Modern Warfare Is A Wealth Extraction Scheme, Iran Framework Leaked, & The Bond Market Is Breaking | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Modern Warfare Is A Wealth Extraction Scheme, Iran Framework Leaked, & The Bond Market Is Breaking
Date: May 22, 2026

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Overview / Main Theme

This episode of Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory (live from London) dives into the messy realities beneath the headlines of geopolitics, finance, and technology. Tom and regular co-host Drew scrutinize the latest Iran ceasefire "framework," discuss the underlying economic implications of modern warfare, analyze the crumbling bond market, and reflect on the true state of government spending and the impacts of AI on jobs and productivity. Their tone is direct and sometimes irreverent, oscillating between darkly cynical and cautiously optimistic, with a focus on helping listeners see through media noise and manipulation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Iran/US-Israel Ceasefire Framework & Geopolitical Manipulation

• Framework Details ([04:31-08:54])
  • The US and Iran are inching toward a 30-day ceasefire extension, not a true peace deal.
  • Verified steps include: Iran providing benchmarks for its nuclear program, possible release of frozen assets, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and sanctions relief in later phases.
  • "This is a letter of intent...nothing is real yet." (Tom, 05:00)
• Skepticism About True Motives
  • Tom suspects much of the framework’s motivation is market manipulation, especially regarding bonds ([04:35-06:31]).
  • Israeli leadership is unhappy, with rumors of potential preemptive strikes from Netanyahu—highlighting different stakes for US vs. Israel ([09:05-09:36]).
• Modern Warfare as PR and Wealth Extraction ([09:36-15:13])
  • Tom critiques the “absurdity” of modern warfare: “It’s largely done as an exercise of PR…a phenomenal way to funnel wealth from everybody to a small group of people.” (Tom, 10:48)
  • Separates perspectives: U.S. war as an abstraction; for Israel, it’s existential ("as if California and Arizona were at war").

2. Warfare, Capital Flows, and the ‘Wealth Extraction Scheme’

• The Dixon Framework ([10:48-11:32])
  • Outlines power groups: military, financial, technical industrial complexes.
  • War is now about resource and wealth extraction, less about territorial ‘victory.’
• Role of Financial Markets ([17:47-21:09])
  • Drew and Tom lament that modern “warfare” is now orchestrated for financial extraction, with asset markets moving in tandem.
  • "My hope is that it can be saturated. At some point there's nobody left to steal from because everybody's in on the game." (Tom, 22:33)

3. Practical Money Talk: Navigating Systemic Dysfunction

• Owning Assets vs. Being Left Out ([18:39-26:50])
  • Tom urges listeners: “You can get right off the bottom of that K-shaped economy by buying assets,” even if it feels distasteful.
  • Emphasizes: Money is just “stored utility of time”—the system is rigged, but you can still play intelligently.
  • “Don’t have cash. Be an asset holder...It’s not a sexy answer, but it is that simple.” (Drew, 26:24)
• The Corruption of Money Movement
  • Rescue packages, central banking, and inflation are all tools for moving wealth upward, facilitated by government dysfunction.
  • Two approaches: Participate in the system as an asset owner, or opt out (sovereign individual/Bitcoin), though the latter route is fraught and unproven.

4. Ukraine/Russia War Update & Propaganda Awareness ([29:38-33:07])

• Ukraine is increasingly on the offensive, striking inside Russia’s borders (refineries, drone training centers), but war reporting is heavy with propaganda.
• “They’re not even trying to take land anymore, just trying to break the budget of Russia.” (Tom, 29:57)
• Tom highlights the shifting narrative and the role of Western media in painting the conflict.

5. Government Spending, Taxes, and Political Theater

• Deconstructing the ‘Tax the Rich/Spend More’ Argument ([44:20-54:30])
  • Responds to Tom Steyer’s claim that higher tax rates mean better infrastructure/social services.
  • Featured Analysis (Notable Guest Clip):
    “We spend more, in real terms [per capita], on all three…50% more on transportation, 800% more on health, 700% more on education.” (Economic Analyst via Tom, 49:04)
  • The issue isn’t tax levels but government inefficiency, fraud, and bureaucracy ([47:21-54:30]).
  • “We have a spending problem. We are spending money on fraud, ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy.” (Tom, 42:14)
• On Lobbyists and Money in Politics ([34:31-41:42])
  • Politicians are “actors” chosen early and groomed by lobbies. Limiting money helps, but won’t solve systemic alignment of interests.

6. Bond Market Warnings and Personal Investment Strategy

• Bond Market Turmoil ([03:32-04:22]; [61:33-66:16])
  • Multiple bond markets are in historic distress, with consequences for global equity and personal pocketbooks.
  • Tom shares his diversified but paranoid investment strategy—emphasis on broad exposure, cash reserves, and skepticism about predicting timing.
  • “My largest position is in crypto…but I have roughly three years in cash…very, very short term and can be liquid…” (Tom, 61:33-65:42)

7. Fraud/Corruption Prosecutions ([72:12-74:33])

• Massive fraud busts in Minnesota (“Feeding Our Future”), with charges totaling over $250M in COVID-related food program fraud.
• “Do not defraud your fellow citizens, boys and girls. Real talk.” (Tom, 73:10)
• Ongoing investigations in other states predicted.

8. AI: Productivity, Labor Impact, and Opportunity

• AI’s Transformative Power ([74:45-87:14])
  • Jeff Bezos Quote: “We’re going to have so much productivity…a lot of households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce…because of the productivity gains.” ([74:46-76:01])
  • Tom: Every year, everything should be getting cheaper due to innovation, but instead inflation robs those gains via central banking.
• Job Disruption & New Opportunities
  • Tom and Drew emphasize both the anxiety and the optimism of AI: New jobs and creative opportunities will emerge, but the transition will be brutal for many ([81:19-84:12]).
  • Films made for $500K now possible in weeks by a handful of people using AI—radical reduction in barriers (84:12-85:51).
  • Gaming and creative industries must adapt or be “eaten alive” by studios leveraging AI ([87:14-88:49]).
• Regulation, Environment, and Data Centers
  • Debates around AI/data center environmental impact (with a live AOC hearing reference about contaminated water in Georgia).
  • Tom: Regulation should be “smart, light touch…common sense”—not simply antagonistic toward innovation ([89:24-95:26], [95:26-96:35]).

9. Corporate Structure, HR, and Bureaucracy ([102:17-107:10])

• The Bolt CEO fires entire HR team, riling debate.
• Tom: HR can go “toxic fast,” but some employee protections are crucial, particularly in large organizations.
• Champions transparent, feedback-driven, flatter organizations.

10. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is a phenomenal way to funnel wealth from everybody to a small group of people…it just locks into place.” (Tom, 10:48-11:32)
• “Money is like body fat…a thing that allows you to store the utility of your time.” (Tom, 26:50)
• “Your politicians are actors. None of this is real. That really should drive us absolutely bonkers.” (Tom, 34:31)
• “Don’t sleep on AI. AI is a tool. Leverage it to do the thing that you want to do.” (Tom, 87:14-87:48)
• “If you look at history, every single technology that promises an advantage gets developed. … It’s not about how do we hobble ourselves, it’s how do we win.” (Tom, 91:03-92:56)
• “Every time you have a technological revolution, the people that don’t adapt…are destroyed…but every single time…has created more jobs than it eliminated.” (Tom, 81:19-83:39)
• [On asset holding] “It’s not a sexy answer, but it is that simple.” (Drew, 26:24)
• “Companies and governments, for that matter, should live and die by their ability to serve their customer. That’s it. Period. End of story.” (Tom, 58:43)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Iran Framework Breakdown: 04:31–08:54
• Modern Warfare as PR/Wealth Extraction: 09:36–15:13
• Bond Market Crisis: 03:32–04:22, 61:33–65:42
• US/Israel/Iran – Ideological Layers of War: 09:36–15:13
• Ukraine War Update/Propaganda Analysis: 29:38–33:07
• Government Spending Breakdown Clip: 44:20–54:30
• Fraud Scandal (Minnesota): 72:12–74:33
• Bezos on AI & Productivity: 74:46–76:01
• Tom’s Investment Strategy: 61:33–66:16
• AI, Modding, Spotify Announcement: 96:35–98:25
• Corporate Bureaucracy/HR Abolition: 102:17–107:10

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Conclusion / Value for the Listener

This episode challenges conventional narratives on conflict, economics, and technology. Tom and Drew denounce “kabuki theater” in politics and expose the mechanisms of wealth extraction hidden in modern warfare and government spending. Their solution for listeners: Ruthlessly separate emotion from cause and effect, own productive assets, and adopt/adapt new technologies—especially AI. Skepticism of both government and corporations, a diversified asset portfolio, and critical engagement go a long way in (trying to) stay ahead of chaotic change.

Listeners come away with practical financial advice, a clearer understanding of how news headlines often mask deeper schemes, and encouragement to embrace new tools and adaptability as protection—and as opportunity—in a rapidly evolving world.

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

With the American Express Platinum card, you can access over $3,500 in annual value with benefits and eligible purchases across travel, entertainment, and more. There's nothing like platinum. Learn more at americanexpress.com/explatin-platin enrollment requirements monthly and other limits in terms apply. What is up, everybody? Good morning. Welcome to another Tom Bilyeu show live. We are coming to you from London. This is our last one in London. Drew is crying, man.

[Drew]

I want to stay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We have had a good time. We've had a good time. I think Drew may have had a really good time. So light him up and chat. Get some of those deets. I'm not going to rat anybody out, but you guys need to figure out why. Is London Drew's new favorite town? I'm just going to leave it at that. All right. In addition to Drew's many escapades, here in the great city of London, we reportedly have the details of a potential agreement with Iran, which we shall see. Unverified reports are that Netanyahu does not want a diplomatic solution and is going to strike Iran preemptively. I'm not sure why I'm laughing. That's terrible. We live in a clown show. The gallows humor rears its ugly head once again. Ukraine continues to strike inside of Russia, hitting a purported military dormitory and oil refinery. Refinery. We're going to try to separate fact from fiction on that one. And I'm realizing now these are literally some of the first words I've spoken today, which is why I sound like I'm having a hard time with the English language. California gubernatorial candidate Steve Steyer calls for higher taxes and more spending. Not realizing that we already have both. It's just not working. And in entirely related news, the fraud prosecutions continue apace. In Minnesota. We're going to be diving into that. Jeff Bezos had a killer interview. Man, do I hope you guys have watched it. He predicts that AI is going to increase productivity so much that couples will be able to send one of them back home and out of the workforce if that comes to fruition. That would be an absolutely extraordinary Win for AI and all of us. And speaking of AI, a film premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, I don't know if it was an official contention or not, but it was made entirely with AI and we're going to be talking about that and why people should be happy and not afraid. Drew, welcome. I'm sad that it's our last day here, but it has been a lot of fun.

[Drew]

It's been a great trip. But definitely nice to hear good news about a war winding down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you're optimistic. You actually think this is getting across the finish line?

[Drew]

Because I feel like it's been quiet for a week now. There hasn't been any oil swings. I think it's kind of been like, okay, we're. We're winding this down. We're winding this on. At least I think we're on the same page.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The markets are with you because the price came plummeting down.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I am so cynical about this now because one of the bullet points is like, this buys us time to negotiate further. And I was like, ah, they're never going to come to an agreement, so you'll forgive me if I take the cynicism.

[Drew]

I blame you, though, because the bond. The new deep dive about the bond Guild really broke my brain because I watched that earlier this morning. I was watching it out for the editor, and it's crazy that a bond market usually breaks and then an economy collapses, and that's a very bad thing. And we have four bond markets on a historic bench for four of seven. That's what I mean. So it's like we usually say, you know, the Great Depression, it came from this bond market, or this bad thing came from this one market. I'm like, oh, well, four of those are happening right now at this time. So to me, yes, Iran is a problem, but at least it's drones, it's bombs. It's kind of something that's a bit more regional in the presence where we're not really impacted in America. But if this bond market thing keeps going, bad prices, global equities, like, it's a thing that's going to impact you tomorrow, your pocketbook tomorrow, like immediate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, yeah, it's a bit.

[Drew]

It's a bit cut and dry for that, but we'll get to that. Let's jump through this Iran breakdown.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's do it.

[Drew]

You want to. You got to write or we going to go through the beep?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm ready. Theoretically. So for those of you paying attention, the US And Iran are theoretically. That is the Most that I'm going to give it getting closer to a formal extension. I hate all the caveats, but that's where we're at. Nothing is real yet, but this would be a formal extension to the ceasefire that would supposedly give them time to negotiate a path forward. You will forgive my growing cynicism, thinking that this is probably more to do with manipulating the bond market than anything else. Now, none of this is official yet, but here is the deal as reported by Axios. So take that for what it's worth. To be clear, what I'm going to walk you guys through is a framework. This is a letter of intent. This is not a final peace deal. Okay, so this is just an agreement to keep talking. The terms of the offer go like this one. We would have a 30 day pause in hostilities. The current ceasefire gets extended for another month while negotiators try to work out a permanent end to the war. That's the beat that gives me the most pause. That makes me think we're just trying to drag this on again. I've said this before, each side thinks that time is on their side side, and we're going to find out which one of them is correct. The second point is that Iran is going to provide specific, verifiable benchmarks on its nuclear program. This, to me, is. Is certainly a softening of Trump's rhetoric. If this is really something that he would sign off on, he's been so hardcore that basically they wouldn't have a nuclear program. So this is part of that central US demand. The US Wants Iran to very clearly define in measurable terms what it's going to give and how that will be confirmed. But read in that language how vague and like, far off that still is. To me, all of this feels like a step backwards. People were being more clear before. Everybody's just softening their language up and basically saying, we'll talk about it and we'll see where this goes.

[Drew]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The third point is the US spells out how it will release frozen Iranian assets. Iran wants clarity on the mechanism and the timeline. No public dollar figure has been reported, but the fact that we're talking about it, yeah, this is going to get wild. This feels like we've done a whole lot of work and we're just going to be in a worse position than we were, that nobody has really gained ground. I mean, maybe Iran. We'll see.

[Drew]

4.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The Strait of Hormuz reopens the commercial shipping during the renegotiate, during the negotiation window. This was already part of the April ceasefire remains a condition is a benchmark for how little progress we have made. And five, sanctions relief is on the T for the longer term deal, but not necessarily during the 30 day window. Not necessarily. I would certainly hope not. That would be crazy. Now, where do the players stand in this? What are they acknowledging? Do they feel good about this? Do they feel bad? Iran has formally responded to the US proposal, their foreign minister confirmed on Monday. Pakistan's Interior minister in Tehran this week also helped to close the remaining gaps. So those guys acknowledged that this is real. They're not going to be saying, theoretically, we're not even talking to them. So that's that side. The US is treating the framework as a path to a permanent deal. Eurasia Group analyst Gregory Brugh describes it as functionally a 30 day ceasefire extension. That feels pretty close to what this feels like to me. Nothing has happened. We're just pushing the date out. That would be my read. Israel is opposed. You guys have probably heard about the very heated call, supposedly between Trump and Netanyahu. Trump informed Netanyahu of the framework on that Tuesday call. According to two Israeli sources who spoke to Axios, the call was very contentious. Netanyahu, Netanyahu and Trump disagree on how to proceed with Iran. Trump told reporters this week that Bibi will do whatever I want him to do. Why he talks like that, I will never understand. But he does it all the time, so people should be used to it. Trump called Netanyahu on Tuesday, walked him through the framework. But yeah, Bibi clearly is not thrilled about this. At one point, somebody said it was like he had his hair on fire. So he wants to blow things up. I don't think that's too surprising to anybody. So there we have it. We'll see if we're able to get to the other side of this. I'm super cynical. Drew's going to talk me off a ledge. We're going to get back to being optimistic, as I promised I would be. Drew, we're going to find a way.

[Drew]

Once you brought Israel up, I was like, oh, we go in the wrong direction because there's been some reports that there's like a surprise missile attack, that Israel is trying to slide in really quick before the war is over.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're going to bomb us, Drew. We got to do it.

[Drew]

It's one of those things. We have to be honest, though, this is a different war from Israel's perspective than it is from the US's perspective. So to us, again, it's over there. We're Going to throw some drones over there. We got people in the Navy, but we're not boots on the ground. We're not dealing with this every day. Israel is like, this is as if California and Arizona are at war. They're next door to us. They could come over like there's a bit more existential threat there. Do you think Israel, whether it's just paranoia or warmongering, whatever it might be, do you think they're justified to want to kind of keep this war going, or should they try to get an off ramp themselves?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, Drew, you will do your best to keep me from getting canceled off of planet Earth for giving my real take on this. I think warfare in the modern way that it's done is patently ridiculous. It is largely done as an exercise of pr. And so you. Historically, when countries went to war, the only question was, how much of this do I want remaining when I'm done? And they would just kill everybody, tear everything down. I mean, it was really, really horrific. Not that war now isn't horrific. War now is horrific. But the scale of the horror was something far worse in days of old. And so now it's as if there is some weird thing that echoes in human psychology that makes us still want to go to war, but you're not going to be able to get the victory that you want. And to me, this seems so obvious since World War II. So I cannot figure out where the winds are actually happening unless you adopt the Dickson framework. And so we just had Simon Dixon on the show to be coming out on a couple of weeks. And it really is bleak in that there are. He lays out a framework of groups of power. So you've got the military industrial complex, who we know, we've been warned about since the 50s. You've got the financial industrial complex, which was an interesting. And you've got the technical industrial complex. I don't think he would say that that is the sum total of the forces of power, but those are the three that he talks about all the time. Now when you go, oh, they know they can't win, but this is a phenomenal way to funnel wealth from everybody to a small group of people all of a sudden, Drew, it's not confusing. When I look at it, I'm like, oh, oh.

[Drew]

It just locks into place.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It makes sense. But from a warfare perspective, like, I'm actually trying to get the thing that I want. The way that we wage war does not make any sense. Now I would like to fall on the side of war is eternally Immoral. But the reality is that humans will attack and they will take whatever they can take until they hit sufficient resistance, either morally or physically. And so you have Israel and Palestine that hate each other, they want to kill each other. It seems very clear to me, based on actions, that Israel, at a minimum, would like to ethnically cleanse that space and just take it over. And given the animosity and the hatred, yeah, I get it. Like, set morals aside. I understand that that is a horrible thing. I agree, it's a horrible thing. But I also understand from a perspective of if you guys are constantly getting attacked, that at some point you just go, we got to get them the fuck out of here. And given the realities of modern warfare, it is there always going to be, like this manipulation of the public to try to get you on board and try to pretend that you're not, like, doing it. And so the farce of it all, in an era of the velocity and volume of information that we have, is just too much for my brain to handle because it somehow still doesn't stop it. Like, that's the crazy part. Be aghast, but it will keep going and mix. On top of that, there are no good guys. And so anybody that says Israel all bad, Palestine all good, or anybody that says Palestine all bad, Israel all good, both of those are nonsensical. And so when I look at this, all I see is the madness of humanity playing out in a way that it's. It's almost like if you want me to answer the question, you have to give me the layer of analysis. And so if you want me to talk about power structures, then I'll say, okay, you've got. The west is extraordinarily good at wealth extraction, and you can see that being played out. If you want to talk about it at the level of ideology, then you can talk about what I will say is the madness of the ideology. To take international aid and instead of building something, you build terror tunnels and go on the attack. I'm well aware of the blockades and all of that. The way that I see that still stands, I would much rather have seen that go to building things up and trying to follow in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela and be like, yep, it's all unjust, but to become the oppressor is just completely illogical. You give up a piece of your own soul. So we're going to build something here. We're going to find a path to unity. I don't expect anyone to agree, but that would be my take at that level. And then if you want to talk about it at the level of the human willingness to kill and murder, it's just horrific. And so I'll apply that to Iran. I'll apply that to Israel, Gaza, the U.S. it's just, it's a total mindfuck. And then when you look at the oh, this is really just about wealth extraction and control of resources. And then everything just fits. It's really gross. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

[Drew]

Get that Amex gold cart ready.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm way too tired to cook tonight.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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

[Drew]

Yeah, the wealth extraction black pill is something that unfortunately I feel like I've definitely swallowed. So listening to Simon, it just felt like it was confirming all my hidden beliefs. But I do think Jordan Shuffield said it in the chat that there is something to reimagining what we do with welfare, with warfare like this is there's no longer Napoleon Hitler. I'm one bad guy and I'm going to take over the whole planet just because there's weaknesses in that approach. So just with technology and things advanced, you have to Be more subtle in your deception. You have to be more subtle in your control. You have to be more subtle in your expansion. So I think that what we traditionally think of warfare just like it used to be, guys with swords running and smashing against each other to people with guns and mobile units and from navy to air, I think we're now transforming into something else. It's no longer like, I don't want to say pure war, but I don't think if I look at like Iran, there's. There's no, again, there's no actual combat happening. It's more like mind tricks and infrastructure attacks.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But even that, being very careful not to go after the infrastructure, or I should say the US is being careful not to go after the infrastructure. Iran is being less careful with the GCC nations. What I will say to that is I need to spend more time with it. But I have a really bad feeling that warfare now is a monetary game that ultimately the quote unquote warfare. So warfare is, I'm a strong man and I'm looking around me and I realize I can take what's yours. And that game for about a hundred years has stopped playing out on the battlefield. And bankers have gotten very smart at going, oh, I don't need to win militarily. I just need there to be buyers.

[Drew]

If you owe me enough money.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I need to. I need to create a customer base. And so war is one of my customer bases. And I understand that people fight. And by the way, I understand that it's actually far more difficult now to get a victory. And so people are not going to use nuclear weapons, thank God. Obviously the best thing ever, but they're not going to do that. And so they're going to get into these stalemates and they're just going to keep like needing to supply all this weaponry. Oh, and by the way, it makes other people paranoid, which makes them want to buy more weaponry. And so the whole game plays out at the level of this thing. That is a miracle. And that is the bad news. You would never want to get rid of the stock market. However, it also creates this ability to go, oh, I can profit off of this. And so. Oh, God, Drew, I'm going to say something. I don't even know what to do with this. My dear beloved, the people that are watching, here's the great news. I hope if you hear my voice right now, you are one of the people on the bottom of the K shaped economy, because you can get right off the bottom of that K shaped economy by buying Assets. And so all the psychopaths in the world doing all the crazy shit, you're actually in a position where you can make your life better by you can buy the same Raytheon stocks that the bad guys can buy and you can buy all the things that are going to be needed during the war. That's so gross. It's true. And so to say anything else would be a lie. But nonetheless, that is wild. That is wild.

[Drew]

It's when Simon was like, you can look at their earning reports and see

[Tom Bilyeu]

where they're going to go next.

[Drew]

Yeah, where they're expanding their resources and where they're. And it's just, it's corporate jargon and spreadsheets. But then you start to say, wait, there's massive amounts of capital moving to Iran that's looking like it's going to extract into. And then you can literally kind of see the one in the two. So interesting. Interesting. Is it because you pray at the altar of capitalism? So is it what you are, a capitalist disciple? So it's good. I have no beef with it. Did it hit you a little bit, knowing that there is a speculation in the line of thought, a string of cause and effects that some people manipulate even to the point of war, famine, stuff like that, in order to like make money and stuff like, if you

[Tom Bilyeu]

read history, you understand all of those things are always man made. So the fact that people are doing it for money and power was not in the least bit surprising. That's the only reason anybody ever does this. Like, if you look into Mao, it's just Mao was doing it for Mao. Now at least it's a broader set of people. But the thing that I find distressing is that I don't see the eject button. So I don't see the way to get out of it. Like I've now spent a year yelling into a microphone about what the cause and effect is. And people don't come back with superior cause and effect. They come back with emotion. And so given that they're easy to keep in the state that they're in now, which is the fodder, the dumb money, the people to extract from. It's so wild. It's so wild. How do we make this awesome? Let's make this awesome. Okay, so no, we need to, otherwise I am actually going to go crazy. So, okay, we're going to make this rad. So I don't know that we can stop the locusts from going from one place to the next. So let me explain that. The way that Money and currency and wealth work is they move from geography to geography, getting control of assets. Sometimes those assets are oil, sometimes those assets are companies. It doesn't matter. They, they go from place to place. The mechanism by which they do it is central banking. And so they go in and the bailout is the point. Big government is the point. Fraud, waste and abuse is the point. Because that's how you get the need for the government to print money. And that means that you can watch it, you can see what's going on and you can understand how you can participate in that. And my hope is that. My hope is that it can be saturated. And so at some point you just. There's nobody left to steal from because everybody's in on the game. And that's why it's actually. Even if Trump is the most corrupt president of all time, he did create the ability for kids to get in on the shtick. And so at least at the individual level, everybody can play. Nobody has to be the sucker, nobody has to be the one left holding the bag. You just have to broaden your horizons far enough that. Meaning the way that you invest so that you're not trying to get hyper rich off of one thing. Because they will fuck you on that, because they will figure out where all you guys think it's going and they've got enough money that they can manipulate those prices and you'll get hurt. But if you're broad spectrum enough, you can protect yourself from it. Okay, that's option one. Option two is the eject button. I'm less confident in the eject button. So please take the following with a gigantic grain of salt, but this is the total sovereign individual. This one scares me, largely because it's untested. Now, keep in mind, this is my single largest position, but I'm over here being sovereign with massive amounts of anxiety. So just keep that in mind. But that would be exiting out of the financial system. So Bitcoin would be the most stable. Let's put that in air quotes. Way to do that. To fight and resist at every conceivable turn. The surveillance state. All right, I will diatribe on this. I'm gonna stop there. But we are going to be talking more about how to make this awesome. We're gonna spin this. We're gonna make this a good thing. This is a good thing.

[Drew]

No, because I think that's what makes it real. Is like the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate black pill that it's okay, is the white pill. It's nobody's fault. I'm not attacking you personally. The ultimate, ultimate black pill is like, nobody's coming to save you. Money is a system. You could just hop on the system. Like you. It's like an escalator, and it's not gonna. You could get to the 10th floor, but with escalators as it's. It just moves at one pace. Like it's very. It's a very 1, 2, 3, 4, like system. And I think too often we bring in our alt and our values, our beliefs and all these other things into money. And I realized that money is quote, unquote dirty in the way that, like, it doesn't care about your feelings, it doesn't care about the blood, it doesn't care about. It doesn't care about anything. If you do this thing, this is the outcome. If you do that thing, that is the outcome.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I think, well, that's not money. That's cause and effect. So the, the, the.

[Drew]

The way to, to like, gain money

[Tom Bilyeu]

like that into the system, you have to. And that's the ultimate black pill. Is that what you're saying?

[Drew]

Yes, that it's. The game is simple and it's as dirty and as empty as you think it is. Like, it's really. Just start. Just don't be. Don't have cash. Be an asset holder. And it's like, no. So you just tell me, I just buy stocks and that's gonna solve everything. Yeah. After a certain amount of time, and it's just like, no, but what. None of that matters. Do you have enough stocks after a certain amount of time? And it's like. It's not a sexy answer, but it is that simple.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I will give you that. The only thing that I am just really, really hungry for people to understand what money actually is. Money is your ability to take your time, turn it into. Is energy the right word to turn it into? The ability to move the world, to change the world? God damn it. I need an easy way to say this. Money is. And if anybody in the chat has an easy way to say this, please, by all means, say it. But you have your time, and you need to turn it into something that you can spend on anything, Meaning you can spend it for food, you can spend it for pleasure, you can spend it for, like, real estate. And once you understand that, it's like discovering batteries and so. Or a cup so that when it rains, you can store the water and it's the ability to store the utility of your time across time. It's like body Fat. Body fat is nature's way of not having anticipated refrigeration or knowing that it had to span the God knows how many millions of years to get you to refrigeration. So it was like word, just overeat. Now I'm going to store some on your body and then I will release it. That's what money is. Money is like body fat. Money is a thing that you allows you to store the utility of your time. Now people don't like that. Everybody's time is valued differently. I understand that. But nonetheless, all of us are the problem. All of us have said, now I don't value your time that much for that thing you did. And so just as you're pointing a bunch of fingers at everybody else saying, ah, your time's not that valuable, other people are pointing their finger back at you and saying, matt, your time's not that valuable. But at least you know what it is. You get what money is. So money isn't the dirty thing. The thing you don't like is the system that moves the money. Fair enough. That system is hyper corrupted, but money itself is dope. Money is your ability to turn your time into a flexible asset that can be used to get people to do what you want.

[Drew]

Yeah, if so, factor to that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There it is.

[Drew]

Please save money, guys. I know it's assets. I know it's hard. I know it's. The system is corrupt and you work too hard and you should be making more. And everybody's back. I get all those things. Yes, I feel all those things. You heard still make sure you like feel all those things and then save your money too. Like do both.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yup.

[Drew]

All right, let's jump over to Ukraine, which Ukraine is looking like the little country that could because this war has been going on for years and I feel like they're doing better than we are in Iran. This is smaller in the country, half the budget. But they've been holding their own and there was a couple of significant attacks over the last few days.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, if the propaganda can be believed, Ukraine really is making moves. They're now hitting targets 50, 1500 miles inside of Russia. Refineries are halting production because they keep getting hit. Now I'm super skeptical of everything coming out of this war. It's all propaganda. But the reports are as follows. Ukraine hit the Rosneft owned Cisrin refinery in Samara 800 km inside of Russia. Both sides, by the way, have confirmed that one. Apparently Ukraine isn't even really trying to take ground anymore. Like they're not trying to get land. They're just trying to break the budget of Russia. They're trying to stop them from being able to keep funding their military machine. The second strike was a hit on a drone operator training facility in occupied Donsk. CNN ended up geolocating the building and the target does appear to be military. Ukraine at least claims that 65 cadets were killed. And then strike three was a strike on a college dormitory in occupied luhansk. Russia says four were killed, 35 wounded, and that there were teenagers inside. Now, what exactly happened? I don't know. This, again, is where you have to be very careful about all the different propaganda. At one point I heard that they had just completely bombed like a boarding school and had nothing to do with the military and all these kids got killed. So we'll see what comes out in the wash in the long term. But as Drew was saying, it really does seem like Ukraine is, is far more on the offense right now. Now, I don't know if that's because Europe is getting farther and farther behind them. If that's because they have just been getting better and so their side is getting better faster because they have more to fight for, I don't know. So we'll see. But it is certainly interesting if this is true. Now, another read on this is just that they're getting better at the propaganda war and the west is taking their side more. And so we're seeing the coverage be unbalanced, but something has shifted even if it's only in the coverage. So we'll see. Ends up being true. But they are the little country that could. We'll see. I'm very curious to know how engaged Europe is in all of this and how much we really should be looking at Europe taking a bigger and bigger risk against Russia. Because if that's true, Russia is not going to take that sitting down. They've already been like revving up the engines on missiles that they say could, can and will hit Europe if Europe continues to meddle. So now how much of that is verified? I don't know. So as yet to be determined, but it's wild. Taking a short break. But there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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

[Drew]

It's yet to be determined. This is like a warfight Trump don't even talk about no more. So I don't know if he just hit a couple, he can't make it stop.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He said he was going to make it stop before he came it off. Or day one when he actually. No, he did say at one point that he would stop before he got into office. Then he was saying that it would happen on day one. So this is one of those, man. When you make a specific bombastic claim, at some point you do just have to let it go and let the news cycle wash over it. Otherwise people are just going to keep bringing it up, up, up, up, up. Yeah. Trump is living proof that if you make enough wild claims and they come fast enough that people will just move from one to the next to the next, they don't have time to sit and dwell on any one of them because the next one is going to come so fast and so furious. Fascinating thing about life, man. It is very fascinating. Got to be careful not to fall for that one because it does burn your credibility over time. People may let it go, but they build a mental map of you as constantly overstating things. So it's a high risk strategy.

[Drew]

The funniest Trump moment I always bring back is when he did healthcare in his first term and he was like, I have a healthcare plan day one, da, da, da, be easy, whatever. He gets into office and then he had that press conference where he was like, who knew? Who knew healthcare care was so difficult? Like, who could have figured it out? And it was just like, oh, so your day one plan isn't actually day one. Like once you get behind the scenes, you realize how many layers are in there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, also, so here's a big thing that I really want people to be really angry about. Your politicians are actors. They are all playing a game of kabuki theater. None of this is real. And that really should drive us absolutely bonkers. So, yes, money's in politics. In fact, one thing that we don't talk enough about is, did I cover this in a deep dive? I think I did cover this in a deep dive. So one of the ways that the lobbies get to people, and I really do mean lobbies, I know everybody wants everything to be is the Israel lobby. I don't buy into that. I Think Israel's one of many lobbies that are out there causing problems. Shout out, by the way, to Bernie Sanders, who I can't stand, but boy oh boy, do I like the idea of limiting money in politics. And he put something forward recently that would limit super pac contributions to 5K. Fuck yes. Sign me up. I here for that. All right. Having said that, you've got all these lobbies that are going after your congresspeople and they find them very early. They'll go find them in like when they're, you know, in a county somewhere running for city council. And they'll go basically say, hey, I've got some money for you to run. I think you're a big up and cominging talent, can't wait to see what you do. And they're looking for people who are aligned with them. This is where I think people get it wrong. I don't. I'm sure that there is some grooming of people and I'm sure that there's some like, well, I really like this person and so I might find myself more amenable to that. Thanks. I care about this person. They've been with me since I was, you know, just coming up and they supported me when nobody else did. But they also just look for people that actually think like that. And so they're going to support the people that already support those positions and help them come up through the system so that by the time they're hitting the national stage, they've shown over and over and over and over that they're willing to do the things that that person, that lobby would want them to do. And so you've got that. So you've already got that problem in politics. And then on top of that, they will do and say anything that they need to do and say in order to get reelected. And that is the nature of the game. It is very hard to get anywhere on the national stage of politics if you don't say the things that money wants you to say. Now, speaking of people that I do not like, but I will always shout out when they're doing something I think is dope. I think it's dope that Mamdani is live streaming now. He'll probably live stream to his base, no problem. He might cherry pick the things that he agrees with. Honestly, no problem. He's putting himself out there. He's talking. I fully respect that. It gives people a chance at least to say what he's saying. Like even if he's not taking the challenges and maybe he will Like, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt until he proves otherwise. I will say make sure you get moderators because there was a whole lot of ASCII porn in your feed. But, I mean, listen, that was hilarious. That's tough. But. But I really do dig that, and I hope that more and more and more politicians start doing that now. Of course, there's going to be. It's going to turn into stump speeches and all that, and I get that. And they'll be in an echo chamber. I get that. But again, it gives us access to their thinking, and I think that that's really, really important. So from my situation, credit where credit is due. Okay? Setting that aside, so you've got these people, they will do and say whatever they need to to get into power. And this is going to be one of the things that in this era of volume and velocity of information, recognize that we can start putting ideas forward that people will start taking seriously. Nothing will ever go as quickly as we want. But if you put good ideas out there, they really do begin to stack. People do begin to adopt them as their belief system. And I think that we all have to recognize that we are in a fight for culture. We're in a fight for the soup that kids grow up in. What do people believe to be true? And so the thing I'll stump speech for is just freedom of speech to make sure that people can say what they believe to be true. Because the second you take that away from people, then everything bad cascades off of that. That's been one thing that's been interesting about being here is man, the UK has fallen far and fast from a freedom of speech perspective. And people just want to, like, lock down and not engage with the people that they don't agree with. I interviewed Tommy Robinson while I was here. I'll be super curious to see how people respond to that in the chat. But the people here at the facility that we're shooting at, I didn't even think about it, but they were all like, pearl clutching hard that we brought them in. And I was just like, that's so wild. Don't you want to know what's their best argument? What's the best counter argument versus especially a guy that can get hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million people to show up. That's not the guy that you want to pretend doesn't exist. So anyway, I find it very strange.

[Drew]

Yeah, it's definitely different, interesting seeing, like, the societal reactions in the uk. But going back to the bill that you Announced that Bernie brought up. It's. He introduces a bill to stop billionaires from buying elections, and that would cap super pac contributions at 5,000.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's go.

[Drew]

So there's already the individual contribution limit. You do your taxes, you can like donate to a competition. You could donate to a congressman or a politician. Then they have corporate donations that you can then pull together and go. And those get capped. And then super PACs are uncapped. As long as it's not from a direct candidate. It could be uncapped as much as you want, but it's slowly becoming the slush fund where the person will put all the money into the super pac and then the super PAC runs all the ads. But you don't know where that money is going into the super pac, so they're trying to limit that as well. It's just, it really comes down to where paying commercials to tell to paint our opponents like terrible people. That's where a majority of the money and the pins and the marketing and all that other stuff too. So I definitely don't want it to make it seem like money equals success when it comes to, like, politicians and stuff like that. We've seen many politicians spend hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars and still lose. But at the same time, I do think it's important to stop lobbyists and other special interest groups from organizing and themselves putting a hundred thousand, a hundred million, or just like in Kentucky, $35 million on a primary race. This isn't even the election yet. This is the who's going to represent us? Race. So it's, it's going to be interesting to see where this bill goes because a lot of people think that these PACs are funding the politicians themselves. So would they vote to shorten their pocketbooks in this way?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I mean, look, this isn't going to solve the problem entirely for the reasons that I was saying before, that you're going to get the support back, like early, early in somebody's career where you're not throwing a ton of money at them. It's just enough to keep them going. I'm sure there will be plenty of ways that around the system, but boy, do I like the idea of making it as hard as possible.

[Drew]

We'll see. We'll see. I feel like every couple, every, after every election cycle, somebody announces this bill and then it's like, yeah, they talk about it and then it never actually gets passed. Like, yeah, Citizens the United been.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that is two decades. Distressingly true. Yeah, distressingly true.

[Drew]

Something that's just a hilarious quick hit talking about like government policies and stuff like that. In Chevron, a gas station in California, they now have a political ad saying Sacramento policies did this to make now make you pay more like at the gas station. So it's interesting that this is the turn they're taking when technically they rose the prices based off of the news of the Strait of Hormuz. It's not like Chevron is actually in Iran waiting for oil to get there. But do you agree with them kind of, yeah, 100%. Dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would love to see just a breakdown of them. Post. Here's our profit margin. This is what we pay. This is our profit margin. These are the taxes. Just list it all out. Just total transparency. Let everybody see exactly what's going on. I think you want to talk about sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we had total transparency where we're being taxed, how much we're being taxed, by who, for what? Like, the more information that we can get in the hands of people, the better. Like one of the things that I put in the doc I want to make sure we talk about is that Steve Statter thing. Stayer, forget what his name is, but he's a gubernatorial candidate. Yeah, yeah. So he was like calling out like, oh, we need more spending. Like, this is crazy. And it's like, bro, from the time period that you're quoting, we are spending more. So it is absolutely ridiculous. People do not know that our problem is not that we don't tax enough. Our problem is that we spend horrifically. We have a spending problem. We are spending money on fraud, ridiculous amounts of bureaucracy. Like, it is crazy. Basically, the only time that we've ever had a more progressive tax rate. Top tax bracket that we have now is after World War II. So, yes. Have we ever done a tax bracket of 94%? Yes, we have. When after World War II, did we collect more per taxpayer at that time than we collect now? No, we did not. And that is the part that I keep trying to get people to understand. Like the. When you look at. If you grab. So I put in the spreadsheet a link. There's a guy, awesome clip. He does a phenomenal breakdown. I think he's called like, quick thoughts or something like that. This guy is rapidly becoming one of my favorite people on X.

[Drew]

Think of this guy breaks down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's my man. There he is. Is. So in fact, let's. It's. It's long, but let's start right from the beginning and. But pause Real fast, I'm gonna give a little bit of context. So you've got. In fact, let's read.

[Drew]

Can you the tweet his week?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah, Tom. All right. Tom Stayer. He says, for decades, this guy is a. He's a billionaire gubernatorial candidate for California. So I think a lot of this had to do with the. The interview that Jeff Bezos gave, which we'll also be covering. But he said, for decades. This is Tom Steyer. For decades, the top top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans, like at Jeff Bezos was much higher than it is today. What did we do with that money? We built roads and bridges, expanded healthcare and invested in education. We grew the middle class, care about economic growth, tax billionaires. All right, Tom, that's fucking retarded advice. And so here comes my man with an explanation of why that is full retard.

[Economic Analyst]

California Governor Tom Steyer says for decades the top tax rate on the wealthiest Americans like Jeff Bezos was much higher than it is today. What did we do with that money? We built rebates as it ever has been our highest.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, no, hold on. You just skipped over his.

[Economic Analyst]

Him explaining Jeff Bezos was much higher than it is today. What did we do with that money? We built roads and bridges, expanded healthcare and invested in education. We grew the middle class. One problem with this is that government spending as a percent of GDP is about as high today, 23%, as it ever has been. Our highest top marginal tax rate was during World War II, 94%. But other than World War II, the highest top marginal tax rate was in 1952, 92%. So today, the federal government spending is a greater share of our economy than it was in the 1950s or 60s or 70s.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You've got an insane top tax rate, 92% today. You're spending more than you were then. And he's going to get into, oh, but we're making more money. He will address that.

[Drew]

That.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I am talking per capita per person. We spend more now than we did back then anyway. I'll save more of that rant for later.

[Economic Analyst]

So when Tom Steyer says we could spend more money, well, we're already spending more money as a share of our economy. Tom Steyer says, what did we do with the money? We built roads and bridges. Here's the federal budget for 1952. Transportation and communication is 1 point. So $1.7 billion in 1952 has the same buying power, adjusted for inflation, as $20.9 billion in 2026. How much are we spending on transportation Today, is it more than $20.9 billion? Yeah. In fiscal year 2026, we have $71 billion on transportation. And note that this is fiscal year to date. I could use obligations for the fiscal year which would make this even larger, but they might not spend all of their obligations. So I'm just using spending year.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so first of all, he's talking year to date, not even for the full year. That number is going to be grotesque. It will be way bigger. So we're already way, way, way over what we were when homeboy was saying, oh, we used to do cool shit with the money, but what do we do now? Yeah, we spend even more on that. But people are rightly going to look around and say, hey, what the fuck? Though I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Yeah, much of this is going to bureaucracy. The size of the government is getting so big. When you look at this is like college. When you look at the amount that the college tuition has gone up and then you're like, well, surely they must have a lot more students and surely they must have a lot more teachers. Nope, they have a lot more bureaucrats. They have a lot more like middle managers, administrators. And so nobody's feeling the benefit of the expense. Like we have this brain dead notion that just spend more, spend more, spend more and you're going to get better results. It doesn't work like that. There are so many problems to which the only thing you can throw at it is competence. You cannot throw money at it. Throwing money at it will only make the problem worse. All right, he's going to explain exactly how it gets worse.

[Economic Analyst]

To date, $71 billion. Maybe you're saying, well, we have a lot more people and cars, so we need more roads and bridges.

[Tom Bilyeu]

True.

[Economic Analyst]

What we can do is get the population in 1952, about 158 million. And, and the population in 2026, 343 million. And then we can compare inflation adjusted spending in these different categories per capita divided by the number of people. And when I say these categories, what I mean is Tom Steyer's chosen categories. We built roads and bridges. Transportation. Expanded health care. Health. And invested in education.

[Drew]

Education.

[Economic Analyst]

So comparing Those categories from 1952 and today fiscal year to date, we find that we spend more in inflation adjusted per capita terms on all three of those categories. 50% more on transportation, 800% more on health, 700% more on education.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Bro, this is massive.

[Economic Analyst]

So Tom Steyer wants a high top marginal tax rate like we used to have so that we can spend more on roads and bridges, health care and education. Well, we already spend a higher percentage of the economy than we used to and we already spend more in real terms on all of those things. Remember, we're spending a larger share of the economy on the government than we used to. And the economy has grown a lot in inflation adjusted terms. This is real inflation adjusted gdp. It's going up. So the country's getting richer. We have more money in the country.

[Drew]

Country.

[Economic Analyst]

And we're spending a larger share of it on government services, which is how we're spending more on all of those categories that Tom Steyer wants to spend on. One area where we're spending less, by the way, is national defense. So in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, we're spending 12, 10% of GDP on national defense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That tells you how terrified of Russia we were.

[Drew]

Yeah. Okay.

[Economic Analyst]

How about the middle class, though? Tom Steyer says we grew the middle class. True. And that's bad. This graphic is from stepped on one

[Tom Bilyeu]

of his lines there. So he said we grew the middle class and that's bad. He's going to explain why.

[Economic Analyst]

An enterprise institute. And what they do is they create five different income classes relative to the federal poverty line at the time. So poor, near poor is 150% of the federal poverty line. And then the other income categories are just greater and greater multiple of the federal poverty line. And the point that they're showing you this only goes back to 1979, but I think it's good enough for our purposes. The thing that they're showing you here is that the middle class, our lower middle class and middle class buckets, those really are shrinking. We're shrinking the middle class. No, but you can also notice that the poor or near poor category, that's shrinking too. That's getting smaller, smaller. The groups that are expanding are the rich. Up at the very top. The rich are becoming more numerous and the upper middle class are becoming more numerous. That's why I kind of jokingly said that growing the middle class was bad. Because what's happened since 1979, 70% top marginal tax rate. By the way, what's happened since then is that we've shrank the middle class by making people richer. There's fewer of the lower middle class, fewer of the poor, fewer of the core middle class, but there's more of the upper middle class.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, it's wild. So that the one part that I would disagree with him there is that when you start having the just huge discrepancy it ends up being the discrepancy that starts creating a problem because your baseline expense for everything is all that you can benchmark off of. And if you're. You've got a ton of people below that line and then a ton of people above that line, you just start to get a tale of two cities. And they won't tolerate it for long. So it is interesting. The rate of people below the poverty line is shrinking faster than I thought. I will give them credit for that. So I certainly thought that that was an accelerating number, not a decelerating number. But when you are siphoning like the people, the one thing he doesn't cover on this, that is a huge distortion is how are the people that are getting wealthy that are going up. And the answer is assets. And so I need to, I really need to spend some time with this data because it paints a rosier picture. Then. Then I have a mental map for

[Drew]

that was my reaction, is that what he's saying is indirect controversy to what a lot of conflict into what a lot of people are feeling. I'm feeling like I'm not stretching as far. I feel like I'm getting poor. I feel like things are working.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is true. Now for the last four years, it wasn't because for the last four years, people in real terms were getting wealthier. It flipped negative again. And so is some of this delayed sentiment? I don't know. We'll have to look at that. But I keep coming back to the stat that I think should set off alarm bells in everybody's head, which is that 10% of people own 93% of the assets. So that's where it's like, okay, you definitely have a problem. But yeah, I need to spend more time with that because I thought we had more people on the bottom side of the K than it looks like we actually do.

[Drew]

But there is something to that, though. But let's kind of double click into what Tom is advocating for as a governor candidate to what this person is now breaking down because that is fundamentally that is wrong. A lot of people are saying no. In my math, one plus one equals three. I got it. We should spend more. We should tax more. And this person's saying no. We're missing some things. Actually, one plus one equals two. But because this is something that is so prevalent and it's something that comes up every election cycle taxing more. We need to be better with our funding now, knowing that we spend 3x7x8x when it came to health care, more than we used to. Is it just the allocation problem? It's going into the waste. And so it's not the tax dollars that's the problem, it's just how the government is managing the money that's the problem.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Problem.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Drew]

Got it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, I wish it were something else, but the Jeff Bezos said this in his interview. He said, we have a competence problem. We don't have a spending. He called it a skills problem. But it really is. If you can get the most competent people in the world to run it, they start innovating, they start coming up with better systems. So I know people absolutely hated Elon Musk being involved in the government. I am not one of them. But when he pointed out the fact that the retirement rate for government employees is tied to the rate at which they can move files into a mindshield shaft, I was like, what the fuck? So the actual rate limiter was the speed of the elevator in the mineshaft, dude. That's where, like, okay, as an entrepreneur, you spend all day trying to find things like that, like game development. So the nice thing about game development is you literally just ask the engine rat on yourself. Tell me by tick, what did you spend your time on? And so you'll look through it and you'll be like, the grass was rendering for like a tenth of a millisecond. What the fuck? You can't do that. Like, that's crazy. So we've got to go find a new way to optimize for that. We don't have that with the government. So all we know is this doesn't feel good. There's too many kids in my class. The teacher's not making enough money. The cost of eggs is going up. I can't afford a house. That's a big one. Jesus Christ. If we solve that problem, do you know how much of this would go away? Hey, I can't afford a house. People don't understand, like, where that derail is. Why can't I afford a house? It makes them think they're poorer than they are because one of the main things they want they can afford. We've completely distorted the sense of who needs to go to college and completely abused the cost of going to college. We have not driven the cost of health care or drugs down. And so people are like, like, what the fuck is going on? And if you took those things and you were able to inject a high degree of competition so that innovation would come out so that people could really get ahead, win by building that next Great medical device or innovation in insurance or whatever. But of course they don't. For instance, there's a stat. I don't remember the exact stat, but I'll just give you a sense of directionality. The number of banks, new banks per year has fallen off by, I'm going to guess, hundreds of a percent. Hundreds of percent. So it is a level of catastrophe where we're letting these banks just solidify at the top so that nobody's doing anything new, nobody's innovating. And you get that through regulation in so many of the most important industries. And the way that they're able to convince you to do what ends up becoming regulatory capture. Drew. Healthcare is so important. We could never leave that to these evil companies. That's crazy. And I will put forward that the only thing more evil than a corporation is the government. And so people say, I, we can't have it in a corporation, so you put it in the fucking hands of the government. That is wild. And all the while people look at what happened to Thomas Massie and be like, yo, this is evil. This sinister. I can't believe. What the fuck. So it's like you get that it's all being manipulated, but you don't realize people, more power.

[Drew]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What the are you talking about? So this is one of those things, man, that you have a spending problem, you have a competence problem. You have a bunch of people that are attracted to the government for whatever reason that are not getting things. Not just the government, but big industry. This is why, okay, now I have a bad feeling that this is going to be a trigger for the group. Group. But this is why I don't like unions. It's. Unions are designed to feed the union. They are not designed to make a better output for the customer. Companies and governments, for that matter, should live and die by their ability to serve their customer. That's it. Period. End of story. And if a, if a company is able to abuse its employees, the first question you should be asking is how the. Do they have a monopoly?

[Grainger Advertiser Voice]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because that is the very thing. The employee should just be like, I'm the fuck out of here. I'm going to go somewhere else. Because there are plenty of other people doing this thing because it's valuable. And if that thing isn't valuable, then it's going to go out of business anyway. And so then I start looking for, are there government contracts here? Like, what's going on? Because something is stopping competition from happening. And so that's why breaking down the monopolies Is, yes, focus on that for sure. But we have to find a path to innovation. We have to find a path to eliminating fraud, waste and abuse. We have to find a way to be efficient with our dollars and path part of that. So step one down that path is smaller government, not bigger government for sure. You've got to get rid of the bureaucracy. You've got to reduce. You're not going to get rid of it. Even. I'm not trying to get rid of it. I take that back. Reduce.

[Drew]

Yeah. Nick in the chat asked if you talked to Tommy about Brexit. He did. Check out the interview. It'll be out in two weeks.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We didn't get super deep on Brexit though.

[Drew]

Yeah. But it was. It was interesting that it came.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He brought it up by way of like, quick thing, though. I get Drew's desire to advertise and get you guys to actually watch the episode. But if I remember right, he was speed running like it was supposed to lower immigration. It didn't even do that. I think that was the only time that that came up. But if you have questions, I'm not super deep on Brexit, but happy to answer. I know enough about it to be dangerous,

[Drew]

like. Cause we were just trying to find optimism in this. So I feel like what bearded Maestro is trying to tell us right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Bearded Maestro, by the way, what can you put on screen what his username is? Check this guy out. I think he's pretty small. It's quick. Dots is like what you see, but it's lth, lth, L, N, K, S, O. Yeah, that's hard. Yeah, he's super small. This guy somehow got on my feed and he now comes up a lot. I think he's great. Like, he really does the research.

[Drew]

So he's communicating good news in this way. Good news that there is upward mobility in the economy compared to 1952 to these tax rates. So we are doing better than what we might feel. But the anxieties of the economy are real. The yields are really scary. AI taking over labor is scary. We do have some rough hills in front of us. Where do you think that balance is between internal, like stability and keeping an even kill versus being super paranoid or over prepared about what's coming next? Like, how do I balance being my squirrel and just hiding my nuts versus, like, okay, I need to be an early adopter and I need to get out there and run around.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, well. So everything when I look at the economy, well, let me describe to you what I do with my money. And then people can decide what I actually believe. Okay. So I have a huge amount in crypto. It's my largest position and by that I mean mostly bitcoin, some ethereum outside of that that I don't keep buying. So I'm not on the sailor train. Over a several year period I bought and I had a certain amount that I was going to dollar cost average in. Once I hit that amount I was like that's it. And I have stayed. I haven't done anything meaningful since then. Is it possible I've done some up and some down in some small way, yes, but nothing insane Then I try to be very broadly placed because I do not trust myself to see the future well, but I'm super paranoid. So I have roughly three years in cash. When I say on hand I do not mean at my house, I mean that it is in like short term paper. So it's never more than 30 days out. So three years so that I don't have to worry if there's a down now, if there's a Great Depression, I'm going to be worried just like anybody else. But, but any sort of multi year recession I'm going to be fine. I don't have to sell anything. I don't have to worry. And I try to be as broad as I can. So I'm in some high risk stock, some like blase the workhorses that have performed well for decades and decades. Well those guys are, I'll say those are your growth stocks. So a little more volatile definitely there as well obviously believe in AI. So I've got some there got gold but a ton, a ton of short term US debt basically I don't think I have any long term debt. I'll say basically just in case the money managers put something in that I forgot about. I'm in US International, I'm in emerging markets. So basically I'm trying to diversify across the different economic forces as much as I can. Am I forgetting anything? I think that's the bulk of it. Oh municipal, municipal bonds. So that's like that is me going I'm super fucking paranoid. I don't believe that I'll be able to call a collapse but I'm kind of expecting one. And, and because I don't think I can get the timing right, I'm not just sitting in a bunch of cash but because I don't trust that we won't go through something brutal. I have plenty that is very, very short term and can be liquid at, you know the drop of a hat. Okay, so that's where I'm at. That is how I advise people to be thinking about this is like you can't sit out of the market, you've gotta be in the market because of the thing that I've explained a thousand times, you're gonna get inflated into nothingness. The markets are highly volatile right now. So there's something called the CAPE index. I don't know what CAPE stands for, but what they're measuring is the average 10 year earnings of the market and when the compared to what you're paying. So the average over like whatever, I can't remember if It's a full 100 years, but a very extended period of time was 17 to 1:1. We now are 40 to 1. And at that point there's only been two other times in history where we've had a 40 to 1 cape ratio and that was 1929, 1999 and today. So 1929, for those not keeping score, that was The Great Depression, 1999, that was the dot com bubble. And now today, those are the only three times that we've ever.

[Drew]

Amazing, amazing comparisons, amazing comparisons.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm just like, Jesus, like something's going to happen. So when I fiendishly encourage people to own assets, it is with the caveat that you need to have money on hand to live your life in case there is a rapid and terrifying downturn. Remember, the hardest thing to do is to buy low and sell high. Everybody does the reverse. They buy high and sell low. So be very careful. Dollar cost average, if you're going to get in, yada yada, spread out over economic forces. But anyway, that's how I'm actually approaching

[Drew]

and I shout out to you because I feel like that's a very diversified approach. That's the one thing that Simon surprised me with that interview was he's very much a bitcoin number four kind of guy. So he probably amassed a majority of his wealth there. And even him was like, yeah, I'm good, I'm set, never have to work again. Good. But even he was like, well, you know, Nvidia did outperform me and I lost to the market. So even somebody that is extremely wealthy and successful in that way still has missed those moments and things like that. So I think that should give everybody a little bit of ease that you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to win every game, you just have to win your game. So pick your lane, get diversified. Whether it's you need to get more Money up or you're trying to invest what you already have. It's not like a one size fits all thing. Just get your lane and just keep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. I'll also say that I'm going to guess that most of the people that got wealthy in Bitcoin were evangelical about sovereignty and not that they thought, this will be the greatest investment of all time. It's the same reason. So I've talked about this with Quest, that you have to get the timing right. Like, if you really want to have one of those just crazy outsized success like I had with Quest, you've got to get the timing right. The odds of you getting the timing right because you timed it are basically zero. You're going to get the timing right because you were on some other thing and then it just happened to hit right at the right time. So. So the fact that Quest had the timing that it did was because I tried to quit. So I was working with the guys that ended up becoming my partners at Quest. I tried to quit. We were doing a different company and I was just so fucking unhappy. I wanted to go make movies. So I go in and quit. They're like, no, don't quit. What would have to be true for us all to work together. And I was like, well, we got to sell this fucking company because I'm not going to keep doing this. And so the answer ended up being Quest. And then I was like, listen, my whole thing is I want to tell stories. So I know this is weird, but I want to. There's this new thing coming. We now call it social media. It was not called social media back then. And I was like, I want to use that to tell stories. And we now call it community. I didn't say that, but I was like, I want to use the words of today. I want to build the community by being authentic. And again, not the words I was saying back then, but that's what I was getting to. I just kept saying, I want to be myself. I want to be myself. I don't want to be a slick marketer. I just want to be myself. And so I'm like, I want to tell these stories. Yes, I get it. It's a protein bar. But like, I want to tell stories about this. I want it to mean something. I want the brand to be who we really are. And so again, not doing it because I'm like, oh, this is going to be like, social media is going to be on the rise and all that's going to be great. And because we were Trying to eat something that was metabolically real. It just happened to be timed perfectly with the world waking up about sugar, sugar. So when we first made it, we're like, well, we know at least three people will eat this. Meaning us three founders, we're like, we don't know if there's a big market now. We were business savvy because we'd been in business a long time. So as it started to pop, like, we knew what to do. But the timing on that wasn't about going, oh, I get it. Cynical. I'm just going to go do that thing and this is going to be big. Same with Kaizen. Kaizen could flop because I'm building the game I want to play and it's the only way. So I once watched a guy just completely get destroyed as an entrepreneur, and I watched him lose confidence in himself. And I was like, ooh. When you can no longer trust your intuition, it's game over. Because you've spent your whole life training yourself to, like, when you have a fast read and it's different than everybody else and you end up being right, that's when you win. And so if you have a fast read on something but you don't trust yourself, you've got no shot. You're always going to be following. And so to be out ahead of the pack like that, there's a bit of survivorship bias that makes it seem like that person saw something that they didn't really see. They were probably seeing something else. They were probably going, I've always, like, take Elon Musk. I've always wanted to do this thing, and it's now finally technologically possible. That is not me trying to take anything away from Elon or even to downplay my own accomplishments. Accomplishments. It's just that there becomes an outsized effect because you were onto something other people didn't give a shit about long before they cared about it. Like, Elon made electric cars cool. Electric cars weren't, like, happening. And he's like, oh, I'm gonna get it. The timing's right. He was like, I'm gonna do this fucking thing. Cause I wanna do this thing. And then everything aligned in terms of being able to drive the cost of batteries down and people waking up to the message around the environment and all that. And it, you know, goes to the moon. So always have to execute. But anyway to the timing question, don't try to time the market. You're never going to get it right. Believe in something, have a thesis. If your belief is right, Then you may be rewarded because you saw something before anybody else. But what you saw was belief. It wasn't, oh, I'm going to get rich.

[Drew]

That's a good way to put it. Solving, like believing yourself and like going forward. And that's the.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And having a thesis because I want to. It's not even believing in yourself. It's. Take the early bitcoiners. It was like, fuck the government. I see what's going on. These guys are all in cahoots. This is bankers. They are robbing us blind. I'm not going to play it anymore. We're going to build this alternative thing. And they got on it because they were like, yeah, fuck these kids. And they had a thesis about what sovereignty was. And that made them go for it. It's not like, oh, I trust myself to be smart and to see this. And I suppose that algorithm is running in the background, otherwise you couldn't get yourself move. But it really is just, I've got a thesis. I'm gonna go with it. It's why I haven't sold bitcoin. My thesis is, tomorrow's gonna be more digital than today and money's going to get digitized. And so. And then now the new part becomes. And I don't trust the government to control that. Hell no.

[Drew]

Minnesota fraud. They just did. They prosecuted somebody. J.D. vance announced.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, my God.

[Drew]

Today, the task force and the DOJ announced a massive takedown of two of the largest fraud cases in Minnesota state history, as well as the largest autism fraud scheme ever charged by a federal government. Our message is simple. If you're committing fraud, we will find you. And we won't rest until justice is served. Let me see if I can pull up the ladies switch cams. Eric. Let me see if I can pull up the lady's name who got it. I forgot what her thing was called.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh. Feeding our future.

[Drew]

Yes. Feeding our future. Thank you. 41 years.

[Tom Bilyeu]

41. Like, 41 and a half.

[Drew]

Sheesh. Look at this Somali pirate. How dare she. Like, I'll dare to Somali pirate pillage our country. Like that. Look at that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, if you're not looking at your screen, this is the whitest white girl of all time.

[Drew]

It's the Somalis in Minnesota. That's what they told me. 250 million to send back to her Somalia harem. How dare you?

[Tom Bilyeu]

41.5 years, man. God damn wild. Do not defraud your fellow citizens, boys and girls. Real talk.

[Drew]

And this is just to start. The task force was associated. Nick Shirley was On the road with Dr. Oz, they talked about California being next. There's been some talk about Miami speculation in other. In other states. So if there's actual jurisdiction, then, you know, charges and evidence found and by all means, like, they should be going to jail. And I support this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, fraudsters are like, okay, you got to collect them all. You got to collect them all. Like this. This is what we're up against. You want to understand? 250 million. This is one case in one state.

[Drew]

Quarter of a billion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is wild.

[Drew]

Quarter of a billion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love to see it. I love to see it.

[Drew]

Yeah. Wow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Crazy. God. God damn.

[Drew]

We will keep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dude, they were supposed to be feeding the kids, man, during COVID Jesus. Like that is icy. Icy.

[Drew]

Just like that. It's over. Okay, let's talk about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean just like that's over? What's up?

[Drew]

That the. Her.

[Tom Bilyeu]

250 million rain.

[Drew]

Her? Yeah, her. Her. I was gonna call it like scheme. Like her scheme. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, thank God. I'll be curious to see if we get any of that money back, though.

[Drew]

I doubt it is. That thing is gone. It's in the dust. All right, let's go back to the Bezos interview we covered when he talked about tax policy. This is about changing the labor force and how it's going to be structured.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I like this.

[Jeff Bezos]

Smart people. And they are smart and they are saying, oh, my God, you know, there's going to be no more radiologists because, you know, AI can read X rays better than a radiologist can. And they're going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So what's really going to happen is that it's going to elevate all of these people and there's going to. It's like, it's. It's like you've been digging. Let's say you're a software engineer, right? What it's the. The analogy I can give you is you've been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody's about to hand you a bulldozer preacher. You should be so happy. If you're digging the basement to your house and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here that's going to. And what's really going to happen is we're going to have so much productivity in our economy that, for example, this is just one effect. A lot of people who have two earner income households, one of the people is going to. To drop out of the workforce. That's why we're going to have a labor shortage, people. Because of the productivity gains. You're going to be able to afford things we're going to have. I, I predict we'll act.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, pause it. You know, you know the rant I have to go on. I, I cannot stress this enough. Please, whatever you're doing, stop. Hear me when I say every year things should be getting cheaper. What things? Everything. Everything that's made, obviously. Your rare things, the limited supply stuff, paintings, stuff like that. Not necessarily the case, but when we're manufacturing things, it should be getting cheaper every year because of innovation. When things do not get cheaper every year, it is because your government in cahoots with central banks and I mean this, this literally are stealing that money through inflation. They need there to be fraud, waste and abuse. They need the government to get larger. They need wars to be happening all over the place so that they can deficit spend money print and take via inflation your purchasing power away up through all of that innovation. And so when they say that it's oh, inflation is only 2%, what they mean is we've stolen however much it would have gone down. Maybe it would have gone down 2%. And when they say 2% up, it's really 4%. Maybe it would have gone down 5%, 10% more, who knows? But they're burning through all of that innovation plus 2% or 4% or wherever we are. And the fact that people think that deflation is a bad thing, they have sold you a lie. Crisis led deflation is bad. Crisis led deflation is bad. Innovation led deflation is awesome. You should want more of it. You should want things to get cheaper, not more expensive. Right now it's getting more expensive because they're stealing from you. That one really. It doesn't land, does it? It doesn't land. I just can't convince people and they're going to be like super mad. Oh, bro, I can't afford anything. I've explained it, let me tell you, like over and over and over. And yet we're still going to act like, well, what we just needed, we just need to tax more, Drew. We need to get like more people in the government. That's the only way.

[Drew]

If we just gave them more money, if we just let me dictate how they're going to spend more money and it's all going to be fin.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Going to be fine.

[Drew]

It's all going to be fine. Yeah, it's Jeff. Yes. What you're saying is correct. Right But Amazon is a productivity miracle. Amazon is doing things that have revolutionized the way people AWS and people receive goods across the world. It has literally changed the industry. They have to carry pee bottles with them. So I love that this explosion.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm curious.

[Drew]

Productivity is up there, but we act

[Tom Bilyeu]

like, do we have data on that? Do they have to carry pee bottles or do they have an incentive to carry pee bottles? And I don't know the answer. So it's possible that it's just real fucking evil. But I will say, if you tell these guys, hey, we compensate you based on how many packages you deliver. And then one guy goes, hold on. If I take a pee bottle with me, I can deliver more packages, make more money in a day. Fuck yeah. I'm in. I'm that guy. I'm the guy that I literally. Drew. I used to sleep. You know those big protein canisters? I used to sleep with an empty one next to my bed so I could pee in it in the middle of the night so I didn't have to get up out of bed.

[Drew]

Efficiency maxing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, there. There are those among us.

[Drew]

Do we have any angel investors in the chat? I want to invest in Amazon worker pee bottles. I think we could just get enough ambitious people, people. See, we can. We can really make. We could really make. Maybe we do like it. Amazon diapers.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have we made a capitalist out of you, Drew, or do I detect sarcasm?

[Drew]

We don't even need a bottle. They could be on themselves directly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Diapers are good. Sitting in my own pee, I don't know that I'd be here for. So I'm probably still prone to the bottle, but I'm open to diapers.

[Drew]

Okay. Sarcasm aside, productivity equaling wage growth is the. The talk of the 70s, you know what I mean? So him spouting that AI will increase productivity. I like the other analogy. I'll put it that way. The I'm trying to dig myself out of a hole and somebody hands me a bulldozer. That's very. That's very true. If you're actively trying to build, make something in the world and you had the door closed on you before, AI is the window that you hoped for. Yes, but I also want to be hyper, like, honest. Whether it's one company, whether it's to all of them, there is going to be a company that figures out AIs to a point that. That if you're human and you come near their doors, it's going to close on you. Like, no, it costs too much. We can Outsource you. We can AI it, we can digitize it. Even if it's 40% as cool as what it would be if a human does it. Money margins, it makes sense. I'm just going to get rich doing it by myself with robots and boxes. So I just want us to be honest that there is going to be people who do that. That is going to be a part of this economy. And whether it's 10%, 30%, 50%, whatever that number is, we're gonna have to deal with that exhaust of this great technological.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like, there's a huge part of that that's very real. I would say looking at history, it tells us exactly what's coming. So when you look back at history, it says every time you have a technological revolution, the people that don't adapt or can't adapt, they are destroyed. It is devastating to them. It's not good. You don't want to be them. You probably don't even want to be their kids, their grandkids. Yes, but it is. Is absolutely brutal. And there's no denying that. However, every technological revolution that we have had through all of human history has every single time, without fail, created more jobs than it eliminated. So it's one of those living through the transition that's going to be cold comfort if you're one of the people that just gets disrupted. But the only way to grow GDP is to have more kids or immigration, but to get more people or make the people more productive. And so productivity growth really is the right thing. Like when you say we want to make the country wealthier, what you actually mean is we want to make it possible for each person to do more with their time. This is why I say you've got to think of money as your ability to capture the value of your time. So if we say, hey, I'm going to give you AI, you're going to be able to capture more value for your time. That's incredible. And if it were a zero sum game and it were just like those jobs just don't exist, Keep in mind, I am not talking about artificial super intelligence, where it's better than us at everything and it's embodied and all that, that's a totally different ball game that we'll deal with later. But for now, AI really is this extraordinary tool that is right now, today, making things possible that weren't previously. And so as a filmmaker, I look at AI and I think two things. Oh, man. Cannes, like really truly the film industry that I thought I would one day be a part of it is gone. There's a film at the Cannes film festival that, 90 minutes long, made for $500,000. And like 460,000 of those dollars were for compute. And so it was literally just a small handful. I don't know how many people did it, but a small handful of people, and I believe they made the film in two weeks. A small handful of people in two weeks made a film that you can see there. And I'm going to guess, look, you'll watch it and you'll say, I can tell this is AI and fair enough. But it's like the fact that they're able.

[Drew]

95 minutes, though, that's. Yeah. Shout out to them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's getting so good. So now I say I changed the way that we were developing Kaizen because I realized that in video games, the most expensive thing you do is the art and the cutscenes. The gameplay, while still expensive, is. Is orders of magnitude cheaper. And now all of a sudden, I'm like, well, actually, I can insert them in again. And so. But obviously they're going to be AI generated.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so that is thrilling. It means that people that just have a rad idea, they don't have anything holding them back. And so just like if in 19. Well, no. Why make it that in real life? I graduated from film school in 1998, and I was sliding towards depression because I had no idea how to break into the industry. And I could never have predicted YouTube, but YouTube happened. Journalists. The number of journalists that, like, when we think of the New York Times and all that, oh, my God, they're in trouble. Yeah. But how many people now make a living as a journalist on YouTube? Nick Shirley was never going to be a journalist list without YouTube. And so it. No one could have predicted it. In fact, YouTube started as a, like, dating site, but it's ended up becoming this incredible thing on the back of the technology. So did it completely disrupt journalism? Yes, it did. Did it create something where orders of magnitude more people are now able to access it and for much less money? Yes. So it's. We can't predict the things that people are going to do with AI, yet. We only ever talk about the obvious ones. Like, I talk about the things that it does for art and all that. But it's going to be doing a lot, a lot, a lot more. And that's the part that I really hope people can get excited about. And if I can't get them excited about that, then let me see if I can give them a splash of cold water. I pulled a clip from Asmongold who, boy, people are split about whether they like him or not. Go to 1 minute and 2 seconds and hit play on.

[Jeff Bezos]

Right.

[Asmongold]

I think that we all kind of knew this was gonna happen, but I think that another big one was. I was watching a trailer for it was the Mandalorian and I think Grogu. That's like the little baby Yoda thing. And I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, does this really look better than AI? And the answer, answer really in my opinion, right where they're fighting around with the.

[Tom Bilyeu]

walkers.

[Asmongold]

No, it doesn't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It doesn't.

[Asmongold]

It's basically the same thing. And there have been a lot of people and I've noticed this, there's a lot of AI anti AI sentiment. I want to let you guys know I'm totally in on AI. I'm completely bought in. I think it's totally going to be the future. It's not going to replace everybody, but it's going to let the top 10% replace the bottom 90%. That's what I think is happening. And unfortunately, a lot of these companies, especially in the west, are held hostage by a ideology that is keeping them from being competitively, you know, like advantageous with AI. And I think, what's this doing? I think that it's opening up windows for places like China to be able to come in and succeed in and Korea to come in succeed in these huge ways that, you know, I think that these western studios aren't doing because they are trying this Luddite. Well, let's not do it. It's not the same. It doesn't have the soul to it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Pause it for a second. So he's talking about. So the gaming industry has changed a lot. And the search for the next live service game to be like Fortnite has just literally killed studios because they do so many misses. And he's talking about, look, if that era is done and if you're going to try to make these 250 million dollar projects, you're going to get eaten alive by the people that adapt and use AI. And that is true. We become the apex predator by being the most adaptive to change. Not because we're the most intelligent, though I like to think we are. But that isn't what got us here. What got us here is being adaptive. We are the only species that you can find on every continent. So that is the thing that I want people to really lean into with AI and like shout out to April, who realized oh, Tom, beating this investment drum to death. Let me go get some assets. Thank you. That's a big win. I'm telling you right now, do not sleep on AI. AI is a tool. Leverage it to do the thing that you want to do. Forget who was asking about Kevin. I think it was Kevin saying like, hey, I'm building websites. Like what should I be doing? Never a better time because of AI. AI is making this stuff possible. And so look, shameless plug. This is exactly what I teach people to do. On impact theory University is leverage AI. Like there is a way to do it now that simply did not ever exist. I don't want to see people miss out on this opportunity.

[Drew]

We have to talk about the other side of AI. And AOC held up a brown looking jar of what she claimed to be Georgia's drinking water. Now after data center was constructed, I

[Tom Bilyeu]

thought you said George. And I was like, who the fuck is George? Why is he drinking it? Georgia Got it.

[Drew]

Georgia. Yeah. So there has been some speculation that data centers have caused changes in like cancer rates, things like that. It's been very early. I haven't seen any like verified studies. But there is the unknown environmental health impacts of data centers being 24, seven operational near families, near schools, their waters and stuff like that.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

That have a jar right here. This is the current drinking water in Morgan County, Georgia.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Then your filtration.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Right after the data center was constructed, the metadata center was constructed. The only difference between the clean water and this was that data center. I have another one as well. So this wasn't just one. Well, this wasn't just one family situation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

She does a good job of shaking it.

[Drew]

I'm impressed.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Next to that data center and I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things are drinkable.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So pause it for a second. So I agree that's not a hard thing to get into. So if you're putting a data center in place and you know when we put data centers in that we need to increase the water filtration. Yes. Yeah, cool. Love it. Very easy to say okay, as a part of putting this in, you have to supply your own power. You've got to be able to cleanse the water that's coming out. You can't in any meaningful way impact downstream. Whatever, whatever. Like that stuff is simple enough to put in the beginning. Just keep in mind regulation ends up being the thing that the corporations use against all of us. So I know we want to live in a world where regulation is just this unmitigated good but it's not. You have to have a very light touch, not a zero touch. So stuff like this, clearly you bake in. But that kind of stuff is relatively simple. If you understand what the output is that you want, and then just tell them you have to get this output. So you've got output this much, you. It'll be a percent. There's this much clean water coming in. We've got to make sure that there's this much clean water coming out. They will innovate. If there is a way to do it. Like think about the fact that we figured out a way to split the atomic. We can find a way to clean the water. We can desalinate water, for Christ's sake. So rather than using this as like a theatrical stunt to try to stop the data centers from happening, which is what she's trying to do, which literally. Okay, this is hyperbole. It is directionally correct, but that is. That's treasonous, man. She is going against America. I'm not joking. And I'm happy to fight with anybody in the chat that wants to get down with this. If you look at history, every single technology that promises an advantage gets developed. So if you know that you are in a race with China, and China's doing everything that they can to develop this, and if the US and China somehow don't, then the next country will. You know that this is going to be developed. So the game isn't how do we hobble ourselves so that we can all suck on the teat of the government even harder, it's how do we win? So what is the thing where the surrounding community is going to end up being better off? I want to hear that conversation. Putting in a data center needs to be the best thing that's ever happened to a community. So what would the outputs have to look like for that to be true? Great. And now let's have that debate, and then let's make sure that that kind of shit actually happens. But instead, what we're trying to do is because there's something about this that they don't like, which I think is they're just scared of AI. They think it's going to take jobs or make them obsolete or point out all the things that they're doing. Stupid, I don't know. But because of that, they just want to stop it. And the difference between how do we do this well. And just fucking kill it is the difference between America continuing her very traumatizing decline and us continuing to lead the world.

[Drew]

Yeah. Ryan has a Question in the chat, shout out to Ryan, our very own Ryan.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's up, Ryan? I miss you, Ryan.

[Drew]

Yeah, I miss you too, Ryan.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can't wait to see you.

[Drew]

Tom, all those suggestions you mentioned cost the company money. What would stop them from passing that cost on to the people of the area like we're seeing now?

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're saying in the data center.

[Drew]

In the data center, water, electricity, Obviously

[Tom Bilyeu]

you're asking them for, hey, go build a company. I'm going to increase your cost structure. That's exactly what sets the price for the thing. So, sure. But if what we say is, hey, we want this data center to not harm the drinking water, if that comes at a cost, then that's going to be factored into the price of the good. That just is what it is, then.

[Drew]

So then if we keep like following that train of logic, then there's going to be certain communities that are incentivized to bring the data centers there that don't have regulations versus the communities that would welcome the data centers there, but they have energy, water, location.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is why people leave California, because California is a nightmare and other places are welcoming to business and so people move there.

[Drew]

Nice, Nice. I'm looking through the chat, I don't see anything really, really crazy. I think everybody agrees that data centers should clean up their own mess, but that's like telling the wolves to guard the hen house. So we have to be super.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so this may become the theme for you and I is I think that corporations cannot be trusted. But the only thing I trust less than a corporation is the government. So the fact that everybody is racing to give more power to the government is wild. The more money you give to them, the worse things get. It's like, I'm saying that as an opinion, I have a very strong feeling that will be backed up in countless elements of data. So on that one, I just, I don't know what experience people are having with the government where they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, let's keep giving them more money. Like, they'll. They can see as we have already walked through it in this episode, that our rate of spending is on par with the average that we have ever spent. It's higher than it was back in the 50s when we were trying to collect more money from people. And yet throwing money at education and health care and all that hasn't made it better. So I wouldn't give the money to the government.

[Drew]

Government I want to give it to, but we would need regulations around data centers. And I think that that's something that we're going to remember.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You have to have smart, light touch regulation. But when it is, we just want to regulate these guys and there's this element of like, fuck them. We're just trying to stop it and we want to regulate them to death. And there's no sense of skepticism of the government. There's no sense of skepticism on the regulations. Then they just regulate and regulate and regulate and regulate and regulate and regulate. And it creates jobs and it costs a lot of money and it slows everything down, down. But it certainly doesn't generate jobs and make things better. I mean, look at homelessness, look at the high speed rail. Like it's all of this stuff falls prey to regulation. And for anybody in the chat that claps for China every time it comes up and they're like, see, democracy is not good. Capitalism's not good. I'm like, guess what? They don't have a problem with regulation. So the very thing that you're clapping for is exactly what I'm talking about. Like you've got to light touch, high, common sense regulation.

[Drew]

All right. In other AI news, this is probably the biggest deal that AI has done besides the Sora Disney deal that lasted for like two months and died. But Spotify and Universal Music Group have announced a licensing deal that will let Spotify premium users create energy. AI generated song covers and remixes of songs from certain artists and songwriters. So it's gonna be like a paid add on to the tools.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's cool.

[Drew]

It's interesting what's going to be those things. But Spotify is changing as a, as an app and it's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is smart, man. So if artists are able to opt in or opt out and let people like around with their stuff, this is like the modding community in gaming. Yeah, thousand percent. At some point it probably won't launch with it because there's like a lot of work that you have to do. But at some point I love for Kaizen to be moddable so people can go do like their own crazy shit, introduce stuff, different shaders, different objects. Like that'll be dope. So there are definitely some people that get excited that somebody will remix their stuff and do something cool. And then there's people like, no, it's my vision and it can't be touched. I'm not that guy, man. I want people to have fun.

[Drew]

I was gonna ask you if you were like pro modding when it came to like games.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, the way that I see it is, listen, I'm gonna Make kaizen. That's my version. And then I want to see what other people do.

[Drew]

Yeah, we'll see. Figure you've been watching this, you guys. I feel like you talked about it on Piers, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you talk about the. This particular thing. I don't know that I talked about this particular thing, but we did talk about Paul Bunyan, which might have been related, but this is that this was a 200 hour live stream. Yeah. And so what they're actually celebrating isn't because there was. I think it was the same people because it looks like almost the exact same shot. Whereas like a human competed against me and the human ended up winning. So that was the Paul Bunyan thing I was talking about, I think. And then. And by the way, I was on Piers Morgan.

[Drew]

Keep your eyes peeled.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Solo by the way, I might add. Just me and Piers. Let's go, Piers. Thank you for having me on. And this one here is them celebrating the fact that it ran for 200 hours without making a mistake.

[Drew]

Nice. But I mean, I know sorting packages is important. I think is this big for figur to show that it can learn something and do it to completion. Like, because they're popping champagne in the back and celebrating.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I mean, look. So I'll be really honest when I see them popping champagne in the back and all that stuff. I fucking love that you work so hard, man, to build stuff and we just don't celebrate things. I'm really bad at this by the way. You're probably better at this than I am. Like thank you by the way, for the way that you've been here in London taking the team out and doing stuff as I'm old, manning it and going back to bed and stuff. Really, really not mean that. That's so cool. And so I love, love that feeling of camaraderie and we're building something, we're doing something and to take time to celebrate it. And look, in five years will this look ridiculous? And we'll be like, people were celebrating. That was so stupid. But like that's a lot of hard work, man. That, that might represent 10 years of trying to figure out and all the like vision pieces and the tendons in the hand and all that. So I love it there. There is. There are few feelings better than being on a team. A team did something hard and you win and you're celebrating. Lord knows, dude, there are certain milestones that if you and I hit. Oh, we bout to celebrate.

[Drew]

Did you have like a milestone you can think about like in your quest days or something like, was there like a champagne bottle popping moment?

[Tom Bilyeu]

There were. I, I'm notoriously bad at taking the time to celebrate. So I am both, I love this. And am reminding myself quietly in my own head, like, you need to get better at this. So there were moments that felt extraordinary. But oftentimes in the middle of it, you're so busy and you're just trying to get the thing done that it can take a minute. The most profound like holy shit moment for me was my father in law did not want me to marry his daughter and he thought I was going to make her poor, which I did for a decade. And so when he finally came over to America and he had heard that the company was doing well, but he'd never seen it. And he comes on, we have 300,000 square feet on the floor. That day there were somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people. It's tens of millions of dollars of equipment as far as the eye can see. I mean, 300,000 is big. And people are coming up, oh, Mr. Thompson, Tom. Mr. Tom, thank you so much. Like, oh my God, thank you for the job. Now they don't know this is my father in law. So they're just like thanking me, being very kind. And for people that don't know, we used to hire ex convicts and stuff. So there was maybe a little bit more gratitude than you might normal normally find. And so anyway, he sees all this and I say, andreas, do you remember me telling you that one day, Sorry. Do you remember asking me how I would take care of your daughter?

[Drew]

Daughter?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And he said yes. And I said, how am I doing? And he looked around, he just started to cry. And that felt like something that was like better than popping a bottle of champagne. Because there were nights where the very thing that kept me working. My father in law has always been kind to me. I've learned so much from him. Very, very, very cool guy. But nonetheless, there were nights where, where the only thing that kept me going was like, I'm not gonna let this guy be right. Stick it to him like, I am going to make this woman wealthy. So yeah, that's funny.

[Drew]

That's funny. Okay, last but not least. This, this is interesting story. I'm here for the shit. So I'm gonna be honest with you. I don't, I haven't dug super, super deep into it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but the headline's good.

[Drew]

Yes. No HR team, no problems. The Bolt CEO fires his entire HR team. We had an HR team and that HR team was creating problems that didn't exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go. And then there was a bunch of retweets from other CEOs and things like that. Cody Sanchez jumped into and was like, companies are better without HR departments. So is this one of those things that as the labor, as the labor force is kind of getting reshuffled, we're on, on setting off, boarding certain jobs. People are kind of getting in and out. Is the HR next on the chopping block of like, there might be something here?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, I mean, an HR department can go toxic very, very fast. There is no doubt about that. The whole idea of a complain culture, which he references later in the piece, that's a very real thing. But there are also legitimate things you want to make sure that people are protected against. So while we have also closed our HR department, but you would not find me celebrating that in this way. When we closed ours, it was with an intention to reduce the bureaucracy in the company. And the COO and I got together, obviously you know him, and we said, listen, we need to make sure that people still have an outlet. So we got an outside team and it was like, okay, you guys have their number. If you ever need anything, you can go directly to them. It's a third party resource. So that kind of thing is, I think, very important. I am aware of the power dynamics where it's like, you guys can fire me by leaving. And that's a very real thing that I often don't think people fully appreciate. But I can fire anyone in the company. And so some affordances need to be made so that people don't feel like, hey, something bad just happened to me and I don't have anywhere to go with this. That kind of thing can go toxic and icky super fast. But with all of that said, I am a big believer believer that I want to be surrounded by hardcore, period. If you've got beef, say it to my face. If you've got a problem with somebody else in the company, say it to their face. I don't do anonymous feedback, all of that. If you're so weak that you can't speak up, then you've got no place here. If you think that you've been wrongfully terminated, there are avenues to deal with that. And I just, I only want to be around people that if I say something that upsets them, they're just going to me, tell, tell me, dude, that bothered me. And here's the thing, you know, and look, privately, one day when I'm not here, you can have a chat with chat and tell them if I'm being sincere or not. But my thing is I tell people give my feedback aggressively and in public. And the reason I want you to be aggressive and be in public is I want people to see that the way that I'm going to respond is going to be to thank you for the feedback. I may not agree with you and I am willing to defend myself if I think that I'm doing the right thing. I'll say, here's why I'm doing that. And then watch how that person doesn't get fired or blackballed. And that's my thing. It's just over time. You're going to see that's not. I. I am so convinced that I'm blind to something and I need people to tell me. I am way more terrified that someone will be like, I don't want to get fired, so I'm not going to say anything or I'm worried about coming across wrong. So I'm not going to say anything that they don't say something. I'm way more afraid of that than that they're going to be mean to me, me. And then I'm going to be like, oh my God, you said something mean in front of other people. So yeah, I want people to act like adults. We're a small enough company that I think we can get away with that. As you scale, that gets a lot harder. But because you really do as the owner, you become like this nameless, faceless thing. Like, you may never fully appreciate that you've worked for big companies, so you probably get it. But you might not appreciate that. Like, you and I have a relationship that like, imagine I had 3,000 employees across. So the way they thought of me is not the way you think of me, but I'm the same person. So it's you, you, you need to be thoughtful about that. But. And look, that's a thing for me. I just want to be around people who aren't afraid. Because the worst thing is people that can't speak to power. That that damns the whole company.

[Drew]

Mm, that's a good one. It's interesting. Flatter organizations are becoming more of the norm. And me coming from, to your point, like larger institutions where my boss had a boss, had a boss. It's nice to just be like, hey, I got an idea. Yes, go. Like, it's, it's very. We're a speedboat. We're not this big, like Titanic thing that everybody has to get on board. Then we have to get it Approved. Then we have to. Then we have to. And it's just like, let's just execute and go do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's even miserable for the owners. That's the thing. Like big companies like Fuck and Quest, you know, 3,000 employees. Not exactly a big company, but. But certainly the biggest company I'd ever run. And that was like. It got to the point where it's like, this is a lot of people.

[Drew]

I dig it. I dig it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you guys for joining us. It is really not lost on me that you guys could spend your mornings or wherever you are in the world with anyone. And the fact that you choose to spend it with Drew and I means the absolute world. Thank you for joining us while we were here in London. I hope we've put together some cool content coming up for you guys while we were here. Shout, shout out to my man Drew when I say this motherfucker. Yes, yes. With the claps. Produced the shit out of this trip.

[Drew]

Thank you, guys.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This fucking guy from bottom to top. I was very, very impressed. Drew, for real. For real. My man. You killed this Trip. We had this conversation privately, you know, I'm being sincere.

[Drew]

I appreciate it. He killed Trip.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He killed this.

[Drew]

Shout out to Eric and G. G was dropping 15 hours of footage. Eric did 10 shoots this week. You're the man. Thank you, guys. Nothing without my team. You guys are the best. Love everybody here. It was a great trip.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've got a second that G, when you see this, my man. Well played, Eric. I know you're listening right now because you're running the whole thing.

[Drew]

Philippe, in the bag. Shout out to Ty.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

Best studio in London.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Damn this place. You guys really treated us well. Indeed. Indeed. All right, that's enough love. Love you guys. All right, see you on my Monday. Will we see him on Monday? It's a holiday.

[Drew]

No, Monday's holiday. See you Wednesday.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So no Monday. All right, we'll see you guys on Wednesday. Love you bunches. And happy Memorial Day. Peace.

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