The Ben and Emil Show - BAES 94: Is America Over as we Know it? ft. Kyla Scanlon

Starting point is 00:00:00 Trump's interesting because, like, he is that father figure and, boy, like, he was a successful business fan. He was able to accomplish so much. You know, six bankruptcies later. He's not an authoritarian. He is trying to be, like, big daddy. I mean, they do call him daddy and stuff. It's very weird. And I think that's just, like, really the American experiment.

Starting point is 00:00:19 Like, can you put a bunch of wealthy people in a country together and will they distribute wealth fairly? Will they not try to take power? Like, will we have some sort of oligarchy at the United? end like no no yes and so you almost need like a warrior to trump right like sure it is easy to sit back and be like oh who will do it and i guess i'll do the answer is just that i'll do that actually us unfortunately no me i'll do it i'm sure you will i'll do it how would you what would be your first step oh geez you put me on the spot i don't know i don't know i don't know down time with bedding me tell me what's going on if you see what's going on if you see the title you know we have a

Starting point is 00:01:25 everyone's favorite Kyla Scanlon and we're going to get right to that but first very important announcement we are coming to Austin for a Ben and Emile live that's right we'll be live in Austin at the creek in the cave on May 8th and if you want tickets too bad go maybe too bad and I'll get to that in a second but right now go to the ticket link in the description and too bad if they're all gone because Ben and Emile Show.com members get first dibs at them. They went up a few days earlier, and they got to buy tickets first. So if you want to join us there, it's Benademielshow.com. You get, what, over 100 hours of bonus content and...

Starting point is 00:02:03 First month free. First month free. That is ending very soon, though. So get in while you still can. And, yeah, we'll post all shows there first for sale. And one more thing, friends, do us a favor. Like this video. It helps us a lot.

Starting point is 00:02:20 comment. Have it go wild. And without further ado, here's our interview with Kyla Scanlan. Welcome, welcome to the show, everybody. It's the Ben and Emile show. I'm Emil, that's Ben. Whoops, my ties on too tight. I'm Ben. That's Emil. We've got with us our, by popular demand, back by popular demand, our favorite guest, the fan favorite. Don't tell any other guests that I said, she's our favorite guest, but Kyla Scanlan is with us. Thank you so much for coming. You made it all the way. over here in one piece, are your arms tired? Boy, are your arms tired? From black.

Starting point is 00:02:55 Yeah, from all that points. Also, if you're new to Kyla Scanlon, if you don't know who she is, get your act together. You probably know her popular TikToks. You know her book in this economy by Kyla Scanlon. If you don't know the book, you got to go buy it and read it. Work with Bloomberg. All kinds of stuff.

Starting point is 00:03:15 Work with all sorts of stuff. Yeah. An incredible substack. Yes. So, if you don't know Kyla, you should know. Get your act together. Yeah, get your act together. We've got a lot that we want to talk about with you today.

Starting point is 00:03:30 Because we've been trying to have you on for a while and everything keeps happening all the time. Every single day, it seems that more things are happening. I will say pretty much every week when we're getting ready to do the show, Ben goes, ah, this would be a great week to have Kyla on. And it's still just a great week to have Kyle on. Yeah. Big week. yeah what's happening this week is it what's liberation days on tomorrow uh april second april second

Starting point is 00:03:56 on wednesday on wednesday so by the time this come out we'll know it'll be yesterday if we're liberated yeah yeah uh we're not going to be liberated at all you don't think so no i i don't feel any more liberated but we also live in a bubble yeah because you haven't been liberated yet i'm excited to be liberated that's true that's true this is how the french must have felt during world war two well why don't why don't why doesn't why doesn't someone explain to us what liberation day is for anyone who does that. Yeah, let's kick it off before we get into... I don't think anybody knows what the ratio is.

Starting point is 00:04:24 No one knows? Well, so, like, it's tariff day, right? Like, Trump wants to implement a bunch of tariffs, but they're... And this has been going on for months. They, you know, the can keeps getting kicked down the road. They make a last-minute deal with Mexico or Canada. And so we'll see if it finally goes into effect. But, yeah, and there's been all kinds of strange messaging around.

Starting point is 00:04:49 the tariffs too. And a lot of confusion. I guess the general idea is that we are going to make it so make it so it's much more valuable for American companies to manufacture here.

Starting point is 00:05:07 That's the goal. I don't know if that'll work. That's what they're saying. But it's really interesting because Trump is just, he's pure isolationist. Like he wrote this article or he took out an ad in a newspaper back in 1987 basically being like we should never help out Japan and then he lost

Starting point is 00:05:25 a bid that he had made on this piano that was used in Casablanca so he was like trying to buy this piano from the classic movie Casablanca and a Japanese trading house beat him and so he became very upset well how would you feel but then he was like you know we should really be taxed in Japan. And so it's just interesting. He's always been very isolationist. And I think in his mind, if you're the top dog, like everything should be done just in your country. So it really ignores the concept of comparative advantage, right? Like other countries are going to be better of producing stuff than the United States would be. And so he's like, well, we should just tariff and then everybody will come, you know, rebuild manufacturing back in the U.S. But that's so expensive.

Starting point is 00:06:11 And firms are like super freaked out. Like the Dallas Fed. manufacturing survey. Oh, yeah. Like, they were so upset. So mad. Yeah. Some of them saying, I read some of the comments. We read them a few weeks ago.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Oh, perfect. Yeah. Uncertainty after uncertainty. Never seen this before in my life. No idea how I'm supposed, I'm just kind of pulling numbers out of thin air because there's nothing on which to base them. I have nothing that I can meaningfully glean for predictions and for cost estimates because everything is just such an unknown.

Starting point is 00:06:44 But it's not a ridiculous notion that American manufacturing should be brought back in some way, right? Like, especially, you know, in the aftermath of the explosion of COVID and everyone kind of finding out like, oh, wow, we're just going to face massive shortages on supplies that we need because we actually don't manufacture any of that kind of stuff anymore and actually have no capacity to. And then also, you know, the amount of jobs that were shipped out in the wake of. trade agreements and stuff like that. I think he is appealing to some legitimate grievances that people have. Yeah. Well, so the problem with bringing jobs back is the jobs being brought back would be done by robots. Like China has autonomous factories. Like the idea that we're going to return back to 1950s America where there's the big smoke plumes and you could

Starting point is 00:07:37 buy a house on single income. It's just not realistic. If you think about the American economy through the lens of manufacturing. We're a service-based economy. And we've kind of vaulted above the need to produce things in the U.S. You're right with like the supply chain breakdown during COVID and how important it is to have, you know, stable supply, especially in terms of semiconductors. But then it's really confusing because he's trying to cancel the Chips Act. And so it's sort of like rhetoric around one thing, but then the Chips Act, which is very valuable for building simis here in the U.S., you know, he's like, no thanks. And so. So it's like, oh, we'll just build cars.

Starting point is 00:08:15 It's like, I get the premise. Yeah. But in action, it just isn't lining up. I'm also not in support of it. I'm just trying to, you know, kind of tease out to the details of what he's actually trying to do. And the, yeah, I think the sentiment around all of it has been so confusing, right? Even if you're, even if you're just taking him at his word, I mean, he's centered so many other things outside of, bringing back manufacturing jobs. I mean, just, you know, going on and on about fentanyl crossing

Starting point is 00:08:49 the border, all kinds of different things. And you're like, wait, what is this about? Are you trying to bring back jobs? Or is it? So the only way that he's allowed to do tariffs as the president is by saying it's the border and fentanyl. So this is all emergency action plan. And like, so everything has to be under the guise of fentanyl and borders. It can't really be like reshore manufacturing because he would have to have the power of Congress. Right. And so. What was passed under the House GOP budget plan was actually Congress giving him their power around tariffs. And so we could see a world where the president does have unilateral tariff power.

Starting point is 00:09:26 But right now, the reason he talks about fentanyl so much is because he has to. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's probably a good place for us to start. We want to get into the recession, the markets, politics. But one of your recent articles was about context. versus content. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:44 And I think that that's a really great diving off point because you talk about this new era where the battle between content and context will, you say, reshape how all policy is created, communicated, and understood, and that we're witnessing a shift where value derives not from the content itself, but from who frames it, where it appears, and how it's positioned. And it feels like this is where we're at with a recession looming. being that those in power are becoming these masterful narrative manipulators. And Trump has been that for quite some time.

Starting point is 00:10:20 But it's like now more than ever, it just doesn't matter what the content is. It's Trump saying it, how he's saying it, how the message is dispersed. I don't know. Do you have any follow-up thoughts on just that and how it's causing everything to just feel like it's collapsing around us? Yeah, I mean, I'd recommend people to check out the newsletter. Um, because it, it's, it's into that theory. It's like, like the idea is that ideas don't matter. It's who says them. So like if Joe Rogan tells me to do something like, uh, not believe in, what's he, what was he talking about now on his show? Like don't believe in the vaccines. Yeah. Get people to just maybe get measles or. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like take vitamin A. It's so very RFK Jr. coded. Um, because I think RFK Jr. was the first person to see that. But people are, going to be like, oh, Joe Rogan's telling me this. And like, they don't really question the underlying content. It's more the context. So how is it being said? Who's saying it? The framing really

Starting point is 00:11:21 matters. And so you see people not pushing back on ideas as much, but pushing back on who is saying a certain idea. Right. And so that's a very weird world to be in because people no longer engage on an... So you're saying like if someone sees a Joe Rogan tweet, they're not necessarily going to engage with the idea, the actual thing he's saying. They're just going Joe Rogan said something, I disagree. Or I agree, yeah. Right, if you're, right, I'm defaulting to... It's gotten so bad.

Starting point is 00:11:50 I mean, a good example that, unfortunately... Well, not unfortunate. A good example that I've seen used from the right is Trump could come out and say, I've found a cure for cancer. And people on the left would say, well, cancer is actually good. The guy from Sequoia tweeted that, right? I think so, yeah. I mean, Trump had the best one himself with I could...

Starting point is 00:12:10 I think maybe it was in the lead-up to 2016. Yeah, I could shoot someone. on Fifth Avenue and oh yeah sure uh yeah but and that's also on both sides of the spectrum i think maybe that's just like a consequence of everyone uh yeah it's both sides using just social media to engage with the world rather than actually like engaging with anyone's actual uh substantive work i think that's a frustrating thing about having conversations like this because if you criticize trump people are like uh hello like that's my guy you know and then they're like you're lib and it's like you're lib and it's like

Starting point is 00:12:42 I think there's a lot of value in criticizing. And I think people are so blinded by ideology where there's no room for criticism. And if you don't allow yourself to be critical, then you're just a follower, right? Like, you're not a supporter. And that's a very, very thin line that I think were, there was a very good article in the Atlantic about how Trump is kind of, they called it patriotism. Did you see this? I don't think so. So they were like, he's not an authoritarian.

Starting point is 00:13:12 He is trying to be, like, big daddy. I mean, they do call him daddy and stuff. It's very weird. Yeah. Yeah, I know. What? They do call, there's like a weird movement. Yeah, but you...

Starting point is 00:13:21 Among supporters of, like, calling him daddy and it's an odd thing. The article talks about that, how it's like almost a father figure that, like, comes to save. And, um, it becomes very difficult, I think, for people to delineate, uh, truth from, truth from lie. And that's the case. Because, like, oh, that's my, my father figure. Like, he would never lie to me. right? Yeah, and people are just kind of like blasted with information in the digital age where I feel like they just kind of need to develop these heuristics where it's like, I need to just kind of, you know, order everything in good and bad. Like, you know, okay, that's him, that's that guy, he's on that side bad. That's that guy. Okay, he's good. Have you read Roland Barris ever? So he has an essay on WWE where he talks about this. Well, he stole it from me. He came into the future and stole your idea just now.

Starting point is 00:14:12 But he talks about this like push and pull between good and bad and how everybody wants like a good and a bad guy to pin stuff on. And so it becomes very difficult to have that nuance. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. No, no. That was basically the- This podcast is all about interrupting a meal. So it's okay. That was basically the, that was basically the gist of what I was trying to say.

Starting point is 00:14:34 It's honestly very reminiscent. Have you ever experienced the thing where you're kind of, I don't know, talking about a celebrity or some public. figure and someone will go like, wasn't he canceled? And you go, uh, uh, I don't know. And then they're like, I think he was. And then no one actually knows what anyone did. They're just kind of like, ah, okay, I saw a thing online. I've filtered. I filtered it. And everything's like put into these. A blob. Yeah. And no one actually like has any substance. Yeah. It's all just filters. I like that you went on to say, uh, direct quote here. We already have models for this in financial regulation where there are strict rules about how investment opportunities can be presented to

Starting point is 00:15:13 consumers i'm subject to those personally it really sucks similar principles need to be applied to information more broadly and i think you raise a really big idea there that just gets it just gets so hairy like it just boils down to who determines what the truth is right and how information is that where you were going with that, just regulating, not regulating, but like you said, a similar principles. How would you interpret? I love when you try to ask her a question. You always like, my tie is on too tight. You read the thing and then you're like, oh, wait, I'm supposed to ask a question. Yeah, well, what do you think? What do you think about your own words, Kyla? What do you think about that? Yeah, I wrote that about a week ago. I still agree with it mostly. So, yeah,

Starting point is 00:16:07 That was in context to how we talk about information, the stuff that people are able to share. Because, like, we have community notes on Twitter that are able to, like, take down tweets or not even take them down, but, like, add a note and be like, hey, this guy is full of it. Don't listen. But if you're on TikTok, like, you all both know this. Like, if you're on TikTok, it's the worst financial information of your life. But it's also a lot of, like, misinformation just about economics or politics. And so that general idea behind that statement was there has to be rules.

Starting point is 00:16:37 on like what we are able to show people online because it is like melting our brains john burn murdock over at the ft has this excellent paper where he talks about that we're not getting stupider we just can't process stuff as well um because we're so distracted everything's a notification and i really i feel that even within myself like i'm like i don't even know where i am and you're just like parsing so much information all the time and there's a lot of really great psychologists that have studied this more in depth than i have but it's really quite harmful i mean i have to talked about this a little bit, but just as an aside, I did a brief screen cleanse, no screens. Oh, dopamine detox? Yeah. And it's pretty wild how immediate. You're just like, oh, I do have

Starting point is 00:17:19 ideas. I need a pen and paper now because I have ideas and things. What has been like your number one idea? Just, I mean, just like things I've been thinking about where I'm like, oh, I wish I could square hot dogs. He was telling me about that. He's like, so you know how when you go to a barbecue, there's always long hot dogs and you run out of the hot dog buns but there's always

Starting point is 00:17:42 so many hamburger buns wait this is really are you just going with my bed or I'm just messing with you okay I was like Jesus Hey guys

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Starting point is 00:19:59 I have a dog that's starving. I need a feet. Holy shit. Sorry, pal. No, I feed him. But yeah, it's, I think we haven't quite reckoned with what we did to ourselves and our attention spans and our ability to process information and sit with information. And I think the younger generations are unfortunately like test bunnies for all of this. Like we're going to learn so much from what has happened to the three of us and maybe a lot of people watching the show right now. And we're going to hopefully implement some sort of policies.

Starting point is 00:20:31 around like screens and um people are already removing them from schools which i think is really great but it's like it's so bad so bad don't you what concerns me is the amount of i mean we did that with cigarettes we did it with alcohol but the amount of wealth that has been created in the last 20 years eclipses anything we've ever seen before throughout human history to the to the extent that i just don't think that regulating it is possible in any meaningful way because the value of these tech companies is so large, it is so now intertwined with the country's collective wealth. Everybody's got their 401ks and their IRAs and everybody's loaded into Vanguard funds that have such heavyweight attributed to the likes of meta, Google, and so on.

Starting point is 00:21:21 So do you have any concern that their massive size will get in the way of any meaningful kind of regulation that we desperately need? Yeah. sucks. I mean, not only would have dragged down the tech industry, but everything with it. I mean, the burgeoning AI. Yeah, well, and it's just, I mean, when you're talking about our attention spans, it's all of advertising is just like, the whole reason for getting us hooked on these things so that they can just sell you stuff, right? They want you to look at your phone longer so they can place ads on everything and then monetize

Starting point is 00:21:54 everything. Yeah, it's really quite dark. And it's tough because, like, so I'm a hypocrite, right? Like, I make videos on social media. And the goal there is that I'm hopefully like interrupting people's feed and like, here's thing on economics and like you can educate yourself you're trying to disrupt from the inside yeah but it doesn't always feel that way it's also like well maybe i'm contributing to the broad problem here no but and this isn't like make kaila feel better but i do think like it's really hard because like the

Starting point is 00:22:22 marketers are like oh we have to rely on the influencers because nobody will listen to us anymore and so everything has been really siloed into the social media platforms right like advertising on tv is a little bit difficult. You can still advertise, like, within Netflix shows or Amazon Prime, I guess, but it's hard, yeah. Can I ask you about the regulations around, like, all the stuff that's, all the information that's being blasted as constantly? Like, so in some of those, I'm not familiar with that Financial Times article or some of those other things we're talking about. Are they talking about stuff like Section 230 and making tech companies more responsible for the stuff that's published on their sites? Or what kind of, uh,

Starting point is 00:23:04 like what does regulation look like when you're talking about making sure humans aren't just like overwhelmed by information at all times yeah i mean i think it's an element of responsibility and then probably disclaimers too like if something isn't real like you know TikTok has so many bots like there's a bunch of bots of me that are asking people to trade crypto and and so it's like stuff like that like they're just like Elon and Twitter for example like there just has to be some sort of policy as you said about who's responsible for what and then too like cleaning up the platform and having disclaimers on content that might be misleading right uh might just real fast on attention spans my favorite new thing over the last five years is now before a movie trailer

Starting point is 00:23:49 there's a mini little teaser that's like trailer starts now with just a you haven't seen these it's like the first five I mean it'll be like very quick quick cuts from the you believe this guy you believe this what's going on over here between you forgetting what you're talking about and this guy I mean geez yeah it's quick cuts it's just like

Starting point is 00:24:16 trailer starts now but it's necessary because as we well the best part is if you want to do that you have to watch a quick YouTube ad first before you watch the ad for the movie it's very funny that's why I take the time and I go into every one of our episodes

Starting point is 00:24:33 and I delete 95% of the mid-roll things that YouTube puts on. You should see it. It's just like ding-ding-ding-n-tweet about it. Holy God. Anyway. So the biggest thing we're all thinking about

Starting point is 00:24:46 is recession. It's on the tip of everybody's tongue. I see you put that Goldman Sachs just raised the 12-month probability of a recession to 35% from 20%. And that's good. Yeah, that's good. When the number's higher, it's good.

Starting point is 00:25:02 If we get a recession, we're all going to be able to afford a house. Because everybody's going to keep their jobs. Yeah. I think the first time I came on this show, we had a similar conversation. Really? Yeah, it was like, are we in a recession? Oh, yeah. That was the birth of the vibe session, which you believe we're no longer in, correct?

Starting point is 00:25:20 But, yeah, I mean, Goldman, the reason that they raised that is because of the tariff uncertainty. And we're seeing, like, you know, massive layoffs, federal workers. And then that bleeds out into the private sector. with layoffs of contractors. A bunch of funding has been cut that impacts the private sector. And so what's interesting about the administration is they have this Mara Lago accord that they're like, oh, we're not actually going to do. But I think it's very similar to Project 2025 where they're like, we're not going to do it.

Starting point is 00:25:48 But we're going to do it. I know. And that's all about like, okay, we're going to kind of really take a hammer to the public sector, which did need some elements of reform. and have everything be the private sector. So that seems to be the plan. But when you have even the goal of that, like even if it works, there's going to be some sort of downturn.

Starting point is 00:26:11 And then they seem to be like, yeah, that's okay. Like everybody's going to be fine. But of course, it's much easier to have a downturn in theory than it is in practice. So you're not buying this short-term pain for long-term gain? No, because it never works. Like historically, this has never been a successful. What about me who's going to be uniquely unimpacted by the recession and going to be able to gobble up cheap homes? Well, what's interesting about that is after 2008, it was institutional investors that came in.

Starting point is 00:26:42 It wasn't even the little guy. The short memory of these people, it doesn't work like that. You are going to have a horrible time and huge corporations are going to buy your house. I remember I had just started. I had just opened my first e-trade account and I had like $1,500 in it. And I'm like, I'm going to buy some stocks, man. And I remember seeing serious satellite radio trading for five cents. And I was like, that's going to go bankrupt.

Starting point is 00:27:07 We're in the middle of a recession. No, there doesn't make any sense to me. Shows how little I know. All right, I got to go. But so what scares me is I was reading how the top 10% of all wealth in this country. country accounts for 50% of all discretionary spending. And now more, as far as data has gone back to measure this in the 1940s, stocks make up a larger portion of assets than ever before.

Starting point is 00:27:45 So in other words, we've got the top 10% have more stocks as assets than ever. And I fear that, and this isn't a fear that's unique to me. This is not my unique opinion, but we've never been so dependent on the stock market as a gauge for economic health. And we've never before had so much wealth so highly concentrated at the top. And so if that 10%, as stock starts to drop, that affects that top 10%. And then in turn, the next dominole to fall is if they adjust their spending, even moderately, it would have it would cause presumably these system-wide shocks and uh citrini who'd shout up to citrini and this last bear standing they put out a really really long uh really informative piece

Starting point is 00:28:39 and they're calling it a wealth effect driven slowdown um yeah they're they're now now turn it into a question it sounds like you just agree with it yeah well yeah but i wanted your thoughts on it because i I think that there's a couple different ways to look at the potential for a recession. Obviously, chief among them is the tariffs and the uncertainty. And then that begets the fear in the stock market, which then leads to these people whose high net worth is directly tied to the performance of stocks. And as that underperforms, they tighten their belts. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:15 And then it's just, then it's on. They also point out, interestingly, they're asserting that lower income people are actually and bear with me. I'm not saying that I'm not making any kind of truth statement here, but they're asserting that they are going to be more shielded from it because they don't own as many assets and stocks. And they point out actually that lower income people have actually been in a recession since around 2021. In their own like bifurcated way, pointing to credit card delinquencies and loan, auto loan delinquencies, buy now pay later stuff. Hey, everybody. We've got to take another quick break to thank another sponsor of the show. It's Factor.

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Starting point is 00:31:35 Put your burrito on layaway for four months. Interest free? Don't do it. No, but once you miss the payment, once you miss the payment. Right. You're fine. You're a cocktail. So it's a misaligned incident for sure.

Starting point is 00:31:47 But yeah, I mean, I think like the concentration of wealth, have you ever read the book as Gods Among Men? No. So it talks about wealth, concentration throughout history, like really beginning in the black death. So kind of like what happened post black death with the really, really rich people. And sort of how we've seen this cyclicality of wealth throughout the ages and how it's just gotten more and more and more concentrated at the top.

Starting point is 00:32:12 And what we've seen from the really wealthy people is that they don't really interact with society as much. They don't give back in the same way. Like you still have a Bill Gates type figure who, you know, donates a lot of money. Warren Buffett, I think, has pledged like, 99% of his wealth to be donated. Gensi Bezos. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:29 Yeah, but like Jeff Bezos is doing. And so it's interesting to the point of like what they're really, really wealthy are doing and like what happens if it does get too concentrated because there's so much risk in that, especially if we do have a stock market sell off. And so I think that's interesting. So are they saying that the market would drive the economy? Is that how they're? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:49 They're saying that normally it's the other way round. Yeah. That, but this time it's the stock market that could actually tip us into a recession. And it's just an oeroboros. It's just a snail eating, or snail eating its own tail. Snake eating its own tail. Excuse me. And they point out things that the data doesn't show us, people living paycheck to paycheck, working multiple jobs.

Starting point is 00:33:14 And then you pointed out that. We do it. Yeah, that people are just dropping out of the labor force. Why did they say that? I don't know. I was also culling from a, it's a. Massive article. And that this was really sad to me.

Starting point is 00:33:28 The bottom 20% of households now allocate 94% of their spending just to necessities. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's bad. But what was an interesting divergence is that the top and middle income earners have a higher expectation of unemployment in 2025, whereas lower income workers, their expectation of unemployment has actually decreased. priest for 2025. Again, probably pointing back to that they've already kind of been in a recession since 2021. I don't know how I feel about that. Yeah, what are your thoughts? I know. I just threw

Starting point is 00:34:06 a lot at you. If you want to take a break, we can take a break. I just, I guess my follow-up question as I've put, is there any way, like the wealth divide has gotten so great? Is there any viable way to fix this disparity? That's a big question. No. And I have, God's Among Men is like an interesting exploration if people do want to read more about how wealth operates with really, really wealthy. It's a very interesting book. In terms of fixing the wealth divide, there's a lot of good research papers on that. And a lot of things point back to taxation, which of course is politically very, very unpopular. And I was listening. Politically unpopular in what sense? You won't get voted in if you. You won't get

Starting point is 00:34:51 voted in if you propose higher taxes but higher taxes on who rich you won't get voted in if you propose no let's say I'm running for president now I say I'm not going to raise taxes on anyone making over I think Biden said I'm not going to do it over on anyone over 400,000 people sorry on people making under 400,000 dollars but I am going to raise taxes on people who make over that you think that's a politically unpopular policy because I agree I think the only like the only solution is taxing these people. Like when you're talking about fixing this wealth

Starting point is 00:35:27 gap, this disparity, the only viable solution is taxation. Yeah, absolutely. And like, and you know, the most frustrating thing is like these guys talking about like the debt and all the, the national debt, all this stuff like, you know, we just how are you going to pay for that? It's like taxing.

Starting point is 00:35:46 And but right now we have people like, why don't we get rid of the IRS? Which was going to, I Natasha Sarin Sarin, Sarin, over at Budget Lab at Yale,

Starting point is 00:35:56 they have a great paper on like what happens to our revenue if we got the IRS and we lose like billions of dollars. Yeah, they want to have

Starting point is 00:36:04 the external revenue service. But in my mind, if I'm making under $400,000, which I do, most Americans do. Everyone does. I'm going,

Starting point is 00:36:15 good. Raise the taxes and pay for shit. Why don't you knock off some of that debt you're so worried about? raise revenue. So there's two interesting things here.

Starting point is 00:36:24 The first point is how Americans think about well. Like in the United States, we've historically had a lot of upward mobility. So Stephanie Sancheva over at Harvard, I feel like I'm like shouting a ton of people out. I can actually send links to all of this stuff. So that way it's, yeah, I feel like I'm like virtue signaling a bit. But I'm just trying to like cite my sources, you know. Of course. No, I think that's important.

Starting point is 00:36:44 I don't think it's, yeah. But Stephanie Sancheva at Harvard has a great paper with a bunch of co-authors about upward mobility and how it's gone down in the United States. But historically, we've had a lot of upward mobility. And so people look at the situation for the rich and they're like, I'm going to be really rich one day. Like, I'm going to be Elon Musk. So I don't want them to raise taxes rich right now because that's going to be. Right. It's the Steinbeck thing. Every, every American is just a disgraced millionaire. Exactly. Yes, yes, yes. So like, that's one part of it for sure. And then the wealthy people do generally tend to kind of control like the corporate side of elections and so it can get a little

Starting point is 00:37:25 bit fuzzy yeah i was going to say oh that's certainly true but i think if someone you know if someone was like actually willing to run on some like popular economic policies and you know convey the messages that we're going to pay for this by taxing rich people um and you're not going to pay a cent more In fact, the aim is to have you pay less. It didn't really work for Biden. He got in office. Did he run on that in his first campaign? Oh, no, but I thought that's what you were in mind, but he won.

Starting point is 00:37:59 I don't think he ran out. Nothing really worked for a common issue. A weird watered down economic policy that people didn't quite understand. That thing changed the history of it. There's a lot that went wrong there. Yeah. Well, speaking of that, that's actually just kind of this next quote, from you. You say we exist in a state of perpetual half conclusion where nothing is ever fully

Starting point is 00:38:22 processed before the next urgent matter demands attention. So I would say that there's something to that effect too, where even if you were to run on such a platform, it would be gone within 15 minutes and onto the next thing, whether it be a culture war thing that the opposition would pull out to throw in your face. I feel like you could run on the most popular platform and you would still run up against pretty tight competition because the other side, the right, has gotten so good and so, yeah, really, with the Steve Bannon, what does he say? Flood the zone. Flood the zone, man. It's exhausting.

Starting point is 00:38:59 I don't know how you keep up with it anymore. Even if you have, even if you run on an incredibly popular platform, you would almost have to, what's it called when you get brainwashed and then you have to undo it? Brain dirtying. You got dirty up those brains again. There's a word for it. My uncle's calling me. That lends itself to another big thing.

Starting point is 00:39:23 You talk about how bots are a huge, huge problem. I don't see, and I don't know if I'm just like not paying attention, but I don't see anybody like kind of talking about the bots. When you were the one that kind of, I was seeing you talking about it and I'm like, yeah, that's actually a much bigger thing than we. Than we talk about. Yeah. We're kind of like, oh, no, everybody's telling the truth all of the time on these platforms. Oh, and it's just porn bots mostly, but it ain't. No, it's people in like, you know.

Starting point is 00:39:50 Well, there was that brief moment where Zuck was almost like, happy about the fact that he's going to have all these AI creators, AI influencers. That was weird. But I'm not even talking about those. Like, I'm talking about the bots. They get in the replies on post and they're like. Help control the narrative. Yeah, and they're like, Elon Musk, you're like the coolest guy ever and you're so smart. And he himself has been brainwashed.

Starting point is 00:40:13 I don't know what the opposite word is for what you... Deprogrammed. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, the bots are... I really think, like, we'll look back at this moment in history and be like, oh my gosh, like the bots drove this election. It was the media election, but it was 1,000 percent foreign adversary.

Starting point is 00:40:30 I sound like conspiracy theorists, but like foreign adversaries in the replies on Twitter, on TikTok. I mean, everything makes you sound like we're in such a weird... I mean, Elon Musk is in Wisconsin right now. offering a million dollars, and it ends up going to the, like, the director of the college Republicans of Wisconsin or whatever. And you're just like, everything, you just sound crazy. I know. You can't really talk about this period without, but it's all real. It's not a, yeah, it's made it. You're not some crackpot conspiracies. I think I'm paraphrasing you, but it's made it so that people don't know what's factually true anymore, creating an environment

Starting point is 00:41:06 of information exhaustion and our ability to, inability to, inability. to think long term anymore. You touch a lot on time frames and the attention that are ever-diminishing attention spans. And you just raise a really good, interesting point that I just don't know how we collectively recover from and rebuild from.

Starting point is 00:41:27 When our attention spans are so shot and we are so addicted to this everything now and so affected by bots that it's just, it's overwhelming. And we're so used to being lied to. And like Signalgate was last It was last Monday And it feels like another thousand years have passed

Starting point is 00:41:48 And like everybody I talked to And this is like all part of the floods his own plan And unfortunately it works quite well Everyone is like I'm pretty tired I'm pretty beat up I don't really know which way is up or down And it becomes very difficult To do any sort of like long time happening

Starting point is 00:42:05 And we're all a bit biased because like it's our job to be absorbed by the news like you can definitely if you get outside of a bubble i think it's a bit simpler but um it's uh it's very interesting for sure they're masters of that i i like this other thing i'm sorry i'm just spitting your own words back at you no this is great somebody reading my newsletter you're guys folks if you don't read kaila's newsletter you really oh you have you're such a gifted writer and and not only just your ability to parse really dense topics, but just, I don't know, your way with words, you weave a very compelling tale. Yeah. It's easy to read. And before you know it, you've read through the whole thing. Oh, great.

Starting point is 00:42:53 It actually kind of did that in as much as you're talking about the dopamine cleanse that you went through where it's like, I got ideas. I was like, damn, I've sat here and actually read without checking my phone or like stopping to twiddle my thumbs or scratch my ass. 20 minutes. Holy shit. Anyway, then my back started hurting because I was sitting with really poor posture. Can you help fix that? Can you write an article about that? So the way that I manage that is like I sit on a stool with no back. And so that way I have to like really good posture. It helps a lot. I'm sure it does. I try to do that. But anyway, you say factual economic understanding has been

Starting point is 00:43:36 replaced by tribal signaling, which is something that we were just talking about, conditioning people to accept simplified narratives about economic issues, boy, does that sound familiar, an accelerated discourse to the point where appropriate timescales for economic analysis has been lost. And Trump himself even kind of said that with how Beijing thinks in terms of centuries. Yeah. I think in terms of quarters here. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:01 God, it's, fuck. That's your capitalism at work, bitch. What do you? I don't understand. they rail on this so much in the West being number one and now all of a sudden there's this weird unfurling of these ideas that have been traditionally just so hammered into our heads of like capitalism rocks

Starting point is 00:44:18 and is impervious to criticism and yet here they are just the people on the right about like him making that that statement about where we're so focused on the short term it's like yeah that's that's the system we've been told is the best one and it doesn't it doesn't

Starting point is 00:44:37 right we have this two-party system that kind of tries to dismantle whatever the other one wants to do every four years well they have a one party system and you know if you want to criticize that you're welcome to but they clearly have a vision for the country that they're trying to enact and put in place

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Starting point is 00:46:27 So keep your Mac tidy with Clean My Mac, folks. Try it seven days for free and use our code, Bays 20 for 20% off. That's seven days free with code Bays 20 for 20% off. Yeah, no, I mean, the two-party system is probably quite an issue. It would be better if we had some sort of parliament, I think, where there could be like at least some level of debate. But now it becomes so ideological and so easy to sell a simple narrative

Starting point is 00:46:55 and tell people things that just aren't true. Yeah, like tariffs are paid for by other countries, for example. That's a tough one. Yeah, that's a really tough one because, like, we have data on it. And I know data, like, doesn't matter. But it's really difficult to get people to realize that, like, that's ultimately a tax on consumers. And broad-based tariffs are never a good idea. And, like, you can look at what happened in the Great Depression, where we had tariffs enacted. And then something called the Kindleburger spiral happened, where we had tariffs. And then people retaliated. So we did more tariffs. And then they retaliated again. And then you had the economy just do the spiral down, down. down, down. Yeah. So it really worsened the Great Depression to have a tariff period. And Trump is always praising McKinley. But McKinley came out of that era and was like, tariffs are actually

Starting point is 00:47:43 not great. And it's just kind of interesting how even he falls prey to not understanding the full scope of a story. When you're thinking about people not being able to reckon with data and all that stuff, have you engaged with any of the data around the

Starting point is 00:47:59 illiteracy rates in the country and maybe um maybe that we all just can't read and that's part of the problem no it's truly yeah yeah i've been so i travel like on it i travel a lot right now i've been traveling since the book came out and i go to a lot of universities and i go to a lot of conferences and i've been on the road since may 24 um and like people will tell me this like professors about their students they're like I love my students but like they can't read books and it's adults too

Starting point is 00:48:32 I mean that's the thing there was you know because there's so many things get circulated on Twitter and there was this stat I wish I had it basically about the literacy rates in this country and I was going that just cannot be true and I started Googling it and it

Starting point is 00:48:47 is very true the literacy rates in this country are shockingly and you can remember the number no if you can see sounds like what an illiterate would If you can maybe Google the literacy rates in the country, maybe we can find... I mean, I know that we're like number 32 in the world for education. Honestly, since I've seen it, I've kind of been like, you know what, that makes so much sense.

Starting point is 00:49:08 On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024. Maybe the 54% of adults have a literacy below a sixth grade level. Yeah, that's concerning. Because sixth graders are famously stupid. I mean, that is... They're dumb as hell. unbelievable. Look at that. Low levels of literacy cost the U.S.

Starting point is 00:49:26 up to $2.2 trillion per year. Oh, my God. Jesus. But yeah, you had a funny, I think it was either a tweet or a comment or something you posted on. Making fun of people who can't read? No, it basically just said something like, if you're going to comment on the article,

Starting point is 00:49:43 please read the article. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, every time I share an article, people understandably, they're quite long. They don't read them. But then they're like, stupid and wrong and then like what they're picking a fight about is something I said yeah and they're like why don't you say that and I was like and I so I screenshot quite a bit and I'm like here I always love that when I see that I'm just like I don't know how you have the patience I'd be on there I mean I'm

Starting point is 00:50:08 I get pretty damn impatient on the internet I uh I should stop doing that stop being cussing at people especially yeah like chamath polyapitia I'm like fuck you dude you suck but so you you you call tariffs, attacks on American consumers, an affront to allies and a gamble, there won't be retaliation. And I think the gambling thing for me is a perfect encapsulation of just, it's like a, I don't know, not a microcosm, but it's like, you know, with, with a lot of youth feeling so hopeless, a lot of them have turned to things like gambling because they're, they feel abandoned and by the systems that we've been raised to believe in

Starting point is 00:50:54 and we're just all kind of, especially young people are all kind of collectively realizing that it's all bunk. I mean, I think that's a good point that we haven't really talked about. It feels like when you kind of move around on the internet and see people talking about this stuff, there's so much resentment baked

Starting point is 00:51:10 into so many of their, so much of their communication online. They're so, you know, angry at just you know, either the other side. It's just a, I mean, it's a lot like your context content thing. It's just like, well, that's that person who wronged me. I'm never, they're dead to me. Right. And just Trump, when you, when you look into what this administration's goal is, it really does feel like a giant,

Starting point is 00:51:38 giant gamble with like a nine-leg parlay that needs, every single one needs to hit in order for this to succeed. Would you agree with that? That it's just one big. fucking gamble. Yeah, I mean, the Mara Lago Accord, I wrote about that in a newsletter as well like kind of walking through like they want to devalue the dollar and then they want to do tariffs and tariffs usually

Starting point is 00:52:02 strengthen a currency and so it's kind of like it's immediately. Yeah, it can be straightforward and then like the way that they want to deal with tariff strength and incur currencies and have the dollars still be devalued is have perpetual dollar bonds which would really require people to believe in the infinite power

Starting point is 00:52:20 of the United States because it's a perpetual dollar bond. So you're basically like, yeah, I'll give you my money, United States, and forever and always. You get paid a little bit of interest on that. And so it's a massive gamble. And like there was a news hit today talking about how China, South Korea and Japan are teaming up. Oh, yeah. So to have a trade plan to deal with these tariffs. And Canada has like totally, understandably freaked out.

Starting point is 00:52:45 Mark Carney, who is their prime minister, he was like, we're not. dealing with the United States anymore and then him and Trump had a call and I guess think well but um I think we're not dealing with the United States anymore is going to be a popular sentiment I mean I don't blame them yeah it's it's so sad because I really love the United States like I think it's such a beautiful country and it stood for so many important things like being able to move here like that's my grandparents moved here and you know they made lives for themselves and they used to kind of be it was tough still but like that was kind of what it was and it just feels like we're turning our back on what the country is.

Starting point is 00:53:24 Yeah. What do you think exactly? Because a lot of people have articulated what they believe the Trump administration's goal is right now with all of this tariff shit. I mean, obviously, we know now that they say it's fentanyl, and I'm sure that plays a role. In borders. Yeah, in border security.

Starting point is 00:53:40 But that just being a means to the end of being able to implement it without the need of Congress. But a lot of people have been talking about the refunds. financing of debt coming up and that being a thing that they're trying to force every they're trying to force equities down so that bonds look more attractive so the bonds go up thereby dropping rates thereby making it so that uh our refinancing of debt is is a lot more tenable does that sound about right to you oh yeah yeah that's uh kind of part of the yeah they want yields down on the 10 year um and uh you know crashing the economy is certainly

Starting point is 00:54:19 one way would need to do that. I mean, I think it's so hard to really like wrap your mind around exactly what's going on. They have expressed this like economic detox period being important to their underlying goals. And so I would take that quite seriously. And they do seem to want to refinance at a lower rate, which is understandable. Like interest payments are a huge part of part of our issue right now because rates have been quite high because inflation. hasn't gone down at the rate that we thought it would. And so it all makes sense in theory. But again, we have this disconnect of practice, right?

Starting point is 00:54:59 You have the disconnect and practice. And then you have the strong man, crossed arms, isolationist attitude that's only going to exacerbate the existing, like even if you were to be Mr. Nice guy and do these tariffs and stuff, it's like you're just adding so much insult to injury that in a way that's like, how do these people not recognize? what they're doing as they're doing it and just tearing it all for what like to what end

Starting point is 00:55:24 maybe privatization getting all their buddies to own you know the infrastructure of the you know the entire American but it's like it's working right like we've spent how long an hour

Starting point is 00:55:41 just talking about their plans and theorizing and I've spent the better part of since this inauguration theorizing and plans and reading other people theorizing. And so, like, they have completely captured attention, like, 100%. Oh, yeah. We haven't even, like, covered so many things.

Starting point is 00:55:58 Yeah, like the real meat of the economy. Like, what does the labor market look like? What's AI going to do, right? Like, there's so many questions beyond the Trump administration. But it makes it, I was talking to somebody today where we were talking about, like, how it's very difficult to get your head around anything else because the news is so all encompassing and it almost feels like a soothing thing to check the news because you're like I'm informed like I'm going to be prepared when this bad thing happens but there there's so many other

Starting point is 00:56:27 things going on that could be even potentially like more catastrophic than then I think the policy is being enacted right now are quite concerning but you know AI for example that could be even worse yeah uh you had pointed out actually Argentina as a good example of what could potentially happen here because Argentina was like the number one economy in the early 1900s and now they're number three excuse me and now they're like the 70th which is I mean do you think that that could potentially happen here where we just suddenly really fall down the ranks? I think that there's like so the United States is very lucky because we have the reserve currency right like the dollar is a serve currency so people want to do trade with us because they want

Starting point is 00:57:12 dollars and we are the as you mentioned earlier like the stock market hub we have a lot of big companies like where we're a lot of wealth is um we have a lot of rich people and so there's a lot of incentives to trade with the u.s and so it's a little bit of a different situation than Argentina but they kind of had that same like isolationist stance where they were like we can just do things to all ourselves and we certainly don't need other countries and it just it never works out quite well right we live we live in a society as george Costanza would say we live in a global society. You've got to be able to play with the other kids in the sandbox. I like what you went on to say about all of this stuff. Sorry, I'm just, I have to say, I like what you say.

Starting point is 00:57:51 You said this path, the path of what the Trump administration is presumably doing, getting yields down, stocks go down, the economy slows, debt gets refinanced, the Fed cuts rates, and then everything just explodes. That's their kind of plan. And they've kind of forecasted it by saying, oh, we're going to have a detox period. And also, they're, they're, They're kind of laying the ground by saying this actually isn't Trump's economy yet. Trump's economy is six to 12 months down the line. Yeah, Axios published. We're still in Biden's economy.

Starting point is 00:58:22 Right. But you say this path assumes a lot of the American public and a lot of goodwill from others. We're moving away from stability as a primary goal toward volatility as a tool for transformation. A high stakes experiment with our economic future. And I think that that's really fucking astute. And like I then say, it's the sign of the times. It's one big gamble. And as much as people are going all in on fucking fart coin and doge coin,

Starting point is 00:58:48 America's just going all in on this one extremely risky thing that could pay off. But so far, it's just a fucking mess. We're Adam Sandler in the, what's the Big Diamond movie? Great Big Diamond lover? Big Daddy. Big Diamond? Big Diamond. Uncut gems.

Starting point is 00:59:06 Uncut gems. Oh. Did you ever see? Ben, what is going on? I'm fucking tweaking it up, man, all these tariffs and shit. Again, my tie is very tight. So do you think it can work to be more isolationist or is it just a total backward-ass thinking? It's not what I think works.

Starting point is 00:59:29 Like free trade is really the goal for an economy. It's like, can you trade with other countries? You can do things more efficiently. And then, of course, it gets very complicated because obviously, like, we want other countries to have solid labor laws, like China has had a lot of problems with that and we've gotten a lot of cheap goods from China that we wouldn't be able to produce here because we pay our workers a living wage most of the time whereas China they don't and so like that's also something that we have to take into consideration it's like okay we can do free trade but other countries should probably treat their workers well

Starting point is 00:59:57 they should and so I definitely believe in free trade as a concept and I think it's like one thing that has led the United States to be such a powerhouse is we did that and we allowed for it and we are very physically in a good location, right? Like, we are pretty protected. We have Canada and we have Mexico, and those have been our buddies. Someone argue that, like, Mexico needs to tighten the border. We need to tighten the southern border. And, but, like, they've been our buddies.

Starting point is 01:00:24 And we have ocean on either side that has prevented some type of invasion. And we've been able to trade with both Canada and Mexico, and that's been massively beneficial. Like, we get a lot of natural resources from Canada. We get a lot of crops from Mexico. And so it's worked. And I think people are, like, it's, it becomes psychological where I think Trump thinks that the United States should just be the big guy on the block. And other countries should pay a price to have, like, tariffs are really, like, what's interesting about tariffs, and I promise I'll, like, wrap around to a point in a second.

Starting point is 01:01:02 But, like, what's interesting about tariffs is that we do talk about them in terms of reshoring manufacturing. But when you look at the Mar-a-Lago Accord, there's also an element of national security. Like, other countries have not been theoretically paying enough for the United States military to be protecting them. And so they also... They never say thank you. Thank you. That's a good point. Sorry.

Starting point is 01:01:23 You know, it's a really good point, especially when that person did say thank you quite a bit. But it goes back to the point of few, like, fact, versus lies. And so, yeah, the free trade is important there. and Paris could be a form of like trying to instigate some form of a national security tax or an international security tax as well. But yeah, I mean, free trade is, this is the thing they teach in economics class. Like it's like macroeconomics 101, free trade creates wealth. Yeah, you, onshoreing seems to be this notion that not only can it be done, it can be done efficiently, cheaply, whatever, and it'll be done in a flash. And it just, I'm always surprised when I see that because it takes so much time.

Starting point is 01:02:10 And not everything should, I agree with it to a certain extent of insuring stuff. We all can. But you point out that there are certain things that other countries just do better and that we can never compete on in a reasonable way. Also, I believe you pointed out that forcing everything on shore, risk creating inflationary problems. You've got export difficulties, higher costs throughout supply chains. Supply chains and factories are complicated. small businesses rely on imports. What's funny about the reshoring manufacturing is it assumes we have somewhere

Starting point is 01:02:40 to support everything too. That we haven't like made everybody so mad at us that they don't want to trade. I think that's kind of a funny one. Not funny like ha ha ha, but funny like, oh. No, it's funny ha too. Well, it's hard to laugh at this stuff. There is like some kind of cosmically funny thing. Like if you were floating in the stars watching America, you'd go like, this is kind of funny.

Starting point is 01:03:02 like and this is like the last outgrowth of yeah the ugly american um it's the last level of the american experience yeah yeah it's uh and it's funny that it's living through it not so funny well it's like that uh gandolph quote de furdo it's like i'm not super familiar with yeah i'm not because i'm not a huge nerd so no i don't know tell us what is it i don't think what does can't say it's like i i i wish that we didn't have to live through hard times essentially I thought it was going to be like, you got to destroy this ring, dude. Wait, do you not like Lord of the Rings? I haven't seen it.

Starting point is 01:03:41 I saw the first one. Oh, you should see it. And I was really turned off by how weird the old man was when he gets corrupted. He's like, I should have this ring. Oh, Smingle? I must be. No, Smingle is not. You don't see him.

Starting point is 01:03:50 No, not Smigel. He was the older guy who was like, he's literally looking at it. He goes, why shouldn't I have this? Who is he? Oh, Bilbo? Bilbo. Bill Bo, Bill Bo Baggins. Man, what a guy.

Starting point is 01:04:02 Everybody's talking about Bilbo. No, no, that movie is like, the movies are pretty informative, right? Like the whole concept, or the books, the books too. The, you know, what the movies are based on. But, like, the ring itself is sort of this explanation of, like, wealth and power and how it can corrupt. And I think that's just, like, really the American experiment. Like, can you put a bunch of wealthy people in a country together?

Starting point is 01:04:25 And will they distribute wealth fairly? Will they not try to take power? Like, will we have some sort of oligarchy at the end? Spoiler alert. No, no, yes. Yeah. Yeah, but it's a fiction is the best explain of everything. Yeah, but I mean, to your point, I feel like, I don't know, I feel very naive. I think I thought, I just kind of thought, yeah, bad, hard times were behind us.

Starting point is 01:04:52 And like, sure, we were going to have some hard times, but I just kind of thought we were going to have. I thought we were going to like just keep inching up and bringing more people. people out of poverty and like the real good times were just around the corner. And I feel very silly being like, oh, wow, it can get really bad. Well, you were saying that there may be a saving grace in the form of artificial intelligence, right? Was that one thing that you were saying could be a kind of silver lining? It could either be one or the other. Yeah. Well, that's good. Can you explain that? I'm not familiar with this. With AI. No, no, I'm not familiar with your perspective on how it could be a silver lining. Well, I mean, like if AI becomes,

Starting point is 01:05:32 comes very real. Theoretically, the government would have to respond in some way. When you say very real, do you mean something like AGI comes to fruition? Okay. And so if that ends up happening,

Starting point is 01:05:41 like, this sort of stuff could probably see like sitting and talking about terrorists because then AI does that for you, right? Like it can conduct

Starting point is 01:05:51 international trade. And this is far away, I think. But it could be like a massive compliment to the economy or it could be a detractor. Like there's so many

Starting point is 01:06:01 movies and books talking about Blade Runner, for example, or the Matrix where the AI takes over, like computers take over. I think we could we're kind of at a fork in the road, really, where we've seen a lot of progress in AI to the point where it could, I think, reach that AGI level.

Starting point is 01:06:18 But we've also maybe seen it being controlled by people who might not have the best incentives. Do you trust Sam Altman? I don't know him. Sure, but Do you trust him as a as a popular figure and a leader in the artificial intelligence space based on what you know?

Starting point is 01:06:38 Yeah, I think what I've heard about him from people who do know him is that he's transactional. And so he's just, he's a businessman, right? And they business, that's also a funny thing. A lot of people say that the United States should be run like a business. That's the most assignee thing. That's what drives me insane. That's a tough one. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:06:58 That's why they want to privatize everything. because, oh, if it's not making money as a service, we should privatize this office. Or maybe it's not a misunderstanding. Maybe it's just a fundamental disagreement. Maybe that's how they think it. And I think, yeah, that's the core of it. I think this is like a genuine disagreement about people's idea of what government should do.

Starting point is 01:07:19 Like, do you think government should provide services for citizens, make their lives easier, act as a shield against, you know the horrors that can happen from private institutions or do you think it should just be I don't know the military and roads and it's so yeah I keep thinking they're like misunderstanding but they're not they just I think very disagree well business people always see a business problem right and so we have a lot of business people like it's very interesting like the I think the House of Representatives is over half lawyers. And so like lawyers are going to think about things a little bit differently. And like they kind of see things in terms of cases. And there's a lot

Starting point is 01:08:08 of, oh, you're a lawyer. So you actually, how do you, how would you think about that? Like as half of like, is that something that you're like, that makes sense or? I think that kind of makes sense that lawyers end up in government. I think. Do you think it's good? Lawyers are generally bad people. But I don't think, um, I don't think it's good or bad. I feel neutral towards that. I think I feel much more, I think there are much worse professions that people could go into politics for. I think, like, for example, I mean, they're not necessarily turning into politicians.

Starting point is 01:08:46 This is more of, like, them having lobbying arms. But I think I think I'm much more disturbed by things like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, all of these people, Elon Musk. being all-knowing. It's a very strange thing that because they've achieved some success with, because they've achieved some success with business or tech or whatever, that they might, they should, they have an answer for how to run education. They have an answer for how to run health care. And all of these guys get into it.

Starting point is 01:09:20 Oh, sorry about that. All these guys get into it, right? Bill Gates has tried his hand at health care education, whatever. All, you know, varying degrees of failure. And especially his marriage. It's such a strange thing. No one gets a very successful teacher and is like, you know what, maybe we should hear her thoughts on how the tech industry runs. Okay?

Starting point is 01:09:43 She's risen through the rank. She's become a principal or a superintendent. Why don't we let her make all the decisions about how health care is run all of a sudden? If anything, she probably has some great ideas and should be included on how we do education and stuff like that. But that I find way more disturbing than, you know, lawyers becoming lawmakers. They definitely are going to have a baseline understanding of laws. But yeah, that stuff worries me way more. Yeah, do you ever do, I mean, Doge has been dominating headlines.

Starting point is 01:10:18 And I recently was thinking that it's really upsetting that we're all just kind of falling victim to, one of the most historical displays of grandiosity and narcissism in the form of Elon Musk. True to just his character, that he's got to insert himself at the center of every big event conundrum, be it the Thai kids stuck in the cave, COVID, the machines during COVID, like, we'll handle that, getting the rescuing the astronauts. This seems to just be the final thing of like, I can solve it. Elon Musk to the rescue, and I don't know. I just find it really exhausting, but equally fascinating, that we all just have to sit here and let it happen, that this malignant narcissist has to make himself the savior. When he has zero experience, just because he's ran companies and has been able to do whatever

Starting point is 01:11:22 magic needs to be done on balance sheets at Tesla to keep it afloat. that he should automatically be able to correct the course and fix the American balance sheet by treating it like some kind of corporation. There's no question at the end of then. I was going to say, like, don't you think that's fucked up? I'm like Chris Farley in that S&L sketch. Hey, everybody just...

Starting point is 01:11:53 That was cool. Yeah, that was pretty cool. In your article? Yeah. Well, because you went on to say treating economic suffering is a form of tough medicine. They're treating economic suffering as a form of tough medicine rather than a policy failure. And it's just really fucked up. And they're also giving us such conflicting takes.

Starting point is 01:12:13 At once they're saying, oh, we're going to go through this detox period. It's going to be very difficult. But also, we're about to unleash the most tremendous period of economic growth you've ever seen. And then, yeah, they're, they're treating it like a corporation when they have no business doing so. And they're toying with millions of American lives and money and services that I just don't think that they fully understand what they're fucking doing. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, please. I am curious, like, how you, I think probably a lot of people are just, like, worried right now, right?

Starting point is 01:12:50 Worry about the future in a way that I'm sure everyone's always worried about the future. but maybe we're in a future in a different way. I mean, in all aspects, economically, I have friends who are on visas who now are like, well, Jesus Christ, I'm scheduled to go home. I'm a little bit nervous to come back. Things have changed very quickly. I'm wondering, and if it's too difficult to answer, you don't have to. I'm just wondering if you have any kind of, like, inkling on how this turns out.

Starting point is 01:13:17 Like, are we just going to be unrecognizable? Is it, I think there's a lot of people who maybe freak out, like say, oh, you've got Trump derangement syndrome. Are people just freaking out? And we're going to look maybe fundamentally similar. Or is it just completely unknowable? I think there's an element of it unknowable. But what we're seeing with the Trump presidency is a mass protest, right? So people voted him in because he promised the 2018 economy, but also because they were. very sick of the status quo. And so the underlying status quo really hasn't changed. Like, the Democrats are still doing all the same old stuff. And so I think there has to be some fundamental change or else we're just going to kind of keep on repeating this cycle until the thing actually does break. So I don't know how to predict the future. But I think this is, it makes sense to me that we're here. And it makes sense to me that things are falling apart in the way that they

Starting point is 01:14:19 are yeah i think uh i am i would count myself among the people who are worried about the future and it's a it's definitely a strange thing where i mean i sometimes feel worried even talking about it because i don't want to add to i don't want to add to like the pessimism vibe or be like a um you know there's definitely a it's all over um corner of the internet i don't want to like i don't want to believe that I don't want to sell that to people, but sometimes it's hard not to get sucked into it, right? But I'm like, okay, but where do I place my, where do I place my hope? Where do I? And like you said, the Democrats aren't really changing their tune that much.

Starting point is 01:15:03 There's some definite excitement around some progressives, like the Bernie Sanders of the world. The AOCs who are joining him on his, like, fighting oligarchy tour. Tim Walls. Yeah, he's really, he's fiery. But I think it's hard to, you know, the joke has always been that every four years, like, people hoping for a better thing are basically Charlie Brown and the Democrats are, is it Lucy with the football? Yeah. And they're going to, they're going to hold the football for you and be like, we are promising, XYZ, we're going to do it different and then, you know, they yank the football from you. And it seems like at this point, it's hard for me to not feel like.

Starting point is 01:15:48 It's a little, too little too late. As we watch some things just get irreparably harmed. Well, trust, too. Oh, for sure. And that's part of the thing. You know, you see Tim Walls going on all these stops and you're like, yeah, but then you're like, wait, it was just a few months ago. He was kind of, you know, refusing to push any of these. He was kind of containered by.

Starting point is 01:16:12 Yeah. But who's to say, you know, that's kind of the problem, right? Democrats are always at there, or like progressives are always at their most like fervent and rabid when they, when it's safe to do so. Right now it's very safe to rail against the establishment of the Democratic Party. And I have a hard time placing hope in that like they will be able to like popularly take back. Well, it's a pendulum. Yeah. And so I think like what has happened with Trump's interesting because like he is that father figure and people are like he was a successful businessman um and and he was able to accomplish so much you know six bankruptcies later

Starting point is 01:16:59 but uh i i think like that kind of complicates stuff and so you almost need like uh wario to trump right like so i think that it would be like a dwayne the rock johnson no or somebody who's Like, go on. Go on. So Dwayne's going to do it. Somebody from outside, I think really has to come in. I love to seem chokeslam Trump. Or like, you know, Mark Cuban has floated him. Guys, I'm not saying they're the best choices. I'm just saying, I think you're not wrong. I'm just like, I think if you look at the situation, it has to be some sort of celebrity. Yeah. Because that is the only way to your point earlier, Ben, like you have to be out there all of the time. Dwayne the Rock Johnson has, you know, made a name for himself most recently with his little jingle bells.

Starting point is 01:17:50 Oh, yeah, he most recently definitely made a name for himself with his little jingle. Did you see a lot of people were pushing Stephen A. Smith for a while? Yeah, I did see that. That'd be fun. I mean. So is that where you're placing, if you are, sorry, if you are placing Hope anywhere, is it, is it in a figure like that? Or do you have any other? um any other things that might um no no not not even outside of all that just anywhere that you might

Starting point is 01:18:16 be like you know what maybe that is our way out of this mess well i think like so if people do read my newsletter they know i get like a little philosophical sometimes and i do believe that like the spirit of a human is is quite powerful and like um we've sort of been in a lot of situations where it's been pretty untenable before right and there's always been the rise in the fall of an empire. And I think now what we're seeing is very similar to 16th century Spain, where we had a very rich country. Spain was like top dog during that time, had so much silver because they were trading with and they owned a bunch of colonies in the Americas. They just like sat on their laurels and they didn't learn from that lesson. So there was massive brain drain. The silver just stopped

Starting point is 01:19:04 coming. And bureaucracy really became a big issue. So I think, like, we can learn from things like that and continue forward, but we have to be able to, like, get up off of the laurels for, and realize, like, American exceptionalism is not guaranteed. And so I think that's, like, where it's not necessarily hopeful. That's probably the wrong word for it. I think there's a path out. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:28 And it's just that realization, which is very difficult and very abstract. Yeah, I think you're right. And people kind of realizing that it's not going to, um, maybe no one's coming to save us and we are going to save us and we are going to Of course not. And everyone, yeah, needs to get up off their laurels. It is easy to sit back and be like, oh, who will do it? I'll do it.

Starting point is 01:19:48 I'll do it. The answer is just that I'll do that actually us, unfortunately. No, me, I'll do it. I'm sure you will. I'll do it. What would be your first step? I don't know. You don't have a place.

Starting point is 01:20:02 I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how anything works, which is what I was going to. to bring it to into my next uh and you say we're seeing a systematic devaluation of institutional knowledge in favor of some form of misguided intuition with some quite far reaching executive power and i think that that's pertinent to what we're talking about that we're all just kind of collectively realizing i think that holy shit we've had so much blind trust in these institutions and the people in power but uh perhaps they don't really know

Starting point is 01:20:39 as much as we have given them. Did you see Grimes tweet about this actually? I thought that that was very eye-opening. Grimes, Elon Musk's ex-wife ex-girlfriend, just tweeted that she realized that basketball is a lot like... No, it wasn't that. It wasn't that. That was good though. Did you see that? She said, increasingly, I discover with looming horror that we have no idea what's going on. And the civilization we all assume is a given is completely new and hardly stress tested. And there's no Illuminati, which is actually worse, because no one has any idea what's going on. That's funny. I'd feel more comfortable if there was an evil Machiavellian plan, but no, actually, we don't

Starting point is 01:21:17 even really know history, really. And I think that that's especially pertinent, given how close she's been to such tremendous power that she might have witnessed it firsthand and is kind of... Yeah, she's been quite honest, I think, about her relationship with Elon and what she's learned. But no, I think that's true. it's almost, I think people think of things like the Illuminati is like they don't think

Starting point is 01:21:43 Wait, can you pull the tweet back up? Sure. So is she speaking solely about this current administration? I think she's just talking about generally nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Read it to me again? Increasingly I discover with looming horror

Starting point is 01:21:58 that we have no idea what's going on and the civilization we all assume is a given is completely new and hardly stress tested and there's no Illuminati, which is actually worse because no one has any idea what's going on. Huh. She's just saying that we're just a bunch of fucking dumb children. I think, because I'm, I, I don't want to misinterpret her,

Starting point is 01:22:18 but I'm kind of, I'm kind of convinced that, like, we did, we had a pretty good thing. I think, I think we didn't do enough to, like, bolster American institutions and make sure we impacted people's lives. and really brought everyone up as this as this wealth exploded. We became the wealthiest country in the history of the world. And our wealth inequality ate us alive. And we turned into freaks.

Starting point is 01:22:54 I think, yeah. And we chose to, we're choosing to like dismantle a system that could have provided for people. Yeah, let's, I feel like that's a. I feel like that's a good transition to the last thing that I wanted to talk about with you is just the human cost of all of this in the next generation. We've talked about the apathy among young people, which is prevalent with the massive rise in gambling and meme coin trading and crypto and all of that stuff and how part of Trump's appeal is not necessarily that he's right leaning. but that just fucking everything up in the form of voting for him is just a sort of form of revenge

Starting point is 01:23:40 for many young voters. Yeah. And I just wonder if you could speak to that at all. And like how you feel also because I'm sure you feel a certain degree of apathy and despair. But obviously you're old enough to not turn it into just like,

Starting point is 01:23:57 well, fuck I'm going to vote for this guy then. No, no. A lot of people drove this. Yeah. We really saw it in under 24s. David Shore, Blue Rover's research, has a pretty good, called an autopsy of the 2024 election where you saw young, of course, men specifically, not of course, like men, but we all think, I think we all know that young men kind of drove the Trump vote, especially the 2020-2020 group. In terms of sort of the apathy, it goes to your point, Amiel. about wealth inequality, right?

Starting point is 01:24:35 Like, a lot of people have realized that the system is just not there. It's so sad because we're the richest country in the world and it should be. And so they're turning to things like Newton coins and gambling and taking on a bunch of risk, having elements of financial nihilism

Starting point is 01:24:54 in a way to try and, like, mitigate all of that. Yeah, and just how sad it is that social media on the internet have just kind of gigafried everybody's brains. I really like this quote from Kate Wagner that you phone world. Oh yeah. Great article.

Starting point is 01:25:13 Yeah, locking us in an eternal present. The constant storm of hot takes saps our capacity for nuance, making it easier for political actors to weaponize half-truths and reinforce distrust any meaningful governance. And that sounds so familiar.

Starting point is 01:25:31 It really is sorry, I don't mean to turn it into a depression, depressing thing. I mean, as you said, the pain of economic insecurity has to go somewhere. And if it can't be channeled into meaningful work or stable institutions, it festeres into alienation or extremes. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about pain. Like, it always has to have a home. Like, it never just floats away.

Starting point is 01:25:53 Like, you kind of resolve it for time, but that's because you allocate the pain toward new friendships, like, or, like, figuring out a new hobby. But if you have so much economic pain, you're going to revolt. And we had this quiet rebellion in the form of voting for Trump. And the Biden economy had its flaws for sure, you know, pulling back on rent forbearance a bit too early, probably never solving the student loan debt thing and really letting a lot of people down with that. And now student loan debt is coming back and it's going to knock 170 points off people's credit cards. scores, and that's going to create a little economic calamity within itself. But the Biden economy, it really fell into the arms of manufacturing, like the chips act, the IRA. It was very

Starting point is 01:26:42 useful for those. But to your point, Emil, like, he didn't do a lot for the average consumer. There was an article by Kate Arnoff called Pull Party Progressivism, where she talked about, you have to have poll parties for people. Like, you have to give them something really nice and, like, have really nice parts and, like, really nice sidewalks. And that's sort of the thing that I hope America figures out is there has been, like, a lot of bureaucracy. And the way that the Trump administration has deemed to solve this is by taking a hammer to it. The Biden economy had good rails around it, but internally do. Yeah, I mean, I think, like, what you're talking, like, with some of those needs for bold things during the Biden administration, I think the most frustration,

Starting point is 01:27:28 I think the most frustrating thing watching the Trump administration. I've said it on the show where, you know, I don't, I agree with the substance, but watching him just kind of try to do as he pleases, I think every time, you know, it brings to mind the Hillary Clinton quote, I think it was 2016 when she's talking about like, oh, you, you know, you guys just want ponies and rainbows or whatever. but if someone with like trying to push through broadly popular policies is just like I don't care we're pushing it through it. For example, you brought up the student loan thing. If Biden could have had the, you know, political will to be like, we're just going to cancel it, wipe everyone's

Starting point is 01:28:09 accounts. We'll deal with the courts later. They're not going to be able to claw back everyone's money. And all of a sudden, you can just do it. Or go much broader and use actual, uh, the actual policies like the Higher Education Act to make sure you have the authority to do these things. They went about it in the most like kind of feckless way and they couldn't even they couldn't get a single thing done like something like big they could hang their hat on like that. And so it's really frustrating to see someone be like, no, I took power and I'm going to use it. Yeah. When for so long we've been told like if we get power we actually can't do that much. Yeah. I think part of the problem is.

Starting point is 01:28:51 is that the right has gotten so good at controlling narrative and making it all about culture more bullshit. There are many instances we can point to in history when we've had the power. Of course.

Starting point is 01:29:02 Not we, but like the broad Democratic Party and did not deliver. And that just feeds into what we're talking about when there's people going, but how am I supposed

Starting point is 01:29:11 to believe in you? You don't do it when you have the power. And if we want people to, I don't know how we're going to convince people. Well, you talk about education reform and digital literacy as being some of the only tools we have at our disposal in combating these myriad problems. I mean, do you think that that's even possible at this point? Yeah?

Starting point is 01:29:40 Oh, well, that's good. Why wouldn't it be? I don't know, because the whole education department getting gutted and how do you collectively, I don't know, inform people when misinformation is at all-time highs? I think that it's always possible, right, to do some element of education. But I think we're going to have to. And there's a big difference between wanting to do something and needing. Like, if we don't get this figured out, we will end up like Wally, right?

Starting point is 01:30:16 I'm serious. It's not what I was expecting you to say, but totally. Why wouldn't we? Yeah. Right? Like where the screens control people. Yeah. And they just like scoot her around.

Starting point is 01:30:26 You already see it. It's crazy. Like I sound like an old man, but like walking around with my dog. I've seen so many people just walk right into trees or signs because they're phone, right? Like Technic. And so I think we're going to. Technic. That's good.

Starting point is 01:30:42 I like that. No, it's a real symptom. Look at a picture of it. No, I've seen it. It's depressing. To the points of like, is it? possible. Like once people do see a real need, I think there will be some force around it. Will it be implemented in the correct way as a different question? Politics is, as we've talked about throughout

Starting point is 01:31:02 the show, is quite complicated. But yeah, I think we just got to figure out how to educate on it. Like, it's such a new thing to Grimes' point about like civilization is new. Technology is even newer. We've really only had it in this form for like 20 years. Right. Wait, can I, With your old man take I do just kind of because we were talking about this a little bit and I have this fear of with AI and everything

Starting point is 01:31:27 and just kind of social media and the the cheap engagement and stuff it just kind of do you worry about people kind of like losing the satisfaction of I don't know how else to put this but like almost labor like the fruits of their own labor

Starting point is 01:31:44 being able to draw a picture draw a picture, produce art, produce music, produce anything. And like when I say labor, I don't mean like your job that you clock in to go do. But like I'm worried like we're building a generation. When you talk about Wali, a generation of people who just like, yeah, put me in the scooter. I don't I don't really identify with like the satisfaction of producing any kind of thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:13 And do you think there will be any kind of like at least movement to be like, hey, wait, working with your hands and like creating something is good. Well, it's real fast. A big thing that you've talked about in all your writing recently has been, we need to reestablish our relationship with time. Yeah. I was actually

Starting point is 01:32:31 in a big debate about this a few days ago. Oh, great. Yeah. Kind of like what is art? Because there is this big AI thing on Twitter where people were studio gibliing their families and like themselves. and, you know, the creator of Studio Ghibli does not like AI.

Starting point is 01:32:52 He's called it an insult to life itself. And so a lot of people are like, oh, this is making art accessible and beautiful and wonderful. And it becomes very difficult to delineate what art actually is in that environment. And, like, is applying essentially a Snapchat filter to your family art. And I think the way that I think about art, is once we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with art. And that's what I really worry about with people is like if they don't go outside or like be around the trees or get away from the phones, you do get just consumed by a world that isn't

Starting point is 01:33:30 around you. Like you're just in an alternate reality all the time. And so you can still get inspired to make art like based on what you see in the internet. But it might detract from the impetus to do so. And so I worry that like, yeah, once we lose touch with nature, we lose touch with art along the way. You're not leaving your house. You're not falling in love with people. And that's all the best of art.

Starting point is 01:33:56 Well, you are, but it's like online bots, right? And that's like a whole other podcast topic about the demographic crisis. Well, so I'd like to leave this on a positive note. Sure. And ask you a simple question. Kyla, what are you positive about right now? Not that you're a negative Nancy, but I know. Do you feel like I am?

Starting point is 01:34:17 No, but I just, I feel like we have no choice but to be really, yeah, realistic. And I try to be an optimist about things and I just wonder if you have any, just to end it on a positive note. If there's anything in particular that you, is there a silver lining that you see in all of this? what kind of hope you have for the future of the country, the future of the youth, whatever. Yeah. So my writing is always a reflection of what I'm trying to grapple with. And so it's been a lot of the Trump administration. It's been a lot of attention, economy stuff, as I'm trying to figure out my relationship to all of that stuff. And so I have, like, struggled with all of that. And it has been very hard because you lose yourself quite a bit. And so the things I'm hopeful

Starting point is 01:35:06 about, or things that are in my immediate control. Like, I like to garden, like I have a garden and I grow lemons and oranges and kale. And I can go outside and see the dirt and see the growth. I realize, like, everything does grow anew again as long as we don't have nuclear winter. And I, like, I ride my bike a lot and I like to see people doing things during their day. And I have a a dog that I really enjoy being around and I have family and relationships and so I think that's like what you have to root yourself in is it's very easy to get lost in the global and you really like not to be up on a soapbox about it but like you do have to like focus on the local because there's nothing you can control on the global level like you can freak out about it and make videos

Starting point is 01:35:57 about it but at the end of the day it's what you do and in where you are there's some guys who could do something on the global level. They're out there. Maybe they're on a Discord channel and they're, they maybe don't have that much to lose. Luke's not going to be happy about. You know what? Maybe I take matters into my-

Starting point is 01:36:17 Who's the Discord channel? Oh, no. He's hinting at a Lee Harvey kind of situation being somewhere out there. Yeah. Don't drag her into this. Don't implicate her. I was really trying to be like hopeful and lying.

Starting point is 01:36:33 I guess it's not your old I mean the decor is not about your all is fine but oh we've just been well wait before we do this would you like to plug anything for the audience I mean we we to reiterate what your book is called where people can find it and where people can where you'd like to point people to yeah yeah so the book is in this economy and it's wherever books are sold and then the newsletter is krela.substack.com and I published on social media almost every day kind of talking about the economy and yeah

Starting point is 01:37:09 so it's just yeah I totally forgot to say it to people but if you've enjoyed this you're still watching please give the video a thumbs up yeah yeah and we have the Gandalf quote that you pulled up would you like to read it to take us out? Yeah he says to

Starting point is 01:37:25 Frodo or Frodo says to Gandalf I wish it need not have happened in my time and then Gandalf says back so do I and so do all of us who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. Wow, that's really good. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:37:42 There you have it, folks. Everything's going to be okay, according to Kyla. If you're one of those guys on those discords, I'd like to say all we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us. Okay? That's all we can do. All right. Thanks so much for watching and listening, folks.

Starting point is 01:38:00 We'll see it the bonus, Ben and Emile Show. That time. man thank you very much coming up on this week's episode of ben and amel show dot com i still have nightmares about being a waiter and just sucking at it and people getting mad at me it is very stressful i always

Starting point is 01:38:14 i always ask sarah if she thinks i have what it takes to be a waiter and she always lasts and i say let me do one you'd be rude to people yeah well she was like number one you just like don't like people and i'm like come on let me do one one shift even if we were to do it you would just hate

Starting point is 01:38:30 it so much not only would you be bad at it, you also would dislike it. Arguably, the worst combination for someone being a server is not liking it and being bad at it. My kids are going to be cool. They're going to know how, by 10 they're going to know how to kickflip. They're going to be too cool to be... Do you think you'll hit them?

Starting point is 01:38:47 Do I think I'll hit my kids? No, I won't need to. What if they're standing on the table of a restaurant? They will, they will know that they just will know not to fuck with me like that. They'll just respect me. Because of the hitting. No. And they had a speech. with a Michael phone attached to it and you're not even going to say anything are you I just like saying I've been turning micro into Michael I know everything I say Michael plastics Michael wave what is the response you wanted from that just tell me I'll give it I'll give you what you want so just tell me there's nothing you can just tell me what to do I want I want to give you what you want I just want I wanted you to go just call it a microphone and I go yeah but you've been doing it on this you've been doing it on the show saying Michael stuff You tweeted about it.

Starting point is 01:39:33 Yeah, Michael Plastics. Yep. And then you say it to me. And I want to give you what you want. Just tell me what to do. Yeah, that's it. No, there's nothing. To just go like...

Starting point is 01:39:42 It's pretty funny.

The Ben and Emil Show - BAES 94: Is America Over as we Know it? ft. Kyla Scanlon

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