Blue Wave Backlash: New York’s Socialist Gamble & The Market’s Sudden Crash | The Tom Bilyeu Show

In today’s episode, Tom Bilyeu and Drew dive headfirst into America’s current political and economic landscape, unpacking the recent “blue wave” of Democratic wins—including Zoran Mamdani’s victory in NYC—and what it signals for the future of governance, policy, and the middle class. The conversation kicks off with heated reflections on the consequences of political shifts, examining the impact of progressive policies, the perennial debate over wealth and poverty, and the mechanics of economic systems that are driving so much division. Drew shares candid thoughts on why some policies, while well-intentioned, might be leading us toward more hardship, especially for the working class—all while painting vivid analogies connecting personal growth, historical lessons, and even Greek myths to our current reality. From government shutdowns and fiscal responsibility to the behind-the-scenes drama of Congress and power plays among billionaires, no stone is left unturned. The episode even touches on breaking news like the UPS cargo plane disaster, the precarious state of America’s air travel infrastructure, and technological leaps with wireless brain implants, before rounding out with world affairs like Tommy Robinson’s acquittal in the UK. Join Tom Bilyeu and Drew as they challenge conventional wisdom, debate the path forward, and highlight why cultivating a thriving middle class may just be the greatest KPI for America’s future. Strap in for a thought-provoking, entertaining journey through politics, policy, tech, and human nature—this is Impact Theory at its most unfiltered. ButcherBox: Your choice of holiday protein — ham or turkey in your first box, or ground beef for life — plus $20 off at https://butcherbox.com/impact Bevel Health: 1st month FREE at https://bevel.health/impact with code IMPACT Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory HomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.com Netsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory http://netsuite.com/Theory True Classic: Upgrade your wardrobe at https://trueclassic.com/impact Cape: 33% off with code IMPACT33 at https://cape.co/impact Surfshark: Go to https://surfshark.com/bilyeu or use code BILYEU to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! AirDoctor: Up to $300 off with code IMPACT at https://airdoctorpro.com Raycon: Go to https://buyraycon.com/impactto get up to 30% off sitewide. Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://found.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu 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?

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

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Mamdani is now the mayor of New York. I guess they're gonna have to learn once again how economies work. A UPS plane still full of fuel crashes during takeoff, leaving a mile-long fire. Tommy Robinson has been acquitted in the UK of terrorism. The government shutdown is now the longest in US history,

• 1:27Tom Bilyeu?

  and TSA Houston walked off the job. And brain-computer interfaces have now reached sci-fi levels. The world is about to get very weird.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  All right, we gotta talk about it. If you're a Democrat, you're on top of the moon today.

• 1:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know that that's true. Are you gonna talk about Mamdani?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're starting with Mamdani. But the governor of Virginia is now a Democrat. The governor of New Jersey is now a Democrat. Prop 50 in California passed. And of course, Mumdani won NYC. So it was a blue wave that kind of happened. Um, I have his, uh, a portion of his victory speech up here. What are your initial thoughts, though, of Mumdani taking the W?

• 2:04Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm a little bit surprised that it, it made me feel some type of way. So I don't usually navigate life by a whole lot of feelings. It's like, where are we trying to end up? Uh, so that caused me to pause. I don't trust my emotions. So, um, but I felt very negative. I felt very sad for, uh, the direction of America. I do think that Mumdani in New York is indicative of something larger happening. And so it, I feel about Mumdani the same way that I feel about Gary's economics, where it's like, you've got the, your finger on the right problem, and the answer is so catastrophic and will accelerate this. It's like how I felt when Steve Jobs was like, uh, I have pancreatic cancer,

• 2:48Tom Bilyeu?

  and so I'm gonna do just like apple juice. And it's like, bro, that, that is going to make things worse. You're feeding a tumor which survives on carbohydrates. You're feeding it a steady diet of, guess what? Carbohydrates. So, uh, it, it's one of those where when you don't understand the fundamental cause and effect of things, you can make the most like egregious, obvious own goals. And that's what we're about to see. So, uh, the great irony of all this is I want the same outcome they purport to want. Now, I think that Mumdani is only understandable when you think of him as somebody who despises the wealthy, not as somebody who actually wants to help the poor. Once you think of him that way, then things are gonna make sense.

• 3:30Tom Bilyeu?

  You understand how we could look at the world and see just failure after failure after failure of these policies, uh, and still wanna do it. But they really do punish the rich as well. Uh, so it beats everybody up. And that is wild to me. And dude, sometimes really when I'm writing the deep dives, I think about you. And I'm like, I never needed to be aware of all this stuff, but Drew just wouldn't let it go. He had to have me every week, right? These deep thoughts, and they're phenomenal for the channel. But it is, uh, boy, oh, boy, are they hard. Because as you get into the, the meat and potatoes of the economy and how it works. So first of all, I've said this many times, but, uh, as the island of your knowledge grows,

• 4:14Tom Bilyeu?

  so grows the shore of your ignorance. So you come into contact with more and more things that you don't know. And so you begin realizing, wow, like, I really thought I understood this stuff. And then you start encountering more and you realize there's a whole lot more complexity to this. But so far, none of the complexity that I've encountered makes me go, oh, I was fundamentally wrong about something. You just see how it like spreads even farther and farther and farther. Uh, and so it just so happened, I mean, none of this is an accident. We obviously zone in on the things that are really, um, meaningful in culture at the moment. But I was writing about basically the markets are about to crash. Right. Like two days before the market crashes.

• 4:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So, um, it, seeing all of that, seeing all the interconnectedness, seeing that what everybody should be focused on is getting a thriving middle class and then watching us do all the things that like literally mechanistically, from a physics perspective, you just go, oh, the things that are being pushed by Mom Donnie are the exact opposite of things that could even possibly work. And that is, there's something about the Cassandra complex of knowing the future, but no one will listen to you, that is devastating. So it's my favorite Greek myth. I am convinced it was a parent trying, you know, somebody writing it was trying to explain to parents what it's like. And basically you've lived through it, so you know what the future is going to be.

• 5:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And so you try to explain to the other person, this is going to be the future. So the, the actual myth goes like this. Chick has an affair with a god. Gods never like that, so they punish her and they say, you're going to know the future, but no one will believe you. And so she runs around trying to tell everybody, if you do that, this terrible thing is gonna happen. They won't believe her. So they still do the thing and the terrible thing happens. And she knew it was going to come and the curse is that people will not listen. That is exactly how I feel about New York. And I'm sure every parent feels that way about their kid, knowing, hey, like I've done those sayings and it's absolutely grueling to your heart and that's gonna haunt you for 20 years and you're gonna need therapy around that one and you still can't stop them from doing it. That's what this economic moment feels like, is there are knowable things that are

• 6:25Tom Bilyeu?

  making our economy have the outcomes that it's having, which are as terrible as people are saying. They are horrible for the poor and working class, just absolutely god awful. They are wonderful for the wealthy in the short term because eventually you actually get murdered. So it's like, if you can just get people to see all of that, then we could go, okay, like, what are the actual things that will lead to the outcomes that we want? A thriving middle class, a place where people can get rich, they can pull ahead of everybody else, but it's not by such a grotesque margin that the government, and the way that you stop that, by the way, is by making sure that the government isn't getting involved in the financial markets, because you need wealthy people to get wiped out. So like,

• 7:08Tom Bilyeu?

  if you make a series of bad decisions, you have to be able to fail. And we've removed that. And so, and then the other thing is that we steal from everybody. Nobody likes to call tax theft, but it's theft. And so when you think of inflation as the ultimate, it is both theft and it's secretive. And they, they take money from everybody and because of the nature of economies, the only people that benefit from inflation are the people that own assets. Only 10% of Americans own assets. I shudder to think what percentage of the 10% own the vast majority of the assets. So call it something like three, 1% to 3%

• 7:47Tom Bilyeu?

  of Americans like just get wealthy in an unhinged way. And that is what's creating our problems mechanistically. But when you start voting for a Mom Donnie, you're saying, I just need things that feel right. I don't need things that could actually yield a good outcome.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's one of those things though, where I understand.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Theoretically, why New York is headed for disaster, I understand what's supposed to happen. I understand all the wiles and the whispers in the dark about um the bad things that is associated with socialism.

• 8:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  However, New York has made its decision. So just how as a father with a daughter who I want her to do X and she always tells me that she's gonna do Y instead.

• 8:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I can't just say, alright, well, go figure it out yourself and kick her out the house. I have to figure out, okay, you're doing the thing that I don't want you to do. How can I best help her through this situation?

• 8:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Now that we woke up this next morning, he's elected, he's in there. What can we do or what can we learn from this moment that we can actually utilize to kind of help the young people? How can we kind of reinvigorate the economy in this way? Cause I get it, if it was up to us, we would stop money printing, we would balance the budget, that's priority one and priority two. But just like similarly to the right and the left both spend money, people are just choosing the right because they're spending less money. I feel like in this moment, some people on the left are choosing Mom Donnie because at least if we're gonna spend money, at least give me some free shit in the process of the money spending. And I think that's their kind of rationale from there. So um do you think that there is a way that we can kind of mitigate some of these uh quote unquote catastrophes that will come with his election?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Is there ways that we can kind of isolate the rest of the US from it being kind of completely off the rails? What are some ways we can kind of look at it now that the damage is done?

• 9:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So uh one, the the only thing that you can count on at this point is the structure of New York government. So some of the things he wants to do, he just won't be able to do because the mayor doesn't have the power to do that. So um there'll be many things like that.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Checks and balances.

• 9:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that things just stymie his agenda. And so that's the joy of the gridlock of a democratic system. Is no one person can really like do too much damage. The problem is they put in systems in place and those systems over time do catastrophic damage. So rent controls back in the seventies and eighties were just absolutely devastating to the Bronx specifically. Uh and so if anybody can conjure up those images of the burned out Bronx and all of that, that was from the kinds of policies that Mom Donnie wants to put in place. That's a great. Great irony is not only has this been tried before all around the world. It's been tried in the five boroughs. Uh, and just led to disaster. And then you should ask, how did they unwind it?

• 10:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Hey, guess what? They unwound it by deregulating and capitalism. So it's like, we're, we're gonna do the loop again. Uh, but other ways to mitigate it are basically none. So. Part of the reason I did not have children was I understood. That part of the reason I became who I became was my parents couldn't really help me. Once I graduated from college, my dad had already spent a ton of money to put me through college. Um, I had taken on a ton of debt. My mom was not in a financial position to help me. My parents divorced literally three weeks after I left for college. Uh, so my mom was financially destitute, working two jobs, just nightmare scenario.

• 11:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, my dad had already put himself through enough to try to get me through college and shout out to him. Uh, so they, I, I, from the day I graduated, never received another dollar from my parents. And that meant I had to figure it out and I had to get hurt and I had to sometimes be in a position where I was like, oh, wow. I actually can't pay all my bills this month. And so you go, all right, I'm going to get some final notices from these guys and. Uh, I'll pay these guys this month and then vice versa. And you do that for a while. Uh, so.

• 11:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I didn't wanna, I didn't think I could trust myself to see my kids suffer. And so I didn't, that was part of my calculus around not having kids was I would make them soft. And so I was like, well, I don't want to do that. Uh, and I also don't want to watch them suffer. So New York has to suffer. That is the thing that will make it tough is that they'll go, oh, these really didn't work or but hey. Listen, when I say that my, my money is invested in a way that will show you, I believe what I say. So I think that's going to be a good litmus test for a lot of people, but um, I think that these policies are guaranteed to fail.

• 12:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, so at this point, it's like, well, you just have to step back. Like you said, they've made their decision, see what happens, let them go through it. The thing that I want to do is I want to plant flags and I want to say, here are the things that I see coming. I don't expect people to listen or to vote, but over time you do earn credibility. And also, a big thing for me is I need to say what I think is going to happen so I can find out how close to mapping the truth I have been. That helps me sharpen my own thinking. So, crime is gonna go up, that's for sure. All the things that he's trying to make free, they will go down in quality. They're going to say that no matter what happens, that they've done the right thing,

• 13:12Tom Bilyeu?

  and that the bad outcomes are due to something exogenous. None of them are going to go, ah, these are just bad policies. None of them. So, until we get the middle class thriving again,

• 13:28Tom Bilyeu?

  effectively, nothing is gonna change at the societal level. New York, though, will become increasingly violent, increasingly dirty, increasingly seedy. Again, we've already played this movie. I was in New York in the 80s. I know what it looked like up close, and it was wild. And people will get sick of it. They will, the people living there, and they will finally plug their nose and vote for somebody that promises law and order. That will be the start of it. People that are obsessed with law and order tend to be right-leaning. Right-leaning people tend to be more focused on sovereignty, so they're gonna get back to traditional economic policies, not necessarily because they understand the economy, but because they lean towards sovereignty. And so, that'll be the loop.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Okay, we had our conspiracy theory ads on on Friday.

• 14:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally, it was fun.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  I wanna put my optimism hat on right now.

• 14:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, let's go.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I found out, went through the Twitter rabbit hole. Dragonfly Jones, what like a Twitter commentator I follow who does basketball commentary, got into it over my Donnie with like a Twitter bot. And I found out through him, Richmond passed free buses during the pandemic. So for the last five years, they've been free buses. There has been a noticeable increase in crime. There has been a noticeable increase in attacks, violent attacks, no Ukraine immigrants getting shivved or anything like that there. Well, how they are paying for it is that the government funding that they receive from federal funds, they've reallocated to make it free for the bus system. Now, of course, there's still other, you know, you don't get free trains and all these other things. You still pay for those, but at least specifically for the buses,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  they were able to sustain free buses through the subsidies that they receive.

• 15:02Tom Bilyeu?

  There literally isn't a thing you can't make free. You can make anything free.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but-

• 15:07Tom Bilyeu?

  However, you're only making it free for the people who use it. You're not making it actually free because people don't work for free. So if people understand-

• 15:15Speaker 01

  The spending is coming from a different budget.

• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So if New York is just gonna say, hey, listen, the things that Mom Donnie wants to make free or cheap, we're going to pull resources from everywhere else and we're gonna reallocate them to that. Like if Mom Donnie were like, listen, I'm about balancing the budget. This is about fiscal responsibility. I understand capital flight, so I understand that I can't just keep taking and taking and taking from the wealthy because they will leave. Um, so this is all a balancing act. And if he were appealing to um, the like patriotism or whatever of Americans, this is something that we've done in times usually of war. But like if he were able to rally people around, hey, listen, guys, this is an economic war. I think we can all agree that the middle class and the working class, they are suffering the most.

• 16:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And he could lay out the cause and effect of how the economy works and he could say, listen, rule number one, balance the budget. Rule number two, we've gotta help bring back a thriving middle class. We've gotta put power from a negotiating perspective back in the hands of the working class. We've gotta make sure that we're bringing industry back so that people have jobs. Like then, as a wealthy person, you might be like, yo, this guy really gets it. Like, okay, I'm here for this. Like, I wanna be a part of this. And if that guy were engaging with the business community in a non-corrupt way, because I think that they're, they're, like when I see Mom Donnie posing with Alex Soros of all fucking people, I'm just like, here we go again. Like, this is gonna be a fun loop. In fact, literally, I mentioned George Soros

• 16:46Tom Bilyeu?

  in uh, the upcoming deep dive that I wrote. So get to part four. As always, I'm trying to tell people this is a thing that I think that you should do moving into the future. And I was like, please don't try to day trade against people like George Soros because they understand that when the economy is left to its own devices, that it can be very unpredictable. So they don't leave it to its own devices. They spend money on NGOs. They have deals with like DAs, like they structure society in the way that they want. They will go into different countries and make sure that things play out in a way that's good for their portfolio. And it's like,

• 17:27Tom Bilyeu?

  guys, you hate the billionaire class for a reason. Now, if that reason is just vibes, that's retarded. If the reason is, when people meddle in international affairs, not only does it create political problems that can be horrible for the people in that country, but they're doing it because they're trying to protect their portfolio. Now, you can't paint anybody with a blanket brush, but bro, that's going to get you 80, 85% of the examples. George Soros broke the back of the British pound. He literally looked at the pound and was like, these guys are making a mistake. Hey, Secretary Besen, not Secretary at the time, but like, let's roll in, let's fuck with these guys. They have made a mistake. They've made it clear, like where the support has to be.

• 18:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I know that they're gonna just try to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, but they don't have his pocket, they don't have pockets as deep as I do, so I'm gonna buy even deeper. Okay, that's the guy, the son of anyway, that Mamdani is arms around. So billionaires shouldn't exist. Here I am with one of the most politically active internationally billionaires on, yeah, son of, on planet Earth, but he's got all the money now. So Soros is toast. So if you hear like George Soros, at this point, it's Alex. So I don't know if you think that's like a get out of jail free card.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  No, but to your point of the kids are always soft, like Alex isn't breaking the back of the British pound. I think Alex is-

• 18:50Tom Bilyeu?

  He may not know how to do it, but he, he is- I would need to do a much deeper dive to put forward any very concrete things. But I assume that he's carrying on his father's legacy. If nothing else, he is still out there swaying markets. I hate it when Elon does it. I hate it when the Soros is doing it. So that one, to me, I am an equal opportunity. It is a problem when people put money in politics like that and try to sway these markets like that. So anyway, that, that is the nature of what Mamdani is going to be trying to do. So he isn't doing what I wish he were, which is getting the business community together, balancing the budget, saying, we're going to make these things more affordable by putting government dollars, because that's what the people want.

• 19:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And as long as we're balancing the budget, we know these other things are going to have to give. Great, no problem. That's not how this is going to play out. First of all, he seems completely, I think if you map him again as somebody who wants to see the wealthy punished, he'll make a lot more sense. He does not care if the wealthy flee. He does not care, he's not paying attention to capital flight. Dude, if you go back to his 2020 tweets, they are so unhinged. And so he's asking us to believe, no, no, no, that's not me anymore.

• 20:03Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll see, like, there's no doubt. If you look at my tweets going backwards, that there are going to be some things that'll be like, listen, I changed my mind about that. Like, I looked at it further, but I'll be able to map out for you the cause and effect that led me away from those positions. He's not going to be able to do that because he, he is doing whatever is politically expedient. Yeah. Is my mapping. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60, and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax.

• 20:48Tom Bilyeu?

  The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag. That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less. And it's not just the cashmere. I ordered a few things myself, their fleece joggers, a couple of their- Their tees, which I wear obsessively. First thing I noticed was the quality. Soft, well-made, built to hold up. They make down jackets and wool outerwear now, too. So upgrade your stuff to things you'll actually wear. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too.

• 21:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Impact Theory. It's the best way to support the show. Let's talk about something that genuinely keeps me awake at night. My team at Impact Theory gets hit with phishing scams from bad actors pretending to be me all the time. And they keep getting more sophisticated attacks with details specific enough to look legit. AI has made a lot of things possible, including scams like this. But AI still needs raw material. It gets it from data brokers who sell your name, address, phone number to anyone willing to pay. Incogni goes after that supply. They handle removal requests across 420-plus harmful broker sites.

• 22:13Tom Bilyeu?

  And they keep checking back as brokers constantly try to relist you. On the Unlimited Plan, the Exposure Scanner hunts down your information. Send a link and their privacy experts handle the takedown. Track your progress in the app and get a monthly risk assessment showing exactly where you stand. Go to incogni.com/impact and use code IMPACT for 60% off an annual plan. Incogni is I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com/impact. Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

• 22:51Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 22:54Speaker 01

  I definitely get the frustration. I get what you're saying that we have to be very careful about the billionaire class and how, who Mamdani is buddy buddy with. And while George Soros now, I feel like is like the Republican candy man, that when people whisper his name, they think like an NGO is gonna pop up and some trans person is gonna jump out. It is actually true. I, I feel like though, the game is the game. Cause if we could look at Rupert Murdoch, Jon Stewart just did a talk with the New Yorker where he talks about, everybody thinks the Republican Party and MAGA started with Trump, but it started 10 years ago when Rupert Murdoch bought all of AM radio stations that nobody was listening to, that only 50 year olds and older were listening to. He bought Sinclair Broadcasting, that was the synchronized local news network that was all saying the same thing. So they've been setting these

• 23:36Speaker 01

  conservative seeds for a decade ago. You know what I mean? That's how they were able to get support for the weapons of mass destruction. So it's, this is a political game. This is a map. And we all were realizing that everybody's grabbing for power in their way. The left might be doing it through NGOs, the right is doing it through conservative media, but everybody's just trying to grab power. I think what we should really be focused on now, and Vivek has a great tweet that I would kinda wanna bring in to, to point this out. We thought Trump has been saying the economy is booming, everybody's happy, the markets is flying and all these things are happening. The market was a bloodbath yesterday. A bunch of Democrats won. I know that Republicans still have control of the office, still have control of the executive office, they still have control of the Senate, still have control

• 24:19Speaker 01

  of the House. But that is awakening to say, wait, the midterms aren't a shoe and wait, the, the economy isn't booming for everybody. There are people that are still hurting. And whether or not we can point to the budget, whether or not we can point to communism, whether or not we can point to socialism, the voters are saying, your, your fear tactics aren't working. I still want change. I'm voting for something different. Cause status quo isn't working for me. Let's jump into this video from Vivek where he kinda breaks down what the, what the conservative party should be paying attention to after this election victory.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  We got our asses handed to us in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City. Democrats swept all three. There's two key lessons for Republicans. Listen carefully. Number one, our side needs to focus on affordability. Make the American dream affordable. Bring down costs, electric costs, grocery costs, healthcare costs, and housing costs, and lay out how we're gonna do it. And number two, cut out the identity politics. It doesn't suit Republicans. It's not for us. That's the woke left's game, not ours. We don't care about the color of your skin or your religion. We care about the content of your character. That's who we are.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  So with that coming, do you think that this will be a wake-up call for the Republican Party, especially with the midterms happening next November?

• 25:32Tom Bilyeu?

  No. They know that they're in a political game. They will certainly understand the history. It's like only three times does the midterms not flip things. So it's like, eh, that isn't the game. So keep in mind, I want to be very clear. I'm not Republican.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:52Tom Bilyeu?

  So I look at the Republican Party and I say, these guys are god awful. And the bad news is, the only people that are worse are the Democrats. So you just have to look at how much money they want to spend. And you've got the Republicans that passed the catastrophic, big, beautiful bill, and then the Democrats were like, hold my beer. We want to add more to that. It's so wild. So they're all irresponsible. They are all doing something that is going to continue to hurt people. They are caught. So you're in a simulation, Drew, and I'm, I almost defiantly am deciding to think like that, which I need to be careful of, but you're living in a simulation.

• 26:36Tom Bilyeu?

  You've been programmed to act this way. And Watching this play out, like, once you understand the code that's running in all of our minds, I am not immune to this at all. I am as stuck in all of this as everybody else. I'm having as much of a biological experience as anybody else. But Jesus, like, we just respond in the most obvious ways to these things. And so politicians only make sense when you think of them as somebody who will do anything, say anything to get elected and to get re-elected. All they are trying to do is maintain power. So my only hope is that because we live in a moment where we have high velocity of information, that we are able to

• 27:19Tom Bilyeu?

  lay everything bare, make everything as transparent as possible, not spill into conspiracy brain, but really get people to see enough of the picture that they can start putting things together from a cause and effect perspective. So, um, pick an area. For me, it's been economics. You pick an area and you just start mapping out, how does this happen? From a cause and effect perspective, because if we are in a simulation, even if we're not, God laid out rules, but the world clearly is built on top of rules, which is why when people say history repeats, all they're saying is that there's a set of rules that everything obeys, economies, the way politicians act, the way humans respond to politicians and money and power and fear and all that. We respond in a very narrow-banded way.

• 28:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, once you understand that, it's like, oh yeah, then as circumstances arise that are familiar to something that's happened in the past, we will respond in familiar ways. They, we do not become perfectly predictable, not at least at the level of data that a human mind can process and retain. But, boy, oh, boy, are we predictable. So, that's why when you look at, uh, whether it's, okay, uh, the trains worked in Richmond. Oh, great, let me explain how that works. Like, you can point your money at whatever you want, but what you can't do is deficit spend. And so, what I want people to understand is socialist policies don't work because they are trying to make everything free.

• 28:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Zohar Mhamdani in 2020, uh, tweeted the Communist Manifesto from each, according to their need, to each, or from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, or vice versa. You get the idea? And so he tweeted that out. That's not somebody who's like, oh, look at this terrible idea. But it is a terrible idea because it is as if humans are fictional characters. It's like when economists think of humans as a perfectly rational being and that you can map all economic movements based on humans being rational beings that will always do the thing that is the obvious like financial incentive and then they don't and they completely surprise you. So

• 29:28Tom Bilyeu?

  once you understand that the very thing that capitalism works on top of, which people may love or hate, I don't care. It is how humans work. The very thing that makes capitalism work. Again, China used capitalism to rise above a poverty. Every time you want to cure a socialist system, you give it capitalism. So the thing that that rides on top of is man's inherent impulse to do what is self-serving. And the second you take away man's desire to do what is self-serving, it all breaks. And so that's why resentment around people who are good,

• 30:10Tom Bilyeu?

  like they do what is self-serving and they're very good at it. When you resent that person, you become completely unhinged and and let's call it spade a spade. The policies force you to use guns. So I know people get weird about when I give real historical examples about how far that goes, but you need only ask.

• 30:32Tom Bilyeu?

  What if, Drew, your 27 year old daughter was not living life the way you wanted her to, but you have to force her to because everybody has to do what you say, or the system falls apart. So what do you do? You eventually get guns out. And eventually, if that person just really won't get into line, you lock them up or you kill them. Mao said plainly, because there was a person way back in China's history that was infamous for having buried alive a bunch of people that were disagreeing with him. And he jokingly said, oh, we've

• 31:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Done that guy, but a hundred times more. And in honesty, it's a hundred thousand times more. But like, that's where people go. They realize, or they form a mental frame of reference that says, I know best. When you disagree with me, you're gonna break society. And so I will go all the way to killing you. If that's what I have to do to get the system working in the way that I want it to work. But because humans disagree, humans are intrinsically selfish. Everybody has a different frame of reference. So everybody's pulling in different directions. You run into a problem. You run into a problem that requires violence.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  All right, let's jump over to UPS Flight 2976. For those that don't know, this was a cargo flight with three people on board that had a crazy explosion. It crashed into a nearby petroleum factory that just

• 32:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that what it hit?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  That's why, that's where all the fire came from.

• 32:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh my god.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Out in Louisville, we have the video out here.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  As you could tell, this thing looks like the tropic fire, the tropic thunder like fire scene, just like a row of fire.

• 32:24Tom Bilyeu?

  There are some other angles where you can actually see the plane.

• 32:28Tom Bilyeu?

  That is brutal. Was it on takeoff? It looked like it was on takeoff.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the engine was on fire as it was before it even got off the plane. It looks like it's the left engine, off the ground, yeah. And then this is the one that you see where it's actually on the ground. Like even as it's trying to lift, the fire kind of started early.

• 32:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh my god.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  So three people dead on the plane, another 11 injured, but authorities said that totally was only gonna

• 32:55Tom Bilyeu?

  When you keep going, so we've got even more angles. There's one from the inside of a truck. And you just, you see the plane like break apart and tumble and oh my god. Like I can't imagine dude, I can't imagine. Listen, we all die some way. But like, oh, that'd be one of the craziest ways to go.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, God, look at that.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Sheesh, sheesh.

• 33:19Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so wild. There's other ones. It might even be this one later or maybe the other. Anyway, uh, there's one that shows like an overhead view and you just see that line, just a fire. It looks like it's going through like a industrial area.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like, oh, man, that is rough. But there were no other fatalities, huh? Other than the people on the plane?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they said that number is gonna grow though, cuz everything, it had, like you said, a path of destruction.

• 33:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  That was early reports as of this morning.

• 33:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I was like, man, you might have dozens of people. So if it's only 11, like, whoo, that is, thank God. That is terrifying.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Uh, in related news, um.

• 33:59Tom Bilyeu?

  In related to plane crashes?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Secretary Duffy's, uh, due to the, uh, government shutdown, they are considering now setting down certain American airline, uh, airspaces because of the lack of air traffic controllers. For those that don't know, air traffic control is having been paid, TSA hasn't been paid, going on 35 days now. And this is the record as of today.

• 34:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, it is. So we have broken the record.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  We have broken the record from Trump's last one. So he won it up himself.

• 34:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Uh, so then, yeah, this is Secretary Duffy, uh, speaking about it.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  One payment, 80 to 90% of one payment. They missed the second paycheck. Uh, on Thursday, they get a email pay stub that'll show what their next payment is gonna be. So this Thursday, they'll get a, an email that shows that their pay stub is a big fat zero. Um, many of the controllers said, uh, lot of us can navigate missing one paycheck. Not everybody, but a lot of us can. None of us can manage missing two paychecks. So if, if you bring us to a week from today, Democrats, you will see mass chaos. You will see, um, mass flight delays, you'll see mass cancellations, and you may, may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it cuz we don't have the air traffic controls.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then, in, in related news, Houston TSA has literally walked off the job, leaving thousand, it looks like hundreds, maybe thousands of travelers just stranded.

• 35:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. And this is all happening while the three of us are here in Florida. I was like, oh, this will be fun.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Perfect timing. Perfect timing. Uh, we talked, uh, before we started rolling that I had a delay on Sunday because LAX had to restrict airspace because they only had so much, uh, air traffic controller. So our flight was pushed back an hour to allow other traffic, I guess, to coalesce. So it, it seems like it's only getting worse. Uh, how do you feel about us breaking the record for government shutdown?

• 35:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, this is horrific. So there are two things going on right now. So one is just, we have a world that we expect to work a certain way. The government has made certain promises. You need to make good on those promises. So there are things that I wish we had never agreed to fund, but if you've agreed to fund it, then you've got to fund it. And if you're going to unwind that, you need to do it slowly. You can't just furlough God knows how many people and then be like, oh, and by the way, some of you are never getting paid and we're just ending your job. Uh, that is a very rough way to go about it. So in the beginning, when they were dozing it and they were like offering people exit packages and all that. I was like, yeah, that, that's cool. I'm here for that. Uh, you reduce the strain on the economy. First of all, like even if you're not going to look at it, just the, the human

• 36:30Tom Bilyeu?

  cost of it all, uh, you want to see that done as elegantly as possible. And I'm still, I don't know who I'm mad at exactly, but I'm mad at the way that America reacted to Doge. I really, God, what do I feel? Despair, hopelessness, uh, just that one really wound me up. It's like people had knee jerk reactions because it was Elon, because it was people saying they were going to cut the budget. People just went off their rocker and they should have been like, yes, please. Like even if this is just a nod to now getting into fiscal responsibility. Like I, I want to remind everybody, the word fiscal means government, government spending. Fiscal responsibility is government spending responsibly. We've used fiscal now

• 37:15Tom Bilyeu?

  so loosely just to mean basically monetary that people don't understand fiscal policy is government spending. Government spending is so unhinged. So when I say fiscal policy is the problem. That's what's driving this. Once you understand that, that the government deficit spends and the government covers bailouts and the government, inflates the currency, you realize, oh, we have a spending problem. So you need to reduce spending. So anyway, seeing people react like that to Doge just really wound me up. Because it's gonna make their lives worse. They're literally, it's like, uh, when you're training to be a lifeguard, one of the first things they teach you

• 37:57Tom Bilyeu?

  is a drowning person will drown you. They don't have a single qualm with that. They are just trying to get oxygen. So as you get closer, like they'll push you under, they'll hold you down. So you have to be, if they're not calm, you have to disengage. And I always remember thinking, ooh, that's rough. Like you go out there, they're panicking and you just gotta be like, sorry, not going down with you. But that really is the reality. And so that's what that felt like was these are drowning people. And as we get closer to try to help, they just start throwing punches, pulling us under. It's like, oh my God, like, come on. So, uh, hated that. So that's the second part of this is that we have, it's like 40%

• 38:42Tom Bilyeu?

  of, fact check me on this, please. I believe 40% of Americans work for the government now. You can't do that. You can't do that. It's either 40% of GDP or 40% of people buy per capita. You absolutely cannot do that. Hard pass. Out. It's a sign of sickness. Like there's, call it, I don't know. 7% is reasonable. 40% is you can't do that.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see a much lower percentage.

• 39:08Tom Bilyeu?

  What percent?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I see federal government is 1.9%.

• 39:11Tom Bilyeu?

  No way.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  The public sector is 13.4 according to, this is out of, as of 2022.

• 39:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll have to look this up if it's GDP, but there was some number that either was number of people that work for the government or GDP that was so horrifying. Anyway, off the fact, maybe I'm just wrong. That's always possible.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  GDP is 23% of government spending.

• 39:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, that's zero, just for the record. So government work should not count for GDP. So that gives you an idea of how little we actually grew. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. 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.

• 40:18Tom Bilyeu?

  So there's less admin and more selling. 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.

• 40:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  I wish I had a better like answer for this government shutdown. I wish I had something more like interesting to talk about. But like, at some point in time, I don't know where that line is. Have you ever been in like a tough negotiation, maybe at work, where it's kind of like the standoff where it's like, I'm hurting other people by doing this. I need to cave. Like, how do you balance that pressure from, I need to do this so that way my team can get this win that long-term, I think, would benefits the most amount of Americans versus the current pain is too much to handle?

• 41:22Tom Bilyeu?

  You can map out ahead of time. These are the things that I'm fighting for, that are an absolute must, that if I don't get those, I'm willing to. And then you map out like how far you would go and then you map out what your breaking point is. You should go into a negotiation knowing all of those things. Now, there's always going to be surprises and things you didn't expect or an outcome that maybe you didn't think of ahead of time. All that, for sure, for sure, for sure. But you should have that kind of stuff mapped out. I think the thing that would really surprise, maybe not our community, because I do feel like we collect A pretty bright group of engaged people. But the average person, I think, would be very surprised to see the gap between the way politicians present themselves and the way they really are.

• 42:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the really are, the behind the scenes, all the negotiations, that kind of stuff are, yeah, they'll, neither side cares. If the American people are suffering, both of them will say that's all they care about. The reality is they want to get reelected and so they've got a position, they've got a spin. Now, I think they also both have agendas that they are trying to push through, like if you're gonna play the game, play the game. And so all of the rock star people are gonna make a lot of noise around what they're trying to do. They won't all pass bills, but they'll all make a lot of noise, the rock stars. So the rock stars get it, I've gotta show leadership, I've gotta say, we should be doing this thing. This is the part that Mam Donnie is very good at, is he's able to articulate the outcome that he wants.

• 42:44Tom Bilyeu?

  He is retarded and therefore does not understand how he's actually going to get you there. But he at least can say like, oh, this, I'm gonna get you free stuff. Okay, great. So he can make a lot of noise, he can go up, he can argue, he's good at debate and that he knows how to obfuscate. People will say that he's a weak debater from the perspective of he's not gonna be able to argue cause and effect. Because that's not what he's about. Once you understand that's not what he's about and that he understands him. It's better to think of him as an entertainer who is very good at emotionally moving people. And his rap genre now is politics. And so you've got gangster rappers, you've got pop rappers like Will Smith, and you've got political rappers like Mam Donnie.

• 43:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And their game is to go out and say things that make people feel a certain way and that's that. He's very good at that, very talented. And this is where I think people make a mistake, obviously, when I say he's retarded, I mean that tongue in cheek, he is quite smart. So that is, you wanna make sure that you understand how your opponent really is, that you can really think of this. But anyway, people would be very surprised to see that their politicians are just wildly different creatures. When they're not having to pose for the populace.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Do you think that, I don't know if this is the populist moment, agenda or not, but do you think the spreadsheet politician can be elected? Is there, is that possible? Cause I feel like. The best politicians that I can remember over the last twenty years have always been vibes. The actor Ronald Reagan, like to Obama, to even Trump, he's an entertainer. He was a reality TV show.

• 44:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Vibes is always gonna be a part of it for sure.

• 44:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Chemistry is a big deal. And so having chemistry with the country, having chemistry in backroom deals, all of that stuff goes a long, long way. Watching the All In Podcast deal with Trump was really fascinating because even Jason Calacanis, you could see he was struggling. He found Trump charming, but he didn't want to say that I found Trump charming. So it was fun to see that. But you, that's just how politicians are. Like when you sit down with them, if they're just pure spreadsheet, and I'm gonna guess, I don't know Thomas Massey well at all, but given that he wears the debt pin, I'm gonna guess this is him, that he's like the spreadsheet guy. And so when you're with them, it's probably a little spectrum-y.

• 45:08Tom Bilyeu?

  There isn't the charm and charisma that you're gonna get with an AOC. Like, did you see AOC? First of all, super attractive. Second, she's got her hair like coiffed over to the side. She's like, I've got some tea for you, right? And she spills the gossip. And I was like, I'm entertained right now. There is something, even though I think her policies are murderous, she is engaging. So it's like, eh. Anyway, the point that I'm trying to make with all of those decorations is that there is, there is a wild difference between what they're gonna be like privately, the way they think about the world, which would disgust people, the way that they'll use people as pawns, manipulate them, move them around the chessboard, all of that,

• 45:52Tom Bilyeu?

  and the way that they present themselves. I think about this a lot as a CEO. So no one will believe anything you say now because you're on camera and you're sitting next to me, but I know this to be true. So if somebody gets sick, for instance, I really do want them to rest. And so even though it slows the company down or whatever, like, one, it's what I want to do and I don't want to treat anybody on my team differently than I would want to be treated. So I'm going to extend to people the thing I want extended to me. So. If somebody's sick, I'm gonna say, hey, let me know how I can help. I'd go get somebody. Or if I'm being really honest, I would send somebody to go get you chicken broth, if that's who you needed. I want you to sleep in and get your rest. And so for me, my like ultimate game is I want to earn my own respect.

• 46:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And so a huge part of earning my own respect is being who I am outward facing and inward facing. Now, listen, I talk to my wife in a way that I would never talk if I were on camera. So don't think that I don't have gears. I definitely have gears. But in terms of my value system and what I believe and don't believe.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  You're consistent across.

• 46:56Tom Bilyeu?

  It's very consistent. And so people would be like, oh, wow, like he, um, he's much more playful when he's with his wife. Like I'm the, the number of times I will be silly on camera will be very low compared to how often I'm silly in real life. Because my wife has rewarded me to no end because she loves that side of my personality. So anyway, politicians are not like that.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Let's go to that AOC clip that you brought up about the tea. So for those that don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been pivoting recently about the government shutdown. She was on The View. She's been very vocal in opposition about some of the Republican policies, just as she was about Democratic policies.

• 47:32Tom Bilyeu?

  People can change.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  AOC says she has a reason behind her sudden switch.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Here's some tea for you.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  MTG, people are like, oh, my God, she's saying all of these things like what's gotten into her lately? Oh, like she's bucking against Trump. She's bucking against the administration. Marjorie Taylor Greene wanted to run for Senate in Georgia. She wanted to run for Senate earlier this year in the state of Georgia. She wanted to be the Republican nominee for Senate.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  So she was gearing up for that statewide race and Trump told her no.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Trump said no. And the White House and Trump land shut down Marjorie Taylor Greene's personal ambitions to run for Senate. And she has been on revenge tour ever since.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Um, so that's the reason for the sudden switch. It's, it's weird hearing it the behind the scenes because we're all like, nah, they're probably doing this behind scenes. This is probably a political move. And then hearing somebody like AOC come out and say, yes, this is definitely a political move.

• 48:45Tom Bilyeu?

  This is one of the things, I don't know whether I love this or hate this. Uh, but the social media age, the fact that we're gonna hear ultimately so much of this stuff come out. Uh, is God, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't here for it. I want the tea like.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Give me all the tea.

• 49:01Tom Bilyeu?

  When she like leaned in, I was like, yeah, you go girl, you tell me.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  She did look good too. Oh my goodness.

• 49:06Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm not gonna lie, she is very attractive and we can all be mad that uh, God sought fit to uh, make us care, but we care. And so she knows how to play it. God bless her.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  How do we quantify that? I know you're, you're Mr. Metric, you always want KPIs to kind of steer us toward. Is there a KPI we can put in in Congress? I know we joke about the Warren Buffett thing every time the deficit is too much, everybody gets fired.

• 49:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, I am not joking. They should do that.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  That is good, but everybody would get fired. They, that's like me, that's like me advocating for policy at Impact Theory, like if our numbers don't get to a million, I get fired like.

• 49:39Tom Bilyeu?

  They, they will do whatever they need to to get elected and so they would cut the budget. And they would just be like, we're not gonna get reelected unless we trim the budget.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  After we fire this whole wave of people.

• 49:51Tom Bilyeu?

  They're never gonna do it because they don't want to put that restriction on themselves. But in terms of it generating the behavior that we want, it would. And so that's one of those, this is how you get a small government light touch. You put a regulation like that, that's just, it's blind. And so your favorite uh, politician may get caught in the crossfire. And it's like, yep, tough break is what it is. And if you're willing to live and die by those policies, cool.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Also, outside of the fiscal one, is there something we can do where it's? The government has been shut down more than this time. People need it like I just feel like we're gonna they're gonna end up signing something. Somebody's gonna cave. And then in six months, a year, two years, whatever that number is, we're gonna be back here again. Just like the debt ceiling conversation. Every eighteen months, we're having that argument. Is there something mechanistically you think we should put in that can kind of prevent that? Um, I'm just trying to figure out how we can fix Congress without firing everybody through a dictatorship and going straight Mao or just like killing and reinstalling a bunch of other people like.

• 50:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, there are things that you could do mechanistically. I I'll give you ideas. It's entirely possible that the Constitution blocks some of what I'm gonna say. So this is where I'm not a constitutional scholar, so it's it is very possible that the things I'm gonna put forward are like a business guy thinking through these problems, not a politician. Uh, so but you could do things like you put dead hand switches. So if the government is shut down for more than X number of days, budgets get cut in the following ways to bring us back to solvency and the government automatically reopens. Uh, so for instance, if you said something like, um, every department is cut in equal measure with the exclusion of the Department of Defense and whatever, pick a the entitlements.

• 51:36Tom Bilyeu?

  With some sort of like caveat, right? So it's like if they're over X percent of the budget and it's not wartime, then they can still be cut up to this amount. Like you'd have to get pretty specific. But if you had a dead hand switch like that, then unless one of the parties is like, that's what we actually want. Um, and that's the only way that we can get it, then nobody's gonna let the government go that long. Now, admittedly, my biases are leaking like crazy. Because my brain goes to what is a dead hand switch that I would want? Uh, because that's also one of the things that's happening right now, at least at the level of rumor, is one of the things that's being said is that there's a certain number of days. I forget how many, but it's not that many. It's like forty-five or something.

• 52:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And Trump is able to, or the administration, whatever administration's in power, is able to start making permanent layoffs. And so it's entirely possible that the Republicans are like, well. We went either way. So either we rebuff all of their desire to grow the budget in ways that Republicans don't like.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Extend the ACA, roll back some of the big bill cuts, yeah.

• 52:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. Or we get all the way to we get to start firing people and now we can actually start tightening up the government.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Those doze effects that we wanted to do that were overturned can now be done free hand.

• 52:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Exactly. And I'll be honest, I want to see the size of government reduced so dramatically, so dramatically. So yeah, I, I am, it, look, doing it all at once is probably a bad idea. I would much rather, in reality, I would much rather see it happen slowly. But if you back me into a corner, I would rather see it happen fast, deal with whatever pain that causes over the next two or three years. Uh, and have it permanently be smaller than it never happened. Uh, and again, what is the metric I'm steering by? The thriving middle class as defined by just what percentage of Americans are in a well-defined middle class.

• 53:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, I'm not trying to pull a fast one, like the, the middle class is everything. The life is so much better when the middle class is thriving. It's better for the wealthy, it's better for obviously the middle class. So it's like, dude, uh, I don't understand how people have lost sight of when somebody's in the middle class and they earned their way there, like the euphoric vibes of like, not only did I get here, but I earned my way here.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  I think there's going to be some permanent damage from this because just like Secretary Duffy said, you know, a month without a paycheck is hard for everybody, like 60% of Americans can't afford a thousand dollar, um, emergency bill. I don't know how many percentage of Americans can afford missing two paychecks, but I feel like that number is higher than 60%. Like they're going to feel some reasonable pain.

• 54:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, they're gonna feel a lot of pain, yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we extend to the 45 days and then those people are now permanently cut. Let's say in a perfect world they get back pay, but now they have lost their job.

• 54:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Is this similar to the AI utopia that we've been pitching as well, where there's just going to be a waft of pain? Then hopefully they can find purpose and the private sector can kind of help out on the other side of that. But we're just gonna have to go through that valley of the second and third year of the Trump administration will kind of have breadlines. And then by year four, everybody's back to humming like, because we can't act like, you know, 40% of GDP disappearing. Is gonna just make like people just walk into Walmart and get a job like there's gonna be some some pain there.

• 55:03Tom Bilyeu?

  There's gonna be some pain there. It could have a psychological effect where people lose confidence in the markets. That is for sure.

• 55:11Tom Bilyeu?

  It is one of those where there is no way out of the situation that we're in right now without pain. There is no way. There is no way. So now it just becomes a question of how

• 55:23Tom Bilyeu?

  effectively can we deploy a beautiful deleveraging? And I will say the chances that we do a beautiful deleveraging aren't approaching zero. They are zero.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Oh, hundred percent like it's never happened.

• 55:36Tom Bilyeu?

  We we psychologically do not have the makeup in America to do that. So we're in a position where beautiful deleveraging is not going to work. Uh, no one's even gonna try it. So the only thing that we're gonna try right now is growth. That's it. We're gonna try to grow our way out of this. And remember that if the Democrat Party gets their way, that they will accelerate the demise because the demise is very simple to map out. It is how much are you deficit spending?

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And when you say accelerate that demise, like you're just saying they're gonna be spending more money at a faster rate than the Democrats.

• 56:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so it is money we don't have.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying to make it completely clear.

• 56:16Tom Bilyeu?

  They're they're gonna they're gonna deficit spend and they will deficit spend even faster than the lunatic Republican Party. So now you have a problem where you you lose in both ways. Just one way you lose a little bit faster. So there is right now, I will credit Trump with, he's at least delusional enough to believe that he can grow his way out of this and he is trying to grow his way out of this. Um, I don't see any way to grow your way out of the problem unless you balance the budget first. If he balanced, like if the big beautiful bill had balanced the budget and then he was doing all these things, I would then actually become the pro-Trump guy that people think I already am.

• 56:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Because I'd be like, okay, we have a balanced budget. So now we've stopped all the bleeding. So we're no longer damaging the middle class and the working class and we're gonna try to grow GDP. Now, I think The way that he would grow GDP would not match my ideal scenario. Uh, but nonetheless, at least we would be moving in the right direction and that 122% of debt to GDP ratio would start going down. So if that were the case, I'd be like, yes, he is unhinged. Yes, he has authoritarian tendencies, but he's at least bringing back a thriving middle class. And by the way, I don't think he has the authoritarian, the amplitude of authoritarian impulses that people try to map him to. So he's, I don't believe he's ever gonna go anywhere near down the path of Hitler. I don't think.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  He's doing his best to try though with the National Guard marches through the parks and.

• 57:46Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think so. It's not even close. This is, have you watched?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  To look like it.

• 57:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So first of all, read Mein Kampf. Read Mein Kampf and you're gonna be like, oh, I get it. There's a real scale problem here. Uh, and then second, look at the footage of Hitler. Bro. So if politics are a genre of rap, he was gangster rap. Like, it was wild.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  He wasn't smiling and waving like my.

• 58:15Tom Bilyeu?

  He was, he was unbelievably effective at deranging people and getting them to get behind murderous ideology. It was wild. And when you listen to him, like, uh, imagine Nick Fuentes, but like really good at like big marches. Put Nick on meth and you're maybe for real. He was a total speed addict. Whether it was meth or not, I don't, I don't think it was meth, but he was a speed addict. He was totally out of his fucking mind, but he had a very clear, unflinching,

• 58:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I know the way, I'm gonna get you guys all out of this. Like, it's gotta be me or nothing else. Um, yeah, he, he was wild, dude. He was looking at, from the beginning, he was looking at Russia and saying, they're gonna be our American dream. So the Ukraine is gonna be our American West. And Germans are gonna get to spread into the Ukraine and live on the frontier and take over all of that. And it's gonna be amazing. Now, listen, Trump says wacky shit about Canada being the 51st state. But he's not saying, I can't fathom, even in the darkest of closed rooms, that he's saying to somebody, that's our, Canada's our new American West.

• 59:41Tom Bilyeu?

  We're just gonna expand in. He had his goal for Greenland for when he- We're gonna take everything. So Greenland is a military installation. And he always approaches it from, your country is doing you dirty, we will do you well. Uh, you're important to us anyway. These are bad things. I hated it when he was doing it then. If he starts doing it again now, I hate it. Uh, what he's doing in Venezuela is horrifying. I wish he would just talk about fucking China, so we could at least understand this is just about China. It's not about the oil, I don't think, partly, I guess. But like, the big play is, uh, China can't have you. That's the big play.

• 1:00:21Tom Bilyeu?

  So now, at least if he were being honest about what's going on, we could say, okay, do we wanna be bullies like that? And then, I'm gonna say, no motherfucker, we don't. Get better policies. Get better policies. That's how we win people over. We don't try to out-China the world. We don't try to strong-arm and bully and all that shit. Be savvy, like you were in World War I and World War II. Where you're like, we are the greatest manufacturer on planet Earth. We know our worth. And dear Europe, if you guys wanna keep killing each other, that's your business. We'll fund the shit out of it, we'll loan you money, we'll give you weapons, and we'll get rich off this while you fucking destroy yourselves. If America wants to play that game, I'm here for it. If America wants to be some asshole bully that's running around the world, slapping everybody around, putting

• 1:01:06Tom Bilyeu?

  fifty million dollar bounties on Maduro's head. Uh, bro, that shit is fucking Wild West. So this is not me saying, oh, I dig Trump, I like the way- No. What I'm saying is, he's not Hitler. So, he's got his own set of problems.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  All right, let's jump over to the UK now where Tommy Robinson beat the terrorism charges. The judge was blistering in his criticism of the police, saying their testimony lacked credibility and that they in fact targeted Tommy for political reasons, which is illegal. Incredible outcome. This is a journalist from the Rebel News over in the UK.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Ezra Levand here for Rebel News. I'm standing outside Westminster Magistrates Court. Huge news today, Tommy Robinson acquitted of charges under the Terrorism Act. The judge blistering in his criticism of the police, saying they lacked credibility and their testimony could not be relied on. In fact, the judge went further, saying that he believes that the primary reason the police arrested, detained and interrogated Tommy in the first place was because of his political views, which is a protective characteristic in the UK. That is, you can't go after someone just because of their politics or their religion. And in fact, the police had no recollection of any questions they asked about terrorism. The judge particularly blurted about that.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  It's very encouraging for Tommy to be acquitted, because sometimes you feel like you have to give up on the system, that maybe Tommy can't get a fair trial anywhere in the UK. Today is proof that sometimes the system does work.

• 1:02:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I have to say, this is very encouraging. What, I mean, this is the ultimate values debate is playing out right now in Europe. And Tommy has sort of become the firebrand at the center of it all. And seeing them go after him, seeing them lose faith in themselves as a nation, as a British identity, not a white identity, but a British identity, is, that's been hard. I have so much family over there. So, yeah, I mean, we'll see. I don't know if they're going to be able to back out of this or not, but it is certainly, this is a tick in the right side, for sure.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  As we were joking earlier at the show, like you move into Florida, things like that, Lisa was in the chat like, yeah, moving to the UK is not an option. So even with family ties, I would never go there.

• 1:03:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, the funny- Thing is, I doubt she was saying that for political reasons. When I met her and none of this was on our radar as something to be concerned about at all. She was like, get me out of here. I was actually, uh, I loved it because I, I not only grew up in America, I grew up on the west coast of America in the northwest. So, and not even in a city and like a small like town, sort of. Um, and it was going to London for the first time was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Like you can never sort of re-experience that first time you see something truly different. And I said, I was like in hysterics laughing because I was just so excited. Uh, and I was like, being here is like being on the set of Mary Poppins.

• 1:04:13Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm like, this is so wild to see all the roofs and, you know, that look in that like classic British way of just house after house, after house, after house, with all the chimneys and they're all in a line. Uh, it was just so surreal. Um, but it was awesome and I worked in central London, so I was commuting into the center of London every day. And was just like, this is amazing public transport. First of all, this was like, um, just one of the most fascinating. I was reading Clive Barker at the time. Clive Barker is a British author and he, it was a book set in London. Oh man, just like all of it was so cool to me. And so I was like, I don't know if you want to like stay here for a year, I'd be open. And she's like, absolutely not. She is like, we are leaving right now.

• 1:04:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So as a Greek girl, she just could not stand the gloom. So for me, I grew up in Tacoma, Washington. There's only two places on planet earth. This is one I probably should fact check, but I read once from a lord knows if it's a, um, reliable source. But I read once, there's only two places in the world that have a marine climate. And that's the Pacific Northwest and London. And I was like, oh yeah, like this is so recognizable being in the UK. I'm like, this is exactly what it felt like growing up. She might be right, it might be a little more sort of damp. But Tacoma's very similar, very similar.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Um, we talked about this at the beginning of the show. A new sub nano night light ray wireless brain implant just recorded activity in awake mice for a year. That's crazy. No wires, no battery, light powers it. Um, light transmits data, the brain machine merger is near. So they kind of show that they made this like they insert this nano into the mice's brain. It has sending signals to a computer in which they were able to measure like processing power and things like that. So I know we already have, um, what Elon Musk is doing and how he's already doing in Neuralink and then already implanting it into patients. Now we have this nano, um, technology emerging as well. It seems like we're going to have augmented brain activity, definitely next five, 10 years, it seems like.

• 1:06:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so you already have it. It's just a question of safety. It's a question of the risk. So when you've got somebody that's a quadriplegic and it's like, well, either you are totally, uh, inoperable and people have to do everything for you. Or we can do this risky thing and we can put electrodes in your brain and we can allow you to, uh, move a robotic arm and move, uh, play video games, move a wheelchair, all that kind of stuff. Obviously if you're a quadriplegic or you have ALS and you're just deteriorating by the day, it's like, yeah, I'll bypass all that bullshit and go straight into essentially living in a virtual world. Now you can live in the virtual world or you can come back out and via the virtual world, live back in the physical world with robotics and all that.

• 1:07:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That is a no brainer for anybody in that. Now, what I think you're getting to is when will a healthy human begin augmenting themselves? That's not going to be in five to seven years. That's going to be in 10 to 15 years. But it will happen and it will like, if you have a five year old, it might happen before they graduate high school.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:07:21Tom Bilyeu?

  So it, it's like, when you get it in that perspective of how near term it is, it's like, oh, whoa. Like this is transformative. Remember Elon is estimating AGI is coming in the next 24 to 36 months. Uh, AGI is effectively the thing that is going to usher in, um, a SI because AGI would be, you can have as many humans as you want, as, as many as you can produce the compute for. But you would be able to bring on, call it.

• 1:07:55Tom Bilyeu?

  10 million Einsteins. What does the world look like when you have 10 million Einsteins? Right? Like that's, bro, that's wild.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  What's the moat? Is it just waiting until it catches on?

• 1:08:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Energy and compute for altering our own brains.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  For healthy humans to say, yeah.

• 1:08:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Safety and utility. So right now, cutting your brain open is about the most dangerous thing you can do. There's a saying in brain science, it's like, once air touches the brain, it's never the same again. So you wanna keep that thing locked down as tight as you can. Now, as we get better at that, like my mother-in-law had brain surgery and I was just on a loop. She's one of my favorite human beings, on a loop. I was like, once air touches the brain, it's never the same again. And I was just like expecting her to be different. She is 100% the same. And dude, literally thoughts and prayers. Like, bro, I was like,

• 1:08:50Tom Bilyeu?

  yeah, I was beside myself with that result. I was just so, so, so hoping for. So anyway, years ago now, and she's normal. So hopefully, that's a sign that things are just getting better and better. And as more of these people get these implants, I think it'll take a good five to seven years for there to be even several hundred of them. And so that's why these kind of things, like getting the approvals and all that stuff, that really does take time. But you start getting out to 10, 15 years, you probably see the first small handful of people augmenting their brains. Now, someone like me, when am I gonna do it? It's like first gen tech is always pretty weak. So it's like, I don't wanna look like a cyborg. I just wanna feel like one.

• 1:09:33Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm probably in the 20 to 30 year range where I start going, yeah, 80, like, you know.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  When the Neuralink 17 Pro comes out, that's when I'll grab it.

• 1:09:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So I think most people will wait quite a ways, but it's really gonna happen. All right, everybody. Until next time, my friends. Be legendary. See you guys on Friday. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water and you're done.

• 1:10:24Tom Bilyeu?

  You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics. Nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements. And perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2 and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.