Understanding Socialism’s Historical Failures and America’s Economic Crossroads

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Understanding Socialism’s Historical Failures and America’s Economic Crossroads

Date: July 20, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Featured speakers: Drew, Guest Expert(s)

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Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu and his co-hosts tackle contemporary geopolitics, economics, and the ideological battles over socialism and capitalism. The discussion spans the ongoing US-Iran conflict, economic malaise on both sides of the Pacific, the risks of political radicalism, the fallacies pervasive in socialist rhetoric, and the nuances of technological arms races—especially in AI. Throughout, Tom deconstructs pervasive memes and headlines, emphasizing the importance of understanding cause and effect in history and economics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. US-Iran Tensions and Global Economic Repercussions

[03:20 - 08:15]

• Recent escalation: US soldiers killed in the Middle East; conflicting reports on casualties.
• Social media rumors: Iran thanking Jordan for aiding attacks (potential disinformation).
• Economic fallout: Tom analyzes oil price volatility—spiking with immediate events but not in long-term global market expectations.

  "We are at the tail end of something economically that's been happening for a while and we've been masking it here in the US by spending money that we had saved up for a rainy day or just clocking dollars onto credit cards, which is the American way." (Tom Bilyeu, 06:10)

• Parallels drawn with China's ongoing 2008-style housing bust and its effect on household wealth, echoing Japan's '90s collapse.
• Both the US and China, the world's largest economies, are experiencing prolonged economic slowdowns, with broader implications.

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2. Political Optics of War and Oil

[07:45 - 13:10]

• Debate on public tolerance for war in the absence of direct economic pain (i.e., oil not soaring to $200/barrel).
• Tom warns that American public support for intervention is closely tied to whether the costs are felt at home.

  "Body bag after body bag... just would be something [Trump] will not survive politically." (Tom Bilyeu, 09:26)

• Speculation about Iran inciting a ground conflict to inflict maximum US casualties, understanding the political and strategic calculus involved.

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3. The Dangerous Cycle of Radicalism and “Useful Idiots”

[13:15 - 22:30]

• Tom references a classic “KGB defector” interview about the fate of leftist “useful idiots”—those who help revolutionary movements and later become its victims.

  "Their job is completed. They are not needed anymore. They know too much, some of them... that's what happened in Nicaragua, Cuba..." (Guest Expert, 23:15)

• Analysis: Extreme leftists historically participate in upheaval, only to be purged by the authoritarian regimes they help empower.

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4. The Physics (and Biology) of Society & Political Movements

[22:45 - 35:17]

• Tom’s “physics-first” approach: Any political or economic hypothesis must first explain the world as it is.
• “Overproduction of elites”: Examines how disillusioned, over-credentialed youth drive radical movements.

  "It's never the workers that rise up. It is always the overproduced elites." (Tom Bilyeu, 27:47)

• Tom and Drew spar over human exceptionalism versus animal nature in social evolution and adaptability.
• Both agree that humans can break cycles—if they fundamentally understand cause and effect and act intentionally.

  "History does not need to be a prison. It can be an instruction manual." (Tom Bilyeu, 35:02)

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5. The DSA, Peru, and Socialism’s Historical Effects

[43:50 - 79:01]

• DSA on Fox News: The co-chair’s defense of state-run grocery stores triggers Tom:

  "If a bodega owner can’t compete with a state sponsored grocery store... maybe they just shouldn’t be in business in the first place." (Gustavo Gordillo clip, 45:21)

• Tom rebuts, emphasizing how free market competition, driven by knowledge of price signals, innovation, and risk, creates prosperity and resilience—while state-run businesses destroy efficiency, price signals, and ultimately quality of life.

  "When you get rid of that magical thing [the price signal], then the economy dies." (Tom Bilyeu, 48:28)

• Deep dive into Peru’s failed experiments: From leftist land reform to the Maoist-led Shining Path insurgency—both failed to deliver prosperity, instead resulting in hyperinflation, violence, and economic collapse.

  "Under imperialism? No, motherfucker. Under the thing that was supposed to replace imperialism, which becomes just authoritarian rule." (Tom Bilyeu, 71:10)

• The roots of radical rhetoric: Tom warns that emotionally charged, fact-lite speeches from the radical left (drawing parallels with populist rhetoric globally) repeat cycles that end in disappointment or disaster.

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6. The Frustrations of Social Safety Nets, Welfare, and Economic Lies

[97:20 - 102:50]

• Surge in Americans dropping out of the labor force; discussion of what it means for social stability and the temptation toward radical or utopian fixes.
• Tom critiques Bernie Sanders for misleading claims about billionaire wealth taxes and the solvency of America’s welfare state:

  “America is one of the largest socialist states in the world... We can’t tolerate people to frame America as if we don’t have social safety nets.” (Tom Bilyeu, 98:12)

• Perpetual expansion and inefficiency in welfare and education, due to government interventions, create escalating costs and fraud.

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7. The AI Arms Race: US vs China

[102:51 - 109:14]

• China’s Moonshot AI releases Kimi 3, a frontier model challenging OpenAI and Anthropic, signalling the intensifying technological rivalry.
• US government weighs restricting Chinese AI models—a move Tom believes risks hurting US competitiveness more than it protects.
• Broader point: Top-down interventions (tariffs, subsidies) are a double-edged sword—sometimes needed, but often risk deranging markets if not applied with understanding and restraint.

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8. Implementation of Top-down Policies and “Price Signals”

[109:15 - 118:36]

• Drew queries Tom about inconsistencies in when government intervention is acceptable (AI, automotive protection, groceries).
• Tom clarifies: “The second you destroy the price signal, you create a problem.” Protectionism used to maintain industries (e.g., manufacturing) is different from state-run enterprises that eliminate competition.
• Effective regulation balances intervention and competition—using criteria, not favoritism.

  “Is it a dangerous game? Did we just give more power to the government? Yes. But is it a necessary game? … because the very thing I’m worried about with government had become actual and manifest in business.” (Tom Bilyeu, 114:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tom on repeated historical cycles:

  “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And it rhymes because our human psychology is banded. We are a certain way. We have a nature.” (28:17)

• Tom on radical leftists:

  “People have not had to actually go build something and be on the hook for all the fucking risk of trying to keep something going…” (59:01)

• On “useful idiots” in revolutions:

  “...once they realize, ‘Oh my God, you’ve been pulling for something completely different...we saw eye to eye, enter ‘Queers for Palestine,’ and now they will finally collide, but by then it’s too late.” (24:06)

• Tom on why populist rhetoric works:

  “It is a speech that’s not meant to necessarily make contact with cause and effect. It’s a speech that’s meant to make you feel something and he’s doing that. And Hitler did that and countless orators...” (87:32)

• Tom on capitalism’s strengths and necessary regulation:

  “When you let capitalism truly go unchecked, what you find is that men with a sociopathic tendency...rise to power and they don’t mind being predatory.” (114:16)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• US-Iran escalation & energy markets: 03:20 – 08:15
• War politics and oil prices: 07:45 – 13:10
• Cycle of radicalism & "useful idiots": 13:15 – 22:30
• Human nature, societal “physics”: 22:45 – 35:17
• DSA debate & Peru case study: 43:50 – 79:01
• Labor force exodus, welfare critique: 97:20 – 102:50
• AI arms race and policy nuances: 102:51 – 109:14
• Top-down policies & price signals: 109:15 – 118:36

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Conclusion

Tom Bilyeu weaves history, economics, and current events to challenge prevailing narratives about socialism and the state’s role in the economy. By highlighting the repetitive nature of utopian thinking and the persistent failure of radical policies, he advocates for understanding the underlying “physics” of social and economic systems. The episode concludes with a call to engage in nuanced, fact-driven debate and to avoid simplistic, emotionally appealing solutions—whether in politics, economics, or technological policy.

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Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on the scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I am so excited to be back with you guys. I miss you all on Friday. Hope you guys had a wonderful weekend. Unfortunately, not everything from a global standpoint was great. Over the weekend, US Soldiers were killed in action as the war with Iran continues to escalate. Trump says in response to Open the Gates to Hell as his retaliatory measure. More Americans are out of the workforce than at any other time in American history, which is going to be problematic and is probably not a sign of what people think it is. We're going to go into that. Hasan gives populist a populist rant that shows how basically only extremism is going to win in this current political climate, which is deeply distressing. Speaking of deeply distressing, the DSA co chair went on Fox and blamed capitalism for the fall of Peru. But history tells a very different story and we're going to be going deep on that one. As you can imagine, that one had me nice and animated. Speaking of, Bernie Sanders is caught lying by my own estimation. Here again, as New York City welfare hits record highs, the Kimi AI model is taking the world of AI by absolute storm and reigniting fears that China is pulling ahead of the US which may convince us to act stupidly in the face of that. We'll get into the details. The Tate brothers. Oh. Once again arrested and apparently being sent back to the UK to face new allegations. It is a wild time. Oh, wow. Ouch. You had that one ready. All right, let's dive into Iran. Iran struck U. S Base in the Middle east, killing at least two, possibly three US Soldiers. The US has continued their bombing campaign as a part of the retaliation, going absolutely ham, hitting deeper into Iran than they've hit at any point since the war began. Now, the US Base that got hit was in Albany, Azra, Jordan. Apparently both missiles and drones were used in the attack. The Pentagon named The fallen soldiers 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, who was 25 years old out of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, and Private Isabella Gonzalez, 19, of Carrollton, Texas. Four more service members were medically evacuated and have since been discharged. Thankfully, a third service member member was initially listed as missing, and unidentified remains were later found at the site. It's unclear exactly the total number, so we'll wait until all of that gets sorted through before we plant a flag and say, all right, this is the final analysis. A separate service member was also killed in Iraq on Saturday during a controlled detonation of a drone, an Iranian drone that was down but hadn't exploded. So not clear on the details of exactly how that person got caught up in what should have been a controlled demolition. Some more details on that will be coming forth. That brings the US death toll to somewhere around 17 or 18 since the war began in February. I'm seeing conflicting reports on that. Trump called the soldiers deaths a very sad thing, adding that they were killed fighting to ensure that Iran never has access to a nuclear weapon, which has just become the de facto statement that they state over and over and over. I think everybody at this point understands that that seems a bit dubious to me. It certainly wasn't how wasn't the messaging that we were first getting when this all re kick. So keep that in mind. It is hard to know what exactly to believe at this stage, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt. But on social media, Iran appears to be very publicly thanking Jordan for helping them identify and target buildings that were housing U.S. troops. So I don't know if this is somebody trying to make Iran look bad. Obviously, given that we have bases in Jordan, that would heighten tensions between the US And Jordan if it ends up being true. So I don't know if, you know, we're being trolled at this point on social media or if that's legit. So at this point assume that that's just rumor, but I'll certainly be watching to see if anything more comes of that. Oil prices have been moving again. I'll just point people to the difference between the front end of the curve and the back end of the curve. So with an escalation in the destabilization of the Middle east, which of course we are absolutely awash in now, as I don't think anybody at this point believes that we're going to reach a negotiated settlement of this, not without a whole lot more things blow going up on both sides. So what will end up coming of all of this is a very big question. But you're going to get these initial transient movements in oil just based on the inability to get this stuff safely through the straight. But when you look at what does the market as a whole think are the either inflationary or deflationary pressures as you start looking out even six months and they're expecting deflation. So not seeing a lot of movement in the long run of that tail. So that would be what I keep my eyes on there because we have two sort of conflicting stories coming out of Iran right now, which is, oh my God, like energy prices are going to be skyrocketing, this is going to be inflationary, we're in for a rough time. And then the other, which in many ways is worse, which is. What do you mean going to be in really rough times? We're already in really rough times. We've been in a stealth recession for years at this point. And now it's just becoming absolutely impossible to, to avoid acknowledging that we're in the middle of this. And I'm sure we'll talk about this more in terms of the record rate at which people are opting out of the. Not all opting out, but some people opting out of the labor force participation and then others just not being able to find a way in. You put that together with the market betting that there are going to be deflationary pressures over the sort of mid to long term, not even just long term, and you start seeing that we are at the tail end of something economically that's been happening for a while and we've been masking it here in the US by spending money that we had saved up for a rainy day or just clocking dollars onto credit cards, which is the American way. And so you put that together with what's going on in China. They're in the middle of their 2008 style housing crisis that is just completely engulfing the entire Chinese economy. They're wiping out like $18 trillion of household wealth, which is absolutely grueling. We talked about this last week. You start paralleling what's happening in China now with what happened to Japan in 1989 through the 90s. And you realize that when people lose that kind of household wealth, they start just pulling back economically massively. And so China's now once again changing the way that they report data to try to obfuscate the fact that their economy's in real trouble. So yeah, you've got the two biggest economies both in the middle of multi year pullbacks. So when you look at the long tail of the Oil even shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is only causing a temporary blip in people's long term vision of what that means for the cost of energy.

[Drew]

It's wild.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's wild. And when you really start paying attention to these numbers, it gets quite unnerving.

[Drew]

Yep. And then on the back of that, we have rumors that Iran is considering a ground incursion into Kuwait to seize US Military bases. So it seems like this can only get worse with more boots on the ground. However, because we haven't felt the economic shocks, is that a positive for Trump, that maybe we have a little bit more appetite for this war because oil is in 300, it doesn't put that type of pressure on us, at least right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What a fascinating question. The very grueling, gut wrenching answer is yes. So if you imagine the original predictions were oil's going to hit $200 a barrel, if we had gone to 200, stayed at 200 through all of this, if we were seeing 210, 220 on the horizon, because things have only gotten worse, the pressure on Trump domestically and internationally would be grueling. And so, yes, this does buy him a lot of leeway. Now you're bringing this up on the back of a ground incursion. Rumor, rumor, rumor. Those two things I don't think belong hand in hand, though. I think that $200 a barrel would have just precluded him pursuing the war at all, full stop. But God, I'm projecting now. I want to believe that good sense will prevail and he understands that body bag after body bag after body bag just would be something he will not survive in the midter. And as a psa, he's likely to lose the House, as that always happens. The Senate, though, probably not. If he lost the Senate, if he lost the House, in the Senate, odds are he goes to jail. So odds are he gets convicted of. He'll get impeached and then convicted. What that means. I actually don't know enough about how that kind of thing plays out. So I'll take back that he ends up in prison. But nonetheless, that becomes. That would be the first thing I go research, like what happens if you actually get convicted of an impeachment. So on that front, he still has to worry about that tremendously. And I, God, do I like to believe that he has enough sense of self preservation because I certainly do not expect him to act in the best interests of the broader public. But do I think he has enough self preservation to not go down that Road. I really hope so. But he's. He hasn't ruled it out. He has said very publicly that basically he's going to retain all options, but that would be tough. So one thing I don't know, I certainly didn't know just how big Carg island is. So Carg island is at least the size of Iwo Jima. Might be a little bit bigger. I forget the exact stat that I saw, but iwo Jima costs, what, 30, 000 lives over a very short period of time? So you start talking numbers like that, whoa, Americans already don't have an appetite for this conflict from the air. I can only imagine the extraordinary backlash that would come if we saw 30,000 troops get killed, because keep in mind that Iran could just torch that island themselves. And so they have several times tried to bait us into a ground incursion precisely so that they can rack up the body count. So, yeah, when, when your enemy wants something that badly, one of two things that play either they're trying to run some sort of, you know, psychological tactic where they. The very thing they don't want, they're telling you they do want to try to, like, unnerve you, or they really do want it because they know how good that would be for them in terms of the ability to sitting duck, just take people out. There's another island in that chain as well that's also massive. So if we try to ground incursion these islands to take them over, and I know this is separate from what you brought up, which is Kuwait, we'll get to that in a second. But sending them in that one strikes me as just a terrible idea. You're really putting your troops in harm's way, which you're not going to survive politically is my estimation of it right now. In terms of the Kuwait thing, that becomes a very interesting play for them to basically force us to defend one of our military bases. And so now it's not about goading us into showing up on their shores, it's about forcing our hand of, okay, we just invaded a sovereign nation, and this is obviously, we're way out over our skis here, but they invaded a sovereign nation and took over one of your bases. Assuming that they're able to pull it off, who you leaving that unresponded to would be crazy. You blowing up your own base would also be crazy. So, yeah, all of that would be a movie, massive ratcheting up of the tensions here. Now the question becomes, if Iran did that, what's going to be the public the broader non US backlash, does that galvanize the Gulf countries? Does that put more antagonistic pressure on Iran? Those are going to be the calculations that Iran is going to have to run. There are rumors and again, I'm trying to be very careful not to believe the propaganda that I'm most certainly being fed, but there are rumors that already the GCC nations are sort of re finding their sense of like, okay, this isn't about America. I don't have to be pro America to be against Iran. So if that comes to fruition, if Iran really is feeling that pressure, if Iran really is divided internally between their own hardliners and people that really do want to just join the world stage. And this is something that I think Americans do not have a full mental model of. Iran ejected out of the world stage back in 78 when they took over Iran with a revolutionary, murderous theocratic regime that by the way, killed the leftists that helped get them in power. This is going to be a new thing that I'm pushing down. As I was researching Peru because of this whole DSA thing, I was like, what the fuck? This is a thing that plays out over and over and over throughout history. And somehow we have just memory hold all of this leftist violence and the way that they will help these Marxists, Leninist, Maoist organizations come to power, which we are watching be attempted here in America right now, come to power. And then when they get into power time and time again, they're killed. And so it's like, it is shocking to me that these guys fall for this. I really hope that I pulled the clip, but I saw a clip this morning of a guy who I believe had defected from Russia and he was walking people through the exact playbook of using the useful idiots, as he called them to. You get these leftists that help the Marxists? Yeah, that's the one, yeah. Fuck, let's just play it right here.

[Drew]

This is wild.

[Guest Expert]

You see the useful idiots, the leftists who are idealistically believing in the beauty of Soviet socialist or communist or whatever system. When they get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies. That's why my KGB instructors specifically made the point. Never bother with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes.

[Drew]

Aim higher. But to eliminate the others, to execute the others, don't they serve some purpose?

[Guest Expert]

Wouldn't they be the ones. They serve purpose only at the stage of destabilization of a nation. For example, your leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defender, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion, only to destabilize the nation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When I heard him say that, that's what it feels like we're living through right now, through much of the West.

[Drew]

Destabilization.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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And when it reappears, because it will, they remove it again. Plus, with custom removals, you send them any link where your information shows up and their dedicated team takes it down. Go right now to incogni.comimpact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan. Try it risk free for 30 days. That's incogni.com impact and be sure to use code impact. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. You've got leftists that are. And I want to. I really hate that these have the same words. So you've got the left and the right. Very evolutionarily advantageous that you have both. They hold each other in a delicate balance where you've got people pulling for compassion to make sure that the group is protected and taken care of. And then you have people that are personal responsibility, innovation, pulling towards. We've got to build, we've got to create. They both have pathologies at the extreme. Both are hyper useful when they're towards the middle and they understand the need to work together. To me, it's just like a marriage, quite literally. Women tend towards the left, men tend towards the right. It is obviously not universal, but when that is working well, that's precisely the dynamic that you see when raising kids. And so you have this tension between, no, come on, they got to suck it up, they got to work. And then the mom being like, hold on, come to me, let me soothe you, let me take care of you. And that kind of thing is you need both. You do not want one or the other. Now as you radicalize and you get to the extremes, it becomes something totally different. So when I'm talking about leftists, it will inevitably get whipped up into seeming like a partisan attack. But the reality is that when you're talking about the thing that we're dealing with right now is you have this game Being played where the, the leftists, the radical leftists, not people who are left leaning Democrats are, you know, the very useful part of that. But when you're going way out, people that want to tear down capitalism, people that want destroy the American system, all of that, that is extremely destabilizing of a country. And the thing that unfortunately I worry we're about to live through though we've been through this before and we've somehow come out the other side. But when a country is destabilized and we're going to talk about this when we get to Peru and the dsa and yes, I'm extremely animated by all of this and I want to make sure that I make my rational case over and over and over to try to get people to understand the mechanisms by which this stuff plays out. So he's talking about two beats of this. One, that leftists are extremely good at destabilizing a country. That what starts as compassion becomes resentment. And that resentment, you cannot understand the far left without that. So you've got this resentment over production of elites. This is going to be, this has become a real pillar for my ability to understand and accurately map the likely actions that somebody will take as I try to look at this moment in American history. You have to understand resentment how it. On the left you can have these, what people call champagne socialists. But I'll say people that grew up affluent and now are pushing for an ideology that would completely destroy all of the prosperity engine. And so okay, he's talking about these two beats. One that you've got the leftists as the useful idiots of a far more authoritarian style government that is not in any way shape or form interested in the utopia. They understand the people talking about the utopia are very useful to usher in the people who are authoritarian and want the power. And again, over and over and over, those people that help you rise up end up literally being lined up against a wall and shot. And so that's the like crazy part of all of this. So those are the two things the lefty stabilizes and then they end up being the useful idiots for people that are far more violent and extreme, that are going to ultimately seize power because that, that is the personality type that they represent. So yeah, it's wild. All right, let them keep going.

[Guest Expert]

Their job is completed. They are not needed anymore. They know too much, some of them. When they get disillusioned when they see that Marxist Leninists come to power, obviously they get offended. They think that they will come to power that will never Happen, of course they will be lined up against the wall and shot. But they may turn into the most bitter enemies of Marxist Leninists when they come to power. And that's what happened in Nicaragua. You remember, most of these former Marxist Leninists were either put to prison or one of them split. And now he's working against Sandinistas. It's the same pattern everywhere. The moment they serve their purpose, all the useful idiots are used either be executed entirely, all the idealistically minded Marxists or exiled or put in prisons like in Cuba. Many, many former Marxists are in Cuba. I mean, in prison.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Reason, dude. And it goes on and on. It's really wild. You saw the same thing in Iran. That's what triggered all this in my head is the leftists help the Ayatollah come to power. Once he was in power, he had the leftists killed because they all have this moment of realization that wait, that you didn't have the same ends that we had. You weren't trying to bring in socialist utopia where the workers control the means of production. And we're living in this fantasy utopia. And I forget who said this, but it's a really interesting idea that when you're dealing with a leftist, what you're talking about is somebody who starts by mentally mapping what the utopia looks like and then working their way backwards to the world that they see now and every gap between the way the world actually is and the utopia is considered a failing of the current state. Not that humans just aren't designed to have that kind of utopia. We talked about mouse utopia last week. It's like humans are never going to get there. It's just not wired in animals to be that way. And somehow people brush that aside or just don't have the ability to see or understand it. I'm not sure. But once they realize, oh my God, you've been pulling for something completely different, that you have worn a mask this whole time, that we saw eye to eye, enter queers for Palestine and now they will finally collide, but by then it's too late. And so that is a really. People need to have a mental model. Regardless of what side of the political spectrum that you're on, you need to have a mental model that explains that. This is a fascinating thing about physics and why I'm always saying you want to get to the physics of something. Whether I'm talking about in business, in politics, you want to get to the physics of it. And the reason you want to map physics as a discipline as well as Just getting to the cause and effect, which is what I mean by the physics, is that one of the tenets of the study of physics is that whatever hypothesis you put forward and say this is how the universe really works, it must first describe the world that we actually see, because the only thing that we know is true is this is physics, right? This is all physics, all these things work. Now, you may have a misunderstanding of why this world exists the way that it exists, but any new hypothesis can't say, it can't invalidate the world that we see. It can say it's a hologram, whatever, but it's got to explain why and how we see the world that we see. And so if you're on the left and you're trying to explain to yourself where this is going and how this is actually functionally going to lead to utopia, you've got to show the mechanism by which it always fails. Okay? So, yes, hey, the right, they always try to like slap me around and say that this is never going to work because it's never worked in history. Let me walk you through why it has never worked in history. And if they walk me up to this point and then they go, the authoritarians end up killing the leftists, and so that's a big part of it. Or they get rid of the cost signal, which we're going to talk about later. And so here's how we're going to reintroduce a cost signal. Here's how we're going to make sure we don't get murdered. It's like, okay, at least then they've got something that describes the world that I see, that shows that they understand this dynamic has played out over and over and over. And so they have a solution for that rather than a blindness. And right now the only thing that I see is a repeated over and over blindness to the way that these dynamics play out. And this is a big part of why this is. Oftentimes young people that are doing this, first of all, they're the most likely to have the emotional reaction to being an overproduced elite. Meaning you've gotten all the education, you've taken on all the debt, you were told that you were going to be important, you were going to be somebody. And then you realize, oh shit, like, I'm not anybody. I'm struggling to make enough money to justify all my education. I'm not as important as fast as I thought I would be or should be. And so those are the people. It's never the. It's Quite literally never the workers that rise up. It is always the overproduced elites. And so it is. This is so fascinating. It's so dangerous, and I really hate this. But as like an amateur historian, this is unbelievably fascinating to watch. This psychology, these algorithms that are eternally embedded in the human mind play out over and over. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And it rhymes because our human psychology is banded. We are a certain way. We have a nature. And so when you drop us into. I'll shorthand it to you, drop us into a given economic scenario and it's like, oh, yeah, this is how humans respond in this economic scenario. Authoritarians will partner with leftists and they will march down a path of bringing in the utopia, which for one part of that equation is just, we rule everything. Everybody does exactly what the fuck we say. We have complete and total control over the country. And the other is trying to bring in the world's most delusional, completely untethered by reality vision of what the world could be or ought to be but never will be because of human psychology. And then they collide. And the most willing to murder wins always. And the most willing to murder is always going to be the person who was in it for power from the beginning.

[Drew]

Got it. I want to double click on something you said a couple minutes ago about the animal thing and about human nature. Animals aren't wired like that. I put. I push back against that because I think humans are selectively categorized as animals when it's convenient for whatever narrative we're pushing by me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's no way you think that about me.

[Drew]

I do, because I think, like, no animals in nature charge rent, but we charge rent. No animals.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There is a huge animal. There's like 9 billion of them, and they charge rent.

[Drew]

I've never seen a monkey charge rent.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've never seen monkeys don't. Because they don't have a prefrontal cortex.

[Drew]

But, okay, so I thought we were monkeys. So we're not monkeys.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then we are monkeys, but we

[Drew]

are shift to monogamy. I can shift like, well, so I

[Tom Bilyeu]

want to make sure you're having an argument with me.

[Drew]

No, no. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Versus.

[Drew]

Because you're saying this is like human animals aren't wired like that. It doesn't work. It doesn't make sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But do you feel that I have been eternally consistent on one thing? That you're having a biological experience and you must understand life through the lens of biology?

[Drew]

Yes, but we were in physics just now, so I Kind of want to separate those two things out because, yes, your, your makeup, you're a reaction of the chemicals inside of you. Okay, cool. Human nature specifically, though, I want to like zone in on that, because human nature, in some aspect, we're innovative. We are, we're supposed to rise. We're supposed to create the world that we see in front of us. We're at the top of the animal kingdom. We're supposed to form the animal kingdom. We're not supposed to be products of the animal kingdom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

See, now you've left my belief system. So we are inextricably in the animal kingdom. We are, we have a different intellectual engine just to make this about something that's, I think, easier for people to understand. So you can have different cars that go different speeds, can carry different things, all of that, but ultimately they're all cars. Or maybe internal combustion engines, let's say, to keep it simple. Now that can be a rocket ship that can take us into outer space, or it can be a Pinto that explodes when hit from behind and can barely make it to the grocery store. So same idea, but very different scales. And what I'm saying is if you try to understand one is somehow mystical and separated from the rest, you will be eternally confused. It is the one issue that I have with humans is they see themselves as not being part of the animal kingdom. And I'm saying we're the intellectual equivalent of an internal combustion engine. It operates on physics. There's nothing magical about it at all. And when you put certain things in, you will get certain things out with a high degree of predictability. And that is one of the earliest realizations in my life was that whatever I am, the thing that I perceive as myself is so trapped in my biology there is no escape. And that's the, the thing that like guides my thinking is that I'm having a biological experience.

[Drew]

But compared to any other animal, we're the only ones that can self reflect. And because we're the only ones that can self reflect, we're the only ones that hold ourselves accountable because we're the only ones that hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard. I think that separates us from a different category. Dogs will be. Dogs will always be dogs. Cats will be. Cats will always be cats.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If we want to debate that, I'm happy to debate it. That is not my view.

[Drew]

You feel like no matter, like, well,

[Tom Bilyeu]

first of all, I don't think we're the only animal that can self reflect. So I think it's crows that recognize themselves in the mirror, if it isn't crows, there's another animal that just outright gets that, oh, that's me. So there are other animals that have a sense of this is me, I'm separate from other people. But they're going to like a crow is going to behave in crow ways, a human is going to behave in human ways. And so regardless of whether we can differentiate ourselves based on that, I think it's pretty easy to say humans are different than crows. And so even if crows are super intelligent, I think they clock them at like a seven year old. So it's like, that's pretty astonishing. But there are certainly things about our brain that make us unique. It just is still beholden to the biology. I don't know if we're progressing your argument, so I just want to make sure that we debate the right thing. You're not yet representing my views, which is fine. If you want to just put forward like here's my thesis and then I can respond to that and not get caught up. As long as you understand you're not representing my worldview, we're good. And I'm happy to address whatever you

[Drew]

think this came from the fact that where animals don't work that way. And my rebuttal to that is because we have a prefrontal cortex, because we have the power to self reflect and improve, I'll make sure I add in that, that distinction. If any species on Earth were to come up with a solution to society's problems, it would be the human. So I think too often we get caught up in, humans always do this thing. So humans are always going to do this thing. So then we kind of perpetuate the outcome. It's like you're always, everybody who grew up in this block is always going to be this type of thing. So you're all, you're going to become that type of thing. And we've seen time and time again that we can break out of those pre deceived, like preconceived notions for us. So I think humans as a, as a society, as a body, as a animal, quote, unquote. I hate, just hate that framing. I think we can figure out solutions that we haven't seen before. I think we can figure out solutions. So when you just say animals don't work that way, that's why this thing can't work, that's the part that I'm like, well, there was a point in time where we didn't have money and we figured out how to make money work. There's a point in time. We didn't have cars, we figured out a way to cut transportation we can apply. So there's all these other things that society, humans are two legged animals. We're only allowed to walk. And then we said that's not true. So I think when we come to so many other things, we have circumvented what our predestined abilities were. And I think that we can keep doing this in other aspects of our lives, other aspects of society, other aspects and growing. Does that make sense? Am I crazy?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, you have internal logic. And so it's very easy to track what your hypothesis is, which is humans have the ability to change. Therefore history does not need to be a prison. It can be an instruction manual that allows us to not repeat mistakes.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So now I love that in terms of. I certainly believe that that's true at the individual level. And I believe that in order to effectively describe the world that I see before my eyes, I have to accept that it is true that even at massive scale, almost the globe, not quite, but almost at the global level, we've proven post World War II that we can have like this incredibly extended period of peace. If you're aligned with the world's dominant power, the second you're not aligned with the world's dominant power, then we fuck you up in whatever way we decide we're going to fuck you up. We extract your resources, et cetera, et cetera. But without miring the argument in that we did show, if you're ignorant to what happened to Japan after World War II, you're just missing a huge insight into the human psyche. If you've never contrasted what happened in Germany versus what happened in Japan, you're ignorant to a real piece of the puzzle. But if you see what we're going through now as somehow a surprise, that history has never looked like this before, you're clearly ahistoric. So this is a moment that repeats over and over and over. Now if I wanted to take your frame and go, okay, well we know that humans can change. And if humans can change, then we should be able to get a different outcome. I would say all of that makes sense. You have to get down to cause and effect. And what I think you will encounter as you try to run the cause and effect is how do you go through an economic disruption, which is what we're going through right now, without this happening again? And the answer, there are two things that I guarantee. What I'm about to say is a failure of imagination and there's three through 3,000 options that I just can't imagine right now. But there are two options on the table right now for how we would eject out of the historical rhyme and they would be one AI That AI super intelligence actually ends up being a thing. It's not a thing yet, but let's say that it were a thing and that people would willingly give themselves over to it because it that yield such superior results. And so everybody, even myself, goes, hey, I'm totally on board with this now. I want AI to just tell me what to do. And I'm just going to do it, because when I do that, even though sometimes it's super counterintuitive, it's made my life better. And the. I just can't stop myself from saying this out loud. It is a little too reminiscent though, of when God, I think, tells Job to kill his son. And so Abraham, Abraham, okay, sorry, my biblical knowledge is lacking here. So Abraham is told to kill his son. He's like, well, it is God. So that makes me a little nervous. But the other one would be that we're able to, again, because of AI, but we're able to actually alter our DNA such that we don't have some of the pettinesses, the ambitions or whatever that cause us to be a murderous species.

[Drew]

And that's. You think that's at the DNA level?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is for sure.

[Drew]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now we have nature that requires nurture. So we are very much a product of our time and our circumstances. So I'm not saying that it's just DNA and it doesn't matter when you're born. Our DNA is designed to be like, what's the world like? What do I need to adapt to? And what direction am I going to move? And because it's the blind watchmaker, it's not like this was done with high intent. So there are going to be weird things that will pop up that may be unexpected as we think about trying to reshape our destinies, in that we may shape ourselves in a way that still requires nurture. And now we've never run the experiments of now with our updated processing of the physical world. What does the nurture of this environment derange us? How does it derange us? In what way? And so, man, does it scare me, the idea of editing. Certainly our germline, which would be the thing you pass on to your kids. That's terrifying. If people want to run experiments on themselves, that could be a very interesting way to start reaching conclusions. But anyway, those are the two ways right now where we could escape it. But as of this moment, neither of those are real. Nor do I think that there are any other real ones that I'm just unaware of. And so we can expect despite the fact that people can change, when you start scaling up, up, up, up, up, you suddenly run into humans en masse. Humans at sufficient scale are distressingly easy to predict. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about why you're running your business on hard mode. Right now, your company is sitting on the answers to your biggest problems. The data exists, the patterns exist. You just can't get to them fast enough. That's what NetSuite Next solves. NetSuite is the AI powered business management suite trusted by over 43,000 customers. And NetSuite Next is their next massive leap. AI built into everything, it automatically surfaces customer insights throughout your day. Before you even think to ask, AI agents work alongside you to handle routine work and solve problems, and it's customized for a wide range of industries. Whether your company earns millions or hundreds of millions, this is where Your business meets AI for the first time ever. You can try NetSuite next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, just go to NetSuite AI theory built for every industry, ready for every boardroom. Netsuite AI Theory let's talk about leverage. Effort doesn't grow a business, at least not alone. You need leverage. The same hours that get you 10 sales somewhere else can get you 100 if you're in the right place. What not Whatnot is where that math works. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country. Sellers on whatnot move 10 times more product than on other major marketplaces. Same inventory, same Hours spent, but 10 times the output. Because the format is built for selling. You go live, you show what you've got, you take questions in real time, and buyers convert on the spot. If you've never seen it, Whatnot is incredible. Check it out. Buyers spend more than an hour a day in the app. They're engaged, they're loyal, and they almost never pay full price. Which is exactly why they keep coming back. The number of sellers on Whatnot making over a million dollars a year has doubled. And live selling has crossed the line into full time work for many people. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. If you have something to sell, the audience is likely already there. Search Whatnot W H a T N O T in the App Store. Download and you can start selling right away.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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

[Drew]

Okay. I feel like we were supposed to do like a DSA pit stop, but I feel like we kind of got into a bit of a DSA potholes. I feel like at this point we might as well keep it going.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wow, that's interesting. So that has not felt good to you in some way?

[Drew]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like we were like, yeah, we're gonna talk about that later. We're gonna talk. And then I felt like we just started talking about it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We got on the lane, we took the best on ramp ever with freeway speeds. It's an autobahn.

[Drew]

We're cruising down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No potholes.

[Drew]

I feel like this is a perfect segue to jump into Peru and kind of the debrief of what happened there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's do it. This one's wild. If you guys didn't see it, The DSA co chair, Gustavo Gordillo went on Fox News, told the world that if a bodega owner can't compete with a state sponsored grocery store backed by billions of dollars of taxpayer funding, then maybe they just shouldn't be in business in the first place. If you don't believe me, let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

[Drew]

We'll play the clip.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It probably doesn't start right with that statement, but it's worth seeing the whole thing. So they're breaking ground on one grocery store. So far it's going to cost $30 million to build a grocery store. In what world does it make sense to build a $30 million grocery store and put competitive pressure on the bodegas that are in the neighborhood?

[Drew]

I think that what we saw in the mayoral campaign is the mayor was able to build a movement that inspired people to believe that we could have a government that works for ordinary people, that is actually responsive to the working class.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That makes me want to chew glass. I want to crawl through this fucking tv. Dude.

[Drew]

The crazy deflection.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Crazy deflection. And the DSA is so good at talking points. All politicians are fucking terrible at this. They all do this. So I fully acknowledge this is not just a them thing. But because their policies are so radical, I find that these guys have to do it more than most. Bodega owner, how would you feel if the government opened a big grocery store right next to your bodega?

[Drew]

How would you feel if one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business? Then maybe they shouldn't have been in that business in the first place.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fuck this kid.

[Drew]

I mean, that was Amazon, Walmart's model, right? Like, you know. Yeah, well, and we already have government owned grocery stores.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, hold on. Hold the phone. So I know what I'm arguing against. Drew, I read yours to be sarcastic, to bring up a point. Ryan, I read yours to be sincere. Do you think. And by the way, if I'm wrong about you and you really think this kid's on.

[Drew]

Truly, I'm. Truly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you really believe, like, what the fuck the problem is, like, give me. Give me a grocery store. I just don't see the fuss with this kind of stuff because we already have. Well, we already jump in. We already have military grocery stores for military folks. Like, I'm not saying we should have these, but what I'm saying is I think people act like it's the spawn of Satan.

[Drew]

You know what I mean? I think it's like, this is the worst thing that could ever happen ever.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When to Drew's point, there is something true about Walmart kind of just closed all these mom and pops already and Target's already going after know. So it's not that I'm like, ooh, grocery stores.

[Sponsor Voice]

It's just.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think it's a little like, Fox News is a little scared of this stuff for no reason. Allow me to retort. We have to get that as a sound. It's Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction. I need that shit on speed dial. Okay, that's the craziest thing I've ever heard you say. And I mean that sincerely and with as much aggression as the law will allow me to place on it. Here's why this is absurd. Okay? So what Amazon does to come in, what Walmart does to come in and clean all of this out is they look at a system. And they realize either they can achieve an economy of scale or they can do something better than other people. And that's going to allow them to survive on thinner margins. And so they use a competitive force of being a more efficient business to allow them to get better negotiating power with the different people that are selling into them. As somebody who is sold into Amazon, sold into Amazon, this is going back a ways now because everybody's used to it being different. But you used to go pitch Amazon and say, I want you to carry this product. And the way that they would treat you was just absolutely grotesque. It was horrible and I hated them. But at the same time, I'm like laughing to myself because I'm going to go home and use Amazon because as a service, as a customer, it is so much superior than my other options that it's going to mean what it's going to mean to sellers, because the public is saying, I value this thing. Now, what people don't understand, when you have a corporation that's doing that where they are at risk, they are aggregating capital from investors and they're saying, hey, this is my bet that we can build this thing that customers are going to like more. We're going to have to do it profitably. We're going to create all these jobs and all that, and we're going to evolve the way that commerce works because we found a new level of efficiency. Okay, that's the Amazon story. The Walmart story is actually utterly fascinating. A guy that would literally go to all of his competitors, walk the stores and figure out all the things that they were doing wrong and how they could do them better in their store. And is a classic case of a guy just out entrepreneuring anybody else. And so they end up being able to do what Walmart ends up doing. In both cases, they are not publicly funded, so they are not taking anybody's tax dollars. They are just building a superior business on the back of selfishness and innovation. It is absolutely brilliant. This is. Oh, God, Joseph Smith. I always get him confused with the guy that founded Mormonism, who wrote the wealth of nations, whatever that one guy is.

[Drew]

Adam Smith.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Adam Smith. Thank you. I always confuse those two. Okay, Adam Smith ends up having this insane realization that, wait a second, we can build a better world by tapping into people's selfishness instead of pretending that that's not a thing. Instead of asking people to be these utopian idealists, let's just go. This guy legitimately wants to make a ton of money. He wants to be richer than everybody else. He wants to lord it over people in his family. He wants to be the asshole at the country club that's richer than everybody else. That's his motivation. Whether it's secret or whether he's wearing it on his sleeve, it doesn't matter. I'm going to put that guy in a legal box where the only way he can do that is by adding value to people such that they say, I would rather have your service, your product than my money. And if that guy executes that well enough, he really can be the asshole in his family, in his country club that's lording it over everybody and I'm richer than you. But nobody has to care about that guy being an asshole because he has. Even if it's for the worst motives in the universe, he has made their life better. They can afford more. They are materially richer because this guy wanted to be an asshole. Now, obviously, as an entrepreneur who's not motivated like that, I think I can just let you run with the worst interpretation ever and you still get an extraordinary world. If, on the other hand, you have the government come in and they have put a literal gun to people's head and said, I will put you in jail if you do not give me tax money. And now I'm going to spend that tax money however I want, you end up deranging things in several ways. First of all, you get rid of the thing that the market absolutely needs to function well, which is price signal. This is one of those things that you'll hear people say all the time. They are trying to get the average non economically inclined person to understand, hey, there is a magical thing. There is a magical fucking thing, and that thing is a price signal. And when you get rid of that magical thing, that super necessary thing, then the economy dies. So you can think of there is an electrical impulse in the body that tells your heart when to beat. If you disrupt that electrical signal, you die. Okay, so this is why people get pacemakers and shit like that put in their body to be like, oh, this thing has a hard time maintaining its electrical signal. And so we're just going to give it that pulse when it gets out of whack. That's the price signal. The price signal says, I'm trying to build something that people in the neighborhood want, but I don't know what it is that they want. And so all of a sudden, the only way for me to know is what do they buy, what do they not buy? This is why people that have never done A store tend to go out of business because they don't have all of that information. So if you're about to start a bodega, the first thing you want to do is go find somebody that's been running a bodega for 20 years. They know all the ways that you're going to fall down. When I first got into comics, I took the former president of DC Comics out to lunch and I asked him one question. Why am I going to fail? Not how do I make sure I succeed, why am I going to fail? I wanted to know all of the pitfalls. And so that was incredibly useful. So you're always trying to figure out. There is a thing I am blind to. What is that thing? The price signal answers that question on the whatever 5000 different items that you have in the store that no one is going to be able to guess at correctly. And when taxpayers come in and pay for everything one, there's no incentive for that state run store to be efficient. And so guess what? They won't be. And this is why governments just get completely insanely bloated. Because they are going to paper over all the lunacy of that organization. No matter how dumb they get, no matter how what they're doing is not what people want, it doesn't matter, they're going to keep funding it. The second way that it deranges it is it destroys the competition in the neighborhood. Each of those bodegas should be competing to make people walk a little bit farther to come to their bodega instead of the next one. And one of the most obvious ways to compete is already on price. So unless you're saying these guys are all just a cartel and they're getting together and they are colluding to set prices, the very thing that a smart bodega owner is going to do is say, oh, I'm going to survive on thinner margins and I'm going to make sure that people come to my bodega and I'm going to make it up on volume. And that's how the consumer wins. The reason that state owned entities break everything is they have no impulse for efficiency. They do not innovate. The very thing that a free market brings out of people, innovation because of the pressure to stay alive, which goes away because this is a state backed organization. And then because they lose the price signal, it, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. And so now the other bodegas end up going out of business because they can't compete on price. And so you're left with only bodegas that are run by the state, that don't have a price signal, that have no impulse for efficiency, that do not innovate. And so the customer ends up losing and losing and losing. So what happens when you artificially lower prices while demolishing the service that you provide to people? You end up in a position where the price can't go up. And so you just have empty shelves, because eventually you run into somebody that says, I can't afford to make my insert raw ingredient that that store requires. So, hey, let's take one that I'm intimately familiar with, protein bars, and let's say you have done some incredible innovation that allows the bar to taste like it has sugar, but doesn't. But you pay for much higher quality ingredients than the next person. And so your margins are thinner than the next person. And by the way, your prices are higher than the next person because you're doing all of this stuff that's just more expensive because, first of all, you're innovating on all of it. So it's costing you an absolute fucking fortune. I used to walk people in to show them what's known as a slabbing machine. And I would say, let me show you my Ferrari, because it cost as much as a Ferrari. But instead of me having the Ferrari out in the driveway, I turned it into something that allowed me to innovate and make a product for other people. So we're doing all of that. We're taking all of that risk. We're innovating, we're giving people something they want. But then California, through no fault of mine, by the way, has a drought, and this causes the price of almonds to skyrocket. Now, the vast majority of our products were made with almonds. I've just now had the price of almonds go up because there's a drought in California. And hey, guess what price signal the almond growers go, well, motherfuckers, this is more expensive for us. So it's going to be more expensive for you. You guys are going to have to bid by telling me how serious you are about your business. The weak businesses fold. Strong businesses like ours, we're like, all right, we'll pay more for the almonds. So we pay more for the almonds. Now, we're going to eat as much of that as we can, but we're not going to eat it to the point that we go out of business. So at some point, I may have to raise my prices if the bodega goes, no, now what the fuck am I going to do? Well, I can't. I either can't sell you the bar or if they're all like that, I just can't make the bar because you're telling me that I can't make enough money to stay in business. You don't fucking know about the almonds. You don't need to know about the almonds. The number of ingredients that go into all the items in your store. You could never fucking know. You sell batteries, condoms, fucking protein bars and everything in between. You don't fucking know what's going on. Like in lithium ion batteries. Get the fuck out of here. So what you do is you just go, well, I. Because I'll never know. I'm just going to let the free market do what the free market does, which is deliver a price signal. Dude, the staggering level of ignorance that these DSA guys show. They are so blind to the things that they don't know because. And here's where I'm going to go off the rails, but the effeminization of these guys is fucking maddening. And then on top of that, they in no way, shape or form have any humility in the face of the things that they don't know. They have never built anything in their lives. They are just soaked in resentment of other people having more than they have. And so there is no sense of like, the tribe was like, bro, you're going out into the wilderness for a week. We really hope you survive. And when you come back, you will be greeted as an adult. We don't do that anymore. There is an incredible book, book I really hope everybody reads, called the Power of Myth. And Joseph Campbell puts in the book a hypothesis that a big part of the problems facing modern society. He wrote this shit like in the 60s. The problem facing modern society is that we do not do coming of age rituals anymore. And so there is no transition between I am a child and I'm an adult. This is what you see playing out with homeboy. Because if that really had the. By the way, the things that I'm about to say are actual real things that people used to do. We're gonna send the kid out into the woods and you have to kill whatever the big scary animal is. I don't remember if it was really a line or some, but insert scary wildebeest, whatever. And don't come back until you have killed said wildebeest. And so they would go out and some of them would just die. And you didn't make it. Well, bummer kid. But if you want to be an adult, if you want to show that you're going to have a stake in this society, you've got to go do hard thing. There are other tribes where they would put big fish hooks in people's chest or their back and they would hoist them the up and literally they would just be hanging by their own flesh. And they would go on whatever spiritual quest they were going to do, and they had to do that. You have the tame one. But Nelson Mandela wrote about this in the Long Walk to Freedom. They get whatever kids are turning 14 or 15, I forget, or 13, whatever it was somewhere in that age. And they strip them bucket ass naked and they bring them into the center of the village, they sit them down, they tell them to sit with their legs spread as wide as they can. And then the chieftain, the shaman, whatever comes with a fucking rock that has been turned into a blade, he grabs the foreskin on your dick and just shunk cuts it off, lets your dick go. And then you are supposed to scream this, like, warrior statement about being some badass, tough motherfucker, whatever. And then they cover you in like this clay. And then a young woman comes and wipes off all the clay, like, what?

[Drew]

You had me at the last one.

[Guest Expert]

And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But here's the thing, it does not work. No, no, no, you don't need a badoom button, because I really think that's part of it. It's like you're at your most vulnerable. Obviously this is not a time to get an erection or anything like that, but you're in this super vulnerable position. You've just sort of proclaimed your masculinity. And the awesome thing about Nelson Mandela is he confesses that he almost forgot to say the prayer because it hurts so much. And so he felt like this kind of weak guy and like, it stuck in his head that, like, I didn't like, say it like hardcore enough. But when you put people through something and it's like, oh, like, I had to do a hard thing, I had to suffer in some way or prove myself in some way, on the other side of that, you really are a changed person. And man, like, without some of these signals of having to toughen up, having to do hard things, knowing that there's a transitionary moment from childhood to adulthood, like all of that stuff, there begin to be deranging things that happen. The overproduction of elites meets this effeminization of culture. And you find yourself in a situation where people actually say the fucking words which the audacity of this kid to say, if you tell a landlord that, oh, you're making double digit profit margins, you have no right to do that. And so this is cruelty. To say that if you can't afford rent in New York City, you should move somewhere else, that's cruel. But if we put all of the bodegas out of business, it's not cruel to say, well, maybe you just shouldn't have been in business in the first place. Even though we're backed by billions of taxpayer dollars. Get that out of here. That kid can eat an entire bag of dicks. Like that is the most insane break the engine of prosperity shit ever. And it is entirely because people have not had to actually go build something and be on the hook for all the fucking risk of trying to keep something going, of understanding how things actually work. They are not coming to the world with the appropriate amount of humility of saying, yo, this engine of prosperity is incredible and we need to protect it. And there's this thing called Chesterton's fence. Chesterton was walking through the English countryside with a guy. They see a fence and the guy goes, hey, I don't know what that fence does, let's take it down. And Chesterton said, hold on. The fact that we don't know what it's for is the very reason we need to leave that fence there. Once we understand what the fence is for, if we realize that thing is no longer needed, then we can take down the fence. But when you don't understand something, to say that it should be gotten rid of when you, when you don't fucking understand it in the first place is civilizational suicide. It is so ridiculously stupid. You're living in this period of stability and prosperity and you look at that and you start wanting to pull everything apart without having any idea what's on the other side of this. How do I know? Because this fuckwit himself, his parents fled Peru during what was known as the Shining Path. The Shining Path was one of the most bloody eras in Peru's history where you had Maoist trying to take over the country. And he's saying, we'll let him say it himself. But he's saying, well, the reason that my family fled Peru was because of us meddling. And I've got, unfortunately for him, some historical facts to walk people through that show that that's just stupid and is not the case. But nonetheless, let's hear it from my man first.

[Drew]

I was not queued up. I'm sorry, hold on, I'm still on the 40 die. I'm still on the circumstance rituals, the foreskin rituals. Okay. We're going back to Peru. This was the 49 clip. I feel like that was the clip from Peru.

[Guest Expert]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We were. You just needed to hit play.

[Drew]

Oh. So we had to finish it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It was the same one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Drew]

I thought we can went through it. Yeah. Because he, he nailed it. This is the 40.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, this is a short one. There is a longer one. So if you just search for Gustavo Gordillo, Fox News copy, it will come up for sure. Okay, I have, this is like a 14 minute interview.

[Drew]

I have a couple of rebuttals. Two of them are from the chat.

[Guest Expert]

Yep.

[Drew]

One of them is me trying to combine everything together.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Drew]

I don't know if I should just list all three and just let you

[Tom Bilyeu]

kind of, well, take them one at a time.

[Drew]

But first, in NYC right now, Walmarts are illegal to operate. This is New York City like city. Of course in New York State there are Walmarts.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Drew]

The fear was a Walmart opening in Manhattan will kill all the bodegas, all the duane read stores, stuff like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it would have by the way,

[Drew]

almost certainly no 100%. So in your point, he is missing something that his own city that he thinks is championing to do it. However, in the grand scheme of things in the U.S. national, like in the U.S. amazon does have price controls. They are price fixing. There's algorithmic pricing. So there are certain advantages that a larger company would have that smaller companies won't have. Yes. Is that different than government? And if we're mad that the government is fixing the prices, why aren't we mad that the, the big tech thing people aren't fixing prices as well?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so I think we have to be very careful with fixing prices. So Amazon is using their economies of scale to bully everybody. And if we as consumers actually hate that and it's not just performatory, then we should stop buying from Amazon. But people are not going to because the product and service is so much better. Now if we want to say Amazon must be broken up, this is crazy. They're using things like Amazon web services to funnel money back into the side of the business that isn't making money. And so they can do loss leaders and blah blah, blah like there. I haven't looked at it closely enough so I do not have a take on that, but I definitely have a general standing take on monopolies. And so if the government found itself like breaking companies up more, I probably wouldn't Push back too hard on that, I would get it. So, yeah, you don't want monopolies because companies will go in and bully, but because I lived through this and knew I'm not going to stop buying from Amazon, even though they're making things miserable for me as somebody trying to sell. This wasn't Quest, by the way. For a long time we didn't sell Quest on Amazon for this very reason. But my product before that, which was software, that was like a whole different thing. And so being on Amazon would have been transformative for the business, but we couldn't sell at profit margins. That made it make sense anyway. So that's where it's when through a legislative process, people say, okay, listen, we want to regionally protect ourselves. We believe that mom and pop shops, even though both Amazon, Walmart, those guys are subject to price signals. They are subject to having to please their customers. We think that there's a soullessness or a scale that we worry will create a vulnerability.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you guys want to come in and say like, hey, this is the type of character that we want our area to have, then by all means. If you don't understand economics and you're saying we want the taxpayers to foot the bill, that's where I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Those guys are saying, one style of capitalism we think lacks character and. Or creates a vulnerability. And so we're just going to make a regulatory environment where a certain type of company is advantaged. It's meddling. You got to be careful. But they have real things to be concerned about.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Capitalism for capitalism.

[Drew]

Ish.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We'll let that slide. When you start going, the bodega owner is going to pay for his own demise through his tax dollars. That's where I'm like, get the fuck out of here. That's crazy.

[Drew]

Got you See the delineation. Got the Peru clip pulled up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Heather, your family came here from Peru, really, in the middle of the heat of the Shining Path. They were Maoist communist guerrillas in Peru. So why did your family come to America?

[Drew]

The economic situation in South America and in Peru was in a really bad place. But I think that much of what we could say is responsible for that actually was the imposition of capitalism. And American imperialism in many cases is actually what brings immigrants to the US Outside coming out of Latin America.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so they come here. She's about to make a good point, but I think that instead it's better to challenge his direct assertion. So what she's about to say Is that. Hold on a second. You're saying America bad, America imperialist. So you leave Peru and go into the belly of the beast. Like, what are you talking about? Let's say that that were true. Then it makes sense to come to America because you're like, well, they're destabilizing these countries to stabilize themselves. So, yes, I would rather go live in the belly of the beast. I accept now that I'm a part of the problem, but it. I'm going to raise my kids in a better place. So even if you accept his framing, which would be ahistorical, but even if you were to accept his framing, it does make sense. So I don't think she has a strong argument there. Unfortunately, he doesn't really have a way to say what I just said, so I'll make his argument for him. So that is, to me, completely logical. Now, I have a feeling that isn't what happens. She frames this in a weird way, and he oddly doesn't push back. And I don't quite know what to make of it, but from the research that I've done, I don't think his parents were Maoists, though that is my initial read on what she was saying. Yeah, he doesn't correct her, but I don't think that was true. So anyway, I don't know that maybe in the fullness of time, we realized they were Maoists and they raised him to be a good Maoist. I don't know, but I like to make things harder. So let's assume that they weren't Maoists, that they just wanted him to have a better life. So then to challenge what he said, you've got to directly confront, does the US Go into these countries, destabilize them? And so now it makes sense that you would want to flee and come to America for the reasons that I laid out. Or does that not make sense Now? As I've said many times, whenever somebody puts forward a hypothesis, the great news is that that will make predictions. So if that's true, so he makes a prediction, hey, the reason that Peru was in rough shape was because of America. Okay? If that were true, as American imperialism gets defeated from the inside, which, hey, great news, it did in Peru, then you would expect things to get better. I've got some bad news. As soon as they booted America out, things got much, much, much worse. So let's run through some hits from Peru. So from 1968 to 1980, Peru was run by military governments. The first phase, under General Velasco tried A sweeping left nationalist program, nationalizing industries, expropriating, which I guess I could be here. So if you want to cue this up, I actually have this Eric down so I don't have to be looking at my screen. But the. When they were nationalizing the industries, kicking out the foreign countries, and running one of Latin America's most ambitious land reforms. The land reform broke up the old hierarchies, but the haciendas, but it largely failed the highland peasants that it was supposed to help. So this goes back to the very thing that I'm trying to get people to understand, which is that they say that they're here for the workers, but the workers are never the ones that do the rising up themselves and they're never the ones that benefit. So it ends up right there. You're good. So much of the best land ends up going to the coastal cooperatives. Hey, does that sound familiar? We talk about the coastal elites here all the fucking time. The poor Andean regions end up getting little productive benefit. So the very workers, the backs of whom on which you raise your Maoist propaganda to the forefront, those guys don't end up getting help because what they get is raised expectations and then just disappointment. The old world order is dismantled, but they don't have anything to replace it. And then guess what steps into that vacuum you get. The terror brought by the Maoist organization was run by a guy named Guzman. So he then sweeps in to this hole. You also have debt hangover, which you guys will not be surprised to hear that there's these economic requirements for any of this to kick off. The military governments ended up borrowing super heavily. Guess why? Because they don't have price signals. So if they want to fund their utopian programs, they've got to borrow to do it. So they borrow like absolute crazy. So that was in the mid-70s. When the bill finally comes due, Peru hits this just severe balance of payment crisis in 77 and 78. They go to the IMF. The IMF forces austerity on them. So they get subsidy cuts, devaluations, wage compression gets hit hard. So real wages are now falling. There were massive general strikes in 77 and 78. And this is all the immediate backdrop to the Shining path launching in 1980. So you've got a country where living standards have been falling for years and the state had visibly failed at both its statist experiment. So we're going to get everybody kicked out of here. We want to run this. So American imperialism is gone, baby. The state owns everything. So this Dumbass is going to call for the same thing here in America. But instead of pointing you at Peru, where what he's talking about has actually been tried, he's going to try to bamboozle you and say we want a Nordic model, which is, is absolute horseshit. We can happily go through that. So in Peru we see these guys running the extreme leftist playbook, the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist of it all, and it ends up absolutely destroying the country. So the Shining Path, which is the Maoist guerrilla insurgency, they terrorized Peru from the like early 80s through the 90s. It ranks among the most violent internal conflicts in Latin American history. This is all after you get rid of the US because listen, I'm not saying that the US hasn't gone into countries and destabilize them. I'm not saying a bunch of Western countries, European countries haven't done the same. But the problem is that when you boot them out, if you do not have a plan for what comes after, or if your plan is some foolhardy utopian fantasy that is never going to come true because of the realities of, of power and violence and the fact that humans are petty, then you are going to be just completely bowled over by chaos, which is exactly what happens. So in 1980, the same day Peru held its first democratic election, by the way, after 12 years of military rule, Shining Path launches its armed struggle. They burn ballot boxes, do all kinds of crazy shit. From there it escalates very fast. You've got assassination of local officials, massacres of villages that refuse to cooperate. Let that one sit with you for a minute. Bombings in Lima, blowing up power lines to black out the capitol. And what ends up making that group distinctive is their just absolute brutality towards guess who? The very peasants that they claim to represent. Okay, we were talking about at the top of the show, what ends up happening? The leftists pair up with the authoritarians. The authoritarians just want power, but they're going to wear this over here like a fucking skin suit. Which is exactly what the DSA is doing with the Democratic Party. Boys and girls, we've got to wake up to what's really playing out right now. So this group ends up executing community leaders, which by the way would have all been left leaning. So this is when they start to eat their own imposed forced labor, also known as slavery, and slaughtered entire villages deemed insufficiently loyal. We've heard that idea of these purity tests, okay, that drove many rural communities to form self defense militias that end up fighting against them. So Peru ends up having this truth and Reconciliation Committee later, it's estimated that roughly 69,000 people died in the conflict, with the Shining Path responsible for a majority of the deaths. Which, by the way, this is super weird because normally when you have internal conflict where the state is involved, typically the state is a bigger killer. But that didn't end up being the case. The fucking Maoists were. Which is why part of the reason you hopefully will understand by now why I'm such a psychopath. For people that are embracing Mao, it is such a murderous ideology and the victims always guess what, Overwhelmingly poor and rural. So the people that they're supposedly trying to help end up being the ones that they kill en masse. Now, the worst of Peru's collapse, they had hyperinflation, by the way. They had a roughly 25% GDP crash. All of that happened under the anti imperialist program itself. So the leader capped debt payments, defied the IMF and ran heterodox stimulus because he was so pissed about US involvement and us running the world. But the reality is money works the way money works. And so if the IMF is the way that you're going to get money is the way you're going to have a debt rating that allows you to attract foreign investments, you can actually build your country. And those are the guys you're telling to fuck off. Guess what happens? You end up having, and this is real, the fastest destruction of living standards in Peruvian history. Under imperialism. No, motherfucker. Under the thing that was supposed to replace imperialism, which becomes just authoritarian rule. Now, you can argue the credit cutoff made this program impossible, but Bolivia and Israel stabilized in the same era using the orthodox programs. So I get why you might be annoyed at the system, but you're going to have to use the system that exists if you're going to interface with economic realities, which is what these guys tend not to do, because they think that they can just continue to Paris statize the engine of prosperity. And they think, well, capitalism is not going to go anywhere. We were making money before, we were wealthy before, and that's all that matters. We're going to keep being wealthy and we're just going to tag, we're just going to take control of it, we're just going to tax it, it's not going to be a problem, everything's going to be great. And of course it ends up breaking everything because the very thing, and I know that this makes people uncomfortable, but the very thing that makes the engine of prosperity work is that people can be selfish and end up getting more money, they can get richer than other people, and they want to show that they can do something bigger and better than everybody else. And for some reason, we're totally chill with it on the sports stage, but we're not when it comes to business. But the reality is it is the same impulse to compete and to win and to push your skill set and to become truly great and to do something extraordinary that will be remembered for generations and generations. And for hundreds of years, civilization, at least in the west, has been advantaged by taking advantage of that reality, the way that humans are and the things that motivate them and what makes the actual free market such an incredible generator of innovation. But now we are finding ourselves telling bullshit lies about what's really going on. And because, bless her cotton socks, she doesn't know about the economy, so she doesn't know how to fucking push back. And so you end up in a situation where you've got people spouting just absolute bullshit that's easy enough to debunk, but you have to know about it. And unfortunately, economics is just complicated enough that people will just take the bullshit bamboozled story that somebody gives them. And in a moment where people are emotionally vulnerable because the economy is not working for the people on the bottom side of the K than they grab for the emotional story, even though it does not make contact with reality.

[Drew]

There's been some back and forth, right? Have you ever read the book Economics Confessions of Economic Hitman John Perkins?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've heard of it, but I haven't

[Drew]

read the majority of the pushback is like, yes, that's true, but we have to make sure that we're not saying to Gustavo's point, economic destabilization is a thing. And I think a lot of times we think of we swing back from the ought and is too frequently in the sense of, yes, in a perfect world, we ought to have free markets and we ought to have capitalism winning and we ought to have competition just like we do in sports and all these other things. No pushback at that. But there is in certain places is it's economically beneficial for the world to believe that capitalism is the only way to win, especially when it comes from a country that is number one in capitalism. It's the same as if looking at the World cup, it's beneficial for Messi to get all the calls because it's beneficial for his team to win. And every time his team member goes down, it's the worst thing in the world. Every time another team member goes down. What I Barely touched you. And there is a sort a level of framed expectation when it comes to certain talking points or framed grace is a better word. I'm not trying to get into the woo woo, but it's like, oh, okay, that's different because of this, this, this, this, this, this and this. But that's still mostly capitalism, so that's cool. And as soon as it's socialism, it's like, nope, not budgeting. I'm not giving you 1%. You said the S word. Banned, exile, blocked. And I think that the level of grace, again, I'm just failing to find a better word. I think we need to add to where the general emotion of socialism come from. Because whether it's Gustavo or Gary's Economics or Mamdani or even Bernie Sanders for his third political reinvention, these ideas are here and they're not going away. And we need to figure, to me, I think we need to figure out how to galvanize that audience versus just saying, you're stupid. This is what happens. Or you don't know about history, this is what happens. Is there a way that we can bridge that gap in a way? Does that make sense?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It makes perfect sense. And I think that hopefully by this point, anybody that's been watching for a long time understands that is my commitment that I've given over this part of my professional career to largely trying to deal with one thing. The bottom side of the K is not working. And the thing that got me into economics was wanting to help people on the bottom side of the K. So this all started for me in Covid when I was still much closer to my days at Quest, when I was working with former gang members, drug dealers, like people that really grew up hard. And so my entry into economics was going, Covid is going to wipe those guys out because none of them are going to have jobs. They're going to get sent home. And I didn't have a mental map for money printing, so I didn't know they were about to get stimulus checks and all that stuff. So I was just like, oh my God, these guys are really going to be fucked. So I was like, I've got to do content. And my whole team was freaking out because. And Drew wasn't here at the time, but they were like, this is going to be bad for the channel. And I was like, yes. And I could not care less because this is what people actually need in this moment. And so I started doing basically balance your checkbook, how to get ahead the like personal finance 101 stuff. And then as I started encountering like, what is money? And all of that, it just unspooled into something. So to not diatribe on that too long and just say, the very thing that animates me is wanting to help people on the bottom side of the K. And to actually help them, though, you have to say how things really work. Because Gary's economics wants to give people an emotionally satisfying answer that won't make their life better.

[Drew]

Better.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And Gustavo is. He wants to give them an answer that will make their lives worse to a degree that is hard to overstate. If he were to be able to play out his actual full agenda, abolishing the police, getting rid of prisons, no borders. It's really crazy. It's crazy. And so we're going to keep playing the DSA in their own words so people do not need me to translate for them. Them, they say, the most unhinged ever. So all of this is what scares me, is that, hey, I actually want to fix the K. And you can. Even though I'm emotionally animated by something, just listen to the cause and effect. I'll walk you through it over and over and over and over and over

[Guest Expert]

and over and over.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so there you can say, oh, I've got to ignore Tom. He's so hyperbolic. But he, the dumbass gives me his chain of logic. And so I'm just going to go show how that part in the chain of logic doesn't make any sense. You'll notice people don't do that, but if they did, that would be great. Okay, so now accepting your frame, we must galvanize those people and say, you have every right to be mad. I understand the frustration. Not only do I understand it, the frustration is legitimate. Now let's just not do what historically people have done, which is grab the emotionally resonant speech that will make your life a thousand times worse. Worse. Let's instead do the hard work of saying, this is how an economy is actually constructed. And so let's go in and figure out how we get rid of the abuses of power. This is why the death of Thomas Massie as a relevant political figure is so emotionally devastating. I don't think he's a saint, and he probably isn't who is ever going to be a viable presidential candidate. But at a minimum, he really understood debt is now caught up in money and politics, and so he'll be able to bang that drum well. And so that kind of thing is very disheartening. And I understand why people get sad to see that go, but our energy should be on that. We need sensible voices, like a Thomas Massie, like a Rand Paul. But instead, what we're getting. I see you have queued up Hassan. Next we're getting Hassan's. We're getting Gustavos. Instead of people that are like, listen, you're mad for this reason. This is corrupt. This must be fixed. And here's what the economy needs to look like, here's why the debt is a problem, and they're just cause and effect all day long. But I. I will be interested to see if the fact that I'm emotionally animated by this ends up helping or hurting us. I don't know. It's far more entertaining. I can see that in the numbers. The more you can take me somewhere where I am legitimately riled up. I'm never going to play a character, but the more that it goes somewhere that I legitimately have emotional animation. We can see it in the numbers. So it's like, that's. Obviously there is something there that makes it better tv. Whether it ends up being more persuasive is a bigger question. And I don't know the answer to that. So. But what I will say is, when you can make the person feel the way they want to feel, they're far more likely to follow you than if you simply give them. But I don't know if I make people feel the exact same opposite because for my thing anyway, I need people that challenge my ideas. And so what we don't do, there are communities that from a financial standpoint, is very wise. But there are communities where you'll see any dissenting voice gets first put in timeout and then they just will block them forever. And it becomes like sort of a joy. And you'll hear their community be like, oh, ban them forever. Because they said something that's considered, you know, a non starter in their group, whatever. Like, oh, we shouldn't ban all Muslims. That's crazy. Ban them. Like, you'll hear that kind of shit all the time. And I'm like, yeah, I get it. You're gonna make more money. Because people go in and they're like, you're gonna tell me all the things I wanna hear. Whereas in some ways, I'm using it the opposite way, which is I ask you guys to surface the sharpest critiques of my ideas.

[Drew]

You kind of answered my question. The reason I had it queued up. I was gonna say, why do messages like this resonate when other messages that come from a place of I'm trying to help. And the Rand Paul's, the Thomas Masseys don't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is only a minute. We should probably still play it. So people are attacking this speech in ways that I think go too far. So everybody's saying this is a Hitler style rant in a Maoist uniform. The Maoist uniform is almost certainly intentional. So that one I will say I've got all my beefs with him on that and I can't believe that he backs a murderous regime. But whatever. We can have that comment or that discussion separately, but I don't think it's fair to categorize this as being like Hitler. But we're going to talk about why Hitler's speech falls into the same category. But Hitlerian isn't the category. It's just where Hitler slots. So anyway, no more to Trumpism, but no more to the Democrats who compromise, who conciliate and who betray us. No more to the fascist reactionaries, but no more to the Democrats who will collaborate and cooperate with the fascists, who will fund ice, who will fund Israel, who will help poison the planet, who will stiff workers and help bosses. We don't need those Democrats anymore. This is so wild. We're really living through it. In fact, I know we have a message. We are coming. We are on boss, we're on board, we're on bowed and we will become undeniable. Okay, so the reason that people are calling this Hitlerian is that it's a populist speech. So it's designed entirely to arouse your emotions. I used to do something called impact quotes. And impact quotes was me doing what I have always referred to as my magic trick. So I would take quotes that may seem unrelated. I would start with one and I would finish with another. And I would do a very performative rant in that I knew music was going to be put under it and I knew that it was meant to be this sort of fast flowing chain of ideas that was people would often listen to in the gym and was meant to get them hyped up. Okay, so that falls into the same vein. It is a speech that's not meant to necessarily make contact with cause and effect. It's a speech that's meant to make you feel something and he's doing that. And Hitler did that and countless orders. Nelson Mandela, I'm sure, did that. But certainly Martin Luther King Jr. Was the king of this. He would give a speech that made you feel something. Now are we going to say that Martin Luther King Jr. Gave Hitlerian speeches. No, that's fucking ridiculous. It is that people are tapping into your emotions. It's what we want in a populist moment. So it's why it works in a populist moment. And so there's enough to drag Hasan for. For being a complete unhinged lunatic in terms of his actual policies that when people. People, in my opinion, discredit themselves by trying to paint it as if it were worse than it really is. This is why I tried to make Gustavo's argument better than he made it in terms of why his parents would have come here, even if, like, it almost doesn't matter what they believe. If you look at whether they were or weren't. If America really is destabilizing something, it makes sense to go inside the belly of the beast. So if you can show. I'm not trying to straw man, let me make this as hard as I can. Let me steal men the shit out of this, and then tell you why this is still nonsensical, then you have something. So I. Yeah, I. The speech is designed to whip people up into a lather, to get them to stand up and get them to applaud. There's nothing specific. He's just saying, we can't be stopped. We're here. We're the formidable force. And, yes, that is the kind of thing that Hitler would do. It's also the kind of thing that Churchill would do. It's the kind of thing that every populist leader ever would rightly do because they understand that moment in history.

[Drew]

It kind of brings me back to the David Freeberg quote that was just like, I think we're just gonna have to, like, run the experiment, fail it, just to squash this. I don't think there's any other, like, avenue. He kind of pushed his chips in, in that way. I hope it's not. But that quote came back to my head after seeing him rile up people. And it is true. If you get people feeling emotionally connected with you, they don't care what you do. They're like. Like, he gets how I feel. I'll follow him. And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but here's the real problem. So there are going to be people that will hear my breakdown of Peru, and they're just going to say, oh, that's all crazy. These guys were only demented because American imperialism happened for so long. This is all just American imperialism. And so for them, they're still going to have the argument, we are living in a world where Mao killed at least 45 million people. Stalin killed at least 25 million people, and we still can't condemn them. We can't say that, oh, this. And forget Pol Pot, who killed millions. It's like government after government after government in the 20th century alone, racked up. The numbers vary, but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 million to 200 million people were killed by their own own governments. And yet still people want to give more power to the government instead of stripping it away. That is. That is scary. That tells me that touching your hand to the stove only works for the person whose hand actively got touched. The people who fled Cuba, they're like, yo, we can't do this again. But their kids are like, what's the problem? So it fades so fast that I think it was Jefferson that was like, to preserve liberty, you must water the country with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. I mean, basically, in a far more poetic way than I'm not remembering off the top of my head, saying, every generation is going to have to pay a price to keep this in place. Because of this loop where it's like, if you grew up in prosperity, you. You just don't know anything else. And so you don't realize how bad things can get. You don't realize that prosperity is not the default setting. So they assume Peru would have been fine if America hadn't come in and messed things up. They assume India would have been fine if the British Empire hadn't come in and messed things up. They assume Africa would have been fine if Europe hadn't come in and messed things up. And we don't have the evidence for that. So recognizing that there have been these incredible problems born of colonialism and imperialism is not the same as going, this all would have been fine without it. It's like people that have a vision of Europeans come to America and ruined this otherwise, like, idyllic pastoral life where everybody got along. And it's like, well, let's also remember that you weren't considered a man until you took the scalp of somebody else from the tribe. So that sounds like some gangland shit, but that's just what it was. They would raid four women and take them back, and they didn't let them go. You were going to be somebody's wife whether you wanted to be or not. And by the way, they killed your husband in front of you. And if your kids were old enough, they would kill them in front of you. And oftentimes, by the way, they would, like, cut their bellies out and pull the intestines out and show them they would kill a woman if she was pregnant and cut her baby out right there. I mean it. People just do not understand. Like, humans are savage. So it's like one savage group happened to beat the other. But in this case, partly because largely through geography, you don't need to discount anybody. Europe had fucking amazing geography. And so they just got hundreds of years ahead of everybody because they had. And part of the amazing geography shit was cold. And so they had fertile land, but only for like a narrow band of the year.

[Guest Expert]

And.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then they would freeze to death during the other part of the year and couldn't grow food. So that forced them to be like, yo, we've got to be industrious. We've got to make hay while the sun shines. Literally, why we have phrases like that. So you would plant and reap what you sowed during a very specific time. You would hunker down for the winter. You would build shelter. You had to come together as a group, but also compete within the group, like all of that shit. And by the way, you couldn't tolerate people that were just trying to be a parasite. So those motherfuckers got ostracized, which meant what? You're going to die. You're either going to be eaten by wolves, you're going to die in the first winter period. End of story. Go watch a season of alone. You will see very quickly being ostracized is the same as being killed. So it was just like, that's how we came up. Now, because of that, we were able to import that European culture into America. And America then becomes the greatest nation, most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. That is not the same as a counterfactual of had we not ever come here, that this would have been something even better. That's where it's like, maybe it would have been. We don't know that. So all I'm saying is, well, we have one result and the other is a big set of question marks. So we have to be very careful about thinking that people will touch their hand on the stove, draw the right conclusions. It's just not what history says actually happens.

[Drew]

And it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm talking about the US labor force numbers. It seems that Americans are falling out of the labor force at record rates. And to me, unemployed person is the prime. Was it. Idle mind is the devil's playground. So they're going to be sitting around not working. So I'm going to be looking more and more. Good. Yeah. So the number of Americans who are not in the workforce rose by 832,000 in June to 105.8 million, an all time high. These are people who are neither employed nor actively looking for work. This is now 2.2 million above the 2020 pandemic peak when the global economy was shut down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is crazy. This is worse than Covid.

[Drew]

So in 2026, 2.5 million Americans have exited the labor force. By comparison, 68.7 million Americans were not in the labor force at the beginning of this century. As a percentage of the population age 16 plus, this figure is up 38.5%, the highest since the 1970s. Excluding the pandemic period, the US job market is weak under the surface. This goes back to the Jeff Snyder conversation we have. So it's. There's a lot of different indicators of recession, not just the stock market.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. And the wild thing to me. So this exists right now in a confluence of things. We had our boy at the dsa, but we've also got Bernie. If you pull up his tweet, basically like trying to bullshit the American public about what's really going on. So this is Bernie Sanders. Sergey Brin is now worth 200 billion. He could save health care for 3 million people. Instead, he's spending 82 million against California's 5% billionaire wealth tax. He'd rather see low income Americans die and suffer than pay his fair share of taxes. That is a moral obscenity.

[Guest Expert]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The fact that Bernie Sanders knows this is a lie is a moral obscenity. First of all, the reason I call this a lie is to say that Sergey Brin has not paid his fair share. Like, remember, for him to realize any of those gains in his life, he would have paid tax on them. It's not going to be ordinary income. So I understand that riles people up, but I've debated that a thousand times. I'm not going to go into it right now, but he's paying an obscene amount of taxes. He will have paid more in tax than virtually any other human being who's ever lived. So that's already crazy. And then this is the part that really drives me crazy with this. He could save health care for 3 million people. That's a lie. That would be for a year. The thing is, the billionaire tax is meant to be a one off, which is a lie because it will never be able to meet the needs of the system that has a gap that must be filled every year. This is the central lie of what Mamdani is saying about what's happening in New York is I've closed the budget shortfall. No, you have not. You've widened the gap and you will have to close it again next year and again the year after, but making it worse every time. And so eventually you run out of places to pull it, you run out of deferrals, and you still are going to have this gigantic what these guys try to do. I would just like to remind Bernie Sanders that 47% of Americans are on public dole of some kind. Our welfare system is massive. America is one of the largest socialist states in the world. And so we can't tolerate people to frame America as if we don't have social safety nets. Now, if you want to start making our social safety nets less fucking obscene, I would be all for it because the amount of fraud that's in them is ridiculous. The fact that the government will pay for things. So it's saying like, oh, we're using free market economy, but not really. This one goes aimed specifically at healthcare. And so you've got all these problems with the put college loans in there as well, where the government's backing all of that stuff. And so it creates massive distortions in the market, which makes everything more expensive. And so you're not actually letting the free market do its thing. And so you're creating like the worst of all worlds where you're socializing health care, you're socializing education, but in the worst conceivable way possible. And so that kind of stuff, I would love to see that solved because these things are absolute atrocities. But that's not what Bernie's talking about. What Bernie's talking about is just a little bit more tax revenue is going to solve the problem. And just if these greedy assholes would give up the money, we'd be fine. Dude, with the amount of fraud that we have, you're never going to convince wealthy people to give up more money. That is absolutely absurd. What you want is to get them to go in and make it more efficient. Oh yeah, we tried that. And people started bombing Elon Musk's Tesla facilities because they didn't like that he was going after fraud, waste and abuse. And look, I know that that's going to be hotly debated and there are going to be people just absolutely freaking out. But who was it that told us that the rate at which an employee of the government can retire is choke pointed by the speed of an elevator in a mineshaft where all of the Records are sent down. Guys, this is so crazy. The level of absurdity that money can go out without anybody having to say what it's for. That's fucking absurd. Like there are so many things that are just absolutely asinine. You had the single most effective entrepreneur at creating efficiencies ever in human history, history in the government for whatever number of days. And people reacted to that with such an allergic reaction that the only thing that made sense was this is either left extremists just trying to get what they want, full blown Trump derangement syndrome, or people just so blindly hating capitalism that a capitalist coming in and trying to make the government more efficient was such anathema to their belief system that they couldn't have it or that they're just in on the take. And that was of course one of the things that Elon put. He said, listen, this is largely a left leaning thing, but there are people on the right that are also using the fraud spigot to get money going over to them. And I'm sure you guys algorithms are not as honed as mine to show you fraud examples over and over and over, but boy, there is no shortage of examples of basically every day of new fraud being uncovered. It's absolutely crazy. And so every time I see Bernie going on one of these rants, I'm going to counter it with facts. It is just criminal that Bernie makes out like we're not already taxing people to death. Like just look at the graph of. Remember over the last 10 years, the last 10 years we have effectively doubled the government budget. That's crazy. That's so stupid. So you just see tax going up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And he just wants more, more, more, more, more. It hasn't solved the problem yet. Why the fuck would it solve the problem with the next round? So stupid.

[Drew]

Crazy. I was trying to pull up the graph but I did not find it in time. Okay, I want to jump over to AI because I think that this is a really good example going back to earlier about like subsidized industrial. So right now, Kimike 3 was just released China's open source model. And this spells big problems for OpenAI and anthropic. So set it up for us. But I have a couple follow ups to see kind of how we maneuver this market disruption that's happening live. Because I think this is a live example that we can use that we can hang back from Peru and all these other things that we were talking about earlier.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this one is very interesting. The AI arms race continues between the US and China and it is best understood as an AI arms race. Beijing based Moonshot AI released Kimi 3 recently. It's a 2.8 trillion parameter frontier model showing that China can do frontier models. It's the largest open weight AI model ever built by Moonshot's own benchmark. So take this with a grain of salt. K3 beats Anthropics, Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT5 on most coding and agent tasks. It still trails the absolute American top tier system. So Cloud Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 SOL, but it runs at roughly 40% lower cost. And on July 27, so a little bit in the future here, Moonshot plans to release the full model weights, meaning any company or government by the way on earth can download it and run it on their own servers for free. So people are going to sit up and pay attention to this one. The market for sure has semiconductor stocks sold off. In an echo of the deep seat panic of January of 2025, Xi Jinping amplified the moment personally opening the World AI Conference in Shanghai with a speech doubling down on China's open source strategy, casting China as the open collaborative partner and America's closed frontier labs as the ones hoarding the technology. Technology. Now of course he fails to mention that him using OpenAI, funding it with the government, but then using OpenAI the way or open source AI the way that the DSA wants to use state run agent state run grocery stores to wipe out bodegas. China wants to use that as a way to basically batter the entire US economy, which right now hinges almost entirely our growth anyway on what's going on in AI. And so it's really a brilliant strategy. So that is a part of this that people cannot lose sight of is what you really have going on is this AI arms race between the US and China. China having the much better cover story of like no, no, no, like we want to open source this, this is crazy. These guys are just being closed source. Now the bad news is that Trump may take the bait. So the Trump administration is now reportedly weighing an executive order targeting open source AI, potentially restricting American access to Chinese models. So even the administration's own advisor, who is like the czar of all this, David Sacks, warned that the rules could entangle the country and complications that end up hurting US competitiveness. So while yes there is like the, the AI models out there, if they're open source and sent to the US would be bad for anthropic and OpenAI, they're going to use a jiu Jitsu move to try to make this the best thing that ever happened to them, so that the government clamps down on China and open source models maybe entirely to create a protected space for our big AI companies. Now this is where this shit gets complicated. I do not trust them to do this well. So just to plant my flag, I don't trust them to do this well. I think this will end up being a bigger problem and they should just, just not do it. And if the American companies can't survive, you've got to wipe out that first wave of investors. And it means what it means. And then, as with all of these technologies, you get the inheritance generation that will come along behind them and they'll be able to build something big on the back of this. It will be very economically devastating, but it is what it is, man. And so this is one of those times, okay, everybody hears me, I'm planting that flag. That is what should happen. Now, do I understand why the government is being protectionist? Yes, I do. This is just one where they're going to end up creating, I think, more problems than they solve. So if we want to say, okay, look, we've got to do something to feed our, the, the big frontier models, so we've got to make sure that those are getting funded, but we are going to be agnostic to what companies end up actually running that.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know what the best way to do that is, but I certainly understand, much like I really believe America should make sure that things are being manufactured in the US Even if that means that we give incentives to industry, even if that means that we tariff our competitors and keep them out. And I understand the historical fears over protectionism, but so far we have not seen any inflation from doing that. So a lot of that stuff assumed a very different economic time than what we're living in right now. So I think that there are good ideas to be had there. I do not trust the Trump administration to do this well, which is why my flag gets planted elsewhere. But there is certainly an argument to be made that we have to make sure that the US wins this AI arms race. It's just there's going to be a smart way to do this in a dumb way. And the odds that they choose a dumb way border on 100%. So that is my fear.

[Drew]

Okay, This I understand. I get the importance of AI, I get the importance of restriction. I get the importance of winning the arms race. But I'm Going to lay three industries down there and I'm going to ask you to help me see the nuance of it. So we have the AI industry. China versus America. America needs to go balls to the ball. No regulation. We need to just make the best man win.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You'll never hear me say no regulation, but yes, I get your point.

[Drew]

Yeah. Automotive BYD wants to come to the US we cannot let them come to the US it will decimate for DeSantis Chrysler in our local manufacturing. We need to learn how to manufacture locally. Grocery stores. I want to subsidize a grocery store in order to get low cost goods too. So I'm not being a jerk, I'm just trying to. No, no, no.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't feel like you're being a jerk at all.

[Drew]

I'm trying to lay out the three different things that seem to rhyme, but I know that there are different nuances and I want like to explain like this is why it's okay for here, not okay for here. This is the, the main thread of what you know, I'm trying to communicate in that way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the second you destroy the price signal, you create a problem for yourself. So anything that the government does where they're picking winners and losers, this is why I absolutely despise the US Government. Investing in intel is. Well now you're saying for the American people to win, every president is going to have pressure to make sure that whatever policy they put in place advantages. They'll say the American people because it advantages is the one that the US Government has a stake in that. So what you want to do is say like with the Trump accounts, that this is about American industry writ large. And so what you do is you put a. Much like you would do with the S P500, you put a set of criteria. Whatever companies meet that criteria, they're in. Whatever ones don't, they get booted out. And so it's constantly changing. So you are completely agnostic to what companies win and lose lose. So that is the ideal way to do something like that where the American people are advantaged but they don't have to care about what companies. Exactly. So you want to do a very similar thing with your subsidies. So hey, we're going to be protectionists. So vehicles from other places, especially places that we really fear China. And keep in mind the reason we fear them. Amazing engineering. So they're just awesome. So start with that. But then the government subsidizes. So now this is bodega territory. So the reason that we're walling off is they're using their taxpayer dollars to go up against an industry that historically wasn't using taxpayer dollars. So that's unfair. So you guys can make things cheaper for, let's say, five years, 10 years by forcing the taxpayers in your country to pay for it. And then you stop doing it Once we've hollowed out our manufacturing here because we couldn't keep up. And now we just don't have the industry. And so we literally, we can't compete physically. And so even if we have the brilliant engineering talent, the years it would take to spin up the factories and all that, who's going to fund that? So that's the kind of thing that will only get funded by the government. So we did exactly that, riding on the back of our belief that America was this incredible industrial powerhouse. We ended up gutting our industrial capabilities because just that was our identity. And so we didn't realize we were weakening ourselves through globalization, but nonetheless we were. So you tariff, you keep people out, you incentivize companies to bring their manufacturing here. So even if this is like Toyota or whatever, it's a Japanese company, but they're hiring American workers. And by the way, the thing that you don't want to say out loud, but is very much in the back of your mind, should we go to war with anybody, Japan or anybody else, we're going to confiscate that facility. And now because of people like Palmer Luckey, we're going to be able to spin that up into a cruise missile factory. And so that becomes that part of it. Now, when you get into the state run grocery store of it all, that is now you're making sure that the industries themselves are run by the state. So the state isn't doing an incentive structure to make sure you still have all the competition amongst all the different bodegas, all the different doing things in a very different way. But that, and I don't even know how they would incentivize this at the bodega level, but let's say that you do like what we're talking about, where you keep Amazon and Walmart out. All right, guys, we're going to help your industry. We're going to be protectionist geographically with the five boroughs of New York. And we're going to, from a regulatory method, we're going to block out the big guys. So it's government involvement to make sure that you guys are doing okay. It's not technically ideal for the end customer, but we think it creates a bigger vulnerability in the Long run. Plus we don't like what it does to the characters, so we're going to do it. So it's like that. I still think that you've got to be so careful, but I get it. And at the end of the day, this is why we live in a republic. It's like if those are the things that you want to see done, then you can go lobby your congressmen, your senators to make sure that's the thing that actually happens. Okay, great. Other cities are going to run different things. So another city be like, no, fuck you, we're letting the most Walmart in ever and let's see who ends up winning the argument. So state incentives and protections versus State run very different. But state incentives and protections can go very, very awry and create some of the problems. And so you want to do it for the least period of time possible. So if you're trying to incentivize electric cars, I get it, you're going to do some subsidies in the beginning probably should be blanket tax incentives so everybody gets it equally and it doesn't advantage one company over another. But and tax breaks would be another way that they would do what I was talking about with the grocery stores, like those kinds of things where it applies generically to anybody who qualifies versus we're picking that store is going to win.

[Drew]

So then when it comes to top down policies, it's not necessarily every top down policy is wrong. It just comes down to the implementation of that top down policy and the second and third order consequences.

[Sponsor Voice]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it's a slippery slope and I'm well aware of that. So I am doing my best to describe the world that I actually see and the world that I actually see. When you let capitalism truly go unchecked, what you find is that men with a sociopathic tendency, the dark triad, they rise to power and they don't mind being predatory. And so then you get like Standard Oil where he just didn't care if he put you out of business. The Standard Oil story is really, Rockefeller is really a fascinating fucking story. Like that guy was, was unbelievably good at entrepreneurship. Like unbelievably good and psychotically disciplined with his money. His men loved him because he was so driven and so ever present and just set the tone and at the same time was so efficient that he could go bully everybody off the ball. And so he just Consolidated, Consolidated, Consolidated, Consolidated until you just couldn't compete with him because he could lose money wherever he needed to to put somebody out of Business because he was making so much money elsewhere. And so, yeah, part of the way that we got out of the robber baron era was we broke those monopolies up. That's a good thing from where I'm sitting. So it's like, is it a dangerous game? Did we just give more power to the government? Yes. But is it a necessary game? From where I'm sitting, yes, because the very thing I'm worried about with government had become actual and manifest in business. So it's like, well then I'm gonna say, hey, okay, for the least amount of time possible, I want to see you and minimum amount of force, I want to see you go break that stuff up and then back the off. And we definitely ebb and flow. Right? We'll go too far with regulation, which is where we're at now, and then we'll deregulate too far and you run into other problems and you, you oscillate between the two. I wish we didn't, but that's just how it works. And so, so me trying to describe like, okay, how do I create the like real period of prosperity? It's not a utopia, but how do I create a real period of prosperity? Let me look back at the eras that worked very well and the periods that worked very well. We had just enough regulation that we didn't spill over into monopolies, but we were light touch enough that there was just constant competition where you had all these new upstarts coming nipping at the heels of the people bigger than them. And just the way that companies work, this is the most fascinating thing to all the young people. If there's anybody young, if you hear my voice, oh, please know, here's how this always, always, always works. Old people get stupid and they get stupid partly because literal plaque is building up in their brain. And they get stupid because things worked for them. And so they, they take their lessons. The, the very thing that made them aggressive and risk taking, they thought that they had some brilliant idea that was better than everybody else. And they end up being right. And so now they're like, I can do no wrong. And so they, that calcifies into dogma. And it's like, well, this is how we do things here. This is why I'm one of the goats. And all of a sudden you don't realize that you're 39 Messi and you don't make some of the runs that you should make. And so kind of trading on a reputation of you four or five years ago, but that's not who you really are anymore. And so it's the young fucking hungry kid who's a little bit faster, a little bit sharper, and he supplants you. And so young people always have an advantage. It's crazy, but you can't take the victim card. And right now people are handing it to you like candy at the first day of kindergarten. And all the way through of like, just get your piece from the government. You're being victimized. Go get your piece from the government. Instead of being like, yo, young people always eat the lunch of old people.

[Drew]

Go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is like, I remember when I heard Eric Weinstein say that old people just need to retire. They need to, like, recognize that their time has passed, that young people need to be taught to be savages. Like, get out there, do your fucking thing. You can run circles around these old dumbasses and they're just not. And so that one makes me sad. Now we can get into the like ways that the government is facilitating all that, the demographic shifts and all that. All of those things are real. But in trying to make a point, I'm going to overcome, simplify. And so anyway, that's where I want to see young people just really leverage that. You want that competition, so we don't ever want to overregulate, so you lose that competition, period.

[Drew]

That's all I got word.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, everybody, thank you so much. We've got an AI masterclass coming up. Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm Pacific. I hope you will join me for free. I'm going to show you how to build a company using AI. There's never been a better time than right now. If you want to control your destiny, make sure you you join me again. That's August 5th at 1pm Pacific Time. The link is in the description. Sign up now, boys and girls, and we'll see you then. Until next time, my friends, be legendary.

[Sponsor Voice]

Take care.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Peace.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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