Wild Weekend Recap: Iran Chaos, Global Shifts, and the Economic Debate Shaping Our Future

ITU: Ready to break through your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE Sign up for my next FREE A. I. class here: https://tombilyeu.com/leverage-ai-july-9?utm_campaign=ai-masterclass&utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_content=post-260407-1 https://tombilyeu.com/leverage-ai-july-9?utm_campaign=ai-masterclass&utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_content=post-260407-1 Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu with Producer/Cohost Drew and channel Moderator, Ryan. In today’s episode, Tom dives into a whirlwind of global events and economic shake-ups. From chaotic Iranian negotiations that seesawed all weekend, to Israel’s hardline stance in Lebanon, the rise of the right in South America, and Xi Jinping’s crackdown on dissent—even for those outside China—they unpacks the truth behind the headlines. Tom questions the sustainability of current political strategies, analyzes the never-ending economic debates around inflation, government spending, and student loans, and dissects the cultural roots of conflict in the Middle East. Expect candid commentary on populism in the UK, why America is so deeply tied to Israel, and a powerful conversation about personal responsibility in the age of AI and social change. If you’re seeking bold perspectives on the forces shaping our world, this episode delivers unfiltered insight and actionable wisdom. Chapters: 00:00 Online behavior vs real-life actions 05:19 Iran nuclear inspection agreement 13:18 Political upheaval and global tensions 16:09 Progress on Middle East Peace Talks 23:52 Grappling with extreme defense strategies 27:05 How lobbying influences politicians 34:26 Iran-Israel tensions and conflict 38:52 Cultural responses to conflict 42:35 Brexit, migration, and labor dynamics 47:13 Economic growth and deregulation discussion 54:25 Reflecting on Personal Challenges 58:30 Discussing wealth tax impacts 01:07:12 Student loan debt and consequences 01:10:22 Discussing student loan discipline 01:17:46 Student loan forgiveness debate 01:23:32 Innovations changing survival challenges 01:24:37 Devotion and service in religion 01:34:12 Overcoming obstacles with small steps 01:35:38 Struggling with AI advancements Sponsors: Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Paleovalley: 30 for $36 https://bit.ly/PaleovalleyIT OpusClip: Explore Agent Opus at https://agent.opus.pro/explore 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 Truemed: Check your eligibility and start saving at https://truemed.com/impact Ethos: Get a free quote athttps://ethos.com/impact Quo: Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory https://netsuite.com/Theory Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.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?

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  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bluey Show Live. We are here. It was a wild weekend. I was telling the boys, if we had gone live on Saturday, it would have been a different show than Sunday. It is now a different show than Monday. Everything in Iran has been up in the air. It has been absolute madness.

• 1:25Tom Bilyeu?

  The Iranian negotiations first fell apart after Trump threatened Iran and their negotiators, which was wild. Israel refuses to leave Lebanon. That continues to be a big sticking point. But then somehow it all got put back together like Humpty Dumpty, and major progress was supposedly made. At least that's the claim from J.D. Vance. We'll be talking more about that. Europe is pushing harder into madness as Keir Starmer officially resigns, but he's likely to be replaced by somebody who's even farther left. That's going to be fun. But then South America is swinging all the way to the right. That right wave just continues to sweep all across the continent.

• 2:06Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got Columbia now has elected a new president, and he's promising to go full Boo Kelly. Ro Khanna plays a round of "Am I Evil or Just Dumb?" and gets hardcore ratioed by David Freberg. That was fun to watch. Xi Jinping has made it sort of illegal to criticize the Chinese government. We'll be getting into the details. But by the way, it applies even if you live in a different country. So I guess China is officially off the table for me. And Cuba's president publicly admits that communism doesn't work. So that's cool. Very happy to hear it, though. Our politicians refuse to give up. All right. Shout out to Calshi, who is becoming one of my favorite companies. You guys, I love you so much. Thank you for all the support. It is incredible.

• 2:50Tom Bilyeu?

  There's a QR code on your screen. You can use code IMPACT for $10 to trade on calshi.com. Or if you're like me, you use it to find out what does the world think? Where are people actually willing to put their money? That's what I want to know. How people are actually perceiving where things are going? Because, boys and girls, as the Chinese, I like to think of it as a threat. As it goes, may you live in interesting times. And boy, oh, boy, we all live in interesting times. This weekend was a wild roller coaster for me. If you guys were watching it, Trump went full unhinged mode as the Iranian talks really started to stall out.

• 3:32Tom Bilyeu?

  I presume he was trying to absolutely batter them to get them back to the table. He put his position in language that would be literally impossible to understand. This is a paraphrase, but damn, is it close to an exact quote. Close the strait and you won't even make it back to your fucking country. So, yeah, pretty, pretty clear. And by the way, that was in nested inside of a longer, sort of more threatening tone. It was really crazy. Hence, the title of today's episode, crazy even for Trump. That one was wild. As you can imagine, I don't think Trump would be dumb enough to actually kill negotiators. At least I like to hope.

• 4:15Tom Bilyeu?

  That would be truly barbaric and completely kill America's credibility in any way, shape or form going forward to actually have a conversation with anybody. Because now you're in like Putin territory with Zelensky, where he's like, I'm not going to Russia. You're out of your mind. Like, I'll meet you in Switzerland, maybe. But if the US were, thankfully, they didn't. But if they were to show, we can touch you anywhere, anytime. You can forget negotiating anything into the future. So that was pretty crazy. I was holding my breath a bit to see how things would actually play out. Now, Thankfully, things did not play out horribly, even though the Iranians originally said the talks were dead, that they weren't even going to come back. There was all kinds of stuff on social

• 4:56Tom Bilyeu?

  media saying, "Oh, look how JD Vance has been humiliated by the Iranian delegation. The Qataris snubbed him." And Iran said, "We're not coming back until Trump apologizes and Israel leaves Lebanon." So at one point, I think it was early Sunday morning, I thought, "Well, those talks are done. I can expect gas prices to skyrocket back up on Monday." But somehow, some way, it all got pulled back together. So a reminder to all of us that the internet is not a real place. People tend to talk in a spicy, crazy way on the internet that they would not do in real life, and we should all be very, very glad about that. So it's cool. You get the unhinged take on where people at, what's their emotional temperature, but watch what they do if you want to actually see where

• 5:41Tom Bilyeu?

  the rubber meets the rub. And thankfully, the rubber was them sitting down, actually having a conversation, and putting some more clarity around the MOU, which I still think is bad. I think it's going to fall apart. But let us plant a flag as to where we are right now today. According to JD Vance, great progress was made. The strait is open. A de-confliction team has been put together. Now, what is that? They know that there are going to be skirmishes. I will give the Trump administration, they are very realistic about how these things play out. They have many times referred to ceasefires as where there is simply less shooting. I think that that's probably

• 6:25Tom Bilyeu?

  the most accurate take. So they know these skirmishes are going to pop off every now and then, and what they want to do is connect everyone so they can de-escalate the situations as they arise. Iran apparently agreed also to allow nuclear inspectors back into their country. I will, however, remind everybody that they had nuclear inspectors before. So as a part of the JCPOA, nuclear inspectors were going in. Now, the Trump administration has said a gazillion times, "Yeah, but that was a bad deal." And Iran was still just doing their thing and spinning up the centrifuges and pushing way beyond what is necessary for civilian use. But what I will say is, well, if the inspectors did not work, then I'm not sure what makes us think

• 7:09Tom Bilyeu?

  that we're going to work now. And so either I got what I was going to get in terms of change when you bombed the life out of their facilities, but I should still expect them to move forward and ignore all of that. Or you're gonna have to explain to me why things are going to be different this time. And I'm sure he's gonna say something along the lines of they know that we'll go in and bomb things. That's a pretty fragile piece, and obviously gives them all the incentive in the world to just hide things better. So I remain incredibly skeptical about this, but nonetheless, that is one of the things that they're putting forward as being a big win. I will say, if things are this fragile, at this point, when we're, what,

• 7:51Tom Bilyeu?

  a handful of days into the 60-day extension, I still fully expect everything to fall apart as negotiations move forward. So brace yourself for that one. Lebanon, basically, at this point, is a whole game. So do I expect Hezbollah and Israel to not shoot each other? No, I do not. So as I said last week, I think that in Iran's pocket is a trump card that they will play whenever they feel like it. They've already played it once, and that is, we're backing off because Israel struck Lebanon, not mentioning that Hezbollah had killed five of their soldiers in one attack, and then several more in a follow-up attack. So I think that they can

• 8:32Tom Bilyeu?

  always nudge Hezbollah to act a fool. They can point at Israel refusing to leave Lebanon, which Ben Gavir, anyway, is banging the drum. I haven't heard what Netanyahu's saying, but Ben Gavir is banging the drum. We are not going to give even an inch in the territory that we've taken in Lebanon. So this all feels like you've got a clause in the MOU that says if Israel doesn't get out of Lebanon, that this is all void. Israel is saying, we're not leaving Lebanon. Nobody has given any indication that Israel's leaving. You've got rhetoric from Trump saying that he doesn't like the way that they're handling it, but he certainly hasn't said, don't worry, they're all gonna be out. So yeah, we have a 60-day

• 9:15Tom Bilyeu?

  clock that ticks away, and I think America is bargaining from a point of weakness. That just is what it is, man. It is what it is. And we've got to be able to be honest about that so we can figure out a way forward. Uh, man, this is wild. May you live in interesting times. May you live in interesting times. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman.

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• 10:37Tom Bilyeu?

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• 11:16Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:04Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Well, it was an on-again, off-again weekend with these MOU. But going to Kao Shi for our trade of the week. It seems right now that the sentiment is we'll probably get a deal done before 2027. But the before-December numbers are slowly chipping out.

• 13:23Tom Bilyeu?

  How do they define a deal? What is a deal?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  If the US has agreed to sign or accepted a new Iran US nuclear deal before January 1st.

• 13:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so a new JCPOA.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yes, and I don't think the MOU counts.

• 13:38Tom Bilyeu?

  No, there's no way. The MOU is literally just, we're gonna talk about some shit at some point in the future, we'll see how it goes.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  The stipulations are, imposes verifiable restrictions on Iran's nuclear program, including limits on uranium enrichment, and provides for lifting, suspension, modification of at least one US economic sanction. That's very interesting. So it has to be a nuclear specific item or.

• 14:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Not or, is it or or and?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Oh, and, and, sorry, and.

• 14:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  A sanction, yeah. Interesting. So, yeah, we definitely have seen the market swing on every Trump tweet. We have seen the MOU swing. We have seen JD Vance talking, then Israel talking, then Ben Gavir wants to bomb every Lebanese woman. I don't get that tweet. We could cover that next.

• 14:21Tom Bilyeu?

  A thousand Lebanese women must weep for every one soldier. Something like that. It was insane.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Like, it was poetically massacred. I don't even know how, like, it was beautifully written that you wanted to commit genocide. Like, I don't know how to get there. But anyway, let's first start with the likelihood of a deal. The MOU gave us optimism. The strikes, the threats.

• 14:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I've never been optimistic about the MOU.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Really? So it was completely.

• 14:46Tom Bilyeu?

  It's bullshit. This, this is literally, we're gonna word this vaguely. The, the game that's actually being played right now is Iran. I can keep bombing you. I just wanna remind you all of that. You've got to give me a story that I can go back to my public and say that I won. And if you don't do that, I'm actually better off bombing you than I am not. So, recognize the situation that you're in, and if you wanna push the world's largest military to go back to that, if nothing else, it will do massive economic damage that you guys will have to rebuild from. It will delay you, it will cause problems, there will be more turmoil within your own government, which puts you in a weaker position.

• 15:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But this is, this is a Mexican standoff. They both have a gun to each other's head, and Iran knows that they can close the Strait. Trump knows that he can go back. Back to bombing them. It's catastrophic for both of them, but neither of them will go out without doing damage to the other. Like neither of them is just gonna be like, yeah, okay, ah, fuck. Like this didn't go well. You know, I'm gonna peace out. They are going to pop off as many parting shots as they can. So yeah, this is the MOU. There is so little likelihood that it gets across the finish. And of course, like if this gets negotiated well and things start turning around, I will immediately update my thinking, but uh, which people are bizarrely afraid to do. But that to me, no problem. But where are we right now?

• 16:13Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a total clusterfuck. This, he had a shot to get on Mount Rushmore and he didn't, he didn't make it. He, he tried to take the game when he shot and he missed. It just bank like off the rim hard. And it is what it is. And now this is about the PR cleanup. That's it. That's the 60 day MOU, PR.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Do you think that's why like they have Vance out there in Switzerland? He's been running his kind of uh, PR tour, talking to people about the deal and the, and he's now kind of the face of it?

• 16:38Tom Bilyeu?

  If you are in the negotiation, you're holding in the back of your head. This could possibly go well. So this is something I say to my wife all the time. If my wife has beef with somebody, she's got to like attack it head on right now, today. She's got to say the thing that she's feeling immediately right to your face. And I'm just like, mm, if you buy yourself some time, an opening may present itself where you can artfully diffuse this situation. If it has to be addressed right now, today, because you cannot be in that discomfort, then it's just going to be blunt force trauma. So they're all going in hoping maybe if we drag this out, some kind of opportunity presents itself. I don't know what it's gonna be,

• 17:21Tom Bilyeu?

  but it could be something. And so let's see if we can make this happen. And I think this really does come down to just a lack of theory of mind. Certainly on behalf of Trump. Trump cannot put himself in the position of what it means when you're willing to accept victory in the afterlife. And so for him, that's like, he, he's not able to run that calculus. And then on top of that, you've got people who are both backed into corners. Now Trump's corner is less terrifying, but it is like getting impeached, possibly going to prison if it really all breaks bad and the Republicans lose power. And Democrats now have like a moral high ground to stand on and be like, oh, we never would

• 18:03Tom Bilyeu?

  have done that. And so that could go very, very wrong for him. The Iranians, though, they get killed. They get Gaddafi'd. And so they've got to be very, very careful because if the people are, if the IRGC fractures enough that militant armed groups inside of Iran, whether the Kurds or actually like people breaking off from the IRGC that have access to weapons, then that ends in a whole lot of death. And so everybody's just like, okay, I'm not in the best position ever. I think the Iranians are in a stronger position because of what they are willing to tolerate. Whereas the US is like, I can't let inflation get

• 18:45Tom Bilyeu?

  too high. I can't let interest rates get too high. The economy has to like keep going. Gas prices can't get too high. So it's like, we've got all these sort of superficial things. These guys are like, I just can't get shot by my own people. So, but I can starve them. I can continue to murder them in the streets, all that. That's perfectly fine. But so it is two people backed into a corner, but different degrees of bad outcomes if they're not able to get the thing. So I think people want to look for that space. They want to see a path forward. They're constantly testing what marketing works against our own people. So if you think about Trump, remember in the beginning, they weren't even clear like, oh,

• 19:28Tom Bilyeu?

  this is about the nuclear issue. If you remember when we first started covering this, this is after they've blown up Fordow. And all of a sudden, I can feel them ratcheting back up to attack Iran. And I was like, wait, is this about the fact that they killed their own people? What, what, like, what has gotten him riled up? And at first, it was like a bunch of things. And like, over time, they realized, oh, the messaging that sticks is the nuclear thing. So just beat that to death. And so now they're acting as if that was always the real thing. But I'm supposed to hold in my head, I completely destroyed their nuclear capabilities with a couple bunker buster bombs, aren't we the best, to no, no, no, like, we've got to destroy the whole country because these guys were like seconds

• 20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  away from a nuclear weapon. So it's like, well,

• 20:18Tom Bilyeu?

  One of those messages is a lie. So, uh, now I know that this is all just spin. So what they're doing is market research and they're just trying to figure out, what can I say and repeat enough that you're going to be on my side? So I can win at the midterms and then keep another Republican in power in 2028.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  You covered it at the top, but you know, JD Vance says that they have made progress on their forest talking points, establishing a conversation in a framework. So if ceasefire or something does break down, they have a structure talking about nuclear, agreeing to getting the inspectors in there and things like that. So it seems that what they're telling us on face value on paper, we are at least making progress going in the right direction. Is it now just, we just have to make sure Israel doesn't bomb Lebanon too hard? Or do you think Iran is just kind of using that as a scapegoat? Yeah, like, you know what I mean? Like, what, what do you think will impede this progress now? With kind of the, the approach that JD Vance is taking because he seems very level headed versus the Trump, do what I say now, or I'm gonna buy me to the stone ages. JD Vance is like, hey, we're getting together in a room.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  We're talking about the things that we want. We've made progress on these issues, yada, yada.

• 21:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I have to imagine at some point in the, who do I choose as vice president? Somebody said, you have to accept that you're able to play bad cop in a way that nobody else is, but you need somebody to play good cop. And so you need somebody who's going to be loyal, although there's all kinds of rumors about JD Vance being so anti-Trump's foreign policy that maybe he doesn't get that credit. But he has sent him over to negotiate. So there's enough goodwill there that he's letting that happen. So JD is always going to come across as good cop. He is very rational. He's very calm. He's very intelligent. He's eloquent. So he offers a very good counterbalance to Trump. Now, I will admit, even though I thought what Trump said was completely unhinged, I was like,

• 22:13Speaker 01

  You won't make it back to your fucking country?

• 22:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Tom Bilyeu?

  He's shown he will just kill, kill, kill. So the fact that Trump will just kill, kill, kill gives you enough cover when it is a naked threat that is almost certainly pure bluff. Some part of you has to be like, maybe it's not. And so that, I hate to say it, but that instability is very useful. So you send in Kushner, who's getting like the, you're too young to probably remember this, but Karl Rove had this sense of like, you could hear wolves howling in the background every time he like appeared on screen. He was like a Halloween episode perpetually. He was like a ghoul of some kind. So Jared Kushner is starting to get that like vibe, but I actually, from the things where

• 23:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I've seen him speak, he is very sharp, very calm, very eloquent. And so you put those two together and I think that Trump is hyper aware. I am the hammer and you guys will smooth things out. I'm going to make sure that we are unpredictable enough that people need to stay at the table for their own safety. And so it did work because at least on social media, Iran was signaling aggressively. The talks are dead. We are going home. We won't even do a photo op with J D Vance. Qatar wouldn't do a photo op with J D Vance.

• 23:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Like it was really like, for a minute, it really looked like this was dead. So I think that that is strategic. I don't think in the end, the reason I say that this is also stupid is this is egos clashing with real lives being spent as if they don't matter at all. And it all comes down to the very distressing reality that even for people who are willing to take their payment in the afterlife, in the here and now, it's all about the economy. So the people who are willing to take their, their payment in the afterlife, what weapon do they wield? The economy.

• 24:23Tom Bilyeu?

  So people always try to dance around that for reasons I do not understand, but the economy, the economy, the economy. And so when you really just pull it all out into the fray, it's like, oh, I've got these egomaniacs who are like, I'm not going to have somebody talk to me like that. I'm not going to have somebody tell me that I can or can't do this thing. Nobody's going to boss me around and all over the economy.

• 24:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's horrific, but it's where we're at.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  And then now bringing back to Israel and Lebanon of it all. Um, this is Ben Gavir's tweet that was been getting traction. This is the first time I've seen something get like community noted, but like this post violated the X rules. However, X has determined that it may be in the public's interest of the post to remain accessible.

• 25:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yo, that's wild.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  That's hilarious. I've never seen that before, but this is what Ben Gavir said. For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep, all of Lebanon must burn. With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn. This is the second time he said that. Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF. And this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration. I told the prime minister, even in our private meetings, for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. Enough with the ping pong. In the Middle East, you don't win with measured responses and restraint. You need to go berserk to obliterate to crush the terror.

• 25:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so here's the thing.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  This is total war though, right? Like this is.

• 25:51Tom Bilyeu?

  That is total war.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And they won't do total war, but it, it really is. That, that impulse is there. Okay. Now here's where you can get people pretty riled up about Israel. But they, at one point, I don't know if they still do, so by all means, if anybody in the comments knows. But at one point, they had a policy of disproportionate response. And that's what he's describing here. It's the, for every one of ours, it's a thousand of theirs. And that's how the little guy in the region holds its ground.

• 26:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And it is an utterly fascinating thing that, shout out to all the fathers.

• 26:41Tom Bilyeu?

  My dad told me a story of how he stopped getting bullied as a kid. And it was for me to do with what I will, but he said, um, my father told me, this is, so my technically step grandfather. Uh, told me that if the bully is coming up and giving you a hard time, punch him in the nose. And watch how quick he stops. And so kid comes up to bully my dad, punches him in the nose, bloody nose, and the kid ends up falling down the stairs, if I remember right. And that was it. My dad never got bullied again. Uh, so I would say it's good advice.

• 27:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Take peace if peace is on offer, but if somebody's fucking with you, you gotta punch them. The bad news is that if you aren't careful, you become the monster. And this is Israel going full monster mode. And so watching what they did in Gaza, everybody's like, oh, that's what the monster looks like. And so what they've done at an industrial scale, it's so efficient. And it's so overwhelming that you forget how it started. You forget that it started with a music festival full of the peaceniks, the kids that want to see

• 28:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Gazans, Palestinians be able to be free and have their own state and live their life. Those were the kids that were murdered and raped and all of that. So it's like, but in the face of industrial scale murder and ethnic cleansing, it's like you just kind of forget. So it's one of those very effective strategy. In terms of people don't fuck with you. This is like some Genghis Khan shit. But you become the monster. And in the modern era where cameras are everywhere and social opinion whips around the world, you find yourself isolated very fast.

• 28:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I get why they say that because it is how they have stake to claim for themselves. It is them having to deal with a day to day reality of terror tunnels being built in Gaza, in Lebanon, them launching rockets at you. Like at some point you do go, oh, if tit for tat isn't working, then I'm going to just level. Your entire city, your entire country and but nonetheless, it's monstrous. And so now the thing that we all have to contend with as people watching on the outside is what would we do? In their position, like what do you do like thought experiment? What do you do if you have tried for whatever 80 years?

• 29:28Tom Bilyeu?

  To negotiate a settled peace and it just doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work. And they keep killing your people. At what point do you go, yeah, fuck them all?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  It's interesting because like going back to the bully analogy, I got bullied one time. And I tried to hit the guy in the like face, but I missed. And then like pushed me down and started like kicking me and stuff. So it's like I got more beat up.

• 29:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  I didn't get bullied again, though, but I didn't walk away like I didn't have like the bloody nose like triumphant in that story. But it's like I went down swinging, whatever. So I think I respect that Israel has a right to defend itself. I think every sovereign nation does. Ukraine, we can go around the world. However, I just hate that we're in bed with this person that's fighting all the time. Like it's one thing if you had the friend that's crazy that's fighting, but it's another thing when it's your girlfriend who's drunk at the nightclub, fighting every guy. Now it's putting you kind of in this bad situation.

• 30:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Now heard, agreed, but what if guys really are coming up? Uh, pinching her ass, like saying all kinds of horrible shit, like, uh, groping her. And she, oh, and by the way, um. Let's say, let's really make it bad. Let's say that she's really had some essay problems in the past, like proper horrific essay problems. But now she's strapped up at all the parties. Uh, a guy wings at her once she shoots him dead. Now you're like, god damn, like, wait, hold on. But essay is not a problem for her anymore. Let me assure you.

• 30:58Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's like, yeah, it, you go, hey, got it. Understand how this started, but fuck. Like we gotta, we need to find a solution, but the problem is like. I re- there isn't a solution.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  No, I just think that Israel as a sovereign nation, I do think that it has the right to defend itself. So it's one thing if it's just disproportionately is bombing everybody and that's cool. You guys are doing that over there, but I think it impacts us now where Iran is saying we're not going to make a deal with the US because of Israel. Or now we have to justify their actions or things like that. And I think that us being like-

• 31:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, so you're just saying, does America go-

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, okay, so I don't think we understand why we're as married to Israel as we are. So if we're married to Israel simply because they fund politicians, elect better politicians. That one is, it's so straightforward and yet seemingly impossible to do. I'm going to speed run how lobbying actually works because I don't think people understand it. The way that lobbying actually works is you're not just throwing money at a candidate today, which is why AIPAC doesn't necessarily have to be one of the largest contributors. And I'm sure Big Pharma does this. And so anyway, what they do is they go find a young guy running for city council and they check his beliefs.

• 32:23Tom Bilyeu?

  And if that person is just actually in alignment with their stuff, they give them some money and they're like, let's see what you do. And so that person has been being funded since they're like in their twenties, since they're doing like, you know, really local stuff. And so it's more of a survival bias than it's a, we're going to throw big money at the problem. This is like Soros. The genius of Soros is realizing you gotta go local. So you go to a DA and you just get a whole bunch of activist judges and this gets a whole lot easier. So they go and they find people who really just believe, like Mike Huckabee is not bought and paid for. Like he believes what he believes. And so Mike Huckabee is the kind of person you find young and you work with forever.

• 33:06Tom Bilyeu?

  And you just ignored hundreds of other people that you could have gone with because he's the guy that like, whoa, he's got a real read of like the scripture that makes him like want to glue himself to Israel. So to unwind that is- Like, I would say has already begun. We've now got a generation, maybe two, that have become completely radicalized against Israel. Okay, so we're running an experiment of like, there's real cultural energy now for people who are like, I'm not gonna take a fucking dollar from you, no matter what. I'll eat fucking beans out of a can because I'm not that guy. So whatever, you're gonna get a crop of politicians who are not gonna be interested in being in bed with Israel.

• 33:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, money does go a long way. I'm sure that's part of it. You've got ultra wealthy, people who are very sympathetic to the Zionist cause, either because they're diehard Christian, or because they are just, they're wealthy and can fucking, they're Jewish, believe in the state of Israel and are gonna funnel a ton of personal money into making sure that that's all very real. But I have a feeling there's also, Israel, the GCC nations are an increasingly important part of the foreign equation. My generation didn't grow up thinking about them because my generation grew up thinking that oil was always a thing.

• 34:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And they don't realize that, nope, it's really between World War I and World War II, that all the leaders of the world go, oh shit, like, we need to start building tanks and airplanes and all of that stuff is going, and bigger factories. And all of that stuff is going to require energy, oil, and so now all of a sudden, all eyes on making that switch over. And so, reading about Churchill was utterly fascinating because Churchill was the guy in England that was basically like, hey, the navy needs to switch over entirely to oil. And I was like, damn, a politician like in sort of modern history, was the guy that was like, oh, we need to switch everything over to oil. And I was like, that's really recent.

• 35:14Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, when you think about this all playing out in the last hundred years that we've switched over to oil, I think it becomes a little bit easier to understand what's going on, why everybody's eyes are on what's happening in the Middle East. And if your guy in the region is Israel, and for reasons we've talked about- Before, they've got the possibly the most effective diaspora of any ethnic minority ever. Now, it's like, okay, hold on, there might be a lot more going on here than just these guys are throwing money around to politicians. So if the men in black suits roll up to the new president, whether that's Obama or anybody else, and is like, bro, I get that you hate Israel,

• 35:54Tom Bilyeu?

  but let me tell you a little bit about what you get from Israel. And you're like, fuck, they're giving me all kinds of intel. They're keeping things in that region, either destabilized or stabilized, depending on how you want to read it. But they play some insanely important role that we're not giving enough credit to. And so now, when Miriam Adelson rolls up and is like, I want to give you a bunch of money, and the men in black suits have been like, bro, you're gonna need these guys. All of a sudden, you're like, all right, fuck, like, I get the money and I get the whatever that thing is. Intel, destabilization, stabilization, you know, the balance of power in a way that's favorable to the West. It's going to be far more complicated than Miriam Adelson is rich and she gives a lot of money.

• 36:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, it just isn't gonna be that basic bitch.

• 36:42Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 36:48Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I found the context for the disproportionate response thing you were talking about, because it's called the Dahia Doctrine. And it was from the 2006 Lebanon war, they basically took out an entire neighborhood of Dahia and Beirut. And they basically said, oh, all of Hezbollah is here. So they used that doctrine. Then in 2008, he went on the record, the IDF Chief of Staff, to say, "We will apply disproportionate force and cause great damage and destruction to villages from which Israel were fired upon." So that's kind of how they see disproportionate response.

• 37:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, also, I don't know if this will make people even more anti-Israel, but there's a book called Rise Early and Kill First. And it's all about, I guess there's a passage in the Old Testament that said, "If a man is coming to kill you, rise early and kill him first." And Yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  I hadn't heard of that book.

• 37:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. So it's.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  You have it.

• 37:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  You're a goyim.

• 37:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, if you.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I have it tattooed.

• 37:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Listen, like any state, the stand your ground states, the castle doctrine, all that shit for my money is correct. If you come into my house, you get shot in the face. So, yeah, but again, you push it too far and you become the monster and oh God, so much is waging in the realm of public opinion versus the reality of if you got people knocking on your door every day. But like if I start going to my neighbors because they're launching the attacks and I start preemptively shooting them in the face, it's like, oh, that's very different than you came into my house. And so this is where it gets ridiculously ugly.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, let's talk about Hezbollah. Cause there were some people in the chat, like where does Hezbollah fit into all of this?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  I think your analogies just nailed it. I can understand terror attacks. I'm going to people responsible for this. We have to go find them like that. But there's one thing to stay in your ground and then there's another thing that like, oh, somebody robbed me two weeks ago, I'll be right back. And now I'm driving up and down the block, blowing their house up, their aunt's house, their mom's house. Cause like that's gang violence. That's, that's gang warfare. Like that's not proportionate response.

• 38:52Tom Bilyeu?

  This is gang warfare, for sure.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  So that's why I'm like, it's getting toward that. But what's your read on just Hezbollah and?

• 38:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Iranian proxy, uh, doing the will of a government who wants to see religion spread around the region. Israel's a problem. The Iran in the middle of these negotiations is making it abundantly clear. We are not going to give up on our desire to eradicate Israel. Okay, so now you've got, we're committed. Sure, we'll do the peace talks, but bro, it's not like you're going to convince me that I don't hate Israel and don't have a duty to God to eradicate them from existing in the region. So now they recently found more terror tunnels, great PR, terror tunnels,

• 39:40Tom Bilyeu?

  where you go in and you find in just a fucking neighborhood, you find a bunch of drones and missiles and tunnels that literally allow them to shoot right at Israel. And you start finding all that stuff and you go, see, we told you this is real. We're not making this up. And as long as those two are going head to head, you've got a problem. Now, my plan to get out of this is both the only plan that will work and almost guaranteed to fail to the point where I'm like, I need to proffer some solution to be congruent with my own like frame of reference, which is there is a solution to every problem. You need to put it out on the table. You need to understand where it breaks down. There's just cause and effect. Okay.

• 40:25Tom Bilyeu?

  So the reality is because it really is all about the economy, you need two things. One, you need to get the countries interested in the wellbeing of their citizens in this life, not the next. So, hey, hope that the 72 virgins are waiting for you. That would be rad. That sounds really good to me. Shout out to my wife. Like, that sounds fucking fantastic. But I need something to be good here now. So I need my people to believe that a year from now, my life is going to be better and that 20 years from now, my kid's life is going to be better as defined by economics here in this life. So you get them involved and this is, I can see the Trump administration trying to do this. They keep saying, we want to give them a chance to act like a normal country.

• 41:10Tom Bilyeu?

  What that means is stop attacking your neighbors, stop pushing a religious agenda, start focusing on economics, period. So, but I don't think they're going to do that. But that's what you would have to do. You have to get them involved in the economics. Then you have to say, listen, you guys have been killing each other for a very long time. So there is no salve to make you guys feel better about that. So the cooler heads in Israel and the cooler heads in Iran and Hezbollah and Gaza, like they all have to prevail. And cooler heads means stop trying to force your religious doctrine on other people. You don't get the land back. Focus now entirely on moving forward. There's no more looking backwards. We completely abolish any of this bullshit.

• 41:52Tom Bilyeu?

  The fascinating thing that we saw in Japan play out, oh God, this, this gets so nested, Drew. I have never believed more than I believe today that culture just controls everything. Culture is a very shorthand way of saying the people in a given group. It's typically regionally based, but not always. The people in a given group have an algorithm running in their brain that controls how they interpret everything that happens to them. Uh, Japan had as a very fascinating um honor shame culture hierarchical.

• 42:31Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm gonna do one more nest. You may have to help me get back out of this. Part of the reason that Europe conquered the world and Africa did not is that cows are all about hierarchy. And so you can come into the picture and be like, I'm the king cow now. And so all the cows will just do what you say because you've established yourself as a leader. So that's baked into their DNA is to be submissive to whoever the boss is. Zebras don't play that game. Horses do. So if you can exert your will on a horse, they'll fall in line. They'll do what you tell them. A zebra is gonna bite you, fuck you, kick you, literally doesn't care. You cannot um tame them. You can't. And so if you are on a continent where you can tame a horse and now you can kill all the other tribes that don't know how to ride a horse, you win.

• 43:16Tom Bilyeu?

  You have a superior technology. If you have a zebra that bites you, kicks you off, tells you to just fuck right off, then you can't. And so you're gonna get beat by the culture that has the horses. So this, this is now what you're up against. So we nuked this shit out of Japan, but they happen to be a culture that's like, oh, we totally get in line with um the hierarchy. And so what the US did was they co-opted the um emperor. And they said, emperor, tell them to do this. And then fucking Japan just did it. Now you try to do that to a hurting culture that realizes um if I allow you to come kill my sheep, I'm fucked. So I'm gonna disproportionate response. So if you take one of my sheep, I kill a hundred of yours, right?

• 44:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And so now you've got multiple cultures that believe that. You did me a wrong. I've gotta come back at you a thousandfold. And so how the fuck do you defuse that bomb? So this is where it's like, the answer is obvious, but it's so difficult to do because you have to break those cultural norms. Good luck. Like if you're not, if you're not willing to do like for real total warfare, like good luck with that shit. Because Israel, for instance, they may really get Gaza because they just bombed so many people there. Seems pretty clear that they're running a

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Ethnic cleansing?

• 44:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, ethnic cleansing thing. I was like, I just fucking said it. An ethnic cleansing campaign there. So they may get that. But the problem is, that's not going to solve the problem for the whole region. It's just like, they get another chunk of it, and now people are even more mad. So until you can get people to let go of that cultural belief, you will have made precious little progress. Now, some Muslim countries have secularized. So it's like, it is possible. Look at UAE. But the UAE, like if you look at the numbers, man, it's like, basically an international hub. So from a cultural perspective, you have one family that's basically overseeing everything else. And then they just imported like, instead

• 45:22Tom Bilyeu?

  of just low wage workers, they imported a ton of capital. And so, interesting immigration process. Saudi is like flirting with it, we'll see. But that, this is a cultural question, and nothing scares me more than trying to rapidly change a culture. It feels like, yeah, you're not going to.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Got it. I never heard Israel in a culture perspective. But that framing, I feel like, definitely highlights this problem. And it adds an additional layer to the conversation. Because I think too often, it's, Israel stopped being mean, whereas now you're taking the cultural nuances baked into them as people. And it's like, okay, that's why they even had that response before even, before the situation even escalated, they already knew that that response was like built into them, that it was gonna get there.

• 46:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  All right, that was a lot to put on the table. All right, well, we covered the grooming gangs. This is perfect timing for Kira Starmer, because now he could just slowly back away and say, the next guy has to deal with it. This is his speech from the resignation, a clip from his resignation announcement.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Every decision I've taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party.

• 46:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Respect.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  I will ask the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to set out a timetable with nominations opening on the 9th of July and completed by the summer recess.

• 46:54Tom Bilyeu?

  The bad news is, he's probably gonna be replaced by somebody farther to the left. That's the wild part. But people are offering, I think, legitimate criticism, which is that the right did nothing to stop immigration. So you had people vote for Brexit. They exit the European Union because they didn't want to be beholden to their laws anymore. And they still let a ton of immigrants into the country. I think it actually went up when conservatives were in power and actually went down under Kyrastharama. So it's like, this is one of those where it's like, kids, if you don't get it together and confront why they're bringing in migrants. So everybody hears the story about why the people on the left want to bring in migrants.

• 47:37Tom Bilyeu?

  But people don't hear the story about why the people on the right want to bring in migrants. Everybody is trying to deal with the fact that birth rates have been declining for a very long time. And if you have fewer workers, then the workers start getting powerful and they can negotiate for higher wages. And all of a sudden you realize that your economy isn't growing because you regulate things to fucking death. And so it's like, well, this is a lot easier to import cheap labor, especially when you have a left-leaning personality and you're like, well, we raped the world for 200 years. So we should now let the world literally come and rape us. That is the brutal reality, the brutal reality what you see playing out.

• 48:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And because you have that dual need, right? All eyes on Japan, please. Because you have that dual need, you're going to see neither the right nor the left get serious about booting people out.

• 48:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Just real talk.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Um, Lyra in the chat kinda nailed it for me. I think UK naturally is more left. So even their Conservative Party, I would say we would call like American moderate. I don't think they have like a, I guess Rupert Lowe and the Reform Party is like the real.

• 48:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Restore Britain is right.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like maybe that's where that's where it is, but under UK Labour, like the Labour Party has to get control until they're the next election. So it is going to be somebody from the same party. So the equivalent of if Trump resigned, it'll be another Republican person that will then take the mantle over.

• 49:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, and maybe it would be far more noticeable because Trump really is a singular figure. In England, Kyrstaram is not a Trumpian figure. He's not able to force his will on his party or people outside the party. So the real question is, the guy that everybody thinks is going to replace him is a guy named Burnham. And that's why he's announcing now because Burnham got elected. He had to be a member of parliament to be considered for Prime Minister. And so they finally got him elected. So now he can be considered for Prime Minister. But this would be like, what, AOC getting elected, stepping down so Mam Donny can take her place. And yes, I'm well aware that he couldn't actually be an American

• 49:52Tom Bilyeu?

  president because he wasn't born here. But that's what it's like. It's a shift even farther left.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  So we shall see. Like you said, they'll have it wrapped up by the summer recess. So that's like around the fall time for us. It's weird, though, because I want to say this is their seventh Prime Minister. Like, it seems like UK hasn't really been, yeah, like locked in the last couple of years. And I want to say from like 2019 or something like that. So it's not a long time. Or 2019, yeah, 2019. In general, though, is this more an indication of how he performed as a Prime Minister? Is this more of an indictment of the West is still distracted and people don't like the change that it's going through? What do you think is the thing that like, made him actually like, leave?

• 50:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It's populism. So you have economics. Well, sort of. So what I'm talking about, the specific element of populism I'm talking about now, is you have, economics is the problem. And you're bringing in a politician to solve an economic problem with every other tool at his disposal. And so it fixes nothing. And so he can read a laundry list of, oh, I've done. All these things and everybody's like, mm, but I still have a problem. And that problem, depending on whether you're on the right or the left, is going to be different. But it it has an underlying economic issue. And so unfortunately, what you need right now is the country to believe in a Margaret Thatcher type character, but they're not going to. They'll be super divided.

• 51:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is why austerity hasn't helped and why he came in because you're not pushing it far enough. And so he came in and lifted the austerity measures, which is the exact wrong thing to do when you have an economy that's in trouble. He's trying to socialize things even farther. And so what what the UK needs to do is close your borders.

• 51:44Tom Bilyeu?

  You need to deregulate a lot. You need to focus on innovation and you need to grow your fucking economy. So you're going to empower your workers so that their real wages are going up. You're going to deregulate so that fewer things are run by the government and let the free market start to run, which will increase your GDP, which will increase your tax base, which will also allow you to deal with the fact that wages are going to get more expensive because there's less immigrants coming into the country to undercut everybody. So that's what they need to do. And then also they've really, for long term health, they've really got to get their birth rates up. But they're not going to do that.

• 52:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And so whether you go right or left, I mean, maybe if you go all the way to restore and they at least stabilize the culture so that you're not swinging left and right so hard. That may help. I don't know enough about Rupert Lowe, though, to know if he's really going to go unhinged psycho. Because anybody who's at the fringes, like the very thing that gives him the backbone to say, we're going to deport all these motherfuckers can also make them go Xi Jinping. And so we've got, we'll see if we have time for it. But Xi Jinping is, it's hard to say if he's passing laws, edicts, like whatever the right word is when you have a Politburo and they just do things by decree. But he's starting to now tighten his fist over China. And it's like, yes.

• 53:10Tom Bilyeu?

  When you have a benevolent dictator, it actually is a more efficient form of government. But you create a vulnerability to a character like Trump or a character like Xi that we don't actually have. So Trump isn't able to do for all of the crying and wailing. Trump is not able to do the things that Xi can do. We have too many checks and balances, even though our system is certainly weakened. It is not weakened that far. So that's where it's like, be very careful what you wish for. And I don't know enough about Rupert Lowe to know, no, maybe he's great. Maybe that's exactly who they should elect. But anybody that finds themselves on the extreme end makes me nervous.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  So it's interesting on that stand front, the UK, the West is going a bit more right. Whereas South America seems like they're going through a red wave of themselves.

• 53:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Wait, wait, wait, UK is going more left.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, the West is going more left. South America's.

• 53:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Sorry, I thought you said more right. My apologies.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  South America is going more right. With Columbia's new presidential candidate.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  I need the Spanish speakers. How do I pronounce his first name? Albalardo? Albalardo de la Esperida?

• 54:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that's exactly correct.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Esperida. I can't roll that R.

• 54:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Esprilla.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Esprilla. Esprilla, okay, Esprilla. What's up? We need to go to Columbia for research.

• 54:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's what it's for, Drew.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Because it's right wing and we gotta inspect it. So with that going on. It does seem like in different regions, everybody's kind of tightening it up. And now bringing it back to China with this national unity law. China's already a dictatorship. They don't have to worry about the right or left, but even Xi Jinping now is trying to like double down. So where do you think it's coming from? From China? And how can we tie that kind of how the ebbs and flows are going on around the world?

• 54:58Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, so let's take them one at a time. The most interesting story in South America is a question. I don't think anybody's answered it. It is literally just a question right now. But the question is, did US aid?

• 55:10Tom Bilyeu?

  As an NGO, influence all of the left-leaning things that were happening in South America. And the reason that all of a sudden, we have so many countries swinging to the right is because USAID is no longer funneling money into those organizations. That to me is a very critical question. So I have a growing belief that NGOs are just activist groups that throw money around in the same way that anybody who's up in arms about AIPAC should be up in arms about USAID. So that's where I'm like, we don't have a clear enough picture about the NGOs yet, but more and more stuff is coming out. So that's, it's very open-ended and I don't think we have an answer.

• 55:53Tom Bilyeu?

  But it is, that is a very, very interesting question. Now, it may just be that people have put up with this bullshit long enough. They see a Trumpian figure, they get excited, they see Bukelli, they see Milley, and they're just like, oh shit. Like, these guys, one, they're being supported by the US, which is a very good thing for us in South America. And then, two, like, look at what Bukelli has done. Look at the surplus that Milley has done. Milley, everyone said, there's no way he's gonna come in, he's gonna ruin everything, but he didn't. And he's actually turning the country around. It's very, very exciting. So now, it's like, is it just that? Or is it both? It's probably both, we'll see. But that's the part that I find really interesting about what's happening in South America right now.

• 56:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And by the way, I would like to put another thing on the table, which is the, the president of Cuba, I had to fact-check, I was like, there's no way he actually said this. But the president of Cuba went on and said, "One of the core tenets of communism does not work in practice." And so it's like, hey, really cool idea, it sounds awesome. I get why people like the idea of communism. It lets you completely indulge in all of your resentments. You can hate the guy that's more successful than you, fucking burn that asshole to the ground, which is a real thing that drives humans. Humans are very resentful creatures. And so you've got that, and it leans way into that, and it also cloaks it in, treat the country as you would treat your family.

• 57:20Tom Bilyeu?

  And because you really do have that impulse for your family, like, yo, I want, like... It is a point of pride for me that if ever Lisa and I, like, there's only one thing and one of us is gonna get that thing, I'm like, not 90% of the time, 100% of the time that goes to my wife. That makes me feel good about who I am. And so it's like, cool, yes, like, I get it. That doesn't scale. It is also in the human mind. Fuck those other kids. So you get into like this complete derangement. Remember the iron law of oligarchy? So you build something around a thing of resentment. In fact, will you do a fast search? If we can pull it up while I talk here, I want to read a message. So Karl Marx's

• 58:04Tom Bilyeu?

  father's message to Karl. Search that. See if we can get it up. So you've got this like ideology of resentment cloaked in this like thing that's very loving. We want to take care of everybody else. But it doesn't work in practice. And so everyone, yes, okay, here we go. Boys and girls, on the day after Father's Day, let me read a message from Karl Marx's father to Karl Marx. So this is a guy that gave us communism. Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess without labor or trouble, well furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant

• 58:49Tom Bilyeu?

  carriages. This embitterment disgusts me, and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever, have you ever up till now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet, the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish evokes embitterment. Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

• 59:34Tom Bilyeu?

  That, boys and girls, the socialism and communism in a nutshell, from the father, watching his son literally invent it. So, hearing the president of Cuba finally admit, "Price controls don't work. Price controls don't work. They fuck everything up. They break the physics of the economy. And once you understand that the economy works on physics, that plugs in to the human mind, you understand why it is both so enticing, for the reasons I just laid out, and it fucks everything up. It's wild. And yet, we keep doing it over and over and over, because people do not mentally map the actual functioning of the economy.

• 1:00:18Tom Bilyeu?

  It's wild. It takes a long time. I get it. It took me a very long time. But nonetheless, if you don't, you end up in a cul-de-sac of death as you pursue things that are never going to work. So I loved hearing him admit it.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  We're supposed to be talking about China. And, uh, but that is a perfect segue to the Friedberg-Rokana exchange that's been happening on X. For those who haven't been following the journey, we're not ready yet. For those who haven't been following the journey, it started off with Friedberg giving his opinion on the economy. Rokana retweeted it, and then after that way, they kept kind of going back and forth on it.

• 1:00:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, and I can give you the details. So, basically, you've got Friedberg trying to get everybody to distinguish between makers and takers. So there are people in the world that make things, and then they create value. So obviously, this is still largely an echo of the conversation around Elon Musk. Rokana is just beating the drum, literally going on every show that he can, saying, "Hey, we can afford this amazing thing. We can take care of all kids. We just have to tax Elon Musk, literally just one guy. We just tax him, and it would take care of this. This other policy, we could just tax Elon Musk. It will take care of this." So, you've got Friedberg trying to get everybody to understand, "This is all bullshit. This is fake framing. The world is not even divided into rich and poor.

• 1:01:39Tom Bilyeu?

  It's divided into makers and takers, people that create value, employ people." People build things that people actually want, create a way for people to invest in the stock market to make their money go up. And then you have people that just want to tax everything, that don't make everything, don't make anything. These are the politicians, people like Ro Khanna. And so that is when Ro was clapping back and being like, listen, there's no way Friedberg, this wouldn't even pass like a freshman class in a place like the University of Chicago, which is full fucking retarded from Ro Khanna. So, and I went through, and I tweeted back at him and broke this shit down point by point. Now, our boy Friedberg,

• 1:02:20Tom Bilyeu?

  which by the way, it's fun seeing two alumni of Impact Theory doing battle on X. But Friedberg clapped back with a really like cool zinger, which was like, all right, man, if it would work so much to just go take money from people, you're worth roughly 200 million. Why don't you

• 1:02:38Tom Bilyeu?

  donate that money? Just go ahead and do it. You want other people to do it. Why don't you do it? Which of course, he's not going to do. But A, it's wild that Ro Khanna has a 200 million net worth. I believe he's, if not the top trader in Congress, he's one of the top traders. I think last year, he did like $53 million in trading volume. Absolutely wild. So-

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  That's my first time hearing about Ro Khanna being a top trader. That's interesting.

• 1:03:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Ro Khanna's not here to fuck around. So, yeah, this is where it's like, also, one of the things that Ro said that absolutely drives me fucking crazy, when they talk about taxing the, someone like Elon Musk, and they say, we could take care of children's food, education, whatever, they never say for a year. So they just go, this is a one-time tax. Drew, what, what's the problem? We could feed kids, clothe kids, educate kids for, you know, they, they never say for a year. We could, we could do it. And then it's like, you say it's a one-time tax, but that will only pay for one year. You 100% want this to be a policy that lasts forever.

• 1:03:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is exactly why, for every new dollar in tax revenue that we bring in, we spend a dollar 58. This is literal madness. We do not have a revenue problem.

• 1:03:53Tom Bilyeu?

  We have a spending problem. And if, if you can get by a freshman class in the University of Chicago or anywhere else, by saying we can do a one-time tax and then put a policy in place as if that's not going to create a problem in year two, you better fail. Otherwise, that fucking university is not worth the ground that it's on. Like, that would be the most insane shit ever. And so now I'm back, left asking a very sincere question. Are these people dumb or are they evil? It's one of the two. They are either dumb or they know exactly what they're doing and they are pushing this fucking agenda. And either way, that is bad news for being in office.

• 1:04:37Tom Bilyeu?

  If you actually want to solve the problem. Cause here's the thing, I think Roe unfortunately is smart and I think he's intentionally conflating things. And so he'll say some true things. He'll point out, the economy is broken, the American dream is dead. He is correct. Now, the question becomes, if you roll up on a house and there's a dead body on the floor and there's fucking blood everywhere, you don't just go, ah, that person's dead and let me tell you who I want to be the killer. You actually have to do the forensic analysis and figure out who killed the American dream. The American dream is dead. There is like fucking slaughterhouse blood everywhere. And the answer is very simple. Politicians and central bankers killed the American dream. That's it. Nice and fucking simple. Nowhere to hide.

• 1:05:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't need to caveat, those two classes of people killed the American dream dead and they did it in a mechanistic way, which means that we can just follow the cause and effect. And the mechanistic way is, the only thing that people understand, if you want them to actually save their wealth, so they can pass it on to their kids, they understand saving money, meaning I spend less than I make, and they understand buying a house. That's it. Full stop, period, end of story. So if you make houses unaffordable, you just fuck them. It is the only asset they understand. This is part of why Pokemon cards do so well. People sort of understand it, not really, but at least they know they like the thing. Best performing asset class, more than Bitcoin. P S, by the way. I'm not sure if it's more than Nvidia, that would be the only question mark that I would have, but it might be. It's been insane. So.

• 1:06:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Politicians and makers have created that problem. So politicians regulate everything to high heaven and they deficit spend, which then forces the Fed to print money. When you print money, you devalue the dollar and smart money does what? They go into assets to hide from the hidden, but very intentional tax of inflation. And so now the rich get richer because you push them into this wealth creation vehicle known as the markets and you force so many of them in there because they have to beat inflation that already that bumps up the value. But then you devalue the dollar, which then makes it appear that their wealth is going up even more than it is. So, and then you cry foul. Fuck you.

• 1:06:50Tom Bilyeu?

  You created the problem. It's very easy to see. We can talk about it openly all day. You can throw any caveat that you would like to talk about and let's just talk about it head on. So the American dream is dead. You fucking killed it and you're the only one that's going to be able to unwind this shit, balance the budget. And then on top of that, he like goes through a list of like all the other like bullshitty things that we need to do. Okay. Oblique references, the K-shaped economy. We just talked about that. Nurses and teachers need to get paid more. Awesome. Guess how you do that? Isn't price controls. Guess who just told us trying to control the price with rent freezes and shit like that? They just said it doesn't fucking work. The president of Cuba.

• 1:07:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Yet you bitches are still going to do it. That's fucking crazy. The guy in the middle of it is telling you this shit doesn't work and you still want to do it. That shit is wild. Deregulate, deregulate. Let the tax dollars follow people. Oh, by the way, we have spent more and more and more on our students and the union. And guess what? It's done fuck all. So we have made school more expensive, but we have not improved the outcomes. You've got to trust the parents to actually think through this problem and say, we have this many dollars to give to parents for each of their kids that are in school. Cool. Let them do what they will with those dollars.

• 1:08:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Then you're going to find out real fast what schools are actually competitive and which are not. So yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  You kind of say the same thing about our military too. We threw all that money at our military and yet Iran is handing us. Uh, a problem.

• 1:08:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Sort of. So I, I know you well enough to know uh that that is your sort of version of sarcasm. So what I will say on the military is the military, you're making a category error. Unfortunately, you can't have competition in the military. So we can't like arm a bunch of states and be like, all right, you guys decide which one of you guys is gonna go fight Iran. Uh, that's how you end up in total chaos, madness, civil war, all of that. I, I am not, and this was actually part of my um pushback to Rohana. Unless you want like, actually, that's not true. My pushback is the people on the right who want to go all the way to no government. And it's like, unless you're gonna go with uh Michael Malice and Anarchy, which I think is the most positive

• 1:09:14Tom Bilyeu?

  version of that that you can go. So it's not me trying to be cheap and say, you know, the typical branding of anarchy means chaos. It doesn't. But it does mean that every exchange has to be voluntary. There is no tax. There is no military. And it's like, that to me is stupid. So you need to have, your country needs to have a military. There are going to be some guardrails that you need to put on because the elite, just as they will do all the crazy sexual shit, they will also manipulate the financial world as they are doing right now today. And if you don't try to curb them, they will curb stomp you. So you do need some guardrails. But this is, and I'm gonna use this analogy until I see people fucking wearing it on T-shirts.

• 1:09:56Tom Bilyeu?

  This is just like food. So regulation is like food. If you have too little, you starve to death. If you have too much, you obesify yourself to death. You have to be disciplined. You need to eat, but you need to look at your body fat and be like, am I lean or not? And if you're fucking fat, you need to be like, I'm fat. America's fucking fat, morbidly obese. Our government is crazy. This is, this is legitimately an 850-pound man to whom people keep bringing ice cream. And that person is like, I don't have enough calories. Bitch, you must be kidding. So this is crazy. Once people understand the American government is like an 850-pound person

• 1:10:38Tom Bilyeu?

  who is adhering to the fabric of their fucking couch, they will understand whenever that person goes, I need more food, you can just immediately say fuck you. Literally fuck off right now. Shut up, get up, starve for at least a year. Then, as you start trimming back so you can actually stand up, then we can talk. But goddamn, right now, hell no.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  All right, uh, let's go through some of the Rohkon's exchanges because I think we need to beat this dead horse to death. Um, because I think that everybody says, well, but he does have a point because the math works. But to your point of the year thing, let's kind of run these thought experiments. So this is him on Bill Maher talking about the student loan debt.

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  I took out a lot of student loans. I've done well. They shouldn't forgive student loans for people like me. But if you're working class, you're first in your family to go to college, you have all this debt. And then you're paying off your debt until you're 50 or 60 and can't get a house, we can pay off that debt.

• 1:11:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, man, does this make me mad. So, okay. Uh, here's what's actually going on because people don't understand how these loans work and how we have found ourselves in this situation. Everybody is just super confused. Um, the US government has done a very immoral thing. And they have, uh, put students in a situation where they can get themselves in an insane amount of debt. And those people cannot declare bankruptcy. You cannot discharge student loan debt. And then the government has guaranteed those loans. So now taxpayers are on the hook for the kids that end up going to college. That already is absolutely sinister because what you allow the colleges to do is just absolutely bloat their, um, staff with a bunch of, um, administrators that aren't providing a better education.

• 1:12:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Remember Xi Jinping just killed off a bunch of degrees you can get because he's like, these are bullshit. So these don't matter in the modern economy. So we've got people going to universities to get degrees that literally don't matter. You're not going to add value. This is why you remain in debt for so long. Because your job is not going to pay you enough for that investment. So this is like, um, everybody's an entrepreneur of their own life. And they say, to start my company, my life, I'm going to take on this debt in order to go get this degree so that I can build this company, my life, moving forward. And the government's like, yeah, cool. I'm going to back you. And so I'll guarantee it. So the banks will give you the loan. And then the schools are going to get their money, whether you end up succeeding or not.

• 1:13:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the schools win and they just keep getting bigger and bigger and bloating and bloating, getting more and more obese. And more degrees are added on that are never going to pay back. So there are bad companies that never should have been funded in the first place. And taxpayers are going to eat that when that kid defaults, whether now or in the future. The taxpayer ends up having to pick up the tab. So what they should do is go, oh, we need to free market this because some of these degrees are stupid. And so we're gonna net, we're gonna let kids decide. So eight, if you want to take an underwater basket weaving degree, if you want to do like trans lesbian studies, whatever, fucking go do it. And if schools want to offer it, great. And then when a crop of people gets out and they're like, damn, I got my trans lesbian studies degree, but I'm fucking sweeping the streets.

• 1:13:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Then people go, well, okay, it's dope. I want to read about it. I want to learn about it. It's really important to me. And I'm not even being derogatory about that. Like if, if you really love that, fucking learn about it. There's nothing stopping you. I'm obsessed with Japan. I learn about it all the fucking time. Nobody's paying me to do it. So go learn about the thing you care about, but don't try to start a business on that. That's fucking stupid. Your life is a business. And so the government shouldn't be backing these loans. Fuck you. If people take out a bad loan, they need to be able to declare bankruptcy so that, here's the punchline of it all, the banks are disciplined about who they loan money to. Right now, the government's like, you don't need to be disciplined. I'm going to cover you. So they'll back anybody to go to college. And it has created these insane distortions.

• 1:14:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Once again, price controls do not work. You need to let banks go out of business for making bad loans. Full stop, end of story. Then all of a sudden, banks are going to be like, yeah, I'm not loaning. What degree are you going to get? What'd you get on your SATs? You either are or are not a good person for me to invest in because I either do believe or do not believe that you're going to be able to pay this back. Once you force that discipline, all of these downstream problems go away. You no longer have generation after generation saddled with this insane debt. Because the schools know they can charge more and more money. Because the government's gonna guarantee your loan. And the banks are gonna give you a loan for like these insane fucking figures. It is so crazy.

• 1:15:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So again, Roe is either dumb and he doesn't understand how this works. Or he's evil and he just wants to have another thing to promise people. We're going to free college for whatever. Because he's given like some weird narrow things. First person in your family to go to college. Why the fuck does that matter? Yeah, so this is all insanity. Force the discipline at the level of the economics, which is at the bank.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  We do have an affordability crisis. We do have a student loan debt epidemic across a trillion dollars. It's gonna be almost as big as the military's budget. Is this something that should be talked about? My proposal always was the government should be making profit off of kids in their loan. So if you are, if you do have a student loan, cool, you can pay it back. But just pay back principal, we don't need interest. The government has plenty of money, they don't need to make 7% flips off a bunch of 18 year olds. That's my pitch. That cuts the loan down by 30, 40% on average to certain people. At least now we're under a trillion dollars. Some people want to forgive it full stop. How do you think the government should handle this massive amount of student loan debt?

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  And saddled young people who can't get out of that?

• 1:16:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I think the least controversial one would be you've got to let them declare bankruptcy. They should, anybody with student loan debt should be able to discharge it by biting the bullet. And filing whatever chapter seven or 11, I forget which one's personal. But you file for bankruptcy and now it's gone. You've got seven years of like bad credit, but hey, better that than a lifetime of this. Now, that would cause real problems with banks. You're probably gonna have some banks go under, is what it is. And by the way, if that ends up affecting me because my money is in a bank that ends up getting hit. It is what it is, man. Like this is one of those where. You've just gotta say, you can't do that. You can't saddle kids with that. That's fucking crazy.

• 1:17:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, your idea is also great. It's far better than this idea. Just principal only. Okay, awesome. Let them declare bankruptcy and just make them pay the principal. And that way, if somebody's like, okay, do I take the seven years of hard knocks to get rid of the 180 grand or whatever? Yeah, I'm never gonna make this back. Fuck it. Cool. Great. Double whammy. Now you got both. So I think that there are plenty of sophisticated ways that we can go about dealing with this that are relatively straightforward and do not make this a taxpayer burden. But right now, that's the one thing, hey, wouldn't you know it, politicians are banging the drum. Let's make it a taxpayer problem.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  All right. And then the second thing, this is him, Jennifer Welsh, I blanked on her name. A 5% one-time tax on Elon and this can provide universal childcare. He used Elon money to solve like four problems already, so.

• 1:18:03Tom Bilyeu?

  For a year.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  But think about this, Jennifer, for 5% tax, one time, on Elon Musk, you could have universal childcare in America, $10 a day for every family. That's one person, one time, 5%, and he wouldn't even miss it because the market would grow by 15% and his wealth would still grow. And yet they're opposed to something.

• 1:18:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Listen, I would say that Roe can't predict the market, but maybe he really can, given his history of trading. So yeah, that's like a string of absurd statements. So first of all, absurd statement number one, we talked about before. That's only for a year. Of course, they're gonna keep the policy ongoing, which means you will have a hole in the budget the next year. Also, the just foundational problem is that Elon does not have that money. That money is fictional. It's called an unrealized gain. I wish that they would just call it, uh, pretend gains, fake gains, maybe one-day gains, but it's not money. It's not actual money.

• 1:19:05Tom Bilyeu?

  So that one's maddening. That one's maddening. So words matter. And when we call it wealth, we make it sound like people actually have this money. Elon does not have that money, just as a reminder. First of all, I'm sure there are lockups, so there's some amount of it he's not even able to sell. And then in selling it, you end up influencing the price, yada, yada. So yet another problem. Also, hey, every time the government throws money at something, guess what you get in just massive measure? Corruption. So guess how many daycare centers open when the government's just like, we're just gonna pay for all of this. All of a sudden, it's like, just like we had a 10,000% increase in autism. All of a sudden, we have more kids enrolled in daycare than we have kids in America.

• 1:19:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So yeah. Your government is obese. Your government needs to get lean.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. We covered the Cuba angle of it all. It's just, I don't know, I'm going back to Freeberg's original post on All In a couple of months ago, when he was just like, I think sometimes we just have to walk it through it. Some people just have to burn their hand on the stove to know never to touch it. Cause I think-

• 1:20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  That's dire.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. This conversation keeps coming up and people still repeat it. But still, he got it. Still, he's fine. Still, but it's Elon. He can make more. Like, we come back to this a lot. So I feel like it's one of those things-

• 1:20:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing. This is one of those, every time I say this stat, I think I have it wrong. And then I relook it up and I'm like, no, it really is true.

• 1:20:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Ryan, as our fact checker-

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Since, in the last 10 years, I believe, we have doubled the government's budget. Please fact check that. Now, I believe that's accurate. And if that's accurate, ask yourself, has your life gotten twice as good? And if it has, okay, well, that's at least an argument. If it hasn't, I don't think most people would say that it has. What the fuck are we doing with that money, Ryan?

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Federal spending was about 3.69 trillion in fiscal year 2015 and 7.01 trillion in fiscal year 2025, which is close to a 90% increase. So essentially doubling in nominal terms.

• 1:21:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Kids. Wow. Kids. What the fuck? So we went from 300 pounds to 600 pounds and we're still asking for more calories. That is crazy.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  All right, I got one. Kit Moon, I just think it's messed up that the government bailed out the banks but are against bailing out people with student loans. Like student loans debt is considered, they need to figure it out, they need to bootstrap it, they shouldn't have done it. Why are you taking out that loan? What's your major? What's your degree? Meanwhile, you shorted the housing market, but it's cool, you're too big to fail, we need you. Like you created the problem, we were predator, the receiving it of predatory policies.

• 1:21:51Tom Bilyeu?

  We got preyed on.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? And yet, they don't get that same, that same love.

• 1:21:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's why, because you end up giving a tax break, or just raw dollars, to people that are already ahead of the curve. And you're asking people that may be worse off than them to deal with the tax burden. So it's, that, that one's pretty rough, like from a psychological perspective. So when you do that, like if you forgive that, so those-

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Forgive student loans.

• 1:22:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Forgive student loans, that, that money is owed. And so now, the government is gonna have to go pay all that debt. And they're gonna use a trillion dollars, whatever, of taxpayer dollars to do it. But they're not gonna shrink the budget. So now they just gotta get another trillion dollars in tax somehow, some way. They will either do it by printing, which is almost certainly true, and that taxes everybody. And so now you've got a fucking poor guy coal mining, and he doesn't pay taxes, but you're still taxing him via inflation. And so the money that he makes goes down. And so rightfully, people who are like, hold on, I didn't go to college because I couldn't

• 1:23:03Tom Bilyeu?

  afford it, or I didn't send my kids to college because I couldn't afford it, and now you're gonna ask me to pay for your college? No way, hard pass. So I think it is unfortunately immoral-

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  I mean, there's people without houses that still got taxed by inflation, well, because of what the banks did with the housing market.

• 1:23:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but it's like, okay, let's say this. One person got beat unfairly- And so now I need you to beat everyone to like make up for it. It's like, hmm, that doesn't strike me as the right answer. So I agree, bad things have been done, but the way that you end up in madness is just constantly looking backwards. You just have to fix the problem and move forwards. Like there's unfortunately, there's no way around it. You have suffered an injury to which only you can deal with the consequences. That's the bad news. And you're just gonna put the country back in the same death spiral. If you're like, no, no, no, you need to cover this too. There will be no end to the calls for, but wait, I was wronged over here. You've got to take care of this as well.

• 1:24:05Tom Bilyeu?

  You, you just literally have to say, okay, we're not doing that anymore. We're just gonna look forward and yeah, fix the problems, but don't paralyze yourself with having to both fix the problem moving forward and create a bigger hole for yourself by trying to resolve a problem that will be fundamentally unresolvable going backwards.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Is that the same argument as food stamps in section eight? I can pay my rent, I can buy groceries, so why am I responsible for other people's SNAP benefits and section eight benefits?

• 1:24:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Not quite, because what we're talking about is if we want to look at like the SNAP benefits and things like that, what you want to look at is the breaking point where you end up making yourself poorer. So like somebody like me covering the cost of poor people. That's whatever, I'm not gonna notice. But when you have one of those tax demarcation lines where you start losing SNAP benefits because you're making that amount of money, but you're not making more than you lose in benefits. And it's that transition period that creates all the madness because people go, I'm better off here. I'm just not gonna make that extra money. And so you create a perverse incentive.

• 1:25:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So there are people for whom they would be better off if they just let go of their pride and said, I'm just gonna take from the government. And they would actually have more money in their pocket. So that has like its own derangements and you know my take, which is that should all be means tested. If you're able-bodied, you should be working. And just full stop period, end of story. And all of government assistance barring like permanent catastrophic disability should be temporary at best. I love that we have it, but it should be very temporary. So that's how I would look at that as differentiated from, okay. You did this bad thing and there have been so many people that have been wronged by bad government policies.

• 1:26:00Tom Bilyeu?

  And I would like you to make up for all of those bad government policies. It's like, you really can't look backwards. It's, it's too deranging and it just makes the whole deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And so this is where, okay.

• 1:26:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Where socialism communism goes very wrong is it says, I just cannot have an individual suffer. So I'm going to push everything up to the government level. What Christianity solves for, and the reason that Christian countries have done so well is it says, no, the individual needs to carry their own burden. And you've all been forgiven, you're going to heaven, you're going to get your just rewards, but I'm going to push this all down to you. You all have to bear your own cross. And that idea of like, all right, I'm going to shoulder my responsibility and that is how I honor God. That's how you get something where the spark of divinity is in the individual.

• 1:26:54Tom Bilyeu?

  And you get a country now where people carry their burdens and they take personal responsibility. They push forward and that asking people to carry their individual burdens where the family rallies around them or the church may rally around them, but you don't try to push it back up, up, up, up, up, up, up to this nameless, faceless thing that has no idea whether the people that are asking for a handout are worthy or not, quite frankly.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  You bring me back to my like summer camp days when you raised your hand. So I appreciate that.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just don't want to cut off the flow.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  I was just wondering, because I feel like this is adjacent to this whole conversation. So I'm on Catholic Twitter, even though I'm not practicing, so I still see all the arguments going on. And one of the things the Pope tweeted something this morning and it split the entirety of Catholic Twitter. And I was wondering if y'all saw it because it's kind of about all of this. He basically wrote, is the, it is, it is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. And he keeps going. So I'm just curious, like with the religion element, how does like Catholicism play into this? Cause we mentioned Christianity.

• 1:28:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so well, on that, all I can say, not necessarily how Catholicism feeds into this, but certainly how that comment feeds into this, which is, um, he has been a part of an organization that has been prosperous now for almost 2,000 years. Uh, so at this point, I think he has completely lost sight of the fact that both religion and governments were originally born, because most people died of toxic water or whatever. And so, um, what we have relied upon to get to this point is innovation. And the fact that we're now acting as if, uh, nature isn't red in tooth and claw, that you don't have to bust your ass to pull bacteria

• 1:28:47Tom Bilyeu?

  out of the water to avoid, you know, all of the waterborne diseases and parasites and all that shit is crazy. People have lost a frame of reference that is so scary that they're going to bring us back to that initial starting point. So I get it, he's viewing himself as somebody that needs to fight for the little person, and I fucking love that. I love that there are people that are wired like that. And religion at its best does that at the, the ground level, that it's like you literally train people to be, you're going to give your life in service of God by making contact with humanity. So God is running this experiment where he creates everything, but he steps back and only pops in like once every few thousand years. It's like, no, I got you. Don't worry. But like,

• 1:29:32Tom Bilyeu?

  I need you guys to do this shit yourselves. And so you get these, you know, being generous here, but you get these pious people who are legitimately like, holy shit, I'm going to dedicate my entire life to this. Like, I cannot fathom a guy saying, I'm never going to have sex because I just want to serve people so much that I will subordinate all of my needs. But yet some of them do it, man. What a fucking beautiful gift. Like, that's really crazy. And so at the local level, go to your local church and look after 75 people and just do everything you can to make their lives better. That's awesome. Like, can you really look poorly upon that? Now, they derange in the same way that a

• 1:30:14Tom Bilyeu?

  large corporation deranges or a large government deranges. I get it. But like, if you accept that read of the way that some people go into it to really do that, that is a really beautiful thing. Okay, but we have to understand how we actually solve these problems. We solve these problems because we have people that innovate. And unfortunately, a lot of that innovation is warfare. A lot of that innovation is sanitation. But if you want to go see countries that are really held back and they just cannot make progress, they can't take care of the basic stuff. And unfortunately, as China has proven, as so many countries have proven, the only way to pull people out of that desperate grinding poverty, where they are just being eaten alive by disease and stuff, famines, is innovation. And the only way to get people to innovate is to give them economic freedoms,

• 1:30:58Tom Bilyeu?

  to let people get rich. That is the only thing that gives them the energy to try things, the vast majority of whom will fail and die broke because they tried and it didn't work. But every now and then, someone becomes incredibly successful and it makes life better, not only for the people in that country, it makes life better for the world because that technology inevitably spreads.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  How do we deal with the changing societal contract, where it's no longer go to work, get a college, go to college, get a job, you'll be good for 30 years? To a now you have to kind of figure it out yourself. You're responsible for your career path. It's on you to kind of make the money.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  How do we square that with not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur? So is it just going to be kind of a wave of hardship? And then the people that can't figure it out, don't figure it out? And the people that do, do?

• 1:31:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  And we have to just stop trying to make the most amount of people prosper at once?

• 1:31:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That is correct. And if unless you are literally retarded, it is on you to make your life work. Now, the awesome thing about family, and we should be encouraging family values.

• 1:32:17Tom Bilyeu?

  They'll take care of their own.

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:32:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, not always, and of course, families can break bad, just like anything else. But it's the right level for people to look after their kin. So, um, we should be encouraging that. Again, religion has historically played this role. Maybe that day is over, or maybe it's resurging. But that's where you don't ask the government to be a nanny because it's absolutely god awful at it. It will perpetually destroy the children. Uh, but you do it at the family level and you get a pretty overwhelming number of people that come out. Okay, we all get broken in some way. Everybody's broken in some way. But nonetheless, that's the best layer to do this at. And yes, some people are going to win, some are going to lose.

• 1:33:02Tom Bilyeu?

  But if you look at, um, certainly Western civilization, it has been not an only up phenomenon because it is a jagged line, but it is a, over the long period of time, innovation makes everything better because being, um, isolated, like if you were just taking extreme example. If you were schizophrenic back in the day, your best hope was to become Joan of Arc. Uh, but for the most part, you got kicked out of the group or just killed by the group itself because you seem like a witch or you seem completely crazy or you really were dangerous. And so they just killed you. Uh, and so being, the reason being ostracized is so terrifying to people is it meant basically certain death.

• 1:33:44Tom Bilyeu?

  They literally gave, um, Socrates, you can be banished or you can, um, drink hemlock and kill yourself. He just killed himself. He just drank the fucking hemlock. So ostracization used to be like good and proper terrifying. And only through innovation have we made it such a homeless person can get by because we live in a world of so much abundance. They can get themselves out of the elements. They can get money off of people just walking by, we'll just give them fucking money. Um, and so in even a city like New York, how many people freeze to death in a winter? In a population of, I mean, in the city proper, what's it like? Three million, something like that, four million, somewhere in there.

• 1:34:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Still only losing a couple hundred, like that's wild. So, um, none of that should be possible. It should be, uh, Every homeless person effectively should be dead, but they're not because of all the technology, whether that's the heat coming up on the grates and they just fucking cling to those, whether it's shelters, people giving them money, whatever. So we've completely lost sight of none of this is natural. This has been an unending string of inovation.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Okay, Dofy Sophie just said, Drew, does your kid know what she wants to do yet? I'm struggling to know how to guide my teens. I feel like that's going to be a conversation. I had a going away party this weekend with a friend of mine who was leaving Phoenix. He was like, yeah, man, like, you know, I, you know, I got all these things I have to figure out. What about you? What are you dealing with? I'm like, I don't know. I'm dealing with a world that I don't know how to raise my daughter in because I don't know what it's going to look like. So it's like, I know what my next year is going to be, but my next five is just a big question mark because it's like, is she going to crash out and not be able to do it? And then I'm going to have to modify my life to take care of her. Or, you know, maybe I can become a bank and just get bailed out. So who knows? One can hope. Maybe I could be too big to fail.

• 1:35:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Fingers crossed.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Fingers crossed. So I'm trying to figure that out, but I think that that's definitely a sentiment that's happening is just that there is a changing social contract. And I think that I've heard the boots strapped right to it my whole life. So that's nothing new. But I think I've never heard it while society was also collapsing under those straps.

• 1:35:55Tom Bilyeu?

  But here's the thing. So it, the, the reality is the only way out is to get as strong as you can intellectually, emotionally, and financially. And obviously I know you personally, so I know you're making all of those moves. So I believe that Lynn is being certainly indoctrinated by watching you. You're both loving, you're attentive, you're smart, you're hardworking, you're focused. So I imagine you're telling her all of these same things. Now, AI is terrifying, so it is hard to see around that corner. But the thing I remind myself of is the only real battle with AI, because AI is either going to fail to become the thing that we fear, in which case life looks very much like it looks now,

• 1:36:39Tom Bilyeu?

  or it becomes the thing that we fear and we have universal high income. And then the only thing you have to manage for is meaning and purpose. Now, that's not nothing. That's a big deal because I don't think people have a very easy time manufacturing meaning and purpose in a world that's easy, which is why we have the fourth turning, why good times make weak men. Um, but nonetheless, if what everyone focuses on is adaptability that um to your daughter, I would say, yeah, I don't know what the future looks like and that's super scary. But there are people that love you and you love them, focus super intently on that. In term, because by the way, that's the best thing life has to offer you anyway, full stop.

• 1:37:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, and then in terms of money and taking care of yourself, the big thing is going to be to be adaptable. And to find out ways to engage with the thing that you love, whatever that ends up being, or maybe there's multiple things that you love, to find out ways to um make sure that you're making a living, somehow touching one of those things. And that can be working as little as possible to allow yourself maximum free time to engage in those things. Or it can be working as much as possible, doing the thing that you actively love. Now, a lot of this is based on your talents and skill sets. And so focus on something that's going to be very difficult for AI to supplant, so that you're the last one standing, so get good at using AI, because that's where we're at currently.

• 1:38:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And then things that are about being in person, engaging with real people who value real people, that is never going to go away until the human genome has been altered, either through technology or through gene editing. And so that's off in the future. And again, you don't have to worry about it because it will only matter if we all do it. Uh, otherwise, it will be again, coming back to uh, love yourself, love the people that you're around. Um, make sure that you can be emotionally resilient, because some of this shit's going to get real scary, but that's life. And I think if we all model that, that like, yeah, okay, cool, courage is not the absence of fear, it's moving forward in the face of fear. Like then it's just like, keep your head screwed on straight.

• 1:38:43Tom Bilyeu?

  And then whenever dude, if ever I get overwhelmed with business, I always say to myself, okay, there is a knowable obstacle between where I'm at and where I want to get to. And there's a knowable thing that I could do with the next 15 minutes of my time that will take a meaningful like bite out of that obstacle. What is that thing? And then just do it. This is why lateral eye movement works as a um anxiety treatment and depression treatment, is your eyes move laterally when You're moving forward. So evolution had to get people going, even in the face of being terrified. The whole village is going to die or whatever. And if you laid on your stone bed in your cave, then you all died. And so only the people who, when they started moving forward, they felt better.

• 1:39:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Only they survived. So now we all have this algorithm in us where when we move towards the difficulty, we move towards the solution, we actually feel better. And so that's my whole thing is I have a rule in my life. I don't stand still. I make mistakes. I sometimes pursue the wrong thing, but I never stand still. Standing still is the only guaranteed failure. If you move forward though, it's like, okay, moving forward and I'm always checking for, is there a different direction that I can go? But I'm not just going to stand still. And so in the face of AI, that that is my advice to people. And I'm living that. Now, look, admittedly, I have money, all that, so I understand. But keep in mind, my whole life has been moving towards one dream, which I am trying to build in this video game.

• 1:40:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And as I'm building it, I'm getting daily notifications that AI is almost certainly going to make it irrelevant. By the time I'm actually able to get this thing across the finish line. And so on a daily basis, I have to fight the impulse to just go be rich and to just to give up and not do it. So while I don't expect anyone to give me any credit for the fear and anxiety that I will have to eat. But again, AI will only be a problem if it ushers in an age of abundance. So we're all going to have to contend with the like meaning and purpose thing. How do I keep myself moving forward, even when it seems like, God, maybe this is all going to be worthless? Just it's not worthless today. So keep going.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Cool. Appreciate it. Appreciate it.

• 1:40:50Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. Well, my gratitude continues to Kalshi. Kalshi, thank you so much for supporting this live. We really, really appreciate you. And you guys, show them some love. There's a QR code on the screen. Use code IMPACT for $10 to trade on kalshi.com. Really, really appreciate them. And what I use them for is just figuring out where is the sentiment? Where are people willing to spend their money? They are tremendously good at acting as a proxy for polls. So I encourage you guys to get a read on where culture is, what people think, super effective for that. And speaking of being effective, I've got another AI masterclass coming up this Thursday, not this Thursday, Thursday, July 9th at 1:00 PM Pacific, Thursday, July 9th at 1:00 PM Pacific.

• 1:41:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So excited for you guys to sign up for that. It's completely free and I'm going to show you guys how to use AI to launch a business. This is such a charmed window. Do not let this moment pass you by. And I'm not like blind to what AI can actually do and where it falls down. So I'm giving you the real stuff, things we do here at Impact Theory on the daily. All right, guys. Love you bunches. We will see you on Wednesday. Take care. Peace.

• 1:41:56Tom Bilyeu?

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