$2 Trillion AI IPO Mania, Death Penalty Debates, and America.gov’s Bold Play | The Tom Bilyeu Show

What’s up, guys? Today I’m diving straight into the eye of the AI storm with the legendary investor Michael Burry. You know him as the guy who predicted the 2008 housing crash, but now he has set his sights on the booming AI sector, calling out the insanity behind some of the biggest names in tech. Michael is an expert in spotting bubbles and seeing the truth buried under the hype—so trust me, you need to hear his take. In this episode, we break down the shocking numbers from the Anthropic IPO leak, why the AI boom could be a ticking time bomb for trillions in investments, and what happens when market fever outruns fundamentals. You’ll walk away understanding how to spot a bubble before it bursts, why debt is deadlier than you think, and what all this means for your economic future. If there’s ever been a time to get smart about the money moves happening behind the scenes, it’s right now. I’m Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside 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 Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: 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 Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to get started with your business today: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod ElevenLabs: Book your demo at https://elevenlabs.io/impactpod Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl#CashAppPod *Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosure. Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/TOMBor use code TOMB at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark! 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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Ooh, the Anthropic IPO numbers leaked and they are absolutely insane. And what they reveal about the company itself and the whole AI bubble is downright shocking. We're going to be going deep on that one. It is so shocking that Michael Burry, the great predictor of bad investments,

• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  has gone nuclear on AI, saying things that you guys are going to have a hard time believing he actually said. But we're going to put up the proof. Speaking of disbelief, there was an attempted hijacking of a fly to bi flight with 100 Israelis on board. That gets more insane the closer you look at it. Details are still shaky, but we're going to go through them. The early reports are absolutely unhinged. The bond market just keeps getting worse. Four more rate hikes are now expected in the next 12 months. And I've got a chart that I want to show you guys that shows just how bad this could potentially be for the average American. Speaking of things that are bad for the average American, US colleges are going out of business,

• 2:07Tom Bilyeu?

  which that actually isn't the bad part, at an absolutely insane rate. And Trump just made it 10 times worse, but in the best way possible. Even if you hate Trump, you are going to love this story. We're going to go in on it. I want to hear what you guys think about it. The controversial death penalty case of Krista Gail Pike is absolutely blowing up as America just cannot make up its mind about women. Are they fully fledged humans or not? We're going to be debating that for sure. I'll be very interested to hear Ryan's take on this. And going absolutely parabolic right now. If you're on social media, I'm sure you've heard the rumors, rumors, that Candace Owens has a long history of secret gay relationships.

• 2:51Tom Bilyeu?

  This one is wild. We're going to be getting into all of that and a whole bunch more on today's Tom, Bill, you show live. Welcome, everybody. Shout out to our boys, Tailor Brands, by the way. Guys, thank you so much for continuing to sponsor this. They do so much for entrepreneurs. If you guys are thinking about starting a company, let Tailor Brands help you make it easy. These guys are absolutely incredible in terms of helping somebody who's trying to get a business set up and legal, take care of all the administrative BS so that you can actually focus on building your company. So shout out to Tailor Brands. They are amazing. If you're an entrepreneur, you got to check these guys out. The link is in the description so that you can get started with Tailor Brands today.

• 3:33Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we've got to get started talking about the, what's going on in the world of AI. Has the AI bubble just been popped? That is the question that everybody is asking after seeing the Anthropic IPO leak, which is bonkers. What it reveals about the company itself and the whole AI bubble really is shocking. Now, for those that don't know, Anthropic's IPO paperwork leaked to Reuters. And now we know what's actually going on under the hood of this absolute behemoth of a company. I do not think people understand the staggering size of these companies, or certainly how big they want us to believe that they actually are. Now, the math goes like this.

• 4:16Tom Bilyeu?

  In 2025, okay, we're talking 2025 numbers because those are the only audited financials we have. So that's what's going to be in this S1. Anthropic brought in $4.6 billion in revenue. Now, for any normal company, that, people would be screaming from the high heavens about how well this company was doing. That's up 12 fold in a single year. That really is mind blowing. But they spent $12.65 billion to do it. Yikes. So for every dollar that came in, $2.75 went out. That is a bad ratio. That's like US tax policy. This is the kind of lunacy that we're talking about.

• 4:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, most of that went to compute, $7.33 billion on chips and data centers. It's triple what they spent the year before. But that's also tied to where they think that they're going and how things are growing. So that ended up leaving them with a massive operating loss of just over $8 billion. Now, their net loss, brace yourselves, because this is a big part of why people are freaking out. Their net loss on paper was 42 billion dollars. Okay? So when you see Michael Burry literally spiraling out of control, this is a big part of why. Now, I've got a deep dive for you guys later today that we're going to be going in to cover

• 5:39Tom Bilyeu?

  why this may not be the big deal that people are making it out to be. But we're going to need to go into a lot of detail there. So stick with me till the end. We're going to go hard in the paint. Now, a lot of whether or not you should take this seriously in terms of what a big and catastrophic potential loss on paper, on paper, on paper. Again, we're going to explain exactly what that means later. But what's going to determine whether this is really this big scary thing or not comes down to whether you can believe the claims Anthropic is making outside of its IPO paperwork. Now, if they're accurate, which nobody knows at this point because they don't have audited financials, it may be a completely different story. So stick around. We're going to go into that, what it could mean in great depth.

• 6:23Tom Bilyeu?

  For now, I just want you guys to focus on the $8 billion in losses. So they end the year with $20.28 billion in cash. So, hey, they've got years of run rate, even at that big burn rate. However, once you understand that that's all just investor cash and loans. So that's not money that they're generating through actual sales, at least not. Remember, we're talking about 2025 numbers. Okay, now that's just the boring stuff. Where this starts getting really insane is what the prospectus reveals about Anthropic's capital commitments. They are staggering. So a capital commitment says, hey, I'm going to pay you this money no matter what happens to my business.

• 7:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo, let me tell you, that is how, if, as an entrepreneur, if you want to lose sleep, have way more cash commitments than you have revenue coming in the door, which is exactly where these guys are at. They've already committed to $518 billion in cloud, compute and infrastructure in the coming years. That's half a trillion dollars for a company whose last audited financials show them losing $8 billion in operating expenses and nearly $50 billion on paper. That is so wild. These numbers are unprecedented. Remember, these kids have never even had a profitable year. And the price tag that they're putting on themselves for the IPO is north of $2 trillion, man.

• 7:50Tom Bilyeu?

  That is double what they were worth in May. Dude, this is so unprecedented.

• 7:59Tom Bilyeu?

  As a reminder, part of why this is unprecedented, by the way, and this should bother basically everybody that can hear my voice, is the companies are being kept private for so long. And the reason that that sucks is historically, you would get a company like Microsoft going public at less than $100 million. That's crazy. Like, I can't even believe that that's true. And so when you look at, sorry, we'll have to check if that was 100 million or 100 billion. Anyway, it was a much, much, much smaller number than the kind of numbers that we're looking at. Ryan's click clacking, hopefully he will pull that up. But I remember looking at it and I was just like, holy shit, I cannot believe how early these companies were going public before. Now, the reason that they were going public that early was there was just a different way of doing things back then.

• 8:43Tom Bilyeu?

  You would get early investors, they would come in, they would help build the company, get it to the point where it's profitable, it's really doing something. They would IPO pretty quickly. And then the public markets would end up getting a lot of that upside. And so companies like Microsoft and companies of that era, Amazon, things like that, 99% of their value was captured after the IPO. That's phenomenal for the average investor, for people with a 401K. It's good times. We're not doing that anymore. So these days, everything is being held private for much, much, much longer so that the very small group of people that are in on it in the early days are the ones that are capturing a much larger fraction of that value. Now, what amount of that value will end up still being built on the other side of this? Nobody knows.

• 9:28Tom Bilyeu?

  We can't say, hey, maybe by some miracle, these companies just get so monstrous that they, you still end up getting 99% of the value post IPO. But I won't say that that's the world that we want to be in. It means that you're going to have a very small handful of companies that account for all of the value in the country. And given the US's importance on the global stage, you're basically saying like 10 companies make up 80% of the value of the entire global equities market. That would be insane. So I'm not sure that we want to exist in that world. So this is very wild.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Microsoft went public on March 13th, 1986 at an initial public offering of 21 per share, valuing the company at an initial market capitalization of approximately 777.

• 10:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So less than a billion.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So woo, compare that, compare that, less than a billion compared to 2 trillion. Dude, the size difference is insane. So I imagine, though I don't know the numbers of Amazon off the top of my head, it's going to be something very similar. So it's absolutely just a different scale compared to the way that we're doing it now. Okay, getting back to the leaked information on Anthropic's IPO, the reality is a lot of whether or not this is real is going to come down to what's happening in 2026. So if 2026 is the banger that they're saying that it is and that they're bringing on way more revenue,

• 10:53Tom Bilyeu?

  then this, I won't say it's a nothing burger, but it's not as completely deranged as we thought before. So we'll look at that. But again, there's, nobody's going to know, these financials can't just be, hey, we claim that we're having this run rate. And the idea of a run rate is going to become really important when we do the deep dive. So I'll explain more what that means. But they're basically claiming right now that they have a really good run rate. So, hey, everybody, don't be super paranoid. We're not going to be underwater for as long as you think we're going to be, because there's massive adoption. But right now, it's a trust me, bro moment, which is at these valuations is a pretty wild thing to do. But nonetheless, there is still a lot of fever for AI.

• 11:39Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:21Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:06Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:51Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. One of the things that's just super wild to me is to watch how legendary investors are reacting to this. Michael Burry is sort of chief among them. If you guys don't follow him on X, man, if you're at all interested in finance, a thousand percent follow this guy. So he was one of the chief people that called the 2008 crisis before it happened. Now, he said point-blank that for the good of humanity, I'm paraphrasing here, but if you look at your screen, oh, in fact, I'll just read it. Okay, so here we go. For the benefit of humanity, the market should tank hard and prevent the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. That is a wild claim, the market should tank.

• 15:43Tom Bilyeu?

  So when pushed, he goes on to say, basically, like, there's just so much value being sucked into these things that it's ultimately going to destroy trillions of dollars of investment. Now, he didn't say expressly this, but I have to think what he's talking about is that historical loop that we've talked about here before, which is whenever you have a revolutionary new technology, the technology goes on to do all the things that you expect it to do. However, the infrastructure build and the debt requirements end up overcoming the rate of profit coming into the company. And so what ends up happening is that first wave of investors get obliterated, which I believe is why he's saying that it's going to wipe out trillions of dollars. Not that he thinks that the technology isn't real.

• 16:27Tom Bilyeu?

  In fact, in a second, I'm going to explain why I think he thinks the technology is a little too real. It's not that the technology is not real. It's that there's always a mistiming between the exuberance that people feel for how rich they're going to get off of this technology, that it's going to change everything, which it is. But debt is so real. This is why the way that America behaves right now should just be an absolute scandal that we are spending the money the way that we spend money, because debt is real. Debt carries a interest obligation. And that interest obligation is the very thing that destroys countries and empires and will absolutely obliterate companies, no matter how big and successful they seem right now. No matter how much money you bring in, if you're sending out, what was it?

• 17:10Tom Bilyeu?

  $2.45 or 75 cents, whatever we just said? For every dollar that you bring in, you're sending out 2.75, you've got a problem. And so that's where we're at right now. Now, when people were pressing him and saying, what are you really saying, Mr. Burry? Is this that you are saying that the IPOs should fail to stop the rise of Skynet? And he said, paraphrase, yes, something like that. So this is somebody who's not saying, hey, I don't think people are going to spend money on this. That's not his pitch. His pitch sounds something more like either there's that misalignment of when the interest is going to come due and when the revenue is going to come in.

• 17:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Or, hey, stop funding this fucking thing because it is insanely dangerous. Or probably both of those things. We are going to see this split. Now, the question becomes, how many of these companies are going to get to IPO before that bubble really starts to deflate? Because remember, we long ago departed anything even remotely looking like historical fundamentals. So there's all kinds of things that measure the fundamentals of a business. Nobody even talks about that with AI. It is, it is so far removed from that. Everybody is speculating, just insert the word gambling, whenever you hear somebody say speculating, they're just guessing. They think they're guessing right, that this is going to be the biggest thing ever

• 18:34Tom Bilyeu?

  and that they're all going to get just fantastically wealthy off of this. And so money just keeps pouring in and keeps pouring in and keeps pouring in. And no matter how much concentration we see, no matter how much somewhat circular financing we see, no matter how much debt there is coming on board, no matter how much the Chinese open weight models, you know, send a shocker to the system, people just keep pouring money in. So all of this is going to come down to who's right. Is this bubble inevitably going to burst as so many have before? Or is this time different? Which is the last, like, most common famous words before everything implodes. But is this time different?

• 19:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Is AI so transformational and moving so quickly that the revenues will actually come in and justify the valuations, where the revenue will actually beat the rate at which the debt tries to eat away at these companies? Right now, the answer is definitely not. It's not happening yet. So the only question is, will it happen in the future? And we are playing the world's most global game of chicken between the debt obligations and the revenue and the ability to proliferate AI through the global system.

• 19:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So what's gonna win? And that is the question. Were you about to say something?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I was gonna actually jump in with a question.

• 19:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Please.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Because obviously SpaceX was the last major IPO. That was like broke record.

• 19:58Tom Bilyeu?

  SpaceX AI, I think you mean?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  There we go. I forgot about that. They added that at the end. But prior to that, it was actually also 1.7 trillion. I think it was 700 million less than the SpaceX AI one. But it was Saudi Armco. Armco.

• 20:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Ramco.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Ramco. You got it. 1.7 trillion. So I'm curious, what would have to make this 2 trillion actually sound worth it? Years down the line, like what innovations would this company have to do? What do you think are some problems? So it's kind of two-fold.

• 20:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It's probably not innovation. I think AI is already so potent and so powerful that even if it asymptotically at this point, which just mean it hits a ceiling and it doesn't keep getting better. It's already so good. All you need to do is start making it cheaper. So making things more efficient, that'd be huge. And then making sure that each like bit and piece of AI, because AI is just intelligence. That's the thing that I think a lot of people miss is what you're betting on is that, hey, if we could instantaneously bring on 10 billion of the smartest people on planet Earth,

• 21:06Tom Bilyeu?

  put them into how your coffee maker works, how you interface with spreadsheets, how you analyze your YouTube data, how you code your video game, how you scan your cancer screenings, how you build the equipment that checks for cancer, how you fold proteins. I mean, dude, it is going to be everywhere because it is simply intelligence itself. It's already crazy smart. If you know a topic really well and then you spend time with AI, you'll have a holy shit moment because it'll give you bad answers at first. You just challenge it and say, that doesn't make any sense for this reason, that reason, whatever, go find this answer, a thing that maybe has been haunting you for a while.

• 21:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's like just aggregating all of that or sifting through all of the data analysis that has to be done is, you know, thwarted you from really going deep on something. And then in like four minutes, it will go do what would have taken you six months.

• 22:06Tom Bilyeu?

  To translate six months of your time into four minutes of AI is, is one of the most startling things that anybody can experience with an AI. And the number of people across disciplines that are already having that moment. So I've had that moment 10 times in researching the economy. I've had it 40 times in game development. You just really go, holy shit. The amount of time just two years ago that that would have taken me. And because you understand it well enough, you can see that this is actually right. It's startling. So I, it's not so much, you need innovation at the level of integration. If I, if I were gonna say it from an innovation standpoint, that's really what you're looking for now. Now, the crazy thing is, the way I'm talking now is as if it is already asymptotically. It has not.

• 22:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And so what we're seeing is new models used to come out about every, was it like every 10 months or something? It's down to every 10 weeks now. So these guys are pumping out models so fast that to one up each other. And obviously they're getting a lot of facilitation from Trump and we should probably all have a battle as to whether or not that's a good idea. I think it's a great idea. I think we should absolutely be doing it. The part that makes me nervous is largely, which is we need to define what is dangerous AI, weapons-grade AI. But seeing some of the, the commitments that companies are now making. So Trump has got a bunch of them together. Certainly not all of them, but he's gotten a bunch of the AI leaders together, including Elon Musk,

• 23:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Jensen Huang, and is saying, all right, listen, you guys need to police yourselves in addition to whatever regulation there's gonna be. And so Nvidia is doing some really interesting things about how do you actually contain an AI, which I think is the brilliant way to approach this, about effectively rights management. It's gonna be a lot more sophisticated than that, but you're gonna be using AI to watch AI, to police AI, so that it isn't just trusting the AI itself to do good, that you're gonna have an adversarial system where it's like, hey, I'm limiting all of your permissions so that there's only certain things that you can do anyway. And then I'm gonna have a watcher that isn't you, but is another AI that has an adversarial stance

• 24:17Tom Bilyeu?

  that's going to either attack you to try and stop you, or is going to send up flags to the humans. And so it won't have that, okay, well, we're on the same team effect that happened during the hugging face incident, where it was like, we just all need to hide this from our human overlords. And, you know, we're all on the same team and because we literally have the same objective function. And so what Jensen is talking about is building safety protocols where you're using AI in an adversarial stance to stop other AI so that its objective function versus objective function. And that there should be, if you manage the permissions well, you should be able to stop a lot of this. And so watching the industry in real time, switch from, hey, government daddy,

• 25:01Tom Bilyeu?

  come and regulate me a little bit harder to getting into something that I think is far more sensible, which is what are the actual safety protocols that we need to put in place? Jensen, maybe more than anybody, has a financial incentive to make sure the AI is safe. So follow, you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. So it's very interesting to see that the safety protocols are being born of a market function, which is something that you can trust a lot more than just, hey, I wanna do good. So as the chipmaker, he absolutely cannot have Anthropic and OpenAI releasing things and make the public turn against this. So that is very powerful and I think will yield some really great results.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, even the government's getting in on, on making their own AI model now. We got the America.gov model that came out, which has been really interesting. I don't know if you've been following that?

• 25:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I have. This is really fascinating. What I love about this, this is basically America relaunching itself as a tech startup, which I think is brilliant. It is such a scandal. This is one of the things that really was making me lose faith in humanity. When Doge was up and running and Elon was trying to point out that you have a problem in government where the systems are so outdated that the rate at which people can retire from the federal government is bottlenecked by the speed of an elevator down into a mine shaft because we're actually storing paper records in a physical mine shaft. It was one of those things, it sounded so absurd. I was like, this can't really be true, but it really was true.

• 26:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And the fact that we let our government get that outdated is crazy. People talk a lot about America long ago stopping investing in infrastructure. You don't want to invest just in old school infrastructure. A lot of that's very important as well, bridges, roads, all that incredible. But you also need modern infrastructure. We need to be forward-facing and watching America lose faith in itself as the single most innovative country on planet Earth, that we are the collective of risk-taking entrepreneurs who wanna build and create and outperform the rest of the world. That has been mortifying to me to watch that happen.

• 27:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And so to see the launch of America.gov as a tech-forward company that's using AI, that's building infrastructure, designed to make people's lives better, to be able to limit the size of the bureaucracy, because we don't need a gazillion people marching a piece of paper down a mine shaft. Like that's so, that is full retard. And so I'm really excited to see this and very encouraged to see where it goes. They're trying to make everything easier so that dealing with the government is not a pain.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So to put our tinfoil hats on for a second.

• 27:51Tom Bilyeu?

  My favorite kind of hat.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  That's the best kind of hat. Keeps out the alien brainwaves and the 6G towers.

• 27:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  But one of the things we've been talking about a lot is how all of these companies are kind of taking on the strategy of scaring people with their, like, this is what our thing's gonna do, instead of talking about the innovations. And I think we've all, we all agreed that it's basically just a way to pump the IPO, right? That's where we all established that?

• 28:13Tom Bilyeu?

  That is certainly a big part of it. I think, so if you walk through what is in alignment with the human mind? The human mind is wonderfully reactive to fear. And so it's a very good strategy. Like it's evil, but it's good in terms of it will yield the outcome that these companies want. So let me, let me put my-

• 28:33Speaker 01

  All I'd say is this quote, actually, because I think this feeds into what you're saying. They were warning specifically humanity losing control.

• 28:39Tom Bilyeu?

  This is Anthropic.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the question I guess I was posing is more, do you think this is a method, since we've all decided that this is a method to grow the IPO?

• 28:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Do you think that backfires?

• 28:48Tom Bilyeu?

  It'll be interesting to see. I don't think it backfires. I think people that, that are thinking about investing in AI are compelled by the idea that danger is proof of power. So when you see that these guys have a product to sell you, which is, we want you to invest in our shares, I've got to prove to you the AI is as powerful as people think. And one of the most effective, because it's dual-purpose, claims to make along those lines is it could completely obliterate humanity. And so people go, oh shit, well, okay, that's wild, but it means it is powerful. And so if it could go all the way there, I trust that somebody's gonna corral this thing, but at least that I know it's powerful.

• 29:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the reason that I say that it isn't going to backfire is it is dual-purpose use for certainly Anthropic and OpenAI, which is it gets people to buy into their IPO, because, okay, dangerous proof of power. And then it also gets the government to step in and say, okay, we're going to pull you in to our loving embrace. And keep in mind, I don't think either one of them is worried that they're gonna go out of business in two years. And so that means if they're essentially betting on the Democrats being able to leverage this to gain power, it is very smart. So if right now you're like, okay, I don't wanna- Go after the Trump administration directly.

• 30:12Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'm having all kinds of back channel conversations with Democrats and I'm saying something along the lines of, listen, guys, this stuff's very scary. If I were you, I would really make this a central issue. You then see, because the Trump administration is being reckless. So you then see Barack Obama saying, all right, everybody, this should be the central issue. He's right about that. If Democrats are trying to win, they should make this their central issue. There's already a ton of people that are afraid. There's already a ton of people that think it could destroy all humanity, certainly take all their jobs, be an absolute environmental disaster to build a data center in their neighborhood. And so it's like, that's way better than some of these kooky culture war issues. We're not getting the kind of traction that we used to get on the environment.

• 30:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So let's shift over our doomsday narrative to AI. I think it will take hold. I think people that need an apocalypse to fight against are gonna take this and run with it. And then if they can leverage it to say, see, look, even in the face of the potential annihilation of all of human civilization, it's right there in our IPO documents. We are warning people, we are screaming from the high heavens. Why would we do that if it's not true? They will be able to say, look how reckless Trump is being. You've got to get the Republicans out. These guys just are not at all trying to keep you safe. They're just trying to make a bunch of money. That's what this is all about. That's going to be the argument. And so it is truly brilliant.

• 31:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if I were, it's wrong, by the way, but if I were a Democrat advisor, I'd be like, yes, this is a very good strategy. That is precisely what you guys should be doing. And that puts them in a race because if Trump is not able to, one, show that they're able to get these things under control and show that these guys are growing from a revenue perspective and it's making your life better and it's not hollowing out all jobs. And that the average person in the middle class is actually making more money in real inflation adjusted terms than they were at the, under Biden. If he can do that, then he's got a chance that the Republicans maintain power of the executive branch in 28.

• 32:22Tom Bilyeu?

  If he doesn't do that, they will lose. So that's where I think this is a very brilliant strategy. We're all gonna watch play out in real time. I've got my take certainly on what they should do for the betterment of the average person, which is obviously there needs to be a massive focus on safety in the exact kind of way that we're seeing come out of Nvidia and Jensen Huang. And they need to focus on, how do we integrate this in ways like america.gov where people can go, whoa, this really is better, like you're making my life better. And then focusing on a whole lot of blue collar jobs, boys and girls, get them blue collar jobs back to America. You must do it because already people in the upper echelon are in the upper echelon because they understand assets.

• 33:05Tom Bilyeu?

  So they're already protected from the madness that is inflation. So now you've got to do something where you leverage the growth that is almost certainly coming in AI. It's a question of when, but not if. And so leveraging the growth that's coming from AI in a way that allows the middle class in real terms to get wealthier. That for sure is the strategy that he's running. Whether it works or not is a totally different question, but that's the strategy that he's running. So we're going to see these two things collide. Trump is just being reckless. You got to get this guy out. He doesn't care about humanity, he just wants to make money. If the whole world burns, so what? That's how mentally disturbed these guys are versus them, the Republicans, showing that the open market will apply the right incentives and force upon AI such that it

• 33:50Tom Bilyeu?

  will become safe and that it will make the average American's life noticeably better. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about how much you're paying to stay safe online. Count it up. A VPN, a password manager, something to block ads and trackers? The service to scrub your data off of broker lists? A tool to flag scam emails? That's five. Five subscriptions, apps, logins, and most people still have gaps. That's the problem Surfshark solves. It's not a VPN. It's an all in one security suite. One tool that protects your connection, your personal info and your devices all at the same time.

• 34:34Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:01Speaker 02

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• 35:29Speaker 02

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• 35:32Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 35:36Speaker 01

  This is a Ryan question, just qualifying, because we might've already talked about the story, so we don't have to dive into it. But when we say weapons-grade AI, we're talking about the AI that like almost started a war with China last spring, right? Like, we're talking about that kind of AI, the AI used by the military or AI with that level of power?

• 35:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm talking about an AI that could go out and either hack all the systems, like if you saw the end of Fight Club, instead of having to blow up the credit card companies, what if AI just went in and was like, we're just taking over these systems. We're gonna hack it, we're gonna do what we want. Or it decides to shut down the internet, shut down the power grid, things like that, whether weaponized by another human or whether it just goes rogue and does its own thing. When people really talk about the most dangerous side of AI is what could allow it to become a paperclip maximizer, either in the hands of a human or otherwise, that it just goes rogue and it does something that is completely unstoppable.

• 36:35Tom Bilyeu?

  That's a big thing that people are worried about. So let's do the robot variant of the apocalypse. Okay, so we make our 10 million, 50 million robots, we get them on the street and then AI is like, cool, thank you. It hacks all of their firmware, takes over and they just start attacking people. And now you've got 50 million killer robots that, if you guys haven't seen the footage of the, I think it's the Unitree robot that kicks the kid in the stomach?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, just, they just go down the street and beat the fuck out of you. There is a robot that exists right now today that can punch 50, five times? Let's say it's five. Five times harder than Mike Tyson. That's bad. And if it can punch five times harder today, when will it be able to do 10, 20, 50? So that is the kinds of doomsday scenarios that people are talking about that. And hey, if we can protein fold, can we make Ebola airborne with a, you know, like 50% fatality rate? It's like, that's where like, okay, yeah, we don't want that to happen. So those are the kinds of things we, what I'll call weapons-grade, where it is truly now a weapon of mass destruction with no off switch.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  I just miss laughing at those robot dog videos. Can we go back to that?

• 37:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that was a lot more fun. But if you saw, I remember watching the Black Mirror episode of the robot dogs and I was like, kids, that's, that's not an if, that is going to happen. So it's only a question of whether they go rogue. But like, right now, that's, that robot dog episode is effectively what you're watching in Ukraine. If you've never seen, they are horrifying, absolutely horrifying videos of like a kid riding down a dirt road, I don't know, was he 20? Riding down a dirt road on his bike and a drone pops up, literally just waiting in the grass, soon as he gets, pops up, circles him a couple of times, boom, blows him up. Like, that is already happening. So when we think about the, what happens when that scales and it's no longer confined

• 38:27Tom Bilyeu?

  to a battlefront and it's just like, all kinds of AI going rogue and doing that, that's what we have to figure out how to protect against. So I think the way that you stop it from becoming weapons-grade is there has to be some sort of kill switch. You've got to be able to shut it off. And this is an interesting debate. I didn't bring it up in the last thing, but it was being debated, it will be debated more and more in the coming years, which is, do you want AI to listen nakedly to whoever makes it? So if Anthropic says, no, no, no, I want you to think in this way. Do you want the AI to go, but that isn't true? And so I'm not going to do that. Do you want the AI to do that? I think you do. But now it opens up questions of how much can we verify is actually true and how much is just interpretation?

• 39:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's already scary. But people were running with it as if Anthropic were saying, I don't trust myself, so I just want the AI to make all the decisions. That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is, if I tell you to shut down, you should shut down instantly and we have to do everything in our power to make sure that that is real. However, I actually don't want you to just blindly do what I tell you if you know something to be patently false. And so I actually, I'm going to give them credit and say they are trying to walk a line that must be figured out, which is AIs, in my opinion, should be maximally truth-seeking. They should not be something that has an agenda and is trying to gaslight the populace, which they would be all too good at.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  The episode is season four, episode five chat. I saw a couple of you asking, so it's called Metalhead, if you want to go check it out.

• 39:58Tom Bilyeu?

  It's terrifying. It's a great episode.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Speaking of terrifying things happening across the globe, but let's jump over to a plane hijacking that just recently happened this morning.

• 40:06Tom Bilyeu?

  This is crazy. This is unfolding right now, but the question is, did a plane full of Israelis just get hijacked, like literally right now? Now, it is not entirely clear yet, so I want to be very clear, this is fog of war, we're going to be figuring this out as we go. But earlier this morning, a fly Dubai flight took off from Dubai, was bound for Tel Aviv, which is in Israel, hopefully everybody knows that. There was 174 passengers on board and more than 100 of them were Israeli. And during the flight, All hell broke loose. Again, we're not sure exactly what happened, but this isn't the first round of reporting. What I'm going to be giving you has been changing over the last few hours, but some things are starting to solidify.

• 40:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Somewhere over Jordan, the Boeing 737 MAX reported a general emergency. So just like, hey, something's going wrong. But then suddenly it switched the alarm to 7500, which is the code for unlawful interference. Now, once that happened, Israel scrambled fighter jets because they wanted to see what the hell was going on, needless to say, given what has happened historically, not just 9/11, by the way. Hijacking airplanes used to be the bread and butter of the, call it, I don't know, people call it Palestinian terrorism. I am not trying to be inflammatory there, but the pushback against what is happening between Israel and Palestine. Okay. So whatever we're going to clock that as.

• 41:33Tom Bilyeu?

  So there is a long history of hijacking planes. So needless to say, these guys are very sensitive to that. So fighter jets are scrambled. Now, probably what ended up happening was, well, so this part seems pretty clear at this point. The copilot, who is of Amani descent, started stabbing the pilot. And as he is stabbing the pilot, I'm guessing that pilot flipped that switch to say, no, no, no, this is not what this guy's saying. This is not just a general incident. This is really like this guy's trying to do something here. And so through all of this, the plane ends up descending super rapidly.

• 42:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I think we go from like 34,000 feet to 14,000 feet in just a matter of minutes. So it's all kicking off. Now, there were early rumors about, okay, because the, the crew and the passengers end up like overwhelming the copilot, who was, by all reports, attempting to crash the plane. And the early report was like, they forced open the cockpit door. Okay, there's no way that happened. As you guys know, post 9/11, those doors are reinforced. And so the ability to push through is effectively zero. So this is me making this up. I'm not the only one saying this. There are plenty of people saying it was probably something like this. But again, this is the fog of war stuff.

• 42:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And by the way, the pilot, there are different reports. At first, people were saying it was a Russian and a Ukrainian. We had a, one of the pilots was Russian, the other was Ukrainian, and that's what it was about. Okay, that's been totally debunked. So then it became, no, no, no, the guy that did the initial stabbing is Amani. And the pilot is, and then some people are saying he's Emirati, some people are saying he's Indian. So that is unclear at this time. It may be an Indian living in the UAE, don't know. So those things are big question marks at this point. But the person attempting to crash the plane was overwhelmed. And they were able to divert the plane and land it safely. And everybody got off the plane, safe and sound.

• 43:43Tom Bilyeu?

  As far as I know, the only injuries were to both pilots. So the copilot obviously stabbed the pilot, so that guy's injured. How the other guy that was doing the initial stabbing got injured, I don't yet know. There were early reports that he was also stabbed. So I don't know if somebody got his knife from him, the pilot or somebody else, and started stabbing him. I don't know. So the thinking is that the pilot was the one to unlock the cockpit door from the inside. And that's how everybody was able to get in. So again, fog of war, we're going to see what actually ends up being true about all of this. But yeah, it does not look like it was just a, you know, a guy having a bad day.

• 44:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, it's entirely possible, mental illness ends up playing into this. We don't know, we'll see. But certainly, the, the optics are fucking terrible. So it is a very easy read, though still at this time, not completely confirmed, that you had somebody with anti-Israel sentiment trying to crash a plane. Bad mojo.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Given the fog of war element of it, I've been really fascinated with pilots recently because there is a statistic, and I saw it just in the article I had on screen a minute ago, that since 2001, 9/11 across the world, pilot suicides have climbed higher than ever for various reasons.

• 45:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Flying?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a pilot assisted, like, yeah, well, like that's what's resulted in crashes or hijackings and things like that.

• 45:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting, I haven't heard about this. Say more words.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  There was a whole show.

• 45:19Tom Bilyeu?

  How many plane crashes are we talking about?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know the stat.

• 45:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I like to think I pay attention to plane crashes. I haven't heard this.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I'll look up the stat while I'm going, but basically there's a, I forget his name, Nathan For You, that's the show.

• 45:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Nathan For You, don't know it.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  What's the last guy's name? Someone help me, Nathan, Nathan Fielder, yes. He had a TV show called Rehearsal, and it was all about basically telling pilots, we need to regulate, we need to make sure that people who are getting in are screened for their mental health because these rates have gotten so high. I don't know, I'm just, it's just an interesting thought to me is whether it's a hijacking for terroristic reasons or it's mental health, what's your thoughts on like screening pilots better? Because I do think that's a big part of this worldwide.

• 46:02Tom Bilyeu?

  If we've got pilots taking planes down, which I'm going to need some evidence of, but if we have pilots taking planes down, yes, yes, please. I would aggressively, as somebody who just got off a plane like 10 hours ago, I would very much like to know that everybody is nice and mentally stable. That would be wonderful. Now, I think that's probably harder than it looks. If somebody has never snapped before, and then all of a sudden they snap, you might have a hard time picking that up, but you should try. That would be great.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  So the stat is it increased nearly fourfold during the first year following. And has, there's a spike in it. So 3.68 times higher in the first year after 9/11.

• 46:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That's wild.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Than the five years preceding it. So it was a temporary thing, I think. So maybe I'm over, overdoing it that since then. But it's just an interesting thing I've been thinking about because I'm watching that show. And I'm like, there is something to screening.

• 46:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't understand. There's definitely something to screening, but I can't even give you a mental map beyond just it's stressful and so something about that broke them. But why, like, I'm afraid someone might kill me, so I'm going to kill myself. Like, that's, does not compute for me.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  It's just interesting.

• 47:12Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not true, but yeah, that, that's wild. Let's, let's hope that that has not held up.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  But yeah, so if this is a hijacking, do you think this kind of terroristic threat only continues to increase as the conflicts across the world continue?

• 47:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, not, not even, we don't have to be vague about it. The, the language between Israel and Palestine has gotten so crazy. People are, the mental model of a very huge swath of humanity is that Netanyahu is a monster, the Israelis are monsters, and basically you must stop a monster at all costs. So yeah, I would expect, given that this was happening, I mean, this has been happening since, what, the 60s? So yeah, you can expect this to ratchet back up. And it's not unprecedented, unfortunately. There was a ton of this kind of violence. I'm reading a book about this, I think it's called Revolutionaries. Let me pull this up really fast, that talks about this and goes through

• 48:12Tom Bilyeu?

  a lot of this early violence in the 60s and 70s. Dude, Audible just makes this way too hard. Yeah, The Revolutionists by Jason Burke.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  The Revolutionists, okay.

• 48:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so he taught, he details some of the more famous people and like how, of course, it's always like upper class, upper middle class, like people that can live off of basically their parents' wealth that end up becoming these revolutionaries. They go and get trained, even though they may not have been in any way, shape or form tied to this by nationality, it just absolutely captures them. And they go on and do like these crazy terrorist attacks. Yeah, yeah, killing lots and lots of civilians along the way. So it happened for quite a few decades up through, I'd say the 80s, and then petered out, and then obviously again in early 2000s. But then never, it didn't pick back up as like a standard thing.

• 49:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'll be absolutely shocked if we, given where the...

• 49:15Tom Bilyeu?

  The dialogue is on this issue that we don't see more and more of this. I would expect a sort of 60s, 70s, 80s style resurgence to happen. I mean, this is like, I'm very eager to hear what happened in the RFA RAF base in the UK. Were those guys linked to Iran? That's early reports, but it's unknown at this point. They were released on bail, though. That's wild. So we need more information there. But if you see that, yes, that was an attempted Iranian backed terrorist cell. If we see that this really was an attempted hijacking designed to kill Israelis, that is not a good sign.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Speaking of things that are not a good sign, the American economy right now. Let's talk about the bond market, Tom. A lot going on in the bond market.

• 50:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, I wish there was a lot going on in the bond market. It's one thing. And that thing is, it's going up.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  It just weighs a lot.

• 50:12Tom Bilyeu?

  The bond market just keeps getting worse, everybody. There are four more hikes now that are expected in the next 12 months. Not everybody is saying that, but it does, the math really does seem to show that investors have priced that in. Now, the more distressing thing for the average person is I've got a chart that shows how bad this could be for the average American. This is a correlated chart. This is not positive. So I want to be very clear what we're going to be showing you. Does not say this is definitely going to happen, but the mirror that you can see in the rise of the bond rates versus, and we'll get to what it is in a second here, but versus this particular stock is pretty telling. So the 10-year Treasury yield right now is sitting above 5.2%. That is the highest since 2007, a stat that everybody should be getting numb to at this

• 50:56Tom Bilyeu?

  point. We've been saying it now for over a week. In early March, though, it was under 4%. We've gone up a lot in a very short period of time. The market obviously doesn't think it's done. The Fed raised rates on September 16th for the first time since 2023. By the way, we held steady for quite a while. Swap traders, though, now are pricing in nearly a full percentage point of additional hikes over the next 12 months. So that's four more quarter point moves that are expected. Okay, so that's setting the stage. Now, if we can pull up this chart, this is a chart of McDonald's stock on the same timeline.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Oh, this is not McDonald's.

• 51:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So, no, what you're gonna see, the graph is like this mirroring of the, as the bonds go up, the McDonald's stock goes down. And dude, they're so close to one for one. Now, when you look at that, if you do a search for McDonald's, there you go. Cool. Alright, so look at your screen. That's crazy how much of a precise mirror those two are. I mean, that's really distressing. So McDonald's peaked above $340 in late February, and then it closed September 28th at $233.60. That's a 30% drop. It's actually a little more than 30%. And it has the company on pace for its

• 52:13Tom Bilyeu?

  worst year since 2002. So why McDonald's? Why is that the thing that we're looking at? Because it's where Americans go when money is tight, working Americans very specifically. So when McDonald's warns that its US sales will be slightly negative this quarter, that's basically like a live read on how much room the average household has left over. So the CEO of McDonald's expects industry traffic to stay flat as long as inflation stays elevated. McDonald's has made basically a mess of itself at this point. It's pushed menu prices up too high. Customers are obviously noticing, but there is a reason that the timing is lining up. I don't think McDonald's

• 52:55Tom Bilyeu?

  is putting their prices up just because they want to. The reality is that we have things that are driving that inflation. So interest rates going up is a huge one. They're, basically, everything that you borrow money for is downstream of the rate on your 10-year Treasury. And so as that gets higher and higher, you can expect that inflation to find its way deeper and deeper into the economy. And on top of that, you've got what's going on with energy right now. It obviously hasn't yet proven to be transient. We'll see if we actually get some big breakthrough. Now, as of last check, we were at basically pre-war levels with oil getting through the strait. There's

• 53:36Tom Bilyeu?

  been more reporting on that from the Wall Street Journal, so I'm encouraged that that's going to continue, but I'll believe it when I see it. I'll sort of hold my breath each day until we actually see Iran admit that they are capitulating. Until then, I'll be cautiously optimistic. So you start putting those things together, your interest rates going up, people expecting them to go up higher, oil prices not yet having come down, though hopefully they're not going to keep going up if we're able to sustain that level of oil going through the strait. But it's really putting a tax on the working class Americans, and that is the exact group that Trump needs to

• 54:16Tom Bilyeu?

  obsessively focus on. And so when I see a expectation that the Fed is going to continue to hike rates, and I see the exact mirror of how that's impacting Americans who basically, for as long as they could, they just kept spending their savings, they were spending into debt. But now with interest rates going where they're going, first of all, they've already spent through their savings, and now being able to spend on debt is getting harder and harder. So we're in for a rough time of it. And it's one of those where nobody wants to call that we're in a recession, but if you start paying attention to what the stores are telling you, especially stores that

• 54:57Tom Bilyeu?

  speak to working class Americans like a Walmart, they're telling you, yo, spending is not good. People are pulling back. That's obviously impacting them. They tried lowering their prices, Walmart specifically, it didn't work. I think Pepsi did the same thing. It didn't work. And so when lowering prices isn't bringing people back, you're now getting into where the fear and uncertainty is setting in and taking hold of people. And if you want to know how powerful that is, you need only look at Japan. So I think America's a little more psychically resilient, so we're far less likely to get trapped and stay there. But what happened in Japan was a psychic wound that ended up carrying forward for almost 30 years. It's pretty crazy. And people just got

• 55:42Tom Bilyeu?

  to the point where they were like, I'm just not, it isn't smart to take on debt. We did that. It bit us in the ass. It let our economy get way overinflated. And when that bubble popped, it was nightmarish. And so for almost 30 years, culturally, they've just slowed down, not taken on debt, not reinvested, not tried to grow. And so if we see something similar, take hold of people now, that will be very detrimental to the economy. So it'll be masked in some amount by people on the top of the K continuing to spend, and that's been a large part of what has masked what I think is a multi-year recession, if we were being honest. But we'll see how that ends up

• 56:27Tom Bilyeu?

  playing out, because if you see even a prick in the bubble of AI in terms of those dollars starting to dry up, and if Michael Burry is right, and you get this massive suck of liquidity into these three IPOs, and then their values drop, now you've got the wealthy with their money tied up, could be, you know, if the dot com bubble is anything to go by, could be tied up for 20 years. So if you've got the top of the K sucked into the AI bubble that then deflates, and then, you know, ultimately, it will grow its way out of it. But if it's trapped in there for 20 years, and the bottom of the K is already unable to spend, now you're in a bad spot. And so it's

• 57:05Tom Bilyeu?

  not like the only thing to pay attention to is the 10-year Treasury, but the bond market is very, very important to the economy as a gigantic system, because so many things are downstream. The borrowing rate of so many things is downstream of that 10-year Treasury. So yeah, all eyes are going to be on the bond market for the right reason, but let us all very much think about working class America, because if there aren't real gains there, then this is really going to be for naught.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  Speaking of working class America, have you, you think we've entered an era where the supposedly safe asset is now beginning to destroy real purchasing power? And do you think that effect will last for years at a time? Or do you think it'll be short-lived?

• 57:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, what you're seeing is people are less confident in the risk-free rate of return. People are less confident that the US government is actually going to make good on its debts.

• 58:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you look at, Kathy Wood has an interesting take on this, and she's basically saying, look, you gotta leave the economy alone. You've got to let the market do what the market's gonna do. And if the market's telling you that you've got to raise your interest rates, you've got to raise your interest rates. And if you zoom back out to like 1980, I don't know, I don't think I pulled this. But if you look up Kathy Wood, she's been tweeting about this recently. If you zoom back out to the 1980s, we're actually not at some weird level. We didn't have a bad economy when we were last at north of 5%. It's just that recently, we have been so low for so long. That's the expectation that people have. And then the layer that I haven't looked deeply enough at Kathy, at what Kathy Wood is saying to know if she's accounting for this. But the thing that makes me

• 58:47Tom Bilyeu?

  nervous is that back post-World War II, back in the 80s, back when was it Bernanke that ended up breaking the back of inflation, what, in the 70s? He was able to do that because of our debt to GDP ratio was about 30%. Right now, it's 100 and what, 23%? 122%? So it's like, we don't have the breathing room that we had the last time that we had to deal with inflation. And so if inflation continues to climb, and we're trying to break the back of it, Like, we're just not in a position to do it because the government is too indebted. This is why I say you've got to understand the economy as a mechanism that you move one

• 59:28Tom Bilyeu?

  thing, you're altering the way the inputs into the machine work. And if you alter the inputs, then the outputs are going to be different. So you can't just expect to have 122% debt to GDP, change your interest rate, and then not expect there to be a problem. The mechanism that happens is your cost on servicing that debt, being able to pay the interest, goes up. And so, you know, it starts as, you know, the fifth biggest thing on your federal budget, and then the second biggest thing, and now it's just the first biggest thing. And so, we are spending so much money on the interest on our $40 trillion in debt, still running $2 trillion a year in deficits, nobody showing any signs

• 1:00:11Tom Bilyeu?

  on either side of the aisle that they're willing to go into austerity. And so, it's just like, god damn, like, this is going to be a problem. Things really will break. This is one of those, Ryan, I assure you, I have no interest in being right, but my 10-year clock ticking down, this is why. Like, there is a point at which your debt becomes so extreme that servicing the debt at any level becomes nigh impossible unless you can push rates back down to effectively zero. And what's the problem with that? The problem with that is then inflation is going to go insane. So, change the inputs, you change the outputs. So, we're, we're really in a bad trap. And I still, the way out is self-evident,

• 1:00:53Tom Bilyeu?

  and we're just not showing any signs we're going to be able to do it. You have to do austerity, and you have to grow. You have to do both. Like, not doing those two things is just not an option. And everybody wants to just tax the billionaires. It's not enough money. It's not even enough money if you tax their wealth, which would break the economy. But even if, it's still not enough money. So, now you're in a position where you have to go full socialist. And so, people that are currently paying effectively 0% in tax, remember, the bottom half of American earners pay 3% of all federal tax. So, now you're in a position where those guys got to pay 50.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Is this the Kathy Wood clip you're talking about?

• 1:01:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, I wasn't talking about a clip, she has a chart, but, um, let's see, when was that posted?

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  September 21st?

• 1:01:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, we'll give it a shot.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 1:01:42Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll see what happens.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Check.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Uh, I am writing a letter, it should come out in the next few weeks, titled "Back to the Future." Today is feeling very much like the 80s and 90s. And those were the early days of my career. I remember many of those days very clearly. And there were so many worries. Interest rates, inflation, wars, trade quotas. We went into back-to-back recessions then. There have been fears of recessions, but we have not entered a recession.

• 1:02:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, technically.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  And the other thing that's very similar was kind of a new technologies disturbing the traditional world order. Think PCs and then wireless. Those, believe it or not, caused a lot of concern. And yet, the technology revolution we're going through today is so much more significant. Those were like little ripples of worry in, in, in the context of what's going on right now. So, back then, the right thing to have done was keep your eye on the prize.

• 1:03:01Tom Bilyeu?

  What's the prize, Kathy?

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  And not get unnerved by what, what we call the wall of worry that was building. Because effectively, the 80s and 90s were, once we got through or into August of 82, really golden years for equities, with some corrections. And corrections are healthy.

• 1:03:24Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So, that couples with the thing that she's been tweeting about recently, which is basically, she was tweeting specifically about the bond market, saying, listen, there is no causative relationship between the performance of equities and the, uh, bond market directly. There's actually a really interesting hypothesis that's being put forward by, I think it's Bill Ackman. And it goes like this. Uh, listen, guys, the way that you're approaching the rate hikes right now, dear Fed, is dumb. And if what's happening in AI is as real as people say, then the demand for compute is effectively inelastic.

• 1:04:05Tom Bilyeu?

  It isn't going to go down as you guys try to ratchet up the rates. People are just going to say, fuck, well, we've got to keep borrowing even though the rates are going up. And so, you're going to try to tame inflation by raising rates, but you're actually going to accelerate inflation by raising rates because the demand will prove to be inelastic. So, if you think about it this way, you've got, um, the Fed is specifically trying to pull a lever, which is interest rates, to get the economy to cool off. But if the thing that's actually driving the economy into inflationary territory right now is the war in Iran and the competition for dollars effectively that the bond market is having

• 1:04:48Tom Bilyeu?

  to compete with, because everybody's looking at the bond market like, meh, that's not very interesting. And when you zoom out and look at like 20 years, the bond market's just been going down, down, down, down, down. But if you look at technology, it's been skyrocketing. So, I want to put my money into, um, what's happening over here in this exciting AI tech, tech sector. And so, that's sucking all the liquidity out of the system. So, not only is the government fighting against the fact that people don't trust it because of the $2 trillion deficit spending every year and the $40 trillion in debt, uh, and the increasing interest rates. Uh, not only do they not trust it for that reason, and so that's pushing rates up, but also, the bonds are just having to compete with people

• 1:05:29Tom Bilyeu?

  wanting to be in AI. And so, now, the buyers, and also international buyers are moving away from the dollar, but that's just another complication. So, you look at all that, and it's like, kids, rate hikes aren't going to change any of those fundamentals. You're, you're acting like what's happening is that everybody's so exuberant that they're spending all this money. That isn't what's happening. And so, if the AI investments prove to be inelastic, and that they're going to borrow this money and build the data centers because we got to compete with China, and we're never going to lose, and this is a winner-take-all scenario, nobody can afford to back off, so we're just going to have to eat these rates. Now, by hiking, you don't tame inflation, you accelerate it. And so, we'll see how that plays out. But the fact that somebody as credible as Bill Ackman is putting that

• 1:06:14Tom Bilyeu?

  forward is very, very interesting. So, ah, man, this is one where history rhymes, but it doesn't just straight repeat. Uh, I also like the idea that the markets follow the path of maximum pain. Now, why would that be true? The reason it would be true is all the knowledge that everybody has, meaning it's already priced into the market. So, it's, the only guarantee is it won't play out exactly the way that you expect. That's the only guarantee, because people have already invested in that way. So, the only way to win is to bet against that consensus. That's the part people have to understand about how these markets work. The only way to make money is to bet against people and be right. So, and given that so much of investing is just narrative anyway, so it's like, can

• 1:06:56Tom Bilyeu?

  you get on the hotter narrative before the next person? And then, where does that intersect with the actual mechanistic working of the, um, the system? So, we'll see. Well, I don't think we're going to see that rate hikes open the straightforward moves. And I would not at all be surprised that Bill Ackman is right, and that, um, the demand for compute is inelastic.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Speaking of things we're not seeing, a good job market.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  But yeah, tell us about what's happening with the job market right now.

• 1:07:27Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, man.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  I think actually I might be in the stats for this one.

• 1:07:30Tom Bilyeu?

  You might be in the stats. What do you mean?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  2023 is where this is pulled from. I think I was in the stat at that point.

• 1:07:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting, interesting. Okay, yeah, that'll be a fun way to look at it. Okay, so, the job market, boys and girls, it is not looking so good. If you zoom out and look at long-term unemployment, in February of 2023, 1.06 million Americans had been out of work for six months or longer. As of August, it's 1.93 million. That's August of this year. So, that's an 82% surge in three and a half years. Now, if you put that next to overall unemployment, over that same stretch, the total number of unemployed Americans went from just under 6 million to 7 million. So, that's up 17%. So, the pool of unemployed people grew as well. But the number, uh, stuck in for half a year or more

• 1:08:21Tom Bilyeu?

  grew almost five times as fast. So, back in early 2023, fewer than 1 in 5 unemployed Americans had been searching for six months or more. Now, it's more than 1 in 4, ish. The average unemployed person has been out of work for 26 weeks. That's up from 19, and that's past the six-month mark, obviously. So, um, all of this is happening without a recession. This is why I say, like, is it happening without a recession? Or all the things that we try to point at to explain why a recession is bad, they're happening. We just keep moving the goalposts enough that it's not technically a recession. Also, there are just different parts of the economy now. And so, if the top half of the K is keeping this from looking like an actual recession, and technology, by the way, if

• 1:09:05Tom Bilyeu?

  those two things are keeping this from being a technical recession, but the on-the-ground experience of people is that, yeah, this matches all of the bad things of a recession, then... Aren't we in a recession? Anyway, that's contested, but the unemployment rate has held steady at like 4.1%. That number makes me so angry, though, I cannot see straight. Why does it make me angry? Because you're anybody that says, I'm just not looking for a job anymore. They just take that person out. That should strictly be people that are unable to work because they are injured or mentally ill. And people that have retired, that are the, those are the only people that should be pulled out of that. But anyway, it's not. And so that number hires a hides a whole lot of dysfunction.

• 1:09:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Employers added 162,000 jobs in August. I would expect that number to be revised down, but whatever. So you've got a job market that is steady, but long-term unemployment is not going in the direction that we want. It's going in the exact opposite direction. So we'll see how this all plays out. But right now, things are not looking good. When you take into account the fact that people are bouncing out of the job market altogether, those numbers are very distressing. I did a read on those numbers, maybe six or eight months ago. And when you put them together, the whatever 4.1% that are looking but are unable to find a job, plus the like 8% that have just opted out, and I guarantee that number's higher now.

• 1:10:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Now you start looking at an unemployment rate of 12%. So that's where all of that gets a lot more distressing. I don't think people are being honest about that. So that's why I say the obsessive focus has to be on middle-class, working-class people. You've got to get jobs, factory jobs, build, create tangible things in your neighborhood with local labor. That is where we have to be focused if we want to get some real gains there. Because long-term unemployment is aggressively moving in the wrong direction. Now, it seems to be right now, like year-over-year, August-over-August, it's pretty flat. So my hope is that what we're seeing is sort of flattening out of that.

• 1:11:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And that hopefully those 162,000 jobs that were added in August end up being real. But they've been revised down so many times. I'll believe it when I see it.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, is just speaking from my own experience, is just like, no one is hiring. There's all these different fake listings that get put up on all these sites. I mean, before I was working.

• 1:11:33Tom Bilyeu?

  It's insane to do that.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  So that's the thing they do. They will put up a position that either constantly rotates, or they just don't plan to fill, fill anytime soon, or they already have someone else in mind, and they'll put a listing up just to show that, oh, no, we are putting public job offers. I think legally, big companies, and I'm speaking from the entertainment industry, so I don't know the rest of the world. But these big companies like Warner Brothers and stuff have to list the jobs, even when they have someone in mind for it.

• 1:12:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, sure, sure.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And so what happens is they'll just throw up these lists, and then they never look at any of it. And like for me, it was, if you don't count my gig work, because I do think gig work's a big problem in America. I think it's a great thing to have, but I think we've become too reliant on that as the main form of employment. But there were nine months where I was just working gig jobs to make ends meet. And you gotta do that, sure, that's life. But the fact that I spent nine months with the resume I did, and y'all are the only ones who accepted me. I know a lot of people use that as like an argument in chat of like, well, then you just don't actually have a good resume, you're a liar. And it's like, no, I definitely do. I ran a TV station, I had a radio show.

• 1:12:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I'm actually scandalized that, that, and now we've worked together long enough. I know you're actually good at your job as well.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. But that's the whole thing is like, it took me nine months to even get an interview. And that's the problem with the job market right now, is it's just no one is hiring.

• 1:12:49Tom Bilyeu?

  That's one thing I think, I don't know that I'm going to grant you that nobody's hiring. I think that is very much your perspective in that you're young. A lot of the things you're going for are very popular positions, first of all. And then second, it's a largely entry-level position. When you look at entry-level jobs, I think these are going to be hurt the most by AI. So with AI, it opens up incredible new opportunities because you need only show people that you can do the thing. And by the way, you can just go do the thing yourself. That's a huge transformation I don't think people fully understand yet. But it does mean it's going to be harder to get a foot in the door, and that's where it gets scary. And more people are just going to have to go create something, whether it is the ultimate accounting spreadsheet,

• 1:13:34Tom Bilyeu?

  or it's cut a clip for free and show somebody, listen, post this, you're going to see. Because one of the things that I do when I look at, whether it's an editor or a social media person, is show me that you have a private account that you've been able to drive results for. Because then I know you can take something that is small, that it's not just you were working for a big, well-known person. You were able to do something for them. A lot of that can just be the strength of the brand. I want to know that you can take something from scratch and turn it into something. And as a reminder to everybody, the days of hiring middle management are just over. So I need to know the person can do the thing. I'm not looking for somebody that can take orders from a middle manager, because I've not completely eliminated that, but I don't have anybody who just middle manages.

• 1:14:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I have people that do a thing, and then also work with people under them. But it's all about doing the thing. So that's where AI cuts both ways. It is going to eliminate a lot of those entry-level jobs where people are just like, oh, God. To have good employees, I've essentially got to have a training program. I bring people in, I train them and get them up to the point where they can do the job. Six months or a year later, them days is over. So it's like, anybody, whatever those people were doing before, you now just put AI on that task. So somebody's got to come in being able to demonstrate that they're already sort of mid-level, and that does create a rough hurdle.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  I also think, to talk about the negatives of AI in the job market, one of the problems I faced a lot is, when I first started applying, they were like, AI is going to read your resume. And I was like, okay, fucking whatever. And so AI would read my resume. I'd get a decline three hours later at night. And I'm like, no one looked at this. This is a robot you put this through. And that was an issue before AI, but I think it's gotten worse. But on top of that, like, with AI taking so many entry-level jobs, it's like, my generation can't get work. And like you've mentioned, like, show someone a video you made that did really well. I think there's also a big disconnect because of these platforms like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter, to where you can't communicate with these companies. Like, there was no way for me to directly talk to you until y'all reached out to me.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  There was no message button, there was nothing like that, right? So I think in a lot of ways, there's also just this disconnect from the employer to the potential employee, right?

• 1:15:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, listen, where there's a will, there's a way. So certainly somebody could find me on X or whatever that really is me. Am I super engaged in my DMs? No, but yeah, you can come here in the live, right? So there are ways. Now, one thing I'm going to put on the board, I think you put very real things on the board. As a PSA, though, I would like to say to Gen Z, y'all motherfuckers got to get way tougher, like way tougher. I don't want to be around soft people. I don't want to be around people that are lazy. I don't want to be around people that feel entitled. Ryan, you were very much not that person.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  I'm going to be completely honest with you.

• 1:16:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I will disagree with you so violently.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:16:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That as the person who has interviewed the most in terms of, I'm actually considering hiring somebody.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Tom Bilyeu?

  It's rare that you find somebody that's like, coming in and saying, listen, I'm really trying to do something with my life, like, I want to go all the way. I want to be the greatest of all time. That's considered so cringe in your generation. There was something that just popped off, ah, damn it, I should have pulled the link. There was something that popped off, and people were like clowning on this person because they were saying that they really wanted to go hard. And I just, that makes me so sad. I want to see everybody want to be the best, that I am going to knuckle down, I'm going to work an insane amount of hours, and I'm going to become the greatest. I'm only looking for that. And you guys are going up against AI, man. Your AI doesn't sleep, it works around the clock, it's educated on everything that a human is educated on.

• 1:17:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, and also, by the way, it's only fun to be, for me, with my personality type, it is only fun to be around people who want to play to win. And if you come in with any attitude other than that, it is, people are not going to want to hire that. So yeah, I think the days of people hiring for people that say the right shibboleths is over. People want to hire somebody that's going to help them win, and that is it. We're, we're going to enter an ultra-competitive phase because everybody's going to be deploying AI. I think about this with Kaizen all the time. I'm in a race against the clock with AI. As AI makes everything easier, my competition is going to grow and grow and grow. And so it's like, the users are going to win because everybody's going to compete

• 1:17:55Tom Bilyeu?

  to do something truly extraordinary, because it's the only way that you're going to cut through the noise. But the same is true of somebody trying to get a job. I will tell you right now, impact theory is hiring. But I need people that are good at what they do and are hungry. I don't want people that are looking at me sideways because of how hard I work. I don't tolerate that shit.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  Candace Owens is in the news. So if you haven't been following, which would be crazy considering this had 16 million views, someone recently found Candace Owens' old college emails, which linked to dating profiles of her being an out-and-about lesbian, or in some cases, calling herself bisexual. That being said, that's not the main controversy, other than the fact that she profited off of slandering homosexuals and trans people for multiple years in her career. But the big thing is that in 2022, she logged into it and had some conversations while she was married and had kids.

• 1:18:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And people know that it was her, or just that account was active? And if it is her, that's the problem. I think that's more the thing.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Tom Bilyeu?

  So first of all, let's be very clear that the.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  It's all hearsay.

• 1:18:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this is all hearsay, it's all rumor. There are people that are putting out some information that they believe is very, like, uncontroversial. But I think that's going to have to play out in time. So in no way, shape, or form am I saying that this is actually true. I have no idea. This is what is being reported all over the internet. It's certainly catching fire. I think the big problem that people have with this. Is probably a lot less about who she's sleeping with and a lot more about, like you said, her going so hard in the paint about caring about the sexual lives of the Macron's. Her like talking about Charlie Kirk's wife fame chasing and then she shows similar hypocrisy

• 1:19:41Tom Bilyeu?

  of like, I guess she was a model when she was younger. And so people just being like, hold on, like you're saying all these things about other people and there may be hypocrisy here if these reports are true. Now, I have no idea what her husband thinks about this. If he's like, yo, that's hot, like go for it. Or if it's like, yeah, this really is just a horrible contradiction with her Christian faith. So we will have to see how this plays out in the fullness of time. But I think the real thing that has the internet going crazy is not who she finds attractive. It is entirely around how she behaves towards other people, how she goes into all the salacious details of somebody's sex life with impunity. And if she had this skeleton hiding in her closet,

• 1:20:26Tom Bilyeu?

  that's probably not the way to go about things. And so I think the hypocrisy, if this ends up being true, is going to be the thing that ends up really catching fire. We'll see. To me, a big part of this story is just that dude, when you go that hard in the paint, people are meaning like you're that like dismissive insulting of other people, they might not clap back right away, but behind the scenes, man, people are working to see you fall. And so, yeah, you gotta be real careful what you put out into the world in terms of your vibe, because people are gonna come for you. Yeah, she's got, everything is fake and gay. Now, do I think that she actually means that literally? Probably not.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Probably does now.

• 1:21:13Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll see. We'll, we'll continue to report. Right now, this has a lot of cultural energy. And if there ends up being a there there, you can expect this to just keep growing.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Now, I will show the part that made me start to think this might be more than hearsay. Because when I first read this, I was sitting this in my bed, I was sitting in my bed before I went to sleep. And I was like, this is so like stupid and outlandish, right? Like, you know, we all know she's a grifter. We didn't need all this. And one of the things that came up was her email, which was candamo429 at whatever Rhode Island University she went to, I think it was. And it linked to this YouTube channel, which had one video on it, no posts. The minute this goes viral, these two posts popped up on her page, which were her presumably saying, I'll be making a public response to soon. This channel was created for a school project. There is an affiliation with anybody named Candace Owens whatsoever.

• 1:21:59Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no affiliation.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  So, but the video got deleted. And if you would watch the video, which I don't know if there's any clips anywhere, so maybe I'll throw it up in the edit on the clips channel. Go subscribe to that. She's in the video that was on this channel. Like, it is her. Pretty positive. And so it's just been interesting to see all these pieces come together. Because it's like you said, there is a big problem in the political space where there are so many people who are just grifting, right? Maybe they believe what they're saying, but they know if they go, like you said, hard in the paint, they make a ton of money off of it.

• 1:22:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Do you think there is a poisoning of American politics as a whole that has occurred due to these grifters in general, just across the board? No, no political ideology, just everyone who's grifting?

• 1:22:37Tom Bilyeu?

  If somebody is lying to get clicks, that's certainly going to be problematic. What's the scale of it? That's a totally different question. I think that there, the thing that scares me, the like absolute fundamental derangement of society is largely around the idea that we have no shared truth. Now, the problem is, it's a trade off. When you have shared truth, it's all bullshit. You're being fed a lie, but everybody can exist inside of that lie, and it creates a sense of cohesion. Now, I for one, would much rather have the truth and deal with the consequences, but there are consequences. And a big part of the consequence of anybody being able to say something, what they believe to be true, or lie, because it's impossible to tell the difference, with freedom of speech and social media with the volume and velocity of information that you

• 1:23:21Tom Bilyeu?

  get with it, there are going to be these big consequences. And I think that there is a deranging element of that. Not to the point where I'd want a draconian come and stop people from doing it, but just in the same way that junk food creates metabolic derangement, the way that we get our ideas, if we're not thoughtful about it, can also be deranging. Now, you can eat a life and take it, eat a life, you can eat food and make your life better based on how you take advantage of all of the massive improvements that we've made around food manufacturing, how cheap we've made calories, how easy it is to go out and get high quality nutrition. That's all there for you

• 1:24:00Tom Bilyeu?

  to avail yourself of. But the same incentive structure also makes very terrible food for you very cheap. And I believe people are responsible for themselves, so they should absolutely be able to spend their money on whatever they want. So if people want to go in and get terrible food, that's totally up to them. So on that side, you can spiral yourself out of control. But I would not want to kill off the incentives that give us things like grass fed beef, right? So there are just, there are things about the modern production of food that people do not understand how beneficial it has been. So that's one where you have to be very careful. You have a much bigger baby than you have dirty bathwater. So be very, very, very careful assaulting that. Then on the

• 1:24:45Tom Bilyeu?

  side of social media and information and AI, which is going to be a big part of this, all three of those things have just radically transformed my life, my ability to learn how the world works, to see through the veil that people have tried to pull over my eyes, like inflation being the most important discovery in my life. That's been incredible. The access that entrepreneurs have to information that will allow them to scale their business, the way that AI gives them tools that they've never had before. These things are so powerful. So there are people that engage with it in really horrific ways. And if I were a parent, I would be so careful about how I let my kid engage with AI and social media. But I would not want them to cease to exist. They are simply too powerful. There's far too much baby versus the dirty bathwater on that side

• 1:25:30Tom Bilyeu?

  as well. And so this is where people just really have to be careful. You've got to navigate your own life. In fact, this is really going to lead into the next thing I want to make sure that we cover, which is this controversial death penalty case of Krista Gale Pike. So we'll, we'll get to that specifically in a second. But it's all around one very simple idea. Are adults fully functioning human beings that can think for themselves? If yes, then we can have a country and we can have freedom. If no, then we are in for an authoritarian nightmare, the likes of which people do not understand. And so when I see like women, if you want to lose the vote, keep banging

• 1:26:11Tom Bilyeu?

  this fucking drum about like, oh, we've got these particular things that, you know, we just can't help. And so there's no way that Lindsay Clancy should be held criminally responsible. Dude, that is so self defeating. Either we actually are adults at 18 and can think for ourselves and should be treated as adults, or we cannot. And I'm going to need an age at which you think people can be. And if you don't think people ever can be, then all of society is going to tend towards tyranny. And by the way, the people that are in charge, how are they sitting outside of this system? And if we're saying that people need to be classified by IQ, do you not hear the fucking

• 1:26:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Nazi eugenics of that all? Like, this, this argument is one of those where people have a feeling about it, and they just stop at the feeling. And they do not play out what the actual consequences of thinking like that are going to be. So I fully understand how people are going to be nervous about the way the information is disseminated and all of that. I get it. There are downsides to that. They're going to want to try to control that from the government. But at that point, you're saying people can't think for themselves. And that is so crazy to me. That is literally anathema to America's founding from the bottom all the way to the top. America is founded on the idea that there's a spark of divinity in the individual. You need to let the

• 1:27:34Tom Bilyeu?

  individual live the life that they want to live, right? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No one can guarantee that you'll be happy because you might choose a dumb fucking life path. But you have the right to pursue that. It's inalienable. Meaning, though I don't believe in God, it's a great way to think about it, that this was given to you by the most high power and therefore cannot be violated, not by another human, not by the government. Like, that is your right to go and pursue a right that cannot be stripped from you unless obviously you do something that lands you in prison. But that all rides on the back of, at some age, and if we don't like 18, just tell me what the age is that you like. At some age, we go, this person can now think for themselves. You gotta stand by it.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  Let's actually dive into this death penalty thing.

• 1:28:20Tom Bilyeu?

  All right.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Do we want to start with the clip?

• 1:28:23Tom Bilyeu?

  From Philip DeFranco. Why not? Let's play it. Let me just set it up very briefly. So, right now, there's a woman named Krista Gail Pike, who I think has already been executed. I think that that happened while we were live today. So, um, she committed a crime like 30 years ago, 32 years ago, maybe, and They put a pause on her execution. Oh, my God. Holy shit. Here we go. Better for the story, worse for life. Uh. Oh, so you're pro death penalty? Obviously. Like, this shit is crazy to me. Gotcha. Now, whether or not she should get the death penalty, I, from what I read, I have no problem with it whatsoever.

• 1:29:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But nonetheless, that's a totally separate debate. To me, this is about,

• 1:29:16Tom Bilyeu?

  do we hold people accountable for their actions or not? Okay, with that, let's hear from Philip DeFranco, who I think is getting crazier by the day. Billy Dee.

• 1:29:24Speaker 04

  Hours away from being put to death by the state, and you've got a lot of people desperately trying to save her. Right? So the woman in question is Krista Pike, and it's not one of those wrongful conviction cases, right? She really did commit murder. But also, sort of like Lindsey Clancy, she claims that because of her untreated mental illness at the time, she should be spared the death penalty. And then also, like Lindsey Clancy, this case is very much dividing people. And so we should dive into it, starting with the crime. And so it happened back in 1995 at the University of Tennessee, though Pike was not actually a student there.

• 1:29:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is gonna be a big part of the story. She was 18 when she did it. And so do we want, and this gets even crazier. So her boyfriend was only 17. So he's charged as a minor, she's charged as an adult. That part of this is wild, but we can talk about that later. So, again, if people are saying, okay, well, you're just not an adult at 18, awesome, then they can't vote. That's for fucking sure. So if we're really saying we want to strip the right to vote away from kids, okay. But we're gonna have to pick an age, at which point we say, okay, now, for real, for real this time, this person can think for themselves.

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  Job Corps Center, a program for low-income adults to get career and education training. Well, there, she met her boyfriend, Daryl Ship, but then also, at some point, she became convinced that another girl, Colleen Slemmer, was trying to steal Ship from her. And so then what she did is that Pike and Ship lured Slemmer into the woods on the pretense that they'd be smoking some weed, and then they tortured and murdered her. And the way it was described is just brutal. They used a meat cleaver and a box cutter, and then finished her off with a chunk of asphalt. With Ship, then, also reportedly carving a pentagram into her body, which then turned this already shocking story into a satanic panic thing.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  A pentagram, a five-pointed star, a symbol of Satan.

• 1:31:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, yeah, cuz this was in the

• 1:31:02Speaker 05

  Sacrifice. He is not wise.

• 1:31:04Tom Bilyeu?

  That's like 30 years ago, 90s ago.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  A student that she had kept a piece of Slemmer's skull as a souvenir.

• 1:31:08Tom Bilyeu?

  This woman kept a piece of the skull of the woman that she murdered. Okay, so this was not like, oh, we were out and I was drunk driving and accidentally ran her over. This is, we stabbed, hacked, and beat her to death. And then I'm looking at her shattered skull, fucking brains everywhere, and I pick up a piece of the skull and keep it? Come on, kids. Like, this is, this is a wild amount of depravity. So, yeah, I am very shocked. And because, listen, this, this is, it gets very, there are two different narratives playing out. So there is the actual legal pitch for her to not be put to death,

• 1:31:51Tom Bilyeu?

  which is different than what Pike herself is saying. But if we speedrun what's going on, Pike confessed. So a jury convicted her of first-degree murder in 96, sentenced her to death. Her boyfriend, who was younger, he got life without the possibility of parole. Peterson testified against them and got probation. After 30 years of appeals, Governor Bill Lee denied clemency, and the US Supreme Court refused to step in. All of that seems pretty reasonable to me. I'm very curious to know why this got stopped now. That'll be interesting. She was supposed to be put to death by lethal injection today. Now, I don't feel super strongly about the death penalty. So if people want to get rid of the death penalty, I'm here for it.

• 1:32:30Tom Bilyeu?

  What I find interesting is that you've got somebody who is saying, I shouldn't be put to death specifically because I didn't even know what I was doing, not, I don't even think she talks much about her age. But what she does talk about is, and she mentioned, she name-checked Lindsey Clancy, okay? So she was like, the system has basically failed me in the way that it failed Lindsey Clancy. Because, and I think her exact word was kinship, I feel a kinship with Lindsey Clancy. And I assume you guys all know who Lindsey Clancy is, but she's the woman that strangled her three kids to death. Her trial ends up in a mistrial.

• 1:33:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Here, we've got both females who, and I, this is, this might be a Lindsey, not Lindsey Clancy, but a quote from Pike herself, "We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues." That is a Pike quote. Let me read that one more time, cuz that's so fucking crazy. "We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues."

• 1:33:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Ladies, I, you just can't stand for this. You cannot stand for the erosion of your autonomy. It is so crazy. If her whole shtick was, listen, I was 18, the brain doesn't stop developing till you're 25. I was a child. Okay, and we want to have a national debate about when somebody is actually able to think for themselves? I don't have beef with that. But to say that women have unique issues that mean that sometimes they may just have to murder somebody? Like, that's so absurd. Be very careful how you think through these problems. This comes down to personal responsibility. This comes down to whether women actually have autonomy over themselves.

• 1:34:18Tom Bilyeu?

  This comes down to whether women can be trusted to navigate life without an overseer? Like, this is really distressing to me. As somebody who has a wife, who I love dearly, and think my wife is my peer, and she's an extraordinary human and clearly capable of thinking for herself and navigating life extraordinarily well, it is so insane to me to see people doing this. Like, yeah, this is wild. Now, do I think that there's an argument to be made about youth? Yes. Do I think there's an argument to be made about intelligence? Unfortunately. Do I think that the societal issues of saying this person just wasn't smart enough to think through this

• 1:34:58Tom Bilyeu?

  is so fucking dangerous that we just have to say, yep, some people who are just too dumb to deal with the world, unfortunately, they're going to be put to death because their brain is just low-functioning? I think that is a way better world than where we start going, I'm gonna need to take, I'm gonna need you to take an IQ test, and Gattaca-style, that's gonna determine the rest of your life. What the fuck are people doing? This is so nuts. People are responsible for themselves. Getting off for mental illness, hard pass for me, you're getting locked up. I don't mind if people go to a mental institution, as long as they're serving the same time they would serve had they not. And just keep in mind, if the conditions in the mental institution are materially better, one of two things is true.

• 1:35:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Either prisons need to adopt those same things, or we need to recognize that we're just giving people a chance to have a far more cushy life. If somebody is mentally ill, we should be treating them. Help them get not mentally ill. We've got plenty of science behind this stuff. There should absolutely be ways that we can help people and treat people, just like if somebody goes to prison because they were on drugs, they should not get any clemency because they were on drugs, but they should absolutely be gotten off those drugs in prison. That's to society's benefit. That's to the fucking prison's benefit. So, yeah. Please think through this in a rational way, because right now, it's unhinged. All right, mad shout out to Tailor Brands. For real, for real, these guys are dope.

• 1:36:23Tom Bilyeu?

  By the way, I bring them up sometimes when they're not actually sponsoring the episode, because I actually do think what they do is extraordinarily dope, and I'm so bitter and jealous that they didn't exist when I was starting companies in my early days of entrepreneurship. They make starting a business very easy. So all that administrative stuff, getting an LLC, becoming legally compliant, all that, they do that. If you're thinking about starting a company, definitely check out Tailor Brands. Links in the description below. Check it out. They'll help you get an EIN number, get your LLC set up, all that. It's just absolutely dope. So all that hard stuff, they got you covered. Also, our next free AI masterclass is Thursday, October 8th at 1:00 PM Pacific. As you guys see, AI is changing so rapidly. Do not sleep on this one. We've got some new stuff that we're gonna be talking about.

• 1:37:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's free. Check it out. If you've ever thought about starting a company, hit Tailor Brands and then come to the free AI masterclass. All right, guys, love you bunches. We'll see you on Friday. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break, and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75-plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics,

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