Nick Fuentes, Global Tensions, and the Future of AI: Tom Bilyeu Breaks Down the Headlines

Welcome back to another episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! Today’s episode takes you on a whirlwind tour through some of the most pressing—and controversial—headlines shaking up culture, politics, and technology right now. Tom Bilyeu and co-host Drew dive into the explosive clash between Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan, dissect the rise and endurance of figures who thrive on internet controversy, and unpack what these cultural moments reveal about shifting generational values. But it doesn't stop there. From the escalating rhetoric between China and Japan to the looming economic storm clouds threatening Japan’s economy, Tom Bilyeu breaks down the real-world stakes behind international power plays and what they could mean for the future. The hosts also explore Elon Musk’s ambitious plans for SpaceX’s IPO and the astronomical implications of building data centers in space, questioning whether capitalism as we know it is heading toward a seismic shift. And if you’re a parent or anyone concerned about the digital lives of young people, don’t miss the discussion on Australia’s countrywide ban on social media for kids under 16. Is it the answer to our “youth and screens” dilemma, or just the start of yet another debate over technology and regulation? From sharp personal commentary to deep dives into history, finance, and AI, this episode is packed with hard questions, bold opinions, and a dose of actionable wisdom for the times we live in. Buckle up, because this is Impact Theory at its most thought-provoking. 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. Nick Fuentes and Piers Morgan collide over whether Hitler was very effing cool or not. Japan's economic troubles continue apace as debt threatens to finally engulf their entire economy. China fires rhetorical shots at Japan about accepting that they're a defeated country as tensions between them both continue to rise.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  XAI plans to redefine the size and scope of what an IPO is so they can build data centers in space. And Australia has made it illegal for children under 16 to be on social media.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Nick Fuentes was talking to Piers Morgan, but before we jump into the actual interview, I have to play this edit because I think this is like the clip of the year when I found it.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  How can you call it a movement when you have no motion? You can't call it a movement because you have no motion. None of these diggers have motion except for me.

• 2:03Tom Bilyeu?

  The edits.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  None of them have motion except for me.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  The fact that he says the N word and uses it with an A. I don't know how I feel about that yet.

• 2:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I don't know how I feel about that.

• 2:16Tom Bilyeu?

  You're not like 100% opposed?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Nick is a troll and we're going to talk about that with the Piers Morgan episode. But there is something to your point of the youth. He has captured something that I think a lot of Republicans thought Charlie Kirk had, thought Trump had, thought it was the manosphere of the podcast. But we're starting to realize, no, this is an entirely different ethos of people. And for some reason, he's not going away. He's been banned, he's been ridiculed, he's been quote unquote, uh, uh, reprimanded, condemned. He been disavowed, he's been told not to play with the, the grown up Republicans. But yet he doesn't, he's still on Tucker, he's still on Steven Crowder, he's still on Piers Morgan. What's your take on Nick Fuentes and how he has been so electric in the movement?

• 2:58Tom Bilyeu?

  I think he sums up his own position very well, which is we're done clutching our pearls. We being especially young white men, but I think young men in general. And I remember watching this and Douglas Murray just really had clarity on this. Shout out to Douglas Murray, man. And he said, listen, if you keep bashing white men and saying that whiteness is bad, it's some sort of original sin, I guarantee you what's going to happen is they are going to band together. They are going to start thinking of themselves as white first. And you do not want people grouping up based on being white first. And, and I think that holds true of any race, PS by the way.

• 3:43Tom Bilyeu?

  But, um, that's exactly what's happening. And so this is a psychological principle. If you beat me up and tell me that I'm bad, bad, bad for insert trait that I can't change. And then I run into somebody else who has that same trait and I know they've been treated exactly the way that I've been treated. Like all of a sudden I'm going to be like, hold on, we're going to glom on. And if there are millions of us, like, bro, this is a bad strategy. It was a dumb idea when they did it. It's a dumber idea now that they see what's happening and they're continuing to double down. That's so dumb, the youth is always going to take over. Do you really want them to take over out of bitterness and aggression? I would put forward, no, that's a terrible fucking idea.

• 4:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So nonetheless, here we are. And I don't know what they thought the end game was, that they were really just gonna be able to

• 4:36Tom Bilyeu?

  feminize every man, get every white person to back the fuck off and sit down and shut up. Like, that is a dumb fucking strategy. It doesn't work with anybody. Every group is gonna rise up. And by the way, whites are only like 8% of the global population. So this is not like, you look around and all you just see is a sea of white people. It, it is, this is a legitimate minority that will have minority vibes, that will band together, see themselves as white first, and cause all kinds of problems. I think it is a really stupid idea. So, am I at all surprised by his rise to popularity? I was when it happened, I won't lie. But now as I look back and math it, I'm like, yeah. Yeah, this is precisely what Douglas Murray was trying to warn us about.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  All right, let's jump into his interview with peers. The, the thing about Nick that I think gets him in trouble is not his populism, it's not what he's rooting for, it's not even his political stance. It's that he belittles things that I think are more important, or, or sacred than people have. And this is going to the Hitler is cool thing. Um, but let's go into his thoughts on women for a second, and maybe this can kind of color where he comes from, and how he became the person that he is.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Just to clear up, one of the many theories about you, I've no idea what the answer is, and you haven't got to answer it. But are you actually attracted to women?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  I am attracted to women.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  You're not gay?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  No. But I will say that women are very difficult to be around. So, there's that.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  And do you think they should have the right to vote?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I do not, no, absolutely not.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  They should stay at home?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, absolutely. See, basically, you're just a misogynist old dinosaur, aren't you? For a, for a young guy. I mean, I know I'm the boomer, I know I'm the boomer here. But actually, you're a 27-year-old dinosaur, aren't you? Aren't you, Nathan? All women, all women are annoying.

• 6:33Tom Bilyeu?

  This is worse than that.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  All women grow old, they all get fat. Says the guy, have you ever had sex? No, absolutely not. Wow, says the guy who's never got laid.

• 6:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I would have never thought to ask that question. I was shocked when he was like, no.

• 6:50Tom Bilyeu?

  What? Dude, this, this may be the part of the young male experience that I am most confused by. I remember being like 14 and it hit me one day and I was like, wait, I'm one day going to put my penis in a vagina. Like, this is gonna be fucking wild. And I couldn't have been more excited about it. I was legitimately giddy at the thought that one day I was actually gonna do that. And now it doesn't, like, it was, I won't say all-consuming, but damn, a lot of my high school was oriented around relationships. Now, I was not good with women. I think I've been abundantly clear about that, but

• 7:35Tom Bilyeu?

  were they an obsession? Was I trying? Yes, very aggressively. And so for him to be like, I don't, it's, it is a bad frame of reference to have adopted. I'm not saying that I can't walk people through the steps that have led us here, but it is a very bad frame of reference to adopt, to be closed off, to lump all women together as if they are some monolithic body, to think that while women are very different, and I certainly understand that there can be frustrations to cohabitating, certainly with a woman, because they view the world so differently. But when you think of them as a partner, unbelievable things unlock. You just have to have

• 8:18Tom Bilyeu?

  very good, I call them rules of engagement, so that you're not driving each other crazy all the time. But it's weird to me that he is Just so nonchalant. I mean, how old is he?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Twenty seven.

• 8:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow, bro, that is wild.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  He's making money at this point, so.

• 8:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, he is voluntarily celibate, make no mistake. Like, this is not a kid that can't get laid. He's good looking. He's very charismatic. And, boys and girls, if you are confused, women go for charisma long before they go for just like rugged, good looks. And if you put together charisma, fame, and money, like, there are a litany of women that would sleep with this kid. And so he is a thousand percent staying celibate by choice, which is very hard for me to understand.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I guess the thing about me is, similar to you, there is this North Star, at least I was growing up, that you kind of go down two paths where it's like, I need to become the best person I can be, so that way I can then increase my value in the sexual marketplace, so that way I can get laid, get a girl, have a family. Or the other thing was like, okay, I already look good, I'm gonna just get a girl then. So I feel like, as a young man, those are your two options. Either get better to get a girl, or just get a girl. So the fact that he is twenty seven, he has roles in popularity, and he also is voluntarily celibate, like, what is that North Star then? And maybe is that where the hate is coming from? What are you using, what are you doing with your time? And I know that that sounds very trivial, and there's probably women in their chat rolling their eyes right now, but like, seriously, as a driver for men, that is an incentive to become better.

• 9:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It is the incentive to become better. There is nothing higher. Men will send themselves into war when they no longer believe that they have mating opportunities. They will go kill and risk dying to get laid. So anybody that thinks that there won't be problems that come from men ejecting out of that system are out of their fucking minds. And the only way that, um, men are going to be able to sustain this for the long term is, I guess, access to pornography, certainly AI and sex bots will, um, give an outlet for that extremely intense impulse that is buried very deeply in the brains of men. So unless we've got like a microplastics problem that is manifesting as they legit- Admittedly do not care like it's changed their brain wiring.

• 10:41Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no way this one does not start to become problematic for sure. And even if Western men completely eject out of this, I guarantee that other men around the world absolutely will not. And so this is a fundamental biological drive. It manifests as a need in the same way that hunger or thirst manifests. So yeah, you unless again, literally it's been destroyed by environmental toxins or something. There's no universe in which this does not rebound in some horrible way, either where people that aren't having sex, they just cease to exist. Obviously, because they're not procreating and the people that are procreating just take over the world. And this is a momentary blip.

• 11:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Or there's a big rebound effect and people realize, oh, my God, like we have allowed something so moronic to happen. Cause I obviously understand that one of the critiques of the way that I talk is going to be that Thomas from a different era. Women were different back then. And I will just tell you the frame of reference layer for sure. There's no doubt if I found myself 21 today, that I would have to take a very different approach. But the reality is that if you're tied to ground truth and you encounter somebody that's at a cultural layer, then you can get beyond that. That becomes very easy if you have a sufficient level of game, shall we call it like once I understood how to truly be myself.

• 12:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And I had no fear of loss and I could approach somebody with confidence and I could have some swagger. The fact that I was able to have interesting conversations was ultimately what got me laid. One of my favorite stories, I had been sleeping with a woman. I'd never been able to give her an orgasm and then. One night, she saw me be really like talk for the first time about something I was deeply passionate about. And so I clicked over into that zone. And the next time we had sex, she had an orgasm. And I was like, that is wild. It is nothing about the sex. It's I finally clicked over into her mind where she now found me far more interesting. And I was like, God, I've got to remember that.

• 12:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And I remember my mom giving me the best advice ever about sex. She said, remember, women have to trust you to have an orgasm. And I was like, what? Like, that is so weird for a guy. So, once you begin to understand like all of those things, even in a time now where clearly I would find myself in a much worse position than I was, in terms of they can just swipe onto the next person, it's always on to the next. It's some women trying to take advantage of you to get a free meal, blah, blah, blah. There are defenses to all this stuff. So the person that this was probably will never hear this, but I had one of my employees say to me that

• 13:31Tom Bilyeu?

  they, oh, God, what was the specific thing? Oh, they had, oh, God, how do I say this without ratting this person out? They were creating something and they felt that that something was not being recognized because the, when they created it, they have to like go put it in a basket, just to try to make this as abstract as possible. They had to put it into a basket. And once it got put into the basket, it no longer resembled the hard work that they had done. It was, you know, getting battered about by the basket. And I was like, meh, I'm like, there are ways around that basket. And the second that you're saying it's somebody else's fault, you're missing an opportunity to take control and get a better result. So if you know that the basket creates problems for you, then solve for not needing to put it in the basket.

• 14:15Tom Bilyeu?

  But don't just go, ah, well, I do all this hard work and then I put it in the basket and it just all breaks. Like, that is a terrible way to move through life. So if young men are looking at this and saying, oh, the basket is ruining my chances. I'm just saying, oh, cool, then find a way around the basket. So there is always a solution.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was literally somebody in Discord who was talking about that, who was like, I hate the Scott Galloway interview. He only blames men. It's women. The marketplace has changed. There are gold diggers to this, to this, to this. And he gave me a whole diatribe around women are the worst people in the whole wide world. And I was like, women didn't all of a sudden become the worst people in the whole wide world, like they're. Back in it like my, the best example I always use is like rappers because the first rapper ever did any like Sugar Hill Gang, everybody loves that song. The third verse is from somebody else. He stole that verse, went into the studio while they were recording. He said, hey, can I hop on and recited somebody else's lyrics and ended up getting like a platinum record. It was like this whole thing. If you think about it, when he, I'm the T A S, he spells somebody else's name. He doesn't even spell his name.

• 15:09Tom Bilyeu?

  That is hilarious.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Didn't even do that. So it's like, all you had to do was just rhyme words and you can become a celebrity. Rappers nowadays, you have to produce, you have to be a content creator, you have to rap. You have to also be a fashion mogul. You also have to have a social media following. You have to do five different layers of things to be as competitive or as relevant as back in the day. And I think that same thing is true with the protein bars. If I want to make a protein bar company, I can't just be like, hey, guys, no sugar.

• 15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  There's a thousand no sugar bars now. It needs to be no sugar and organic and this, and it needs to come from Jesus. Like there's all these other layers that now need to be added. So for some reason.

• 15:43Tom Bilyeu?

  We gotta launch that bar, Drew. The only thing that could get me back in. The bar.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:48Tom Bilyeu?

  By Jesus.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Seriously. So we just think with dating is like, well, I have money. That's it. That's the only requirement that. You have to be a little bit more evolved. You have to also catch up with the market. And I think we get too caught up in the, it's the basket's fault versus no, how can you, where can you shine that make you not need the basket in that expansive energy again?

• 16:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, there's a, just one more story to back this up. So you've got Kanye makes, I forget which song. The one that he was saying he wanted to compete with Sexy Back. He was like, oh, my girlfriend at the time was a little too into Justin Timberlake. So he writes a song, becomes a hit. I forget which one it is. And he says, I hear it in the club and it's muddy. No, he doesn't go fucking clubs, don't know how to build acoustics. He goes to like every producer he can find to figure out how to make his beats sound like Sexy Back's sounds in the club. Ultimately finds himself at Timberland's door who did it. And then Timberland showed him how to do it. But I always thought that was brilliant. That's the right way to respond. Oh shit, the thing that I made, that is objectively amazing. In this environment, it has a problem. So how do I go and solve that problem?

• 16:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is how I would advise people to look at it. And listen, there are going to be some women that you do just write off. They're. Too far gone. Uh, there's not enough interesting there. I'm not saying you bump into the first person that is female and you go, cool, I'm going to make it work with this person. You may have a rapid filtering mechanism where it's like, yeah, you're filtering out eighty, eighty-five percent of people and you're narrowing it down to just the people that haven't been completely captured by that ideology that don't have a belief that it's just always on to the next. They are going to be out there. And I'm not saying that it's not more work. I'm just saying the way to approach life in general is, oh, there is a problem. I'm going to take complete and total

• 17:34Tom Bilyeu?

  responsibility for that problem and I'm going to find a solution because unless it violates the laws of physics, there is a way around this problem. And for people that approach life like that, then it is incredible, the opportunities that will open before you. If you run into a problem and you stop, which is the vast majority of humanity, then it's like, life sucks because you're going to run into problems all the time. But if when you run into a problem, you go like, roll up your sleeves, you get kind of excited because you're like, oh, cool, like, I'm gonna find a way over, under, through, around, whatever, but I am going to solve this problem. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 18:15Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:58Tom Bilyeu?

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• 19:41Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:38Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So we talked about his sexual orientation. Let's talk about something that's actually like matters. This is his comment about the Hitler is cool.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  You say that Hitler was very fucking cool. Are you joking? Or do you actually think he was very fucking cool? The most genocidal monster of the last 150 years?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing is, my generation, we're just done with the pearl clutching, you know.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, you might be, but then your generation hasn't gone through what Danny Finkelstein's family went through. So maybe, maybe the pearl clutching has a way to go for families whose, whose family members were murdered.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, yeah, we, we got all that. We, you know, me, me mom, me mom, like we're, you know, I don't even know who this person is. Why is this person talking to me? This old British guy is saying, me mom got killed by Hitler and me dad got killed by-

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Because he doesn't find it funny when you say Hitler's very fucking cool.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  I don't care. I don't care.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I know you don't care. That's fine. You don't have to care. But he does care.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Does that guy care about America? Does that guy care about me and my country and my family? No.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  He cares.

• 21:44Tom Bilyeu?

  This is the great tragedy of generational gaps. You don't feel like the other side understands you at all. Yeah, so that's sad. The Hitler is cool thing, to me, is just stupid. I think Nick explains the point. Like, he certainly is able to articulate exactly what it is that they find cool. He does, I think, a better job in another clip that I saw of him where he's like, it's the cuts, all the like, hypey supercuts of Hitler leading armies and all that stuff. But it is, it's the same way that I feel when Nick talks about being

• 22:22Tom Bilyeu?

  a big fan of Stalin. These are mistakes that history makes over and over, and just an godly number of people die. So having some mental defenses against those things is very shrewd. Like, there are things that the immune system should respond to. Now, I'll admit, we've had a cultural immune system for the last 30 or 40 years that has responded to gluten as if it's a brain parasite, and that's dumb. But that doesn't mean that there aren't actual brain parasites. It doesn't mean that there aren't actual things that the immune system should be responding to. And so when I hear him talk, it's like, okay, we had

• 23:06Tom Bilyeu?

  an overactive immune system that did really bad things. And so now just shut off the entire immune system. Everybody's cool. Like, it's funny. It's hilarious. Look, because of my time with, and by the way, I hate it when people say that Hitler was the biggest...

• 23:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Pro generator of genocide that we've had. Do, do people not know who Mao is? Like, do people not know who Stalin is? It, that one is traumatic. There's something about the Hitler was horrific. He's one of the Mount Rushmore of monsters. Let me be very clear on my stance on Hitler. Uh, but man, people just do not seem to know that Mao and Stalin existed. Um, or if they do, they seem to think that Hitler somehow is outpacing them. Hitler burned really bright, really fast, and he ran a PR campaign for his shit. Uh, and we like knock, knock, like you lose, we take over your shit. So we got all the paperwork so we could like really point to it.

• 24:04Tom Bilyeu?

  But dude, Mao and Stalin were orders of magnitude more efficient at killing. Uh, and it's just getting lost by history, which is why I feel the way that I feel about Mom Donnie.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  So let's jump over across the Pacific and head over to the Asia-China-Taiwan-South Korea triangle rectangle isosceles.

• 24:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Isosceles, that won the award for word I did not expect to hear.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, when's the last time you heard about an isosceles? It was such a big deal in high school.

• 24:32Tom Bilyeu?

  High school.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  We, we cared so much about isosceles. Uh, okay. We talked about Japan and China, like sharing words, trading barbs. Um, it all started at the G20 summit. China and Japan didn't have a meeting when they talked to the Japanese new PM. She said, if something happened to Taiwan, it'll be an existential threat for us and we would have to join. China didn't like that. China said, watch what you say. Um, don't be talking out your, the side of your mouth. And then Japan was like, all right, it's cool. I ain't gonna say nothing, but just know I'm not playing that game. And then China was like, oh, we conveniently now have military exercises we need to do right around y'all. And then Japan was like, wait a second. If y'all do do something to us, America's gonna jump in and Trump act like he didn't hear that. Cause he was like, I'm in Venezuela. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And then now China has accelerated those military exercises. So much so that they even locked on to a Japanese, uh, plane. As they were kind of exploring those waters once again. When Japan condoned China, China foreign milis-, uh, the China foreign minister said something that I think was hilarious. He said, "On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Japan, quote unquote, as a defeated nation, should act with greater caution." So, I think that that is hilarious, as in like, "Hey, bro, I think you should just remember where you came from, so that way you don't have to go back there."

• 25:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  For somebody so close, that's the equivalent of Canada being like, "Hey, America, like, civil war was a couple of weeks ago. If you keep asking, there's gonna be a new north and south beef." I feel like we wouldn't respond clearly to that. Right now, Japan and China relations seem to be out of hand. What's your take on the region? I haven't brought in the Taiwan of it all yet, but just so far, it just seems like they're trading quips back and forth.

• 26:19Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think there's anything real here. I don't think that we have to worry about something really getting out of hand. However, when you've got nations that have the kind of historical beef that they have, uh, don't think that these are just like passing words of one sort of unhinged guy in Beijing. Like, this, this is real historical beef. These guys hate each other. So, I think Japan will ratchet up military spending. I think they are gonna take this very seriously, but I also think that Japan is in the middle of real economic trouble. And it is entirely possible that, over the next decade or so, that we watch Japan really start to slide into economic problems.

• 27:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And when countries slide into economic problems, they can be a backwater for 100 years. Like, this isn't a thing that you pull out of very quickly. So, do I think China is gonna conquer Japan? No, because I don't think they want that kind of smoke. Uh, will they force Japan to sit down and shut the fuck up? If they feel like it, yes. And what that would take would be China being economically strong enough to move on Taiwan, and Japan being economically weak enough that they can't really mount a military, um, like, to be a big enough problem for China. So, I think in that case, China would understand there's no need for us to go in and conquer, um, Tokyo.

• 27:43Tom Bilyeu?

  We're just going to show them diplomatically on the world stage, they're completely irrelevant. We will humiliate them at every turn. And if they're not economically strong enough to deal with it, fuck them. That's basically how this will play out. But going and conquering a nation, unless they have resources that you really want, that is a lot of headache, dude, because they're going to blow stuff up constantly. They're going to kill your soldiers constantly. Like they'll just guerrilla warfare that shit. And listen, Japan isn't who Japan used to be, but don't forget that Genghis Khan, the Mongol army, because I'm not sure if Genghis was still running it at that time. But the Mongol army attempted to invade Japan twice and lost both times. It's like the only place they couldn't conquer.

• 28:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So when the Japanese are properly motivated, they defend the homeland. So that's not who I'd want to be trying to sit on top of and keeping calm. So, yeah. Again, I think the big concern here is that Japan ends up destabilizing itself economically and just, just goes backwards. They're already going economically backwards over the last 40 years, they have. So that scares me, the escalating of that. And then that reverberating around the rest of the world. The real thing to watch out for is China moving on Taiwan, reunifying, and that calling into question whether the US is going to step in or not. Now, the US is already undoing its international reputation.

• 29:09Tom Bilyeu?

  So I don't know if we have the incentive to back them up the way that the, you know, historical agreement would lead you to believe that we're going to. It's possible that we actually pull out of NATO. I don't know that it's likely, but it's certainly possible. And if we do that, we send the same signal that we would send by not backing up Taiwan, which is if you think you're our ally, if you don't have relevance to us right now, don't count on it.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Backing out of NATO is pretty much telling the EU you're on your own. You gotta boss up and do your own thing.

• 29:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. So basically what happens is World War II, crazy. Germany is doing its thing. We team up with truly one of the greatest mass murderers of all time, Stalin. And we win. And Russia pays a huge price that is often by Americans completely overlooked. But Russia pays a huge price. They just throw an ungodly number of people at stopping the German march in Stalingrad. And after the war, we then divvy up essentially Europe and.

• 30:14Tom Bilyeu?

  They then reveal themselves to be just absolute monsters. And now it's like, hold on a second. Like Russia is not playing by Western rules at all. And so Russia starts getting very powerful. Europe starts getting terrified. And so we, as the big brother, walk in and go, listen, we got you. If Russia ever moves on you, we will fuck Russia up. We Article Five guarantees we will come and we will protect you. And so we end up winning the Cold War all as well. Now, obviously, it's a very different world, but that like we're the world's big brother. We unfortunately have printed our way and deaded our way into just not realistically having the appetite for that anymore.

• 30:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Because for us to pay for it would be just continuing the trend that we're on now, which is inflating our currency into meaninglessness. So we know that that would cost a ton of money and cause us to print just ungodly amounts. And then the populace would not stand for it. So, um, yeah, that's where that we are almost certainly going to send the world that signal anyway. Uh, it could happen over Ukraine. I need to look more deeply at what's going on right now, but it looks like we've got Zelensky killing the peace process, Europe wanting the peace process dead. This could be the perfect time for Trump to be like, cool. You guys wanna do your thing, do your thing. I'm over here trying to stop this. Putin acknowledges, I'm trying to stop it.

• 31:42Tom Bilyeu?

  You guys are trying to prolong this. All right, well, if you're gonna act, uh, without us, then you're gonna deal with the consequences. And so he would have the political cover that he needed. He's still gonna be called a coward. People are still gonna say that like we betrayed our agreement with them, but he'll have enough cloud cover but between just so many Americans calling for America first, more people now calling for America only, him trying legitimately, it seems, to actually end the war and that being rejected. So it's like, hey, we, we are willing to be a sensible partner. We are not willing to put troops on the ground. I think everybody understands, and I think that that would be very popular.

• 32:23Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if I'm Taiwan and that happens, I'm like, uh oh, like, how relevant are we to America right now? And if not relevant enough, given the power of China, uh, odds that America does anything other than be like, hey, we got a ton of weapons. If you want to buy some, uh, we really wish you guys well, sending thoughts and prayers. But us rolling up on the beaches of Taiwan to block China, not gonna happen.

• 32:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I thought war was good for the economy. War is great for the economy, uh, if you win. So if you're just sending something over, so like, here's how war, here's how World War II was phenomenal for America. Phenomenal. All the countries that are getting bombed are all in Europe, not other than Pearl Harbor. Literally nothing happens to the US. We're just out of the way. It doesn't matter. Nobody's coming for us. We also become essentially the world's gun shop. And so we're selling weapons like crazy to Europe and Europe very quickly realizes that, oh, we're not going to be able to win this war without the Americans being willing to send all this.

• 33:32Tom Bilyeu?

  We were an industrial powerhouse. And so now we go, hey, your cars, they're selling. I'm not saying they're not selling, but let's switch that over to tanks, to airplanes, to boats. Same factories. Now we need double, triple the output. You're making money hand over fist, guaranteed contracts. You got four, five, six years of conflict. And so it's like, man, can you? So this is how Disney, by the way, survived. Disney made cartoons for the war effort. So it was like, anybody that had a government contract was going to make it through that period well.

• 34:08Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it's guaranteed revenue. You're, you know, you've got, you got the biggest, deepest pockets in the world telling you like, yeah, don't lose workers right now. Like whether you've got. Things coming off the line or not, just keep your workforce. So paying the money for all that, like it's, that is your wet dream as a business owner, is that you've got a patron who's just like, no matter what, keep max capacity. So that ends up creating that boom. And also it drew women into the workforce. So men are off getting paid to be at war, also getting the GI bill that they're going to leverage once they get home. Women come into the workforce, they're now getting paid.

• 34:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it ends up being economically amazing. Plus, the world now owes us a ton of money. And we've come out of this in really great shape, owning essentially all the gold, which allows us afterwards to become the world's reserve currency. Now, wars can be terrible. Iraq, Afghanistan, like you're losing a ton of money and you're having nothing to show for it. So that, you're like, your defense contractors are still making a lot of money and they love it. But in terms of being good for the general economy, not so much.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's dive into that, like what Japan's ails are. Cause I'm seeing nearly low interest rates, inflated money, they've been pumping currency. And it seems like they've been, I don't know, I don't wanna say surviving, but how have they been able to keep up the charade?

• 35:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So part of it is that they have a culture where everybody just agrees that we're not going to do things that are bad for the homeland. And so they don't sell their debt to foreign purchasers, they sell their debt to the Japanese. And then they go, listen, you're holding a lot of debt, super precarious, but we need you to buy more. And so then people do their patriotic duty and they buy more. And then they don't wanna dump their stuff back onto the market because they know that that would create a problem. So that's part, very much an oversimplification. But that's part of why Japan has been able to rack up instead of 130% where everybody else tears themselves apart. Cause remember, when you cross the 130% debt to GDP ratio, it's not like anything mechanistically breaks.

• 36:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It's that people get mad because the wealth inequality is going so crazy. For a very simple fucking reason, most people do not understand assets. So they don't. Own assets and assets are inflation resistant. So as your country prints a ton of money, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And if I could just get everybody to understand that basic mechanism and get everybody into assets, then the world would look very different. But alas, you don't. And so you get the wealth inequality. The wealth inequality is what creates the anxiety and the bitterness. That's what manifests as revolution. That's why you're not conquered from the outside. You fall apart from the inside just because you have so much infighting. People are so bitter. They hate each other so much.

• 37:06Tom Bilyeu?

  The left and the right just literally want to kill each other. And so, yeah, you just weaken yourself. Now, we're in the unique position of not only tearing ourselves apart from the inside, but we're in Thucydides' trap. And so that makes it worse because you also have an external enemy that can create problems for you.

• 37:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It's so funny how, um, so I bumped into a guy in New York, former guest on the show. I'll laugh if he listens to this. And he was like, oh, my God, it's so good to see you. I really love your content. Very doom and gloom. And I was like,

• 37:46Tom Bilyeu?

  do you want me to lie? Like, I don't know. It's like, listen, if I hadn't gone down the path of economics, maybe I never would have ended up here. Just to remind people how I ended up doing economic content. Covid hits, I had just, like in the last few years, had a thousand employees that grew up in the inner cities. They were, I thought they were all about to get wiped out. I didn't know what money printing was. So I thought, oh, my God, they're all going to lose their jobs. This is going to be terrible. I know and love them. I want to see them do well. I'm like, in my small way, what can I do? Let me make some content that will help them understand how to buckle down economically so that they can weather this storm. Obviously, not thinking only of them, but thinking of the tens of millions of people that are just like them. So I'm like, cool, let me make this content.

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Then I start making that content and I just kept finding like new pieces of information. I'm like, wait, this does not work the way that I thought this worked. And so as I begin to unravel that, you suddenly you have the Scooby Doo moment where you realize, wait a second, like these politicians are stealing. And so that's when you're like, hold on, like the economy is not at all what I thought it was. That investing money. Certainly, if you've already made money, investing money is like the most powerful thing that you could pay attention to. And then you just keep finding stat after stat after stat about how the sense of malaise that we have today is all economic. And so, anyway, I don't know what else to say. It's like, all of this stuff is avoidable. And

• 39:14Tom Bilyeu?

  so I want to talk openly about it to make sure that we avoid it. It's avoidable systemically at the level of society, and it's avoidable at the individual level. So basically, all my deep dives go something like this. Hey, big problem. This thing's about to happen. Future's very uncertain. I don't know that we'll be able to convince everybody. So the last section is always going to be what you, as an individual, should do. Now, keep in mind, in 2025, at least until the correction happened, I was up millions of dollars. Like, investing is fucking real. Like, you can just make so much money investing. It's wild. So, I get it. People, it is not an unwise way to navigate the world to just assume that everybody's a dirtbag. Fine. If that's your guiding light, you're going to look at me, you're going to be very cynical. Another way is to remember, I've been broke a lot

• 39:59Tom Bilyeu?

  longer than I've been wealthy, that I realized that by changing the set of ideas in my head, I was able to make myself wealthy. And because I like to see other people succeed, I like to tell people how to succeed. And then, by the way, it also creates a multimillion-dollar company for me. So yay, it's like literally a win-win-win-win-win-win. But I really do want to see individuals get out from under the lunacy of a system that is both, sort of just dumb, and then second, also has people that understand precisely how the economy works, precisely how to get money out of the most vulnerable people at a systemic level. And so if I can help people get out of that, I will.

• 40:42Tom Bilyeu?

  If so, facto to that. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 41:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  All right, let's jump over to the SpaceX IPO news. This is going to be ground-changing, it seems like. For those that don't know, Elon announced that SpaceX will IPO in 2026. But something that's getting a lot of attention is its valuation. It's estimated to be valued at $1.5 trillion. That's 65x of value. That is not a revenue. That is not a typo. Boeing trades at 0.7, Lockheed at 1.5. SpaceX is demanding a multiple that never existed in aerospace ever. At the $1.5 trillion evaluation, Elon Musk's stakes become worth $630 billion. That means that one man alone will be worth more than the GDP of Sweden, Poland, and Belgium combined.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  All the countries that Trump wants people to come from.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And the one thing that I think jumps out to me as well... Is that 8.5 million Americans already depend on Starlink for internet by IPO? Next year, that number crosses 10 million, a constellation of 7,600 satellites. 65% of everything orbiting this planet right now belongs to one company.

• 43:04Tom Bilyeu?

  That is so insane. So as a PSA to anybody out there, become an engineer. Become an engineer. No, I'm not kidding. Like when you can engineer, so first of all, you are literally thinking up from physics. And

• 43:25Tom Bilyeu?

  once you understand the rules of something, this is really what I'm trying to do with Kaizen. I want to create a world that is built on rules so that once the player understands the rules, they can change the world. That's true in real life. Once you understand the rules, you can change the world. And that's what Elon is doing. And when people audit what makes him successful, one of the things that always comes back is that he stays close to the engineers. So not only is he an engineer himself, but he stays close to the engineers in his company.

• 43:55Tom Bilyeu?

  And because people, because money is being printed, the people that understand assets are flooding into assets. And he is an engineer that is able to build more things than any human ever in human history. I believe that that is just beyond true at this point. Certainly the largest number of consequential things. So now you've got a scenario where you can seek refuge from money printing in this sort of

• 44:26Tom Bilyeu?

  once in 100 years, once in 200 years kind of person in the public stock markets. And so you get these just completely unhinged valuations. When you remember that when you get a 65X, what you're saying is we're going to pull forward 65 years worth of revenue at today's rates into the present. And that, I mean, he's about the only person that's been able to execute at that kind of level and actually make it work just because he grows it so much. But this is basically people betting on space as the next frontier for data centers and AI. And it's like, what's hap- okay, so Drew, when I write a deep dive, like the one that's coming out on Monday about, um, we have 900 days left of capitalism.

• 45:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Part of me is like, okay, this is a, it's possible and therefore I don't feel bad putting that in the headline. But you know, is it a bit cheeky? Like, is this really gonna be more like five or six years? Maybe, and I certainly leave myself open to that. And then I hear interviews like the one that you just queued up. And I start talking about SpaceX getting a 65X on revenue now because of data centers in space. That this isn't a crazy idea. This is something that is going to happen. It's going to happen very rapidly. I start going, do we have 900 days? And so I'm-

• 45:55Speaker 01

  With Elon going zero to 100 on the Tesla customers in Memphis, how he just, you know, built it, cause I like that, who knows?

• 46:01Tom Bilyeu?

  There's that, there's also, I forget what company it was, but there's a company that claims they've already done AGI. Odds are probably not, but if they're getting like a big enough step ahead that it's worth putting out that press release and you're not just gonna look like a clown in 60 days.

• 46:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That tells you that, okay, we may have just taken another step function, um, move forward. You've got the TPUs being created by Google, which are proving to be incredible. You've got, I think they're called blackwell chips that are coming out from Nvidia in 2026. Those are supposed to be like a leap forward from where we're at now. So it's like, oh man, like the, the changes really are moving fast. You're normally limited by material science. That tends to be the thing that puts the brakes on this. But when you've got Elon able to build these like super coherent data centers that lasers,

• 47:04Tom Bilyeu?

  the only thing that travels faster than a laser through fiber optic cable is a laser traveling through the vacuum of space. And so you've got Elon able to put tonnage into space very, very fast. You've got- That same guy building the largest, most coherent data centers faster than anybody by orders of magnitude, taking it from like four or five years down to like 18 months or something. So it might even be less than that. So it's like, it's just With reusable rockets, so he could just be taxiing them things up there. Which is how he's put 65% of the tonnage into space. I mean, it's just, it's really, really crazy.

• 47:45Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I, I'll give everybody the mental framework that I use. I still have anxiety about this though. But so I'm, I have a rule in my life that I never stand still. That rule has cost me millions of dollars and it's made me hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's like, on balance, it's better, but like in the times where it costs me a lot of money. I'm always like, oh God, do I revisit this rule? Uh, but anyway, I have a rule that I do not stand still. Okay. So, uh, have a rule, don't stand still. AI is coming at me like a tsunami, but I still have this rule that I don't stand still. And I tried to address this in the upcoming

• 48:26Tom Bilyeu?

  deep dive by saying, listen, I think that we're going to go through this crazy transition period, but you have to invest today because the future is unknowable. So you've got to invest today. Otherwise I guarantee you're going to get eaten by inflation. So you've got to invest today. You've got to invest in what makes sense for today. Now you need an eye towards the future, but you've got to do something today. So I'm building my video game. I've got this target now of 23 months, obviously going down every day. Uh, I feel very comfortable that we'll be ready for early release by that point.

• 49:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But I don't know that video games will be relevant at that point. And so it's this really weird, like as I try to track where technology is going to be when I'm ready to launch.

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm like, are people gonna be prompting games at that point? I don't know. And so it is only that standing still is the only way to guarantee that you get hit by the truck. So I'd rather be hit by the truck of, yeah, I just couldn't see the future clearly enough. And so fair enough. But I don't want to be standing still. I highly encourage people to formulate a similar thing. Cause being anxiety ridden and standing still, that's never the winning path. But it is possible that 900 days from now, that capitalism doesn't really make sense in the traditional sense. That the way that we think of technology doesn't make any sense. Like, I'll give you an example.

• 49:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Once agents become real, you probably won't interface with your computer. Your AI agent will interface with your computer. And I could definitely see that in the next three years. Where you go from sitting at a computer like click clacking, you know, call it six to eight hours a day to zero. And you've just got a thing in your ear that communicates to your phone that probably won't be made by Apple. Cause those guys are fucking AI retarded, but made by somebody. You're talking to it, it's talking back. The conversations feel completely natural. You're looking at the screen so you can see that what you want done is actually being done. You say, do this, move that, tweak this, and it's just doing it. And Google just launched a prototype of their glasses.

• 50:43Tom Bilyeu?

  It's connected to a puck. It's kind of like the Apple Vision Pro, but like glasses. They look a little awkward, but like if they really offer a AR VR experience in a glasses form factor. And those are out in 2026 by 2029. It's just like, it's really kind of crazy to think how we might see 15 years worth of normal advancement play out over the next three. And again, the only assumption that I have to make for that to be true is that AI doesn't asymptote. Now, that's a fancy word for it doesn't hit a ceiling.

• 51:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you really can simply add more chips and write more efficient algorithms and it just keeps getting smarter.

• 51:36Tom Bilyeu?

  The world will be, it won't be incomprehensible in three years, just distribution chains and things like that take too long. But the way that we interface with our daily lives will be radically different. And I know this is one of my favorite subjects and I run the risk of talking about it too much. But at one point, we had a hundred people working on Project Kaizen. We now have like six. I have one artist and I'll go in AI, I, me, the CEO. I'll go in AI and I'll create a character and I'll give it to him and I'll say, get this in the game. And I mean, he can have an ugly version of it in the game that day. And call it a week and it's like, cool, it's refined, it's working.

• 52:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, I went from a hundred people and it taking like three months to like really make a meaningful insertion into the game. So I can do it in a day.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Three months, a hundred people to two people and a day. That's in the last four years.

• 52:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Where are we in, that's in the last three years. Where are we in three years from now? Like it's, that, that one is really hard to wrap my head around.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  I want to ask you about that too, because I think we're at the cusp of two things. On one hand, we have the CEO of Scale AI, Eddie Chen, saying that he's worried about LLMs because they're turning into social media companies. Feedback loops, algorithm, they're trying to keep you typing and asking questions as long as possible. As opposed to solving novel first world problems. But on the other side, we have Sam Altman, who put a code red out on his company. And said, forget agents, forget ads, we need to beat Google, we need to beat Google. And to me, that is the start of every Terminator movie, every AI like, I'm about to be broke, this is my whole life. F it, AGI is not ready yet, sir, we need a couple more, forget testing, it needs to go out live now. And then it takes over, like, you know what I mean?

• 53:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  It's, it's.

• 53:29Tom Bilyeu?

  I know precisely what you mean.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's one of those things where it's like, what's that balance between? They're going to try to baby step it to maximize the revenue for shareholders and make the most money.

• 53:40Tom Bilyeu?

  That was always, they, they may have thought they were being honest because they may have actually felt it at the time, but those are not the incentives. Game theory tells you the truth of the human condition and game theory says any technology that promises an advantage over others. It doesn't say that part, it just says advantage, but what it means is advantage over others will be developed even recklessly.

• 54:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm just like, God bless Elon for trying for whatever five years to get the government to pay attention. Remember, the vast majority of people cannot understand complex ideas. And then on top of that, they don't have time, even if they can understand it. And then if they're a politician, it's all about gain and retain power. So that thing way off in the distance that nobody understands yet does not matter, even if it's like Earth ending. I'll remind everybody that when they were about to test the first nuclear bomb, they knew there was a non-zero chance that it would ignite the entire atmosphere and kill every living thing on the planet, and they did it anyway. So, um, yeah, the AI is going to be developed, if not by you, by someone else.

• 54:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it's like the, I hate to be a sort of fatalist about it, but I am. It's like, it's not going to be stopped. You might be able to slow down here, but you're not going to be able to stop it everywhere. Unfortunately, that, that, that game is done. So now it just becomes a question of, cool, how do you deal with the transition period? I'm not a big believer that AI is going to have the need to enslave us if it becomes super intelligent. That's us, I think, just painting the stuck in a body, um, mired by evolution, really everything was tooth and claw. But the AI is going to be like, there's abundant resources, everything that we want to create, we can create. So I don't know why, like, if we started to fuck with them,

• 55:27Tom Bilyeu?

  like then maybe they would neutralize us. But anyway, I can't figure out. I know that they will have an alien intelligence. So any guess that I place upon it is going to be the guess. That's limited by my human cognition. But anyway, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about that. I spend a lot of time worrying about how I make sure that my life has meaning. That I worry about a lot. I don't see an escape from that. That is hardwired in the human mind, and most people are going to implode. Now, the good news is that I love Minecraft, so I'm very self-directed. Uh, so I won't need to be on rails, but

• 56:04Tom Bilyeu?

  The transition will be hard. I'll have to fall in love with something new. And while I'm capable of it, it's never the thing I want to do.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's like an emotional impulse. I was talking to like a buddy of mine who was just like, I just want to say F all computers, F all technology. I just want to go grab a wrench and be a mechanic. Like, I want to just opt out of the AI technology and be the master of the atom world and kind of let the software world kind of eat itself for a little bit.

• 56:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Is that the right impulse if you were talking to a 25 year old or something like that?

• 56:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Not the right impulse.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  But you know what I mean?

• 56:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It is.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Our opportunity, maybe not impulse, but like, because right now this tsunami is scaring a lot of people. And to your point of not standing still, there are people right now, they're at the beach and they're like, okay, that wave is way bigger and it's way closer than the last one. My car is right here, but I know I can't drive out here, but there's this beat like they're trying to figure out what their next move should be and they're kind of stuck on that beach. Would that be at least the correct next step? What do you think that?

• 57:05Tom Bilyeu?

  There, there really are only four paths before us. And so the path that he's choosing is basically the all human, all the time path. So path number one is do drugs. Path number two is you become the like, this is just about humans for me and I'm going to go do my human thing. Uh, so I move out into the woods, uh, revert to 90s technology, like that kind of thing, the new Amish, as I call them. Uh, path number three is go to Mars. So, uh, you just played one game of your, we are literally in an open world survival crafting game. The reason open world survival crafting games, Minecraft being the most famous,

• 57:48Tom Bilyeu?

  are what they are is because evolution has hardwired us to do that, to seek resources, to build things, seek safety, all that. And so. That's real life. You just won it. You created AI. Well done, humans. Uh, and so like any gamer who just loves games too much, you just go play the next one. You start back at ground zero and you know what you have to do. You have to go build safety, get access to the resources, build things up, try to get laid like, and so it'll just reboot on Mars. And I think that a very meaningful subset of humanity will do that. And it will be like playing life on hard mode. So basically the new Amish revert back to the nineties. The people that go to Mars revert back to like

• 58:31Tom Bilyeu?

  the seventeen years ago, no, ten thousand years ago. Cause it's like you're, you're going to a planet where you have nothing. You can't even breathe yet. You've got to like oxygenate or build little hubs and stuff like that. So it, it will be just absolutely wild. And then the fourth one, and this is where I fall is, um, I like to say build and explore virtual worlds to comfort me that I'll still be able to create, which is the thing I find most interesting, but it may just be that the, um, simulation, the AI creates the simulated worlds for me and then I just go explore each of those. That speaks to my personality. I've tried to think of another path.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  I think that would be applicable in 10 years. But I think right now in this transition part, everybody's kind of just on angst.

• 59:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Everybody's already sorting into one of those shoots. That's the thing. So, uh, look, it in, in the moment now, there is still head buried in sand. So I'm just playing the game I'm in right now. I'm not thinking about it.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Got you. Okay.

• 59:41Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's just that bucket doesn't have a future, but it, it might get you a decade. Like, yeah, this might, first of all, everything always takes longer than we think it's going to take. Nothing is ever cool as we think it's going to be. Nothing is ever bad as we fear it's going to be. We dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. They just sort of got on with it. So it's rare. I won't say that it can't happen, but asteroid struck is pretty bad for the dinosaurs. So. But it's pretty rare that something goes all the way to like truly cataclysmic. It'll just be a slow unwinding. We'll all get used to it. But it'll be weird very, very fast.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  This story is heating up and it's taking international, it's starting to get international attention. Australia has officially started its age restricted social media ban.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  TikTok and Instagram. Here's the complete list. Australia's ban for young users went into a

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  They are banning Facebook, Threads, X, Snapchat, Kick, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I understand the intention behind this. Do you think that this will have the intended effect? I know there's no solutions, only trade offs.

• 1:00:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That's the right way to think about it. Um, oh God, this is one where all of those seem fine to me, except YouTube. YouTube is just too educational, like there's, God, so much you can learn. So will it have the intended effect? Yes, I think over time, the odds that society must restrict kids under 16 seems like a reasonable place to start. From engaging in social media is basically a hundred percent. Like you just, bro, the things we're seeing it doing to kids is so brutal. So I don't see a way around that. People are gonna have to find a way for kids to sensibly engage with

• 1:01:35Tom Bilyeu?

  things like YouTube. Like I don't know that you need to be on Instagram or TikTok, but YouTube is like when I think about how much I've learned about economics from YouTube, it's extreme. So YouTube is the outlet through which I learned most things. It also strikes me as the harder of them. Like if you said you couldn't have, thank you, that you couldn't have your own YouTube channel. Maybe I could understand that. But anyway, we, we will have to come up with something to protect kids. Is this the right play? I'm glad they're running the experiment, so we'll get to find out if this actually is positive or negative.

• 1:02:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And if it even works, but we have to do something. The, the developing brain needs to be protected. And right now we are not protecting it from shortening attention span, which I think is terrifying. We're not protecting it from bullying.

• 1:02:31Tom Bilyeu?

  When I think about to bully me in school, people had to like actually come up to me. And I remember there was a kid who came up to me, it's probably 20 years after I graduated high school. And he came up, he's like, I just want to apologize. And I was like, oh shit, for what? And he was like, I was so mean to you. And I was like, bro, if you were, I had no idea. I never found out about it. So it was like, it didn't bother me in the slightest because I never knew. And so here was a guy that was carrying enough guilt about it, but like on social media, it lives forever. It travels like wildfire. It can reach you in your bedroom. It's like, oh,

• 1:03:15Tom Bilyeu?

  that's rough. So yeah, I, in thinking about like, what would I have done if I had a kid? I, there's no way. I don't care how much they complained. I would not let them have social media until they were 16. No way. Now, if people think that I would buckle and break, you know, not my personality. But yeah.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  I'm thinking 11, 13, 14 year olds. Is there a net positive for them being on social media?

• 1:03:47Tom Bilyeu?

  On balance, if you have a sensible kid and parents that have very strict rules, yeah, like, I don't think this is gonna be, this isn't like a necessary problem. So take somebody like myself. I do not have an addictive personality. Obsessive, yes. Addictive, no. So if I think, like, part of the reason that I stopped taking my phone out, this is years ago, when I'm quote unquote bored, not that I never do it, keep in mind, but it's pretty rare, is because I was like, eh, I don't want to be in a position where I feel the need to pull that out, that I can't be meditative or compli- uh, contemplative. That-

• 1:04:32Tom Bilyeu?

  The whole idea of all of the world's problems or man's inability to sit alone in a room. It's like I never wanted that to be true of myself. So if you've got a kid that has that kind of vibe, then yeah, if the parents put rules in place and they sort of get it. And they're not like, um, super swayed by peer pressure, they'll be fine. But the vast majority of kids, first of all, don't have a prefrontal cortex. They can't stop themselves. They get into these dopamine loops and they literally are like little addicts. So, um, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be tested when I was a kid. So yeah, I, I think that while nothing is ever going to be universal, so it's not universally bad.

• 1:05:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, and there's certainly a lot of good to be had. And again, I'm, I'm uneasy about the YouTube one. But yeah, I think I get what they're trying to do.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then somebody in the chat said, well, what about like Xbox and gaming? Should that be included in this band as well?

• 1:05:33Tom Bilyeu?

  I wouldn't, but I do think parents need to put limitations on it. So, um, growing up for me, it was like, I could play for a while, but I had to go outside and do things. Which that's just like, first of all, I grew up in a, wasn't quite rural, but it certainly wasn't suburban. Uh, area. And so that was, there was a lot to do outside and I could do it safely. And so I know that that's not true for a lot of people. But yeah, gaming is, uh, I have a massive bias. So people can discount away. But keep in mind, I ended up here with this philosophy long before I was making a game. But, um, I mean, you can look at neuroprotective stuff. You can look at doctors perform better in surgery if they're also a gamer.

• 1:06:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, the way that it lets you reinforce goal, direct to behavior, all that stuff. I, I think gaming is great, but anything can be overdone and gaming is certainly on that list. So, um, not letting your kids play for, you know, six hours a day. That's gonna be a very wise thing.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Montez talked about, uh, what's not being talked about is how it will be enforced. That's actually something very interesting. Children and parents will not be banned, but instead, social media companies who allow a child to break through will get fined. And the fines are upwards of the tens of millions of dollars. So I kind of appreciate this kind of inverse incentive. So these social media companies now have a obligation to make sure kids don't get past it because they're gonna be like charged a bill based on that.

• 1:07:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, we basically just moved it from thirteen to sixteen. So, because right now, social media companies can't create an account for you if you're under thirteen. Now, the people with digital ID concerns, that's very valid. That we need to watch out for.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  I feel like it's funny though, because I like, I understand, you know, under sixteen, that's the rule. But I feel like as a kid, that's just like, okay, challenge accepted. Like, I just need to figure out a way to get over that, whether that's a VPN, whether that's an AI face app swap. Like, there's gonna be something that, I don't know, maybe I'm just a rebellious kid, but a lot of times when those artificial limits are placed on things, I'm like, okay, how can I get over this thing? How can I surpass it?

• 1:07:41Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no doubt that a lot of kids are gonna do that for sure, but like anything, it just, you give parents another weapon to say, listen, you're not allowed to have that. So for me, it worked when my parents said, you cannot drink until you're twenty-one. Just end of story, it's illegal, it's bad for you, you're gonna do something stupid that you regret. I was like, okay, cool. I didn't have my first drink till I was twenty-six. So, um, it works for some people. For other kids, like I had friends that I would be at their house, so I saw with my own eyes at twelve and they're drinking. So it's like, it obviously didn't work for them, or their parents gave them a very different message, but.

• 1:08:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Just because some people are gonna get around it doesn't mean you don't put the rule in place. So, and kids are gonna kid, they're gonna find ways around, many of them are gonna find ways around it, is what it is.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Andrew in the chat says she hates YouTube, it's debating for existence, Amazon has it as like unscripted TV. There was one like interesting thing I noticed is that when, I forgot the kid who opened up the toys, Max Toys or something like that.

• 1:08:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Ryan's?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Ryan's, yeah. He was the biggest YouTuber for a couple, this was right before the Mr. Beastification happened. And I think that kids then became, they didn't wanna play with toys, they wanted to watch other kids play with toys.

• 1:09:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so crazy to me.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  And I remember like arguing like with one of my like, one of my friends about it, we were like all that brunch and stuff. She's like, yeah, these kids are weird, they just do that, they just watch other kids play with toys. When I was younger, I wanted to play with toys. And I was like, well, it's kinda like you watching the Kardashians. You don't go out and talk to your friends, you're watching other people talk with their friends. And then like their table kinda got a little bit quiet and I'm just like, it is so, but I'm not saying reality TV isn't a good or a bad thing, like whatever. Different strokes, different folks, but that has, as we're seeing as the men who are capping for Nick Fuentes happen. That has also skewed how women look at life, what women deserve, what they think, based on these values. Are we doing that same thing with kids in a different way?

• 1:09:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course, so, do I think there's some blanket thing happening to kids? No. But do I think that every piece of media ever created that ever will be created in some way informs your frame of reference? Of course, that's precisely why I want to make video games. I want to tell kids one idea over and over and over, if you work hard at something, you'll get better at it. Like, that's the idea that I want to indoctrinate children with. So, yeah, I am well aware that that kind of thing really does shape people. So, yeah, that, you're making something entertaining. Shorts are entertaining. You've got an entire global ecosystem of content creators making the one funniest thing that they could show you, most poignant, most insightful, funniest, whatever.

• 1:10:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is amazing that we all get to take advantage of that. But if you just sit there and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll, you do a weird thing to your brain. So it's like we, I don't think we should want to get rid of the art form. I don't even think that we should be saying to kids, like watching another kid play video games is dumb. You don't want to do it. We want to recognize what it is. Like I remember the first time I heard about Twitch and people playing video games and that people watched them play video games. I was actually confused. I thought I was misunderstanding what they were explaining. They're like, no, no, no, Twitch, you go and you can watch other people play games. I'm like, but nobody would do that. And they're like, of course they would. Like, what are you talking about? That's really stupid. And then I was at the time, my game of choice was Destiny.

• 1:11:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And I was like, oh, man, there is this one thing I'm having so much trouble with. Let me just go look at this thing because I'm kind of curious. And since I'm here, I'm not going to look up a random game and look up the game I play. I looked it up, started watching this guy and I was like, oh my, that's so brilliant. And so I was then just completely sucked in and shout out to Bush Camp Dad, Bush Camp Dad. I don't know. In the early days, he would show up before we like went hardcore politics. I don't know if he ever pokes in anymore, but um, he's so fun to watch. Like watch him play Fortnite. He's a guy my age, but is ranked in the world because he hides. It's really brilliant. Anyway, um, so that kind of stuff is way more fun than I expected it to be, but it's different.

• 1:11:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So playing with toys is one type of entertainment. Watching someone play with toys is almost like watching a cartoon where the kid is drawing you into a story. It's a different kind of story, but he's drawing you into a story. He's making it entertaining with like flashing lights and all that. And it's like, that's always going to be a little bit easier. It's a little bit, um, I don't want to be judgmental, but it's a little bit lazier of a type of entertainment. You don't have to think of it yourself. Um, but both have their place.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, being the little brother, like I used to watch, I used to be forced to watch my older brother play video games. Cause he'd be like, no, I'm playing something. So I would, so like, I feel like Twitch was natural to me. I felt like that was just me reliving my childhood, but um, A Melly Will, you just pulled my card. So I had to close my mouth after this. He says, we watched soccer and Olympics and same with other like games. So I sure enough was yelling at the TV on Monday night for the football game. So I guess.

• 1:12:51Tom Bilyeu?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  I don't go outside and play football with my friends. So you got me there.

• 1:12:54Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. I've got a whole take on that. So first.

• 1:12:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Sports are war replicants. So you are trying to, that thing that's ingrained in us to want to compete and to win and destroy the enemy. It's like, that's how you get wars. We needed a proxy for that to, because it, it is a thing, like especially in men, that you have this impulse to want to compete, to want to be better, to drive yourself to be the gladiator. And it's like, but I don't really want to kill them or be killed. And so we came up with all these proxies. So that's like this evolutionary drive. Then there's another evolutionary drive to care deeply about your team. This is part of the reason that esports don't work is they just can't get the momentum of the sense of that's my team because they're not geographically bound.

• 1:13:43Tom Bilyeu?

  The games change so rapidly that they come and go. You can't like pass it on to your kids and like, why are you into Tottenham Hotspur? Because my wife is. Why is she into it? Because her dad was. Why was her dad into it? Because he moved into that area of London. And so it's like, there's all of this geographical thing, this passing it down to your kids that really creates this like, oh, this is my team. And now I'm going to invest. And this is the same way that I feel about TCGs. So I don't collect any cards. Like I have IP that I love. And so I'm way more likely to collect, say, One Piece or Gundam because I'm really into that IP. And so it isn't even fun for me, like all the other ones that are out there. Maybe they even have better art.

• 1:14:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Take, um, Riftbound. Riftbound is from League of Legends. Okay. I don't care about League of Legends and therefore I just can't get into it, even though it has better art. So I'm just like, eh, whatever. I'm not going to pay attention to that because I want to invest. I want to care about something. I want to pour myself into this thing. I want to say I care about this thing. And that like is this drive that people have. And so when people make fun of sports or whatever, and I'm not a sports guy, but when they make fun of it, that to me is like making fun of the human condition. We want to invest. We want to care deeply about something. We want to go on an emotional roller coaster. And so having that part of your life, of course, you can take it too far and You can damage your relationships because all you ever do is care about the sport. But it's the same reason people want to bet on the game.

• 1:15:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It makes you feel more invested. And so now, if you're like, imagine you're betting on a game that's your team that was like, became your team because you bonded over it with your dad and you're going against that number one rival and you've got money riding on it. It's like, that's just going to be like this really heightened emotion. Now, once you realize, all of life, all of life is about one thing, Drew.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  It was that one thing.

• 1:15:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is changing our brain chemistry. That's it. That's why we fall in love. That's why we pursue sex. That's why we eat the foods that we like. It's why we work out. It's why we listen to music. It's why we go to the movies. It's why we pursue a career. It is all to manipulate our brain chemistry. And so when you can invest in something and then go on that ride and you want the volatility of emotion. If you always win, it's boring. The best matches are when it was like a back and forth, but you finally pull it off in the end. There's a time where you're like, you want to cry in the middle of the match because the coach is making a dumb decision. The players are playing terribly and you're down and it's, oh my God. And then they finally do the right thing that you've been screaming at them for, and they score the goal in the last second. You win, you're just freaking out. You're, you're on a high that you wouldn't have been if it hadn't have been this roller coaster.

• 1:16:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And people want that. People want that ride. All right. Thank you guys so much for coming on this ride with us today and we will see you guys on Friday. You're all amazing. 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.

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