Trump’s El Salvador Prison Plan + Ray Dalio’s Global Collapse Warning | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. Today, we're diving into an intriguing aspect of our ever-evolving world: the complexities of international policies, economic strategies, and the tech-driven transformation shaping society's future. As we unravel these dynamic narratives, we'll touch on everything from the economic forecasts of visionaries like Ray Dalio to the ethical implications of technological advancements like AI sexbots. From the White House premises to the heart of El Salvador, we're addressing the pressing issues that may redefine the way we understand leadership, economics, and technology. Let's embark on this captivating journey of insights and discussion. Now, let's plunge into today's thought-provoking episode. SHOWNOTES 00:00 Debt Cycles, Populism, and Strongmen 09:19 Cultural and Economic Dominance Factors 13:19 Economic Warfare Escalation 16:41 Bukele's Impact on El Salvador's Crime 21:37 CNN Bias on Immigration Policies 27:58 Supreme Court's Ambiguous Ruling 35:03 Hamilton on Pardons and Legal Balance 39:04 Skepticism Over Fast Predictions 44:44 "Federal Funding vs. Institutional Autonomy" 50:32 "Manage Your Own Psychology" 56:02 "Myelination Impact on Human Connections" 59:01 "The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan" 01:06:03 Mastering Neurochemistry and Life's Game CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com https://www.vitalproteins.com/ and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Kettle & Fire: Get 20% off your first order at https://kettleandfire.com/impact with code IMPACT Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Thrive Market: ​​Go to https:thrivemarket.com/impact http://thrivemarket.com/impact for 30% off your first order, plus a FREE $60 gift! American Alternative Assets: If you're ready to explore gold as part of your investment strategy, call 1-888-615-8047 or go to https://TomGetsGold.com https://tomgetsgold.com/ Tech Unheard: Tune into Tech Unheard from Arm and NPM—wherever you get your podcasts. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Mint Mobile: If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at https://mintmobile.com/impact. https://mintmobile.com/impact DISCLAIMER: Upfront payment of $45 for 3-month 5 gigabyte plan required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customer offer for first 3 months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes & fees extra. See MINT MOBILE for details. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Trump wants to liberate Americans by sending US citizens to jail in El Salvador. He also declares victory in the Kilmar Garcia deportation case, while the Supreme Court is like, hey, that's not what we meant. Ray Dalio is worried about something worse than a recession. RFK says the HHS will identify the cause of autism by the fall.

• 1:28Tom Bilyeu?

  Harvard University sparks debate when they clap back against Trump defunding them. Drew and I debate the ethics of AI sex bots. Drew, WWE plus politics. This is real life, man. This is bananas.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  At this point, every time somebody comes to the White House, it's just an interesting story. Like, nobody just comes, shakes his hand, and leaves. It's always headline, headline, spicy take.

• 1:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that they're doing all of this in public. I love it so much. This is amazing. I have a feeling that when... This changes and we don't have Trump as the president, that it's not going to be like this anymore. So I am savoring getting to see how his mind works for better or worse. I want to see this man. Like, we are really seeing the personality of the people running this country. Sometimes I'm excited and other times I'm mortified. But being able to see it is, I think, a huge win for the public.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  We'll see how it all pans out. Before we jump into the, his meeting with Bukele in the White House, Ray Dalio kind of set a start turn about what's happening in the economy right now. Everybody's talking about tariffs, people are talking about rising costs, but he worries about something far more greater than just like a regular recession when he was with me to press over the weekend.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I think that, um, right now, we are at a decision-making point and very close to recession. And I'm worried about something worse than a recession if this isn't handled well. A recession is two negative quarters of GDP, and whether it goes slightly there, we always have those things. We have something that's much more profound. We have a breaking down of the monetary order. We are going to change the monetary order because we cannot spend the amounts of money. So we have that problem. And when we talk about the dollar and we talk about tariffs, we have that. We are having profound changes in our domestic

• 3:21Speaker 02

  order, how ruling is existing, and we're having profound changes in the world order. Such times are very much like the 1930s. I've studied history and this repeats over and over again.

• 3:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's how you have to understand Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio right now is banging on the desk, he's screaming at the top of his lungs, his vocal cords are tearing. He just always displays it like this, but he is really trying to get people to hear what he's saying. Now, the part that he's not saying is, when he's talking about the 1930s, he's talking very specifically about Europe. He's talking very specifically about the rise of Hitler. Ray is really trying to get people to understand that there's a big debt cycle. And when that big debt cycle loops around people, you get populism because there ends up being this massive spread between the wealthy and the poor. And it creates all this unrest and the people who feel that they're being treated poorly in that moment, they long for a strong man that will come kick the shit out of people and make

• 4:18Tom Bilyeu?

  life better for them. And historically, when people make that promise, they're not the best of people. It can break bad, I will just say that. And so I don't think that Ray is saying, hey, this is inevitable. He's certainly not saying that Trump is Hitler. He's just saying these things come together into a situation where debt creates a completely unsustainable reality. You have to do something, the something that you do. And by the way, because I have been checked by people because I don't always take time to explain why debt creates this situation. I'll give a very small nutshell. If you think more is needed, I'll go deeper. When you get debt like that, the only way to sustain those debts is to deficit spend. And so you end up inflating the money supply.

• 5:03Tom Bilyeu?

  It's actually the inflation of the money supply that drives asset prices way up, which is exactly how you get that growth of inequality between the rich and the poor. And we're seeing that play out right now, but it is tied to debt, which is something that Ray is very careful to explain. Every empire in history that has ever made its way to being the world's reserve currency falls prey to printing money. And all of them have devalued their currency like to 99%. So even the UK, which hey, is still a great country, love them to death, but they used to be like number one, and now they are way lower on the totem pole. And literally the sterling lost over, I think, 99% of its value in the last 120 years or whatever.

• 5:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is not a like, oh, no big deal. Like this is exactly how, as he says in his new book, countries go broke. So he, again, he has a demeanor that's very subdued, but this is him banging on the table, slapping it, trying to get people to pay attention to say this cycle is knowable. And if we are not very careful, this doesn't end in a recession. This ends in either a global depression or outright kinetic war.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  We joked around about it on the live that, you know, sometimes when you're hungover, you take that last shot and it kind of puts you over the edge. Or is this like, is there any way to kind of get off of this trail? Or is it just kind of an inevitability that it's going to end in one of those two things?

• 6:25Tom Bilyeu?

  It's so close to an inevitability that it is far, there's far more predictive validity to go, ooh, we're in a tractor beam and it is pulling us towards over inflating our currency, finally hitting the breaking point, the rest of the world moving away from our currency. And so I think, and now I am prognosticating a little bit, but I think that Ray would say, okay, you, the world order is going to be disrupted. And if this isn't handled well, this continues to escalate and become a bigger problem. Or if it's handled well, and he's very cagey about what handling it well looks like, he'll say things like, you have to delever, he calls it the 3% promise.

• 7:05Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got to get your debt to GDP ratio where your debt or the servicing of your debt is only 3% of GDP. And he's right, but the way that you do that, he doesn't often comment on, which is exactly what we need is, okay, Ray and other people like him who are, they are economists in practice, meaning that Ray has made more money than anybody else by looking at the world and saying, this is how things are going to change. This is how global economies are interwoven. And given the way that the debt cycle works and a whole bunch of other factors, this is what I think is going to happen. And he's bet on it for the last 50 years and been more right than anybody else.

• 7:48Tom Bilyeu?

  People will be quick to point out that in the last 10 years, his returns have been soft, but I think it's because he knows something's coming and he's just trying to hedge his bets and not hit a terminal event where he's so like out over his skis that when something bad happens that he gets caught off guard because figuring out the timing precisely is next to impossible. So that's.

• 8:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That situation, going back to your analogy, it really is like that. But it's the idea that it's not the one shot that causes the problem. It's all of the partying and all of the psychological things that made you want to go to the club, to impress the ladies, to try to get laid, to flex and make it look like you have access to resources. That whole thing, the algorithms running in the human mind that pulls us all together around alcohol and dancing and flirtation and all of that. There's a similar thing going on from an economic standpoint, which is a country becomes the dominant country for whatever reason. After World War II, we were the dominant country because there was very little kinetic warfare in our country.

• 8:56Tom Bilyeu?

  We did in Pearl Harbor, but beyond that, nothing else. So we were able to spin up our manufacturing, which hopefully has echoes now as to why people are certainly why I'm banging the drum about the need to have manufacturing capabilities, certainly as it applies to energy, technology, warfare, just absolute must haves. And because we were able to spin up our manufacturing, basically the whole world owed us a whole bunch of money. And so at the end of World War II, we hadn't taken the damage that everybody else had. We came into the war really late, so we hadn't even lost as many people as some of the other major players have per capita. And we were in a tremendous financial situation.

• 9:37Tom Bilyeu?

  So we could establish the Pax Americana World Order, where it was like the US dollar is going to be the world reserve currency. That's going to give us a ton of leverage financially to be able to go into debt. And in the beginning, you think, hey, just gonna have one cocktail. It's gonna be fine, maybe two, Drew, maybe two. And then you start having such a good time. Literally, you're having a great time and you realize, hey, when we print a little bit of money, have another shot, there's no problem. And you have another shot, there's no problem. And what you unfortunately don't find out until it's much too late, even if you manage your buzz such that you're still able to walk around, still able to engage, you're not blackout drunk, but your body just can't process that much debt, that much alcohol.

• 10:21Tom Bilyeu?

  And so eventually you vomit and that's when you've you've just pushed things too far and there is a consequence to be paid. And so we're in that moment now where we know we've had a lot to drink. And now the question becomes. Is there something, can we drink a lot of water? Like, what do we do?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Eat a bunch of bread.

• 10:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Exactly, to try to undo this stuff. And the undoing it when you've accumulated this much debt is extremely difficult. And I think all of us have had those experiences where it's like, oh, I actually got off easy. And for some reason, I feel fine the next day. I played things just right. I slowed down early enough. I waited to go to bed. Like, we're trying to find the economic equivalence of those. And now I will not make any attempt to speak for Ray. And I will just say, I look over at Trump and I just see more shots going down. And I'm like, oof, this is where, um, we're now not talking about money printing. So I'll ject out of the, uh, out of the analogy and into the reality. And it's just, there's so much uncertainty being created right now.

• 11:21Tom Bilyeu?

  It may work out, but it might not. And it just may end up in disaster. So I have and can articulate what, if he's doing it in X, Y, Z way, it could play out this way. And it could end up being fine, but it's such a high risk game that's being played right now that people really do need to wake up to the amplitude of the potential consequences here. So that we are now doing everything we can, reduce our debt, slow down, like get some, um, get as much certainty in the economy as you can while understanding you absolutely must

• 12:04Tom Bilyeu?

  alter the world order, because the way that it's going now is because of the debt, is driving you directly into Thucydides' trap where the US and China are going to collide. First economically, we're literally already in it. Remember, Ray has these six stages of this. And he's been saying now for like two years that we're midway through part five. And it's like, just each part of that cycle keeps revealing itself. That first, the warfare will be, um, political, then the warfare will become economic. And then if you can't solve it at that point, the warfare becomes kinetic. And so we need to snap out of it, be very clear eyed about where we're at in the cycle and what we need to do to deescalate this.

• 12:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And the easiest one is you've got to stop deficit spending. You've got to stop printing money. And right now, given the way that things are ratcheting up, that's the only solution I see on the horizon. And you'll hear Besen talk about, hey, we've got options, which is basically that if we see liquidity drying up in the bond market, treasuries will go in and will start manufacturing liquidity. And so the Fed's saying, we don't need to do it yet. We're nowhere near there. Besen is saying, don't need to do it yet. We're nowhere near there. How much of that's PR and how much of that's real? It's on the table as an item to discuss, which should scare the life out of everybody.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  On the other side, though, to be fair, the Republicans new budget bill that includes tax cuts and increase in military spending, that doesn't help the deficit in our debt problem.

• 13:38Tom Bilyeu?

  It's the wrong way. If, if they are not able to make good on tariffs generating revenue, the gold card generating revenue, and then Doge being able to deliver enough savings that like the military increase is accounted for and the decrease in some of the other stuff. Because I think the military budget is only going up like 15%. That, that number is approximate.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, 150 billion.

• 14:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Roughly correct.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  To 850, now it's going to hit a trillion.

• 14:05Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's not inconceivable that we could find savings that would match that. But you'd certainly rather see them both going in the same direction. But the reality is with the absolute need to onshore some critical manufacturing and be prepared from a military standpoint, because right now you're getting, China's outproducing you on, on ships is always one I go to, because this is one that I have looked at. But they're, they're outproducing it. It's something like 20 to one. It's not a little thing. It's a very massive difference. And given the historical importance of controlling the seas,

• 14:47Tom Bilyeu?

  that's not a small thing for China to be ramping up like that.

• 14:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories. They skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere, starting at just 60 bucks. 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now, I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else. I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well. And I can tell you their whole line is high quality.

• 15:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. 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. The business phone that's built so you never miss a call or a customer. QUO writes up your calls for you and one click

• 16:20Tom Bilyeu?

  turns any of them into a task with a name and a due date. The follow-up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, QUO's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and ChatGPT. Ask who called while you were out and it's handled. QUO is the number one rated business phone on G2. It's trusted by over 90,000 businesses. When money is on the line, always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/impact.

• 17:03Tom Bilyeu?

  That's Q U O dot com slash impact.

• 17:08Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  We'll see how things play out. I think that there's a lot of turmoil happening in the world, and we're back into the White House, where yesterday President Bukele of El Salvador came to visit Donald Trump. They talked about the pending case with Kilmar Garcia, as well as Trump might use El Salvador to host more American prisoners. Is that like a weird thing for you, before I play that clip, like, American prisoners getting kind of exported for their punishment?

• 17:37Tom Bilyeu?

  It is. It definitely, I'm now in emotion. It does not hit me well. This sounds like Australia prison colonies, nothing about that, just at an emotional level feels right. The idea, though, that you have to get the criminals off your streets, that, I like that a lot. I think that that is absolutely true. I think that what Bukele has done in El Salvador proves, if, there's a known contingent of people creating the problem. It's usually young, aggressive, disaffected, young men. And if you round

• 18:13Tom Bilyeu?

  up the most aggressive people, as evidenced by criminality, association with gangs, you're gonna be headed in the right direction, right? And Bukele has done some pretty amazing things. In fact, we have somebody here that I want to give us two cents in a second. But nonetheless, this is a dangerous game that has to be done well. And the more I read about the founders of America, they really understood, like, this is a system that's like this constant give and take, push and pull. You've got three branches of government. They're not all equal, though, which is interesting. I thought they were always meant to be equal. They are not meant to be equal. Judiciary, at least according

• 18:58Tom Bilyeu?

  to Alexander Hamilton, was always meant to be the weakest of the three branches. I don't know what you're gonna talk about, because Trump is certainly treating them like the weakest, maybe a bit too much. And so, understanding that all of this stuff is a delicate dance, there's no solutions, there's only trade-offs, all that stuff comes into play, and this stuff gets very, very messy, very quickly. But I think that Trump, constitutionally, just does not have any of those breaks. Like, there's no, there's no sense of the nuance. There's blunt force trauma.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Okay, I kind of want to go through like a breakdown of the timeline for this Kilmar Garcia. Before we play the reactions and what the explosion in the White House. As we were kind of doing our research leading up to the show, we were reading two different articles, got two different responses, so we wanted to kind of level set and kind of lay out a timeline. So as it's stated right now, Kilmar Garcia came into the US illegally when he was a teenager. He's been here over a decade, longer than that. He stays with his wife, who is a US citizen, in Maryland. In 2019, he was arrested, and he was then brought into an immigration court. That immigration court deemed him a member, one, that he's illegal, he has no right to be here, and that he was a member of MS-13.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  After that, they sent it to another court, another immigration court, who put a hold on the deportation, because they were worried that if they did export him to El Salvador, he will be killed because of his criminal, his gang affiliations.

• 20:27Tom Bilyeu?

  And that there was a rival gang called the Eighteenth Street Gang, that is precisely who was going to go after him.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Since then, the Eighteenth Street Gang has been disbanded. So now with Trump and their mass deportations that happened a few weeks ago, he was one of the people brought up into that. And they're anchoring on the 2019 case to say that they deemed him illegal in MS-13. Now that MS-13 is an official terrorist organization, there's no more protections for him, he can now get expelled from the company, from the country. So with that, as a timeline, you're going to hear a bunch of back and forth between both what happened in the White House, and then we have a CNN lawyer commentator who gave us what the Supreme Court interpretation actually meant, and then we can kind of have our reactions after those two.

• 21:10Tom Bilyeu?

  This is one thing, one more thing, just to put in people's minds. What you're gonna see is two different sides claiming victory. So people that want, and this was a 9-0 Supreme Court decision. So they unanimously said something. And the Trump administration is saying that unanimously said we were right and that the federal district court judge had no ability to tell us how to run foreign policy. And then the other side is saying, what are you talking about? This was 9-0 that you absolutely need to bring this person back into the country.

• 21:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And you've got to now run the process, the way that you would run the process on anybody that wasn't erroneously deported, which is how they're saying that the Supreme Court decision played out. Okay. With that all in mind, now we're going to do our best to give you guys both sides of this.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Can you just also respond to that question? Because, you know, it's asked by CNN and they always ask it with a slant because they're totally slanted because they don't know what's happening. That's why nobody's watching them. But would you answer that question also?

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yes, gladly. So as Pam mentioned, there's an illegal alien from El Salvador. So with respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador. So it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point. As two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13. When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States. So he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that under our law, he's not

• 23:05Speaker 04

  even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation. This issue was then by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that Neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who again is a member of MS-13,

• 23:47Speaker 04

  which as I'm sure you understand rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world, and I can promise you if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.

• 23:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, one thing that I'm always trying to remind myself is I'm being spun at all times, and that even whether I want to or not, I'm spinning people because I have a worldview, and I have a frame of reference, and everything I say is going to adhere to the frame of reference that I have. And we're all doing it all the time. Now, I think some people, certainly in the political arena, are doing it in a more aggressive, possibly, this won't always be true, but possibly nefarious way. They want you to see something in a certain way that allows them to either get power or maintain power. And so people are always going to position you, spin you, try to get you to see things through their lens, and by controlling the frame, you can control the debate. And so what we're witnessing

• 24:41Tom Bilyeu?

  in this specific case is the clash of two frames. So the first thing I did was go look up, how, what is the Supreme Court saying about this? Because they were the ones that ruled 9-0 on something, and so what are they saying? We'll get to that in a second. But, um, here is, is there more that you want to play here, or do you want to go to the legal analysis?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I thought you were setting that up, but we could play more.

• 25:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, no, no, no. If there's more here, hit this.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Supreme Court, Steve, was it 9-0?

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yes, it was a 9-0. In our favor. In our favor, against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual, at El Salvador's sole discretion, was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here, because he is a citizen of El Salvador. That is the President of El Salvador. Your questions about it, per the court, can only be directed to him.

• 25:38Tom Bilyeu?

  It is my understanding that that's not... Quite what it said. Again, what it said was that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of this person. Now, the implication is that if El Salvador, and they're actually quite careful, I don't know if it's in the clip that we have here, but I think it was Trump that ends up saying, like, yeah, we would supply an airplane or whatever to bring him back. And I remember when I first heard that and hadn't heard the distinction around the word facilitate yet, I was like, why would he supply the plane if El Salvador was sending him back? He clearly doesn't want, because he has to, to adhere to what the Supreme Court ruling says. So the question ends up becoming, why did the Supreme Court give

• 26:23Tom Bilyeu?

  him the wiggle room that they gave him? And when the Supreme Court speaks out, it's not all nine judges. Now, do I read anything into that? Was it just the other ones were too busy? I don't know what to make of that. But it is, you are being spun.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then with that, let's go to the other side and kind of see Chief and the legal analyst Paula Reid, how she broke down exactly what the ruling actually said. CNN brought her on, she's independent. Yeah, chief legal correspondent.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  President Trump and President Bukele made it clear that Abrego Garcia will not be returned to the United States despite this US Supreme Court ruling saying that Trump had to facilitate his return. So are they just ignoring a US Supreme Court ruling? Or is the fact that the ruling was so mushy, in your words, giving him an opening?

• 27:18Speaker 06

  It's a technical term I learned in law school, Jake. Mushy, look, they're working within the ambiguity that the Supreme Court justices gave them. They did not order the administration to return him to the United States. They said that they need to facilitate this return. They could have said, we order him returned, but they didn't do that. So you heard the Attorney General, she was being very careful in the Oval Office when she was asked, you know, would you help? She says, of course, we'd provide a plane, right? Thereby facilitating whatever El Salvador is doing. The Supreme Court appeared to defer to the executive branch, given that this is an international matter. And you see, yes, it does look a little bit like a semantic game, but they are playing within the bounds of what the Supreme Court ruled. So no, they are not defying this order.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  And take a listen to how White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller views it.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  And a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised with the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  Stephen, you got the win. I don't know, I don't know why he had to go so far because what he's saying is not completely accurate. I want to talk to the kid. All right. So the district court said that the administration needed to facilitate and effectuate the return of this man to the United States and gave a date. The Supreme Court says, yes, you need to facilitate this, but when it comes to effectuating, making it happen, they said this needs to go back down to the lower court. They need to clarify what that meant, and they warned the lower court, you need to be deferential to the executive branch because we're talking about foreign affairs. And they gave no deadline. So again, they're not running afoul, but Stephen's summary of the case there, the holding, it's not exactly accurate.

• 29:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. So after hearing all that, I was like, all right, I want to know what the Supreme Court is saying on this. The Supreme Court has addressed the matter concerning Kilmar Abrego Garcia. On April 10th, 2025, the court unanimously ruled that the Trump administration must facilitate, in quotes, "his release from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case is handled as it would have been handled had he not been improperly deported." The court acknowledged that Abrego Garcia's removal was illegal and emphasized the government's obligation to rectify the situation. And then it goes on. Justice Sonia, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Kentaji

• 29:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Brown Jackson, expressed concern over the administration's position, warning that it could set a dangerous precedent, allowing the government to deport individuals without legal consequences, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. So it is, it's very interesting to me that they allowed for this squishy interpretation, that they are sending it back down to the district court judge to clarify what they mean by facilitate. This is one where...

• 30:30Tom Bilyeu?

  I really want to better understand if the Supreme Court is doing, leaving the room for interpretation because they don't want to step on the executive branch's ability to run foreign policy? Is this, um, is this something else? I, I am very surprised, given that what the Supreme Court is supposed to do is say, this is either constitutional or unconstitutional, that they didn't give like a very clear line in the sand that not only would their ruling be clear, but that if they're, the justices are going to come out and talk about this, that they would just reiterate exactly, this is a line in the sand.

• 31:13Tom Bilyeu?

  This is exactly what has to be done according to the Constitution. Uh, and so I'm going to guess over time, I will learn that this is the way that this game is played, that they are allowing for the executive branch to remain in control and that when they're unclear, their job is to not be quote unquote activist and to just say, look, this is, the Constitution doesn't have anything very clear. And so we're going back on the, um, foreign policy is meant to be handled by the executive branch. And therefore we see that out, we're gonna let it remain in his court and not be constantly trying to override him. That's my gut instinct, but we'll see how this plays out over time.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Because the legal system is a precedence game, it definitely raises a red flag for me. Because what happened, and we can interchange the labels, but what happened was a population of people that were in the United States were rounded up and sent away. And in, yes, when you add the moniker of illegal and alien, a couple of people lean back in their chairs and say, okay, that makes sense to me. But I'm, I'm nervous, I, my 1984 book, uh, report is starting to jump up where I'm starting to realize if you change that moniker from illegal alien to domestic terrorist to dissident to insurgent, and if those words keep changing, it can then start to hit actual US citizens. And that's, I think, is a, is a bigger red line.

• 32:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, here's the bad news. He literally talks about US. Citizens in the meeting with Bukelley when asked like would you send an American citizen to jail in El Salvador, his answer is yes. Now, he's saying if they are ultra violence, one of like the examples he gives, if you rape a 78 year old woman, or you beat an old woman in the back of the head with a baseball bat, those are the kind of people that I would send. So he's not saying like shoplifters and stuff, but it is

• 33:07Tom Bilyeu?

  it is all too easy for it to keep moving in that direction for sure.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Definitely. Now, I know that we're talking about this at the policy level. We wanted to kind of take another look at it from like a more empathetic on the ground level. So we have our boy G in the building today. And G, I know your family is from El Salvador, right?

• 33:25Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  So from your perspective, how has this been? I know during the election cycle, when my family's Haitians, and when we were eating dogs and cats, it was hilarious and funny, but also traumatizing and like weird. So I feel like El Salvador citizens are having that moment right now. So just from your perspective, what has this like last couple of weeks looked like for you?

• 33:44Speaker 07

  For sure. I mean, this is a very interesting time for the country in general. Obviously, we went from being one of the most dangerous countries on the Western Hemisphere to now being the safest, deemed the safest. And that's something we take pride in. I get to go visit my family.

• 34:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Specifically because of what Bukelley did?

• 34:01Speaker 07

  Because of what Bukelley has done in terms of rounding out all the criminals, making just the streets safe again, from an education standpoint, from a health standpoint, bringing back social security programs, things like this that ultimately helped the working class. All these things have been great. This particular situation with this case in Maryland is a bit sad. From my perspective, only because I know that that specific generation is part of the generation that necessarily didn't have a chance to, you know, have a future in El Salvador. They were part of the class that was always trying to escape. The gang life itself, right? And in many ways, a lot of, not a lot, but a small percentage of the people that are in jail right now had to essentially affiliate to the gangs in

• 34:44Speaker 07

  order to save themselves or their families, right? And so these are parts of these different cases that are now surging that we're kind of forgetting that they at some point were also just, they were in the victim, the victim chair, you know, and to this day, what he's been working, he's been in the, this particular guy, he's been in the States for what, 17, 18 years, 20 years? And assuming he's made a pretty good life of himself, um, that it's something to think about that it's not always as black and white as you seem, you know, he's not completely a terrorist, right? Maybe he had to do these things to, again, to protect his family, but that also involved him having to leave the country to fight for his better, you know, better life for himself and his family. So these are just things to be, that need to be taken into account when evaluating the

• 35:28Speaker 07

  cases that I don't think necessarily are right now. So, you know, while I am happy that I can go back and visit my, that my parents cannot retire there and that, you know, that kids can go on the street, be out in the street through midnight, that moms and dads can go out work wherever they want, different parts of the country, knowing that they're gonna make it back. There, there is that small fraction of people that are suffering the consequences of something that they didn't, they didn't really have control over. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's a tough situation to be in for sure.

• 35:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, and I, thank you, by the way, I really appreciate you talking about that. So, obviously, here at a company like this where we do media and we're talking about all these things, um, we certainly encourage everybody here in the company to, if you've got something to say, say it, because I want to know, is there a better way for me to think? And so, as we were talking about this before we started rolling, G had said, you know, that, um, it is priceless seeing the change happen in El Salvador and, uh, at the same time, it is scary to start hearing your country's name thrown around like this. People getting snatched off the streets, maybe they're the right person to grab, maybe they're not. And then for me, it triggers that there's no solutions, there's only trade-offs.

• 36:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, it's interesting the way Bukele talks about this, that, uh, this is him saying it, "I don't think of myself as having imprisoned thousands of people, I see myself as having liberated millions of people." And so, Trump was then, you know, grabbing onto that line, and, "Oh, I love that, I'm gonna use that." And he isn't wrong, but it's like, man, do you...

• 37:04Tom Bilyeu?

  You want to create a lifeline so that there is a way to figure out, did we get somebody wrong? I'm not saying stop the momentum. I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying, again, not to overquote Alexander Hamilton, but Alexander Hamilton, the most quoted person by the Supreme Court, by the way, has been quoted over 300 times, sorry, 291 times as of 2000. So I imagine it's over 300 by now. And he was the one that pushed for pardons, for the president to be able to get pardons, because he said, in a moment where the necessary, this is a paraphrase, but the necessary force with which the legal system must act,

• 37:48Tom Bilyeu?

  if it doesn't have that kind of relief valve, then it just becomes too draconian. And that's the thing that I want to see showing up here in a way that it's not, is right now, this feels like team ball. And the other side wants to dunk on Trump and say, see, like, this is all wrong. Like, you're getting the wrong people. And Trump wants to be like, wow, we're perfect. We haven't gotten anybody. And so I want that energy of we'll make mistakes, but we'll correct them quickly. And look, maybe legitimately, this guy isn't a mistake. And maybe people that look closely at this are like, he really is MS-13.

• 38:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Nonetheless, the energy that I would love to hear coming off of we, the people, is there needs to be some path to review that if we catch the wrong person, that we look at it and we say, cool. Now, if they're saying, we've looked at this guy, we love that there is a review path. He's been reviewed and we stand by it. Okay, but the energy is more just like, you're fucking dumb. You don't understand how this procedure works. And if you don't believe me that that's the energy, watch Stephen Miller talking to the press. Now, admittedly, he called them out. They didn't, they don't understand the law. But the thing that if I'm going to be charitable from their perspective is, yeah, but you're acting like a dick.

• 39:08Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's like, right now, in this moment, we need to know that if we've got people here in the country that are getting caught up in this, again, maybe this isn't the guy. But if we've got somebody that's erroneously gotten caught up in this, that you guys are going to pump the brakes, look at that and come up with some sort of resolution.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll see. This is still actively happening. We'll see if they book a deal or something. But as of right now, Kumar Garcia will be remaining in the El Salvadorian prison. Thank you, G. Appreciate you, man. Yeah, no doubt.

• 39:39Speaker 07

  For sure. No, no doubt. Thank you.

• 39:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Quick break, but don't go anywhere. There's more to come after this short break from our sponsors. All right, we're back. Let's get into it.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  In other news, RFK has made an announcement that he'll figure out what caused the rise in autism by September. Let's go to the clip that he had with Fox News.

• 40:01Speaker 08

  The studies that they did were very, very narrow, and there were about 17 studies. The Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, says that 14 of those studies are invalid. And the biggest weakness in those studies is they never studied vaccinated versus unvaccinated group, which is the only way that you can really make this determination. And more importantly, none of the vaccines that are given to children during the first six months of life were ever studied. We're going to look at vaccines, but we're going to look at everything. Everything is on the table. Our food system, our water, our air, different ways of parenting, all the kind of changes that may have triggered this epidemic.

• 40:46Speaker 08

  It is an epidemic. Epidemics are not caused by genes. Genes can provide a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. So we know that it is an environmental toxin that is causing this cataclysm. And we are going to identify it. We are narrowly focused on identifying it and using as many scientists we can from universities and research centers all over the world. Focus them through NIH, through Jay Bhattacharya, to focus them on answering this question.

• 41:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, I am shocked that he's calling his shot that fast, that we're gonna have an answer, whatever, five months from now. It would be incredible. So not to get lost in the timeline, so I'll be a little surprised if they actually have a definitive answer that quickly. To say that means you already think you know. But that he is pursuing this stuff should be, in my opinion, the least controversial thing in the world. Of all the people to be in a twist about, I just, I cannot track how any sensible, clear-thinking person is bothered by what he's what he's trying to do. So if he were to come back and say, without evidence, it's vaccines,

• 42:02Tom Bilyeu?

  then I would understand if people said, hey, the methodology that you use doesn't make any sense. There's no way that you can call this. We gotta have a debate. This is crazy. I'd be all for that. But when somebody's like, we're gonna look at everything. Everything's on the table. We've got to figure something out. The numbers I'm gonna give are directionally correct, if not literally correct. That back in whatever, the 1970s, it was like 1 in 10,000 people had autism, and now it's like 1 in 37. It's insanity. So that kind of freakish rise, to his point, that's an epidemic. There is a cause. That cause is knowable, but you've got to do the work to figure out what it is. And so, do you have a sense of like, give me the flip. Why is this controversial? What do people latch on to?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Everybody, I think, when they hear this, they automatically go to vaccines. He's having a war against vaccines. Somebody in Texas just died because of measles.

• 42:55Tom Bilyeu?

  So you're gonna kill people.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're messing with official, established science to uncover some conspiracy theory.

• 43:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Can I throw something in and you tell me where I'm going wrong? When I hear that argument, I'm like, you can still get your kid vaccinated. Unless he says, we're not going to allow vaccines.

• 43:19Tom Bilyeu?

  What's the problem?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  It's irresponsible that your kid doesn't get vaccinated because they can injure my kid.

• 43:24Tom Bilyeu?

  So this is the dumb voter problem. The other people are so stupid, they'll never be able to think through this. We just have to have one blanket party message, vaccine good.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  That is that dirty, but to RFK's credit, he talked about removing fluoride in water. He talked about removing dyes in food. So for him to be the vaccine guy, when he has talked about other issues that I have, to his point, have been environmental factors that can impact this. Um, I'm at least giving him credit for being blanket, like, we're gonna look at everything, everything is on the table. Um, and he's already done legislation in those other areas. I think vaccine is the one thing that he hasn't quite been able to break yet. But it seems like he's trying to start with the science first before any sweeping mandates or anything.

• 44:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, I'm really gonna be curious to see how many, what they call natural experiments have been run. Cause there will inevitably be groups of people like, for instance, oh, during COVID. Parents were terrified to leave their house, so they didn't get their kids vaccinated until they were three, whatever. There will be things like that, or areas in the world where people don't get vaccines for religious reasons, because they're um, an untouched population in the Amazon rainforest, whatever. And you'll be able to see like, oh, wait, this group of people, like, they do this with the Japanese. Uh, you look at the Japanese, no obesity. Maybe it's in the genes, they move to America, they get obese just like everybody else. Nope, guess it's not the genes.

• 44:50Tom Bilyeu?

  So then it becomes, okay, well, there's something else going on, maybe it's not the food supply, though that seems obvious. Uh, but we know that it's not the genes. Um, and

• 45:00Tom Bilyeu?

  given the timelines that they're talking about, he's gotta be doing something like that. They're looking at data that already exists and finding patterns in those. Um, that they're expecting to yield a very conclusive result. And now with AI, I mean, it'll be able to parse through a lot of data.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  In five months, AI will have like seventeen more models and they'll be able to also read brains by that point, so who knows? The president of Harvard, Alan Garber, came out with a statement that has went viral on X.

• 45:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, like, this is crazy. I thought I was misreading the number of users. Forty-eight million, right?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, forty-five point five now.

• 45:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Jesus.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  "No government, regardless of which parties in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admire and admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue."

• 45:48Speaker 01

  A lot of talk has been around secondary education, especially with the protests that happened for Palestine and Israel, that a lot of people are now thinking that because universities will allow that type of demonstration that indirectly supports a terrorist organization, that they should then, one, remove funding, they should be restricted, their curriculum should be reevaluated, and all these things. Um, I know you're Mr. Top Down Bad.

• 46:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, but here, we're hiding the ball on this one. So, the, the quote, let's read it again. "No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue." I agree, he is right. But then you can't be funded by the federal government if you're not going to adhere to their mandates. So, Harvard has, like, fifty billion dollars stored in their endowment. So, the real debate, and the, I mean, the only reason I can think that this has gone viral is that, that this is a debate about, should we be giving money to these institutions, yes or no?

• 46:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And if people want the dollars from the government, then now you're gonna be beholden to what the taxpayers want. It's that simple. And if the taxpayers are saying, because it was my understanding that the issue that really tipped this over was transgender women in female sports. And- If that's true and my understanding is correct, it's like, well, then if you really feel that strongly about it, fair enough. Like, do your thing. You, you're right. As a private institution, you should be able to do whatever you want. And if that's what you want to do, don't take the federal dollars. Use the money from your endowment, which is plenty. I mean, you could run that school, I mean theoretically forever. So, go for it. So I, this is another

• 47:42Tom Bilyeu?

  one of those where I get that they want as much money as they can get. And if they can get money from the government, they're gonna spin and try to get people on their side. Totally understand, but this one seems pretty simple. If you want federal dollars, you're going to have to adhere to what taxpayers are willing to pay for.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And I believe Donald Trump felt something similar because on Truth Social, he tweeted, "Perhaps Harvard should lose its tax exempt status and be taxed as a political entity if he keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist-inspired supporting sickness?" Question mark. Remember, tax exempt status is totally contingent on acting in the public interest.

• 48:15Tom Bilyeu?

  It's so interesting. This is, um, this is very much a Trump way to respond. This is escalatory tariffs. At first, it was like, well, we're just gonna withhold your funding. And you then clap back. And so now it's, okay, well, let's talk about your tax status. So, um, I get what he's trying to do, but I also go back to that impulse, I think, can turn pretty dark pretty fast. So, um, I agree with him that just be cut and dry. This is what you have to do to qualify for the federal dollars. I was quote unquote, given the mandate. This is one of the things that the public really cares about. Um, and so if you don't adhere to these things, we're gonna pull your funding. But just because they don't like it, there's no

• 48:59Tom Bilyeu?

  need to start escalating. Either universities get tax exempt status, or they don't. And if they don't, it needs to be a universal policy. Um, and not a one-off because you think that

• 49:10Speaker 01

  That's

• 49:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Harvard's got a big mouth. Because now you get into, um,

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Free speech issues and Trump plays pretty fast and loose with that. Happy. See how it plays out. Um, in other news, this was an interesting story that hit my feed over the weekend, but I kinda with the rise of AI, Black Mirror Robotics, I thought that this will be a much bigger conversation. So. Did you start watching Black Mirror? I'm like two episodes in so far.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  I got the first one in. It's good. Yeah. We really probably should be talking about it. Yeah, we should do a Black Mirror breakdown, maybe on the live next time. Uh, join us for our lives every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 6 a.m. Okay, so what is No Mercy? That is, it was a PC simulation game that had a protagonist rape, torture, and kill women. Um, there was some incest in there. I heard that there's a scene where like you can do, you can like rape your mom like. Oh, hi. It's really crazy. It's a really crazy game. Um, this game at first didn't carry age rating, didn't take carry content warning. A content warning, it got downloaded so many times in early April that it then went to the homepage because it was being featured so much.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  So it, it picked up steam. Uh, put in power. Uh, but, uh, advocates, of course, um, different civil rights organizations. They stepped in kind of flagging like, hey, this game is a little bit weird. It went viral on Twitter over the weekend and then the game has now been pulled and like removed. Now I understand the freedom of platform, the freedom of expression, things like that. But again, because we're in a black mirror, we're on the precipice of AI. We're on the precipice of like these LLMs pretty much running the world. How do you feel about like the ethics conversation? And the IP laws in a weird spot, like there's this kind of murky, we can't see what's over the horizon. And these things are only going to get more crazy before they get less crazy. Like it's one thing to have a PC simulation game, but what happens when it's

• 50:57Speaker 01

  a sex bot based off of a coworker or what happens if it's, you know, and you could kind of start getting crazy and manipulative and Black Mirror episode four type thing.

• 51:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, this is gonna be an incredibly complicated area that I think you have to deal with at the level of thought experiment. I mean, you can pull me down into any specific you want, and I'll give you my take based on my beliefs and my value system. Ultimately, the the big thing on this one for me is not that the game was created. It is that it wasn't tagged as essentially being pornographic. So this is where it should have a rating. Parents should know what they're getting into. They should be able to very easily block their kids from having access to this. For me, this is a kid's question.

• 51:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Should your kids have access to it? Yeah, like, should there be a mechanism by which parents can just say, my kid has a Steam account, but they cannot access things that are over PG 13 or whatever the gaming equivalents are. And when you don't have that, now I've got beef. The fact that they made this game out of pixels, oh, God, even looking at that image, I really don't like it.

• 52:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, you can make a movie about a serial killer and you can show it. So, yes, people should be able to make this stuff, but the reality is I don't ever want to accidentally find my way to it. I want this stuff to have some sort of signifier so that I get it, that I can block my kids from having access to it. But yes, top down, for the most part, is bad, and so I think that people should be able to create art like this if they want. Honestly, the thing that this triggers in me is a a call out to people who I don't think realize that they need to manage their own psychology.

• 52:59Tom Bilyeu?

  And so I don't want the world to tell you what you can and can't do when you're not hurting somebody else. But at the same time, I want to make it clear, if you're spending your time looping on really dark, really distressing.

• 53:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Like sexual adversary stuff where um the thing that you invest in sexually is demoralizing, dehumanizing, you become what you repeat. And so if you're doing that all the time, it's gonna have a toll on you. Again, people should be able to do what they want and they're not hurting anybody else. But boy, oh, boy, it's not going to be consequence free. And I'll be really honest, man, I am very glad that I did not grow up with the kind of access to pornography that kids have today. And I really have sort of jokingly said, but actually I do wonder.

• 53:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know if I would have graduated high school if I had had access to porn like that before my brain was done developing. And um whoo, like there are just algorithms running in your brain. And when you don't have the ability to understand, oh, I'm caught in a dopamine loop. And I have this evolutionary impulse to engage with this thing like a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. And as you become like at first, like just a nude photo is enough. Like I remember like a Sears catalog when I was a kid, you'd be like, yo, like the bras, right? But then it's like, well, I've seen the bras now. Then you gotta escalate to like National Geographic. And then it's like, okay, here we go. We've got actually some exposure.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Your mom walking into all the magazine pages is sticky like what's happening?

• 54:44Tom Bilyeu?

  But it escalates. And so if I had had that escalatory loop when I was fourteen and all of a sudden I'm playing a video game where you're choking and raping women, fucking hell, man. Like that, that goes dark. Unfortunately, the brain is shaped by its environment. And so I really do think you have to, you have to give parents the ability to keep this away from their kids. You just have to.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I feel like a like a hypocrite in this moment because I remember when I was growing up, GTA was a bad game because it was all about looting and blowing stuff up and killing people and it was bad, bad, bad. And now I'm appalled at this game, but isn't it just, I don't want to say it's two parts of the same coin because like crime is bad, all crime is bad, but disproportionately, you know, rape, incest, like that's a different, it hits a different emotional nerve than just blanket murder or blanket grand larceny does. But I do think that. If you can't, is it impossible to legislate that? I feel like we almost, if we either have to stop everything or it's like.

• 55:45Tom Bilyeu?

  It's very easy to legislate, but it's a very dangerous game to start saying this kind of thing can't exist. Because there is, um, it is a form of self-expression. It is allowing people to tell the stories that they want to tell to explore, um, things that they want to explore. But you cannot treat kids like they're the same as adults. The brain just does not work like that. And so the long-term consequences of a kid that plays a game like that over and over and over. It strikes me as you should be default defensive. You should be default, just I don't know enough about how this could impact them. And so I'm going to pump the brakes. Uh, again, adults do what you want. I think adults should be allowed to do drugs.

• 56:28Tom Bilyeu?

  I think adults should be allowed to gamble and waste their money, time, whatever they want. I think, oh God, this is not necessarily going to be popular. I think people should, adults should be allowed to commit suicide. If that's what they want, let them do their thing, but I don't think it should be encouraged. So, uh, this is where I think treating kids and adults differently becomes important. I think this is where flagging the piece of art so that people can understand like what it contains, I think is important.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Fifteen years, somebody creates a whole bunch of AI slave bots in their basement. And it's just like, you're just a weirdo and that's what you chose to do. Like, there's not, like, I, I just hate, I just hate that that's like, I don't want that to be the takeaway. But it kind of feels like, as long as you're an adult and you can pay for it and you're not hurting anybody externally, you're fine. But like, is there going to be like a rights conversation that should happen? Like, should we, should robots have rights?

• 57:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, well, here's where it gets into, if they are sentient, then it, meaning, let's define that very clearly. If it feels like something to be a sex bot, then yes, you're going to need to, um, legislate it. If it does not feel like anything to be a sex bot, then no, I don't think that it matters. And if you want to choke your sex bot, go for it. Um, but again, as a PSA, I will say that if that's the thing that you do over and over and over, you are making those the easiest. Feelings to feel. You are making those the most rewarding feelings because you are hardwiring them.

• 58:10Tom Bilyeu?

  And your brain will actually wrap fatty tissue around the connection points in your brain. It's a process called myelination, which allows those feelings, those actions to be done more easily, literally from a caloric expenditure standpoint than other actions that you take. And so you end up slipping into that. Or this is like the whole idea of if you've got kids in the car, they should have left a long time ago. But there's this whole idea with kids that grew up with porn called death grip. And what was happening is the kids were grabbing themselves so firmly that when they had sex with a woman, they're like, wait, this is it? And you can get these weird distortions like that where you don't expect it.

• 58:53Tom Bilyeu?

  And now all of a sudden, if the activity doesn't feel risky or subversive or taboo, that you can't engage with it, like you can't get excited. And so now you've fed that system so much that you're now depriving yourself of real human interaction, the deep connection that you can have with a human being. And I just, man, people have to be a little bit careful. And again, that's not me being prudish at all. Like people, like if people want to do bondage play or whatever, I literally don't care. Yay, if it's consenting adults, do your thing. But you do have to be thoughtful. In fact, Drew, can I really drag us into weird waters? Let's go.

• 59:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay. We're already here. There is a documentary called Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan's Super Masochist. Now, Bob Flanagan had cystic fibrosis. And I think starting when he was like 11 years old, he was in so much pain all the time. He started putting needles in a belt and whipping himself with the belt. And he would bleed all over the bathroom and you'd have to clean it all up before anybody saw what he was doing. And when asked, that's him, when asked about it, he said,

• 1:00:19Tom Bilyeu?

  "I spend so much of my life in pain that when I torture myself like this, I feel in control." And feeling like I'm in control of the pain is like this huge unlock for me. And you shouldn't make that illegal. Like if this guy, if that's what he wants and he ends up marrying a dominatrix and she does all this like crazy S and M stuff to him. And they film it all. And the craziest moment, this is the only part of cinema I simply could not watch. I had to cover my eyes.

• 1:00:54Tom Bilyeu?

  He nails his friendly appendage to a board. Jeez. And then pulls the nail. I mean, it was just like I was losing my mind. And but the whole time he's explaining why he does this stuff and the sense of power and control that it gives him. And here's why I say all of this. At the end of his life, this movie is called The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan. They show him die on camera. You watch him take his last breath. But before he gets to that point, his wife is just in hysterics and she asks him, why won't you let me hurt you anymore? And he says, it's not about that anymore.

• 1:01:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I know I'm dying. And whatever it used to bring me, it doesn't bring me anymore. And like you saw him drop into his humanity. And it was like, not saying he wasn't human before, obviously, but just that profound sense of shift. And I was like, the chronic pain put him in a certain place. The whipping himself put him in a certain place. And his whole life became about the dealing with that pain. And the way that he chose to deal with it, maybe on balance it was positive, but it wasn't consequence free. And so seeing them disconnect at the end of the movie, I was like,

• 1:02:25Tom Bilyeu?

  there's something here, like the, the wolf that you feed is the one that grows, the plant that gets water is the one that grows. Like you're going to put energy into something. And

• 1:02:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I'm just saying be careful what you put your energy into because it's it's going to become the thing. And so if your thing is um having a horrible relationship even with your AI where you're just dominant and you demean it, it's like that's the part of your brain that gets watered.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I'm still on the male appendage being stable to abort.

• 1:03:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, hammered nail.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Um, that's good.

• 1:03:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Hammers a nail.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Dude, wake up in the middle of the night like.

• 1:03:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I, yeah, that that's one of the hardest things I've ever seen in my life. It's crazy.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  And yeah, we need to, we can't end like that. So in more positive news, we have a

• 1:03:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's go.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  A post from Will Smith talking about mindset.

• 1:03:22Tom Bilyeu?

  So um, is this the one that I take? You're having a biological experience?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so one of the most important ideas in my life is that you're having a biological experience and the the human animal is an animal of pursuit. That is how we've become what we've become. It is the reason that we're going to make AI no matter what. We pursue a future that is better than our present, like relentlessly. Uh, you get a job, you want to get promoted, you have kids, you want to raise them perfectly. You um, you build a business, you want it to be one of the biggest businesses ever. There's always the next thing. Uh, you join a football team because you want to win in Super Bowl. And so many times people do that and then they say, I've never felt more empty in my life. I go get off the football field, just won the Super Bowl and I cry because I

• 1:04:11Tom Bilyeu?

  realized my whole life has been about achieving this. And now using my own words, because this is exactly what I felt when I made my money, which happened literally in one shot. And I was like, I was prepared for this, but it is utterly fascinating that all of my insecurities are still here. And so I was like, that is fascinating. So there, the way that the brain works is what he's about to tell us is knowable. You do not have to live Will's life to know that this is the end result, that we are all going to um.

• 1:04:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Achieve everything we ever wanted to achieve if you're so lucky. And all your insecurities will still be there. You'll still want more. There will be no sense of satisfaction. Like you literally just have to understand yourself as a biological creature that is designed to want. And as long as you understand you are designed to want. There will never be a time where you're like, oh, I have enough. Therefore, you should be able to modulate how hard you go for the more and more and more. So the thing I've always promised Lisa is I'll pursue more, more, more as long as it's fun. If it ever stops being fun, then I'm going to stop doing it because I know I have a compulsion to pursue. So that compulsion is never going to go away.

• 1:05:35Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, with that, let's hear what Will has to say.

• 1:05:37Speaker 09

  People talk about rock bottom. That when you hit rock bottom is when you'll make a change. But there's a corresponding place that I call Cliff Top, right?

• 1:05:50Tom Bilyeu?

  You could be too high?

• 1:05:51Speaker 09

  Where you get so high that you realize literally none of this stuff can make you happy. Right? After you, you get, you can get to the end of the material world. You get to the end of money. You get to the end of sex. You know, you get to the end of fame. You get, you, you, you have so much and you get, and then you, you like go off of a cliff into the same kind of abyss that you'd be scared of slipping into at rock bottom. Right? Where life loses all of its ability to sustain and please you.

• 1:06:34Speaker 09

  And then the only thing that's left, the same thing at rock bottom. The only thing that's left at cliff top is you have to, you have to find what you're actually looking for and what, what you're actually looking for is you.

• 1:06:50Speaker 09

  You're looking for you. You're running around, right? When you, when you like a woman and you like being with a woman, it's because you like how you feel. Right. You like what's happening inside of you. When you have money, it's like, yeah, it's cool to buy things, but it's not the money. You like how you feel inside. It's unleashing a feeling inside. And at rock bottom and at cliff top, what you have to learn how to do is generate that feeling without anything external. You wanna, you have to learn how to like, like you so much

• 1:07:30Speaker 09

  that you like being alive so much that you, you bring positive energy that's not generated by stuff, right? Because stuff is coming and going. Right. Like people are coming and going. Everything you have and everybody you love is going to rise and fall in your life. The place that we have to find is a spiritual place where we are good with us. We trust us. I trust myself. I trust God and I trust life that whatever happens, I'm going to make happy out of it. I don't need specific things to happen.

• 1:08:07Tom Bilyeu?

  That's somebody who's realizing that this is all about modulating my neurochemistry. And once you realize, oh damn, that's the game that I'm trapped in, it becomes a lot easier to be like, okay, I'm just not going to do that. Or like he said, you're going to find ways, simpler ways to do it. Uh, it's always been a huge, um, weight off my shoulders to know that I could be dead broke as long as I can write. Because the writing cost me effectively nothing. And it feels awesome. It is the neurochemical manipulation that I want. Um, so anyway, I want all of us to have that recognition,

• 1:08:50Tom Bilyeu?

  understand that this is a game of biology and to master that biology well, to understand the nature of the human mind, uh, so that you don't spend an entire lifetime feeling like one day I'll cross the finish line and it will finally make sense. It will finally feel like I've made it. It's not the nature of the human mind.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  And there's something to that, too, because there's always that pursuit of once I get this thing, I'll be happy, or like, I'll be happy when, and it just seems like the ultimate hack is just be happy and like, separate it from the when, if, after.

• 1:09:22Tom Bilyeu?

  That for sure, and maybe even more common is to understand that the thing you will always love the most is pursuing something before you achieve the thing you're pursuing when it feels like it's about to work out. That's the perfect moment, where it's like, oh, my God, this is gonna work. Like, I'm doing a thing, I'm good at it, it's working. Uh, that's, that's the best. Like, that's way better than the getting, and it's certainly better than failing, but it is, um, it is better than the final acquisition, because that just triggers the what's next.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's all I got.

• 1:09:59Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, guys, if you're not already watching the lives, they are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. Pacific time, and here is a highlight from today's live.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  This is like 17, 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I'm not gonna have you pinned down exactly it, but do you think there is something other than what the news reported is like behind it? Do you think one of these 17 alternative reality theories might have something? Like, is there every?

• 1:10:24Tom Bilyeu?

  It's the same way I feel about God. There are people that can give you an explanation that if you'll grant them a miracle or two, uh, that has internal logic, and it's like, okay, cool, I can track your beliefs, I understand. Um, but if I don't agree with your miracles, then it all falls apart. So, it is deeply, let me finish that part. So, everybody has an explanation. I may disagree with the explanation, but I agree there's something going on that I don't understand on any one conspiracy. I think you've gotta like, really fucking go down those rabbit holes.

• 1:11:06Tom Bilyeu?

  That's not the level of analysis that I ever planned to do. So I am cause and effect man. So I want to track cause and effect. And once I get to the level of what humans do at scale, that's the cause and effect that I'm looking for. So when I look at something like nine 11, I go, yes, governments will pull against themselves.

• 1:11:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, people will lie, cheat and steal. Yes, people will do anything to gain power and maintain power. Yes, there are people who are sociopaths. And so as long as they're winning, they literally don't give a fuck about anybody else, even at the level of country. As far as I can tell, those are distributed around the world, not evenly, because culture is going to exacerbate those things. But that means there are going to be some here. And so all of those things fall within what I'll call the physics of the human mind. So that's where I start tracking things.

• 1:12:04Speaker 10

  This is not a crazy person. These are not crazy questions. He makes no claims he doesn't have personal firsthand evidence of. When it ended, I asked him how many other officials who were in and around Washington during nine 11 have similar questions. And he said to me, as far as I know, all of them. And he's still in touch with a lot of those people. After this conversation, which again, we've been thinking about ever since.

• 1:12:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Or is it on you? And I would say it's on you, motherfucker. And I get it. You might be too dumb to do this well. Tough fucking break. Take it up with God. You have the hand of cards that you have. And now, yes, I am expecting you to parse a very complicated world. Because otherwise, you get all these narratives, people get drug into wars and all kinds of stupid shit. And they give you a really good argument for why it should be just like that. Why you would be a fool to do anything else. My superpower, the reason we are recording this-

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, because you're not afraid to get embarrassed.

• 1:13:04Tom Bilyeu?

  From a mansion-

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Is because I'm not afraid to look stupid.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I literally just had somebody offer me a piece of their company. And in the conversation, they were like, you ask the deepest questions. And I was like, no, I don't. I'm just not afraid to look stupid. And you are so not used to that.

• 1:13:25Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Tom Bilyeu?

  That you're confusing me just trying to go, wow, I really don't understand this. I have to get to cause and effect, so I will drag people down. I'm like, listen, I can just nod and smile, or I can keep asking you till I understand. You tell me what you prefer. And he's like, I want you to keep asking. Cool. All I'm trying to do is get to cause and effect with absolutely no fear about, I know I'm gonna look dumb to somebody that, I mean, this guy's clearly smarter than me, knows a lot more than me about that thing. But I'm like, I can track cause and effect, so we can get down to that point. And people always confuse it for a superpower. For one, think AI is a meteorite screaming towards the earth. And not that it's going to destroy everything, but that it, nothing will be the same,

• 1:14:10Tom Bilyeu?

  literally nothing, top to bottom, nothing will be the same on the other side of this. I'm so curious to get your take, what you think the impacts of AI are gonna be.

• 1:14:19Speaker 11

  I agree. And, and look, in the context of that, there's gonna be so much change in the geopolitical system and the economic system and how societies function in the next five years because of AI. You know, maybe the conversations we're having about, you know, is it problematic or not for Elon to have a conflict of interest? Maybe we're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, right? Maybe it just doesn't matter.

• 1:14:46Tom Bilyeu?

  If you guys haven't already, be sure to go give us a five star review on Spotify or Apple. It helps more than you know. Until next time, guys. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds. Against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics,

• 1:15:31Tom Bilyeu?

  nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.