Breaking Down AI Hype, Economic Uncertainty, and the Real Impact of Innovation on Society

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory

Episode: Breaking Down AI Hype, Economic Uncertainty, and the Real Impact of Innovation on Society

Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Main Guest/Co-Host: Drew

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu and Drew dive deep into the crosscurrents shaping modern society: the hype cycle of AI, economic uncertainty, and the societal impact of innovation. They critically examine the myths and realities behind soaring stock valuations, AI advancements, education reform, and wealth inequality. Throughout, Tom challenges listeners to seek clarity and practical frameworks for navigating disruption, urging an understanding of the rules governing technology, markets, and progress.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Stock Market Bubbles and Economic Liquidity

• Separating Fundamentals from FOMO Investments (01:04)
  • Tom unpacks how share prices can become decoupled from business fundamentals through sheer market psychology, liquidity, and speculation.

    “You can have the number of the value of the shares be totally detached from fundamentals… that can stay irrational… as long as people decide that putting my money here, it's going to go up more than putting it in the risk free rate of return, then they're going to put it in there.” – Tom [01:04]

  • Tesla and Nvidia are used as examples of market exuberance, where future profits (even decades out) are being priced into today’s valuations.
  • Tom compares market volatility to a game with evolving rules, reminding listeners that attempts to ‘day trade your way to success’ are nearly always doomed.

    “On a long enough timeline you get clobbered, it's effectively a hundred percent.” – Tom [05:34]

2. Recent AI Mega-Deals & The Onrush of AGI

• Nvidia, Microsoft, Anthropic Alliance (06:47)
  • Drew outlines recent massive investments and strategic partnerships, calling out the circular flow of investments between leading AI companies as potentially “a circle jerk” [07:17].
  • Tom stresses that this is “terraforming” the technological landscape, warning that the scale-up is monumental and the pace is accelerating:

    “Seven years from now, the world just… it’s unrecognizable.” – Tom [09:31]

• Gemini 3 Pro & The Arrival of AGI (11:36)
  • Gemini 3 Pro’s performance on spatial reasoning (91%) is highlighted as a leap toward AI that truly “understands the physical world."
  • Tom frames the possibility of having “20,000 Einsteins thinking 24/7, 365 about everything,” setting the stage for continuous breakthroughs in science and technology.

    “Physics unlocked the modern age… A breakthrough in physics is like saying there’s going to be a whole new class of thing that is possible that wasn’t possible before.” – Tom [15:00]

3. Social Impact of Disruptive Innovation

• AI, Automation, and Job Losses (19:14)
  • The episode explores the inevitable disruption and job elimination caused by AI and robotics. Tom acknowledges the transitional pain, especially for workers who won’t quickly adapt:

    “It will exacerbate the have and have nots… The people that don’t [own assets] are gonna be increasingly out of jobs and increasingly more likely to be violent.” – Tom [19:14]

• Volatility of Innovation vs. Societal Anxiety
  • Tom draws the analogy of a society “pregnant with artificial superintelligence” and “pregnant with economic collapse,” emphasizing the certainty of transformation, but uncertainty in timing.
  • Referencing previous guest Roman Yampolsky, Tom advises humility in making predictions but urgency in adopting a directionally correct stance:

    “My only hope is that I'll be directionally correct… The only point to being correct is to say, I'm gonna do a new thing because I have this information.” – Tom [23:39]

4. Education Reform & the Fallacy of Money-Equals-Results

• Debate on Defunding or Restructuring the U.S. Department of Education (27:39, 29:32)
  • Drew brings up recent political moves to dismantle the Department of Education, sparking a broader conversation about education funding’s limited correlation to outcome.
• Bureaucratic Bloat and Accountability
  • Tom compares bureaucracies to tumors, sustaining themselves regardless of actual results:

    “If throwing money at problems actually solved them, governments would have accidentally fixed everything by now...” – Quoted by Tom via Twitter discourse [28:16]

• Measuring Outcomes, Not Inputs
  • Tom insists on measurable metrics for all societal goals, even seemingly intangible ones, using his marriage as an example:

    “That which gets measured gets improved. If you’re measuring the amount of money that you spend per student, which is basically what we’re doing now, then you’re going to be like, oh, let's keep spending more per student with no connection to… is it actually making our students better?” – Tom [37:05]

• Comparative Models & AI’s Promise in Education (44:29, 47:44)
  • Discussion of global education models (China, South Korea, Nordics) and the possible future of AI-driven, hyper-individualized learning.
  • Tom argues that advanced AI could one day adjust educational delivery to each student’s needs based on data from millions, perhaps making current debates obsolete.

5. Wealth Inequality, "Eating the Rich," and False Solutions

• Debunking "Billionaires can solve everything" Memes (28:20, 55:12)
  • Tom and Drew dissect social media claims that billionaires like Elon Musk could single-handedly solve world hunger or other societal ills.
  • Tom breaks down three key fallacies:
    1. Wealth ≠ cash or spendable income; most billionaire wealth is illiquid, tied up in stock.
    2. These are recurring (annual) problems; confiscating wealth would be a one-off, not a sustainable fix.
    3. Handouts create dependency, not empowerment (“teach a man to fish...”).

  • “People think Elon Musk has a Bank account with $500 billion in it… he owns his own companies, and the shares that are outstanding sell for a certain price based on how many other people are selling those shares.” – Tom [55:57]

• Innovation Lowers Costs Over Time (51:56)
  • Tom emphasizes that the answer to global challenges is making things cheaper through innovation, not redistribution through confiscation.
• Freedom and Passing on Wealth
  • Tom argues for the ability to pass down wealth, linking America's strength to capital aggregation, not just equality of outcome.

  • "Freedom is the backbone of innovation. It is a generator of innovation." – Tom [68:34]

6. Audience Interaction and Critical Self-Examination

• Pushback on Rich Hosts Offering Advice (63:12)
  • Drew shares a comment likening rich podcasters to cats advising mice. Tom responds candidly, urging skepticism, first-principles thinking, and cause-and-effect reasoning, regardless of speaker status.

  • "No matter who gives you cause and effect, if it’s real cause and effect, take it." – Tom [63:23]

• Work Ethic Among the Wealthy (67:51)
  • Brief debate on whether the wealthy should be required to keep working. Tom details his own intense drive, even with the ability to retire comfortably, and frames forced labor among the rich as counter-productive.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Artificial Intelligence:

  "This is the single most transformational thing that has ever happened to humans. I’m including in that fire... and AI is so much bigger than that." – Tom [10:41]

• On Economic Reality:

  “Your economy is rigged against you. Your government hates you. All they want to do is get reelected. They will lie to your face. They understand what they have done to the economy.” – Tom [62:25]

• On Cause and Effect Thinking:

  "You should try to build cause and effect. Think up from physics. This is first principles thinking." – Tom [63:23]

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Timestamped Guide to Important Segments

• 01:04 – Stock prices vs. fundamentals, market gamesmanship, example of George Soros and the British pound
• 06:47 – The new AI mega-deals (Microsoft, Nvidia, Anthropic) and their implications
• 11:36 – Gemini 3 Pro AGI discussion; what AGI might look like
• 15:00 – Physics breakthroughs and “living in different literal universes”
• 19:14 – AI’s impact on jobs; transitional chaos and wealth gaps
• 27:39 – Education debates: federal vs. state, funding, effectiveness
• 29:32–37:05 – Why more money doesn't always mean better results; accountability via metrics
• 44:29–47:44 – AI in education, socialization, systemic goals, parental outcomes
• 51:56 – Innovation reduces costs vs. redistribution; lessons from history
• 55:12–59:19 – Billionaires and the myth of “solving” global problems with money
• 62:25–63:23 – Critique of government, advice for evaluating thought leaders
• 68:34 – Wealth, work, and freedom as the fuel of innovation
• 70:47–72:08 – On asset ownership, trickle-down misconceptions, and the roots of wealth inequality

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Final Takeaways

Tom Bilyeu delivers a rapid-fire, deeply skeptical, and technically literate tour through today’s “hype vs. reality” narratives in AI, economics, and social structure. Listeners are reminded that:

• Real progress is measured, tested, and often counterintuitive.
• AI-driven transformation is inevitable and will disrupt everything, but predicting the pace is fraught with uncertainty.
• Wealth inequality, government interventions, and educational reform all require a granular, first-principles approach to solutions—not soundbites.
• Personal agency, relentless learning, and adaptation are the only defenses in a world defined by volatility and innovation.

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This episode challenges dogma, rewards critical thinking, and refuses easy answers—making it a valuable listen (or read) for anyone serious about thriving in our complex era.

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Good morning everybody. Welcome to the Tom Bilyeu show live as usual. I've got my man Drew in the house. Drew, how we doing today?

[Drew]

Good morning.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Nice. Mason is on community and we've got G DJing solo today. So hopefully nothing too crazy happens. Otherwise it's going to be pandemonium.

[Drew]

Everybody Marky can absorb everything. Is, is that kind of similar to that kind of false AI bubble that we seen last week when people were like, well wait a second, everybody's paying each other, the AI bubble's gonna. And then that's. That anxiety kind of gets to the market and then that's when kind of

[Tom Bilyeu]

we see those dips and then eventually it really will burst. You can't have the. Okay, let me make sure that this is true. You can have the number of the value of the shares be totally detached from fundamentals. You can. And so that can stay irrational, as they say, for a very long time. Because as long as people decide that putting my money here, it's going to go up more than putting it in the risk free rate of return, then they're going to put it in there. The stocks themselves are a function of supply and demand. So if there's huge demand and a tight supply, then number go up. The problem is what happens when either structurally something happens so that liquidity gets pulled out of of the system. Japan, the yen carry trade disappears, for instance, liquidity will get sucked out of the system. That's why people are paranoid about it. So now you've got the saying that's totally detached from fundamentals. Another thing happens that pulls liquidity out of the system. People start selling, there's no new buyers, and now all of a sudden that thing can't keep going up. And because nobody understands debt, because nobody understands debt, they don't understand how new liquidity comes into the system. They don't understand how liquidity gets sucked out of the system. And so most people are just confused by what's happening. Yeah, it is. It's a thing, Drew. It's a thing. And I don't know what to do about that thing.

[Drew]

I feel like Tesla is probably the biggest contributor to this at the market highs, I think it was trading at 235 times its earnings.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So something like, you think Nvidia is higher than that. But anyway.

[Drew]

But the reason I'm using Tesla, specifically because I know that one, is the. We're doing this because we know Tesla 3.0, not even Tesla 2.0, of we sell cars now. We sell cars and robo taxis. But we sell cars, robo taxis, and we're doing robots.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Drew]

So I think for Tesla, you can kind of squint, turn your head to the side and be like, okay, if he does get that straight shot from here to robot, I get where that productivity will come.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You can but imagine that you're pulling 2045 profits into the future. Now you've got a problem because at some point people don't go, okay, I'll give you to 2045. But I think enough changes between now and then. I don't buy your 204546 projections. And so now I'm just going to wait. So that's where you run into trouble. Or people sell because they're like, okay, I've got the 2045 chumps that are buying into that number. I'm the fuck out. And now you guys believe in 2046. That's on you. Like, you do your thing. I'm going to take these and I'm going to put it into something different. And that's what happens. Eventually you get to the point where you pulled so much of the future into the present that people stop believing in the future. So he's putting. I mean, look, he's managed to do it for this long, but he's putting himself in a position where, like, the next thing is going to be like, okay, and now we're going to mine asteroids. And so. And it's going to be. It's going to have to be something like that where it's like, there's an even bigger thing that we haven't yet talked about that's fucking massive. But at some point.

[Drew]

But it will probably show. It might not grow year over year, but I think, would he be able to sustain that in 2545? Where it's like, okay, I. I hit the thing. I did all four beats. I think we're good now. This is Tesla now, 5%.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The way that it actually will play out will go something like this. People will believe in it in some periods and they won't believe in it. In others. And so we'll do this up and down with a general trend up. But the volatility is part of what people like. So once you understand, oh, people want volatility. Volatility is a feature, not a bug, then it starts to make more sense. Which again is why I say this is a game, understand it as a game, understand that there are rules, understand that people try to bend, some of them break, some of them certainly understand them better than the next person and try to win that way. People try to influence markets. People do influence markets. And as a reminder, your very own Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant, along with George Soros, the economic boogeyman himself, they, they broke the back of the British pound. Like they went in and said, oh, oh, I see you guys have to defend it. Cool, well, we're going to make you buy and buy and buy and buy a bunch of it to keep the. Where you've basically implied that you're going to keep it. And what we know that apparently you don't is you won't be able to do it forever. And they couldn't and they lost. And that is so wild. So when once you understand that a room full of guys, a room full of guys, we're just like we're gonna with that entire country's currency. So it's like, yo, anything is possible. Not only is anything possible, you're a moron. If you're trying to day trade your way to success, like the odds that on a long enough timeline you get clobbered, it's effectively a hundred percent.

[Drew]

I bought the dip though, Tom. I bought the dip though.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, in some cases that's the absolute own bitcoin. But you've gotta be careful. One, this is a time horizon thing. So if you told me that you bought the dip and you expect to get a return in the next week or you're not gonna make rent, then I'm like, then honestly I quit the show and I just stopped because if I can't even get you on board with things, it's like at that point

[Drew]

I'm like, check it up everywhere.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Lynn becomes a co host and I at least try to get her to invest wisely. But woof.

[Drew]

All right. In the sense of AI deals. Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic just announced a new strategic partnership. These seem to be happening more frequently now. So Anthropic is going to buy 30 billion of Azure's, Microsoft's compute capacity. Nvidia is to invest 10 billion in anthrop, Microsoft to invest 5 billion in anthropic, Nvidia and Anthropic to collaborate on design and engineering. Nvidia and Anthropic established deep technology partnership. It seems like a circle jerk to me. I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, this really comes down to people do not understand how the world is being terraformed from a technological standpoint. Boys and girls, if you're not looking at the score that Gemini 3 Pro deep thinking got on the AGI test, it. Today is the day that you wake up and you check it out. The rest of my week is going to be about figuring out what Gemini 3 is doing. This is psychotic. Look at. Look at that dot, man. Look at that dot. If you're not looking at your screens, bro, that is so up and to the right. Now, admittedly, right is cost, but the up part is insane. It is orders of magnitude above most the other players. That is wild. Wild. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it. So, guys, it's really happening. And so there are people that look out at the world and they say to themselves, the Steve Jobs quote, all the things that you see in the world were made by people no smarter than you. And when you're really smart, that is absolutely true. And so these guys are getting together and they're like, we imagine a world that is totally different than this one, and we are going to build it. And we need energy and we need compute and we need chips and we need the AI algorithms and the training data and all that. And that is exactly what you see getting together here. And I'm telling you, seven years from now, the world just. It's unrecognizable. It's not the full transformation, but seven years from now, dude, it's unrecognizable. So I'm writing right now a class, which, by the way, we have a class today. Mason, can people still sign up or is it too late? Okay, so you can still sign up today. Technically, this is only for people making a million dollars or more in their business. This is Impact Theory University, Billion Dollar CEO. But listen, we don't check. So if you want to come and hear this class, come and sign up for this class. I'm literally writing it as we speak. And I am just absolutely floored. As I go to explain to people how much I use AI, I'm like, holy fuck. Like, in the last year, my life has just become so different in terms of how I use AI, how good it is, how rapidly it allows me to do things that historically would have taken. Oh my God. I used to tell the team, hold on, if you want me to write a new class, writing a new class is a full day. I'm talking a full one of my days. That's like 16 hours now. What, can I do it in four hours? Dude, that is bananas. Now, it was me doing a whole bunch of training on the data so that I can come to it and then say, okay, now I'm doing this thing and you know all about me and you know how I write and you know how I think, you know all my arguments now spit them back out to me in this format. It is so good at that that it's like, oh my God. And then, okay, I'm gonna end up teaching the whole class right now. But that people have got to understand when you see stuff like that, it's tempting to just like run by. Those are the indications of where the world is actually going. And if you want to have any hope of being at the forefront of that and not just getting mowed over, you've got to pay attention it. You've got to pay attention to this stuff. It is the single most transformational thing that has ever happened to humans. Okay? I'm including in that fire and how fire unlocked the caloric content of food, which allowed our brains to get bigger. Okay? So I'm saying even understanding that AI is so much bigger than that. So I know people are taking it seriously, but so many people are just anxious and so they shut down and they're not looking at this stuff. So anyway, that announcement is big to me. You see, once. Once you see the energy company get involved, I mean, you could sort of say Microsoft is an energy company. They have their own nuclear power plant. That's when I'll really be like, holy bejesus. This, this is, this is that moment. This is the himothy of historical moments.

[Drew]

With that AGI breakthrough, it seems like because we have a new GPT coming out at any time now, it seems like we're getting closer and closer to trying to one up each other. And AGI is closer, getting closer, getting closer. It seems like it might be even a shorter timeframe than the 2027. We initially thought it might even be next year, depending on how each company is forcing the other company to kind of scale compute faster at a. Yeah,

[Tom Bilyeu]

what's the thing that we don't see coming? Probably? I mean, listen, 2027 feels like let's not get overly obsessed. It certainly could surprise US for sure, 2027 feels about right to me still. But once you understand that the real thing that makes AGI AGI is it'll be able to teach itself. Once it can teach itself, you now have a creature that can think at the speed of light, can infinitely replicate. It's not infinitely a run up against energy and compute, but it can replicate itself a lot and it just thinks around the clock. So that's where this gets wild. And remember that Einstein level intellect will be considered AGI won't be considered ASI. So now imagine a world where you have 20,000 Einsteins that think 24 7, 365 about everything. So Gemini 3 Pro, one of the things that it's done has scored ridiculously high like a 91% or something on spatial reasoning, which means it understands the physical world. It understands like how to animate a gymnast for instance, because it actually knows how to how a gymnast body moves through space. So this is a totally different universe.

[Drew]

Human scores 100%. Gemini 3 scores 91%.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. Dude, that, that is. For a game developer like myself, that's thrilling because it's funny that human is

[Drew]

now included on those graphs because soon we're going to get past dude, this

[Tom Bilyeu]

is assuming like this is. You pass it in 2026 for sure. So that means that it's beginning to understand the physical world. If it really can master the physical world, then I have no reason to believe that it won't be able to solve. It's already solving novel mathematics. I have no reason to believe it won't be able to solve novel physics things and start having insights and breakthroughs there. So remember that. Lisa Dahl. Lisa Dong. God damn. The GO champion. I forget his exact name, but that's close. He said playing against AI is like playing against an alien intelligence. So now imagine an alien intelligence as smart as Einstein, but coming at things from just a totally different direction because it's not trapped in a human frame of reference. And it could, it could. I don't want to get overly like it's going to in the next two years, but it could get to the point where it's making steady progress in physics. Physics unlocked the modern age. I don't think people understand that. Your cell phone brought to you by physics, your GPS brought to you by physics. Like so much of the things that we think of as just like, oh, it's just a modern gizmo that I have in my house that was made in China. No, no, no. That, that was a physics breakthrough from the 40s that is now manifesting as a device in your house. But if there's a breakthrough in physics, you can expect products, life changing products to start making its way to the market. So a breakthrough in physics is like saying there's going to be a whole new class of thing that is possible that wasn't possible before. So it's like all these like Promethean moments that if we don't run into a compute roadblock, they'll just start happening. And that's when it's like, okay, imagine for a second you're living in a world where nobody can agree on what's true. But now imagine living in a world where your knowledge base determines what is actually possible. So simply not knowing something is the same as that thing not being possible. Other people know it, and so therefore that thing is possible. And if enough of these are, like, happening, like if you get a physical breakthrough once every few weeks, no one will be able to stay on top of that. So now you're going to have different physics labs, like not telling people for a while that they've got a thing. And so they'll release something that is built on top of a physical, a breakthrough in the laws of physics. They're able to make a thing that people are like, wait, what? And they'll get like this huge moat for a minute and then other people will be like, oh, I didn't know that was possible. And so then they catch up. That's going to be wild. It will be like living in different literal universes. In one universe, this thing is possible. Like imagine one universe, GPS just isn't possible because we don't know what relativity is. And then one country over, they've got a breakthrough and they're like, well, it is possible here. This is why people say that AI is a winner take all game. Because if the breakthrough is big enough, you just run the table.

[Drew]

Yeah. Nobody sees it. For my weekly update on Atlas Shrugged. I'm so close. I'm so close. I have like 100 pages left. But this, this thing has been a. A monster. There's a scene in it where like everybody's. I don't want to spoiler alert, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

there's a scene, it's been out for like 50 years.

[Drew]

Yeah, there's a scene where like the train stations are all falling apart and they're all breaking and they. The interchanger is messed up. So the one of the protagonists assembles just a whole lineup of men and they're like, what are we doing? We're manually shifting the trains. They're like, well, what? What do you mean? And then she has like a monologue was like, what used to cost, you know, minutes is now going to take us hours because of the technological breakthroughs that we had. And just that sentence kind of hit me. Like, oh, snap. There's so many little things that we have that has made our days more convenient. So GPS and stuff like that is cool, but a lot of people think, I don't need GPS in my phone. But there's little things like train interchanges and stuff. Like, before, a whole bunch of guys used to have to manually pull trains to change them on tracks. Like, there wasn't just a button you can press. There wasn't interlocking systems and things like that. So now if you use AI to go the other way, how many things are taking us hours, days, weeks? That AI's gonna be like, oh, you could just do da, da, da, da, da. And now it's gonna take us minutes instead of hours. So there is that. I can't see what's on the other side now. And I think that was a really grounded example of, like, trains used to suck and we used to have to lay them down manually. Now we can lay them down in 1/15 of the time. And now it's like, how many other breakthroughs on the other side and other physical world that we haven't iterated on since the 80s, are we gonna see those, like, processes happen?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yup. People used to shit in pots and pans and dump it out the window onto the street. That's real. Streets used to be designed for all the, like, rivers of. If you go to, like, Pompeii in Italy, the streets are elevated, and they're elevated so that the shit could just run down the street to get out of town. It wasn't even, like, going anywhere specific. It was just, like, not here. So, yeah, like, the advantages are wild.

[Drew]

Somebody put in the chat AI air traffic controllers. But yeah, literally, things like that, like air traffic control, that's a human. A lot of these plane crashes are human errors. So just one thing of robots, like, all right, but I zap into your. Everybody's navigation. Let's line it up, and everybody lands more efficiently, faster, less delays. Like, so that's just one of the examples that if we just actually embrace it, it can have all these other ramifications in the physical world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I mean, look, we. We're embracing it. It's. It's a question of how much pushback is it going to get as it arrives? Because it really is going to eliminate jobs. And I see more and more people saying, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, they don't create jobs, they eliminate jobs. How do you argue that they. They are going to eliminate jobs and replace them with robots? And the transitionary period is going to be brutal. It will exacerbate the have and have nots, because the people that understand the asset equation of it all, they're gonna own those companies and they're gonna skyrocket. And then the people that don't are gonna be increasingly out of jobs and increasingly more likely to be violent. And I just can't seem to get people to listen to that. So in the chat, we have both Tom. This is the coolest timeline to live on. And after Tom's last interview, I thought the world was supposed to end in a few years. So how do you think through, like, that dichotomy where innovation is taking off, but at the same time, like, everything's. So here's the funny part. I assume they mean Roman Yampolsky. So It's. It's been two days. So Roman is saying, like, call it 15 years, so report back, motherfuckers. Like, there's still plenty of time. This is the funny thing about people's perception of time is like, oh, man, they said this was going to get bad. This hasn't gotten bad. Like, for instance, take Peter Schiff. Love Peter Schiff to death. Peter Schiff is. He's so keenly aware of the mathematics that he's looking at it going, hold on. Like, this is all guaranteed to collapse. And so he starts saying, guys, this is going to collapse. Now, he's been saying it for, let's say, 10 years, 15 years now it might take 30 or 40 years to actually collapse. Collapse. And was he wrong? Should he have just stayed quiet? Should he try to get people to take it seriously when there's actually still time to take it seriously? It's one of those, well, what's your goal? If your goal is to make money, then getting the timing wrong is the same as being wrong. And so in that case, no points for Peter Schiff. If, on the other hand, you're like, oh, you want people to understand how this actually works, you want them focused on the math. And what you know is standing before economics or AI, timing predictions or anything of that, one should stand with great humility because there's just so much that you can't understand. But at the same time, like saying, listen, I'm looking at this and it's like, this seems like an inevitability. And so I want people to understand this as an inevitability so that they can plan and act accordingly. So timelines are always going to be a little bit fubar. Nobody is going to get them right. But when people end up standing on top of nuclear rubble laughing and going, I told you it wouldn't happen before 2026 is like, wait, hold on. That's your victory lap, bro. It's nuclear Rebel. So, yeah, I would say people need to have their eye on the prize. Not trying to win, but trying to figure out, okay, how do I navigate a world with tremendous uncertainties, certainly around timing? My only hope is that I'll be directionally correct. But the only point to being correct is to say, I'm gonna do a new thing because I have this information. And so what is that new thing? Did you actually do it? Like, I talk about the economy so much that now I'm like, okay, am I actually moving my money in accordance with all the things that I'm learning? And if so, am I doing well? And so you start looking at all of this stuff and you start thinking, okay, all weather strategy. That's certainly what I preach. How close to that am I? So learning a thing is the sum. The total purpose of that is to do a thing that other people can't do. So learning about money is so that you may take care of your family, that you can invest your money in a way that is wise. It isn't to be right. It isn't to point fingers, it isn't to nail the timing or anything like that. So anyway, when I have a guy like Roman Yampolski on, what I'm looking for is, okay, give me a mental model that I can use to map what's happening. I'm going to constantly check what's happened versus what I expected to happen. And I'm going to constantly update my model. So if people look at it like that, they would understand. This moment is hyper precarious. We have too many things that are unstable, that all throughout human history, instability rapidly turns into deep problems that yield a whole lot of death. So it's like, okay, well, we all hope we dodge that moment because like Ray Dalio will say, empires last 150 years, give or take a hundred years. So it's like, well, a hundred years is a very long time, Ray. So this may be a problem for me or it may not, but it is guaranteed to be a problem for someone. So now what do you do if you're Ray and you're looking at the history and you're like, yeah, there are confounding variables that can essentially double the timeline, but the outcome is always the same. And so the way that I would think of it goes like, this civilization is pregnant with artificial superintelligence. Now we know it's we're going to give birth. We just don't know if it's in five years, 15 years, 50 years. So it's like, ah, that's tough. But I know we're pregnant and I know we're eventually going to give birth. So people ought to care pretty deeply about that timeline and look at it. But it's impossible to know what the exact timeline will be. We are also pregnant with the economic collapse of the United States, for sure. You're deep, man. You are wearing maternity clothes.

[Drew]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

People are convinced that you have triplets. Like, that's where we're at on that one. So you haven't given birth yet, but plan for it. Plan for it. Yeah, that could be very interesting.

[Drew]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If enough people get excited about that, that could help them in the midterms. We'll see. But really quick, why do you not want people to YOLO into GameStop? Because they'll lose their money. Okay. How would you feel if somebody came running and was like, mason, Mason, I went to Vegas, I put it all on black and I won. You'd be like, dude, that's dope, man. I'm so happy for you. That's rad, because you've got the money in your pocket. But what do you know? They're going to be like, mason, I'm going to Vegas again this weekend and this time I'm going to put it all on black again because it's now my lucky color and I'm going to win. And you're like, oh, God, you're going to lose. Eventually you're going to lose. And when somebody is like, they're just doing crazy shit like that, you're like, oof. And I mean, this is exactly what happened to all the GameStop kids. Like, it became this huge movement and the vast majority of them held as it went back down and so they walked away with nothing. Remember, it is a sport. There are winners and there are losers. The vast majority. I'll do crypto because I know the numbers. I believe it's 5% of wallets have made 90% of the gains. So that's 95% of people that got their ass handed to them. So, yeah, we are in a gambling age and I get why, but I don't love it. I don't love it. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. If you work in university maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Drew]

All right, I wanna, I wanna set the scene for a second, so let me take you on a journey. Right Beginning of this year, Donald Trump wrote an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Okay, it's not working. Department of Education was set up in

[Tom Bilyeu]

1980, and since that time we have

[Drew]

spent almost a. I'm sorry, I just realized that was Triple H behind him

[Tom Bilyeu]

and we have watched our performance scores continued. I do believe that it is a

[Drew]

responsibility to make sure that our children do have equal access to excellent education. I think that that is best handled

[Tom Bilyeu]

at the state level, closest to the states, working with state administrators, teachers, parents

[Drew]

who should have input into their curriculum. It's not working. Okay, then, last one, then I'll throw it over to you. This was a tweet by Harry Eccles. He said Elon's. Elon Musk's personal wealth could solve world hunger twice. Provide access to clean water for everyone on earth. Twice.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dumb.

[Drew]

Vaccinate all children worldwide for a decade. Eradicate malaria, NTB with change. Reforest the Amazon. Don't tell me billionaires are good for society. Somebody retweeted that total global government spending in 2024 is approximately US$42 trillion. Elon's net worth is 1% of that. If Elon's net worth could solve all these problems, why haven't the world's governments? And then this person praying Bradford Ferguson retweeted them. If throwing money at problems actually solved them, governments would have accidentally fixed everything by now from just from sheer volume. So I, I do think that there is this running. And I, I do want to talk about how everybody has spent Elon Musk's wealth in their head already. Like everybody has said, if Elon Musk just did this, everybody.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

So we'll get to that. But there's also this. Don't cut. The Department of Education. People need that. We need more funding into education. That's what's the problem is. I think there's this disconnect between more money equals solutions.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

Versus, so break this whole down and help us think through these things. Because we see these tweets a lot. They're happening more frequently, especially with the rise of Mamdani.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you took the Department of Education stats, fed it into AI and said, what's the problem? The AI would literally instantly spit out. The more money you spend, the worse your results get. So that, that is so self evidently true. Now it doesn't mean that more money causes it to be worse, but the correlation is so obvious. So now the question is, okay, well if throwing money at the problem doesn't work, why do we keep doing it? And why would somebody look at that and go, you just need to do more of it. So if you beat your kids and their anxiety doesn't go away, do you go, I gotta beat em harder? Because that anxiety, that's a real, that's a problem. My kid is really going to struggle in life if they're this anxious. I just need to beat them a little bit more. In fact, I've never even beat them with a belt. Like, God damn, I got to go get the belt. Let's try this. No, hopefully you would go, ooh. I don't know that the beatings are causing the anxiety, but I know that they're not helping with the anxiety. So why don't we try a different strategy? And that's where we're at. Like, the Department of Education, whether it had good intentions or not, is a bureaucracy that is designed to keep itself alive. And so it will try to suck up more resources to live longer, to grow and get bigger. And if it is not held accountable to its results, then it loses the one signal that it needs, which is that what it's doing is working. And this is why in companies you gotta fire people that are underperforming, because if you don't, you send a signal to the system that performance doesn't matter. And so then you just end up attracting barnacles. Everybody slows down. Nobody feels like, oh wait, I really need to do a thing. And so, yeah, but this is, this is what I call the physics of progress. So you want to, you have a hypothesis, you know where you want to get, you know where you are, you have a hypothesis okay, we want children's education rates to be better, whatever that looks like. You define that and then you say, I'm going to try a thing. I'm going to found the Board of Education or the Department of Education, and I expect it. And this is where they went wrong. I expected to have this impact on these scores. Then you create the Department of Education and you do it. And if three years down the road, the test scores are moving in the wrong direction and you go, okay, what I think happened is I underfunded the Department of Education. Cool, viable test. So now we're going to fund it more. We're going to run the test, we fund it more, education scores go down even more. Now you have to reject that. Money is the problem. But they don't. And they just go, keep giving me more money, more money, more money, more money. And so the physics of progress, which quite literally is the scientific method recontextualized for business or, you know, governmental tests. If when you get the feedback from the test, it says, that thing didn't work, and you keep doing it, now it's just, oh, this is you. You have the wrong frame of reference. The frame of reference needs to be, I created an organism. That organism's number one job is to survive and to grow. And therefore it's going to try to get resources regardless of outcome. And so this is why things need limits. Like, the Department of Education is going to exist for five years or 10 years, and at the end of that time, if it is not yielded these results, it's automatically disbanded or no matter what, we have to re vote. And then you would go before Congress, you say, look at these amazing results that we got. So people need to start expecting their tax sellers to yield a return. It doesn't need to be a fiscal return, but it needs to be a return. There needs to be a stated outcome that you're expecting to get from that. And if you don't get it, then you stop doing it. And also, I just really want people to internalize. Competition is what makes something better. I know we don't like it and we don't like. Because you end up losing sometimes. And losing really sucks. But the reality is competition is the thing that makes you better. And if there is no evolutionary pressure to get better, you won't get better. Because getting better is very hard. And you go up against what I call the chaos machine. So life is the chaos machine. Life is just always throwing crazy stuff at you. Just when you thought raising a daughter was hard enough. Oh, I'M going to introduce social media. And you're like, oh, my God. So, right. Or just when you thought raising a daughter was hard enough, I'm going to introduce you to puberty. And then you're like, what is happening right now? So that's the chaos machine. Or, hey, things are finally going good. Your daughter's off to college. She's fallen in love with somebody that you really like and respect. Sorry, bro. I want to introduce you to something called cancer. And so it's like, just is what it is. That's life. There's always some fucking curveball coming out of left field that makes everything hard. So given that a system, even one that's trying to achieve excellence, is going to be constantly bombarded by the cosmic rays of the chaos machine, something that's stagnant, that's not even trying to grow, is also going to have to go up against a chaos machine. It's just going to fall apart. And then it becomes a tumor. And what I mean by that, I mean that almost literally what a tumor does is it disguises itself from the immune system, because the immune system is designed to find a tumor and kill it. But it disguises itself from the immune system and it is able to say, no, no, no, nothing to see here. And then it goes and grabs all the blood vessels and it says, I need nutrients. And so now it like hyper funds itself and it pulls these, you know, in the metaphor, it pulls the revenue streams towards it to get more money, more money, more money. And then you realize, okay, it's shielded itself from anybody criticizing it by saying, but we're the Department of Education. We're here for the kids. You got to invest in the kids. What's wrong with you? You evil insert capitalist. Whatever reason you think they're evil for, uh, so that's how you blind yourself to the immune system. So nothing can attack it. You keep pulling resources to it, but in reality, it's actually killing the organism. And so, yeah, people just need to have standards. Like, if people have expectations, standards, this is what we expect. You either hit it or you get dissolved. Then they would be able to try new things. And they would realize that part of the reason that Elon does as well as he does in his companies is he's constantly making the default assumption that the way that I have built this rocket engine, this car, this factory, this supply chain, whatever is broken in some way, and I've got to identify the ways in which it is broken and optimize it. When you assume that instead people Are politicians are playing a game of gain and maintain power. You realize that budgets have to do with who's getting the money. How, how does that money help them get reelected? So it's like, oh, I'm going to fund this department, so now the teachers unions are going to vote for me. And so then it's like, oh, you're not doing it because it gets results for the kids. You're doing it because it gets results for you. Yes, that's correct. I went to, you know, you've got the people right now going up against it because they went to Jeffrey Epstein and they were like, listen, I know that you are a sex offender, but I just need some of that money to get elected and I don't care about anything else. So give me the ducats, let me get into office. They may even tell themselves a wonderful story about, I'm able to turn that dirty money into something beautiful by getting elected. But the reality is that they will turn a blind eye to morality, to results, all in the name of must get elected.

[Drew]

Somebody said that the Department of Education isn't about numbers. It's about helping disabled kids and stuff like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You have to put a metric on that, man. That was really triggering for me. Oh, God. Why do I have the impulse sometimes? Okay, my beloved person who clearly wants good things for people. I love you. Thank you for being here. You have to understand that all the things that you want to accomplish in life have a metric that you can associate with it. And. And that which gets measured gets improved. So take my marriage. Okay. Seems super ephemeral. How do you put a number to that? You could do something as simple as, my wife and I are going to have a shared calendar, and every day we're going to mark it with a green dot or a red dot, and a green dot is, today was a great day for me in my marriage. I got from my marriage what I wanted. And so some days will be green, green. Some days will be red. Green. Some days will be red, red. And then we say any time where there's a red dot on the calendar, that's a metric. And so our goal is to steer by how many days have a red dot on them. Great. Now you've got a metric. Seem like this super ephemeral thing, but in literally nine seconds, I can turn that into a metric. So there's always a metric that you can associate with something. You might say, we want to do it with test scores. Okay, maybe that's a good metric, maybe it's not. We want to do it by grade reading level upon graduation. Maybe that's a good metric metric. Maybe it's not. Maybe we want to do that plus track the kids 5, 10, 15, 20 year. I mean, God knows how much data we would have at this point down the road to see, like, what are their economic opportunities so that we see, oh, if somebody graduates at reading level, that predicts their job prospects or their total household income 15 years down the road. Okay, grade reading level, or no, no, it's not grade reading level, it's math level or typing skills or whatever. But I'm just saying what gets measured gets improved. And so if you're measuring the amount of money that you spend per student, which is basically what we're doing now, then you're going to be like, oh, let's keep spending more per student with no connection to. Is it actually making our students better? Here's the part that I think people forget. There is going to be a time in the future where the smartest people in China are going to try to kill or neutralize the smartest people in America. And the smartest people in America are going to try to kill or neutralize the smartest people in China. So you better make smart people. Now, if you think I'm kidding or that that's meant as hyperbole, it is not in the slightest humanity, all of history is one long string of one people conquering and or enslaving the other. That's it. It's an unbroken chain of that. I don't know. If you guys want, right now, you can go online and see video being recorded right now, today of people being this right now, today being buried up to their neck in holes. And then a person with a big machete comes behind them and beheads them. That's right now, today. That is happening this minute. So if you think literally I watched it, so I'm not making that up, it's horrifying. And if you think that humans stop being human at some point, like after World War II or something, you're living in a world that is so full of delusion that life is going to surprise you in horrifying, horrifying ways. And we could live in that comfortable world of delusion for about 70 years. And now we've spent all that money, goodwill, all of that, and it's now up. And you've got two great powers that are about to collide, and they're going to be consequences. You've got religious wars happening all over the place. You've got border Disputes happening. Um, so, yeah, I don't know how people have. America's been powerful for so long, they believe that it's a law of nature that America be the primary country. And they are forgetting that every primary country that has ever existed all through human history has fallen. And so it is mathematically self evident that America will fall. Doesn't mean this week, doesn't mean in 10 years, doesn't mean in 50 years, but it does mean that either we're the first country to survive. Much like one day, it's very possible that a human will live forever. But death is undefeated so far. Drew. And so I'm betting on death going

[Drew]

back to the education of it all. Brutus Lugo in the chat was like, should we copy countries that are working? So our education system right now, should we define working? That's where I was gonna go next. Our education system is broken, I'll give you that. I think we all agree on that. I don't think anybody thinks America's the best at education. We're not. What can we do tangentially to fix it? There's the state sponsored China model where we're just making robots. And this is what you're going to learn from 3 to, from 6 to 15. And then if you're good enough, you'll go to college. If not, I'll put you somewhere else. There's the South Korea model, which is elementary, middle school is free, high school is paid, college is optional. So it's like you have to. The better in that model, the higher the tuition, the assumed higher and better the school is, stuff like that. There's all these Nordic models that follow a similar method to South Korea. But it does seem like there are countries where education is working better. Do we kind of look over the wall and peek and see what they're doing and kind of model that? Or is there something uniquely American that we can just do? Just like how we have uniquely American innovation in some of these other categories?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think you always want to look to see if somebody is doing something better than you. But you have to be very careful to say, this is where I want to go. And then who has done something that has led to that outcome? So for instance, if somebody's a parent, I should rank very low on their list of people to take advice from about being a parent. I have not been a parent, so I cannot prove to you that my ideas work. So be careful who you take advice from. That would be one thing. So now it's like, okay, what's the outcome that you want, do you want to be globally dominant, or do you want to slide into late stage empire comfort and then just slowly drift into the background like Italy? Unfortunately for all of us, the world becomes whatever young people want it to become. And so that answer is going to play out based on what young people believe. But, yes, you should look at somebody who's doing it. Well, I doubt knowing Brutus as well as I do at this point, I doubt that he and I are going to agree on who's got a model that we should be looking at.

[Drew]

And is this also because I'm seeing some speculation that, like, AI can solve this. But to me, plugging a kid in front of a screen at 6, I don't necessarily know if that's still the best way because to me, that's just your.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is that a comment on AI? What is that a comment on?

[Drew]

Comment on? I think. I still think there's a need for social interaction. I still think there's a need of. I need to be taught by a person. I need to have those social. I don't know if it's hierarchy. I need to understand when to sit down, when to stand. Like, there's certain things that I need a human being to tell me that a screen can't tell me. The attention spans aren't there. They're not going to be able to grasp those concepts. So I understand maybe in high school, maybe in middle school, we can then transition to like an AI thing. But I do still think that we need, like a traditional school model. But I'm seeing everybody's kind of saying, well, the AIs will take care of it. We can just plug them in, the AI and that will do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. The part that I think people forget about AI is that in its full Pokemon form, AI is going to understand that. Let's say it's very important that you have an extended attention span. You will be wearing devices like an Oura ring, stuff like that, and it will know whether your attention span is long, short, whatever, and it will change the way that it interacts with you to lengthen. If that's what it's trying to get the outcome for, then it will lengthen that. So this is where people have to understand the ability to process data, to pattern recognize that AI will be getting. So let's say that you have an AI that's deployed across 100 million students worldwide. All 100 million of those students is kicking off pattern data. The AI will instantly synthesize that pattern data, update itself. So that the kid that's learning in Mogadishu is informing how you learn as well. And so now it's like oh, we know that when we do blinking lights or whatever, kids attention span gets shorter, we're frying their dopamine circuits so we're not going to do that. And so maybe in the early years it's like there's very little flashing lights and all that because the kid needs to learn to look at boring shit for extended periods of time. Or maybe this kid needs to look at boring stuff for extended periods of time but this kid actually needs the flashing lights to stay engaged because they have adhd. Whatever, I don't know. But so that kind of tailored one on one but pulling data from millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people is going to be as close to a magic trick as you're going to get. And so then we just have to make sure that we know what we're aiming at. So do we want like kids that are sort of uniformly pumped out, which seems to be your beef with the Chinese model, or is that super useful? And this is just about maximizing the individual ability of every kid and we just have to accept that the system cannot support the kids with like an 81 IQ just sorry, can't do it. And so we're looking for your 140s and 150s and we're going to make sure that they just are lavished with attention because they're going to be the ones that actually run things. We'll see. The AI may find very counterintuitive things, but pattern recognition is what AI is about. Humans just can't take in that much data that fast. And then we're so bad at recognizing what the actual outcome is that we want. Because I've got bad news. I think that what the Department of Education for instance actually wants is to have a job, have a high paying job, protect their own essentially and secretive secrets. I think that adults probably want to control kids so that the kids don't steer away from the world they want. And so it's like eh, if the kids are a little bit dumber than us, is that really bad? Yes. But do I think that many people have that impulse? Almost certainly.

[Drew]

Jose in the chat said it won't be screens that they'll put the kids in front of, it'll just be AI robots. Is this a humanoid robot like solve?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well so I don't have the fear of AI I think that you have.

[Drew]

So I just think it's gonna be it Ends up being screen time. Like, I don't know if I want my kid on iPad for six hours a day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but here's what I think you actually care about. You care about an outcome. And if you see that, you can get the outcome that you want, like, let me paint a picture of Lynn, you and I have never discussed this, but I think you're gonna love the following outcome. But you tell me she is loving and kind and smart. She's focused, very knowledgeable. But I mean by smart, knowledgeable. She knows the things that she loves and she feels confident in pursuing them. She doesn't let the world tell her what to do, but she's plugged in. She gets it. She is somebody that is career focused, but it doesn't consume her life. Like, she wants to do something on her own. She wants to stand in her own two feet. But at the same time, she's not defined by her career. She wants to fall in love. She's very interested in having children. But, you know, she wants to find somebody that's going to be right for her, that respects her, that respects her father and her relationship with her father and that she's happy. Not all the time, but she's. She knows how to fight through difficulties and from. She's never sucked into depression. She's not overwhelmed by anxiety. She knows how to navigate the world, and she lives a comfortable life. She's not overly focused on getting rich or anything stupid. Like, that doesn't matter to her. She wants a husband that loves her, that loves the children, that's engaged, and that pushes her to be better. And she loves that she gets to push him to be better. If that were the output, would you be like, okay, that was dope?

[Drew]

Yeah. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, I imagine if you felt irrelevant in that equation, that would not feel good. And you want to feel like, sure, the AI had something to do with it, but honestly, this was largely my doing and her mom's doing. That would feel the best, right?

[Drew]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. There's hesitation.

[Drew]

No, because it's like the outcome is more important than the attribution of credit word.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, well, that's phenomenal. You're unlike most humans. But that's great. So I will deliver you that. Whether you need to be in the lead or not, or whether you just want the outcome, you'll literally just be able to tell the AI and the AI Honestly, it's going to ask you a bunch of questions that you don't understand what it's why it's asking about your favorite movie. Or your favorite scene, or your most heartbreaking memory from your relationship with Lyn's mom. Like, you won't know why it's asking those questions, but it will be learning who you are at the deepest level possible. And then it will optimize for that outcome. But not just with Lynn. It will be running that same algorithm across hundreds of millions of kids, seeing what the outcomes and then going, ah, Lynn fits into category double CA43. And we know all C A43s with parents that match this profile. This is exactly what they need. Dude, it will be that wacky because we are inside of a system. Whether God created it or it was created by a simulation simulator, it runs on rules. And so once you're running on a set of rules, it is deterministic, which means once you understand the vast data set, you really can nudge things in a direction. And I'm not saying this is what happens. Linl have done grown up long before this comes into play, but I mean this is on a 15 year horizon and that might be long.

[Drew]

What you say?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So Sarah D. Sanberg said if OpenAI needs $500 billion just to run for five years, and that's with profit, how would a government funded AI school system with no profit be possible? Unless you go full socialist, AKA eating the rich.

[Drew]

You might, you might have bars, Sarah, you might have bars. Okay, that, that was a great picture that you painted, but I don't trust my school system to implement that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so first of all, eating the rich is the wrong way to think about socialism. Eating the rich is bitterness and resentment and I want to see them punished. And once you're in bitterness and resentment, I want to see them punished. Nothing good, literally nothing. You get the Soviet Union, you get Mao's China. So that's not a world in which AI thrives. It's a world in which at best, AI is used as a draconian weapon. Remember, if you're willing to enslave people, then you can get a whole bunch of shit for free. So that is the path of eat the rich. The bad news is when you eat the rich, you end up drawing the weirdest lines ever and you tend to kill the most effective. Read about the mass famines in Ukraine in the twenties, killing the kulaks. Okay? So now the question becomes, how do we look at history and learn a really powerful pattern? And the pattern is that things start expensive, but they very rarely stay expensive. And innovation is the driving down of costs. Now, because we have been brainwashed by the government that Prints money as fast as they can. We think that prices should go up over time, but the reality is prices should go down over time, but not through crisis like you see in Japan, through innovation, through improvement. And so things should get cheaper. Your TV shouldn't stay the same price for better quality. It should go down in price for better quality. And every time you realize that your TV is getting better in quality but staying the same price, you should feel betrayed. So the AI will get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every day. The only reason that it's expensive is because we cannot capture enough of the energy from the sun. As soon as you start capturing more energy from the sun, the cost of the energy will plummet, and that's going to be the vast majority of the cost. And then the building cost will go down, because as energy gets cheaper, robotics will get cheaper. And ultimately, you don't even have to pay a human to do it. You will have an object that eats sunlight, literally. And they have abundant calories. So now you've got the labor cost plummeting, and you go through a tumultuous period, there's no doubt about that. Because people will be losing meaning and purpose, even if they're not going hungry, even if they have better houses than before. You're still going to have a problem with meaning and purpose. But meaning and purpose aside, you will get to the other side, where it is a world of abundance. Because what stops you from a world of abundance is energy costs, labor costs. And then, like, humans just want things that are scarce. Think about trading cards. Not to make everything about trading cards, but if you think about trading cards, they could print whatever they want. And the very reason that trading cards are popular is because they don't do that. They intentionally create scarcity. So humans love that shit. We're wired for it.

[Drew]

And just to land a plane. On this original concept, there are people who oftentimes see somebody of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos immense wealth, and they say, this person can solve world hunger twice.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

How? What is that flaw in that thinking? Where.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why is that full retard? Because that is full retard.

[Drew]

Break it down to us, though. So somebody worth $500 billion. And then you hear something along the lines of, it takes $10 million to cure home, like, world hunger, like $10 billion to cure one hunger. So things like that, like, where is the flaw in that thinking? Where does the math fall apart? Why is that not the right way to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We've got to start doing, like, do you know, theater games, theater Olympics, Improv Olympics. Improv Olympics. Do you know Improv Olympics?

[Drew]

I know improv. I know the Olympics.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Improv Olympics. They will, like, give me a metaphor or whatever, and somebody will throw something up, and then you cobble it together. And now you have to, like, explain that concept. But, like, through Transformers as a lore, it's probably a terrible idea, but I feel like I've said these things so many times, we're gonna have to start getting varied. Okay, here's how we look at that. So the first thing is people have to understand the difference between wealth and income. People think Elon Musk has a Bank account with $500 billion in it. Elon Musk does not have a Bank account with $500 billion. Elon Musk owns his own companies, and the shares that are outstanding sell for a certain price based on how many other people are selling those shares. The second more people are selling the shares than are buying the shares, the price begins to plummet, and I mean plummet rapid. So if Elon Musk, who now owns whatever, 25% of Tesla, if he started selling his shares, they would drop in price like a rock. First of all, just because the supply would be so high. Second, because people would go, wait a second. Elon is divesting. I don't buy that he's as like in this as he once said that he was. Okay, nobody gets that. I mean, hopefully this audience gets that. But the vast majority of human humanity does not understand the difference between income, where you have spendable money, and wealth, which you can borrow against, but you have to pay interest on. So, yes, like, they will give him some amount of money if he wants. And trust me, Elon is never going to have trouble getting money as long as he's worth that much. But he can't liquidate all of that money. So in reality, he's got, you know, call it a few billion dollars he could probably access in any one year. I don't know, 10 or 15 billion dollars maybe, without causing, like, super big drama. But now he's like, as I say, never spend the principal. Because once you start spending the Principal, now, the 500 billion very rapidly drops down. Okay, that's. That's the first part. The second part is they are talking about an annual problem. Okay, so now he does it. Once you buy yourself a year, let's say you buy yourself a decade. Drew, in some crazy universe, somehow, some way, you buy yourself a decade, then what? So that guy's wiped out. He's got nothing left. You just confiscated all of his wealth, or you forced him to give it away. And now he finds, like so many people before him, he once was psychotically wealthy. And then he dies, broken, alone, which is like a story as old as fucking time. So that's the second problem. Now the third problem, which may be the most destructive of all time. There was a drew, okay, One of my favorite books in history. Ah, God. I forget the exact name, but it's something like the Bibble. Biblay. Biblay. Got a name. Oh, God. What's his name? Jesus of Nazareth or something like that. So anybody, is this ringing any bells? Bible, Jesus of Nazareth, something like that. So anyway, there's a book about him, and he said. I think it was him. Anyway, teach a man to fish eats forever. Give a man a fish eats for a day. So all anybody wants to do. And I'm shocked that you hadn't heard of the B blade. Not gonna lie.

[Drew]

Yeah, you got me there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if people are so unmotivated to take care of themselves that you must go and give them food, you have a totally different problem. And you are teaching more and more people, because people are going to sit back and go, wait, one of the reasons that I work so hard is because I need to feed my family. If you're telling me I don't need to feed it, that you'll feed it, then, yeah, fuck all these rich guys give up your money. And so now people learn to do this. They hold their hand out, they do not contribute to society, and they expect to get something from the government, and they instantly become barnacles. And barnacles drag down even gigantic whales. So that's probably not actually true, but they do kill turtles. So this is a very, very bad thing for those three reasons. What you should be doing is going, why aren't people able to feed themselves? Now you are going to get into. Our economy is completely fucked. And there's no one that's here that could even possibly for half a second think that I have not banged that drum harder than just about anybody. So obviously there are things we need to fix that are making it hard for the. Whatever, 4% of people that are unemployed for what I'll call legitimate reasons. Obviously, I'm not talking about people that are truly, like, disabled and they need to be looked after, but we have. I believe the number is 8% of people that have just checked out. That's not an option in my world. So this is why you don't elect me for president? Because I'm just like, yeah, everybody that can work is expected to work.

[Drew]

Got it. So it's. It's less like you're putting a band aid versus you're changing the institutional thinking that is creating that problem.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. That's a very, like, 80,000 foot way to say it. The three beats are the real beats. People don't understand that he doesn't actually have that money. Even if you were able to somehow magically confiscate all that wealth, it would only last for a year. And you still have a then every other year ever after that problem. Oh, and by the way, when you give things to people for free, everything breaks and falls apart. Everything. Look at every single society that's tried it.

[Drew]

Boom. Okay. Excuse me. Jump over to Texas.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm so curious. Really fast. Mason. What? Are people, like, clapping? Is this like a standing ovation? Where's Mason? What the fuck? Ah, look at that, Drew. Is the community like. Are they just thunderous applause or are people actually beefing with that? I need to know. I need to know. Am I buying the Maui Bunker or not? This is a Maui Bunker question.

[Drew]

This is a Maui Bunker question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Drew]

Honestly, some people are still arguing about the AI and education thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Drew]

I'm not seeing a lot of dissent in the chat. If you have something to say about this now, speak now or forever hold your peace. Either the cost of living is too high or salaries are too low.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The cost of living is too high, salaries are too low. Both are true. You have a wrecked economy. Your economy is rigged against you. Your government hates you. All they want to do is get reelected. They will lie to your face. They understand what they have done to the economy. God, we may have to play that clip. Some of them really don't understand what they've done to the economy. Jesus Christ. Could it really just be that they're that fucking stupid? Ooh, I don't like that. It is a mixture of some of them are too fucking stupid to understand what they're doing to you. And some of them are malevolent. And then others are maybe even well intentioned. But they learn very quickly that getting reelected, getting elected and then reelected is all that matters. And they will take money from a PDF file if that's what they have to do to get elected. And that's just the world you live in. So, yeah, wild.

[Drew]

Listening to a millionaire give money, give advice on how society should be is like taking advice from a cat if you are a mouse. Go figure. Rich people can afford to start podcasts and spread their beliefs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

True. Okay, okay, okay. Hey, fair Enough. Let me speed run that one. Okay. You should be inherently distrustful of people. People, for the large part, are just inherently not worthy of your trust. So I totally understand. Take me as a step inside of a frame of reference. Don't think that any person you hear speak, least of all me, is right about everything. I assure you that half of what I say is going to end up being just absolutely wrong. And the bad news is, even I don't know which half. So you should not take anyone's word for it. You should be trying to build cause and effect. Think. I'm from think up from physics. This is first principles thinking. No matter what anybody says, that's what you want to do. You want to understand the universe via cause and effect. So you step inside my frame of reference and you go, can I detect cause and effect here? If yes, useful. If not, not useful. Okay, you may step inside of it and go, no cause and effect here. And I bet it's because he's a rich guy lying just to try to make his life better. You have a very hard time, I think, reconciling the things that I tell people to do with that, but, hey, fair enough. And then if you step inside and you go, ooh, like this actually predicts the world that I see around me, then for your own selfish reasons, it might be useful for you to take those and go, okay, he's a bad guy, but he said things that have a lot of utility. I would say run with it. So no matter who gives you cause and effect, if it's real cause and effect, take it. Because now you've got utility and you can interface with the real world. That. That would be my advice now, I guess, to shill for myself for a second as a reminder. And this hopefully won't be true forever. But as of today, I still was some variation of broke or middle class for more of my life than I had been wealthy. So I didn't get wealthy until I was in my, what, mid to late 30s. So it's a lot of years to be sort of the normal, average guy. And so my perspective is very much informed by that. Also, I'm driven by meaning and purpose far more than I'm driven by money. So when Covid hit and I saw that a lot of people that I loved and worked with back at Quest were going to get mauled because they were still in the inner cities, I thought, okay, let me start doing financial content that will help people like them, only to find out that, oh, my God, I know how to make money. I don't know how to invest money. And that sent me down a rabbit hole. That the final punchline is that, yeah, the economy really is rigged against people. And by the way, you only need to believe that I'm completely selfish to believe that. I at least believe the things that I say because I am trying to avoid being decapitated, literally. And what happens is wealthy people get so detached from what the average person just trying to make ends meet is going through that they start accelerating the wealth inequality because things are working for them. And so they don't even realize that there are now two different economies. And so they just keep saying, do more of this, and that's anything that's good for assets. And you will notice me screaming endlessly in the opposite direction. Now, how could that be a troll against you in real life? If I were sinister, what would I be doing, man? The only thing would be that I would be trying to make things better for you so that I'm one of the good guys and you don't kill me when you inevitably have to eat the rich. I guess that would be the most cynical take, but it actually is good for you from a cause and effect standpoint. So I don't know what to do with that. Why. Why I would be saying if it. I didn't want to see good things happen for more people, I. I just want to sell to you. Does that help? So if I'm just like, listen, I just want to make a video game, which is true. I want to make a video game, and I need the middle class to buy it. Does that help? So I need a thriving middle class just so I can sell you things. It's perfectly true. It's not the only reason. But it's true that I do need a thriving middle class if I'm going to sell people my video game. So you can even look at it through that lens. All right, that was a very long diatribe, but there it is.

[Drew]

Tom wants everybody to go to work, but if you are rich, you don't have to. So we should make all rich people go to work as well. Tom, I know if I had those resources to not work anymore, I would just stop working. Is that a bad thing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, because now you're just trying to do something that is punishment. So, yeah, here's that to me, is the argument that goes like this. Okay, fine, people can get rich, but they can't pass on that wealth. That's where I'm like, wait, I think you're going to Want to look at history and history is going to show you how did Europe become what it became? Because it was very good at passing money down and not just dividing it amongst the kids. They really concentrated that wealth and so they were able to really build wealth. Remember, the world you see around you is aggregated capital. It's not enough to have enough to get by. You need to aggregate additional capital. That's how things get built. This is why debt is so powerful. So you want people to be able to pass money onto their kids. Why was redlining so evil? Because it made it impossible for black people to get on the property ladder, which is the very thing that you pass on to your kids. So if we can admit that it's evil to do that to black people through redlining, can we not admit that it's evil to confiscate people's wealth upon their death? Okay, the government is the world's worst people to do something with money. So I would say let's not do that. Yeah, so that's why I would not say I, I, I would not do anything that tells people how they have to live their lives. America is America for one reason. We are free. So I over index on that. Freedom is the backbone of innovation. It is a generator of innovation. China wanted to copy America's innovation and so they had to offer freedoms. It's the only way to do it. So yeah, I would say try to out America everybody. And by telling rich people you can't be leisurely because you were handed your wealth. Which remember only 30% of wealthy people were handed their wealth. The other 70% did it themselves. You create a problem. And also P.S. there are a lot of people like me. I'm fucking wealthy. I never have to work again, ever. And I work everyone in this company under the fucking table. I will look anyone in the eye and I challenge if anyone wants to. When I wake up and start working, if they would like me to call them and wake them up, I invite that. But then everyone will have to remember I was working at 2:35am this morning. 2:35am this morning. And I will work until I go to bed. Technically I'll probably take 20 or 30 minutes to be with my wife. So call it 8:30. I will hang out with my wife and potentially do nothing. But not always. Last night I worked until I closed my eyes. So I just don't think most people want to live that life. So anyway, be careful what you wish for.

[Drew]

I got one more for you. G, can you grab the charger for me, please. Sarah D. Sandberg is just like when they say the trickle down effect will make everyone rich. Just let rich people make all the money and they trickle it down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, it won't work like that. No one is. Well, there might be some people saying that. I'm certainly not saying that the economy's broken. It is broken in a very noble way. Here's the thing. I don't think most people, Drew, can explain how the rich people get rich. If they could, this would be a lot easier. I'll speedrun it. The way that rich people get rich is by owning assets. Everybody can own an asset. It literally, you can buy assets with pennies. So anyone can own assets, but most people don't because they don't understand it. They're being forced to gamble, which I'm very sad that they're forced to gamble. But when the government prints money to cover the deficit in the spending, then that forces people that understand how assets and inflation work to go buy assets. When they buy assets and the government keeps inflating the money, that causes the assets to go up in value. And they can either then sell those or they can borrow against them. And this is how you get these two wildly divergent economies and you get this wealth inequality which is so destructive, you. No one should want that kind of wealth inequality. Not the wealthy. It's why in my upcoming episode, I say, and this is unfortunately true, you have to be open to being a passport bro at this point. So. God, I hate that that's true.

[Drew]

Passport bro, meaning you might have to travel to a different country. Not passport bro that you're supporting sex tours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tourism. Correct.

[Drew]

Is that a thing for passport bro means sex tourism.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, whoops. That's gonna be read funny in the deep dive. I'm glad you called it out, Drew. Yeah. No, I mean that you're willing and able to go live in a foreign country. All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining us. If you haven't already, obviously subscribe. We are here every Wednesday and Friday. It'll be a little bit different than New Year, but every Wednesday and Friday at 6am Pacific. Hope to see you there later, everybody. Love you. Bye.