Timcast IRL - THE KILLING HAS JUST BEGUN w/ Andrew Heaton

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

Tim, Phil & Ian are joined by Andrew Heaton to discuss a Mexican cartel launching a massive assault against Mexican government forces, Trump doubling down on tariffs after the SCOTUS ruling, Tim debating Andrew Heaton on outsourcing manufacturing, and why Gen Z can't afford homes.   Hosts:  Tim @Timcast (everywhere) Phil @PhilThatRemains (X) | https://allthatremains.komi.io/ Ian  @IanCrossland  (everywhere) | https://graphene.movie/ Producer: Carter @carterbanks (X) |  @trashhouserecords  (YT) Guest:  Andrew Heaton @MightyHeaton (X)

Chaos in Mexico. U.S. tourists are currently trapped. Airlines are shutting down. Insane videos of car bombs, explosions, fires, gunshotss, ringing out, people running and screaming in airports. All of this in retaliation for killing a cartel leader that some say, well, I should say, according to some reports, was at the behest of Donald Trump, who continued by saying it's only just begun.

25 Mexican National Guard were killed in these attacks. And it is expected to continue. Right now, we're getting reports that security forces are currently still battling cartel members, and it's popping off across the country. Now, I would argue it seems the cartel's retaliation is basically we have ended all tourism in Mexico. I mean, there's no possibility of you driving to Tijuana, flying down to Puerto Vallera, and having any kind of relaxing day. because people are being told shelter in place.

It's kicking off. Donald Trump and the rest of the Trump badmen are not going to back down from this. So we don't know exactly where this will go, but some have said this could effectively be some kind of civil war. I said it, but not for the reason you thought I would. Now, I don't know if you'd call it a civil war,

but the cartels control various territories. There's different cartels all over Mexico. And many have argued it's effectively a narco state because the government bends the knee to these cartels anytime they demand it. We've seen all of these stories about mayors and politicians being killed when they try to stand up. Now that Trump has effectively said, if you, actually, I'm pretty sure we have to report. Trump did say this. The Trump admin told Mexico, if you don't stop the cartels, we will. So Mexico launches an operation. They kill El Mancho, and this is kicking off like crazy.

There's no reason to believe it's going to stop. And so, again, tourism may be effectively over. We're going to talk about that, but boy, oh boy, do we have a lot of news for you, my friends. At Mar-a-Lago, a man with a shotgun and fuel breached the perimeter, reportedly aimed the weapon, and then was shot and killed. Now, according to TMZ, his motivation may have been the Epstein files. Getting absolutely crazy, my friends. The UK has arrested the former ambassador to the U.S. from Britain over the Epstein file revelations. he was leaking financial information to Jeffrey Epstein. Holy crap.

And then the U.S. beat Canada in hockey. Now, all those other stories are crazy, terrified. But the one I know most Americans care about is that we gave a thorough trouncing to Canada in their game. And there's a viral tweet where, I don't know, Trudeau or somebody was like, you know, you can try and take our country, but you'll never take a game from us. And now everyone's retweeting it. and the White House posted an image of a bald eagle crushing a Canada goose to death. So, yeah, there's that.

And still, we get a lot of news. In response, the U.S. men's team has agreed to attend the state of the union address tomorrow. And the women's team just can't find time in their schedules to do it, sparking a major backlash. Oh, boy, we got a lot for you today. So we're going to get into a lot. Before we do, we got a great sponsor. Tonight, we are brought to you by the campaign for America First International Assistance. This is the CAFIA.

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about this and so much more, we've got Andrew Heedon. Hey, good to be back. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Who are you? What do you do? I am a political satirist. I make jokes about news and politics. I host a political podcast called the political orphanage, so-called because I don't really like teams. So everybody, everybody hates you then. Everybody, everybody hates me. I am either a traitor or an infidel to everybody. Well, all right. Well, it should be fun then. We'll have a good time next to hanging out.

We got Ian here. You leave a memorable impression because I guess you said it's been four years since you've been here, but I feel like I saw you pretty free. I have thought about nothing but graphene since I last spoke to you, Ian. Lighting me up, Andrew, from the inside. Well, I'm going to let him know. I mean, when he got here, his hair was perfectly done. But when he saw Ian, he started just shaking.

Yeah, the 11. And they both started freaking out. As the heat goes up, electricity couples, and that's why you get that static shock. Hey, go to graphing.com movie if you haven't seen that yet. Graphene. Dot movie, that's where I'm working on. Hill's here to bring us back to Earth. Yeah, Phil, take it home. Hello, everybody.

My name is Phil Labonte. I'm the lead singer of the heavy metal band All That Remains. I'm an anti-communist and a counter-revolutionary. Carter. What's up? Cardburn's hanging out. Welcome back, Andrew. Thank you.

I get into it, man. Here's a story from WTOP. Security Forces Keep Up Fight with Cartel Gunman a day, after the Mexican military killed a drug lord from the, this is reporting from the APA, in fact. They say tourist shops in Tapalpa were open Monday and workers were on the job, but gunshots also rang out. And in the street was a dead man lying beside a bullet-pocked vehicle. Meanwhile, heavily armed Mexican security forces kept up the battle with cartel gunmen following the killing that sparked a surge in violence and put the country on edge. I mean, these videos that

are popping up are just absolutely nuts. We've got this one allegedly from Tijuana. I don't know exactly. Look, take it all with a grain of salt. Excuse me. This does appear to be the Tijuana border. You can see the border fence. And we don't know if this is from today, but I don't see why it would not be. Now in Tijuana, Mexico.

The cartel are blocking roads by setting cars on fire. This is a few miles from San Diego along the border. And this area in Baja, California is controlled by the, how do you pronounce it, Halisco? Alisco. I don't know how to pronounce that stuff. The cookie manufacturer? Have I got that right? In Nabisco.

My bad. Continue. All those, very close. They're smuggling cookies into the sky. You know, I mean, the videos that are coming out are absolutely insane. And this is the effective end of tourism in Mexico. No Costco is safe in Mexico now. Listen, this is, the cartel is basically saying, you hit us, we hit you back.

But this is not just, this is strategic. They're firing guns and airports. They're burning vehicles. vehicles in the middle of the street in key tourist destinations. They want the Mexican government to look at this and think we are about to go broke because tourism to Puerto Vallerta, to Tijuana, these are very, very important for the Mexican economy. Americans love coming down there and partying. It's slightly cheap. It's less expensive for the Americans to do so. Now you can't go. Americans are being warned to shelter in place. There was a video that Fox News had a report.

some guy said that a car bomb went off and everyone said quick get inside you can't even go outside now so for the people who are trapped there we hope that they can get out safely but now there's no it's just it's just off the spigot has turned off no tourism right now i imagine trump's response to this is going to be a brutal brutal crackdown the reporting is that apparently trump told mexico if you do not take out these guys we are going to do it the u.s will launch strikes on Mexico. And so Shinebaum, the president said, okay, we'll do it. Now, reportedly, the U.S. provided the intelligence on the location of Almencho. They went in, and there's conflicting reports. I read one report, according to cartel members, apparently. The U.S. went in with the

intention to murder, to kill him, not to capture him. And I think there was something like 70 dead in the operation. The U.S. found out that he was with a romantic partner, a woman I'm assuming, I don't know why. I'm assuming they call it romantic partner because they're leftist and media. That means mistress is what that means. It could be. And apparently they went in guns blazing just killed everybody. But I've also seen reporting, I believe the official narrative is they went in and arrested him. And when the cartel moved in to try and get him out, a gun fight ensued and he died in the conflict. Now, I don't know for sure, but what I can't say is, ain't no way Trump is watching this go down and thinking, I'm going to let the cartels do this.

No, this is what the left is trying to get the American right to do is to start blowing up streets and setting roadblocks and fury. They provoked the cartel into flipping out. The cartel took the bait and now they're going to get wiped off the face of the map. This is victim blaming. Like you're saying that the cartels. What else could they do? You know, their leader gets killed. What are they going to do?

Sit back and take it. I mean, the cartel are the ones that are actually causing the havoc. The cartel are the ones that are blowing things up. The cartel are the ones that are killing people. 75 people, 74 people of total have been killed in the operation in its aftermath. 25 security forces of the National Guard have been killed. This is not like you don't appease the bad guys. Like you don't just sit there and say, oh, we can't put these guys in jail or go after these guys because they'll wreak havoc.

That's how you end up with this situation. You end up with the government not controlling parts of the country because you're appeasing them. You're saying we can't go after them because they'll attack back. they'll cause havoc. You have... You know, you can appease them with that. What they try and do is they buy off their opponent. If that doesn't work, they'll try and assassinate the guy, which they just do with this guy. Then you'll do full-scale invasion.

I have mixed feelings on this. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with El Mancho, who is a great DM. And I was in a drug cartel in Mexico for about 10 years. And they've got a good pension plan. Nice. But it feels like they've kind of gone off a different direction than when I was there. I don't know. Non-discriminatory policies.

Yeah, that's another thing. They don't harass you or kick you out for being gay or Latino. But it was all those, they smoked all that pot, man. Mm-hmm. It helps. It was trafficking meth and fentanyl. And this is likely why Donald Trump said, take them down. Oh, yeah.

Just the other day Trump had that angel, or it was today, I think the angel mom's event. Yeah, today. He said February 22nd is going to be, was it Angel Family Day? Yep. And for those aren't familiar, this is a term that means, if you're an angel parent, it means your child was killed by an illegal immigrant. So Trump declared yesterday as the, you know, the day to commemorate all those who are killed by illegal immigrants. And look, this is the guy, the Holisco was responsible for the trafficking of fentanyl into the United States. I think Trump called up Mexico and said he's done.

And Mexico said, okay, because you know what's funny, the cartels right now, shutting down tourism, they're exacting leverage against the state. They're saying, you want to go to Trump because he's threatening pain. We're going to bring you pain. We're going to shut down your tourism. The problem is Trump can threaten so much more. Yeah. The cartels do not have the leverage here. They can kill.

They can bomb. They can fight and they can scream. And Trump can go to the Mexican government and say, we can end Mexico. Okay. The degree to which Trump can threaten Mexico is insane. The degree to which one cartel can is scary, but nowhere near as scary as Donald Trump threatening to launch U.S. invasions of Mexico. The cartel can wreak havoc.

They can cause unrest and stuff. But the U.S. has spent 20 years building an apparatus, the past 25 years, building an apparatus to find people anywhere in the world. We found Osama bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan where the country was doing everything they could to help. There's no one in Mexico that can hide from the United States military apparatus. And we don't have to drop a ton of bombs. We can literally send hellfires with swords on them. and take out individuals without blowing up everything. Like the United States as a military entity

is beyond what anything the cartels are prepared to handle. I wonder, like, of these cartel members, they're, like, getting bribed by the CIA right now to turn on each other. And then when they turn on each other, the CIA is like, you're all dead anyway, and they kill them all anyway. Why would the CIA bribe them?

Why what? Why would the CIA bribeck them? Get them to turn on each other. Then it's one less enemy and one more ally. They're going to turn on each other. When I was in the cartel, I took a lot of kickbacks from the CIA. It was actually a big part.

of my job. Yeah. It'd be like in addition to military operations, you're trying to bribe leadership to turn on each other and stuff. And it's like with a limitless amount of money with the cyber tech they got. They're fighting each other now

because the cartels are going to start fighting each other for dominance over territory and stuff now. They don't need the CIA to pay them to fight each other. They want to fight each other to take over territory as it is. Yeah, but I think this is it. I think what you are seeing with Donald Trump's foreign policy is pretty dang nuts. In his first term, he crushes ISIS.

In his first term, the war, the conflict in Ukraine starts dying down. You get in the second term, so I'm going to throw it to Biden for helping kick off the Russia war with Ukraine. I blame Russia largely, but Biden's failed foreign policy with Afghanistan and Ukraine, largely with Ukraine, helped contribute to it. And then you have Donald Trump coming in with what does he do? He's taken out the drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. He, again, already ISIS-crossed.

You got Abraham Accords. Trump has worked under these peace deals. and so it looks like his interests are substantially more in line with domestic protection. That being said, we have deep concerns about an escalating war with Iran, so I'm not going to say it's out of the question. But I think the cartels are cooked. I think Obama, let me just one more thing. Obama wanted ISIS to exist. The U.S. government was funding groups that eventually became ISIS, and they were utilizing weapons the U.S. had given to these people.

and Barack Obama gave thousands of guns to the cartels fact. It was called Fast and Furious. Now, the excuse they give was they were going to give the guns to the cartels, but then track them and see how the guns were being used and who got them. Yeah, you always give your enemies a bunch of automatic weapons. Ridiculous. And they actually found in the raid rocket launchers. So some are questioning just what, these are military grade.

Yeah. To what degree the U.S. was actually providing support before Trump got in. Tim, do you think that that was a willful action? Like, I would read Fast and Furious as just incompetency on behalf of the DOJ. But like, are you inferring that they wanted to arm them rather than entrap them? You know, I would typically say something like Hanlon's razor. Are you familiar?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this capacity, if I were to assume that Barack Obama was just incompetent in handing over thousands of weapons to cartel members, I would have to assume that he was a functional retard. Maybe they were like. It's one thing to say incompetence. That's like the dude spilled the coffee, and I'm not going to assume he did it on purpose. What was the plan?

Okay, we're going to give them a bunch of guns. They're going to go use them killing a bunch of people, but then we'll know they did. No, no. You give them the guns. Then they take control from their government. Then you have no choice but to go in and quell the resistance and take the country for yourself. It's the same thing they did with ISIS. They armed them.

Now they have an enemy to go invade and take. Now we have Afghanistan and Iraq. We armed our own enemies. technically correct in some circumstances. The point of ISIS was to get Assad out of power. The reason why the U.S. let under Barack Obama ISIS expand rapidly was because it was like we couldn't, I mean, we did invade Syria, which is funny because who remember was in that? Who remembers when that happened? Does anybody remember a big declaration of an invasion of Syria? Well, they tried in 2013 and I was. No, they went and did it. No, not then they didn't.

Because Obama wouldn't do it. Obama did do it. Obama did do it. And it was after Trump got out of his first term, Biden set the troops back in. declaration of war as well. I know exactly. He went and did it illegally. So anyway, the point is this. Obama was like, let's let ISIS expand because they are attacking Assad's regime and they're going to knock Assad out of power. The propaganda machine did everything to say Assad was an evil guy because he was aligned with Russia and we did not like him. We wanted to build an oil pipeline into Europe to offset Russia's gas monopoly. A lot of other factors. That's a big one. Assad said no. Then we said, we're going to knock out your government. So Obama lets ISIS happen. We provide materials and

happens to the rebels, the Free Syrian Army Associates, which eventually get taken over by ISIS extremists and becomes a singular faction. And the U.S. is happy to let it happen. They say, we'll sit back and watch them tear each other apart. Trump gets in and he flattens ISIS. I don't think that Barack Obama gave those guns as an excuse to invade Mexico. I think he gave the guns to the cartels because the cartels are part of what they need to happen for drug trafficking and human smuggling into the United States. I think that the interests of the Uniparty, like the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the neocons, has never been, at least in the last 40 years, for the American people. And you can criticize Donald Trump for a lot of things. In fact, there's so many things, it's hard to

name, but at least you could look at his plans and what's going on and say, well, that's for the American people. Can you elaborate on the Mexico bit? Because I follow you in terms of arming ISIS. We have a long history of arming people that turn out to be our enemies. So like that, that sounds plausible to me. But why would they want to build up cartels in Mexico? Like what would the Democratic Party get from having increased drugs? Well, it's not the Democratic Party. It's the Uniparty. It's the old Republicans. We're all the same. Neither of them were going to go in and do Am Bush, didn't do anything about it. Are you familiar with the crack epidemic in the 90s? And it was how the CIA was basically facilitating all of this. And the reporter who uncovered

it committed suicide with two gunshots to his head. You have to wonder about what was that all about. Well, there's a lot of conspiracy theories, but the reporting is basically the CIA was funneling crack cocaine into black neighborhoods. Your guess is as good as mine, I guess, suppress and depress minority populations, maybe. I'd have to imagine that with the flow of fentanyl and other drugs and human trafficking, the Democrats have been encouraging, especially in the Biden administration, they would want these groups to be able to operate to do what they want to do. Not only that, but it allows the U.S. to do, I would just call it extra legal things under undercover. You can't go to the Mexican government and say, we need to transport two million people into our

country through your border because that's public record. But you can certainly go to the cartels and say our NGOs will take care of you. You guys provide the security. Here's a bunch of guns. Here's what we want to happen. So you think it was an immigration attempt to get? No, no, no, I'm saying there are, there's a multitude of factors involved in why the U.S. has been supporting illegal activity in Mexico. If you go back to the 90s, you know that the United States intelligence CIA largely was helping funnel crack cocaine from Mexico. into the United States, and I guess one could only surmise us to the purpose, but they were flooding black neighborhoods, black communities with crack cocaine. I believe the working theory is that they

were trying to suppress and depress black population. Perhaps, I mean, people argue that. As for why he would be giving them guns, it's because they do extra legal things that the U.S. needs or wants them to do. So it's powerful to have these groups who are willing to do anything for money at your behest. I think that it's a largely a narco state. You take a look at Afghanistan, for instance, the United States, where we got soldiers in Afghanistan guarding poppy fields because it's a large portion of their economy pumping out heroin. I think that the government of the United States, pre-Donald Trump, post-World War II, or probably even before that, has not been operating for the betterment of mankind, but for control. And you need, as I think Ian brings up quite a bit,

the Henry Kissinger's, what is it called? Limited war principle. You want there to be a degree of chaos. That's why I said I half agree with you when you said, fund the enemy so that you can take a stand against them. It's in that realm. I will also say, if I knew exactly what their intentions were, I'd have no problem coming on and say it. But the only thing I can say is, I don't believe Obama is so stupid that he gave a bunch of automatic weapons to cartel members on accident. I think with the Mexico thing, I'm still on Hanlon's razor, but I share your skepticism of the kind of neocon project that's been going on in the country for a long time.

So entertain, would you then, sir? Why give 2,000 or more automatic weapons to cartel members? It's been a while since I've looked at that, right? But there was Eric Holder with the DOJ. As I recall, the plan was, which they botched. And nobody was prosecuted either. So there are a definite problem. with it. But as I recall, the plan was to, like, get the guns out and then intercept them before they were actually used. It wasn't to just arm them. I don't know. Again, I'm on the side of my competency. I'm sorry, you're saying two plus two equals five. Why do you need to send guns to intercept them when you can just go as the United States government and arrest the people? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. There's no logic whatsoever in the plan to give automatic weapons to cartel members. You don't need to. They're already buying guns from somewhere.

They already have weapons, military-grade rocket launchers. Trump isn't doing any of this stuff. You need only go to the Mexican government and say, shut down the cartels now. We know they're selling drugs. We know they're stealing avocado farms now. There is literally no logical plan, none whatsoever. So while I typically can look at Handlin's Razor for a lot of things, not this. I'm sorry, like if Ian gave a drug dealer 10 grand.

What Ian did give a drug dealer 10 grand. I know I was making the point. No, no, listen, if Ian walked up to a drug dealer and handed him $10 grand, do you think when they come in arrest Ian and he goes, no, no, you don't understand? I gave him the money so that later on I could catch him with the money. They'd say, what? They use entrapment regularly, right? Like, that is a thing that law enforcement does. Why do you need to entrap the cartels when you know what they're doing and you know who they are?

They might have been trying to track the people. I don't know the ins and outs of it. See who they gave the weapons to? I'm sorry. I just find it. I find it incredibly hard to believe that Biden's government, knowing the cartels are murdering people, killing politicians, needed some kind of pretext to go in and do anything about it. So instead, they hand a bunch of guns to people they know who are violent murderer criminals and then go,

oopsie, just like when Obama. You have to remember, I've made a career out of claiming the government's incompetence. So that is my general default position. Was the government incompetent when they killed Abdulraman Al-a-Lakki? Remind me of who that is? 16-year-old American citizen visiting Yemen, was at a civilian restaurant. and Obama ordered a drone strike blowing the restaurant up. No, I'd say that's illegal and unconstitutional.

He claimed it was an accident. He said, oops, we were targeting a terror leader. We didn't realize that it was the wrong target. I don't believe for a second that Obama, when he's, listen, they come to him and they say, okay, president, we want to blow up, we have a target to blow up. And Obama goes, okay, where is it at? And he goes Yemen. And Obama goes, okay, and are we at war with Yemen?

No, sir. Okay, what's the target? It's a restaurant. Okay. Is it a military restaurant? No, sir. It's a civilian restaurant. Uh-huh.

So a civilian restaurant in a country we are not at war with and you want to blow it up. Yes, sir. Hawaii has a terrorist in it. Okay, go out and do it. At bare minimum, Obama was like massacre a bunch of civilians in a country, not at war with. You are arguing that the Obama administration was very competent then. Absolutely. The Obama administration was competent.

There are so many things one could argue about incompetence with Obama, but Obama is not a moron. Obama was a very, very sharp, very charismatic, cunning individual. Look at the Russia gate hoax. I mean, Obama's meeting with Comey, Sally Yates, who was Biden there? And they're effectively planning to go after Donald Trump with this whole nonsense. These people were cold, calculating. And you know what? The only thing I can give for him in incompetence is that they couldn't get Hillary Clinton across the finish line.

But again, so I look at what the Obama administration does. And I think it's silly to say that giving thousands of guns to cartel members was just an oopsie-dazy. Because Trump doesn't need any of that pretext. He goes to Shinebaum and says, do it or we will. And she does it. Can you flush out for me what you see Trump's foreign policy as? What I mean by that is when he was running in 2016, I was hanging out with lots of libertarians. The pro-Trump argument amongst the libertarian crowd was Hillary's a known war hawk.

Trump is an isolationist. Vote for Trump. You're going to get peace. But I wouldn't describe this term. is isolationist, but at the same time, we're not going into full-blown war. So I'm trying to figure out what's going on. How do you see it? Easy way to explain it. The priorities of the of the Donald Trump administration as it comes to foreign issues and military issues is about what is going to benefit the United States the most. That being said, he's far from perfect. I don't,

I don't want to see a war with Iran. I have a general idea of why he's doing it. No, it's not because Israel controls the United States with puppet strings, but some people are just whackaloons. And I would argue that Trump is largely imperfect. But look at the what we describe it, the fervor over Trump striking these drug boats. I mean, we see videos of boats carrying drugs blown up. And then there's an argument that some of them are not. They're just fishing boats and they're civilians. And I say, okay, well, that's bad, right?

Let's take a look into that. Let's get a full report. Let's get an investigation and make a determination if there was military action that was taken against civilians, for which we will make an attempt to determine what the penalties of that will be. Barack Obama murdered people. He murdered children. He murdered innocent civilians. He killed American citizens.

No one cares. There, and I know the left always says, what aboutism? And I say, no, no, no. It's about actions speaking louder than words. When Donald Trump targets boats shuttling drugs to the U.S. or largely to Europe in the Caribbean, They lose their minds over it, but they don't say a damn thing when Barack Obama was murdering Americans. So I don't believe for two seconds they actually get.

Anyway, real quick, your point about Trump's foreign policy is, well, he tried not to be involved in the Ukraine, Russia stuff, but oh boy, he can't figure that one out. The Iran stuff is troubling, but Iran is basically shutting down the Red Sea. They're funding these terror groups, Houthi rebels in Yemen. the Houthis are then firing on ships in the Red Sea. And the Red Sea, of course, is a Suez Canal. There are three major trade vectors for global trade. You've got Panama, which Trump is trying to regain control of. The Suez, which we do control and Trump, the conflict of Iran is largely around whether or not we can maintain security in their region. And then, of course, Greenland and Canada, which is the Northwest Passage. So Trump is, I would argue, retracted on liberal

economic order worldview, but not abandoning of it. and largely focused on securing American national benefits. So the cartels are shuttling fentanyl and drugs in the United States. Trump says shut it down. These boats are transporting drugs, funding these operations, shut it down. Venezuela stole billions of dollars of U.S. oil assets in 2009. Trump says, no, we're shutting that down. So I would argue maybe at 60, 65 percent.

It's going to be a direct repercussion or the direct regression is going to be the benefit to the American people like tariffs. I would argue that the perspective on Ukraine and Iran largely is, will it ultimately benefit America? But that's where you're starting to stretch it into global security for the betterment of America. I can understand why my libertarian friends are largely challenging of that notion. But I would also say the libertarians that are critical of it, I respect, the libertarians that are isolationists have no idea what's going on in the world. I'm an intervention skeptic. So that is to say, like, the default is no.

you might be able to talk me into it. Where I struggle with that analysis of Trump is it does sound like it requires me to sign off an intentionality of looking at what were the intentions of the Obama administration. What are the intentions of the Trump administration? I don't really like either. And so it's harder for me to put that into a rubric that I can follow. But like the basic idea would just be whatever is strategically the best thing for America? Well, yes.

Tariffs, for instance. Any anybody who... Oh, good. We can fight out tariffs. Good. Anybody who's interested in, well, let's pull up the legislative tariff. Trump said, we ain't back and down. Yeah.

So let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me grab a, uh, he's doing a 10% tariff for 150 days as authorized by the 1975 NIA Act that preceded Aipa. Let me, where's the, I thought I had that post pulled up where Trump is like, we're going to do it anyway. But, uh, all the, I want to, I want to get the, uh, the, here we go, here we go. Trump threatens, uh, let's pull this up. All right, everybody. We got the story from the AP following the Supreme Court's decision that Trump cannot enact

emergency tariffs under this one particular law. Donald Trump has come out and said he's going to increase tariffs anyway, citing three other laws from the 70s. He's now warning countries to abide by tariff deals despite the Supreme Court decision. Any country that wants to play games of the Supreme Court decision, Trump posted, will be met with a much higher tariff and worse than that which they just recently agreed to. He said Saturday that he wants a global tariff of 15% up from 10. He announced immediately after the ruling. The courts didn't struck down tariffs Trump had imposed

on nearly every country using an emergency powers law, but the Republican president won't let go of his favorite albeit now a limited tool for rewriting the rules of global commerce and applying international pressure. So I am of the opinion that the tariffs are quite possibly the best thing for the United States. I am a huge, huge fan. And I believe that anybody, who is truly interested in the betterment of the United States would support this, and anybody who either wants to extract value from the system to its decay would oppose it. The people that I view that there's two groups of people that I believe are in opposition to the tariffs. Those that want to extract the value from this country to its demise, and those who don't

understand what is going on in this country. I suppose I'd be in the latter camp then. You don't understand what's going on in the country? If I have to pick one of those two, I think comparative advantage is a thing. I think trade is good. The best argument that I've heard in terms of the Trump tariffs is that there are situations where we need to use leverage to compel other countries to quit doing bad things. And it would be better to use tariffs than to do military intervention. Completely disagree with tariffs as a means of military.

Oh, no, like as a way of avoiding military stuff. This is the best argument I've heard is that, like, China is doing they've got a predatory IP system. Other countries have tariffs. We could use punitive tariffs to try to lower it. So if you're using tariffs as a temporary leverage to try to get a policy goal, that makes sense to me. The idea that we have a kind of zero-sum fixed amount of wealth and that if we are buying things from other countries, they're extracting wealth, I don't think that that's sound. Is your argument graph go up?

My argument graph, what do you mean? Is your argument, comma, graph go up? Yeah. So the typical libertarian arguments is described by a lot of people as graph go up, and liberals have adopted this recently as well. It means that on the macro, we can see a general economic improvement in the short term, so it's worth doing. I would say my argument is that comparative advantage is real. So I have a company that manufactures products. How do I compete with Chinese slaves?

If we've actually got a supply line that's got slavery in it, I'd be fine with abolishing that. It's all of it. 100% all things that we get from chasmus labor like is 25 cents an hour not slave labor because they choose to work for that much no there's there's a difference between my employees my manufacturing employees compete with a guy who makes 25 cents an hour um they got to find a way to compete so when my industry dies because we are spending 10 times as much to ship lumber to china to manufacture it with slave labor sorry peasant labor and send it back to the united states how is that good for us our country and our children So two things. First, I want to go ahead and hit the slave labor thing, right? If there's actual involuntary servitude going on, that's immoral... I'm being hyperbolic. I'm talking about people who would otherwise work for better wages with health care, but instead are getting paid 50 cents an hour to do this work.

If we're removing actual slavery from the equation, right? Peasant labor. Yeah, peasant labor, right? The one thing they can compete on, lower wages, we end up being able to import things cheaper. It makes everybody better off in the long run. That's completely incorrect. You're flat out wrong. When you look at like American manufacturing, we've got intermediate parts that come in from other countries. So if you want to have cars in America, you need to be able to get parts from other countries. Why?

Because if you raise the prices on that, you raise the price on the consumer and everything costs more. And if everything costs, so are you familiar with the old apocryphal legend of Henry Ford and the Ford factory? Yes, I'm familiar with the apocryph. Yeah, where he had to pay people enough. He argued that if I pay a higher rate, then the employees actually buy the cars. from me on a loan and then they're paying me back the money I'm paying them and then earning a percentage off the access cars we produce. I haven't heard the loan bit, but I do think it's apocry. Well, it's their financing it. They can't afford to buy the car outright, but they're paid

enough to where they can say, okay, I can save up for this. And then a portion of them, they're buying the product back from the guy where they're making it a premium. But like, you're familiar with comparative advantage, right? Like, you know the basic premise behind that? May I enlighten people? Enlighten everybody with it. So like, let's say I'm Scotland and your France. I is Scotland, I'm very good at making sheep. I'm not very good at making wine. Like, Scottish wine would, like, presumably be very sweet. You'd probably fry it. It wouldn't be particularly good. Meanwhile, well, that could be great. You know what? Actually, I've got to go back. Like, we're going to call it Scottish prison wine. I would try it. Scottish prison,

but they're probably not going to produce very much of it because it's not very good for making grapes, right? But they're very good at making sheep. Meanwhile, France, really good at making grapes, large amount of grapes, very bad at making sheep comparatively, right? They probably have some sheep. If the Scots go, well, we want to protect our nascent wine industry. So we're going to put tariffs on the French wine industry, then France is going to respond by putting tariffs on wool coming in from Scotland. The result is you're going to get more wine in Scotland, but you're going to get less wine overall in the equation. You're going to get more sheep in France, but you're going to have less sheep overall. Everybody gets less wine and less sheep.

Now, you said that the Scottish wine was just no good, right? It's, uh, you know, we could, we could just focus on like quantity. They're not going to be able to produce as much of it. So you're going to use both countries in a less productive manner. Is it better for the people of Scotland and the generational wine farmers to have their industry destroyed because you, as a consumer, want to save $3 on your wine? Or is it fair to say that the bustling wine industry in Scotland, which is storied and has legacy, deserves a chance to survive for its community, for its culture? They should absolutely be able to compete for that. Well, like, you might want to get Scottish wine. But if it's a chance,

something that they can't produce that people want. France has got Chinese peasants working 25 cents an hour producing garbage wine that Scotland can't compete against. The wine is actually no good. And now what's going to happen is the Scots are going to put more of that effort into sheep and they're going to produce more sheep. This is just not correct. Shift their economics towards something that's more productive.

So I'll give you an example that I often give to most people, which is it's personal. Skateboarding is dead. It's an Olympic sport, but it's completely dead. I sold, we sold something like 500 boards in a month. Shocking industry experts asking me, Tim, how did you sell 500 skateboards? And I said, I went on my show and said, go to Booneyshq.com and buy the skateboards. The pros are not working for Uber Eats. They are doing delivery driving for Amazon.

They no longer have the time or ability for the most part to be professionals in their own sport. There's videos popping up of some of the best professional skateboarders who are Olympic contenders who now work for Home Depot making minimum wage. You know why? Because the factories that produce skateboards, instead of employing Americans and marketing a product to Americans, offshoreed all the manufacturing to China, where we cut down wood in Canada, imported to the United States, send it to China. Chinese peasants make the boards for pennies and a dollar, send back cheap Chinese crap, and now there's no factories, no employees, and no pro skateboarders. If you go to Japan and China, they have skateboarding up the wazoo. Every new pro is some 15,000.

year old Japanese kid, and the country that invented the Olympic global phenomenon has lost control of it because we gave it away, because we told people in this country, which would you rather buy? The $50 American-made skateboard or the $30 Chinese-made skateboard, and to be honest, when the people walked into the shop to buy a board, they didn't know the difference. And they said, 30 bucks sounds good to me if it works. Well, guess what happened? Every American worker who grew up, whose dad owned a wood shop, lost their job, and now they don't skate anymore.

They're kids, the Gen Z, and this is across the board. Skateboarding is personal for me. I know people probably don't care about it. But it's the perfect example of how we are willing to spend 10 times as much on the energy to send our raw materials to China so peasants can do it and Americans lose their jobs. And then when no American has the job, what company is going to promote and market the new product to kids? It doesn't exist anymore. It's in China.

So when you go to China, what do you find? Thousands of kids at their skate parks. When you go to Japan, what do you find? They're opening new skate parks like crazy. They're launching TV shows about skateboarding. We invent it in California and we gave it away and it's not coming back. I lament that there's been a dearth of professional skating and that it's something that's near and dear to you.

So why was- What is stopping the professional skateboarders from just buying the skateboards that they have in China and Japan? There's no one skateboarding anymore. Because the skateboards of declining quality? The companies used to go to parks and they'd say, look at this skateboard we made down the street. Why don't you try it there, Sonny? and the kid would then try it. And the factory had five to ten employees.

And those employees would come home and give the extra boards to their kids. And the company would say, we're going to put together a skate team to market this. That company's in China now. So that guy going to the park, he's Chinese. There's very few American manufacturers. It takes us weeks to produce because we're desperately trying to rebuild an industry while we're competing with China. And they tell me on the phone, Tim, if you get the Chinese to do it, we'll get your boards $5 cheaper. And I say, I don't want a $5 cheaper board.

I want skateboarding back. I want the sport. Can you not just compete on quality? I mean, wouldn't people pay a better price for a quality board? Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I think that's part of it. You might want a cheap board or a high quality board. Maybe we compete on quality.

What you are missing is that the culture around this industry is gone because there's no economic support. There's no factories. There's no dads. There's no marketing endeavor. It doesn't exist anymore. It's in China. So in China, skateboarding is exploding like crazy.

In Japan, they're launching TV shows for skateboarding. And today in the United States, we don't even have the big skateboard contests anymore. They're failing and falling apart, and all the top pros are just little Japanese kids. Now, I got no beef with the Japanese kids. Some of the best skateboarders, they're all Japanese. I'm pissed off that the country that made this, that invented it, that inspired the world, gave it all away. And now where I live in my home country, I, for the life of me, well, actually, I'll say this. One of the advantages to it is that I can go to a pro skateboarder and give them $500 and they'll come and they'll produce content because they're so desperate for money.

And what I tell all these guys, when we were doing, we stopped doing our games of skate events because of security issues. We're working on trying to figure out how to do them again. We told the pros, you get $3,000 if you win and you get a guarantee just for showing up. And they all show up and they beg to come and compete because these guys are working at Home Depot. They're working for Uber Eats. They're driving cars. There is no, this is an Olympic sport. And now there's very few people left.

Would you want to have government support for this industry where they get subsidies? I would like the government to say, if you move your factory to China, we will charge you 30% on the way back in so that you will not be competitive in the marketplace. It's two different things. The competitiveness of the skateboard itself and then the industry of skateboarding, it's similar to like, are our bikes cheap to make? are they Chinese bikes, but then the cycling community and the cycling industry and cycling for the Olympics and stuff. Is it necessary? It's not a direct relationship. It's more of a correlationary relationship. It's a direct relationship. There's a famous photo of a man in a suit in the 1960s, I believe it was, riding a little fishboard, one of the OG skateboards in Central Park.

It's a great mystery to figure out who this man is and no one really knows. That event that became iconic where it's like a guy in a suit and he's like cruising was because a company that made skateboards announced they were having an event in Central Park and encouraged everyone to come. They told families, they told kids, they went and promoted it in New York City. And then everyone showed up. Well, not everyone, but a lot of people showed up. And skateboarding started to get more and more popular in the United States. The factories and the companies are gone.

And one of the biggest brands. I want to make sure I understand this. So they were like $50 boards here. They're $35 in China. And because the boards are cheaper in China, the industry is just imploded here. Yes. And no one, but people can still buy it. The people, because you don't have to make your own board.

So you can order your Chinese made board owned by what I would call a vapor brand. So some of the biggest brands in skateboarding have collapsed. All the skateboard companies are going out of business because I would refer to them as vapor companies. They slap a logo on a board made in China and then tell people to order it on the internet. The only problem is there's no one. Okay, you have a factory, right? It's 1960. You have a wood shop and you make skateboards.

You say, how can we sell more of these? You've got to get kids to skate. So what do you do? You go to the park. You pop up some tents. You give out free lemonade and ice cream and you say, try this skateboard. The kids are all excited and ecstatic. And the parents go, I think I'll get some of these for my kids.

And so they buy a bunch. Well, now you don't have any factories. You don't have any shops. They can still, I mean, like, so the boards are cheaper now than they were when it was made in America. Indeed. And the result is there's fewer people skateboarding? Yes. See, this is what I was saying about people who don't understand the economic chain.

They simply look at the numbers improve. So what's the problem? The problem is when a guy shows up to a wood shop and says, I don't know nothing about skateboarding. You say, well, we need someone who knows wood. I certainly know wood. How would you like a job at a wood shop? I'd love one. Then he goes home with some samples and he gives them to his kids. And his kids go to their friends and their friends say, wow, I like this. Let's do more. Now this man working at the factory starts talking to his neighbors. I work in a wood shop. We do skateboarding. Hey, it's an Olympic sport. We're actually sponsoring some of the Olympic

athletes. It's big. Then a rival company pops up and says the kids can't get enough of these things. We need a new factory. All those factories are gone. There's no longer a guy going to his kid. there's no longer a company going to the park. The demos don't exist. And one of the biggest brands in American skateboard history moved to Japan. My guess would be that if you were to buy a keyboard today, like a piano keyboard,

you're probably going to get a cassio or something like that. I don't think that we've had like a limited amount of people earning piano. Or to use the wood shop example, like guitars are still abundant. People are still playing guitar. I don't know where they come from. It wouldn't surprise me if they're not from the United States.

I think the issue around something like skateboarding is that it's decently new relative to say like piano, which has been around and is global. And there's a tremendous opportunity. What I would still argue, though, is as someone who is not a pianist, I can only refer to the things in which I'm involved in, and I can stress the same thing is happening in other industries. So I can cite surfing, snowboarding, and skiing as being massively impacted by foreign manufacturing. And it's because the boards are lesser quality, so people aren't skating.

as much? It's because there's no culture anymore. So do you know culture works? Yeah, but I don't want the government propping up culture. Like I think, I don't want the government punishing other people for making economic choices. Why is it? What do you mean punishing other people? Because you're taxing me for buying a cheaper skateboard. Yep. Yeah, I don't think you should do that. And I like to back up a little bit, I question this whole

idea that it's a lack of tariffs and protectionism that's resulted in lack of American manufacturing. So like you look at like, no one does this with farmers. Like if you go back to like 1880, 90% of the American workforce was farmers. Like it's not because we started importing food that we do. It's because we got really, really good at making food. So my uncle's a farmer. He's basically like an agronom. Let's go macro.

Let's go macro. Tell me about Detroit. Detroit with manufacturing, I'd say it has more to do with unions and with just the cost of manufacturing cars in general. Why are people? Oh, right. So agreed. So if we stopped allowing companies. to move their factories to Mexico or Indonesia or other countries, it would be a little bit more

expensive, but there would be a bustling auto industry in Michigan. So, let's kind of stick with that for a minute. Like steel, for example. Steel is one of the things Trump talks about regularly. We export more steel now than we know in the 1980s. The difference is we need fewer people to do the steel. We came up with better innovations for it, and therefore we have fewer people working in it, but the actual exports are fine.

With cars, like most of the cars we get in the United States, even if they're foreign, like Kia, Toyota, whatever. They're manufactured here in the United States by American workers. You can buy stock. No? No, I mean, we, Donald Trump's famous, well, I should say Michael Moore's famous speech of Donald Trump in his 2016 campaign was that he went to the auto manufacturers and said, if you move your factories to Mexico or China, I will slap a 30% tariff on your vehicle and no one will buy it. And it was the first time someone stood up for the workers. We have watched Michigan deteriorate in psychotic ways. Flint, Michigan, being an amazing example of what happens when you gut the manufacturing base.

So, yes, one could argue with innovations in travel and transport and cheap fuel specifically, we've been able to move manufacturing to other countries through these free trade agreements. So what ends up happening is if you're a family who lives in Michigan, hey, it's like that movie Tommy Boy, remember that one? The brake pad factory goes, the whole town goes. I like to go to cities, or I could say this, when I go to cities, I like to ask the locals, what is the basis of their economy? for what purpose does this town actually exist? And you'll find out really interesting things.

You know, in Seattle, for instance, a lot of timber. People don't know that, but what is the economic driver of the Pacific Northwest? All the lumber work that gets done gets spent in these states setting up shop. So, for example, if I go to a, if I find a gold in the ground, and then I'm like, I need to hire 100 people to get the gold out of the ground. You get a pop-up city. Well, what happens? Someone says, these people are hungry, opens a restaurant. And so then towns form. In Michigan, something really interesting happens. You're familiar with the Flint water crisis.

That's a direct result of sending our auto manufacturing to Mexico and other countries and importing cheap vehicles. I'm unfamiliar with that. It won't be through. So what happens is in Michigan, you have a water distribution apparatus, the city water supply of Detroit. When you divide the fixed cost of water distribution among, say, a million people, I'm going to use vague. numbers because the actual numbers get wonky. Let's say you have a million people and it costs everybody a hundred bucks a month for their water bills in their homes. That's not so bad, right? I mean, it can be heavy for your house, but it's just a hundred bucks. So if the economy's stable, you're going to be able to afford it. Well, the manufacturing leaves. And this means we begin to

see a mass exodus from Michigan, something like, I think in the 2000s, it was like 11 families per minute. We're leaving the state. This means the tax base is eroded, but the fixed cost of the water delivery system remains static. Overnight, an individual receives double the water bill. That's something you just can't afford. It's a shock charge, especially when, as the auto manufacturing leaves, there's less money coming into your city, state, or town, less tax revenue for social services and public roads, and less money in general being spent on restaurants and toys, whatever it might be that drives

in a country. They go shut off parts of town. They got a, like, they can't have services. Now, you get a water bill you can't afford. So what did Flint say? Why are we paying the most? expensive water bill in the country for Detroit water, when we can use Flint River water, which was contaminated with Legionaire's disease and started running water through pipes,

which got everybody super sick. It is unfortunate. If they'd wanted to relocate their factory to Louisiana, should that have been legal? Yes. Okay. It would have caused the same problem, though, right? Like Flint would have had the same issue? Not necessarily. Why not? The issue with Mexico is you have to compete with no union wages. You have to compete with no minimum wages. You have to compete with no health care and you have to compete with cartels running a lot of sweatshops, or I should just say illegal activities is what to explain it. At least Louisiana would have to present to the auto manufacturer legal and justified competition to which Michigan encounter. My point is just if they were to relocate elsewhere in America, you'd still have that kind of

collapse of services because you'd have fewer people. Ignoring the fact, no, wrong, because in the United States, we have federal laws on manufacturing and distribution. So Mexico. There's lots of businesses that leave from California to Texas. Certainly they do. From the northeast to the Sunbelt. And I have no problem with states in a stable system trying to be competitive with one another. Do you think it would be preferential if they all had tariffs between each other? I mean, if it's a good to build up the local economy, wouldn't it be beneficial to have

these protectionist measures internally? And there have been arguments made, such as in Ithaca, New York, are familiar with the Ithaca hour. No. Largely fall into disuse, but they created a local currency, which lasted for about 20 years, that could only be used in Ithaca. and it was called the Ithaca hour, representing an hour of labor, and people could be choose to be paid in hours or in U.S. dollars. And in fact, it actually helped boost the economy. I would be fine with that if you wanted to have like alternate currencies.

And the point of the currency is that it can't leave the jurisdiction. So you can make the argument that Louisiana can offer to compete by going to an auto manufacturer and saying, we're going to cut you 5% on taxes. Michigan can then say, we will too, but the one thing you can't compete on is peasant labor, which is impossible, especially with unions. So, of course, these factories want to generate profits. You move the auto manufacturing out of the state, the economy gets depressed. This idea that we would be a service sector economy is insane, or even worse, that we would be a cultural economy when we're literally bleeding our culture out across the planet and doing nothing to protect it. We're not a service economy or only a service economy. We're still a manufacturing

powerhouse. We have been, it never went away. The difference is that we're We shifted from like low-wage stuff, the peasant labor that you're talking about to high-end stuff, like building airplanes, computer parts, things like that. I would rather have a high-end manufacturing industry than a low-end manufacturing industry than a low-end manufacturing. This is all macro-graph-go-up argument that ignores the fact that cultures, families, traditions, and our country is gutted and eroded. By all means, if you want to live in a plastic jumpsuit shaven-headed society, let's roll, baby.

We'll all see short-term gains as what makes the soul of our nation function dies. What I want to do is maximize people being able to make free choices and not have top-down command economies. So I am fine with you. If you find a better deal, I'm fine with you taking that deal. Again, we'll carve out slave labor and things like that. But in terms of just being able to have a competitive economy, be as competitive as you like. Do you know where our aluminum comes from? No. It comes from Canada. Okay. Canada has no bauxite mines. They have cheap labor. Okay. And so instead of building our own aluminum refineries, being more energy, efficient, we import aluminum from Canada, who imports their raw materials, bauxite, which refines

into aluminum and then aluminum in Canada, when the United States very well could have their own very cheap aluminum produced in country. We have bauxite mines in Louisiana. Why don't we just do that then? If it's cheaper from Canada, buy it. Because the worldview that you espouse, why buy it from Canada if it's cheaper? It's cheaper, get it. Yeah. Like, spend the money on something here. This is, we have gutted our refinements. We have got at our manufacturing base for a fake argument. That is, instead of building nuclear reactors and hydroelectric plants so that we can do it here cheap, I'm with you there. We're actually spending more for Canada to do it.

Hey, I'm all in favor of nuclear power. Yeah, but it's cheaper. Yeah. Look, look, I'm on team consumer. If you can get a cheaper thing, go for it. You can make- And if we lock down some tariffs and block out these countries and start doing it ourselves, everything will be cheaper. Why don't we just do that?

Do you think the country would be better if instead of the Commerce Clause, all the states could enact tariffs? Do you think we've been more economically viable? No. Okay. There you are. Like, I don't think that that would benefit of it. I think it's more beneficial when you can get cheap parts from various places. You can get cheap labor from various places.

It ends up making everything less costly. And it allows different regions to focus on what they're productive at. And you're not, you're not, you're not, you're not. You're not asking about the long-term end result of that is going to be. I am talking about the spirit of our country. what it means to believe in constitutional republicanism, and you are saying, but we'll make money. Well, I think part of that republicanism right there is the idea of doing whatever you want as long you don't hurt anybody else.

No, that's classical liberalism. Yeah, and that's what the country was founded on, was classical liberalism, and the idea that you are a free citizen, you can engage in free activities, whether they're sexual or corporate, with whoever you want, as long as you're not hurting anybody else. Well, there is a debate long term over imports and exports and tariffs. And more importantly, if we want to get an argument over what the founding fathers thought when the country had four million people in it, 13 colonies and imports were substantially limited due to the difficulty of travel, we're talking about something entirely different from gigantic cargo vessels traveling the whole world and undercutting the economies and cultures of the countries for which they are. You know what? I'm always open to arguments of scaling, but like that did take place at a backdrop of mercantilism. The idea of mercantilism was well known.

What you're describing as mercantilism, what Trump is as a mercantilist. Like, that was well known at the time. So the point I'm bringing up is with a subculture particularly like skateboarding. And this is, again, there's also snowboarding, they're surfing. Everyone's complaining about very similar things. The United States is hollowing itself out. It's pumping out money to foreign countries because they will always have cheaper labor. We now have houses people can't afford.

We are not producing enough. We never were ever since the petro dollar got kicked into gear. after uh with a liberal academic order you've got it you've got gen z that can't buy anything there's no low skill labor for which a young man or woman can get a job to actually be competitive and at the same time we're opening the borders to non-citizens who are basically effectively taking a lot of our low-skill labor this is the end if this continues and and hey hey hey i mean those of us that are rich are going to enjoy it all the way down until we invest in china and gtFO all right there's a bunch of things to unpack there. Okay, so in terms of the rising housing costs, I would say the

principal reason that housing is getting, housing is getting more expensive is that we restrict supply. Like the, America doesn't have a housing policy or an investment policy where we want everybody's house to raise in value forever. Housing sales, housing prices just went down for the first time in a long time, and sales have actually. That's great. No, it's true. And there's going to be, there's going to be variation day to day, right? But like, the principal reason houses are expensive is not because of free trade. It's because we restrict how much houses can be built. Like, that's the main. thing. It's a restriction to supply. How does that make sense when you have a plethora of houses for sale today and people aren't buying them? You've got about 2% of the housing market right now of like multiple

houses that people own that nobody's living in. But when you look at any map of any major city in the United States, 80% of it is zoned for single family occupancy. And so it's illegal to build a duplex. There are houses for sale that are not moving right now. Yeah, well, we still got high interest rates. And then on top of that, like, you're, you're maintaining a property that you think is going to increase in value. You may not want to leave in it, right? So, like, I'm not, this is sort of a side argument, but housing, I think, like, fairly indisputably is going up largely because of supply problems. We need more houses. I completely disagree with that. No. There's, there's so many houses for sale right now. It's a buyer's market. But we've got a lot, one, I think one of the principal arguments as to

why houses cost too much that people are living longer. And boomers who own, on average, I think they like 1.7 houses or something, whatever the number is. You've got a small, 80% of boomers own homes, and then a small percentage own multiple homes, and then a small percentage own quite a few. Gen Xer is around 72% own a single home, millennials, 50%, and Gen Z, it's something like 17% or less. Why can't Gen Z, in their 20s, have a house and have a family? When you look at wages, wages have increased since the 1970s, but prices have increased for health care, college, and housing. Those are the three things that have gone up. has gone down. Food's gone down. Consumers, consumer goods, gadgets, they've all gone down, right?

So people are actually earning more than they did in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s across age cohorts. But prices for those three things have increased. So like, because of restriction to supply with housing, with health care, health care is a complicated issue. I would say that it's a combination of regulatory malfeasance combined with the fact that we have sort of state-by-state monopolies that we allow rather than competition to exist. And it's in this huge morass of regulations that are in there. In terms of college, I would say that college is because we went from a college degree is a nice thing to have. And some people are going to have it in 1950, like 2% of people at a graduate degree, maybe 6% had an undergraduate degree. But in the 1980s, we went,

everybody has to get a college degree. If you don't get a college degree, you're a loser and you don't get to be a part of the social pyramid, right? With a college degree, you're a student. If it's a positional good that's predicated on the value being other people don't have it, you can't equalize it. The value can't be egalitarian. So we pushed everybody into that system. You also have a limited amount of college spots that are available, but you have people coming in and you have, excuse me, you have money coming in, capital coming in, too much money chasing too few goods is going to increase the price.

You're going to cause inflation there. So college, we pump too much money into it in terms of student loans and things like that. The federal government has... We agree on that one. Yeah. Okay. Great. So college is a waste of time and nobody should go.

Yeah. So wait, why are you thinking that housing has got more expensive because of free trade? No, no, no. What I said was Gen Z can't afford to buy a house or have a family. The question of why houses are getting more expensive is because we're living longer and boomers have investment properties. They don't want it to go down. That's a supply issue, right?

Well, technically, yes, but I mean, it's largely based on, I'm not paying the blame on anybody over the fact that in order to actually get houses to lower cost, which I wouldn't necessarily call a supply issue, it's more of a, it's a question of can Gen Z make enough money to compete with the interests of boomers? The answer is no. And I think the reason is we've destroyed the jobs that they would normally get. They don't exist anymore. And we tell women, you want to be rich, get naked and have sex on camera. And a bunch of girls are trying. It doesn't work for them. And now the worst thing about that, AI just knocked all them out of a job. Well, I'm happy to, I'm happy to talk about only fans.

Cyberindustrialization. I'd say the main problem with housing is we don't have a housing policy. We have an investment policy. We want to treat houses as the principal investment vehicle of the entire country. The problem with that is if you want all houses to increase in value forever, which is what we want, then you can't have cheap houses. Well, they will, though, because land is finite and population grows. But when population retracts, these houses will implode and nothing to stop it. That probably will happen to me.

So I guess my question for you is, ultimately, there's... There is one simple disagreement between us, regardless of what our view on economic policy is. I have a vision of America that is rooted in the American tradition, and you don't. I—Masana is an insult saying you don't. I agree to disagree on that one. No, I think individual liberty, free trade, and, you know, comparative advantage are pretty rooted in the American experience too. Yes, but that's all money. I mean, it'd be great if a Chinese guy got those advantages, right?

Then you can have a communist party that externally is doing those things you describe. that's not what I'm talking about, and that's the point I'm making. My view of American tradition is not, we have a fiscal policy that the founding fathers agreed with. It's that I wake up in the morning with snow falling around open Christmas presents, and we have apple pie baking sitting on a windowsill, and I go outside and I watch people playing baseball. Those are nice. They're spiritual and they're spiritual. I think the government should be protecting you from crime and should be enforcing contracts. It should be stopping fraud, negative externalities like pollution. But I don't think that the government should protect you from competition. What about monopoly? Well, no, no, we're not, we're not, we're not, again, again, I'm not in, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm advancing this to the soul of a nation, not the fiscal policy. The fiscal policy is a, is a, is a component of the argument, but my point is this. We're, we're now switching from policy to, to, to sort of, which is why I said, ideology. The key distinction between us is that I have a

view of what makes America, America based on its American tradition, and you argued for policies based on American policy tradition. So, I have no interest in the United States becoming an Islamic nation where women have to wear the cob. Yes, me neither. Well, go to Dearborn, Michigan and tell me what you see. I don't think that's super germane to the free trade thing. The point is, why did we have 20 million people on the high estimate? You know what?

I'm going to pause and go low estimate. Why did we have 10 million people be allowed to enter this country illegally under the Biden administration? Biden screwed up where he decided that there were, hold on, real quick, we'll talk about immigration in a moment. in terms of the spiritual defending things thing. Let's say that there's an industry that, like I work in entertainment, like you're a journalist, but we're kind of broadly in the same media family, right? Like if stand-up comedy became less popular, I wouldn't want the government to prop it up. And like, and I do stand-up comedy, right?

Agreed. I would question what you have done with your industry and why you couldn't make it more popular. Right. And if they're, same thing. If there are manufacturers that are making buggy whips or are making sad. battles and people don't want to ride horses as much. I don't think that there's any onus on the government to protect those industries. And so what I see is a willingness of libertarians short-term gains burning the country down. I don't think they're short-term. I mean, like,

no, no, hold on. Let me ask you this. Yeah. What if Americans stopped listening to American comedy because the Chinese comics were just funnier. Now, the thing is, right, we get more comedy? And then all the people start adopting Chinese communist views. They start voting for communism. and then they have you arrested because 10 years ago you said something naughty. I feel like we're getting into civil liberties now. I would very much stand with you in First Amendment protection. This is the problem I have with libertarians. I mean, as podcasters, Tim, as podcasters, we're already in competition with the entire planet.

You and I are in competition with porn any minute. Indeed, but largely those who speak English and care about these issues. Which means Australia and Canada and Britain and everything else. And like, that's part of it. The short-term benefits you're looking at, ignore the cultural ramifications of the world. do you live in? We are in a country right now where you have competing ideologies within our own borders. You've got the multicultural democracy largely represented by progressives in the Democratic Party and constitutional republicanism largely represented by not even Republicans, just the MAGA point,

a part of it. What we end up seeing that is when you go to Dearborn Michigan, for instance, you have an enclave of Islam and Sharia patrol. You have Chinese communist police departments opening across the United States because the graph go up argument ignores what makes a people what a constitution is is the views of the world that constitute its people and when we open our borders

because we say economically it's great competition is no big deal 50 years later you have no free speech you have no sovereignty and you now have to contend with a voting block that wants your country eroded and destroyed notably New York with

Zohran Mamdani who explicitly stated in his campaign, he will advocate for illegal immigrants against federal law. This country will not exist if we maintain your description of how things should be run. We have to have borders and we have to have a working body that is able to exist without having to compete with peasants in other countries. There is a, there is a, an enclave, Irania, I believe it's called in South Africa. Are you familiar with it? No. I believe it's called Irania. It is a white private landmass that no one can live there. It's private unless you come to them and they approve you to live there. And they said, we don't allow any hiring of labor from outside the community because what

ended up happening was the money started leaving and the trade started slowing down so they realized it may be more expensive to hire a neighbor to do the work, but they have to. Otherwise, it all starts falling apart. I am sick and tired of the laissez-faire libertarian. I will squeeze what is left of the American way of living and watch this country become a communist woke cesspool by importing people who don't care for our values and displace our voting blocks because in the short term, the graph goes up. So I take Ambridge with the idea that me promoting freedom is a communist plot. I'm not saying that.

I'm saying that you are short-sighted and you are ignorant of the ramifications of how- Let's go back. So like a lot of people would like, would hark in the 1950s is sort of the high watermark of American manufacturing. Well, that's only because we blew up Germany and Japan. It is. And if you were to compare us to the 1950s, we're more prosperous than we were in the 1950s. The 1950s existed now, and it was a separate country we could visit.

We would view it like Poland right after the Soviet Union came down. We'd become far more prosperous. Let me ask you a question. How would you state – how would you describe the state of political affairs in the United States? Political affairs? Yeah. As in like romantic trists or just like politics in general. Like how would you describe the political?

state of the United States right now? Very bad. Very, very bad. Why? Great question, Tim. I actually wrote a book on this called Tribalism is Dumb. I'll be happy to give you a copy of it when we leave. That is a salient question. That's something that has been going on in the United States now for 20 or 30 years. It's been going on in other countries as well. It's been going on in Europe. The countries that have a predispribunist economic model, which is kind of what you're advocating for, of let's keep wages higher at the base floor through higher minimum wage, things like that, they're going through the same thing as well. So I would infer that that's not an economic thing. I don't advocate for a minimum wage.

Forgive me, I don't want to put words in your mouth. There's market competition within our borders and an expected standard of living for an American. We have eliminated that when I say predispributivist. What I mean is trying to force corporations on the front end to pay more through some method or stopping competition. A cultural enforcement. Rather than redistribution, right?

Right. So like France and Germany and Spain have predistributed models, which are also going through these things. So I would infer that it's not primarily economic. I think it's largely technological. I think the period that we're living in is probably more similar to. I largely agree. Yeah. So that's the main thing. But let's talk about immigrants for a minute. So I stand by my position. I think free trade's been good.

I think it's been great for the planet. I think it's been good for America. But I don't want to, like, hijack your show and only talk about that. Let's talk about immigrants for a minute. You brought up Biden. Biden made a horrible mistake during his presidency, where prior to Biden, if you wanted to seek asylum in the United States, you would come to the United States. They would go, thank you very much. Here's your number.

We'll call you when you're up for asylum status. go back to the last safe port of entry. He reversed that and said, you can come into the United States and then just hang out until we call you. That opened up the floodgates. That's why there was a ton of people that came in under. Well, I mean, it's more than that. CBP was ordered to bring anybody in.

They were ordered that if a child had a number with them that they knew was to a sex trafficker to ignore it and just send them to the sex trafficker. Sorry, can you repeat that? CBP was ordered that if they knew a child was brought across the border for sex slavery to deliver them to the sex slavery. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not here stumping for Biden's immigration. What Biden did was not an accident where he said, oopsie, I made a thing go wrong. It was an intentional plan where they were ferrying illegally trafficked children on planes

into various red states for years. Tennessee, this erupted a major scandal when a U.S. plane loaded up a bunch of child trafficking victims onto a plane and flew them in Tennessee. There was one plane that landed in, uh, um, Westchester, New York, and a journalist filmed it coming on, interview to one of the guys and he's like, they're making us do it. Biden was assisting, so we can go back to the cartels, Biden was bringing these trafficking victims into this country intentionally.

Now, I think the obvious answer is that there are a series of economic faults that are affecting the United States ever since 2008. In the liberal worldview, the numbers improving is better than anything else. And this is a disease for which all political factions find themselves afflicted. Even Donald Trump talks about affordability and how we've conquered. It is completely wrong. But it's because you can't win political power unless the people feel comfortable. So the Democrats' play is graph must go up.

In the short term, we'll win. In the long term, this country will burn down. And a great example of it is, since the ICE operations kicked off, the Republican Party, The polling has shown Latino voters are bleeding from support for Republicans because many of these voters have family and friends who are here illegally. And they would advocate by vote for people who are not citizens of this country who are going to receive benefits or at least contribute to the cost of running a nation that comes from the public coffers. You will not survive if you have someone in your home voting to give away what you have to people outside. That is never made sense and it won't. And it's going to keep getting worse because we are a nation of Grafco up, give way our manufacturing jobs, open up our borders to illegal immigrants, slowly but surely you end up with enclaves and voting blocks that say, fuck America.

Zoran Mamdani being an example of a man who ran for mayor and explicitly stated, I will protect the criminals who broke this country's laws from those in the federal government who seek to enforce these nation's laws. when you get to the point where our largest and most prosperous city is now voting for a man who explicitly states we are de facto outside of the federal government, your country is breaking apart. So I would describe the political state of affairs in this country as civil strife with the political assassinations and murder. I would describe what we're talking about with tariffs and immigration as components of the erosion. I do believe that the internet plays a role in that it keeps the masses ignorant and hateful. the left, I believe, is substantially more hateful while believing they're not, while screaming in people's faces and beating and murdering people. And it's only going to get worse. And unfortunately, we have liberals and libertarians who could stand up and say, and that's why I like the Mises Caucus guys,

because they outright say, close the borders. And that's like, I mean, Milton Friedman, peace be upon him, said years ago, you can't, you can't have a welfare state and an immigration state, right? And so, like, I don't. But the liberal mindset is. as you're describing it. We need the short-term gains to make money today. I don't care what happens tomorrow. And I could go to the American people and say, the world that you live in will cease to exist. But boy, will it be fun riding that bomb straight out of the, out of the inola gay, or, you know, we do disagree on this. I mean, I don't think it's short-term to buy something cheaper. Like an attorney that buys things from a grocery store has a trade deficit with his grocery store, but the

attorney still making more money than the grocery. But the difference between the grocery stores is minimal. You're talking about other countries that have peasant labor we cannot compete with. And listen, I as a company owner, when we launched our previous Booneys skateboard, it was the, I think it was the Beasts. No, no, no, it was the weapons. Weapons was the last one. 50 BMG Tim Pool Blueprint model, the Cody Mac, a single action revolver.

we made $30,000 in two hours selling those skateboards, American made, American pressed. Great. To the people who ordered them, I apologize it's taking so long, but you paid American and be patient because you know you're doing the right thing. I could have made $40,000 if I went to China instead. And actually, 10 grand. I could have bought myself a gold necklace. Hey, I applaud that, man. I don't want a gold necklace.

I want my country back. That's terrific. I don't want you to restrict other people's rights. but if you want to do that, that's fine. And I applaud that you want to hire American workers for it. It's a right. So it's a right. Explain what you mean by that. I think you should be able to have a voluntary relationship with anybody unless you were actively hurting them. So like if I want to marry five people, I'm fine with that. I don't care. If I want to have a economic relationship with somebody, that's also fine. The government shouldn't be stopping me from having economic relationships. So if you want to hire only Americans and only have your

product made in America, I applaud that. And there are a lot of people, as you just pointed out, who would purchase that? I mean, like, you just made a case that people will buy American even if it costs more, that you're able to compete within that market despite having cheaper boards. That's great. And that, to me, indicates... We sell our boards cheaper than the big companies do. Despite making their boards cheaper, they sell them for more money. I think that, but I think the point is, like, America's not just a market, whereas I understand property rights and I understand, you know, freedom of interaction, Freedom Association and stuff. America's not a market. America's not, you know, the United States

isn't an economic zone. And I think it's, it's, I got to be completely honest, I think what you're describing in some circumstances is treasonous. Okay. You so, and I know you'll, you'll want to clarify, of course, and you will present the caveats because any reasonable person would, but certainly not an American could have a voluntary relationship with a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Could somebody date a member of the Chinese Communist Party? I'm talking about an economic relationship with an American and a CCP member, there are some caveats. Would you not agree? Maybe, but by that same token, if an American wants to visit Cuba, I'm fine with it.

If an American wants to buy stuff from Cuba. Let me try this again, because you're going to apologize and say you were wrong. You believe that is there any circumstance in which an American can't engage in a voluntary exchange of the CCP member? Yeah, there could be some circumstances, right. if we were at war, if there were specific elements that, like, I wouldn't allow somebody to buy, like, rape drugs or something like that. Would you allow, like, a publicly funded university to give away trade secrets that was paid for by the American public to the CCP? Probably not. Why not? It's voluntary. Why are you restricting the right of the individual with knowledge to simply have a conversation?

Well, I think in that case, you're talking about public funding, though, right? No, no, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on. If a private university wanted to. A university professor. knows in his brain something. They had a study at university. He read the reports. That's it. He just knows it. It's not confident or classified. Why can't he go to China and take payment from these Chinese people so that the government of China can have access to the same knowledge? For the same reason that a governor or a member of the executive branch couldn't sell American secrets to the CCB despite the fact that they're an individual. See, now what you've described is there were

for trade protectionism only when you think so. No, if there were a private individual that came up with some kind of IP and they wanted to sell it, that would be fine. Like if, if, I don't know, Elon Musk wanted to sell something to China, we could run it through Scythias. Like, there are ways to go through in terms of looking at national security. But if an individual within a corporation, within a private part of the sphere, wanted to do trade relations with a communist country. Agreed. So you think there are certain instances where the government should stop a person from voluntarily exchanging with another person? Yeah, but the default state is going to be, you're allowed to do what you want. All you've just said to me and everyone else is, my ideological

worldviews, world view supersedes yours, and I respect that you believe that, because I think mine supersedes yours. I believe I'm correct. I think we both think we're correct. If you would assert the government has the authority to stop someone from doing trade, I would agree with you. If you want to put restrictions in place on what the government can do with other governments or even other corporations, I'm fine with that. But like, yeah, unless you've got a specific, American auto manufacturers can't go and cut deals with foreign manufacturers to hire cheap slave labor. You and I agree. You are for trade protectionism. For the private sphere, I'm all in favor of that. Like where I got hung up was if we're talking about-a-thian, a Raytheon employee can go to the CCP and say,

I know how to build a nuclear weapon launched from a hellfire drone. Let me give that to you. You're going to say no. My point is this. You are simply asserting. If it benefits me, it should be allowed, but there are certain things where the government should stop voluntary exchange. Tim, in all honesty, in all complete sincerity, do you think that is what I'm saying? Yes. You think that I'm saying that there's no appreciable difference between saying you can't have a tariff versus you can sell nuclear secrets to the CCB? What you are missing is that you have in your mind the limiters on when you believe the government

should stop voluntary exchange. You have already explained scenarios in which the government should stop and even punish voluntary exchange. You have made the argument that you disagree on where that line should be. in some areas where I agree the line should be a little bit further. Yet at the same time, you've argued the government should not do it. So you are wrong. You do believe the government should.

You just want to get cheaper stuff where I think the cheaper stuff you're getting hurts us. I don't think I have to be an anarchist to not have any kind of government regulation. Like I'm in favor of some government. We agree. There are instances where the government should stop and even punish individuals who, engage in certain economic exchanges. If they're selling nuclear secrets, sure. Drugs?

If there's, I mean, you know, going back to the cartel thing, if you really want to the more of the cartels, like, I would like figure out a way to decriminalize most drugs. So the answer is yes, right? In terms of, you believe the government should stop some economic exchanges of some economic exchanges, but like, but just pointing out that I want the government occasionally to do things doesn't justify every instance of government interaction. My point is you said previously you think people should be free to do these things, but you, of course, don't mean it. You just think that you should be able to engage in economic behaviors that'll benefit you and how you see the world.

And I think you are destroying this country by doing so. Now, again, we would both agree an individual taking a state secret or general information that would benefit China in destroying this country. The government should stop that, right? Hey, Tim, let's back up. I don't want to do any character attacks here. I don't want to hurt anybody in America. Like, I'm a guy in a three-piece suit. If Trump does 10%, 15% tariffs, the reality is it's probably not going to impact me.

I can take that on the chin. I think that it's actually going to hurt manufacturing in the long run because it's going to hurt intermediate parts. It's going to affect how much stuff costs for people that are poor. I'm concerned about them. In the short term. I can make a good faith argument. And I would hope you could concede to me that while I might be wrong, I'm still operating

in good faith. Yes, and you are wrong. Because, again, my point is simply, the premise of the, your argument is government shouldn't restrict voluntary exchange. That should be the default state. But you don't actually agree with it. There are going to be exceptions to that in the same way that the government shouldn't kill people, but there are instances where it's going to have to kill people. That doesn't mean I think that the sheriff can gun down anybody they want. The only real argument is the sectors in which you believe you should be allowed to trade with foreign countries. And I disagree with you on that.

I believe that in the short term, giving away our manufacturing, I'm sorry, I believe that in giving away our manufacturing to Mexico or China or other countries will benefit. benefit us in the short term as consumers now get a cheaper product and the company gets a higher profit margin. In the long term, you eliminate the jobs, you eliminate the culture, cities begin to dry up, families stop happening because they can't buy food and they can't seek shelter anymore, and now we are looking at a population collapse, a financial crisis, an ideological conflict. Long term with tariffs, people start to rebuild factories begrudgingly. They start to bring back these jobs, now young people who didn't have a job before, start generating these jobs,

interest and culture starts to rebuild and is within a confine, that short term, it may get a little bit more expensive, long term, you will have a self-sustaining ecosystem, an economy, household management. The argument that we had was simply based on where you want to draw the line and where I want to draw the line. Yeah, you said something about that if it's cheaper, then that's good or something like that. I'm very much on the side of the consumer. on cheaper at what cost because it's not all fiscal. You know, it's something might be very cheap to order from the barbarian leader, but then the barbarian leader gets money and he poisons your DNA and kills you, you know, in seven years because you funded a danger that you didn't,

just because it was cheaper, you were actually funding a negative that you didn't. Let me, so you have to really, this is a great point. Let me ask you, is it good that China is buying up our farmland? I'm not terribly bothered by that. Like, so, so there is a thing we've got called Sipheus, which is the committee on international, I can't remember what it is, but basically the Senate has a committee where if there's going to be a foreign entity buying some American industry, some kind of company, it has to go through approval for them. So, for example, there was a big kerfuffle a few years ago where a Saudi company wanted to buy, I think the port of Los Angeles. What that basically meant was they were just going to be the company in charge of logistics for it. They

weren't in charge of security. Sipheus looked at it and went, this does not pose a threat to American security because American security is still handed by America. So sort of like a farmland. You're not, you're not bothered by China. No, because that would be the easiest thing to seize. If we ever gone into a con, like let's say we go to war over Taiwan, we could immediately appropriate that. Now, if they started like poisoning the land or something, sure, absolutely ban them from doing

that. How would you know? Well, what about what about SBA? Hold on. Okay, hold on. You've given control of your food supply to a foreign country or a large portion of it. What percentage are we talking? about here because I'm guessing it's less than 1% of American

foreign that's owned by China. Let's pull up the number so we can... We're talking about 20% we can talk. But if we're talking about like 1%, that's probably just like investment diversity for the Chinese, in which case they're spending money over here and we're getting more money. What does that... What do you mean by we get more money? It means somebody went, I can make more money

having this... 3.6% of U.S. agricultural land is... Canada owns one... Wait, what? Canada owns one third of our land. What? Wow. I don't think that's right. Canada holding the largest share about one-third of foreign-owned, no, no, no, of foreign-owned land. Right.

Okay, that sounds more right to me, yeah. Yeah, if you can find... No, no, China owns 0.2 of all land. I'm not bothered by 0.2. I mean... I am. I'll tell you why. So they are producing food in our food supply. So the way the food chain works, most people, I assume, know this.

The farmland is going to be the bottom, which means... small amounts of that are going to spread out to a much larger amount of our food supply. It theoretically could be greater than depending on what they're growing. You don't know for sure. But let's say that 0.02% actually is, it's hard to know. Some of the agriculture will be for things that are, you know, animal feed or whatever. Actually, you know what? I'll say this.

It didn't even matter. If China begins genetically engineering or infecting food with something not. intended to kill a person overnight, but to say lower their ability to reproduce by 1%. China's on the 100-year, 1,000-year plan. Why would we allow a foreign adversary? We're not at war, but they are an adversary. They're listed in federal law as an adversary. They're codified as one.

Why would we allow them any degree of control in our food production? You know, if you could find any evidence that they were doing anything untowards, I would be happy to. They've released multiple lights in the U. that have attacked our... They were shipping viruses. They're running illegal biolabs. Yeah. They've caught numerous Chinese CCP members transporting drugs through airports.

Well, I meant more than viruses through airports. Sure, but like just focusing on the agriculture, if, Phil, to your point, if they are bringing blights that are affecting farm and crops and things, then, sure, stop them. But just the idea that, like, foreigners can own farmland doesn't bother me. But if there's some additional thing going on... I think that who the foreigner is matters. I think that China is an adversary. Right? Let me. Let me. We're not, they're not, they're not rivals. We're not partners. China is an adversary of the United. Maybe we should have to be. Let me. Let me. Yes. So, so again, the bigger picture here that I see is, you're sitting in your rocking chair, sipping your delicious sun tea as the Chinese peasant comes over and asks you, so, what would you like to eat? And you're like, this is great. And behind you, they're cutting, they're, they're tearing down the walls of your home. They're pissing and crapping all over the place. And you're like, I don't care because I'm getting it.

good right now. And then there's a 17-year-old guy watching it happen going, bro, why are you doing this right now? And you're like, who cares? It's great. So an example of that is China, for instance, has birth tourism. So I forgot the number. There's a story recently. There are companies in China that fly women to the United States to give birth and immediately fly back. Yeah. There's something like 30,000 in the past couple of years. These are U.S. citizens now exploiting our laws for one purpose. in 20 years, in 30 years, they're going to come back as full-fledged citizens, but loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. They are building up control on our country. And their strategy is we can conquer these bloated gluttons because they love it. Right now, they are more than happy to sell out

this country for a short-term gain. 30 years from now, they will be our servants. I would be happy to have a constitutional amendment that restricts citizenship to people that descended from a citizen. And that's all well and great, and we agree, except the issue is that right now, that's not the case. I'm not, okay. I mean, if we're talking about 0.2% of farmland, like, that is a small enough thing that you could maybe compel me to go. Okay. The location matters what land. Yeah, they're outside military bases. Okay. So, like, like, if you can make a compelling argument that it's going to impel national security there, you might be let any of it happen at all. You know, like, I'm just, so, so I do care about comparative advantage,

because I think that that's kind of foundational. How many refugees? do you have in your house? Just to finish. Comparative advantage, we're getting kind of the root of economics, right? That's why I'm big on that. We don't live in a zero-sum world. I don't want to go back to a zero-sum world. We tried that for two thousand years. It's bad. Okay, I've got a question for you. But with like 0.2%, I'm, like, if I'm like an

eight on comparative advantage in terms of how much I care, I'm like a three on this 0.2% farmland thing. So like if, if, like, I could concede that. I'm not as bothered by that one. I got a question for you. How big is your house? I don't know. I've got two bedrooms. Two bedrooms? Yeah. Using both of them?

Yeah, I use one to sleep in. I use one to film in. Oh, so you got extra space. It would economically benefit you if I could get one of my friends from Guadalajara to come and stay in your place. We're going to do that whether you want it to or not. And they're going to stay in my place against my will on my private property? Well, that's what's happening in the United States. Is the United States not of the American people?

So if we're talking about immigration, here's what I want. I want wide gates and high walls. I want there to be good security to make sure that bad actors don't come into the United States, that there aren't gangs coming in, there aren't criminals coming in. But I do want there to be a lot of immigration. I got a question. It's a blizzard outside. Terrible blizzard.

And there's a woman, as a knock on your door, as a pregnant woman. She says, can I please come in and shelter from this terrible storm? Would you let her in? Probably? All right. So you let her in. And then she goes, oh, I'm going into labor. I'm having my baby right now.

Should that child be allowed to own a piece of your house 20 years later? No, but again, like I would say, like I'm happy. I think the basic idea of birthright citizenship based on soil was a bad idea. Agreed. So considering the fact that it is still in place, and we are experiencing this attack from an adversary, should this woman come to your house and say, let me in so I can give birth? Would you want to cut off all immigration? I would. I would. I wouldn't. A decade at least. You would cut off all immigration for like in every sector?

For at least 10 years, yeah. I would say the own, we don't need, we don't need to have. have any more immigration. We've got, you know, we had, what, 20 million or so people that came to the country. We have to sort out who can stay and who can go or who needs to go. I personally think that there's no problem with having a 10-year moratorium on immigration, and we deport all people that are illegal. What is America? Be more specific. What, how I could define the country very, very easily. Okay. I'm asking you, when someone asks you what America is, what would you say? The United States of America is a sovereign state in North America based on classical liberalism. I would say that America, the description is that, what is it, that a nation is a

people and a country as its borders or something that effect. So I would argue that the United States of America is a people with a longstanding history and tradition and unified culture that was built from rejecting one tyrant 3,000 miles away in exchange for 3,000 tyrants, one mile away, just to quote the Patriot. Brilliant. We have an American tradition built on the wars that we fought, the things that we've built. These things are deeply rooted in a variety of sports and foods. We are told now by a large faction of people that we have no culture, and that is rooted in what the left describes as multiculturalism. So what I'm seeing happen right now is when I look at this picture of Donald Trump talking about tariffs, he represents the nation of America.

We are two distinct worldviews, a multicultural democracy, which does not believe in classical liberalism or American tradition. And we are a constitutional republic that does. Libertarians occupy a weird space where I believe that, and I'm not saying you're a libertarian, I'm saying libertarians because they swing the vote a point or two, exists in the space of it should be legal for me to do and I'll vote for it. Like the principal moral foundation of libertarianism is my right to liberty. Yeah.

So what we- marriage and pot, good. What we have, and right. So I think gay marriage is a really great example. Support for gay marriage is dropping for among Gen Z. It's the first generation where we see an inversion. Because boomers were opposed. Gen X was kind of okay. Millennials were largely okay. Gen Z went the other direction. And interestingly, Gen Z dropped dramatically from like 2020 to 2020, which is indicative of a couple things. One, that there was a cultural shift among Gen Z, which is much harder to accomplish and less likely. or two, younger Gen Z moving into adulthood, already held anti-gay marriage views. The gay marriage is a great example because the liberals said, let two guys or two women get married and do their thing.

What's the worst that's going to happen? I mean, it's not like they're going to be teaching about sodomy in schools, narrator, they started teaching about sodomy in schools. So the conservative argument has largely been, okay, we got to get rid of all of this because we can see that the slippery slope wasn't a fallacy. it was a fact. The actual American traditional, the constitutional republicanist, American liberal view is gay marriage is fine. We just have to ban the sodomy stuff in the schools. Conservatives go back and say, no, no, no, reverse it because it was proven bad. The left says, you're all fascists. We're going to keep doing more. The question is, how do you end up with a voting block in your country that wants to do away with your own way of life? These people are not America. The only pro-

To back up a little bit, so Phil, you would have a 10-year moratorium. You want some amount of immigrants. Is that right? Indeed, yes. So, like, I don't want unlimited immigrants. I do want more immigrants. I think part of the reason, pre-Biden, that we had a big influx of immigration over the last 20 years is we basically set the speed limit too low and we're surprised that people are speeding. You want more immigrants than we have now?

Yeah, but I want them legal and I want to focus it on ways that are going to be productive in America. There's an estimate of 50 million non-citizens currently in the United States that are either a permanent rise. or illegal immigrants. I would love to get one... I'd love to get more H-1B visas in. I also, like, I flew down to the border... So like Dunkin' Donuts and stuff? Like Dunkin' Donuts?

For H-1B? That's what they're doing, yeah. I don't know if... I don't want to besmirch the good name of Dunkin' Donuts, but there were store clerks for donut shops and bank clerks that were H-1B. I would love to be a brain drain on the rest of the world and have the smartest people and other places come over. That's not H-1B.

You're talking about O-1. You're talking about like 0-1. O2, you're talking about K-visas. Okay. H-1Bs are not brain. Then I digress in the H-1B specifically, but I would love to be a brain drain on the rest of the world. H-1Bs are, we can't find anybody in this country, so we'll look somewhere else. Yeah, I think they do that a lot with software and things like that.

And which is all fake. It's all a lie. And then you have... The other... I flew down to the border two, three years ago. I hung out with the border patrol. I hung out with people down there. I talked to farmers.

Farmers are an incredible disadvantage if they want to be legal at the moment, because it's incredibly difficult to hire people legally through the process. One of the things that we've got in the country is we require, if you have legal immigrant labor, it has to be so high as to try to make it competitive for Americans doing it. And they still suffer for it. They still can't get people in, right? We actually don't have enough people that would do basic agricultural stuff in the United States. Let me, let me ask you a question. How do you feel about war with Iran? I don't want to go to war with Iran. Do you know why we are going to war with Iran? We've wanted to get rid of the Ayatollah since the 1980s.

I don't know. What do you think? The Ayatollahs largely object to the liberal economic order, the petro dollar system. They want to trade oil in other currencies, and they are not letting up on threatening the Red Sea, which of course are access to the Suez. The United States global hegemony is largely prefaced upon the fact that we control all trade. We police the seas. We have the world police. the problem with the United States and the petroddollar system is that we don't produce enough. We don't export enough. In order to maintain a strong economy, there's a bunch of factors, but one simple component is you need to produce more than you import.

You need to make more stuff than you're buying. I see it goes back to that zero-something. Like an attorney and a doctor have a trade deficit with their grocery store, and they're doing fine. Aren't we the second largest exporter? So let's just make it real simple for you. If you make $100 a week and you're spending $120, what happens to you? Go bankrupt. That's not a trade deficit, though.

That's a spending deficit. So back to the point I was making, irrespective, I don't know what point you're trying to make, in order for a simple component of when an economy is strong is when it is selling more than it's buying. Like anyone else, you are making more money than you are spending. You then have more money to invest. And another easy way to explain it is they estimate that, you know, today you need like $150,000 a year to live what was once described as middle class median. So you get two weeks of vacation, you got clean clothes, you got health care, you got a place to live, you can have a family. Well, if you make $150,000 a year, you're not really saving if you are living comfortably.

You're going to cut back on some things you might think you need, but you'll save a little bit. If you're making $250,000 a year, after taxes, you're going to have probably like $50K to invest, allowing you to grow your wealth. This is why it's important for countries to sell more than they buy. The U.S. is the exception. The reason for it is, we don't do that, but we will kill you if you don't sell. spend our money for oil. So for, let's just say, like Russia, back when it was solely the petro dollar system, they would have to use rubles to buy dollars so they could use the dollars to buy oil. And the United States exported just the fact that we'll kill you if you don't lose our money.

That is a wonderful, a wonderful system. If you believe in free trade, open borders, it works perfectly so long as you are willing to blow up other countries and assassinate world leaders who try to build a global war outside of the U.S. dollar. As the BRICS. nations begin expanding and Iran seeks admittance, I think they may have gotten it with BRICS. The U.S. largely is getting pissed off. The war in Syria largely is about the Qatar-Turkey pipeline, where the U.S. said, we want to build this oil pipeline from Qatar through Syria, Turkey, into Europe because Russia is charging too much money. They control about 20 percent of natural gas through gas prom. Syria responded that Vladimir Putin is our ally,

and for this we won't allow you to do it. So the U.S. said, then we will kill you. At first, they negotiated, then they refused. Simply put, I believe it is fair to say the liberal economic order system, swift payment, IMF, big banks, all of that is built around. The United States is the world police, the police of the oceans and international trade. And for this reason, Americans will live like those in capital city. The hunger games, so long as we're willing to drop bombs on the people who try to break that system. Notably, more Margaddafi, who wanted to create an African Union and trade gold dinars for oil and Saddam Hussein, who wanted to trade oil for euro. And so the U.S. said, now you're going to die. And then they did. So I think we have, we have growing degrees of

overlap now. I'm unabashed free trader. I'm very much free trade. Which cannot exist without a strong economy that produces more than it's buying. Immigration. I'm not for open borders. I do want more immigrants to come in legally, but it sounds like you also want legal immigration. So we're talking about a question of degree there. Yeah, all ones. I'm an intervention skeptic. So like I don't want to be bombing other countries, if they're socialist or they're theocratic. If you want to maintain a strong American economy that engages in the trade practices that you believe in, it requires us to blow up anybody who would oppose the petro dollar system. In order for me to be in favor of free trade, I have to blow up anybody that is not using dollars. That's the position.

So let's elaborate. If you want, I agree with, I don't want to give our manufacturing to a foreign country so we become an import nation. We are not producing enough to sell to the rest of the world. How do we maintain an economy when we are spending more than we generate? Right. Okay. So here, I think you've got a point in terms of deficit spending. We're spending way more money than we have. And we survive because we will kill anybody who tries to break that system. So the debt doesn't matter if we've got guns pointed to everyone's head, right? Like, I'll put it this way. Let's say you take a hundred bucks from your buddy and you go and blow it. on cocaine. And then he comes to you and says, where's my money? And you pull out a gun and say,

your money's gone. What's he going to do? He's going to put his hands up, turn on a walk away, and your debt's cleared, right? That's America. I don't, so I'm worried about the national debt. We might have some commonality there. The national debt's separate than a trade deficit. They're not the same thing. Indeed. With the national debt, like most of the debt is held by Americans. And so that that is something that could happen. It's not like we can hold the world hostage. If oil is produced in the Middle East, they have to purchase. US dollars first. This is where the international reserve currency, yeah. What does that mean? It means that whenever anybody's doing an international transaction, they're using dollars to do it.

Indeed. So if China's purchasing something from Cambodia. China has to give us money, right? Right. It's also part of why we're able to get away with so much deficit spending because we can inflate it away to other people. That's exactly the point. The only way we maintain an export, I'm sorry, an import economy is by forcing everybody to give us their currency. And then what do we do with their currency. We buy their labor and resources from just the fact that we, listen, we don't produce the oil, right? Like, we do produce a lot of oil. But let's say a barrel of oil is made in Saudi Arabia. Let's say, China, easy example, wants to buy that. Okay. Up until recently, they started trading in Juan and the Saudi Arabia got off the petrodollar contract. But historically, China wants to buy that

oil from Saudi Arabia for which we have no involvement whatsoever. What does China have to do first? They come to the United States and say, we want to buy this barrel of oil. We need dollars to do it. So we're going to give you Chinese currency for literally no reason. And then we're going to get dollars in exchange to buy the oil with. It's a really good gig. And so what happens is the U.S. now has access to Chinese labor for nothing. When you do that, you can maintain an import economy. I think that, again, I think you're right in terms of the deficit, because if we've got a spending deficit and other people are using our currency, when we inflate it, they bear part of that burden. So we're able to do that. Again, I'm not talking about that. Yeah, but like with the trade deficit, though, like, okay, I'm saying, you've got, you've got a doctor.

But I'm not talking about any of that. I am saying that China has to tithe to the United States in order to buy oil. We get access to Chinese labor in exchange for nothing. We do not give China anything other than we print a dollar. say, we'll give you a dollar for your for your one, which means when you want to, it's, you want to buy that scarf off Ian. And I have a gun pointed at you and I say, you've got it first, give me something of yours before I'll let you trade with Ian. And you say, but you haven't done anything. I say, I don't care. I got the gun. Yeah, I'm not for bombing other countries if they want to abandon. This is how we maintain an import economy, sending our jobs overseas. We tell everybody, use the dollar or die. That means we get access to your labor if you want to buy

oil from someone else. And they do it. And that's why we've got, how many aircraft carriers do we have? 17 or? I think 11. 11. Aren't we the second largest export economy? Have I got that wrong? We might be a very large. My point is sending our factories overseas and the jobs happening somewhere else means we don't have workers that are going to be producing things and trading amongst themselves. So how do we provide a laptop to a person who is providing very little to the rest of the world? Would you oppose companies that can automate on those same grounds? Like they can have a thousand employees, they can replace half of them with robots. Would you stop that by law?

Depends on the circumstances of which company and where? Most manufacturing in the United States went away through automation. Indeed. Compared to trade. Like trade is minimal. What you'd have to do. First, it would entirely depend on which company, which factory, the degree of necessity for the product.

And it would also, the sector of the economy and how much it would, would be damaged. So the easy answer is usually automation's great. It's got to be tapered. So if we've got little robots that are going to come and make shoes from now on, then we have to have some kind of tapering process by which when a company brings, so yes, government must intervene. Otherwise, what you end up with is shantytown slums and depressions. So a great example of this is the accusations against Tom's shoes. Are you familiar with Tom's shoes? I've heard of them, but you're going to have to fill me on on this. The accusation is the story was that they said, for every shoe, of ours you buy, we donate a pair of shoes to someone in Africa.

I know that much. Destroyed their economy. Because what happened was the small town said shoemakers, cobblers. And one day, the cobbler had no job. People stopped coming and buying from him because the people all had clean American cheap shoes. And so the economy was destroyed by free. When a factory says, we're going to fire 100 people and we're going to bring in robots

to do the job, you now have 100 people who no longer have customers. The customer was the factory who said, we'll pay you an exchange. for your labor. Now you have a whole bunch of people who can't feed their families. They end up becoming homeless. Some of them may get drug addicted. A lot of bad things happen from that. We don't want economic destabilization to happen overnight. So we don't want companies to be able to just fire 100 workers and bring in a bunch of robots. In this instance, you're concerned with the speed of the transition rather than the transition itself. So, okay. So like what normally happens with automation is somebody does a job, a robot is made, the job goes away, but more jobs

are created. And there are people that are kept in the patch. In what way? So what jobs? Coding jobs? Farming, for example. So a factory assembly worker does not a farm? To finish, what I'm saying is you on net automation produces more jobs than it gets rid of. I mean like it doesn't. See, this is again, graph go up macro economics. Just to let me, Tim, let me finish.

A factory worker can't farm. I answer that or your point means that makes no sense. I am acknowledging that there are people that are in the pinch, and we need to have things for people in the pinch. But what I'm saying is... Universal basic income? Maybe, I don't know, job retraining something, but like... Job retraining is fake. But in terms of automation in general, or I shouldn't say in general, on the macro, over time, produces more jobs than it gets rid of. And it creates better jobs in the process.

This is all macro argument nonsense that just manipulates people and not understanding what is actually going on in our system. So the question is... It would be horrible if we all have to go back to being farmers. How old are you? How old are you? How old are you? I'm 42. 42.

Will you ever be as good at writing music as Philibanti? No. So when you lose your job to automation, what job retraining can you get if the only job available is rock star? Now, obviously it's not rock star, but the point is this. A 50-year-old assembly line worker who gets fired because a robot came in is not going to learn to code. It's never going to happen. So what do we say for that person in this economy? there's going to have to be some protectionism.

My point, Tim, was not that there's going to be any problems with it. It was just that overall, you still want progress, automation, dynamicism to happen. You want to make sure that it's slow so that people can adjust. Am I reading you correctly? And what I am sick of is the manipulation that we experience. Learn to Code is a great example. Hashtag Learn to Code. And this is what I think largely motivates MAGA, the people who understand this.

Someone says to you, no, no. If we bring in the robots, we create more jobs in the long run. And that sounds really good to someone who doesn't know what you just said. What you said is 1,000 people will become homeless, destitute, and their families will starve. But 1,000 Indians on H1Bs will get coding jobs. So I'm open to the idea that we need to have things in place to make sure that the transition doesn't happen so rapidly. If you were to automate all cars tomorrow, you would have a lot of problems, right? The driver's the most common job in America. My point was not that, you know, screw them. That's not what I'm saying here. What I'm saying is that overall you do want to have that dynamism and innovation, right? And so the issue.

And it's overall right now, me being 42, I'm from Oklahoma, it's good that I'm able to podcast and talk with you. It's good that we're all doing this. if we were living 100 years ago, we'd all be farmers. It's a good thing that we've been able to make those jobs more efficient. And I see that as a corollary to the free trade issue where we're able to get more money, we're able to specialize more, more productive. I think we hit the nail on the head with this point. And it kind of exemplifies everything in that when you give away a job of a factory,

what you are saying is when that factory decides to close down, a thousand people who are to the factory will now be destitute. But don't worry, 1,000. Chinese laborers will make one-tenth of what they were making, and China will be very happy to receive that. Is it okay for companies to go bankrupt? Is it okay? Okay. So you're right with that. Well, I mean, that's a natural element of failure, and it happens. Okay.

And so the difference here is sometimes businesses fail, and that's sad. A business choosing to lay off 1,000 people to hire 1,000 Chinese at a 10th of the price. Or robots. Or robots is evil. What would you do to stop the automation? You don't stop the automation, but you have to have a tapering plan in place, not just for the sake of the individual whose life would be ruined. For the sake of your own country, so your economy doesn't collapse. Pitch me on this, because if you get laid off at 50 and your job no longer exists, it's going to be very difficult to find a job with a comparable income to get trained up.

I don't disagree on this, right? And so what would that policy-wise, what would you do to taper it? What would that look like? Like you're saying if we have a bunch of optimist robots that can make cars. How will we taper it off? Yeah. And you can only bring on 10% of the optimist bots per year or something. Okay.

Or every two years? There would be like an automation law. You can only replace X amount of your workforce over X time. That won't work because the Chinese are going up zero to 100. A, when you have free trade and no protection is I'm exactly correct. You saw C dance. They just said fuck IP law. They don't care about any of, they're going all the way disrupting the entire planet.

And this is why if the U.S. does not find a way to stabilize itself and rely on itself, we are cooked. IP law's gone because China doesn't care and there's no restrictions. They had a massive attack on Open AI just today. Open AI announced it. China? Yeah, three of the biggest Chinese

AIs basically were just pinging it millions of times, basically stealing the code from me. And then I'm sorry, but you're like, I don't care if China owns our land. General problem. And it's bad that they're having birthright citizenship, but it's happening. My general problem with this whole thing is

is that if it's just like free trade, kind of laissez-faire, like, path of least resistance, that insidious machines within government will take advantage of that easy, like, yeah, we're just going along to get along. And literally the Chinese will just buy us out and then own us with like. Yeah, short-term gain, long-term losses. Let me ask you this question. It's like this. If the Chinese Communist Party came to you and said, I'll give you $10 million today

to sell out your country. No. But this is what so many people are doing. That's the whole point. If we're looking at, the automation is a great point, and Ian's point is great. If we have free trade at the same time as automation, we're basically saying to the American worker, you'll be left holding an empty bag overnight, learn to code, good luck. The only problem is the H-1Bs are bringing in the coders because Americans don't know how.

AI can code better than a human code now. Now we're vibe coding. Andrew, like, can you define what you mean when you say free trade also? It's a very common word. I'd love to hear a quick definition. It just means you can freely purchase goods from other countries and that you're not impeded with tariffs. So if you're going to sell watermelons for $2, I can import the watermelons for $2, minus the logistics of getting it from you to me. My concern is about corporat, corporatocracy and a corporation taking control in a country and then serving as the de facto government like Amazon.

And if Amazon can do whatever it wants and sell to anyone on the planet, because that's my right, that they'll just make it cheaper and more. robotic and less human and then all of a sudden they'll own the food supplies and they'll own. I mean, I'm glad Amazon's around. Like, Amazon's made my life far easier and it provides tons of jobs. I'm pretty pro-A-I-I-I think started a pretty high rate compared to a lot of other jobs. It's above minimum wage. So like, I don't think like, maybe, maybe there are other examples you could give, but like Amazon to me- Google, Alphabet, taking control of the information sector. We absolutely got to grab Super Chats and Rumble Rants. Fuck, yeah, we do.

But this was a lot of fun, so, you know, I get wrapped up a minute. But let's grab this, because we can continue in the uncensored. Yeah, the after show. Go to the Rumble after show, because we're going to keep going. All right. Let's grab some of your comments as well. It's already 953. We only got a few minutes.

I apologize. Andre Tugalescu says, Hanlon's Razor is the Sciop to cover for other sciops. What is that one? Hanlon's Razor? Can I jump in? Can I jump in? So, Ackham's Razor is the idea that the simplest solutions, or the simplest explanations probably the most likely. Hanlon's razor is do not attribute to malice or conspiracy that which can be understood by sloth or incompetency.

So basically, if there's ambiguity and it might be a conspiracy or it might be an idiot, assume it's probably an idiot. Indeed. Wolf says... No, no, it had nothing to do with you. Wolf says, can we get the British guy with Touretz to attend the State of the Union, please? Everybody knows what happened. No. I'll take use my...

Of course not. I heard about some of this guy's screaming profanity with... Then you know what happened. What do you mean? I don't know. I didn't look into it. Was it Bafta or something? What was it?

I'm not sure what it was. But he was real like nasty what he screamed or something. Yes, he did. No. Sorry. No, no words came out. All right. Omega Resetsu says, for the anti-tariff people,

tariffs are why Japan and Korea built plants in the U.S. Instead of floating cars to the U.S. I say we need to tariff Apple by 300% until domestic consumption equals 70% of production. I appreciate the kind feedback to your listener. If you were to look at how much it would cost to manufacture an iPod in the United States, I think it would increase by something like $10,000 or not an iPod, iPhone. It increased by like $10,000 or so. So I think it would be prohibitive if you tried to do that just here.

Here's the best part. If we didn't have the petro dollar, it would cost the exact same thing made in Korea or China or at Foxcom. and without maintaining a balanced economy and proper spending, I'll put it like this. If the petrodoll system collapses, your laptop was going to cost you $10,000. Like the fact that we get laptops for $1,000 is like a stable. Bro, I went to Best Buy last week,

and there's a 90-inch TV for like $300. Just like, geez, man. You know, sometimes I question whether or not we should go to war with Iran, but then I see these TVs. And I'm just like, well, you know, we can bomb some of them, right? I'm kidding. But that's how we do it, baby. That's how we do it.

Mason says, this is why I hate libertarians. How many jobs can be sent to foreign countries before there is no more country? And when you would argue against it, the graph kept going up. I think the argument, an interesting argument would be, what if 100% of jobs were done elsewhere? That wouldn't work. Why not? Because then you wouldn't have any income at all. Okay.

So what percent of income? do you need to maintain your jobs going to foreign countries? Again, I go back to the example here. Your doctor and your attorney have a trade deficit with their grocery store. It doesn't mean that they're imperiled. We're still a gigantic manufacturing economy. The difference between us now versus us in the 50s is that we do high-end stuff. We still make things in the country.

We export a tremendous amount. What percent of jobs? What percent of American jobs could we give away before we collapse? I don't know. But there is a number. Sure. Well, right, because you said if we gave away all our jobs, there's no country anymore. So to give away the jobs would imply that we're being able, we're doing it because we're purchasing things. We need money to purchase the things to begin with. So I don't think you could get to that point. Well, why not? Government prints the money. I mean, look, the cars manufacturing in China are sold in other places.

Yeah. Or cars made in Mexico get sold in other places. In the same way that you can automate jobs and you're going to destroy jobs, but you're going to create more jobs in the process by getting cheaper parts and having places. What jobs are created in the process of automation? Oh, I mean, like what we're doing right now. I mean, like, again, if we were to go back to like 1940, more of, like, one of us would be a farmer in the room. One of us would probably be doing, like, ledger sheets that don't exist anymore. I definitely wouldn't be able to do my job, like a social media manager.

I question whether or not any of that is a good thing. I don't want to go back to 1900. I think it's good that people can operate in all sorts of different careers that didn't exist 100 years ago. Largely disagree. Where would you want to go back to? I don't know about going back anywhere, but I think it's a problem that people are fat, lazy, slothful, locked in their houses and don't have anything to do. They've become listless and without passion. They've sought ideological addiction to fill the holes in their world, and they've become violent psychopaths.

I saw a video of a guy. went to a ice protest stand in Minnesota where they were giving away hand warmers, gloves, coats, food, hot chocolate. And I thought to myself, how incredible that we have such tremendous abundance that people literally don't have to work and can get free food and clothing just for saying an idea outside. That's a bad thing. I think people should actually have to have some attachment to their lives in reality in order to exist. but the country right now is at this inflection point where I would argue it's massively detrimental to get to let me let me do this because we're talking about Star Trek we got we got to go in two minutes I'll say one thing real quick if we had replicators civil war would erupt in two seconds

and then this country would become just like the whole world would just erode but we'll save that I do want to grab at least a couple of the superchats here I don't want to leave people hanging because we don't only have a minute left let's see Dave, the devil chicken says, Tim, the reason we let fast and furious happen is to let the 21st century version of manifest destiny happen when we, where are we going and take over? So you're making a similar argument that it was to, like that Ian said, to create an enemy that we could then say, oh, no, now we have no choice. It was the first day I ever thought of that in regards to the cartel. But yeah, I thought it's because they're running illicit activities for intelligence organizations. Yeah, I thought it was they were just trying to track the guns and find who the higher ups were in the org. but now I'm starting to think like, geez,

they'd create the enemy now if they can go, go conquer? S.A. Federali says every low-tee neck beard who properly pronounces every foreign word has been steadily screaming, but my Mexican food. It's glorious.

Yay-yo hasn't been good since 09 anyway. Wow. Hit him where it hurts. Mexican food's best at Taco Bell. Yeah, avoid that white. Ameri-Americans. That's not Mexican food, dude. All right, let's see.

Human up in you. T.T. says people like this is why everyone is betting on AI to replace everyone's job. If no one has a job, there are no customers to pay for your AI slop. They kill their golden goose. They are only focused on short-term gain. It's a really interesting example I brought up on the show because they started to automate fast food restaurants. And the response that I get in these arguments is, yes, but AI is going to make it easier and cheaper for everyone to get these things. And I said, who is going to? A.I. Can't buy the tacos. If you don't have customers, if there's no people, then what do you do? The argument was there's a population collapse. There's going to be a lot of lost vacant jobs, and they're not going to be able to fill them.

And the argument is we'll get AI and machines to automate these things. And then I said, who's going to buy from your Taco Bell if there's no people to eat it? You can't have robots coming and do it. But in fact, that's the plot to that video game about the cat. You play that one? About the cat? Yeah, you plays a cat in the future. And there's robots everywhere that were created by humans.

to serve humans, but humans all died off. So now the robots just kind of facilitate the non-existence of whatever they're looking for, and you're a cat. We're going to go to the uncensored portion of the shows when you talk about Star Trek as it relates to communism and free trade. So smash that like button, share the show with every person in your life

even if you don't like them. You can follow me on X and Instagram at Timcast. Andrew, do you want to shout anything out? Yeah, I host a program called the Political Orphanage. I welcome your listeners and viewers going over to do that. Tim, it was a pleasure to be back. Ian Phil and Carter.

Nice to see you again. Thank you as well. The mighty Heaton. Ladies and gentlemen, Heaton is mightier than the sword. I like that your last name is a noun. Thanks, Ian. My pleasure, and as always, follow me at Ian Crossland.

Go to graphing.com movie and check out the new documentary that I've been building with 6-7 Kevin and Andreas Excertis. Graphene.com. It's hot. And sign up with your mailing list. You'll get notified when the movie's live. The trailer's live now. But before the show wraps, I want to give it to Carter Banks.

Oh, thank you. But first let's, okay. What's up? Carter Banks everywhere. I was out of order a little bit. I did it because I want to go. Phil's last. Okay.

Yeah, but also there's like some weird guy sitting behind Carter. This is Brandon. Rendo. Look at him out. Anyway, yeah, follow me at Carter Banks Everywhere. Phil, what's up? I am Phil that remains on Twix. The band is All That Remains Online.com.

You can check the band out at All That Remains Online.com. We are going on tour this spring. We start April 29th in Albany. You can get tickets at All That Remains Online.com. You can check out our music at Apple Music, Music, Amazon, Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, and Deezer. Don't forget the left lane is for crime. Brandon's actually the, he's the real CEO of the company.

Oh, Brandon. And he, this is like a, he's coming to make sure everyone's doing their jobs properly. Watch it. So you got to watch out, Ian, because he's been watching. All right, everybody. I think I'm winning. We're going to see you all over at rumble.com slash Timcast, IRL. We're going to complain about Star Trek,

but largely just as an excuse to talk about communism. So thanks for hanging out.