Is Socialism the Answer? Tom Bilyeu and Drew Debate Economic Policy and Free Buses | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

n today's thought-provoking episode, Tom is joined by his ever-insightful co-host Drew for a dynamic, no-holds-barred conversation tackling the most pressing issues shaping our world right now. The crew dives headfirst into global politics—from the ongoing turmoil in Israel and Gaza, to the influence of leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump—analyzing whether the problems we face are rooted in individuals or systemic forces. The discussion takes an especially sharp turn when Tom and Drew debate the economic policies of populist leaders, with a special focus on Mamdani and the rise of socialist ideas. Tom is adamant about the dangers of deficit spending and the unintended consequences of well-intentioned but economically unsound policies, arguing that populism risks making life harder for the very people it claims to champion. Drew, meanwhile, pushes back, questioning whether reallocating government spending toward infrastructure and services—like free buses—could offer real solutions for the middle and lower classes. Listeners can expect rigorous analysis of America’s fractured economy, why wealth inequality is exploding, the pitfalls of government spending, and the urgent need for economic literacy. The team even explores how America’s mass under-education and lost competitive edge might threaten its place on the world stage, especially compared to China’s meteoric rise. Throughout, Tom anchors the conversation around the core values that he believes America needs to reclaim: self-improvement, ambition, and a relentless drive to win. Thought experiments, tough questions about the future of unproductive citizens, and even reflections on children’s entertainment and cultural mindsets round out this expansive, deeply relevant episode. If you’re ready for a blend of hard truths, big ideas, and a little levity, this is one Impact Theory episode you won’t want to miss. Let’s dive in! Bevel Health: 1st month FREE at https://bevel.health/impact with code IMPACT 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 Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/bilyeu or use code BILYEU to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! AirDoctor: Up to $300 off with code IMPACT at https://airdoctorpro.com Raycon: Go to https://buyraycon.com/impactto get up to 30% off sitewide. Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://found.com/impact 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?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:09Speaker 01

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• 1:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Tom, Bill, you show live. I'm joined by my co-host Drew, as always. What's up, man? Good morning. We've got Mason on the community. We've got Eric, but I don't see G. So it looks like we got a limited crew today. But I have no doubt Eric is going to hold down the fort and everything's going to be just fine. Drew? How goes it?

• 2:02Tom Bilyeu?

  I think you're traumatized by what's happening in Israel Gaza.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  You know, it was just, we were celebrating, taking victory laps.

• 2:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  We were like, hey, how come he didn't get the peace prize? Where's the peace prize? And then Israel was like, hold my beer, we're not done yet. It's a developing story, so I wanted to just make sure we acknowledged the elephant in the room that is Benjamin Netanyahu. But of course, snap.

• 2:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But do you really think this is just a Benjamin Netanyahu problem? Like, get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu and problem goes away?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  I feel like that's what we've done in Middle Eastern and other regime changes. We're trying to do that in Venezuela right now.

• 2:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It never works, and they shouldn't do it in Venezuela either. Because here's what happens, you have a problem. These people are bottom up leaders. They're not top down. You don't have Benjamin Netanyahu as a person who creates the problem. You have a problem and Benjamin Netanyahu rises to the top in that moment. In the same way that Trump is not some tremendous leader that has moved us into a populist era. He is a populist leader that could only come to power in a moment like this. And so, once you understand, a moment like this is the thing to focus on. Like, what are all the underlying things that drive this? This is why it drives me nuts when people aren't talking about the economic problems.

• 3:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I feel so sad. This is as close as I'll be able to give people moral outrage. I feel so sad, like today, there's a comedian guy, I forget his name, very funny. I retweeted it, so it'd be easy enough to find, but

• 3:31Tom Bilyeu?

  he was like, I'm against any politician who billionaires are for. And so, I'm supporting Mamdani. And I'm just like, oh my God, the one thing guaranteed to make your problems worse. Because, because he was like, we can have a better world. Yes.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Here it is.

• 3:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, you can have a better world. The bad news is, you have to fix the economy if you want said better world. And guess who's going to make the economy worse? Just going to the mathematics of how economies work. Zohran Mamdani. So, I get it. I love that you feel a connection to the working man, that's amazing. But the reality is.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Okay, I was trying to save this and bury this a little bit, but. I feel like we keep saying that Mamdani is gonna make the economy worse. When we are losing a million jobs, the stock market is being propped up by seven and a half companies.

• 4:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  So it's not like the economy is humming and Donald Trump is just rolling it in. So it's like, to your, to your very same point, let's see the symptoms that brought Mamdani into power and gave him this rise versus saying he's gonna be the boogeyman in the corner.

• 4:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so if I could show you that the policies that make this happen are like, let's say on a scale of one to 10, they're like a seven and Mamdani is a 10 of the same exact policy. Can we agree that we at least understand why I'm saying this is gonna be worse?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  If you can tell me that Trump's impact will be a seven and Mamdani's impact will be a 10, then I would say it will be worse. That's the, that was the question.

• 5:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:09Tom Bilyeu?

  It was slightly different than that, but that's close enough.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, perfect. So all of this comes down to in 1913, you passed the Federal Reserve Act, which gave the government the ability to print money, which meant printing money simply means I can take money from everyone in the country at will for any reason without passing any sort of legislation. Okay, once people understand it as that, it is mathematically, it is government sanctioned counterfeiting. So we all agree counterfeiting is bad, but for some reason, when we let the government do it, we go, that's cool. And the great news is we've run the experiment because the honest answer is I get why

• 5:53Tom Bilyeu?

  modern monetary theorists get very excited because you can create money really easily. And that creates high velocity of money, which gets people to buy a lot of things, which gets people this sort of sense of I feel rich. But it only works for a while and then it does the exact opposite. And it starts creating massive wealth inequality and I can drill into any one of these beats. But if you'll just grant me, so it starts creating this massive wealth inequality. And then all of a sudden people go, wait a second, I'm not rich, I'm actually shockingly poor. Okay, so this is all tied to 1913. Federal Reserve, deficit spending. So deficit spending is the villain.

• 6:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the problem with socialism is that it believes to the core of its existence that you can deficit spend and it will hurt only the rich because they're just gonna go take more in taxes from the wealthy. Mm hmm. But what they don't understand is you will actually, the more you try to take from the rich, because they pay just an obscene disproportionate amount of the tax. It's like the top 10% pay something like 90% of all taxes. I mean, it's like insane. So what ends up happening, laugh or curve, we're gonna get them on the show, is that the more you try to tax them, you end up getting less revenue.

• 7:17Tom Bilyeu?

  So they always think, well, I'm just gonna tax them into oblivion and I'll get more tax revenue. You won't, you end up getting less. Mm hmm. So you try to give all this stuff for free and you say, I'm just gonna tax. It doesn't end up working. And so all of those things that you're giving away for free also tend to go down in quality because you can enslave people, so you have to pay them. Mm hmm. So now you go, well, fuck, I've promised all these things, I have to deficit spend. Mm hmm. So you deficit spend, but that takes from the poor as well as it takes from the rich. And it hurts the poor a lot more than it hurts the rich, like a lot more. And so now the poor get more and more frustrated and they, they demand more and more things for free, rent freezes, all of that. So you do it, which then makes you have to deficit spend more, which makes the poor poorer. So Trump- Escalating kind of-

• 8:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so Trump is terrible. He passed a big, beautiful bill, a literal crime against humanity. The only people that are worse than Trump in terms of immoral deficit spending are the Democrats. And the only people worse than the Democrats are the democratic socialist wing of the Democrats. So he's on the DSA side. He's all the way to just complete madness, dialed to 10, maybe dialed to 11 in terms of how bad he's gonna be for the poor. So this is not a defense of Trump overspending. I'm just saying, if you've got one guy that's like, I'm only gonna overspend by 2 trillion and you've got another guy's, I'm gonna overspend by 3 trillion.

• 8:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And then you've got another guy that's like, I'm not even think, I don't even know what the effects are gonna be. I just know I'm gonna freeze rents. And he has no concept economically of how all this works. Like if I sat down with him, he would hit a point where he's befuddled. And so he would just start like coming at me with like random non sequitur bullshit or empty politician platitudes. There's no, he's either sinister or he doesn't understand economics. Those are your two choices. There's no third option. He's either ignorant or sinister.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Copy. Okay. What you're saying is his deficit spending is worth his Trump deficit spending. So that's why he's, Trump is a seven and he's a 10.

• 9:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  I summed it up.

• 9:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, just to keep it real simple.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Do you think we run a free market capitalist system currently right now? Okay, so do you think that Mumdani is gonna enact a full 100% socialism structure overnight in New York City?

• 9:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Overnight, no.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Probably, he doesn't even have government powers to raise half of the taxes that he's talking about because he'll need the government approval.

• 9:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  So even if he had 100% leeway, everybody said yes to everything. He couldn't make New York City 100% socialist.

• 9:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, correct.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Cool. Okay, so now we're both agreeing that if it was, if we can pick something starting at zero, 100% capitalism is way better than 100% socialism.

• 9:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  No argument, 100% agree, handshake agreement.

• 10:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Now, when we're talking about these blurred messed up systems, let's dive into it a little bit more.

• 10:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  For example, currently right now, USAID needed $35 million in order to enable food banks, food programs across the US, some international.

• 10:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  We said that was too much, 35 billion. We gave 40 billion to Argentina.

• 10:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna put that one to the side, that's right here.

• 10:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Okay, second thing. Billionaires just got $175 billion tax cut through the big beautiful bill. 175 billion tax cut.

• 10:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I'm gonna put that in the middle.

• 10:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Mumdani said to run the buses for free, it'll cost $4 million. I'm not including the free grocery stores and all that other stuff. That's like the 40 billions, let's just call it 4 billion, the 4 billion. If I were to take that $175 billion tax break and made it 165 billion dollar tax break, I feel like billionaires would still be okay with that. You got 160 billion, you didn't get 175.

• 10:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And I feel like now I have free buses. And I feel like nobody flew and we didn't go full socialism and nothing blew up. Not a single baby's eaten.

• 11:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  The math is gonna math. We literally did this physically in Impact Day where you talked to one of the teammates and said, "Hey, you spend too much of your time doing this. I'm not gonna allocate more time or I'm not gonna take away more time. I'm just gonna take these things that aren't profitable and I'm putting in something that is profitable." And my argument, and I think the thing that is making Mamdani rise to power, is right now we've been playing this trickle-down game that I'm going to now say yes to everything billionaires want because they create jobs and they make the economy flow and they do all these things. But somewhere in that system, whether it's the regulations, whether it's the capitalists or whether it's the greedy monocle guy from Monopoly, somewhere there's a break in the system in that trickle-down is not trickling down.

• 11:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you're making a rhetorical flourish that I don't think you realize you're making, but you're trying to trap me into an argument that I'm not making.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  Break it down for me. Let me know my flaw.

• 11:49Tom Bilyeu?

  The breakdown is very simple. You can't say, "Hey, Tom, we have a bad economic system. I want to replace it with a worse economic system and I'm gonna borrow from this bad economic system and reallocate it over here and pretend like this isn't an economic system that just will escalate as fast as humanly possible." So if he were, whatever amount he's able to do from a socialist standpoint is just gonna make it worse from where we are today. So there's one, I'm saying this isn't sustainable. The position that you try to make sound like is mine, as in the current, it's democratic in New York, it's not republican, but the current democratic lunacy is not my position.

• 12:33Tom Bilyeu?

  The current republican lunacy is not my position.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Agreed. I didn't allocate.

• 12:38Tom Bilyeu?

  My position is very simple. You have degrees of lunacy. And if you're, the guy all the way in the end, Mamdani, makes people feel seen and so they're voting for that. The problem is in feeling seen, it's gonna make your life far worse and all the things you're worried about are going to escalate. So now we have to, one, we'd have to go into like, what are the tax breaks for? Do they generate jobs? If they don't generate jobs, then okay, if this is just going into the billionaires' pockets, like, that's bad. If we could take money that was like just going to private citizens in their pocket, wasn't creating jobs, wasn't an incentive to get something like a factory or whatever built in their state.

• 13:23Tom Bilyeu?

  It was literally just, hey, go get your money. Then, yeah, you would be better off doing something that gave to poor people. Buses wouldn't be the answer, but like, hey, that at least there would be some logic on. I'll just make my prediction right now in terms of what's going to happen to the buses. They are going to get worse. They're going to, if they're truly free, homeless people will just post up in there because now they've got a slightly weather-protected place that they can go and fall asleep. So now you've got a bus that's just full of people that are mentally unstable in many cases. Certainly disconcerting for the average citizen for many people.

• 14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  They have no barrier to entry whatsoever. So now one of Mamdani's pushes is that by making the buses free, more people are going to take the bus, less people are going to drive, we're even going to get, it's not his main argument, but we're even going to get fewer people driving cars. You're going to get the exact opposite. More people are going to drive cars because they don't feel safe on the buses. And so-

• 14:26Speaker 02

  But isn't a law and order problem not a very-

• 14:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, now we have another knock-on effect to all the things that he's trying to claw back in terms of what he said about defunding the police.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  He said he wasn't about defunding the police, though.

• 14:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, there's so much footage of this guy talking about how the police are a problem, they're anti-queer, on and on and on. Now, we can say, hey, maybe he's had like this complete reversal of fortune.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Because he knows it's not a winning position, just like politicians always politic. I can pull up a bunch of taco moments where Trump had a position and that kind of backed it up. So, you know, I think we both agree that politicians say things and then they take, they backtrack on that.

• 15:02Tom Bilyeu?

  What you're trying to do, though, is map out what are they actually going to do? So if you map out the positions of the DSA, they are all- Catastrophic at a whole host of cultural levels. He is in that same vein. Oh, and by the way, all of his economic policies are completely suicidal. They've been tried a gazillion times before. I did an entire deep dive about the housing crisis in New York. And how the fact that when you freeze rents, it makes everything fall to shit. And so I'm just saying, hey, we've already tried these.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And they're already forty percent.

• 15:32Tom Bilyeu?

  In that same fucking city.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  They're already forty percent rent frozen though. So I, I think what the, the issue.

• 15:38Tom Bilyeu?

  You and I had this argument before and I'm getting scared now. That either I didn't convince you then and you just went quiet. Or you're reverting to the mean. When you tell me, Tom, there's already forty percent rent freezes in New York and everything is fine. I cannot reconcile that with everything is so shit that we need Mom Donnie to come in and save us by freezing the rents. The very thing I'm saying is if you've already frozen forty percent of the rents in New York and it hasn't fucking worked. Why are you going to try to freeze the rents more? Like, this is so outlandish.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  I, I feel like we're having, because we're going in the same kind of circle of like. Mom Donnie is going to usher in Mao style, Stalin style, Marxist style socialism.

• 16:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Mom Donnie is pitching those ideas. Hold tight, we're gonna take a quick break.

• 16:30Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:15Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:54Tom Bilyeu?

  We're back. Let's dive right in. And so do you think that I just don't understand what happened?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  No, because what I'm saying is that he doesn't have the power to enact socialism at that level in New York City.

• 19:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Great.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So, so it's okay. I guess.

• 19:12Tom Bilyeu?

  If he is pitching these ideas that we know are not only terrible economically, they end up being murderous. Okay. For reasons I can walk through.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  But, but again, it's, but it's murderous from the top down. He doesn't have that power to make it like.

• 19:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I understand I'm going somewhere with this.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:28Tom Bilyeu?

  So you've got a guy spouting policies that we can prove are murderous. They're, they're terrible economically. He's going to go into New York.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Do we have reason to believe that he will not try to enact up to the limits of his power, everything that he can within?

• 19:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Cool.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:45Tom Bilyeu?

  So we have a guy that's moving us in a horrible economic direction, who will make maybe 2%, but he will make to some amount, New Yorkers' lives worse.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Ipsa facto, period?

• 19:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I've got another point, but I want to first get agreement on that.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  That's where I'm kind of pushing back from, because I think you're saying his policy equals bad, free buses equal bad.

• 20:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  And what I'm saying is, we have an allocation problem. I learned this from you, and I think this is why I'm pushing back. The government collects a lot of money.

• 20:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  But somehow, we spend it on bullshit.

• 20:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  And I think if we stop spending it on bullshit, and we can spend on something that actually impacts the middle and lower working class.

• 20:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Positively, right?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  It can positively help.

• 20:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Now, I understand that increasing taxes and making it into a black hole is bad. I understand that if we increase the tax revenue, we're going to run out of rich people's money to take. I understand that if we did this on a national level, this is not sustainable and it would break.

• 20:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  I understand all of these policies. I think that's where the federal and the state policies, that's how they balance the power out. I don't think that Mamdani's policy should be on a national level. Absolutely not. I don't think free buses should be on a national level. Absolutely not. But to say that infrastructure isn't a, to me, infrastructure is a worthwhile investment.

• 20:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Agreed.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Versus unnecessary tax cuts.

• 20:59Tom Bilyeu?

  See, again, you're prescribing to me a philosophy that is not mine. So every word that you just said, we agree on. It's only when you then say Mamdani is a guy that's going to do that, that I'm like, that's not what he's pitching. So if you were saying, hey, Tom, I want to vote for this guy, whoever this guy is.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Because he's talking about, we've got to reallocate these tax dollars to building up the infrastructure of New York. And then I would say, to do what? And if you said, we're building up the infrastructure to facilitate commerce, I'd be like, fuck yeah. Good investment. Very good investment. I just did a deep dive on this coming out on Monday. So you want people to, you want the government to tax the people, to put things in place that facilitate business. Okay, as a speedrun, the only reason you ever have a single tax dollar ever is because of business. Just to make everything clear for everybody.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 21:53Tom Bilyeu?

  So you want to build the infrastructure as a way of saying, wahahaha, I'm a politician twirling my mustache. I'm gonna make this place so amazing, so business friendly, that you're gonna build all these businesses, hire all these people, and it's gonna generate all this tax revenue for me. Great, that's fucking fantastic. You will make everyone's lives better. But that is not what Mamdani is doing. He is very anti-capitalism.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  However, that is a pitch that has been pitched out since the seventies. And we have seen that making poor business, fewer regulations has not generated this.

• 22:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Remember, you're just restating things you and I already agree on. If you focus on you're going to bat for Mamdani, I'm just saying Mamdani is bad. And you're saying, no, no, no, the system is so broken, there's a better way to do this. And I'm like, yes, but Mamdani is bad.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  With that person saying this.

• 22:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, because he's about to get elected and his policies are going to be so bad for New Yorkers. Because it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the foundational physics of economics. And because he doesn't understand the foundational physics of economics, or he does understand them and he does not give a shit, and I will remind everybody of the cross-cultural study. That showed what people actually vote for is punishing the rich. They do not vote to help the poor. They vote for policies that if the policy would help the poor but also help the rich, they will not vote for it. If the policy hurts the poor but also hurts the rich, they'll vote for that.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Okay, I can give you an example. Remember when you were voting for, like, we were talking about who we voted for last election, we brought up Trump. You said, I didn't vote for Trump because I thought he was going to be this leader. I didn't vote for Trump because I thought he was gonna be this charismatic guy. I voted for Trump because he's gonna deregulate crypto and he was gonna be more pro-AI. And I was like, okay, out of those two policies, out of the 10 that he pitched, eight of them are bullshit, the two that actually honed in on are the ones that I'm interested in. If I said that I have the same kind of faith in Mumdani in the sense that there are two policies out of the 10 that he pitched that could work and could be better, is that worth the trade off from business as usual? Because I think we both agree that business as usual isn't working.

• 23:57Tom Bilyeu?

  If on balance, he were going to do things that were better for New Yorkers, of course, I would vote for him. But I, if you're talking about buses being free as one of the policies that's going to be better for New Yorkers, then we just fundamentally disagree about what's about to happen.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Copy. Okay. Do you think that it's important for a government to invest in infrastructure? Full stop or everything should be?

• 24:20Tom Bilyeu?

  You need to be very thoughtful about what the infrastructure is. But yes, security, national defense,

• 24:29Tom Bilyeu?

  infrastructure that supports commerce, like, these are hugely important things that America has neglected. And America has spent money like a drug addict. Like, we have no logic or sense and we're just all over the map.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Shout out to Riley J Sixers. I think they summarized this last 15 minutes in one line. They said, Drew equals reallocate, time equals allocate less.

• 24:53Tom Bilyeu?

  No, that's not accurate.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Okay. You don't think that, you think the government should get less tax dollars to spend?

• 25:02Tom Bilyeu?

  What I'm saying is you must balance the budget. You're going to have to get out from under some of this debt, which I have not talked about in this sequence. But in terms of, what I'm saying in this sequence is, Mumdani will move you closer to a system that is going to literally gut New York in the way that it was gutted back in the 70s and 80s, where people burned buildings for the insurance money. They probably won't do that this time because the insurance companies are too savvy. But it'll be that same sort of just desperate setup, where it's making everything worse. Now, in the greater context of what I'm saying, you have to put yourself in a position where you can get out from under a bunch of this debt. You are going to have to do a beautiful deleveraging,

• 25:45Tom Bilyeu?

  which requires you to tax the wealthy more. It requires you to redistribute wealth. But in the ways that he's doing it, it just is not going to yield the things you want to yield. You're going to have to money print, even though I think that it is just an astonishing evil. And you have to.

• 26:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Be, um, you have to balance the budget. I'm forgetting the name of the fucking word austerity. Uh, you have to have austerity measures and no one, not Republicans or Democrats is prepared to do what needs to be done. And what I'm railing against is I can feel all of this populist energy. Catching people up. They get somebody that speaks to them in emotion. And now we're totally detached from what actually works. It, it is, um.

• 26:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It's crazy making is the.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Crazy making.

• 26:37Tom Bilyeu?

  It is crazy making. So what do you do? Like this, this is how it feels to me.

• 26:46Tom Bilyeu?

  I am, there are people that are far more knowledgeable than me, but I'm like a junior physicist. And I understand physics well enough that I like get this sort of big blocky, uh, movements of it. And if you step off of a 10 story building, you fall to your death every time. And I can explain it to you from, um. Just gravity pulling an object seemingly towards the center of mass. Uh, I can explain it from the sudden stop. That your brain tissue goes through and that causes it to basically fragment. And then it can no longer send electrical and chemical signals. And so you become lifeless. Like whatever, I understand it well enough. Like I can sort of give you all of those.

• 27:31Tom Bilyeu?

  The different ways that people are going to die and what it's going to look like and you know, rough trajectories. Uh, and now I'm hearing somebody that's like. But you should be able to step off that building. And the reason that you haven't been able to step off the 10 story building is because all these rich motherfuckers are holding you back. Like this is wild. Look at them. They get, they take a helicopter off that building all the time. And you think just because you're poor, you can't step off that building? You, this is crazy. What are we going to do, everybody? We're going to step off the building. We're going to make building what? Free. Who gets to jump off the building? Everyone. And I'm just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I get why you guys are mad. A hundred percent. You're right to be mad. You have been taken advantage of. This is fucking terrible.

• 28:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And by the way, I want, while I'm saying all of this, you have to remember. I've got the fucking G five, G six, G seven, G nine, whatever fucking G I want. Over idling to take me to whatever country I want. A nice island where no mosquitoes at. Whatever. Okay, but I'm here and I'm trying to get people to understand. This guy's gonna fuck you up. Now, if Mom Donnie ruins New York, it will not impact my life. But I love people, Drew, and I want to see them win. And so I'm just like, hold on. If you do that, you are going to fall to your death. And so while I understand how mad, how righteously mad people are.

• 28:57Tom Bilyeu?

  The solutions that they are finding most enticing will accelerate their demise. So I'm just like, the only idea I can tell you to rule out is if you have three candidates, which one wants to spend the most money? Get rid of that guy. Get rid, because economics are your problem. Look at your three candidates and ask, who's the most economically illiterate? Get rid of that guy. And right now, that's Mom Donnie.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  So one issue voter is because he's spending so much money, it's not gonna work.

• 29:30Tom Bilyeu?

  As long as you're saying that the one issue is save America from violent revolution. Yes.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:36Tom Bilyeu?

  If you're saying the one issue is spare the poor, yes. Then I'm a one issue voter.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  We're about to lower the Fed rate right now. Mom Donnie has nothing to do with that. That is going to then hurt the dollar. We are also set to go 107 trillion dollars over the budget. We still haven't talked about SNAP. We still haven't talked about the shutdown, but let's just earmark it 2 trillion. That we're probably gonna go over budget in our deficit.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  So to me, it's funny because you're saying, everything you're saying, I'm not debating. But for some reason, you think that I think that government should do everything. Or I'm team government. Or I think I love the government.

• 30:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I am arguing one exact thing that you've said. That free buses are good. That's it.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 30:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm not ascribing literally anything else to you.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 30:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Free buses are good.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  And free buses are bad because, let me speed run this.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Mechanics are gonna be like, the government is paying for this now, so I'm gonna overcharge them for repairs. Drivers are not incentivized to drive faster or slower because the government's footing the bill, so I could just do as I want. Homeless people who can't be on buses now, when they check the fare 50% of the time, are now gonna be on buses all the time, and they're just gonna be chilling there, and nobody's gonna do anything about it. And then, the people that actually are saving the $2.50 are just gonna start driving more, even though they have a $30 congestion tax in Manhattan to drive. So it seems like when we have very specific problems, that I think it's not impossible for the US to come up with a sustainable bus system. Like, I don't think that's impossible, especially with the rise of robo taxis

• 31:19Speaker 02

  in this AI future that's right around the corner.

• 31:21Tom Bilyeu?

  When you can money print, nothing's impossible. Except prosperity. Hold tight, we're gonna take a quick break.

• 31:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:15Tom Bilyeu?

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• 33:07Tom Bilyeu?

  We're back. Let's dive right in. The one thing that you left out of that is that the way that a self-sustaining economic engine works is when costs go up, you charge more for it. And so when you're in a situation where costs are going up for all the reasons that you listed and more, they can't raise prices. So they now have a fixed price that they can charge the customer, which is $0.00. So they're raising the prices on taxpayers. We've already talked about you can't just keep taxing, taxing, taxing, taxing. So they'll have an option. They'll try to tax some. They'll try to cut costs. And that's when the quality goes down.

• 33:48Tom Bilyeu?

  So if you can point to the government-run institution that is deeply efficient and highly innovative, then I'll be like, okay, cool. Let's copy that. It doesn't work like that because they're not forced to compete. And when they're not forced to compete, the way that you compete as an entrepreneur is you go, oh shit. I've got to find really smart people and I've got to get them to focus on my problem. And so I'm going to spend money. I'm going to create a cool environment. Like I'm going to do all this stuff to try to get the smartest people in the world to come and work for me. The government doesn't have that ability. Because they fix funds, they're not innovative, they're huge bureaucracies. You said that you were, I can't remember if you said red-pilled or black-pilled, on it's the bureaucracy that grows.

• 34:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not like in a university, you just put a bunch of new teachers. You put a whole layer of middle management. So you're going to have this terrifying amount of middle management running this free bus system. And so it will be a clusterfuck and there will be no financial incentive to make it better. And so it won't get better. It will get worse.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Do you believe that the government should invest in infrastructure at all?

• 34:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, aggressively, but towards things that facilitate commerce.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Like an airport.

• 35:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Airport's a good example, roads are a tremendous example, bridges are a tremendous example. Train stations might, I'd have to look at like where that falls if it's like.

• 35:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Human transport, probably not. That's probably best left to the private sector, maybe they lay some of the track, but I don't know. I'd have to look more closely at that one in particular.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  All right, um, do you think he's gonna bring Sharia law to New York City?

• 35:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Him? No, like you're 20 years out from that kind of thing.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  What do you think the worst case scenario of Mom Donnie is? Worst case scenario?

• 35:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Of, uh, four years with him? Uh, he damages the police force dramatically. He does things to, um, reduce their sense of confidence going into conflict. So they start backing off. You start losing more good officers. You get increased lawlessness. You make more things legal, like he wants to legalize prostitution. Whether he has the ability or not, I haven't looked closely at that, so I don't know. But just going off of things he's talked about publicly that he wants to do. So as you decriminalize things, then gangs move in to the vice type stuff. And you're gonna see increased lawlessness, especially because he doesn't believe in harsh policing.

• 36:21Tom Bilyeu?

  You're going to get, um, like social workers and stuff. Having some of the policing dollars reallocated to that, those put on the street, that isn't gonna work. It's a very feminine approach to a very masculine problem. I think that's just absolutely stupid.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Masculine problem is the law, like order?

• 36:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Violence, yes.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Violence?

• 36:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, you will have people, I mean. Listen, I know I like to talk about TCG, but you can find videos of like masked men just walking into, sometimes not even masked. Walking into a TCG shop, smashing everything and just grabbing it and going. And, um, back in my Quest days, there was a guy who was like, oh yeah, we used to, there was a Jack in the Box. We used to practice, or Burger King, I forget. We used to practice robbing it. That was like the practice place. And so everything was like, um, bank teller, like Plexiglas inside of a fast food restaurant. So it was like, these things can and do have. And when you don't have law enforcement in those areas. So I think that'll be the big one. The next one will be he'll make buses worse.

• 37:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Whatever economic policies he has the ability to pass, he will universally make them worse. And because he is so charismatic, he's really gonna win more people over to the dark side. That is socialism. And yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Even when everything goes worse.

• 37:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because they drew for the same reason. You're a very smart man. You and I battle all the time. And yet, you're still like, free buses is probably a good idea. So.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Okay. The reason I say free buses are a good idea is because government is already stealing my money. And instead of giving it to people I don't like, give it to something that'll make me feel better.

• 37:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  It's a hundred percent self-serving.

• 38:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna say something really horrible.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:03Tom Bilyeu?

  If somebody is raping my sister, I don't go, can you please rape her in a better way? I go, if you don't fucking stop raping my sister.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  But nobody's proposing no taxes. Nobody is.

• 38:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Drew, I'm not proposing no taxes. You have to balance the budget. Now, I just want to remind everybody, my sister, in this horrific analogy, is poor people. So what I'm saying is, everything has to be geared towards bring back the middle class. And what I'm saying is, Mamdani is going to make that worse, not better. We need to bring back the middle class. Bring back the middle class. Dude, AI is the problem you've got to be looking at. And we are going after the most dumb stuff ever. Focus on what matters. Be economically literate. Be able to walk me through your cause and effect.

• 38:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, these are the things that we need to be doing, and we're just not doing them. And it is wild. And smart, well-intentioned people are getting caught up in the emotion. They get as far as, I know I'm being screwed over. And then, as long as the person says, I'm fighting for you, they can then, after that, I'm fighting for the working class. They can say the dumbest, most self-destructive stuff ever, and people will still be for it. Um, like I I'm still raging against the Gary economics machine because he will literally

• 39:29Speaker 02

  He likes not making content.

• 39:30Tom Bilyeu?

  He will wa- has he really?

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It's probably good. He'll walk you through the problem and then he'll throw his hands up as soon as you ask him to put forward a solution. It's wild and people let him get away with that. That's crazy town. So, I mean, listen, I I'm gonna live and die by I have mapped out at the end of every one of my deep dives. And now go do this. Uh huh. I'm not trying to hide behind vagaries. I'm literally giving people every video ends. This is my best guess at what the right path forward is. No way am I gonna be a hundred percent right. I'll just tell you that upfront. But I'm at least trying to put forward actual solutions that people can execute against.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Hypothetically speaking, um, I know we talked about this number earlier that estimates forty percent of people are employed by federal and like government. I'll say federal and state. I'll put combine those numbers together. Let's say we slashed that to twenty percent. Um, that is roughly sixty million people. Um, on top of the other million AI job losses that is kind of on the

• 40:31Tom Bilyeu?

  That this is where it gets scary.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Is you now run the risk of putting yourself into a deep, dark depression.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, from just all the job loss.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Because whether that's recycling tax dollars or not, that's money that people have to put into the economy. Dude, so we have to pull up the clip or the tweet from Ray Dalio. This is, this is one of those showstoppers. He's saying the same thing he's been saying for a while. But every now and then he'll just say something in a slightly new way. And it's like, ooh, yeah, that's rough. And he said that, uh, there are two economies now in America. They have completely fractured away from each other. And basically, rich people are driving all of the spending and

• 41:16Tom Bilyeu?

  You can look at our economy and go, oh, like, hey, 1.8, okay, that's not great, but it's not horrible. And then you start looking under the hood and you realize that that 1.8 is largely fake because of people working for the government. And then on top of that, it's driven by like a tiny number of companies. The spending is driven by a tiny number of people. It's like 10% of Americans are driving, I don't know, 80% or more of the spending. Yikes, dude, you can't have that. You can't, you can't have it simply because of envy and resentment.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, there's not a complex mathematical formula about why you can't have it. You can't have it because we as animals cannot look out at somebody else that has way more than us, where the economy is working for them, and be okay. We won't be okay. We'll start fighting. We start hurting other people. Like, that's the response. And when you get a mass number of people mobilizing to hurt other humans, you have instability, lack of safety. It is a nightmare of epic proportions.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  All right, let's jump into the tweet. This is Mario Noffa quoting Ray Dalio. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio says you can't look at the US economy as whole anymore because the gap between winners and losers is too extreme. About 3 million people, 1% of the population in AI and tech are thriving, while the bottom 60% are struggling. 60% of 350-

• 42:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Suffering hard.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Uh, 71.5, roughly about 100 million people. If you're looking at, let's say, the AI world and really what amounts to about 3 million people, 5% to 1% of the population leading, and then the 5% or 10% around them, you have one world that, you have one world that the whole world is dependent on. Then you have the bottom 60% of the population. Consider this, 60% of the American population has below 6th grade reading level. That's tough. And with that, they're becoming unproductive. And because of those things, you have a dependency, an extreme dependency. The numbers back them up. 22 states are in a recession while only 16 are growing. California, New York carry the entire economy on their backs. Wealth inequality has exploded since 2020. The top 1% nearly doubled their-

• 43:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Top point?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Top 0.1% nearly doubled their wealth from 12 trillion to 22 trillion. The bottom 50% gained just 2 trillion combined. The economy now runs on spending from the rich. If they stop, everyone else is toast.

• 43:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro.

• 43:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro. Bro.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  When you read this, what was your initial reaction?

• 43:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Stop printing money.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 43:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Balance the budget. Jesus Christ.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  I feel like sixty percent of Americans.

• 43:46Tom Bilyeu?

  The voice was screaming in my head.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  I feel like we just kind of skimmed over the sixty percent of Americans below have below sixty.

• 43:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, that is so terrifying. So in the age of AI, what is happening?

• 43:59Speaker 02

  That's tough, and with that, they're becoming unproductive.

• 44:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Here, here's, here, okay. Drew, I'm now just talking to you. I'm gonna pretend like there is nobody listening. This is why I'm into children's entertainment. We, somewhere along the way, we lost a sense of your job is to become a badass motherfucker. Your job is get hard. Get hard, young man. Work your ass off. Put a log on your back and fucking stand in like a seating position until your quads are on fire and then do it again over and over and over. Your job is to get smart, is to get educated, is to read, to be a renaissance man,

• 44:39Tom Bilyeu?

  to take in as much knowledge as you can from every direction and for everyone to pressure their children to do that, to pressure your friends to do that, to let your friend know he is cool for being good at sculpting and architecture and archery. Like dude, when did we lose all of that? I'm, so I'm watching One Piece right now. Bro, I am blown away. The Japanese just have figured something out. They get it. Like they get the hard work. Set a goal, go after it. Literally, One Piece, the kid says like a hundred times, "I'm gonna become the king of the pirates and if I die on the way, that's fine with me." Dude, imagine, imagine something in America made where the kid is like, "I'm gonna go do this insane thing.

• 45:23Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna risk my life and I don't mind dying in the pursuit of it." And like, that's not even the thing you talk about when you watch One Piece, but it's like. That's exactly what makes it dope. America does not have that spirit. America has lost its belief in itself. America no longer believes that we are worthy of winning, that we're even worthy of competing at that level. And so the fact that we let 60% of our population go without being shamed into oblivion for having a sixth grade reading level. And dude, I don't care. It, the only way to get people to like, do this kind of hard stuff is to make them want to earn the respect of the people they respect

• 46:07Tom Bilyeu?

  by doing the things that those people do. So yeah, I get it. You grew up with a single mom who's working 18 jobs because she's being money printed to death. And I still expect your friends to clown on you and shame you for not being able to read well, for not getting more powerful by the day, for not setting your sights on just victory over everyone. That you are going to play an honorable game, but you are going to play that honorable game to win. I want every kid in America sitting around in groups like my friends and I did, or on the monkey bars like my friends and I did, saying, I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be the best at this. I'm going to conquer this thing. Whatever your mission in life is, fucking do it.

• 46:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And at the society level, we've got to encourage that, man. And if you're fucking off and you are wasting your potential, dude, people need to clown on you hard. Like you need to get it top, bottom, left, right. And yes, it will hurt emotionally. And yes, you will carry those scars with you. And yes, it will make you work harder. Because you don't want people looking at you like that. Dude, we've got to get back to that. Cause we are going to face a, a massive population of Chinese people that are doing this, that believe in themselves, that are prepared to win, that are going hard in the paint to be the greatest of all time at whatever. And you will meet them in economic battle, if nothing else.

• 47:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you are not prepared to fight to win, you will lose.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Man, man. Man.

• 47:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, I'm telling you, like, we've really let go of something and we are going to pay a hu- we are already paying a huge price.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Alright, um, hits blunt. I got an idea.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  60% of people are unproductive.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  There's going to have to be a reckoning coming soon. I'm not gonna say that 30% of them, maybe 50% of them, I don't know how much the percentage is gonna be. I feel like the homeless population is about to explode. I feel like there's gonna be a lot of people that are going to quote-unquote "need help." Now, we talked about balancing the budget. We talked about how we're already broke and we can't help any more people.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  What happens when those 60% get exposed? The tide comes in and we see there's a lot more naked people than we thought. We see that there's a lot more broke people than we thought. There's a lot, the people been paying themselves, the government has been propped up. Trump gets rid of all these non-essential workers. And we see the unemployment rates go to 20, 30%. At that point, is that a... We have to cut off the hand to save the whole body? Because if we get bacteria infection, it could kill us. But if we just sever that, we can just sear it and we'll be good to move on? This is a tough conversation, I know. This is worst-case scenario. I'm not saying let's go around and kill 30 million people.

• 49:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I hope not.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  But I feel like

• 49:13Speaker 02

  there's a population of the people that we don't know what to do with. And all I'm saying is, maybe I understand why Mao popped them.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. Maybe, maybe I understand why they-

• 49:22Tom Bilyeu?

  God damn, Drew!

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Maybe that's where we're at right now. I don't know. What do you think? What are we gonna do with the 30 million people?

• 49:28Tom Bilyeu?

  That sounds completely unhinged.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  We can't, we can't, we can't house them. We don't got it. We can't feed them. We don't got it. There's not enough churches. We don't got it.

• 49:35Tom Bilyeu?

  So, we're living in a fictitious thought experiment-

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100% made up.

• 49:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Where we're saying that we're at like 30% unemployment and what do we do? Uh, okay. So always build up from the physics. If you're at 30% unemployment, you're in Great Depression territory. So now you've got to be focused on all you treat this like a national emergency and it becomes, what do you have to do to rebuild the economy? You have to immediately unburden people from debt. And so you're, you're hitting a nuclear option and you're, you're going to do a ton of debt forgiveness. You're going to do like the beautiful deleveraging, but if it gets ugly, it gets ugly. Like you've just really got to get people out from under the debt.

• 50:19Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got to create an economic environment that is so deregulated, so pro-business, so anti incumbent, being able to cock block everybody else. You've got, you, you've put people in hunger mode, which is great, but you've now got to clear the runway for all of those guys to innovate their way out of poverty. Because there's going to be a huge number of people that look around and go, I'm not willing to let my kids go hungry. And so some will turn to violence, obviously. Some will turn to crime, obviously. But a lot of them are going to create incredible companies. There's a stat, it's not quite true, uh, but it's often repeated. It gets the spirit of something right, even though it is not literally true. But it will often be repeated that more millionaires were created during the Great Depression than any other time in human history.

• 51:03Tom Bilyeu?

  What they're trying to get at is in those moments of desperation, there is a subset of people that go, oh, I'm going to win because my back is so against the wall. And you've got to facilitate that. You've got to get the debt off their back. You've got to give them access to sound money and maybe Bitcoin is enough already. But you have to make sure that there's no regulatory hurdles for that. So somebody can amass money in a non-inflatable currency. You've got a, this is where you start thinking about infrastructure, digital, physical, everything. That's where the government needs to be allocating their money. And you have to let people fail. And this is the part that people are going to have a really hard time. So this is where you got to audit FDR. He was very popular at the time, but the reality is he almost certainly prolonged the Great Depression

• 51:47Tom Bilyeu?

  because he was doing all these socialist policies and they don't work. And so his own cabinet, like finance. Cabinet or Economic Cabinet said like, we tried everything and it just didn't work. So we look back on that fondly because it felt so humane, but the reality is to your point about the cutting off of the hand where I thought you were going was you just have to let some people fail. And you don't kill them a million, million percent. You do enforce the law. So if they even out of desperation, if they are stealing or whatever, they go to jail. So unfortunately, it's not one where you can be like, oh my God, I feel so bad for you. No, like if you did a crime, you were going to serve the time, but you need to understand why they're

• 52:31Tom Bilyeu?

  doing that so that you can change, you can terraform the economic landscape to be ready for people to build back up. And that was one of the lines of my deep dive is the cycle of history pre 1913 was boom, bust and then rebuild. And it was brutal when people lost everything. It was brutal, man. Nobody wanted to see that, but you had a shot to rebuild. Like, listen, I've arrogantly said many times that you can drop me into any company in whatever the lowest ranking person is. Six months later, the odds that I'm an executive border on a hundred percent. And then on a long enough timeline, the odds of me becoming CEO are ridiculously high. So it's like, I'm just not worried about having to rebuild. I don't want to go through it. This is not me like, oh, I don't

• 53:14Tom Bilyeu?

  care. I'm not trying to be flippant. What I'm trying to point at is skill set matters a lot. And so if somebody actually has the skills and they get knocked all the way down, that would be brutal. But then you set about rebuilding and you find out if you actually know how to do something or not. This is why I want people to understand skills have utility. They let you do a thing other people can't do. If you actually have skills that are better than other people, you just go out, compete them, understand what the outcome, the desired outcome of the game is, get very good at delivering that desired outcome and then go do that thing. And as long as the system isn't rigged against you in a way that is just impossible to overcome, then hey, you've, you've got a shot, but you have to let that creative destruction.

• 53:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Take place. You've got to let people fall from their mighty purchase. You have to. Otherwise, people just can't rise back up.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Do you think we have a skill issue now in the US like that?

• 54:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Obviously, if you have people, the 60% of the country has a sixth grade reading level. Okay, this is wild. I did not do any research, but when I started writing the deep dives, I dumbed down for my audience and doubled my dollars. They criticized me for it, but they all yell holler. So I consciously was like, I'm gonna write these at a sixth grade level. So it was like an intuition about where we're at. Uh, but that's wild. That's literally true. Let's look at the bright side of what the military did because I fear they're on the side of, how do you cannon fodder a bunch of people? But the military also realized we need to educate them to make them better soldiers.

• 54:47Tom Bilyeu?

  They did the GI Bill, so coming out of the war, a lot of those guys also got educated in a way that they never would have been educated otherwise. Uh, and so, um, you were asking about infrastructure earlier. Honestly, I'm way more focused on education. We are, it's a travesty that our taxpayer dollars go to, um, teachers' unions that are letting this happen. And anybody that's like, oh, it's not their fault. It's entirely their fault. A hundred percent. Now, ultimately, who do I blame? The parents, of course, but it's like, you, you can't deliver those kind of trash ass results and expect me to keep funding it. That's, that, that is literally criminal. We, we are abusing our own citizens at a rate that is grotesque.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Um, can we just shout out Nunya for a second? Thank you, bro. Or sis, I appreciate you.

• 55:38Tom Bilyeu?

  What'd they say?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  They just are doing a lot of super chats today.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Yep, we got two more from them. And it's, uh, it's LeBlanc as well. Um, like LeBlanc is-

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Oh, Twitch LeBlanc.

• 55:50Tom Bilyeu?

  We got LeBlanc back? Wait, Nunya's LeBlanc?

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Nunya's LeBlanc. Ah, y'all be trying to switch up on the streaming platforms, get us confused. Tricky, tricky.

• 55:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Blonde's legit.

• 55:58Speaker 04

  Second one from Nunya or LeBlanc. Uh, people think the next war and draft is going to be just blue collar people. It's not. It's going to be poor and uneducated.

• 56:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  That's what I honestly, I thought you were gonna say that we'll, we'll start another war.

• 56:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus Christ.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  War, war definitely.

• 56:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I certainly hope not. I mean, listen, the war is what pulled us out of the Great Depression. Oftentimes people will credit FDR. That just isn't true. The bad news is we were a very different country at that point. We're not that country now. So I don't think a war is gonna help us like that.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Were you invited?

• 56:30Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no. So it'll be very interesting to see you guys, uh, watch this most recent deep dive. So I give a lot of facts about what we were capable of, um, at the beginning of World War Two in terms of our, well, really even before World War One with our manufacturing capabilities. It was insane. Now we're like some ridiculously small amount of global manufacturing. It's crazy. So that, the fact that we don't make things here other than software and services is very distressing. So right now, the country, and I'm gonna let you guess, I don't normally do this, but I think you're gonna nail this one.

• 57:10Tom Bilyeu?

  What country do you think has the kind of manufacturing stats today that America had right before World War Two?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  China. Easy.

• 57:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So China, by the numbers, is the new America, but much, much bigger. That's bad. That's very bad. They are your biggest rival. And they control your entire modern way of life. Uh, the vast majority of the supply chains for weapons. It's not good.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Wasn't that the transition from Britain to the US, superpower transitions? Wasn't that bad because they spoke English? And if like China becomes the world superpower, like we're not gonna like have to learn.

• 57:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, that was a big part of it because we could become allies with England very, very quickly.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And so there was, we had already had, you know, call it a hundred years of getting over the, you used to be a colony, you smug, impudent, you know, little bastards.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. We were shared fams, like siblings, type of thing.

• 58:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, definitely. Uh, yes, that's part of it, but the other part is the British and American cultures are so similar. Chinese culture is authoritative, authoritarian, top-down, collectivist. And America is bottom-up, individualistic. And so like when you talk to Chinese people, they love China. Like, don't be confused.

• 58:27Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm, of course, there are gonna be people that don't, but for the most part, like.

• 58:32Tom Bilyeu?

  The Chinese people I've interfaced with, they love their country. They have pride as they should. I'm not at all surprised.

• 58:40Tom Bilyeu?

  But boy, are we different. So that's the, this is me trying to get everybody to focus on values is your beef. It isn't the fact that they look different than me. It is the fact that they have a different value set.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Because they're going so hard again, like they're going so far in front of us. Does it even make sense with them to leverage a war or leverage any type of conflict? Cause it's like, you already like on paper, they're winning. Like bigger, stronger manufacturing, real GDP, depending how you look at it. If you turn your head and take out the government, but like, they're beating us in the essential categories that companies use to rank each other. What benefit do they have of like, starting a conflict? I feel like they could just keep, they could just keep doing their own thing and.

• 59:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, which they would want to do until they're so big that it's just self-evident. And so that's certainly the play that they want to do.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Got you.

• 59:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, they want to get into a position where they could march onto the beaches of Taiwan. Taiwan wouldn't resist. America wouldn't say shit about it because we're, we know we're not going to fuck with China. They don't want to get into a hot war.

• 59:43Tom Bilyeu?

  But I don't think China's afraid of a hot war. So it's one of those where peace through strength, keep growing your power as much as you can. America and China will fight the war cold for as long as they can. It'll be economic. It'll be alliances. It'll be all the things that we saw via Russia, but heightened. It'll be a battle for AI supremacy. It'll be a battle for energy supremacy. All of that stuff long before it becomes kinetic, but those battles will also be rough. Like the, the Cold War was fascinating. In some ways it galvanizes you. It focuses your attention.

• 1:00:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It get, it gives people somebody to challenge. So when you look at somebody like Palmer Lucky, the CEO of Androl, you realize, oh yeah, this is a guy going hard in the paint because he looks out there and he sees real enemies. Enemies that are a mass. Troops at the gates and he's like huh our military like he was the one that introduced me to the fact that China makes 200 ships or maybe 2000 it was some the number was so startling but let's just say it's 200 200 ships for every one we make like imagine being outproduced at that level like that is dude people don't know what that means that is not good that is very bad so um

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Okay and then I know I'm in this rabbit hole but I want to like expand this do you think that we really could ramp up like I think what's happening right now is

• 1:01:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Ramp up manufacturing

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah I feel like everybody thinks they knows better and that's why we're not we're fracturing in so many different things it's like they're saying this the other side saying this I know better you know better you're broke you're dumb you're poor you're black

• 1:01:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We are we're doing this weird dance between are we going to go into open revolution or civil war or get our shit together on the international stage first

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Yeah so I feel like if if China really was like alright they're America's sweet now boom dropped a bomb on San Bernardino County took out that would that's there

• 1:01:42Tom Bilyeu?

  That wouldn't be a smart play for them because you'll turn the entire world against you but what would be a smart play for them is imagine you're Deng Xiaoping Mao finally dies you take over and you go okay listen guys gather around uh we're gonna spend the next 40 years we're gonna get really strong and we're gonna do that by being the hub of manufacturing for the world and we're going to invite Americans to come over and teach us about capitalism and you do and they teach you everything and you start getting really strong and you realize oh my god we've got this incredible card that we can play which is we'll enslave our own people so we'll put up nets around Foxconn so that Apple is incentivized to come here to get cheap labor and we won't even

• 1:02:24Tom Bilyeu?

  let them kill themselves this this is all real uh and so they become not only the manufacturing hub for the world they become the advanced manufacturing hub of the world and there's a great line in the social network where the character playing Mark Zuckerberg says China's so big they have more geniuses than America has anything and I remember thinking oh god like that's hard to digest and so now you've got incredibly smart hard driven moral

• 1:02:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Wonderful like all the things that you think that anybody has a monopoly on. Nobody has a monopoly on that shit. They've got all that too, but a whole lot more of whatever. And they're just build, build, building. Now they're not as good at us as at innovating. They don't have freedom and freedom is just better for certain things, namely innovation. So there's no doubt that we have some advantages. They have some advantages and so they're playing their advantages. So Deng Xiaoping is like, we're going to grow really strong, but we're going to be quiet about it. I'm not going to say shit. And so for a long time, they just keep more powerful, more powerful GDP skyrocketing, going from like $260. These are not literal numbers, but they're very close.

• 1:03:34Tom Bilyeu?

  $260 GDP per person to like 12,500. So

• 1:03:42Tom Bilyeu?

  in a a generation. Imagine, imagine like while your wages stagnated in that same time period, there's 30 X. That's the real number. That much I know is true. Okay.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  And while 60 of us can't read past the 60.

• 1:04:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. So all of that and China's turning out people that know how to read. Okay. I'm not saying that they're creating some mythical super soldier. They're all human too, but like they're really doing the thing.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  They know how to read.

• 1:04:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  At the very minimum.

• 1:04:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So they, they're like pushing their students to get hyper skilled. They're parsing them out based on ability. Everything's meritocracy, yada, yada. Okay. Then you get this guy named Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping goes, hold on. I saw what happened in Russia. We're not playing that game. So all you guys that are getting uppity, mm hmm. We're not here for that. So he boots like 100,000 or something people out of top roles in the Communist Party that he doesn't think are loyal. Kills a few, uh, disappears a couple billionaires, namely Jack Ma, the most famous. Literally like a day or three days before his IPO, 70 billion IPO, just insane, insane, insane.

• 1:04:58Tom Bilyeu?

  He says, I don't like the way that our banks give loans.

• 1:05:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Disappeared, kidnapped him, literally, re-educate him. And let everybody know in the entrepreneurial class. You serve at the pleasure of Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping goes, oh, by the way, it's time to let America know. And so he now, as an act of policy, says, we are going to be dismissive of America. We are no longer going to like, play the little bro role and abide our time and get strong. We are now dismissive of them on the world stage. And so they start showing their hand, they start openly going against the dollar. They're building this gold corridor all across South America. They're letting people know, basically, they're not saying exactly this, but like, we're gonna

• 1:05:49Tom Bilyeu?

  re-peg our yuan to gold. You're gonna be able to get gold, we're not gonna control it, like, you guys are gonna be able to access it. So we won't do what Nixon did to you guys in 1971. Like, you're actually gonna be able to get your gold. So start doing transactions in yuan, because we're gonna protect you. And they're doing all these Belt Road alliances, all that stuff, right? Okay, so you wanna know why America's funding Argentina? Because they can't have Argentina break China, like, break their way. So it's like, we've gotta go and now get some of these guys shored up. Probably something similar happening in Venezuela. So you're getting like, all of this geopolitical maneuvering. But China is now like, coming forward and just saying, we are re-unifying with Taiwan.

• 1:06:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Whether America wants to or not, I don't give a shit. And so I forget what timeline he's put on it, but it's like, they really do plan to make those moves. They really are being dismissive of America. They are not hiding anymore that they are strong. They see themselves as number one, not just in their region, number one. That they have a mandate from heaven to basically be the central kingdom, the like, center of everything. So brace yourself, gonna be a wild, call it 25 years.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  I interrupted a super chat for that, sorry.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, we went a long way on the super chat.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Fractal.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Pretty solid.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  That's on me.

• 1:07:08Speaker 04

  And had more come in while we were away. Uh, speaking of more coming in, the next one from Nanya.

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  So many from Nonya today. Uh, difference between Chinese and American. Chinese is linear, US is imaginative. Their genius doesn't matter if they can think outside the box. Also, Chinese geniuses are going to be old and dead soon. They don't have replacements.

• 1:07:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, they've got demographic problems. There's no doubt about that. Uh, yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  And the last one from Nonya. Tom and Drew should dress up as rubber chickens on the Halloween stream.

• 1:07:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Why rubber chickens?

• 1:07:46Speaker 04

  I don't know, but the mental image is hilarious.

• 1:07:47Tom Bilyeu?

  We're not, we are gonna dress up, but we are not dressing up as rubber chickens. It was so funny, I was going hard in the paint on, I don't dress up for Halloween, this is some bullshit. And then Drew, as a producer, was like, well, hold on. For the episode, that would be good. And I was like, god damn it, Drew. So, so we're gonna dress up, we're gonna dress up. Make sure you show up on Friday.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Yes, dress up, we're dressing up. Uh, everybody, drop your costumes in the Discord, um, general chat. Um, we can't see you, so make sure I wanna see you guys dressing up and stuff like that. Happy Halloween. Um, and for those who don't celebrate, give them candy, pesta, a bible, whatever you do, don't be a buzzkill.

• 1:08:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Nice, I like that, that was a good PSA. All right, bit more?

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Nope, that's it.

• 1:08:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, oh god, there was something I was gonna say, what was it? I wanna commit because I like to be held accountable to the things. So, my goal, this, this I'm not committed to, but the, the next thing I am. But my goal for 2025, I'm going to have watched by December 31st, 250 episodes of One Piece, the anime. By the end, by December 31st of 2026, I will be caught up.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Okay, what episode are you at now?

• 1:08:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm at like 68.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  68, okay. And then how many episodes are there total?

• 1:08:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, like 1,126 or something.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Okay, that's a scale.

• 1:08:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, no, bro, we gotta go hard in the paint.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Going quest on your anime consumption.

• 1:09:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, Lisa was literally laughing at me, cuz she was like, when you set your mind to something. She was like, even when it's something like this, she's like, you are a freak.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:09:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, no, I'm already, I've clocked 68 episodes in like, two weeks.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:09:18Tom Bilyeu?

  So, I'm on a pace.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Straw Hat is going crazy in the chat right now. It was, it was your fault, Straw Hat, we couldn't do it without you, you've been holding the One Piece down for a while. You the realest one.

• 1:09:26Tom Bilyeu?

  For real, but- Like if you're at all into impactful children's entertainment, yo, One Piece is goaded. It is goaded. It is really like the morals in that thing are dope. But it is illicit literature. It is stuff where the kid is gonna look over their shoulder a little bit cause like, oh man, mom's not gonna love this. She's probably not gonna stop me from watching it. It was a little bit how I felt about Alanis Morissette. When that song came on and my mom heard for the first time, would she go down on you in a theater? And I was like, oh God, my mom's gonna freak out. It was like, you're not gonna get grounded for it, but mom is gonna turn like a sideways glance to it. Anyway, it's incredible. I'm loving it.

• 1:10:06Tom Bilyeu?

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