Everyone's Getting Laid Off. So Why Can't Economists Find AI in the ACTUAL Data?

Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! In this episode, Tom is joined by returning co-host Drew and team member Ryan to dive into some of the most pressing topics shaping our world today. The discussion kicks off with celebrations—both personal and technological—as Drew shares his recent experience producing a short film and Tom breaks down the astonishing advancements in AI, notably Claude Opus 4.8’s breakthrough performance on "humanity’s last exam." The conversation evolves to explore the implications of AI for the job market, society, and creativity, as Tom and Drew challenge the widespread fears and hype around artificial general intelligence. They examine the paradoxical effects of technological disruption, the shifting landscape of employment, and the need for personal adaptability amidst rapid change. The team also tackles recent events ranging from protests at ICE facilities and global political developments in Iran to economic impacts of rising energy prices and cultural upheaval seen in global sports celebrations. With lively audience engagement and thought-provoking super chats, this episode delivers a sharp, no-holds-barred analysis on how technology, culture, and leadership are intertwining to shape our future. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, creative, or just trying to figure out your next move in a rapidly changing world, tune in for a masterclass in adaptation, resilience, and critical thinking. Truemed: Check your eligibility and start saving at https://truemed.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Plaud: Get 10% off with code TOM10 at https://plaud.ai/tom Whatnot: AT&T Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Do You Show Live. Today is a very special day. We have the band back together, boys and girls. We've got Ryan back on Community and we've got Drew back in his rightful place in the co-hosting chair. I hope you guys all enjoyed the time that we had with Lisa. It really was wonderful. But Drew, you were missed. I'm excited to have you back.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And I actually found out why Drew was gone. It was rad. It's for a rad reason. He produced a short film that was in a film festival. I'm like, why didn't you tell me, Drew? This is good. This is an amazing thing. So I am very excited for you, man. And so just to take a second to clap for you. That is awesome. Congratulations. And the title of the film, do you want to let everybody know?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  We've been turning a cart. We're doing a couple more film screenings this year and then should be available to the Y by the end of the year.

• 1:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go. Is it going to be on YouTube?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I don't know yet. I don't know. We gotta talk about distribution. I need somebody to cut the check first before we go straight to YouTube. But hey, we'll see, we'll see.

• 2:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm excited, man. This is good stuff. So to keep the hits on coming with the good news, some people are saying that Claude Opus 4.8 has achieved AGI. Now, I know not everybody's going to consider that good news. But hopefully by the end of today's episode, I can convince you that the better the AI gets. Minus a dystopian vision, the better for all of us. And we're going to see some of that in a fascinating new report that came out from Apollo's chief economist that indicates that AI is having a surprising impact on the jobs market. We're going to detail exactly what that surprise is. Protests at the Newark ICE facility have surprised me because they actually escalated to the point that they had to put a curfew in place, but then they actually made arrests.

• 2:46Tom Bilyeu?

  So everything seems to have cleared out. We'll be talking about that. Reports are coming in that the president of Iran may resign due to a takeover by the IRGC. Not sure yet if that's true, but we'll detail all those out. Rumors are also circulating that Iran might hand over the nuclear dust to the US. And there's enough optimism in all of that, that Iran's stock market was actually all green recently. Riots broke out in Paris after Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League title. That was a bit madness and something very weird is going on in the sewer system under Brooklyn as multiple people, like batches of seven or eight people unauthorized with tools

• 3:31Tom Bilyeu?

  have been seen crawling out from manhole covers under Brooklyn. It's wild, so we'll find out what's going on there indeed. And shout out to today's sponsor, Kalshi. If you guys want to know what the odds are of certain things happening in the world, make sure that you check them out. Drew and I have been using them for a while now to understand movements and culture. It's very interesting and there's a QR code on the screen, so check it out. If you want to see, they're better than polling as far as I'm concerned. So it's a fascinating new movement.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And you get $10 off your first trade, so go ahead, go, go. Everybody has a different thing. It's sports, it's crypto, it's politics, it's elections, whatever your favorite thing hobby is. Go bet on that, go trade on that.

• 4:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Use it for the polling. Save your money, boys and girls. Use it for the polling.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Okay, there's been a lot of updates since I've been gone, so I'm playing catch up and stuff like that. But AI, I feel like this narrative is just swinging left and right and back and forth and front and center. Cause when I left, everybody was getting layoffs. That's when Meta announced the 8,000. So we were like, oh, it's official now. This is the 16th company that just did layoffs and this is five digit layoffs, not like 40 people or nothing. AI is officially doing something, but now we just got news that that's not the case. Then AI is doing something completely different. So is it just a timing thing? Are we too early? Are we calling it? What do you think is happening with all these different AI narratives now kind of in the ecosystem?

• 4:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I think what you're seeing in terms of the specific responses, people are panicking about the unknown. Humans are fascinatingly predictable in terms of anything new is scary. It's dangerous with very few caveats for, hold on a second, maybe I don't understand where this is going to go. What does pattern recognition tell us? And listen, AI is a unique beast. It really is if it becomes the thing that people think it could become. It truly is unlike anything that came before it. And so I don't want to poo poo away the fears there. However, every technological transition that we've seen historically has ended up following something called Javon's paradox, where you would think as coal becomes more ubiquitous,

• 5:37Tom Bilyeu?

  that it's just going to crater people that are doing jobs that that's going to come in and supplant. But the reality is that it creates all these other opportunities. People end up using it even more. And so it doesn't end up cratering the whole market. And so we're seeing something very similar, I think, happen at this stage of AI. Now, I think it's very important to break AI into different stages because down the road, it is possible that it becomes self improving, that it is smarter than us, and it gets better than us so rapidly that there's that fast takeoff that people fear. And all of a sudden, we're left behind and we really don't matter at any level of the stack.

• 6:22Tom Bilyeu?

  So that is possible, but that isn't what's happening right now. And so I would say, do not get lost in the grips of that fear. Understand instead, the stuff moves in phases. Understand what each phase is. Have an eye towards the future, but live in the present. And this is the very thing I've had to convince myself to do as a game developer, because if I cast my eye too far into the future, I go, this is pointless. Why am I doing this? And you would tap out and walk away. But the timing of all this stuff is where it gets nearly impossible to predict. Getting the long tail trends right, I think it's relatively easy. But understanding the specifics of timing, that part's impossible.

• 7:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So what I had to say to myself was, right now, today, it makes life better, easier. It allows us to do more things than we could do historically. So just in case that the next phase doesn't come for 10, 15, 20, 30, who knows? Before it actually reaches that kind of ability to be better than us at everything. Let me not live paralyzed in that future state. Let me execute right now with what's real today. And so the market response is very few people where I'm at. And a whole lot of people living in the future freaking out. And I think that's going to lead to increasing levels of violence. So get ready for that. We certainly have not seen the last of that.

• 7:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So there are two things that are happening right now. The first is that Clauda Opus 4.8 just scored 57.9% on Humanities Last Exam. And if you guys don't know what Humanities Last Exam is, it is a 2,500 question test that nearly 1,000 experts came together. They built it specifically trying to be the hardest thing for an AI to pass. That the AI would just struggle and it would grind to a halt. Now, Peter Diamandis said that if an AI were to ever score over 50% on that exam, he would consider it artificial general intelligence. Now, if you don't know him, he's been at the forefront of future technologies for a very long time. Is one of the most credible voices in the space. I know him personally. In fact, he's coming on the show today again.

• 8:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And he really does, I think, have a better grasp of the totality of future facing technology than just about anybody out there. And I'll be very interested to hear if he actually thinks that now that Opus 4.8 has at 57.9% beat his benchmark for AGI, if he'll still think that that's true, or if now that he's engaging with it, he'll realize that there are some massive limitations. I'll fall into the maybe camp. The HLE is not solvable by simple lookups. That is true. It definitely requires real reasoning. That is true.

• 9:12Tom Bilyeu?

  But the, all the AIs right now have a very hard time pushing very far beyond their training data from a, take the lessons that you've learned and now generalize them and really push them out. But the reality is that they are able to go past their training data. So they're solving novel mathematics now, which is pretty wild. So the goal in creating the test was to be the final test, the hardest questions across math, physics, history, medicine, that human experts can think up. So once a machine has really gone all the way to, I mean, I don't know if it'll get to 100%, but once it's like in the 90s, upper 90s, then you know that the human intelligence

• 9:54Tom Bilyeu?

  at the absolute frontier, like the smartest of the smart people have been matched. But the fact that we are already, even if we haven't reached AGI, we are already interfacing with technology that can do things that so far humans have not been able to do. That is a big deal. So you've got protein folding happen. You've got the novel mathematics being solved. You're going to see more coming out in biology, chemistry, et cetera, all of that. And so the fact that that is happening, I get why people's ears are perked up. This is definitely something that we want to pay attention to. But right now, I would say, rather than look at, because there was a mathematician that saw the novel mathematics be solved and he literally was just completely shook.

• 10:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And he was like, I feel like everything that I put my life into to get good at this thing, it's meaningless and I don't know why I've now spent that time. And I don't remember him saying like, I'm depressed, like the vibe of what he was writing was a man who's feeling depressed. I would say that's the absolute wrong approach. And the way to be thinking about this is that all of us now have access to an incredibly powerful tool that you can aim at virtually anything. And by the way,

• 11:07Tom Bilyeu?

  You are important in that chain still. Uh, I know I've mentioned this before, but this to me is a really great litmus test. So, um, one of my deep dives at a road, somebody ended up putting, hey, thanks for reading the LLM script. And I was like, dude, I wish that you could just go prompt an LLM and it would output one of my deep dives. And I'll say, if we ever get to the point where AI can, you can actually one-shot something that I would read on screen because it so accurately maps my belief system. That would be shocking. As of right now, it is an incredibly empowering feeling to go into this, knowing that, okay, there's going to be poor judgment on behalf of the AI.

• 11:51Tom Bilyeu?

  It's very good at a thing that I don't want to spend my time on, which is go out, tell me what's known, what's known in the world, argue with me about my ideas. Come back and you show me the best arguments against this thing. Because a lot of times I'll think of something and I'll be like, oh my God, like that. Nobody's ever thought of this before. And then it's like, no, it's already been thought of. It's known as this. And then I'll say, okay, cool. Then what's the best argument against it? And so you can sharpen your thinking in real time. It's incredible, but through that back and forth, because you as the human are such an important part of this dyad, that you end up creating something that is completely novel. It's you plus the AI.

• 12:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And nobody working with the AI will be able to replicate what you plus the AI will be able to create. And that thing, like, let that be this gigantic glowing orb in your life. What are you trying to do at work? What are you trying to do at home? Are you involved in a creative endeavor? Because leveraging the AI is not some cheap way out. It's like your writing partner, your thought partner, your assistant in the office, however you want to think about it, is quite literally one of the smartest, most well-educated people on planet earth. And they just really want to help you do your thing. It is so incredible. So I want to infect people with that enthusiasm. I get it down the road.

• 13:11Tom Bilyeu?

  It may be that this was a brief moment in time, that it didn't last, that the AI does surpass us. But it has not surpassed us yet in ways that are incredibly meaningful. And so leverage that to do the things you want to do. I just can't express enough how profoundly impactful AI has been, both for me as a content creator and for me as a game developer. It's just absolutely incredible. And so seeing people paralyzed by the fear, no bueno. So, um, yes, AI is now pushing into truly novel territory. Yes, there are credible voices that are saying it's achieved artificial general intelligence. Yes, it's beginning to be able to generalize beyond just the very strict things that it's taught on.

• 13:54Tom Bilyeu?

  But at the same time, it really does lack something uh that we either don't know how to quantify yet about what it means to have good taste, to be human, to leverage emotion, maybe.

• 14:07Tom Bilyeu?

  And so we have this really unique place. And by the way, it's possible that that unique place lasts a lot longer than we think. So imagine a world where AI gets um inhuman at all of the memory reasoning, all of that. But because it doesn't have an emotional system, it can't ever choose between this, that, or the other. Which means it will be stuck only with backwards looking pattern recognition. And it will never be able to surprise us with novel creations. If that's the position that we're in, at least for the creative folks in the crowd, that is extraordinarily good news. It means now all of a sudden you can radically cut the amount of time that it takes you to create something.

• 14:52Tom Bilyeu?

  But you are still incredibly necessary in that process. And that, I think, is a world that people should be very excited about. Because not being beholden to, like even Drew was saying, like, I've, I've got to find the solution to this distribution problem. I need somebody to cut the check for that. Maybe less and less every day, but he is still necessary as a creative producer that understands what actually makes sense and what doesn't. I, I think it's in my upcoming deep dive tomorrow that I cover this. I start losing track of what I've written that has or hasn't come out yet. But there is a really fascinating thing when you start thinking about um the way that the mind works.

• 15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  And this was in the context of free will, but let me just put it in the context of creativity right now. If you selectively damage the regions of the brain for emotion, the person will lead a normal life in every respect. They can solve puzzles, um, they can have an intellectual debate with somebody. But what they can't do is make a decision. It's super wild because we don't actually decide based on logic. We decide based on emotion. And once you realize that, first of all, your life will change dramatically because you will realize you were constantly in the grips of emotions. Emotions don't always have your best interests at heart, so just keep that in mind. But that if AI is never able to tap into that emotional set, and if we assume that

• 16:18Tom Bilyeu?

  emotions have a very powerful evolutionary reason for existing, if AI is never able to mimic an emotional system, then that leaves this uniquely human contribution. So anyway, I would think a lot about that in this phase. We'll deal with whatever comes in the future. But right now, understanding that, that you have that ability, that you are able to tap into that emotion. I've said many times about creative endeavors, that you could never convince me that something is cool or not cool, because I'm having a physical response to it. I have a very strong, as I imagine most of you do, a very strong emotional response to things that I like or don't like. And so somebody coming along and saying, no, no, no, secretly you actually do like that, is nonsensical.

• 17:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So there is a very real chance that there will always and forever be output, sorry, that the outputs will always and forever be made better by the fact that there's a human in the mix. 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. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag.

• 17:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less, and it's not just the cashmere. I ordered a few things myself, their fleece joggers, a couple of their tees, which I wear obsessively. First thing I noticed was the quality. Soft, well-made. Built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them? Let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show.

• 18:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number to anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after that supply. They handle removal requests across 420 plus harmful broker sites. And they keep checking back as brokers constantly try to relist you. On the unlimited plan, the exposure scanner hunts down your information.

• 19:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Send a link and their privacy experts handle the takedown. Track your progress in the app and get a monthly risk assessment showing exactly where you stand. Go to incogni.com/impact and use code IMPACT for 60% off an annual plan. Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com/impact. Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk free with a 30 day money back guarantee. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM.

• 20:03Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:48Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Let's pull up our Kao Shi trade of the week really quick because they're now predicting what will be the best AI by the end of 2026. And Claude is overwhelmingly the favorite.

• 20:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Claude is gangster.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  And just for one second, we have to talk about the generational fumble that ChatGPT was because they were the best and brightest. They started this whole AI thing. Y'all didn't know what AI was if it wasn't for ChatGPT. And then Gemini, they went back and forth. And then Claude, if you can see, it's like a green line going straight up. They're the only ones that kept improving and improving and improving. So that aside, do you really think?

• 21:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you want an answer to why that happened?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Oh, why does that happen?

• 21:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, so again, humans, there is, it is so distressing that a company is only as good as the people that it can collect. And once they started having the internal like weirdness and Elon really went on the offensive to try to claw talent away. They just started losing the people that actually made it. And I remind my team internally and to any entrepreneurs listening to this, take this like short idea and burn it into your psyche. That companies are not nameless, faceless organizations. They are just the collection of the people inside of that company.

• 22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And choose wisely. When you have the right people, they're focused on the right things and they have the right talents. You can pull just about anything off. But if you start losing those people. It's rough, man. It is rough. And as entrepreneurs, you really have to think about that. In fact, you and I were talking about this before we started. It's not like I can just move you out and put anybody else in that chair. It's whoever we put in that chair makes a different show. Because you, as an individual, you read a situation differently. You cue off of something that I say differently. You ask a different follow up. You have your own worldview, all of that. Same will be true of anybody else that I put in.

• 22:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And so it is really fascinating how even in something like just this show is influenced by the person sitting there. And so what you're witnessing in this graph is that the talent has just swung over to Anthropic. And so for better or worse, that's where you're at now. Now, never bet against Elon, so I'll be interested to see what happens to XAI over time.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Especially after this crazy IPO and they get all that money.

• 23:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Okay, now, bringing back to it, there was a couple, a lot of chatter in the chat about what AGI actually is. So I kind of gave the definition like trying to, oh, guys, it's just when AI can improve itself. But there was like, well, kind of technically, isn't that self improving? So to you, Tom, what is AGI? And then bringing back in this humanity last exam, what are some of the metrics that they are looking at to cue off whether it surpassed it or not?

• 23:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I think everybody will reject AGI. They'll keep moving the goalposts. I think, I'm going to ask Peter the question today. I have a feeling Peter's answer will go something like this. Yeah, no, I stand by it. I think the early innings of AGI that it will improve over time. But yeah, yeah, this, this probably is the beginning of that. I think that's a great answer for a podcast, but I think in reality, everybody's going to go, this does not feel like a human. And the proxy, what people are trying to get at with AGI is it feels like a human. So what does it mean to feel like a human? All right, if I hire somebody new and I bring them in, I explain something to them once or twice, and then I expect them to be able to go and do it. Now, it won't be perfect. It might not be as good as somebody else that has like way more experience,

• 24:23Tom Bilyeu?

  but they'll get it and be like, cool, I get where we're trying to go. I understand how to do this and they'll do it. Until AI is like that, people will not have a sense of AGI. So the number of times that I will explain something to Claude and then it just isn't getting it. And I'm like, bro, what the fuck? Like, how many times do I have to say this? And you can tell that it's just, it's so glued to its training data. Yeah. It cannot extrapolate away from that. And so that is, that thing which feels somewhat ineffable is what people are looking for. So for instance, I run into this with game design all the time. I want you to take this element from here and this element from here. I'll be very specific.

• 25:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I want you to take the body proportions of one piece, but mix it with the more adult style of Jujutsu Kaisen, right? Now, if I'm saying that to an artist, they're gonna be like, say less, man, I got you. Because they understand that the vibe of Jujutsu Kaisen has to do with the colors, the shading, all of that. So you can give me like a really playful character and make it look like that. Now, that's probably a bad example because AI probably wouldn't struggle too hard with that. But when you're taking two ideas like that and you're trying to mesh them together, if I've got to spend like a lifetime prompting you with like 72 pages of what it means to meld those two things, that's not general intelligence.

• 25:54Tom Bilyeu?

  If, on the other hand, I say to you, and there's just a ton of shorthand that you bring to it because you're able to generalize based on your life experience, that I think people recognize as like, oh, cool. I can move this person from one thing to another, to another, to another, to another. Now, the really interesting thing is humans actually generalize a lot less in some ways than AI. Like AI on any one topic is going to be as smart as the smartest person. And so all of us are gonna be like, whoa, that thing's a lot better at that than I am. But our ability to go from topic to topic to topic to topic, meaning like...

• 26:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Tennis.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Tom Bilyeu?

  To algebra, to keeping your girlfriend happy in a relationship. We're going to be better going through those wildly diverse, generalized topics than an AI will.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And it's interesting, the more you talk to AI, it'll bring the tennis things back to the relationship. I'm like, we're not talking about tennis anymore. Stop that.

• 26:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Uh, but shout out to Telegraph. They had this really cool, um, mad cover. When AI is more expensive than people, why replace the people? I don't know if you've seen the new, the news on X about that one company that had told everybody, go use AI, go crazy. And they racked up half a billion dollar, uh, token bill.

• 27:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  So it's one of those things now where, to your point, AI is doing a bunch of different things at levels we've never seen before. A lot of companies are embracing it first and saying, yes, go and run it. But then they're starting to use up the tokens. They realize they have to iterate on things. They realize they have to keep replacing things. And the cost of AI is now being scrutinized. So we have this cost that it's a little bit more expensive than we thought it was. And then the impending, it's going to replace everybody, job doomed thing. Um, what is now, I know we talked about the technical, the technical aspect of AI. Now let's move to how it's going to impact the job, the economy, um, and like the people that it's replacing, quote unquote.

• 27:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So a couple of things on that. One, you can tell what an article is going to be like in the mainstream media. If they make the person look bad visually, then the article is going to go against them. If they make the person look great, then it's going to be totally for it. It's hilarious how manipulative that is. Um, so I think a big part of what's playing out right now is that, um, there, there is a chicken and egg. No, there's a game of chicken being played right now between all of this massive investment into the infrastructure of AI.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Combine that with the fear of the unknown, all of that. So you've got people attacking the data centers just because they're scared and they think that they're going to be replaced by AI. They're an eyesore. People don't want them in their town, yada, yada. Um, coupled with the reality that AI is just going to keep getting better and better and better. But in any one moment, you can look at it and be dismissive. And say, oh, my God, look at these fools like they're, you know, being so stupid in what they're telling people. The they didn't put any guardrails. These guys are morons. AI is fake. Like, this is all bullshit. And if you're a historian, you look at that and go, no, no, no, hold on. This played out with railroads. Railroads ends up transforming America, bankrupts a ton of people. And for a while, I bet it looked really stupid.

• 29:04Tom Bilyeu?

  But now there's not unused lines or anything like that. Like it, it literally changed the face of America. Uh, it happened, obviously, in the Industrial Revolution. It happened in the Great Electrification. It happened in the Great Internetification. All of that, same thing. Bunch of companies go bankrupt in the um, infrastructure investment phase. And so if you write an article as all of these companies are going broke. If you go, these guys made bad investments, you're right. History will look back on you and go, that was the right assessment. If you go, this technology is bogus. These guys are morons. This is all going to zero. You're going to look like an idiot because the technology is just going to keep getting better as it does always and forever. And so um, that is the takeaway for me is like, yeah, if you don't put

• 29:49Tom Bilyeu?

  like caps on your employees' usage, you're not thinking about incentive structures. So anytime you put an incentive structure in place, like a leaderboard, people want to climb a leaderboard. If the leaderboard is merely token usage, you've just now incentivized somebody to write a program that gets AI to run all night on the simplest thing that it can generate a token on very quickly.

• 30:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Cause there's no concern, there's no even check for whether it output anything that was beneficial. But you climb the leaderboard. So as you design that program, if you're not thinking about perverse incentives, then you're going to end up there. Um, so to write an article and say, that was a dumb move as an entrepreneur, yes, that is correct. But to then go, oh, see, told you AI is bogus. It didn't like yield anything. It's like, okay, that's going to be the chattering class is going to give you that answer. But these entrepreneurs have become the greatest entrepreneurs of their generation because they don't even listen to you on that. They just go, what mistake did I just make? Got it. Perverse incentive, understood. What do I need to do to make sure that this actually is? High utility that this is outputting something and it may take us a year, two years, three years.

• 30:56Tom Bilyeu?

  One, to churn over the people that are going to code like an asshole just to climb the leaderboard. Or the people that are secretly afraid of AI and so they actually want it to fail. And so they are doing things like that. Known as malicious compliance. And so I'm just doing what you told me to do, but I'm actually doing it to show you that AI is bullshit. And they, and it will break some weak entrepreneurs. There's no doubt. They'll panic, they'll back off and, and that'll be game over. But anybody that has like, dude, the thing that just grounds me on AI. I'm fucking using it. So like, what are you going to tell me that's going to make me go, oh yeah, I guess you're right. It's not working. It's like, what?

• 31:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Like I'm using this every fucking day. Uh, I've saved myself an insane amount of money. I've increased the amount of top line revenue. That's the part where like, I'm, I'm like, guys, we reduced our headcount, increased top line. Of course you expected to increase your profitability because you cut your expenses. But when you decrease expenses and that increases top line revenue, that's unexpected. And so, and then on the gaming side, it's just, it's unhinged how much of an impact it makes. So, uh, I'm in the very fortunate position of not getting sucked into the rhetoric. Because I'm just over here deploying it as fast as I can and watching my coders go from.

• 32:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Not using it at all, like they wouldn't use it. I'm like, the fuck is going on? And so finally we put in something that I was like, I need to see. How much code you're like, just tell me the percentage every day of code written by AI. And at first it was like very little. And so I was like, hey, just a reminder, like go in and use it. I'll pay any amount, right? Sounds familiar. I'll pay any amount. Don't worry about that. Like just use, use, use. And so finally it was like, okay, today it was 15%. And then one day it clicked and they were like, oh, that thing I don't like doing. AI is just doing that for me now. Oh, this thing that we wanted to try like a really unique solution.

• 33:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That nobody's done before. I just did it using AI. So now they feel clever. Because they're just using AI as a tool to solve a problem in gaming that nobody solved yet. And so that once people start feeling like. Oh, wait, I can go do something other people can't do. That makes me feel cool. Now AI is a tool to help me feel cool. Like anytime you can make the most selfish thing somebody can do, you're gonna get that adoption. And so now, all of a sudden, it's like my guys are being more aggressive in terms of what they think they can accomplish. So you've got to be careful about, do they feel celebrated? Do they feel like you see them? Do they feel like we're really creating something that's cool? Like in the early days of game development, I had a very different relationship with the team.

• 33:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Because I didn't know what I was doing. And they felt like, no, we're making something, this is never gonna go anywhere. This guy's just waffling about. They obviously didn't know me well enough to know that I'm not going to stop until I get where I want to go. But now it's like the game has so much focus and momentum that they're getting excited about being a part of building this game. And so then that just becomes a totally different energy when you try to integrate something like AI. So that's how, like, if you're trying to contextualize this moment, that's the thing that I would be looking at. Now, there's specific data that's been coming out that's well worth looking at. Three years after ChatGPT arrived, Apollo's chief economist went hunting for AI's fingerprints in the US labor data.

• 34:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Employment, productivity, inflation. He didn't find anything. That's the crazy part. Zero evidence of a single job that has been lost to AI. Now, I can tell you right now, that isn't true. So how is it that it's hiding, that there's something hiding in the data? So Torsten Slok, he, this is not a hype guy, this, the, the chief economist. So he's an ex Deutsche Bank, ex IMF, ex OECD, like this guy has all the credentials in the world. And he's now running the macro desk at one of the largest asset managers in the world, Apollo. So his read on the technology is something everybody should pay attention to. And what he's saying in terms of its impact on the economy is the following, this is a quote. AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data.

• 35:15Tom Bilyeu?

  So you look at the numbers, weekly employment data shows no AI-driven layoffs. But remember what they're actually looking at. They're just looking at total numbers. So he's not seeing an increase in productivity. And I agree, right now, you're probably not gonna see something big because you're still in the malicious compliance phase. You're still in the people at scale that are actually going to influence the numbers. Like, they don't have their heads wrapped around it yet, and they probably have a large group of people. That are resistant to the technology, doing everything they can to subvert its deployment. So just this is how this kind of thing goes. Now, he's looking at inflation, he's saying it hasn't moved. I think that's a delay in the data because inflation is

• 35:59Tom Bilyeu?

  running again. 3.8 was the last that I saw. So that is up significantly from a couple of months ago. And the forecast that are being put out, he's saying that they're tame. So the Penn Wharton model puts AIs yearly productivity boost at a fraction of a percentage point through 2035. Now, plant that flag. If they're going to point and say that that's where we're going to be at in 2035, I think I'll plant my flag. They're going to look ridiculous. So nine years of improvement from now, nine years of understanding what AI does well, what it does poorly. Getting people that were raised on using AI that are actually being trained how to use it. I think that it's going to be radically different than it is now. So

• 36:44Tom Bilyeu?

  when you look at that and you see that the does not look like the technology is having much of an impact. What do you read? Now, my read is that this really is Jevon's paradox. So in 1865 economist William Jevons caught like a really strange phenomenon. If you make coal engines more efficient and the theory is that Britain is going to burn less coal, but it didn't burn less coal. It burned far more coal. Cheaper power did not shrink demand. It actually made it explode because all of a sudden it was like, oh, that thing that I wasn't doing because it was just too expensive. I'm going to go do now because it's cheaper. Literally swap in impact theory game development

• 37:27Tom Bilyeu?

  and you'll understand. So my first two years, the game was so expensive that we were going to have to shut it down. It was just absolute insanity. And I was like, okay, like we're never going to be able to keep this pace. So either we have to scale back to what they call friend slop and just make like a really simple, basic bitch game, or If we're going to try to do the very ambitious game that we're trying to do, something's got to give. Swap in coal for intelligence. And that's exactly what happened. And so the intelligence, meaning what I could rely on to create largely art assets, that's been the big save for us. We could leverage AI. And so when that level of intelligence gets cheap, you don't end up using less of it.

• 38:12Tom Bilyeu?

  You start using more of it. So we are now hiring developers and game artisans that we wouldn't have hired before because we would have had to scale back so much. So this has allowed us to keep that scale or something close to it. And now employ people that we otherwise wouldn't have employed because we're able to onboard AI. So Slok actually also ends up reaching the same frame himself. I think he's less convinced than I am. But nonetheless, he did bring up the paradox. And so we'll see how it ends up playing out. I think the reality of what's going to happen is you're just going to see a massive shift away from some jobs and towards others. You might see a decrease in entry level positions, which will create a problem unto itself.

• 38:57Tom Bilyeu?

  But nonetheless, over time, you're going to see more jobs being created, more people doing things. It'll be more fragmented. More people are going to start their own companies. There's no doubt about that. The world is going to look very different on the other side of this. But I don't think that we end up, at least not in this phase of AI. I don't think that we end up with a glut of jobs. But history tells us that people that don't adapt will end up losing work. There will be tons of consternation, tons of protests and people getting very riotous over the fact that they don't see anything in their future. But young people and the highly adaptable will begin shifting over to this new economy, just as we did with the industrial revolution. Electricity, internet, all of it.

• 39:41Tom Bilyeu?

  It's just played out so many times. And I think we're going to see the same thing with AI.

• 39:47Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 39:53Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 39:57Speaker 01

  I think this might be a two Americas problem though, because right now we're saying that, if I heard you right, that AI didn't technically wipe out jobs, it's replacing jobs, it's reshuffling the deck, but the deck is still 52 cards. And then I have friends who are, who've been unemployed and can't find a gig because they are used to being, literally a close friend of mine, he's used to being like VP of Sales. So I manage people, I manage teams and things like that. And I was like, yeah, there's no more people managers no more. It's either you are doing the thing or you own the company. Everything in the middle is kind of gone. So how do you rectify what people are seeing on the streets, the headlines that we're reading, and then this Economist report that's saying, well, technically it wasn't really jobs, we're still broken even, it's not that bad?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  When Meta was like, see, 7,000 people because of AI. And that was like their bailout of statement. Like, how do you rectify those two truths?

• 40:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think you have to integrate them. I think that there's going to be a bloodbath of people like your friend that refuse to adapt or accept that, ooh, I have to take five steps backwards and hopefully over time I'll be 15 steps ahead. But that five steps backwards is just too brutal. For any anime heads in the crowd, there's a studio called Studio Mappa. And one of their lead directors, I believe, was at the studio for, it's like 39 years, man. Like a long time. And he recently got fired and he said, my severance was zero yen. So nothing. And he said, I'm starting at a new studio, but I'm coming in with the mind of a beginner. And I'm like, I'll be interested to see if that guy, and I mean, if you've been

• 41:34Tom Bilyeu?

  somewhere for over 30 years, you're old as fuck. So this guy's probably in his 50s. And he's coming at it like, yeah, I'm good at a thing. That thing is still valuable. This company doesn't know me as well, so they're probably not giving me the same opportunities. But if I'm actually good at this thing, then I'm gonna drive it forward. And I will climb up the company. That will be the question put to everybody is, yeah, we may just now live in a world where this is about reinvention. I think about this a lot with me as a YouTuber. Now, maybe I am more prone to this than the next person. But at the height of my YouTube success, I pulled the team aside and said, I'm not going to keep doing this.

• 42:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm like, it's not interesting to me anymore. And so I'm going to be rebooting the channel. And to say that that caused consternation would be an understatement. It hurt our revenue for well over 18 months. And, you know, it was pretty wild. And I still get comments to this day, like every now and then the algorithm will reach somebody from phase one. And they'll be like, oh, remember when this guy, like, he was cool and he used to talk about, they won't say mindset, but that was the drill. And

• 42:46Tom Bilyeu?

  as if Kaizen takes off, that will get more and more integrated into what I do. And there'll be another reinvention. And I think that's just a world that we live in now. AI moves so fast that everybody's going to have to reinvent themselves. And you'll have these phases where it'll be like, okay, this is what I'm focused on now, because this is what the world values now. But the world may not value that same thing in seven years. And there are going to be some people who hate that in the extreme. And they will just hunger for AI to give them everything and they will vote for policies that are nanny state. And other people are like, no, no, no, I'm like, this is fun. I like the fact that I can go from one thing to the next, to the next.

• 43:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And so we'll see, but it is the ability to adapt is the thing that will get people.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, that's a really good point, because we are coming out of an economy that was, you work here for 30 years, you get a gold watch and you're taking care of for life pension. Then that turned into, well, you could do, you might bounce around every two or three years, then you're going to find your niche and you'll be there for the last 20. And now it sounds like the new economy that we're going into is every four to seven years, you might have to completely change what you do.

• 43:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, what you do is the right answer, because it, meaning the levers that you pull. So I saw a really great quote, forgive me for not remembering who said it, but it's really brilliant. And they said, don't think about who you want to become, think about what you want to do. What do you want to do? Because that's really the thing that defines the quality of your life. Are you doing a thing on a daily basis where doing the thing is interesting and engaging to you? It feels like a good way to spend your time. Because even if you're aimed at the right thing, if you're not doing the thing on a daily basis, then it's not going to be enjoyable. So the guy behind Take Two Interactive, the CEO, doesn't play games, doesn't care about games. And so I'm like, oh, this is just a guy that like, he's like,

• 44:42Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think he is a turnaround CEO, but he's that kind of CEO. Where it doesn't matter what the product is, just he understands the systems, the capital allocation, part of the job so well that, yeah, yeah, drop me in here, drop me in there, doesn't really matter. I'm going to thrive because I know how to run a business. And I let the artisans go make the GTA 6. And I would hate that. I'm the exact opposite of that kind of CEO. I am on the product side, I'm on the marketing side, the storytelling side. Like, I want to be in the thing, I have to care about the thing. And so I'm in one of the better phases of my life now. Shout out to Andrew Press, who I hope hears this.

• 45:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Largely because of finding him and bringing him on as COO, I've been able to spend more time being the product, writing the deep dive, doing the research for the lives, working on the game, like actually working on the game. And so that has been transformative for me in terms of the levers that I'm actually pulling. So people need to think way, way, way more about that. And so as AI shapes how we move through our careers, be really thoughtful about what levers am I going to pull?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's good. Ryan, I want to bring you in this as our resident young person. Cause I just talked about kind of the exchange of culture that we're kind of, I'm living through the transition from pension to now every four years I'm out to find something else.

• 46:07Tom Bilyeu?

  How dare you?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  From your

• 46:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I have to say, I really hate it. It's like, yes, this is the right conversation, but Drew, Lord knows, I want to buck that trend. Anyway, barring you becoming a big time film producer that we couldn't possibly afford, that caveat aside.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Uh, no, but so Ryan, from your perspective then, what uh, do you feel the pressure with you and your peers of like, I'm gonna do this forever? Or is it like, hey, man, I'm just trying to pay my rent tomorrow and I'll figure it out later?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  In terms of like your day to day job?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Like your career, your aspirations, like what do you see your, how do you see it unfolding over the next thirty years?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I feel like in your twenties, and maybe this is just universal, but I feel like in the twenties, it's just survive. I feel like most of what I make decisions are, or how am I gonna get money? So down the line, I don't have to worry about this stuff. So it is a lot of just day to day, get the paycheck kind of thing in a lot of ways, but at the same time, there's ways, you know, outside of it, I try to grow my career.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Got you. And then for your like friends and like peers and things like that, are they in more of the corporate side? Are they more creative? Are they, are they able to find jobs and work and stuff like that? Or is the unemployment kind of hit them as well?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Unemployment, I, of all my friends, I've got about like fifteen friends I keep in touch from college. Only three of us have gotten jobs. And we've been graduated for a year. So and it's not like two of those were through their family who already worked at companies. And mine was just by chance. So everyone else has just been applying since graduation. It's just impossible. Cause you get, you don't get, you like, you'll go through three stages of interviews and then they'll still end up ghosting you for no reason.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Okay. This is me on my old man rocking chair. So I'm a disclaimer, but are what, what, what were their fields? And were we talking about like twelve art history majors? Are some of them?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  A variety. So uh, some are medical field, some are psychology, some are art, and the two who got jobs, who have it through family were both computer science. So there is a vast variety of like arts and things. Um, I guess I would be more considered arts. Um, so just depends. I'd say it's a good fifty fifty for my, my friend group.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Copy.

• 48:10Tom Bilyeu?

  That is wild.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Very, very interesting.

• 48:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So here's a, listening to you talk, first of all, makes me feel ridiculously old, but uh,

• 48:19Tom Bilyeu?

  You guys, your generation has a meta-awareness that we didn't have. You might have started to have it, but we didn't have it at all. None of us knew, we were all going through the same thing in our twenties. The idea of a quarter-life crisis hadn't been defined yet. That didn't get defined till I was probably in my early thirties. And so that whole idea of like, oh yeah, the world is complicated and it's hard to figure out. And there's something about being in your twenties where you're just trying to stack knowledge and get a lay of the land. And you guys are aware of it. We weren't, I would just go home and be depressed. And like, what am I doing with my life? I didn't have a sense of like, oh, this is normal. You've got to figure it out and then you're going to start generating some momentum. I was a telemarketer.

• 49:02Tom Bilyeu?

  So I went to the most prestigious film school on planet earth at the time. I mean, like undeniably, the most prestigious. So go to the Harvard of film schools and graduate, second in my class, by the way, not some slouch. Like really thinking, oh, I'm about to do this. And I'm working as a telemarketer. And I'm like, yo, how far have I fallen? Like, I don't have any, and then at one point I was selling insurance, door to door, pure commission. Like, it was wild. And so you just feel lost, like where the fuck am I going? But none of that meta-awareness. So there is some like, if you guys have a, an attitude of, well, I'm either going to do a thing with my degree, or I'm just not going to get a job.

• 49:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, that wasn't an option. So my dad sent me for the five months leading up to my graduation. He's like, five more months, four more months, three more months, meaning with the, the rent check. Like, when you graduate, that's it. Like, you get a job, final answer. And after that day, my parents have never given me a dime. In fact, I, for a while, was helping supplement my mom's income. So it was, it's just a different time. There was no, I didn't want to move back in. They would have let me, obviously, but I didn't want to move back in. I wanted to make it work. And so you take a job somewhere.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  I had that revelation literally this weekend because I had to like find some pants. So I walked. Into like an H and M and the two, three people behind the desk on the H and M, one of them was in their fifties, one of them was in their forties. One of them was probably like thirty something and that's when I kind of took a step back because I have friends after college who didn't get a job immediately. I know I'm thinking of some of my frat brothers off the bat, they went to the mall and got jobs and then they went into the real, but now those intermediate jobs. Are now grow like, I don't wanna say grownups, but like people are now in those jobs now. So the college people can't even get in there. So it seems like. The transitional jobs, the insurance, the door, door, door, the things that we used to, this is what I have to do until I figure out the thing that's gonna start my career. There are now people in there that that's their career and they.

• 51:08Tom Bilyeu?

  I will be so interested to know why that's happening because one, we didn't have YouTuber as job. So none of us were like, oh, I'm gonna go try my hand at YouTubing. So that was off the table. There was no gig economy. So it wasn't like you could be a DoorDash person or an Uber driver on the side. So it was like, you had to get a job. So you either had a full time or a part time job. And so for my generation, the idea of going and working at the mall was like, that's what you did. It was like your first job was gonna be at the mall or at the um, uh, uh, fast food restaurant.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Mall fast food.

• 51:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that was just like where you got your jobs. And so I remember there was always that time where your parents would be like, summer's coming up. Like you need to go walk the mall and pick up job applications. And so I was so lazy. I did for like the CD store or whatever. DVD store. And if I got rejected there, then I was like, I'm not even sure what I was gonna do. And so I always ended up working at a paint factory. Because my dad worked for a paint company. Uh, and so, yeah, it's, it's such a different time. Like there's so many sort of gig ways, even Etsy. Just none of that existed. And so you really felt like I've got to somehow plug into the world of jobs, if you will. There was no like, I can go try my own thing, make my own thing. That was not real.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Interesting. Scuttle in the chat said, "The black market is always hiring." So Ryan, if your friends really wanna... This time's really tough.

• 52:37Tom Bilyeu?

  They may already be there.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  That's one way to go. Let's jump over to the Iran war. Donald Trump has an announcement for everybody. He says, "Hey, guys, Iran really wants to make a deal."

• 52:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Wait, really? I hadn't heard that.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  "And it'll be a good one for USA and those that are with us. But the Democrats and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans understand that it is much tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate when political hacks keep negatively chirping at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever. Just sit back and relax. It would all work out in the end. It always does." President Donald J. Trump. So don't worry that your gas prices are high, guys. It's all gonna work out in the end. Don't worry about the strait that was open, that we closed, that is now closed, that we opened, that was now closed again. It's all gonna work out in the end. Do you feel reassured by Donald Trump's true social tweet?

• 53:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I do not feel reassured. My beef with this is, one,

• 53:36Tom Bilyeu?

  it's whiny. Now, I understand certainly that people chirping at you constantly, it does get very obnoxious. And as my poor wife found, our comments are full of people who either think I'm evil, or dumb, or whatever. And if you let it, it really will drive you nuts. And I bet if I went back and looked at some of the first episodes where I was just always fighting with chat, I would be like, "Okay, listen, you're getting a bit whiny. Like, let it be what it is." So from that perspective, I hate that. I simultaneously have found Donald Trump funny for the way that he engages and lament the death of, like, presidential. And so, right now, I'm in a mourning the death of presidential mood.

• 54:20Tom Bilyeu?

  This one is not nearly... This isn't funny at all. And so, if you're going to be like that sort of anti-presidential, at least be funny. This one is not that. So, look, Iran is a shitshow right now. Do I think that any of us know enough to know the pace at which we should be negotiating? No, I do not. Um, so on that side, whatever. The thing that bothers me the most about this tweet is the Democrats thing. So as president, you have to find a way to unite your base. And when, sorry, not your base, your country. And so when you're president, like you represent everybody. And right now, the populist moment, which I have repeatedly pointed out how much I fucking hate.

• 55:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, it's just all about the other teams, a bunch of dumb asses and I hate them all and all of that. Um, so I really, yeah, I just hate that. So, um, name calling is precisely how he got into office and I hate that.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  There are some reports, though, that there is a little bit of turmoil on the Iranian side of this war. It's still early, reports, reports, you know, disclaimers, we're taking it as sources say, but that could be a bright spot in all of this if this can actually wind out.

• 55:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Or it could be a mess. We're about to see. So Iran's president just tried to walk away from the jobs supposedly. Uh, Masood Pazeshkian reportedly handed a resignation letter to the office of the supreme leader. Supposedly the stated reason, this is according to a London-based, um, group Iran International. He's trying to walk away because he no longer has power to govern. He says that the Revolutionary Guard has taken the country out from under him. Now, Iran right now is in a succession vacuum. This is an incredibly dangerous time when the supreme leader was killed back in February. Um, his son, Mohtaba, was pushed forward as a successor and a chunk of the regime's old guard never accepted him.

• 56:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is a problem with regime changes is you never know who's going to fill that vacuum. I think most of us here in the West wanted to see the, the quote unquote people of Iran rise up. I will remind us all that I'm sure Iran is divided in the same way that America is divided. And so do we really even know what that means? Do we have a sense of how many people? We're often asked to believe that 85 or 90% of the people are on the quote unquote "good" side. They just want their country. They want to look like they looked in the 70s. They want broad freedom. They want to pursue economic interests. They want a secular state. I just don't know if that's true. Maybe it is. Lord knows. I would love that. That would be incredible.

• 56:56Tom Bilyeu?

  But it may not be true. And even if it is true, if the group at the top is willing to be extraordinarily violent, then they'll be able to keep even a mass of the country down. So reports right now are describing a military council of senior guard officers making the real decisions in the country with the elected government just basically being locked out and the guard itself is now starting to fracture. So you've got the IRGC that are willing to be violent, willing to control the country by force, but they themselves are being torn apart by factions. So you have one commander Ahmad Vahidi, who runs one faction. Parliament Speaker Mohammed Begir Galabaf runs a rival one and then the security chief maneuvers

• 57:41Tom Bilyeu?

  between them. So all of this is rumor right now, but make no mistake, if there is this kind of turmoil playing out, we have no idea how this is all going to end up. And so this could end up making any functional negotiation impossible, which means that this is going to continue to spiral and be a problem. And ah, man, I'm going to say, if the people haven't risen up by now, the odds that they're going to are very low. And that's the problem. If you really, so look, we don't know how many people were killed. I've heard everything from like 2,500 of the protesters killed to 45,000. That is a gigantic swing. But you can imagine, if the number's even anywhere in the middle, if let's say 10 or 15,000

• 58:25Tom Bilyeu?

  of your most hardcore brave people that are leading the marches out in the street when you know that it's hyper dangerous, if they were all murdered, Then that revolutionary energy is going to have been zapped out of the people very, very quickly. And so that's just incredibly brutal to think that maybe there could have been a moment, but they were just all killed. So Tehran, of course, is denying that any of this is playing out. The officials say that the president is working and the call behind the scenes to say that he's about to back out is just built to sabotage the ceasefire talks. So I don't know. We, we will see what ends up coming of all of this.

• 59:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But again, right now, what's going on there is extremely uncertain.

• 59:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Will it end up back in violence? I think there's a low chance of that, but are they going to try to just economically strangle them to death? And when I say violence, obviously there are strikes happening right now during the ceasefire. But they are, call it tit for tat. So it's not a gigantic bombing campaign. That's what I'm talking about. So we'll see how this ends up playing out. I'm expecting a long tail shit show.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  And it's only going to get worse, according to the SVP of Exxon, who's saying we're approaching unheard of inventory levels. I mean,

• 59:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Of oil basically being bad.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, really, really low levels. You can debate whether that's going to hit those very low levels in two or three weeks. Once you get that point, then you'll see prices shoot up. The price of physical Brent oil cargoes will spike to 150 to 160 per barrel. When inventories hit all time lows in coming weeks, the executive said, when the price gets to a certain level, demand destruction brings it back into balance. So we're at a point right now where we've been hovering around the nineties to 100, top 110, came back down. We've been in kind of that window there and they're expecting a, what's that, a 40% increase? Over the next couple of weeks, that should drive gas prices, who knows where. So with this war that's happening, yes, on the, on the actually boots on the ground, you know, we don't want to see any more death or violence.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  But economically, when

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  When bread oil is that high, that's gonna have ripple effects across the entire industry.

• 1:00:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Across the entire globe. That will, depending on how long it lasts, take you from a momentary recession to a global recession. If it drags on for six, 12 months of having that kind of elevate, it's so inflationary that, as he said, you'll get the demand destruction. That's exactly what a recession is, is people just start going, I'm just gonna hold my money back, because I don't know where this is going. And then any company that's in a weakened position, or is extremely exposed to energy costs, poof, they just stop existing. So we saw early weakness when Spirit Airlines went out of business. So you'll see more weirdness in places that have really thin margins that are really exposed to energy costs, really starting to struggle. So,

• 1:01:29Tom Bilyeu?

  yeah, I mean buckle up if this doesn't get done. Also, if this isn't done by midterms, forget it. Like now you're gonna see a flip there, that agenda dies. And so, yeah, we'll see what happens on the other side of that.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  With everything going on, what is kind of your gut read about this Strait of Hormuz Iran situation? Like I know early talks, we didn't know what was going on, but now I felt like we kind of got, we're starting to hit the same loops in the news releases, the articles, Trump is starting to backtrack, get back, he's starting to get into his, his kind of loop. What's your read now of this Iranian war situation, Strait of Hormuz? Where do you think it goes?

• 1:02:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I think a lot of it is going to depend on what happens at the midterms. Let's say that Trump, let's do a Trump wins scenario. He retains a majority. What you're gonna see is, I think Iran drags out forever and ever if he's able to get to the other side without a resolution. So it doesn't resolve, but for whatever reason, he's able to convince people that he's still the guy that you want to trust. And so he holds and you'll see him do everything he can to make the US the world's gas station. He'll, people will start going, okay, yeah, everything is so uncertain in the Strait of Hormuz. Largely, we've stopped talking about the insurance side of this, but that's still a big part of this. The insurance company is just like, yeah, we're not gonna fuck with Iran. So in this scenario, I'm like, insurance companies.

• 1:02:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Still read Iran's unstable. This is maybe a long term stalemate, but we don't trust them not to bomb people or the expense just gets way too high. And so the GCC basically retreats from the US. The US, because they just can't afford to invest, they've got to focus here. Cause remember this was all about getting the GCC countries that have accumulated a massive amount of wealth to point that at US investments. So that begins to weaken. You get the US becoming the gas station, beginning to up our production that we do anything and everything that we can to be pro oil. Maybe we even get Alberta out from under Canada. We develop a relationship with them.

• 1:03:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that connection becomes like this top part of North America, just oil, massive production. We go crazy. And because of our geography, we end up being relatively protected from all of that instability. And we just, as the US, end up in a pretty strong position. We don't hate that China sort of gets into a weird position. I think at some point China may have to step in to at least stabilize an economic relationship with Iran, which then could power them if the US leaves the Middle East and is just like, yeah, we're just kind of throwing our hands up. That shit could get weird in the Middle East. And so you get this weird shifting of power where the US refocuses everything back here

• 1:04:14Tom Bilyeu?

  in the US, sorry, in the North America through the South America corridor or hemisphere. And we really just plan our routes, say this is our thing. We continue to try to have at least an economic relationship with the GCC countries. I don't think they're just going to cut bait and run, but I think it's going to be difficult for them to position themselves as the protectors of the GCC, given that we walked in, created all this fucking trouble, because this is a scenario where we bail and it's just this long-term stalemate. So anyway, there's so many question marks over that. This is not me saying, oh yeah, this is definitely what's going to happen. But I think all of that is a very plausible read on this becomes a very destabilized region

• 1:04:56Tom Bilyeu?

  that really forces China's hand to go in, build an economic relationship. Tell China to chill the fu- or tell Iran to chill the fuck out. That things have got to get through, but they start charging a toll, maybe not on China, but on everybody else. Everybody else starts going, yeah, we can't get proper insurance. We don't want to pay tolls. So we're going to go over here. Whether China lets the toll sit or not is a bigger question mark because they're, they have other choke points where if people start charging tolls everywhere, it becomes a very non-ideal situation. And if America positions itself as the one place that doesn't charge tolls, then it's like more focus goes there. So anyway, I think ironically, America walks away from this economically in an okay position.

• 1:05:40Tom Bilyeu?

  If pro-energy people are still in positions of power. If he loses at the midterms and the green, like, energy, energy comes back. And now it's all like, they're just quietly regulating us out of the game. Crying about, look what Trump did in the Middle East. This is his fault. Inflation starts going crazy. We start running policies that make us look like what Germany did to themselves, which is fucking insane. But nonetheless, they've done it and caused massive economic damage all across Europe with green energy policies. So yeah, that one would be, I think, economically disastrous and would make, would make it such that what happened in Iran, which we created that problem.

• 1:06:24Tom Bilyeu?

  But that problem ends up biting us in the ass in a way that it actually could have been beneficial for us, however grotesque.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  All right, there's a lot of if, ands and.

• 1:06:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, look, nobody should take that as a like, this is probable.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  That's crazy. Yeah, we'll wait and see what happens, but R I P to the gas tanks, man. We almost started walking to work. This was crazy. I was, I got tripped over the six, the six dollar thing. I was gone for three weeks, came back. I was like, oh, it got more expensive. Oh. Okay, yeah, I'm going to walk now. And to those struggling, I feel you. Empathy, empathy, empathy. I'm sorry about that. Voting has consequences. All right, let's do a tale of two riots, I will call them. First, let's go over to Newark in these ICE facility riots. We talked about it briefly earlier. There's just a lot of energy in motion outside. I think this is the same energy that we've seen in Minnesota and other places earlier this, earlier this year.

• 1:07:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Thankfully, the, and tell me if you've seen something I haven't. So this has the same cause as what was going on in Minnesota. But the energy to me has felt very different. And the reason is that the, um, the police, the law enforcement is not acting a fucking fool. And so because they're not like, just like, oh, you're going to escalate, we're going to escalate. They've been able to create a situation where, I mean, they literally just rounded them up. They literally rounded them up if, for people that haven't seen the footage. And, um, put these guys that refused to leave because they gave them all kinds of warnings. There were like tones playing on people's phones, curfews in place, you need to leave. And some of them just refused to disband, thinking they're not going to do anything.

• 1:08:06Tom Bilyeu?

  But they really did something, brought in big vans, encircled them, arrested them and took them out. As far as I know, there were no substantive injuries or anything like that. So that to me is how you do it. You've got to enforce the law, but you've got to create a situation where it's not like a did the person do something wrong? It's like, you can't be here. We have a curfew, you can protest during the day, but at nine or nine fifteen or whatever, you've got to disband. And now if you don't disband, you're breaking the law, you're knowingly breaking the law. And we don't have to be like, well, did that person push the ICE officer? Did the ICE officer push them for, right? It's just all super fucking clear. You're not allowed to be here. We're arresting you for being here when you're not supposed to be here. Super smart, very easy, seemed to diffuse a lot of the energy. So from that perspective, I'm very excited to see law enforcement learn their lesson.

• 1:08:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know if that's an ICE, uh, figuring shit out, if that's the state police just being way fucking better.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, these are state troopers.

• 1:08:57Tom Bilyeu?

  If New Jersey just get it, I don't know.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Jersey's better everywhere, so you know we just get it.

• 1:09:02Tom Bilyeu?

  So, um, but this was well handled, so preach on.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  It's one of those things though, where I understand the frustration. This is something that has been happening and I think that, I don't know if it's because Trump hasn't tweeted and hasn't then brought the subculture to then come and fight him about it and make it a bigger thing. Once he's seen what happened in Minnesota, but it does just seem like a good old fashioned protest. People are mad, cops show up, they get rounded out, everybody moves back, the people that leave, leave. The four or five adversaries get arrested, get thrown, so. I'm weirdly okay with how things are turning out because nothing's getting burned down. There's no massive destruction. It's just agitation, frustration being like let out in protest.

• 1:09:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Very well said.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm kind of aligned with you on that one. On the flip side, though, when you go to Paris and you see that it has been completely crazy.

• 1:09:50Tom Bilyeu?

  This is wild.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  I'm a little bit upset. One, because Arsenal wasn't able to get it done. My new.

• 1:09:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Drew, imagine my shock and horror that my American co-host, as American as the day is long, falls in love with a Premier League team, the only Premier League team that is the absolute dyed-in-the-wool rival to the team that I support. How? How, Drew?

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  You wasn't on the Hollywood movie with the men in them. She was there. But no, people, but what I hate about this is that when people see these, I have seen a lot of anti-immigrant, this is the war on demographics, this is what's going on. They need to deport these people. This is why. And I'm like, guys, this is, this is, this is football. This is what happens when a championship is won. I can pull up phrases from San Francisco. I could pull up videos from New York and all these other places that have gotten just as crazy. So while, yes, burning in the street, I think Paris is going out. I don't want this to then become something that becomes politicized into another category that's separate than just people celebrating a little bit too excessively after a football game.

• 1:10:57Tom Bilyeu?

  I think you're pointing to something very important, and I think making sure that people begin teasing these things apart is critical. But there was a post about, God, what country were they from? Somewhere in Eastern Europe. I don't remember the name of the country right now, like Slovakia or something. And they had a huge rally for their national team or something. Anyway.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it was Poland. I know what you're talking about.

• 1:11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  A gaggle of people. And they were like, nobody was violent. And it was, the crowd was mahusive. And so there really is something about France, man. France really likes to burn shit. Like, the number of riots that I've seen in France is crazy. And we're starting to see more and more of this in the US. So I think for people to rule out cultural influences would be a mistake. So one thing that's really fascinating, I'm reading this book about Japan that I, or specifically about Tokyo, that I did not expect to sort of stick in my mind as much as it is.

• 1:11:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And this guy was talking about how in the sixties, because Japan gets bombed back into the Stone Ages in the early forties. They also have to reconcile with, oh, fuck, we were the bad guys. And so like, there's this whole weird thing that happens to their culture post-World War II. And so in the sixties, basically, young people are just rioting everywhere. And they are constantly having to be broken up with fire hoses and like, really like, a level of like, our own civil rights movement where you're like, oh, this is kind of violent, the way that these people are being broken up. It's pretty draconian, what the fuck? And but nobody talks about it, about what Japan ends up going through.

• 1:12:41Tom Bilyeu?

  But on the other side of basically breaking the will of the protesters and then showing them, as you know, I'm gonna say, this was an economic problem. And then they solve their economic woes, because dude, in the fifties, this guy is like, it was prostitutes as far as the eye could see, because they just, so many men died. And then the women had no way to take care of themselves. And so it was just, they sold their bodies. And so I don't think we really ever think about, we are generation, my generation for sure, and your guys' generation less so, and he doesn't even know where Tokyo is, except as it relates to anime in fairness, because he's an anime head.

• 1:13:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But like, that whole thing, we thought of Japan as like, the way that people think of China now. So my generation was like, as soon as like the eighties hit, it was like, Japan's gonna take over everything. And that was the mentality. Go back and look at Back to the Future 2. Who's like the big boss? The Japanese guys. Die Hard, who's the big boss? Japanese people. So it was like, that was like the thing, oh shit, these guys are taking over. So they break the back of the protesters and are like, stop fucking being assholes. Guys and the reason they did it for a reason. I had no fucking idea about this. So originally, they weren't worried about China. And then when the Korea War kicks off, they realize, oh shit,

• 1:14:03Tom Bilyeu?

  like, we need Japan to be a bulwark against communism. So they went in and were like, fuck the unions, uh, fuck these student protesters, like, you guys need to get in fucking line with the economy. And so they switch the mentality of their entire country over to like, we're pro capitalism, we're here to build something dope. And so I just, first of all, I couldn't believe they were able to actually do it to just switch the fucking culture. So you would never see this shit in Japan. So Japan has like, hey, we're in this together vibe that is orchestrated, which I had no idea. Uh, so this highly orchestrated, we're collective, but we're

• 1:14:43Tom Bilyeu?

  a capitalist nation, fucking wild that it worked. And so when you go, oh, like, hold on, this isn't a cultural thing. This is just soccer. Well, first of all, you've got the culture of soccer, hooliganism, which was really started by the fucking Brits. Nobody did it quite like the Brits. And then you do have to ask the question of what is going on in France that makes them so likely to light shit on fire? What is going on in America that makes them so likely to light shit on fire? Is it the same thing? Which I actually don't think it is. Uh, it's an echo of something. But so when you look at like, okay, what happens to the crime rates when you import people from certain countries, which for the love of fucking

• 1:15:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Christ, will people map it to countries and not ethnicities? I get that there's going to be a lot of overlap. But when you look at the fucking demographics in the US, it does not matter what their skin color is, matters what fucking culture they came from. There you'll start to see, oh shit, there are just some cultures that The things they celebrate are not high performing, or the the things they celebrate are just rowdier. They burn more shit, whatever. And so that understanding culture transmits values. If the Japanese taught themselves, oh, the culture that we're gonna transmit is we clean the soccer stadium up afterwards. Then they're not going to riot and burn things because that's not what's cool in their group. I've talked a lot about this in in my mindset phase.

• 1:16:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Moms specifically would come to me and be like, yo, my son is derailing. What do I do? And I'm like, there, there's a very simple answer. You've got to get as close to the following as humanly possible. Kidnap them, put them on a deserted island, only surrounded by other men whose respect they want to earn. And then those men must act in a way that you want your child to act. That fucking kid will get whipped into shape, and I mean literally, like, they will actually like physically hurt him if they have to, to get that kid to fucking snap in line, because that's what men do. And that kid will fucking get in shape. And as long as he's loved and celebrated, when he gets in line, he'll fucking get in line. But he has to want their respect.

• 1:16:50Tom Bilyeu?

  If he wants their respect because they do cool shit, then like, but you can do this with gang bangers, drug dealers, whatever, doesn't matter. That kid wants their respect. He gets jumped into the gang. He will act in crazy ass accordance with the things that they do. Same thing is true of honorable men. And so you've got to model something and they've got to be in an arena where they can't go, no, I don't want to work hard like that. I'd rather go earn the respect of these guys over here. It's got to be like they're, they want their respect and they're trapped inside of it. That is culture. And so whatever the culture reinforces, then you're gonna get that. And so if they're in like a religious youth culture, then they're gonna model that. If they're in a youth gang culture, they're gonna model that.

• 1:17:30Tom Bilyeu?

  So figure out what culture, like the actual values that are being passed down. And you will get your answer to what this is. And Drew, I want to bite through this fucking microphone every time I bring this up. And people want it to be about race. It is not about race. It is about, for whatever fucking reason, you're disseminating culture.

• 1:17:51Tom Bilyeu?

  It's those values and what that culture is. And because for so long, we tended to look like the people that we grew up in that culture. People have made the mistake that they are one in the same. They are often related, but not in a causal fashion.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you you said something earlier. I want to double click on you say that the France and the American thing. They're not the same thing, but they're echoes of each other. What's the thing that they echo?

• 1:18:18Tom Bilyeu?

  That we're becoming at the policy level of feminized nations. Now, I think that so I believe.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  Before you jump in, and you're saying that specifically, we're talking about riots or we're going now broader?

• 1:18:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Riots.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  No, riots like.

• 1:18:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Riots, yes. So a feminized culture allows this to happen. A feminized culture becomes so convinced of compassion that, well, the only reason that they're doing this is because they're impoverished. And you know, it's not affluent soccer fans that are doing this. This is a poverty problem. And so, sure, when you have somebody who's desperate in poverty and they finally get a glimpse of something joyful. They they don't know what to do. They they have been so neglected by society, abused by society even. And so what do you expect? Okay, that's fucking nanny state bullshit. So when you allow that to become policy, instead of going, hey, I love it when a soccer fan celebrates. That's dope. But by the way, if you fucking burn that, you're going to jail.

• 1:19:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if you don't have that, where you say, nope, hard pass, don't care that your team won, don't care that you're poor. None of that fucking matters to me. You just did a thing that we have a law against, you're going to jail. And I'm going to get as close to sentencing you in a totally blind way. I'm not like giving partial credit for this or the other. Nope, this is just what we do. So, but we don't do that anymore. And in fact, it's so crazy. Dude, I'm so milquetoast back from back in the eighties, bro. Like now, though, people are just like, this guy is unhinged. That is so wild to me. So that's what this is an echo of.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  We have some people in the chat are saying, you know, this is, this is not about the culture race talk. It's about the rich elite talk, which honestly, I thought that's where you were going to go. I thought you were going to go straight to the economics of it all.

• 1:20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It's always grounded in economics, meaning the values that are being so take.

• 1:20:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Welfare states destroy families. They destroy families precisely because of the incentive structure that they create. So, once you incentivize them through poverty essentially to split the family up, now you don't get a male and female dynamic. You tend to get an only female dynamic. So, that's where it's like, this is an economic problem. Don't become a welfare state, which is an economic question. Keep families together. And when you do that, now you get a male female dynamic. The father is going to use discipline to keep the kids in line. And hopefully mirror what masculinity looks like when it's channeled towards the right things, taking care of a family, etc.

• 1:21:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, all of a sudden, values are getting passed that you're like, well, this is a value thing. It's not really economic. It's like, yes, but the underlying thing was that you had an economic structure that incentivized the disintegration of the family. Evolution is trying to tell you, you need a male and a female. Like, if we just had males, you deranged in a different way. But you just have females, and so you're deranging in that direction. And we have just effeminated our culture to an insane degree. And remember, men can largely be clocked as they're trying to get laid. And so, if the way to get laid is to act more effeminate, then they're going to act more effeminate, which is wild and doesn't get you laid, PS. But they think it will, and so they run the, it's literally known as the sneaky fucker strategy.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's that inside the mousetraps in people's brain when you say feminization of culture, that they think like, Tom, women are the problem.

• 1:21:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I kind of enjoy that. Women are partly the problem.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  But is, I think, if I can like, talk for you, there are certain characteristics that we attribute to feminization that you're leaning on. There's too much empathy, there's too much.

• 1:22:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, but let's not shuck and jive.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  I'm gonna double down. Stop that.

• 1:22:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Drew's like, trying to save you, goddammit. I'm looking at the chat, bro. Take the fucking cue. So, here, but here's the reality.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Tom Bilyeu?

  That.

• 1:22:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Women are incredibly necessary and needed. Evolution has shaped them to be half of the whole that makes society run. Men are incredibly important and needed. Evolution has shaped them to be half of the whole that makes society run. When either of them derange, so masculinity deranged in Nazi Germany. There was just no compassion. You can't have compassion and shove people in an oven. That's wild. So we know what that looks like. And then femininity is running wild right now. And so just so happens that this moment brought to you by weak men and systems that have become overly feminized.

• 1:23:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, it is a double whammy of it just has way more women in it. And that we have taught men to emasculate themselves for whatever 30 years. So you put the two together like this isn't a, it's not like women are to blame. This is a men and women are out of balance right now. It just so happens that in creating the out of balance, they're spilling over here. Now, I'm actually more nervous to say the following. Because I, I think this is way more likely for people to run with and become problematic. But I do think ultimately that

• 1:23:47Tom Bilyeu?

  when men are weak, then it creates the space for women to become out of balance. So it's like in my marriage, Lisa and I hold each other in dynamic tension. And if I didn't hold her in dynamic tension, she would, I mean, and I would really like to say these things in front of her. I am not bashful about this, nor do I expect her to, she might ask clarifying questions or whatever, but I don't expect her to disagree with this. That if left to her own devices, she would run the company very emotionally. And that would be to the detriment of the company. And the company is far less likely to survive her absence than it would be to survive my absence.

• 1:24:32Tom Bilyeu?

  So without me, the company is far more, if I said that backwards, the company is far more likely to collapse if she's running it than it is if I'm running it. Now she is very, very useful in keeping my lesser impulses in check. But When you mistake emotion for a guiding light to logical outcomes, you run into trouble. She does it all the time. She knows she does it. And so she'll turn to me and be like, look, I feel this way, but I get it's a feeling. And so make sure that you take us where we need to go. So that part of the dynamic tension, because my wife contributes as an equal peer to me, just in different ways.

• 1:25:13Tom Bilyeu?

  But that part of the dynamic tension requires me to be strong and not to buckle when I feel like maybe I'm being mean or whatever. It's like, no, we can't do that. It's got to be done as a policy. It's got to look like this. Otherwise, we're going to spin off into this thing. And I get that that's upsetting to you. And there have been many times where my business partner and I have had to have a conversation away from the team so that I could say, you're having this, the way that you're processing this is emotional. You cannot bring this in front of the team. You cannot do that. And so I know that people hearing me say those words are like, fuck, that's grotesque. How can this guy say things like that? It's like, motherfucker, how are you not saying things like that? That is your fucking job. And if my wife ever sees me being a robot, she's going to say, stop being a fucking robot.

• 1:25:58Tom Bilyeu?

  This company is staffed with humans and they have loves and passions. And if you don't integrate that, this company will also die a different death, but it will die a death. And it's true. And so I need and want her to say those things. And she needs and wants me to say the things that I am saying. So it's like, we've somehow become deranged as a culture. And we don't think men need to say in a very humane, loving way that recognizes women as their fucking peers. I don't know how many times I have to say that. But like, where you go, hey, my job is to make sure that we don't let this become an emotional rationalization. That's precisely what you're doing right now. I understand me saying that's going to make you mad and I don't care.

• 1:26:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Not that I don't care, but like, we're going to have to set that aside. We can deal with that, whatever that's doing to our relationship later in a side conversation. But right now, no, we're not going to do that that way. And I think that we have trained men to fear their.

• 1:27:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Aggression, and I don't mean with women. I mean to feel like, yeah, I know what's right in this moment. I'm gonna be a warrior for it. I'm gonna say, no, like that's, we're trying to get here. And the way that I'm saying that we're gonna get there is the way that's gonna lead us there. And I will always listen if you have a better idea, of course, but it's gotta be an idea based in logic, not based in emotion. So, I mean, you've given me every opportunity to eject out. And I understand that I haven't taken it, but it's like, if I'm actually gonna be useful to people, I've gotta say the real thing.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  And I'm glad you brought that around, because literally I was dealing with my first, this is my first teenage crash out with Lynn, and I didn't know how to handle it. I had to call my sister to talk me off a ledge. I'm like, wait, like, am I tripping? Because there's a lot of emotion coming here. And like, did I, I feel like I'm doing the right thing here. Like, and I had to just look around and just have somebody else. And she was like, no, you have to remember, like, she's a young teenage girl. She's going through a wave of emotions. Like, it's not the end of the world. It's okay. I know that she might have said things that was hard to hear. And there might be some truth in it. And you have to talk to it through her too. But that doesn't mean fold immediately under that pressure and then acquiesce to that. So there is something to that.

• 1:28:05Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm now your sister's super fan.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  No, but there is something to that. Like, yes, as men in society, we do have to draw that line. And then even on the, on the flip side of that, there are times with women when you are right to a cue, or you are right in this one aspect of the area, but you're not looking at the totality of the picture and things like that. So I completely understand how that works on an individual dynamic. I understand how that can bleed into the family dynamic. We have specific examples. But from a society level, I think is a part that I'm a bit more confused. Like, how do I, we can't say every man needs to say no to a woman today. Like, how do we?

• 1:28:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that would be asinine. That's what I'm saying. The reason I don't even like talking about that side is it will be read like that. And people will think, this bitch, like, I don't even need to listen to her. It's like, yeah, that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. When my wife speaks up, I'm like, hold on, I wanna hear that. Tell me what you think I'm missing. My wife is extremely insightful. She understands me very well and will often see things that I miss. I so, I'm so skeptical of my ability to be right all the time, that like, I just wanna, I want her to debate me. I want her to push back. I do not want her to fold. And so all of that, and by the way, she's had to say, like, listen, sometimes you're too hard. You're too tenacious. You're too aggressive. And so it's like, fair. And I appreciate that. And thank you.

• 1:29:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, and one of the biggest arguments we've ever had, where she was properly upset, was me becoming a robot. And she's like, you become so divorced from your emotions. Unfortunately, she, the only word she could say were, I want my husband back. And I just was like, I do not know what that fucking means. And so it took us a very long time for me to realize, okay, what you're saying is you need me to broadcast and receive love. Yes, cool, got it. Now, that was on the back of some yelling and screaming where it was like, I don't understand what's happening. But anyway, you get there in the end. So yes, I don't want men to just go, I'm just gonna say no, and whatever I think is right, I'm here to put boundaries.

• 1:30:03Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like in a high functioning dyad, you're here to figure out what the right path is forward. When the reasoning being done is emotional, then it's to go, okay, those are feelings. Got it. But feelings do not necessarily help us get to our goal. Cause and effect helps us get to our goal. And so my job is to go, I need to integrate those feelings into the experience because my job isn't to create a life that you hate. My job is to create a life that you are in love with. But we have to be able to state our goals and then use cause and effect to get there. And so that's where I want to see men get to is to have a spine. By the way, if you want to get laid, always be willing to walk away. That's the only way. And so once you, your strategy for impressing women is to go become extraordinary at something.

• 1:30:49Tom Bilyeu?

  To want to partner with them, to listen to them, to hear them, to understand them, to be emotionally available to them. But at the same time, have an agenda and say, we both agree, this is what we're trying to do. And it's my job to really map out the cause and effect of how we're going to get there. Anytime you see something I don't to integrate that. And it's your job to make sure that I don't become a motionless automata who lives only to serve a goal. And it's like, that dynamic for hundreds of thousands, millions of years, has just been evolution trying to make sure that we keep our kids alive long enough to have kids. And at some point, we got so good at both, being able to have sex without having kids.

• 1:31:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Prosperity has been so long-lived that we haven't had to remember, oh, we need dynamic tension between the two groups. And more economic forces have deranged it by forcing women into the workforce, yada, yada. Which I'm happy to talk about at any time. I love that women are in the workforce. Impact Theory has its incredible fair share of extraordinary women. But I would tell all of them, they need to run an audit on what their life is going to feel like in their 50s and 60s if they don't have kids. And if they prioritize their career, as my wife has done, by the way, for anybody confused. But we had those conversations. What do your 50s and 60s look like? How do you account for, you will have a strong desire to nurture, you will have a strong desire to play the grammar role of being able to pass on your wisdom.

• 1:32:14Tom Bilyeu?

  How are you going to fulfill that? Because otherwise you will feel adrift. There will be nothing that gives your life meaning and purpose. I'm gonna stop, otherwise I'll fracture.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  No, no, that was good. You nailed it. And the last thing.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things happening in Brooklyn. To me, this was like conspiracy theory, like conspiracy corner. I was like, oh, it's just a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That's what's happening. Like they're coming out. But apparently there's been a couple. Yeah, there's been a couple of individuals coming out and walking around. So I don't know if this is the beginning of an Ocean's Eleven reboot, or if there's just gas prices too high and we're taking underground sewers or anything like that. But what do you think is adrift happening in New York right now?

• 1:32:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know. So I have no idea what to make of this, other than this needs to be investigated. They need to look at this immediately and figure out what's going on. So my brain immediately jumps to the fact that they found that device in the reservoir, the bomb. So there was a bomb planted in a reservoir that they found randomly as they were like running maintenance on it. And so when I start seeing infrastructure, people being there, bombs being planted in infrastructure. Now I'm like, hold on, like you've got to figure out what's going on because this is the kind of thing that it's like, oh, they've been down there either building tunnels where they can put weapons or whatever for, you know, quick maneuvering through the city to get access to the weapons.

• 1:33:38Tom Bilyeu?

  They are planting bombs on infrastructure, whatever. You can't not look into this, but there's nothing right now other than, oh, super weird. People with tools were underground for three hours. That's very weird. It does not immediately mean that there's some giant conspiracy going on, but you can't not look at it.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Ninja Turtles, man. I'm telling. It's definitely Ninja Turtles.

• 1:33:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Wouldn't that be dope, dude?

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  That's what the world needs right now. We need Ninja Turtles.

• 1:34:03Tom Bilyeu?

  No.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  The safest.

• 1:34:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you really want to know what we need? God, how do you do this?

• 1:34:08Tom Bilyeu?

  There was, so the reason that cartoons popped off so hard in the eighties was because you could run commercials on normal TV for children's entertainment, which meant all you had to do was make a cartoon to go along with a toy. And now you could print money hand over fist because the cartoon itself, you couldn't make enough money. This is the crisis in the Japanese anime industry that will be saved by AI, by the way, but they're of course resisting it for now. So that whole thing was just, it created some of the greatest IP on planet earth. And then they re-regulated it. So it's like, but they're not making IP to beat it.

• 1:34:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I think I already brought up that, I can't remember if I said it on camera, but there was a, I think it was an athlete who was, I think he's famous, interviewing this young kid and a kid's like eight and he's like, oh, so what cartoons are you into? Kid's like, what do you mean? And he was like, what cartoons do you watch? I watch YouTube. Yeah, yeah, but what cartoons? What are you talking about? And he's like SpongeBob SquarePants, Tom and Jerry. And the kid's like, what? He, he didn't even have a concept of cartoon. Now, of course, he's watching cartoons, but he doesn't know they're called cartoons. To him, it's just YouTube and YouTube has become this amorphous, hyper segmented,

• 1:35:32Tom Bilyeu?

  like very weird digital circus thing that I don't think sticks to your ribs. I need to go see obsession because obsession at least speaks to what does Gen Z want in films? And from what I've seen, it has a more almost Blair Witch, modernized, obviously, but a more modernized Blair Witch YouTube vibe. And that shows me that their entire visual language is different than somebody of my age.

• 1:36:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think it's going to stick as profoundly to their ribs, especially not Gen Alpha, who's now just coming up on never-ending AI slap, etc. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. But I think you have to force a longer-form narrative engagement as parents, or your kids are going to suffer for it. So like we used to force kids to learn piano or trombone, in my case, we gotta like do things with kids to get them to intake story in long form, or it's really gonna be a problem.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  That's a good point. I do it like subconsciously, like I would force Lynn to watch the cartoons I used to watch. Me and her bonded over the Powerpuff Girls. Craig McCracken killed that cartoon. There are some that didn't stick, you know, some old shows that she was like, this is dumb, I don't want to watch it. But her liking that show that I liked when I was her age, that was kind of cool. So there are certain overlaps, and I do think that as much as humans evolve and things get bigger and technology and stuff, I think there are still those basic mechanisms inside kids' brains that the Saturday morning cartoon worked for a reason. And I still think if we put them in there and the kids did the same thing, it would have the same effect on them. They'll still bond with it in the same way.

• 1:37:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Also, their morality plays.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That's one thing, like you lose sight of that at your own peril. Like, part of the way that you indoctrinate kids is through entertainment. So yes, be very careful what you let them watch, but you are shaping their value system by the cartoons that they watch. Like, G.I. Joe literally taught me over and over and over about being a hero and about not leaving somebody behind. And then they would literally do PSAs in the middle of the cartoon. Like, to this day, if it's thunder and lightning, I know not to go in the water because of G.I. Joe. Like, they did this whole thing about how it hits the water and it can electrocute you, and I was like, oh, damn. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  There is. Cool. Big shout out again to Kelsey. Appreciate the sponsorship. So guys, again, use code IMPACT to get $10 off your first trade, and we got a masterclass coming up.

• 1:38:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, we do. So as you guys well know, we were talking about this at the top of the hour. AI is changing the landscape dramatically. I think the world is going to force all of us to constantly, not constantly, but you're not going to be able to sit in the pocket for 20, 30 years. You're probably going to be in four to seven year epics where you do one thing and then technology changes so much that the world changes so much that you're going to be doing something else. And so I do offer a free masterclass on how to start your own company using AI. And so I'm going to be doing the next one, June 11th at 1:00 PM Pacific time. So whether you want to learn how to deploy AI inside of a company or you want to start a company using AI, make sure that you join me.

• 1:38:47Tom Bilyeu?

  It's totally free, June 11th at 1:00 PM Pacific time. The info is in the description, so make sure you check that out. Sign up immediately. All right, love you guys bunches and we will see you on Wednesday. Take care, peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done.

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