Breaking Down The Most Complex Ideas of 2025 - Best Of Impact Theory

Welcome back to another powerhouse episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In this special “Best Of IT 2025” edition, Tom Bilyeu sits down with a remarkable panel of thinkers, investigators, and insiders, including Whitney Webb, Scott Galloway, Andrew Bustamante, and Mo Gawdat. Today’s conversation dives headlong into the intersections of politics, national security, technology, and the human condition. Whitney Webb unpacks the shadowy networks behind political and business power, giving us a candid look at Donald Trump’s motivations, the AI arms race, and the rise of a modern technocracy. She draws bold connections from backroom deals to the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, questioning who truly benefits from these seismic shifts. Andrew Bustamante https://app.castmagic.io/speakers/D/E, a former CIA operative, pulls back the curtain on intelligence operations, the Epstein scandal, and explains how global gamesmanship actually unfolds—reminding us that the truth often lies somewhere between conspiracy and incompetence. He explores the ongoing “shadow conflict” with China, the realities of modern military strategy, and what’s really happening behind the headlines in hotspots like Venezuela and the Caribbean. Mo Gawdat challenges us to rethink the broader implications of global power plays—asking whether America’s aggressive stance towards China may actually be hurting itself, and positing that economic diplomacy and humility could be the keys to a more peaceful future. And Scott Galloway offers his trademark candid analysis on the Trump presidency, economic malaise, masculinity in crisis, and what it will take for America’s young people—especially young men—to thrive again. If you’re looking for a conversation that pulls no punches and explores the uncomfortable truths behind world events, government, technology, and society, you’re in the right place. Buckle up for a deep-dive into the power plays shaping our future, right here on Impact Theory. Quince: Go to https://quince.com/IMPACTPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory HomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.com 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 CashApp: Download Cash App Today - https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod Connectteam: 14 day free trial at https://connecteam.cc/46GxoTF Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact AquaTru: 20% off your purifier with code IMPACT https://aquatru.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?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. What's up, guys? To wrap up one of the best years yet, I have put together some of the most incredible advice that we heard on Impact Theory this year. Hope you guys have a great holiday season, and I'll see you next year. Until then, be legendary. Take care, peace. First up is Whitney Webb, "Understanding the Deep State."

• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that Trump is somebody who has the elite view of like, "Hey, the right people are in power. Let's make these decisions for everybody else." Or do you believe that he actually sits outside of that system and is actually trying to help the everyday person in the way that he presented himself while he was campaigning?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as far as my perspective on Trump goes, it tends to do with the view, it tends to revolve around the view that he is a businessman at heart and that the focus of his political style, I guess, is deal making. And, you know, I wrote a lot... In my book about Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, who was, among other things, the general counsel to McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings, he was also, you know, a New York City lawyer that represented a lot of unsavory figures, including some tied to organized crime, and also had the ear of Ronald Reagan and taught politicians in the United States and sort

• 2:28Speaker 01

  of bridged a variety of worlds. And he very much essentially taught Trump the art of the deal, as it were. And, you know, a lot of his close, Cohn's close associates, like the Pope family, for example, were very politically connected, also connected to organized crime, arguably, but were very much in the business of making backroom deals, and that that's how, you know, power, political power in the United States functions. And so, you know, fundamentally, I think a lot of what Trump likes to focus on and promote about

• 3:09Speaker 01

  his political style is around negotiations, whether those are diplomatic negotiations or negotiations with businessmen that lead to a big number of investments he can tout to the public, which is, you know, I think, part of the impetus behind his having the Project Stargate press conference, you know, at the White House on his first full day, you know, at his second term. And I think that was all, that's also kind of consistent with what we saw from Trump during his first term as well. So when you're sort of focused on those metrics, I don't necessarily think that the focus is necessarily on how do I help, how do I help everyday Joe. I'm sure that, you know, in his mind, well, I don't

• 3:52Speaker 01

  really necessarily want to speak for him, but if you're, you know, of the opinion that I'm going to tout this big multimillion dollar investment in US AI infrastructure, for example, perhaps he views that as helpful for the American economy and thus helpful for the American people. And I think it is very likely that over the next four years, there certainly will be some Americans that economically benefit, you know, from Trump's economic policy, but I don't necessarily think that's going to be. Everybody, and I think, you know, generally, based on what we've seen so far, there's been a lot of courting of big tech executives and a lot of talk about making the US the AI and crypto capital of the world.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And how much of that is necessarily going to translate or trickle down to sort of refer to, you know, Reaganite economic terms, you know, to the everyday American public? It's really hard to know. But again, you know, I just want to go back to someone like Eric Schmidt, for example, who, as I noted earlier, had sort of an outsized role in developing the AI policy of the military and intelligence community. He wrote a book called The Age of AI with Henry Kissinger and also, I believe, a professor from MIT, who, I'm sorry, his name escapes me at the moment. But basically, that book posited that essentially AI is going to make a two-tiered society. There's going to be the top tier of people who develop and maintain AI and set and determine

• 5:19Speaker 01

  what its objective functions are, and then sort of a second class, which we would assume is larger than the first class, so they don't explicitly say that, but who AI acts upon and eventually that that group will lose the ability to understand and really be able to conceive of how AI is impacting their lives and will develop some sort of dependency on AI for things like decision-making, sort of leading to this phenomenon that they refer to in the book as cognitive diminishment, which I sort of see as this idea of, you know, we've all heard it before, if you don't use it, you lose it. The idea of like mental math, you start using a calculator or a phone calculator or something

• 6:03Speaker 01

  like that, and it becomes more difficult over time and eventually very difficult to be able to do mental math in your head when perhaps when you were in grade school, it was much easier to do that because you were sort of, you had to use that ability regularly. And so they sort of, they essentially argue that by not making those decisions and outsourcing that to AI, this particular class will lose the ability to make those decisions over time. And when you also have a factor in Uh, that there's a lot of efforts to sort of outsource creativity, art and music to artificial intelligence. Will that have an impact on people's ability to create and what sort of impact will this have on society? And, you know, these are things that I think sort of get left out of the public discussion, and I don't think they're really on someone

• 6:45Speaker 01

  like Trump's radar as a businessman. He's focused on sort of the bottom line, the number, the success of the negotiation and how successful it it looks, frankly, whether it's to his base or to businessmen he wants to court, um, or, you know, other people, foreign leaders, you know? Um, and, you know, I, I, I'll, I'll stop there, I guess.

• 7:08Tom Bilyeu?

  No, that was great. Uh, so how do you feel when you hear about AI creating this two-tier system?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I certainly don't think that's positive. I think it's sort of the technocratic model that we discussed earlier, where you sort of have an elite class that sort of set, um, you know, the system that will micromanage the masses at the end of the day. I mean, they don't explicitly say that, um, in the book, but if you're familiar with someone like Henry Kissinger, for example, and some of his more controversial views, um, on, on the masses and the public and some of his more infamous quotes, you know, I mean, uh, is that a system that he, um, wants to happen? I don't really know. He's dead, and so no one can ask him, but, um, I think it is kind of disturbing, um, in a sense that someone that was known-

• 7:56Tom Bilyeu?

  What are some of his more infamous quotes? I, I'm not, I'm not super familiar with Kissinger. I know who he is, but I couldn't quote him.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Uh, well, he created a national security memorandum, for example, that viewed, uh, people that live in the third world, birth rates and, and, and, you know, in the global south as national security threats to the United States, um, and wanted to, uh, implement policies to reduce, uh, their population size, uh, for example, and sort of had what I would argue was eugenicist bent to some of his policies. Um, and he was one of the mentors, of course, to people that have become infamous in recent years, like the World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab. Um, and, um, you know, some of his more infamous quotes that he's known for refer to, you know, soldiers, uh, being, you know, pawns of foreign policy, essentially sort of like, you know, people's lives are just, you know,

• 8:42Speaker 01

  pawns on a chessboard for the, sort of the elite figures to move around, you know, for, for their benefit. That's sort of the mentality as I see it. Um. of someone like him, but obviously he's been, you know, praised as a model statesman and all of this stuff and has mentored Trump in his first administration, mentored Hillary Clinton, you know, people on both sides of the aisle. Um, and but I personally, um, you know, I think the more you look into someone like that and his connections with sort of dubious oligarchs like David Rockefeller going, you know, significantly back in time. Um, you know, he's sort of someone that promotes this idea of of a global technocracy.

• 9:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so do you have the impulse to want to see AI slow down or stop?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Well, I don't necessarily want to say that I'm like a Luddite and we and we should all go back to the Stone Age or things like this, but I think there needs to be like an actual public discussion on this, particularly on the fact that our out of control national security state um, in Silicon Valley or have essentially been fusing over the past few decades and what necessarily that means. Because a lot of people be, you know, will say stuff, well, it's AI in the private sector, but when that private sector company has multimillion dollars conflicts of interest with the national security state, I think that should, um, you know, be part of the discussion. Uh, necessarily, and I think also there needs to be a way to sort of know

• 10:11Speaker 01

  um, whether some of these algorithms are hyped or whether what the company says their accuracy is, for example, is actually accurate. Uh, before, uh, decisions are made to outsource major decision making, whether at the government level or the local level or really on any level, you know, to an algorithm. So, you know, as an example, uh, during COVID-19, uh, the the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, sort of gave a green light to this Israeli company called Diagnostic Robotics, uh, to use, you know, the health data in the state to predict, uh, COVID-19 outbreaks, uh, before they could happen. Right? And Gina Raimondo, by the way, became-

• 10:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Does that violate HIPAA laws?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure a lot of those were sort of suspended under the emergency justification of COVID-19, but I'm not exactly familiar with the legal or potential legal snafus of that. At the time, or maybe they justified it by alleging, you know, saying they sort of took anonymized the data. I don't really know. But the idea was to sort of use that data to identify local hotspots and predict outbreaks before they happen. And so obviously, if, you know, the algorithm of this company predicts an outbreak, there would be sort of these localized lockdowns and people would lose their ability to engage in in-person commerce and freedom of movement, et cetera. So, you know, consequences that are pretty significant to the people living there.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And when I reported on it at the time, as I recall, but it's been a few years, but I do know that the algorithm per the company was under 80% accurate. I think it was somewhere in the 70s. And so that's the company, right? So if it's not independently vetted, and this is sort of, you know, company PR, at the end of the day, is that overinflated? It's quite possible, right? And so what if the accuracy of that isn't really in the 70s, in the 60s or near the 50s? It's no better than a coin toss, right? Is it really worth putting that kind of power in the hand of an algorithm that isn't necessarily going to be more efficient and accurate? But all this hype that's been generated around AIs and industry suggests that has sort of created this public perception that AI is inherently

• 12:18Speaker 01

  smarter than human decision makers and more efficient and more cost effective, for example.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I think these are kind of problematic scenarios that need to be considered. And I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or poo poo on on innovation, but I think, you know, civil liberties do matter. And I think people need to be very mindful of that, especially considering, again, the Silicon Valley fusion with the national security state and the national security state's tendency to opportunistically whittle down American civil liberties for their benefit.

• 12:54Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a really interesting intersection that I clearly need to start thinking more about. 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.

• 13:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:16Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it. The way that I would look at that, and this ties into something you mentioned earlier during the inauguration of Donald Trump, you had all these tech billionaires there by him. And it gave, it certainly gave me like, ooh, this is why people are paranoid about oligarchy vibes. And I'm not super prone to that kind of thinking. So the fact that it hit me like that, I was like, okay, definitely it's good that people are being paranoid. But the intersection feels like it's a very natural intersection to me. So the reason that national security would be fusing with technology is that technology is going

• 16:07Tom Bilyeu?

  to be the front where these battles are fought. And so anybody that's seen, you know, however many thousands of drones that China can launch and get to, you know, dance like a dragon is very compelling when you see it. It looks so cool. And then you imagine, well, what happens when 10,000 drones like that are able to go over an aircraft carrier and each one drops a reasonable sized payload that by itself would do next to nothing, but you drop 10,000 of those little somethings on that ship and you turn it into Swiss cheese. You realize, ooh, the way that we've been doing national defense is not going to work in a modern combat scenario. And so it is going to be these tech guys that we're going

• 16:52Tom Bilyeu?

  to need, even if you just grant me that AI is going to get really good at hacking, which there was a recent announcement, I forget if it was from DeepSeek, I can't remember. But there was a company that was doing this where they wanted to see how well their AI was at hacking and it was unbelievably good. And so they were doing it as a red team inside of a company. So they can say, okay, here's how we broke our own systems. Now we need a blue team that can come in and shore these up. But you're gonna have to have that. Like, if you are living in a world where one country has AI and another does not, the country without it will lose. And so, to me, this feels

• 17:31Tom Bilyeu?

  like an arms race we cannot afford to not engage in. And so, it just becomes a question of, all right, well, given the stakes, how do we actually navigate this? So, I would not want to pull apart the national security apparatus from the tech bros, to be dismissive. So, what do you do? I don't know if you want to stay in the lane of like, I just want people looking at the right things, or if you actually have an insight there, but I'd be very curious.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  You know, I do prefer to stay in my lane as much as possible, frankly, especially on sort of these sticky, stickier issues, but I do have some opinions. So, first of all, as I referred to earlier with the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and some of these FOIA documents that came out of there, there is the promotion of the idea that essentially, the US needs to do what China has done and replicate this civil-military fusion model in order to win the AI arms race. And sort of, the argument inherent in that

• 18:42Speaker 01

  is that in order to beat China, we must become China even more than China is. And, you know, a lot of the justifications, you know, around China as an adversary are related to how China is not as protective of civil liberties as the United States at least postures itself as being, for example, and a major difference in the value system between China and the United States. And so, if you're willing to adopt exactly that model... Civil military fusion, in my opinion, is really not that different than fascism at the end of the day.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  It's the corporatist model, and I don't think it's necessarily what Americans want. And yeah, there is a trade-off, and I think people should consider it. But again, I'm not in the business of telling people what to think. But what happens if we go so far out of a desperation to win an AI arms race with China, for example, that we completely surrender our, the value system that supposedly makes us a freer, better society in the process? I think that is complicated. And I would also point to the fact that, you know, transnational capital, a lot of that has enabled China's AI arms race. There is a lot of cross-pollination in these, you know, Chinese government-adjacent tech

• 20:09Speaker 01

  corporations and the United States. You can look at people like Larry Fink, for example, who definitely have a lot of ties to Chinese industry, for example, and people like Steve Schwarzman, quite similarly, very much tied there, who's, you know, head of Blackstone. And they're both very close, personal friends of Donald Trump, and also, of course, Fink has ties to the Democrats as well. And a lot of, you know, Henry Kissinger, who I mentioned earlier, a lot of top CCP officials have pictures of them with Henry Kissinger in their offices. They love the guy. And there was that effort, of course, to open up China to commerce and partnerships with Western companies, for example, you know, back several decades ago.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  And a lot of that involved, you know, US capital and some firms, like Bechtel, for example, that were very much tied to the national security state of Ronald Reagan, for example. A lot of top people that served in his, in top national security positions under him were involved in Bechtel, which was building a lot of the infrastructure that helped enable China to become.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  This, you know, the power that it is and why is that not being talked about? And I mean, this is really isn't exclusive to Democrats either, though they often get rightly pointed out for having some conflicts of interest of this nature. But someone like Howard Lutnick, for example, who was head of the transition team for Trump and is his incoming Secretary of Commerce, has the same, his, his company he runs, has the same tie, arguably a more direct tie, to a Chinese government majority owned, a financial entity that was a big scandal for conservatives when Hunter Biden's Rosemont Sineka was also tied to it. But there's been no conservative uproar over this tie. And you have to kind of ask why that may be.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  And why you have a lot of these big tech people, Elon Musk included, who has a major role in the national security state of the United States, is one of the top contractors to Space Force in the Pentagon, for example, and Starlink. And all of these things, you know, through Tesla, has a lot of ties to, you know, Chinese commerce and, and tech giants that also have rather cozy relationships with the Chinese government as well. Why is that not being discussed as, you know, a potential national security risk if we do really need to become China to beat China? You see what I'm saying? Like, if it was really, that was really the key driver of our issue, shouldn't we be

• 22:40Speaker 01

  scrutinizing the ties of these oligarchs to both China and, you know, some, and our own national security state? And, you know, again, I think, if people are familiar with my books and my work, there is a scandal that really exposed a lot of this, that happened during the Clinton administration and was not properly investigated at all. It's remembered as, as Chinagate. And it was really of, you know, sort of, today is, I would argue, misremembered as a campaign finance scandal for the Clinton reelection campaign. But what was the scandal, what, what was the alleged bribery of the Clinton reelection campaign meant to accomplish? And if you look at what these, you know, forces gained, what these, what these figures

• 23:24Speaker 01

  gained by sort of, you know, for all intents and purposes bribing the Clinton reelection campaign, it was facilitating exports of sensitive national security technology to China. And a lot of that was done through a company called Laurel. Uh, which has since uh become, I think, part of Lockheed Martin. And um, the guy that that ran lower at the time Bernard Schwartz, uh, nothing ever happened to him at all, despite the fact that he uh helped pass uh very sensitive satellites and other military technology from the US, uh, you know, directly to the Chinese military. Um, and nothing was done about it, and he was actually a major backer of Biden in 2020. Why was that not covered?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Don't you think conservatives should be all over that story? And um, you know, again, that sort of um, it makes me concerned because I think there's not enough talk about um, transnational capital in these types of situations. And there's a very urgent need to go back and reexamine a lot of the past scandals of our national security state. Chinagate specifically, because as I note in my book, uh, the the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a lot of people at the ITA Department at Commerce, those were the most people targeted as this bribery scandal of Chinagate because the Commerce Department oversees the export of sensitive technology to foreign powers. Right?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  And um, the fact that most of the employees that knew about that scandal were all essentially blown up in the same uh, you know, aircraft accident and that Ron Brown had a bullet hole in his head when his body was discovered in the plane. Why has that not been? Well, it's true. You can look at the evidence, um, and it's absolutely there. And um, you know, why can't we examine this? And shouldn't it be disturbing that the incoming head of the Commerce Department has a direct tie to the Chinese government in the context of that type of scandal of Chinagate and targeting the Commerce Department specifically?

• 25:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that Howard Monnik? Who are we talking about?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Next, we've got Andrew Bustamante, Understanding the Government. The ugly, under-the-hood machinations of the world came up to the surface and people are just like, there's no way I'm gonna let you see how things actually work. Um, Drew, my producer, who's just off camera right now, hi Drew, uh, has said, you'll never get the Epstein files. Like, he's been saying that from day one. How, what's happening? Give me the FBI angle.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, there's a, um, the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes, which is what's so often turns out to be true, right? So, um,

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Jeffrey Epstein was doing a lot of illegal stuff on his own. In the eyes of the justice system, a bad guy doing bad things is useful. It's helpful. That's so wild. Because bad guys doing bad things are almost always connected to other bad guys doing other bad things. And that opens up this access route, this utility, for the Justice Department to say, oh, well, now we have a smorgasbord of bad guys, but we only have access to these bad guys through this one bad guy here. So they created this process called a CI, a covert informant or a clandestine informant. The CI's job is to inform and to gain and grant access to a wider net of bad guys.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  And this is specifically an FBI thing? It's specifically a law enforcement thing. Okay, so it could be CIA or FBI. CIA is not law enforcement. Interesting. Yeah, CIA's job is intelligence collection, not law enforcement. They tend to kill people. They used to be more able to kill people than they currently are. So law enforcement falls under the judicial branch. Intelligence collection falls under the executive branch. That's why the president can do whatever the hell he wants to with CIA, but the president cannot do whatever he wants to with FBI. Right? That's how it was that FBI could investigate the president and how he decided to have a backlash against the FBI. CIA, he just says no. He just shuts off their budget and tells them he doesn't listen to them and stops using them. And that's how you have the mass exodus of 2016

• 27:35Speaker 02

  that you had at CIA during Trump's first administration. So you have these two different branches of government. One controls CIA, the executive branch. One controls FBI, the judicial branch. That also means that Donald Trump can say, "Release the Epstein files," and that doesn't have any impact on the judicial branch. But is Cash Patel that makes that decision or someone else? So they can be pressured into acting when the legislative branch and the executive branch both work together in a checks and balance way. Like if Pam Bondi and Cash Patel say, "We're releasing it," there's nobody else, right? Not really, yeah. They can choose to do that on their own as long as it fits American law. American law is dictated by the legislative branch. So here's why I'm saying this. I'm saying this because even if...

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Our legislative branch votes to have the judicial branch release the files. That does not mean that they control what gets released or where it's released. So the files might be released only to the Senate Intelligence Committee, or only to a subcommittee in charge of law enforcement, not to the American people. You're not gonna, they're not gonna vote today and then tomorrow you're gonna have full access to every file. They also might only release redacted files, because there's going to be lines and details inside all of the files that have law enforcement, intelligence, or national security relevance. So it's all gonna be redacted. You're already seeing that in the emails that were leaked recently from House members. Who makes those redactions? The Department of Justice makes those redactions. Why do they make those redactions?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Because they're protecting other cases that they're trying to close for criminal conviction. So, release the files? What's laughable to me is that they can release the files, and the average American still won't see them. Because they're not going to be released to the public. They'll be released to subcommittees. They'll be released from the current kind of bucket of control they're in, in the Justice Department, and they'll be released to the Legislative Department. And then the Legislative Department and the subcommittees there will determine whether or not it should be released to the public, or it should go right back to the Judicial Department, because we have to protect XYZ case. Epstein as a CI was incredibly valuable, because as much as he did bad things,

• 29:48Speaker 02

  the people that he had in his sphere of influence did worse things in the eyes of the law. This is an uncomfortable truth that people need to understand. In the eyes of national security, a pedophile is not that big a risk, yo. That sucks, but it's true. If you're trying to protect a country, if you're trying to protect national secrets, if you're trying to protect our ability to win a war against China... A guy having sex with an underage child is not that important. But when that pedophile is connected to other world leaders, when that pedophile is connected to politicians that might be corrupt, politicians that might be allowing foreign influence in American policy,

• 30:31Speaker 02

  now all of a sudden that person can be granted amnesty in exchange for their cooperation in advancing the cases for all these other targets. That makes the most sense. In any research I've done, in any expert I've spoken to, in any review of the evidence that we've gotten so far on Epstein, that explanation makes the most sense of any other. That the United States said, hey, you're doing shitty, you're doing bad things. Here's a whole list of things that we can arrest you for and convict you for today. And he saw that list. And then they said, or you can cooperate with us to bring down bigger fish. And what's a guy like that going to say? This isn't the mafia. He doesn't have to worry about somebody, you know, whacking him, he didn't think. So he's like, okay, I'll cooperate with you.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Because then if I cooperate with you, you bring down some big fish. I don't ever go to jail for the things that I have to do to stay influential in my network. And now I'm protected. Right? At the end of the day, we all have two instincts that we have to deal with. Our survival instinct and our tribal instinct. And those, those are the two instincts that drive us. Sometimes we're very survival based. Sometimes we'll sacrifice our survival to be part of a group. In that moment, Epstein was like, I need to survive. I need to take care of me more than I need to take care of my friends, which are my tribal instinct. And then life just is. That's just how human beings are wired. All of us have that same decision matrix every day.

• 31:56Tom Bilyeu?

  And what do you think about, was he ex-filled by the FBI? So they could either protect their sources? Or did somebody actually have him killed? Or was this just a guy that was like, I don't want to go through the trial?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think he killed himself. I will say that

• 32:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Because of evidence.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  What has been released to us so far, when I look at it, it just, it doesn't make biological sense to be able to hang yourself essentially off of a doorknob at low out, at a low distance from the ground. It's a very difficult thing to do. So it just seems biologically improbable, not impossible, but improbable. And then even though I have, I have, I have supported wealthy people who have been convicted and are going to prison. I provide counseling and I provide training to shape, to shape their mindset before they go into prison.

• 32:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Because they're going to come out of prison too, right? So I've, I've helped people in that way.

• 32:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  I've helped people in that way.

• 32:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Later.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And they all have that same thought that Epstein most likely had, where they're like, it's all over. My wealth is gone, my reputation is gone, my family will forever hate me. My kids are better off without me, so I'm just going to kill myself in jail. I'm just going to give up and never talk to anybody again. They all have that moment and it's just a mindset moment that they have to work their way through. Without a doubt, Jeffrey Epstein had a consultant like me who came in and coached him on his mindset. Without a doubt, his attorneys would have done it for sure. He had too much wealth behind him for someone not to invest in that way for him. So when I think of probability, probability is he would not have killed himself. Probability is even if he tried biologically, it wouldn't have been successful. So then what did happen? Was he killed in an organized criminal activity?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Or was he, or was he killed as a political martyr of some sort? But most likely, most probable to me, he was violently attacked. Whether they intended to kill him or just intimidate him, I don't know. But that seems the more likely case. That's completely separate from his role as a CI. If he would have been discovered as a CI, he would have been even more likely to be killed. If he was not known to be a CI, they still wouldn't want to release the details because to release the details of his role as a CI would be to undermine the, all the other CIs in the world right now, who are providing information about worse bad guys than them to the FBI. The promise the FBI makes, the promise CIA makes to all of their assets is we will protect you.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  You will provide us information, we will protect you to the best of our ability. The best of their ability, when they're protecting a US citizen in the United States, is pretty high.

• 34:29Tom Bilyeu?

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 34:34Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:16Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staking around, let's get right back into the action. What does it say about the state of the government, I guess?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  It doesn't say anything new. We've all been, we've all believed that we're good. We've all believed that we're on the right side of humankind and we're a good and decent government.

• 36:00Tom Bilyeu?

  When I watched House of Cards, it didn't seem plausible. So it was fun, I enjoyed it. Very over the top, I'm like, get out of here. And then Epstein happened, I was like, oh my God.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Like this might actually be like the level of chicanery that's actually going on. That, that's where I'm like, wow, this is really hard to metabolize.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Again, you have to look at those two razors that we talked about, right? Occam's razor and Hanlon's razor. Is it more likely that we only recently became corrupt as a federal government? Is it only recently that we became highly politicized and, and survival oriented? Or have we always been that way? But the advent of technology has made it more transparent to the layperson. Which one of those is more likely? Well, if you keep, if you take the most simplest explanation, we've always been that way. So it meets Occam's razor to believe that we've always been this way. We've always been this way, it's just that technology has made it so that you and I can now keep up with it at a faster pace.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  And then if you look at Hamblen's razor, don't subscribe to conspiracy that which can be explained through idiocy. Then again, we've always been this way. It's not that we've been able to keep a secret. It's just that nobody's had real time access into so much information about what's happening in government. We've never had so many leaks. We've never had so much press interest. We've never had so many channels to communicate the information that we're collecting. We've never had, like you were saying before, podcast journalism, or social journalism, or community journalism, whatever, whatever isms you want to call them. We've never had that before. Everybody was too busy working on an assembly line, or trying to scrape together two sticks to make a light, right? We never, we never had that in the past. So when I look through the laws of analysis,

• 37:47Speaker 02

  it just confirms for me what I learned when I was at CIA. The average American has no concept of how the government works. And the average world citizen has no concept of how their government works. And for sure, they have no concept of how the US government works. The largest, wealthiest, most militarily powerful government in the world. You think that we became that way by playing fair? You think we became that way by, by standing on the moral high ground? That's not how government works. That's never been how government works. That will never be how government works. The whole reason we have a representative government is so that we don't have to have blood on our hands as the voters. We can elect someone else to go do the dirty work.

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we ever going to get transparency into who Epstein was and what he did?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  I don't believe we will. I don't believe we will because it doesn't benefit our national security infrastructure to tell the true story. We might get answers, but we'll never know if the answers that were given are complete, accurate, or truthful. Because every government knows you have to give the people something to follow.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  And then it doesn't have to be the truth. Just like what's happening right now in the Caribbean. Why do we have a military buildup in the Caribbean? Because of Venezuela? Run that through the two razors that we talked about. It doesn't make any sense. But that's what we're being told. And because we're being told that, we accept that. Nobody's questioning whether or not our military presence in the Caribbean is due to something else.

• 39:21Tom Bilyeu?

  You think it's China?

• 39:22Speaker 02

  That's what I believe.

• 39:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll get to that in a minute. If you were advising the Trump administration right now, how do you get enough Epstein file out there? Lie or otherwise, that people go, cool, got it, check, thanks. We finally got the transparency that we needed.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  You don't want people to say, cool, I'm done. You always want to have this red herring. This is the definition of a red herring. A red herring is, is a useful tool that you can use to distract people. You want the Epstein case to always be available as a red herring. So if I was advising the Donald Trump organization, I would say, do exactly what you're doing right now. Donald Trump, you tell the people officially, I think that you should let the House vote on releasing the files. Even though the president, as the leader of the executive branch, could do it himself. He could tell the judicial branch to do it. And they would arguably, as commander in chief, be hard pressed not to listen to him. But he's not doing that. Instead, he's making it the House's problem. He's making it Congress's problem. So he's like, hey, Congress,

• 40:23Speaker 02

  you do this thing from the legislative branch. And I'm going to be the one that's the figurehead saying, the leader, saying you do the thing that's going to help the American people. And then simultaneously, you're telling Cash Patel, release whatever you need to release that doesn't compromise current investigations. And anything that looks bad on our current administration, redact. Now Cash Patel, leader of the FBI, Pam Bondi, the head of Homeland Security, they can both go in there and they can, they can redact anything that they, that they decide looks bad on the current administration or is related to a current criminal investigation and release that. And the American people will say, oh, now we have all the files, but what about all these redactions? And now the Justice Department can always say, those redactions are critical for national security.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Because the stability of the federal government, the survivability of the current administration is considered a national security priority.

• 41:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this is gonna get weird. Like, this has not been good for his presidency and his inability to fix the economy in a timely manner, which I think is impossible, but nonetheless, is a double whammy. We, we shall see.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Well, that's, I think Donald Trump is also, he's a very practical personality. No matter how you cut it, you can kind of accept that there's a pragmatism when you look at it through the lens of Donald Trump protecting Donald Trump. That's survival instinct. He's, any, any failure that he has in a campaign promise is something that he can distract from. He also promised to not start any new wars, and he's gone back on that several times, right? He's turning into a very conflict-oriented president, not only with Iran, but also with Venezuela. That completely, that goes completely against the campaign promise. He's done an about-face on releasing JFK files. He's done an about-face on releasing Epstein files. Those were also

• 42:10Speaker 02

  campaign promises. You, you see him trying to, like, trying to boost the economy in traditional ways. The traditional ways are not that different from the way Biden or Obama tried to boost the economy either, even though he tries to make it look different. He knows that probability-wise, this is his last term, and coming out of this term, he wants all the benefits of being a former president, and he wants to shore up as few risks as possible that carried over with him into the presidency. So Donald Trump's there to take care of Donald Trump, and the United States will be a secondary benefit, but that's his primary goal.

• 42:48Tom Bilyeu?

  The election is existential now on both sides. So Trump is obviously going after his political rivals. If the Republicans win, I would imagine that whoever comes into office will pardon Trump, just to end all of that. I believe he can't pardon himself, so that's off the table, but... If the Democrats win, they're gonna go after him legally in a big way. So the bad news is that becoming president is now existential in office and out of office. And this is why if I were advising Trump, I would say, whatever you do, don't pursue Obama. That would be a huge mistake because they will come after you tenfold.

• 43:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And then when it switches again, they will come after them tenfold. So anyway, we're in a super weird death loop. But talk to me about Venezuela. So China is the thing that I'm very sad anytime people get distracted because while I would love to hold hands and march into the future with China as an ally. But we not decouple, but we get realistic about not letting anyone control certain aspects of our way of life. Certainly not somebody who has proven that they will very rapidly become an adversary. What is Venezuela all about? How does China figure into this and what should we do?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll answer your question directly first and then I'll kind of backfill it with why I think, I think the way I think. I believe Venezuela is a red herring. I believe that all of the Venezuela talk and the Venezuela focus is not actually the focus of the president, not actually the focus of the Department of War, as it's now called. I believe that that is all a red herring that's being given to us as a pill that we'll accept. Because we all kind of agree Venezuela's, we don't know anything about it. That's what we all really believe. We don't know anything about Venezuela, except Maduro bad. And we all hate drugs. So if you can

• 44:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Speak for yourself, Andrew Bustamante.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  So if you can

• 44:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm kidding.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  If you can affiliate Venezuela with drugs, then boom, yeah, of course we're against it. Ra ra ra, let's, let's blow up boats and let's show American power off the coast of our own country. I mean, who doesn't want to cheer for that? I lived in Tampa. It gives you a giant erection every time an F-22 takes off and you're like, fuck, yeah, that's America, right? Like when you're standing in the field and there's Abram tanks that are driving by, the whole world rumbles and you're like, fuck, yeah, that's America. Trust me, I get it. I get it. And now we get to do that off the coast of Florida. And of course, Texas and of course, Mississippi, Louisiana, we're all like, oh, fuck, yeah, that felt like we're awesome. Cause we get to do it here. We've been projecting that power worldwide. We don't get to rah rah rah when it's, you know, off the coast of Israel. But here it's different. So, all of that to say, I believe Venezuela is a big red herring.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Now, why do I believe that that's a big red herring? When you look at the actual evidence, the objective realities of the claims that are being made, we're fighting a drug war against narco-terrorism, or narco-terrorists, right? The term narco-terrorist has an actual definition, right? And that definition for a terrorist has to be the use of violence to gain a political change. That's, that is what's required of a terrorist. They must use violent, lethal attacks in an effort to force political change. Narco-terrorists would just be drug-funded or drug-related terrorists. That's the definition that's out there for everybody to look up.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Well, the cartels aren't doing that. The cartels aren't using violence, particularly not violence against the United States, to change politics. That's where the argument comes from recently, that they're trying to say, "Oh no, Maduro weaponized cocaine. He weaponized cocaine specifically to attack Americans." Even if that was the case, what's the political change that he's trying to drive? Because that's the important part about a terrorist. They have to be driving a political agenda. Secondly, only 15% of all the cocaine at most, only 15% of the cocaine that enters the United States comes through Venezuela. 100% of it almost is created in Colombia. But then a small fraction is sent through Venezuela and then shipped up to Puerto Rico,

• 47:05Speaker 02

  where it goes into the American postal system, and then it can be shipped all over the United States. A small percentage. Upwards of 90% of all cocaine goes through Mexico. So why are we focused on Venezuela? If we're trying to fight cocaine, why wouldn't, why wouldn't we focus on Mexico? Why are we focused on Venezuela? Doesn't make any sense in terms of volume. Then you start to think about other issues. Venezuela's top two military weapons partners are Russia and China. Russia, historically, China more currently.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Venezuela also maintains one of the largest amphibious assault forces in all of Latin America. And guess who provided all of their amphibious assault weapons?

• 47:48Tom Bilyeu?

  China.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  China. So if you really want to know what an amphibious assault would look like of China against Taiwan, you want to get a look under the hood of what the amphibious assault looks like in Venezuela. What do their capabilities look like? What do the weapons look like? How would they use them? China's number one trading partner is actually Pakistan. So China's number one weapons importer is Pakistan. Pakistan buys the most Chinese weapons. But almost all of the weapons that Pakistan buys from China are focused on ground warfare and airborne warfare, radar detection, ballistic missiles, et cetera, that they're using against India. It doesn't give us, and Pakistan's a US ally, so we know everything we need to know about Chinese weapons, because our Pakistani partners are probably giving us the information.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  But we know very little about China's amphibious assault capability, but Venezuela would be our best insight into that. Add into that mix the fact that the Panama Canal was a major focus of Trump during the presidential administration, because he claimed that China controlled the Panama Canal. That's not fully correct. The more correct way of saying it would be that China controlled the entrance and exit ports of the Panama Canal. They were predominantly owned by a Hong Kong subsidiary. In March of this year, Trump demanded that that Hong Kong subsidiary sell a majority stake to US investment company BlackRock, I believe it was. So then in August of this year, that that transfer actually happened.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  So it was only in August, August 25th of this year, that the Panama Canal became majoritively owned by US investment firms, instead of majoritively owned by Chinese investment firms. And then within two weeks after that date, the first drug boat was blown up off the coast of Venezuela.

• 49:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  So I'm not saying we have smoking guns, but I'm saying we have multiple verified independent sources of information that point to the fact that our conflict in Venezuela actually isn't about Venezuela.

• 49:43Tom Bilyeu?

  So the boats that were blowing up, are they us really going, oh, these are narco boats? Or are these... That China is working with them to do a thing and we want to keep sending a message to China.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  No, I believe that they're actually carrying drugs. And if you look at some of the, not only the drug boats between Mexi- or between Venezuela and the United States, but even the drug boats that are going to Europe, like they're busted old boats. They're handmade, they're leaky, they're, they're, they're, they're not, they're not significant enough that you would imagine they'd be worth a six-figure missile to blow them up. Right? But that's what we're doing. Maybe it's five, maybe it's a $50,000 missile, not a $100,000 missile that we're using to blow up the boat. Either way, it's a $50 boat. So I do believe that there really are drugs. I do believe those drugs really are moving. And I do believe that we really are impacting the flow of drugs.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  But we're impacting a part, like a fraction of the 15% maximum of cocaine flow that's actually coming into the United States.

• 50:42Tom Bilyeu?

  If we really- I totally buy that that's all a red herring, but now I want to understand. So if this is really, I think we're already in a cold war with China. That seems patently obvious to me. So in, in the rubric of this is a cold war with China, why, what are we doing blowing up the boats? Is it just a reminder we have these missiles? I mean, it seems so insignificant.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  It's to consolidate our military in the Caribbean.

• 51:03Tom Bilyeu?

  To justify sending them there.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, to justify sending our military to the Caribbean because China not only predominantly owned the entrance and exit port for the Panama Canal. They predominantly own multiple-

• 51:15Tom Bilyeu?

  It hasn't Panama, not Venezuela. So do you-

• 51:17Speaker 02

  It's that, it's that part of the ocean.

• 51:19Tom Bilyeu?

  But do you think there's a clandestine battle that's happening that we just aren't aware of?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  So I think the answer to that is, the simplest answer is yes. My, the book that I wrote about my own experience with CIA talks about the start of what we call a shadow conflict with China, right? An intelligence battle, an intelligence war with China. And the big difference between the Cold War that you and I lived through the tail end of with Russia and the-

• 51:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, I lived through the whole thing. I'm older than you, my friend. Not the whole thing, I suppose, since it started at World War II, but-

• 51:50Speaker 02

  But the big difference between the Cold War with Russia and- I don't know, we should come up with a name for it. Let's just call it the Rice War. I'll be racist. Damn. The Rice War that we're dealing with now. You heard it here first, everybody. The Rice War that we're dealing with now is that during the Cold War, the United States had no economic reliance on Russia. They were two completely separate economies. Yep. But now, we have a major economic reliance on our largest geopolitical adversary. So it's not so easy to have a standard Cold War where we just turn a cold shoulder and we put up an iron curtain. Now, we have to meet over rice. We have to talk. We have to pretend like we're friends, even though we wonder who's poisoning the rice, right? On both sides. I kind of like this analogy right now. Nice.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Right? Especially since I think we grow the rice and they actually buy our rice. So there's all sorts of interesting fucked up things about our relationship with China. But that's what we're dealing with. So we can't just out-China. If we out-China, we go back into a tariff war, we stop getting plastics, they stop getting chips, it all gets really fucking messy. So we have to find this way to like be in bed together, but still kick each other under the sheets. It reminds me, it reminds me of the sport water polo. I don't know if you follow water polo. I know enough about it to know exactly where you're headed. Yes. I, I knew nothing about water polo till I went to college and then I became friends with a water polo player. And I only then discovered it's a dirty fucking sport. Under the water, they do horrible things to each other and then they just pass the ball up top.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  So when we watch, we get to see all this cool action above the water, but all the nasty shit's happening under the water. That's what this war is like with China right now. So China owns huge chunks of the Caribbean. China has massive leases on infrastructure and military bases and ports all across the Caribbean. They have rare earth mineral rights across the Caribbean. Their major shipping routes go through the Caribbean. We move all of our shit to the Caribbean just to tell the Chinese, don't forget, don't forget, this is our house. And that's what we're doing here right now. We've consolidated our forces. Look how fast it happened when we were fighting Venezuela. How fast do you think it's going to happen if you mess with us? How fast can we take your Caribbean investments? How fast can we cut off

• 53:59Speaker 02

  your flow, not just to the American, the American market, but also to all of your own rare earth minerals and all of your supply chains in the Caribbean? And oh, by the way, if you think that you're going to continue to grow influence in Latin America and South America, which it has, China's increased its partnerships all across Latin America.

• 54:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Massively.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  By the way.

• 54:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Look up the gold corridor.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, don't forget that we're their neighbor. It's a huge message. It's a huge message that was arguably effective enough to walk China off the tariff cliff that Trump just closed with them recently.

• 54:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That is a very good breakdown. I knew that this was a move about China, but to be honest, I had not started putting the pieces together of specifically what they're doing. I didn't realize how much of China's shipping went through the Caribbean. That is very interesting. How do you see this playing out? Is China, so first of all, this is one of those I have to be very careful because I really want to believe this, but I'm hearing reports that Xi is losing power in China. Now, for anybody that follows the timeline of China, Deng Xiaoping, listen, he was the Tiananmen Square guy, so only clapped so hard, but he's

• 55:08Tom Bilyeu?

  also the one actually responsible for China's great leap forward. Xi is a reversion to Mao. And so seeing Xi come into power and turn the Mao spigot on and start purging a whole bunch of people, start really going back to their communist ways, that makes me uneasy for the Chinese people. Now, they may tell me not to worry, and they love it, entirely possible. But as somebody who has just an absolute allergic reaction to Mao, Stalin, Lenin, like a massive allergic reaction, I'm looking at this going, I really hope he's

• 55:53Tom Bilyeu?

  losing power. Do you, have you paid close attention? Is he losing power? Is that just a pipe dream on my behalf?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think it's just on your behalf. So Xi Jinping is one of the strongest leaders that China has ever seen. He's very much like a Putin. He's very much like a Netanyahu to the Chinese. There are many people who celebrate him as a hero, not necessarily as any kind of villain.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  So your allergic reaction is a valid reaction as a Westerner. But as an Easterner, we have to try to look at the situation through their eyes. Under Xi Jinping, in the last 10 years, their country has modernized. Increased their GDP, increased their global positioning, increased the, their, um, reduced their reliance on manual fabrication and manufacturing. Increased their reliance on high technology, which increases their overall standing, not only as a, as a center of excellence in a modern first world country, but also as a global alternative to the United States. That's what Xi's goal is. The reason he's turning back to Maoist tendencies isn't because he believes that communism is the way of the future.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  It's because he understands that consolidated power means he can move faster.

• 57:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I think he also looked at Russia and was like, we're not going to let that happen here. And so these capitalists like, yeah, useful, but they get a bit uppity, but I know how to handle that.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Possibly, but the, the, the point is what, what all of the world authoritarians are trying to do right now. Whether it's Putin or whether it's Netanyahu, I do classify him as authoritarian, right? Again, Israel's different than Jews. Israel knows that Netanyahu is an authoritarian, you know, I'm talking to you, Israel. Um, but either way, Xi Jinping understands that he needs to bypass the process to move fast enough. When you look at their, when you look at, I mean, the most obvious thing to look at is their, is their fighter aircraft. If you compare Chinese fighter aircraft to American and Russian fighter aircraft. There's only like seven of them that are in production right now. Every one of their aircraft is almost a carbon copy of either an American model or a Russian model.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  It's crystal clear that they're fabricating based off of stolen, stolen plans.

• 58:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  They even number them the same way, right? We have an F-35, they have a J-35. Why is it called J-35? Because the J stands for G N G G, which is the word fighter in Chinese. So it's literally the F-35, right? They, they have, they've modeled this all the way down to the, to the Su-10. So they've got this, they, they. Copy and then they refabricate on their own. And that largely took off in 2017. In 2017, you started to see a huge reduction in Chinese importing of technology, specifically technology that was related to their military infrastructure. And it was because they had finally grown their own indigenous capability to create high-performance weapons, high-performance engines, high-performance avionics,

• 58:47Speaker 02

  high-performance, you name it, technology. And that started to become their new mantra. China knows that the United States gained global dominance because we stopped creating corn and soybeans. And we started creating financial tools. And we started creating software. And we started creating weapons. And we started creating digital healthcare devices, storage devices, computers, software, the cloud, etc. So that's what China's been focusing on. Telecom, technology, AI, robotics. They've been focusing on that the whole time that we were focusing on a war on terror. So from 2001, when we got distracted by a global war on terror, they started focusing in on how can we just suck the West dry

• 59:31Speaker 02

  of technological information and use this as an opportunity to build our future economy. That's all under Xi's guidance. So the average Chinese person sees the rise of their middle class. The average Chinese person sees more money, more power, more influence, more global standing. They can reach more parts of the world. The world welcomes the Chinese in a way it never did before outside of the United States. Do they still have a real estate crisis? Yes. Do they still have an aging population? Yes. So does South Korea. So does Japan. So do lots of pro-Western Asian countries. So does the United States. So is it really such a big deal? Like, we try to keep a scorecard. You can't keep a scorecard between East and West. That you couldn't imagine two more different cultures than American culture and Chinese culture.

• 1:00:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Next is Lynn Alden, Understanding the Economy. Is Trump right to call for the lowering of interest rates? Or is Jerome Powell actually wise to be holding off?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  In fiscal dominance, almost everything the central bank does is wrong. That's the problem is that because if they hold interest rates high. So go back to what kind of what we said earlier. The primary purpose of raising interest rates is to slow down bank lending. The problem is that the whole period of inflation we've had for the past five years was not caused by excessive bank lending. It was caused by those fiscal deficits. Originally, it was intentional stimulus. And now it's just kind of this background higher deficit. So the Fed in some ways has been trying to raise interest rates to slow down bank lending to offset the real problem, which is the federal deficits. But by doing so, because the debt's over 100% GDP, by keeping interest rates high, they're

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  also actually keeping the deficit high because they're keeping federal rates high. And yet, if they if they cut interest rates, while you have stocks at all time highs, gold at all time highs, Bitcoin at all time highs, you know, property values at all time highs, then they're adding fuel to the fire, too. And that's why you get to that statistic where 98% of economies, when they reach these debt levels, tend to have some sort of default, which can be through purchasing power, because their own central bank kind of runs out of options. And so I think that, you know, it's probably due for a mild cut, just based on the deterioration of economic conditions. But I view that as a much like a smaller lever to pull than the fiscal situation.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Kind of one way of putting it is that when the money's weak, people will monetize other things. And then by doing so, they make those things less available to those who just want to hold them for their actual utility use, not their monetary use. And so by monetizing our equity market, by monetizing our real estate market, because our money's weak, it causes all these more structural imbalances. And therefore, it causes periods of malinvestment. And it causes that kind of, along with other policy decisions, those high levels of wealth concentration.

• 1:02:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly, the way that Jerome Powell is looking at this, he knows what you know, which is I don't really have any great options. But the one thing that if the real problem is the government is taking on too much debt, that's causing them to print a bunch of money, that's causing the high inflation. Then it seems like I should be trying to pull down the interest rate. Obviously, I need to find a sweet spot, but I should be trying to pull down the interest rate, knowing that I'm going to have a bigger impact on the government, certainly at first, than I would have on the banks then suddenly going crazy. Because I have a bigger problem with the accrual of compounding interest.

• 1:03:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Because we're adding right now a trillion dollars every 100 days to the government deficit, which is just absolutely insane. So why wouldn't that alone be a signal to like, "Bro, look, there's obviously a breaking point and then you're going to trigger the private market too much, but we've got to bring this public debt interest payment down."

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  I think because the optics are so bad. A key part of central banking is that they're supposed to have some degree of kind of optical independence, which is that they're focusing on their mandates, you know, employment levels, inflation, things like that. And they're not really supposed to take into account the fiscal situation of the country. And yet, in practice, of course, you find that they, you know, when the rubber meets the road, they do. So when there's a war, when there's a fiscal crisis, the central banks' options shrink. Because at the end of the day, they have to kind of support that bond market. And so we saw this, you know, in recent years. And basically, from their perspective, they can't say out loud that because the debt's a problem, that we have to kind of change how we would otherwise do things.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  And I think actually, like that, going back to my prior point where I would say... It's hard to criticize the head of the central bank, even though I'm kind of critical of the whole practice of central banking. The one thing I think that's fair to be critical of is the asymmetric talking point they've had around the fiscal deficit. So for example, during COVID, during the depths of it, the federal, the head of the Fed called for more fiscal. He basically said, our tools are limited here. Given what's happening, we need more fiscal spending. And they got that. There was, of course, very large stimulus efforts. And now on the other side of that, they won't go out and say the opposite. They won't say that our ability to control inflation and kind of tweak all this is being hampered by the fiscal side.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  They basically, our tools are not geared to doing that. And if anything, could make it worse. So they have to kind of show confidence and say, look, we got this. Our tools can fix this. But the problem is that I think it doesn't. They basically, that their, their tools are largely unrelated to what the core issue is. And, and, you know, I think that the first step is basically to say that. And they're not doing that part.

• 1:05:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. So let me give you my layman's counterpoint to this, which would be, I'm the Fed. I'm Jay Powell. I look at this and I know one simple thing. If I jack up interest rates, you're going to have to spend less because you're going to hit a point where it is just absolutely untenable for you to keep spending what you're spending. Is it that Jerome Powell knows, oh, we'll hit a political crisis first. They'll oust me. They'll find some way. They'll oust me before that? Because other than that, like, this is one of those where, he once said something akin to, I want to be in a position where I can raise interest rates because it's essentially breaking the leg of the economy and I know how to heal a broken leg.

• 1:06:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So he like gets that that's exactly what would happen. So why isn't he doing that? If, if he's really trying to control inflation, he has to do that.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's what he has been trying to do, which is by holding interest rates high, it makes the dollar fairly strong compared to other currencies. It kind of puts pressure on the rest of the world. It does keep commodity prices in check. For example, you know, oil, generally speaking, it's hard to have out of control inflation if oil prices are pretty low, which they are. So it's having those effects. But then the problem is it's grinding out more and more of this public debt, which is actually ironically spewing more dollars into the market. The problem is that in kind of no world, if there was like an acute bond crisis, would they kind of blink and just let it happen? Because one of their kind of shadow mandates is financial stability. And that goes at the heart of financial stability.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  A really good example is the Bank of England, which was under similar strain. So back in 2022, inflation there was like 10%. The Bank of England was going to do a speech around balance sheet reduction, so quantitative tightening. And then the gilt crisis happened. So for people that aren't familiar, the UK sovereign bond market kind of broke. It was just kind of this leveraged vicious cycle. So yields were rapidly rising, causing more entities to sell. And ironically, the Bank of England had to cancel their speech on balance sheet reduction, and they had to go and buy the bonds, despite the fact that inflation was 10%. So they did something that is normally only done in a low inflation environment.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  And they basically had to do it out of an emergency to maintain kind of just functioning like sovereign bond markets, because everything would have kind of ground to a halt. And you know, I think we would see the similar thing in the US, that basically, they can try to pretend as though that by increasing interest rates, that they would maybe change the fiscal trajectory of the country. But I think in practice, the problem is that the fiscal side would pretty much just ignore them. As they have recently, for example, the big beautiful bill doesn't really have deficit reduction as part of it. The only thing that that kind of some ways is deficit reduction is the tariffs. But basically, there's there's been kind of no change during that process. And if they actually were to get called out on it with some sort of bond issue, I think

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  we'd see that the Fed pretty much right in there. We also saw this back during the 2023 regional bank crisis. So inflation was still above target back then even more than it is now. And, you know, if they let banks fail, that does destroy part of the money supply. But they were more worried about the cascading perceptions of bank instability. So they actually went to a period of temporarily balance sheet increases and liquidity provision to put out that fire despite the fact that inflation was above target. So generally speaking, whenever they actually run into a true crisis, they do generally err toward allowing that inflation, keeping things nominally together, and then trying to slow things down in the future.

• 1:09:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so if I remember correctly, it was Volcker that raised rates north of 10%. I want to say north of 15%. Like, it was wild. He was, what, able to do that because government debt was so low? Like, why couldn't we run that playbook now?

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. He was able to do that because total total debt levels, both public and private, were low. And in particular, the primary cause of inflation, in addition to the oil shortages, was that elevated rate of bank lending. So he went after the actual kind of root cause, which was the accelerated bank lending, and he made bank borrowing, bank lending, less attractive by raising interest rates. So in addition to solving the oil constraints, that was kind of the one-two punch that helped get that inflation under control. The problem in this environment is excessive bank lending is not the cause of inflation. And both in the private market and the public market, debt's very high.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  So if you jack up rates super high, you actually blow out the deficit even more. And that's that's, I mean, that's, for example, why Argentina, I mean, they had very high rates for for quite a while, and it didn't really slow down. Their inflation or their deficit because it's not a bank lending issue primarily. It's a fiscal issue. So certain tools work when the problem is coming from certain things. So in this case, the Federal Reserve has tools to deal with bank driven inflation. But they just don't really have the tools to deal with fiscal driven inflation. That's mostly a present in Congress thing. And that's, you know, that that's the part that has to be addressed and it's not.

• 1:10:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So what I'm hearing is that this is where we realize that the Federal Reserve, the central bank really isn't independent. Because if the government wants to spend, they are going to spend. Because he has, assuming that there was true independence, the Fed could just say, you guys are $2 trillion a year over budget and we're going to keep cranking up the interest rate until you balance your budget. And then we will, you know, lower it again. And then the government would be like, oh, my God, like this would be disastrous. So we're going to have to balance our budget. That clearly doesn't happen. I mean, I'm hearing you. You're being very clear. Minus a political problem that seems like, basically said another way,

• 1:11:33Tom Bilyeu?

  when it's people, the private sector that's getting out of hand, too much bank lending, ah, the Fed just slaps them around, raises interest rates until they calm down. But when it's the government doing the same thing, printing too much money, they're like, oh, gee, well, we don't have anything that we can do to stop this. Yes, you do raise interest rates.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. If they were willing to let the sovereign default or have basically illiquid action in its bond market, then that could affect it. But kind of if you just look at-

• 1:12:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's purely that. It's you're you're going to end up doing a hard default. And that's why we're going to keep going.

• 1:12:12Tom Bilyeu?

  One, did I understand that correctly? And two, are you like, yes, dummy, that's what they should do?

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  Um, I actually don't because it go, it actually ends up hitting their mandate. The problem with the default is then it cascades through the whole system. So for example, banks, they hold treasuries. Uh, so if the US government defaults, uh, basically banks risk becoming insolvent. So then people's accounts at the banks risk becoming insolvent. Same for their insurers, uh, same for retirees, right? Uh, that's generally speaking, why they wouldn't just say, you know what? Let's, let's let default happen. Uh, they always instead say, look, we can do a gradual default through debasement and inflation. That's almost how they always do it. Uh, and the problem is that if, if the, if the, if they start doing that approach,

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  which they almost always do, and they currently are, uh, but then the actual things remain unresolved. So we have entitlement form that doesn't happen, or you know, a Pentagon audit and, and clear out, you know, pork in, in defense spending and make sure that's all right sized. If none of that happens, then it just kind of keeps over time accumulating. And so people, going back to my earlier point, it's not that we have one big debt crisis. It's they have a bunch of little mini ones all in a row. So everything is but that UK guilt crisis was a debt crisis, even though it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the end of England. It was just a, a crisis that they put the fire out, they kicked the can down the road. They'll have another one. And the same thing happens generally speaking in the US where it generally comes out in

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  the form of inflation, comes out in the form of populism. And then the problem is it just keeps getting worse until there's some sort of pretty radical change. And if you look at public polls, people don't want to cut social security. They don't want to cut Medicare. They don't want to cut, uh, a lot of these key things. Uh, and so I think we have to probably go through a lot more pain before we potentially come out on the other side of this, uh, stronger.

• 1:14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Next up is Mo Godot, understanding the radical change coming to the labor force. I agree that this is a super precarious moment and boy, do I wish that everybody could just say, can't we all get along, but we won't. That, that I'll just take off the table. That's not going to happen. And given that that's not going to happen, how else do you play it?

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  When we get to the point where we take out the capitalist. Arbitrage, which was the entire idea of a capitalist is how can I get labor or, you know, manpower to do the work for less than what I can sell it for, right? Now, interestingly, as we take humans out of the workforce, it equalizes across the world. It's five years away, okay? Could be sooner, by the way, if we start with interesting industries. The second is, and I say that with a ton of respect, is when at war, war does not have to be aggressive, okay? So, so the idea here of pissing off Taiwan, uh, sorry, pissing off China around Taiwan,

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  makes China, who also depends on Taiwan for, for the chips of everything that they make, right, basically think the same way. So, so if America has foothold over Taiwan, we China are afraid. So you're escalating the fear, okay? The opposite is true. The opposite is to say, again, like we said with CERN, you know, can we agree that Taiwan is just going to be continuing to support everyone, right? And, and I think that's a conversation that is very difficult to have. But if it is the, the switch between humanity's existence and continuation and not, it will get resolved.

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  The third, which I think is really where the core issue is, is, you know, when times get tough, we tend to do more of what we know how to do best, okay? Which is normally what got things to be tough in, in the first place, right? So when, when, when, you know, when America competes with China on artificial intelligence, for example, they sort of say, okay, only H80s, no H100s in, in video chips. Uh, you know, we're gonna sanction you from this. We, you know, we're gonna make it illegal for people to invest in China. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. Uh, you know, no more Chinese students can come and study in America, da, da, da, da, da. Okay? And, and those tactics.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  Could work if China was seventy years ago starving to death. Okay, when you do you take those tactics against this China, they immediately say, okay, how much does it cost for us to create our own fabs and create our own microchips? Right, how much does it, you know, what can we, what do we need to change about our students? So that they become the best in the world forty two percent of all AI scientists in America are Chinese. Who's being hurt by that fight? It's America. Okay, and and it's, you know, it is interesting that the American people are not fully informed of this, that that, you know, those bully strategies are now met with the world saying,

• 1:17:22Speaker 04

  okay, you know what, if if you're gonna sanction Russia by taking three hundred billion dollars out of the Russian oligarchs, then by definition, okay, every other oligarch in the world is gonna de-dollarize. Now, instead of you saying, you know what, I'm gonna, you know, tap the table and I'm gonna shout at everyone and I'm going to be even more bully. Okay, you might as well say, okay, guys, you know what? I understand that upset you, can we talk? Right, because the one that's being hurt by this is the American people.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  Okay, the American policy somehow is running in a way that basically says, do more of what you know how to do best. Now, the the more interesting part of this, Tom, and I I really urge you to think about this, is that Russia, sorry, China historically has never in all of history invaded outside its border. Ever, okay, there was one case in Vietnam, which was again instigated by the US. Right, and it didn't last for long. Hmm, now, the the other side of this is that if you look at the war, at the map of the world today, with with America having one hundred and eighty plus bases, you know, military bases across the world, China has won.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  That protects shipping through the Red Sea. Okay, they explicitly are giving the world signals that all we want, we don't want to dominate the world like the empire. Okay, we want to become prominent for the world mainly economically, so that we can feed our 1.4 billion people. Okay, and I may be wrong, but but but there has not been a sign of aggression issued by China in your lifetime or mine. There hasn't been one. Okay, so what are we reacting to? We're either reacting to manufactured signs so that we can continue to have our forever war.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Okay, or maybe we're exaggerating and hurting ourselves in the process. And I think this is where the conversation needs to happen. Now, there could be, this could mean that millions of people die in Vietnam like we saw in the 1960s and 70s. And, you know,

• 1:19:41Speaker 04

  unbelievable, I mean, someplace like Vietnam across the world, which is unacceptable if you ask me, but you know what? American people will not feel it. Right, but to bring the war home economically, the way America is doing.

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  It is clear if you're sitting in my seat outside the US that everyone, everywhere in the global south is saying, I don't want to be bullied anymore. And the minute you give them an alternative through BRICS or whatever that says, hey, can you, you know, ship to me using my currency, they take it. Okay, and and somehow, it's not that we don't like America, it's just we don't want to be bullied anymore. And and in a very interesting way, it's the benefit of America to suddenly say, you know what, while I'm still taller than all of you, I'll make you my friends. Okay, so that when you're taller than me or as tall as I am, we can play together.

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  This cold war is working, believe it or not, against America. And this cold war, believe it or not, even in tech, in AI, is being lost by America. Okay, so DeepSeek comes in, Amanus comes in, quantum computing chips come in, they have 105 qubits now in China. Okay, and I don't know how much more I can tell the politicians in America. You're not losing, you're not winning this through aggression, win it through diplomacy. Everyone wants your market. Everyone loves you, loves the movies you send us, they will love your music. We, we really, we have nothing against America. But the rest of the world needs to also protect their own sovereignty. And more aggression is not helping anyone.

• 1:21:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so let me see if I understand what you're saying is that you, you, America, need to understand that you, China is a rising power, that the whole world has their own...

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, I'm sorry to interrupt you, I'm sorry to interrupt you. China is the world's superpower. It is the world's superpower. And purchasing power parity, they are a bigger GDP than America and have been for a very long time. And most of the world is much more dependent because of the trade deficit of America for so many years. Most of the world is much more dependent on China than they are on America.

• 1:22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you guys have already been passed economically by China. So the Cold War that you're trying to wage with them does not make any sense because not you're the only ones that are going to get hurt, but you are going to be disproportionately hurt.

• 1:22:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna stop there because I think the next thing I'm gonna say is gonna be a prognostic it's gonna be I think that statement makes a prediction but first I just want to make sure that I got that far correctly.

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  I don't I don't think you're gonna be disproportionately hurt is accurate. We nobody knows. Okay, I think the rest of the world will probably pay more than the two two superpowers, right? But but you're gonna be hurt. Like, there is a way where this doesn't hurt anyone. So so there is no need for the pain.

• 1:22:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So walk me through the way that this doesn't hurt anyone. Because you're you're what you're about to say is gonna be based on your assumption that China is not an aggressive nation. They're a nation of influence, to be sure. But they're not going to put military bases everywhere. They're not going to go into foreign incursions the way the US has. And so therefore, you have I don't know that you'd use these words, but you have nothing to fear essentially from a strong China.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  From a military point of view, the day China puts in a second base against your 187 or whatever, start to worry. Okay, but it's one military base outside China versus more than 180 for America. You're still the world's superpower militarily. Okay, so nobody wants to attack anyone. This is not a war. Okay, from an economics point of view, from an economics point of view, the biggest threat I believe America has is not debt. Okay, because you have the military power to back your debt. The biggest challenge, in my point of view, I'm not an economist, is inflation. And how inflation will hit your

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  nation. And inflation is two sides. One is the cost of goods on on, you know, American soil, which is going up because of tariffs, for imported goods and locally manufactured goods, which will have a margin to increase their prices in. Okay, but more interestingly, it's because everyone is sending you your dollars back.

• 1:24:33Speaker 04

  Right, so I'll tell you very openly, I'm very interested in classic cars. Now, I buy most of my classic cars in America.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  Why? Because then I can send you dollars and get the goods.

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  Okay, I can send you dollars that I'm afraid will be inflated into lower value.

• 1:24:55Speaker 04

  Okay, and then if I keep the classic car here, I can sell it here, or I can sell it in Europe, or I can sell it in Japan, for money that is real money as the US dollar loses its value. And the risk of inflation in my mind is that American people are paying for it. Okay, and America is not the safest place on earth if people become hungry.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Because of the Second Amendment.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  This truly in my mind, I'm really sorry, I don't have the right, I honestly do not have the right to comment on American policy.

• 1:25:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh man, this is so helpful. I get it, you have to worry more about the comments than you have to worry about me. But I hunger for perspectives that are not my own. And so getting a chance to look back at America through your eyes is incredibly useful. So if at the risk of you having to deal with whatever people will think, I am grateful.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  I have all good intentions, by the way, for people who are about to comment. I only have good intentions, I'm not against America, or against China, or against anyone. I'm just basically saying my daughter and everyone's daughter is at risk. And if that means you're gonna comment negatively on what I say, thrash me, it's okay, but keep my daughter safe.

• 1:26:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so, one, we certainly share a belief that inflation is, oh, my audience has heard me talk about this so much, inflation is the devastating force that everybody has to worry about.

• 1:26:38Tom Bilyeu?

  You've given me a perspective on China that is very fascinating. One, I'd be so curious to get more data on my understanding of the Chinese economy is that they beat us in some areas and they lose to us in others, that overall GDP we still win, but you're saying that's inaccurate, that's basically Western spin.

• 1:26:58Speaker 04

  That's in, yeah, it's US dollars GDP.

• 1:27:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so that's very interesting. Also, I have a formulated vision of the Chinese economy as being weak at this point. Given all the crazy investments that they made in getting their own populace to buy housing, again, I'm perfectly willing to accept this is all spin, please.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is a huge spin on that. So what ended up happening when America declared economically that they are going to try to slow down China is that China is, China is very different than America when it comes to economics because they're able to make a decision at a state level that they don't need to convince the capitalists of, right? They basically, they simply instructed their banks to stop paying mortgages because housing is less important than industrial capacity. Okay, so what you see if you want to slice the economy and look at housing and the mortgage crisis and what's happening in China, it looks like an economy in decline.

• 1:28:04Speaker 04

  But as those funds are being reinvested in the industrial capacity, they're building industrial capacity in the spaces where America threatened to starve them. So when it comes to microchips, for example, you know, a lot of the Chinese officials will tell you, within six to eight years, we will be, we will be building chips that are more powerful than Nvidia. Okay, so this, this shift economically doesn't mean they're poor, they're just using a different strategy to invest in a different part of their economy.

• 1:28:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Next up is Scott Galloway, understanding Trump's first year back in office. Talk to me about Trump, give me a report card. So people may have thought they were voting for one thing, what have they actually gotten? I think many people, certainly people on the right are going to be surprised to hear you say that Trump is more socialist than Mombani. So give us the, the litany of receipts there. What is Trump getting wrong, certainly, and then if you think that he's gotten anything right, I'll take that as well.

• 1:29:05Speaker 05

  Trump's instincts are often very strong. It's just his execution. I think he recognized before other people the asymmetric trade relationship with China. I think you got to give him credit for that. I thought, I think they were taking advantage of stealing our IP and then selling it back to us less expensive and gutting our manufacturing sector. I think he saw that. I think that he saw immigration as a big problem. You know, the Vice President, her big thing was supposed to be enforcing the border. She didn't do a great job. When a quarter of a million people can come over in December of 23 by just raising their hand and saying asylum, you know, they had to say asylum and then boom, they were in. That's a problem. So I think he recognized immigration. I

• 1:29:49Speaker 05

  think his messaging around affordability was the right message. I would argue that the level of corruption we have seen under the Trump administration is unprecedented in history in the West. You know, launching a crypto coin, a meme coin, the Friday before its inauguration, under the cover of dark, such that someone could put in 10 million bucks into that thing and then say, please stop shipping arms to Ukraine and we would never know that that happened. I think overrunning co-equal branches of government, just basically ignoring Congress. You know, I could go sending in a mass secret police to terrorize cities and people who've been here for 20 or 30 years when he could just show up with a clipboard

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

  and say, hi, car wash, you have social security filings for these people. I need proof of their documentation or I'm going to fine you $10,000 a day. We have turned a blind eye to the immigration problem for 40 years because the sad truth or the uncomfortable truth about immigration is that people say it's the secret sauce of America. Okay, that's nice. That's a Hallmark commercial and part of that is true. But the most profitable part of immigration is illegal immigration.

• 1:30:59Speaker 05

  Because they come across the border when our crops are coming due, or grandma needs her ass wiped, or we want cheap food at a restaurant. And then when the jobs dry up, they don't go on unemployment, they don't collect social security, they melt back to their countries. They usually don't stick around longer to call, to, they, they pay social security taxes, but they usually don't get them. They commit crimes at a lower rate than native born citizens. They don't call 911 or use the police. So, we have turned a blind eye to illegal immigration for 40 years on purpose. Has it gotten out of control? Yes. Has it created real structural problems in the US? Yes. Should we have borders? Yes.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  He was good at leveraging that in people's frustration, especially in border states. And also, a lot of young, struggling men like to blame women for their romantic problems and immigrants for their economic problems. He tapped into that, he flew right into the manosphere. Genius political strategy, focusing on affordability, the asymmetric trade relationship with China. The implementation, it's as if he went to ChatGPT and said, I want to reduce the prosperity of America elegantly and consistently. And it would come back and say, I know tariffs. I know scare the best and brightest PhD students from coming to the US. I know reduce the greatest ROI investment in history, investing money through our great academic institutions

• 1:32:23Speaker 05

  that produce medical and technological breakthroughs. I know make people feel bad about America by showing these horrific videos of people who are so ashamed of what they're doing, it's so, their activity is so depraved and vile, they have to wear masks. And people say, well, they could be doxxed. Judges put mob bosses in prisons. They don't wear masks. So, some of his political instincts, I think, are correct. I think he's a great campaigner. I would argue that the economic policies of America right now, putting drunks in charge of the Department of Defense?

• 1:33:01Speaker 05

  Putting conspiracy theorists who believe that vaccines cause autism in charge of our health and human services? I mean, I feel like this is literally a clown car running the nation right now. It's a corrupt crime family, all right? And the even worse news is Michael is running the grift and Fredo is running the government. I wish they brought half the competence to their grift that they're bringing to the government. Trolling around the Gulf and not going to the democracies, Turkey and Israel, because they know they can't give you a plane or a golf course or a building, only going to the nations that are comfortable, saying, hey, take this $400 million plane, wink, wink.

• 1:33:44Speaker 05

  Oh, and then, oh, what do you know, you're gonna, what, you're gonna give us Article 5 NATO protection for free? We basically just give Qatar NATO protection, a security guarantee. Oh, and he accepted a $400 million plane a few months before? I mean, that's just not, that erodes the very fabric of what it means to be American. And it hurts us, it hurts our reputation around the world, it makes us much weaker. Let's start bombing fishing boats that would take 20 stops to refuel and get to Miami in a nation where there's no evidence there is no fentanyl while we let Ukraine fall? I mean, the, the poor decision making here, the incompetence and the corruption are

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  noxious, they're stifling. The optimism is that we have been in worse places than this before. Americans are narcissists and we always tend to think this is the worst thing ever. We were interning Japanese families in camps because they were Japanese. Slave owners used to be the most powerful political force in America. We opened fire on veterans marching in front of the White House after the Great Depression, protesting economic conditions. We have been in worse places before and America has come back stronger. And I believe we are going to come back stronger here. So, yeah, I do think Trump gets some stuff right. I think he has good instincts around certain things. I think he's an amazing campaigner. He is a stain on the American experience.

• 1:35:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you think this is a great man theory of history where he just brought these things randomly, got elected? Or is he a symptom of something that the populace is going through?

• 1:35:22Speaker 05

  Well, okay, so I want to acknowledge, I'm a hammer and everything I see is a nail. I think the reason we elected an insurrectionist, I focus a lot on the struggles of young men. And young men are doing worse than, are falling further faster than any cohort in American history. Four times as likely to kill themselves, three times as likely to be homeless and addicted. And what happened was, he recognized this, and he flew right into the manosphere. As Vice President Harris was going on MSNBC and CNN, he went on Rogan, Andrew Schultz, Theo Von, crypto, World Wrestling Federation, rockets, he went right into, his campaign reeked of testosterone. Because if you look at the three groups that

• 1:36:06Speaker 05

  pivoted hardest from blue to red, 2020 to 2024, in order, one was Latinos, that says nothing. We should stop tracking them as a group. Mexican-Americans in Southern California have much different priorities than Cuban-Americans in Florida. It's stupid to make any reductive generalizations about the Latino community. Number two, hardest pivot, people under the age of 30. They're not doing well. When you're not doing well, you don't want to parse nuance, you just want different, even if it means chaos. And then the most interesting thing is, the third group that pivoted hardest was 45 to 64-year-old women. And my thesis, Tom, is that's their mothers. And that is, if your son is in the basement playing video

• 1:36:48Speaker 05

  games and vaping, you don't give a shit about territorial sovereignty in Ukraine, or transgender rights, you just want change. So, and also, what we don't like to admit, is there are a lot of women in America who will vote for who they perceive as being in the best interests of their husbands and sons. We talk about the patriarchy, men versus women, women's rights were supposed to be the defining issue of this election. It did not show up. 54% of white women voted for Trump. So my sense is, if we want to stave off, if we want things to be better in America, if I were to do anything, it would be economic programs to lift young people up. And just as the economic bludgeoning of young people in America has disproportionately

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  hurt young men, who are disproportionately evaluated on their economic viability, lifting young people up economically will have a disproportionately positive effect on young men. I get it, I just wrote a book called Know Something About Being a Man. I get attacked by all these therapists, by the way, 80% of therapists are women. It's always work on yourself, therapy is the answer for everything. And I want to be clear, if you struggle with mental illness, or have mental illness in your family, or you can afford it, have at it. I believe it's hugely beneficial. But this dogma online, if therapy solves all problems, you know what would be the best therapy in America?

• 1:38:10Speaker 05

  Eight million homes in 10 years, $25 an hour minimum wage, universal childcare, eliminate 40% of the medical debt on households. You know what makes you mentally fucking stressed out? When you can't afford your 16-year-old's root canal. When you don't make enough money to pay your rent. So while I'm a big fan of blood pressure medication, and statins, and diabetes medication, here's an idea, get everyone working out first, and see if we can avoid that. So I think the mental health in America, I think the stress young people feel, the

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  anxiety they feel, is nothing, no amount of mental health or therapy is going to replace economic precarity. And I want to detonate a nuclear bomb of therapy, called massive increase in minimum wage, tax holiday for people under the age of 30, massive explosion in new home construction, more third places, more mating opportunities for people to meet, universal childcare, dignity around, lower the cost of education through competition, and then the three per 10,000 people who are actually therapists.

• 1:39:32Speaker 05

  Won't need to go on TikTok and say that therapy is the only solve for our issues. I'm a little triggered by therapists right now, as you can see.

• 1:39:40Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I see that. I like it, to be honest. I think that there's a lot of truth in that. I want to get explicit, though, about why exactly you consider those things therapy, especially for young men. I feel like, and this is one of the questions I wanted to ask you, I feel like you're dancing around, there's sort of an archetypal beneficial male path, not the only. I do not think you think that, and I'm certainly not trying to put those words in your mouth, but that there is an archetypal path that, nah, I've never met the kid, never gonna meet the kid, don't know anything about him, but if he were to follow this kind of path, we might be in better shape. One, is that accurate? And two, if so, what is that archetypal path?

• 1:40:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, so I want to be clear. I'm guilty of projecting what's worked for me. I got economically secure. I worked really hard. I got the skills, the certification, took the risks. I also had unfair advantage, being born a white heterosexual male in the 60s. And then I found I've had great relationships, great friends. So I feel like money and relationships are kind of the solve. And I think some legitimate feedback is, Scott, winning capitalism and having a romantic partner sometimes isn't the end-all, be-all for everybody. That some people do, there's different paths for different people. I get it. So I, you know, I understand

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  that. And also, we need to figure out a way to recognize more of the emotional labor that women have been expected to give around caregiving and start to recognize that a form of masculinity and surplus value is when men do that. So I think that society needs some, what I'll call nuance and calibration and manicuring.

• 1:41:24Speaker 05

  And now, let's talk about the world we live in. Seventy-five percent of women say economic viability is important in a mate. Only 25% of women. The likelihood of divorce does not increase when a woman gets fired or her income goes down. When the female in the relationship earns more money than the man, the likelihood of divorce doubles and the use of erectile dysfunction drugs triples. Beyonce could work at McDonald's and marry Jay-Z. The opposite is not true. And I don't care how many subscriptions to The Atlantic or The New York Times you have, that's not going to change in a few years. And I'll give you an example that triggers a lot of people. I tell my sons, "When you're in the company of a woman, you pay for everything." What?

• 1:42:09Speaker 05

  What? That's the patriarchy. You do not own women. You should not have expectations from them. They are not your sexual... Of course, they're not. Women aren't responsible for servicing men. Men's problems aren't women's fault. Women entering the workforce, probably one World War II for us. It's the only reason we're not a second-rate power to China. Women making a lot of money is wonderful. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. I had a single immigrant mother, lived and died a secretary. It did not work out for her with my father or other men. But the biggest strain in our life was she didn't have a lot of economic opportunity. If you were a woman without a college degree back in the 70s, you could either be their travel agent or a real estate broker. You couldn't even be... or secretary.

• 1:42:54Speaker 05

  You couldn't even be a teacher. You had to have a college degree. That was the biggest strain in our life. So, I'm all for the economic liberation of women. A lot of women are doing the math. Three-quarters of divorce filings are women because they wake up and go, "Okay, I'm ascending economically." And, boss, you're flatlining around domestic and emotional logistical contribution in the home. I'm out. I get it. I get it. And I put a lot of pressure on young men, who have more agency than they think, to raise their game. And then, pressure on people our age to join Big Brothers, three times as many women joining Big Sisters. As big brothers, men our age need to step up. We need more economic programs to put money in people's pockets. I genuinely believe that young people having more economic opportunity,

• 1:43:38Speaker 05

  more third places to meet and demonstrate excellence to each other, and establish more friendships, more romantic relationships, and then policies that regulate big tech such that they don't have an economic incentive to sequester young men from their relationships, from work, from school, with their more dopa-hungry, immature brains, would solve a lot of our problems. So are there different ways to demonstrate masculinity and be happy? Should you be more supportive of your partner, who happens to be better at that money thing than you? Absolutely. In the short and medium run, before we become a more evolved species, I'm here for it. I'm here for the world where the man is celebrating in those relationships where the man wants to stay home.

• 1:44:22Speaker 05

  Until then, we have to acknowledge the reality, and that is, men are disproportionately evaluated based on their economic strength, women on their aesthetics. And an economically unviable man feels really bad about himself, and generally speaking, has very little currency in the mating market. So where I start is, how do we create structural changes that maintain the momentum of women? Maintain it. I don't buy this Charlie Kirk shit of, of women were sold a bag of goods, and they were told if they just worked really hard, and they end up being partners in law firms, and then they're miserable and childless. So what's the answer? Have them be broken alone? Of course, they should continue to kill it. That's great, good for them. But at the same time, let's figure out ways

• 1:45:07Speaker 05

  that young men, one in seven young men, aren't neat, neither in employment, education, or training, that one in three of them aren't living at home under the age of 25, that one in five of them aren't living at home under the age of 30. What are the programs to do that? Male affirmative action? No, I don't want to go there. Programs that lift all young people up. Best thing for men, universal childcare that takes an economic strain off of young families. More college freshman seats such that we can get more gay kids, more Republican white kids, more men, more women in college, which still is a fantastic upward lubricant. $25 an hour minimum wage. Give people incentive to work. And that would not hurt us if productivity, if minimum wage, you kept pace with productivity and inflation, it'd be 23 bucks.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  Let's go crazy and raise it to 25. Let's more housing. The archetype of a man, I get it. Maybe what works for me doesn't work for young people. But we don't want to recognize the world we live in.

• 1:46:09Speaker 05

  Marriage has become the new luxury item. One in four men in the lower quintile of income-earning households get married. Three in four men in the upper quintile get married. And they think, well, marriage isn't the answer. Well, it's a pretty good answer for men. Men live four to seven years longer in a relationship. Women live longer, two to four years. But what it ends up is that men benefit more from relationships than women, which isn't to say women owe men anything. It's to say that men do really well in relationships. And there are a lot of women out there that would like more economically and emotionally viable men. So let's lift, let's lift up young people. Let's, let's figure out a way. Are you married? I am, yeah.

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  Okay. Do you enjoy being married? Aggressively. I, I, look, I didn't want to get married. I didn't want to have kids. It has given me purpose and meaning in my life, which I did not have. So I am projecting it on other people. And by the way, my first marriage didn't work out. 84% of people, all this, all these TikToks about marriage is a failed technology. Well, then why do 84% of people who did it once and it didn't work out, get remarried within five years? So you, I, I, anyone listening to your podcast, Tom, is not going to be surprised by this. I struggle with depression and anger. So I decided I'm going to write a book on happiness. I wrote a book. Called the algebra of happiness.

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  I have read, I think, every peer reviewed research study on happiness. It all comes down to the basic things. Number two, a basic level of economic sustainability. You don't have to be rich. You just have to be able to have some level of healthcare and education. But the number one, number one source of happiness is the number of deep and meaningful relationships you have. And unfortunately for a man, his relationship with himself and his ability to have a primary relationship with a romantic partner is unfairly and absolutely inextricably linked to his economic viability. And until our species changes, that's not going to change. So let's at least have an honest conversation around how we level up the mental health, the prosperity and the purpose of our young people.

• 1:48:22Speaker 05

  Should it come at the cost of women? Hundred percent, no. Are women responsible for fixing this? No. Are they responsible for this problem? No. First and foremost, young men need to level up. I hate the term incel. When I coach young men and they describe themselves as an incel, I'm like, no, I met you. You're not Brad Pitt, but you're not bad looking. You're, you're, you're not disabled. You're, you're, you have, you're physically fine. You're a little fucked up in the head, but you're, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be described as clinically depressed. You are a V cell. You are voluntarily celibate. Right? I wanted a girlfriend desperately when I was in high school.

• 1:49:05Speaker 05

  I wanted to have sex desperately. I could not find anyone to do that with me. So quote unquote, it was an incel. I worked on myself. I worked out. I tried to develop excellence. I went to college. I developed a sense of resilience. I started talking to women and I entered into a series of skills such that I could develop the most important things that have given me purpose and meaning in my life. Friends, colleagues at work, and a wonderful mate I get to raise wonderful kids with. I want to create the infrastructure such that more and more young people have access to that. And if they decide they don't want it, have at it. Watch Netflix all day, do your own thing, go to Saint-Tropez, be alone. But 60% of 30 year olds used to have a child in the house. Now it's 27%.

• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  Is that because they've all discovered that children suck and they don't want children? No, it's because they're having trouble finding a viable mate and they have less money. So I want to go to the world where men are celebrated on their character and their perp and their self-worth. Call me when we get there.

• 1:50:10Tom Bilyeu?

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