END WAR

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“He was open with Pam Bondi, now the former Attorney General, back in September, that she wasn't moving fast enough to prosecute certain people. In that case, it was James Comey. He has been talking to allies about how prosecutions can move quicker. You are seeing Todd Blanch now work with— This is the acting Attorney General. These are people who the president believes are going to do what he wants.”

“We're all here for a reason. Like, you don't need to go out there and tell yourself to go do anything. Like, that just brings in the little devil on the shoulder. We're all really good. So let's just continue to be yourselves. But, you have to go out there and say, like, man, like, I need to go do this. I need to go get this home I need to go hit a home run. Man, I need to go get a hit. No. You don't. Because now you're just telling yourself something you've never told yourself before.”

“We have stated that our strategic goal, you'll hear Secretary Hegseth rattle these off in his morning briefings that he gives to the media. It's to destroy the Iranian Navy, to destroy the IRGC, to destroy their ballistic missile capability, to destroy all their enrichment. So we have a checklist of things that we want to bomb, essentially, to take off the battlefield. That's about as far as we've gone with stating what our strategic goal is.”

“You cannot have a Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it's not gonna happen. So I can't, I think he's very weak on crime and other things. So I'm not I mean, he he went public. I'm just responding to Pope Leo.”

“Unless we restrain the Israelis and tell them, like, you're done, and if you continue to attack and you continue to do things without telling us and asking us, without asking us first, we're paying for it, you're going to ask us first. Then, we are going to negate our other part of the deal, and our part of the deal says that we defend Israel.”

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“The key to life, if I was telling that that kid who walked up to us at the restaurant is assume right now you don't know what it is, but know what you're looking for. You're looking for the blisters that you enjoy and that will come from doing this loop thousands of times. And you don't have to know upfront you would like to do it thousands of times. Just see, are you interested in doing it once, twice? Do you have an enthusiasm towards doing this?”

“A Florida judge issued a restraining order on behalf of a Florida woman, another woman, not also not his wife because Cory Mills was deemed to be, a danger to her and had, blackmailed her, with revenge porn, basically trying to share, you know, pictures and videos of of intimate moments that they had had with people that she wanted to go on and date. And she had to ask congressman Mills 11 different times to stop contacting her. And he he refused to listen, and that's what landed him in court and got the, got the restraining order against them.”

“I would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm. Yesterday, I I had a piano lesson in the morning. And then in the evening before bed, I'm tired. I'm walking to bed, and I pass the room that has the piano. I'm like, let me get in here and play the sea shanty. Like, I'm a pirate on the pirate like, on a boat or something like that. And I'm playing this song, and I'm I've I've basically half half eyes open, but it's but I got a little bit better. Right? I've got one step closer to mastery.”

“The only proof of there being an investigation is someone in the government leaking to the media saying that Kent's under investigation for being a leaker. So they had to leak that I'm a leaker. Right, exactly. That's why, like, I mean, I take it seriously. The FBI has ruined innocent people's lives, like General Flynn with an accusation before. So I take it seriously.”

“In fact, I would argue that he is behaving like somebody who thinks that this changeover is probably going to happen anyway. He's kind of ambivalent about it in terms of control of the House, maybe the Senate. And so that only gives him six months to get done the things he cares about. ... He has been talking to allies about how prosecutions can move quicker. You are seeing Todd Blanch now work with—these are people who the president believes are going to do what he wants.”

“Right after the president won, I called someone very, very, very close to him. And I said, look. America just showed us the pendulum has swung to an extent. This is Trump's opportunity as in his early days, in his inauguration speech, really, to say let's come together. And when I tell you this person screamed, yelled, and cackled at me, like, come together, come to the middle. I mean, this person spiked a ball in my face, you know, punched me in the teeth, laughed their head off, and basically said, absolutely not. Every single naysayer out there should get on their knees and beg him for mercy and forgiveness.”

“And in it, he has this one phrase that I remember, which is, let enthusiasm be not just the motor, but the rudder of your boat. So, basically, enthusiasm is obviously gonna provide you some fuel, some, like, some, your motor. It's gonna get you to go. But let it also be the thing that guides you, like a rudder that guides your direction.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”

“In a statement, James says an investigation found people arriving at New York Presbyterian's hospitals in New York City received inadequate care that, quote, put vulnerable patients at risk. Her report alleges people with mental illness weren't properly screened. And in some cases, patients who appear to pose serious risks to themselves or others were left unsupervised or received no care.”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“What he talks about is, like, Paul Graham basically says, let the let the enthusiasm be the engine and the rudder. It'll guide you where you need to go. It'll take you to the frontier. And at the frontier, you will notice some gaps. So when you were at the frontier, Sam, did you not notice a gap? And the gap that you told me about has turned to one of our most profitable investments.”

“What I realized was like, dude, you spend all of your like, when you when you decide to start a company, you're gonna try to, like inherently, you're saying, I'm gonna make this thing successful. To make it successful, it's gotta grow. And to make it grow, you're gonna spend most of your time on that really hard problem of making it grow. Part of making it grow is the product, but that's only a small part. Minority percentage, not more than 50%. I would say more closer to 15% than 50.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”

“Cubs con after the world series. Rizzo was like, hey. Come out. We'll have dinner with the whole t I I was literally sitting at a table with the entire team. I was sitting next to you, and, we all got we're at a steakhouse. We all got our steaks, and you got a salad. And you were just, like, under your breath, you're like, Theo's fucking making me lose weight. This is bullshit. You were eating a salad.”

“He does not want something that is going to be very easy to describe as similar to the JCPOA—the Obama nuclear deal with Iran from 2015—that Republicans have been deriding for years and years and years for a variety of reasons. And so one of the first things he did was tear this deal up. He was very proud of that. He has talked about it constantly, and he has talked about why he thought it was a very bad deal. And throughout these conversations... that's what the president knows he wants to avoid.”

“So my wife were so it's the lockout year. And this, like, lockout gets lifted. And we're in March, and my wife's pregnant with our first kid. And so I get on this call with Dombrowski and kinda just lay it out there. And it's, like, 10:15 at night and go for, like, you know, twenty minutes, whatever it is, get off the phone. You know, agency's kinda going back and forth, and all of a sudden, they call. They go, hey. We got you know, this is the deal. And I'm like, yeah. We're doing it. Four for 79 and, you know, bang. About to celebrate a little bit. And then not even thirty minutes later, my wife's water breaks.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“Metta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it plans to cut 8,000 workers or about 10% of its staff. The company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he expects much of the work now done in tech to eventually be overtaken by AI.”

“Bitcoin's global, distributed architecture makes it the perfect candidate for protecting U.S. interests against cyber warfare. It's about using the network as a shield to ensure that our defense systems remain operational even under the threat of massive coordinated attacks from foreign adversaries.”

“Where does this hatred and venom come from? uh with respect to the United States, it's very simple... in 1979, as the sha of Iran was dying of cancer, the people uh led a revolution, an uprising... The United States hated that. When you're an empire as we are, when you have protectorates, when you have uh places where you have your military... that led to uh a reputational question.”

“Pete Hageeht is in congress at a hearing today, and one of the things we learned is how much, this Iranian war has cost us so far, which is $25,000,000,000. I have a really amazing statistic from friend of the show, Spencer Ackerman here, Molly. That's how much the surge cost.”

“Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has secured a parliamentary majority. His Liberal party won the majority Monday night following two special election victories. Carney has said that a win would help him deal more effectively with the trade war started by president Trump.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“So you're getting a lot of mixed messages, a lot of silence. And so we're in this very uncertain moment. Trump has extended this ceasefire seemingly indefinitely, but at the same time, they've kept enormous military force in the Middle East and are poised to attack if this thing falls apart.”

“Iran has not invaded or attacked another country for a century and a half. This was a peaceful country... it had been invaded several times. But it was a democracy that didn't threaten anybody, didn't want to threaten anybody, hadn't threatened anybody, hadn't invaded uh any place actually since the 1790s.”

“If he says instead, uh, we can't wait any longer. We're going to attack, I believe we will see a different world four weeks from now. uh a world uh that is uh profoundly damaged, the world economy in crisis, the possibility of escalation to a full world war. And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic uh or naive to say that we are at that fork in the road right now.”

“But the number one regret by a huge margin was I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. That was the number one regret by a huge margin when she, like, tallied this this up. And then, basically, this idea is that they, like, would spend too long, and they didn't realize until the end of their life that they were living a life that other people that they thought other people would should want them to live, not versus what they really wanted to live.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“Forget the narrative of Bitcoin just being digital gold for investors. This update from the Senate confirms that the military sees this as a tool for national survival. They are moving into a phase where the network's resilience is the primary feature being utilized for our national security interests.”

“I actually thought you were gonna go with that question was, me trying to bunt with two strikes The World Series. Going up pretty nasty guy, didn't see it great. And I'm like, man, you know what? Like, I all I gotta do is just touch this ball. I just gotta touch it. Put it in fair fair territory, get the first base down. In all reality, terrible idea. The worst idea I've ever had, I think.”

“The key to life, if I was telling that that kid who walked up to us at the restaurant is assume right now you don't know what it is, but know what you're looking for. You're looking for the blisters that you enjoy and that will come from doing this loop thousands of times. And you don't have to know upfront you would like to do it thousands of times. Just see, are you interested in doing it once, twice? Do you have an enthusiasm towards doing this?”

“In District 7, forty 5,000 people are now without health insurance period because of the ACA subsidies expiring. And over a 150,000 people just in this district will see their premiums go two times, three times, or even four times. So a family of four that was paying, you know, dollars 2,500 a month is now paying upwards of, you know, dollars 5,500, dollars 6,000 a month. That's not sustainable.”

“You have a new model that you claim is the most powerful model in the world. So instead of selling it, you give a $100,000,000 of claud credits away to a consortium of companies that includes many of your competitors, which is what Anthropic is doing. That is not how I personally would market a spooky new model if I were in the business of marketing spooky new models.”

“The reason is that the Iranians have not pursued a nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence agencies have said that repeatedly. What they have pursued though is a treaty with the UN Security Council to confirm that to put them under strict monitoring under the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty but in return for ending the US economic warfare on Iran.”

“As of this moment, the Trump team is still waiting on a response from the Iranians to a proposal that was sent over to them, which outlined broad deal points, baseline points to start a negotiation, to start a more serious and detailed negotiation, mostly focused on how do we prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and how do we get the highly enriched uranium out of Iran? Those are the two main issues involved. And Trump is very frustrated right now because nobody on his team... feels he can negotiate properly with the Iranians.”

“But if you combine a mass uh destruction in West Asia, the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, uh with a super El Nino, I don't even know. Somebody's going to have to write the next book quickly about this because we would not have had a shock like that since World War II. Certainly. and the effects on political destabilization uh on the effects of governments falling the potential cascading of this war would be tremendous and uncontrollable.”

“So Trump had said, my red line is no nuclear weapons. Diatola said, great. I don't want nuclear weapons either. Let's talk. So they moved the red line by saying, enrichment. Iran can have no enrichment. Enrichment equals a nuclear weapon, which is just fundamentally not true.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“In terms of the Krog Island, that makes me nervous because I have heard so many people like Lindsey Graham and others that are not military people, that are not in the Pentagon, that are not reading intelligence every day, talk about it very flippantly. Like, oh, we'll just take that island. We'll just take their oil. I want to tell you guys, like, it's not 2003 anymore. You can't just put guys there and they'll occupy it. Like, there's ballistics, there's drones. They would be sitting ducks in that area.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“There was a man in Kentucky that laughed so hard at the botched field goal. It triggered a seizure which sent him to the hospital. But at the hospital, doctors discovered when they were, like, going through them that there was a tennis ball sized brain tumor. And then they were able to, you know, find that, remove it, and it was deemed not cancerous. So that missed field goal might have saved a guy's life.”

“But if you combine a mass uh destruction in West Asia, the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, uh with a super El Nino, I don't even know. Somebody's going to have to write the next book quickly about this because we would not have had a shock like that since World War II. Certainly. and the effects on political destabilization uh on the effects of governments falling the potential cascading of this war would be tremendous and uncontrollable.”

“And that is what's called the clean break strategy. The clean break was the clean break from the peace accords, from the land for peace idea that Israel would return to its borders... specifically seven wars uh were designated that would overthrow governments supporting Palestinian militancy. And those governments were, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.”

“What he talks about is, like, Paul Graham basically says, let the let the enthusiasm be the engine and the rudder. It'll guide you where you need to go. It'll take you to the frontier. And at the frontier, you will notice some gaps. So when you were at the frontier, Sam, did you not notice a gap? And the gap that you told me about has turned to one of our most profitable investments.”

“US Southern Command posted grainy videos on social media showing explosions that destroyed two small boats alleged to be smuggling drugs. Many legal experts say these strikes amount to execution without trial or simply murder, and some allies in South America and Europe have stopped sharing some intelligence with the US military as a result.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“The other frustration for Trump is he's facing real constraints. Despite all the bravado that you hear from the president and from Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, we have unlimited weapons, etc. They don't have unlimited weapons and they're very, very constrained when it comes to long-range strike weapons. What that means is if they do do what Trump has threatened, which is blow up every bridge and power plant inside Iran, they don't really have the long-range arsenal to do that.”

“So ball gets hit hit up in the air. I just come running in and Javi's playing short. And Javi's like 10 feet, 15 feet over here, and the ball is gonna be, like, over here. And I'm like, well, looks like I gotta call it. I go, I got it. I got it. Put the glove out. Ball seeing, like, three balls. I'm like, please choose the right one. Bang. Clank. Nope. Didn't choose the right one. Ball rolls on the dirt, on the infield dirt.”

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“One of them was that this model apparently found a twenty seven year old security flaw in OpenBSD. OpenBSD is an open source operating system that runs on firewalls and routers. It is sort of like a critical security layer on the Internet, and it was designed specifically to be hard to hack. And this model, because of its advanced coding and reasoning capabilities, was able to find this bug that twenty seven years worth of professional security researchers had not been able to find.”

“By running our own Bitcoin nodes, the military is able to ensure that our data protocols are backed by the most secure and decentralized ledger in existence. It provides a level of redundancy and security that traditional, centralized government servers simply cannot match against state-sponsored actors.”

“Where does this hatred and venom come from? uh with respect to the United States, it's very simple... in 1979, as the sha of Iran was dying of cancer, the people uh led a revolution, an uprising... The United States hated that. When you're an empire as we are, when you have protectorates, when you have uh places where you have your military... that led to uh a reputational question.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“Trump papered over all of these disagreements and problems because he was Donald Trump. Now, we're starting to see the first glimpses of what a post-Trump Republican Party looks like. So what you then get is the disagreements, the fights, and all of these fractures. You get a bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump because he thought they were going to keep him out of foreign wars, who are now in foreign wars, angrily disaffected.”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“Business people I speak to are still like, it's working for me. They they don't like him. They don't like lots and lots of policies. They see all the risks involved, but they contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for him Because they love the access they have. This is what happened in Russia. Look what happened to all the oligarchs. Right? They chummed up to Putin. They made lots of money, and then he turned around and stabbed them in the back.”

“The question for Trump is, how can the gives that we give be portrayed as superior to what Obama and Co. gave away in the JCPOA? I mean, if it was up to Trump, he would be the president, the first one, to deal with this problem in a permanent way, completely eliminate the program, have a new regime in that's more friendly to the United States. But none of those things seem likely right now.”

“In 2015, such an agreement was reached, the joint comprehensive plan of action, the JCPOA. It was reached not only with the United States, but with Britain, with France, with Russia, with China, and with Germany... Then came the Zionist lobby in the United States. Oh no, you can't have an agreement with Iran. They're the evil empire. You can't do this.”

“What's happening to young men is masculinity vertigo, in which on Monday, what you're being told is, the problem is that you're not masculine enough. You need to work out more, be more dominant, man up. The next day, what you're being told is, you're too masculine. You need to cry more and eat more salad, and go to therapy more, and find your feminine side. Then on Wednesday, you're back to the other one. It's just become this very contested and difficult thing right now.”

“And in it, he has this one phrase that I remember, which is, let enthusiasm be not just the motor, but the rudder of your boat. So, basically, enthusiasm is obviously gonna provide you some fuel, some, like, some, your motor. It's gonna get you to go. But let it also be the thing that guides you, like a rudder that guides your direction.”

“Fatherhood is the last male institution. You don't have institutions anymore that are kind of just like male. It transforms us from the inside out. It's just existentially obvious to you that there are lives in the world that are just unambiguously more important than your own and for whom you would do anything. You would give your life for them. It changes men in this massively kind of positive way.”

“The first is name the blisters. So it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome. It's like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna go I'm gonna start working out because I really wanna be in shape. I really wanna be fit. I wanna be I wanna have, you know, a six pack. Okay. Cool. I wanna be jacked. Name the blisters. The blisters is I'm gonna be waking up at this time. I'm gonna be going to gym on days I don't even feel like it.”

“On June 10 in San Francisco, we are doing the second ever installment of Hard Fork Live. It's happening on June 10 in San Francisco at the Blue Shield of California Theater. Bigger venue than last year. Tickets will be on sale at nytimes.com/events. Not today, but next Friday, April 17.”

“Israel says that it will have full control of the Lebanese town of Bin Shabeel, quote, within days. The town has become the center of intense fighting. It's part of land that Israel says it's seizing from Lebanon to create what it calls a buffer zone so Hezbollah can't fire rockets into Israel.”

“What Donald Trump is focused on in this term, what he has been focused on, is making himself a capital G great figure of history. The amount of time he's spending on domestic politics pales in comparison to him taking really bold aggressive moves in foreign policy and also putting his physical imprint on the world, on Washington DC, designing monuments to himself, renaming institutions, ensuring that he achieved some level of immortality, building a grand ballroom, calling it the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

“If he says instead, uh, we can't wait any longer. We're going to attack, I believe we will see a different world four weeks from now. uh a world uh that is uh profoundly damaged, the world economy in crisis, the possibility of escalation to a full world war. And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic uh or naive to say that we are at that fork in the road right now.”

“Notably, they are not releasing this model to the public because they claim it is too dangerous to do that. Instead, they are giving access to a consortium of tech companies, including Cisco, Broadcoms, or makers of Internet infrastructure, as well as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Basically, every big tech company that is not OpenAI or Meta is getting access to this model, but not general access. Just access to do defensive cybersecurity testing, basically, to go out and harden their systems and their infrastructure and their software before the general public can get its hands on this model.”

“For too long, the deficit framing around this issue of young men... classic example, of course, would be toxic masculinity. I'm just like, let's start with not making you toxic. There's just this way of talking about young men that really suggests that they're the problem, rather than looking at the kind of systems around them. I do think we have to set the table in a way that allows us to do the work, the cultural stuff both before and after.”

“The dollar has already been weakened so much because of our deficit spending. We can deficit spend because we're the world's reserve currency holder. And a lot of that strength comes from the petrodollar, that any money that gets bought from the GCC or any oil that gets bought from the GCC, you got to sell the transaction in dollars.”

“I think I have to be honest that I felt like banging my head against the brick wall with Democrats until November 2024... And then there was an election, and then my inbox started filling up with Democrats. Because they saw how much they'd fallen behind with men, especially young men. I mean, they can read a poll. And there's no question that one of the things that happened in the 24 election was that Democrats lost men, and especially young men, in a very, very big way.”

“And that is what's called the clean break strategy. The clean break was the clean break from the peace accords, from the land for peace idea that Israel would return to its borders... specifically seven wars uh were designated that would overthrow governments supporting Palestinian militancy. And those governments were, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.”

“What is clear, Michael, in every single poll that we have had described to us in our reporting is that the war has damaged Trump's numbers universally. And again, it doesn't mean he won't come back from it, maybe, depending on how this ends. But the longer it goes, Republicans who have been generally in lockstep with Trump, because they've really been afraid of incurring his wrath, are going to face a choice about how closely to align with him in the fall.”

“The message I think most young men need is 'we need you.' Society still needs you, the tribe still needs you, your family still needs you, your kids, for the love of God, definitely still need you. We want you because you're a man, not despite being a man. We see you being a man as a feature, not a bug. I just don't think enough men have heard that. Not as a volunteer, but as a man.”

“The first is name the blisters. So it's really easy when you go into something to just only focus on the outcome. It's like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna go I'm gonna start working out because I really wanna be in shape. I really wanna be fit. I wanna be I wanna have, you know, a six pack. Okay. Cool. I wanna be jacked. Name the blisters. The blisters is I'm gonna be waking up at this time. I'm gonna be going to gym on days I don't even feel like it.”

“Was handed a buffalo saber sword, going out to the outdoor party outside the KeyBank Arena. Filled with a beer, went out, apologized, crazy pop from the crowd, chugged it all over my Sabre's jersey. Kind of embarrassed. I'm like, oh, shit. I come off the stage. The emcee of the events, like, dude, these things, you can't chug out of them. You have to drink it slow because you can't chug. They end up spilling. It's impossible to chug.”

“The fertility rate conversation is a great example of where people take their priors and explain the fertility rate based on what they already thought. Jennifer Schuber's basic conclusion is the thing that's causing the decline of fertility rate is a lack of gender equality, while conservatives will say it is feminism and the entry of women into the workplace. Truth is, no one knows. And so it's a really dangerous subject because it is one of those things that we don't know yet.”

“What I realized was like, dude, you spend all of your like, when you when you decide to start a company, you're gonna try to, like inherently, you're saying, I'm gonna make this thing successful. To make it successful, it's gotta grow. And to make it grow, you're gonna spend most of your time on that really hard problem of making it grow. Part of making it grow is the product, but that's only a small part. Minority percentage, not more than 50%. I would say more closer to 15% than 50.”

“Activists are always psychologically reluctant to succeed because there's something about your identity and your purpose that is tied up to your own failure. If you succeed, you have to start saying, great, we've done it. Now I have to find some new identity. If you've actually wrapped up your identity in the sense that the whole of society is stacked against men, and then suddenly people do start caring about men, you've either got to say, oh, that's not true anymore, or say, no, no, that can't be true.”

“The reason is that the Iranians have not pursued a nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence agencies have said that repeatedly. What they have pursued though is a treaty with the UN Security Council to confirm that to put them under strict monitoring under the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty but in return for ending the US economic warfare on Iran.”

“The leaks that are coming out of the Pentagon, these are career department officials. Okay? These are people from the military, and the reason they're blowing a whistle is because they're panicked about our national security. That's a different kind of leaking, and the reporting that we're getting is extraordinary. When those people are sounding the alarm, that's a lot more than Jared versus Bannon versus Mnuchin versus John Kelly. That's a totally different game.”

“I can't say. I would say very high chance, probably, like, over 95%. I had one last night, actually. I thought, like, I mean, I stood there. And I was like, man, I crushed this ball. And, like, saw you know, normally, you see the ball get small. And, it gets small.”

“There's foreign connections we need to look into. That I can't get into because that's gonna... That's all tied up inside of classified channels, essentially. But there was more work we needed to do. And now I'm not saying, like, you know how an investigation works. You chase down 99 leads, and 100 leads, and 99 of them are BS. And you get one good one.”

“And the idea of blisters is like, on my hand right now. I've I have these blisters because I've been training for this MRF, and I've been doing pull ups all the time. So my hands on both sizes have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a it's it's a receipt. It's an evidence of a price paid. A price paid over and over and over again that you really couldn't force yourself to do just through willpower, but you had to have been actually, like, pulled to doing it.”

“The United States military is now treating the Bitcoin network as a weapon for national defense. We aren't trying to get rich or speculate on the price; we are leveraging the unhackable nature of the network to protect critical U.S. data from sophisticated cyberattacks.”

“What if you were a military parent? Okay? So what has Pete Hegseth done this week? Made some videos, spent some time with Kid Rock with Kid Rock. What is he doing today? Sending out a a funny, a cartoon of him as Franklin you know, with Franklin the turtle before he goes into this hearing. We've got men and women serving our country. How would you feel if you were a military parent watching this?”

“In 2015, such an agreement was reached, the joint comprehensive plan of action, the JCPOA. It was reached not only with the United States, but with Britain, with France, with Russia, with China, and with Germany... Then came the Zionist lobby in the United States. Oh no, you can't have an agreement with Iran. They're the evil empire. You can't do this.”

“But the number one regret by a huge margin was I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. That was the number one regret by a huge margin when she, like, tallied this this up. And then, basically, this idea is that they, like, would spend too long, and they didn't realize until the end of their life that they were living a life that other people that they thought other people would should want them to live, not versus what they really wanted to live.”

“And the idea of blisters is like, on my hand right now. I've I have these blisters because I've been training for this MRF, and I've been doing pull ups all the time. So my hands on both sizes have all these blisters. And if you think about the idea of blisters, it's a it's it's a receipt. It's an evidence of a price paid. A price paid over and over and over again that you really couldn't force yourself to do just through willpower, but you had to have been actually, like, pulled to doing it.”

“And it's very frustrating to Trump because he doesn't feel he can negotiate properly with the Iranians. It's not clear that the Iranian negotiators are empowered to negotiate. It's very unclear the extent to which they're able to communicate in real time with the Ayatollah, who we don't have a clear idea of his health, his well-being. It seems pretty clear that he's in a bad way and that the negotiators are not able to get quick responsiveness from him.”

“Alex Stamos said, like, yes. This is a big deal. And he was hoping for a long time that we would see a consortium come together like this because of exactly what you just said, Kevin. The intelligence in in these machines and their ability to work autonomously are now great enough that they can chain together exploits that human beings either would never see, would take them a long time to see, or they would just never get to because we're we're limited in ways that these machines are not.”

“I would say mastery comes from an enduring enthusiasm. Yesterday, I I had a piano lesson in the morning. And then in the evening before bed, I'm tired. I'm walking to bed, and I pass the room that has the piano. I'm like, let me get in here and play the sea shanty. Like, I'm a pirate on the pirate like, on a boat or something like that. And I'm playing this song, and I'm I've I've basically half half eyes open, but it's but I got a little bit better. Right? I've got one step closer to mastery.”

“Right now there is a an ongoing building global serious economic crisis and that is because uh a uh narrow stretch of water through which uh comes a an enormous extremely important strategic flow of resources... oil and gas obviously, but also fertilizers and petrochemicals and uh many many other key commodities... is closed.”

“What Donald Trump is focused on in this term, what he has been focused on, is making himself a capital G great figure of history. The amount of time he's spending on domestic politics pales in comparison to him taking really bold aggressive moves in foreign policy and also putting his physical imprint on the world, on Washington DC, designing monuments to himself, renaming institutions, ensuring that he achieved some level of immortality.”

“The thing that's extraordinary about this Gallup poll is people feel worse about the economy today than they did during COVID, than they did during the great recession. And so we have to pull apart why that is because, usually, like, a president gets blamed for for the economy that that he's presiding over, but it's usually not the president's fault. In this case, all of the almost all of the negative things happening to us from an economic perspective are direct policy decisions made by Donald Trump.”

“Right now there is a an ongoing building global serious economic crisis and that is because uh a uh narrow stretch of water through which uh comes a an enormous extremely important strategic flow of resources... oil and gas obviously, but also fertilizers and petrochemicals and uh many many other key commodities... is closed.”

“There was a span last year where I was literally I think I was over 20 last year, over 21. And I don't even think I could be I could be mad. Like, I was swinging at the pitch that I think I should swing at, taking pitches I think I should take, hitting the ball pretty hard. The more that you can kinda, like, stay objectively in that mindset besides just really, you know, beating yourself up from the inside that the game, you know, one, it becomes easier to play.”

“I truly believe, like I said in the letter, that the way that the president was influenced by the media, but then also by Israeli government officials, and the way that decision-making was took place in a compartmentalized environment. Compartmentalized in the sense that the president didn't have a bunch of, didn't have much in terms of people giving him alternative viewpoints, that our country was in a bad spot, and the most effective thing that I could do was resign, resign publicly.”

“Despite all the bravado that you hear from the president and from Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, we have unlimited weapons, etc. They don't have unlimited weapons and they're very, very constrained when it comes to long-range strike weapons. What that means is if they do do what Trump has threatened, which is blow up every bridge and power plant inside Iran, they don't really have the long-range arsenal to do that. That means flying planes in, exposing your pilots to risk, potentially having more shoot downs.”

“The Republicans here in Tallahassee are are truly breaking our constitutional, requirement, to to not gerrymander districts because they're unable to create the policies to keep in office, so they have to pick their districts in a way that the voters get, disenfranchised.”

“Iran has not invaded or attacked another country for a century and a half. This was a peaceful country... it had been invaded several times. But it was a democracy that didn't threaten anybody, didn't want to threaten anybody, hadn't threatened anybody, hadn't invaded uh any place actually since the 1790s.”

“The testimony before Congress highlights a massive shift in how the government perceives blockchain. Admiral Paparo's confirmation that we are actively running nodes shows that the U.S. is serious about not falling behind in the digital arms race where decentralization is the best defense.”

“Dads should actually be able to take time off and should take time off with their kids, not because they can do what mums do, nor in support of gender equality, but because dads are awesome, and kids are awesome, and kids do really well with their dads around them. I don't want to be the deputy, the malfunctioning mom, the kind of, 'oh, if only you could be a mom.' I want a pro-dad argument rather than a gender equality argument for fathering.”