Trump vs The Fed, Flag Burning, Cartel Wars, and Cracker Barrel: What It Means for Your Freedom | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, where today's episode dives into some of the most controversial and thought-provoking headlines making waves in America right now. Tom and co-host Drew break down Trump’s ongoing maneuvers—his attempt to oust a Fed board member, his executive order against flag burning, and even his push to nationalize stakes in major companies like Intel. The discussion doesn’t stop at politics; Tom and Drew tackle the nuances of free speech versus incitement, using recent incidents like flag and Quran burning to explore where we draw the line as a society. They don’t shy away from the economic big picture either, analyzing fiscal dominance, the future of U. S. industrial policy, and what happens when government power starts encroaching too far into the private sector. As always, Tom brings a nuanced perspective on how America’s story is shaped by both its triumphs and its flaws—warning of the dangers of centralizing too much power and the unintended consequences that can follow. Plus, there’s a lighter (and hilarious) look at the controversial Cracker Barrel logo change, why fast food chains all look the same now, and the consumer-driven realities behind the gray box phenomenon. And if you thought you knew where AI was headed, wait until you hear their take on the Will Smith concert footage fiasco and why we’re on the brink of needing “proof of human” to believe what we see online. SHOWNOTES 00:00 "Distrust Federal Rate Setting" 07:21 Free Speech vs. Flag Protest 14:36 "Intentional Self-Propaganda for Growth" 25:14 Notes on Strategy and Influence 32:37 "Redefining Responsible Oversight" 46:19 "Founder Mentality in Investment Cycles" 53:45 Upcoming Schedule Change and Updates CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. SleepMe: Visit ⁠⁠https://sleep.me/impact⁠⁠ https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Tailor Brands: 35% off ⁠⁠https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35⁠⁠ https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠⁠ https://shopify.com/impactHims: Start your free online visit today at ⁠⁠https://hims.com/IMPACT⁠⁠ https://hims.com/IMPACT. Linkedin: Post your job free at ⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/impacttheory⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/impacttheory What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:⁠ ⁠ 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%20show⁠join 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:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call⁠see if you qualify here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/⁠sign up here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,⁠ Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook⁠ https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:⁠ ⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory⁠apple.co/impacttheory⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ ⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ ⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:⁠ ⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu 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 Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Trump attempts to fire Fed Board Member Lisa Cook. Trump signs an EO making flag burning illegal. Trump wants to seize the means of production, apparently. And Trump is going after the cartels in North and South America. And they finally did it. They added the cracker back to Cracker Barrel. Plus, you are not going to want to miss the AI Will Smith fiasco.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, everybody, here it is. Another Tom Bilyeu Show. Welcome.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  All right, let's talk about Trump taking over the Fed.

• 1:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  So Trump has issued-

• 1:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Get it all. It's like Pokemon. He's gonna get all the agencies, all the companies.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Intel. Now he's taking over the Fed. Everything. Trump has issued a letter to Fed Governor Lisa Cook, calling into question-

• 1:50Tom Bilyeu?

  More than a letter.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Calling into question of her trustfulness, her trustworthiness as a financial regulator because she's currently being investigated for mortgage fraud.

• 2:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, he's accused her of a crime.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Lisa Cook has put a-

• 2:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that a Freudian slip? Lisa Cooked?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Lisa, she did cook. No, um, she, uh, bought two, uh, properties and put both of them as her primary residence to get favorable rates. That's what Trump is calling out for fraud. So I just want to kind of put that in there because fraud is different than mortgage fraud, in my opinion. Cause fraud is like, you're not actually who you are. People are coming at her credentials. She just fudged some paperwork so that I wish she'd get a better rate on a mortgage for her investment property. Some people are saying that this is Trump's way to kind of control the Fed.

• 2:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Have an ownership over the interest rates.

• 2:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Last time this happened, Nixon did it. It worked for a couple of months, then everything tanked.

• 2:43Tom Bilyeu?

  It is a terrible idea. So, uh, listen, I'm in a weird position with my, um, code of ethics where you cannot let people run rampant with crime. Period. New paragraph. You cannot weaponize the, um, Department of Justice to get things that you want done politically. And when I say can't, I mean, you certainly can, and both parties have been doing it for quite some time now. It is a terrible idea and it will accelerate the division in this country. And this is going to be the death of us. This is exactly how we become a banana republic. So I could not hate this anymore if I tried.

• 3:26Tom Bilyeu?

  So I love if a president wants to apply, uh, narrative pressure on the Fed and call him too late Powell and all that stuff. I love it. Like try to convince the American people that this guy is doing the wrong thing.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Funny nickname's cool.

• 3:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep. But when you start going after somebody, this, again, people should not be doing mortgage fraud. But that he isn't overly concerned with mortgage fraud. This is a, which one of these motherfuckers can I go get? And if he could have gotten Powell, he would have gotten Powell directly. Oh, I can't get Powell? Let me get one of the people on the board. And so this is a terrible idea. Like this is what happens when people trust themselves too much. Dude, do you know why I don't want a Fed? Because I don't trust these guys to set the rate correctly. So we gotta stop trying to manipulate the economy now.

• 4:23Tom Bilyeu?

  The only thing that strikes me as worse than an independent agency setting the policy is the executive branch setting the policy. This is wild. So anyway, I hate everything about this. If you don't like Jerome Powell at the end of his term, replace him with somebody better. But dude, you just, you just can't do this. This is the odds that things go wrong. Like even if he gets it right, right now, because I really wish Jerome Powell had lowered interest rates so that America could secure better long-term rates and relieve some of the interest rate burden. But he didn't.

• 5:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if Trump manages to bully them enough that he's able to influence them, because by the way, him booting her out is not the same as him controlling interest rates. Let's be very clear about that. Even booting Powell out is not the same as the Fed no longer has autonomy. So let's be very clear about that. But this ever ratcheting up pressure, he's doing it because he knows it will work. Because even if she doesn't end up getting convicted, she's going to be like, do I really want to deal with this? Like, this is a lot of drama. So he knows that the pressure will work, which is exactly why he's applying it. And if you can influence them, then you end up getting policy that might be well-intended,

• 5:47Tom Bilyeu?

  might even be short-term positive, but over time, you're going to make mistakes. Because when somebody who has to get re-elected in a very short period of time has control of the interest rates, you jerk it around till you get to the midterms and then, ah, look at that, money's so cheap, everybody's happy, the economy's booming, oh, I'm up for reelection. Oh, my God, who would have thought? Interest rates will come down, Drew, isn't that wild? So, and also, by the way, watch the upcoming episode with Lynn Alden. By the way, we should message next week. I'm going to be traveling, so we will not have a deep dive on Monday, nor an interview on Tuesday because of the holiday weekend and my absence. We're going to wait and drop them the week after. But when I get back, Lynn Alden drops on Tuesday and a great episode.

• 6:32Tom Bilyeu?

  She talks about something called fiscal dominance. So we're in fiscal dominance. Now, I know that Besen understands that. Do I know that Trump understands that? I don't know that Trump understands that. And he certainly isn't acting like he understands that. Fiscal dominance, put very simply, is where the government takes on so much debt that it outpaces the private debt. And when the Fed, which is charged with basically maintaining the private part of the economy, when the government is taking out so much debt that it outstrips the private government, when the Fed tries to raise or lower interest rates to influence the public sector and the corporate sector of the economy,

• 7:14Tom Bilyeu?

  they can't do it because the government is just taking on debt so much, so fast, that they're in control. And the Fed is going to have to print money to match whatever amount of deficit spending that they're doing. So the Fed is in a no-win situation. Because if they raise interest rates, then the debt accelerates on the government's side even faster because of the interest rate. And so they have tools, but they don't really have an impact. So that's a pretty bad place to be, and we are there. And on the following Tuesday, Lynn Alden will walk you through it all. It was an awesome interview. I really, I was, she changed some of my thinking on economics. And when that happens, I am always excited.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  There's been some speculation about what the actual wording of the executive order is. But Trump has put a renewed focus on flag burning. And if you really open up the EO and kind of bury something at the very bottom, in the last paragraph, it says, "My administration will act to restore respect and sanctity to the American flag and prosecute those who incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating the symbol of our country." And I think that that "incite violence" line is literally the thing that separates it from free speech.

• 8:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly what they're going to use to try to separate this from free speech. And so we'll see when they actually go after this. This was something, though, that's already been litigated. The Supreme Court It has already said that this is protected speech. So I don't know, man. This one is if it, they give a ton of latitude and people can go and they can burn a flag and they can make their statement and they can protest and they're not gone after. Great. But if they're like, well, this could have led to an incitement because they were doing this out in public and we are going to throw the book them.

• 9:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Then this is just about trying to rally literally around the flag to draw a line to say that this thing is sacred as a symbol of America. And you're going to be patriotic whether you like it or not. And this is where, and I remember this coming up. I think it was back in the nineties.

• 9:25Tom Bilyeu?

  It just, it felt weird back then. It feels weird now that I love that we all make certain things sacred in our lives. But we will get to the, um, the person who burned the Quran. Did you see that? Yeah. With a flamethrower. It was like the most hysterically American thing I've ever seen in my life. And

• 9:50Tom Bilyeu?

  like when you make something sacred in your own heart, that's one thing. When you are trying to make it sacred to everybody else, that's a totally different thing. And so people are saying she's doing this to incite violence against that community. It's also possible that there is violence towards her from that community because it's such a sacred symbol. And so again, making something sacred in your heart is fine, but expecting everybody else to hold it in that same esteem, I think is a mistake. If we're going to protect America, we've got to tell a good story about what America is. We've got to make people literally rally around the flag because they believe in what it stands for. You are not going to get people there because you make it illegal to burn. And so that's where this just starts becoming idiotic.

• 10:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Is like you're, you are clamping down too hard. So when you go, hey, DC is way out of control. We're going to go like restore law and order. Okay. Like there's an argument to be made, but when you start trying to.

• 10:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Take something that's already been adjudicated by the Supreme Court and like inch a little bit closer, a little bit closer. It really is just, I mean, I don't want to bandy around authoritarian. It's just overreach. It's not going to have the effect that you want. It's going to continue to be divisive. It is not going to draw America together. And if your goal is to get people to re-fall in love with America as a country, that's not the way.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Gee, if you could put up the laptop screen of the lady burning the Koran. How do we, how do we tease these two things apart though? Because on one side, right wing, a lot of politicians, Matt Walsh went crazy about flag burning and things like that. They're all saying, if you burn the flag, you should go straight to jail. Don't pass go, don't collect $200. But then on the other side, we have a GOP candidate literally burning something as sacred to that community. And should it just be, oh, they're not American, it's cool? Because I feel like if this was a Bible, those same people would be up in arms. And me being religious, I definitely don't want to be a hypocrite in this situation where her burning the Koran, I don't know what she's trying to incite. I don't know if she's trying to say, I'm going to take down this religion. Like, she's trying to almost be like a villain. I don't really get it.

• 11:59Tom Bilyeu?

  So play the clip because she's pretty clear about what she's trying to say. Like, this is a wild.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded unless we stop Islam once and for all.

• 12:14Tom Bilyeu?

  This is full satire.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  We're done turning the other cheek.

• 12:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I can't believe she's serious.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Remember, David didn't pray for Goliath. He killed them. America is a Christian nation, so those terrorist Muslims can fuck off to any of the 57 Muslim nations. There is only one true God, and that is the God of Israel.

• 12:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so this, this is a collision of values. This is exactly what I'm talking about. And so I'm a little bit jokey because this is so over the top. But the reality is, a collision of values is the thing everybody should be afraid of. It is the thing that people will start killing each other for. Anybody that's confused about that, go ahead and draw a picture of Mohammed and see how that goes. People take their value system extremely seriously. So that's really what you're seeing here is somebody who, in a TikTok fashion, is realizing this is how I'm going to get my message across by being like bombastic, dialed to 11 to say my message in the most aggressive, crystallized fashion

• 13:13Tom Bilyeu?

  so that it will be emotionally triggering, so that it's going to get attention.

• 13:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Playing the hallelujah music as you That was a Kanye song. As you, as you fry the Quran is, this is wild. So, okay, how do you tease the two things apart? Honestly, getting into the, um, the collision of values thing is the thing that, that draws these inextricably together for me. So I don't know, while they're two examples temperamentally arguably very different, but, uh, it's the same idea. You take a sacred symbol and you say that this thing is off limits. That because I believe it to be sacred, I insist you believe it to be sacred. And this is where we're going to find a collision.

• 14:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Because she's right that this is a Christian nation.

• 14:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, but when you start talking about David didn't pray for Goliath or whatever she says, he killed him.

• 14:19Tom Bilyeu?

  It does sound pretty bad in terms of what she's trying to get across. So this is exactly like worry about the incitement. Don't worry about the symbol that they're burning. And so trying to make the American flag like the special exception. And so burning the Quran is fine and calling for, I mean, she, she gets about as close as you're going to get to saying, go kill yourself a handful of Islamists. Uh, so this one feels pretty incitement-y to me. And so if we're going to be okay with this, but we're not going to be okay with that, had she burned the flag, that's idiotic to me. So, um, getting people to focus on the core issue. When values collide, people become very dangerous.

• 15:03Tom Bilyeu?

  You need to protect yourself from that. Uh, and then if somebody wants to burn a Quran, let them burn a Quran. If they want to burn the flag, let them burn the flag. But if they want to incite people to violence, we already have laws against that.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Is there, but to the whole story, we need to have a unified America. We need to bring people together.

• 15:21Tom Bilyeu?

  You can't force it, though. This is the problem. So, yes, we need it, but you've got to sell it. You've got to make America,

• 15:29Tom Bilyeu?

  from a narrative perspective, easy to track, why it's awesome, why I should love it. You should be very careful what you're teaching kids. If you only focus on the negative things that have happened in America, then of course, people are going to have a negative view of America. So, you have to propagandize yourself, because you don't want to be lying to yourself, but you do want to, you want to focus in on the things that set you up to build in the right way, in a way that is going to be prosperity for as many people as humanly possible, would be the thing that I rounded to. And so, when you create a, an internal narrative, and by the way, for anybody that's internally freaking out that I'm saying you're gonna

• 16:12Tom Bilyeu?

  intentionally like, look at only certain parts, that's all humans do all the time. So, part of having eyeballs is that your evolutionary, the evolutionary processes that gave you the human animal said, the vast majority, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of things you interact with, they don't matter. So, I'm going to limit your world to a very small subset. So, a stat that I've said a gazillion times, we only see 0.0035% of the available electromagnetic spectrum. So, evolution has said, nah, the vast majority of what's there just doesn't matter, so focus in on this. And I would say the same is true for people that like, pushed the 1619 project. They're saying,

• 16:55Tom Bilyeu?

  hey, all those wonderful positive things about America, they don't matter. Just focus on the negative things. That has second and third order consequences. I would say they are terrible, but nonetheless, it's a simplification of the American narrative. I would say, hey, do a similar thing that they're doing, but focus on the positive things that lead us in a good direction, that make people feel more connected to each other, that make people feel unified, that give them this expansive sense of what America is. And focus on that.

• 17:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Even word choice already artificially focuses people's minds in a certain way. So trying to get outside of a frame of reference doesn't make any sense. You're going to be in a frame of reference. Build a frame of reference that is useful. Build a frame of reference that makes people come together because if you don't, especially in populist moments driven by wealth inequality, you're just going to exacerbate the separation of your country and it will ultimately begin to fight against itself. And I mean that in a bloodshed way.

• 17:55Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:38Tom Bilyeu?

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• 19:23Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:08Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I want to kind of keep this, uh, what America is doing and how they're stepping on our rights conversation going. Because a lot of people worried about the Biden regime, the authoritarian tactics. But now with Trump investing in private companies and more private companies now becoming nationalized. There is some speculation. So this is a report from after the cabinet meeting that he took from reporters talking about his 10% stake in Intel.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  You call Kamala Harris a communist. But the Biden Harris administration, they never called for nationalizing a private company with the federal government like you're proposing with Intel. What do you say to some who say this is a bit hypocritical? And is this the new way of doing industrial policy?

• 21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure it is. I want to try and get as much as I can. If people come in and they need something, as an example, as a real.

• 21:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Honest. You can't, you can't say that he doesn't just say the thing. He says the thing. I wonder how often Trump is outright lying because he is so willing to say things. I'm just like, bro, this is like horrible thing per minute. Like he, he will hit a density of horrible thing that is so high that I'm like, that just, I'm, I was about to go after you for that one. But then you said this one and now that.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And you're still talking.

• 21:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's like it. So I don't know, man. I'm sure he does lie. Every fucking politician lies. But he also just says the things, man. It is wild. Is this the new industrial policy? Yeah, sure. Yep. I want to get as much. I want to get as much as I can. He actually said it. That's wild. That is wild. Dude, does he? This is like historically illiterate. So I've really tried to map like what he's doing here. And the only thing I can think is that he is so, his frame of reference is so entrepreneurial. That he's like, bro, I've done deals like this. No, no, no, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew. I'm gonna get you a piece of this. I got you.

• 22:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, as the American people, we're gonna get you stuff. This is gonna be dope. I'm gonna get you some of TikTok. I'm gonna get you some of Intel. I'm gonna start like hardball negotiating these guys. And he's not realizing, yeah, but as the government, this hits different. And now all of a sudden you become, they are, the US government, if they get 10%, they are now the single largest shareholder of Intel. Now, they don't have voting power, but guess what, Drew? When the President of the United States calls you into the Oval Office and is like, bitch, I own 10% of this company. You better fucking hop to this. Cause it'd be, it'd just be a real tragedy if some tariffs showed up on your door tomorrow, wouldn't it, Drew? Like, to your point, like, the government can start acting like a gangster.

• 23:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And I, it's like, I think he's so just, he realizes the utility of authority from an entrepreneurial standpoint, that he doesn't realize that you cross like a really weird chasm when you go into the government. And when you try to carry over some entrepreneurial principles, it's incredible. When you try to carry all entrepreneurial principles, it becomes madness. And so this is like, this is, if this is because it's purely national security, okay, like if I were convinced, okay, got it. Like, there are gonna be times where you have to do stuff like that. We've already done it historically, including bailing out the banks and all of that.

• 23:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But historically, this has always been, there's been some big crisis. We had to address the big crisis and then we move forward. This is not that. On its face, it could become that as we go down the road. If in the battle for AI with China, like this really ends up being a chip war. And if China really is on the precipice of either sweating Taiwan to the point politically where they just start listening to China more than they listen to the US. Or if China just outright goes and takes over Taiwan. Yes, we would need a backup plan. And that is the, what the administration has said is this is about making sure from a national security perspective that we have access to chips. Then people will push them.

• 24:35Tom Bilyeu?

  But hold on, like you're negotiating increased access to chips from Nvidia. Like, what are you talking about? And their punchline is only chips that are down the tech stack. They're no longer the cutting edge. We're not worried about that. We're using that and leverage as leverage with China, partly to slow down their own development, which will be good for everybody, just because they won't need them as much. And partly to get other concessions. So it's like, I don't want to pretend that this isn't inside of a context that there's some logic to that and you can get why they would be doing what they're doing. But at the same time, like, watch the pattern. And the pattern with Trump is it's a business guy who loves deals. He's legitimately excited. Part of it is he just, he wants to throw his weight around. He wants to get things done his way.

• 25:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And part of it is, I legitimately think this is a guy who loves America, loves the American people, wants to do something good for them and doesn't realize that this puts them in an increasingly dangerous position. You centralize more power, you start becoming more socialist. It's like, you don't out China, China. You out America, China. And so with us going in the wrong direction with so many of his instincts, it's not ideal.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to keep this going because he does say why he did it in comparison to the Biden administration and the CHIPS Act.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  And I have a, I have any form of a stopgap where I can stop somebody from doing something, right? I have a covenant and an agreement and they come to me and they say, I would like you to. Would like to do something, but you have us restricted. If I do that, they usually have to pay. Now, in the case of Intel was interesting, but I hope I'm gonna have many more cases like it. Intel came in. I met with a gentleman I had a lot of respect for. He came in under a little bit of a cloud. I liked his story.

• 26:27Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. A little bit of the cloud. They, they were in trouble. Do I like pressure him to step down for national security reasons? Or do I just take a piece of his company? And the fact that he's saying like, I hope that there are many more like this. What does that mean? You hope that there are many more industries that are a national security risk? I don't. You hope that there are more companies that are in trouble and so you have leverage over them? I don't. Like, what, what exactly do you mean by I hope there are more things like this? What I think it is, is I hope there are many more companies that I have leverage over that I can get a piece of. And so it's like, uh, what constitutes leverage? If somebody is advantaged by your tariffs, do you now have leverage over them? And they should be grateful.

• 27:10Tom Bilyeu?

  I think he would, even if he won't say yes out loud, I think he believes yes. I think this is a guy who, in a business context, Drew, one of the most important things as an entrepreneur, you have to be able to do is recognize where you have leverage. And by the way, not just recognize where you have it, you have to position yourself to get it. So if he's now got the controls of the US government, he's like, okay. Just, he has a process that he's trained himself to run in his brain, non-stop. I need to build leverage. Some leverage that I know how I'm gonna use right now today. And some leverage, I don't know how I'm gonna use, but I know it'll be advantageous to me down the road somewhere. And if he starts doing that, he's gonna realize, oh man, I can pull a lot of levers. Like, these do a lot of things. Like, when you're the president, like, you can really do some shit.

• 27:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And so he can start putting himself in a position where he has tremendous power over our, all of our capitalist entities. And If he's looking at Xi and he's like, yo, I really do like that he just puts a an official in the company and is like, uh, okay, listen, car manufacturers, I'm gonna need you guys all to vote as one block because I'm gonna use you uh, as negotiating power against India, US, whatever. Um, so here's the party line, do as you're fucking told, or suddenly you're gonna find yourself being reeducated. And then they just do it. And that's the kind of thing that I could see Trump being like, that's pretty dope. Like, I just, listen, I'm not trying to take over these industries.

• 28:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Xi doesn't take over the industry. He lets them compete. But boy, oh, boy.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  I just have some notes.

• 28:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  I have some notes.

• 28:48Tom Bilyeu?

  And, you know, look, don't be intimidated by all the guys with the guns. You know what I mean? Like, just, they're just notes, Drew. Just take the good ones, everybody. Uh, so, yeah. I unfortunately can see him really enjoying, like, oh, America, we got you 10% of this, and we got you 5% of that, and we got you 50% of TikTok, and and right now, I almost feel worse that they realize that it's not gonna be popular to start a sovereign wealth fund where they take your tax dollars and they buy something. But he is expecting it to be very popular, that he can get you stuff for free. And so he's gonna be looking for those leverage points, which all look like him hitting a big stick, going, hey.

• 29:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so, yeah, I hate that.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Uh, okay, so, I'm, I'm conflicted. Again, I've been reading Atlas Shrugged later, and the entire inciting incident is one of the mines got nationalized. So I'm automatically like, government control, bad.

• 29:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  On one side, we have the sovereign wealth fund. Hypothetically speaking, it includes 500 billion in tariff revenue, 10% of intel, 20% of TikTok, 5% of these other organizations, and that's growing in a stock market, in a portfolio, etc.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  On the other side, to your point, should the government be in bed with these people? The CHIPS Act, we put up a hundred billion dollars on initial estimates that's been paid so far. And with that, we didn't quote unquote, get anything back. That's Trump's words. So instead of me just giving you money or investing in a resource or investing in an industry, at least now I have a percentage of it and I'm on the upswing. I have the upside leverage.

• 30:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but so this is where people really rightfully start going crazy about the idea of corruption. And so part of what makes the government work is that the government isn't getting anything back from the things that they, they try to create the soil in which their people can thrive.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Got you.

• 30:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Once you understand the government's job is not to feed the government, is not to grow the government, is to support the people, then all of a sudden you're like, okay, I get what this is. So you want to create the soil. So the government should think of itself as my job is to make sure that the soil has a ton of nutrients so that the farmers can go out and do their thing. And so where do we need to put a little bit of nutrients to make sure that those things can grow? And then you want to see them grow. And if you start getting a monopoly or something like that, consider those weeds or consider that a locust swarm and I've got to go deal with that. Cool. That, yeah, a hundred percent, the government should be doing that. What the government shouldn't be doing is betting on farms and saying, oh, I want this farm to win. Because this farm is a little bit better for me.

• 31:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And then me suddenly becomes, well, it starts by saying, me is the American people. Then me becomes me, the politician. And that's where all of this stuff gets dangerous. And so again, China is showing you what that model looks like. And my fear is because it is successful, there's no denying that, that people will look at that and go, oh, I want to do that. And I would say that China is better, way better for politicians than it is for the average person. Now, we are about to find out how true that is because remember, this system for a long time was starving tens of millions of people to death. America's never done that. So black mark on China. But then China pulled people out of poverty faster than we did.

• 32:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's a win in China's column. But now that Xi Jinping Is in power and nobody can stop him. This is the thing that democracies are meant to protect against. Cause democracies are worse when you have a string of like so so leaders, right? Like, ah, God, we're just pulling back and forth from one side to another. And when you've got somebody like Deng Xiaoping, who's like yanking China out of poverty. You're like, yo, like, we're falling behind. Like, these guys, they're like, they're really fucking killing it. We're over here like this sucks. Like, we have constant gridlock. We're not able to get any momentum. Everybody's thinking short term. I don't want to be a part of this. This is super lame. I want to be, or even like people looking at the UAE, like, bro, like, we gotta be like the UAE. We gotta be like China. Like, these guys are moving a lot faster.

• 32:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's like, when one of those motherfuckers breaks bad, they start killing people left, right, and center. And they will take you down the darkest of dark roads for like a hundred years. This is, this is the thing that we're protecting against. So people need to understand, it's entirely possible that Xi is about to move them backwards, like 70 years. Because he has like real Leninist Marxist theories. And those are proven throughout history to just be an absolute bloodbath. Xi is about reconsolidating power, thinking that your entrepreneurs are getting too uppity and literally reeducating them. So that's where it's like, hey, be careful.

• 33:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Because the, if you could have a benevolent dictator, like if Jesus came down from heaven and he was willing to run America. Cool. But alas, it tends not to be that way. And this is why people say, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so, once you have somebody in that role who is not responsible to anything other than their ability to maintain like cohesion, they will maintain cohesion through violence. And it just, it just is, man, over and over and over and over and over. So that's what the American system is meant to protect against.

• 34:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. 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. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople

• 34:55Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  So diving into that, US warships did sail off of Venezuela as tensions soared between Trump and Maduro regime over his alleged cartel accusations. We tie that with the most recent Joe Rogan interview where I forgot the guest's name. Ed Cauteran was just talking about how they're sending US drone intelligence agencies are sending drones over Mexico to kind of map out the region. So Trump is trying to take on cartels, but it seems more research investigate versus we're actively putting boots on the ground.

• 35:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, we're seven months in. Yeah. Like, we got almost three and a half more years. That investigation is gonna lead somewhere. So, ooh.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Very good play.

• 36:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, if he, if I love the like, hey, we want to partner with Mexico. We want to help them solve this problem. And if Mexico was receptive, that would be wonderful. If they are not receptive, at some point, you do have to have like a check in yourself of like,

• 36:20Tom Bilyeu?

  border would be a nice, easy one. Dear cartels, I highly encourage you to stay in Mexico because, oh dear God, if you cross that fucking border, we will bring unholy hell down upon your head and then make good on the threat. I love that. But the Mexico doesn't want you here. The Mexican president has said as much, and you've still got drones like flying over their airspace?

• 36:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That does not seem like the play. That's somebody, again, who's just trusting himself a little too much. He thinks, look, I got this. I'm the daddy of Europe. I want to be the daddy of North America. As a PSA, remember, Mexico's North America. I want to be the daddy of North America. Maybe I want to be the daddy of Central and South America. So just as I don't want China throwing undue weight around the world, I want America to be seen as, hey, everybody, we're your ally. We're going to police the seas. We are going to expect a bit of a tithe for that to make sure that commerce can flow easily. We want to be a good partner to everybody. We understand that you have autonomy, but we want to be the the big brother that people feel like is looking

• 37:30Tom Bilyeu?

  out for them, not the big brother that's like, oh, you've got oil, you need some freedom. It's like, that whole vibe that we spread for decades is definitely not the vibe. And now the like, we're tired of being taken advantage of, and we're going to start slapping people around, is also not the vibe. So draw boundaries, not just borders, but draw boundaries. So hey, not going to be taken advantage of. Got that. But it's not, this is one of the things you guys will see in the Lynn Alden interview. It's not that easy. We wanted trade deficits with people because it actually allowed us to get more people to use the dollar as a reserve currency, which allowed us to export more of our inflation. So there, it's not like we weren't getting

• 38:12Tom Bilyeu?

  anything out of it. Anyway, I want to see us position ourselves as the big brother who's tough as hell, nobody fucks with, but at the same time, like, wants you, dear little brother, to thrive and do well, and we're not just gonna smash and grab shit.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it it seems like we have the right intention in mind going against the war in the cartels, like claiming war on the cartels, but it is giving me war against terrorism, where it could just be perpetual debt, money, like grab, not money grab, but just like a hole that we throw money. We spent so much money in Iraq just to leave and nothing be changed effectively from 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I don't want that to then happen on the Venezuelan coast, the Mexico border, things like that.

• 38:56Tom Bilyeu?

  And we unfortunately have a long history of thinking, if we just get rid of this one regime. Now, he was measured in Iran. So it gives me a lot of hope. Like, the way he handled Iran, I had no

• 39:09Speaker 01

  One strike, got out, that's it.

• 39:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's it, we're done. And so if there are things going on with Venezuela that I'm unaware of, and he's got to do a show of force or something, fine, but invading Venezuela, no thanks. Rocketing them into oblivion, I'd have to know a lot more information before I'd be comfortable with that. Right now, that would just seem like really unhinged shit. But sure, there are things that could be true where I'd go, okay, yeah, fine. But I don't have any of that information right now.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  You brought this up in the intro, and it is true. The Cracker Barrel has rescinded their new rebrand. They put the cracker back next to the barrel.

• 39:50Tom Bilyeu?

  There it is.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  He's back. And I wanted to talk about this, but instead of getting into the minutia of like this specifics business woes, there was a TikToker that kind of broke down all of the modifications of a lot of our fast food 90s tenants.

• 40:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Crashing out over capitalism. Let's hear it.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  So this, by the way, is all because of Wall Street. This is all because of the stock market, because of investors, private equity, and the demand to get more value to shareholders. This has nothing to do with wokeness

• 40:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And by the way, the thing that he's talking, this, the this is, everything went from like these super custom things to like these gray boxes. So everything getting simplified. He's not wrong about this.

• 40:32Speaker 05

  I, you stupid sleeping babies, okay? I'm gonna explain this to you. McDonald's The way McDonald's is structured is McDonald's owns the land underneath this building. They own the land. They're the biggest landholders in the United States when it comes to commercial properties. The franchisees then rent the building on top of them. And you know what happens? Sometimes McDonald's go out of business. And when McDonald's goes out of business, they want to put a different business in there and they want to sell the land underneath it. Well, guess what? When you have a building that is, can only be a McDonald's, or can only be a Pizza Hut, or can only be a Cracker Barrel, or only be a Taco Bell, guess what? It's harder to sell those businesses. So every business has slowly been turning into a gray or beige box.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Because you know what happens when you put a vape store inside of an old Pizza Hut? We all call it, oh, the vape store inside of the old Pizza Hut. Now, in the future, they'll just-

• 41:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Who do you think he's mad at, Drew? He doesn't know who he's mad at. He thinks he knows. He thinks he's mad at Wall Street. But who's he really mad at? Inflation? I don't know. The person that wants three burgers for 99 cents. Like, it's a good default. It is a good default. It's like, my wife says a quote and she's like, you know where that quote's from? I'm like, Friends. It's like, you just might as well default to Friends. Like, whatever quote my wife's doing is guaranteed to be from Friends. So- He's mad at the person that wants three cheeseburgers for 99 cents. Correct. So, everybody wants things cheap. So the business is like, oh, cool, I know. Like, so when I'm teaching entrepreneurship and Impact Theory University, sign up immediately. I am always trying to get them to identify the hard. Like, find the hard.

• 42:09Tom Bilyeu?

  When you find the hard, go solve that thing. That's how you start a business. If there's nothing hard for you to solve, there's probably not a big business opportunity there. You're probably somewhere with high sex appeal. So like, game development. If you're not doing something new and original, you're gonna have a very hard time. So, the hard thing is finding something new and original to do. So, in anything, in Quest, finding the hard was manufacturing the equipment. So, you've gotta find all of that stuff. Otherwise, people are just going to move on to the next thing because you haven't done anything for them that, like, businesses solve problems, period. So, the problem that a McDonald's solves is I'm going to provide you food that you like to eat at a price that you're willing to pay in a way that's super convenient.

• 42:52Tom Bilyeu?

  So, when they did it in the beginning, it was like, I'm going to get you food that you want to eat at a price that you're willing to pay in a way that's convenient, and I'm gonna entertain your kids. Now, once "and I'm gonna entertain your kids" stop being profitable, then- It doesn't make sense. The consumer is telling you, I don't care about that. I care about the first three things.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Hold on, let me jump in there because I know we talk about consumers vote with their feet, things like that.

• 43:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So if McDonald's, after they removed Play Place, everybody stopped going to McDonald's, they would have brought it right back.

• 43:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Immediately.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 43:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Immediately. And so what people, and what they would do is they would go, oh, in a given area, like when I was a kid, not all McDonald's had a Play Place. And so McDonald's corporate is looking at that and going, do we make more money in the places with Play Places or not? And for a while, I'm sure they did. And then over time, it stopped. And so they were like, okay, cool. People don't care about that. So now we're going to swap that out and all the ones in the future are going to be without. Then they start doing, okay, when one of these goes out of business, like every time we think about opening a new location, we're going to think about the full life cycle. How many years do we expect it to be there? At what point do we expect that this might go away? When it goes away, how are we going to be able to flip it?

• 44:06Tom Bilyeu?

  They will know all of these details and all of those details will be priced in to the cost of a burger. And so what they realize is, oh, cool. To give you the thing that you were telling me to a customer that you want, you want the cheap burger. Got it, heard. So that means that I have to make the businesses look like this. So they make a couple of businesses look like that and they go, did revenue decline? No, it did not. Great, nobody cared about the unique roof. Cool, easy peasy. And so now that's going to be more profitable. Now I can charge less for the burger or keep the burger at low price. And so I get it, it like especially, he's a guy of a certain age. If you grew up with the cool roofs, like you get kind of bummed that like it's all looking gray boxy.

• 44:51Tom Bilyeu?

  But dude, even in a video game, when you're developing the video game, you constantly have to think about CPU resources, GPU resources. It's like, am I going to melt this computer? So all of a sudden you start going, hey, that texture on the grass, I'm going to use that texture on like this creature's fur. I'm going to use that texture on like this distant mountain. And you just try to have very few master textures that are everywhere, even though they look slightly differently in different places, long story how you do it. But like, that becomes a game of optimization. And so, and that you're trying to keep the cost of the game development down. So you're going to recycle assets, tweak it a little bit, change the color, whatever, whatever. And this is how you keep the cost down. So it's like, dude, your money has physics. Businesses have physics.

• 45:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And he's like arguing against the thing where the consumer is the problem. Because there is a greedy capitalist right now being like, yo, dope roofs. Like, let that come back in style. So that'll be my differentiator against McDonald's. I'm gonna fucking hit him. I'm gonna have a play place. This is gonna be the dopest shit ever. All I have to do is solve the insurance problem? Word. And the problem is, solving the insurance problem isn't gonna help you because people don't trust a restaurant with their kids like that anymore. So parents are like, I'm gonna take my kid to fucking McDonald's. But if somebody's smart, they're looking at, ooh, okay, wealth inequality. Yep, it's doing its thing. Okay, okay, people are getting poorer and poorer. So now how do I go serve the poor? This was like Magic Johnson, fucking brilliant. He would go into underserved areas and he would build like amazing shit.

• 46:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And he made himself ridiculously wealthy doing that. So trust me, at all times, there are capitalists looking for that opportunity. And if a red roof with weird fucking shingles was it, people would do it. So he's mad at Wall Street, but the reality is this is just people trying to pass on the savings.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is my thing, and I need to put these feelings somewhere. So I'm gonna ask the most capitalist capitalist that I know.

• 46:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I think I was just insulted chat. I'm pretty sure that was a slur.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right now, turning your building into a gray box, it's almost like you're hedging your bets. If this does go bad, I am gonna have to sell this building. This is gonna make it easier to sell. It's gonna make it easier for my exit. This is the second founder, second CEO problem. Like Ray Kroc loved the golden arches. It was his idea to do the land thing. So he was the one like, everybody's gonna see a golden arches from a mile away. You're gonna see it, you're gonna smell it, it's iconic. So then this other guy comes in who's a Wall Street investment banker, or he's a consultant for the last two years. He's like, nah, forget that. We're gonna make it a gray box so we can sell it and increase our stock price. So to me, he is the bad guy because the founder wanted the red. And the yellow and the arches and all these things.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  What happened to, I feel like Silicon Valley gets away with this because Mark Zuckerberg cannot turn a profit for three thirty years and then come back like, okay, now we can put on ads and now it's gonna pop. Whereas they're allowed to maintain their culture in order for the betterment of the product long term. Where a lot of these box stores are like, nah, fuck it. Let's just go straight gray box and just increase stock price now. As opposed to making it fun. Like in the nineties, the purple and blue Taco Bell was hot. Like that was cool. Like the, the Play Place was somewhere to. You know, I mean, I think if a Play Place showed up tomorrow, there'll be so many people that are like, oh yeah, I like that. I'll go to a Play Place. But it's. It's not there anymore. So people don't go to it and they say, you see, we don't care about it. But it's like, y'all took it away from us. We didn't have an option. So.

• 48:12Tom Bilyeu?

  I.

• 48:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, and I love this. This is so interesting. Okay, we'll see if chat cares about this. But. Uh, my speed run on that is, uh, you've put your finger on the exact right thing, which is when a founder starts a company, they are almost always mission driven. And that mission will make them do really counterintuitive things. Those counterintuitive things are exactly what makes a company valuable. So. Uh, at Quest, we started that with the idea of ending metabolic disease. And so instead of doing what everybody else did, which was put high fructose corn syrup in their bar when they realized you can't run it on the equipment. We said, well, hold on, that's not our mission. So we're going to do this thing that nobody would ever fund because it seemed completely moronic. And we're going to engineer our own equipment. Of course, that's exactly one of the things that led to the company being very successful. Cool.

• 48:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Brilliant. Uh, impact theory. I start mindset. It's what I'm known for. Cool. Do my thing and channel explodes. Covid hits and I'm like, hold on, these people that I love and care about are about to get like run over by something. And I want to make financial content to help them out. And then my own team was like, what are you doing? Uh, this is crazy. You're going to wildly damage the channel. And I did. And I took our revenue down and it was brutal. From a revenue perspective, but from a self-respect perspective, it felt awesome because I was like, this really matters to me. I really now feel like I'm helping people. The only reason I did mindset was I believed it was a thing with my talent, intelligence, skillset. This is the best thing I can do to help people.

• 49:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Now that this is happening, this is the best thing that I can do to help people. And so from a business perspective, if I were a public company, that would have been like the board would ousted me. They would have found somebody else like that would have been insane. They never would have gone through that. So 100% founders are able to do things because they are driven by something other than just profit. But ultimately, a company has to stay in business. And so over time, like even look at Apple, over time, they go into a revenue optimization phase of their development. That's where Apple is now. And I mean, in to give Tim Cook his flowers, he has made Apple way more money than Steve Jobs ever did. But Steve Jobs put them in a place that they could revenue maximize. And if you had,

• 50:27Tom Bilyeu?

  if Tim Cook had founded the company, it never would have gotten off the ground. So it would have just been like any other PC product, right? He would optimize all this stuff behind the scenes, but there never would have been any soul. There never would have been any brand that really attracted people. So that is a real phenomenon, but like, once you spread it across like the entire landscape, you're going to get some metas and he can do whatever he wants because of the way he structured his voting shares. So he's going to forever, literally forever be able to do whatever he wants. And then there are going to be other companies that don't have that. They're later in their cycle. And so they're going to be on a totally different thing. Sophisticated investors will know how to treat different things differently. Early-stage investors almost never give money to somebody that doesn't have a founder mentality.

• 51:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So they're always looking for that, but it's like, you just sort of have to take it all the way across the board that some things are going to be like that crazy thing that people are trying. And then other things are going to be, well, I know this works optimization and it starts losing its soul over time. And so the world has always been that mix. It will always be that mix. And so what he is lamenting is largely that we've watched, because we're not even in second generation founder, CEO, we're like third, fourth, fifth generation CEO across these companies. And so, it, it's new ways of revenue maximizing that we're seeing manifest in buildings. So the thing I'm trying to point out for people is, This is always going to be the cycle.

• 51:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, one, don't be, I mean, I get why people are traumatized. I'm traumatized over the death of the film industry. I'm traumatized over, dude, IP as a thing is dying. Like, it just doesn't, like, to TikTok generation, they just don't really care. Like, stories don't get inside their soul. And for me, because stories embed themselves so deeply in my soul, that really is sad to me. But I've built a frame of reference that says, never argue with what is true. And what is true is the world is moving increasingly in that direction. So fighting against it doesn't make any sense. So anyway, to me, this is just a guy crashing out over the realities of capitalism. And if there is a capitalistic opportunity, somebody will exploit it.

• 52:39Tom Bilyeu?

  If Play Places really are a brilliant idea, then you or somebody else should do it and find out, right? And then that's the world that we all get to live in. This is exactly why I don't want Trump or any other government getting involved in things. Because now you start robbing from those counterintuitive decisions that a founder would make. Because you look at him, you're like, hold on a second, like, that's not what we want as a country. I don't want somebody trying that, that's wild. And so you just start putting pressure on them. We want the mavericks. America should be the nation of mavericks. But we're going to, if we're, if we let the government get involved, we are going to gray-boxify everything.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  All right, we gotta talk about this AI thing. So for those that don't know, Will Smith is on tour. I don't even know who's going to those concerts anymore, bro. Like, I Love Pretty Girls was not it. But he released a promo video on his Instagram. Really quick, in succession, you can't really tell. To me, I got fooled the first time I've seen it. I was like, oh, this is cool.

• 53:40Tom Bilyeu?

  You guys told me that it was AI, and I still was like, I don't see it. I mean, you can sorta like, the, that one's probably AI. That one looks real to me. That looks real, real, real.

• 53:57Tom Bilyeu?

  I assume that's real. Yeah. So I don't know if he just used it to get some close ups that he otherwise wouldn't have gotten, or if you wanted to add signs. The far away ones, but. Yeah. So my thing is, was he protecting himself from a small crowd? If he was, then danger, danger Will Robinson, because you're gonna get roasted. As he is now. For faking a big audience. If you had the big audience, but you're just trying to like do some insert shots, you wanna like put in some signs or whatever. I'm not gonna hate on you, like, if you're getting hated on at that point, you're getting hated on actually for something else, the loss of the credibility from the slap, to the, I like pretty girls or whatever. Yeah. Um, and also, this song sounds terrible. It is not good.

• 54:37Tom Bilyeu?

  So, uh, like that stuff, but here is what people do not understand about AI. AI is trained on the entire corpus of human knowledge. So if somebody's good at a thing, AI can tell you exactly what they do.

• 54:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Whose strategies would you like to know? Uh, it can go aggregate everything that's ever been said about what made Michael Jordan a great basketball player. Now, it doesn't mean you're gonna be able to do it, but it does mean it can tell you. So there is now nothing that doesn't have pattern recognition that AI can't tell you about. That is insane. So now you're going up in, uh, like convince people off. You're going up against something that's trained on all of human knowledge. It's like a master debater going against a high school student or something. Going against a preschooler, because it's like, what style of debate would you like me to use for this? So there's that guy, oh, I don't remember his name, Andrew something, that people call like the king of blood sport debating. So it could be like, oh, I'll debate in his style?

• 55:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Or would you like me to debate like Jordan Peterson? Or would you like me to debate like Lincoln Douglas style debates? Like, you tell me what you want. Boom, and it can do it, or it can pick up on, ooh, you debate like the bloodsport guy. Cool, I'll come back at you like a bloodsport guy. Like it, dude, it is wild. And then, by the way, they're going to be trained. So the AI is going to look at, oh, which argument was persuasive? Is it more to match somebody fire with fire? Is it better to hit them with the alternative? You're emotional and so I'm calm and collected. Also, by the way, oh, I look back at your history. Oh, when somebody is, matches your emotion, you crumble. Oh, no, no, no. When somebody is the opposite of the way you are, then they get the better of you. And so it'll just fucking tailor it to you.

• 56:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is where, oh my God, like this is Andrew Wilson. Thank you very much, Mad Villainy. This is where this stuff gets wild. So yeah, brace yourselves. We, we are going to need proof of human, proof of human. The blockchain, people, people. I get that when the blockchain came on the scene, it came on in a way that people did not like. Drew, there was a lot of pushback, but I'm telling you.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  That's what they're doing, NFTs and all that?

• 56:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:53Tom Bilyeu?

  The blockchain is the shit. We need the blockchain. You need to know this person is real. You need to know that an account was created yesterday or no, this account has been around forever. Oh, and by the way, it's got an AI probability score of 94%. And you're like, I don't listen to anybody that has an AI probability score higher than 32. Cool. Like those are all going to happen. And then we'll all just know what's their probabilities. Oh, fuck this kid. And you just move on. So we've got a race to that. Because right now we are acting like, no, not going to be a problem. They're already making movies about what a big problem this is. Did you see that movie? With Schwartzman, he's one of my favorite actors. That kid is so fucking hilarious. Rushmore is like one of my all time favorite comedies.

• 57:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Somebody, anybody, what is the name of that movie? Something about a mountain.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Oh, Mountain Head, the HBO movie.

• 57:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, I did see that. Yeah.

• 57:44Tom Bilyeu?

  It's all about like, oh, you can't tell what's real. And so you can just spin people out of control.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  They started an international coup or something like that.

• 57:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Just by lying about it, putting out AI. Like if you can make a movie about it, you can put blockchain solves in. So, I mean, I can steal man, why it hasn't. Happened yet, but it feels pretty weak like this should be happening. All social media, in fact, what's the real reason? They don't want to out people as bots. They don't want you to see that whatever 92% of all social media traffic is bots. That's exactly why this isn't happening. And we need it to happen to keep us all from deranging. Now, a little bit of housekeeping. I am going to be traveling, so we will not be going live this Friday. We will not be going live next Wednesday or Friday, and then I will be back the following week. Yeah, even I'm sad. I'm gonna have a great time and I'm so excited to see my family.

• 58:34Tom Bilyeu?

  But at the same time, I love getting to spend time with you guys. So just keep in mind, not this Friday, not next Wednesday, not next Friday. But then we'll be back to our regularly scheduled program. And we are trying, we're not ready to commit to it yet, but we are trying to get to three days a week. So hopefully we'll be able to do that in the very near future and that you guys will join us. All right, with that, everybody, I hope that you guys have an incredible intervening week and a half. Much love to everybody.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Happy Labor Day weekend.

• 59:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, happy Labor Day weekend. In fact, thank you guys all for joining us and we will see you next time here live. Tom Billy Show. All right, everybody, peace out. 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 and minerals, pre and probiotics.

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