Why Negotiating Through Violence Fails: Middle East, Ukraine, and the Collapse of the Freedom of Seas

Sign up for my next FREE A. I. class here: https://tombilyeu.com/leverage-ai-july-9?utm_campaign=ai-masterclass&utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_content=post-260407-1 https://tombilyeu.com/leverage-ai-july-9?utm_campaign=ai-masterclass&utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_content=post-260407-1 ITU: Ready to break through your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE Welcome back to The Tom Bilyeu Show with cohost, Drew, where we dive deep into the world’s most pressing news and the underlying mechanisms shaping our society. In today’s packed episode, Tom unpacks the latest geopolitical escalations between the U. S. and Iran, analyzing the breakdown of negotiations and the growing risk of conflict in the Middle East. We’ll also cover Ukraine’s relentless strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, and what it means to back a nuclear-armed dictator into a corner. Shifting focus to domestic policy, Tom breaks down the California billionaire wealth tax—what it signals about America’s political climate, why it may have disastrous economic consequences, and the mechanisms behind rising resentment toward the billionaire class. The conversation explores both sides of the wealth tax debate, addressing the emotional and practical grievances fueling the populist moment. We’ll also tackle Europe’s deadly heat wave, examining how draconian regulations and lack of innovation are costing lives, plus a bizarre turn as China trolls Europe with air-conditioned pig pens. And as always, we spotlight stories that reveal deeper cultural trends—from citizen vigilantes in Mexico to rampant fraud in American government spending. Get ready for a thought-provoking journey through policy, economics, and the psyche behind the headlines—because understanding the “why” is the first step to creating real impact. Chapters: 00:00 MOU dispute over the Strait 07:17 US-Iran conflict analysis 14:42 Skepticism on Iran negotiations 20:28 Tensions and grievances with Iran 22:06 Alienating Allies and Regional Impact 31:16 Russia's WWII sacrifice and impact 36:47 Newsom positioning for 2028 election 37:52 Economic influence of billionaires 46:16 AOC on wealth inequality 52:39 Frustrations with the economy 57:41 Impact of Budget Policies on Workers 59:42 Discussing job market leverage 01:09:18 Taxing inherited assets fairly 01:15:06 The fisherman's simple lifestyle 01:19:54 History repeats and innovation's role 01:25:59 France's excess deaths and AC debate 01:26:56 Innovations in tackling climate change 01:34:34 Fraud in NGO funding 01:39:47 Ad hominem attacks in populism 01:42:47 Promoting the AI masterclass Sponsors: Truemed: Check your eligibility and start saving at https://truemed.com/impact Ethos: Get a free quote athttps://ethos.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com http://business.att.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I hope you guys had a wonderful weekend. There certainly was plenty of drama to go around as the US and Iran exchanged blows. Once again, we're going to discuss the details and what's likely the result from negotiating via violence, which I'm not expecting to turn out very well.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Ukraine continues to smash Russian oil infrastructure. Speaking of negotiating through violence, Europe is helping them more and more push Putin into a corner. But the question is, what does somebody who's put in a desperate situation, what do they end up doing? So all eyes over there. In addition to what's going on in the Middle East, China is now trolling Europe with AC videos as thousands die in a European heatwave that's sweeping the continent. And their response is to further restrict people's use of AC, which is absolutely wild. The odds of the California billionaire theft tax passing go up dramatically after insane video from Gavin Newsom comes out.

• 2:11Tom Bilyeu?

  More evidence of mass scale fraud as more than 1 million people are found on Obamacare without a social security number. And a Mexican Batman is hunting down motorcycle thieves and you're not going to believe what he's doing when he catches them. It is amazing. Shout out to my man. Right. Speaking of shout outs, Kalshi, thank you so much for continuing to support the show. We appreciate it very much. You guys, there was a QR code on your screen. Right now, you can trade $10 to get, you can trade $10 to get $10 with code IMPACT. So do your thing and also use it as polling, man. This is something that we do more and more here, trying to get a sense of what's really going on in the world.

• 2:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And in fact, that is exactly what triggered me when I saw what's going on with the billionaire theft tax, seeing the odds there jump on the polling places. It's wild. So keep your eyes peeled to that stuff. It really does tell you where our culture is moving to. Okay. US and Iran, the ceasefire just absolutely blew apart this weekend. It all started Thursday. We talked about this a little bit on Friday. So you had that drone hit the ever lovely, it was a Singapore flagged container ship. They were trying to go through the Strait of Hormuz. They were hugging the coast of Oman and I think that's what kicked off the beef. Iran sees when the ships are hugging the coast of Oman, that that threatens their ability to control the strait.

• 3:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, you're going to get propagandized so hard on all of this stuff, both from the US and from Iran. So what's really going on? Trump certainly wants you to believe that Iran is a rational state actor, that we can do these negotiations with them and everything is going to be hunky dory. But despite what the propaganda would have us believe, Iran wants control of the strait and they are obviously willing to fight and die for that control. Now, as we are seeing now, even during this 60-day negotiating period, where this is supposed to just be peace as far as the eye can see, Iran is attempting to exert their domination over the area, and I think that is the right way to see this.

• 4:16Tom Bilyeu?

  The way that the MOU was written is an absolute comedy routine. I don't know if both sides think they're being clever, but it is written so vaguely that it is forcing them essentially to violently clash, to say, "No, no, no, this is what we actually agreed to. We are going to take over the Strait. We are going to run it the way that we see fit. We are going to charge a fee for it after the end of this 60-day negotiating window." And Iran has said very vocally with their full chest that they are never going back to the way that things were before all of this shook down as it relates to the Strait. So imagine if that's how they're behaving now,

• 5:01Tom Bilyeu?

  when you've got US troops just all up in their business, what they're going to be like when they pull out. Now, I hate to say it, but as things stand right now, I do not see any universe in which what we're building towards is peace in the Middle East. What I see is we are building towards a breakdown of the longstanding freedom of the seas paradigm. Iran is going to be charging tolls, period, end of story. They're going to attack if people try to hug the coast of Oman. They don't want anybody else being able to tell them what to do. They want the US out of the Middle East entirely. They want to be the hegemon of the Middle East. So even though Trump is trying to warn them

• 5:46Tom Bilyeu?

  that he's not going to stand for any of that, they're just going to keep showing time and again that if the US isn't willing to fight over it, they're not just going to chill and go back to normal. So yeah, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the optimistic view that everything is going to settle down. So we're moving into technical talks right now. So according to Trump, Iran asked for a meeting, which is going to be Taking place Tuesday in Doha. It's a technical talk, meaning we're going to talk specifically about how this stuff is logistically going to play out. But given how far apart they seem to be in reality, I am not expecting anything to come out of this, except more violence. So how long will the back and forth go before somebody finally breaks? That I don't know.

• 6:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But yeah, I don't have any belief in the negotiated settlement working. So right now, I think you have two regimes, the US and the Iranians that do not see anything the same. Iran is moving into a new world where the Strait of Hormuz becomes a choke point that they can use strategically as a weapon anytime they want the leverage in a negotiation with the US or virtually anybody else. That depends on the Strait of Hormuz. And remember, Trump is going to bang the drum and say that the US, we don't need it. Strait of Hormuz doesn't matter to us. We produce more energy than blah, blah, blah. But the reality is from a pressure standpoint from our allies, it matters tremendously.

• 7:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So that is going to be a problem, certainly for Trump, in that anytime that Iran goes and exerts control over that, people are going to rightly point out, we were in a much better position before Trump struck Iran. So yeah, this is going to make it even harder for him in the future to be able to build coalitions. And he'll say, we have coalitions, but yeah, when push comes to shove, people are not siding with the US in great numbers, as we've seen both from European allies. We've seen weak knees from our allies in the Gulf region. So yeah, we're not in a good place right now. That is the punchline.

• 7:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And I don't think that we're going to get in a good place unless we push the issue militarily. It's one of those, should we have ever started it? Probably not, as we are in just an absolutely horrendous position compared to where we were before.

• 8:12Tom Bilyeu?

  But now that we have started it, all the hand wringing over, we never should have done it in the first place is just completely nonsensical. Having that conversation is a waste of time and energy on everybody's behalf. We are where we are. And so now it becomes a question of how do we get our way out of this? And given the behavior of Iran in terms of being a "rational state actor," I'm not seeing evidence of that. So now it becomes a question of how far is the US willing to go to bring an end to this? I don't think that we would put troops on the ground. So yeah, the ability to get this done from

• 8:51Tom Bilyeu?

  the air does not seem possible. So stalemate, stalemate, which at the end of this, if we are not able, willing and able to escalate to the point where Iran no longer has the military willingness and ability to continue to fight, you can expect the US to just sort of eventually wash their hands of this, leave Iran in a situation where they use their control of the strait as negotiating power, and then we'll just have to see how far that takes them. They've made it very clear they don't plan to back off their nuclear ambitions. So yeah, not in a great place.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  So stalemate, I'm immediately thinking of like Russia-Ukraine, where it's like this off again, off again drone battle here. Some weeks it's strike every day, some weeks it's months of quiet. Do you see it stalemate kind of in that direction? I'm trying to think what does a stalemate in war look like?

• 9:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so what's going on in Iran is not a conventional war. This is tit-for-tat diplomacy. It is negotiated violence. What you see in Ukraine is an all-out war. So Ukraine is, we don't talk about it sometimes because there are other things that are popping off, but Ukrainians, Russians are dying on the front line every day and have been ceaselessly for four years. So these are two very different things. If we're going to speed run, we've got more detail on it later, but to speed run what's going on in Russia. It looks something like this. Europe is backing Ukraine harder.

• 10:26Tom Bilyeu?

  The US, despite Trump's protestations, are beginning to back Ukraine, at least verbally and with votes. You're getting people, even Republicans, that are signaling that they want to get back to supporting Ukraine. It's a small number, but they're they're in open defiance of Trump's desires to do it. So that fracture needs to be taken very seriously. And so now with that assistance, though, Europe is trying to stay as much in the background as possible, despite Starmer's sort of very high-risk support on his way out. They're really trying to make the average Russian citizen feel the pain. And so they're striking more than 1,200 miles into Russia.

• 11:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, that's wild. So Ukraine, they're doing it largely internally, meaning it's not like the US is shipping them a bunch of drones. It's not like Europe is shipping them a bunch of drones. They're building it internally, but they do clearly have the growing support of Europe. And that's buying them the things that they need to build the weaponry that they're going to need to continue to strike deep into Russia. Because of that, you're now backing a nuclear armed dictator into a corner who has signaled multiple times willingness to use nuclear weapons if he's put in a particular position. And so if his own country begins to turn against him,

• 11:52Tom Bilyeu?

  the dictator playbook is to suppress your own people with violence if you need to. And then obviously get more and more violent against Ukraine. So this is really gonna, this is probably rightly viewed as a standoff between Europe as the real backstop and Russia. And so how far are they willing to escalate that? But while I'm, I'm really impressed with what Ukraine has done. And I side myself on the pro Ukrainian side of this because Russia invaded them. But this could escalate quickly into something that gets uncontained really fast. And so.

• 12:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, yeah, don't love it, but I I don't see another way for this to play out. You have to at a minimum, try to get Putin to the negotiating table. And if he feels that he's in a superior position, he's going to push the advantage. And the problem is, that's exactly what I see in Iran. So while the war status of them are very different, the reality of you've got to use violence to get people to start acting quote unquote sensible is true in both scenarios.

• 13:05Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:28Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:34Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Your point earlier of using violence through negotiation, that's the motivation you think? Or was this all retaliation because they struck that vessel? And this was?

• 16:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, so what I mean by that is you've got Trump who's saying, listen, we want to be calm in all of this. We want to get a deal done. I think there's a deal to be had here. They're saying all the right things. Don't worry. Yeah, they're gonna pop off. They've got to give their, um, their countrymen something to believe in. They've got to see that they've won this, but don't worry, it's just rhetoric. And the reality is that Iran is negotiating violently. And they're, they are saying exactly what they're doing. And Trump just keeps asking us not to believe them. But the reality is they're saying, no, no, no, we're going to control the strait.

• 17:29Tom Bilyeu?

  And then the second a ship hugs the coast of Oman to try to avoid anything that Iran might have done, they attack them. So that is completely consistent. There, there's like, if you strip away Trump's whole, no, no, nothing to see here. Everything is fine. And you just, they say something and they do something. There's complete coherence. It is only when people tell me not to believe my lying ears that all of a sudden it seems confusing. So I'm like, nope, these guys are negotiating with violence. They're telling you, the MOU says this. I know you wanted to say something else, but the MOU says, uh, fuck all your inspectors. It says, um, you guys are going to give us $300 billion. It says that we're going to control the strait and that we're going to be able to start charging fees

• 18:14Tom Bilyeu?

  after the 60 day window. It says all of those things. And every time we see you do something in violation of that, we're going to blow something up. And that is going to force the US to strike back. So now we're in a position where it's like, we can layer a level of diplomacy on it to try to calm the markets, but the reality is that your, your diplomacy is at the end of things that go boom. So, uh, it, it's just like, I'm now trying to just go, okay.

• 18:50Tom Bilyeu?

  None of, all the words are pointless. Let me just watch what happens. Okay, if you try to get around the mines, the military control of Iran in the Strait, they attack you. Okay, so they see themselves as like having that whole bad boy. And if Oman isn't gonna help them, then they're just going to attack. Uh, and so now it's like, oh, okay, yeah, this is completely unsettled. The MOU is bullshit. Uh, every word that I hear that we're near a deal, nope. Iran is just buying time. This is them trying to get to a decrease in troops in the region. And then they're gonna run the show the way that they want. So it's like, if, if you, um, let me, let me just make a really horrible analogy.

• 19:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, if you see domestic abuse and you send a, a social worker in there to watch how things are going, and the guy beats his wife while they're there, and is like, you guys need to leave the house. And when you leave the house, like, yeah, this is all gonna be fine. But they're beating them right in front of you. Like, what on earth makes you think that by leaving, things are going to get better? So without sufficient military intervention, meaning without the US breaking enough shit inside of Iran, that they finally back down.

• 20:06Tom Bilyeu?

  What indication do we have that they're going to back down? Other than our diplomats saying, no, no, no, secretly, they're saying all the right things. What do you see that leads you to believe that that's really true? And I would say, nothing. There's nothing. The only like minor thing you have is, um, we do get moments like now where they're like, cool, we're gonna stop. So my question is, what is the US saying that to them privately? Like, they're asking you to believe, no, no, no, they just say a bunch of stuff to us that they're not saying to you. What if that's projection? And we're just saying, meaning the US diplomats are just saying a bunch of things to us, the American public, calm the markets.

• 20:45Tom Bilyeu?

  But in reality, the, the actual at the table thing just is exactly what we can see with the violence. So that's my instinct, is that with wildly imperfect information, the only thing that I'm left to be able to do is go, but what are people actually doing? And what they're actually doing is exerting control right now in the middle of the negotiations to make their position clear.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  I feel like so that from that standpoint, they're negotiating from a place of strength where America is kind of slowly losing its leverage? Or does America need to just bomb more things? How do we react to?

• 21:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, America, the, the only leverage that America has is how far are you willing to go? How many things are you willing to destroy? Americans don't have the appetite for it financially. We don't have the appetite for it from a, do we support Trump and think that he's doing the right thing? Um, he's gone in and like done a partial job in terms of like, there are two battles. There is the moral battle, which I think Trump has already lost. Nobody's on his team from that side. That like ought we have done it? People don't buy the nuclear thing. So they're like, yeah, well, I agree with you that Iran shouldn't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think that's what this was about from the jump. Uh, I think this is about Israel putting a bunch of pressure on you to go in and do it.

• 21:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, and I think, I mean, I can do the like, he was trying to get on Mount Rushmore and I can explain all the nuance. But if you just look at it in terms of how the public thinks about it, the public is, is simplified, the narrative down to, uh, Israel really pressured you to do this. You go off half cocked anyway with this stuff. You just wanted to bully them around. And so now that moral battle lost, but you still went in and blew up a bunch of stuff. You, the current supreme leader, you killed his dad, his wife, I think one of his kids or multiple of his kids. So he's not on your team. Uh, so now you've got the IRGC more hardened than ever before, more angry than ever before, more willing to blow things up.

• 22:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And they've got asymmetric warfare. So now I want you to pull out of it because I don't think the average American has enough information to think through the political, uh, geopolitical ramifications of us backing out now. So they're just like, get out. I don't want to see you in foreign wars. I certainly don't want to see you in a foreign war that I map as Israel just sort of pushing you around. And so get out. So Trump has very little leverage. I think he'll keep blowing things up because he's, anyway, we'll set that aside for now. I think he's going to keep doing that for a while. But he's going to run out of political capital very fast as we get to the midterms. If anything happens to knock us off all time highs in the stock market, which AI looms

• 23:29Tom Bilyeu?

  large there. So now you've got a Trump will strike back, but from a very weakened political position. And then Iran trying to negotiate purely through violent strength. And whether they're in a politically tenable position is irrelevant because they'll kill their own people to quiet them down again. So it is one of those. It always brings me back to the following statement. If you're not prepared to do total warfare, you are essentially guaranteeing a quagmire. Because if Afghanistan can back down the Russian military and the US military, the Afghans, man, like that's dudes in sandals with AKs.

• 24:13Tom Bilyeu?

  And if they can back you down, then Iran is way more sophisticated, way more sophisticated. So you're now in a position where minus total warfare, I don't see you getting out of this.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Somebody just said that, is this like the sunk cost fallacy? Like, we already spent money, we're already losing. I don't think anybody thinks that we're being, we're getting benefits from this war. What is stopping Trump from just packing up? Is it just ego at this standpoint? He doesn't want to come home with, you know, his tail between his legs?

• 24:47Tom Bilyeu?

  People are not doing a good job of differentiating between where we were before, before we struck Fordow. But that one, maybe we would have been fine.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I thought we should separate those two.

• 24:59Tom Bilyeu?

  But even if you're going to say bombing Fordow was cool. But now that we have launched this offensive to where they feel truly aggrieved. So remember, Iran believes they're doing God's work, that God wills what they are doing right now. And they have had a longstanding belief that America is meddling in a region that they have no business in, that Iran would rightfully be the hegemon of the region, that Israel has no right to exist. So when you put all that back on the table, they feel like you guys have really come in here,

• 25:39Tom Bilyeu?

  killed our citizens, destroyed much of our infrastructure, and all of it was unjust. And so now we're gonna go ham. Okay, so if you're an American trying to like figure out, is this sunk cost fallacy, it between Ford out and the big attack, like I could see you going, listen, you, you did what you, you did your best to push back their nuclear ambitions. It either worked or it didn't. Cool. There, I would say sunk cost fallacy, Trump, don't move any farther. Now, the, the only way to understand the quagmire is to recognize that partial warfare no longer works. And what do I mean by that? Okay, so you now have an emboldened Iran for all the reasons that I just said,

• 26:24Tom Bilyeu?

  you have weakened relationships with all of your allies because you have not gotten the job done. The only person that maybe you could say is a stronger ally from their perspective would be Israel. But in recent months, Trump has really burned a lot of those bridges as well. So now you probably could say that you basically have universally alienated your allies, at least diminished your relationships with them. And so what would it look like at this moment to back out? So yes, you're gonna save a lot of money in the short term because you're not funding a war, for sure, but you're going to lose control of the strait. And so now you have an entire region which was moving more in your direction via the Abraham Accords,

• 27:09Tom Bilyeu?

  was normalizing relationships with Israel. That's all gonna go away. And you've now got Iran is going to, if you actually remove your sanctions and allow money to flow back into Iran, let them control the strait, let them charge billions of dollars in fees annually for the use of the strait, dude, they're going to be like, how much noise did Trump make about whatever? One to three billion dollars, I forget exactly how much that Obama gave. And it's like, oh my God, that money has allowed them to fund all this and create all this madness with three billion. And now we're talking removing sanctions, which would be billions and billions and billions, plus some theoretical ability for the rest of the world to invest in Iran to the tune of $300 billion. O N P S.

• 27:53Tom Bilyeu?

  If the regions around really do want to fund Iran, ask yourself why? Because they know they've got a tithe in some way to get Iran to leave them alone. So now, de facto, you've got a huge signal that the region is saying, yep, Iran is basically the hegemon, and that's why we're all investing in Iran. Like, it's so wild. And if the worst prognostications about what that 300 billion really is, which is the US funneling money to GCC nations so that they can then pay Iran, you've effectively got the US funding Iran. So, oh my God, like, this would be a level of just disaster. So I am certainly empathetic to anybody that doesn't want this quagmire

• 28:38Tom Bilyeu?

  to be the quagmire that it is. But it's like, holy shit. This, this is Bad News Bears. So anybody trying to think through this, they've, they've got to run thought exercises and say, okay, US pulls out and doesn't give any money to the GCC nations, but does allow there to be a backtrack of sanctions. What does that look like? What does a, an emboldened, well-financed Iran look like? What do people think it looks like? They're showing you right now, it looks like control over the Strait of Hormuz, right? I don't think anybody's denying that. So you've now got a well-financed Iran, aggrieved Iran, going after the Strait of Hormuz. So now that becomes, we're, we're seeing right now what happens to the global economy

• 29:23Tom Bilyeu?

  when Iran is able to choke out the Strait of Hormuz, okay? So keep in mind, even if the US can protect itself, if you end up with a global recession because of Iran's, you know, ability to, ability and willingness to choke out the strait to hold sway over the GCC for sure, I think that would be their first target. But they can toy with just about anybody now that does have that. So you're going to have a very well-financed Islamic republic doing their theocratic madness. So.

• 29:59Tom Bilyeu?

  What are we willing to do to make sure that that doesn't happen? And I think that the answer from the US is very, very little. So yeah, you'd have to run all of those scenarios. Then the scenario with we are funding the 300 billion through back channels. What does that look like? So yeah, this is not, it's not easy to stay in. And it certainly is not just, oh, well, get out, cut your losses. It will be, I think, more traumatic than that. But, but just ask the question, what does it look like when Iran just nakedly controls the Strait of Hormuz?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Going back to Russia, when you brought it up, the Russia-Ukraine war right now, Putin has announced that there are fuel shortages growing from the strain on Russia's energy infrastructure. And this largely is because Ukraine has been attacking their oil refineries. There's been arguments on the street and it seems like Russia is starting to feel the strain of the oil. It seems in this standpoint that Ukraine is doing strategic attacks now that are actually hurting Russia's bottom line.

• 30:55Tom Bilyeu?

  They are. Gas shortages are literally sweeping across Russia as Ukraine just continues to hammer Russia's oil infrastructure with long range drones. More than two dozen strikes have taken place since March that have hit eight of Russia's 10 largest refineries. You've got the International Energy Agency estimating that more than 20% of Russia's refining capacity is now offline. Okay, let that sit out there. 20%, 20%, 20%. How much of the world's oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz? 20%, 20%, 20%. So this 20% number is so meaningful because just look at what's going on in Russia when you choke out 25%.

• 31:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So you've now got the refinery throughput in Russia as of May anyway. So I'm sure it's much worse now. Hit its lowest level since 2009. You can expect the data on June to make that look even worse. Ukraine is just going deep, deep, deep inside of Russia. On June 20th, a drone struck a refinery that was more than 1,200 miles from the frontline. That's wild. Now, because of all of this, Russia is being forced to spend trillions of rubles to try and keep gas prices from skyrocketing. This is like, you now get, what does it look like when you try to control prices from the top down? Does it actually work? Spoiler alert, no, it does not. What does 20% of oil being taken offline?

• 32:22Tom Bilyeu?

  What does that look like as a parallel to what's going on in Hormuz? It's all bad. Because even though Russia is able to keep the prices down, they can't stop shortages. And by the way, that's what happens when you freeze rents. You're going to create shortages. You might keep the prices the same, but you can't stop the shortages. So now those shortages are sweeping all across Russia. They're putting restrictions. They're either putting a restriction to hide a shortage, or just accepting that there are shortages across roughly two thirds of Russia as a totality. Okay, Crimea halted civilian fuel sales, full stop, on June 21st. Just like, sorry guys, you can't have a, really think about that for a second.

• 33:07Tom Bilyeu?

  You choke out 20% of a supply and you get this kind of reaction. That's the power that we're getting now in, we're giving to Iran if we let them control the strait. So using these as like parallel systems. So you see Russia is just a little bit farther down the road. The Russia-Ukraine war is farther down the road. So we can start to get a sense of what this really looks like. Now, as you would imagine, this is freaking Russians out. So it's a bit hard to believe state media in Russia for what I hope are obvious reasons. But both independent and state pollsters are reporting that Russians are just getting fed up with the war. That Putin now has his lowest approval since the invasion. Imagine if the polls actually show that and you know if you get caught talking shit on the government,

• 33:53Tom Bilyeu?

  you're going to fall out of a window, which happened again. Dude, the number of times that military personnel fall out of windows in Russia is wild. It is wild. So in light of all of that, the polls still show that Putin is losing favorability. Now, let's hope that Ukraine's ability to continue to hit Russia where it hurts is going to force Putin to the negotiating table instead of to the... I don't want to overdramatize this, but instead of the bigger and bigger weapons table, which strikes me as a likely attempt before he just concedes, unless there is some sort of off-ramp that's going to make him look good to the people in his country.

• 34:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, so fingers crossed, because I think Ukraine has to do this. I, you cannot allow somebody to invade your country, man. You can't do it. So they're going to have to do this. They're going to have to be more aggressive. But the reason that war should be avoided whenever humanly possible is because the outcomes are never certain, man. Other than guaranteed, everybody's going to lose a lot, a lot of people. And if you guys have been paying attention, there was a recent breakdown of the average life expectancy of a new recruit for Russia sent to the front line.

• 35:13Tom Bilyeu?

  It's 20 to 30 minutes, man. 20 to 30 minutes for a new recruit sent to the front line. That's crazy. So you can imagine that that is going to send shockwaves through the populace of Russia. If you're sending people into a meat grinder and the only path forward that you see is a repeat of World War II. If you guys don't know the Battle of Stalingrad, holy Jesus, they just kept sending people to die to stop the advancement of the Nazis. And the crazy thing is it worked, but oh my God. The millions of people that Russia threw into that meat grinder is insane.

• 35:54Tom Bilyeu?

  That's why, to be honest, the US just telling itself the story that we stopped the Nazis effectively by ourselves, that Europe had been clobbered and we went in and stopped it, really denies what Russia did in terms of lives lost to stop, to stymie more importantly,

• 36:17Tom Bilyeu?

  the offensive into Russia, which caused a massive distraction for the Nazis. And that helped weaken what they were doing in Europe. So Russia has a historical legacy of showing that they're willing to throw bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies. So yeah, this one is deeply distressing if you care at all about lives lost. Um, and show the cost of warfare when everybody's trying to, um...

• 36:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Push as hard as they can without going to total warfare. It's just grinding, so grinding.

• 36:53Tom Bilyeu?

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 37:00Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something interesting about the article too about that, where so many of young people are dying, so many men are just getting thrown to the combat zone. There was at one point in time, people were getting kidnapped just because they were trying to dodge and evade.

• 37:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I fear it's still happening, but I don't know that.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  At that point though, from Putin's perspective, he has to feel the walls closing in on him, like he thought this little country was gonna be wrapped up in a couple of months, and four years later, he's still battling with them, and they're doing significant damage there. Consulting other big countries on how to do drone warfare and kind of change how war is played on the large, on the world stage. What do you think Putin's options are at this point?

• 37:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Escalate, bigger bombs, attack a European city as a reminder that, um, don't fucking interfere with this.

• 37:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Come up with a better story for why now's the time to end the war. And take that off-ramp, negotiate something, propagandize your people until the end of time about how it really was a victory. Kill dissenting voices inside your own country, uh, throw a few more people out of windows. That, that's really where we're at. He's not going to back out unless he can paint it as a win. And I, I will just remind people, man, like the lives lost in World War II to the Russian willingness to throw bodies at a problem is, it's a longstanding tradition.

• 38:34Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, Russia is a formidable foe that should never be taken lightly. And Putin is...

• 38:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Putin is desperately trying to reunite the USSR. He said the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the dissolution of the USSR. He is territorially acquisitive by doctrine. So you've got a guy that's like, this is the right thing to do. It's what we ought to do. And now you've got the West meddling in that. And if he sees it as an existential threat to himself and the regime, how far is he willing to go? And I don't know the answer to that. But it is certainly on the table. He has made mouth noises to let you know that he agrees that it's on the table. And that he sees Europe as at least partially responsible. And so his

• 39:27Tom Bilyeu?

  rhetoric, which is gonna be obfuscated as much as possible by Western media, his rhetoric is, he's always very calm, which I find super unnerving about him. But he's like, listen, this is Europe. Europe is doing this. And so if Europe continues to meddle in this regional war with a country trying to rightfully reunite its own people, then we will have to let them know the cost of getting involved. So we'll see. This isn't Hezbollah. You're not fucking with people like firing rockets from tunnels. You're fucking with one of the great military powers on

• 40:10Tom Bilyeu?

  planet Earth, one of the most nuclear armed powers on planet Earth. And so we're living in a time where people think no one's ever gonna use a nuclear weapon. I don't know that that's the wise approach. I think people should be very thoughtful about backing a nuclear power into a corner.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Interesting. We'll monitor and see. Let's move on to our Calci Trade of the Week. This is based off of the California billionaire wealth tax. It jumped up 15 points at an 18% chance and now it's polling at 36. I lied. It's an 18% jump. And that is on the backs of Gavin Newsom's video. He said he's not going to vote for it, but he thinks that everybody should be allowed to vote for it. It seems very strained the line. I want to appease my base without. angering the rich billionaires who are funding me.

• 41:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Welcome to political bullshit. Like this stuff winds me up.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  101. Um, I know we have the Chamav take to jump into about this, but just top level. Is there anything specifically about the California billionaire tax, especially where we are now? That you want to point out before we jump into that?

• 41:18Tom Bilyeu?

  So the thing to understand here is I'm glad that you pointed out, you've got a politician who is telling you one thing, but making sure that the bill still goes forward. He's saying, look, this isn't a great idea. I'm probably not going to vote for it, but I think everybody should have the right to vote for it. And the reason that he's doing that is this is a guy who is trying to find a way to appease a growing radical base on the left and is still trying to become the president to that radical base on the left in 2028. So if you want a glimpse into what politics are going to look like on behalf of the Democratic Party, it's going to be this.

• 41:59Tom Bilyeu?

  They're trying to signal to the fundraising part of their base, which will give them the millions and millions of dollars that they're going to need to work against a very well-funded Republican Party. So the Democrat Party has done a terrible job of working with their big donors. So that's what you're seeing in the rise of Newsom as a national candidate. He's got to walk that line. Now, because they have to appeal to the radical base, you're going to see, once they get into office, they're going to try to be normies as they march towards the election. And then, just like Biden before them, they're going to push farther and farther left. It's where the energy is in the party. Now, why does that matter?

• 42:43Tom Bilyeu?

  It matters because, for instance, if you believe that billionaires are the reason that the economy is broken, the thing you have to understand is that if that is true, they will have done it mechanistically. Okay? So as everybody maps all of this out, if we're going to say billionaire is bad guy, then walk through the mechanisms that they have used to abuse the economy. And you will see that the mechanisms ultimately are the only thing that matter. Now, I have made my opinions abundantly clear on the mechanisms. People are going to see that the way that the billionaire class has abused the system is money in politics to create regulatory hurdles so that they can get a moat, so that they can

• 43:27Tom Bilyeu?

  continue to make sure that incumbents can't come in and knock them off their pedestal. That is where you should be paranoid about the quote unquote billionaire class. That mechanism is very real, but you can point at it, it's a mechanism. Now, what we're talking about on the radical left is also a mechanism. And the reason that the billionaire theft tax is such a bad idea is it will mechanistically break the economy. And we're going to get into this as we talk about what's going on in the heatwave going across Europe. That, again, same thing, it's mechanistic. It's regulatory burden causing a breakdown of actual things on the ground that are killing people, including hospitals not being able to cool the rooms of somebody that's just

• 44:11Tom Bilyeu?

  gone through cardiac surgery and them having to deal with the heat stress and that causing additional excess mortality. So mechanisms as far as the eye can see. So as you think about the billionaire theft tax, think about what is the mechanism that's going to be a play here? And the mechanism that's going to be a play here is in a country where people can leave one state and go to another, you're going to create a hole in the tax base. So the very thing that you're supposed to believe is what's driving for this tax, which is, hey, we want to make sure that we have the tax base to help the people in need. Okay? That is the propaganda that you're being sold about why you should be doing a billionaire

• 44:55Tom Bilyeu?

  theft tax is that, hey, this is a one-time tax. Remember, they keep saying that. This is a one-time tax. It's only on billionaires. It's to make sure that we short budget shortfalls. Now, the mechanistic effect of that is billionaires are already leaving, creating a bigger gap. So the billionaires accounted for about $2 trillion in taxable dollars that they could conceivably get from them. But given how many have already left, that number's already dropped to at least a trillion. So it's cut in half. Those are the ones that have already left, right? They've already left at least, lost at least one of the founders of Google and a bunch of other people that have gone to either Texas or Florida. And so you're already seeing now something that's going to play out over time

• 45:39Tom Bilyeu?

  as a widening hole in the California tax base. Now, if this actually goes through, do you think more or less people are going to leave? Now, the answer is obvious, more people are going to leave. And it then becomes a question of, well, this was only going to be one time anyway. So project out and what becomes the problem? Because you get a one-time lump of money that they're going to spend very rapidly, because all the numbers they ever give you about what they could fund with this, those are assuming one year, okay? They don't assume forever years. So what ends up starting as a billionaire wealth tax becomes, well, first of all, by doing this, we sent a bunch of billionaires away.

• 46:22Tom Bilyeu?

  That created its own problem, because now we're taking in less money. So now we're going to have to drop down a rung and we're going to collect this supposedly one-time tax again from a wider tax base, because, well, these greedy billionaires fled, which by the way, they're going to litigate till the end of time, because it is unconstitutional, but setting that aside. So now you've got, we've had to go wider. And now what happens to that next group of people? There are also some percentage, they won't all leave, but some percentage of them will leave, myself included, and I will go somewhere else, whatever that means. I won't want to do it by any stretch of the imagination, but I absolutely will. So you're going to have another hole open up there

• 47:04Tom Bilyeu?

  and you will eventually hit an inability to pay for the services in your state. And that will force them to rebound off the bottom. Or, I mean, they'll, they'll either just go into...

• 47:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Failed state become the next Michigan where you're just, you've lost the only industry that was propping you up, uh, which I suppose is possible and people can stay crazy for a very long time, but you will find California finding itself in a position of potentially going bankrupt, uh, which is a very real thing. So yeah, it, it is nightmare scenario for California because the radical left is not able to map the mechanisms by which all of the economy works. And because of that, they are doing things that are detrimental to the economy. Now, in the face of that, I think it reveals much less about the mechanisms

• 47:58Tom Bilyeu?

  of the economy and more about the fact that all of this talk about this is really about shoring up the tax base, uh, that's just propaganda. That isn't what's really happening. What California is doing as a representative of the radical left is entirely about resentment. It is about punishing the billionaire class. And that's why when Newsom is talking about we need to reset the economy, you can just know on its face, that's an absurd lie. Because if you're trying to reset the economy by a quote unquote, one time tax on billionaires, uh, what you're going to end up doing is realizing that you're going to get some money, you're going to send some people fleeing, you're going to hurt your tax base overall,

• 48:43Tom Bilyeu?

  you'll take in less money, but you will have been punitive. And that is what is really going on. This is meant to be a punishment tax. And once you realize that the radical left is driven by resentment and jealousy, then all of a sudden, everything that they're doing makes a lot of sense. And this is exactly, again, we've seen this ideology play out in many places around the world. And it's easy to predict when you map it as resentment, it's impossibly, uh, convoluted when you try to map it as actually logical policy from an economic standpoint, because it doesn't work out. It's never worked out historically. You can point to the mechanisms by which it doesn't work out. So, um, only resentment will make this all make sense.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Can we still mend the other argument? Cause I want to make sure that we're not minimizing people's grievances by just saying, you're jealous of me. So let's still mend it so that way they know that you see them and then you're still choosing to use those words.

• 49:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. So, um, I'm going to, I'm going to plant the more controversial flag and I'll say this.

• 49:47Tom Bilyeu?

  If you're on the radical left and you want a tax on billionaire wealth, the only way to see you, to actually like get inside your theory of mind, is ignorance or malevolence. That's it. Because it doesn't work. History bears this out a thousand different ways. So it doesn't work. It isn't what the Nordic countries are doing. I forget, it's like 70% of all countries that have instituted a wealth tax have rescinded them because they don't work. You can expect the other ones to do the same on a long enough timeline. So it's like, again, so it's either ignorance or malevolence. The malevolence being I just want to punish people. I'm caught up in my emotions, all of that.

• 50:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I can give you the rhetoric that people are saying they are mis-mapping what has actually broken the economy. So I will say all the words that they say to show you that I can repeat the propaganda. So it goes like this.

• 50:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Directly quoting AOC, "There is no way to generate a billion dollars in net worth without doing something illegal." And it is absolutely grotesque that these greedy people are amassing this insane wealth while the rest of us are struggling to afford things. We're in the middle of an affordability crisis. And by the way, we are in the middle of an affordability crisis. You absolutely can track what's going on with the K-shaped economy mechanistically to figure out how this has happened. And so it's very possible that they just do not understand the economy.

• 51:34Tom Bilyeu?

  And so they look at the fact that housing prices are getting completely out of control. And they say, "I can't afford a house. American dream is dead." And I can look at these other people who, while I can't afford a house, they can afford mega yachts. I'm looking at the, what they'll call the Epstein class donating obscene amounts of money to manipulate politicians. And by the way, they're right about that. And I get the emotional trauma of watching wealthy people throw money around politics and manipulate

• 52:12Tom Bilyeu?

  the game, watching things become unaffordable, being, getting no education whatsoever around asset ownership, which if you're going to allow a central bank is the only thing that matters. And I also see, well, okay, so do you feel seen yet, or do you think people running that argument feel seen yet from a, they don't like my emotion around it, that I totally understand. But have I said the things that make it clear that I recognize the parts that are broken?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  The people in the chat do not believe you have.

• 52:57Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, what now I need, this is where-

• 52:59Speaker 01

  This is me? You're asking me?

• 53:00Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, no.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:00Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm asking you on behalf of what chat is saying.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  On behalf of the chat.

• 53:03Tom Bilyeu?

  But here's what I have found every time I audit chat, is they will say, he doesn't get it. He's in his ivory tower, but they won't give me an argument. So what is the actual thing that I'm missing where they're like, no, no, but you don't understand that bread costs $7, or you don't understand that gas costs, like I'll say all the words, so they understand, I see it all, but where we're going to disagree is it's going to come back to, they don't understand the mechanisms, or they really just aren't their feelings.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so you know how when we talk about like immigration, we talk about the-

• 53:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Ooh, we're gonna do analogy. Give me the actual arguments that they're making.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  You are thinking that the billionaire class is taking similar routes that you took when you grew your company, and there are people that don't take those similar routes. There are people that can pay more and choose not to pay more. There are people that can invest in their employees and choose not to invest in employees.

• 53:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  There are people that would rather buy a yacht than they would elevate the people behind them.

• 54:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  SpaceX, 4,000 millionaires, we high five that, that's great.

• 54:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so really fast, just so I can make sure that when I sum up their points that I'm hitting the really important ones. This is a great one. Okay, so one thing that I did not expressly cover just now, though I totally agree. But again, comes back to they just don't understand the economy. But what they're saying is, listen, man, in a time where Walmart is posting record profits, or Exxon is posting record profits, or insert your favorite company here is posting record profits. These assholes still aren't paying their employees a living wage.

• 54:42Tom Bilyeu?

  They could, they're choosing not to. They would rather be on their mega yachts.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yes, I would just say profit and productivity is not catching up with wages.

• 54:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so the decoupling between productivity and workers' wages. That, Tom, is a mechanism, fuck you, I'm being very clear with my argument, that has broken. And you're, you're just running cover for these billionaires by not pointing that out. Even though you've pointed it out many times before, but like, right now.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  In this thing, yeah, you think you're minimizing it to you're just jealous because you aren't a productive citizen, as opposed to saying there are mechanisms that the billionaire class has decided not to maintain that were maintained in the previous.

• 55:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, perfect, very glad that we're saying that out loud again. I have addressed this before in the past, but yes, very important to address now. So that's still, they don't understand the mechanisms, which we'll talk about.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  I mean, we addressed the Iran war 18 times, so we should, you know.

• 55:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, you're so right, you're so right, you're so right, you're so right, you're so right. Totally agree with that, okay? That one's important, we'll get to that, but that still does fall into that first bucket, they just don't understand. But, keep going. Or was that the only one that I missed? I want to get exhaustive, where it's like, okay, we've laid it all out, so now.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I give you another one. The percent that of taxes that we pay into a system does not match the percentages of taxes that other people pay into a system.

• 56:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Sorry, can you be more specific? Who are the "we" and the "other people"?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  People that...

• 56:16Speaker 01

  The progressive tax that happens, so for example, if a person makes under, I want to say eighty-five or eighty-three, I don't know what the new number is, they pay thirty percent of their income into social security.

• 56:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  A social security that might not be there by the time they retire. And then you have millionaires who they pay, or not millionaires, a ten million.

• 56:34Tom Bilyeu?

  So the percentage of tax.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  They pay point one percent of their income when they're into social security. And I understand that point one percent of ten million is more than thirty percent of eighty thousand.

• 56:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but as a percentage, that doesn't.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  They have that ability.

• 56:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Feel good.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're paying a higher percent because we need that thirty percent versus them, they don't need that point one.

• 56:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, so, cool, again, is that exhaustive?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  That would be the second thing I can think of. Let me scroll through the chat. So are you getting these to address all of them?

• 57:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the reason that.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  While you're addressing the first two, I can then look for if there's a third or fourth.

• 57:09Tom Bilyeu?

  So the reason that I want to get all of these out is all of the problems that we can identify will have a mechanistic solution, right? So either they don't matter and therefore there won't be anything to address, meaning they don't matter in that they don't actually affect the economy. Or they do affect the economy and now there is a meaningful mechanistic way forward. And so what my whole thesis is this, anybody who's angry about the economy is so right. You should be furious about the economy. And then my hope is that I can help translate that into a set of policies that we can pursue that will actually remedy the economy.

• 57:55Tom Bilyeu?

  The problem is, we're in a populist moment and people transmute that anxiety around the economy into rage. And then they aim that rage at something right now from a where is the biggest ground swell? They aim it into socialist policies. And by aiming it at socialist policies, they will further break the very thing that's creating that anxiety. And so I'm really trying to help us avoid that catastrophe. So I want to make sure that you guys see, I see all the things that you see, I get it. However, we've got to be very careful about mapping it. Okay, so let's take them one by one.

• 58:39Tom Bilyeu?

  So the big one that I missed in the beginning, though this is something I think a lot about, is the breakdown between capturing the productivity versus the amount that are going into wages. Okay, so what you guys are putting forward is you've got these greedy billionaire class. They could pay more, they choose not to, and this is exactly how they're fueling their wealth. What I want everybody to understand is you're never going to solve that problem by doing taxes. Okay, that it won't work out, partly because they'll find very clever ways around it. And I get why that's emotionally enraging.

• 59:18Tom Bilyeu?

  But also because what you end up doing is you shut off or dull down the productive class. And so if you disincentivize people's ability to win, and I get people don't like that this is true. But when you disincentivize or make it just outright impossible, which you're going to get to watch play out in New York. When you make it impossible for people to be profitable as, let's say, as they see fit, then they're not going to continue to take the risk because running a business is extraordinarily risky. And so you end up breaking that engine. So insert every socialist country ever, and you're going to see where that goes down.

• 1:00:01Tom Bilyeu?

  But there is a mechanistic way to ensure that that parity is closer, where the worker is able to capture a much bigger portion of the productivity that they're able to bring. So now the question becomes, what is that method? If it isn't taxed, if it isn't being angry, how do we corral, excuse me, how do we corral the natural tendencies of people to get greedy? Because, and here is something that needs to loom over all of this. Innovation is the great savior. It's the great savior. It is why we have the society that we have.

• 1:00:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Think of society at its best, peak, wherever you think that was, 1950, 1960, whatever you think was peak. That was innovation, okay? Innovation took us there. Then, bad policy allowed innovation to get to the point where, just to stay focused on this, where we break the productivity connection. So now, the billionaire class is capturing way too much of that upside. So the question becomes, what happened? What, what policy was put in place? Now, I'm gonna keep things simple because it is multivariate. But one of the biggest things is globalization. It's not the only thing, but it's one of the biggest things.

• 1:01:25Tom Bilyeu?

  What you have to do mechanistically, if you want to make sure that workers are empowered, which by the way, that's what you want to do. You want to empower the worker, okay? When the worker's empowered, they're gonna be able to negotiate better terms. They're gonna be able to leverage their skillset to capture that upside. If, if you hold on to that, that that's the mechanism, it's an empowered worker, okay? Now, we can debate, well, is that just unions? Is it deglobalization? Is it tariffs, tax incentives? What does that look like? Or is it just taxing the billionaire class? And I will say that there's nothing in history that shows us that a tax on the productive class,

• 1:02:08Tom Bilyeu?

  the billionaire class, there's nothing that shows us that that empowers the worker. In fact, I will say that if you look historically, even just in America, that disempowers the worker further because it removes more people from the job market because they realize I can come with my handout, I can just get something effectively for nothing. And now, you're creating a further widening of the gap of people that are like, no, I'm gonna build, I'm gonna innovate, I'm gonna keep doing this thing, okay? So that is where tax now is going to disempower the worker. So my thesis on that is, you've got to balance the budget so that you're not doing all this crazy ass deficit spending, even if your budget is quote unquote balanced, but is predatory to business. You want to cut spending, okay? Look at what they're doing in Florida.

• 1:02:52Tom Bilyeu?

  So Florida as a state has roughly the same population as New York City, and yet their budget is dramatically less. So Florida has been cutting their budget. And thriving, New York is rising, raising their budgets and screaming about an affordability crisis. Okay, so just watch those two play out. So that's one thing that we need to be thinking about. So, cutting the budgets, getting lean, and empowering the worker. So, deglobalization is one big thing that is going to force companies to localize. So, when you are forcing a business to say, "Well, I've got to find a way to be profitable here. I've got to find a way to be profitable

• 1:03:33Tom Bilyeu?

  with these workers," and you create an environment where employees are very mobile, they can move around, which by the way, requires growth. So, look at Japan. Japan stagnant, no growth. What happens to people? Companies, to get you to stay, they say, "Stay here, we'll give you a job for life." Sounds cool, except for the fact that it stagnates their economy. Because, when you stagnate the economy like that, you can't spur positive inflation. Jesus, this gets complicated, but it's nonetheless real. So, now Japan shows us, "Fuck, you don't want to just like socialism this and say, 'Get a job here, you're gonna keep your job forever.'" You want growth, so that an employee is like, "Hey, I'm a big part of the reason that this is growing. If you don't pay me what I'm

• 1:04:14Tom Bilyeu?

  worth, I know you can't go to another country. I know that because you listen to Tom, and H1B visas now are more expensive. And so, if you try to import foreign talent, you're gonna pay a premium for that." And so, now, I know, it's all eyes on us. You're trying to make sure that we're getting educated, so that we come out of training, whether that's a technical degree, or a traditional college degree, that we're coming out this insanely educated populace, and now we're extremely valuable to you, and we can go to the next company, because you guys have stopped all this regulatory burden bullshit, so that people can use regulatory capture to stop innovation, to stop competition. So, now, all kinds of companies are popping up, and I can leave,

• 1:04:55Tom Bilyeu?

  at a moment's notice. And I'm very good at my job, okay? Globalism, plus that, that's putting deglobalization, excuse me, plus that, huge. Then, if people want to put, I'm not a fan, but if people want to put unions back on the table, awesome, cool. Now, we're empowering the worker. But empowering the worker is the mechanism. Punitive taxes do the opposite.

• 1:05:17Tom Bilyeu?

  With me, I see the same problem. I feel your pain. Disempowering the worker is a fucking like speedrun of civilizational suicide. What the fuck are we doing? It's so stupid. I'm just saying that the tax on a billionaire's wealth, remember, we're talking wealth, not income, taxing a billionaire's wealth does not empower the worker. Now, I don't even need you to believe me that it disempowers the worker, but I think it does. I think there's plenty of evidence there, but it certainly doesn't empower the worker. So we've got to be saying, what do we have to do to empower the worker?

• 1:05:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so seen, heard, felt, and if I take out all of my like dickhead tone and I just say that clocks back to the economy is complicated, it's not self-evident what the mechanism is, but you can always track it back to a mechanism instead of just going to fuck those kids, right? So if we stick with the mechanism, this will get a lot easier. Okay, there was another mechanism that they brought up that I had not talked about, or did you find another one?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  The productivity and the percentage of tax from social.

• 1:06:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so percentage, looking at what do we want to do in order to make sure that we can take care of people? When we look at contributions, we will often get ourselves in a crazy twist over what is the percentage? Now, I don't see a lot of positive reaction whenever I say this, but if people said they just wanted to charge a flat percentage and like, let's say it's 20% across the board. You make a dollar, we take 20 cents, you make 20 billion in income, by the way, not worth, but income, 20%, cool, no problem. Like, I totally get a world where we want to do that. Now, there's probably complications there because every time I bring this up, people

• 1:07:08Tom Bilyeu?

  everywhere hate this idea, but at least there's nowhere to run, there's nowhere to hide, there's nobody to get out of it. And as somebody who has been approached by my taxi many times, been like, hey, there are more sophisticated things that we could do, and I have eschewed doing that, I'm not trying to hide from my taxes. Let's pay taxes. I've paid an obscene. Amount of money in taxes. Okay, so percentage, I'm on board with it. And when you do it across everybody, you at least have a mechanism that stops people who aren't paying taxes at all, or pay very little, from trying to weaponize taxes in a punitive measure. Okay, the other beat of this is we're seeing that throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it.

• 1:07:52Tom Bilyeu?

  So in the last 10 years, remember, the US government budget has almost doubled in 10 years. That's crazy, but things haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. So how people don't look at that one stat and go, okay, cool, nice idea, but it doesn't work. I'm shocked every time. Throwing money at the problem doesn't solve it. You can also look at the Department of Education. We spend more than anybody on planet Earth on our students, and yet we're middle of the pack in terms of results. And by the way, the results have been stubbornly flat. So no matter how much additional money we throw at it, it doesn't actually solve the problem. And guys, we have a fraud problem, a massive fraud problem. So the more money that you pump into the system, the more likely there is to be leeches, unfortunately,

• 1:08:37Tom Bilyeu?

  that will innovate, if you want to use that word against me, that will innovate in terms of fraud, and they'll get more and more clever. So again, throwing money at the problem doesn't solve it. Being disciplined with your dollars, always a good idea, no matter how much money you have. So be disciplined, be focused about where you spend your money, and insist on results, which we are not doing. So if people wanted to put forward something that said, I really want to see everybody pay the same percentage, I would totally get that. Simplify the tax code, which is the very loopholes that people use. When you create a complicated tax code, you make it possible for people with a lot of money to hire the smartest people on planet Earth to both lobby the government and find very clever ways.

• 1:09:17Tom Bilyeu?

  So I'm just saying, mechanistically, it doesn't work. We've had a top tax percentage of 91% post-World War II. And by the way, World War II is a phenomenal example of how we get out from under massive debts.

• 1:09:35Tom Bilyeu?

  And the great irony is the way that we did it. So we had a top tax rate of 91%. But that wasn't causative. Remember, we collect more per taxpayer now by a lot than we did back then. Why? Because of growth. How did we get out of the shit show that was post World War II? We grew faster than we stole from people. So we were stealing like crazy. We use something called financial repression. Okay, we, we intentionally use the central bank to hold interest rates below inflation. Okay, devastating, devastating. We're about to do the same thing now, by the way. The problem is, back then, we had more economic growth due to what? Drum roll, please.

• 1:10:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Innovation. Okay, we innovated our way. We grew our way out of World War II, even though we were using financial repression to make the debt to GDP drop. But it required that the growth go up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Okay, and we hadn't globalized yet. So the American workers powerful as shit. Okay, so super empowered worker. Yes, they were being financially oppressed, which is brutal, but the government was growing even faster than that. So the average person felt great because they're, the amount that they were making in real terms, like real, I can buy more shit, was going up. Okay, everyone feels good after World War I. Everyone feels terribly now because we've, we've let regulatory burdens and all that stuff,

• 1:11:00Tom Bilyeu?

  money and politics, just completely disempower the average worker. Okay, that's a real thing. Guys should be mad as hell about that. But you've got to deal with it at a framework level because the taxes at 91% didn't work back then. They're not going to work now. That's that. It's growth. Okay, it's growth. You've got to grow the economy. Taxes slow the economy. Look at Europe, if you don't believe me. Look at Europe. Europe now, I can't believe this is true, but it is. In fact, I think I pulled this stat. You can pull it up. Europe right now, the median European is making less than the bottom 20% of Americans.

• 1:11:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, the median means 50% of the actual humans, okay, 50% of Europeans are tied or below the bottom 20% of Americans. So I get how mad you guys are. I get it.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  I have it if you want to say.

• 1:12:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Plenty of abuse. However, taxing slows the economy. It doesn't grow. So if we want to look at our historical example of how the fuck do we get out of this ridiculous position, it is to get growth happening again, which is going to be a lighter tax burden in the right places. It's going to be tightening your spending. That's hugely, hugely important. And obviously, innovation, innovation, innovation, while empowering workers by deglobalizing, making sure that companies have an incentive to build here, that we can't import cheap labor at the low end or the high end with cheap H1B visas. I think we still want to be a country that attracts the best and the brightest and most entrepreneurial from

• 1:12:42Tom Bilyeu?

  the world over, because for every successful entrepreneur that you bring into the US, they're going to employ, you know, a lot of people compared to them. And so there, you want to force it to be at a premium though, so that you're never choosing it over an American that could have gotten that job. Okay.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  I got one more. Right now, we incentivize people to grow and hoard wealth. We don't incentivize people to grow their income. The more you ink, the more you raise your income, the higher your wealth tax rate, the more you invest, the lower your tax rate.

• 1:13:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so now we're back on to, we've got a mechanism. I think this is really powerful to look at. So I think people may have a distorted view of how much tax wealthy people pay. So I know that there is a, there is a loophole that says, I can borrow money against my assets. And then when I die, I'm not going to pay it back. I'm just going to pay the interest. When I die, my kids get a step up in basis. And let me know how much depth people want to explain this. But they get a step up in basis. So that money is effectively never taxed, quote unquote, appropriately. Now, a couple of things on that. One, I think there's a very significant argument to be made that says, you're taxing.

• 1:13:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Things that were purchased with money that was already taxed. If it's anything essentially other than a company that was built from the ground up. And there's a very simple way to close that loophole, in my opinion, which is you do something like the following. Hey, if it was an asset that you bought with post-tax dollars, cool. Then step up in basis, all the normal stuff. That works just fine because you're handing something down to your kids. It's already been taxed. But if you built something and you're now, you know, you're one of the founders of Google. And you've got this insane gap. You borrowed, you got to spend all that money.

• 1:14:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And now with the step up in basis, basically the loan is wiped out. Nobody has to repay this one second. So what you end up doing is there you say that should be taxed normal capital gains. So we're going to treat it as if they were transferred the moment before this person died. And so you're going to pay cap gains on that. So just like it would have been paid, otherwise you get the tax you would have gotten. So that to me is perfect. All right.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you derailed a little bit from that. I'm talking more so the Scott Galloway argument where a lawyer who makes $300,000 is taxed at 50%. But a tech bro who gets 2 million in stock payment doesn't get taxed at all. He could borrow against that stock payment. It doesn't hit. He could borrow 100K against that stock payment, pay it back a year later with the increase in stocks, with the increase in growth from that stock. Whereas this person, their real income on that 300K, they get 150, that hits their bank account.

• 1:15:35Tom Bilyeu?

  I literally, in that example, I don't see the problem at all. If that person paid back their loan, the increase in value, you're saying we don't want people to be advantaged.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying that right now this person is growing wealth tax free. The Steve Jobs method?

• 1:15:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Huh?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  They are because you're getting paid in stocks.

• 1:15:52Tom Bilyeu?

  They're not. That's completely illogical. So when you sell a share.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Before you sell though, I'm saying before you get to the sell part.

• 1:16:00Tom Bilyeu?

  I just gave you how to close that loophole. So first of all, I don't, I don't even think people use that loophole. That is so dangerous.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  But it's, the loophole that you just gave me is a step up basis if I'm passing it down to my kids. You're talking people who are, who already have retired. You're talking about the Bill Gates and them. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about actual tech bros now who get paid in stocks.

• 1:16:17Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a misunderstanding of how tax works. So if, if I found a company, I know because I've done it. If you found a company, then your, your starting point is zero, right? Because you, the company was worth nothing, you created it. And so your wealth, all of it, is taxed at whatever cap gains tax is. Now, when you're talking about when you pass it on to your kids.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I'm not. I'm talking about employee number three at Facebook.

• 1:16:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Understood. Let me just walk through the whole thing. When you're talking about passing it on to your kids, they then get the tax as if whatever the worth is today. So if it's $300 or $3,000 or whatever, then they're only going to get taxed from that point moving forward. So that gap from zero to 3,000 or whatever, that's people's beef. So now, let's say.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  That's not the beef that I'm bringing up.

• 1:17:06Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm getting there. If you don't understand all of these beats, you're going to forever be lost.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:17:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So now, your employee number three, whatever, they still only get, so let's say founders at zero, the employee gets it, what's it at? $12 a share, let's just say. It's headed towards 3,000. But their clock starts at $12 because that's where it was when they started. Now, 12 to 3,000, they're going to get taxed on, cap gains.

• 1:17:32Tom Bilyeu?

  So the only beef is the 0 to 12.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  What's the cap gains percent?

• 1:17:35Tom Bilyeu?

  It's probably in the neighborhood of 20 to 24%.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Okay, and then a lawyer and a doctor who are working nine to five to keep pedophiles in jail and to do heart surgery to keep people alive, they get taxed at 50%?

• 1:17:47Tom Bilyeu?

  On income.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  On income.

• 1:17:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  So again, the beef-

• 1:17:50Tom Bilyeu?

  These are two totally different metrics. Okay, so if the emotion is my income is treated differently than cap gains-

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  That's the flip. Income should be treated at a different rate than cap gains should be treated. And that's the beef. You just told me a layout beef.

• 1:18:04Tom Bilyeu?

  This is beef number three. Perfect, love it, clear. Labor is sacred and therefore should be taxed at the lowest rate possible. Capital gains, that's all bullshit. That's fake news. So that should be taxed at the higher rate, right? If I understood the... Okay, that is asinine. So that is somebody who does not... Like you, I lost you back at innovation is the sacred thing. And so if I've lost you at innovation is the sacred thing, fuck. Like move to Venezuela and watch the building collapse around you during the earthquake because there's no innovation. Have fun. So if you believe that prosperity just comes out of thin air, that the kind of tensile

• 1:18:47Tom Bilyeu?

  strength steel that's needed to keep buildings from falling, or the wheels that they put buildings on in Japan that allow it to sway without breaking, if you think that all just fucking happens and doesn't happen only because there is somebody who took a huge fucking risk at some point, poured their life energy into innovating, taking big capital risks, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, then, then we would have to go back to like that initial framework because if you don't believe that somebody taking that risk with their time, capital, energy, all of that, we don't want to incentivize that, then fuck. Like now, really all hope is lost.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  I would like to play this tale about the parable of the Mexican fisherman. And I think we might need to have an update of our perspective on life.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Have you ever heard the parable of the Mexican fisherman? You heard this? I don't know. Okay. An American investment banker was at a small pier on a small coastal town, village, when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat was several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them. The Mexican replied, "Only a little while." The American then asked, "Why didn't you stay out longer and catch more fish?" The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife Maria, and stroll into the village every evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life." The American scoffed, "I have an MBA from Harvard and can help you," he said.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  You should spend more time fishing with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you could sell directly to the processor and eventually open up your own cannery. You could control the product, processing and distribution, he said. Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City and then Los Angeles and eventually to New York City. While you will run your expanding enterprise. The Mexican fisherman asked, but how long will all this take? To which the American replied, oh, fifteen to twenty years or so. But what then? Asked the Mexican. The American laughed and said, that's the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, you could sell your company's stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions. Millions? Then what?

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  The American said, then you could retire, move to a small coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife and swirl to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos. Life is often simpler than we make. Yeah, dude.

• 1:21:16Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so fucking stupid. Okay, uh, so let's walk through it. So here are the mechanisms. May you all live in a country that has clawed and scrabbled its way out of poverty and being abused by stronger powers such that you may fish a little siesta and hang with your amigos. That really is beautiful. And anybody that wants to um, work a job and love their spouse and raise some kids and relax, dude, I love that and I want everybody to live the life that they want to live.

• 1:21:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And I love that the human race has people in it that are wildly ambitious and strong and want to prosper more than most. And they want to innovate and make something that people want so that they can have an easier life. And I love that so many people are like, I'm willing to suffer now so that my kids may have it easier. In fact, let's, let's uh, tell another Mexican parable. Shout out to the Mexican that finds his way to America and works in landscaping and builds a landscaping business and works his nuts off in ridiculous summer heat in Los Angeles

• 1:22:42Tom Bilyeu?

  to make sure that his kids get educated and that they're able to grow up in a prosperous America where their dreams really can come true because we have freedoms that the rest of the world doesn't know. And if my kids want to siesta and play music with their friends, they're gonna have that ability because I got us here. And I worked hard to get us into a middle-class life where that's possible. Shout out to all those motherfuckers that work like that. You guys, truly, I'm willing to fight for that. I love that. And if your kids, some percentage of them, want the life of the Mexican fisher, that's fucking dope, man.

• 1:23:26Tom Bilyeu?

  And watch, watch a season of Alone and ask yourself, how many people had to create new innovations in shelter and fishing to make it possible such that there was so much surplus that people could fish a little when they want, play music with their friends, have a siesta. That's the glory of civilization and how far we have come. The sad downside of how far we have come as a civilization is that we think the ability to fish a little and siesta and play music with our friends is a natural state of the world. It is not. The natural state of the world is starvation, freezing to death,

• 1:24:10Tom Bilyeu?

  seeing your women raped by the neighboring village that comes to conquer you and take one of the only assets that have mattered throughout human history, which is women's ability to bear children. So, yeah, I, it's both simultaneously beautiful that we've been as successful for as long as we have, that people legitimately don't understand what the world really is, and terrifying that the reason that history repeats is we become so successful, that people forget that some percentage of people need to innovate, some percentage of people need to make sure that we're protected from others. That the economy is exactly how a thriving economy is how we fought back against

• 1:24:54Tom Bilyeu?

  nature because we are able to inspire and incentivize the people that are ambitious. Not that everybody should want to be ambitious, but the people that are ambitious realize, I don't have to steal my wealth. I can make something beautiful that people really want, that they value more than the money that they've worked their asses off to gain, and they want to buy this thing from me. And that unlike hundreds of years ago, where the only way to get wealthier was to conquer a nation and to take their stuff, to steal it by force, now the surest way to get wealthy is to invent something that is better than everything else that's out there, that innovates and pushes a world forward and adds value. And that is how people can now get wealthy. But we've lost sight

• 1:25:38Tom Bilyeu?

  of it. And so, people will listen to that fucking stupid, out of context story as if that doesn't ride on the back of civilization pulling itself out of millennia, hundreds of thousands of years of pain, suffering, toil, rape, pillaging. It's fucking wild. And so wherever you start the story is going to determine what you see, but the mechanisms underlying all of it are the human psyche. And the way that the human psyche works is people will expand until they hit a sufficient moral or physical force that stops them, and that's it. And so you let your society break down at your own peril.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  All right, we gotta jump over to Europe because everybody's dying because it's so hot outside.

• 1:26:26Tom Bilyeu?

  This is crazy.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  There's more heat deaths than there are gun deaths in America. And I just thought that that was a fascinating stat and we should talk about that. But here are the stats. As it is, as it stands right now, from the last week, 24th to the 26th of 2026, 1,450 people in Paris, not 620 in London, 520 in Milan, 340 in Barcelona, 310 in Berlin, and the numbers keep going on. There's a lot of different speculation about this, saying it's coming from their China, their climate policy. There's videos of China trolling them, putting... AC in pig pens and things like that while people are literally dying in the streets of Europe because it's too hot.

• 1:27:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, China is literally trolling Europe guys. Footage of pigs with AC in their pens being spread all over the internet as thousands die in another heat wave that is sweeping the European continent. Europe looks like lunatics to me. This is so dumb and so crazy. What they should be doing is responding to the persistent heat waves that they've been experiencing in recent years. They should be responding by deregulating. They should open up modern nuclear energy sites. They should be encouraging people to install life-saving AC units. Okay, you could, you could literally save lives just by installing AC units. But instead, they're banging the global warming narrative harder and harder.

• 1:27:46Tom Bilyeu?

  They're admonishing people for just wanting AC even though people are dying from not having them. And they're telling families, this is a real story. They're telling families with members in the hospital to bring ice packs from home to help stabilize that person after surgery. Now, if you told me that this was somewhere in rural Africa, I might be like, alright, well shit. I mean, you do what you can. If you've got a freezer and ice packs, fuck, bring them. But the reality is that they have done this to themselves. I understand the impulse. The climate is changing, okay? Whether we're doing it or not, the climate is changing. So now the question becomes, how do you respond to it? So if I can get you all to just assume for a second, climate change is real, okay?

• 1:28:28Tom Bilyeu?

  The answer is, was, and always will be, the way that you solve that is through innovation. It's not draconian regulations. It's never meant to, it's never going to be that, right? So if you've got draconian regulations that are trying to force people to live their lives like it's 100 years ago, that is dumb. By its very definition, get those politicians out immediately. This is so fucking crazy. You should be asking who benefits from this kind of policy? Because it is pure madness. Now, if it's hotter now because either we did it or just the world changes, this is what happens to the climate, it just moves. It doesn't matter whether we caused it or not. If it's hotter now, it's hotter now. What do you do about it?

• 1:29:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, the WHO is saying that more than 1,300 excess deaths have been recorded across Europe just since June 21st. Okay, you need immediate intervention if that's true. Now, it's

• 1:29:26Tom Bilyeu?

  AC is a 100-year-old technology. It should already be widespread across Europe. And when I talk about regulatory capture, this is the kind of thing that I'm talking about. These are regulations brought to you by a stupid idea because, again, if we're causing the problem, we have to innovate our way out of it. Because if you haven't seen the graphs, like, Europe is like this in terms of like what they're doing on a CO2 emissions perspective. China is like this. The discrepancy is so massive. No matter what Europe does, it isn't going to matter. So now the question becomes, are we just going to let people die? And so far, Europe's answer is yes.

• 1:30:08Tom Bilyeu?

  They're actually stopping people from putting AC units in, which is absolute insanity, partly because they don't have the energy to support it. Because in places like Germany, they've been taking nuclear energy offline, which is one of the great tragedies of the modern world. They are literally moving backwards from an innovation standpoint. Right now, France's public health agency alone has reported 1,000 excess deaths, just on its own, since June 24th. Okay? Most of these people are over 65. So now the question becomes, when you have a solution like AC that's so obvious, is the refusal to do anything about it because they actually want old people to die to free up tax dollars?

• 1:30:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Is this never let a good crisis go to waste? Or do they hope that by forcing people to stew in the heat, that they'll finally accept more draconian regulations? Because, look, see, we really are making the planet warmer. And by the way, if you want to say that, see, we really are making the planet warmer, just look at the math and go, Europe could literally just stop emitting anything. And given the trajectory that China's on, whatever, if we are the ones driving this, China will just keep driving it anyway. So you're not going to stop it, but you are going to cause people to die. So if you're in a situation where it's like, okay. It is hot now, regardless of what caused it. Is there anything that we can do? Can we innovate our way out of this?

• 1:31:35Tom Bilyeu?

  One, we have a technology that allows us to immediately address the problem of people not dying, of being able to cool hospitals, being able to cool homes. But also, we have nuclear, modern nuclear facilities that we could be spinning up, which the US is doing now. Germany should bring their old ones back online and put new ones in place. So we should be leaning into that. And then also, what are you guys doing to incentivize breakthroughs in solar? So there's more energy falling on the earth in like a day than we need all year. It's crazy. The gap is so massive. So focus on getting that energy captured in an efficient manner. And by the way, guess who's leading the biggest breakthroughs in this?

• 1:32:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I hope that the answer is obvious. China. So China is like, listen, we're gonna fucking run hot. We're just gonna pump CO2 as fast as we can into the atmosphere. But we get it. We don't want to do this forever. So we're gonna leverage the financial winds here to make sure that we can incentivize breakthroughs in solar. And so, nobody is adopting solar faster than China. So wait, everybody. You've got one country that's like, yes, we're, we're going to pump a lot into the atmosphere for now, but we do recognize the problem, or at least that it's way too risky to keep doing this. And so, we're going to focus on innovation. Europe should be doing the same. America should be doing the same. Innovation. This is one of those, you guys are gonna start memeing me.

• 1:33:04Tom Bilyeu?

  But the reality is, the, the just core foundational fact of

• 1:33:11Tom Bilyeu?

  life is that innovation is the holy grail. It is the thing that allows you to overcome the problems. Even when those problems are a thing that we created, you can innovate your way out of that problem. And that's why, when you look at the trajectory of the world, there are moments where we dip down. But when you look at the trajectory of the world, life just keeps getting better. Life expectancy gets longer, wealth gets more extreme. We pull more people out of poverty, less people die young. I mean, it is just a never-ending string of improvement.

• 1:33:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And now, all of a sudden, things have been so good for so long that the places for whom it got good first, those people now have lost faith in themselves and are running civilizational suicide. But the people that have lagged behind are like, alright, well, fuck you guys. We're gonna innovate and we're just gonna do the thing that you're unwilling to do, which is pump CO2, get better, innovate, move into the next region, and they'll be more than happy to run the globe. And I literally, by the way, this is so crazy. There was a woman, I pulled the link, there was a woman who said, um, she is, god, is she French? She's, anyway, a woman feminist who said, um, she's French? German. German, thank you. A German woman who said, and I quote, "My bloodline ends with me. I would

• 1:34:23Tom Bilyeu?

  take all immigrants and all refugees in because we ruin the world." So she is saying that basically white people should stop existing. That's so crazy. That's so crazy. Uh, so, but that's where some people are at, that because Europe, for very complex and utterly fascinating reasons, they got out of the gate in the modern era faster than other people, were able to colonize and do all that shit. They're now going to get colonized by people who came in the game late and who will now leapfrog. It is wild how this sequence plays out, man. It is wild. So, anyway, I don't know that we can escape it. The human mind is what the human mind is, but the answer is always going to be the same. Uh, focus on innovation, um, focus on getting

• 1:35:08Tom Bilyeu?

  better, improving, set your sights on an outcome that you want, and then go for it. And if your outcome is that you want less deaths across Europe, you're gonna have to put AC in, you're gonna have to put energy in place to do so, innovating all the while. And if you want to solve the CO2 problem, it is not asking people to move back in time to make life worse. It is to, instead, innovate in things like solar.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Um, okay, we are rounding the corner of this busy news day. I feel like we've been talking about a lot of different things. This has been my favorite story so far. I've been secretly been waiting to talk about this and all this other stuff was just a precursor. Mexican Batman is out here and he's saving the day.

• 1:35:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, let's go.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  He's capturing thieves. I want to play this video game. Um, Ubisoft, EA, I don't know who has the Batman rights. We need to do this immediately. Uh, and one of the alternative suits should be a Mexican flag. That's my hill to die on. I get to sit down.

• 1:36:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I like where your head's at.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  Uh, but yes, a citizen vigilante in Mexico is now capturing thieves and criminals across Mexico and duct taping them to poles with notes that they were caught stealing bikes and motorcycles. Uh, this is like legit, like there's like six or seven examples of people duct taped.

• 1:36:20Tom Bilyeu?

  This is incredible.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Duct taped to the pole, but is vigilante the problem? Do we need to start taking crime into our own hands, Tom? And, and taking ownership of our communities? Is that's what needs to happen?

• 1:36:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, this is one of those where the answer is obviously no. But if people are going to refuse to do the thing that actually needs to be done, which is to get a government that prioritizes law and order, then the fact that you will hit a point where people start doing this is the only reasonable response, that is going to happen. So if, uh, mom and dad are not going to protect you, then the kids are going to have to protect themselves. So that's where we're at here. Now, that's not me condoning vigilanteism, but that, that is me condoning you've got to stand your ground at some point. So, um, yeah, man, like this is just a reality. Boys and girls, you cannot let people, uh, just take over. You can't do it. Now, the first appeal should be to your government to say, listen, law and order, safety is priority number one.

• 1:37:14Tom Bilyeu?

  If you're not going to do what it takes to keep us safe, then we're going to get you out of office. If corruption makes it impossible to get people out of office, then protecting your own, and what I like about this is literally this is somebody using a Batman-like approach. If you don't know Batman, uh, he refuses to kill. So Batman is always trying to do things with the least amount of force necessary. So the fact that this guy is somehow getting these people duct taped to a pole is fucking incredible. Uh, so I'm very sad that we find ourselves in a situation where this is necessary. But I love that people are doing it in a minimum force necessary type way. It's rad. Shout out to those guys.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Wild. And then RFK and Dr. Oz had a press conference yesterday where they were talking about shady insurance agents and bad actors who are enrolling unsuspecting Americas in health plans they never signed up for. So they have been using people, signing up people without social security numbers and zero premiums, just so that way the people who are signed up don't know that they're signed up, they don't get a bill or anything, and these people are then going to the government expecting a payout. Um, another side of fraud in the government.

• 1:38:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. The fraud in America right now is so rampant that asking for more tax dollars is patently absurd. Stop the fraud, reduce spending, then we can actually assess whether we have an actual shortfall where we want to make sure that people don't fall below a certain line and as a society, we're all going to agree to pay for it. But when you're funding the NGO networks, guys, right now NGOs have 14 trillion dollars in US taxpayer money that they've managed to hoard. That is the most insane shit ever. If you want to talk about don't fund foreign shit, stop spending 14 trillion dollars via NGOs.

• 1:39:04Tom Bilyeu?

  That is so fucking crazy. And if you don't think that a lot of that is coming from fraud, you are out of your minds. You don't aggregate 14 trillion dollars just by being like, hey, we're a good cause and really doing a thing. I don't even think people argue that, we were talking about this with Haiti. Something like 2% of the NGO dollars that were meant to actually end up to improve the lives of Haitians actually made it to them. 98% leaked out into what I will clock as the overproduction of elites. All of the administration fees, all of the fucking fundraising parties and shit that they use that money to throw. It is wild. You are funding the lifestyle of the fucking American elites and elites in other countries.

• 1:39:51Tom Bilyeu?

  All saying like, we're actually gonna go help these people. It's not helping. You could look at what have decades of money going into Africa actually bought you. Certainly not African prosperity. So this shit is crazy. This is crazy. Fraud is rampant. We've really got to tamp this down. And the fact that places like California are passing legislation make it harder to detect fraud. That is so unhinged. It's so unhinged. But hey, shout out to the radical left. The radical left has done such a good job. I had, I had a crisis this weekend because I realized that the propaganda around billionaires are the problem has been so effective.

• 1:40:37Tom Bilyeu?

  So effective that people aren't even asking about the fraud. They're not even asking about how much money the government has added to the budget in the last 10 years. It's almost double. Nobody's freaking out about that. So crazy. It's so crazy. No, remember your daily PSA. You could tax billionaires at 100% of their wealth. So they literally now have $0.00 anywhere, nothing hidden. You could tax them at 100% of their wealth. And if current trends continue, you will spend $1.58 for every dollar that you steal from them.

• 1:41:19Tom Bilyeu?

  It is your spending that guarantees you will be in this hole forever. You must, in no uncertain terms, there is no mechanistic way out of this hole other than to reduce your spending habits. There is no mechanistic way out of this hole without reducing your spending. There's no way. It's not possible. So that's where this is just maddening, maddening.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  And Thomas Massey flipped the script on a Fox News Digital reporter. This whole exchange was just hilarious to me.

• 1:41:52Speaker 04

  Clear up the stuff your ex is saying about you with the NDA that you pressure her to sign an NDA for wrongful termination. What, is that true, what she's saying about you?

• 1:42:02Speaker 05

  Who are you with?

• 1:42:03Speaker 04

  With Fox Digital.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Uh, it's all false.

• 1:42:07Speaker 04

  And what she said about you and Boebert having an intimate relationship?

• 1:42:11Tom Bilyeu?

  If you're looking at your screen, watch, watch what he's doing with his phone.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  Saying it because of the primary, ahead of the primary, what do you think is motivating it?

• 1:42:20Speaker 05

  When did you all become a tabloid?

• 1:42:22Tom Bilyeu?

  So Massey's gonna start, he's looking at his phone.

• 1:42:25Speaker 04

  No, I just thought it would give you a chance to respond.

• 1:42:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Is he moving on, is he checking his text messages? Or is he doing something else?

• 1:42:32Speaker 04

  About anything you could say.

• 1:42:33Speaker 05

  So let me ask you, I heard that you like gay porn. Is that true?

• 1:42:39Speaker 04

  Cars, man, I'm not, I just want to give you a chance, your side of it.

• 1:42:43Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna get into that. Are you a real news organization or not?

• 1:42:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I can't believe this worked.

• 1:42:49Speaker 05

  All you gotta say is you don't like it, that you haven't been to those websites.

• 1:42:53Speaker 04

  Of course I don't, of course I don't like it.

• 1:42:56Tom Bilyeu?

  I really can't believe this worked, man. How does this guy crumble that fast? Like, at least have a sense of humor about it and be like, I love gay porn the most, or whatever, like, dude, that's so crazy.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  And he's like walking away.

• 1:43:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Dude, mad respect to Massey for this, mad respect. I love this so much.

• 1:43:14Tom Bilyeu?

  That's very impressive. I just really can't believe that guy folded that fast, but that was incredible.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Last room on left, man, Thomas Massey.

• 1:43:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, it, yes, by the way, it shows you that, uh, that's exactly what these guys are doing. They ask you a question to which there's no good answer, because you accept the frame. Once you accept the frame, then they've got you. And so, all Thomas Massey had to do was randomly, he doesn't know this guy, he just had to say something that he knows would be socially uncomfortable.

• 1:43:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, do you deny that you like gay porn? That's so wild. I can't believe that works. That's really crazy. And just shut it down. That's crazy.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Is there something to, cause TMZ recently got into politics and people are all up in arms about like, how is he covering politics? That's like nasty. But our 24 hour news cycle, our media landscape, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, all of them, they have dipped into this personal tabloid-esque news. Do you think that there should be, and this is an alt question, I know, but do you think there should be a separation of like, we only talk about politics and the actual policies versus personal attacks, smear attacks and things like that?

• 1:44:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, yes. I think people should stop immediately with ad hominem attacks and lay out the mechanisms of the things that they're bothered by. But we're never going to do that. We're certainly not going to do it in a populist moment. Because from a populism perspective, the follower, the adherent, is coming to you and saying, make me feel the way I want to feel. And the way that you make them feel the way you want to feel is by pointing out that the other person is bad, they're less than, they're a crete and a creature, whatever, and they need to be stamped out. That's how you make them feel what they want to feel. So, um, expect a lot more of it. And because humans reason emotionally, like, deep down at our foundation, like, it's so hard to pull people up into the neocortex

• 1:45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  and get them to go, okay, I'm gonna set my feelings aside for a second and I'm gonna reason through this with actual chains of logic. Phew. It's just, it doesn't work, man. It doesn't work. Not, not at the level that it works to repeat, uh, ad nauseam, billionaires are evil, tax the wealthy, make them pay their fair share, freeze the rent, dignity of workers, like, all of those things are way easier because they're way more emotionally powerful than, um, the actual like, hey, let's talk through what, how does this actually work at a mechanistic level? It's so wild. It is one of the things that I think-

• 1:45:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Cause the vacillation between the reason that governments exist, an empire specifically, exists for somewhere between 150 to 250 years and how crazy we're going through this literally on our 250 year birthday is because that's roughly the period of time that it takes for the what once was really good, like really hardcore people are like, we have to be disciplined and fuck you, we're going to be Sparta and they Spartan their way to success. And then some people, you get sort of the halcyon days of like post-world war II, we just did the really hard thing. We're super disciplined. We're very patriotic. Everybody's doing the thing for the country and we've got massive growth because we still have these hardcore

• 1:46:24Tom Bilyeu?

  motherfuckers that have come home from the war and they really want to build something and build, build, build, grow, grow, grow becomes like the, you know, the cry of the day. Families are strong. Like, you know, it's all about that. The government's doing its best to get small again. Like it's just fucking golden times. But then what ends up happening is you start abusing it and you're just like, well, if a little bit of debt's good, then a whole lot of debt must be great. If a little bit of a handout's wonderful, then a whole lot of handouts must be wonderful or even more wonderful. And it just spirals into madness. And then you get where we are now, which is just total lunacy of more free things, more money printing, debt, debt, debt. There's never going to be a problem. Anybody that tells you we've got to be disciplined is an asshole. They're just being greedy and you implode. And then you'll bounce back and you go through the hard times again and then you get the Spartans again and the whole cycle repeats.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Epso facso. That's all I got.

• 1:47:12Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, boys and girls. Thank you so much for joining us. Do we have any final super chats? We good? Okay. So, Kalshi, we love you. Thank you so much for supporting us. There's a QR code on your screen right now. You can trade $10 to get $10 by using code IMPACT and we have an ITU AI masterclass coming up Thursday, July 9th at 1:00 PM Pacific. So make sure that you sign up. It's a free class, free as the day is long. And I'm going to show you how to launch your company using AI. Sign up is in the description. All right, guys. We'll see you Wednesday. Have a great day. Love you. Bye.

• 1:47:47Tom Bilyeu?

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