LA Wildfires, Regulations, Gaza Ceasefire, Greenland is in? Tiktok ban Rednote | Tom Bilyeu Show

Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. I'm Tom Bilyeu, and today, we're diving into some compelling topics that I think you'll find both challenging and enlightening. Alongside my co-host, Producer Drew, we tackle the fascinating tension between emotional validation and practical problem-solving, and how this dynamic shapes our societal progress. In this episode, I emphasize the critical importance of personal responsibility in achieving our goals, even amidst emotional challenges. We'll explore the cyclical nature of generational responses to technological and economic shifts, and how today's youth are rebelling against a system crafted by previous generations. We also address some pressing current events, like the ongoing California wildfires. We'll discuss the rigorous regulatory policies that affect these situations and the broader implications of governmental decisions. Additionally, we examine the geopolitical dynamics involving Greenland’s independence and the U. S. political landscape, offering some thought-provoking insights into these complex issues. You'll hear my take on the challenges of narrative control and misinformation in our digital age, with references to controversies surrounding figures like Elon Musk and Gavin Newsom. We discuss the importance of finding a balance between regulation and market forces, taking cues from historical precedents to shape today's policies. SHOWNOTES 00:00 California fires spark debates over misinformation & regulation. 05:48 Focus should be solutions, not misinformation, PR campaigns. 15:18 Regulations need KPIs or removal. 22:50 Unintended consequences of rent control. 29:59 How equity led to millions dead in Ukrainian famine. 40:58 Human mind needs meaning. 45:14 Emotional decisions overshadow reality. 54:55 Elon's gaming resume challenged. 01:01:10 Priority on innovation. 01:04:23 Mel Gibson's claims on Rogan. 01:11:57 Karen Bass prioritized African tours despite timing. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Range Rover: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com https://www.vitalproteins.com/ and entering promo code IMPACT at check out. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACT when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Butcher Box: Choose either 2 pounds of wild-caught salmon, 2 pounds of grass-fed ground beef, or 3 pounds of organic chicken breast to get free in every box for an entire year. Plus, get an extra $20 off your first box when you use code IMPACT at https://butcherbox.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business: join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business: see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox: sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT athttps://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/0482bfe8-8502-11ed-af5d-3bdc320068d7/podcasts/0a41f61a-9ddf-11ed-9eb7-dbb3a40775f5/episodes/8ac68366-8a85-11ef-bb65-abca3ffdcf54/www.twitch.tv/tombilyeuwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  Before we get into the show, here's something worth your time. Every day, animals across the country face abuse, neglect, and cruelty. And every day, the ASPCA shows up. They rescue animals in crisis and provide life-saving medical care. They help animals recover, and they give them the second chance they deserve. But they can't do it alone. Every rescue, every medical treatment, every safe place to heal depends on people who choose to help. If you'd like to be part of that work, visit aspc.org/need. Become a monthly donor today, and you'll help support these life-saving rescue efforts

• 1:52Speaker 01

  and provide the care, shelter, and love these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Again, that's aspc.org/need.

• 2:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Fires continue to rage across California, fueling heated debates on who's spinning misinformation and whether we need more or fewer regulations to rebuild LA. Chamas letting no one in LA off the hook for the high winds excuse. Zuck inspired an inspired rant from Adam Carolla, who told the government to make love to janitorial supplies on repeat. Prop G explains how good deeds can go seriously awry. The kids were told to ditch TikTok, so they found the most Chinese app ever. Plus, are we buying Greenland? Is Musk faking his gaming? And who gets credit if Hamas releases the hostages? Trump or Biden? Drew, let's get into it.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  How you doing?

• 2:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm good, man. I'm hungry, as you well know. We're shooting this in the morning, and so I do these fasted when it's the morning time. And boy, oh, boy, did I not account for the prep time. So I was ready to go if we had started to shoot right at the beginning of prep, but alas. So it's all right. It's good. It actually, I think, does help with mental clarity.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, let's get right into it. So you get something in your stomach. Update on the California wildfires. They've been raging for days now at this point. The containment levels have increased. Thank God. Palisades is up to 17%. Eaton Fire, which is Altadena, Pasadena, that's at 35%.

• 3:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We're recording this on Tuesday the 14th?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Tuesday, the 14th. And just so, I didn't know this either until one of our editors told this. The containment doesn't actually mean how much of the fire is put out, but how much of the fire is preventable from spreading. So when I say 35%, that means 35% of the barrier they had prevented of the perimeter of the fire.

• 3:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it. Is no longer expanding.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  It's not expanding. It's not getting bigger. So they're kind of going on the outside, making sure nothing spreads, and then they're going to kind of douse it in the middle.

• 3:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Makes sense.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And then thoughts and prayers to the 24 people who have lost their lives. We're hoping to, that number doesn't get any higher, and that way we can hopefully wrap this up.

• 3:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That is really gut wrenching. Woof, okay.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  I know you have family and stuff impacted by this.

• 4:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't have family impacted by this.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Friends.

• 4:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lost everything. Plus, a lot of people still evacuated. It's crazy. Like, I've been here a long time, and this is by far the worst. But it's bringing out a very fascinating debate in terms of how we're gonna handle this. What does it look like going forward? So, obviously, we have to first get on the other side of the fire. So, there's a ton of debate around misinformation, disinformation, all of that. And we're gonna get to the Adam Carolla thing in a little while. But when I first heard his quote, I thought he was talking about the Newsom is on like this PR campaign about how Trump is spreading misinformation, disinformation, and all this, which to me is not the area of focus right now.

• 4:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Right now, all he should be thinking about is how did we get up in this place? And how do we make sure that we, one, get out of this as quickly as possible? And then, two, never find ourselves here? And somebody hit me in the comments on our previous video and was like, basically, well, what are your solutions, Tom? And it was ridiculously easy to give like a whole list of things that could be explored at a minimum, almost certainly should be done, not the least of which is the fact that we have the reservoir sitting empty. And so, I think Chamath really did a phenomenal job of explaining this in a recent clip. If we can play that clip, I think this is bang on.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  I'm not very sympathetic to the there were 100 mile an hour winds. Not because it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are happening in greater and greater frequency. Remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018 burning to the ground? AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislature, or worse, vetoed by Governor Newsom.

• 6:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Alright, so I think that is the right way to think through this. It is so tempting for everybody to point the finger at somebody else and to say,

• 6:13Tom Bilyeu?

  "This is an act of God." "Natural disaster was getting said on repeat in a way that I felt like people were trying to terraform my mind for me to accept that this was something that we couldn't control, that we couldn't influence."

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Climate change?

• 6:23Tom Bilyeu?

  100%. And the reality is, I'm not even, the most insidious thing about excuses is that they are valid. Yes, there were 100 mile an hour winds. Yes, the climate does seem to be changing. But the reality is that there are things that we could have and should have done. These were things, as Chama said, in the realm of the knowable. We have the data. We have seen this stuff happen in recent memory. People have been talking and debating about exactly what we should be doing, and they didn't do that. And so, this is where, just, just as a rule in one's own life, you want to always point all 10 fingers of responsibility back at yourself and say, "What could I have done differently to get a different result?" We have got to be holding our politicians accountable to that same thing.

• 7:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Because the second we're like, "Oh my God, act of God, yes, what could they have possibly done?" You're just going to live in this death loop where these kind of things keep happening. And it is, it is really fascinating to me that Rick Caruso, the guy that ran for mayor up against Karen Bass, his properties are still standing. And why are they still standing? Because he said, "Okay, this is a knowable thing. There is a way to prevent against this." The Japanese also have an incredible water strategy for dealing with these kind of wildfires. And so, seeing that his buildings are still standing, goes, in the Palisades, goes to show that there are ways to combat this stuff, and, and he has but one of what I'm sure are many, many, many, many things that we could be doing once you get the government involved in this.

• 7:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, look, I, I'm not asking people to be on my bandwagon of, "Get rid of these people." But even if I can't get you on board with that, just get on board with, we could do a different thing and get a different result because 2026 is gonna come and we're gonna be in the same situation and we are going to relive this nightmare over and over and over until people realize that actions have consequences. It really is that simple. You do a thing, you get a result. If you don't like the result that you got, you need to do a different thing. Dude, everything in everyone's life lives in that cycle of cause and consequence. And if we could get people to embrace, cool, you're, you're probably not going to be able to mitigate

• 8:31Tom Bilyeu?

  100 mile an hour winds. Those are going to happen from time to time. But okay, your reservoirs, A, if you find a problem, it can't take a year to fix. That's absolutely insane. B, build more reservoirs, get more of these tankers that can drop stuff, build in sprinkler systems, get hoses that can run, because these, dude, LA burned along the water. So there were people whose backyard is water and their houses burned down, where they literally have pylons in the water, holding their house up and their house burned. That's insane. So getting hoses that you can run into the saltwater, there are enough videos out there about saltwater is not

• 9:12Tom Bilyeu?

  corrosive in the way that people are saying. It takes time, it's not going to drop the, the water suppression, or sorry, the fire suppression mechanisms out of a fire truck to run saltwater through it for a couple of days. You just have to cycle the systems and keep them clean. So just on and on and on and on. And those are already the things that we can do right now today, let alone getting to innovation. Now, innovation brings me to my favorite hobby horse, which Chamath touched on in that clip, which is regulation. So you're getting all of these bills going into the government that are getting shot in the face, not some, in some cases, not making it to the governor's desk, in other cases, being vetoed by him. This is absolute insanity. And so here is the thing that I really want people to do, and the, the thing that I hold myself accountable to.

• 9:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, nobody should just listen to me because I say it. People should treat me like I'm an AI that will give them an angle on this. But I can articulate to you the beliefs and the value system that drive my thinking. I can literally say them. This is what I'm making this decision based on. People can ask me anytime they want and I will pull it out. And if I find, ooh, whoa, weird, I actually don't know why I believe this. I can say that. And then you go, I'm not gonna listen to him on this. Doesn't make any sense. He doesn't even know why he's saying it. It's probably being driven by emotion. Our elected officials better be able to tell you why they're making these decisions.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And not in the like shimmy way of Newsom doing his weird shimmy shake.

• 10:36Tom Bilyeu?

  They're not just saying in a really clear, simple way. This is why I'm vetoing this bill. There's always spin, double speak.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  And that's really what stood out to me in that clip. There's four bills. If this was a, it happened in 2018, one bill came up, okay, guys, let's not overreact. I get that. But you had time, you had multiple iterations of it. There was different formats of the bill. We can bury the power lines. We can exempt, I know we want to save all this conservation. Let's just exempt wildlife and fire.

• 11:05Tom Bilyeu?

  They can clean up the dead trees, man.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Like it's like, there were so many opportunities, but that that does bring up my next question. What is that line of regulation? Is, do we need devastation to show that regulation is stupid? Like, there should be a better way of saying, let's regulate this, but let's not regulate this. And how should the elected officials approach that situation?

• 11:23Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, there is a phenomenal quote that, and I forget who it's by, forgive that. That's going to be a running theme in the show. I'll remember the quote, but I don't remember who said it. People will look it up, drop it in the comments.

• 11:35Tom Bilyeu?

  The only law of history is the law of unintended consequences. The whole idea, the whole reason I rage against like manipulating markets, the reason that I rage against a lot of regulation is there will be unintended consequences. And you may have really, truly, your heart really, truly may be filled with love. You may really, truly be one of the good guys, be trying to do something positive for the world. Like, I'm willing to grant you that. But there are going to be unintended consequences that you don't see coming. And that's why, for the most part, it's better to have a light touch, small government, less regulation.

• 12:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And when you put a regulation in place, because again, I'm, I'm, I am very glad that we have government. I'm very glad that the government does its best to protect its people. I think there's a lot of meaningful work to be done by the government. I'm not a no government guy at all. However, when you put a regulation in place, it should either have a finish line, or it should be, my favorite, tied to a KPI. And if it doesn't move that KPI in the right direction, lift the regulation. So that way, we don't get this like ever additional layer of barnacles added to the turtle, such that finally the turtle ends up drowning because it can't move because it has so many barnacles on it. That's how I view regulations.

• 13:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Any one, not a big deal, but oh my God, you get layers and layers decade after decade where you're adding, but you're never taking anything away. Ends up being madness. So Chamath touched on it a little bit there. Prof G actually talking about something totally unrelated. He was talking about, I think, what's going on in Santa Monica with rent control. So you want to talk about something where they're trying to do something good. And Prof G is about as progressive as a sane person can get. Play that clip for me real fast.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  What could we do to bring down housing prices? And I think legally, if you have 50%, if two companies own 50% of the rental units in say, Southern Florida, or let's pick another market in Buckhead, Atlanta, and you know, COX is calling COY and saying wink, wink, we're going to raise prices 8% this year of rents. That's illegal. That's price fixing. But I get nervous around the unintended consequences of sequestering capital from a market and that it ends up backfiring. For example, rent control in Santa Monica, meant to help renters, right? You can't raise rents.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  And the problem is, no one's building in Santa Monica because there's no economic incentives. So as a result, what's happened is anytime something comes up for rent, usually when someone dies. It gets 100 applications and they end up picking that nice white family that makes $400,000 a year for the $800 a month rent controlled apartment. And it's ended up essentially creating housing discrimination.

• 14:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Again, the law of unintended consequences. And when I look at all the fire insurance being pulled out of California, they're going to try and regulate it again. But it's regulations that got us into this problem because they were saying, hey, we don't want you to gouge people that are trying to get insurance. So we're going to put caps on the amount that you can raise the prices. And the problem is the insurance companies went, hold on a second. I can't do this based on historicals. I have to do this based on a forward looking forecast. That's what actuarial tables are, is not just what happened in the past, but what do we expect to happen in the future? And we have to make this bet such that I think insurance companies are only allowed like a 5% profit margin. Dude, that is razor thin margins, razor thin.

• 15:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you then also cap the amount that they can increase it, don't let them look forward to what they think is going to happen with climate change, with some of the regulations that we see happening in California that have this knock on effect with the ability to fight fires. And they're like, yo, we've got to get out. So they start pulling out and you think, oh, wait a second. That was not the effect that we wanted to have. We were trying to protect the consumer, but in the end you end up fucking the consumer ultra hard because now they can't get insurance. So I get it. You are well intentioned, but the consequences don't end up being positive. And this is where, dude, my core thesis in life, people have got to stop thinking they're that smart. They've got to stop thinking that they can be trusted. And look, I get it.

• 16:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Every video I do has people reminding me that I'm dumb. And my core thesis is I get that I'm dumb. I get that there are things that I'm blind to. I understand that. I want to be a voice that gives you a sincere angle upon which you use to triangulate what you believe is true. And then you need to make decisions based on that. No one is going to be able to hand you all the right answers, but the second you think you're the G that everybody should listen to, now we run into problems. And government is that at scale. It is a whole bunch of people who believe they're the ones that should be listened to. And so, oh God, it's this well intentioned thing that's really driving me nuts in culture right now. This belief that we need a group of elites. We're probably gonna have to do like a standalone video on this at some point.

• 16:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Cause I'm only gonna skim across it, which is people are gonna go crazy. That we need a bunch of elites that can think through these problems for us. They know better than we do and they will lead us to the promised land. And the reality is they probably do know better than the average person and they won't lead you to the promised land. They will lead you straight through a gate to hell. And the framers of the American constitution understood that and they understood huh? We, the people are wildly flawed. People that make it to the elites tend towards tyranny and a desire for control. And they will, read the book Machiavellians, they will manipulate you. They will pursue additional power. And so that's what you're witnessing right now.

• 17:38Tom Bilyeu?

  The only correct response from Karen Bass, from Gavin Newsom is we fuck this up. And that means what it means. And while I'm in power, I'm gonna do everything I can to rectify this mistake. You're never gonna hear that. So please don't hold your breath. Instead, they know that people are manipulatable and they're gonna go on a PR campaign. Doing their absolute best to use this period of crisis to reestablish their relationship with the voters. To get them to re-believe that they're the right people. And it is a maddening loop. And it's one of those where man, do I sort of miss the period of my life where I just had my head down. I was building, I didn't think about any of this stuff.

• 18:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Because I was blissfully unaware of how, I'm not even gonna say sinister. How Machiavellian the political arena is. And how much people are lied to and manipulated and drugged by the nose. And were it not for COVID, would I still be asleep to a lot of this? Probably.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people would. I don't think that's a crazy stretch.

• 18:40Tom Bilyeu?

  That and social media. Social media is is a huge part of just everybody has a voice now. That's part of what we have to cover in that solo episode about the Machiavellians elites. Why I think that's a problem. Oh, I did not expect to bring this up. Please remember, everybody, I really like Sam Harris. I think he's very smart and I use him a lot as one of my my AIs that I like to point at a problem and get their take. But good Lord, he has so bought into the idea that you must have an elite class of people that can make sure that there's, how would he say it, is a functioning narrative, maybe, that holds people together and points them in the right direction. Oh, God. But his recent take on Jordan Peterson was not ideal.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  It was questionable, to say the least.

• 19:25Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm not even gonna, we haven't prepared the clip, so it's not me trying to be funny, but I'm not gonna show it.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I'm gonna put your feet to the fire about the regulation thing, because I think it's very interesting about the rent controls. Because specifically, what we're noticing now is that Zillow has shown pricing increases in rentals, where somebody would have a listing up in January that was 12,000 a month for a house. Now, after the fires, that same listing is now 16,000 for a house. And in that moment, is that a thing that a regulation should fix? Or is it, sorry, bro, capitalism gone capitalism, supply and demand?

• 19:55Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 21:21Tom Bilyeu?

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• 21:59Tom Bilyeu?

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• 22:14Speaker 02

  Is that a thing that a regulation should fix? Or is it sorry, bro, capitalism gone capitalism supplying demand?

• 22:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, okay.

• 22:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me ask you. What mechanism would you like to use to prioritize who should get that rental?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  What mechanism?

• 22:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, right now we use price. Who can afford it? So either builder want to know I can get the highest rents because I'm going to put a ton of capital at risk to build this apartment complex. Or I, the landlord, same thing because I might lose this person or during COVID, I just couldn't collect rent. So I've got to make sure that I've got enough money socked away. So I want to get as much for this as I can. Plus, we all, I would advise people, maybe a little slow to buy something. Because you've got to deal with all the repairs and all that stuff and the property tax. Okay, so the landlord's got to do that. So I get people think the landlord is evil, but the reality is that they're carrying a big financial burden and.

• 23:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Without getting into the big corporations buying it up, which I actually have some beef with, but assume a guy that owns like a building or two buildings and that's his retirement. That's the thing that he plans to pass on to his kids. I think it's a lot more clarifying. So right now we use price where he's like, okay, whoever can afford this and I'm going to look at the market and see how much I can charge. I'm not going to charge more because I won't get anybody. Or Prof G in that same episode talked about how he as a landlord charges a little bit under market. So that he can find somebody that's really going to be a long-term person. But what mechanism would we use other than price?

• 23:48Tom Bilyeu?

  For real.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Right? So people can look and look and look for an answer, but the reality is the only one that's time-tested in terms of there are unintended consequences, but the least problematic unintended consequences is to use price as a proxy for value. So you are able to pay more. So that's a proxy that you're a valuable renter to me. It's a proxy, but it's a proxy that you're valuable. And then as somebody looking at it, oh, it's expensive. That's a proxy for it's probably more valuable. And so as you look at different neighborhoods and see different prices, it's a good proxy for this neighborhood's a better neighborhood than the next. And then again, you get into all the unintended consequences of trying to do rent control.

• 24:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And Prof G, I think, did a very good job of explaining the knock-on effect of that. So people just need to answer that question. What are you, there, there are going to be, let's say a thousand people that want to rent that thing. Or they want access to the builders that are going to rebuild the Palisades now that it's burned down. What are you going to use? You, this is where I go crazy because people do not understand how to prioritize. And because they don't understand how to prioritize, they don't understand how prioritization happens. And so many of them are steering by emotion and so they will hear an individual's story. They will have a very strong emotion. That person should be able to rent because I have a really strong feeling. They seem like good people. But if you go ask of the thousand, there might be 800 people that have a really compelling story.

• 25:17Tom Bilyeu?

  And so now, how do you put it? So now you start rank coding, well, cancer and being old has to trump being young and health. Okay. Well, now we're still all down to here are the 17 people that are all old and have cancer. Now, how do you start doing it? Right? And so it, it will derange so fast, especially because let's say that you say we want old people with cancer. Now the guy that owns that building is like, fuck, I've got a bunch of people on fixed income. That are in these properties. Now that's hurting my ability and so to earn. And so the next person is just like, yo, it's always old people with cancer. I don't want to fuck with this anymore. This is just not a good place for me to put my capital. I'm going to go elsewhere. And then all of a sudden, we have the prof G problem all over again. And people just aren't building. And so now it's like, we need more houses.

• 25:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And the bill is like, get the fuck out of here. Like, I'm not, do you know how much money you have to put at risk? To build that kind of building? It's a lot. So anyway, this is where you begin to fractal into black rock. They've got enough capital to start black rock and companies like that have enough capital that they can absorb sort of the the 10, 20 year lunacy of all of this stuff. And then get on the other side of this when they can get something deregulated or whatever.

• 26:24Tom Bilyeu?

  But it, there's just a way simpler way, which is yep, it's gonna really suck. That people end up then being dispersed based on capital. And so people that can afford fancy neighborhoods will live in fancy neighborhoods. And people that can't afford it live in less fancy neighborhoods. All the way down to just abject poverty. That's ugly. No one wants to talk about that. Which is, hey, we can have a whole conversation about that and how you at least rescue people that have the intellectual ability to escape. Many people won't and it's just going to settle that way. God, there's so many fractals. I'm gonna stop there.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  No, but what I'm hearing from you is that price is the great equalizer because that way it's, do you have it or not?

• 27:07Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not the great equalizer because it really does disperse people. It is a great prioritizer. It allows people to go, I need a proxy. One thing that we can all agree on, and the way this is going to work is I'm going to set a price for this. And if you can afford it, great. I don't care why you can afford it or how you can afford it. I just know that you can afford it. Cool. That's going to be it. And it's, I don't have to hear everybody's story. I just know it's this price. You pay this price or you don't. Once I have to get into adjudicating who ought to be able to be in it. Boys and girls, if you need to know how that plays out, look at the USSR. It goes to, what? Tens of millions of people dead? If you really look at Mao's China, it goes to 100 plus million people dead.

• 27:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm telling you, this, this isn't a slippery slope. This is directly causative.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  I don't see that correlation.

• 27:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about it because I didn't say correlation. I said causation.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Causation.

• 28:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So what happens is.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so here's you are up against human nature.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 28:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Have you ever tried to get a million people to agree on any one thing?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  I haven't.

• 28:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Imagine trying.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  It'll be hard.

• 28:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Very hard.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 28:17Tom Bilyeu?

  You're never gonna do it. There are gonna be people who see it differently than you. There are gonna be people who are just trolling you. There are gonna be people who don't understand, but they're all gonna have their own opinion. So suddenly you go, oh, I've got two options before me. I can try to convince people. Or if I can't convince them, but really believe I'm right, that what I'm doing is better for everybody. Let me just kill a few of them. Just a few, Drew. I'm just gonna kill a few. Just make them a little bit more quiet.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Just the loud ones, just the loud ones.

• 28:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So then everything's gonna be great moving forward. I'm just gonna kill the rabble rousers. Now, the problem is that you end up building all this. So let me walk, you build all this resentment. Let me walk people through exactly how this plays out. Uh, to get people in this situation where they will go with just killing the loud ones. You have to go, world's pretty unfair, isn't it Drew? This is pretty horrible. Can you believe that your neighbor has three cows and you don't have any? Fuck that guy. You know how he got there, Drew? He got there by taking advantage of other people. And so why don't you guys rise up, put me in power?

• 29:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna make sure that those guys don't have more than you. You go to confiscate their cows. They push back. So you kill them. And then what you find out is whoops, that guy had three cows because he was better at farming. And so now, this is the kulaks in the USSR. This is real. This is not Tom making this shit up. So you kill the kulaks because you owed that to the people that helped put you in power because you promised that you were going to make things more equitable, equity, equity, equity. And now.

• 29:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, we had to kill him because he didn't want me to take away his cow. And by the way, I was telling all these guys that he got it through corrupt means. So they'll sometimes just go kill him for me. I don't even have to do it. And now all of a sudden, all the people that were good enough at farming to have the three cows and the nepotistic sinister ones that really did get their cows through evil means, they're all dead. And so all the ones that know how to farm are toast. And now you have the Ukrainian famine of the 1920s and the, the total death toll ends up being over a hundred million. I don't think it was just, or sorry, that's including China. So I don't remember how many the Ukrainian famine killed, but it is north of 10 million. If I'm not mistaken, we can fact check me here. A lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:40Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is causative from going stoking the resentment, showing that the inequity is all corruption versus just God has willed it, Drew. Strike me if you think this is wrong. God has willed it such, some humans are smarter and better at things than others. I hate that fact, but as far as I can tell, it is a fact. And as long as that's true, exacerbated by education. Tom can do a whole thing on education.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Our last episode was about education.

• 31:11Tom Bilyeu?

  This is how people get trapped in poverty. But the reality is some people are better at things than others. And because of that, if you kill or disempower, shun exile all the people that are good, you're left with the people that aren't as good and they literally just can't feed everybody. And now people start starving to death. It is directly causative. Now, I'm not saying that's where we're at. We are clearly not there, but I'm saying this goes back to the episode that we did that nobody liked. Where I said, hey, stop worrying about this at a tribal level of Democrats versus Republicans. May, maybe Republicans have it right, right now. We'll see law of unintended consequences. I'm optimistic. Maybe the Republicans have it right, right now.

• 31:56Tom Bilyeu?

  But they're not always going to have it right. And so if people feel that they have to team up, tribe up, and either be red or blue, that's a suicide mission. So I'm just saying, let's not do that. Let's think about this from an ideology standpoint. Where does this ideology lead? And I'm just saying, a heavy hand in regulation ends up going nowhere positive, very, very fast, even when it is well-intentioned, because no group of people is going to be smart enough to make all the right decisions. And so you are far better to let very big

• 32:32Tom Bilyeu?

  things play out, which people are usually referring to the invisible hand of the market. So the invisible hand of the market is human nature at scale. So I'm just saying, don't try to change behavior. Try to leverage it. And the way that you leverage it in this moment is to let the free market do what it's going to do. Now, if when you let the free market do what it's going to do, you find that there are some people that are getting iced out, and you don't like the way their life looks, now let's start talking about the underlying cause of that. For the sake of this episode, I will shorthand it to a single word. Education.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Man, okay. I'll, I'll give you that credit. You showed me the causation, how right controls is a hint, a shadow of some much sinister things that already happened in history, and that we should learn from that lesson in history. And that right now, in this moment, we should be very strategic about the type of regulations that we do.

• 33:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, and I'll say, because I don't trust myself or anybody else to know the quote unquote type of regulation, I would just say, back off regulation as much as you can, without letting capitalism go.

• 33:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Deranged and toxic and fucking eating the world because as I will repeat ad nauseam, there is pathology on both sides. So you don't want to let either of these systems run amok. And that's why I'm saying government is amazing. We want government. I'm not a zero government guy, but I'm saying your default scent should be light touch. Let's see what stands the test of time. Uh, let's make sure that regulations have an expiry date. Let's make sure that this stuff is benched, benchmarked against an expected outcome. And if we don't get it, we shouldn't assume it just needs longer. We should assume it's not working.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  I'm going to put a pin in this because I think right now in this moment, there's been a lot of information. We have seen Gavin Newsom trying to play a gotcha moment with Elon Musk on that tweet. We'll pull that tweet up and we seen Adam Carolla have a very, very risible reaction to the, the

• 34:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Zuckerberg.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Not even the Zuckerberg. I will call it the, uh, the gatekeeping of information and who's allowed to have the information kind of flow.

• 34:46Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:26Tom Bilyeu?

  the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. All right, let's pick up where we left off.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  I will call it the uh, the gatekeeping of information and who's allowed to have the information kind of flow. Let's play that uh, Adam Carolla clip.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  All you fucking pussies out there that are, have your panties in a bunch because these guys are gonna be able to speak freely now? Go fuck yourself a thousand times with a thousand rusty mop handles because you're now worried that misinformation and disinformation? After you've been creating all the miss and disinformation for the last 10 years? Give me a fucking break. You are pissed off because you can't control the narrative, not because the narrative is dangerous. It's only about control. You guys were wrong about everything. You had control and you forced everyone to capitulate. And now you don't have control and you hate it. But it's not because it's dangerous, or if it is miss or disinformation, then what are we talking about?

• 36:46Speaker 05

  Ivermectin and horse paste, like what are we talking about here? It's insane that they even have the gall to feign that they're upset about this new thing and how dangerous it's gonna be.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna even push back on this when he said like in the last 10 years. I could go back to like 20 years to like, yes, COVID misinformation, but even weapons of mass destruction. I'm sure if we dig in the files of the 90s and the 80s, we're just gonna see.

• 37:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, you can go all the way back to cave paintings used to manipulate the tribe. Dude, this is a forever thing. This is human nature at scale. This is, okay, so the idea of the elites, that we need a group of people that will tell us how to interpret the world. It's really helpful. It's really helpful. The problem is, once you get there, by suppression, you have a problem. So the only way we're going to return to a group of elites is you have to let anybody talk that wants to talk. The cream is gonna rise to the top and um, there's gonna be a lot of problems on the way.

• 37:53Tom Bilyeu?

  There are gonna be a lot of people who can't be trusted that managed to get into that chattering class. It is what it is, man, and this is why as a society, we have to get obsessed with metrics. What's moving us in the right direction? What's not? No one is ever going to see everything very clearly. Again, the founders of the US Constitution got about as close as I think that you're going to get. They could never have anticipated social media. But I really think that you can begin to filter people based on their reaction to this very question. Which by the way, just for massive context, he was referring to what's going on with Zuckerberg. And he said, look, whether Zuckerberg is being honest or not, and this is really him having an awakening moment. I don't care.

• 38:37Tom Bilyeu?

  The reality is when the government comes after you as a private citizen or as a company and says, if you don't do what we say, we are going to fuck you up. You realize very quickly, we're going to have to do what they say. And so he's saying, that's why he's mad. He's mad at the government for going after Facebook or any other company. Because he wants to make it clear, this is the quote unquote elites trying to control the narrative so that they can make sure that people vote the way that they want. What do they want to keep them in power? And that's what he's trying to get people to see beyond. And I don't know where this goes. I understand why a Sam Harris wants there to be an elite that control the narrative. I understand why the government wants there to be an elite that control the narrative.

• 39:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But in an age where the only way to get that is to silence people, censor them, bump them off of social media, de-bank them, like really go after them for having quote unquote problematic views. That's where I'm like, it just doesn't work in the age of social media. You're back to the whole Kulak thing where you're just like, shut up, sit down. And the only way to make that happen is those elements of force, which will continue to escalate. Because people won't be held down forever. It starts with a vote, but it doesn't end with a vote. Like if they don't get what they want out of the vote, this continues to escalate until you get warfare. But people will only be subjugated intellectually or physically for so long before they push back. But just, that is what it is.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  I think this is a perfect transition into the Schellenberger clip that we have pulled up here. Because I don't think it's no longer. We don't even have a standard foundation anymore. We used to be, you know.

• 40:16Tom Bilyeu?

  A shared foundation?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  A shared, like, there's nothing that everybody can kind of say, okay, at least we're all on number one. Some people's on one, some people's on zero, some people's in the next. We don't even believe the same things. And in the absence of that belief, who knows what happens? And I think Schellenberger articulates this perfectly.

• 40:31Tom Bilyeu?

  That's right.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  You know, when people stop believing in traditional religions, they become, they unconsciously, you know, develop, you know, they develop a new sense of guilt, a new vision of the apocalypse, they invent a new soul. I mean, people think that there's this thing called gender, which is separate from your body. It's kind of like a soul. My friend Abigail Schreier pointed that out. And so we just end up recreating Christianity, but in a deformed and deranged way. And, and the emergent quality of it is this destructive fire. Like, you don't, it's actually more powerful because nobody got out there and said, you know, let's let, I mean, somebody did say, let's let Malibu burn, but that was never like the explicit policy of the government of LA.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  It's just something that emerges after years of budget cuts, after years of self-hating ideologies like DEI, like climate apocalypse, like the homeless apocalypse. It's just emerges kind of deep from deep within us, from some, from some self-destructive part of us. So for me, if there's a foreign invasion, it came through the human psyche, not from outside of it.

• 41:40Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a profoundly interesting idea. I need to study Nietzsche more. He is very fascinating. That was a guy who just understood the darker side of the human psyche. Uh, okay, so is it a true statement that this is an echo of the death of religion? And you brought this up in terms of we don't have a shared belief system. I think the shared belief system thing goes a long way. Having shared beliefs and values, I think is extremely important to holding a large group of people together. But I want to go deeper on this idea that this is a, there is architecture in the human mind. These are my words now, but there's architecture in the human mind that longs to kneel before something.

• 42:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We all have a God-shaped hole in us that will either be filled with something or causes the kind of derangement that he's talking about. So, okay, what does he mean when he says the death of religion necessarily brings about this destructive tendency that manifests as the fire? So that's where I am unsure if this is really an echo of the death of religion or not, or if this is simply

• 42:54Tom Bilyeu?

  people have swapped out a religious impulse for a secular form of religion in terms of, I really want to do a beautiful thing for humanity, which now is manifests as DEI. But imagine for a second, so there are two things at play there. There is the Nietzschean will to power, which is very ugly, sinister, Machiavellian, disguised as compassion, but is really evil. I'm going to set that aside for a second. Let's talk instead about people who really looked at the world and said, wait a second. When people get trapped in these cycles of poverty, it is grueling and ugly, and I hate everything about it, and I want to do something about it. And that became this new religion.

• 43:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Once it becomes new religion, now it's about faith and it's not about results. And that's where I think things derange. So to understand my worldview and how I look at all of this is the elephant and the rider problem. So if you've never heard that idea before, it's the human experience is such that the elephant are your emotions and the rider is that part of you that you think of as yourself. And we are all being moved around by this gigantic elephant. And most people don't even realize that they can get a modicum of control over that elephant. And so for, I think, most people, most of the time, the elephant is either invisible,

• 44:21Tom Bilyeu?

  meaning they don't even realize they're on it, or they know it's there, but the emotion is so all-consuming that they cannot help but move in the direction that the emotion wants them to go. And I've been thinking a lot about this lately. And what I see when I look at people who are riding on their elephant is what they really want. This is an idea I call invisible goals. So they have an invisible goal. They will tell you they want to do well in their career. They want to be a better parent. But the invisible goal that's really moving them is they want somebody to validate their emotions. And so they're on an elephant. The elephant is making their life bad and they they will not take conscious control of the elephant.

• 45:02Tom Bilyeu?

  What they want is people to say, oh, my God, I see that you're on this elephant and it's ramming you into things. And that's really terrible. And I'm so sorry that that's all happening to you. And because people don't give them that, because they are on their own elephants, going in their own direction, dealing with their own dramas. They just keep riding around bashing into things, longing for somebody to acknowledge you're on this elephant. It's ramming you into things. This is really terrible. I'm so sorry. Now, my worldview is as long as you want people to acknowledge that you're on the elephant, that that's really terrible and how hard that is. You will never put the energy into going, wait a second, I'm the the driver here. I can take control of this.

• 45:44Tom Bilyeu?

  I I am the reason I'm ramming into things and I'm going to stop ramming into things by being less emotionally reactive. By insisting that instead of, well, I feel this really strong thing, therefore I'm going to act in accordance with this. I'm going to say, no, no, no, my goal is to get over there. The elephant is ramming me into the wall. I'm not interested in that. I'm the driver and now I'm going to do the very hard thing, appointing my elephant in the direction I want to go. And no matter how much wrestling I have to do, I'm going to get this thing moving in that direction. But people never get there because they're so longing for people to just be like, yeah, I get it. This is really tragic and I'm so sorry it's happening to you. And the bad news is even if they got that, they would just want more and more and more. It's like this insatiable desire to be told that the person understands what you're going through and it's terrible.

• 46:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And I hope somebody solves this problem for you, rather than realizing I'm the only one that can solve this for myself. So if that is accurate and our emotions are this gigantic elephant that steers us around.

• 46:40Tom Bilyeu?

  People aren't looking at KPIs and saying, in fact, they're looking at an invisible KPI, which is how does it make me feel? And so instead of putting a known KPI that objectively measures whether things are getting better for the people that they want to protect, they just double down on what makes me feel good, what makes me feel the way that I want to feel. And that then gets us into these completely deranged things like all these DEI policies. Instead of saying, ooh, we've just had all these historic fires, one after another, after another, after another.

• 47:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the champion of climate change becomes Greta Thunberg, which is all emotion, all the time, the I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, versus people going, oh, interesting, manmade or otherwise, the climate is changing and here's how we can innovate around this and celebrating those people and championing that. You get more of whatever you celebrate. This is why American soccer sucks and why Brazilian soccer is fucking gangster level. Because it's just generation after generation after generation of celebrating people that are good at that. You need look no farther than Japanese manga. Can't replicate it here in the US because generation after generation that's celebrated there.

• 47:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So if we celebrate all this emotive connection to the problem and we don't celebrate innovation, manmade solutions, then we're not going to get them. So this is people steering by emotion instead of steering by outcomes. This is people that want the emotional side of it to be recognized rather than, ooh, we're actually, this person, this line of thinking is yielding these outcomes and we want to celebrate it. One really scary question to ask yourself, when was the last time we threw a ticker tape parade for somebody?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 48:30Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't do it anymore.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:32Tom Bilyeu?

  We do it for sports teams, but we don't do it for individual accomplishment. So we have lost this sort of will to innovate our way around things. We want our emotions to be acknowledged.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  We've been celebrating the emotional people versus the engineers, versus the builders, versus things like that. So that way people are now more emotional to these problems versus the people that are strategically building the things that can solve those problems.

• 48:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  That's a very good way to like put it. Do you think that there also is kind of like a? Rebellion might be the wrong word, but through this kind of lack of void that happens in our soul, our new sense of guilt that Schellenberger was talking about, can it swing into the other direction? Because for example, some of these fires were, they happened, we're still figuring out, but some of them were arson. There are some people that are like, it's burning, let's burn more. Let's let Malibu burn and we have this rebellious spirit.

• 49:21Tom Bilyeu?

  A brilliant question. Yes, I think is the short answer. The youth get whatever culture they want. This is why people say that demographics are destiny. We are all responding to our parents' generation because they have created the soup in which we're going to grow up in. So if you haven't read David Foster Wallace's This is Water, read it. Our parents' generation is the water that we all grow up in. And there's a really fascinating thing about human nature where we will rebel against our parents' generation, no matter what. And everybody knows the sort of four cycles that good time make weak men, weak men make hard times,

• 50:05Tom Bilyeu?

  hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, on and on and on the cycle goes. So we're living through one of these moments right now and it has given birth to a spirit of burn it all down because they're being iced out of a system that worked really well for their parents, has created good times. So they're growing up in like this incredibly peaceful area, this time of plenty, air conditioning, internet, soft serve ice cream. I mean, it's just like, dude, but when you go back 5,000 years, bro, like it's crazy. But they can't make progress. Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. So they're in this time of plenty, they can't make progress.

• 50:50Tom Bilyeu?

  They're on the elephant. They just want people to acknowledge that it's super shitty for them. They're not looking at what they can do to be in control. So there's this burn it down mentality. And yeah, it is very scary because they have a belief that in burning it down, they'll build something better, which almost never happens, law of intended consequences. And this is why they will give birth to hard times. And so, yeah, it's pretty inevitable. I mean, look, AI may just come in and knock all of this around, but AI is going to do its own fair share of helping speed up the hard times. Long story, probably another episode.

• 51:29Tom Bilyeu?

  But I think you're really on to something with this rebellious spirit thing. And I think we're seeing this manifest in other ways. So a sort of fun and funny way that this is manifesting way funnier than the arson. Arson rate rates about zero on my humor scale. Is Red Note. So for people that aren't following this. US government, we're in a cold war with China. People need to embrace that. And if you didn't grow up in the eighties, hey, welcome to your first real cold war. They're they're a whole thing, so brace yourselves.

• 52:04Tom Bilyeu?

  China owns TikTok. The government worries that it's basically one big spy device. They're using it to map everybody's face, map all of the US. Manipulate the algorithm so that we're looking at dumb shit while Chinese kids are looking at engineering and stuff like that to push them forward. So they're threatening to kill it. And we're, I think, like a week away from knowing whether this is actually going to happen or not. And all the kids said, oh, you don't want us using a Chinese app? We are going to find the most Chinese app we can find. So when I heard about Red Note, I was like, oh, damn, it's number one in the app store for social media. Let me go look this thing up. Like, do we need to get on Red Note? Is this going to be the next thing? And I do a search for Red Note, and the only thing that shows up is all in Chinese. It's not called Red Note.

• 52:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, it might be, but it's in Chinese characters. I couldn't tell you if it's Red Note or not. And so I was like, oh, damn, like, they are really trying to send a message that fuck you, we won't do what you tell me to quote Rage Against the Machine. So it's gonna get weird because if AI does what I think it's gonna do, which is absolutely crush their job market, give them constant, never ending existential dread right before it ushers in the closest thing to utopia that we're ever gonna get. But it's gonna push you through, call it a seven to 10 year period of, oh, God. And in that period, I think things are really going to get fucking weird.

• 53:32Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that's gonna exacerbate this.

• 53:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Need to push back and that never is fun to live through.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  I feel like the theme of this episode has been unintended consequences, second order consequences, kind of things like that. Is there a positive to this rebellious spirit? Is there?

• 53:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh my God, it's the only way that society moves forward. Okay, so uh, this is why I think we go through hard time only to come out the other side. It's gonna be glorious and amazing and all that.

• 54:01Tom Bilyeu?

  But evolution, the, the longer time scales do not care if you grow up in one of the hard times and everything sucks for you, or you grow up in one of the good times and everything's great for you. Doesn't care. Like that loop is just gonna continue, continue, continue, continue. And so, uh, yeah, people need to, the, the whole reason I began changing the direction of the channel from just like pure empowerment, which I realized was becoming spiritual entertainment and nobody was actually doing anything with it, to really trying to be in the weeds of the toughest, stickiest, most consequential problems is that the only reason you build up a mindset is to be able to do something with it to navigate the real world. So people that are paying attention, that understand how to position themselves well, no matter what the period of time is, they're gonna be fine.

• 54:45Tom Bilyeu?

  But I clock that number at somewhere around 2%. And 98% are in for a roller fucking coaster.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Sheesh, hopefully get some really good music, some really good drugs, like what happened in the sixties with the.

• 54:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yikes.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  So you know.

• 54:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yikes.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Maybe there's some good things.

• 54:59Tom Bilyeu?

  That's Cruz's recommendation, everybody. If you haven't read, uh, A Brave New World, there, there it is. The drug thing doesn't play out well. I've got some very bad prognostications.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Uh, okay, everybody, don't do drugs. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.

• 55:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I say as I'm chewing nicotine as we speak.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Oh man, okay, so moving on from a, uh, I guess a digital land, I, I don't even know, man, this is, this is just crazy. Are, are we really talking about this? So Asmongold kind of challenged Elon on Twitter recently.

• 55:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, people are calling Elon out that he's faking his gaming.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  I feel like this is the point of gaming, but let, let's play the clip and we'll kind of take it from there.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Did Elon Musk play this account to level 97? The answer is very simple. No.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Unequivocally, without a doubt, if Elon Musk can prove that he played this account to 97, I will stream on X, starting the day that he proves it, for an entire year straight, every single stream that I do.

• 56:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That's pretty gangster. So, he, uh, so for people that don't know Asmongold, he's massive. He's a huge streamer.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so he is certainly, uh, putting something on the table that if Elon can prove, it'd be great for the platform. Um, I don't know. I don't know what this is going to be in the final analysis, but I will admit, when I heard he was the number one Diablo player, I was like, "How? How does he have the time?" Like, even if you're just, just unbelievably good at games, like, let's just say, right? His brain clearly works in a new way. Uh, let's just say that he's unbelievably good. It still takes a certain amount of time to run the dungeons and do all that stuff. I mean, it is, I, I can't even fathom how long it would take to max out a character, even if you're freakishly good, but it's 10s,

• 56:55Tom Bilyeu?

  20s, maybe 100-plus hours? Where does he find that time? That's not me calling him out. I don't know enough about it. I'm just saying, like, uh, admittedly, I've got my popcorn on this one, and I'm like, "Yo, I want to see how this plays out." Because admittedly, I was like, "Damn, where does he find the time for this?"

• 57:11Speaker 02

  It's, it's crazy, because I'm literally running in my head, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company, campaigning for Trump, he has like 15 kids, like, wha-

• 57:22Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it's only 13, Drew. Let's not exaggerate.

• 57:24Speaker 02

  But, like, when are you then playing, like, it's, it's a phenomenon. So, the, the, for context, the game I think is, uh, P O,

• 57:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Path of Exile 2!

• 57:33Speaker 02

  Path of Exile, P O F, I'm saying P O F 2.

• 57:35Tom Bilyeu?

  P O E.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  P O E, Path of Exile 2. Um, P O F was Plenty of Fish, that really old dating app, uh, back in the day with the-

• 57:41Tom Bilyeu?

  I know nothing about it. I've been married for too long.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  You're not, you're not in the trenches. Um, so P O E 2, which, you know, launched recently, and he's already at 97, so it is- I don't know. Would you ever pay somebody to like farm a game?

• 57:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't even understand.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Like that doesn't make sense to me.

• 57:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So I play a lot of Fortnite, a lot by my standards. And in that game, you can buy some of the battle pass and just you get the rewards. You just pay a little bit extra and you get the rewards. Dude, no way. There's no universe. I buy the battle pass because I love that progression. But I want to earn every one of those things. And so basically, I don't think I've ever maxed out the battle pass, which means because I don't play enough, because I'm not good enough when I do play, I never get all the rewards that I technically paid for. So what am I doing, right? Spend a little bit of extra money, Tom. You can afford it. Get all the stuff. But I only want it if I earn it. Like, there's something about it that robs all the joy.

• 58:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So I literally can't get my head around, like, I would, I literally wouldn't want to play an account that somebody had built up and then handed to me. It's not interesting to me in the slightest. I would much rather be in a sort of more boring part of the game and like build my way up in order to get there. And I literally can't make it make sense. So it's the only thing that makes me hold out, like, surely, given what he's accomplished, he's obviously motivated by progression and all that stuff. So I'd be so surprised, like, if he just wanted somebody else to build up his character, that would be shocking. So if I had to, like, place a chip on he's faking it or he's not faking it,

• 59:20Tom Bilyeu?

  with a lot of trepidation, goes, oh, fucking no, I would put it on he's not. That's my gut, but that's very much me projecting.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  I never played Path of Exile. I doubt I would be able to get to level 97 while also running four companies and having 18 kids.

• 59:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know how he has time for oxygen, doing all that, dude, and that's, I'm in the trenches of building. It's like, Jesus, that, it's insane.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  It's nuts. It's nuts. So more surprises. Greenland said, hey, Trump will talk, which I don't think we even seen this coming, so.

• 59:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I certainly did not. This all caught me off guard. The whole Greenland is important to America thing was new to me. This is very, very interesting. But the post goes like this. According to Colin Rugg, if he can be trusted, Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egadi, no idea how you pronounce that, says he is ready to speak with Donald Trump as he calls for independence from Denmark. He said his people didn't want to be Americans, but said it was ultimately up to them to decide their future. If he really said that, that to me is like a pretty big tell that people in the country, at least are taking this conversation seriously. "We are ready to talk with Trump," is the exact quote. "We don't want to be Danes. We don't want to be Americans. We want to be Greenlandic."

• 1:00:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course, it's the Greenlandic people who decide their future. Okay, you had a really good point about this off camera, which I thought was really shrewd and is probably the closest thing to the real direction, which is that it will probably be some sort of trade deal or something where it's like, okay, we understand what you want from us. We're very strategic to you. And here are the things that we want to start growing the Greenlandic economy, would be my guess. I would be surprised, but again, I'm a headline reader when it comes to Greenland. I'd be surprised if they were like, yeah, we want to be the 51st state. We're going to beat Canada to it. It's just people have a sense of pride. So them becoming independent makes sense. Them having a trade deal with us makes sense.

• 1:01:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Them saying, yeah, we're for sale and we want you to buy Greenland? I don't know. That doesn't strike me as plausible.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  It is very interesting, but this is something that I didn't even realize going to the next tab, that there was a poll that happened and 68% of the Greenland people, the Greenlandic people, wanted their independence from Denmark. So to be completely transparent, this went from Donald Trump tweeting about, yeah, Greenland, come on over to America, to now seeing that 68% of them actually don't like what they're doing with Denmark. It's, this became a joke to me, a meme. And then I was like, oh, hold on. This is really, this is actually real.

• 1:01:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, I'm going to make a prognostication.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Tom Bilyeu?

  People are going to realize this cycle with Trump, that he's way more in the weeds than people think, that he says things in a way where you can write him off as crazy. Because he'll say, ah, I bet Canada would welcome us as heroes if we made them the 51st state. Not true. Most of them want to be Canadian. Would be my guess. And... Yet, there's an underlying game with some of this stuff that is legitimate. So he's been pursuing Greenland since I think 2019. Oh, wow. And so this has been on his radar, been something he's been pursuing, talking about for a while now. And I think the mistake people certainly made when he was president the first time is because he's so easy to dismiss as crazy.

• 1:02:44Tom Bilyeu?

  They just dismiss him and they don't ask, okay, stripping down all the bombastic rhetoric. Is there really something here or is this pure insanity? Like, I remember I was watching live, because this is during COVID, when he was talking about like drinking bleach or whatever. And so I watched him say it and I'm like, oh, I recognize this. This is the no bad ideas, part of the brainstorming cycle that you go through where you're trying to find like a crazy, out of the box, innovative idea. And you just need to let your mind make all these connections. And so you start talking, the vast majority of what you say is going to be absurd. But the path that you're trying to walk down is I need fresh connections. I need to break out of the paradigm of the way that we're thinking about this now. And so in writers' rooms, you say, no bad idea. So no bad idea, or this is the terrible take or whatever.

• 1:03:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And you throw it out and then other people bounce off it and they come up with better ideas. So I watched all that as an entrepreneur and just thought, yeah, yeah, okay, cool. All right, that's interesting. You know, some of the things he was throwing out, never taking him literally that we're gonna, whatever it was, inject light or it was all kinds of interesting. But obviously, without adaptation, absurd. Underdeveloped ideas. And then everybody just blew it away. He's a lunatic. What's he talking about? Made fun of him forever and ever and ever. And I think this time, I hope this time, let me say it that way. More people are going to be like, okay, we know how he talks, but is there a way to react to that idea that can make it better and good?

• 1:04:07Tom Bilyeu?

  And can we draw more people into this brainstorming so that we get these ideas out there? And I know what that will be met with from the people who want a tighter controlled narrative. So let me address that. I have a philosophy. This was my whole thing with Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan was I watched it. My bullshit detector was absolutely screaming. Uh, seeing Mel Gibson on Rogan, my bullshit detector again screaming. But if these super fringe, wacky, crazy ideas get enough, like if they hit a certain tipping point in the cultural zeitgeist, then you bring on the best minds and you start looking at that.

• 1:04:48Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I really think that's the way to make use of the fact that everybody has a voice is see what are like, the craziest of the crazy stuff tends to fall away. But like Eric Weinstein going on Rogan with Terrence Howard and saying, hey, look, here, here are the things that you're saying that are real. And this is why people are getting so behind this is there's just enough real there. And then he tried to help Terrence see this is the one thing you should be zooming in on. Maybe there's something to be done there. Now, I don't think that ended up being super fruitful from a Terrence Howard perspective and that Terrence is going to run off and do that one thing. But I thought it was awesome for the culture where, okay, Eric, I get it.

• 1:05:29Tom Bilyeu?

  You're not going to want to spend all of your time whack a moling all these terrible ideas. But this one hit a certain level and you addressed it. And I would like to see us do that with everything. So, uh, my bullshit detector screams when I hear Mel Gibson, even the way he was talking and moving, uh, when he was talking about the cancer treatment. I was just like, there's something so weird here.

• 1:05:52Speaker 07

  I have three friends. All three of them had stage four cancer. All three of them don't have cancer right now at all. And they had some serious stuff going on.

• 1:06:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And what did they take?

• 1:06:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, Jesus. They took some, what you've heard they've taken.

• 1:06:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Ivermectin.

• 1:06:13Speaker 07

  Fenbendazole.

• 1:06:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Fenbendazole, yeah. Yeah, I'm hearing that a lot.

• 1:06:17Speaker 07

  They drank hydrochloride, something or other.

• 1:06:20Tom Bilyeu?

  There's studies on that now where people have proven that they've.

• 1:06:23Speaker 07

  Drinking methylene blue and stuff like.

• 1:06:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, methylene blue, which was a fabric dye.

• 1:06:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it was a textile dye. And then they find it has profound effects on your mitochondria.

• 1:06:33Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 07

  This stuff works, man.

• 1:06:37Speaker 06

  There's a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange. Because, again, it's profit.

• 1:06:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know if he's just super uncomfortable. I don't know. But, who am I? What the fuck do I know? So if that reaches some, like, incredible zenith of awareness and people saying, no, no, no, there really is something here, then you bring on people that really do know, and if they have an open mind and are like, okay, let's look at why this one might be moving forward. And I think the idea of steel manning something first before you dismantle it helps the people listening to you, right? So if you're an AI, that people get to aim at a problem, and all they're asking is for a strong, sincere take. They don't need you to be right. They need you to be sincere, clear, strong. This is what I think is true. Cool.

• 1:07:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Now we can begin weighing those different things and getting into the scientific method of, okay, this is the hypothesis. Does it work? Yes or no? But just telling people to shut up and stay quiet, I don't think is the play. So getting into that mode with Trump, I think, would be very beneficial over the next four years.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. We shall see. So it's a lot going on. I wanted to bring this next story up because it directly reflects over our last episode, because we were just talking about how Trump is talking tough his press conference where he said there's gonna be hell to pay if they don't bring those terrorists home. And he was kind of called the hostages.

• 1:08:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Terrorists you can keep.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Don't bring the terrorists home.

• 1:08:02Tom Bilyeu?

  But we'll take the hostages back.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  But I was nervous about how strong he was talking toward Hamas. And then, according to the-

• 1:08:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Why nervous?

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Because I think talking to suicide bombers with a lot of hostility doesn't necessarily equal fruitful outcomes, because you're just telling them to go to heaven faster.

• 1:08:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Period.

• 1:08:26Tom Bilyeu?

  There we go. That's clear, clear.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  But according to the BBC, the Gaza ceasefire deal is close as they're entering final stages, so. I know Biden's gonna try to use this as his final victory lap. Like, see what I did before I got out of office. But do you think that people are looking at that 20th date as a deadline of like, you know what? Let's just wrap this up before this new crazy guy comes into office. Like, how do you? Who do you think? I don't want to say the credit line, see, but who do you think influenced this decision?

• 1:08:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, it is impossible to see any other way other than Trump threatened a very big hammer because Biden has had whatever, a year plus to get this done and didn't. And now suddenly, a week before Trump takes office, magically, we're about to cross the finish line. So I think this sort of Trump madman effect is really what's getting this across the finish line. But shout out to the current administration. If they even just let it get across the finish line and don't go in and bungle this, don't go in and mess this up. I am perfectly happy to be like, word. Take some credit. Everyone's gonna put it in context of what Trump said and what Trump means on the international stage. But yeah, cool. I'm here for it. Like, I, I have found in life, the second you don't need credit,

• 1:09:36Tom Bilyeu?

  you can get so much done. Because if you can let it be somebody else's idea, then they're gonna get it across the finish line. So, uh, I want to see the hostages return. I want to see the freakish amount of bombing to come to an end. And so I don't care who ultimately gets the credit for this. But I don't think you get here without that big hammer. But if it happens while this current administration is still in office, like, take, take your flowers.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Nice, nice. All right, last one I got for you. Okay, so a couple of episodes ago, we talked and you said you don't believe in any conspiracy theories. You don't, you say, you said black cats are cool. You'll just go around breaking mirrors.

• 1:10:18Tom Bilyeu?

  That is true. Yeah, that, that one I will give you. Superstitious I am now.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  I want you to just hear this video out full out and let me know.

• 1:10:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Should I put my tinfoil hat on?

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  I, I feel like we're gonna rain it.

• 1:10:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go. All right, tinfoil hat in place.

• 1:10:30Speaker 07

  Okay, so California's on fire, but we have like the best fire department in the world, right? We should be able to contain this, right? I mean, we did, but the mayor cut the fire department's budget last year. So not enough personnel for this one. What?

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, we don't need everybody. We just need a certain amount to spray the area with water. Oh, my God, I love that you say it's so funny because the state actually depleted its water reserves a couple of months ago. So the firefighters literally don't have enough water to fight the fires with. Wait, that doesn't make any sense. We're in a drought and so we depleted our water reserves? Well, at least the people that have fire insurance will be getting some money, right? Ooh, this is awkward. Okay, don't get mad at me, but insurance companies like State Farm has not been allowing renewal of fire insurance policies since two months ago. And it's been cancelling a lot of contracts. So let me get this straight. Two months before the fire, the state depleted its water reserves. Insurance companies have been cancelling this fire insurance policy. It's like it's Maui all over again.

• 1:11:26Speaker 06

  But it's not like the state needs to free up a whole bunch of land to open up a new smart city infrastructure, right? Because we haven't announced anything like that, did we? The LA district might have announced plans to set up a smart city by 2028.

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  So it's like Maui all over again? Yeah.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:11:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so I've heard that you can take the like high-speed rail map and put it right over the Palisades and they match like distressingly close. Um, okay, so here's how I think things like this really play out. So one, I it really, I'm not conspiratorially minded. These are fun, though, so I appreciate the conspiracy corner. I think we should definitely do more of these. Uh, but here's how I think this really plays out.

• 1:12:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Running a government is hard and unless you're able to attract the best and the brightest and run uh, all of your policies through the KPI filter, that you're going to end up in situations like this. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence. I don't think we can have it two ways. I don't think that we can say, uh, these guys are grossly incompetent and P S evil geniuses that uh, have figured out exactly how to burn this all down so that they can build a smart city, which P S they will fuck up. I guarantee it. So then i- it's like, uh, my favorite example of this is when Coca-Cola launched New Coke to compete with Pepsi. And then the world freaked.

• 1:12:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Out and they literally within weeks reintroduced Coca-Cola Classic. Going from just calling it Coca-Cola to Coca-Cola Classic. And it ends up passing Pepsi and it's never looked back. So people look at that and they say, oh my God, this is amazing. And what a brilliant idea. And Coca-Cola themselves have said, we are not smart enough to pull that off. And I think that's exactly what's happening here. People are not smart enough to go through all those gyrations. And why would they like, they don't care if the insurance companies go out of business. So they're not going to be in cahoots with the insurance company to pull out. This is everybody looking after their own interests. Doing a whole bunch of short sighted stuff that has all these tremendous knock on effects. And it's probably a mixture of a little bit of evil, a little bit of stupid.

• 1:13:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And a whole lot of like, and there really are the hundred mile an hour winds and all that stuff. And like, if you zoom in on Karen Bass, for instance, for a second. It's like, okay, she's in Africa at the time that this all pops off. We knew that the winds were coming. Why on earth would she go away during this time? I think the real answer is if you go back and listen to the way that she was talking about it. When she does these tours to Africa, it's like really emotionally meaningful to her. And she's like, this is the greatest part of what I did is I think she was in Congress. Greatest part of what I did in Congress, I never want to give that up. And then when she decided to run for mayor, she's like, actually, no, I'm not going to do that. I'll even believe that she meant it when she said it. And then I'm perfectly willing to believe there was absolutely nothing sinister.

• 1:14:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It was just, oh my God, I have this tremendous opportunity to go be a part of an inauguration. They're going to put me up and like fancy shindig. It's a lot of people that I know and love and care about. And I really believe in what they're trying to do in Africa. I don't know, right? I don't know her, I don't know any of that stuff. But it's very easy to paint that picture, just as easy as it is to paint. Like it's all evil and space lasers. And we're trying to burn down areas that we don't want. Man, it just, this is, this is new Coke, classic Coke. This is people that go like, if they end up building the smart city on it. It's not them being super evil geniuses. It's them going, well, it doesn't exist and we fucked up through regulation. Nobody's building, so let's put it on top.

• 1:15:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I'd have a really hard time without like documentation that these people are that fucking good. At being able to get people organized around a topic. It's just too hard.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  All right, I'll give you that. I'll give you that. I'll let you go. Last thing, community quarter is this Friday, guys. So if you want time to answer any of your questions about the news, about life in general, make sure you drop something in the comments. And that's all I got.

• 1:15:25Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, everybody. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 1:15:38Tom Bilyeu?

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