Saagar Enjeti on Who’s Profiting From Trump’s New America of Gambling, OnlyFans, and Drugs | Tucker Carlson Transcript

Saagar Enjeti and Tucker Carlson discuss gambling, pornography, drugs, and political corruption in Trump's America

Tucker Carlson interviews journalist and Breaking Points co-host Saagar Enjeti.

Summary

Tucker Carlson opens with an extended monologue connecting the owners of OnlyFans, gambling companies, and neoconservative political organizations, arguing that the same donor class pushing for foreign wars is also profiting from pornography, gambling, and drugs — and that exploitation is the common thread. He then interviews Saagar Enjeti, who provides a detailed breakdown of the online sports betting explosion since 2018, arguing it has become the single most destructive force hitting young American men, eclipsing all other entertainment in total dollars wagered. Enjeti also covers the Trump administration's active promotion of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, the rescheduling of marijuana at the behest of cannabis industry donors, and the Treasury Department's guidance facilitating banking access for pornography companies. The conversation broadens into a sweeping discussion of institutional distrust, the Iran war, the midterm elections, AI surveillance, and the conditions Enjeti believes are creating a pre-revolutionary moment in American society.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Tucker's Opening Monologue: The Connection Between Pornography, Gambling, and Neoconservatism

Tucker Carlson: A couple of years ago, leaked internal documents from AIPAC showed that the single largest donor to the organization — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's number one donor — was a man called Leonid Radvinsky. Radvinsky was a Ukrainian-born pornographer. He was the owner of OnlyFans, one of the largest porn sites and human exploitation sites in the world — a site that has effectively turned thousands upon thousands of American women into prostitutes. According to these documents, Radvinsky and his wife had pledged $11 million to AIPAC. He later denied that, but the documents remain. And you had to ask yourself — and many people did ask themselves at the time — why would someone who runs a pornography site donate this much money to a pro-war organization, a neocon organization like AIPAC? What's the connection between the two?

Then of course it was that same year, 2024, that Miriam Adelson became one of the biggest donors to the Trump campaign — hundreds of millions of dollars. Now Miriam Adelson is not in the pornography business that we know of, but very much the beneficiary of the gambling business. Her late husband was one of the largest proprietors of casinos in the world, Sheldon Adelson. She became one of the biggest donors and, partly because of those donations, became one of the driving forces behind our war with Iran and also immensely powerful within this administration. In fact, literally one of the people who picked employees of the Department of Justice — she would call up PPO, the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House, and say "I want this person at DOJ." And that person would get a job at DOJ. That happened.

But again, you have to ask: what is the connection between pornography, in that case gambling, and neocon politics? You wouldn't have thought there was one, but the connection keeps showing up. Here, for example, is a pretty amazing and telling clip from Ben Shapiro's recent podcast.

In the clip, Ben Shapiro says: "In my opinion, as I said at the time, I thought the ceasefire was counterproductive — that it signaled weakness, that it actually gave credibility to the Iranian regime. Well, now things are starting to reverse. You have Operation Economic Outcast led by Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. The goal is to economically strangle the Islamic Republic. So the odds have been steadily going down about when we will actually have full traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. According to our friends and sponsors over at Kalshi — but they are rising actually rather sharply recently. Before April 1st of 2027 is now up to 42%. Before July 1st of 2027 is up to 53%. Honestly, I think we'll probably get there before that."

So that's a pretty amazing clip. Here's Ben Shapiro, and if you see the whole show, he spends a lot of it — as he always does — pushing the United States to send more money and more of our American soldiers and airmen into harm's way, fighting Israel's war in Iran. And then he kind of seamlessly moves to a pitch for Kalshi, a gambling company with whom he's a partner. Apparently, not only is he excited about the war — he's effectively saying you can bet on its outcome here. Sign up now for Kalshi.

So here's Ben Shapiro using his daily lecture on why war is good when it's fought by Americans on behalf of a foreign country to seamlessly pitch a gambling company. If war wasn't good enough, how about some gambling for you? Why not pornography? Why not weed? Here's some prescription drugs.

Well, of course, virtually everybody who pushes for wars like the war in Iran, or the war in Iraq, or toppling the Syrian government, or killing the leader of Libya — that group, we call them neoconservatives — almost all of them are on board with all of these other public policy questions, every one of which has the net effect of hurting Americans, weakening people. So what's the connection here?

There clearly is one, and we're just guessing, but maybe the connection is exploitation. The idea of the Iran war, like the Iraq war before it, was: we use the world's best-funded military, backed by the world's most powerful economy, to fight a war on behalf of another country — a tiny country that can't fight its own wars. In other words, take the United States and use it for our purposes to achieve something that we can't achieve ourselves. Basically, treat the population of the United States — the 340 million Americans who live here — like livestock and just use them.

And that's really not so different from the attitude that gets you to buy OnlyFans, or promote gambling companies, or push legalized weed, or prescription drugs on the population. None of those things is good for people. And of course you know that — you would never encourage your own kids to spend all day betting on their phones or smoke more weed. You probably wouldn't want your daughter on OnlyFans, would you? But these aren't your kids. These are other people's kids. These are American kids. And why do you care? Because you can get something out of it.

So that's a worldview that most normal people would consider repugnant. That's exploitation. It's cruel. It's awful. It reveals that you think the people from whom you're profiting aren't fully human. You don't care about them. You just want to take something from them. Most people consider that immoral. But increasingly there's no sanction against it. In fact, you're criticized for pointing it out.

And you should know that the same people pushing for these wars — whose outcome can't possibly benefit you, where your only role is to go die in their prosecution or pay for it, face the consequences long-term, bankruptcy, destruction of a generation — the people pushing for those wars don't care about you at all. Because if they did, they certainly wouldn't be steering you to gambling sites, or getting your kids to smoke more weed, or convincing your daughters to join OnlyFans.

We're just starting to notice this because it's kind of hard to ignore. The president's top donor runs a gambling empire. Ben Shapiro's shilling for gambling. The guy who owns OnlyFans is AIPAC's biggest donor. Maybe there's a connection here.

Introducing Saagar Enjeti

Tucker Carlson: Very few people have noted that. But one of them is a man called Saagar Enjeti. Now, we know Saagar — I actually hired Saagar out of college years ago. And what set Saagar apart was not simply that he was smart, but that he didn't — and this was almost 15 years ago — have any real interest in the partisan system. He thought it was fake, back when most of us, very much including me, bought into the idea that this was a war between two parties with differing worldviews. And of course, that wasn't what it was. We learned on February 28th that in fact the parties are aligned on the basic questions, and the rest of us are encouraged to argue at the margins to preserve the lie that this is a real argument, when in fact they're colluding against us. Saagar Enjeti realized that many years ago, and so he left conventional journalism and has wound up running something called Breaking Points, which is an excellent show that he co-hosts on all social media platforms. We strongly recommend it.

Maybe because he doesn't have a conventional worldview, he is one of the only people in all media to point out that digital gambling is utterly destructive of people. It's incredibly addictive. The odds are abysmal. In fact, there's almost no chance you can win. And it is growing at a pace that has eclipsed all other forms of entertainment. One of the reasons Saagar Enjeti has been able to point this out is because he's one of the very few people in media who's not taking money from gambling interests — and we share that with him.

The Scale of Online Gambling in America

Tucker Carlson: Saagar, thank you for doing this.

Saagar Enjeti: Thank you for having me. Always one of my favorite interviews of the year, so I'm grateful that you made the effort to come up here.

Tucker Carlson: So I'm a little cut off from the question of gambling. I think of it as something that takes place in a casino — craps and blackjack and pai gow and whatever. But suddenly it's omnipresent. And I'm wondering if that's good or bad.

Saagar Enjeti: Well, I think it's very bad. And I'll just set the stage. I wish that we were at the stage where you were at — which, by the way, I still think is bad for people to waste a lot of their money on craps and blackjack — but those people would put modern-day gambling companies to shame. Because at the very least, the house edge on those games is very limited. Americans are effectively being subjected to legalized theft, especially with the bets being pushed by these gambling companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, where 60% of their revenue comes from a type of bet which would put a Las Vegas casino to shame. They're called the single game parlay.

But before I even get into all of that, let's zoom out. Gambling as of this year is now the most popular entertainment in America. America is a nation of gamblers.

Tucker Carlson: It's the most popular entertainment in America?

Saagar Enjeti: Not only the most popular entertainment — the total amount that was gambled in the United States eclipsed all types of other entertainment revenue: movies and others combined. So that is the amount of dollars we're talking about. Hundreds of billions of dollars, in some cases tens of billions of dollars per state. And most of it is targeted to young men specifically, which is where we see the data overwhelmingly. It's depressing — not only are their savings rates going down, bankruptcy goes up, domestic violence goes up by nearly 10%, especially whenever there's a home team loss, which has largely been associated with the NFL for quite some time. But when you add dollars into that, it makes the magnitude of the loss, of the drinking, of the depression, and of the anger express itself even more. So there's basically nothing good that has come out of it.

There's an argument that comes from many of these states about revenue. But even the revenue argument honestly falls apart. The Ohio governor even said that legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake — the same governor who legalized it. He gave us some of the numbers where the amount of revenue that Ohio raised, let's say $200 million, was roughly equivalent to the associated social costs.

Gambling's Unique Danger: The Path to Suicide

Tucker Carlson: Gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction in the United States?

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, it does. Well, it's one of those addictions where you can operate and hit your rock bottom without anybody around you knowing. If you hit rock bottom as an alcoholic, everybody around you knows — you probably lost your job. There's no ability to maintain that. Same with drug addicts, fentanyl addicts, and other types of addictions. With gambling specifically, to hit rock bottom, you can gamble your way into a hole and a debt spiral and shame. And it often leads to a point where many of these men just can't face the music. It very tragically leads to suicide. And I believe that — I don't want to play dumb. I've actually seen it.

Tucker Carlson: And you know, I quit drinking myself. So if you reach the bottom of alcoholism or drug addiction, you can stop using drugs or alcohol. You reach the bottom of gambling and it's insolvency. It's pretty hard to fight your way out of that.

Saagar Enjeti: That's right. And it's on your phone. Imagine if you could drink out of your phone when you were an alcoholic. That's the equivalent of what we're looking at. This is the most omnipresent environment for gambling in modern history.

And just to put some color on the numbers — there's been $500 billion wagered since 2018. In 2025 alone, $166 billion on sports, more than movies, recorded music, live music, books, and museums combined, which total a normal $70 billion. So it's double the amount of revenue for all of those associated other types of entertainment, which I would argue have a lot more social net positive.

What we see is a 25 to 30% increase in bankruptcy in states which legalize online gambling. One dollar bet leads to two dollars of less savings. A 10-point increase in domestic violence after NFL upset losses. And that's just the top line.

In terms of how much this is pervading everything, these companies spend billions of dollars a year on the most expensive advertising real estate in the world — all of sports media. ESPN, all of these podcasts, are being paid millions of dollars above market rate simply to promote gambling and to get their audiences, many of them young men, hooked. And I think we can also have a bigger conversation about what it's done for sports generally.

You were talking about this as an older person. You may not realize it, but if you talk to the young generation — I'm talking 12, 13, 14 years old, specifically teenage boys — if I ask them before an NFL game what the line on a game was, they'll know it. They'll even know what the odds of relative prop bets are for some of their favorite players. That is a completely new reality that has only emerged since 2018, since the landmark Supreme Court decision originally struck down PASPA — the law which had been passed which allowed Nevada to continue sports betting in a casino but did not allow sports betting wagering nationwide. And we can thank Chris Christie for all of this.

Tucker Carlson: There's no one worse. There's no one more corrupt than Chris Christie — on a deep human level corrupt. You said "podcast" without getting into it, but we were approached by a couple of different gambling companies with real money. I had no idea they were gambling companies. I thought they were polling companies. I mean, I really didn't know. And I mean that. I called someone about it. "No, those are gambling companies." Oh, okay.

Saagar Enjeti: What's the difference between a polling company and a gambling company?

Tucker Carlson: Right.

Prediction Markets vs. Sports Betting: Kalshi and Polymarket

Saagar Enjeti: Well, this is where it also gets complicated. All of my criticism right now has been about online sports betting companies — FanDuel, DraftKings, Hard Rock Bet, any of those types of actual wagering. And just to explain the difference: that is a house against you. The house of DraftKings sets the line on a specific book for, say, Patriots versus the Eagles. So that's you against the house, trying to make sure that you get an edge and hopefully win.

What you're talking about are these prediction market companies — predominantly in the United States, Kalshi and Polymarket. And I do want to be fair to them: they are not the same thing. However, operationally I think they are. They advertise themselves as event contracts, so it's a prediction market. There are two sides of the bet, and somebody else is willing to take the other side. It's similar, I would say, to horse race betting in terms of the amount of dollars inside the pool and who's going to take the 85% chance versus the 15% chance.

Tucker Carlson: And the house gets a set percentage.

Saagar Enjeti: They get a set fee that they take off — that's their similar difference between the prediction market and the actual gambling company. However, these prediction market companies have a lot of the same problems. When you speak to them, I'm sure they would talk a lot about derivatives and event contracts. It's all very financialized language. They try to present themselves as above what these companies are. But here's the truth: the vast majority of the action taken on these platforms — and I use that term specifically because they would say "dollars wagered" or "dollars placed," but I'm saying "action" because it is ultimately gambling — is all on sports. Over 80 to 85% of the volume on Kalshi and Polymarket is placed on sports.

You also have the same power law problems where the vast majority of the profit accrues to a very small group of traders known as "sharps," both in the prediction market business and in actual online gambling. By their own data, only 25% of the people who play within a month — or "trade" within a month, as they would call it — are even people who win money. And by the way, that's actually quite high if you were to wager over a month in sports betting.

This is what I mean by legalized theft. When I step back and you ask me the question, is this good for America — how can it be good for young men to routinely participate in a daily, sometimes more than daily, practice of just throwing their money away to either groups of Wall Street traders or large gambling houses based in Europe and the United States to accrue for shareholder value? There is no good that comes from that.

I laid out domestic violence and the social costs, but bigger picture — and this might actually be even more important — the CEO of Kalshi, Tarek Mansour, has said that he envisions a future where people can trade on everything. Think about the social and corrosive cost of what it means for some of the event contracts which are offered on Kalshi or Polymarket. We're talking about flight delays. Can you imagine the perverse incentive of manipulating flight delays? They frame it as hedging — saying, well, somebody wanted to do a conference and they wanted to make sure that if the conference got flight delays they could hedge their bet. They promote the hell out of this, but they don't think about the social cost of what it means to be able to wager literally on everything.

You could create a market right now for what you and I are going to say on this platform. By their rules, according to their internal house rules, that would be insider trading if you or I were to wager on that. However, I was at a restaurant yesterday — we both were — and I was speaking to some people asking me about what I was going to talk about. Well, they could have wagered. They could have created a market about what I was going to say with that inside information. There is no regulatory authority to actually go after insider trading at a bigger level.

There is for the military, and I can talk about that as well, where large bets specifically on Polymarket for insider information — things like the Maduro raid and others — clearly leaked out to a small group of people who then went and placed bets on whether the United States was going to capture Maduro. Same whenever it came to the military operations against Iran. There were huge sums of money that were paid out on that. The Trump administration has gone after a few select cases, but those are only the most obvious cases involving members of the military. The Israeli military also had to prosecute several of its own soldiers for placing bets on Polymarket for events they knew were going to happen because they were participating in them — betting on wars.

Tucker Carlson: Betting on wars. On death. And again, they would push back very heavily — "we don't have death markets." But when you have a war, betting on whether the United States is going to bomb Iran is effectively a death market.

The Social Corrosion of Betting on Everything

Saagar Enjeti: Let's just keep it here because that's the most obvious easy example. The social trust between all of us is broken when everything is tradable and everything becomes a scam — everything from sports to our flights. In some places people are betting on the temperature at an airport. There was a case recently where people were betting on weather markets, and the way the weather market was decided was off of a single sensor at an airport. So a man took a bet on how the temperature would be on that specific day. He went to the sensor and held a hair dryer next to it to cause the sensor to rise so that it would resolve in his favor. These are extreme examples, but this is the extent to which people will start to manipulate literal reality just to make money.

Tucker Carlson: This is the free market capitalism they promised.

Saagar Enjeti: This is the free market capitalism that they've promised us, and it makes it so you can't trust anything. There was recently a case where Caroline Levitt was holding a press briefing, and there was a market on whether it would go over a certain amount of time. She happened to end it seconds before the majority position resolved. So you could have bet the under on how long that press conference was going to take place and paid out — I forget the exact dollar, maybe 20 to 1.

There are also all these insider trading things. I gave the obvious example about what you and I talked about specifically. I'll give you another one that relates to a vice — marijuana. I don't think like this, but I could have. I'll give you an example. I got a call because this is my job — I do reporting. Somebody called me and said Trump's going to reschedule marijuana. I was like, wow. So I start working the phones. I start seeing what I can find out about this. I email the White House. At that time, I could have gotten a 1% chance on either prediction markets, or I could have purchased marijuana stocks, because I had inside information. And I actually watched as I started doing my reporting that it started to leak out in broader Washington. I can see the stocks start to rise. I see rumors begin to come out. Then the official announcement eventually breaks from some establishment media outlet. The price goes sky high. I personally could have profited literally millions of dollars if I had wanted to. I would never do such a thing — I think that's literally blood money and scumbag behavior — but there's no law that prevents me from doing that. I was doing my job on a routine basis. I could have made myself extraordinary sums of money. You probably could have done the same thing with all kinds of various things that you've been doing in your line of work.

Tucker Carlson: Is it technically insider trading? No, we're not even covered by those laws.

Saagar Enjeti: Exactly. Because that's our character. But how many people is character really the constraint through which we should offer the integrity of our financial markets? And even worse, I see these viral social media claims — people will say, "I'm getting rich betting on what Donald Trump is going to say." You can get various odds of whether Trump will say the words "low IQ" this week, or whether he would criticize you this week. People in the White House have relatives. They could call them. The relatives could call another relative. They could easily make a lot of money doing this. This is about our government. This is about sports. It's about entertainment. But my bigger picture is: this is bad for society.

Tucker Carlson: Isn't the reason that sports betting was banned in the first place 100 years ago because it corrupted sport?

Saagar Enjeti: Exactly. And people started throwing games.

Tucker Carlson: Exactly.

How Sports Leagues Reversed Their Own Principles

Saagar Enjeti: Major League Baseball itself — the National League and others — were formed specifically to stop the corrosive effects of gambling because they knew it was a problem. And for over 80 years, these organizations held the line. Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, testified before the U.S. Senate against gambling. David Stern, the NBA commissioner, also testified against gambling.

But what ended up happening — and this is a very tragic story — is that the English Premier League, when Britain legalized gambling and specifically had long had sports gambling, their valuations began to skyrocket. And so the capitalist greed of the NBA owners and of the NFL owners and the commissioners — they looked across the pond and thought, "How can I accelerate my valuation and the amount of dollars that I can extract from America just like they did?"

Now, you and I as social critics would say: in what way would we want to emulate the British working class for our working class, who have been immiserated and who currently have a GDP less than the state of Mississippi? GDP is not everything, but you know — less than the state of Mississippi.

I could look at Brazil, another horrific example — really ground zero of sports betting. In Brazil, they have those cash transfer programs for poor Brazilians, which previously was held up as a major social welfare benefit. Well, more recent data has come out from Brazil: the vast majority of that money is being cycled right back into sports gambling. People are getting their cash transfer from the government and handing it right over to the gambling companies. They are massively addicted to soccer betting down there specifically.

So our NFL commissioner, our mob commissioner — they looked abroad to the Premier League, all at the same time that Chris Christie was advancing his case for New Jersey to have sports betting. All of this came from the Great Recession. Atlantic City was really having a hard time with their revenue in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Chris Christie becomes the governor. Christie decides he's going to try to have a workaround to allow sports betting in New Jersey specifically.

The basics of it are they passed several laws, took it through various circuit courts, went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Five conservative justices and one liberal justice ruled on behalf of the state of New Jersey, saying that what Congress did by restricting sports betting — specifically only allowing a loophole where Nevada could have it but nobody else could — was unfair to states' rights. This comes at a time when states are revenue hungry, right into the pandemic. So what happens? The vast majority of these states — I think 42 states now — have legalized sports betting. And what they did is they not only allowed sports betting in the casino like Nevada always had, they quickly realized that there were these apps like DraftKings and FanDuel which had the infrastructure laid out already, which allows you to normalize and create online sports books specifically. And so that's why I gave you that number: $500 billion — half a trillion dollars — wagered in this nation since 2018.

And it just dispels all of this notion of, "Oh well, people are always going to sports bet." That's actually BS in my opinion. Because if we look at the current types of bets that people place today, they place the types of bets which no bookie or mafia boss would ever offer you. When I open the app, the single game parlay would say: it's not just whether you win or lose. It's not even just the spread, plus three and a half, minus three and a half. It's the spread combined with the quarterback throwing for 200 yards combined with the receiver scoring two touchdowns. And they offer you a price: bet $10 to win $750. The idiot brain, combined with alcohol or marijuana for a lot of these guys sitting on their couches — let's do it, $10. What they don't realize is that the contingent odds they just placed lose money so regularly that the companies can project their revenue based off of that type of bet, the single game parlay. So much so that they can project their earnings out into the future. 60% of their revenue comes specifically from that type of bet.

So when people tell me America's always been a nation of sports gamblers, that's totally wrong. The type of bets that they were making were usually illegal, backroom types of bets, plus or minus on the spread. To the extent that they were ever able to even get these types of parlay bets, it was in person in a Vegas casino, and they would never take the amount of dollars that they're wagering currently.

And one thing I beg for a lot of the listeners — if you're a younger guy out there and you're doing this for the thrill, I just want you to know, especially with the parlay bets, you will not win. You will not win. It's a mathematical fact if you do this over time.

How Gambling Companies Addict Losers and Ban Winners

Saagar Enjeti: And this brings me to the worst part of the industry. If you do win, they'll ban you. Everybody famously lionizes the people who can count cards at blackjack. What they don't tell you is: if you walk into a Las Vegas casino and you start counting cards, you will be asked to leave the blackjack table within probably 30 minutes to an hour, unless you're really good at it and you're working with a team. How is that legal? They have the right to refuse service. And it's because even with the small house edge of blackjack, if you are an advantaged player and they allow those advantage players to have unlimited bet size — and counting cards gives you about a 1% edge — you will eventually beat the house.

It's the perfect game: you can addict people, you can effectively legalize theft, and if you happen to, despite all of this, be able to win money, they will simply ask you to no longer play with them. Or if they don't ask you to leave, they will limit your bet size. So where previously you might have been able to put $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 on a game, they'll say, "Sir, you're only allowed to bet up to $3 on this game."

So you addict the losers and you look for the whales. The vast majority of the profit for these gambling companies comes from a very small group of users — roughly 3 to 5% of the people make up almost 50 to 55% of the revenue. These are absolute gambling addicts who by law shouldn't even be gambling in the first place. The winners, if you're able to even win, they will ban you. In fact, their algorithms are so sophisticated that if you place the type of bets which look like a potential winner — before you even win — they will limit your bet size. They will say, "We don't want your business," or "You're only capped to $10 on a game."

So they've created a system where they can addict young men, find the potential whales — those 3% who are full-blown addicts — and shower them with gifts. They call them incessantly: "Hey, where have you been? Haven't heard from you. Do you want tickets to the next Patriots game? Do you want free whiskey? Let me fly you out on a private jet." They shower them with more benefits than you can even believe. Now, those addicts think it's for free, but they're paying for it obviously with their losses. They do all of this while if you're actually a winner, they'll ban you.

And so for the casual bettor who is doing three to five dollars or eight dollars, I want those people to know that is only enabled by these people getting crushed by gambling addiction, throwing their futures away, their lives, their marriages.

Tucker Carlson: I covered the case of a guy whose wife, I think, sued DraftKings. He had never placed a bet before 2020. He ended up gambling away every dollar that he had — every single dollar. He bankrupted his children's 529 plans, his 401k, took out multiple mortgages on his house. The entire time he was being called and encouraged to gamble by DraftKings, his casino host would ask him, "Hey, where have you been this week? Hey, I've got a good game for you. This is exactly the type of thing you would like to do. Here's some free whiskey. Here's some free concert tickets." They were encouraging him despite him showing obvious symptoms of gambling addiction. And by their own rules, they're supposed to tell him not to do it. But of course, they don't. And in some cases, not just this case, there have been other cases where they say, "Don't put this in text or they're going to come after me — make sure you just talk to me on the phone if you're having a problem." This is scum of the earth type of behavior. But this is what's been enabled by these laws. This is sweeping the nation.

So what happened to the guy?

Saagar Enjeti: Oh, he went absolutely bust and his wife sued DraftKings.

Tucker Carlson: I actually — they're a publicly traded company, Fortune 500.

Is Portnoy involved in any of this? I don't know if he owns DraftKings, but I know that Barstool has an affiliation with DraftKings. I think they have a partnership between the two of them.

Saagar Enjeti: And ESPN does too. They had their own actual casino called ESPN Bet, which is ironic because it's a media organization. ESPN Bet was down literally on the chyron encouraging people to bet. I think now they just have an exclusive partnership with Penn Gaming, which is a large casino conglomerate which previously owned Barstool Sports.

Tucker Carlson: Oh, it's also disgusting. It's horrible. So why is this allowed? I thought the promise of this administration was the country was going to produce things. New Jersey was once a rich state because they made a lot of stuff in New Jersey — pharmaceutical, you know, tangible things. "Trenton Makes, the World Takes."

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, thank you. Exactly. I think that sign's still there.

Tucker Carlson: It's still there. But it's not true. So the idea that you're going to fix the state budget hole by just treating your population like livestock — that's not really the answer we were promised, right?

The Trump Administration's Pro-Vice Policies

Saagar Enjeti: No, it's certainly not. And this administration is the most pro-vice administration in modern American history. The CFTC — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — has taken a very different line from the Biden administration. They not only reversed many of the rulings against the Kalshis and the Polymarkets, they not only enable them to just do what they do — which is bad enough — but there are gradations of worse. They go to extraordinary lengths to defend them in court.

Recently there was a case in New York State. Kathy Hochul's attorney general went after Kalshi because they said Kalshi was illegally operating as a prediction market, as a gambling house, in their state. The argument was: there's federalism. We are a state. We have the right to regulate sports books in the way that we see fit. And by doing that we charge, I believe, a 20% excise tax on the amount of trades or revenue generated within the state. Kalshi obviously argued against them, although in negotiations previously they had acknowledged some level of regulatory authority and said, "Why don't we pay you 6% the way that we do in North Carolina?" New York State rejected that. They said, "We don't do carveouts. We believe you're a gambling company. You need to abide by our gambling laws."

The CFTC under Donald Trump issued emergency authority ordering and telling Kalshi to please continue operating because they have absolute authority as the federal government over the regulation of these prediction markets.

Tucker Carlson: Wait, so the Trump administration described it as an emergency that people wouldn't be able to bet enough online?

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, that's right. Effectively, that's right. I mean, Kalshi would tell you they're trading, but in my or your estimation, yeah, it's gambling. And so the Trump administration has their CFTC commissioner, Brian Quintenz, routinely going and delivering video press conferences, many with crypto magnates and others. Recently there was one with Donald Trump, the CFTC commissioner, and one of the Winklevoss twins behind him — who himself is a Bitcoiner with Gemini — where they're giving press conferences and extolling the virtues of prediction markets. Trump's own son is either on the board or was an adviser with both Kalshi and with Polymarket.

You have a situation now where Kalshi specifically, because their regulatory approach is to work extensively with the federal government to ensure that they're totally legalized, the CFTC commissioner has issued multiple guidances and even written briefs on their behalf in many other state courts and places where they're being sued, because many state attorneys general believe that they are illegally operating as a gambling house.

So that's Trump on gambling. There's no question he has made gambling more prevalent in the United States than any previous president, just because of the way prediction markets work. And in my opinion, running roughshod over federalism. California and Texas — bless them — they did not have legal gambling before this. But now, because Trump as president is protecting these prediction market companies, we now have legalized gambling in all 50 states. And in fact, both Kalshi and Polymarket would not want legalized DraftKings or FanDuel in those states — so they could be the only option for people who want to put action.

In California, it was the Indian tribal casinos that didn't want nationwide or statewide gambling, and they successfully defeated it at a statewide ballot initiative.

Tucker Carlson: To preserve their own monopoly.

Saagar Enjeti: Right, to preserve their own monopoly. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the voters there decided. In Texas, the evangelicals are the only reason we didn't have statewide betting from my own home state. Not that Miriam Adelson isn't working overtime to make sure that's been repealed. One of the reasons she bought the Dallas Mavericks, as I understand it, was to create this super entertainment gambling complex. Mark Cuban himself even said that before he sold it to her, the valuation of his franchise doubled because of legalized gambling. So I don't think it takes a genius to see that was part of the long-term Adelson plan for my home state of Texas — to legalize gambling and to make it part of the fabric of the state. Texas was one of the last states actually willing to stand up with a substantial population. However, of course, Trump has now made prediction markets legalized in the nation.

Marijuana Rescheduling: Donors, Not Medicine

Saagar Enjeti: Let's talk about marijuana. Trump rescheduled marijuana. He did so not after any rigorous review. He did so at the behest of marijuana companies, where Schedule 1 status by the federal government was prohibiting their ability to use the legalized banking system. That was it. There were huge donors at Mar-a-Lago and in Florida, as I understand it, who were constantly complaining to him about their inability to access the banking system. In these states where there was legalized weed, they would take these vast amounts of cash and they had problems on their hands — many banks would not touch the money because the federal government could technically invoke Schedule 1 and they saw it as illegal. So there was an entire side banking arrangement conducted in hard cash. A lot of these companies were having to hire armored guards. It was causing them all kinds of problems.

They heavily lobbied the administration to reschedule — specifically not for the reasons that Trump came out and said, about needing more studies. We've had plenty of studies on marijuana, specifically medical marijuana. All of them are absolutely clear. There is not one claim for medical marijuana that's held up to scrutiny. You can read that in the New York Times and from some of the most prominent health journals in the United States. But nonetheless, they claimed we need more research. That was the justification. That's not the justification. The justification specifically had to do with allowing these companies to have more access to the legitimate banking system. And so the venture capitalists and the stocks — remember I told you earlier about that story about how I could have made money — there's an entire ETF and others that track marijuana companies which exploded post-rescheduling. So that tells you the story, and it made people very, very wealthy who are very connected to Donald Trump.

Tucker Carlson: Did it leave the country at all?

Saagar Enjeti: I'm in this state — I'm shocked at the amount of cannabis stores everywhere. Downtown Portland, cannabis everywhere. You smell it everywhere. You'll be in the rural parts of this state. We're here in Maine. I see a brand new cannabis dispensary next to a rotting home. So you can tell me whether you think that's been an improvement.

Tucker Carlson: It's lowered IQ. Talks about young men. The number of people who drive while under the influence of marijuana skyrocketed. Lower testosterone, increases the schizophrenia rate. It's been a true disaster.

Saagar Enjeti: It has probably been, aside from gambling, the single biggest disaster to hit our population. And by the way, daily marijuana use now outnumbers daily alcohol use. It's not that alcohol is good, but now you're using a force which massively increases the amount of people who go schizophrenic, mental illness, testosterone issues. Pregnant women's use is dramatically up because of a lot of these false health claims that people make. Doctors have not caught up. There's actually a teenage-specific affliction where if they smoke too much high-potency marijuana, they end up vomiting for days — it gets stored in their fat cells. They literally had to create an entire new term for that type of affliction because it spread across ERs. Ask any ER doctor in America — they'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

OnlyFans, Debanking, and the Treasury Department

Saagar Enjeti: So Trump has been a boon to the marijuana industry. But pornography doesn't get covered nearly as much. And in my opinion, pornography — I talked to you about this a little bit before — the Treasury Department issued a report on debanking in which they specifically said banks should not discriminate against these vice industries. And one of them that they named was pornography. And so the Trump administration issued guidance to the nation's banks that they should do their best to facilitate banking for pornography companies and for women on OnlyFans and others who previously had had trouble getting access to the legitimate banking system.

Tucker Carlson: Wait a second. So when people voted for Trump in the hope that he would end debanking, they probably weren't thinking, "I hope OnlyFans can find a more efficient way to transfer its funds."

Saagar Enjeti: Exactly right. And that's what's happened.

Tucker Carlson: So it's sort of like you vote for Trump to do something about immigration, but the only people who get deported are those who criticize Netanyahu.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. It's interesting how they subverted the idea.

Tucker Carlson: Subverted the idea. By the way, you want to know who's buying OnlyFans? The people who are buying a majority stake in OnlyFans — which was run by a Ukrainian billionaire who we knew nothing about, turned out to be a major AIPAC donor, by the way, in his life, and he recently died in Florida — well, it turns out he's selling to a Silicon Valley operation. One of the co-founders there was part of the tech team on Clearview AI, which is the facial recognition software. And so now a majority stake in OnlyFans is being acquired by somebody who previously worked at Clearview AI, which is facial recognition software used by the federal government and by a lot of others.

Why would you allow OnlyFans in your country?

Saagar Enjeti: That's a great question. But why not just arrest the owners?

Tucker Carlson: Arrest the owners.

Saagar Enjeti: And I try not to even take the maximalist position because I see how far gone we are here. Can we at least say let's enforce our human trafficking laws in this country? Because that's why the banks didn't want anything to do with the pornography companies or OnlyFans — they were deeply afraid, rightfully, of the amount of human trafficking and exploitation that happens in the pornography industry. That is bedrock to it. Everybody knows. I've listened to and unfortunately heard the testimony of so many men and women who were involved in that industry. None of it is from a place of entrepreneurialism or capitalism. It's all from a place of exploitation, of being used by these broader systems. And if anything, it is shocking to the conscience that a woman who's 18 or 19, who sees her only chance of being able to make money, buy a house, or achieve financial success is to sell nude images of herself to perverts online who are three, four, five times her age. That's something that the federal government, in my opinion, should want at the very least to make sure they're not being subjected to human trafficking.

Tucker Carlson: If some Ukrainian billionaire is turning our women into prostitutes, maybe we should do something about it. Isn't that why we have a military? That's exactly why we have a justice system.

Saagar Enjeti: And same when we talk about gambling — how can you argue with a straight face that normalizing, because even if we take Kalshi and Polymarket, these are the darlings of Wall Street, everybody loves them in New York City, they're offering all kinds of liquidity for trading on the Federal Reserve, on whether they're going to hike rates, on the futures of Bitcoin, on all of these complicated derivatives which you and I will never understand until there's another financial crash. So they're the darlings of the hedge fund and Wall Street industries. But how could you say that when 80% of the volume is sports, and most of the customers — by their own admission, only about 25% — are the ones taking profit, how can you say that's a good thing?

Tucker Carlson: Maybe because it's not so different from the equities markets.

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, exactly. Maybe that's the red pill here — of course Wall Street loves them, because Wall Street already does this. It's the same thing. But to zoom out from that — and this is where I get frustrated — Kalshi's argument wants to make the case that if things are corrupt, the equities markets are just as corrupt. I would say yes, but the average American can still largely just put their money in the S&P 500 and get an 8 to 10% return over the long run. They're much better off doing that than they are trading on Kalshi.

Oh, I forgot one thing with the Trump administration. They lowered the bar for day trading. Previously there was a regulation that you needed to have $25,000 of liquidity to engage as a day trader, and the Trump administration removed that. By removing that threshold, it's supposedly sold as a populist move — like everybody should have the right to day trade. Over 80% of people who day trade lose money. It's a statistic.

Tucker Carlson: I wonder how many Fox News viewers — I'll speak for myself. I campaigned for Trump. I didn't think Trump's election would result in more gambling, drugs, and pornography. That kind of wasn't on the menu that I remember.

Saagar Enjeti: It certainly was on the donor menu, though. And every one of the donors — especially marijuana, I can link that directly back to Mar-a-Lago and to Florida. With the CFTC, it's largely venture capital. And I should be fair — there are a lot of libertarians who support these on their face, the wisdom of crowds and how great they are at predicting various types of events.

Tucker Carlson: Right. Exactly. Why don't they shut up at a certain point? Like, that's just too stupid. I can't deal with it.

Saagar Enjeti: It's foolish in the sense of what social utility does gambling on everything provide? There is none.

Tucker Carlson: It would be funny to have — you know, there were all those horrifying pictures of lynching in the South. And I know it was more complicated than the images suggest — some of the people really were rapists and I get it, but we still have to oppose lynching. You need a justice system. But these kind of wild-eyed crazy people and the guy swinging from the tree, and then underneath it says "the wisdom of crowds."

Saagar Enjeti: Wisdom of crows. Right. Or the Bolshevik mobs.

Tucker Carlson: Exactly. We can find all kinds of cross-ideological examples.

Why the Media Won't Cover This

Tucker Carlson: Has this received coverage?

Saagar Enjeti: Very little. And you know why? Because the news organizations are in bed with these same companies. CNN has a deal with Kalshi. They use Kalshi odds on their network. There are multiple major news organizations which have incorporated their actual odds into their coverage. A famous example more recently was Harry Enten, the stats guy over at CNN, covering the Kalshi odds of a specific race. Francesca Hong, I believe he said, had a 95% chance to win. She lost the election. But the coverage was not just polls. And by the way, a sophisticated news consumer — even a casual news consumer — has a general feeling that polls are wrong all the time. We've just lived through too much to know that. But an event market or prediction market — well, those were right in 2024, right? They predicted Donald Trump would win. So a 95% chance of that — that's a sure thing. Well, it wasn't a sure thing, because she lost. And there have been multiple of these primaries.

Tucker Carlson: Okay, so that's what kept me away from the prediction markets as a sponsor for this show. I didn't even get the gambling part of it because I'm obviously too stupid to see the whole picture. But I do understand my little slice of the world. And I thought this seems like an intel-inflected thing. It felt to me — on the basis of no evidence at all, but just my instinct — that these are companies that are not simply reflecting back the public's opinion, but trying to shape the public's opinion.

Saagar Enjeti: Oh, well, you're making a great argument. Because in that case, let's actually look at a recent case where I believe it was in California, a polling company put out a poll which said — I forget which candidate it said was leading by 12 points. It comes out months later, the polling company admits it was, quote, "a social experiment to see how much our poll would get coverage."

Tucker Carlson: Well, exactly.

Saagar Enjeti: And so how much did that one poll have influence on Kalshi or the prediction market? Probably very little. But in the aggregate, all of these polling companies — their error, to the extent there's an error, which you and I know there's no money riding on it, but we have a feeling many of these polls often understate or overstate the way things are going — they then get extrapolated to the nth degree and financialized in these prediction markets, where the liquidity trading can be hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars depending on the race, hundreds of millions in the case of the presidency.

So in these cases, the actions of certain polls — let's say the Selzer poll, we famously remember that before the Donald Trump election, which was so dramatically off despite her reputation — is it so outside the bounds of possibility to say, was that an event meant to manipulate a market? Now, I don't think that's actually the case, but there isn't a lot of law that would prevent her necessarily from doing that. And then take it even deeper with foreign governments or others that may want to influence a certain type of event here in the United States, who might buy a large position on one of these prediction markets to generate the news coverage that it deserves — because these aren't taken as fact when they are not fact at all.

Again, to be fair to Kalshi, they recently did a meta study. They sent me their data where they said when there's a 5% chance of happening, it usually happens 5%. If there's a 90% chance of happening, it usually is 90%. They're trying to prove that they are predictive. My problem with that is their sample size, especially taken from elections. You and I know the vast majority of primaries are not contested and the winner is clear. The data would only be useful to me in an actual contested primary. And in many of these contested primaries, they were totally wrong. They were wrong with Angie Nixon. They were wrong with Francesca Hong. They were wrong with Abdul El-Sayed — they had him winning dramatically more than he actually ended up winning his election by. Francesca Hong they had at a 95% chance — she lost. Angie Nixon, who beat her opponent by like 10 points, they had as a dramatic underdog.

So when it actually mattered — in the contested primary, where you would have looked to these prediction markets for information you wouldn't be able to glean from polls or from other open-source material — it didn't end up mattering. And so in the contested primary, what's their actual track record? Because right now it just seems like a casual election bettor goes on the RCP average, sees Francesca Hong, there's even a meme where they say, "Oh look guys, they're selling dollars for 95 cents because she had a 95% chance of winning." Easy 5% pop. You put $500 in. Not a lot to some people, a lot to most people. And next thing you know, you lose all of it. And that story has compounded on sports, on elections, on what color dildo will be thrown on the WNBA court, on the color of Gatorade which will be poured on a coach after they win the Super Bowl. I could go on.

Tucker Carlson: All of it's non-productive though. Nothing is being created.

Saagar Enjeti: Nothing is being created, except the youngest female billionaire is one of the founders of Kalshi. So we can just thank God for that.

Tucker Carlson: Just an entrepreneurial MIT grad.

Saagar Enjeti: Entrepreneurial.

Tucker Carlson: How is it entrepreneurial to find new ways to exploit desperate people? Or offer liquidity to financial houses so they can bet up and down on the Federal Reserve? It just seems predatory. So why would young men participate in this when some of them presumably are smart enough to know the odds, but they do it anyway?

The Neuroscience of Gambling Addiction

Saagar Enjeti: I would dispute that, because unfortunately they don't know. We just have too much data. They don't know the odds and they're bombarded by advertising. But a lot of it is — and everybody can understand this, actually — I did a lot of research into this. I go, why is this? I don't have the gambling gene. I'm capable of playing craps — it's fun, and winning is fun — but I can easily walk away after losing $25 and say I'm done.

So what is it? It's actually fascinating. Our dopamine rewards risk. When you get the reward, you get serotonin, which brings you down. So risk — the action itself — and there's a famous line: "For me, the action is the juice." That's actually true, especially when you're a high-testosterone male. What it means is that gambling is a derivative of our chase of dopamine and of risk. And specifically, the reason why we are rewarded with dopamine for risk is hunting.

You'll understand this as a hunter. The vast majority of hunting is extraordinary boredom, and most of the time it doesn't work unless you're deeply familiar with the terrain. Especially when we're talking about non-rifle hunting — it's an incredibly difficult task. Well, what nature needed to do was reward you. You needed to go out there and forage for yourself, probably burn more calories than you were going to get. It's a totally irrational thing when you actually think about it. But it only makes sense if there is the payoff at the end.

Gambling is basically hijacking the dopamine and the nervous system which we developed to become hunters so that we could go out and provide food for our families, for our clan, to be able to feed our children. But in modernity, with the grocery store and all of that removed, that nervous system — our biology — has not caught up. And there's a specific subset of our population, just like there is with alcohol or marijuana or even drugs, where that dopamine rush is the greatest thing in the world.

And if you've ever been to a casino, when you see those wide-eyed guys, you notice they don't feel when they win. They feel when they lose. It's when they lose that they finally feel alive. Because to be alive for them was the moments in which they thought they would win. They have to come back to the crash and then they have to chase again. Because if they won, they wouldn't be able to get the same chase — they would actually get the reward which they think they're seeking. But what they don't realize is they're seeking the drug itself.

And when you normalize this across hundreds of millions of people, you hijack the biology largely of a lot of young men who are full of testosterone — who traditionally would be the hunters. That's really where it all seems to come down to. Pornography is the same thing, right? It's the same artificial construction, the same hijacking of the dopamine and the nervous system which is intended for you to be able to procreate. Day trading is a very similar thing — easy ways to get riches, but ultimately it's about risk.

And so what gambling does is it hijacks that and it takes somebody in the prime of their life where they could have used that risk and that appetite for dopamine. If it wasn't legal, they would at the very least participate in something more sociable. Because what did I just say about everything with gambling? They do it on the phone. Even with alcohol, you have to go out and buy alcohol. You have to at the very least speak to the clerk who's selling you the booze or the bartender. Even marijuana, you have to go and buy it from a store. All of this can be done in total solitude on your phone.

And actually, I read a book — Danny Funt wrote this incredible, well-reported book on gambling. He said that sometimes FanDuel or one of these companies would survey their customers and ask, "Would you recommend this product to a friend?" Their best customers said no. Because they wouldn't want their friends to participate, or they're ashamed, or they don't have any friends. They just do it by themselves. It's the only rush that they have.

And I've seen it bleed now into our society. Male loneliness obviously is an epidemic. But the other thing I hate about gambling is that it has replaced the common parlance of sports talk among men. When you talk sports with my generation of men and younger, it's very little to do with whether the team is good. It's about how much you've bet on the games. If you go to a bar, you can go to any sports bar in the middle of football season, sit next to a guy — almost certainly if he's there by himself, he's got money riding on the game, and probably on both sides of the ball in terms of this down.

I was at a football game where I saw a man, severely intoxicated, in front of me tell his son to place $100 that the Eagles were going to score on this specific drive. So his son goes on the app — they immediately don't score. I saw him lose that $100 right in front of me. Okay, it's $100. He can afford the seats, probably fine. But multiply this at scale, and that's ultimately the rush that people are chasing — all being channeled by our government, by our capitalist oligarchic elites, into sinful activity.

The Libertarian Argument and the Meaning of Freedom

Tucker Carlson: So you said a minute ago that there are people — libertarians, you describe them — who argue that it happens anyway. Is there any acknowledgement that if you make something easier you'll get more of it? They say you should tax and regulate it, and that eventually it will normalize over time.

Saagar Enjeti: There's no evidence it normalizes. They say, "Oh, people will — right now we're just in the wild west days of gambling and we'll figure out the regulations and we'll figure out more safeguards and in the long run we'll be better off because there's no more illegal gambling." Even though there is still a lot of illegal gambling, because they can sometimes offer different things or better customer service. They said the same thing with marijuana. Nope — the illegal marijuana market is still booming because they sell it under the price of tax. And none of the tax revenue has even come close to making up the social costs that have been inflicted on all of us.

Tucker Carlson: Tax revenue becomes the goal.

Saagar Enjeti: Exactly. This is what happens when you make tax revenue the goal. Secularized America has decided that freedom means freedom to sin. For the vast majority of human history, specifically under Abrahamic faiths, freedom was freedom from sin. The changing of freedom from sin to freedom to sin was one of the great social changes and understandings in modern American history. And that is what is now being reflected in all of our values.

Tucker Carlson: Indebted people, addicted people, compulsive people are not free. They're enslaved.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. You and I understand that. But well, that just seems so obvious. I know a lot of them. They are literally enslaved — to the credit card companies, to the banks, to the gambling companies which help them go bust, to the mortgage lender, to their job, to their boss, to the system which they work in. But that's because you and I have empathy for them. Whereas the libertarian argument, the non-personal argument, would be: they're an idiot. A man is free to do with his money. A fool and his money are going to part anyway, so we might as well allow that transaction to take place out in the open.

Tucker Carlson: And profit from it.

Saagar Enjeti: And profit from it.

Tucker Carlson: Do young people understand that they are being farmed for resources?

Saagar Enjeti: People see it, but they don't have the language. That's one of the reasons I'm really happy that we're doing this. There was a recent Gen Z poll that came out that a lot of people are discussing — the lowest level of institutional trust of any generation in modern American history. Usually doesn't set things up for a productive century. But I think the reason that they feel that way is that they are at the mercy of the student loan companies, the banks. They were locked down during COVID. They're bombarded with predatory scam advertising, with AI promises which may take their job. So of course they are deeply untrusting of institutions.

A decent portion of young men voted for Donald Trump. I would say, having met most of them, anti-war was one of the major reasons why they did so. And then they launched one of the most extraordinary, dastardly acts in modern history — Iran — under cover of negotiations. Twice, actually, we did that. Our own version of Pearl Harbor, which we all understood was the ultimate betrayal.

And so for them, I think they can sense this level of betrayal. And there is polling actually coming out where you can see that actual support for legalized sports betting is beginning to dip, right along with marijuana — now that we've run the experiment, people are coming down. But what I'm saying — and I want to acknowledge at the top — it is not popular, and we have to look to past social revolutions to see where the change came from. It's actually from women. The reason why Prohibition happened was because women had gotten the right to vote and they were living in a nation where people were drinking like a liter of whiskey a day. These women were getting absolutely beaten up almost every single night, or left destitute with their children in the poorhouses, left at the mercy of literal charity organizations. Literally the first thing they did when they got the right to vote was to outlaw alcohol. And the temperance movement — again, I know it's controversial — I think it was one of the most righteous movements in American history.

Tucker Carlson: I think it was the same year. Universal suffrage and the Volstead Act. Both 1919.

Saagar Enjeti: Both 1919. Great show — Boardwalk Empire actually shows that exact meeting. It shows the politician Steve Buscemi meeting with the Women's Temperance League despite the fact that he is himself involved in bootlegging. But it made the point that many of these women — the first thing they did with the vote was to support politicians who supported Prohibition. And the reason why is very similar to gambling and marijuana and pornography today: they were the primary victims, being left with a population that was dissipated, that was drunk, that was beating them — very much like the domestic violence case I just pointed out.

Imagine being in a position where you're such a slave to your addiction that you're losing your home and selling your children's Christmas gifts — which has happened in that case. Another more recent case in Philadelphia, very similar circumstances. He took two mortgages out on his home, gambled away tens of millions of dollars. It appears that what happened is he was gambling with FanDuel. FanDuel actually got him a personalized video from Bryce Harper, who is a player for the Philadelphia Phillies. In that video, Bryce — with the FanDuel logo on it — tells him, "Hey man, I just wanted to reach out and say Happy Thanksgiving. Your host from FanDuel just wanted me to make this video for you." It turns out his host went on Cameo and purchased that video for her client over at FanDuel. He denies that he knew it was for gambling purposes, even though it said the word FanDuel in the script that he read on camera. Nobody who's worth hundreds of millions just says, "I'm not going to do this one video." But those are the lengths to which they'll keep you gambling. And by the way, he lost everything — his house, second mortgage, et cetera. I think he gambled $18 million.

Tucker Carlson: Are any politicians against this?

Saagar Enjeti: Well, Mike DeWine — I'll give him credit. He said, "I legalized it and it was a mistake." And he published some of the statistics. That's pretty much it. I can't think of a single nationwide politician. And it's because of the money. Even in our industry, Tucker, what I'm saying is so rare. Most of my colleagues are taking money from Kalshi or Polymarket. A lot of them are taking money or have been sponsored by Polymarket, or they don't want to close off the potential revenue source. My friends in the sports podcasting industry — I can think of one guy I know who doesn't take money from the gambling companies. They're really flooding them with tens of millions of dollars. They find themselves in a position where it's the only financially viable way for them to do what they want to do. I get it. I blame the politicians. I wish it wasn't this way.

But they are showering them with so much cash that it's only people who are willing to stand up and say, "I won't take your blood money," who are the people who will come out and speak about this. And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this show and talk about it in these stark terms. What — at the very least, if we're to be confronted with this secular government who will do nothing to protect our children, our young men, and the women — can we at least start a cultural revolution of shame? There should be shame for smoking marijuana every single day, for gambling away your children's inheritance. I feel sorry for that person in terms of him being a gambling addict. I would actually support funding recovery programs and all of that. But I don't want him to get to that place in the first place. And if you see a person who's gambling, or you're friends with someone who is, there should be social space to say, "Hey man, that's bad. You shouldn't do that. You're throwing your money away."

Tucker Carlson: No, that's yeah — they're there. I mean, that's what blows my mind. It's not that people destroy themselves. It's that other people get rich from their destruction, and those people still have their names on the buildings at Harvard. I don't understand that.

Saagar Enjeti: They become multi-billionaires.

Tucker Carlson: You become president, you make a billion dollars in office. How can you make money in office?

Saagar Enjeti: Take trades — tens of thousands of trades that Trump has placed while he was in office. His net worth obviously skyrocketed. The Trump coin. My God, the details on that are shocking, genuinely, in terms of some of the associates.

Tucker Carlson: Good deal for the investors.

Saagar Enjeti: Right — for the ordinary people who are his most devoted fans who put their hard-earned money in. That's what gets me. Money is not everything, and the chasing of it after a certain point, in my opinion, makes you evil. And so when I see these hardworking people — and I've met some of them — who are either his biggest fans and they put their trust in the name of Trump, and this doesn't just apply to Trump but generally — when they put their hard-earned dollars into this and then they end up losing their savings, that's just the height of scumbag behavior. And that's not just Donald Trump. That applies to podcasters and other people in tech who promote SPACs and other sketchy financial instruments and tell their audience to invest and then betray the trust of those people.

Tucker Carlson: Just in their defense — it is a minefield, because I have almost taken money from all kinds of bad people. Gold companies, prediction markets, crypto scams. I get it.

Saagar Enjeti: I'm not saying I would never — I came pretty close a couple of times. You have to do your research. And that's where the lack of public reporting is, I think, the worst part. And look, I'll say there are a few places which still do good journalism. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have done great deep dives into prediction markets. They have more bulletproof business models because finance relies on them, so they're able to charge higher subscription fees. A lot of the cable companies are in bed with the prediction market companies — they're using their odds in a lot of election coverage. Come midterm season, you will see Kalshi and Polymarket odds featured very prominently in the coverage. It's going to be embedded in our daily life.

And what's so crazy is this wasn't even the norm 10 years ago. It only became legal 2018, 2019 onward. And now we're living in this already, in my opinion, dystopian society where gambling eclipses all other revenue. I cannot even imagine what 10 years from now is going to look like. We're going to look like the late 1900s in the same way of temperance. We'll have poorhouses. We will have literal shelters for the women and children of gambling addicts if the community doesn't step up. That's the future we've created.

Gambling Anonymous has reported an absolute skyrocket in the number of calls. Congress won't even pass a piece of legislation for a national exclusion list where if you put yourself on the exclusion list in one state, it applies to states elsewhere. So if you live on the border of a state, even though you've excluded yourself from one place, you get the itch and you could drive across the state lines. Kalshi only recently introduced self-exclusion, but there are workarounds.

Tucker Carlson: Self-exclusion is like a gambling gun safe where you just keep it out of your own hands.

Saagar Enjeti: You can go into the sports book and say, "I want to self-exclude. Don't allow me to bet." And I think there's actually a way to reverse that sometime in the future. But at the very least on that day they won't allow you. Any casino in America will do the same thing — if you tell MGM, "I don't want to be allowed on any of your properties," they will exclude you. But obviously there are still workarounds. You go to other properties, et cetera.

Congress and the government are happy to work on behalf of the prediction market companies. Nobody looks out for the consumer, for trying to at least marginally protect potential gambling addicts, which we all know will massively increase as a result of this epidemic which is now sweeping the nation. I think this is opioids. It might be worse, honestly, because opioids at least take you down very quickly. The insidiousness of this is it's compounding every day. Already in the data we know tens of thousands more people will likely commit suicide as a result of this epidemic. Tens of millions will have lost money. Potentially millions will go completely broke or on the verge of bankruptcy. And it's all voluntary on behalf of the people who run our country.

Pre-Revolutionary Conditions in America

Tucker Carlson: So obviously there's going to be a revolution of some kind. I hope it's peaceful. What's it going to look like politically as a result of this and all the trends you described?

Saagar Enjeti: I think the lack of institutional trust is very similar to what we saw — and I hope it's peaceful too. I'm hoping we look to our cousins in the United Kingdom, where an aristocratic elite — not talking about in the current moment, but at their time of mass social change — voluntarily, yes kicking and screaming, ended up giving up power, giving more of the vote to the people, to avoid violent revolution. They had an aristocracy and a bourgeoisie which fundamentally understood that they had to address the concerns of the people and of the driving social change, that they had to voluntarily give up some of their power, some of their wealth, their hold over the establishment, in order to keep what they really wanted to protect — which was their monarchy and their social status. And it worked, to their credit. We'll look across the continent to all of the other monarchies which didn't survive the First World War and many of the other revolutions which ended up sweeping them.

I hate to say I don't think we're there, but we are in — if we were to look at what I laid out — mass institutional distrust, a period now of multiple presidents, Trump being one of the most egregious, but of multiple presidents saying one thing and doing the opposite whenever they come into office. "I'm going to end the war." How many times have I heard that one? Only to end up right now where we are. You have Trump who is effectively sacrificing the might and the prestige of the American empire for his full-hearted decision to go and attack Iran.

I heard about "Economic D-Day" today. I could only wish that it had the level of seriousness and intellect behind the original planning of D-Day, who were real men. You can say a lot about them, but they were real men. They thought about things. They didn't just throw out terms like "Economic D-Day" and "the most sophisticated financial campaign or sanctions of all time." When are we really going to do secondary sanctions on China and blow up our relationship with the largest second-largest economy on earth? Xi Jinping is flying to our country. I don't think so. And if we do, it would be even more extremely foolhardy. You have sanction-proofed economies.

So you have this disastrous war, very much like the First World War, which can ignite more social change and revolution. And we're obviously not there yet — tens of millions of people are not dying. But every American who is consuming anything remotely about this war is watching the destruction of our bases, the inability to feed, clothe, and keep sane the people on the USS Abraham Lincoln, where stories have to come out from their distraught relatives for us to even actually do anything about it. We're watching our ships have to be refueled or resupplied from Diego Garcia because our bases were destroyed.

I didn't even think that could happen. I'm one of the ultimate pessimists about the American Empire going into this war. If you had told me Iran's ballistic missiles and drones would kill — I believe 18 Americans — injure, I believe the latest number is over 700, that we would be driven like dogs from the region, have to resupply our carriers from 2,400 kilometers away, I would not have believed you. If you told me we were going to expend the vast majority of our THAAD interceptors and our Patriot missiles — the technologically advanced spear of the American defense systems — and that we were to do it all on behalf of Israel while leaving real countries like South Korea and Japan in the lurch, I would not have believed that. And yet we did all of that, in only a span of six months.

So congratulations to Donald Trump. But more so — you asked me about revolution. I watched that happen. I watched the expenditure of all this. What is the Trump administration's response? Double down. Economic D-Day. $1.5 trillion for the military. The same military technology which we just delivered a massive strategic loss over the Strait of Hormuz. So you see that there's no learning in the state.

You have multiple instances of politicians who say one thing and do the other. Everything in America, like you just said, is a scam. Everything is about extracting more value from you, the consumer, than creating value for your daily life. This is what backstops, I think, a lot of the data center backlash. But what it all comes down to is: we can't enrich you. We can't make you richer. So we have to oppress you. And we also have to take your money and spend it on even more foolish adventure.

All of the ingredients are there if you want to look for everything ranging from a minor revolution to a major revolution. You and I know many people think — despite what the Soviets said — a working class revolution is always a bourgeois revolution. It always is.

Tucker Carlson: Take a look at our elites.

Saagar Enjeti: Elites versus elites is the classic story of every revolution. Our current elite is either literally morally bankrupt — trying to extract people through gambling and marijuana, pornography, everything I just discussed here — or they are people who have been failed by the institutional promises of the 2000s. Saddled with student debt, put into a situation where they can't get married and have a child, can't buy a house, have no upward mobility, total lack of trust and failure by the system, which was never necessarily going to deliver for the bottom quintile, but was at the very least supposed to make life decent or better for the 50th to the 90th percentile.

Right now in the U.S., if you're in the 50th to 75th percentile, your quality of life has gone down — not just because of Donald Trump's war, not just because of gambling, but because of all of the institutional measures which are used to oppress you. And so that is the group I pay the most attention to. And that group is angrier than they've ever been. They're behind a lot of these DSA wins that have been sweeping the nation in terms of the Democratic Party. Highly educated people who are downwardly mobile — those are the two ingredients, along with mass institutional distrust. Oh, and an unpopular foreign war which is bankrupting the empire.

Tucker Carlson: World War I. Does anybody want to pick up a history book? And I hope it doesn't get there. I desperately hope it doesn't.

Saagar Enjeti: No, but unemployed nonprofit executives are the most dangerous people. Underemployed lawyers, people like that — white, college-educated people whose dreams have been shattered. Man, those are scary people.

Tucker Carlson: Smart, motivated, angry, resentful — they've been betrayed.

Saagar Enjeti: Yes. Those were the backbone of the Russian Revolution, the backbone of the German Revolution. And that's exactly what led to the outcomes in those two countries — the destruction or rewriting of the general rules of society.

I had just read a fascinating series of books on the French Revolution, and the extent to which there's something inspiring and terrifying — and this is kind of what I think we're going to begin to see in the United States — is that at the beginning of the French Revolution, there was just a sense of: why should we do it that way at all, the old way? Let's just do something brand new, inspiring. And you can actually see how easily that message could catch on in a society like ours. But what they didn't realize is that by opening Pandora's box, it would lead to the Terror, to Napoleon, to the destruction, the beheadings of nuns, the persecution of every institution in all of their society. That's what it leads to. And it has happened now so many times over the course of the last several hundred years.

Tucker Carlson: I could too. And it's interesting — we spend so much time thinking about Stalin's crimes, Hitler's crimes, Robespierre's crimes, and so little time thinking about the predicate. Like, how did they get there? How did a society like 18th-century France — which was pretty sophisticated, pretty rich, a liberal society — how did that happen?

Saagar Enjeti: That's the thing that strikes you. This was not an oppressive regime. Not to cape for the French monarchy, but it was not one of the most authoritarian and oppressive societies. And in fact, one of the critiques that later on many of the other monarchies of Europe took away was: we need to be much more oppressive, because the libertine French allowed this modicum of speech, of pamphleteers, of openness in their society. And look what it got them — Louis XVI.

Tucker Carlson: No, it's totally right. Nicholas II was not — he was like a pretty liberal, pro-western, spoke French at home kind of guy.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah, exactly. And he was a fool in ways, but it does seem like those are the periods worth studying — the pre-revolutionary periods.

Tucker Carlson: I totally agree. And you can't find a good book on Weimar. I've never been able to find a single one.

Saagar Enjeti: I heard there's a good one coming out.

Tucker Carlson: But there should be a hundred of them. Okay, we spent your entire childhood learning about the Nazis. It's the only thing that ever happened in history, along with the civil rights movement. Okay, I'm totally anti-Nazi. I get it. How did they get the Nazis in an election? No one wants to talk about that. What is the answer? I'm not even sure I understand.

Saagar Enjeti: And even then, they reduce it down to just the depression, which is ridiculous. It's not just the depression. There are all these social forces — and actually Weimar is very similar to what I talked about with the French Revolution: the idea of "we could try anything." So you saw absolute sexual insanity, very similar to how things were happening in France in pre-revolutionary France. It's fascinating how you could always see the same types of things happening, similar in some ways to a lot of the gender dynamics currently here in the United States.

And I don't want to take it too far. We don't have brownshirts currently on our streets. We're not in a Great Depression. You mentioned the Russian Revolution — so my historical parallel would be: okay, it's not 1917. What if it's 1904? What if it's the Russo-Japanese War? What if it is the war that previously broke institutional trust and showed the brittleness, and created the crackdown, and then 10 years later it explodes?

Tucker Carlson: They were so shocked to lose that war.

Saagar Enjeti: The world was stunned by that. And that is our equivalent, I think, of what we have watched here. People try to extrapolate too much to the most extreme examples — Suez or that — but you have to pick some of these side wars which at the time were monumental in their understanding of geopolitics.

Tucker Carlson: It's totally right.

The 2026 Midterms

Saagar Enjeti: So what happens in the midterms, more imminently?

Well, if we were to look at structure — the incumbent president almost always loses ground in the midterm elections. America is a nation of the median voter who loves a Republican president and a Democratic Senate, or vice versa. This is baked into our political consciousness. So normally you would always expect to see some sort of a backlash against the Trump administration as they actually enact what they wanted to. Similar happened in 2018. Okay, so that's normal times.

We are not living in normal times. We're living in times of $4 gasoline for the last six months. By the way, nobody's paying attention to diesel. Open call — everybody please pay attention.

Tucker Carlson: $1.70 a barrel this morning.

Saagar Enjeti: I think it might be more on a different marketplace, but it's $5.69 a gallon national average. It was $3.50 or so just a year ago. So the inflation that's happened in diesel is dramatic. It turns out that diesel literally runs all of our industrial machinery, our grocery prices — everything has diesel price baked into it. So we've had six months of that. Working people who run trucking — I've spoken with a few — diesel is destroying them, or they're having to pass it on.

On inflation generally, we have seen that the Trump administration's actions in Iran have bled into some of the more inflationary data. Mortgage rates — which are impacted by this decision in Iran — I believe they're hovering around 6.7% for the average American if they were to try and get a normal 30-year fixed rate mortgage. If they were to do so, they would be entering a home market where, if you were to look at the median wage and what it's required to be able to save for a down payment of 20%, you would need to save for literally like a decade just to be able to get just the down payment and the ability to sustain the income on a two-parent household.

So extraordinarily expensive housing market. And in terms of the midterms, the way that the Trump administration acted — even before all of what happened with Iran — was in such a manner where they didn't really act as if they needed to convince the public of anything. They did a decent enough job in the campaign of getting a popular vote victory, but they turned around and, to the extent they did anything for their voters or their promises, they did it in such a fashion as to ignite major public debate. That was side by side with some of the most corrupt actions that we've ever seen from a White House. We're not just talking about Trump personally enriching himself to the tune of billions — nobody even knows from his own financial disclosure. We're talking about the basic sale of pardons that have happened, where all of these pardons Trump issues to corrupt Ponzi schemers and others who then go on to victimize other people — all of it basically done for donor pressure, or largely just because he likes feeling powerful by letting people, specifically rich people, off the hook.

And then Israel hovers over all of that, because a proud nation cannot serve another nation.

Tucker Carlson: Yes. And this is left and right — everybody feels this way. And specifically, for a decent portion of our population, to watch us go into this war, to deport people for their opinions on Israel, to have the Department of Justice sue campuses and others for their opinions on Israel — everything the Trump administration has done on antisemitism was Ibrahim X. Kendi's dream when it came to anti-racism. The Department of Antisemitism might as well exist for what it is — it's our entire government, from our military, the infusion now of the NDAA, our Congress. I was amazed recently — Rick Scott — Israel attacked Turkey in Syria, a NATO ally, which we're told is the most important thing in the world. Rick Scott backs Israel. I was like, wow. The same people who will tell you about how NATO is a religion to them.

Saagar Enjeti: Rick Scott is really disgraceful.

Tucker Carlson: He's really disgraceful. One of his constituents was murdered in the occupied territories in the West Bank by a group of terrorists. And Rick Scott refused to meet with the parents, who run an ice cream shop and a Smashburger place in Tampa. He wouldn't meet with them because their son — an American citizen born in the United States — had been murdered by Israelis. And so Rick Scott took the side of the Israelis. How can he serve in the Senate?

Saagar Enjeti: How can our ambassador defend a foreign country over our own? And I think — so who would vote for that?

Tucker Carlson: Who would vote for that? Also, yeah. If you ask me about the midterms — Republican vision, what's their vision for the country? What are you going to do about my home price? Nothing. What are you going to do about my gas prices? Increase them. Tell me short-term pain for long-term gain — they said that six months ago. It's been six months. What are you going to do to create a better future for my child? Oh, you're going to create a den of sin and gambling and marijuana and pornography. That's the type of industries which we're going to elevate. If I voted Republican in the midterm, what are they going to pass? My health care premium went up 30%. Are you going to do anything about that?

Saagar Enjeti: When did they become liberals? Like everything I dislike about liberals — the neoconservative foreign policy, the identity politics at home, the promotion of the destruction of people through drugs, pornography, crime — that's the Republican Party now.

Tucker Carlson: What? I can't — where's the DSA in all this stuff?

The DSA, Abdul El-Sayed, and the 2026 Midterms

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. Wow. That's fascinating. The DSA is going through — they're a fascinating group. So for example, everything you just laid out is probably the position and the same articulation that the DSA co-chairs, the people in New York City who Fox News likes to bring on and argue with, would make.

The candidates themselves are very interesting. And you can either say this is insidious or not, but they are learning. I do at the very least have to admire their ability to shape-shift from where they were not that long ago. Abdul El-Sayed, who's running in Michigan against Mike Rogers — who, as you and I know, is probably the most pro-Israel neocon. They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States Senate who, by the way, already lost. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that?

Tucker Carlson: Mike Rogers is really — I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. And so that's the candidate — a literal loser who lost when Donald Trump won the state. Just to show you how much of a headwind he had at his back — a tool of Israel and the intel agencies. How would you run someone like that? It doesn't even make sense.

Well, El-Sayed — look, El-Sayed is a full-blown leftist. He doesn't call himself DSA. I've known him for quite a long time.

Tucker Carlson: You know him personally?

Saagar Enjeti: Not well. I've interviewed him many times over the years because of my co-host Crystal. And so I've watched his ideological evolution. You could easily call him — as AOC said — "woke one," right? Where he said "defund the police" on a podcast. He said all kinds of silly things about football and the standard leftist shibboleths.

Tucker Carlson: Yeah. Hates Mackinac Island. He's for vaccine mandates.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. Classic stuff. I watch his campaign now — it's America First. The amount of times he says it. He doesn't even — when he talks about Israel, he says Israel is committing a genocide, but ultimately: "I want to make sure that you don't pay more for healthcare. I don't want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military." He stands in front of a giant American flag. It's almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of it.

Tucker Carlson: Literally Trumpian.

Saagar Enjeti: Exactly. And so you see candidates like that — especially him — he will be the most interesting test case come November.

Tucker Carlson: Is he going to win?

Saagar Enjeti: If I had to bet, which I don't, I would probably bet that he'll win.

Tucker Carlson: I would think so. I would think so too. Do you have any idea — not to fixate on poor Mike Rogers, who I know — but how did he get the Republican nomination for Senate?

Saagar Enjeti: I looked into it. It was relatively uncontested. He had the most backing of the Michigan GOP, which is of course very in touch with their own voters. And again, this is the guy who lost to Slotkin when Donald Trump was able to win the state. And they decided to nominate him literally yet again.

Tucker Carlson: He was the AIPAC candidate, to be clear. And he's told AIPAC not to advertise in public forums.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. And do you see — that's where I was saying with El-Sayed, his ability to go up against AIPAC and to win. If you're a DSA person, that's got to be one of the most inspiring wins of your entire life. That's way bigger than Zohran Mamdani.

They've got to get rid of the social liberalism. If they get rid of that — because that's where the world is — most people are not orthodox free market people. They just want the economy to serve their families.

Tucker Carlson: Right. I think that's fair. They want to be treated fairly. I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. And they're not for radical social change. They think that there are two genders and each has a distinct role, and it's not good to sexualize children, and drugs are bad, and they kind of want law and order. These are not crazy right-wing goals.

Saagar Enjeti: That's what we call the socially, roughly speaking, socially conservative view. And that's the majority view around the freaking world. Everyone feels that way.

Tucker Carlson: So why can't we have a party that feels that way?

Saagar Enjeti: Well, that's where we have to just be honest here with the DSA. At the very least, they're not willing to have that conversation. They are —

Tucker Carlson: Because it's run by rich girls? Is that why?

Saagar Enjeti: Part of it is that. But part of it is — look, they were a small movement with very little backing as of eight years ago, and they are now a major force within the Democratic Party. They're not dominant yet because the establishment of the Democratic Party hates them, largely over Israel but over all kinds of other campaign issues — healthcare, let's be fair, over one of them. But they are the prototype of the upwardly mobile white, or downwardly mobile, highly educated, largely white female or male.

Tucker Carlson: Yeah, that's what they are. And you and I, having spent a lot of time around these people — these people are largely delusional whenever it comes to the actual social views of the vast majority of the public. Their theory of change is that Trump is so bad and has so destroyed the credibility of working-class messaging that they will emphasize their America First platform on Israel and healthcare for all — which is their belief — and not talk about their radical social views. But they still have them. El-Sayed is on tape saying that Medicare for All should pay for gender-affirming surgery. Okay, he's on tape for saying that. So I don't want to sit here and claim he is a conservative or just sensible.

Saagar Enjeti: I mean, I don't know if you have to be, but if you're telling me abortion is awesome, you're a freak.

Tucker Carlson: You're a freak if you think it's awesome. Maybe you think it should be legal in some cases or whatever, but if you're celebrating abortion, you're evil. Can we just have a normal person run for some office at some point?

Saagar Enjeti: I agree. And that's why I do want to say — there are some within the DSA who very much disagree with some of the tactics of Woke 1.0. Like AOC herself — many of them saw her as a much weaker person. You can see Zohran Mamdani. I have a lot of disagreements with Zohran, especially going into the campaign. But you can't deny that the guy has kind of embodied their vision.

The current DSA, at least the people I speak to — Crystal specifically and Ryan — their vision for that is like the sewer socialist model, which is very much how Zohran is trying to govern the city of New York. He uses his extraordinary popularity and charisma. He focuses heavily on quality of life issues. He does use his political capital on social issues which he feels are very important to him — let's say like Transgender Day of Visibility — but he doesn't make it the main component of his overall governance. On law and order, he capitulated completely. He reappointed Jessica Tisch. There has been at the very least no actual defunding of the police. He apologized to the NYPD for saying he should defund the police. He's largely a pragmatist, at least rhetorically and from what we've seen.

How is the crime in New York? Well, actually, let's be fair — New York has one of the lower actual crime rates in major American cities. If you were to pick between New York or San Francisco, I'm choosing New York every single day. And he's also focused on things like new garbage containers in neighborhoods to make sure there's not trash on the street. He put a video out this morning about rebuilding the BQE, which is a disaster you and I have both been on. As a guy who has deep disagreements with a lot of their vision, it's pretty attractive to see somebody who says, "I'm going to fix the infrastructure and I actually am going to do it." As opposed to seeing Donald Trump, who has multiple times now run on rebuilding America, and now whenever it does come to rebuilding, his most recent tactic is to go to bat for the data center companies and for AI.

Tucker Carlson: More weed, more porn.

Saagar Enjeti: At a regulatory level, he's done that. But then even to the extent that they're — if you were to look at what projects they support building — their main saving grace for their presidency has been AI. AI is the only reason we're not in an economic depression. AI capital expenditure, specifically with data centers, is the major driver of any GDP growth that we have left. It is the only thing holding up our capital markets whenever it comes to the S&P 500. They need AI to keep working, and so they are going to bat at a regulatory level, at a rhetorical level, to make sure that this industry becomes the multi-trillion dollar promise.

But protect the public from mass surveillance in the process? Why doesn't Trump call for a bill in Congress saying, "You want your data centers, okay, but we're not going to turn this into East Germany"? He claims — like, he says executive orders, they have to build their own power whenever they build it. I support that, but that needs to be codified into law. We need to make sure that they are not bribing local officials, like that case in Utah with Kevin Oleary in the data center project that he spearheaded. We need to make sure — look, many of the water use claims are overblown, but at the very least they are somewhat of a concern. And then power generation is ultimate.

In Virginia, where I live, 40% of the power goes to data centers. 40%.

Tucker Carlson: In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

Saagar Enjeti: In the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. In Oregon, it's 30%. Virginia is the worst because all the data centers are largely powered for the government, for Amazon — we have the best fiber optic cable because of the defense contracting industry. But it's an extreme example where you can see that power generation itself is becoming a zero-sum game, which is a nightmare especially when you're competing against one of the fastest growing industries in the world, which is the most power hungry.

If we had abundant cheap power, none of this would really be as much of a conversation. But we're actually living in a world where the administration is coming to the back of these data center companies and in many cases attacking Republican governors who, in my opinion, are just trying to do some very sensible stuff. Greg Abbott — let's not pretend he's doing this out of the goodness of his own heart, he was dragged kicking and screaming to the data center issue — but he signed a data center moratorium. And in it, all he says is: "We're doing a moratorium. We have to figure out rural land use and water, noise, generation. We need to make sure you don't get certain tax breaks. We just need to make things normal so that when the local community allows this data center to be built, they reap some of the benefits." And Trump comes out and says, "I think it's a mistake." He said that about Greg Abbott. He said that about Kathy Hochul. Josh Shapiro similarly also just announced another data center moratorium.

The proponents of the data centers will attack you for speaking this way. In some of these cases, they've been able to lower property tax. West Virginia data centers — they're looking at potentially trying to remove their own income tax. And if the actual benefits of all of that work out, I would be happy. However — and this is what you're talking about with mass surveillance, with data, with privacy — we cannot use just the promise of riches to offset what could potentially be an industry which, by their own admission, they say will be the most radical social change, economic change since the Industrial Revolution. Some of their own CEOs say that they will make it so that none of us are even necessary in their future world. I know that privately they want that, because they want to be gods. They see themselves as gods, literally, as transhumanists. Their goal is to infuse the human in the machine, and they will personally be part of a rarefied elite which is transnational, above governments, and so powerful that governments are ultimately answerable to them.

That's where Flock comes in. You and Glenn did such a great job of talking about mass surveillance, and it was amazing to me — with Flock, for example, everybody talks about the crime. I totally get it. It is very useful in many cases. But the internal mechanisms and controls are not governed by any real federal privacy laws. A lot of it is up to these corrupt local sheriffs. We have all these cases of police officers stalking their ex-girlfriends or their wives while using the technology. Only in response to that do they put some safeguards in. They claim they delete some of their new customers' data after 7 days, not 30 days. It raises the biggest question about warrantless surveillance and privacy in your own nation, about your ability to move about your daily life. People say solving crimes is worth that. I say let's at least have a real debate and guardrails, and not leave it entirely up to the companies themselves.

Tucker Carlson: Well, they haven't ended crime. That's for sure.

Saagar Enjeti: Of course not. I mean, Harris County, Texas has the highest or one of the highest penetrations of Flock cameras. A lot of crime there in Houston.

AI: The Upside, the Downside, and the Extraction Machine

Tucker Carlson: Let me just ask you a question that I actually have been talking to someone involved in AI about. This morning we just interviewed a guy called Nate Soares, who was an early developer of AI. He's been sounding the alarm that it's out of control and superintelligence is a threat to humanity. He's written a new book on this. He doesn't have a counterpart on the other side. That's what strikes me. There's not one person I'm aware of who can explain the tangible benefits to me and other people from AI. All I hear is "China, China, China." I don't care at all. I'm sick of your lies. But that's not even the beginning of an answer to the question: why should I support this? Do you know the answer to that question?

Saagar Enjeti: I do actually. I have a lot of friends in tech. The best case scenario for AI, the way that they see it, is it will simply remove friction in our daily lives. It will be equivalent to a credit card. My friend John Coogan from TVPN gave me this analogy — he's much more bullish on AI than I am. The credit card was able to facilitate more transactions and ease of payment, which doesn't just open up the ability for me to pay you. It opens up more financial transactions via the distribution of credit and mass adoption, so that more businesses can be built on it. It is simply a workplace invention which unlocks productivity, which creates and grows the pie of the amount of commerce that can take place in our society.

That's how I would say the best case scenario for AI works. It makes white collar workers more productive at white collar work. It makes radiologists able to view more scans — they can do 30 instead of 15. And in some cases that is true. I want to be fair. And it can make research tasks easier. For example, all the notes that I have in front of me — I had all the data from across all of my different spreadsheets because I research this topic and cover it often. I was able to use it to compile all of that into one place. It would have taken me hours. This was able to do it in five minutes. So that's very productive in terms of what it's able to gain.

That is the best case scenario for AI — it is a workplace productivity tool. Now, this is what I would also say to my friends: what else did the credit card industry give us? Yes, it facilitated more transactions, it eased payments between individuals, it made settlement of transactions via Visa so that even disputes could be resolved. But what do you talk about often with credit cards?

Tucker Carlson: 70-something percent of people ended up in debt. And the idea that the problem with America is we don't have enough commerce — we don't have enough creativity, we don't have enough contemplative time, we don't have enough love between people. We don't have enough commerce? Are you joking? We have a lot of commerce.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. And so the argument is that technology will remove friction. But what we have seen is technology removes friction in some ways but introduces it in a variety of others.

Tucker Carlson: That's right.

Saagar Enjeti: Email. Nobody was able to get in touch with you in the 1970s when you left your job — somebody would have to call you on the phone if something happened after 5:00 p.m. Now everybody just sends an email. White collar workers are slaves to their phones — not just for work purposes, but they also have gambling entertainment and Instagram reels and TikTok. And you end up focusing so much on this device that you forget all of the other things that are around you.

Tucker Carlson: Like your wife and your children. One of the most liberating things I ever did was get rid of email. Ten years ago, no email. And I don't think it's made me less productive. I think it's made me more productive.

Saagar Enjeti: Right. And you're in the position to do that. But there are a lot of people who are —

Tucker Carlson: No, it's a privilege. I agree. And I'm very aware of that.

Saagar Enjeti: And I always think — I'm also in a position where I'm my own boss. I can do what I want. That's an incredible feeling. I don't take that for granted for a single day, because I know so many people who are living in effective wage slavery, who are chained to the desk, and they're making good money but they're spending all that money because they need to be able to buy a home or to support their child or pay for daycare. Their wife has to work even though she doesn't want to work. And that's a tragedy to me.

And so what our system has done is — when they say "productivity," they want to make that person more productive. What I want to do is to give that person more leisure, or more ability — to the extent that they're more productive, I want them to be able to use that productivity to make up the time and spend it with their kids.

There was a viral interaction — I think it was Sam Altman — who was talking about being able to create custom podcasts that he said parents could listen to with their children in the car, using ChatGPT and calendars and all of that. He said, "I could imagine the ability to play that custom podcast while the parent drives their kid to school." And any real parent is like, "I don't want to do any of that."

Tucker Carlson: Well, imagine a world in which you're getting parenting advice from Sam Altman. Exactly.

Saagar Enjeti: No. Honestly, a normal society would be like, "Hey, take a pass on that, Sam Altman."

Tucker Carlson: When I drive my kid to school, I want to ask her how her day is.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah. Go fix my washing machine, son. I don't — what are you weighing in on stuff you don't understand? Do not tell me how I should be interacting with my child on the drive.

But that's what ultimately their vision for society is — depersonalized, and entirely sacrificed to the phone, which ultimately is to their profit. The more time I spend on ChatGPT, the more ads they can serve me on the free version, the more of my data that they can suck up. There are no restrictions really on any of that data. They can do anything they want. There have been cases where lawyers used ChatGPT and it turns out that's not privileged, so they're able to subpoena some of your privileged information. Nobody knew that. Nobody even thought about it whenever they were using it for that purpose.

And so the amount of our personal lives that we give over to these things, and then we allow it to make decisions for ourselves — I think one of the real lessons I've learned as an adult is that friction itself is learning, and that there is deep joy on the other side of it. But in this modern world, you have to intentionally put yourself in a situation because it is too easy to outsource your thinking to AI. It's too easy to outsource your entertainment to gambling. It seems an easy way to get rich, but the system — everything is designed to be extractive from you.

And so what do I want from our leaders? I want them to end that. I want them to create a society where everybody at home is not a slave to their phone or to gambling or to any other extractive means, to be able to spend time with their families, to be able to do it on a modest budget. We're not saying it's for free, but on a modest budget to be able to take a vacation or two. And then the most important thing: that your child will grow up and have a better life than you do — which has been broken as a social contract since my generation, the millennials.

Tucker Carlson: That's exactly right.

Will Trump Voters Switch to DSA Candidates?

Tucker Carlson: So just a couple more very quick questions about politics because you follow it closely. Do you think that there is a sizable number of Trump voters — 2024 Trump voters — who would vote for DSA candidates?

Saagar Enjeti: I've thought about this a lot. We don't have enough evidence yet. Michigan will be the big test. There was a sizable contingent of Trump-Mamdani voters. I do know this — we interviewed many of them on our show. We sent our producer out, found many of them. There's a decent overlap, actually maybe 10 to 15% or so of the people who ended up voting for Mamdani or AOC even, who voted for Trump. All of it came down to the anti-war position.

I do think specifically on issue-contingent things like Israel, the war with Iran — there is a massive swing group, which in our modern politics is everything. The ability to swing even 2% of the electorate is the difference between winning or losing in half the states that Trump won in 2024. So if you're asking me, is that contingent, the independent contingent, available — I would say yes.

But I do think that many conservatives harbor a dream — a sad dream, which I wish for too, but which is just not reality — where Fox News-hardened boomers are not going to vote, or are going to turn on Trump. We haven't seen enough evidence of that. We just haven't seen enough evidence in terms of the support for the war with the 65-plus coalition. Self-identified MAGA still seems very appreciative of Trump. Now, the argument there would be self-identified MAGA is a much more restricted group than where it used to be before. And the people who are still in are very much in.

Thomas Massie actually said that to me. He said that the reality is the Republican primary voter was still willing to go with Trump on Israel, and with the Adelsons and with Israel on the Iran war, and they were able to vote him out of office. He lamented that fact specifically about elderly Republicans.

Tucker Carlson: I don't know. How will Trump respond to the midterms? Is there going to be self-reflection, or is it just going to be —

Saagar Enjeti: Launching a ground war. He will be the most — and this is part of the foolishness — do they have any self-preservation instincts? You were around for Clinton, 1998 onwards. That's your life, Mr. President. That's what your life is going to be like under a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. Good luck to you, sir. The amount of money — if you're appointees, I hope you all saved a lot of money. Your legal fees are going to be insane. I hope you all signed up for legal insurance. If you served in DOGE or ICE or in the Pentagon or any of these, you will be called before the Congress. You will be inundated by subpoena. There will be independent counsels and all kinds of absolute insanity waged against you. And it's your fault for allowing the country to get to a position where something like that could be elevated. That will be what his life is going to look like — his last two years in office — if things are trending the way I think they're trending.

Tucker Carlson: And you think they'll lose the Senate?

Saagar Enjeti: It's possible. I'm not 100% on that one. There are still structural advantages for some of the Republicans. It depends on the course of the Iran war. I would say the gas price probably matters more than anything. But we're close enough where — Iran gets a vote in this war too. It'd be very hard to go from "Economic D-Day" back to $3.50 gasoline. So in the reality of where things seem to be going, I would at least say this: they have a 50% chance, which is 25% higher than it should have been. And so if they have a 50% chance, maybe even a little bit more, to be able to take the Senate, we could even see an 2008-style takeover. I could see that. In my bell curve of possibilities, if things go dramatically in one direction, you can see Texas going Democratic, especially with —

Tucker Carlson: Especially with Abbott and Paxton and there's enough drama there. You could see Alaska — there are actually some questions up there.

Saagar Enjeti: I saw a crazy poll out of Kansas. Who knows if it's true — could have just been leaked Democratic opposition research. But as you remember from 2008, you can have Democratic senators in all kinds of places you never would think even possible. And maybe we're still too partisan of a country, but people are very upset. There's a combination of people being very upset, and then a combination of people being very demoralized, and then even the hardcore ones — why do they come out to vote? Because Trump is not on the ballot. And that is a perfect storm for those three things to come together for a potential situation like the one I just laid out.

Tucker Carlson: It sounds right to me.

Saagar Enjeti: Yeah.

Tucker Carlson: I'll check Polymarket for the odds. Saagar, thank you for that. Was so smart and so needed. I appreciate it.