Welcome everybody to the Tom, Bill, you show lot. We got a lot to cover today because the government is officially shut down. Republicans and Democrats could not reach an agreement. Their only point of leverage right now is to take the American people hostage.
That's gross. This is the first shutdown since Trump's first term. Yeah, which, hey, listen, that's not lost on me. Yeah.
35 days under Trump. So I am not saying I know people think that I'm just going to bat for Trump, which I could pull endless clips of me going in the exact opposite direction, but whatever people are going to believe what they want to believe. But neither of them are both of them. This is a better way to say it.
Both of them are willing to take the American people hostage. It just happens to be right now. The Democrats are doing it in this instance. It's one of those things where it's like, what is the North Star going back to your point earlier?
What are the leaders supposed to be doing? What are they trying to lead us toward? I think right now we do get caught up in the negotiation of it all versus what do my people actually need? You've got to be prepared to be a leader that gets your people what they actually need, not what they want.
You should be able to articulate. This is like Margaret Thatcher. You should be able to articulate. This is what you want.
This is what you need. Right now because of government fiscal responsibility, I'm going to give you what you need and not what you want. But because it actually does work, it starts moving things in the right direction. And this is terrible and people hate this about my personality but it's true.
I'm going to say it. There's a hilarious meme where you've got this guy looking at TikTok and he comes across a furry who's like whatever doing some of the search in their bedroom and just acting a fool. And he walks over, peeks his head in his dad's bedroom and goes, dad, I just want to thank you for beating me as a child. Implying that you kept me on the straight narrow that I would have had just as many weird things that I would have pursued.
But discipline kept me on the straight narrow. And I'm exactly the same about my mom. Now I would never classify what my mom did to me to discipline is beating me. She spanked me.
She once broke a wooden spoon on my ass. She once chased me down, stopped picked up a tree branch and spanked me with a tree branch. And switch. It was.
I was like, my mom is gangster. You don't play with my mom. And so I had tons of respect for my mom. She always made me feel loved.
So like there was no, I don't have any trauma over this whatsoever. I felt like I was a kid that was constantly trying to push the boundaries. I want to see how much I could get away with. And my mom had boundaries.
And so when I bumped up against the boundaries, there was a correction using what I like. I wanted to call him Trump, but it's not Trump. It is Jordan Peterson, his idea of minimum necessary force. My mom used minimum necessary force.
And so always putting me back in line and because I always felt loved and because it worked and it kept me in the straight and narrow, it was like, this is fantastic. So we need that version of leadership where people like, no, no, no, there's discipline. Because I know those things have consequences, we are not going to do that. We are going to balance the budget.
We are going to make it so that elected officials are not eligible to be reelected if our debt to GDP ratio is out of whack. And so those kinds of disciplinary actions, I think, are incredibly necessary for leaders, but they have to be able to articulate it. They have to be able to get people to buy in. And they have to have the will to do it, even if it makes them unpopular.
Yeah. I blame the debt ceiling conversation because that was one of the first times where political people realize this is now a negotiating point. We have to approve a budget now because once the just with interest inflation, all these things were naturally going over the debt ceiling a lot. So now that's the first time the government had to negotiate how we're going to do a budget.
And of course, when people see a power that like open, they try to grab it and ever since then it's all raised a ceiling, if you do these things, okay, well, now we need to continue resolution to pass the button. And it kind of started this spiral. And to your point, we really just need austerity. I haven't gotten your Venezuela thoughts yet.
You know, the US is bailing out Venezuela. Do you have a super chat? Oh, let's go. I'll just jump to the chat.
I'll prep that up. So really quick. What should we actually say if we deny healthcare to illegal immigrants, can we put a number to the supposed problem? We should be able to.
I don't know the number off the top of my head, but that sounds supremely findable. So yeah, you can look that up. The question isn't the line item of any one thing. The question is we don't have a balanced budget.
And so if we don't have a balanced budget and you are spending more money, this is why I have a beef with the big, beautiful bill, the big, beautiful bill increases the rate at which we are adding to the deficit. You can't do that. You don't have to tell me the details of what you're spending the money on. I'm just telling you right now, you can't do that.
So I don't need to know all the details about how much illegal immigrants are going to cause. I don't have to know the details on Obamacare and odd. You can't spend more money. So if people are putting forward something that costs more money, I'm immediately going to be like, hold on a second.
Stop. We've got to negotiate this properly. Now, you can't just be an ideologue. You've got to do compromises.
So as a pundit, it's easy for me to just be like pump the brakes. In reality, I'm going to need leadership that can go in and do the hard work and make it in the compromises. And part of the compromise is going to be like, yeah, things are still going to be bad for the next generation. Hopefully we can make it a little bit less bad or whatever.
But I get it. There is no utopia legislation coming. You never be able to get it signed. No one will agree on what utopia is.
So I'm well aware of that. But if you want to know how I parse through this stuff as I think through it, it's like, okay, I can automatically tell you my answer is no without further discussion on anything where price go up. It doesn't matter if my favorite representative puts it forward. It doesn't matter if that money goes directly into my pocket because I'm not retarded and I understand.
Boys and girls, hear me when I say PSA of all PSAs, we are on a march to revolution or civil war. More because unfortunately now we're already at the more stage, more people will be killed if we don't solve this problem. But it is so obvious to me that this country will tear itself apart right at a time where China is on the rise and the world will be a fundamentally different place and in my opinion a much worse place and much more violent and dangerous place certainly in my backyard. So I'm just wholly uninterested in that.
So making more money off of this is not like, yay, this is so great. Dude, I am telling people everything I do to make money. Literally everything. I teach entrepreneurs how to be entrepreneurs.
I tell you everything I know about investing. I tell people where I'm invested. I don't have some secret. I want other people to win in the same way that I'm winning.
So yeah, yeah. And as much as I came here hot saying we're not trying to just give healthcare to illegals and then Brutus acts a super chat like that and then it's just like, you know, I can't win. It's coming at the knees. I was trying to help you out bro.
That's going to be like the last thing talking point. I said Venezuela, I met Argentina. Trump is a negotiationist to bail out Argentina's economy after it tanked. Did not hit your radar?
No. Wow. Which I can't believe. Yeah, it's crazy.
So right now I'm trying to find a lot of information. Now people are upset because Trump has a potential tariff aid with farmers. That's another conversation. But Argentina's stock market collapsed last week, September 22nd.
At that point it was looking for options because people were losing their jobs. The economy was kind of upside down. At that point Scott Besant offered a $20 billion swap line to aid and help stabilize the Argentinian peso because the currency started to like. Interesting.
So do we have any clips of Besant talking about this? I would really like to hear what his rationale is. I don't have a clip of Besant. The thing is they are the austerity measure.
They are the. That's the thing. These things like they are what they are. And so what we need to figure out is what he's doing going to work.
Was this somebody we need to know what caused the collapse in the market? Were a bunch of bubbles being inflated? Was somebody running like a short game and trying to damage the Argentinian market? What was going on that caused this?
Is this a justifiable come in and save it and we have reason to believe this is going to be good for America? Or is this them seeing somebody who is ideologically aligned with them? And so they want to make sure that he wins to be able to point to him as a success case? Like I'm going to need some information on this one.
This is the commercial agreement from the beginning of the year. They said they're open to this. And then this is actually have it. I'm trying to find something recent though.
Man, I thought this was on your radar. My bad. So, okay. This is very interesting.
I was just going back to the austerity even the people that are doing the right things even sometimes they need help. Well, not only that, but the right things are the things that work. So this goes back to Ray Dalio's idea of the beautiful deleveraging. What Ray Dalio tries to warn people over and over and over is you have these four levers.
Some are stimulatory and some are trying to cool the economy. And the reason you need both is because if you pull one lever like say money printing, which is stimulatory to the economy. But if you start doing that, then you create inflation. If inflation gets out of hand, then that ends up destroying the economy.
So you have this weird balancing act that you have to walk. And so what it sounds like we're seeing is that they're pulling levers out of balance. And now you're running into trouble. Now, I'll be very curious to look at this to see if what we see is, oh man, he's just walking a really tight rope, minor slip up, you get him back on track rate.
Or if he's out of his mind and he's done something that's incredibly stupid because he starts to believe his own hype and sees the only one that sees things clearly. And as soon as people think they're the only ones that see things clearly, they start making mistakes. So we'll have to look at this. That's why you will hear me say things like, yeah, you're going to need to tax the rich more.
Then you're going to hear me say things like, if you tax the rich too much, they will leave. It's stupid. And oh, by the way, when America last had a 90% progressive tax bracket, you took in less per taxpayer than you're taking out. So I imagine people like, wait, what?
Like, is he schizophrenic? What I'm trying to get people to understand is you have to do a little bit of it. You have to be very careful because the second that you tip them too far and that they'll leave or stop producing. And by the way, you also have to run a game of like, hey, people like Tom, we need to paint a national vision that you can be excited about.
I want to make you believe in America so that you feel patriotic so that you want to help this country that you feel like this country is your everything. But that's not the narrative that we've been telling people for the last 30 years. Narrative we've been telling people for the last 30 years as a richer evil, white people are racist and evil. And so it's like, you start to feel less attached.
If I were to hang up an American flag, I doubt it would last 72 hours, meaning outside. Somebody would rip it down. I have a friend, this person is very famous, and they hung up a flag at their house. I was like, bro, I'm just going to rip that down.
And he was like, oh, they already have. I was like, what the fuck? So it is scandalous to me that we are telling ourselves a national narrative that our own flag is racist. That's the dumbest shit of all time.
If you want to understand how you get to a 90% tax bracket and people will be like, yeah, I'm going to pay it. They've got to believe that their country is amazing. It's the greatest in the world, that their country loves them back, and that ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And when everybody feels like that, then people are going to give and they're going to help and they're going to do whatever they can.
So this is a really weird cause from being successful for too long. This is the result of it all worked. All these ideas they worked. And then when something goes well for too long, people grow up thinking, well, this is just how the world is.
So now I feel guilty. I've got so much. I've got so much of them things or let me invite them into my country not realizing, oh, you got here because you killed a lot of people that tried to fuck with you. And we no longer understand that Japanese blew up a bunch of our shit, killed a bunch of our people, and we just went and slotted the fuck out of them and said, you will sit the fuck down.
And if you don't, we will keep killing you on mass. Like people don't understand how we got here. They don't understand how you get the tick or tape parade and all the prosperity. They don't understand you have to go and stick a bayonet into the guts of a fucking Nazi.
They don't get that. They don't get how you have to have the Marshall plan and you have to rebuild people's psychology back that you've got to be like, no, no, no, Japan. You're amazing. No, no, no, Germany, you're amazing.
You can't do those things anymore, but you're amazing. You've got to believe in yourself. You have to understand the things that make you great. And by giving people these national narratives, dude, in the 80s, this gets complex because we end up breaking their economy because we thought that they got too good.
But we helped rebuild Japan psychologically and economically and just like physical infrastructure. And they took to it and they ran with it and they created a new narrative, a new culture. And it's amazing. Same thing with most of Europe to be quite frank, but certainly Germany.
And I was just in London, not too long ago, and I went to the Churchill War Room and to think that people are now making Churchill a villain is so disgusting and such a slap in the face. Yeah, people are just ignorant to the way the world works. And so because they're ignorant to the way the world works, they don't have national pride. They don't see fellow Americans as being an in-group because it's just been too good for too long.
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Let's get right back into the action. Alright, well let's tap into the lifeline. Michael Saylor was on Bloomberg yesterday and he gave us the one to choose a Bitcoin and how it's really going to blow up and take off. So not a big concern.
Not a big concern. It's interesting. I mean, you think about the position that you hold when it comes to Bitcoin, which is basically never sell. You hold forever.
And then I was listening to a conversation this morning with Tim Draper on BTV with Matt Miller who was saying that Bitcoin is the currency of the future. You're going to have a day where you have US retailers using Bitcoin instead of US currency. And it falls into basically the store value versus currency debate. And I wonder if Michael, whether those two viewpoints can coexist together, is it going to be one or the other?
No, I think that the digital asset economy is exploding and the winning digital currency is the tokenized dollar in the form of tether and circle. And that entire asset is exploded. This is a brilliant narrative that soothes the US government and certainly Trump obviously buys into this and is doing everything that he can. And I have a feeling though I have no evidence for this whatsoever.
But if Michael Saylor and David Sachs aren't in direct communication, I would be shocked. But they're singing certainly from the same hymnal, which is that we're in a position where we can get US debt to be the thing used to back these stablecoins. So let's create a global market for US debt by promoting stablecoins. And so I don't see how Bitcoin isn't better off if it were a currency.
Now I think that Bitcoin isn't a currency probably largely for technical reasons and that it's just too slow. You're not going to be able to run the kind of transactions certainly not cheap enough. But it's my understanding that right now the only way that miners who protect the network are compensated is through mining. Mining will eventually go away.
And so then they've got to have transactions. Once there's no mining transactions, what transactions are there? So maybe there's a brilliant explanation for that that I'm just unaware of. That is entirely possible.
But I don't know of one. So it feels like they're like, we'll deal with that problem later. If this is a potent enough store of value, we'll find a mechanism to reward people. And I think they're right about that.
But it does feel both true and convenient that treating the US dollar as how treasuries technically how you back these stablecoins is like, I know that the US government is going to need to hear that, that they're going to be chill so that we can cooperate with them and not be antagonistic. And I think it's genius. I also think it's politically expedient. And so when I try to map out, when I hear a sailor say things like this, like, oh, this is just like de facto.
No, just the way that it's going to be is like that's only one. And I think that this is narrative designed to further cement it in people's minds. I think sailor is a brilliant spokesperson for Bitcoin, which by the way, I think is moral currency. I love it.
I could not be more grateful. I'm glad that people are talking about it. The person wants to build this reputation around saying all the things and not just the things that sound good for what is good for me. I do think that that's part of the game is we just have to make sure that the government is chill, that this also gives us the ability to sell our debt.
So take it with a grain of salt when he talks about it. Like, oh, yeah, yeah. I remember we had that convert that clip from the Russian oligarch who was like, oh, yeah, America's just trying to bury their debt in digital currency. Do you think that they're trying to bury their debt?
I think they see, oh, this incredible thing, this moral currency has come on. It's game seem it is going to happen. Oh, I the US government realized, oh my God, if we use treasuries as a way to do these stablecoins. So anybody can spin up a stablecoin.
As long as it's backed, provably, one for one with a US treasury, you're good. And it's like, now all of a sudden, oh, damn, I'm in Paraguay, Mogadishu, Nigeria, whatever. And I just need to fund the wholesale slaughter of Christians. I'm going to go and create a spin up a coin.
I had to drill. I don't even know why. I had to. Yeah, so real.
And that is, I think, just them being very smart, very shrewd, understanding that you can do that with the debt, which, listen, as an American, yay. And then also, if you're in even Argentina right now, one of the things we're trying to do is get people to use dollar first, forget the peso, use the dollar first. And if you can do that and get something more like a global currency, you're certainly going to be, if your currency is weak, you're going to be better off. You do invite the export of inflation.
But if you've got your exit ramp into Bitcoin, and then it's only backed in like these really short term periods by the inflationary asset, you've got a really good system. So it's one of those, it will work incredibly well, incredibly well. And then of course, this helps our reserve currency status maintain a couple of decades. If you don't find a way to get people to buy your debt as Japan and China and other places are getting rid of it as fast as they can, if you don't find a way for people to absorb those losses plus, given all the extra money we want to spend, which becomes debt, you're in dire straits.
Kevin, let's close it. It's about $250 billion. I mean, so if people want a circulating medium of exchange on crypto rails, they're using stable coins in the form of tokenized dollars. Bitcoin has emerged as digital capital.
What you want is a commodity that's also scarce and decentralized as a long term capital asset. So the killer application of Bitcoin is a digital credit issued against digital capital, whereas the killer application for medium of exchange is a digital currency in the form of a stable coin. I think the crypto industry understands this. And I think the people of the world understand it.
If you've talked to anybody and ask them, how are they going to pay for their cup of coffee? They're going to send a stable coin from their mobile phone app. And if you ask them, what do you give to your granddaughter, they're going to say, give them a Bitcoin. Okay.
That sounds romantic and sweet. And I'm sure Michael Stale is going to blame that drum because he's what, $74 billion at this point, making $500 million every day on this thing. That's wild. Yeah, somebody said that he's a moron.
He is anything but a moron. I just need to shout out Jay, mayor, who put a banger quote and chat, he said, I have become debt destroyer of worlds. That's so good. We're hitting pause for a moment.
There's plenty more ahead. So don't go. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back in the action.
Is Sailor being misleading calling Bitcoin capital? I mean, people are using it as capital. So I don't have any beef with that because they're now offering loans against it and all that. So no, you could get into the semantics of it.
I don't think it matters. The reality is it is an asset class that people believe in. They will loan against. And so, yeah, you can effectively turn it into money instantly through stablecoins.
So whether via alone or just actually directly selling it for stablecoins. So yeah, I don't have any beef with that. I don't think he's being dishonest. I do think he's trying to solidify a narrative to get people to behave in that way.
But I don't think there's anything disingenuous about it. Thank you, Plumber, for the $50. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, let's jump into it because there has been a lot of salty action happening.
Let's start with the electric arts acquisition. This one blew my mind. $55 billion for a game development company. How dare you insinuate it should be less?
No, I'm just, I love you, Tom. I love Kazi. I was like $55 billion in 2025. EA, the Sims?
Is that worth $55 billion? It was a sports franchise. It was a project. And what they do call it, right?
Yeah, yeah. Call of Duty EA Sports, the Sims, I think, are the biggest three gamers in the chat. Let me know if I'm missing anything. So it's one of those things.
This is good because any deal in a space means that activities roll in other people are looking for it. So I know why gaming. I don't really care about it from that perspective. But in terms of, I expect players to care about this very deeply.
Now, the player community is like sort of in a weird state in terms of one of the things that they're saying is, oh my god, yes, they've been bought by a company consortium of investment houses that are in Middle Eastern. This is going to be great. No more work garbage, right? There's a huge contingency of millennial gamers.
The more time I spend watching gaming content, the more I realize how much this is a millennial reaction, utterly fascinating. But millennial gamers are up in arms about anything that has to do with woke this out of the other. So like, this is going to be awesome. But then people are like, well, hold on a second.
Didn't Saudi Arabia like a bone saw cat to pieces like getting the not to, like, this and past? Is that? They're going to have their own values into the games. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
So for sure, they're going to now inject their values or have bumpers in the alley of like, well, don't say things bad about us or whatever. So you will for sure see that the bad guys in an EA game aren't going to be Middle Eastern. Let's just say that. So they're going to point you in some other direction.
So certainly embrace yourselves for that. But ultimately, businesses like this, especially when you're doing it on debt, they need to make money. And so the things that I would expect gamers to really be focusing on is what are they going to do to the monetization here? Now the reality is, as a game developer, I'm paying a lot of attention to where games are going in the future and games are going mobile.
Mobile gamers don't have all the beef with the microtransactions. So you can expect that they're hyper aware of that, that they're going to be looking for ways to incorporate microtransactions into what they view as the future. And so if I were them, I would be looking at this going, oh, OK, how much of our revenue do we generate off PC gamers? Do we think that's increasing or decreasing?
I would say it's decreasing. How much are we making off mobile? Do we think that's going to increase or decrease? I think they're all going to look at that and go, that's increasing.
So I would expect over the next 10 years for them to begin putting more and more of their time and attention into mobile. First things migrating their famous properties into mobile playable games, either simplifying the mechanics or just using more of the loot driven mechanics, pay to win mechanics, things like that. And so millennial gamers, traditional gamers, if you want to think about it, which by the way, I'm one of, not millennial, but traditional. So I play on PC and console.
And I'm not a big fan of where things are currently on mobile gaming. But I think you're going to see a move like that. So if gamers are going to either be excited or be traumatized, I would look at it from that perspective because these guys, when they do acquisitions like this, they're not like, I like games. They're going into this and they're going, oh, I understand this at the level of a spreadsheet.
The vast majority of the people involved in these acquisitions don't play games. I've never played games. Literally don't care. They are like Warren Buffett.
They're looking at a bunch of spreadsheets and going, where is something undervalued? Where do we think we understand the future or better than somebody else? Where is their discrepancy between the price that the shares are trading at versus where we think they'll trade out in three or five years? That's it, man.
That is how they process through this stuff. It is totally mercenary. Now, you don't need to be traumatized by that because one of the most mercenary things that a company can do is go find the young, hungry talent that really want to make something awesome. This is what always makes me laugh is that, remember, companies are leading from the back.
So you'll get like Quest ended up succeeding the way that it did because we left from the front. We were for our own reasons. We all bent to build that company and we didn't know if it would work. And so if anybody remembers my story, the super speed run is we're doing a company before.
I get tired of being a slick marketer and I want to do something that I believe in because I realized the struggle is guaranteed, the success is not. So I need to structure my life in a way where I would enjoy my life even if I'm failing. And so the answer to that ends up being Quest for a whole host of reasons. So for my own weird selfish reasons, I'm like, I'm going to build a film studio inside of a protein bar company.
That made us the first movers on social media because I knew how to create content because my background is filmmaking. So I start doing all this stuff, which now everybody does, but back then I was like, what are they doing? We were shooting our own commercials, making like UGC style content, working with other people to make UGC style content like, it's just crazy. And so because we did it way ahead of anybody else, the company just absolutely explodes.
So that was us going, this might be a suicide run, but I really want to do this for my own reasons and it worked. Once it works, everybody else just floods in at the spreadsheet level. So everybody's looking for that, right? So the game I'm building Project I is I'm not building chasing a spreadsheet.
I'm building the game I want to play. I've got a whole thesis about what I think is going to happen to the world. I think AI is going to make the world so easy that people are going to be forced to find hard mode and they're going to find it in simulated worlds. That isn't what I'm building today.
I'm laying the foundation trying to figure out the game mechanics. That's five, ten years away. But anyway, so I'm leading from the front. Maybe it'll fail catastrophically.
When you leave from the front, you run that risk. But this acquisition is about leading from behind. So gamers have proven we want a mobile game. I'm just growing up with a mobile device, always in my hand, always easy.
I'm not growing up in the PC era where it's like all my friends get together. It's just not how they play games now. So if you want to understand where this acquisition goes, look at it through the lens of assets, investments, entrepreneurship, and it's going to get a lot clearer. And so they'll try.
They're going to try to maximize the revenue of profitable revenue. They're going to try to maximize the profits, it's a better way to say it. They're going to try to maximize the profits of all of those games. And they will do it through the ways that I just talked about.
So that's what I'd be thinking about. Now, I get why, it was sad for me to watch what happened to Star Wars, but there's always going to be cool new shit. So look, I get it, nostalgia, all that. Nobody's more nostalgia-baited than me.
But at the same time, good games will continue to get made in the way that you like good games. They just might be super niche. So I would do a PSA to all of my millennial gamers out there. I've watched so much of your content.
Literally at this point, I've seen well north of 100 videos about the state of the gaming industry, from they don't call themselves millennials, but you can tell that they're millennials from their perspective. And it's just all lamentations. And you are making these less fun for yourself. And I would just say, find a path to like, where's the joy?
Where's people doing cool stuff so you can fall in love again? I want that for you. So we'll see. Anyway, that's the state of play right now.
All right, so we have that on one side of the coin. And honestly, the gaming community seems to be aligned with it. Hey, it's not prepping to more. Hey, I see this has been open up more investment.
It hasn't been what we've seen on the other side where the Re-i Comedy Festival was announced. And all these communities were announced to be a part of it. And immediately everybody was mad. Like, how can they speak to this?
It's the same country that killed the journalism. This is going crazy. People have memes because David's in loss is dead in 9-11. So people have memes of his dad looking in heaven.
Like, how dare you go to the country? So it's kind of like on one side of this, people are like, okay, teacher gaming, we finally got the investment back. They're leaning from behind, we're good. But then on this side, it's like comedy.
How dare you do comedy in it? Are there an interior regime? How dare you open up those relations? Are these on the same thing?
Like, does this? Everybody's going to have to decide how do you treat somebody that has different values than you? Do you try to alienate them, isolate them and say until you think like I think fuck you? Or do you go, all right, listen, I don't like a lot of the things that they stand for.
I see what they're trying to do. They're trying to modernize. I'm going to look at the restrictions that they're putting me under and I'm either okay with the restrictions or I'm not. And they can't make me say something I don't believe.
And I won't say something I don't believe. But I don't need to go over there to be antagonistic. I am running a business. This is very good for my business.
I'm going to go or not. And so I believe that Shane Gillis that decided he wanted to take a principal stand, totally get that. Full disclosure. Saudi Arabia.
It's a Saudi Arabia to do three live interviews there. They were doing a health expo and they wanted to bring me into film live from the health expo and I went and did it. And I had no beef whatsoever fully aware that Saudi Arabia itself had a journalist killed. But I'm like, it wasn't like the guy running this event is over there like wiping the blood off the bus off.
So just as I would not want to be judged for everything that America did, nor would I say to anybody coming to America signing off and everything that America did. Oh, and by the way, I want people to cooperate with us. I think that Saudi Arabia is finally trying to step into the 21st century behind the scenes. I think that they are using violence to corral like the royal family to get everybody pointed in the right direction to understand that we're going to have to move away from oil.
All that. I see humans as incredibly complicated figures. You were not going to look at any government, any point in history and be like, oh my God, they just did everything right. So I was just praising the founding fathers who by the way had slaves.
So it's like, you're just never going to find it. So I don't know what universe people live in. I don't have a beef with anybody that's like, you know what, I want to take a principal stand. That means more to me.
Yeah, go do your thing. That's going to allow you to say things and be taken as credible later that other people won't be able to say. I'm not signing off on the government, but I've never made this much money for this before. Oh, by the way, I want to go see it for myself.
Yeah, totally. That was exactly what I did. And I was like, my answer when asked was they cannot get me to say something I don't believe given that I've got no problem. And so I went and did the interviews I wanted to do said the things I wanted to say and literally didn't have to corral myself.
We were talking about health. So it's not like Saudi Arabia was going to come up. So I was like, yeah, no beef with this whatsoever. So that's how I would look at it.
Like these guys are running a business. They are entertainers. When let's say your normal fee is $25,000 for a gig and they're going to pay you $250,000, it's like even as like a life story. It's just interesting.
Again, they're not being invited by the guy wiping blood off the bone saw. So and just keep in mind how many people have American governments killed like this week. So yeah, I don't know. I think people are instead of trying to build bridges, people are trying to find reasons to be holier than now.
It doesn't resonate with my belief system, but people should do what they think is right. Yeah. David Cross had like a whole like thesis statement about it. Other comedians have the reaction video.
So it really is mixed. But I just love how you said it. We shouldn't hold the organizers of the festival, but hold it to the actions of the government, assuming those aren't the same people. Now, if you do find out, hypothetically speaking, that the prince that was responsible for getting the journalist killed is the person that decided to throw them in.
Well, now, here's the crazy thing. If you said, listen, MBS wants to meet with you, I would do it a thousand percent, a thousand percent. And we can just assume he is the guy wiping the blood off of his bone saw. But when I think about how important the Middle East is going to be moving forward, they're going to be the hub of investment dollars.
I think at least no way. It's something like seven of the biggest investment houses are in the Middle East. It's wild. So it's like, man, we should be looking for ways to partner, join each other in the 21st century, to put that kind of stuff behind us.
So MBS strikes me as a very important figure. And again, I think that when you hear Dave Smith talk about Barack Obama, he's not wrong. And he's like, Barack Obama's a murderer. He killed all these people with drugs, strikes and all that.
And I'm like, yeah. But if Barack was like, Tom, I really want to talk with you about the future of America, would you do it? Yes, yes, I would very much. And I mean, look, that's weird.
It is a region of my brain where I'm like, this is how the world works. And leaders may not kill with their bare hands, but they kill a lot of people, man. And if we don't understand that this is how the world works, and that you both want to call out when it's like, hey, we don't want to do that. And at the same time that you don't go, like, Mamdani is saying, I'm going to arrest Netanyahu if he comes to New York.
It's like, that's stupid. So you want to find ways to invite these countries into the 21st century. You want to find a way to bring them closer to your values and not isolate them. That would be my take.
Do we have a responsibility, though? And the reason that I'm kind of harping on this a bit is because right now we are so ideologically captured. We're a couple weeks ago, we were talking about Bob Villenkchin, it's not foot in America because he made foot. You know what I mean?
So there's certain lines that we do have drawn in the sand. Where is that balance between this could be a bridge for the future? If MBS was like, listen, I'm going to keep killing your journalist, but I would like to invite a bunch of journalists over. Then I'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I wouldn't expect anybody to go. That would be wild, but he's not. And obviously there's like evidence and all that that he was involved in blah, blah, blah. So it becomes a question of what's going to be the thing that you draw the line on?
Is it that they did a thing ever that we think is morally repugnant? In which case, Trump's got to go. Biden's got to go. Obama's got to go.
Clinton's got to go. You literally just run down the list of American leaders all the way back to Washington's got to go. Like as far as I understand, Washington had slave teeth in his own mouth. He pulled the teeth.
Somebody fact check me if I'm wrong. But he had dentures that were made from like some horses teeth, some wood if I remember right, and then some slave teeth. So that's horrific. So but at the same time, when he had the opportunity to become dictator for life of America, he didn't do it.
He also fought the British and garnered America its freedom. So it's like, yeah, I'm not going to throw him out with the bathwater. I'm not going to say his face needs to be taken off Mount Rushmore. When I teach that in schools, I'm going to say listen, despicable things were done, but we are not going to focus on that.
What we need to focus on is what makes this country great, what are the values that we want to embrace. And it is absolutely antithetical to moving forward well to say that we're evil or the product of evil or it doesn't even matter if it's factual. It just matters that it's not useful moving forward. So same thing.
If the Middle East is going to transition off of oil and get into tech, get into biotech investments, get into entertainment, whatever, and they're going to be a driving force there, we want to have good relationships with them. And so yes, there needs to be pressure. You can't like if they killed a journalist now and we're like, okay, we just did that thing and now we're inviting everybody over. I'll be like, yo, this is way freakish just to like make sure they understand I think that that's a non-starter.
I'm not going because if they did some atrocity right now, I'll be like, no fucking way. So it all of that factors into as people build their belief system about how do we approach the world? Should we have invited Putin into a negotiation? Obviously.
But he's killing Ukrainians. Yes. You have to find an off ramp. You've got to treat this guy like a human, even though you think he may be committing war crimes.
Same with B.B. Netanyahu, same with Hamas, same with Palestine. It's like, you've got to find a way to work with these people. In fact, there's an image of a guy that's in the UN, he's in the UN or something like that where there's footage of him holding two decapitated heads.
And he's now in a leadership position in the world. Somebody who's going to know chat, please, rescue me here. And what do you do with that? Well, if he's in a position of leadership, you've got to deal with him.
So this is one of those where, yes, like when Trump brought the South African leader into the White House, you say, bro, you've got farmers being killed, you guys are moving in the wrong direction, we've got to address it. But you don't go. They're despicable. We'll never speak to them.
And there are, of course, lines around recency. More words are just going to loop. Okay. Shout out to Yadi Bandit.
He just dropped the link to the Shane Gillis of George Washington's sleeve. Joe? George Washington's slave course. By the way, the first thing you do when you walk into George Washington's slave course is you go, ooh.
Somehow worse than I thought they were going to be. It's rough dude. I'm in there. I'm in there.
You know, by myself, and I'm like, you know, you remember that time, it was a tense fucking time in this country. I'm in there by myself like, Jesus fucking Christ. This is like during the yellow. And I hear some footsteps coming down the path behind me and now blocking the only exit of the room was a slave reenactor.
They have those there. And he did not break character. I turned around. He was like, oh, well, oh yeah, so awesome.
Jesus Christ, dude, please, you don't have to do the character. I'd give anything for you to not do that character. He didn't break. He was like, look at those clothes.
You must be from the future. Hello, time traveler. I was like, no, I'm from right now. What are you doing out?
Come here. No, I did not say that. Obviously I didn't fucking say that. I didn't say word.
I was frozen. I was paralyzed with white guilt. I didn't say word. I was like, he's good.
And he knew what he was doing. He for real. He knew what he was doing. He wasn't giving me the George Washington toy.
He was just drilling me with shit. I didn't want to hear it. He was hitting me with the white. You remember that time, that guy walks in there and sees me.
I know what I look like. I know exactly. I got the body type of a guy who says, let's see the rest of the body can't footage before we jump in. I know what I look like.
He wasn't even giving me the George Washington toy. He was talking about other people. He's like, Thomas Jefferson had about six slave children of his own. He only freed two of his own children during his lifetime.
That's crazy. Isn't that a farmer? Thomas Jefferson literally enslaved some of his own children. Now you know how I felt.
You're not getting fucking drilled with this information. That's when I started playing possum a little bit. I was like, maybe I am a special needs guy. He was hitting me with the fucking white guilt facts.
I was like, that's a good thing. Dude, he's mad. He was like, dude, wizard's fighting. Finally, I won by just lowering my mask.
He was mid-ran. He was like, shit. I'm in a shit fucking. Dude, so funny.
Didn't get into the tea part. I'm pretty sure he does in that talk about it. But listen, that unfortunately is when I have a good authority that it's not a story you want to be true, but is nonetheless true. I think it comes down to how you map people.
If you think some people are perfect and then you can hold out for perfect, I'm far more in the reality of the knife fight of geopolitical strife. They kill people. Literally everybody. And this is why I think that the Putin quote about, oh, everybody gets elected on all these crazy promises and then they don't follow through with them because men in black suits that look like me walk up until the other government really works.
And so, yeah. It's kind of threw me for it. Oh, wait. So hold on.
Rotar says, Tom, the human guy holding the two heads is a mod al-Shara, also known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. So word. If you look that up, I've seen the image. It is wild.
Like you see him in both modes. You see him looking a little more like he spent some time in some underground shelters, a little more like he's done. And then other ones where he's like all done up and his beard's all cut clean. And in the one where he's on the ground, he'd be holding them heads.
There it is. On joy, everybody. Look at that. That is wild.
So now, okay. Let's say you bump into Homeboy and I don't know who's heads. He severed. But let's say they were friendlies and then you bump into him at the UN.
What do you do? You scream, you throw a fit. You walk out. Anytime he's in the room.
Nope. Can't have it. Or do you go, yeah, the world is a crazy ass place. And so what's the long term play?
How do we back more people away from this? I fall into the camp of, yeah, the world is a crazy place. And you're not going to see me at his kids' 12th birthday party. But if we're going to try to find a path forward, I would rather know what this guy thinks, where he's at, what he's looking for, what can we do.
But as I say, forgive but don't forget, bro, if I found out later that you had severed two heads and there were photos of you carrying them around, let's just say we're not going to Hamilton together, not to Hamilton tickets. But hey, listen, it's wild. So anyway, I think I'm maybe a little too accepting of how the world is for people's taste. We're going to actually try to get things done.
You can't just infinitely let things slide. And at the same time, you've got to be in the real world. I think there is a line of righteous indignation that a lot of people are walking where it's like, I am so right about this thing, I will cut off my family for it to show you that Trump is a bad guy. And it's like, Trump is not saying thank you, sir, come into my arms.
You're not getting a turning point, USA membership. So the alienation of actual people who we need to fix these problems, that's the part that I really don't appreciate. So as much as it's there, the bad guys, we're the good guys, us, we're some, all this other jargon, just like with this government shutdown, we need to be bipartisan whether we want to or not, you need to. So the name coming in on this stuff, it has to eventually end.
Also, like if you think about it, they're inviting people that are of Western culture into their country. And of course, they're going to give them like, don't make fun of Saudi government, but they're still inviting people of Western culture in. That's a very good time. All right, everybody, we are at the end.
Make sure you clown and drew extra hard for apparently, sleeping through his alarm or not setting his alarm. How dare he shout out to my boys who were here on time. I love you guys well played. And to everybody that shows up for this show, we kind of thank you enough.
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And by the way, thank you guys so much for watching. The deep dives that continue to routinely hit one out of 10 for us, which is phenomenal. It cannot be more grateful for you guys. I'm getting you that I'm trying to make them about the most important things happening in the world today.