GO LIKE HELL MACHINE: Hey there. Welcome to this week's episode of Normal Men. This is go like hell machine from Portland, Oregon, and I'm taking a break from Normal Men for a little bit. But I'm leaving you in very capable hands. Ed: Hi. Hello. Hi. I'm Ed. I'm from I guess you could no. No. I'm the guy from Maine, aren't I? I was going to say I'm from Boston, but I'm not. So that's a lie. And someone on the Internet will know. But hi. Hello. Thank you, go like hell machine. It's weird calling you that, but we're we're we're going to keep up the the facade. Yeah. Glad to be here. It'll be fun. Propter: Clean on OPSEC. George: And just so everyone is aware, any audio issue issues of any kind, any bad mics, any bad editing, it's all a 100% Ed's fault from here. Do not bring me any problems with this on Blue Sky. I don't wanna hear it because it's a 100% ad. I have nothing to do with it. Ed: Yeah. I I feel like you were changing the terms of this deal. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. It's not. George: We'll talk about that in private. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I mean I mean, cool. Like, 99% of our mic problems are George's bizarre mic that picks up every time he touches it. Ed: Yeah. That that that microphone is legit known for making the most noise ever when you, like, think about it. But for the price, you can't beat it. George: He has promised to send me a loot box, which is nice. I don't know if he's actually gonna follow through or if that was just a way to get onto the podcast, but he did promise that. So hopefully, my mic will improve at some point, thanks to our new cohost. Ed: Yeah. I'll just go go through ten years of bad purchases and regrets and find something. George: We'll remember you. Grand Prix, remember you. Ed: Alright. Now that he's gone, that guy. George: Welcome to Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when normalcy is impossible to find. We talk about what's happening, explain some of it, and joke with each other in order to stay sane. I'm George in Charlotte. Ed: I'm Proctor Malone from the District Of Columbia. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I'm low tax speed run enjoyer in Outer Florida. I'm go like hell machine in anti fit controlled Portland. George: Yeah. We we can't abide him. That's why we kicked him out and are not desperately missing his various contributions, which include the wonderful website for the podcast among other things. It's really sad to lose a normal man, but we've also gained a normal man. And here we are, uh, a quartet of normal men who get to talk about a new war Spectacular. In case you have been living under a rock, we have bombed Iran this weekend. Uh, last week, the president said he would make a decision at some point over the next two weeks, and the decision had apparently been made, I think, shortly thereafter to actually launch the b two bombers that ended up delivering massive ordnance penetrators to a couple different Iranian nuclear facilities. We are still not sure what the effects of those strikes were in terms of hurting their ability to enrich uranium or produce a nuclear weapon. There was damage done. That much is clear. Whether there was actually anything or anyone at those facilities that was damaged or not is an open question. And I think that is where I'll leave it and and throw off to the rest of the normal men to talk about where we're at here. Propter: Yeah. The physical issue here is that these, uh, centrifuge facilities are buried under mountains. These are very much hardened facilities and they're under, depending on which of the facilities we're talking about, something like 30 feet of concrete or again a literal mountain. Uh, so there are real questions as to how far our bunker busters penetrated and how much damage was done to the working guts of the facilities. Uh, but the imaging we have indicates that at least the entrances took a fair amount of damage. At minimum it's going to take some digging out to get back to the point where the Iranian nuclear program can access whatever they were doing in these facilities. The question I think on everybody's mind is what happens next? Are we looking at retaliation from Iran? Are we looking at something that doesn't quite rise to the level of retaliation but otherwise a pain in the butt for The United States or for the world? What happens with Iran's various proxies? What is this going to do economically and what is this going to do militarily? There's a lot of question marks in all of these areas. I guess maybe the place to start is militarily since the ostensible purpose of this strike was to cut down on Iran's nuclear breakout time excuse me, was to expand Iran's nuclear breakout time so it's going to take them longer to get to the point where they can enrich uranium to a high enough level that they can make a nuclear weapon. At least as of this recording, which on Sunday night, the day after the strikes, we don't know where the enriched uranium is. There is some evidence that there were trucks, despite all the we'll make a decision in two weeks, despite all the in theory surprise attackness of dropping these bunker busters. There was some amount of transit from the sites prior to the strikes and that may mean that the uranium is somewhere else in Iran and we don't know where it is. That's maybe not a great scenario if your major concern is damage from nuclear weaponry because that's pretty highly enriched uranium. I think they've got it at about 60% that would not take all that long to turn into a nuclear weapon and is potentially usable as a dirty bomb besides. George: Yeah. In terms of response, you've got the traditional military response, and we're gonna talk about the vulnerabilities of the global oil market. We talked about it last week, but we're gonna talk about it more tonight. You've got the question of can they create a fission device, and then you've got the general risks of a bunch of uranium floating around. You do not need a lot of technology to create a dirty bomb. Basically, all you need is some enriched uranium. And when we say dirty bomb, we mean a traditional explosive with a bunch of radioactive material attached to it. In this case, uranium. The risk is that one of the ways Iran responds is by strapping a bunch of enriched uranium to a conventional device and getting it into either Israel, The United States, maybe somewhere else, and detonating it as a response. That's, like, the sort of biggest, most nasty asymmetric response. There are others, terrorism, stochastic terrorism of other kinds that don't involve radioactive materials. There's also the conventional military response, and then there's the fission path. And they're all dealing with different capabilities and probabilities that and and different incentives for the Iranian leadership that I think mean it's going to be a little bit tricky ruling out the worst case scenarios in coming weeks, but that doesn't mean that those scenarios are particularly likely or let alone highly likely. Propter: For those of you who were of age, uh, during the, uh, during the second Gulf War, some of this may sound very familiar because it's basically the same problems that we're encountering here. One of the big concerns during the second Gulf War period was that there would be weapons of mass destruction that were loose in Iraq somehow, that there would be biological weapons or chemical weapons or nuclear weapons or material that was not itself a weapon but that could be weaponized, that was running around in the country that could fall into the hands of a non state actor who might do damage with it. Uh, and I think that that's also a concern here in Iran that it's not exclusively the nation that we need to worry about here, uh, that there is verifiably dangerous material that at least publicly we no longer know where it is. And if that falls into the hands of somebody who wants to use it to do damage, it could do a lot of damage. So that's going to be advanced as an additional reason to press the offensive here, whether it's militarily and as we all remember from Iraq, you can spend a long time in a big country looking for weapons that may or may not exist without finding anything useful. Whether it's diplomatically where we're trying to get the nation of Iran to regulate these stockpiles that we just tried to blow up. Um, so far, there is no radiation signature that's radiated out from the strike sites, uh, which probably indicates that we did not hit the uranium. That's a good thing and that's a bad thing, right? I mean it's a good thing in that we're not dispersing clouds of radioactive dust all over Iran and it leaves open the possibility that this was a strike that did limited damage to a to a narrow objective and isn't going to cause a lot of collateral damage down the road. But it also means again that we don't know where this stuff is. Ed: I mean, there's I take your point on that, but like there there's a certain commonality here with everything else that's going on, and that's that this is going to be a technical term. I apologize. These people are clown shoes, morons. And they're the the assumption that, like, that this administration can can I mean, could they run a lemonade stand without lighting it on fire? And I don't think we should be assuming that these strikes did much. Right? Like, it's certainly possible that they have, but it's really telling that, you know, Hagsef and his shellacked hair are out there day one screaming about how effective this was, how amazing this was. And then, you know, like the Pentagon's out there saying, PDAs aren't done. Right? Like, assessments aren't done. So that kind of makes one wonder about exactly if they're that worried it was effective at all because, I mean, they're nihilists. Right? Like, they're they're not going to care except insofar as maybe they can use it for the next thing. And I think that's kinda maybe the thing we as as Americans should be maybe thinking about right now is turns out how how dare they get bombed by us is very much in line with the way that some of these folks would make excuses for going and doing something a lot more drastic. George: And also looks unlikely to work in terms of public opinion. The way that these guys are talking in the on the Sunday shows is just wildly unpalatable. JD Vance justifying a complete pivot by saying, well, it's different this time because we don't have a dumb president anymore. The the prior presidents were all dumb, and that's why it was a bad idea then, but it's a good idea now. No nobody is gonna look at that and and be highly convicted that that's a good call. You'll see the relative unpopularity of a strike against Iran. Poland, had late last week for a US strike against Iran, not an invasion, just a military strike, was roughly two to one opposed, roughly. I mean, these things have error bars, but I think you had roughly two to one in favor among Republicans, eighty twenty or ninety ten, something like that, against for Democrats, and I think something like eighty twenty against for independence. And you're not gonna move those needles. You'll you'll move the republican needle to a 100% just by doing it. You're not gonna remove move the other needles by making the argument that, well, this time it's gonna work because we're not stupid when everything you do makes you look stupid, mister breakfast jen. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: And how much of this I've wondered? Because apparently, we were in communications with Iran ahead of the strike and trying to assure them we're not after regime change. We're we're just doing this, and then and then we're done. How much of this and we've telegraphed this whole thing the whole way. The Iranians knew something was coming. Like, how much of this when we think about the strikes, what damage they may have done, and the response that Iran may engage in? Like, how much of this is I don't know if kabuki theater is the right term. George: K fib. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: But yeah. K fib. Fib. Something along those lines. Propter: You know, it's been clear that this that there's been a fairly productive back channel between The United States and Iran with regard to Israeli action in recent months and it's entirely possible that these conversations are happening. One thing that I think has gotten a little bit underplayed so far is that while the idea of these strikes was to remove an Iranian capability to take their centrifuges offline so that they could no longer enrich uranium, um, we've also kind of removed an American capability here. The bunker busters that we used, we used 14 of them, we only had 20 of those. Uh, and it's not clear that we can just go whip up another 20 of them. Um, these are these are very very specialized bombs that were designed for essentially bombing these particular facilities, um, and if they didn't work the way that we wanted them to work, um, we're not going to get another bite at that apple anytime real soon, uh, not just logistically or operationally but because we're out of bullets. George: To add to that observation, there's a really interesting thing that's gone on since the start of the war or reacceleration of the war in Ukraine where Western countries with advanced military capabilities, and not just The United States, other Western countries as well, France, The UK, have basically run out of stuff that they can send Ukraine. Not not entirely run out as in we can't send them anything, but there's not a ton of extra ordinance lying around. And I don't just mean ammunition. I mean tanks. I mean aircraft. There is not a huge amount of this stuff in the world that is in good shape to fight. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Oh, the Europeans ran out of weapons again? What a shock. George: It's not just the Europeans. It's everybody. Yeah. It's okay. Had problems with this too. Right? There is a serious lack of productive capacity related to producing weapons in the world, which is an insane thing to say from a from a moral perspective. Right? Like like, from my perspective, my ethics and politics would say the productive capacity of weapons in the world should be real close to zero. Like, we shouldn't have a lot of that ideally, and that should be what we were working towards. So I'm not out here being like, we need to build more guns and bombs factories. I'm not I'm not saying that. But the reality is there is a lot less ability to produce weapons, especially quickly and especially really advanced weapons. There's really good Wall Street Journal reporting last week talking about the relative lack of interceptors that Israel has to to knock down ballistic missiles inbound from Iran. And they only have so many of these interceptors, and The US only has so many interceptors on, uh, at its military facilities in the region and on its naval vessels. So you burn through them eventually against a much lower tech but easier to construct weapon, that being the ballistic missile and drone arsenal of of Iran. The there is nothing lower tech than a big old pile of concrete, And it appears to have been a lot more effective against a very large and expensive and very low count weapon system than was previously thought. Ed: Yeah. And the the thing that jumps out, and and it's it's not just the very the very expensive, very advanced weapons, like, no one can make enough shells to keep Ukraine occupied. But the the thing that keeps jumping out at me when when looking at the coverage is the way that that, like, the Blythe assumption that this worked on on, like, TV is really unsettling. Like, I know I I'm going back to that, but, like, actually did realize that we had so few of those those deep penetrating bombs. And if we only have one bite at that apple, the the the worst people in the world are the ones who are who are in charge of that right now. So, like, step two and, obviously, no one is no one public is going to to really know this. Right? But, like, what the what the next step is going to be is probably going to be something we can't see. Right? Like, it's going to it's going to have to be done out of band, not just because of us. Right? Or or because us as in, like, the public, but, like, us as in, can they trust Donald Trump not to tweet it out? And and that's going to put these any of these conversations because it does seem like we've still had very high bandwidth conversations. It it's just what are how are we how are we supposed to go forward when the next step is true social is a really weird thing for folks to be navigating. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I mean, Donald Trump would never tweet anything out. Ed: I mean You're right. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I said it. Actually why I'm convinced we've never made contact with aliens that there's, like, there's nothing hidden. Because you know he asked. As soon as he was sworn in in 2017, he asked. Like, where are the aliens? I wanna see the aliens very strongly. Propter: Yeah. There was there was a fun half hour last night in between the Trump tweet, I'm not gonna call it a truth, and media confirmation that these strikes had in fact taken place, where I was genuinely unsure whether or not we'd actually done the thing or if Trump had just tweeted about us doing the thing, possibly prematurely. And that's kind of the environment that we're living in right now is is that there's there's an inner loop that is obviously moving faster than kind of the outer media loop, uh, in terms of information. And normally that's a good thing for these kinds of intricate plans, uh, but in this case the people involved in the inner loop are unstable and incompetent. And, uh, that means that you sometimes get these emanations from what should be the seat of the good information that are anything but, uh, that are either flatly wrong, are intentionally misinforming George: people, Propter: uh, or that are themselves misinformed. Ed: They have other good qualities too. Propter: One of the major questions from here is how Iran's various proxies react to Iran coming under direct attack from The United States. One of the things that I'm maybe naively concerned about here is that down in Yemen, the Houthis say that they're back off the ceasefire plan with The United States and that in the fairly recent past has been a major issue for Suez shipping. I don't know whether it's going to resume being a major issue or whether that's you know something where they're still going to be fairly limited in their strikes only against US flagged vessels, in which case it wouldn't be as big a deal. George: Just one more thing to the pile to think about in terms of disruption of global value chains, whether it's US tariffs, potentially having the Strait Of Hormuz closed, which, again, we we talked about last week. It's the narrow strip of water that, uh, separates Oman from Iran and hosts about a quarter of global oil flows, including 90% of the crude that Iran exports that goes to China and large volumes of other crude that goes to China, which is why China has not really said much. They've said, well, these strikes were illegal, but that's been about it. They haven't come to bail out the Iranian regime at all. There's also Yemen. If you can't ship through the Suez Canal, you can still get goods from East Asia to Europe. It just takes a lot longer, and it's a lot more expensive. Anything that takes longer is by definition more expensive. You're also dealing with massive trade uncertainty related to tariffs. So you're seeing this large series of shocks hit the global production system that we haven't seen since 2020, 2021 when the combination of responses to COVID and huge swings in consumer demand really messed up a bunch of stuff. It doesn't look like right now these disruptions are going to be as bad as that, but if you look at what happened to global inflation after that episode, it wouldn't have to be anywhere near as bad to have a pretty material impact in terms of inflation. And that dynamic is gonna be one to watch in coming months because we still haven't felt in domestic US consumer prices anything from the tariffs. There there it's not there in the data as as having a big impact yet. It will have an impact. It's just not there yet. So the the as Proctor said, the the inside track for information is moving much faster than the public track for information, but the inside track for feedback loops is also moving much faster than the actual feedback loop on the outside that is visible to the world. And those feedbacks will come home to roost both domestically and and around the world in economic terms. Propter: George, is there something of a multiplier effect there? Uh, if if you have to go the long way around rather than rather than through the shorter canal, and that means longer shipping times, that's maybe not that big a deal if you have very consistent demand and you can just space things out to eight weeks instead of four weeks or whatever it is. But if you have things that are changing rapidly in the commercial environment, such as tariffs, such as major variability in demand, doesn't that additional lead time, uh, kind of build on itself and make it much harder to do the the sort of just in time things, uh, that our supply chains have become very used to doing? George: I think you could make that argument. I wouldn't necessarily say that definitively just because there are so many moving pieces and puts and takes in terms of what demand is doing. I mean, keep in mind, European manufacturers, for instance, are likely staring down the barrel of a pretty big drop in demand from The US. Autos is the best example of this, but it will happen in other places as well. And demand is gonna be falling as supply falls as well. I mean, the the way to think about this is the the supply curve shifts. Right? That that's essentially what closing the Red Sea to friendly shipping does. You're gonna you have demand falling at the same time. It's just it's not super clear. What is clear is that, we we when we talked about tariffs a lot earlier this year, you're whacking a very large and complicated machine very hard in a couple different key points, and maybe it's built strong enough that there's and there's enough slack in the machine that other gears take over and it's not a huge deal. If they don't, then you get a lot of inflation. And I think there's a good case to be made that we're looking at that latter outcome just because the WAC is so hard. Now if Iran doesn't close the Strait Of Hormuz or doesn't if there isn't enough uncertainty around what happens in the Strait Of Hormuz that that shipping can continue using it because we've already seen a pretty large decline in the volume of oil tankers that are moving through oil and natural gas tankers that are moving through those waters. If that doesn't continue, then I think there's a a pretty viable way out of this just just based on all the puts and takes. But if you suddenly see on top of the Red Sea logistics disruption, on top of the tariffs, on top of all that and all the other geopolitical uncertainty, etcetera, now oil goes to a $100,120 dollars a barrel, which I think is probably a realistic outcome if Hormuz really closes for longer than, like, a week, then yeah. Now I I think this is a good jumping off point to talk about what Iran is capable of in conventional terms at this point. We talked earlier about some of the concerns from unconventional stuff. Conventionally, they are still fighting Israel. They are still lobbying ballistic missiles and drones at Israel. It's not really working. They're they're landing some in Israel, and there have been casualties inside Israel. Nothing as big as what they're lobbing at them. It's roughly a 90% takedown rate from Israel's defense systems and The United States helping them as well, well, some other countries. Ed: It's a little tricky to find some of this stuff. I was looking looking earlier, but, like, Iran, for those who don't know, has two of almost everything in terms of governmental structures because of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. So they have the Iranian Navy, but IRGC also has naval assets. But I'm pretty sure they have like, they can do a lot in terms of of assets that are not necessarily super useful for attacking or defending against Israel. Right? Like, their navy isn't going to be doing very much against Israel. So the fact that they I mean, I believe they have a couple of submarines. And, you know, they can mine the strait, and they can they can keep it that way pretty much indefinitely as far as I understand, unless somebody goes and and exerts a lot of effort to to pry them out. So it kinda comes down to George: To paraphrase my old football coach indefinitely is a long time. True. Ed: But pick, you know, pick the pick the option. Right? Like, who's going to go in and do and do something about it? Because if The United States is involved, they're probably going to be involved in an in, like, an aerial form, I would assume. I hope. I guess that's topic two, isn't it? The the endgame for for when when that turns back on to some extent is is also really unknown, and that that has ripple effects on everything else. Right? Like, how do you how do you how do you assume a a a time horizon for a lot of this stuff if the the party that gets to make that decision is effectively opaque? Propter: And particularly if you're talking about something like mining the strait, that's not an easy decision to unwind. Once you've once you've put things out there, you're going to have to clean them out before commercial traffic can resume in earnest because you're going to have a pretty big problem if tankers start hitting mines in that straight. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. And I don't think they're gonna do that unless they believe that we're really serious about regime change. Definitely. They they may they may shut down the straight in other ways, but, I mean, doing something that would become a longer term project to unwind is is something that I think you're that's a desperation maneuver, I think, that I I don't think we're we're there yet with Iran. Same thing with the idea of Iran, you know, detonating a dirty bomb or something in Israel or The States. I don't think they're gonna do that unless unless the fall of the regime is imminent in their view. That's not to say they may genuinely be nuts. I don't know. I don't think we George: have any indication of that for what it's worth. I I just No. I think we've got I think that's one thing we can pretty much rule out. The US leadership is nuts. I don't think they are. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. They they get stuff wrong in in war and intelligence and stuff, and and we've seen them do so pretty spectacularly in this war so far. Um, but Iran historically, at least, has tended to be a fairly rational actor, I think. George: And for all you EV fans out there, if the Strait Of Hormoz is closed, congratulations. You have your lottery ticket. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: That's one of the greatest two tweet series I have ever seen. That's it's just magnificent. I was legitimately crying for, like, a half an hour reading that. George: We are referring to a very interesting concept that is important for understanding how this strike on Iran is looking like it might play in the domestic US political environment. We'll come back later to how Democrats are responding. TLDR, not great, not as good as they could be, but they are also playing on a very tilted field. And I think the the the Glonzo concept is is very helpful for understanding this. So low tax. Who's Glonzo? Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: So Glonzo is a creature who was made up by a guy we all follow on Blue Sky named William b Fuckley, who posted who was talking about how to communicate with really stupid voters. And he said, if 25% of the population believed in a creature called Glonzo believed a creature called Glonzo caused high power prices by chewing through transmission lines. Any competent politician would be negligent in not trying to find a way to exploit this. That doesn't mean that these people wouldn't be fucking morons. And then William follows that up by saying, Trump has a natural advantage with these voters over people who give a shit about policy or reality because we'll mumble something about hardening electrical infrastructure while trying to hide our contempt, while he'll say that the marines will kill Glonzo under him. Ed: Wasn't he talking about wasn't this, like, during that weird drone scare? Propter: Yeah. This was this was during this was during the great the great UFO panic of of December, uh, 2024 when the Eastern Seaboard became convinced that George: It was New Jersey. It was not the Eastern Seaboard. As an Eastern Seaboard resident, come on. It was New Jersey. Ed: It was New England. George: New Jersey discovered the concept of perspective and freaked out. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. Let's not put this on on Delaware or even New York, and certainly not us in the South or folks like Ed in in New England. Ed: No. I got bad news for you, dude. It was it was a thing up here. I regret my choices. Propter: Alright. Well, I'm not I'm not fully willing to absolve Delaware on this one, but I think that it's true that it was mostly concentrated around Jersey where you had people who were seeing what we are now we are both now and then pretty sure were airplane lights and thinking that they were aliens doing some kind of advanced terror planning or surveillance or science or maybe invaders. Anyway, something that was out of the ordinary and this got a lot of pickup, uh, all the way up to you know, the mainstream media level where New York Times was running articles about it. I think Chuck Schumer had to come out with a vaguely conciliatory statement about how you know, we have to be careful about the maybe UFOs. There's sort of an analogous phenomenon to that that existed in the social media sphere last year, uh, that's had a very recent uptick, uh, which is this kind of crazy notion that the military draft is in imminent danger of being reinstated. When this came up during campaign season, uh, this was an attack on Democrats. Uh, the memes were that you know, warmonger Kamala Harris is going to start a new war in The Middle East and draft all of us, uh, and people actually believed this. Um, I don't think there was a whole lot of evidence behind that at any point. Uh, you know, Harris had been part of the only administration in my adult lifetime to get us out of a war in The Middle East. Uh, there was no indication that Harris particularly wanted to go to war in The Middle East and certainly no indication that we would be doing anything along the lines with a non volunteer, uh, military force. Uh, even if we did, we have no particular need for draft type manpower at this time. But it was something that resonated with people. It's something that it sounds like people are bringing up again to politicians, to media, on social media in light of the renewed salience of the possibility of a war in The Middle East. This is especially rife on TikTok based on the comment screenshots I've seen floating around, George: but it's a real world phenomenon too, I I think. For a specific subset, I I think when we're talking about these sorts of things, we need to be careful to not over extrapolate and just assume that because it's happening in some common section sections on TikTok, it's rife in every group chat of among young men aged 18 to 25 across the nation. I don't think it's anything like that, but it is a real thing to a point. And it it really speaks to how completely broken our information environment is, where whether it's a drone in New Jersey or a draft in response to a draft fear in response to the Iran stuff, there we are just completely separated from material reality. There's just no conceivable way to worry about that specific outcome, let alone pin it on a political party that is in opposition to the people with agency at that point. Like like, I I don't I don't understand what's going on with it. And I think there's a ton of hand wringing about young men, how do we reach young men, how do we do this, how do we do that. It's because not that messages can't be sent to young men. It's because there's a certain subset of young men who just it doesn't matter what message you send them. They're thinking, it it literally doesn't matter what the reality is. It's they they're inside a a distortion field too powerful. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I'm going to choose to believe that it is representative of all young Zoomer men, first of all. And that that, like, sorry, y'all are gonna wear that one. And and that it's true. Yes. Donald Trump is going to like, y'all have those those ancient Sparta profile pictures on on all your shit on these sites. And and now now Donald Trump in his great war of liberation of the Iranian people is going to send all y'all off to fight this. So you're gonna you're gonna get the genuine Sparta experience. And by that, I mean, getting your head kicked in by a bunch of Iranians. Propter: You know, I'll take the devil's advocate side of this a little bit. I think that we're in a world now and and have been really I think Doge was really the point where I where this became fully real to me under the second Trump administration, so very early on, where the notion that something is obviously stupid and counterproductive is no longer sufficient rebuttal to say, well then, they're not going to do it. Do I think it's likely that we have a draft? No, don't think it's likely that we have a draft. There would have to be a lot of things that go wrong in very specific ways from here to get us to the point where we're mandating military service for young men. But I don't think it's entirely off the table and I think it's materially less off the table than it was two days ago. So you know, even though these are mostly empty fears, a difference between a mostly empty fear and a totally empty fear. You know, the UFOs are a totally empty fear, but being worried you're going to get hit by a car, that's that's not a totally empty fear. You know, you're not likely to get hit by to get hit by a car, but people do. You're not likely to, you know, have brain eating amoebas kill you because you used your neti pot, but that's a thing that happens. George: Or swam in a southern lake as I did this afternoon. And let me tell you, I did think about that when I got some water up my nose at one point. Uh, Ed: I mean, okay. I I I hear what you're saying, but, like, this is lightning strikes you three times type of stuff. Right? Like, the the information environment is so trashed, and and the the screenshots you see floating around because who's on Twitter anymore? Too many people. But, anyway, the it's the same tired morons from the Atlantic. Right? Like, it's the same useless theoretically professor guys. Although strangely enough, they seem to have been on a leave for a very long time. I wonder if they're ever going back. Whoops. Did I just say that out loud? Anyway, uh, but, like, the the the people that are saying this are so hilariously incredible, and that's kind of itself a commentary on what we're dealing with because I I tend to look at these sorts of things because in in my day job, right, like, I I spend a lot of time I'm I'm I'm a software architect. I spend a lot of time looking at different systems and going, okay. How can this lie to me and how can this break? And in so doing, like, you start seeing, okay, this one can break, and then the cone starts growing outward from there, right, because of the level of uncertainty across the board. And where's that uncertainty starting? Well, it's starting with the disinformation artists in in the White House. Right? And then the the in the influencer types, if you ask them, I am sure they do not believe that there's going to be a draft. But you can say anything you want now. It's fine. There's no penalty for being wrong, and there's also, like, not really any benefit from being right except you got a bunch of clicks. And that's a really bad situation to be in. And, like, that's honestly going back taking the long way around back to what we were originally talking about. That's the sort of thing that I would like to start seeing politicians actually key on. Right? Like and then figure out how to fix the environment when we actually have power. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: No. I'm saying the only way to stop a bad guy with misinformation is a good guy with misinformation. Ed: No. No. Please don't. Please don't. George: If you are not making stuff up to make Republicans look bad and posting it on TikTok or Instagram reels, targeting an exclusively 30 male audience. You simply are not engaged in praxis, my friend. It's there's nothing else to say about it. Ed: Do you have to make it up? The truth is bad enough. George: You you do have to make it up. No. That's that's the rules. We're not Stansel out here. We're making stuff up now. No. I I mean Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: But this is I mean, it's as as as Proctor said, the the probability is very low here, but it's not zero. So it's not technically a lie to try to try to scare the shit out of the kids. Propter: No. I mean, I think I think fear mongering is the technical term here that that we are that this is something where the perceived risk from a very, very remote chance of a very bad thing happening, uh, is overestimated and that's a well known, well defined psychological phenomenon that happens in lots of different arenas, to lots of different people under lots of different circumstances. Ed: I mean, you're not wrong, but one thing that so the we keep talking about this as if it's real. I have a feeling we're going to find out in five days that, oh, no. No one thinks that we're going to have a draft because they don't think that about Republicans. Right? Like, this is this is a random stick that is used to be Democrats. Right? Like, the the people who are who are involved, like, they're I mean, they're fascists. Come on. They they don't believe things. They they go ahead and and say x when x is suitable to them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to believe it five minutes later. And I think that's honestly probably what we're dealing with here. We're probably all getting washed is what I'm saying. George: Are the people receiving the message the fascists, or are the people sending the message to fascists? Because the problem is the people receiving the message. Right? People fascists are gonna try and do what they're gonna try and do. Right. How do you drown those out those voices out, or how do you counteract those voices in terms of who's hearing the message? You would have a really hard time convincing me no matter how much negative stuff you trotted out. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: The way you do it is you send Grock after them, apparently. George: Liberalism's strongest soldier. You would have a really hard time convincing me that every 30 dude in this country is a fascist. Ed: I don't No. But a lot of them are certainly fascist receptive. George: Right. And that gets to what I'm saying. Right? How do you deal with people who are fascist receptive as opposed to actual fascists? I think is that a is it a different problem, or is it the same problem? I don't know. That's the question. Ed: I don't think anyone alive knows. Meanwhile, we've got Proctor over here gesticulating wildly into a muted microphone. Propter: Sorry. I think it's I think it's a different way to attack the same problem. Right? I think it's I think it's the the problem we're actually trying to solve for here is that we wanna marginalize fascists. We don't want fascists in control of our politics. We don't want fascists in control of our industry. We don't want fascists in control. One way you can do that is by making fascism entirely unpalatable. Uh, you can do that through legislation. That's the core of the German approach these days. You can do that through ridicule, through the various processes by which fringe groups get marginalised, that's a perfectly good way to do it. You can do that by not allowing them to unite, so the factional inviting holds them down. That's essentially how we did it in this country for a long time, that the fascists couldn't get on the same page with each other and so we didn't have a functional fascist movement in this country and it was very nice. Trump has cut through some of that. We can no longer say that fascism is a marginalized position in America because they're in the White House. It's clear that there's a path to power that runs through right wing reactionary thought that gets you right there to the big levers. So now we're talking about how to do PR to the next generation rather than just make it clear that this is a path that if you go down, it's material suicide, it's career suicide. You're going to eliminate your own prospects, you're not going to be able to accomplish any of the things that you may be deluded enough to think are good to accomplish, that it's a dead end. That part's no longer true. So now we have to figure out how to get the marginally attached people, as George said, to stay away. People who you know, they're not necessarily opposed to fascism, they're not necessarily fascists, it's within the range, they don't want to think too hard about it. That's fine, you know. You can build a pretty good nation out of people who don't want to think too hard about things, as long as the fascists don't get the whip hand. But as soon as you have fascists in the corridors of power, you actually do need to do something to pry people who do not want to interrogate this deeply away from the movement. I think that ultimately that's going to turn on essentially fascism being seen as uncool. One of the mistakes that I think we've we've made is we have somehow allowed authoritarians to also take the position of being rebels. That you have people who believe in these top down hierarchical structures who at the same time are able to present themselves as being, you know, the lone voice in the wilderness crying out for sanity. They're not, they're the lone voice in the wilderness that is completely nuts, but they are able to present themselves as in opposition to a calcified power structure, to the gerontocracy, to the old, to your parents' and your grandparents' way of doing things. And that's a dangerous combination when you have both the appeal of novelty and rebellion and the kinds of reactionary modes of thinking and power structures that the fascists in America would like to like to set in stone. Ed: That's a lot of words to not have an answer. George: I think back to that, I think it was New Yorker piece in February of this year maybe or March where they profiled all the hot young Republicans and very, very intentionally framed it as here are where all the hot people are and what they're doing. Now the sort of people that we're talking about reaching here, the marginally attached or fascist receptive type people are not reading the New Yorker. They're not reading legacy, you know, highbrow public media. That's not where they're getting their information from. They that's not it. So I hesitate to pin this on that specific viewpoint or that specific channel of distributing information. I think you can see an analogous thing where people get really mad at New York Times headlines, rightfully so, without a discussion of who is actually reading these headlines. The people who are reading the headlines are not the marginally attached people. The people who are reading New York Times piece or the New Yorker piece or whatever are not the marginally attached people. But it is creating a culture of acceptance for whitewashing fascism among elites. And I think that's where getting mad at the New York Times as, uh, my pal, Michael Tay Sweeney, is so legendarily good at, and I spend quite a lot of energy as well, is actually useful because you are disciplining what is acceptable for elites to say. That's true on stuff like trans rights. That's true on stuff like acceptance of fascism. That's true on a wide range of different points of view. The the the way the, uh, war the attack on Iran is being covered is a great example of it. It is worthwhile to attach a social cost among elites to fascist ideas. That that's worthwhile. It's not the whole ballgame, but it's one way you can do that. And I can say, personally, I I have no compunction about holding someone accountable for the project they're engaged in even if they're doing it incidental to the actual project of fascism. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Also, on a side note, um, on a side note, along with the Glonzo tweets from from William, Michael Tay Sweeney also has my other favorite tweet about the the median voter who he has commented believes that the NFL commissioner is a cabinet appointment. George: Now should they be? That's a different question. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Only if only if my guy's in office. I mean, just like any other appointment. Propter: Coulda had Condoleezza Rice. Ed: Oh god. I like how that one took a second. The the the implications had to sink in. And then low tax just explodes. Art. Art is what George: I'm saying. How many rings would the Cowboys have at this point if Condoleezza Rice had been the NFL commissioner at some point? Ed: I'm pretty sure we would have had a full nuclear exchange by now, and it would be a moot question. George: Wait. Jerry Jones is strapped like that? Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I I I yeah. You can you can put Kaadaleeza in charge. She's she's not going to change the outcome of a team being run by Jerry Jones. George: What about a nuclear weapons program? Ed: Run by Jerry Jones? Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. Yeah. Who? I mean, give it Propter: They gotta arm the moderate Cowboys fans. Yeah. I Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: don't know. Give it give it another week of discourse. I might be in favor Ed: of it. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Speaking of the info environment, AI is allegedly making us dumb, but probably not. So, Ed, what do you got? Ed: Uh, I mean, we're making ourselves dumb, aren't we? But no. So there's this paper that came out. The it's an MIT paper, Your Brain on ChatGPT, Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for SI Writing Essay Writing Task. Oddly enough, not plural. Yeah. So this paper has been covered by everyone on the Internet saying that it makes you stupid, and it's not what it says. Right? Like, it's saying that that it increases cognitive debt in the sense that if you use an LLM to to perform parts of a task, you don't remember those parts of the task as much, which yeah. That that makes sense. If I delegated a task to a coworker, I would expect to not know what the coworker did either. And that's that's a weird situation to be in when the coworker is as spotty as Jack EBT is, but, like yeah. And? George: I think we've just reinvented the Peter principle from first principles. Ed: A self Petering. You're not wrong, and I hate it. But, yeah, I mean, like like, that's honestly a good call because that's definitely what I see a lot of because for for for my sins, I spend a lot of time dealing with these tools in my day job, and there's it's very bimodal. Right? It's and, George, I know you've you've poked with a lot of these things as well. But, like, you see a lot of people who have no theory of mind for how the thing works, and then they just punch something in and they go, well, that must be right. The computer said so. And you see this even in, like, non LLM context. Right? Like, if I go tell somebody don't do that, they yell at me. If I said the computer said don't do that, they go, oh, okay. And then they go do the other thing. And it's just sort of the way we've coached a lot of people into acting and just treating these things as an authority when they shouldn't be. George: For elder millennials out there, I can remember a time when anything you got on the Internet had to be treated very in very suspect terms. Anything on Wikipedia was assumed to be wrong. But if you went to an encyclopedia that was edited by somebody sitting in a dank room in London, then it was fine. I mean, it's it's the truth. It's in the encyclopedia. Nowadays, very much the opposite. Propter: Right? Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: Very much the goes to my this goes to my observation that Americans will believe anything if you sell it to them with a British accent. Propter: There's always been a little bit of a disconnect for me on this with people taking output from LLMs because my first impulse when I see that is to edit it, it's to go through and say okay, uh this part is wrong, this part is poorly written, this part needs to move around here and you know, you kind of ship a thesis your way through the thing and you wind up with an end product that ideally is a synthesis between whatever the LLM spat out and whatever you want it to look like. And I think these are useful tools in that way, that they can kind of throw up a scaffolding that has fairly solid formatting and some principles of layout that are useful that you can then punch up yourself. A thing that I'm learning that I think a lot of us are learning together is that lots of people don't do that with LOM output, that you kind of you take the first answer and you go, oh yeah, that looks good, that's probably it. And that's the end of the process. There's no iteration, there's no back and forth, there's no final cut back in the human hands. And those are very different ways of approaching the tool. Ed: But that's also not, like, new in itself either. Right? Because what did people do before this? They went and copy pasted Wikipedia into their term papers. Right? It's it's not really a different thing. And I I actually, like I find that you can get extremely good results, but you have to know how, and that's the hard part. And and no one's really teaching anyone how because I don't think anyone really understands it at a level that's really re, you know, rep reproducible at this point. It's it's all kinda like, well, this works for me. Uh, if I ever give a box of prompts to a coworker or somebody who who does know how these things work, it rarely works because they're kind of wrapped around how I approach a problem. And the I do think there's a set of principles that that we could be teaching around things that are like, we we see very often that you're trying to go from a state of high information, low entropy. You're try to a a smaller amount of output data, which means you have to put stuff in. Right? It's it's the don't trust the training set type of thing. And if you do that, if you give it a bunch of orienting materials and if you ask focused questions and and ask for focused outputs based on those materials, the hit rate goes to to 99 plus percent. Whereas if you're just asking it these questions, a lot of it just sort of naively just pulls from the training set, which is really just kind of that that's where you get into the the fancy autocomplete stuff. And the lack of understanding of how those tools work and the lack of understanding of how you can leverage them is one endemic, I think, this point. I don't know if we're gonna fix that. But two, it's really aided and abetted by the vendors because at minimum, you could just turn on a web search for most of this stuff. But they don't because web searches cost money, and the free tiers are loss leaders at best. So you get a bunch of people who are just throwing together something completely out out to lunch. When if you just click the checkbox and run the same thing again, you get a markedly better output. And it's just really weird that we're sitting here for that. Also, don't use chat GPT. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. George: The the thing that really I've used LLMs for is writing code, and I don't write code for my day job. So there is no real reason that I should be dedicating huge amounts of time to understanding how Python works at a granular level. I can write some Python code. I've got a process I use that I converted from Excel to Python a few years ago that I wrote just it was just before the LLMs came out. So great investment on my part to spend dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of hours writing a 3,000 line Python file, Python pandas to convert a raw micro dataset into a finished aggregated output that I could drop into Excel and have charts update. There is no reason for me to be spending a bunch of time on that particular task, but here's why why LLMs are great for this kind of thing. I had a very specific input that's very comprehensible. I had a very specific output. I knew exactly what I needed to do, and I would be able to validate whatever the output was in a very straightforward way. How I get from input to output is really not important. If the code runs, it's good. It's just that simple. And my code runs that I wrote myself, if I had used ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to write this code, it would have taken me an hour. Instead, I spent dozens of hours and I didn't really retain most of the stuff I learned because a, I was bad at it. B, it's not what I'm gonna be doing most of my time anyways. So now when I have a coding problem, I go to ChatGPT or Claude. I use Claude actually for almost all these. I'll go to Claude and say, here's what I want. I want it in this language. I have this input data. I want this output data. And then I run the code and I validate. You can't just take it naively. But if you can find a problem where you have a limited set of tools you wanna use, a limited information space, a limited, um, sort of horizon for it, and then you can actually validate that what it's putting out is useful, it's gonna save you an enormous amount of time just in the same way that typing something into Google is a heck of a lot faster than going down to your local library and, uh, rifling through index cards, and that's not a criticism of the library at all. It's just a fact that Google's gonna be faster and get you there even if it's slightly inferior from an epistologic epistemological perspective. Propter: I think one of the problems with the way LLMs present is that LLM output looks like it's finished product. Ed: Mhmm. Propter: It's it's well formatted. If if you were getting if you were getting that format, that quality of presentation from a coworker, you would assume that it's the final link in the chain or near the final link in the chain. This isn't, you know, the stage where you're still workshopping the idea and tossing things back and forth. It looks like the final cut. It's not the final cut. Many of the good use cases for LLMs are where you're doing something that is an intermediate product, where you're asking it to write you a coding widget that is part of a larger product project, that you have more comprehensive oversight over. You're asking it to draft something that you're then going to alter. You're asking it to put out, um, I don't know, some kind of a storyboard project if you're doing video where you can describe something verbally and then pass that off to the people who do, uh, the graphics professionally once, you know, the dream machine has fed has spat out something that looks directionally kind of like what what you wanted, uh, so that it's easier to reach a meeting of the minds rather than you trying to do that same process directly to the artist. I think it's easy to get away from that. I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that these are largely intermediate products rather than final products. Ed: I think that is an artifact of workflow, though. I I really do. To to give an example that I've used before on Blue Sky, we have a lot of APIs, software APIs at my day job, and nobody writes documentation. I have, at this point, built out a system that writes documentation. I would comfortably say is, like, median quality compared to to most folks on the Internet. If you if you took this and then you looked looked next to, you know, the representative sample, this is this is punching above its weight. And it takes about five hours of a human's time as opposed to fifty plus. But the final output is predominantly what the LM came up with, and it's because of how you put the data in. What you're describing, I think, Proctor, ends up being what happens if you let the LLM drive. And the rule has to be never let it drive. Right? Like, the rule has to be, this is the information I'm giving you, act on it, as opposed to come up with something from somewhere. And that's a little better when you're using a web search because it's not actually pulling it from the training set. It's pulling it from a web search. But what most people are doing is what you just described. And I think that you're right. It does create things that have the affordances of being a finished work. Like, it likes writing prose. Uh, one way to combat this is to to have it write bullets, for example. But if you're acting on things you put into it, the results can absolutely be really, really good. The trick is that most people don't necessarily, one, fully understand why that's the case. Uh, I keep meaning to to do a little bit more to explain that. But on top of that, people are also just not hey. Let's be honest. Most people don't know what they're asking the thing. They don't have a definition of done because they don't have a definition of what the thing is. And that's kind of where we keep getting trapped because people just treat these things as oracles and treating oracles as true has historically gone very poorly. What you're saying is basically you should treat it like a Tesla. It's probably not gonna crash and burn and destroy George: you if you drive it around town yourself. But if you give it over to the machine, it will definitely do that. Ed: That's the most tortured analogy I've ever heard. George: Hey. It's my specialty, baby. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I mean, basically, you have to Ed: Autopilot is really scary. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: You have to put your BA hat on. Right? You have to be a business analyst, a program manager, kind of. Many people who listen to us probably have similar jobs to that. Um, that's what I do for a living along with, um, some average ass SaaS and SQL programming. Ed: Living in the Jira mines. George: That's our episode for the week. For Normal Men, I'm George in Charlotte. Low Tax Speedrun Enjoyer: I'm low tax speedrun enjoyer in Outer Florida. Propter: I'm Propter in Washington DC. Ed: And I'm Ed in scenic Boston, Massachusetts. George: Before we let you go, we have one quick plug. We here at Normal Men are extremely big fans of pride, and I am a big fan of Charlotte FC. So I'd love for you to join me and other Charlotte FC supporters as we raise money for Time Out Youth, a Charlotte space for LGBTQ plus youth. Our Pride raiser works by pledging a donation tied to the number of goals Charlotte FC scores in June. We are terrible on the road and have no home games in June, so pledge big. Please visit perk.es. That's peark.es/prideraiser to pledge.