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Unknown A
As somebody who founded arguably the most disruptive media company of this generation, as you look at what's going on today, what do you think is the most important story that we should be paying.
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Unknown B
Attention to for the first time ever? Like, we're a post truth world, and I think Vice, our whole thing was we would go to Afghanistan and we'd go, oh, there's a whole nother story going on that nobody's talking about because news is institutionalized. They have, like, a guy who stays in the hotel, he has stringers. The stringers come to him, he writes a thing, it goes in that goes into a teleprompter. The host goes, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when you go there, you're like, yeah, nobody's left the hotel in three years. And that we forgot into that by mistake because we were filming the only heavy metal band in Baghdad. As you do. As you do. And we were there, coincidentally, when Bush came. Submission accomplished, we won. And we weren't using the green zone. We were in the red zone. Everyone shooting at each other.
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Unknown B
We're like, the war isn't over. So we just started going places. And I'd say 90% of the time when you went somewhere, the story would be completely different than what you were being told. Now there's 50 different versions of every story on social media, and that's A and a B. Young people believe them. That's two. And then there is a lack of trust in the mainstream news media, with good reason, I think. And then there's, you know, op ed crap on one side and snide comedy on the other and not a lot of facts. So it's. It's a terrible situation. But for guys like us, it's a great situation because we can go out there and sort of try to find the people that you know. I was watching your podcast this morning with my talk about bitcoin, and you're like, that's interesting. And that's going directly to the source and figuring stuff out.
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Unknown B
And so it's kind of good, but kind of bad. I guess I was going to ask.
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Unknown A
Does the truth matter, or does the interpretation of truth matter lines the rub?
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Unknown B
I mean, how do you think about it?
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Unknown A
Because you've said multiple times that what you're trying to do with Vice news, presumably, and certainly your own show, is figure out why we don't have shared facts. And I'm assuming to try to in all of that, figure out what actually is true.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
So it matters enough to guide your.
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Unknown B
Professional life, but I think so look, I'm a centrist and I love the political game and I love watching it unfold. And what's happening now is incredibly interesting. And Look, I think 70% of it is bread and puppet or bread and Turkish theater. Because we want to be part of this grand democracy, which we aren't. We don't have a lot of agency in a two party system. There's two party systems, they're always power. It's republic's not democracy. Like if you want a democracy, you get 4, 5, 6, 10 parties. I mean it's the same two parties forever, whatever. So like, what is it all for? And I was gonna say, you know, I wanted to do a show called let's Go Back and let's go back and see what they said about Trump, all the things that Trump would do during his first presidency. Let's go back and see what they were saying about Obama and he's gonna take the guns and he's gonna do this and he's a communist and he's, it's all like nothing ever happens.
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Unknown B
And so now like there's some stuff happening but you're like, like there's, it's always doom and gloom from one side to the other side and goes on during those four years. So a lot of it is for we are part of this grand democratic experiment and democracy in America and the best country. And it's like know the people are the great beast and we're going to the circus to watch this stuff. And this is the circus. It's the, it's the best and biggest reality show that everybody in the world tunes into. And we have a new star of that reality show and he knows how to milk a cow. So does the truth matter? Look, I like commonality effects, I like science, I like, you know, look, we're going to run into a wall, let's say climate wise and everyone's going to go, you know, why didn't you tell us?
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Unknown B
Or like, you know what? People don't like doing anything unless you have a gun to your head. And you know, I've been doing environmental programming since I started in media and nobody gives a. And you can see it now, now it's like, okay, our house is just burnt la, just burn. You know, you're having these crazy storms. Everyone's like, it's the government, it's the government, it's. The world is like, this is only the beginning and it's going to get worse. And there is no common that's been politicized right There will be another pandemic and half the people won't get vaccinated or what have you because it's been politicized, right? There's like, AI is going to happen and upset. AI is the all human endeavor done by machines. That's going to, if you study your Smith and Ricardo, that's going to have a lag of people going from.
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Unknown B
I'm like, I, you know, oh, the wine makers now have to be coal miners. Well, the wine makers don't have wine, coal. Well, there's a lag meaning people die. And so there's going to be a huge cultural lag until there's universal living wage or until there's something, you know, that happens. But the capitalist system is not very forgiving to a huge shift towards all human endeavor done by somebody that isn't a human, something that isn't even. So, look, massive shifts. And if we can't point to a commonality of facts and everything becomes politicized, then we're. And arguably we are. Next question.
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Unknown A
That's. That is a very, I think, important take. I think there's two ways to look at the shared facts. Problem number one is if we don't share facts and people are just going to argue and almost certainly the people are framing things not to get to a universally useful outcome. They're arguing and positioning things so that they can get their way. But the other is that the world actually does work in a certain way. Like physics are real. And if you understand the physics of money, if you understand the physics of climate, then you can actually navigate the world in, in a more useful way. But I find that there's a really fascinating tension and it's very interesting to hear you use almost a verbatim quote that I said this morning on the podcast that we'll be releasing tomorrow, which is that reality is the greatest reality show ever.
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Unknown A
And it just, everything that's happening is so crazy that it becomes a question of, okay, do we engage in this big game of politics or culture or whatever wrapper you want to put on it? Because it's entertaining and we just, it's, it's too fascinating not to engage with. Or, or is it that you can actually improve the direction of all of human civilization if you can get closer to what is actually true? Which of those do you feel a bigger pull towards when you, when you think of how to spend your professional time?
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Unknown B
I think it's both, I think, look, it's like, you know, we're sitting at this sort of thing, but like, like, if you look at Joe Rogan and you're like, okay, Joe Rogan sort of straddles both of those things, but became a sort of political kingmaker in the last election.
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Unknown A
Absolutely crazy. What he says ends up being so.
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Unknown B
Important, not only with Trump and, but like. And Elon and like, you know, all of it. And so I think that both of what you say is true. So you have the sort of people on the periphery who are doing the rally show part of it, but that you can get close enough to actually getting in. Like. Like RFK Jr. And Elon and all these people are on the periphery and now they're calling the shots. And if you look what's happening with Elon especially, you're like, holy. Like, it's kind of great, kind of crazy. And to go back to like, politicized, I mean, it brings into question a lot of things, which is, why do people believe what they believe? You know, and then you have to sort. And I look at myself and you know, like a lot of people in America, I'm sort of moving on my political spectrum and I'm like, why, you know, did I believe all that stuff?
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Unknown B
And if you're really introspective. I went to school in Canada and I think here they've done studies in like 80 or whatever, 90 are leftist and like 20 are Marxist. Or in Canada, like, everyone was a Marxist. I was a Marxist when I left. Really? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I was again, I was. I studied it. So my actual paper, my final paper was about how both capitalism, Smith capitalism and Marx and Engels communism were effectively the same thing. They were apologies for the industrial revolution and both wanted in the synthesis of communism was a sort of like very small government that. And the markets regulate themselves and people regulate themselves and then government, just a sort of infrastructural stuff. And so. But yeah, when I. When I was going to do my graduate work, I was like, you sort of went with a Hegelian guy.
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Unknown B
Hegel was pre marks and so very left and Canada very politically correct. But as a backlash to how politically correct Canada was, vice started because it was so stifling and there was so much censorship and we were punks. We're like, yeah, we're going to be different, but still coming from a place of hyper sort of political awareness. And then as you get older and you get more in the political game, you're like, holy, can you believe this stuff? And I think that was a big eye opener. But getting close to the political machine and Being able to move the. The needle. Look, that's a real thing, and that's a great question. So, I mean, I think both. And if you look at Joe, like, he's a perfect example.
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Unknown A
Yes. He's done a phenomenal job of the way he talks and engages with the world. He finds humor in the madness of it all. But he can so quickly switch to. But okay, this is really serious, and we actually have to talk about it.
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Unknown B
And he talks to everybody. Yeah. Which is big. Like, you can't talk to people on the right if you're on the left, and if you're on left, can't talk. Which I've learned. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Coming after you.
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Unknown B
Yeah. I think Vice was sort of leftist. I mean, Vice was a big thing. It was all kinds of things, but, like, Vice News, we tried to be centrist. And I remember, like, we had a lot of young people working for us. And you'd be the edit suite, and you'd be like, okay, you can't have the Democrat coming and be like, ah. And have Republican dumb, dumb. Like, music stings. Like, how they cut it. Like, everything.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
And we were always trying to shove it towards the center, but, you know, it was perceived as being very left. And then when I left, it got even more laughed and woke all. And so when I started doing change with that question, my whole thing is like, I love. One of my favorite things we ever did is I went to. We went to a prison with Obama. It was the first time seeing president went to prison, prison reform, blah, blah, blah. We wanted Emmy. So he gave me basically access to his presidency. Last six months to do it, to do a doc. And I was. Look, I was going to do a blowjob cream puff. Like, I shouldn't say those back to back, but like a cream puff by, like, peace.
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Unknown A
Like, this is getting worse by the second year.
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Unknown B
Shane, I love it. Freudian slip. Barry, I love you. No, he gave me this access to the White House. And. And like, again, I was just gonna do, like, a nice. You know, and he. All they would talk about was Republicans and Republicans. This is at the peak of the Tea Party and Speaker Boehner. And so I'm like, well, now you brought it up. So I now have to go talk all these guys. So I went to hang with speaker, who's a lovely cat, like, great guy. And so I just was hanging out with him, and he was a great guy. So I started hanging with Frank Lunc. He's a great guy. He's hanging out all these people and you realize, oh, like there's, there's this like Speaker Boehner got fired from his own party being speaker of the House for going to meet President Obama.
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Unknown B
And you're like, oh, that's your job. Sorry, cancer. Sometimes we get deplatformed for the salty language. That's your job to go see him. And so the Tea Party sort of ousted him just for even going. So what does that mean? It means that there's no consensus politics anymore. It means even if you go meet the opposite side, you can be kicked out just by meeting them, not by doing any deals with them. And that's where we are today. We're in a hyper galvanized into inactivity or even worse, we're going to go back and undo what you did during your presidency and, or House. So we're, what we're going to do is reverse everything that you guys did. And so we're in this bipartisan. Not bipartisan, partisan, Partisan, bipolar. There we go. I got it. Partisan, bipolar world near the country. Like they're over here, over here.
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Unknown B
And during that presidency was. That was when the Republicans say not one vote. So we're not going to give you one vote on any of your legislation.
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Unknown A
Yeah, that's super unhelpful.
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Unknown B
Correct.
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Unknown A
So, yeah, as I look at this stuff, I, because my content used to focus primarily on what I was called empowerment. So I'd worked in the inner cities. I had a thousand employees that grew up like hard in the inner cities. And I realized, oh, some of these guys are quite a bit smarter than I am. Their lives are going nowhere because I have a, a set of ideas that's just not useful in the real world. And so I said, look, I'll come in early, I'll stay late. I'll teach everything I know about entrepreneurship so you can control your own life. That ends up becoming impact Curate was me just really trying to see if people could take these ideas and run with them. And it was very distressing to see how few people do once they hit a certain age. But the people that did it had a similarly positive impact on their life.
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Unknown A
And what I call the 2 percenters ends up being this incredible journey for them to go on. But you begin to realize, okay, wait a second. Ideas matter. They matter a lot. Your frame of reference matters. It matters a lot. Depending on how you engage with the world, you can actually get it to move in a direction. And then just the more I've been in it, the more I kept like, getting closer and closer to like the Final line, which is politics and culture. And as I got there it became very much the community was like the initial community. I don't want to hear about this stuff, I don't want to talk about it. Everybody's tribed up to your point that if you're talking to the wrong person then people just feel betrayed. They don't want to ask of themselves, this thing I believe, when I act in accordance with that belief, does it make my life better or worse?
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Unknown A
They don't look at it just because it feels so good to have a team and to feel like, okay, the world's very complicated, I don't wanna have to parse it all. So just in my blue red team and then just give me all the download and then I'll know this is how I'm supposed to think about these different issues. And my thing, the reason that like you, I'm always trying to push my own thinking back to the center is it feels like the most useful place from which to pick the best ideas. Because if you tribe up now, you're no longer looking at an idea based on its ability to take you where you want to go. It's just, am I going to look to my left and right and be cheered on?
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Unknown B
That's an ideology.
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Unknown A
Exactly. And ideologies certainly lead to feeling good about being on your team. They lead to having a simple answer to very complex problems, but they don't lead to I know where I'm trying to go and this thing is actually going to get me there. Now do you have like a. When you think about being a centrist organization, looking at what's happening in the world, do you want that kind of outcome where it's like, hey, maybe things move slowly, but they do move. And so I want to give people the information that they need or is it something else?
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Unknown B
That's a great question. I want to go back to impact here for a second because you just spurred something on. And that's a great thing by the way, going to people and saying, hey, I'm going to give you all the tools that I had. And whether or not they take it or not, because I was always, I went from sort of being a, you know, hustler in Montreal, just like trying to make a media company work. All of a sudden you're in the stratosphere, everyone's billionaire, everyone's going to vote, everyone's going to plan and you know, there's like this knock on effect of you made money and now you're like a design genius because you know, your houses are nice, and, you know, you're, you're, you're a style guru because, you know, all of a sudden you know about clothes or you know about travel or where the coolest restaurants are and all these things.
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Unknown B
And, like, you know, is it because of the money? And you're in the right time, the right place with the right product now because you have money, it opens up your brain and confidence, and so you become a sponge and you learn and you learn and you learn, and other people aren't learning. So you do this. Or were you sort of predestined because of your brain to do all this, because you can figure out the systems of modernity, you know better than anybody else. That's a great thing. Someone should study. Like, what's the percentage of. If everyone's given the same tools? Because obviously rich people have kids, and those kids a lot of the time don't do well. In fact, the opposite. So that's just a very interesting thing. To go back to your direct question again, you're exactly right. So it's an ideology. I don't want to be an ideologue.
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Unknown B
I like to look at things critically and say, okay, look, you know, some people on the right have a great idea. Like, if you ever put a tax on anything, that tax is staying there forever. And. And it's never going. Like, we just need to tax it. Now for this one bridge, we just need to. You can go back and say in 1789, they needed to do a tax for wigs. It's still there, right? So I'm like, I'm not very. Like, the more tax you have, the harder everything becomes an economy. And look, the reason why this country is great is because people like, I'm an immigrant, come here, make money. So. But yet there are some things. Like, look, you can't walk around la. We were coming here today. There was these, like, sort of hipster rich guys over by the Chateau Marmont, and there was a dude naked, just jacking off on the street.
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Unknown B
And you're like. You're like, look, the. The homelessness situation, especially in la, is insane. And look, I don't know if that's because people are insane because of. You know, you don't see that in, like, Denmark. You know, like, there's got to be. So. So there's, there's points. But the problem is if you go too far to the right or too far to left to go back to, I think the left went way too far to the left, which is why you know, you have a huge move to the right because the left kind of up. And so, like, I like to look at both and say, what's the best of both? And I think you bring this up a lot on your podcast, is like, I want to be able to pick, you know, the best person and, or the best theory and. Or the best thing.
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Unknown B
You want a meritocracy. I'm exactly that way. And I think if you become an ideologue, you're. You're saying, I'm going to take 50 of the world and say, I'm not going to look at that. I think that's wrong. So I think, you know, you should be Switzerland. You should be. I'm going to take everything from all people. Yeah.
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Unknown A
My thing that hides in plain sight, that people seem to ignore for reasons I really cannot grasp, is that you can certainly chart a different course in your own life. You can probably sway culture more than you think, certainly if enough people are going in the same direction. But nobody, not nobody, but very few people take the time to say, I want to end up at exactly that place. And they'll have goals, but they'll be hopelessly vague. So I coach entrepreneurs, and I get that all the time. They say they know what they want, they'll give me an answer, and it's really vague.
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Unknown B
They don't be poor anymore.
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Unknown A
That honestly, sometimes it's that simple. Like, I want to make $500,000 this year. Rad. Doing what? So it's like they don't even have the specifics. It's crazy. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, I have good news for small business owners. Your days of scattered finances and wasted time are over. Say hello to Found, the last business banking platform you're ever going to need. With Found, you can effortlessly track expenses, manage invoices, and even find tax write offs all in one place. No more juggling multiple apps or spreadsheets. Plus, it's completely free to sign up. And small business owners absolutely love it. That's why found has over 30,000 five star reviews. With users saying things like Found is going to save me so much headache, it makes everything so much easier. Expenses, income, profits, taxes, even invoices. If you're ready to streamline your finances and get back to doing what you love, open a Found account for free at found.comimpact that's F O-U-N-.com impact to get started today.
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Unknown A
Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Piermont Bank MEMBER FDIC THE is a paid advertisement. And now let's get back to the show. If you have what I call the only belief that matters, that if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you'll actually get better, then it's like, I want to go there. I'm not good enough to get there yet, but I can get good enough. And then you start putting time and energy into that. But to answer your question about, okay, if everybody had the same skills, what would end up happening? I don't have the studies in front of me, but from what I see coming out of the scientific community, it's roughly 50, 50. So your outcomes are 50% based on your brain, your genetics. And then 50% is malleable and it's going to be culture and it's going to be all the things you do.
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Unknown A
And the bad news is that you can really fuck somebody up by raising them poorly. And like the first three years is all you need to just absolutely decimate them. And the example I always use is that the language centers of somebody's brain will either develop or not develop well based on the number of words that they hear by the age of it's either three or five. And they looked at kids in low income areas compared to people in the middle class and it was people in the middle class heard 5 million words by the time they were, let's say 3. And people in low income areas heard 3 million words by the time that they're 3. And then the ratio is the middle income kids heard 70% positive to 30% negative. And for lower income kids it was exactly reversed. And then when you take, because they were trying to answer the question like what is it that happens that leads a kid who grew up in the inner cities to effectively have an accent in a native language?
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Unknown A
And that was the big thing. The language centers of the brain do not develop as much as somebody who just hears whatever 40% more words, volume of words by the time they're three. And there are realities to be faced about the way brain, brain development happens. And so like you're able to make all these crazy connections up to like age 11 and then it starts pruning and then post 13, you're sort of on this downward trajectory until at 25, your brain is effectively done developing. People can argue the exact moment, but it's effectively done developing. Now it's still plastic, it can still change and go in any direction that you want. But most people don't because at that point they've Gotten all their early easy gains. They've set things like their vision of themselves, their vision of how the world works. They don't realize that those are decisions based on, oh, this ain't happened to me, and this is what it means.
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Unknown A
And they could change that story, but they probably won't. And then there are actual developmental things that are now baked in. And I had a guy on the show, Gabor Mate, and I said, gabor, you have two options before you. Option number one, a kid is raised unbelievably well up to the age of three. And then after that is just abused horribly until they're in, let's say, their early 20s versus somebody who is just absolutely in a terrible situation, bad parenting, neglected, abused, whatever, until they're three. But after three, they're in a loving relationship. They get highly educated. Which of those two has a better chance of having a positive outcome? And he said, it's the person that has the good first three years. Even though they're gonna go through some brutal stuff, they will have had things locked into the way that their brain developed that's gonna carry with them forever.
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Unknown A
Attachment styles and things like that is gonna carry. But if they have those first three years are just brutal, then they're really going to be in for a hard time. Now look, the, the, some of the stuff going on in charter schools proves that you, if you catch somebody at say, kindergarten, ish, you can still really change the trajectory of their life in a positive direction. But yikes it, there are just hard.
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Unknown B
Truths to be fixed. That's really interesting. Makes me feel kind of good about being a. Yeah, because. Yeah, just because the first three years you're like laser focused on the kid and you know, so you're like, oh, good, I got those three years. That's good. Because now I have two teenagers and they definitely don't want me to be laser focused on them.
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Unknown A
Yeah, but that is a, that's a whole thing also very predictable. And that I think that's one of the things that I am obsessed with. So going back to my initial question, I'd love to hear from you, the thing you think people should really look at. Because for me, when I think about, okay, what's the thing that matters most? If you're really trying to help people, you're trying to sway culture to a direction where my North Star is human flourishing at scale. So that's right. What do we do? What do we have to set up? I am a big proponent of. Some cultures are more effective at leading to Human flourishing. And therefore we should be adopting whatever works to get people there. And in trying to move people in that direction, I just come back to over and over and over the way that money works.
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Unknown A
And if you make it impossible for people to get economic progress, boy, oh boy, are you going to have all kinds of problems.
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Unknown B
Yes. Every time I come back to the States, I'm like, there's a lot of countries I don't know, I'm not don't pay me factually, but I would say 85 of countries. You don't get a kick at the can. Like, I'm like, oh, you know, I'm on my third kick at the can. Like I, you know, made a lot of them. And I was like, you know, if you have access to capital, like you can day trade and you can do stuff with crypto and you can do that. And whenever I come back, particularly from, you know, Southeast Asia, Africa, Middle east, but Europe, I mean, if you don't have the right name, the right accent, didn't go to the right school, you don't get a kick again. And it's pretty wild like that. You don't have any ability to move that socioeconomic ladder. And that's most of the world.
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Unknown B
So that's like when you, you write, I mean capitalism and hyper capitalism are the way that people who are smart and, or dedicated and, or you know, focused and, or, you know, who can figure out systems. Whatever it is, that's, that's where it happens. If you have any other type of, like going back to the Copenhagen. Copenhagen is lovely. It's great. It's a great city. Everyone has clean sheets, beautiful apartments, everyone's riding bikes and rosy cheeks. But like what's, what's coming out of Copenhagen? Like, you know, then you look at New York City, which is sort of dirty and effed up and you know, there's rats everywhere and there's poor poverty right next to extreme wealth. But it's the atomic engine of culture, man.
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Unknown A
So yeah, it's a value judgment on those. What do you mean is one better than the other?
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Unknown B
Well, I think it's, look, coming from Canada, it's two different ideas. So yes, I was about to say no, but coming from Canada, Canada is really a cut off the tall trees, you know, country culturally. And there's a joke, there's an American fisherman and a Canadian fisherman. They're standing on the border and they have two buckets and boat buckets. There's lobsters in the. Lobsters are coming over the edge of the Canadian fisherman's bucket. And the American fisherman says, the Canadian fisherman, hey, you're gonna lose your lobsters there. Going over the edge of the bucket. He doesn't look back. He goes, no, they're Canadian lobsters. His friends are pulling back in. So one of the reasons why we left Canada was because of that. It's like, really, like, everyone just be a B minus. And. And if you wanted to polish the turd to become an A plus, there was not a lot of incentive.
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Unknown B
And in fact, there was disincentive. And if you were arrogant and you said, we're gonna be the biggest in the world, we're gonna be the best, we're gonna do, you were kind of like, you know that Shane is a bit of a braggart, you know, And. Whereas when you came to New York, it's, like, the hardest city to get to, but it's also the hardest city to stay in, and also the hardest city to like. Like, everyone's having a hard time, so they have to be smart and tough and amazing and have story, and to climb that ladder is even harder. So it's like you're playing, you know, NFL, super bowl football every day in New York, and then you go to, like, any other country, and they're just tossing around in the backyard, and you're like, I can really do this in my sleep.
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Unknown B
And we've noticed that, like, when you're. When you're baptized by fire in New York and you go to Europe, Europe is a very weak market, and. And sort of five to 10 years behind, and you can get in there and really, you know, we're gonna get a lot of comments from Europe and Canada about those statements. But, yeah, it's brutal, but it's like a gladiator war. Like, it's like Conan on the wheel of pain. Like, he pushes and he becomes a pit fighter. It's a gladiator. I mean, like, gladiator. He has to. He fights as a gladiator for whatever the. This five years, of course he's gonna be like, he's gonna fight Caesar. I mean, like, he's like. Because he's a gladiator now, like, that became his special skill set. So if you're in New York, you're learning all these special skill sets that nobody else is learning.
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Unknown B
But is it hard? Yeah, it's hard. But, like, at the end of it, you're like, now I can go up against anybody.
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Unknown A
So right now feels like that moment. So we, at least in America, we have been regulating the life out of everything. Things are moving in the wrong direction. People were feeling like they couldn't even speak. And obviously we had, with the election of Donald Trump, a huge sort of release from that pent up energy. And what do you think about that? When you look at how fast they're moving, the move fast, break things, the make big cuts, we can always add it back later. Are you energized by that or do you think, ooh, gents, we gotta slow down a little here?
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Unknown B
I mean, I think it's hard not to be energized. I think like I said, the sort of American political system was sort of galvanized into inactivity and because of the non sort of, you know, working together, you know, polarization, it became just unbearable and unbearable, politically unbearable for media. You know, everything became propaganda. Like the right has propaganda, the left has propaganda. The left doesn't know that it's propaganda is propaganda. You know, and I think that that came out, which is good. I think that's a good thing. I think doing stuff is good. I think, look, there was a lot of, you know, out there in the world and now at least if you're moving to one side, you can say, is it right or is it wrong? And by the way, the Democrats will have their, you know, their time just to Chuck Spears.
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Unknown B
But if it works, boy, oh boy, if it works. You know, I remember when Obama got in, they were doing demographics and they're like, okay, because of Denzy and millennials, just like the baby boomers were the largest cohort and now it's going to be millennials. And so there might never be a Republican president again because it's just young people vote. And now you're like, I mean, is there going to be a Democrat? Like they have done such a terrible job of building their bench and coming up with hard hitting political slogans and, you know, cultural zeitgeist moments and Joe Rogan moments and they just, I mean, they just did a terrible job. And to the victor go the spoils. Also, I think, look, I think a lot of people are going to go back to the center of the Nixonian great center, the silent majority.
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Unknown B
A lot of people were pissed. Like a lot of people were just sitting there going, come on dude, what is this now? Why is this now everywhere? Why does this become what everybody's talking about, this thing like we have bigger fish to fry here. And so I think that there is kind of a release of people going, okay, let's focus on these big things that matter. Like, I was Listening to you talking about this. But the sort of unbelievable. I saw go back to taxation, but the unbelievable waste that in the Pentagon, like, you know, they're finding out. So I've been reporting on, you know, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan for, you know, I've been going to Afghanistan for 20 years and I used to get all these scoops. And being Afghanistan, where do you get your stories about all the waste? I was like, sigur, the American appointed congressional appointed Secretary General for the investigation of Afghanistan, the American government knows it's happening.
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Unknown B
They know that trillions of dollars are going out the window and that's your money. And so for me, like, look, that's. America should be frustrated. Like the Pentagon just spending nearly a trillion dollars a year with no audits. I mean, that's crazy. And having Elon go there and say, hey, we should be able to do have an audit. I mean, I saw a thing that John Stewart did and the head of the DoD was like, giving him shit for like saying that, you know, they should do an audit. And then he just did this thing where he was like, okay, I'm not a, you know, a specialist, but I'm a human being who's on the earth. And you get a trillion dollars and can't tell me where any of that money goes. No. So I think there's a lot of common sense that people are waking up going, thank God.
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Unknown A
Why do you think, though? Because I would read that as, at a minimum, political figures and media figures on the left are screaming bloody murder, trying to get every judicial interruption that they can get. Is that corruption come home to roost? Is what is that?
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Unknown B
I'll ask you. I don't know. I mean, the USAID stuff is interesting because you don't know what's true. I mean, why is political getting USAID money? I don't know. I, like, look over, like, that's crazy. Like, were they buying stories? I mean, I don't know. Like, that's, I'd like to know. I mean, that's interesting. You know, were there slush funds for money coming back? I don't know, but it looks interesting. I mean, if that's the amount of corruption that's going on in usaid, which is comparatively small, can you imagine, like the Pentagon, which is, I mean, 80% of our budget? 70. I mean, it's lots of money. And by the way, they can't. And it's so big that they, they say they can't audit it. And you're like, why? I mean, that's our Money. So I think that's good. I think there has to be some sanity.
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Unknown B
I, yeah, I don't understand the narrative, like what soapbox you're going to stand on. Because if you're going to stand on, no, we don't want the Pentagon to be audited. That's a hill you're going to die on politically and you should die on it. And look, rooting out corruption and waste in government, if you're going to say no, we shouldn't be doing that, then you should look at your electorate, should look at. You should tell that to your voters. Yeah, definitely.
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Unknown A
Alarm bells going off. All right, so the new show is Shane Smith has questions. How do you decide what question you're going to pursue? Because when you go down a rabbit hole, like you go pretty far. So it's going to be a pretty big time investment for you.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
How do you pick?
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Unknown B
That's a great question too. You should do this for a living. The idea was during the last election, social media, which I'm fascinated by and has become media, social media was sort of informing, especially the Republican side like questions and policy and narrative. Like immigration for example. Big one. And so I'm like, nobody's reporting on it like reporting on the social media, like so no one's looking at it like investigative journalists and saying, okay, where's this coming from? Like immigration was the big one. Like on this side you had literally like gates opening and people flying across the gate. And I said this on Rogan and by the way, I still get like thousands of comments. There was no gate that was open and people running through like that was, you know, two miles before, two miles after border, whatever. There were people coming and giving themselves up and then they get released into America which is open border versus being sent back to Mexico now.
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Unknown B
And so you get into it. But the, the Republicans have done such a great job of saying open borders and you know, the criminals and all that stuff and keep hammering and hammering it, hammering. And the Democratic response is, well, it's kind of nuanced and sort of like 80 to go back to facts. 80 of the people are showing up for their education and the Republicans are saying 90 never show up and it was illegal immigration versus legal immigration. And when you get into it, it's just insanely complex thing. But the Republicans had sort of boiled it down to something they can hammer that people believed in their bones. Even if it wasn't true, they still believe it's go back to doesn't matter if it's true. And The Democrats couldn't come up with response, and it's one of the big reasons they lost the election.
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Unknown B
And none of it was true. And so we. Parts of it were true on both sides.
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Unknown A
You can get more DMs.
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Unknown B
Yeah, well, parts of it were true, but, like, open borders is not what people think now. Illegal immigration versus legal. We don't have any legal immigration. It's like 85, 000 people a year or something. It's nothing. So we have to increase legal immigration, decrease illegal immigration. It's very complicated and very nuanced, whatever. But we don't have gates where just people. The gate opens and people run through. There's no gate. Right. And so that's when I started saying, okay, let's talk to people. This is no fact. So let's go talk to the border guards, let's go talk to the Homeland Security. Let's go talk to the sheriffs who are reporting that, you know, people from Senegal are coming in, like, straight out of Africa who are paid by the UN literally with UN credit cards. And you're, okay, let's just go ask questions. Because these stories are crazy.
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Unknown B
And so what happened was basically what you think would happen, which is half the stories were, there's a gate through. And then the other half were like, there's no gate. And what happened was we started releasing them into America versus releasing them to Mexico because Mexico Supreme Court said it's unconstitutional for us to release other people from other countries into Mexico. And now Trump came in and said, well, how do you take them? Or tariff. Tariff. Tariff. Tariff.
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Unknown A
Apparently the most beautiful word in the.
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Unknown B
English up until now. We'll see.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's so.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
You see something that people. It is a consequential issue, but people do not yet understand what's really going on.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So I think we do a deep dive.
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Unknown A
Take immigration. Did you walk away from that being like, okay, I now have an understanding enough that I can. Like, if I were asked, I could at least give an opinion on what I think should be done. Or is it like, hey, I make the facts available to the world and what they do is what they do?
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Unknown B
I mean, yes and no. I think, you know, I went on Rogan and I was halfway through shooting it, and I knew sort of that there weren't gates and stuff, because I've been reporting on the board for 20 years, but I wasn't sort of fully, you know, up to speed as I am now. It's going to be an ongoing story. So, you know, ICE is going to become a huge thing. Who goes, who stays is going to be a huge thing. It's. That's going to become a very nuanced story and interesting because it's not going to be Operation Wet Back, I. E. You know, back in Eisenhower, just like everybody goes, you know, and so that's going to be an interesting space to watch. There needs to be comprehensive immigration reform. What's interesting is if you look at it, you know, the immigration God was Reagan, ironically, and, and the Democrats were anti immigration because they were the party.
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Unknown A
Of the unions back and forth so much. It's crazy.
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Unknown B
And so now I think there needs to be bipartisan, like you have to. There has to be legal immigration. I mean, if you look at Japan, you look at all they're offering, you know, all kinds of incentives and has our Europe, you know, to people to come in because we need people and we're not replacing fast enough. We need, you know, people to come in and be capitalists who want to work and make money and live the American dream. That's America. That's the basis of America. But it has to be legal. I'm a legal immigrant, like and. But what happened was everyone was applying for asylum and everyone doesn't deserve asylum. You can say, I want to come and have, like, make money economically and there should be something for that. But, you know, everyone was saying, yeah, I'm going to be beaten or killed or whatever in my country.
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Unknown B
Which, you know, a lot of the time wasn't true. So there has to be sort of comprehensive reform, legal immigration. The border can't be a question mark. Even if it's not true, it can't be a question mark. You can't just have it dividing America, people 50, 50. So it has to be controlled. And I think both sides realize, I think it has to be controlled. And that's just going to be going forward. That has to happen and on either side. And I mean, you're going to be hard pressed even as a Democrat to say no. Just.
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Unknown A
And they really tried for four years. That was the effective design. Well, so let's argue that point. So when I look at a complex thing like the border, I say to myself, the result of a system is the effective design of that system. It may be what they set out to do, but it is the effective design. And I think the reason people think of it as an open border though, I get the nuanced linguistical reality of ah, there would first have to be like a hard thing for it to be open. But What I think people are emotionally trying to convey is there are a lot of people coming across the border one way or the other. They're no longer being shoved away. They're being allowed in whatever way you want to talk about it, and they feel some kind of way about that.
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Unknown A
Now, my thing is, you've got to go back and ask the bigger question, which is, why do they feel some kind of way about this thing? Because I think that the picture actually gets far more complicated, but it really does have to be simplified into a thing that people can understand. So a phrase I never thought I'd be saying a lot, but I find myself saying all the time now is the dao that can be named is not the eternal dao. So it's from a book called the Dao de Jing, written 2,300 years ago. Whatever. And what he was getting at, the dao means the way, so translates as the path that can be explained is not the actual path. And the second you put words to it, it's no longer actually literally true. But if it's the thing that allows people to get the gist and to sort of understand where this goes, then it's like you can begin to unwind all of this stuff.
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Unknown A
Because, man, my thing is, all right, I want to look out at the future of America, and I want to see something good for the people. Okay? Now we have to define what good is human flourishing. We have to find what that is. I'll round everything to the ability to make progress towards an honorable goal, just to, like, keep it as simple. Again, as simple as possible. But now you get into, okay, people feel some kind of way because they can't make economic progress, and they don't understand why. And so, oh, I can't. My parents, in their 20s, had access to way more house than I can get. You know, they. It cost them, like, a matchstick and a piece of chewing gum to get a house. And then. Exactly. So they're just like, what's happening? Oh, what's happening is people are flooding over the border.
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Unknown A
Okay, problem. And so going back to the initial debate of is this what's really happening or not? My thing is the effective design of the border right now is that a lot of people are coming over the border in a way that's very noticeable, in that you could send. And many social influencers were podcasters, whatever, Going down to the daring gap, seeing that's happening, reporting on it, showing what was going on, and then conspiracies then run wild. And so now it's like, well, hold on with the thing. I can see with my own eyes and capture on my own camera. I can see that many people are entering the country. And so if, and I think this is exactly what happened. If the Democrats or anybody else tries to get people on a technicality to not believe their lying eyes, then it's like you just start hemorrhaging credibility.
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Unknown B
They fail. Yeah, the Democrats in the last election, Republicans are saying the border's chaos and it's bad and there are criminals coming, there are lots of drugs coming. There are things happening. People come from all over the world and Democrats didn't have response. And one of the major reasons they lost the election, that's one of them. Because they didn't have. And you hit the nail on the head which it doesn't matter to go back to our. Because we're so good at this. We're gonna go back to the original thing is, is it doesn't matter what the truth is, but the perception is the reality. And you're exactly right in that. Look, economically I'm not where I want to be. There's a lot of reasons for that thing. Immigration can be blamed on a lot of those things. Now we always, I mean it's easiest political tool it's been done since there's been politics.
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Unknown B
Well, it's not as it's them, but there are problems. And, and you're saying, look, there's problems. And my tribe is saying that my problems are caused by those people, which some of them are and some of them aren't, but some of them are. And so you have to address that and you can't address it with sort of namby pamby wishy washy. Well, it's kind of. A lot of them do come to adjudication and we give them a phone and they come and maybe they get some money, but maybe they don't. And you're like, okay, dude, like you can't do that. Like you have to hammer and by the way, you have to solve the problem. So that's what you get paid to do. So you have to at least try to solve it or at least say that you're gonna solve it. And I mean, ironically, in the last year before the election, they shut down all like he had executive orders, Biden to shut down everything and all of the way stations and were empty and they started saying everyone else's and they couldn't even get that, you know, message out there.
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Unknown B
They just failed miserably at that. At that. And now so you have to have comprehensive reform and you have to control the border, which probably means ironically, building some sort of wall that people can't get through around. Yep. Yeah.
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Unknown A
As you look at the future of America, somebody you've traveled all over and I've heard you say, like, when you travel, you really get a sense of what America is.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
When you look at the future of America, what do you see? Where are we going?
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Unknown B
I think we've lost Africa to China.
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Unknown A
Whoa.
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Unknown B
Well, I mean, I don't think. I know you can talk, you remember about that, but I spent a lot of time in Africa and it's all Chinese. I think America is number one, China's number two. That will change at some point. I don't know when.
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Unknown A
China number one.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Economically or international?
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Unknown B
Sure. Because if you look at when America became the hegemonic power, it was post World War II. We had just a bigger market. We were like 4x the market of UK, which up until then was one third of the world's landmass and was just the economic powerhouse, but we just had a bigger domestic market. We had manufacturing, we had, you know, population, we had space. Right. And so just mathematically, England could not compete. And also we had modernity. We had the new factories and they had Manchester and Liverpool and we had like, you know, Detroit. We can see where this is going. China now has obviously, whatever it is, a 3x domestic market to us. They have the manufacturing, they have. Britain built the rule, which is you get the stuff, you get the trees from Canada, you get the cotton from India, you bring it to England and then you sell it to everybody.
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Unknown B
Right? So you get manufacturing and you get the sale, manufactured goods. Then America really did a great job of exporting America. I mean, we're probably the best at it. And then now China is going from an internal, you know, everything is about China to now external. So they need the raw materials. And so they went to Africa, for example. Not just Africa, they went to the world. But. And saying, okay, if you're a dictator, you know, we don't give a. About human rights. Like, America's gonna at least, you know, make you pay. And oh, by the way, here's a lot of technology, facial recognition technology, all kinds of stuff to keep your people in line. And by the way, you want to build a, like a super stadium to celebrate yourself named after you, Fine. Instead of a railway, fine, we'll build you that. And by the way, if you can't price back, that's no problem either.
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Unknown B
You just give us your uranium for the next 30 years. So they're just winning, but they're just, they're trading better than America. And so that, by the way, that has, it's not just trade because, you know, every hotel you go to is like, it's, it's culture once the, once they get there. I mean, Gramski said that if you can export your culture and not your troops, that's when you won Gram Shed. When he said, like Coca Cola, Hollywood, Marlboro. Well, China's doing that now and so for the next few generations. So like, if you look at, there's, there is a cold war going on now between China and America that's going to increase. And the quantum slash AI. I mean, just happened whatever two weeks ago when they're like, here, we're going to give you open source AI for free. That's maybe as good, if not bad for open source.
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Unknown B
And I was talking to Mark and Visa about this and what's interesting about that is at the time where we have been basically saying we're going to control AI and government's going to control it and we're not going to, you know, open source. And China is saying we're going to open source and give it to the world. You're like, oh, what? America's saying we're going to put dampers on it and China's saying we're going to open source. Yeah, the future of everything. So that just goes to show you. And there is some question as to whether or not that's not the CCP saying that. So to me, that's wildly interesting that China's taking the high road on tech and AI. And when quantum comes, when quantum comes, it's going to be quantum AI and that's going to revolutionize. It's going to like, if you think there's to go back to your philosophy of all like humans picking themselves in the mud, that's going to be a big one because quantum AI is going to further differentiate.
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Unknown B
It's going to be like super, super smart people over here doing crazy things that nobody knows what the hell's going on and people eating mud. And like, that's going to be, that's going to be like, that's gonna be a big one. That's gonna be a real wealth redistribution. And it's gonna be. Right now it's gonna be two countries.
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Unknown A
When you look at that future, what, what are you most excited about?
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Unknown B
I mean, I think tech can solve the majority of our problems, which is interesting. And I think, look, you can die and go like if I thought that environmentally like what we're seeing now, my kids are like driving through their neighborhoods that are gone from the fire, from the fires and you're like, they had Covid and they're actually growing up ironically. Like I talked to other dads especially, but you know, like, oh, our kids are, you know, we used to grow up tough and we were having sort of, you know, Gen X and latchkey kid and we just went out until the dark and lived in the forest and you know, Raft would. It was like stand by me every day and you'd come back like I lived, you know, I remember it well. And our kids are so weak. And then you're like actually like you grew up during COVID And then there's fires and there's environmental things create chaos and all stuff.
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Unknown B
They're kind of learning.
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Unknown A
Are they getting tougher or are they getting more anxious?
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Unknown B
You learn how to cope with it or you don't. But I mean you learn how to cope with it and that's makes you stronger. And I see my kids sort of getting stronger, being able to adapt to that. I never thought they would. So environmentally I would be very sad to leave this world to my kids because it's going to get worse and it's going to be bad. Like, I mean sea level rise is going to be a big, big issue for them and all the things that that entails. Like we think immigration is bad now to go back to immigration. If we don't get our together now when, you know, we have two feet of sea level rise, which means a third of the population is moving somewhere, then it's going to be really bad. So we better get our shit together. But tech is going to be like, there's like we didn't have those solutions before.
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Unknown B
Like we didn't have. Even now we can look at like cloud seeding or ship tracks or geoengineering also, which now seems stupid and whatever rudimentary. But like anything, it's going to get better. And we didn't even have that like when I came out of school, by the way. There's no. Nothing changed when I came to school. My first job was for Greenpeace. And I'm like, yeah, we're screwed. Like, I've already lived in the biggest house and the biggest. I've joined the biggest circuses. My parents. Like, we have to stop doing all this stuff. Nobody stopped doing anything and it got worse and it's going to continue to get worse. So we're not going to stop using fossil fuels. We're just not. So tech has to change things and, and geoengineering eventually, you know, we're going to find some stuff that hopefully works. So I think tech is going to be like what we've seen hitherto is nothing compared to AI and quantum.
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Unknown B
It's going to be more long steroids.
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Unknown A
What do you think about it from impact on people losing their jobs, the way the kids interact with the world. What do you, how do you perceive.
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Unknown B
That that's a problem? So to go back to Smith and Ricardo, the reason why communism exists is because during the Industrial revolution, if you want to go in Marxist dialectics, go. Marxist dialectic is very simple and I love it because I love history. But it's basically you always have to increase production, humanity has to increase production. So it used to be horizontal. So if you want more carrots, you have to go get more land and labor. Which is why humanity was just continual warfare. Because if I want more carrots, I'd have to come take your carrots, right? So that's just how you get more carrots. So it was warfare all the time, just fighting, fighting. I want your carrots, you want my carrots. It's why we have castles. It's basically the whole of human existence is around keeping my carrots from you.
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Unknown A
Carrots, man.
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Unknown B
Then it goes to, you know, vertical production, which is technology, Industrial revolution. And so everyone went from farming carrots to like, now you have to learn how to make cotton, gin, things work or fabrics or. And most of the people knew how to make a carrot by planting the seed in the ground. And then all of a sudden they moved to these horrible cities and had horrible jobs and made no money. And very few people made a lot of money and a lot of people didn't make any money was so bad that people said, wait, if we do this, we're going to have a dystopian world of very few people being rich, everyone else eating coal and garbage. And by the way, it was that, you know, for a while and then tech got better, tech got better, we started getting more people and you know, education, healthcare, all the things you talk about giving about your kids, like, like really that's a very modern way of thinking.
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Unknown B
And so now if you look at it, that's going to go like through the roof. And that's going to happen because of capitalism. I think it's the best system for that. However, will masses of people be left in the slums of London? You know? Yes. I mean, there's going to be, there's going to be, you know, instead of the slums of the London East End or the Gorbels in Scotland or all these places, there's going to be arguably continents that won't participate in that. Upside, there's going to be heavily populated areas. I mean if you look at climate change, but like something like 20% of Bangladesh which is all at sea level has had to move from the coast into like mega slums which are now like 30, 40 million people are slums in Bangladesh, which is not enjoyable. And that's. They make the slums of London in the turn of the century look like, you know, Paris in the 20s.
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Unknown B
So that's going to be a problem for sure. And smart people like yourself or I mean, I think this is why Silicon Valley is like, you know, universal living wage or whatever the new acronym for it is is. They realize that because you know, there's gonna be Quantum and AI and then there's gonna be dudes with AK47s and the new currency is going to be bullets. And if you don't have some sort of solution to that. And we see it already, I mean like if you look at, we've grown up in a period of non conflict and non war and stuff, but the war that we do have is sort of the war of ignorance where you have a lot of people who are illiterate being told what to believe by imams, what have you. And they grow up with a collision of coffee sand and then we come in with drones and it's, that's the disparity in the war that's happening.
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Unknown B
And if you look forward to mass, hundreds of millions of people being displaced by environmental degradation and then super rich big brain people with quantum things and then they're just going, well, I have to feed my kids. I mean that, that could be, that could be the, that could be a problem. Let's be. Unless we do something to fix that. I mean you see it happening in Europe right now.
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Unknown A
The. Well, what do you see happen in Europe right now?
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Unknown B
I mean you have sub Saharan Africa, which is conflict and poverty.
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Unknown A
Right. Flooding into Europe.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And basically like I'm so screwed. Like for example, if you go to study immigration in Europe, it's a different ball game. But what they'll do is they'll have like a boat and inflatable and they'll have like 50 people in the boat and they, they put a knife into the boat. Because in maritime law if you catch a boat, you take the boat back but if the people are in the water, then you have to take them. Right. So I mean, it's become super sophisticated and by the way, life threatening. And for you to sort of pop about like in the middle of Mediterranean, it has to be pretty bad. Right. And so people are coming and it's, it's now it's causing huge, I mean, from national. In France, you know, in England it's massive political upheaval, obviously in Italy, huge political upheaval. This is like a trickle.
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Unknown B
Like imagine when there's a drought and you know, you know, it reaches above 15 sub Saharan Africa for three years in a row. What's going to happen when it's not a trickle, it's a flood. Yeah.
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Unknown A
It seems like you're now onto another problem, which is integration. So this is when you look at. I haven't ever had a chance to speak directly with Douglas Murray, but I've read his work and the whole idea of the strange death of Europe and people not recognizing that culture matters and that if people are coming into your country and they're not assimilating, then you're going to lose what you think of as your country. But then for the last however many years you've been called a bigot if you brought that up. Going back to the idea of traveling makes you look very differently at your own country. I'm a total Japanophile. And so going to Japan and literally just seeing Japanese as far as the eye can see, it is not a multicultural place. You will literally see the occasional American person.
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Unknown B
But boy, oh boy, much more so now than before. Like when we prefer. I don't know when you started going, but when it was nobody.
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Unknown A
I have no doubt. Yeah. When you say much more, it's still like just radically outnumbered now. Their birth rate is so low. That's going to change. Korea is basically not going to exist. But my, my whole thesis on all this stuff is I think AI is going to bring about as close to a technological utopia as you're going to get. But it's on the other side of a horrific amount of upheaval. And I'll call it pockets of violence. I, that, that literally is just an act of faith. Cause I can certainly paint a picture where it gets very dire very fast with a lot of weapons and a lot of bloodshed. But I'll, I'll call it pockets of violence as a, an act of faith. That will figure something out. But nature just does not care about any one generation. So even if the long arc of history bends towards justice.
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Unknown A
There are still people that put 20,000 people on pikes as a way of scaring off an invading army like that, just the way it is. Read about Genghis Khan long enough and you're real fast gonna be like, yo, humans are capable of tremendous evil. Like, it is insane. But also from said tremendous evil comes the Silk Road and the uniting of the world and incredible trade. And so it's like, I, I don't know what to do with that. But I think that if we can get on the other side of all of that, then you've got an opportunity where AI can really help people all over the world. Because one thing I learned working in the inner cities is that intelligence is more or less evenly distributed. Intelligence meaning the ability to process raw data. We'll get back to the show in just a sec, but first, let's talk about the business.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
So no matter where I drop you off in the world, you can find that kid. It's just like ridiculously smart. You're like, whoa, like, what's going on here? Now, whether they have an outlet or they have access to any of that information, they will have a mind that just can process the data. And so if you're able to get into everybody's hands, open source AI, I mean, you've got not only deep Seq, which is the model from China that you're talking about, but you've got Llama coming out of Meta here in America. They're all open source. So those things are already out. Like, there's no putting that cat back in the bag. So that is going to proliferate like crazy. You've got guys like Imod Mosstack, who his whole mission in life is to build what he calls universal basic, either computer intelligence. I forget how he phrases it, but, like, making sure that everybody, everywhere in the world has access to that compute so that they can push themselves forward, that they can be an island of one to not need a strong educational infrastructure, that they can learn the information.
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Unknown A
Now, how you get out from under a bad culture becomes a totally different question. Which answers the question, why do impact the way that I do now? Because culture matters so much that if you don't paint a picture for people that they can grab onto and say, okay, I get it. This is how we have to behave in order to end up in that space that we want to end up. And I admittedly don't have an answer for scaling culture. Uh, this would be a very different podcast if I were, you know, in a country that was ruled by a despot.
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Unknown B
Sure.
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Unknown A
Um, doing it here, it's like, that's ultimately what I'm looking for, is for people to be capped only by their work ethic, their curiosity, and, as much as I hate it, their intellect.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And if you can at least create that scenario, you're still gonna have very unequal outcomes. Just because that 50% of us is hardwired, there's nothing you can do about it. But if we can get to that situation now, we've got a shot for people to really get ahead. But this is why, to me, truth does matter. And the reason that truth matters is I think it is it. It exists. It's known as physics. Virtually everything we think of as truth is interpretation. But if you can have some sort of metaphor, like, for me, it's, I have a black bag in front of me. There's an object inside of that black bag. We're all wearing mittens, but we can reach our hands in and try to feel what this object is. And I'm going to do it and get my own opinion, but I'm going to ask you to do it.
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Unknown A
I'm going to ask Eric to do it. Like, everybody's going to come in and try to figure out what this thing is wrong. I'm going to talk about this, what I think. Is this what you think it is? And I'm sure as hell not going to tell you to shut up because you think it's something different than I think it is. I'm going to try to triangulate on what it really is based on all the different feedback that I'm getting, because understanding what is true allows you to predict the outcome of your actions. And once you can predict the outcome of your actions, I'll make this very tangible to anybody that can hear my voice right now. If you're wondering why you can't get ahead financially, the punchline is that your money's been inflated to nothing. And if you don't own assets, there's no way to win that battle.
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Unknown A
You will lose and you will get poor every day unless you're. You have a job that gives you a raise that outstrips which just isn't gonna happen. So you must own assets. The vast majority of humanity doesn't understand that, but that's one of the truths inside of this black bag that, oh, I now understand it. I didn't understand it two or three years ago. And so through this podcast, I have managed to grope on this thing enough with enough other really smart people to be like, okay, here's a piece of the puzzle. Now you can actually go do something with that information. We can start building this shared future. But it really, like, I did not think I would ever talk about politics. I could not escape it. It was a fucking track to me because I didn't ever think I would talk about finance.
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Unknown A
But Covid hit, and literally when Covid hit, I was like two or three years out of having had the thousand employees, I grew up in the hood. And I was like, oh, damn, everything's going to get closed. Those guys are living hand to mouth. They're going to get obliterated. But I didn't understand money printing. And so I started doing all this financial content takes off, highest performing content. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. But then you learn about money. You're like, wait a second, this is how I thought money worked. And so you just start asking the next question, the next question, the next question, and you're just like tumbling down the rabbit hole. And all of a sudden you understand why the rich get richer and poor get poor. And it's like, wait, these are explainable things that anybody can do something about, but they don't understand it.
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Unknown A
And I think that people use complexity to hide the ball to make it a game that's not only rigged, but that is. Has a. Like the way that they use legalese to make sure lawyers have a job. People make money sound complicated as a way to make sure that they keep getting to take advantage of the weird.
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Unknown B
Way that they're the scribes of modernity. Lawyers, you have to get one. You have to have one. Yikes. Just the language. Yikes.
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Unknown A
The good news is AI I think is going to make most of that go away.
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Unknown B
That would be good because we need to reform in this country. To go back to your bag and thing in the bag, that's Plato's cave, which is so you're, you're in good company. Where we're chained by ignorance and so we see shadows because of this fire. But if we can break the chains of ignorance and go through the fire, we have the courage, then we actually see the real thing, which is sort of good. The other thing I was thinking is if you go and give everybody the AI, and that's Andreessen, Andreessen's utopian positive. And he's like, if you give everyone an AI assistant, then you know, the smart people and the people who use it and the people who are going to use this thing to climb the ladder and et cetera, et cetera. What I think is interesting is there's always been 10 of the population that just can't do it.
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Unknown B
They just can't navigate, not even modernity. They couldn't navigate it in 1642, they couldn't navigate in 1942, they can't navigate it now. And there's just always been 10. 10 is just the number. And I think the. I think you're right. Like you can go now, today and you can get Harvard professors, Oxford, whoever, the top. You can get Einstein. You know, you can get everything online. You can get the best education you can possibly get. If you're a little bit diligent and, and, and learn how to sort of search. Well, there's probably products that can do that for you. In fact, I know there's products that can do that for you. So that's. We're one step away from having the best of all educations, like all that you can have. And it'll just be, how many people do you think will avail themselves of the greatest education you can possibly get?
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Unknown B
Better than any university, better than Harvard, better than Oxford. Because it's like the best professors from every. How many people? 20% on the outside.
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Unknown A
Sure, it's generous, but yeah, yeah, let's.
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Unknown B
Say 15 to 20%. Okay. Why?
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Unknown A
Really want to know?
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Okay. So this is the complex interplay of level of intelligence and culture. So given that there's very little you can do to impact like your true level of intelligence, pre neuralink and things like that, which are way closer than people think, and then personality. So if we are All a role of 120 sided die. And that's like, what's your level of curiosity? What's your rate of processing data? Like on and on and on. How easy. There's a thing the brain called the basal ganglia which allows you to switch gears. So some people, if you've ever met somebody that just, they can't shake a trauma or they can't shake a slight, that somebody didn't just become obsessed with, like I've got to get back or whatever, that person has a hard time shifting gears so they get locked in. All those things matter. And so we are all something like that.
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Unknown A
It's probably more like 10,100 sided dice, but you get the idea. And given that distribution, you will always get wildly uneven outcomes. Now 20 is the percentage of people that just go all in. There are still people that, they're using it to tremendous advantage and it will make their life way better. But it is terrifying that that 10% number exists. That they are, they are definitionally, I don't mean this as a slight. They are definitely definitionally morons. And so they're never going to be able to navigate the world. And so their only hope is either genetic engineering or brain implants. And we'll see. But yeah, until something changes at the genetic level or the interface level, it's going to be wildly uneven.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And I think that to go once. It's worse than that, Jim, he's dead. Because it's, it's just the baseline is 10. But when you start adding in this Moore's law on steroids, when you start adding in AI and, and quantum and all of these things, the understanding, not just the understanding, but the ability to apply these things to real world, you know, actions that, that uplift you either intellectually or monetarily. That's gonna like, it's, it's paint me a picture.
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Unknown A
Think like a sci fi writer for me.
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Unknown B
Yeah, well, I was just saying that the other day. We need like, like really good, like remember was it Gibson in the 80s? Yeah. Like, like you know, predicted all the stuff or you had to predict where the nerds read it and then made it because they read it. I want knowing all the stuff like we know now to have like someone like a very, a futurist Gibson to be like, here's what it's going to look like, what it could look like. Because he was even back in the day talking about neuralink and stuff, which we were like, you're crazy. And all the stuff he's talking about Anyway, I think one of the books name is Nervous. I don't know, someone was in love with a like a AI AI hologram, like made up person and like all this like, like the, the. I'm not gonna say the platforms because I want in trouble but like there's all these AI porn things of like people in Japan.
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Unknown B
Speaking of our favorite place, Japan. Crazy right? You're gonna fall in love with any AI and spike to the movie her and you know, I probably don't know.
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Unknown A
Your history with him, but we get to that later.
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Unknown B
Yeah, great guy. But, and, but yeah, he, he, he, he, he predicted that in her. But it's, it's. I look at that stuff and I go wow. Like there's gonna be people who are earlier doctors and people who, who get into it and, and, and, and it's gonna go like this. Like I really see that there's gonna be.
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Unknown A
I mean there are people that have access to it, but they don't use it well. And so the people that have it and use it well will just eat their lunch. Poor people just can't afford the nice technology. They can't put themselves in orbit. Does that come close to what you imagine?
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Unknown B
I mean what's the. There was when, when we were growing up there was a, it was a thing called culture lag or something. It was the.
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Unknown A
I heard you talk about it before. I never looked at the exact phrase, but culture like certainly explains culture.
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Unknown B
Like I mean it was a big thing in the 80s and 90s of like basically, you know, nothing really happened. And then in the 80s, like computers and so 80s and the 90s was tech. And then, you know, the rate of.
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Unknown A
Change begins to speed up.
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Unknown B
There you go. And so there was this societal philosophy of cultural lag. Like it takes us, excuse me, like five years or 10 years to take a technology and then sort of adapt and be able to use it. And I think that that's just shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. So you have kids who are sort of digital natives who are already using AI every day, even if they know it or don't know, but they're kind of, you know, using it. And, and really, I mean my 7 year old is like. And we're typical sort of modern parents, like oh, you can't use technology, let's go to the park. But I mean they're just. It's like when I was a kid we have a tv, so I became obsessed with medium. You know, my, my, my. Anyway, my ex wife was not allowed candy and so she became obsessed with Candy.
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Unknown B
So there's medium anyway. But the kids today are just insane. Like technology, sort of sponges. And they're really good at it. Like really, like, you know, and, and.
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Unknown A
Think about their brain is rewiring based on their interactions with technology.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
That is how deep that rabbit hole goes.
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Unknown B
Yes. And I was just in Africa and the big thing in Africa is microbanking. Like, you know, $2 and not having to use cash and stuff and doing it with a phone. But the phones are like donated. Like Nokia 71 80s or whatever. Like they're old. I don't say analog. It's not analog, but you know what I mean? Yeah.
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Unknown A
Not a smartphone.
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Unknown B
Not a smartphone. And you're like, oh, right there. Like to go back to your three, you know, so you're already wired by the time you're three. If my kids already been using AI for 20 years. I mean, the other thing is education. Like, I grew up sort of. I started my education the British system and like reading, writing, arithmetic, like penmanship was a big deal and you know, writing was a big deal in math. And you know, and now none of that is a big deal. And older parents are like, what the hell's going on? You're like, look, by the time these kids get into the workforce, it's like calculators and math. We used to be a big thing. Well, now every phone has, like everyone has calculator. Like that changed math. You don't need to memorize everything because we all have calculators now. Now pure math.
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Unknown B
People want you to still do that, but you don't really need to. With AI, that's pretty much everything. So you have to figure out what your niche is within that AI world. Right. But if you're not even in that AI media, then you're at a 20 year disadvantage.
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Unknown A
Yeah, I have a feeling it's gonna play out very differently than that. But before I debate that point, I want to. I want to know what the images you have in your head when you talk about that. So when you do you. I think in movies. So for me it's very easy to be like, oh, this is what I imagine. Do you think in books? Movies.
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Unknown B
Movies.
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Unknown A
Okay, so what movie gets closest to imagining the future you think will come true?
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Unknown B
That's a fucking great question. It would be dystopian except for the fact that lately I've been contemplating things a lot, thinking a lot, because I've been forced to because of this kind of stuff too. It sort of made me question, you know, where my thinking Comes from. And I'm just gonna be a little bit long. You're Gen X. Gen X. Okay. So Gen X was always. If people don't know, we were always sort of forgotten. Generation Gen X is where it came from, naming generations. And we were forgotten. We were like, you know, not a lot of parenting. Sort of, you know, feral. You know, grew up on our own, whatever, and sandwiched between the baby boomers and the millennials. And there's two things that I realized. One, I started thinking about Carl Sagan, and he's like, look, imagine time. You know, we have this tiny, tiny, tiny little window where humans can flourish.
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Unknown B
And the temperature is just right. It can't be 2 degrees more. 2 degrees. And the water is just right. And atmosphere is just right. And this, you know, it's just amazing for humans to live. It's one tiny little time, right? And so you should enjoy it. Gen X arguably has been the best and greatest window of humanity in the history of history. So we didn't have any great wars. We had total economic upticks. There's no real murdery kind of crazy things happening. Travel became accessible for everyone to go all around. Most. Most people like, luxury became a thing. Food, foodies. I mean, food used to be. And now it's like, oh, my God, this is the greatest smash. Like, education, all of these things and the environment held up and you're like, wow. Like, we live greater than any aristocracy ever in the history of the world.
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Unknown B
I don't know what happens with AI. I don't know what happens with environmental degradation. But if you look at history, it goes upwards. Elon has a thing of, like, all of history is sort of like, you know, death, infant mortality, and education, and it goes like this forever. Sort of uptick in like the 1500s and a little tiny, like, it just. And so we're just doing straight up. So if you add all those things together, you're like, well, what has been my experience? My experience has been one of pure glory. Like, just great. Like, the Earth is great. My experience has been great. I'm still going great. Still going great guns, you know, you can live longer. We know more things about stuff. Like, my mom grew up and she lived on a farm. She was told, like, the Tang was good and like that, you know, Hungry man dinners, whatever.
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Unknown B
TV dinners were more healthy for you because they're made by scientists. And so, like, we at least have some modicum of truth. And, you know, you're like, okay. So if you look at it, you should think, well, why Would that change like your experience with life has been Godhead? Yep.
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Unknown A
And that really is the rational optimist.
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Unknown B
Yeah. But is the environment screwed? Yes. Is AI going to cause a lot of upheaval? Yes. But if you look at what I experienced and I did a valedictory address where I said, like I said, I've already lived in the nicest house, I've already driven the nicest car total, I went on to make and lose fortunes and I had a great, interesting, incredible life that I have no reason to think that my kids won't be even more so.
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Unknown A
Okay, so you have what I'll call an act of faith. Belief that the future is good, but not necessarily a strong movie tied vision.
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Unknown B
Oh, sorry, movies. That's a good point. Okay, movie, movie, movie. There's no real movie that captures that sort of utopian minimalist tech. They're all too tech heavy. I think tech's gonna be so good that it's not in the fore. Like it's just we live in a sort of heaven like beautiful environment of nature that tech sort of makes for us like or manipulates in such a way that we don't all die. That's a great question. We should make that movie. What's a utopian beautiful thing? But it's not too easy.
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Unknown A
Solar punk?
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Unknown B
No.
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Unknown A
Might be kind of fitting with what you're grasping for. It's, it's clearly technologically driven, but hyper integrated with nature. Beautiful blue skies, but still that like hard tech edge. I would look at that. That might capture it, but okay, that's interesting.
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Unknown B
What's your movie?
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Unknown A
Well, movie wise I think is probably the wrong way to get it where the future is actually going. So my vision of the future is ready. Player one is near term. So call that the next 15 years. Probably not VR, probably AR, but where you live a substantive portion of your life in a virtual world that you have hyper tailored to your preferences. And you've made real friends and some of those friends are going to be AI. So the pet rock that you earn inside of your favorite video game, you'll have a real relationship with, just like in her. It will have a memory of you, it will know you, it will have its own personality, it will have gone on adventures with you and remember it and you guys will really be able to share that. And if you grant me that, that AI will be able to pass like truly a Turing test where you wouldn't know, is this another person playing in another city and I've just never met them physically or is this AI, probably the steel trap memory will give it away.
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Unknown A
It just remembers too much. But that'll, that'll be very, very near future. But the long term future is effectively the Matrix without the body. You live in a world that is code and you can manipulate that code in any way that you want. And as you become aware of the code, which everybody will be, you can effectively live any life you want, superhero or other. Now this is where I would expect anybody who's paying attention that understands I really believe what I'm saying and I mean it literally. They will become, some portion of them will become the people that push back on this. And this is where you get pockets of violence. Once people understand AI is really coming for your job, everybody your job. And it's going to drive energy cost to effectively zero. It will drive labor cost to effectively zero. You'll be able to get anything you want for effectively free.
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Unknown A
And you're still going to be traumatized because you have no meaning and purpose. People can start pushing back on that. So I think there's a pretty near term timeline where this starts being problematic. 25 is a year it goes from oh, it kind of feels like I have an intellectual understanding to I feel that AI is doing something that's this year. 26 is like, I'm really starting to take this seriously and I'm pushing back. I'm getting very vocal and I'm boycotting companies that use AI and I'm getting angry at the people that are building it. 27 is where you start seeing violence towards robots. And I hope it stops there. And I hope then it starts returning dividends enough that people are like, actually this is pretty cool. And it's made a lot of aspects of my life better. And I see costs coming down and whoa, this is wildly deflationary.
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Unknown A
And I've been lied to about deflation. And deflation is actually awesome. It's not bad, which is what I think will actually happen. People are confusing crisis instigated deflation with innovation instigated deflation, which are very different phenomena. That, that's my hope there. But because this will be almost certainly humans become a midwife for a highly technological version of us. Like people that are young now, like your kids, barring AI hitting a compute or energy problem, they will have to make the decision whether they augment themselves or not.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And will we maybe, like if we live long enough. But I could certainly see in the next 30 years this becoming a pretty serious consideration. I would be, what, pushing 80? So will I still be Alive, it's a question mark. But if I am be fucking interesting, man.
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Unknown B
It'll be interesting and like to go back to my utopian version. And it's funny because I would say, up until two years ago I would have said dystopian. But I'll tell you why. If you ever look at like rich people who by the way are the people who control a lot of the assets that you say you have to an asset, they own most assets. Where do they go, right? They go to the nicest and they carve out the nicest parts of the world and say I'm going to be here. And then tech, even though they're made by tech and funded by tech, takes a backseat. You want it sort of as remote and as authentic and as sort of, you know, beautiful and simple as possible. That's the sort of peak high end. Like I want my own island with my own stuff and my own beach, my own thing.
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Unknown B
That's the sort of aspirational thing. Now a lot of the world you can't do that in, right? Like for example, 80 or 90 of America is just, you know, just not. There's nothing there. However now like you can, you can make jungles where there are deserts and, and you can, you know, see the clouds. And we were talking to a guy about doing that who's, who's actually getting money from like Utah and Nevada and stuff. And as geoengineering goes, there's gonna be more and more plays for more and more people. And I think as people pull themselves, look at China, as people pull themselves out of poverty and the hutongs, they move to like these futuristic cities. I think that happened in America. Everyone moved to cities. And then when you're in the city like, you know, it's nicer than the city are. These have my own house with a pool and backyard.
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Unknown B
And I think as you can have more land that you can put crazy 3D printed houses for cheap and you know this and you can have connectivity through Starlink. You can have all this stuff. It opens up a lot of things outside the city because I think cities become unlivable after let's say 20 million people. And there's going to be 40 million, 50 million people city. So we're going to use more and more of the land and that land we're going to go to where we want the tech to be less ready. Player 1 and more like I keep on thinking of. You'll probably get this. There's a rare Star Trek technology where they can create A planet. And it creates a lush planet holodeck or something? No, no, it's a planet. It creates a planet, builds a planet and it's. And they use it. I forget what it's called.
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Unknown A
Star Tre.
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Unknown B
Anyway, it was, it was like one of the shitty Star Treks. It was like the last of the Captain Kirk. And it was, it was, it was a, it was a technology that they developed that it could build like virgin planets basically. And I think we're going to have a lot of technology because we can make a lot of money making these sort of environmentally friendly cities. Like we have the technology now to make reactors out of salt that are totally failed, fail safe, that can power, you know, 10,000 homes.
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Unknown A
A nuclear reactor?
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
With salt.
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Unknown B
Salt, Yeah.
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Unknown A
I need you to say more words.
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Unknown B
Taylor Wilson on the show we'll tell you all about. He developed this technology out of salt. Yeah. And he developed a technology to, to power like, you know, one to 10,000 homes with like, you know, totally fail safe and very little waste. Right. So yeah, so we're there technologically, we're there, we're close. We're going to be within five years, I think we're going to have fusion, you know, being a power source, at which point energy becomes, like you said, free. And so when that happens, I think you're going to go, let's create the nicest places on Earth for rich people. Then middle class people want to do what rich people do, so they're going to want to move to the sort of next to the beautiful places. And then the poor people will be aspirational and say, well, we want to be living in a beautiful place too.
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Unknown B
The reason why I say that is if you move from New York to la, you're like, boy, there's a lot of nice houses in la. Like when you're in New York, everything's just an apartment or thing around. There's a few houses and a few rich people, but like you can't really tell who lives in a nice apartment versus another one. And then you're like here. You're like, wow, there's a lot of. Because people came and they built this modern city of like palm trees and movie, you know, movie stars and pools and big houses stuff. And I'm like, if that's the way we're going. Because that didn't exist like as a World War II. Everybody came back and everyone had 400 square feet, whatever it is, 800 square foot house. So we move towards luxury and better quality of life and higher standard of living. And I think that that continues.
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Unknown A
It is going to be absolutely wild to see what happens grounding it back in what we actually have today. You have traveled extensively around the world. Where have you had the most insane adventures as somebody who's been at high risk, about to be kidnapped, jailed.
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Unknown B
So I'm with you on the positive side. I'm with you on Japan. Japan is my favorite country and I've been going there for 30 years and I just absolutely love it. I love everything about it.
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Unknown A
Can you articulate what it is you love about Japan?
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Unknown B
They give a shit. They like, like, even if you go down an alleyway and you're wasted and there's some like, yakitori guy for a dollar, it's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be amazing because he cares. There's a movie called Tempopo and this. This woman, her husband dies and she was middle class and she goes to being poor, which is terrible in Japan, but she's left like a truck stop. And. And nobody goes to a truck stop. She's about to go bankrupt. And. And she's like. And then when the trucker says, okay, because this guy does the best broth and this guy does the handful noodles and like, so she goes and she learns how to make the best broth and pan pull noodles. And it's basically like a kung fu film about making the best ramen. That's Japan, because if you have a truck stop, you better have the best ramen or nobody's gonna stop there.
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Unknown B
And that's everybody. Like, everybody gives a shit. And when you go there, like, you go to Yansen and like, everything has to be perfect. And you go to the, like, any. Any restaurant from high to low. Everything has to be perfect. The cabs have to be perfect, everything. And everyone cares. And you're like, wow, this is good. This is really, really good. On the spectacularly crazy side of things, look. I mean, Middle east is bonkers. And what happens there is bonkers. Like, look, Gaza. I mean, what do you think about Gaza? I got 17 hours. I mean, I spent a lot of time there. I spent a lot of time in Lebanon, which is. Was basically my favorite country on earth and now has been completely destroyed. Whoa.
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Unknown A
How to go? What made it your favorite? Obviously what destroyed it is far clearer.
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Unknown B
It was beautiful. It was a place where you could, I mean, look, as a journalist, you're going to stay safe. And you cut to like, you're on a beautiful beach, turquoise water, having branzino and delicious wine and great nightlife, great Food, Some of the best food in the world. Beautiful country, great people, Casinos, like, super fun. And war. War. Hezbollah, kicking out. It used to be a third, third and third. Like in the constitution, you have to have a third. Like a Christian has to be prime minister, Muslim has to be president, and Drew's has to be the CFO or whatever. And then just systematically sort of kicking. Everybody's been a big brain drain. Mismanagement, explosions, Iran, Hezbollah, the war with Israel, which is ongoing. Poverty, now desperation. Like, people leave if it's shitty. And it became shitty. And now it's just. It's like Syria.
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Unknown B
I'm sorry, but, like, Syria's is terrible. And. And it used to be Damascus, used to be the spot, and now it's because of so much war. And it was in Baghdad. Afghanistan is just. I mean, you want to talk about the weirdest on earth, Afghanistan just shows you the opposite of what we're talking about. If that's a utopia. Afghanistan is the triumph of the people eating sand and shooting machine guns. I mean, it's the triumph of the people who have the biggest hammer and which is the sort of nerd's biggest fear, because they were beat up by the football players in high school, and they're the football players. And by the way, they. They beat us. So that's. That's. You go to Afghanistan, you learn a lot about humanity. I mean, it's grim.
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Unknown A
That sounds like a history buff talking. So what do you learn about humanity by seeing that?
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Unknown B
You learn trying from the human will that as long as you don't give up, you know, who wins battles or wars. People don't give up. The big thing about England was they wouldn't leave the battlefield most of the wars. They. I mean, Afghanistan, no one's gonna ever be Afghanistan in a war. But that leads to. I mean, it's. It's a nation of, you know, the. The people running the Taliban are thugs, and so now the thugs are running Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan, I could tell you 500 lessons. I mean, you know, my favorite story about Afghanistan is there's a guy named General Abdul Rizik who was a kid when the Taliban took over or started in Kandar, and they killed his parents. So he went to the tunnels to the caves to Pakistan to swap Northwest Frontier Province, and he was sweeping a corner store in Northwest Frontier Province, which is about as poor as you get in the world.
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Unknown B
Snuck back into Kandahar, and it looks like sort of Adam. And they had these crazy, like, ribbons of fabric that they would wear huge Turbans, and they look great. And they were up in the mountains and they started killing the Taliban. So America invaded. They said, bring us anybody who's fighting the Taliban. So he, he was brought to Kabul and he met the Americans and they trained him and gave him money and weapons and he went back to Kandahar. And it's like Colonel Kurtz, like, he. When he went to Kandahar, all Taliban activity went to zero. Done. Now it went to the other provinces, but. But he killed them all, right? He was like, he's no Taliban killer. And so he then became the governor of Kandahar and the police chief and whatever. And his brother, I believe, killed Karzai's brother, who was. Karzai was the prime minister at the time.
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Unknown B
And they found like $2 billion worth of gold bullion and he became the largest heroin trafficker. And I remember I went to interview him in Kandahar and I came back and. And the, the. They came to get me the hotel and. And the, the. They took me to the American embassy and they're like, what's. You know, if you give us Rizzic, we'll give you like decover stories and stuff. And I'm like, we can give you Rizzic. What do you mean? They're like, what's going on with him? I'm like, what's going on with that? He's your guy. I mean, I asked him questions in English and he responded passionately. We have to translate. I don't know you're talking about, but like he'd gone off the reservation. And when you realize like what war is. So to go to apocalypse and talk about movies, he's carnal carts and like that's war.
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Unknown B
And you start off, it's like everyone has a plant a punch in the mouth. Mike Tyson, that's war. You start off, we're going to nation build and we're going to do this, we're going to do that, and it ends up with prison. It ends up with murder and killing and bullion and assassinations and heroin and bad. That's war. It's bad. It is a full on bad thing. We should do whatever the we can to not go to war with anyone ever, because it doesn't end well.
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Unknown A
So that started from what you learned about humanity? Does it resonate? The idea of the line between good and evil runs through every human heart? Or is there might makes right? Do you think about it from a master morality kind of approach? Like what, what glimpse is that into humanity?
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Unknown B
Well, to go Back to Marxist dialectic. If you have whatever it is, let's say 5,000 years of land and labor, carrots, then it's sort of built into us fighting. So fighting is part of humanity and survival. There is a good and evil. I think good and evil is in large part a construct of our consciousness which is given to us by parents and books we read and religion and all those laws and all those things which by the way. Right. A lot of times because it's like chaos is bad. Like if we just leave it after chaos, we all kill each other. So. So there is a reason. But a lot of our good versus evil comes from that. Do we want to fight each other and take the carrots? Yes, that's been bred into us. We are dogs and we're. That's the kind of stuff is bred into us.
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Unknown B
We do want to fight and we, you just see it now. We do brinksmanship all the time. And it's. People who've never fought in war are the ones who threaten to fight. Or people who fought the war like, whatever we can do, don't do that because it's really bad. Let loose the dogs. War. No, but let loose. Humanity can focus all of its 1%, you know, intelligence and like, you know, whatever fast moving, fast thinking stuff and technology on war. Like we can do it on utopian technology and let's make the environment good or we can kill people really well. And so during war we focus all that energy and stuff on killing people. Really, when we're really good at. To go back to dystopian is you're gonna have two countries who have quantum and AI and are well ahead of everybody else and data sets and everything.
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Unknown B
And you have one or two countries that are forgotten that have the weapons from the previous generation. So you have Russia, who's going to be left holding a bag. They don't have nothing. They're going to have zero. And they're going to have 4, 800 warheads. And you're going to have North Korea and by the way, Pakistan and a couple other countries but you know, that have the ability to destroy the world and no ability to get to the new standard of power which we've determined that is ours and we own. Maybe the Chinese do. They're allowed in. So it's us and them. Oh, and these guys you want to talk about, he has the biggest hammer or, or who's willing to do the worst thing. The bully has 4800 warheads, which is more than enough to kill everybody on the Planet. So that's dystopia.
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Unknown A
That is dystopian. Yeah. It's interesting you are a student of history. What do you have a particular time period that you find engrossing?
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Unknown B
Modern European history. I like American history. European history is very interesting. I think we get a lot of Greek history, Roman history. I like it all. I mean it's all basically modern. I mean if it's. I blinked and like you look at it, it's like we haven't been around that long in, in the sense of, of as sentient beings especially they can write stuff. Being the Bible, being the thing that sort of changed everything. But Rome is a big one. Obviously Greek, Ancient Greece, which I'm getting into. They sort of started. You're like, where did all this come from? Like they sort of started everything and it hasn't really changed that. When you go back to physics, physics has changed. Taylor Wilson that like the laws of physics have been sort of recently offended and they will be again. But Renaissance, obviously crazy. And then, you know, World War I, World War II, like you want to talk about how bad you can get?
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Unknown B
Like Post World War II was more deadly than World War II because of post World War, post World War II because of ideology. I mean Mao Ti Tongue in the Cultural Revolution in the 60s killed double the amount of people that died in World War II.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's crazy and I don't think people understand just how deadly that was.
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Unknown B
Stalin and Mao were unbelievable.
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Unknown A
So I normally, I always read at night. Helps me fall asleep. But there was one book I just could not read tonight because it was fucking me up so badly. That's the Red Famine which is about the Ukrainian famine in the early 20s, 1920s. And I was just like, God, when it got to the part where the woman eats her seven year old daughter, I was like, I'm out. Can't. This is too much.
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Unknown B
It's crazy. There's a lot of amazing, amazing speaking movies, amazing movies made about that time and, and it's just, I mean that era was shocking and Cultural revolution, like there was no, you know, bombs and you know, tanks and Panzers and stuff. It was like a pitchfork or like a rusty knife. Like it was a lot of murder. Like a lot, a lot. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Crazy. Now you dodged the Gaza question earlier.
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Unknown B
The west question.
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Unknown A
Gaza.
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Unknown B
Oh, Gaza. Yeah.
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Unknown A
The reason I bring it up is reading. So one of my particular areas that I love reading about is the conquest of America and first just surviving the winters, then dealing with the fact that hey, there's people already here and a lot of conflict there, and we certainly had questionable ways of dealing with that. But as you push out west and then the sort of final climactic battle with the Comanche Indians and the Mexicans, and it's a, it is a fascinating moment in history when President Polk, who was like, we are going all the way to the ocean, that time in history has these really eerie parallels to what's going on in Gaza right now for me, where it's like the thing I can't wrap my head around. I hate doing this to you because maybe this is not something you want to talk about, but I look at what's happening and when Trump came on and was like, oh, well, we're going to rebuild, we're going to just take them somewhere else.
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Unknown A
It's just rubble. There's no for them to go, we're going to take somewhere else. And you know, I mean, it's just been horrible for them. So they shouldn't be a part of the rebuild. I was like, wait, what? Why wouldn't they want to be a part of the rebuild?
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
That feels very reminiscent of total military victory. To the spoils. To the victor go to spoils. And it feels a little slight handy there at the end.
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Unknown B
And who knows what's gonna happen. First of all.
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Unknown A
Very true, very true.
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Unknown B
Now listen. Yes. In the answer to your. But it's not as crazy as I think and I'll tell you why. You know, I used to say I spent a lot of time, guys. And the, There's a lot of parallels and there's a lot of sympathy for Gaza. In Ireland. Right? Yeah, because it's the same thing. It was partitioned and Britain and, you know, made. And, and, and by the way, the, the, the, the IRA spent a lot of time in, in, in with the palace. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
And so there's a lot of sympathy in Ireland anyway. In Ireland, there were 600 years of fighting and it only stopped when they basically got telemarketing jobs. Like literally there was a sort of tech ish revolution joining the eu. They got some money and the guns just got buried. Right. Because we have some money now, we have some agency, we buy houses. Because Ireland was a very poor country and poverty, you know, breeds warfare. Gaza was poor. And, and the Iranians fund Hezbollah and they fund Hamas. And Hamas. I mean, Hezbollah at one point was like 35, 40% of all working people in Lebanon and probably 50 to 60% in Gaza. So it's paid for by Iran. And Iran is the boogeyman. Of and you know, they want to keep Israel and the GCC separate because the enemy of Miami then they get encircled. And so they're playing a geopolitical war to sort of keep the region destabilized.
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Unknown B
Now the reason why this whole thing happened was because Hamas came out, because the GCC were to ratify the Abraham Accords and there were going to be normalization of relations between Israel and done by Jared Kushner and the gcc. Monumentally huge. Like the biggest thing nobody reported on it was massive. And just before the ratification of it, right around that time, they came out and, you know, did a terrorist attack again. The sad thing about that in 911 is it proves that terrorism works really well. Really well. And it put the sort of history we were at this moment where it looked like the Middle east is actually going to be sane for a little bit, barring Iran. And. And then this happened and then we went completely the other way and over retaliation and basically the flattening of a, of a, you know, I won't say country, but, you know, whatever you want.
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Unknown B
Territory. And so very bad. Like we're talking about war. Like it's bad. Like it's like all you have to do is go to wars on you ever want to go to one again. I remember talking like when I would go to Wisconsin, you know, all these guys were doing the rings. Oh, tell me what you know. Afghanistan's like, you're like, don't go, dude. Like, you're not protecting America. You're not getting anything from America. You don't come back with a manly thing. You come back unable to for the rest of your life. You come back pissing into a bag. Once you can, you know, defend a convoy that, you know, has a can of coke in it because they get $100,000 a convoy. Like, what do we win in Afghanistan? We lost Afghanistan. And all the propaganda. We lost Afghanistan, we were calling it five years before says you're going to leave and Taliban's gonna have more territory when we came.
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Unknown B
And so it was unequivocal loss. We did nothing in Afghanistan. What do you tell all those parents, all those kids, all the trillions of dollars gone, all those lives, by the way, all the collateral damage, all the Afghanis, all the Pakistan, all the people who died. What do you tell them it was for nothing? It's for zero. You can ask any general at you who went to Afghanistan, you can ask any soldier. So to go back to like war zones like blown up children, no matter what the cause is not Good. That said, before Gaza happened, before all this stuff happened, that's a triumph of terrorism, which it should not have allowed. You can't let terrorism try for they'll just keep doing it. And that's just terrorists. When I say they just put comments like, that's all terrorist. However, before that, I said, look, you can solve.
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Unknown B
God is beautiful. I mean, let's go back to Lebanon. Turquoise water, you know, beaches, you build a burj al Arab. Hipsters want to go there and say, I'm fighting. And nothing. Like, it's what Lebanon used to be. It's a forgotten, esoteric, weird, cool place to go where everyone has a job and have money. I guarantee you the guns get buried now. They won't. Because the other problem that you had in Ireland for 600 years is if you kill my brother or you kill my dad, I'm going to kill you and I'm going to die trying to kill you. And then you're going to kill me, and then I'm going to kill you and then your son or daughter. So right now, you've just reinvigorated Gaza forever. But the idea of making it into an economic entity rather than a slum that breeds terrorists was not so crazy.
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Unknown B
It's crazy now to say now we're going to do it on the rubble. Well, like, we're going to displace too many people. You're going to displace too many. Wherever those 2 million people go, they're going to blow shit up. I mean, already, like, there's more Palestinians in Jordan than are Jordanian. Like, they're going to take over Jordan at some point. And by the way, Lebanon, it's a huge Palestinian. I mean, it's, it's geopolitical instability. And that solution might have worked in a time of like, okay, we're going to rather by the GCC Abraham Accords and we're going to give Gaza, Arab, Saudi or whoever, Qatari money to make it. Dubai, you know, Dubai on the Mediterranean for Arab people. Great. Can't do it now.
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Unknown A
Very sad. Shane Smith, where can people follow along with you?
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Unknown B
Shane Smith has questions. Where all better podcasts are born? Shane Smith has questions. I love it.
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Unknown A
Thank you, man, for being on the show. This was definitely a lot of fun.
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Unknown B
Thank you, bro. Let's keep it going. Come back on mine.
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Unknown A
Indeed.
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Unknown B
Anytime.
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Unknown A
All right, boys and girls, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary and take care.
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Unknown B
Peace.
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Unknown A
If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Trump has just come into office. Do we think or I should say, do you think, as we may see this differently, do you think that Trump is somebody who has the elite view of like, hey, the right people are in power. Let's make these.