From Declining Middle Class to Economic Patriotism: Solutions for America’s Future Ro Khanna Part 2

Part 2 of this must-hear discussion finds Tom Bilyeu and Congressman Ro Khanna accelerating straight into the core of America’s identity crisis—exploring economic patriotism, housing and education policy, the perils of populism, and how to navigate the forces pulling our country apart. Ro shares insider perspectives on bipartisan cooperation, building coalitions, and his vision for restoring hope and opportunity for everyday Americans. Through candid dialogue and intense debate on topics like wealth inequality, capitalism vs. socialism, the psychology of populist moments, and the practical steps needed for reform, Tom and Ro map out what it will truly take to revive the American dream. They wrestle with history’s lessons, the specific physics of economic pain, and the need for leaders to respond to real-world results over ideology. Whether you’re interested in the healing of division or the details of urban policy, this segment is packed with actionable ideas, philosophical insight, and raw political strategy. 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 What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: 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 https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: 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. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby. And then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University. And the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Welcome back to part two of my incredible conversation with Congressman Ro Khanna. Without further ado, I bring you Ro Khanna. I'm very eager to see people not accumulate debt. So the four-year college degree thing to me is just a question of, well, can you do it without accumulating debt? If you can, great. If you can't, probably a terrible idea.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But let me put forward a radical idea that I've never said out loud. I want to see what you think about this. If you want to fix education, acknowledge that you live in the age of AI. And hire basically hall monitors, effectively babysitters, to sit at the front of the class, a very limited number of them, but let's say one for every 10-ish students. And then they just interface with AI all day. And you give each school a budget to buy their AI system. And then you just let the AI systems compete for who outputs the best students. And that allows...

• 2:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Alone would be so much cheaper and so much better than what we do now that we should do. It would, it is immoral to not do that. I'll go that far.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Here's why I disagree with it. Not, not, no, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use AI as tools to supplement teaching. But when I think of the teachers and I'm curious when you think of your teachers who had the biggest impact on you. I don't remember the details of what books I read in ninth grade English. And I probably don't remember the details of the history I learned in 10th grade social studies. But I remember Mrs. Rob believing in me, encouraging me to write, challenging me to write. I remember Mr. Longo pushing me to care about public service, to love public service, to develop my ideas. And I think that so much, yes, they're the hard skills. I'm not gonna, to, to, to, to say that they don't matter.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  But to get someone to be good at those hard skills, you've got to give them purpose. You've got to give them a sense of why it matters. You've got to get them to love things. And I think that is not AI. That's emotional. It's I had this conversation with Jensen Long at Nvidia. And I said, do you think AI is gonna really displace jobs? And he said, yes, it's gonna displace jobs, but you know, I spend most of my time as CEO of Nvidia, setting goals and talking about resilience and inspiring people. And I, I just think that that human quality is ultimately the most important in success. I imagine it was the most important for you.

• 3:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So I love that. And that's why I'm saying you want more people in the classroom, not less. But you just want to make sure that we accept that the question has been asked and answered. Is it a good system to expect each individual, each new generation to go and train themselves to death? And then go in and teach? Or are we better off with AI, which has been trained on the entire corpus of human knowledge? And gets better every day and will most likely on acute tasks like history or whatever, always outperform an individual human?

• 4:20Tom Bilyeu?

  You put them in place to give the instruction, right? This experiment is being run right now in schools in Texas where they're having the kids spend two hours a day with tailored, because that's the thing, even if it's one AI, it can still tailor its rate of progress to that exact student. And with two hours of AI instruction, those kids are like outpacing their classmates that aren't using AI by like tremendous degree. It's really incredible. And this is gonna be the birth of something beautiful.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  You know, because I certainly am always a data person and wanna look at what we can do. And I'm not a, I represent Silicon Valley, I'm not a Luddite or someone who says that let's not use AI. Certainly it's powerful tools. And I think the question is, how do we, how do we blend the uniqueness of teachers going all the way back from Socrates on to the teachers you and I had with the tools of technology?

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I agree. So I wanna see humans in the class and I wanna see them be people that can inspire a child to dream bigger, to want more, to not be an indoctrination engine, or if we're gonna indoctrinate kids, which we are inevitably, that we have a nationwide curriculum from an indoctrination perspective that everybody agrees on, and it's just real basic. For me, it's a growth mindset. Just take everything Carol Dweck has ever taught and just be like, here it is. This is the...

• 5:45Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things, I was just in China, that I think we do so well in America, to your freedom point, is we love to challenge, right? Even, you know, you could be an administrative assistant or a CEO in this country, and you perfectly can say that the president is someone you think is utterly wrong and believe that your opinion matters just as much with fervor and certainty. And it's not just that you have the freedom of speech to do that, you have the self-confidence to do it. One of the things I used to do as a student is I used to love arguing that my teacher was wrong about something. And that now I argue that people may be wrong, and it's given me an ability to challenge the system. And so I feel like that...

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You don't want it too sanitized, right? Like, are you going to say the AI is wrong? Or you want to make sure people are developing a spirit of challenging the system, questioning authority, taking risk. And I think, I know these things seem soft, and we definitely need to get our math reading and technology skills up. But I think it's actually what makes America exceptional. I think it's why I am very bullish on the American experiment long term.

• 6:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I could not agree more. It's one of the things that makes me very nervous about what I see happening in America culturally, which is a move to a very socialist stance of like, we want to make sure that everybody's outcomes are the same. You said what you believe, which is you want to make sure that people have the same opportunity that you had, and I think that is absolutely critical. I think it's immoral to do anything other than that. But from the perspective of God, the universe, whatever it is that you believe in, has seen fit to give us different talent and intelligence. And so there's always going to be different outcomes. So having the ability to take a swing, to think that you're right,

• 7:39Tom Bilyeu?

  only works if we're going to allow the marketplace to slap you around and say, nope, you're wrong. And right now, I believe that America has lost the stomach for letting people fail. And to make sure that we catch everybody, we are robbing us of what you're talking about, which is, all right, guys, we're going to make sure that you all get educated. All right, guys, we're going to make sure that you don't have to worry about your healthcare. However, after that, this is going to be a question of your talent, your intelligence, your discipline, your hard work. You've all got access to the AI. You've all got access to the healthcare. Let's go. But some of you are going to get rich, and some of you guys are going to crash and burn.

• 8:23Tom Bilyeu?

  And by the way, some of you are going to be lazy as hell, and you're not going to do anything. You're not going to develop yourself. No beef. But then we're going to get a very uneven distribution of outcomes. And I really think we have lost the will for that. And there is, and I think it comes from, things have gone so well for so long that people think that amazing outcomes and growth are a law of nature, not realizing it is tied to exactly one thing, and that exactly one thing is entrepreneurship. There is nothing else. It's the only thing that generates jobs. It's the only thing that generates taxable revenue. Like, it is the whole game. It's the thing that is innovation itself. Like,

• 9:07Tom Bilyeu?

  it just, that is the thing. And we're losing sight of that to our detriment. And I see, let's call it the AOC-Mamdani wing as representing that. And that one really scares me. Like, I look at that and I go, ooh, this doesn't work.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Let me ask you this, though. You know, what they're speaking to is the 70% of Americans who have lost the American dream. And they're saying, look, we can't afford our housing, we can't afford rent, we can't afford healthcare. And I agree with you on the entrepreneurship and the innovation. But don't you think some of the issue was people being subject to forces well beyond their control? That the shop owner in rural America who couldn't compete with Amazon didn't know that, it wasn't that he or she didn't work hard. The factory worker that couldn't compete with China or Mexico, it wasn't that he or she

• 10:09Speaker 01

  couldn't work hard. The, you know, small town that couldn't compete because all their kids were leaving for Silicon Valley or Seattle. It's not that they couldn't work hard. And so there have been so many forces of globalization, automation, that have hit the economy that a lot of people are saying, we did everything right. You know, we worked hard. Yeah, we're not entrepreneurial. I mean, not everyone can start a business. That's why one or 2% of people in this country do that. I don't know, maybe it's a little bit more. You would know the statistics. We didn't put everything in our job. We had pride in our job. And then we wanted to support our family. We wanted to go to church. We wanted to coach Little League. And every, my, our grandparents did that. Our parents did that. And we couldn't

• 10:54Speaker 01

  do it. And now we see no possibility for our kids doing it. And it's not because we're not working hard. It's because the system screwed us. And I really think that's a large part of what explains whether it's Trump, whether it's Bernie, whether it's AOC. It's this righteous anger at a system that people feel has failed them, even if they're willing to work hard.

• 11:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag. That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less. And it's not just the cashmere. I ordered a few things myself, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, which I wear obsessively.

• 11:57Tom Bilyeu?

  First thing I noticed was the quality: soft, well-made, built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time.

• 12:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number, to anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after that supply. They handle removal requests across 420-plus harmful broker sites. And they keep checking back as brokers constantly try to relist you. On the Unlimited Plan, the exposure scanner hunts down your information. Send a link, and their privacy experts handle the takedown. Track your progress in the app and get a monthly risk assessment showing exactly where you stand.

• 13:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Go to incogni.com/impact and use code IMPACT for 60% off an annual plan. Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash impact. Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

• 13:42Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 13:47Tom Bilyeu?

  You and I are in violent agreement about that. So that's why we started the interview where we started it. I want people to understand it is not unknown forces. It is, it is a force. I can walk you through it over and over and over. It is, I'll oversimplify again, but it's debt and inflation. That, that is what's robbed you of this. If you make homes unaffordable, and then put people in a position where you are creating inflation, and the only way to hide from inflation is to own assets, and the only asset you understand is a home, and that's unaffordable, you are saying, "I, I, the government, am going to put a boot on your face, and I'm going to stamp on it forever." And that's it. Like, I, I really want people to understand.

• 14:31Tom Bilyeu?

  That is what has happened. And so now the question becomes, how do we undo that? Now, you're one of the few people that I really hear banging the drum eloquently, and so I want to just amplify this as much as possible. You've, you have talked about this as economic patriotism. We need to get people to understand you've got to bring some very meaningful percentage of manufacturing back to the United States. An absolute must for a whole host of reasons, by the way. National security being one of them. Thucydides' trap, if people don't know it, look it up. That's a very real thing. China's gonna be a real, China is a real thing. So you're preaching to the choir. Amen, brother. Like, keep going with that.

• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  But getting people to understand, nothing, nothing comes even close to matching as long as the government is deficit spending, your neck is being stepped on. And if we don't stop deficit spending because of the, the physics of the economy... You're in a, just a horrible position. Now, there are things, I think, thing number one, stop deficit spending. Thing number two, there, it's so simple to make houses more affordable.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Which is?

• 15:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is free market, baby. Let builders take a risk to go build a whole bunch of apartment complexes in that neighborhood that you really don't want apartment complexes. And they will find that balance. Like, if you look at, there are several places-

• 16:06Speaker 01

  I agree with this in terms of, we gotta double our construction of housing in this country. I mean, that, that, that to me, and I, I, I think there's more and more recognition in California, we messed that up. I mean, for, until now. I mean, now finally Scott Wiener had a bill to say, okay, let's have more, more housing. But look at my district in Silicon Valley, prime example, you got five trillion dollar companies in the, in the place that have arisen in the last 20 years, 25 years. And yet, the place, from a housing perspective, still looks like the valley of the heart's delight with orchards. Like, you can't have that. You can't have the most economic activity in the world and housing growth be, be restricted. And so, it's not

• 16:49Speaker 01

  a surprise that you have all these multi-millionaires now bidding up the housing prices so that a, the, the working class can barely, can't live there. And I, I, I do think that the debt and inflation is one of those causes, but restrictive zoning has been another reason. And the fundamental income inequality, I think, is also a reason. If you're, if you're living as a plumber or as a teacher, and everyone around you is working at Google and had stock, and it just so happened we had this tech boom, well, you know, that, that makes it hard to have housing be affordable.

• 17:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I totally agree. And so, the good news is, you're being very specific. And once something is specific, then we can look at the cause and effect, and we can say, what exactly do we need to do for people that, that don't know YIMBY? It would be yes, in my backyard. So, NIMBY-ism, which is the thing that you'll hear most commonly, is not in my backyard, meaning, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can go do- Do it somewhere else, but don't build those apartments in my neighborhood. So I think that there's a lot of things that we could do with that to make sure that we're getting more housing. Houston is a great example. Houston just says, yeah, it's easy to get a building permit. No problem. Go do your thing. And because of that, housing prices in Houston have been ridiculously stable.

• 18:07Tom Bilyeu?

  And so people that want that number to go up, yeah, they're bumming because it's just sort of a steady across line. But it does mean that people can actually get onto the property ladder. And again, given the need to get on the property ladder, to have an asset that you understand, you gotta do it. It's one of those, like I keep coming back to, the government has certain moral obligations. One moral obligation would be to give people access to a home that is affordable for, call it the median income in the country. So it's like, bro, you can't put people in a position where they cannot get into assets unless you're prepared to not inflate the currency.

• 18:48Tom Bilyeu?

  So you can't both inflate the currency and make it impossible to get into an asset. So pick your poison. If you want to re-harm the currency.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  I agree with you on the Houston permitting and building. And I, from the things I've read, that Houston has been better than some of the places in California on that. Would you do anything more though? Would you, you know, some people, for example, say for a first time, home buyers at a certain income level, help them with their down payment, lower their interest rates at two to three percent. Other people say, no, you know, if you do this too much, you're going to create a bubble and that, that, that at its extreme is what led to the 2008 crash. I mean, where are you and how much do you help beyond building people get into homeowner ownership?

• 19:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll come down to cause and effect on it. So if somebody can show me that, hey, the government getting involved can really do something, if the program fits these metrics, I'd be all for it. My gut instinct is it won't work. When the government gets involved, they do create bubbles, they create distortions, they give rents to the wrong people.

• 19:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Housing developers know, oh, I know you're going to be able to get a loan for this amount. They'll know that loans get handed out in certain bands. So they're only going to build houses that match those bands. Or they're only going to price houses in those bands. Like it creates distortions in the market. It is probably much better to make sure that everybody's getting their education. That we're not inflating the purchasing power of their dollar away. That we're not sending all of their jobs overseas. That we're not importing cheap labor. And then we say, okay. And now we're relaxing some of these restrictions. So that the people in the local market who are capitalists, who are just trying to. They're going to take a risk and they're going to say, I can build a better house than the next person. Uh, I can get better loans than the next person.

• 20:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I'm going to win in this housing market. You let all those guys compete with each other. Some of them are going to go out of business, are going to go bankrupt. And the buyers will get to take advantage of that jockeying and that competition. So that when you're uncertain about something, letting the free market do its thing is almost always the right answer.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  We're, we're in the, I mean, I went on housing. I agree on the doubling the housing construction. I agree on expediting permitting for building. But I do think we need to stop sort of private equity subsidizing private equity to be buying single family homes.

• 21:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, stop, stop ridiculous competition where you're letting people just gobble that stuff up. Or have some sort of progressive system where it's like, all right, if you want to buy that third house, like go for it. But damn, like you're paying some crazy like tax or whatever. Facts, like a consumption tax where it's like, oh, if you want to get into that thing, like we, we are trying to save. Let's make no bones about it. We are trying to save these houses for first time home buyers. And so if you're a third time home buyer, they're going to be like just, you can do it. Because fine, having 50% tax or whatever, uh, is great. We can do amazing things with that. So that kind of thing, I have no problem.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Well, and, and that's an interesting idea. I didn't even thought of it. Maybe I'll, I'll have my team look at that. But a consumption tax, whether it's for private equity or a second or third, third home. Uh, and then some, some sense of a, in my view, a well crafted, uh, a program for first time home buyers. But. Well, let me ask you this on a broader philosophical level. Most people think sort of the New Deal, the G I bill, when we came back to the United States. Well, let's start before that. Europe didn't allow everyone to go to high school. High school was an elite thing in Europe. Twenty, thirty, forty percent of people went to high school between nineteen ten to nineteen forty in Germany and France, in England. The United States had no high school for everyone, public high school for everyone.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  It helps us become the dominant post-World War economy. We make that bet. And then we have the G I bill and we say, you know, we're going to help with people who served in the war, get housing, get education, and that's credited for our economic development. Are there fundamental things that you would say in the last hundred years or last fifty years that the federal government has done really well? Or where you say, yeah, that is something that is foundational to the American dream? Or are you just deeply suspicious of the federal government? And if so, how far back? I mean, where do you think? What are the programs that you think the federal government should have and is doing well?

• 23:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so again, if I go back and look at the results, then it is undeniable that the setup post-World War II was amazing. So we had the incredible baby boom that we had. Baby boomers really came in to like some good stuff for a reason. Thanking our troops, honoring their service, you're always going to get big applause from me. So doing a G I bill and saying, hey, thanks for risking your life to protect our freedoms. Yes, we're going to make sure that you get educated and all the other benefits. Love that, totally here for that. So when you look at that boom period, some of it is demographics and that becomes very, it becomes impossible to replicate.

• 24:10Tom Bilyeu?

  But nonetheless, they made some really good moves there. I'm also very impressed with what the US did to establish itself as a reserve currency. The, even though I absolutely despise and think that it...

• 24:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Evil is probably the right word, though everything's a trade-off. So there are certainly upsides. But in 1913, when we passed the Federal Reserve Act, we did people all the dirt of inflation. So I don't love that one. But we, we made America. America is amazing. So my thing is, you and I are exactly the same age. We were both born in 76. And I'm like, yo, growing up in the 80s was dope. Being 12 in 1988 was dope. I believed I could become anything I wanted to. I have so many memories of like, because the easiest way to explain how I grew up, I didn't have cows, but my neighbors did.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Where did you grow up?

• 25:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Tacoma, Washington.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So I was almost rural. And even being that kid, I was like, I can be anything I want. This is amazing.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  You did pretty well.

• 25:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I've done extraordinarily well. And so I want everyone to have that same feeling. I don't expect everyone to actually win. To your point, not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. It's very stressful. I don't recommend it for everybody. But I want people to believe, okay, the game is not rigged against me. It did not feel rigged against me when I was a kid. And right now, it is provably rigged against people. So I feel like we had a great run there for a minute. The debt accumulation caught up to us. We made some very troubling decisions with letting the government basically back a lot of loans in housing, back a lot of loans to students to get educated. And that came home to roost.

• 26:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so there are obviously other issues. But like, you start stacking those things up and it, it starts getting bad. But I, dude, I'm the most patriotic guy you're ever going to meet. Like, my mission is literally to get people to feel the way I felt when I was 12 in 1988.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  I know, I know you're not, we share the same aspiration. We share the same kind of hope about America, right? Even though we have such different backgrounds. My grandfather spent four years in jail alongside Gandhi, fighting for India's independence. My parents are immigrants, but I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 99% white.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Indian American Hindu faith, going to Phillies games of the 700 level at the Vet, watching Rocky movies, believing you could do anything in America. And then this country elects me to represent arguably the most innovative place in the world at the age of 40. Obviously, you can't have a story of like mine and or like yours and not believe in the American experiment. And it pains me that the country my parents came to, the country I grew up in, that there's not that same confidence, there's not that same hope, there's not that same spirit. That's what I want to invoke and to build in this country. We're both doing similar work from different angles and perhaps different ideologies. Who do you think, putting, you're not political, but is there a president in your lifetime

• 27:25Speaker 01

  who spoke to that, who you said, you know what, that's the, that's the direction I want America to go? Or have you just been, think that we made mistakes over the last 50 years?

• 27:35Tom Bilyeu?

  90s Clinton minus the blowjobs, like that, you had me at hello. That felt dope. Like when it was happening, it felt awesome. Now, behind the scenes, I'm sure in terms of presiding over what was going on with China and all of that, that there are mistakes, obviously, that we would look back on. But being fiscally conservative, ironically, as a Democrat, dope, building the, I mean, they were basically saying Doji things back in the 90s.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Clinton reinvented government. 300,000 federal workers were either reassigned or let go in terms of, but it was done with Congress. It was Al Gore's reinventing government. And the challenge with this Doge thing is that they were like, oh, we don't have to work with Congress, we can just do whatever. And, and they didn't really do much, I mean, in terms of the actual.

• 28:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, here's, here's my whole beef. This is a populist moment. And in a populist moment, there are very predictable psychological things that are happening. And those psychological things are, there was a cross-cultural study done that showed if people, in times of wealth inequality, if people can vote for something that will help the poor.

• 28:55Tom Bilyeu?

  They won't do it as readily as they will vote for something that punishes the rich. So if they have two, if they have two, and this is cross culture.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  You know, I gotta say, I gotta interrupt here because you're so spot on. There was a study about when Elizabeth Warren would talk about, we can have childcare at $10 a day or whatever. I mean, I for that. And then she'd say, and we will tax the wealthy to do it. That the collapse would be more for taxing the wealthy than for the, the program. So it's, it's interesting that study. It's fascinating.

• 29:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, it is heartbreaking because this is the thing that's driving us apart. So my whole, my whole mission is to pull people back to the middle. You, you have to be in the middle, no matter what. These are our countrymen. These are fellow human beings. We share, uh, you know, geography. Uh, we've got to understand you're going to compromise. I don't care what side you're on. Uh, just like I compromise with my wife, even when I think that she is just not looking at the world the right way. And she compromises with me when she thinks I'm not looking at the world the right way because we're married. And so it's like, we don't want to self-destruct. So anyway, I'm trying to get people back to the middle, but, um, the way that we're going to get there

• 30:08Tom Bilyeu?

  has to be grounded in what is real. And in a populist moment, we have to recognize what is real is that people want to punish the wealthy more than they want to help the poor. And when you understand that, all of a sudden the voting and the cheering and all of that, it all starts to make sense.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  But do they want to punish the wealthy more or do they want to punish society's enemies? So, you know, Trump comes in and says, it's not just the wealthy. He blames China. He blames Mexico. He blames immigrants. He blames trans kids. He blames that, that they want a villain of, of some kind. And, and you could say my party says that the wealthy should pay more and maybe, maybe it's punitive. But, uh, there's a populist right that is also, uh, looking for, for things to blame.

• 30:52Tom Bilyeu?

  A hundred percent. So, uh, who's the villain? This is why people always talk about, um, you know, if only we could have an alien invasion and then we could all be united, uh, being against the alien. I don't know if you've ever read it, but there's a comic book called The Watchmen and spoiler alert, though it is like 40 years old. So.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Are you big comics? And all that stuff?

• 31:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, I, I am a big believer in the power of myth. And so what you see behind me are some of my favorite myths.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Someone once asked me, that a young guy, uh, to like start to explain the difference between the Justice League and Avengers. And I started going down the rabbit hole on ChatGPT. And I can tell you, I can talk for two hours on economics, but I was just, I was confused. I left, I left not being able to piece that, that together. And, and, and so I've given up on that, on that goal.

• 31:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That's hilarious. Yeah, I think it speaks to a certain personality type. It's definitely not something I expect everybody to get into. Uh, but it's, humans are meaning making machines. And we tell ourselves stories as ways of transmitting a whole lot of very important information in an emotional fashion. That's easy to remember. That's why religion works. That's why Star Wars works. Um, that's why the story I was talking about with, um, The Watchmen works. And in that story, basically a guy fabricates an alien invasion to try to bring people back together. And it's, it's a very fascinating story. And it's a very big question as to whether he was a villain,

• 32:31Tom Bilyeu?

  uh, or whether he was, um, somebody actually saving America. It's, it's, uh, or the world. It's very, very fascinating. So yeah, we, we have to be very careful. Right now, people want a villain. They'll get a villain no matter what. And so how do we talk people down? Now, for me, Mom Donnie is a villain.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Really?

• 32:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  I'll try to talk to you. Have you met him?

• 32:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's, this is the part, uh, where I wanted to talk to you the most. You're a very sensible, very smart man.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  You know, I've endorsed him. I'm, I've, I've gone to campaign for Abigail Spanberger. She's running for governor of Virginia. I've gone to campaign for Mike Sherrill. And I'm going for M'Donnie November, November 1st. So I, uh, you know, all cards on the table. I, I, I'm supporting him. So let's, let, let me ask you why you, uh, why you feel that way?

• 33:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Because his policies. Good.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I, would you be open to having a conversation with him? Or?

• 33:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  No. Yeah.

• 33:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, of course.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Let's have a conversation. Let, let me, let, tell me why, let me tell you, let me make the case for Mumdani's rise. And you tell me where, where you have the strongest objections. Mumdani says, look, in New York, we think of it as, as, as, as, as almost sex and Broadway and finance. But, you know, the real people building New York City are the, are, are also the construction workers and the cab drivers and the bodega owners. And the costs have gone, skyrocketed for them and they aren't being appreciated. And I, I want a New York City that's for young people and working people and that celebrates

• 34:12Speaker 01

  it as much as for the billionaires who are making the financial engine of the United States and country work. And I really think he galvanizes folks on that. And then he galvanizes folks on, on, of course, the Israel Palestine issue, which, which we can get into if you have an opinion on. But those are the two things I think animating his campaign.

• 34:35Tom Bilyeu?

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. 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 and join the over 100,000 companies

• 35:20Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 35:43Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 35:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so the part that you just represented, I'd be like, yo, this, he's my guy. Who's this guy? I gotta meet him. Like, this is what I'm about. I love that. I love that he's honoring hardworking people that really are helping build the city, and there's no doubt about that. But once, if you try to map what he's actually talking about from a policy perspective with the words you just said, you're gonna be very confused, because it's like, wait, but the things that you're gonna do are gonna hurt all of those people. And once you map him from, oh, you're tapped into the resentment of all of those people, and you're the populist leader who's gonna promise the socialist things that lead to, first, just the destruction

• 36:32Tom Bilyeu?

  of the economy, but after the destruction of the economy, it leads to death. And I am, I'm not a scholar, but, ooh, am I getting close every day to being a scholar of the atrocities of the 20th century led by Marxist thinkers. And he embraces a very distressing number of their ideas. And so I'm just like, he's going to hurt the very people he purports to want to help. And so he only makes sense when you think of him as somebody who resents the wealthy far more than he wants to help the poor.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  But what about if we're in a FDR-like moment in this country? You know, we've gone in income inequality from 53rd in the world to 128th. We've got extraordinary wealth generation. You're a example of it through hard work, through entrepreneurship. And we've got a lot of people for struggling, and for reasons, you know, that you've discussed in terms of debt and inflation, and we've discussed in terms of globalization and automation, and the decline of unions, and the neglect of rural and factory towns.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And the working class. And what if Mumdani is saying, we need a correction to this capitalism? And you know, FDR and his coalition at socialists and FDR had saved basically capitalism from itself. And if what we need is to take seriously the critiques of capitalism, of unfettered capitalism, to have our own vision of a free enterprise system that is going to work and reduce some of these inequalities. I call it progressive capitalism, moral capitalism. I imagine you would have at the central premise of that reducing debt. But even if that's not my central premise, what do you just think about the goal of capitalism correcting

• 38:24Speaker 01

  itself and Mumdani pointing out that it must correct itself, or we're going to have massive resentment?

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So the way that I approach all of this is from cause and effect. So economies have physics. And when I hear somebody go, okay, we want to, we want to get to Mars. And we have tried everything and nothing has worked. And so guys, I'm telling you, we got to point the rocket down. I'm going to be like, hey, I understand you want change. Hey, I get it. Things aren't working. Heard. We're totally on the same page. But pointing the rocket down is the only thing guaranteed not to work. And so this is where I always ask people to read a series of books, which will make clear exactly what happens when you try these

• 39:13Tom Bilyeu?

  policies. Oh, and by the way, so I'll list the books in a second. You don't have to go any farther than the 70s and 80s in the Bronx. His very policies, the very things that he's saying that he wants to do now have already been tried. So my number one lesson to entrepreneurs is, oh, cool, you're about to do a thing. The number one question to ask is, has anybody tried this before? And if the answer is yes, go find out what happened?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  What about this idea that he has on free buses, right? His point on that is, a lot of the people on these buses aren't paying their bus fare anyway. And it's kind of a deterrent to some. And so if you made it free, it's something that's The city can afford and makes public transportation easier. It's not a huge revenue loss. I mean, is are you are you opposed to all his ideas? Or are they specific ones? And I don't, you know, I mean, I obviously have my own platform and and want to be accountable for my my ideas. And I work with Mamdani, I work with Nassia, sort of trying to build a a unique coalition of what what the time requires. But I I'm curious, obviously, his he he

• 40:21Speaker 01

  does his platform concern you more than Donald Trump's platform?

• 40:27Tom Bilyeu?

  His platform does concern me more than Donald Trump's platform. But Donald Trump is doing his best to make me more concerned with every passing day. So.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  If it's Mamdani versus Trump, who do you vote for?

• 40:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, Trump, for sure. When when Trump did the big, beautiful bill, he lost me.

• 40:48Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, any anybody that's trying to map me is like, oh, my God, I love Trump so much. They're always going to be confused.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm you're an independent thinker and you're not political. I'm just I'm I'm asking it more. One of the things I've loved about this conversation is it's sort of intellectually open and curious, which I think we don't have in our politics. I'm asking it more as you would as a friend over dinner, not not in trying to, oh, you're a Trump supporter.

• 41:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so the talking about Mamdani specifically, the even if I map him as like, no, he's really well meaning. If he's well meaning, he does not have any historical context. So to the bus thing, one thing you learn as an entrepreneur very fast is every division needs to be a self sustaining economic engine of its own. Why? Because anything that can't output something that is more valuable than its inputs, so the labor costs, the parts, the whatever, it tells you the world does not want that thing. And so when you use other things to cover the losses from that area, you're really just doing an emotional thing. There's no logic to that.

• 41:55Tom Bilyeu?

  The world has been asked and has given you an answer as to whether it wants that thing at that price. And the answer is, no, I do not.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  But they're public goods, right? I mean, we have public schools, we have public health. I mean, there are public goods where we don't take that that view. Public roads.

• 42:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure. So when you're talking about something like the roads, you're saying, okay, everybody, we've got all this infrastructure. We are going to be taxing people and then we're going to efficiently deploy that to build the things that we think are going to give the maximal output. And what you're running into is, okay, we have an unbalanced budget. Because if you have a balanced budget and you just want to say, pick anything, we want to make buses free, we want to make ice cream free, whatever, then it doesn't matter. Because you've got a balanced budget and that's the thing you've decided that you want to allocate funds to. And people can argue, no, no, no, I don't want buses for free. I want taxis for free. Or I don't want ice cream for free. I want the subway for free, whatever. And then I think most people go, well, the subway, the buses, those are better because more people can move around from it'll open up job opportunities and things like that. And you'd hear me be like,

• 42:59Tom Bilyeu?

  yeah, that's way better than ice cream. When you have an unbalanced budget, then I'm like, hold on, you have to figure out why this thing is not able to make money in and of itself. And so I have a feeling you're going to come down to your housing is the problem and you need to address housing, you need to make housing affordable. So I think a big problem that I'm going to have with Mom Donnie is that he is speaking to people's emotions. And I unfortunately, I only care about emotions in as much as to get people to do the right thing. You have to meet them where they are. So they have to understand that you get how bad things have gotten for them. But then you've got to walk them through what's actually going to solve the problem. Mom Donnie, in my opinion, is on the civil war revolution path. So if we follow his policies,

• 43:44Tom Bilyeu?

  well intentioned or not, they end with more deficit, they end with violence breaking out. Keep in mind, every country except Japan that has ever been over 130% debt to GDP for more than it's like 18 months, has ended up in open conflict. So I think, given we're already seeing political assassinations, we're already seeing riots, we're not going to be Japan. We're not going to be the next country that can stay over 130%. We're at 122%. So I think he's got the most energy in the Democratic Party. So I don't look at this and go, oh, but it's isolated to New York. I go, no, no, no, this is where the country is moving, this Certainly is where the Democratic Party is moving.

• 44:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And through the physics of the economy, this becomes a problem. So.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  What would you do in need? So let's say M'Nani now wins. The reasonable guy, he says, okay, what should I do to bring down housing costs, grocery costs, bus and costs? You know, he can't deal with the federal debt that's out of his hand. He's mayor of New York. What would you tell him to do?

• 44:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so one, I want to make clear if he becomes the elected mayor of New York. I want him to do well. I want him to succeed. I want him to make like, no, no, no, this, this is like the most atypical thing for somebody to want. Most people, I just said he's a villain. So if the villain gets elected, I still want him to win for New Yorkers. So let's start there. So I would come with sincerity and say, all right, listen, man, this is all about cause and effect. This is all about physics. So if you're deficit spending, you're going to have a problem. Please look at the Laffer curve. There's only so much that you can tax people before they leave and you actually end up taking in less tax. The US post-World War II had a 90% progressive tax rate.

• 45:28Tom Bilyeu?

  We collected less tax per taxpayer than we do now, per taxpayer. So it isn't a winning solution. So let's be very careful. But hey, if you've got ideas, you want to tax people a little bit more because he's saying, look, it's only 2%. Okay, rad. So 2%, I think it's livable. I don't think you're going to see a ton of flight. But if they're seeing things play out poorly elsewhere, they're seeing they're not getting a return on their investment, or they see that you're, that's really just a Trojan horse. You want to do more. You've got to be very careful. So number one, hey, I'm sitting in the lobby of your office just to get one thing across. Make housing affordable. Make it affordable. Don't do rent control. It will make it worse. You need only look at the Bronx.

• 46:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally 70s and 80s Bronx, baby. We tried exactly this. It doesn't work. So we both agree we want to make it cheaper. Don't do it through rent controls. That would be like if I was going to give them one thing across the board, it would be that.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  But my understanding is New York, like, half the apartments already are rent controlled. They're like

• 46:30Tom Bilyeu?

  There lies the problem. That's why it's too expensive. But I'm saying the very thing he's railing against, he's right to rail against it. His solution is the only thing that's going to make it worse.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  I think the point is that we need to build more housing in New York. I think he could be open to it. My sense is that, you know, he's been open to the abundance agenda. I don't know if you read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, but they've been talking about we got to build more. We got to have expedited permitting. So I don't think he'd be, it'd be out of the question for him to support that. As he talks about the rent control departments that already exist, he doesn't want their rent to go up. And that, that I think is, you know, Blasio, I think, did it three years or something. I mean, it's, it's already in place in New York. But I, I hear you that, you know, his challenge, I think he's going to win the election. I think his challenge will be, okay, now, how do we, in the next year, really show in New York City that costs are going down?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Because it's, governing is very different than campaigning.

• 47:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. As you well know, yes, that, that is a very big thing. And so that brings us to the other part is the DSA is hyper toxic, in my opinion. And part of the reason it's hyper toxic is they reject ideas that I think are evolutionarily placed in us. And the easy one to round to is the family. And they held an event where they were talking about abolishing the family. And this is in the last, like, six months. So

• 48:05Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't see that.

• 48:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, God. It, it might have even been the Yeah, yeah, yeah. It might have even been the name of their meeting. So it won't be hard to find. But, um, so I don't know how much he goes in on that kind of thing. I would have to see that play out over time. But I would want to see him bring people together in the middle. I want that of every politician. This is my huge complaint with Trump is he's constitutionally incapable of bringing people back together in the middle, which is wild because he's International, yeah, internationally, he's, but I think there it works because it's just carrot

• 48:50Tom Bilyeu?

  and a whole lot of stick. And that's not going to work with your own populace. Or maybe it will, and I just am blind. I don't know. He strikes me as the wrong person to help us find the middle in America.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  So what is your advice to someone like me who works with Massey? It was kind of, obviously, I've got a progressive capitalist view. There are places where you disagree with me on wealth tax, or maybe Medicare for all. There are places you may agree with me, which is that we need to support entrepreneurship, innovation. We need to create economic opportunity in places and for people who haven't had them. And I'm building this coalition where I'm supporting Mamdani, I'm supporting moderates like Mike Yashel, Abigail, working across the aisle with people like Massey. What as a citizen would say, you know, I don't agree with Roe 100%, but I can see being supportive of his efforts, where my real goal is to try to figure out how do

• 49:42Speaker 01

  we bring this country together. And Mamdani speaks for 30%, at least in the Democratic Party. And, and you know, Massey speaks for a percent, and Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks for a percent. I mean, what would you want to see from someone like me, even where we have ideological disagreements?

• 50:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Lead them to the physics. So, follow the money. How does this actually work? It really is the economy. Everything's the economy. So what people are actually lamenting is the economy. I can't afford the things that I want. I don't think my life tomorrow would be better than it is today. And I don't think my kids' lives will be better. Oh, and by the way, I don't even feel like I can afford kids. So, yeah, I mean-

• 50:22Speaker 01

  The same exact diagnosis of the problem. We have a very similar read on the cultural challenge of America. We have a very similar read on the aspiration of America. And we have very similar life experiences, being the same age. And, you know, I think you would embrace economic patriotism and making America dynamic and humming again. And I think it's the mechanisms, your cause and effect, it's the specifics that, where we may have certain disagreements and need to figure out. And but it's specifics of how do you build that kind of coalition with where you can get the broad 50% plus of Americans on board? Because otherwise, you can't get things through a Congress and a Senate. And I think that-

• 51:06Speaker 01

  The physics matter of the economics, but my sense is in this country right now, the temperament may matter the most in that this country is exhausted. We're tired. We're looking for inspiration. We're looking for a common purpose. We, we want to believe in the American dream again. And we're desperate for people in the House and the Senate leaders who are, who are going to take that as opposed to just villainizing things and, and pretending that that's going to bring back the American dream.

• 51:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, getting more people like you is probably the only answer. And when I say like you, I mean, very specifically, you, I think, will respond to results. And as long as people are responding to results, nobody's going to get it right out of the gate. But I love that you have a Trump, you took Trump's words, I believe from the executive order, and we're like, cool, I'm going to turn this into a bill and let's see what happens. The bad news is I don't think you're going to get Republicans and Democrats on board with it because the political moment we're in is so dumb. So.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Well, I got, I got criticized for, yesterday I, I did a, I had reached out to, to Benny Johnson, who was friends with Charlie Kirk, and I'd reached out to him just saying, you know, I know this is a terrible time in your life and I'm sorry for your loss and horrific what happened to Charlie. And he said, well, come on my podcast, let's talk about it. And he was very fair. It was a half hour conversation about condemning violence, figuring out how we lower the temperature. And, you know, if you look at my X feed, it's sort of Rokana, you're going and talking to a Russia paid agent and why are you going over to the other side? And I, we just live in this, in, in this moment where if I say anything that positive

• 52:56Speaker 01

  about Trump, like I gave him credit for the hostage deal, you get attacked. And I, I think what people want is just balls and strikes and, you know, and, and, and being honest, right? It's like if I came here and I didn't talk about the supportive of wealth tax, that'd be pandering. It'd be like, I, I know your, your politics and, but they want someone who's going to say what they believe, be consistent about it, let their cards out there and call balls and strikes. And I think we've just so caught up in the gamesmanship of politics.

• 53:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Row, I think you're wrong. So I think there is a certain type of person, I'll definitely include myself, I want balls and strikes. I don't trust myself to be right. So I'm glad that when you think differently, you're going to tell me you think differently and you're going to make me think about that. And if I can follow your logic, then at least I'm just dealing in cause and effect. But what makes populist moments rhyme all throughout history is human psychology doesn't change. So the times, the circumstances, they change, but the way that people respond to wealth inequality, for instance, you can see it in monkeys. Monkeys respond to unequal pay. So if you give a monkey a cucumber, they're

• 54:07Tom Bilyeu?

  both happy to do the task for a cucumber, but you start giving one of them a grape, which they prefer over cucumbers for the same task, and the cucumber monkey goes ballistic. So this kind of thing is just baked into our DNA. And what I think happens in populist moments is economic insecurity makes people afraid. Being afraid sucks. And so we transmute the emotion of fear into anger. And we seek a populist leader who points it at somebody, like you were saying, they give us an enemy, and now I can focus on that enemy, and I at least feel good. Now, this study, I hope, distresses you as much as it distresses me.

• 54:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But neuroscientists took people who had their skulls opened, and so they were putting electrodes in their brain while they were having surgery, and they stimulated all the different emotions. And then they asked them, love, happiness, fear, anger, all that. Which one do you want me to stimulate again? The answer was universally anger. Anger is the emotion, when we're given the option to hit it, we will. And the reason I think is anger is devoid of anxiety and uncertainty. And the thing that people hate is being anxious and uncertain. But when

• 55:32Tom Bilyeu?

  you're mad, you have clarity. You know exactly what to do. You feel right. You feel righteous. You are ready to move. And so when you get in a populist moment,

• 55:45Tom Bilyeu?

  What those leaders ride on is they're able to capture all of that anger that feels so good and they stoke it and you feel even better and they tell you, "Ooh, I'm gonna go slap that other side around, I'm gonna get you what you want, I'm gonna get it to you for free," and people just go gaga for it. And in these moments, the person that sounds like you is like, "Well, you're not making me feel angry. I wanna feel angry, Ro. What the hell?"

• 56:12Speaker 01

  You could rise in a populist moment with anger at the debt, right? I mean, that's your villain, the debt.

• 56:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And I have to be careful of that. That's why I have a, um, an internal mandate that if I wanna respect myself, I have to be pulling people back to the middle. If I whip them into a frenzy in any direction, debt or otherwise, I don't get to respect myself because I will just be making it worse.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  What do you think breaks the populist moment from your reading of history? And how do you think we break that moment in this country, other than solving the fundamental issue of?

• 56:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you wanna know what history tells me, or do you wanna know what the sort of fantasy land of unwinding it would look like?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Well, what do you think is a practical way forward to heal kind of the extremism, the division in the country?

• 57:04Tom Bilyeu?

  There's only one. It's called a beautiful deleveraging. It's Ray Dalio's, um, so Ray Dalio, if people don't know him, he is the most successful hedge fund manager of all time. He built the largest hedge fund in the world, and he built it by understanding this big debt cycle that I'm talking about. And he said, "Every empire has gone through it. It's all very predictable." And so he mapped out every empire over the last 500 years that's gone through this. And he said, "There's six phases and they go through it." And he said, "There's only one way to back out of it," and it's what he calls a beautiful deleveraging. And it's basically economic pain in four flavors, done in just the right way, that people don't riot in the streets.

• 57:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, not all of the capital flees and you restructure the debt to keep going. And so you tax the wealthy more, you forgive a bunch of debt, you restructure the debt. Uh, you print money and you do austerity and you, you have to do them in like, oh God, like these micro little adjustments to watch to see how it happens. Um, because when you forgive a debt, for instance, that's somebody else's money. And so you're just saying, sorry, you don't get any of your money back. You just got wiped out. Obviously that person's going to freak out. So you can only do that so much.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  You're saying forgive parts of the federal debt or?

• 58:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but I think people forget the federal debt is owned by individual citizens. I mean, the world over, but meant like I own a ton of federal debt.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Right, federal bonds, yeah.

• 58:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, exactly. So this, there's not some amorphous thing out there. Um, it's real people ultimately. It could be the people of China, the, they are divesting about as fast as they can. Uh, for reasons.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  I think Japan actually owns more of our debt at this point.

• 58:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And they are divesting as fast as they can. So it is, if you look at the price of gold in the last year, it's hilarious. It's gone from like 2,500 to 4,200. That's insane. The last time gold moved like that was the 1970s. Guess what was happening in the 1970s? Inflation. So yeah, this stuff just rhymes, man. It rhymes, it makes me very sad. Makes me very sad, Ro. Ro, how do we solve it all? What's, what's your answer? If you were going to nutshell it for us, you're in the mix. I'm out here, I'm just a pundit. I, I don't have to actually get votes. So in the thick of it, what, what's the answer?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Well, I believe the answer is economic patriotism. I think it is, uh, figuring out how do we, uh, get people to have, uh, productive jobs that can support a family? Uh, and how do we make sure that they have basic healthcare and education? That that allows them to be able to produce wealth, to be able to build wealth, to be able to feel like they're participating in a modern economy and not that wow. You got a bunch of people in Rose District that are getting obscenely wealthy while my life is getting getting worse. So to me, that is the the key. And while we do that, we've got to have a plan, a path to lower the lower the debt. And and that plan is going

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  to be taxing the wealthy more, but also looking at the biggest ticket items like Pentagon budget. You can't lower the debt without 50 with 56% of the discretionary spending is on on the military without touching that and figuring out a path that we slowly lower the debt. But that lowering the debt is something that's abstract. I think in the immediate we've got to give a people a sense that they can build wealth, build jobs, build entrepreneurship, and and participate in in the modern economy. And and that, to me, should be our highest mission, the economic success of every family and community in the 21st century.

• 1:00:53Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Ro, this conversation has been extremely enjoyable. I thank you for taking the time and I certainly

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  I appreciate it. I learned a lot. And I appreciate cause and effect is and results, I think, is a underappreciated value in our government. I mean, we'd be all better off if there was a results focus, regardless of the ideological lens you start with.

• 1:01:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, I agree. Where can people follow along with you or engage with what you're doing politically?

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  You know, at at RoKana is great on on on almost all the social media platforms. And on X, I often reply to folks. And so or they can email me at [email protected].

• 1:01:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. Ro, thank you for your service, man. I mean that sincerely. I really appreciate you taking the time. And yeah, I wish you the best in making America a better place. It's wonderful.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Well, I appreciate it, Tom. I appreciate what you're doing for so many folks. I'm it's really interesting talking to someone who shares a similar view. But of course, you went out and did a lot, made a lot more money than I ever did. And you're doing great things in in terms of inspiring others. But maybe we'll get a meal if you're ever in Silicon Valley or DC.

• 1:01:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, I would do that in a heartbeat, for sure.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:02:04Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, Rob. Thank you. Take care.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 1:02:06Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 1:02:47Tom Bilyeu?

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