The REAL Reason Behind The Government Shutdown w/ Congressman Ro Khanna

Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact True Classic: Upgrade your wardrobe at https://trueclassic.com/impact Cape: 33% off with code IMPACT33 at https://cape.co/impact Incogni: Free 30 day trial and 60% off annual plan at https://incogni.com/IMPACT AirDoctor: Up to $300 off with code IMPACT at https://airdoctorpro.com Welcome to this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. Today, Tom is joined by Congressman Ro Khanna for a deeply candid and wide-ranging conversation about the true state of the American Dream, the forces shaping today’s economy, and what it will actually take to create a future where all Americans can thrive. Together, Tom and Ro dig into the causes and consequences of the government shutdown, the ever-expanding federal deficit, and the policies driving America’s growing wealth inequality. With raw honesty, they debate the value—and risks—of wealth taxes, deficit spending, and the proper role of government in healthcare, education, and housing. Ro brings a unique perspective as a son of immigrants and representative of Silicon Valley, advocating for what he calls “economic patriotism” and laying out a detailed plan to reduce the national debt while investing in American families. Tom, meanwhile, challenges the idea that more spending guarantees better outcomes and presses Ro on the importance of results, personal freedom, and market-driven solutions. This episode is more than a political debate—it’s an exploration of values, results, and what it means to believe in America’s promise. Stay tuned as Tom and Ro grapple with big questions about policy, prosperity, and the urgent need to pull the country back to the middle, finding common ground in a time of division. If you’re ready for a thoughtful, no-holds-barred conversation on the future of America, you won’t want to miss this. 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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• 1:10Speaker 01

  Tom, it's an honor. Thank you for having me.

• 1:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It is an honor for me. We are living in wild political times, and I could not be more grateful to get a sit down with somebody who I think is really sincerely approaching these problems and trying to find solutions. So I'm grateful for your service, and I'm certainly grateful for your time.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate your voice. You've lived the American dream. Now you're trying to help others to live out their potential and their dreams. So that's an incredible service in and of itself.

• 1:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Thank you, and that's a great framing for the conversation today. I think that the American dream really is dead. But I think it's very knowable what made it real in the first place, and therefore is knowable what can bring it back. A great entry point to that conversation is, right now, we're in the middle of a government shutdown. And to me, this is a budget question. So the government has shown over and over and over for whatever the last 30 years that we can't pass a budget on time. I think the big, beautiful bill was reckless beyond all measure. And now I see we're in a shutdown. The Democrats want to add things that will make it more reckless.

• 2:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And I want to get your take on whether you think the shutdown is actually about the budget, is it about something else? Give me your take on how we have ended up here.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, I think your comment about the American dream is true and it's sad. I mean, 70% of Americans themselves have given up on the American dream. And people say, well, we've got better life expectancy, better medicine, we have consumer gadgets. But the reality is, the American dream is about your kids doing better than you. And when you have Maxwell House Coffee naming itself Maxwell Apartments, that's sort of the commentary on the American dream. And most people believe their kids aren't going to buy a house, they're not going to be able to have a better job. And it's very sad to me, as a son of immigrants, my parents came here when John F. Kennedy had called for us to go to the moon, and we were the nation to be, and we were humming, and I was born in Philadelphia, grew up with that vision. So to me, that's the central issue of our

• 3:18Speaker 01

  nation and our time. Look, I agree with you also on the big ugly bill, putting aside politics, it takes the, it takes the, it takes our debt deficit to 8% of GDP. In peacetime, we should have a debt deficit of under 4% of GDP. And I think there was way too much tax breaks in there for people who don't need them. That's, that's my own view. In the OECD, which is all of the European, Western democracies, we are the second lowest tax nation in terms of how much we tax wealth. And so to me, we can talk about where we need to cut spending, but that is the principal reason we've got these deficits that are

• 4:01Speaker 01

  at unsustainable levels. Now, there's two things in the shutdown. One is why we're shut down in terms of not paying, and the other is why Congress is shut down. And then Congress is shut down because of the Epstein files. I mean, they don't want to have a vote on the release of the Epstein files. They don't want to swear in at Alita Graha. So they've literally said for Congress not, not to vote. That's not why the government is shut down. The government is shut down because the Democrats want to get extended premiums for the healthcare Affordable Care Act, the tax credits. And that would, if we don't do that, premiums would double for 24 million Americans, and the Republicans

• 4:44Speaker 01

  are opposed to that. And that's the central debate in, in the shutdown.

• 4:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so without getting lost in the, uh, they presented a clean resolution and why don't we just sign that as has been done a million times? I think that debate's been had. I don't expect us to get anywhere with that. But what I do want to talk about is, for me, the core issue is if you already have a bill that we can agree is ugly precisely because it increases the deficit, how can you back something that increases it even more?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Well, because I would say that I have a plan to reduce the deficit by debt, the debt by $12 trillion over 10 years. How would I do it? Now, you may disagree with some of these things, but I would have a wealth tax on over $100 million. I would have a small financial transaction tax. I would take the corporate tax rate up to 28%. I would not let people pass on money to their estate and then let Facebook stock of $1,000 that becomes $100,000 and then have their kids not pay capital gains tax on that. I would really restrict these grantor trusts where you have billionaires basically passing on wealth to their heirs without paying an estate tax. I would have a tax on stock buybacks.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  That would raise a lot of revenue. And then I would cut the Pentagon budget, which is over $1 trillion, 56% of the fence. I would cut Medicare Advantage, which is ripping off the American people by saying we're sicker than we actually are. I would cut fossil fuel subsidies. I would cut duplicative programs. When you do all of that math, you can save up to $12 trillion over 10, 10 years on, on the debt. You can bring our deficits under 4% and you can still pay for things like universal childcare and expanding the Affordable Care Act. And so that's, that's my view of how you get the math to work.

• 6:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So there's two things there. One, it'll be good for us to, in a second, talk values in terms of what's the value system and the beliefs, quite frankly, that drive your, I think, even in just the way you listed it, you're a tax first, reduce spending second. We'll get to that in a minute, but that's, that'll, I think, be Very helpful. The other is, though, when I look at this, I see anything that adds to the deficit is just a nonstarter. So from that perspective, are you not worried about adding costs back into the big, beautiful, ugly? Bill, that that's going to make that even worse?

• 7:20Tom Bilyeu?

  What what is driving the thinking of just get this stuff back in and we'll deal with everything else later?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Well, first is the immediate, right? I mean, people's insurance, healthcare insurance would go up double. If we don't, if we don't do that, and that is going to mean for people who are already struggling economically, enormous hardship could increase medical bankruptcies, could mean people skipping treatment. But then there's the the broader view, which is that we can reverse the the tax breaks to, in my view, very wealthy people that we shouldn't have in this country. We can cut spending from other areas to be able to fund healthcare. And I think there are two types of spending that are deficit spending. One is deficit spending that is productive, and one is deficit spending that is nonproductive.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  If you have an investment that has a rate of return that is higher than the the amount spent, then that's productive investment and that's that's appropriate. I mean, Paul Krugman, others have written about sort of productive investment. If you just have money, though, that's not leading to productive investment, then then that is that's a cause for concern. My view is that investment in people's health and education is productive.

• 8:37Tom Bilyeu?

  I will agree certainly that an investment that actually yields improved health and actually yields improved education results would be wonderful investments to make. Our our government has not shown, in my estimation, any ability to yield those results. You you don't have to look very far to find the stats on spending more per person on healthcare to get some of the worst outcomes in the world. It's a developed world. It's absolutely wild. So and then education, same idea. So. From that perspective, where I start to say, okay, the conversation we have to have, I think, is around values. So that we can establish, okay, what is it that's driving us in this lane?

• 9:19Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think you and I are going to disagree on the fact that we're not getting the outcomes that we want now. And yet, you look at that problem and say, but still, it's better to spend more money, even though we're not getting the outcomes that we want. And I'm gonna say, no, no, no, you have to balance the budget first. And given that we have not shown an ability to generate those results, we, and I teach entrepreneurs all the time. And one of the things I'm always telling them is you cannot assume exponential growth if all you've ever shown is linear growth. And that's what this feels like to me. It's like, well, we've never shown that we've been able to get these results, but keep throwing money at the problem and somehow it's just going to resolve itself.

• 10:00Tom Bilyeu?

  And so then it comes down to, okay, well, we each have a belief system, a value system, that's driving why we want to act the way that we want to act. So I'd be very curious to hear, what is, like, if you had to break it down into some really simple ideas that you filter, every bill that you pass or reject, everything that you're trying to accomplish with your time in Congress, like, what is that small handful of values that are your north star that lead you to vote the way you vote or endorse the people that you endorse?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Every person in this country should have the chances I did to be able to live out their dreams, their potential. That means they should have healthcare, they should have good public education. Maybe they shouldn't have to take out as many loans as I did, but live in a safe community. I have people who support them and believe in them. So that's the first principle. The second principle is I represent a district of $14 trillion, five companies within 50 miles of over a trillion dollars, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Tesla, and Broadcom. We are producing enormous wealth in America. We can afford to make sure that everyone has healthcare, childcare, housing, education, the basics.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  That's not an unachievable dream for the wealthiest country in the world that's going to be producing more wealth than ever before. And I want a nation where everyone has a chance to have the basics, to have the capability to be who they can be, and also to be productive, to contribute, to be able to start a small business, to have a job, or to have a career, to do something that brings them pride and satisfaction. Those are sort of the broad principles.

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• 14:18Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 14:22Tom Bilyeu?

  A lot of that makes sense to me, but there's some devil hiding in the details. One of the things you mentioned a couple of times is wealth. And so I think it's really important for us to define terms to see if we're saying the same thing. So I think a wealth tax is literal financial suicide for a country. Anybody that proposes that, I'm gonna go campaign against that as hard as I can. But I think most people confuse income with wealth. And so I'm just not sure, I doubt that's you. I think you know exactly what wealth is, but I want to make sure that we define it. So I'll define wealth as potential income. Maybe one day it will happen, but it has not been realized.

• 15:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And to realize that the actual income on that wealth, you have to destroy the asset, your possession of it. So you take a share and you have to sell that. You take a house, you have to sell that, or you'd have to take a loan against it. And so those are the only ways to liberate the potential from that thing to be able to tax it. So if you take wood, wood has heat energy trapped inside of it. But to get it out, you have to light it on fire. So to me, it's like saying, hey, you have a whole lot of wood. And so I want to tax you on that heat energy by burning it. And that's where you begin to, you actually break down the engine of wealth by forcing people

• 15:48Tom Bilyeu?

  to essentially light that asset on fire. And so I'd love to get your take on why tax wealth if you understand the mechanism that I just described?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Well, I view wealth as a person's total net worth. Now, I'm not for taxing unrealized capital gains. So I'm not for, okay, you get a stock option, that option appreciated, that we tax that as a realization of it. But if someone is worth over a hundred million dollars, let's say someone is worth a billion dollars, Elon Musk may be worth a trillion dollars. So I say, let's have a 5% tax on his trillion dollars. That would be fifty dollars.

• 16:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you say worth, he's only worth that because the potential revenue that he could generate by selling his shares, he doesn't actually have that money.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Sure, he may have some, well, some people borrow against it. And so they're borrowing from the bank and then financing their lifestyle and not, and avoiding tax. But let's just say he has a billion dollars and let's stipulate it's all in stock or the vast majority is. I don't think paying a 2% tax on that, forcing the sale of 2% is going to disincentivize people from building more wealth, nor do I think it will lead to capital flight because 93% of American wealth is invested in America. It could lead to flight from, let's say, California to New York, but people aren't going to put their money in China. It's 20% unemployment. It's got huge debt of cities. They're not going to put their money in India. And what are they going to go to Europe?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Like Europe hasn't had a successful tech company other than SAP for, or ASML for decades. So I think that America is unique. We're not France. There's extraordinary wealth generation and having a tax of a few percent on them to be able to finance the healthcare and the, and childcare that we need is worth it. I mean, that's, that's my view. There are other taxes we can look at as well, but, but you're right. I mean, I certainly understand the distinction between wealth and income and a lot of people aren't paying the income tax at that level because they don't, they don't have a W2.

• 18:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, help me understand. You said, "I'm not for taxing unrealized gains," but then you said, "I'm in a tax, 2% of their unrealized gains." How do I reconcile those two statements?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I'm for taxing their total net worth, but not taxing... Some people say, "Let's just tax unrealized capital gains of everyone," right, "of someone over 100,000." We're talking about people over 100 million, and we're not talking about their total unrealized capital gains. We're talking about their total net worth at a given moment and just 2% of that.

• 18:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, but this will be the last time I say it, and then I'll let it go, but I want to be very clear for anybody listening, that is taxing unrealized gains. You may only be taxing a percentage of their unrealized gains, but net worth is not income. It's not money in the bank. It'll be partly that, but the VAT, like someone like Elon Musk, what do they have, half of a percent of their net worth at most in a form that would be liquid, and it would have already been taxed unless they did it through a loan, but it would have already been taxed when they took it out, which is why in the year that Elon liquidated a bunch of his shares, he paid more tax than any human has ever paid, ever, in all of

• 19:16Tom Bilyeu?

  human history. So, here's what I'm mapping. Ro Khanna believes that, hey, we've got Americans that have healthcare needs. We've got Americans that aren't getting the shot that you got, largely from an education standpoint, and the way that we're going to get there is the wealthiest individuals, over a certain amount, we're going to force them to liquidate assets in order to pay roughly 2% against their net worth. Is that a fair assessment? Cool.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  I don't think that'll be enough. I think we need other taxes, too, to get the math to work, just in fairness, but...

• 19:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Ro, you're losing me here. All right, we'll get to that in a second. So, the only flag...

• 19:57Speaker 01

  One thing I think is important is for politicians to be honest about their math. You have all these people come in, they say, "I want healthcare, I want childcare," then how are you going to pay for it? And they don't have any answers. In my case, people may disagree with where I stand, but the math actually works, and I'm honest about where I want to increase taxes on the wealthy, and what I want to spend it on, and how to get there.

• 20:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, this is why you have the reputation that you have and why I have a feeling it's going to get better by the day. So yeah, I mean, full acknowledgement of you got on my radar for being the guy that you could actually have a real conversation with, somebody who has, I think, sincere aims and is really trying to get there. So, full respect. Very grateful to have people like you doing this. What I want to get to is just mapping the cause and effect of, okay, when we do this, what does history tell us is going to happen?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So, where I come down, just to, so I'll plant my, the final flag, then we'll move on just to my side of the values equation. So, last thing is, very clear on what you want to do, we're even going to need more, but that is a tax that will require people to sell things. Getting into the value perspective, so for me, I'm looking at everything from a cause and effect perspective. And I'm trying to figure out, if we do one thing, what is the thing that this is going to yield? So if we take healthcare and education as examples, I look at that and go, oh, we've run the experiment of does throwing money at those two things, does it solve the problem? And the answer is unequivocally, no.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 21:28Tom Bilyeu?

  We, yeah, so we know that just throwing more money at this isn't going to do anything. So then the question becomes, what is? So my guiding value is, one, freedom. I really believe that freedom is the backbone of prosperity. And so for America, which is declining in prosperity, literally by the minute, I can't remember which one, you'll probably know, but there's a, somebody either in Congress or Senate that wears like a button that shows the deficit growing?

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my friend, Thomas Massey, is an MIT graduate.

• 22:04Tom Bilyeu?

  That was my guess.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And we did the Epstein file release together, and I, we were both actually on Twitter saying that they shouldn't interfere with MIT, the administration, that let MIT figure out how to select their own students and faculty. And one of the points I said is that, yeah, the guy, Thomas Massey, who went to MIT, happens to have programmed his own gadget of the deficit. He's a brilliant guy, and you should have him on, actually. He's, he is a thinker. We come from, he comes from the right, I come from the left, but we're actually interested in ideas.

• 22:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I am not at all surprised to see you guys link up. This is what I hope is the future of America. I have no indications that it is, but getting people to really map out, again, I'll just say cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect. So Thomas Massey wears the button. At least my interpretation of why he does that is to make it clear to people that literally America is growing less prosperous by the minute. Because as we accumulate debt, and so this is part of my belief, debt is the problem. Why is the American dream gone? It's very simple. Debt. Debt forces you to print money. Printing money forces you to own assets. The only assets people understand are a house,

• 23:20Tom Bilyeu?

  and we've made houses completely unaffordable. That is the crisis. If you want to know why the middle class is evaporating, it is precisely inflation caused by debt forcing you to own assets. And right now, 10% of Americans own 93% of the assets. So it's like, you literally need no nothing else. That's your problem. And so now for me, it's like, okay, what are, if I believe the freedom is the backbone of the prosperity that will reverse that so that America is getting more prosperous by the minute, then it becomes a question of, okay, what are the things that we need to do to actually increase freedom? Now, I actually don't consider myself a libertarian,

• 24:02Tom Bilyeu?

  but I am admittedly very interested in seeing government be smaller. I am very interested in seeing us spend less money and be way more disciplined. And forcing every one of us to accept Thomas Sowell's brilliant insight that there are no solutions, only trade offs. And so it becomes a question of what are the trade offs that we are going to make? And I think, going back to my values, those trade offs should be driven based on the cause and effect of what will actually generate more freedom and thusly more prosperity. So for me, balancing the budget by reducing the cost of the government is a must. And the reason I think that's a must is any gains.

• 24:46Tom Bilyeu?

  So like Trump has a don't worry, we'll grow our way out of this strategy. But that's all hypothetical. And the same is true for anybody that wants to increase the budget. Because the only thing we know is the budget's definitely going to go up. The deficits are definitely going to go up. Everything else is a maybe. I'm trying to get people to be honest about what they're prepared to cut in order to balance the budget based on where we are today, which is already ridiculously up from where we were in just 2017. What are the things that you think government should get out of so that we can start reducing that deficit?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Well, first, I agree with you that inflation has led to the devaluation of assets.

• 25:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Assets go up.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  But devaluation of money and making life more expensive. And then people are then taking it because they're afraid of inflation that they're putting. Well, when you're printing more money, that money is going in the hands of people who already have capital. Capital and so they're benefiting from more money in the system. And it's contributed to income inequality. But I don't think it's the only thing that has. I think it is also the deindustrialization that led to people not having jobs. It's also people not having healthcare and education. It's also the concentration of industry. So I think that the fact that 10% own 93% of the assets, the story of printing more money is, in my view, one factor.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  But there are a whole other set of factors that have led to that income inequality that have to be addressed. And I don't think just the deficit reduction will do that, though important to do. I mean, that's.

• 26:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Can I tease those out? Because I think you're correct on everything that you said. I'm going to give you a speed run of all the beats, literally that I think are all of the beats. And if you think that I've missed one, let me know and we can go into it. So debts force the government to print money. Printing money is inflation. It's not a proxy for inflation. It is inflation. Inflation causes prices to go up, but they are two separate phenomenon. So debts cause inflation. Inflation causes prices to go up. You've pointed out very smartly that offshoring everything, globalization, letting China into the WTO,

• 27:22Tom Bilyeu?

  NAFTA, all that stuff hollowed out a lot of our manufacturing base. We lost roughly 3 million jobs. That was one of the biggest, actually far bigger than what happened to the unions. That made it impossible for Americans, American workers to negotiate their wages. Even in white collar jobs, you just go, ah, I'll just outsource it somewhere else or import somebody that will do it cheaper. And so that robbed the average American of being able to negotiate higher prices or higher wages. And therefore, the real wages have not gone up. So you've got inflation causing asset prices to go up because that's what happens.

• 28:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Every, the people that understand get out of cash, they get into assets. And then the only asset that anybody understands intuitively is a house. So the average person could get into the stock market, asset ownership. But they won't because it's confusing and risky. And those two things together, the confused mind says no. And so they're not going to go after it. When you couple that with they're unable to get their wages to go up for the reasons that we just covered, you're now in a position where every time somebody says, add another thing to the budget without removing something of equal or greater value, you're pushing that person's head farther underwater. Because you've already made it impossible for them to negotiate their wages in any meaningful way.

• 28:52Tom Bilyeu?

  But inflation, as Thomas Massey's pin shows us, is growing by a trillion dollars every 100 days. It is wild. So.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  A couple of points to that. I agree with 90% of that. What I would say is that if inflation was matched by wage growth, then of course you wouldn't have the issue, right? It's that the prices are increasing over wages. And so one of the things that I believe is we've got to figure out how do we get wages up? How do we get people into good paying jobs, productive jobs to match the cost of living? The second thing is I think that there's technology has had some deflationary effect, not on, not on everything. And the United States being the reserve currency has had a deflationary effect. But so what we see

• 29:43Speaker 01

  is that consumer goods have gone down, products have gone down, but the costs of healthcare, of housing, of childcare are up. And so I think this is one of the reasons we've not really had to confront inflation because we've been buffeted being the, the reserve currency that's allowed us to keep interest rates relatively low. And we've had technological processes that hasn't shown up in ordinary consumer goods, though the story of, of the price inflation of healthcare, childcare, education, combined with people not making it as much is, is really the, the crux of why the American dream is, is harder.

• 30:26Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:34Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 31:38Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. And so another thing to look at there is when you start thinking about, okay, technology is actually making things cheaper every year, but the average American doesn't feel that. The question becomes, why doesn't it? Now, I already think we've said so many things that the average person is like, I already can't follow you, but for completeness, let's put this final piece on the table. When the Fed says that we want to maintain inflation at 2%, what they really mean is we are going to print so much money that we gobble through all of that technological

• 32:19Tom Bilyeu?

  innovation because your prices should be going down, down, down, down every year. And people will lie to you and they will tell you that deflation is bad. It is absolutely not bad. You want prices to go down. We've eaten through all of that by printing money plus 2%. And so people are already rightfully up in arms when they hear in the last five years alone, inflation has been 25%. But if they only understood that it's dramatically more than that, because first we printed our way through all of that innovation that you were talking about plus 25% on top of it.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  But don't you think that there's that it's the price hikes and declines have been dependent on what we're talking about? So, you know, a price of TVs have come down, the price of computers have come down, the price of an iPhone or an Android have come down. The price of knowledge has come down. Today, every person has On their fingertips, the amount of knowledge probably President Reagan had in the 1980s with all his staff. And so certain things, the price of communication has come down. But the price of healthcare, the price of childcare, the price of education, those have skyrocketed. And that, that I think is the, the biggest challenge.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And on healthcare, I agree with you. We haven't achieved the right option. I, I would be curious what you would think of having a single pair of health, health system, because I think it would make it much easier for businesses who don't have to deal with it. You'd eliminate a lot of the dead weight costs with middleman insurance. And you could still have, have doctors and nurses. But I, I think the problem is these, these sectors where the costs have skyrocketed.

• 34:07Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no doubt that there are some things where the cost is easier to get down at a more rapid rate that people do feel it. My favorite quote, though, is you can't eat a flat screen. So, yes, there, there have been things that have come down and those are wonderful. And we've gotten to take advantage of some of them. But it creates this weird sort of dystopian thing where it's like, I can get this, the most advanced TV of all time. However, my groceries have doubled in cost, right? So, or even looking at healthcare. So my take on that is the areas where we just cannot get the price down are the areas where the government is most involved, not where the government is least involved.

• 34:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And so this is why I'm careful to plant the seed for the very thing that I think is the engine of prosperity is freedom. The very thing the government takes away is freedom. Now, I think we actually want some rails. I think that humans have a tendency towards tyranny at the individual and at the collective level. I think if companies don't have any checks and balances, we've already seen what they do. They've got like nine year olds cleaning chimneys. So, uh, let us not pretend that humans will not do dastardly things if they're not given boundaries. I think boundaries are a good thing. I think we want them. I just think that it's one of these dances where as you start putting more and more, it's like, hey, this is a good thing, right? We're trying to protect people, right?

• 35:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And then you start getting into the nanny state, which ends up breaking the mechanism that gives you the freedom to actually get the innovation.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  But this is, oh, go ahead. I don't want to interrupt.

• 35:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Please, no, you.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  But I just wanted to push on this idea of freedom because this gets back to sort of basic political philosophy, right? There's negative freedom and positive freedom. And I'd be curious how you think about the negative freedom, which we can all agree on, is you don't want the state to say, hey, you know, you said the wrong thing on this podcast, or, bro, I said the wrong thing, we're going to put you in jail, or we're going to come and just confiscate all your assets without due process. That is the freedom to be protected against the arbitrary use of violence by the state. But that's not sufficient, right? But to be truly free, and this gets to the work of someone like Amartya Sen, who wrote

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Capabilities Theory, or FDR, on the Economic Bill of Rights, they say like that a human being, to be free and achieve your potential, you needed an education, you needed health, you needed the basics to be who you are, and that a society has an obligation to help people achieve their potential, and that that is the positive achievement of freedom. So it's not just a state that is allowing you not to face violence, it's a state that's helping you flourish. And then in a modern complex society, family and civic society

• 37:07Speaker 01

  isn't enough, the state has to play some role.

• 37:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So what I would say to that is, all of that stuff is wonderful, but there has to be a point at which you say, I'm trying to do the minimal amount of this. So Jordan Peterson has a really interesting take on parenting, and he said you should use the minimal force required to get your child to act in a manner that is appropriate. Now, of course, we could all debate appropriate, and of course, we could all debate. What is the minimal force required? But that feels like pretty good guidance. You cannot, and from where I'm sitting, kids will not develop in a manner that will make them productive adults unless they have some boundaries. So, hey, government needs to come in. The government is the parent in this situation. The government needs to make sure that we become a productive society. I love that.

• 37:55Tom Bilyeu?

  However, if a parent is slapping their child around and beating them, I think we all know that there's going to be real damage that's done. Even if it's not physical damage, there's the potential for massive psychological damage. And I think the same is true to extend the metaphor about as far as it will carry, that if the government is coming in and it's doing too much, that now you're going to run into problems. So, I think, I mean, I'll not have a hard time getting you to agree with, yes, there is such a thing as the government does too little, and yes, there's such a thing as the government does too much. So then the question becomes, okay, what are we going to use as the barometer to say the government is now doing too little or the government is doing too much? And I would say the answer is results. Nice and easy, just like in a business. Am I doing the right things in my business?

• 38:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know. Are you profitable? Yes, I'm profitable. Then you're doing the right things. Now, there's an element of, could you be even more profitable? And then we can start to optimize for that. But if your company isn't profitable, you're going to go out of business. So I know you're not doing the right things by its very nature. You can get into the like nitty gritty of, well, maybe if I'm not profitable for two or three years, like I'm going to find the path. Let's not get lost in the complexities. If your business is losing money, that is a bad sign. All of your energy and effort should be put to get out of that situation as fast as you can.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  And so I'm saying- On your metric, I'd be curious, genuinely curious. So let's look at Obama's Affordable Care Act, right? So we know when he passes it in 2009 or 2010, that millions of Americans, 30, 20, 30 million Americans, who did not have health insurance now have health insurance. We know that people who had pre-existing conditions of diabetes or heart disease, now they're covered. We know that young kids up till 26 who didn't have health insurance, now they can get on their parents' health insurance. Now, we also know that premiums have skyrocketed since then, and that that's a structural issue. And this is why I believe we need Medicare for all. But would you acknowledge, though, that, yes, on a results metric,

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act- Ended up improving health for many Americans, giving them the health care that they needed. But it came at a steep cost, and this is a values question then of whether we think the cost is worth the improvement of health that happened for particularly lower wage Americans.

• 40:23Tom Bilyeu?

  What I think the Obamacare Act did was give a ton of peace of mind to people that we're going to reduce the number of people that are dying of something acute, we're going to reduce the number of people that are going to go bankrupt due to medical costs. And I think those are huge wins. And the other problem is, because we have, and probably just for the scope of this conversation will leave vague, but because we have structural problems, as you said, with the way that that is set up, we're pouring money into a system that actually isn't delivering the result of making Americans healthier. So I will just say right now, and I am happy to take a debate with anybody on this one,

• 41:09Tom Bilyeu?

  your health, barring, of course, there are going to be people that tragically end up getting cancer either because of genetics, or they live near a pollutant, or they were, you know, just something in their environment closet. I just, I can't stress enough the tragedy of cancer. As somebody, I had skin cancer, and I was aghast because I'd been so careful my entire life, but I'm married to a Greek girl, and so I'm always in the shade in a very sunny space. So anyway, it played out the way that it played out, right? And so I will grant that same grace to anybody struggling. I get it, anybody can end up there. But if you want good health, it comes down to what you eat. And so if you eat poorly...

• 41:52Speaker 01

  More than exercise.

• 41:53Tom Bilyeu?

  By a factor of 10. So if you only let me control one variable, I will just control what the person puts in their mouth. And the number of ailments that I will be able to reduce just by controlling what they eat, it will be far greater than what I can control by getting them to work out. Now, if I can get them to work out like... Like an Olympic athlete. Okay, maybe then it's so hardcore that you can sort of start to get where food matters a lot less. Uh, but ooh buddy, that, that is

• 42:25Speaker 01

  What would be your top three things? I mean, we discussed, I think before we were online, you said no car or low carbs. If you were to, to be talking, I mean, we had this complex economic discussion, but you said, here are your three laws. Uh, someone changing their lifestyle tomorrow. Uh, what would be the top three things?

• 42:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't eat sugar. Don't eat sugar. Don't eat sugar. Like it's, it's, and the problem is most people don't understand. Well, carb, uh, I, I don't advise it, but it's not nearly as problematic as sugar. It just depends on how much they have. My, I don't have the studies to back this up, but my instinct is if you overeat artificial sweeteners, you're going to have microbiome problems that will be severe. Uh, probably not as detrimental to your health, but you're going to get things like itchy skin, irritable bowel. So look, they have their own problems. So I would advise people to eat whole food whenever humanly possible. But going back to the sugar thing, most people just don't understand how many things have sugar.

• 43:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So carbohydrates will turn to sugar in your bloodstream unless it's fiber. So, um, yeah, just that, that's the number one variable. People intake so much glucose. It's wild.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Now, well, and you have an expertise, but that was your whole, your whole company. And, uh, and I, I agree with, with you on this point that, that, that there has not been enough focus in our society on, on health, on wellness. You know, I, I, I had one of the best educations, uh, you could have in this country and I was very studious. And what amazed me is even though I went to a great public school, even though I got fancy degrees from the best private university, Chicago, Yale. I did not really know these simple things about sugar and carbohydrates and diet until I was in my thirties and read about this. So the amount of one lack of health wellness education that we have,

• 44:20Speaker 01

  at least in my generation, I don't know if, I don't think it's become much better now, uh, in our society is a huge problem. And then the amount of access that people have just to regular, uh, health and wellness in their communities is a huge problem.

• 44:35Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. So this is where we get into like the, the, how do you actually solve these problems? I don't think that health is confusing anymore. I think everybody knows exactly what to do. And it's just hard. So there are some things in life-

• 44:52Speaker 01

  I don't know your age. I'm 49. You agree in the 1980s, it was not obvious. Like, we would have, you know, orange juice and Rice Krispies and cereals and sodas. I don't think, or at least, I grew up in Bucks, Pennsylvania. It was not as obvious about the health knowledge we have now.

• 45:09Tom Bilyeu?

  In the 1980s, the US government was actively trying to kill its citizens. My producer just laid his head on the floor. He's not happy with that statement. But that really is, either out of ignorance or malice. The food pyramid is unforgivable. And every time that the government wants to put a regulation in place, I want to scream, because they're convinced they know best, and they do not. And so this is why I'm a huge proponent of pointing out that freedom is what leads to prosperity. Because freedom is a bunch of really selfish people competing to win the game of capitalism by making something that's better for you. And meaning you want it more.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  The Maha movement, and put aside where I disagree with Robert Kennedy on the vaccines, but this idea that, you know, Europe has regulations on food, and that we shouldn't be having antibiotics in, in the, the food we have. We shouldn't be having food dyes. We shouldn't be having as many preservatives, that we, that we can do a lot to clean up our, our food system.

• 46:16Tom Bilyeu?

  When you don't know the truth of nutrition, the sort of first, put no weird thing in your food, is a really good strategy. So from that perspective, while I have no idea if he's going to be right about all the specifics, what I hear him saying is, my belief system, my values, however you want to look at it, tells me that putting exogenous, weird things in our food is unwise.

• 46:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Just look around and I see how much faster America got fat compared to Europe. And then I look at Europe and the more they adopt American style food, the more of a problem they have. Hmm, we should probably reduce the number of things that we allow to be put in our food. Yeah, as a knee jerk reaction, that seems very reasonable. Um, you can probably simplify it even farther and just go. You really want to be eating things that look like it looked when it was growing or roaming. And the farther away from that it gets. The more likely it should only be a snack, something you eat on rare occasions. It should not be like the core of your diet. This is why, like, this goes back to my cause and effect thing.

• 47:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, I can't explain human biology to you, but I have, I've lost 60 pounds like 15 years ago and have kept it off. It is the easiest thing in the universe because I simply know what to eat and what not to eat based on what it does to my own body. So I'm like, oh, if I eat that, I overeat it, I overconsume calories, I put on fat very easily. Cool. This thing makes my joints hurt. Cool. I'm not going to eat it. Right? So it's like, you don't have to be a genius. You just have to pay attention to, am I in shape? Uh, if your body fat percentage is way out of whack. Your, your diet is not the way that you want it to be. So, but this, this all started, you were talking about education. I actually want to get back to that. So same idea.

• 48:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, the way that you're educating the kids, what, what result is it yielding? I would say it's yielding a terrible result. I say that compared to international results on standardized tests. I say that what we spend per person versus

• 48:29Speaker 01

  You're right. And our reading and test scores, just they, they just came out. They've stalled, they haven't done well. And there's just a national study on reading scores, math scores. Uh, I mean, what you're saying is factually accurate that we have not done, uh, enough, uh, well enough for, for education. And we failed a lot of people who don't get a four year college degree.

• 48:49Tom Bilyeu?

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• 49:30Tom Bilyeu?

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