Kind: captions
Language: en
A single gunshot rang out on September
10th, 2025, killing Charlie Kirk and
proving the pollsters right because one
in four Americans openly believe
political violence may be justified to
save the country. Twothirds of Americans
believe the other political party isn't
just wrong, it's a threat to the country
itself. And while Charlie Kirk lay
bleeding to death, as people were
literally still ducking from the
gunfire, someone stood up, threw their
hands in the air, and cheered. And
online, the responses were even worse.
Countless people celebrated the
assassination of a husband and father of
two young children simply because he was
their political rival. But this wasn't
the beginning of violence in the
country, merely the continuation of it.
Things have been going very wrong for a
very long time. First, it was the
attempt on Donald Trump's life. Then,
the assassination of Minnesota House
Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband,
and the attempted assassination of John
Hoffman and his wife, a Ukrainian
refugee stabbed to death on a public
train. And now, Charlie Kirk gunned down
in front of his family, a massive crowd,
and on camera for the whole world to
see. And those are just the highlights.
There are far more politically motivated
killings in just the last five years.
But as Constantine Kissen said,
Charlie's assassination really does feel
different. It feels like the crossing of
an invisible line that we didn't even
know was there. Seeing stadiums fill up
with mourners. It really does feel like
the straw that broke the camel's back
and has made this horrifying trend
impossible to ignore. America is tearing
itself apart. Now, I've spent the better
part of two years warning that we were
edging closer to civil war. People
thought I was doing it for clicks. They
couldn't understand why someone who won
the game of capitalism and who built his
YouTube channel off of empowering ideas
was suddenly quote unquote
fear-mongering. But in reality, it's the
same impulse that led me to make mindset
content that has led me to spend the
last couple of years trying to get
people to see that history is clear
about what happens in the kind of
economically challenging environment
we're living through right now. The
violence is not random. It's what
happens when economic uncertainty
collides with radical ideology. when
people are told that words are violence.
And so real violence is a justifiable
response to words. When algorithms send
us down rabbit holes of teambased anger
and feed us a steady diet of rage,
radicalism, and anti-western sentiment,
we are bound to end up right here. This
moment is a rogue wave caused by a
mountain of debt, wild wealth
inequality, economic despair,
conflicting ideology, messages of hate,
and a belief that life is a
sandwich, and every day is just another
bite. When that's your mantra, it's only
a matter of time before things break
bad. But this video isn't just about
what's going wrong. It's what we can do
about it to reverse the trend. But we're
never going to find a way out if we
can't be honest about what's wrong. So,
this isn't just about Charlie Kirk. This
is about walking America back from a
line that if it's crossed, it won't be
able to come back from. How do I know?
Because history rhymes. And right now,
the next line is becoming very
predictable. In four parts, I'm going to
lay out where we are, how we got here,
what happens if we don't change and the
playbook for creating a better path
forward. Part four is the playbook, but
do not skip part two. That's the key
ingredient to this shift towards
violence. If we don't address it,
there's no pulling back. Welcome to part
one, the Molotov cocktail of things that
have led to this moment. The first
ingredient is the erosion of free
speech. In the United States, roughly
40% of young people now say free speech
should be restricted if it offends
someone. In the 70s, the ACLU defended
neo-Nazis right to march through a
neighborhood full of Holocaust
survivors. Now, one in three college
students say it's sometimes acceptable
to use violence to stop a speaker they
disagree with. Violence to stop
speakers. Sound familiar? We should not
be surprised that a majority of
Americans now say they're afraid to
share their real opinions in public. Not
because they might be wrong, but because
they might be ruined by people who
disagree. And in the UK, our cultural
cousin, 30 people per day are arrested
for things they post online. It is the
most Orwellian thing I have ever seen in
my life. And once politics become about
teams instead of ideas, people are
pushed into us versus other outroups.
And once that happens, the other side
stops being perceived as merely wrong
and they start being seen as evil. And
we already know violence will be seen as
acceptable, perhaps even morally
necessary to stop someone who's evil
from spreading their message. Because
after all, words are violence. And just
like that, free speech, the cornerstone
of a thriving democracy, collapses. The
very thing that once acted as a pressure
release valve for our disagreements, is
now viewed as a threat. Politicians
across the aisle, from Biden to Trump,
and back again, are calling for the
censorship of speech they don't like.
Biden had a pipeline directly to the
social media platforms so his admin
could remove posts they didn't like. And
now Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi,
is making unhinged remarks about
targeting people for hate speech after
Charlie Kirk's death. As Charlie Kirk
himself said, however, there is no such
thing as hate speech. There might be
ugly speech, gross speech, or even evil
speech, but it's all protected under the
First Amendment. But we are losing the
will to fight for people's right to
offend. And we seem to be willfully
blinding ourselves to the fact that when
you're not prepared to fight for
people's right to say offensive things,
by default, you're fighting for the
right to jail them for wrong think.
Hence the daily arrests in the UK.
Making matters worse, as free speech is
being systematically dismantled, people
are beginning to believe that the
American system itself is irreparably
broken. democracy corrupted, capitalism
an exploitative farce. People are being
taught in public schools that America
and the West more broadly is nothing
more than a colonial theft project
founded on slavery. Education has ceased
being a place where you learn how to
think and instead it's become a place
where you learn what to think. People
have become so convinced of their own
righteousness that they no longer want
to be challenged. The whole point of the
structure of the American government
itself was to build a system with checks
and balances because humans are deeply
flawed and systems populated by humans
tend towards tyranny. Remember the
Statue of Liberty? It was a gift from
foreigners to the US because we had
become not just a symbol of hope and
prosperity. But we had actually managed
to succeed in becoming a place where
unparalleled innovation was born out
actually leading people to breathe free.
America was the place that put its money
where its mouth is in terms of
understanding people cannot be trusted
blindly. To think you've got things so
right that your job as an educator is to
indoctrinate children rather than teach
them to question everything is madness.
And to make matters worse, the thing
we're indoctrinating people with is that
we're a very bad, horrible place. That's
the plan. Perversely, I think this
self-loathing is only possible because
of our prolonged success. We've had it
good for so long that we've lost the
stomach for the realities of competing
on a dangerous world stage. But this is
turning into a global fafo. We are going
against cultures that still believe in
themselves that are internally united
and they will run a divide and conquer
strategy on us. And it will be easy
because we no longer have a shared
national narrative. We live inside of
fragmented echo chambers where the
loudest, angriest voices rise to the top
and everyone is scrambling to get on a
team and spout the party line. As they
say, the moderates die first in a
revolution. No one wants to be isolated.
Not when the issues are so complicated
and hard to think through and when the
mob could come after you at any moment.
Being on a team feels better than being
isolated. Being angry feels better than
being afraid. In a study where people
had electrodes in their brain and could
stimulate any emotion they wanted to,
did they choose to stimulate love or
even laughter? No. They chose to
stimulate anger. Let that one sink in.
You really think people are going to
avoid content that further divides us
when they will stimulate the regions of
their brain that control anger over
happiness when given a choice? Anger is
what we want. Because when you're mad,
all of that uncertainty goes away. You
know what to think and how to act. And
speaking of brain stimulation, while the
juryy's still out on how much impact it
will have, we'd be fools not to mention
what is possibly the world's dumbest
experiment, mass- medicating our
children. One in five kids in America
are now on psychiatric medication by the
time they're 18. We are rolling the dice
on their brain development. Maybe it's
neutral, maybe it's catastrophic, but we
won't know until we have the guts to
stare down big fara and actually study
the impact it's having. But by then, how
many generations will we have already
put at risk? And let's not forget the
final ingredient in this Molotov
cocktail, the economy. Beneath all of
these cultural fault lines sits the most
important factor of all. It has become
impossible for young people to buy a
house. Housing affordability is at its
worst in over 30 years. The median home
price is now more than 7 times the
median household income compared to just
2.5 times in 1970. Since 2000,
inflationadjusted house prices have
risen 65%
while median household income has barely
moved. Why does this matter? There are
three very specific reasons. One,
because housing is the only asset that
people intuitively understand. Two,
assets are the only way to avoid the
crushing effects of inflation. And
three, when inflation is high, anyone
who owns assets gets richer and everyone
else gets poorer. That's what's
happening right now. The rich are
getting richer and the poor poorer. Not
because capitalism is broken. It's
happening because over the last 5 years
alone, inflation has been 25%
and wage growth has been stagnant,
locking young people out of the only
asset they understand. They could invest
in the stock market for sure, but they
won't because it's risky and confusing.
And that's why 10% of Americans own 93%
of all the assets. This creates economic
uncertainty, massive inequality, which
together makes people fearful, which
makes them vulnerable to anger-based
populist leaders who promise they have
all the answers. And the most important
answer of all is that the other team is
evil and must be stopped. And so the
flywheel spins and you end up here. 37
trillion in debt and growing. And an
entrepreneur and YouTuber known for
empowering content is fear-mongering
because he's studied the historical loop
we're in. This much income inequality
will lead to violence over and over and
over again. Scratch that. It has already
led to violence and it will keep
escalating until we address the root
cause and snap out of this
self-destructive trance. That brings us
to maybe the most surprising part of our
story, the part no one understands.
Welcome to part two, revolutionary
empathy. It's deadly. In 1789, France's
top 1% controlled nearly half the
wealth, while bread prices consumed
roughly 80% of the average worker's
wage. I hope that sounds distressingly
familiar. This unsustainable economic
position led to the French Revolution
during which guillotines were brought
out into the streets and the elites
found themselves being beheaded. Within
3 years of the French Revolution kicking
off, over 16,000 people had been
executed. The bad thing about bloodlust
is that once it gets started, it is
nearly impossible to stop because it's
not about ideology or even
problemolving. It's about thinking
emotionally and being enraged and then
riding the wave of lunatic certainty
that comes along with that. That's why
by 1794,
Rob's Pierre, the guy who had originally
called for justice in the streets, was
himself dragged to the guillotine.
Violence stops being about a cause and
starts being the solution for anyone you
don't like. That is the loop. And that's
why the French Revolution didn't end in
equality. It ended in tyranny and
empire. Napoleon understood that blood
lust couldn't just be switched off. It
had to be refocused. And that's how he
rose from the bloodshed by channeling
France's revolutionary rage away from
itself and into 16 years of near
constant wars of conquest that killed
over 3 million people across Europe. It
simply didn't matter that the wars had
nothing to do with equality. Once the
masses get a taste for literal blood,
once they are reasoning emotionally,
they become a swarm of locusts that will
devour anything before them. That's us,
all of us. Nobody escapes that. History
is clear. When economic despair fuses
with envy and ideology, violence is
inevitable. It's only a question of
scale. Eric Weinstein introduced me to a
term he calls revolutionary empathy.
Now, honestly, I don't know if he came
up with that or if I'm even using it in
the way that he intended it, but for me,
those words perfectly encapsulate what's
happening right now. And it's critical
to understanding this moment. If you
want to know how it's possible that
someone could justify murder or how
people could cheer it on, look no
further than revolutionary empathy.
Evolution had to come up with a solution
for making sure that humans could flip a
switch in their mind and go from loving
and protecting their own to the
wholesale slaughter of an invading
group. This is the anti-mpathy seen in
times of war and revolution. That's how
you get Luigi Manion and Tyler Robinson,
two men with disperate motivations being
connected by the same psychological
virus. Both believed in the absolute
righteousness of their cause. both
believed the person in front of them
wasn't just wrong, they were evil. And
they both clicked over into
revolutionary empathy, making it
possible for them to pull the trigger.
Beliefs drive behaviors. And if you've
been taught that words are violence,
capitalism is slavery, America is evil
and has no right to exist, and denying
an insurance claim is the same as
murder. Well, then shooting someone in
the back or the neck becomes justified.
That's revolutionary empathy. Love of
ingroup. murderous hatred of outgroup.
Expect more and more people to slip into
revolutionary empathy in the coming
years from both sides of the aisle.
Everyone has an ingroup and everyone has
an out group. Even if one side is more
likely to choose violence than the
other, to preempt violence, you only
have two options: persuasion and
compromise or violence. And unless we
halt the escalating division in tribal
thinking, the bloodshed will continue
until we're trapped in our own
revolution. This is predictable from
simply looking at a spreadsheet of
wealth inequality. I know we like to
think humans have all of this free will,
but the reality is on historical time
scales, we are ridiculously predictable.
And that brings us to part three. Our
current path only leads to more
division. After Charlie Kirk's
assassination, #free Tyler trended half
a million times on X. That means
hundreds of thousands of people weren't
mourning, they were celebrating. 87% of
Americans now say polarization is a
direct threat to our country's survival.
But that's done nothing to slow it down.
Instead, both sides think it's only a
problem with the other side. Oh, the
irony. Here's the bad news. This is a
self-reinforcing feedback loop that
grows stronger over time. There are
three main drivers why. One, algorithmic
echo chambers. The more people engage
with polarizing content, the more the
algorithm feeds it back to them. That's
how social media works. It doesn't care
about truth. Cares about engagement. And
what engages us most is outrage. So,
we're all being radicalized by our own
tendencies and machines desire to give
us more of what we want, no matter how
bad it might be for us. The cycle is
brutal. the more you interact with
content that outrages you, the more
enraging content you're going to see,
thus ensuring you're outraged all the
time. Two, violence begets violence.
Every time blood is spilled, the desire
for revenge intensifies. One
assassination becomes an excuse for
another. One attack becomes a
justification for retaliation. As the
bodies pile up, each side convinces
itself that restraint is weakness and
vengeance is justice. And violence also
just proves to be an expedient tool. I
wish that weren't true, but it is. Don't
like someone? Take them out. Don't
believe it works like that? Consult
history. All of it. The norm is
totalitarian dictators. As far as the
eye can see, whether kings or
desperates, it hardly matters. The
outcome is the same. Rule with an iron
fist because it works. The modern
western democracies are the historical
exception, not the rule. The notion we
can't and won't slide back into that
kind of monstrous dictatorship is naive.
America's biggest competitor on the
world stage is a murderous autotocracy
that as recently as the 1960s was
starving its own people to death on
mass. Within my lifetime, their middle
schoolers were beating teachers to death
at the request of the head of state. As
a reminder, how did Napoleon come to
power and kill millions in Europe? by
capitalizing on the murderous zeal of
revolutionaries. It doesn't matter if
the movement starts out with righteous
grievances. What comes when humans
embrace murder as a solution is more
murder. Three, humans are her animals.
We've always sought the protection that
comes with groups. And in times of fear
and chaos, the pull of the tribe becomes
irresistible.
Just like there are no lone wolves in
prison because you need allies to
survive, there are no moderates in a
revolution. The middle gets hollowed out
first. Moderates are the first to die
specifically because they have no team
to defend them. Over time, the cost of
being in the center becomes so high that
no one stays there. And both sides
sprint away from each other at the speed
of light. And as we're seeing, this
tribalism becomes complete, touching
everything, even commerce. Companies
today get attacked not just for what
they sell, but for who they employ,
where they advertise, or whether their
CEO took the right political stance.
Even silence is treated as an offense. I
remember long before I started covering
politics, having to spend hours trying
to decide how I was going to respond
publicly to BLM. Not because I didn't
care about the issue, but because I knew
that whatever I said or didn't say would
be taken as a political stance. It's
only gotten worse. Today, math has been
called right-wing. Being on time has
been called white supremacy. Refusing to
round up migrant farmers with criminals
has been called suicidal empathy. Every
single issue gets shoved into a partisan
box instead of being analyzed through
the lens of cause and effect. No one is
thinking backwards from their goals. No
one is asking, "What are the first
principles that are going to take me
from where we are to where we want to
be?" Instead, it's endless team-based
talking points, dunk contests, and
everyone trying to own the other side.
And when that happens, we lose our
shared humanity. We stop being neighbors
or fellow citizens, and we become mutual
combatants. That's how you end up with
half the country in tears over Charlie
Kirk's assassination while the other
half memes his death and celebrates a
man bleeding out in front of his family.
It's not everyone to be sure, but it's a
growing number of people. And the more
one side dehumanizes the other, the more
it guarantees that the same thing is
going to happen to them in reverse.
That's the cycle. Division accelerating
by nature and by algorithm. Tribes
demand loyalty. Violence justifies more
violence. The middle collapses, trust
disappears, and restraint evaporates.
And once that's gone, there's nothing
left but escalation. That's why every
revolution eventually eats itself.
Because when you've run out of external
enemies to punish, you turn inward. You
purge the moderates, then the former
allies, then eventually anyone. Because
murder is just so damn expedient. So the
question is, can we stop it? Is there a
way to interrupt this cycle before it's
too late? The answer is yes, but only if
we return to the fundamentals that made
freedom possible in the first place.
We'll get back to the show in a moment,
but first, let's talk about why you keep
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And now, let's get back to the show,
which brings us to part four, the
playbook, where and how we go somewhere
good from here. According to Pew
Research, 72% of Republicans now say
that Democrats are more immoral than
other Americans. 63% of Democrats say
the same of Republicans. The number of
Americans who have an unfavorable view
of both major parties has tripled in
just the last 20 years. Only 35% of
Americans have trust in the media to
report the news accurately. 70% of
Americans believe corporations and the
wealthy control the government. And
they're probably right. The US is now
$37 trillion in debt. That's $100,000
for every man, woman, and child in the
country. We're at 122% debt to GDP. And
historically speaking, when debt to GDP
goes above 130 for any meaningful amount
of time, collapse has always followed.
And the collapse is always from
revolution or civil war. So when you see
politically motivated violence
occurring, don't handwave it away or ask
what side it's coming from. Look at the
dashboard with all the warning lights
and alarms going off. Ask yourself what
are the underlying factors that's
driving this litany of problems. These
kinds of trends do not happen in a
vacuum. They are the result of
predictable patterns in society caused
by human nature itself. If we don't
address these knowable factors, the
violence will escalate until the country
fractures too deeply to be safe or
economically viable. Here are the
factors we've discussed and what we need
to do to address them. One, it starts
with the most foundational principle of
all, freedom of speech. We have to learn
to cherish it. When people can't argue
with each other, only violence is left.
Speech is the pressure relief valve of a
free society. Ideas, even terrible ones,
have to be aired in public because
that's how they're defeated. Even good
ideas often start off on shaky ground
and require debate in the public square
to be sharpened and improved. To remove
debate in the name of avoiding offense
is to eliminate the mechanism by which
progress itself is made. Also, when we
empower governments or mobs to decide
what can and can't be said, violence
becomes inevitable. No one ever agrees
on the boundaries of acceptable speech.
So, violence becomes necessary to
enforce compliance. Kill off freedom of
speech and watch your society stagnate.
Therefore, we have to double down on
free speech, not the sanitized feel-good
version, the real thing. even ugly
speech, even offensive speech, even evil
speech. Because the alternative isn't
compassion, it's bloodshed. Two, we have
to fix the economy. We must must must
fix the economy or every other solution
is just managing symptoms. Have to
balance the budget, reduce the debt,
focus on real growth, not just money
printing. If we need to temporarily tax
the wealthy more, fine. Do it
strategically, though, because if
capital flees, jobs flee with it. We
also need to strategically forgive,
stroke, restructure some portion of the
debt that is crushing entire
generations. We also must make housing
affordable again. I cannot stress this
point enough. We have to stop the
addiction to printing money because
inflation steals from everyone, but it
only gives to asset holders, which is
another way of saying the rich. Now,
technically, anyone can become an asset
holder, but it's confusing and risky.
So, most people will never have a
meaningful percentage of their wealth
and assets unless it's a house. If we
don't solve that problem, we will only
see worsening income inequality. And
that is a guaranteed path to violence.
But it won't look like that violence is
economically driven. It will look like
political violence. But in reality, it's
the economics that drive people into the
embrace of populism. And even if we
can't solve the economic issue at the
government level, everyone still needs
to fix their own personal finances. I'm
talking to you. I'm talking to me. We
need to buy assets because assets are
the only way to avoid being gutted by
inflation. Three, we must guard against
algorithmic hijack. If you don't curate
your inputs, your inputs will radicalize
you. That's human nature plus
algorithms. No one needs to have bad
intentions for it to work that way. It's
just the outcome of a mind wired for
tribal thinking and the deep desire for
certainty, even false certainty. The
machine is designed to keep you engaged.
It's not the system's fault if outrage
is what maximally engages all of us.
Demand transparency and choice when it
comes to algorithms. I think this is
going to be a movement that's going to
gain a lot of traction in the coming
months and years. Algorithmic choice, it
is critically important that it becomes
a thing. So, make your voice heard. Even
if no one is being evil in the creation
of the algorithms that manipulate all of
us, we need to take conscious control of
our information diet. Just as we take
conscious control of what we eat for, we
must reject tribal certainty and
revolutionary empathy. We need to
remember that words are not violence,
that none of us see the world clearly,
and the only way forward is through
non-partisan vigorous debate. We all
tend towards in-group outgroup
anti-mpathy. We all tend towards
in-group outgroup anti-mpathy. We have
to have a healthy distrust of our own
thinking and never allow ourselves to
view bloodshed as an expedient answer.
The state should maintain a monopoly on
violence and we should never celebrate
someone that takes that into their own
hands. And we should all abore violence
when it's aimed at either friend or foe.
Otherwise, eventually that revolutionary
fervor will wrap back on itself and we
will eventually be the victim and not
the beneficiary. And above all, remember
this, the other side is human. They love
just as you do. They believe in the
rightness of their cause just as you do.
The reason we need to find our way back
to the middle isn't because it feels
good or because it feels safe. It's
because compromise is necessary for a
free society to survive. Dictatorships,
even when there are preferred dictator,
are like driving without a seat belt.
When the road is smooth, it all feels
fine. And then when we crash, everyone
dies. And if you think it can't happen
here, remember this. In the 20th century
alone, roughly 200 million people were
murdered by their own governments. Don't
forget the lessons of history. They will
offer the deepest insights into the
truth of the human condition. It's what
we're like. Five. Invest heavily in the
future by investing in people,
especially kids. Teach young people how
to think, not what to think. Get them
excited about skill acquisition and
personal growth and progress. Teach them
about how money works. And above all,
teach them that individual sovereignty,
family, personal responsibility,
personal property, capitalism, and a
religion that upholds the sanctity of
the individual are exactly how we ended
slavery, escaped the dark ages, and
pulled millions of people out of
poverty. To abandon those western ideals
is to rembbrace the thousands of years
of warfare and spiritual darkness that
led to a world where finally we can
literally touch the stars. Because make
no mistake, hard times are here. But so
are we. And if we take this playbook
seriously, we still have a chance to
bend the arc of history away from
collapse and towards renewal. And if you
want to watch me explore ideas like this
in real time, make sure that you join me
Wednesdays and Fridays at 6:00 am
Pacific time where we go live on
YouTube. You can debate in the comments.
You can challenge me. We love vigorous
debate. We are not going to treat
anybody like the enemy because we know
where all of that goes. All right, guys.
If you haven't already, be sure to
subscribe. And until next time, my
friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
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when he said, "This custom GPT is
lighting a fire in me." He went from not
knowing how to maintain momentum to
implementing a 10-week action plan that
was so effective, he was having a hard
time convincing himself to leave his
workspace at the end of the day because
he was getting so much done. This free
custom GPT is personally trained on my
proven framework. It will help you
analyze the market and create an exact
action plan to launch in just 30
minutes. Stop overthinking and start
taking the steps to launch right now
today. Click the link in the show notes
to access the free zero to founder
launch GPT right now. If you like this
conversation, check out this episode to
learn more. It took electricity 46 years
to reach one quarter of American homes.
The internet seven years chat GPT did it
in just five days.