran responsible, what you're seeing right now is the cost of everyone turning.
First of all, it's monetized.
So if you're posting on X and you're monetized and there's financial incentive to do so, it is not prudent to take a ton of your advice or your news from people who are financially benefiting from the most sensational headline they can get.
I said Trump's safest play is off ramp and declare victory.
Iran is driven by ideology, is not going to back down, leaving Trump with two options total annihilation or retreat.
Both will be bad, but retreat is the safer and easier option.
Trump will likely back down.
That was not an insult to Donald Trump.
That was not a request for one of the two options.
The effing lunatics on X. I'm going to tell you guys, I have never been more anti free speech than I am right now from the people who are trying to make World War III happen.
Trump gets a ceasefire and they're like, you're a chicken, Trump.
You're a chicken.
It's like, stop, shut the fuck up.
And there have been a series of posts where Tucker Carlson says that there is an effort to have a new economic order and bring China into the fold.
And I stated a fact the liberal economic order is waning and a new Chinese communist is rising.
And I get all these MAGA bros being like, Tim wants China to win.
And I'm like, I'm literally just saying what is happening.
Same thing here.
This is what we live right now.
This is our politics.
The Daily Beast says Tim Pool predicts Trump humiliation.
No, I said Trump's going to weigh the options and he's going to take the safer approach.
He's going to declare a victory.
He's going to pull back.
And that's exactly what we're seeing.
And it's a good thing.
But they have to frame it always in the most insane of ways to make sure everybody is at each other's throats like maniacs.
But this is a direct result for the political landscape becoming what it is under Trump, right?
Which is that it's funny that you mention Trump's foreign policy and American foreign policy.
Like we're having the most foreign policy wins.
In his first term, right?
The most foreign policy wins that doesn't involve just surrendering and giving other countries money under the guy who is the most bombastic with his dialogue.
Whereas in prior administrations, they're very polite when they tweet, they're very polite when they give their speeches, but you end up surrendering, giving money, leaving hostages behind.
Now they frame the American government destroys a bunch of their equipment just to save one soldier, and the people are framing it as a bad thing that we lost a bunch of equipment all to go back and save one person when that is objectively what makes America great.
But the reason, the reason that they want to burn down America is because they don't like the, a lot of the, at least the right wing libertarians that are like this, they don't want to see the United States be the unipolar power.
The libertarians' take on foreign policy is one of the big reasons why I'm not a libertarian anymore because I think it's a fantasy.
But they would say, look, China doesn't have these goals.
Russia doesn't have these goals.
You know, the reason that Russia invaded Ukraine was because the U.S. was meddling and blah, blah, blah.
Essentially, they blame everything on the U.S. Ever since the term blowback got into the libertarian mind, they're like, everything's the United States' fault.
Everything is the United States' fault.
And so they're like, the U.S. should close all the bases, stop being the world police, and we should just retract to our own continent and be here in the U.S. and trade with everybody, which sounds great, but.
And paid no attention to the action of like literally leaving our people in Benghazi to get slaughtered, which is disgusting.
You juxtapose that with the fact that we, Trump may have some crazy rhetoric, but then he like saves people.
But I just, I don't think people understand how.
Evil and horrible the world is.
And I don't think kids are taught history.
So they don't understand that the vast majority of people have lived in completely barbaric times.
And what we have right now is so special and unique.
And the vast majority of the world wants to cut us down.
I don't think that we understand the evils of China, of Iran.
We only in America, the media is obsessed with how horrible America is.
We talk about war crimes, it's been all about the potential hypothetical war crimes that the U.S. might commit, nothing about how evil and horrible Iran is.
Like the United States, regardless of what you think about the United States, the United States is objectively the most measured and the most benevolent global power ever in human history.
Do you think the Mongols, if they had aircraft carriers, do you think the Mongols would have made it a second?
Yeah, the Russians were not in any way a chill kind of group of people.
Like in all of human.
Yeah, in all of human history, there has never been a country with as much power as the United States military has.
And there has never been a country that has given away as much money as the United States does.
And so to say that the United States is anything other than the most benevolent world power in human history is farcical.
But they will still say, oh, you know, you have that.
And again, it's just this naivete that somehow if we just focus inward and whatever, the world will be fine.
And it's interesting part of the red arc, too, is we hear that, oh, well, the only reason the Middle East is messed up is because we ever went in there in the first place.
Like everything somehow in the world is either America or.
Or Israel's fault.
And it's like, no, we were just fiddling our thumbs under Jimmy Carter, and they literally attacked people and murdered America.
Like, anytime that we just try and are isolationist, we get it.
It's funny because we see these videos of how America used to be, and they're like showing Times Square in like 1890 with this like high up res footage, and everyone's like, look how great and peaceful it is.
And they show ski resorts.
Where everybody leaves thousands of dollars worth of ski equipment lying around, high trust society.
And then many of these same people criticize Donald Trump or the U.S. in general for trying to maintain order and stability and high trust around the world.
Albeit it's a difficult job and sometimes you don't do it well.
And we should criticize the U.S. military when they do things that are bad.
I think Afghanistan and Iraq were huge blunders.
But again, to Phil's point, this has been the most benevolent global power in the history of mankind.
And as a matter of narrative framing, like, my favorite part about X is like, whenever a different president is in office, the other party or people who like the other party are like, the rest of the world is laughing at us right now.
But literally, all you have to do is wait, and both sides will say the same thing about the other side, about everything.
Squid Games, when it came out, I said it was a critique of communism.
And all the communists and lefties were like, Tim Pool's so dumb, it's clearly a critique of capitalism.
The guy who wrote it even said it was a critique of capitalism.
And I go back in time with this story because it's relevant to the worldview of these people.
Let me explain something.
In Squid Games, People who are down on their luck are promised the beautiful, beautiful new world.
Come and join us, and you will get something beautiful.
They are told to join by choice, and they are put into a game where now they can die.
Not capitalism.
When they enter this game, they are stripped of all their possessions and belongings and have to wear jumpsuits that are identical and eat the same food.
They are placed on an equal line and told to compete in games while the powerful elites laugh and the poor people die.
Not capitalism.
If Squid Games. were a critique of capitalism, they would say you can leave at any time.
They would say if you have more money, you can purchase a higher position in the hierarchy in those games.
They wouldn't require them all to revolt to try and fight their way out the way communists do.
Now, if your argument is the guy who wrote it thought it was a critique of capitalism, my response is yes, because communists are retarded.
And they don't understand that capitalism offers you choice.
If you don't like this system, you can literally opt out.
You can walk off into the wilderness.
You can get in a boat and just kick yourself off in the ocean.
Now, fair point.
If you want to argue it's not so easy just to cut yourself off from society, that was always true whether there was government or not.
Alone in the woods, you die.
And if you want to argue that Squid Games was a critique of capitalism, I would accept this.
If in the show they said you're all allowed to leave whenever you want and the door led to the ocean, I'd say, I get it.
It's impossible.
Capitalism is very hard.
Leaving society is difficult.
But unfortunately for these people, that's not how it played out.
Well, it's also like we live in like this nihilistic culture now where it's like just the idea that they have to get up every day and go to work, and they're like, I have to go to work for eight hours and I have to commute an hour.
That's like half my, that's like a third of my day.
I have to sleep.
Like, I have no time for me, right?
Not realizing that throughout human history, you didn't really have time for you because you had to get up and go hunt to make sure that you could actually get on these.
Well, I think these silly game shows like Survivor are dumb.
And Mr. Beast, it's like.
The Mr. Beast games are actually just more cutthroat.
If you take the million dollars, they all lose.
I'll do it.
Yeah, I don't know you.
I don't care.
Everybody's going to say yes.
What they should do is, if you like, they should recruit people who are like, capitalism is bad.
It's like, okay, how would you like to play this game show where we could win?
We should do this.
You win 10 grand.
What we do is, we bring you to the woods, we throw a pointy stick at you and say, you're on your own for two weeks.
Good luck.
If you can make it in the real world without help from others, you will win money because then I will agree you actually have a point when you argue the system is bad.
If at any point you want to leave, just scream, Dear God, help me, I was wrong, and we'll airlift you out and we'll bring you home.
You know, but it's so interesting to me and it kind of makes me sad.
I feel like we're seeing the Iranian people want freedom.
They're tired of this Islamic Republic.
Or, you know, throughout the world, it seems like there's a recognition that capitalism is good, that the society that America's created is good, and yet Americans don't appreciate it.
And I know there's, you know, you were talking about some videos that have gone viral of what America used to be in the 1800s and 1900s.
And now we're seeing viral videos in El Salvador, right?
Of how they've cleaned that up.
At the same time that we're looking at like, Paris is being desecrated.
And so it almost feels like, I don't want to be fatalistic here, but it feels like in South America with Miele and then in Argentina and then in El Salvador, those places are embracing Western values at the same time as we're eschewing it.
I mean, look, I can't say enough negative things about people like, you know, like Candace Owens and a slew of other, you know, influencers or whatever you want to call them that have just jumped onto Charlie Kirk and moved directly to Israel did it and all.
It's almost like the strategies you read that the communists use on people.
It's sort of this.
Frog in the boiling water, where day by day you're not really paying attention to what's going on, and then you just get so sucked in, and then you start to believe this, and you assume that only she has this secret knowledge, and she's the only person that you can really listen to, right?
I just the conspiracy theories are really out of control, and I don't understand where they come from, but it's my conspiracy theory is that they are excising the fringes, and this is a really excellent plan towards doing it.
Every day, she look, the people who follow you, you mean.
Her corporate interests, deep state, machine state politicians.
The same people who are behind, like intelligence agencies, the same people who are behind YouTube censorship.
If you're looking at how Twitter and Facebook, when it was Twitter, had backdoors for intelligence agencies, where the Biden administration, I think, got sued by Alex Bernstein for telling them to censor him, censorship did not work.
So, what is the best course of action you can take?
Okay, well, how do we get people to all collectively start breaking the rules in such a way that we can legitimately just remove them?
I would argue that Donald Trump was not supposed to win.
They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.
The WikiLeaks emails in 2016 from Democrats show that they thought Trump was a Pied Piper candidate, that they would use him to lead Republicans in a bad direction they could not win.
And then Trump won.
And they were like, crap, what do we do?
I think they're now realizing that you have this massive populist base.
They're all subscribed to and supporting Turning Point.
Turning Point helped Trump win again.
So the play is how do we get these people to stop paying attention to foreign policy and politics?
I mean, do you think, I mean, now I'm criticizing conspiracy theories and then potentially getting into them.
It's interesting.
Hassan Piker was criticized because he posted a screenshot of his followers and it revealed that he only had like 20,000 verified followers or something.
On X. Talking on X.
I mean, do you think then that there are folks who are sort of.
When Elon announced he was going to buy Twitter, something strange happened across Social Blade where you could track all of the liberal personalities started losing hundreds of thousands of followers and conservatives started gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, which defies explanation.
Some argued that they had their thumb on the scale.
They had a script that would artificially amplify the accounts of leftists to make it look more prominent.
One of the theories is that, well, I'll tell you this a tactic in Cypher, which is a fact, this is true.
What you do is you go on Google Ads.
It's harder to do these days, and you can run advertisements on a single video of your choosing.
So let's say the story that I've talked about is a fitness influencer who I will not name.
I don't want to start a beef.
A guy who used to just make, I'm doing push ups today, and I'm going to do my delts today, and like we're going running today.
And then he got asked to comment on Israel after October 7th.
So he made a video saying, I'm not big on politics.
I know people have been asking me.
That video gets 50K views.
So he's normally getting 10 to 20K.
Well, it's a big trending story, right?
Gets a bunch of views, and then he says, Wow, I talked about Israel.
I got a lot.
He goes back to fitness.
The comments are saying, Hey, look what's going on.
Look what's going on.
What do you think?
We saw your video.
So he goes, I'll do another one, 100,000 views.
And he goes, Wow.
Now his channel is literally just Israel.
And all he does is he doesn't even do fitness anymore.
Because what happens is he starts getting massive viewership.
Now, how can you game that?
You can go to someone's channel, wait till they post the content you want them to make, take the URL, go on Google Ads, and put $1,000 behind that one video.
Now, every time somebody watches that video, your ad wins the bid and they'll get slightly higher viewership and money.
Because you pledged a thousand bucks on it, YouTube says, we need to play this video more because we've got ads bought against it.
If you have a great big wall, it's guarding your property, and everybody keeps attacking the weak point, and you're like, They keep breaking through the weak point and getting in past our wall.
We need to trick them into fighting the tree over there instead of the wall.
So, what you do is you can start running stories about how the tree is a portal that leads to the inside of the wall, and they all start whacking the tree, and now they're doing God knows what, and you're laughing.
I mean, this is such a new phenomenon in the history of the world where you have these sort of parasocial relationships with podcasters and influencers in a way that we never had with like Walter Cronkite or.
You know, Tokyo Rose, who obviously tried to like lure the soldiers into sort of Japanese propaganda.
But there's so much trust because she, you know, all these people market themselves as just your normal kind of gal that you might see at a coffee shop or whatever.
And then it's crazy to think that like there actually could be money and propaganda and all of these things behind that.
Getting people to turn on Turning Point, which is a massive voter registration effort for Trump and the Republicans, and convincing the maha suburban women that Trump is an assassin who killed Charlie Kirk for Israel.
She is attacking a principal voter block for the right populist movement.
It was like when you were talking earlier about Animal Farm, and I'm like, I'm radicalized against private equity.
Have you seen the stories about like the hockey player, the hockey kids whose parents aren't allowed to film at arenas because private equity owns the rinks?
What the critique, though, is instead of saying company bought, there's a company I like, it was bought out by an investment firm, that's what private equity means, and then stripped of assets and broken down.
So, private equity, I would say, I don't want to name them.
They're the big PE firms that buy things up, they laden them with debt, and then they create this situation where they have to make an insane amount of profit, which means firing people and raising prices.
The concept of private equity at its blanket core is I have an investment firm and we see a dysfunctional company that is burning money and mischieving its employees.
We can come in, clean things up, cut the bloat.
It's basically like flipping houses for businesses.
But the communists hate all of it.
There was a video I watched where someone was talking about how to disrupt house flipping.
And I'm like, house flipping is a service.
You find a derelict house that's in disrepair.
You go in, you clean it up, and you get a profit for doing that service and making the community a little bit nicer.
Private equity does that for businesses that are dysfunctional.
They go in, they say, You've got redundancies here.
You've got to cut that, and we can make this business profitable again.
However, there are big, evil real estate companies that do things like blockbusting.
We don't say all real estate is evil.
And there are big private equity firms that do bad things and gut companies and fire people to strip them from parts.
But that doesn't mean the entire concept of investing in businesses is a bad thing.
What I would say, yeah, I totally agree with that analysis.
I think.
Right now, we're in a situation where, and this is, I've been thinking a lot about like America as an experiment.
And obviously, the founders believe that like America is, I think this is apocryphally attributed to who is it I'm blanking on?
To Tocqueville.
But America is great because she's good.
And when she ceases to be good, she'll cease to be great.
And so I think the morality and faith and religion, all of that is such an important underpinning for our system.
And when you watch like, you know, Frank Capra movies where you see the little guy trying to stand up against kind of the big guy, I think America used to have.
People who critique the guy at the top of the food chain at the company tend to strawman the argument about just how important his job is and just how much he has to do in a given day, the relationships that he has to build with other companies, his attempt to be able to foresee what's going to happen at the market.
If you look at what David Zaslav did with Warner Brothers before the Paramount sale, he had to lean out the company and he had to cancel the right projects.
He had to move things around to make it, he took a stock that was at like $16 and got another company to pay like $30.
It's also about your fundamental outlook on improving the world, right?
It's like the argument I always make is like, we've been to the most rural areas of the state, and Amazon can still deliver you packages there, right?
The idea is like, Like, is Jeff Bezos, I guess Jeff Bezos isn't in charge of Amazon anymore, but the point being, it's a company that he built, right?
Like, how much cap do you want to put on what he's worth when he's able to bring people who at one point may not have had access to that much that quickly can now get something shipped to them in two days?
It depends on how you view what he's given society.
Okay, so I'm curious, actually, Tim, to get your take on hedge funds because I know you made the point that PE can actually be beneficial.
I think maybe hedge funds can be beneficial.
I think they are so abused right now.
Like all of the many of the richest people in New York, I live in New York, the nicest homes in the Hamptons are almost all owned by hedge fund managers.
I don't think they create that much value for the economy.
And I know the argument about, oh, they have teachers' pensions and, but, but, but, but, I really don't think that these people who are worth like $10 billion, I don't think that they have created $10 billion worth of value.
I think, honestly, I would, I would, I would agree and disagree.
I know this is not head fund managers, but day traders are not a real thing for the most part.
Like, their margins are slim.
There are people who live in this fantasy world where they think that you can sit there on a computer trading and you're going to make a bunch of money.
You don't.
I think you sit there and think about it for a few seconds, you're going to realize, like, there's a cap to how much money you can actually generate.
There's a bunch of fake posts on the internet where they're like, you can program a bot to make money on the stock market for you, which is just not true.
The liquidity doesn't exist for it.
So, like we've discussed this here, these posts where they're like, I made a bot for Polymarket and it's generating $100,000 a month.
Not true.
It's not possible because liquidity doesn't exist for that.
So, there are key areas where you can buy, but you have to manually do it because these bots don't know how to do it fast enough and they can't see as wide as a human can.
Maybe in the future they can.
For hedge fund managers, they're doing that, but a larger scale, which is managing people's pensions and investments.
So, the management of retirement funds and economics is a very important job.
I think there are more important jobs.
I do think they probably make.
A lot more money than they need to.
That's a fair assessment, but I don't think it's as simple to say just move money around.
Everybody thinks they're smarter than everybody else, and it's laughable when they say things like they're smarter than most people in Congress, and they're just like some mid 40s dude who, like, Comes on a podcast periodically, or they, well, everyone knows what I was talking about, or they claim that Donald Trump is an idiot and they're smarter than him.
What I will tell you, and here's a lesson for everybody who doesn't own a business from someone who does, and I know all the people who do own a business are going to love it because they know what I'm talking about.
You will find that there is a decent portion of individuals who will come to work for you who believe that you have infinite money, money just exists, and they deserve it.
And I will tell you throughout my years with contractors and various employees, I have literally asked people, So you're asking me for money?
And they're like, Yes.
And I said, Where does that money come from?
And what do you mean?
I'm like, well, you want me, Tim Poole, to give you money, right?
Like, yeah, okay, where does that money come from?
They're like, I don't know, the business.
And I'm like, right, but the business has to get it from somewhere.
Like, I had this, Ian, we had this conversation on the show when he was saying that in the future, shows will pay the people to watch them.
And I said, what?
He's like, yeah, because the eyeballs are valuable.
I'm like, then why?
So the sponsor would make their own show, they wouldn't sponsor other shows.
He's like, What?
No, I'm just saying the show would just pay people to watch the show.
And I said, where does that money come from?
Like, I have to track every month, every week, income and output, and then balance that budget.
The government doesn't have to do that, they just print the money.
But I tell you, there are people who literally just think, what do you mean?
You're a business, you have money, it just exists.
That's why I think communism is so easy, because people don't understand that businesses have to have inflow.
And they just assume the company has the money.
And I love this.
I'll tell you one of my favorite stories.
When I worked for Fusion and ended up leaving, I had friends who still worked there.
And I found out they were trying to form a union.
For those that don't know, Univision and ABC teamed up for an investment to create a.
It was originally supposed to be Hispanic oriented millennial media, but they realized that millennial Hispanics actually spoke English.
And so they could actually cast a broader net.
So they teamed up with ABC and said, let's make a youth brand.
Creative Fusion.
So, this was a company that made no money.
It was built off of, I believe the number was a $300 million combined investment from the two companies.
So, they built a building.
It was massive.
They hired a bunch of young people.
I was one of them.
They paid great salaries.
I left and then I heard the employees were trying to form a union.
And I talked to one of my friends who worked there and I said, What's this about?
You guys are trying to unionize?
And she's like, Yeah, I don't think they pay enough.
And I said, But they don't make money.
She said, What do you mean?
They've got a bunch of money and they need to pay us more.
And I said, The company you work for does not generate revenue.
I'm not talking about profit.
I'm saying they literally don't generate revenue, meaning they are spending other people's money to hire you in hopes they get more advertising dollars.
Now, they did have some revenue.
She could not comprehend what I was saying.
And she said, I don't know what you mean.
We are a bunch of talented writers and journalists, and they need to pay us more money.
That's market like comparable.
And I said, The money you are asking for of this company has to come from the pockets of a wealthy individual.
Who then decides whether he's going to give it to you?
I said, listen, if you want to keep your job, you need to go to the president of the company right now and say, I reject the unionization.
Tell me what you need me to do, and I will do it, but I don't want to be party to this because I understand we don't generate revenue.
It's very confronting, I think, to recognize, yeah, like, oh, I actually have to create a service.
Like, I have to create value for something.
And I think a lot of journalists, particularly in New York, Kind of thing because they went to an Ivy League school or they have a job that's very prestigious that they should also make a lot of money.
And David Brooks writes about this like status income disequilibrium.
That the reality, and I didn't realize this when I got my first job in news where I'm like making 30K and trying to live in New York.
Like, no, there's a lot of people who want to do these jobs.
And if you want to differentiate yourself or if you want to make more money, you have to differentiate yourself.
That's the fundamental thing that a lot of people in Hollywood don't understand because they're basically paying the studios to make these movies.
And then they're mad when the movies don't get to be made the way they want them to.
And they're like, why won't you let me make my movie the way I want to make it?
No one wants to watch your movie.
I'm the one who has to pay everyone the money.
I want to see a return on my investment.
And then they're shocked when they're told, no, you can't do that because the studio theoretically actually wants to make something that people want to see.
And if you make a product that the, I don't know if it's the way, this way in the studio, but in the music world, like if you make a record and you're like, no, we're doing this on our record, we're not doing what the label wants, the label will be like, we don't hear a single or what have you.
If you make a record and the label's like, we don't believe in it, it's actually better for the label to say, okay, fine, you made the record.
We're not going to spend a whole lot of money on promoting it.
And the reason is because they don't believe in the record.
So why are they going to spend more money over the $250,000 they spent to make the record or whatever?
It's the funniest thing in the world to me because I certainly can't speak to it the way that Phil could, but I've had friends who had smaller deals back when I was in my early 20s.
And the entitlement from these people blew my mind.
And I have to ask them, I was like, honest question, did you like.
Did the label just owe you the money that you were asking for?
Like, was there a reason they had to pay you?
And they were like, well, they signed us.
And I'm like, right, but they signed you to make a product that people would listen to.
And then you told them you didn't want to.
So why should they give you money if you don't want to do what they're hiring you to do?
And they did not understand because in their mind, they were talent.
I'm not trying to like dunk on millennials because I am actually a millennial.
But, um, I do think there's an entire generation that was raised to think that we're just inherently special and wonderful and talented and we need to be celebrated no matter what we do.
And I also think Gen Z to an extent, all of these kids, because the parenting mindset went from basically like, live your life, you know, be smart to now like, oh no, children need to be nurtured and told they're wonderful.
And of course, when you get into the real world, you just assume that everyone else is going to treat you like.
Your parents and just nurture you and tell you you're great.
And that's just not the real world.
And I'm sure parenting is not preparing children to be successful, competent adults.
I know there's a lot of chatter about income inequality, and I'm very mixed.
I do think that we're in a tough economic environment.
I do think that many people were sold a false bowl of goods where they were told to go to college.
They took out too much debt.
Now they're in a tough situation.
So I'm very conflicted because I do think there are certain people who were set up to fail.
But I also think there's a lot of people who thought that they should have the sun, moon, and stars and are really upset that they have to take a low paying job and work their way up.
And also, the reason why there's so much income inequality is because the government left interest rates at zero from 2008 until 2018 because people were taking loans at 0% interest and putting it in the stock market.
I have to stress this too about the income inequality thing.
I agree to a To a functional perspective, that whatever your view on this is, societies collapse when there's a difference between the highest and lowest brackets.
However, what I will say is, I take this personally for one very simple reason.
There are people who say tax the rich.
What they don't understand because they are ignorant, unlearned people is that I make a lot of money because I work 16 hours a day and weekends.
And I've done so for years.
I work less now on the weekends, but there's still a little bit of business stuff that we have to do in terms of paperwork, but I don't do as many shows.
I used to work doing a morning show every day, no days off, and Tim Kest IRL Monday through Friday.
Because I work double shifts and the weekends, my income is greater, but I have to pay more tax on the extra money I'm earning.
You're a high producer, high talent individual who generates something of value that people want and it makes a lot of money.
But the more you do it, the more we're taking from you to the point where right now, if I were to cut my workload in half, I've talked about it before.
I know people don't like.
They think it's like offensive for me to say this, but if I did not do Timcast IRL, the company revenue drops by like 30%.
So I'm doing double the work for a 30% increase.
That's the system we exist in right now.
There was a great video where this rich guy was talking to some commie, and he says to the commie, he's like, You think I should be taxed on everything over a million dollars?
And he's like, Yup.
And he goes, Okay, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
As soon as I make a million dollars, I shut my company down and I furlough all of my employees, and I say, Why?
Well, there's a fundamental difference that, like I said earlier, some people believe that there should be some type of cap on what a human being is able to accomplish.
And to everybody in this room, you would find that offensive because the idea that I, you know, because everybody wants to strive, right?
They want to find themselves with success.
But the thing is, the people you're talking about have already kind of accepted that that's not going to happen to them.
So their worldview is more nihilistic and they don't see a path forward.
It's also why Hollywood and everybody else has turned billionaire into a slur.
Billionaire with a B means you can say tax the rich, and the millionaires, like Mark Ruffalo, can say, Well, I'm not talking about me.
When they're talking about that, too, like the Mark Rufflows of society, arguably, they don't create the same level of value that a Jeff Bezos does.
Now, you can put in, you can have a conversation about, you know, what art.
Means to society and all that, but if we're talking about actual dollars into the economy, then it's a very different thing, and they've demonized that for a reason.
All of the movies now they don't say the wealthy, they don't say the elite, they say billionaires because it's being turned into a slur, like you said, Pavlovian to put it into the brains of young people.
And we'll just lightly touch on this as we got a few minutes left before the super chats and all that.
But the new trailer for Animal Farm came out.
Yo, they edited this one intentionally to highlight as much of the communist perspective as possible.
Because, like, so I watched the new trailer for Animal Farm, and it is a selective grappling of only the key pieces where they can say, see, look, it's criticizing communism.
So, I'm not going to play the trailer, but I'm going to make a few key points as we go through this using the footage they've released to explain this.
So, the first thing you notice in the opening of the trailer is there's these guys in hazmat suits, and the animals are being loaded up onto a cart.
So, again, we talked about it quite a bit because the film's coming out.
And just because they are wearing Animal Farm like a skin suit, Andy Serkis has written an op ed for the Washington Examiner saying Orwell would approve because it's a modern.
Critique.
It's a critique on the modern power infrastructure that oppresses us.
I would just say this movie is not Animal Farm, not in any meaningful way.
I think it's fair to say this because although this might be technically a spoiler, I don't think it's fair for Angel Studios or any company to.
Let me say this.
I'm not going to spoil plot elements from the movie and tell you what happens.
This is their movie, it's their product.
They want you to pay to go see it.
I'm just saying, I think it's not a critique of communism.
It's a critique of capitalism.
That being said, I do take issue with them using the name Animal Farm for a movie that is not Animal Farm.
Yeah, his comment about he would approve of this because it's talking about the modern structure that oppresses us just proves that Hollywood likes to take IP and use it as a skin.
So the reason I'm explaining this is I'm now going to say something that does reveal something about the movie without telling you the plot of the movie.
But it is important so that people, again, if I came to you and said I was selling pool water and you got something different, I think that's wrong to do.
The windmill is not in the movie.
The battle of the windmill is not in the movie.
I'm sorry, the battle of Cowshed is not in the movie.
Old Major is not in the movie.
A bunch of, like, I'm going to tell you this right now.
This movie is not Animal Farm.
It's just literally not Animal Farm.
It's something totally different that maybe has 10 to 15% of Animal Farm in it.
So I'm not spoiling what happens in the movie.
I'm just explaining if you're expecting to see the story of Animal Farm in this film, you will not get that.
So, there is something there that is relevant to the critique of capitalism, which you will find out if you see the movie.
Well, maybe when I had this discussion with the Harmon brothers, they won't care if I talk more in depth.
Because I will say this I'm being very respectful in not wanting to spoil key plot elements that they, I shouldn't say they, because Angel Shoes just bought distribution, but Andy Serkis added to the film, which is such a dramatic deviation.
Again, I'll say this in the original Animal Farm, the chickens have their eggs stolen from them.
These are their children by the state who profits off them.
And when the chickens complain that their eggs are being stolen, they're executed.
Not in the movie.
So, you are not getting animal farm, whatever this movie is.
Like in some of the new legislation, there's all these provisions.
Again, I'm saying this is tangentially related, it's related to farm animals that basically allows us to be very abusive to animals and pigs in particular.
I tend to have less of a problem with race swaps than a lot of other people as long as they don't turn race into a conversation about the story, which fundamentally, well, Harry Potter.
I did a video on it today.
Well, I've done like three, but yeah, like Black Sabbath.
But that fundamentally changes not just him, but it changes James Potter's motivation.
It's like, I was trying to explain to somebody.
I said, you do not understand that, um, to the outside world, a schoolyard bully is not looked at the same as a racist bully, even if that racist bully is underage, right?
It's looked at as a shortcoming of both your upbringing from your family.
I read an article today, I'm not even kidding you, from comic book resources that says it's a good thing they're making Snape black because it makes more sense for him to be an outcast because he's black.
Where they literally said, they said, like, you can't, they basically, it basically says, you cannot understand what it means to truly be an outcast unless you are a minority.
And when the boggart is in the wardrobe and pops out and scares the crap out of Neville.
The funny thing about all of that is, it's proof that J.K. Rowling does literally agree with them on everything except for trans issues because J.K. Rowling is a progressive.
So, there's articles written or there's quotes coming out from the writers and the production designers who seem to want to speed run everybody hating this.
One says that the show has been produced around the idea of naturalism, which, if you look into naturalism, is the idea that supernatural only exists through scientific order.
Oh, they're doing one of these?
Yes.
So, which is why they're using all earth tones and colors.
All right, everybody, we're going to go to your Rumble Rants and Super Chats.
So smash that like button.
Share the show with everyone you know.
The uncensored portion of the show will be coming up at 10 o'clock at rumble.com slash Tim Castile.
But before we do, go to those Rumble Rants and Chats.
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I'll add one more thing.
As an aside, because I love shouting out things that help you sleep.
Your testosterone and human growth hormone are generated by your body.
They're produced while you're in deep sleep and REM sleep.
If you are sleeping poorly, you will be fat and tired.
I'm not a nutritionist or anything like this, but I'm telling you, look into that.
Sleep better.
You will feel better.
I'm seeing all these ads for TRT.
And I'm like, the first thing I would say to all these guys that are looking for testosterone therapy in their late 30s and 40s or whatever, The first thing you should be doing is figure out if you're exercising enough, eating healthy enough, hydrated, and sleeping before you start doing any kind of supplementation.
But, you know, talk to a nutritionist, talk to a doctor.
Don't take advice from guys on the internet unless they're a doctor.
But let's grab your rants and super chats and see what's going on.
St. Miles says, Who do you think blinked first?
US, Iran, andor other nations.
I actually wonder if this was not the play for the whole get go.
I don't know that it's going to hold off.
If this succeeds, this might have been the plan.
Trump doesn't.
It's not possible to have regime change in, like, I mean, like fundamentally.
Obviously, you can kill their leaders, but other people come in.
You need boots on the ground to actually get rid of the structures of their fundamentalist government.
I don't know if Trump ever thought that would be possible because it's 90 million people, it's a massive country.
I wonder if this is the case.
Trump threatens annihilation, offers them the off ramp.
They have no choice but to accept it.
And Trump did a big ask the whole time.
Now, there are rumors that Iran is demanding that they enrich uranium if there's going to be a ceasefire, which is a non starter.
So, we'll see how this one plays out.
It may not work out well, but we're crossing our fingers, and I'm not going to root against a ceasefire.
Seems that they were about to call his bluff, and he didn't want to make good on his threats.
I disagree.
I think both sides want to make it look like they've won.
So, Trump killed all of their leadership.
The IRGC can claim everything they want.
Trump blew up the Ayatollah.
Like, I'm sorry, there's no reality where Iran wins.
It just doesn't.
Trump may not get the guaranteed Grand Slam victory of taking the control of the entirety of the landmass, but Trump blew up like 40 government officials.
I'll put it this way if you get into a fight with somebody and he punches you in the face 15 times, but you threaten to kill a kid, so he stops punching you, I'm not going to call that you winning.
I'm going to be like, okay, the fight's over, but man, he messed you up.
Iran lost their senior leadership, most of their Navy, at least half of their missile launchers, thousands of security personnel, bridges and rail lines, steel and petrochemical plants, their ability to deter their nuclear infrastructure, their air defenses, and the ability to use Dubai as a sanctioned evasion hub for the possibility of charging trolls for merchant shipping on the Strait of Hormuz.
I mean, look, this is still, you know, there's actual, like, missiles still flying.
We'll see if the ceasefire holds.
I'm hoping that it does.
If I understand correctly, there was a 10 point plan released, but that was BS.
Trump said on Truth Social that it was not an actual outline or anything, that they didn't come to that kind of agreement and that they're going to work on it over the next two weeks.
So we'll see.
I don't try to predict what's going to happen, but I do want it to be over.
And I do think that regardless of what anyone says, like Iran got the absolute hell knocked out of them, and they don't have the ability to.
To intimidate the other countries in the Gulf the same way they did before.
Lava Bear says DS9, season 7, episode 16, Intern Arma Enum Silent Legos is the second best episode of the series, right behind in the pale moonlight.
What Sloan says to Bashir at the end of this episode is a gut punch.
I will also stress I just watched the episode of.
TNG, which is why am I forgetting the name of this one?
I refuse to ask.
It was Inner Light, which is considered to be one of the greatest episodes of television ever made.
Probably one of the best episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation, if not the best.
Have you ever seen it?
You know which one that is?
Man, it's such a crazy story.
So they come across a star system that they're investigating.
That went nova, the sun went nova a thousand years ago, wiping out all life on the planets surrounding it.
And a probe approaches the Enterprise and then blasts Captain Picard with a beam of some sort, some kind of energy, which causes him to collapse.
What happens is this probe is broadcasting an experience, memories into his mind, and he lives in the span of 25 minutes, 30 years on their planet.
And he has a family and he has kids and he learns to play the flute.
And then after 30 years of living this life, They reveal to him that the probe was created because it was a civilization about on par with modern Earth that knew that they were going to all die and go extinct.
So they created the probe as a way to transmit a history of their people to someone 30 years of experience on their planet.
And it's just brutally sad.
And then what happens is Picard wakes up, the probe deactivates, they bring it in, and inside of it, stored for a thousand years, is a flute that they broadcast into Picard's brain.
It's actually much better when you watch it because.
He has a family and he has kids and he has grandkids and he lives this life and then he has to watch them explain that they've died a thousand years ago.
I also do think there's so much arrogance in commenting on this because the fact of the matter is we don't have all of the intelligence.
We don't have all of the briefings that he has.
And I also will say, I feel like this is the new op.
This is the new thing.
I feel like every day there's some sort of story about.
Some person who called into C SPAN or someone who said on the radio that they voted for Trump three times, but somehow this is a bridge too far, right?
It's like no matter what he did, oh, I supported Trump, but this I no longer support.
Like, you're taking all this information in secondhand.
You know, they're like, On one hand, they're saying we blew up a girls' school.
On the other hand, they're saying that they killed 40,000 protesters.
Their own government killed 40,000 protesters.
And then somebody says, Oh, you believe that number?
So what does it really matter if you don't know for a fact whether any of this happened?
The sad fact of the matter is, guys, you, I, everyone is not really programmed to care about everything that's going on everywhere in the world.
You could make the argument that you care about this because it will have severe consequences for your homeland, given that your children may be sent off to war.
But in general, when all you do is take in the news all day and take in nothing but bad news and the violence and the crime and the evils of the world, you weren't programmed to deal with that.
But it's also like as a matter of personal responsibility, you should want yourself and those around you to be smart enough to be able to see through that stuff.
So she's saying something where if you trust her, She must be right because it seems insane you'd walk up to a Brazilian gang member, but that's literally what you do.
You go to the favela, you ask around and say, I'm a reporter and I wanted to see if there's any of the gang members I wanted to do an interview.
And they'll go, Let me ask somebody.
They're not going to just murder you.
They'll tell you, Nah, they said no cameras.
And you'll go, Okay, and you'll leave.
But it turns out many of these gangs want attention.
They want people to know.
They want to say, Hey, we're the good guys here.
The gangs in the favelas view themselves as de facto government.
They think they're good guys maintaining peace and order where the government has abandoned them.
And so they say, Yes, I'll do an interview with you.
So she lies about Nick Shirley to discredit him.
And I'm just like, Okay.
There's no way this is real.
Like, who in their right mind turns on Nick Shirley?
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The enhanced games valued at $1.2 billion before a single race.
We've all talked about this the idea where everyone just gets jacked up on goofballs and then we just have monsters taking crazy drugs just going for it.
Also, you know, given the fact that Ken Griffey Jr., who in my opinion is my favorite baseball player of all time, the fact that he never got caught up in a steroid scandal just makes those players that didn't.
I'm curious, are they, is this going to be like a live golf thing, right?
Where like with live golf, obviously, like the Saudis paid people a lot of money to leave the PGA to go there?
Because I feel like if I was an athlete who'd worked my entire life to get to the Olympics, I wouldn't want to be like, oh yeah, I'm giving up my dream of getting a gold medal to go to the, They're going to make more money.
I think there's, we probably have a video on PCC going back to like 2021 where I was talking about how we need the steroid Olympics where everybody just gets jacked to the gills and does amazing stuff.
But that, like, that's, like, I honestly think this is actually going to be, it's going to do fairly well because people want to see records broken.
They want to see amazing performances.
And the Olympians are all, you know, they're great.
They bust their hump to get there.
But when you see the augmented Olympics crushing the records of the people in the regular Olympics, people are going to be like, I want to watch that because it's about entertainment.
It would mess with your like your ability to keep your hands the only thing that guy needed more was a cigarette hanging out of his mouth while he was doing it, just sitting there ripping a dart.
There seems to be a massive reforming of who or what kind of, you know, the quotes right is.
It's taken place over the past several months, if not even a little bit longer.
You know, we even highlighted the elections where progressives are taking a hit.
I guess my question is are we doomed to regress to kind of early 2000s politics, or can, you know, all these obvious grifters be called out and kind of kicked out of the movement?
So you kind of keep the core movement that I guess we had more in 2016, but yeah, in the early right after the election, too.
You know, I don't even like, I don't know that the actual national socialists out there, Are super anti Trump.
There's the Groypers and stuff that are, but I'm that Nick, the Nick Fuentes followers, but I don't know that if you're actually like really, you know, national socialist, I don't know that they're anti Trump now.
I mean, I'm sure that Trump wouldn't want them to be pro Trump, but I think that Nick Fuentes and the Groypers and stuff, they're kind of an entity to themselves.
This is all like a ton of purity testing, which is just a side effect of a large scale coalition of voters being built.
Kind of like the left purity tests themselves, but they're so rigid about keeping everyone in line that you're not really allowed to fall away from the pack, anyways.
So everybody arguing about who's more like who was more America first or who was more MAGA early on.
Right, but for the honest, the purpose of woke right was to create a catch all for people he could smear as anti Semites and white supremacists the same way alt right did.
That's his explanation.
So he's outright saying he knows all these people have different ideologies, but he wants to create an insult for all of them to freak people out.
It's like I don't use the term woke when I complain about things in movies and TV shows because my definition of that is likely very different.
Like you have a very specific definition you have for that term.
But I could people give you the correct definition, but people could give you 10,000 different definitions for what they consider to be something woke in a movie or a television show.
So it's inherently not beneficial for me to describe it that way, especially if I'm trying to tell you to or to not to see something.
And it's kind of like a Venezuela situation where a lot of Western companies invested in Iran and then they sort of took over the means of production.
So I think that's why when Trump was saying, oh, to the victor goes the spoils, I think there is a sense in which they stole a lot of effort and work and infrastructure from many companies quite a long time ago.
There is talk about them charging for transit through the Strait of Hormuz and splitting the money with Oman.
I don't know if that's actually true, but one of the reasons that was stated for that. Was because they were going to use that to rebuild the infrastructure.
But no, I don't think the U.S. should give them a dime.
I don't think the U.S. needs to give them anything.
And somebody made this distinction between there's a difference between regime change and regimes acting differently.
And from the American vantage point, the only thing that matters is the regime is acting differently, but we don't need to prop them up and give them cash for that.
For American hegemonic power, if you want the U.S. to stay on top of all the other countries, you don't want a Chinese Communist Party controlling the world, then yes.
I mean, that's the challenge of war.
Some people will argue China will never do it.
I don't think that's the case.
I think they will.
I think the Belt Road Initiative is.
Obvious that they're trying to build their own IMF, their own liberal economic order, and we'll be under their boot.
I mean, I'm of the opinion that a lot of this had to do with China.
I don't think that it was exclusively China.
I think that a lot of it, I think it was, you know, Israel deciding, saying that they're going to attack Iran, you know, kind of forced the U.S.'s hand.
But I also think that the U.S. looked at the situation and said, you know, this is actually going to be really bad for China.
We can make sure we can use this to our advantage.
Regardless of, I think I still have a lot of questions about the strategy long term, but regardless, I think the display that our military put on and the success from a military vantage point, I mean, the AI we were using, this is the first time we deployed some of these incredible new technologies we have, the way that they were able to rescue.
The soldiers, they had a heartbeat detector, so they were able to find his heartbeat over the span of thousands of miles.
So I think that is certainly a deterrent to China to show off everything that we've created.
Yeah, I mean, and also the fact that the weapons that Iran had and Venezuela actually were all Chinese, and China had said, oh, you know, these things can defeat stealth, and it was an absolute, absolute annihilation.
China, it was really, really, really bad for China.
And I think that that's why China stepped in and said, Iran, you need to stop this.
So, like I said, I think a lot of this had to do with China, even though I don't think that it was exclusively China.
I'm not saying that it was all because of China.
But I think that the reason why the US thought that it was a good idea to do this was like, we can make this work to our advantage by putting China in.
So, I guess something I kind of want to add a little bit is just that.
So, I'm teaching my seven year old son how to play chess, and he's getting very, very good.
And I guess the way that I kind of see this is as much as I hate to see the destruction and the use of our military.
And the just kind of free floating anxiety throughout the world, it's kind of like removing a bishop off the board.
It's not necessarily the king.
It's maybe not as powerful as a queen, but it's still a problem piece that is, you know, especially if he's controlling the center of the board, it's kind of like you got to get that piece off the board or do something with it to, you know, to try and protect your own side so that you can essentially win in the long term.
And that's how I kind of, I guess that's how I kind of look at it.
It doesn't make me happy.
I wouldn't advise a Tim, I'm sort of with you.
I wouldn't have advised going into Iran.
I wouldn't have advised on it, but it's just one of those things where it's kind of like once we're in it, we have to try to kind of make the best of it.
It's been really awesome to watch things moving the way they have been.
And yeah, no, I just want to get into this.
So, what you guys were talking about with private equity earlier made me jump onto my computer and go to the Discord and say, hey, I'd like to talk to Tim about this.
It sounded to me like you were really defending private equity.
And I come to this topic as a libertarian capitalist myself.
I'm not anti capitalism, of course, but I think the way private equity is operating.
Is very sketchy and is hurting the economy in general and hurting the American people.
So, I just wanted to get a clarification from you, Tim, on how you feel about private equity and how you're actually like what your actual point on this is.
And if that is taking into account the issues of these leverage buyouts, the collateral obligation loans that they're putting the companies under, recipe thinning, asset stripping, all these things these private equity firms are doing that are destroying these companies.
And these things are also being passed off to pension firms as well.
Like private equity is a vague, generic term that has been used by activists upset about large companies that do bad things to start attacking just general capitalism.
So if Phil and I pool resources and say we're going to start a private equity firm, we each put in, you know, 20 grand small, and we say we're going to buy a small business off BizBuySell that we think is not doing a good job, there's a reason they're selling.
We're going to invest in it.
Clean it up and fix it up and make a profit.
That's great.
But what happens is you have big companies that have done bad things to be able to criticize.
So they said, Private equity as a general concept is a bad thing.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
You're talking about that one firm.
Like, you're talking about this company did a bad thing.
Don't attack the idea of investing in a business in general as bad.
Language wise, I feel like it's from videos that are being made where somebody makes a general point about a company.
Like the video I was talking about earlier about the private equity firm, the specific one that bought up these hockey rinks.
And remove the rights of parents to film their kids with their phones because they have a streaming service that they have to subscribe to if they want to see their kids play hockey.
And the video is basically like private equity is doing this thing when what he could be saying is like this company and others like it are doing that thing.
Pretty much any private equity company that's publicly traded.
I actually, not to toot my own horn here, actually, I wrote a story that I think is very cool about now there are companies that are sort of trying to offer an alternative because one issue we have is sort of this what's referred to as a silver tsunami, where there's a lot of boomers and folks who've created these sort of small and medium sized businesses.
They're retiring and they face these two options either they shutter their business or in some cases the only option is to sell to private equity.
And some of these folks don't want to do that.
And To large private equity firms that are publicly traded because they've seen the outcome is employees get fired, prices are more expensive, and the investment that they personally made in the community of supporting local charities and whatnot and giving back, large private equity firms that are headquartered in New York City, for instance, aren't going to invest in their community.
So there's one company I wrote about, it's, I think, I'm blanking on American Operator, but I know there's other companies doing this as well.
And they're basically trying to offer an alternative where they partner with.
Somebody in the community to help that person purchase the business and sort of keep the money, keep the profit, keep the business locally owned and not outsource it to a big company.
I take another look at, too, like even with large private equity firms, the thing that annoys me about it, too, is there are a lot of companies that are dysfunctional, run by morons, and by luck, they're staying afloat.
They should have someone come in and gut it and clean it up.
So, even large scale private equity, I think, is a good thing.
The idea that like businesses should just get to exist is communist to me.
Don't get me wrong, there are nefarious practices in the business with debt, loading a business with debt to offload it and things like that, then bankrupt it.
Like the cost, I forget, I think Bank of America produced a research study that said, as a result of some of these big private equity companies buying up veterinarian clinics, prices are up something like 38% over the last five years.
Open a veterinary clinic and compete and offer cheaper prices.
It is communist to say that because a business is bought another business, we should shut that business down instead of why doesn't someone just open a competing clinic next door that offers cheaper prices and steals all the business, putting them under?
This is what Starbucks does.
Starbucks will open, allegedly, a coffee shop across the street from a mom and pop shop, drops their prices at a loss so that people stop going to the mom and pop shop, putting them out of business, then they normalize their prices.
So I'll just say this like, if I were to go, let's say it was a company for sale and I bought it and then said, guys, you have three employees that don't do anything and fired them, they'd be like, this motherfucking asshole came in, fired people, all for profit.
Like, if you were to try and regulate these companies to prevent them from buying up a certain amount of companies, I think it's like every problem was the solution to a previous problem.
Honestly, Tim, you know, honestly, Tim, I can't imagine a world in which I should ever trust our government.
I get that Trump's attempting to do good and being stopped in everything he does, but he is just one man.
We can't lay it all on him.
That's why we got Marco Rubio.
But more importantly, we just saw in Kentucky the state Supreme Court ruled that the Kentucky legislature, having voted 73 to 14 to do so, cannot impeach a state circuit judge, citing that there is a judiciary review committee that is supposed to do that, not the legislature.
I mean, I don't really, I don't, I'm not familiar with what you're talking about, but the idea of getting rid of judges is, uh, It seems to me one of the more difficult things that absolutely has to happen if we're going to have, if we're going to straighten out what's going on, the problems in our government, right?
Like a judge should not be able to decide that something the president does.
Like they shouldn't be able to make a nationwide injunction for everybody about a thing.
You know, it should be like, there's this person that's bringing up this issue.
There's an injunction for this individual.
It shouldn't be.
You know, nationwide, it's an injunction for this person, and everything that, like, the whole rest of the country still goes as had been before the injunction.
And then, when the specific person's specific claimant or whatever gets in front of the court and the court finds, then maybe it'll go to the rest of the country.
But the idea that they can just put the brakes on the executive office because one person says, Hey, I don't like this now, that is not in any way anything.
That anyone has ever intended.
I think that this actually got started during the Obama administration in 2012.
So, like I said, I don't have any, I'm not familiar with the specific thing you're talking about in Kentucky, but the idea overall of a nationwide injunction, that stuff has to stop.
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