The Biggest Crypto Hack in History | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Hey everybody, Tom Bilyeu here. On today’s episode of The Tom Bilyeu Show, we’re diving headfirst into a wild week across the worlds of crypto, investing, and politics—so buckle up, because there’s a lot to unpack. We’re talking about the unprecedented $6.36 billion Binance crypto hack, a breach so big it’s sent shockwaves through the entire industry and is raising some serious questions about security, state-sponsored cybercrime, and the future of digital assets. With North Korean hacking groups in the spotlight and stablecoins getting frozen by the billions, what does this mean for your trust in crypto exchanges—not to mention your investments? But that’s just the start. The conversation also focused on the historic shakeup in the stock market, with big players like Alphabet, Amazon, and Intel taking hits that have wiped out hundreds of billions in market value overnight. We’ll explore whether the relentless AI tech boom is running out of steam, why investors are suddenly demanding real-world discipline, and what a return to fundamentals might mean if the bubble keeps losing air. From there, we’re heading into controversial political territory—the Alaska Democratic ballot scandal that’s igniting fierce debate about election integrity, the legal fallout from undercover investigative journalism, and a feminist think-piece that’s going viral for challenging the legacy of modern feminism. We’ll question what happens when biological realities and cultural beliefs collide, and why sometimes admitting “we got it wrong” might be a necessary step forward. Stick around as we break down these seismic stories—what’s really at stake for our money, our society, and our values—and share what you can do to stay informed, prepared, and ahead of the curve. This is one episode you absolutely don’t want to miss. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Thank you to our Sponsors: 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 Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. 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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:07Speaker 01

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• 1:37Tom Bilyeu?

  The unprecedented crypto hack story is insane. And what it reveals about the crypto industry as a whole is shocking. And wait till you hear who is likely behind this whole thing. What's happening to the stock market right now is wild. And every investor needs to understand exactly what is happening. The new details in the Democrat ballot scandal are worse than people realize. And all of this is likely to backfire on Democrats. Speaking of things that are backfiring, James O'Keefe and Cam Higbee are now facing felony charges for exposing election corruption. And a recent post from a disgruntled feminist is going viral as biology and idiotic cultural

• 2:21Tom Bilyeu?

  beliefs collide with some real fireworks. All of that and more right now on the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. Welcome, everybody, on this all-hallows eve. All right. The unprecedented crypto hack is not going to be fun, man. This one is breaking records, much to anybody, the dismay of anybody in that industry. Once you start realizing that this is yet another indication of something that's pointing towards a country that I think everybody is rightly paranoid about, it gets even worse. But yesterday, an attacker drained Binance hot wallets of 10 on 10 different blockchains.

• 3:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Roughly $6.36 billion were snatched up in a matter of 20 minutes. This is the largest crypto theft ever recorded, more than four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack from back in February of 25. Now, about $3.79 billion of this was on Ethereum. So Ether, poof, vanishing. You've got bad things happening in Bitcoin. 18,270 Bitcoin worth about $1.47 billion. Another $628 million on Tron, 296 million on XRP, just when you guys thought you were getting back on your feet, and 96 million on Solana.

• 3:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, Binance wants everybody to be calm. Stay calm, everybody. Their early investigations are pointing to a compromised laptop belonging to one of their engineers. From there, the attacker reached a service container and started pushing unauthorized withdrawals. Blockchain forensics firm TRM is looking into all of this. Whoever did this got Binance's own signing system to approve their transactions across every chain. Dude, they get you at like the most oblique angles. And they prepped the whole operation at least 36 hours in advance, rehearsing the whole thing on test wallets first to make sure that it was going to work.

• 4:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Tether, Circle, Ripple, and World Liberty Financial froze, thankfully, roughly $2.7 billion in stable coins within hours. But alas, the attacker was racing ahead of them, dumping stable coins to market makers at a 10% discount to convert into Ether and Bitcoin, which is something that nobody's going to be able to freeze. And so, right now, the hacker still holds about $2.4 billion that they've been unable to dump. Now, the reason that Binance is telling everybody to chill, don't freak out, is they say that user funds are safe.

• 5:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Are they? And that they're going to cover every dollar. Maybe that's possible. I'll believe it when I see it. TRM attributes the attack with high confidence to Trade Trader. And for anybody paying attention to these things, that is the same state hacking unit that the Federal Bureau of Investigation blamed for Bybit. Chain Analysis also says, yep, that's with high confidence, almost certainly what happened. And guess who those fingerprints match? They match earlier North Korean heists. So that brings us to North Korea. Is your man, Kim Jong-un, dead? Is he alive? Is it body doubles? Is the sister now the evil supervillain that's behind all of this? Dude, it just gets more and more wild in North Korea.

• 5:51Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is what happens when rogue dictators get nuclear weapons. Nobody can go in and stop them from doing nefarious things. All kinds of memes flying around about the GDP of North Korea just going up by $6.36 billion. So pretty wild. This is pushing more speculation that crypto essentially is going to go to zero. If it is uniquely vulnerable to hacks, then obviously that is not going to be good for confidence for people investing in that system. So do I think it's going to go to zero? No, I do not. However, this is a bad look, and this is certainly something that is going to need to be addressed. And when you talk about not being able to beat the allegations, people are talking more

• 6:35Tom Bilyeu?

  and more about Bitcoin being vulnerable to all of the AI attacks that are going on. At the headline level, there's question marks about whether there are all these AI-related hacks happening to banks right now, and that everybody is on both offense and defense, trying to protect themselves from what seemed to be an increased rate of attacks on financial institutions. So whether that is just more people reporting about it, people being more paranoid about it, or if there actually really are more attacks being brought to you by the power of AI, it's a bit of a question mark right now, but it is very wild times. I am holding my breath every morning for new announcements about some horrific thing that's happening in the industry.

• 7:18Tom Bilyeu?

  But yeah, for me, right now, I'm holding steady. Everybody needs to make up their own decisions. Obviously, this stuff matters a lot. But the hacking stuff actually makes me a lot less concerned than what's happening to the stock market right now. It's completely bananas. And investors obviously are paying attention to this. Investors are really, the like really savvy investors are the ones largely driving this. But right now, almost 60% of the companies in the S&P 500 are down 20% or more from their all-time highs. 84% are down at least 10%. 41% are off by more than 30%. And 17% have been cut in half.

• 8:03Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is not a good time for the upside of the K. The only up phenomenon is just taking an absolute beating. You've got 10 stocks that have delivered 70% of the index's gains since the March 30 low. The other 490 have contributed the rest. Now, we're talking about headline numbers rising and the 300-plus companies sitting in their own private bear markets.

• 8:32Tom Bilyeu?

  What's going to ultimately register for people? Are we going to say, okay, hey, look, we are now just in like deep bear territory? Or are people going to be spinning a narrative that, hey, there's nothing to see here? This week put just a ton of load on the current narrative in investing. You've got Alphabet itself dropping 12%. Their Thursday earnings were their largest, after their Thursday earnings, excuse me, they registered their largest single-day fall on record. They lost $500 billion in a day. Intel fell more than 23% after hours on a weak fourth quarter forecast.

• 9:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Amazon slid 7% overnight after capital spending blew past estimates. That is a huge part of this story, man. These guys are spending so much money pushing the AI infrastructure build out. And for a long time, that brought nothing but enthusiasm from investors. But now, you're getting a totally different response. The NASDAQ 100 futures were down 2% heading into this morning's opening. And still, more than 400 S&P 500 members closed higher on Thursday. But nonetheless, money has left the artificial intelligence names and is going somewhere else. The index has lost 3/10 of a percent.

• 9:58Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, that's basically 2026 in one session.

• 10:04Tom Bilyeu?

  The narrative is it's beginning to wobble, is having an impact on everything. And the question is going to be, is there enough real stability in these businesses and the rest of the index that people are going to flow there and stay there? Or is it going to be people actually bouncing out of the indexes entirely moving? Not entirely, obviously, but beginning to migrate funds into whether it's treasuries or dare I say gold. But what's going to be the long tail reaction to people starting to say, okay, listen, the way that we've been responding historically to the idea that AI is just going to deliver all of these riches, people are starting to scrutinize much more heavily.

• 10:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And we've been seeing these rolling corrections that are beginning to unwind some of the excesses, one stock basically at a time. Now, I've been talking about this for, I don't know, a week or two at this point, that I think it's probably a good idea that the only up AI tech narrative is beginning to lose some steam. I think we want to see that prick in the bubble. I think we want these things to begin unwinding slowly. But some of the just bluest chips, a blue chip names are getting absolutely hammered. And so, understanding what's causing investors to make these massive moves is going to be important for all of us that are in the stock market.

• 11:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Because basically what's happening is investors are looking at the actual financials of the big tech players and they're starting to demand more discipline. It's no longer okay to just take on an unlimited amount of debt because it's for AI. Again, I think this is a good thing. There's a reason Quince sells cashmere for $60 and it isn't the cashmere. It's real 100% Mongolian cashmere. It's the same stuff luxury labels charge a fortune for. Quince just works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So there's no need for a markup and no logo tax. The $60 goes to the actual sweater, not the fancy name on the tag. That's why everything they make runs 50 to 80% less.

• 12:18Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:46Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that the unknown amount of bad debt that's already in the private credit markets has got to be better understood. People have to understand where this is going. They've got to be applying some brakes to the system. And so, applying discipline and getting people back to something that approaches reasonable valuations, I think is a wise move. So even though this obviously isn't great for anybody's holdings, I think that this is a wise thing. We would much rather it begin happening slowly over time to play out over an extended period, rather than to be some sort of massive crash. Allow people to begin rebalancing their portfolios, requiring this kind of discipline and getting

• 15:54Tom Bilyeu?

  people back to something that we're, I don't think we're going to get back to historic baselines, but getting somewhere closer, I think is going to be a lot better. Because you can zoom in on some of the big boys. If you look at Alphabet, which is the parent company behind Google, they reported Wednesday night that their revenue is actually up 25%. So they're what, $127.6 billion? But their net income is down 25%. So these guys are making more money and keeping less of it. The company spent $51.4 billion on CapEx in a single quarter, man. This is blinding. And they burned more cash than it generated for the second straight quarter in a row. These are your cash cows, man, that are no longer proving to be cash cows.

• 16:39Tom Bilyeu?

  And this is a big part of the story for me. Their ad growth is now starting to be questioned. And I think it's getting attacked essentially by AI itself. Now, always wise, if you're running a business, to disrupt yourself. So fair enough, these guys aren't just trying to sit back and pretend that AI isn't going to change things. But if you've got AI slowing their growth on the ad revenue or actually softening it full stop, then the very thing that makes them so strong financially is now itself in question. And it's always going to be the timing mismatch between the transitions.

• 17:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So if ad revenue falls faster, then the revenue from AI actually picks up and you find yourself in a situation where the people or the companies that seem like the absolute bedrock foundation of the entire, I mean, the entire US economy on, from an investing standpoint, and thusly, the biggest bet that the entire globe is making. If all of that was really predicated, everybody's comfort was predicated on the fact that these guys still just have an unimaginable amount of money coming in from the traditional business model. If we're seeing that begin to shake faster than the new business model is bringing in revenue, that's going to put a lot of questions on a lot of things.

• 18:02Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's where, just because the technology is real, just because it's going to make all of our lives better, does not mean that it isn't going to change the underlying fundamentals of the businesses that have been driving all of the gains in the stock market. And that is why, when you look at a stock market that has seven to 10 stocks that are carrying the vast majority of the growth, that is not a good position to be in. You would much rather see it spread out far more evenly across all 500 of the companies. You're never going to get like a totally even split. But we are in historic territory where the gap between the 10 that are performing and everybody else is massive.

• 18:43Tom Bilyeu?

  So that is going to be a big question mark as that core business begins to weaken. So again, Alphabet, 12% decline on Thursday, its worst day, eliminating 500 billion. But that's not just Google and Alphabet that's suffering. Amazon is also drenched in blood. According to their reporting yesterday, web services grew by 39%, but the stock still dropped by 7% overnight because they missed on revenue and earnings. So they managed to hold their 2026 capital spending, but it's at an absolutely eye-watering $220 billion. And they told analysts that 2027 is going to be higher.

• 19:27Tom Bilyeu?

  So if we're already cash flow negative and they're going to be spending more money in the coming years, and if they're having any of the same kind of woes that Alphabet is happening where the core business is softening, EGADs, that's going to be bad. So you combine that with the fact that free cash flow is negative for the second quarter running, and it's not hard to see why investors at this point are bailing, especially when retail and advertising both came in light. And their holiday guidance landed under Wall Street's expectations. And as a reminder, those expectations are already priced in. So you can have a company that's doing great, but if they're not matching the benchmark that Wall Street is setting for them, then you're going to see a decline.

• 20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, what about Intel? America's own company at this point, since you've got Trump actually making investments in Intel, I've made my feelings about that clear. I think it is a terrible idea. They're not doing great either. So they beat on earnings and their data center revenue blew past estimates, but its guidance on fourth quarter revenue went to 15 to 16 billion instead of the expected 17 billion. And as we just said, if you miss expectations, it doesn't matter if you're growing. If you're not growing fast enough, you're still going to get hit. They also cut their margin forecast from forty-four percent to thirty-eight percent. So they're becoming less profitable.

• 20:55Tom Bilyeu?

  They blamed a PC slowdown that they expect to run through mid twenty twenty-seven. But the question is going to be how much people actually buy that? Or is this something tied to a bigger reckoning with the fact that like every historical revolution, based on technological infrastructure or that requires a technological infrastructure build out, you end up getting this timing mismatch and that timing mismatch can cause a massive amount of pain and suffering. Now, they also disclosed a fab plant explosion in Israel that cost three hundred million dollars this quarter. Boy, would I like to know if that has anything to do with sabotage or anything to do with the ongoing war there? If it was just a big coincidence, we'll see.

• 21:39Tom Bilyeu?

  They said that that even rebuilding out that plant, it's not going to generate positive cash flow next year either. So all of that put together, took the stock that's up one hundred and fifty percent for the year. So let's, you know, be clear, these guys aren't struggling when you zoom back out to the year, but they're down more than twenty percent in after hours trading. So not a happy day for these guys. And AI just keeps getting more expensive and now investors are obviously way less charmed by the AI narrative than they have been historically. Now, the bull case has always been that, all right, listen, yes, AI is an extraordinarily

• 22:20Tom Bilyeu?

  expensive capex build out, but the hyperscalers, the guys that are doing all of this crazy AI spending, all of that spending is optional and at any point they can dial it down and they can go back to being cash machines. But the problem is that this week, every one of them is basically saying, psych, just kidding, we're actually going to be deepening our negative cash flows because we've got to keep taking on insane amounts of debt and keep doing all of this build out. We're already planning for it. And when you're doing that, when your fundamental business is struggling, man, that is not going to be met well. Investors, obviously, given these results, don't love it.

• 23:00Tom Bilyeu?

  They're now grading on growth, much less so, and they're focusing now on cash. That at least is a return to something that is fundamental. And so, holding these businesses accountable to actually managing their cash better is going to force discipline on them, which I think is wise. And if that means that the AI industry grows a little bit slower, I would say so be it, man. You've got to be sensible in all of this. America is way too financialized for people to get too far out over their skis. And we've been playing so aggressively in AI, it's just like completely ignoring history

• 23:41Tom Bilyeu?

  saying, hey, dear investors, dear people spending on debt, you guys get way too aggressive and this ends up being a problem and it ends up wiping out a ton of companies. So again, I love seeing a return to discipline here, but it is pretty shocking in terms of the impact that it's having on valuations.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  All right, it's as you bounce around the stock market, the NASDAQ is down, Dow is down, S and P is down. We go to gold, gold is crashing right now, crashing is a little bit generous, is down

• 24:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Generous or aggressive?

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Generous, aggressive, it's more, I'm over talking, over speaking the absurdity of it. It's down two point three percent. Bitcoin is also down four percent over the last week. So it seems hugely, you know, my economics class, it was always when the stock market is down, people are going to gold or they're going to Bitcoin. When Bitcoin is down, people are going back into the stock market. But it seems like the stock market is down, Bitcoin is down, gold is down. Are people just cashing out? Like what's happening or is it just the overall sentiment? Not feeling too excited?

• 24:43Tom Bilyeu?

  When things all get too pumped, eventually people have to revert to some kind of baseline and say, okay, hold on a second, like what are we actually valuing all of this stuff on? And so, we had obviously massive runs earlier in the year on gold. We had years of absurdity in the stock market getting completely detached from reality. The, the thing that we would need to look at to really understand is where are the, where is the capital moving into? And so, is this a flight to safety into bonds? And so, we'll see what happens to interest rates. If interest rates continue to come down, you'll notice we haven't been talking about interest rates going up there in a while. Does seem like we've hit a top.

• 25:28Tom Bilyeu?

  People are returning to treasuries as a, like, okay, it's working as expected. People start reassessing their appetite for risk. They move into something safer. If treasuries are working well, or if people have confidence in treasuries, then you're not going to see people flying into gold. So that would be the question. If we were also seeing rate spike, that would be far more nerve wracking. But if you see people just flowing into that saying, all right, listen, calm the fuck down, we're going to back out a little bit, let these rates get more normalized, I'm going to rebalance my portfolio, I'm going to spread things out a little bit more. And it'll be interesting to see, are there other markets that people are flowing into?

• 26:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's possible, that there's an international move that I haven't seen evidence of yet, but that'll likely all be a part of this, that people are just trying to diversify away from an over concentration in AI, that people are listening to the Ray Dalios of the world who are like, listen, there's only so much of this party left. He called a couple of weeks ago that we probably only have twenty percent left in the AI boom. We may have essentially burned past that. There might be other bumps down the road, something, a big announcement comes out or something that causes people to come back in, but people are returning a bit more to sanity. I think that's a good move.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Nice. And to your point, the bond rates did drop, the ten years under five again, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about it was spiking to its historic high.

• 26:55Tom Bilyeu?

  What that tells you is people think that there's more room, because we have talked many times here about the fact that everybody has massive reason to distrust the US government, the bonds, that if you want to be inflated away, get yourself into anything in USD. But they're saying, listen, we've got more room there than we have in AI. So people are pulling out, they're going into the flight to safety. The fact that that is doing its job is a very good sign. Obviously, the Fed isn't raising rates right now. I think that that makes sense. I think that's very wise. I don't think that them hiking, though they are saying that they'll probably hike in

• 27:36Tom Bilyeu?

  December, I don't think that what is broken in the system right now can be fixed by hiking, especially if we're seeing a cooldown in the pursuit of debt, debt, debt for AI. That was like the one area where I could see the Fed being like, all right, listen, you guys got to chill on that and trying to make that a harder play for people. So if you've already got them backing off of that debt, returning to treasuries, bringing the rates down there, we're in better shape, that will obviously stop more inflation on things like mortgages. So that'll help if people are actually going back into treasuries and we don't have to spend as much to raise the debt.

• 28:19Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, we'll see that, this all feels like the system working in the way that it should. It's not a violent popping of the bubble, but the bubble is clearly losing steam. It's not people panicking and, you know, fleeing. You're getting an orderly transition. So the, the, given how high things went, the best thing that people could hope for would be an orderly transition, which is what we're seeing now. If the bond market was breaking, then I'd be like, oh shit, like now, now where the fuck are people going? That would be the scary part.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  It seems like less of a crash and more of a slow dismantling type thing.

• 28:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's a, it's the air coming out of the bubble. Now, the question becomes, is this a regime change? That would be a little, that's the thing that people really have to pay attention to. Is the way to win something totally new now? Or is the way to win a return to something relatively predictable, which is, okay, I'm going to hedge some of my bets on the stock market by going, putting a meaningful amount of my money into the debt, into treasuries. And by moving into treasuries, now the interest rates come down there, that'll help with housing if nothing else, which is obviously a critical part of what is making people feel like everything is at a reach. So that'll calm people down there. Yeah, so from that perspective, that is what treasuries were meant to do.

• 29:35Tom Bilyeu?

  There for a while, we had such negative sentiment over treasuries that you couldn't, that was working in the opposite direction. The bond vigilantes, as they call them, were just saying, no, no, no, you're going to pay us a bigger real yield. We're no longer going to give you that money at that rate. So, yeah, the fact that we've seemed to have found the top is a good sign.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And I want to jump back over to the Binance hack. Simon Dixon had a good tweet kind of breaking it down and Tom, jump in here if anything inspires you. What, what the Binance hack teaches you? Bitcoin held on an exchange is not Bitcoin you control, it's a Bitcoin IOU. Crypto is not the same as Bitcoin. Many tokens are programmable assets issued or controlled by centralized foundations and companies. Sable coins are not Bitcoin, they can be frozen for good or bad reasons. Large crypto exchanges are not FDIC insured banks, their crypto balances are not protected by FDIC deposit insurance. Binance created its own insurance style emergency fund, SAFU, because it cannot rely on being too big to fail. Banks, on the other hand, can become too big to fail, socializing losses while privatizing gains. Self custody comes with different risks.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Social engineering tricks you into taking an action that compromises your keys, compromises devices, malicious software and insecure seed fairies generation can expose your Bitcoin without realizing it. Wrench attacks introduce another risk, the physical violence or coercion to force you to surrender your keys. Self custody removes counterparty risk, but makes you responsible for managing your own security. AI is accelerating crypto threats across everything, not just exchanges and crypto. You have no choice but to be good at security. It's the world we're moving into and we're never going back. Securing your own keys, money, identity and data is becoming one of the most important skills for surviving the future. To me, I said, I think that kind of highlights some of the fears that people had when they first heard this attack, that the exchanges got hacked, not the blockchain, not crypto,

• 31:20Speaker 02

  not the entire industry, but this exchange, it's similar as if somebody hacked Bank of America, started to empty out bank accounts versus saying they hacked money. Does, but with all this talk about Bitcoin going to zero, Bitcoin being hacked, now with this Binance attack, do you have a different perception on the crypto industry in general? Or do you think this is just another bad, like ramification of AI getting so good that it's exposing all these different industries?

• 31:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, I think it's a question that's open right now as whether this is an AI thing or not. So we'll certainly find that out in the fullness of time. My instinct is it is that AI is just making people so much more profoundly able to gain access to whatever, a local laptop, which sounds like this is how this one started. I don't know if that was social engineering or an actual AI-enabled hack. So we'll definitely need to let the details come out about that. Simon Dixon is both completely right and he's trying to reorient people to the actual nature of what Bitcoin specifically is.

• 32:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But it is also a sort of telling on yourself in that crypto is like this flashback to I banks aren't a thing and I have to bury my money in the backyard. I mean, that that really is what it is. And Simon is trying to rightly, again, I think he's he's so right about this, but he's trying to remind people that this is not necessarily something for the masses. And if this isn't something for the masses, then you're not going to get mass price points. And so right now we're living in a world where what we're seeing in Bitcoin is a lot

• 33:05Tom Bilyeu?

  of mass adoption that happened and people that probably are not emotionally prepared to deal with being responsible for their own money, which is why everybody is trying to put it back in the hands of somebody else, whether that's Binance or Coinbase, whatever. And they want the kind of ease and protection that you get from something like a bank with your normal money. But as he's pointing out, these systems don't exist within that. Now, if Binance really does have something akin to FDIC insurance, that certainly helps. If that insurance ends up covering this entire loss, that would be a big win. But then I'd want to see what happens to those insurance premiums on the backside of this.

• 33:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So yeah, it, listen, having your own keys, being in control of them makes you safer on one hand in that I was not at all tense about Binance being hacked. I was not at all tense about anything that may happen to Coinbase because I don't have my crypto sitting on an exchange. But when you start thinking about like having multi sigs and like it's split up and I couldn't access it by myself if I wanted to, it's like it does have its own risks. And so I have, there's a bunch of like stress and anxiety about managing that money. And part of why I don't have more in crypto is at least partly that. It's also partly, I just don't like to overindex on anything.

• 34:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But the vast majority of humans are not going to embrace crypto until they feel it's as safe in the hands of somebody else as their money is with the bank. And so that reality, though, leaves it vulnerable to these types of attacks. But the industry is fooling itself if they think that the average person is ever going to get to the point where they're as effective or comfortable controlling their money in that form. Like my dad, who listens to the show a lot, Dad, so if you hear this, I'm constantly paranoid that my dad is not tech savvy enough to protect himself and that he's going to fall prey to

• 35:12Tom Bilyeu?

  somebody being like spoofing his bank or spoofing Coinbase or whatever. And he just doesn't realize he's at Coinbase with two S's or he's at Coinbase.com and or dot net or whatever. It just doesn't catch it. And so I have heart palpitations about that. So I can only imagine the people that are looking at this, that know themselves well are just going to be like, I'm not going to touch this. And it only takes a few, you know, friendly old people to just get completely obliterated before people start going, yeah, I'd just rather be with a bank. Especially because they don't understand what it means to have the losses socialized. Or they understand it and they're like, yeah, I want, sorry, guys, you're all going to have to be my insurance plan.

• 35:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's one of those, it's so, it's so important. Let's not focus on the the bad side here. It's so important for companies to innovate and make this stuff more safe in the same way that the global banking system rose up as a way to protect people. Now, unfortunately, the way that we've let the banking system evolve, it protects everybody by hurting everybody. But you need some way to have an authority that you can trust that's going to do the ultra, super ninja way of keeping this stuff safe. Otherwise, it just won't be embraced.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Before we get into the show, here's something worth your time. Every day, animals across the country face abuse, neglect, and cruelty. And every day, the ASPCA shows up. They rescue animals in crisis and provide life-saving medical care. They help animals recover and they give them the second chance they deserve. But they can't do it alone. Every rescue, every medical treatment, every safe place to heal depends on people who choose to help. If you'd like to be part of that work, visit aspc.org/need. Become a monthly donor today and you'll help support these life-saving rescue efforts

• 37:18Speaker 03

  and provide the care, shelter, and love these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Again, that's aspc.org/need.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  All right, I kind of want to pivot. I want to talk about the larger business ecosystem. DoorDash was just agreed to buy Instacart for 17 billion. However, earlier this month, I think it was September when they finally officially did the settlement. This is a tweet from Mayor Mamdani. Just last month, DoorDash couldn't seem to find the money to pay their deliveristas until our administration forced them to give back 131 million in stolen wages and penalties. Apparently, they were miscalculating how they were paying out the DoorDashers. So some DoorDashers were underpaid. That's what he's referring to. This week, they managed to find 17 billion to acquire one of their main competitors. Corporate consolidation means higher prices, harsher exploitation, and greater economic inequality for New Yorkers.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  We stood up to these giants before, but that doesn't, that doesn't stop now. I'm going to ask a couple of different questions. I know this is kind of a big tweet, but first, from the corporate consolidation perspective, it does seem like we're in a corporate grab right now where a lot of companies, instead of innovating, they're just kind of purchasing their next competition. We just seen it with Skydance. We're now seeing it in the delivery space. DoorDash will now be the only place where you can get groceries delivered. So, you know, we kind of starting to see that consolidation in there. Is that something that you think there needs to be intervention or should the markets be able to balance out whether they're too big or not?

• 38:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, I think one of the core things that the government has a responsibility to do is to make sure that people aren't able to get a monopoly. So if this looks like a monopolistic practice, then denying the merger wouldn't break my heart. Now, I haven't looked at it closely enough to understand what the field looks like and all of that. But having competition there, I think, is great. I think we should want that. And I think breaking up the monopolies is one of the smarter things that the government can do. You don't want to get to the point where you cool mergers and acquisitions so much that a lot of these companies just end up going out of business because they couldn't compete effectively and they would have been absorbed by a larger competitor that's got a more efficient business. So it's like you have to be very careful.

• 39:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, I don't know if Instacart was in that kind of position where it's like, we're looking out at our future, maybe we've got three years, but if we don't get acquired, we're going to be in trouble. So you want a very deft hand happening at that level. But corporations cannot be trusted. And so at the end of the day, you've got to put yourself in a position where there is a referee on the field and they're making sure that we're not just watching monopolies gobble up all the little guys, completely eliminating competition and innovation. That's the stagnancy that we should want to avoid. So I would need to look more closely at that to figure out if this is a good play or a bad play. But at a high level, anybody who's skeptical about when you've got two giants merging into one blob and then how are they going to be able to ice everybody else out, especially

• 40:21Tom Bilyeu?

  because this is a network effects game? It's like you've got to have all of those places in your network for people to want to use your service. So being the little guy becomes very hard once there's an established entrenched player. So I certainly get looking at this with a skeptical eye. Now, needless to say, if a corporation is stealing from its people and not paying them what they owe, fuck that company in all capital letters. And if it's Mamdani, that's the one that's finding it, fuck yeah, like go Mamdani. You will not hear any negativity out of me. Now, when I look at some of the other things that he has historically said about this,

• 41:01Tom Bilyeu?

  where it, to me, is very akin to the, we can't have a minimum wage worker working for that amount of money. That's where I start going, okay, this is where the government just should not get involved whatsoever because you end up creating these perverse incentives. The reality is that if somebody's willing to work for the wage that is on offer, then they should be able to work for that wage. I am a big believer that minimum wage causes more problems than it solves. You're much better off if somebody's willing to work for whatever, like ridiculously cheap wage because it fits some need that they have, whether they can't get any other job or they've got no entry level experience and so they need something that gets them on the ladder, then people should absolutely be able to do that.

• 41:45Tom Bilyeu?

  When you don't believe that that person is able to think for themselves or negotiate for themselves, you become nanny state. The government is a parasite. I've been very clear about that. The government wants to grow at all costs. And so we should absolutely not trust them to be making decisions that are in the best interests of the people. They certainly don't understand the economy well enough to be in making those decisions. So that's where I'm like, okay, I've got a messenger who is, if they really have found theft, I'm celebrating that big time. But I know a big thing for him is he just wants to see Dashers or anybody else paid more money. And now you're trying to, now you're not trying, you're putting pressure on a company

• 42:30Tom Bilyeu?

  that you don't understand the inner workings of that company. You don't understand the dynamic between them and the workers. So that kind of thing is where he can end up doing a good thing with the right hand and then a terrible thing with the left hand. So I still look at this with a very skeptical eye.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Understood on that. I want to bring it to the philosophical now, though, because I think this is something that also the government gets a lot of slack for, where when it's time to pay people, when it's time to do infrastructure, when it's time to manage schools. We don't got it. Budgets are tight. We can't make those sacrifices. When it's time to go bomb somebody, when it's time to go do other things, oh yeah, we got thirty billion dollars here, right here.

• 43:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  So where, maybe you can help this from CEO mind, maybe just your, your experience, but it does seem like there's a slush fund for things that are for our personal gain that is always available. And then when it's some stuff that's not as fun, like paying people more money, like doing the infrastructure, the boring projects. All of a sudden, the funds have ran out and, and seems out of it. So is it just us not paying closer attention to the budget or? You know, do companies kind of have that back pocket in case of emergencies fund to go acquire somebody?

• 43:34Tom Bilyeu?

  It's not the, it's not the companies. So the, there's a natural tension between an employer and an employee. Where the employer is incentivized to get the labor as cheaply as they can. And the employee is incentivized to get as much money for the job as they can. Uh, when you empower your workers, that works wonderfully. Uh, to empower your workers, you've got to stop importing cheap labor and you've got to stop sending jobs overseas. And what have we spent the last thirty years doing? Both of those things, sending jobs overseas and importing cheap labor as fast as we can. So both of those things are bad for the American worker. Anybody, whether they're a communist or they're a diehard capitalist.

• 44:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Anybody saying that you need to empower the worker is somebody who is on a message I totally agree with. So we've got to find a way back to actual middle-class workers being able to negotiate a wage. The way that you do that is like what Andrel's doing, bringing manufacturing back here to the US, not sending everything overseas, trying to control our, um, our supply chains, doing as much of that as we can here in the US. All of that stuff is a massive win. Because when you can only hire from the pool of workers that are here, that limitation actually empowers the worker. Now, not to diatribe too much, but the fact that we don't educate our populace in a way, uh, that is, um, I'll say honorable and effective.

• 44:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, you're creating a problem for yourself. Um, so that's where it's like, we should be looking. Like I believe in finding the smartest talent all over the world and bringing them here to the US to make US companies more effective and efficient and creating more jobs and all of that. Uh, but if you're leaning on that more and more because you're under educating your own populace, that, that is a moral crime. So, and I think we are doing exactly that right now. So to me, that's terrible. Now, getting back to your point about, well, there's money for this, but there's not money for that. What the fuck is going on? That's political will. So there's always money for anything that you want to spend it on. You just have to steal from your populace.

• 45:40Tom Bilyeu?

  So anytime you see a deficit, just know that that is the government stealing from the populace. If you guys are fine with it, that makes you the very opposite of me. I'm not okay with that. So every time that we're deficit spending, I've got beef. But when you look at, okay, what is it that we're actually allocating money to is? It's very different when you look at the government versus you look at a corporation. So a corporation. Hey, if you can raise debt, go raise that debt. That's not diluting the world at large because they don't have the ability to print their own money. So by all means, if they want to do deficit spending to take on a big acquisition or something like that, go for it, do your thing.

• 46:20Tom Bilyeu?

  There needs to be tension between the worker and the employee. When either one of them becomes unduly strong, you have a problem. The answer to this is not, um, unions. That is like the dumbest way to try to solve this problem. Because you'll end up just creating a parasite inside the company that ends up creating problems. If you don't believe me, look at the education department where we're spending more money and more money and more money and getting worse and worse results. Because the teachers' union is so strong that you can't fire people, even if they're grossly incompetent, which the entire education department is grossly incompetent. You need to look no further than the rates of people that graduate high school without being able to read uh, at grade level. It's just absolutely startling. So that's where we have to tease those two things out. So, uh, corporations empower the worker.

• 47:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Make sure that the worker is able to negotiate a fair wage. On the government side, stop fucking deficit spending. Um, those would be the two. And then don't do what, um, the DSA is prone to do. Philosophically, they want control. And that philosophical desire for control does not end well for the people in the country, ever, literally ever. And there is a mechanistic reason why it can't and won't ever yield the results that they want it to yield. So from that perspective, my default, uh, reaction to anything that Mom Donnie wants to do is one of looking at it with the jaundiced eye. Because I know where he's trying to end up. He said nakedly where he's trying to end up. Uh, so no mystery there.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Got it. All right. Let's jump over to our super chats.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Tools and skills and hashtag racks for the IT team that I think you'll like. They're made by the guy who helped build the Twitch chat, as in the software. Should have him on to talk about AI stuff.

• 48:07Tom Bilyeu?

  All right. Very interesting. We'll check them out. Thank you. Marusha.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Uh, Marusha Dark again. Thank you for the forty total. Says, if the US called for the West to completely boycott, divest and sanction China with ten thousand percent tariffs plus secondary tariffs until it becomes like Taiwan, what would the consequence be? Would you favor such a policy and why?

• 48:24Tom Bilyeu?

  I almost certainly wouldn't favor such a policy. I think that you're gonna have to use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. So yes, we need to have a long-term plan, a medium-term plan, because if this takes decades, it's way too much pain and suffering will, uh, have to be endured. But going in and figuring out which industries we want to return with haste to the US, I think is very wise. Um, so a blanket tariff is economic warfare and is going to get retaliation. And so now you're going to see the cost of so many things skyrocket because China will retaliate. And we are not currently in a position where we can just onboard all of that stuff.

• 49:06Tom Bilyeu?

  So being strategic about saying, hey, look, these industries matter a lot to us, whether it's car manufacturing or what. But looking at those industries and industry by industry, saying, okay, we're going to, uh, adjust our tariffs industry by industry for a very specific outcome that we're trying to achieve, whether we're trying to protect our farmers, we're trying to protect manufacturing. Whatever it is, all of that makes sense, but doing something blanket just invites retaliation. So yeah, anything at like a super high level does not make a lot of sense. Also, when you say like Taiwan, if you mean compliant, uh, we're certainly not going to be able to do that to China. So I really hope everybody is learning their lesson from Iran.

• 49:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Countries have their own agenda. They have their own sense of pride. And when you come in and you act like you're the big swinging dick and you try to slap people in the face with your, uh, nice weighty inches. They just start doing the same thing back to you. People are going to resist that. It's idiotic maneuvering that we see when countries act like that. So it is far better, and this I'll give love to Xi, it is far better that the, um, that America and China work together, that they move in lockstep, that they have a shared vision of prosperity for both. And they understand, both of them understand that, um, you're not gonna let me flood your market with X. I'm not gonna let you flood my market with Y. They both understand that. Both of them are going to protect themselves.

• 50:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And so if you do it in a way that is sensible and it's high communication and you both understand what the outcomes are that you're driving towards, but you want cooperative trade in the areas where it makes sense. Um, then you can navigate your way to something positive. But a lot of it is gonna be, are you actually building something here in the US? Are you just trying to smash China in the face with a hammer? So I think is the key. And even though one of the biggest antagonists to China publicly is, um, Palmer Lucky at Andrel, he's also one of the people that's just making smart moves where he's like, we're gonna manufacture this stuff here. We're going to make it with things that we have expertise in. So whether it's metal that we know how to refine, whether it's building the technological chips here,

• 51:15Tom Bilyeu?

  building more fab sites here in the US, all of that. Great. Innovate, do your thing. Um, that is a far wiser strategy than just trying to bludgeon people. Make everything expensive and then see what happens on the back of that to make the companies dance because they can no longer afford the stuff that they were buying from China. So promoting innovation, doing things here that incentivize builders to build. There is gonna have to be some blocking or slowing down of China and other places that would otherwise flood us with cheap goods. Uh, but you don't want that to be your only strategy. Like, I'm gonna break this and then watch, Americans, Americans will respond. It's like, yes, but on the back of a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  Uh, the wandering wizard, this one's fun. It's for all of us. So gotta get into the zone for this.

• 52:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  You're dropped into a fantasy MMORPG.

• 52:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  What class are you? What is your primary and secondary stat? Your main hand, your offhand, armor, alignment, weakness, your nemesis? What is your ultimate?

• 52:15Tom Bilyeu?

  This one escalated quickly.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  I'd say let's just clash and then what your weapons are probably. Cause I don't know, are y'all into MMORPGs?

• 52:23Tom Bilyeu?

  So MMORPGs, I'm quite light on. So I wouldn't, um, there are gonna be a lot of those elements that I don't have a ton of firsthand experience with. But what I'll say is I tend to play, uh, whatever class is the closest to crayon eating. So, uh, in Destiny, I was always made fun of for being a crayon eater because I played the Titan. Uh, I'm gonna go for whatever I can do frantically. So I don't need good aim. That's very important for me, uh, at every, even when I was a kid, I was not the guy that had the best aim. Uh, my reaction time maybe isn't as fast as I would like. So yeah, I'm gonna tank it up. Need to be able to absorb a lot of damage, do a lot of damage. That's usually my thing.

• 53:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, yeah, let me just charge forward, melee people to death. Uh, that's, that's usually the way I go.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  This sounds like Overwatch. Is it like classes similar to that? Like assaults and tanks and like the healer?

• 53:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, but Overwatch is like pre-baked. So think more like World of Warcraft.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, like sorcerer. Like, are you a magic type? Do you think you're hitting shit? Do you think you're like inspiring your team, like as a healer?

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Uh, I'll, I'll probably be the attacker, the person with like the sword, the, I'm the knight.

• 53:37Tom Bilyeu?

  DPS, baby. Let's go.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  You don't think you'd want range?

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Um, no, I'll be up close and personal. Cause if I'm, if I'm in a fantasy world, you know, you gotta go super like silver, uh, silver knight and, knight in shining armor, like, you know, big sword.

• 53:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Get it? Okay.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  You know, I'm, I'm gonna lean all the way into it.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 53:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, Ryan, who actually knows?

• 53:55Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go, well, currently I'm in a, in a RPG thing that I'm playing and I'm for the first time doing magics. I'd say I'm a sorcerer. Um, and for those who want to know what my D and D races, I'm usually a giant or a tabaxi.

• 54:08Tom Bilyeu?

  What is a tabaxi?

• 54:09Speaker 04

  It's like a cat.

• 54:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. Brian, are you a furry?

• 54:13Speaker 04

  No, no, not a furry, not a furry.

• 54:16Tom Bilyeu?

  He rolls up in one of those like furry masks.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  I'm not a pilot nor an engineer, so not furry.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  But, uh, yeah, and then weapons. I feel like, um, I'm just doing like classic wand.

• 54:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Shout out to the super chat. Thank you.

• 54:30Tom Bilyeu?

  I know, right?

• 54:30Speaker 02

  We need more of this. Thank you.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  More hypotheticals. Uh, next up, Nate of the South. In my humble opinion, it always is a good time to know God or otherwise have spiritual grounding, know some neighbors, have a few gallons of water and a few days of food and how to get a few places on foot. And that's all free.

• 54:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, what's interesting. So, um, people I think are getting pretty uneasy about all of the governments talking about like, hey, just make sure that you're able to survive a few days. And so there's now starting to be a lot of chatter about, okay, is there really something going on? Like, do they know something that we don't? Whether it's, uh, are we about to be hit by a meteorite? Um, is there threats, whether they're, um, cyber in nature or an escalatory path that people think is going to be born out of Europe or North Korea or Iran? Since there's all kinds of talks about, uh, post midterm escalatory, um, attacks, meaning we start something and then they retaliate all over the region.

• 55:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Um, so again, nothing is being reported as being specific, but I'm not surprised to hear this super chat. Uh, by the way, your advice is all good. It's all true. There's no doubt that all of that stuff is beneficial. And there's no doubt that technology has allowed us to live a more and more separated life. We'll probably get to this when we talk about the, um, the article that was just written from a feminist, basically saying feminism has failed women. Uh, I think that's very true. Religion, I think is, as people have exited out of religion, I think the ability to transmit ideas like, what does it say in the Bible? Be a gem to your husband or a jewel to your husband, something like that. Like that kind of stuff is no longer being reinforced.

• 56:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And I think that, um, when you get out of step with what evolution wants, you start running into problems. And technology has really allowed us to start separating from what evolution wants, which causes psychic distress. Uh, and so that stuff devolves very quickly. So yes, um, the sort of religious vibe, know thy neighbor, have a set of values that unite people, common ground, that kind of stuff. Uh, it's all free and it's good, but is not quite mainstream in the U.S. right now in much of the West.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Uh, Anon Games C.A. This was someone from the, uh, Next Fest last time. Tom, fellow indie dev here. Inspired by your game dev journey. Thanks for the shout out last week. Next Fest was a big boost for us. Deep Frost is out now. Please try and share your thoughts.

• 57:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go, man. Uh, I haven't had a chance to play it yet, though I did check out your page. So I'm super stoked. I hope that you absolutely crush it. I know how hard it is to get where you're at. Uh, so I hope that you're integrating AI so that you can keep building this out bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, we're currently looking at ways that we're already using AI, but I think that there are probably ways that we can more deeply embed it, given that we're Unreal Engine. Uh, and we have more tools coming out from your boy, Tim Sweeney. So we'll see, but I hope you're doing the same.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Uh, Hamana Cortez says, where's the old set?

• 57:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh yeah. So yeah, I didn't say a word about this. Uh, we're traveling right now. So we are at a company retreat, which I don't know how you boys have felt, but this has been a lot of fun.

• 57:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So shout out to Andrew Press. I don't know if he's listening right now, but man, Andrew Press, you absolutely killed the game. Uh, phenomenal, phenomenal job. So that, that man definitely deserves a round of applause. So yeah, we'll be back on normal set on Monday.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Alaska? Um, when I first heard this story, I thought it was like not real. And then I'm like, okay, we're getting way too creative with this election interfering stuff, but.

• 58:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, wait till you hear the end of this story.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll let you take it from there.

• 58:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I wish, I wish this was new. Uh, alas, though, there really is some gnarly stuff shaking down in Alaska. The new details in this Democrat ballot scandal are worse than people realize. We'll certainly get to that by the end and all of this is likely to backfire on Democrats. Boys and girls, stop doing dumb shit. The people do not like all of the shenanigans. It just makes you guys look like a big box of clowns. A full 50% of the names on Alaska's senate race ballot are Dan Sullivan.

• 58:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Let that one sink in. It's exactly how the Democrats wanted it. Now, one is the Republican, uh, incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan, who's running for a third term against Democrat Mary Peltola in a toss-up race that could decide senate control if it does. And the, if Mary Peltola wins and it's a close race and it ends up being the one that decides senate control, the Republicans are gonna go scorched earth. There are going to be all kinds of subpoenas, which are already coming out, but they're gonna go full on lawfare with this one. And unfortunately, it really does look like there's a smoking gun. So this is gonna be one that's hard to talk people down from.

• 59:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, now the other Daniel Sullivan that's on the ballot is Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. He's a retired elementary school, uh, teacher from Petersburg, which is a small town. He filed, uh, back in May, which was just two days before the deadline. Now, the rumor is, according to the New York Times, which again, the fact, or not again, the fact that this is being reported by the New York Times, who's not exactly pro Republicans, definitely tells you something about the veracity of the claims that are being made here, that this one is too difficult to ignore. And what they're saying is that they went around, they, the Democrats, went around all over Alaska

• 1:00:18Tom Bilyeu?

  looking for somebody that would be, that had the same name, Dan Sullivan, and would be willing to run for office. And allegedly, this Dan Sullivan, Jr. said that he, uh, hated Trump and he would be excited to see, um, the Democrat win in the state. And so, yeah, cool. Sign me up, even though I have no interest in politics whatsoever. So on June 15, Alaska's election director, uh, threw him off the ballot, ruling that his candidacy, candidacy wasn't in good faith. He then sued and on June 26, a state judge said that the, the division could redesign the ballot,

• 1:01:01Tom Bilyeu?

  but couldn't remove a legally qualified candidate over his presumed motives. Three days later, the Alaska Supreme Court agreed in a one paragraph order. 14 Republican attorneys general had filed briefs on the state's side. They all lost. In the August primary, Ptolo took 49.5%, Senator Sullivan took 41.4%. The other Sullivan took 2.5%. In a race that both sides expect to come down to a point or two, that's basically the deciding factor. So that got everybody up in arms, digging into this, doing investigations. And on October 22, the Justice Department sued to block certification of the Ptolo win,

• 1:01:46Tom Bilyeu?

  pending an investigation into whether votes for Daniel J. were meant for Dan S. Uh, and that's according to Trump. So, uh, or sorry, according to Trump, he said, I'm the one that said to do it. Election law scholars say the statute doesn't allow it. Then on October 28, the New York Times reported, uh, the thing Republicans have been alleging for months, citing 12 sources, text messages and documents prepared for the potential lawsuit. The Times says Ptolo's campaign staff, her lawyers, they, and aides, they all got together at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

• 1:02:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, and what they were, they sparked up what they're calling the ballot composition project. A summer 2025 effort to find Alaskans named Dan Sullivan and get them to run. Now, a Midwestern operative pitched recruits over beers under a fake name. Ptolo's former campaign manager says that Ptolo was absolutely aware of what was going on, even if she wasn't directly involved. Ptolo says she knew nothing. Her campaign, though, is basically trying to deny any involvement in this, but there's some pretty damning evidence in the New York Times article. Governor, uh, Dunlevy ordered a state investigation the same day.

• 1:03:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Federal prosecutors have in fact issued subpoenas, but nearly 58,000 Alaskans have already voted. So this is only gonna get weirder. Now, much to my dismay, when you start digging into this, what you realize is this is a very old playbook that is very much used on both sides. In 2020, former Florida State Senator Frank Artiles paid an auto parts dealer named Alex Rodriguez about $45,000 to run as an independent against Democrat incumbent Jose Javier Rodriguez. The decoy allegedly polled 6,382 votes and the Democrat lost by 32.

• 1:03:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So Artiles was convinced in 2024 and got sixty or was convicted and got twenty, uh, sorry, sixty days back in 2024. The decoy Kennedy itself was legal, though. That's the wild part. It's the payments that weren't. So it's actually legal to put decoys on the ballot. So buckle up because this is something, unfortunately, that these, these guys, meaning politicians, have been doing for a long time. And so any Republican that's beating their chest and stomping their feet and acting like this isn't something that their side has done before is absolutely wild. It's fake. It's happened more times than the times that we've gone over.

• 1:04:38Tom Bilyeu?

  And so this is unfortunately a longstanding practice of doing whatever you can to stymie the other side. So the bad news is this shit works. That's the part that is the most just absolutely obnoxious. All of these political plays that people do, whether it's the attack ads, whether it's money in politics, whether it's just outright trying to put a decoy on the ballot so that you can split the vote, it works. And so people keep doing it. Absolutely maddening to see what is becoming of our politics. Now, how much of this is the current populism is making all of this possible? And how much of it is just we're seeing more of it because we actually have the high

• 1:05:22Tom Bilyeu?

  volume and velocity of information that is made available to us by social media? That is question marks. This kind of thing definitely has been going on. So whether or not it's speeding up, getting worse, that there's a lot more of it, or it's just more visible, I don't know. But there are consequences to either one of those. If it's speeding up, obviously feeds into my belief that populism is itself a scourge. It is a cancer on the mind of humanity. And if it's just that we're seeing a lot more of it, it's causing a rapid loss of trust in institutions, which has been going apace since even before COVID. But COVID was just an absolute kill shot to people having any faith in their government.

• 1:06:06Tom Bilyeu?

  And as we have less faith, I think I worry that people are going to get more brazen because it's like, well, nobody believes in this anyway. So let's just do the thing that actually gets us the result that we want. Because of course, this is an existential threat. When something is an existential threat, that you have every right to do whatever it takes, and that's where everybody's at. This is, everything's an existential threat. As a reminder, if you, in your soul, hunger for a one-party system, you are the problem. You shouldn't want your side to be the only person that has any chance of winning. You actively shouldn't want that. If you want that, then you're moving towards authoritarianism. Now, if your pushback is, well, we've got to do this to stop authoritarianism, that's fucking retarded.

• 1:06:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's like, um, beating someone to death to stop them from doing something dangerous. It's like, what? What? What are you actually talking about? What are you actually trying to stop from happening? If you're trying to stop the institutions from being so corrupt that nobody can actually trust them, by becoming so corrupt that nobody can trust you, it's nonsensical. The reason that we have a dual-party system is very much so that they hold each other in dynamic tension. The, these are, the left and the right are representative of evolutionary traits. Evolution has realized that you need the masculine and feminine. Evolution has realized that you need people that lean towards compassion and those that lean towards personal responsibility. Evolution has realized that if you want a society to be able to scale, you need both

• 1:07:36Tom Bilyeu?

  of those impulses because either one, left to their own devices, goes inextricably towards pathology. They become tyrannical. In slightly different flavors, sure, but they become tyrannical nonetheless. And so anytime that you're like, I know best, my team is right, and therefore I want them to have all the power in the world, that is the problem. Everybody always thinks, no, no, no, but this time is different. This time we really have to do it. This time we have to go all the way. We've got to stop those guys. We've got to get one-party rule. It's fucking obnoxious. It is so stupid. It is so self-defeating. It will create so many problems. And yet, here we find ourselves racing towards where each party wants to make sure that the other party just never has power again.

• 1:08:20Tom Bilyeu?

  It's absolutely insane.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was a report, I'm trying to find it, that said, Trump already has a, um, a appeal process in place for Alaska. They're just waiting to see what the results are to see if it's actually going to, if they're actually going to file it or not.

• 1:08:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, and fair enough. Like, here's the thing, so you have to. If, if it is true, and given that it's the New York Times reporting on this, uh, I have no reason to believe that this isn't going to prove out to be roughly something like what is being reported now, then yes, you actually have them dead to rights. This is not like some light little thing. Uh, it, it will come down to though, not whether they put a decoy on the ballot, it will come down to, did they lie about it? Did they lie to federal investigators? Have they perjured themselves essentially? Because, again, as much as I hate that this is true, putting on a fake candidate isn't illegal. So there you have it. So we'll find out.

• 1:09:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, my thing is always, if you don't have them dead to rights, don't pursue it. But if you have them dead to rights, and of course you have to.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Tom Bilyeu?

  So we'll see. This is just so idiotic.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  It, it's definitely wild. And just a familiar reminder, I really don't think we care about our, like, election integrity as much as we claim we do. Because like, the fact that this is not illegal just is like, come on, like, but.

• 1:09:41Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't, we don't require ID to vote, Drew. And I know, I'm sure, among the three of us, that, that isn't even agreed upon. But the fact that we don't require people to prove that they're legally allowed to vote is the smoking gun to me. That is the craziest shit in the universe. I really can't believe it. Oh, by the way, we don't have it, but we should talk about the Hassan suing, uh, Scott Jennings at some point.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely want to get there. Um, speaking of election fraud, we got to talk about the James O'Keefe thing, um, before we just finished that beat. But yes, I think that's going to be interesting, a lawsuit and how far they go with that. Because he's using the guys that did the demanding voting machine.

• 1:10:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, he's not playing around.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Fox News cut that check. So if he could get Fox News to cut a check, like.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Did y'all see the thing that Jennings cut up too, for it? Because it was bad.

• 1:10:25Tom Bilyeu?

  He didn't cut it, that's the problem. So it, that'll be, I think, a big part of his defense. Anyway, I know we've got another beat before we get onto that, but, but, uh, stay tuned, everybody. We're going to be talking about the, uh, Hassan Piker and, um, uh, Scott Jennings lawsuit. Seventy-two million dollar reward being sought. So, yeah, it ain't small. All right, James O'Keefe, here he is, boys and girls. This one is wild. Uh, okay, if you don't know what's happening, so James O'Keefe is basically, um, he dressed up as a Muslim man. I think, I don't know if he or Cam Higbee were wearing the burka, but you're about to see it. But these guys went in and, uh, used a fake name to show that basically our elections

• 1:11:08Tom Bilyeu?

  have no integrity whatsoever, that people are able to come in, vote under somebody else's name, they're able to, um, vouch for somebody else. And so without proving who you are, you can vouch for somebody else as well. And so given that reality, if anybody thinks that, uh, the vote is just exactly, only the right people are voting, they're out of their minds. But now Minnesota's pressing felony charges against him for doing that, even though they didn't vote. They just wanted to show that they could get to the point where they could vote. Uh, so, all right, let's hear it from our man, James O'Keefe himself.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  Minnesota has just charged both myself and fellow journalist Cam Higbee with two felony counts in retaliation for our bombshell investigative report on voter vouching laws that we did August 11th. We stand by our reporting. This is an attempt to criminalize investigative journalism. The charges are an attempt to distract from what we exposed as insecure elections in Minnesota. Now, this case has become a landmark First Amendment case where everyone's right to speak, truth to power, has just been put on the line. This from today's press conference featuring the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minnesota.

• 1:12:21Speaker 06

  Today, we are charging two individuals, James O'Keefe and Cameron Higbee, with felony counts of unlawful voting and identity theft.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Mary Moriarty, the Hennepin County attorney, even says that we could do jail time for our investigative reporting.

• 1:12:39Speaker 06

  They could do some local jail time.

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  We've received a charging document that lists two felony counts. Count one, identity theft, knowingly misrepresenting identity in applying for a voting ballot. And count two, unlawful voting, knowingly misrepresenting our identity in applying for a voting ballot. Two counts with the exact same justification beneath each count. In the report we did, we clearly stop and walk away before any voting ballot is even touched. Thank you so much, ma'am. Thank you. We go get Mohammed, we come back. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty even admits that my and Higbee's intent was to act as reporters.

• 1:13:17Speaker 06

  A group of people were attempting to cast doubt on the state's vouching system. I think it's pretty clear they did not intend to vote.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  Hennepin County Attorney Moriarty even says there is no such thing as undercover journalism when looking into election loopholes.

• 1:13:35Speaker 06

  If you identify as a journalist, there is no such thing as undercover investigation in the polling place. You have to identify yourself as a journalist in the polling place, which they did not.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  Wrong as a matter of constitutional law. The First Amendment allows reporters to show up on Election Day and ask questions in polling booths, but don't take my word for it. Listen to former Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, no friend of mine, talking about myself on an almost identical investigation we did in Washington, DC in 2012. Was offered Holder's DC primary ballot to vote in that election.

• 1:14:12Speaker 07

  Do you have an Eric Holder? But I think what I drew from that video was that that guy was very careful not to say he was Eric Holder, not to actually get a ballot. He didn't do the kinds of things that would have subjected him to criminal.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I'm not. The Minnesota prosecutor then says.

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  There's a difference between intent to vote and intent to apply for a ballot. The application of a voting ballot in and of itself is a multi-step process. I can't anticipate what their defense is. I'm sure we'll hear from them.

• 1:14:43Speaker 05

  Our defense is the shield of the First Amendment to hold government accountable to the people. We didn't apply for a ballot. We were there talking to election clerks, posing hypotheticals and getting answers so that Americans could know what was happening in the elections. Many people.

• 1:14:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's what drives me nuts about this. I think about this a lot as an entrepreneur. You should hunger for disconfirming evidence. If your elections aren't secure, you should want to know. That that is, that ought to be job number one. Your job ought to be to make sure that the right person is elected, that it represents the will of the people. And if there is something that proves that you have a leak in that system, then you should want to shore it up. If you don't want that, then you were trying to subvert the will of the people. That kind of thing is just blatantly obvious. And if you're so incompetent or so fearful of somebody seeing your incompetence that you're willing to hide it,

• 1:15:39Tom Bilyeu?

  hide it behind lawfare in this case, then that that is a level of gross incompetence and malevolence that absolutely cannot be tolerated in politics. But I have a feeling we're going to see it everywhere, that we have seen it, will continue to see it everywhere, is a better way to say it. And journalists are inevitably going to expose something on your own side that you hate. And if in that moment you say, okay, listen, we need to find this stuff out. We need to know what's really going on. Cool, I'm on your side, even if technically we wouldn't vote the same. If you're, if you're philosophically aligned with me from a voting perspective and still want the truth hidden because you think you'd be able to use it to your advantage, like that, that is, you are at that point, no friend of mine.

• 1:16:24Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got to protect the institutions. You've got to uphold that first and foremost to make sure that the actual democracy can work the way that it's supposed to work. And that's something that we have just completely abandoned. Everybody only cares if it's their side.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  I always thought that this story was hilarious because when we first covered it, I was like, you're recording yourself committing the crime that you say that other people are committing. And because you got a, like, because you did, you said, see, it's this easy. Let me dress up and go show you how easy it is to commit this crime. I would compare it to like if I was, there's the no chase policy in malls, right? So I would compare if I were to go to like a Foot Locker, I put on some new sneakers and then I run out the store. And then before I leave the mall, I'm like, see, it's that easy to steal something. And then I put the shoes back into the Foot Locker and I leave. I don't think they're going to say, oh, okay, you got, you gave me the shoes back. So technically you think it's like, you went through the process, you went to the finish line. And then right before you stepped over, he was like, oh, it's like, no, I'm a journalist now. I'm not really doing it. So I, I think that yes, there is a way to hold them accountable.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  And we're talking about election and we're talking about ethics. I can have that conversation. But James O'Keefe saying like, I'm a, this is my free speech and you're coming after me. Like, you knew what you were doing, you knew what you were pandering to. And now that you got your, your hand slapped, now all of a sudden it's about America's unconstitutional, all these other things. So I feel like you're, you're being the bad guy. And then when you get held to be the bad guy, you're then crying victim. And it's like, you can't, was it, you can't throw a rock and hide your hand. Like, so either you're going to say, you recorded yourself committing a crime and then you're mad that you now have some ramifications about that crime. Now, should he go to jail? No. Should he be in prison for 30 years? No, that's stupid. But my thing is, don't say like, it's this easy to commit federal crime, everybody submit to YouTube and then get mad that people are saying you almost, you tried to attempt to commit a federal crime.

• 1:18:09Speaker 04

  And on top of that, I feel like, and I don't know this specific example, so I'm talking to this broader push on journalism. A lot of times what happens is these people will continue to push until they've actually broken whatever thing they're trying to break, right? So it's like the system is there to prevent it, but they will just keep being obnoxious, keep breaking things. I think of, what's her face? She's mostly plastic surgery at this point. And she had a show, but when she was in college, which got her put on the map, was, basically she went into this room and was like, oh, I want to make a terrorist group that sends money to another country, was their pitch. And they put it behind this thing of, oh, no, no, it's a group to help the victims. We're sending money over there. And then she would keep pushing until it would like, where can I break it?

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  And so that's what a lot of these hidden camera people do.

• 1:18:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I'll address that comment, Drew, in a second, but let me ask a calibrating question. So are you guys, when you look at this story, you're more bothered by this guy acting like a clown and then being surprised that he got slapped on the wrist than you are the fact that it's that easy to go and vote without being that actual person?

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  There should definitely be changes to our voting system. There should definitely be things that we need to visit, like philosophically as a country, we need to look at voting in a way different way than which we look at it now. So I'm completely okay with election reform. We had a whole conversation on the five things we want to do to make sure elections are secure.

• 1:19:36Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'm saying in this particular story, which of these do you find more distressing? Guy acts like clown and is shocked to be slapped on the wrist? Or whoa, it's really that easy to commit election fraud?

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  Um, I feel like you're asking me, is the crime more worse than the ability to commit the crime?

• 1:19:56Tom Bilyeu?

  No, what in?

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  That's what you're saying, you're saying in this.

• 1:19:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so that's how you read it.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  That's how I read it.

• 1:20:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Guy commits actual crime and that.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Or so am I, am I mad at the landscape for which it's that easy to commit a crime? Or am I mad at the person that recorded himself committing a crime? That, that, that's what I see when I see this story.

• 1:20:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Cool, okay, so I'll let your word stand and I'll give my take on this. So the level of absurdity that I think it is for somebody to be more angry at somebody pointing out an absolute catastrophic flaw upon which our, a substantive part of our democracy hinges, to be, to go, ah, but by the letter of the law, that was actually illegal. And therefore I can't even see beyond that. I just see the guy committing the crime, as you said. So the words you said were, am I more worried about the fact that he revealed that a crime could be committed or that he committed the crime?

• 1:20:56Tom Bilyeu?

  That to me is such a shocking way of assessing what we just watched. What we just watched is a person not commit a crime because he doesn't cast the vote. And in not casting the vote, he has highlighted though, how easy it is to walk up to that line.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  But even as I read it, he's getting identity theft charges, which with the intention of committing about like.

• 1:21:20Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's why he played the clip from the DA, or whoever that guy was, where he is asking, right now, James O'Keefe is asking us to believe that he played this game exactly the way that he played it prior. And before, they noted that he was very careful not to do the illegal thing. So I'm assuming at this point that James O'Keefe is showing that you're going to find the same thing as you pursue me legally, that I actually didn't do an illegal thing.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Right up to the line of the legal thing.

• 1:21:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I went up to the line, I know exactly how to handle this, I've done this before. And what I'm trying to show people is without even needing to break the law, you can see how easy it would be to break the law. And so on that, I'm like, let, let's say for instance, that the story was, man smuggles real gun through airport security to show how easy it is to smuggle a gun through airport security. Now I would go, that guy is, that is so high risk, I cannot believe that he would do that. But I would then immediately go on to, the real story here is the fact that you can get through fucking airport security with a gun. So I get it, people want to be, they want to talk about the theatrics, but it reveals something that is far more terrifying.

• 1:22:30Tom Bilyeu?

  To me, there are two parts of this story that are so big and so important. The fact that anybody is worried about whether James O'Keefe is a clown or did some minor violation going in is insane to me. The only thing to pay attention to is he can walk the fuck in without showing who he is. Not only vote as we, I don't know if we need to, but if you play this on, he's then able to vouch for the person in a burka that you can't see who the fuck they are and say, no, no, no, this really is XYZ person. They're like, okay, and they've got to let him vote. That shit is insane. You cannot have a system, a system with that leak is, is a non-functioning system.

• 1:23:14Tom Bilyeu?

  That is like to me, somebody showing that they can walk into a bank, access my account, get my money without having to show any ID. I'd be like, what the fuck is going on? This is so outlandish. And so I'm watching that and then I'm watching more political lawfare. I've made no bones about pointing out that the Trump administration is actively engaging in lawfare. So this is not like, oh, this is Democrats uniquely pursue lawfare. This, this is a state of emergency in politics and we have allowed this shit to happen. And people are actually going to cover this like James O'Keefe is the fucking problem. So the fact that these guys are trying to stop journalists by saying, whoa, that journalist went a little too far.

• 1:23:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Instead of being like, holy shit, okay, listen, James O'Keefe went too far. We are going to look at that because like I was getting chastised in chat on Wednesday. Hey, Tom, there's got to be law and order. Fine, if you want to say, listen, we're going to look at that because you, you just can't let this run riot. However, despite the fact that that will have its ongoing investigation, the real thing I want to talk about today is the fact that he was able to get this far. And that is a much bigger problem than the fact that this journalist did that. If that's how that woman was responding, I don't know if she's a DA or where the fuck she is, but. If that's how she was responding, if that's what people out in the general public were saying, I'd be like, alright, cool. Law and order, you guys maybe go harder in the paint on that than I do, but fine.

• 1:24:41Tom Bilyeu?

  If you want to see him go through whatever process, he becomes a martyr, great. As long as the real fucking story that everybody's talking about is our system is fucking broken. And the people that are running the system are corrupt lunatics that, that are just absolutely convinced that they are so right that like John Kerry, who actually said on camera, uh, the first amendment is, uh, a thing that has to be gotten around. That's not the exact quote, but that is so directionally correct. And what, like, the very thing is, the first amendment is going to be used to point out you're doing something stupid.

• 1:25:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yep, it's that such is the nature of the first amendment. I don't need to know who you are. I just know you're not going to do everything perfect. And the first amendment allows people to come in and say, you're a dumbass. Great. Don't, I get it, when it's aimed at you, it's not going to be fun. But when that happens to go, basically, uh, she's not saying those words, but she is trying to use lawfare to stop people from doing this. We also had the, the quote unquote, Stop Nick Shirley Act in California.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  I think that's crazy and I don't think that this is the same. Cause I think there's Nick Shirley knocking on the door, asking questions. And then they make a law against you allowed to knock on the door and ask questions. Okay, that's egregious. I get that, like, I don't have, I have no beef. The Stop Nick Shirley Act is stupid and I could say that.

• 1:26:09Tom Bilyeu?

  To me, it's born of the same.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Both sides thing.

• 1:26:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Like the same impulse to stop people from uncovering a problem. Now, when you're trying to stop somebody from uncovering a problem, either you want that problem to happen and you are my enemy, or you have such a distorted moral compass that you can't be trusted. Either of those, we're, we're in.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  I don't think those are the only two options though.

• 1:26:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Give me another one.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  I think that there is also the politicization and controlling of the narrative to create issues where the issues do not arise. I think we have way more beef with gerrymandering than we do with voter fraud. So I would much rather us ban gerrymandering before we even talk about voter ID. I think, but again, every time I bring up how elections should be run, it should be a day off, you should have to, you should have multiple days of vote. Like, there's all these other things that it can make it voting as easily as possible. But if you think of what we've been doing for the last hundred years, we don't want to make voting as easy as possible. We want to take votes away from people. We wanted to make, bringing more, um, obstacles and loopholes to the ultimate point of that way, people who have power can keep their power in there. They're not getting voted out.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  So I think that that's where the tension lies is that the person that's sitting in power is like, I can change it, but then now, now my job is at risk. It's going to be harder for me to now stay where I am. So let me just turn a blind eye to it. Just like the Alaska thing, like that was grimy, that was dirty, that was nasty. It's not illegal, but like, just be a better politician and you won't have to find somebody with the same name to try to edge out your win.

• 1:27:37Tom Bilyeu?

  I agree with all of that. Then I say, there's an underlying rot that if we go, I don't want to talk about the underlying rot because there are other things like gerrymandering that we should be talking about. I'm like, but gerrymandering is born of the same underlying rot, which is I want my team to win at all costs. So I think you've got to go straight to what is causing this problem. Drag it out into the light and have a zero tolerance policy. All the politics is downstream from culture. If we as the culture don't start going, no, hard pass. Like him, whatever minor infraction he may have done is irrelevant to the fact that what he just displayed is that we have an election integrity problem and it has to be addressed. And right now, our politicians are refusing to address it.

• 1:28:22Tom Bilyeu?

  And that it's become a team thing. That one side is like, uh, no, we're not going to do any of that because we could disenfranchise somebody. And then other people, um, just my way or the highway. So this has got to be something where everybody goes, okay, hold on a second. State out loud like what your goal is. And if you want secure elections, awesome. Now let's map out exactly how we get to secure elections. Because where it stops is you're, you're disenfranchising black voters, right? That was like the whole fucking drumbeat about no, uh, ID. And it's like.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Historically, back in the sixties, it's a, it's a valid excuse for an old problem.

• 1:29:02Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'm saying.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  It's no longer a problem right now in 2026.

• 1:29:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Word. And like, even if that were the thing, it, you can't stop the conversation there. You've got to go, so we're putting forward this idea. But there's got to be something that says, this is how we secure the election. But we don't do that. We eject out of these emotional appeals and that's where it's absolutely maddening.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  And that's the one credit I give to RFK before, I don't even know what happened to him currently. But his biggest pitch was just make ID free, like federally, and then require it. And that, that would flip the switch. That would flip the switch tomorrow. Everybody's happy, there's no disenfranchised.

• 1:29:35Tom Bilyeu?

  It's like one, one Moab bomb and you just paid for everybody's idea.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's like $400 million. It's, it's the cost of gas to go fill up that tank that we're about to bomb Iran with. Like, it's not a big idea, a big bill on the budget, but it's just to your point, we don't get to the solution part, we get to the outrage part and stop.

• 1:29:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. Yeah. It's so brutal.

• 1:29:56Speaker 04

  Uh, I found the name I was looking for, Laura Lumer, which the reason that's important, worked at Project Veritas under Keith before Keith left in 2023.

• 1:30:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  So that was the name I was looking for. But that's what Project Veritas and Keith are so known for is these sting operations that are just ridiculous, they're not true journalism. And they are just trying to do things that the system doesn't normally enable, but they just keep pushing and then we'll spin it a certain way through edits. If you watch their stuff, which again, Keith's not at Veritas anymore. So who knows what's happening there now, but.

• 1:30:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I have a different take on O'Keefe. I think he's theatrical and over the top and probably needlessly inflammatory. But in the age of social media, that is a way to get eyeballs. That one, I'll, um, I won't stop at the unnecessarily inflammatory take of him showing up dressed as a Muslim. Obviously, we did not have to go that far. Uh, so that part is, um, theatricality for the sake of getting clicks. But what he's pointing out is so important.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Uh, okay. Um, you were talking about Hassan, brought something up to talk about Jennings. I'm gonna try to scour Twitter to get it. But can you set it up for us as I'm looking at?

• 1:31:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so here it goes. You've got Hassan Piker, the king of talking shit on everybody, is now suing, um, a CNN reporter for on-air comments that he made that he's saying defamed, uh, him, Hassan Piker. Uh, the, right now, the fee and it's Scott Jennings is the reporter's name. The damages that he's seeking is like $72.4 million or something like that. It's definitely over $72 million. Um, and yeah, it looks like the lawsuit will likely move forward. Um, we'll see. So I'm not expecting it to get dismissed, but do we have the clip of what he's saying? Uh, so that we can hear.

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  I'm looking at it. I got a Destiny response and now I'm seeing news clips of people saying it. Um, Marusha in the clip said Asmin Gold just did a clip drop of all the things Hassan said incorrectly about people to say that there is.

• 1:32:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, this, this to me is like, it, let's say that Hassan wins this. The odds of him getting sued go up dramatically because he talks shit endlessly. So yeah, it will be a very unexpected, 72.5 million is the defamation suit. Uh, I don't think this is going to go well for Hassan on a long enough timeline, but he's chosen to go down this road, so here it is. All right, let's at least hear what our man.

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  You have it, I think this is it.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  Well, I will say, so the one we're about to watch is the one that Jennings and the team cut down. And what they accuse Hassan of.

• 1:32:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you sure that Jennings cut it himself? Cause there was a clip, like a mashup that had been going around. And one of the potential, and I don't know, maybe he did his own cut. But one of the potential arguments is going to be that, look, this was a clip that was making the rounds. I played it because when it comes to defamation, it comes down to, did you knowingly do something that you knew was false? And so if he saw this clip mashup and interpreted it wrongly, but interpreted it sincerely, then they're never going to be able to prove that it's defamation. So, so that's a big part of it. Well, we need to play the clip though.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  Well, I'm just giving the context that this is the cut down one that Clippers, Jennings, whoever the hell it was, doesn't really matter because Jennings is getting more accused for what he says about the clip.

• 1:33:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. Okay, so here it goes.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  On top of these candidates, in their own words, their surrogates are just as bad. Even worse, actually. We continue today, our exploration of the radical socialist streamer Hassan Piker. Now he's Abdul El Sayed's best friend and he campaigns for him all the time. And African Americans out there, within the sound of my voice, need to listen up and you must listen carefully. This is who socialists like Abdul El Sayed choose to keep for company. Just listen to this, Hassan Piker in cut eight.

• 1:34:01Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't give a [bleep] what black people care about. Aw, black people care about this, black people care about that. Like, shut the [bleep] up. That's not how politics works. Oh, well, Hassan, how dare you? Like it or not, black people care about this issue. It's like, it's such a [bleep] stupid stance. Any other black folk want to engage in radical activist language in this [bleep] chat? Suck my [bleep].

• 1:34:23Speaker 05

  Yes, dude, it's because I'm racist. That's why. It's because I'm racist, dude. Go back to a better time when lynchings were happening. This is what I like as a black man. Are you always doing too much with black people? Leave them alone. I want to go back to lynching. Like, I get it, but relax, man. Shut the up, okay? You got me, okay? You got me, because I'm a racist person.

• 1:34:45Speaker 05

  You just heard campaigns all the time for Abdul El Sayed in Michigan. He campaigns for other Democrats around the country. Every black voter in this country needs to listen to this. And if you look at these Democratic primaries, black voters have been voting against the socialists, only to be overruled in many cases by young, privileged, white commies. Might these black voters find a home in the Republican Party this fall? Well, if Democratic campaigns are adopting the Piker Plan of returning our country to lynchings, that just might happen. Did you ever notice, by the way, how violent these people are? You have Jewish Americans say they're feeling constantly threatened by El Sayed supporters.

• 1:35:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so, yeah, there's a lot of different elements of this that have to be teased out. So, one is, as somebody who's on air and plays clips and responds to them, one of the things that we certainly try to do here, though I'm sure at some point there'll be some clip, or I don't have sufficient amount of context, but, uh, go find the original clip, zoom out, see what was going on, understand what the context is. Uh, most of what you just heard Piker saying, or a very substantive part of it, was just him reading comments in his chat. Uh, that'll be so easy to prove. Now, whether Scott saw something that was

• 1:36:10Tom Bilyeu?

  blood in the water, and he thought, oh my God, this is so useful to the political point that I want to make, and then put it out there, um, that was stupid. So, in terms of, is he accurately representing Hassan Piker? Absolutely not. Now, Hassan Piker, in terms of going after Scott Jennings for defamation, I think that is very unwise. There have been people that have been playing clips of Hassan Piker saying about other people. Uh, the exact quote was something like, um, "There's no way that this guy isn't totally excited about lynchings." That's directionally correct, if not verbatim. And so Hassan just has so many vulnerabilities to this kind of stuff himself, like, literally

• 1:36:54Tom Bilyeu?

  on the same topic. Uh, so, yeah, this is, people are now going to pull out clip after clip after clip of Hassan actually saying things about people, not things out of context, actually saying things about people. So, the fact that he's decided to take on this fight is just very surprising to me. So, yeah, we're gonna see how this one ends up, but, oof. Do we have the Asmongold thing?

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  I was looking for it. I don't have it, like, pulled up. Um, this Destiny one keeps popping up. Go ahead, Ryan.

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  I think showing Destiny and Asmongold clips regarding Hassan is a little silly to do, because what these people have done is they're the reason, you know how we have such-

• 1:37:34Tom Bilyeu?

  These people are Asmongold Destiny?

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Yes, their communities. Not maybe them specifically, but their communities. They, uh, have created the clipping environment. So, the reason I even have a job is because clips became popular, right? And so, what these people do is they don't like Hassan. Uh, Destiny used to stream with Hassan. Asmongold used to stream with Hassan. He called them out, I think, Asmen for gambling, and, um, Destiny was just being a little pervy. Destiny's bisexual, and was hitting on Hassan when he didn't want to be hit on, and things like that. So, they took that to heart, and now have then, for the last seven years, been pushing to get this guy canceled. So, for context, over the lynch clip, uh, lynching clip specifically, Hassan was watching Jubilee's middle ground. There was a black conservative named, uh, Xavier De Rosier, who argues that there are too many woke districts and things

• 1:38:19Speaker 04

  like that. And basically, like you said, it's him talking to his chat, him being like an entertainer. Because at the end of the day, he's not just politics, he's an entertainer. And what I think is important to know, whenever watching an Asmen or a Destiny clip, is that these people's only content is smearing Hassan. You go to their channels, and you look at any of the videos they're producing, majority of those thumbnails are gonna be Hassan balding, Hassan something AI-generated, right? Because that is all these people do, is they hate Hassan, and they make an audience off of hating him and his politics.

• 1:38:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I would say, at the end, you overstated the mark. Uh, Asmongold is one of the biggest political streamers on planet Earth. Uh, I think he's bigger than Hassan. So, it isn't that he is just, it's certainly one of his buckets of content, there's no doubt about that. But, um, my point is that the question becomes, can you clip somebody out and get them saying something that legitimately is going to work against them? I think, if Hassan thinks that in context he's bulletproof, he's out of his mind. Now, that's just a gut feeling, based on how many crazy things I've heard him say in context. Um, so, this is the, I believe, uh, they covered this in that book that you like, the

• 1:39:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Bible. "He who lives in a glass house, uh, should not cast the first stone."

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  No, that's not, how are you gonna bring up the Bible and then quote something that's not in the Bible?

• 1:39:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that not in the Bible?

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Mm-mm. He without sin-

• 1:39:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  He without sin should, uh, cast the first stone.

• 1:39:45Tom Bilyeu?

  So, the glass house thing, that's just been conflated over time. Okay, okay, perfect. So, even better. The accurate, the, uh, lore-accurate quote of, uh, you know, "He who has, uh, he who is without sin can cast the first stone," or, uh, is it in the Bible, the whole, "Don't ignore a plank in your own eye to fish out a moat in somebody else's?"

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  A speck in somebody else's, I guess.

• 1:40:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so, uh, all things that Hassan would be very wise to heed, and actively is not heeding right now. So, he might get the victory over, um, Scott Jennings, we'll see. Typically, these things don't go anywhere. They, they don't go to a very satisfying conclusion, precisely because it is so hard to prove that the person did it maliciously. Now, meaning they actively knew it was false, and they did it anyway. Um, so, we'll see. The facts will come out. If these guys go to either arbitration, we'll know less, but if it goes to court, we'll know a lot more. Uh, so, we'll see. But, after that, whether by Scott Jennings, Fox, or somebody else, people are gonna go after Hassan. So, um, this is not the Pandora's Box that I would have advised him to open.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because at this point, this is a discovery play. Like, that means I'm gonna go through every single minute of every stream you ever did, ever, and I'm gonna look for something that you said that was inflammatory, disrespectful, you know?

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  That's what they do, though, to him.

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, but-

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is the very thing.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. You know what I'm saying? But now you have to do this in a courtroom, and say that, you know what I mean? So, it's one thing when you let the internet dictate it, but it's another thing when you're exposing yourself to a courtroom, to then say, "Yeah, this guy is bad because he took something out of context."

• 1:41:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Totally agree.

• 1:41:16Speaker 04

  Let's put ourselves in those shoes, though. At what point are you, as an individual, drawing that line between, "I'm being smeared by people online just because they don't like me, or they disagree with me"? Where are you drawing that line as a person, if that happened to our show?

• 1:41:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, if somebody, I, I've been in enough lawsuits to know that you don't want to be in a lawsuit if you can avoid it. Um, so, somebody would have to go pretty hard in the paint. There certainly is a line, and if somebody crossed it, I would be saying, "Okay, I'm opening myself up to equal scrutiny on the other side. How bulletproof do I think that I am? How far do I want to go?" Um, also, I feel a little bit, you live and die by clips. And so, the second you are gonna go into this game and start reacting to clips, it's like, you know that people are gonna do it to you. And in fact, I, please, somebody take a clip and talk about how stupid I am. That'd be wonderful exposure.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  Bumper notes.

• 1:42:05Tom Bilyeu?

  So, yeah, exactly. So, on that side, it's like, I know the game, so going into it like I'm not that, like, I get it. I know what this whole loop is. Um, so, on that side, I'm very surprised, given that Hassan knows that he does this to people all the time. I'm surprised that he is going after it. Now, I heard him when this first happened, and he was hedging on his stream, which I thought was wise. And he was like, "Oh, God, do I really want to do this? And this is gonna be very expensive, and time-consuming, it's such a pain in the ass, it's really hard to prove." And so, I was like, "Yeah, that's the right play." But I feel, like, feel, this is definitely just emotion. I

• 1:42:45Tom Bilyeu?

  feel like his audience was egging him on, and was, I'm now, uh, like, getting out over my skis in terms of, I didn't, uh, go super deep on this, but I would be a little surprised if it doesn't play out that basically his community was like, either you're LARPing about how mad you are, and you know that you're vulnerable to a similar attack, or you gotta go after this guy because it's a blatant example. And so, are you really Hemethy, or are you gonna back down? I think they gassed him up. I think he went in ill-advised, and is now going to deal with some downstream consequences of this. And I hate to see it, because this is like, uh, the whole H3H3 thing, like, turning all this stuff into

• 1:43:28Tom Bilyeu?

  lawsuits. Yes, the fair use thing, that was probably a fight worth fighting, but I do-

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  That was the original one?

• 1:43:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. I do worry that, um, Ethan Klein went from, uh, he got his Venezuela, everybody benefited from the oil, and then he went after Iran, and it did not go well. And so, um, you start making too many enemies like that, and it's just, people just want you to fall so badly. And then something that might have been survivable for somebody else becomes, uh, you know, the potential end of a career. So, I mean, we'll see how it plays out in the fullness of time. Anyway, my advice to Hassan Piker, who, I think his politics are absolutely unhinged, but I will say until the end of time, uh, when he came on the show, was absolutely lovely. Just kind and polite from the second I saw him

• 1:44:19Tom Bilyeu?

  till the moment he left. Uh, I hope everybody knows by now that just because I think very different political things as somebody, doesn't mean that they can't be a nice person. And certainly in my interactions with him, he was nice. I would advise him, this is not a wise road to go down.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  Um, this reminds me of the madness that's going on in Georgia during these rally beefs. Um, our drone commander in chief, Obama, was talking in response to Trump. For those that didn't see the story, Trump, uh, Obama, El Said, and somebody else was onstage in Michigan, and they were talking about how Trump has turned the White House into the Cheesecake Factory. And that's why you guys have been seeing all these Cheesecake Factory memes, and MAGA talk about how much they love the Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Scott Besant rolled out of a Cheesecake Factory to give, uh, like, little presser. I was like, "These guys are so petty."

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  This is Obama's response to the Cheesecake Factory gate.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  That was the interesting thing about how the administration-

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Can we turn up the audio?

• 1:45:13Speaker 05

  ...responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. They did not argue with that.

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  They did not deny terrorists were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn't say anything about that. I accused this administration, based on the facts, that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn't say anything about that.

• 1:45:47Speaker 05

  The president wasn't even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn't bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments.

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  He took great umbrage.

• 1:46:10Tom Bilyeu?

  He's good at this.

• 1:46:10Speaker 05

  He said, I didn't understand.

• 1:46:11Tom Bilyeu?

  There's no two ways about it.

• 1:46:13Speaker 05

  The work of the artisans in the White House. And they mobilized, this, this is, this was, this, I mean, it's all crazy, but this was the really crazy part.

• 1:46:25Tom Bilyeu?

  This is why I don't want to look at his policies.

• 1:46:27Speaker 05

  A whole of government response to that joke.

• 1:46:32Speaker 05

  Not to inflation, but to that joke. The, the White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy. The person who's supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable.

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  The guy who's supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and, and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.

• 1:47:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, you can pause it. That, that was, that was some petty shit. There's no doubt about that. These, this is politics, welcome to it. It is the world's dumbest game. The world's dumbest game. Obama has charisma, there's no doubt about that. That guy can fucking speak.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  He got, he got spunk, that guy.

• 1:47:22Tom Bilyeu?

  He's got something, man.

• 1:47:23Speaker 04

  It's like smelling nice flowers after walking through an alley of trash.

• 1:47:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I think you, I, I think you might be a little more aligned with his policies, but, uh, yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  Hey man, OG Obama was very, um, practical. He just liked to kill a lot of people.

• 1:47:38Tom Bilyeu?

  That's the only catch?

• 1:47:39Speaker 04

  Joe Commander in Chief.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  That's it, that's the only thing, he just liked to kill a lot of people from afar. But yeah, this was, and he was the previous woke one, so you can't even put that at his problem. That wasn't even his fault. Um, okay, we need to talk about this, um, feminism essay. So this was like an essay or, cause I see the translation, yeah, break it down for us.

• 1:47:57Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, well, this one certainly makes me very sad. Basically, the entire world is coming to a very brutal conclusion, which is that evolution actually does matter. Veteran British columnist, uh, says feminism failed, that's her quote, her generation. Her name is Petro Nella Wyatt. She's a longtime British journalist and former deputy editor of The Spectator. She's drawn widespread attention with a column that she wrote for the Daily Mail arguing that feminism has left women of her generation, single, childless and isolated. Uh, and not saying it like it's a Hallmark card greeting, the way that so many people have talked about it in the past.

• 1:48:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Wyatt, who's now 54, um, opens a piece by describing a weekly lunch that she has with a circle of her female friends. Uh, they all get together in London and they're all super highly educated, 40s to mid 50s professionals. And all of them are unmarried without children. And she said that she had absorbed, growing up through her schooling and a radical aunt, like all of this feminism from Gloria Steinem and Simone de Beauvieu as a teenager. And it pushed her and other women to think and behave like men and treated traditional femininity as a male invented trap. Now, one of the most like, just arresting parts of the whole thing actually comes from one of her friends.

• 1:49:24Tom Bilyeu?

  It was a 55 year old that she calls Sally. And she says that she was taught that the traditional woman was a stereotype, that men had artificially created to push on women, to get them to believe it, to keep them down. And that she had internalized that idea of that's just all the patriarchy so completely that she became actively hostile towards men and then drove them away. And the ones that would approach her, she would just reject and now she finds herself alone. And she says now that she's paying a pretty big price for it. Another 53 year old says that her career has stalled, she never married and she feels worthless as a person. That's brutal.

• 1:50:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Wyatt writes that many of her single friends suffer from depression rooted in basically living these solitary lives with nobody to be in a relationship, not having had kids and somebody to raise. Now, keep in mind, I say all this as somebody who's decided not to have children. But it's like, I understood the risk going into it. And at least I was saying that from the safety of a very long-term marriage. So it's like, oh man, these people are just getting out of step with what evolution wants from us. Now, this woman says that she doesn't know one woman of her generation, living the way, uh, living this way, isolating themselves from men, pursuing their career, uh, to the exclusion of all other things, not having kids.

• 1:50:53Tom Bilyeu?

  She doesn't know anybody in her generation, living like that, that actually likes it. These, these are the feminists, these are the ones that were pushing that message, beating that drum. And what these women say they wanted was not a job title ultimately, but a partner and children. Now, I don't expect that to be everybody's punchline, but the fact that you're seeing this more and more and more should not be ignored. And Wyatt's own argument is that the ideology that she was raised on told them that those desires were a form of submission, that if you wanted a man and you wanted to have a kid, that that meant that you were giving up some meaningful part of yourself, that you were sacrificing to the patriarchy.

• 1:51:35Tom Bilyeu?

  She cites a figure that one in 10 British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone. And her ultimate conclusion is that it just might be too late for the people of her generation. And that the culture needs a reset so that younger women aren't steered in the same direction. Now, first of all, shout out to her, man. It is so hard to get to a point where you've built your entire career around a particular stance. And to then be like, fuck, man, we really got this wrong, or I really got this wrong. And I think that it's the only thing that would be a bigger tragedy than putting out a message that you think may have done harm to a lot of people, would be to keep doubling down on that.

• 1:52:19Tom Bilyeu?

  So I really do have a lot of respect for the fact that she and other women of her generation that really embraced this sort of, this is all patriarchy and it's bad. Uh, that they're actually coming out and saying, okay, we think that we've made a mistake. And the column followed a shorter Telegraph piece in April of 24 and prompted a response from Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson, who credited Wyatt's honesty, uh, but pushed her argument further, saying feminism could be, um, open boardrooms, uh, but it could never repeal biology. And I agree with that so aggressively. This has been the thing, I've been beating the drum, you guys have heard me say before, the thing I want on my tombstone is that you're having a biological experience.

• 1:53:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, when I first started saying that a very long time ago, I wasn't even aware of all of the blank slatism. I was completely blind to woke one, just none of that stuff was on my radar. I was just trying to get people to understand that if you understand your own biology, you're far less likely to make decisions that are going to end up hurting you. But for instance, if you think that a woman can act like a man and be happy about it, woo buddy, time is going to have a very punishing lesson for you. And the fact that women's fertility window is fixed. So if you're gonna have kids, you're just on a very different clock than men who doesn't have that same time constraint. Also, we don't have the same impulses and evolution assumed that we were going to be working together as a couple.

• 1:53:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So we have all of these impulses to connect with each other, that there are feedback loops in the brain, that when you're not connecting with somebody in a relationship like that, there's going to be a profound sense of dis-ease. Just getting people to understand all of those things, that like you're trying to navigate the world through a meat suit. And if you don't understand the way that that meat suit throws you around emotionally, then you're going to set yourself up for failure. So it's pretty brutal. And when you have a generation of women that basically are trying to effectively infinitely defer motherhood, because they think, well, I can always make that decision down the road and that I'd rather focus on my career.

• 1:54:27Tom Bilyeu?

  And then things change and hormonally, I imagine as they, I, while I don't have access to a study right now that would definitively prove this, I have a feeling that there is research out there that proves it. Or research could be done that would easily prove that as women go through menopause, they stop caring about a lot of the things that they cared about when they were younger, especially the pursuit of a career. Of course, nothing is ever going to be universal. But understanding that menopause is this radical transformation that women go through that is going to alter the things they care about, what they want to focus on, what they love, what they're interested in. And so planning your entire youth for an adulthood that is going to just catch you completely off guard

• 1:55:10Tom Bilyeu?

  because you're not thinking through the lens of biology, it's just absolutely brutal to watch happen. And obviously between that and, uh, technology, especially phones, social media, dating apps, the things that it's done to relationships is just absolutely brutal. Uh, so I for one, am excited to see somebody come forward and say this. So hopefully we can get the tide turning a little bit, uh, for people to understand that being in a relationship is not submission, you're not less of yourself. Being married to my wife, making concessions to my wife, not living my, um, days however I want, with total disregard for my wife is not some shackles. She is not a ball and chain, as the saying so often goes.

• 1:55:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It's by making these compromises, by being able to share a life with somebody, which means yes, I'm going to defer things that I would otherwise do in order to keep the relationship healthy and moving forward. All of that stuff has huge payoffs. And seeing society begin to wake up to this is certainly, um, some sign that we're headed in a better direction. I just don't know how many young people are going to listen before it's too late. It took a long time to get all of this momentum to the feminism, I don't need no man movement, to get all of that going. I imagine it's going to take some time to unwind it.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Um, Lisa was in the chat, she said she was here to talk to us.

• 1:56:30Tom Bilyeu?

  She in the chat right now?

• 1:56:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just sent a message to her, but just in case she's listening, please Lisa, drop your take, I would love to read it. Um, uh, Lisa said, you're the best decision she ever made, that was cute.

• 1:56:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, trust me, that is, uh, my, me to her as well.

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  There, there's one thing that you base this, uh, the argument on, and it's based off of evolution. We were just talking about the Bible, there's a percentage of the world that doesn't believe in evolution. So if we had to take evolution off of the table, would that change your take on what is happening?

• 1:56:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So here's the thing, there's something about the universe that we don't understand, so cool. Let's say evolution's all fake, all right, whatever. Uh, God has seen fit to give you a biological body. Maybe I don't know why. But he did it. And so here we are. And now that we're in this meat suit, let's at least realize that it behaves in a certain fashion. I'll let other people decide why God has chosen to do that, or the universe, or whatever it is that they believe. But here we are. The one thing that I know is that I am having a biological experience. Whether that was given to me by evolution or God is completely irrelevant. I'm having this experience.

• 1:57:31Speaker 02

  So it doesn't matter how we got here. We are here and you feel this way for a reason.

• 1:57:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct. Now, I think people will find that evolution explains a lot of things that make it far more predictable. But if you, in isolation, you just have to understand the biology of it all. And that will allow people to make, I think, better decisions. So take Lisa and I. We didn't not have kids by accident. We had, we decided not to have kids very intentionally. And the big conversation that we had was, okay, listen, when we get older, this will be very different. Because right now, a big thing that takes up that space for us emotionally is that we build. So my wife and I have been entrepreneurs for a very long time at this point. So we build

• 1:58:18Tom Bilyeu?

  these things, we invest, we care about them deeply. It occupies a big part of our sense of meaning and purpose. And if we don't have kids, then we are going to have to work a lot harder than other people that have meaning and purpose. Because somebody that has kids has fulfilled what evolution wants them to do. And so even just knowing that their kids are out there somewhere in the world is tremendous comfort. Now, if they also have their kids close to them and they can interact with them, then that obviously is going to provide a tremendous amount of that. And I warned Lisa, I said, listen, this is going to be a harder decision for you than it is going to be for me. First of all, I'm far more likely to get meaning and purpose out of building

• 1:58:58Tom Bilyeu?

  companies, I think, than you ultimately will. That is certainly borne out, if she's gone through perimenopause, she has, just from a physical ability to grind as hard as I grind, doesn't have that anymore, and has had to find ways to step back and do less. And so navigating all of that, we built out a plan for her. It's like, okay, what is that going to look like? Knowing that when you stop working at some point altogether, that that's not a get out of jail free card from needing to have meaning and purpose. And so what will be those things that you do? And so she's building those things now to make sure that as she gets older, that there are still things that will provide her meaning and purpose if she ever decides that she doesn't

• 1:59:40Tom Bilyeu?

  want to work for a living. So it's like, you've got to think through that stuff. Now, the reason that we had those conversations when we were young and could have changed our mind and still had kids was, we didn't want to walk into this blindly. We understood that we were having a biological experience, that our minds were going to do things to us, that we would have to be prepared for, that our hormones were going to change, and that would change the way that we felt about our lives and what we were doing. And so, none of this stuff has caught us by surprise. And that has made all of the transitions much, much, much easier.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  Lisa had a response. She says, I think feminism feminism had initial genuine purpose to help women. It gave us the right to have equal rights. And somehow, over time, that turned into a, I don't need a man. And that's a sad evolution and interpretation of it.

• 2:00:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Listen, she, when she can, you know, not have to type everything and really talk about this, Lisa Billy is my favorite feminist. Now, I don't know if she'll take the title, but she knows what I mean by that. So Lisa is strong, she's independent, but she's not only private about the fact that she wants to be quote unquote, small in my arms, she's public about it. And is like, listen, my husband is the right person to lead the family. That does not mean that my wife is silent or wilting. Lily, very much the exact opposite. But my wife understands the evolutionary reason why women are wired for hypergamy, why women are wired to push men, to hold them to a

• 2:01:06Tom Bilyeu?

  high standard, how they can influence the world through the person that they're in a relationship with. And she's always been very comfortable with all of that. Now, she never wanted, she never really thought about it when we were younger. But once she was a stay at home housewife, that did not resonate with her. And so she learned very early that she wanted to interface with the world in a way that was far more creative. She wanted to build something. She took to that very, very well. She's actually a very gifted entrepreneur. And if she had male biology, I think she'd be like, right beside me, working the same number of hours, going crazy, because she's so good at it. But that just isn't the biological hand that she's been dealt. And so

• 2:01:46Tom Bilyeu?

  she deals in reality and is like, okay, I don't want to try to match you hour for hour. And so has found other ways to express herself. But that, her ability to be strong, to be independent, to, she isn't a person who just does what I say. But at the same time, she will trust that I will know the way to go. And if she disagrees, she will argue. But then if ultimately, I'm like, listen, I really do think that this is the right answer for the family, then she'll do it. And because she knows that I really do listen, and if she's right, and this is the key, if she's right, then I go, you're right, I'm not, and let's follow you. We've mapped out the areas where she

• 2:02:30Tom Bilyeu?

  is more, she's just better at that thing than I am. So my wife is ridiculously good at like, knowing what the standard should be. Whereas I actually, I, people that watch me may find this surprising because of how much I rail against this. But I'm actually far more likely to be overly compassionate, to the point of allowing somebody or something to drag us down. And Lisa's like, nope, this is a standard. Anybody below that, we've got a problem. So when you go, yeah, actually, you do have more credibility there than I do. I have let things drag on far longer than I should have. It's like, that kind of thing then doesn't create tension, because she feels respected for the things that she's good at. And then I don't feel like I'm in a constant battle with a boss

• 2:03:14Tom Bilyeu?

  bitch who just like, is fighting me for control. And that was like, one big collision point we had. When she became like a full blown entrepreneur, she was bringing that energy home. And I said, listen, I have no desire to fight for control. I will always listen to your ideas. When you're right, you know me, I'm going to acknowledge that you're right. But in terms of like, okay, we know what we're trying to do here. We've come to an agreement, and now we're going to march and lockstep. I don't want to be in like, this constant battle. And so navigating that was very tricky. It was one of the more tumultuous periods in our life, where she had to be able to find out, how can I be totally me, stand up for what I believe in, always speak my mind, always

• 2:03:59Tom Bilyeu?

  push for what I think is right. And then at the same time, never allow us to reach a loggerhead, where we're just two atoms colliding, matter and antimatter, and we obliterate. She had to find a path to be like, okay, these are the areas where I do think that you see things that I don't, that ultimately, you're the right person to lead the family. And so there are going to be times where I defer to you, even though I think you're wrong. And that was a very important milestone that she's been able to navigate, which is exactly why I say she is my favorite feminist.

• 2:04:32Speaker 02

  Nice. Okay.

• 2:04:36Tom Bilyeu?

  It's funny though, sorry, sorry, really fast. I know that we have something to cover. We got to get going. But, ah, fuck, what was I gonna say? Never mind, we'll go to the, damn it, I had something. Baby, I had something cool to say about you. I love you so much.

• 2:04:49Speaker 04

  First up, Kate in the corner says, it's Friday. Duck tattoo, Ryan. Share tattoos you all. I'll just show them real quick. Got Last of Us window. Got a chainsaw and a duck.

• 2:04:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go.

• 2:04:58Speaker 04

  All personal meaning to me.

• 2:04:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go.

• 2:05:00Speaker 04

  Instinct AI detection. Love the toxin information. Allowing different points of view in a safe environment is awesome. Speech workbench has all candidates information loaded for real time transcription, ready for voting. Would love feedback.

• 2:05:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that their app?

• 2:05:11Speaker 04

  I think it's theirs, from the sound of it. I'll look it up.

• 2:05:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Speak workbench. Speech or speak?

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  Speech.

• 2:05:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Speech workbench.

• 2:05:19Speaker 04

  Mark T. Banker says, I'm seeing a pattern. When there's real evidence of fraud, corruption, or criminal behavior on the left, a lot of people won't admit it. Not because the evidence is weak, but because admitting it feels like handing Trump a W.

• 2:05:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. But please know that that is a thing people do on both sides. People don't want to admit when they're wrong, because it actively will be used against them like a cudgel, which is fucking obnoxious. Which is precisely why you will see people, the story that we were just talking about with the feminists, you'll see people that just want to beat her up and get her to admit that she was a fucking moron and all of this stuff, and that she was bad, yada, yada. Instead of being like, yo, word, respect. So glad that somebody's speaking up for that. This is how we find our way back to the middle. Don't beat the other person up when they admit that they're wrong. Just be like, yep, very glad that they found this. Respect to them. We got to shore this up. Be a much better world.

• 2:06:07Speaker 04

  Bulletproof Monk says, Tom, your talks on the biological experience helped me put words to the mechanics of existence I explore in my art at Thought Loop Studio. Repetition creates form, belief carries weight, perception follows the frame.

• 2:06:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Perception follows the frame is a deep insight. Very well said. Very well said.

• 2:06:27Speaker 04

  Bulletproof Monk again, thank you for the 40 total. Just had my first solo show in Baltimore. I'm center left, but many artists around me are more extreme. I fear my views could hurt friendships. Your show helps me explore these ideas. How do I bridge the gap? Godspeed.

• 2:06:38Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, that's really a question for Ryan. So, uh, no, for real, I'm, I'm, I really hope that I have mapped you accurately. I've been thinking about that a lot this weekend. From where I am, we get along very well. I think that we have a very easy time talking to each other about a whole host of things. But at the same time, we can collide on politics. And then for me, I eject out of it and I don't even think about it. I find you interesting. There's a lot of things that we share in common that we enjoy. For me, the fact that you have very different politics than me just does not bother me. And if that is a shared thing on your side, then it's like, hey, this is exactly it. It's like, make sure, I feel the same way about my sister.

• 2:07:22Tom Bilyeu?

  She is very much politically aligned with you, but I love her and I love being around her and she's wonderful. And while you and I can talk politics, my sister and I cannot talk politics, but we both know like, hey, let's just avoid that. And, uh, we love each other. My sister's always been just like my biggest champion. And shout out, my sister will never hear this because she could never listen to me talk about politics, but, uh, she used to eat green beans for me when I was a kid with massive food trauma. Shout out to my sister. My grandmother, who used to scare me to death, my sister always ran interference. Yeah, my sister was just dope, dope, dope as a kid and is dope now. And yeah, but we don't share politics.

• 2:08:02Tom Bilyeu?

  So people, I think, not needing this to be an existential threat, like at every second of the day, knowing that people seeing things differently is a good thing. I think that's super useful.

• 2:08:15Tom Bilyeu?

  That Ryan is likely to make me see something that I would otherwise spiral off on a bias because whoever said, uh, um, the perception follows the frame is so true that I have a worldview that I get locked in. And so I will forget that I'm locked in a frame of reference. And so anyway, having people that are sincere or point that out is just super useful.

• 2:08:38Speaker 04

  I think the best advice I can give, I grew up in a very conservative town. Clearly didn't turn out that way, but, um, I think something that I've learned with time, and this is not even just politics, this is everything. People just want to be heard, right? Like at the end of the day, you just gotta suck it up. You gotta listen to someone say the shit they're gonna say. Smile, brush it off the shoulder, walk away, complain about it later, you know? And I think that while there are a lot of different beliefs, religions, ideologies, I think a good skill to have is being able to just listen to people, even when you don't agree.

• 2:09:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll second that.

• 2:09:16Speaker 02

  Cool. Is it last one?

• 2:09:17Speaker 04

  That was the last one. Oh, yeah, that was it.

• 2:09:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:09:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. All right, guys, we will be back in our usual place on Monday. So have a wonderful weekend and we do have the upcoming AI masterclass. It is free. I think it's the 15th. The fifth, the fifth. Thank you, Eric. All right, the fifth of, I cannot believe this, but November. That is crazy. That's gotta be next Thursday then. All right, this coming Thursday, let's go. Free AI masterclass, gonna be talking about how to launch a business, uh, using AI. Obviously there have been massive advances in AI recently. I'll walk you through it, free, how to start a business. So I hope you guys will join me for that. It'll be 1:00 PM Pacific time, Thursday, November 5th. All right, everybody, have a wonderful weekend. We will see you on Monday. And until then, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace.

• 2:10:11Tom Bilyeu?

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• 2:10:56Tom Bilyeu?

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