Will Israel Continue the Fight If America Pulls Out of the Iran War

Summary

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Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Will Israel Continue the Fight If America Pulls Out of the Iran War
Date: March 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this live solo episode, Tom Bilyeu navigates the complex web of current world events—primarily focusing on America’s involvement in the Iran war, the calculus behind US and Israeli military actions, and the economic consequences tied to these geopolitical moves. Tom breaks down economic policy debates, especially the wealth tax proposal by Elizabeth Warren, and offers insights into global instability, the energy transition, and how all of this affects both average Americans and global markets.

Tom’s trademark: unfiltered analysis, economic literacy, audience engagement, and a mix of both strategic and philosophical deep-dives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. State of the Iran War: Conflicting Pressures and Strategic Interests

• [01:00-08:11]
  Tom opens up with a summary of the volatile Middle East situation. Trump is considering an “exit ramp” in Iran just as Gulf countries—most notably the UAE—signal that a simple ceasefire is no longer satisfactory for their security needs.
• UAE's Ambassador to the US, Yosef Al Otaiba, states in a WSJ op-ed that “a simple ceasefire is not enough... We need a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran's full range of threats: nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, terror proxies and blockades of international sea lanes.” ([06:15])
• The escalation from the Gulf states is seen as an opportunity to permanently weaken Iran and ensure future economic stability as the world transitions away from oil.

2. Energy Future & Regional Ambitions

• [08:03-11:29]
  Tom explores the Gulf’s incentive: Using their current oil wealth to pivot into global investment and tourism before the rise of green energy erodes that advantage. Iran’s destabilizing actions threaten that future, which explains the urgency and hardline stance taken by the UAE and others.
• "Oil is going to not necessarily run out, but the world's just going to move away from it all." ([08:08])

3. Predicting Trump’s Moves: The Bond Market as a Political Barometer

• [11:29-14:21, resumes 15:31+]
  Tom emphasizes that to understand Trump’s erratic-seeming foreign policy, one must look at the bond market—particularly the 10-year Treasury yield.
• If the yield exceeds ~4.5%, borrowing costs surge, threatening economic stability and Trump’s political future. Thus, Trump’s diplomatic and military actions are inextricably tethered to bond market fluctuations.
• “It's not him having mood swings; it's him going into something with a message... I understand if I let the bond yield on the 10-year Treasury go above, call it roughly 4.5%, it's an existential threat to my presidency.” ([20:05])

4. Does Trump Have a Plan?

• [15:43-22:41]
  Tom rebuts the claim that Trump acts without a plan:
  • Trump is outcome-driven—he wants to control Iran’s oil, outmaneuver China, and secure a legacy as a consequential president.
  • Strategic planning, war-gaming, and responsiveness to market shifts are all present. The real question, Tom suggests, is not whether Trump has a plan, but whether he is pursuing a good plan.
• “Mapping Trump as a shooting from the hip lunatic I think is incorrect. This is why the bond market is so informative.” ([19:33])

5. What If the US Pulls Out? Israel & The GCC

• [22:41-27:53]
  If the US withdraws, Tom predicts Israel—driven by existential security concerns and belief in military superiority—will continue the conflict. GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, particularly the UAE, may join if they feel they have sufficient backing, but would not act alone.
• “I don’t think that Netanyahu is bluffing when he says, we decide when this war is over. If the US pulls out, but we're not going to back off now.” ([25:19])

6. Economic Volatility & Game Theory

• [28:10-32:48]
  Tom delves into how volatility is not only an accidental byproduct, but a feature—sometimes even a strategic tool.
• Tactical policy reversals—pausing airstrikes, floating tariffs, etc.—aren’t random but are deliberate circuit-breakers to keep bond yields and inflation in check.

7. Wealth Tax Debate and Economic Policy

• [52:08-74:48]
  Tom passionately criticizes Elizabeth Warren’s new wealth tax proposal, warning of dire economic and social consequences.
  • A wealth tax targets net worth, not income. It forces the sale of illiquid assets and, according to Tom, pushes successful innovators and capital out of the US.
  • “[A wealth tax] is the government stealing from you and is proof that Elizabeth Warren has gone fully retarded... It’s a tax on the things you own. It is confiscatory.” ([52:47], [53:00])
  • Tom emphasizes the “Laffer Curve effect”—taxing the ultra-wealthy leads to capital flight.
  • Historical cases: Argentina, Cuba. New York’s attempts to recover lost tax revenue after wealthy residents fled.
  • Core argument: Real reform should focus on balancing the budget, rooting out fraud, and simplifying the tax system before pursuing punitive wealth taxes.

8. Audience Q&A, Super Chats, and Economic Literacy

• [44:21-87:08, select highlights]
  • Tom answers audience questions on balancing the federal budget, removing money from politics, the concept of a flat tax, and the need for a thriving middle class.
  • “History has just made it real fucking clear. If you have a thriving middle class, yay. If you don’t have a thriving middle class, you are fucked, man.” ([85:09])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Gulf states and Iran:

“We want Iran to be a normal neighbor. It can be reclusive and even unfriendly, but it cannot attack its neighbors, block international waters or export extremism.”
— UAE Ambassador (as quoted by Tom) ([07:21])

On Trump’s decision-making:

“If I let [the bond yield] go above roughly 4.5%, I’m going to have an existential threat to my presidency because everything is going to become more expensive.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([20:05])

On Israel’s motivation:

“Israel sees this as existential. Israel sees this as, we’ve only got one person causing the problems. Everybody else is good—that we can finally step into a future where everything is going to be one wonderful... They are looking at just completely taking over Gaza... turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East, making it all about economics.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([26:50])

On the wealth tax:

“It is the government stealing from you and is proof that Elizabeth Warren has gone fully retarded.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([53:00])

On populism and America’s current crossroads:

“All you do is summon a demon to fight for your team. So when you think of populism as a demon summoning circle... those two demons are going to go to battle... and that’s the moment we’re in. That doesn’t have anything to do with Trump. Trump did not create this. Trump was summoned by it.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([43:18])

On middle class as a North Star:

“The only thing that matters is: do we have a thriving middle class?”
— Tom Bilyeu ([85:06])

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Important Timestamps

• [01:00-08:11]: Setting the stage – Iran, UAE, US policy, Green energy transition
• [11:29-14:21]: GCC states’ messaging shift; bond market’s role in US decisions
• [15:43-22:41]: Debate on whether Trump operates with a plan; strategic motivations
• [22:41-27:53]: What Israel and the GCC will do if America exits the war
• [28:10-32:48]: Tactical volatility, market prediction, and policy whiplash
• [52:08-74:48]: Wealth tax proposal deep-dive—history, mechanisms, consequences
• [82:43-87:08]: Audience Q&A: democracy, balancing the budget, and the centrality of the middle class

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Takeaways

• Geopolitics and economics are deeply intertwined in the Iran war; US leaders are balancing global strategy against crucial domestic economic signals.
• US bond market—the 10-year yield—is pivotal: It's a “dashboard” metric guiding high-level decisions in real-time.
• Israeli and Gulf state postures are far more aggressive than often portrayed, and they are prepared to continue the fight without the US if necessary.
• Populism and volatility define the current era: Policy chaos is both cause and effect of the world’s deep economic and political strains.
• New tax proposals could have deep social and economic fallout: Tom argues that pursuing a wealth tax without first balancing the budget and rooting out fraud risks catastrophic economic decline.
• Sustaining a thriving middle class is paramount to long-term social and political stability.

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Episode in Tom’s Own Words

“I don’t need you to like anything Trump is doing, okay? Right now, to be honest, I don’t know if it’s gonna work out or not... But the only thing that matters is: do we have a thriving middle class?” ([40:43], [85:06])

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For an unflinching, economically literate breakdown of America’s foreign and domestic crossroads, this Tom Bilyeu episode is a must.

Transcript

[Commercial Announcer]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Good morning everybody. Welcome to the Tom Bilyeu show live. I'm flying solo today, boys and girls, so we are going to get properly unhinged. You're going to see Drew has been the only restraining force in my life and now I get to really go crazy. I'm sort of kidding, but we'll see how much is true. But pour one out for our boy Drew, who's on vacation right now, hoping he is having an absolutely wonderful time. He will be horribly missed while he is gone, but we do want to make sure that he has a lot of fun. Ryan is going to be picking up the slack today. Ryan, thank you so much. He will be battling on your behalf, Dear Chat. So anything you have definitely give to him and anything appropriate he will challenge me with. There is no shortage of madness going on in the world as I would expect you guys to already be primed for. The UAE has rejected the Iranian ceasefire. These guys now are the ones that seem super eager to get going. Even as Trump is considering some sort of exit ramp, he's now getting gifts from the whoever's in control over in Iran. So he's ready to find a negotiated settlement, but apparently the UAE is not and they said that they are ready to join a ground war if necessary. We're getting more into that.

[Ryan]

Larry Fink, the largest asset manager in the known universe, explains that Iran will

[Tom Bilyeu]

either be amazing for the global economy or usher in a catastrophic global recession,

[Ryan]

but there's not going to be anything in the middle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Elizabeth Warren is doing her best to absolutely trigger me and we're going to

[Ryan]

have A full deep dive on this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Today she's introduced a new wealth tax proposal which hopefully, by this point, everybody that comes here understands that that is so economically irresponsible.

[Ryan]

This is absolutely foolish.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And my hope is that every American rises up if they don't want to be locked in the grips of poverty, that is and absolutely makes a ruckus. And speaking of making a ruckus, the bond market continues to be the best way to predict what Trump is going to do next.

[Ryan]

We're going to look at exactly how

[Tom Bilyeu]

that mechanism works, why it works. It is truly fundamental one to understanding the functioning of the US Economy and to understanding why Trump does what people are calling taco all the time. I don't think it has anything to do with chickening out. And once you map it to what's going on in the bond market, it's going to make a lot of sense. You'll be able to predict a lot more things than you otherwise would.

[Ryan]

The Pelosi act has made it out a committee, boys and girls.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Could this be the first step to

[Ryan]

forcing politicians to stop being immoral assholes who profit off of insider knowledge? Let's hope. Fingers crossed. We'll see.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'll believe it when I see it.

[Ryan]

Speaking of things that you have to see to believe, Druski completely broke the

[Tom Bilyeu]

Internet yesterday with his Erica Kirk sketch. We'll be watching that for better or worse.

[Ryan]

Can't wait to hear what you guys think about that one. It was pretty wild. And I have to say, everybody here

[Tom Bilyeu]

at Impact Theory was very eager for me to watch that sketch. So we'll make Ryan stand up for an entire generation here at some point later, defending his choices as to why this is doing what it's doing on the Internet. But as of yesterday, it was pushing

[Ryan]

100 million views just on X.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I shudder to think what that looks like when you go all the way across the different apps and places that that video is going to live. I imagine it's got to be hundreds of millions depending on its performance on TikTok, where I could see it really going crazy. Could it push a billion? It might. So there's definitely a lot of cultural energy behind that. We're going to talk about that. Uh, it was funny, it was weird, maybe distressing. And so we'll dive into it. Definitely. Let us know in chat what you guys are thinking.

[Ryan]

All right, everybody.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Iran continues to be a unstable situation.

[Ryan]

If you're getting lost in the messaging,

[Tom Bilyeu]

it is going to be very unclear to what exactly is going on. But the reality is that Trump understands that he has to have an off

[Ryan]

ramp and if he's not able to

[Tom Bilyeu]

get one, then this is going to be a political disaster for him.

[Ryan]

It will have a larger and larger

[Tom Bilyeu]

knock on effect on the economy. Again, we're going to dive deep into why he pays so much close attention

[Ryan]

to the bond market, why the bond

[Tom Bilyeu]

market is so reactive to everything that is going on in Iran. But ultimately, the thing to look at here now is how much pressure is coming from the other GCC nations. So Trump may be eager to get to a ceasefire, as I hope you guys have heard. He's extended a 10 day pause on the destruction of Iran's power infrastructure. That doesn't mean that they're not still bombing Iran. They are, but he's putting a pause on the threat that he was going to come in and just absolutely blow them back to the Stone Age. But from that, we've seen the other Gulf nations really having a reaction like, hold on a second, you can't just

[Ryan]

back out of this. They're not looking for a ceasefire right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that is really interesting. The UAE Ambassador to the us Yosef Al Otaiba, published a Wall Street Journal op ed on March 25th in which

[Ryan]

he stated directly, a simple ceasefire is not enough.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We need a conclusive outcome that addresses Iran's full range of threats.

[Ryan]

Nuclear capabilities, missiles, drones, terror proxies and

[Tom Bilyeu]

blockades of international sea lanes.

[Ryan]

He explicitly defined the removal of the Iranian threat as a fundamental condition for

[Tom Bilyeu]

any ceasefire or future agreement. Now, when all of this was being painted in the media, we were being asked to believe that Trump was just going off unhinged, that he hadn't talked to anybody, that he was just in there pummeling this poor country, only to find out that the Gulf nations now, while they weren't necessarily in the beginning saying, trump, you need to go in.

[Ryan]

Once Iran started bombing them, then all bets were off.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And these guys have gotten very aggressive, especially the uae, and they have declared that the UAE is ready to join a military campaign on the ground, if that's what's necessary. And so the direct quote, which is kind of funny, was, we want Iran

[Ryan]

to be a normal neighbor. It can be reclusive and even unfriendly, but it cannot attack its neighbors, block

[Tom Bilyeu]

international waters or export extremism. And so I think from the safety

[Ryan]

of America and the west more broadly, we don't really have a sense of what it's like to have an unstable

[Tom Bilyeu]

neighbor who believes in jihad and is stirring shit all over the world. And I imagine it is not a lot of fun. So I think that the GCC countries realize that right now, given what Trump is doing, there is a narrow window for them to establish themselves as a

[Ryan]

meaningful member of the, of the global economy in a post oil world. And that's the part that I think

[Tom Bilyeu]

a lot of people are losing sight of, is oil is going to not

[Ryan]

necessarily run out, but the world's just going to move away from it all.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The push towards green energy with AI coming on board, if AI really does

[Ryan]

drive energy costs down, I can all

[Tom Bilyeu]

but guarantee the way that it's going to do that is by getting better at solar. So it's 99.8%, if I remember correctly, of the mass in the solar system is the sun. So if you want to talk about we burn things to generate energy. Well, the burning thing that contains virtually

[Ryan]

all of the matter in the solar system is the sun.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so if you're going to try to get any meaningful amount of energy from the Earth itself, it's going to be minuscule in comparison to what you could get if you just capture the rays coming from the sun that are falling on the Earth. And if you start generating power actually outside of Earth's atmosphere, you're going to get even more.

[Ryan]

They're not dumb. They know that's the way that the world is moving.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so there's a window now where

[Ryan]

they're still oil rich, where they can

[Tom Bilyeu]

begin to make that transition.

[Ryan]

But you can't make it if you have a terror state. And that whole idea of, is Iran a terror state? Is they not?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are they not? Has become this insane political football here

[Ryan]

in the US but when you've got the countries there in their own words saying, all right, we will put ground

[Tom Bilyeu]

troops and go in and fight this war to make sure that we take advantage of this moment to weaken Iran to the point where they can't continue

[Ryan]

to fuck things up for all of us. We want to make a stable region. Iran has constantly made itself the outsider. And like they said, they can be recalcitrant, they can back off, they can try to be isolationists, but they can't

[Tom Bilyeu]

go around messing things up for everybody else. And so they're now drawing a line in the sand, which is really pretty interesting in terms of developments, in terms of what that means for the narrative of people that are for Trump, the narrative for people that are against Trump. And so if we, again, look at all this through an economic lens, it becomes pretty logical what's happening when you think about them having a mental model of we've got to transition into things like tourism, we've got to transition into things like global investment, so getting capital to flow in. I know I've talked about this a

[Ryan]

lot, but the UAE has become a magnet for capital, the likes of which

[Tom Bilyeu]

the world has never seen.

[Ryan]

It is absolutely extraordinary the amount of US VC and private equity firms that are being funded by the Gulf states.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so we look at it as American companies, but the reality is their limited partners are in the Middle east, and this is all part of their desire to transition into the future economy.

[Ryan]

And so if Iran really is the

[Tom Bilyeu]

sticking point for them, destabilizing the region, painting them all with a picture that this just isn't a stable place, this is not where you want to do business, you can understand why that will start to feel existential for them when they look at a future that is not going to rely on oil. So I certainly understand why they have the motive, the impetus that they have. And so that's why, I think, while many of the Gulf countries originally were warning Trump about going into a conflict with Iran, most now are urging him to keep striking the regime until they

[Ryan]

break and are forced to capitulate to aggressive demands.

[Tom Bilyeu]

As one senior Gulf official put it,

[Ryan]

ending the war with Iran while they're still in possession of the tools it is currently using to target GCC countries would be a strategic disaster. So for them, they're making plenty of

[Tom Bilyeu]

noise, certainly signaling to Washington what they're prepared to back. The UAE's ambassador to Washington, in fact, Yosef Al Otaiba had that whole thing in the Wall Street Journal, and he said that basically the ceasefire is not going to get us where we want to go. So everybody has. If you're trying to map out where this is all going to go, then you have to understand their take that One of the officials from the uae, I believe this was, was a sultan. He said that Iran's control over the Strait is direct, quote, extortion on a global scale. So the way that they're looking at this is very in keeping with the way that Trump has been presenting this, which is this is going to be something that's good for the entire region. Iran is creating more problems than a lot of Westerners who are against this war have thought. But this goes back to my beef. The messaging around this war at the beginning was just all over the map. It did not make any sense. It wasn't being clear about why we were going in. I think the Trump administration had a

[Ryan]

belief that, well, the only thing that

[Tom Bilyeu]

people are going to believe or that they'll be willing to support is that it's an imminent threat, that this is all about nuclear. I think it's becoming more and more clear that nuclear is a part of it, that there probably wasn't the urgency to do it right this second based on that, that it's probably more a question of right this second because of what they were doing with their ballistic missile capabilities, driving them further underground. And that there were becoming larger and larger question marks about with the midterms looming, with the investment dollars needing to be secured for Trump to actually get the economy in the place that he wanted it for the midterms in order

[Ryan]

to be able to survive.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That if he was going to make a move on Iran, and he wanted to do for legacy purposes, which you can just read as straight ego, he wanted to do because if we can get control of it, it'd be economically massively advantageous, not only to the US but to the global economy. And so if they were also on the precipice of being able to build their future facing, not that they were going to have it in three days or whatever, but their future facing nuclear program so far underground that the only way to get to it would be a ground incursion.

[Ryan]

Now all of a sudden you put

[Tom Bilyeu]

some ugly motives together with some motives that actually make sense and you get why they move when they move. And so now, seeing how much the GCC countries are backing, this is very interesting. So now it's a question of Trump seems the most ready to find an exit ramp. And that ties into what's going on with the bond market.

[Ryan]

We're hitting pause for a moment, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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

[Chat Moderator]

A lot of the chat right now is seeming to be on the side of Trump doesn't have a plan. And I'm really curious where you are at in terms of you were just talking about Trump having an exit ramp. Where do you think he is at at this stage of the war?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. I'm so fascinated by people who think that Trump doesn't have a plan. So the way that I map Trump goes something like this. He has an outcome that he knows that he wants. So I want to control Iran's oil. Why do I want to control Iran's oil? I've got the problem of China. That certainly maps back to what he's doing in Venezuela. I want to control Iran's oil because it will drive energy costs down the world over and I'm going to look like a hero. He wants to control Iran's oil because he knows that it's a play for Mount Rushmore, which is, I don't literally think he's going to end up on Mount Rushmore, but that's a stand in for him really being able to say, I'm one of the most consequential presidents to ever live. And so he's got that playing. And so on top of that, I think behind the scenes he's getting pressure from the GCC nations that are like, listen, I can't say this publicly, but boy, would it be great if they weren't a problem. He's got a ton of pressure coming at him from Israel, one of our most potent allies. Again, love or hate Israel, whether you're the in the perspective that Israel controls all the puppet strings, whatever. Nonetheless, he's also getting pressure from that direction. And then he's been talking about going after Iran since like 1980. So he is old enough to remember when our we had US Citizens that were being held as hostages in Iran, the way that I think it was Carter dealt with that, that whole fiasco. So Trump is old enough to remember when this all started, the large humiliation that that was for the US and then let's not forget whether it's true or not, Trump believes that Iran tried to have him killed. Okay, so now what's the plan moving forward? These are all the reasons that I

[Ryan]

want to do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now how am I going to do it? He surrounds himself with a bunch of people that go, all right, we know you've got Iran in your sights. Let's try this out in Venezuela. We've got a incredible military ability that a lot of people aren't even aware of.

[Ryan]

Boom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They do the strike in Venezuela and it goes off without a hitch. I think that gases him up massively. And now he's like, holy shit. I've always known that our military was extraordinary because keep in mind we dropped those gigantic bunker buster bombs on Fordow back in, what, June of last year. That goes swimmingly well. So he's got that in his back pocket. He's got now the attack on Venezuela. And so all of that would have been very detailed strategic planning. So that all goes extraordinarily well. I think everybody can agree those things got the outcome that they were aiming to have lightning strike very quick in, out getting the things that you're trying to get. Now, whether the plan ends up working

[Ryan]

the way that he wants it to

[Tom Bilyeu]

work is very different than saying he has no plan. So now he takes those same strategic plannings and he applies them to Iran. There's no universe in which Trump didn't think that Iran was going to try to close the Strait of Hormuz. This has been a big part of the conversation forever. So that was definitely on the table. Now the question becomes, was the plan, hey, what I'm going to do is go in, launch an error campaign with the Israelis, we're going to take out all their leadership, it's going to cause mass chaos. The people are going to rise up. We're in there for a week, two weeks, maybe three tops, and then this is all done and the people have risen up and they've taken it. Maybe that might have been his plan.

[Ryan]

It's still a fucking plan.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I will tell you, there's no universe. Given all the things that he said that at least that wasn't the plan going in. Now, how many contingency plans did he have down the road? He has certainly continued to take action.

[Ryan]

None of this is meant to be

[Tom Bilyeu]

a defense of whether these are wise plans or not. I think we just need to shift the discussion from Trump has no plan to. Let me explain why the plans that he has are non strategically viable. And that's a far more interesting discussion. Mapping Trump as a shooting from the hip lunatic I think is incorrect. This is why the bond market is so informative. When you look at Trump's behavior, it's

[Ryan]

not him having mood swings, it's him going into something with a message that he's not going to make directly, which

[Tom Bilyeu]

is I understand that if I let the bond Yield on the 10 year treasury go above, call it roughly 4.5%, it's never going to be precise.

[Ryan]

But if I let it go above

[Tom Bilyeu]

roughly 4.5%, I'm going to have an existential threat to my presidency because everything is going to become more expensive. And so I will push an agenda, push it as hard as I can, and hope nobody points out the fact that I'm steering by the bond market. And if I'm Iran, all I have to do is make sure that I'm making your bond market go up north of 4.5 and I know you're going to be forced to back down. Okay, so again, this is not Trump going in blind. This is not Trump having no plan. And we can keep detailing out what it, we can detail out the things that he's actually doing and we can presume that those were things that were planned months, if not years in advance through war, gaming and all that. Because remember, this isn't Trump coming up with the actual execution. These are the generals coming up with the actual execution. But you can see from the things

[Ryan]

that he's doing, how quickly they respond, that they've got these like, think of it as a dashboard.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're looking at the bond market, they're

[Ryan]

looking at his polling, looking at a small handful of things, the victories that

[Tom Bilyeu]

they're getting, and they're weighing their options.

[Ryan]

Can we keep pushing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

How long will the stock market be able to go into the red before something becomes politically untenable there? How far can I push the bond market before something becomes politically untenable? How far can I extend our military before we make a mistake that costs

[Ryan]

a bunch of lives?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then there's, it becomes politically untenable. He's watching all of those things. He's going to be adjusting in real time. No, what's the phrase? No plan survives first contact with the enemy. So of course the actual way that this rolls out is not the same way as it would start.

[Ryan]

Okay, so hopefully with all of that, and Ryan will let me know if we have, I have made the case. It's not that he doesn't have a plan.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You can hate the plan, but spending

[Ryan]

all the time saying, ah, he's just shooting from the hip, he doesn't have

[Tom Bilyeu]

a plan, isn't going to be super fruitful. This is where I think we all take a page from Professor Jiang's strategy of going, hold on, let's look at

[Ryan]

game theory, let's look at what history tells us.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And he throws in a third thing that I'm a little more skeptical of, but end of days religious theology, you

[Ryan]

put those together, it becomes very clear exactly what's going to happen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That, I think is a very interesting

[Ryan]

way to approach this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But if everybody derails on the surface level argument that he just doesn't have a plan, I think it's inaccurate and it's very low predictive validity.

[Chat Moderator]

Jumping over to the Israel side of this, because I think we've mapped what Trump's thinking right now. I'm curious, and so is the chat, about what your perspective is if America does manage to pull out of this. Do you think Israel remains and still pushes for their goal? What do you think's going on in Bibi Netanyahu's head?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think the reality with everybody in Israel, with everybody in the GCC nations, is their incentives right now are aligned with the UN incentives, but they're not the same. If the US Pulls out and Israel believes that it's premature, they're going to keep pushing. If the US Pulls out and the GCC countries think that it's premature and they can get a sufficient enough force, either with Israel or just with the GCC countries, I think they will keep pushing forward. I think everybody right now understands that starting the war is politically difficult. But maintaining the war, if you're moving towards a very known outcome that is within the political realities of what you can sustain in your country, you want to keep pushing that. Otherwise, it could be another six months, 10 months, a year, three years before you get an opportunity where the psychology of the people that put you in power will be in a place where they'll accept you going in, because if it looks unprovoked, you have a problem. This is part of the, the payoff. I don't want to give it too much credit for being a brilliant strategy, but this is part of what has worked with Trump's strategy, is that he'll go in. He's in the middle of a diplomatic effort.

[Ryan]

He makes the presentation of like, look,

[Tom Bilyeu]

they can't have nuclear weapons. We're negotiating with them. They're being very unreasonable. Oh, talks have broken down, so we had to strike.

[Ryan]

It's not that I wanted to. We gave them every opportunity to exit

[Tom Bilyeu]

and to do this diplomatically, but they just wouldn't go for it. And so these dumb asses are the reason that I have to bomb them back into the Stone Age.

[Ryan]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So getting that started is the hard part, but you've got the GCC telling you straight to your face, hey, you can't do a ceasefire right now, okay?

[Ryan]

Because now you've just pissed them off. They still have all the weapons that

[Tom Bilyeu]

they need to continue to wreak havoc on the Strait of Hormuz. They still have everything they need to keep wreaking havoc on their neighbors. And now they feel betrayed by everybody. And so we're in it now.

[Ryan]

We've got to see this through.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Israel is going to be the most hardcore about that. I think America is going to be the least hardcore about that. And I think the GCC countries, especially the uae, UAE falls somewhere in the middle. I think if the UAE felt isolated, they absolutely would not take on Iran. But under the COVID of, hey, the US Is still here, they're doing something. I think they'll be in Israel, will do this on their own. And so I don't think that Netanyahu is bluffing when he says, we decide when this war is over.

[Ryan]

If the US Pulls out, the US

[Tom Bilyeu]

Pulls out, but we're not going to back off now, again, you do not have to agree with people to map what their base assumptions are that drive their decision making. When you look at Netanyahu's administration, which I get in the same way that Trump does not represent all of America, Netanyahu does not represent all of Israel,

[Ryan]

but he's in control.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so he's going to be the one dictating that policy as long as

[Ryan]

he is in control.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so his worldview goes something like this. We are being held back by this force in Iran. We don't have the same problem with

[Ryan]

any of our other neighbors through, quite

[Tom Bilyeu]

frankly, military conflict with a lot of our neighbors, like Egypt, we have come

[Ryan]

to a stalemate where there has not

[Tom Bilyeu]

been continued hostility with Egypt for decades. So, okay, cool. That one's more or less stable. We can play ball with anybody that signed up on the Abraham Accords because

[Ryan]

we get it, they've clicked over.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now this is about economics. They're willing to let go of the blood feud that exists between Arabs and Israelis. And so I guess that's maybe a little bit unfair of a way Muslims and Israelis. I think this is where understanding the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims becomes very important. The Shia are obviously way more hardcore about the beef that they have with the Israelis, which is why Iran is going so hard in the paint. And so as you begin to understand, Israel sees this as existential. Israel sees this as, we've only got

[Ryan]

one person causing the problems.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Everybody else is good that we can finally step into a future where everything is going to be one wonderful, for

[Ryan]

sure, one man's opinion, but for sure

[Tom Bilyeu]

they are looking at just completely taking over Gaza in the following way, turning it into the Riviera of the Middle east, making it all about economics. They may not have direct control, but they'd have mass ability to trade with them. They stop becoming a terror attack place that's launching those attacks on them, and they become an economic hub. And that's overseen by Arab nations, but Arab nations that are focused on transforming the Middle east into something that's economically viable as we step into the future. Okay, so you lay all that out. Also, I think that Israel rightly has a lot of belief in their military, and so they're just going to keep trying to hammer Iran until they get the outcome that they're looking for. Now, does that mean they get drug into a protracted war that they end up losing? That's certainly possible, but I think that's how they're looking at the situation.

[Chat Moderator]

Now, I'm bouncing around a lot between chat and super chats and stuff, so if I get this wrong commenter, please mention it. But something someone is saying to jump back to Trump's plans is that it only seems like he has a plan when the market closes. And so I'm curious how that feeds into a lot of the choices he's making.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I can't, I have not taken the time to stop down and isolate what the base assumptions are that keep people going back to Trump has a plan. Trump doesn't have a plan. It is going to be high, much higher predictive validity for you instead to say, okay, there is a thing that Trump is reacting to that makes him make decisions that from the outside seem counterintuitive or whatever. If you start mapping his behavior to the bond market, then it will make sense. But you have to understand what the bond market is. And so in fact, this might be the time for us to really get into what's going on with the bond market. Because once people actually get what this is, then I think people are going to understand why Trump is behaving the way that Trump is behaving. And suddenly it's like, okay, again, you may still disagree. That makes all the sense in the world. But he is operating off of a set of logic that basically says, I've got to steer by what's happening in the economy. And once you understand that he's steering by what's happening in the economy, then all of a sudden it's like oh, this isn't random. This is somebody that's like, I've got a number on my dashboard that is giving me the information. So, honestly, the bond market really is the best way to predict when Trump is going to serve up tacos in the White House, if that's the way you want to think about it. The bond market has become a real time pressure gauge for the state of

[Ryan]

our economy, or at least the part

[Tom Bilyeu]

that Trump understands presents a true existential threat to his presidency. So let's pause there for a second.

[Ryan]

Once you understand we have $39 trillion

[Tom Bilyeu]

in debt, the interest rate on that

[Ryan]

debt is set by the 10 year bond yield. Things that Trump especially does in the world affect that yield up or down. Trump is hyper aware of that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you think of this moment as Trump is driving a race car and he sees a curve up ahead, which is, oh, this is the rate yield going up. It's a very sharp turn because we're doing this via war. So things become very unstable, become harder to predict.

[Ryan]

That number starts going up, he's going to turn the wheel. And when he turns the wheel, people say it's taco.

[Tom Bilyeu]

People say he doesn't have a plan,

[Ryan]

but the reality is his plan is to keep everybody at bay by making

[Tom Bilyeu]

sure that that number doesn't go up too high because it would become a burden too big for the government to carry. It will change the mortgage rates, it will change car loan rates, all of that stuff. So everybody's going to feel the burn of that.

[Ryan]

So he sees that ahead and he turns the wheel accordingly. Then it calms back down, he's on a straightaway, he hammers the gas. Then he sees, oh, it's going again.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He turns the wheel again.

[Ryan]

And once you understand, he sees a

[Tom Bilyeu]

track that maybe other people aren't paying attention to. I mean, the great irony is there's so many people now talking about this because the evidence is so clear that this is what he's doing. It's not random. It's not like he's chickening out. He's like, I'm never going to let that number get above. It's roughly 4.5%. Okay? Every time it gets above 4.5%, he starts doing something so that like, if you want to know when Trump is going to back off of one of

[Ryan]

his extreme policies, it's going to be

[Tom Bilyeu]

then the number gets over 4.4, over

[Ryan]

4.5 and he starts taking action.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He does it specifically to calm the markets.

[Ryan]

Now, if you've mapped all this, that

[Tom Bilyeu]

the markets are highly reactive.

[Ryan]

So Trump can just make a statement and markets will swing wildly. He knows that. So that's him turning the wheel, knowing

[Tom Bilyeu]

how things work, knowing how this is going to swing.

[Ryan]

And if you want some proof, Last April, the 10 year treasury yield hit

[Tom Bilyeu]

4.5% during Trump's tariff announcements.

[Ryan]

So he immediately paused the tariffs and everybody was like, what the fuck? What is he doing? He's making sure that the yield comes back off of 4.5% because he understands

[Tom Bilyeu]

this way better than the average person. And he understands this a lot better

[Ryan]

than

[Tom Bilyeu]

motivated reasoning coming from political economists.

[Ryan]

Okay? So he sees that, he knows what

[Tom Bilyeu]

to do, he knows how to calm people's fears. And he even told people back in

[Ryan]

April when he did this, he says, I was watching the bond market and he said people were getting queasy. It's not like he's hiding it. He just doesn't broadcast this nonstop. But if you map it to that,

[Tom Bilyeu]

then it's all going to make sense.

[Ryan]

By the way, he's not talking about the stock market, he's just talking about bonds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So traders have finally figured this out. They're watching the yield, he's watching the yield. When it starts pushing towards 4.5% threshold, they know that he's going to make a move. And so we're seeing the same pattern play out here in the Iran war.

[Ryan]

As the conflict escalated and oil prices

[Tom Bilyeu]

surged past $100 a barrel, treasury yields started to climb. There's no mystery there.

[Ryan]

It crossed this like quasi magical line

[Tom Bilyeu]

of somewhere around 4.4, 4.5% was happening for the first time this year. And that caused markets to begin pricing in inflation. That means that there's going to be delayed Fed cuts, rate cuts. So they're pricing that in and they

[Ryan]

start to, at that point, price in

[Tom Bilyeu]

a war that may not have an off ramp. So Trump looks at that and he

[Ryan]

says, okay, I'm going to pause the strikes on Iranian power plants. That's freaking people out. It caused the rates to go up. So I'm going to push it, I'm going to try it, I'm going to float the balloon. I'm going to say, I'm going to do it because I know I have

[Tom Bilyeu]

in my back pocket.

[Ryan]

I can just say, well, now I'm not going to do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And if you think of him like that, somebody who's just totally unafraid to

[Ryan]

180, okay, I said I was going to do it, but I'm not going to do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because I said I was going to do it.

[Ryan]

And the part that I don't say out loud is, well, I'm going to do it until the rates go up. And if the rates go up too much, then I'm going to suddenly not do it. I'll give you a reason. The reason is going to be some

[Tom Bilyeu]

bullshit, because he doesn't just want to say, I'm steering by that number because that makes it too clear to the Iranians what they have to do to trip him up.

[Ryan]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So he's not going to go deep into talking about it.

[Ryan]

And by the way, when he made

[Tom Bilyeu]

the move and announced that he wasn't going to blast the power plants, oil

[Ryan]

dropped 13% in minutes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, if you think Trump isn't aware that that happens, I'm sure this is confusing, but if you assume that he knows it's going to happen exactly like that, then the moves start to make sense.

[Ryan]

Now, when yields started creeping back up in the days that followed, Trump then extended the pause, this time by 10 days. So now we've got a new deadline for April 6th. Yeah, this is all manipulative, but it's strategically wise. The 10 year treasury yield is the interest rate that the US government pays to borrow money. And this government, Holy Jesus, they borrow constantly for everything. The military, Social Security, the Iran war, fraud, endless fraud, and talk more about that later. All of that stuff requires borrowing. And Trump knows the borrowing has to continue, quite literally for him to. This is a slight projection, but for Trump to avoid prison, he's got to keep borrowing. Therefore, the rates cannot go above a certain level.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not when America is carrying a $39 trillion debt, boys and girls, that's hundreds

[Ryan]

of billions of dollars just in interest. The 10 year bond yield is also

[Tom Bilyeu]

the thing that's driving your mortgage rate,

[Ryan]

your car loan, your credit card. Banks use it as their floor. So whenever it rises, everything gets more expensive for everyone. And the thing I just cannot map to people who are like, Trump doesn't

[Tom Bilyeu]

know what he's doing.

[Ryan]

He's whipsawing around. They either just don't understand the bond

[Tom Bilyeu]

market or they don't map Trump as

[Ryan]

knowing better than most people that that's how this works. Now, given that he's talked about it explicitly and given that Besant is his treasurer secretary, even if Trump doesn't understand it, I assure you Besant does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so Besant's going to be in his ear like, nope, can't let it get that high.

[Ryan]

Now, Trump's team has said explicitly that lowering the Yield is a core goal of the administration. So you can rest assured that he's

[Tom Bilyeu]

going to turn around every time that that number gets too high.

[Ryan]

And what's wild is we're all going to talk about it. You guys are going to hear me bang on about this all the time. It's all over X. But the average person that votes has no idea. This remains completely invisible to them. Trump knows that as well. Now, when the yield spikes, Trump's entire

[Tom Bilyeu]

economic story will fall apart.

[Ryan]

Whole thing about making America great again

[Tom Bilyeu]

and, you know, bringing jobs back and

[Ryan]

lowering the cost of living, that all goes away. Borrowing costs would go up, the Fed

[Tom Bilyeu]

would stop cutting rates, inflation would get worse.

[Ryan]

And the president who promised you prosperity is going to end up looking like a fool. And so homeboy is bound to continue to pay attention to the 10 year yield. And you can have some sense like ahead of time, even before he does it, how he's about to react. If you watch the 10 year rate, but acting like he is not using it as bumpers in the alley, he's going to do the most outrageous shit that he can do. He'll plan it out. It's not him just winging it, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

there is an amount of, you go

[Ryan]

into a negotiation, you don't know what

[Tom Bilyeu]

they're going to say.

[Ryan]

So you've got to be nimble.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You've got to be ready to react as much as to have an agenda and try to push it forward.

[Ryan]

And the bumpers in the alley are where's my rate?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And if the rate starts going too

[Ryan]

high, he's going to suddenly be conciliatory. He's not going to say that's why he's doing it. He's going to say it's because they released eight then ten ships of oil. But he's really got pressure that he

[Tom Bilyeu]

has to address because it's existential to

[Ryan]

his presidency in the form of the cost of borrowing money.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned.

[Ryan]

Thanks for staying tuned.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now let's get back to it.

[Chat Moderator]

So a lot of chat is worried about the government meddling so directly in the economy. And so people are wondering should we be okay with such erratic behavior coming from Trump while he's driving the economy,

[Tom Bilyeu]

erratic behavior around him, taco ing I think people should hunger for, they should be desperate for. If you have a guy that acts hyper aggressively, that's bullying the world, that's alienating, alienating allies. The only thing that would be worse than him backing off when he sees that it's disadvantageous to the average American is that he never backs off, even if it is bad for the average American. Now if I can appeal to you guys really fast and just say this, America is in trouble. America is in dire straits. And we've all been talking about the war so long, I think we forgot why we originally came together. We originally came together. I abandoned all of my phase one content around mindset and all of that

[Ryan]

because the more I looked at the

[Tom Bilyeu]

economy, the more I realized that there really is an elite cabal of people that understand the economy well enough to siphon money from the working and middle class and make the top 10% of people that own the assets wealthy beyond anybody's imagination. Now, it's a game that's available to everybody. It's super rigged and the vast majority of people are never going to understand it. They're not going to take the time even if they could and that it's just happening in broad daylight. And so if we can just for a second reflect on the fact that we are really, really in trouble. And so we want to look at what are going to be the things that are going to unwind this. And if you have a president that is doing things that are extremely dangerous,

[Ryan]

very reckless, but at least the one

[Tom Bilyeu]

thing he's using as bumpers in the

[Ryan]

Alleyway is the 10 year rate of the bond, that's somebody who at least

[Tom Bilyeu]

understands, ah, yeah, that place where this

[Ryan]

interfaces with the entire economy, I'm gonna

[Tom Bilyeu]

make sure that I protect that so

[Ryan]

that I don't need you to like anything.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Trump is doing okay.

[Ryan]

Cuz right now, to be honest, I

[Tom Bilyeu]

don't know if it's gonna work out or not. And I take a very largely consequentialist view.

[Ryan]

It matters to me enormously what comes out of this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I will look back at Iran and say it was either, yep, this was a good idea or a bad idea based on how it ends up. If we get sucked into a forever war, prices go up.

[Ryan]

Bad idea.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If we're able to free the Strait of Hormuz and the people of Iran rise up, Great idea. So it's all going to hinge on how this stuff turns out. But at least the madman at the switch, as I think people understandably map

[Ryan]

Trump, he doesn't run over the line

[Tom Bilyeu]

that would make me say this guy is legitimately just unhinged. So yeah, I think we should really

[Ryan]

want somebody that does that. Now since I understand the question is

[Tom Bilyeu]

really coming at a much higher level, which is Tom, forget about the contextual erratic nature of steering by the bond market.

[Ryan]

What about overall?

[Tom Bilyeu]

In this moment? You just convinced me that we're in this really fragile moment. We've got $39 trillion in debt, we're in a desperate situation because we have an ever increasing K shaped economy, because these evil assholes are siphoning money from the poor and working class. They're shoveling it up to anybody that own assets.

[Ryan]

Oh, and by the way, the whole

[Tom Bilyeu]

thing is now so fragile because money is just fleeing from the inflationary effects of money printing, deficit spending and all that.

[Ryan]

So they're cramming into these assets that

[Tom Bilyeu]

looks like the numbers are going to the moon. But the reality is the more up

[Ryan]

those go without increased productivity, that's just bubble territory.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's super risky.

[Ryan]

It could crumble at any second.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then that's not just bad for the rich, that's just bad for everybody. That's where the global economy just completely freezes.

[Ryan]

And we've got a deep dive coming up on this. If you don't know about the Eurodollar, if you don't understand exactly how that works, I've got a nice terrifying eye

[Tom Bilyeu]

opening thing for you coming on Tuesday.

[Ryan]

And so you can freeze the entire global economy with the way that this system is working. So we should never lose sight of that. We should be completely traumatized by that. And do we wish that we had steadier hands right now, 1000% now why don't we? Because in moments of populism, all you do is summon a demon to fight for your team. So when you think of populism as a demon summoning circle and the left is going to summon their demon, the right is going to summon their demon,

[Tom Bilyeu]

and then those two demons are going to go to battle to try to

[Ryan]

get their side everything. And that's the moment that we're in that doesn't have anything to do with Trump. Trump did not create this. Trump was summoned by it. And that's the unfortunate history tells you

[Tom Bilyeu]

this is how populist moments play out.

[Ryan]

Everybody's in their feels, everybody's completely emotional and they will only elect people that

[Tom Bilyeu]

bang on the table, flip it over

[Ryan]

and say, look, I'll do whatever it takes to get you free shit. And that's it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that's where we are.

[Ryan]

So, yeah, do I wish that in

[Tom Bilyeu]

this moment we could have a 90s Clinton or, oh, God willing, a JFK that could actually make us believe in the moral center of our nation. I'm not saying he was moral.

[Ryan]

I'm just saying he really made people believe that we had a moral center that made us look to the stars and believe that we could get there, all of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So yeah, I do wish for that,

[Ryan]

but that's not the time we're living in. Or Jesus, I'll take a Reagan. It's just not where we're at.

[Chat Moderator]

I'm going to jump into the super chats because two of these actually fit everything we're talking about.

[Ryan]

Let's go.

[Chat Moderator]

So first up from Big Digglers, part of the plan in air quotes may be intentional chaos or the perception thereof. Tom would have expected a bear steepener considering all but saw two years and 10 years converge, not diverge. 100% agree. We're being trained for more volatility.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting to say it like that, that we're being trained for more volatility. I don't know if they're intentionally trying to train us for volatility that I can't map the logic to that. However, I will remind people that volatility is a feature, not a bug. Let me say that one more time. Volatility is the point. Watch Bitcoin become boring like gold as its volatility continues to decline. The reason bitcoin got so hyped is because it's volatile. Once you understand that the stock market or the markets in general, they are gambling mechanisms. This is why they're so hyper responsive to news, is everybody thinks that they're smarter than everybody else and so they're betting against them. Whether that's betting on something's going to go up or betting that something's going to go down, or betting that you're going to get the timing right and get out before everybody else. There are different classes of investors. You've got day traders that are measuring their trades in milliseconds, a lot of it being algorithmically driven. And then you've got people, hopefully like you and I, that are investing for very long term, that make very few moves during a year that are really going. I have a thesis. This is my thesis. Until that changes. I'm not trying to bet on horses. I'm not trying to time the market. I'm just, just like, this is roughly where I think things are going to go. I'm widely diversified against economic forces because I can't see the future clearly. And now I'm going to sit back for 10 or 20 years and reap the benefits by being patient. Okay, so when you think about the

[Ryan]

stock markets, it's not driven by the

[Tom Bilyeu]

long term people, it's driven by the short term people.

[Ryan]

That's where you see all this like crazy movement.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so that is a just part

[Ryan]

of the nature of what this is

[Tom Bilyeu]

more than I think Trump is trying to condition us to that.

[Ryan]

It's just we're living in such a weird moment. The economy is so fragile because more

[Tom Bilyeu]

and more people are waking up to the inflation game and that means that they're trying to get into assets. And as they try to get into

[Ryan]

assets, and by the way, fewer and fewer assets perform well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So now the people that have been in assets forever are now cramming harder into anything with a good story AI and it's just creating insane bubbles.

[Chat Moderator]

Next up from Marushia Dark, this is about the straight of Hormuz and how do Iranian mines avoid Chinese ships if the Strait is semi open? Seems more likely they're a bluff unless there's some tech slash intel I'm not privy to. Also, will the Chinese Communist Party bombing at Centcom hurt Cheese xi's level leverage in May?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know about the bombing that would impact Xi, so we'd have to look that up. So if somebody has a link that they can share, that'd be great. In terms of the Strait of Hormuz, that's a big question mark. And we don't know right now. And this is part of why letting the 10 ships go through, even though they're not coming to the U.S. i think virtually all of them were going to Pakistan, will still be able to track what lanes the ship uses to get through. Now it's possible that they have mines that they can activate and deactivate, but it's also possible that those mines, while they have very different levels of functionality, some are just dumb, others can detect movement far above them. Some can even launch torpedoes, which is pretty wild. So. But it will give us some intel to watch the coordinates that the ships are given to go through the strait because yes, I would expect Iran to try and do everything they can to long term poison the Strait if they see that they're failing and they do a last ditch effort just to make things hard for everybody else. So there will clearly be danger in the Strait even if the Iranians capitulate.

[Chat Moderator]

Next up, the Mandrake mechanism says offering a frame. The US Government's deportation of immigrants and raising of military age is a recognition of mass unemployment, incoming from AI, job loss. For those that can't make the cognitive

[Tom Bilyeu]

switch to the new world, man, that's really Interesting. We'll see if that ends up being true. But I like that a lot. It's one of those. I can't fathom that's why they're doing it, but it certainly is a brilliant second or third order consequence of doing that, that we'll be able to scoop up people. But it tends to be that people won't take rate cuts or do major retraining. So it's far less that people don't have the ability to get another job that leads them down the path of death, of despair, and never re engaging with society in that way. And again, I've covered this before, but this happened in the Industrial Revolution, it happened in the great electrification and it happened in the great Internetification. What happens is if you're north, say of 35ish, you've already been trained, you've already had 15ish years in the professional workforce and now all of a sudden all that momentum that you had in your life just goes away and your job doesn't exist anymore. Dude, I'm 50 in a couple days and I'm still able to learn new skills, adjust. I could not build a video game just five short years ago and now feel completely capable of doing that. So that's one of those things where I just retrained myself. I was interested enough, I was willing to put in the work. And it was an extraordinary amount of work. And listen nights and weekends. This was not something that I was doing in the middle of my workday because I still had the other elements of the company that I had to run.

[Ryan]

So it isn't that people can't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So making roles available in the military will pick up some people if that feels like either a lateral step or a step up. But it isn't going to work for

[Ryan]

people for whom it feels like a

[Tom Bilyeu]

step down or a type of work that they don't want to do. Like you can imagine. Is an HR professional really going to be rushing off to join the military?

[Ryan]

Probably not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this will largely come down to what are the economic buffers that we make available to people that will either force them to get retrained or allow them to coast the rest of the days on the public dole. That is going to be a brutal question that will have to be answered and people are going to get weird about that one.

[Ryan]

So brace yourselves.

[Chat Moderator]

Stoic anarchy says, I used to live next to a crazy lady. She had a bad car accident causing brain damage. We took her husband out after she cheated on him. That night she came to our house and pulled a gun on me. It sucks living next to bad neighbors.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yikes. Yeah, so I'll apply that to Iran, which is where I think that is coming from. But, yeah, living next to crazy neighbors does not sound like a lot of fun. That's pretty wild that you guys tried to do a good thing, at least as I'm understanding what you're saying and that that was not appreciated. That is a theme I think you will find over and over in life, by the way, that people don't always want help, man. And despite the best of intentions, sometimes you catch real flack for trying to help somebody. So I once got sued by somebody who I was doing a favor for them. Yes. But it was actually for a friend. So I had an apartment for rent. Their friend came to me and was like, listen, my friend doesn't have good credit, but she's gone through this really hard thing, like, would you guys be willing to rent her? And so we did. Didn't raise rents, yada, yada, yada, and still ended up being bad. So, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

[Ryan]

It just is what it is.

[Chat Moderator]

And that's it for the super chats for now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, well, cheers to that. All right, I think it is time that we get to the lunatic of the week here. So if you guys are paying attention to what's going on in the government, your friend, not mine, Elizabeth Warren, is putting a new tax proposal on the docket. And so just yesterday, she announced a new proposal that is completely insane.

[Ryan]

Insane.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it's a wealth tax. So let's make sure that we understand, we get our terms straight. A wealth tax is not an income tax. So this, you're not being taxed on money that you're making.

[Ryan]

This is a tax on the things that you own. It is confiscatory. It is the government stealing from you and is proof that Elizabeth Warren has gone fully retarded.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I feel so strongly about this. I'll address whether this is just because it's something that applies to me or not.

[Ryan]

But this new proposal is another one in an endless parade of economically illiterate

[Tom Bilyeu]

politicians that are robbing American workers blind.

[Ryan]

You guys. You guys are being robbed blind with deficit spending, fraud, and then they erode their own tax base because wealth will

[Tom Bilyeu]

flee the second you start doing this stuff.

[Ryan]

The people that can move will move. Is this not getting old for you guys?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, okay, this is the ultra millionaire tax, as it's lovingly being called.

[Ryan]

It would impose an annual 2% tax on the net worth of households and trusts. And trusts over $50 million and an additional 1% surtax on billionaires.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So net worth over a billion. Remember, this is all about net worth.

[Ryan]

The bill has 45 co sponsors in the House. It's led by Reps. Pramila Jaipal and Brendan Boyle. The tax base would consist of a household's financial and non financial assets, stocks, land, things like that, all at market prices as the IRS determines it, which will of course absolutely crater when people go to sell them. Now, they will have to sell them to pay the tax because these are unrealized gains. Now this is one of those times.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Ryan, I want you to put together the best arguments, the most vehement, the most.

[Ryan]

Tom, it does not have my best interests at heart. If what I'm about to say is not a defense of the middle class, then fuck me. So what my goal is going to be, and I will take on every argument, what I'm going to take on is that I'm trying to protect myself, obviously, but I'm also trying to protect the middle class. Remember what's my North Star? A thriving middle class. I'm all about human flourishing. You don't have to believe me. Just watch the things that I actually do now in the bill to deter avoidance. Right, because that's the big narrative, that the wealthy don't pay their fair share. Keeping in mind that only 50% of Americans actually pay tax. And when you look at the percentages, I don't remember them off the top of my head, but directionally it's correct. It's like the top 1% pay something like 90% of the taxes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's absurd. So that whole argument is just completely ridiculous.

[Ryan]

And let's also remember, underlying all of this, you don't have a balanced budget. You don't have a balanced budget. And so instead of saying, hey, let's get our shit together, like we would expect of any American, let's balance our budget first and then seek additional tax revenue. It's a very different conversation. Now, to avoid deterrent or to deter avoidance, the bill has proposed a 40% exit tax on anyone worth more than

[Tom Bilyeu]

$50 million who renounces their American citizenship.

[Ryan]

Okay, let that loom over you because

[Tom Bilyeu]

we're going to talk about that later

[Ryan]

as to whether this is going to impact me or not. Now, to me, this is like the new Boston Tea Party. This is the line in the sand. Like, this will. I'll just completely change my life around this because it's so fucking ridiculous. And is the nail in the coffin of the middle class. It will not come back. You will spend 100 years as a backwater nation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so, yeah, just brace yourselves for that.

[Ryan]

If you don't believe me, go look at the history of people that went from second, third biggest economy in the

[Tom Bilyeu]

world to just falling off an absolute cliff.

[Ryan]

Argentina being one of the most profound examples. Just absolutely tragic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you look at it regionally, same thing.

[Ryan]

You have Cuba thriving and then completely

[Tom Bilyeu]

backwards now for what, 50, 60, 70

[Ryan]

years, something like that. So yeah, this, when it happens, it happens and it happens for a very long time. Now, anybody that can propose this kind of thing, they are showing you a stunning lack of, of how unrealized gains works. This is like telling someone that if they want to own a car, they have to give over the carburetor in order to have the car. So you have to break the car apart to pay the fee for owning the car. It doesn't make any sense. This is a well known problem, guys. This is well known. It's not like I've stumbled onto something that nobody knows about. Everyone who understands economics knows what this is. None of them think it's a good idea unless they actively want to destroy the engine of prosperity that makes America the largest economy in the world. So please understand, one of two people is going to bat for this. Somebody who is stunningly economically illiterate. Do not let those fucking people run your country. Number two, someone who would like to destroy your country because they believe that prosperity itself is the problem. Both of those people literally get them all the fuck out. This is so crazy. If we elect people that actually want to destroy the economy, we are going to go down very rapidly. Now there's a notion here called mark to market taxation where when you're looking at the unrealized gains, you say, hey, what's the market value if they were to sell this? So this requires the annual valuation of assets that lack a clear sale price. Normally we just say, well, you sold

[Tom Bilyeu]

it, that's when we're going to tax you. So now we know we don't have

[Ryan]

to guess that's what it's sold for. Okay, doing this this way, not having an actual sale price is exceedingly complex, potentially quite economically damaging, by the way. And it may necessitate the liquidation of some or all of the assets to pay the taxes on the valuation. So think of a founder with a $200 million, with $200 million tied up in hyper illiquid private company equity. So they're just trying to build a company, employ people, make a product that solves a problem, okay? And because they're doing that and the public's happy and the jobs are thriving, they're worth, on paper, a lot of money. And they would owe $4 million a year in cash on assets that they can't easily sell. Now they make a provision for taxpayers with high net worth. But liquidity constraints, they would have you believe that it's a rare occasion, but it's not for people with that kind of net worth. It almost always comes from shares. It comes from the ownership of assets. It comes from an asset that started low and climbed high. And so the odds you have the cash sitting around without selling is very low. None of these guys are sitting with billion dollars in the bank, okay? It's always going to be tied up in an asset because they're not stupid. So first of all, they know that inflation is going to hammer them. And most of them built their wealth off of either investing in assets that go up or building something. So they may have started with nothing, which is basically where I started with Quest. Not like I had money. Even as I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, I didn't have that cash. Now they're giving people an option to defer. In fact, let me paint a picture for you. I was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and I was driving a like 12 year old Ford Focus with a leaky exhaust. My wife and I shared one car. It would vibrate violently at 65 miles an hour on the freeway. I routinely had to borrow rides from my employees in order to get home because Lisa and I had to leave

[Tom Bilyeu]

at different times for whatever reason.

[Ryan]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's what it looked like when I was worth.

[Ryan]

I don't call it $400 million. So now imagine I can't afford a car now when I sell. Yes, and when I sold, I paid a lot of tax. A lot of tax. But while I was building the company, every dollar was going back into the company. Now you have the option to defer payment for up to five years, but you have to pay interest on it. So the IRS would be instructed to create rules, presumably for cases where deferment is required. It's going to be very difficult to ascertain all of that and there are going to be massive negative impacts on whatever the ongoing enterprise is. And so let me be clear. Even letting people defer by five years is economically moronic. It will destroy companies, it will cause mass consolidation. And unlike, and I'm going to explain more on that in A minute. Unlike the estate tax, which is, is immoral. Let's be very clear. Because it's. They are taking a mass. It's like 40% of post tax dollars. That's crazy. We'll set that aside. At least it's one time. At least it's only on death. Okay, what we're talking about here is an annual wealth tax. So even if you defer year one, year twos, bill is also coming and it's based on the business's value again. So you are perpetually accumulating tax liability against an asset that you haven't sold. You don't have that money. The practical reality for a $200 million founder, remember, that's just what they're worth on paper. It's not like they've got it in cash. Even if they had $5 million in cash, they're racking up a 2% annual tax bill. Okay, that's 4 million a year in tax plus interest that you're building up by year five before the interest, you're looking at $20 million owed on money that you don't have. The ridiculousness of trying to tax wealth before you end fraud is insane. I bet the people proposing this bill hate big corporations. But guess what? Wealth taxes will 100% lead to less market competition, make the corporations that they hate much bigger. It's going to massively increase corporate consolidation because a small business will not have the cash to pay their tax bill. So their options are artificially stunt their growth to stay below a certain wealth tax threshold. And I guarantee that many small to medium businesses will take a premature exit just to meet their tax burden. More and more industries will consolidate into gigantic cyberpunk level mega corps. And consumers will pay higher prices. They'll get worse products, worse service, and way less innovation. The National Taxpayers Union, they've tried to wake people up with a very vivid historical example to illustrate the stakes. Netflix founders offered to sell to Blockbuster for $50 million back in 2000. Now Netflix was laughed out of the room, a move that ultimately sunk Blockbuster, by the way. But it's hard to imagine what outcomes might have been different had a wealth tax incentivized them to sell at that early stage. If it hadn't been okay, well, they said no, so we're just going to

[Tom Bilyeu]

go build this thing.

[Ryan]

If they had looked for the next acquirer, the next acquirer, because they can't afford to grow because they're going to have to start selling the company off in pieces anyway with a lunatic wealth tax in place The Netflix founders would have been forced to sell. The buyer with the most cash would have been an incumbent giant for sure. Exactly the kind of consolidation that kills innovation and industry disruption leads to monopolies. And now you've got the government pushing for something that has the obvious known, well documented consequence of driving megacorp consolidation. You want startup companies to compete. As wealth doesn't always translate to liquidity, founders are going to be forced to continually, to continually liquidate ownership in their company in order to pay that tax bill. And guys, needless to say, business founders forced to sell the kind of equity stake that we're talking about here to raise the millions of dollars annually that they would have to raise to pay off their tax bill will soon find themselves as minority shareholders in their own fucking company. This is, this is a level of engagement on behalf of the corporations. That is insane. Okay? Unless you guys want everything to be owned by Microsoft and Google. This is so dumb. This is going to hurt the middle class. Now when people look at AI, they understand what this is going to do

[Tom Bilyeu]

to the middle class.

[Ryan]

They understand how this is going to have a negative impact on people having their jobs. But they don't understand you have a government that refuses to balance its budget, is already stealing money from the poor and working class, has created a K shaped economy because they refuse to balance their budget. And now they want to force people to start selling their company, often pieces to pay, pay off a tax bill on money that they don't actually have, dissolving the company, putting it in the hands of megacorps that are already on the other side of this, that will use tax tricks and all that to avoid this. And so now you get the death, what they call cradle death or crib death of these upstart innovative companies that America has relied on for the last 250 years to become the most dominant country the world has ever seen. Because we prioritize innovation, we fight against over consolidation and now we're proposing a bill that will force that to happen more and more. Now let's address the elephant in the room. I know a lot of you guys think I'm mad because this means I will get taxed more. What you guys must realize, I'm never going to get hit by this tax. I will leave, I will renounce my US citizenship and I'll do it before the 40% exit tax is in place. There's no universe in which I pay 2% of my net worth annually on top of my normal fucking taxes and on top of the fact that When I sold my company, I paid an insane amount of taxes to a country that refuses to balance its budget and is clearly willing to let fraud run rampant. And I assure you, I will not be the only one. The Laffer curve exists for a reason. Remember Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, telling wealthy people in New York in this very dismissive rant, go, go, go to Florida. You guys don't represent the value of New Yorkers. And then three years later, she turns around and says, you know what we have to do to get things back on track? We've got to go down to Florida and get some of those billionaires back because our tax base has shrunk. This is the tax fafo game. I get that these ideas sound good on paper, but the reality is they end up hurting the average person. Let's take New York. Mamdani comes in promising a bunch of free shit. 47 days later, he realizes, oh, can't get the tax that I need from the wealthy, so I'm going to tax everyone. And remember, if you tax the wealthy literally to death to completely extinguish the trillions of dollars that they have, when you have a $2 trillion annual deficit, you can only cover a few years just of the deficit before you run out of money. Once you start looking at where all the money really is, all of a sudden you realize how the social democracies over in Europe, in the Nordic countries, how they pull it off. They pull it off by taxing everybody. So when you have a government that refuses to balance its budget and thinks that it can just tax its way to prosperity, first of all, the builders stop building. They leave, and the tax base begins to dwindle. I don't need you to look any farther than going back three years in New York City. This is not a guess. This is not, oh, I wonder if this will happen. It's happening right now in California. Founders are already changing their behavior as the wealth tax law that hasn't even been put on a ballot, it's just been floated, has created this new mantra where they say, leave before the B, meaning the B round of investments. They're just saying you got to get out of Dodge before your company hits a milestone that can give you an, on paper, net worth of billions. Okay, so more and more people will leave the US if this happens at a federal level, and you just won't be the hub of innovation anymore. Your tax base will continue to go down. I understand that right now people do not want to accept that. It's very Hard to create a company that matters. It is very hard to create jobs. It's just very difficult. And given how difficult it is when you rob people of the rewards for doing that in a way that makes it that much harder to actually do it, they just stop doing it. Or by the way, the company just falls apart before they can get that momentum going. Because the megacorps are out there gobbling them up, taking them out early, blocking them. It will be an absolute economic shit show. It is far better to recognize creating jobs is very difficult. A company becomes profitable because they've innovated, they've created something that the world wants and the world's willing to pay for it. And then people that understand investing are going to invest in it. And then that's how they hide from the inflation because nobody is willing to balance the budget. Not on the left or the right. I mean look, I think you guys all know but Ayn Rand wrote a book about this and it's about what happens and has happened in every country that has tried policies like this. The builders stop building, they leave, the economy declines and the government becomes increasingly kleptocratic because it's a shrinking piece of. And then you end up as Russia, Maus, China, Cuba, Pol Pot, forgetting Cambodia. Thank you. Any one of these places that has tried this before, it's. It is lunacy. And the people that end up getting hurt the least are the wealthy people because they have the means to go somewhere else. So would I be sad if I had to leave? Yes, of course I would be sad. I want to live and die in America. But if America gets to the point where it is doing things that are so self destructive then the only sensible thing is to leave now. Not a big dramatic threat. This is just math. So I really hope that we can all collectively get people to look at cause and effect and understand that this would be absolutely God awful for the economy. It will erase jobs in record numbers at a time where jobs are at their most risk. At risk that the harder you try to grab onto your tax base, the lower the tax base goes. Okay. It's well documented. Laffer curve. We had the guy on. We've done the interview. This stuff is out there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is.

[Ryan]

If you don't believe me, go check it for yourself. But I do worry that we're on a path where these things just keep cropping up. They've flirted with this idea before. It's obviously not going to pass while Republicans are in office. But I doubt Republicans are going to be in Office forever. So this kind of thing because of populism. Because either again, people don't understand how the economy works or they are knowingly trying to destroy America as some sort of act of penance, but we're pushing the country in a way that violates the laws of physics. Now your economy is broken, your economy is rigged against you. We've got that much right. But the fixes that people keep putting forward are suicidal.

[Chat Moderator]

So chat, I was letting you cook for a minute. You were on fire. But chat has kind of been mixed all over the place with this topic so far. But one of the things I'm noticing on both sides of people who like it and people who don't like it is, well, if this doesn't pass, should we then do things such as closing loopholes that hurt the middle class or prevent the rich from being able to get loans against their assets as a way around their taxes?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So wild guys, balance the budget. Balance the budget. Balance the budget. The way that your money gets stolen from you and it is being stolen from you is through a very simple mechanism. That mechanism is money printing. You money print because you're deficit spending. If you're not deficit spending, you don't have to money print. And once people understand your money's not being stolen from you because the wealthy aren't paying their fair share and they're avoiding taxes, what a place like New York shows, what a place like California shows, what the Board of Education shows is that if your mentality is, it's

[Ryan]

never enough and I don't need to

[Tom Bilyeu]

be held accountable to my results, just give me more money. And the act of giving me more money is the only thing that matters, which is how we govern right now.

[Ryan]

We don't say, how's that tax money being spent, we just say, how much

[Tom Bilyeu]

tax money am I getting?

[Ryan]

Remember, the reason the wealthy are getting

[Tom Bilyeu]

wealthier at a runaway pace is because

[Ryan]

of deficit spending and money printing, period. It is not because they have done something wrong that they are taking money out of somebody else's pocket. It is because money has to go somewhere to hide from money printing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you have money and you're just saving it in your bank right this very minute, you're being stolen from. Because we're money printing right now. The numbers at least, this is pre war, at least $40 billion a month just created out of thin air right now. That's standing policy.

[Ryan]

So that's where your money's going to

[Tom Bilyeu]

if you don't balance your budget.

[Ryan]

This is the statement that Everybody has to contend with. If you take 100% a billionaire's wealth, it's trillions of dollars. If you take 100% of trillionaires billionaires wealth, there are exactly, not only are there no billionaires, but all of them are dead broke. They have no assets whatsoever.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You buy yourself, it's like four years and then what do we think? That the country is only going to

[Ryan]

last four more years. So if you know that you have to balance your budget at some point, right? At some point you simply must balance your budget because you will run out of money. Why not start by balancing your budget? And the answer to that is self evident. It's hard. People don't want a balanced budget, they want free shit. And so you end up here. And this is how countries legitimately death spiral. And I, I think people have a mental map that you death spiral for a couple years, you go into recession and everything's fine. No, when you get to this point where the empire breaks, you become a backwater for 100 years or more. So you will not live to see us come back out of this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let that sink in.

[Chat Moderator]

So a lot of people are saying we're talking a lot about balancing the budget. And they want to know from your perspective, if you were in a position to balance the budget, what would that actually look like and how as the middle class, like, what should we be asking for?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so this would be something that I'm going to give you an answer because I hate it when people dodge questions. But to have a real answer, you need somebody that actually has access to the budget, where we're spending money, all of that. And so I don't know all of the line items, but the things that I would look at will go something like this. Your education system is so flawed that you're almost hopeless. So I would be starting there. Anywhere where there's a strong driving union inside of a governmental agency. I'm going to be looking at that because I need to see outcomes that justify the expense. We spend more per student than almost anywhere else on earth. I think we do spend more. I don't even think it's like, I think we spend more than anywhere else on earth. And we're routinely in the middle of the pack. So what the fuck. You're getting absolutely terrible results and they're declining quickly. So I'm going to be looking at that. You're almost certainly going to have to raise the retirement age. So we have a demographic problem right now. We are a column. And the way that meaning we have as many old people as mid as young and it's slowly inverting and so it's doing this. And over time we're going to get to the point if our birth rates continue where we've got way more old people that are outside of the workforce. And so you've got to keep people in the workforce longer. We have an obscene amount of fraud.

[Ryan]

I'm going to guess it's hundreds of

[Tom Bilyeu]

billions if not edging up to a trillion dollars and that's annually. And so clearing all of that out has. And by the way that's going to be a contentious figure. So that's Tom guessing based on everything that he sees. So you'd have to figure out what that actually is. But it's going to be wild and we will have to get that down as much as you can. I don't think anybody's ever going to get it to zero, but you're going to need to get it much, much, much lower. Then we're going to have to continue to deregulate so that we can actually generate more revenue, more taxes without having to increase the percentage, which is where you run into trouble. If you actually want to generate more tax revenue, then you just need more revenue at the same tax rate. If you focus on that, good things come of it. If you focus the other way around, all kinds of bad things come of it. But there are going to be consequences to deregulating. Now I don't think that we're anywhere near any of those consequences being bad right now. I think that we've got an absolute absurd amount of regulations. But just know that everything is going to be a set of trade offs. So those would be the places that I would start. And then we might have to do going into the beautiful deleveraging.

[Ryan]

We're probably also going to need to

[Tom Bilyeu]

free up some economic bandwidth by doing things like some debt forgiveness based on some things, some soft defaulting. So we'll have to work through that.

[Ryan]

Well, as that isn't going to be

[Tom Bilyeu]

easy, but that's where I would start.

[Chat Moderator]

So the next question, and this is, I'm just going to read this directly. How do you balance a budget when the rich just buy their tax breaks and pay for their politicians with Citizens United?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So getting money out of politics would be a very wise idea. That would be I think absolutely wonderful. That will put certainly people in a much better position where their elected officials are not beholden to some group that has interests that are either opaque or running contrary to the will of the American people. But is that as big of a problem? Like, if you knew that your politicians were being influenced, but there were guardrails that stopped them from spending, from deficit spending. Now it's like, show me the spending bill. I'm going to run it through AI and I'm going to figure out where the money is actually going. And that level of transparency, I think, would wake a lot of people up and get them sober very fast. Why the are we spending for xyz that I would much rather if you. If you said, I can have both, I'm going to take both. But if you said I could only pick one, I would much rather buy a country mile. Rather have a balanced budget over money out of politics. But money out of politics would be a huge win.

[Chat Moderator]

That seems to be most of the consensus on this. I am curious.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's got to be somebody who's like, fudge this kid. He doesn't know what he's talking about. For XYZ reason.

[Chat Moderator]

Well, I kind of distilled all this down, but someone did mention you have talked about a flat tax, but before.

[Ryan]

Yep.

[Chat Moderator]

And I'm curious, in what way do you think a flat tax would be the solution to making everyone happy, where we're still getting money from the rich

[Tom Bilyeu]

and say that we are doing a flat tax after we balance the budget, then I'm going to have a stroke. As long as everybody understands, hey, we just balance the budget.

[Ryan]

We're not doing. We're not raising another fucking dollar in

[Tom Bilyeu]

tax until we balance the goddamn budget.

[Chat Moderator]

Gotcha.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, if we've balanced the budget, then yes, a flat tax would be great. First of all, it's just simple. Everybody knows what they're going to pay,

[Ryan]

and then everybody pays it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And right now it is. I forget the exact number, but it's like over 35% and it might be closer to 50% of people get government assistance of some kind, and yet we squawk that America doesn't, like, do enough to help people. That is the wildest shit I've ever heard in my life. We are just so bad at it and so much of it is stolen via fraud that I think we lose sight of how leaky our bucket really is. But yes, a flat tax would make it simple. But a flat tax is more like what you see over in the social democracies in the Nordic countries where everyone, everyone is gonna pay tax. Making $25,000 a year. Word, you're still paying your, whatever, 10% tax. Now people have to ask if they really want that but if they do, it would certainly work a lot better. You're going to get a lot more money out of wealthy people because they know on my revenue, I am going to pay this. There's no loophole, there's no like crazy deductions. Whatever, whatever. It's just, this is my tax now,

[Ryan]

I'm all for it, I'll happily pay it. But if you balance the budget.

[Chat Moderator]

So remember.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

[Chat Moderator]

Good.

[Tom Bilyeu]

One thing that I want on the

[Ryan]

record, the longer the government leaves the budget unbalanced, the more the government prints money, the wealthier I get. So anybody who thinks that I'm here arguing on my own behalf is fucking retarded. I am here because the long term, the only thing that matters is do

[Tom Bilyeu]

we have a thriving middle class?

[Ryan]

Do we have a thriving middle class? That's it. History has just made it real fucking clear. If you have a thriving middle class, yay. If you don't have a thriving middle class, you are fucked, man. You are either ruling the country with

[Tom Bilyeu]

an iron fist, you're shooting people in the streets, you completely get rid of freedom of speech.

[Ryan]

It's just all bad all the time. But if you have a thriving middle class, cool. You can have stability.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Things are working.

[Ryan]

You bring that K way, way down, you're always going to have inequality. It's desirable. Not toxic inequality, but inequality. So this is me fighting for what I believe, yes, is in my long term interest. That is for sure. But also it's just the right thing to do. Remember, you can figure out how somebody's going to approach the world if they'll just tell you. What's your North Star? My North Star is human flourishing. The easiest economic way to talk about human flourishing is a thriving middle class. It's not the only way, and it's more nuanced than that, but that gets you close. And so I am literally trying to make sure that somebody could come out compete me and end up with my money and I end up broke. I want to live in that system. I did. I came up in that system. I was able to get wealthy coming from. Listen, I did not come from abject poverty, so I won't say I came from nothing, but I came from relatively boring lower middle class background. And I was able to make myself fantastically wealthy by getting better at something that mattered than other people. And so I was able to outperform other people and I was rewarded by the masses for that because they wanted my product more than they wanted their money. It's fucking awesome. I want everybody to have that opportunity, even if it means that I have to keep competing. I'm also in the YouTube game, man. I've got to earn my stripes every fucking day on this platform. I get it. I get what competition is, and I get that one day, I won't want to keep doing it, and I will tap out. Great. Fine. That's how it should be. The young should eat the old. That is the way the game works, man. Perfectly fine with it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, we will see you guys on Monday. We'll do one more without Drew, and then he'll be back. Thank you guys so much for joining me for our inaugural solo episode here. And we'll only get better. All right, I'll see you guys on Monday. Have a good weekend.

[Ryan]

Peace.