Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #681 FBI Hunter Biden Censorship CONFIRMED PSYOP w/Vivek Ramaswamy & Lauren Chen

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Tim, Luke, & Serge join Lauren Chen & Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss FBI collusion with twitter regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Arizona gubernatorial election now going to trial, Stanford University saying that calling people Americans is hate speech, the EU implementing a carbon tax for its citizens, & America's financial institutions bowing to China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

you you you Well, it's live now, isn't it? No, it's not. It's't it? No, it's not. It's pulled up right now. It's not live. I mean, it's... It's our background. It shows live for me. Like, I see it on my phone.

She's on. Yeah. We're live. I think you said you have to do something. I know. Hello. I'm waiting for... Oh, people are saying live.

We're live. They're saying it. How's it going, everybody? I think we're live now. So here's what happened. We did the show at Turning Point USA. This is Tim Cass IRL, by the way. Not the Charlie Kirk show. We were doing the show at Turning Point USA's America Fest. It was really, really awesome. And then we're here for the rest of the week. So they were giving us studio space and equipment to continue our show. Otherwise what would happen is we fly out for the weekend,

we do the live show, and then we have to fly back the next day and we won't be able to do the show if that was the case. So we're just doing it here. And we're on the set of the Charlie Kirk show because the temporary studio that we ended up building for some reason, the very last minute, the camera stopped working. That's why everyone's like, are you live? They're not live. They're not live. They're late. They're late. We all just ran full speed over to Charlie's studio and then just jumped in his chairs. So we're going to talk about the news today. We actually have some big news. The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was real and they lied to big tech. They lied to the media in what is definitively now confirmed a psy-op. They knew the story was real. They knew that crackhead Hunter Biden

lost a laptop. And they tried making this narrative that was more like, oh, you know, maybe someone hacked the data and then cloned the machine and then planted it at the computer shop, which is this ridiculous conspiracy, as opposed to the more simple narrative of, you know, the poor guy is a drug addict and he lost a laptop. It happens. So we got that. We have Stanford, who released a guide on, what is it, dangerous language? Hateful language? You know, standard language that is not, you know, American.

Right. They're saying that it's hurtful to use the word American. And then we have a bunch of other stories, too. We'll get into a lot of stuff, too. Harmful to use the word uh american and then we have we have a bunch of other stories too we'll just we'll get into a lot of stuff harmful language harmful language and then we have this viral post on twitter where i'm just gonna say i'm sorry guys it's not family friendly but there's a new version of the pride flag which has a puckered anus on it i mean that that's what everyone's saying i'm not gonna i'm not gonna try and sugarcoat it because you know whatever but they said it's a red umbrella to symbolize sex work so we'll talk

about that before we get started my friends please head over to TimCast.com. Become a member in order to support our work directly as a member. You're not just supporting this show. You're not just getting a product. You're helping us build out everything we're trying to do in order to change the culture. So I've long talked about the coffee shops we're going to be building. I'm really, really excited for that. So thank you all for hanging out. Smash that like button. Subscribe to this channel. Share the show with your friends.

Joining us tonight, we have a couple of guests. We have Vivek Ramaswamy. How are you doing, man? I'm great. Introduce yourself, good sir. Yeah, I'm Vivek. I had a career in biotech. I built a biotech company.

I was an investor. And then I hung the jersey on that a couple of years ago to start critiquing what what I wouldn't call a biological cancer, but a cultural cancer that threatened to infect both politics and business. And ever since then, I've been on a mission to hopefully save American capitalism from politics and to save American politics from American capitalism. So that's kind of the goal. I wrote a couple of books about it and now I'm running another business. Thanks, man. Yeah, Woke Inc. We definitely talked about this

back when it came out or something happened. Maybe not when it came out, but I remember we were talking about it. It came out last year. They're both pretty recent. Yeah, and we were talking about your work and stuff,

so I'm glad to have you on. This is going to be fun. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. We also have Lauren Chen. Welcome back. Great to be back. The last time I was supposed

to be on the show, I had to cancel it because I had my baby. So clearly not in danger of delivering any babies right now. So it feels good to be here. Well, you have a baby. Congratulations. Thank you.

And I guess if people don't know me, my name's Lauren. Happy to call myself a TPUSA contributor. So we just had America Fest. It was awesome. You can find me on YouTube. Lauren Chen is my political channel. Mediaholic is my, I guess, my pop culture commentary channel. I don't have books, although the Miami Herald did once refer to me as a social media influencer and a hit piece.

Pretty big deal. But if anyone wants to support, you can head on over to etsy.com slash shop slash Clearly Pure Naturals because we kind of do soap as everyone does coffee. We do soap, and that's Clearly Pure Naturals, C-L-E-A-R-L-Y-P-U-R-Naturals.com. It's a product that doesn't hate you for who you are, and we are all about that parallel economy. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. It'll be fun. We've got Luke, of course. He's here. Hey, guys. Last night was really fun.

It was pretty incredible being able to feed off the crowd, and it was interesting seeing the TPUSA crowd also cheer for the larger ideas that I was kind of spreading out there, which was pretty interesting. Ian also fell off stage last night. He's not here. He's recovering. We hope he is going to be doing well. Ian, we're rooting for you. anyway uh today i'm wearing a shirt uh depicting bill gates in his natural habitat helping and saving humanity from itself and overpopulation if you like this shirt you could support me by

getting it on thebestpoliticalshirts.com because you do that's why i'm here ian we're rooting for you hopefully uh ian's okay you know i think he's been he thinks he's been in a coma since that since that fall it was a big fall It was a big stage. No Ian's actually completely fine I was gonna say there are so many people who are so worried about Ian right now He was so he didn't realize the stage was split with like a central platform and then it branches to the left So when he was on the front of the stage He waved everybody and then spun around and walked right into the pit and just flopped like five feet to the ground

And then he jumped up and was like, I'm OK. He's totally fine. He's totally fine. You know, he's just chilling in the other room, I guess. So there's there's someone in there pushing buttons. I can't tell. It's like it's like a one way mirror or whatever. Anyway, let's talk about the news. The big story right now, we'll jump right into it, is we have this from the Daily Mail. This is a psyop run by the FBI on the American people. Twitter files author Michael Schellenberger says FBI knew Hunter laptop was real, but still told Twitter and the U.S. public it was fake. Ultimately, what we ended up seeing from the latest Twitter files is that not only was the FBI paying Twitter money so that they could run censorship operations, but that Yoel Roth, I believe it was Yoel Roth, wrote an email saying basically what happened, it seems that someone download hacked into Hunter's laptop,

downloaded the contents, cloned the machine, and then dropped it off at this computer repair shop in a, in a Russian disinformation campaign or something. I love, I love that narrative because it is the most insane conspiracy theory I've ever heard. And they call us the conspiracy theorists for saying that the FBI was running a psyop and manipulating the election, you know, interfering in the election and all that stuff. But now here we are with definitive proof because Elon Musk bought Twitter and released all this stuff. We now know the FBI knew the story was real, lied to big tech, lied to us, and I guess definitively interfered in the election. Well, I think it's kind of hard when they call the story disinformation, even from what Yul Roth

was saying, is that if it was cloned and then put on a new device and then left somewhere, that would still have meant that the information was real. I heard leftists at the time saying, no, this is completely fake. It's not even real information. So we had so many different narratives, all of which were leading to it's not real. Don't worry about it. And I'm just wondering, is the FBI or individuals within the FBI, are they ever going to be held accountable? Because at this point, since Trump, we saw that they were essentially acting like this pseudo fourth arm of government doing whatever they wanted, trying to interfere with American politics. When does the accountability happen? When has accountability happened?

That's a good point. A depressing point, but. Yeah, I think we've got to stop calling it, by the way, big tech censorship. I've been saying this for a long time. It is government tech censorship, which is to say it is just government censorship disguised in the veneer of private sector activity. I wrote an op in The Wall Street Journal when in January, about two years ago, January 2021. And at that time, with far less evidence, to me, it was already obvious, right? This was the government doing through the back door what they couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution. To me, if you see the pieces already put on the chessboard, you've got threats already being issued. You've got inducements already being issued. And this isn't just inducements by the FBI or the administrative class. This is hardwired

in the law, right? Not a lot of people know this. You have a section 230, section two literally says, okay, if it is constitutionally protected content, you can still take it down and not be liable under state law. And by the way, if you want to actually be an extra cherry on top, we're going to threaten you that we're going to break you up. We're going to, you know, regulate you call, you know, call, call for your breakup or whatever it is. And so why is it surprising that the executive branch of the government is just executing on the threats that they made starting two years ago? So we need to stop being surprised by this and just recognize it for what it is.

This isn't some sort of collusion. It's just the reality of directed government censorship. The only difference is Vladimir Putin will tell you through the front door that he's actually saying what can and can't be said on the internet. Here we abide by a fiction that says that, no, no, no, these are actually just private companies

that we're going to have do it instead, but it's the same side of the story on two different sides of the Atlantic. It's an illusion. It's a lie. It's partly a bigger psyop that I think finally is being exposed here because, you know, you've been saying it,

I've been saying it since 2008, 2009, saying, hey, you know, the intelligence agencies have a lot of control over the corporate media. It's only a matter of time until they have their influence with social media. And I think throughout the last few years, we have seen them act in very coordinated ways. We have seen all the companies on a dime turn and make the same decision at one time.

That's not an accident. It didn't happen because they all decided to come together and do what's not good for them, destroy their business, destroy the ability of what made them great, and that's people being able to debate and to talk to each other. They went against their own principles, their own things that were good for them and then obeyed the government. Because as you said, the government was threatening them from the very beginning. And it's only because they were there calling the shots why we can't have free speech online. And to be clear, this is not a new phenomenon.

I mean, even back when we had print journalism or just televised journalism, we had people like Anderson Cooper who have essentially been to Fed camp, right? So essentially all they did was pivot to traditional media, to digital media. So, I mean, as shocked as, well, we shouldn't be shocked, like you said, we saw the signs, but as surprised as some people are,

this goes back even further than a lot of people realize. Especially when it comes to the church commissions and when we found out that the CIA had officials at the top branches of all the corporate media outlets. And Mr. Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper, as some people call him, did also train to be a CIA agent.

Coincidentally. I had a couple conversations with him about that three times. He didn't like me bringing that up. I was there. Luke runs up to Anderson Cooper and he's like, what did you ask him? Why did you leave the CIA or something like that? I was like, can you tell us about your training at the CIA? What happened here? And what about that saying,

you know, once you're CIA, you're always CIA. Can we discuss the influence of the intel agencies leaking fake stories to the corporate media that always regurgitates them? And whether it's the WMDs, the banker bailouts, they are in lockstep and barrel when it comes to pushing out the bigger lies of, of course, the government, of the intel communities. They've always been doing it, and we have always been sold a bag of goods that were lies based off a bigger agenda that they've been pushing. I've heard activists call Facebook Face CIA book. Face CIA book. Fed book is also a good one.

And we were talking about this yesterday on the show that I think it was Bannon mentioning that these organizations, these big tech, they were built with government subsidy and assistance, and they intended to use them this way. So I'm wondering for you, Vivek, or whatever you guys' thoughts are, do you think the inception of these things, you mentioned that Section 230 has that provision, Section 2, I think you said it was, that allows them to remove constitutionally protected speech. Do you think that these things were built in mind to do an end run around the constitution? Yeah. So I don't think you need to have the facts of them actually having been in the same room with the same venture capital investment on the cap table of the company for the entire conspiracy to still hold intact. Okay. It was at least softly designed that way. Okay. So this is actually,

I actually want to go into that, into the specifics of this law a little bit, because people actually mix up the two parts of section 230 all the time. There's the part that everybody knows, which is that, okay, these platforms aren't liable for what does and doesn't show up. That's section 230 C1. Section 230 C2 is probably one of the most remarkable statutes that most Americans are not aware of, which specifically was a statutory workaround for the Constitution. So never have I seen a statute where you say that there's no liability for taking down such material, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.

It was explicitly designed to allow the government, the federal government, to protect private companies, to take down content that the federal government otherwise couldn't take down. So I think that in a certain sense, the traps were already laid to say that the federal government wants to make sure it has the latitude to take down content that the First Amendment otherwise would protect. It needed to induce private companies to do it. And there's a great example. You'll actually like this one, you know, relating to an issue that doesn't relate to free speech, where the federal government wanted to do the same thing with the war on drugs. Okay. So they wanted to say, okay, we want to get drugs off the street. We're in a war on drugs, but we can't directly search

passengers on railroads or whatever directly. So what did they do? They passed a law that said that any railroad company, private company, is immunized from liability. They can't be sued if the railroad company searches the passengers on board for drugs. We're not doing it. It's just a private company doing it. So guess what? Now, thankfully, we have a Supreme Court in this country, which is the one branch of government that I think we can still, at least if we're going to have to pick one that has its integrity

still intact, it's the judicial system, said that not so fast, if you're going to use a federal law to do through the back door what the government couldn't do through the front door because of the Fourth Amendment in this case, that's still state action, and we're going to treat it as such. And so the railroad companies are bound by the Fourth Amendment. That's effectively what's going on with these technology companies. So whether or not it was, you know, certain of these companies, Palantir and others, were definitely funded by the government at inception. Others may not have been directly funded. But that detail matters less than the truth of what comes out of it is functionally these may as well have been arms of the government.

That's what we're learning. The latest story today is that we're finding out that the FBI was giving Twitter $3.4 million as a thank you for allowing them to, of course, spy and kind of manipulate the whole platform. That's chump change. That's not a lot of money when we're talking about these big companies. But when you look at the start of a lot of them, especially Facebook with In-Q-Tel, when you look at the grants that were given to Alphabet and Google, when you look at the government research and data, especially when it came to satellite imagery that was given to Google Maps,

they were able to have an advantage that no one else in the market was able to have because of their connections to government. And I think they took a note saying, hey, we're able to have an advantage that no one else in the market was able to have because of their connections to government. And I think they took an oath saying, hey, we're going to be serving the government. We're going to be doing everything the government wants if the government gives us all these tax incentives, all these grants, all this information. And I think that's the deal that they made with the devil to destroy any kind of legitimate competition, making them the current monopolies that they are now, who are kind of undefeatable. You look at Alphabet, you look at Google, who's going to be competing them in the market? We can't compete

with them because of the unfair advantage that the government gave them from the beginning. Right. So the question is, what do we do now? Right. I mean, I've seen people say, oh, well, in order to break them up, that in and of itself is just more government intervention. So what's the answer? Take away all their taxes, take's take away other grants get all their money back That would be a start for me from my point of view, but more essentially spread awareness Make people aware like hey your tax dollars paid for this. Let's get all that tax money back Let's let's also allow the free market to speak. Let's also try to allow competitors to be out there Let's also not intervene and regulate the market so much as it is to make it almost impossible for anyone. Because the person that loves regulations the most is usually the head of industries who get to use it in order to destroy their competitors. Right. So I agree with a lot of that. But the thing is,

we've seen what big tech does to its competitors. So even if we say, all right, you have no more tax breaks, none of these leg up policies the government has been giving you. What do we do when all these servers decide to kick off a free speech platform? Because we see that they're already big enough, they're able to act as a cartel. Yeah, and they do. They act like a cartel. State action doctrine, okay? If it's state action in disguise, the Constitution still applies. There's a First Amendment in this country. It's a really pesky thing that says that if you're the government, it's an inconvenience. You can't tell people what you can and can't say. So what's the government doing? They found a workaround.

Take the Alex Berenson case or whatever. By the way, I love this example because it is literally what the founding fathers would roll over in their graves if they actually knew what was going on. The First Amendment is designed to do one thing. It is to allow citizens to criticize the government. So you take a government critic. What the government does is they want to silence government critics. They can't do it directly. So they call any officials from Twitter and say that here, here's this individual by name, Alex Berenson in this case, whatever, it doesn't matter

who it is. Why aren't you taking him down? Why aren't you censoring him? We know from their private Slack message channels internally at the company that they felt that pressure and they did it. Well, guess what? It's a really simple solution. If you are working hand in glove with the government, if you are protected by section 230 C solution. If you are working hand in glove with the government, if you are protected by Section 230C2, which you can make an opt-in statute, if you're responding to threats, then you're bound by the same standards

as the federal government. Full stop. These companies ought to be bound by the First Amendment. Full stop. But it's not just that. I just want to go back to the Hunter Biden story just to connect this all together.

Let me address this. Put a pin in it. We've seen lawsuits. The judges don't care. So I actually think that, so I don't think all of these cases have been argued nearly as well as they should. Some have been argued in the Ninth Circuit, which is out in California. When you see these cases brought in the Fifth Circuit, okay, which I think the judges in the Appellate Circuit and the Fifth Circuit, I'd like to see Judge Ho in the Fifth Circuit take one of these cases.

Clarence Thomas has already sent smoke signals saying that actually this is a viable theory all the way up to and including the Supreme Court actually potentially hearing these cases. So I don't think it's actually been tested in the right way yet. And the facts just keep getting better and better. I mean, the whole reason why these cases fail is what is the nexus of control that the government exercises? Some of the ones that have been brought have been super, you know, on the weaker side where it's some state that made a request and then the company complied. That wouldn't be the case I would bring. All right. Pick the case where there's White House officials that specifically call in the company, specifically name a specific critic, individual critic by first and last name, tell them to censor. Then you have the evidence of the company

officials going back and forth saying that they felt that pressure. Now you've got the payments, no better inducement than money to get a private party to do what you want them to do. Then you combine them with the threats. And now it's not just some health department, it's the FBI, the guys who wield the guns. That's a stronger case. And so I think that, you know, we got a lot of people got overeager before the evidence actually presented itself. I think that picture has already changed. And I want to add to your point. It's not just picking out individuals and censoring them. They got so drunk on power.

They have orchestrated a vast censorship operation, false flag with the Hunter Biden laptop story that literally the laptop they knew they had it in their possessions. December 9th, 2019, when they had it, they knew it implicated Joe Biden. It made him look bad. They knew an election was coming up. So they lied about it. They called it a Russian hack. They orchestrated a vast conspiracy in order to get the media because they knew Rudy Giuliani was getting that laptop too. They knew it was coming out. So they orchestrated a PSYOP in order to, of course, make sure that the story was dead on arrival. And then when it came out, it was censored everywhere. And as we know, it also impacted the election very severely

with many people believing that it helped Joe Biden win the presidency, according to many polls out there. That right there is more than just... And then you can't even talk about that. And you can't even talk about that. And major news organizations, the New York Post, one of the biggest newspapers, one of the longest running newspapers in the history of America, was censored, wasn't allowed a voice, was taken off social media platforms, was taken off public landscapes for even being able to discuss what happened here.

That right there is far more of an atrocious criminal act, in my opinion, than just picking out individuals and censoring them. Did you see the news on Carrie Lake today, Vivek? I did not see it, no. So she, her election contest is going to trial. There are two main counts. Two out of the ten. Two out of the ten. It was chain of custody, and I think, do you remember what the other one was?

Something to do with the counts. But yeah, one was chain of custody being broken, and I forgot what the other one was. I forgot the other one. But I bring this up because we were just talking about big tech censorship. The FBI's involvement with it. Government tech censorship. Government tech censorship. You're right. And one of the counts that Kerry Lake brought forward that was dismissed was First Amendment, because we saw that Democrats in Arizona, I believe it was Democrats. Yeah. Illegal tabulator configurations. That's right. So I think what they argued was that individuals in government, I'll put it that way, had made contact with social media to suppress certain individuals. And that was a First Amendment, the FBI's manipulation, did interfere with the election.

Absolutely. We're seeing poll after poll now show regular people saying, if we had known about this story, if we knew it was real, we would not have supported this man for president. And it's substantial enough that some people are saying, if this story wasn't suppressed, many people would have voted for Trump instead. We could have seen a different outcome in this election. With Carrie Lake, the judge outright said, well, censorship, no idea. How do we calculate votes based on that? Well, that's kind of ridiculous because actually, if you look at election law, federal election law,

you can't do certain things as a campaign regarding social media advertising, right? Because they see it as a violation. So it doesn't make sense to me that if you're a candidate, you can't spend however much you want on maybe social media ads, but then social media doing whatever it wants to censor different things. Well, that's totally OK. Right. Either we acknowledge the fact that, yes, social media and these advertising campaigns, they can sway people's votes. And therefore, we need to control how much candidates spend into it and do all of these workarounds with super PACs. Or we let social media companies do whatever they want because, oh, I mean, we can't really decide how much posts might interfere with voting, right? You can't have it both ways.

Right, I think the issue is we look at polls and we say X percent of people may have voted another direction, but how do you actually quantify the impact of these psyops, of this government tech manipulation? Yeah, so look, I think that there's, you know, three layers of legal issues. You actually raised a pretty interesting one. One of the constitutional issues. Okay. If you're going to work around using the first amendment, guess what? The same

instruments that you use, including companies ought to be bound by the first amendment. Talked about that already. Second is actually, I think there's a strong campaign finance case here. There is no greater financial contribution that Twitter could have made to the Biden campaign than to have censored the most damning piece of information on the eve of the election. That is a constructive campaign contribution. Okay, so that's another legal layer of federal laws. Then there's the state laws of just old school,

people forget this one, consumer fraud, all right? You know what the definition of consumer fraud is? Telling consumers you are doing one thing, such as not censoring speech or shadow banning or whatever, when in fact you are doing the exact opposite thing. SBF, FTX, all that news, that's outside the political context, right? So let's talk about that. Telling customers that you're not commingling funds when in fact you are commingling funds.

That is definitional consumer fraud. That's not that different than what was happening at Twitter. Telling consumers actively through public statements and otherwise, we're not engaged in viewpoint-based censorship. We're not engaged in shadow banning when in fact you were engaged in viewpoint-based censorship, we're not engaged in shadow banning, when in fact you were engaged in viewpoint-based censorship and shadow banning, all of which is against the backdrop of, forget the legal issues. Is this the kind of society we want to be living in? Irrespective of whether or not it was legal, that there are centralized forces, both in

government and in the deep corporate apparatus of the private sector that are working hand in hand to suppress the will of the everyday citizen. The question you asked was, where's accountability, though? Okay. And I have a very, I have a very clear view on this. These systems of accountability include the very same little three letter acronym soup that's responsible and infested in the first place. It actually starts with who sits in the Oval Office the next cycle around. And by the way, equivalent for state governors across this country. We need a government where the people who report to the Oval Office the next cycle around. And by the way, equivalent for state governors across this country. We need a government where the people who report

to the chief executive can be fired by that chief executive. This is why I'm shocked this is not at the top of a GOP agenda, reforming these civil service protection statutes that say if you work for somebody, you are eligible to be fired by that person. I've actually, so one of my big, whatever, successful chapters of my biotech journey

was actually by doing business in Japan. We did a $3 billion deal at the end of 2019. I spent countless days that year in Japan. And the funny thing in Japan, it's true in Japanese pharma, it's true in almost Japanese corporate, Japanese corporate, is that even if you're the CEO of the company, you can't actually fire the guy who's the head of your research division or the CEO of the company, you can't actually fire the guy who's the head of your research division or the head of your commercial division.

Turns out that that means if the CEO says this is the direction that the company's going, if the guy who's running research doesn't agree with you, he's going to keep doing whatever project he was working on before anyway, because if you can't be fired, it means you don't really work for the person who was put in that position.

So that's in the corporate context. It's not any different in the governmental context. We need to make sure that the people who we elect to run the government are the people who run the government. And I personally think this is one of my big disappointments in Donald Trump is that you have a guy who will complain and identify the problem in a lot of ways, but will complain about Anthony Fauci, will complain about James Comey. Doesn't fire them. When the thing you got to do is very simple.

Yeah. You fire them. You fire the legions of people who work for them. You fire the managerial industrial complex underneath and around them. That is accountability because otherwise any legal battle isn't going to sort this out. That is what draining the swamp looks like. And that's what it's going to take. Plus, a lot of this. He should have done that. But I don't mean this to be a defense for him,

because he should have done it regardless. But anytime he would make these staff changes, the media would, of course, paint it as him trying to ensure that individuals pledged loyalty to Trump, that he was some kind of fascist dictator, when really, I don't think it's too much to ask that if you work for a president, you should be on board with the president's agenda. But that was absolutely how the left was spinning things. Any time Trump did make staff changes, but yeah. But then he just turned the media into a fourth branch of government

that he's reporting to. Yeah, you're right. He should have done it anyway. But Lauren, they were saying that anyway, right? Yeah, I agree. They were saying he was a fascist anyway. So there was no reason for him to capitulate. I think he loved the media too much and tried to appease the media way too much because a lot of these policy shifts, especially with the DHS, happened under his watch.

It was also him that approved gain-of-function work in Wuhan, China before this whole entire debacle a few years ago. It was his administration that pushed a lot of this stuff that now we're dealing with that was turned against him. As he had users, he had people on his staff saying, hey, they're going to censor you. Hey, they're censoring all of your top supporters, all the people who got you elected, all the people who worked so hard on the Internet spreading memes, talking about you. They're all slowly being eviscerated, and that circle is coming closer and closer to you.

He ignored it. Jared Kushner told him to shut up and to just play ball. He did, and then we're here. He did do the executive order in regard to how Section 230 could be enforced, essentially saying that a platform would have to pick between being a platform and a publisher. I thought it was a very good executive

order. It wasn't really changing the policy. We can go into the meat of policy. No one ended up challenging it in court, so it was useless. I'm just talking about running an organization. You run a company. I run a company. People have run countries, whatever it is. There's a simple principle.

If you run the organization, you decide who works there and who doesn't work there, period. And a good litmus test of whether or not a leader is doing it. I don't care if it's the CEO of a big company. I don't care if it's the CEO of a big company. I don't care if it's the chief executive of a country. If you are complaining to the media about the people who work for you, that means that you have already failed. Because if you had to, as the leader of the free world,

complain to third parties who write about you, that means you already didn't do your job because the people shouldn't have been there in the first place. I do think the civil service protections need to be repealed. I do think that actually, you know what, if you're president of the United States, you can't work for the federal government for more than eight years. I'm not sure that the people who report to the president of the United

States should be able to work for the federal government for eight years. Actually, I'm sure they shouldn't. But even still, I don't think you need to wait for Congress. I think Article 2 of the Constitution says that those civil service protections are basically unconstitutional. Anyway, if you run the federal government, then doggone it, run the federal government. And whoever sits in that office next, that is not Joe Biden, whoever that might be. I don't care if it's Democrat, Democrat, Republican. Democrats should be every bit as bone chilled by what happened as Republicans. The same Democrats are upset with what James Comey did with what they see as tilting the

scales back in 2016. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It is the fact that whoever we elect, it might not even be the guy I want. I don't care. I'd still rather the guy I didn't vote for be the guy who runs the government rather than actually have somebody else who runs the government who temporarily does what I want them to do when it was actually somebody who nobody elected. That is what accountability looks like. And I'm surprised not enough Republicans right now are even talking about that as a solution.

It's probably going to be Biden and Fetterman with the way things are going. And let's be honest here. They fortified the elections. I don't see Republicans winning, especially when it comes to ballot harvesting, especially when it comes to all the things that they have kind of enshrined themselves with.

And I think the main reason Democrats aren't doing anything is because they're winning. The intelligence agencies are using them right now. And they're, of course, benefiting greatly. They're getting all the seats in Congress, in the Senate. They're getting the presidency and most likely will still get the next presidency and probably control politics for the next few decades unless something drastically changes, which I don't see it drastically changing. Well, what's interesting, if you look at all the quote anti-establishment leftists who traditionally would have been against operations covert by the FBI against the American people,

you would think that a psyop like this would upset them. But what we see is because the outcome happens to be one that they favor and that it's censoring their opposition, they're silent, right? Because the old song and dance used to be, oh, it's a private company. They can do what they want. Now that it's been revealed, it's actually not just a private company. There's state involvement. Now they're saying, oh, well, you shouldn't have the right to do that, spread quote unquote misinformation or hate, whatever they want to call it in the first place. So, I mean, what we see is that people say that, you know, leftists have double standards. It's actually one very consistent standard. If it helps me, it's good. And so that's why we see so many people who, again, like actual progressives who should be anti-FBI running cover for the swamp.

I don't mean to get too, like, you know, abstract here, but here's a pattern I see in the moment we live in, in general. Okay. People are addicted to the drug you will give them. Here, here, the drug is that you give the leftist here, as you call it, is the outcome you want. So we will violate whatever procedural norm we clearly held near and dear to our heart if we at least get to the place we want to in the short run. By the way, that's the same human intuition that led these social

media companies to get as powerful as they did. You give something away for free. That's the other thing. People will flock to it. People forget. If you get something for free, that means... You're the product. Yes, you are not the consumer. You are the product. But we have this cultural moment we live in that as long as you get that, it's like a little hamster on the wheel.

As long as you get that little jolt, that serotonin surge, that experience of satisfaction, you are willing to trade off the thing that in your deeper soul matter to you over the long run. Be it your data, be it your privacy. In the case of index funds, I mean, this is what I spend my day job, your right to express yourself as a shareholder in corporate America, give an index fund away for free, they'll say, fine, I'll hand over my vote, get you the idea that actually, I care about autonomy and individual procedural justice. I'll give that away. If you actually put my guy in office, we live in this in this deeper cultural

moment where the everyday citizen is so effete, so weak-willed that we will trade off the thing that we know we care deeply about for some short-term outcome. And that's what the managerial class is exploiting. I don't even see this as a left and right issue. Between the managerial class, the bureaucrats who staff the middle layers of, from our universities to our government to most large companies in the private sector, the managerial class is able to give the masses what they want, like feeding cocaine to a drug addict. But because that drug addict is willing to accept it, the managerial class is able to wield its power. And I just think that's the defining. To me, that's about left and right. It's more about this managerial technocracy and bureaucracy versus the everyday citizen, because the everyday citizen's inner level of fortitude was so lacking that they were able to be bribed into it in one sphere of our lives from another.

That's what I see happening. You talked about how, you know, Democrat and Republican should both be concerned about this. Excuse me. But I think what I see happening. You talked about how, you know, Democrat and Republican should both be concerned about this. Excuse me. But I think what I see with Democrats and Republicans is all they want to do is the bare minimum to maintain power, to stay in office, to have a job. They don't actually want to do anything that could harm them. So what we see with Republicans is throw the bare minimum out there for, you know, the red meat to the base, stay in office, say what you got to say. The Democrats, of course, have a more fervent base with many of these younger leftists. So they're forced to actually try and give them a little bit more, even though they don't want to. I think if Democrats,

Republicans had their way, they'd sit back and never say another word and just keep getting their paychecks. So so long as you have on the left this, I don't know, zeal and energy, then you're going to keep seeing Democrats more in line with this, or as Luke put it, the FBI is using the Democrats. They're winning. They're getting power. They're in line with it. And then you have some Republicans who are speaking up, but it's only some. I guess my point on all that is, sure, it should be a problem for Democrats and Republicans, but I don't think they're actually there in the fight or concerned about anything. I mean, maybe there's like 10 members of Congress who actually care. Yeah, see, I've got a slightly different theory.

There was in the Twitter files leak. I think there actually was maybe one Democrat representative. Yeah, that expressed concern about it. And I was actually kind of impressed about how many world leaders, including the likes of Angela Merkel, I think expressed concerns for the freedom of speech.

Of course, none of them said anything publicly because we can't seem to be citing publicly with Donald Trump in any way, even if it's just defending freedom of speech. Of course, none of them said anything publicly because we can't seem to be citing publicly with Donald Trump in any way, even if it's just defending freedom of speech. But I was, I don't want to say pleasantly surprised, but it was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's part of the reason why I don't, I mean, even Bernie Sanders has been actually give this guy credit that whatever year, year and a half ago was the first person on the left to say that he did not, and nobody dislikes Donald Trump more than Bernie Sanders based on what he said, but that he doesn't want a fourth branch of government in Silicon Valley deciding who does and doesn't get to speak to the American public.

And so I don't, I think what you said is descriptively true, but I would, there's a lot of ways you could, a lot of lenses you could bring to describe the same phenomenon. I bring a different lens, which is that it's not even the left wing and the right wing lens. I think what the left does better today is that they feed that generational hunger for a cause. Like I told you, all right, we have this vulnerability in entire generation of Americans to latch on to what someone sells us. That's the cocaine for the drug addict. Well, one one form of cocaine for the drug addict is religion for a drug addict who actually lacks religion in the first place. I mean, the things that used to fill the void of human purpose, right? You could debate what it is, right? Patriotism, faith, hard work, family,

pick your favorite, fill in the blank, whatever they are, they've disappeared in modern life. And I think what the left has done effectively is at least to feed that vacuum with pick your ism, you know, woke ism, climate ism, COVID ism, whatever the ism is, they've come up with modern secular religions that fill that void. And I think that the right where the right is actually failing is what you called the fervence. I think that was the word you use. Well, the right could tap into that fervence if we actually had an affirmative alternative that can fill that void of purpose and meaning. And I think instead we're, myself included, are just taking, you know, playing a game of whack-a-mole, taking a jackhammer to one form of poison at a time, instead of figuring out what is the alternativism? Maybe it is Americanism. I think it's a pretty

good alternative. Well, let me pull up this story because you mentioned Americanism and it's the perfect time. We have this from Fox News. Stanford releases guide to eliminate harmful language, cautions against calling U.S. citizens American. Stanford's index says its goal is to eliminate many forms of harmful language. So you said maybe the fervence or the zeal that the right could tap into is Americanism. There's America first, but they're preempting you. They're already coming out and saying

it's harmful language to do so. Which is a good sign that this is actually the direction we need to be going, actually. Well, see, the left is smart in this way because the things that they've replaced religion with, they are actually tools in which they gain more power, whether that's feminism, radical leftism, wokeism, you name it.

These are actually tools that not only replace religion. Covidism, climatism, all of these. Exactly. They simultaneously further state control. It's actually the opposite with the right. What are we trying to get people passionate about? Small government, religion, families being less subservient to the government. It's funny, we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot by trying to breed this, I guess, fervence in dependency and otherwise living happily lives that don't require us to become servants of the state. The left is smart in that way.

They understand that if you want people to essentially need you, you need to not only make it their politics, but also their personal identity. And religion as well. And I think that with the absence of religion, I think a lot of people replaced the Christian church or Islam with specifically the state. And they worship Fauci. They have candles of him.

They have altars of him. So I think at the end of the day, the Republicans need to be called out because if they're good at anything, it's capitulating and surrendering. Kevin McCarthy right now, I don't see reigning in the FBI. He has an opportunity to do so. He's not.

But Trump is still endorsing him. Kevin McCarthy called for Donald Trump to resign as president of the United States. Why are you endorsing him and telling your local Congress members not to fight his appointment? This is absolutely crazy. Eventually the disruptor becomes the institutionalist. That's not true in just politics. Did you see what McConnell said? That the number one priority for Republicans is actually

to ensure that Ukraine gets those missiles and is able to defeat Russia. This says Zelensky is coming to the United States Capitol to address the United States as there's going to be a big bill negotiating 46 billion dollars that's going to be additionally possibly sent to Ukraine

to prolong this larger proxy war, which is bringing us closer to the brink of nuclear holocaust. You mentioned earlier in the show, Luke, about how they're taking your tax money. And I was going to say something then, but I'll say it now, too, about all the money they're sending to Ukraine. It's modern monetary policy. They're not really taking your tax money. They're just mass printing your money and extracting through inflation from your savings. So whether it's paid or not, they're finding a way to gut the American middle class so they can fund their wars. They could do whatever they want. There's no oversight in that.

Well, it's a transfer of wealth from everybody else to the super rich. It's socialism for the super rich that we're seeing right now with specifically the military industrial complex getting their way. We're running out of missiles. There's other countries that are running out of bullets, especially Germany. There was a countries that are running out of bullets, especially Germany. There was a news report saying Germany has given out so much bullets, they're running out of ammunition.

Canada is one of those countries that's not critically low in arms. Exactly. Do you want to go in this direction, though? You want to get a funny fact here? Okay, so which is the country, which is the major developed country, that lobbied against the EU ban on Russian oil imports. Anyone know the answer to this?

It's the United States. The Biden White House was the major nation that was begging the EU, as we now head into the end of the year, the Russian, the EU ban on Russian oil imports goes into effect now. Why is that? It's actually, there's a long reason why. I mean, we've gone to war in our own fossil fuels industry that actually worries about the consequences for global, you know, let's just say oil and gas markets, if that EU ban actually goes in, especially when Chinese coronavirus-related restrictions are being lifted. There's a supply-demand shock.

But I want to point out the irony of this. We are, with one hand, sending $40 to $45 billion or more to Ukraine to fight against Vladimir Putin, while, with the other other hand are the leading nation that calls for overriding the eu ban on russian oil imports which in turn finances putin's war machine to actually invade ukraine so that's why the whole thing is actually even a farce the idea of getting into should we or should we not support ukraine okay i think we're over allocated ukraine we need to focus our military's energy on the one geopolitical threat that matters to the united states which is china but that's a policy point

here's even if you were committed to the pro-ukraine cause at all cost even the effectuation of that is itself frustrated by the fact that if you wanted to do it you would be starving putin's army yet biden is the one who's actually arguing for allowing Putin to finance his war machine by selling oil and gas to Europe, which is actually the laughable farce of the whole thing. And I believe it was also fertilizer as well, I think. Someone could fact check me as well, that they were also buying a bunch of fertilizer from them and financing them that way. Why are we doing it? Why are we playing both sides on the issue? It's because it's a form of self-loathing, actually.

I don't mean this just in a culturally superficial sense. I mean it in a deep-seated sense. We live in a moment of Western and particularly American self-loathing. And since I've been up the oil and gas example, I could give you six spheres of life where this is true, but let's talk about the oil and gas examples. I just brought it up. All right. Why is it that now we're talking about other religions? Let's talk about climateism. Why is it that the that the members of the Church of Climate, the climate activists are so averse to the United States producing oil and gas, but are perfectly fine with global markets that allow the likes of PetroChina and also many Russian oil and gas producers to pick up the slack. Ironically, oil and gas producers over there who have actually methane leakage that is far worse than in the Permian Basin of Texas.

And by the way, even if you subscribe to the climate religion, methane is 80 times worse for global atmosphere and global warming than is every unit of carbon dioxide. Why are they OK with that? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to the question of why those are the exact same people who are also opposed to the development of nuclear energy in the United States, which would actually be the single most efficient form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind. What's going on? The problem isn't that, let's say, nuclear energy wouldn't be good enough at solving the alleged climate crisis. It is that it would be too good at solving the alleged climate crisis, which in turn is really

just a vehicle for effectuating the agenda of global equity. So you want to know the answer to the question, why, Tim? It is because this is a moment of global redistribution back from the West to the other side of the world, including Russia and China. And everything in our self-loathing is flogging ourselves for the sins, the perceived sins of the last century, to say that we're going to give the $45 billion to Ukraine. But we also want to make sure that actually we shift oil production to places like Russia

and we don't ban the Russian oil imports because it's really just a form of self-loathing at its core. That's what we're seeing on display. And just really quick, that's because war is a racket. And throughout history, there have been powerful people supporting both sides. That's been well documented. But with the United States supporting Ukraine right now and giving them billions and billions and billions of dollars, there's this misnomer that it's, oh, Ukraine's just doing whatever Ukraine wants.

It's Ukrainian policy. But we not only incentivize the continuation of this proxy war, which is extremely dangerous, but also at the same time, we have to remember, when Zelensky actually reached a peace deal with Putin, they had a date where they were supposed to come together, sit down, meet, and negotiate, and sign a peace deal. We had Western powers come to Ukraine, specifically the UK prime minister came there and said, no, you're not signing this peace deal. And Ukraine has been the one backing away from peace, continuing this war, endangering everyone, which is absolutely insane.

As this war is also hurting the poorest people in the world, not just the people of Ukraine, but this has global economic impacts that's going to wreck our whole entire financial system in ways that we have never seen before. And I think it's right to say that there, for a lot of the activist class, there is absolutely self-loathing involved, especially when it comes to the climate change agenda. But when it comes to Ukraine specifically, and yes, even climate change, I also don't want to underestimate how many people are actually getting rich off of this, how many people are getting rich off of the subsidies to green energy,

that no, you're right, it's not as efficient as nuclear. Places like France, like we already know that. If we were to build new nuclear plants in the U.S., which I don't think has been done since the 70s, they would be even safer than the ones that exist now, but we haven't been able to do it because of fear-mongering. Same with Ukraine. It's bad for America. It is very good, very lucrative for the military-industrial complex.

Zelensky actually spoke at one of these conferences for, I guess, big war. They're not even trying to hide it at this point. It's so blatant, the exchange that's war. They're not even trying to hide it at this point. It's so blatant, the exchange that's happening. You mentioned with climate change, and it reminded me of this viral video that people keep sharing where it's this guy saying, if all of this stuff was true in every prospectus for a new construction, it would say, you know, the condos in Miami Beach, in 30 to 40 years, your investment will be zero as the water rises and makes us very uninhabitable But not a single bank not a single person has ever brought that up. So why are they still investing in?

Why are they still buying 30 to 40 year old, you know properties or loans? If the water is gonna rise and wipe out this whole area No They they're living in the beachfront properties so that other people can't do it and you know So they're safe and they are willing to take the bullet for all of us by living that cross lots of beachfront property as well Barack Obama lots of beachfront property we want to thank these guys for their sacrifice it really means a lot to thank you it's it's the meme of you know from the Simpsons of the person jumping in front

of the bullet for a poo or whatever you know i love that you're funny bill gates story he was um so he was my college commencement speaker and you know what i was looking at that time he was the world's richest man i didn't come from a lot of money i was unapologetically ready to make some after i got out of college moving to new york working at a hedge fund i was like all right let's let's figure out how one creates the level of of wealth that Gates has. The only thing he would talk about is how to, the whole speech, it was one of the more disappointing speeches I heard in my life. Remember it. I met him on stage afterwards. It was all about how to give back what one has gained. And ever since that moment, I was like, look, the expression of even giving back doesn't make sense to me because it assumes that one took in the first place.

Actually, I think he's done a lot of taking ever since he started the Giving Back Project. But making the PC was not actually the one thing that he took in the first place. That was actually the one thing that he created. And I think it was right around then. I graduated from college in 2007. Then came the 2008 financial crisis right after, right after I graduated.

And that was when this period of apologism began. And that's why I think Americanism, for a different reason too, is part of the solution is once we stop having to apologize for the successes of the modern West, for the successes of modern America,

we can have a model that the rest of the world can follow to lift themselves up. But I could almost pick 99% of the things that the four of us at this table would find disappointing about the direction of modern American culture and pin it to this culture of apologism for our own success.

And I think that that's why the answer can't be us going one at a time playing whack-a-mole, trying to send that mole back into its rabbit hole, but to instead fill that void with the sense of revived pride, an unapologetic pursuit of excellence. And that is what it means to be be american i am not going to apologize for it through some climate religion that causes me to adopt an emissions cap through some racial equity system that causes me to use a racial quota system to hand out goods according to some metric other than merit no i'm going to do this in the same way that got us 250 years into this experiment i am not going to apologize for it if we're going to make another 250 years from now that's how we're going to do it and i I think we need to get, I wouldn't use

the word religious, but I think we need to get fanatical behind the idea that set the whole experiment into motion rather than hanging on. And you might disagree with me here, but rather than hanging on the thin siren song of proceduralism, right? Liberals abandoned liberalism because they were smart. There's something about the idea of just, hey, it's just about free speech, free markets. Hey, individual autonomy. Those are just procedural norms that don't satisfy the more base human hunger in a way that wokeism

or climatism or COVIDism does. And I think that what the right needs to wake up to in this country is that just falling back on the slogans of liberalism, proceduralism is not gonna be enough. We need our own affirmative values. I think excellence, the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, what I was just talking about probably belongs on that list.

Maybe somebody else says it's something else, but we need an affirmative content that people can actually get fanatical about, but it's actually content that's actually far more rich than woke is on the other side. Let me jump to this story. We'll get to this next subject here because talking about Americanism, I think, is a good – Americanism is a good subject to segue into this story – for us to segue into this story. We have this from TimCast.com. EU approves carbon tax for individuals.

Some officials warn the new CO2 taxes could be politically suicidal and spark widespread protests. Under the EU Emissions Trading System 2, ETS2, the new polluter pays taxes will be imposed on buildings and for transportation fuels as part of a plan to reduce

Europe's greenhouse gases by 55% compared to a 1990 to 1990 levels by the year 2030. The carbon tax will impact gas, diesel, heating fuels like natural gas, making it more expensive for Europeans to travel and heat their homes. Now, we saw when France tried raising that petrol tax and then they got the Yellow Jackets protest for like two years. I don't think this will go over well, but I will just stress to everyone who is American, if you do not stand up for yourself and for what you believe in, this is coming here next. There's actual conversations in the European Union right now warning about a yellow vest populist uprising because of how they're just bleeding the average person there. And I literally wrote carbon tax because I was

going to say that next without even knowing that you were pulling up the story because it was already in my mind. Another thing I wanted to bring up really quickly, Bill Gates also is an individual who promised to give the majority of his wealth away to charity. He has since then doubled his money. It's not a coincidence because he's launching a lot of scams. And when you look at the larger kind of philanthropy scene, when you look at a lot of these people who say that they give the most, usually those are some of the most ruthless, psychopathic business people that you could ever imagine that are milking the system, abusing the system. And this larger climate change Ponzi scheme is just a way to try to bleed out the people, take away more money for them, and to control them as a form of, as a proxy social credit score system. There's a reason airlines started calculating your carbon credit score. How much carbon are you using here? There's a reason private businesses

and banks started to calculate this on their own initiatives. It wasn't their own initiatives. It was centrally controlled and centrally pushed out there. And this is the slow creeping Chinese totalitarian society that they're going to be bringing in everywhere. Europe is just the beginning. They're going to be bringing it here to the United States eventually. Canada is right lock and step with Europe. In Canada, they've actually floated, it's not being implemented or anything like that,

but actually capping the number of miles that an individual may be able to travel. So essentially, if you drive for work and you want to go on vacation for summer holidays, well, guess what? You can't buy that plane ticket. You've already exceeded your mile quota. And they've even floated things like, oh, you could have cap and trade for summer holidays. Well, guess what? You can't buy that plane ticket. You've already exceeded your mile, your, your mile quota. And they've even floated things like, oh, you could have cap and trade for individual miles. And oh, you have an electric vehicle. Well,

now we can monitor who is going where and driving what. So they might actually be able to just press a button and stop your engine to ground you so that you don't go anywhere. Uh, this is terrifying and it's being done in the name of compassion. And I think, you know what? I, I'm, I'm going to say this. If these policies take hold anywhere, it's not going to be Europe. It will be Canada. Let me ask you, do you think maybe 10, 20 years you're driving your Tesla and then you get a carbon energy consumption warning and it slows you down and says return home? You've consumed too much energy.

Yeah. And it's like you're in an arcade. If not, we're going to have a central bank digital currency that is deducted from your account that is linked to your otherwise carbon emission footprint unless you actually comply. That's where we're headed. There are people trying to get that done for the Canadian trucker protests already. Electric vehicles that were, they were trying to actually ground them, make them unable to

move. The state of California literally told people, stop charging your electric vehicles. Why? Because their power grid was going down. Why? Because they're going into this green energy revolution, which is, again, a larger carbon tax, a larger social credit score system. I'm glad you mentioned California because here's how the global cascade works on any of these climatists or even beyond climate policies. Europe does something boneheaded because they have their own insecurity complexes apologizing for their own colonialist past or whatever is going on in Europe. California then copies that European policy. California then becomes competitively disadvantaged relative to other states. But California, which has the largest pension

fund system in the country, CalPERS, uses its money to get BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard to then implement that through the private sector for the rest of the country. So that is the same cascade. We see that pattern time and again, which is why every American citizen should absolutely pay attention to what is happening in Western Europe, because it's going to find its way into the United States by the government of California, which then runs through the money of CalPERS, which then runs through the money that streams into the private sector of the United States. That's just the loop. It's sort of the unpaid, the unidentified invisible road of social policy from Europe into the media.

I'm glad you mentioned stuff like that because those ESG scores, I mean, people start to wonder why is Disney going so woke when their movies keep bombing? Well, it's exactly because of those investors that are looking specifically for companies that are pushing these. And it's not for financial gain because clearly these companies aren't making money. It is actually an ideological push. And I think you're wrong if you believe that, oh, money is the ultimate mover and maker right now because there are people who are willing to lose a lot of money in order to push this agenda. Which is why I'm also more optimistic

on market solutions than I am on government solutions, by the way. Do you guys, I don't know if we haven't talked about this out there, but if you know what Strive, want to know what Strive, or does that mean? A little bit. Yeah. So my whole view is, look, just for people who aren't aware of what's going on with the BlackRock problem, all right?

You've got three asset managers. They manage over $20 trillion. Okay, that's BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. That is, by the way, the largest private sector aggregation of capital in human history. I've actually started studying this going all the way back to the Dutch East India Company and beyond. This is the most powerful aggregation of corporate capital in human history. But they're using the money of those everyday citizens to tell oil companies to drill for

less oil, tech companies to adopt racial hiring systems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you ask most people in this country, actually, I'll give a homework assignment to anyone watching this show. Literally, go cetera, et cetera. Well, if you ask most people in this country, actually I'll give a homework assignment to anyone watching this show, literally go ask your financial advisor, go ask the person who runs your 401k plan at work, was my money used to vote in favor of a racial equity audit at Apple or a emissions cap at Chevron?

First thing they'll tell you is they don't know because they probably don't. Tell them to find out and you're almost certain to find out the answer was directly or indirectly. Yes. Once you know that, it's you got to recognize it is your own money that is actually being used to vote for the very policies that we're sitting here.

I bet probably directly or indirectly, I would be willing to bet that most of the three of you, if not all three of you, had your own investment accounts in some way directly or indirectly voting for those policies, once people wake up to that reality, you can move your own money in a way that at least gets much further than the government's going to get to in the next 24 months. I mean, sure, mine is it, by the way. Right, right. So break this down for us. How would your money fall into the hands of those companies? Yeah, so it's like a game of Plinko. You've seen The Price is Right, you know that game that you drop the Plinko chip? Oh, yeah.

You don't know it, Lance? Yeah, it's a pretty good game. So there's a bunch of intermediaries. So let's say, you know, I'll give you a couple different cascades. Let's say you are working at a company, you put your money in a 401k account because you put that away, there's a tax advantage associated with doing so, whatever. Well, that's invested in index funds. You don't know who those index funds are because you have only a menu that your 401k

plan administrator picks. Well, those index funds tend to be provided by the three largest asset managers, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, Invesco, by the way, is number four. They're not much better in this metric. Now, what do they do? They use that money to buy shares in publicly traded companies across the American economy. That's what an index fund is. You own the index. Now, with that comes not only a financial entitlement which is the right to receive the profits and dividends that's what you get if you own a share of a company but also the right to vote because if you're a shareholder in this company you have a right to actually have say who runs the company how much they're paid and so on however that

voting power rests with the index fund manager the black BlackRock, the vanguard of the world. And what they're doing now is they're using that share to not vote for what actually advances the financial interests of the person in that 401k account, but to implement someone else's political agenda. Who's that someone else?

Actually, it turns out that's CalPERS. It's California's pension fund system. That's the state of New York's pension fund system who've explicitly, starting when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords, this is about four years ago, they said that, well, look, if the government isn't going to address climate change

or racial injustice, then we in the private sector have to do it instead. So we, California, and by the way, Norway or whoever else do the same thing, we're gonna pull our money from you, BlackRock or Vanguard, unless you use everyone else's money that you manage to vote this agenda in place. And so they drag everyone else along for the ride,

because they know that mom and pop working with their 401k account ain't going to pay attention. They don't know what's going on. So it was by design that that's actually what's implementing this agenda, where if you put it in the ballot box, that same mom and pop would say, hell no. If you ask them, do you want your money to be used to implement that same climate agenda or racial equity agenda, they will still say hell no. But little do they know that their hard-earned dollars that they banked away in that 401k account was indeed the very weapon that was used to implement that agenda in the first place.

And it's not just individuals. It's also states. It's also countries entirely just giving all of their money to these institutions and not even knowing that they're doing so. And I believe it was West Virginia and Florida are the only states that kind of moved out of it away from the ESG score, which I think is worth noting here, because there is a way if people spread this information enough, there is a way to move away from the system that we are incentivizing and giving money to, which is absolutely crazy. And I think we should stop immediately doing so. And I don't mean to plug my own stuff or whatever,

but just factually speaking, I didn't think I was going to start another business. I thought I was done. I hung the jersey on business after biotech. The reason I came back to it is literally this is a problem that is begging to be solved through the market. So that is literally why I started Strive, which is to be a voice in the market that uses shareholder power, that tells these companies to knock it off with the politics and to focus exclusively on making excellent products and services, to make money, and to do it without having to apologize for it. And the irony is, like, back in 1990, you would have said, this is banal. This is the most boring thing you possibly could do. Yet today, there's no other major firm I'm aware of that's actually started doing it. And, you know, what's funny is we've,

I mean, there's a million things I would have done differently. Three months in, we crossed half a billion dollars. It took JP Morgan when they entered the ETF business, the exchange traded funded business, I'm told over two years to cross a billion. It's like upstart. We're three months in, we crossed half a billion because of the demand of the everyday citizen for this basic alternative invoice they bring to the table. Can you break down in layman's terms what it is you do? Yeah, so Strive is basically the new company I founded. It is competing directly with the likes of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard, offering index funds, ways to invest in the market, to own the companies in these underlying indices,

but with a different mandate to the underlying companies. Using not a gentle ask, but using shareholder power to mandate these companies to focus exclusively on products and profits over politics and social agendas. Have you talked with anyone in government in West Virginia or Florida about- I've been talking to people across the states in the country, and it's been a wake up,

it's been an exercise in waking these people up to what's happening in their own backyard. Now, the funny thing is, a lot of these folks are really happy in red states and otherwise to point the finger to BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard. And that's fine when it's a lot harder for them to admit what's happening in their own backyard. We're talking about the deep state at the federal level. The deep state within the states is actually even more eye opening. When you look at how Florida or how even the state of Texas, forget blue states, how those states' pension funds, even for the proxies, the shareholder votes that they cast internally, they're every bit as bad as the ESG industrial complex at BlackRock,

racial equity audits at Amazon, civil rights representative on Facebook's board without reelecting Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen. They say they want to reelect them. They want to appoint a civil rights representative to Facebook's board. That's the state of Florida, right? And so I think that, I think that like a lot of conservatives, a lot of red states, they're really good at pointing out the problem in somebody else's yard, but not good enough at looking actually at the cesspool in even their own state governments in their own backyards. And so one of the things I've been trying to do is talk, yes, to all of these states and more, educating them about what's even happening in their own little fiefdom.

And the more people get educated, the more it becomes difficult for them not to take action of some kind. I think that's what we're beginning to see. If social media allows you to have a voice. And I absolutely agree with you. I do believe the market is a way better solution and should fix everything. But we have a lot of socialism when it comes to a lot of these government officials manipulating the market for their own personal benefit. But at the end of the day, for me personally, if you believe the government is going to solve any problem, you're either insane or delusional. So I'm with you. I think what you're doing is exciting.

It sounds really awesome, to be honest with you. And I think if more people were aware, like, hey, I'm in a red state, but my retirement is going to the ESG, I think a lot of people would act on it immediately. I would. And I did personally, too. I have someone that handles my retirement. And I'm like, I don't want my money in any of this nonsense.

And he handles it in a way where he makes sure he doesn't prioritize a lot of this bigger bull crap. We talked with the state treasurer from West Virginia who came on the show last week. Yeah, Riley. Good guy. You met him. Oh, yeah. He's a friend. And he was telling, yeah, exactly. We've written together.

That's what I was going to ask you about. He talked about getting West Virginia out of all the ESG companies, saying we're not going to do contracts with them. These companies were saying we will not provide financing for the oil industry, for the coal industry, for fossil fuels. And that's West Virginia, strong point of West Virginia. So he said, then get out. We need to see more of that. Here's a, I mean, this is going to be probably getting too boring and technical for you guys, but the thing I've learned is a lot of the state treasurers have been making a lot of noise. Turns out they don't have a ton of power. I hope I don't upset some of them by saying this,

but I'm just gonna call it like I see it. The real money is in the pension fund systems, right? So what the state treasurers have is like a pittance. They'll move a few hundred million dollars, which sounds a lot on a foxnews.com headline, but is actually a pittance compared to a $20 trillion problem where the tens or hundreds of billions

are actually in the pension systems. And there you have politically insulated actors, right? You have actors who are designed to be not responsive to the will of the everyday citizens that are through layers and layers of appointments, the people who sit on those bureaucratic bodies, that's really where the decisions get made. So, you know, even, even that Florida decision, they pulled 2 billion from BlackRock or whatever that was mostly cash and short-term like like, fixed income, like, lending instruments. Nothing to do with the equity problem, which is owning stocks and actually telling companies how to behave. That's in a different part of a state bureaucracy's apparatus. And it's, again, the same problem that we're talking about with the federal government, the whole FBI issue. It's the same issue here too, where the people who we elect to run the government

are really good at projecting to the public that they're able to exercise actual political power. When in fact, that only deepens the problem because they're not even the ones who are exercising the real political power, which is a bureaucratic technocracy that sits beneath the level of detection. That's really where the meat is.

It absolutely is a political bureaucracy. And I know you're right that it's not left versus right, as simple as that. But once more, these structures that actually extend to things like pension funds, I don't think we can overlook that yet. These are all leftists, right? So the thing with leftist activists is that they are not just at their job they are a leftist activist at their job that is exactly why something like an esg score even exists in the first place and so what is frustrating to me with the right is that okay we are trying to further our agenda by saying let's not be political a lot of the times and a lot of time that's all that the right is asking for is just political neutrality i would like to see the right fight back a little

bit more and say no that's actually not enough right it's for is just political neutrality. I would like to see the right fight back a little bit more and say, no, that's actually not enough, right? It's actually not just enough to say, oh, we're going to care about finances and not that your firm should be in this, but individual companies. I would love to see more of them actually say, hang on, we're actually afraid to say something that's pro-abortion. We want to be pro-life because we know otherwise we're going to be upsetting the conservative consumer base just as much as we would be upsetting the left-wing, rabid, regressive consumer base. But unfortunately, the right is still not on the same cultural level that the left is in that regard. Do you see that viral video from, is it live action or live action? Live action. Live action. See, I always say one and then think it's the other, where this woman, she comes in and

their boss and the manager, they're like, so we heard the good news. We heard news. You're pregnant. She's like, I am. And they're like, let us know. There's anything we can do for you. We'll get you a flight, whatever you need, a flight out of state. We'll get you a really nice hotel.

And she's like, flight out of state? And they're like, right, right. When do you think you get back to work? We're thinking a couple weeks. And she's like, after giving birth. And they're like, oh, we meant, you know. So these companies, I think this one's obvious. They want to save money.

It's cheaper just to have a woman go get an abortion than it is to actually provide benefits. Pay for maternity leave as well as dependence on the health care. No, it's it's being spun as this feminist thing to pay for an employee's abortion. It's really just, I mean, capitalism trying to get you back to your nine to five, which in other circumstances feminists would oppose, but because it enables abortion, they're actually for it. Kroger is one of the places that said that they would come and pay for abortions. Tesla? Yeah, Microsoft as well.

There's a whole bunch of them. I encourage anyone who watches this to actually look up those lists of companies and stop shopping there because otherwise you are literally funding abortion. That's not hyperbole. You are financing these employees' abortions. You've got to vote with your dollar. I think a lot of people realize that you have a lot more power when it comes to deciding what you incentivize than just going to that ballot box once every four years. So just to ask you directly, if you could have your way, what would happen?

How can we take action on this? How can we move forward? If you were able to decide how we move forward, what would be the next step? Transparency, first of all. So look, the way I look at it, we live in a free country.

If you want with your own money to advance an environmental agenda or a social agenda, whatever that is, pro-life agenda, pro-choice agenda, whatever it is, if you want to do it with your own money, we live in a free country, you're free to do that.

But if you're not free to do it with OPM, okay, other people's money, okay? That's especially used, we talk about that all the time, okay? You can't do it with OPM. So if you're going to do it with other people's money, there's a really simple standard. You just need to tell them you're doing it, and you need to get their consent. So what happens when every wealth manager, every 401k account in corporate America, every 401k plan manager, every pension fund manager goes and asks the teacher, the doctor, the nurse, the engineer, hey, are you cool with me using your money to vote

in favor of a racial equity-based hiring system that's a effective quota system in corporate America? Most of them are going to have a pretty clear answer. They're going to say, hell no, I'm not. Now for the 20% or the 10% who's fine with it, that's great, that restores integrity back into the system. And some of those people are gonna say, you know what? I would trade off a few dollars of investment return if you actually make sure that these companies embrace pro-life causes.

And if you're doing that with your own money, I'm fine with that too, but I would not be fine with an asset manager, even though I'm right of center, doesn't matter. I don't think an asset manager should be using somebody else's money to fund a pro-life cause without the capital owner actually knowing it. So my ask is actually pretty simple. Transparency, disclosure, consent, and actually prosecute, bring civil action or otherwise against the people who violate those principles. That's the challenge, though. If they're not playing by the rules and you are,

they're winning. Well, part of the role of a market actor is also to raise hell and make sure that they are damn well playing by the same rules by the time we're done with this. And so this is a bottom-up revolution, not in our politics, but it's in our market because people are voting every day with their dollars. They just don't think of themselves as voting as they do once a year when they go to the ballot box every November. Once they realize that, though, that knowledge is the first step to actually giving them choice, make sure the other guy's feet are held to the fire, that they are playing by the same rules. We don't need to pass new laws for this, by the way. Most of these are violations,

I believe, of laws that are already on the books. Basic fiduciary principles. If you're Sam Bankman-Fried, you cannot use a customer's funds in a way that a customer did not agree to without his permission. That's the crime on offer. Well, I don't care if you dress it up, as he did actually, by the way, too, in an ESG clothing. You could say the same thing. You can't use somebody else's money to advance your own agenda without telling them you're doing it unless you get their permission. Same principles, just got to apply those standards even-handedly. I think red states are slowly, slowly beginning to wake up to it. And I think people really need to know about this because I would be pissed. My money is going to

promote wokeness. But also, more importantly, I think people need to realize you're losing money because you're incentivizing a lot of this nonsense that doesn't make money. And at the end of the day, your retirement account is losing on its investment. You want me to make a blood boil one step? Since we're on the kick of pissing you off here. So with one hand, okay, the Black Rocks of the world are pressuring Exxon and Chevron and others to effectively drill for less oil with emissions caps. Turns out those companies have to drop oil production projects to meet those net zero standards by 2050. Guess who's – let me ask you just a question about your net reactions.

You may know where I'm going with this, so you'll probably get it right. Do you think those projects are still proceeding, or do you think that they actually just got dropped in the interest of staving off global emissions? Which do you think it is between the two? Dropped. No, wrong answer. Projects are proceeding. They're just proceeding under new ownership.

So the firms that are buying up these projects from Chevron include the likes of PetroChina on the other side of the world. Now you ask the final question. Guess who's one of the largest shareholders of PetroChina? It is none other than BlackRock, the very firm that was actually pressuring the Exxons and Chevrons of the world over here to drop those kinds of projects. That is how deep this runs. You don't know why? Because if you go to China and say, I'm going to establish an ESG agenda and scope three

emissions targets, they're going to tell you to get the heck out and to shut the door on your way out because we built a great Chinese wall, the great wall that stops you from entering the Chinese market if you're going to tell you to get the heck out and to shut the door on your way out because we built a great chinese wall the great wall that stops you from entering the chinese market if you're going to mess with our companies but actually if you're also one of those firms that's doing it to the u.s we'll roll out the red carpet and that's exactly why blackrock became the first foreign owner to win a license to sell mutual funds in china a few years ago because they were doing the bidding of the cc So this runs deep, right? And when you have sort of concentrated nodes of private public power in the United States,

that's what lends it to capture even by other governments like the CCP in a truly decentralized free market system or in a truly decentralized democratic body politic, by the way, that doesn't lend itself to capture, including by foreign actors. But when you have that level of concentration of both capital, but also capital coordinated with state action, that's what lends itself to capture from abroad.

And that's the game the CCP has actually mastered too. This brings me to something I've been talking about for a very long time, because we have seen a lot of Western elites, a lot of Wall Street firms prop up China. And I think they're using China as a vessel not only to test out their draconian, big brother, totalitarian policies, but more importantly, I think China is the direction the whole world is going in. And we see individuals like Bill Gates literally advise the Chinese government. I don't think that's a coincidence here.

What do you think is really going on here? How do you think this is developing? Because for me personally, I'm seeing this as an attempt by many elites to make China as an example for the rest of the world. Klaus Schwab even openly talks about this. Bill Gates openly compliments China with their zero COVID policies when they're actually creating humanitarian crises and violating human rights on so many different levels. So to me, China is the playground of the elites. They're using it for the future for everyone. Is that correct or is that too much? I view it just in reverse.

Whereas I think that when people who you call the elites are really just the circus monkeys. Okay, Tim Cook and Larry Fink are Xi Jinping's circus monkeys. He will say jump, they will ask how high because it actually comes down to money, right? So the game we played in this country, and by the way, this is not just Democrat, Republican, this is Democrats and

Republicans, by the way, starting in the 1990s, had this philosophy of democratic capitalism in the United States. The way it went was, we're going to export Big Macs and Happy Meals, and somehow we're going to imagine that spreads democracy to places like China. We're going to use our money to get them to be more like us. What China realized, and they're always playing a longer game than we are, is that actually we can turn that on its head. We can use our money, access to our market, to get America to be more like us. Or one step better, they realized they could use our own money to get us to be more like us because we're the ones who invested there in the first place. Well, there's that old neoliberal idea that as a nation progresses economically,

that naturally liberty and democracy will follow. So that was the idea with all the foreign direct investment. It was dead wrong. It's dead wrong. That's the thing. That's the idea with the foreign direct investment to China. Not only do we get all these cheaper goods, but hey, we also get to democratize them. We get to make them exactly Western like us. You know, I grew up in China partially. Yeah. Not only in Hong Kong, but also in Shanghai. And it was shocking, absolutely unbelievable the amount of progress and development that happened while I was living under there. But the thing is, they I think they overestimated the draw that American neoliberalism will have, because as China has gotten more developed, it's actually I mean, people say it's communist. It's not really communist. It's the strange hybrid of state-run authoritarianism. They're actually seeing the decadences of the West and they are using the capital that the West has essentially transferred over to them in order to combat it directly.

And we see this through TikTok. Chinese TikTok is not the same as Western TikTok. You go on Western TikTok and they're offering you up videos of trans, non-binary, whatever. Chinese TikTok is not the same as Western TikTok. You go on Western TikTok and they're offering you up videos of trans, non-binary, whatever. Chinese TikTok is actually educational. It's math and engineering. Exactly. And that's not an accident. China is very aware of the societal ills that the West has, basically the same thing. And they're actually trying to encourage them abroad while limiting it at home.

So you hit the nail on the head there. So there's no distinction in China between economic policy and military policy. They're two sides of the same coin. Okay. So what's really going on here is I think it's their version or their vision of the Trojan War. Okay. Greece was not going to defeat Troy militarily any more than China is going to defeat the United States militarily. Ain't going to happen in the foreseeable future, okay? But what they realized is that we can give the other side the gift they cannot resist. In Greece's case, we can give them the Trojan horse that we know they cannot resist.

We'll use that to burn them from within. For us, absolutely. It's global capitalism itself. The illusion of global capitalism itself, that is the sweet siren song that we know the West and America in particular cannot resist. We will turn their own companies, Apple, Airbnb, TikTok as an app, whatever it is,

as Trojan horses to undermine their system from within. And people pick on TikTok right now for a good reason. I think it's a data collection Trojan horse. Forget the Chinese company, right? To buy Dan's own TikTok.

Just take Airbnbbnb for example not a lot of people know this but this is like front page wall street journal reporting three years ago i wrote about a little bit more in my book airbnb american company headquartered in silicon valley esg darling by the way puts a neat little black square on its instagram account to stand solidarity with black lives matter okay what do they do They are literally handing over the American user data on their platform, including private messages between people who rent and the hosts on their platform,

geolocational data, et cetera, as a condition for doing business in China. They don't get to do business in China unless they hand that over. Do they tell US users that they're doing it? Absolutely not. Did their chief privacy officer resign? Yes, he did. But you know, Nate Blacharczyk, he was a couple years ahead of me in

college, what did he say? He was quoted and saying it internally at their meeting. We're not here, we're not here to promote American values. So we in America are fine with that. We think that companies should not exist to promote American values, they should exist to sell goods and services. But the problem is on a global stage, China does believe that those companies exist to promote Chinese values. And unless they abide by that, they don't get to do business there. So that's how they've actually turned our own game on its head. And here we are playing along, going along for the ride.

Ten years from now, if we wake up to today, I think there's something we can do about it. Ten years from now, wait to wake up to this, we're done. It's toast. I mean, same with our lack of capital controls. This is especially a problem in Canada, but you have all of these Chinese property buyers who are not only buying residential areas, you know, entire projects, but also buying up things like ports, right? So it's not just the financial system. We're actually talking about physicality. China owns the West. This is not even mentioning the amount of dollars that they have in reserve, right?

So I get that people are saying, oh, this is a problem we need to address militarily. China doesn't really need to lift a finger in terms of arms to, I would say, fatally hurt the American system at this point. They have police departments inside of the United States and Canada from the Chinese government. I mean, they have a lot of sphere of influence,

but they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller going over there and opening up China to the world. That's the nice phrase that they used. But in all actuality, they just used China as a vehicle to spread globalization. They took all the factory jobs from the United States, they shipped it over there, and they made a deal with China, saying, hey, we're going to be working with you guys one-on-one. This is the pathway by Henry Kissinger that led us here,

and now we're in this situation that you're describing. So you're totally right. Kissinger screwed up. No, no, no, no, no. Kissinger doesn't screw up. Kissinger, I think, is a brilliant human being, and I think a lot of his screw-ups actually do benefit a lot of his friends. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Kissinger screwed up in—screwed up may be the wrong word. Screwed us. Screwed us. Kissinger screwed everyone else over for the benefit of his friends. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Kissinger screwed up in, screwed up may be the wrong word. Screwed us.

No, no, yes, yes. Screwed us. Kissinger screwed everyone else over for the benefit of his friends. Screwed up or not screwed us. Like his policies usually do. His legacy screwed us. Okay, now though, that's the easy part.

Identifying that in the rear view mirror and blaming, and correctly assigning blame is the first step, fine. What do we do about it? The question is, there a going to be a sacrifice it is not a small sacrifice it will be very big sacrifice an economic sacrifice that we're going to have to be willing to make to say that we're not going to defeat an enemy who we depend on to supply our iphones and our movies and the sneakers that we wear on a given day is that a sacrifice we're willing to make we're not even willing to make a sacrifice to ban tiktok because kids are

so addicted to it what level of sacrifice are we going to be willing to make. We're not even willing to make a sacrifice to ban TikTok because kids are so addicted to it. What level of sacrifice are we going to be willing to make? It goes back to the thing I said earlier. It's like giving cocaine to the drug addict. Okay. If the drug addict can't say no to the thing they're addicted to, they're just heading down the road to the black hole of their own misery. That's where we are in our relationship with China right now. We don't have it in us. We don't have it in us. We don't have the fortitude to cut ourselves off from the comforts that we're going to have to give up in the short run in order to fix this for the long run. Well, if you look at China's model of economic nationalism, there are things that the U.S. could copy essentially and ensure that they take greater control of their own companies, their own capital. But like you said, they're not

going to do it. And I bring this back to movies because again, Mediaholic channel, China, you actually, they limit the number of foreign movies that you can bring into China every single year. And obviously China's this huge market for movies, a lot of revenue. So what Hollywood does is that they actually do joint partnerships with Chinese production. So if you ever wondered why there are so many different movies that are filmed in places like Shanghai and Hong Kong counts for these purposes, though it's an SAR. It is because if you partner with Chinese production, then you get to skirt around the quota. Now you're no longer one of the maybe 10 films or whatever it may be that they release from foreign production houses. Now you actually count as local. So you can give as many movies as you want in China. You take a greater share of the cut. And what that means is that actually Hollywood

is funding the Chinese Communist Party. And it's a smart move, but you see the United States, like you said, they would never ever do something that bold. I guess that economically national, they're not strong enough to do that. The only thing I would say, Lauren, is one thing we gotta be careful of,

and I see a little bit of this sloppiness on the right sometimes, is there could be two very different justifications for taking similar courses of policy. One is just straight up economically protectionist, which is to say that, oh, they took our jobs and, you know, we need to we need to know they're they're making stuff cheaper than we are here. I'm not super sympathetic to the economically protectionist account of giving and coddling the American worker. What I'm talking about is the national security side of the line. And actually, it turns out that a lot of these policies can

point in the same direction. But when China is viewing economic policy and military policy as two sides of the same coin, I think that when it comes to a national security question, we got to treat it as a national security issue that defends us against the one threat that actually matters to the United States. That's not Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, Ukraine, and it's China. But I think that we got to be careful not to make that a sloppy way into anti-meritocratic American worker coddling, which I think we could use less of rather than more, even though sometimes on the right people end up conflating, you know, a lot of that's where I part ways with Josh Hawley and whatnot is the justification for taking courses of action that might make sense for national security grounds don't work for me

if it's just anti-meritocratic laziness. Well, I think we're at a point now where people would be more willing to accept some economic protectionism if it's in the name of national security after COVID, right? Because so many people saw that, hey, we don't actually make a lot of drugs in the United States anymore. We don't make a lot of PPE in the United States anymore. So there are definitely certain industries where I think people would be willing to say, let's make the sacrifice in order to support American business. We already see that historically with American steel, right? Because

we understand the importance of wartime. I don't think people would be as willing to do that for when it comes to those cheap goods that we can get at the dollar store, right? Because the average consumer is going to think, why am I paying more for, I don't know, whatever it may be, my toothbrush now, for my iPhone now, like how is this part of national security? That would be a really hard sell in terms of policy to the public. I don't have an answer for that. Yeah, I mean, I think any time, the litmus test for me is if China is using a company as a vehicle to advance a geopolitical goal, we need to treat that as what it is. It is a geopolitical question. It is a security question. It is not just an economic question. Where does

that leave us? Probably banning TikTok. I mean, not just TikTok. We're also talking about the NBA as well. We see them pushing this leftist agenda. They have big contracts with China, and they won't say a thing about free speech i mean it's it's even something as simple some might say apolitical as sports there's also the economic incentive like china is in that they are controlling that that's why lebron james despite all his blm activism won't say a thing about the yugra muslims yeah i mean these are again circus monkeys of the ccp as i said earlier do you think there could be a market solution to this? Because I'm thinking about this, and I just don't want the government deciding what we can and cannot see. I think a bigger solution, and this is just me being optimistic, is giving people an internet bill of rights, where you have your data, you protect your data. And I think the

reason why all this sabotage and spying and fifth-generational warfare is going on, because it's not just benefiting the Chinese. It's also benefiting the American deep state. They're getting data sets. Facebook knows when you take a dump. They know everything you do, and they have garnered so much intelligence. They knew when I was about to give birth

because I was Googling pregnancy stuff. They knew when the newborn was coming. But there's advertisements being sent to mothers that are sent before they even know that they're pregnant themselves based on their behaviors and activities that they commit on social media. So I think the one step moving forward is saying, hey, your data, you control it. And if you want to sell it to another company, you have that right to do that.

Is there a possibility for that to happen, rather than the government coming in and just banning these accounts? Because I think also there needs to be a lot more public awareness at the severity of just this kind of deep state spying that's happening. I mean, I've seen libertarians argue that even something like a bill of rights for the Internet would be government action in and of itself. Because you can't forget if there's an Internet bill of rights that also necessitates that there's some sort of penalty or enforcement. So I think you're talking about fancy solutions in terms of market solutions. I think there's actually lower hanging fruit just to keep it even simpler. I think in the same way that globalization represented an

opportunity in the 1990s, just from a raw investment perspective, I think deglobalization represents a massive investment opportunity from a capital allocation perspective over the next 10 years ahead as well. You know, so I'll give you one small example, right? I still, you know, company, I've done business in China before, by the way, and I was exchange student my senior year of college at Peking University. That's, you know, sort of the Harvard of China, they call it, done business in China thereafter. I've seen what that looks like. I said that when I founded Strive, I said, look, we're not going to do business in China. We're not, we're going to make that commitment on day one. Why do I say that? Is that because I dislike

the CCP? I personally dislike the CCP, but that's nothing to do with it. As to the fact that you can't be a good fiduciary to an American consumer managing an American's funds, speaking as a vocal shareholder on behalf of American clients, if you have the boot of the CCP on your neck. Now, I think that that is actually a business opportunity to operate with greater integrity, serving the American consumer unapologetically in a way that the pendulum, when it swung so far in one direction, you know, is sort of a classic maxim of Warren Buffett, be brave when others are fearful, be fearful when others are brave, to actually be contrarian and go in the other direction,

to be an even better steward for the American customer by differentiating yourself, by making sure that the thing that differentiates you is that you are not under the bear hug or under the auspice or with a gun to your head from the CCP. And so I just think that deglobalization broadly and a willingness to invest to serve the citizens of nations rather than global citizens can itself be an economic opportunity that defines probably great businesses that can be built on the back of that over the next decade. Now, operationalizing that into an internet through a tech based infrastructure or the blockchain or whatever else, I mean, that gets complicated, free speech bill of rights or internet bill of rights. You know, those are all thorny issues

we could spend a five hour discussion on in their own right. But I just think about even basic business builders and entrepreneurs stepping up and saying that I can, in order to put my American customer first, that itself is a business opportunity that I can liberate myself from, even if that means sacrificing the extra 30% of the opportunity that I could have gotten by going to China. And I think we're going to see more of that. Lauren, if I could just ask you, because I grew up in Poland during communism, my family tells me all these crazy stories about what they had to go through because of the KGB and the government there. Do you have similar stories growing up in China? Does your family tell you stories of maybe how the social credit score was being put into place or anything like that? I mostly grew up in Hong Kong. My dad is Cantonese from Hong Kong.

My views about, I guess, the benefits versus cons of British colonialism have gotten me in trouble on Twitter many a time. So, you know, my parents, they've been in Hong Kong during things like the umbrella protests. And personally, I witnessed that every time I go back to Hong Kong, you see more and more actual propaganda. And for anyone who's not familiar with Hong Kong, it is one of the most developed and I guess financially free places on the planet, right? 15% flat tax. You're walking down the main street and there are all these major brands, Dior, Chanel, you name it, now with CCP propaganda covered over it. So this is absolutely something that's gotten increasingly worse over the past few years. And there's footage of people doing

things like trying to rip down those data hubs, essentially, that are trying to monitor your face. So this is something that, I mean, you know, it's even more recent. And that's what's so scary about it, because you hear about these losses of freedoms, and you think maybe Soviet Union or a generation ago, you know, maybe even further back. But no, this is actually some freedoms are actually something that you can lose in real time. And heck, even I'm going to bring it to Canada that my nationalities have not been doing too well in terms of safeguarding liberties. I'm also Canadian. It's the same thing in Canada as well. I mean, you're freezing bank accounts now. So like

where are these people supposed to go at a certain point when literally, I would say most nations are backsliding? Yeah, I mean, I was in kong during a lot of the protests there and the way that the chinese government squashes protests and and the measures that they put in is absolutely terrifying i i talked to a lot of the protesters there i've done on the ground reporting i was in the tear gas i was in the craziness and just the level of sophistication when it comes to their intelligence surveillance state police state it is terrifying right and i think i you know i've spoken with my husband about this before uh if we are in a situation where liberty is essentially dissolving everywhere we

go i would rather live in a state that is at least less physically and technologically capable of oppressing you than one that is right which is why there are so many people that I know just personally. Incompetent dictatorship rather than a competent one. Exactly. You're right. And that's something that I think Rousseau has kind of written about. I would rather at least a dictator who's only got a limited reach due to limited resources rather than, I mean, somewhere like Hong Kong, like China, like Canada. And I would say in a lot of ways, yeah, like Europe. We're going to go to Superchats now. So if you haven't already, would you kindly smash that like button, subscribe to this channel,

share the show with your friends, and become a member over at timcast.com. We are going to have a members-only show coming up. Those go up around 11 p.m. Eastern time. So we record those usually after we wrap. But we're going to read Super Chats from you. So again, smash that like button. Let's read some of your comments.

And I'll just address everybody in the chat. I am sleeping, actually. It is because I'm very tired, because we flew out here, we did the show, it's work, work, work. And then today, not only did I do my morning show, I also recorded for PragerU, which was really awesome. They were awesome. And then we're here. And then so then once everybody got into it, I was like, man, they're holding it down. I'm going to chill, and then we'll get to the Super Chats, and here we are. So let's read. All right. Autistic Musings says, why don't you ask your politician guests why they aren't running on getting the Epstein client list exposed? You would think there is no better platform to run on than that. And it unifies people, too, from the left and the right. A lot of people know that the whole Jeffrey Epstein saga doesn't add up, doesn't make any sense. You can unify America with it. Yeah, but, you know, Luke, we just saw a handful of politicians at TPUSA, and you were asking about church commissions. Yeah, absolutely. What about Epstein? Church commissions would

probably expose what happened with Epstein. And again, if people don't know what happened with Epstein, it's an international trafficking and extortion operation run by the intelligence agencies for over 30 plus years. So high levels of the government, big banks, all involved in trafficking small children, the most unspeakable, sickest, nastiest things that happen in this world. The fact that the client list is still not released shows you just how corrupt our whole institution is

and how the intelligence agencies probably have a lot of dirt on all of our politicians, especially individuals like Bill Gates. I'm looking at your shirt, man. Huh? I'm looking at your shirt, man. Huh? I'm looking at your shirt. Yes. I really do love that we're going into the holidays,

and what we did with Thanksgiving, but also with this Christmas, everyone's going to have the opportunity to be elected. That Epstein thing was true, huh? Alex Jones was right. Alex Jones was right. Dollar in the jar. That's right, everybody. I have like 15 Epstein shirts just to get the conversation started

and sparked up. So, I mean, no better way. I mean, this is something that everyone on the left and right, everybody. I have like 15 Epstein shirts just to get the conversation started and sparked up. So, I mean, no better way. I mean, this is something that everyone on left and right agrees on. I mean, this should be a major talking point, and it's not. Yeah, absolutely. All right, we got Beavis McLean who says, Tim, quit stealing my spoons and hiding them on the moon. I demand that you put pictures of my favorite people, you, Luke, Ian,

and possibly Michael Malice in Times Square, and I can forgive you for the thefts. Me, I, Luke, Ian, we are in Times Square right now. It's actually really crazy. Plus, right on the North Tower on the ground, there's two three-sided, it's like a big screen, it's like a cube. And it says Timcast IRL. I saw it. It looks pretty good.

You saw it? Yeah, I saw it. I'm excited. I saw it a couple weeks ago. There was some ad agency in my DMs, and I had checked out their profile. They're legit. They wanted to get on a call with me about purchasing stuff in Times Square. It's like, I don't know who you think I am

that I could do that. Who you bet on the show. Well, I guess. They think I have billboard money. It's like, no. We did it for New Year's, so it's going to be up on New Year's when everyone's filming.

It's going to be a big Timcast. Doing that is about sending a message. We want to be in the cultural spaces. We want to be dominating the cultural spaces. So one thing I'm really, really excited about is in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be setting up a coffee shop. And then we're going to hopefully have 10 coffee shops in a year or two. And then we're going to have 20 coffee shops, maybe 1,000.

But these are places people can go and hang out. These are places where you'll walk in. It's a brick and mortar. The physical world. Who would have thought about that? Physical world. You'll walk in to buy a coffee, and there will be TVs playing this show, playing Pop Culture Crisis Tales from the Inverted World.

We'll also have your show playing. We will have people that we think are sending good messages just as the default content when you're sitting down having a coffee. But wait, I know what the audience is wanting to know. I saw this on Twitter, the suggestion. Is it going to be called the coffee beanie? No,

because the coffee bean already exists. That was my idea. It's a chain of coffee shops. Yeah, so there was a, there's a coffee shop

in New Haven that's called Blue State Coffee, based on being a blue state or whatever. I always thought there was an opportunity for a red state coffee.

Actually, I know it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a partisan thing, but a place where people get together with common interest to have a conversation. I hope that's part of it. I hope that's part of your vision. The first one we're setting up,

it's a coffee shop. It's going to have a place for playing music, small stage. And then we're going to do Ian's crystal cave Cove or whatever. Small stage music. That's pretty good. Yeah. But then the second floor is going to be like skate shop and games.

So you can get a coffee, go out, play board games, skate stuff. Third floor, we're going to have a podcast studio set up. So that way we can do special Friday night shows. Members only can come and hang out in the first floor. Like live shows. Yeah. Like people, like an audience. Yeah.

But maybe very, very limited to members. It might be only a small handful of people drinking, having a drink or something. Hopefully we get a liquor license. And then, you know, at this location, man, yeah, we got the building and building exists and audience live show would be incredible. We, we can't do that. The new building we got, cause it's just not structured that way, but we're hoping to, we've been trying to do this for a while now. Hopefully we can have a bunch of these small little venues and then people can come and hang out and meet like-minded people. But mainly what

I want to do is comedians you going to have comedians? Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm working on standup. My husband is sure that I'll bomb, but I would love to bomb at your place. Oh, you'd be great. We'll get Ryan Long to come out.

No, what? Okay, I'm not following Ryan Long. Give us a joke. He's crazy good. Lauren, right now, give us a joke. Come on. I refuse. You guys have to wait.

Here's one thing I promise you. We're not going to put in our windows BLM signs, Antifa signs, or please do not hurt us signs. We're going to put Molon Labe, the Gadsden flag, the American flag, et cetera. Let's read some more. Drive-by commenter says, hi, everyone, and Vivek. From y'all's experience, is there any way for Americans to resist the adoption of social credit through CDBCs? What is that?

CBDCs is what he was talking about. Central Bank Digital Currency. Ah, okay. Yeah, so, I mean, you want to take this? You got this. I mean, so Central Bank Digital Currencies, I think, are going to be gaining a lot of popularity as a response to what happened with FTX.

I think they're going to use the fall of FTX to say that cryptocurrency is not where it's at. If you want to go digital, do it through the Central bank. Now, the irony is that the number one justification for central bank digital currencies, so this is thinking about the equivalent of a digital dollar, is that China's already doing it with the digital yuan. And so the way the economic argument goes in the United States is that the dollar is going to be less strong relative to the yuan if we don't keep up with the Joneses, if we don't keep up with China. And China's doing it because this is a great way of effectuating centralized control over your population. If you can literally go in and

tie somebody's actual net worth to their social credit score, then the way in which their behaviors align or don't align with the government can literally correspond to the number of digital points in their bank account, which is today the green piece of paper in your wallet. So that's why China's doing it. My view is, I think that the keeping up with the Joneses argument is completely backwards because let's say every other major nation does go the direction of China. I actually think that will make the dollar relatively more valuable and distinctive to be the currency that does not actually subject itself to the same

debasement and co-option by actually becoming a vehicle for exercising governmental control. So this whole strong dollar in order for the dollar to remain strong, it must actually keep up with what the yuan is doing is actually backwards. The fact that China is doing it creates an opportunity for distinctiveness for the dollar to remain the actual last reserve currency of the world if we don't subject ourselves to that same downward spiral. So his question was, how do we actually do it? I think this is an electoral democratic accountability issue. It's going to take an uprising of everyday citizens to stand up and say, no, we're not

doing that. Thank you very much. No, thank no, we're not doing that. Thank you very much. No, thank you. We're not going that direction. I mean, we already see the end result of this happening in places like Canada where they were freezing bank accounts. And even if the U.S. doesn't have this, I guess, at a systemic level, I mean, if you look at what PayPal recently tried to do through, I mean, fining people up to $2,500 for posting

misinformation. That's still there. The policy is still there. Yeah, they snuck it back in, right? They put it back. So the funniest part about this. They said it was back in right? They put it back So the funny is that it was a mistake. It was a mistake So the first response was to say that no no that was just an error Yet it was coincidentally an error that they purposefully reinstated a matter of days later. Yeah, here's fact here's kind of

Yeah, I think I think everyone got the story wrong It's been a while since I covered this but I think they implemented some policy Then there was some language came out that was worse, and they said, no, that was a mistake. But the other policy, it had been there for a couple years. The core policy about fining you for spreading misinformation or whatever was still there. So now imagine that's not PayPal doing it,

it's just the government doing it, because they're producing the dollars. I guess the point is, is it any better if it just happens to be PayPal, but also all of your different banks? We see people like Laura Loomer, like Nick Fuentes. They essentially can't bank now. I think Nick Fuentes posted on his telegram he's gotten kicked out of his fifth bank. I mean, obviously, it's not as bad as the federal government doing it, but we have some

level of this already in the United States. Well, the federal government actually confiscated a half a million dollars from him and still has not given it back. That's crazy, man. All right. Let's read this from Raymond G. Stanley Jr. He says, Tim, to be honest, I've missed it. Blissful ignorance, but I'll never go back. I'll never stop now. You keep being a voice for our movement and will do our darndest to support and fight to save our nation. Amen. Well, I appreciate all of your support. He's making reference to something I said earlier. I said the idea that ignorance is bliss is not true. Because today you can see that in people's ignorance, they're left confused, wondering why it is they're losing purchasing power, why their homes are being

foreclosed, why there's war and escalation. Ignorance is actually making people quite the opposite of blissful at this point. Knowledge is empowerment. Yep. Yeah, it is. And you know what? Keep giving it to people, man. Maybe knowing the truth might suck in a certain sense. Being pulled out of the matrix. You know when, what's his name, Cypher was eating that steak and he says, I don't care what it is.

It just tastes good. Yeah. But the thing about the matrix was that you were safe in your little pod and you were warm. The reality is that's not the case. You stay in the pod, you lose your house, you lose your job. You end up homeless and hungry and confused as to why it happened. So we got to wake people up. We got to tell people to be responsible.

All right, let's read this. John Doherty says, had to search the show tonight. No notification. You pissed them off again, Tim and crew. Congratulations. Keep up the great work. Thank you so much for what you do. Thank you for the super chat. Yeah, I actually believe they probably try to suppress this show. Did you put Hunter Biden laptop in the title? Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course. But but I says Hunter Biden censorship. I think so many people share the show and come to the show that they keep trying to suppress it. It just doesn't work because we've got people who share it. That weight is hard to counter. Jonathan E. says in October, the Post Millennial reported about a man joining a sorority

at U Wyoming. Recently, a Laramie resident got suspended for tabling at UW for a sign saying the man is male. Now Wyoming state government is threatening to cut UW funding. Free Todd Schmidt. Wait, are you saying that Wyoming is going woke? Is that what they're doing? Is that what the story is? I mean, it sounds like it from that description. I heard about the first part. I haven't heard about the sign. Oh, man. Well, you know, they say get woke, go broke. But as much as people like to think that means the industries will eventually learn their lesson, what's happening is the country is just getting woke and going broke. So hopefully we, you know, yeah. Doug Phel happening is the country is just getting woke and going broke. Hopefully we... Doug Phelps says the FBI

is working just as J. Edgar Hoover designed and used it. They removed Hoover, but his organization is still in place. So it's like a zombie chicken with his head cut off? The beast lives on. And that's the point. Liberals need to wake up to this too.

It's not about one side or the other. It's about the beast that actually outlasts both of them. So I think he's dead right. And I think that that framing is useful because it can awaken a level of political consensus amongst the citizenry of this country to take this issue off the axis of partisanship. So thanks to whoever said that, because I think that'll actually bring about 10, 15, 20% more people along on this than if we just made this about the Hunter Biden story. And they need to realize the iron fist

that they're propping up is gonna backhand them very soon. You look up COINTELPROBE, look at the activities of what the FBI was doing to JFK, to MLK, and be prepared to be surprised and shocked. Doc Holliday says, Luke is suffering from severe TDS. That's your opinion. I just like to call, you know, I like to call the facts out. I don't think I said anything that was incorrect.

Kyle Kalinske called you a Trump supporter. I know, which is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, Bill O'Reilly called me, again, a jihad-loving liberal. So people just, I guess, I mean, have I said anything that was that was incorrect if so let me know i i would love to get my right from derangement but but i i i think it's also important to know that he did some good things he did some bad things but we need to call it out and we need to keep people in check no matter who they are even if you like them or don't like them i don't care you have power

it deserves to be checked and held responsibly all right sleep is the cousin of death, says the way Donald tried to appease the media is our our we see you appeasing YouTube. Well, I guess I suppose I don't see Trump as I don't see necessarily the same way. Trump knew people were going to lie about him and chose to do interviews with him anyway. We kind of use YouTube because we want to stay on the main centralized platform where most young people are. It's the most prominent social media platform used among Gen Z, and it is the second biggest search engine in the world. So it's a double-edged sword, I suppose.

I mean, face two bad choices. You know, you change the game in the long run, but you'll make the choice you have to make in the meantime. But this is why we have TimCast.com and why we have the members only uncensored portion so that we can be on YouTube, tell people, go to the website, learn more, and support.

Sort of the best way we could do it for now. Or we can stop. I'd rather not do that. We'll keep going. Let's read some more. All right. Sorta says,

great to see Tim Pool and Lauren Chen in the same podcast. Love you too, Luke. Very cool. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Leta says, great to see Tim Pool and Lauren Chen in the same podcast. Love you too, Luke. Very cool. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Let's let's jump down. OK, so because I read that one about Luke having TDS, I'll also read this one for him. Essay Federali says Luke is the goat. There you go. Nice. Valdemar Perez Jr. says, Tim, the clip you are talking about was dan pina on london real or is

it dan piniac i don't know but yeah it's a viral video where he's like they're buying miami beach front property and none of these none of the prospectus will say this is going to be underwater in 40 years because they don't believe it damian master says fbi literally working under trump to tilt the election in his competitor's favor. Crazy. At the very least to protect the Biden family. And while they while he was running for office and there was evidence of corruption and malfeasance. I mean, it's more than just Trump's competitor. It is a guy who, by all accounts, if you look at this laptop, was committing some crimes and or illicit business dealings, say least so even if he wasn't running it was still like as a private citizen josh oh my gosh says my friend has family in ukraine and he tells me peace

talks won't happen because putin was attacking ukraine while the talks were happening how do we know one way or another you know anything about it luke no No, from that particular point, no. I mean, but we know for certain that at one point, Zelensky was willing to have those talks. I heard that story. There was a date. Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sit down together, and they already made a partial deal that they agreed to.

The deal made sense. Both parties lost out, obviously, with negotiations. No one's going to get their perfect deals and even henry kissinger the the war criminal the the butcher of cambodia is coming out and saying hey yeah we we need uh we need a peace deal here and his peace deal is ukraine possibly conceding some land here so this is henry kissinger saying this and if the war criminal henry kissinger is saying hey we need a peace deal that's when you know we've gone too far all right josh m says elon says he is stepping down as soon as he finds someone foolish enough to take the job i think jack dorsey is the best possible option no now that it's under private

ownership i believe in second chances seconded no no no okay so not jack dorsey is trying to essentially give himself a makeover as if our collective memory is that of a goldfish okay he's trying to make it seem like now he's pro free speech. There are two options. Either he's lying and he was on board with all the censorship and the backhanded deals with the federal government the whole time, or he was too incompetent to know about it. In either case, he is not the man for the job. Agreed. I think he was removed from the situation. I mean, he was meditating in Myanmar and in French Polynesia.

Which to be fair, if I had billions, I would be doing as well. So the reality is, it's just this managerial class again. It's the same way you think the people who you elect to run the government don't run the government. We talked about that earlier. The same thing is true for most large companies. The people who you think are appointed in the role of CEO don't really run that company. And it was the managerial class at Twitter that ran the show. It's like the deep state in the federal government's deep corporate in corporate America. And so, you know, I actually, I'm a little bit, I have a little bit of a softer corner for Jack

Dorsey amongst the Twitter critics, which I'm, of the old Twitter critics, which I'm definitely squarely in the camp of, is criticizing the assault on free speech culture. I actually think this was a founder whose initial vision was actually to, as Twitter's stated mission was, to break down barriers on the internet. I think that's actually part of what he was motivated by. Eventually, the managerial class around him just started to ossify around this other consensus. The guy checks out and says, I'm going to crypto world going to crypto world and I'm going to Myanmar. But I think that that's a different basis for disqualification rather than the fact that he was actually a pro censorship dude, which I think misses the essence of what's actually going on.

All right. Marie Gray says, please read this super chat. Canada is getting ready to vote on a bill that will allow the state to euthanize children who want to be euthanized without their parents' knowledge or consent. The medically assisted dying. Yeah, absolutely. And there are stats going around that say potentially medically assisted suicide is now one of the top five leading causes of death in Canada. They're talking about killing the mentally.

There was this one really hilarious tweet. I wish I could take credit for it, but it says essentially, kill yourself is both a term that can get you kicked off Twitter or is healthcare advice from the Canadian government. Eric says, Vivek, how do I get my 401k money to strive from my 401k, which is hosted at Fidelity? Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that.

I think one of the, my main question is, my main suggestion is educate yourself and make sure your 401k plan administrators themselves educate themselves. Because right now, most wealth managers, most 401k account plan administrators, most pension fund boards, most pension fund investment staff have no idea about the things I was even talking about here. So this has to be a bottom-up revolution where it takes a lot in order to get on a 401k platform. I don't think most of our money,

very tiny portion of it comes from 401ks because once you're a new player, it takes a huge process to get added onto those platforms. So what I would say is show up, ask that plan administrator, the HR representative at work, get in touch with them and just ask them a simple question.

Was your money used to advance a, just give two examples, racial equity audit at Apple, or was it used to vote in favor of the 2021 scope three emissions proposal at Chevron? Those are very two answerable questions. Get that answer. Tell all of your colleagues. Then I think that forces them to actually create an alternative. And I hope there are many other alternatives. I hope it's not just Strive.

I hope there are many other alternatives eventually that people can choose from. That's the answer. In the meantime, most of the, I believe most of the people who have actually helped get Strive off the ground, you know, actually have just come from their own brokerage accounts, not necessarily from 401k plans or pension plans. I hope that changes next year. Am I the only one in light of all of the, the trans agenda, the climate agenda that when I hear about something like a simple racial

affirmative action process, I'm like, Oh, how quaint the good old days. Right. I'm a classicist. I still cringe equally. Yeah. It's still bad, but it's like, Oh, at least no one's, no one's trying to shove drag Queens down five-year-olds. Okay. The question is, it's the sacrificing of merit that I think bothers me the most.

I agree. I agree. Kevin Brady says, Tim, it's important to remember that DARPA's life log was squashed the same day that Facebook launched. They serve the same purpose. Look at what life log was. I'm looking at you, Luke. What is it? Off the top of my head, I don't remember it,

but I do know there's a big connection between DARPA and a lot of these big tech companies. But I'm going to have to look that up. I don't like talking about stuff that I don't have the notes on. Yeah, I think, and I could be wrong, is that it was an attempt to track people's lives, create a record of their lives or something to that effect. That's what's called LifeLog. That seems fairly obvious. And then Facebook, someone's sitting there and he's like, why are we spending all this money to try and track people? Let's get them to track themselves. They'll write everything about themselves wherever they want, you know what I mean?

And then there you go. It's genius if you really think about it. It's like bagging the groceries at the end of the line. Just let the customer do the final piece. Exactly. We're not going to hire anybody anymore. I remember when they had a cashier and a bagger and now it's just the cashier and then you've got to put the stuff there and then you go around. That's right.

So they figured out. Now they've got self-checkout. Yeah. Just make you do the work. We'll keep the money. Now it's just one person watching people. Right. That's all it was.

As long as you allow them to post it, they're going to do it for you. Exactly. It's a perfect end around. they realized that the dollar will mean nothing and pushing this woke agenda is being done to cause decisiveness to push us to civil war over insanely different realities maybe divisiveness yeah quite possibly we were talking about this how you know luke mentioned that they want to divide and conquer and the division now is among those who want division and those who don't who are divided against those who want division is those who don't, who are divided against those who want division. It's the weirdest thing. The woke people want racial segregation and gender segregation.

Then you have the meritocrats who are just like, just be a good person and be good at what you do. But there's a divide between the two. It's just the weirdest thing. And then you have the wonderful Michael Mouses of the world that are pushing the national divorce, who say, I have nothing to do with you. And this guy. I've been talking about it for a very long time,

because if you want to reduce harm, that could be one potential way of doing it. I don't think we're there yet. It could also lead to a lot of harm as well. I also don't think we're nearly there yet. I think even the people who are hungering for that division, and this is maybe a charitable interpretation of it, but I think there's a lot of it that's true. It may even come for many of them from a good place where they are, as I said earlier, so hungry for the sense of purpose that's unfulfilled, especially why you see it amongst people more under the age of 40 when it comes to wokeism, is that we want to address that division, fill that hunger with something else rather than telling them they go to Ben and Jerry's and order a cup of ice cream with some social justice sprinkles on top. They don't fill that moral hunger with fast food. Okay.

If we can fill that hunger with something else, I think that's going to be much better than taking even seriously the idea that this was what they even wanted. Just because it's like, it's like a baby. You had a baby recently. I have a two year old and had a baby earlier this year too. It's like when they're hungry for real food,

you give them a pacifier. They stop crying because they think they're not hungry anymore. Well, they're really just hungering for real food. And I think we've got to see them as crying for what they're really crying out for, which is something of real purpose and meaning and substance to satisfy that vacuum. And I think that's going to get us there sooner than talking about some sort of bifurcation or national divorce. No, Wexit. I'm very, very optimistic. I've already thought about it. If Alberta does separate, I would gladly trade in my Canadian citizenship for, I don't know, like Western Canada or whatever it may be. Are they seriously talking about that?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's gaining momentum. I'm a huge supporter of it. And I think what really pushed a lot of people over the edge, I was always for it was the COVID policies and the breakdown. I think a lot of people, you know, I don't think you're wrong about the, what got so many people there where they're willing to do something like support those extreme policies. But I think for people like myself, it's just like, all right, you know, hopefully somehow we can de-radicalize a lot of the authoritarianism that's creeping into our system, crafted to our society. But until then, I am putting myself in a position where My my neighbors want to remove me from public life It's a tough one

I don't think America is here yet as much as places like Canada But it's dangerous because people are being radicalized the key factors for people being radicalized as poverty intelligence and lack of Relationships modern men have all of that right now And it's only going to be increasing from here. More people are going to be radicalized. We're going to be living in a more dangerous society. And I think what Luke is saying about peaceful divorce is because you could make the argument

that we are in a fifth-generational warfare. We are. The culture, a fifth-generational civil war. We're in fifth-generational warfare. The culture war. You see what you mean by that? Yeah, fifth-generational part of it. Yeah, this is psychological operations manipulation, essentially.

False flags. I mean, the stuff you see with hoax hate crimes, fake news in the media, it's an attempt to gain control of a population without using force by just getting them to acquiesce to your way of life. So we live in a constitutional republic, but now we have a constitutional republic in the same space as a multicultural democracy, and those two forces are fighting each other. That may eventually foment a peaceful divorce or a violent one or something of that nature. So I'm going to propose something that I'm going to caveat this by saying I'm not yet there yet, okay, in terms of being in favor of this. But you just drew a distinction that actually you're in a really important point we live in a constitutional

republic not quite a democracy that was actually part of the vision of what set this nation into motion in the first place is direct democracy especially diverse diverse direct democracy does not work now before the basic principle behind this idea was you have to have skin in the game in order to play in that game including as as a citizen, it used to be as a landowner. That era has passed. I mean, for now, maybe we'll bring it back. So here's where I'm going with it. Okay, let's not bring the landowner thing back.

What about civic service? Service guarantees citizenship. Guarantees citizenship. And also as a condition for all of the privileges of citizenship. I think that would solve a lot of the problem. I think it goes a long way. So you get these privileges and immunities of citizenship in the 14th Amendment.

In this proposal, okay, the immunities everyone gets, that is the government can't knock on your door, search your house without a warrant, can't muzzle you from speaking. Those are the immunities. But the privileges, tax deductions all the way up to and including voting

You only get if you serve that nation in common cause black white Red blue gay straight doesn't matter Yep If you want to vote that's your skin in the game and serve the country that creates that that satisfies that national purpose the Americanism It satisfies that hunger for purpose of meaning if you don't want to vote you have to vote But if you want to vote, earn it. And the service could be...

So you guys are into it. I thought you were all going to vote. Oh, no. We talk about it. Yeah, service guarantees. Oh, okay. Good. Not just military, but it could also be any type of public service. I support that because it's less... And I see capital C citizenship. Lowercase c citizenship, you still get all the benefits and privileges and protections. Right. It's not a surf class. All the immunities.

Civilians and citizens. Civilians and citizens. Capital C citizens. Restoring the enemy of a citizen. Service could include, you know, having squads of people going around to make sure that everyone, you know, bends the knee to Black Lives Matter. Making sure that we have putting up political slogans all over, you know, the country. So you can't define

it too squishy. That could be public service. I agree. That's my main problem with that, actually. You can't define it too squishily. I see the government abusing that power,'s my main problem with it, actually. You can't define it too squishily. I see the government abusing that power, essentially, in so many different ways. But we could talk about it in an after show, too. Let's do that. Because this is a great discussion. Then let me do just one last super chat before we bounce from Steve Robertson.

Luke, did we land on the moon? Why or why not? I don't know. I don't have all the answers here. All right. I'm skeptical. Where's Alex Stein? My original thought is there's a lot of bull crap out there, and my, you

know, I didn't do much— That doesn't mean no. He's saying no. I didn't do much research into it, but my gut instinct is they probably lied. Let's talk about service guaranteeing citizenship in the members only section. I actually have some philosophical questions for you as well about when the government should intervene in medical care for kids. So smash that like button, subscribe to this channel,

share the show with your friends, and become a member at timcast.com because we're going to have that members-only show coming up for you. We usually post it about an hour or so from now, so you don't want to miss it. You can follow the show at Timcast IRL. You can follow me at Timcast on Twitter or wherever else, maybe not Twitter for long, who knows. Vivek, do you want to shout anything out?

Thanks, guys. It's a good conversation. I mean, I think market solutions Maybe not Twitter for long. Who knows? Vivek, do you want to shout anything out? Thanks, guys. It's a good conversation. I mean, I think market solutions, not all government solutions. Strive.com if you want to learn more about Strive. But more importantly, educate yourself, empower yourself. That's the path forward. Right on. You can follow me at the Lauren Chen Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Lauren Chen on YouTube,

as well as Mediaholic for that entertainment stuff. And if you want to buy something to support me, again, that is etsy.com slash shop slash clearlypurenaturals, C-L-E-A-R-L-Y-P-U-R naturals. We've got soaps, beard balms, body butters, beard oils, gift baskets, free shipping in the US over $35. This was great. I thought this conversation went really deep, and thank you guys for doing that. It was really, really a great conversation. My website is LukeUncensored.com. I did

a video there for my members about gut health and diet. I also talked about a lot of nuance issues that I think are very important for people to find out since we're being poisoned in many different ways. We should have talked about seed oils. Oh, my goodness. Don't get me started.

LukeUnsensor.com, my website. I'm going to be there for that conversation. And I think someone also has a book here that hasn't promoted it yet. Well, I want everyone to read the book if they haven't read it already. Woke Inc. was my first one. It came out last August. And this September just came out the sequel to Woke Inc., which is Nation of Victims.

So check it out. Let me know what you think. And I want to give out the sequel to Woke Inc., which is Nation of Victims. So check it out. Let me know what you think. And I want to give a special thanks to Charlie Kirk because we're in his studio. Drinking his water. Thank you, Charlie. And metal. It's in metal. It's probably lined with plastic.

He's a healthy guy. So as we're out here, TPUSA has helped us out following AmFest to be able to keep doing the show. And we're grateful. So thank you all so much. And we will see you all over at TimCast.com. Thanks for hanging out.