NYC is spending TOO MUCH on the homeless, Why Are Influencers Defending a Regime That Starves Its Own People, Argentina's Milei Did in 18 Months What the U.S. Couldn't Do in Decades | Weekly Recap

Summary

Impact Theory – Weekly Recap: NYC Homeless Spending, “Useful Idiots” in Cuba, and Argentina’s Economic Overhaul

Date: March 29, 2026
Host: Drew (Tom Bilyeu currently not the main speaker in this segment; Drew leads discussions)
Guests/Panelists: Multiple co-hosts, unnamed guest critical of socialism

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Episode Overview

This episode of Impact Theory tackles three major, controversial stories of the week:

• The explosive cost of homelessness in New York City and its political fallout.
• The phenomenon of influencers defending authoritarian regimes—in this case, Cuba—despite evidence of suffering and repression.
• Argentina’s dramatic economic turnaround under President Javier Milei, and what it implies about economic and political orthodoxy.

Through impassioned discussion and sharp analysis, Drew and panelists challenge common narratives, debunk economic myths, and urge listeners to anchor their worldview in cause and effect—not ideology or emotion.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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1. NYC’s Soaring Homelessness Spending: A Case Study in Incentives (00:45–10:00)

• Opening Fire:
  • Guest criticizes NYC’s per-homeless spending:

    “Now have to justify mom. Donnie. Spending $81,000 per homeless person.” (00:45)

  • Drew confirms and highlights the magnitude:

    “New York City is now spending $81,700 per homeless person per year. That’s more than the median household income in New York City.” (00:58)

• Comparative Framing: It is clarified that this figure exceeds even the combined household income average, not just individual income.
• Political Fallout:
  • Clip of NY Governor Kathy Hochul urging wealthy residents to leave if they disagree with progressive policies, prompting analysis on tax base erosion. (01:26)
  • Drew:

    “It’s not that they’re stupid. It's that they are optimizing their worldview around emotion. But what you’re seeing play out is the Laffer curve at work.” (01:57)

• Key Economic Principle:
  • Laffer curve: Increasing taxes beyond a point leads either to reduced productivity or people leaving the tax base.
• Escalating Numbers:
  • NYC’s budget for homelessness exploded:
    • 2019: $102 million → 2025: $368 million → projected 2026: $456 million.
    • Yet, homelessness numbers rose.
• Core Argument:
  • Drew:

    "If you nearly quadruple the money that you spend on homelessness and you get more homeless people, what does more money actually equal? ... The correct answer is more homeless people." (03:07)

  • The bureaucracy and service labyrinth incentivizes more homelessness rather than solving root issues.
  • Helping people in abstract, without real “offramps” toward self-sufficiency, just grows the problem—for both taxpayers and the city’s vulnerable.

Notable Quotes:

• “You cannot spend more money per homeless person than the average household earns...and expect that taxpayers are going to stick around.” — Co-host (02:26)
• “When you pour money into a system without first fixing the incentives that have created the problem, you don't solve the problem. You fund the problem.” — Drew (03:34)

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2. Emotion vs. Economics – On Taxation, Social Incentives, and Systemic Failure (05:02–10:00)

• Personal Stakes and Moral Purpose:

  • Drew:

    “I'm rich. I...can go other places. I don't have kids. If the world burns, I'm already not leaving anything for the future....I want to see everybody do well, but I certainly want to see Americans do well.” (05:05)

  • The panel emphasizes that understanding economics is not just about theories, but about mapping real cause and effect.
  • “If you can solve the puzzle of cause and effect, then you can do incredible things.” — Drew (05:40)

• Taxing the Rich for Social Services:

  • A guest cites “Roto Reuterman” as a defender of taxation to balance the budget and maintain services. Drew agrees tax is necessary but only alongside balanced budgets and responsible spending:

    “If you always spend more than you make, you are always going to have a problem. ... You will always be robbing from...the working and middle class. And every country that runs this experiment—literally without exception—ends up in a miserable place where everyone suffers.” (06:34–07:45)

• China as Economic Proof Point:

  • Co-host: “Capitalism.” (08:08)
  • Drew: “China realized, 'We got to stop killing our entire population ...' And what was their solution? Capitalism... leveraging people's desire for income inequality...to pull people out of poverty, it's the only way.” (08:08–08:36)

Notable Quotes:

• “We live in a deterministic universe. If you can solve the puzzle of cause and effect, then you can do incredible things.” — Co-host (05:36)
• “You have to look at the setup and go, okay, shouldn’t we balance the budget first? Yes, we need tax...but if you always spend more than you make, you are always going to have a problem.” — Drew (07:35–07:49)
• “This is why pushing the responsibility down to the individual is the right way... When you try to raise that responsibility up to the level of government...it makes you feel like you're doing something, but you're actually making the problem worse.” — Drew (08:36)

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3. "Useful Idiots": Influencer Tourism and the Cuban Crisis (11:11–16:35)

• Narrative:

  • Influencers flock to Cuba, apparently encountering power and comfort amidst national blackouts. The hosts highlight the hypocrisy: while the regime stages displays for visitors, ordinary Cubans face deprivation.

• The “Useful Idiot” Playbook:

  • Drew draws a direct line from current influencers to NYT's Walter Duranty’s apologist reporting on Stalinist Russia:

    “They’re running the same useful idiot playbook that Walter Duranty ran for Russia while they were busy starving their own people to death back in the 1930s.” (12:17)

  • Not stupidity, but ideological motivation pushes apologists to ignore or excuse suffering.

• Historical Atrocities:

  • Castro’s Cuba: Once prosperous, now a failed state “that relies on charity from foreign nations.” (13:16)
  • Stalin’s Ukraine Famine; Mao’s starving of millions for export wheat.

• Core Takeaways:

  • Focusing on peripheral things (like who gets electricity in a blackout) distracts from the core horror: an economic system that requires force to sustain itself, resulting in misery.

Notable Quotes:

• “When you present communism as being good for people... you ignore history and human nature in equal measure and you prolong the inevitable suffering.” — Co-host (15:51)
• “Duranty had a famous line ... 'You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.' But what are the eggs? ... the millions of lives that were lost.” — Co-host (16:11)

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4. Why Socialism and Communism Fail – And the Cycle of "Touching the Hot Stove" (18:04–20:36)

• Perennial Lessons Not Learned:

  • Despite abundant evidence and historical failures, each generation seems doomed to retry socialism (“touch the stove and burn ourselves”) (18:41).
  • Drew references David Friedberg (of the All-In podcast):

    "I guess every couple of generations we have to touch the hot stove of socialism for people to learn the lesson.” (18:41)

• Human Nature vs. Policy:

  • Socialism and communism disregard the motivational bedrock of human nature:

    “People don’t like to be told ...‘I’m just going to take it via tax, the fact that you’re outperforming doesn’t matter anymore.’ ...You know better than that. You know that humans aren't wired like that. You're going to trigger, like, resentment, jealousy, all of that stuff.” — Drew (19:09–19:24)

• Balance Needed:

  • There’s value in both left- and right-leaning perspectives living in dynamic tension, but swings to either extreme are destructive.

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5. Argentina’s Javier Milei: Turning a Country Around (21:36–27:40)

• Breakthrough Case Study:
  • In less than two years under President Milei’s radical free-market policies, Argentina’s poverty rate collapsed from over 53% to 31.6% (~5 million people lifted from poverty).
  • Approach:
    • Drastically reduced government spending
    • Slashed subsidies
    • Fired thousands of government workers
    • Deregulated rent controls (resulting in rental listings surging 170% and, after inflation, average rents falling up to 40%)
    • Accepted short-term pain for long-term adaptation and stability.
• Comparison to the US & NYC:
  • Contrasts New York’s endless spending and disastrous homelessness growth with Argentina’s embrace of market incentives and willingness to endure tough reforms.
  • Warns America risks spiraling unless it can balance budgets and empower the middle class.

Notable Quotes:

• “Some absolutely unhinged—I'm tired of hearing that people are going to die if I institute these policies. Somehow, some way, people always find a way not to die.” — Drew quoting Milei (23:19)
• “With less regulation, you get more supply and therefore lower prices. That is what economics predicts.” — Drew (24:08)

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6. America's Fiscal Cliff and The Dollar Privilege (27:40–32:05)

• Dire Fiscal Numbers:

  • The U.S. Treasury is technically insolvent: $47 trillion in liabilities versus $6 trillion in assets (27:40).
  • Unlike other countries, America enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
  • Therefore, the only real risk is hyperinflation, not insolvency.

• Eurodollar System Explained:

  • Much of the world’s trade flows through U.S. dollars, even when not in the U.S., which allows the U.S. to “export inflation”—but also makes global finance fragile (29:06–29:34).

• Prescription for Recovery:

  • Drew reiterates: “You have to balance the budget. You can’t be deficit spending and then printing money to cover the gap.” (31:39)
  • The moral imperative is to create a society where the middle class can save their way to prosperity again.

Notable Quotes:

• “The real thing that you want to focus on is that they will just inflate, inflate, inflate the currency until somebody says, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to be in this system anymore.’” — Drew (30:05)
• “When you put people in a position where they can save their way to prosperity, you have, in my opinion, done the moral thing.” — Drew (32:05)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes with Timestamps

• On NYC’s Homeless Budget:
  • “If you nearly quadruple the money ... and you get more homeless people ... more money equals more homeless people.” — Drew (03:07)
• On China’s Capitalist Reforms:
  • “China realized ... We have to leverage people's desire ... for income inequality, you also heard that correctly, in order to pull people out of poverty.” — Drew (08:08)
• On Influencer Excuses for Repressive Regimes:
  • “They’re running the same useful idiot playbook that Walter Duranty ran for Russia while they were busy starving their own people...” — Drew (12:17)
• On the Need to “Touch the Stove”:
  • “It just seems like we have to just touch the stove and burn ourselves. There’s nothing else at this point we can do.” — Guest (18:37)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|---------| | 00:45 | NYC’s homeless spending explosion and Governor Kathy Hochul’s comments | | 01:57 | Laffer Curve & tax base erosion explained | | 03:07 | Critique of doubling down on failed homelessness spending | | 08:08 | How China’s reforms proved capitalist incentives work | | 11:11 | Cuba/Influencer “useful idiot” discussion begins | | 12:17 | Historical context: Walter Duranty in Russia | | 13:16 | Cuba’s economic decline and foreign dependence | | 18:41 | “Touching the stove” – recurring failures of socialism | | 21:36 | Argentina’s rapid progress under Milei starts | | 23:19 | Adaptation after economic shock in Argentina | | 24:08 | Rent deregulation and economic textbook results in Buenos Aires | | 27:40 | U.S. federal insolvency and unique reserve currency privilege | | 31:39 | Drew’s primal fiscal message: “balance the budget” | | 32:05 | “Save your way to prosperity”—the moral core of economic reform |

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Tone and Style

• Direct, no-nonsense, occasionally impassioned but always anchored in a pursuit of underlying “cause and effect.”
• Frequent analogies and historical references (China, Cuba, the USSR, Argentina).
• Clear frustration with “ideological blindness” and the abandonment of basic economic realities.
• Urgent: a call to learn from history rather than endlessly relitigating failed ideas.

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Conclusion

This episode of Impact Theory delivers a trenchant critique of popular narratives surrounding homelessness spending, socialism, and economic resilience. By analyzing New York City’s escalating costs, exposing the dangers of emotional reasoning, and highlighting both historical failures and fresh successes (like Argentina), Drew and the panel underscore the enduring importance of incentives, fiscal responsibility, and honest cause-and-effect analysis in public policy.
For listeners hungry to see past headlines—and to equip themselves for today’s debates—this episode is required listening.

Transcript

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[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

This is what frustrates me. I can go on a tirade about how this war is wrong and then the Democrats will actively try to nosedive the society and then now have to justify mom. Donnie. Spending $81,000 per homeless person.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Drew, I'm so with you. New York City is now spending $81,700 per homeless person per year. That's more than the median household income in New York City.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Guys, that's. That's not individuals.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

That's household. That's combined income they're spending per homeless person. Now I also want to play a clip of New York Governor Kathy Hochul telling wealthy New Yorkers to get out and go to Florida.

[Co-host or Panelist]

This is 2022.

[Kathy Hochul (via Clip)]

First that the era of Trump and Zeldin and Molinaro. Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong. Okay? Get out of town. Get out of town. Because you don't re. You don't represent our values.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Look at that swagger, bro.

[Kathy Hochul (via Clip)]

New Yorkers. But maybe the first step should be

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

go down to 2026 and see who

[Kathy Hochul (via Clip)]

you can bring back home. Because our tax base has been eroded. So I feel soft. We don't have a problem. It is like I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

It's very tempting to yell and scream and call people like Kathy Hochul a moron. But the reality is it's not that they're stupid. It's that they are optimizing their worldview around emotion. But what you're seeing play out is the Laffer curve at work. The Laffer curve is simply you can try to tax people as much as you want.

[Co-host or Panelist]

The more you tax people, you reach

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

a point where they either stop producing if they can't flee because the is not worth it to them anymore, or they leave. And I don't know how many people or how many times these people have

[Co-host or Panelist]

to learn this lesson before they get it in their heads, you cannot spend more money per homeless person than the average household earns. Again, not even an individual person. A household. And expect that taxpayers are going to stick around. It doesn't work like that, guys.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

It doesn't work like that. If you want to tax people more,

[Co-host or Panelist]

balance the budget, and if they don't

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

want their taxes to keep raising, then they're going to deny it at the ballot box.

[Co-host or Panelist]

And then you need to accept the

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

will of the people.

[Co-host or Panelist]

If you just keep raising their taxes, they will leave.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Now imagine that you're looking at the

[Co-host or Panelist]

taxes being pulled out of your paycheck. And then you look at the homeless numbers.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Okay?

[Co-host or Panelist]

In 2019, New York City spent 102 million on homelessness services. That's already horrific. But just six years later, in 2025, that number had already exploded to $368 million and is projected to hit $456 million this year. That's another 25% on top of the 250 plus whatever percent. So the obvious question anyone with half a brain is going to ask themselves when they're looking at all this data. If you nearly quadruple the money that you spend on homelessness and you get more homeless people, what does more money actually equal? The correct answer is more homeless people. More money equals more homeless people. The city that threw an extra $266 million at the problem ended up yielding a result where the problem gets worse. Not a little worse, a lot worse. Now, the hard truth that nobody in city hall wants to say out loud is that when you pour money into a system without first fixing the incentives that have created the problem, you don't solve the problem. You fund the problem. I'm not saying that it's the homeless stuffing $81,000 in their pocket. I'm saying it's all the people and the bureaucracy that's grown up around it. Outreach teams, drop in centers, low barrier beds. These are compassionate, but only in the abstract. When you fund all of that stuff, the system makes homelessness easier and more comfortable. And I get why people want to do it. But there are no serious off ramps towards helping homeless people become self sufficient or if they're mentally ill, to actually get them somewhere where they can get help. And then more people are going to end up in that system. It doesn't work on two fronts. It doesn't actually help the homeless. It grows the population. The people getting taxed will leave and your tax base goes down. Kathy Hochul said it herself. Our tax base has eroded. People have got to start focusing on what actually works.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

Taxes get you round up. You know what it is?

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Hold on. Can I. Please let me speak to that for a second. I'm rich. I. I can go other places. I don't have kids.

[Co-host or Panelist]

So if the world burns, I'm already

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

not leaving anything for the future. So my way of dealing with meaning and purpose and just partly the things that motivate me from a neurochemical standpoint

[Co-host or Panelist]

is I want to see the world do well. I have a total aggressive bias towards

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

the country that I'm in. I'll be the first to admit I

[Co-host or Panelist]

want to see everybody do well, but I certainly want to see Americans do well.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And entrepreneurship has taught me one immutable truth.

[Co-host or Panelist]

We live in a deterministic universe. If you can solve the puzzle of

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

cause and effect, then you can do incredible things.

[Co-host or Panelist]

If you fail to solve the puzzle of cause and effect, the whole world's a gigantic mystery.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Economics is complicated, there's no doubt. And there are sophisticated interactions that make

[Co-host or Panelist]

it impossible to predict exactly. But there are big movements that repeat

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

over and over and over. And so if I'm gonna pass anything forward to the next generation, it is going to be the simple idea of

[Co-host or Panelist]

mapping cause and effect.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And that will make me feel very good on my deathbed to feel like I really tried to get people to understand a thing, even though I can

[Co-host or Panelist]

eject out of the system and it doesn't touch me and I can make

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

myself impervious to a lot of it, not to everything. Nobody can. You're always vulnerable to something, but man,

[Co-host or Panelist]

would that be awesome. So all you have to do is trust me to be selfish. And I will try to get people

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

to understand how useful it is to

[Co-host or Panelist]

actually understand economics, but actually understand it.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

Roto Reuterman said we need that. We need to tax the rich to balance the budget. You can't just cut services for the ones that need it the most.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Okay, so he is. The statement that he made is correct. You're going to tax for sure the wealthy. I don't think the wealthy, I mean, speaking for myself, certainly don't have a beef being taxed. What I mind is when people fundamentally do not understand economics or are willfully evil and they are structuring something to steal from the very people that they're saying that they're trying to help. Remember, deficit spending is precisely how you steal money from. You steal it from everybody. But wealthy people know how to protect themselves from that theft, so it only ends up hurting the working and middle class. So given that that is the truest thing that has ever been said out loud. You have to look at the setup and go, okay, shouldn't we balance the budget first? Yes, we need tax, so that's going to be a part of it. I'll grant you. Let's just do income tax. There are ways to get around that. We did it for I think more than 100 years in America, but let's just say that we're going to do income tax. Fine. Now if you always spend more than you make, you are always going to have a problem. If there is no end to that which you will spend on social services, then you will always be robbing from. Again, say it with me. The working and middle class and every country that runs this experiment with literally without exception, ends up in a miserable place where everyone suffers. If anybody wants take on my arguments, the first thing you should do is point at China. Now the reason you should point at China is because China did such a good job of being both communist and enriching their populace. Now what I love about that is you end up proving my thesis. Because what China realized, China, remember China? What China realized China. We got to stop killing our entire population. We got to stop starving them to death. And what was their solution?

[Co-host or Panelist]

Capitalism.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

You have to be able to tap into the people that are good at creating jobs, that are better at generating economic activity, that are better, farmers, better, whatever. The only way to get them to do that is to let them selfishly get ahead of other people. China realized we have to leverage people's desire, you heard that correctly, for income inequality, you also heard that correctly. In order to pull people out of poverty, it's the only way. And when we try to beat that

[Co-host or Panelist]

out of people because we think it's

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

morally repugnant, we end up making life worse for poverty, everyone. So the experiments have been run, results are in. We, we just have not yet found the system where you spend the money and you get the result that you're looking for. This is why pushing the responsibility down to the individual is the right way to do it. And then the individual, there are going to be some people, they don't have family, they don't have a community organization that can help them when they're down. And that's brutal. And those people are going to get run over by life. And I get why people lament to God and why is it so? But nonetheless, when you try to raise that responsibility up to the level of government, then not only does it not work, it makes you feel like you're doing something but you're actually making the problem worse. And so it's like it's all brutal. I get it. Humans are trying to find some way to help people without creating these perverse incentives. But so far, in however many hundreds of thousands of years we have not found that way and societies have tried everything from well, we're just going to kill the people, exile them if they're not contributing meaningfully to we're going to take care of everybody no matter what. And then you get barnacles and you drag the society down. So there's no easy answer. There is friction. This is why you want both people that have a left leaning personality and a right leaning personality in the society to hold each other in dynamic tension. But we tend to just swing one

[Co-host or Panelist]

way or the other. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere.

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[Co-host or Panelist]

Thanks for sticking around.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Let's get right back into the action.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

Last week on the show I was talking about blackouts, how hospitals are going out of business, people on ventilators had threatened to be killed and dying and things like that. Cuba needs help. Russia was trying to send some barrels of oil. We blocked it. We're the bad guy. We really need to do a better job. And then a bunch of influencers came to Cuba and suddenly they found a bunch of power and there was AC and light and everybody can have great productive communication. I don't know how else to spend this time.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Break it down for yeah, I mean, look, I'm gonna do my best. You guys know that I'm wildly inflamed on this topic. I think there's a much big that people really need to focus on. And it isn't the fact that they had electricity for their party keeping morale up and all that stuff on either side is going to be important. I guarantee you our side will do things like this in the future. I try never to have sides. I hate that I just said our side as I don't think of it that way. Whatever side you identify with in that moment is going to end up doing something like this. That's not the one to get hung up on. The influencers down in Cuba right now are basically fighting for a regime that represses its own people. That's what I want everyone to focus on. They're running the same useful idiot playbook that Walter Duranty ran for Russia while

[Co-host or Panelist]

they were busy starving their own people

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

to death back in the 1930s.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Okay.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

The useful idiot idea is like a real thing. It's an actual playbook. But once you understand it, it's like a real thing that people do throughout time immemorial.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Hopefully you'll see it when it's playing

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

out in real time and have the right aversion to it. Over the weekend, as influencers are flooding down to Cuba to protest on behalf

[Co-host or Panelist]

of a communist regime, they were getting

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

caught up in an argument that I

[Co-host or Panelist]

don't think is the point of last week.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

I went through the entire litany of horrors that the Cuban regime has forced

[Co-host or Panelist]

on its own people over the years.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And as we talk about what's going on right now, I want you guys to hold this stuff in your mind. Castro bragged that Cuba had 20,000 political

[Co-host or Panelist]

prisoners they would routinely detain journalists.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

This is the regime that the influencers that I'm calling useful idiots are down

[Co-host or Panelist]

there protesting on behalf of.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And honestly, this is the thing that's

[Co-host or Panelist]

had the most negative impact on just

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

the ability to live a good life. They took their country from one of

[Co-host or Panelist]

the most developed and successful economies in Latin America to a failed state that relies on charity from foreign nations.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Okay?

[Co-host or Panelist]

And they have stayed there for decades

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

and decades and decades.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Influencers are down there carrying water for these people because apparently history really does repeat. In 1932, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for the lies he was telling about how great Soviet Russia was while actively covering up a famine that killed between 3.5 and 7 million Ukrainians. Duranty, the New York Times journalist who was there while this is all happening, knew what was happening. He just decided the revolution was more Important than the bodies that were stacking up. That's where I want everyone to stop. That is the danger of useful idiots. They're not actually stupid. They are motivated. They have an agenda.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

They are trying to get an ideology pushed through. Now we've got a clip I hope that we can pull up quickly.

[Co-host or Panelist]

That is footage from outside of the

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

luxury hotel in Cuba that people were staying at.

[Co-host or Panelist]

So you guys can see for yourselves what the hubaloo is all about. What you're seeing is a generator that's supplying lights and AC for the influencers inside. So let's go ahead and take a look at this.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Okay, so the vast majority of the island is completely dark. If you're looking at your screens, you can see there's one hotel that seems to still be bumping. There are going to be a lot of people that are mad about the parties and the bands going ham in Cuba, but that really is minor. Was it a waste of precious gas to run the generators for a party? Probably. But I really doubt that it was a choice of having that party or saving lives at the hospital.

[Co-host or Panelist]

That would require there to be some

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

sort of barter system where they're passing the gas back and forth for them to even know that that kind of thing is going on. Should they have known that they could

[Co-host or Panelist]

take them to local hospitals and help?

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Probably, but that really isn't the thing to focus on that. That is looking at a single tree

[Co-host or Panelist]

instead of the forest.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

What everyone should be focused on is

[Co-host or Panelist]

the fact that these guys are running

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

propag for an economic system that is so willfully ignorant of human nature that

[Co-host or Panelist]

it destroys entire countries, causing unending misery and death. And these systems are so bad and they are so hated by the people inside of them, it requires violence to keep them in place. That is the legacy of the durante playbook that we're seeing being run here in Cuba.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

Over.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Focusing on the flotilla, over. Focusing on the generator use is just the wrong play. When you present communism as being good

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

for people, which these useful idiots are

[Co-host or Panelist]

doing, you ignore history and human nature in equal measure and you prolong the inevitable suffering.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

You don't have to believe that the US is doing a good thing by stopping Venezuela from selling oil to Cuba to understand that communism has kept the people of Cuba in a horrible place for decades. And so when you've got contempt for

[Co-host or Panelist]

capitalism combined with a worldview that reasons from emotion rather than cause and effect, only disaster awaits you. Durant, he had a famous line about this that you guys have heard. You just didn't know it came from him. He said, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. But what are the eggs? They were the millions of lives that were lost in the Ukraine in the 1930s. Millions.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

The people in the hotel in Cuba

[Co-host or Panelist]

just want to cook up that same omelet.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

In terms of history.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Repeat, as China was starving its own people, guess what they were shipping out of the country? Wheat. So the food that could have gone to save the people that you were up with your horrific policies, they were selling because Mao needed the money. So he literally sold the lives of his own people to stay in power. That's communism. So I get that people think that communism and socialism will usher in equality. They won't. Guess what will happen? Balancing your budget, eliminating or reducing the ability for the Fed to steal money via money printing. Those things actually bring the K shaped economy back together. There's always going to be inequality. You want inequality? Just like think about it this way. Will there always be inequality in the Olympics? Yes. It just is what it is. Will there always be inequality in professional sports? Yes. Some people are better at things than others. Some people have different interests than others. And there's horrifying things that go on to up the system, minimize the horrifying things, and accept the reality that what motivates humans is that it's the ability to get ahead. People want to get ahead. It's a good thing that they want to get ahead. It's not a bad thing. And we have to stop talking about it like it is. But just like discipline can become abuse, you can break a capitalist system, as we have done to create this kind of problem, but you have to actually solve the problem instead of doing the emotionally desirable thing. That only makes things much, much, much worse.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

There's so many stories that are about communism, socialism. We have historical examples, we have country examples, we have economic examples. So I'm thinking of all the levers we can pull that say, okay, socialism, let's look at the money of the crowd. Socialism, let's look at the evolution of it. Let's look at the history of the countries that started it. Let's look at the people that are trying to run it now. There's so many different. So much information we can actively extract to it falls apart. But yet in 2026, there are still people that are like, no, no, no, no, seriously, like this time we'll get it right.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Yeah.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

And it just seems like we have to just touch the stove and burn ourselves. There's nothing else at this point. We can do.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

David Friedberg, of all in podcast fame, also guest on Impact Theory. He made that statement. He was like, man, I guess just every couple of generations we have to touch the hot stove of socialism for

[Co-host or Panelist]

people to learn the lesson.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

But that one really makes me sad. That's one of those things that he's not a glib person, so I don't want to paint him with that brush, but. But it's one of those where that one feels like, worth raging against the dying of the light for me, because the consequences can be so dire and

[Co-host or Panelist]

for so long, and it's so knowable.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

That's what's crazy. Like, I just want people to come to understand that it's how people are. Yeah, it's how people are. People don't like to be told, hey, I know that you're better than other people at this, but I'm still going to take more of your stuff. And that I think at an individual level, like, they would get it if

[Co-host or Panelist]

I said, hey, listen, man and a woman are together.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

They have three kids. The man comes home from work every day and refuses to do chores because he says that he's worked harder at work. And the wife says, hold on, I've been taking care of these three kids all day. You should be doing your fair share. They'll jump right into that on one side or the other, and they're going to fight like hell to say, yeah, we've got to be dealing with this based on who is working harder. Like, that's crazy. If the. Let's say that the man didn't have a job and he was just out fishing all day and he comes home and refuses to help because he says that's women's work, people would go absolutely ballistic. But somehow, when it's socialism or communism and I'm just going to take it via tax, the fact that you're outperforming doesn't matter anymore. And that's where I'm like, guys, you know better than that. You know that humans aren't wired like that. You're going to trigger, like, resentment, jealousy, all of that stuff. And so I'll say to wealthy people, you do understand that you can't let this flywheel run away, right?

[Co-host or Panelist]

Because you'll trigger resentment and jealousy.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And then I will say to the

[Co-host or Panelist]

socialists and communists, you do realize that

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

you can't let this become your economic

[Co-host or Panelist]

mode because all of the people who build will stop because they're filled with resentment and jealousy. So it's like, what the are you guys doing so that one just drives me crazy.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And listen, not every quote unquote elite person understands the economy well enough to

[Co-host or Panelist]

know that they're doing it on purpose.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

But the ones that created the system absolutely do.

[Co-host or Panelist]

And they are evil and that is such a wind up.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And so they're now colliding with the people equally evil on the other side who want to hurt and destroy and

[Co-host or Panelist]

tear down and are either so dumb or they're lying.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Taking a short break.

[Co-host or Panelist]

But there's more impact theory after Stay tuned.

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[Co-host or Panelist]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

Let's jump over to Argentina where there has been some crazy economic breakthroughs. Javier Milei has gotten a lot of beef, but I know you like to bang this anti socialism drum, so I'll let you take this story.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Yeah, this one. We're going to check in with Argentina every so often. It really is important that we look at the realities on the ground because if it's not working, we need to know why. What's broken? Argentina's latest report card is in and their poverty rate just hit a 10 year low. One year ago more than half the country was poor. That number is now 31.6%. That's roughly 5 million people pulled out of poverty in just 18 months. Guys, please, we've really got to understand what to clap for and whatnot. You've got Cuba stuck forever in an endless cycle of poverty, not able to get out. People flying over there being excited, saying it's America's fault that forever they've been poor. What now you've got Argentina that hey, they're making hard choices. There's no doubt. But when Javier Milei took office In December of 23, Argentina was a disaster. Inflation was running above 200% annually, the government was spending money it didn't have and nearly 20 million Argentines were living in poverty. Malay's solution? Radical, hardcore difficult for Schweize, however, at

[Co-host or Panelist]

at least it was aligned with how economics actually work.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

He slashed government spending, eliminated subsidies, devalued the currency and fired thousands of Government

[Co-host or Panelist]

workers critics call the economic suicide. I would like to line up each one of those critics. I want to know a lot more about them. I have a feeling they're going to sound a lot like the Biden senior economic advisor who could not explain modern monetary theory. Now, there was initial pain when Javier Milane came to office. At first, poverty actually went up. You have to be honest about that. Prices surged, welfare payments dried up. People were super nervous. But then, and this is the part people do not enjoy the reality of this one, people adapted. I remember Milei said, some absolutely unhinged. I'm tired of hearing that people are going to die if I institute these policies. Somehow, some way, people always find a way not to die. Now, that sounds super heartless, but it's actually true. People always adapt. And as they adapted and realized they weren't going to be able to suck on the government teat anymore, inflation collapsed from triple digits to somewhere in the 30 to 70% annualized. Now, that is still horrific, but it is much, much better. Argentina's GDP grew by a staggering 4.4% in 2025. That is a massive rebound. As the growth rate kicked up, the poverty rate began to plummet. It dropped from 53% all the way

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

down to what we were talking about

[Co-host or Panelist]

before, 31.6%, well below where it had been before Milei was elected. This is a direct comparison to New York. So he started deregulating rent policies. Okay, so Mamdani wants to freeze rent. He wants to regulate rent because he wants to bring prices down, which is ludicrous. It will have the exact opposite effect. That is obvious. It is knowable. So either Mamdani is a moron, completely ignorant to how economics works, or he's got a different agenda. Which I will say I think he has a different agenda. I think this is about plundering taxpayers. I don't think it has anything to do with actually thinking this is going to work. So Milei deregulates policies in rental policies. The results are insanely staggering. Landlords had been pulling their properties off the market for years because rents were so low they couldn't afford to have tenants in them. Tenants are an expense line. And it had gotten to the point where it was better to let that sit vacant even though they were losing money, because they would lose less money than having renters in them. So now people come flooding back into the market. Rental listings in Buenos Aires surged by more than 170%. You can't build buildings that fast. So this is people just saying, nope, I'm not renting this and then going, cool, now that I can actually charge what this is worth, I'm going to rent it. Even though prices went up because there was so much more on the market at an inflation adjusted rate, rents fell by up to 40%. Now anybody paying attention to economics, that's exactly what they would expect. With less regulation, you get more supply and therefore lower prices. That is what economics predicts. And now obviously we're seeing reality backs it up. But nonetheless, that is not going to stop people in Cuba, people in new, from running the exact opposite strategy. It's maddening. By way of keeping myself sober and being completely honest about where we are. Argentina is not out of the woods yet. This is a very difficult transition that requires you to get people on board inside of your own country to deal with some of the pain that has come along with this, to believe in this long term that you're actually going to find your way out of it. It would not take much for them to go spiraling back into economic lunacy because I bet there are still people in the system that are mad that they're not getting free handouts anymore. We need to accept that this is fragile, that it could break, that it could go the wrong way. Also Malay could start doing dumb and just making mistakes. This is very complicated, but the progress so far has been absolutely incredible. And anybody that's not willing to acknowledge that has a political agenda, not an actual economic agenda. As a world once again seems locked into this weird tractor beam of debating whether socialism actually works or not. Let's hope, hope that people will see what's going on in Argentina, see what best practices look like, see that the policies that they're running yield the best results. Because right now, as I was saying at the top, we are dealing with this here in New York City. And I very much think that Mamdani and the things that he stands for are the heart of the current Democratic Party. I think that this then ties directly into voter integrity. It ties directly into open borders and how many people we've let into the country. So we've got to be very, very thoughtful about what yields long term prosperity for as many people as possible. Because you've got the right trying to hollow out the middle class and the psychopaths on the left are trying to go full socialist. And we need to find all the reasonable people and march them towards the middle to make sure that we have a thriving middle class. If you just look at the middle class health as like a barometer of Whether what you're doing is working or not, you're going to be in pretty good shape right now. The extremes on either side are destroying the middle class together. It's horrific.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

I want to daisy chain this with a report that came out from Fortune. The U.S. treasury is insolvent. We have 47 trillion dollars in liabilities. We have 6 trillion in assets on paper, just no nuance. Looking at hard numbers, there's no asterisks, there's no people. We're not talking about budgets or illegals or Social Security. We're not talking about any categories, just top line numbers. I don't want to say the budget deficit because that's us continuing to climb into our past bills are crazy. Our, our wealth, our worth is crazy. It's alarmingly high number. And if it was any other country, I do believe that it would be a red flag, a red alarm ringing. People would flee immediately. So what do you think is differentiating America? And then we can go into how that ties into the end the socialism.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

So people don't understand what a reserve currency is. The second you understand how a reserve currency actually functions in the market, you'll understand that the US is never going to default on its debts unless it chooses to do so because we can always print money.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Money.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

The real thing that people have to worry about in the US is hyperinflation. So I don't think you guys ever have to worry about the US defaulting. So anybody that says that the US is insolvent is trying to make a political point because it sounds scary.

[Co-host or Panelist]

But the reality is the thing you

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

need to be afraid of is that they will print more and more money to avoid defaulting to make sure that they're not insolvent so that they can rob from everybody by stealing their purchasing power. And that's not just Americans, that's everybody.

[Co-host or Panelist]

So there's something called the Euro dollar system. It's the world's worst name. This is so stup.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

But the Euro dollar by the way, is not a different currency and it

[Co-host or Panelist]

has nothing to do with Europe.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

It is about dollars that can be printed out of thin air by countries

[Co-host or Panelist]

other than America, which is wild.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And I don't think people realize that there is an absolutely gigantic amount of money out in the world that's created and destroyed through credit every day. And so this is the thing that

[Co-host or Panelist]

made 2008 so scary was the euro dollar system froze. And that was when it was like, oh, this is like all of global trade. The way that we facilitate everything is by putting the dollar in between any currency that wants to swap with each other. So if you're Switzerland and you want to do business with Japan, you're going to put the dollar in between your two currencies. And so that system requires debt to be loaned out sometimes just overnight, sometimes 30, 60, 90 days, but basically never more than that. And so all of these trillions of dollars are coming into and out of existence very rapidly and it's outside of the control of the Fed Fed. But because it's through debt, everybody's able to do this. And it is crazy, but that's the system that you're able to extend your reach to everybody using the euro dollar system, everybody storing their money in dollars or saving their money in dollars. So central banks holding dollars, et cetera, et cetera, you're able to inflate the money supply, steal the purchasing power of all those people. But the dollar extends a lot farther than anybody realizes. And this is why when people talk about like what's the reserve currency? It's that, it's that thing that facilitates the trade across all borders. So it is, it really is an exorbitant privilege. People need to be terrified of how the US is economically. But when somebody says that we're insolvent, and I might say it from time to time because I'm trying to get somebody's attention, but the real thing that you want to focus on is that they will just inflate, inflate, inflate the currency until somebody says, yeah, we're not going to be in this system anymore. Which obviously they're already trying to do. It's a huge part of what's going on in Iran because if they do that, then we would default, then we would be insolvent because you don't have the ability to just print your way out of this.

[Caller or Guest Critical of Socialism]

So yeah, there's politicians like Rand Paul who says he has a five point plan that could get the America out of debt. Yeah, we have Javier Milei, who you are standing up right now that says this has been a tough austerity plan, but in three years I was able to turn the country around. Yeah, America is doing none of that right now. We're not building up the middle class, we're extending to another war. We talked about invading another country. We have military operations generations in four different continents. What should we be doing that we're not doing?

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

Do you remember those toys that you would pull the string on its back and it would say like a prerecorded message. This question is the version of pulling the string in my back to let me say that you have to balance the budget. You can't be deficit spending and then printing money to cover the gap.

[Co-host or Panelist]

Like if you stop those two things,

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

people would not recognize this country because

[Co-host or Panelist]

the middle class would be able to start saving their money.

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

And when you put people in a

[Co-host or Panelist]

position where they can save their way

[Drew (Host or Main Commentator)]

to prosperity, you have, in my opinion, done the moral thing.

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