Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Tom, Bill, you show live. Boy, oh boy, we have a lot to go over today. It is April Fools.
And we're going to try to remember that as you guys put stuff in the comments. It's already started. And Drew and I have fallen for things already today. So we are very hopeful that everything that we are going to represent today has been cleaned.
Of all of the April Foolsery, we shall see. But the Daily Mail has reported that the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk does not match the gun purportedly used by accused assassin Tyler Robinson. As far as I can tell, that clean is truly real. Nope, nope, rim shot.
You're trolling now. Come on, aren't you? You're working against over here. That one's real.
Not kidding. We're going to talk more about that. Trump says that we've only got two or three weeks left of the war. And then he's going to pull out even if the straight is still closed.
I kind of wish that that one was April Fools, but alas, it is not. We're going to talk about the chaos there without doing to the markets. Speaking of the markets, chief inflationist Jerome Powell admits that we can't keep inflating the money supply faster than the economy grows. Who would have guessed?
Who would have guessed, boys and girls? New poll, crowns, Trump, the least popular president in history. Ouch. Ouch.
That was wild. Saudi's Crown Prince has terminated the defense agreement with US after reported insults from Trump. After European allies deny the US the use of their airspace for military operations. Rubio says they can defend themselves against Russia.
He was a little tongue-in-cheek, but not a lot. And anthropic accidentally open sourced its own code base. So apparently now, anthropic is the new open open AI. We'll see about that.
And Kristi Noem, this one I cannot believe this is real. Kristi Noem is asking for privacy and prayers after the bombshell that her husband is a cross-dresser. You never know, man. You never know.
As we were saying before, we started rolling the harder. You thump the Bible. And I don't know that her husband is in that camp. Maybe she's not even.
But man, is that her branding. The harder you thump the Bible, the more likely a skeleton is going to come flying out of your closet. So shout out to all my cross-dressers out there. God love you all.
But when you try to hide it, woof. No point of mind. My cross-dressers? Yeah.
I got nothing but love. Drew, have you ever been to a drag show? I have one accident before. I'm going to be honest with you.
Are you accidentally ended up in a drag show? We went to a bar. It was like eight o'clock. And then at 10 o'clock, the lights got low.
Over the ground like, OK, cool. Hold on a second. He's LA though. They have drag brunches at K-Mart.
So like everywhere. K-Mart does no longer exist. I just want to ask. These 50 plays.
Thank you, everybody, for the wishes in the chat. I appreciate it. It's happy to be back. I was on vacation.
Nothing blew up. I've seen some spicy comments. But no, Tom is great. Everything is good.
They were worried that there was a beef between us? Yes. They were worried about it. And we got to talk, announced an address to the nation later on tonight.
It's going to do with Iran. Do you have an over under? What are you thinking about? Yeah.
I am not entirely sure what he's going to be talking about tonight. I think it will be something as simple as we have accomplished the vast majority of our objectives. And we're about to dip out. Trump has said that he plans to leave Iran, even if the global energy markets are still in chaos.
He doesn't word it like that, obviously. But nonetheless, he's saying, even if the straight is still closed, that people can deal with it themselves. And Wall Street shockingly loves it. So 10 days ago, Trump gave Iran 48 hours to fully open the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on his power plants.
He extended the deadline twice while munching on some tacos. And now the White House says reopening the straight isn't a core objective. What? He was originally threatening to bomb them back to the Stone Age if they didn't open it.
Now it's like, man, whatever. We never really cared about it in the first place. Gas just hit $4. Yikes.
So what gives? What exactly changed? And what's he going to talk about tonight? Well, on the tonight part, we're going to see.
But Trump posted on True Social, directing allies who can't get fuel through the Strait to do one of two things, buy oil from the US or build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait and just take it. And of course, take it being in all caps. He added, you'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The US will not be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.
So things are getting weird. He went on to say a little bit more. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done.
Go get your own oil. All right. Thanks for getting wild. We'll talk more about this later.
But the relationships with our allies is really beginning to be a problem. And I worry that Trump's personality he just doesn't care about that and maybe overestimating how easy it's going to be to cake walk a world in which you have very few allies. We'll see how that plays out. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Trump told AIDS he's prepared to end the military campaign, even if the Strait remains largely closed.
The White House confirmed it. Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said, reopening the Strait is not one of the operations core objectives. Hey, Seth, echoed that at the Pentagon briefing, listing Iran's missiles, drones, and Navy as mission goals. Hormuz wasn't on the list.
He said, again, try to reconcile that with Trump, saying if you don't open the Strait, we're going to bomb your civilian power infrastructures. And possibly your desalination plans. That's pretty crazy talk if that's not actually one of your missions. Just as a reminder, you're being spun at all times.
People are lying to you constantly. And they will tell you what they want you to think. They will try to control your frame of reference. And the president is a master of that.
So you are being gaslit by this administration. Please don't lose sight of that. Every administration is going to do it to you. So it's not like I think that it's unusual that it's happening right now.
I just don't want any of us to be blind to it. Let's use this high velocity, high volume of information landscape that we're in to remind each other when this is happening and it is certainly happening now. Secretary of State Rubio went further, saying that the Strait will reopen one way or another after the operation concludes. To be honest, he's probably right.
Now he didn't give a timeline or a mechanism by which that would happen, just that it would happen. If you're familiar with history, even after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, it reopened after the revolution in 1979, when they couldn't have been any more anti-U.S., it's still reopened. So yes, it probably will reopen, but the world is not smiling on Trump for this war. And that is the part that I think may be underestimated by virtually everybody on planet Earth, not that changes coming in the future.
Changes already happened. The maps are totally different now in terms of alliances. And just to recap, on March 24th, Trump threatened to obliterate Iran's power plans if the Strait wasn't fully opened in 48 hours. He extended that deadline twice.
Now is no longer a core objective. Our allies aren't helping us. Meanwhile, gas crossed $4 a gallon on Tuesday for the first time since 2022. And that's up more than a dollar since the war began on February 28th.
And none of this is over yet. Even if Trump tonight says that, hey, we're gonna be pulling out. We've achieved everything that we came to achieve. Bye, we'll see you later.
The drama has not finished unfolding. And you have the UAE saying that they're gonna open the Strait by force if they have to. So the dynamics in the Middle East have completely changed. Our relationships to our allies have completely changed.
And I don't think just as a result of Iran, but Iran is the thing that people can point to that had global consequences that would not have played out this way, were it not for Trump? Now you can make a very compelling argument that Iran should not have nuclear weapons and that no nation on Earth should want them to have that. You're gonna see a lot of support for that. However, the way that Trump went about it, the way that he goes in creates chaos and is perfectly fine to leave that chaos in his wake as long as it doesn't directly impact the United States is not going to buy him any friends.
And the world is remapping their mental model of what it means to deal with the US. At this rate, man, I just, I do not see a clear path for Trump to win in the midterms right now. I think the only way that this plays out in his favor is a consequentialist strategy, meaning that the ends end up painting over the horrific means. And so if on the other side of this, oil drops, stock market goes up, countries do start turning to the US for more oil, jobs are surging here, the US is doing better and Trump can just say, there's more money in your pocket with me in charge than there was back in the Biden era.
And by the way, let's not lose sight of, even though people hate Trump more and more by the day, there are also polls showing that people are moving away from where the Democrats are going as well. So you sort of have like, I don't know who the hell I want to win vibe across America. So that's going to be a fascinating thing to watch. So it's basically gonna be, is Trump able to pull off what at this point looks like a semi-miracle of actually making Iran work out better actually on paper and not just in rhetoric, because right now he's gonna spin and spin and spin until the end of time, he will give the people that identify as mega, he will give them the words that they need to say to their friends to be like, no, this made sense.
But in reality, it's all gonna be a counterfactual that we'll never be able to run. What he's gonna say is, well, we didn't get bombed from Iran with nuclear weapons. But that wasn't on most average people's bingo card. Like even myself, I constantly remind myself how I felt about Iran before he went in.
Before he bombed for it out, it wasn't even on my radar. And then when he went back in the second time, I remember being completely befuddled at some point we'll have to bring the clip up where I'm like, why is he building up troops? I don't even understand what's happening right now, because he wasn't messaging at all. I didn't realize that in his mind, the right messaging was, we obliterated their nuclear facilities, but we still have to be worried about it.
I was like, what, huh? Like I could not reconcile that. Now they've gotten clearer with their messaging, but even though I have a lot of respect for Rubio, the messaging at the beginning of this was God awful. And they've only gotten good at consolidating it down to the four things that Rubio now repeats at Nazium, which is smart.
And if they had done that in the beginning, they all played out in a very different fashion, but it's just been super messy. So now he's gonna be forced to claim victory over two things, essentially. If the price of oil goes down, he'll claim victory there. And the price of oil going down will cause S&P 500 to go up.
So he'll take that victory lap, if that's what ends up happening. And then the other would be, you didn't get hit with a nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb thing's not gonna buy any thing from anybody. No one's gonna buy into that because it's just a thing didn't happen.
A thing didn't happen that virtually nobody was worried about. It's not like this was the Cuban Missile Crisis where like the whole world is holding their breath, being like, yo, what the fuck is about to happen? Are we all about to die? nobody had that vibe.
All he's done from the public perception, you're not chronically online, you're not politically activated. You just look around and go, gas prices are up and I hear they're up because Trump is acting a fool and invading Iran. And all the other shit about like they've killed Americans for 47 years and it's a theocratic regime and all that. It's just a bunch of yapping heads.
That's the average, certainly American, cannot make ground contact with that. And the whole idea that they were building a ballistic missile program that was able to reach much, much farther than anybody thought, again, it's counterfactual. If they had struck London, like if you could show big Ben in a smoldering pile of runes, now everybody's going to be like, oh damn, okay, I guess they really could do a thing that we didn't think that they could do. That's not what happened.
They tried to hit supposedly the base, should I forget the name Diego, Diego something. But even that was a British base in the middle. Yes, still, but it was, if true, that really is a much longer distance than anybody thought that they were able to do, but there's just too many question marks around that possibly because their missiles were too weak and our defense is too good, but you put those together and people just stop feeling like it's a threat. So that's where all of this gets messy.
And I think if Trump is thinking that this is going to help him anywhere, I don't even think he's helping him with his base and it's fueling the mega civil wars. People are calling it but certainly on the right, I think it's fueling that. So yeah, this one right now feels like a big miss. And if he ends up leaving the straight in disarray and then people really do go in behind him.
And like if the Europeans have to go in there, broker deals with Iran and Iran takes, which would be a very wise stance. If Iran says this is our opportunity to separate Europe from America and goes, yeah, we'll deal with you guys. No problem, no extra fee, love it. All your ships are going to get through.
China, love you, all your ships are going to get through. Yep, yep. We just want to hurt the US and Israel. Then you further drive that wedge.
So we'll see how it plays out. The future is way, way too unnoble, especially when something as complicated as this. But right now it's a mess. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after stay tuned.
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Now let's get back to it. This is on the dawn of three world leaders addressing the nation, all talking about Iran, Australia and UK already did their address. I'm a summarizes for everybody. We are figuring it out.
Energy prices are going to go up. Now I'm putting a poly market bit. This is drew by myself, one man army. I feel like he's going to pull out and be like, yeah, we did it.
It's done. I'm over. We have oil over here. We have Venezuela.
We're making drill, baby drill. We rode back regulations. If you want oil, go get your oil. America's good.
We're done. We're taking care of it. If that happens, do you think that the impact of energy prices on Europe would then come back to the US? Because you know it is a global market that is interconnected.
Or can we really separate ourselves at a distance enough that our economy will recover into your point. Trump can do some last minute tweaks to then help the mid-term so that people can forget about this. Which side of the K that you want to talk about? That's a really good way to put it.
I'm going to say the lower K, because the other ones are going to be mad enough. OK, so the lower K, as long as the prices of oil come back down, which they almost certainly will come back down very quickly, unless, like if there's major beef between the GCC countries and Iran, then you could see the strike out a lot longer in terms of oil prices being elevated. But if Iran goes, all right, they left, they'll claim victory, of course, and say, hey, we defeated the Great Satan. We made the US leave the straight.
They start taking some sort of toll, but let's say they keep it reasonable. It doesn't have any major influence on global energy prices. Then we're going to drop down back to $60, $50 a barrel. The bottom side of the K is just a nothing burger.
They don't end up feeling anything. If it stays elevated, then they get walloped with a hammer. Because energy prices are a doppelganger of inflation. They aren't inflation, but they so mimic each other that you might as well just call it inflation.
And they will certainly think of it as inflation. So they'll be saying, OK, hold on a second. Everything just got more expensive, because everything sits on top of energy, virtually everything. So yes, they will really feel it.
Their life will have gotten worse. They will be absolutely irate. They will point their ire at Trump. And you will see Trump lose one of the most important voting blocks that he has, which is working Americans.
And so you can talk about putting money back in their pocket. But if at the same time, you just take it away from them in another way, it was a gamut that just didn't pay off. And so that is, I think it's more likely that oil prices come back down before the midterms. I think it's very unlikely that they'll remain elevated.
If he puts boots on the ground, then I'll be like, all bets are off. The oil prices remain elevated for an extended period of time have just quintupled. But he's not signaling boots on the ground anymore. He's very much signaling.
In his mind, yes, he has some plan for the story that he's going to give his base as to why this was a victory. Once he got a hold of that, which seems to be our allies are a bunch of fuckwits, they can go take care of themselves. We're going to peace out. We don't have the problem from an oil perspective here in the US.
Fuck them. Let them deal with it. And so he's going to say, hey, this is America First, baby. I go in.
I do what we need, which is we've got to protect ourselves from nuclear weapons, ballistic missile program, Navy military. We did it. Now we're the fuck out. And hey, Americans, don't worry.
We produce enough oil here. We're going to keep, as you said, drill baby drill, all as well. So now that he has that, I think there's going to be no boots on the ground. He pulls out.
Oil prices come down. The bottom of the K doesn't. Like they don't have a mental map of how all this works anyway. So they just know either price is good direction, prices is bad direction.
And so then he's got a shot. Now I think he's becoming so unpopular in his own base, who were promised no new wars. And he's going to have a very hard time trying to convince them, hey, I said no forever wars. And I was talking boots on the ground.
I didn't even count. Yeah. That's going to be his pitch. And so it's like if Iran had played out like Venezuela, that people would be singing his praises.
And you would not be able to use it as a distraction. And it wouldn't work to say, this is the guy that promises no new wars. And he's over here bombing everybody. The rhetoric would be these aren't wars.
These are just like really fast strikes to get a very geo strategic thing across the finish line. And he's done it. And he's done it multiple times successfully. Never before has a US president use the power of the US military to such incredible effect.
Yay Trump. But that isn't how it played out. And so now he's going to have a near impossible time of getting low information voters on board with such a subtle message. It's just not going to work.
Is that sustainable though? Because it sounds good on paper. We did our thing. We did what we need to do.
We're back over here. It's Europe's problem. It's their oil. It's Asia's problem.
It's their oil. They need to go in and help. But we have constantly, over the lifetime of America, have gone to other places to subsidize our oil demand in other regions. Can we be OK being energy independent truly for the next decade, for example?
From an energy perspective, yes, the US can truly be on an island by itself and not have to worry about anything. We're not there today. I want to be very clear. This would take time.
But we would be able to, given that we are the largest crude oil producer in history, bigger than Saudi Arabia, bigger than Iran. Like we have the wherewithal to do that if we have the political will to continue to deregulate and allow us to do that. Trump obviously does. But with a single seat majority, it could get messier.
But let's assume that we can do that. Then the US can leverage the fact that it's energy independent. But none of that is going to matter. If the people on the bottom of the K are not able to make ends meet.
And right now, Trump has not proven that he can actually make their life better. Right now, their life is getting worse by the day. We are deficit spending in the most reckless way, humanly possible, which is making things worse for them. And you've got, currently, because of the war in Iran, oil prices are elevated a dollar.
So that's a problem. The will it come down is a big question mark. So if he does not take the time between now, and let's remember, this is the first of April, man, you've got to get serious by the summer because all of the messaging to get people to vote in November is going to kick off hard in the summer. And if by then, people are not feeling that, yeah, life is materially better under Trump than it was under the Democrats.
They are going to flip. And we're already seeing in the special elections, they're going to Democrats. So like if you want an early single baby, there it is. If you have the election right now, Republicans are going to get hammered.
So at the midterms, it's already likely that you get flipped. At the midterms, with the way that Trump has made people feel, which is that he just turned the entire world into chaos, if he's not able to reorganize it and say, yes, I made it chaotic. However, I'm now reshuffling things in a way that it advantages America first. He'll have a shot.
He'll have a shot to change what the narrative of America first is, which is America wins. So yes, I'm going all over the world. And I'm fucking using our military slapping people around doing all kinds of crazy shit. But it's America first because we're going to come out ahead.
We've now got control of Venezuela and oil. We're making that better. We've, if this plays out this way, Cuba is now an open economy. And we're able to do business with Cuba.
We've got better oil flowing if Alberta, like, this is never happened in time for the midterms, but Alberta peeling away from Canada and negotiating a better deal with us. Like there are things, and then obviously, there are things that he can do here in the US, drive energy costs lower, put money in people's pockets through tax breaks, create jobs or deregulation. There are things, and then tariffs, if you can keep that going, get people manufacturing here. There is a sort of narrow, you can sort of see it path forward.
But I just think he's created so much chaos. I don't think there's any way that he puts this back together in time. I feel like those are the same promises that we heard in November when he won. And then in January, when he was inaugurated, and now we're at a year and a half later.
And it's like, if he could just, and it's like, how many months can he just, because he's been just in for a lot. And what he's been doing in the meantime is enriching him in his homies. I don't think he saw our allies turning on him as hard as they have. I think he wanted to tear them and say, all your business deals and you've been taking advantage of this and I want to charge double of which you've been charging me historically.
And now I need help and you're not there for me. What's the most predictable problem ever? Yeah, I really think he thought that we had more leverage than we had in the end. Now here's the really bad news.
He might end up being right. They may find after three, four years of being without, like if we pull out of NATO, Russia starts really making some gains in that war. And they're all the sudden like, oh shit, we actually really need help. They may find that, okay, he had more leverage than we wanted to admit.
But there's going to be a lot of question marks for a lot of years because there are a lot of other people for these guys to partner up with. And when China is playing the game very well in terms of never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake, they're just letting the US do what the US is doing, which is torching our reputation all over the world alienating our allies. And then they're saying, hey, don't worry, we've got you. We're stable.
We don't do nation building. We're not trying to be an empire. We just want like a nice open world where we can do the thing that we do well. You guys can do the thing that you do well, like really sort of pitching the old playbook.
And when you make China look like steady eddy, wow, it's pretty wild. But right now we are making China look like steady eddy. So your point of new agreements, it might take three or four years, they'll be a new president, they'll be a new story, they'll probably sweep it under the rug. But what's happening right now is Saudi Arabia's bin salam has terminated the defense agreement with the US following the insults from America and has entered into defense back with Europe without informing the US, even though I feel like you're getting with the defend themselves.
So this is interesting, but we're already starting to see the GCC countries kind of. Here's the interesting. Yeah. Is there a pack, if I understand correctly, is with Ukraine.
And so Ukraine not only went from like, oh, these guys are going to get obliterated like in a week. Russia's just going to steamroll them to, whoa, like these guys are really like digging in, they're not backing off to, oh my God, the whole world is reaching out to them now with what's going on in Iran. The US doesn't have the equipment that it needs to protect against this new type of warfare with drones and all that. We're over here flexing these gigantic aircraft carriers, these super stealthy airplanes, but we're also getting footage of like little drones just coming down, looking around the base, what do I want to hit?
And then finally, after like 20 minutes, I'm not being able to be stopped, they crash into something on the base. So people like, this is different type of warfare. So honestly, the Saudis are smart to reach out to the people right now that are the best at defending against this. Also, Ukraine broke the Black Sea blockade that Russia had on them.
So they've also got technology about how to deal with mines and a waterway, how to get past a blockade. So Ukraine has paid an extraordinary price to be in this situation, but they actually are showing that they understand modern warfare better than the United States. And this is where I'm being big. Dude, I think about this so much.
So Quest has all this crazy success, 57,000 growth, massive company, billions of dollars in revenue, billion dollar valuation like crazy, crazy crazy crazy. And when I started my next company, obviously this, Impact Theory, I was like, okay, you have to be very careful because you can get arrogance so fast that you know how things work, that you get caught off guard by the fact that things have changed. And I've been asked so many times for people to teach me how to do what we did to scale Quest. And I'm like, I could walk you through it literally day by day decision by decision.
It won't work for you. Because we already did it, the world adjusted, and now you would have to do it in a different way. We did the thing that caught people off guard. And that's why it worked.
The thing that worked then, everybody adjusts to, it will no longer catch them off guard. They're already doing it as well. So it's like, the thing that we can do as the US military with all this big stuff is like, that's not where the world is anymore. And so then reaching out, whether it was based on Trump saying, you can kiss my ass or not, which I can't, I haven't verified yet, but that's certainly the rumor going around.
It's a smart move because they're the best in the world. And so this generic like, oh, they're turning to Europe, also feels a little disingenuous. And I'm not sure why people are trying to frame it like that. He's turning to Ukraine, who are like in the middle of a war, that's been going on now for four years using drones.
Nobody's gonna be better than them. No, that's real. I wanna circle back to the affordability piece of it. Marco Rubio is catching up some heat for what he said about negotiations with Iran.
This was on Good Morning America two days ago. At the end of the day, I think that if there are people in Iran who now given everything that's happened, are willing to move in a different direction for their country, that would be great. Imagine an Iran that instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars supporting terrorist or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran, you'd have a much different country. So we are always hopeful that that would exist over.
People are kind of highlighting the hypocrisy of that. If they had, if they wouldn't have spent billions and billions of weapons and have invested in the country, they would have a much different country. Yeah. So this is where we are gonna have to decide, as a globe, what values actually matter.
For a long time, we believed that Western values were worth killing a lot of people for. And now we are backing off of that. And ultimately, we're gonna have to decide what we're willing to fight for, because it's not always going to be others in existential threat. And it's very clear.
And so we go in and do our thing. There is a reality to be faced that if your enemy does not share your values and you let them get militarily strong, that ultimately they can tell you what to do. And so this is the part that confuses me. Americans have somehow gotten into their heads and Europeans that it's perfectly fine for somebody else to get strong and ultimately tell them what to do because they've lost faith in their own values.
And they're somehow still thinking that, well, they're just gonna leave us be. No, they're not motherfucker. Like they are going to take you over, even if only just culturally. And I don't think people understand that a culture is a thing that you have to defend.
If you don't indoctrinate the next generation with those values, then they simply won't have those values. And whatever country that believes in their values enough to say, I'm going to build a military to protect my values, they will ultimately end up having the influence on the world. This is exactly why the US was able to have the kind of influence that we had. We were the strongest economically.
We were the strongest from the manufacturing standpoint. We had the clearest vision of our own identity in terms of value set. And so we're like, yeah, we're not going to let the Nazis or the Japanese take over the world. We just, we don't stand for fascism.
And so we're willing to put our lives on the line to make sure that that doesn't spread. Same with communism. Now we don't have that belief. And there are going to be consequences to that.
And so right now, I think people in the West are actually perfectly fine with that. They either don't know how to think through the problem well, or they are perfectly happy for somebody else to go, well, I do believe in what I stand for. And I am willing to kill a lot of people in the name of that. And so they're just going to back down.
That means fucking wild. But I'm a product of the 80s. I understand that. I'm well aware of how generations work.
And young people get the world that they're willing to fight for. And if they're not willing to articulate, this is my value set. And I'm willing to die for it, then they will get killed by the person that is willing to fight and die for their value set. Just is what it is.
We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. OK, last thing about the war.
Israel has officially now seized a larger percentage of Lebanon's total landmass. Then Russia has taken from Ukraine since its 2022 invasion. The latter was a meeting met with international uproar and unprecedented multisectural sanctions. Multisectural sanctions?
I said sexualized. Wait, what? This is getting juicy. Well, the former is barely even mentioned.
I do want to highlight this because we just said that Iran is the largest state, and that is why everybody need to rally and fight them. The rest of the world was like, actually, they're not that bad. We're OK with them. It's just you, you know, Israel has attacked multiple of the GCC nations, Israel has violated treaties, peace, cease fires, all these things.
And now they have taken a landmass from Lebanon. Is that interesting? Who did they attack in that's part of the GCC? Southern Lebanon, they said Syria, they attacked it previously.
And then there was that false flag with Saudi Arabia with Iran saying they didn't do what USA they didn't do and Israel saying, I don't know what happened. I need to see what countries are in the GCC. So yeah, if Israel really did attack countries in the Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, has Israel attacked any of those? I don't think so.
Lebanon, certainly not in recent memory. Someone in chat will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Right now, you're seeing unprecedented cooperation between Israel and the GCC nations, which was all the Abraham Accords. This is part of what was spiraling Iran out of control.
Was like, hold on a second, we're losing our grip on the GCC nations, which is part of what created the tensions. Now, I'm certainly empathetic to anybody that looks at Israel or the US, quite frankly, at this point and says, I don't like the way that these guys are being bullies spreading out into other territories. Trump was talking about taking Greenland. Trump was calling Canada the 51st state.
Trump, at one point, if I remember correctly, was flirting with. He never did anything but flirting with violating the sovereignty of Mexico to deal with drug gangs. So it's like, I get anybody that has beef with that. And I think Netanyahu said directly that the Greater Israel Project is near and dear to his heart, and that is very expansionary into the region.
I think that there's a very significant contingent of Israelis that would love to take over more of the Middle East. So all of that makes all the sense in the world to me as to why people would be bothered by that. However, there is an economic reality to be faced. You've got, before when Lebanon was a Christian country, oh god, this is gonna be racy, when Lebanon was a Christian country, they were fucking thriving.
And now they have become very, very problematic. I don't know what word to use. They've been bombing Israel and listen. This is one of those, if Canada and Mexico were constantly fucking with the US, I'd just be like, guys, what are you doing?
Like at some point, take an Egyptian approach and be like, yeah, we tried it. We're just going to create a little bit of space between us and we're gonna leave Israel alone. That would aggressively be my advice to Hezbollah, to Hamas. Now, we can get into the Palestine of it all and the apartheid of it all if we want.
It feels like it's gonna derail. I'll plant those flags just so people don't think I'm unaware of that reality. Can you sell the BB files that took across and released? That's not about how BB Netanyahu had a part with funding Hamas.
There was a state of the government. I mean, that's been rumored for sure for a long time. And I don't, are people confused by that? Like, that's what nations do.
So right now, America is out there trying to fund people that we think will be to our advantage, even if later down the road they become our enemy. We were partners with Stalin during World War II, only to then realize Russia was our biggest enemy as soon as war was over. I think countries do this all the time. I'm sure Israel's doing it.
I'm sure Iran is doing it. So it's what countries do. I think part of my disconnect with people is that I will often just talk about the world the way that it is without getting caught up in the ought of it all. I wish that humans weren't like that.
I wish that we didn't have to do that. But the reality is that we do do it a lot. Yeah, it's gonna be hilarious in 300 years when the greater Israel is the superpower of the US. And they dig us over just like we did the British.
And then it becomes everybody speaking Hebrew. And this is where you better know what you're willing to fight and die for because just because Israel's our ally today does not mean that they're gonna be our ally tomorrow. They were not our ally if we put boots on the ground. Yeah, the US is as the masses are very much the tide is turning against Israel in a big way.
I don't know this dad's off the top of my head, but I believe I have seen things to say with young people. It's like even way more lopsided. And so as they are able to effectively take over the world just by becoming the people in power, then it's gonna be a totally different relationship with Israel. We gotta talk about Charlie Kirk.
Candace Owens is doing a victory dance right now. She, I know her episode was probably crazy this weekend, but the ballistics on the bullet did not match. This could be a nothing burger, then the sheriff resigns. It could be something.
It could be a something burger. It's just smoked. I'm not with cheese. This is a royalty cheese.
Right, rumors are flying that Candace Owens was right about everything. Charlie Kirk was not killed by Tyler Robinson, according to a new ballistics report anyway. So the new ballistics report from the ATF says that the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk was not conclusively from Tyler Robinson's gun. Okay.
Now the way that is being framed by the Daily Mail is the exaggerated version that it wasn't him, like this is proof, that's not what's real. When you look more closely, what the report actually said is just that it's not conclusive. When the bullet hit Kirk's body, if all of this is being reported straight, it struck a bone, it broke up on impact. The forensic pathologist recovered fragments, not an intact bullet.
Law enforcement sources told Fox News, it is impossible to do ballistics analysis on a bullet fragment. Additionally, and I haven't seen many people reporting on this because it's not cool and not conspiratorial, but the spent shell casing found on the scene did match the rifle. The rifle. So you're in a situation where it's not that the bullet was like this didn't come from that gun, done, done, done.
It was a bullet fragment we can't tell. We need to take that done by it. That's what we need to take that done by it. But the shell casing on the scene did, the gun trigger has Tyler Robinson's DNA on it.
So this is not the, I think, conspiracy theorists are a big moment that people thought it was. A retired FBI supervisory special agent said that basically, this is a pretty significant piece of evidence for the prosecution and pretty damning for the defense. The defense doesn't even have the full ATF case file yet. It's only a summary as the retired FBI agent put it.
Nobody outside the ATF lab knows why they couldn't make them at yet. Now I'll admit, this will be a far more engrossing story if Israel or somebody else is the one that killed Charlie. But right now, the narrative is up against a confession to Tyler's dad, a text message confession to his lover, and a massive video archive of Tyler, actually on the day of the assassination, as well as the spent bullet casing, as well as his finger DNA from his finger on the trigger being present. So all of this is probably just the defense trying to buy themselves more time to find a way out from under all of that.
In a March 27th, Robinson's defense seemed filed a motion to delay his May preliminary hearing. And it was the thing about the bullet, which is buried on page 22 of the filing. So the whole thing that Daily Mail took and ran with has proof of conspiracy, probably more just a headline grabber than anything in reality. The Daily Mail basically turned that into just a headline that was something like, bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk, did not match the rifle.
And it's like sort of inconclusive. That is true, but the implication is more for conspiracy theorists than it is something that's real. Within hours, the internet, of course, was going crazy, exonerating Robinson and saying there had to be a second shooter. We're gonna need this one to play out.
The reality is that fragmented bullets are routinely inconclusive in ballistics analysis. So unable to identify being confused with came from a different gun is what's causing the drama here. It means that the physical evidence was just too degraded. So I think people wanna slow down here.
This is not the bombshell that people are making it out to be. The FBI is still currently running a second compared to bullet analysis and a bullet led analysis. Neither is complete yet. So the defense filing for preliminary request for more time is not exoneration.
So they're sitting on like 61,000 pages, 31 hours of audio over 700 hours of video. So they're just asking for more time to go through all of that. So we'll see how it comes out in the final analysis. Yeah, there's been somebody spamming in the chat.
Like it's a bullet fragment. It can't be tied to any gun. It's just because it's a piece of the book. So yes, caveat, we know all those good things.
We'll see. But it's like, this is one of those, I almost don't want to deny people they're fun. You know what I mean? Like this is one we don't know.
So it is possible that it wasn't him. And there's all these weird things. If it's true and I didn't do the research, I know that it is, but it's a great coincidence that the claim was the last time the bullet didn't match the weapon was when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
So it's like, when I saw the headline, I was like, oh, but then obviously you dig a little bit deeper. And it's like, okay, maybe not so much, bullet fragment, yada yada. But yeah, I want this to be fun right up until the end. I think the punchline is going to be Tyler Robinson killed him.
But yeah, but I want to have a good time as we go. I'm not going to lie. That's just being honest. So yeah, I do get why people think that there's something more going on here.
I'm going to put on my conspiracy edutainment hat on for a second. Because I love how you said conspiracy as a form of entertainment now. I followed a TikTok, or I'm not going to give him a platform because his ideas are wild. But he's just like, yo, I feel like they cloned people.
And he says it so passionately. And it's just like, oh, I get it now. Like he says here. Matt Gates.
Oh, with the hybrid alien? Yes, Matt Gates. I watched the video myself. Matt Gates said a uniform military.
We have. He said officer, but a person in military uniform, a real part of the military in an unclassified briefing said that aliens are being co-bred like the DNA with humans. Here we go. Pull it up.
Listen, the man himself. I think the most important information will be the biologics that are not human that have been discovered. And even some of the briefings that aren't classified just need to be out in the public. I mean, I had someone come and brief me who was getting military uniform, worked for the United States Army that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breathing with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage.
Hey, Jesse. You all have said some wild shit, but Gates, like, can we come on, bro? Like my audience has their limits. Actual uniform member of the United States Army briefed me on that.
Non-given biologics. I want to know what you cut out there. Yeah. What is that?
What? So there is this seething need for like, the world is out to get me. I don't. I'm trying my hardest.
I'm not able to get on this property ladder. I'm mad. I'm frustrated. There's aliens over here breeding with people.
We have all these words. So it's like, I don't know if this conspiracy breeds on that frustration or if it's just an entertainment escape, it's the evolution of reality TV because the Kardashians don't do it for us anymore. I don't know where that next thing is. But it's just if Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson gets off, do you know what that would do to TPUSA?
Like that would implode. Like the internet would go crazy. That the internet would go absolutely insane. There would be backlash in an extreme fashion.
That would be wild. But to your earlier question, I do think this is partly conspiracy as the new reality TV. It is a new form of entertainment where you've got, like, I don't know what's called the form of journalism, but it's like you're doing journalistic looking things to dig into the conspiracy to do the John Nash, for people that don't know, he's a guy from a beautiful mind. It's schizophrenic.
It's not exclusive to schizophrenics. They're just early to the party. But they'll see patterns in things where there actually aren't meaningful patterns. Like they're bar patterns.
They're just not meaningful patterns. And so watching. Coronation not causation. Exactly.
Watching Candace feels like that. I feel like I'm watching John Nash at the board. And I'm like, those patterns are there, but I don't think they mean what you think they mean. And so there is an entertainment level to it.
She's obviously doing incredibly well. And honestly, shout out to Candace for just reading this moment right. Again, this is not a moral statement of whether she should be doing it or not. But it's like, she understands how to marshal people's attention.
Whether she believes what she's doing or not for now, I'll just assume she does. And she's seeing these patterns that don't add up to anything, but she's drawing all these conclusions in this wild. And there's some part of her that believes that, because you feel it, which is like anathema to me. It is the exact opposite of how I approach the world.
But she believes that if you feel it, that's proof that it's true, which is the wildest shit ever. And I advise you guys never, ever, ever, to interface with the world like that. But it really makes for good TV. So you've got that part of it.
And then Drew, I almost didn't spin myself out of control. But for the first time, this question grabbed me so hard that it was like having an out of body experience. I want to see if I can infect everybody who's listening right now. I want to see if I can infect you with the same thing.
So Drew and I are grappling with, why does this stuff catch hold? New form of entertainment, yes, that's part of it. But the other is people really do lie. You really are being gasslet.
Governments really do conspiracies. False flags are real. When you start looking at history, you see that these patterns repeat. So then we paint forward, well, everything is a conspiracy because we're losing faith in institutions.
Okay, that's not the weird part. That's not what gave me the out of body experience. All of that rides on the back of a willingness to believe a very important thing, which is the world is not what I think it is. Now, anybody who thinks the world is what they think it is, I posed to you the question, but I've heard it gazillion times.
But for some reason this weekend, it gave me an almost out of body experience. Why is there something instead of nothing? Okay. Why is there something instead of nothing?
All of us can agree that things exist because we exist. So we may disagree about the laws of physics. We may disagree about God or the multiverse or whatever. But the thing we can't disagree on is that there is something and all you can ever hope to do is push that back, back, back, back, back, back, back.
So my favorite thing pushes the miracle back one level. And I say, this is all a simulation. Okay, like build the simulation. We'll turn it up to the computer.
Yeah. So eventually you get to what's known as the unmoved mover. Many people refer to that as God. I think people personify God in a way that just becomes nonsensical.
But I think that they're grabbing onto, it's not even a deep intuition. They're grabbing onto something that is so obvious and so foundational that when you get moments like this where institutions are trusted institutions breakdown and therefore we cannot hold onto a narrative which is like the soothing little blanket over the fact that we don't have an answer to. Why is there something instead of nothing? And all of a sudden all hell breaks loose.
We're not at the level of narrative anymore. And we all collide with whatever level our intellect allows us to collide with it. Cause my intellectual collision does not exist at the level say Eric Weinstein who collides with this at a much higher level. But I collide with it and I go, whoa, like this is crazy.
Why is there something instead of nothing? Now I have to grapple with whether I want to believe it or not, there is an unmoved mover. So I can tell you I don't believe in God, but I sure as hell can't tell you that I don't believe in an unmoved mover because things exist. And there's no way to like push it.
You're always going to reach the, well then that God is the real one. That's the unmoved mover. But eventually you get to an unmoved mover and then you collide with, my brain can't make sense of that. Like I just can't make sense of it.
And so you put that into a moment where institutions have lost their power and all of a sudden everybody's grappling with that in their own way and it gets weird fast. You get me saying we're living in a simulation. You get Drew saying that Jesus is real. You get other people being like everything is a conspiracy.
Charlie Kirk was killed by the Israelis because no narrative holds all of us from having to contend with the world is not the way that we think it is. How's profound? Well, thank you. Was it Jordan Peterson who said we have a God shape hole?
We have a God shape hole. He, whether he says that phrase or not, he very eloquently touches on that we all have to contend with that. Yeah. We have a God shape hole and we're just filling in with other things.
So I think identity and all types of things can become that. And to your point, it conspiracy, identity politics, religion, some people maga, that's their god, like capitalism, socialism, everybody's has a thing. OK, I got one more conspiracy brain wrap. Let's go.
I don't know if you've been seeing the Dan Manjiano, Tommy Massey back and forth on Twitter. No, same word. OK, so Dan Manjiano called out Thomas Massey, called him a fraud. He said this guy's a worse politician.
I called him three times. He didn't pick up because he doesn't want to understand the truth. Thomas Massey replied, gave like an eight thing. Well, actually you called.
It was really a way to out FBI people who were holding the FBI accountable. There was much back and forth. He came out with receipts. But what was interesting is Thomas Massey showed him the screen show the screenshot of his calls.
He's like, wait, you didn't call me out one in the morning. You didn't call me out two in the morning. Why are your screenshots messed up? So Thomas Massey showed his screenshots there at 8 AM, 730 PM, you know, reasonable hours.