WTF Is Going on in America? The U.S. Economy Is Shrinking, Altman’s Eyeball Scans, and RFK’s War on Soda | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Tom Bilyeu and Producer Drew jump straight into the breaking news of the US signing a critical minerals deal with Ukraine, dissecting the motivations behind this strategic move and its potential to reshape the global power dynamic amidst ongoing war with Russia. The episode then shifts focus to the volatile US economy, exploring the reality behind the recent economic contraction, the intricacies of trade deficits, and the initial ripple effects caused by new tariffs. Drawing from real-time data and personal insight, Tom and Drew provide context on how these changes may impact Main Street businesses, American allies, and the emerging trade chess game involving China and Canada. SHOWNOTES 00:00 Trump's Rhetoric on Russia Shift 04:30 US-Ukraine Security Guarantee Dispute 06:27 Ukraine's Leverage and Military Challenges 11:44 Pre-Tariff Import Surge Concerns 14:42 Government Bailout vs. Market Failure 17:42 Pre-MMA Reality Check 21:41 Balancing Immigration and Human Rights 25:01 Blockchain and AI's Impact on Humanity 29:43 Book Triggers Emotional Response 33:10 "Promoting Healthier SNAP Spending" 33:48 "Anxiety Over U. S. Future" CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Upway: Get $150 OFF any purchase over a thousand when you use code IMPACT at ⁠https://upway.co⁠ https://upway.co. iRestore: For a limited time only, our listeners are getting a HUGE discount on the iRestore Elite when you use code IMPACT at ⁠https://iRestore.com/impact⁠ https://irestore.com/impact. Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at ⁠https://monarchmoney.com⁠ https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! Mint Mobile: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at ⁠https://mintmobile.com/impact.⁠ https://mintmobile.com/impact DISCLAIMER: Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5 gigabyte plan required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:⁠ join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:⁠ see if you qualify here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:⁠ sign up here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,⁠ Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook⁠ https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on my⁠ Twitch stream⁠ https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT at⁠ www.twitch.tv/tombilyeu⁠ https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:⁠ apple.co/impacttheory⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. The US signs a critical minerals deal with Ukraine. The US economy is officially shrinking. Columbia student and activist Madawi is released on bond. Sam Altman continues to push for proof of humanity as AI threatens to fake the world at every turn. And RFK has a gotcha on the soda industry as they lobby for SNAP benefits. Drew, let's dive right in.

• 1:29Tom Bilyeu?

  The US is not playing around when it comes to pushing Russia to the table.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, Russia came back with their terms to end the war. It was basically Putin's wish list. And now the US just signs a minerals deal with Ukraine. So I think they're starting to apply a little bit more pressure to get to that peace deal.

• 1:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I'll be interested to see how much Trump's rhetoric changes. He started throwing little hints that he's getting frustrated with Putin. But I have to admit, like, I am pretty impressed not getting what he wants on the Russia's side for them to come. Because we went through this in our last episode. The list of things that Putin put on the table starts with a nonstarter from where I'm sitting, which is that the Ukraine would have to demilitarize, which is nonsensical. When you've got an invading army literally inside your country, and then they're saying, "We'll stop, but only if you demilitarize." To me, is the same as saying, "As soon as Trump is out of office, we're going to be right back here, but we'll be in a far better position,

• 2:29Tom Bilyeu?

  because you won't have any ability to defend yourself." And so, if you've got Trump looking at that, and I am admittedly mind-reading, I haven't heard him say exactly this, but I've heard him say enough things that this feels pretty comfortable, that, "Okay, cool. If you guys aren't going to come to the table with a serious offer, then we're going to move over here, and we're going to negotiate this deal that we've been talking about forever." And as somebody who is very paranoid about us needing to break away from China in terms of our reliance on them supplying basically everything, having a minerals deal with Ukraine, I'm very happy about that. Now, the problem remains that we still, all of the refinement, essentially, it's like 95% is done in China,

• 3:13Tom Bilyeu?

  so we're going to have to find some long-term play there. But he really does seem to be making moves to shore things up. Whether he'll be able to do it in time is a totally different question, because the US economy is an ice cream cone that is threatening to melt in the sun. I don't want to be that hardcore about it, but the reality is, we're on a timeline that there is going to be disruption. Clearly, we're already starting to see it. And if he isn't able to get some of these other trade deals across the board in the near term, I think people are going to pretty rapidly lose faith. So, we'll see. We'll see if he can get it done in time.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. The deal is interesting and includes a $50 million military ad package. This is us supplying weapons and resources for the military of Ukraine.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  We also are doing a joint reinvestment fund that is going to invest in the reconstruction and the building up of Ukraine. And this is only off of the profits. This is not a debt obligation or anything onto Ukraine. That was one of the sticky points that one of the earlier deals fell through on. But one interesting thing I want to kind of circle and highlight is that this doesn't have a formal security guarantee. So although we are in deals with them, this doesn't mean that we are now militarily, contractually obligated to defend them or anything like that. However, it does kind of seem if I'm getting my resources from you and I'm offering to rebuild, I do have kind of a shared interest, but just nothing is in black and white. I think that's kind of a gray area. Would you call that like a win for Ukraine?

• 4:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, honestly, yes, it's a win in terms of you've got the US that's been signaling very clearly that they're going to pull back. If they pull back, that puts Russia in a much better position. Your only ally remaining is Europe. I think there are a lot of credible voices that are saying if they have to rely, if Ukraine has to rely on Europe exclusively, probably not going to go well for them. Especially, you pointed this out in the last episode. It's like, it's going to take them a while to spin up their ability to really help with weapons and defense, even though they are increasing the amount that they're spending. How long is that going to take to manifest as actual on the battlefield results? That

• 5:25Tom Bilyeu?

  remains to be seen. So for Zelensky and Ukraine to be coaxing the US back into their, onto their side is certainly a win. But when you're talking about $50 million, that is absolutely tiny. There was no universe in which the US was going to agree to security guarantees during an active conflict, because that's the same as saying that we're going to join

• 5:54Tom Bilyeu?

  an ongoing war. Trump made it very clear months ago that that just wasn't on the table, not even something that he would contemplate. So I don't think that was ever going to happen. I think Zelensky is smart enough to know that, evidenced by him moving forward with this deal. He isn't going to go for that, or he understands that Trump's not going to go for that. But when you look at what he was pushing back on, not wanting this to be a debt obligation, he's basically saying, I don't want Ukraine to be a rump state for the US any more than I want it to be a rump state for Russia. So we're not going to let you take Profit from the mineral revenue streams that we already have.

• 6:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're not going to let this be turned into a debt obligation that we have to the US, which obviously would have been far better for the US, but would have been terrible for them. And so when Trump is talking about even the $50 million, my understanding is that that's coming out of the profits from anything in the future. So I don't, from what I've come across, it isn't clear whether that's saying it's coming from the profits it will generate, or it's coming from the profits that they'll generate. But I would assume it's coming from the profits that Ukraine will generate from the deal of these new things moving forward. So we'll see, there's a lot of detail still to come on this. But it's an encouraging sign that Trump isn't hesitant to be very aggressive in this pushback,

• 7:23Tom Bilyeu?

  like real tangible pushback against Russia.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's good that US and Ukraine are now working together, signing something. Hopefully that signals the end to this war.

• 7:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it's way too early to say that, but certainly it's putting Ukraine in a much better position because Ukraine has to have some leverage. They don't have the leverage from a military perspective. Nobody is eager to put boots on the ground. So it's not like they're suddenly going to have this reinforcement of troops. But they've got to be able to point to something. And US was signaling so hard that they were willing to walk away from all of this. And it's one of those where huh, I'm not a big fan of, I'm not a fan of populist moments. I'm not a fan of strong man rhetoric. But especially when I check my feelings against China, I realize you have to draw lines, you have to do some of this stuff.

• 8:17Tom Bilyeu?

  And so even though admittedly, it does feel a little bit icky to say, nah, we'll let you hang in the wind, Ukraine, even though you got, and you were a sovereign nation that was invaded by another nation. We've talked before about, did the US push this with moving of NATO, NATO, NATO? But nonetheless, Russia invaded a sovereign nation and Trump was clearly willing to walk away. I did not like the way that that made me feel.

• 8:45Tom Bilyeu?

  But like at some point, you do have to say, uh, this has got to be a deal that makes sense for us. And

• 8:53Tom Bilyeu?

  he's got to show that he's also willing to be as dismissive, maybe isn't the right word, but it feels directionally correct against Russia. Fine. You're not going to come to the table. Fuck you. Like we'll do something with these guys and then we're gonna, because we have a conjoined financial interest.

• 9:12Tom Bilyeu?

  We're going to make sure that these mineral rights are protected. And if I'm aware of what I think is a very, um, logical and realistic narrative that dear Putin, I am going to move away from China. Dear Putin, I'm going to use, you are Ukraine. You had your shot. You took a pass. So cool. Now I've got my deal with Ukraine. Now I care a lot about making sure that I continue to have the unfettered access to this deal that I'm going to need to separate myself from, uh, China. So if I'm Putin and I'm going, okay, Trump's unpredictable and he's got very, um, big incentives

• 9:54Tom Bilyeu?

  to actually make a deal like this with one of us. This either becomes a negotiating thing where it's like, okay, I'm Putin. I don't want you to do the deal with Ukraine. So I'm going to come in and say, hey, look, do the deal with me. I'm going to give you way better, um, a way better deal. I'm the far bigger country. I've got far more resources than Ukraine. And then if Trump is, uh, going to negotiate in the way that I would want him to, at that point, he says, cool. I'm happy to do the deal with you. I'm happy to whatever back out is, um, plausible, because it's my understanding that they've actually signed the deal, but whatever back out, I'm sure he has, I'll do, but not if you're going to be invading these guys. And so you're again, back at the negotiating table and there's some real leverage.

• 10:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is the whole thing we were talking about in the last episode. Do you judge Trump's 100 days? Do you lock in a score and say he's doing well or doing poorly? I think it's too early to tell. Uh, it is entirely possible that this is just a catastrophic failure. But it's also possible you start seeing more stuff like this where he's actually able to leverage his, uh, I'll use the word erratic, his erratic nature.

• 11:01Tom Bilyeu?

  With that creating opportunities like this. And if we can get them across the finish line, then we'll end up looking back on this time, I think, very differently than if it's everybody just scatters in the way that when I look at Canada, I'm like, they are literally running away from us, potentially, I don't want to overstate where we're at, but potentially into the arms of a deal with China, with Europe, rather than with the US, which is exactly what people should have in mind when they think about the world order being upended.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially when our allies walk away from the table. We'll monitor it closely.

• 11:37Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:20Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:05Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:51Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:57Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  The first quarter numbers for 2025 of the GDP came in and America's economy goes into the reverse. We dropped point three in the first in the first quarter. That's slower from the 2.4 rise we experienced in Q4 of 2024 and much lower than the point eight that economists projected. I'm going to read this paragraph because it was tricky and it got me tripped up in the prep. But the economy's decline in the beginning of the year was driven by a wider trade deficit. A result of America's front running purchases to beat Trump's tariffs and cutbacks in government spending, according to a release. Inpoint skyrocketed from negative 1.9% in the fourth quarter to 41.3% in the first three months of the year. Meanwhile, exporters registered a 1.8% rate.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I like this graph because it makes it a lot simpler for me. It seems that when Trump announced tariffs, a lot of businesses and companies went to front load their purchases to try to avoid it as much as possible. Thereby causing our GDP to kind of upside down. I didn't realize this, but our GDP is actually calculated by our exports minus our imports. So when our imports sharply rise, it will then drag the GDP down. Which is a bit ironic that I thought that would be like a growth thing, but GDP is a tricky calculation.

• 15:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Given the signaling that Trump was doing on the tariffs, people knew that they had to race. To get all of this stuff in. So people were importing as much as they could before the tariffs took effect. So all of these numbers are very temporary. It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the long term in terms of how all of this ends up settling out. We're obviously not going to continue to see these kind of insane increases in importing. In fact, that number is almost certainly going to plummet. This is the very thing that people are afraid of with us going into a trade war with China. Is that all these things that we've been bringing into the country, we're not going to be bringing in.

• 15:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That's going to have a massive knock on effect on all of these small mom and pop shop companies. That are like my entire business model is importing something cheaply from China. Spinning up an Etsy store or an Amazon store or whatever. And that's just going to stop and these are not going to be companies that are going to be able to weather that storm. And so what is the ultimate knock on effect of all of this remains to be seen. But this is a game of chicken. It is about to get very real. If we think that we've already experienced the pain and suffering from the trade war. We're really at the first edge. We're at the the edge of sentiment. Right now, what people are responding to is, I think this is going to be bad.

• 16:40Tom Bilyeu?

  What they're about to be responding to is, holy bejesus, this is actually bad. And these companies are going out of business because they, you know, unlike an apple that can be like, okay, listen. We've got forty six trillion dollars in reserves. We're going to be just fine. That's a made up number, but we're going to be fine. But the mom and pop shops are not going to be fine. And

• 17:05Tom Bilyeu?

  obviously, the final analysis of all of this is going to be, okay, this is a point of leverage. How much pain can we endure? How much pain can China endure? And what does that look like culturally? So we know we have a democratic process by which we can punish Trump back as voters. We can punish the entire Republican Party. But in China, that doesn't happen. And so they can really muscle through this in a way that the US is not going to be able to.

• 17:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And so how does that play out? Does it give China what it needs to go and build allies with other countries to find a way around the US? They're already pushing for higher domestic consumption inside of China. So basically, hey, do your duty. That's probably not worded like this, but basically do your duty. Buy from these Chinese companies. Also, we'll help our manufacturing base pay their employees like a minimum living wage. So they can get to the other side of this when there's really nothing for them to manufacture. But we don't want them to lose their employees because it's very hard to train them, retain them. And so we, the government, will step in, make sure that we get to the other side of this.

• 18:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Whereas in the US, uh, that's not how it's going to play out. A bunch of those companies are just going to go out of business. It is what it is. It will hit us the way that it hits us. And you hope, if you're Trump, you hope that people don't get so furious that they're like, yeah, you're toast. And that there's no way for him to recover from this, especially with the promises that he's made that, hey, we don't care so much about Wall Street, but we really care about Main Street. Yeah. But it starts to feel like Main Street is the one that takes the baseball bat to the face. If you've got all these small companies that are closing. So that's where the game of chicken ends up playing out. Trust me when I say that China is not going to walk away from this unscathed.

• 18:59Tom Bilyeu?

  But will they be able to essentially force their country to deal with it in a way that the US can't? But the thing that I really want to know is how does the world perceive them? Because right now, China from the outside seems the more stately. They're being pretty quiet. Xi Jinping isn't running around beating his chest. And you've got Trump calling Canada the 51st state, which makes them feel some kind of way, so much so that it looked like they were about to have a conservative victory and instead the liberals win. And so if you start, uh, this is one where I don't know in the long run, who's going to end up being right? You've got Besant going, we have 18 major trading partners, China being one of them. Set China aside.

• 19:42Tom Bilyeu?

  All of the other 17 are here. They're negotiating. They're coming with deals that we consider good. We're going to have no problem. We're going to get all 17 of these guys lined up. Or I look at Canada and Canada's like, what? Like, we are saying as loud and clearly as we can fuck you. Like, no, we're not going to play this game. And we're gonna build a trading world in which we're not reliant on the US. Mark Carney, in his acceptance speech, said, the days of us moving in lockstep with the US are over. That's a paraphrase, but it's like, we, we are looking for trading partners other than the US.

• 20:26Tom Bilyeu?

  That's who's now running Canada.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Uh, we fucked around and found out, didn't we?

• 20:33Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't know yet. That's the thing. I want to be very clear. Like, I don't know if, I don't know how it's gonna play out. I can articulate what I think Trump is doing, based largely on the things that he's saying out loud. So it's not like I'm doing a whole bunch of mind reading. But it's just a question of, in the final analysis, how does it work out? Because every punch you throw, people counterpunch. And so you can create rhetoric around, this is how this is gonna play out. But that, it's like, if you've ever seen fake martial arts, forgive me Aikido for saying this, but I trained in Aikido for like, a year. And in the Aikido class, I really felt like I was learning something. Like, I could throw people and do all this crazy stuff.

• 21:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And then I was like, to a friend, I was like, hey, let me show you this stuff I'm learning. And there was like, this wrist lock. And I grabbed his wrist, and instead of him flipping over and falling like all the students in the class, he was, just pulled his hand back. And I was like, what? And so then I was like, hold on, this doesn't work as well as I thought it did. This is all pre-MMA, before the world was just like, put two people in a cage and let's find out. Uh, and that's when I realized, oh, your partner in all of this, they're gonna act unpredictably, and so you've gotta be ready for all the different moves. And right now, because we're always being spun at all times, the US, China, all spin, Canada, all spin all the time, it's hard to know where this is gonna settle out.

• 22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  So, anyway, it really does at times feel like the highest stakes reality show ever.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And it's, it's only getting better. We're just getting started.

• 22:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Season one. Actually, technically, this is season two, but woo, season two is a lot spicier than season one.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Oh, man. In New York news, Columbia University student Madawi was released from a detention center this, this past week. He was locked up for his Palestine activism. This is another one of the college students that was detained over the last weeks from the Trump administration. He was a national permanent legal resident since 2014. He missed the departing flight that would have took him to the detention center in Louisiana by eight minutes. And that's how he claims he was able to get free. So this was one of those rap, put him up together, ship him out, but apparently he missed his flight. So he was able to get out.

• 22:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, it'll be fun to find out if that was intentional, given that we have a world where judges are helping escort people out the back door. It's interesting, man. It's interesting. I am a little conflicted on how I feel about, okay, listen. Let me be very clear with myself, if nobody else. I love due process. The Supreme Court has already ruled on that. And even though I think that there is a legitimate grievance that any administration would have to say the amount of people that we now have to process will overwhelm the system and you do have to face that reality.

• 23:42Tom Bilyeu?

  However, we trust the Supreme Court to rule on this, or at least I do. I'm a big believer in the three branches of government. And so they've said very clearly, hey, not worried about the system overwhelm at all. You are going to give these people due process. Cool. Is from where I'm sitting, that's loud and clear from the rulings that they have put forward. And so without defending the person that is allow, that helped escort what appears to be a pretty gnarly criminal out the back door. I don't know enough about the, the claim of missing the flight by eight minutes to know if just natural things happen and whatever, whatever. But we, the Supreme Court's been very clear. These people deserve due process.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And I do think to the point there, this is a complicated immigration issue because I don't necessarily think that former gang members, alleged gang members are in the same category as university protesters, people who are fighting for Palestinian human rights, isn't the same as, you know, supporting Hamas. So there is a level of gray between all of these immigration cases.

• 24:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's just do it at the level of thought experiment so we don't derail into, but that's not what happened. If he's pro Hamas, I for one, do not want that person to have a green card. Because I think culture matters. I think you have to defend your culture. If a citizen is doing it, yep, cool. It is what it is. Freedom of speech, do your thing. Uh, now that's, I'm saying that as somebody who has a green card holding wife. So I understand that this is a policy that could come back to bite me in the ass, should my wife clap back at the US in a way that, from a cultural perspective, we don't want to see. So you do need to protect your culture. But to your point, if this is somebody that is simply

• 25:35Tom Bilyeu?

  saying, uh, we need to stand up for human rights, I believe the way that the US and Israel, I mean, obviously the real beef is Israel, but a lot of people will put the two together. Um, this is grotesque injustice and somebody needs to stand up and speak about it. Those to me are very different things. One is a known terrorist organization and showing support for them for me, uh, is not the kind of person that I want to invite into the country. If on the other hand, this is somebody that is standing up for, um, human

• 26:16Tom Bilyeu?

  rights, that to me is perfectly in line with American values. Yay, cool. Uh, but that is going to be a debate that has to happen in public where we have to decide, like, what are we doing here? Is there a difference between a green card holder and a citizen? Yes or no? That'll be debated. I've put forward my ideas, but I would want them to be debated. This is not something where I want people to just be like, well, he said so. Um, and then, is there a difference between standing up for human rights and standing up for a terrorist organization? And look, there, I think that that is a worthy debate. When you look at, um, the-

• 26:56Tom Bilyeu?

  The old school ACLU defending Nazis' right to march through a neighborhood of concentration camp survivors, which I was totally for, versus going to bat for Hamas. To me, that's a question of citizen versus non-citizen. And the need to protect your cultural value set. But it's such a different moment. So I'm saying all of that on the back of mass immigration. I'm saying that on the back of watching Europe and what's happening over there. And so it's one where it feels like a debate that's worthy to be had. And P.S., by the way, I am very open to, as this debate happens, I look at it and go,

• 27:41Tom Bilyeu?

  yeah, you really do just have to let whatever debate, anybody, it's not my take now, but I, I want to see this debate happen with the brightest minds around. I, I think that that's going to be a really important inflection point for us moving forward.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that conflict has no signs of dying down. So I think this is just getting started.

• 28:02Tom Bilyeu?

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• 28:47Tom Bilyeu?

  already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact, and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 29:10Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  In world tech news, Tools for Humanity, a startup cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, just released a mobile verification device that uses retina scanners to verify you're a human. How the tech works is that this is, it scans your eyeball and gives you a unique identifier on the blockchain, so that way it can verify transactions. Their whole mission is that in the future, they think that it's going to be impossible to distinguish between a human and an AI agent, so this is the way to do it. What do you think about the eyeball scanning verification tool?

• 29:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Ah, okay. It is absolutely critical that you be able to prove humanity. Using the blockchain to do it makes all the sense in the world. Whether scanning your retina is the right play, I will let security experts who have thought through that more than me come and put the big stamp of like, this is the way or this is not the way. But Drew, AI is absolutely going to flood, for sure, the internet. The whole dead internet theory is that the vast majority of content will be created by AI for AI. That seems so self-evidently true. AI can already create things that will trick you at a glance.

• 30:30Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm ashamed to admit, and to be honest, I haven't even looked deeply enough to know that my reversal is correct, but I'm 99.999999% sure that it is, given just the absurdity of it. But I saw a quick video of people in Chicago, homeless people, putting tents on top of buses. And so there's an algorithm in my brain that was like, oh, in developing nations, you'll see a lot of people traveling on trains on the top. So my brain was like plausible, check. Building tents struck me as ridiculous, so like, as I thought more about it later, I was like, there's no way. Like, the amount that you'd have to wait it down, the odds that you get hit by a bridge, things like that, I was like, nah, this just, it can't be true.

• 31:14Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I went back and looked at it and I was like, man, you're looking at a close and you're like, no, I just, it's gotta be AI. The amount of time that I had to spend on that, I was like, uh, the amount, it's only going to get better, first of all. Yeah. And then there's going to be article after article after article that's going to be written by AI. That's going to say, no, it is true. And so when I go to research, is this real, this is not real. I'll be met with a wall of, yeah, this is real, this is really happening. And so it'll be visually indistinguishable. There'll be fake articles backing up that it's real and they'll probably get cleared up over time. But for a minute, people are going to be like, no, it's real.

• 31:54Tom Bilyeu?

  And then some percentage of people won't be able to update their mental model that, oh, that got proven false. And then also there is something, because that image is seared in my brain. There is something happening to my subconscious that says a tent on top of a bus is a plausible thing. And so we really, we, we, we have to be very thoughtful about what are the mechanisms by which we map things as real or not. And given that humans will rapidly, AI versions of humans will rapidly become indistinguishable from actual humans. You're, you're going to need something, the blockchain certainly seems like the right answer

• 32:36Tom Bilyeu?

  to be able to prove humanity without that, oh my God. It is going to be a tsunami of manipulation that will be impossible to escape.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  In health news, RFK shared a burn that he experienced with the soda.

• 32:53Tom Bilyeu?

  This is hilarious.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Secretary Rollins had the soda industry come and knock on her door very much, very loudly. And they said to her, well, the SNAP program is not supposed to be about nutrition. She pointed out to them that there is no nutrition in a soda. And she, they said, well, it's not supposed to be about nutrition. And she said, the name of the program is supplemental nutrition.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  It is about nutrition.

• 33:25Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there he's still getting pushback for the ban on sugary and soda products on Snap. But to his point, Snap's whole point is for nutritional insurance.

• 33:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, it's okay. So that's certainly why it exists. But that is not the region of the brain that it occupies in people's minds. Drew, we we are living in such a weird time. I actually so I think you know this about me, but I listen to books while I sleep. Not because I think that I'm absorbing it. I'm not. It's because I've learned that when I wake up, I'll be awake for hours unless I have something that immediately captures my mind again and isn't the worries of the day and all that. And so then I'll fall back asleep and say, two minutes. Hugely effective in my life. I'm not saying I recommend it to people because I am worried about constantly having headphones on, but highly effective to altering my sleep patterns.

• 34:17Tom Bilyeu?

  There was a book called The Red Famine that I couldn't read at night because it talks about the famine in the Ukraine in like the 20s. It was just so devastating. Had to stop that. So I'm reading a new book about China and I've had to stop reading it because it so like triggers this area in my brain about like this moment and what's happening. And

• 34:46Tom Bilyeu?

  once you realize that the way that somebody maps something in their mind, it equates to the physiological emotional reaction that they have to that subject. You get a lot closer to understanding the kind of reaction that you're getting to Snap. Because it's the the emotional trigger in the brain isn't, oh, thank God RFK is doing something to make my kid healthier. It's that's inhumane. Why? Why should wealthy people be able to drink soda? But a poor person who relies on Snap can't? That that's disgusting. That's so grotesque. And so the emotional reaction to this is knowable. It doesn't matter how much he bangs on the drum about they're going to be able to live

• 35:31Tom Bilyeu?

  longer and this is going to be better. The mapping that people have in a modern context is everyone should have everything. And this goes back to the idea, uh, some people just need to be, we all need to be chased by a line. Let me not make it about some people. We all need adversity. We all need difficulty. It has a way of really sobering people up really fast. Because you suddenly realize, for instance, the government doesn't make money. The government takes money from the people who make money. You can't redistribute wealth that wasn't first generated. Well, what is wealth? Wealth is the ability to have inputs into a system that costs less than the value of the outputs that come out of the system.

• 36:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That is so hard, Drew, but when you've been living, uh, in a world where certainly in a US context, for the last 80 years, like on our soil, there's just been no problems. It's been growth. It's been, uh, we were talking about this previously. Uh, you've got people on the streets begging for money with iPhones. Uh, not a made up story, a real story. And so we're just living in a time of plenty. And it begins to distort people's psychology. And that was the very thing in the book about China that was keeping me awake was, uh-oh, we're not going to be able to reverse this. And the book was talking about how China ended up with the 100 years of humiliation.

• 36:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And there was a guy in China, I forget his name, forgive me, who was like beating the drum at like the height of China's success. And it was like, yo, we've gotta like knuckle down. We've gotta like work hard. We've gotta be disciplined. Nobody listened. And so they ended up losing a war to Japan, like just a whole raft of bad things happened. And then it's a hundred years of bad things. It's not like you go into a six or seven year recession. It's not even like you go into a 10 or 11 year depression, go into a hundred years of humiliation. And so I was just like, uh-oh, I feel a lot of those very similar things happening here in the US,

• 37:41Tom Bilyeu?

  where things have been so good for so long that even something like...

• 37:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't allow soda to be the thing that people are spending their snap dollars on. Make it so that those snap dollars are being spent on things that are better for their health, better for their longevity, uh, will be better for their cognition. I mean, just in every way, shape and form, especially for kids, it's better for them. People still don't want it because their brain is not mapped to survival, the need to fight, that this is going to be hard, that we have to be disciplined. It's mapped to, um, these things just happen, that prosperity is a fundamental law of nature. Like, what do you mean that we have to earn this or we have to work for it? And so, um, it literally, when I woke up in the middle of the night,

• 38:31Tom Bilyeu?

  my blood pressure spiked, I'm not kidding. Uh, my heart started racing and I was like, whoa, I have to stop listening to this book because I'm really freaked out that the US has such a weird mental map of what is happening right now, that the decline is unavoidable. It's the unavoidable of it, Drew, that scares the life out of me. And I don't have kids, you have kids. So it's like, yo, I don't know, man. Uh, I really, really, so the thing that allowed me to fall back asleep is one, changing the book. And then two, sitting there going, okay, okay. I've got a platform.

• 39:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me just do my very weird, perhaps blend of mindset and world affairs. I don't know if it's going to work, Drew, but it's what allowed me to fall back asleep.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I'm gonna need you to start whispering that to my ear because I'm gonna be up for a little bit after that. That's all I got.

• 39:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. If you haven't already, make sure you give us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps more than you know. All right, guys, until next time, be legendary, take care, peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When you- Routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient

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• 40:45Speaker 03

  In a world where everyone drives distracted, danger lurks ahead. Drivers swerve, collisions litter the shoulders, chances are taken and lives lost. They're driven by a compulsion, a compulsion to respond. Sounds like a movie. Unfortunately, it's our reality. Eyes on the road, not on your phone. A message from the Virginia DMV.