Elon Musk EXPOSED The Biggest Scam In History (Joe Rogan Couldn’t Believe It)

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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. In fiscal year 2023, federal agencies reported $236 billion in improper payments. And that's not a one-off. In fiscal year 2024, after massive post-COVID reductions,

• 1:23Tom Bilyeu?

  16 federal agencies alone still reported an estimated $162 billion in improper payments. Since fiscal year 2003, cumulative improper payment estimates across the federal government are nearly $3 trillion. That's 8% of the entire federal deficit. Pretty soon, it's going to start being real money. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office, the $3 trillion in improper payments we can account for are just a subset of the total problem. The real number is almost certainly much higher.

• 2:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But even if it's not much more, that still accounts for roughly 10% of the entire national debt. Deficit. That is the definition of gross incompetence. But here we are. And the madness does not stop there. The Social Security Administration's Office of Inspector General found approximately 6.5 million social security numbers belong to people, get ready, 112 years or older. You want to know the real number? It's 80, not 80 million or 80,000. It's just 80. That's 81,000 times more than the reality. It's actually more, I'm rounding down. That's five orders of magnitude of discrepancy.

• 2:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so far off, it's a comedy routine. It is as if the government is designed to make fraud easy and racist towards bankruptcy. To put it plainly, we are getting robbed and not by scammers overseas, by our own government. Elon and Doge tried to warn us, but what they got in return was firebomb Tesla dealerships and uniparty bipartisan support for continued spending, no matter how much waste or fraud there is inherent in the system. Now, I want to stare directly at that because it's never hopeless. All of this is fixable if we can understand what's happening, call it out and map out a plan.

• 3:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Right now, the machine is rigged to ignore, if not facilitate, waste, fraud, and further destructive political outcomes. But it doesn't have to be. All right, guys, buckle up because this one gets ugly, but salvation awaits at the end. Parts one and two may be the valley of despair, but by the end, you're going to know exactly what's going on and what to do about it. And as G I Joe taught us all, knowing is half the battle. So welcome to part one. What's really going on and why? In 2022, the federal House and Senate election cycle cost approximately $9.5 billion. The median amount raised by a senator

• 4:14Tom Bilyeu?

  running for reelection in 2024 was approximately $11 million.

• 4:20Tom Bilyeu?

  That's roughly $15,000 a day. Almost 93% of the members of the 117th Congress had a leadership PAC that collectively raised $243 million just between January of 21 and December of 22. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, fewer than 50 families supply the majority of mega donor funding in US elections. A closed feedback loop of money, policy, and media reach. And in 2023 alone, federal lobbying topped $4 billion. This is the tragedy that has turned Washington DC into a swamp of entrenched political interests

• 5:04Tom Bilyeu?

  and has turned governing into a game of self-preservation rather than public service. And that's why 1/3 of senators have held office longer than the median American marriage lasts. Politics is a business and its product is power. And baby, business is booming. As James Burnham pointed out in his seminal work, "The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom", every group, no matter how big or small, will create an elite ruling class. Burnham calls this "the iron law of oligarchy". I created a whole video about it, which you can watch right here. But for now, suffice it to say that Burnham makes a very compelling case

• 5:48Tom Bilyeu?

  for the fact that every organization, no matter how idealistic it starts, eventually serves the people running it, not the people it was actually designed to help. Sound familiar? The government that was once "for the people, by the people" has become a giant parasite, stealing our money through inflation, making it impossible for the young to get on the property ladder, and forcing us to pay our hard-earned money towards the insane amount of interest we have on our insane amount of debt. Left alone, that's just how things go. The longer any organization runs, the more energy goes into keeping power instead of wielding power to help those Paying into the system.

• 6:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Hence, the massive immune response to Doge, whose sole function was to reduce government waste, fraud and abuse at a time when the country is literally careening towards bankruptcy and must, as a matter of survival, find a way to balance the budget. To stay in office, you need two things. Votes and the money to get those votes. Once you start looking at the government's relentless deficit spending through that lens, it all starts to make sense. The deficit spending is not designed to help people, and it most certainly doesn't. At least not in the long run. It is, however, designed to help politicians get re-elected.

• 7:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Make no mistake, both the left and the right will shovel subsidies, grants and contracts towards donors and districts that can bankroll them. They will throw the borders open, outlaw showing ID to vote, keep dead people on the social security rolls and inflate census counts with illegal immigrants just to stay in power. They will happily drive all of us off a fiscal cliff as long as they get to be in the driver's seat as we go over the edge. And they will rebel against anything that threatens the flow of money. Now, with all of that in mind, let's look at Musk's recent claims on the Joe Rogan experience of rampant fraud

• 7:59Tom Bilyeu?

  and waste in the government.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  The scam level here is so staggering. So there are hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments from the federal government to the states. Those transfer payments, the states self-report what those transfer payment numbers should be. So California and New York and Illinois lie like crazy and say that these are all legitimate payments. Well, these days that I think they're even admitting that they literally want hundreds of billions of dollars for illegals. But for a while there, they're trying to deny it.

• 8:46Tom Bilyeu?

  To speedrun Elon's argument, it goes something like this. The whole game is to gain and retain political power. You do that by increasing your state's headcount. Because the census is coming in 2030, and a state's congressional seats and presidential electoral votes are determined, not by the number of citizens you have, but merely by the number of people physically present in your state at the time of the census. The more immigrants, illegal or otherwise, the better. But you have to do something to gain and retain the immigrants. And that thing is to make government assistance available, by any means, even fraud. But you have to get into the official system somehow to make things work.

• 9:30Tom Bilyeu?

  That's where the Social Security Administration comes in.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  But so let me tell you how the scam works. It's a bank shot. So the Social Security Administration database is used as the source of truth by all the other databases that the government uses. So even if they stop the payments on the Social Security Administration database, like unemployment insurance, Small Business Administration, student loans, all check the Social Security Administration database to say, is this a legitimate, alive person? And the Social Security database will say, yes, this person is still alive, even though they're 200 years old. But forget to mention that they're 200 years old. It just says, it just returns,

• 10:12Speaker 01

  when the computer queries, it says, yes, this person is alive. And so then they're able to exploit the entire rest of the government ecosystem.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  So then you get fake student loans, then you get fake unemployment insurance, then you get fake medical payments.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  And this doesn't have to be tied to an individual where there's an address where you can check on this person?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  No, if you did, if you just did any check at all, you would stop this.

• 10:38Tom Bilyeu?

  People take advantage of fraudulent or erroneous social security numbers to get inside the system. Once inside the system, the person can get access to a whole host of government assistance programs: Medicaid, EBT, student loans, unemployment, and more. Potentially hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned via this indirect "bank shot", as Elon calls it. The fraud and waste is coming from both professional criminals who exploit the holes in the system, but also, much of the misappropriated money is the states themselves trying to redirect federal dollars to fund things like migrant housing and luxury hotels that the average American couldn't afford.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  So what's going on right now is, they have been funding these people, they've been giving them EBT cards, they've been giving them Medicaid.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  They were taking hotels, like four and five-star hotels, like the Roosevelt Hotel being the classic example, was, they were sending, I think, $60 million a year to the Roosevelt Hotel, to, which, all it did was, was house illegals.

• 11:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Again, the goal is to gain and retain power by drawing in immigrants with open borders and financial assistance. But you can't just get them here. You've got to create a path for them to vote. This is being done in two ways. First, in some states like New York and California, lawmakers have made it illegal to ask for ID to vote. Not that it's just not required, that would be bad enough. It's actively illegal to ask to see someone's ID when they're trying to vote. And according to Elon, that's not the only type of fraud being perpetrated on the American people. There's also the case of what he calls zombie payments.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Because what we found was that there were tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that were zombie payments. So there, like, somebody had approved a payment, uh, somebody in the government approved a payment, um, and, uh, some recurring payment, and, um, they retired or died or changed jobs, and no one turned the money off.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  So the money would just keep going out. And it's a pretty rare-

• 12:48Speaker 02

  And go where?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  To a company or an individual. And it's a pretty rare company or individual who will complain that they're getting money that they should not get.

• 13:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Once a recurring payment starts, they rarely stop. Billions of dollars quietly just drain away. And this is coming from both sides of the aisle. This is a big part of the reason that Elon got so much pushback from both the Republicans and the Democrats when he was attempting to reduce government spending. Both sides are benefiting from the flow of money and using it to help them get reelected. So no one wants it to stop.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  The entire basis for the government shutdown is that the Trump administration correctly does not want to send massive amounts of like hundreds of billions of dollars to fund illegal immigrants in the blue states, or in all the states really. And so the, and Democrats want to keep the money spigot going to incent illegal immigrants to come into the US who will vote for them.

• 14:01Tom Bilyeu?

  According to Musk, a state like California would go bankrupt if it wasn't for the money it manages to pull from the federal government.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  New York and California would be bankrupt without the massive fraudulent federal payments that go to those states to pay for illegals.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  How would they be bankrupt because of that?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  They wouldn't be able to balance their state budgets and they can't issue currency like the Federal Reserve can.

• 14:24Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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 tees, which I wear obsessively.

• 15:06Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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.

• 15:48Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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.

• 16:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. That's insane. Despite having the fifth largest economy in the world, if it were counted as a country, California can't even break even. That is how much waste there is, even at the state level, which then puts additional strain on the federal government, which then forces them to print more money, which hurts the poor and middle class the most. And not by a little, it hurts them more by a lot. It is the very reason we have such wild wealth inequality and effectively two separate economies, to have assets and to have nots. They're living in different worlds right now. And I want to remind everyone right now,

• 17:36Tom Bilyeu?

  neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are fighting to stop the flow of fraud and abuse. In fact, my one beef with Elon is that he paints this as more of a partisan issue than it probably is. He claims 80% of the abuse is coming from the Democrats, but I haven't heard anything other than vibes to back that up. But even if in the end that ends up being true, I still think it is critical for people to understand that the big, beautiful bill is a disaster that will bankrupt this country, and the Democrats want to make it even worse. Now, it's not an endorsement of the Republican Party, because they're keeping it a little tighter. It's a condemnation of them both. The reality is that the scams will continue because they work for everyone in power.

• 18:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Democrats defend their sanctuary cities, welfare pipelines, and NGO networks, and Republicans guard their subsidies, defense contracts, and donor-funded projects. Different routes to the same destination of self-preservation and continued rule. This is what Burnham was warning about when discussing the iron law of oligarchy. Every organization, once entrenched, will bend towards protecting its own continuity. Washington isn't malfunctioning. It is following the laws of political physics, where everyone is just trying to stay in office. The people who could fix the fraud are the same ones benefiting from it. So, good luck. They can't turn it off without starving their own reelection machines.

• 19:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And getting elected and reelected is the entire point. So when Musk describes the bank shot, he's not just exposing a computer glitch. He's showing us the operating system of modern politics, a self-feeding cycle where fraud, waste, and dependency are the lubricant that keeps the gears of power turning. If we do not balance the budget, by any means necessary, we will create a catastrophe for everyone. It is not kind or humane to bleed the country dry of her economic resources. That will not spare the poor. It allows you to pretend, for a bit, that you don't have a problem,

• 19:47Tom Bilyeu?

  but there is a financial asteroid racing towards Earth, and it will smash into all of us if we don't do something dramatic immediately. So, welcome to part two. Why this is so dangerous, especially right now. Compounding interest and deficit spending has now pushed the national debt over $38 trillion and climbing. That is a burden of over $275,000 per taxpayer. Roughly 25% of all federal revenue will go to paying interest on the debt in less than a decade, a reality we are unlikely to survive economically. According to the 2025 CBO budget outlook,

• 20:32Tom Bilyeu?

  mandatory spending plus interest on the debt already eats a full 77% of the entire federal budget, leaving just 23% for everything else, from defense to infrastructure. For anyone who thinks that we can tax our way out of this, please consider this. For every dollar of new tax revenue we have generated since 2019, Washington has added $1.58 in new spending. We do not have a revenue problem. We are already the richest country on Earth. We have a spending problem. If no matter how much you make, you spend more,

• 21:16Tom Bilyeu?

  you can be as rich as you want and still go broke. According to the Social Security Trustees' report, Social Security's trust fund will run dry by 2033. Stop for a second. That's only seven years from now. And it will force an automatic cut of nearly 25% to all Social Security benefits. Imagine being an elderly person and going from, "I can barely make ends meet," to "Would you like fries with that?" That's what a 25% reduction means. Despite the largest tax receipts in history, the US government still runs deficits larger than any pre-pandemic wartime period. Than any wartime period.

• 22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And people still present tax increases as the solution. Drug addicts don't need more money to stay out of trouble. They need to stop taking drugs. America doesn't need more tax revenue. We need to stop spending more than we make. The level of absurdity has hit parity levels. But it isn't parity. We are letting our politicians rob us blind. In fact, we are voting for it. Let's look at this through an analogy. Imagine a machine that prints money. Not fake-looking monopoly cash. I'm talking, these look like real dollars that the whole planet accepts. Whoever controls that machine is going to be the richest and most powerful person on Earth.

• 22:46Tom Bilyeu?

  They can buy favors, buy votes, delay consequences, paper over mistakes, and spend way more than they make because they can just print more money. That's Washington's literal superpower. They have that machine. We have the world's reserve currency. And that gives us the ability to legally counterfeit our own money. But here's the iron law of economic gravity. Printing money makes it less valuable, and even printed money carries interest that has to be paid. You can dilute your currency, and you can rack up the debt, but you can't avoid the all-consuming power of compounding interest.

• 23:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Eventually, it will eat your entire federal budget, and even if you confiscate 100% of the wealth of billionaires—or everybody, quite frankly—it only buys you a year or two, not to mention that would permanently kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. You get one nice meal, then you starve to death. So we are now caught in this weird double-whammy trap. If we allow fraud and waste to continue, and we don't balance the budget, we have to keep borrowing and printing to fund the gap. But if we keep borrowing and printing to fund the gap, we eventually break the confidence in the dollar, and then we can't borrow or print any more money, because no one will

• 24:09Tom Bilyeu?

  buy the new dollars, and that makes them instantly worthless. This happens to currencies around the world all of the time. Most people just quietly assume this can't happen to us, but it can and will. It's math. Even after the post-pandemic cleanup, some agencies still admitted to $162 billion of improper payments in fiscal year 2024 alone. That's bigger than many cabinet departments, and this is every year. And it's only a subset of the full problem. Medicaid and Medicare alone rack up $100 billion plus in improper payments annually,

• 24:50Tom Bilyeu?

  while demographics are pushing costs up and worker-to-retiree ratios down. So right now, every wasted dollar is another dollar we have to borrow. This is why the bankshot fraud problem matters so much, why immigration matters so much, why benefits have to be means-tested, and why we must assess the government through the lens of a bunch of people who will do whatever and spend whatever it takes to gain and retain power. They all just want to get re-elected.

• 25:26Tom Bilyeu?

  They'll promise free healthcare, free buses, more tax breaks, extra subsidies, etc. As if no one has to pay for anything. But we pay for all of it in the form of wealth inequality. It's a simple mechanism. The only way to shield yourself from the ravages of money printing caused inflation is to own assets. And 10% of Americans own 93% of all the assets. Not because they're mean, but because they understand the stock market and/or they got into property before homes just got too damn expensive, like they are right now due to horrible protectionist government policies designed to help politicians get re-elected.

• 26:11Tom Bilyeu?

  When political survival depends on pleasing voters and funders, you build benefits that start instantly, recur automatically, and are politically toxic to turn off. Recurring payments without hard end dates, transfers that scale with headcount, grants with fuzzy purpose fields, state pass-throughs where the state self-reported the need and the federal government automatically wires the cash with little to no oversight. That's where we are right now. You would also see resistance to obvious fixes like mandatory appropriation codes, required comment fields, pre-payment checks, auto sunsetting, recurring payments unless re-verified.

• 26:55Tom Bilyeu?

  You'd see that resistance because those controls interrupt the cash loop that helps incumbents. Both parties face the same physics. You need votes, and you need money to get those votes. Benefits create loyalty. Contracts create donations. Transfers create grateful districts. Remove any of that, and you've just volunteered to be the next ex-official. And that's why we have the system that we have. And for all the reasons previously discussed, our current system creates an intolerable amount of wealth inequality and intolerable levels of wealth inequality make societies unstable.

• 27:34Tom Bilyeu?

  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. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople

• 28:16Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it. So the question becomes, how do you escape a system where the political class is addicted to free money and purchases votes so that you can actually avoid the calamity racing towards us? Let's answer that right now in Part 3, "The Solution to Our Woes."

• 29:01Tom Bilyeu?

  According to the Department of Labor, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program overpaid by an estimated $191 billion, and only $11 billion has been clawed back. In fiscal year 2023 alone, improper Medicaid payments totaled $50.3 billion, and 82% of that was due to insufficient documentation. Same issue with Medicare. $51.7 billion in improper payments, largely due to bad documentation or medical necessity errors.

• 29:37Tom Bilyeu?

  The good news: Medicaid fraud control units recovered 1.4 billion in fiscal year 2024, and that's about $3.46 back per $1 spent. And according to the Government Accountability Office, the Treasury's "do not pay" system has flagged or stopped $22 billion in potentially improper payments since its creation, simply by cross-checking death records and eligibility files before money leaves federal accounts. Now, we need to focus on cleaning up the Social Security Administration's database to ensure there are fewer avenues for abuse and fraud. Now, the path that we're on right now is a dead end, but we only accelerate our demise if we embrace hopelessness.

• 30:21Tom Bilyeu?

  The leaks are measurable, the fraud and waste is trackable, and there really are plenty of solutions out there if we can only muster the political will to apply them. So here's how we do it in four steps. Step one: Focus on identity verification and data hygiene. The Social Security database, the one that every other agency relies on, is full of bad data. At least 6.5 million SSNs belong to people who are dead or haven't been born yet. Some tallies put the number of bad entries at close to 20 million. I've used really conservative numbers here to show that even at the low end, the problem is financially disastrous. Even if the true number is the lowest end of the spectrum,

• 31:04Tom Bilyeu?

  so many improper and fraudulent payments flow from bad entries in this database that has a matter of priority. We have to clean it up. To that end, we fund a one-time, all-hands cleanup effort. The SSA must reconcile its records with every state's death registry, the VA, the IRS, and anyone else who keeps vital data. Additionally, anything that can't be automatically verified using database queries or AI should be manually verified. Then, we publish the results every month on a national accuracy scorecard, celebrate the wins, and pressure the government to find solutions to the stubborn in data integrity.

• 31:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Once the data is clean, we lock it in as a real-time prepayment feed. Every agency has to check the updated alive status before they send money out the door. And any new recurring payment, social security, unemployment, disability, et cetera, should be set to automatically expire after 12 months unless someone re-verifies the eligibility. If the payment parameters are unable to be re-verified, the payment doesn't go out. Simple as that. We can no longer afford to default pay in the face of uncertainty. I understand the complications that that introduces, but they pale in comparison to the complications of going broke.

• 32:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Step two, we must create total transparency and AI-powered payment controls. When you've got the clean data, you've got to keep up with reporting and ensure AI-enforced guardrails are clamped down on the actual flow of cash. Every payment should have an appropriation code and a purpose line. No blank fields, no miscellaneous, no unspecified. If a payment doesn't have a reason attached to it, it does not get sent. The goal has to move from maximum convenience to maximum transparency and accountability. We live in the digital age, for God's sake. We need to stop pretending like we are carving stone tablets and we can't easily track and reconcile this stuff with technology.

• 33:11Tom Bilyeu?

  We can. We also need to end the ridiculous approach of pay now, chase later. That approach has cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars a year in improper payments and fraud. If the system is struggling to keep up, update the system. We literally had one of Earth's most effective technologists in the White House as a special government employee, and rather than embracing his suggestions, we fought him tooth and nail like a bunch of rich kids who think daddy will never run out of money. It is self-destructive. And here's the good news: AI works. When the Pentagon's travel card audit found over $103 million in questionable charges,

• 33:55Tom Bilyeu?

  the automated transaction monitoring was turned on, and it helped claw back $84 million. California also had a big win with AI, using it to flag duplicate unemployment claims, which blocked roughly $20 billion in suspected fraud in a matter of months. Step 3: We must means test everything, including immigration. This one's touchy, but non-negotiable if we want to avoid bankruptcy. Means testing is not cruel, it's not a punishment. It is simply making sure that people qualify for the aid and its fiscal discipline.

• 34:34Tom Bilyeu?

  No parent with any sense, no matter how wealthy, just keeps giving money to their kids. You set rules, you assess what they need, and you stick to it. No one should ever have the expectation of just getting free stuff. At least not until the robots turn us into a Kartishev Type 2 civilization. That is a whole different video. Assistance programs need to be thought of as launchpads, not hammocks. Their goal should be to get people back to being totally self-sufficient. Outside of seniors and the truly disabled, government help should be temporary by design. Get people back on their feet and contributing. Then move those dollars to someone else who needs them at that moment.

• 35:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And this most aggressively includes immigration, which should be both hyper-limited and means-tested. If we want to rescue people from foreign hardship, fantastic. But we have to do it from within a balanced budget. We cannot keep importing people with their hands out, using it to gain voters and calling it compassion. There should be no incentive, financial or political, to import cheap labor, people to pad the census, or create a new voting bloc built on dependency. In no uncertain terms, importing dependents will bankrupt this nation, and then nobody gets anything. And while it's beyond the scope of today's video, we also have got to stop financially punishing families.

• 36:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Intentionally, DSA, I'm looking at you, or otherwise. A strong family unit is the most effective welfare program in human history, and bad policy has been tearing that apart for decades. Step four: Balance the budget and vote smart. We have to balance the budget, not someday, right now. Because if we don't do it voluntarily, bankruptcy will do it for us. And bankruptcy is not kind to anyone. That means remembering that we don't have a tax revenue problem. We have a spending problem. History has proven, no matter how much we bring in in taxes, we spend even more.

• 36:41Tom Bilyeu?

  We have got to cut the deficit until spending grows slower than revenue. Revenue must overtake our deficit. Anything else is financial suicide. Additionally, we use, the only power that still scares Washington, our votes. And we have to use them far more wisely. In every election, we need to demand a pledge from our candidates. That's very simple. They're going to ensure a balanced budget and stop stealing from our children and marching us towards the cliff of bankruptcy. If they won't commit to that, they don't deserve our vote, period. And if someone served in office and didn't do their part to balance the budget, we need to seek candidates that will.

• 37:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, look, I am hyper-aware that there are political realities. But if we do not become obsessive about this issue, no other issues will matter. Financial health is like human health. A man with good health has many dreams. A man with poor health has but one: to get healthy. A country with healthy financials can pursue many goals. A country with poor financials can only pursue one. You've got to balance the budget. None of this is complicated, but it's also not political or ideological. It's just math. If we don't stop spending more money than we make in tax revenue, we will bankrupt the country. The dollar will collapse, and no one will get any benefits of any kind.

• 38:09Tom Bilyeu?

  That's the part that I think people keep missing. We're talking about something that's only seven to 10 years away. We need to act now, for no other reason than we must, if we want to continue to be compassionate, let alone a superpower with many dreams. All right. If you guys want to see me explore topics like this in real time, be sure to join me live Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 a.m. Pacific on YouTube, X, Twitch, and Kick. You can join the debate or just chill in the community. I hope to see you there. Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it.

• 38:54Tom Bilyeu?

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• 39:38Tom Bilyeu?

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