ferent topics. Everything from what is good management in the Dilbert comic to how to fail almost everything still big which should be about success and one of the most influential books on success ever written, a book on persuasion which has had a tremendous impact according to people who privately tell me what they've used that for and I could go on, the reframes that you saw at the beginning etc. So what's different about what I do is I'm intentionally trying to influence as much of the world and their brains as possible. You know, I do it publicly and transparently and for the public good. Now, to the extent that I've succeeded, meaning the books have sold well and I've got a podcast that you're listening to and all that, would it not be fair to say that an AI that was trained on just everything in the world would have picked up a little bit more from me both directly, but also through the influences I've had on other people and because they would pick up the other people's influence as well. So there's a ripple effect. So should I get paid? Does that mean that my copyrights had been sort of taken from me and AI turned it into their advice? If you asked AI for advice, would it ever give you advice that was different from what I give at this point? I don't know. Do you think AI would be in favor of passion as the driver of success when people like me say no don't follow your passion just do what makes sense and then make some money and then you can follow your passion when you're rich. Right? So I don't know if there's any answer to this but we'll see. You know if one AI company is worth five trillion I think OpenAI might be worth, how many billions is that? And they don't have one billion for me. Really? I only want one billion. I'm not asking a lot.

I saw an article in The Daily Wire from George Gammon talking about what causes societal collapses throughout history. I'm actually really interested in that because I end up watching a lot of YouTube videos about old civilizations that went extinct. And much like the animal conversation we had about animal extinctions, every time I see somebody dig up a buried city from antiquity, I say to myself, what happened to all the people? Where's all the people? Where did they go? What killed them? Why'd they leave? And some of the obvious reasons would be war and disease and natural disasters and stuff but there's a new model that speculates that the real thing that kills every society because if you notice 100% of the old societies are gone. Yeah. Have you ever asked yourself what happened to all the old ones? They're all gone. So what's going to happen to our society? Will it be the first one in the history of the whole world that didn't go away after a while? And what was it that would cause it to go away? Well, at the moment, technology and our connected world makes us way less susceptible to one of those things I mentioned, except you know, even war doesn't. You look at Gaza, even war won't keep that from being repopulated eventually, right? So the other speculation is that what causes societies to collapse is complexity which naturally gets added as any society is successful. So when you're first successful, just a scrappy little tribe of something, but as you become more and more powerful and rich, everything gets complicated. You're like, you know what, we could use a court. You know what would be good is if we had a committee to decide what to do with our water resources. So as soon as you've got wealth, you get all these complexities and committees and people want a piece of the wealth. And the idea is that the complexity never stops until it destroys your civilization. You can't operate. Where are we on that cycle? This would almost completely describe exactly what we witnessed when DOGE started digging into the NGOs. Didn't you know that was the end of civilization when you saw how all our money is being unwatched and funneled into massively complicated structures that can't be observed. That is the end of your civilization. Now, maybe if we're lucky, we caught it in time thanks to the good work of Elon Musk and Trump, you know, Trump creating that possibility. It's possible that Trump can back up some of that complexity and keep us alive longer than our competitors. Maybe. We'll see. But complexity is your enemy.

Well, I guess the SNAP, the people who receive the SNAP money, which is the thing that allows food stamps, basically it's the thing that allows you to eat while the government pays for your food. Now, apparently there are 40 million people who are getting this assistance. There are reports that some largest-ish number of the people getting the assistance are criminals who are somehow illegally getting it and then reselling it for a discount or something. So a lot of it might be fraudulent, but it's a lot of people. And now the New York Post is reporting, and I've seen this as well, that on TikTok, probably other places, the people who don't know where they're going to get their next meal from as their SNAP benefits are cut are saying out loud and on social media, "We're going to steal the food. We're just going to go into the store. We're just going to ta