Transcript of Saagar Enjeti on Who’s Profiting From Trump’s New America of Gambling, OnlyFans, and Drugs

A couple of years ago, leaked internal documents from AIPAC showed that the single largest donor to the organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, number one donor, was a man called Leonid Rudvinsky. Rudvinsky was a Ukrainian-born pornographer. He was the owner of OnlyFans, one of the largest porn sites and human exploitation sites in the world, the site that has effectively turned thousands upon thousands of American women into prostitutes. And according to these documents, Rudvinsky and his wife had pledged $11 million to AIPAC. Huh. He later denied that, but the documents remain. And you had to ask yourself, and many people did ask themselves at the time, why would someone who runs a pornography site donate this much money to a pro-war organization, a neocon organization like AIPAC? What's the connection between the two? Huh. Then, of course, it was that same year, 2024, that Miriam Adelson became one of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign, hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, Miriam Adelson is not in the pornography business that we know of, but very much the beneficiary of the gambling business. Her late husband was one of the largest proprietors of casinos in the world, Sheldon Adelson.

And she became one of the biggest donors and partly because of those donations, became one of the driving forces behind our war with Iran and also immensely powerful within this administration. In fact, literally one of the people who picked employees at the Department of Justice, Mary Maitland, calling up PPO, Presidential Personnel Office at the White House. I want this person at DOJ. Bam. That person gets a job at DOJ.

That happened.

But again, you have to ask, what is the connection between pornography, in that case gambling, and neocon politics? You wouldn't have thought there was one, but the connection keeps showing up. Here, for example, is a pretty amazing and telling clip from Ben Shapiro's recent podcast. Watch this.

In my opinion, as I said at the time, I thought the MOU was counterproductive, that it signaled weakness. That it actually gave credibility to the Iranian regime. Well, now things are starting to reverse. You have Operation Economic Outcast led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. The goal is to economically strangle the Islamic Republic. So the odds have been steadily going down about when we will actually have full traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to our friends and sponsors over at Kalkshi. But they are rising actually rather sharply recently. Before April 1st, 2027, Is now up to 42%. Before July 1st, 2027 is up to 53%. Honestly, I think we'll probably get there before that.

So that's a pretty amazing clip. Here's Ben Shapiro. And if you see the whole show, he spends a lot of it, as he always does, pushing the United States to send more money and, well, more of our American soldiers and airmen into harm's way fighting Israel's war in Iran. And then he kind of seamlessly moves to a pitch for Kalshi, a gambling company with with whom he's a partner, apparently. Not only am I excited about the war, he's effectively saying, you can bet on its outcome. Here, sign up now for Kalshi. So here's Ben Shapiro using his daily lecture on why war is good when it's fought by Americans on behalf of a foreign country to seamlessly pitch a gambling company. If war wasn't good enough, how about some gambling for you? Why not pornography? Why not weed? Here's some prescription drugs. Well, of course, virtually everybody who pushes for wars like the war in Iran or the war in Iraq or toppling the Syrian government or killing the leader of Libya, that group, we call them neoconservatives. Almost all of them are on board with all of these other public policy questions, every one of which has the net effect of hurting Americans, weakening people.

So what's the connection here? There clearly is one, and we're just guessing, but maybe the connection is exploitation. So the idea of the Iran War, like the Iraq War before it, was we use the world's best-funded military backed by the world's most powerful economy, to fight a war on behalf of another country, a tiny country that can't fight its own wars. In other words, take the United States and use it for our purposes to achieve something that we can't achieve ourselves. Basically treat the population of the United States, the 340 million Americans who live here, like livestock and just use them. And that's really not so different from the attitude that, I don't know, gets you to buy OnlyFans or promote gambling companies or push legalized weed or prescription drugs on the population. None of those things is good for people. And of course, you know that you would encourage your own kids to spend all day betting on their phones or smoke more weed. You probably wouldn't want your daughter on OnlyFans, would you? But these aren't your kids. These are other people's kids. These are American kids. And why do you care? Because you can get something out of it.

So that's a worldview that most normal people would consider repugnant. That's exploitation. It's cruel. It's awful. It reveals that you think the people from whom you're profiting aren't fully human. You don't care about them. You just want to take something from them. Most people consider that immoral. But increasingly, there's no sanction against it. In fact, you're criticized for pointing it out. But it's so obviously true. And you should know that the same people pushing for these wars, whose outcome can't possibly benefit you— your only role is to go die in their prosecution or pay for it, face the consequences long-term, bankruptcy, destruction of a generation. That's your role. The people pushing for those wars don't care about you at all, because if they did, they certainly wouldn't be steering you to gambling sites or getting your kids to smoke more weed or convincing your daughters to join OnlyFans. So we're just starting to notice this because it's kind of hard to ignore. The president's top donor runs a gambling empire. Ben Shapiro is shilling for gambling. The guy who owns OnlyFans is AIPAC's biggest donor. Maybe there's a connection here. Very few people have noted that, but one of them is a man called Sagar Enjeti.

Now, we know Sagar, actually hired Sagar out of college years ago. And what set Sagar apart was not simply that he was smart, but that he didn't— and this was almost 15 years ago— have any real interest in the partisan system. He thought it was fake back when most of us, very much including me, bought into the idea that this is a war between 2 parties and differing worldviews. And of course, that wasn't what it was. We learned February 28th that in fact the parties are aligned on the basic questions, and the rest of us are encouraged to argue at the margins to preserve that lie that this is a real argument when in fact they're colluding against us. Sagar Enjeti realized that many years ago, and so he left conventional journalism and has wound up running something called Breaking Points, which is an excellent show that he co-hosts, uh, on all social media platforms. We strongly recommend. But maybe because he doesn't have a conventional worldview, he is one of the only people in all media to point out that actually gambling on your phone, digital gambling, is utterly destructive of people. It's incredibly addictive.

The odds are abysmal. In fact, there's almost no chance you can win. And it is growing at a pace that has eclipsed all other forms of entertainment. And one of the reasons Sagar Enjeti has been able to point this out is because he's one of the very few people in media who's not taking money from gambling interests. And we share that with him. We are strongly pro-dog on this show. We make no secret of that. Dogs are one of the great blessings of this life. And to keep them healthy, we recommend Dutch. It's the solution to skyrocketing veterinary costs. Why are those costs so high? Well, private equity, in case you didn't already know that. Big investors have bought up veterinary clinics across the country and doubled the amount they charge. So they're exploiting your love for animals to make money. And are they providing better services? Well, if you can't afford to go to the vet, you get no services at all. We did a whole show on this and it's Really distressing. Dutch is the solution to this. Licensed veterinarians, easy remote appointments. Start with the code Tucker, plans at just $82 per year.

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Thank you for having me.

Every year, this is one of my favorite interviews of the year, so I'm grateful that you made the effort to come up here. So I was— I'm a little cut off from the question of gambling. I think of it as something that takes place in a casino, craps and blackjack and baccarat and whatever. But suddenly it's omnipresent, and I'm wondering if that's good or bad.

Well, I think it's very bad. And I'll just set the stage. I wish that we were at the stage where you were at, which, by the way, I still think is bad for people to— waste a lot of their money on craps, blackjack, but those people would put modern-day gambling companies to shame because at the very least, the house edge on those games is very limited.

Yes.

In fact, you can win, it's just you're very unlikely in the long run to do so. The products that are available today for the vast majority of Americans are effectively legalized theft, especially the ones that are being pushed by these gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, where their whole and/or 60% of their revenue are a type of bet which again would put a Las Vegas casino to shame. They're called the single-game parlay. But before I even get into all of that, let's zoom out. Gambling as of this year is now the most popular entertainment in America. America is a nation of gamblers. Last—

It's the most popular entertainment in America?

By not only just the most popular of entertainment, gambling, the total amount that was gambled in the United States eclipsed all types of other entertainment revenue, movies, books, and others combined. So that is the amount of dollars that we're talking about, hundreds of billions of dollars, in some cases tens of billions of dollars per state. And most of it is targeted to young men specifically, which where we see the data overwhelmingly is depressing not only their savings rates, bankruptcy goes up, domestic violence goes up by nearly 10%, especially whenever there's a home team loss, which has largely been associated with the NFL for quite some time. But when you add dollars, into that, it makes the magnitude of the loss, of the drinking, of the depression, and of the anger express itself even more. So there's basically nothing good that has come out of it. There's an argument that comes from many of these states about revenue, but even the revenue argument honestly falls apart. The Ohio governor even said that legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake, the same governor who legalized it. And he gave us some of the numbers where the amount of revenue that, let's say, Ohio raised, it's $200 million.

Well, the amount of associated social costs was roughly equivalent to the same amount of revenue that they took in. Gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction in the United States.

Actually?

Yes, yes it does. Well, it's one of those addictions where you can operate and hit your rock bottom without actually— well, if you hit your rock bottom as an alcoholic, everybody around you knows. You probably lost your job. There's not an ability to maintain that. Same with drug addicts, fentanyl addicts, and any other types of addictions. With gambling specifically, to hit rock bottom, you can gamble your way into a hole and a debt spiral and shame, Often leads to a point where many of these men just can't face the music, often very tragically leads to suicide.

I believe that. I've actually— I don't want to play dumb. I've actually seen it, right? And I, you know, quit drinking myself. So if you reach the bottom of alcoholism or drug addiction, you can stop using drugs or alcohol. You reach the bottom of gambling and it's insolvency. It's like pretty hard to fight your way out of that.

That's right. And it's on your phone. So even, you know, imagine if you could drink outta your phone when you were an alcoholic. That's the equivalent of what we're looking at. This is the most omnipresent environment for gambling in modern history. And just again, to put some color on the numbers, I have some of my notes in front of me. There's been $500 billion wagered since 2018. In 2025 alone, $166 billion on sports, more than movies, recorded music, live music, books, museums combined of a normal $70 billion. So it's double the amount of revenue for all of those associated other types. of entertainment, which I would argue have a lot more of a social net positive. Now, what we see is that there is a 25% to 30% increase in states which legalize online gambling. $1 bet leads to $2 of less savings, 10% point in domestic violence after an NFL upset losses. And that's just the top line. And in terms of how much this is pervading everything, these companies spend billions of dollars a year on the most expensive advertising real estate. in the world. And this is all of sports media. So you had ESPN, you have all of these podcasts which are being paid millions of dollars above market rate simply to promote gambling and to get these people, many of their audience, a lot of these young men hooked into the sport.

And I think we can also have a bigger conversation about what it's done for sports generally. You were talking about as an older person, you know, you may not realize it, but if you talk to the young generation, I'm talking 12, 13, 14 years old, specifically teenage boys. If I ask them before an NFL game, what the line on a game was, they'll know it. They'll even know what the odds of relative prop bets are for some of their favorite players. That is a completely new reality that has only emerged just since 2018, since the landmark Supreme Court decision originally struck down the— I think it's PASPA was the law which had been passed, which allowed Nevada to continue sports betting, again, in a casino, but did not allow sports betting wagering nationwide. And we can thank Chris Christie for all of this.

There's no one worse. There's no one more corrupt than Chris Christie. He's just— and I mean, like, on a deep human level corrupt. Yeah. I mean, you said podcasts without getting into it, but we were approached by a couple of different gambling companies with real money. I had no idea they were gambling companies.

Yes.

I thought they were polling companies. I mean, I really didn't know. And I mean that.

Yeah.

I called someone about it. No, those are gambling companies. Oh, okay. What's the difference between a polling company and a gambling company?

Right. Well, this is where it also gets complicated. So all of my criticism right now has been about online sports betting companies— FanDuel, DraftKings, Hard Rock Bet, any of those types of actual wagering. And just to explain the difference, that is a house against you, as in the house of DraftKings sets the line on a specific book. for, you know, let's say like a Patriots versus the Eagles. Like, it just comes to mind. So that's you against the house trying to make sure that you get an edge, hopefully, and you'll win. What you're talking about, uh, are these prediction market companies. Predominantly in the United States, it's Kalshi and Polymarket. And I do want to be fair to them, they are not the same thing. However, operationally, I think they are. So they advertise themselves as event contracts. And so it's a prediction market. So for example, there's 2 sides of the bet. And so I come in and somebody else is willing to take the other side of that. It's similar, I would say, to horse race betting in terms of the amount of dollars which are inside the pool, and then who's going to take the, you know, X 85% chance versus the 15% chance.

And the house gets a set percentage.

And they get a set fee that they take off. And so that's their similar difference, let's say, between the prediction market and the actual gambling company. However, these prediction market companies have a lot of the same problems. So when you were to speak to them, I'm sure that they would talk a lot about derivatives and event contracts. It's all very financialized language. And so they try to present themselves as above what these companies are. But here's the truth. The vast majority of the action which is taken on these platforms— and I use that term specifically because they would say the amount of dollars wagered or dollars placed I'm saying action because it is ultimately gambling, is all in sports. Over 80%, 85% of the volume on Kalshi and/or Polymarket is placed on sports. You also have the same power law problems where the vast majority of the profit accrues to a very small group of traders known as sharps, both in the event, you know, in the prediction market business and/or in gambling, actual online gambling. And I think even by their own data, only 25% of the people who play within a month or trade within a month, as they would call it, are even people who win money.

And so, by your own admission, admission. And by the way, that's actually quite high, uh, if you were to wager over a month whenever we're talking about sports betting. This is what I mean by legalized theft. When I step back and you ask me the question, is this good for America? How can it be good for young men to routinely participate in a daily, sometimes more than daily practice of just throwing their money away to either groups of Wall Street traders or large gambling houses based in Europe and the United States to accrue for shareholder value. There is no good that comes from that. I laid out domestic violence, think about the social cost. But bigger picture, and this might— this actually might even be— I talk a lot about sports betting. I do think it's the number one scourge. But the CEO of Kalshi, Tariq Mansoor, had said that he envisions a future where people can trade on everything. Think about the social and corrosive cost of what it means for some of the events contracts which are offered either on Kalshi or Polymarket. We're talking about flight delays. I mean, can you imagine the perverse incentive of manipulating flight delays and want— you know, they frame it as hedging, saying, well, somebody wanted to do a conference and they wanted to make sure that if the conference got flight delays, that they could hedge their bet.

They promote the hell out of this, but they don't think about the social cost of what it means to be able to wager literally on everything. You could create a market right now for what you and I are gonna say, on this platform. By their rules, according to their internal house rules, that would be insider trading if you or I were to wager on that. However, I was at a restaurant yesterday, we both were, and I was speaking to some people or asking about what I was going to talk about. Well, they could have wagered, they could have created a market about what I was going to say with that inside information. There is no regulatory authority to actually go after insider trading at a bigger level. There is for the military, and I can talk about that as well. where large bets, specifically on Polymarket, for insider information, things like the Maduro raid and others, clearly leaked out to a small group of people who then went and placed bets on these markets on whether the United States was gonna go capture Maduro. Same whenever it came to the military operations against Iran. There were huge sums of money that were paid out on that.

The Trump administration has gone after a few select cases, but those are only the most obvious cases of members of the military. The Israeli military also had to prosecute several of its own soldiers for placing bets on Polymarket for events that they knew they were going to happen because they were participating.

Betting on wars.

Betting on wars. Yeah, on death. Like, and again, they would push back very heavily. We don't have death markets. But when you have— Well, how is betting on a war not a death market? Betting on whether the United States is going to bomb Iran is effectively death market.

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But again, let's just, just even keep it here because that's the most obvious, easy example. The social trust between all of us is broken when everything is tradable and everything becomes a scam. Everything from sports, uh, to our flights, to— in some places people are betting on the temperature at an airport. There was a case recently where people are betting on weather markets, and the way that the weather market was decided was off of a single sensor, which was at an airport. So a man took a bet for an outshot of the— how much weather, like how the temperature would be on that specific day. He went to the sensor and held a hair dryer next to it to cause the sensor to rise so that that would then resolve in his favor. I mean, these are extreme examples, but This is the extent to which people will start to manipulate literal reality just to make money.

This is the free market capitalism they've promised us.

This is the free market capitalism that they've promised us. And makes it so you can't trust anything. There was recently a case where Caroline Levitt was holding a press conference, one of her press briefings, and there was a market that it would go over X amount of time. I forget exactly how much time that she would spend at the podium, and she happened to end it seconds before that the majority position was. So you could have bet the under on how long that press conference was gonna take place, and you could have paid out— I'd forget the exact dollar, maybe 20 to 1. There's also all these insider trading things. So I gave the obvious example that you and I talked about, this specific one. I'll give you another one that relates to a vice, is marijuana. I don't think like this, but I could have. I'll give you an example. I got a call, 'cause I'm— this is my job, I do reporting. Somebody called me and said, Trump's gonna reschedule marijuana. I was like, wow. So I start working the phones, I start seeing what I can find out about this, I email the White House.

At that time, I could have got a 1% chance on either prediction markets, or I could have purchased marijuana stocks, because I had inside information. And I actually watched, as I started doing my reporting, that it started to leak out in broader Washington, and I can see the stock start to rise. I see rumors begin to come out, then the official announcement eventually breaks from some establishment media outlet. The price goes sky high. I personally could have profited literally millions of dollars if I had wanted to. I would never do such a thing. I think that's literally blood money and scumbag behavior, but there's no law that prevents me from doing that. I was doing my job on a routine basis. I could have made myself extraordinary sums of money. You probably could have done the same thing with all kinds of various things that you've been doing in your line of work. Is it technically insider trading? No, we're not part of these. It's never even occurred to me. Exactly, 'cause that's our character. But how many— is character really the constraint through which we should offer the integrity of our financial markets? And even worse, I see these viral social media claims.

People will say, I'm getting rich betting on what Donald Trump is going to say. you can get various odds of whether Trump will say the words low IQ this week, of whether Trump will say, which pretty much a lock, I think, if you hold that one, whether he would criticize you this week. And so, people in the White House, they have relatives, they could call them, their relatives could call another relative, they could easily make a lot of money doing this. I mean, this is about our government, this is about sports, it's about entertainment, But my bigger picture, this is bad for society. There was a recent poll that came out. Go ahead.

Well, isn't the reason that sports betting was banned in the first place 100 years ago because it corrupted sports?

Exactly.

And people started throwing games.

Exactly. And, you know, the Major League Baseball itself, the National League and others were formed specifically to stop the corrosive effects to the game of gambling because they knew that it was a problem. And for over 80 years, these companies held the line. Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, testified before the US Senate against gambling. David Stern, I think is his name, the NBA commissioner, also testified against gambling. But what ended up happening is— this is a very tragic story— is that the English Premier League, when Britain legalized gambling, and specifically has had long sports gambling for quite some time, their valuations began to skyrocket. And so the capitalist greed of the NBA owners and of the NFL owners and the commissioners They look across the pond and they think, how can I accelerate my valuation and the amount of dollars that I can pluck out of America just like they did? Now, you and I as social critics would say, in what way would we want to emulate the British working class for our working class?

Well, exactly.

Who have been immiserated and who currently have a GDP which is less than the state of— GDP is not everything, but, you know, less than the state of Mississippi. I could look at Brazil, another horrific example. Really ground zero of sports betting, where, you know, in Brazil they have those cash transfer programs for poor Brazilians, which previously was held up as a major social welfare benefit. Well, more recent data has come out from Brazil. The vast majority of that money is being cycled right back into sports gambling. And so people are getting their cash transfer from the government. They're handing it right over to the gambling companies. They are massively addicted to soccer betting down there specifically. So our NFL commissioner, our MLB commissioner, they looked abroad to the Premier League all at the same time while Chris Christie is advancing his case for New Jersey to have sports betting. All of this came from the Great Recession. Atlantic City was really taking, you know, having a hard time when— with their revenue after— in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Chris Christie becomes the governor. Christie decides that he's going to try and have a workaround to allow sports betting in New Jersey specifically.

And so I won't take everyone through all the complicated legal minutiae. The basics of it are they passed several laws, they took it through various circuit courts, went all the way up to the Supreme Court. 5 conservative justices, 1 liberal justice rules on behalf of the state of New Jersey. And they say that what Congress did by restricting sports betting, specifically only allowing a loophole where Nevada could have it, but nobody else could have it, was unfair to states' rights. This comes at a time, too, when states are revenue hungry. 2018, right into the pandemic. So what happens? Vast majority of these states, I think 42 states now have legalized sports betting. And what they did is they not only allowed legalized sports betting in the casino like Nevada always had, is they quickly realized that there were these apps like DraftKings and FanDuel, which had the infrastructure laid out already. which allows you to normalize and create online sportsbooks specifically. And so that's how I gave you that number, $500 billion, half a trillion dollars wagered in this nation since 2018. And it just dispels all of this notion of how, oh well, I mean, the classic libertarian argument, well, people are always going to sportsbet.

That's actually BS in my opinion, because if we look to the current types of bets that people place today, They place the types of bets which I've talked about, which no bookie or mafia boss would ever offer you. They're talking about offering you— when I open the app, the single-game parlay, it would say it's not just whether you win or lose, and it's not even just the spread, +3.5, -3.5. It's the spread combined with the quarterback throwing for 200 yards, combined with the receiver scoring 2 touchdowns, and they offer you a price. Bet $10 to win $750. The idiot brain combined with alcohol or marijuana for a lot of these guys sitting on their couches, let's do it, $10. What they don't realize is that the contingent odds that they just placed lose money so regularly that the companies can project their revenue based off of that type of bet, the single-game parlay bet, so much so that they can project their earnings out into the future. 60% of their revenue comes specifically from that type of bet. So when people tell me America's always been a nation of sports gamblers, that's totally wrong. The type of bets that they were making were usually illegal, you know, backroom types of bets, plus or minus on the spread, to the extent that they were ever able to even get these types of parlay bets.

It was in person in a Vegas casino, and they would never take the amount of dollars that they're wagering currently at a lot of these places. And one thing I beg for a lot of the listeners, and I've tried to explain this, if you're a younger guy out there and you're doing this for the thrill, I just want you to know, especially with the parlay bets, you will not win. You will not win. It's a mathematical fact if you do this over time. And this brings me to the worst part of the industry. If you do win, they'll ban you. And so I'm sure you know this with blackjack, for example, everybody famously lionizes the people who can count cards.

Right.

What they don't tell you, if you walk into a Las Vegas casino and you start counting cards, you will be asked to leave the blackjack table within probably 30 minutes to an hour, unless you're really good at it and you're working with a team. How is that legal, you might ask? They have the right to refuse service. And it's because even with the small house edge of blackjack, If you are an advantaged player in blackjack, and especially if they allow those advantaged players to have unlimited bet size, and they get that 1%— really, that's all it is, counting cards gives you a 1% or so edge— you will eventually beat the house. It's the perfect game, is that you can addict people, you can effectively legalize theft, and if you happen to, despite all of this, you're able to win money, they will simply ask you, to no longer play with them. Or if they don't ask you to no longer play with them, they will limit your bet size. So where previously you might have been able to put $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 on a game, they'll say, sir, you're only allowed to bet up to $3 on this game.

It's an easy way. So you addict the losers and you look for the whales. So the vast majority of the profit for these gambling companies comes from a very small group of users, roughly 3% to 5% of the people make up almost 50% of the revenue. So these are absolute gambling addicts who by law shouldn't even be gambling in the first place. The winners, if you're able to even win in this game, they will ban you. In fact, their algorithms are so sophisticated that if you place the type of bets which look like a winner, a potential winner, before you even win, they will limit your bet size. They will say, we don't want your business, or you're only capped to $10 down on a game. So they've created a system where they can addict young men, they can find the potential whales out there, those 3% who are just full-blown addicts. They can shower them with gifts, they call them incessantly. Hey, where have you been? Haven't heard from you. Do you want tickets to the next Patriots game? Do you want free whiskey? Let me fly you out on a private jet from here to here.

They shower them with more benefits than you can even believe. Now they think it's for free, but they're paying for it obviously with their losses. They do all of this while if you're actually a winner, they'll ban you. And so for the casual bettor who is doing 3% to 5% to 8%, I just want those people to— or $8, I want those people to know that is only enabled by these people getting crushed by gambling addiction, throwing their futures away, their lives, their marriages.

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I covered the case of a guy. His wife, I think, sued DraftKings. So he had never placed a bet before 2020. He ended up gambling after a few years every dollar that he had, every single dollar. He bankrupted his children's 401, uh, 529 plans. his 401, took out multiple mortgages on his house.

Oh.

The entire time he was being called and encouraged to gamble by DraftKings. His host, casino host, who would ask him, hey, where have you been this week? Hey, I've got a good game for you. This is exactly the type of thing you would like to do. Here's some free whiskey. Here's some free anything, right? You know, free, like, concert tickets, those types of things. They're encouraging him despite him showing obvious symptoms of gambling addiction. And by their own rules, they're supposed to tell him not to do it, but of course they don't. And in some cases, not just this case, there have been other cases where they say, don't put this in text or they're gonna come after me. Make sure to just talk to me on the phone if you're having a problem. Again, this is scum of the earth type of behavior to even participate in this, but this is what's been enabled by these laws. This is sweeping the nation. The largest gambling—

So what happened to the guy?

Oh, he went absolutely bust, and his wife was suing.

Who owns DraftKings?

I actually had to— they have a— they're a publicly traded company, so it's, you know, Fortune 500.

Is Portnoy involved in any of this?

I would— well, I don't know if he owns DraftKings, but I know that Barstool has an affiliation with DraftKings. I think that they have a partnership between the two of them.

And ESPN does too, promotes all this stuff?

ESPN, well, it's a complicated case. They had their own bet, their own actual, like, casino called ESPN Bet, which is ironic because it's a media organization with ESPN Bet that was down literally on the Chiron encouraging people to. I think now they just have an exclusive partnership, I believe, with Penn Gaming, which is a large casino conglomerate which previously owned Barstool Sports.

Oh, it's all so disgusting.

It's horrible.

So why is this allowed?

Yeah, because—

I thought the promise of this administration was the country was going to produce things. Like, New Jersey was once a rich state because they made a lot of stuff in New Jersey. Pharmaceutical, soup, you know, like tangible things.

Trenton makes, the world takes.

Yeah, thank you. Exactly. I think that sign's still there.

It's still there.

But it's not true. So the idea that you're going to fix the state budget hole by just treating your population like livestock, that's not really the answer we were promised, right? Is it?

No, it's certainly not. And this administration is the most pro-vice administration in modern American history.

So really?

This administration, CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has taken a very different line from the Biden administration. They not only reversed many of the rulings against the Calshies and the poly markets, they not only enable them just to do what they do, which is worse, but there's gradations of worse. They go to extraordinary lengths to defend them in court. Recently, there was a case. Let's take New York State. So New York State, Kathy Hochul, the governor, she sued— or her and the attorney general went after Kalshi because Kalshi, they said, was illegally operating as a prediction market, as a gambling house in their state. The argument that they had was, look, there's federalism. We are a state. We have the right to regulate sportsbooks in the way that we see fit. And by doing that, we charge— I believe it's a 20% excise tax on the amount of trades or revenue or something like that generated within the state. CalSHI obviously argued against them, although I will say in negotiations previously, they had come to them and had acknowledged some level of regulatory authority. They said, why don't we pay you 6% the way that we do in North Carolina?

New York State rejected that. So we don't do carve-outs. We believe you're a gambling company. You need to abide by our gambling laws. The CFTC under Donald Trump issued emergency authority, an emergency release ordering and telling Kalshi to please continue operating because they have absolute authority as the federal government over the regulation of these prediction markets.

Wait, so the Trump administration described it as an emergency?

As an emergency.

People wouldn't be able to bet enough online? Yes.

That's right. Effectively. That's right. I mean, Calshi would tell you that they're trading, that are there online. But I mean, in my or your estimation, yeah, it's gambling. And so the Trump administration has their CFTC Commissioner, Mike Selig, routinely goes and delivers on video press conferences, many with crypto magnates and others. Recently, there was one with Donald Trump, Mike Selig, and one of the Winklevii twins behind him, who himself is a Bitcoiner. with Gemini, where they're giving press conferences and extolling the virtues of prediction markets. I mean, Trump's own son is either on the board or was an advisor with both Kalshi and with Polymarket. You have a situation now where Kalshi and Polymarket— Kalshi specifically, because their regulatory approach is to try and capture— not capture, but work extensively with the federal government to ensure that they're totally legalized. The CFTC commissioner has issued multiple guidances and even written briefs on their behalf in many other state courts and places where they're being sued because many state attorney generals and others believe that they are illegally operating as a gambling house. So that's Trump on gambling. There's, there's no question he has made gambling more prevalent in the United States than any previous president just because of the way prediction markets work.

And in fact, I mean, in my opinion, running roughshod over federalism California and Texas, bless them, they did not have legal gambling before this. But now, because Trump as the president and of the federal government is protecting these prediction market companies, we now have legalized gambling in all 50 states. And in fact, as I know, both Kalshi and Polymarket, now they would not want legalized DraftKings or FanDuel in those states so they could be the only option for potential people who want to put action. So in California, it was the Indian tribal casinos that didn't want nationwide or statewide gambling, and they successfully defeated it at a statewide ballot initiative in Texas.

To preserve their own monopoly.

Right, to preserve their own monopoly. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but they still— they want— look, the voters there decided not to legalize.

I get it, but you're not describing any organized force acting on behalf of the public.

No, there's maybe the evangelicals in Texas. They're the only reason that we didn't have statewide betting from my own home state. Not that, uh, Ms. Adelson isn't working overtime to make sure that that's, uh, that's been repealed. I mean, one of the reasons she bought the Dallas Mavericks and their whole, you know, vision for that, as I understand it, was to create kind of this super entertainment gambling complex. Mark Cuban himself even said that before he sold it to her, that the valuation of his franchise doubled because of legalized gambling. So I don't think it takes a genius to see That was part of the long-term Adelson plan for my home state of Texas to legalize gambling and to try and to make it part of the fabric of the state, which, to their credit, was one of the last actually willing to stand up with a substantial population. However, of course, Trump has now made prediction markets legalized in the nation. Let's talk about marijuana. So Trump rescheduled marijuana. He did so not after any rigorous review. He did so at the behest of marijuana companies. where Schedule I status by the federal government was prohibiting their ability to use the legalized banking system.

That was it. There were huge donors in Mar-a-Lago and in Florida, as I understand it, who were constantly complaining to him about their inability to— because, right, and in these states where there was legalized weed, cannabis, as they call it, they would take these vast amounts of cash, and they had problems on their hands. Many banks would not touch the money.

Right.

Because the federal government could technically It was Schedule I, and they saw it was illegal. So there was an entire side banking arrangement that was happening.

Conducted in currency.

Conducted in hard cash for a lot of these companies. They were having to hire armored guards. It was causing them all kinds of problems. They heavily lobbied the administration to reschedule, specifically— not for the reasons that Trump came out and said, for studying. We've had plenty of studies on marijuana, specifically medical marijuana. All of them are absolutely false.

It saves a lot of lives.

No, it's complete nonsense. There is not one claim for medical marijuana that's held up in scrutiny. You can read that in the New York Times, and from some of the most prominent health journals in the United States. But nonetheless, they claim we need more research. That was the justification. That's not the justification. The justification specifically had to do with allowing these companies to have more access to the legitimate banking system. And so, the venture capitalists and the stocks— remember I told you earlier about that story about how I could have made money? There's an entire ETF and others that track marijuana companies, which exploded post-rescheduling. So that tells you the story, and it made people very, very wealthy who are very connected to Donald Trump.

We're into gold. We've been into gold for a long time. That turned out to be pretty smart, not to brag or anything. We've told you a lot about gold, how it's outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 25 years. That's true. How the central banks around the world have been buying it at record levels as they diversify away from U.S. debt. That's all true. But there's another reason to consider buying physical gold, actual gold. And that reason, of course, is privacy. Your bank and credit card company record every transaction. Cryptocurrency, whatever its benefits, leaves a permanent public record. It's on the ledger. There are stories about how government tracks cash, literally cash. Because remember when they switched to the new bills? Well, they're trackable. So gold is probably the only store of value that can even conceivably remain private. It's outside the system built to monitor and control you. And that's one of the reasons that we founded Battalion to help Americans reclaim sovereignty and privacy, which is to say reclaim freedom by making it simple and secure and accessible to own physical gold. So with all the drama around the world and all of that drama affects the strength of the US dollar, which is getting weaker, gold helps protect your savings.

And the surveillance state, of course, getting stronger every day. That's what the data centers are about. Probably like a little bit of privacy. Gold gives you privacy. It can't be tracked. Explore our collection at battalionmetals.com/tucker. Did it improve the country at all?

You can ask. I'm in this state. I'm shocked at the amount of cannabis stores everywhere.

It—

downtown Portland, cannabis everywhere. You smell it everywhere. You'll be in the rural parts of this state. We're here in Maine. I see a brand new cannabis dispensary next to a rotting home. So you can tell me whether you think that's been an improvement. It's lowered IQ. Talks about young men, the number of people who drive while they're under the influence of marijuana skyrocketed.

Lower testosterone increases the schizophrenia rate. It's been a true disaster.

It has been a— it is probably, aside from gambling, the single most biggest disasters to hit our population. Oh, and by the way, daily marijuana use now outnumbers daily alcohol use. Not that alcohol is good, but now you're using a force which massively increases the amount of people who go schizophrenic, mental illness, uh, testosterone. Pregnant women use is dramatically up because a lot of these false health claims that people make. Doctors are not caught up. There's actually a teenage-specific affliction where if they smoke too much high-potency marijuana, they end up vomiting for days and it gets stored in their fat cells. They literally had to create an entire new term for that type of affliction because it's spread across ERs. Ask any ER doctor in America, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. So Trump has been a boon to the marijuana industry. industry, but pornography doesn't get covered nearly as much as well, in my opinion.

Pornography? Yeah.

And so I talked to you about this a little bit before. The Treasury Department— so conservatives were rightfully very upset about debanking under the Biden administration, or debanking concerns broadly.

For ideological reasons.

For ideological reasons, which is fair, and nobody should lose their bank account. The Treasury Department issued a report on debanking in which they specifically said banks should not discriminate against these vice industries. And one of them that they named was pornography. And so the Trump administration issued a guidance to the nation's banks that they should do their best to facilitate banking for pornography companies and for other women, let's say, and OnlyFans and others who previously had had trouble getting access to the legitimate banking system. Now, why, you might ask, do you think banks—

Wait a second. So when people voted for Trump in the hope that he would end debanking, they probably weren't thinking, I hope OnlyFans can find a more efficient way to transfer its funds.

Exactly right. And that's what's happened. And we've seen that now.

So it's sort of like you vote for Trump to do something about immigration, but the only people who get deported are those who criticize Netanyahu. Right.

Yeah, it's interesting kind of how—

So they subverted the idea.

Subverted the idea. By the way, you want to know who's buying OnlyFans? You can look into this. Is that the people who are buying a majority stake in OnlyFans, which was run by a Ukrainian billionaire who we knew nothing about, Turned out to be a major AIPAC donor, by the way.

He was the biggest AIPAC donor.

He recently died in Florida. Well, it turns out that he's selling to a Silicon Valley operation, which I didn't know a ton about, but one of the co-founders there was part of the tech team on Clearview AI, which is the facial recognition software. And so now a majority stake in OnlyFans is being acquired by somebody who previously worked over at Clearview AI, which is facial recognition software, which is used by the federal government and by a lot of those spy agencies. Why would you have—

why would you Do you allow OnlyFans in your country?

Yeah, that's a great question.

But why not just arrest the owners?

Arrest the owners. And, you know, I try not to even take the maximalist position 'cause I see how far gone we are here. Can we at least say, let's enforce our human trafficking laws in this country? Because that's why the banks didn't want anything to do with the pornography companies or OnlyFans is 'cause they were deeply afraid, rightfully, of the amount of human trafficking and exploitation that happens in the pornography industry. That is bedrock to it. Everybody knows, uh, and I've listened and unfortunately heard the testimony of so many men and women who are involved in that industry. None of it, none of it is from a place of entrepreneurialism or capitalism. Uh, it's all deep from a place of exploitation, of being used by these broader systems. And if anything, it is shocking to the conscience that a woman who's 18 or 19 who sees her only chance of being able to make money, buy a house, or achieve financial success is to sell nude images of herself to perverts online who are 3, 4, 5 times her age. That's something that the federal government, I think, in my opinion, should want at the very least to make sure they're not being human trafficked.

If some Ukrainian billionaire is turning our women into prostitutes, maybe we should do something about it. Isn't that why we have a military?

That's exactly why. That's why we have a justice system. I mean—

Yeah.

And same when we talk about the gambling. How can you argue with a straight face that normalizing— because even if we take Kalshi and Polymarket, which are these— again, they're on Wall Street. These people are the darling of Wall Street. Everybody loves them in New York, in New York City. They're offering all kinds of liquidity for trading on Federal Reserve, on the Federal Reserve and whether they're going to hike rates, on the futures of Bitcoin, on all of these complicated derivatives, which you and I will never understand until there's another financial crash. So they're the darlings of the hedge fund, Wall Street, and all these other industries. But how could you say that when 80% of the volume is sports and most of it is people who are customers who, by their own admission, 25% or so are the ones who are taking profit, how can you say it's a good thing? Why would you want to encourage the daily participation, weekly even participation, of placing wagers on events which were primarily who were primarily known and wanted to be known as non-gambling entertainment.

Maybe because it's not so different from the equities markets.

Yes, exactly.

Maybe that's— maybe the, the red, the red pill here is that it's like, of course Wall Street loves them because Wall Street already does this.

Exactly.

It's the same thing.

And but, you know, to zoom out from that, and, and this is where I get frustrated because Kalshi's argument wants to make the argument that, uh, if they were to say things are corrupt, they would say the equities markets are just as corrupt. I would say Yes, but, alright, the average American can still largely just put their money in the S&P 500 and get an 8 to 10% return over the long run. They're much better off doing that than they are trading on Calshi. Oh, I forgot one thing with the Trump administration. They lowered the bar for day trading. So previously, there was a regulation that you needed to have $25,000 of liquidity to engage as a day trader, and the Trump administration removed that. And so, by removing that threshold. Obviously, it's supposedly sold as a populist move. It's like everybody should have the right to day trade. Over 80% of people—

Day trade?

Day trade. Over 80% of people who day trade lose money. It's statistically true.

I wonder how many Fox News viewers— well, I'll speak for myself. I campaigned for Trump. I didn't think Trump's election would result in more gambling, drugs, and pornography. That kind of wasn't on the menu that I remember.

It certainly was. It was on the donor menu, though. And every one of the donors, especially Marijuana, I can link that directly back to Mar-a-Lago and to Florida. With the CFTC, it's largely venture capital and a lot of the other— and it's libertarians, I should be fair. There are a lot of libertarians and other things that support these on their face, the wisdom of crowds and how great they are at predicting various types of events.

The wisdom of crowds, isn't that lynching?

Right, exactly, especially—

Why don't they shut up at a certain point? Like, it's just too stupid.

I can't deal with it. It's foolish in the sense of what social utility— again, do I think some of the— what social utility do we have on gambling on everything? There is none.

It would be funny to have, you know, there were all those horrifying pictures of lynching in the South. And I know it was more complicated than the images suggest, right? Some of the people really were rapists and I get it, but we still have to oppose lynching. Like you need a justice system, right? Okay. So yeah, but these kind of wild-eyed crazy people and the guy swinging from the tree and then underneath it says the wisdom of Christ.

Or the Bolshevik mob. The Bolshevik mob, exactly. We can find all kinds of cross-ideological examples.

Yeah, I mean, wow. Okay, has this received coverage?

Very little, and you know why? Because the news organizations are in bed with these same companies. CNN has a deal with Kalshi. They use Kalshi odds on their network. There are multiple major news organizations which incorporate their actual odds into their coverage, and a famous example more recently was Harry Enten, the stats guy over at CNN, covering the Calci odds of a specific race. Francesca Hong, I believe he said she had a 95% chance to win. She lost the election. But the coverage was not just polls. And by the way, a sophisticated news consumer, even a casual news consumer, has a general feeling polls are wrong all the time. We've just lived through too much to know that. But an event— a prediction market Well, those, they were right in 2024, right? They predicted Donald Trump would win. So a 95% chance of that, that's a sure thing. Well, it wasn't a sure thing 'cause she lost. And there've been multiple of these primaries where it's the same.

Okay, so that's what kept me away from the predictions markets. You know, as a sponsor for this show, I didn't even get the gambling part of it 'cause I'm obviously too stupid to see the whole picture. But I do understand like my little slice of the world. And I thought, this seems like an intel-inflected thing. It felt to me on the basis of no evidence at all, but just my instinct told me, these are companies that are not simply reflecting back the public's opinion, but trying to shape the public's opinion.

Oh, well, I mean, you're making a great argument in that point. I just feel that. Well, because in that case, let's say— actually, we recently had a case where I believe it was in California, a polling company put out a poll, which I think it— I forget which candidate it said was leading by 12%, points. It comes out months later, it was— the polling company admits, quote, it was a social experiment to see how much our poll would get coverage.

Well, exactly.

And so now, how much did that one poll have influence on CalShear or the prediction market? Probably very little. But in the aggregate, all of these polling companies, their error, to the extent there's an error, which you— again, you and I know that there's no money riding on it, but we have a feeling many of these polls often understate or overstate the way things are going, they then get extrapolated to the nth degree and financialized in these prediction markets where the liquidity trading in these can be hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars depending on the race, hundreds of millions in the case of the presidency. So in these cases, the actions of certain polls, let's say the Seltzer poll, we famously remember that before the Donald Trump election, which was so dramatically off despite her reputation, Is it so outside the bounds of possibility to say, was that an event meant to manipulate a market? Now, I don't think that actually to be the case, but there isn't a lot of law that would prevent her necessarily from doing that.

Oh, yeah.

As long as things are covered or, you know, their ass is covered in a certain way. And then take it even deeper with foreign governments or others that may want to influence a certain type of event here in the United States who might buy a large position on one of these prediction markets to, again, generate the news coverage that it deserves, because these are taken as fact when they are not fact at all. Again, to be fair to Kalshi, they recently did a meta-study. They sent me their data where they said when there's a 5% chance of happening, it usually happens 5%. If there's a 90% chance of happening, there usually is 90%. They're trying to prove that they are predictive. My problem with that is their sample size, especially it's taking elections. You and I know the vast majority of primaries are not contested, and the winner is clear. The data would only be useful to me in an actual contested primary.

Right.

And in many of these contested primaries, totally wrong. They were wrong with Angie Nixon. They were wrong with Francesca Hong. They were wrong with Abdul Syed. They had Abdul Syed winning dramatically more than he actually ended up winning his election by. Francesca Hong, they had her 95% chance. She lost. Angie Nixon, who beat her opponent by like 10 points or something, they had as a dramatic underdog. And so when it actually mattered, again, in this case where you had an event where you would have looked to these prediction markets for information that you wouldn't be able to glean from polls or from other open-source material, it didn't end up mattering. And so that, in the contested primary, and these things haven't even been around that long, what's their actual track record? Because right now it just seems Like a casual election bettor goes on the RCP average, sees Francesca Hong. There's even a meme where they say, oh, look guys, they're selling dollars for 95 cents because she had a 95% chance of winning. And so easy 5% pop, you put $500 in it, not a lot to some people, a lot to most people, and next thing you know, you lose all of it.

And that story has compounded on sports, on elections, on what color dildo will be thrown on the WNBA, uh, the WNBA court, on the types of Gatorade, the color of Gatorade which will be poured on a coach after they win the Super Bowl. Uh, I could go on.

All of it's nonproductive though. Nothing is being created.

Nothing is being created except the youngest female billionaire is one of the, uh, founders of CalSheets. So we can just thank God that. Just entrepreneurial MIT grad. Entrepreneurial, right?

How is it entrepreneurial to find new ways to exploit desperate people?

Exactly. Or offer liquidity to, uh, financial houses so they can bet up and down on federal reserve funds.

It just seems predatory. So why would young men participate in this when some of them presumably are smart enough to know the odds, but they do it anyway?

Uh, I would dispute that because Unfortunately, they don't know. I mean, we just have too much data. They don't know the odds, and they're bombarded by advertising. But a lot of it is everyone can understand. This is actually— I did a lot of research into this. I go, why is— so I don't have the gene. I don't have the gambling gene.

I don't either.

You know, I'm capable— playing craps is fun, and winning is fun, but I can easily walk away after losing $25 and say, I'm done. But yeah, so what is it? So it's actually fascinating. Our dopamine rewards risk. When you get the reward, you get serotonin. which brings you down. So the risk, the action itself, and there's a famous line from Heat, for me, the action is the juice. That's actually true.

Yeah.

Especially when you're a high testosterone male. Well, what it means is that gambling is a derivative of our chase of dopamine and of risk. And specifically, the reason why we are rewarded with dopamine for risk is hunting. And so you'll understand this as a hunter, the vast majority of hunting is extraordinary boredom. And using your mind to—

Oh yeah.

And most of the times it doesn't work unless you're deeply familiar with the terrain.

That's true.

Especially when we're talking about non-rifle hunting, or it's an incredibly difficult task. You can ask anybody who does it. Well, what nature needed to reward you. And so you needed to go out there, fare for yourself, probably burn more calories than you were going to get. It's a totally irrational thing when you actually think about it, but it only makes sense if there is the payoff at the end. Gambling is basically hijacking the dopamine and the nervous system, which we developed to become hunters so that we could go out and provide food for our families, for our clan, to be able to feed our child. But in modernity, with the grocery store and all of that removed, that nervous system, our biology has not caught up to that. And there's a specific subset of our population, just like there is with alcohol or marijuana, where that dopamine, or even drugs, anybody, you know, I don't think I could ever be addicted to drugs. I just don't have that type of gene, but I know a lot of people who do. I'm not better than them or worse. There's a scale whenever it comes to human biology.

There's a specific subset of our population where that rush is the greatest thing in the world.

Yes.

And if you've seen 'em, if you've ever been to a casino, when you see those wide-eyed guys, You notice they don't feel when they win. They feel when they lose. It's when they lose that they finally feel alive, because to be alive for them was the moments in which they thought they would win. They have to come back to the crash, and then they have to chase again, because if they won, then they wouldn't be able to get the same chase because they would actually get the reward, which they think that they're seeking. But what they don't realize is they're seeking the drug itself. And when you normalize this, like I said, across hundreds of millions of people, you hijack the biology largely of a lot of young men who are rushed full of testosterone, traditionally would be the hunters. That's really where it all seems to come down to. This is why I talked previously about— I mean, pornography, it's the same thing, right? It's the same artificial construction hijacking of the dopamine and the nervous system, which is intended for you to be able to procreate. Whenever we talk about day trading, Trading is a very similar thing, is easy ways to get riches, but ultimately it's about risk.

And so what gambling does, it hijacks that, and it takes somebody in the prime of their life where they could have used that risk and that appetite for dopamine if it wasn't legal, to at the very least participate maybe in something more sociable. Because what did I just say about everything with gambling? They do it on the phone. Is that, you know, even with alcohol, you have to go out and you have to buy alcohol. You have to, you have to At the very least, you have to speak to the clerk who's selling you the booze or the bartender. Even marijuana, you have to go and buy it from a store. All of this can be done in total solitude on your phone. And actually, I read a book, Danny Funt, who wrote this incredible book, well-reported book on gambling. He said that sometimes they would go— FanDuel or one of these companies would survey their customers and said, would you, would you recommend this product to a friend? Their best customers said no, no, because they, they wouldn't want their friends to participate, or they're ashamed, or they don't have any friends. They just do it by themselves.

It's the only rush that they have. And I've seen it bleed now into our society. We see male loneliness obviously is an epidemic. But the other thing I hate about gambling is that it has replaced the common parlance of sports talk with all men. When you talk sports, with my generation of men and younger, it's very little to do with whether the team is good. It's about how much you've bet on the games. If you go to a bar, you can go to any sports bar in the middle of football season, sit next to a guy, almost certainly if he's there by himself, he's got money riding on the game and probably on both sides of the ball in terms of this down. I was at a football game where I saw a man severely intoxicated in front of me tell his son to place $100 that the Eagles were going to score on this specific down. He said on this drive. So his son goes on, they immediately, they don't score. I saw him lose that $100 right in front of me. Okay, it's $100. He can afford the seats, probably fine. But multiply this at scale, and that's ultimately is the rush that people are chasing is all being channeled by our government, by our capitalist oligarchic elites into sinful activity.

So you said a minute ago that there are people, libertarians, you described them, who argue that it happens anyway. So is there any acknowledgment that if you make something easier, you'll get more of it?

They say that you should tax and regulate it and that eventually that it will normalize over time. There's no evidence— What does that mean, normalize? That, oh, people will— right now we're just in the Wild West days of gambling. and we'll figure out the regulations and we'll figure out more safeguards. And in the long run, we'll be better off because there's no more illegal gambling, even though there is still a lot of illegal gambling because they can sometimes offer different things or customer service, you know, that the illegal gambling companies do. They said the same thing with marijuana. Nope. Illegal marijuana market is still booming because they sell it under the price of tax. And none of the tax revenue has even come close to making up the social costs that have been inflicted on all of us for having a dumber population.

When did more tax revenue become the goal?

Right. I mean, this is what happens whenever—

Like what?

Yeah.

Who cares about your tax revenue?

And even tax revenue bastardizes it because they look at it— I mean, I said it earlier, we— secularized America has decided that freedom means freedom to sin. For the vast majority of human history, specifically under Abrahamic faiths, freedom was freedom from sin.

sin.

And so the changing of freedom from sin— freedom is freedom from sin— from freedom is freedom to sin was one of the great social changes and understandings in modern American history. And that is what is now being reflected in all of our values.

But indebted people, addicted people, compulsive people are not free. They're enslaved.

Right. You and I understand that.

Well, that just seems so obvious. Do you know any? I know a lot of them. They're all enslaved.

I know a lot of them too. They are literally enslaved to the credit card companies, to the banks, to the gambling companies, which helped them go bust, to the mortgage lender, to their job, to their boss, to the system which they work in. But that's because you and I have empathy for them, whereas the libertarian argument, the non-personal argument, would be they're an idiot. A man is free to do with his money— a fool, you know, a fool and his money are gonna part anyway, so we might as well allow that transaction to take place out in the open.

And profit from it.

And profit.

Do young people understand that they are being farmed for resources?

People are— people see it, but they don't have the language. That's one of the reasons I'm really happy that we're doing this. So there was a recent Gen Z poll that came out that a lot of people are discussing. The lowest level of institutional trust of any generation in modern American history usually doesn't set things up for a productive century. But I think the reason that they feel that way is that they are at the mercy of the student loan companies, the banks. They were locked down during COVID They're bombarded with predatory scam advertising, with AI promises which may take their job. So of course that they're deeply untrusting of institute— of a government where a decent portion of young men vote for Donald Trump. I would say, having met most of them, a lot anti-war was one of the major reasons—

Of course.

Why they did so. And then they launched one of the most extraordinary, you know, dastardly acts in modern history.

Sneak attack.

Bombing Iran under cover of negotiations twice, actually, that we did that, our own version of Pearl Harbor, which we all understood was the ultimate betrayal. And so, that's who we are now. And so, for them, I think they can sense this level. And there is polling actually coming out where you can see that the actual support for legalized sports betting is beginning to dip. right along with marijuana, is that now that we've run the experiment, people are getting to come down. But what I'm saying, I wanna acknowledge at the top, it is not popular. And we have to look for past social revolutions to see where the change came from. It's actually from women. So the reason why Prohibition happened—

Yeah.

Was because women had got the right to vote, and they were living in a nation where people were drinking like a liter of whiskey a day, And these women were getting, you know, absolutely beaten up almost every single night or left destitute with their children in the poorhouses, left at the mercy of literal charity organizations. Literally, the first thing they did when they got the right to vote was to outlaw alcohol and the temperance movement. The temperance movement, again, I know it's controversial. I think one of the most righteous movements in American history.

I think it was the same year, universal suffrage and the Volstead Act, both 1919.

Both 1919. Great show, Boardwalk Empire, actually shows that exact meeting.

Really?

Yeah, it shows the politician of Steve Buscemi meeting with the Women's Temperance League, despite the fact that he is himself involved in bootlegging. But it made the point that many of these women, the first thing that they did with the vote was to support politicians who supported Prohibition. And the reason why is very similar to the gambling and marijuana and to pornography, is they were the primary victims, as they were being left with a population who was deracinated, who was drunk, who was beating them, very much like the domestic violence case that I just pointed out. I mean, imagine being in a position where you're so— such a slave to your addiction that you're losing your home and you're selling your children's Christmas gifts, which has happened in that case. Another more recent case in Philadelphia, very similar circumstances. I have somewhat of a connection to this one where what happened is, is he— I believe he took 2 mortgages out on his home. gambled away tens of millions of dollars, ended up, it appears, was— what happened is, is that he was gambling with FanDuel. FanDuel actually got him a personalized video from Bryce Harper, who is a player for the Philadelphia Phillies.

And in that video, Bryce, in a video with the FanDuel logo on it, tells him, hey man, I just wanted to reach out and say, Happy Thanksgiving. Your host from FanDuel just wanted me to make this video for you. It turns out she went on Cameo and purchased that video for her, for her client here over at FanDuel. He denies that he knew that it was for gambling purposes. And even though he says your host from FanDuel is involved, he makes hundreds of millions of dollars, by the way, and is a Mormon, actually. And so it's one of those where, look, I mean, Maybe I believe him that he didn't know that it was involved, even though it said the word FanDuel in the script that he was read and he did read on camera. Nobody just blank— nobody who's worth hundreds of millions just says, I'm not gonna do this one. I'm not gonna do this video. But those are the lengths to which they'll keep you gambling. And by the way, he lost everything. He lost his house, second mortgage, etc., tens of millions of dollars. I think he gambled $18 million.

Are any politicians against this?

Well, Mike DeWine, I'll give him credit. He said, I legalized it and it was a mistake. And he published some of the statistics. That's pretty much it. I can't think of a single nationwide politician, and it's because of the money. I mean, even in our industry, Tucker, what I'm saying is so rare. Most of my colleagues are taking money from Kalshi or for Polymarket.

Actually?

Yes, absolutely. A lot of them are taking money. or have been sponsored by Polymarket, or they don't want to close off the potential revenue source. My friends in the sports podcasting industry, I can think of one guy I know who doesn't take money from the gambling companies.

Really?

They're flooding them with tens of— it's tens of millions of dollars. It's— they, they find themselves in a position, it's the only financially viable way for them to do what they want to do. I get it, right? I blame the politicians. I, I wish it wasn't this way, but But they are showering them with so much cash that it's only people who are willing to stand up and say, I won't take your blood money, who are the people who will come out and speak about that. And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this show and talk about it in these stark terms is what, at the very least, if we're to be confronted with this secular government who will do nothing to protect our children, our young men—

Yes.

And the women, can we at least start a cultural revolution of shame? there should be shame for smoking marijuana every single day, for gambling away your children's inheritance. I feel sorry for that person in terms of him being a gambling addict. I would actually support funding recovery programs and all of that, but I don't want him to get to that place in the first place. And if you see a person who's gambling, who you're friends with, there should be— we should have the social space to say, hey man, that's bad. You shouldn't do that. And so you're throwing your people's money, profiting from it. No, that's— yeah, they're there.

I mean, that's what blows my mind. It's not, you know, not that people destroy themselves, um, it's that other people get rich from their destruction, and those people still have their names on the buildings at Harvard. I don't understand that.

Harvard, they become multi— I told you, you become president, you make a billion dollars in office.

How can you make money in office?

I take trades, uh, every— I mean, tens of thousands of trades that Trump has placed while he was in office. His, you know, obviously net worth skyrocketed. The Trump Coin, um, I mean, my God, the details on that are shocking, genuinely, in terms of some of the business associates.

You mean it wasn't a good deal for the investors?

Right, for the ordinary people who are his most devoted fans who put their hard-earned money. That's what gets me, is that money is not everything, and the chasing of it after a certain point, in my opinion, makes you Evil.

I totally agree.

I completely agree. And so when I see these hard-earned people, and I've met some of them who are either his biggest fans or, you know, and, and they put their trust in the name of Trump, and this doesn't just apply to Trump, but it's, it's really just generally when they put their hard-earned dollars into this and then they end up losing their savings, that's just the height of scumbag behavior. And that's not just Donald Trump. That applies to podcasters and other people in tech who promote SPACs and other sketchy financial instruments and that tells their audience to invest, and they betray the trust of those people.

I'll just say—

By stealing their money.

In their defense, it is a minefield because I have almost taken money from all kinds of bad people. And I just didn't, you know, gold companies, prediction markets, crypto scams.

Like, I, I get it.

I'm not an— I would never took money from any of them, but I came pretty close a couple of times, like, hey, this seems like a good deal, right?

Yeah, you have to do your research, and that's where the public— the lack of public reporting, that's what is, I think, the worst part is. And look, I'll say there are a few places which still do good journalism. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times have done great deep dives into prediction markets. They have more bulletproof business models because finance relies on them, so they're able to charge higher subscription fees. A lot of the cable companies are in bed with the prediction market companies. They're using their odds. Many, a lot of election coverage come midterm season, you will see Kalshi and Polymarket odds featured very prominently in the coverage. It's going to be embedded in our daily life. And what's so crazy is this wasn't even the norm 10 years ago. It only became legal 2019, really 2018, 2019 onward. And now we're living in this already, in my opinion, dystopian society where gambling eclipses all other revenue, I cannot even imagine what 10 years from now is going to look like. We're going to look like the late 1900s in the same way of temperance. We'll have paupers, we'll have poorhouses, we will have literal shelters for people, for the women and children of gambling addicts if the community doesn't step up.

That's the future we've created. Gambling Anonymous, has reported an absolute skyrocket in the number of calls. Congress won't even pass a piece of legislation for a national exclusion, where if you put yourself on the exclusion list in one state, that it applies to states elsewhere. So if you live on the border of a state, even though you've excluded yourself from one place, you get the itch, you could drive across the state lines. CalSHIE only recently introduced self-exclusion, but there are workarounds that are around that. There is no regulatory body Looking out for the consumer, for trying to—

So exclusion is like a gambling gun safe where you just like keep it out of your own hands or something?

You can go into the sports bet and say, I want to self-exclude, don't allow me to bet. Uh, and I think there's actually a way to reverse that sometime in the future, but at the very least on that day they won't allow you. Any casino in America will do the same thing. If you tell the casino, if you tell MGM, I don't want to be allowed on any of your properties, they will exclude you and they won't take your action. But obviously, there's still workarounds. You can go to other properties, etc. But Congress is— Congress, the government, they're happy to work on behalf of the prediction market companies. Nobody looks out for the consumer for trying to at least marginally protect gambling, potential gambling addicts, which we all know will massively increase as a result of this epidemic, which is now sweeping the nation. I think this is opioids. It might be worse, honestly, because opioids at least takes you down. very, very quickly. The insidiousness of this—

Yes.

It's only compounding on every day, but already in the data, we know tens of thousands more people will likely commit suicide as a result of this epidemic. Tens of millions will have lost money, or hundreds of millions will have lost money. Tens of millions, potentially millions, will go broke, completely broke, or on the verge of bankruptcy, and it's all voluntary on behalf of the people who run our country.

So obviously there's going to be a revolution of some kind. I hope it's peaceful. What's it going to look like politically as a result of this and all the trends you described?

Yeah, I think the lack of institutional trust is very similar to what we saw. I hope it's peaceful too. I'm hoping we look to our cousins in the United Kingdom for an aristocratic elite. I'm not talking about in the current moment, at their time of mass social change where they voluntarily, yes, kicking and screaming, ended up giving up power, giving more of the vote to the people to avoid violent revolution. They had an aristocracy and a bourgeoisie which fundamentally understood that they had to address the actual— the concerns of the people and of the driving social change, that they would have to voluntarily give up some of their power, some of their wealth, their hold over the establishment in order to keep what they really wanted to protect, which was their monarchy and their social status, and it worked, to their credit. Well, we'll look across the continent to all of the other monarchies which didn't survive the First World War and many of the other revolutions which ended up sweeping them. I hate to say, I don't think we're there, but we are in— if we were to look at what I laid out, mass institutional distrust, a period now of multiple presidents, Trump being one of the most egregious, but of multiple presidents saying one thing and doing the opposite whenever they come into office.

I'm going to end the war. How many times have I heard that one? Only to end up right now where we are.

Yeah.

Now you have Trump, who is effectively sacrificing the might and the prestige of the American empire for his foolhardy decision to go and to attack Iran. I heard about economic D-Day today. I could only wish that it had the level of seriousness and intellect behind the original planning of D-Day. who were real men. You could say a lot about them, but they were real men. They thought about things. They didn't just throw out terms like economic D-Day and the most sophisticated financial campaign or sanctions of all time. When are we really going to do secondary sanctions on China and blow up our relationship with the largest— second largest economy on Earth? Xi Jinping is flying to our country. I don't think so. And if we do, it would be even more extremely foolhardy. It's foolhardy in both cases. You have sanction-proofed economies. economies. But so you have this disastrous war, very much like the First World War, which can ignite more social change and revolution. We're obviously not there yet. Tens of millions of people are not dying. But every American who is consuming anything remotely about this war is watching again the destruction of our bases, of the inability to feed, clothe, and keep sane the people on the USS Abraham Lincoln, where stories have to come out of them literally jumping off ship from their distraught relatives for us to even actually do anything about it.

We're watching our ships have to be refueled or resupplied from Diego Garcia, except for the region, because our bases were destroyed. I didn't even think that could happen. I'm one of the ultimate pessimists about the American empire before going into this war. If you had told me Iran's ballistic missiles and drones will kill 18, I believe, Americans, injure, I believe the latest number is over 700, that we will be driven like dogs from the region, have to resupply our carriers from 2,400 kilometers away, I wouldn't— I would not have believed you. If you told me that we were going to expend the vast majority of our THAAD interceptors and our Patriot missiles, which are the technologically advanced spear of the American defense systems, and that we were to do it all on behalf of Israel while leading real countries like South Korea and Japan in the lurch? I would not have believed that. And yet we did all of that. We did it only in a span of 6 months, so congratulations to Donald Trump. But more so, you asked me about revolution. So I watched that happen. I watched the expenditure of all this.

What is the Trump administration's response? Double down. Economic D-Day, $1.5 trillion for the military. The military technology, the same technology which we just delivered massive strategic loss over the Strait of Hormuz. So you see that there's no learning in the state. You have multiple instances of politicians who say, I'm gonna do one thing and the other. Everything in America, like you just said, is a scam. Everything is about extracting more value from you, the consumer, than creating value for your daily life.

That's right.

This is what backstops, I think, a lot of the data center backlash. You talked about Flock. That was a great episode that you guys did, but that all what it comes down to is we can't enrich you, we can't make you richer, so we have to oppress you. And we also have to take your money and spend it on even more foolish adventure. All of the ingredients are there if you wanna look for everything ranging from a minor revolution to a major revolution. You know, you and I know many people think, despite what the Soviets said, a working-class revolution, it was a bourgeoisie revolution.

Always.

I mean, it always is. Take a look at our—

Elites versus elites.

Right. Elites versus elites is the classic story of every revolution.

Of course.

Our current elite is either literally morally bankrupt, trying to extract people through gambling and marijuana, pornography, everything I just discussed here, or they are people who have been failed by the institutional promises of the 2000s, saddled with student debt, put into a situation where they can't get married and have a child, can't buy a house, have no upward mobility. Total lack of distrust and failure by the system, which was never necessarily going to deliver for the bottom quintile, but was at the very least supposed to make life decent or better for the 50th to the 90th percentile. Right now in the US, if you're not between the 50th— if you're in the 50th to 75th, your quality of life has gone down. as a result, not just of Donald Trump's war, not just because of gambling, but because of all of the institutional measures—

Right.

—that are used to oppress you. And so that is the group I pay the most attention to. And that group is angrier than they've ever been, dramatically liberal. They're behind a lot of these DSA wins that have been sweeping the nation in terms of the Democratic Party. And you can see highly educated, people who are downwardly mobile are the 2 ingredients, along with mass institutional distrust.

Exactly.

Are the exact ingredi— oh, and an unpopular foreign war, which is bankrupting the empire. World War I, does anybody wanna pick up a history book? And I hope it doesn't get there. I desperately hope it doesn't.

No, but unemployed nonprofit executives are the most dangerous people.

Oh yeah.

Underemployed lawyers, people like that, white college-educated people whose dreams have been shattered. man, those are scary people.

Yeah.

Smart, motivated, angry, resentful, they've been betrayed.

Yes. I mean, those were the backbone of the Russian Revolution, the backbone of the German Revolution. I mean, and that's exactly what led to the outcomes in those 2 countries, or to the destruction or rewriting of the general rules of society. I was recently— the French Revolution, I just read a fascinating book, several series of books there on the French Revolution, and the extent to which There's something inspiring and terrifying, and this is kind of what I think we're gonna begin to see in the United States, is at the beginning of the French Revolution, there was just a sense of, why should we do it that way at all, the old way? Let's just do something brand new. Inspiring, and you can actually see how easily that message could catch on—

Oh, yeah.

In a society like ours. But what they didn't realize is that by doing the brand new, of opening Pandora's box, is it would lead to the terrors, to Napoleon, to the destruction—

Oh yeah, beheading nuns.

Beheadings of nuns, of the persecution of every institution in all of your society. That's what it leads to. And it has happened now so many times over the course of the last several hundred years that I could see a very similar situation happening.

I could too. And it's interesting, we spend so much time thinking about, you know, Stalin's crimes, Hitler's crimes, Robespierre's crimes, and so little time thinking about the predicate. Like, how'd they get there? How did a society like, you know, 18th century France, was a pretty sophisticated, pretty rich country with all the—

A liberal society.

Totally.

That's the thing that strikes you.

Yeah.

This was not an oppressive regime. No, it's right. Not to cape for the, you know, French monarchy, but it was not one of the most, you know, authoritarian and oppressive societies. And in fact, one of the critiques that later on many of the other monarchies of Europe took away was, we need to be much more oppressive because the libertine French allowed this modicum of speech, of pamphleteers, of openness in their society, and look what it got— Louis XVI.

No, it's totally right. Nicholas II was not, you know, he was like pretty liberal, pro-Western, spoke French at home guy.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, he was a fool in a variety of ways. Oh, of course.

But it does, it seems like those are the periods worth studying the pre-revolutionary period. I totally agree. And you can't find a good book on Weimar. I've never been able to find a single honest—

I heard there's a good one coming out.

But there should be 100 of them.

There always should be 10,000.

Okay, we spent your entire childhood learning about the Nazis as the only thing that ever happened in history along with the civil rights movement. Okay, I'm totally anti-Nazi, I get it. How'd they get the Nazis in an election? No one wants to talk about that. What is the answer? I'm not even sure I understand the answer.

And even then they reduce it down to just the Depression, which is ridiculous. Oh, of course it's ridiculous. It's like, you know, there's all these social forces both from— actually, Weimar, very similar to what I talked about, the French Revolution idea of we could try anything. So you saw that the sexual absolute insanity, very similar to how things were happening in France, in pre-revolutionary France, the same. It's fascinating how you could always see the same types of things that are happening, similar in some ways to a lot of the gender dynamics like currently here in the United States. And I don't wanna take it too far. We don't have brownshirts currently on our streets. We're not in a Great Depression. You mentioned the Russian Revolution. So my historical parallel would be, okay, it's not 1917. What if it's 1904? What if it's the Russo-Japanese War?

No, that's right.

What if it is the war that previously broke institutional trust and showed the brittleness and created the crackdown?

That's smart.

And 10 years later, it explodes.

They were so shocked to lose that war.

They were stunned. The world was stunned by that. And that is our equivalent, I think, of what we have watched here. People try to extrapolate too much of the most extreme, Suez or that, but you have to pick some of these side wars, which at the time were monumental in their understanding of geopolitics.

It's totally right. So what happens in the midterms more imminently?

Right. Well, if we were to believe the polls, I actually, Let's take the polls aside. Let's just look at structure. The incumbent president almost always loses ground in the midterm elections. America is a nation of the median voter who loves a Republican president and a Democratic Senate for some reason. That's— or vice versa. This is baked into our political consciousness. So normally you would always expect to see some sort of a backlash against the Trump administration as they actually enact what they wanted to. Similar happened in 2018. Okay, so that's normal times. We are not living in normal times. We're living in times of $4 gasoline for the last 6 months. By the way, nobody's paying attention to diesel. Open call, everybody please pay attention.

$117 a barrel this morning.

I think it might be more. Well, it might be more in a different marketplace, but it's $5.69 a gallon national average. It was $3.50 or so just a year ago. So the inflation that's happened in diesel is dramatic compared to what's happened in gasoline. Do we really need diesel? Oh yeah, it turns out that we do. It turns out it literally runs all of our industrial machinery, our grocery prices, everything.

Yeah.

Has diesel price baked into it. So we've had 6 months of— and I'm sure you know working people like I do who run, let's say, work in trucking, and I've spoken with a few. Diesel is destroying, the price is destroying them, or they're having to pass it on. So that's just on the gas front. On inflation general, We have seen that the Trump administration, specifically foolhardy actions in Iran, have bled into some of the more inflationary data. We have seen mortgage rates, which again are impacted by this foolhardy decision in Iran. I believe they're hovering around 6.7%, something like that.

Damn.

For the average American, if they were to try and get a normal 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. If they were to do so, they would be entering a home market where If you were to look at the median wage and what it's required to be able to save for a down payment of 20% to avoid PMI or any of these other things that set people back, you would need to save for literally like a decade just to be able to get just the down payment and the ability to sustain the income on a 2-parent household if you were to actually be able to afford it. So extraordinarily expensive. housing market. You're met also with, let's see, in terms of the midterms. The way that the Trump administration acted even before all of what happened with Iran was in such a manner where they didn't really act as if they needed to convince the public of anything, of anything that they did. They did a decent job enough in the campaign of getting a popular vote of their victory, but They turned around, and to the extent they did anything for their, quote, voters or their promises, they did it in such a fashion as to ignite major public debate, which is fine in a campaign, but when it comes to policy, if you don't do it exactly correctly, you will get torn apart with the press, which is a lot of what happened.

But that was side by side with some of the most corrupt actions that we've ever seen from a White House, and we're not just talking about Trump personally enriching himself. to the tune of billions, but nobody even knows from his own financial disclosure. We're talking about the basic sale of pardons, right, that have happened, where all of these pardons that Trump issues to these corrupt Ponzi schemers and others who then go on to victimize other people, all of it basically done for his— either for donor pressure or largely just because he likes feeling powerful by letting people specifically rich people, off the hook. And then Israel hovers over all of that because a proud nation cannot serve another nation.

Yes.

And this is left and right, is that everybody feels this way. And specifically for a decent portion of our population to watch us go into this war, to deport people for their opinions on Israel, to have the Department of Justice sue campuses and others for their opinions on Israel. I mean, I said this on our show last time, it's even more true today. Everything the Trump administration has done on antisemitism was Ibram X. Kendi's dream when it came to anti-racism. The Department of Antisemitism might as well exist for what Ibram X. Kendi—

It's the entire government.

It is our whole government, from our military, the infusion now of the NDAA, of our Congress. I was amazed recently, Rick Scott, uh, Israel attacked Turkey in Syria, a NATO ally, which we're told is the most important thing in the world. Rick Scott backs Israel. I was like, wow, same people who will tell you about how NATO's a religion to them.

Rick Scott is so disgraceful. He's really disgraceful. One of his constituents was murdered in the occupied territories in the West Bank, right, by a group of terrorists, um, and Rick Scott refused to meet with the parents who run an ice cream shop and a Smashburger place in Tampa. And he wouldn't meet with them because their son, an American citizen born in the United States, had been murdered by Israelis. And so Rick Scott took the side of the Israelis. How can he serve in the Senate?

How can our ambassador, who you interviewed, defend a foreign country over our own? I think it's time.

So who would vote for that?

Who would vote for that? Also, yeah, if I were to ask you—

Not me.

I'll tell you that. If you ask me about the midterms, Republican vision, what's their vision for the country? What are you going to do about my home price? Nothing. What are you going to do about— what are you going to do about my gas prices? Increase them. Tell me.

Yeah.

Short-term pain for long-term gain. They said that 6 months ago. It's been 6 months. What are you— what are you going to do to create a better future for my child, who's ultimately— that's all I actually care about. I don't even really care about myself anymore. Oh, we're gonna create, you know, a den of sin and gambling and marijuana and pornography. It's like, that's the types of industries which we're going to elevate. If I voted Republican in the midterm, what are they going to pass? My healthcare premium went up 30%. Are you gonna do anything about that?

When did they become liberals? Like, everything I dislike about liberals, the neoconservative foreign policy, the identity politics at home, the promotion of the destruction of people, drugs, pornography, crime. That's the Republican Party. Where's the DSA in all this stuff?

Yeah, wow, that's fascinating. I mean, DSA is going through— they're a fascinating group. So for example, everything you just laid out is probably the position and the same articulation that the DSA co-chairs, the people in New York City who Fox News likes to bring on and to argue with, the candidates themselves are very interesting. And you can either say this is insidious or not, but they are learning. And I do, at the very least, have to admire their ability to shapeshift from where they were not that long ago. Abdul El-Sayed, who's running in Michigan against Mike Rogers, who, as you and I know, probably the most pro-Intel neocon They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States, who, by the way, lost already. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that?

Mike Rogers is really— I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint.

Right. And so that's the candidate, the guy, a literal loser who lost when Donald Trump won the state, just to show you how much of a headwind he had at his back in Michigan 2022.

He was basically a tool of Israel and the intel agencies. How would you run someone like that? I don't even— it doesn't even make sense.

Twice. So that makes no sense. Well, El-Sayed, who— look, El-Sayed is a full-blown DSA. He doesn't call himself DSA. He's a full-blown leftist. I've known him for quite a long time. This is something—

You know him personally?

Not well. I've interviewed him many times over the years because of my co-host Crystal. And so I've watched his ideological evolution, who you could easily call, as AOC said, was, quote, woke one, right? Woke one, where he said defund the police on a podcast. He said all kinds of silly things about football and masculine— standard leftist shibboleths.

Yeah, hates Mackinac Island. He's for vaccine mandates.

Right. Classic stuff.

Right.

I watch his campaign now. It's America first. The amount of times he says— he doesn't even— when he talks about Israel, he says Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately, I want to make sure that you don't pay more for healthcare. I don't want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military. He stands in front of a giant American flag. It's almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of those tropes. Well, it's literally Trumpian. Exactly. And so you see candidates like that, especially him, he will be the most interesting test case come November.

Is he gonna win?

If I had to bet, which I don't, I would probably bet that he'll win.

I would think so.

I think so too.

Do you have any idea, not to fixate on poor Mike Rogers, who I know, but I mean, there's no one who should be farther from a position of power than Mike Rogers. How did he get the Republican nomination for Senate?

I looked into it. It was relatively uncontested. He had both— he had the most backing of the Michigan GOP, which is, of course, very in touch with their own voters.

Mike Rogers?

So they just decided to go with— and again, this is the guy who lost to Slotkin when Donald Trump was able to win the state. And so they can cry about vote rigging and all that as we want. Okay, whatever. But we all know that this is not a strong candidate in a wave year, which just happened. And they decided to nominate him literally yet again. Genuinely dumb.

He was the AIPAC candidate, to be clear. And he's told AIPAC not to advertise in public for him.

Right. And do you see, that's where I was saying with El-Sayed, his ability to go up against AIPAC and to win. If you're a DSA person, that's got to be one of the most inspiring wins of your entire life. That's way bigger than Zohran Mamdani.

They got to get rid of the social liberalism If they get rid of that, because that's where the world is. Most people are not orthodox free market people. They just want the economy to serve their families.

Right.

I think that's fair. They wanna be treated fairly. I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. And they're not for radical social change. They think that there are 2 genders and each has a distinct role. And like, it's not good to sexualize children and drugs are bad and kind of want law and order. I mean, these are not crazy right-wing goals.

No.

That's what we would call the socially, roughly speaking, socially conservative view. And that's the majority view around the freaking world.

Yes.

Everyone feels that way.

Yes.

So why can't we have a party that feels that way?

Well, I mean, that's where we have to say, we have to just be honest here with the DSA. Like, at the very least, they're not willing to have that conversation.

They're not?

They are. They are.

'Cause it's run by rich girls, is that why?

I mean, part of it is that, but part of it is deeply, look, they are a, they were a small movement. movement with very little backing as of 8 years ago, and they are now a major force within the Democratic Party. They're not the dominant yet because the establishment of the Democratic Party hates them largely over Israel, but over all kinds of other campaign issues, healthcare, let's be fair, over one of them. But they are a very— they are the prototype of the upwardly mobile white or downwardly mobile, highly educated, largely white, female or male.

Yeah.

That's what they are.

Yes.

And you and I, having spent a lot of time around these people, these people are largely delusional whenever it comes to the actual social views of the vast majority of the public. Their theory of change is that Trump is so bad and has so destroyed the credibility of working-class messaging that we will emphasize what we have here in our America First platform whenever it comes to Israel, healthcare for all, which is their belief, and we're gonna not talk about our radical social views. But they still have them. El-Sayed is on tape saying that Medicare for all should pay for gender-affirming surgery, okay? He's on tape for saying that. So I don't wanna sit here and claim he is a conservative or anything like that.

Or just like sensible. I mean, I don't know if you have to be good, but if you're telling me abortion is awesome, you're a freak.

Yeah.

You're a freak if you think it's awesome. Maybe you think it should be legal in some cases or whatever, but if you're celebrating abortion, You're evil. Like, can we just have like a normal person run for some office at some point?

I agree. And that's why I do want to be— and there are some within the DSA who actually very, very much disagree with some of the tactics of the woke 1.0, like AOC herself. Many of them saw her as a much weaker person. I mean, look, you can see Zohran Mamdani. I have a lot of disagreements with Zohran, especially going into the campaign, but you can't deny that the guy guy has kind of embodied their vision. The current DSA, at least the people I speak to, Crystal specifically and Ryan, their vision I know for that is like the sewer socialist model, which is very much how Zoron is trying to govern the city of New York, is he does— he uses his extraordinary popularity and charisma, he focuses heavily on quality of life issues, he does use his political capital, on social issues, which he feels are very important to him, let's say like Transgender Day of Visibility, but he doesn't make it the main component of his overall governance. On law and order, he capitulated completely. He reappointed Jessica Tisch. There has been, at the very least now currently, no actual defunding of the police.

He's largely worked— he apologized to NYPD for saying he should defund the police. So he retreated dramatically. He's a pragmatist ultimately whenever it came to that, at least rhetorically and from what we've seen.

How's the crime rate? In New York.

And so, well, actually, I mean, let's be fair. New York has one of the lower actual crime rates in major American cities. If you were to pick one of New York or San Francisco, I'm choosing New York every single day.

Oh, for sure, yeah.

And he's also focused, let's say, on new garbage containers in neighborhoods to make sure that there's not trash on the street. He put a video out this morning about rebuilding the BQE, which is a disaster.

Yeah.

You and I have been on. I'll say, you know, again, as a guy who has deep, deep disagreements with a lot of their vision, it's pretty attractive to see somebody who says, I'm going to fix the infrastructure and I actually am going to do it, as opposed to seeing Donald Trump, who has multiple times now run on rebuilding America, and now whenever it does come to rebuilding, his most recent tactic is to go to bat for the data center companies and for AI.

More weed, more porn, more gambling.

At a regulatory level, he's done that, but then even to the extent that If you were to look at like what projects do they support building, their main saving grace for their presidency has been AI. AI is the only reason we're not in an economic depression. AI capital expenditure, specifically with data center, is the major driving of any GDP growth that we have left. It is the only thing holding up our capital markets whenever it comes to the S&P 500. They need AI to keep working. And so they are going to bat at a regulatory level, at a rhetorical level, to make sure that this industry becomes the multi-trillion-dollar promise that its CEOs said.

But why not protect the public from mass surveillance in the process?

Right.

Why doesn't— how about a bill in Congress that Trump could call for saying, you want your data centers, okay, but we're not going to turn this into East Germany?

Yeah, we are going to— every data center. I mean, he claims, like he says, right, executive order, They have to pay for their own power, but it hasn't necessarily— or they have to build their own power whenever they build it. I support that, but that needs to be codified into law. We need to make sure that they are not bribing local officials like that case in Utah with Kevin O'Leary and the data center project that he spearheaded. We need to make sure— look, many of the water use claims are overblown, but at the very least, they are somewhat of a concern. And then power. Power generation is ultimate. The amount of power, Virginia where I live, 40% of the power goes to data centers, 40%. It's the largest in the nation. In the entire state? 40% of power generation goes to data centers.

In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia?

In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. In Oregon, it's 30%. And some of these, it depends on various different states. Virginia's the worst because all the data centers are largely powered for the government, for Amazon, for, we have the best fiber optic cable for, because of the defense contracting. industry. But so that's— it's an extreme example, but I'm giving one where you can see that power generation itself is becoming a zero-sum game, which is a nightmare, especially when you're competing against one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, which is the most power hungry, especially with these hyperscale data centers. If we had abundant cheap power, none of this would really be as much of a conversation. But it is actually living in a world where the administration is coming to the back of these data center companies and is, in many cases, is attacking Republican governors who, again, in my opinion, are just trying to do some very sensible stuff. Greg Abbott, who, let's not pretend he's doing this out of the goodness of his own heart, he dragged kicking and screaming to the data center moratorium.

He's about to lose that election if he doesn't.

He very well may, but he signed a data center moratorium, and in it, all he says is, look, we're doing a moratorium, We have to figure out rural land use and water, noise generation. We need to make sure that you don't get certain tax breaks. We just need to make things, you know, normal so that the— when the local community allows the data center to be built, that they reap some of the benefits. And Trump comes out and is like, I think it's a mistake, right? He said that whenever about Greg Abbott. And he said that about Kathy Hochul. He said there's all these governors. Josh Shapiro, similarly, also just announced another data center moratorium. The proponents of the data centers will attack you for speaking this way. They'll say, you know better than the water use, or any of that not being true. In some of these cases, we've been able to lower property tax. West Virginia data centers, they're looking at potentially trying to remove their own income tax. And if the, the actual benefits of all of that work out, I would be happy. However, and this is what you're talking about with mass surveillance, with data, with privacy, is that we cannot use just the promise of riches to offset what could potentially be an industry which, by their own admission, they say will be the most radical social change, economic change since the Industrial Revolution.

Some of their own CEOs say that they will make it so that none of us are even necessary in their future world. I know that privately they want that because they want to be gods. They see themselves as gods. Literally, as transhumanists, like their goal is to infuse the human in the machine, and that they will personally be part of a very rarefied elite, which is transnational, above governments, and so powerful that governments are ultimately answerable to them. That's where Flock comes in. You and Glenn did such a great job of talking about that, about mass surveillance. And it was amazing to me, you know, with Flock, for example, everybody talks about the crime, I totally get it, it is very useful, in many cases. But, but the internal mechanisms and controls are not governed by any real federal privacy laws.

No, no.

A lot of it is up to these corrupt local sheriffs. We have all these cases of police officers stalking their ex-girlfriends or their wives while using the technology. Only in response to that do they put some safeguards in. They claim they delete some of the new— their new customers' data will be deleted after 7 days, not 30 days. days. It raises the biggest question about warrantless surveillance and privacy in your own nation to be able to move about daily lives. People say solving crimes is, is worth that. I say let's at least have a real debate and guardrails and not leave it entirely up to the companies themselves.

Well, they haven't ended crime. That's for sure.

Of course not. Yeah. Right.

I mean, I, I think Harris County, Texas, has the highest or one of the highest penetrations of Flock cameras. A lot of crime there. Yeah. In Houston. So, like, but I don't see— let me just ask you a question that I actually have been talking to someone involved today about it. This morning we just interviewed a guy called Nate Soros, who's the, you know, the guy who, uh, you know, was an early developer of AI. He's been sounding the alarm that it's out of control and superintelligence is a threat to humanity. And I'm— I know you're very familiar with the argument.

Mm-hmm.

So he's written a new book on this. He doesn't have a counterpart on the other side. That's what strikes me. There's not one person I'm aware of who can explain the tangible benefits to me and other people from AI. All I hear is China, China, China, China. I don't care at all. I'm sick of your lies, China. Oh, shut up. But that's not even the beginning of an answer to the question, why should I support this? Right.

The—

Do you know the answer to that question?

I do, actually. I have a lot of friends in tech.

Well, so what's the upside?

The, the up— I'm— it's not a vision I necessarily support. The best-case scenario for AI, the way that they see it, is it will simply remove friction in our daily lives. It will be equivalent to a credit card. So this is the case. My friend John Coogan from TVPN gave me this analogy. He's much more bullish on AI than I am. The credit card was able to facilitate more transactions and ease of pay, which doesn't just open up the ability for me to pay you. It opens up more financial transactions via the distribution of credit and of mass adoption of this that more businesses can be built on. Right. It is simply a workplace invention which unlocks productivity, which creates and grows the pie of the amount of commerce that can take place in our society. That's how the— I would say the best-case scenario for AI. The best-case scenario for AI is it makes white-collar workers more productive at white-collar work. It makes radiologists able to view more scans. They can do 30 instead of used to be able to do 15. And in some cases, that, that is true. I wanna be fair.

And it can make research tasks. For example, all the notes that I have in front of me, I had all the data from across all of my different spreadsheets, because I research this topic and I cover it often. I was able to use it to compile all of that into one place. It would've taken me hours. This was able to do it in 5 minutes. So that's very productive, right? In terms of what it's able to gain. That is the best case scenario for AI, is it is a workplace productivity tool. Now, and this is what I would say also to my friends, what else did the credit card industry give us? So yes, it facilitated more transactions. It eased payments between individuals. It made, you know, settlement of transactions between— by Visa, make it so that even disputes and all of that can be resolved. But what do you talk about often with credit card?

Debt.

70-something percent of people ended up in debt.

Saves. Right. And the idea that the problem with America is we don't have enough commerce.

Right.

We don't have enough creativity.

Yes.

We don't have enough contemplative time. We don't have enough love between people. We don't have enough commerce? Are you joking?

Right.

We have a lot of commerce.

So the argument is that technology will remove friction, but what we have seen is technology removes friction in some ways, but introduces it in a variety of others.

That's right.

Email. Nobody was able to get in touch— if you, in the 1970s, when you left your job, somebody would have to call you on the phone if something happens after 5:00 PM.

Oh, yeah.

Now everybody just sends an email. People are— if you know white-collar workers, they're slaves to their phones, and they're slaves to their phones Not just for work purposes, but they also have gambling entertainment and Instagram Reels and TikTok. And you end up focusing so much on this device that you forget all of the other things that are around you.

Like your wife.

Like your wife.

And your children.

Children.

One of the most liberating things I ever did was get rid of email.

Yep.

10 years ago, no email. And I don't know. I don't think it's made me less productive. I think it's made me more productive.

Right. And you're— and you're in the a position to do that, but there are a lot of people who are wage slaves.

Oh, of course, no, it's a privilege.

Right, exactly.

I agree, and I'm very aware of that.

Yeah, right, and I always think, I'm also in a position where I'm my own boss, I can do what I want. That's an incredible feeling. I don't take that for granted for a single day.

I agree with that.

Because I know so many people who are living in effective wage slavery, who are chained to the desk, and they're making good money, but they're spending all that money because they need to be able buy a home or to support their child or pay for daycare. Their wife has to work even though she doesn't want to work. Uh, and that's tragedy, actually, to me. And so what our system has done is when they say productivity, they want to make that person more productive. What I want to do is to give that person more leisure or more ability—

Yeah.

To the extent that they're more productive, I want them to be able to use that productivity to make up the time and spend it with their kids. There was a viral, uh, there was a viral interaction. I think it was Sam who was talking about being able to create custom podcasts that he said parents could listen to these custom podcasts in the car with their children to use ChatGPT, the calendars and all of that, and play that podcast. He said, I could imagine some— I might butcher this, but it's like the ability to play that custom ChatGPT podcast while the parent drives their kid to school. And any real parent is like, I don't wanna do any of that.

Well, imagine a world in which you're getting parenting advice from Sam Altman.

Exactly.

No, honestly, like, a normal society would be like, hey, Take a pass on that, Sam Altman.

Yes. Right. When I drive my kid to school, if I— when I drive my kids to school, I wanna ask her how her day is.

Yeah. Go fix my washing machine, son.

Right. Yes.

I don't know. What are you weighing in on stuff you don't understand?

Do not tell me how I should be interacting with my child on the drive.

Yeah.

But that's what ultimately their vision for society is depersonalized and is entirely sacrificed—

Yes. That's right.

To the phone. Which ultimately is to their profit, is that the more time I spend on ChatGPT, the more ads they can serve me on the free version, the more of my data that they can suck up, the more that they could potentially— there's no restrictions really on any of that data. They could do anything they want. Uh, you know how many people have— there have been cases lawyers have used ChatGPT and they end up saying that's not privileged, and so they're able to subpoena some of your privileged information. Nobody knew that. Nobody even thought it whenever they were using it for that purposes. And so, the amount of our personal lives that we give over to these things, and then we allow it to make decisions for ourselves. I think one of the real lessons I've learned as an adult is that friction itself is learning and that there is deep joy on the other side of it.

Of course.

But you have to— in this modern world, you have to You have to intentionally put yourself in a situation because it is too easy to outsource your thinking just to AI. It's too easy to just outsource your entertainment necessarily to gambling what everybody else and all of that are doing. So it, it's a, it's a, it seems an easy way to get rich, but the system, everything is designed to be extractive from you. And so what do I want from our leaders? I want them to end that. I want them to create a society where you know, everybody at home is not a slave to their phone or to gambling or to any other extractive means, to be able to spend time with their families, to be able to do it on a modest budget. We're not saying it's for free, but on a modest budget, to be able to take a vacation or two. And then the most important thing, that your child will grow up and have a better life than you do, which has been broken of the social contract since my generation, the millennials.

That's exactly right. So I just have a couple more very quick questions about politics because you follow it closely. Do you think that there is a sizable number of Trump voters, 2024 Trump voters, who would vote for DSA candidates?

I've thought about this a lot. We don't have enough evidence yet. Michigan will be the big test. There was a sizable contingent of Trump Mamdani voters. I do know this.

Is that true?

We interviewed many of them on our show. We sent our producer out. found many of them. There's a decent overlap, actually, maybe 10, 15% or so of the people who ended up voting for Mamdani or AOC even, who voted for Trump. All of it came down to the anti-war position. I do think specifically on issue-contingent things like Israel, the war with Iran, there is a massive swing group, which in our modern politics is everything. The ability to swing even 2% of the electorate is the difference between winning or losing in half of the states that Trump Trump won in 2024. So if you're asking me, is that contingent, the independent contingent available? I would say yes. But I do think that many conservatives harbor a dream, a sad dream, which is I wish for too, but which is just not reality, where Fox News hardened boomers, are they going to vote? Let's put DSA out of it. Are they not going to vote? Are they going to turn on Trump? We haven't seen enough evidence. evidence of that. We just haven't seen enough evidence in terms of the support for the war with the 65-plus coalition.

Self-identified MAGA still seems very appreciative of Trump, like Trump. Now, the argument there would be self-identified MAGA is a much more restricted group than where it used to be before.

Yes.

And I would make that argument because I say that the independent people out of that, but the people who are still in are very much in. Thomas Massie actually said that He said that the reality is, is that the Republican primary voter was still willing to go with Trump on Israel and with Trump, with the Adelsons, and with Israel on the Iran War, and they were able to vote him out of office. And he lamented that fact specifically about elderly Republicans. And so—

But it's got to change after the midterms, right?

I don't know. I don't know. Because Trump is— how will he respond to the midterms? I mean, is there gonna be self-reflection, or is it just—

By launching a ground war with Iran, probably.

Yeah, right, launching a ground war. He will be the most— and this is part of the foolishness where I wonder, like, do they have any self-preservation instincts? You were around for Clinton's '98 onwards.

I sure was.

That's your life, Mr. President. That's what your life is gonna be like under a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate and a House. Good luck to you, sir. The amount of money— if you're appointees, I hope you all saved a lot of money. Your legal fees are gonna be insane. I hope you all signed up for legal insurance. If you served in DOJ or ICE or in the Pentagon or any of these, you will be called before the Congress. You will be inundated by subpoena. There will be independent counsels and all kinds of absolute insanity waged against you. And it's your fault for allowing the country to get to a position where something like that could be elevated. That will be what his life is going to look like his last 2 years in office, if where things trend, if things are trending in the way I think they're trending.

And you think they'll lose the Senate?

It's possible. I'm not 100%. That one, there's still structural advantages for some of the Republicans. It depends on the course of the Iran war. I would say the gas price there probably matters more than anything, but we're close enough where I don't— Iran gets a vote in this war too. It'd be very hard to go from economic D-Day back to $3.50 gasoline. So in the reality of where things seem to be going, I would at least say this. They have a 50% chance, which is 25% higher than it should have been. And so if they have a 50% chance, maybe even a little bit more of that, to be able to take the Senate, we could even see '08 style of a takeover. I could see that. I mean, in my bell curve of possibilities, if things go dramatically in one vision, you can see Texas going Democratic.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, especially with—

Easily.

Abbott and Paxton, and there's enough drama there. You could see Alaska. There's actually some questions that are up there. You could see— I mean, I saw a crazy poll out of Kansas. Who knows if it's true? Could have just been leaked Democratic opposition. But as you remember from 2008, you can have Democratic senators in all kinds of places, which you never would think even possible. And maybe, you know, we're still too partisan of a country. But people are very upset. There's a combination of people being very upset and then a combination of people being very demoralized. And then even the hardcore ones, why do they come out to vote? Because Trump is not on the ballot. And that is a perfect storm for those 3 things to come together for a potential situation like the one I just laid out.

It sounds right to me.

Yeah.

I'll check Polymarket for the odds. Sagar, thank you. That was so smart.

Thank you, Tucker.

Needed. I appreciate it.