The Sparks Show
Hosted by Spencer Parks, The Sparks Show is a conservative American politics podcast that goes far beyond the headlines. Each episode dives into the core issues shaping our nation — from the economy, healthcare, and foreign policy to the border, immigration, and the culture shaping America’s future.
Featuring influential guests from politics, business, media, and faith, Spencer leads candid, truth-driven conversations that challenge narratives and champion conservative values. Inspired by the legacy of Charlie Kirk, The Sparks Show continues the mission to speak boldly, stand firm in faith, and fight for the principles that make this country great.
Because the truth still matters — and the torch must be carried forward.
The Sparks Show
Ep. 16 "America 250: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly"
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For 250 years, the United States has stood as one of the most influential nations in world history. But as America celebrates its quarter-millennium, an important question remains:
Is the American Experiment stronger than ever—or at a crossroads?
In this special Independence Day episode of The Sparks Show, Spencer Parks and Cameron Collier celebrate America’s 250th birthday by examining the good, the bad, and the ugly of the nation’s past, present, and future.
From the principles that built the Republic to the challenges shaping the next generation, the conversation explores where America has succeeded, where it has fallen short, and what must happen to preserve the freedoms that have defined the country for two and a half centuries.
Topics include:
- The American Revolution and the Founding Fathers
- The Constitution and the Bill of Rights
- Capitalism, innovation, and the American Dream
- Immigration, national identity, and assimilation
- The growth of federal government and national debt
- Election integrity and public trust
- Education, culture, and civic responsibility
- Faith, freedom, and the future of the United States
- America’s role on the world stage after 250 years
Whether you’re celebrating Independence Day, reflecting on America’s history, or thinking about its future, this episode is a conversation about where we’ve been—and where we’re headed next.
What does America look like at 250?
And more importantly…
What will America look like at 300?
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Everybody, welcome back to episode 16 of the Spark Show. I am your host, Spencer Parks, and we have our co-host Cameron Collier in the studio with us today. Happy 250th birthday, America. Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Cheers. We'd like to say that after 250 years of the United States of America, we have ended up in a place with the good, the bad, and the ugly, which I think the good substantially outweighs the bad. And I think that most would agree. America's a better off place than it was probably 250 years ago. But some might argue that we've fallen into decline. But today on the show we're gonna talk a little bit about the good, the bad, the ugly, and see where it all lies. Gavin Newsoms. That's all I'm thinking.
SPEAKER_02He's definitely made it worse.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. In California, Gavin Newsom has definitely made us fall into a decline, specifically with just some of the issues that I talked about in the last part of the show. I think it made some remarks that some of our followers were hot and heavy about, especially regarding natural resources like water, trying to build reservoirs, off-river reservoirs, and nature getting in the way in our society. Water management. That's one of my hobbies. But before we get to that, I would just like to.
SPEAKER_02We can't talk about California.
SPEAKER_00No, we shouldn't talk about California, but we should talk about is this guy right here. And let me see what's going on with those socks right now. Show everybody that we rock socks in the studio. Keep it in the world. Abraham Lincoln socks. Abraham Lincoln. So we should start with a little bit of quotable wisdom from Abraham Lincoln. I think that it's he's arguably one of our most notable and memorable presidents from the past.
SPEAKER_02Now who's that guy? Oh, Abraham Lincoln. Man, when you do when you see that man on the street stuff with people asking Americans about the OnlyFans girls, that's always fun. About history, and they're just like What? You can't be that fucking retarded, right?
SPEAKER_00Alright, guys, so this is from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, March 4th, 1861. This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. Sounds like a bigot.
SPEAKER_02Sounds like an extremist. Yep. Some might argue. That's ridiculous. Doesn't America no one's illegal on stolen land?
SPEAKER_00Well, I would argue that Abraham Lincoln was closer to the time of the land being stolen than we were.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he certainly was, wasn't he? Yeah, and I don't think they were the removal act. Isn't that what it's called? Indian Removal Act.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that was one of those points where I had used the word engine. Let me just walk back some of my comments about extermination happening of the Native Americans because that's not what happened.
SPEAKER_02But rather a polite sort of push in sort of what I love about the internet is you cannot talk shit on the internet, man, because there is just no room for comedic relief. You know what I mean? Where you're just like, you're I got in trouble because I said nuke the Middle East, and it's do I really believe nuke the Middle East? Of course not, but it's just you get so frustrated and you're just like, this is out of control, and it just I think people need to know first of all.
SPEAKER_00Del the most restart whenever the animated characters of Cameron and Spencer start coming out on the show, that is when the satire begins. Yes, it's an expression of frustration, you fucking pussies. I mean, we had somebody on YouTube who just wouldn't leave the show alone with his commentary in our comment section, and he was just like, I've watched it a hundred times and it wasn't funny. I'm like, I can't help you if you don't know what comedy or satire is, you gotta move on. I mean, you've been here for the last 24 hours going back and forth with comments, and he's just but I'm watching it again, and he was serious. I'm like, dude, there's literally funny music that was put in the background of this clip. It's literally like circus music, and then he goes into an animated character form and starts saying funny things, or maybe crazy things.
SPEAKER_01You're like, this is not intellectual debate. Yeah. We're not at the Oxford Union. I have sources, and let me tell you, my sources have other sources. And they sourced it from the correct source.
SPEAKER_00So let's just kind of stick to our script today so we don't go off on one of our tangents that we love to. Oh, we're already tangenting hard. I know. So let's start with the good about the United States.
SPEAKER_02The good of the United States.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so is America still the greatest nation on earth? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, of course, it's simply just our founding documents. It's our foundation. The foundation is what makes us great. It's not the pomp and circumstance, the buildings or the wealth or all that sort of stuff. It's simply the novel act of asserting that human beings have the liberty to choose for themselves without being told by the government what they can and cannot do. Our founding government tells the government what it can and cannot do, which is why the United States, in its adversarial system, has been able to resist this global leftist group think that is contributing to the downfall of Western Europe.
SPEAKER_00I agree. And to complement that, the image on your shirt, our beautiful American flag, is the only flag of unity and inclusion and freedom that we need to represent the United States. Every other thing is secondary to that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So you mean like when people are flying their native home flag or country flags, stuff like that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that good old pride flag that we see flying in front of people's homes.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. This flag knows no hate. Unless I mean, these are some of the most hateful people I think I've ever seen. I mean, they just spit venom. It's crazy. And all you're doing is presenting some sort of opposition to their thinking. Okay, maybe this unintended question. Shut up, bigot. Racist transphobe, homophobe, islamophobe. This guy's a pedo supporter. Oh, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Pedophile lover, you guys are pedophiles.
SPEAKER_02That's because Donald Trump's a pedophile, according to the left-wing blue and on crowd. Never been adjudicated. They did their channel.
SPEAKER_00Never even been investigated. The smear campaign has officially worked for the left.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Well, that's what they deal with. That's politics nature. When you lose the argument, just start going to personal attacks.
SPEAKER_00Oh, what will the liberals do when we have a next conservative president? What will be the next thing? How will they hate him so much to the likes of Donald Trump? Well, I could tell you because Donald Trump's probably going to become a governor somewhere or something like that. So he'll still be looming in the darkness. Oh man. Gosh, who knows? Who knows? And on top of that, I mean, if America is still the greatest nation on earth. Well, I guess that answers the next question. Why do people still want to immigrate here? But I think it isn't because we are the greatest nation on earth or we're a military superpower or we enjoy some of the most freedom of anywhere else in the world.
SPEAKER_02It's more so because there's a huge network of NGOs teaching people how to abuse our asylum laws to gain access. They know exactly where to go, who to go to, how much money they can receive, all these benefits. It's absolutely insanity. That's why. It's what they can get from us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that old thought or the old process of immigrants coming here, let's say from Mexico, to work hard and send money back to their families in Mexico to support them is no longer what happens. The incentive now is we need to make it over the border because for every family member we have in the household that social services in California does not give a crap about when you go to apply for those benefits. We can get more money. We can get cash aid and we can also get food aid. We can also get health benefits. We can get a driver's license. We can live a whole life off of the American taxpayer. So we have an incentivized program now that encourages illegal immigration into the United States.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I would argue they did that on purpose. It's moths to a flame. And the whole purpose of that is to blow up the census numbers in order to gain more representation in the federal government.
SPEAKER_00Oh well, you can't it's not just that, remember. We were propagandists and we were saying that they that illegals were voting in our elections, which there may be little evidence of that right now. But Karen Bass has done a good job, as we discussed recently, that city council finally put it up to amend their charter to allow for the vote to come up to the Californians or the Angelinos.
SPEAKER_02And let me tell you how that's gonna go on November. It's gonna be defeated on election night, and on election month, it's gonna win. That is exactly what's gonna happen. It's kind of it's just mind-numbing and it's it's demoralizing, right? Because we're talking about the greatness of America, and it's just like you have this apparatus of fraud that's just overthrowing our system. And fundamentally, they want to destroy America because they look at they're like basically Iranian propagandists. We are the great Satan, and we must burn it down and start from anew.
SPEAKER_00I would argue, aside from the incentivizing illegal immigration factor, and this was something that I actually talked about a lot back in 2016 about how we're encouraging, let's say, the black community to stay in poverty because what we've seen is a walk away from fathers in the black households. So we typically have a split household in the black community, and we see a lot of single mothers, single fathers. But what the NGOs and the left has done was create these programs on the welfare state that incentivize single parenthood. They cash out and provide more benefits for single parents. And so essentially what we've done is we've incentivized fathers leaving the home. We say, oh, you can leave the home and not take responsibility of your children and leave your wife alone with however many children you have, and they can cash out on more benefits and they'll be okay because we have subsidized housing, we have food programs, we have cash programs, we have all of the programs you could think of to make sure that people don't actually starve, but they're not able to get out of poverty.
SPEAKER_02Well, I remember when I was on food stamps and I'm looking at my benefits and I'm looking at my job, and I'm like, okay, well, I have a ceiling to how much money I can make before I lose my benefits. And so now I'm looking at it, okay, how can I game the system? How can I find a job to get some cash under the table? And where does that lead you to? It necessarily leads you to selling drugs, selling marijuana in my case. And it's yeah, I mean, it's in humans are bound by incentive. And so if that incentive is you're gonna lose this, and so I've always thought about it. You're like, okay, so how can you create this? And it's like at the end of the day, you can't. You can't create a system where these people can keep their welfare benefits, and so for me, it was okay, how can I game the system? How can I keep my benefits? And just the reality of it was I can't. It's just not gonna happen.
SPEAKER_00And well, if you're a productive member of society and you have that ambition to achieve the American dream, the house with the white picket fence, the cars for mom and dad, the beautiful life and childhood for your children, and you want to put them in a suburban community or at least a community where you feel safe, protected, and that your children will thrive and you will thrive as well, then there's no way you could stay in the welfare class. You need to at least move up into the middle class, whether you're at the bottom of the middle the working class, sure. Okay. Middle class, working class has definitely become subcategories and sort of work their way apart. But working class, worst case scenario, is where you want to be as an American that's trying to achieve or participate in the American dream.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah. So when I was thinking about it, it's like, okay, how can you help? And it's at the end of the day, you have to sacrifice the safety net of the government and to take a chance and go out on your own. But it comes down to personal choice and how much baggage you collect along the way. So it's just like anytime, say you have children out of wedlock or you're doing these things that create these responsibilities, well, now you create that level of dependency where it's just like it becomes more and more risky. So for me at the time, I'm only what 18 to 20 sort of region. So it was just I was already in school, so I just continued. And yes, I lost my benefits and it sucked. But after a week or two, you forget about it and you just keep moving on, especially as a 20-year-old. And that's what it absolutely worked out. And what I've learned now in retrospect, it comes down to delayed not gratification. Delayed. Yeah, is it delayed gratification? Mm-hmm. Yeah, delayed gratification. Where you can't live in this weird social media bubble where you think you're gonna be a millionaire in your 20s, because chances are you're nothing special, and the examples that you see are less than a percent of a percent, and that's just not reality. Those are statistical anomalies. Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_00Yep. Moving on, what do we think about the Constitution after 250 years? Has it withstood the test of time? Is it still the greatest political document ever written in the history of the world?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'd say so. But it comes down to it's interesting because it absolutely has withstood this the test of time, but it was also intended to kind of change. Or at least that was the argument. However, when you look at the rules of you need two-thirds, and they already had political parties and systems and adversarial systems, so I don't know how it's supposed to change. I mean, they did do it with women getting the right to vote with the 14th Amendment, slavery, and all that good stuff, and then the the abolition of alcohol, and then bringing alcohol back. So it's it is possible, but at the same time, I don't think they were under active psyops and demoralization campaigns like we are with social media, where everything on social media is designed to get you to hate the United States and to want to see its downfall and its destruction. And it's just constant undermining, and then there's a profit motive of creators to undermine it even further. Pretty wild.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I remember growing up, my dad was still a reader of the newspaper, I think your dad was as well. But I also remember in high school learning about how propaganda was projected out onto Americans, and it was mainly through television sets in the newspaper. And as we evolved through high school, cell phones started becoming more and more in the hands of every student, and we slowly got to the point where social media became prevalent at towards the end of our high school career and everyone had an iPhone. And so then it's a real it's a wake-up call that the propaganda has reached the hands of every American. It's no longer a certain time frame where someone goes and checks in on the TV and sits down to watch, and then they're being exposed to not only their favorite show or their movie, but they're being exposed to propaganda on the TV, on commercials or things like that. Or I don't even think young Americans like myself in our childhood were reading newspapers or window or adolescents, so we weren't exposed in that regard, but we have had a large volume of propaganda flood our minds through social media and just through news coming through on the phones that are now in the pockets and hands of every American.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's I gotta say, man, it's just sort of thinking about the extent of the problem is stupefying. It's like, how do you convince someone that they're do they're being psyoped? I see it all the time where it's just like people just they pull all these separate points, these data points, and they come to a conclusion. And it's just like, okay, if you have a thousand data points and you just draw a line through them to a conclusion, have you actually found the real conclusion? Or is it more so you cherry-picked your data points to create the conclusion? And that's essentially what I see on the internet everywhere, and it's just it's so demoralizing because it's like at the end of the day, I mean, especially like the Charlie Kirk stuff and like Erica Kirk. Oh, now I think the new talking point is his parents are in on it as well. And it's just it's wild to see, and it's just it's this weird thing. It's like the serpent that's eating its own tail, is sort of how social media feels. And I believe that was actually one of the points that we were supposed to go over, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we were gonna get there. Just wanted to touch quickly, though, before we get there on American innovation. I know we talked a little bit about SpaceX and Elon Musk creating the regenerative rockets, reusable rockets, and just technology and business in general in the United States. Do we feel like that's moved in a positive direction over the last 250 years? Obviously, the evolution of business has come a long way since the industrial revolution. Uh we've had a technological revolution, I think, is what they'll probably call this time and age in history books moving forward. But I would say that for the most part, this is going to be a point in history that's been detrimental to the human psyche with social media and its prevalence. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's it's really weird. I don't know, maybe it's my faith that's giving me some resilience, but I see comments flaming me, and it's just like it is what it is. But then people there's other people that take it such to heart, and it's just like, dude, it's just someone reacting emotionally at the end of the day. It's not that big of a deal. It's just words, sticks and stones. So but how do you say that to a 13-year-old, a 12-year-old, a nine-year-old? You know what I mean? They haven't even formed their personality fully, they haven't even faced the world, and then they're facing these just an onslaught of negativity, and just it's something that has younger generations need to be protected from. And it's kind of wild to see. It's I was just at the park the other day with my kids, and there's a group of young girls there, I would say, in the say about 12 years old, and every single one of them has a smartphone. And I'm looking at the parents, and I'm just like, why are you allowing this to happen? You know what I mean? Do you realize the danger that you're putting in your children's hands? Just unlimited access to human debauchery for such a young mind.
SPEAKER_00And it's just, I don't know, like it's this scary cycle of social media that's overwhelmed the parent mind as well, of the parent wanting to participate in social media, it's actively for myself as well. I have to, especially now being involved on the podcast and doing a lot of the marketing for the podcast, you have to learn to do your business and then detach. Yeah. Put it aside. Because if you as a parent are actively or want to be actively involved in social media as your child really wants to be actively involved, then you're going to put that phone in the hands of your child as a distraction mechanism to not have to take accountability for their actions. But what you're not realizing is that number one, you're not participating in your child's life and they're going to remember that when they grow up. And number two, like you're saying, they're being actively exposed to the debauchery going on social media. It is literally pure evil, and there's now become psychological studies coming out stating the harm it's doing to our adolescent children. So something to be mindful of for parents and to make an active and conscious effort to put the phone down. Put the phone down.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know. I struggle with it too. You get stuck in that doom scroll. I mean, they've designed these programs to keep your attention and to constantly do the dopamine spike. And it's crazy, dude. Sometimes you'll be you'll You look at the clock and it's 10 o'clock, and then you're next time you look at it and it's 12 45 and you're like, Holy shit! How in the and I mean, talk I feel like a total degenerate when that happens. And I look around and I'm like, what the hell happened? If there was a camera watching me, you would just see my head down as my little toddlers run around playing with his toys, and it's I'd just be yelling at myself, look up, look up. No, yeah, and that's I mean, that is the potency of the screen. And it's like I remember I was I was in the supermarket and I saw a I would say this lady's about 10 years older than us, so maybe like 45, 40, something like that. And she had an early preteen daughter, and they did her daughter chastised her by saying, Are you looking at your phone again? You can never put it down. And I was just like, whoa. I was like, I didn't judge the lady because I had my stupid ass phone out too. And I'm like, dude, I'm walking around the supermarket right now, scrolling. Can I not like put this thing down?
SPEAKER_00I recently came across a father scolding his son and his friend outside of a grocery store for this exact reason because something must have happened in the store. I didn't see the whole situation unfold, but he was the father was scolding the son, saying, Why are you watching things on your phone while we're walking around grocery shopping? What are you doing? You look like a fool. You can put it down and you can watch and participate in what we're doing right here, right now. That can wait. Yeah. We're turning into a bunch of zombies.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, it you know, it's wild. You go to just look around. It's that's demoralizing in and of itself. You're just like, hey, we're all at the movies, scrolling at the movies because the movie's not unfolding fast enough and it's not giving me enough dopamine hits, so I gotta continue scrolling.
SPEAKER_00You know what my favorite one is is when I'm on the road, I'm at a stoplight, and I've got somebody crossing the crosswalk with their head buried in their phone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then the people that are waiting for them to cross are burying their heads in the phone while they're driving. Oh gosh, it's just a damn recipe for disaster. Oh no, how many times have I felt just that insatiable desire to just smash my phone to pieces because it's just like I don't like something to have that much control over me. And then you know what stops me? What all my pictures. Right. Oh, but I get look at all these great pictures I have of my family. And it is great. It's like I got five years of this, it's amazing. And I watch the freaking the collages, the music, man, start tearing up. You know, so you have this emotional attachment. Not only do you have the dopamine, but then you got the emotional attachment. And it's like, do we guys do we recognize what's going on here? And so I would probably argue that the reason, the, the, the reason why the wealth is accelerating so much is because those who can put their fucking phones down and work are doing it, and the ones that can't are not, they're sitting there scrolling instead of working.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're gonna eventually see that not only is it psychologically degrading to the mind, but it's gonna become it's gonna come at the cost of your time, which we know time is our most valuable asset. And so if you're not dedicating your time to at least working a good portion of your life and you're just stuck in the doomsday scroll, oh yeah, you're gonna become stuck in a vicious cycle. That's an addictive cycle. Yep. So game on the something we gotta be very careful of. Let's quickly cruise through the things, which I'm noticing this was kind of sad because we started off with what was supposed to be the good, but it seems that we've only been able to take the good and circle into the bad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, into the negative.
SPEAKER_00Right. So, as much as all of the things, especially the constitution, immigration, why America's the greatest nation on earth, we've circled back into some of the bad and the ugly, which was like, why has the government become too powerful? Are national debts extremely massive? Is it going to be a long-term threat? We talk a lot about border security and immigration here, declining trust in elections and media and institutions, which people, if they've been watching the show, know our opinions very much on our distrust in elections and things like that. Crime and declining public safety in major cities is the education teaching civics anymore, which I think plays heavily into all of the bad that's coming going on in the nation now with these newer generations and why when they're at the voting age that they're all starting to vote for Marxist, communists, socialists, yeah, and identifying as democratic socialists, which I think is gonna inevitably be a factor that is going to have to be squashed because America can't survive as a socialist country of any sort.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, when you're a young kid, you're always kind of like in this idealistic state, and you like you look through everything through the most ideal. So when you go to a kid and who has been taught to share, share, and then they come across communism versus capitalism, they're like, Well, I've been taught to share my entire adolescence, so of course communism's great, but then you know, of course, I mean, sharing everything, sharing resources, this makes sense, but the problem is you have a disparity between people's ambitions. We're not equal in the things that we want. And then you have greed and corruption, and people, the older they get, they become more and more self-serving, more and more selfish. Or maybe they always were, right? And that's why when you're younger, you're trying to teach kids not to be.
SPEAKER_00But Yep. What's what's your hot take on identity politics and what it's done to the United States?
SPEAKER_02It's fractured it into a million pieces.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, you can just you can constantly just I mean, think about the fractures you can create an identity of just yourself. Just fracture everything based off of your interests, who you are. I am a father, so now okay, now you're separate that. I am a husband, I'm a white male, I'm a British ancestry, I'm uh it's just like at some point it's just like you've just fractured yourself into a million different pieces. And it's just like and then you create these little coalitions of your identity groups, and you've just become hostile to other people and their identity groups, and it's just straight up bigotry at the end of the day. An intolerance for other people and their viewpoints based off of characteristics, immutable characteristics.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's why maybe the left went with the identity politics route was because they knew it could fracture, divide, and cause chaos. Because truly, at the end of the day, if you're an American and you're a patriot, you know that the only identity that matters is that you're an a an American at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, well, what do they say? They say they're a big tent party, right? So they allow all identities into the big tent, and as long as you think like them. If you don't think like them, you're not invited. You're excommunicated. And they're militant with it. I think we we brought up the Anthony Wiener thing last time, or I did, and it's just it's shocking. It's wow, what are we doing here?
SPEAKER_00Speaking of militant, how do you think that's played into the cultural decline of the United States in its current state of unrest?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, just look at the city of Portland and their onslaught of the Antifa queers smashing up the buildings and stuff like that. And with the graffiti and all that, what does that do for property values around there? So that level of criminality necessarily causes a level of decay because who's gonna invest in that neighborhood? Who's gonna build a business? Who's gonna take any sort of risk when there's that level of criminality? So it's just like this sort of left-wing thought pattern of not being hard on criminals creates the urban decay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, imagine you're a real estate investor and you're checking out real estate in Portland, and that your real estate agents, oh well, Antifa operates in this neighborhood, and you as a real estate investor go, oh, aren't they a designated terror organization?
SPEAKER_02Well, no, not even that. See, you're just a left-winger and you think that's just some right-wing propaganda, but you're just like, at the end of the day, you're putting your hard-earned money into an investment property that's probably gonna be being smashed up on a weekly basis. Yeah, and it's just like who's gonna do that? No one's gonna do that. So that's why you lose this level of investment. And then from the government level, there's this adversarial. You're a businessman, so you're automatically a predator. And we fight for the oppressed, so we think because you're a predator, we're we're gonna attack you. And it's just okay, and then you lose business, you lose jobs, and it's just contributes to the overall decay. And it's just like just go look up El Salvador as a perfect example. The left calls him a dictator. He's this evil right-wing, far right dictator, but then go look at their capital and do a before and after of the capital before Bukele and after Bukele. And it's undeniable how clean it is. And then you see some of the opinions of the people on the street and they love him. Well, why is it that they love him? Because they got rid of the actual predators who were causing the high levels of criminality that were contributing to the decay. And now these people can actually breathe and enjoy their capital. They can hang out at the fountains, they can walk around, they can shop again. And it's not looking over, you're like, oh boy, here comes someone down the street, and that's like it creates more discrimination because you're like, you see a guy with a hood on, and it's just, oh boy, what's gonna happen here? And your butthole starts to pucker, and then they walks by okay, thank God.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's just speak to the decline of the United States and poverty and some of the destruction that comes along with that.
SPEAKER_02Wash I should have said Washington, DC. Look at what's what it's been not even two years. And look at how clean the streets are, and all they have is just they just have the National Guard on rotation, on foot patrols, and they're actually investing in cleaning up the various sites.
SPEAKER_00And public safety. Yeah. Speaking of public safety, decline of the culture, where the United States is heading, and will it be recognizable in the next 25 years when we reach 275 years, with the rise of AI coming to light and many of the billionaires involved in the production of AI sounding the alarm of the dangers of AI? What do you think that as we continue towards the future and work with AI, what is what's gonna happen to our class of the working class, the middle class, the upper wealthy class? What is AI gonna do? And is it going to actually improve where we're headed as a United States, or do you feel like it's actually gonna cause more pain, suffering, destruction, and bigger problems for the United States?
SPEAKER_02I venture to guess it's gonna still continue to be this weird 50-50 split of 50% of the people saying it's terrible and 50% of the people saying it's great. It's kind of like how you look at the glass, is it half empty or is it half full? And honestly, it just comes down to in my opinion, it comes down to your faith. It comes down to if you put your faith into human beings, then it's gonna be terrible. If you put your faith into God, it could always be better, but it's not gonna it's not terrible. It's not the end of the world. So personally, what I'm thinking is it's going to be great, honestly. I did a thing where it's like by 2060 all the jobs are gonna be replaced. And well, I mean, if you actually look at what AI is and it's like a large language models and all that, and it just does what it's programmed to do. I don't think it necessarily has this, it's gonna become a sentient being that replaces humans unless it's programmed to do that, if we figure out that sort of programming, but that means that we would have to figure out consciousness and we can't even prove consciousness, so I don't know how you're gonna program consciousness.
SPEAKER_00So we thought that we're facing a existential level of information warfare now, right? And we're at the tip of the iceberg of AI just rolling out. What happens when we start to see the Tesla home robots becoming purchased, and we start seeing these $30,000 personal robots in every home that are doing laundry dishes and all of the at-home tasks, and we start freeing up all of that time that I'm selling my fucking truck and getting one, I'll tell you that.
SPEAKER_02Just worried. I'm worried about it though. Fucking love it. What a great idea. But think about this. You just imagine that you're everything's just being done for you.
SPEAKER_00It's that's how we that's how we evolved from the industrial revolution because everything was started to be created. Appliances became these things that took the oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_02They were like Bro, a robot is picking up after my kids, just like right behind them, and I don't have to do it. They're cleaning up, vacuuming behind the couches and cleaning the windows and cleaning the steel, stealing your dishes, the refrigerator. That's a total fucking disaster zone.
SPEAKER_00It's but it's essentially doing the next step of what appliances were originally developed for.
SPEAKER_02It's take it's replacing all those mundane bullshit activities, and that just sounds great. And I'll absolutely I'd get rid of my truck for that in a heartbeat. Are you fucking kidding me, Dan? But what happens send it off onto my projects in the backyard. Hey, dude, I want to build this and it's gonna take all this physical labor and I don't have the time to do that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so what happens then outside badass out in the working world for the working class when those robots start to become the workforce and start taking out the physical labor where a lot of people earn their income.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I think I think at that point, that is where a serious conversation of this quote unquote wealth tax and these things that the left wing talk about, maybe hot take, maybe the left wing is just a hundred years before its time in terms of taxation and taxing the rich and all that sort of stuff. Because necessarily, I mean, just think about it, if no one's able to work because the billionaires have created this robotic workforce to replace everything, well, what do you do with the human flush bags? Maybe you do what Bill Gates is doing, hey, take this vaccine and kick the bucket. Yes. Oh no, or we're gonna depopulate the earth because Mother Gaia's dying because humans are a what a or maybe Elon Musk's push for UBI, universal basic income.
SPEAKER_00It was just a little too early. But that probably is gonna be something that's gonna be Yang. Was it Andrew Yang? That was Andrew Yang. But I he I hear Elon Musk talk about Yang.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he's talking about it now. No, he's absolutely because he's looking at the realities of it because he's like, dude, look at how much value and all this sort of stuff I'm creating. And dude, that guy's gonna probably be what is the next thing after a trillionaire?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. But I also worry about people not being able to prosper. That scares me. That's that sh that makes me feel like the American. Well, no, I slowly drive.
SPEAKER_02So no, I think that at that point there would have to be a serious conversation about access to those tools, free access to them, to where you can't charge. Because if no one's working, no one has the money, but then you have all these tools. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, it's straight up feudalism at that point, but then you're just the wasted space because they have their robot armies to to be their slaves, and then who are we? Is it gonna be like Elysium with the Matt Damon? Where they just they're gonna be on their little uh space station.
SPEAKER_00My mind just went to space. I was thinking space explorers. Oh, they'll just start sending humans up into space. No, they're gonna send robots into space because no business venture is going to want to risk human life anymore if they can just put a robot in the cockpit.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And but at the end of the day, that's this is where I say where faith comes into play, and humans they always respond to stress and they adapt. Humans are incredibly adaptable. So, but we will see. I don't know. I mean, it I can understand why it's nerve-wracking, but I don't necessarily think it's gonna be the worst thing in the world.
SPEAKER_00Well, we'll look back on this in 25 years.
SPEAKER_02What do you think is gonna happen?
SPEAKER_00You let me flesh out your vision of AI, and I honestly I it could be I'm biased. It could be that I'm biased because I've seen grown up with the movies which were I feel like looking, not maybe predicting, but projecting on what a society of robots could look like in the future. Yeah, dystopia. Yeah. We there's literally the movie Artificial Intelligence, where everything is just this dystopian, sort of apocalyptic robotic future. And I honestly, the more you think about AI and the diluting of American participation or just human participation in everyday life, just like I'm talking about, you bring a robot into the home, you're losing a part of that everyday life of your chores, and you say, Yeah, well, that that's great, but that's always the pitch. The pitch is always it's gonna be great. Just like when they invented the dishwasher or they invented the washer and drying machine. It took away it freed up time, like you were saying. You were saying, Oh, it's gonna free up so much of this time of us doing all of these monotonous activities or this intensive labor activities. Yeah. And it is great, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It is nice because I mean, dude, it's this okay, so because everyone kind of has a scarcity mindset, and well, the abundance that this can create, because imagine that you literally have a workforce that can just work 24-7. And one of the greatest things I think of like food security. Imagine literally just having robots out in the field just going out and burning weeds as opposed to humans spraying pesticides on weeds and what it's gonna do to the nutritional viability of our soils, and think about our watersheds and how we're depleting California water is always a problem. But imagine if you have this robotic workforce out there that's recharging the aquifers by the way it manages rainwater. And that's one of the things I I got I'm super passionate about is recharging the aquifers. And it simply just comes down to how you manage the water. And if you look at the way our streets and our municipalities manage water, it's how do we get the water off as fast as possible to prevent flooding? And it's the exact opposite of what you want. You actually want to encourage the flooding, but obviously not in zones that would negatively affect human health, right, human hazard. And so you create these zones of flooding that can then soak back into the ground and recharge the underground aquifers.
SPEAKER_00Well, speaking of agriculture, I would like to see AI heavily implemented in our agricultural sectors. I would like to see innovation and robotics that could pick strawberries, harvest grapes for wine, do all the things that manual labor from humans is required to do, especially from illegal migrant labor. That would be a huge focal point. Well, I mean, the Democrats say it themselves. Who's gonna pick our crops? The robots. The robots, guys, and that should honestly be where their money's going to. And hey, you might think that the billion or trillion dollar investment into those robotics now is a bad idea, but when those are still going and people aren't dying out in the fields from heat exhaustion, and you're able to have robots working 24-7, and the productivity starts to surpass your investment, well, there's the trade-off. And I think that what when we are able to eliminate the argument that illegal immigration is needed for that type of stuff, then the better we will be in coercing the Democrats to back off those arguments. I mean, it will definitely help in that regard because then what's gonna be your incentive into allowing these people to do these jobs?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I know, you know what? It's funny. I'm sort of being challenged right now, kind of thinking extrapolating on the future. And it's just like honestly, this extreme level of wealth and artificial intelligence is probably gonna turn me into a lefty. I'm just being straight up honest about it because it's like at a certain point their arguments are gonna take hold because there's gonna be this impassable barrier of entry that's going to be created by this level of technology. Like they're seeing the symptoms of it, and it's absolutely right. But it's okay, how can we do this in such a way through legislation to where we can still encourage because we We want that technology, we want that innovation, but we don't we want to reduce the harm of inequality. And we want to create a level playing field and level access. And at the end of the day, what is it that people are seeking? They're well, they're seeking money to live. So if they no longer need to seek money to live, then what do they need to do? Well, you I guess you can do whatever you want to do, and you just need a basic level of income, something that's going to provide for your housing or something. So it's going to be it's going to be interesting. It is sort of scary because it's just like we we have one foot in the past of the white picket fence and the lawn and all that, but this sort of future almost seems like apartment blocks and amenities pool. I don't know, who knows? Very Elysium-like. Yeah, and you're hoping that it's not going to be like Eastern Europe block communism where it's just like everything looks the same, everyone can only have a white, small ass car. Like you kind of you would hope to have the diversity of the of America that's created all these different flavors.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's weird because we keep talking about is the American dream dead? And I think we use that question a lot because we feel it's becoming it is dying out of reach and it's slowly fading because we're working towards this utopian artificial intelligence type lifestyle. And so we got to take it with a grain of salt. Oh man, I tell you.
SPEAKER_02It sounds like I said, man, what a great irony for me. That's why I'm not married to my viewpoints, because things change. And when the arg when the evidence becomes just absolutely blatant, I'm very skeptical because I want to believe in that because just for myself and for my family, I want to be able to have that opportunity to create business, to move on, to create wealth for myself or for my kids to create wealth, where I don't want it to just be by committee, where it's just like you work for the party. And that's like your only mobility is working for the party and the party system. And that's what scares me about left-wing collectivism, because it seems to be like when you look around the world, it always devolves into the party apparatus.
SPEAKER_00Well, like any great American that came before us, I think we're trying to ensure that our children and their grandchildren have a world that was left better off than when we got here. And it's hard to predict, it's hard to understand, it's hard to know what's going to happen. So all we can do is pray and maintain our faith and thank God for the opportunities that are set before us right now in this time. And keep reaching for the stars and don't give up hope.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, absolutely. It's all about gratitude. Even gratitude in the face of despair. Always be thankful for what you have because it can always be worse. Never ask if things could be worse because they can be. And I mean, that's kind of like how I've always operated. And by the grace of God, I've been given things that I'm like, did I even work for this? Like, how did this happen? And I would argue by grace alone. And so I know it's kind of hard for people to swallow that, but I think Jesus said it best. Do the birds fret over what they're gonna eat, or does their creator feed them every single day?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, one last word before we wrap this up. I think it's important to be proud to be an American, be proud of your heritage, and most importantly, be proud and faithful to the Almighty God. Yes.
SPEAKER_02At the end of the day, where else would you want to be? Do you really want to be anywhere else than in at least a Western society? Absolutely. You know what I mean? Everyone seeks to come to that because of the opportunities that are created. And well, why is that? It's because of these principles of liberty and freedom where people are able to express themselves and to create for their own, and they're not bound by the government. Or one of the biggest things that I see with my wife's own government is you have this sort of creativity, and they create a business, and they get to a point where the government just seizes it for itself, and then all of a sudden you see the cousins operating the business. And you're just like, How can you create a prospering society where the government seizes your success? You can't.
SPEAKER_00And on a last note, we don't ever want that, and that's why socialism will never work, and communism will especially never be able to exist in the United States. And with that, happy Fourth of July, everybody. Go light some fireworks, let the mortars fly in the sky, hear them roar, be safe, don't drink and drive, enjoy an exceptionally great Fourth of July celebrating America's two hundred and fiftieth birthday. And don't forget to be a patriot. Love your country and your fellow Americans. See you on the next episode of the Spark Show.