The Midterm Special | Weekly Recap

Welcome to Impact Theory. In this midterm special, the team breaks down the bluenami: an election night that went past every forecast as Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, flipping seven Senate seats from Maine to Texas and heading toward what Tom calls their biggest House majority since 1993. Pointing to exit polls that showed 62% of voters disapproving of President Trump, with most blaming his policies for the economy and gas prices and the Iran war weighing heavily on the vote, Tom argues the results were a rejection of Republicans more than an embrace of Democrats. He walks through what comes next: two years of gridlock, vetoes, and investigations, a likely impeachment push without the votes to convict, and a 2028 campaign that has effectively already begun, while the team debates how far left the new wave really is. The conversation then turns to markets, from Bitcoin’s jump to the historical pattern of stocks rising in the year after a midterm. Tom says history favors the bulls, but argues AI is a big enough wild card that this cycle may not follow the script, and makes the case that a divided Washington that freezes new spending could steady Treasuries and reward the market. The team also looks at what the results mean for data centers and AI policy, including ballot measures that would have been tougher on AI but didn’t pass, and California’s billionaire tax heading toward defeat. Asked whether he feels more or less optimistic, Tom says neither: he saw the backlash coming after unfulfilled promises, but he’s still worried about America drifting toward a European-style economic model. Note: This episode contains commentary and opinion, including predictions about markets, Congress, and the 2028 race. Results and ballot-measure outcomes discussed reflect counts at the time of recording; several races, including the Senate contests in Alaska and Mississippi, were still uncalled, and final tallies may change. 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 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 Quo: ​​Try for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months at https://quo.com/impact Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order PLUS receive a free gift with your second shipment—or find Ketone-IQ at CVS stores nationwide and get $5 off your first 6-pack for a limited time! Shopify: Sign up for your free trial period at https://shopify.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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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Tailor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. What could have been a blue wave really did turn into a tsunami. It is a very big deal that is going to matter a lot, but not what people think in terms of what this is actually going to mean. And so that's where all of this stuff is going to get crazy, because if you don't understand the reasons why all of this is happening, you're in trouble. Now, going in, every model had Democrats as heavy favorites to sweep.

• 2:00Tom Bilyeu?

  We were talking about it. You had Polymarket clocking in at 75% chance of a sweep. Calshi 74, Silver Bulletin 82%, and they were right. But as Drew and I were talking about in our last time together, these guys are often wrong in sort of what's going to be the direction. And this time, it was just a complete underselling of the margin. The blue wave truly came in tsunami territory. The Democrats nationwide grabbed the GOP by the collar and punched them in the face hard. The question is, for swing voters, was this a vote for the Democrats or against the Republicans? And if you look at some of the exit polls and what is flying around on social media,

• 2:45Tom Bilyeu?

  this was a stunning rejection of Trump and the Republicans, far more than it was an embrace of the Democrats when we're talking about swing voters. Obviously, if you guys saw some of the footage coming out of Austin, Texas, it really did sound like some dictator had just been overthrown, people honking their horns, screaming, yelling, cheering. So there is a lot of energy pushing back against what the Trump administration is doing. I very much doubt that Trump was actually doing anybody favors by campaigning as hard as he did. I think this is going to go down as somebody just shooting themselves in the dick over and over and over over the last two years. You got to the point where even Nick Fuentes was telling his army of Groyper's to vote Democrat. He was not being bashful about it.

• 3:30Tom Bilyeu?

  He was telling them to get out and vote Democrat. So when you've got Nick Fuentes and the DSA sending out almost identical tweets to their followers, you have a very strange alliance indeed. This was so wild. Let's hear it directly from the maniac's mouth. Nick Fuentes, we got a clip for you.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Really the worst-case scenario. Four Republicans playing out tonight. And honestly, I could not be happier. It's a great night for the Groyper's, bad night for Republicans, maybe it's the best night of all for the Democrats. And I'll show you, this was my take earlier on Twitter. Let me get my profile loaded up here. I, of course, was encouraging everybody early in the afternoon. I was telling my followers, you guys watching at home, to vote Democrat.

• 4:26Tom Bilyeu?

  This is how you know this is about punishment.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I said this at noon. Get out and vote Democrat, blue wave. And it was actually kind of a nice moment. I saw Dean Withers posted an identical tweet.

• 4:37Tom Bilyeu?

  From the DSA.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Dean Withers said the exact same thing. He said, get out and vote Democrat. And then he did a blue heart emoji and then the ballot. Trump has truly united the country. Not in the way maybe he thought, maybe not in the way that MAGA wanted to.

• 4:54Tom Bilyeu?

  I would say not.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Trump has truly united the country, the biggest of big tents. You got Nick Fuentes and Dean Withers. You have the Groyper's and the DSA all going absolutely hard for the Democrats tonight and delivering the biggest of all victories. Couldn't be happier.

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is completely wild. When you think about how much the reality on the ground of Trump's policies has alienated people, they were expecting one thing when they voted him in, and they do not. They look at the results and they see that they clearly did not get the things that he promised. When you are banging the drum about the Epstein files and then you try to bury it and act like, what are people talking about? Why are they still interested in this? When you say no new wars, especially, he literally called out the Middle East and then goes to war in the Middle East, does not get the quick victory that he was obviously hoping for, gas prices going up. The great irony being that gas prices are lower now than they were during the Biden administration, but people do not care about that. That is old news, man.

• 5:58Tom Bilyeu?

  What people are looking at is, right now, are things moving in the direction? Were promises kept that were made to us? Were they broken? And people voted saying, you broke your promises, we want you out. People, I don't think swing voters are necessarily thinking, oh, hey, I bet that the Democrats are going to lead us in a better economic direction. I think they're thinking that Trump and the Republicans did not do the things that they promised. In fact, in many cases, they did the exact opposite. And then just all of the allegations of wrongdoing in terms of Trump's investments. So imagine, you're the average person on the street. You're, it's getting harder and harder for you to make ends meet, and the president is getting unimaginably wealthy from being in office.

• 6:40Tom Bilyeu?

  People are going to feel some type of way about that, and that is exactly what you saw happen in the elections. Now, needless to say, some of the people that are getting voted in were not the people that I wanted, because I am thinking from an economic lens. In the long term, where is this going to go? There, especially, because remember, I'm here in California where Nithya Raman is in the lead. It hasn't been called yet, so we'll see. I had a choice between Karen Bass and Nithya Raman. Yikes. And nonetheless, in Los Angeles, it looks like the DSA wing has the energy, I've been saying this for a while, man, that there is just a push farther and farther to the left on economic policies, which are going to come back to bite people in the ass.

• 7:21Tom Bilyeu?

  That is the thing that people are not necessarily being clear-eyed about in terms of, hey, if I want to send somebody a message of basically, you can fuck right off, there are going to be very interesting consequences to this. So let's look at all of this from the perspective of math to get a better idea of exactly where we're headed over the next two years and what this actually means for how government is going to be run and what laws are likely to get passed. So Democrats are projected to hold at least 255 House seats when the new Congress is sworn in. NBC's Decision Desk puts the final number near 258. I've seen people say as high as 259.

• 8:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And obviously, they're, they're calling the Senate also a 75-seat, sorry, that's a 75-seat majority. So just absolutely massive. The scale of it is astonishing. So Democrats won 233 seats back in 2006, which was the backlash against Iraq. So this is bigger than that. Republicans won 242 in the 2010 Tea Party wave, but no party has held 258 since 1993. The Senate flipped it. So you've got seven pickups, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Lindsey Graham, little sister, got out of there. We got her up out of there.

• 8:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Walloped.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  I don't know foreign policy, but to my knowledge, Ali, my bad.

• 8:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Go ahead. Not at all, man. The one that really is scandalous is Texas. Now, I am not going to be a big fan of James Talarico from a policy and economic perspective. I will tell you that. However, all of us should be looking at this and realizing

• 9:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Money don't buy what it used to, man. So you had Elon Musk throwing a gazillion dollars at that race and he still lost. He actually tweeted about this. I don't know if you can pull it up fast. But he had a pretty funny tweet where he was like, I guess my, um, oh God, he used a really funny phrase. Here we go. Guess my election interfering space lasers didn't work this time. Guess not, man. So to be honest, even though I would much rather see somebody in office that's going to be pushing AI hard, that's going to make that lane nice and easy. That's a more conservative on some of the social issues. Would love to see it. I am glad to see that the will of the people can actually overwhelm money being spent in politics.

• 9:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Hopefully all of us, I don't care what side you're on. Hopefully all of us can agree that money in politics is a freak show and we should all want to get it out. So the fact that people have spoken, despite saying some things that I don't necessarily want them to say. I love hearing that the will of the people can overwhelm the money that's being spent. So for all of us, that is certainly a win. That once people set their mind to something and they really get out there and vote, that you can overwhelm the amount of money that's being spent. So for me, that is a big win. I'm very happy to see that. Now, South Carolina also flipped. So it is very interesting to see what a move this is.

• 10:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, we have had times where there have been more seats lost or gained, depending on how you look at it, in a midterm election than what we just saw. So in that sense, it's not unprecedented. But again, having this many seats in the House, the last time we saw it was 1993. So pretty wild. This is a very big swing. Now, the exit polls explain a lot of this. 62% of voters disapprove of Trump. So you've got the worst election day number for any sitting president since 2008. 65% of people in the exit polls said that his policies made the economy worse. Gas averaged $4.14 a gallon on election day, which again, lower than where Biden was pretty significantly. Biden was up over $5.

• 11:25Tom Bilyeu?

  But nonetheless, it is not a place that made people very happy. And we're up $1.16 since the Iran war started back in February. People don't love it. It just looks like a catastrophic error. 74% told CNN the war was a crucial or major factor in their vote. So this is definitely a FFO initiative here on the president's side. So, uh, yeah. If you're not, if people are telling you, fix the economy, keep me out of wars, stop foreign entanglements, put America first, remember all that rhetoric. And then you do what looks like the exact opposite and it has results that are the opposite.

• 12:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Then people are going to vote what is in their best interest. Now, the markets have been whipsawing around. It, it has been absolutely fascinating to watch. At first, they were cratering. It was just falling down, down, down. But then the Dow futures jumped 800 points overnight. The S and P rose close to a full percent. Treasury yields fell, meaning that people were, yeah, I'm perfectly happy to buy treasuries. I love it. The dollar also fell with them. And that mechanistically sent gold back over 4,000 and silver up 4% to roughly $52.

• 12:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I think ultimately that's the market understanding that, one, that the election isn't being contested. So Trump has not, I haven't seen anything where he's saying anything other than it is what it is. And so I think there is some massive relief there for the markets that this didn't escalate into just like some constitutional crisis and get way crazier than it otherwise could have been. They're also looking at potential gridlock that basically the president, while the Republican Party will almost certainly take reputational damage, as now Congress and the Senate will be able to get bills pushed to him that he's going to be forced to publicly veto. And they know that that will play into their hands in the 2028 campaign season. So that's going to be a whole thing.

• 13:34Tom Bilyeu?

  But the market understands that basically there's going to be gridlock. And so there's not going to be a ton of spending changes that are going to be able to be pushed through because the president will be able to stop it. So there, I think the market is essentially looking at all of this and saying, all right, we've got two years where very little is going to change. And so let's just keep, um, steady, if you will. So, but it was so interesting to watch them initially, not panic, but start selling things off, then stabilize and bounce back up. And it looks like this crazy V on a chart. So very, very interesting. Now, Trump has accepted all of this. He said, and I quote, "I'm absolutely willing to accept those results." Cool.

• 14:16Tom Bilyeu?

  He told the New York Times from the White House, adding, "We'll probably work something out." What he was referring to is basically, "I'm going to veto a bunch of shit and then eventually we'll find some common ground." We'll see about that. It is wise for everybody to remember that we're now just into the presidential election season now. It'll be maybe a little light over the next year, but then it is just going to be a full-fledged battle after that. You can also expect to see another spending issue where the government is likely to hit gridlock again on the debt ceiling. Uh, I think there are some things that they can do to push that crisis off until 2028.

• 15:00Tom Bilyeu?

  And I think Trump will try to kick that down the road as much as he can, but we will see. It's been pretty fascinating to watch who Trump is blaming in all of this. He was actually turning on Fox News and said Republicans would have won in a landslide if his name had been on the ballot. This man is capital D delusion. That is wild. Now thankfully, he's not throwing out fraud claims. I think a lot of people were worried that the Republicans were trying to lay the groundwork to say that the election was stolen, but I think it's just so overwhelming. You want to talk too big to rig? Yeah. I, I just think there was nowhere left to hide from these results. They were polled coming into it. Everybody was saying the same thing. Not only were the polls directionally correct, they undersold the whole thing.

• 15:44Tom Bilyeu?

  So, uh, it's pretty wild. Now, what is going to happen in January? Democrats are going to take every committee gavel and the subpoena power that comes with them. So get ready. Strap in, you are definitely going to see the Trump administration pursued from virtually every angle that you can imagine. You can be pretty confident that Trump is going to get impeached. You can also be pretty confident that it will fail in the Senate. He's not going to get convicted. That would be absolutely shocking because you would need a super majority there to pull it off, which they don't have, which is an important note about all of this. Neither in the House nor in the Senate do the Democrats have a super majority. So they're not going to be making constitutional amendments.

• 16:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, they're not going to be able to override Trump's veto for that. They would have to get Republicans to cooperate. I think the odds of that are very low. However, uh, you are going to see a lot of Democrats on oversight. Uh, Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on oversight, posted two words. Lawyer up. That was Gallo humor's laughter on my part. You guys know I fucking hate all of this back and forth, legal battling, but it is what we are about to go through. It is going to get way worse before it gets better. Ron Wyden posted one word and just said subpoenas. So yeah, we can all get ready for a whole lot of investigations, which by the way, investigations, definitely.

• 17:14Tom Bilyeu?

  We should want to know what's going on on both sides of the aisle. The thing that I pray for emptily, because I know this is never going to happen. But boy, would it be nice if the Democrats were actually looking at both sides of the aisle to begin rooting out corruption. It is very distressing to see how much of that and fraud is present here in the U.S. And boy, oh boy, would I like to see an administration, any administration, actually tackle that stuff head on and not just make it a political cudgel that they try to beat the other side to death with. Looking at exactly what's going on so that we can root it out, so that we can actually get back to a functioning democracy. Boy, that would be lovely. I am certainly not holding my breath for it. But that's where we are.

• 17:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Hakeem Jeffries has promised to run Pete Hegseth out of town and says a third Trump impeachment is neither ruled in nor ruled out. I, I will just tell you right now, they're going to go after it for sure. I would be absolutely shocked if they didn't. I've been wrong before, but boy, that one would be surprising. 71% of voters, including 41% of Republicans, said Congress isn't doing enough to check the president.

• 18:23Tom Bilyeu?

  So get ready, get ready for some checks. So you're gonna see a lot of bills coming forward. Jeffrey's first four, probably something along the lines of reverse Medicaid cuts, extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies, take tariff power back from the White House, and end the war in Iran. Ro Khanna's list runs even further. Medicare for all, a $25 minimum wage, tax the billionaires. Now, none of this is gonna survive a veto, but these guys are laying out their plans. You've got Ro Khanna tweeting about all this stuff. We're gonna get to some of the more unhinged shit, which, holy lord, there has been some unhinged Democrats calling for things that are beyond shocking, given who they're coming from. Democrats are roughly 32 House votes and 13 Senate votes

• 19:08Tom Bilyeu?

  short of the supermajority that they would need to override the presidential veto. So again, that's not likely to be coming in the future, but they are going to use that as a weapon. Ro Khanna's been talking about this nakedly. He just literally said it out loud on X. And he said, "We wanna make Trump Hoover." Now, if you don't know what that means, basically, this is a historical reference to the Great Depression. In 1932, Hoover had vetoed a relief bill. Roosevelt ran on exactly that veto, and Democrats held the House for all but four of the next 62 years, riding on the back of like, "Hey, these guys don't care about you in your moment of most need.

• 19:53Tom Bilyeu?

  They, the president voted against you. That's exactly what you can expect from the Republican Party. They're not gonna be there for you when you need them." So Ro Khanna's strategy, and I think something that will be echoed by many Democrats, is going to be put things forward that sound good on paper. They're terrible ideas. They will absolutely devastate the middle class, but hey, that's not gonna stop them from running on it. And they're going to force the president to veto those spending initiatives. And in doing that, in 2028, they're going to push, the Democrats are going to push very hard to paint Republicans as just being completely out of touch with where the average person is. And given what's happened over the last two years,

• 20:35Tom Bilyeu?

  if Trump does not turn the economy around in the next two years, I think that will be a message that will really resonate. And the Republicans are gonna be in deep trouble trying to win back the House and/or the Senate. It is gonna be a long road. There is likely a lot of years between now and when the Republicans are able to actually win back a majority, barring some unforeseen event. This is big, man. There's just no two ways about the fact that these, the midterms was a big shift. It is a meaningful shift. Now, when I say that people do not understand exactly what this means, the problem here is that if this allows them to paint a picture around what we really need is more spending, more spending, more spending, and anybody that votes against it is your enemy,

• 21:20Tom Bilyeu?

  then they are going to lock us all in a death spiral. Because the problem is the spending. The problem is already the spending. Spending by Republicans, spending by Democrats. Whoever wants to spend more is the bigger enemy. Whoever damages the underlying engine of prosperity that our economy is structured on, whoever does more damage to that is the bigger enemy. And unfortunately, given that the energy on the Democrat side is pushing farther and farther left, and I would certainly expect that to continue, if not accelerate, though that'll be the one hope of a balancing effect that we'll have is if over the next two years, the left feels that,

• 22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  "Hey, we've just been told that the DSA-style energy is the energy." People knew that, they voted for it. Look at El Said's victory. We know that. Look at what's happening in Los Angeles with Nithya Ramon. So if they lean more into that, then that is going to be just hammer blow after hammer blow on the economy, on cultural issues. And so it's possible that we get some temperance that comes out of that and that more swing voters start getting worried about the acceleration to the left. We'll see. It's a bit too early to call that. But that would be the one hope of something that balances things out, which is always the thing that I'm hoping for. Nice tension between the two sides. But we're gonna see what it looks like now for the next two years

• 22:45Tom Bilyeu?

  when there's way more influence in the House and the Senate coming from the Democrats. Because boy, oh, boy, they want big.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  I think it's important to ground us in what just happened, okay? Because while, yes, the Democrats now have a majority in the Senate and in the House, there's gonna be a bunch of terms.

• 23:02Tom Bilyeu?

  A convincing majority.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  There's just gonna be a bunch of terms. So you already.

• 23:05Tom Bilyeu?

  There's gonna be a bunch of terms?

• 23:06Speaker 03

  There's gonna be a bunch of things that people say and they kind of run with because, "Oh, the Democrats are in power, so now this will happen." And we just wanna let you know that that's why checks and balances are so important. So the Democrats don't have a free pen that anything they write into law will become. So Ro Khanna can tweet his wish list, but he would need at least eight Republicans in the Senate or like 40 in the House to agree with all those terms. I don't think that's happening. So a lot of those policies are gonna fall flat. When we talk about impeachment, the House can impeach Donald Trump on paper, which they have done twice before. But when it goes to the Senate, the same thing. They need at least 67 senators to say it. So unless MAGA and the right suddenly say, "You know what? I wanna be conservative Republicans again and not MAGA Republicans again, and maybe this is their time to kind of cut out the dead meat." Maybe, but for all intents and purposes,

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Donald Trump is gonna be our president for the next two years regardless. So we just wanna, I just wanna kind of level set that. If there's any confirmations or any new cabinet positions that come up, yes, the Democrats have the Senate majority, so they could just say no on his appointments. So that might be the only.

• 24:05Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's a good way to think about this, is what just happened is the shift from who gets to say no moved from Republicans to Democrats. So Republicans were able to get precious little legislation through with their slim majority. They just weren't able to get a lot done. And now you're going to see that flip to where the Democrats are gonna be the ones that say no. But because the president can just veto anything that he doesn't wanna see go through, there's gonna be a lot of vetoes. So the gridlock is likely to go up, not down, to your point. It's not gonna be Democrats ramrodding things through because of the checks and balances that we have set up.

• 24:47Tom Bilyeu?

  But when you look at the, how this plays out in 2028, that's gonna be very interesting.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  I disagree, though. I think that the Republicans did get a lot through. They did get the BBB bill passed. Trump did get every tariff policy he wanted off the ground. They did invade Venezuela and Iran without Senate approval.

• 25:02Tom Bilyeu?

  He's done most of that through EOs, so it'll be easily reversed.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  No, the BBB bill is a law. That law got passed in there. Terrorist was the EO, the Senate did cut that down.

• 25:12Tom Bilyeu?

  I wish I had pulled it, but I did look it up. So the numbers were, and I can't remember what they were comparing it to, if they were comparing it to Biden or the last Trump term. But it was like 229 pieces of legislation passed versus like 140. It's a substantive drop. So just from a volume of legislation perspective, we did not get much through. Were there a couple of big beats? Yes, definitely. But if, I haven't mapped this much out, but I have a feeling if you were to look at like the last 20 years, you would just see like a slope of legislation that gets passed that's just going down, down, down. Again, that's gut feel. Somebody would definitely need to fact check me. But it, the, I don't know if it's a historic low. Certainly won't say that.

• 25:54Tom Bilyeu?

  But I think it's a regional low in terms of what legislation has been passed in the first two years, even though Trump had a majority in the House and Senate.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Copy. There's one other thing. I took this tweet from Cartoon underscore Magoo. "Today's results are better understood as..."

• 26:12Tom Bilyeu?

  These are hilarious.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  "The today's results are better understood as a left-center wave, not a woke one. Trump lost big, but so did a lot of far-left ideas. The billionaire tax failed in California. Transgender school sports restrictions were passed in Washington. Increased penalties for fentanyl dealing and even possession passed in Colorado. Weiner won in Chan, and one over Chan in San Francisco. Angie Nixon, the only person who was on the ballot saying, 'I am a member of the DSA.' She lost in Florida. As much as we call El Said DSA, he's just Muslim. He has..."

• 26:42Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, that's false.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  He's not, he's not part of the DSA. He has condemned the DSA as well. Just, again, a lot of people say you will use political power to get into the, "I will use my political allies to get into power, but when I actually have to pass legislation, a lot of that legislation hasn't passed." I'm looking at Mamdani. Buses still aren't free. He had, the period of terror tax, he's on his way of passing that. But I just wanna just ground us, everybody, that there's not just a bunch of transgenders about to pop out and come transition your kids. We're okay. Don't let the cultural noise impact what's actually happening on the front lines.

• 27:15Tom Bilyeu?

  So I definitely agree with the sentiment that nobody should be panicking right now. Everybody should go about their day and love their neighbor and not be mad at people that voted differently than you. That is for sure. However, I'll take exception to the direction of travel is real. And when you look at El Said and the things that he has said on the record, they are so aligned with the DSA that I think what you're seeing is a very talented politician, and he is very talented. This kid is bright. He's a very eloquent guy. He's very persuasive. Nobody needs to pretend that they're not up against what I will call a formidable foe.

• 27:59Tom Bilyeu?

  He, for me, I'm not saying for you. But for me, he is a very formidable foe, super intelligent. I think he's gonna be an effective politician. One of the things that I think he was very effective as is he understood, "Listen, I've got two fucking battles. I cannot fight them both. I've got the fact that I'll be the first Muslim senator, which he is now." But he also has the, all the early ties to the DSA, all of the campaigning that he did with the literal poster child for the DSA, Hassan Piker. There's no, he'll never beat those allegations unless he just completely flips and starts voting for things. Because there's a very big difference between, "I couldn't get the thing I wanted passed, and I voted against the thing that I said I didn't like."

• 28:43Tom Bilyeu?

  So Mamdani is still going hard in the paint to get all the things that he wants through. Like, he has in no way, shape, or form de-radicalized.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  No, I disagree. Because even with the defund the police, he's now cool with the NYC police chief. So he's actively stepping back on things. So I think, just like with Trump, he made a bunch of promises and he broke them when he got into office. I think Mamdani's gonna, did the same thing. I think El Said's gonna do the same thing. So there are certain things that we have to understand that, whether you're a right politician or a left politician, you're still a politician. You're still gonna lie. You're still gonna say what it needs to say to get into office.

• 29:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So your take is that El Said is moderate. Mamdani is moderate. And they were faking when they rallied the DSA vote.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  They're not as far left as we think they are, yes.

• 29:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that to me is a crazy man speaking. So this is all gonna play out. Again, I'm not saying that their legislation will get passed, and I'm not saying that they won't realize very quickly that they have to compromise. All of that is true. I want to be very clear because people are going to play these clips later wisely. This is how this game works, but I want to be very clear about what I'm saying. These guys will check themselves because they will realize there are certain things that they cannot get past. But what they push, the rhetoric that they try to build up among the populace. I have not seen any softening of Mamdani's language in terms of what he says to the public we ought to want and should be aiming at. Likewise, I am not expecting any softening of the rhetoric coming from El Said in terms of what he thinks we ought to be aiming at.

• 30:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Do I think that he'll be a politician? Yes, of course. Will there be things that he has to back off of? Yes, of course. And so he will give into good sense in terms of what he can actually get across the finish line. But in terms of what he wants to see happen, that I will watch very closely. So I'll be watching the rhetoric. I'll be watching what he's pushing for. I'll be watching for the energy that he's trying to drive forward and given the things that he plays on fucking repeat. It is all DSA adjacent, directionally going in that direction for sure, for sure. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 30:53Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:26Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 32:29Speaker 03

  There's been a lot of ramifications throughout the market. I just had the Bitcoin price up. That's up 5%. So it seems like the store wealth, uh, crew and things like that are happening. Historically, I was listening to Earn Your Leisure. They have like a stock show. They were talking about historically after midterm election, the next 12 months, the stock market is always up between 14 and 17%. So it is one of those things where it might just be temporary ramifications, temporary speed bumps, but most likely it's directionally always going up after a midterm.

• 33:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, the question is going to be AI. So have we corrected enough already that we can be up in the long run in a year? Maybe. Uh, is there another breakthrough that where people go, oh my God, like I've got to get back on the speedy train. And yeah, we're willing to pay for the privilege. Maybe. All of those things are possible, but AI is a big enough wild card that I won't say that the sort of default answer is a guaranteed answer. But uh, if you're betting on history, then the bet is that, yeah, we are likely to be up.

• 33:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Partly because you get like a rebalancing of um, the tension in politics. And so if we get that and we see spending stopped and we don't see any big swings to the left. I could certainly say, sorry, better way to say it because the, the left is not the only guilty party here. If we see a freezing in spending, meaning nobody's able to spend more, uh, then I think you're likely to see that be rewarded by the markets. Certainly it will keep treasuries more likely to be stable.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  And one thing about these elections, we do have to talk about the implication, the implications on data centers, things like that. Especially in Texas, there was a big rollout with there with Greg Abbott losing seat in the Senate flipping blue.

• 34:20Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm at the headline level there, but one thing that I came across that I thought was interesting is that um, yes, the Republicans were soundly rejected, but that there wasn't from a ballot initiative perspective, there wasn't the rejection of AI specifically that people were expecting.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 34:37Tom Bilyeu?

  And we're going to talk about in LA, the fact that the wealth tax didn't succeed. I think people are probably misreading the signal there. If, if anybody breathed a sigh of relief. I've got a take on this that, don't, no exhaling for you. But we'll talk more about that in a little while. But so yeah, I'll be interested to see just how much people are rejecting AI. I was a little surprised to hear that some of the ballot initiatives um, were, that would have been far more anti-AI had they passed, didn't pass.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  I, I want to kind of like, take a step back because I know we talked about election, we talked about the market. Overall, just quick yes or no, like I know we, we went through the specifics beat by beat, but just overall, are you more optimistic? Like going forward, do you have like pause? Cause I feel like the market did kind of a pump fake. So just your personal sentiment, do you feel like, okay, this was necessary to push us ultimately forward? Do you think that this is going to be like a referendum? How are you overall?

• 35:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Neutral on it to be honest. So I wouldn't, I'm not more or less optimistic. I have concerns obviously about the energy going left. I don't think I've uh, pulled my punches on that. But at the same time, I, this had to happen. So when you look at a president making a whole lot of promises and then not delivering on them, you are going to get backlash. So that doesn't surprise me at all. I definitely don't think um, that, you know, across the country rewarding the Republican Party would have been the right answer. Um, so yeah, this, in that sense, I had metabolized that this was going to happen a while ago.

• 36:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And the thing I'm left with is our slide towards being more European is the thing that scares me. That's where I'm like, man, they're, they're playing it out 10 years in our future. It's not an optimistic future. So what are we doing? So you can continue to expect me to rail against that without thinking that they're, you know, that a bad thing just happened. I don't map it like that. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact Theory after. Stay tuned. I'll call you back. That's the most expensive sentence in business. You mean it when you say it, but by the time you remember, they've already found somebody else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q U O.

• 36:57Tom Bilyeu?

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• 37:39Tom Bilyeu?

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• 37:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it. Now, the thing I think you can expect because people are already saying it, uh, you had a guy, the tweet's gotten over a million views as of last check. This is from Matt Binder. I looked him up. He's got hundreds of thousands of followers. So this is not a random guy. It's now got 1.5 million views. Uh, and the tweet is simply, you clicked on it. There we go. Arrest Elon Musk, seize his factories, nationalize SpaceX. Uh, you've got, and maybe now's the time to talk about it. You've got Scott Galloway literally saying, he infers, he does not, the words do not come out of his mouth, but he infers that Elon Musk should be executed. He is not like bashful about it. So let's play this clip and we'll talk about who the Rosenbergs actually are.

• 38:36Speaker 05

  Have begun believing through this ridiculous, unhealthy and dangerous idolatry of innovators that they get to live by an entirely different standard. Elon Musk is a traitor to the West. We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  This is a traitor to the West, and he should be held to the same standards as every other traitor in the West.

• 38:59Tom Bilyeu?

  You said "cut" as if, I bet they just cut something out where he moderates what he says. And then I would like to point out, he fucking reiterates the statement without a cut. The Rosenbergs were executed. They were executed. So he is saying Elon Musk is a traitor in the same way that the Rosenbergs were a traitor, and he should be treated in the same way that we have treated them, which is to fucking execute them. That is the most unhinged, out-of-his-mind shit. And this, I do expect this kind of energy to resurface and gain a lot more traction, because when you hear the audience clapping like fucking seals for a guy saying that Elon Musk should be executed like traitors before him, that is unhinged at a level that is hard to describe,

• 39:42Tom Bilyeu?

  because Galloway is smart, Galloway is, he has a big heart, like, those things are true. And yet, he is so convinced that he is right. He is so convinced that the other side is evil, that he likens them to traitors that were executed, and says, in no uncertain terms, he should be treated like other traitors in the past. That is so crazy. So...

• 40:06Speaker 03

  I have a question about that, though. Because we're letting Matt Bender, Scott Galloway, be the focal points for this, I'm gonna call it DSA energy, as mouthpieces for the Democratic Party. And I think that we're letting a lot of commentators dictate how we're treating the people who implement the policy.

• 40:24Tom Bilyeu?

  I'll say it in a slightly different way. So you're teasing something out that's important, and if I get this wrong, by all means, jump back in.

• 40:31Tom Bilyeu?

  So there are gonna be policies, very important, we'll look at those. Policies matter tremendously, and if things don't get across the line, that's a very important thing. Then we've got, where is the cultural energy going? And I am being, I'm migrating back and forth between those two points quickly enough that I'm very grateful that you're slowing us down and saying, hey, these are two very separate things. I think that's a meaningful distinction to make. However, to deny that this is energy that culturally we are moving more and more towards, and that the extreme reaction to Trump, not even saying it's unjustified, but the extreme reaction to Trump is likely to embolden this, which is what I'm saying.

• 41:16Tom Bilyeu?

  So we already have people who I would have formerly considered... I was thrilled to have Scott on the show, was really grateful to get to spend time with him. I consider him to be a very bright person who thinks about a lot of issues that really matter, and he really does seem to have a very big heart. And so watching people then allow themselves to become deranged is pretty wild. And so, from a, not a political perspective, I'm not saying that he is a mouthpiece for the DSA. I actually think the DSA would clap for this vehemently, but that's my opinion, we'll see. But the cultural energy is very real. And the fact that we have been moving left as a society, which you may not hold that belief, but I certainly do,

• 42:00Tom Bilyeu?

  that as a society, we've been moving farther and farther to the left, or the left has been moving farther and farther and farther, and so...

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Let's establish timeframes. Like, we've been moving further and further left since we elected Trump. We just had a red wave in 2024?

• 42:12Tom Bilyeu?

  No, well, so...

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Because all the moderates and independents were swinging to the right, because woke was too much, we're going too far, now we need to bring it back in, and Trump's gonna say...

• 42:20Tom Bilyeu?

  I clocked the move to the left starting roughly in the 60s and 70s.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 42:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So that's when you get a sincere, long march through the institutions, which is not a phrase I'm making up, that is literally what, I forget the French guy's name that said, this is what we have to do to win the cultural battle. We need to begin the long march to the institutions. We need to take over education, they've certainly done that. We need to win at local political levels, they've done a lot of that. You look at a one-party state like California. So, for sure, from where I'm sitting, my read is that culturally, we've moved farther and farther to the left, and we have completely lost track of what makes an economy work. I think that much of the energy in the left is either full DSA

• 43:03Tom Bilyeu?

  or the tempered people are, let's mimic Europe, which is insane, it is literally insane. It would be like a race car driver saying, you know what we really need to do? We need to mimic the guy that's in last place and falling behind everybody at a terrifyingly fast clip. You'd be like, what? But that's exactly what we're doing economically. Europe is committing suicide economically. I don't even need you to get into like the immigration of it all. They are committing suicide economically. They do not understand the engine of prosperity. They've got completely delusional, they have no sense of how much you can give away for free without hurting yourself, and so they are driving themselves into the ground.

• 43:43Tom Bilyeu?

  They are in for a hard time, there's a reason that they've been on fire for almost six weeks now, that it's spreading, all of that, their policies, which are based on their cultural move to the left, are so lunatic, it is absolutely insane. Did you guys know, there's a four-day work week in France, and these guys are complaining that they're not getting paid enough? Kids, you work like 32 hours a week, no joke. That kind of shit is just crazy. They do not understand what makes an economy work, and therefore they keep shooting themselves in the face. Therein lies the problem. So, I look at all of this, and I've said many times, politics is downstream of culture, and I see the culture moving farther and farther to the left. You put those together, and you have a trend

• 44:27Tom Bilyeu?

  that hopefully will be kept in check through the political system, that hopefully, like I was saying earlier, that we'll see enough of this energy swell on the left, and then people that are moderate will be like, alright, listen, we need to come back to the center. That's all I'm ever looking for. I'm not a one-party state guy, I do not want the right to be, have total control, that would be a disaster. I don't want the left to have total control, that would be a disaster. So I look at the culture right now, I think it's gonna swing left, and I think that the left is, unfortunately, a little too convinced that they are right. And when they start calling for, it's not an incitement to violence, so let's be very careful about how we say this, but when you have somebody as traditionally thoughtful as Scott Galloway

• 45:12Tom Bilyeu?

  saying that we need to treat Musk like the Rosenbergs, who we executed, as a reminder, that is a level of crazy that is very distressing. Now, if you're hearing that from a blue-haired 21-year-old who's never worked in the real world, that's very different than hearing it from a hyper-successful entrepreneur and investor. That's crazy. That's where I'm like, yo, this is gonna get weird.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. There was a good exchange between Benny Johnson and Shermichael Singleton. People know Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator. Shermichael Singleton, also a conservative commentator, he does the TV route. Ben Johnson does the alternative media route. Ben Johnson had this tweet, "In the 1970s, the white population in Texas was 89%. In 2000, it was 50%, now it's less than 39%. Demographics is destiny. For those that don't know, Texas turned blue." Shermichael retweeted it, nonsense, dude. "In 2024, Trump won 55% of Hispanics in Texas and 34% of black men. Was it conveniently demographic, Stan? We had every opportunity to deliver and did it. Instead, those voters got a costly war that raised gas prices and diesel, prolonged tariffs that increased the cost of goods, and poorly executed immigration policy that turned people off, and that's putting it mildly."

• 46:22Speaker 03

  And it's the demographics excuses should fall on deaf ears, because if that were true, there's no way in hell we would've gotten the numbers we received in 2024. There was a generation opportunity to realign crucial voting blocks, and Republicans screwed up. Instead of making excuses, the party needs to have a serious reality check about what is obviously not working, and move forward so that way the focus can be on 2028 and 2032." I think that's why I'm pushing back on you so much now, is because I don't want this postmortem to be, people wanted to be woke again, people wanted free shit again, people... There is something to, Republicans had cultural energy. Joe Rogan, Thiel von...

• 46:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Pause really fast. So, I have gone way out of my way in all of this to make sure people hear me saying this is a vote against the Republicans.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Not me saying that this is like a woke brigade or anything like that. So, one, I agree with the second guy, what was his name?

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Shermichael Singleton.

• 47:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So, I agree with Shermichael Singleton.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So, if you think that I'm saying something other than exactly what he just said, then you're not hearing me. Now, I will say on this, that the whole idea of demographics are destiny, that has become a phrase because it is true. Now, there are two different issues that need to be teased out. The reason that I don't lead with immigration in all my talks about this, I don't even lead with immigration when I talk about what's happening in fucking France, is I think people are, immigration's real, you cannot just say that, oh, demographics don't matter. That would be fuck... So, demographics matter a lot, but this election is exactly what he's talking about,

• 47:54Tom Bilyeu?

  in terms of, we had an opportunity to reorient people, to realign something that was actually going to make life for the middle class better, and the Republicans fumbled that ball in like historic fashion. If I were going to write the same response, you've gotta do the, alright, listen, to give the devil its due, yes, unchecked immigration is a problem, this is not something that you can ignore, there are going to be changes in all of that, but, meaning, this will have an impact on culture. Now, having said all of that, when you look at it, if you try to peg this by race, you are gonna get perpetually confused. Which is why I say that phrase all the fucking time. This is a values question, this is not about race. And so, what you're seeing here is, at a values level,

• 48:38Tom Bilyeu?

  that you can appeal to Hispanics, and it isn't about the fact that they're white or not white. It is about, what are the fucking values? And so, the core mistake that Benny is making is to conflate skin color with values. And so, that's why, when you look at France, and you're like, I, when people wanna tell the story that this is a fucking immigrant problem, and then they're like, wait, these, some of these people are second and third generation, people that grew up in France, they didn't even have parents, they grew up somewhere else. Their parents grew up in France, they fucking grew up in France, they have the Frenchest accent in all fucking time. And then you look around, you're like, god damn, there's a lot of white people that are probably ethnically French. So, how do I explain this?

• 49:20Tom Bilyeu?

  It's very fucking easy. This is a values question. And when you have people turn against the West, you've got a problem. You have people turning against America, for sure. The fact that it doesn't break along racial lines should surprise exactly nobody. So the question is, if you let a bunch of white as fucking snow people that hate America into America, you're gonna have a fucking problem. And so the fact that people keep trying to map this to race is so dumb. It's boring because I have to keep fucking repeating myself. It's so detached from real life that I'm just like, Jesus Christ, how do these people walk around in life and actually get something done? Because they are so mismapping the fundamental truth.

• 50:01Tom Bilyeu?

  But if you can't get people to understand, when you have unchecked immigration, the odds that you're letting people in your country that do not care about your country skyrocket. And if you're not very careful about who you let into your country, you're going to have a values collision because you did not select on values. Now, that it will also likely map, in some cases, depending on the countries, because of how evolution works, some of those people are gonna have different amounts of melanin in their skin. And then fucking chimps react to that and they fucking spaz out as if that's the issue. You could bring in nothing but Hispanics. You could bring in nothing but Muslims.

• 50:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you map to who are people that are pro-America, pro-freedom, pro-economy, all of that, you would be just fine. So this is where to pretend as if demographics don't matter, and I'm not just talking strictly ethnicity, because ethnicity is merely trying to get at a high-level proxy for values. Or the real thing with demographics is often age. That's really where demographics kick in. So again, demographics matter, but they don't matter for skin color. Jesus Christ. So anyway, I know you're not saying I'm saying that.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:17Tom Bilyeu?

  To be abundantly clear.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  That was not my assumption.

• 51:20Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, no, I'm not. That is me reacting to Benny and where all of this is going to go. Because people are going to keep having this debate as if either demographics don't matter or the demographics actually are a skin color thing. They're not. Skin color is a proxy for, let me guess, at what your value system is going to be. Because you probably grew up somewhere else or whatever. You have allegiances to somewhere else, which is gonna be what you're gonna hear about French people. Or Somalians in Minnesota, whatever. Like, it is a values question. This is why you don't hear me ever whinging about the fact that El Said is Muslim. Great.

• 52:01Tom Bilyeu?

  And like, my beef with him is that his policies, despite what you say, they are fucking DSA. All day, every day, up, down, left, right, BA select start. This kid is so far left.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  He doesn't want to abolish the police. He's not about reparations.

• 52:15Tom Bilyeu?

  We'll see.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Is Medicare for All the thing? Is that the DSA policy?

• 52:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Will Medicare for All break the economy? Yes, it will. So does he immediately become an enemy? Yes, for sure.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  That's different than DSA, though. So are you saying people who say Medicare for All are DSA?

• 52:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, I am saying that Medicare for All is a DSA directional policy.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  That was started in Bernie Sanders before we even knew what the term DSA was.

• 52:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Bernie Sanders' DSA, great. Same thing.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 52:43Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, look, if I were gonna be nuanced, of course, the DSA is more radical.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  That's an older policy, yeah.

• 52:48Tom Bilyeu?

  So what, I wanna be clear. This is direction of travel, Drew. It is direction of travel. And if you, if it feels like you keep ignoring, when I say direction of travel is the thing that worries me, that will be crazy-making on my side of the table. I need to know you understand when I talk about somebody like, those are DSA-like policies, it's DSA-adjacent, it's directionally that way. I don't need that person to even want to be a member. Like, if I could put El Said in an fMRI scanner and I saw legitimately, he doesn't want to be a part of the DSA, that changes nothing for me. Because I hear the words "he says", and I'm like, these are all damaging to the underlying thing that gives us prosperity. It is a problem. It is a direction of travel that is deeply worrying.

• 53:33Tom Bilyeu?

  I think that he has anti-American sentiments. I think that he does believe in American first sin, stolen land, fucking uniquely racist. I think in his heart of hearts, we're gonna see that come out in his rhetoric, which we've already heard in the past. And so that's where I'm like, boys and girls, that cultural frame of reference is extraordinarily toxic to America. And we've got to encourage it out of people. We've got to tell better stories. We've got to show people that this is not the way to look at it. There's an incredible book, I'm in the middle of reading it right now, so the punchline, I suppose, could all fall apart. But the book is called Not Stolen. And it is about how Americans treated Native Americans, or how Europeans, more truthfully, treated Native Americans when they came here.

• 54:17Tom Bilyeu?

  It is a far more complicated story than we are told. And we're given this just like, oh, we're radically evil. Or take the slave trade. The fact that the Brits were the first people to end the slave trade, and yet, we're expected to believe that Europeans are uniquely like these evil slave masters is fucking ahistoric. It is so wild. We've got to start telling stories that are like, yeah, humans are fucking complicated. And guess why you should be paranoid about anybody having too much power? Humans go off the rails. But if you look at the self-correcting mechanisms, how we have created more prosperity than any country ever in all of human history, on and on and on, there is a far more interesting story, a far more optimistic, expansive story to be told

• 55:02Tom Bilyeu?

  that will give people a better image of what America is, was, and can be. Instead of this, what, 1619 Project? And America's uniquely evil, the West is uniquely evil, that we've gotta fight against whiteness. You have what's-her-face, Ilhan Omar, saying we need to be more afraid of white men. It's like, get the fuck out of here. So all of that stuff is-

• 55:22Speaker 03

  But are we still doing, that's like a 2020 talking point. That's woke 2.0.

• 55:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, we are still doing that. As long as that energy is being spouted off, yes, we are putting that energy out.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  I think right now, we're missing the point.

• 55:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so hold on. Are you saying, Drew, is this breaking news? Racism's dead?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Racism, no, of course not.

• 55:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. Then I'm saying, let's try to kill it. Let's really be chill. And let's recognize, this is a values question. And when you say we're shit, like, we need to be more afraid of white people, this is not the way.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Okay, I wanna bring this back.

• 55:55Tom Bilyeu?

  No, no, no.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I'm rejecting that. I'm rejecting that. I'm pulling that out. That's an unnecessary fractal that solves nothing that we need to talk about. It's, we need to get back to election coverage. We need to get back to what we-

• 56:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Before we do that, I wanna understand what you think is happening culturally. Why do you think I'm bringing it up?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Because what I think happening is right now is the same thing that is the reason that the Republicans had, are the result of the blue wave right now. And I think that right now, we need to have an honest look at where America is. We need to stop looking at tweets. We need to stop looking at what have people said at a rally when everybody's all trumped up. I never hold Trump to the same standard that like, he's mean to people because he mocked that journalist. That's not the point that I'm mad at Trump. I'm mad at Trump because of the Iran War. So I think in the same regard, we're looking at something that one person on the left said, not even the policy that they did, not the policy that they tried to push. Something that they tweeted, just let me finish this. That is what we need to figure out, and that's the cultural energy versus what's actually happening on the ground. And I think Republicans need to do two things.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  One, they need to decide if they're gonna be MAGA full-on or if the conservative Republicans, the legacy GOP is gonna just spin off and make their own party. Because right now, MAGA is not sustainable. It's not. J.D. Vance, Rubio, if they run as MAGA, they're going to lose. They need to figure that out. Secondly, what needs to actually change that can help America? You're the Mr. Economy, we need to balance the budget. Nobody has balanced the budget. So that can be the first thing they start. Let's talk about more economics. Let's talk about more about the debt. Let's talk about more things that are actually helping people move forward. But I think if we keep saying the culture war is what's bringing this energy here, and this culture war is doing this over here, we're no longer talking about what actually is causing day-to-day people to flip. Iowa farmers turned blue. Iowa is the whitest place in America. So it's not about Ilhan Omar talking about white men. It's not about woke 2.0.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  It's not about the Muslims. It's about that Trump has made farmer prices 3X, 4X what they were three years ago.

• 57:49Tom Bilyeu?

  So my question is, why do you think I brought this up?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Why do I think you brought the cultural energy up? Because you think that, I'm projecting onto you. You think that there are a few bad actors in politics that are gonna take the energy that is happening culturally. They're gonna use that to hijack a party. And once they hijack the party, they're gonna instruct policies that are gonna run off a cliff.

• 58:07Tom Bilyeu?

  That's very clear and completely wrong.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 58:10Tom Bilyeu?

  What I'm saying is, politics are downstream of culture. We have a cultural problem. I brought up the 1619 Project because a lot of people on the left, our beloved Ryan, I have a feeling that Ryan would agree with the sentiment that America is founded on racism, that there is unique evil to the way that the West has approached things. That is why you have politicians that think it's a good political move to say we need to fear white men more. So what I'm talking about is not that I think that this is about race. I've said a gazillion fucking times that this isn't about race, this is about values. What I'm trying to get across is, the value system is so antithetical to how an economy actually functions.

• 58:55Tom Bilyeu?

  If we don't get people to understand-

• 58:59Tom Bilyeu?

  That America has built something completely unique. It's given us more freedom and more prosperity than any country ever in the history of the world. And if we cannot come to a shared understanding of why that is, then we will keep making mistakes. And I just see us making policy mistake after policy mistake. But those policy mistakes are all downstream of a national story and an international story about the West, about who we are, what we've done, what we're doing, what this is. And it's very deranged. And I'm saying, what I see is that energy is going to grow. There's two stories.

• 59:41Tom Bilyeu?

  There's the rebuke of Trump and the Republicans, which is where we opened. Very important. That was always meant to be the meat and potatoes of what we're talking about here. Then there's the secondary story, which I only brought up after like 35, 40 minutes of talking about the down the middle race and what happened, where I'm saying, hey, now let's talk about Scott Galloway and what he's popping off with. And that's a very real thing. And then I think that's where I get frustrated with you, where I feel, just emotion. I feel like sometimes you think I'm trying to have a race conversation and you don't want to get sucked into that because we both agree that's not the real conversation.

• 1:00:23Tom Bilyeu?

  But if we can't ever come to understand for, since the 60s and 70s, the long march to the institution has indoctrinated Americans writ large with an anti-America sense of itself. That will destroy this country. And so that's where I'm like, hey, we've got to start changing that narrative. We've got to, at a cultural level, get people excited about not just what America can be, because you can get people on either side of the political aisle to imagine the America that they want, be excited about that. What we have to get is people excited about the founding story. We need, we need an original myth, a founding myth that people can believe in, that they can understand,

• 1:01:06Tom Bilyeu?

  that we can teach over and over and over about the things that have made us great. And we have been great.

• 1:01:13Tom Bilyeu?

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