The Pomp Podcast - #1154 David Pakman on Biden, Trump, Guns, & The Fed

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

David Pakman is the host of The David Pakman show. In this conversation we cover a lot, everything from Republican to Democrat perspectives on various issues, what the federal reserve should be doing with the economy, the gun issue, race, geopolitics, and regulation in the private sector.  ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th, 2023 in Miami hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of fascinating discussions. We'll cover topics from investing, emerging tech, scientific research, sports, music and more.We have some massive names being announced via Twitter throughout January so stay tuned for details.This will not be your typical event and it certainly won’t be one you want to miss. We’re going to learn a lot, make some smart friends, and as always, we’re going to have fun.Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. David Pakman is the host of The David Pakman Show.

In this conversation, we cover a lot. Everything from Republican and Democrat perspectives on various issues, what the Federal Reserve should be doing with the economy, the gun issue, race, all sorts of things that are happening in geopolitics, where exactly you should be focused on your own independence, and how you should think about regulation in the private sector. David is someone who has a left-leaning perspective when it comes to politics, but he's unique in his ability to be able to talk about the pros and cons of various people

and different issues along with different political perspectives. I always enjoy talking to people who are very clear about where their leanings are, but also are willing to engage in good faith debates about these topics. Here is my conversation with David Pakman. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night, or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the guard and the shield.

The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion, if you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I thought a great place to start a conversation would be what is the role of government with the private sector? There's a lot of people on certain sides of the aisle who think that the government should stay the hell out of private business. There's another entire segment of the population who's like, no, actually the government's super important and we should be embracing them and using all of their resources to help businesses

and everyone in between. Like, how do you think about the role of government with private businesses? So I think it's very easy to assume that someone who's on the political left like me would say, regulate everything all the time, more, more, more regulation. My view is I'm glad and think regulation is necessary if it can be demonstrated that there is a benefit to it and that an absence of regulation is going to be a problem. So, for example, there was this story about this sugar plant where there was a horrible accident where someone something broke essentially and somebody was killed and it immediately started this debate about, well, regulation didn't prevent that? Or was there not enough regulation in that particular case? There was regulation which was

not being followed. OSHA was not inspecting regularly enough to determine whether the regulations that were law were actually in place. And so it was basically regulation was there wasn't enforced. So it wasn't despite regulations. It's we haven't actually given the regulators in this particular case enough power to do what they have to do. So my view is I don't want to get in the way of business. I'm a business owner. You're a business owner. Unless there's a really good reason to say we need regulation here. I don't want it. I'm not looking just to overregulate. There are many industries where it makes sense to say you have all the freedom in the world as an entrepreneur to work in this space and make as much money as you want. But we've determined there

are some minimum ground rules you have to abide by. And this applies in insurance. It applies in manufacturing. There's some aviation, et cetera. I'm fine with regulation. I think it's critical to have the right amount of regulation, but I'm not interested in over-regulating or saying involve government and everything. Yeah. What's interesting about this perspective is that there are many businesses where we benefit from regulation in the sense of, I don't know, take the airlines. Like I get on a plane in America and I don't feel like the plane has a 50-50 shot of making it, right? And some of that is a belief in technology and confidence there, the training of the pilot, the safety precautions, the FAA and kind of all the weather and their

ability to coordinate between different planes like there's a bunch of different layers to this um at the same time it feels like uh areas of regulation that people agree on are then extrapolated out and it becomes like let's regulate a whole bunch of other things and um you can't blanket statement it it's very much industry specific situation specific is there examples where you think that regulation exists but it's actually at the detriment of a business yeah i i'm let's see i'm trying to think of the industries in which that would be the case I think there's lots of situations in the content space. And this is less about regulation by law, but it's more by policy where, for example, there was a long period of time where the default was

in a copyright dispute. The person claiming the copyright infringement was immediately given the benefit of the doubt and the content was taken down. So, for example, me as a content creator, if some company alleged that I violated their copyright, I immediately suffered as a result. I was either restricted on YouTube or had a problem on podcast or would get a demand letter, whatever the case may be, rather than they should really have to prove that I'm actually doing something wrong. The default should actually be the claimant should have to demonstrate that I've done something wrong before I'm sanctioned in some way. That's like an example of where the balance was probably a little bit off. But this is a great example, right? Because we deal with

this all the time on YouTube specifically. And one, there's many cases where we see the copyright claims and we're like, well, we are using a library that is approved or when it's like for music or it may even be something that we created. Yes. That somehow somebody is trying to copyright. Right. And so you go through these situations and you do wonder, like, what is the letter of the law? I think it's one. But two, does the letter of the law actually matter when the platform is willing to enforce based on their own rules? And so I do think about this idea of hard regulation and soft regulation. So hard regulation being like, these are the letter of the law. There has been a process that has created these laws. They are enforced by a court. But if all of a

sudden a platform says like, hey, we know what the law is, but we're going to have these other rules they'll always default to uh terms of service or whatever but if it becomes a tool to be weaponized against other users of the platform yes then all of a sudden like what what is the point here like how does a platform decide which users to reward and which users to punish with their own set of like kind of fake rules right that's one question and this was a really big deal during the 2020 uh debates the primary so the presidential debates are sort of like open source. They're put on by the Commission on Presidential Debates. It's one feed. And anybody who wants to can repeat it. The primary debates were really like for profit endeavors

where like CNN would have the copyright to a particular Democratic debate and then Fox would have the copyright to a different debate. And content creators like me and others were live streaming those events. And CNN on a particular day sort of blanket copyright struck, as the term would be everybody who was streaming the content, even if it really did meet fair use guidelines. You know, the four fair use tests, including you're transforming the content. You're not just repeating it, but you're actually adding something. It's of news or educational value. Although those guidelines were met. But there was this sort of like blanket shut everybody down. And we were all shut down, shut, shut down in the moment of that night. And then it took weeks to

unravel the entire thing. And the damage was already done. The damage was already done. And that's the problem with a lot of these things that as the smaller creator myself compared to someone like CNN. They have the bully pulpit. They have the direct system to shut us down. I now am in a position where I lost whatever I was going to get from the event and I have to spend a couple weeks trying to clear my name. Sometimes some people even have to go so far as to hire a lawyer and incur those expenses. It seems extraordinarily unbalanced. I have had a number of videos taken down over the years. Some of them we've gotten clarity and they've said, hey, look, these are the timestamps this is what they said it violates his policy whatever we may disagree with the

policy but like okay fine you have your rules uh that's fine um then we have situations where a video is taken down we get nothing right and we have a contact at youtube we talk to them they're like i don't know what to do talk to another person like you just get like lost in the sauce kind of yep um but what we've noticed is it drastically increases the odds that we would self-censor ourselves oh in terms of you just beat your head against the wall so many times that you You're like, I don't want to deal with arguing over another video getting taken down, potential ramifications, like all these different things. And so if you know that that's happening, you try to fight it, right? Like as much as you can, but you're human and you kind of follow these biases.

And then I saw like the Twitter files. And when I saw that come out, there was things about like all kinds of tags that they supposedly had on accounts that were almost impossible to get off. you then start to get into this world where like if we're worried about the government going to a social media platform and having some sort of say in in the moderation of content well like if cnn or another media company could do the same exact thing which is worse is it the government or is it the large media company being able to do it that's an interesting question doing it yeah i mean i we could talk about the twitter files i largely thought substantively the twitter files were a nothing burger relative to the story that was being told in the sense that, yes,

the Biden campaign, which was not the government at the time, did have the ability to directly email Twitter and say, hey, we want this stuff taken down if it violates the terms of service. The Trump administration had those exact same contacts. I thought that was more or less a nothing burger. I thought the more interesting part about that was more or less what I think you're pointing out, which is in a sense, this is happening in way more ways than on Twitter. Twitter has terms of service and they have latitude to enforce them more or less the way they want, assuming they're not breaking any law. Right. Saying we don't allow Jewish people to tweet. That would violate very specific law. Right. But the the very interesting part is the

way in which this feeds back in other areas and the way content creators like us are affected on YouTube or on Twitch, where it starts to become a self-censorship thing. A really good example of this was in the aftermath. I call them the Trump riots. I don't know. In your audience, you might call them something different. The thing that happened on January 6th, there was a period where footage if you included any footage of that event, the content was either marked as for mature audiences only or it was not monetizable on YouTube or you could actually get suspended on Twitch altogether for those images. It was such a newsworthy story. But we all had to figure out how do we how do we talk about this and not end up hurting ourselves by getting ourselves banned

or whatever the case may be that seems like a fail of the terms of service in the sense that it's encouraging us to say we'll talk about non-newsworthy stuff because if we talk about this thing in the news we're going to have a problem well and like that specific event obviously is like super controversial politically and like all these different things just like the aisles have different opinions but i think when you look at that framework and the ability of them to be able to do that then what it leads you to start to ask like what other situations are we not aware of where this is happening and one of the the pieces i think that just kind of blew my mind frankly is uh i there's a specific video i'm thinking of where i interviewed someone he's a

professor at a university there was one part of the interview i knew they're gonna have a problem with so we rather than just normally cut it out and have the interview play we essentially created a a snippet or like a clip where i walk onto the screen and we say hey guys right now this guest dave is still talking i can't put it up i'm gonna take the video down i want you to know that we are being forced to self-censor because of these rules that we've been made aware of and what they want us to say and not say so you know that there's a piece of the interview that is not being put up here but i want you to know that rather than me just cut it out you think that nothing happened right that's interesting okay back to the show yeah and kind of come back to where now he he is

past the point of what he said the video goes up and uh we'd interviewed him once before hundreds of thousands of views on the on the interview probably one of the more popular guests that we've had uh this one starts to follow the same trajectory all of a sudden after like a week you ever seen a video grow grow grow grow grow and then it literally looks like a horizontal line And I have because I work in news and politics where the first 48 hours are key. So a lot of my videos look that way, but I understand that in your space, it's not that typical. And so like this goes to, it could be a change in consumer behavior.

It could be our audience cares and nobody else cares, right? There's all these things that could happen. Yes. But I think that idea where people say, okay, hold on a second. This is a spicier interview than let's say if we were just talking about Fed interest rate policy or something. Right. And it looks weird.

and then what happens is we have been doing this a long time right so we're kind of just like hey it is what it is let's move on to the next thing um but there will be people who run out onto twitter or email or whatever and like i'm being censored this is happening but whatever and so when i see those now i always have to ask myself like are they actually being censored or is it some weird you know algorithmic thing or whatever and it used to be that i would default my answer to like eh probably not like it's probably something that they don't understand or they just haven't gotten the information yet and i'll change their mind now i don't know like now it leads me to be a little bit more like it's 50 50 whether there's actual like intentionality behind

it from the platforms or it's just like some weird you know glitch in the system i totally sympathize with what you're saying i think one of the difficulties anytime people have this conversation what sometimes happens is it becomes censorship in the idea of someone a person with a political bias sitting there going deprioritize this video prioritize this video i've seen no evidence that that exists. And I've had my battles with I mean, just recently we had a problem with with where on January 9th, our YouTube views went down 70 percent. Algorithmic thing. I don't imagine there is someone there pressing a switch. I think there is something algorithmic which may be reflective of a bias for sure. I think one of the really tough things with this in general

is that when you talk about censorship, I don't have a problem with a platform having terms of service. So we know what the ground rules are and then enforce them in accordance with what they are. The the real problem I have is when I understand the ground rules and I play by them, but due to some either kind of misunderstanding, deliberate or accidental or confusion or whatever, I am limited anyway. A really great example of this was at one point in the pandemic when I think it was YouTube. Maybe it was Twitter had a rule against covid disinformation. I might do a video debunking like the guy who says, inject your own urine to prevent covid. I think it's a bad idea to inject your own urine. I've talked to doctors. The doctors were like, don't inject your own

urine. People say don't drink your urine. Don't do any of that stuff. There was a guy who said I'm curing my urine and then using it. I'm gargling what he was doing, all sorts of stuff. Me as someone saying the scientists don't do that. I got caught up in the censorship that was designed to target those spreading the urine disinformation. That's an example of where I understood the terms of service. I was abiding by them. I was debunking the misinformation, but I still got caught up in it. And I don't know what the solution to that is. Maybe it is human reviewers, but sometimes the human reviewers don't speak English as a native language. So can they tell the difference between I'm saying drink your urine or I'm saying don't drink your urine? You

understand the difference, but I don't know what the reviewers necessarily do. The idea of censorship. Yeah. Is there like a line to where, OK, this isn't censorship and now it is. And I'll give you an example. So let's say that YouTube sees a video, uh, with a certain topic and, uh, they say, eh, we're going to suppress the distribution of it, but it's still allowed to stay up on the site. Yep. Is that censorship? Is it not censorship? Like, how do you think about, you know, the word censorship is used all the time, but what actually is censorship versus if they're just suppressing the distribution, is that not actually censorship? Like, how do you think about it? It depends who you ask. There are people who believed that Twitter

not allowing nude pictures of Hunter Biden was censorship. At the same time, it's in their terms of service that nude explicit images of someone released without their consent aren't allowed on the platform. It's pretty clear. It's also illegal in most states. They call it revenge porn, even though a lot of people say that that's not the right term. So that's an example where there were people who thought that was censorship. I didn't seem to think that it was censorship. I think there's a couple components to keep in mind to figure out. Is it censorship? Number one, are these ideas and this is so subjective and I get that. Are they ideas that can contribute to that would their spread would be detrimental to the health or safety of individuals? Right. So

when we're talking about doxing, when we're talking about people saying drink urine, all this different stuff, you can make a really good case that if that became widespread and people maybe falsely believe that there was some authority to it and they followed whatever was being said that that could actually hurt people. I think that's one good question to ask. It's in the eyes to some degree of the beholder. Right. And that's the difficulty of it. Number two, I think the arbitrary application of terms of service arguably is a form of censorship in the sense of if we have the terms of service and they're understood, some people have to follow, abide by them and some don't. I think that that's a real problem. The difficulty with that second

thing is it is true that if someone with five million subscribers on YouTube publishes some piece of disinformation and someone with 500 does it, the person with the 500 might not actually have any problem. But in a way, it's like nobody's really watching that video because they have 500 subscribers. And so I think it's inevitable that you're never going to have 100 percent equitable application. And we kind of have to deal with that. But those are the two things i would look at so let's take them in reverse yeah i think that there is a size of audience it's kind of like um uh in in the finance world if you have no money and you have no uh loans right bank and other people don't really give a shit if you have loans and let's say that

it is uh a normal amount of loans right and something goes wrong the bank is in the upper hand they have the upper hand right and so like you owe the money uh to the bank or the bank can kind of call the loan or whatever but if you have such big loans that the bank is dependent on you yes all of a sudden you're too big to like fail for the bank right and they'll make all sorts of concessions and all this kind of stuff so we know that goes on in the finance world like there's all these jokes of like you know uh have enough of uh of leverage and like then it's the bank's problem right uh same thing in the content world so if you have the 500 subscribers like nobody cares nobody's paying attention whatever there's probably all kinds of crazy stuff that happens there

if you have five million or less subscribers let's call it people are paying attention and the platform has a lot of control the platform will really implement things yes but if you're a major media company i don't think youtube is applying the same rules to you i actually think that the major media companies get on both sides get somewhat of a pass from these platforms sometimes because what will happen is either one they have a massive platform outside of youtube that they can use to spread the word and fight back and do all this kind of stuff but also too is it is in the eyes of the platform seen as like they're a news organization so if they show the video or the photo or whatever that you or i can't do yeah it's like oh these are not news people

right even if you're doing news even if you consider yourself a new show or whatever but if you're cnn or fox or msnbc or whatever they just get a little bit more leeway there's two parts to that. One is I do think that that's true. And YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, I don't remember if it was a year or a couple of years ago, talked about YouTube wants to prioritize what they consider authoritative news sources versus those that they don't. So to some degree, I think that's absolutely true. And they're openly saying it. And they Susan Wojcicki openly said it, even though in later conversations it's been sort of like more ambiguous. But she did say it. She didn't make that clear. Is that a good thing?

I think that the intention is good. I think the application of it fairly is extraordinarily difficult and problematic. That's one thing. The other part of it is I don't know if this is still the case, but there was one time where I remember going to my YouTube rep and I said, listen, I'm doing content. I don't remember what it was. I'm doing content on X and it's getting completely demonetized. Jimmy Kimmel is doing content on the same thing and there's ads running on the videos. And what I was told at the time was Jimmy's YouTube channel is selling ads differently. It's not coming from the auction AdSense marketplace. So they are selling ads directly to advertisers that appear on YouTube where the advertisers are saying we'll run ads

no matter what he talks about. So is that relieving or is that concerning? It depends on your perspective, but there was certainly a difference there and how that ad marketplace was playing out. And it also goes to this idea of when I was talking earlier about, you know, the view counts are going up and then it kind of just goes sideways. They continue to tell us that if a video is limited monetization or completely demonetized, it has no impact whatsoever on the distribution on the platform. I'm not a mathematician. I am not a scientist. But when I look at graphs, that appears not to be true. That is my instinct as well. And we're talking completely, you know, these are not hypothetical, but we're speculating here. But it's been my

intuition after doing this for so long. When you do this for so long, when I look at my stats and my graphs, things that don't look right, attract your eye very much. It's sort of like my dermatologist will often say, if you're paying attention to a particular mall, I'm going to pay attention to because you know yourself, but you kind of see what things look like. It's the same thing with the YouTube analytics where you see something weird, your eyes drawn to it. I am on your side that it seems as though that's not true, that it has no impact on the video. And it would make sense for it to have an impact. Like I actually wouldn't necessarily have a problem if yeah we were just told like okay uh youtube monetization is directly tied to the

ability for youtube to make money yes and so if you're making money and youtube is making money you're kind of partners on the content and so they're gonna send that shit right if people are gonna watch and they're gonna make money it wouldn't be illogical yeah i would just rather know makes complete sense by the way if we turn the monetization off on a video we make no money from it and so therefore we're gonna put videos where we make money on it out to the audience okay it makes sense like actually that would be a capitalistic approach to uh running a business and doing all this what's weird is that they say that it doesn't have an impact right because it's like well okay the video was growing a lot then the monetization got shut off and now it doesn't

grow yes like how is it that did 100 000 views in four days and then in the fifth day it did 50 views yeah right and the only thing that changed is we got an email that says monetization got shut off it's very hard to believe and i think those things reduce trust you know i have lots of friends who are also YouTubers. And whenever these sorts of things happen, where there's a topic that is all of a sudden not monetizable after the Roe v. Wade decision, there was a period where if you talked about, you know, it's a Supreme Court decision. It's like substantive stuff, right? Because it dealt with abortion. Abortion was sort of a hot button issue that was under. I don't remember if it was like the controversial and whatever policy, but it was part of that.

nothing related to the Roe v. Wade decision was monetizable. We all are talking to each other saying, how can we talk about this without suffering because of what is taking place? And then things change and all of a sudden the content is monetizable. You don't necessarily hear anything. This happened at the beginning of the pandemic where before where it seemed like maybe it's a two week story rather than a four year story. In December of 2019, when I did a couple of COVID stories, they were just flat out not monetizable. And at the time I was told by our YouTube rep, yeah, that, you know, it deals with medical and tragedy. And I don't know, whatever the thing was, it's just not monetizable. By January or February, where it was like, this is

going to be every day for the next two years, YouTube changed its policy. And all of a sudden it was monetizable. As long as I know what the policy is, I can work with it. Yeah. And I always wonder, like, did they change the policy because of some expert they talked to or because they realize like we're gonna have to make money off this i don't know i don't know yeah and also what is the process how do how do things get selected for they're good they're not good right again we may never know um going back to your commentary about like the health stuff one of the things also that uh surprised me is uh the country of el salvador which is coming to the spot because all the bitcoin stuff but um they ran an ad early on which was basically like get outside

be healthy eat healthy like i mean like pretty basic like health stuff yeah but it was done in almost like a controversial way because at the time everyone was talking about you know potential for vaccines and you know all of the various uh precautions like all the stuff and they were like hey people who are unhealthy seem to be being affected by this like go be healthy right and i remember tweeting it and being like why are other countries not talking about this or doing this or whatever. And I had a friend who messaged me and he was like, dude, forget other countries. Like I can't go on and say that on YouTube. And I remember being like, what? And so I went and I looked and like, nobody was talking about it. And that's why I reached out to people and they were

like, yeah, like that's considered not actually misinformation, but it's like not directly in line with what is coming out of the CDC or whatever. And so it was fascinating because like technically the information is not inaccurate, right? Uh, there go outside, work out whatever uh second is like any other point in time like you would be allowed to say that no one would even think about it right but like this period of time this commentary compared to what other people are saying maybe it's not so good yeah and so like that is like oh shit like point in time matters not only what the content is but like when are you saying it under what context which makes the job even you know more complex and harder for them yeah i was saying

more or less that stuff and didn't have an issue with that on YouTube. But also, again, it's who's saying it. What's the size of their channel? What's the context? What's the totality of their coverage? I don't know. I think the COVID thing was also tough because and my audience knows my view on all this stuff. But one of the things that I think was tough with COVID was the best information we had did change over time. There was a point in time where when the vaccines were for that initial what they call the live type virus. The vaccines were really good at preventing transmission and infection over time. They really became less good at that to the point where now it's like, well, they'll they'll reduce your risk of death and to some degree your risk of

hospitalization on transmission and infection. They're no longer doing anything. It's not that it was a lie back then or that it was mis or disagree. It's the circumstances genuinely did change and the effectiveness of the vaccine for that piece changed over time. That's also really difficult for people who are trying to at all points accurately cover what's going on yeah what was your take in terms of like the vaccine in um relationship to like all the uh potential side effects stuff right and side effects being uh i've seen everything from like the hysteria and like what i'll call like the conspiracy theory stuff to like uh people who are just hey i want to put as little things in my body as possible but i want to be a healthy individual like what's

your take in terms of like where is probably like more truth than not. Hey guys, what's going on? I hope that you're enjoying this conversation, but I wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that I'm hosting on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, Ordellian and Mike Solana from Founders Fund,

Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Cody Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Agermeyer, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up.

But come check out Lyceum Miami, on march 4th the lyceum was a public gym in athens greece where people used to come together talk about ideas and debate topics that were important to society i want to meet people in person in real life once again after three years of a hiatus from real life events and so i'm hosting the event and as i mentioned anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time. So come check it out. Come hang out with me,

many of the popular guests from the podcast and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation? Well, more truth than not, this is a big topic. I mean, where to start? So first of all, I think a lot of the hysteria stuff, we can maybe chop out that and that'll get rid of like 70% of the stuff. And would you put like the thing I'm speaking or thinking of specifically is like the my myocarditis, myocarditis. OK, so you sound like a doctor, not the best information I've seen. And again, I don't come up with my opinions on this stuff because I'm not a doctor. I'm going trying to go to the peer reviewed science on this.

the best information I've seen is the risks of myocarditis and pericarditis from the vaccine are lower than from covid on average. Interesting. So it's not only just like lower high, but in comparison to other things. Exactly. And if I understand correctly, even when it does happen and it seems to be concentrated more in younger males, that that's a side effect, even though it's still extraordinarily rare. Um, it usually resolves by itself with no intervention within a few days. So it's also not particularly serious. I, I, my, I understand it's uncomfortable, but it's not particularly serious. Um, and the, my take on it as I got my vaccines, you know, and I'm in that, that age

group, my take on it was I'd rather take a shot on less severe COVID than on an extraordinarily rare side effect. And so like, we all got COVID two months ago, my girlfriend and my, my baby daughter. Um, it, I was like really not feeling well for about 28 hours. I can't say what it would have been like with no vaccines, but it's sort of, it compared to the stories other people tell of four or five, six, seven days, really not doing well after 28 hours, I was almost back to normal, totally plausible. It was the vaccine. I don't know. I mean, uh, I, that that's kind of where I fall on it. I think on the other side of, um, requirements or any of that stuff, I am not the type of person who's going around saying mandate these vaccines.

I do think there's a total perfect legal basis for schools to include this vaccine in a list of others that are required or college. There's nothing really special or unique about that. Vaccine requirements go back over 100 years. And to me, that seemed kind of like a distraction from just like what makes sense to do from a health perspective. So the mandates is interesting, right? Because in New York City, for example, they locked down basically the city and you couldn't go to a restaurant without having the vaccine card and all stuff for a period of time um indoors right outdoors indoors yeah yeah and um it was a weird thing where like you didn't know how long they could keep this going or like was it a forever thing right kind of like uh you know

what is the most permanent thing it's like a temporary government program right the old saying um but what i found most interesting was less about like what does the government say and more about like are the restaurants going to enforce it or not yes gets back to kind of the regulation conversation and i always use jaywalking as the example like uh you know for those who don't know jaywalking is illegal you're not supposed to do it uh in new york city you could jaywalk in front of a cop and like literally they don't even pay attention walking is just crossing where there's no crosswalk right correct yeah yeah so like again seems like not a big deal if somebody gets hit by a car then like you know then it all of a sudden becomes a big deal so like it's kind of a weird

thing but it's not enforced a lot now of course you will find a cop every once in a while who like is trying to stop somebody and they're like oh perfect excuse is like jaywalking as a pretext correct you technically broke the law so here we go right um and so this was like pretty similar in that like some restaurants were very very very serious about it right yes others i'll put in the like kind of we'll do the bare minimum so like flash me something that kind of sort of looks like it and like whether it's a copy or someone else's or whatever yeah but just even just like it doesn't even have to be an actual card like it could just be like your license i saw a picture and some letters and like whatever you're good and then other restaurants like wouldn't even

ask and we weren't living in new york at the time so like we uh were going and and when we were there it was like kind of interesting like is this restaurant like a serious one not serious like whatever and i just remember thinking to myself like this is chaos right and then you get outside of this like super urban dense area where like there was actual mandates and they got into the like personal preference yep where some business owners even though it might not be legally mandated we're like this is like my what i want to our policy yeah and then it's like was that legal is that not legal how does that work like you get into this like very very weird world very quickly where i was like oh shit all the people who were like the economist in early uh

2020 are now about to become like uh supreme court experts on you know like free speech the epidemiologist became constitutional law attorney yeah so the legal thing we've got we have to talk to a lawyer. I mean, my view was. Earlier in the pandemic, when the vaccines against that early variant were really good at preventing transmission, I liked the idea of after feeling shut in for a while saying, hey, you know what? I can go to a restaurant and know if the restaurant's doing it. Everybody in here has received a vaccine. That means they're not going to give me the virus. I'm not going to give it to them. That's really interesting to me. me as the reality started to change in many ways, which is the vaccine became less effective on

transmission. So it became more I can protect myself against hospitalization or death by getting myself vaccinated. So it became more of that. And the death rate went down and we started it started shifting into something a little more seasonal. It didn't really make the same sense to me to say you have to be vaccinated to come into the restaurant because the facts changed, so to speak on masks. I've always been a I will wear one if it's required. I won't. I didn't avoid flying when it was required. I'll just wear the mask and then I'm at the place I'm going to. And it's great. You know, we went to Aruba after getting our vaccines and all this stuff. Great. And then once the masks were no longer required, I said, all right, I'll decide for myself. Do I

want to wear one or not? And that that was fine. The thing that really stressed me out about seeing the reaction from some was there was a period where there were these handful of things that based on everything we knew at that time were really like pretty light lifts. They weren't life altering things. And the resistance from some people, either because of some law they misunderstood, as you point out or whatever, their resistance to do it, it kind of just bummed me out because I would have thought naively maybe that there would have been more of like a coming together and like, hey, let's just all do this stuff for a little while and see if this helps. Do you think that people resisted it because they were scared, like, you give an inch, they take a mile?

Like, it was less about the individual law or the individual, like, inconvenience or whatever, and it was more of just, like, we can't give the inch because then they will take the mile, and it was, like, a psychological thing? A hundred percent there were people who were afraid of that. I don't think it was based in reality. You know, when we go back to the gay marriage debate, there were people who were saying, listen, if two dudes can get married, next thing you know, people will be marrying trains and horses. And it's like, well, no, trains and horses can't enter contracts. They can't.

That's not that slippery slope is an absurd argument. And similarly, you know, during the early mandate phase, there were people, including, I think, the people who tried to kidnap the Michigan governor who were saying, first thing is you got to get a vaccine. Next thing you know, all this none of that stuff happened. I mean, literally none of those other things happened. It didn't go any further. They were talking about a slippery slope and it just went nowhere. So I'm laughing because, uh, yeah, I was pretty sure there's a book called the woman who married a horse. Now it's a book. It's not a

real thing, but, uh, it's not nonfiction. I'm guessing it's a novel. Uh, it is a, uh, definitely a, uh, they call it a monograph, uh, which I don't know exactly what that is, but, um, on the, uh, Michigan governor thing, you've probably paid more attention to me. uh the feds were involved somehow you know honestly i don't remember the exact i think what so this is like a meme on the internet now like you see these pictures of like all these protests or whatever and they're like they just circle like a random group of like white dudes usually and they're like feds right and i'm like epps on january 5th is another one where they were like this guys i don't know if you've heard about ray epps this is another one you could look up

where there were people saying ray epps it's just an just an old dude he was in dc on the 5th he was encouraging people the next day to go into the Capitol. He's an FBI agent. Absolutely no evidence of that. This guy's been harassed now from people trying to prove he's like, I'm not. No, I have nothing to do with it. My understanding is that someone involved in that kidnapping plot was working as a confidential informant, which some people on Twitter seem to think means you're an FBI agent, but it doesn't. I think that that's the connection. But it's been a couple of years, so I don't remember the details of the story. The when you see that type of stuff, like how do you think about uh the conversation around those topics right so like i'll get the details

in a second of like what actually happened but um should the platforms be like correcting people when they talk about things let's say for example uh you're talking about a difference between a confidential informant or an agent of a law enforcement agency yeah across any top sure any situation if somebody uses the wrong terminology should the platform like take them down? Should I like something like that? I mean, how does that work? You know, Twitter had this policy where and YouTube as well, where if it detected certain keywords, it would pop up a little info box. So if there was a video about vaccines, no matter what you were saying, there was a period where you would look underneath the video and it would say, here's a link to the CDC

where you can get information about vaccines or whatever the case may be. Sometimes I think Twitter will put something in there that says this is like an evolving situation. And, you know, what is being put out right now may not actually be accurate or whatever the case may be. I think I applaud those efforts in general. I think that if you go down to the nitty gritty of like if someone uses the word confidential informant, something pops up and is like, oh, you should know the difference between that and an agent that that seems to be a little too much. So this is an article from the Chicago Sun-Times. I don't know if they have political leaning or not but uh it's one of the first ones that popped up the headline is fbi's tactics doomed case

against men charged in kidnapping plot of michigan governor um and the opening uh paragraph is just through confidential sources undercover agents and clandestine recordings the justice department announced in october 2020 law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap michigan governor gretchen whitmer meyer and acting in furtherance of that plan but it and then this is uh that was the end quote and then but it turned out that those individuals included the government's confidential sources who pushed the half-baked scheme and orchestrated acts in a furtherance of that plan even when the defendants resisted it which then gets into like this weird world of like right so that's why there was a contingent saying the fbi organized the plot and

say well no that's not what that article said what the article said was there were individuals already working as informants who did try to encourage and i think the issue was whether it was some form of entrapment. I do think it hurt some elements of the case. But pretty recently, I think that the main plotters actually were given pretty, pretty severe prison sentences. Yeah. So I think there was four people at this time. Jurors acquitted two alleged conspirators and they failed to reach verdicts for the other two. But then there's other articles talking about there were six original defendants, two of them which pled guilty and testified for the prosecution as well. And then I guess some of the individuals involved were also tried on

different things. And so like my general read on all this is like it's messy. It's messy. I think the messiest part of it. And as someone who tries to encourage people to like when you read a news article, understand, is this a primary source? If it's like sometimes you'll see an article that's really just rewriting someone else's work. Go to that original article. Really try to think critically when words like may or could be are there. That's very different than something that is happening or that that did happen. Sometimes these stories are used as proxies by people cynically for political reasons to make much broader claims that can be made. Like, for example, nobody did anything wrong on January 6th, for example, or the FBI is uniquely a bad actor and

should be disbanded or things like that. That's where this type of stuff gets extraordinarily messy. When we think of the last, let's call it five presidents, right, four presidents, we've got George W. Bush, we've got Obama, we've got Trump and then Joe Biden. So let's go last four. Yeah. What do you think they've done well and what do you think they haven't done well? Oh, boy. So let's see. I don't think any of them have really done that much for the lower middle class, middle class. OK, I think you can find things, you know, with the Bush tax cuts, which went mostly to the very rich. There were those small payments to the average person. So you could say, well, that that's something, you know, with Obama, Obamacare didn't get everybody health care,

but it did get much closer to getting people health care, Medicaid expansion, which instead of hitting just the poorest, it went a little higher than that. So it got more people on Medicaid. With all of these presidents, although I think with Trump, it's harder to find the stuff for the lower middle class and middle class. They didn't really do as much as I would like to see as someone who thinks that Denmark and Sweden and Norway are more interesting ways to organize an economy. I think it's sort of like degrees on foreign policy. I think Bush's main mistakes were Afghanistan and Iraq. I think with Obama, the kind of squishiness when it came to Russia wasn't great. The drone program I didn't love. Trump is just so confused about it. I don't know.

You know, I mean, he had love letters with the Kim Jong Un and then he it's it's really hard to analyze Trump with only a couple of years in the rearview mirror because it was so kind of cartoonish. Do you think that Trump did a horrible job, a fantastic job or an OK job? I think Trump did a terrible job. Here's the thing. There were a lot of things Trump wanted to do but failed to do. And that was great because they would have been horrible. Right. So in that sense, like if Trump had gotten to do his agenda, the health care plan, one of the things Trump ran on was we're going to get rid of Obamacare and we'll replace it with a beautiful system. They never really proposed it. The one thing that was proposed in 2017 by Republicans in

consultation would have led to like 25 million more people losing health insurance. But it didn't happen. So that's great. It was a terrible idea, but it failed. So we can kind of do we zero it out? Maybe. Maybe so. Trump was going to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict in the first year. Jarrett was going to solve it. You might not be shocked to hear it didn't actually happen. He moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which was it's this is internal politics, but it was controversial. It irritated a lot of people, et cetera. Why? Why was that so controversial? Well, the reason it's controversial is within Israel, particularly among the more Orthodox Jews and also among the evangelical American community, for religious reasons,

they want the capital of Israel to be Jerusalem. Right now, politically, Jerusalem is disputed. So the internationally the capital of Israel is Tel Aviv. The people who want to just push the embassy to Jerusalem. It doesn't change the capital, but it's a signal. It's sort of like saying we view Jerusalem as the capital because that's where we're putting the embassy. It sends a signal of like we don't actually care to resolve the conflict around Jerusalem. We're just going to put the embassy there anyway. So it inflames. It doesn't work towards peace. It arguably works against it. Yeah. So that's something he did. It didn't get us closer to peace. So I think the thing on Trump is very confused, you know, confused about North Korea, confused about China,

didn't understand how tariffs worked, all these things. But fortunately, he didn't actually accomplish a lot of the things he tried to do. And I think we're better off for it. That's my political perspective. You think he didn't do a good job with North Korea? Well, what did he do, I guess, is the question. Yeah, well, he kept them from doing anything. Right. But also, I guess the question would be, did he do that or were they not going to do anything anyways? Yeah. If you understand the last 50 years with North Korea, it's a very similar cycle, which is they start to make belligerent comments and they start doing missile tests and they appear to get marginally closer to developing whatever the next step in technology would be. Often it coincides with when there's famine or horrible circumstances. They then walk it back a little bit in consultation with, you know, negotiating partners in exchange

for food aid. And the whole thing kind of circles. And so the funny thing about Trump was it was just kind of like a naivete where Kim Jong Un told Trump all the same stuff every North Korean leader has been telling every American leader for a very long time. And Trump thought that it was an accomplishment because he just didn't understand the history like these leaders have been making these exact same promises forever. They never actually do them. They never demilitarize. They never do any of these things because Trump didn't know the

history. He thought it was a major deal. What do you think is the best thing he did? I think that this is really narrow and it might have been repealed. But in that tax plan that he did in twenty seventeen, he lowered the threshold, at which point medical expenses become tax deductible. That's a good thing because there's people who have high medical expenses for their income, but not quite enough for them to be tax deductible. I think it's a really good thing, especially when a lot of people pay for their own health care to make it easier to make medical expenses tax deductible. Part of me thinks that that that might have actually been reversed, which would be really sad because I thought that was a good thing. I think the First Step Act,

the criminal justice reform, did some good things. And so it changed sentencing around cannabis to a great degree. And it also did some I don't remember if it was expungement or it helped people who had been previously wrapped up in the justice system as a result of cannabis. I think that that was good. I think it would have been great for him to do more of that. The funny thing is, and this goes to Trump's confusion about everything since leaving office, he goes around saying we should execute drug dealers. He is the one who through the first step step back actually allowed some of those drug dealers to have their records cleared or whatever. Do you remember that you did that? So it's all like a mishmash throwing stuff at the wall. But

I do think that that was a good thing that he did. Is he the most entertaining president of all time? Hundred percent. Right. Hundred percent. I think that that is one of the one of the things that the media definitely misses is just like you woke up every day. Yeah. And you just you didn't know what was going to happen. Right. Which was a chaotic. Yes. But also, I got to say that when he tweeted a little rocket man at Kim Jong-un, pretty funny. I would even scary. That's pretty funny. So there's two parts to this. It is scary. It is scary because you realize the the president didn't like where the hurricane was really going. So he took a Sharpie and he drew a different hurricane map. It's horrifying, but it's incredibly funny. It's incredibly funny. I told the story on

another podcast, Trump's obsession with toilets. It's an you can't even do a skit. I don't know if you know what is his obsession. This was all about how Biden was going to end heating and cooling. He was going to give you low flow shower heads and also the toilets were going to be low flow. So you'd have to flush them 10 to 15 times. OK, so he kept saying at rallies, you're going to have to flush toilets 10 to 15 times. It's not it's not going to work, which, by the way, if that was true, that would suck. It would be terrible. Right. But like that wasn't happening. You should see the toilets I was able to get installed at my place. So he starts talking about that. Then it turns on after he loses. He goes on Fox News and he goes, there were huge

dumps, huge. And you're like, what is on this guy's mind? He's obsessed with toilets. He's talking about huge dumps of votes in the middle of the night. And then you find out he was flushing documents down the toilet. And you're like, that's why he needed to flush 10 to 15 times because he's jamming classified documents. You can't write stuff like this. And it takes the six month arc to figure it out. It's pure comedy. It really is. But scary. So. Is there something to the fact that Trump, Boris Johnson, Zelensky, etc., were all elected and kind of. Different than the mold of leaders of these countries, and they all kind of rose up in power at the same time. Yeah, I think they're they are different things. I think Trump is more analogous to

like an Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro. You know, he's more of an authoritarian type guy. Boris Johnson is a little bit like that. And then Zelensky is kind of a different different type of figure. The circumstances are very different in all of those countries. I think the more interesting trend in terms of who's been getting elected has been this kind of authoritarian slide in the United States among some Republicans, which is being mirrored in parts of Europe as well. In France, with Marine Le Pen doing well, but not ultimately winning and Orban, Boris Johnson, to some degree. There are other examples. There are people who I don't tell. I don't say that they're wrong in the feeling that they have sort of been left behind for different reasons. Some

think they've been left behind because dark skinned immigrants have come in. I don't agree with that. But some of them feel that others think it's because of business not being regulated, whatever the case may be. And they've all kind of said we need someone like a Trump or Orban or johnson so that's been the trend that i've seen it's concerning to me because i don't think that it we would be better off with those types of leaders others would have a different opinion i'm sure yeah this is like a really fascinating uh topic because i think that um the left i'm putting that in air quotes for those who are just listening because i don't even know what that really means at this point um controls the media would be like the critique of the media right by

by the right um and then vice versa is like i think a lot of people on the left would critique the right and be like no but you guys are like the crazy you know alt right on social media and like all this kind of stuff so it's like a very weird uh people just like to yell and scream back and forth at each other um but when you go to the state level it seems like most of the more um aggressive policies actually were happening in the democratic states or the democrat states versus the republican states now i'm just using california new york texas florida as like kind of a line that you could draw do you mean on covid or on what i think covid's one but there's other things like we're obviously seeing around uh school education like all you can kind of go

through all the political topics that are like the hot topics and i think that there's two very different approaches right and when you see those policies one is very much like more free market like hey people should just like do whatever they want to do which comes to pros or cons but like that is the approach. The other side is much more like this is the policy, you know, top down. Hey, this is what we should be doing. Is that true elsewhere in the country that we see kind of divided on red and blue states? Or is it just that like New York, California and Florida, Texas have always been at the extremes of some of this. And so they tend to get all the attention. I don't even think it's true in the states you mentioned. And I'll give you a counterexample.

so in texas texas has a very powerful uh board of education because since it's such a high large population state um they can have a huge impact on the books that are used and then that can trickle down to other states because it's just so powerful if you can get books that are being used in texas in texas there are all sorts of places and i don't remember them but we could look them up where they are wanting to teach intelligent design or creationism alongside evolution in science class. That's quite aggressive, I would say, because you explain the difference for people who don't know. Well, evolution is the theory of evolution and the way in which humans and the great apes evolved from a common ancestor who evolved from some earlier, you know, just

people would say is like generally the science. Yes, exactly. Science. We could call it the scientific approach. Yeah. Science now is controversy as well. And then you have intelligent design and creationism, which is a religious view from only some religions. Right. Because there's a thousand religions. It's only some religions. And to teach that, which is really more suited for Sunday school, I think is what they call it rather than science class. That to me doesn't seem like freedom and liberty. It seems like a red state saying here is what you will teach. So I think that that narrative, which is not a rare narrative, like it's not it's not unreasonable for you to frame it that way as someone who is more in the finance space than

the political space. I don't know anything about politics. I totally guess I'm going to crash course. Yeah, no, I totally get. Now you could get someone else sitting here who would say, Anthony, you're absolutely right with that. You're spot on. I happen to disagree with that take. But I think that it's much more complicated than that, really. And a lot of times the idea of the red states of freedom and do whatever you want, it only extends so far. The attorney general of Texas recently said he thought he could defend sodomy laws in court. Sodomy laws are laws where the law says what kind of sex you can have behind closed doors. That's not freedom and liberty. That's very aggressive. We're going to sort of tell you what to do. So I think that

that generalization doesn't, doesn't really hold. Yeah. What about the, this whole idea of like the documents? So obviously there was a bunch of hoopla around, uh, Trump had some top secret documents or whatever, and now it's coming out that Biden also had some documents. Uh, I think Mike Pence has document. It seems like anyone who's been in the white house and like in the last like five years has got documents somewhere first. Like, is that a normal thing? This has been going on forever. It seems normal. That's the thing. We're sort of learning that it's not that rare. I think that here's the problem. And this is where, again, if you superficially look at the stories, like many of the people who email me do, you get one impression. If you look more

deeply, you see that there are some categories here. One issue is, is there over classification in general? Like, are we does the US just classify too many things where some of the things that were kept by these people shouldn't actually have been classified? Fair question. They were classified. So let's put that aside for a moment with Pence and with Biden. And this is a Republican and a Democrat. Everything that I've seen so far suggests that they genuinely had no idea that these documents were left behind. They didn't tell anyone, box these up and put them at my house. As soon as they were found, they were immediately turned over to the National Archives and they are cooperating with investigations. So the Pence and Biden thing to me seem relatively benign.

The Trump one seems different in that it's hundreds rather than a couple dozen documents. there's testimony that Trump directed people working for him, box these up and take them to Mar-a-Lago when they were found rather than saying, turn everything over right away. He used lawyers to try to keep the documents. Even when his lawyers said, here's all the documents, they still kept documents. And then there's video footage of in the middle of when this was going on, of the documents being moved from one place to another at Mar-a-Lago. So it seems like there's a couple categories here, but it does seem, I would wonder, are there secretaries of state where some documents were left behind? It wouldn't strike me as super unusual, but there seems to be like

a deliberate effort to what Trump did that these other guys did not do. Can I tell you what my reaction was as I like started to see all this? And again, like coming from somebody who cares less about like the partisan politics. I was like, man, there's a lot of paper, like in the business world. Like, I mean, yeah, we still use paper, but like a lot of stuff is digital. And I was just blown away by like how many boxes of documents and folders and like like it just seemed like such an archaic way of like conducting day-to-day activities yeah and i was like guys just get a fucking ipad but you know what the reason why they don't have the i mean it's for information security of course you know they put these things in a room everybody's got to leave

their phones you can look at it and then that's it but but it just seemed like like that was like literally like my like uneducated elementary view at first was just like why are there so many physical papers right and then you start to understand why they're doing some of this or whatever 100 and it just like kind of blew me away that like wait we expect somehow the government to like track down all these physical pieces of paper for years and years and like of course people have stuff right doesn't make it right doesn't whatever yeah or do they do intentionally do they not whatever but like you're telling me only three guys got it like no way obama sorry man but like you probably got some stuff right bush you probably got some stuff like and it could

be like from what this overclass classification thing i guess is like sometimes they just if they don't know they just stamp it and like hey this is classified as something but it could be like directions to get to you know lunch right or i don't think that it would be that but i mean i think if if you're going to meet a specific person like so i was seeing something online which was like things that you actually don't think are that important like directions to lunch Yeah. Could be completely innocent. But if it's involved in a top secret investigation or there's a specific person or whatever, all of a sudden it's part of this like package. Right. So it ends up getting in there. Now, I don't think anyone at least has said that they believe these individuals are going through the packets and like taking out the benign information. Right. Like, let me leave the important stuff and take this other stuff. It's more of just like there's a box of documents or there's a folder of documents or whatever. And so really important stuff and really not important stuff are all kind of boxed up together. yeah but i do wonder like what is the line in terms of let's say that uh the american people read all of the documents right what do you think could be in the documents that people would like

like i don't care about politics like that's wrong that's yeah it's wrong to have the documents or what's being done what's in the documents is like deemed so bad that somebody took it so like if the nuclear codes right were on the documents i think people would be like oh those are like the actual codes, we probably shouldn't have those floating around. Like, I don't care what side of the aisle you're on. Like that's bad. Yep. Now, as you kind of go down that list of things and get closer and closer to like non-material benign stuff, like where do you think the line is where people would be like, Oh, I can't believe that those are just floating around out there. See, I think it's less about, I can't believe that they're floating around, but a lot of these documents relate

to ongoing operations. They could expose individuals that are working in areas where are not known to be working because there's either diplomatic cover or other types of cover. For me, it's less about, oh, there's Trump had a document he flushed about aliens. It wouldn't be it wouldn't be that type of shock, but they would be things that would just interfere with the operations of government, either clandestinely or in terms of diplomatic or foreign policy. It seems to me that the bulk would be that sort of stuff where the average to be quite frank, I think the average person looking at some of these documents wouldn't even know why they're interesting because they wouldn't even follow the substance of what's there. They'd be related to

issues they don't they don't know about. But I think it's that they could compromise operations or it would be that sort of thing. Speaker 1 You think there's aliens? Speaker 3 I have no reason to think we've been in contact with them, but I find the general idea that because of the size of the universe, mathematically, it's pretty likely there's intelligent life somewhere that's compelling to me. I don't think they visited us. snowden i think was asked uh when he got inside all the systems or whatever was he i'm pretty sure he was asked and he says he checked and didn't see anything okay like like no uh uh

documentation at least of like it um but then you listen to like the bob lazard or i don't know if you've heard any of these guys and they're like i saw the saucer that stuff is super entertaining i mean i think it's fascinating i don't know if you ever listened to howard stern but he had this guy riley martin who since passed away who's that who believed that he had been abducted and all these it's obviously all untrue but some of the most entertaining stuff how do you know it's untrue well i mean it doesn't make any sense you know none of it makes sense but bob lazard one i will say the bob lazard one uh i listened i think he took two episodes um and if he if what he is saying is his experience right because some of it's like i saw lights right the type stuff but

like let's just say that that hold that is true i got a lot more questions okay right and then he like worked in uh area 51 and he or maybe like an area that was tangential i think to it and he's like i saw like the flying saucer basically yeah now again is that an american made you know kind of defense uh base thing is that a alien aircraft like you're getting all these like there could be other explanations or whatever. But like, Dan, that sounds like a lot more information than we've been told. Well, one of the things that is interesting in general about the entire aliens thing is that the stories that are told are really similar in the West and in places that have access to Western media. And they mirror a lot of the stuff from movies and television. When it's if

you go to places where there's less access to Western media, it's not that you don't have a portion of the population that reports these types of unexplained phenomena, but they don't conform to the saucer and the humanoid alien and anal probes. I don't know why, you know, it's like there's proctologists seem to be aliens and other planets. It's the one job that you have. It's all very strange, but they have a totally different sort of a set set of ideas. It is interesting that so much of what is in media is what's mirrored by people who claim that these things happen to them. It doesn't seem like a coincidence to me. Yeah. And I wonder how much of it is like you start to see things that you've heard. Right. Versus you just make it up. Yeah.

Which is the other thing. Aliens and UFOs are different. Yeah. What do you take out of the government releasing the UFO videos? Yeah, I I have a hard time having a strong opinion one way or the other. I don't think it's evidence of aliens. It seems from what I've read, it's almost certainly either technology being developed by the U.S. or by other countries and the videos, the angles make it seem as though things that defy gravity are taking place. If that makes sense. I haven't seen anything where I see it. And I say that's definitely evidence of something from another universe. That might scare me more if it was like arguably China is developing this aircraft and we don't know how to replicate that technology and it's faster and more powerful than

anything we have like that might scare me more than fucking aliens the geopolitical impact would probably be bigger i don't know yeah yeah like that that stuff really uh uh i think people would be like wait hold on a second forget the aliens and now it's just gonna be cool i want to grab a beer with one of them right like well this actually is like a problem which i don't have anymore because people have told me it's it's really naive i had this idea that if ever there was like this first contact with aliens, humans would be so inspired by it that the globe would come together and there would be like a lot of these petty differences about, you know, homophobia and wars and religion would all go away because we would all realize, wow, we're not alone in the

universe. I've spoken to so many people, psychologists, social scientists, astronomers, you know, all these people, and they all say, no, it would be like two weeks of like, wow, this is incredible. And then everybody would go back to the exact same conflicts that we've had. That's probably true. Well, and also the question is, are the aliens friendly or adversarial? Of course. Right. And there's a ton of science about or speculation about that. Yeah. Some which says by the very fact that they can get here, it would signal that their intentions are. Yeah. You know, all this stuff's been gone through one way or the other. I think maybe someday we will we will find out i don't know yeah um what are the areas uh when it comes to the politics and the intersection

with like the federal reserve obviously inflation went bananas right um official numbers kind of just under 10 unofficial measurements depending on who you ask is like 12 to 20 or whatever uh the fed's been stepping in in a super aggressive way crashing asset prices trying to kill demand on the consumer side. Is there a place for politics when it comes to like monetary policy stuff? I think there is. Separate. I would like it to be less political. I think from a macroeconomic perspective, the tools are pretty well known. They're relatively limited. There are, you know, from the political side, aside from the Fed acting on interest rates, you have sometimes elected officials want to do um stimulus which includes government spending

and there's different opinions about the impact of that on inflation um you can which by the way sorry to interrupt you but uh that reminds me uh trump i think that's probably the thing that he did for the lower and middle classes uh i just for whatever reason have the memes of trump bucks right and people being like i don't give a shit about anything trump sent me money i'm voting for him. That's absolutely true. But then they were angry when Biden sent the money. Whole thing. Right. Difference. Different thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, listen, on the on the I my view was as someone who thinks we are terrible at predicting what an economy is going to do. My view at just the arc of the thing was that inflation was going to start coming down three

or four months ago. I said this a year plus ago. It was just a lucky guess. And it sort of has started to happen. And now the question is, did the Fed do too much? Is it going to continue having too much of an impact and it will drag down the stock markets or whatever. I remind myself that the long term view is probably the most important to me in the thinking of where the country is going and where the economy is going for the average person. And food being really expensive has been a really tough thing for people of average incomes, et cetera. When that is the case, I'm fine with doing targeted stimulus. I'm not about just spent deficit, spend, spend, spend for no reason. Let's actually think about the economic multiplier of the spending that we're

doing. But I think that the Fed becomes way more political than it has to be for sure. It. Well, we had Trump who was tweeting at the central bank, basically, you know, devalued the currency, kind of all the currency games he was comparing to other countries. Biden, on the other hand, likened it to he basically called Jerome Powell into the principal's office at one point right and it was very like hey this isn't politics but yeah what's going on over there this kind of was the at least the um uh the vibe i think that kind of came out of a lot of the media articles was like they were unhappy they wanted to talk to him whatever um and so i tend to think a lot of the political uh political partisanship is just like a mirror of each other

right so like and also everyone has to have something to say when one side enters the political space with something like interest rates the other side has to respond yeah well and also they do the same things right so like i'll give you a great example let's use two individuals maybe uh we'll use a topic as well so like trump and aoc yes are more similar than they are different well they both use use populist rhetoric which is a very common way now of coalescing people around you their policy solutions would be different but they're using similar rhetoric for sure the tactics are similar right that the language is similar uh the platform distribution is similar and then the other thing too that i think is really interesting is uh the

what i'll call the marketing so uh trump i don't know using the hats let's say uh as a ability to raise money and to uh kind of hammer home his message aoc wearing the dress that says tax the rich yeah but she's not selling the dress and then lying about what she's using the money for no but she but she sells sweatshirts let's say tax the rich that are like 65 bucks i don't know where does the money go uh that's a good question i only know that because uh kevin o'leary has one and he wears it around like to like dinner and stuff okay i was like what are you doing he's like no it's taxed around i'm on board yeah let's do it um so like again it's just like there's a lot more similarities and and part of it i think is just like there's only so many things as a

politician like there's topics to talk about there's current events there's like get attention raise money and like win the next election yeah like there's not really that much more to do and so if it almost in some way is actually a positive if like you're smart enough to see someone on the other side of the aisle doing something that works and you figure out how to do it yourself and it's kind of like business right as a business of the personal brand and getting themselves re-elected a hundred percent i think where it becomes a huge distraction is on an issue that really is not super political, like gas prices. I always tell my audience, go back to the beginning of my show. You will find I have never played these political games

on gas prices. Presidents have very little impact on gas prices. You've got a global market. You've got your strategic petroleum reserve, which can have a 10 to 18 cent, depending on who you ask, kind of temporary impact. I have never praised Democrats for low gas prices. I have never criticized Republicans for high. It's I jokingly tweeted. It's amazing how quickly Joe Biden got the gas prices down after getting them up. Right. But that is an issue where it's just a total distraction. We're missing talking about real issues by pretending that the presidents are doing things to raise and lower gas prices when it's a global phenomenon and they have almost no impact on it whatsoever. This plays almost perfectly into this theory that I have about

the president specifically. It's not government, but the president. They actually can't do as much most people think they can do right if you really think about take uh bush there's the wars but other than that there's not a ton of things that you can point to that tax cut well but we're radically different that had this long-lasting negative impact on a large portion of population then you jump to obama and there's a lot of people who didn't want obama to be president they were yelling and screaming why he was president all this stuff same as bush obviously right obama he got uh the um uh the medicare and uh the health care bill through obamacare but obamacare right but there wasn't really anything that had this radical huge negative

impact on the population right uh then you go and you jump to trump same thing right of like there's a whole bunch of chaos and like much more entertainment factor than anything but like when you really look at it it wasn't anything that was like this huge negative impact on like a big portion of the population and then biden same thing and so like it's interesting because there's so much attention put in and usually rightfully so in terms of who's the president who's the leader of a country whatever but when you look at it from the perspective of like i wanted person a to win but person b won i think that you can find some safety in the fact that like we do have checks and balances we do have all these systems in place where like the president's

powerful but they're not unilaterally powerful to the point where like you have to worry about like we're a developed nation in four years. We're going to be, you know, completely wrecked and like everything has blown up. This is really interesting. So do you disagree? I agree in a lot of ways in that, yes, the amount of damage that a president can do in four years, there are limits to it. There are 100 percent limits to it. In a lot of ways, it is true that if you were living in wherever for the last six years and not paying attention to the news, things might be identical for you today as they were when Obama left office and Trump first came in, right? Roughly six years. I do think that that's true. But I also think we shouldn't understate the sort of, you know,

on a cruise ship, which I have never gone on and I'm not interested. It seems like a nightmare. After 2020, I'm out on that. But on a cruise ship, you might say, you know, I'm looking at the captain. They're spending a lot of time watching TV. They're on the phone. They're in office. They're sitting. They don't really seem to be like controlling the ship very much, but they are putting in place a system and a policy, their attitude and the atmosphere that they create. It's sort of like a CEO of a company. You could kind of make the same analogy. This is not like the most important thing, but as an example. Trump coalesced and made feel more OK saying the stuff they already thought a lot of white nationalists and white supremacists

and people who don't like me because I'm Jewish. Right. The number of anti-Semitic messages that I would get during the Trump era was higher than at any time before. Is that a policy change? No. Did Trump create anti-Semitism? Of course not. But there was a very clear change in that Trump rolled into his coalition and said, listen, I don't care what you hate Jews, you like Jews, whatever. I'm here for ABC reason and you can be out there and they're not going to censor you and whatever. So it had a kind of trickle down impact and something tangible that like affected my day to day. So I agree with you in in one sense. I also don't want to understate the kind of environment that is fostered by the person who is in the White House and the way it impacts state

level government conversations we have with each other, all these different sorts of things. Yeah. What it like immediately makes me think of and I haven't thought super deeply about this, but around a lot of like the police reform. Right. There's kind of like a couple of components. So obviously there was a number of situations that occurred across the country. People were very upset about it. Some cases, it seems like they were dead on. And like the story that came out first was exactly what happened and actually pretty impressive in terms of how accurate the stories were. In other cases, it was like, well, they said this, but like more facts came out later and like that is not what happened or whatever. Right. And so we've had, like, this very kind of, I don't know, I'm going to say, like, an evolution, I think, in terms of people's reaction. So you go from some of those events initially happening, even before 2020 or whatever, right? Yeah. They occur. Then I remember, like, there was one night in, I think, 2020 during a lot of the social justice stuff and everything. Like, there was a police station that was set on fire.

What was that? Whoa, that's crazy. It was in, like, Wisconsin or Michigan or something, right? Yeah, I vaguely remember stuff. but but like it was a situation where you were just like it was kind of like a a shock like holy shit in new york city there were situations with that were incredibly peaceful and like you were like seems like those people got a point of view and like that's the american right to get out there and protest whatever and then i remember there was one night when they were looting um uh

kind of some of the crowds were looting in uh uh time square and we lived you know somewhat close like we're not gonna go outside tonight right and again like i think a lot of people jump to the conclusion of like the looting crowd is the same crowd that was like you know uh marching in protest on saturday yeah right and like i don't know like maybe maybe not like who knows but like there was all these like conclusions and assumptions like all stuff whatever but then if you fast forward to even in the last six months or so there have been uh a number of different situations i who don't pay attention really to the news can think off the top of my head where uh there was the guys i think it was in alabama who uh shot and killed the guy who was

like running uh in the neighborhood or whatever oh yeah yeah yeah they've already been sentenced the three the father son and the driver so like that wasn't the police georgia i think georgia wherever it's somewhere in the south right yes um that was like a pretty controversial thing uh and the police weren't involved in the incident but then there became like who's friends with who and like there was a bunch of like controversy it seemed yeah uh we are recording this now uh about a week after um the uh gentleman who i think it was in chicago or memphis maybe it was uh who was just beat by the five police officers yeah um and it's on video right doesn't look so great and so as you kind of unpack all this stuff race gets thrown into it all the time and what i think that

i've started to kind of unpack a little bit more is like there are definitely situations where race plays a huge piece in it and like that's not good we should call that out yeah and um kind of treat it as uh i think america as a society generally says like racism is bad we don't want that uh and we want to live our lives without that as a piece of it but then there's a lot of other components of like just poverty right where you see so many situations happen and you're like dude white black brown anything that is a outcome that is driven by poverty and how do we solve the poverty problem so like when you zoom out on all this stuff you're like hold on a second we have police we have economics we have like all these different things that a government normally has

to deal with yeah and you're like are there right answers because if you just focus on the race issue right across all these different topics like you're going to come out with maybe some solutions maybe not depends on how good you are but then if you focus on the poverty issue exclusively then like you solve those problems but you don't solve the race issue then you go and you solve like the education problems and like you very quickly realize you can't look at any of these in a silo because you have to try to actually solve and create a better society? Yes. How do you do that?

Hey, guys, I hope that you're enjoying this conversation. As you probably realize, we don't run any ads on this show. That's right. All the other podcasts, all the other YouTube shows that you watch, they have advertisers. We don't have any direct relationships with advertisers, and we simply create this because we enjoy doing it. Now that we do that, though, we have a team. and if you'd like to support us one way you can do that is to go subscribe to the pomp letter

it's a daily letter that i write to about 235 000 people about my personal opinion on financial markets business technology and bitcoin just go to pompletter.com and you can sign up there i'd love to have you join us and it's a great easy way to support the work that the team and i are doing on a daily basis all right let's get back into this conversation well the first realization is what you're saying, which is you can't look at these as siloed issues. I think one of the classic ones that that represents this is in some of these incidents, firearms are like at the nexus of what took place. And so the conversation about firearms comes up and there are some who say the only aspect to the entire firearm thing is mental health. You say, well, is that really

likely as complicated as the world is with, as you say, poverty, education, firearms law, Constitution, Second Amendment, mental illness. But we're just going to say mental illness is the way to solve this. And by the way, some of the folks who say mental illness is the way to solve this don't actually want to fund better access to mental health services. So like the realization you came to, which is you can't silo these issues, is absolutely perfect and fundamental one. I think that in some cases, these incidents are less about race and more about something else. I think in some cases they are completely about race. I mean, I think I was speaking recently to a friend of mine who is a blonde white woman after one of the incidents you mentioned where she said,

I know when I'm out in the world that will just never happen to me because of my identity. It It just will never happen. Even if I have a gun in the car and I say to the office, I have a gun. It's just it's I'm never getting pulled out and beaten to death. You could add on to that solely because of my identity. And that's, of course, true. That's never going to happen to her. So we know intuitively that with some of these things, it is very much related to race. In other ways, it also race. And in that case, could be gender could like could be a lot could be race and gender there's like um i also always uh um i had a friend in college i played college football and so you can imagine those people from all walks of life right white black

brown the whole thing um and from different geographies inside the united states and also some people who come from outside the united states like you kind of put all this and i remember some guy said it was offhand comment he's like walking out of the locker room once and it's just always stuck with me he was like america's one of the only places where y'all talk about people with a single label as the like to describe the person so it's a white guy right or it's a a black guy or whatever and he was like basically making the point of like no that person is race gender like you go to like they're made up of all these different things and so in these scenarios as humans we underwrite a lot of that stuff right you could take two people of the same race but

different genders and they may get treated differently you could take two people of the same gender, but different race. Like, and so it just gets so complicated so quickly that it's very hard to jump from current event to current event, to current event, to current event, trying to identify what is happening. Yeah. And I think that one of the difficulties is sometimes the conversation that needs to be had is only useful if people really are open to considering all of the different types of solutions. And sometimes people are closed off too early. I mean, with the firearm thing I've come up with, come up with, I've gathered these weren't my original ideas. I've gathered 10 to 12 different points that I think would be

useful in reducing gun violence. What are they? And well, generally, so certain firearms should be unavailable to people under 25. If you are under 25 to get a gun at all, there should be a mandatory waiting period, required insurance, and you should have to get two letters from adults in your community saying they have no concerns with you doing that. There should be a psyche valve. It should be sort of like with vision tests that are required every once in a while for driving. You should have to be relicensed for firearms. Well, you know, this long list of things. But also we should deal with the mental health thing. And it is also true that it's not just that it's really common that certain weapons are used in mass shootings. It's also really common

that the perpetrators are of a certain profile, which is often young white men with certain characteristics that are less than ideal in their lives that are taking place. All of these things should be looked at. It gets extraordinarily political. So there will be people who hear that and they'll say the mental health piece sounds great. All that gun stuff we don't we don't really need to deal with. And then we're not going to get anywhere. there seems to be um both in america and i think some places in europe as well right uh and maybe it's the media is just amplifying it i don't have the data so i need to caveat out with that but guns there's always shootings right i mean they're being

reported stabbings but then also like vehicles people just like getting run over right there's a christmas day parade there's a new york city i think there was somebody who uh went over a sidewalk there's somebody who i actually think uh if i remember the details correctly he like rented a commercial like construction truck like a flatbed and he like went down the bike path that like hit people and i don't remember if he killed anybody or hurt them or what but just like okay hold on a second like people using vehicles using guns or using all this kind of stuff and it always makes me think of like well what is the counter examples right and we just saw one in california where uh a young guy was uh i think at a dance hall or something somebody

walked in with a gun i think he had been somewhere else and like shot some people uh unfortunately had killed some of those individuals shows up and this guy somehow wrestled the gun out of his hand yeah right um i remember watching a uh uh an interview with a gentleman i want to say it was somewhere in the midwest or maybe in southern california or something uh he was at um i think was a drag show and his daughter's like friend was in the drag show so his daughter was going down it was him his wife his daughter maybe like his daughter's boyfriend or something but they were going to like support yeah kind of a family friend and military veteran all of a sudden somebody busts in they start shooting he like drops to the ground grabs his kid he gets up and

the way he tells the story is he like pretty much ran up behind the guy while he's shooting grabs him puts him on the ground and just beats the fuck out of him right and you're like okay that guy didn't have a gun the first guy didn't have a gun but then there was a situation in indiana and a mall where a guy went into the bathroom had a gun with him gets it comes out starts shooting and i guess the story is that he's like a 18 to 22 year old kid who uh had to have some sort of training in the uh uh food hall basically stands up and shoots like a pretty you know far shot shoots this guy and basically neutralizes the threat and i think that maybe he had already shot one or two people but like this guy was able to kind of stop the situation yeah and so you look at it you're

like man i hear the argument of like if everyone had guns no one would shoot anybody maybe right i hear the argument of like if nobody had guns and there'd be less gun violence but you start to realize like every single one of these situations is different and actually you as an individual you should pay attention to details you should try to participate in the democratic process and politics and all that stuff but like kind of at the end of the day like you know you got to be prepared by yourself right like when you live through your life i don't want myself my family my kid to like worry about they go to the mall and they're like well i better be prepared in case there's a shooting today but at the same time like i do think that there's this element of

like unfortunately we live in a world where like you can't control other people 100 of the time there are criminals there are people who do all these bad things like yeah you probably should just like pay a little bit of attention to like how would you react in these situations have somewhat of a plan. Right. What's so difficult about this is that there's what is the best societal ways to improve these things. And then given that this is where we are, what are the best things I can do? Yes. That's a great way to frame it. I as an individual don't want only what we would call the right wing gun nuts to have the guns. That's scary to me. I don't really talk publicly about like my personal gun ownership, but just big picture, like the idea that only

the right wingers have the guns. That's a scary idea to me. Do you think that's true? It's it's not literally true. I mean, I have lots of liberal friends who are gun owners. They are saying you're saying the like marketing of the gun debate is very much like the right wingers have the guns, even if the data actually is different. Yes. And if you say to me, well, all the people who think that it should be harder to get a gun don't have them. That's scary also. Right. Because then you're sort of like ceding the gun ownership to the people you're most concerned about having them. So that's me at the personal level. At the societal level, it would be a much better thing where like when I go to Europe and I'm walking around, you know, Dijon, France or

whatever, I know nobody who's around has any guns. And obviously someone can get a gun. Sometimes there's a shooting in France. But statistically, these things are so rare in just about every place in the world other than places that are almost in sort of like war states than the United States. There is something that brings a certain level of peace where I'm like, nobody around here has firearms. And like that's I don't have to worry about having one myself. So that is separate from me saying, given that the U.S. is the way it is, do how prepared do I need to be? Do I need do I need a bombproof car or what? What exactly is that? And there are two kind of different considerations like you're talking about. Do we have any data or have you ever looked at like

road rage incidences in other countries versus America. And what I think about is like almost using that as a proxy maybe to like the aggressiveness of the American culture versus other places. Right. So like when I think of Dijon, France, I think everyone's like chill. They're drinking like cappuccino. You can get any kind of mustard you want. And it's really good. Lots of mustard everywhere. So people are bathing in it. Right. Like, like again, incredible generalization. Somebody from Dijon, France will watch this and I walk around with a done yes of course right but like i think that is the at least perception yes uh if you go to like something like a london i think that people would be like oh dijon france and london are

still they're they're on different parts of that scale yeah but america i think generally is seen as like on the more aggressive forward uh um kind of like uh i'm gonna go out there i'm gonna earn this i'm gonna like whatever yeah and does that play into the debate too because now that's not mental health. That's also not a weaponry. It's a cultural thing. This is a critical difference because often Switzerland is pointed to and Switzerland has a really high gun ownership rate. But Switzerland doesn't have a shooting problem. And it is not seen as a way to solve problems to use your gun in Switzerland. It's just not seen that way culturally. So like there is something in the United States where you see a road rage incident and someone feels justified in taking

out a gun, sometimes actually, you know, even discharging the firearm. That that is a cultural thing to some degree. I don't think it's mental illness per se, but it's the idea that guns can be a solution to problems. And even with the mass shooters, in a certain sense, they see the mass shooting as the way to solve whatever problem it is they believe they have, which maybe they have or maybe they don't. I think that is an absolute difference. And I don't know how you change that. Yeah. One of my wishes for society, if if I can be arrogant enough to have a wish for uh for uh all of us is um there's been some pretty heroic uh um situations over the last couple of years that i wish didn't just get as much media attention but got it for a more

prolonged period so i'll give you kind of three examples like at the off top of my head so one is the indiana uh counter shooter i guess like you know the guy who basically stopped the shooter with his own personal firearm um again should they have guns should they not have guns and like all the details whatever but just like that takes some degree of courage to stand up put yourself in harm's way and discharge the weapon and try to stop someone uh related to that in a similar sense is i think it was a border patrol agent uh at this school in texas there was an active shooter he i guess they were just waiting in the hallway or whatever he shows up and he basically was like i'm going in there you guys want to come with me like knock yourselves out

and i saw a photo later online which again who knows if it was real or not but i guess uh what the shooter had returned fire and had basically uh kind of skimmed his uh head or his hat or whatever and so you look at that and you're like dude like again this guy is a law enforcement you know officer to uh uh board patrol whatever like it's kind of his job but at the same time like there's a bunch of other men and women that are standing that aren't doing it and so like that guy probably we should put him on a pedestal and say like hey if you were put in a situation like we need more people like that who are willing to go put themselves in harm's way to stop it but then also even not in gun situations i don't know if you know uh in indiana uh jordy's from

indiana so i always give him shit that like uh a lot of weird stuff going on in indiana sometimes but there was a pizza delivery driver he was driving down the road and he passed a house at you know kind of early morning hours i think and uh he saw smoke and a potential flame so he stopped and kind of backed up he went to go check the house and he realized the house was on fire so he kicks in the back door and when he kicks in the back door there's flames everywhere and there's a couple of kids at the top of the stairs and they start to come down so he's like oh shit so he grabs the kids and he's basically bringing them outside and he keeps asking him is there anybody else inside is there anybody else inside and they're like yeah are like sisters inside she's

like shit there's another kid inside so he didn't wait outside he didn't do anything he goes back inside um he somehow gets the kid i think and uh he gets lost so now he's inside of a burning house he's lost doesn't know which way he's out he basically figures sees a light goes up to the second floor kicks out a window and jumps and so there's a body cam footage of this guy comes running around the house he's got the kid the cops are there right whatever and uh he and he hadn't kicked out the window he had punched it out so he'd sliced up his arm pretty bad And so on the body cam footage, they basically take the kid from him and they lay him down and they start immediately addressing, you know, his wounds and all the guy keeps asking is, is the kids okay? And you're like, man, we need more people like that. Yeah. Right. But those stories play for 24 or 48 hours. Yeah. Maybe a week we get out of it. The other thing about it is that third story is amazing. You know, there is no doubt that the

counter shooters, whether they're in law enforcement or not, there is no doubt an amount of courage that is involved in that. You know, Trump once said I would run in and it's like, no, you wouldn't do it. You wouldn't. You would. First of all, you don't run, but you would walk away. But I am more interested. You hate Trump, don't you? Well, I just think he's a joke. He could be the punchline tiny joke. I think it would be more interesting to prevent those shootings from happening in the first place. And that's a much harder thing. It's a much harder thing to think about because it's not. Well, here's where it started. Here's where the shooting started. But where did this person's desire for a gun start?

Where did the situation that this person ended up in start familiarly at some point? I am more interested in that as a solution than depending on counter shooters. Yeah, I think that's right. It goes back to your idea about like society versus individual. Yeah. Right. Of like as a society we don't want shootings right uh as an individual uh are you going to be the person who is caught in the shooting and not prepared and what are you going to do exactly and what are you going to do 100 it's um it's very unfortunate and i think also about um uh there's a school here in miami that uh when i go running i run by and like it's frankly sad it looks like it's a uh a lockdown location yeah right i mean they have a security guard that checks every car that goes in

and out they have all like all this stuff and like in high school i grew up in uh in north carolina and like i don't remember all of the details right but like i'm pretty sure i know for sure kids would go hunting before school i don't know if they would actually show up to school with like a shotgun or something like in the truck yeah but there was never a worry that like even if that was happening or they had gone hunting and went home and then like whatever yes we never worried about like somebody's gonna come to school and shoot everybody right right and so like i was in middle school when columbine happened and that was i think the first time people were like oh this is like a thing yeah that's my first memory of that that yeah same yeah and maybe there was once before

but like i think that was like for our entire generation like that was the first one but like even after that i don't think people were like oh this is gonna happen all the time yeah now it feels like you go read a news site like unfortunately it seems like almost you know every weak. There's something that's going on. And the two sides to that are it is happening a crazy amount in the United States. It also is still statistically very rare. So it's also important not to feel as though there is a 50 50 shot that when you walk out or when your kids in school, there's going to be a shooting. It's not that's not healthy either. You know, and it's sort of like when there are people or people think people dramatically overestimate the risk of being in a

terrorist attack. It's so unlikely. They really are very infrequent. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to prevent them. And I think that's an important thing with with the shootings as well. Yeah. You want to know one of the things that's helped me mentally? I didn't do it because of this, but like I've noticed I'm much less worried about a lot of this stuff. Reading physical books. Oh, yeah. I mean, I have never had a Kindle. I always read physical books. But do you mean the content of them or just physically reading them? Because if I audited my calendar, So I get a report at the end of every week from someone on our team who basically says, this is how you spent the hours that you scheduled this week. And so different businesses, different things, whatever.

And then I basically have a block every night that is just for reading. I do the same thing. Now, that reading block is recent, like in the last, I don't know, a couple months, right? Because before, what I realized was I was like, I call it doom scrolling. I'd sit there and I'd be, you know, I'm on Twitter. Okay, let me go check what's going on on Instagram. Oh, maybe say post something on Twitter, right? oh let me go back to instagram like and you're like doing this and all of a sudden you realize

like i've been here for 45 minutes this is right crazy yes so when i started to read the books the physical books what i noticed was i was spending less time on social media so it was less about like the physical nature of the book and it was more of like i'm not on social media reading about all this crazy stuff that's happening in the world that i think is so prevalent that it's literally happening outside my front door right instead i am focused on other things or whatever And I do wonder what the connection between this feeling like the world is ending, everything's horrible, like it's not going to get better, whether it's depression, anxiety, like all these different things, and just like literally using social media. I think the connection is abundantly clear. I think there's a clear connection. And it's unfortunate because the desire to sort of like be informed about what's going on on the planet and

in your community, in your country, natural and healthy to want to know what's going on so that you can decide here are ways I can help here are things I want to get involved in. But there's no doubt that spending more time consuming that type of content is is not good. And I don't think the solution is, you know, now these digital detoxes are very much in. What are those? You take 30 days and you're off social media. And then after the 30 days, you go back and do the exact same thing. And people say during those 30 days, I experienced this or that. And it was great in this way. Have you ever done one? No, I haven't. And I don't plan to because I don't think it's really practical. It's more practical to, I think, do what you're doing and what I try to do,

which is, OK, I don't want to end up sucked into social media such that I don't go to the gym or I don't read a physical book. So I'm going to schedule in the things that are important. If I've done those things and then I spend 15 minutes looking at Instagram, whatever, fine. Right. But I'm saying, well, here are the priorities rather than allowing this stuff that I don't really want to be doing to fill up most of my time. I think it's the same concept. Yeah. The digital detox is interesting because it's kind of like habits, right? So James Clear talks about like, if you say January 1st, I'm gonna start going to the gym and you go for two hours yeah it's unsustainable there's no way you're going to keep it instead just go for five

or ten minutes and then just build the habit right and then over time it'll become more um talk a little bit about your business uh in terms of like how do you think about content creation where are you guys focused now how important are like the cycles of the mainstream media in terms of election seasons versus not given that you guys talk a lot about politics so the biggest downside to being in news and politics is that it's much more difficult to sort of like create news stories And other than by like attacking someone who's in my space and trying to create some kind of a rivalry, which is not really my thing, it's very hard to create stuff. You know, chess right now is having a huge upswing online chess. And one of the great things about it is

they can create news by organizing tournaments, creating matchups where people might be late or people might be accused of cheating. You can kind of like create a news cycle and in news and politics, it's much harder to do that. So we definitely do have this ebb and flow that relates to, um, to, to elections. Do you ever like see the news story and you're like, I got to lean into this and basically like all hands on deck. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not out of a, uh, sort of like predatory instinct, but it's sort of like, here's an opportunity to really connect with people who then might stick with me because they value sort of the thing I'm doing. My big thing is I want to be as efficient as possible in content creation. So I want to repurpose content

in as many ways as possible. So now we have a full-time social media guy who is taking all the stuff that used to just be podcasting YouTube and thinking, OK, let's crop it vertically, subtitle it and turn it into five TikToks. Let's use, you know, whatever other sort of tools we're using. So it's becoming as efficient as possible, getting better at identifying what are the stories my audience cares about. Sometimes I'm just wrong. Sometimes I think my audience will be really interested in a particular story and it's just a swing and a miss. And that's not the case. So being more accurate as far as that goes. And then three, leveraging technology, because we get pitched all the time by platforms. We're going to be the next YouTube or we're going to be better

than YouTube, or here's a way to, instead of at by ad revenue with subscription revenue to bolster what you're doing or what do you guys do now? So you record content and you put audio podcasts up on all the audio platforms, right? Do you put the video content? YouTube. Okay. Um, and you put up anywhere else? Facebook. Okay. Tik TOK, Instagram, Instagram. So not rumble or any of these other, uh, you know, it's funny you mentioned it. I think we're on rumble. We rumble has this thing where you click a button and it'll just mirror your YouTube channel. And so I think we did that where it's we're not heavily invested in it, but I think we are on there. We don't get much traction. It might not come as a huge shock to you. What is the biggest surprise on all the

platforms for you over the last couple of years? Tick tock. Tick tock. Yeah. Same. The scale with which, you know, tick tock rather than being kind of follower based, it's individual video based. So aside from the number of followers we have, individual videos can just hit. We had one where we sent a correspondent to a Trump rally, and I think it was Texas, 1.2 million TikTok views in like a week because it was just perfect for the way we edited it. And the guy, Luke, who did it is really good at all these different things. Did we ever, Tyler, we got a million views on TikTok on a video? Oh, we got 6 million views on it. By the way, I'm not in it. What video is it? Oh, Liver King. I pressed them. We could talk about Liver King. I think he's

a billionaire is that true i mean i was sitting there and i was interviewing him and i started doing the math and he does 100 million dollars in revenue and uh do we know that i mean he's lied about a lot of stuff do we know he's doing i i have you ever heard this theory of the alter ego no so uh my wife is the one who told me this she'll be upset if i don't give her credit for it um but basically uh the alter ego a lot of these people have uh so kobe bryant black mamba when he goes on the court that's black mamba that's not kobe bryant so he separates kind of personal life from like what he does uh on the court uh david goggins new book he talks about uh david goggins didn't accomplish the shit goggins did and it's and it's kind of this he calls it like a mental

lab right um and so uh i think that actually there's a number of people on the internet like these creators they have the same thing so i don't actually think that liver king when the camera's is him oh of course it's not right there's no way it is and so what ends up happening is the character's not on steroids but he is on steroids okay and so what ends up happening is it becomes the things that are coming out of their mouth have no anchoring in reality whatsoever and like that one's a very obvious like yes no whatever but like if you go and you watch all these people online you're like no what that person is saying is what their character what they want their character to be or what they believe the character is that may be actually them in person right and so like

what's fascinating is i wonder and uh we didn't talk about this with him but like i wonder that if his friend had asked him are you on steroids no cameras i know anything would he've just been like yeah of course right or would he have been like no and then like that's more malicious right because like it's like you actually are lying all the time to people um but like outside of the steroid thing like i actually was like pretty impressed with just how he was like i lied i was wrong i deserve all this hate like you know i didn't see that clip but that is interesting i mean part of it is even since that i you know tiktok just recommends his videos to me because it just i'm sure he's popping on tiktok yeah yeah absolutely in one i see him sitting there

with blocks of salt and he says that's his dinner who would believe i mean it's just like it's almost silly right like is it is is it what i don't understand is is that obviously a joke or is does he say that and some people go wow liver king's doing a fast where he's just licking salt blocks for a few days what is that i don't even see that that's a perfect example i think that the expectation is people know and then after he goes and has ravioli off screen or whatever or like he may be actually doing a fast but he's not licking salt blocks right right like maybe what he's doing is he's just doing a water fast which lots of other people do some for religious reasons from for health reasons whatever but like i kind of when i saw the news about the steroids i like

my first reaction was like wait you guys actually you guys actually thought he wasn't on steroids right and and so i don't know it was just like a uh that one's like a very weird one well even like the the organ stuff where it was like in the emails it was revealed he has like a couple ounces of this stuff but then like at dinner you know his chef puts like pounds and pounds of this stuff i'm i'm kind of wondering like what happens with that stuff or when he has like 12 steaks sitting in front of him yeah is anybody eating those steaks does he have 40 people it's very hard to eat a lot of steak it's i mean he the dinner is 30 pounds of food obviously he's not eating it what happens with the food i don't know i'm curious about that yeah all right so liver

king i guess is he he got six million views on tiktok not me um no but tiktok is fascinating in the sense that it's a totally different audience for me but i think so i agree with a different audience. But I think that if you had to choose, or let me ask, and then I'll tell you what I would do. If you had to choose between the TikTok audience or YouTube Shorts audience, which one would you pick? Well, that question changes today because TikTok or YouTube Shorts monetization starts today. Do you think they're going to pay out a lot? I don't know. I'd have to know the answer to that question. The thing that has been tough about TikTok is it doesn't monetize. And at some point when I have staff and expenses, I have to think about how am I slicing

the time and what is the revenue that's generated from it. TikTok doesn't really monetize. And I don't know if it helps bring people into my other spaces. I'll get recognized. I was just here at a Walgreens and like a 65 year old lady who worked there came up to me and said, I watch you on TikTok. That's super interesting. Talk to her a little bit more. She doesn't know I have a podcast, doesn't know I'm on YouTube. Now, maybe that's my fault because I'm not telling my TikTok audience about these other platforms that I do monetize. But it seems a little siloed right now. what's um interesting about it is uh i think i heard maybe it was mr beast somebody you know that uh has a large audience was talking about the fact that you could or maybe actually it was

reed who is mr beast manager um you could watch like five videos of somebody on tiktok and not know who they are if you watch five youtube videos you know exactly who they are like there's a difference in in the in the connectivity with the person yeah and some of that might be the ui ux of like the, uh, the site, but also, uh, there's something about like a 30 second video versus a three or four minute or eight minute video. Um, and so I think that I would pick YouTube over Tik TOK 10 out of 10 times, regardless of the monetization. I think on average, like one of the things we talk about with my team is an audio podcast listener is on average more connected than a YouTube viewer. Right. Oh, interesting. In the sense that cast, because if somebody somebody

is subscribed to the podcast and it gets downloaded onto their phone and while they're at the gym or whatever, they spend an hour listening to me. That is a much stronger connection on average than somebody who sees one four minute video of mine on YouTube and then kind of moves on to other stuff. And we find that podcast listeners convert to paid memberships at a much higher rate. Now, we have way fewer of them right because we have 1.6 million youtube subscribers but on average the the podcast listener i think is more connected and more engaged than a youtube subscriber i think a youtube subscriber is more engaged than a tiktok yeah that's interesting to think of uh youtube is easier to grow right because of the virality and kind of the the uh the lack of need to opt in for

the user to share right just kind of youtube sends it um but actually that means that the podcast listeners more valuable and more connected. Yes, I think so. I couldn't tell you by what degree, but by some degree, for sure. How do you guys make money? So most of these platforms have ad revenue on them. And then we have a membership program on our website. It's like a freemium model where you get the show commercial-free,

and we do like an extra members-only show. And then we do direct ad sales as well. And when people sign up for the paid membership, how much is it? six bucks a month or 60 for the year well it's not bad right and you use uh something you guys built or use another service built on wordpress um yeah uses stripe and paypal for payments and works pretty well all these systems could always be better but but it's good and stripe and paypal you've ever had problems with them given all the news politics talk never never never no the i mean i think the most annoying problem is people who forget that it's a subscription they see the charge

a year later file a charge back we were talking about where does the the burden fall yeah um we get hit with not only do we sometimes lose the payment but we get hit with a dispute fee because they are like this was fraud even though they just forgot and that's that's a bummer that can start to add up we we uh on uh uh the sub stack um i'd written it for years i never checked one time any of this i didn't know about disputes or anything yeah and uh we hired someone she goes and look she's like do you understand that people for years have been disputing all these charges and i was like no what does that mean she explained it to me and i was like and we're paying on top of losing the revenue and she's like yeah i was like we should probably figure out this and what you'd

find is exactly that right we have a small sub stack and sub stack will fight it for you is one thing but then you still get the opportunity to submit as well and i don't know i don't actually know what you're supposed to do on that yeah so what's interesting is most people are not being malicious i mean you get an idiot every once in a while who's like read all the way up for 360 days and then they're trying to do something yeah but for the most part uh people are just they forgot they didn't mean to they they wanted to do monthly not yearly whatever all that kind of stuff yeah i still think the net all of these platforms all of these systems we have issues with youtube we've been banned from tiktok for the similar stuff where it was like your content is spreading

disinformation no we're debunking the disinformation we took a week to email everybody we could eventually the channel reappeared on TikTok. We'd never heard from anybody. We don't know why we have the chargeback issue, which we have all these issues. But without these platforms, I would have no following. Right. So I think they're all such an obvious net positive, just a matter of managing them the right way. If you had to pick one channel, what would you pick that you only get to keep one right now? It's mathematically it's probably YouTube. YouTube. yeah yeah um ben thompson uh i don't know who that is strategy um and also uh i think james clear and maybe mark manson too like two authors uh i've listened to podcasts with all three of

them recently and they all said email oh that's interesting because they they have their relationship right they and they and they have a much bigger list yeah our email list is like 60k and it doesn't get the high i mean what's interesting is each day we send out a newsletter with what's on that show of the 60k we get 20 000 opens which is really considered pretty high yeah but it's not super useful for other stuff in my experience so it's a way to keep people engaged with the content but it's not directly doing that much for us they're just they're there to see what what's on the show today yeah which is great it's a fine way to keep people engaged Interesting. What is your aspiration? What are you trying to eventually build?

Exactly what I'm doing. Yeah. I mean, I used to think it would be great to get hired by whoever. But now that I know so many people that have been hired by whoever and they have four bosses and they have a set schedule and it's at this point, I'm more than successful enough and into my career enough that I just aspire to keep doing what I'm doing and keep growing the platforms I'm on. Did anyone ever talk to you about going to work at one of the networks? Speaker 1 I. Yes. Yes. In the sense of, hey, you know, if you start appearing regularly, you might then become an unpaid contributor and eventually a paid contributor. And then maybe if someone is sick, you could be a guest host. And I was like, that's not sounding

that great to me, really. And I did have one conversation early in my career and I've told the story before with a radio sort of consultant executive who said, listen, there's really no market for what you're doing because you're on the left politically how much do you care about like would you kind of like because you're you're good enough but you got to do like right wing stuff would you claim to be on the right if it could get you a job and i was like no i wouldn't do that that sounds really horrible that sounds crazy they even suggest it sounds crazy yeah he's like because that's where the money is right now we could get you syndicated on you know you could be on in milwaukee and i was like i don't know that i need to be on in milwaukee right now let

me do what i'm doing you know yeah i am i've talked to networks like very loosely before yeah and uh always within five minutes it's like this is this sounds horrendous like i have so much respect for the people who do it because it's something i couldn't do like in the day-to-day of like i am excited to go do this yeah right and schedule is one piece of it but also um uh there's an individual uh my brother was telling me he recently had lunch with who's a like a sports caster and uh i gets up at 2 30 in the morning just not even not it's a non-starter well it's a non-starter i once filled in on an 8 a.m radio show i was like this is it i'm i know that i'm never doing this yeah but 8 a.m though i gotta be here at 6 45 yeah right well i was going backwards

and i'm like let's see when do i have to get up it's way too early for me yeah and you know part of it is maybe i don't have the work ethic for that right like maybe it's maybe it's me where i but then now I go, I'm doing way better now than had I pursued that path. So I don't think it's really a work ethic issue. I think it's just knowing what you want and what you don't want to do. It's awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Uh, davidpackman.com. All right. And what's there when they get there, the audio content, the video content, and all sorts of other stuff. Basically everything's there. My social media, all of it. All right. I have two last questions for you, please. I want you to say one bad thing that

Biden's done. And I want you to say one good thing that Trump did. Okay. Bad thing that Biden has done is he has not done significantly, not nearly anything on cannabis. I would like to see him do cannabis reform and good thing that Trump did. Well, I mentioned the good that, yeah, I mean, you know, a couple of little things. You know, that's it. Yeah. That's really all I can think of. I mean, he provided four years of some of the best comedy that anybody could ever dream of. And also, they loved it. He put SNL out of business at the end because if they can't, you couldn't do it any crazier than he was doing it. All right. Now, reverse one good thing about Biden and one bad thing about Trump. I love the the stuff that Biden is doing on electric car

charging infrastructure. And I and so that's that's a good thing Biden's doing. And then was another bad. What's a bad thing about Trump? Oh, well, we I did so many. I don't want to go back to that. What do you think is the worst thing? It's impossible to, there's, I mean, I don't know. Here's the thing. Here's why I can't say it'll take years to know the stuff he did. I think in a couple of years, ask me and then maybe we'll know. All right. I appreciate you coming. Thank you. I, uh, uh, I always appreciate someone who could talk about both sides of it. Obviously you have your bias and your leanings and all this stuff, but, uh, I think it's important to be able to positive negatives on both sides. Glad to be here. Uh, davidpackman.com. Thank you so

much, and we'll definitely do it again in the future. Pleasure.