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New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra, speed slower, about 40 gigabyte CDTL. I think that the country will survive, and do you know how I know this? No, because we survived four years of it back to back the last eight years. The media started to realize clicks and link bait, drove revenue. That led to, I think, the audience starting to lose faith in it, and it was kind of like a self-own by the media.
But how do we have 80% consensus on every major issue, but feel like we're out more with each other? What we cause that? If you feel bad about where the world is, it's because you're consuming too much social media, and you're getting distracted by politicians, and you're being manipulated by the media. Jason, great to have you on the show, man. It's great to come here and still your producers. Yes, you're laughing because we've had a great time bantering before the show.
You were taking the piss out of us for being comedians who do serious conversations, you're trying to steal our stuff, you do all kinds of things. But actually, we really wanted to have you on the show to talk about more serious stuff. One of them being, we're recording this on the Sunday before the election. The election, as this goes out, has just happened. We probably don't quite know what's happened. We'll talk about that in a second.
The one thing that a lot of people have been talking about, you're a podcaster, but also an investor, and you've been in the media world your entire career. Because this is the podcast election. That's what people are saying. What do you make of that, first of all? Well, it is Wednesday, if you're watching this at home, and that sounds you hear outside or the riots. I think media is a pendulum, and it goes back and forth, and trusted media is hitting all time low.
I started my career as a journalist, and we took it very serious back in the 90s. It was kind of a vocation, and you were really trained, hey, your job is to do it. It was to present the truth, tell the story, give the facts, let the audience decide. They're smart, so just give them the facts, the who, what, when, where, why, and we're done, and they'll make their own decision. Over time, that's changed a lot, and I think I've seen the media kind of turn over a couple of times now.
One of the businesses I had started was Zine. In the 90s, the height of being kind of punk rock, or being an entrepreneur in New York was to create a Zine. The Zine was a magazine without the budget, basically. It wasn't Guassi.
You would do a photo copy, and so I had one called CyberSurf, I had one called Silicon Ali Reporter, and the way you kind of made your way in the world was by saying the things and having the conversations and those publications that the mainstream media at the time were not willing to have. We had spy magazine, Esquire Paper magazine, and I think you guys had time out, Mondo 2000, 2600, a hacker publication, there were always kind of really interesting.
Then blogs came out, and I was involved in that. I had a company weblog saying that did engage at Autoblog. We sold it to AOL, and that was very disruptive because again, you had writers who didn't have editors, and then you look at podcasting. Well, the media became biased. We'll get into why that is. Also I think the media started to realize clicks and link bait drove revenue in, or a very significant way.
The audience was like, I don't believe all this stuff because the headline doesn't match the story. The headline was written by somebody who worked in the social media departments. Literally, at a publication, like the New York Times, there's a group of people who write the headlines. Buzzfeed and Gawker, some of these early publications that hacked the system, would make 10 different headlines in their social media department.
They would test them on Facebook with $10 against each one, whichever one performed, whichever two performed, they would edit those and punch them up, and then they would spend $1,000 on Facebook to get the first, you know, whatever, hundreds of likes on it. That led to, I think, the audience starting to lose faith in it, and it was kind of like a self-owned by the media. But then it's very hard to have a two-hour conversation or a three-hour conversation and pull that off.
And experts started going direct. And when experts started going directly to their audiences, you had a large number of members of the audience with their AirPods in and their phones kind of become addicted to this longer format. And then you have Joe Rogan and a countless other podcasters. Kind of do what Howard Stern did. You know, Joe had a big, Howard Stern had a big influence on, I think, Joe Rogan and a number of people in podcasts because he would go long.
He had a three or four-hour radio show in New York, probably 30 million people listening to it at the peak. And going long was like a really kind of an interesting piece of what he did. And he had a technique. I've studied all these interviewer techniques and his technique was to pretend he didn't understand. So you'd be like, oh, yeah, so you were in that rock and roll band. And yeah, so what's that like? You know, like you're on tour and you're like our tour bus and he's playing dumb.
And they're like, yeah, and he's like, well, they're a groupies, you meet girls. And they're like, oh, yeah, you wouldn't believe me. And all of a sudden Van Halen's telling this crazy story. I think that's what happened in podcasting is you take off the expiration date and the time where, oh, well, we're just getting into it, but we have to stop. People get very interesting in hour two.
If you can get somebody to the second hour, that's why anytime I interview anybody, I put the harder questions at the end and the more banal ones at the beginning. You just let them kind of warm up. So when we had Trump on the pod, I asked him about abortion a little bit later. I asked him about immigration a little bit later in the pod. And my final question, they pulled them off the show by the end because it was going a little bit long, was going to be on January 6th.
And I had that sequence in my mind. We'll just go a little bit harder on each one. We'll start with immigration. That's kind of easy. Then we'll go to abortion, Roe v. Wade, and then we'll go there. But yeah, it's definitely the podcast election. And I think if Trump wins, we will look back on it and say, JD Vance and Trump doing really well on podcast was a big part of that.
And if men start voting in the United States and men consume a lot of these podcasts, then it's going to be very interesting because men in the United States, as you probably know, don't vote as often as women. Right. And the interesting for me, you are the kind of the lone leftist now, I think, on the whole in podcast effort to say. I have always been a moderate. I voted probably one third Republican in my life into their democratic.
So I've always considered myself a left leaning conservative or moderate. I'm very conservative on fiscal issues, the size of the government, maybe interventions globally in wars. And then socially liberal, like if you want to be gay or straight or whatever, pansexual go for it, whatever you do at your house, your business kind of thing. Well, your buddies have gone all in on Trump. Big time. To coin in time. You are the lone voice holding the line, right?
Well, I mean, I don't like either candidate. I fall into this double-hater group where I think one's an authoritarian and a low moral character. And then I think the other one's a bit of a puppet and a socialist. So if you ask me to pick, I'm just going to tell you the truth. Like neither of these are candidates I would ever nominate or vote for.
The reason I bring it up is I was curious to hear you say that you thought the media had gone biased and you wanted to talk about why, which I really was. I don't want to talk about. But one counter-argument to my own argument would be it feels to us because we are in the center of it, like this is the podcast election. But the New York Times still has a gigantic audience that is doing very well financially.
And you could we kind of live in a world where you can find data and evidence for whatever belief you have, right? So I could say, well, look at Jeff Bezos on the Washington Post. He's come out and reprimanded his own team. Well, I could say, look at the New York Times still crushing it. Yeah. Let's talk about that. What is going on in the media? Why did they become biased and is it really true the podcast of taking over or were just a while we in that trajectory, but not quite good?
I think we're in a transitional phase where people are starting to realize they need to come to their own conclusions. They need to maybe consume multiple sources and determine the truth of themselves, which they should have always done. They should never have trusted any one person, whether it's the media or government. You should always kind of collect your own information and come to your own conclusion. I think people are kind of figuring that out.
The bias started, I think, in the United States at least with Rupert Murdoch and Fox. That was really where picking aside, I remember when Fox started to, Fox News became prominent in New York. It was like, whoa, these guys have picked aside. That was like a novel thing to do. And then MSNBC, people forget, was Microsoft and NBC had done a joint venture in the 90s to bring news to the internet. That's the origin, that's the MSNBC.
And they decided, you know what, if Fox is way over here on the right, we'll just pick the left. And you lose half the audience. But then the audience is much more loyal. So even though you've alienated half, which was what you never wanted to do in media, or you never wanted to do as a CEO of a company, you don't want to lose half your customers, you want to keep all your customers. What they realized was you could own that audience and they would watch you for three, four, five hours a day.
And that was really, I think, Rupert Murdoch's big innovation in the US was Fox. Then you had, you know, when Trump won, if you believed he was an existential threat. And if you talked to people on the left, they believe he's an existential threat. And you could make an argument as to what happened on January 6th, an election denial. You could very reasonably make an argument that they tried to overturn the election results. In fact, a lot of courts have determined that.
And whether you think it's law fair or not, there's a reasonable case to be made that they did. Now if you're really, really, extremely far left. And you actually believe that this person is Hitler. I don't, but some people do. You would do whatever you have at your disposal to, you know, stop Hitler. Like we literally make movies about going back and time machines and would you kill baby Hitler as like a question. So I think the media saw themselves as a tool to stop Hitler, to stop Trump.
And so that distorted everything they did. And you see it in the UK as well with the Guardian would say like subscribe to the Guardian and we will do more journalism to stop Trump. The Washington Post, the New York Times, like literally in their marketing materials would put at the bottom of the story. And I think the Guardian still has it explicitly. If you want to see more journalism like this, to stop Trump, to stop authoritarianism, back us, right?
And that I think has made people just not trust me at all. They just assume they're, you know, they've picked aside and I don't think they're wrong. I mean, if you were to ask me which media hasn't picked aside, I would have a really hard time. Maybe the economist's financial time, some of those publications, Wall Street Journal. Most people would say, who study media would say they're the most, you know, center not picking aside objective.
Do you think the future is podcast where people go look, these are my opinions, these are my thoughts, but I'm going to host people from different sides of the political spectrum. And actually that's a far more honest way of doing it than the BBC, same way, neutral when the reality is nobody's neutral because we all have our opinions in our thoughts on various issues. Yeah, you know, different publications have different standards for that. And I think disclosing them is important.
And so the public has always been confused about, for example, the editorial page. So having an editorial page at a publication and saying, our editorial page is a group of people who are separate and you know their names and they write these edits. And they give their opinions. But on this side of the business, these other pages of the same publication is straight reportage. It's just the facts. I think consumers have always had a problem with that and you probably just shouldn't mix the two.
You should just take the opinion stuff out and leave that to Fox, leave it to MSNBC. Those are opinions. They're not doing journalism. They're not sending reporters out. Now, the BBC, Reuters, AP, Wall Street Journal, they're not doing journalism. They're not sending reporters out. They're diet, Reuters, AP, Wall Street Journal. They're hiring reporters to try to tell stories, to interview people, to try to tell the facts as best they can. And maybe be objective.
But the problem is definitely, when these things are side by side, it's too confusing. Then you add to it, oh the New York Times is going to add journalists who are doing podcasts and they're giving their opinion. And then you watch them on Twitter. And they're writing all this crazy stuff that, you know, these business leaders or authoritarians or, you know, whatever it is. And they're doing spicy tweets at the same time they're doing reporting. That kind of kills it, right?
And I think the public gets smart. Then they discover those tweets. They put them together with the story. And I advise all the startups I invest in to not talk to the New York Times or not talk to CNN. And I think that's a very, very, very good thing to see any journalist because it just goes direct to your audience because they're just going to write a negative story.
And it's pretty predictable now if you were to just look at the last hundred stories by the New York Times on technology or even capitalism writ large. It's going to be negative. That's just their approach. You know, it's such a good point because I remember watching Newsnight, which is a very famous political BBC daily show.
Now remember, I can't remember what the issue was, but Emily Maithless, who is meant to be impartial because she's a BBC journalist, did a monologue to camera about what she thought about this particular issue. And I remember just being so angry because I was thinking, it is not your job for you to give me your opinion. It is your job as a BBC to hold the neutral position, bringing people with different opinions and moderate a discussion.
And actually what you've done by doing this is betray the mission of the BBC. Yeah, I think if you look at podcasting back to podcasting, people understand Joe Rogan's a comedian who has a passion for MMA fighting and he is a commentator and a sportscaster. So I think they probably go in with the understanding that he's just having a conversation. He's not attempting to do journalism. Now random facts and interesting things can come out of it.
But it's up to consumers now to really figure this stuff out. And maybe they should have never trusted journalistic publications. Maybe we shouldn't have trusted the BBC as much. There's a really weird thing though, you're all paying for that. Through the taxes. So if you're paying for it through your taxes, you would hope that they would have some rules of the road there.
We have a similar discussion here with public radio where the government does give modest funding, not to the level of funding the BBC here in the United States. And that colors it as well and you probably don't want to do that. And what do you think about the business of side of all of this? Because you're an investor and one of the things that might be happening is given that you can't have 7 billion podcasts in the world basically, right?
Particularly when it comes to the monetization side of things. Everyone can have a podcast. And if I'm consuming content, I am not going to give $5 a month to 30 podcasts because the admin alone will kill you, right? Even if you're a billionaire, it doesn't really matter. So there are some models where there's a consolidation element like the daily wire. They've brought together a number of personalities under one umbrella. Is that how it's going to go?
Or is it going to be the way it is now where just the people at the top are going to get further and further away from everybody else? They're going to pull away. What do you think is the business future of this space? Probably similar to writing or music. There are people who write in their journal every day because it gives them equanimity and nobody reads it.
And then there are people who write on social media long posts and a hundred of their friends read it and go, wow, this person is incredibly funny, but a hundred people read it. And then there are people who write for the New York Times or BBC or write books. You got a book coming out on teaching. We'll look forward to that. August 25th. Thank you very much. Great plug. At Finder booksellers everywhere.
So you know, it's, or music, you know, people play music at home or are they saying around the piano, a Christmas or something, and then people will do it professionally and everything in between. And that's really what, you know, Jen Exer's thought. Jen Exer's really thought the magic of the internet would be someday everybody would get to produce content, have other people consume it, and it would rise and fall based on how good it was. It's a tradition accomplished.
You know, anybody can start a podcast. The tools are such that literally anybody can do a live streaming show and compete with the BBC and people do. And people who you wouldn't expect, you know, the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, now gets 10, 20,000 people every morning listening to him. So cartoonist. He's talk about politics, you know, and he just did it as a side hustle and he has no producers and he just presses a button and goes every day. And he's built up a really significant audience.
And we've had a couple of things. Yeah. So, you know, he's a perfect example of somebody who's not doing it for money. Money might be a side product of it. And I think that's super encouraging. It should be. And you've always had that in comedy, right? Open Mike Knight was like a tradition. And the internet has done that for radio.
And you know, it used to be you had to start in the United States, like in some really local town as a radio host and then you would go to a B city and then eventually wind up in New York LA or Chicago. And you had to like pay your dues for a decade, refining your craft. And now it's it's all open. So it's wonderful. And who cares? Like some people will make a living. Some people will make a fortune. Some people will be like Joe Rogan and get a nine-figured yell every five years.
And other people will make $9,000 a year and will pay for their car payments. Yeah. I think that's like the wonderful part about this. And all the new talent that gets discovered is amazing. It is. It is. Well, speaking of talent on your podcast, one of the things that I really like about the All-In podcast is I've had my battles with David Sacks about Ukraine and stuff like that.
But one of the things you guys do is you have your battles on air as four guys that actually respect each other and like each other. Or maybe that's a facade, I don't know. You're looking at me with some person. But we are, we are actually going to see that.
And so that's kind of what I'm asking is we know all the data now shows that America and much of the rest of the Western world actually is polarizing very rapidly in terms of who people marry, in terms of who people hang out with, in terms of the kind of differences of opinion that people will tolerate in friendships even. Well, you guys, you do duke it out and you have disagreements. Is that an important thing for people to be doing now to disagree respectfully but publicly? I hope so.
I mean, one of the great pieces of feedback I've gotten from the first four years of the All-In podcast is my friends and I like listen to it every week and we debate it and we get into arguments about Ukraine and Putin and we debate Trump versus Biden, Kamala, the hot swap, all this stuff. And if we can show people that you could have a debate and still be friends, I guess that's a good thing.
It's kind of weird for me because as a Gen X or, you know, you would go to Thanksgiving and I'd have two of my Irish uncles, you know, who are for Reagan or Bush and then another two or three who are, you know, for Clinton or whatever. And it was totally fine. Everybody could debate an issue or two and then just move on and still be friends. So I think, you know, this polarization and the extremes has a lot to do with social media.
So our tribal and you pick a side, you're going to get a lot more followers than if you're nuanced. You know, if you were to ask me a question about Ukraine specifically, I would be like, yeah, you know, we should, I think we're very nuanced take. Like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't put NATO on Russia's doorstep, but conversely, it does make sense to me that free countries should be able to join NATO if they want to or I should a dictator get to choose that. Both of those things can be true.
And so having a tolerance for ambiguity is like one of the highest forms of intelligence is if you can keep these disparate ideas in your head with that and not have to pick a side. The problem is, you know, the world wants you to pick a side and if you do pick a side, the bells go off. You get more likes. You get more people to like you. I don't care if people like me. I'll be totally honest.
I've been far more successful and happy in my life than I ever thought I could be as a kid from Brooklyn. I hit the lottery seven times. I've made more money than I could ever spend. I've got a beautiful family. I honestly don't care. And so it would be very easy for me to come out for Trump and to go to the rallies with my friends and tell you, oh my God, Trump is the answer for everything. But I actually don't believe that. I believe he's not a good human being. Okay. Let's investigate that.
Why? Because of his character and the way he's treated individuals and all his business dealings. So I guess the, don't forget the elections happened. Yeah. Okay. So I'll be totally honest. I think that the country will survive with four more years of Trump or four more years of Kamala Biden and the DNC machine. And do you know how I know this? No. Because we survived four years of it back to back the last eight years. We actually literally survived Biden and Kamala and we survived Trump.
I believe the United States is strong enough, the operating system that the founding fathers architect it will survive either one of them. Well, before you do this, why don't we find out what you think has happened? It's Wednesday afternoon in the West. Oh, take a guess. Yeah. What do you think has happened? Well, all the statistics are saying on all the surveys and prediction markets are saying Trump has a lead. And then, but it's close.
And so the last time Trump won, everybody was saying the opposite that Hillary had lead was to their chance as a poker player, I can tell you, a one third chance of winning is very significant. I've seen people put large amounts of money into the pot and going all in when they have a one third chance. Like that happens one out of three times. It's like not that uncommon. So I think either thing can happen.
Yeah. Maybe either one does happen, I just hope we can get through the counting of the votes without it causing another January 6. You know, you invest in startups a lot, Jason. And startups and correct me if I'm wrong, they have a disruptive element to them. That's kind of the purpose of a startup. Is that he's going to come into the market, disrupt, change the market. Do you think that Trump is a disruptor of politics? If you look at pre-Trump to what has happened?
Not clearly is disruptive, yeah. He's a Democrat who ran as a Republican. He believes in a woman's right to choose, but then overturned Roe v Wade. He believed in banning TikTok and then he got a $50 million donation from one of the big investors in it in flipdisposition. Yeah, he's super disrupted. And is there some policy positive elements to that of being disruptive? Yes. But looking at politics and the political system. I mean, sure.
I mean, being disruptive if you do something innovative that it makes a better system could be positive. I'm not a fed of burning it all down for the sake of burning it all down if that's what you're saying. No, that's not what I'm saying. Oh, okay. No, what I'm saying is that Trump appeals to people who maybe felt more marginalized that politics wasn't for them. Steve Baton is a genius.
With his strategy to get the Republican party to take on the causes of the working man and woman in the United States was a brilliant master's hook. Steve Baton is a genius in that regard. He took the Republican party, which stood for big business and flipped them and had them represent and become a populist party. That was absolutely stunningly brilliant. You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about that because I think that's a really accurate assessment. I was stunned when Trump won in 2016.
Francis and I were. Yeah, of course. Francis and I in the UK, we both voted remain in a referendum. That's kind of like voting for Hillary in 2016. So when Trump got elected, I was like, well, if I'm stunned, that means I've got the wrong information. This is step by definition. So I watched every interview that Steve Vanond did. I spent hours and hours and hours because I was like, this guy is literally telling you how he did this. Yeah. Why haven't the Democrats done that?
I think they're in the process of doing it. I think what you'll see come out of all of this is race to the center. I think people are realizing the trick of using the extremes of each party, the extremes on the left or the extremes on the right, that that hack has been burnt out. So Trump was able to win the primaries by going after evangelicals. He promised them he would overturn Roe v. Wade.
He promised them he would get two or three people on the Supreme Court, specifically to overturn a woman's right to choose. And he did it. Then he realized that would not win him this election. So this election, he said, I did the greatest thing ever. Let the states decide. Okay. Everybody wants the states to decide. And now the states are going to decide it. I'm not involved in it. But he told this group of people, and he won that.
Remember the primary had to beat like 12 candidates who were, remember the, and the interview saw the Republican debates in that 2060 era. I mean, it was like, who's not running? It was, they couldn't even fit that many people on stage. It was comical. I think they maybe had seven or eight people on some of these debates. And he worked the sets up there. And now he's working the opposite. He wants people to believe that he had nothing to do with overturning Roe v. Wade.
And that JD Vance, who is for a national abortion man, is not going to do that either. And that these are not the droids you're looking for. So I think Trump is a master at communication and manipulating people. I agree with you. And you know what I find really interesting is whenever I agree with you. He is a credible at manipulating weak dumb people. Okay. What, what do you mean by that? He's a master at manipulating people, people, especially people who are suffering, weak or dumb.
Yes. I would push back on that because... You would, I know. Yeah, I know. Maybe I'm... Because you're weak and dumb, mate. You're weak and dumb. That's what Jason's right. Yeah. I'm all of those things. But I think what Trump is very... I'm joking. No, no, no, it's... It's devastated, fuck you. No. No, what I think Trump is very good at is identifying the things that are very important to people that the elites do not want to talk about, always not important to the elites.
So for instance, the border isn't really important to the elites. The fact that there is a poorest border because the reality is it doesn't really affect them on a day-to-day basis. Plus, it's kind of beneficial to them when it comes to driving down wages, et cetera. 100% beneficial. 100% beneficial. In fact, in the United States, people don't know this, but the Republican Party was for an open border. We had a thing called NAFTA, you know, the National Free Trade Agreement.
They wanted North America to operate largely like the EU does, where you could just travel between the different countries in Mexicans, could come work in California in agriculture, and then go back to Mexico. And the border would just be open. You could just show your driver's license and go back and forth. Kind of like going between countries in Europe is pretty fluid. And the reason was we wanted to have more low wage workers. That was the Republican position.
And so Trump is a genius in that he was able to convince people, hey, America is an incredibly tolerant place that is a melting pot where we allow the world's immigrants to come, especially once you are suffering in their countries. And all that we ask is that you integrate yourself into the country, learn the language, and become part of the melting pot. Yeah, he was able to convince them that their jobs were being stolen by Mexicans and that it was lowering their wages.
When in fact it was Republicans who were sending those jobs business leaders, overwhelmingly Republican who were sending those jobs to China with globalization. And the Democrats were absolutely pro globalization at the time. Yeah, and I agree with that as well, but it's also there's a security element to it. I think over the period of time that Biden has been in power, I saw a stat, I think it's 11 million illegal immigrants.
Now that is an unsustainable position for a country to be in because what you don't have is a border and a country is defined by its borders. How many millions of people should be able to come into the United States every year? That is a decision that people need to make and people need to agree upon. But what you just call it, 11 million was too much illegal. Illegal, illegal. Okay, illegal. Okay, but I'm just saying let me on. Let's put the number on the table. 11, what is the right number?
And the reason I'm bringing it up is zero. Zero people should be illegal and got it. Okay, so the question I think that will resolve this issue eventually for the United States is to look at what Canada, New Zealand, Australia, many countries have done, which is a point system. About 75, 80% of Americans believe we should have an orderly border. They don't want to have people crossing illegal. I don't think anybody really does.
The 20, I wonder who the 20% are who believe that people should be able to illegally cross the border. I think they maybe don't understand the survey question. If I'm being totally honest, I think that's running the system. Yeah, something is very weird. Under what circumstances would you want people coming illegally to your point about the security system? But in the United States, it's incredibly insincere. Both sides could solve this issue and they've manipulated the public.
All you have to do is say there are really three buckets of people who can come into this who we need to address coming to the country. There are people who are in line properly and then there are people who are refugees who are leaving a country where they would be murdered if they went back. Then there's talent recruitment, getting the best and brightest into this country. If I was running for president, I'd say, look, we have three groups here.
We want to have the most talented entrepreneurs in the world. Anybody with a PhD and master's degree, and this is what I asked Trump about, and he said, I guarantee you I'll give a green card, I'll staple it to their diploma. I don't know if you saw that clip when he was on the show. They walked it back a bit because their party needs to be xenophobic and maintain this position that all the jobs are being stolen by these low wage workers who are coming to the United States.
But we should be recruiting the best and brightest, especially from communist countries, dictatorships, authoritarian countries. Why? Every smart person we take out of China, Russia, North Korea, any dictatorship Iran, they lose a smart person we gain a smart person. This is like a double win. On a compassionate basis, we can just pick a number of how many people we could absorb with over 300 million Americans, maybe 0.1% of the population, we could all agree on 300,000, sound reasonable.
And then in the middle, the line of who we need, that should be done based on merit, and there should be a scorecard. And it could be how many degrees you have, speaking the language natively, and then what positions we need to fill. We need to fill out a healthcare positions, nurses, doctors, etc. So for the next five years, we might say, hey, I got you one or two or three points if you have one of those degrees. And if you speak the language fluently, you get two points.
If you speak it partially, one point, if you don't speak it, zero points for that. And this sounds crazy. This is how they do it in Canada, they do it in New Zealand, Australia. You have a merit-based system. In the United States, it's incredibly cynical and both sides of the political spectrum are manipulating people. Give me one minute to tell you about senilitics and why they're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime.
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It's also available at select GNC locations near you. It's Q, U, A, L, I, A, life.com slash trick for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks for qualia for sponsoring today's episode. To tell us more, how are the Democrats manipulating people? I think, well, they're in office right now and they've left the border open and they've said that it's not open and it's not a problem. So that would be manipulation. So I'd say gas lining.
But your point about Trump and jobs, I think that's more of a 2016 talking point of being honest right now. What I hear out of the right in America, just as an outside observer, feel free to correct me, is they've basically elone his force the right to adopt what I think is a very sensible position, which is we're pro high levels of high quality immigration and we're totally against the legal immigration.
I think Trump is doing what he does, he is pandering to the crowd and he's adapted his position to win this year, which is what politicians do. They adapt their position to win. Number one job of a politician is to win. I would not, do you know how you can tell if a politician is lying? Go on. Let's move moving. Yeah, basically, Kabela basically going to the center is a lie. I think she's far left of center and then Trump having this position is just a lie to get votes.
To give us the scenario by scenario, we're sitting him Wednesday, we may not have a result yet. Yeah. But if Kabela gets elected, you're basically saying she's a fraud. That's what you just said, right? I think she, like all politicians, is saying what she needs to say to get elected. Okay. So if she's been elected, are you happy? I am for having a split government, you know, have different aspects to a government here, the executive branch, legislative branch, et cetera, judicial branch.
I would like to see some stasis and them not be able to pass too many laws and spend money. The number one issue for our country is that we are adding 10 trillion to the debt every administration. I guarantee you, if we were sitting here in four years, we could do this protest again. And in four years, we'll be sitting here and either one of them will have put 10 trillion in debt into the United States.
I'm really glad you've made this point because there are people who, economists out there who go look, modern monetary theory, you can keep printing money. It's great. It shows, we share people with money. It's going to be like the hip hop video. Everyone's great. Everyone's got a diamond and cross-stit cane. You are a money guy. What's the problem with that? Have you ever met one of your friends who like lives above their means?
You know, like how do you afford this house and then these two cars and then all of a sudden they lose their job and it all blows up and they lose their house and the two cars get repossessed? You can't live above your means for any sustained period of time. There's a reasonable amount of debt we're using debt to build a business or to invest in an economy.
If you were going to build some infrastructure, this beautiful house that you guys have here in Austin, I don't know how well this podcast is doing. What crushing it. I know. You just go to different cities and buy a luxury house like this. No, not you. It's an amp in me, mate. Oh, man. What's that? Was there a pain being? I know you did. I know you were spectacularly going down. I thought you bought this. I mean, you saw this place as gorgeous. We looked for it in the last time.
Wow. For a podcast with two comedians. That's right. Wow. It's a really original idea. Yeah. Right. We're looking for $10 billion for a 10% stake. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're happy to negotiate. Yeah. We'll be there. We'll be there. A billion here, a billion there, mate. What's a billion? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's very much comes back to the actual serious point, which is like that. Right. And we're back to the dead.
Yeah. I mean, if you want to be happy in life, I think living below your means and controlling your expectations is super important. Elon always had a funny thing he would say, like happiness is expectations minus reality equals happiness. So like, if you put your expectation that we're all going to be flying on private jets and have three homes and be famous, like you're going to be pretty disappointed, I think austerity and living below your means is virtuous.
And I can tell you, having had many friends get very, very wealthy, like, uncomprehendable wealth. Wealthy than us. Yeah. Well, I said uncomprehend. You're comedians. Come on. But comedians have done incredible. You have that happen where a comedian will make $30 million for a special Ricky Jervais. Yeah. I mean, he kind of laughs at how ridiculous his pay is.
So I can tell you, like, when you go out and you have a steak or like a hamburger, there is no difference between like four or five people going out and having a hamburger and like two or three of them are billionaires, two or three of them are not or just million aires and one or two people are just, you know, civilians working class folk, which is how I grew up. Yeah. It's no difference in the hamburger and the joy of it.
Where if you go skiing or if you go for a walk or you hold your kid, you have a two or a half year old, like same experience. And if you actually have this overwhelming amount of wealth, it creates massive anxiety and happiness. And most people I know who make a lot of money. Really? That's interesting. Why? How does that work? It's worked really hard and they believe that if they became famous or got to a million subscribers on their YouTube channel, all the noise and insecurity would go away.
And once they had the money and they had the plane and the house, the noise would go away and the insecurity and the doubt would go away. And then it doesn't, which then magnifies it. Oh no. I've made a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars and I still feel bad about these issues. There's no way to solve these issues. It's what they come to the conclusion and then they realize, oh, you have to do some self-work. There's some process here of dealing with those issues that money can't buy.
I know it sounds ridiculous. No, it doesn't sound ridiculous at all. There's certain voids you can't fill with material things. No, it does take the edge off. I will say, like, you know, if you do not have to worry because I lived with my parents having to live paycheck to paycheck week to week day to day sometimes, that does create an underlying fear. And I grew up with a fear of running out of money. And I think it was probably why I was driven in business.
And a lot of people I know were the most driven are the people who come from that circumstance. And in fact, it's kind of a trope in our industry that the kids of immigrants are the best people to bet on because their parents were just scared to death. Are they going to get kicked out of the country? We have to work and we have to meet this child, get into an Ivy League school.
The only way that we're going to survive as a family and the bravery it takes to leave your home country and go to America or another country in your case, Russia, and then going to England. Like, this takes an amount of hootspa and fearlessness. And yeah, if you can do that and then raise your kids with that same fear in paranoia, they're going to be really great entrepreneurs.
Well, actually, that's a good question for you because you know, you have the trauma as a young man watching your father's business be taken away. And I know that you did your research. Me. Yeah. We know that well-themed. Yeah. But in Brooklyn, we kind of, what do I say? 17 years old. He's still on a bar, right? He used to own a bar, yeah, probably. They came because he was behind on the taxes. Guys with shotguns, like the ATF and everybody put the locks on it, took everything out.
My dad said, I'm going to jail, take care of your mom. And I was supposed to go to college. And he said, I have no money for college, but good luck. I'll be, take care of your mom, take care of your brothers. Yeah, come visit me and jail. That has to have a profound effect on you. Yeah. I remember with my dad, my dad got fired from his job through no thought of his own. And I was at school and I said to him, one morning, hey, can I have some money to get the train to go to school?
He went, I don't have any money. And I'm going, well, how am I going to get to school? And he went, so I had to bunk. I had to jump on a train and dodge train inspectors in order just to get to school. Yeah. I mean, that gives you foreign a way that nothing else can. How old were you? Fifty. Yeah, I had a similar experience too. Oh, sure. Well, my father was one of these guys that did very well in early 90s, Russia. And he went into Borussia, also as government.
And then for various political machinations, reasons he was falsely accused of tax evasion had to flee the country. And so I went from being the son of a very wealthy guy to literally sleeping in a park for several weeks. So that's actually really hard because you think you're up here. Yes. And then the distance is here. Best thing that ever happened to me though. Yeah. Best thing that ever happened to me. See, my point is women go have ten billion dollars for ten percent. Women?
We have the kids of the absolutely make it work. Women go to therapy, men start pocket men. There we go. So what it is true, if you talk to any successful entrepreneur or even somebody in the entertainment industry, which is incredibly entrepreneurial, you will see some sort of like trauma there that filled that battery and made them go. And sometimes the harder it was for them, the harder they'll work because you have that fear that they keep running. And it's also if gratitude as well.
So my mom's been a sullen, everyone on the podcast is now going to drink, but I realize how lucky I am to be in this position. Yeah. I realize how lucky I am because there are people way smarter, way more talented, way funnier, way better looking than me. He said that before we started actually. Who are who are literally thinking to themselves, how am I going to get water, not food, water to drink? This is really important to have perspective.
That's why I don't get super worked up about like if Trump wins or Kamala wins, like my family will be okay. We're in good shape and I've been so blessed in my life to hit the lottery six or seven times. What are the chances? It's bizarre, right? And so I do think gratitude is one of those ways to fill that hole.
And then whatever trauma you had is a 15 year old who now has to hop the turnstile and commit a crime because their dad lost her job through no fault of their own and then you see your hero who is supposed to protect the family. They have no armor and they have no sword. They can't protect the family. It's literally what happened to both of us. It is the hardest thing to see that happen to your dad because you could see it in their face that they know that you know that they've found.
I mean, let it sink in how hard that is. Well, you have the opposite problem, which is why I brought this up, which is you are very successful and you've got three kids. And this is one of the things I've been wondering. A lot of people, there's a lot of conspiracies always about families that have managed to preserve wealth and the right mindset through the generations, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds.
They're all kind of, they're usually treated with suspicion because it's so bloody hard to pass down that attitude over generations. How do you do that when they're living in the lap of luxury? Well, maybe don't live in the lap of luxury. I think it's part of it. So when I travel with the girls, we could afford to fly business class, obviously, and we fly coach. Because I have friends whose kids have never flown commercial. Commercial. They fly private owned. They fly private owned.
I have literally friends whose kids have never flown commercial. And I think that is actually, it's good for them. And then people will see me and they're like, what are you doing in coach? I'm like, I'm flying to New York to see my family. And they're like, don't know about your in coach. And I'm like, yeah, it's a good deal. Don't you leave it at that? Yeah. But in sincerity, like I don't think, showering your kids with, you know, this kind of experience or is a good idea.
And I think having kids work and get jobs is also good. I'm in a lot of young folks when I went to work in Manhattan. You know, I'm like getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan was like the really hard goal that everybody had in Brooklyn. Now Brooklyn's cool. Everybody wants to be in Brooklyn. When I was there, the goal was to leave Brooklyn and get to Manhattan. And you know, when I met the kids who lived in Manhattan and went to Ivy League schools, they didn't know how to work. They had no grit.
They didn't know how to hop the turn style. They didn't know how to hack the system. And so they were too soft to actually perform. And their anxiety level was really high. It was very bizarre to see. And then I just would be like, well, I'm going to come in an hour before you get here. And I'm going to stay two hours later. And I'm going to read all these books on how to do this technology stuff. And I'll just beat you through sheer force of will. Is that what it is?
So you need a bit of childhood trauma, hard work. Is that it? Certainly helps. Certainly helps. What else makes it great? No, well, great entrepreneur. I think the ability to lead other people and to get them motivated and to be relentless and not give up. That doggedness is so critical. Because you have to find purpose in pursuing something in the face of just constant pain and suffering. It's almost like marathon runners or something.
You have to really get good at the feeling of having blood in your mouth and getting punched over and over and over again. It's literally entrepreneurship if you're doing anything meaningful is constantly trying to solve problems and failing and just getting beat up day after day after day. In a way, it's very much like stand up, I'm told. I'm told that like the first couple of years of stand up is just horrific. You get bombed. People will have fit you. You get off stage.
The other comedians are like, oh, you really suck. And then at some point, you really suck. Because they enjoy watching you. Right. But it's almost like there's some recognition that the way to get there is to go through it. And I think that's entrepreneurship is like you have to go through that pain and suffering and failure in order to become good at it. And it is, it's hard to watch.
Like people really suffer, but it's also a gift that here in the United States, you can start a business and raise capital. And people are like, that's a really crazy idea. The chances of that succeeding are very low. Here's a bunch of money. Let's do it. You know, because you've convinced them that you're crazy enough to do it, you have the skill to do it. You're not going to give up and that you have the ability to execute on some level. You know what you're saying is true.
I think you've missed one part of the question of the pie. I think you've got to enjoy the blood in your mouth. Sure. Absolutely. That's a very good point. Yeah, you get that taste of the iron. Yeah. It's like, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree with that 100%. If you do not feel like, yeah, I'll show them. I'll get this done. I'll figure it out. Yeah, you're not cut out for it.
I mean, the logical thing to do if you've gotten punched in the face over and over and over again is to extract yourself from that situation immediately. If you got on stage and bombed five nights in a row and everybody told you, my God, you suck at this. And they laughed at you. The logical thing to do would be to say, yep, I suck at this. I am not coming back next week.
But then somehow, like, I don't know if it's narcissism or pigheadedness or just blind faith, some number of comedians come back the next week and get one laugh and it fills their bucket enough for them to not quit. But how many of them quit? Loads of them quit. Most people quit after their first gig. Yeah. One in nine. One in nine. 99% of people who have ever done stand up quit after the first gig. It is. And then another 0.9% quit after the second gig. Really?
So you basically eliminate everybody in the first week. Pretty much because if you've had a bad first gig, you never do it again. If you had a great first gig, you go into the second gig thinking you're the dog's bollocks. Yes. I'm invincible. You have a terrible gig and then you'll go, oh, okay. And then you quit. This is so interesting when it comes to human nature. It turns out the most successful people in venture capital investors are the ones who have early success.
So if you have early success in venture capital, a virtuous cycle starts. So in my first seven investments, I hit Uber, Thumbtack and Datastax. Three out of the first seven companies I invested and became worth over a billion, one of them became worth over 150 billion. And so you would look at that and be like, that's the equivalent of like maybe doing three Dave Chappelle skits. His three best skits in a row in your first time running a show.
And what happened after I did that was everybody said, oh, you're really good at this. Let's give you more money so you can invest in more companies. Those are called limited partners, LPs. They're the money behind the GPs, the general partners, which is a fancy way of saying venture capitalists. So that early success led to people giving me money for my first fund, a $10 million fund. Then the founder said, you invested in Uber and Thumbtack? Oh, yeah, I know those companies.
Can I tell you about my company, Robinhood, it's a stock trading app. And so then I invested in a robberta. So then more founders started coming to me with their ideas. And then I just said, well, you can get me on Twitter. I'm just that Jason DM me your idea or email me anytime. My email for life is Jason at calicanas.com. Email me your idea. And to this day, I have 20,000 people contact me and my firm every year for funding.
This is out, that would be the equivalent of like you go into your first poker game and you win. And I've seen this happen. People win in their first poker game. They come back the next week. If they happen to win again, then people say, why are you really good at poker? And then you know what they do? They go buy a book about poker. They go watch poker clips on YouTube and they start studying the game and they get better. So randomness, early success can drive people's motivation to do stuff.
Whereas the people who failed the first two times, they should have the same experience, which is I fell two times, I should probably read a book on comedy. And I should talk to some comedians about what I did wrong and I should study the tape. Instead they give up. And the people who got early success should say, you know what, I got lucky early. I should be prepared to fail again because that was just random dumb luck. Or maybe I should study and figure out why those jokes work.
What was it about those jokes that worked or those bets? And then if you think about raising kids, if you said to a kid who hit a three point shot in basketball, you're great at shooting threes. Why don't you come to practice and I have a three point coach. I'm going to have you work with the three point coach. We're going to make even better. Just that one little act which would cost almost nothing to do could change the trajectory of somebody's life.
I'll just keep that in mind when you're talking to folks. And I always do that with entrepreneurs. I've had an entrepreneur the other day who stopped me in an airport. He says, you don't remember this, but I pitched you on my company. And I said, oh really, Diane Vassan, he said, no. I said, okay, he said, but I told you the idea. And I remember it like yesterday, you told me there were seven other people who had pitched that idea and failed. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, I just waited.
She goes, no, you did the opposite. And I said, what did I say? And he said, oh, you said those seven people failed. What's your plan to make it work? Because sometimes the person who comes up the hill after those first six or seven people, they take the hours and then you take the castle. So what's your plan? And I told you the plan and you told me, you said, then I'll never forget it. You told me at the end, I don't think many people would be able to make this idea work, but I think you could.
So you should give it a shot and I said, well, how did the company do? You said, oh, it's totally failed. I said, oh, it goes. But I did the second company after that with the things I learned. I found this other opportunity and I sold it for whatever, tens of millions of dollars. And I realized, wow, like you have to be very careful, like what you say can impact a person so dramatically. Absolutely.
And you are not even aware of it, especially if you get to the second half of your career where people actually put some value on what you're saying. So I now have a rule. I never underestimate anybody. I always just tell my team when we're sorting through the companies, like this person could have the worst idea ever, they could figure it out. So let's hear them out. Let's assume they're going to figure it out.
And if they're awkward and they're a personickity and they're hard to deal with and they're contancurists or otherwise odd, well, those are the people who eventually figure it out in my experience. So be super kind and take them seriously. I think it's like, I really agree with that because one of the things that is so important for life and one of the things that we don't teach kids is resilience. Resilience, the ability to take a hit and keep going.
The ability to have failure and learn from your failure, not take it personally and move forward. And if you look at anybody who is successful, you get what happens on the surface and you think, oh, they've had it easy, but you scratch the surface. It ain't been easy. It would have been easier for you with what happened to your dad to think, oh, my life's over, what am I going to do? I've got to do this.
Be overwhelmed, go into aspire and negativity and ultimately choose a path that would lead to a life that is miserable. But you didn't do that because you have resilience. And that's such an important quality. Yeah. I had anger and I had fear. I probably looked back on it. And I think when you look at motivation, I think about motivation a lot. Like there's maslow's hierarchy of needs and self-actualization and different motivations can be very effective at different points in your career.
And anger are very powerful, very powerful motivators. And I look back on it. I was absolutely scared of running out of money and not having power. And I did everything I could in my late teens and early 20s to accumulate power, money, strength, notoriety, everything possible. I started a magazine. I was a black belt and take one doe. I ran marathons. I just did anything I could to make money be powerful, be important. And then, after a while, I realized, there has to be something more to this.
And those short-term motivators run out. Like they I'll show them. They made it. And you have to find another one. And the one I've come to now is it's just so delightful to see people succeed and you've gotten to play some role in it. We just got to be like Obi-Wan Kenobi, if you guys have watched the Star Wars series, I think we're all of the same age.
If you watch the Clone Wars, which is an incredible animated series that goes into the real depth of the character Obi-Wan, he was just really, really narcissistic, powerful Jedi, who they would send on the most elite missions with his padawan Anakin Skywalker. And then he got old there and realized, I have to bring violence to the force. It's like a higher thing to do here. But in the beginning, he was just like, yes, send me on a crazy mission. Let's do crazy stuff.
And so I always try to carry that with me now when I'm working with founders who I find myself working with people where half my age. I'm like, how did I become 54 years old? I don't understand. I feel like I'm 30. And they're so motivated and they want to just go win the war. You know? And I'm like, yeah, maybe I could help them not lose a limb or two. Because the Jedi stuff is kind of a serious business. A nature should go run into the fight. Light savers out. Let's go.
And then they just lose a limb or two. And I'm there. And I'm like, yeah, maybe next time, let's not run directly at the Sith Lord. Like let's be coordinated in how we go about this. And it's like a very delightful place to be in life. I have to say, I wake up every day and I'm like, can't wait to talk to enthusiastic, young people about the business they're starting. But an even more, unfortunately, some people lose unfortunately, lose an arm or a limb, but you can still function.
Yeah. I think the greatest tragedy is when people lose themselves. That's the moment. And I've seen it with friends and people get into comedy and they have success and they do well and you're like, oh my god, you, there's the shadow has come out and it's running rampant now. Yeah, that's the thing about that dark, those dark forces, right? You can go either way. Yeah. And especially with comedians, it seems like they're dealing with a lot of demons, not the satirists, the satirists.
Jason's been great having you on. We're going to ask you our audience questions in a second before we do. The question we always finish on is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we're really talking about? Before I answer the final question, head over to our substack and subscribe. What is URL? It's in the description. Yeah. It's in the description. Just go subscribe. Why wouldn't you?
I think it's such a great question, I think optimism, everybody is so polarized, but there is actually a lot to be optimistic about. And that's why I like when people fight on our podcast, other podcasts, and they get all worked up about Trump and Kamala and the border and Brexit and all this stuff. There are much bigger issues at work that are going to be solved by entrepreneurist technology and innovation that are hard for human minds to comprehend.
If you were to tell somebody living 200 years ago, our lifespan, or that you would be getting paid to talk once or twice a week on your podcast and make a living for talking into a microphone and it was recorded and then everybody else on the planet could watch it for free that would like blow their minds. Just our lifespan would blow their minds at the average human, you know, live 70 or 80 years. We are on the cusp of solving energy, fusion, renewables, batteries, solar, et cetera, nuclear.
And at the same time, we are solving superintelligence. And the ability for anybody to learn any skill has already happened. It's called YouTube. Like literally there is almost nothing you cannot learn by watching a YouTube video. And then all the Ivy Leagues about 10 years ago put their courses on YouTube. And I'll go watch an MIT course on macroeconomics. And I'll look and it's got half a million views.
And I'm like, how is it possible that all the knowledge inside these institutions is now available for free and we're not absolutely over the moon about it? And then it's available to everybody. Like we were not, I don't think maybe you were, but I think two or the three of us here were not ever going to get invited to the Ivy League schools. And now you can consume it all for free. And then you think about water and food insecurity and energy being solved.
Well, water being solved is just an energy problem, right? De-salonization, there's entire countries that live off of desalonized water. And then you think about food insecurity and you think about water. Well, food is just a product of water in some way. So you could actually have unlimited food and then all these robots that Elon and a number of other companies, Boston Dynamics are working on combined with AI, combined with the batteries, combined with energy.
They're going to be able to build anything, including themselves. The abundance that we're living with is a big part of the anxiety we have. And I think back to gratitude, which we talked about earlier in the conversation, getting back to gratitude, we should be so optimistic right now. The things that we agree on outweigh the things we disagree on 100 to 1. The problems we are solving outweigh the problems we're experiencing, a thousand to one. Yet everybody feels bad.
It's because of social media. It's because of being manipulated by politicians. Just pause and assess the fact that you and everybody you know is in all likelihood going to live a long, prosperous life. And even the people in the world who are living in abject poverty, that goes down 50 million, 100 million people a year leave that designation of living in abject poverty. In our lifetime, the number of people in abject poverty will hit zero, or they will be captives of a dictatorship.
In other words, they would not need to live in abject poverty. Just by buying iPhones, we had three or four hundred million people in China that were living in poverty become part of the middle class. The same thing is happening in India as we speak, the entire world is getting dramatically better. And if you feel bad about where the world is, it's because you're consuming too much social media and you're getting distracted by politicians and you're being manipulated by the media.
Just pause and reflect and look around you at everybody you know and love and how well they're doing. And it doesn't mean they have a private jet or they're famous. Just means that you had a great dinner with them or that you hugged your kids and you took them to soccer or whatever you do in England with your kids. And the world is awesome right now. The world is absolutely phenomenal. And I have to keep reminding people who think we're in the middle of this existential crisis that we're not.
Do you think one of the reasons that people do feel that way is that prosperity and material success as we talked about with individuals is not always filling the void that people have. The longer we live and the more comfortably we live, the more we have time to look inward and to be unhappy. Absolutely. And you're being addicted to devices that take all of the joy out of life. If you look at what these devices actually do, we put our devices down. We had an amazing conversation for 90 minutes.
I feel like I could hang out with you guys every week and have a dinner. Like I just felt like I met two great new friends, but you would never have that experience if we didn't put our phones away and actually give 100% of our attention to each other for 90 minutes. That's probably what people are experiencing in a very large way and young people especially. They are, they're missing. It's not that these devices are causing the damage.
It's that they're blocking the things that enrich your life from happening. It's so easy to just scroll TikTok for two hours, then consume a comedy show or go to a theater show or go have dinner with friends. And so it's blocking the joy. Young people don't have friends anymore. They're not having sex anymore. They're not partying anymore. They're staying home and they're face timing their friends. And I think these devices have a lot to do with people's unhappiness and then doom scrolling.
If you think about what we've done to our brains, human brains were not designed to consume funny things back to back for hours or tragic things. So we are firing our dopamine. And the most right now, if we all thought about it for a second, there's probably six or seven really incredibly funny things that have happened in the world that are trending right now. And the producers are looking at one of them right now. That's how compelling it is. They have no choice but to look at it.
I don't think our brains were designed to be that stimulated. Either tragically by like, oh my god, look at all the horrible stuff to have in the swirls been murdered. I guess I'm thinking about this poor squirrel and the family that had the squirrel taken from them. Like, there's tragedy happening all the time. And then to subject yourself to it is literally, quite literally, the topic of a clockwork orange. You guys see in this film?
Sure. And they prized eyes open and he's forced to watch a feed of all the horrible things that have happened in the world over and over again. And he's a captive. We've done that to ourselves. We literally have pride our eyes open and we're forcing ourselves to consume all the bad news and then all the good stuff and the sexy stuff and the funny stuff and the tragic stuff. It will make your mind get very burnt down. I think there's a dopamine burn out that's occurring in society.
That's why everybody's on edge. That's why this election feels so contentious. 80% of people agree about almost every one of these issues in the United States. Now, it might be 50-50 on the candidates. But if you look at gay marriage, abortion or women's rights to choose, however you want to frame it, the border here in the United States. All of this is about 70 or 80% consensus. So how do we have 80% consensus on every major issue but feel like we're at war with each other?
What would cause that? You're being manipulated by the media, by the politicians, by the social networks. You just have to unplug from the matrix and then assess it for yourself. Even when you talk to somebody who's like super pro, Kamala, super pro, Trump, if you'd actually discuss the issues, we actually probably agree on the border. But we've probably been meant to fight about it because I'm perceived as a left-leaning moderate and maybe you're more right-wing, I don't know. Are you?
He's a top-of-the-turn far, right? He's like, Maga? He's like, Lunacy Maga or? No, we're kidding. No. We're both people who are just like totally in the center and in the left one crazy. We just were like, what the hell is this? Probably most people are moderates and most people are good people.
So anyway, to your question of what we should be talking about is the fact that we have consensus and the world's problems are being solved as we speak by good people called entrepreneurs and the people who choose to work with them.
We are literally, because of what Eland did with Tesla and I'm going to give him a lot of credit for this because it used to be that in the United States, major cities were dealing with smog and we were going to be living in a world like Shanghai and some of the cities in China where you would lose five years of your lifespan if you didn't smoke cigarettes because of the pollution.
Like, literally, if you lived in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, like some of these places, five to ten years they estimated would come off your lifespan. If I could tell you the amount of suffering of a city with 30 million people losing five years each, 150 million years of life lost, that's like a huge tragedy. And then EVs now are working. It's like one guy put the entire world on his back and then built this incredible team.
And if it wasn't for Elon going bankrupt, he literally went bankrupt trying to keep that company alive and pulled the rabbit out of a hat, getting some investors to bail him out when the Model S was coming out back in the day. If you hadn't done that, you'll realize there'd be billions of years of lifespan removed from people living in major cities strictly because of pollution. But nobody's talking about that right now. We basically don't recognize all the good stuff that's going on.
It's one of the prinicious things about human nature. I think we, as a species, were designed to avoid the river with the crocodile because we didn't want to die quite reasonable. So we obsess over the darkness, like the pathos, like it's, and we just have to take a moment and assess reality. Just take a moment and assess reality. Unlimited energy, food, water, and resources for everybody on the planet has already occurred. It's just not evenly distributed.
There's just some evil people blocking it from getting to other people, but we've kind of already solved all these problems. Excellent. Well, Jason, thanks so much for coming on. Head over to Substack where we ask Jason your questions. Does he have any guilt? It's full on Alex. About running from a Democrat city because of bad policy and then moving to Texas, a well-run republic and let's stay invoking Democrat again. Guys, we've all been there.
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