Trump’s First 100 Days: Master Strategist or Global Wrecking Ball? | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Tom Bilyeu and co-host Drew tackle the first 100 days of the Trump presidency—an era marked by volatility and shifting world dynamics. With signature candor and sharp analysis, Tom unpacks the ripple effects of global power plays: the destabilization of the post-WWII order, the mounting US-China economic standoff, and Ray Dalio’s stark warning that massive change is inevitable. Alongside Drew, Tom interrogates the headlines, from the unpredictability of Trump’s style to China’s unwavering claims it can outlast American economic pain. This episode lays the intellectual groundwork for understanding our new, unstable world order—why economic and political models are breaking down, how tariffs and non-trade barriers play into global negotiations, and what lessons from history can help us decode what’s coming. If you want to gain clarity in these chaotic times and learn how to build a mindset for predicting (rather than reacting to) future disruption, this conversation is essential listening. SHOWNOTES 00:00 "Erratic First Hundred Days" 03:08 Tariffs: Strategy or Economic Gamble? 08:39 Assessing Policy Impact Quickly 12:35 "Risk of Civil Conflict Rising" 16:03 Mindful Navigation and Future Consequences 18:22 Global Capital Dilemma 21:07 Economic Predictability Drives Investment 23:47 Annexation Dispute and Trench Warfare 26:59 Key Sticking Points in Ukraine Conflict 31:53 U. S.-China Trade Conflict Dynamics 33:13 Manufacturing Investment and Economic Growth 37:37 AI Revolutionizing Code and Surgery 41:24 "Strategic Choice and Human Dominance" 45:52 Questions Over Dating Apps 47:37 "Revealing Personalities Through Questions" 50:38 Join Our Live Sessions 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?

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• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  We get the real answer to 100 humans versus one gorilla. And we have the 36 questions you need to ask if you want to fall in love. All in one episode today, Drew. How are we ever going to get through it all?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  100 days, man. Time flies when you're crashing the economy.

• 1:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Woo, coming in spicy, Drew. Okay, well, I think we know how you feel about what's going on.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  First 100 days with Trump, it's official. Now, I want to give him his flowers. You know, it's not even a billing cycle yet. It has been a complete quarter. They haven't even closed the books yet. So we still have a lot more Trump to go. But how would you rate his first 100 days?

• 2:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, I think that rating his first 100 days is the mistake that everybody wants to make because it makes for good headlines and good TV. You had asked me before we started rolling something that I find more interesting, which is how would you sum it up in a single word? In a single word, I would say that it is erratic. So you never know what you're going to get. You could be maybe a little bit more generous and say it's unpredictable. I think it is. It is unclear how much of the erratic behavior is art of the deal. How much is just he's constitutionally erratic? How much of it is he tries a thing and then responds in real time? I don't know. And so the very reason that I don't want to give him a score at this point is I don't know how it's going to play out.

• 2:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So it is entirely possible he has tanked the economy. It's not never going to recover, but that we're going to really go through something brutal. And as Ray Dalio is pointing out that the he has already done enough things to destabilize the world order. He's done enough to point at the problematic metrics. He's done enough to signal to capital allocators that things are going to be different. That things are going to change. And now the question becomes, are they going to change for the better? Or are they going to change for the worse? And what I'm saying is 100 days in, we do not know the answer to that. And anybody that says that they know the answer is. I mean, it's look, it's possible that that's just how their mind works and they go to every minute. I know the answer.

• 3:36Tom Bilyeu?

  That's absurd to me. Anybody that's doing that, I think is is probably unless you're just trying to be entertained. That's not a good use of your time. So the thing that I would hope that people will use this show for is very simply that you are trying to build a functioning model of how the world works that has high predictive validity. And so that means I'm not investing in being right. I am simply trying to figure out when you do this in this moment, what response do you get? And so Trump has effectively, and I say effectively, because it may be for the better. He has effectively destabilized the world order. Now, is it destabilized and it's just going to crumble?

• 4:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Or is it destabilized and now we begin to put pieces in their rightful place? But in a place where America can thrive. So to get very concrete about that. Focusing just on the tariffs is almost certainly a mistake in that it will have low predictive validity in terms of what his administration is trying to do. Looking at. Using that as a way to get people to renegotiate, to put economic pain on them so that they have to come to the table to negotiate with you. And we'll talk more about who can survive that pain more.

• 4:55Tom Bilyeu?

  But also as a way to open the conversation around non-trade barriers. So there are a lot of claims that Trump is making that I think have a lot of internal logic. So you can follow what he believes.

• 5:13Tom Bilyeu?

  I find Besen a lot easier, but you can follow what the administration believes, even if they end up being wrong. But looking at the way that Besen is talking about this is if we can eliminate some of these non-trade barriers by leveraging the tariffs to get people to come to the negotiating table, to get people to stop doing, I mean, this is the, no reason to say people, to get China to stop doing currency manipulation, which is something that they are very credibly accused of, to get China to no longer be treated by the World Bank as a developing nation, when that's patently absurd, when there's a very credible argument to be made that they have more purchasing power than the US.

• 5:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And so there, there is this old world order that has probably become less useful

• 6:07Tom Bilyeu?

  and needs to be addressed. That's all an echo of what happened at the end of World War II. So yes, at the end of World War II, it was a system that we very much wanted to put in position. But now it's a system that the Trump administration would argue has, its utility has ended and it's now holding back America. It's holding our wages down. It's flooding the market with cheap goods and making it impossible for us to do our own manufacturing here domestically, which I've talked endlessly about, why, why that is so problematic in a moment where you are racing towards a head-on collision with China. So if they end up being right about all those variables, destabilizing the world order had to happen.

• 6:50Tom Bilyeu?

  It's just a question of, is it being handled as deftly as it could be? And I would say the answer there is empirically, it's not. But then, no one is ever going to do it perfectly. So again, I don't want to give him a rating because I don't know how it's going to play out. I want to open my mind to the reality that he could have already created so much devastation that this was just a catastrophic error. Or, nope, this is that formless period where people end up buying high and selling low because they simply cannot track the cause and effect well enough to realize that they should hold and wait till they get to the other side. So, I'm treating the Trump presidency the way that I treat my investments, which as

• 7:34Tom Bilyeu?

  long as the thesis is sound, I'm going to hold tight. If the thesis breaks, then you have to back out. And I don't have enough information yet to feel like my thesis is ill-placed. I still think the US is, long-term, the best place to invest. I think that short-term US debt is still a good place to be. I'm paranoid about long-term US debt and want to avoid. I think China being an authoritarian country rules it out as a place for me to invest heavily. Other capital allocators seem to feel the same. There's been a pretty large exodus for quite some time now out of China. I don't expect that to reverse. At the same time, I think alienating our allies is a dumb move and we should be trying to draw people more closely to us.

• 8:19Tom Bilyeu?

  But anyway, when I look at this and I say, "We absolutely could not keep doing what we were doing. You cannot allow China to control your manufacturing. You do not want to be competing on a global stage with somebody that manipulates their currency." So, for all of those reasons, despite the fact that I can hear, in Ray Dalio's words, "a warning," because this can be done well or it can be done poorly, that you absolutely had to do something. So, the status quo is the one thing that I will just completely remove off the table of options. So, we'll see. We've got, call it, another 18-ish months before Trump will lose the ability to...

• 9:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Get his agenda across the finish line. So I think we're a long

• 9:07Speaker 01

  That's a way he loses the midterm.

• 9:09Tom Bilyeu?

  If he loses a midterm, this game over for his ideas that even if they were going to work over a six year period, it doesn't matter. In our political system, we do not have the ability to think as long term as someone like China, who does not have to worry about elections. So he very much has to worry about elections. So he's on a very tight time crunch. All clock whether this worked somewhere around there.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I was about to ask that.

• 9:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Two years in, we're still struggling. Even if he gets reelected, I'll start to be like, oh, it's a long time to hold your breath.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're saying that the midterms is probably a better gauge to really gauge the progress of the presidency versus the hundred days.

• 9:46Tom Bilyeu?

  It guarantees a gauge for what does the American people think? And two years seems like a very reasonable time to expect policies to either bear fruit or not. If it's something that's four years out, this is like in business. I'm always telling people, you've got to find early signs that give you enough information that you can make a decision. You can't wait four years. To be like, well, maybe this works. But you've got to have early signs. Like, I even think that there are signs that we'll have before the two year mark. That will be very informative. So where are, where are the deals with other countries? Are we getting more isolated or is China getting more isolated from a trading standpoint?

• 10:31Tom Bilyeu?

  What are the prices on essential goods? Because some prices are for sure going to go up if you're tariffing things extremely from China, given how much we get from them. But are we able to use a scalpel to keep the essentials flat or down? All of those will be great indicators as to whether or not this is working.

• 10:54Tom Bilyeu?

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• 11:38Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:08Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:15Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, you brought up Ray Dalio's article, jumping into that. He wrote an article titled on X, "It's Too Late, The Changes Are Coming." And it's a pretty long article. I recommend everybody read it. But some key points I wanted to highlight here is that he talked about whatever happens with tariffs, these problems won't go away. And they radically reduced interdependency with the US is a reality that has to be planned for.

• 13:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so let me say that in simpler terms. America and China are decoupling, period. And there's no stopping that. No matter what Trump does with tariffs, America and China are decoupling. And that's going to mean what it means. And it's very difficult to know all the second and third order consequences already. But they're coming, period, end of story. And so that is,

• 14:06Tom Bilyeu?

  there's more detail for us to go through here, but that's the punchline. The change is happening. There's no unwinding it.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he summarized it at the bottom with four points that I want to cover for this. He says, "Number one, we are on the brink of the monetary order, the domestic, political, and the international world order breaking down due to unsustainable, bad fundamentals that can be easily seen and measured."

• 14:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so debt. You have a debt problem. This is really what he means. So you have a debt problem. You cannot continue to do this. You can't be in a cold war with people that control your manufacturing.

• 14:44Tom Bilyeu?

  It just, it,

• 14:47Tom Bilyeu?

  it leads to catastrophe. And Ray is looking at the historical comps. And he's saying, "We know how this plays out." And that's the one thing you can't leave on the table. There is no sticking with the status quo.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  "The progression of events leading to these increasing disorders is similar to those that have progressed many times throughout history." So this one looks like a contemporary version of the old story of how monetary, domestic, political, and social and international geopolitical orders change.

• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so debt escalates.

• 15:21Tom Bilyeu?

  People print money. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. You enter into a populist moment. You elect a strong man. Uh, and strong men often do very dumb things. Uh, very aggressive things if you're not very careful. And given that, um, you need to be aware of how this tends to play out. And so this is why I talk so endlessly about Thucydides' trap. Is just the likelihood that you are not able to accept that China has passed us. And by the way, I don't think we should accept it. I think just as the world has been made better by China striving to be great. The world will be better if America can strive to be great.

• 16:06Tom Bilyeu?

  And I hope they do. It's just a question of when you're in second place, do you lash out and start shooting at each other? Um, America, when you've got the wealth divide and you've got the inability to see eye to eye on a path forward. Uh, do you hate each other so much that you start shooting at each other? Because if you can use that friction as dynamic tension to make better policies, you end up in a good place. If that friction becomes warfare, you end up in a horrible place. And so what Ray Dalio is warning is that, um, the odds are something like 65%. That's directionally correct, even if it's not literally correct. Uh, 65 to 70% of the time, you end up in hot conflict.

• 16:48Tom Bilyeu?

  It's either a revolution, uh, or a war with another nation. Um, or a more traditional civil war. But it's always bloodshed, 65 to 70% of the time. Uh, the other 30 to 35% of the time, you find a way to unwind it without bloodshed, but it's less likely.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. There is a growing risk that the United States imposing these challenges to deal with will increasingly be bypassed by a world of countries that will adapt to these separations from the United States and create new synapses that grow around it.

• 17:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so basically new allies are going to form.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:26Tom Bilyeu?

  So who's going to ally themselves with China? Who's going to ally themselves with the US? Like, shockingly, we have a horrible relation right now with Canada.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And some people might argue that, but one way to read the tea leaves, and this feels like it has a high degree of predictive validity, is to look at what just happened in their election, that it broke very liberal again when it looked like Pierre Poliev was going to win. Not only did Pierre Poliev lose, he lost his seat. So he's not even in government anymore. So he's been, he's had his seat, I think, since 2004.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 18:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's like, yo, he's been in government for a long time. And many people say that the reason that that happened was, Canada was like, anybody that sounds like Trump is conservative like Trump, not here for it, no way, hard pass. And so that shows, I think they won like a 54% majority, I think. And Trudeau, when he was in power, his team, his party, there we go, didn't even have a majority.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So there's been a pretty big swing.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Liberal swing.

• 18:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you've got Trump out there, going back to my description of this as being erratic. You've got Trump calling them the 51st state, which is just, if you know anything about human psychology, you know that, dude, that is going to be so divisive. And for every bit of good that Trump has gotten from being divisive, I think he gets at least that much in terms of creating problems. But this is a populist moment.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to our point in the past, Carney has been positive about China policies and things like that. So we could be losing the ally.

• 19:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, like, exactly. Like, does Canada actually break towards China? Like, that would be, that would be a very negative sign, in my opinion.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  And number four on this list, if these circumstances are managed in the best ways, the outcomes will be much better than if they are managed in the worst ways.

• 19:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's one of those, it's so obvious that it seems almost silly to say it, but it is the most important thing to understand, that.

• 19:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Part of the reason that I now talk about this stuff on my channel is because the way that you navigate these things matters and that they will have huge consequences, oftentimes for generations to come. And so he's trying to get everybody to focus on the reality that, okay, don't, um, march forward blindly. Make sure that you have a sense of cause and effect that is historically, um, astute. It's never going to be a one for one, but you want to look backwards and go, um, this aligns with what I see looking backwards, or here's what's different that makes me believe that it's going to play out differently,

• 20:29Tom Bilyeu?

  but you certainly don't want to be blind to it. And you want to be marching by a very falsifiable sequence of cause and effect. So that if you expect one thing to happen and something else happens, then you know, oh, my mental model is flawed in some way. Now, I don't think that Trump is at all constitutionally capable of going, my fundamental thinking is flawed, but he does respond to, um, directional movement that does not suit his political aims. So it's a very nice way of saying, uh, oh, I fucked up the, uh, stock market more than I thought,

• 21:09Tom Bilyeu?

  and so I'm going to back off on the tariffs. So at least in that way, he isn't like, no, no, no, I'm going to ram this through no matter what. Like, he is somebody that clearly is dancing on the precipice, but when a foot slips and gravel falls off the edge, he does pull back a little bit. Um, that's not me championing the way that he goes about things, but that is me trying to map the way, um, he actually behaves.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just want to put a stamp on there with this last statement from Ray. The United States' role as the world's biggest consumer of manufactured goods and greatest producer of debt assets to finance its overconsumption is unsustainable. So assuming that one can sell and lend to the US and get paid back with hard, i.e. not devalued dollars on their US debt holdings, is naive thinking. So other plans have to be made.

• 21:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So let me say that one in simple terms. The US is going to print money. And because of that, long-term US debt, no bueno.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And if that's true, um, then people have to start thinking about where is the best place to put your long-term capital. Now, it's going to be very interesting to see, uh, exactly how that plays out on the world stage because just like when, um, I fret about losing dollar dominance, people will say, okay, but where are you going to go? You going to go to the yuan? Like they manipulate their currency. They're known for it. So what are you talking about? You going to go to the yen? They've been stagnant forever. You going to go to, uh, Europe? Like they've got a host of their own problems. Uh, do you buy that the BRICS nations are going to build a, um, currency that's backed by gold? Like where, where are you actually going?

• 22:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So you can have the emotional outburst, as I have done many times, uh, that, hey, these are bad moves. This is not what we want to be doing. Um, but the reality is that where else are you going to go? What Ray is saying is over time, people will find answers to that. And so you're now in a position where you can't just default go, oh, people are going to go to America. And so this is, this is an opportunity for BRICS. This is an opportunity for China. Somebody, somewhere at some time, the US or otherwise, is going to start signaling, we're going to be the place that you can go, that you can count on, we're stable. Uh, and so we'll see, man. I don't know if Trump is constitutionally capable of that.

• 23:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, so he has to do something, but if he's able to pull this off, will he then go into hard stabilization mode? If he does, then it could be everybody coming back to the US. If it, if this ends up being him spending, call it 18 months, just chaos, havoc to, um, move the overton window, to destabilize the way that things work now, change the IMF and World Bank approach to China and other countries, lower the non-trade, a non-tariff trade barrier. All the things that we've been talking about, do all that. And then, okay, guys, we have a new world order. It's not perfect, but now we need to focus on stability.

• 24:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Now we need to really talk about long-term capital investment here in the US. Getting the tax breaks down. This is something Besen said that I thought was really smart. Said, long-term, I don't think the conversation is going to be about tariffs. It's about tariffs now because that's the negotiating tactic. But long-term, this is about regulation and tax incentives to be here in America. And if we're able to realize those for corporations, corporations are going to come here. If it's easier and cheaper to do business in the US and you can trust the regulatory stability, he's like, people will come. And if we're not able to do that, this part obviously he didn't say, but if they're not able to do that, then people won't. And so I think that is very smart.

• 24:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And again, going back to why I don't want to call a winner at 100 days is you're at a position now where you're acting as if the temporary emotional swings of people will cement and they won't. And so if people make a lot of money by investing in China, they'll invest in China. If people make a lot of money by investing in the US, they'll invest in the US. And so understanding just how mercenary people are, just how selfish everybody is, will have a lot higher predictive validity than, well, Trump did a thing and I'm mad and so now I'm going elsewhere. It's real and you have to factor that. But the long-term play, when you start talking about years, is going to be about where is it easiest to get my business moving?

• 25:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And where am I most confident that I'll be able to make money and not lose a bunch of capital inefficiency to a government taxing me to death?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Period. We'll keep monitoring it. 100 days in the books. We'll see what happens.

• 25:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Indeed.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  One of his promises was that he'll end the Russian-Ukraine war. Russia has come out and officially declared their conditions that are necessary to end the war. It's very Russia and it's very one-sided from my viewpoint, but we'll go by them one by one. These are the six things that they laid out to say that this will make an end to the war completely. The first one is a demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.

• 26:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Number one is a showstopper. I cannot fathom a universe in which Ukraine would ever agree to that because you just broke into my house. You stole a bunch of my shit, killed a couple of my family members, and now you're telling me that for you to leave my house, I have to remove all the locks from my doors? It's so sus. So that one just seems like

• 26:46Tom Bilyeu?

  that's not real. Like I, hey, I've been wrong before, but I will be utterly shocked if Ukraine doesn't just go, this is ridiculous.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then number two, Ukraine must not join NATO.

• 26:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That one seems reasonable to me.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  That's definitely been on the table, yeah. Number three, this is a big one, the international recognition of the annex states. These are the regions in Ukraine that was occupied from Russia going back to 2014.

• 27:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, we won't try to pronounce all the names, but basically there's regions that they've annexed. They want it to be recognized.

• 27:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And this one goes against the constitution of Ukraine. So they would have to have a constitutional amendment to agree to this one. But this one seems to me the hardest pill to swallow, but that will probably have to be swallowed. Either now or at some future date. But if World War One is any indication of what happens when you get into trench warfare is they just gridlock and you lose a lot of people, you don't go very far. And so given that that's, it seems to be where we're at with this conflict. It will just become who has an appetite to lose more soldiers. And Russia, that is not the country you want to play that game with.

• 28:06Tom Bilyeu?

  They've just proven historically, we're willing to die for the homeland. In far greater numbers and they have so many more people than Ukraine has. That if Ukraine can't get Europe or somebody else to put boots on the ground, I don't see how they win a war of attrition.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Number four, lifting of sanctions against Russia and the return of frozen assets.

• 28:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Seems easy enough.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I know this was in a big one that kind of spooked the international community when the US kind of froze the assets once Russia.

• 28:37Tom Bilyeu?

  That was probably never the super smart thing to do. Like if you're not going to put sanctions and secondary sanctions on their oil.

• 28:49Tom Bilyeu?

  You're just gonna show people that you're willing to weaponize the dollar.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And, and the payment systems. And that's, you don't want people doing that like, oh, huh, they'll do that. I guess I don't wanna, I don't wanna go against them. You get people to get in line for a while, but that starts making things like BRICS look far more attractive. Now, anybody that trusts Russia, China, and Iran, yo, but nonetheless.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but going back to our first point, if the dollar is showing weakness, and then now this is just another reason to say, maybe there might be another country that I could store this for, and it'll be okay.

• 29:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Number five, the rejection by Russia of the US proposal to transfer control over the Z nuclear power plant to Washington and Ukraine. So there's a power plant within one of those annex territories that Russia wants to have control over, as opposed to the US controlling, US and Ukraine jointly controlling it.

• 29:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this feels, again, doable. If I'm Zelensky, or I'm the Ukrainian people, I'm saying to myself, far easier to spin up another nuclear plant, not that that's easy or cheap. But I would much rather be in that position than trying to replace another 100,000 of my citizens. Like, the, the level of devastation that that causes a, a population is hard to quantify. I would much rather give up a nuclear facility than however many people it would cost me to keep fighting this war.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Copy. And then number six, cancellation of language laws in Ukraine, especially those that restrict the use of the Russian language, culture, and church.

• 30:23Tom Bilyeu?

  I get that that one will be troublesome, but I cannot imagine that that's gonna be the hangup. The only two that strike me as like, these are really gonna be hard, are one and three. So, uh, demilitarizing Ukraine just seems absurd on its face. And international recognition that parts of what were formerly the Ukraine now are part of Russia. Those are, I think, going to be your two sticking points. Now, the whole denazification thing, I don't know what to do with that. That one also feels a little bit fake to me. It's like, uh, whatever hate they have in their heart, you're not going to be able to legislate out of them. So they're going to keep doing that. Uh, and then if there are Nazis in Ukraine in any sufficient manner,

• 31:07Tom Bilyeu?

  like what's the metric by which you're going to say they've denazified? Because that gives them, that gives Russia the ability to say, "Well, you demilitarized, we didn't denazify, we're coming in."

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, that one just, again, seems absurd on its face. And that they list it first, I assume means that's like the line in the sand that they're drawing. So I don't know how seriously to even take this. I'm glad that they're at least putting things forward. There's now things to argue about. There's a place from which to begin the negotiations. But this doesn't feel super serious to me.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my next question is, do you think Russia and Putin actually want to end the war based off of this list?

• 31:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Probably not.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  No. Man, we'll monitor it closely. It's sad, though. I was hoping that we would wind this down. So once I actually heard about it, I was like, oh, nice. Let's look at the list. And then I seen these things, I was like, yeah, they're not really, we're going to be here for a while.

• 31:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, man, look, wars traditionally end because people are so tired of the death and destruction that somebody's just willing to give up. And clearly neither side is there yet.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:12Tom Bilyeu?

  And so now it's a question of will the Ukrainian people have the money and the bodies to keep fighting? And if the US pulls out, then, I mean, Europe, I think, is prepared to step up. I just don't know if they'll be able to do it without the US.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Or if they'll be ready because they just did that investment about their defense initiatives.

• 32:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, also that.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Couple of months ago, it takes a little while to scale that, so, yeah.

• 32:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 33:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes. All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  All right, well, speaking of appetite for a war, China is saying that they're going to be able to hold out on this trade war more than us. The MFA China spokesperson, Twitter has been relentless about that.

• 34:00Tom Bilyeu?

  This guy goes hard.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  He's like, yeah, we're ready for any war. But CNBC News Report said that China might be feeling it a little bit more than they'd want to let us believe.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  In the meantime, China's economy is showing some signs of damage from the trade war with the United States. New export orders in April fell to their lowest level since 2022. That was when COVID was ravaging the country. Overall, manufacturing activity in China was the weakest in more than a year. President Trump has hit Chinese imports with tariffs of 145%, accusing Beijing of treating the US unfairly. Our next guest has some additional new data on China. Joining us right now is China Beige Book COO Shazad Kazie. Shazad, let's talk about these numbers, what you're seeing, because you guys are really doing this on a moment-by-moment basis. We're looking at the month of April and April started off pretty strong. It's not what you saw at the end of the month.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  No, not at all. As a matter of fact, you know, the weakness that you're picking up in manufacturing that we're picking up, that started in March. That's where the initial pull forward in the inventory ramp-up stuff stopped helping the manufacturing exports. And you see a slowdown in output, you see a slowdown in export orders, and then the weakness builds into April, where if you look at direct orders from the US, they are contracting and they're incredibly weak. So manufacturing has a lot of pain that's becoming obvious.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  It was interesting, though, that manufacturing had a lot of weakness in China. Some of the other areas looked a little stronger.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the rest of the economy is actually holding up for now, which is quite predictable. But that cannot last the longer the trade war goes on.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  How much of their economy is manufacturing? Because in our economy, we're more of a services economy. For them, it's a big, big component of what their economy is.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  They have become incredibly dependent on the manufacturing sector. As a matter of fact, more so, I would say, in the aftermath of COVID, because domestic consumption has been incredibly weak, choppy at best. You've got a massive property crisis that they're still digging themselves out of, which has left manufacturing as the core driver of economic growth and the post-COVID recovery.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  So when we hear kind of the conventional wisdom is that China has a much higher pain tolerance, tolerance for pain than we have in the United States, what does that mean to you? What kind of tolerance do they have for something that hits such a key, important part of their economy?

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Well, you know, what they've done is begun quietly helping the export sector already. So if you look at borrowing, for example, in our numbers, it has exploded for the manufacturing sector. They're stepping up additionally on the fiscal side through more activity. So they are trying to stimulate the economy, provide it some stability. They could do this. They haven't done big stimulus in several years, which means that they could keep ramping this up slowly.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Meaning what? That they're just going to prop this up, but they're not going to have anywhere to sell their goods?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. They could prop this up, and then I think what they're really going to rely on is trans-shipment. So I don't buy this whole thing that Chinese manufacturing is going to completely collapse, because what they're going to do is just rely excessively on rerouting their goods to the US.

• 37:06Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is where this gets interesting. Because China has...

• 37:12Tom Bilyeu?

  The one, they don't have to stand for election, so they can literally do whatever they want, including, I mean, the case of Mao, just starving people to death, and sorry, tough break. They can print money like crazy. They have shown that they don't mind keeping the yuan weak. So, and I think that it is fair to say that they have a lot more, they have printed a lot less than we have recently. And so they probably have more quote unquote dry powder to keep printing for a while. So you put all of those together and yes, they may hurt more than us, but will they be forced to blink? That becomes the big question.

• 37:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And will the Trump administration be wise enough to say, look, China just does things differently? And I can't ask them to publicly blink and be the first ones to come to us that we're gonna have to back channel to them and find a way for them to be able to put on the front page of their newspaper, America is dumb and they bowed to us and see we won and get what we want. And so this is where America has to be very clear eyed about what we want to not be beholden to what I call an invisible goal where you say you want a better trade relationship with China. You say you want to control your own manufacturing. You say you want them to stop manipulating their currency.

• 38:37Tom Bilyeu?

  You say you want them to stop dumping cheap goods on you. But what you really want is for them to be like, America's number one. That would be an invisible goal. And if Trump is acting in accordance with, I need you to acknowledge that I'm the bigger dog here, then this really could spiral into just madness where it's like, everybody gets punished for these two guys that have these gigantic egos and neither of them is willing to back down. Neither of them is willing to say, I actually want this thing over here. And I don't care what you print in your papers about me, I want this thing. And so if Trump, which boy oh boy, I don't know that he's capable. But if Trump can be like, all I care about is the six months leading up to the midterms. I want to be able to point to this many dollars spent.

• 39:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And manufacturing showing endless facilities already being built, which by the way, they're already Nvidia, literally, I think today or yesterday, like started building their factory in Arizona, like actually spending money because my thing was, are they just going to try to drag Trump on? And they really seem to actually be spending money. So showing that prices are coming down in in key areas. They won't come down everywhere, but prices on the essentials coming down. So gas price, energy costs and in general, coming down, groceries coming down, jobs being created. Like if he's able to show that story and from a supply chain perspective, we're in a much better situation, be able to point to China used to control 95% of the refinement

• 40:07Tom Bilyeu?

  of rare earth minerals. Now, not only do we have direct deals with these other countries to get the minerals, but we've already spun up. We're doing 12% of our own refinement now. And we expect by the end of 2026 for that to be 32%, whatever. If he's able to paint that kind of picture, it's like, oh damn, like this is actually working. If you've got trade deals with some of our main partners and they decided we're backing America, we're with America all the way. Like if you get Europe on board, you get Japan on board, you get South Korea on board, it starts to feel like, okay, we're actually isolating China? Okay, cool. But it could very easily be that this is just ego v ego. And China, literally, because they don't have to face elections, can just be like,

• 40:52Tom Bilyeu?

  keep going, keep, literally, we don't care. We're going to print money, print money, print money. And we, this is where we now start leaning on the red light capitalism part of this. And we show what the advantages are to being authoritarian.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Elon tweeted a stat that might surprise a couple of people about the actual size of China. So to your point of them wrestling over who's number one and number two, what is the size of the Chinese economy in purchasing power parity? In 2025, based on purchasing power parity PPP, China's GDP is estimated at approximately 35.29 trillion, surpassing the United States GDP of 28.78 trillion. Europe's GDP, the European member of 27 states, is estimated at 21.99 trillion in PPP terms. Thus, China's economy is about 1.23 times larger than the US and 1.6 times larger than the EU's economy.

• 41:44Tom Bilyeu?

  That's massive.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:46Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is what Mogadad was trying to tell us in the episode that we did with him. And he was like, Tom, look, you have such a US centric view. Your government spins and positions and tries to make things sound great from your perspective. But the reality is the rest of the world knows that China is bigger than you guys. So I don't know, man. It, I know that I'm being spun at all times. And this wouldn't surprise me. Now PPP, the whole idea there is that they may not make as much money per capita. So the average per person GDP may be lower than the US.

• 42:24Tom Bilyeu?

  But if everything in their country is so much cheaper that they can buy the equivalent of more stuff. That's how you get these numbers. And so life for them, regardless of what the relative metric is like, yeah, maybe you guys technically make more money per person. But the things, the lifestyle that we get as a result of that is better here. So that is very much something to keep in mind as we figure out who really can tolerate more pain.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And sticking with Elon Musk and AI and future tech news. He tweeted that robots will surpass good human surgeons within five years and the best human surgeons within five years. In a few years and the best human surgeons within five years. And this is in reference to Neuralink using a robot to do a brain computer electrode insertion. After retweeting Mario Nofal, who says that robots are now performing surgery. We've seen a couple of these in China. There was that one doctor that did a 5G kind of a video chat. I'm calling it video chat, but like a remote surgery. He was in a different province where they were actually doing it. This robotic testing and surgeries has been increasing in recent months. It seems like the future is already here and Neuralink confirmed has actually just had one done.

• 43:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Brother, this is thrilling, but is.

• 43:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Absolute insanity. Like when you are talking about things like the CEO of perplexity said that, not perplexity, Anthropic, said that by the end of this year, that something like 90 plus percent of all code will be generated by AI. Mark Zuckerberg just came out and said within 18 months, basically all code will be generated at Meta by AI. You've now got Elon saying, good surgeons are done in, call it three years, and great surgeons are done in five years. This isn't like 30 years, 50 years was like, ah, people are just making this stuff up.

• 44:32Tom Bilyeu?

  This is like near term enough. Now, Elon is wrong about his dates basically all the time. So let's double it. Six years, good ones surpassed, and 10 years, the great ones. This is still not a long time. If you've got a five-year-old, his kid's not even going to be out of high school by the time this happens. Let me say that again. If you've got a five-year-old doubling what he's saying, your kid's not even going to be able to high school. If he's right, your kid's not even going to be in middle school. So it's like, yo, this is.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I went the other way. If I'm starting my med school journey, you know, the four years, four years, four years residency, like I'll be halfway through my residency when I'm like, hold on, wait, I'm replaced now?

• 45:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but keep in mind, you'll be able to do extraordinary things. You'll be able to custom make proteins. So you've got AlphaFold that can figure out, oh, this is what the DNA sequence would need to be in order to generate this protein shape when it's folded in the final form. And being able to do stuff like that, dude, okay, so we've already unlocked that. So that means like, how long does it take people to run the experiments and test this stuff? Three to five years? I mean, you're going to be getting some insanely novel treatments within five years. Absolutely brain-meltingly freakish in 10. Yeah, I mean, this is, it is entirely possible. This is definitely sci-fi writer talk, but I am not the first to say the following statement,

• 46:00Tom Bilyeu?

  that if you can survive the next 10 years, that they, science will be able to add.

• 46:08Tom Bilyeu?

  12 months of life for every 12 months you live, which means your life will be extended indefinitely. It's what they call longevity escape velocity. So that effectively barring traumatic injury, you can live forever in 10 years. I mean, even if that's 20, that's crazy.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  That's nuts.

• 46:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So anyway, fingers crossed that we don't annihilate each other before then, because unfortunately that's all too real. But I mean, Jesus, we haven't even talked about India and Pakistan now are rashing up against each other and you could have some sort of skirmish breakout there. Hopefully very contained.

• 46:45Tom Bilyeu?

  India is coming in hot with their language and there is standing animosity between India and Pakistan. And by the way, they're both nuclear. So.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get bad really quick.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  We have to get into this debate that broke the internet over this past weekend. I feel like it's still been going on.

• 47:04Tom Bilyeu?

  This is so fascinating.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  100 men versus one gorilla. I've heard, I've seen tweets that were like, this is how you could tell the hubris of toxic masculinity that men think they could be a gorilla. And then I had other people that are like, I just need, Eric said, I just need 10 heavyweight UFC fighters and I could take down that gorilla. I don't even need 100 people. So the range, the range is large. What say you about the debate of 100 men versus one gorilla?

• 47:29Tom Bilyeu?

  To me, it is self evident that if you choose wisely with your men, that they are going to win by a lot.

• 47:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I always say, look back in history to find the answer to this stuff. If you look back in history, you see there isn't a single animal that we haven't been able to subdue. I don't know the right word, to hold dominion over. Like, have you seen the people that swim with great white sharks and stuff? No cage. They just understand their behavior well enough that they know like how to move and what to do. Now, I wouldn't want to have to try to outswim a shark. But if you're saying that I'm on dry land with a gorilla and I have 100 people that of like, so we're looking at a simulation right now. I'll presume that you'll put this on screen for people. That this is the world's dumb. Simulation because all of the people are acting like literal NPCs.

• 48:22Tom Bilyeu?

  They are throwing punches nowhere near the gorilla. They're attacking one at a time. They're not talking to each other, like the gorilla is clearly being controlled by the programmer here because the gorilla will create space, come back. And the humans are all acting like idiots, just like rushing and rushing and rushing it. But like even ants can take down things that are far bigger than they are. They just swarm you. And so, look, one person is easy for a gorilla to dispatch. Three people is probably easy. Five people is probably easy. You start getting into 20, 30 and it's like, okay, guys, listen, this is what we're gonna do. Yeah, I mean, here are ants taking down a snake. That is effectively infinitely larger, but now in fairness, that's thousands of ants.

• 49:06Tom Bilyeu?

  But also the size differential is thousands of times. So it will go something like this. If I were one of the hundred, all right, guys, listen, the only way this works is if we essentially segment the animal. So we need to remove its balance and we need to remove its vision. And if you can hit it in the throat, if it's as weak as a human's throat, then that's probably a good place. And you just do that, dude, like, all right, he's going to attack with his arms. So I need as many people as humanly possible to grab his legs at the same time. And then a bunch of us are gonna attack the eyes as fast as we can. We're gonna be poking out eyes. If he throws one of us off, literally while he's throwing, like, let's say it's me,

• 49:50Tom Bilyeu?

  while he's throwing me or ripping my arms off or whatever, you've got to use that moment to get to his eyes. And so now it's like every time he goes to defend against one, it's another gouge of the eyes. Defend against one, another gouge of the eye. I can't believe I'm seriously, I'm taking this. But this is like, dude, this is how humans get to the top of the evolutionary ladder, is we're able to cooperate flexibly in large groups. It is absurd to me that this argument got as far as it got. It's like,

• 50:16Tom Bilyeu?

  The human mind, the human mind, okay? It isn't because that we had the sharpest claws or the most robust fangs. It was because we could think and plan and cooperate. And so when I see things like that, that simulation, it's like all the things that make a human, the adversary, the most dangerous game, as the story calls it, is because of our minds, not because of our ability to throw a punch.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  I'm with you. We'll take down that gorilla. Do it. Easy, easy. Easy. No problem. No problem. All right. And falling in love is supposed to take time, but in 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron made it happen in 45 minutes by asking only 36 questions. The experiment worked so well, it ended in marriage. Here's how he did it. This is a 36 question, set of questions, where each set gets progressively more intimate, I'll call it. And then at the end, you stare into each other's eyes for four minutes. If you follow these recipes, apparently it like equates to love.

• 51:21Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it's important to say it a little bit different. It will allow you to tell whether this person is a potential match or not. I don't think it is such that, oh, if you ask these 36 questions and then stare into somebody's eyes, you will fall in love. This is just a way to figure out, is this person compatible with you or not? And what it may get at, I don't know how many people ended up getting married after this, but what it may show is that there are far more people that are compatible with you than you think, and you're missing those opportunities because you just don't know how to peel back that onion well. And so people get the ick or whatever modern term we want to use, and they peel off, even though if they had run through this, because one of the rules was you cannot skip a question

• 52:06Tom Bilyeu?

  and you must ask them in order. And so you literally go from one to 36, asking each of these questions. As you said, they get progressively more intimate. And they're really designed to map values and to take you to a vulnerable place, so that the person is really figuring out who you are. What I like about this, and the reason that I think- Think that this is popping off now is because we're in a world with dating apps that are the exact opposite. People are very easy to reduce to statistics. They're very easy to reduce to things that you can fit inside of a database. And then people rule out based on the database. Whereas the questions force you to, one, be in proximity with the person. So you're picking up

• 52:46Tom Bilyeu?

  a micro expressions, pheromones, vibes, like whatever all of that is. And you're starting sort of light, but interesting. And then you're being drug into deeper and deeper waters of shared vulnerability. And there's something about that act that I think gives people the opportunity to bond if there's something there. Because you really like, yo, like, I'm really getting to know this person and I feel some kind of way. And oh, man, to hear that story, like, one of the questions is, if you knew you were about to die and you were completely isolated, so there was no way to communicate with anybody else, what is one thing you didn't tell somebody you wish you had? And why didn't you tell them? And so when you get into that

• 53:29Tom Bilyeu?

  territory of where it's like, you know, my, I actually know exactly this, because when my dad passed away, I had never said like XYZ thing, and I so regret. So things, or it could be something that's like, whoa, I've never thought about that before. And then the person goes somewhere like really revealing about who they are. And maybe it surprises them as much as it surprises the other person. And so now there's like this, the 36 questions themselves become a shared experience. Which I think about a lot, because Lisa and I, we still do this, but admittedly, not as much as we used to, just because we've asked each other so many questions. But every time we'd go on vacation, I would come up with like, a list of 100 questions. And over the vacation, we were just going to go through and answer all of the different questions. And any

• 54:12Tom Bilyeu?

  one night, you probably only get through five or six questions, because it like sparks all these other questions. But it really is awesome, like discovering a person, being surprised by somebody that you know so well, and being like, whoa, I wouldn't have guessed that that's what you would say. And there is something about exploring personalities, that's as thrilling as this exploring space.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  I like the questions. I think that it's less about, to your point, it's less about these questions equal love. And it kind of shows the vulnerabilities and the true makeup of the person under. Because as you're going through these questions, like one of them is like, what would constitute a perfect day for you? If somebody says, I'm gonna be staring in the mirror all day doing my makeup. You're like, oh, okay. You know what I mean? Yeah, your answer kind of tells you what the actual person like thinks and feels. But it's nice to just actually have the conversation versus to your point. Just think of the height, date, weight, bank account, like the superficial things that we kind of gravitate to when we're dating nowadays.

• 55:18Tom Bilyeu?

  What I think is the unsung hero of this as well is the fact that at the end, you're supposed to stare into each other's eyes without looking away for four minutes. You mentioned it up top.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 55:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But that is, so Lisa and I did this exercise one time. I forget who recommended it to me. It was a guest on the show and they like promised me that you will do this. And so I promised on camera and I thought, okay, I've promised, I really need to do this. And we sat cross-legged, knee to knee, and didn't look away from each other for five minutes. And it is shockingly intimate. And this is somebody that I've slept with and God knows how many times. And staring in each other's eyes in some ways is more intimate than sex. Like it's really a trip. And the idea that the eyes are the windows to the soul, I don't know why that's true. But when you hold somebody's gaze for an uncomfortably long time,

• 56:12Tom Bilyeu?

  you feel some kind of way. Like it's really interesting. And so I do wonder how much of it is that the progressive level of intimacy and self-discovery, as well as discovery of others, followed by gazing in their eyes, that you're just like, maybe there really is something here. I don't know, man. It's, uh, the human mind is fascinating and I hope people can get beyond just dating apps. Because it, it isn't working as well as people would like it to.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, that's all I got.

• 56:43Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, everybody, if you're not already joining us for the lives, make sure you do. They are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 6:00 a.m. And here are some highlights from today's live.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  They said, what would need to be true for the US and China to work together for human flourishing? What would have to be true for left and right to quit racing towards civil war?

• 57:04Tom Bilyeu?

  We'd need Neuralink upgrades, or I mean this, I'm obviously being tongue in cheek, but drugs or Neuralink upgrades are about your only option because the architecture of the human mind is such that it will just play out like that.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I remember the Rick and Morty episode where he was beefing with the president and he was like, "I could solve the Middle Eastern conflicts in two days," and he flew them to like a foreign planet, had both got both of them high, and they brokered a deal, and he brought them back to the president like boom. So that was just funny.

• 57:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Distressingly accurate. So, okay, what would, let me give you a more grounded answer. The economy would have to be moving in the right direction. When the economy is moving in the right direction and people believe that a year from now they're going to be making more money than they are today, and they believe that their kids' lives will be better than theirs, people are in a good mood and everything is working wonderfully. And so this is why they say it's the economy, stupid. You've got to find a way to get the economy moving on the right track. If you cannot solve that problem, then you're going to continue to have this kind of divide. Gini coefficient explains so much. I don't think it was you, Drew, but somebody the other day was telling me that they saw a, somebody who was begging, whether they're homeless or not, I don't know, but they were

• 58:20Tom Bilyeu?

  begging for money and they had an iPhone. They said, "Imagine living in a world where even homeless people have iPhones. That's the level of wealth that we have, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the difference between the people that you see every day and you. And if the people that you're around every day have a lot more money than you, there is an algorithm that will trigger in the human mind and people will go nuts." So only the differential matters. And right now, the differential is crazy. And so you've got to address the differential. The last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what

• 59:00Tom Bilyeu?

  worked for what sounds good. Capitalism sounds fucking terrible, but it works. And so you've got to let people be selfish. Why? Because you can trust them to be selfish. And ironically, it ends up Working because when consumers are selfish, they end up saying, you're not adding enough value to me. I'm going to go to the other person that's going to add more value. And I quite literally don't give a fuck if you go out of business. That's a you problem. That's not a me problem. So you make my shit, you make it the way I want it for the price I want it, or you fuck right off. And so now everybody goes, ooh, I want to beat Tesla. This Elon Musk guy sucks. So I'm gonna make a thing that's better than his thing, and I'm gonna siphon

• 59:41Tom Bilyeu?

  people off. And that is why you live in the modern world that you live in. Now, if you stack a gazillion little things like trying to cap housing prices, like over regulating the building of houses to keep everybody safe, all of a sudden you realize you're the problem. And you could be driving the cost of these assets down, or allowing the free market to make them accessible to the average person. So what you want people doing, rather than thinking about redistribution, is saying, how the fuck do I get people on the intuitive asset ladder? And the answer is, you do things like stop capping prices, stop making it impossible to build a fucking house.

• 1:00:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But Drew, that means that you've got to let some builders build a shyster-y building, and then somebody moves into it, and they lose their whole fucking net worth. And by the way, their house collapses, kills them, burns down around them, they all die in fucking fiery death, Drew. And why do you have to let that happen? Because otherwise, you try to make everything in this world safe, and you over regulate the shit out of it. And again, I understand the emotional impulse, and I am not a libertarian, I feel weird saying that. I'm not somebody who doesn't think that government can't be helpful. I'm just saying you cannot inherently trust the government. You have to be like, god damn it, do as little as possible. You don't want to overly

• 1:01:01Tom Bilyeu?

  involve yourself, and you have to let assert with kids, you have to let them encounter difficulty, Drew, you have to. You know this as a parent. And so I'm just saying, the government has to let their people go through some stuff, and come up with solutions, so that people go, I don't trust that fucking builder, because he was the guy that built the thing that fucking fell down. And so fuck him. And he gets a terrible reputation. The bar.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  We're at the bar.

• 1:01:26Tom Bilyeu?

  You've had a few drinks.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  I'm tipsy.

• 1:01:29Tom Bilyeu?

  The lights are low. She seems like your type. Oh, man. She's beautiful. And then we turn the lights up. Your buzz is starting to fade. And now it's like, oh, God, this is not what I thought I'd been talking to all night. That is what's happening right now. The lights have come on because of the, these aren't the first shots in the trade war, but we've now reached the point where the lights are turned all the way up. If you haven't already, be sure to leave us a five star review wherever you listen to your podcasts. It helps more than you know. Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace. We out. All right. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress.

• 1:02:14Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:02:55Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:03:16Speaker 05

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.