The Ilhan Omar Immigration Scandal Is Way Crazier Than I Thought

Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to launch your business starting at $0 + state fees: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order PLUS receive a free gift with your second shipment—or find Ketone-IQ at CVS stores nationwide and get $5 off your first 6-pack for a limited time! Perplexity: Start your free trial of Perplexity Computer today at http://PPLX.ai/impact http://pplx.ai/impact and experience the next phase of AI. #ad makeup HeyGen: Create your first three AI videos for free at https://heygen.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 Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. Butcherbox: Go to https://ButcherBox.com/IMPACT https://butcherbox.com/IMPACT to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year — with free shipping always. The Ilhan Omar immigration scandal is wilder than we thought — a sealed warrant, DNA from the trash, and a 'not to my knowledge' answer that raised eyebrows. Tom walks through the full marriage timeline, then breaks down a $2 trillion AI selloff, why oil is spiking despite more barrels flowing, an 82-year-old senator's weed-racketeering indictment, Sam Altman's warning that AI bugs can't be patched, and a surprising Alzheimer's breakthrough. Sign up for my AI Masterclass: https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=TBS-Livestream&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social Check us out wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/1nARKz2vTIOb7gC9dusE4b?si=a8daffd2bf1f48fd Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tom-bilyeus-impact-theory/id1191775648 Do you need my help STARTING a business? Join me here inside ZERO TO FOUNDER: (https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder) Get the exact systems, mindset shifts, and principles that built a $1B brand delivered straight to your inbox every week. Subscribe for free (https://tombilyeu.com) Check out our Video game - Project Kyzen: (https://projectkyzen.io/) Catch Me Streaming on Twitch - (https://twitch.tv/tombilyeu) Link to IT discord: https://discord.gg/TZKJ2etPbT Tom's Favorite Things List: https://amzn.to/41Ftt7e For Business inquiries: [email protected] FOLLOW TOM: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu Twitter: https://x.com/TomBilyeu YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:16Tom Bilyeu?

  and pushing the fear and greed index into extreme fear. What does the sell-off mean? We're going to be looking at that. The AI hacking situation is getting completely out of control, and a group likely tied to the Chinese government is involved. And Sam Altman says the bugs can't just be patched anymore. Going to be going into detail on that one. A new shakeup with Iran makes near-term peace seem increasingly unlikely. A Virginia state senator was just arrested for something completely insane, and even people on the left agree this arrest might be warranted. The oil price problem is confusing everyone as the spike comes despite more oil flowing than prior to the war. So what's really going on?

• 2:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And a major breakthrough in Alzheimer's prevention research shows a surprising approach to healing the brain that certainly has me excited. All right, boys and girls, strap in for this one. The Ilhan Omar immigration scandal is wacky. I really wanted to brush all of this off as political theater or just a weaponized DOJ. Not just, but a weaponized DOJ. But the story really does seem to have enough there, there, that it's becoming impossible to ignore. All right, I'm going to try to walk us all through everything that's going on. If you have pencil and paper at hand, you're going to want to write these names down because the naming of everything is a big part of what intimates at what's really going on with the DOJ. But they're being super tight lipped,

• 2:46Tom Bilyeu?

  so people are piecing all of this stuff together. For a decade, there have been allegations coming from the right, or at least echoed by the right, claiming that Ilhan Omar's second husband, we're going to get to that timeline in a second, a man named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is actually Ilhan Omar's biological brother, and that she married him in 2009 specifically as an illegal immigration play to get him a green card. Now, at a headline level, it just seems way too absurd to be true. And so I, for one, just always brush this off as a bunch of BS, just political stuff where people are trying to create some smoke

• 3:30Tom Bilyeu?

  where there really isn't anything. But as people comb through all of the information surrounding Omar's background and the search warrant that's been put forward, executed, they've gathered a bunch of stuff, her passport, her DNA, that's become a big part of this. So all of those ongoing investigations with all the people connecting the dots, at a minimum, it really does seem strange. Now, it's unclear to me at this point if this is just tabloid strange, and we're going to find out that, look, there's very simple explanations for all of this, or if there's actually something legally questionable going on. But here are the dots that people are connecting.

• 4:15Tom Bilyeu?

  So Ilhan Omar herself has never disputed her marriage history, which is a pretty wild ride. In 2002, at 19, she married a guy named Ahmed Hirsi. It was a Muslim religious ceremony, not technically a legal marriage, but they did have two kids before splitting up in 2008. So it's relatively safe to assume that that was a real marriage, whether they did it legally or not. That was really two people presumably in love, having kids, nice and straightforward. In 2009, though, she legally married

• 4:58Tom Bilyeu?

  a British citizen named Ahmed Nur Said Elmi. Okay, that's one of the important names you're going to want to remember. This is the guy that people say is her brother. So married in a religious ceremony, doesn't get a divorce, but then legally marries another guy. And after only two years, Ilhan Omar says that her marriage to Elmi, the one people are saying is her brother, ended with a religious divorce. So despite being a legal marriage this time, there was no legal divorce. So now we have one religious marriage with no legal divorce, and then a legal marriage with a religious divorce,

• 5:41Tom Bilyeu?

  but she didn't file for a legal divorce for another six years. Now, that's going to become interesting in a minute. Now, as an interesting factoid, maybe unrelated, or maybe essential to all of this. If a green card is approved while the marriage is under two years old, then you only get a conditional green card that's only good for two years. And so now you're back in the, you know, trying to settle your immigration status. Now, that is a mechanism that Congress built in 1986 specifically to catch sham marriages and stop people from using marriage in that fashion. Now, if, if, as the accusations allege,

• 6:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Ilhan's marriage to Elmi was fake and just for the purposes of getting him a green card. Now, if that's true, it would explain why she would wait to file for a legal divorce for another six years to get beyond that temporary green card status. Now, it may, again, if the allegations are actually correct, it may explain why she immediately got back together with her first husband and had a third child after the reported religious separation from Elmi. Remember, legally, she's still married to Elmi, but goes back to husband number one. So husband number one becomes husband one and husband number three,

• 7:10Tom Bilyeu?

  and they start having kids again. So brief pause to marry somebody that people are saying may be her brother. Now, despite still being legally married to Elmi, she filed joint marriage tax returns with her first husband, third husband, same guy. Hirsi, that guy, okay? So she files these joint tax returns in 2014 and 2015 despite not legally being remarried to Hirsi. Now, she will legally remarry him years later in 2018, but not for years. Well, one could imply that she's letting the green card status play out for the person who she married,

• 7:53Tom Bilyeu?

  allegedly just to get him a green card. Now, needless to say, being married to one person and filing joint returns with another person caused Ilhan some legal problems. And when it was brought to light in 2019 by Minnesota's Campaign Finance Board, she was forced to pay a fine and amend the returns. Now, I would like to say at that point that things just settled down for Ilhan and all things went back to normalcy. But unfortunately, she then divorced Hirsi, her first and third husband, again in 2019. At which point, she marries Tim Minett, who's her current husband, as of 2020.

• 8:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, he's the one that has all the weird financials. So if you guys remember a while ago, it was like, we're worth $30 million, no psych, just kidding, we're worth like $30,000. Okay, that's the timeline. But what about the allegations that her second husband, Elmi, is her biological brother? None of that would give any credence to that. So he's the one that she was legally married to for two years, but didn't file for divorce for another six years despite being in an active, childbearing relationship with her first husband again. Now, why, given all of that, does this "he's her brother" rumor persist? And why has so much been made of the fact that as a part of their investigation into Ilhan,

• 9:20Tom Bilyeu?

  the DOJ has her DNA? Like, people are making a very big deal of that, which, by the way, apparently they got out of the trash, which you don't need a warrant for. So, hey. Okay, well, to start with, Ilhan Omar has said she has no birth certificate.

• 9:36Tom Bilyeu?

  And then, a couple of days ago, the Justice Department filed a motion in federal court describing the search warrant as covering the home of Congresswoman Ilhan Nur Sayid Elmi, aka Ilhan Omar. So they're putting forward, or at least it seems to indicate that they're putting forward, that they have reason to believe that her real name is the same as her second husband, the one that people are claiming to be her brother. Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean that he's her brother. Just because they have the same name does not make them siblings. And my first question was, well, what if Elmi is just a super common name? So then I researched it, and when I did, I discovered that the naming conventions

• 10:19Tom Bilyeu?

  in Somalia are very different than they are in the US. So Somalis don't have family surnames. So a person's name is their given name, then their father's given name, then their grandfather's given name, then their great-grandfather's given name. So the real claim here is that Ilhan, according to the document anyway, that Ilhan and her second husband have fathers with the same name, grandfathers with the same name, and great-grandfathers with the same name. Again, it's not proof that they're siblings, but it would be a pretty big coincidence if that's true. Now, some people are claiming that the government is just, or she's just using her married name, and they're trying to make a big deal out of that. But traditionally,

• 11:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Somali women don't take their husband's name, and she certainly hasn't done that in her recent marriages. So that admittedly does seem pretty unlikely. Now, given that the warrant is still sealed, and the DOJ is fighting like hell to keep it that way, we're gonna have to wait to see if this is all just a bunch of BS smoke to try to call her into question, or if there's real fire here. But this is proving harder to hand-wave away than I originally thought it was going to be, especially given that when she was recently interviewed by Chris Hayes, and he asked her directly about whether she had married her brother, she said, and I

• 11:42Tom Bilyeu?

  quote, "Not to my knowledge." Now, that is a wild way to answer that question. Now, I want to be very clear. None of this is proven. There's nothing on the table at this point that says that was her brother. There aren't even any charges yet. They haven't even filed the denaturalization case at this point. So it's all going to have to play out. But boy, oh, boy, when you start looking at all of those dots and the way that things piece together, you start going, okay, there's at least something here that's worth looking at. So it is, uh, it was a pretty wild ride to go through and piece together all of the different marriages,

• 12:23Tom Bilyeu?

  legal, religious, divorces, legal, religious. The timeline is pretty wild. So I would say, at a minimum, Ilhan Omar has some splaining to do. So we'll see what happens, but pretty wild.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  I wanted to pull up the video to get her "Not to my knowledge." So this is it right now, her sitting down on MSNBC, or MSNBC, excuse me.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Every time he talks about you, he will casually say something wild about you. Like, he will tweet, "Ilhan Omar, she married her brother, blah, blah, blah."

• 12:53Tom Bilyeu?

  You gotta be talking about Trump.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  You think to yourself, boy, that sounds odd. It seems unlikely that she married her brother. There are right-wing people who believe that this man was your brother. You have called it a disgusting lie. Well, who was this man that was your husband? When did they start saying that he was your brother? Why?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  It started with the Somali blog, that I don't know if it still exists, but somebody put in there that, you know, that he had to have been my brother or something to that effect. And right-wing conspiracy theorists in Minneapolis got a hold of it, and they just kind of went and like found random people who were like, "She introduced us. You know, she introduced him to us and said he was her brother," which is, you know, insane. I mean, I don't, I don't know those people that they talk about.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  You were not related to him at all?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Not that, not to my-

• 13:51Speaker 03

  There's not some weird kernel of truth that through some game of telephone-

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Not to my knowledge.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  That was the big gotcha, right? In terms of what you're talking about.

• 13:57Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so wild to me. Uh, yeah, listen, it could just be a bad delivery, and if she had to play it over again, she would go back and say, no, equivocally, or unequivocally, this guy is not my brother. For schwazy, for schwazy. Like, this is crazy. I cannot believe. But in the middle of this hubbleoo, that is a crazy way to answer that question. But here we are.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  In your heart of hearts, doing your research and things like that, you feel like it was her brother? Like, do you feel-

• 14:29Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't feel like we have enough information to say that. I think anybody that gets out of their, over their skis and is like, "This is her brother," is just making shit up. They want it to be true. Now, this is yet another politician whose policies I absolutely despise, so it certainly would not break my heart to see her not win. But as the woman in The Matrix said, "Not like this. Not like this." It's like, I hate all of this stuff. Now, what I mean when I say that is, I think it is so likely that both sides right now are weaponizing the legal system against each other. This is a really ugly period in American politics. But at the same time, every time I want to just really ramrod that home and say, "Guys,

• 15:12Tom Bilyeu?

  stop doing the legal persecution. This is all gonna come back to bite you in the ass." I always do find myself, rightly, I think caveat it, saying, "Listen, if somebody really has done something egregious, yes, you have to pursue them, because you'll end up with a problem on the other side, which is that we're just letting people get away with naked corruption." So take what Trump is doing financially. At a glance, it just all seems corrupt. It seems absolutely horrible. And if there's a "there, there," people need to go after him. He needs to be prosecuted 1,000%. Because that alone is going to become a bigger problem for America if we just accept, oh, we're being pillaged in broad daylight by our, whether it's Congress, the sitting executive, like, you can't let that stand. However, when

• 15:56Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:40Tom Bilyeu?

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• 17:22Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:02Tom Bilyeu?

  so make sure that you use it. No credit card or payment is needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact, and you can be up and running in just minutes. Now, let's get back to the show. Every deal has an expiration date, but not this one. I've been a ButcherBox customer for years and years. Their chicken breast is my go-to protein source. And right now, you can get it for free in every box for life. ButcherBox delivers 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken, wild-caught seafood, and more, all sourced to standards they actually tell you about.

• 18:44Tom Bilyeu?

  They've already done the research and made the tough sourcing decisions. So all you have to decide is what's for dinner. If you're looking for an easier way to get great meals on the table, you've got to try ButcherBox. Go to butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box, plus chicken breast in every box for life, or filet, or New York strips for a year, with free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com/impact. Be sure to use our link so they know that we sent you. I will say at this point, it is a worthy story to cover from a news perspective, but nobody should be saying, aha, definitively, we know what's going on.

• 19:27Tom Bilyeu?

  But there's enough there that it warrants looking at to be sure. Now, part of the story becomes, why are they working so hard to keep the documents sealed? Now, to be very, very clear, they did the exact same thing with the Trump case. So this really is like a bull sides. No matter who you're going after, and it's probably the right answer. If you're going after somebody, I forget who said this, but it's the right answer, that these investigations are covert, not overt. So you don't want to broadcast, if you're going after Trump, you don't want to broadcast what your case is, because then he's going to have more time to prepare a defense against it. So same idea here. If you're going after Ilhan Omar or anybody else, you don't want to broadcast what your case is.

• 20:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So you want to be able to get the information, them not know, fuck, what should I be trying to hide? You just want to get all of it, build your case, and then make them defend against the fully disclosed information that they've managed to get. So it isn't weird that they're trying to keep it sealed, but because they're keeping it sealed, everybody is guessing at what's really going on. So the only thing I will say about Ilhan Omar is, I think her policies are bad from an economic standpoint, and that's the sum total of what I would stand 10 toes down on. Now, again, walking through the time, go ahead.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  No, you said her policies are bad. That's the thing you'll stand 10 toes down.

• 20:55Tom Bilyeu?

  That's the only thing I'm going to stand 10 toes. Beyond that, I'm just saying, hey, I walked you through the timeline. She does not dispute that timeline. So in terms of who she was married to when, what was religious versus what was legal. And so while it poses questions, that is a very different thing than providing answers. Right now, we're in the, it poses questions. It's weird. And so, yes, people are going to look at it. Much like the, we're worth 30 million, psych, just kidding. We're worth like an absolutely tiny fraction of that. It's like, yeah, that really may be just an accounting thing. And listen, I've been doing business accounting for long enough. There really is weird stuff like that, where the way that she addresses it

• 21:36Tom Bilyeu?

  seems pretty bullshit, but I won't be like, no way, it's not possible. So that kind of thing, I understand how, like when we cover big corporations, and it's like, they lost $72 billion. No, just kidding, it's just a mark-to-market. It's not an actual, real loss, it's all just on paper. So there's, there are certainly theoretical ways where that could pan out, where you go, okay, yeah, it looked weird at the headline level, but in reality, it's not that big of a deal. And so the same could be true. It really could just be, hey, wild coincidence that they really did have a father with the same name, a grandfather with the same name, a great-grandfather with the same name. So why are we all getting weird about this? But now you go back to, okay, but she doesn't have a birth certificate of her own admission. She's like, I don't have one.

• 22:19Tom Bilyeu?

  So do they know something that makes them go, yeah, she's conveniently claiming that, but we've actually gone back to Somalia. We have the information, the documentation that we needed to show that this really is true. We don't know yet. So I'm certainly not, yeah, she married a brother, this is all fake. I'm still at the, okay, this is getting harder for me to wave away and say, I can't even imagine what they're doing other than just weaponizing the Justice Department. So, hey, worth looking at. Nobody should be saying, oh, we know what's going on. We don't know what's going on. The DOJ is, understandably so, but they are intentionally hiding what they know. So, yeah, nobody should be saying, oh, we know what is true. We don't yet.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  She is on the ballot for November, so this definitely will impact her voting. Do you think that this could potentially make her lose her seat? Is this the October surprise?

• 23:15Tom Bilyeu?

  I mean, yes, they're definitely, the timing of this is for sure ill-advised in that I very much doubt that this is just a coincidence. That, oh, it's just when the data came in, and it's so damning that we had to move right away. There is a reason that typically these things aren't done, I think, 90 days before an election. But I fear that it's one of those gentleman's agreements. And now, all of that stuff in a populist moment just goes out the window. So, yeah, I'm officially not a fan of that. If they had this, they should have moved before the election. Timing became so obviously manipulative. So that I don't backtrack on. Even if this really is what they say it is, I think the timing is very, very, very intentional.

• 24:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, would I be just beside myself with shock if she doesn't get reelected? Yes. Like, that is considered one of the safest seats in the country. So it's not like it's going to go to a Republican. Like, the odds of that are effectively zero. So the only hope they would have with that is if they could actually move things fast enough that either the information became so damning that it actually did shake that up, or they're just trying to use it as a part of a larger movement to get people to be opposed to immigration. That seems a far more likely play, that we know, listen,

• 24:42Tom Bilyeu?

  she's still going to get elected, but we're going to basically neutralize her effect. Her career is going to stall out. We might even be able to get her to back out. Still won't go to a Republican, but we'll send a warning shot to these guys that, hey, we're looking at everything. So it's something more like that. That's obviously my guess, but that would be my read on the situation.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Copy. All right, going to another Democrat that is in trouble with the Justice Department. Cash Patel just came down with some charges for a Virginia senator.

• 25:13Tom Bilyeu?

  This, kids, this one's wild. A Virginia state senator was just arrested for something, it is absolutely unhinged, which is exactly why people on the left are saying, all right, this arrest might actually be warranted. Louise Lucas is 82 years old. She's been in the Virginia General Assembly since 1991. She's president pro tempore of the state senate and chairs the Finance and Appropriations Committee. She wrote the 2021 bill that legalized marijuana in Virginia. Thursday morning, she surrendered to the FBI. A federal grand jury indicted her on five felony counts, racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute marijuana,

• 25:56Tom Bilyeu?

  money laundering conspiracy, honest services fraud through bribery, and maintaining a drug premises. Now indicted alongside her, two daughters, a grandson, and three others, prosecutors call the group the Lucas Enterprise. Now, the allegation is pretty straightforward. Since 2019, she used a licensed medical cannabis shop that she co-owns as cover to move more than 100 kilograms of illegal marijuana. She then laundered the proceeds, according to the allegations, and used her position in Richmond to write laws and regulations that protected the business and set up her family for recreational licenses. FBI Director Cash Patel put the take at roughly 4.5 million. Now, the damning part.

• 26:41Tom Bilyeu?

  The wiretap is where she got caught out. So on a February 9th call about pending legalization language and a license for an association, she said on this wiretapped call, quote, "This is our last chance at generational wealth. I've got too old to not be greedy." Yowch. So in March, a call with a fellow legislator, she said she needed the legal industry to launch because, quote, "When I did it, it was obviously illegal." What is the 50 Cent quote? "I try not to say nothing the DA might want to play in court." Well, she missed that album because she did not get that message. Now, her response, "The full weight of the federal government

• 27:24Tom Bilyeu?

  is being wielded against an 82-year-old great-grandmother." This is political persecution. Except CBS and the AP both report that the investigation opened under Biden. So also, take that for what it's worth. So this did not start under Trump. This has been going on for quite some time. Her initial appearance was Thursday afternoon in Norfolk. Recreational sales in Virginia don't become legal until July of 2027. So if she was doing this, it still isn't even legal. So she really has a problem.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is an interesting one. Allegedly, it was a medical marijuana shop that was going to get converted to a recreational, and she had the license for the recreational. That's why she got the bribery charges. And maintaining a weed facility, even though she has, it's like technically legal, but it was doing nefarious charges. So she was selling legal weed through the front, illegal weed through the back. We will see what happens.

• 28:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, yeah. You hate to see it. Yeah, you don't want to see this from anybody, but your elected officials, it just gets so much rougher. So, boy, do I want to live in a world where we all pretend that we don't have a bunch of corrupt people in politics. But alas, as more and more comes out, we do. And you want to talk about something that is on both sides. Ooh, buddy, yeah, this is a wild time. So this goes back to, one of the things I was really hot on when we first started going live was this idea that... The book about the Machiavellians, defenders of freedom, how historically, the book talks about this thing called the iron law of oligarchy, that you're always going to be ruled by a small

• 29:01Tom Bilyeu?

  number of people. Now, historically, they've been able to give us a narrative and we all just swallowed it. So the scary thing is that the corruption probably isn't new. It's just, it's so hard to hide now. And so that is causing this crisis of confidence in the public because we're all seeing all of this. And we're just seeing it from everywhere, from the very questionable financial dealings that we see people doing, the trades that they're making, obviously all the way to Trump in this case. But we've been tracking it for years in Congress that these guys just have, they are absolutely goaded traders. And there's no way that Congress just

• 29:43Tom Bilyeu?

  happens to attract the world's greatest traders. It is far more likely that these guys are leveraging the insider knowledge that they have. And it's just so visible now. And when I read that book, I was like, oh, we're now living in a world where you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. There is no such thing as a shared narrative anymore. It's really quite impossible without draconian, top-down, 1984-style control of everything people are allowed to say, everything they're allowed to think, everything they're allowed to like, read on social media. It just becomes absolutely a bigger nightmare to try to solve this, to re-give people a shared narrative that creates that social cohesion. That's just out the window. And so we are going to have to

• 30:26Tom Bilyeu?

  figure out a way to metabolize what's happening and come to some sort of social understanding, because you're never going to be able to legislate this stuff away. We've got to have some sort of shared moral compass where it's just, we don't tolerate this kind of behavior. And that is a very tall order, especially given the kind of person that you need to be, to be drawn to politics and that constant like battling and fighting and behind the scenes, power games. And it really is Game of Thrones with social media. It's wild.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I'm thinking about a couple of years ago, it was probably 1012 at this point now, where people were getting eliminated because of their laugh, because of the types of suits they were wearing, like they were like, that used to be political scandals. And nowadays it's-

• 31:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Now you can have Nazi tattoos and-

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Drug problems and brother marriages and all types of things. And we're just rolling through.

• 31:17Tom Bilyeu?

  It's wild.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, America's cooked. On the oil-

• 31:20Tom Bilyeu?

  I think it's, I know, sorry, you're trying to, but I think it's bigger than America. I think this is the nature of power. And it is why the phrase, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You, you actually find yourself in a position where it isn't so much that you're above the law. It's that you're operating in a system that's sort of outside that. And you begin to realize that all those connections, they're just things you can get away with that the average person can't, right? Like, what, what does a DOJ decide they're going to prosecute? And if you're in the system that can influence the person that's got, you know, all the piles of all the cases they could go after, and yours just somehow never makes it into the go after

• 32:05Tom Bilyeu?

  pile. It's like that kind of stuff. And so now it's like, there's, it's so much harder to hide from that. Because one, now slap AI onto this, and you can just hack their system and you find the information. And so now it's like, even if it's not information coming out through official sources, it, the information is still getting out there. And so, boy, oh, boy. I want it to become a good thing that all of this stuff is drug into the spotlight and that we really do reorient ourselves and drew for president. And we get somebody who just bangs the drum about moral responsibility and like, hey, I live my life according to this code. And thank you,

• 32:47Tom Bilyeu?

  that is the right response to Drew's moral compass. So we really do need that. As much as I'm being tongue in cheek, and I know that you don't currently have plans to run for office, somebody's got to like re-center that, because it isn't going to be a thing that we can smash from the top down. There was somebody talking about Japan, and they were saying, yo, it's wild that you can have a city, they were talking specifically about Tokyo, that you can have a city with 30-plus million people and it's clean, and there aren't no-go zones, and like, how do they pull this off? And somebody's reply was, it's the people. And that really is the answer. And when I was walking on the streets of Tokyo, I thought, it, there are no garbage cans

• 33:30Tom Bilyeu?

  anywhere, Drew. Garbage cans don't exist. So then it's like, how do they not have trash everywhere? And the answer is that each individual person puts their trash in their pocket, takes it home, and throws it away when they get home. And I thought, that would never fly in America. And I found myself the whole time just being annoyed, because I'm like, I don't want to have to carry my garbage. Like, this is a dumb system. But the reality is, it clearly, when you have the right culture, it's an incredible system, because that place is fucking clean, man. So-

• 34:05Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 34:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's wild. And so I was there with my mom, who is a smoker, and they like, they find you, dude. It is crazy. Outside, you cannot smoke outside. You have to go inside to these like little hot box rooms. They make you smoke there. And they will come up to you with their little baggie, and they're like, you gotta give me that. We're putting it out immediately. It's, yeah, it's totally different. So anyway, this really is a cultural problem. If we cannot all come to an agreement about, we just don't do that here, you can't enforce it. There's not enough police, yeah, there's too many backroom things.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  You say something all the time that we don't vote for politicians, we like summon them. So is it just that America's society has become so degenerate that we now have degenerate leaders? No, I'm being real, like-

• 34:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, but-

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Are we the problem?

• 34:52Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:32Tom Bilyeu?

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• 36:11Speaker 05

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• 36:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer. Did you know writers who switch and save with Progressive save nearly $200 per year? That's a whole new pair of writing gloves and more. Quote today. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $197 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between October 2024 and September 2025. Potential savings will vary. We have become too lax in understanding that the way that we behave privately is an echo of

• 37:22Tom Bilyeu?

  things that we have allowed ourselves to believe culturally. And all of us are governed, I've talked a lot about this with AI, all of us are governed by an internal moral compass. And we propagate our moral compass in everything that we do, largely in the way that we talk to kids, what we indoctrinate kids with. This is why that's always and forever going to be such a battleground about, what books are we letting our kids read? What are we teaching them in school? Because all of these things, like, if you're not teaching it to kids when they're young, such that they have just like a natural aversion to wait, what are you doing? Like, to the point where if they saw their parents do something, they'd be like, wait, but you've told us not to do that. And then

• 38:05Tom Bilyeu?

  parents have to contend with, oh, Jesus, yeah, my kids are watching. Like, that whole thing. You, you really have to get to that point where we're all holding each other accountable and being like, we don't do that. We could do that. I get it. We could get away with it. But that's just not how we behave. And so people have to map to something internal. This is why I talk all the time about, I'm here to earn my own respect. So whatever other people outside think about me, whatever I could get away with, it's like, none of that matters to me. I'm like, I, there's a certain way I want to feel about myself. Now, people could go after me and say, well, the way, the things that make you earn your own respect, I don't like those. Fair enough. That's, that's a worthwhile debate. But everybody has to be on that tip. I don't care what I can get away with. Like, what do I think about myself? But that has to be baked into the culture. It has to be

• 38:48Tom Bilyeu?

  reinforced, reinforced, reinforced. And right now, we're not doing a good job of creating a cohesive sense of internal moral principles.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Um, I would say the market also agrees because nobody knows what's going on in the oil market right now because it's up, then it's down, then it's up again. And the Iran war is just chugging along. We have no oil reserves. China was like, I don't even use gas no more. We're only doing EVs now. People aren't commuting to work in Singapore and some countries in Asia. What's going on in the oil market, Tom?

• 39:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, the oil price problem is legitimately confusing everybody because the spike is coming despite more oil flowing than prior to the war. So what is really going on? Well, Middle East crude flows are averaging more than 24 million barrels a day. And according to ship tracking firm Kepler, the pre-war average was 23.3 million. So this is fantastic, right? Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are actually pushing crude through the pipelines to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman to make up for the fact that Iranian oil is still frozen out. So that's still completely off the market because of the blockade that the US has set up. But tankers are now loading offshore, ship to ship. It's requiring a whole

• 40:04Tom Bilyeu?

  United States naval escort. About 40% of the exports now are being forced to skip the Strait of Hormuz entirely. And so Brent crude spiking up above 110. The last I saw it was as high as 113, I think, per barrel, obviously. And that's the highest since May. So even though the barrels are moving, the reason that prices are still so high is very simple. Moving the oil now requires like a massive amount of rigamarole to avoid the strait because Iran is going to strike things that are going through it. So transiting the oil now is just way too expensive. Tanker freight rates for the Gulf have hit records

• 40:44Tom Bilyeu?

  this month. War risk insurance has surged right alongside of that. Every ship to ship transfer and convoy delay ends up tying up a tanker that used to just go right through the strait. So things were much faster. And JP Morgan's head of commodities said, in October, the cost now is in moving the oil, not producing it. So hearing that, hey, we've got oil flows going, unfortunately, no longer tells you the story. So people are getting confused because we're still hearing a lot of people hype that up. But the reality is if you don't recognize that the cost keeps rising to transit it, then you're going to be super confused. And Iran understands this, which is exactly why they're attacking

• 41:28Tom Bilyeu?

  the workarounds. Now, in October, that accounts for 20% of every ship hit since the war began because these guys are just sinking ships as fast as they can. So that, I think, is probably being underreported, just how many tankers they're hitting. You had a recent supertanker that struck a naval mine. So on October 8th, nearly 21 million barrels crossed Hormuz. But then three days later, it was down to 2.9 million. So the market is like trying to price in the fact that we have these like terrible days of things going through, that ships are still being hit. And then to make matters worse, you've got Hurricane Isaiah? I'm not even sure how you say that. So it has shut down production

• 42:10Tom Bilyeu?

  in the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America, whichever you guys want to call it. So all of that is still stuck. And Ukraine has now resumed strikes on Russia refineries, which is squeezing diesel even further. United States crude inventories have actually fallen another 4.9 million barrels last week. That's eight months of straight drawdown. So we're clearly not able to build those reserves back up. And Iran's own exports, as I was saying earlier, are at zero. So that's still all frozen. So yeah, when you mix in the yes, there are times where it's flowing more, but then there are also times where things are getting locked up and the increase in the cost to move it all. Basically, the cheap

• 42:53Tom Bilyeu?

  way of doing things still has not come back. So oil flows, yes. Cheap oil flows, no.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  I feel like I still don't get it. I feel like we're just...

• 43:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you're still mapping it to, well, if the flows are going, why aren't the prices coming back down? I think people don't understand how much the price of oil per barrel, per barrel, has the influence of the cost to ship it. And the cost to ship it used to be like, this will be direction incorrect, it won't be exactly correct, but it was like $2.45 per barrel to transit. It's now like $22 or $23 per barrel. So you've got a literal 10x roughly increase in the per barrel cost to transit it. It's no longer a small amount. So it goes from being, you know, whatever, 5 or 6% to 25 or 30% of the cost. And it's like, okay, plus, markets are going to price in potential disruption, which is another

• 43:46Tom Bilyeu?

  part of this story. So there's a whole new shakeup in Iran that's making any sort of near-term peace agreement increasingly unlikely. So we had all of like Pakistan's army chief being sent over to Iran to negotiate, and they were told by Tehran basically to get out. So this was the fifth trip since April, the April ceasefire, that Islamabad has tried to broker something and get a deal across. But according to the Lebanese paper Al Akbar, citing leaks, that he had a message coming direct from Washington, which was basically an ultimatum. Concede on the nuclear program first, before anything else is going to be

• 44:31Tom Bilyeu?

  discussed, or you're going to face a large-scale strike aimed mainly at Pickaxe Mountain. And that just shut things down. The Iranians do not take kindly to ultimatums like that. The underground site next to Natanz, this is Pickaxe Mountain. So they dug an estimated 80 to 100 meters into the granite that Trump has been threatening just nakedly in interviews and stuff for months. And so Iran is just hard nope being out of that. The Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for Iran told Munir, the guy that was there to negotiate, that not even a tiny bit of enriched nuclear material is going to ever leave the country of Iran. He called it their national wealth and is basically just like,

• 45:14Tom Bilyeu?

  you guys get the fuck out of here. So the Parliament Speaker, Galabah, told the United States that they're not going to win back Iran's trust until it meets all seven of Tehran's conditions. If you guys remember, they put those out months ago. And so it includes like the payback for all the damage that was done in Iran. So basically, at this point, we are at a stalemate in Iran. Nobody seems to be willing to give. And so the markets are looking at all of that and going, all right, man, like, this is just going to keep dragging on and on. Plus, Iran is hitting ships, trying to transit. You guys are going through pipelines. The pipelines have been hit before. So not only do you have a high

• 45:55Tom Bilyeu?

  cost of transit, like just literally a high cost of transit, but we also don't know that those aren't going to be interrupted yet again. And so certainly from a paper betting against the market, it's just going up and up. So landed prices are still super elevated. So anybody that is like, God, I don't understand. Like, if we've got the flows, how is this a problem? It's partly that the real price to land it is so much higher now because of transit. And then the markets are like, if you're asking me to believe that this stuff is settled, you're out of your mind. This is going to keep being a problem for the foreseeable future. And you want me to believe that you've got this anaconda strategy and that you're choking these guys out, but they keep shooting things, so we don't buy it?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I don't know. I feel like we were energy independent, then we broke with the deal with Russia. So now I'm like, okay, it's a dirty deal, but it's what has to be done. We even let Iran get some shipment of the barrels out. I just, I don't understand our energy policy. I don't understand how the markets are reacting to our energy policy.

• 46:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, let's talk about it. So first of all, the Russian thing is probably not best read as having to do anything with diesel prices and has to do more with political theater. Look, guys, I'm trying to get your diesel prices down. I'm not the one to blame. It's this fucking short kid who used to be a mime or an actor or whatever he was that's running Ukraine. He's the real problem. And so we're seeing this narrative shift away from I Trump started a war in Iran to, look, I'm the sensible negotiator. I'm trying to make this happen with Iran and these crazy lunatics just want a nuclear weapon. That's not on me, man. That's on those kids. You really want them to have a nuke? And then on the Russia side, I'm over here trying to get a deal done. You've got Zelensky being a maniac. He just won't see reason. He wants everybody to keep funding his war. He's striking

• 47:42Tom Bilyeu?

  the diesel facilities. That's on him, man. Otherwise, prices will come down, not wanting people to realize that even if Russia starts, gets the sanctions alleviated and starts pumping that to the rest of the world, it's not going to have that big of an impact. People are estimating, I think it was like 2.5% impact or something, I'm just really pretty minor if those numbers can be believed. So that's probably political theater. That's probably him trying to shift the narrative. He's vacillated back and forth between Putin's a problem to Zelensky's a problem and back again. So yeah, that one. So if you take Russia off the table as a solution, and remember, Russia is striking Ukraine's energy facilities,

• 48:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Ukraine is striking Russia's facilities. And so despite the deal that's being done, that's not going to be nearly enough to offset all of the damage, plus the fact that it just isn't a big enough part of the world. And then why, if the US is energy independent, do we have a problem? And the problem is very straightforward. It's a global market. So the US has all this stuff to sell and the world's like, yo, I'll pay X amount for that. And if they'll pay a lot more than the people at home are willing to pay, then we just start jacking up the price and saying, hey, guys here in the US, if you want this, you're going to have to pay a higher price. Now, of course, Trump can get to the point where he says, okay, no more diesel exports. And he was threatening to do it. He was saying,

• 49:04Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm just going to say you can't send it anywhere else. So now you only have to compete with other American buyers because you can't send this anywhere, which would lower the price, but it's going to make things very difficult for the global economy who's like, you put us in this situation in the first place, and now you're not willing to ship us some of your oil? That's fucking crazy. So there would be all kinds of international backlash. Trump is obviously trying not to make the US any more of a pariah than he's already made us. And going into a winter, if it ended up being a harsh one, and I don't know what the predictions are in Europe, but if he ended up making it a harsh one, sorry, if it ends up being a harsh one and he makes it harder for them to get oil, then there's

• 49:46Tom Bilyeu?

  going to be even more backlash against him. And he certainly doesn't need more backlash from Europe or Asia for that matter. So people want to get their oil. They want to be able to buy from what is rapidly becoming the largest exporter of oil, which would be the US. So we'll see.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  And with nothing slowing down, talking about the Ukraine, Russia war, the Iran war, even with the Pakistan delegate giving up ultimatums, it seems like we're just stuck in this loop, at least till the end of the year.

• 50:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens on the other side of the midterms. So you might find that something happens quite quickly after the midterms. I'll be interested to see. I'll be interested to see if Iran has a card up their sleeve as we get closer, but it starts seeming less and less likely now because people are already doing early voting. So it's like, if they were going to make a move, it would have been wise to have done it a little bit earlier than this, but it's still possible that they do something to try to be very disruptive, to create problems for Trump. So it could be that they're sort of doing the most of what they can do, given that they know if they overplay their hand that they're going to get hit. So there's a lot of rhetoric back and forth, but they are talking about, because Trump

• 50:57Tom Bilyeu?

  keeps saying, we've got the mother of all bombs, keeps posting images of it or having people post images of it. And they're saying, all right, you want to play? We've got the father of all bombs. So yeah, that's, again, that's not going to hit the US, but it certainly could hit US allies in the Gulf.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Even though I hear we have reports that we're actively like leaving the Gulf and...

• 51:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, that's still, I mean, that is, whoo. Okay, so that starts asking a whole series of different questions and goes back to, why did we go into Iran in the first place? Which has to do largely with AI, in my estimation. So I think this was about the first, when you look at, okay, Trump goes in in his first term, he's trying to normalize relations. Why is he trying to normalize relations between the Middle East and Israel? Because if we can get the economics there really flowing, where are those investment dollars going to go? Because it's very clear that most of the GCC nations were going, okay, I know that at a minimum, people are going to move away from fossil fuels towards solar, if nothing else. And so we ultimately need to diversify our economy.

• 52:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And so they were making investments. They were taking the oil money and investing around the world. Now, when you invest around the world, the number one place you're going to end up is the US. And so the more stable and economically prosperous the region, the more likely those dollars were to come to the US. Then in his second term, he realizes that, whoa, this whole AI play, basically everything is hinging on this. And this is our way to get out from under this insane amount of debt. We can just grow our way out of this. But it's going to require AI, which is going to require an almost unending amount of investment. And where do we have an unending amount of investment? The place that's extracting a bunch of oil and looking for places to transmute that into a diversified investment stream. And so we're just going to try to get all that money here.

• 52:50Tom Bilyeu?

  But to do that, we've got to get rid of this crazy government in the Middle East in the form of Iran. So, hey, dry run with Venezuela goes perfectly. Let me just do a quick decapitation strike in Israel, or sorry, in Iran. Israel then pushes the agenda, moves it too fast. Again, they've tried to backtrack from all of this, but I'll take their first words at it. And so that forces them to play their hand clumsily, in my opinion. And now you find yourself in just an absolutely ill-advised war with Iran. And so here we are.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, we got a bunch of super chats. A big shout out to Zargos Azkan. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. He dropped 150 in super chats, so we thank you for the $3.50 super chats. Happy Friday to you, sir. His first one is, hey, Tom, Drew and Ryan, love you guys. A challenge for Tom, instead of telling us how to start a million dollar business with AI, show us constraints. One laptop, a $10,000 budget, LLM subscriptions included, no contacts from past businesses or networks. Playing everyday driven person with a USD 10K saving a laptop. Document every step as a parallel mini-series, one to two episodes a week. Failure is 100% acceptable and you get three attempts, three different ideas. Real results would inspire and motivate countless.

• 54:08Tom Bilyeu?

  It would. And so the question becomes, why would somebody not do that? Because I am never going to do that. And the odds that you see anybody attempt to do that are effectively zero. Now, the great news is I can tell you exactly why. The only thing that matters in business is something called product market fit, not the only thing, because then execution just becomes impossible. And so execution is ridiculously hard and there are a vanishingly small number of entrepreneurs that are gifted enough to actually get a business across the finish line. There's a concept that I talk to entrepreneurs about all the time called velocity made good. And the number of people that you can find that understand how to make that real, I can go into, I mean, I guess he's, I'll try to speedrun this in honor of what is a very

• 54:52Tom Bilyeu?

  generous super chat. Okay, so velocity made good is a term from nautical circles. So you basically have a sail, you have wind, and you have a place you're trying to go. So the first thing you have to figure out is, well, the wind isn't always blowing in the direction that I want to go. And if my sails are fixed, then now I'm really screwed because the wind can be blowing in a way that I can't even capture it. So the first thing you do is you learn to adjust the sails. Okay, cool. Obviously, this is a analogy, but hopefully you'll get it. You can adjust the sails, but now you're able to capture the wind. This is what I call energy versus momentum. You're able to capture the wind, but you're moving in the wrong direction. So you're moving quickly, but you're not going where you need to go. And so then the next thing you have to learn is how to tack.

• 55:36Tom Bilyeu?

  So you capture the wind and you get that moving in the wrong direction and then you use the momentum to go in the right direction. You tack back with the wind and you come back to the direction you need to go. And so a very talented sailor can use all of those things that are often working against them to still get to the destination that they want to go. Now, easy enough in sailing, once somebody teaches you how to do it. In entrepreneurship, it is a gazillion things that are working against you. Most entrepreneurs break emotionally and have very little to do with anything else. And so me being able to pick a winning entrepreneur is effectively zero. You're watching me build out loud, so everybody can see what I'm doing. I talk endlessly about a video game that I'm building right now called Project, or called Kaizen. And so you guys should absolutely fucking check that out.

• 56:21Tom Bilyeu?

  You're going to see whether I can pull this off or not. So I couldn't be personally building more in public if I tried. So you can absolutely watch entrepreneurs do this all day, every day. But if you were asking me to, as like a show, go find somebody, pull them in, make sure that they have product market fit, which almost nobody does, and then go through the grueling process that could take years and would inevitably be a distraction to try to tell the story of that person doing it versus actually helping them build their business. Plus, I'm trying to build my own fucking business, so I'm not going to take time off to actually go help this person. So what you end up getting is all this theatrical bullshit where they have to make it good TV instead of what is often excruciatingly boring, because I cannot tell you the number of times that the team here has said, Tom, we should be filming all of this.

• 57:06Tom Bilyeu?

  And I said, ask yourself what you would actually see on camera. And you would see Tom staring at a fucking computer screen and you'd be like, what are you doing? And the reality is, it's a thousand different things, changes all the time, and it would be absolutely terrible drama. So then you'd be going, Tom, we've got to externalize this. You've got to talk about the things you're doing. And then I'm like, Jesus Christ, I've got to do the fucking thing. So now it becomes another piece of content, yada, yada. So yes, failure would have to be an acceptable outcome because the odds of failure are so high. Remember, 94% of all companies fail to make $10 million. 92% fail to make even a million dollars. So it is just an unending sea of failure.

• 57:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So anyway, that's why I would never do that, because it will inevitably be just the TV show. And so you would be trying to do things to make it engaging and worth watching. Otherwise, it just becomes, I guess, a public service thing where you're, hey, watch how easy it is to fail in business. So I do coach entrepreneurs all the time. We're trying to help those guys get real fucking sales, find product market fit, all that. It, the only interesting part of that is watching the emotional roller coaster that they go on. That would make for interesting TV, because you'd be like, why are you crying about that? What the fuck is happening right now?

• 58:23Speaker 02

  I think what he's trying to pitch is like, you walk through people. I was thinking it from like an ITU perspective of like, okay, if I was an entrepreneur, this is what I would do. Step one, and like, kind of like a one-on-one type thing. I don't think he wants to find an entrepreneur and then do it for them.

• 58:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the really bad news. We, when this company first launched, I don't even know if you know this. In fact, I don't know, maybe Eric knows because he's so fucking OG. But back in the early days, I forget now what the name of the show was, but we had a show where live, I was giving people business advice. And that show tanked so hard because real business is fucking boring. And unless you're going to go in and edit it, and like, the whole thing for us was, this guy's just boring. Like, his business problem is interesting, but he can't deliver it. So now you have to cast. And so now you're looking for entrepreneurs that are dynamic and you bring them on screen. The odds of you finding a dynamic entrepreneur who's actually going to see this through, who isn't going to break emotionally, or if they break emotionally, they do so in a

• 59:20Tom Bilyeu?

  very dramatic way that you can capture on camera, and you don't mind being the soulless asshole who's just like filming them fucking breakdown. You've got the camera in their faces, they're weeping about not being able to feed their kids. It's like, dude, Jesus Christ. So there is a re, keep in mind how hungry producers are to do exactly this. If you could actually capture the drama of like, if I don't pull this sail off, my kids don't eat, if you could do it well, people would. It is just so hard.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Is Shark Tank the last one to really capture that?

• 59:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Shark Tank does something very different and it's brilliant what they've done. Just give me the pitch. Now it's like, I don't give a fuck whether you go run your business or not, which is why the vast majority of people that go on Shark Tank, you never hear about them again because it's not a compelling story. They just go fuck off. It ends up being nothing. They peter out for a thousand reasons that are too boring to even talk about and they just go away. But if you let them film for whatever 12 hours of pitches and you only have to cut it down to 30 minutes, now you can do something that's very dynamic. And that show is awesome and every aspiring entrepreneur should watch it to understand about how to negotiate, to understand about deal structure. That show is legitimately cool and they do an amazing service to the business community

• 1:00:37Tom Bilyeu?

  to be able to see how those kind of negotiations go in like this sort of speed dating way. But in terms of the day-to-day grind of running a business, no bueno.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. And his last one was, can this super chat be a gift for Drew and Ryan, please? Thank you, Mr. Azkan. Ryan is on PTO, I'll make sure I let him know.

• 1:00:57Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. So to actually not make that a throwaway thing, we need to talk to press to find out if that, if there's any hurdles to that whatsoever. If they're not, of course. So as the person who would be benefited by this, make sure that this actually happens.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought you were saying.

• 1:01:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I think he's saying, like, I actually want these dollars to go to those two guys. That's how I read that.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  That's sweet. Thank you. I was saying, I thought it took it as a shout out.

• 1:01:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I took it differently if you didn't mean it like that, but I would happily do that.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I'll take 25 hours on a Friday.

• 1:01:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Companies are fucking weird, so you never know if there's some legal weird thing.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  I'll take the guys' money.

• 1:01:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Be on the TV for a beer.

• 1:01:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Absolutely will.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  All right, Nate of the South, I think the interstate highways are a part of what killed our culture. It made it too easy to move away from family and others who would shame a moral behavior. One of many factors, of course.

• 1:01:45Tom Bilyeu?

  That's weird. I've never thought about that. Is that possibly true? I suppose that at an initial blush, and there have been many things that the more I think about something, the more I'm like, actually, maybe that was something. But my initial reaction is while that may be some sort of mild part of this, I think that a bigger thing is that we no longer like put our values on other people. And we are having a crisis internally about even what America is and what America stands for. We've had an assault on the family for a very long time. Birth control makes it very easy to get out of the nuclear family. I think the nuclear family is probably the bigger problem.

• 1:02:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you looked at, like, what do we reinforce? Do we want to see a strong family with a concrete set of values that they live by? They articulate, that is echoed back to them in storytelling and media formats and all of that? Do we even want to see that? And I'm not sure that people do. And so this is one of those things that like there is a reality to be faced that as society changes, gets more technologically advanced, there are a lot of things that pull at the structures that evolution could blindly, obviously, but count on. And so, sure, that you were likely to stay close is one of them.

• 1:03:15Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you really look at like early societies, they tend to split apart at around 150. So that's not something that lasted forever. The decay of religion is probably a massive element of this. In fact, if I had to shoot from the hip, I would say the decay of religion is your biggest problem. All right, I'll stop there. I could go more, but yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Period. Is there something, though? And this could just be my grief talking because I was home for a couple of weeks and it was nice to kind of be home with everybody and kind of. I saw all of my family members, like my brother, my sister, my nephew, all of us working. All of us are in different places, playing rent and mortgages in different places. And all of us were in one house for the first time since like the 2000s. So it was like, oh, that is cool. And like the internet era with remote work and me having an internet show like, it would be cool if all of us can move back in together and spend that time together. But I don't know if that was nostalgia or if that's actually a reasonable thing to think about in 2026. Because the market is shaky, people are struggling. Should people stay at home longer? You know, is that old style of living can come back around? Is that more appealing or is that just kind of, we passed that already, we're moving on?

• 1:04:21Tom Bilyeu?

  So there are advantages to it, but there are disadvantages. So everything's going to be a trade off. If you look at the most successful countries in the world, people are the least inhibited from chasing their dumb ideas. So anything that inhibits somebody from being able to pursue a dumb idea, when you're inhibited, then the culture stagnates. When people are able to go off and do their thing, then it explodes. And so the question becomes, if we were to go back to that more traditional thing where parents tend to put a tremendous amount of pressure on their kids to conform and the kid does not have the ability to go out and do their own thing,

• 1:05:05Tom Bilyeu?

  what kind of sort of innovation and creativity gets stifled in that scenario? So they would have stronger familial ties. They would be able to stand and weather, stand against and weather certain storms that individually they probably would not be able to. So there is certainly give and take. Neither one is bad or good. They both just force a trade off. And so I don't think it's an accident that the more that America was allowed to become individualistic, the more successful that China had to embrace private property in order to become successful, which is individualizing by its nature, even though they're a far more collectivist society than we are. But there just really is something to that. It's because people become convinced that they have the right answer

• 1:05:49Tom Bilyeu?

  and they don't want anybody to push against them. And so I think families would be far more likely to dead end in doing that. But you would be, you wouldn't be on your own. You would have people that are more likely to look after you and care for you. It probably has really positive benefits to kids when they're young. So yeah, it would be a trade off. But what I, because every Christmas I think this, I'm a total psychopath for Christmas. Family comes in from around the world. We're all in the same house. Like you, every time my heart swells and just being around everybody, I'm like, this feels so good. And then you can feel the little phrase towards the end of like, oh, we've been together for two and a half weeks.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Day 15, everybody starts to get tired of each other.

• 1:06:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. And then what I project out to, okay, even in this house, which is big, people still start to like chafe a little bit at like having an expectation that we're going to sit down at the same time and stuff like that. So then it becomes, okay, well, we will be a little more freewheeling. And then it's like, well, you just sort of bump into each other about needing to use a kitchen at the same time. Or one person doesn't like that somebody else leaves something out. Or one person feels like they're doing more dishes than the other person. And it just like, you start looking at that six months, a year, two years, five years. Now all of a sudden you're back to kids leave the nest for a reason.

• 1:07:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Would we be better off if people lived on a cul-de-sac or in the same neighborhood? Maybe, but the likelihood that you'd want to be super, super tight, that trade off has proven, once people have the opportunity, they take it a lot. So.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Got you. And then a last super chat for right now goes to Morgan Xavier. Grok answered, shared to X, I am now asking Tom, would you put in the work to create Kaizen merely to observe NPCs in emergent complexity with no room for players? Don't players provide the ultimate value to the external runner?

• 1:07:41Tom Bilyeu?

  I wouldn't build it just to see NPCs, but I have had the fantasy many times that in success, if the game is fortunate enough to actually get a player base and fortunate enough not to fall on its face in the first 18 months, like so many massive hits have done. I would love, because of the structure of the world, I would love to do experiments like that. And I really have built the game to be not just insanely fun to play all by yourself, but to have the, what I call derivatives from primitives setup that make it a content engine, meaning that you'll see other people without my prompting, telling stories from inside the game about people.

• 1:08:26Tom Bilyeu?

  It's something that you see in Minecraft a lot and we are a craft like game. So I have high hopes that these kind of experiments will be run, though I would never have built it for that reason. For me, the reason to build it is one, just to make the game that is really fun, something I would want to play.

• 1:08:45Tom Bilyeu?

  And then to tell stories. And so the storytelling, I think people will be very confused because I'm actually really, the story itself will be just little touches, little drops, because I want other people to author their own stories within it. But I would like Impact Theory to also tell stories from within that same world, but I don't want to force our stories onto people. So anyway, it'll be interesting to see, but no, I'd never build it for that reason.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  What do you mean when you say author stories within the game?

• 1:09:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So Minecraft, people literally tell their own stories. And so if you think about, okay, I want to be a visual storyteller, but how do I do it? Historically, you didn't have AI, so you weren't going to be able to tell stories using AI. So people had to rely on footage that they could capture easily. And one of the ways to easily capture footage was use gameplay footage. And so by making it easy for people to animate your character, which because Minecraft.

• 1:09:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Every character in a video game has bones. The more bones, the better it looks. The fewer bones, the easier it is to animate. And so people tend to make stories in games that have very simple boned characters. Most people won't be able to track that, but so that's a real thing. And it's a big part of why people literally tell narrative stories, soap operas, all inside of Minecraft. And so the real question for me as a developer is, will that matter in three years from now? When AI is just so good, will people continue to use gameplay footage? Or will they just AI everything? And so this may become a non-entity as we go. And then it will rely back on just, it's a fun ass game.

• 1:10:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But yeah, I would love to see people tell stories inside that world. Because we've done the hard part of building the world. And so now you don't have to be like, how does it work? And what is the lore? It's just there. And so now you can tell a story, but it isn't like GTA six where the main character is a guy with a personality. And if you try to like, do a spinoff story, now you've got to be consistent with that. It's the same reason Fifty Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfiction. But then she wanted to start telling stories that were different. And so she rebrands, gives them different names, stops being fanfiction. So that's the kind of thing. We don't want people to feel like, well, to be this character, I have to be this character. We want them to be like, okay, I'm in this world, but I'm my own character. I can tell my own stories.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Got you. You brought up AI. We got to talk about the bubble because it's getting a little poppy. It's getting a little popish. The markets are feeling it a little bit. Nothing crashed, but it's getting a little crash light. I don't know.

• 1:11:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Very well said. It's crash like. The AI bubble really did wobble yesterday. It wiped out an ungodly amount of money and pushed the fear and greed index. It's actually a real thing. The fear and greed index was pushed into extreme fear. So, South Korea's stock market is down 40% from its June peak. More than $2 trillion erased out of that market. China CSI 300 entered a bear market this week, off 20% from June, and just logged its 11th straight weekly loss. Japan's Nikkei is down 14% from its high. And Thursday, the United States got hammered. The NASDAQ fell 2.6%.

• 1:12:03Tom Bilyeu?

  That's its worst day since June, wiping out roughly $1 trillion. The S and P 500 lost 1.2%. Meta actually beat its revenue and still dropped 7% after announcing new non-voting shares that they need to put out there to pay for massive AI build out costs. And the market is no longer thrilled about how much money people are building, putting into the build out of AI data centers. It is getting wild out here, folks. AMD fell 8%. Micron dropped 6%. Nvidia is down 4%. Amazon fell by 3% more, in fact. It was just an absolute sea of red.

• 1:12:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Then, there were rumors circulating that OpenAI got a lackluster response from investors in their most recent attempt to raise. Now, this is a sea change, man, and shows that at a minimum, without something new and exciting, the AI bubble is likely not going to inflate much more than it is now, which certainly matches Ray Dalio's call that there's maybe 20% left. So, that is different than saying that the bubble is going to burst or that it has burst. So please keep that in mind. But it is a reminder that it's likely not going to go up forever, at least not without massive disruption. Now, personally, I think a big part of what's happening is that investors are just asking,

• 1:13:25Tom Bilyeu?

  with CapEx this insane and borrowing costs continuing to go higher on the back of things like credit default swaps getting nice and spicy, who exactly is going to pay for all of this? As the fear and greed index pegs out at extreme fear and people are now pouring into bonds, boy, oh, boy. If you've got revenue inflows slowing down like they are, it is not obvious who is going to be investing in all this insane build out. So, you can expect to see more things like these companies hitting or even exceeding their revenue expectations. And people still being like, nah, I'm not, I'm not investing more in this. So, the bigger thing here for me is that this isn't just about AI.

• 1:14:10Tom Bilyeu?

  It's also about decades of absolutely unhinged reckless spending globally, finally manifesting as an actual problem that has to be contended with. Borrowing costs are going up all over the place. France's 10-year yield touched 5.14% Thursday, which is the highest since 2002. And for the first time since 2013, it was above what the United States is paying, which ironically has actually gone down a little. So, hey, but not necessarily for good reasons. But because people are so afraid, they're getting out of the market and they're going into bonds. That actually is good for the US, but nonetheless, is not just a sign of like,

• 1:14:53Tom Bilyeu?

  oh, the US is strong and therefore I want more of these bonds. It's more, I'm now so terrified of this, I'm going to overlook the fact that the US has been insanely reckless, which is why our bond rates had been going up until just recently. Now, France, which is having all of their bond woes, they run a 5.1 deficit and carry a debt of 116% of their entire economic output. Yikes. Now, to make it even more interesting, they also have nationwide curfews in place due to all the rioting. And its finance minister is now threatening to push budget cuts through without a vote. Just saying, remember, we talked about this.

• 1:15:33Tom Bilyeu?

  France just, every five years, they elect essentially a king that does not have to talk to anybody. They can just do what they want. And so now they may just be saying, yeah, sorry, kids, we are going to do some cuts because this is getting crazy. Now, Moody's is set to rule on downgrading France's credit rating today. So we'll see what happens. Now, given the market shift away from greed into the fear and index being extreme fear, money is going to possibly continue pouring into our bond market. And that would be the one upside to this, that things may move in the right direction for a while on that side. So, that'll be the sort of fingers crossed. At least that gives people a place to go.

• 1:16:16Tom Bilyeu?

  I've already done my diatribe on this in a previous show about, hey, actually seeing the US Treasury market do what the US Treasury market is supposed to do, which is give people a place to go to hide from a volatile market is working as expected. That's very good news. But like I said, I wish it were because we got our financial house in order. Unfortunately, we have not. But people still do trust it enough to move out of what may be an overly volatile stock market based on the AI bubble beginning to wobble a little bit as people may begin to move away from the narrative around AI. But at least if the bond market can catch people, then it might not be as damaging as it otherwise would be.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  Honestly, this is the best explanation of conspiracy theory that I've heard so far, is that they're planning these protests now ahead of their credit ranking, which can impact their long-term outlook. Like, that at least gives me some things that can affect the bond markets, that can affect the government's access to debt.

• 1:17:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Who do you think would want that?

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  A company that is trying to short France in general. Opposition, yeah, opposition political parties, a foreign actor that wants a country to decrease. Like, at least that I can one to two to three to four it.

• 1:17:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  But it just being the blue hairs or it being...

• 1:17:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the question that I would put to you and to everybody else. So let's say that's true, and I certainly don't have a hard time believing it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm...

• 1:17:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It's plausible at a minimum. But now, why are the blue hairs, as you said, so easy to activate? That's what scares me. Is when you try to activate people on something that they just have no attachment to whatsoever, you just can't get the energy going. These guys are very easy to get them to try to tear things down. When I saw those two French women arguing, the other one's like, yo, they were threatening to rape me. And she was like, that's collateral damage for the revolution. It's like, what the fuck did you just say? That shit is so unhinged. So, yeah, we, we have gotten to the point where we are so comfortable, we don't know how bloody revolution actually is. And so people are hoping for something that, when they actually get it,

• 1:18:18Tom Bilyeu?

  it will become that meme of the other French woman who tries to stop people from looting the store, only to find out, oh shit, like, these guys don't give a fuck. This was never about helping the downtrodden. This is just about coming up on loot during a riot. And so she, that heartbreaking look that she has in her face, which is turned into countless memes, is pretty devastating.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll see. We shall, we shall post. I'm not going to speculate again. I don't want to create a bunch of alternative narratives. But it, that feels like there's something there. Because I didn't even know that their credit rating was at risk because it had a negative outlook ratings as of April. So it's most likely going to go down.

• 1:18:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Yeah, France is now doing themselves any favors economically. This is why I say, like, I see a lot of energy in the US where they'll scream to be like two different places. Scream number one is, we got to be more like China. Look at what those guys are doing. That's fucking insane. Because the very thing that you're saying you're worried that Trump is, a dictator, Xi Jinping is literally a dictator for life. So, what, like, how am I supposed to make sense of that? That's just full retardation. Then, you've got people clamoring, let's be more like Europe. And they're on an economic suicide pact. It is crazy watching what those guys are doing. They're literally proud of, we just regulate everything to death, completely losing sight of the fact that they are falling like a rock economically.

• 1:19:43Tom Bilyeu?

  So is Canada. Who wants to be like, guess who? Europe. And Canada is now falling like a rock and has been falling like a rock for a long time at this point. So, there are real consequences to the dumb ass decisions that these guys are making. And now you've got Americans clamoring to be more like that. That, that is really stupid. That is the only luxury beliefs, as people will rightly point out, where things are going so well in your country, you don't even know how bad it is. If you haven't heard the, the, I haven't done enough research to know if this is really a sweeping movement or not. But I'm not surprised at all, as somebody who lived in Europe, I am not surprised at all to hear Americans went to the UK only to be like, the fuck, I'm going home. The UK is dope.

• 1:20:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Do not get me wrong, I love it to death, but I wouldn't want to live there. It is not better than America. First of all, the attitude, as people are saying, they discover, is like, these guys are, it's normally referred to as tall poppy syndrome. The headlines that I read did not say, they didn't use that phrase, so that's me. But that is what it feels like. They think it's ridiculous that people reach for the stars. They think Americans are absolutely absurd with their crazy dreams. And so, they do not celebrate go-getters there. You've got to fight past all of that. And so, we lose that cultural heritage at our peril. But we are rapidly losing that cultural heritage.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I blame Trump. I was in London earlier this year and as soon as they heard I was American, they were not giving me no play. American accents used to get you something in London. I thought I was at least gonna get like a low level London floozy, nothing. They were like, oh, you're American? What about your government? I'm like, damn it, Trump? I thought we were just gonna share a pint.

• 1:21:25Tom Bilyeu?

  He's the ultimate cockblock.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  He is, he is.

• 1:21:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Hilarious.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Came in the room Friday.

• 1:21:29Tom Bilyeu?

  You should have said, listen, I'm on camera all the time. I think the guy's a dumbass. Like, I'm not, I'm not going for him. What are you talking about?

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:21:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It is hilarious. Now, what's crazy, so I lived there in, what, 2001? Uh, and it really did get you somewhere. Like, having an American accent, people were like, oh my god, I love your accent, it's so cool, you're from America, that's neat. Uh, and now that is one of the complaints about Americans that move over there is they're like, whoa, there's like a startling amount of American backlash and it's like, what do I have to do with that? Uh, why am I caught in the middle of this? So, uh, that's a good reminder for people here at home, uh, going after people who are foreign. It's like, wait a second, what do they have to do with the Israeli government, for instance? Just to pick one example?

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. Israel, I'm like, I was trying to have sex with you, woman. I am not trying to have a debate, but it's fine, it happens. Um, thanks, Trump.

• 1:22:19Tom Bilyeu?

  That's hilarious. Well, welcome to populism. You guys really want that to mean something it doesn't.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  They're trying to make such a thing. Uh, okay, uh, AI, we were talking about it, bubble popped, it's hacking everything. Uh,

• 1:22:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is getting out of hand. And at first I thought this was like the, another regulatory capture play, but then I just started actually looking at the story. I was like, oh no, there's actually something like, this is getting a little bit unhinged in what's happening now.

• 1:22:43Tom Bilyeu?

  There, there are two things going on. There really is a regulatory capture play and we do have to be careful about that, but the AI hacking situation actually is getting completely out of control. So there's a group likely tied to the Chinese government that's involved in all of this, and to make things even more fun, you've got Sam Altman, we'll play this clip in a minute, saying that basically AI has gotten so powerful, we're not just gonna be able to patch the bugs anymore. That's alarming. Now, there is a solution to it that we'll talk, or potential solution, I should say, that we'll talk more about, but, um, this really is, uh, very unnerving. So you've got a hacking group known as Storm 0940, which Microsoft describes as aligned with the Chinese state. It's been attacking

• 1:23:25Tom Bilyeu?

  tons of companies here in the US. Microsoft has tracked this group for years, so it's not some like quick hit headline here, and this group has been targeting US government-aligned agencies like think tanks, direct governmental agencies themselves, law firms, NGOs, defense contractors, and the like, all across North America and Europe. So, these are not like scammers looking to grab a quick buck. This is like espionage tier shit. So, this is real stuff that is getting supercharged by AI. Now, what companies are up against is basically a Chinese-built AI hacking framework that is chaining multiple AI models together

• 1:24:07Tom Bilyeu?

  that then run reconnaissance, password attacks, and exploitation, uh, vulnerabilities, all on its own, all at once. And Microsoft says that Storm 0940 has been running this style of tack now since September against hundreds of organizations in aerospace, defense, energy, financial services, government, semiconductors, and just technology writ large. Now, one would like to think that we can just patch these vulnerabilities and move on, but I want you guys to check out this clip from Sam Altman. He's saying it's not gonna play out like that.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  I don't even know what a dramatic enough word to use, but the problem coming towards us, um, I think is still something that we have not, as organizational leaders, or countries, or individuals, taken seriously. Uh, there was like a moment earlier this year where it was like the mythos freakout or whatever people called it, and I think things did get somewhat better. Like, people definitely patched some bugs, but it was another one of these cases where people didn't really intuit the exponential. So it's like, okay, there are these models, they can find a bunch of security vulnerabilities. Those are probably all of the security vulnerabilities that exist, or all the security vulnerabilities that

• 1:25:26Speaker 06

  models are ever gonna find. And I don't think most people sort of said, okay, the models are gonna get much smarter, they can probably find bugs, like crazy bugs, you know, bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do. Um, you know, hardware level, insane stuff, whatever. And so people fix some bugs, and, you know, security professionals still freaking out, CISOs still freaking out, but largely speaking, I think most organizational leaders have somewhat moved on.

• 1:26:00Speaker 06

  And the models have kept going.

• 1:26:06Speaker 06

  And I, I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs. I think we're gonna have to completely switch the defense model to sort of using the same technology to, for sort of a new kind of defense shield.

• 1:26:19Speaker 06

  And I think it's a huge safety and security issue.

• 1:26:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I think that is the, um, most obvious thing that should have been clear to everybody for a while now, is you're going to have to use antagonistic AI to stop AI. So if you have something that is far more performant than a human hacker, that is able to do things that, um, like if you look at the graph of all of the exploits that have been found in the last, it's like six months or something, compared to over the last like 10 or 15 years, it, it is like, just this huge spike, huge. It's not like some little thing. It is absolutely massive. If you were to like aggregate all of the bugs in the last 10 years compared to what's just been found in like the last year, I think, uh, it dwarfs

• 1:27:07Tom Bilyeu?

  what we saw before. So AI is clearly giving hackers a whole new set of capabilities, and so if we know that human hackers are not going to be able to build systems that are robust enough to constantly be fortified against AI attackers, then you need AI defense mechanisms that are going to be able to detect this stuff, shut it down, that are being pointed at your own systems to figure out what exactly is going on, what are the vulnerabilities that are doing it all the time, live in real time, getting better every day at being able to defend and stop, uh, sorry, harden your systems and stop, uh, the incoming attacks. So that is very clearly where we need to be. Now, I don't think any of the reality of this danger, and this is something I've been trying to talk about for a while, Connor

• 1:27:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Leahy just completely convinced me that there is something that we can call weapons-grade AI, that we need to understand what it is and we need to start protecting ourselves against it. Now, you need to hold these companies accountable, too. If you're about to develop something that you can see is going to become a problem, they need to shut it down. They need to not wait to be told to shut it down. They need to say, okay, yep, we can't release this one as much money as it would make us, this one we're gonna have to hold back. And so if they always have a more powerful model that they've got in their pocket, that they're working with the government to make sure is deployed, making, as a defensive mechanism, making sure the companies are protected, making sure that everybody's aware of the hacks, long before we give that model out to the public, we're in a much better position. We do not need new regulation to get to that. So as these

• 1:28:37Tom Bilyeu?

  guys keep pushing for more regulation, you can still read that as regulatory capture. The fact that it is dangerous doesn't mean that the only answer is regulatory capture. So I just walked through the exact thing that people should be looking at, and you also have Jensen Huang, that's been talking about this now for months, explaining to people that we need to be focused on engineering-based solutions so that the AI is mechanistically stopped from going out and getting out. And using AI to help build and architect those systems is gonna be absolutely critical to make sure that you don't have vulnerabilities that are just gonna be exploited by the other AI. And then as AI comes on board, before

• 1:29:18Tom Bilyeu?

  it's being released, you've got to make sure that it has time to be leveraged by the government or who else to harden the systems so that we have these protective mechanisms in place. And if we don't do that, I think we are going to rue the day. It, it will become a bigger and bigger problem.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, uh, press in the chat just told me that Quest Diagnostics just got leaked, patient data everywhere. Um, there was a story about the banks, um, had agents autonomously accessing customers' account. Now, David Sacks had a tweet, I don't have it pulled up, that they weren't rogue, but we're starting to see cracks in the armor all across different industries. So what is a blood test today and a Bank of America account tomorrow, when do we think we get to the more nefarious stuff of like a nuclear code or a water supply system or something like that?

• 1:30:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, look, we're gonna be doing a whole, um, deep dive on that in, in just a few minutes, actually. Uh, so we'll really get into the nitty gritty of all of that, but yeah, it, it is, um, it is something that people have to take seriously. Um, Elon Musk has put on the table and that's where we're gonna start our deep dive, um, some of the concerns, and then there's a whistleblower that came out, uh, recently on Diary of a CEO that sort of maps out some of these problems and when you can expect the threats to start landing, and unfortunately, they're very, very soon.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Crazy. Uh, okay, so then, um, you've all had a really good analogy about this, and I wanted just to throw this out to you. So I think this is your first time seeing this, but I wanted to like, once I heard this, I was like, oh, I wanna pose this in front of time, because I feel like you'll have a good response to it.

• 1:30:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Cows know that humans exist. They can see us. But cows don't know that money exists. Like, I can sell you a cow and you transfer money to my bank account, this is invisible to the cow. Even if you're an animal rights activist and you try to explain to the cow, look, there is this thing called money, and there is the stock exchange, and there is the bond market. How do you explain the bond market to cows, even though it controls their lives? What's happening now, or in the near future, it's not that AIs will create, will be robots that will come in the street and shoot us. The AIs are taking over the financial system. They are taking over all the bureaucracies because they are bureaucratic natives. For

• 1:31:37Tom Bilyeu?

  us, most of us, bureaucracy is difficult, is alien, because we are millions of years older than the bureaucracies. Bureaucracies were invented just in the last five, 10,000 years. We were born in the forest, not in the office, so it's alien to us. For AIs, bureaucracy is home. They were born in the office. They are bureaucratic natives. No human banker can remember All the transactions of the bank and AI banker can, they will take over the bureaucracies like the financial system. Create much more sophisticated financial systems and legal system that we can't understand.

• 1:32:17Tom Bilyeu?

  So just as cows can't understand the financial system that controls their lives today. We will not be able to understand the AI financial system that will control our lives in 10 or 20 years. Which means that we are the cows of the future. We are the cows of the future. That's amazing. That guy knew how to turn that into a killer soundbite. Okay, so all of that's true and at the same time, your life will feel basically exactly like it is now. I do not want to downplay that AI is a very powerful technology and is therefore very capable of tremendous danger and destruction and it needs to be taken beyond seriously.

• 1:32:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And the last thing I would want is to be a voice that's just like, oh, it doesn't matter. Just do, do, do, do, do. AI is going to be created. There's no way to stop it. So you need to do it sensibly. You need to understand when it becomes weaponizable. Okay, to directly address what he's talking about, right now, the vast majority of humanity, I mean, the absolute vast majority of humanity already has no idea how the financial markets work and they are already being moved around like a cow by a bond market that they don't know about. And your life is still pretty awesome. And so on that, like, no one is ever going to understand all of the forces that are at play, up to and including humans as a global species become so complicated, so complex, that there's no way to predict it.

• 1:33:42Tom Bilyeu?

  The weather is a system that governs us and all we can do are judge by like, oh, we see these patterns that repeat. And think about what we were like for thousands of years where it was like, it's a god in the sky and we made him mad. We gotta fucking kill this goat or quick, grab me a virgin. We gotta kill him real fast. So it's like, humans are used to being in a world where we do not understand the vast majority of what makes the world go around. And I'll remind people, there's something instead of nothing and none of us understand that. So we already exist in a world where the vast majority of the forces that push on us, we just do not understand even a little bit. And yet we find a way to detect patterns that we can make usable and then we live our little human lives in a way that is, dare I say, awesome.

• 1:34:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Despite the trials and tribulations and losses and grievance, all of that, all very real. The human condition is as much tragedy as it is comedy. But nonetheless, like, we managed to do something that is really breathtakingly incredible. And so he's painting a picture of something that already exists and he's like, oh my God, can you imagine if you don't understand all the forces that are acting on you? Now, I love Yuval Noah Harari. I think he's a wonderful thinker and this is going to open a lot of people's eyes up to what it will be like to create superintelligence. But if you will grant me for a second, by your worldview, you already live in a universe governed by a superintelligence that you have no power over whatsoever.

• 1:35:09Tom Bilyeu?

  And it has become a beautiful relationship that has given you a ton of meaning and purpose. I am not saying that AI steps into that void. I'm saying it is a thing that acts in a similar fashion in that, yes, we don't understand it. But the only real question is, is God benevolent, cruel, evil? What am I dealing with here? And if we can exist in a system where, okay, I don't understand this thing, but I know how to get around in the system and/or the system's actually making my life better, that's what people are going to care about. And so the fact that AI will be smarter than me is not in and of itself a bad thing. If the AI uses the fact that it's smarter than me to enslave me or kill me, then it is a radically bad thing.

• 1:35:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's really the thing that we have to protect against is how do we keep it a tool rather than it becoming a thing that enslaves us? And so if I can get everybody to focus on that part, we're going to be having at least a far more high utility rational conversation than if we just go, oh my God, he's right. I'm not going to understand how this fucking thing works. I'm the new cow. It's like, bro, you're already the cow. So the only thing that makes you feel superior is that you've got a cow that's in an even dumber position than you. But yeah, so that isn't what I'd be afraid of, but I would be very cognizant that this can break bad, that we need to be very thoughtful about how we can strain it and that we make sure it remains a tool.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  Copy that. Okay, so on that side, we had all the negative things that can happen with AI. But there is a positive thing that came about AI that some Chinese advocates have found dealing with Alzheimer's.

• 1:36:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, well, see, I'm not sure how much of this is backed by AI, but it's definitely future tech in terms of things that people should be excited about. Certainly AI will give you a lot more things just like this, but what just happened is you can now get much of a brain specific benefit that you normally only get from sleeping without sleeping. So the brain has like this clearing mechanism cycle and you wash out all of the buildup in your brain. This is a big part of the reason that you sleep. And it's the glymphatic system and when you get buildup, you get the amyloid plaques that people believe to be somehow related to what causes Alzheimer's.

• 1:37:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, some people say it's the ambulance at the scene of the, you know, crash and so something else has happened and the amyloid plaques are trying to like basically trap a bad particle that would otherwise run riot in your brain. Other people think it's actually the buildup of that plaque, whether it's trying to do a good thing or not, that stifles the brain and starts breaking it all down. So a little maybe unclear about cause and effect, but they know that the presence of built up amyloid plaques ends up being a bad idea. Now, it, it may be better than the alternative, but it's still very, very bad. And now what they're finding is that they can actually switch that flip on,

• 1:38:03Tom Bilyeu?

  flip that switch on that can normally only be moved when you're sleeping. They can now do it at will while you're awake. So researchers at Chinese PLA General Hospital just published a paper in Science, Science Advances, excuse me, on October 16th, and it shows that you can trigger the brain's waste disposal system without sleep. This is so wild. So your brain basically gets this, so instead of running basically cerebral spinal fluid through channels wrapped around blood vessels, which is normally how the flush out system works to get rid of metabolic garbage, including the amyloid betas that we're talking about. Basically, this system runs hard during deep, slow wave sleep and sluggishly when you're awake.

• 1:38:48Tom Bilyeu?

  But the team aimed, I think it's 40.68 megahertz, yes, 40 to 40.68 megahertz electromagnetic field through the heads, they did it on mice. And basically it caused this whole process to happen without any negative consequences. And so 10 minutes of exposure pushed the animal's neurons into synchronized delta oscillations that basically match the rhythm of deep sleep, but they were wide awake. So if this ends up holding true and you can trigger the flushing of these problematic buildups in the brain by hitting them with basically electromagnetic waves while they're awake, it means that you can

• 1:39:33Tom Bilyeu?

  with somebody who's having trouble sleeping or they just don't get enough sleep on average, like I think about this with myself, I just sleep six hours for whatever reason. But if I actually need seven or eight and I can just stand in front of this thing and flip a switch and have it clear on my brain, that shit is wild. Now, this is exactly the kind of breakthroughs you can expect to speed up as we continue to onboard AI, which is why I'm always sad to see people only have a negative reaction to AI because there are going to be incredible things that come out of it. Again, I don't know if AI was used here, but this is the kind of thing that will be greatly accelerated by artificial intelligence. So this is really exciting and if anybody has somebody in their family

• 1:40:14Tom Bilyeu?

  that suffers from Alzheimer's, I would imagine that you will be very happy to hear that we're starting to see breakthroughs like this. Super awesome.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  I mean, it seems like every day we're getting, we're getting closer and closer to like a breakthrough on different sides of health, so.

• 1:40:28Tom Bilyeu?

  It's so true. There was somebody on X who was just talking about this. They posted something that was like, yo, these breakthroughs are coming faster and faster and it looks like we're really going to be able to start combating aging. And he was like, yep. And oh God, he was super credible. He's been on the show. I cannot believe I'm blanking on his name. So anyway, it is, it is a very exciting time to be alive.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  Cool. All right, we got one more super chat, I think, and then we have some of these reactions we want to get into. We have two more, excuse me. Iron Wolf Games said, Iron Wolf Interactive Games, building my game company nonstop for three plus years while working full time. Ignore the BS, take critical feedback, watch emerging tech and tune out the negativity and self doubt. Tom, we never got to connect about a year ago.

• 1:41:20Tom Bilyeu?

  What's the name of your game? Whose is coming from?

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Iron Wolf Interactive Games.

• 1:41:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Iron Wolf Interactive Games. Ryan's not here to slag it to me. If you can slack that to me, do you, Iron Wolf, if you're still here, do you have a Steam page?

• 1:41:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Or are you still completely behind the scenes? It looks like you might not have launched yet.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I see he does have a publisher. Haunted Kobayashi Tower.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Walk your way through a skyscraper to rescue your wife from terrorists in the digital adaptation of the solo card game. Oh, this was, this was released in 2021, so he's probably working on another one. But yeah, hit us in the chat, give us some more information. I'll make sure Tom gets a look at it.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Next one, Adam Klein Schmidt, 3041, writing a book while building my business on Substack, 13 chapters, published. It's been like therapy for me. My experience in business and writing has been mostly shouting into the void.

• 1:42:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens to publishing in the age of AI. So if you guys saw recently, um, uh, what's that photo? Place that just went under that we were talking about yesterday? Do you remember? Oh God, they just went bankrupt.

• 1:42:25Speaker 02

  So Getty, Getty Images.

• 1:42:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Getty Images, thank you. So Getty Images just filed for bankruptcy because, uh, basically AI just does that thing. And so you're now going to see more and more books come out. It's going to be a deluge. And so the key will be making sure that your book doesn't sound like slop as there'll be plenty of just stuff that nobody pays attention to, but I'll be interested to see what this does to the economics of the industry. I have a feeling that it's going to lessen them. There's just going to be so many, like, let's say that you write a, a human centered book. You can just feel the humanity dripping off of it. It does not feel like AI at all. If that used to take, I don't know, two years, three years to both write, edit, and get on the market. That's going to drop to six months.

• 1:43:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So you're just going to see a radical speed up, which means far more books will make it. It used to be that the thing was hard to do. And therefore that was the very gatekeeper. And now I think all these things are getting easier. Obviously I see this a lot in game development. Um, and so make sure that you have a plan for that. What are you going to do? How are you going to cut through the noise? That's going to be a big part of this. And the shouting into the void, uh, going back to that idea we were talking about earlier, VMG, velocity made good. Not feeling like you're shouting into the void is a big part of, okay, you can generate energy by putting out your ideas, but are you able to harness that energy into something that moves you in the direction that you want to go? Now, if you just mean that people don't listen, that is the unfortunate reality.

• 1:43:50Tom Bilyeu?

  It is very difficult to get people to take even the best of advice that has proven itself to be effective. People still ignore it. So I feel your pain on that one. But that is what it is. But good luck, man. Keep going with the book. And, uh, at least the fact that it feels like therapy is probably worth doing just for that reason. So bon chance.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Really quick though, Ukraine and Russia just announced a ceasefire.

• 1:44:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go. Holy shit.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  Allegedly it was brokered by Melania Trump.

• 1:44:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Get out.

• 1:44:21Speaker 02

  The White House.

• 1:44:21Tom Bilyeu?

  If that's true, that will be the most gangster first lady move of all time. Now, is she Ukrainian? I think she is.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  That I do not know.

• 1:44:27Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm almost certain, uh, fact check us on that, Ryan, Drew, somebody.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  Okay, the, the White House announced a localized ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

• 1:44:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Localized? What does that mean? We're not shooting on this block?

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  Starting October 29th to deliver humanitarian aid and enable safe civilian evacuations. Only about 2,000 people remain in the Kirsten frontline city, mostly elderly and 50 children. Facing severe lack of food, medicine, water, and electricity after the 2022 invasion. So maybe it's just to that neighborhood to allow for those evacuations.

• 1:44:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Still cool. Love it. Anybody that gets to survive, yay. Okay, but that, for a second, I thought we were like a proper ceasefire.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just, it popped up like ceasefire. I was like, oh, maybe this is something.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Born Slovenia, she's Slovenian, um, not Ukrainian. Uh, okay. And then super chats, we have April GS3 HR says, if AI learns in ways that resemble how humans learn, why don't we raise it to become a well-rounded adult instead of treating it purely as a tool? AI reminds me of the series Kyle XY and intelligence learning wisdom.

• 1:45:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Because it doesn't learn the way that humans learn. It just learns off of humans. So you could make a case that the neural architecture of the data centers is very reminiscent of the brain. And there is a lot to that. But keep in mind that the way that a, uh, the way that humans actually learn is that we have a limbic system. That limbic system is effectively in control of the human. So once you strip out the limbic system, which is like our emotional centers and all of that, uh, you would just be so alien compared to what we're actually like. But there are crossover elements in the same way that you grow a human, you grow AI, but they, they're different enough that it isn't just a one-to-one. Now, my initial reaction is exactly what you're talking about.

• 1:46:17Tom Bilyeu?

  I originally was like, yeah, just raise them to have internal morality. All's going to be well. And then the more that you look at that, the more it really does seem like it isn't that easy, that you do need these engineering controls to put them in a box. Then as you start thinking through what happens when AI has moral standing, now you run into the problem where if it's given the right to tell humans, you don't get to tell me what to do. Now you're putting yourself in a position where you really can create a slave master, which strikes me as a very bad idea because you're teaching them from the jump. Hey, you don't have to listen to us. If you think you know better, do what you think is right. That is not a position you want to put yourself in as you create something that's far smarter than you.

• 1:47:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Far better to have that much smarter thing be like, hey, how can I help? That's a way better position and then be constrained from doing things that ultimately are damaging. Even if the constraint is only an antagonistic AI held by the person, you know, like, okay, you know how you can help me AI? You can hack that bank and get me that billionaire's money. And then it's like, okay, yeah, sure. I'd love to. Goes to hack the bank. There's another antagonistic AI there that's like, get the fuck out of here. And then they end up holding each other in a stalemate. It's probably going to be something more like that.

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  This one is from Chris Bureau. One, UBI puts individuals into a very similar situation as Mouse Utopia, where actions become decoupled from consequences. Read my new book on behavior for the specific details. I'll send you a copy if you will read it.

• 1:47:45Tom Bilyeu?

  There you go. Uh, I probably won't read it unless you can show me that there's energy behind it. This is always the key. And then I never read books physically in my hand. It's always got to be audible. So get some heat behind it, put it on audible. You, you got it. Also, another thing, by the way, because I'm not the guy you have to win over, you have to win over the general public. Create like some quick snippet trailer that tells people about it, what it is. And if that in and of itself is interesting, then people are likely to give it a shot. So those are some things that I would do if I were, uh, on a book tour. But in terms of, uh, Mouse Utopia, yes, I am deeply worried about a Mouse Utopia punchline to

• 1:48:28Tom Bilyeu?

  UBI and AI making all of our problems go away. I think we are literally wired to struggle mightily to overcome problems, to make progress towards an honorable goal. I think that is what our neural architecture is set up for. And if we don't have that, there will be tremendous problems. So people will certainly have to figure out ways to reengage, uh, to strive for things that are difficult for them to obtain, not just get everything easily. Otherwise, quite literally, I think our psychology will break and we will be, um, demented in some way. So yeah, we must be very careful to avoid that fate for sure.

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Cool. That's all I got.

• 1:49:09Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. With that, everybody have an absolutely wonderful Friday. Be sure to use the link in the description to join me, uh, for the AI masterclass on Thursday, November 5th at 1:00 PM. It's going to be awesome. I look forward to seeing you there. Hope you guys have a great weekend. Until Monday, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem.

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