From French Revolution to China’s Rise: What Every American Needs to Know Now | The Tom Bilyeu Show LIVE

From the unpredictable state of the global economy and the looming threats to the middle class, to hard-hitting takes on inflation, asset management, and the very real dangers of deficit spending—nothing is off the table. Tom unpacks why the erosion of the middle class is destabilizing society, shares timeless investment advice that goes beyond market hype (yes, even when it comes to bitcoin), and lays out the framework for how individuals and governments can respond to growing inequality. You’ll also hear candid debates on the AI bubble, Warren Buffett’s cash moves, housing deregulation, and the messy realities behind economic “solutions” like wealth redistribution and debt forgiveness. 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 Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. SleepMe: Visit ⁠https://sleep.me/impact⁠ https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Tailor Brands: 35% off ⁠https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35⁠ https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impactHims: Start your free online visit today at ⁠https://hims.com/IMPACT⁠ https://hims.com/IMPACT. Even Realities: Smart glasses, real style ⁠https://evenrealities.bio/6e396d⁠ https://evenrealities.bio/6e396d What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:⁠ ⁠ 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%20show⁠join 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:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call⁠see if you qualify here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:⁠ ⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/⁠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 ⁠ https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ⁠www.twitch.tv/tombilyeu⁠ https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:⁠ ⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory⁠apple.co/impacttheory⁠ http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ ⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ ⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:⁠ ⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu⁠https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Madness, I say, welcome everybody to the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. We are in it today. This is a big day. We got a lot, a lot of stuff to cover today. It's been a pretty crazy break since we were last here. We've got Drew in the house. What's up Drew? We've got Mason over on Community.

• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And we've got the incredible people behind the scenes that actually make sure that the show runs. I hope they know I love them. What's up, gentlemen?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I want to kind of take a step back and just look at the economy as a whole. Where would you kind of gauge where we are in the economy now? And what people need to brace themselves for like going forward?

• 1:42Tom Bilyeu?

  The economy is not in a reset. The economy is ailing and there are going to be signs, sometimes up, sometimes down, even in a healthy economy. So now you put that into an ailing economy and you're really going to see some weird stuff. Now, why do I say it's an ailing economy? If you decimate the middle class, which you have been doing systematically for

• 2:07Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, since 2008, with a level of aggression that is terrifying,

• 2:13Tom Bilyeu?

  you need to think of it as a sick economy because the amount of money that you have to print, a problem. If you're deficit spending as a government, you have a sick economy. And the reason again that I say that isn't because goods aren't moving well through the system. It isn't that there isn't high velocity of money. There is. It's that you are creating the resentment that we're living through right now by shoving half of the middle class down into poverty and pulling the other half up into wealth. You get the extreme inequality which destabilizes society. And so it's one of those, um, we just recorded the video on this. It comes out on Monday. So my, my upcoming deep dive is this is exactly what happens every time before there's a collapse. Phenomenal YouTube headline. I expect it to absolutely smash.

• 2:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And the bad news is it is exactly, this is exactly what happens every time right before a crash. So, uh, the reality is, once you stop thinking in terms of stock market and you start thinking in terms of the total economy, the total economy should be yielding a stable middle class, a stable society, um, high social mobility, high economic freedom. People win and lose by their choices. If they know how to play the game well, they will do well. If they know how to play the game poorly, they're going to lose and get punished. That's how it should be, that the rich can become poor, the poor can become rich. Uh, you've got freedoms abounding. People are happy because they believe that given their own performance that they'll be able to move up or they'll be able to move down, that their kids' lives are going to be better than theirs. Like, that's the sort of implicit

• 3:42Tom Bilyeu?

  promise that we have made as Americans for 250 years and it's broken. And we broke it. And once we understand how we broke it, then we can get out of it. So, look, anybody that panics about short-term market moves, they're dumb and they're going to get eaten alive by the market. I'm sad to report that just, this is why the greatest advice of all time is buy low, sell high, and everybody buys high and sells low. If you can't understand that about yourself, this is why when everybody comes to me and is like, "Bro, why aren't you investing more in Bitcoin?" I was like, I dollar-cost averaged into Bitcoin. I had a certain amount that I was willing to deploy and the only thing- I would say is I guess you could argue that I would have been better off like spreading that out instead of over, I think I deployed over two years. Instead of deploying over two years, deploy over 10 years or something. Okay, I could see an argument for that.

• 4:28Tom Bilyeu?

  But given inflation, I don't feel badly about it. But I'm not just going to keep buying, keep buying, keep buying, keep buying because I don't trust myself to be right about Bitcoin. I don't trust there to be a black swan event that I don't see coming. So I have a much more diversified portfolio. I know that I'm, I only invest money that I could leave there for 25 years and not have to worry about it. So look, it's fun when it goes up. I stop paying attention to it when it goes down. But I don't have any emotional distress. Like if you said that Bitcoin dropped to 10,000, I'd be like, well, that's wild. And so, and, but I would be like, I know within the next 10 years, I don't know, but my thesis remains that over the next 10 years, it's going to go back up. So

• 5:08Tom Bilyeu?

  I, when I saw some of those headlines coming out, I went and looked at the market and I was like Bitcoins at 113K? What? People are panicking? Like it's all time highs, like 119, 120? So it's like, kids, uh, let's not panic. So anyway, this again, human beings are controlled by their emotions. They make stupid decisions because they don't put any checks and balances in place to make sure that they don't react to their emotions. I am desperately trying to convince people to distrust themselves to just because you have an emotion does not mean that it is wise to embody and act out that emotion, but people are gonna ignore me.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  At the same time though, Berkshire Hathaway has the most cash it ever has on hand. Is that like an indicator that, you know, if the most successful investment investors like, I'm going to take a step back for a second. Do you think that there's like a larger queue happening just where we are in this moment?

• 6:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, yes. You are in a bubble right now, Drew. The AI bubble is going to burst. So don't get confused, boys and girls. If you're paying attention to my man, Warren Buffett, he is sending you a signal that bad things are going to happen to the stock market. In the short term, so keep in mind Warren Buffett's job is to yield an annual return. He's got to think about his shareholders. He's got to think about moving billions of dollars. He is in every minute detail of the stock market. And so you will see over time, he has pulled cash out, put cash back in. The odds that this is very similar to a 1999 dot com bubble are extremely high.

• 6:44Tom Bilyeu?

  The catch is you'd still make an unfathomable amount of money. If you just were diversified across all the dot com stocks in 1999, you rolled, you rode out the bubble bursting and just let all of it climb back up. Or man, if you really wanted to get rich, when Amazon dropped to effectively nothing, you would have bought more. And if you're a dollar cost averager, which I advise you to be, then you would just be doing that. Oh, look, everything's on discount because over the last 200 years, 6.5% over inflation is what the, a well diversified set of stocks has yielded.

• 7:25Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's the game. I am not the person for day chariots to pay attention to. Go look at all the quants and all those guys. And if you want to take that risk and you think you're that smart, go for it. I do not think I'm that smart. I am not a quant. I'm not interested in approaching the world that way. So yes, Warren Buffett is telling you that you're in for probably several years of trauma and turmoil. But if you're invested for 25 years, 50 years, 60 years, what does it matter? All of these blips are going to come and go. So understand the nature of the thing and you will be fine. If you steer by emotion, you are going to lose your fucking money. So don't do it.

• 8:06Tom Bilyeu?

  If so, affect on that. All right.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Mason, I don't know if you got anything? I do. We got a couple of super chats as well as Amelie will had a question, which is, what's the only way for the middle class to push back? Tom, any ideas? And this was on the bit about pushing the middle class down due to debt.

• 8:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I don't think the middle class needs to push back to thrive. If the middle class wants to thrive, there is a very simple set of things that they must do, but you're not going to like them and they go like this.

• 8:40Tom Bilyeu?

  You're going to want to accept that inflation is the biggest enemy that you have. So that means no deficit spending. We have got to vote for things where the government is going to balance the budget. If you do not balance the budget, you are forced to gamble in the stock market and it is a gamble. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Now it's a gamble that pays off over 25, 60 years, but it is not necessarily a gamble that pays off in the short term. So that sucks because inflation will kill you immediately. In the last five years alone, we've had 25% inflation. That is so crazy. So if in 2020, a hundred dollars bought you a hundred dollars worth of goods in 2025, a hundred dollars buys you $75 worth of goods.

• 9:23Tom Bilyeu?

  You still have the hundred dollars in your bank account, but it only buys you $75 worth of things. You've got to be in some kind of asset that controls or that allows you to be inflation. If you're not in assets, you will a thousand percent lose. So you are going to have to find a way to get into that. You've got to find a way to make housing affordable. So that means you've got to vote for anything and everything that is going to make it easier to make houses. So deregulation becomes the name of the game. If you are not deregulating the housing market, if you are not making sure that more supply comes into the market, then it's going to forever spiral up with inflation. And so inflation, because we're doing the deficit spending, because we're money printing like absolute crackheads,

• 10:08Tom Bilyeu?

  that the cost of a house is just going to optically continue to go up. If you benchmark it against gold, you will realize, oh, it's actually not going anywhere. So. Be very thoughtful about that. Nymbianism, not in my backyard. That is the kind of thing that you have to vote against. You can't let people be so protective that it's like, okay, this can happen just nowhere near me. So stuff like that's gonna have to go. We are gonna have to do four things. This is Ray Dalio's Beautiful Deleveraging. You are going to have to do wealth redistribution. Okay, that's supposed to be the thing that's triggering to somebody like me. But I understand that when you eviscerate the middle class, you find yourself in a situation where your head gets separated from your body. Please see the French Revolution. Okay, so that's number one.

• 10:53Tom Bilyeu?

  But that is so high risk that when you start doing wealth redistribution, if you are not careful, you will blow up the entire economy. So dangerous lever, but you are gonna have to pull it. You are going to have to increase taxes on everybody, basically, and not just the wealthy. Look at the Nordic countries for exactly how they do that. This is, they do broad-based taxes that apply to the middle class via VAT taxes and things like that. So just keep that in mind. You are going to have to money print, as much as I hate it, but because the other things that you're doing are so deflationary for the economy, you're gonna have to do things that are inflationary.

• 11:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And then you are also going to have to, oh, God, what is the one that I haven't said? Money print, uh, debt forgiveness. You're gonna have to forgive some of the debt. And so unfortunately, debt forgiveness is taking somebody's asset and saying, sorry, you don't get paid back on that. But again, each of these levers, if pulled alone, is so catastrophically dangerous that you will break the economy. And that's why I wish Ray Dalio had called a beautiful deleveraging, flaming chainsaw juggling, because it's way more akin to flaming chainsaw juggling than it is to anything beautiful, which makes it sound easy and obvious.

• 12:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And it is arguably one of the most difficult things that you will ever do, especially the austerity of spend less money, because you're gonna have to balance the budget.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  They're sticking on what you mean by wealth distribution.

• 12:31Tom Bilyeu?

  You're gonna do welfare programs where you give money to people.

• 12:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So take to where I was saying, hey, there are some people that actually profit off of the economy. Yeah, that's gonna be a thing. So remember, goal number one, thriving middle class, stable society. And if you have people that are looking at the ultra wealthy and they are getting so angry that they're prepared to riot in the streets, you have to do something to mollify them. You have to give them things, not because it's good for the economy, because it will keep them from rioting. This is, this is where, man, when you start getting, this is the thing that we're gonna be talking about with politics and Trump and Putin and just the realities in negotiating. This is what we're gonna talk about when a wife refuses to give sex to her husband

• 13:20Tom Bilyeu?

  and that the husband will retaliate by stopping doing nice things. This is the world you live in, okay? Stop dealing in the world the way that you wish it were, instead of the way that it actually is. We are in a real world where one of the things you have to worry about in the economy is people getting so angry that they burn things, that they break things, that they kill people. Okay? So that's where we're getting. This is a loop that plays out in history over and over and over. People rise up, they kill a whole bunch of people, and depending on who ends up telling the story, I think people are confused. Was the French Revolution good or bad? It was an unmitigated fucking disaster. Okay? So they started beheading people, and then Napoleon comes to power because he realizes

• 14:04Tom Bilyeu?

  these sociopaths now just wanna keep killing. That's humans. They start killing and they're like, ah, this isn't so bad. I'm just gonna kill anybody that bothers me. Look at China. Dude, if you've never looked at what the actual Cultural Revolution was, imagine for a second, middle school kids dragging their teacher on stage, middle school kids, dragging their teacher on stage and beating him to death. Hang tight, we'll be back in just a moment.

• 14:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number to anyone willing to pay.

• 16:02Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're back.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Let's pick up right where we left off.

• 16:51Tom Bilyeu?

  That was the Cultural Revolution. Okay, Mao, talking about the first emperor of China, who buried dissidents alive. And Mao goes, "I'm a hundred times more..." Yeah, he didn't use the word "better", but he said, "I'm that guy times a hundred." Now, I don't think he was saying it to say something bad about himself, and yet, motherfuckers are gonna go to bat for socialism or communism. It is so fucking wild. This is based on resentment because you didn't take care of people when they were struggling. And they will fucking turn on you, and they will turn on you fast. So, to all my rich people out there, which I'm one of, listen, you've gotta find a way to make sure that the game works for anyone who's good at playing it. You don't wanna create a game where only people

• 17:36Tom Bilyeu?

  who have already won can win. And that's where you go with inflation. So, huh.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Can we mark that, Jay? Just mark that down.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  I got that marked for sure.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I feel like smoke is coming from the mic after that, bro.

• 17:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, this is literally self-preservation. So, when people were asking-

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I like my head, guys. I don't wanna lose it. Listen to me.

• 17:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. When people in Hassan's community were like, "You sure he's not just blowing the way the wind's blowing?" Because they're all confused why somebody who's wealthy would be like, "Hey, get a fucking thriving middle class." It's like, bro, read history. This shit gets so obvious. These... Okay, please watch the deep dive that's coming out on Monday. Watch the deep dive.

• 18:19Tom Bilyeu?

  When you start writing this stuff down, and you're like, "Oh my God", this loop plays out over and over and over all the fucking time. It is wild. So predictable.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  We've got two more Super Chats. Uh, first from Sadney Peter. "People have to ignore socialists because they have a fundamental belief that is the problem. They don't believe in human nature. They believe they were blank slates, so they believe they could do socialism better, so history doesn't matter."

• 18:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, yes. And they are resentful, spiteful people who want to control and punish. If you don't realize that they are resentful, that they are spiteful, and that they want control, you will be very confused by how it plays out. You're right about the first part. Just don't lose the second part.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And from the Mandrake Mechanism, can you reconcile your belief of the US being likely to fall in 10 years with Monday's deep dive? I know it's time in the market, but is it now our job to now time the market as we watch for further signs?

• 19:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so this is easy to reconcile in the messiness of reality. It gets harder if people just want binaries. So the messiness of reality is no one sees the future clearly. Not me, not anybody. And anybody that tells you that they see the future clearly is a fool. So all you can do is look at history and go, okay, what are the probabilities? What's the right way to move? And the right way to move right now is to hope that you can forestall at a minimum when America will tank. So I try to warn people that right now we're on a 10-year ticking clock. But oh my God, I will vote for any policy that I think is actually going to, at a minimum, push that off. I would rather it be 11 years. I'd rather it be 50 years. I'd rather it be 100 years. Anything is better than the ticking clock that we're on right now.

• 20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  And because there are things that we can do, I just walked through them. I want to see us do all those things. And so I'm going to keep, and this is one of the things that I cover in this week's deep dive, is what are the things you should do? And one of them is be mobile. So if I could go back in time, I would not have bought this house. Because I have to admit that given the way that California is going, it's entirely possible that I just eat the cost of this house. Now thankfully, it wouldn't affect my lifestyle. But boy, I really don't love the idea. That would suck. So

• 20:48Tom Bilyeu?

  accept the world the way that it is. Understand that you can't see things clearly.

• 20:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Hedge your bets.

• 20:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Have a broad spectrum approach. Try to solve the problems while looking at how you come out the other side better. Because here's the hard thing about writing the deep dive on Monday. The deep dive on Monday. Is a very microscopic look at how things collapse. Like, you're really gonna be in the weeds. And then the final section is, let me give you a quick list of all the people that have gotten rich every time a collapse happens. You can make so much money off a collapse. Now, I admit in the piece, and Drew better not cut this part out. Uh, I admit in the piece, I'm not expecting me or anybody else to get one of those outsized returns on a collapse, because getting the timing right is brutal.

• 21:43Tom Bilyeu?

  You've gotta be one of the rarest financial minds in the world, which I am very much not. And so, uh, I'm not expecting that. But I do wanna understand how people profit off of it so that I can use it as a hedge, if nothing else, that I can have some percentage in the, this might all go to hell in a handbasket, and this is exactly how you thrive through that. And then, hey, just in case we do forestall this for another 25, 30, 50 years, then I don't wanna miss out on all that growth. And so, hey, I spread it around. This is literally why they're called hedge funds. And I'm just trying to say, um, I don't entirely know what's gonna play out, and so I'm perfectly fine to crush my results down to 5 to 7% when I could. If I bet huge and was right, I could get 10,000%. I'm not willing to take that risk.

• 22:27Tom Bilyeu?

  I do not trust myself to see the chaos machine clearly enough. I think the future is way too complicated.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  All right. I've got a string of chats on the Warren Buffett stuff. Do you wanna go back to that?

• 22:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Wherever chat is, I'm happy to meet them there.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  All right, let's do it. Uh, first, Warren Buffett is stockpiling cash because he's not able to find good investments or long-term scale projects anymore.

• 22:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep. I think right now that is a very reasonable thing for somebody that has to yield an annual return for shareholders, for sure. Now, just keep in mind, he has done this before. This might be the time where he's done it, it's 20% bigger than he's ever done it. But he's done this many times before, where he doesn't think there's any deals in the market. Uh, he sees instability here, there, or somewhere. Um, so just be careful. If you're not Warren Buffett, and you are not spending every day reading shareholder reports and all of that stuff, uh, the odds that you're able to do what He does and get the returns that he's going to get are zero. So far better to play the game that's worked for 200 years for the average person, which is just stay in the market.

• 23:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Don't put money in there that you need to touch in the next 25 years. Don't put your grocery money there. Make sure that you have plenty of money in cash. I keep years of money in cash on hand because hey, who knows? Now, I'm, when you take it at a raw dollar amount, the amount that I lose in potential upside on having years worth of cash at my lifestyle is a lot. But I do it so that I don't have to worry. I don't have to like, if the economy went into a multi-year recession, I, I wouldn't even have to think about it. Now, if the economy goes into a decade-long recession, now I'm gonna have to think about it. But it gives me plenty of time to react. So I'm just saying, I think it is wise to put yourself in that kind of position.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Next one, Buffett used to say that he never sells, but now he's sold and holding cash. This is a different behavior. Big signal to everyone else that is being ignored.

• 24:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep. So I mean, look, uh, it is, whenever somebody makes a statement, myself included, what they are saying is right now, with the way things are and the things that I know now, this makes sense. But if you try to pull something that he might've said 20 years ago and apply it to today, that doesn't make any sense. He's not trying to be dogmatic. He's trying to get a return for shareholders. Period. End of story. Once you understand that, the man has to get an annual return for shareholders.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I just like the title of this. The dildo of consequences rarely comes loose.

• 25:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Pretty hilarious.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  An OnlyFans model talks about her personal experiences.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  And a picture of me doing, a picture of me sucking a fucking dildo. I said it. She sent her a picture of me sucking a dildo. And I, and it's my fault. Because she's saying my cousins were looking up my pictures, like my male older cousins. They were looking me up.

• 25:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Listen, I get that there was a day where it wasn't weird for cousins to get married. I don't live in that day. So when I hear about cousins checking out their cousin on OnlyFans or families or whatever it is, I'm creeped out. That's so, I don't like that. There's nothing about that that I like. But the bigger story here, I have to admit, is this, this is a big fafo. And I understand the temptation that women must have. Like, if I could make

• 25:58Tom Bilyeu?

  millions of dollars just by people staring at me because I'm six feet tall, would I be tempted, especially as an 18 year old? Yes. And so when a woman, I, I, forgive me ladies in the crowd if this is really offensive, but I love when people refer to

• 26:18Tom Bilyeu?

  a well endowed woman as being talented. I find that hilarious. I know that's probably terrible. But that, if you're a talented woman, and you're young, and you see the way that men respond to you, as if your mere presence is a drug, and they, they start acting a fool, they're paying attention, they can't stop looking at you, that has to feel really powerful. So I get the temptation. You're like, you mean, all I have to do is put this plastic thing in my mouth and you guys are gonna pay me a bunch of money? Like, okay. But unfortunately, there is a separate region of our brain for that, and we just file you away into a totally

• 26:59Tom Bilyeu?

  separate space. Like, there is sex, you shift into a different gear. People use different words, they talk in different ways. Like, normal communication during sex sounds weird as hell, and sexual communication in normal life sounds creepy as all get out. But when the communication style matches the thing, it's not weird. That's when I realized, like, oh, we're, we have like shifted into a different region of our brain now, where the way that we talk and all that is just so different. It's so fascinating. So if you're gonna do OnlyFans, you are blasting out to the world, to your future children's friends.

• 27:40Tom Bilyeu?

  You're blasting out to the world, hey, take me and put me in that part of your brain. And it is, it's gonna have consequences that are deeply uncomfortable because now it's like you know that when you interface with that person, you're accessing that person in that part of your brain. Like, I won't lie, I have dodged Destiny, like, whatever happened, because I guess some like porn stuff leaked of him online, and I heard Tech Tone talking about it, and I was like, nope, like, I don't even want to hear this. When I sit down with Destiny, I don't want that kind, I don't want him to have access to that region of my brain, if that makes sense. And so, you really have to be careful. You really have to be careful.

• 28:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And look, I get it. I get it. Jeff Bezos, I get it. I get the urge. I have, in fact, have I ever sent things to my wife that one day I may regret? Yes, I have. There's my wife! And the funny thing is, I'm like, I know that you don't care about this, and it is hilarious to me that in my youth, I couldn't stop myself. So, I get it. I'm as big of a moron as anybody else. But you really hope that that just doesn't go wide on the internet. I get it. So, ladies, I understand that there's a lot of money to be made, but, ooh buddy, you gotta be real careful, especially, did we pull that clip of the people that end up doing it, and they make like $168 a month, but now all their photos are out?

• 29:06Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like, oh, this one is the brutal tragedy of this.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I gotta pull that one from Twitter. I don't have that one out. I want to call out Mads, though. Mads says she has two very compelling arguments why she's talented. It's very, well done, Mads, all the way from Danish, Denmark?

• 29:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Well said, yes.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  From Dania?

• 29:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Dania, it is that group. That's what it's called.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  That's what it is.

• 29:33Tom Bilyeu?

  They speak Danishese. Yeah, Tom, we came across one, $168 a month, and they were talking about how all their photos got leaked and all that stuff, and so it's basically all on the internet, and they made effectively no money. That's a rough trade.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of people are comparing OnlyFans to like, oh, it's like Twitch streaming, it's like YouTubing. It's like, yes, if you make an ass of yourself doing a prank in a grocery store, that doesn't have as many consequences as your titties being out.

• 29:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. Correct. Hang tight, we'll be back in just a moment.

• 30:05Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:11Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Balaji actually tweeted this. I didn't put it on a spreadsheet, but I just thought it was interesting how 2,000 years of economic history in one chart. I was surprised how large ancient China, ancient India were a part of just global trade. And then now to see them kind of be slivers and then slowly kind of growing back. It's like, it's very interesting that ideally with 2.8 billion people, you don't necessarily need the American market. Like you need the American money. If you can generate money, prosperity, like efficient capitalism within that system, I can theoretically see a way where China and India just sell into each other. They help each other out and everybody else is exports.

• 31:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You only need America today. This is why I'm like, we are, we're in late-stage liberalism. What ends up happening is capitalism works so well. People have had it good for so long that they generations, generation on generation on generation are raised believing that stable government, economic prosperity, they're just like the water. They're the air that we breathe. It's just, that's how it is. And so when they don't have opportunity, they freak out and rightly so. And I would love to see them understand like, oh, I should be freaking out because the system actually is being manipulated by humans. But I can't lose sight of the fact that this is a very hard thing to do to create this economic miracle that we've created called capitalism.

• 32:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I'm not going to break it with stupid shit like socialism or communism. And so if we could get that, you're mad as hell. You're not going to take it anymore, rightly so. But what we're going to do is get back to the things that make capitalism work. And so that would be what I want to see play out because we can and will lose the

• 32:59Tom Bilyeu?

  the success that we've had for so long. And people just really don't think that it can happen. It can and it will happen. Every empire before us, every single one has fallen. And that graph shows it. Those were huge empires that are now fallen. And then the one last thing that I'll say, because remember, we, this channel should just be about China all day, every day. Because China is the only thing that's going to matter over the next 10 to 20 years. Like we've got this sort of momentary blip over the last four or five months where we're not really thinking about it, talking about it since the initial like explosion with the tariffs.

• 33:31Tom Bilyeu?

  China's the play. China is where the collision is going to happen. China is the biggest thing that we have to think about. And all the Russia, Ukraine of it all, that's a Europe problem. All the Israel, Palestine, that's like a whole fucking nest of weird things. But the real thing that the US is going to have to contend with is China. And how do you be a good person as a nation? And stay in control? Because I think you need to do both.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, it's interesting because I think America is like split right now where we have this international focus, but we're also thinking about, no, we're also thinking about America first. It brings you to a major Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet.

• 34:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, God.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  It's crazy that I'm actually agreeing with everything she's saying here, and I don't know, the matrix is busted right now. She tweeted-

• 34:27Tom Bilyeu?

  A black cat walks across twice, or you find yourself agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Those are signs that there's a glitch in the matrix.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  She was like, "We need to completely abolish property taxes. It forces us to pay quote unquote rent to the government on property that we own."

• 34:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I do have to admit, that's sexy.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  "But if we don't pay property taxes, the property that we own gets taken away from us. That should never be happening in a free country."

• 34:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Facts.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  "Secondly, health insurance is a giant scam that has become completely unaffordable, and it doesn't make any sense, and I don't know anyone, and I mean anyone, that supports the current healthcare system in the United States. These are America-only issues and such significant, and such significant problems that we should be addressing them the same way we would if our house was on fire. America only." And I'm just like, 5.2 million views, I'm like, she's the crazy lady, but she's actually saying what I think are like her policies she should be focused on.

• 35:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, we gotta take these one at a time. So, um, I love the idea of not charging property tax. I think that she's right. It, it offends my sensibilities that the government is like, "You're gonna keep paying me for something that you already paid for." Like, that really winds me up. Uh, death tax to me is the single most offensive thing in the universe. I legitimately cannot believe that people accept that. That is so wild and so unhinged. I just, that, again, it offends my sensibilities. However, uh, you're in the mess that you're in, and you cannot keep cutting taxes without cutting expenses. So, at least, she's sort of putting her proposal forward,

• 35:57Tom Bilyeu?

  which is, the thing that we're going to stop funding is healthcare. Okay. The problem is, uh, that's a 90-10 issue at best. It might be a 98-2 issue. The reality is that the vast majority of Americans, I believe the polling shows this, I could be wrong and I'm very open. Somebody show me if I'm incorrect, but my current mental map is, the vast- Majority of Americans want healthcare. So the reality is now, how are you going to pay for it? Because the way that we're doing it now, which is a terrible healthcare system. So she's right about that. The way that we do it is comical. Like, it's comical, it's terrible.

• 36:38Tom Bilyeu?

  The way that we do it is bad, but nobody that I hear. I mean, I might be the closest thing to this where it's like, let people take their chances. Just like as much as you can. Make it such that, hey, if you win, you get good things. And if you fail, you get bad things. That's America, baby. And every country is going to run their own experiment. But even I'm like, listen, if we can find a way. There are other things that I would rather give up first than making sure that people have emergency care. So I think she's crazy about that. But you, you can't just do taxes, tax reductions and not say this is how we're going to pay for it. So, and she bumps into a third rail with how she's, and she's soft pitching how to pay for it. So ultimately, do you disagree with any of that so far?

• 37:23Tom Bilyeu?

  We still have one more thing to get to, but.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  I don't, um, I think the.

• 37:28Tom Bilyeu?

  So you don't agree with everything she's saying?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  No, no, I just wanted like, be explicit. Property taxes aren't on the federal level, they're on the state level.

• 37:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Doesn't fucking matter. Does anybody give a shit? It's like.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Money's not real. What are we doing here?

• 37:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, I live in California. I don't care whether it's California that's taking my money or the federal government is taking my money. Stop taking my fucking money. Now, admittedly, I am grateful that I can vote with my feet and I can move and all of that stuff. So that's better, I suppose, but it's still, you're paying the money.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. My beef with the property tax thing is that what I was told is that property taxes fund local governments. So it funds the infrastructure of the road that connects your house. It funds the school around the corner, the police, the fire station, things like that. So I do understand that there should be some type of, let's call it community dues that you have to pay. If HOA fees can be legal on a broad set of things, you should be paying to the community that you're in.

• 38:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  So I do think that there should be some type of tax, but I think the threat of your house. Being the leverage part, that might be icky, but I don't think we can say no more property tax and then expect school systems, fire stations, police stations to just operate in nausea.

• 38:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Look, you can look at places that don't, right? So there are places that don't charge property tax and you just shift the tax to other places. But it, here is a very simple thing for people to anchor on. If you want the government to pay for something, they have to tax the people enough to cover the thing that they want to pay for. So it's going to come from somewhere. And so then it just becomes a question of, do you want to tax assets? Do you want to tax what people own? Do you want to tax purchases? Like where, income, obviously, where do you want the tax to come from? But you either dramatically reduce the things that the government pays for, and oh boy, would people

• 39:22Tom Bilyeu?

  bat many an eyelash if they understood how little the government used to cover. Like how fucking little?

• 39:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Compared to where we are now, it's a wild bloated mess. But you either, again, reduce what they pay for, or you keep the taxes and they have to come from somewhere. So, and then you get into, are we going to do an American model where we tax the wealthy? And virtually only the wealthy? Or do we want to do a Nordic model where we tax everybody? And so people like clap hard for the Nordic model, but I don't think they understand Nordic model taxes everybody to death. Like if you're a lower middle-class person, you're paying 50% of your shit. That's just, it is what it is. And so, yeah, you've got like social systems to catch you, but you don't get to decide how you spend your money.

• 40:11Tom Bilyeu?

  The government's going to decide how you spend your money. And personally, by way of like each country gets to run their own experiment. America is the experiment of freedom, but freedom comes at a cost. But again, late-stage liberalism, man, it moves in these loops. And so when you get to this late stage where it's like, hold on, we started accumulating a lot of people that couldn't make it. Before, they would get here and fucking die. They would just die. And Legitimately, and people do not really understand how America was made, baby. America, long before we could slaughter the Indians, we just had to die. A lot of people came here and they couldn't make it. It was like a survival game and they could not get to the, the crop planting, building phase of the game. They could not collect enough resources and they just froze to death.

• 40:56Tom Bilyeu?

  And so when you do that, when you kill like 30% of the people in some colonies, like 60, 80% of the people that roll up, you want to talk about the only people that survive are the hardest core motherfuckers on planet earth. Planet Earth, Drew, then you get that country. But over time, unfortunately, the way genetics works, just because you have two hardcore parents, doesn't mean they're going to have hardcore kids. And then you put culture on top of that. And so over generation on generation on generation, we just start collecting people that couldn't make it. And then we start doing welfare programs and then we coddle people that couldn't make it. Then we start like telling people from all over the world, come here, not just for opportunity, but come here for the healthcare, come here for the section eight, whatever.

• 41:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And now all of a sudden you have so many barnacles, the turtle of freedom begins to sink. But I get it. My message is not popular, which is some people just gonna have to fail. And they don't like that. People don't like that message.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  It's, it's real. It's real. It's honest.

• 41:53Tom Bilyeu?

  That's a 90 10 issue. I get it.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Then going into health insurance, Obamacare socialized medicine in a way that was never done before. In the sense that you're required now to have insurance, whether it's private or public. And if you don't, you then have to pay a like tax penalty. And that tax penalty then goes into a pot that covers the other subsidized like health plans of others. Some people at its onset, it was supposed to be the baby step to nationalized health insurance. It got scrapped. It got reworked. So now it's just basically you're forced to pay into this shitty system. So I definitely think health insurance is a giant scam to her point. I think that what was good intentions with the Affordable Care Act is now something much more hybrid Frankenstein-y looking.

• 42:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Are you also for like, health insurance should be, people take their chances? It should be like, you can have it if you want? Or should the car insurance model of it's required for every person to have?

• 42:51Tom Bilyeu?

  The honest answer is, I would like to go in and start with a zero budget on the government. Come up with the things that we absolutely need, like Argentina style, slash, slash, slash, slash, slash, slash, slash. And, but that comes with, and he's very honest about it. And this sounds terrible, and this is a clip that you clip out if you want to make me look god awful to the wider public. But the reality is, what people said to him was, bro, some people are gonna die. Because you've cut like their assistance. And he said, they're not going to die. They will find a way to live. People always say that they're gonna die, and they just don't die. And people are like, god, this guy has no heart. What he's saying is, you push the assistance down to the local level. And you then are saying, I'm asking the churches and good Samaritans to walk by and see somebody struggling and say, I'm gonna help you.

• 43:34Tom Bilyeu?

  And, but it sounds so god awful, Drew, that I understand that people aren't going to do it. But they really aren't gonna starve to death. They're not gonna have like some massive wave. As long as the stores can stock their shelves, people are gonna get fed. It will be the very rare person that freezes to death. It will be the very rare person that starves to death because humans have empathy and compassion. And so they will take care of them. But the problem is, when things go good for a really long time, good Samaritans are like, why do I have to do this at the individual level? And they try to push it back up to the governmental level, where it becomes wildly inefficient, prone to people taking advantage of it. And so it's like, it goes back to, from an evolutionary standpoint, you have the right for a reason, personal responsibility. You have the left for a reason, compassion. You need both, they need to be in dynamic tension.

• 44:19Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you, the left runs riot and just pushes everything up to the government level, and we're like, nobody can fail. You create a system that absolutely obliterates the middle class because you're deficit spending, you're printing money like crazy. And you end up in the situation that we're in, that Argentina has been in, Venezuela, USSR, China, like on and on and on and on. And I list a whole bunch of them in the deep dive coming out on Monday. Watch that thing, uh, so that people really understand, oh my god, this is a pattern. That repeats over and over and over and over. And it has like all of these notable hallmarks. And that's one of them, that people are just trying to push all the responsibility up to the government, and the government can't afford to pay for it.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  How was it? It was so facto. Um, we got a huge week next week. Uh, we got Andrew Humor Bins episode coming out next Tuesday. Make sure y'all check that out.

• 45:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, we do.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  We have Tom's deep dive that we were just talking about. Uh, that's coming out. That's gonna be a banger.

• 45:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Everybody, thank you guys always. It is so wonderful to see everybody join us today. Today was a lot of fun. I appreciate you guys being here and for being so active in the chat. And if you haven't already, everybody be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I'm not from moral victories, but this was a terrible day that we started with, but I feel like the momentum built and we like ended higher.

• 45:44Tom Bilyeu?

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