Economic Insecurity, Political Division, and the Youth Vote Shaping the Future | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Welcome back to another thought-provoking episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In this rousing live edition, Tom Bilyeu is joined by Drew and Mason as they dive deep into the current social, economic, and political landscape. The conversation journeys from the psychological effects of economic insecurity—where Tom Bilyeu unpacks Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s theory on how people behave under fiscal pressure—to the global ripple effects of money printing, debt, and conflict escalating around the world. Together, the hosts break down timely topics such as speculative asset bubbles like Pokémon trading cards, the complexities of modern capitalism versus cronyism, and the disruptive force of AI on economies and societies. Alongside insightful analysis of political strategies seen in the latest U. S. campaigns, they also touch on global affairs, pop culture shifts, and the importance of understanding history to make sense of today’s world. Fans of Impact Theory will especially appreciate Tom Bilyeu's candid storytelling and the lively audience Q&A, where everything from nostalgic trading cards to the nuances of libertarianism and the realities of American infrastructure are on the table. Get ready for an episode that will challenge conventional wisdom, encourage critical thinking, and remind us just how interconnected—and unpredictable—our world truly is. Business Wars: Follow Business Wars on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory http://netsuite.com/Theory Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Raycon: Up to 20% off during this holiday season at https://buyraycon.com/IMPACTTHEORYBC Connectteam: 14 day free trial at https://connecteam.cc/46GxoTF ButcherBox: New users will receive their choice between filet mignon, ribeye or NY Strip in every box for a year + $20 off! at https://butcherbox.com/impact 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 Cape: 33% off with code IMPACT33 at https://cape.co/impact True Classic: Upgrade your wardrobe at https://trueclassic.com/impact Bevel Health: 1st month FREE at https://bevel.health/impact with code IMPACT What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another rousing edition of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I am joined by Drew. What's up Drew? How we doing?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Happy morning.

• 1:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Happy morning, indeed. Mason is back. It's good to see you. Welcome. Take good care of the community today, if you would, good sir. Behind the camera, we have Eric. Is G there? No G. All right, Eric's flying solo. Let's see what happens, everybody. And speaking of what's happening, so writing my most recent deep dive, which will be coming out next week. It really is about what happens to people when they feel economically insecure. How do they begin to act? And we don't calm down and tighten our belt. We go into what the Nobel Prize winning economist? I don't know if he's an economist or a psychologist. Anyway, Daniel Kahneman. Wrote about something he called the lost domain.

• 1:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And he said, when people go into the lost domain where they no longer believe that they're going to be able to work their way out of a financial problem. They think of COVID, think of the Great Depression. They don't go, okay, listen, gonna have to tighten my belt. It's gonna take me a few years to work my way back out of this. But there's a known way to build fiscal responsibility and I'm just gonna buckle down and do it. That is not at all what people do. Once they click over into that lost domain, they build a new internal model of the world where risk is completely reevaluated and all people think about is can I get everything back in one move?

• 2:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So if you've ever seen people at the roulette wheel, uh, playing poker and all of a sudden they just start gambling totally nonsensically. They cover this in the movie Molly's Game where there was one player always super disciplined. He realized that he got bluffed by a guy that doesn't even know how to play poker. And he just goes full tilt, completely unhinged, just betting maniacally on every hand. Every time thinking, okay, I'm gonna get it all back on this one. And then once people start doing that, it is a downward spiral of just epic proportions. And that's what happens to the human psychology when we feel fiscally insecure. Everything becomes unhinged gambling, but we do it in formal channels.

• 3:22Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll do it in, uh, the stock market. We'll do it in Pokemon cards. Pokemon cards is interesting because first of all, I'm so into TCG, but, uh, it is, I have a growing hypothesis that the hotter Pokemon cards is as a stand in for all of those other asset classes that are way out on the risk curve.

• 3:50Tom Bilyeu?

  That it. Is initially, you think, oh, this is a good sign. It means that things are really humming in the economy. But I think it is a very clear sign that people have become so convinced that they're in an only up phenomenon that they'll even go place these huge bets on something as ephemeral as a Pokemon card. So Pokemon cards have actually started to soften now, but TCG cards in general are still booming, which I think is a sign that we're sort of late-stage bubble. We'll see.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like you said, we're tracking this story breaking right now. Thailand and Cambodia is fighting rages on. Trump intends to intervene, and we're going to get to Trump's rally in Pennsylvania later. But as of right now, do you think that there will be a blowback that can impact America? I know we got troops in Venezuela. I know we're watching Russia and Ukraine pretty well. This conflict doesn't seem like it would impact us, but yet Trump is keen on intervening and stopping it. Is that just him being political?

• 4:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. If you think specifically about Cambodia and Thailand, this is not going to be something that has any major impact on us, is not going to be something that has any major impact on the world. Neither of them control chip supply or anything like that that we predicate our entire modern economy on. So you look at China and Taiwan, Japan, like that, like triangle is, that should make everybody uneasy. First of all, Japan has been responsible effectively for the post-financial collapse boom with the yen carry trade. So they've been propping up the global economy for a long time. So anything bad that happens to their economy is going to have global impact. They also hold a massive amount of US debt, so that's going to have an impact on the US.

• 5:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Anything that happens to the US is going to have an impact on the rest of the world. So if you're focusing on Asia, that's where you need to be looking. Now, if you're looking at what's going on between Thailand and Cambodia, I don't think it's a nothing burger, but I think it's one of many, many, many things that show that the world is in an increasingly unstable position. Now, to your earlier point, why is the world in an increasingly unstable position? It's because of debt and money printing. And so the one argument that everybody has made for a long time is, well, Tom, like all this money printing that the US is doing, it's not a big deal, bro. What are you worried about? Like, everybody in the world is doing it.

• 6:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Notice now that you're starting to see everybody fraying everywhere.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Everywhere in the world is now uncomfortable.

• 6:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, because unfortunately, you're playing a game of mathematics. And once you realize that capitalism really is a zero sum game, you are battling for economic resources. Like, I want to get them, you want to get them, I want to try to outpace you to get them. And so the whole game of economics, the whole game of political power, these things end up boiling down to one person is in charge, one person controls the money. And I don't mean that literally in terms of the economy, but in any like back and forth battle over something,

• 7:10Tom Bilyeu?

  even if you're just taking it as employer employee, if you're taking it as person selling, person buying, like everybody's trying to get the best deal for themselves. So, once you understand the fractious nature of that, then you begin to understand why it becomes a problem globally. If everybody's feeling insecure, everybody realizes, oh, I need to get these resources for themselves. They go into a loss aversion mode, their morality completely remaps. People suddenly feel that it's perfectly justified to march on another country, shoot you in the face and take your shit. And this is where trying to get people to understand they're having a biological experience so that they will look back on human history and go, oh, what do humans act like in moments like this?

• 7:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Because they want to believe that they sit outside of that historical truth. And they don't. And once you start looking at history as merely a recitation of what humans act like in certain circumstances, and that it's predicting your future, then suddenly history becomes, A, far more terrifying, B, you realize that the patterns really are looping, and C, that they're pointing to what's going to happen to all of us now. And so, when I look at, okay, how's AI going to disrupt us? What's it going to look like when people start losing their jobs? Why are all these conflicts popping off everywhere right now? You can really start to trace this back to economic insecurity.

• 8:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, as I wrote the latest Deep Dive, one thing that I realized is people just don't understand that we're all an economic unit.

• 8:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And we tell ourselves a far more beautiful story that we are spiritual units. If I had to round it to probably what is the algorithm that plays in people's minds? But the truth of how you move through the world is everything is predicated on specialization. So you make music, I don't because I'm not good at it, you are. And so we have built modern society to make sure that we don't starve to death. Make sure that we don't have to worry about roving marauders coming in to rape our women, quite literally, steal our assets, kill us. And then the benefit from creating that stability and that protection is we can go,

• 9:33Tom Bilyeu?

  and now you go do that music thing, I'm going to go do this other thing over here. And once you get into that hyper specialization, the whole world models itself or structures itself, a much better word, structures itself around economics, period, end of story. And so then you're like, well, hold on a second. When people say money makes the world go round, what they're saying is that the very structure of our entire modern way of life is economics. And that's why when I look at AI coming in, the way that it's going to disrupt things, which to put it very simply, it will almost certainly simply eradicate capitalism.

• 10:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's like, okay, right now, people aren't loving capitalism, so I get why they think that's a good thing. And honestly, on the other side, it probably is. But if you think about it this way, if it's like 1916, and I tell you, hey, on the other side of World War II, we have an unprecedented run of peace in the West, you would go, oh, wait, we haven't, there's no World War I. What are you talking, on the other side of World War II? What do you mean? And it's like, yeah, we're gonna have to kill. I mean, if you if you'll count communism, we're gonna have to kill hundreds of millions of people. People would have been like, wait, what? Like, it will be very cold comfort to

• 11:00Tom Bilyeu?

  them that things get very stable on the other side of the most cataclysmic period. The 20th century was a level of bloodshed. That's like, you got to go back to Genghis Khan before you start finding something like this. And so that's where I'm like, it's very easy to talk about like, hey, this is gonna be great. Once we get rid of capitalism and everything's abundant, yay. But we're gonna have to go through something that is gonna be rough in order to get there, because people will go into the lost domain, their world will be upending so quickly, where all and all of this is happening while the world has just been weakened viciously by an unending stream of debt and money printing. 1913, creating

• 11:45Tom Bilyeu?

  the central bank in the US, the adoption of modern monetary theory, which did have benefits. I want to always remind myself not to lose sight of how we actually ended up here, had massive benefits, but also created these massive problems. And at some point, the the piper has to be paid. And so this moment feels like that. This is where the bill has come due. 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

• 12:28Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:10Tom Bilyeu?

  quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this, but AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number to anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after

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• 14:38Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 14:42Speaker 01

  There are a certain level of economics that are breaking what I think our founding fathers have thought about when we first invested. The one way I can kind of ground it is like, I think it was Rockefeller or Ford, one of those guys started public education. And it wasn't the government intervention, but they needed factory workers. So they then created the pipeline that then laid the foundation to become public education. So to this point of abundance and on the other side of robotics and AI. Everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows. I do see that that there is a possibility for that to happen. But I do feel like there is going to have to be a conversation about there's a certain all this wealth that is becoming and is now being generated.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  It does need to be converted into infrastructure improvements to help us transition along the way. Because similar to the railroad, yes, this is going to be a great positive, but somebody's going to have to actually pay the money to lay the track down. So somebody's going to have to put the money down to lay a get us from point A to point B. And I don't think the every man for himself now system that we have right now is going to facilitate that. And this is on the back of the Scott Galloway interview on Tuesday, which I know in a perfect world, right now, our taxes just go into a black hole. But in a perfect world with a government with a balanced budget, we do want some of the higher earners to invest into the future. So that way the next generation can be able to get on the, whether it's the property ladder, whether it's the career ladder, they have that positive future in order to reap the abundance

• 16:07Speaker 01

  and become self sustaining economic units themselves.

• 16:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, all true. So the fascinating thing, though, is if you look at the railroads, for instance, some of the most important infrastructure that America ever laid, it was devastating for the investors. And there's almost certainly going to be something very similar that plays. It played out again in the internet and it will almost certainly play out again in AI, where the people that put all the upfront investment into the infrastructure, they end up not making money. They end up losing a lot of money. But then the people that build on the back of the infrastructure that got created, they do well. So one thing that I have a feeling I'm going to have to start campaigning for, though it's such a weird time to be talking about this because it's got a shelf life. But getting people to understand that what we have right now isn't capitalism.

• 16:56Tom Bilyeu?

  And so all the things when we blame capitalism, what we really mean is cronyism by the government. So the government coming in and allowing for things like regulatory capture, over regulating industries, so the free market actually isn't making sensical decisions, doing things like freezing rent so that the free market can't do its thing, bailing out banks so that nobody fails. And the whole idea behind capitalism is, hey, you're you're going to play NFL and I'm putting you out on the field and good luck. And a whole lot of you are going to get your spines broken because you're just not strong enough for this game and you're so fucking stupid that you walked out onto the field. Sorry. And so it's like, we'll have the stretchers to drag you off the field.

• 17:42Tom Bilyeu?

  But we're not going to be buying all of your padding. We're not going to be doing anything other than saying, these are the rules of the game and we'll call a foul if we see a foul and we'll get people that commit fouls off the field. But other than that, like if you're too weak, you'll get snapped in half and that is what it is. You're going to have to pay your own hospital bills. That's capitalism. Now, I understand how that sounds to a modern audience. A modern audience has grown up in a world where stability can be taken for granted. Now, we're about to find out, whoopsies, that was just a limited window and hope you enjoyed it. Hope you had a good time, but the vacation is over. And so now there's going to be this cognitive dissonance of, hold on a second.

• 18:25Tom Bilyeu?

  For the last like 80 years, I was able to take for granted that things were peaceful. Countries didn't invade other countries, not in the West. That this was all a very stable thing, that governments, we all agree, have an obligation to take care of the weakest among us. Sure, that creates all this opportunity for theft and fraud and all of that, but whatever. Like, apparently money is very easy to come by. And so, bah, we just deal with that to make sure that if a bank collapses, we solve it. If somebody is sick, that we cover it, like all of those things. And so people have that in their hearts, that that is the right thing, the just thing, the way that God intended it to be, like fill in the blank of how you want to say it. And

• 19:12Tom Bilyeu?

  when I tell people that, nope, we need to go back to the, you're going out on the foot, if you so desire to go out on the football field, you are on your own. Now, if you win, woo buddy, like there's huge upside and you will be able to take care of your family and pass on generational wealth and all of that. But if you lose, you lose and it hurts. And If you don't allow for that clearing mechanism of people getting hurt, they don't get to play the game anymore. They're pulled off, they're done. You get corruption on the field. This analogy is going to fall apart very fast, but that is where we're at now. Is the game is so fake, it's so rigged.

• 19:57Tom Bilyeu?

  It's how I felt about re-watching NBA clips after we saw that there was a whole bunch of gambling being done by the players. I was like, oh my God, like this is so heartbreaking to see these guys just like turn this into WWE. Was mortified. So that is effectively where we're at. The government has turned capitalism into the WWE. The winners are already decided ahead of time based on who has the politician's ear. The fact that Ilhan Omar made $30 million in like two years. Once getting into Congress is the most insane shit I've ever heard. Now, hey, I haven't looked deeply, maybe she is the most gangster investor ever and she's just like got, got it like that.

• 20:41Tom Bilyeu?

  In which case, please make a course because I would like to learn from you. But my gut instinct is that just isn't true. And this is another case like Nancy Pelosi. This has that side of things like this is not a because I'm Somali thing. This is a, yeah, when you're inside the government, you are a part of the political class. You know what's coming. You know that people need you to do something for them. And so you just get into the tit for tat corruption bullshit that runs all of politics everywhere. Gain and retain power like it's just the game. So trying to campaign to say capitalism is good.

• 21:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Crony capitalism is bad and we need to stop calling it capitalism because it's just tricking people. Socialism bad, free market good. And yes, it's got like a.

• 21:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Three to 10 years, just give myself a lot of flexibility, time horizon. And then unless AI hits some sort of ceiling where it asymptotes and we're just not able to make progress, which I don't see any reason to believe that's true. It is just a foregone conclusion.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  All right, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Trump was on the campaign trail yesterday and me and Tom were laughing before the show started, just some of the soundbites that were coming out of there. But speaking of, uh, Ihan Omar.

• 22:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I really can't, Ihan, Ilhan. I can't, uh, I can't believe that that's a president talking. This is so crazy.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  It's, it's nuts. So let's jump into this first clip.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Individuals from Somalia in the group, please raise your hand. That's for Minnesota, you know? That's called the great big Minnesota scam with one of the dumbest governors ever in history.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  I love this Elon Omar, whatever the hell her name is with the little ching, the little turban.

• 22:44Tom Bilyeu?

  The little turban, not a turban.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  There's nothing but bitch. She's always complaining.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  She comes from a country where, I mean, it's considered about the worst country in the world, right? They have no military, they have no nothing, they have no parliament. They don't know what the hell the word parliament means. They have nothing, they have no police. They, they police themselves, they kill each other all the time. I love it. She comes to our country and she's always complaining about the constitution allows me to do this. The consti- we ought to get her the hell out. She married her brother in order to get in, right? She married her brother.

• 23:25Tom Bilyeu?

  That'll be wild, by the way, if that ends up being true. We'll see, we'll see. But, uh, yeah, so anyway, look, Trump is endlessly amusing and I know that I'm supposed to be, um, I suppose I am mortified, but I'm also entertained and I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't. I look at this and I see this is who comes to power in a moment like this. Once you realize you cannot trust the political class, then you want somebody who does not sound like the political class. They sound like anything but, that is certainly him.

• 23:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't, admittedly, I don't categorize him into a racist box that doesn't strike me from the things that I've seen, but it is so easy to look at him through that lens and be like, "Bro, when you're saying," I don't know if we have the clip, but he goes, uh, basically Somalia is a shithole country, Afghanistan is a shithole country, and there was one other one. Haiti. Haiti. Oh. And, uh, then Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, I think, are like the, "Why don't we import more people from there?" It's like, "Bro, could you have picked whiter countries?"

• 24:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So admittedly, he is easy to capture in that box. When I look at it, I think that there's a more obvious thing, which is, he's talking about Western democratic countries. So from that perspective, there's another way to look at it, which has nothing to do with skin color and everything, to do with my favorite word, "culture." And I do think that, given that culture is transmitting foundational, structural beliefs about how to interact with each other, culture is gonna matter massively in terms of the outcomes that you get. Uh, so. Here's the clip right here.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  I've also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries. I didn't say shithole, you did. Remember I said that to the senators that came in? The Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in and they said, "This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest because our country was going to hell." And...

• 25:59Speaker 02

  We had a meeting and I say, why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right?

• 26:06Tom Bilyeu?

  God, this is so playing to a base, man. Like, this, this is a whole thing that blew up massively, however many years ago. And it's like somebody releasing a greatest hits album. Like, bringing this back up, reusing it. I mean, it, it, it is brilliant in terms of, I know what my base wants. But we're just back to the divisiveness between the two sides. That's the part that really makes me sad. Now, listen, as a student of history, I understand this is what populist moments are. They are always, we're on a team, they're on a team, they're not human, we're the good

• 26:48Tom Bilyeu?

  guys, be as derogatory as we want, take them out, the rhetoric escalates, it gets very bad, there's typically violence. So, I get it, but that doesn't mean that I like it. So, um, yeah, funny though it may be, this is, this is a greatest hits album. This is an entertainer who understands how to get people excited. And you and I were talking before we started rolling that, um, Susie Wiles, I forget what her name is, his chief of staff, is, oh, is this where you have Kuta? Yeah. Well, let's go. Susie Wiles, Wiles.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  We're gonna put him on the campaign trail, too. Typically, just a little bit of campaign speak, if I may. Yeah. Typically, you, in the midterms, it's not about who's sitting at the White House. It's you localize the election. Right. And you, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We're actually gonna turn that on its head. Good. And put him on the ballot.

• 27:45Tom Bilyeu?

  What a surprise.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters. Yes, they are. And we saw, oh, we could go Tuesday, what happens when he's not on the ballot and not active. So, I haven't quite broken it to him yet, but he's going to campaign like it's 2024 again.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And he's already started.

• 28:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, listen, he, he understands how he knows, he has hits to play, first of all, and he knows how to play them. And so, yeah, they're gonna trot them out, get them on stage, let everybody know that local representative that doesn't have the Trump name, trust me, you're really voting for Trump, you gotta keep Trump in power, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. So, uh, yeah, I think the, in the final analysis, the only thing that's going to matter is the economy. But getting to the low propensity voters like they're talking about by using Trump, it certainly makes a lot of sense, but that tells you that they are very worried, and I think if elections were held right now, it would flip. I don't think that's deniable.

• 28:45Tom Bilyeu?

  You just had Miami lose their mayorship to Democrats for the first time since 1998, I believe.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so, yeah, it, it's, right now, people are saying, meh, the Trump thing didn't work. So, or I should say, the, the voters who actually will change their mind are saying the Trump thing didn't work. So if you were to hold elections now, it would flip. Now, Besen and Trump have theoretically, whatever, 11 months, but it's really, they're gonna start campaigning hard through the summer. Um, and if they don't get it, it flips, he lame ducks, and then who knows what happens?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let's talk about those consequences, though, because there are some pretty big Senate races being announced. Jasmine Krakow is probably the most prominent who already announced her Senate bid for 2026, um, using Trump soundbites, I have that one queued up as well. But it seems like, as much as we love the greatest hits of Trump, quote unquote, this can also impact him negatively because you're feeding into what the Democrats have campaigned on for the last 10 years, not Trump. If you want a country, if you want a president that curses, or a president that's bombastic, or a president that calls certain Americans home country shitholes, vote for that side. But if you want a unifying America, come over here. It kind of almost tees up what their message could be. Do you think that he can run the same playbook, or because he's not necessarily bearing the

• 30:09Speaker 01

  fruit of his past economic policies? That it is a little bit shaky now for him to kind of act like 2016 and blaming other people. Or act like 2020 and kind of use that same playbook.

• 30:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, if if he spends his time blaming other people, it just isn't going to play because nobody cares. Right. So when you're coming into office, it's like, yeah, oh, man, for sure. Like, they totally fucked up. Oh, thank God you're here. Now clean it up. If a year in, you're still whining about the last guy. It's like, bro, you're in office right now. Fix the problem. Now, whether that's realistic or not is completely irrelevant. People do not vote based on logic, they based on feelings. People don't do anything based on logic. They do everything based on feelings. When I'm teaching entrepreneurs, this is like the number one thing that I focus on is, boys and girls, your job is to think from first principles, not to go, I feel this and therefore it must be true. Just to throw some strays.

• 31:05Tom Bilyeu?

  That's my beef with Candace. Like she takes, I feel something is true as proof that it is true. I had a dream, which is P S your subconscious, however unhinged, trying to make a story about the things that you're thinking about right there. Dreams are nonsensical by nature. They, in my estimation, are not people speaking to you from the beyond. So when people are navigating through the world emotionally, like they are guaranteed to be worse than chance. They're they're like, if you were just flipping a coin every time you made a decision, you'd roughly be right half the time. If you're going by feelings, you can be up to and including wrong 100% of the time.

• 31:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's where people need to be very careful to try to ground everything from a first principle standpoint. So first principles in an election, you've been in a year. You've got to show me exactly why my life is better and you've got to make me feel it. This is something that I talk to from a relationships perspective. It's not enough to tell your wife that you love her. You have to make her feel in her bones that you love her. And that's going to take a lot of nonverbal things. That's going to take you mapping what she thinks is important and then actually delivering against it. So Trump and all of the Republicans and Democrats for that matter, they have to map what their constituents believe is important and then deliver it to them in a way where they really feel it.

• 32:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the good thing about being the challenger is that you can just make promises. You don't actually have to deliver anything. The bad part about being the incumbent is you have to show the receipts. You've got to be like, this is what I've done over the last year. And people just are not feeling it economically in their pocketbooks. So we'll see. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead. So don't go anywhere. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM.

• 33:19Tom Bilyeu?

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• 34:04Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I ran a poll in chat that said, should Trump continue to campaign for 2026? It was 53% yes, 47% no.

• 34:16Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no way they believe logically, the 47% people. There's no way they believe logically that it will decrease a Republican's chance of getting elected to have Trump. It's not possible.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, fighting that, fighting against that, here's Jasmine Crockett's campaign announcement.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  How about this new one they have, their new star, Crockett? How about her? She's the new star of the Democrat Party, Jasmine Crockett. They're in big trouble.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  But you have this woman, Crockett. She's a very low IQ person.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  I watched her speak the other day. She's definitely a low IQ person. Crockett. Oh, man. Oh, man. She's a very low IQ person.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Somebody said the other day, she's one of the least. Leaders of the party, I think you gotta be kidding. Now they're gonna rely on Crockett. Crockett's gonna bring them back.

• 35:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that was a bit dramatic. It's a great ad.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  So, but it's one of those things where I, I probably would have went in a different direction, but is this a way that, again, will Trump bury himself? Cause I feel like Trump, he's at that point now where he's kinda like, that campaign rally from the shitholes to laughing, to cursing, to, it used to be like, okay, you caught me that one time, ha, ha, ha. But now I feel like he's very comfortable. I feel like he's very casual. And sometimes having that power, you don't understand how certain things can slip. You can kinda help other people take advantage of that. So to the point of this ad, I think it is a good ad, but it's a hundred percent based off of him going on the attack and her just flipping it back on him. Is that some way that Democrats can then use this long-term? I'm just curious.

• 35:59Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure. So the, the thing that people have to understand about Trump is Trump is like a good headline. So Trump is always gonna be talked about. He's always gonna be an amazing leverage point because we live in the age of the attention economy and he is extraordinarily good at getting an emotional response out of people, positive or negative. And what you need as a content creator is something that gets that really strong emotion. So the only thing you can't be is bland. And so we're living in the age where all of our politicians are rising up because they're not bland. They're the people that can get attention, whether it's Mom Donnie, whether it's AOC, whether it's Jasmine Crockett, whether it's Trump. These are the people that they know how to cut through the noise and get you to pay attention to what they're doing.

• 36:41Tom Bilyeu?

  So Trump is going to be ubiquitous throughout the midterms. People, um, standing with him, people defining their entire candidacy against him. And I think that that will be a winning strategy. Now, if you have a headline that's just clickbait and I get in and it's not actually what I've been promised. So if Trump is over here talking, um, about, oh, this is all Biden's fall, blah, blah, blah. And then I feel like, wait a second. That's what you said when you were running and your last year has been the actual video that I'm watching. And the video that I'm watching does not. Deliver on the promises that you made like now that you're saying it again, I know this is just clickbait.

• 37:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So he's gonna have a problem where he's got to find a way to both be super engaging, get his base really excited. Right? The things that he was doing there, back to his greatest hits, shithole country, doing the YMCA dance, all of that stuff is brilliant. His base absolutely loves it. And if he can pair that with some big wins by the midterms, then he's really got a shot. So what could a big, big win look like for him? Uh, I really hate the idea of him, him sending stimmy checks, but if he sent stimmy checks, it'd be great for his ability to get reelected. Uh, so you might have that. Also, he's promising that, um, he's got evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.

• 38:00Tom Bilyeu?

  So if he can hit you with a double whammy where people feel it in their pocketbooks that, okay, the things that he's doing are working. Cause remember the vast, vast, vast majority of people are never going to take the time to understand tariffs and whether they're good or bad. But they understand a $2,000 check in the mail. So it's like, what do you mean tariffs aren't working? That's some bullshit. I just got a $2,000 check. You're dumb. I'm voting for more of the $2,000 checks. Okay. So you will get that effect. Then if he's saying, listen, and let's say it's compelling that there's very compelling evidence. I'm not saying there is, I'm just saying if he can present it, if he can present compelling evidence that he, they really did try to steal the election or did steal the election in a meaningful way.

• 38:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, now he's got the one, two punch. It's they illegally tried to keep me out of office. These guys are very, very bad people. Um, also all the corruption is not going to help. And if the, it won't help the Democrats and if you've got, um, for instance, if you're starting to feel housing prices soften because of immigration, like if that actually has a meaningful impact. Now it's like, ooh, people are actually starting to feel it. And because he can cut through the noise, it's like, then they'll have a shot. If people don't feel it, if they feel like, eh, for all of his bluster and all of his promises, like, I just still can't make ends meet. This is terrible. I'm looking out at my future.

• 39:24Tom Bilyeu?

  I have massive anxiety. This AI thing is freaking me the fuck out. Uh, he's got a lot of talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US, but all it's done so far is make things more expensive. Like, they're dead in the water. Like, it just won't play, no matter how funny, no matter how entertaining. Um, for anybody that thinks that he is coded racist, then they love it, whatever. Like, it won't matter at all if you don't solve the economic problem.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, to that point, a lot of times we get a bunch of, hey, look, the stock market is up. We're good. Or, hey, look, the gold prices are rising. We're good. But that doesn't necessarily affect affordability. He did get the major win recently with his increased drilling and oil prices have come down. Is it just simply, I need to get gas prices down. I need to get grocery prices down.

• 40:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Grocery prices and energy are the two biggest, to be sure. But if he doesn't solve housing, he's going to lose the youth. Once you lose the youth, you are on borrowed time at best. And somehow, oh, God, will you forgive me, a diatribe? I need to tell you a story because I think about this so often. Um, chat, hit the eject button, you pull me off. But this, uh, if people are not engaged, but this is incredibly important. Okay, so, uh, for anybody that doesn't know my background, starting filmmaking, I only get into business because I want to make movies my way. Uh, spent 15 years growing businesses only to discover that the film industry completely got obliterated. Uh, in that time, which is why I focus on games now.

• 40:55Tom Bilyeu?

  But anyway, this starts with me going, I'm gonna break into the film industry through comic books. It's far cheaper. Uh, it's a great feeder into the Hollywood system. You build an audience, you tell the story, people pick it up. They always, Hollywood would much rather buy something that they can see and they get what this is gonna be, rather than, you know, just on a pitch.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so let's start doing that. Uh, go in. I launched the comic book and the there's only at the time, there was only one distributor on comics. So the fact that they picked up our comic was already crazy. And then it sold. And they were like, oh my God, for a first time publisher, you guys, this is unreal. You guys have done so well. This is unbelievable. And I just look at my bank account and I'm like, this is terrible. What the fuck are you guys saying? These numbers are so small. Like this isn't interesting to me in the slightest. And you're telling me that this is a huge win? And so I was like, wait, wait, wait, something is totally off here. That then leads me to go. One of the questions I always tell entrepreneurs to ask is, has anybody done this before successfully?

• 41:56Tom Bilyeu?

  If so, what do they do? So I start auditing the broader market and that takes me straight to Japan. I realized that Japan outsells the entire Western comic market. So there's one manga called Demon Slayer. Demon Slayer by itself outsells the entire Western comic book market. X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all of it. You put it together and it's outsold by Demon Slayer. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like Japan is a third the size of America. And so how does one title? It doesn't make sense. So then I do this deep dive audit and I realized in the 90s, Japan made a decision. And this is where the direct parallel begins. Japan made a

• 42:38Tom Bilyeu?

  decision that changed everything for them. And the decision was, we are going to stay focused on kids. And they saw what was happening in the Western market and they saw the pull in their own market to start aging up with the reader. So think about Harry Potter. Book, whatever, seven is very different than book one. So what she did was she said, I'm going to speak to a generation and I'm going to age the story up with them. Comic books in the US did the same thing for reasons that I won't go into, but they are fascinating. And of course, all economically driven. And Japan goes, ah, this strikes me as a bad idea. We always need to get kids in the market. So we're going to stay focused on kids and we'll just let people age out of what's called shonen jump. Shonen jump is the beast of how

• 43:22Tom Bilyeu?

  you introduce manga, which then becomes anime. It was a weekly magazine printed. And they just said, yeah, if people age out, that's fine. We're gonna keep making stuff for kids. They had a big meeting about it. It was like a very formal decision. So the US comic market takes the different approach and whatever 30 years later, you have a single title aimed at kids outselling the entire adult aimed comic market. Now, I say all of that so people understand. The second you give up on the youth, you fuck yourself. You put yourself on a timeline. You are going to be irrelevant. You are guaranteed to be irrelevant. And so, looking at the Democrats right now are going, ah, we're just gonna focus on the kids.

• 44:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, when I see Mom Donnie, I'm like, oh, here's a guy that looks at millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha and goes, yeah, I know the world that you're living in. Nothing is affordable. Old people are rich. You're broke. You're now in a very antagonistic relationship with older people. You already have every impulse in the world to define yourself against old people. And so, they're just leaning into that. So when I think about progressive policies are absolute death for society, like literal death. But they're brilliant at, in this moment, getting them elected. So if I were advising the Democrats, I'd be like, you've gotta lean into that. You need to go after the youth vote.

• 44:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Even if you're gonna sacrifice 2028 to just completely pivot the party to, we are about millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, period. End of story. That's all we care about. They're the future. They're gonna be everything. Every day, old people are dying and they're, you know, not voting anymore. And the youth is what matters. And so, that's what scares me, is that that will be god awful. Because it's all predicated on a misunderstanding of the economy. But nonetheless, it is a thing that will get them elected so that they can rapidly destroy America. But my advice, if I were saying, you guys really wanna run things for the next?

• 45:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Twenty-five, thirty-five years would be that. Now, all of that's in a bubble where AI doesn't just enslave or completely change society. But yeah, that would be my advice to them.

• 45:37Speaker 05

  So chat really liked the shonen jump reference, just to throw that in there. And then they also asked about Netflix buying Warner Brothers. Uh, in case you guys want to take a quick aside on that.

• 45:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, well, that one is utterly fascinating. Seeing it devolve into a battle is pretty interesting. So we'll see. Um, I think Netflix getting it is good and bad. It's great. If you want to be at home and pay one fee and get everything, you want them to buy it. If you are a creative, you're gonna hate it because they're just algorithms. So at least the old Hollywood system for how corrupt and horrible it was. At least that was, they understood that creative talent ultimately wins the day.

• 46:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And Hollywood is learning a different lesson, which is when you've got big data and algorithms controlling people's lives.

• 46:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Creatives are like, whatever. I just have to manipulate the dopamine loops of the people watching this thing and I will keep them coming back.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And I could sell stuff from the nineties over and over and over again and I don't have to pay a new fee.

• 46:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, and just like with AI coming, it's gonna be wild, so.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Can you break down a hostile takeover so people know what Paramount's doing? Cause Netflix was sending emails like, hey, guys, we got them. Don't worry about it. You're gonna be good. And Paramount's like, hold my beer, we're not done yet, so.

• 47:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, you just, so when you're a public company, you put shares out on the market, which um, usually have voting rights attached to it. And so anybody can go buy those shares. And if you can buy enough shares, you can become a significant enough shareholder where they have to listen to you. And so a hostile takeover is where you basically get control of the board. You have so much influence because you own so much of the stock that you can wrestle control of the company away from them. Reason four hundred and sixty-two why I do not want to have a public company. It's like, people do not understand. Understand the realities of how cutthroat business really can be. And when your company is on the public market and you have any kind of vulnerability,

• 47:45Tom Bilyeu?

  then you'll get these shareholders that are, um, what are they activist shareholders? So they'll come in and um, if they can buy enough of it, they can just do a hostile takeover where they get voting control and they can sway the board. They can kick people off the board. They can fire the CEO. Through pressure, it's usually not that they own like 51% of the company, but they become the single largest shareholder. And so now they can bully people. They can bully the board. They can get decisions made because they can tank the price. Like if they dump their stock, it's gonna damage the price. Um, so period. That's a hostile takeover.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 48:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's hostile because the company doesn't want it to happen, but the shares are out there.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm split between it because uh, I have peacock roots. So like, a lot of my old coworkers are really, really gunning for it because they were in the running. They just got eliminated. And I think from a theatrical release perspective, they were the best company to get it. Because the top three people who releases movies are Warner Brothers, Disney. I, I guess, but I, I mean, that's like saying, stop driving cars. I know in 50 years I won't be able to drive anymore, but I'm gonna hold on to it as long as I can.

• 48:53Tom Bilyeu?

  But, okay, okay.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  But Minecraft movie shows that youth will go if it makes sense. So to your point, I just think that the theaters need to be reinvented for this generation and stop placating to a generation that watches everything in their couch and don't leave the house.

• 49:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Okay, uh, let's do a speed run because I don't know that this fractal will be very interesting, but for anybody other than me. Here is the reality. Life is perpetually changing. I know it feels like everything is static and when you're young, you, you are born into a world that, that is moving, by the way, like the culture is shifting entirely. The whole time that you're alive, the culture is always moving. But you're born into this window where like, if you think of yourself in the middle of something sliding and until the backside here hits you and passes you and leaves you behind where you suddenly feel like, wait, what the? World is not what it used to be like. I cannot tell you how weird it is for me that kids don't have MTV.

• 49:51Tom Bilyeu?

  MTV just doesn't matter. MTV was everything for us that uh not every young man plays video games. What like or they play them on their phone like huh? This is so weird like we there was a movie made called Eight Bit Christmas about how hard one kid went to get a Nintendo, which is literally my life story like that's how we grew up and it felt like it was gonna be forever. And it's never forever. Culture is always moving. So people have this sense that it's static, but the world is changing rapidly. It will leave you behind and the great tragedy of the human experience. And one of the reasons that adults, there's a sadness about adults is they're just collecting all this scar tissue and

• 50:35Tom Bilyeu?

  they um there there is something about the formation of the human mind that will make you love the things from your childhood more than you will ever love anything else ever in life. It it brain development says it is so. And so if you wanna know why nostalgia is such a thing is because nothing else will trigger you the way that those things triggered you. And because of that, there's always gonna be like this misunderstanding between youth and things like that. The my like I beseech adults to recognize that while it is true that the things that were hot when you were a kid, that that's always gonna resonate with you,

• 51:16Tom Bilyeu?

  that you can go through an affinity development process on new things. But you have to go through the process of figuring out why they're cool, understanding them completely, welcoming them into your life in a deep and profound way. And in doing that, you can find yourself um not a stranger in the current culture. And that I would advise people do because like for instance, when I hear you say like I wanna keep driving cars and I'm thinking, but Drew, we're gonna be flying. So it's like it's obviously better and to some extent, it's just that you've never remapped the thing that made driving exciting onto this new thing.

• 51:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you could remap it onto this new thing, a totally new world opens up to you that will, I think, make you feel more childlike. Now, I'll stop there.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  I guess my pushback comes specifically for that because I will look at TCG in your analogy, like something that you can understand, is that in my youth, trading card games was very popular and I remember having a Pokemon deck, a Pokemon card set, and I remember being in the plastic in the binders and all those things. And then I let that thing go because there was other things that I kind of attributed on. So to me, I look at driving as that hobby that then is going to evolve into the TCG, where I have a bunch of old cars that I fix up and that I make and then I keep retro. And there is going to be a sect of people that are like, yes, absolutely. Why am I collecting cars when I could just get, play Pokemon Platinum? And or I could just get Nintendo Switch 2 and play Pokemon 45. I don't need the actual physical cars.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  But there is going to be some type of vintage nostalgia, you know, insert buzzword here, that sustains this hobby. So by no means am I saying, I understand that cars are going to evolve and there is going to be that life and I'll just have to go to a track and drive it with all the other old people. That's fine. But I think there are certain things that we can, especially from a Hollywood theater perspective, I think there is a way that we can evolve it. Because I look at Broadway as that. Theater was the only thing and there was no, then movie theaters kind of disrupted live stage. And then now live stage has been able to sustain through all these years, through cell phones and everything, it hasn't died yet. So I think that there's a secret sauce that movie theaters can preserve, as opposed to saying, yep, it's done, close it up, it's Best Buy. And it's like, or Circuit City or Blockbuster.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  And it's like, no, there, there is a way we can do it if we actually put our minds together and do it, as opposed to just number go up, algorithm, you know, scratch it out.

• 53:48Tom Bilyeu?

  If there is an experience to be had that is better, theater is a phenomenal example. The odds of theater ever going away are effectively zero. My wife does not understand why people want to go to the theater. She thinks of it as like, um, God, I forget the example that she used. But she like, would rather go to the movie, would rather watch it on TV. And I'm like, yeah, but they're very different experiences. So. Take musical theater, for instance, you want to hear them sing live. That's the point. You want to be around other people that are hearing that same electric human voice like do a thing. And for some people, that's like, you're going to hyper respond to that. Cool. So anything that was, there was, that was the only way to do it.

• 54:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Obviously, it's going to be much bigger and over time, it will find itself far more niche as theater has found it. But there really is something unique and real to hearing a live human performing something. And so there's going to be a subset of people that really like that and respond. Great. That'll exist forever. What I'm saying is, and maybe this is just me, but as I got older, Lisa, Lisa went through a really traumatic period in our marriage where this is probably 15 years ago, we were just talking about this last night. She went through a really traumatic period and she was saying, she was traumatized over me. And she was like, you, her words, I actually hate this word, but this is the

• 55:13Tom Bilyeu?

  real word that she used. She's like, you're no longer silly. And she was like, really upset about it. And I was like, I'm kind of proud of that. And she was like, no, like you, part of what I fell in love with was you had this playfulness about you that you don't have anymore. And I was like, that's interesting, because the way that I came up in entrepreneurship was very gladiatorial. And it was, I'll never regret that I went through it. It was transformative and learning to toughen up and be hard was very useful in life. So, super glad I went through it. But admittedly, it did cause the death of

• 55:57Tom Bilyeu?

  that side of me. And Lisa, like really pushing me to rekindle it, made me realize, oh, it's interesting. I'm building up all this scar tissue. I have lost touch with that side. And now, once I realized, oh, we needed to get back into children's entertainment, not back into, we needed to get into children's entertainment instead of adults, which is what I thought I was gonna do.

• 56:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Again, brain development reasons why I had to reconnect with all of that. It's improved the quality of my life. And there's something about getting older and the buildup of scar tissue and the closing down of your frame of reference and the I know what works and what doesn't work and not being open to radically new ideas that feels like dying long before you have died. And this is why the famous quote, uh, science does not advance one insight at a time. It advances one funeral at a time. People just, they build their reputation around like this idea. I've said it and I need to be consistent with it.

• 57:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, um, if anybody watched Death by Lightning, the reason that Garfield died wasn't because he got shot, it was because the doctor was too fucking stupid to realize that germ theory was real. And so he gave him a massive infection and he died from the infection. Um, so, and there's a lot of stories. Semmelweis, for anybody that knows that story, ends up dying alone in an insane asylum after trying to convince people that the reason that, um, women were dying from, I think it was called bed fever, uh, after giving birth was because doctors were doing autopsies in the morning, not washing their hands, delivering babies in the afternoon and passing on, um, this horrible disease. And so aging tends to be a process of calcification.

• 57:44Tom Bilyeu?

  You can fight it and in fighting it, I will put forward, your life will be much better.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Last practical, then we're back to our regularly scheduled program. I accidentally bagged a 23 year old. I know, right? I know, I know. And I was like, haha, your voice still got it. Um, and then there was a certain level of like youthful optimism that I was just like, oh, like, cause there is no scar tissue. There's no, this guy's this and this guy's like, there's no like, I'm just mad at every man that ever happened and you're just the next one. So don't disappoint me by these six things.

• 58:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  And it was just that, yeah, I trust you. And just like, and then I found out she was 23, but.

• 58:27Tom Bilyeu?

  No, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then what?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And then I found out she was 23.

• 58:32Tom Bilyeu?

  But are we going on another date?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I don't, like, it was magical because there is, there is that like.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I can do something with, that's the thing, yo, is I think that people don't realize like, you do have that scar tissue and I am such an optimistic person just in nature, that when I run into that, it does kind of like, oh, okay. Well, yeah, you're right. So there is a thing of to like, oh, I'm optimistic. Yeah, it will work out. Yeah, we'll figure it. And I just feel to your point of like expansiveness, that's such a good like phrase and I do feel expansive.

• 59:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Are we going on another date?

• 59:03Speaker 05

  I think that's a good thing to feel from a woman.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Yes. Age gap is real, though.

• 59:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Age gap is real.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Age gap is real.

• 59:12Tom Bilyeu?

  In that we don't have things in common?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  No, that has not been the problem. I think it's the concept of the age gap that is throwing me off. I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 59:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  If she was three years younger than me, I wouldn't even think about it. I'm like, yes, date number six, seven, eight. I already got it. I got the next quarter planned.

• 59:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, Drew, please go out with her a couple more times and just see if there's a real problem or an imagined problem.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 59:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And listen, I get it because that is surprising to say the least. Uh, especially you being 53. This is where I would like to, I want to remind the group, Drew's not actually 53, okay? So for this discussion, we have to talk his real age is in his 30s. But we'll go back to the lie shortly. But that is very interesting. And I think you are getting a reminder of, one, the power frame of reference. And then, two, how all of us need to fight against the battering that we take in life.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Tom Bilyeu?

  And how it really does toughen you up is good. But like, can you find that other gear of like reconnecting with somebody who is optimistic? And not just focus on the ways that everything is gonna go wrong. And here's one thing that always helps me. All I care about is what is true. And the reality is, as they say, genius is a young man's game for one reason only. That you don't yet have a map of how everything falls apart, how things don't work out. And so the evolution, I don't know what word to use, eats the vast majority of people and they really do all fail. But a few actually get the timing right enough, they've got the right temperament enough and they end up making it through.

• 1:00:53Tom Bilyeu?

  But virtually a hundred percent of old people fail. They don't have the energy, they don't have the belief anymore, they don't want to go through it. They've had enough success. This is the thing that I fight against, which is, should I ever just call in rich? And just be like, why am I fucking working this hard? Like, this is crazy. You have to stay hungry, you have to want something, you've gotta be future planning and be willing to suffer again. But when you tap into it, there is something really beautiful. And every now and then I feel the edges of

• 1:01:28Tom Bilyeu?

  the accumulation of the scar tissue and I don't like the way that it feels. And so, yeah, that's a big part of why I think I've fallen so in love with what we're doing on Kaizen and building something that's aimed specifically at kids.

• 1:01:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Because it just re sort of awakens a part in my own brain.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  Alright, I appreciate that. I thought you were gonna have a different take from it, to be honest with you, so thank you for that.

• 1:01:52Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, first of all, she's well of age. If you were like, she's 18, I might be like, oh god! But yeah, I would say, give it a shot.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally, I did not know. And then I found out and I was like, haha, crazy.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  It was like awkward pause and everything. Alright, we'll talk about that. Let's go over to Florida. Governor DeSantis has designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council of American Islamic Relations as foreign terrorist organizations. Florida agencies are hereby directed to undertake all lawful measures to prevent unlawful activities by these organizations. Including denying privileges or resources to anyone providing material support. It seems like this is a growing, uh, a growing legislation in America. This is on the back of Texas doing it a couple of weeks ago. Um, do you think this is something we're gonna start seeing all over?

• 1:02:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. You're not, you're not gonna see it all over, but you're gonna see more of this. This is the beginning of something, it's not the end of something. Uh, the world is having to come to grips with the reality of disrupting your own culture through immigration. People are realizing that if you offer economic support to underprivileged people, that underprivileged people all over the world will want to come to your country. If you have open borders, they then will come to your country and they will be a drag on resources. Um, also, if they have a really strong culture and you have a weaker culture, then they'll grow in influence because they will, uh, insulate themselves and solidify the way that they're approaching it, the Sharia courts being a great example of that.

• 1:03:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, and then you wake up one day and you realize, whoa, like, we're pretty far down this road, which is exactly what's happening to Europe. And America thankfully has the show to watch of what's happening in Europe. And then go, do we want that to happen here? And if the answer is no, then you have to move now. Um, so that's what you're watching. I don't know enough about the organizations to know if this is like horrible or if this is exactly what needs to be done. I don't know, but I, I think that this is going to escalate from here. This is not going to go quiet. You've got three more years with Trump, so certainly the deportations are going to continue. Uh, certainly there's gonna be a friendly environment for isolating

• 1:04:06Tom Bilyeu?

  the culturally strong groups that are, um, outpacing from a, uh, political activism, outpacing from a, um...

• 1:04:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, like just birth rate, like if I'm really crass about it. So you're, those are going to be the areas where people are going to have the strongest immune response. So we'll see.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Uh, this is on the back of another Somali ran fraud scheme in Ohio that has been discovered. This is from Mario Knoll fault in on X. He said, there's a wild scam going down in Columbus, Ohio that's straight out of a movie. Somali families own a restaurant, a grocery store right next door, sometimes literally attached, and usually a daycare or home health business too. The wives and kids get loaded EBT cards, that's food stamps on a debit card paid by your taxes. Instead of going to Kroger or Walmart, they shop at their own family grocery store with those cards. All that money immediately walks 10 feet into the restaurant kitchen. Boom, free inventory for the restaurant paid 100% by taxpayers. The grocery store reports giant losses every year, perfect tax write-off so Uncle Sam gets screwed twice. Same families often run daycares and home health companies that also pull in government cash.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  The women work part-time at places like Walmart for a minimum wage, keep their income low on paper so they still qualify for maximum benefits, even though the household is pulling in way more. Average Somali household in Columbus has seven kids, that's the amount in a month of the EBT and welfare money. Back in 2020, the feds already busted one Somali market in Columbus for pocketing over 10 million in fake W- uh, EBT and WIC charges. Uh, Minnesota lost 250 million to the exact same playbook. Locals are pissed, whistleblowers are calling for raids, and the whole thing is finally blowing up online. Source, Right Angle News.

• 1:05:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, oh God. So this is such a clear example of show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. So we don't want to believe that people will take advantage of systems. But game theory makes it abundantly clear that they will. Um, so this is a um, freeloader problem. This is why the right and the left exist. From, from an evolutionary standpoint, to get humans to function in large groups together, you have to have something that causes cohesion. And because in the, you know, God knows how many millennia before refrigeration, the only way to make food last was basically to store it on somebody else's body as body fat.

• 1:06:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So if I got more than I could eat before it would rot, I was gonna give some to somebody else, knowing that in the future, they would feel a sense of reciprocal need. And when I don't get something and they do, they're gonna let me eat. And so you bake into the architecture of the human mind, this feeling of reciprocity of wanting to help other people. But then what ends up happening is, um, evolution says that, uh, humans are always going to exploit whatever niche they can. And if the niche is, oh, you have an algorithm running in your brain that says, give something to me, I'm going to exploit that algorithm and get you to just give something to me, even though I'm not contributing to the group. So then, if you don't address that from an evolutionary perspective and bake something

• 1:07:10Tom Bilyeu?

  into the human mind, then you just get a bunch of freeloaders and you get a parasite that ends up killing the host. So you get this pushback against the freeloader problem, which is people saying, no, no, no, personal responsibility. You gotta stand up for your own. I'll give you occasionally, but if you're not contributing and giving back to me, fuck you. And that's what humans are really like. They'll give to you first, but if you don't give back, then it's like, whoa, I'm not giving to you the next time. It's something known as tit for tat. So, um, that is what's in the human mind. And so for a while, we have run a strategy that just assumes everybody's a good person. The reason that we could assume that is because people do not understand the economy. They don't understand the impact

• 1:07:53Tom Bilyeu?

  of money printing. They don't understand why if I print $1, there's no problem in the economy. Why I print a million dollars, there's no problem in the economy. They, they don't actually understand the mechanism. It's very explainable. It's straightforward. It isn't simple and most people aren't gonna be able to grasp it. But nonetheless, because there isn't one for one, they then just go, oh, it's fake. It's not a real thing. And so we can just print as much money as we want. Honestly, they're not even thinking about it that far. They're just steering by their feelings. And so it takes a while for all of this stuff to build up in the economy that it becomes a big enough problem that we then go, wait a second, hold on, uh, we can't keep doing this. And so you, also, there's like this self-reflexive guilt. So let us Speedrun American history.

• 1:08:37Tom Bilyeu?

  We come over here, eighty to eighty-five percent of the people that land on the shore just die instantly. The people that, meaning they don't make it through the first winter. The people that end up surviving bring disease and kill off the vast majority of the already interfighting, war-hungry tribes that were here. Just to avoid the belief that they are all noble savages. Everybody's killing everybody else. Everybody's taking shit from everybody, including white man, just as culpable as everybody else. But they also bring disease, and so that, bad, bad news. But people keep sending people over because they're tired of being tyrannized, which is the default state of humanity. They come to America, and we get to the point where we build the Statue of Liberty because

• 1:09:21Tom Bilyeu?

  we offer opportunity and no guaranteed success. So if you fail, fuck you, leave. Or die. Either is what happened. People would go, whoa, I'm not going to make it. They would leave. Other people would just try, try, try, try, try. They would end up dying. That's how you got the Statue of Liberty, okay? You didn't get it by offering a welfare state. But then, because we end up being so incredibly successful, largely on the back of World War I and World War II, we end up being the victor. We end up being the reserve currency. We end up helping rebuild everybody else. It makes us tremendously wealthy. And we just geographically are in a blessed position. All of it just working to our advantage. We get this prolonged period where everything is good. We start feeling really guilty. And because we're printing money like crazy, we're losing and we don't understand the connection

• 1:10:07Tom Bilyeu?

  between I can't afford anything and printing money. We start believing that we not only can, but ought to, take care of everybody. And that would have worked for longer had we not also believed that that needed to apply to the rest of the world. And so by throwing our doors open and ignoring the fact of the freeloader problem, we have now created a situation where we're going to find that this kind of fraud is everywhere. And it goes down to the individual level where it's like, some people are just, I don't really need this, but I'm going to take it anyway. All the way up to just massive. entrenched corruption in entire regions.

• 1:10:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're gonna have to root it all out. We are going to have to get disciplined again. Realize we have to be physically responsible. Realize that in the modern era, there's no reason that you can't account for every single penny ever. AI should be able to track an infinite number of transactions, almost infinitely quickly. Like, it'll be able to churn through global economic purchases. Let's say, within five years, like, it will be able to do it effectively in real time. So, that's where it's like.

• 1:11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  If we don't track it, we don't want to track it.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Help me understand this, right? Why do you think that this gets, like, steam, credibility, and kind of goes, like, crazy viral? When I remember 60 Minutes did a story on Google, and they went to Google Ireland's office, and it was literally one lady at a receptionist's desk behind, like, a lock gauge. And the only reason that Google had an Ireland office was to receive mail, and that receptionist, that was the only base of operations. But just having that installment there saved them, like, $2 billion in taxes in the US, because it was like some type of, like, EU. Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's like, a family is running a fraud scheme.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And while I'm hesitant to call it, like, fraud, because basically, to your point, if there is incentives of, okay, if I make this much, I'm eligible for this thing, I just stay under that incentive level. So it's not like anybody's being illegal, it's not like anybody's sidestepping things. And that will, this one family is now, let's say, brings in $2 million, $3 million. Okay, that's cool. If that happens perpetually, okay, we can shut that down. But then when we go to some of these corporate taxes, and the shell companies and the LLCs that are allowing for tax havens and things like that, those don't get nearly as much attention and don't go nearly as viral. And I feel like a lot of times, we beat down on the people, like, SNAP is the problem. We need to take everything from SNAP. If there was no SNAP, we would be good, we would have a surplus in our budget.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  But we're not looking at the hundreds of billions of, like, avoided, like, tax dollars just by saying, oh, Have LLC, you can't tax that. Or, oh, I'm in, I'm in Delaware, even though 95% of my business happens in New York. But because it's incorporated in Delaware, I get to save 75% of tax dollars. And there's all these types of uh strategies that they're using to avoid taxes. And that doesn't seem to get any type of scrutiny or uh.

• 1:13:13Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it gets a lot of scrutiny from the public. People are very angry about it. People don't think that things are working the way that they should be, and they are correct about that. The thing that would need to be done to fix it, though, is where everything falls apart. So first of all, people would actually have to get economically literate to vote for the right things. We would have to get money out of politics. We would have to stop cramming things into bills. We would need to wildly simplify the tax code, which stands at, if I remember correctly, four million words. Which is just stupid.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  It's like longer than a fantasy novel.

• 1:13:45Tom Bilyeu?

  You could buy a lot, buy a lot.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  All of the Game of Thrones series.

• 1:13:50Tom Bilyeu?

  A crazy long book is gonna be 120,000 words. Like, that would be absurdly long. So, yeah, that, it's wild. So uh, there's no reason for that. But simplifying the tax code, which would be awesome, um, isn't going to get people elected. Because we are constantly trying to do things for donors. Yeah, if we just said, you gotta balance the budget. Like, if you literally said, you can't use more than 3% of GDP uh in debt. You'd be great, but no one's gonna vote for it.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Somebody in chat said, but right now, Tom, CEOs are the freeloaders. CEOs are the barnacles that are bringing down the system because they're just taking too fucking much.

• 1:14:37Tom Bilyeu?

  So I think that there is a legitimate argument to be made about um the discrepancy in pay with CEOs. I totally understand that argument.

• 1:14:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the way that the person gets paid is, I think, very important to look at. If their real compensation is coming from performance in the stock, then that at least is aligned with the public markets, which anybody can be a part of. Now, it creates its own distortions, and so, trust me, I'm not saying that's a perfect solution. But when people look at what's going on there, what they're witnessing is that you have a scarcity of people that can run these companies and make them more valuable to shareholders, and an absolute glut of people that can do the lower-level jobs. And so, the people at the top have negotiating power, and the people at the bottom don't.

• 1:15:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, that's where I want people to ask a question. Why don't the people at the bottom have negotiating power? And the answer, when oversimplified, is globalism. And so, because of globalism and just some modern technologies, the reality is that people at the average worker, they just don't have any negotiating power. Because it's like, well, if you're not gonna do the job that I want you to do at the price I want you to do, I'm gonna go to Bangladesh or whatever, I'm gonna outsource it. And because of the whole comparative advantage thing, which I still can't believe people trumpet as if it's like some brilliant statement, we end up running into a problem where you can't negotiate your wages. And so, now wages stagnate, prices go up because I'm money printing.

• 1:16:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Then people come with their handout, and the government realizes, oh, yeah, we are doing this massive wealth transfer from you to the wealthy. We want to keep that going, so when you stick your handout, even though I know that means that I'm gonna steal from you even faster, I'm gonna give you that money because it looks like I'm doing something for you. But in reality, I'm still just doing the same wealth transfer. It's fucking wild, but people do not... Half of the people are not going to be capable of understanding it. A huge percentage just don't have the time. And then that leaves the top 10% owning 93% of the assets. So, it's one of these sort of great travesties. But when people glom onto CEO evil because he still has negotiating power,

• 1:17:00Tom Bilyeu?

  that's where I'm like, eh, like, that's not a very compelling argument.

• 1:17:05Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 1:17:05Tom Bilyeu?

  I get the bitterness because we're hardwired to hate inequality, but it's not the root of the problem.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Um, super chats.

• 1:17:16Speaker 05

  Let's do it. All right. First up from RJ Johnson. I earned my way through school, counting cards and blackjack in Vegas. Fifteen years later, the 2000 crash, and I tried to do it all again. Didn't have patience for the slow grind and started taking chances, lost over a million dollars.

• 1:17:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Ooh.

• 1:17:35Speaker 05

  Um, and this was in response to you talking about taking huge gambling risks when you're desperate.

• 1:17:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's the lost domain. Brutal, brutal, but that is real life. Once humans click over into that, yeah, it's rough.

• 1:17:51Speaker 05

  Next up from Mr. Mike. Uh, life's perpetually changing. It's never forever. Are games your scar tissue? It will always resonate with you, but being a parent obviously is better. You just never remapped it. It will make you feel more childlike, even adoption.

• 1:18:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so that's very interesting and I appreciate the number of people that try to save me from my childlessness. I, look, it comes from a great place. I really do understand it and I read it as such. And so I appreciate the attempt insight. Uh, so I think that people should really look at their lives and say, okay, how does my brain work? And so what is likely to make me feel the way that I want to feel? I think fulfillment ultimately is the thing that matters the most. It's the only positive neurological state that I have encountered that will survive even grief. Uh, so I orient towards that. What is going to be the thing long-term that makes me feel fulfilled?

• 1:18:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Now fulfillment, I think, is a byproduct of evolution. Evolution has things that it wants you to do. I think the surest path to fulfillment is to have children and contribute to the group. There's, there's no doubt, uh, that having kids is what nature wants you to do. And so you don't do that at your own peril. In choosing not to have children, I realize that I create a deficit to evolution and that I have to make sure that I Address that I have to find a way to derive meaning and purpose to address the sense that I will end and nothing will carry on beyond me. Like those are all the things like they're mappable. And so when I look at those things, recognize where it creates vulnerabilities in my life. The biggest vulnerability, of course, is when I'm old.

• 1:19:32Tom Bilyeu?

  If I eject out of the work scene, I'm not contributing that way anymore. And I don't have kids and I can feel the end of my life coming. I think the distress will be that there's nothing of me that will continue on into the future. Okay, here's where I will remind everybody that nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So I have to have a frame of reference that's going to do its best to inoculate me from that. There's no way to avoid all pain of all kinds. But you don't want some sort of crippling regret. I'm pretty good at teleporting myself psychologically into a different state. A different frame of reference, better way to say it. Like what will I feel like when I'm in that phase of my life?

• 1:20:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And there's no doubt I will wish that I had had kids. And so when I put myself in that position, though, I will remind myself, yes, but during the years that you would have needed to actually raise those children. There were other things that you wanted. And so that lets me off the hook in terms of like beating myself up with regrets and things like that, because I love my life. So, um, yeah, but anyway, people have to be deeply self reflexive, reflective, and they have to make sure that they understand what thoughts are going to haunt them and how to deal with them. Anyway, I don't know that it'll be interesting more than that, but I've thought endlessly about this and certainly do recognize like my advice to other people is be very thoughtful before you don't have kids.

• 1:21:01Tom Bilyeu?

  It's possible you can do it well, uh, but it is a higher risk strategy. If people actually want to be worried about me, the thing you should really worry about, because this is the one that scares me is I have very few friends. I'm very isolationist by temperament. And so I'm the guy that can see his friend once or twice a year and just feel full to the brim. But if my wife dies, I have no kids and then also have no friends. I mean, listen, I think about AI, I'll probably be fine. I'll have a robot that will will share experiences. But that's the one where I'm like, oh, this is a dangerous strategy. So that one feels like doing life without a safety net. As long as I have my wife, everything is fine. But if I lose my wife, oh, God.

• 1:21:46Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, anyway, that would be the one where I would say, Tom, stop fucking around with creating a video game. Stop fucking around with your TCG cards and watching anime. Go go spend more time with friends. I just can't bring myself to do it. I want to. Friends are fun, but goddammit.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Is it like a social anxiety thing?

• 1:22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  No, it is entirely, I'm sitting there weighing in this moment right now. I can collapse inside of my own imagination or I can go compromise and do something with another human where I have to do a slightly worse version of what I want to do in order to protect myself later.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  I can physically see your body like, or I can be with other people.

• 1:22:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Drew, it's so weird. When I was young, I was legitimately the life of the party. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be around people. My friendships were everything to me. And then I got married and that just so filled that part of my life. Like if my wife and I die at the same time, which my wife really wants, I am not feeling suicidal. So if my fucking wife dies and I suddenly end up dead, that was my wife. A hundred percent. But if we somehow miraculously go together and she didn't take me out, my life will have been perfect because I'll never have to face the high risk strategy of, and it's not that I have no friends, it's that I have a very small pool of friends.

• 1:23:15Tom Bilyeu?

  So anyway, it, I don't think people understand how much I like being alone and creating. So like if my wife walks away, I don't take my phone out. I go inside of Kaizen and I start problem solving. Like that for me is more enjoyable than you can imagine. So, yeah, I don't have the same response to being alone that other people have.

• 1:23:44Speaker 05

  Somebody said when Kaizen is released, Tom will have thousands of children.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  There is.

• 1:23:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, we'll see, because Kaizen could suck. Kaizen may be a game that only I enjoy playing. I try to keep myself sober about that. Uh, but we were gonna do an open community test before the Christmas holiday. And then that was gonna end up fucking up our actual development rhythm, because it takes weeks to stabilize the build. So forgive me for all that we're going to do that. So, but anyway, it's becoming, I mean, it's Minecraft with guns, the easiest way to sum it up. Uh, that's overly simplified, but that will certainly give people, because I know there's some people listening, LeBlanc, uh, for one, um, that have contributed so much to that community that I do want to honor them by getting them back in.

• 1:24:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, but yeah, we probably need end of Q1, probably roughly enough of these things will be together. It'll be worth stopping down for a couple of weeks to stabilize a build and then get people in. But anyway, I, yeah, we're still on track. Twenty-three months from now is when the game will go into early release. That is my guess.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Copy, copy.

• 1:24:49Speaker 05

  We got three more Super Chats, two from Sadney Peter. The first one is, "Tom, it's truth. I'm 23. The Conservative Party and Democratic Party don't speak to me. The party I love is the Libertarian Party, like Ron Paul. Why can't the Libertarian Party gain steam with people my age? I want real liberty."

• 1:25:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so I don't think the Libertarian Party has a very compelling message. I would consider it very similar to my message, which is, hey, if you work hard and you get really good at something, people can't stop you from doing it. You can have all the success in the world that you want. That's not a compelling message for people that were raised to view themselves as victims and to put their hand out. And that's how we've spent the last thirty years raising kids. Uh, so that's why it's not catching on with your generation. And by the way, we gave you a horrific economy. So you're now in a position where you come out and you really do feel like a victim, uh, because you have been victimized, there's no doubt about that. And we've taught you to think like a victim, so just not a good message. Also, uh, libertarianism is probably not real.

• 1:25:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So if you were in a truly anarchic world, which you are, um...

• 1:26:00Tom Bilyeu?

  It'll get mowed over. So, strong men win. Here, I've said this before, but once you understand that countries will expand as far and as violently as they can until they hit one of two forces. Force number one, people that can kill more of your people than you can kill of theirs, literally, so you stop. Or, the internal value system of your country is so violated that, and so obviously, there's no way to hide it, that people revolt. So, that's it. Other than that, like, again, read history.

• 1:26:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Knock, knock. Hi, my name is Genghis Khan. If you don't come out now, I'm going to slaughter you all. Oh, you're not coming out? Great. Dead. That's history. And I don't think people believe that it's real or something. And so, imagine trying to have libertarianism when Genghis Khan rolls up and being like, what do you mean? I don't need to draft men to the army. So, anyway, it's my temperament, to be sure, but I don't know that it's high functioning in the real world.

• 1:27:16Tom Bilyeu?

  See how many people that pissed off?

• 1:27:17Speaker 05

  Uh, next one from Sadney Peter. If we remove all economic safety net, balance the budget, stop printing money, and let adults live the life they want, people will make rational choices if there is no safety net for people and companies. Ron Paul said that.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  I like unicorns, too.

• 1:27:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So, again, this goes back to, that is the idea in the abstract, but in the reality, you do want some government. You want to protect people from people that are predatory. So, if, again, we're, all of us are a thousand dice, 20-sided die, and you're gonna get some people that get an awesome role on intelligence and on Machiavellian traits. And they will Bernie Madoff everyone. So, you do need protect, you, how about this? My moral compass is such that you do want some protections. I get some people probably really don't want any. Uh, but there's a great quote that sums up what life is really like and explains

• 1:28:17Tom Bilyeu?

  all the protections that we build. "The strong will do as they wish, and the weak will suffer as they must."

• 1:28:27Tom Bilyeu?

  That's history. I mean, that's really hard to deal with. There's a line that Eminem says in Toby, that song is so good, where he says, sometimes things just do not pan out.

• 1:28:43Tom Bilyeu?

  That's life. Dude, like I think about, so trust me when I say I want to make Kaizen the greatest video game of all time, but in the back of my mind, I'm like Concord spent like $400 million and closed in 15 days. $400 million, five, six years of development and then closed after 15 days. Sometimes things just do not pan out. That just is what it is, man. It is what it is. So you gotta be able to face that down. We'll see.

• 1:29:17Speaker 05

  Next up, we've got two from LeBron. First up, if the government paid people to have children, we wouldn't need non-skilled immigrants. And I'm not talking about tax credits, 25 to 50K per child. Forever married couples in 20 years, the investment is paid back 100 times, not not utopia, but close.

• 1:29:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you know how fast people would pick strawberries if they were going hungry and there were no government handouts? Motherfuckers be picking strawberries, like real fast. So yeah, we have, I know that we like to think that our problem is that Americans won't do that work, but the reality is Americans might not pay that price for strawberries. Okay, well, then we eat less strawberries. This is market demand. Like, there's no rule that says Americans have to eat strawberries because to pick those strawberries, we're gonna have to send, we're gonna have to pay people a better wage to get them out there. But if there's no handouts, people start real fast going, yeah, I don't like being cold. I don't like being hungry. I'm going to go work this field.

• 1:30:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 1:30:21Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that one is not popular right now. That is not what people want to hear. People want to hear that they're going to be taken care of by the wealthiest country in the world. Uh, I get it, but it violates the laws of the physics of money. So.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Last one, uh, LeBron said, take your time on Kaizen Tom. Also, I'm available if you want to shoot some ideas and need feedback on stuff.

• 1:30:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, brother, well, you will be one of the first people in the game. That is for sure. Um, so yeah, I eagerly await his feedback.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  And if you want to follow the development of Kaizen, make sure you join the Discord. Also, if you want to argue with me, make sure you join the Discord. I'm undefeated so far, man.

• 1:30:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Thank you guys so much for coming on this ride with us today. Thank you for being here. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods,

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