The Revolt of the Public: Why Institutions Are Crumbling and the Internet Is Reshaping Democracy | Martin Gurri

Welcome to another thought-provoking episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. Today, we dive deep into the ever-evolving world of information and media with our guest, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst and renowned author of The Revolt of the Public. In this enlightening conversation, Gurri examines the intricate dynamics of elites, the impact of political figures like Trump and Obama, and the transformative potential of AI in modern governance. We explore the increasingly vital role of new governance models such as charter cities and network states, alongside the significant shifts driven by digital and artificial intelligence. Gurri challenges the notion of societal chaos by contrasting online turmoil with real-world stability, drawing on his personal experiences and historical parallels. From the influence of Elon Musk on free speech and media control to the relentless barrage of information in the digital age, this episode uncovers how we can navigate these turbulent waters. Gurri's insights into communication, persuasion, and the pursuit of truth within complex systems remind us of the importance of adaptation and critical thinking. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Rosetta Stone: Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com https://www.rosettastone.com/ Miro: Bring your teams to Miro’s revolutionary Innovation Workspace and be faster from idea to outcome at https://miro.com https://miro.com/ Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Found Banking: Stop getting lost in countless finance apps and try Found for free at https://found.com/impact Momentous: Shop now at https://livemomentous.com https://livemomentous.com/ and use code IMPACT for 20% your new Momentous routine Factor: Get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month while your subscription is active at https://factormeals.com/impacttheory50 with code impacttheory50 https://factormeals.com/impacttheory50 StopBox: Get 10% off, plus Buy One Get One Free for the StopBox Pro with code IMPACT at https://stopboxusa.com https://stopboxusa.com/ ********************************************************************************************* What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************************************* Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************************************* LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************************************* FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. I'm Tom DiLio, and this is Impact Theory. My guest today is Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public. And he's here to lay out what I believe is one of the most critical shifts happening in the world today. Here's the deal. The rise of social media and the internet has shattered the old ways of power and control.

• 1:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Governments, corporations, even the media, they're all scrambling to adapt. Meanwhile, the public is more informed and more enraged than ever before. But here's the problem. With so much information, figuring out who to trust and how to act based on the information has never been harder. Martin has spent decades studying these dynamics, and his insights are like a map for navigating the chaos. If you've ever felt like the world is spiraling in every direction, Martin's insights will give you the clarity you need to make sense of it all. Let's jump in with Martin Gurri. Martin, we are living through a moment unlike any other in modern history by my estimation. Institutions are collapsing, trust and leadership is at an all time low,

• 2:10Tom Bilyeu?

  and narratives that once held people's rapt attention, literally holding society together are all falling apart. You wrote a book about this called "The Revolt of the Public." Now, my audience doesn't just want to understand the chaos, they really want to understand how to thrive in this moment. So if it works for you, let's start here. What is the major force that's shaping this revolution? And how can people thrive in a moment where truth is so fragmented?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that was my job at CIA, was to cover the media of the world, and it was an easy job. Looking back on it, I didn't think so at the time. One never thinks, well, the job is easy. But looking back at it, it was an amazingly easy job. You know, each country had one or two, either newspapers, or like the BBC would be a broadcast, that were authoritative. And if the president wanted to know, okay, what are the Brits saying about this policy? You go to the BBC, or what are the French doing it? You go to Le Monde, and it was very easy. And then, all of a sudden, everything went haywire. There's absolutely haywire, as the internet, this gigantic tsunami of information riding on,

• 3:24Speaker 01

  you're propelled by a digital earthquake. It just changed everything in an almost immediate way. So if you were like me, dealing with information, you didn't know where to go. It was like this tremendous mass. I often toss out the figure, in the year 2001, information was produced that was double, double the volume of everything that had preceded, all the way back to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture. Year 2002, double 2001. And it hasn't been quite exactly that proportion, but mostly it's been like that.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  And if you chart it, it kind of really looks like a tsunami. It's this incredible spike. And to begin with, it was for me a where the hell do I go for information? What's authoritative in this mass of stuff? Who are these people? Where do you go? You don't want to miss anything, but there's no way in an almost infinite information set that you're not going to mostly miss everything, right? But in fact, that was not the important thing. The important thing was not the volume, but the effect of the volume. And information structure is an ecological force. It changes the landscape. And therefore, it changes the way we behave. At that time, I was sitting at a very high perch of CIA.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I had a view of the entire media of the world. And I could see as countries digitized that tsunami rolled around the world. Right behind it, there was ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence. And this was beginning in the O O's all the way up to when it finally erupted out of the digital world into the real world with the Arab Spring and everything that has followed since.

• 5:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you think that humans can only thrive if they have a limited amount of information being projected to them from credible sources?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I am not a norm maker. I think humans can thrive under very many different conditions, you know? We have lived in the deserts and in the Arctic. And informationally, it can be the same. You can live in an overabundance or you can live with scarcity. It's just learning how to deal with it. And that is not something that happens on a personal level. It happens at an institutional level. And it is not something that happens overnight. It happens over decades and sometimes over centuries.

• 6:02Tom Bilyeu?

  How would you characterize this moment? As the institutions are collapsing, as we are left with no sense of what is true, or maybe even more terrifyingly, everybody thinks they know what is true and it is no longer shared. How would you characterize what humans are like in this environment?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  We're essentially at the very early stages of this colossal transformation from the industrial age, which was very top-down, very, "I talk, you listen," very, "I have the information, I'm Walter Cronkite and I'm gonna pass it on to you," or, "I have the precedent, I'll give you a speech and reveal to you something new that you haven't heard before," to this new order that doesn't even have a name yet. So we have no clue what's coming next. So how do we cope with it? How do we deal with it? With a great deal of confusion. Having said that, I think what you talked about truth, to me, has a tremendously positive side.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  I think, I think as an analyst, the question you always ask yourself is, "What don't I know?" Right? You think you know something, and that scares me. When I think I know something, I go, "I'm missing something, okay? What don't I know about this picture?" Particularly if what you, what you think you know conflicts with what your eyes are telling you, right? You know, there've been all these analyses about Trump, for example, and you go, "Well, like, how can they live with this kind of cognitive dissonance when they say all these things?" And you, you know, they call him Hitler and you see him frying french fries in a McDonald's, you go, "Like, this doesn't make any sense," you know? I think it's healthy for, I think the industrial age dealt from authority.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  It was a moment of tremendous optimism, tremendous elitism.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Marked on expertise and, and you know, going to the right schools and then getting the, the, the right scientific knowledge and so forth. And it thought it knew. And when Walter Cronkite told you this is the way it was on December 26th, 2024, you saluted and you said, yes, Walter, you're right. Why? But we had another way of knowing otherwise. I think truth, I think you, the human relation to truth is very shaky. It's very shaky. It doesn't exist. I'm not a postmodernist. I believe if a truck is coming up at me and I can see it, I'm not gonna sort of like, postmodernize it away. I'm gonna get out of the way, right? So, but, but that said, what we know about complex systems, for example, and, and society is one.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Every human being is one. Um, so what do you know about yourself? Just to put it that way, is not very much, is not very much. And I think it's healthy if this new chaos makes us question, you know, every time something comes up on TV, you say, no, oh, that was Walter's, that must be true. No, you go, I, I have no idea who this person is. That doesn't sound right to me. I'm not rejecting it, I'm just filing it away. It needs confirmation, right? Well, that is the scientific method in the end, right? It's that you need, you need to have enough, um, witnesses and, and enough circumstances

• 9:19Speaker 01

  in which the, the, the proposition gets stressed enough that it either breaks down, it's false, or it, it endures and you can say, well, it's, it's truth. And even when it's true, not to get too philosophical, is temporary, right? Because the whole purpose of science, I mean, science at one point, um, believed that, uh, there was no such thing as a vacuum in space. It was impossible to have vacuum. Well, there is a vacuum in space. Uh, so truth advances, but it has to be understood. It's a tiny little advance on this vast darkness of ignorance that we carry around with us.

• 9:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Before I read your book, I had become obsessed with this idea that we may need a limited amount of information given to us. I don't think I Was saying from on high, but certainly we were thriving more in an environment that had a limited amount of information such that we could all construct a shared view of what is true. Now, the reason I think that that is probably true is because of the dispersion of intellect. So you have people at the top, you have people that I'll call right below. So you've got the elites, you've got the almost elites, you've got sort of the average person. You've got people that don't have the cognitive horsepower to do what I think you're proposing.

• 10:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And the reason that top down has done as well as it has for as long as it has is because like if you take religion as the ultimate pinnacle of top down, a solo God tells you act like this and life is going to be good.

• 10:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And because it's from my perspective, human made wisdom that has lasted the test of time. So if you take that as a definition of religion, the wisdom that lasts over time, you get this, hey, think like this, act like this, your life will be better. People believe it comes from God and so they just do that thing and society hangs together. And now we're seeing this wrecking ball blast through everything because of the preponderance, the tsunami of information, as you were calling it. And I worry that because there are people that don't have the intellectual horsepower to make it, because you have people, the sort of average band, they don't even want to think about it because you have a layer above them that are almost elites and are probably annoyed at the elites. And I think this is a large part of the battle on social media.

• 11:38Tom Bilyeu?

  You now run into a landscape where the people who just need somebody because they don't want to think about it, or they don't have the intellectual horsepower to deal with it, to have a model that works. And without that, it seems like you're doomed to repeat Arab Spring, where you almost have something and it collapses, or Occupy Wall Street, you almost have something and it collapses. Please prove me wrong.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think it's an element of truth in that. I would just say a couple of things. Number one, no doubt when Adam and Eve looked back over their shoulders and saw that angel with a fiery sword, they thought, geez, life was so much better back then, you know, we could talk to God directly and, you know, we could walk around naked and nobody cared.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Well, they had bitten the apple. They had bitten the apple and you can't go back. All right, so we have bitten the apple. We cannot go back. We are now where we are and we have to deal with this structure of information that is before us and that is rolling. I mean, you have artificial intelligence just coming around the corner. And I will tell you another, another aspect of that that contradicts what you said somewhat. And it's a story I've, or kind of a parable I have borrowed from a person I respect a lot, Antonio Garcia Martinez, who, among other things, a very accomplished author and IT guy, whatnot. It's a fellow Cuban.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And he says, imagine you got into a time machine and went back to the Thirty Years' War. Thirty Years' War, as you know, was the most destructive war Europe has ever known, including World War II per capita. It decimated Germany. It took generations for the population to come halfway back up to what it had been. And why did the Thirty Years' War happen? Well, there had been a previous tsunami of information, a previous shift in the landscape. It's called the printing press. So if you went to the typical man in the street and the Thirty Years' War said, well, what do you think of the printing press? That person would have said, it is the most horrible, destructive, conflictive, insane thing.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Look over here, these people are coming out of their church and they have a creed. And look over there, those people are coming out of their church and they have a printed creed and their six words are different and they're killing each other because of those six words. They can now see the words, whereas before it was like, who cares? Nobody knows, right? The Thirty Years' War would never have happened without the printing press. And this man in the street would have said, tear it up, destroy it, get rid of it. Okay, now we know today because of, you know, time has passed, that it was the most liberating communications invention ever. I mean, the internet's gonna have to work real hard to come up to what the printing press did. It gave us the American Revolution, it gave us the French Revolution.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Most importantly, it gave us a scientific revolution, which would have been totally impossible without a printing press maintaining all the data. So scribes couldn't mess it up. So. Your idea that top-down is good, top-down is good if they're just one top. But if there are twenty tops and they're all saying I'm the top and they all have the means of communication that explains to them, well, this is why they're bad, because those six words are missing, then you have an even worse chaos. We are not anywhere near thirty years' war level of disorder or violence or war. So we are doing way better than what the printing press brought upon us.

• 15:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, if I were to append that with the word yet, we're not doing as bad yet, would that feel accurate? Or do you think that this is more of a moment of dissolution where instead of rallying together, we're actually all about negating, tearing things apart?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  How do we adapt to the structure? We adapted to the printing press. How do we adapt to the digital universe and possibly the AI universe coming right behind it? How do we do it? There are many, many ways of doing it. My concern, one of the major reasons I wrote the book, is that at the end of this very destructive process, it is destructive, no question about it, a whole system is being torn down, it's like the airplane is being replaced in mid-flight. It's not an easy thing to happen. But at the end of that, I would like to see democracy, what we call democracy, our system of government, with all its rights and protections, be at the end. And there's no reason why it can't be

• 16:21Speaker 01

  and it cannot be, it shouldn't, it could be enhanced, because when you think of the great big hierarchical structures, the mass structures of the industrial age, they're not particularly democratic. You know, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in its classical day, they were not particularly democratic. They got told who to vote for, right? A guy sat in a room, picked that nominee, and then everybody got told that's your man and you voted for that person, right? And some variety of that is still happening today.

• 16:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say, that sounds pretty familiar.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little more chaotic perhaps, but it's still happening. So.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  The diesel world is a flatter world. It's you're always gonna need hierarchy. I think we could dispense with hierarchy. That would be utopian and counter actually to human nature. But it can be a much flatter hierarchy and you can see the top more and you could trust it better because you can see what's going on. There's not this opacity that industrial age mass hierarchies have. So it could be. I'm saying that the thing is going to be the potential for a more democratic form of government that utilizes the internet to basically pipe them to public opinion on a real term basis. It's there and there's no reason on earth why it can't happen.

• 17:38Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, I want to quote you back to you. I think this is a pretty interesting quote, given what you just said. "The unbundling of truth makes the business of democracy ever more difficult to conduct. As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream. The result, I'll repeat, has been paralysis for democratic government." So is it merely an act of faith that we will get to the other side of this? Or do you see an actual path?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  The future is an impenetrable veil, right? I'm not gonna pretend that I know what was gonna happen. I never make predictions. I worked for CIA. Prophecy was its business model. And what tomorrow looked like yesterday, which believe it or not, happens more than you think. Then they were right. But what the precedent wanted was discontinuities. And every discontinuity CIA got wrong. And I learned, never make a prediction. Complex systems are inherently unpredictable. So.

• 18:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me approach this then from a different angle.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Let me finish out because I wanted to get to the. We are on an early stage. The quote you mentioned is 100% accurate. I think has gotten even worse since I wrote that. I'm describing a stage in what is maybe a century long process, maybe more.

• 18:53Tom Bilyeu?

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• 19:38Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:21Tom Bilyeu?

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• 21:04Tom Bilyeu?

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• 21:10Tom Bilyeu?

  We're back. Let's dive right in. Something that I remind myself frequently is while the long arc of history really does seem to bend toward justice, it does not care about any individual life or generation. It will just thrash them. The 30 years war being a very prime example. Let me approach this from a slightly different angle. You said something earlier about adaptation. And so, please know, as I ask my questions, I'm far less interested in you predicting the future, though if you have a prediction, I will take it. But more knowing my audience cares about how do I navigate this moment well? So if we take that concept of adaptation, how does one adapt to what's going on? Now, I see

• 21:51Tom Bilyeu?

  the battle right now being between the sort of Sam Harris's of the world, who I love Sam Harris, and I think he's such a brilliant thinker. But the way that he's coming at the world is very much, we need a new set of elites. And they need to be able to put some constraints on what people are saying and talking about. Otherwise, you're going to get Donald Trump's forever, and it's just madness spiraling off into infinity. And then you get the Elon Musks of the world. And I think there's no coincidence to the fact that these two briefly were going at each other publicly. Elon Musk, who represents something far more, I'm going to buy X, I'm going to make sure that people can say whatever they want to say and make it freewheeling. That grand collision between the path we should be adapting down is either control, or the path that we should be adapting

• 22:35Tom Bilyeu?

  down is opening things up and maybe letting nature run more of its course. I believe, if I'm not misquoting you, you've referred to as a prologue to freedom. And so, this idea of, yeah, a prologue to the ideology of freedom versus the ideology of control that we have now. So, without predicting where this goes, what do you think is the right path that people ought to be pursuing?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  I am a free speech absolutist. I come from Cuba, okay? I was born there. And when you start constraining, you start by doing it for very noble reasons. You want to protect ignorant people from falsehood and from making mistakes. And then suddenly you realize, but I can also...

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You know, that guy over there, he keeps yelling about how bad I am. You know, he's sort of lying about me, even when it's not a complete lie. So he should be censored too. And, and you know, I'm such a great person and that never gets, somebody should, anybody who doesn't say I'm a great person, they get censored too. The human nature being what it is, look, our founding fathers knew this perfectly well. They put that first amendment there for a very brilliant reason. We're so protected, thank goodness, because of that.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So then you have a free for all. The freedom means free for all right now. So how do you deal with that? I mean, part of what one has to get over is the industrial mindset that, you know,

• 24:08Speaker 01

  this is true or false. This is false or this, you need, the platonic truth is to be arrived at. It can only be arrived at, as you keep saying, through authority. Some authority somehow or another is able to pipe into the cosmos and squeeze truth, you know, platonic truth out of it. And then the rest of us thankfully receive it from that person. That, that's gone, that doesn't happen. So what you have to do to decide is, don't look at it in terms of truth and falsehood. Look at it in terms of what is this message about? Who is sending it? Okay? What was the intent in sending this message? Does it look like that intent has worked? Did it backfire? What was the intended audience of this message?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Why that audience and not another? Who's behind the, the author? Is it just a guy on a blog? Is there some millionaire paying him to do it? My friend Andre Mier says, "The most interesting news is fake news." And the most interesting part of fake news is the fake part. Because if I'm trying to tell you something that I think is true and I happen to be wrong, well, that's just an error. That's neither here nor there. But if I'm consciously lying to you. I mean, if I were you, I would say, well, that's fascinating. Why is Martin saying this thing, which I know to be false, to me? What does he expect to get from that? What's behind all this?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  We need to look at the information um set, this vast, vast information set, which needs to be mapped in some ways, um, the way that a propaganda analyst would do. Because that's what it is. Almost all communications is some form of propaganda. I don't know if you have children, but if you do, listen to yourself. Yeah, well, okay. I was studying this at CIA when I was, my children were like early teenagers or something like that. I suddenly realized that everything everybody says to anybody, particularly inside one's family, is persuasion, attempts at persuasion, the mildest kindness you're trying to persuade. So everybody's trying to persuade everybody. Understand that to begin with.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  In other words, don't look at it in terms of black and white, truth, falsehood, authoritative and integrity and false and dirty Putin back here. Look at it in terms of what's going on. Why are people trying to persuade others? Why lies? Why would somebody lie to persuade? Who gets persuaded? Does anybody ever get persuaded? Separate conversation. I don't believe that happens. Persuasion is the hardest thing to do ever, okay? Most of us believe that you can't persuade. We were born that way. Governments absolutely believe they can persuade. Uh, and dictatorial governments and sometimes democratic governments think they can persuade with lies. So understand what goes underneath the information and above the information and the audience.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And you suddenly are much wiser than you are by going from some little scream coming at you and you have to say, was it true or false? And if it's true, then this, or if it's false, then that, and that's it. It's a much more complex process. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think I would have done that. People did that. Propaganda analysts did that in the old industrial world, where life was a lot simpler. Um, and I think you got at what was going on in that world in terms of information much better than by just going, the old Walter Cronkite, oh, it's Cronkite, therefore it's true syndrome. So that would be. And I think this is something that needs to be taught very young at school. You know, instead of the brothers teachers, of course, have that, well, I'm telling truth.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  And now you I want to protect them from falsehoods. No, no, you want to make them um um robust. You want to make them so that they thrive from from a very chaotic environment. They get information out of it that a simpler environment wouldn't get wouldn't give them. So that's the way I would go about it.

• 28:09Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, so as a free speech absolutist, what do you think about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it prevented the greatest run around on the First Amendment in my very, very long life in the United States of America. Okay, I think it prevented that. When he said he was going to buy Twitter,

• 28:30Speaker 01

  the blowback was so disproportionately huge. People were saying things like, it's going to destroy your democracy. If if somebody allows things to be said on Twitter, it really perplexed me. All right, I believed at that time that it was kind of like a bunch of elites who kind of in a conformistic ways that all agreed their words we're not going to use. There are people whose opinions we want to kind of shadow ban or whatever, or just silence. Um, and it never occurred to me, never occurred to me that the United States government was behind it with the Twitter files. And then the work that people like Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger did.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Um, it it came out that no, the government was absolutely the beginning of this thing. It was a governmental structure that was erected very surreptitiously, very behind our backs. Um, to make sure that certain people didn't get the resonance of the of the web. It began with um with COVID, the pandemic. But as I say, it quickly became, well, you know, we're preserving democracy by silencing Trump and his allies. And then it was like from there on, it was like anybody who does Russia. If you're against the Ukraine war, then you're probably a Russian too. So the whole range of normal, everyday, sometimes, as Mark Zuckerberg recently said, um, parody science, right?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Parody sites that were just making fun of things got either kicked out of of social media or shadow banned.

• 30:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's uh, it has been eye opening to say the least. Elon has been saying something recently that's really freaked a lot of people out in the media, which is you are the media now, meaning the users of the X platform. What do you take from that? Like, what is that collision? Why would the media be up in arms about the people being the media?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not really big on slogans and I think Elon, like any really, really good internet person, is just like a fountainhead of memes and slogans and whatnot, like a geyser, you know? But I think what you encounter there is the old world looking at the new world. The old world, you had a press pass. And man, this press pass got you into places nobody else could go to. And you were connected to these prestigious institutions, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And that made you a special kind of person. And now here's this clown Elon Musk, who maybe he can build a rocket, but what the hell does he know about media?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Saying, no, you are the media. Anybody is a media. Anybody can say anything. So any ignorant person can say whatever ignorant thing they're going to say. And that is somehow equivalent to me with my press pass, who I've just talked to the president? How can that even be possible? And they're angry. They're angry. It's, I mean, it's, it, they're dying out, by the way. This is a slow process of, what you hear, all those screams that you hear are death agony of

• 31:46Speaker 01

  a whole set of media instruments that cannot possibly survive. Just my question of business model into the digital age.

• 31:56Tom Bilyeu?

  The digital age, it is a fascinating shift that is happening. And to be a part of it is certainly bizarre, not something that I ever thought would happen. However, the very interesting thing that seems to be coming out of it is when you unlock the floodgates, what comes out is anger. Why? What is it about this moment or whatever that is really pissing people off?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  There are structural reasons for the anger.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  I'll give them to you, but then I'm gonna back off and say, well, maybe not.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  When you are, when you are like you and me right here, we can just talk. All right. I mean, we're on Zoom. There's two little boxes, me and my, my box and your box. We can talk all we want to. Now, let's say there's three hundred million boxes and we're all talking at the same time. Who's going to be heard? The person with the absolutely loudest voice. What is a really good way to be loud? To be angry. I mean, it's a fight for attention. Okay? And I, um, and I think structurally, you, so if I, there's three hundred million and there you are, there I am. And I say, well, I hate you. You're, you're a communist. They say, well, you're a fascist, right?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  And suddenly, th- these three, two hundred and fifty boxes start to align behind us. Oh, he's the fascist group. We're the good people. Uh, he's a communist group. We're the good. And suddenly you're gathering attention by screaming and yelling and doing that. That is structurally stuck in, um, in the very fabric of the internet. Um, it, it's, uh, what Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, having stolen the phrase from me, uh, calls the Tower of Babel, uh, which is true. Yeah, we're suddenly all speaking different languages and yelling at each other. So having said that, it's as much a rhetorical post as it is a real anger.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  For example, Elizabethan gentlemen wrote sonnets to their girlfriends, right? Well, I'm pretty sure that that's not the way they spoke. It was expected of them, you know, you, you have somebody you're wooing or you want to woo or want to get, get on with. You have to be a good poet. And I think.

• 34:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And so anger is the.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I think anger is, anger is, is the rhetorical post. If you want to get on, you want to have it, Trump, the, the twenty sixteen circa Trump was a master of that game. Okay? So you basically troll somebody, they yell back at him. The people who hate the, the people who are yelling, get behind them. Suddenly he's a leader because he's the one who sparked the, the controversy. And the crowds behind the two groups get bigger and bigger, but he's. Standing in front, because he's the one who started it, alright? It's a pose, it's a pose. I think there are many angry people, I think there have always been many angry people. This is just an era where communications are expected to be angry at certain, like for example, politics. Because otherwise, nobody hears you, it's the accepted rhetorical pose.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  I tell you what, I always tell the story of the laptop on the window.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  I look at my laptop where I'm looking at right now. And everybody's fighting everybody, everybody's yelling, it's the end of the world as we know it, right? And you kind of scratch your head and go, how can we, how can we fix this? And then I lift my, my eyes a little beyond where my laptop is, there is a window. And in that window, it's usually open. And I can see my neighbors walking their dogs and jogging. And the children come along, play ball, and I'm going like, okay. This doesn't look like the end of the world to me. We need to wrench our eyes from the laptop and look, and I think as a Cuban, it's easy for me to, having been,

• 35:48Speaker 01

  had my childhood experience in a country that was really, really troubled, really troubled. You know, the, the, the streets were, you could have a mob out there or something. And instead, when I look over there, the gardens are all clipped, you know? The worst thing about it is, you know, the lawnmowers, everyone's got a lawnmower, I mean, that's the, the big complaint around here. So it's, you have to look at American society. And I think, I mean, the internet is correct, the tsunami is correct. The institutions, the old industrial institutions are being battered. And, and, and are, are in some parts, you know, falling to pieces. But do not despair.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  There's still a whole lot that's sane and healthy out there between us. It just happens outside of the laptop, which among the most terrible things that the internet has, is the fact that I can call you all kinds of names. And you can't do anything about it.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Same room and I called you all guys your name, I'd get a broken nose. So I'd be damn sure not to call your names. Uh, in the internet, I can call you whatever I want and you may not even know who I am, much less, you know, get even with me. So there is a lot of incentives to, you know, be that angry person, to say the extreme thing. But that's the internet. And that's, there's a difference between the two. The, the one world, the two worlds are connected and, and more, ever more deeply connected. Um, so I, I, that's my, my proviso.

• 37:26Tom Bilyeu?

  More with Martin Gurri after this quick break. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 38:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Given all that, what does it tell us that Trump got reelected? Is it just that he's so good at cutting through the noise or does he represent the anger?

• 38:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm a big believer that the, while it's not the sum total of the anger and frustration, but I believe this is an economic phenomenon. I know that you don't. So I'd love to hear how, why you think Trump got reelected if economics is not what's driving this.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  I mean, economics always plays a part of everything, so I you can't completely dismiss it. But you know, when you look at all the uh like the year twenty nineteen, right before the um um pandemic. It was like the peak revolt of the public year. Okay, they were like, they were like, if I remember correctly, at least twenty five major street insurgencies. And the thing that I found most fascinating was some of it was in democratic countries. Some of it was in pretty tough dictatorships like Algeria, for example. Some of it was in very poor countries, uh Sudan. Uh, some of it was in very wealthy countries like France.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  So I don't think either the revolt of the public, which is basically the uh sociopolitical to sort of label that I give to the the effect of that tsunami. I don't think it's primarily a cry for uh democracy. And I think it's primarily an economic phenomenon. And and when you look at at the economics of it, it is never the marginalized or the poor or the bottom of society or the discriminated that um that take to the streets. It is the educated, it is the um children of the elite sometimes, the children of the middle class sometimes. Uh, but it is never ever uh the poor

• 40:32Speaker 01

  or or or the economically marginalized that that that take to the streets. Now, Trump, I mean, explaining Trump, I I I could probably make a billion dollars if I could explain Trump. I I he is an inexplicable thing. Um, he is a political mutant. I don't know if you ever read um the Isaac Asimov books on the foundation, and this is science fiction stuff. So but

• 40:57Tom Bilyeu?

  I know of it, but I haven't read it.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, basically, it's a thing called psychohistory, where scientifically they can predict the broad outlines of history and civilization is dying. So they plan a rebirth, they short circuit the dark ages, a rebirth. But they get this one guy and they call him the mule because he's he's a mutant. He's completely not, you could not have planned for him, all right? Well, um, Trump is a mule. I mean, he's a mutant. He he is this weird, um, comes from many different worlds. Comes from the business world, comes from the popular culture world, which I think is mainly what what he is. Uh, and now he comes into the political world and injects this popular culture, a sort of circus atmosphere.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Um, that that, um, I think the elites who who have dwelled in in our high politics hate because it's certainly like this is not the way things are supposed to be. Um, it it is, it has inspired some of the most bizarre and I think, by the way, I never liked the man particularly. Um, but I mean, he just tricked me as well. He's got this and he's got that. But no, he's like pure evil. He is Adolf Hitler. He is a fascist. Now, if you have any knowledge of what those words mean, you you really ought to go to therapy because they connect absolutely not at all with the person Donald Trump or the politician Donald Trump. So, um,

• 42:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that Trump is a dictator or fascist in the making? That's always the pushback that I get when I say, bro, look at Hitler and what he did. It's insane. Then people's pushback is going to be, well, compare Hitler, you know, uh, right after World War One compared to where Trump is at in the beginning of his career. Like, you just need to give him more time and he's on that slippery slope.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  The guy's seventy eight years old. Come on, name me a dictator that started at the age of seventy eight. Dictatorship is a hard job. You started young, usually in your thirties or forties. Practically every dictator that I can think of started either in his thirties or forties. Um, Fidel Castro was thirty three when he took over. Lenin was in his forties. Yeah, I mean, it's a young man's game. Look at, look at the revolutionaries, both in our war. You know, the, the, um, Constitutional Convention, for example, or the Convention in France during the revolution. These were young people, okay? These were all young people. Napoleon was, I think, in his late twenties when he started to take over.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  So, the idea that there can be a dictator who starts at seventy-eight. Plus, okay, I'll give you one more reason, and then this is a boring subject. One of the things you have to have to be a dictator is command of a powerful institution. That can be your own private army, like Hitler had, you know, with the S A. Or it can be the real army, or it can be the Secret Service. Or it could be, for Stalin, for example, it was he got to appoint everybody in the Communist Party. So, everybody he got appointed was a loyalist. But you need a strong institution that you can then turn against the others and say,

• 44:11Speaker 01

  "Well, I'm gonna overhaul all the institutions with this one, or these two that I own." The institutions hate Donald Trump. There isn't a single institution that likes him, none. So, between those two things, seventy-eight years old, an entertainment guy, that's number three. And also the fact that it's... It would be impossible for him, for example, to tell the military, "Go shoot at my opponents in that protest, go shoot them, go kill them all," right? They wouldn't do it, they would not do it. It would be impossible for him to tell the FBI, "Go arrest my enemies." They would not do it. So, how could he become, through what process could he be? And he doesn't have a private army, to put it mildly.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  I mean, you look at those, finally, this election cycle. I had never really looked at any of his shows that he gives. Is it a combination, like the State Fair and Big Ten Revival Meeting or something? The people that go to that are like, you know, middle class, middle-aged, you know, they're having, it's kind of like a party, like a great big party. He's not organizing an army out of that crowd, okay? So, to me, that's just... It says more about the people who claim these things than it says about Donald Trump.

• 45:37Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think it says about them?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  I think it says them that they are living in a world, in a house of mirrors. They see their own reflection and they think it's reality and they absolutely, and I'll give Trump credit on this, he's kind of a crazy guy, okay, he does some strange things, but he has this superpower of making his opponents 10 times crazier than he is. So they say these completely over the top things, and they do these completely over the top things, like trying to censor the government, you know, trying to censor the web and try to arrest him, it's never happened before, a former president, you know, being indicted on a pretty blatantly political case, he just drives them completely over

• 46:22Speaker 01

  the top, and it tells you that our elites are very panicky. It tells you primarily that, they are panicky. They are not confident they're gonna be around that much longer.

• 46:33Tom Bilyeu?

  That's very interesting. You have referred to, if I have the words correct, you referred to Obama as the chief negator? It might not be the exact phrase that you used, but it's certainly directionally correct. I think a lot of people think that this all started with Trump. You've referred to Trump as a symptom. Is Obama a symptom? Who is patient zero?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not a question of symptoms, it's a question of somebody who adapted to the system, right? Somebody who saw what was in front of him, and instead of pretending that the year is 1950, you say, oh, wait, this is 2008, this is not 1950. He, the initial election, this is his second election, the reelection campaign was different, but his initial election was very powerful use of the internet in very powerful ways, spontaneous support, you know, the Obama girl, that portrait of his that is, you know, so aspirational looking. This wasn't stuff that his campaign paid for. This kind of bubbled up from below. And that's the revolt of the public bubbling up from below. He was a community organizer.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Community organizers look around and see things that are faulty and bad. And point them out to some higher authority. Yell and scream and say, "Community, we need to protest about this." And then they protest. And then supposedly some higher authority comes and fixes it. After 2010, when he lost basically his governing majority big time. That's what he did. He was a president of the United States and he was constantly pointing out things that were wrong with the United States, right? He would talk to a women's group and say, "Your rights are about to be taken away from you." He would talk to a black audience and say more or less the same thing. Except, of course, there was no higher authority.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  So, there is, in the web culture and the revolt of the public, a tremendous, you know, and again, for structural reasons, tremendous power of negation, of denial, rejection, repudiation, that is never counterbalanced by proposing an alternative. You know, the organizer never felt he had to propose an alternative. Just like, "Look, here's a bad thing. You're the government, you fix it." And Obama was a master of that. And I think he was re-elected because people, many people thought, "Yeah, he is on our side." And he was, you know, it was kind of like, you know, stick it to the man, but you are the man, you know?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  He was the man, but he was sticking it to the man somehow in a very credible way for the voters.

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, you have, you've talked a lot about that you don't make predictions, you don't know where things are going to go. But as you look at this, and Trump as a phenomenon, you've said that the government is founded on this initial sin of acting like they can solve all of our problems. Knowing that, do you think that what Trump is trying to do by limiting the scope of the government, by trying to get rid of the quote-unquote "deep state", is he going to make any progress? Or do you think that there's just a reality to be faced that the government cannot solve the problems that people care about right now?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's pretty funny because he, this potential dictator is, you know, anti-regulations and wants to drain the swamp by closing down whole, whole chunks of the government. But he is an old guy, okay? And when he talks, he says, I will solve your problem. I will do this. I will achieve that. I will do that. He has always talked that way. Even when it's blatantly obvious that the problem is not really a problem, it's a condition that can't possibly be changed except through the long, long process of evolution, he doesn't care. He will say it. So, um, I don't know. I don't know how it's gonna turn out. He's got a big fat target, I have to say.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Coming after the Biden administration, that did so many bizarre and unprecedented things. He's got a big fat target. He can go negation on all that stuff. He can basically burn that harvest to the ground and, um, and he would be doing a good thing. Uh, now whether he replaces it with, with a, a different system, what we need, of course, is a reorganized, you know, that, um, reconfigured federal government. We sort of did this in the early 20th century. We reconfigured the federal government to fit the mass information age. Now we need to kind of do the same thing for, for the digital age.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  I, call him a skeptic, I, I, the best thing he has done in that regard is he's bringing in a whole bunch of young buccaneers who's kind of, is, is, uh, cabinet is something like 20 years younger than his first cabinet back in, uh, 2016. And those guys have, some of them are gonna be hanging around, and maybe they will have what it takes to get us there. It's a long process.

• 51:36Tom Bilyeu?

  No doubt. So as you look at the, you've said that so many things have modernized, but the government is really struggling to go digital. What do you think is gonna be the role of AI? You've got Elon Musk, obviously closely tied to the government, building an AI company. Um, do you think AI is going to help or hurt? Is it just gonna flood more information? What's, what are the?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I have no idea. I have no idea. And there would be rank speculation, but you know, rank speculation is fun. So I'll give you some.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  I mean, you could have such an amazing world with AI, right? You can have a farmer that tells AI, okay,

• 52:27Speaker 01

  this is your schedule for watering my plants. And the AI goes out there and hits all the right buttons, and it gets done, right? You could have a child that has a tutor that knows all the information in the world, and it's, it can be tailored to the child's interests or the child's capabilities and so forth. The world's greatest tutor, so that that child will no longer think information is something that gets crammed into your head, you know, by teachers, you know, in a painful process, but it's something that you discover together with this tutor. There's many amazing things that can happen with AI. Will they happen? Or will it, I mean, I'm not, the doomsayers, I scratch my head about it. I don't quite understand.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  All the doomsday scenarios with AI are trivial, in my opinion. But it could go bad. I mean, it could go bad in many different ways. The worst it could go for me is if the government gets a monopoly or basically puts our regulations that only rich and powerful people can play with it. We should probably put it out there for as many people to play with. That's the way, you know, it's gonna be a Darwinian process. And the more that you can have people who are trying to adapt to it and exploit it, the sooner we can get to where we want to be with AI.

• 53:46Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So many people in my audience are in the age group of doers, people that are gonna make the very fabric of our society going forward. When you think about what the right approach for them is, one thing you've talked about are charter cities. And I believe you know Balaji Srinivasan, who talks about network states, both of which seem to take this idea of people need to compete for the citizens, that it needs to be way smaller. If you were going to give us that, that like, hey, this is probably a path to at least explore, what would you tell us about charter cities, the idea of network states?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Well, I know that network states better than charter cities. Charter cities are, you know, they're at the mercy of the political climate. Network state is totally speculative, so they're just at the mercy of Balaji's enormous brain. And I think, and I think it's a, what he does is a very tremendously necessary thing, which is push the possibilities to their absolute limit, all right? My humble opinion, there will never be network states, but what do I know?

• 55:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Can you explain to people that might not know?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, network states, they're like discontinuous. They use cryptocurrency and they, they, basically that's the, the bond is you some sort of cryptocurrency agreement of how you govern yourself, but it wouldn't be necessarily one place. It would be over many places. You could have the same people, so it would be like in the internet. The internet has its communities of interests, the people could be anywhere. Well, it would be like that, only for real, it would be like a country, all right? So it would be a community that ruled itself along certain interests. I mean, it's a fascinating concept, it's not an impossible concept, I'm not saying that it's really not gonna happen,

• 55:46Speaker 01

  but given the realities that stand in the way of that, it probably not, but it, it makes your, pushes your brain outward to think about, well, how much of that, I mean, you can have very massive communities that govern themselves to some extent, like the old religious communities, for example, according to certain rules that they have made up. That probably may happen at some point.

• 56:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you see any flashes of the way forward in what Switzerland does, where it's really down at the regional level? Or even what Estonia is doing, where it's sort of one nation under the internet? Yeah, is there anything in those that we can take away from?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, and both. I mean, I wrote somewhere in the book that, because everything is fractured so much. You know, we're now completely, you know, but what I, what we're saying is,

• 56:36Speaker 01

  The old mass world, for example, the mass audience that I belong to, when we watched Walter Cronkite together, that was like the entirety of the United States. You could see yourselves reflected in this gigantic mirror. Well, internet culture has taken that, they got a mirror and just shattered it. And people live in the broken pieces, right? So you need somehow, so every time you have the old industrial idea, one size fits all, we've got one health plan for everybody. Well, at least half of them, more of those fragments align against it, because that's not what I want, right? Switzerland is, man, every valley governs itself, all right? And it goes down to the point where if you want to become a Swiss citizen,

• 57:21Speaker 01

  you don't go to Zurich and ask the central government. You walk around your little valley shaking hands and saying, please let me be a citizen, and they vote on it. And so afterwards, if there's too much immigration, they can't say, oh, those idiots in Washington or those idiots in Zurich. And if, you know, you turn out to be a good thing, they go, well, it's my credit, not them. It's you own, you own the decision. And I think with the internet, you can do that along, particularly in local and state government, you can do that very easily. So I think that's a model, that's a definite model. And of course Estonia has a really robust system. Living next to Russia, you have to,

• 58:06Speaker 01

  that everybody just has one number, one number. And you can look at everything that's online that you, you can ask for what files the police have on you. And as long as there's not an ongoing criminal investigation, they have to give it to you.

• 58:26Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, Martin, leave us with a window into how we can determine what is true. My vote has always been utility. You've got a goal. Does believing this thing move you towards that goal or not? What do you have for us?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Truth is not a thing. Truth is a relation, right? Truth is, there's this thing as facts. You know, one person's fact. Is another person's, you know, nothing because it doesn't fit their framework. So the important things are not facts or truths, they're frameworks, alright? So again, I go back to my propaganda analysis. Is you have to understand the framework in which a proposition is being presented to you, right? If it was a Marxist-Leninist framework, like in the old Soviet Union, you understood that. I mean, we devoured, although incredibly boring, by the way, writings from the Soviet Union and the satellite country. We devoured it because you could get information from it.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  You just had to understand the framework, right? So what we have today is tremendously competing, it's not truth and falsehood, it's competing frameworks. And keep an eye to what the frameworks are. You know, like Trumpism has this framework. The elite framework is tremendous resonance because it, the New York Times and the broadcast news, all these people sign on to the elite framework, but it's just a framework. So some things are true, maybe in the real world. Some things are just the way they're being described is probably an exaggeration or a lie. In the end, you know, if it's not engineering, engineering, you build something, either it works or it doesn't.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  In society, you know, you live in your small world, your dumb bar number world, you know, 150 people. And that's pretty easy to tell usually what's true and what's not and who's honest and who's not in that world. Live in that world. The part of the problem with the internet is it makes us think that we were born to judge the president of the United States and to write about it and say, well, this is false, this is, you know. I mean, the president of the United States, thank goodness, is one of the things I love about the United States. I suppose, for example, Cuba has tremendously limited influence on my life. Who the president is, I don't even feel it half the time, okay? So, but if my wife is angry at me, or, you know, one of my children is sick,

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  or my neighbor, you know, gets angry because, you know, I stepped on his lawn or something, that matters a lot, alright? So you have to, you have to live in your small world, your dumb bar world, and keep an eye, when you raise your eyes to the, you know, the social, you know, mediated world, to the frameworks. And the frameworks will determine why people are saying things and then you can, does it have an application for me or not? That's for you to determine, but as just looking at this information as you know, yes or no, true or false, that doesn't work. You have to look at the framework.

• 1:01:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Uh, Martin, your book revolt of the public was hugely influential for me. Um, where can people engage with you? Find the book?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the book is on Amazon. It's easy to find. Um, it comes in audible, comes in um ebook um and and hardbound. Hardbound, by the way, this is um uh Stripe Press. And the big Stripe company is a an internet financial company. And as with all Silicon Valley um entities, they have the best designers in the world. And alas, I will tell you, I get told that is the most beautiful book I have ever bought. At least as often as I get told, that is the smartest book I have ever bought. Okay, it is a pleasure.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  They had they had a wonderful designer for the book, Tyler Thompson, and it it's worth buying. They're paying the extra money for the copy because it's pretty.

• 1:02:37Tom Bilyeu?

  I can agree. It is a gorgeous book. Martin, thank you so much for joining me today, man. I really appreciate it.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  It's been fun.

• 1:02:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace.

• 1:02:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins.

• 1:03:27Tom Bilyeu?

  and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  In a world where everyone drives distracted, danger lurks ahead. Drivers swerve, collisions litter the shoulders, chances are taken and lives lost. They're driven by a compulsion, a compulsion to respond. Sounds like a movie. Unfortunately, it's our reality. Eyes on the road, not on your phone. A message from the Virginia DMV.