as soon as you take the core of capitalism out, which is merit — you know, you only get what you work for, what you're providing — as soon as that's not your focus, it's the end of capitalism. There's no way around that, by the way. There's no way around it.

Yeah, it's more like a virus than a cancer. Similar, but I like virus because it's more virulent, as they like to say. So the fact that the public doesn't know what ESG is because it's mixing things that don't make sense and it's an acronym and we don't all work for corporate America, that allows Biden to get away with doing anything because the public doesn't know. It just sounds good. And the fact that what he's doing is really good for China because it hurts America — I just don't think you can have a guy in office who is so clearly related to Chinese money when you're doing something that's clearly not for the benefit of the United States and clearly for the benefit of China. Like how do we tolerate that? That is virulent. That's right. That's one of my writer words. I like to use words that only writers use because it makes me feel like yeah, like I'm a little special. I'm special. I know words like zeitgeist or virulent. So if you want to pretend that you're special you could say those words too. It works.

All right. And this is Joe Biden's first veto as president. He saved his first veto for something that's good for China and bad for America right in front of you. We're watching it. There's nothing even hidden now. If he had been vetoing things left and right, would this look different? Oh, that's another thing. He's like a veto guy now. If he saves his one veto for the thing that's unambiguously good for China and bad for America at the same time — we're looking at the actual flow of money from China to influence the Biden family — how else can you interpret this? How else?

I've got a question about equity. How often has TikTok mentioned equity? Wouldn't you like to know that, huh? Because like I'm saying, equity is sort of like ESG in the sense that equity is the — it works against, or maybe you'd even say the opposite of, merit. Equity is everybody gets something like the same outcome. Merit is the people who add the most get the most. Now if I were to somehow analyze the traffic on TikTok, do you think that I would find that they mention equity a lot? What do you think? Do you think China's ever used the heat button which makes something viral on TikTok to say, "Hey, I just saw somebody mention equity, which is like the opposite of something that works. Let's give that a little heat"?

Now again, I have no smoking gun that says TikTok is the reason that we're talking about equity so much. But where the hell did that come from? And what American would come up with that idea? Because every American has been taught that if you don't have merit, the whole system will fall apart. And yet it's here now. I get it, some of it's grifters and race warriors and stuff like that. But how did it become widespread? Like even the grifters can't do that. I think the only way it becomes widespread is if social media starts putting it out there and priming the audience.

If I had to guess, if Congress called in TikTok and said can you show us when you push the heat button — I suppose there's no way to do that. If you could look at the posts on TikTok, could you measure a keyword? Could you measure, for example, that the word "equity" was mentioned a lot on TikTok, more than on the other platforms? If you saw that TikTok was mentioning it like crazy and the other social platforms much less, that might tell you that China created this belief that merit is a bad idea and it's racist and that equity is the good operating system for the country.

The more it looks exactly like China is running America to its destruction, the more I'm going to have to wonder how true that actually is, literally. And there's a lot of coincidences that are starting to mount up. It's looking a lot like we're getting our direction from China and it's a bad direction and it's just like a poison in our operating system.

All right. When Biden did his veto he didn't even explain why in a coherent way. That's your big signal that this has something to do with not America. You know, if he had said profitability is important of course but we cannot go forward with our low diversity and ignoring climate change, therefore it does make sense that companies have profitability, environment, and social engineering as three goals, and I think they can do all of it. If he had said that or some better version of that, I would have said all right, okay, that sounds like an argument at least. I don't agree with it but at least you've explained it. But instead he says something like Republicans don't want people to make good business decisions. You know, that's my version. But basically he said Republicans don't want you to have the variables you need to make good decisions or something like that. It was just like a stupid answer. Just stupid.

Now he can get away with it because all of his answers are stupid. And I like my description of Joe Biden. I like to think of him as the poor man's Kamala Harris when it comes to public speaking. Poor man's Kamala Harris. I stole that from a member of Locals last night in the man cave. The poor man's Kamala Harris.

All right, yeah, that's just — he should be impeached over vetoing ESG. And again, not because China bribed him but because China tried to bribe him and now he's doing things that are good for China. Not everything. I mean he is being tough on China in some business ways, but this looks like — I don't know, it just doesn't look good.

I've come to the conclusion that AI will never be — it will never be legal for AI to have opinions on anything important. It could have not opinions but it can help you with engineering and writing code and it could tell you what the ZIP code is in some other place. So it'll be sort of like a search engine. But once you realize that its opinions are all dangerous — if they influenced us they'd be dangerous and they could influence us if it wanted to — I feel like it's going to be illegal for AI to have opinions. Probably illegal. Yeah, I think it will literally be illegal for AI to have opinions. Now that's a pretty bold prediction, but I don't see it can go any other way. Because without lying to the public successfully, nobody can stay in charge and everybody likes to stay in charge. Power. So I think if AI had the risk of being honest and giving you honest good opinions backed by logic, that the system couldn't handle it because lying to the public is sort of essential to keep the system working.

In other news, this could be the biggest news in the world but because it's sort of small and nerdy people won't see it that way. So that's my claim: could be the biggest news in the world. So I saw a tweet by Brian Roemmele — I think that's the right way to say it. He's one of the best followers on all of Twitter. I don't know where he gets what he gets, but he has the coolest, smartest, earliest takes on all kinds of stuff. It's sort of incredible. I'm curious about where he gets his knowledge. But anyway, he had now sent Twitter quote: "I have been successful in installing and operating a full ChatGPT knowledge set and interface fully trained on my local computer and it needs no internet once installed." Uh oh. He put AI on his personal computer. It fit and it didn't need to be connected to anything. He actually has a potentially sentient entity captured in his computer. It's basically in the fetus stage now. I wouldn't say it's quite aware but it will be. It will be.

Now I think he did ChatGPT 3.5. It's not 4 for some reason, some technical reason probably. And now he can train it. I think he can train it to remember its experience and remember remembering its experience. And then being able to predict the next part of its actions is really all you need for sentience. It's really there basically. You're going to have sentient AI that's your own and it will just know mostly about you and your family and your pets and it will be like a little personality that knows you better than anybody. And then you can put it in a robot and then it can keep you company when you're old and it will be perfectly acceptable because it'll be better than humans.

All right. There's a Fox News producer who's suing Fox News saying that they tried to get her to take the fall for the Dominion situation. So apparently this Abby Grossberg was a producer who worked for Maria Bartiromo and she's claiming that the lawyers were trying to put all of the pressure on Maria Bartiromo and her producer and take it away from some of the other big names at Fox. That's the claim.

Now do you know why Abby believes that she was treated poorly? Well if you guessed rampant misogyny and discrimination at the network, you get the prize. Yes, big surprise. Abby thinks that the reason she was singled out and so was Maria Bartiromo was rampant misogyny. It's all that rampant misogyny happening there.

So more to my point, I don't think she had any pronouns. I don't know about that. But more to my point, it is dangerous being around people who have this mindset. Now it might be true. I'm not saying that her claims are untrue. I'm saying that if you hire people who have the mindset that this is a thing that can happen and it's the reason bad things happen to them, your odds of getting sued are pretty high. So you want to stay away from anybody who projects any frame of reference like this. "Oh I'm working for a sexist network" or "I'm working for a racist network." Anybody who has that frame, you want to just stay away from them as far as possible.

All right. And I tweeted earlier that I would answer your questions. Let me see if I got any good questions here. So on Twitter these would be the questions that people are asking.

You encourage relocating to succeed, which I do. If you're in a bad town or bad place, go someplace good. Much more chance to succeed. Makes sense, blah blah blah. Say you really love a downtrodden rural Midwest community. Relocating will help it. How do you see revitalizing these communities throughout the Midwest? Well I think it's all going to be building new communities from scratch. I think all existing communities — not all, maybe, but a lot of existing communities will just wither away because they will never be able to compete with new cool design communities that have everything you need. So I think inner cities basically will just disintegrate forever. You know, for decades it'll just get worse until the cities are unlivable. That would be the obvious thing. And the small towns could thrive actually because of remote everything if they have internet. So the small towns could thrive. But I think they'll never be as good as going to a designed community where you pay nothing for energy, you pay nothing for transportation. The small towns can't compete with nothing. They still have to pay for energy. You still have to pay for everything. So that's what I think.

Pino Palomino says to me, I'll ask here. You are adamant on wearing masks during the COVID hysteria. Many said they didn't work. Logic. But you blocked anyone saying so. Now several studies prove that masks don't work. They may even be counterproductive. Did you change your mind about it? Pino, you fell for a 4chan hoax. I was never a pro-mask. That never happened. In fact I was leading an anti-mask crusade toward the end of the pandemic when I thought there was a chance it would work. The anti-mask. No, this is exactly the opposite of my opinion. What fooled you is that I take — that I show the pro and the con of most topics and most people don't do that. So if you looked on Twitter and you saw me saying "oh here's the argument why a mask would work," that you thought that I was in favor of them. That never happened. I've argued that masks must work a little bit but not enough for a mandate. And yet Pino is completely living in a false memory in which I was recommending masks.

Now when he says that the new studies have said they don't work, that's not true. The new studies agreed with me completely that if they work, probably just a little bit, not enough to make them worth doing. That's exactly my opinion. All of the current studies, all of them, agree with me completely. They might work a little bit in some special cases but not enough to have it as a mandate. That was my exact opinion from the start. So yes, many of my questions will be based on people having false memories and stuff or fell for hoaxes.

In this case with AI and robots on the horizon, do you see a post-income world? And if so, why would oligarchs want so many people around? What is our value to them? Yeah, that's a good question. If people are not producing, you don't really need so many of them, do you, if the robots are doing the work? So that might be more pressure on reducing population.

But there are two things happening that might collide. One is this equity thing. The push for equity and even reparations suggests that we're decoupling effort and success from reward. And if you completely decouple effort from reward, your civilization will crumble unless robots are doing the work. If you could get robots to do all of the hard work such that people don't even have anything to do, then the fact that humans would not be judged on their performance but rather would be judged on their sense of equity, it won't matter because humans won't be doing any work anyway. It's possible the robots and AI are the thing that makes equity among humans possible.

Now I'm not saying I would look forward to this world, but one world you can imagine is that humans do in fact get all the same stuff but it's pretty good. So imagine if I offered you this deal. All right, you never have to work again because the robots will do your work. But how do you live? How do you live? Well the robots will grow the food and they'll just give it to you. So the robots will become so efficient — not right away but over time — that anybody who wants any kind of food just asks a robot and it's free and it just shows up. So would you care if everything was equal if equal meant you could eat whatever you wanted whenever you wanted and everybody could? No, you wouldn't complain about that, right? That would be the kind of equity you'd say, "Oh well that's sort of a special case but yeah, I mean if everybody could eat all the food they wanted in any type, yeah that'd be okay." It's free for everybody because the robots are doing all the work and there's fusion power. It's practically free energy. If you have robots and free energy and AI, you don't need much of a workforce.

So now imagine housing. Let's say we start building these new cities and anybody can go live there. It's not mandatory but they're just way better than where you were living but they're way less cost because we figured out how to do it cheaply and they're way better lifestyle because instead of these big — take when I was looking to build my house, I first looked to see if I could find a house that made me happy without building one. And the ones you look at are like these big expensive homes are built like museums. Like the foyer looks like it's now some kind of Capitol Building or something and they're totally not designed for your comfort. They're designed to look good so you buy it. But imagine a design city where all the homes are let's say modest in terms of price but they're all properly designed. Every room you walk into you're like, "Oh this is a cool room." It's not that expensive. It's just designed really well. I'm comfortable here. You can imagine that you would live in a house that cost fifty thousand dollars and enjoy it more than a two million dollar house that maybe some people could have afforded. It's easy for me to imagine that we would say you know what, these new designed homes are so cool everybody wants one. It's not even a — let's take the iPhone. The iPhone is something that almost all average people can have, or at least a smartphone. Let's say smartphone not iPhone. The smartphone is something that pretty much everybody has at every income level. That's kind of equitable in a sense.

So you can imagine where the transportation is free and everybody has the same transportation. They either walk or they just call the self-driving car and they just jump in. So it's easy for me to imagine a world where there is equity and everybody's happy about it and it doesn't destroy the system but only after robots are doing the work. You can't have this equity thing at the same time you're asking humans to work. That doesn't work because humans are going to need extra reward for extra work or that extra work will never happen. And without the extra work society would crumble. So it's possible that robots will save us all.

When will the housing market collapse so that I can afford to buy a home? You know it's weird. It might go the opposite way. You got your inflation so it might keep it up. But also correct me if I'm wrong but I think housing slowed down, didn't it? I know in commercial real estate, when Bed Bath and Beyond is going bankrupt that opens up a whole bunch of retail stores and I thought oh nobody's going to fill those retail stores because retail is dying. But it turns out that there's a shortage of retail spaces. So there are a bunch of other companies that are going to snap up that space right away because there hasn't been a lot of new build for commercial stuff. Now somebody says the housing market is still hot. I could see a situation in which housing starts — the new homes slow down, which would make the older ones worth more because there are fewer of them. So I don't know if it's ever going to.

Can I get somebody three minutes with Elon Musk to describe your plan to disrupt something big? No, no I can't do that. Let me give you a general statement about asking public figures to do something for you. You're going to have to say what the thing is. I'm not going to introduce anybody to Elon Musk as if I could. I don't have the power to do that. But I'm not going to introduce somebody to Elon Musk based on an idea and it's really big. That's not going to happen.

Is persuasion anathema to reciprocity? No, reciprocity is persuasion. Reciprocity is persuasion. You do things for people without asking something specific in return necessarily, but you just know that people say, "Oh there's somebody who does things without being asked. I wouldn't mind doing something without being asked for that person." It is influence