China Just Paused Tariffs for 90 Days — Strategic Move or Dangerous Stalling Tactic? | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In this episode, I sit down with my co-host Drew to rip into one of the most turbulent weeks in global politics and economics we’ve seen in a long time. We break down not just the moves, but the motives and the possible massive consequences behind Trump’s high-octane foreign policy—from slashing tariffs with China and locking in a colossal Saudi investment deal, to taking the unprecedented step of targeting Big Pharma with an executive order to lower drug prices. We get into whether all this fast action is actually helping America or just stirring up more chaos. Are we leveraging our moment, or just getting played by the likes of Xi and Putin? Does tough talk and bold negotiating end with real results for America, or are we setting ourselves up for long-term headaches, especially with midterms on the horizon? Then we peel back the layers on some of the rawest culture war issues, from immigration crackdowns in the UK, the controversy about a Muslim-majority city in Texas, to the viral video of world leaders acting out-of-pocket on a train to Kiev. SHOWNOTES 00:00 – China’s 90-Day Tariff Pause: Progress or a Lifeline for Xi? 01:42 – Negotiation Tactics: Deal-Making or Getting Played? 03:48 – The Real Purpose of the 90-Day Pause 05:16 – China Can Print Money: Central Banks and Sinister Power 07:13 – Trump’s Aggressive Approach: Productive Chaos? 09:14 – What’s Actually Getting Done—And What’s Just PR? 10:57 – Accepting a Gold-Plated Jet: Smart Move or Trojan Horse? 13:29 – Why “Greedy Capitalist” Isn’t Always an Insult 15:51 – When Deals Cross the Line 18:38 – Global Trade Rebalancing: Is Win-Win Possible with China? 21:17 – Breaking Down the $600 Billion Saudi Deal 24:23 – Why Innovation Stalled—and What Competition With China Could Spark 25:54 – Instilling Inspiration vs. Self-Loathing in American Youth 29:31 – Price Fixing Big Pharma: Popular, but Ultimately Dangerous? 32:15 – Central Banks: The Fungus Beneath the Free Market 36:07 – How Drug Pricing Actually Gets Decided (and Where It Breaks Down) 39:04 – Why Price Fixing Backfires 42:36 – Cigarettes, Prisons, and the True Nature of Supply & Demand 47:14 – Drug Discovery, Innovation, and Unintended Consequences 54:58 – Culture Wars: Immigration Policy in the UK and the US 58:34 – Building the Modern Middle East—Without Western Intervention 60:48 – The Harsh Realities of Assimilation and Cultural Conflict 65:35 – What Happens When Zoning and Religion Collide? 71:19 – Demographics as Destiny: What History Teaches About Outnumbering 74:00 – Respecting Law, Freedom, and What It Means to Be American CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to ⁠https://ButcherBox.com/impact⁠ https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box! Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impact Netsuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at ⁠https://NetSuite.com/THEORY⁠ https://netsuite.com/THEORY iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And a proposed Muslim city in Texas comes under scrutiny as rumors fly. Drew, Trump moves fast, man. Hundred days or not, like this guy is nonstop getting things done. But I hate to say, some of the things that he's been getting done lately, I'm not a big fan of.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Hey, well, he's taking a victory lap around this China deal that he just booked. So it was a 90-day reduction in all the tariffs. The 145 rate that we levied on them has came down to 30. The 125% reciprocal tariff they put on us has come down to 10 for 90 days. And this happened over the weekend with Switzerland. It seems like it's going in the right direction. But again, my question is, was the chaos worth it? So where do you think we stand with it?

• 2:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, I think there's a far bigger question, which is, are we being played by China? Are we actually going to be able to paper the deal? Honestly, I walk away from this and I go, okay, this is a step in the right direction. In that, we've got them to the table. They were saying that they were not negotiating and made it sound like they had absolutely no interest. Obviously, we're now talking. Trump is saying he's going to be speaking to Xi within the week. We'll see if it, if it transpires. He also said in the meeting that they revealed that they were well aware that Biden wasn't going to do any pushback. And so as soon as Biden came into office, they reneged on a bunch of the commitments that they had made. So we'll see. Trump feels very optimistic that they're going to get something done. I

• 2:53Tom Bilyeu?

  certainly take it as an optimistic sign that the conversation has begun, that we've got the 90 day pause. The big, or the secondary question to all of this is, does this move by China more time with their own people? Because it's entirely possible that things were rationing up. The pain was getting to the point where they were really going to be willing to play ball. Admittedly, Trump being conciliatory, being easy to negotiate with, if you have a negotiating partner who's negotiating in good faith, this is a great thing. And it shows, hey, I'm here to work. I'm not trying to cause maximum damage. Obviously, don't play. If you mess around, then I'm willing to strike.

• 3:33Tom Bilyeu?

  But it is really possible that the Chinese economy is very weakened right now, that she was in a very weak position, given the Evergrande housing fiasco, which I liken to 2008. It's not like I hear a lot of economists running around saying that, but I don't think I'm too far out of pocket to say that. So you've got them and their sort of 2008 moment. You've got Trump now putting effectively a trade embargo. You've got factories and warehouses shutting down like crazy. This is the moment of maximum leverage. And the question is, did he just throw them a lifeline that's going to make it so that they can drag things out long enough that this becomes problematic for him in the midterms? Because remember, we've only got like a year and change before people start really

• 4:17Tom Bilyeu?

  beginning to campaign. And if he's not got something cooking for a year. So look, I'm hoping 90 days doesn't set us back that far, but you did buy them more time. And so I'll be interested to see how that plays out. I feel Parallels between Xi and him stringing us along and Putin stringing the ceasefire talks there along. So it's hard to know what exactly is real. You want to be magnanimous. You want to be the bigger man. You want to show a willingness to get the deal done. But if people are playing you, then that's going to be the result.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Do you think that this is something that will create an urgency for this deal to get done? Because to me, 90-day pause, it can be interpreted in two ways. One, they're hitting the pause button to go talk to their delegates and come back with, all right, these are our terms, yes or no? But it also could be, all right, you gave me 90-day reprieve on this chicken. Let me go sign somewhere to countries and see what I can do. Because it was released that China also met with the sea-like nations, which is all the Caribbean and Latin America nations. So they're still on their China for the world tour. They're still organizing, you know, the deals and stuff on their side, too. Can this 90-day pause be, I don't want to say monetized in that way, but is there holes in this agreement that could lead to a China not using US at all? Like, worst-case scenario?

• 5:38Tom Bilyeu?

  You're not going to see a thing where China doesn't use the US at all. If Besen can be believed, China and the US both don't want to decouple. Now, that's the right thing to say. Is it really true?

• 5:51Speaker 01

  To your point, Scott, Besen has this world of a big, beautiful rebalancing. And there is a possibility that China and the US can both win from this. So here's a video of him talking about that.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  As Ray Dalio might say, we could do a big, beautiful rebalance. And President Trump wants to rebalance the American economy back to a manufacturing economy with high-precision manufacturing. I think everyone agrees, including Chinese leadership, that they need to rebalance towards more of a consumption and consumer economy. And the dream scenario would be if somehow we could do that together.

• 6:32Tom Bilyeu?

  This is pure gut instinct, based on personality type, based on each country's perception of themselves, based on just Trump's personality, Xi's personality, is you probably have the following setup going. Trump really wants to get this deal done, is a dealmaker, is perfectly willing to make concessions, perfectly willing to use a stick. Xi thinks in extraordinarily long time periods, knows that he still has a ton of dry powder from an ability to stimulate the economy and print, print, print. I think he's got a lot of leeway to print his way out of this, or at least elongate it. The more I learn about the way the banking systems work, the more I'm convinced that they're absolutely sinister.

• 7:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Central banks are evil, but that they also, boy, one of the things that they're really good at is buying you time. And so I have a just gut instinct that Xi's gonna buy himself time. He's gonna try to trip Trump up in the midterms. He knows that Trump is a very singular character and that just about anybody else coming into office is gonna be better for him than Trump. And if he can cause Trump some problems at the midterms, he will. And if he sees that the tide is turning and that Trump is very popular, then, oh, we were negotiating all along. That's pure gut instinct. I don't have anything to go on other than just the mental map that I have of the way that Xi moves through the world and what he believes he's gonna be able to do.

• 7:58Tom Bilyeu?

  It does not behoove him to allow America to get strong. It does not behoove us to let China get strong. And so we're in a very weird dance with the Houthis. I take them at their word that they're not gonna keep attacking, cuz he knows he's got a huge sledgehammer and he can bring it down if he has to. And I like that, not dragging it on and not needing like endless like talks and talks and talks. All the while, you're just like nuking them into oblivion. So I like that he does that, but it does create an attack vector that people can, and in the case of Xi, I think will use against him. But we'll see. Again, I'm well aware when I'm not basing something on facts, that I'm basing it on feeling. But like any instinct, it is somewhat honed. And so that's my.

• 8:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Sense of how this is going to play out.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I think there's kind of like a learning moment in this scenario where Xi is kind of calling Biden out and saying that they don't think that he was going to make a move. So we didn't really have to come through. Where now with Trump, at the very minimum, he's engaging them in a way that they haven't been engaged in a while. So do you think that the chaos was kind of the cure? Sometimes you have to flip that table in order to rearrange it to the whole art of the deal?

• 9:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that really is Trump's strategy. Whether it's the only way to play at this level, I don't know. Seeing how he is trying to actually move things forward is very interesting. And so with the relationship between Xi and Biden, I could very much see that one Xi would never talk about Biden, the way that his version of secretaries are talking about it. You're getting Trump's retelling of what they said, which I doubt is exactly what they were saying. So this is Trump using this as an opportunity to dunk on Biden. But in flipping the table over, in trying to really be aggressive and really get things done,

• 9:51Tom Bilyeu?

  unlike what it certainly seemed like Biden was doing, you get a lot of movement. You get what feels like a lot of momentum. And so I really think it's a mistake to call this before it ends. We have got to see how this actually plays out. We do not have a deal with China. We have a temporary pause. We do not have a ceasefire with Russia, Ukraine. We do not have a ceasefire in Israel, Gaza. We have not brokered deals with, we have now two countries that have really started signing some paper. And that's the UK. Okay, that felt good. You've got what is going on now with Saudi Arabia. That feels good. I don't

• 10:32Tom Bilyeu?

  know if they're calling that in the same bucket of the trade relations, but that's certainly how I'm reading it. So it looks like it could be up to $600 billion of investment, 142 for military expenditures. So anyway, I mean, there's a lot of good signs, but I'm so conflicted about how Trump is that I'm really.

• 11:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Trying to build a mental model of him where I'm being accurate as to why he both gets a lot of things done and legitimately seems like even if he's only doing it because his product is America and he's just a greedy capitalist, which is entirely possible that that's the right frame. So if he's just a greedy capitalist, America is his product or his company, however you want to think about it. And he's going to make that perform well on the world stage, period, end of story. And that's going to end up being good for me. And so he's doing all this stuff to make sure that America, the land of the free, my home, the thing that I want to see thrive, he's making thrive. But at the same time,

• 11:41Tom Bilyeu?

  he's taking what is rightly classified as a bribe. It's a $400 million airplane. That's crazy. Even if it's not meant to be a bribe of Donald Trump, it is, I mean, it's an outrageous gift. It's so crazy. Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian

• 12:20Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:03Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:46Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:19Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me, let's start from like, I'm, I'm taking from day one, level one. Was the Eiffel Tower a bribe?

• 14:30Tom Bilyeu?

  So the Eiffel Tower, I think you mean the Statue of Liberty.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Statue of Liberty, I'm sorry.

• 14:33Tom Bilyeu?

  The, the Statue of Liberty, the funny thing is, when I was thinking through this, I was like, okay, but what about the Statue of Liberty? Okay, the Statue of Liberty is a thing that sits in the harbor, and it's a, it is a signal of hope. It is a beacon of what America meant to the world in that moment. This is a literally gold-plated jet because Trump is fed up of waiting in line to get the new Air Force One. And honestly, I'd probably feel a little bit, I would feel very different if the following things happened. If Trump said, "I'm gonna seek congressional approval, and this will be Air Force One, and we're gonna go..."

• 15:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Cancel our contract with Boeing. Great. Then I actually wouldn't have any beef with it whatsoever. This isn't about Trump. This is about America. Uh, we'd have to like strip that thing down though, man. You've got to assume this is like Trojan horse territory all day, every day. I mean, these guys have been isolated from other countries in the Middle East that we have historically looked at as like, oh God, like these guys are a problem. They are like Qatar is a real problem. And so you're gonna let Qatar give you the flying metal box that you protect the most important person in your country in? Like dude, I've mentioned this before, but look up Stuxnet and how not easy,

• 15:55Tom Bilyeu?

  but it's easy enough for the right people to bury a virus deep into like the bios of an operating system, something that is very, very, very difficult to detect. And so it's entirely possible that they embed on one chip on like, uh, something that turns on the mini fridge and like in that chip is a virus that can work its way into the system on a delay of like a year. And so you don't detect it at first. I mean, Jesus, man. So it just, everything about this screams, this is a terrible fucking idea. I can't imagine what he's thinking other than like, this is where I'm like, the mental model of him as greedy capitalist is like, oh, that's actually kind of interesting.

• 16:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Because on the one hand, the reason capitalism works is you can always trust people to be selfish. And so as long as your selfish desires are aligned, everything works out. And so people talk about selfishness like it's horrible. They talk about capitalists like they're horrible. In being a greedy capitalist, they have given you the modern world. They've given you life-saving drugs. They've extended life expectancy. They've given you air conditioning, pulled you out of poverty, like just on and on and on. Food, agriculture, like all of these things, we ride on the back of these technological advances. And nobody whose grandma was saved by antibiotics or nobody whose grandmother lived an extra five years because there was a hospital that took care of her when she had pneumonia.

• 17:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Like nobody's complaining about capitalism and innovation, all the things that gave birth to all that kind of stuff or riding in your car or roads or, I mean, just literally. On and on and on. So all of that is born out of you incentivize people to do something and they'll do it. And the easiest way to make a whole lot of money, I know because this is exactly what I did, is to create something of value for people that they really want more than they want their money. And so now all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I'm gonna do this hard thing. You get what you want and I'm able to generate wealth for myself. Cool. It's amazing. We're all enjoying the fruits of that labor. So him being a greedy capitalist, I don't mean that as a way to dismiss him. I mean that as I'm trying to capture how this guy can both be the person

• 18:08Tom Bilyeu?

  who is like out there tipping over the table, fighting for America, making sure that we're not getting abused anymore. And we're definitely gonna talk about the drug, the Big Pharma attack where he signed the EO to lower drug prices. And you've got that guy, clearly, like the Big Pharma gave him a hundred million dollars. He's like, fuck you, I don't care. Like, this is what I promised the American people I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do it. So that makes sense, not when I think, oh, he's somebody with a big heart. Nope. Because he does too many wacky shit. But when I think, oh, oh, capitalist, he's like just trying to win, he's trying to get a little bit of alpha on everything, he's wheeling and dealing and trading.

• 18:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that has blinded him to the fact that this jet is a terrible idea. Terrible. I hate everything about it. This is full retard. He has gone full retard with the jet and you never drew, you never go full retard. So, uh, that's bad, but like that mental map is like, oh, okay, I get it.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Okay, if he, if he accepted the jet and put it into the National Aviation Museum in New Jersey, everybody's fine with it.

• 19:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Get congressional approval. I do not understand why you would. The, the constitution says, hey, people can give you gifts, it's fine, but you must see congressional approval. Great.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 19:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Go to Congress, say, hey, guys.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  He just has to talk to Congress, no matter what he does with it. So it's not the use of the thing.

• 19:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally. And as far as I can tell, he's Not saying, oh, I want to keep this. He's saying we would donate it. Once we get the actual Air Force One, then we donate this to the Presidential Library. And it'd be, it's owned and controlled by the government, would have nothing to do with Trump at that point. He would have to, like, if he wanted to use it for whatever reason, which they probably wouldn't let him, but if they did, he would have to seek permission, just like anybody else. And so, um, making it property of the US government certainly would make me feel a lot better. But I'm saying, dude, this is Trojan horse territory. This is Qatar. We do not have the kind of warm fuzzies with Qatar that we have with like, the UK. And to be honest, the UK spies on us. We spy on the UK. France spies on us. We spy on France. Germany spies. We spy on Germany.

• 20:27Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like, dude, there's- Don't take no gifts from nothing. Bro, not like that. Not like that. Like, let me tell you, I once got a gift of, um, headphones. Yeah. Like iPad Pro, not iPad, but iPhone Pro. Yeah, iPod. What, yeah, iPod, whatever the hell the headphones are called. And the guy was like, oh, man, enjoy. Like, I hope you, um, you know, you love them and, uh, just wanted to do something nice for your birthday, Christmas, whatever it was. I was like, oh, thank you, man. And then my phone, or the headphones kept beeping. And it's like, you're being followed by a device connected to another account.

• 21:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I went to him and I'm like, hey, like, super weird, but these are beeping as if they're still on your account. And he's like, no, I never opened them. And I was just like, boy, this is weird. So, yeah, I was like, it would get, because that was the thing. It was like, it's reporting your address to like, whatever, where you are to the other thing. So finally, I was just like, I can't use these anymore. So, anyway, it is, um, this one feels like somebody who is blind to the fact, somebody's giving you something for $400 million, and you've so gotten used to, like, eking the benefit out of every situation that-

• 21:50Tom Bilyeu?

  You somehow can't see that this is god awful.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. We talked briefly about President Trump's trip to Saudi Arabia, but we got the numbers of the $600 billion investment that he got from them. It starts with a $142 billion defense deal. This includes advanced American military equipment and training for Saudi forces. $20 billion in AI and energy centers. Saudi investment through Data Vault to build data centers for AI and energy across the US. $80 billion in tech investments, targeting major US tech firms like Google, Oracle, Uber, AMD. $2 billion in infrastructure projects. Saudi-backed infrastructure work executed by US firms like AECOM and Parsons. $14.2 billion in energy exports from GE Renova. Includes gas turbines.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  $4.8 billion Boeing aircraft deal involves a purchase of Boeing 737 jets. $5.8 billion healthcare investment through SheMake. The fourth IV solutions includes a new facility in Michigan. And $14 billion in three investment funds focused on energy, defense, and sports sectors within the US.

• 22:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a great list, man. It's always important to tease out promises versus things that are actually getting done. But I mean, this is great. This is great. I will be very interested to see if the way that I'm being spun right now by the Trump administration is that the world loves Trump on trade. They want to do deals with him. Again, the whole idea, we've got 18 major trading partners. Set China aside. You've got 17 remaining. Those 17 are all coming to the table. They want to do something. Besen has categorized them as coming with like really good opening salvos and that will negotiate them from there.

• 23:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, I mean, if we can actually get to the point where drug costs are lower, we're able to actually compete in markets. I mean, China is the holy grail, but even if we compete better in Europe, if we can compete better in China. I mean, it's just the win to competing.

• 24:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Openly in the Chinese market, dude, like one, the innovation that will come as each of us tries to outdo the other. Peter Thiel talks about how we hit this point where we just stopped making innovation in the world of atoms. So there's only 66 years between the Wright brothers proving that flight was even possible to landing on the moon. 66 years. That's crazy. And now, if you go back 66 years from where we are now, uh, there's like no. Flat screen TVs. It's like that. I mean, what year are we in? The sixties? Yeah. So, um, all of a sudden, you're like, wait a second, the TVs got flatter.

• 24:45Tom Bilyeu?

  The cars that we drive now, to some extent, people look back at classic cars and go, those are. They got more plastic. Yeah. So it's like, well, wait a second. Now, in the world of technology, we've done a phenomenal job. And his thesis goes that we regulated the world of atoms so draconianly that we just ended up getting stuck, but technology moved so fast, they couldn't keep up. And so technology always ran away from regulators who couldn't understand it fast enough to do anything about it. But that left them focusing on the world of atoms. And so if we can get into a true market competition with China, oh my God. In the world of atoms?

• 25:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. Then it's like, man, like some of the stuff they're doing in robotics, some of the stuff they're doing with cars is unbelievable. And some of the stuff they're doing with like building materials is crazy. So like, I saw, I don't remember which of their cities it was, but one of their cities where they could control, I mean, there's like 30 buildings running skyscrapers, running like the simultaneous like light show on like the buildings were themselves like big LED walls. Giant skyscrapers, thirty of them, playing something in unison. I was like, whoa. And then cut to New York, and with the exception of, uh, was it the Freedom Tower? Yeah. Like, with the exception of that, that shit looks old as hell.

• 26:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's just, I, I want to compete. Yeah. I want to compete, and I, partly because I want to wake up American kids, man. Like, young people, young Americans, hear me when I say, you've got an opportunity to do something extraordinary, but you have to have a crystal clear and thrilling vision of the future. And right now, they do not have a thrilling vision of the future. Right now, there is self-loathing, self-hatred. We're in a downward spiral where we feel guilty for conquering the United States, which we fucking did, and people need to stop feeling guilty. It doesn't make any sense. It, it is so nonsensical. We've got to celebrate excellence, winning. We've got to push forward.

• 26:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's colonize Mars. Let's bring honors programs back, man. It's crazy to me that people are still canceling honors programs. That is nuts. And as somebody who couldn't get into the honors program, at least not all of them, Drew. I'm telling you, hey, fine, leave me out. Like, give me something to strive for. Mm-hmm. I think this is crazy. I want to see people go ham. And opening up the Chinese market and actually having to compete would do that.

• 27:25Tom Bilyeu?

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• 28:06Tom Bilyeu?

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• 28:32Speaker 03

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• 29:03Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 29:06Speaker 01

  That's interesting that if we needed some type of trade war, hot war, in order to motivate us to innovate again. Cause I think the last time we had like industrial revolution, it was on the back of a war or as we were ramping up for war that like started our.

• 29:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so the big mythology that America tells itself, and I love this mythology very much, is that World War II, when the Japanese dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, I believe their line was, "We awoke a sleeping giant or a sleeping dragon." I can't remember the word they used. And I think we're going to regret it. And so, and of course they did, and we win and uh. When I was a kid, that was the ethos of being an American. People fucked with us. We came together. They'd never seen anything like it. And we turned on this magical thing called the manufacturing machinery. And we pointed it at war and we just tore through everybody. Now it's mythology.

• 30:04Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not actually real, but it was based on something real. And boy, did that give me a sense of like, I'm an American. I can do anything I set my mind to. I'm the one you don't fuck with. And that is the exact attitude that we need kids to have for sure. A hundred percent. Now, I don't want it to come at the cost of war, but opening up markets and being able to compete on the battlefield of commerce. Yes, please.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  But just that motivation, sometimes we need that external force in order to awaken what we have.

• 30:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It works, much to my dismay.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  We're praying on that, or, you know, a comet, an alien attack, that would get the world together.

• 30:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, for a second.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  You gave me mad watchmen, so now that's my, uh, that's my theory.

• 30:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, well, whoa, god, what a phenomenal piece of fiction, Drew. I don't want to derail us on that, uh, but here's one thing I will derail us on. Read, read, The Creature from Jekyll Island. Dude, the, the level of conspiracy is terrifying.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Trump signed a huge EO, taking on Big Pharma, uh, for RFK went up there, started calling out other senators about falling under Big Pharma and accepting those donations. It seemed like it's a win. What the EO states is that the US will pay the same amount as a favored nation rate. That is the cheapest rate that it's being sold in any country across the world. Theoretically, this should be a huge win, lowering costs. I hear estimates from 50% to 70% in certain cases, like, this should be a win across the board. What's your take on it?

• 31:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, it's going to be fought legally. Uh, Big Pharma is the biggest lobbyist by far. The next biggest one, they outspend them three or four times. Uh, this will be fought. Here's the really bad news.

• 31:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I want to see drug prices come down, for sure, for sure, for sure. But this one is really, the way that this is being done is really making me realize that I have to update my mental model of what kind of system I live in. Because we, this is price fixing. Price fixing is bad.

• 32:19Tom Bilyeu?

  It is bad, not for even moral reasons. It's just bad because of the law of unintended consequences. And so you think you're doing a good thing, and people are gonna love this, and this is gonna be very popular. And if I were advising Trump, I'd be like, yeah, this is very smart. But this is only very smart politically. And the meaning, people are gonna love it, it's gonna be very popular, and whatever negative consequences come of it, nobody's ever gonna go, oh, this is because you did price fixing. No one's ever gonna say that.

• 32:51Tom Bilyeu?

  This system is so broken that, and when I say this system, I mean the whole fucking thing, the whole American economy. We, we have moved so far from a free market that the more I look at it, the more I'm like, you can look these videos up. There is a fungus for any Last of Us fans. But there's a real life fungus that can find dead insects. I don't know if they have to implant themselves when they're living, but by the time they're done, they're literally a shell. Like they don't have guts. They're, but they can move the shell. A fungus can move the dead bug like an exoskeleton,

• 33:34Tom Bilyeu?

  like it's a Voltron or Gundam. It's crazy. Pickle Rick in that one episode. Exactly. And this feels like our free market system is that. There is a fungus running it. That fungus is known as the central bank. And it creates this illusion that we have a free market, but we really don't. And so now people's temptation is, and I think there are going to be people on the right that are going to embrace the life out of this because they realize like, okay, wait, it isn't a free market. And so I would feel ridiculous saying, don't smash Big Pharma in the face, or don't smash the PBMs.

• 34:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And you should push me because I, to like get into the nitty gritty of how this in particular works. But you'll sound unhinged if you push back on all of that stuff because it's corrupt. So to stand on your principles and say, okay, well, I don't want them to do this because this is price fixing, but, but wait, that means I'm essentially defending a corrupt system. So you're in this no win situation where it would be unprincipled of me to not say, this is price fixing. This is going to have unintended consequences and they are not going to be good. And at the same time, you're up against a corrupt system. It never should have been like this.

• 34:57Tom Bilyeu?

  What Mark Cuban, shout out to Mark Cuban, what Mark Cuban has been doing is attacking the same problem from the free market perspective. And even he's like, yeah, it's probably good that he's doing this. So, ah, what I really want, the principle is, stop over regulating everything. You've created a dead carcass that you are making mimic a free market. It's creating distortions and second and third order consequences that fuck people left, right and center. Dude, I'm telling you, if you want to be filled with rage, read the creature from Jekyll Island. We are going to do a fucking book report on this. I am going to do a 30 minute video. Let's go. Just literally breaking this thing down. It is so terrifying.

• 35:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And so just step by step, this is how it works. This is how they steal money from you. And, uh, they do steal money from you. Oh my God. It's, it's one of those books where it's like between pages, I just want to scream until my vocal cords tear. Because it's all there. It's just there. It's just, we're in it. We're in this horrific manipulation. Horrific. There's no way to get ahead. The people that are punished the most, the people that are punished the most, Drew, are people that are frugal and save their money. That's immoral. That, that's the one group you can't punish. And yet, in our current system, that is the group that gets hit the hardest.

• 36:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So anyway, I won't completely derail us, but we are going to do a very lengthy video on that so that I can hopefully not just elicit emotion, because I want people to understand the way that the, um, economy works, the way the finance works, the way the quote unquote system works is knowable. But the system does not want you to know about it. And this is why things like, if you try to, there's one of the Rothschild children, if you type their name, AI, at least when it was being tested, maybe it's been fixed. But it would literally start to type his name and it would self delete. There's videos of it. You can see it plain as day. And here's the thing, like, I don't know anything about the modern Rothschilds. Maybe they're all lovely, lovely people.

• 37:10Tom Bilyeu?

  But the ones that kicked off, basically fractional reserve banking, bad mojo. Bad mojo. Funding both sides of wars, realizing that you either need to be in war or preparing for war. And it just, it gives people the reason to print money. And printing money is exactly how you take, you're basically, over a hundred year period, you confiscate 100% of the wealth. It's like 99.9. It's crazy. It's drew that so outrageous.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  It's nuts.

• 37:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And because most of us don't live for 100 years and we're not really cognizant of money until we get to like 18, 19, and then we're just trying to take care of our families. So it's like, nobody really puts their finger on it and goes, holy shit. Like, there's this whole system. And then, look, we're, here's what I hope. We are living in the social media age. Information travels very quickly. It is very difficult to stop information from being completely and totally explored. I will do my best to present the facts first. I will present the, what I think is correct emotional response as well. But I want people to be armed with the information about how you're being robbed to, how you're being robbed from, how you're being lied to, why it matters, what you can do about it, which is not nearly as much as I would like.

• 38:27Tom Bilyeu?

  But anyway, it collides in moments like this, where I look at Trump and I'm like, this is price fixing. It's just as dumb when you do it as it is when Kamala does it. But you are in a corrupt system and it is politically expedient to just do the thing. Get people to lower drug prices. And the way that it works is because other countries are socialist, they are already doing this. And they go to the drug companies and they say, you're not going to sell into France unless you give us much lower pricing, period. That just is what it is. And so people go, okay, I want to go into France. I want to go into England. Maybe even the EU gets together and is like, hey, let's all make sure that we get what we need here

• 39:11Tom Bilyeu?

  because we're all, we all have socialist medicine. And so each country negotiates in a centralized fashion.

• 39:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And so when you're a country that sort of does a hyper-regulated version of decentralized negotiation that completely fucks you up and denies you all transparency and all that, and makes it impossible to do it effectively, but because of your free-market roots, you don't have a centralized negotiating tool, you get screwed six ways to Sunday. And so the way that the PBMs operate is they sit in between the insurance companies and the pharmacies, and they print up a list of what drugs are going to be insured, and then they use something called price spreads. And so what they do, they go to the drug

• 40:05Tom Bilyeu?

  companies and they say, "Give it to us for $100." And then they go to the pharmacy and they say it's $120. And nobody ever knows. And they don't tell anybody that they're making 20 bucks or whatever. I'm sure it's worse than that. And without the transparent ability to see what is actually happening, or to just say, "You can't..." Price spread is the one thing you can't do. You charge fees, fine, but you can't have non-transparent price spreads. So, anyway, Trump is not at all afraid to act like an emperor, dictator, whatever. Like, he'd be... If he's the one in control, he just has the personality.

• 40:48Tom Bilyeu?

  He's perfectly happy to act like a socialist or whatever. So, that's what he's doing. So, it's like, it's terrible. We shouldn't be doing this, but we are in such a corrupt system that I understand why we're here.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Okay, let's take a step back, because you said that this is a corrupt system to begin with.

• 41:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  So, to me, if there's already some crony capitalism mixed in there, it's not a free market anymore. Price fixing won't hurt.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  What is the thing that uniquely is dangerous about price fixing? That the other factors don't matter and this will still be bad no matter what?

• 41:32Tom Bilyeu?

  The way that price fixing works is you're saying to a marketplace that has problems that you couldn't possibly be aware of, you can only charge this amount for it. And just take Uber for a second. Um, when you say you can't do surge pricing because that's gouging, then drivers just go, I don't feel like going out tonight. And the only way to get more drivers on the road is to say, okay, we're going to let the pricing surge and it'll just keep going up, up, up, up, up until drivers like, whoa, I don't care that it's my kid's first birthday, I'm making a hundred dollars a mile, I'm going to go do this. Uh, and so they jump in their car and now boom, the supply meets the demand. But when you say you can't do that, then the supply never adjusts to meet the demand.

• 42:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And so you think you're doing a good thing, but you really strand me on the street corner. So it's entirely possible that by putting these caps on the drug prices, that the companies say, okay, then we're not going to invest in new, uh, drugs. And so the rate of drug discovery goes way down. It's possible that they just won't be able to, uh, make the drugs as frequently, that they'll run out of supply. Um, so usually what ends up happening is when you price fix, you run into scarcity and people just can't get the thing anymore because supply and demand gets totally out of whack. Um, so that's the problem.

• 42:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Centrally controlled economies have proven historically that they never work. Maybe one day with AI, but without an all-knowing eye that can perfectly judge moment to moment, like how to mitigate all of those fluctuations, it's just not possible.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yes, but there is a certain level of thinking that that will then decentivize the pharmaceutical companies and then more new nimble pharmaceutical companies will come in and kind of swoop and take their spot.

• 43:27Tom Bilyeu?

  No, because they're they're suffering from the same price caps. So if they could come in and they weren't going to be beholden to the price fixing, then yes, they could, but they will be. This, there was a real estate guy that really made a great point. And he was like, I, all of my developer friends tell me to develop anywhere other than these overregulated areas like Southern California. But he was like, I know, you go into Southern California, he didn't use the word, but this is exactly what he's talking about. You go to Southern California because of regulatory capture. There's so much regulatory issues that basically nobody tries to enter the market. So if you're the one person that's willing to do all that obscene work, goes and like meets the people and knows how to get this done.

• 44:11Tom Bilyeu?

  He's like, once you get a building built, he's like, no one's gonna build another building, no one's gonna drive your rents down. He was like, man, when you look at Austin, so many people moved there, prices boomed, but there was no price fixing, no rent control. And so, and it was easy to build another house. So as soon as prices went up, people were just like, oh, I'd rather build. And so they built their own house and then all the prices came back down. And so that is supply and demand. Another way that this played out, there was a great study done on, I forget if this was during World War II, anyway, it was a prison somewhere and money was being hyperinflated, so money didn't matter. But what mattered was cigarettes.

• 44:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And what they found was that the value of a cigarette was so static and people understood it so well, that they just used it as a medium of exchange. And so they'd be like, oh, this is worth five cigarettes, this is worth 10, this is worth a carton, whatever.

• 45:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But then, because it was like, oh shit, like cigarettes really buy your stuff in here. Then people would try to smuggle more cigarettes in. And as soon as they got more cigarettes inside, the money would get out of whack. You would get hyperinflation and the value of anyone's cigarette would drop. And once the value of the cigarette dropped, because it has intrinsic value, then people started using it for the intrinsic value and they'd start smoking it. And they would smoke the cigarettes and then it would normalize again. And as they smoked them, then the price would start going back up. And it's, this is how the free market works. But when you put distortions in the free market, now you're constantly in these boom and bust cycles because you don't have that like mechanism that just re-regulates itself.

• 45:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Which there was, I don't remember what empire it was, but there was an empire, I think before the Roman Empire, that used gold for 800 years without there being a debt cycle boom bust. 800 years. That never happens now with central banks. You get boom and bust every 100 to 250 years, I think is like the max, max, max.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  But, okay, I can call, because pharmaceutical companies now are artificially doing supply and demand, where they are minimizing prices to move a minimal amounts of supply in order to take care of all the costs in a major leeway, so that way they can pay for these price fixing in other places.

• 46:33Tom Bilyeu?

  No, they're lying to you. It's not supply and demand at all. What they're doing is saying, okay, you guys have collective bargaining. The US doesn't have collective bargaining. So this is very easy. We're going to charge you whatever we're, we think we can get away with in your country to make sure that we get every dollar that we can out of you. And then we're going to tell literally the Americans that you guys are funding the R and D. If you guys don't pay these prices, then we're not able to make these drugs. And we're only able to give it to these other countries that can't afford what you can afford because you guys paid for that drug discovery. If you didn't pay for the drug discovery, these drugs just simply wouldn't exist. Trump looked at that and said, that is stupid. And the reality is,

• 47:18Tom Bilyeu?

  That everybody is gonna pay a little bit more and we're gonna pay a lot less. And that is nonsensical that we would carry the entire burden for the entire world. When you've got countries like the UK, which can certainly afford to pay their share. Canada, I mean, there's all kinds of developed nations that can pay more for the drugs. And the only reason that they're, they weren't doing that is because we didn't have collective bargaining and they did. And so, again, I hate that this is what it's come to, but. When you have a system this corrupt, people just start going, well, maybe a little bit of authoritarianism. Maybe a little bit of a dictator.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  This sounds like the pharmaceutical version of tax the rich. We just, if we collectively bargained and asked other people to pay their share. They would offset the cost that we're experiencing and everybody, you'll pay a little bit more, we'll pay a little bit less.

• 48:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning that's what they were doing before?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  No, it's the same sort of pitch in that same line of. We're going to take a little bit more from other people who have a more profitable agreement. And we're gonna try to swallow up some of that revenue for ourselves.

• 48:27Tom Bilyeu?

  The irony is it's the exact opposite. This is Trump saying, hold on a second. Just do one flat tax for everybody. And the price is what the price is. Set your price. And I mean, technically, he's only saying America gets most favored nations, but everybody else is gonna clamor. And so now it's like, they're gonna have to set one price that's fair across the board. And then it's like, cool. Yeah, maybe your profit margins take a hit, maybe they don't, but. At a minimum, America is going to get whatever the cheapest price is that you pay for other people. Now, again, hey, here's a potential unintended consequence.

• 49:07Tom Bilyeu?

  The drug companies realize that they have to raise prices to a point where developing nations really can't afford the drugs now. And so, sorry, they don't get it because we absolutely, we are way better off just cutting you guys off. Then we are letting America get away with paying that. But America represents 4% of the world's population and 72 or 74% of pharma profits. That's insanity.

• 49:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Insanity. So there was the drug that Trump has talked a lot about, which he never says, but it sounds like Ozempic.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, is eighty-eight dollars in the UK, a developed nation, and thirteen hundred dollars in the US, made from the same manufacturer, same plant. So that's crazy. And the thing that I haven't even mentioned yet, which is that if they isolated this to just Medicare and Medicaid, then I could really get behind it because now you're talking about fiscal responsibility, lowering the cost of the taxpayer dollars, lowering entitlements. So we have to pay less tax to cover it. So this could end up having a major impact on the deficit.

• 50:25Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know the exact amount that we spend on drugs for Medicare or Medicaid, but I have to imagine it's not a small number. So that'll be interesting to see.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  But it should make the price go down then.

• 50:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It should make the price go down. Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying like, as somebody who, okay, I hate price fixing. I think it's terrible. But if we're at least lowering our debt, then we're stealing from the people a little bit less. So that would be lovely. But listen, in no uncertain terms, price fixing is terrible. There will be unintended consequences. People are gonna be like, what the fuck? Why can't we get this drug? Why does that country not get it anymore? And no one, I hate to be cynical, but nobody's gonna be like, you know what? We should just go all the way to a free market. They're never gonna do it.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Um, well, I know a couple of world leaders who have all the drugs they need.

• 51:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, God.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Uh, going viral this past week was French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were caught taking what looked like cocaine on a train to Kiev. Um, I was looking at this as, oh, boys being boys, a bunch of world leaders linked up. It's the weekend. We're on our way to do some very important things. This is just the European equivalent of a beer. But you think they are way too excited for ceasefire talks that it should be.

• 51:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so, okay, first of all, is this actually cocaine? I don't know, man. That really does look like a tissue to me. Uh, but Macron looks so dodgy when he pulls that off the table. I'm like, if, if that is just a tissue, why are you acting like you've got something that you're not supposed to have? It is the way he's behaving that led everybody to be like, that's cocaine. If he had just left it sitting on the table, nobody would have said a thing. If he had just grabbed it, like he wasn't trying to hide it and like look for a trash can or put it in his pocket, nobody would have said a thing. But it is the way that he moves it to one hand and then the other.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  He's moving like somebody who's high.

• 52:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, it's crazy. So do I think that they're actually doing cocaine? I literally have no idea. Would I be surprised that world leaders do coke at these events? Yes, I would. That just seems so weird to me. But as somebody who's never done cocaine, that could just be me as a teetotaller. Uh, so I have no idea. But the story that I don't feel like anybody's talking about, because everybody's caught up in the, was it cocaine? Was it not cocaine? Is that these guys were celebrating. The PR around this, I should say that, was, in my opinion, carefully manufactured to make it look like these guys had already done something.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So looking at like people talking about, oh, it's the photo of the year, uh, with the three of them plus, um,

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Zelensky.

• 53:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Zelensky laughing and looking like they're having a good time. And then this whole thing where they're, they're laughing and they just look like they're having a great time. I'm like, what is going on? Like, nothing happened. Putin didn't agree to anything.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the only thing that I can think, looking at all of this, is that you have a dynamic that's beginning to play out in Europe where, uh, they're referring to Ukraine. I, I don't remember if it was, um, Kyrstama that said this, but one, one of those guys called Ukraine the breadbasket of Europe. And you've got Trump pulling back, but giving his approval. You've got- Them getting together, starting to spend more on defense. You've got a new chancellor in Germany. Kirstar has not exactly been in there forever. So there's like a, it feels like the sense of these world leaders who have found each other, who seem to share a vision.

• 54:18Tom Bilyeu?

  New energy. Yeah, like either were convinced that they were gonna punch Putin in the nose and he was just gonna do it. I don't know. Zelensky seems way more sober than that. So I'm not sure what the vibe is, but in trying to build a mental model from a distance, the model that I'm building is Europe coming together, solidifying, feeling like they were on the same page. Not just feeling like they were in Trump's shadow, putting an ultimatum in front of Putin that the US is agreeing to, but they're doing it. So this felt like guys that were stepping into the limelight, feeling like this is my shot. I'm powerful. I'm the big man here in Europe.

• 55:00Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that was the energy that I was getting far more than these are guys that are doing coke. But it does feel like from a PR perspective, they are trying to establish themselves as a unit, as like a dynamic group that's gonna get something done. But as we're recording this, Putin looks like he's gonna blow off Turkey.

• 55:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Whatever, a day after they proposed the peace talks in Turkey, he launched a drone strike on Ukraine. So it's like, I don't think Putin is seriously considering this. Putin has promised his people that he was going to effectively subjugate Ukraine. That certainly hasn't happened. And if it's true that the Russian economy is really struggling, that the average person is now having trouble keeping food on their table, this is not a good time to say, yeah, remember when I started this whole fiasco in the first place? And I said that we were gonna get Ukraine back. We're not actually gonna be able to do that. We're doing peace talks. I think that might be a tough sell for him.

• 56:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll see, but he, I don't think he's gonna show up in Turkey. That seems like a long.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is again, they were celebrating the hard line. This is gonna be a 30 day ceasefire, no more talks to Russia unless he agrees to this. And then Putin comes out and says, all right, let's meet in Turkey on Thursday. And then he throw, he launches a drone attack on Tuesday. So it's like, it's, I think Putin is definitely playing games with them. He's kind of.

• 56:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it seemed a bit like. Zelensky had been saying, I'm not gonna meet with Putin unless it's for an unconditional ceasefire. And Putin wouldn't do it. So Zelensky was like, then I'm not gonna meet. And so I think Putin was trying to be like, look, I'm the one willing to talk. He's not willing to talk. So according to Trump, who knows? But according to Trump, he said to Zelensky, you need to take the meeting. So Zelensky was like, cool, I'll take the meeting. And then Putin was like, uh, well, I, I, I have to shower my cat. So, uh, yeah, I think you're right. I just think he's stringing them along.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, Kirsten bringing new energy to the British people has also changed his tune on immigration quite a bit. And I know that the culture war over there has been coming to a head. So this is what he said about securing Britain's future.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Migration is part of Britain's national story. We talked last week about the great rebuilding of this country after the war. Migrants were part of that and they make a massive contribution today. And you will never hear me denigrate that. But when people come to our country, they should also commit to integration, to learning our language. And our system should actively distinguish between those that do and those that don't. I think that's fair. Equally, Britain must compete for the best talent in the world, in science, in technology, in healthcare. You can't simply pull up a drawbridge, let nobody in and think that's an economy that would work.

• 58:07Speaker 04

  That would hurt the pay packets of working people without question, but at the same time. We do have to ask why parts of our economy seem almost addicted to importing cheap labour, rather than investing in the skills of people who are here and want a good job in their community. Sectors like engineering, where visas have rocketed while apprenticeships have plummeted. Is that fair to Britain? Is that fair to young people? Weighing up their future to miss out on those apprentices? To see colleges in their community almost entirely dedicated to one-year courses for overseas students? No, I don't think that it is. And truth be told, I don't think anybody does.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  Yet that is the Britain this broken system has created. So as this white paper sets out, every area of the immigration system, work, family and study, will be tightened up so we have more control. Skill requirements raised to degree level. English language requirements across all routes, including for dependents. The time it takes to acquire settled status extended from five years to 10. And enforcement tougher than ever, because fair rules must be followed. Now, make no mistake, this plan means migration will fall. Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  So when you have an immigration system that seems almost designed to permit abuse, that encourages some businesses to bring in lower-paid workers rather than invest in our young people, or simply one that is sold by politicians to the British people on an entirely false premise, then you're not championing growth, you're not championing justice, or however else people defend the status quo. You're actually contributing to the forces that are slowly pulling our country apart. So yes, I believe in this. I believe we need to reduce immigration significantly.

• 1:00:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this immigration is going to be a huge issue in the coming 10, 20 years. Europe is ahead of us by quite a bit, but we're certainly going to be seeing it here in the US. And people are going to have to get very comfortable that culture matters. In fact, there's an awesome clip from Trump, which it looks like you're pulling up right now, where he, talking to the Middle East, specifically in Saudi Arabia, talking about how their culture mattered and the West trying to enforce their culture upon them was a losing proposition, but them rising up on the back of their own culture is very powerful. Let's play the clip and then I really want to talk about this because this is going to be, oof, this is, this is going to be spicy.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  The transformations have been unbelievably remarkable. Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don't want that.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing. To develop, Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves,

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way. It's really incredible what you've done. In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.

• 1:03:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, we are all gonna have to come to grips with this. In fact, there's an incredible quote from the Dalai Lama, where somebody said like, "Oh, shouldn't..." I think they may have even been speaking about Muslims. I could be projecting, but I think it was. And they were saying like, "Shouldn't Muslims be able to come to the UK or wherever they were talking about and live here?" And he said, "A few." And we're like, "What do you mean? Why shouldn't anybody be able to come?" And he's like, "It doesn't make sense. Like, this is your own country. It's too much." We should probably find the clip, because I'm like, I'm very much paraphrasing. But that is so directionally accurate. Yeah, if you put Dalai Lama immigration... That's probably horribly wrong. Yep, there it is.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  ...from Afghanistan, the Middle East, want to stay in Europe. Shouldn't they be allowed to?

• 1:04:08Speaker 07

  Limited number, okay.

• 1:04:12Speaker 07

  But whole Europe, even Jerusalem become Muslim country, impossible. Or African country, also impossible.

• 1:04:19Speaker 06

  There's nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, you're a refugee yourself.

• 1:04:22Speaker 07

  They themselves, I think, better to their own land climatically. Oh, much better. Europe too cold.

• 1:04:31Speaker 06

  My parents moved from India to the UK. That's now their home. That's okay too, isn't it? If Indians or anyone else wants to live in Europe?

• 1:04:45Speaker 07

  I think England, this small island,

• 1:04:50Speaker 07

  90% become Indian. Then I don't know.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  He's like laughing at her.

• 1:04:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, he, look, the, what he understands, what everybody will need to come to understand, is that we're all stuck inside of a frame of reference. That frame of reference is built on your biology, your beliefs and your values. That's a culture. And not saying that the biology part swings wildly around the world. I'm just saying, we all are made of those three things. And once you have beliefs and values locked in place,

• 1:05:29Tom Bilyeu?

  people see the world the way that they want to see it. And getting someone to accept that their country goes from one religion to another, that's what wars are fought over, man. That is what wars are fought over. And that, those are beliefs and values. That's it, that's, people will kill other people over beliefs and values. So let us not think that those are minor things. And let us also not confuse them with truth. It isn't true. Your beliefs aren't true. Your values aren't true. They're yours. They're important to you. A lot of people would die for them. A lot of people would kill for them. But they're not objective truth. And so when you start importing, importing, importing, and they don't assimilate, that's my thesis.

• 1:06:15Tom Bilyeu?

  They don't assimilate.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  So your thing is not the immigration. It's the assimilating into this culture.

• 1:06:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Beliefs and values, beliefs and values, beliefs and values. That's all that matters. But holy Jesus, it matters a lot.

• 1:06:28Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if you've got people coming in specifically because they want to recreate another value set here, you're gonna have problems. You are going to have problems.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  UK just said that their immigration is going down. Our border is practically closed at this point. We just got a bunch of white Africans from South Africa.

• 1:06:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  So you're okay with that as long as they assimilate?

• 1:06:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Copy.

• 1:06:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, listen, you want to get the best and the brightest. There should always be a lean towards that. But yeah, if there's a sensible number of people that you're gonna bring in for humanitarian reasons, I do unfortunately think it needs to be a sensible number. You can't just say, yeah, anywhere. Like, we tried that with the southern border and people, they become incentivized to say that, no matter what. So they will say that in the millions. That doesn't work. So unfortunately, you do have to have some way of vetting people. You need to keep that number pretty tight. And then you have to find some way, and I'm certainly not saying this is gonna be easy, but you have to find some way for people to assimilate to your culture. You do not want to just bring people in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, and then it overwhelms the system, and then there is no sense of culture anymore.

• 1:07:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It's just a bunch of people pulling in a whole bunch of different directions. We're seeing this play out in Texas with the epic city thing, where it's all kinds of crazy rumors flying. And listen, I, I am not a scholar on this issue, so it's entirely possible that hiding somewhere they really do want to bring Sharia law. But that does not seem to be the case. They do want to build a community.

• 1:08:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I've seen videos, god, this is always so tough, whether the videos are accurate or whether they're all actually talking about the same thing. But I have seen a series of videos that paint it to be that what they want to do is basically collect the equivalent of HOA fees and put the fees towards the mosque at the center of the area, and something like 75% of them. And so that way, they don't have to have zoning restrictions to keep non-Muslims out. Just people wouldn't want to donate that much of their HOA fees to a religious organization, and so they're expecting them to self-select out. Now, look, I am definitely extrapolating on what I heard, but it was...

• 1:08:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Pretty close to that. So anyway, I think people are probably overreacting about that. But this does put a flag on a very important thing that we are gonna have to contend with, which is, um, man, research the Mormon church. If you wanna know like, oh, but Tom, we, we already have it in the Mormons. Yeah, there was like bloodshed and slaughter. So you don't have to look very hard to find how nasty and gnarly that got. Because it was people trying to stand apart from where we were as a country.

• 1:09:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And then same thing here. It's like, if this is people, they just wanna assimilate and they just wanna do a dope town. It's open to everybody. Oh, cool. But, um, if this is people who wanna stand outside of the American value system, it's gonna be a problem.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're claiming race, religious based discrimination, um, in a constitution, as a constitution violation.

• 1:09:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Religious. We'll see, cuz I think when asked, they said, that isn't true. Uh, we plan to adhere to every law. So, and we need to remember, we have freedom of religion in this country. So people get to be whatever religion they wanna be. And so the question becomes, what do you do when you have one religion that's incredibly successful? Uh, they have a lot of kids. Um, they're, whether through birth or through, um, importing, like they're just growing, growing, growing, growing, growing. Uh, and they can get them in tight knit groups.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  I call them Jews.

• 1:10:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, the, the funny thing is, literally, that's how the pogroms end up kicking off. Uh, so it's like, you've really gotta be, you've gotta be thoughtful about how this stuff ends up, uh, stacking up. Now, the question of Jewish people gets a lot more complicated cuz they've tried assimilation, blah, blah, blah. There's a whole episode to be done just on that. Um, but.

• 1:10:40Tom Bilyeu?

  This, we will have to contend with this whether we want to or not because we've become such a global world. The world is so small now.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That every country is going to experience Japan is about to get hammered by this.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Tom Bilyeu?

  They're clamoring for people to move to Japan because they've got houses just sitting empty because they're an inverted pyramid. They have a ton of old people and basically no young people. South Korea is in trouble. I don't even know if South Koreans are going to exist as a discernible race in a hundred years. Something would have to change or they won't.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  That's wild. On here, the reason they're claiming it to your point of the HOA fees that the state is saying that there has to be equal proportion to Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other nationality, other religions. It can't just be giving to a mosque. So that's the argument. To me.

• 1:11:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Is there actually a law that says that?

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  That's religious based discrimination because you're not giving it equally to other religions. You're forcing, you're forcing the resident to give to the specific community. To your point, that was their way of self-selecting, but that's the same thing that they're also crying foul on that it's a violation of the constitution.

• 1:11:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, this is where the laws are going to be, where the laws are going to be. And my thing is you control this at the level of immigration. Once they're in here, if they're an American citizen, man, they get to party how they want to party. And as long as they're adhering to the laws, it is what it is.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  And so if all of those people are American citizens, they all own the land about right, they want to do it this way. Are you like?

• 1:12:14Tom Bilyeu?

  And they adhere to the laws?

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  They adhere to the laws, yes.

• 1:12:17Tom Bilyeu?

  You, you can't force them to assimilate. You can write laws, you can say, hey, everybody as a matter of policy must meet these requirements. All signs are going to be in English or whatever. As long as it is a blanket policy that applies to everyone equally, yeah, go for it. But yeah, we have freedom of religion. So if these guys are American citizens and you let them in the country and you let them become a citizen, they are a full citizen. You do not get to tell them what religion they can practice. If they are abiding by the laws, they're going to do whatever the fuck they want. And I'm like, I'm here for it. So my thing is control this at the level of. Incentives, first of all, make being American awesome.

• 1:13:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Make people want to be a part of it. Make it be like, this is the illest thing ever. Of course, I want to be a part of this culture. Certainly felt more like that in my day. And then if you are worried that you're overwhelming your own culture because you've got so many people coming in and they're just not assimilating fast enough, then you need to slow immigration way the hell down, which obviously we've already done.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  We'll keep playing it out. I'm interested to see where it breaks because as of right now, they are, it's a citizen versus a citizen. So to your point, should they be allowed to do it? But.

• 1:13:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And can we get like really crazy for a second?

• 1:13:43Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a good playbook.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:47Tom Bilyeu?

  This is what, um, this is how Israel became a state. Hey, World War II shakes down. We got nowhere to go. Uh, gonna return to our ancestral homeland and we're gonna take this thing over by becoming economically and politically powerful. Uh, but we need a lot of bodies, so we've got to get a lot of people here. And they did it and they pulled it off. And if I'm Native American, I'm like, oh, hey, I've got a strategy. Uh, we're going to be like the Catholics. No more birth control. We're gonna, we're gonna have kids. We're gonna use the money that we raise from the casinos and we are going to support families and we are going to outpopulate these motherfuckers. And we're gonna take it over.

• 1:14:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Hey, it, that's the game.

• 1:14:36Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't want to see it. I want to see everybody get along. I want to see everybody be American regardless where you grew up. Like if you've come here to be an American, to embrace freedom and our values, and you want to get on the fight with me to get rid of the Fed, Drew, and you want a free market and you want to see everybody thrive? Hell yeah, I literally don't give a fuck where you've come from. But you need to be American, whether foreign born or otherwise. But when you start talking about Sharia law or kind of doing your own things, that's when it gets a little dicey for real. That's not American. Got it. I think I see that the left and right. If you haven't already, be sure to leave us a five star review. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress.

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