Are We Facing a Class Uprising? The Real Drivers Behind Economic Turmoil and Social Disorder | The Tom Bilyeu Show LIVE

Welcome to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In today's episode, we dive deep into the unfolding geopolitical crisis as the US blockades the Strait of Hormuz and Iran threatens retaliation, sending shockwaves through global energy markets. Speaker A and Speaker B unpack the diplomatic breakdowns, escalating military tactics, and what these mean for global oil supply and prices. The episode expands into the shifting alliances of America’s longtime partners, with nations like Spain and Canada reorienting toward China, signaling possible realignments in the world order. Beyond geopolitics, we unravel the economic repercussions hitting everyday Americans, from inflation to the growing wealth gap, and discuss the rising social unrest—from warehouse burnings to violent attacks on business leaders—that many now argue are signs of a class uprising. Speaker A and Speaker B confront the roots of economic hardship, debating redistribution versus growth, government deficits, and the looming threat of mass violence if structural reforms aren’t enacted. Expect candid analysis, passionate debate, and critical questions about the future of America and the world, as we explore how emotional responses, social media, and political policies are shaping the next era. Buckle up for a timely, unfiltered look at the intersection of war, economics, and social upheaval—there’s much more ahead on Impact Theory. 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 Blinkist: Start your free trial at https://blinkist.com/impactQuince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpodIncogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impactAT&T Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.comNetsuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory https://netsuite.com/TheoryKetone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription orderSumm: code TOMVIP20 for 20% off your first year at https://summ.com?via=tombilyeu&coupon=TOMVIP20 https://summ.com?via=tombilyeu&coupon=TOMVIP20Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impactCozy Earth: code IMPACT for 20% off https://cozyearth.comQuo: Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Tom Bilyeu Show Live, US-Iran negotiations, Strait of Hormuz blockade, Bab El Mandeb Strait, asymmetrical warfare, uranium enrichment, nuclear weapons, US Navy, class uprising, warehouse fires, Gen Z AI sabotage, President Trump, True Social, oil production, Venezuela, global oil supply, Red Sea, energy shortages, China oil contracts, international waters, supply chain collapse, inflation, airline baggage fees, US allies, Spain-China relations, Canada-US military spending, deficit spending, money printing, economic policies, wealth inequality, AI job disruption Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Negotiations with Iran have broken down and the US is now set to blockade the Strait of Hormuz as of 10:00 AM Eastern Time, which is basically right now. Iran has threatened to retaliate to the US's blockade by extending their blockade to the Bab El Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea. We'll see how that plays out. Are the recent high-profile attacks on business leaders and politicians the beginning of a class-conscious uprising? That is certainly the growing message on social media. We'll see how that plays out. But there have been a lot of warehouses reportedly burning down. We'll see that one. I don't know how much is fact and fiction yet. And a new study shows that Gen Z workers are actively sabotaging company AI rollouts, which is wild. I'm looking at you, Ryan.

• 2:10Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll talk more about that. And President Trump tweeted out an image of himself as Jesus, helping to heal the ailing. I would give you context, but there is none. I had to look that one up. I was like, there's no way this is real. No, it's real. He really did it. So crazy, crazy. Okay.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I feel like Trump just trolls us. He's just like, what can I do this? I need to get them talking. How can I get the people going?

• 2:31Tom Bilyeu?

  The crazy thing is, he does have a troll gear, obviously, but there's also a gear that's just like, he doesn't see how it looks. Cause that one, that's wild. That's wild. And I'm sure somebody just posted it. And then he was like, yeah, yeah, this is dope. We need to, we need to get that. More people need to see this, Drew. It would be a shame if this died in some random corner of the internet. But yeah, that one's crazy.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  All right, let's start at the top. This is Trump's latest update from the war. It is another unhinged post from True Social. So there it is. There you have it. The meeting went well. Most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, nuclear, was not. Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the finest in the world, will begin the process of blockading any of all ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz. At some point, we will reach an all being allowed to go in, all being allowed to go out basis. But Iran has not allowed that to happen by merely saying, there will be a mine out there somewhere that nobody knows about but them. This is world extortion and leaders of countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted. I also have instructed our navy to seek interdick, interdick every vessel in international waters

• 3:38Speaker 01

  that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas. We will always begin destroying the mines. We will also begin destroying the mines that Iranians led in the straits. Any Iranian who fires at us or at any piece of vessel will be blown to hell. Iran knows better than anyone how to end this situation, which will already devastate their country. Their navy is gone, their air force is gone. Their anti-aircraft and radar are useless. Khomeini and most of their quote unquote leaders are dead, all because of their nuclear ambition. The blockade will begin shortly. Other countries will be involved with this blockade. Iran will not be allowed to profit off this legal act of extortion. They want money and more importantly, they want nuclear additionally. And at any appropriate moment, we are fully locked and loaded and our military will finish up a little that is left, will finish up the little that is left of Iran. President Donald J. Trump.

• 4:24Tom Bilyeu?

  You gotta love the all caps. Yeah. So I mean, this is not going away anytime soon. Uh, it is very interesting that the, I don't see people talking a lot about the fact that we have backed them into a corner. This is existential for them. Of course, they're not going to go easily. I don't know what exactly was laid out on the table in terms of the negotiation, the specifics. Um, but what they're presenting publicly, certainly, um, they, they have said many times that they have a right to enrich from a nuclear perspective. And so they are prepared, uh, to fight long and hard, uh, by way of some of the specifics that we do have.

• 5:05Tom Bilyeu?

  The US blockade of the Iranian blockade in the Strait of Hormuz is in effect now, unless Trump has backed down from that. After 21 hours of negotiations, the talks with Iran fell apart. JD Vance and the Iranian negotiator sat across the table in Islamabad supposedly trying to hammer out a deal, but nothing came of it. There's a whole bunch of talk back and forth as to whether the US is being sincere or not. Uh, I will put on the table whether Iran is being sincere or not. To me, this feels like, uh, unless they are able to get the things that they need in terms of the US backing off, giving them sovereignty, their ability to continue to posture in their own country, to be able to get, um, nuclear weapons, long range ballistic weapons.

• 5:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That is clearly their play for getting their agenda across. Uh, so I don't see them backing down on that, especially not if they believe that they can extend this via asymmetrical warfare, which they've been able to do. Uh, so they are clearly in an escalatory mood. Now, the deal died according to Trump on the single word of nuclear. Trump said that most points were agreed to, the one that mattered though, an end to all uranium enrichment, removal of all enriched material, dismantling of Iran's major enrichment facilities. Uh, that Iran was just not going to go for that. Now, the response from JD Vance was amusing. Uh, we should let him say it in his own words.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  This is the, um, talking about his wife?

• 6:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Yeah, this was, uh, this was interesting.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I, I, I love JD. I feel like they're setting him up. I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 6:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, JD is very smart and he's very eloquent, but every now and then, if you're on camera enough, and I, I know intimately, you are bound to say something that just falls weirdly.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Here it is.

• 6:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's, here's one of them.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  The second thing Gollybob said, which again, I found fascinating is he said, "We refuse to give up the right to enrichment." And I thought to myself, you know what? My wife has the right to skydive. But she doesn't jump out of an airplane because she and I have an agreement that she's not gonna do that, because I don't want my wife jumping out of an airplane.

• 7:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so here's the thing.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Hard to the deal. My guy JD, he knows, he knows how to get him.

• 7:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, what, what he's, he could have said it this way. Uh, "I'm in a relationship with my wife. It's one of the most important relationships in my life." Uh, the US is in a relationship with Iran. It's one of the most important relationships, certainly right now for the world. There's huge consequences to that. Whenever you're in a relationship, there are certain things that you do and don't do, based on what's important to the other person. And so, right now, Iran is acting like it doesn't matter that they're in a relationship with us and they can do whatever they want, even though it means, uh, it is extremely important to us that they not continue to enrich uranium. And the reality of any kind of relationship that's this important is you have to consider what the other person thinks is important.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Without all that context, it just sounds like the random misfirings, uh, of, not a madman, because that's way too dramatic, but it just sounds super bizarre and awkward. So, yeah, I mean, look, I get it. Uh, I am somebody who is easy to make sound crazy, so I have some empathy here for him, but, uh, I think if he had laid it out that way though, he does leave himself vulnerable for a totally different attack, which is then everyone would go, "Okay, but there are things that the Iranians think it's really important that you do or not do, uh, and you guys are ignoring all of that. So why do you get to be the bully in this relationship?" Um, so, yeah, that line was probably better abandoned in his head,

• 8:48Tom Bilyeu?

  rather than the thing that he falls through, but here we are.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  It seems like this week, the talking points have shifted back to nuclear versus the blocking or the opening of the strait. Cause I thought the strait was supposed to be open and now we're blockading another blockade.

• 9:01Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. So there, yes, and there's definitely the meme worthy stuff that we can go on there and the blockade of the blockade is funny.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 9:09Tom Bilyeu?

  However, I will say, um, I didn't pull this clip, but there's a clip from, ah, I don't know what he is in Singapore, but, uh, a senior official in the Singaporean government. And he said, no, no, no, listen, more oil travels through the strait of Singapore than anywhere else in the world. And I'm telling you right now, if you don't like draw a hard and fast line and say Iran, you absolutely cannot charge a fee for this. You cannot blockade this. He was like, all of a sudden there's going to be tolls all over the world. And while the strait of Hormuz is bad, it's not the worst place that that could happen and it will escalate and it will become a problem. And he said, so we're not choosing sides.

• 9:51Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a matter of principle. The international waters are international waters for a reason. Nobody gets to control those and shipping needs to be free and safe. Period. Full stop. End of story. The world round. Now this is one of those things where people just don't know how the world works. And since world war two, the U S has had the most, um, dominant navy in the world. And we've just gone around and made sure that nobody was basically stopping any of this free flow.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 10:19Tom Bilyeu?

  This is the first time where it's like, yeah, it's actually being impeded in international waters. Cause you've got things like, um, the Panama Canal where that's a sovereign nation that literally the U S helped them tremendously, but you just dug a hole through your country, made it so that ships could pass. There's, it's like a thing you have to do. You've got to maintain it. You've got to run it. And so yes, there are fees for going through something like that. But international waters up until what's going on in the strait of Hormuz were free and clear. So I think that there is, while I certainly understand anybody that's looking at the U S right now, like we're a bunch of lunatics because we've gone in and taken a strait that was open and closed it.

• 11:01Tom Bilyeu?

  We weren't the ones that did it, but through our actions that it has led to this. So I certainly understand why people have a problem with that. But you really can't let it stand now. The, and I mean that to the international community. So I think that's part of where Trump's attitude of, listen, we can pull out. Like, if you guys are gonna let it stand like this, then we'll pull out. You guys will have to deal with it because it.

• 11:26Tom Bilyeu?

  The very complicated thing right now is.

• 11:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Without, I don't think Trump planned for this. But I do think it was a contingency plan that the US was well aware of. If you go in and they respond by blockading the strait and people don't help you, you can pull out and it will be economically advantageous for the US. Because now, if that becomes a quagmire and ships like are having to pay these huge tolls, the US is gonna go, we're open for business. And so you can come to the US, we'll sell you oil. We just got control of Venezuela, we'll make sure that they'll sell you oil. And so now, all of a sudden, this idea of the Greater North America as the single largest, highest producing oil region in the world

• 12:14Tom Bilyeu?

  becomes open for business in a way that it wasn't previously. And so, again, this is not a claim that Trump is paying, playing like some 90 degree chess. Like, it's just, there are knock on effects. We're going to respond to the knock on effects. And so the US right now is in a position where we win if we get control of Iran's oil. And we win if it's a total shit show and we just back out. Now, I think Plan A is way better than Plan B because there are gonna be a ton of other knock on effects to leaving the strait in that situation. The world is not going to smile upon that. There's gonna be a ton of political fallout. But nonetheless, from an oil production standpoint,

• 12:55Tom Bilyeu?

  the US is in an insanely good position, even if all we did was create total chaos and then back out.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't have those same amount of dependencies as some of the other countries. So that makes sense.

• 13:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And if the countries dealing with it find that it's too expensive to deal with them.

• 13:11Tom Bilyeu?

  They'll come to the US. So yeah, it's not only are we not dependent, but we will benefit from selling the oil that we do have.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, there comes a supply and demand portion at some capacity though, because eventually the UAE nations, let's say Europe, let's say Asia, they do go to the US originally. Iran fills it in their pocketbook with the tools. They will then on their side balance some stuff out, try to cut their deals. So it might be a short term solution, but I know of long term, we can become the energy suit like superstore of the world. Can we take over the Middle East in that way for a substantial period of time?

• 13:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Already bigger than they are.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 13:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Us, us and Venezuela together?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:52Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure. Us and Venezuela together are a super cell of oil production. So how many years does it take to normalize, to get it up to the speed? The GCC, the, um, let's see what's going on. The Strait of Hormuz is only responsible for about 20% of the world's oil and the vast majority of the oil from Iran goes to China. So the US is not exactly going to be traumatized if China is having a hard time sourcing oil. Uh, so yeah, I think over the next, call it five years, seven years, we would be able to start siphoning

• 14:30Tom Bilyeu?

  off a large portion of, um, the demand that is not able to be fulfilled there if that actually ends up being a thing. And so, yeah, we'll see. But if you have somebody in the White House that is determined to make us a much bigger producer of oil than we are now, the oil is there. It's really just a political will, whether we're going to insist on going green or whether we're going to say, we're going to run the table now in terms of oil. 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.

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• 15:57Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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.

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• 17:23Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:30Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 17:34Speaker 01

  On the back of the Strait of Hormuz being now blockaded starting April 13th, Iran said they would retaliate by also taking control of the Bad El Mandeb Strait, which is close to the Red Sea with their proxies, the Houthis doing that. This will cut another 12% of global energy supply, bringing the total shortfall to 32%. 20 from the Strait, 12 from the Red Sea. So now this is now affecting Northern Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia. So it's one of those things, if that, if the Strait then gets blockaded, then they control this Strait as well. What would then be the knock-on effects, you think, for oil and from the worldwide impact?

• 18:12Tom Bilyeu?

  The real question is going to be, how angry does the world get at Iran? Versus how angry does the world get at the US? Because that obviously is unsustainable. People will have to take action. And so it, one of two paths will happen. Either people are going to go in and they're going to start clearing it. Like supposedly, I don't know that this is true, but I've seen a ton of reports that the UK is also sending minesweepers there. China has a ton of diplomatic pressure that they can put on Iran. Right now, though, China seems to be gearing their pressure far more towards the US. Now, they're not saying the US by name, but they're saying, "People better stop meddling with our oil contracts."

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got the quote.

• 18:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so here it is.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  "We are committed for peace and stability in the world."

• 18:57Tom Bilyeu?

  This is, sorry, explain who this is. This is China's Minister of Defense Admiral Dong Jun.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  "We are committed for peace and stability in the world. We are monitoring the situation in the east. Our ships are moving in and out of the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. We have trade and energy agreements with Iran. We will respect and honor them and expect others to not meddle in our affairs."

• 19:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Who, who could they be referring to?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and it is open for us. And there were those reports the last couple of weeks that there were 10 or 12 ships getting through, and most of them had been going to China and Asian countries.

• 19:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep. Yeah, just as a PSA reminder, the war in Iran is not entirely about China, but it is largely about China. And I think it encompasses everything to say that this is the flashpoint for the reorganization. Of the world order. And it's interesting because we've talked about this for so long. I've been banging this drum for a while. Everybody was saying that I was fear mongering. But the reality is, if you look at the economics, this moment was self evidently going to happen, meaning the restructuring of the global world order. And as that happens, like now you're in the messy middle of it all. And it is very difficult to know how this is all going to play out. But this was an inevitability, much to my dismay.

• 20:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So globalism unfortunately didn't work. It did. Well, it worked until it didn't. That's probably a more honest way to say it. And so as we found ourselves in this point, caught in Thucydides' trap, where you've got the rising China, US panicking about a rising China, the US realizing this now is a multipolar world again, that China is poised currently to apply more strategic pressure to the entire world than the US was in many ways, especially because they could do it via soft power, not hard power. And so the US had to do something. Now, was this the something that the US had to do? Probably not. And I think that this is a unique confluence of needing to do something

• 20:52Tom Bilyeu?

  and then summoning a populist leader that comes in the very specific flavor of Donald Trump, has led us to exactly what we're seeing right now. But I'd be curious to see if anybody has like a, this is a better way that we could have unwound the global world order that is realistic, given the situation that we're in right now from, this is a populist moment. So, because I can give you the unrealistic version of how this all could have been done, where everybody's holding hands and we just do what's right, you know, for everybody's sort of on balance, but that was never going to happen. So, but I haven't heard a credible breakdown of like, okay, this is how we do it, given the realities. But the disintegration of some of the allyships

• 21:37Tom Bilyeu?

  that have stood for such a long period of time, like us in Europe, that, that is wild. I would not have expected something that dramatic.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I definitely want to get there because we have to talk about Spain. We have to talk about Canada. We're definitely seeing shifts with our allies. But one more thing about these straits and these uh

• 21:52Tom Bilyeu?

  It's hard out in these straits, Drew.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  All these things impacting, we're not talking about the second and third order consequences. Everybody's talking about oil prices and gas prices, but we have helium, we have fertilizer, we have all these things that are based off of petroleum. So I'm curious, now that we're entering month two of this war, because it was supposed to be the the four to six week. We're now at week six and we're gonna kind of creeping over into a second whole month. This is now a quarter, half a quarter, we're gonna start seeing some of these supply chain issues stress. Because I think it's been like, we have a month of supply on demand, that month is now gone. What are you doing now? How are you resourcing? What are the um order consequences, second order consequences of it? Do you see anything that you're like bubbling up? We have helium collapse talking about, we have fertilizer. And is there any particular industry you think that is gonna be the next thing that's gonna collapse? Other than gas prices that we should be keeping an eye on?

• 22:40Tom Bilyeu?

  The one that we should be keeping an eye out for is food, man. That's the one that I really worry about. When you look at how much of the fertilizer around the world comes out of the Gulf region. You start to realize that we really could be facing, call it famine light. Like, I don't think this is going to be something that escalates that far out of control. If this gets um back in control after a single cycle. But it is something where a very distressing amount right now comes out of the um the region that's being impacted by the Strait of Hormuz. I think people will turn to other places like um Russia, I think, can produce a lot as well. But that one is where people should have their eyes on.

• 23:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So this year, you will almost see a downturn in the amount that is produced. Uh, and if this were to drag on, you know, call it six months, eight months, woo, like, that could get really rough. Um, how bad? I haven't done a deep dive on that yet, so I just know it's an area to pay attention to. Um, I see some people being super alarmist. Things tend to not be as bad as you expect. Um, so I won't go that far, but that is something to really pay attention to. Now, the medical industry seems to be impacted quite a bit. There's a fair amount of machinery that runs off helium. So. That could be an issue. TSMC seems to have secured a lot of the available helium to keep running chip manufacturing.

• 24:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So call it modern way of life. That probably will be able to get what it needs, but costs are going to go up. So that's going to be the real one. The real thing is just the underlying. It looks like inflation, so I will often just round it to calling it inflation. When oil prices, when energy prices go up, then everything gets more expensive. And so you're already in this and we're going to talk more about this later, but you're in a position where the the people are on the verge of revolting already. And now you add this other economic stressor in the form of oil created inflation. It's not going to be fun.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I do want to talk about that, though, and this is just my hill to die on. And every time I could dunk on the airline industry, I choose to. It's hilarious because America, Delta started it, American followed. I think JetBlue was the third one to add it. They all increased their baggage fees because they said the oil prices are going to be unstable. When Trump announced the ceasefire last week, oil prices came back down. And they're like, hey, well, you guys raised the 3% search hat. You could probably bring it down right now. And they're like, yeah, it's not coming down. Like, there's this certain, because I, was it the two, it was the first time we went to Iraq. That was the first dollar hike of gas. And everybody was like, oh, man, gas is not a dollar 99 anymore. It's not 99 cents anymore. Don't worry, it's going to come back down. This is just for the war. And it's like, no, it never came back down those levels. There's these fundamental steps.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  So as we hit that moment where it feels like this is one of those, all right, guys, COVID, we had 10, 20% on everything. This is the straight of her moves 10 or 20% on top of everything. Is that what you're talking about with like that inflation? Like, there's just going to be this raising of prices that everybody's going to just have to feel and it gets baked in.

• 25:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, oil tends to be very responsive to market demand. So, I mean, it's. It's also controlled. Keep that in mind in terms of it is literally a cabal of people that get together and say, ah, we're gonna produce more, we're gonna produce less. But this is when there is a stressor in the system, if that stressor stays for a long time, then yes, it will elevate prices. Some of that is real and some of that is fake. And to your point, the stuff that's fake in a time like this is really obnoxious and people are going to be very upset if they actually come to understand what's going on. So yes, if those companies wanted to be, I don't know, patriotic, if that's the right word,

• 26:36Tom Bilyeu?

  but if they wanted to be respectful of what everybody's going through and honestly just self-preservation, they would dial up and down as needed. And if you see an opportunity to come back down, then you would come back down. You would certainly at least get a little bit of goodwill or less ire from the people. But yeah, for a host of reasons, they're not going to do that. Some of it is it's very difficult to communicate to the frontline troops as to where the prices are. Some of it is just, yeah, we've gotten people used to this. There's no reason to give it back. And if we lower it again and raise it again and lower it again and raise it again,

• 27:17Tom Bilyeu?

  that will drive people way crazier than just raise it once and leave it be. But yeah, I don't need anybody to think that they're doing it for the right reasons.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you brought this up earlier from our allies' perspective. There's kind of been this wave of things that's happening. So starting at the timeline, starting from the beginning and kind of working backwards, we have Spanish PMs telling Trump or Trump announcing, I will cut off all trade in cooperation with Spain because they refuse to support us in Israel. Two hours later, the Spanish PM arrives in China. This is his fourth, his fourth trip to China in like two years or something like that.

• 27:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, keep in mind, this isn't a response to what's happening, but it's certainly going to influence what happens. Now, I for one, am surprised by how quickly our allies... Or going like, yeah, China, we're good. That really surprised me. I mean, this, this is a country that has a very different way of running the world, their part of the world than the US does. And so seeing people as a child of the eighties where it was just like, everybody in the West was breaking towards capitalism and really pushing hard back against communism. And now all of a sudden, though China, I don't think really can claim the communist title. They can certainly claim the dictator title.

• 28:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And so the dictatorships work until they don't. And that's the thing where I'm surprised that people are moving as quickly as they are to embrace China, maybe nobody more so than Canada. I don't know how deep Spain's ties are. This is more optics than reality for me, just because I don't know the specifics, but that is fascinating and that is something that the US is going to have to contend with, that you have a regional power that internally does things that are extremely questionable, but externally are really trying to paint themselves a steady Eddie. And so being like, hey, the US is doing all this crazy unhinged shit.

• 29:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Like we're the completely stable, rational, long-term vision people. And that's a message that the world is like, yeah, cool. Like, let's go see what China has to offer and let's start making deals there. And that would be very problematic for the US. And if the world sense of what the US is and what China is just basically completely inverts. And the US is like this radical unhinged country that you can't trust and China is a stable country that's moral and doing things the right way. That would also be problematic for the US, problematic in no small part based on what that will cause the US to vote for.

• 30:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And so we'll become reactionary in our own voting. And so the deep dive that I just wrote, man, honestly, it, it is.

• 30:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know how to articulate this without, I refuse to succumb to nihilism. I refuse to feel like there's nothing that we can do. But when, in every deep dive, I try to hold myself accountable to, okay, what do I expect people to do with this information? And the punchline is just never going to change. Money has physics. And so, everything that we're seeing right now is because people are violating the physics of money. And it doesn't matter, in the US, for sure. It doesn't matter left or right, they're violating the physics of money. And so, they each have a different way of trying to right the ship. And the reason that I'm still more afraid of the left is their way of righting the ship is 100% guaranteed to make it worse.

• 30:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And the right, the way they plan to right the ship is to get unprecedented growth. That would work. It's just that they're not on track to do it. And so, right now, they would need like, north of 4% growth, we're 0.5. So, it's like, we're way the fuck off. And that, that one's tough. So, you've got Trump acting like a lunatic now. You've got the left where it's like, I know their policies won't work. So, that one's like a guarantee. Failure, but they might fail more slowly than the suicide, all or nothing gamble that Trump is doing. So, it's like, ah, like, this, this one is distressing. If you don't balance the budget, it is game over.

• 31:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And I, it's like, they're, that's simple. So, it's easy. But yet, people will not embrace it.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  There's between simple and easy, man. Things can be simple, but that doesn't mean they're easy.

• 31:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's wild, so.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  But going, going to your point now, of Trump being this unstable nut, on an international level, he has caused some people races. So, we're talking about the Hungarian elections that just got finalized. Trump personally endorsed Orban. Twice this year, sent Vance to Budapest days before the vote. He got crushed. In Canada.

• 32:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Crushed, like, they have, it's either 75% or just below. So, they're within shooting distance of being able to change their constitution.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  Sheesh.

• 32:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Same thing happened in. In Japan, in they went to the right, but nonetheless, you're getting countries like swinging all the way in one direction or another. Now, I'm sorry, I know you want to go through the whole list, but the, I haven't gone deep on Hungary and Orban yet, but some people are claiming that the guy that beat Orban is actually more to the right of Orban. So that's where I'm like, okay, wait, I'm gonna need to look at what's actually going on there. I, I, I don't know. I don't know enough. That seems surprising.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Because the European leaders are certainly claiming victory with whoever got elected, and I doubt they would do that if that person was actually to the right of Orban.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:02Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll see how that plays out.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but same thing happened in Canada. The Liberals were headed for a landslide and lost, and then Trump went on his tariffs, his tariffs and 51st state rhetoric and flipped the entire race. In Romania, that's Trump, pro-Trump candidate went into election day as a strong favorite, lost by landslide. Australia, you guys are kind of getting the thesis of this story. 64% of Europeans viewed Trump negatively. 25, only 25% of Europeans would consider US a friendly country.

• 33:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Isn't that wild, bro? 25% of Europeans consider the US a friendly country. That is wild.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Down from 61% before his election. That's crazy.

• 33:38Tom Bilyeu?

  That is crazy. So that, that is, that is nuts. 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.

• 34:19Tom 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.

• 34:51Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 34:55Speaker 01

  To your point, and I even gotta give it to Peter Zeihan, because it's the first time I heard champion this, that whoever was gonna be the president was gonna have to deal with some very, very tough decisions.

• 35:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  So by no means was this 100% Trump's quote-unquote fault. However, his reaction to this situation, I think, is his fault. And I think that a lot of these statistics, they do lay at the feet of him. He thought he can art of his deal, the weight of it. He thought he can bombastically engage people, and just because I have leverage, you're gonna fall to me, and things like that. That works really well for New York State real estate negotiating. It's a bit different when you're on an international level, and there's alternatives, and other countries, and factions, and things like that, playing against you.

• 35:33Tom Bilyeu?

  You are watching China walk softly and carry a big stick, and you're watching the US walk loudly and carry a big stick. And it is...

• 35:44Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know what has happened in Trump's life that made him think that you can just smash people, belittle them, make fun of them, bully them, and that there won't be these second and third order consequences. That's a part that I just cannot figure out.

• 35:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, what he's thinking there.

• 36:03Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that the US absolutely had to use its leverage to position itself well for the changing world order, there's no doubt. I am not in the acquiesce to China camp. I wanna see us outmaneuver China. I wanna see us be strong on the world stage, and make sure that we are in a dominant position globally, for sure. However, you cannot do that by alienating everybody, making fun of them, belittling them, all of that publicly. Like, you just... There's... If you wanna behind-the-scenes be ultra-aggressive, but then publicly let all of them save face, and make sure that they look good to their people, great. Then you've got a path to them getting on your team.

• 36:47Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you belittle them, dude, you're gonna... They will do things that are not in their best interests, just to look strong. And so, I'm like, yeah, I don't... That is so self-evident to me, that that's how he... Humans behave that I'm just, yeah, I don't know what he's saying.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  But in the American political system, he doesn't have that level of accountability. So this is the same guy that was calling Marco Rubio little Marco and Marco Rubio called him a threat to democracy. But then now it's like, I'm the president, now you do what I say. And Marco's falling right in line with that. So the same type of leverage that he's used previously in his work life, in his work life for his entire life. It worked in those aspects. So he thought, oh, okay, if I could do it in New York state circles, if I could do it in the city, if I could do it and get, become the biggest hotel brand at one point in time. If I could do this and win a presidential election twice and everybody that was talking about me now wants to work for me. It could work with Europe too. It could work with like the Arabs too. It could work with all these other countries. And then I guess they're now realizing like, oh, wait, I don't have as much leverage.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  America isn't looked at as this thing as I thought. They were surprised when Iranian Iran started attacking other countries. They're like, oh, snap. They didn't just obey us. Wait, wait. So I think now we're starting to see the break of like, you know what? We're not going to do it just because we're used to doing that. We're going to break up the way of things. And that spontaneity, I don't think he countered into his decision making. He thought, just like everything else that I tried, it fell to my like, it fell to my knees. It fell to my whim and whatever I wanted to do, I was able to will it into existence. Now these other countries with other individual sovereignty, they're like, no, we'll, we'll suicide it. We'll rather be suicide bombers than bend the knee in other places. And that wasn't a thing, I think. And he's now getting like, used to that being a pushback.

• 38:32Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll be interested to see if he's actually getting used to that. Or if he still has a mental model of the world that you can just keep smashing people harder. So what we're watching in Iran is Trump running an escalatory dominance strategy, only to find out that it's very hard when you have asymmetric warfare. And then the same thing is happening at the ally level, where he's just trying to escalate harder, call them bigger names, be meaner, all of that. And Expecting at some point that they're going to cave. And I'm still, I get taken back to Steve Witkoff every time saying, you know, Trump is just surprised that they're not, um, God, what was the word that he used? That they're not acquiescing. He used a stronger word than that. But that, you know, we're putting all these troops right off their shore.

• 39:16Tom Bilyeu?

  We're threatening to smash them with this hammer and we expect them to cave. And they're not caving and just can't believe it. And that's the part where it's like, okay, like you get it. Hopefully they've got, given you the message. But he's just like, we're just going to keep escalating, escalating, escalating. Um, and it reminds me the very famous, the beatings will continue until morale improves. And it's like, oh, Jesus. So, yeah, uh, the strength, peace through strength. When coupled with diplomacy where you're giving people the ability to, um, join your coalition without looking weak. That I think is a very wise strategy. But, uh, setting people up such that they're going to look terrible if they get on board with you, even when it makes sense, is just a bad strategy.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And then last-

• 40:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Capitulating, thank you.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Lasting on this, um, topic, we have, uh, Canadian PM Carney talking about the days of sending 70 cents of every dollar to the US are over.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  The days, the days of our military sending 70 cents of every dollars to the United States are over.

• 40:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Does anybody know though, I want to know what, what the, where are you sending those dollars to? So are you sending them to China? That sounds like a terrible fucking idea, a terrible idea. These guys will put backdoors in your technology for sure. Um, so that one is wild. And if he's saying that they're going to build their own military industrial complex, cool. That I could actually understand if they're like, we need to be self-sufficient. I think every country should be acting in their own best interests. And then the world order should be a reflection of everybody doing their best with what they have. Um, and- If that's what he's saying, cool, but I doubt that's what he's saying. And so I'll be very interested to see where that money is going to go to.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  This is why I call the whole, this is Trump's master plan, the greater North America project. I kind of call BS on that because he purposely voided trade agreements that we had with Canada and Mexico. And if his ultimate aim was to unite North America, he would have at least kept those into place, secure the bag and then come back and negotiate to that point of having all the, like having all the point of strength. With the fact he alienated everybody and now it's like, yeah, it's for my master plan to unite all these people. It's like, well, you called them idiots and assholes six months ago. Now you're going to ask him for a favor.

• 41:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  We're going to see the same thing happen.

• 41:41Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that is a very deep flaw in his master plan, but that I really think is his master plan. This is the thing that drives me crazy is when people say that Trump doesn't have a plan. It's a very big difference between Trump not having a plan and the plan being bad. The reason it drives me crazy is the same reason it drives me crazy that people have an emotional response to the economy instead of a fiscal response to the economy. If you want to go after Trump, then start breaking it down piece by piece. What should we have done here? This is something I try to do a lot where it's like, okay, I did this with the JD Vance thing. This is what should have happened. This is what he should have said. If for no other reason than I can get people to respond to my own thinking to see where the flaws are. But when you are going into situations like this and you start attacking sort of the low brow variant of this, oh, he doesn't have a plan.

• 42:27Tom Bilyeu?

  No, he has a plan, but if that plan isn't working, why isn't it working? What is the part of the plan that needs to be adjusted? And PS, by the way, what do you think that we should be doing? Because if people are just having these emotional responses, we're in for a problem. In fact, I'll state this very clearly because this is going to be a theme in the show moving forward. If the world at large and America specifically continue to react to things emotionally, there will be a level of bloodshed that is going to be just absolutely devastating. And that is the very thing that I'm trying to put some very small contribution towards not happening because there are solutions to these things, but they involve people getting out of their feelings and into an actual cause and effect analysis of the different situations. And right now, as

• 43:12Tom Bilyeu?

  As a global society, we are doing a god awful job of that. And social media rewards the emotional things. And so the more you can tap into emotional, the more likely that is to go viral, which means the more emotionally charged you are, the more likely you are to get attention. And therefore, the more likely you are to influence things. And so, man, being involved in this and watching how this is unfolding and knowing that the more people use the leverage that will get them favorability with the algorithms, the more they are deranging the public, who is already prone to map things emotionally. And therefore, the more likely we are to really go astray as a planet.

• 43:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And when the planet goes astray, it ends in world altering levels of violence. And I just feel like people are not paying attention to where this escalates to. That makes me very nervous.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  The end kind of threw me off. Are you saying in regards to emotional responses leading to the revolution, leading to the warehouse burning?

• 44:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Leading to World War III.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:17Tom Bilyeu?

  So right now, everybody's response, not everybody. Right now, the vast majority of people are processing through what's going on right now through an emotional lens. What I wish to be true, what I want, instead of, okay, what? When you look at the cause and effect, how do we get from here to where you want to be? And we should be just, if anybody wants to contribute meaningfully to that in whatever way they can, I get it. Most of us are going to contribute in some small way. But if we're going to contribute in some small way to something that actually makes sense, it's got to be based on cause and effect. And you've got to be able to trace the logic of cause and effect from where we are to where we want to end up. And if anything breaks down in there, you should be hungry to find out where it is going to break down

• 45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  so that we can actually build a bridge that's going to work. And more and more, what I see is people, they get to a narrative point that feels right and they just stop.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think when we break down Trump's response, though, I do think that we do a spectacular, spectacular amount of mental gymnastics in order to justify his irrational decisions. And I understand like the joke of-

• 45:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Who's the wher in this?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Um, the 4D chess audience, because I think every time Trump comes out with this like statement, it could be, Trump can come out tomorrow and say, I want to go to war with, uh, Ukraine because I think Ukraine is a threat to democracy.

• 45:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  There's gonna be somebody that jumps in the meeting and be like, yeah, the reason he's really going to be worried with Ukraine is, and nobody's like, well, wait, why is he doing this? What's going on? It's before we even say this is a good idea or a bad idea, people are already spinning their wheels to justify it, to make it look good, to put, to paint Trump in a positive. Without even saying, okay, was this a good idea? What were the alternative ideas and why did he choose that one?

• 45:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, to- totally agree. So the, what I want to do though, is move everybody away from the argument of whether this is 4D chess or not, which just doesn't matter. And you start looking at what's the cause and effect. So he's doing this thing, it's having this effect, what do we need to do next? Is that the thing that Trump is doing or not? Now by way of, cause there are times where I'll go, listen, he could be doing this, he could be doing this, he could be completely confused, whatever. But by mapping it out, you're showing a chain of logic. And that's where trying to get everybody beyond the, is this 4D chess or not, onto, okay, let's just talk about the actual event.

• 46:40Tom Bilyeu?

  It has these knowable consequences, there will be some unknowable consequences. If this happens, where do we go? If this happens, where do we go? This is like, uh, I think I actually said this to Dave in the interview, Dave Smith. Let's just run the thought experiment of what happens if we do what you're saying? And Israel takes the boot off the neck of, um, people in Palestine. Palestine becomes its own state, there's no blockade, they do whatever the hell they want, and then they attack Israel. In that scenario, now let's talk through what we actually would consider right or moral for them to do. Because the one thing I find is people will stop at the, I don't like this thing. This thing shouldn't be that way.

• 47:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And I'm like, okay, fair, but it is that way. And so now let's go with the thought experiment because you can begin to understand either how we believe this ought to play out, how we believe this is playing out, both mapping the is and the ought, like all of these things are knowable. They are discussable, much better way to say it. And so what people tend to do though, is they'll get caught up on, it's not 40 chess, this guy's an idiot. Heard, great. I accept that's your position. Now let's move forward with, let's look at the daisy chain. Where do we think this goes from here? Whether it's a bumbling set of steps, or whether it's actually got a chain of cause and effect? Where do we think this goes?

• 48:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And then with every movement, hopefully we get a little bit closer to mapping someone's behavior, so that we can actually figure out, okay, this is likely to go in this direction. So for instance, I think Trump is prone to two things. This is I'm mapping him right now, and I'll certainly update if it changes. Escalatory dominance is the thing that he uses. I'm just going to keep getting louder, smash more things, break more things to get what I want. And at the same time, he pays deep attention to the markets. And so he'll go, go, go, go, go, until he sees that US treasuries are getting too expensive, and then he's going to de-escalate. And it's like, okay, those are two very useful points of information.

• 48:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I also think that he will leave things in chaos as long as it's not bad for America on an economic standpoint right now, today. Because I do think that Trump often thinks to one order of consequence and then stops thinking. And so I think, so all of that influences me to think there's this web of options that are before us in terms of how this could play out. I think Trump will continue to be as aggressive and talk about smash, smash, smash as he can. And then if The cost of interest on the US Treasury gets too high. He's gonna pull back. He's gonna do de-escalatory rhetoric up to and including leaving, claiming victory,

• 49:31Tom Bilyeu?

  even though he's leaving it in a mess because he knows the reality is, he's may not be thinking through all the loss of allies, but he knows that the US can produce a metric shit ton of oil, especially with our relationship with Venezuela, which means that some percentage of people will leave the chaos in the Middle East and now come and buy oil from the US. So you put that all together and it's like, yeah, those are some pretty dark days, but they reorient you towards this idea that he's talking openly about, but does not seem to gain any traction in the press, which is the greater North America idea. And so then it's like, okay, if we can start mapping that stuff out, then we go, well, what does that look like when you're alienating Canada and Mexico?

• 50:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, how do we get cohesion in that area? And what do we want to see happen there? And then how does that influence who and what we vote for? Because that's like, they're gonna need to be two really pressing questions at the midterms for anybody that wants to make sure that the Republicans get booted out of office. And that's gonna be, okay, what's your plan with the budget? Because if you don't balance the budget, then we're still headed towards catastrophe.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Nobody's asking that question, though.

• 50:44Tom Bilyeu?

  I know, much to my dismay.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And then, but they should be, and it's not the only question that matters, but almost.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And then the next question is, what is your strategy? Is it in terms of world affairs? So what are you gonna do with Iran? What are you gonna do with our allies? And then that way we can compare. We have, Trump is running a smash and grab strat. Cool, we know what that is. And then this person's going to, and then get those answers. But if we just stop it, I don't like this person and therefore I'll vote for anybody else. You'll just swing all the way in another direction and have a different set of woes, but nonetheless woes.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Copy. And then at the top of this, he said, Both the left and the right are trying to break America in two very uniquely different ways. They have two different bets. One person is betting on inflated government uh costs to dictate which problems need to be fixed at a state level. The other side is deregulating tax breaks in order to give money, push the money back down to the corporation class, the ruling class, and hoping that they are better allocators of resources than the government is. Now, when we first-

• 51:53Tom Bilyeu?

  I wouldn't have framed it that way, but that is a dichotomy.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's like, I didn't lie in that way of framing-

• 52:01Tom Bilyeu?

  If you're trying to represent me, it's not a lie, it's just incorrect.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Okay, well, how would you dictate the Republican reallocated, reallocation of resources?

• 52:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, my beef was with the framing of the left. So I think that the-

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Pushing it to the government class to dictate which problems get solved on a state level?

• 52:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, I don't think that they are trying to solve problems on the state level. I think that they are wildly economically illiterate, and they are bending towards socialism, though I know Michael Malice thinks that the political wing, uh, not the political wing, the um, what does he call it? The corporate, corporate wing. The corporate wing of the Democrats is stronger than I think. I have not seen evidence that, we'll see, that that'll play out in the-

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, all the donors are the corporate, like-

• 52:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but if you look at who's actually getting elected, uh, I still believe that Mom Donnie is the spirit animal of the Democratic Party.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  But all the people who swung these midterms and inner intermediate elections, the governors, the republic, the uh governors and the senators in the, on the Democrats, they're still getting Goldman Sachs check, checks, they're still getting Big Pharma checks, so it's this, the corporate oligarchy of the Democratic Party is still very much active in a well than electing people.

• 53:13Tom Bilyeu?

  I, I have placed my map, my, my marker of where I'm at right now. And the marker of where I'm at right now is that uh there is a reason that fraud, waste and abuse is so grotesque in California, uh, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Uh, we'll find out if it's just as bad in red states, and if it is, then that would certainly update my mental map. But right now, when I hear people on the left talk about economics, it is ridiculous.

• 53:43Tom Bilyeu?

  I know we're gonna go to this later, but if you want to play the clip from Kamala Harris, like, this shit is wild. And I've played the clip of, and by the way, bringing up Kamala Harris, because now that Eric Swalwell has pulled out, people are saying that Kamala Harris is gonna run for governor of California. They've already put out a poll asking how people would respond to her doing so. So, and there are people that think that she's gonna run for president again. That one seems less likely, but I suppose. So, let's listen to Kamala Harris speak about the inflation specifically.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  What else are you going to do to fix this problem with inflation?

• 54:23Speaker 05

  All right, thank you. Well, let's start with this.

• 54:29Speaker 05

  Prices have gone up. And families and individuals are dealing with the realities of, of that bread costs more, that gas costs more. And we have to understand what that means. That's about the cost of living going up. That's about having to stress and stretch limited resources. That's about a source of stress for families that is not only economic, but is on a daily level, something that is a heavy weight to carry. So, it is something that we take very seriously, very seriously. And we know from the history of this issue in the United States that when

• 55:11Speaker 05

  you see these prices go up, it has a direct impact on the quality of life for all people in our country. So, it's a big issue, and we take it seriously. And it is a priority, therefore.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  You see, like, my beef with this is that it gets cut off at this top of the interview.

• 55:29Tom Bilyeu?

  So, wait, you think she brings it all back around?

• 55:32Speaker 01

  To me, this is the setup of a response to a question.

• 55:35Tom Bilyeu?

  She does not understand economics.

• 55:38Tom Bilyeu?

  That's my stance.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  So the same.

• 55:40Tom Bilyeu?

  And we can pull up more clips of her.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  The same way how we laid out. Trump said this thing, but here's what I think the web of possibilities that are in front of him. We have a clip where she talks for a minute, and don't get me wrong, she's definitely given the inflation is a problem, it's a political answer. And people are suffering and we have to understand that prices are going up and the quality of life is impacted. That is the emotional.

• 56:04Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not a political answer, that's a vamp around, I don't know how to explain this.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  That's the emotional appeal to my voters because my voters vote emotionally. So that's the same question that if people are saying, Trump, how are you going to make America safer in 2025? That he would say, first off, America's a complete ruin, Biden ruined everything, the world is on fire. That's not him not understanding the question, that's him setting the stage for this is where we are, this is what's happening. Now this is what I would do that he was too scared to do.

• 56:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm confused as to what your thesis is. So my thesis is, uh, the left en masse and Kamala Harris specifically are economically illiterate. They actually don't understand the economy. And that this clip is evidence of the fact that Kamala Harris specifically does not understand what inflation is, which is why she can't tell you what she's going to do about it. Your thesis is what?

• 56:57Speaker 01

  My thesis is we're using this clip, this one minute out of context, but it that it matches your worldview. So you're putting it in the, I'm classifying this as evidence of this worldview that I have that is.

• 57:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But do you think that my thesis is wrong?

• 57:13Speaker 01

  That Kamala Harris doesn't understand inflation?

• 57:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I don't think you are able to run for president without understanding inflation. So I think she at least understands inflation. I don't think she has a good idea of how to solve it, but I also don't think Trump had a good idea to solve inflation because we're still up. So I don't think she's the only, I don't think she's the only presidential candidate that is uniquely ignorant about inflation. I don't think if, I haven't seen anything on the right that people who have ran and won, not people who are just talking or people who are on shows, but people who are on the right who have won, who are then trying to enact in legislation that fights inflation. Because as much as we want to talk about inflation is based on the unbalanced budget, we also have seen Republican regimes cutting taxes at a rate that increases the deficit,

• 57:58Speaker 01

  that doesn't help the balance, that doesn't balance the budget, things like that, so.

• 58:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So if I can say in a succinct way, what I think your hypothesis is, let me know if this is accurate. Neither the left or the right understand the economy and it is unfair to single out the left, which you, Tom, are only doing because it fits your worldview.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Single out Kamala Harris because it fits your worldview, not the left.

• 58:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Sorry.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, that's clear. I think that that's factually inaccurate. And I'll speed run what has led me to this worldview because I do not care. I don't identify as being left or right. So I am perfectly happy. Anybody who will get into office that will actually make the changes that we need is going to get my vote.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 58:55Tom Bilyeu?

  But here's why, when I look at people on the left, the things that I see them say, and if you see people that are making fiscally responsible arguments, please surface them for me. But what I see people doing is showing a distressing lack of the understanding of cause and effect in the economy. So you've got Mamdani and all the socialist shit that he says, which just from a physics of money standpoint is so broken and so terrifyingly wrong that he is guaranteed to, if he follows those policies. I'm obviously always hoping that he will wake up and realize that there's cause and effect. But if you follow those policies, which I bang that drum plenty.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kind of, I get the speed run from that. So let me just tag in right there because this is something I don't push back on you a lot when you say. We both agree, I think, that we don't run a purely capitalist system in America. Yeah, so we have socialism sometimes when it's convenient for a greater, a great amount of people. So sometimes we'll socialize losses for the banks because we know they're going to help this middle class get mortgages for houses and we justify it and we write it off. Sometimes we socialize things for the automotive industry because this is a tier one pillar of America. If America can't manufacture, we're gone. Understand that. We socialize losses for the military because it's national defense. When we need something, we create money for it and we are able to implement those policies. I think that the same way we are mostly capitalism, little bit socialism over here,

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  is the same way that like a Mumdani character would be like, I'm mostly socialism, but when I hit that lever, I'm gonna have to add in a little bit of capitalism. And that goes back to the more oligarchical wing of the Democratic Party. Yeah, give away people free Medicare, because the big pharma companies don't care, because they know that that's gonna be more money for my pocket. So I'll prop up that candidate because that's better for me. Just like Lockheed Martin is gonna prop up a pro-war candidate. I think that when we get to certain checks and balances, I think the same a little bit of socialism that the capitalism sprinkle, they don't think the socialists are gonna sprinkle a little bit of capitalism when they hit those rubs. They don't think that they're gonna turn those levers, just like historically, we have turned those levers. And that's why I think it's an unfair comparison, because we're allowing exceptions on this side,

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  but we're acting like those exceptions never exist on this side.

• 1:01:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, are you attempting to represent the flaw in my thinking? Or a flaw in the left and the right?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  I'm going specifically to your thinking, because you're saying Mumdani is on a one-way track to socialism. There's gonna be no other alternative method. There's gonna be no alternative system methods he's gonna utilize. It's gonna be socialism or bust. And I'm saying even the free-market capitalists that we prop up, even the Reagans, there's a little bit of socialism in some of their policies.

• 1:01:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, but do you think I wanna sprinkle the socialism on the capitalist side?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  No, but I think that the people that you say have a better grasp of the economy, they still sprinkle a little bit of socialism on the capitalism side.

• 1:01:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so that's very fair that that is actively what's happening in terms of their running unbalanced budgets, that they will money print, that they will cover. I mean, Trump went crazy during COVID, so for sure.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Big Beautiful Bill, and even the estimated 200 billion for this war. We ain't have it, but it's gonna be drummed up.

• 1:02:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, but I think with socialism, you really have to begin teasing out what are the mechanisms that they're trying to do. So the thing that people can, if you're gonna rage against Trump's economic policies, the economic policies, forget for a second what he's doing in Iran that is causing an inflation-like reaction.

• 1:02:25Tom Bilyeu?

  But he's trying to lower taxes to spur growth. And so you can certainly make the argument that, hey, you're lowering taxes and therefore you're still operating at a deficit. And therefore you're going to money print and therefore you're going to do the ultimate evil, which is inflation. That is absolutely true. The thing that I will say on the right is that you have people like Massey who are wearing a pin that counts the deficit. You've got Trump that understands that we have to grow our way out of this, or this is going to be a problem. So you at least have people that are, um, call it dumb and absolutely ruining the company, the country. But they, they understand what actually has to be done.

• 1:03:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Whether they can do it or not is a totally different thing.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And I'd say the left has like John Fetterman, who goes on the right sometimes, who says, not every trans person needs to be in the bathroom. Like he fights all those quote unquote lunatic far left policies.

• 1:03:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so let me see if I can. Are you saying that on the right? We have very few people that are actually trying to grow our way out of this. And it's basically just socialist as far as the eye can see on the right and the left.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  No, I think that was a radicalization of the opinion. I didn't say that they're socialist on the.

• 1:03:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, but you stopped me to say, well.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Cause you're naming, you're naming Massey is like Massey, somebody on the right.

• 1:03:49Tom Bilyeu?

  I also named Trump and I could have talked about Besen and I could talk about your Commerce Secretary. Like there, I could talk about Saks, like there's a gazillion people that I can talk about on the right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  In their cabinet.

• 1:04:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That would say that. Actually have economic literacy. But it felt important to you to say that, well, there's John Fetterman over here. So I'm trying to figure out if you thought that I was giving you an exhaustive list of the people on the right that are economically literate.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  You named the president and his cabinet and a, uh, and a senator. And I'm saying, okay, well, I can name you like the presidential candidate and his Senate counterpart on the left who are doing the same thing.

• 1:04:28Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'll ask it again. Are you saying that the left and the right are equally socialist?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  I think that the left and the right are equally.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Attracted to one system, but will turn the levers of other system when it justifies their interest. Cause to say that they're equally socialist to me is is not the same, but they both have both capitalist mechanisms and socialism mechanisms that they use depending on their.

• 1:04:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you saying that the left and the right are going to take us to the same endpoint?

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Off a cliff? Yes, physically, yes.

• 1:05:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so for you, there's left and the right economically doesn't matter. It's six of one, half dozen of the other.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, um, and to understand your argument the best is to understand that the left will sprinkle a little bit of capitalism when needed. Let's put that in quotes, and the right will sprinkle a little bit of socialism when needed.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, um, and so you feel that I'm doing some injustice.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Cause we get, cause we, cause we got here by saying, um, the right is trying to grow its way out of a problem. The left is just economically illiterate. Put them in rice.

• 1:05:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  And I'm saying, well, you can criticize the left for their response of cozying up to socialism, which is equaling the economic illiteracy. And I'm saying, we're saying that without just without acknowledging on the right, they also have some economic illiteracy principles. But we just justify it in a different way. So we don't bring that up.

• 1:05:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, that is very helpful to understand. That's what you see. That is not where I'm at. So, um, I'll keep pushing in. Let's find the next area where you feel like I'm being unfair or I've not articulated my stance. Uh, okay. So on the right, you have an orientation towards growth, economic growth. Do we agree on that or no?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I think both people want growth economically. So I think comparing the.

• 1:06:28Tom Bilyeu?

  You're gonna have to make a case for that. That seems so obviously false.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Cause you're comparing intent versus actions and then you're comparing actions versus intent. And I think we should start with intent. So I think.

• 1:06:37Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll start, start with intent is great. So you're telling me that the left, their intention, let's grow economically. Not let's capture as much money from people via tax as humanly possible.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  In order to grow the middle and working class.

• 1:06:51Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not how it growth works.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  But it's a redistribution of assets.

• 1:06:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct, that's not how growth works.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  So you're redistributing.

• 1:06:57Tom Bilyeu?

  These are fundamentally different things.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's just lay it out there. So on the left, we want to redistribute assets from the

• 1:07:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  From the wealthy class.

• 1:07:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Redistribution on the left.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  To the working and the lower class.

• 1:07:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  The redistribution on the right is away from the government into the, I'mma call it the landlord class, the ruling class.

• 1:07:12Tom Bilyeu?

  They're the only ones who generate money, so you're not really distributing money from the government. The government only seizes money from the people. Let's just be very clear about how this works.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say entitled to the government.

• 1:07:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not entitled to the government. This is the very difference.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Since we signed the constitution.

• 1:07:26Tom Bilyeu?

  What you and I have started, what we've started down the path of trying to do is delineate why I would say that, hey, these guys have a different orientation than these guys. And you're basically saying they don't have a different orientation. They're doing the same thing, but with, one does it point A, one does it point B.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Where we're transferring to make accounts.

• 1:07:43Tom Bilyeu?

  That is not true. And fundamentally, we have to tease out where the, let's call corruption, that's an easy way to say it.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 1:07:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Where the corruption is that they share.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:07:52Tom Bilyeu?

  What corruptions they have that are different, and then what orientations that they have that are different, if any. And I'm saying their orientations are so fucking different, that that's why I keep saying, okay, we've got to look at these orientations, ask very specific questions of our candidates to understand where they're headed, because a Democrat like Clinton was awesome. Fully supported, was amazing, was great to live through. The economic results were wonderful. So to me, this is about orientation and economic policy. My read of what's happening right now is that the left is going more towards redistribution, and the right is, if you want to make the claim about.

• 1:08:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Where they're going pathological is that right now, under Trump, they will continue to spend any amount of money that they have to spend to be dominant on the world stage. And they're just being completely blind to the dangers.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  But let's go to actions, because on the left, we have redistribution. If everything.

• 1:08:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Hold on, because you said we needed to talk about intention. And now as I'm talking about intention, we're going back to actions.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  No, because on the right side, you're saying this. I'm articulate your point. On the right side, you're saying they are so busy on growth. That's where their focus is. How do you get to growth? What policies did they enact to get the growth? Redistribution, the big, beautiful bill.

• 1:09:16Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not redistribution. So what they're.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  I'm changing the tax policy. So how the budget was set up, I am now changing that. So instead of you paying this to the government, you're now paying this to yourself. You're paying this to your corporations. You're paying this to the employee. On the left side, instead of you paying this to yourself, instead of paying this to your employee, you're paying this to the government and the government's going to do this with it.

• 1:09:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, are you talking about deficit spending?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  I'm talking about the tax code. So when you were saying, what is the intention? If Republicans want to institute growth, what policy did you do to institute that growth? How did you get to the growth you want? Big, beautiful bill. That was Trump's. This is going to spur growth. What that bill did, it lowered the corporate taxes. It made people, so where your paycheck was going originally is now going in a different place. If the government.

• 1:10:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Hold on, hold on. Why do you say your paycheck is going to a different place?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Because from.

• 1:10:08Tom Bilyeu?

  How is a tax cut, your paycheck going to a different place? Because you're saying now we have less money. And so therefore, your paycheck still has to go to a government program.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  So how your paycheck was constructed?

• 1:10:26Tom Bilyeu?

  I think here's the difference. You think that the government is entitled to that money and I do not.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  I'm not, I don't, it's not that I think they're entitled to it or not. What I'm saying is like.

• 1:10:35Tom Bilyeu?

  When the, here's, just so that you can understand how I think through this. When the government taxes you less, they are stealing less of your money.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  So every time a government taxes you, they're stealing you.

• 1:10:47Tom Bilyeu?

  That is correct.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  That's a base assumption.

• 1:10:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, not base assumption, that's the reality.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  No, but I'm asking your base assumption so I can understand the best part of this argument.

• 1:10:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You can say, hey, I want certain things to be paid for, and so I'm going to contribute to this willingly.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:01Tom Bilyeu?

  We have gotten to the point where that's not what we do because we run deficits.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Okay, let's take a step back now because we're already two points up of the main point.

• 1:11:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Base assumption, if a government taxes you, they're stealing your money. Since, when did government taxes get enacted? 1913?

• 1:11:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, income tax was 1913.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  1913. Since 1913, we have been stolen from and we agreed to the social contract to being stolen from.

• 1:11:23Tom Bilyeu?

  A lot longer than that, but sure.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so if we want to, so a government getting taxed and you stealing your money? Okay, but since 1913, we said it's okay to steal our money, so us rehashing that?

• 1:11:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure. So I feel like things are getting very muddled right now.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:38Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm trying to make sure that we define very clearly what we're arguing against. We can go intent, and I think the intent on the left is redistribution, the intent on the right is growth. I think that the way they're each going about it is pathological. So I don't think that the right is growing well, certainly not right now, look at the results. But you said you wanted to talk about intent. So that would be in the world's most simple, oversimplified, but so that we can talk about it. If you don't think that the left is redistributory, then we should argue that. If you don't think that the right is oriented towards growth, then we should argue that.

• 1:12:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But we need like firm things that we can hold on to and say, okay, it's oversimplified for the sake of discussion, but here's where we're at.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's leave those two things on the table, redistribution and growth.

• 1:12:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Perfect.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  How do we enact those things? So the first thing, when a left person comes into a party, let's say they had the same senate, house, and party that controlled that Trump has currently. They would enact a legislation. This is their first order of business to change the things that I want. Trump's first order of business wasn't if you start a business, you get a thousand dollars back. It wasn't if your business hits a billion dollars, you don't have to pay taxes anymore. It was the big beautiful bill, a tax cut. So when you get your paycheck.

• 1:13:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Hold on, that's already an unfair characterization. So the biggest, the most important thing that Trump would need to do right now is make sure that the American worker has bargaining power. To make sure that the American worker has bargaining power, you're going to need to start deglobalizing, which is exactly what he did. To make sure that the-

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  He did the big beautiful bill before that.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  So I'm looking right at the first thing he did.

• 1:13:29Tom Bilyeu?

  The big beautiful bill, I think, means something different to you than it does to me. So the big beautiful bill is pathological because it is not a balanced budget. Therefore, it is unhinged and wildly problematic. However.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  It's enacted and it got signed. So that's why I want to talk about it. It's, I'm just, we started at the very beginning, intent, intent, cool. I could see all of that. What's your first action you did now that you got the power? And I'm trying to compare those two things.

• 1:13:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, I think you're misreading the situation. So let's, you've got redistribution on the left, you've got growth on the right. Yes?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  I said yes to that already. I think we're rehashing that again.

• 1:14:07Tom Bilyeu?

  But yes, but now you're saying that the big beautiful bill wasn't oriented towards growth, which seems patently untrue. The big beautiful bill is pathological and I hate it, but it is oriented poorly. It's not going to execute well because it steals via inflation. But it is designed based on very classic efforts to grow, to lower taxes, which does have a stimulatory effect because now companies have more money that they can invest in their companies. And that is likely to bring jobs, which is why then I said, well, if you want to talk about that, the most important thing that Trump has done in terms of classic, make sure that there are more jobs

• 1:14:50Tom Bilyeu?

  and make sure that the American worker, which is something nobody talks about, why American workers cannot keep their wages going with inflation. And the reason that they can't is because the budget is unbalanced and because-

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Globalized.

• 1:15:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, globalizing is probably a bigger, more important.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Heard all these points.

• 1:15:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, but you're not arguing these points.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  I'm not arguing these points because you're already two levels down of the first thing. So again, I'm looking.

• 1:15:16Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think I'm missing?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Legislation. And the reason I'm harping over legislation is because.

• 1:15:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Be specific. What?

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  In legislation, so the first act, you have free rein. Everybody gets one big, every president gets one big move. Obama's one big move was the Obamacare.

• 1:15:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Big beautiful bill.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  But that, that, that was.

• 1:15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  What is it about the big beautiful bill?

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  That's where I was.

• 1:15:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Isn't oriented towards growth?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  It's the way that it's not, it's not set up for incentives of growth. It's set up to take money away from the government class, back into the people, back into the ruling class's hands.

• 1:15:49Tom Bilyeu?

  That's how you grow.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  And that's an assumption.

• 1:15:52Tom Bilyeu?

  That isn't an assumption. That's.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  That is.

• 1:15:54Tom Bilyeu?

  God knows how many hundreds of years of economic reality.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  We can pull up a spreadsheet that shows those different things.

• 1:15:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Now we have found.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  We have data.

• 1:16:01Tom Bilyeu?

  The point of disagreement.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  We have data.

• 1:16:02Tom Bilyeu?

  So you're saying that giving the money to the government, that grows. But giving the money to businesses in the form of just not taking their money does not grow.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  That is the argument that is now being set up from the left and the right.

• 1:16:17Tom Bilyeu?

  But that, is that what you're saying?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yes. And I'm saying that right now on the left, on the left, it's if you leave that money into the government, we're able to now socialize all these things. So that way you'll get those resources and you don't have to pay for it. On the right, they're saying, we're not going to give you everything. We're going to push the money back down. But what has happened historically, when corporations get that tax break, they do well, but they don't pass the wages down. Wages don't increase. They don't pass, they don't hire more people. And those things that trickle down doesn't actually trickle down. So when I say.

• 1:16:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So how do you think the economy grows?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  When I say redistribution, let's get to there because, but we keep going around the thing. I understand how to articulate how the economy grows.

• 1:16:50Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think I'm going around?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Because we're not talking about the actual point of what the second order consequences of this legislation is.

• 1:16:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Because what I'm saying is on the left and the right, it's both redistribution. But the redistribution just looks differently. And that's what I'm saying. And that's the part where it's not left and right. This guy's a socialist, this guy. They're both redistributing. They're just redistributing in different ways. And that's the point I'm trying to make.

• 1:17:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's where you, I think you've made your point very well. I'm saying is you're wrong.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm trying to make sure that you feel understood.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But that you don't think I'm confused so that we can argue the points where it breaks down.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so then you're saying then if the government, if corporations had more money and we invested in them, they would then make the wages go up.

• 1:17:33Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't like the way you say corporations had more money.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  That, okay.

• 1:17:35Tom Bilyeu?

  That feels like they misread.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  How would you like to rephrase that?

• 1:17:39Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got over here redistribution is how economies break. This is like, if you want to destroy a country, go socialist, go communist, you will destroy it. And it will be economic hardship for everybody. The way that you grow an economy is via innovation. So the part that I worry is getting lost is that the only, the only reason that a GDP gets bigger is because you are more efficient per hour of output of the people working in the system.

• 1:18:14Tom Bilyeu?

  And so how do you think that happens?

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  How does a worker in this system become more efficient?

• 1:18:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  When you create efficiencies, when you create innovations, when you.

• 1:18:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And do you do that by taxing the companies more?

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  No, but you do that by government incentives in different places.

• 1:18:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Why? Why? Why does that become?

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Because Tesla was created out of government incentives. SpaceX was created out of government incentives.

• 1:18:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And oftentimes those incentives are tax breaks. So the thing that I can't figure out is why in the big beautiful bill, the tax breaks that they're proposing, which are classic ways of making sure.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  I can articulate this specifically. So on when Obama was in office, higher comma, for example, he had EV tax breaks. So there was three different levels of this. On the solar panels, he completely struck out. He wanted American solar panel to buy it. China just did it cheaper, easier. They scaled it better than him. He tried, a bunch of solar companies came and they died. That was, that was a L.

• 1:19:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Windmill companies, second thing, we got a couple of windmills company. It was 50 50. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. We could get them built up, but the amount of electricity they generated, it was a 30, a 30 year break even and it wasn't worth it. But on EVs, he knocked it out of the park. If you are able to manufacture your car with an electric battery, you are then able to get an incentive tax break. The incentive tax break was then passed on to people. EV market exploded in the US and that's the first time companies like Tesla, but there was also 17 more spawned up. The best ones rose to the top, the not capitalist succeeding ones fell off.

• 1:19:42Tom Bilyeu?

  What is the mechanism that you see at work there?

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  That was incentives to go into a certain area.

• 1:19:48Tom Bilyeu?

  What was the incentive?

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  It was tax breaks and it was government subsidies.

• 1:19:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  On those two things. Now, let's go back to the big, beautiful bill. Big, beautiful bill is not saying that all corporate taxes who then spur this type of investment get bricks. Trump did something correct with the Trump accounts with the kids. That's a win. The no car interest.

• 1:20:06Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not growth. So I want to make sure that we, I love that as well. That's protection against inflation. That isn't growing the economy. What I want to focus on is I'm making one simple argument. Redistribution is death. Growth, when done well, is the path forward.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Describe growth in one sentence so I can understand what it is.

• 1:20:26Tom Bilyeu?

  That you unburden private industry so that it may act selfishly and generate more revenue.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  When we have done that historically, has that led to an increased GDP number, increased employment and increased wages?

• 1:20:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. Without question. In fact, I think I have pull up. There's a thing that I put in there about capitalism. And now capitalism, as it goes up, people just get yanked out of poverty.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I find that to be the exact opposite because if you go from the 70s and trace it back to.

• 1:21:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Capitalism causes poverty?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  If we trace it from the 70s, I don't think capitalism causes poverty. I think that we need to stop those one sentence, uh, gotcha.

• 1:21:12Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm trying to like just simplify so we can talk.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  Because you said when you incentivize corporations, you give them, you unburden them, you minimize taxes, that that leads to increased GDP, increased wages and increased employment numbers.

• 1:21:25Tom Bilyeu?

  It does.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  And what I'm saying is the same thing is that was the assumption in the 70s and that was the basis for trickle down economics. We thought if we unburden all these corporations, it was. Ain't gonna bleed down to the middle class. That trickle never happened. The excess profits that the corporations got, they went into stock buybacks. They didn't go into people. The excessive GDP that was growing created the K-shaped economy because all these people up here are making it and they're doing the growth. But these bottom people got it, got it, got forgot about it and then wages are now stagnant.

• 1:21:52Tom Bilyeu?

  You started with a really important delineation. And we have somehow drifted away from this.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And that was that.

• 1:22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  We aren't living in a truly capitalist society.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:22:09Tom Bilyeu?

  What I'm trying to put on the table is all of those distortions. Those are the veer towards the redistributory. So it isn't that.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Things that were making things bad are the socialist of it, the capitalist of it, the things that are making it great.

• 1:22:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Aggressively accurate.

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:25Tom Bilyeu?

  That, that we, Drew, we have hundreds of years of economic data.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  I'm not arguing with that. I think that the interesting part of this is.

• 1:22:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Isn't that the exact thing you are arguing?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  Because I'm gonna say it in one sentence because I feel like we need to, we need to do bumper stickers.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  When we have a break in the system. A lot of times we want to put a capitalist Band-Aid on it. Depending on who is the break in that system, that Band-Aid then gets rebranded. It got rebranded to communism during the TSMC. When Intel was like, Intel was about to die, we're gonna take over your chips and we're gonna invest in that. That was a communism style practice. Specifically for chips, but it was okay because we needed it. It was a national resource, all these other things. We own the, we own the means of production officially. Officially. So, okay, but when it came to the bailouts, 2000s, 2008, COVID. We put on a socialism Band-Aid. You need to figure that out. We need to socialism our way out of that stuff.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  So now we, for different parts in the system, when we have these different bumps, we have Band-Aids that we pull out in different ways. And all I am saying is the same way that we see the left right now saying we need a socialism Band-Aid for this one thing. We're gonna keep capitalism in the other places, just like what China's doing. I think on the right, it's like, see, these guys wanted to be socialism or death. We want to speed. Yes, Hassan wants to speedrunning, but there's also Steve Bannon who wants to go back to Project Twenty Twenty Five. And I don't cause, I don't put Trump at Steve Bannon in the same ecosystem. There are people who are far, far right. There are people who are far, far left. And I don't do, I don't think it's a disservice to pick the leftist person and throw him at you, or the rightest person and throw him at you to, to, you know, disprove your point.

• 1:24:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But, hold on. So none of that would disprove my point. So the great news is, I'm just trying to map cause and effect.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So if what you're bothered by is that when I look at the situation, I map this as the left has a more terrifying orientation. The right, which is fumbling the ball about as hard as you can right now, has a less terrifying orientation. The thing that we share a concern about, which we're not talking about, which I feel like you're trying to blame on capitalism, which is very jarring for me, given how much time we've spent together.

• 1:24:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Is the thing that's broken in the economy right now is deficit spending and money printing. Period.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So when you look at where is the right going wrong? It is that they have gotten very comfortable with big government, money printing, deficit spending, all of that. And so that is going to hollow out the middle class. So I'm not even, I think it is morally wrong, but I don't even need people on board with deficit spending is morally wrong. I just need them to look at the cause and effect. That when you take from people, don't let them be in control, then the economy gets worse.

• 1:25:33Tom Bilyeu?

  And whatever mechanism you use to do that, you are going to suck the energy out of the economy. And so you're going to create a problem. And what I see on the left is somebody who thinks sucking the energy out of the economy is a good thing.

• 1:25:53Tom Bilyeu?

  On the right, it is a means to an end. And so they're both pathological.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  So the Republicans have their vacuum on for a little bit, but they're gonna turn it off. And you think the Democrats are gonna have their vacuum on 24/7 nonstop to get to eventually, if the Democrats, when they're gonna take 80% of your paycheck and they're not gonna stop at just a 50. That's the assumption.

• 1:26:14Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I'm not, no. So my assumption is that the right right now will leave the vacuum cleaner on forever. And the thing that scares me to death, when I think about trying to contribute meaningfully in some way to pulling us out of this, is getting people to understand whether the politician is on the left or the right, if they're gonna leave the budget unbalanced, they are the problem. Now, I'm, so, full stop. Now, I'm speaking to the ideas of what is the orientation to the active left and right where they're trying to get to. And I'll say this, and maybe this will clear things up.

• 1:26:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Do we agree that the spiritual center of the left, and maybe we don't, and this is the derail, but do you agree that the spiritual center of the left wants equal outcomes for everybody?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Hmm, yes, I'll give that to you.

• 1:27:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Tom Bilyeu?

  That to me is eat your babies. And I don't mean that as a joke. So you can understand, even though you don't agree with me, maybe, you can understand why I'm gonna reject that outright. So history has run that experiment a thousand times.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Cause that's 100% socialism, 100% communism.

• 1:27:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, on the right, even though they're pathological and doing a bunch of dumb shit, do you think they would be mad if we grew our way out of the debt? And we didn't need to deficit spend anymore? And the stock market was fucking roaring. Bear with me, please, cause I just need to know if.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  I can give you the one sentence I would give for the right to make that equivalent.

• 1:27:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you agree that they would want that?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  No, cuz I think what the left, I think what the right.

• 1:27:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's where we disagree.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  I think what the right actually wants is individual, individual outcomes. So on the left, it's equality of outcomes. Left is the ball is on your court. There's no doctor, there's no schools, there's no fire, there's no police. You're on your own.

• 1:28:08Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know that anybody on the right is saying that. Maybe I'm the closest to that.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Right now, they're just vetoing property taxes. How do you pay for your local services? Property taxes, so.

• 1:28:16Tom Bilyeu?

  That's how it's paid for now.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  The continuation of that is.

• 1:28:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Certainly a big argument to be had there. But I just want to get to, if we grew our way out of the debt and the stock market was ripping and roaring, do you think that the right, cuz there would be very unequal outcomes?

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  But, but think, but think how you, how you said.

• 1:28:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Bear with me.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  No, no, but.

• 1:28:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I can't get an answer on this side and I don't know why.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  I said no already, I said no already, because you're.

• 1:28:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So they wouldn't be happy with that?

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  Cuz this is the thing, would the left be happy if everybody can afford a house? And that house could be a $60,000 house in Louisiana? And now everybody's getting a downtown penthouse. Would they be happy if everybody can afford a house and have medical insurance? Yes, the left would be happy.

• 1:28:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Right, but they, but they wouldn't be happy.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  But you said equity of outcome. You didn't list the, the things. So on then on the right, you didn't say.

• 1:28:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Timeout, but that.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  On the left, you said, would everybody be happy with equity of outcome?

• 1:29:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  On the right, would you be happy with everybody being individually responsible for their end things? I think that's the equivalent.

• 1:29:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you'll agree to those two things?

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Great.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  That's it, thank you.

• 1:29:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Wonderful.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:29:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  Now we can talk, now we can go second level with the right.

• 1:29:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you saying to you, these are, um, you think that the left makes sense? So that, the equal, everybody can afford a $60,000 house.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Equity of outcome versus individual results may vary. I think that's the right and the left.

• 1:29:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, perfect, love that. Now, are you saying that the left idea is good and the right idea is bad?

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Um, I, I, I don't think there's good or bad. I think it draws through the heart of every human man. But this is the, this is the conversation, this is the level of the conversation I want to have the debate on. Because I think in certain things, individual sovereignty is absolutely important. And the government should stay out of your business. And I think for everythings, there should be equity of outcome. So I think when it comes to medical, it should be equity of outcome. Everybody should be able to see a doctor. It's gonna suck and it's gonna be expensive and it's gonna be disrespectful. And some people are gonna have to hurt on their profits and that's whack. That's terrible. At the same time, though, if you didn't get up and go to school, I don't, you don't deserve a college degree. You don't deserve an eighty thousand dollar job. Some people are gonna be homeless and that's gonna suck and it's not gonna be nice and that's gonna be. So I think that there should be equity of outcomes in certain situations in a society.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  And I think that there should be individual sovereignty on a vast majority of things in society.

• 1:30:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. And I think. I love that. You and I are very, very similar in that. Now, where I think we break down is that if you to get equal outcomes, do you agree that at some point you must do so by force?

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:30:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you get an equal outcome without force?

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  You get an equal outcome by one limiting your entrance? So what do you want to have limited, uh, equal outcome on?

• 1:30:58Tom Bilyeu?

  So here's the thing that you'll have to contend with. Do you agree that once you have a sufficiently large group of people, that there will be dissenting voices?

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  People who disagree with you?

• 1:31:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you deal with the dissenting voices?

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Debate and then if you win, you win them and the policy gets changed.

• 1:31:12Tom Bilyeu?

  But let's say that you lose, but you still dissent.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Then I, I dissented against Donald Trump. He still got elected and that's still my president. I'm, I'm pouting about it, but he still won.

• 1:31:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, imagine that you actually did something about it and you decided that you weren't gonna pay your taxes.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Then I'll go to jail.

• 1:31:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct, that's force. So I'm saying, so you don't agree that's force?

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Hold on, so people, that's true now.

• 1:31:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  What, what, so what did we just accomplish in this?

• 1:31:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So Drew, what I'm trying to get you to understand is that the reason that the equal outcomes never works is, people will, not never, the reason that you end up with a problem over there is that must be enacted by force. So if you get to the point where you say, okay, what we're gonna do, we're all gonna come together. We're gonna fund the government and these are gonna be the things that we pay for. Great, you're gonna have winners and losers.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But you can decide whether you want to stay in the country or not.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:05Tom Bilyeu?

  What ends up happening is that as you ratchet that up and you start confiscating the means of production, you start trying.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Before, before we get to that point, it's.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  You know how when we talked about the left and the right and we said the would the right be mad if they got the increased stock market and all that as opposed to saying individual sovereignty? I think we're doing that again where we're now speaking on different levels of the argument. So equal outcome.

• 1:32:31Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't think we're speaking on different levels of the argument.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  How my mind works and it's it's I categorize.

• 1:32:36Tom Bilyeu?

  The way that the government works is we all come together as weak people and we say that we're going to agree that some things are going to be paid for. We're going to put into a system where you're able to pay a certain amount of tax. You're going to vote. You're going to be able to somewhat influence your destiny. And then the things that we pay for, we agree on where it starts to break down is where you do that via theft, which is inflation, which is what's happening now. So the thing you're not able to vote for. And so we just in 1913, we enacted the central banks. We agreed earlier that this is the beginning of all the problems. Now, what we're putting is if we were in a situation where we had a balanced budget, then what you're talking about makes sense to me because

• 1:33:18Tom Bilyeu?

  you can say that we want equal outcomes and everybody gets to vote for the things that you want to pay for. And the budget has to be balanced, but when you want equal outcomes and you're stealing people's money to get it. Then you will realize some people are going to say, hold on a second. That's not fair. You're taking from me in order to give to these people, but I'm over here winning. And now you're giving to all the people that are losing. So I'm just saying, I love what you're putting forward. When you put it forward in the abstract that we want personal responsibility on most things, but hey, there's some things that we're going to come together as a society, vote for and say, we just, we can't tolerate this. We don't want to see people not able to get medical attention. And as I have said many, many times, a society can have anything they want. They're just not going to be able to have everything. And so at some point you have to prioritize.

• 1:34:00Tom Bilyeu?

  What I'm saying is the thing that doesn't happen is we don't do that. And we say, we're going to get everything and we're going to do it through inflation. And so then I go to, okay, if you're stealing my money, you're pathological. Now I just want to map. Whose orientation is stealing my money is good and whose orientation is ah, we want to grow and get to the other side. Now I get it that right now they are both distressing, but one ideology. I'll say it another way.

• 1:34:28Tom Bilyeu?

  The right needs to immediately start getting rid of the socialist policies. Full stop.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  And the left needs to enact more capitalism in their future plans of America.

• 1:34:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, they need to come back to the middle.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:45Tom Bilyeu?

  That would be perfect. But there's still something in your head. I can see it in the like, smile on your face.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  I was literally about to say, go to the wire so we can shake hands. It's like we landed the plane.

• 1:34:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Did we?

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  I think so. I thought, I thought so.

• 1:34:58Tom Bilyeu?

  What would you say is, do you think that I have had an epiphany in this conversation?

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  No, but I think we clarified our base assumptions. And then we also listed, where do we think each of the sides come through? Holy crap, we got nine super chats. Yeah, we've been, we've been talking about this for an hour.

• 1:35:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Bear with me.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I got distracted.

• 1:35:19Tom Bilyeu?

  For the health of our relationship, if nothing else.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:22Tom Bilyeu?

  So I want to understand. So if you know, I haven't had an epiphany in this conversation. I don't think you've had an epiphany in this conversation.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  I think I had an epiphany.

• 1:35:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Because I think what happened was we went from, we were back and forth from ought and is. So I think when we were talking about what the economy is, and then we were laying points at that. And then we went into the alt of it all. And then we were then having conversations about the ought and the is. Because when it's, if we went to the ought, how it ought to be, we would already have a balanced budget. We would already stop, uh, there would be no inflation. We would stop money printing. This conversation is much different when we're $40 trillion in debt. So that's why I think that was the way we kind of crossed paths. And the second thing that was important to me was talking the fundamentals at the beginning. So individual sovereignty versus equity of outcome. Then we can argue the policies all day of how we get to that. But I didn't want it to be equity of outcome, stock market growth, because that's not apples and apples.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  My comparison is the individual sovereignty, uh, equal outcomes. And then how we execute those things is a whole nother thing.

• 1:36:24Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm going to go to a meta conversation about your and my relationship.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Tom Bilyeu?

  We've had these conversations before, which every now and then, as a producer, you allow it to happen, which I love them as they are incredibly enlightening to me as to where we stand. I see you as an avatar for an incredibly smart, incredibly well-intentioned person who views the economy very differently than I do. And that always makes me a little bit tense. And we, reason being that you and I are here often, you hear the things that I say, you have opportunities to argue, and when you allow yourself unfettered ability to argue, there is this sense

• 1:37:14Tom Bilyeu?

  that I get that there's a lot you leave unsaid in a lot of shows, which is very generous of you as a producer to keep the focus of the show. Fuck, kudos. But the show is only interesting to me in as much as it may actually be able to enact change. And so we keep coming to this impasse where there is a sense that you think I'm confused. And that's where I always get.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Okay, let me rephrase that. I don't think that you're confused. I think that we have, we talk in segments a lot, and I'm using the word segment specifically because we don't look at the entire body. We talk about the digit of the left finger, or digit of the left hand. We talk about the right kneecap. We talk about the neck.

• 1:37:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I talk about cause and effect all the time.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  But it's specific layers of the economy. So, okay, your neck is swollen. It's because you have inflation that has all attacked this one right, this part of the right side of your neck. It is now causing the local red blood cells to react. But if we take a zoom, like, step back, it's still what you're eating. It's a big, there's a lot of things that go into that specific ailment that we're talking about. So I use that symbolism to say that when we talk about the war and the economy through the war, it's much, it's different than talking about the economy as a philosophical. Forty thousand few, few, forty thousand foot level of it.

• 1:38:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, but let's go back to where we started. So I wanted to play a clip of, we did play a clip of Kamala Harris at my request, where she shows what I think is a systemic problem on the left. And the argument spiraled from that, which is you don't believe that there is a systemic problem there. I can feel now we'll loop and this will end up being bad TV, so I'm gonna put a pin there. But you feel a sense of reconciliation that I do not share. And I feel that this is one of those times where if, if you and I were a married couple, right now I'd be like, we gotta go another hour or two hours on this because the, um, the,

• 1:39:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't want to sweep anything under the rug, which we're going to do for bad TV reasons. But I worry that sometimes you and I represent the middle-ish, uh, people and yet the divide that we still have. So anyway, I'll leave it there. Um, but I'm always grateful to you for.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Tom, I, I, I want you to know, like, I, people think like I get mad or I get like, I, I have real shit to worry about. So of political, like a political conversation about the, like, about the aughts of America is not something that's gonna keep me up at night. So I didn't internalize this. I don't hold any type of way. I don't take it personally. I don't think there's a shot about me or anything.

• 1:39:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I didn't read you in that way at all. To me, this is a, a very big problem that the world is facing and we are careening towards a real problem that maybe I'm internalizing too much, but, um, yeah, I, I think that we have.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  Honestly, we like, it's interesting that we got here because we were about to talk about the revolution, people burning down warehouses and stuff like that. And I think that. Your response was probably going to be into economic problems. I thought it was going to be. That's what it be. I thought we were going to transition into that conversation.

• 1:40:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting because we need to cover that.

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  We need to get there yet.

• 1:40:30Tom Bilyeu?

  This is, I can't believe the time is, that's a while.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  I looked at it like, oh snap, the whole show is gone. Time flies when you're having fun, man.

• 1:40:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Time flies when you're having fun. That's very true.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  It's, I do want to just at least give you the moment to talk about the revolution thing and like bring those two together. Cause I thought I was playing producer like, okay, I'm gonna bring it back this way. And then we got caught up in the wrong and I didn't clap myself out.

• 1:40:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Did we get caught up in the wrong? I don't know. I think that was.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  I appreciated it though. Yeah.

• 1:40:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I think what just happened is indicative of where we are as a country. Even as you march back towards the middle, I think it is interesting that all of us, hopefully all of us map a sense of cause of logic. And so we think that we are right. Hopefully we're all open minded and willing to change. Okay. Having said all that, the question of whether or not this is a class uprising, I think is a very interesting question that is going to be ferociously debated. When you look at all the violence that we're seeing in the last two weeks, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco home. Days later, two more people were arrested near his house after shots were fired in the neighborhood.

• 1:41:40Tom Bilyeu?

  An Indianapolis city council man who voted for a data center had 13 bullets fired into his front door. A note was left on the porch that said, no data centers. And before all of that, a 29 year old worker, warehouse worker named Kamal Abdul Karim, burned a 1.2 million square foot distribution center to the ground. And then uploaded a video of himself saying that if they were just paying a living wage, that the warehouse wouldn't have burned down. Now, nobody knows if all of these incidents are actually connected, but there is a crazy pattern that is starting to be very difficult to ignore.

• 1:42:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Luigi Mangione, who shot the health insurance CEO in cold blood on a Manhattan sidewalk, his legal defense. Has raised nearly a million dollars from 30,000 donors. The guy that burned down the warehouse said that he saw parallels between himself and Mangione. Roughly half of American college students sympathize with Mangione more than the man that he killed. Social media says that we're watching the beginning of a class uprising and these kind of things have happened historically. Uh, if you guys know, part of why Teddy Roosevelt ended up on uh, Mount Rushmore was he was the guy that saw us through the sort of last round of all of this stuff.

• 1:43:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And the thing that worries me is the arguments that are being put forward right now are to rerun what we did with Teddy Roosevelt. And so part of um, the reason that I wanted to spend so much time with Drew in that conversation is that, that people are putting forward yesterday's solution to a totally different problem today. And the truth is that the anger that people feel is completely justified, completely justified. The system is rigged, it is rigged against you. Uh, it is as problematic as people think. Since 1979, American worker productivity grew by 80.9%, while wages only grew by 29.4%.

• 1:43:46Tom Bilyeu?

  The top 1% now hold as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. For six straight years through 2025, the bottom 80% of earners failed to keep up with inflation, specifically on the things that matter, housing, grocery, energy, healthcare. These are the things that you can't cut without real consequences. And when you're spending 65% of your take-home pay on rent, people are going to go berserk. But what concerns me is that people are not mapping the cause and effect. And if people were beating the drum about Inflation and money printing, then I would have hope for the future. But we are not. We are beating the drum about greedy corporations and billionaires.

• 1:44:31Tom Bilyeu?

  And that is to fundamentally miss the connective tissue of how we have ended up here. That was what was happening back in Teddy Roosevelt's day. And that's why the things that he enacted actually worked. He broke up the monopolies. He made sure that worker like 40 hour weeks and making sure that they weren't being abused by a system that had virtually no visibility. That's what you had to do back then for sure. But now people are fighting back against billionaires as if the way that billionaires are getting rich isn't through inflation. And that's the thing that people do not understand.

• 1:45:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Owning assets right now is the great protective mechanism because the system is so rigged. And here's the hard thing that people like Mondani are learning right now. The real wealth is in the middle class and the upper middle class. That's where all the money is stored. It's not with the billionaires. And so the great irony of watching someone like Hassan Piker talk about taxing people to death or somebody like, um, oh, the guy from Connecticut, Bernie Sanders, talking about taxing people to death. As you will notice, Bernie Sanders used to bang on about millionaires and billionaires are the problem. Millionaires and billionaires. Ever wonder why now he only says billionaires? Because he himself is a millionaire.

• 1:45:57Tom Bilyeu?

  So what ends up happening is people realize that, oh, wait a second. Not only when we try to tax the billionaires, does it not work? Because they will leave. They will, um, stop producing, which is by far the worst.

• 1:46:13Tom Bilyeu?

  They will hire accountants and professionals to help them avoid the tax. But no matter what you do, short of showing up with weapons to confiscate their wealth, you don't end up getting more money. Look up the Laffer curve. There is just a reality to be faced that there's only so much money that you're going to get through tax. And by the way, and I just cannot stress this enough. If you have an unbalanced budget, no matter how much you tax people, it isn't going to work. For every dollar that we have taken in in tax revenue since 2019, the government has spent, it's like a dollar fifty-eight. It's if that isn't exactly the number, it's right around there.

• 1:46:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So you will never solve this problem by taxing people more until you balance the budget. And no matter how many times I say that, it just, that's never the argument. What ends up being the argument is that people burn buildings by throwing Molotov cocktails. And ultimately, they're aiming at the wrong target. And if we could get people to understand that killing an insurance executive or burning a warehouse to the ground, going after AI CEOs, this isn't going to solve the problem. They are operating inside of a machine that they didn't build. The machine was built in 1913, and if you want to know who to be angry at, be angry at central bankers and politicians that keep voting for it to exist.

• 1:47:37Tom Bilyeu?

  The machine right now is a $2 trillion annual deficit machine that turns the gap between what you earn and what you owe into somebody else's asset appreciation. That deficit is the thing that's driving the K-shaped economy.

• 1:47:56Tom Bilyeu?

  People think that they're stealing money. They're not stealing money. And I'm not asking you, well, money's being stolen, but that is a whole different thing. Fraud in the government is just going to be horrifying. But when you're mad at a billionaire whose net worth just keeps going up and up and up because they own assets, you have to ask, why are those assets going up and up and up? Because money is being stolen from the middle class. It is being stolen from workers, but it's being stolen through inflation.

• 1:48:28Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's the thing that we have to get everybody to focus on. And yet, every major period of extreme inequality in recorded history has ended in one of two ways. Structural reform or mass violence? So the question becomes, what's the structural reform that would work right now? And the structural reform that I'm rebelling against, and this is one of those moments where I feel bad about Drew because his face is drug all up in this fucking show. And yet, as a producer, he is generous of spirit and allows me to say my thing. But the reality is, I believe that the things the left wants, the vision that they have for the future, is the thing that's going to lead to increased violence is going to be problematic.

• 1:49:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the left or the right is fucking up so much right now that honestly, it's a throw them both in the trash and just look for a candidate that will speak to one very simple thing. The understanding of the connection between deficit spending, inflation, and the growing K-shaped economy. Because anybody that bangs the drum about taxing billionaires more does not understand the actual math. And the violence historically never fixes that math. It just makes things so painful that everyone is finally willing to accept

• 1:49:51Tom Bilyeu?

  the cause and effect of austerity, balancing the budget, making sure that we're not inflating people into madness. So the anger is right. I understand emotionally why people are so outraged that they would do the things they're doing. But the mechanism that they are calling for will make it worse, not better. And if the people who are mad are never able to map that difference, then the rage is only going to bring more suffering, not less.

• 1:50:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Teddy Roosevelt understood the mechanism of his day and he addressed it. We have to understand the mechanism of our day, which again is deficit spending and money printing that causes inflation in the K-shaped economy. That's the thing. And I, I am perfectly, I'm thrilled to vote for a Democrat if they are just gung ho about, we've got to balance the budget. We've got to stop any policy that isn't economically viable. And so, yes, I'm going to continue to call out people that do things that don't make sense, like what Trump is doing now, and that say things that show that they don't understand

• 1:51:09Tom Bilyeu?

  the economy, like Kamala Harris's bumbling thing on the economy, or like one of Biden's senior economic advisors who could not explain modern monetary theory. Because we all have to call out the things that don't make sense. Because whether it's fun to talk about the physics of the economy or not, we're all beholden to them.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask, like, is this gonna keep continuing? But I think from Mangione to the warehouse, to now an Amazon warehouse, to there was another fire in New York somewhere, it seemed like it's already escalating. Is this the pockets of violence part of the debt that you think we're at now?

• 1:51:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, oh, for sure. And the AI of it all is just going to make things worse. So people are understandably afraid of AI. And so you put that on top of everything else that's going wrong. Yep, and you get what we're seeing now. Now, my hope is that it remains pockets of violence, that we pull our heads out of our asses, that we balance the budget and we stop inflating people into oblivion. But- Yeah, we'll see if we actually do it. Uh, all right. Yeah, that's all we got. All right. We, man, I did not think that we were gonna be at almost 10 minutes over by the time that I got to say this, but I am gonna be offline for the next almost two weeks.

• 1:52:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So we will not have any lives. This makes me very sad. We will have, yes, we will have plenty of content for you guys, but we won't be going live. So we won't go live Wednesday, Friday of this week, or Monday, Wednesday, Friday of the following week. Then we'll be back in full force. So it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for me that I'm gonna be taking advantage of. I apologize and appreciate everybody's understanding and I hope to see you guys all back when we get back at it. And thank you. By the way, I know today's show was unusual in terms of the format, but I actually think that that is us at our best. So I really, really appreciate you guys. And one more shout out, Drew. Thank

• 1:53:15Tom Bilyeu?

  you so much for being a sparring debate partner that helps me sharpen my thinking. It's much, much, much appreciated. May you all have somebody in your life that wants good things for you and is willing and able to challenge your ideas. It is extraordinary. So I love you guys all bunches. Have a wonderful time and I will see you when we get back. Later. 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

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